observed the anachronism and meant to remove it; that he had begun his work of correction in the Third Act, and had completed it for the remainder, as far as the dialogue was concerned; but that he had forgotten or postponed the two first Acts, and had not attended to the stage-directions and marginal names in the two last. For it is to be observed that Stanley is never called 'Derby' in the dialogue after the Second Act.-W. W. LLOYD: Stanley shares a portion of the mental qualifications of Richard; but he approaches him only as nearly as simulation to dissimulation, coolness to daring, prudence of caution to that of adventurousness. Much of the value of the character would be due to his being seen on the stage when he was not heard. In Act I, Sc. iii, he makes conciliatory reply to the Queen's accusation of his wife,―the Queen who risks affronting him as she pursues vindictively Hastings, the only other lord who had the disposition to protect her son. Richard enumerates Stanley among his dupes, but there is no proof of it, and Stanley's silence is marked, and was designed to be remarkable, throughout the scene of weak wrangling with Margaret and weaker part-taking with Richard against her by Dorset and the rest. Not less significant is his silence when Hastings, who had rejected his counsel, is arrested, and he follows with the rest to Gloster's invitation, 'The rest who love me rise and follow me.' Thus he foils the penetration even of Richard, who trusts him with suspicion but still trusts him, with pledge in keeping; thus he carries on the important negotiations between Richmond and Elizabeth, and at last, at the decisive and very latest moment, he lays aside the mask, though his son's life may be the forfeit, and the fortune of Bosworth Field is decided. 30. Two Children] WRIGHT: The two children of Clarence were Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, who was beheaded by Henry VII., Nov. 21, 1499, and Margaret Plantagenet, afterward Countess of Salisbury and mother of the famous Cardinal Pole. She suffered the same fate as her brother, May 27, 1541. 32. Sir Christopher] FRENCH (p. 239): Lysons says (Environs of London, ii, 475): 'Christopher Urswick, presented to the rectory of Hackney, by Bishop Hall, anno 1502, was a man of very considerable eminence. His abilities as a statesman which had been evinced in his successful endeavor to promote the union between Henry VII., to whom he was chaplain, and Elizabeth of York, induced the King to employ him in various important negociations and embassies. He was installed Dean of Windsor in 1495, and enjoyed at the same time the archdeaconry of Richmond and Yorkshire.' 36. Queen to Edward IV.] FRENCH says (p. 243) that in only one instance has he met with the time of Elizabeth Woodvile's death, and then it was merely stated to have occurred the Friday before Whitsuntide. As Easter Day in 1492 fell on the 22nd of April, the exact date of her decease was the 8th of June. Her will, dated April 10, 1492, exhibits a touching picture of her maternal affection, and her poverty, having nothing but her blessing to bequeath to her children, for-"I have no worldly goods" is her mournful confession. She was buried in St. George's Chapel, Windsor.'-STRICKLAND (iii, 346): That Elizabeth died destitute of personal property is no proof of previous persecution, since several queens who were possessed of the undivided dower appanage, and whose children were provided for, died not much richer. (The creditors of Eleanora of Castile and Marguerite of France were not paid till long after the deaths of those queens. Queen Phillippa died in debt.) Edward IV. had endowed his proud mother as though she were a queen-dowager; while his wife was dowered on property to which he had no real title.-OECHELHAUSER (Einführungen, i, 149): Next to Richard's, Elizabeth's may be considered the principal rôle. With due regard to her having two grown sons, Dorset and Grey, by her former husband, she should not be represented as too young (perhaps the latter half of her thirtieth year), yet still lovely and charming. The chroniclers lay great stress on the loveliness of her character, her charm, and well-chosen speech. [Oechelhauser has, perhaps, been herein slightly misled by the chroniclers, Hall and Holinshed, who systematically, and purposely, lightened the characters of all those in opposition to Richard III. Later historians give a different account of Elizabeth, describing her as utterly selfish and unscrupulous where the advancement of her relatives was at stake. MISS STRICKLAND says there doubtless never was a queen 'who had a more unfortunate faculty of making enemies.'