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The style in which it is composed deserves observation it is partly in prose, partly in heavy blank-verse, (such as was penned before Marlowe had introduced his improvements, and Shakespeare had adopted and advanced them,) partly in ten-syllable rhyming couplets, and stanzas, and partly in the long fourteen-syllable metre, which seems to have been popular even before prose was employed upon our stage. In every point of view it may be asserted, that few more curious dramatic relics exist in our language. It is the most ancient printed specimen of composition for a public theatre, of which the subject was derived from English history.

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Boswell asserts that the True Tragedy of Richard the Third' had evidently been used and read by Shakespeare;' but we cannot trace any resemblances, but such as were probably purely accidental, and are merely trivial. Two persons could hardly take up the same period of our annals, as the groundwork of a drama, without some coincidences; but there is no point, either in the conduct of the plot or in the language in which it is clothed, where our great dramatist does not show his measureless superiority. The portion of the story in which the two plays make the nearest approach to each other, is just before the murder of the princes, where Richard strangely takes a page into his confidence respecting the fittest agent for the purpose.

"In the Memoirs of Edward Alleyn,' it is shown that Henslowe's company, subsequent to 1599, was either in possession of a play upon the story of Richard III., or that some of the poets he employed were engaged upon such a drama. From the sketch of five scenes, there inserted, we may judge that it was a distinct performance from the True Tragedy of Richard the Third.' By an entry in Henslowe's Diary, dated 22d June, 1602, we learn that Ben Jonson received 101. in earnest of a play called Richard Crookback,' and for certain additions he was to make to Kyd's 'Spanish Tragedy.' Considering the success of Shakespeare's RICHARD III., and the active contention, at certain periods, between the company to which Shakespeare belonged, and that under the management of Henslowe, it may be looked upon as singular, that the latter should have been without a drama on that portion of English history until after 1599; and it is certainly not less singular, that as late as 1602 Ben Jonson should have been occupied in writing a new play upon the subject. Possibly, about that date Shakespeare's RICHARD III. had been revived with the additions; and hence the employment of Jonson on a rival drama, and the publication of the third edition of Shakespeare's tragedy after an interval of four years."

It may be added that, as the unhorsing of Richard is contrary to the old historical account, his well-known cry on his last battle-field, so popular on the stage, and which has been reëchoed by succeeding dramatists,"A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!"—is to be traced to this rude old play, where it is thus given:The Battle enters, Richard wounded with his Page.

King. A horse, a horse, a fresh horse! Page. Ah! fly, my lord, and save your life. King. Fly, villain! Look I as though I would fly?—No! first shall, etc.

Possibly, too, the substitution of the ghost-scene, in place of Richard's dream of devils, related by Hall, might have been suggested by one of the lines in Richard's last speech before the battle, in the old play; and as this is the most elaborated speech it contains, it is here extracted::-

King. The hell of life that hangs upon the crown,

The daily cares, the nightly dreams,

The wretched crews, the treason of the foe,

And horror of my bloody practice past,

Strikes such a terror to my wounded conscience,

That, sleep I, wake I, or whatsoever I do,

Methinks their ghosts come gaping for revenge,

Whom I have slain in reaching for a crown.

Clarence complains and crieth for revenge;

My nephews' bloods. Revenge! revenge! doth cry;
The headless peers come pressing for revenge;
And every one cries, Let the tyrant die.

The sun by day shines hotly for revenge;
The moon by night eclipseth for revenge;
The stars are turn'd to comets for revenge;
The planets change their courses for revenge,
The birds sing not, but sorrow for revenge;
The silly lambs sit bleating for revenge;
The screeching raven sits croaking for revenge;
Whole herds of beasts come bellowing for revenge;
And all, yea, all the world, I think,

Cries for revenge, and nothing but revenge:
But to conclude, I have deserv'd revenge.
In company I dare not trust my friend;
Being alone, I dread the secret foe;

I doubt my food, lest poison lurk therein,
My bed is uncoth, rest refrains my head.
Then such a life I count far worse to be

Than thousand deaths unto a damned death!
How! was't death, I said? who dare attempt my death?
Nay, who dare so much as once to think my death?
Though enemies there be that would my body kill,
Yet shall they leave a never-dying mind.
But you, villains, rebels, traitors as you are,
How came the foe in, pressing so near?
Where, where slept the garrison that should 'a beat them back?
Where was our friends to intercept the foe?
All gone, quite fled, his loyalty quite laid a-bed.
Then vengeance, mischief, horror with mischance,
Wild-fire, with whirlwinds, light upon your heads,
That thus betray'd your prince by your untruth!

