Lew. We will attend to neither:- Bast. Indeed, your drums, being beaten, will cry And so shall you, being beaten : Do but start Hubert. bey there. Mess. Be of good comfort; for the great supply,' K. John. Ah me! this tyrant fever burns me up, others. Sal. I did not think the king so stor'd with friends. Pem. Up once again; put spirit in the French; If they miscarry, we miscarry too. Sal. That misbegotten devil, Faulconbridge, In spite of spite, alone upholds the day. Pem. They say, King John, sore sick, hath left the field. Enter MELUN wounded, and led by Soldiers. Mel. Lead me to the revolts of England here. Sal. When we were happy, we had other names. Pem. It is the Count Melun. Wounded to death. Sal Even on that altar, where we swore to you Sal. May this be possible? may this be true? Which bleeds away, even as a form of wax Since I must lose the use of all deceit ? He is forsworn, if e'er those eyes of yours But even this night,-whose black contagious breath In Sal. We do believe thee,--And beshrew my soul Even to our ocean, to our great King John. And happy newness, that intends old right. [Exeunt, leading of MELUN. SCENE V. The same. The French Camp. Enter LEWIS and his Train. Lew. The sun of heaven, methought, was loath to set; But stay'd, and made the western welkin blush, In faint retire: O, bravely came we off, Lew. By his persuasion, are again fallen off: Lew. Ah, foul shrewd news!-Beshrew thy very I did not think to be so sad to-night, As this hath made me.--Who was he, that said, 1 Supply is here used as a noun of multitude, as it King John did fly, an hour or two before is again in scene v. 2 The king had not long since called him by his original name of Philip, but the messenger could not take the same liberty. 3 A proverbial expression intimating treachery. 6 Rankness, as applied to a river, here signifies eruberant, ready to overflow; as applied to the actions of the speaker and his party it signifies wanton wild ness. Petulantia. 'Rain added to a river that is rank Perforce will force it overflow the bank.' The stumbling night did part our weary powers 8 Innovation. ? 7 Immediate. 9 Tuiring colours is the reading of the old copy, which was unnecessarily altered to tatter'd by Johnson, who is followed by the subsequent editors. To totter, in old language, was to waver, to shake with a tremulous motion as colours would do in the wind. It is obvious that tatter'd cannot be the right word, for how could their tatter'd colours be clearly wound up? tottre (says Baret,) nutare, vaccilare, see shake and wagge. The colours were waving in the wind during the battle, and were wound up at the close of it. To Mess. Whoever spoke it, it is true, my lord. The day shall not be up so soon as I, To try the fair adventure of to-morrow. [Exeunt. Myself, well mounted, hardly have escap'd. [Exeunt. Lew. Well; keep good quarter,' and good care Away, before! conduct me to the king; SCENE VI. An open Place in the neighbourhood Hub. Who's there? speak, ho! speak quickly, or Doth, by the idle comments that it makes, I shoot. Bast. A friend :--What art thou? Hub. Of the part of England. Bast. Whither dost thou go? Hub. What's that to thee? Why may not I demand Of thine affairs, as well as thou of mine? Bast. Hubert, I think. Hub. Thou hast a perfect2 thought: I will, upon all hazards, well believe, Thou art my friend, that know'st my tongue so well: Who art thou? Bast. Who thou wilt: an if thou please, Thou may'st befriend me so much, as to think I come one way of the Plantagenets. Hub. Unkind remembrance! thou, and eyeless night,3 Have done me shame :--Brave soldier, pardon me, Hub. Why, here walk I, in the black brow of night, Bast. Show me the very wound of this ill news; I am no woman, I'll not swoon at it. Hub. The king, I fear, is poison'd by a monk: Bast. How did he take it? who did taste to him? Aud brought prince Henry in their company; Bast. Withhold thine indignation, mighty heaven, 1 i. e. keep in your allotted posts or stations. 2 i. e. a well informed one. 3 The old copy reads endless night.' The emendation was made by Theobald. Foretell the ending of mortality. Enter PEMBROKE. Pem. His highness yet doth speak: and holds belief, Pem. That, being brought into the open air, 4 Not one of the historians who wrote within sixty years of the event mentions this improbable story. The tale is, that a monk, to revenge himself on the king for a saying at which he took offence, poisoned a cup of ale, and having brought it to his majesty, drank some of it himself, to induce the king to taste it, and soon afterwards expired. Thomas Wylkes is the first who mentions it in his Chronicle as a report. According to the best accounts John died at Newark, of a fever. 5 i. e. less speedy, after some delay. 