is of deep interest when viewed as Shakspere's first tragedy, and as a work which probably occupied his thoughts, from time to time, during a series of years. It is a young man's tragedy, in which Youth and Love are brought face to face with Hatred and Death. There are some lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream in which the poet compares "the course of true love" to that of lightning in midnight.

And ere a man hath power to say, Behold,

The jaws of darkness do devour it up :

So quick bright things come to confusion.

It is thus that love is conceived in Romeo and Juliet —it is sudden, it is intensely bright for a moment, and then it is swallowed up in darkness. The action is accelerated by Shakspere to the utmost, the four or five months of Brooke's poem being reduced to as many days. On Sunday the lovers meet, next day they are made one in marriage, on Tuesday morning at dawn they part, and they are finally reunited in the tomb on the night of Thursday. Shakspere does not close the tragedy with Juliet's death: as he has shown in the first scene the hatred of the houses through the comic quarrel of the servants, thereby introducing the causes which produce the tragic issue, so in the last scene he shows us the houses sorrowfully reconciled over the dead bodies of a son and a daughter.

Romeo's nature is prone to enthusiastic feeling, and, as it were, vaguely trembling in the direction of love before he sees Juliet; to meet her gives form and fixity to his vague emotion. Shakspere, following Brooke's poem, has introduced Romeo as yielding himself to a fanciful, boy's love of the disdainful beauty, Rosaline; and some of the love-conceits and love-hyperbole of the first act are intended as the conventional amorous dialect of the period. Το Juliet a girl of fourteen-love comes as a thing previously unknown; it is at once terrible and blissful (see Act II. Sc. ii. L. 116-120); she rises, through love, and sorrow, and trial, from a child into a heroic woman.

After Shakspere has exalted their enthusiastic joy and rapture to the highest point, he suddenly casts it down. Romeo is at first completely unmanned; but Juliet exhibits a noble fortitude and self-command. The scene of the parting of husband and wife at dawn is a fitting pendant to the scene in the moonlit garden, where the confession of their love is made; the one scene wrought out of divinely-mingled love and joy, the other of divinely-mingled love and sorrow. When Romeo leaves his young wife, the marriage with Paris is pressed upon her by the hot-tempered old Capulet, by her mother, and by her gross-hearted Nurse. Juliet is henceforth in a solitude almost as deep as that of her tomb. The circumstance of bringing Paris across Romeo in the churchyard, with his death before the tomb, is of Shakspere's invention. Paris comes strewing flowers for the lost Juliet-Romeo comes to find her and to die. Paris scatters his blossoms with one of those graceful love-speeches, in the form of a rhymed sextet, which flowed from Romeo's lips in Act I.— Romeo's speech is in earnest and plain blank verse, for he has now dropped all unrealities and prettinesses. In Luigi da Porto, in Bandello, and in a modern version of Shakspere's play by Garrick, Juliet awakes from her sleep while Romeo still lives; Shakspere's treatment of this scene as to this particular is the same as that of Brooke and Paynter.

Mercutio and the Nurse are almost creations of Shakspere. Brooke had described Mercutio as "a lion among maidens," and speaks of his "ice-cold hand; but it was the dramatist who drew at fulllength the figure of this brilliant being, who though with wit running beyond what is becoming, and effervescent animal spirits, yet acts as a guardian of Romeo, and is always a gallant gentleman. He dies forcing a jest through his bodily anguish, but he dies on Romeo's behalf: the scene darkens as his figure disappears. The Nurse is a coarse, kindly, garrulous, consequential old body, with vulgar feelings, and a

vulgarised air of rank; she is on terms of longstanding familiarity with her master, her mistress, and Juliet, and takes all manner of liberties with them; but love has made Juliet a woman, and independent of her old foster-mother. Friar Laurence, gathering his simples and moralising to himself, is a centre of tranquillity in the midst of turmoil and passion; but it may be doubted that his counsels of moderation, and amiable scheming to reconcile the houses through Romeo's marriage with Juliet, contain more real wisdom than do the passionate dictates of the lovers' hearts.