To such a performance, it is evident Shakespeare's Richard could have owed little beyond such straggling hints. Knight justly remarks:-"There is not a trace in the elder play of the character of Shakespeare's Richard: in that play he is a coarse ruffian only—an unintellectual villain. The author has not even had the skill to copy the dramatic narrative of Sir Thomas More in the scene of the arrest of Hastings. It is sufficient for him to make Richard display the brute force of the tyrant. The affected complacency, the mock passion, the bitter sarcasm of the Richard of the historian, were left for Shakespeare to imitate and improve."

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The purely historical materials are wholly drawn, as before stated, from Sir Thomas More's (afterwards the celebrated Chancellor) "History of Edward the Fifth," and Richard the Third," as they were embodied, in full, in the chronicles both of Hall and Hollingshed; the latter part of Richard's reign, which was unfinished in the manuscript, being supplied in them from other sources.

The comparison of these historical narratives with the incidents and characters as Shakespeare has dramatized them, presents two distinct questions for the consideration of the critical student of SHAKESPEARE. The first

is the long-contested question, how far is the Richard of More, of Hall, and of Shakespeare, to be received as the authentic representation of the real Richard? Another point, which has attracted much less attention, is how much of the Poet's own original mind has been infused into the character and narrative that he adopted,― whether he has merely given dramatic life to his chronicle narrative, as in HENRY V.; or whether, as in HENRY IV., he has restamped its persons and incidents with his own original conceptions? We have but brief space to consider either of these questions, the first of which has alone filled volumes.

More's narrative comes down to us with the highest authority that almost contemporary history can have, from the author's talents, integrity, and means of information. He was born under Richard III.; his father was a judge of the King's bench, in the next reign; and he was brought up in the family of Archbishop Morton, a living actor in all the scenes of Richard's reign, and who is known to the dramatic reader as Shakespeare's Bishop of Ely, and the "Morton who is fled to Richmond." More's narrative was some time after adopted, in full, by Hall, in his Chronicle; and Hall was not an ordinary compiler, but a barrister, and a member of parliament, who lived near enough to the times to have access to the best living sources of information, when many actors and more witnesses of those scenes were still surviving. The adoption of the same general view of the history and the character of Richard, by Hollingshed, Stowe, Lord Bacon, and. we may add, by Shakespeare, a generation or two later, shows at least that

that view accorded with the tradition of the events of the civil wars, which being in the middle ages associated with family and local recollections, monuments, buildings, armour, etc., is in itself of no slight weight. Nay, the abhorrence of Richard seems to have been so universal, that there is no trace of his having left any remnant of partisans,-any lingering friends. While Byron and Napoleon could find reason to doubt whether the crimes of Nero had not been exaggerated, or mixed with better qualities, because after his fall and death there were found former friends to strew his grave with flowers, in defiance of danger and denunciation; there was no faithful hand, of those who had once served Richard, to wipe off the stains from the escutcheon of the last of the royal Plantagenets.

