in the precocious taunts of young York: the lamentations of the women and children whom Richard has bereaved have real pathos beneath their outward formality. But the abiding power of the tragedy lies in its clear presentation of the moral significance of the events which it relates. Raro antecedentem scelestum deseruit pede Pana claudo are words which would suggest themselves as a fit motto for the play, were it not that here vengeance follows at the very heels of crime. Richard has not had time to enjoy his triumph, when the first blow of vengeance strikes him. Hastings, in the moment of exultation at the death of his enemies, finds himself a partaker in their fate. Buckingham hastens his own downfall by hesitating at the last crime by which he can ensure temporary success. The ruin of Rivers and his friends, the helpless misery of the women, are hurried on by their selfish ambition and intrigue.

It would be inaccurate to say that the author of Richard III. was profoundly moved by the spectacle of sin and its punishment in history. The doctrine was the conventional foundation of the tragic art which he practised. Expressed with pious conviction or reluctant acquiescence by the great Athenian dramatists, it had been accepted as an artificial principle by the author of the Senecan tragedies. In the dawn of the Renaissance, the "harm of hem that stode in heigh degree" was a favourite theme of prose and poetry, of which, in England, The Myrroure for Magistrates was the crowning example. The frigid atmosphere of that grave poem was the atmosphere of tragedy on the early Elizabethan stage, where Seneca was the formal model of drama. The tragic propriety of Gorboduc stirs no emotion of sympathy or horror, beyond the natural repugnance which we feel towards its fatal catastrophes. The crimes and punishment of Queen Eleanor in Peele's Edward I. are merely grotesque. In Lodge and Greene's Looking-Glass for London, a certain sincerity of feeling underlies the artless machinery of the story. But, in plays like The Wounds of Civil War, Greene's James IV., or the three parts of Henry VI., the tragic groundwork is a matter of course; and our estimate of such works depends on the degree of skill with which their leading principle is developed. The same

thing, allowing for the exceptional horrors of the action, may be said of Titus Andronicus. Richard III. is almost the first tragedy of the school of Marlowe, in which the conventional element, used and developed with great clearness, is invested with a real human interest. The characters are something more than mere stage dolls, moved to and fro as the action of the play prescribes. Yet their sin and fate, if they compel our interest, leave our deeper emotions untouched. They are still matters of course. The dramatist has not won as yet that insight into the springs of human sin and folly which gives Othello or King Lear their eternal pathos.] His characters are drawn in simple outline and with uniform colouring. They are good or bad without compensation. They sin without reflection: their punishment is purely mechanical. Richmond, the ultimate avenger, is the most lifeless figure of the play: he is merely the instrument of justice. To the author, in fact, the whole course of such a tragedy was perfectly obvious. It would have been impossible for him, at this date, to make Hastings say, in the hour of his misfortune:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.

Margaret or Elizabeth could not yet acknowledge that :

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

Make instruments to plague us.

Richmond could not yet confess, over the body of his slain adversary :

This shows you are above,

You justicers, that these our nether crimes

So speedily can venge.

In Richard III., as in King Lear, the wheel comes full circle; but the dramatist watches its revolution with imperfect experience, and, as a consequence, with little emotion.

His artistic sympathy is concentrated on the figure of his hero. Every actor in the story receives his degree of life from association with Richard and contact with his malign influence. But, when we speak of the character of the hero and its effect on the play, we recognise in its design the same simplicity which

distinguishes the author's perception of the tragic principle. Richard is an ideal conception after the pattern of Marlowe's heroes. Already his audacity, his determination to stick at nothing, have given him heroic prominence in the third part of Henry VI-a prominence which leaves Warwick, the real hero of the piece, in the background. This preliminary revelation of his remorseless nature, devoid of pity, love, and fear, glorying in its powers of dissimulation and treachery, must have whetted the appetite of an Elizabethan audience for a further development of the theme. The key is maintained in Richard III. Like Tamburlaine or Barabas, Richard is absolutely consistent to his character and aims. There is no room for any real development of character. No chastening of experience can modify the superhuman passion for self-aggrandisement at any price, the ready-made standard to which Richard's every action must conform. His opening soliloquy lays down his motives and plan of campaign. He follows out all his designs with swiftness and eminent success. Relying on his force of will, he removes his enemies one by one, uses his adherents as his tools, and accomplishes feats like the wooing of Anne and the persuasion of the Queen-dowager to further his plans. It is only when he has done everything that he possibly can do, that Nemesis falls upon him. Even so, he is loyal to his part, and goes to ruin with the callous assurance that has been the keynote of all his actions. No compunction visits him. Once, when he hears of the first serious opposition to his career, the defection of Buckingham and Richmond's invasion, he falters, chides the messengers furiously, and issues contradictory orders to his lieutenants. But, a moment later, he recovers his courage. Once again, after his last night of visions, he wakes with the agonised cry," Have mercy, Jesu!" and turns to a self-questioning, which, however, compared with his earlier soliloquies, is lifeless and perfunctory. On the field of battle, there is no place for his usual weapons of hypocrisy and treachery. Courage and physical force alone are possible; and in these he is still superhuman, fighting to the end with entire consistency to those early glimpses of his character in the third part of Henry VI., when, after St. Albans, he flung down Somerset's