The scene is essentially Italian: the burning noons of July in the Italian city inflame the blood of the street quarrellers; the voluptuous moonlit nights are only like a softer day. And the characters are Italian, with their lyrical ardour, their southern impetuosity of passion, and the southern forms and colour of their speech.

12. King Richard II. appeared in quarto, 1597. In 1608 a third edition was published "With new additions of the Parliament Scene and the deposing of King Richard," that is to say, with the added lines 154-318 in Act IV. Sc. i. It is probable that these lines were written as part of the original play, but relating as they did to the deposition of a king, had been omitted for fear of giving offence at a time when the Pope and Catholic princes were exhorting her subjects to dethrone Elizabeth. Line 321

A woeful pageant have we here beheld

which is found in the first quarto, seems to refer to the deposition. A play upon this subject was actually used for a political purpose in the year 1601, having been played on the afternoon before the revolt of Essex, by order of Sir Gilly Merrick, an adherent of the Earl. That this was Shakspere's play is very unlikely. Another Richard II. was seen at the Globe Theatre, 1611, by Dr. Simon Forman, but

neither was it- -as Forman's description of it makes evident the play of Shakspere. The date of Richard II. is not ascertained, but it has been assigned, with an appearance of probability, to the year 1593 or 1594. Whether it preceded or followed Richard III. is a question in dispute. It is the inferior scenes in this play which contain most rhymed verse; the dramatist exhibits, as in Romeo and Juliet, mastery over blank verse, but is not yet free from the tendency to fall back into rhyme. Upon the whole, Richard II. bears closer affinity to King John than to any other of Shakspere's plays. Marlowe's genius, however, still exercises an influence over Shakspere, the Edward II. of the earlier poet haunting Shakspere's imagination while he was fashioning his Richard II.

Having in Richard III. (if, as I believe, it preceded the present play) brought the civil wars of England to an issue and an end, Shakspere turned back to the reign of the earlier Richard, whose deposition led the way to the disputed succession and the conflicts of half a century later. The interest of the play centres in two connected things-the personal contrast between the falling and the rising kings, and the political action of each; the misgovernment of the one inviting and almost justifying the usurpation of the other. At the outset, Shakspere fixes the attention upon the murder of the King's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, who was said by Mowbray to have died in his custody at Calais, but who was not unreasonably believed to have been put to death by Richard's order. Bolingbroke in striking at Mowbray was striking at Richard, and a dark deed of violence is brought into notice as the starting-point of the events which led to Richard's fall. But he has not only done violence to one of his own house, he has wronged the people of England. His upstart favourites, his blank charters, his farming of the realm, are so many blows pointed at the life of his country, and, as has been observed,

the national aspect of the quarrel is brought forward by Hereford's proud assertion of his nationality, and by Gaunt's magnificent eulogy of England. But Shakspere-although no zealot on behalf of the divine right of kings-does not applaud usurpation as the means of destroying a tyranny; from the Bishop of Carlisle's lips proceeds a prophecy of the future horrors of civil war which must ensue from the violent dethronement of the king.

Richard, although possessed of a certain regal charm, and power of attaching tender natures to himself, is deficient in all that is sterling and real in manhood. He is self-indulgent, has much superficial sensitiveness, loves to contemplate, in a romantic way, whatever is pathetic or passionate in life, possesses a kind of rhetorical imagination, and has abundant command of delicate and gleaming words. His will is nerveless, he is incapable of consistency of feeling, incapable of strenuous action. Bolingbroke, on the other hand, who pushes Richard from the throne, is a man framed for such material success as waits on personal ambition. He is not, like his son Henry V., filled with high enthusiasm and sacred force derived from the powers of heaven and of earth. All Boling

His is a

broke's strength and craft are his own. resolute gaze which sees his object far off, and he has persistency and energy of will to carry him forward without faltering. He is not cruel, but shrinks from no deed that is needful to his purpose because the deed is cruel. His faculties are strong and well-knit. There is no finer contrast in Shakspere's historical plays than that between the figures of the formidable king of deeds, and the romantic king of hectic feelings and brilliant words.

Coincidences have been pointed out between Richard II. and Daniel's Civil Wars, 2nd edition, 1595 if either borrowed from the other, the borrower was probably Daniel.

13. King John departs farther from the facts of