stop. What surety of the world, what hope, what stay, 63 When this was now a king, and now is clay?

Bast. Art thou gone so? I do but stay behind To do the office for thee of revenge,

And then my soul shall wait on thee to heaven,
As it on earth hath been thy servant still.-
Now, now, you stars that move in your right
spheres,64

Where be your powers? show now your mended faiths;

And instantly return with me again,
To push destruction and perpetual shame
Out of the weak door of our fainting land.
Straight let us seek, or straight we shall be sought;
The Dauphin rages at our very heels.

Sal. It seems you know not, then, so much as

we:

The Cardinal Pandulph is within at rest,
Who half an hour since came from the Dauphin,
And brings from him such offers of our peace
As we with honour and respect may take,
With purpose presently to leave this war.65

Bast. He will the rather do it when he sees Ourselves well sinewed to our defence.

Sal. Nay, it is in a manner done already; For many carriages he hath despatch'd

in reality to King John himself; but it is with better dramatic effect represented as happening to Falconbridge.

63. What hope, what stay. The way in which Shakespeare uses the word "stay" in this passage-to express a point of reliance,' 'an available support '-may serve to aid in illustrating his use of the word in the passage explained in Note 68, Act ii.

64. You stars that move in your right spheres. Falconbridge here addresses the lords who had revolted, and who have now returned to their allegiance.

65. To leave this war. "Leave" is here used in the sense of relinquish,' 'give up,' 'cease from.' See Note 30, Act iv, "Two Gentlemen of Verona."

Bast.

Thither shall it, then:
And happily may your sweet self put on
The lineal state and glory of the land!
To whom, with all submission, on my knee,
I do bequeath my faithful services
And true subjection everlastingly.

Sal. And the like tender of our love we make To rest without a spot for evermore.

P. Hen. I have a kind soul63 that would give you thanks, 69

And knows not how to do it but with tears.

Bast. Oh, let us pay the time but needful

proposed peace with the Dauphin. In the concluding speech, allusion is made to the lords who have returned to their allegiance by the same word, "princes."

67. At Worcester must his body be interr'd. Holinshed records that King John was buried at Croxton Abbey, in Staffordshire; but a stone coffin containing his body, in regal costume, was found in the cathedral church of Worcester, 17th July, 1797. 63. A kird soul. "Kind" is used here to express 'kindly' or 'tenderly disposed,' 'kindred in feeling with that which you express towards me,' and 'touched with natural emotion.' 69. That would give you thanks. "You," omitted in the Folio, was first supplied by Rowe.

70. Oh, let us pay the time but needful woe, since, &c. 'Let us pay but the due amount of lamentation to that woe which is past; since time now promises to put a period to our griefs by better unity among ourselves.'

SCENE I.-LONDON. A Room in the Palace. Enter King RICHARD, attended; JOHN of Gaunt, and other Nobles.

K. Rich. Old John of Gaunt, time-honour'd Lancaster,2

Hast thou, according to thy oath and band,3 Brought hither Henry Hereford, thy bold son, Here to make good the boisterous late, appeal, Which then our leisure would not let us hear, Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray? Gaunt. I have, my liege.

K. Rich. him,

Tell me, moreover, hast thou sounded

1. The first edition of this play was one in quarto, entered at Stationers' Hall, 29th August, 1597, by Andrew Wise, its publisher. This is the most accurate of the quarto editions; of which there were three more successively published-in 1598, in 1608, and in 1615-before the copy which appears in the First Folio, 1623. That copy appears to have been taken from the 1615 Quarto; although containing some variations therefrom. It seems that there was an old play on the subject of Richard II.; but Shakespeare founded his drama chiefly upon Holinshed's chronicle of this reign, and adopted several passages from the historian's page with remarkable closeness. He had a peculiar faculty of availing himself of historical record, and transmuting its prose into poetical gold; so that speeches which figure in Holinshed or Plutarch, adorned merely by the eloquence of traditional veritableness, in Shakespeare re-appear with the additional halo of blank verse construction. There is no evidence upon which to found a guess at the particular year in which Shakespeare wrote his tragedy of RICHARD II.; but the first Quarto's appearing in 1597, and Francis Meres having mentioned this production in 1598 among his enumeration of Shakespeare's works, show that it was written somewhere before the first of these years. A melancholy beauty invests this tragedy from beginning to end: youthful wrongheadedness and wilfulness in the first portion; weakness and irresolution amid difficulties brought on by previous injudicious Courses; bitter self-reproach and self-lamenting beneath increasing calamities, with final philosophy learned in the depth of overthrow and misery, combine to render this a profoundly mournful play throughout. Pathos of development in moral character, pathos of situation, and pathos of description, fill its every scene; while the pathos is ever loftily and even sublimely sustained.

If he appeal the duke on ancient malice;
Or worthily, as a good subject should,
On some known ground of treachery in him?
Gaunt. As near as I could sift him on that
argument,-

On some apparent danger seen in him,
Aim'd at your highness,-no inveterate malice.
K. Rich. Then call them to our presence: face

to face,

And frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear
The accuser and the accused freely speak :-
[Exeunt some Attendants.
High-stomach'ds are they both, and full of ire,
In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.

2. Old John of Gaunt, time-honour'd Lancaster. The Duke of Lancaster received the surname of "John of Gaunt," from having been born in the Flemish city, 'Ghent;' which is continentally pronounced so as to give rise to the English corruption,

Gaunt." At the period when this play opens, John of Gaunt was no more than fifty-eight years of age; but, in Shakespeare's time, men after fifty were considered "old." The poet speaks of himself in one of his sonnets as "old," as "beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity," and as being "with Time's injurious hand crush'd and outworn," although he died at the still vigorous age of fifty-two; and when the sonnets were first published he had attained only the age of forty-five. Longevity was more rare formerly than now; cleanliness, wholesome diet and habits, good medical and surgical knowledge and treatment, being then less prevalent than at present. Men married and settled in life earlier at that period; Shakespeare became a husband at eighteen, and a grandfather at forty-four. Thus, men were respectable householders before twenty; fathers of families by thirty; venerable personages by forty; and "old," "time-honoured" patriarchs by fifty.

3. Band. An old form of bond.' See Note 40, Act v., "Tempest." It was customary for the combatants to give a pledge for appearance when a trial by combat was agreed

upon.

4. Hereford. Pronounced 'Herford' in Shakespeare's time, and used by him as a dissyllable. All the old copies spell it 'Herford.'

5. High-stomach'd. Haughty,' 'proud;' and 'wrathful,' 'choleric.' Shakespeare here combines the two senses of the word. See Note 32, Act i., "Tempest."