Vaughan, Hastings, and Buckingham are punished for the rashness with which they pressed towards the great catastrophe; Buckingham, also on account of his own transgressions. The race of Henry IV. is ultimately quite rooted out; of the house of York, with the exception of the childless Richard,* there survives but one daughter of Edward IV., to connect the old with the new era. This had to be. The deliverer and founder of the new era had necessarily to be of a different blood; yet his title had, at the same time, in some measure to mediate between the past and the future. Such was the case with Henry, duke of Richmond, afterwards Henry VII., and the husband of Elizabeth, the above-named daughter of Edward IV. of the House of Lancaster (Gaunt), it is true, but not a descendant of Henry IV. He appears a gentle, pious youth, not a distinguished or eminent person. For the age is so demoralised that it not only cannot offer any resistance to the tyrant Richard, but is also unable to provide a deliverer from within itself. Very justly, therefore, Henry considers himself 'God's captain,' and does not centre his hope in himself, in the prevailing circumstances or in the strength of his army; it is simply his consciousness that it is the will of God that gives him the energy he exhibits in the great enterprise. He is the man whom God sent, whom the age required, and who alone was entitled to act; the invisible hand, which ever guides the course of history, maintains and protects him. How beautifully the poet has contrived to express this is shown in that scene of the fifth act, so frequently censured, in which appear the ghosts of those members of the royal family whom Richard had murdered. Such spectral apparitions certainly do not properly belong to an historical play; history knows nothing of them. The poet, however, conceives them but as forms which rise up vividly before the dreamer's imagination, and which in the one case proceed from an evil conscience, in the other from a pure conscience; the spectral apparitions His son, whom Shakspeare does not mention, died one year before him. are to Richard merely the threatening admonishers called forth by the disturbed state of his mind, and his troubled conscience; to Richmond they are merely the encouraging messengers of victory presented to his mind's eye by his pure, trusting heart and his consciousness of right. Yet these figures do not appear only to the dreamers, they are also seen by the spectators; hence they are no mere visionary forms, but have their full poetic reality; to have introduced them as mere dreams would not have And excused the poet. Shakspeare therefore must have had some other special object for inventing this scene. his object is sufficiently obvious if only it be looked at properly. For the dramatist does not describe history simply with the accuracy of a portrait painter, he also invents it, and this invention is the inner nucleus of history-the ideal nature of events not actually or directly manifested-because it coincides with the first and invisible motives of the course of history. On this account the drama must exhibit externally what, in history, exists only internally and is hidden beneath the veil of its often unimportant consequences and effects. This seeming violation of history in the poet proves itself an excellence, as the best-because the simplest means for giving a clear elucidation of the ideal truth of his representation, the substance of which, here as everywhere in Shakspeare, is a view of history from the aspect of its inner connection with that higher, ethical guidance of events spoken of above-a view moreover which Shakspeare expresses emphatically in the words uttered by Henry, in prayer, shortly before the appearance of the spirits (v. 3): "O Thou! whose captain I account myself, Put in their hands thy bruising irons of wrath, That his prayer is heard is then confirmed by the ghost of Buckingham, whose speech concludes with the words: "God and good angels fight on Richmond's side; And Richard falls in height of all his pride." This forms the close not only of the tragedy bearing the name of Richard III.,' but of the whole great tragedy which begins with 'Richard II.,' and ends with the Third of that name. CHAPTER XI. ON THE CONNECTION OF THE EIGHT ENGLISH HISTORIES, THEIR DEVIATIONS FROM HISTORY, ETC. THE eight historical plays which embrace one of the most important centuries of English history, when taken collectively, form such a full, grand, and artistic picture, that I know of nothing in the whole domain of dramatic poetry that can be compared to it. In the preceding discussion I have endeavoured to point out the internal connection, the living, organic process of development which was determined by the first stages, and which, without injuring their independent existence, unites these eight plays into one complete whole. But Shakspeare, with extraordinary skill, has also contrived externally to connect each independent whole with the other, and thus again succeeded in forming all the several parts into one greater whole. In Richard II.,' for instance, we hear Henry inquiring about his eldest son, and speaking of his irregular life; this, it is true, is done at the expense of chronological truth, a proceeding with which the earlier English critics found great fault. Further, at the close of ‘Richard II.' we hear of a conspiracy against Henry; and the latter, after hearing of Richard's death, makes a vow to undertake a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre in expiation of his crime, and to quieten his conscience. These three points again are directly connected with the First Part of Henry IV.;' for the representation of the disturbances and revolts against Henry, the description of his state of mind, compared with that of the life and character of his son, form the actual substance of both Parts. The close of the Second Part (Prince Henry's conversion and elevation to the throne) is, at the same time, the beginning of the following drama, the subject of which is centred in the history of the reign of Henry V. The intervening years between the first apparent termination of the great war and the death of Henry V. had to be omitted because, being without outward, historical action, they were not adapted for dramatic treatment. On this account the poet, in a chorus, refers to the dramas describing the reign of Henry IV.: he there says: 66 Henry the sixth, in infant bands crown'd king That they lost France, and made his England bleed." The coffin of Henry V., which adorns the background of the stage in the introductory scenes of the following trilogy, as well as the lamentations of the assembled dignitaries of the state over the deceased hero, the remembrance of his heroic deeds and the unhappy tidings from France, give us a vivid representation of the subject of the preceding drama as well as of the changed condition of affairs. It is scarcely necessary to remind the intelligent reader that the three parts of 'Henry VI.' stand in the closest relation to one another: I shall therefore only draw attention to the fact that the First Part ends with the successful intrigues of Suffolk in persuading the King to consent to a marriage with Margaret of Anjou, that the Second Part opens with the arrival of the young queen in England, and closes with the battle of St. Alban's, to which the first scene of the Third Part—the deliberations of the victorious party after the battle-forms a direct continuation. I have already remarked that the poet brings the subsequent Richard III. prominently forward in the second half of the Third Part, and that this is obviously done with the intention of introducing the following drama. The last link of the great whole then takes up the thread of history exactly where it had been dropped in the preceding play, silently setting aside the reign of Edward IV., which was dramatically unrepresentable. In precisely the same manner as was done in the first parts of Henry VI.', we have, in the first two scenes of 'Richard III.,' the past and future fused together by |