-ED.] 37. Queen Margaret] MRS. JAMESON (ii, 199): Margaret, as exhibited in these tragedies, is a dramatic portrait of considerable truth, and vigour, and consistency-but she is not one of Shakespeare's women. He who knew so well in what true greatness of spirit consisted-who could excite our respect and sympathy, even for a Lady Macbeth, would never have given us a heroine without a touch of heroism; he would not have portrayed a high-hearted woman struggling unsubdued against the strangest vicissitudes of fortune; yet left her without a single quality which would excite our interest in her bravely endured misfortunesand this in the very face of history; he would have breathed into the woman some of his own sweet spirit-he would have given her a soul.-VERPLANCK (Note on [37. Queen Margaret] IV, iv, 1): As we find in Richard III., all these characteristics of Margaret are adopted and recapitulated, it is clear that this argument against the character being Shakespeare's destroys itself, by proving too much; for it would prove that this play too was not his, which no one can assert in the wildest mood of critical conjecture. Shakespeare might certainly have given a more heroic cast to Margaret of Anjou; but the truth evidently is that, having, partly from the intimation of the chroniclers, adopted this view of Margaret's ferocity and conjugal infidelity, he must have seen that he could not breathe into such a personage 'his own sweet spirit' any more than into Goneril or Regan, and therefore placed her in bold and unmitigated contrast to the mild virtues of the 'holy Henry.' The comparison of Margaret with Lady Macbeth suggests a deep moral truth, which must have been in the Poet's mind, though he has not embodied it in formal moral declamation. Our interest in Lady Macbeth is kept up in spite of her crimes, by her unflagging and devoted attachment to her husband, and their mutual and touching confidence and solace in each other, even in guilt as well as in sorrow. Margaret has no communion with Henry's heart: she scorns him, and her affections roam elsewhere. That last redeeming virtue of woman being lost, Margaret has nothing left but her talent and courage; and those qualities alone cannot impart the respect and sympathy which we continue to feel for the guilty but nobler wife of Macbeth. -MARSHALL: Students who read Shakespeare only, can discourse most eloquently on the grand idea of Margaret, the impersonation of Nemesis, glorying in the vengeance which falls on those who had been either principals or accomplices in all the horrible acts of cruelty which the Yorkist party perpetrated. But when the play is brought to the true test of a play-when it is acted-were Margaret to be represented by one who had inherited all the talent and reputation of a Siddons, added to the prestige of a popular favorite at the present day, no one would take much interest in her, or regard her otherwise than as something of a bore, who interferes with the main action of the drama. -MINTO (286): Amidst the circle of tearful, afflicted women bereaved by the multiplied villanies of Richard, Margaret stands out with irrepressible fierceness flashing through and burning up her tears, husbandless, childless, friendless, utterly impotent, but indomitable. In her young and beautiful days, when Suffolk brought her from France as 'nature's miracle,' to be the wife of King Henry, she gave ample proof that she was a woman of spirit. This was one of Shakespeare's earlier efforts; but he never again equalled the concentrated bitter fierceness of this she-wolf's hunger for revenge, fiendish laughter over its partial accomplishment, and savage prayer for its completion. Words could not hiss and sting with more envenomed intensity than in the speech that she concludes with the prayer for Richard's death: 'Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I pray That I may live to say The dog is dead.'-FRENCH (245): Sir Walter Scott has introduced Margaret in Anne of Geierstein in the decline of her age, and in the loss of her power, but not of her intellect; and he speaks of her as one 'who, if she occasionally abused victory by cruelty and revenge, had made some atonement by the indomitable resolution with which she had supported the fiercest storms of adversity.'-S. A. BROOKE (Trans. New Sh. Soc., 1880-86, p. 512): Margaret is a mighty figure: more Greek in conception than any other figure in Shakespeare-the Fate and Fury together of the play. She does nothing for its movement. She is outside its action, but broods above it, with arms outstretched in cursing, an evil bird of God-the impersonation of all the woe and [37. Queen Margaret] crime of the civil strife of England, and of its avenging punishment. Worn, like 'a wrinkled witch,' tall, with the habit of command, she has not, like Richard, been inhuman, but she has outlived humanity, and passed into an elemental power. She has also been so long under the curse of men for her cruelty, that the curse has divided her from men. So also has her strange sorrow-she is altogether joyless. It is not till she finds the Duchess of York and Edward's Queen in their hopeless pain that she feels herself at one, even for a little while, with any human creature. Then she sits down and curses with them. She has all the eloquence of primeval sorrow and hate. 