6 Prince Henry was only nine years old when his father died. 7 Continuance here means continuity. Bacon uses it in that sense also. So Baret, If the disease be of any continuance, if it be an old and settled disease. I should not have thought this passage needed elucida tion, had not Malone proposed to read in thy continu. ance.' 8 The old copy reads invisible. Sir T. Hanmer proposed the reading admitted into the text. Malone has endeavoured to elaborate a meaning out of the old read. ing but without success. I must refer the reader to I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan, Sal. Be of good comfort, prince; for you are born To set a form upon that indigest Which he hath left so shapeless and so rude." K. John. Ay, marry, now, my soul hath elbow room; It would not out at windows, nor at doors. And none of you will bid the winter come, the variorum editions for his argument, and Steevens's vein of pleasant irony upon it. 9 A description of Chaos, almost in the very words of Ovid: Quem dixere Chaos rudis indigestæque moles.—Met. i. 10 This scene has been imitated by Beaumont and Fletcher, in A Wife for a Month, Act iv. Decker, in the Gull's Hornbook, has the same thought:-the morting waxing cold thrust his frosty fingers into thy bosome. Perhaps Shakspeare was acquainted with the following passages in two of Marlowe's plays, which Marlowe died in 1593:must both have been written previous to King John, l 'OI am dull, and the cold hand of sleep Hath thrust his icy fingers in my ireast, And made a frost within me.-Lust's Dominion. O poor Zabina, O my queen, my queen, Fetch me some water for my Inurning breast, To cool and comfort me with longer date.' The corresponding passage in the old play runs thus:Tamburlaine, 1591. 'Philip, some drink. O for the frozen Alps To tumble on, and cool this inward heat That rageth as a furnace seven-fold. I beg cold comfort: and you are so strait,' And so ingrateful, you deny me that. Who half an hour since came from the dauphin; P. Hen. O, that there were some virtue in my As we with honour and respect may take, tears, That might relieve you! K. John. With purpose presently to leave this war. The salt in them is hot. Ourselves well sinewed to our defence. Within me is a hell; and there the poison Enter the Bastard. Bast. O, I am scalded with my violent emotion, And spleen of speed to see your majesty. K. John. O cousin, thou art come to set mine eye: The tackle of my heart is crack'd and burn'd; And all the shrouds, wherewith my life should sail, Are turned to one thread, one little hair: My heart hath one poor string to stay it by, Which holds but till thy news be uttered: And then all this thou seest, is but a clod, And module of confounded royalty. Bast. The Dauphin is preparing hitherward: Where, heaven he knows, how we shall answer him: For, in a night, the best part of my power, As I upon advantage did remove, Were in the washes, all unwarily, Devoured by the unexpected flood. [The King dies. Sal. You breathe these dead news in as dead an ear. My liege! my lord!--But now a king,--now thus. P. Hen. Even so must I run on, and even so stop. What surety of the world, what hope, what stay, When this was now a king, and now is clay! Bast. Art thou gone so? I do but stay behind, And instantly return with me again, Sal. It seems, you know not then so much as we: The cardinal Pandulph is within at rest, 1 Narrow, avaricious. 2 Module and model were only different modes of spelling the same word. Model signified not an archetype, after which something was to be formed, but the thing formed after an archetype, a copy. Bullokar, in his Expositor, 1616, explains model, the platform, or form of any thing." 3 This untoward accident really happened to King John himself. As he passed from Lynn to Lincolnshire he lost by an inundation all his treasure, carriages, bag. gage, and regalia. 4 In crastino S. Luca Johannes Rex Angliæ in castro de Newark obiit, et sepultus est in ecclesia Wigor Sal. Nay, it is in a manner done already; Bast. Let it be so:-And you, my noble prince, P. Hen. At Worcester must his body be interr'd ;4 For so he will'd it. Bast. Sal. And the like tender of our love we make, To rest without a spot for evermore. P. Hen. I have a kind soul, that would give you thanks, And knows not how to do it, but with tears. Bast. O, let us pay the time but needful woe, Since it hath been beforehand with our griefs.-This England never did (nor never shall) Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself. Now these her princes are come home again, Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them: Nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true. [Exeunt. THE tragedy of King John, though not written with the pleasing interchange of incidents and characters. The utmost power of Shakspeare, is varied with a very lady's grief is very affecting; and the character of the Bastard contains that mixture of greatness and levity which this author delighted to exhibit. JOHNSON. niensi inter corpora S. Oswaldi et sancti [Wolstani] Chronic. sive Annal. Prioratus de Dunstable, edit. a T. Hearne, t. i. p. 173. A stone coffin, containing the body of King John, was discovered in the cathedral church of Worcester, July 17, 1797. 