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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.

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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

willingly allowed by his contemporaries. It was by them that his fame was at first widely spread, and that he won the title of 'mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakspere.' Yet by posterity these works have been, for the most part, neglected, and it must be allowed that some of the very points which made them so popular in Shakspere's own time strike modern taste as blemishes. The subject of Venus and Adonis is taken, though with considerable modifications from Ovid's Metamorphoses1. It tells the tale of how Venus woos the beautiful boy Adonis, how he disdains her love, and, in spite of her warnings, goes to the hunt where he is slain by a boar, and turned, as he lies dead on the ground, into a violet. Such a theme may be effectively handled in two ways. There may be a frankly pagan treatment, a revelling in sensuous beauty, a glorification of passion which, to be convincing, must itself be passionate. This is the method which has given such superb results in Marlowe's Hero and Leander. Or there is the method employed, for instance, by Spenser in his description of Acrasia's bower in The Faerie Queene, where a voluptuous picture of the Temptress is drawn to typify the snares of carnal sin. But between these two modes of treatment the youthful Shakspere is found halting. He does, indeed, put into the mouth of Adonis an outburst on the difference between love and lust, and the episode of the 'jennet' is doubtless intended as an illustration of the same theme. Yet he lingers with unaffected relish over the details of Venus' charms, and elaborates with minute realism every incident in her amorous strategy. The result, however, is not to call into life a glowing, if luscious, Renaissance figure. There are superb touches, as when the hand of Adonis in the grasp of Venus is likened to

'A lily prisoned in a gaol of snow

Or ivory in an alabaster band,'

but the general air is one of ingenious and laboured analysis. This is due in part to the technique of the poem, wherein Shakspere adopts unreservedly the prevalent fashion, of sym

1 For a detailed comparison between passages in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece and Ovid's Metamorphoses and Fasti, see Baynes' essay, What Shakspere learnt at School.

metrical balance, quaint metaphor, and antithesis strained to cracking point. The following verse may serve as specimen:

'O, what a war of looks was then between them!
Her eyes, petitioners, to his eyes suing:

His eyes saw her eyes as they had not seen them;
Her eyes woo'd still, his eyes disdained their wooing,
And all this dumb play had his acts made plain
With tears, which, chorus-like, her eyes did rain.'

Similar is the couplet in which Venus speaks of Adonis' disdainful words as

'Melodious discord, heavenly tune harsh-sounding

Ear's deep-sweet music, and heart's deep-sore wounding,

Modern criticism, as it contrasts such verbal sword-play with the light and music of Marlowe's lines, cannot echo the encomium of Cripple in Heywood's The Fair Maid of the Exchange on Venus and Adonis, as 'the very quintessence of love.' But the Stratford poet, if he failed to irradiate his theme with the glow of a living passion, has done much to freshen the loaded atmosphere by vivid and wholesome touches which waft with them the breath of the Warwickshire fields and glades. The detailed study of the 'points' of Adonis' courser, the pathetic history of the hunting of 'poor Wat' the hare, the picture of the 'fawn hid in some brake' whom the milch-doe hastens to feed, the lovely description of the lark, weary of rest, mounting from 'his moist cabinet' to greet the sun,

'Who doth the world so gloriously behold

That cedar-tops and hills seem burnished gold,'

-all these and similar images are reminiscences of that sweet and pure country life, whose air blows so often over Shakspere's pages, and preserves them from the more tainted influences of the Renaissance. And under the healthy charm of such scenes we are scarcely disposed to regret that the poet's attempt to portray the Goddess of Love, in her debased aspect, must be pronounced, on the whole, a splendid failure.

The Lucrece is probably the 'graver labour' with which Shakspere, in his dedication to Venus and Adonis, had promised to honour Southampton. It is longer than the earlier poem by just above a third, and is written, not in a six-lined stanza, but

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