'Life is her shame,' but she 'waits vengeance,' hungering for it like a wolf. It is the only thing that brings a smile to her withered lip. And her vengeance is felt, like an actual presence in the air, by all who die. She is not only Margaret and hate to them, but the spirit in whom, for punishment, the Divine justice abides. And when she passes away, still alive, departs in awful joy, like one of the immortals: "These English woes will make me smile in France.' It is the most supernatural conception in Shakespeare.-LLOYD: The introduction of Queen Margaret, contrary to the truth of history, is invented with admirable effect; her invectives bring up the horrors of the civil war with the liveliness that is required to give force to their sequel; her penetration and denouncement of the nature and purposes of Richard heighten our sense of the blindness and weakness of his victims, who neglect the warning, and generally relieve the great contrast of the piece by the intervention of a second character of eloquence, pertinacity, clear-sightedness, and decision.—HUDSON (Introd., p. 36): As in the earlier plays Richard supplies a forecast of the style of character which the proceedings then on foot were likely to generate and hand down to future times, so in the later play Margaret supplies a corresponding retrospect. She was continued on the scene, to the end, apparently, that the parties might have a terrible present remembrancer of their former deeds; just as the manhood of Richard had been anticipated for the purpose, as it would seem, of forecasting the final issues from the earlier stages of that multitudinous tragedy. So that there appears to be some reason in the ways of Providence, as well as in the laws of Art, why Margaret should still be kept in presence, as the fitting counterpart of that terrible man as he grows on from youth to manhood, and from manhood to his end, at once the offspring and the avenger of civil butchery. Her condition is, here, vastly different indeed from what it was in the earlier plays, but her character remains the same. She is here stripped of arms and instruments, so that her thoughts can no longer work out in acts. But, for this very cause, her Amazonian energies concentrate themselves so much the more in her speech; and her eloquence, while retaining all its strength and fluency, burns the deeper, forasmuch as it is the only organ of her mind which she has left. In brief, she is still the same high-grown, wide-branching tree, now rendered leafless indeed, and, therefore, all the fitter for the blasts of heaven to howl and whistle through! Long suffering has deepened her fierceness into sublimity. At once vindictive and broken-hearted, her part runs into a most impressive blending of the terrible and the pathetic . . . She is a sort of wailing or ululating chorus to the thick-thronging butcheries and agonies that wind their course through the play. A great, brave, fearful woman indeed made sacred by all the anguishes that a wife and a mother can know!-WARNER (p. 218): Margaret is introduced much after the fashion of a Chorus, a combination of prediction and commentary upon the persons and events with whom her influence is still Anne, Widow of Edward, Prince of Wales, Son Dutchess of York, Mother to Edward IV, Clarence, Sheriff, Pursuivant, Citizens, Ghosts of those mur- The SCENE in England. 42. After this line, an infant Daughter of Clarence, is added by Cap. et seq. 43. Sheriff] Sheriff of Wiltshire. Dyce. 9 38 40 45 45. A Page, a Scrivener] Added by Cap. powerful. This vindictive shade of Margaret in the play is one of the great artistic and dramatic triumphs of the poet. 38. Anne, Widow of Edward, Prince of Wales] GAIRDNER: The Earl of Warwick's younger daughter, Anne, had been betrothed to the son of Henry VI. It does not appear that she was married to him, although she is often spoken of as his widow; on the contrary, the language of contemporary writers implies that she was only contracted or engaged to him. (The Croyland writer, p. 557, says she was desponsata, and even after the Prince's death he speaks of her as puella.) In point of fact, at the date of his death she had not completed her fourteenth year. She was born on June 11, 1456. [The question of Anne Neville's marriage to Edward, Prince of Wales, may be found concisely stated in Miss CAROLINE HALSTED'S History of Richard III., Chap. VII. As the subject is one of purely historic interest, I trust the omission of a more detailed statement will be pardoned.-ED.] 41. Dutchess of York] MALONE: Cicely, daughter of Ralph Neville, first Earl of Westmoreland, and widow of Richard, Duke of York, who was killed at the battle of Wakefield in 1460. She survived her husband thirty-five years, living till the year 1495. |