5As previously we have found sufficient cause for lamentation, let us not waste the time in superfluous sorrow.' 6 This sentiment may have been borrowed from the following passage in the old play : Let England live but true within herself, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF KING RICHARD THE SECOND. IN PRELIMINARY REMARKS. N the construction of this play Shakspeare has followed Holished, his usual historical authority, some passages of the Chronicle he has transplanted into the drama with very little alteration. It has been suspected that there was an old play on the subject of King Richard II. which the poet might have seen. Sir Gillie Merrick, who was concerned in the harebrained business of the Earl of Essex, is accused of having procured to be played before the conspirators the play of the deposing of Richard the Second; when it was told him by one of the players that the play was old, and they should have loss in playing it, because few would come to it, there was forty shillings extraordinary given to play, and so thereupon played it was! It seems probable, from a passage in the State Trials, quoted by Mr. Tyrwhitt, that this old play bore the title of King Henry IV, and not King Richard II, and it could not be Shakspeare's King Henry IV, as that commences a year after the death of King Richard. It may seem strange says Malone) that this old play should have of Shakspeare's historical dramas, which Schlegel thinks the poet designed to form one great whole, 'as it were an historical heroic poem, of which the separate plays constitute the rhapsodies." When the been represented after Shakspeare's drama on the same subject had been printed: the reason undoubtedly was, that in the old play the deposing of King Richard II. made a part of the exhibition: but in the first edition of Shakspeare's play, one hundred and fifty-four lines, In King Richard the Second the poet exhibits to us a describing a kind of trial of the king, and his actual noble kingly nature, at first obscured by levity and the deposition in parliament, were omitted: nor was it pro- errors of unbridled youth, and afterwards purified by bably represented on the stage. Merrick, Cuffe, and misfortune, and rendered more highly splendid and the rest of Essex's train, naturally preferred the play in illustrious. When he has lost the love and reverence which his deposition was represented, their plot not of his subjects, and is on the point of losing also his aiming at the life of the queen. It is, I know, commonly throne, he then feels with painful inspiration the elevated thought that the parliament scene, as it is called, which vocation of the kingly dignity, and its prerogatives over was first printed in the 4to of 1608, was an addition personal merit and changeable institutions. made by Shakspeare to this play after its first represent-earthly crown has fallen from off his head, he first ation: but it seems to me more probable that it was appears as a king whose innate nobility no humiliation written with the rest, and suppressed in the printed copy can annihilate. This is felt by a poor groom: he is of 1597, from the fear of offending Elizabeth; against shocked that his master's favourite horse should have whom the Pope had published a bull in the preceding carried the proud Bolingbroke at his coronation; he visits year, exhorting her subjects to take up arms against her. the captive king in his prison, and shames the desertion In 1599 Hayward published his History of the first year of the great. The political history of the deposition is of King Henry IV. which is in fact nothing more than a represented with extraordinary knowledge of the world; history of the deposing of King Richard II. The dis--the ebb of fortune on the one hand, and the swelling pleasure which that book excited at court sufficiently tide on the other, which carries every thing along with accounts for the omitted lines not being inserted in the it; while Bolingbroke acts as a king, and his adherents copy of this play, which was published in 1602. Hay- behave towards him as if he really were so, he still ward was heavily censured in the Star Chamber, and continues to give out that he comes with an armed band, committed to prison. In 1608, when James was quietly merely for the sake of demanding his birthright and the and firmly settled on the throne, and the fear of internal removal of abuses. The usurpation has been long commotion, or foreign invasion, no longer subsisted, completed before the word is pronounced, and the thing neither the author, the managers of the theatre, nor the publicly avowed. John of Gaunt is a model of chival bookseller, could entertain any apprehension of giving rous truth: he stands there like a pillar of the olden offence to the sovereign; the rejected scene was there- time which he had outlived.' fore restored without scruple, and from some playhouse copy probably found its way to the press.'