In the universal opinion of his own and of the next two or three generations, Richard was undoubtedly identified with the cruel uncle of the "Babes in the Wood," the most popular and touching ballad of our traditionary literature, which Turner and our best English antiquarians agree had its origin in, and was a disguised recital of Richard's treatment of his two nephews. It has been thought that all this is sufficiently accounted for by the policy of Henry VII. and the succeeding Tudors, whose interest it was to blacken the memory of the last of the preceding dynasty. It may be so; but it is remarkable that the first defence of Richard's memory came from the court. This was by Sir George Buck, in his "History of Richard III." He was Master of the Revels under James I., and was the official licenser and inspector of the stage, during the last years of Shakespeare. His book was not published until 1646. In this book, says Buck's contemporary, Fuller, (himself among the best authorities of old English history,)"he eveneth Richard's shoulders, smootheth his back, planeth his teeth, maketh him in all points a comely and beautiful person. Nor stoppeth he here, but proceeding from his naturals to his morals, maketh him as virtuous as handsome; concealing most, denying some, defending others of his foulest facts, wherewith in all ages since he standeth charged on record. For mine own part, I confess it no heresy to maintain a paradox in history; nor am I such an enemy to wit as not to allow it leave harmlessly to disport itself for its own content, and the delight of others. But when men do it cordially, in sober sadness, to pervert people's judgments, and therein go against all received records, I say singularity is the least fault that can be laid to such men's charges. Besides, there are some birds (sea-pies by name) who cannot rise except it be by flying against the wind, as some hope to achieve their advancement by being contrary and paradoxical to all before them."-(FULLER'S Church History of Britain, book iv.)

Buck's work was preserved from oblivion by being reprinted, in the next century, in Kennet's collection of English history, and by his authority being adopted partially by Carter, in his history of England. But as Smollet and Hume adhered to the old authorities, it made no impression on the general opinion. About eighty years ago this theory was revived by Horace Walpole, in his Historic Doubts," where Buck's arguments are reproduced, and others added, with all the grace, acuteness, and ingenuity that characterize all Walpole's writings. Since that time, a more accurate examination of contemporary authorities, many of them unknown to former historians, has given the best grounds to believe that there was much exaggeration in imputing to Richard's

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own personal agency many of the crimes of his party— as the deaths of Henry VI. and his son Edward, and that of Clarence. Sharon Turner, in his laborious and impartial history, is led by these considerations to reject almost all of Richard's imputed crimes, except the deposition and murder of his nephews, which he is constrained to admit.

Still later, (1841,) a female historian, Caroline A. Halsted, has published a very interesting and ingenious work on "Richard III. as Duke of Gloucester and King of England," with the avowed design of " weeding from the pages of history the fabulous tales which have been long associated with his memory," and of "rescuing his character as a prince from those unjust charges which alone derogate from the acknowledged superiority of his regal career."

I cannot enter further into the discussion of this controversy, and can only express my decided opinion that, while it is very probable that Richard was charged with the guilt of several crimes which he was too wise to commit where he had no reasonable motive of policy; yet the general traditional detestation of his memory in the three or four succeeding generations, while the memory of the civil wars was still fresh, is so well ascertained, as to be conclusive that the older historical accounts of him are substantially true.

On the second inquiry, which regards only the degree of dramatic invention to be ascribed to the Poet, in this brilliant delineation of the most splendid theatrical villain of any stage, the decision is more obvious, and may be stated in few words. More had given the dramatist nearly all his incidents, and many of those minor details of Richard's person, manner, and character, which give life and individuality to his por trait. He, and the subsequent chroniclers who built upon his work, had shown Richard as a bold, able, ambitious, bad man-they had described him as malicious, deceitful, envious, and cruel. The Poet has made the usurper a nobler and loftier spirit than the historians had done, while he deepened every dark shadow of guilt they had gathered around his mind or his acts. The mere animal courage of the soldier he has raised into a kindling and animated spirit of daring; he has brought out his wit, his resource, his talent, his mounting ambition, far more vividly than prior history had exhibited them. His deeds of blood are made to appear, not as in the Tudor chronicles, as prompted by gratuitous ferocity or envious malignity, but as the means employed by selfish ambition for its own ends, careless of the misery which it inflicts, or the moral obligations on which it tramples. The Richard of Shakespeare has no communion with his kind-he feels himself at once aloof from others and above them-he is "himself alone;" and he therefore neither partakes in the hatred, nor the love or pity, of "men like one another." Accordingly, every thing that gives the poetic cast and dramatic life and spirit to the character,-every thing that elevates Richard above the cruel, artful, coldblooded tyrant of the old historians-all that mingles a sort of admiring interest with our abhorrence of him, and invests the deformity of his nature with a terrible majesty, is the Poet's own conception; and he produces these effects not by the invention of new incident, but by the pervading spirit with which he has animated the language and sentiments, and the vivid colouring he has thus thrown over the old historical representation.

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