all dismayed for fear fell to the ground, her heart was pierced with sorrow, her speech was in manner passed, all her spirits were tormented with Melancholy.' She had excuse enough; but the dramatist repudiates this tradition in order to make his Margaret hearten her downcast men in a splendid outburst of Elizabethan valour and defiance, worthy of Elizabeth herself at Tilbury. Her courage needs a deadlier blow to shatter it-the blow which is dealt by the daggers of Edward and Richard in the king's tent after Tewkesbury. Nevertheless there was more implicit tragedy in Margaret than the dramatist used. In leading the overthrow of Gloucester, the chief obstacle in the path of York, she blindly incurs her own ruin; but this tragic åμáρτημа is passed over without note. On the other hand, the writers show a keen sensitiveness to the lower tragedy of portents, of which the plays are a repertory. The death of Suffolk is heightened by a portent unknown to history. 'Water' or 'Walter Whitmore,' at whose name the doomed man starts because he had been warned that he would die by water, is apparently invented for this purpose.1 Was it suggested by the equivocating fiends of Macbeth, already doubtless familiar to the student of Holinshed?

Margaret's chief opponent in the Second Part, the Duke of York, also has assigned to him a somewhat more commanding role than in the Chronicle. Till near the close he plays a waiting game; but he

1 Tradition did, however, connect Suffolk's death with a portent of a different kind. The Paston Letters relate that an astronomer' had warned him of the Tower; for which reason he had contrived to be imprisoned elsewhere. But the

portent was fulfilled when his vessel was met and captured by an English warship (not as in the play a pirate) called the Nicholas of the Tower. Holinshed names the ship but appears ignorant of the portent (Stone, ed. Hol. p. 270).

plays it with more far-reaching and more unscrupulous policy than his historic prototype. Holinshed's York watches the two great obstacles in his path, Gloucester and Suffolk, successively ruined without his stir; the dramatic York is not prevented by Gloucester's warm advocacy of his claims to the French regency (i. 1.) from actively 'levelling at his life' (iii. 1. 158). Holinshed attributes Cade's revolt to incitements of those that favoured the Duke of York.' In the play it is York himself who conceives the plan of stirring up in England this 'black storm.'1 At the very moment when he finally threw off disguise and claimed the crown, the York of Holinshed and history was all but checkmated by a resolute move of the party in power. Rashly disbanding his troops on the king's compliance with his demand for Somerset's arrest, he was himself arrested and sent to the Tower; and his fate hung in the balance when the news of Edward's armed advance caused his sudden release. The York of the drama suffers a briefer anxiety. His arrest is no sooner proposed than Richard and Edward rush in to bail him, and his 'two brave bears,' Warwick and Salisbury, compel the appeal to arms which issues in the victory of St. Albans.

Far more radical is the change wrought in Richard. The historical Richard was a child under three years at the moment when in the drama he suddenly emerges. He was but nineteen when, as tradition said, he murdered Henry after Tewkesbury. The

1 The grim tragi-comedy of the revolt itself is heightened by strokes borrowed from the agrarian revolution of 1381, as told in an earlier page of Holinshed. It was Wat Tyler, not Cade, who burned the Savoy

and the Inns of Court, in the hope of destroying all the records of landlordism; and desired that the laws of England should henceforth issue from his mouth (Holinshed, iii. 430, ed. Stone, 271).

dire and ominous shadow of the historic Richard is thus thrown nearly a generation backward. It is also deepened and darkened by the aid of the blacker interpretation of Richard left by Sir Thomas More. Holinshed's Richard is the ruthless champion of his House, who slays Henry only 'to the intent that his brother Edward might reign with more surety'; the dramatic Richard is 'himself' and for himself alone. But even the dramatic Richard does nothing, in the present play, which the champion of his House might not do; and thus the two sublime monologues (iii. 2., v. 5.) in which he lays bare, with the terrific candour of Tamburlane, the policy of his egoism, are only intelligible as preludes to the wonderful drama in which Shakespeare, now at length escaping from the traces of Greene and from the Marlowe alliance if not as yet altogether from his spell, worked out the destiny of the great avenger of the crimes of Lancaster.