"HENRY V." ACT I. sc. 2. Westmoreland's speech : "They know your grace hath cause, and means, and might; So hath your highness; never King of England Had nobles richer," &c. OES "grace" mean the king's own peculiar domains and legal revenue, and "highness" his feudal rights in the military service of his nobles?--I have sometimes thought it possible that the words "grace" and "cause" may have been transposed in the copying or printing; "They know your cause hath grace," &c. What Theobald meant, I cannot guess. To me uis pointing makes the passage still more obscure. Perhaps the lines ought to be recited dramatically thus: "They know your Grace hath cause, and means, and might:So hath your Highness-never King of England Had nobles richer," &c. He breaks off from the grammar and natural order from earnestness, and in order to give the meaning more passionately. Ib. Exeter's speech : "Yet that is but a crush'd necessity." Perhaps it may be "crash" for "crass" from crassus, clumsy; or it may be "curt," defective, imperfect: anything would be better than Warburton's "scus'd," which honest Theobald, of course, adopts. By the by, it seems clear to me that this speech of Exeter's properly belongs to Canterbury, and was altered by the actors for convenience. Act iv. sc. 3. King Henry's speech:"We would not die in that man's company That fears his fellowship to die with us.' Should it not be "live" in the first line? Ib. sc. 5. "Const. O diable! Orl. O seigneur le jour est perdu, tout est perdu! Reproach and everlasting shame Sit mocking in our plumes!-0 meschante fortune! Ludicrous as these introductory scraps of French appear, so instantly followed by good, nervous mother-English, yet they are judicious, and produce the impression which Shakespeare intended,a sudden feeling struck at once on the ears, as well as the eyes, of the audience, that "here come the French, the baffled French braggards!"—And this will appear still more judicious, when we reflect on the scanty apparatus of distinguishing dresses in Shakespeare's tyring-room. "HENRY VI.-PART I." ACT I. sc. 1. Bedford's speech: "Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night! And with them scourge the bad revolting stars EAD aloud any two or three passages in blank verse even from Shakespeare's earliest dramas, as Love's Labour's Lost, or Romeo and Juliet; and then read in the same way this speech, with especial attention to the metre; and if you do not feel the impossibility of the latter having been written by Shakespeare, all I dare suggest is, that you may have ears, for so has another animal,—but an ear you cannot have, me judice. "RICHARD III." THIS HIS play should be contrasted with Richard II. Pride of intellect is the characteristic of Richard, carried to the extent of even boasting to his own mind of his villany, whilst others are present to feed his pride of superiority; as in his first speech, act ii. sc. 1. Shakespeare here, as in all his great parts, developes in a tone of sublime morality the dreadful consequences of placing the moral, in subordination to the mere intellectual, being. In Richard there is a predominance of irony, accompanied with apparently blunt manners to those immediately about him, but formalised into a more set hypocrisy towards the people as represented by their magistrates. |