villains who have been its agents is reserved by him as 'a bonnebouche after supper 1.'

With Richard's peculiar constitution it affords him a special pleasure, on the very eve of this tragedy, to enact an elaborate piece of hypocrisy which degrades religion to the office of a decoy. The preliminaries of the plot concerted with Buckingham, by which the citizens are to acclaim Gloster as king, having somewhat missed fire, though Richard has not scrupled to blacken his mother's honour to serve his ends, a clever piece of stage business is arranged for the edification of the Lord Mayor and his companions. Richard is found by them, prayer-book in hand, with a right reverend father on either side, deep in the devotional exercises which impress the bourgeois sense of piety. With well-feigned reluctance, as of one dragged down from holy contemplation to earthly things, and with protestations of unfitness, he accepts as a scarcely endurable burden the crown for the proffer of which his confederate gives so urgent a cue. The stratagem is wholly successful, and Richard, besides gaining his end, has the added zest of outraging what humanity holds most sacred.

Thus villainy has prospered in superlative degree, and the brows of the arch-criminal are bound at last with the glittering circle within which he had looked to find Elysium. And the spectacle, as we gaze on it, provokes the troubled query, Is Richard right, and can evil be made the law of life? But just as the suspense becomes intolerable, Shakspere gives us a hint that the Powers above are delaying, not forgetting, and in the very hey-day alike of Richard's fortunes and crimes, the warning note of the Nemesis to come is struck in Stanley's brief announcement that 'Dorset is fled to Richmond.' Here for the first time in the play the name of the destined avenger falls on the new king's ear, and the effect is seen in the brooding reverie over prophecies forgotten till that moment into which Richard falls, and which betrays to us that, like other irreligious natures, he is superstitious at bottom. And when he is aroused from this mood, it is only to vent himself in bitter and contemptuous mockery of

1 Moulton's Shakspere as a Dramatic Artist, chapter iv. I owe several suggestions to this study of Richard's character.

Buckingham, which turns him into an enemy. Richard's genius for hypocrisy for the first time fails him at a crisis. And henceforward, except that in his suit to Elizabeth for the hand of her daughter he achieves a tour de force similar to the wooing of the ill-starred Anne, he shows signs of failing power. In preparing for the expedition against the revolted Buckingham, which is afterwards turned against Richmond, he gives contradictory orders, changes his mind, strikes a messenger before waiting to hear his news, and lets himself be outmatched by Stanley with his own weapon of hypocrisy. These are tokens of an inward trouble which Richard gives up the attempt to conceal, when on the eve of Bosworth, whilst issuing orders with feverish rapidity, he suddenly confesses to a subordinate

'I have not that alacrity of spirit,

Nor cheer of mind, that I was wont to have,'

and seeks for stimulus in a bowl of wine. As long, however, as he can find in action scope for the exercise of will, the dogged force of his nature keeps him from entirely giving way, but when his will is fettered in sleep, then at the crisis of his fate those primal human instincts which he has outraged, rising with rebellious power, fling before his gaze the awful vision of his victims, and fill his ears with the dread reiteration of their 'despair and die.' And as Richard starts from his slumber, with drops of sweat cold upon his brow, there is wrung at last from his lips the agonized cry of homage to the might of moral law:

'My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,

And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.'

The horror of his isolation from humanity falls upon him, and echoing, as it were, the grim burden of the spectral chorus, he shrieks aloud

'I shall despair :-There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul will pity me.'

He to whom love had been only foolishness clutches at it convulsively as he hangs over the darkness of the abyss, and, with the imploring cry for pity from his fellows, his scheme of self-centred life crumbles into the dust. That is the 'true

tragedy' of Richard III, the real and significant Nemesis of which his death in battle at the hands of Richmond, God's representative, is only the outward, though dramatically and historically imperative, confirmation.

While the figure of the hunchback king throws all other characters into a subordinate place, the full intent of the drama is missed, unless Richard's fate is seen as the climax of a series of Nemeses upon the guilty House of York. Clarence, King Edward, the Queen's kindred, Hastings, Buckingham, follow one another to their doom, and in each case, as will be evident on careful study of the play, there is a turn of the wheel with the result that those who triumph in one Nemesis become the victims of the next.' But each incident, in addition, goes to form a chain of triumph for Richard, while the catastrophe of his fate, as the gathering of the ghosts testifies, is the retribution for them all. Yet further, alike he and his victims suffer in common expiation of the sins of York against Lancaster, so that a complicated law of Nemesis controls the issues of the play. So uniform indeed is its working that it runs a risk of appearing automatic, and thus losing something of its moral significance. In view of this danger Shakspere varies the action by a number of devices, of which the most striking is the introduction upon the scene, in weirdly impressive contrast, of the two women, the Duchess of York and the Lancastrian Queen Margaret, who epitomize, as it were, the whole story of crime and its retribution. They are less human personages than monumental figures, embodiments of suffering and of doom. The aged Duchess, widow of the great Duke of York, mother of Edward, Clarence, and Richard, grandmother of the boy princes, gathers up into her own breast all the spear-points of penal destiny; as she herself exclaims:

'Alas! I am the mother of these moans :

Their woes are parcelled, mine are general,'

and Queen Margaret, like some Fury of old, chants over her the wild paean of sated, or all-but sated, revenge:

'Thy Edward he is dead, that killed my Edward;
Thy other Edward dead, to quit my Edward;
Young York he is but boot, because both they
Match not the high perfection of my loss:

Thy Clarence he is dead that stabbed my Edward;
And the beholders of this frantic play,

The adulterate Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, Grey,
Untimely smothered in their dusky graves.'

One last victim is still due, 'hell's black intelligencer,' Richard, but that culminating debt is at length paid, and the account between the Houses made even. Then, and not till then, may the White Rose mingle with the Red, and 'fair prosperous days' once more dawn over a re-united land. If, as is probable, Richard III was Shakspere's first serious play, it gave convincing proof that the new dramatist, however tolerant in some ways, held rigidly to the doctrine that evil-doing, whether in the individual or in the State, is dogged by a Nemesis that wrings its penalty, even to the uttermost farthing.

IT has seemed desirable to deal first with Shakspere's early historical plays, as in them we see most plainly how intimate was his relation to his predecessors, and by what gradual stages he rose to independent effort in the domain of serious drama. But meanwhile he had been putting forth his powers in other and, for the most part, lighter spheres, where the distinctive nature of his genius was from the beginning more unmistakably shown, and where the influences of his youthful surroundings helped to give special colour to his art. Delighting, as it would seem, in making varied trial of the faculties that he felt unfolding within him, and urged forward as yet by no single dominating impulse, he experimented, in these early days, here, there, and everywhere, turning his hand with dexterous rapidity to narrative verse, comedy of manners, comedy of incident, fairy comedy, and lyrical tragedy. His output at this period is thus extremely diversified, but in every branch it bears the broad stamp of adolescence.

The two poems VENUS AND ADONIS and LUCRECE may be conveniently spoken of at the outset, though they were preceded by some of the plays. The circumstances of their publication and dedication to Southampton have been already described. In them Shakspere challenged a place among the descriptive poets of the Elizabethan age, and the claim was