† Malone places the date of its composition in 1593; Mr. Chalmers in 1596. The play was first entered on the stationers' books by Andrew Wise, August 29, 1597; and there were four quarto editions published during the life of Shakspeare, viz. in 1597, 1598, 1608, and 1615. This play may be considered the first link in the chain This is a mistake of Mr. Malone's, there is no quarto copy of the date of 1602, he probably meant the edition of 1598. This drama abounds in passages of eminent poetica) beauty; among which every reader will recollect the pathetic description of Richard's entrance into London with Bolingbroke, of which Dryden said that he knew nothing comparable to it in any other language; John of Gaunt's praise of England," Dear for her reputation through the world; p. 224. ACT I. SCENE I. London. A Room in the Palace. Enter KING RICHARD, attended; JOHN of GAUNT, and other Nobles with him. King Richard. OLD' John of Gaunt, time-honour'd Lancaster, 1 Old John of Gaunt, time-honour'd Lancaster.' Our ancestors, in their estimate of old age, appear to have reckoned somewhat differently from us, and to have considered men as old whom we should now esteem as middle-aged. With them, every man that had passed fifty seems to have been accounted an old man. John of Gaunt, at the period when the commencement of this play is laid (1398), was only fifty-eight years old: he died in 1399, aged fifty-nine. This may have arisen from its being customary in former times to enter life at HENRY PERCY, his Son. Lord Ross. Lord Willoughby. Lord Fitzwater. Lady attending on the Queen. Lords, Heralds, Officers, Soldiers, two Gardeners, Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray ? K. Rich. Tell me, moreover, hast thou sounded If he appeal the duke on ancient malice; On some apparent danger seen in him, 2 When these public challenges were accepted, each combatant found a pledge for his appearance at the time and place appointed. Band and bond were formerly synonymous. 3 In the old play, and in Harding's Chronicle, Bolingbroke's title is written Herford and Harford. This was the pronunciation of our poet's time, and he therefore uses this word as a dissyllable. K. Rich. Then call them to our presence, face to And frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear FOLK. Boling. May many years of happy days befall K. Rich. We thank you both: yet one but flat ters us, As well appeareth by the cause you come :2 In the devotion of a subject's love, may prove. Nor. Let not my cold words here accuse my zeal : I do defy him, and I spit at him; Call him-a slanderous coward, and a villain: Which to maintain, I would allow him odds Or any other ground inhabitable* Where ever Englishman durst set his foot. If guilty dread hath left thee so much strength, Nor. I take it up; and, by that sword I swear, Or chivalrous design of knightly trial; K. Rich. What doth our cousin lay to Mowbray's It must be great, that can inherit us So much as of a thought of ill in him. Boling. Look, what I speak my life shall prove it true; That Mowbray hath receiv'd eight thousand nobles, Further I say,-and further will maintain Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries, K. Rich. How high a pitch his resolution soars !- Nor. O, let my sovereign turn away his face, ears: Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom's heir Nor. Then, Bolingbroke, as low as to thy heart, Boling. Pale trembling coward, there I throw my Upon remainder of a dear account, gage, Disclaiming here the kindred of the king; 1 Drayton asserts that Henry Plantagenet, the eldest son of John of Gaunt, was not distinguished by the name of Bolingbroke till after he had assumed the crown. He is called earl of Hereford by the old historians, and was surnamed Bolingbroke from having been born at the town of that name in Lincolnshire, about 1366. 2 i. e. by the cause you come on.' The suppression of the preposition has been shown to have been frequent with Shakspeare. 3 My right-drawn sword is my sword drawn in a right or just cause. Le. uninhabitable. 5 To inherit, in the language of Shakspeare, is to Since last I went to France to fetch his queen:10 death, I slew him not; but to my own disgrace, 7 Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III. who was murdered at Calais in 1397. See Froissart, chap ccxxvi. 8 i. e. prompt them, set them on by injurious hints. 9 Reproach to his ancestry. 10 The duke of Norfolk was joined in commission with Edward Earl of Rutland (the Aumerle of this play) to go to France in the year 1395, to demand in marriage Isabel, eldest daughter of Charles VI. then between seven and eight years of age. Richard was married to his young consort in November 1396, at Calais; his first wife, Anne, daughter of Charles IV. emperor of Germany, died at Shene on Whit Sunday, 1394. His marriage with Isabella was merely political, it was accompanied with an agreement for a truce between France and England for thirty years. |