head on the ground with a savage gibe, or when, at Towton, he and his brother Edward, "like a brace of greyhounds, having the fearful flying hare in sight," chased the Lancastrians from the field.

Selfish ambition, physical courage, absolute want of moral scruple and human kindliness, are the fundamental qualities on which the character of Richard is built up. The figure is imposing, because the villainy embodied in its conception is on so large a scale, and is worked out so thoroughly. At the same time, the conception itself is mechanical. The character is made to order, to fulfil an ideal plan. As a study in selfish wickedness, it is far behind such a study as that of Iago. Exceptional though he is, Iago compels our belief by virtue of the complexity of his motives, and of the mind that dwells in him and admits us to its secrets. Richard's motive is simple; he has no individual mind; he is merely an artistic conception of a gigantic villain with no redeeming quality, worked out with great power, and impressive chiefly because of the bulk of the design. Not very long before, Marlowe had made a similar attempt in the Jew of Malta, in whom malevolence and avarice exclude all other qualities. If Barabas supplied some hints for Shylock at a later date, he can hardly have been overlooked in the work of creating or transforming the character of Richard III. Richard is the most striking stage-villain of the type of which Barabas is the most grotesque example. He possesses in an eminent degree those Machiavelian tricks of which Barabas furnishes a shameless demonstration. To "count religion but a childish toy" is one of the fundamental tenets of this statesman who had boasted, in an earlier play, that he was able to "set the murderous Machiavel to school." He steals "odd old ends" from Holy Writ to deceive the ears of those who suspect him. It is by an unblushing parade of piety that he gains his object, in the critical scene where he accepts the crown from the citizens. He is an adept in the art of moralising "two meanings in one word." Examples of the Machiavelian tradition in English drama recur to the mind of every student. Richard, with his ambition, his fearlessness, his unscrupulousness, his calculating hypocrisy, his never-failing irony,

his natural defects redeemed by his gifts of insinuation and persuasion, is the beau idéal of the Machiavelian, to whom virtù, prompt and unscrupulous energy, is indispensable, with whom the semblance of religion must take the place of the reality, in whom the highest perfection of bestial qualities, the cunning of the fox and the courage of the lion, must be combined.

To discuss the relation of this dramatic ideal to its real origin in Machiavelli, or, more properly, in the ideas of the "Englishman Italianate" about Machiavelli, is not to the present purpose. Nor is it necessary to enter into the relationship between the Richard of the drama and the real Richard of history. Something has been said of the minor characters, of the wouldbe Machiavelian Buckingham, and of the frivolous, sensual Hastings. In the case of Hastings, the dramatic irony of the tragedy, its most distinguishing excellence, is at its best. Richard, and even Buckingham, are too thoroughly alive to their own villainy, and too obviously self-devoted to destruction, to be altogether blind to a possible reversal of their fortunes, or to lend their words that terrible significance with which the thoughtless sinner bears witness on the stage to his real insecurity or prophesies his own downfall. The cynicism with which Richard says of Clarence's murder, "God will revenge it," disarms the situation of half its irony. When Buckingham sets aside Margaret's warning, it is not because he feels himself secure from the necessity to "take heed of yonder dog," but because he thinks himself competent to take care of himself and foresee all means of self-preservation. Hastings, on the other hand, has full confidence in the good faith of the protector. He laughs at Stanley's dreams and caution; he exults in the news of the execution of his enemies; the meeting with the pursuivant, though it recalls an unhappy day in his life, gives him no foreboding qualm. His meeting with the priest fills him with no sense of ill to come: he can laugh over it with Buckingham, and answer his sinister jests with a jeer at the unhappy lords at Pomfret. At the council in the Tower he boasts of his intimate friendship with Gloucester, and praises his friend's simplicity of heart and face, of which he is doubtless ready to take the first advantage. But, in a moment, the fatuous self