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 Contrast in Shakespeare's 
 Historical Plays 
 
 BROTHER LEO 
 
 Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 A DISSERTATION 
 
 Submitted to the Faculty of Letters of the Catholic 
 
 University of America in Partial Fulfillment 
 
 of the Requirements for the Degree 
 
 of Doctor of Letters 
 
 .Vashingtox, D, 
 1915 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/contrastinshakesOOmeehrich 
 

 
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Contrast in Shakespeare's 
 Historical Plays 
 
 BY 
 
 BROTHER LEO 
 
 A DISSERTATION 
 
 Submitted to the Faculty of Letters of the Catholic 
 
 University of America in Partial Fulfillment 
 
 of the Requirements for the Degree 
 
 of Doctor of Letters 
 
 Washington, D. C. 
 1915 
 
Copyright 1915 
 
 BY 
 
 Brother Leo 
 
 National Capital Press, Inc. 
 
 Book Manufacturers 
 
 Washington, D. C. 
 
This dissertation is an investigation of Shakespeare's English 
 Historical Plays in an effort to discover to what extent the dram- 
 atist shaped his materials according to the principles of dramatic 
 contrast. The last ten chapters contain the detailed study and 
 the results thereof. The second chapter is an attempt to amplify 
 the theory of dramatic contrast as set forth by Mr. Hamilton 
 and to test its applicability to typical plays of the past and of the 
 present. Since the theory of contrast cannot be rightly estimated 
 without some consideration of other theories of the drama, there 
 is presented in the first chapter a brief survey of the theory of the 
 so-called "classical" unities, and of the theories of dramatic 
 construction identified with Freytag, Brunetiere, and Mr. Archer. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Theories of the Drama 7 
 
 II. The Element of Contrast SO 
 
 III. The English Historical Plays 42 
 
 IV. The Three Plays of King Henry VI 45 
 
 V. King Richard II 59 
 
 VI. King Richard III 68 
 
 VII. King John 75 
 
 VIII. The First Part of King Henry IV 82 
 
 IX. The Second Part of King Henry IV 89 
 
 X. King Henry V 98 
 
 XI. King Henry VIII 105 
 
 XII. Summary and Conclusion * Ill 
 
 Bibliographies 114 
 
1. 
 
 THEORIES OF THE DRAMA 
 
 The oflBce of the dramatist is to construct plays; the office of 
 the critic of the drama is to follow in the wake of the dramatist, 
 to observe his work, to classify his technical devices, to compare 
 him with his predecessors in the field of playwriting, and to seek 
 to find and to formulate the principles upon which the art of play 
 construction is based. From another point of view, it is a part 
 of the critic's duty to test the worth of a given drama by comparing 
 it with the human life it tacitly professes to depict; to examine it 
 in the light of the artistic principles of the true, the good, the 
 beautiful; to strive, tentatively at least, to assign it a rank among 
 productions of its genre and to set forth his reasons for so assigning 
 it : But with those functions of criticism we are not here concerned. 
 Our purpose is rather to investigate some of the more formal 
 aspects of the theory of the drama. 
 
 More or less consciously and explicitly every critic, every student, 
 every member of an audience must ask himself such questions as: 
 What is it that makes a play a play ? Is this, in the correct sense 
 of the word, a drama? What constitutes the grounds of its appeal 
 to me — or its lack of appeal? Is this truly a play, and not a 
 narrative poem, or a series of illustrations for a novel, or a sermon 
 in disguise? Are its subject matter and its manner of treatment 
 suitable for stage presentation? Intelligent and illuminating 
 answers to these and similar questions depend entirely upon 
 the critic's answer to one basic question which implies them all. 
 That fundamental question is : What is the underlying and essential 
 constituent of the dramatic? 
 
 The history of dramatic criticism is the record of answers made 
 by critics to that searching and all-embracing question. Some 
 of those critics have been more dogmatic than others, some have 
 been inductive in their method and limited in their scope, some 
 have devised definitions of the drama singularly lacking in either 
 definiteness or plasticity. Each of them lived in his own day, was 
 influenced by a distinct set of precedents, saw in the theater a 
 definite type of play, wrote for readers of a given grade of apprecia- 
 tion; to that extent they differed each from each. But in at least 
 one respect they met on common ground. They agreed in recog- 
 
 7 
 
8 ''•'-.* * • coi^;'TRAST m Shakespeare's 
 
 nizing the need of some fundamental principle in the drama, a 
 vivifying and distinctive constituent that distinguishes the play 
 from the dramatic poem, from the novel, from the epic, from the 
 romance. Though they were not always at one in their conclu- 
 sions, they were at one in their endeavor to answer the question: 
 What is the underlying and essential constituent of the dramatic? 
 
 One such endeavor that for centuries served to explain the 
 properties of the drama and that exercised immeasurable sway 
 over generations of playwrights and critics, is embodied in the 
 theory of the so-called "Classical Unities." This theory, as it 
 now comes to us, holds that the basis of the drama is a trinity of 
 unities. First, there is the unity of time, which requires that all 
 the events of the play take place in the course of a single day; 
 secondly, there is the unity of place, which requires that the scene 
 or location of the play remain unchanged; thirdly, there is the 
 unity of action, which requires that the play concern itself with the 
 representation of but one set of events. 
 
 The theory of the unities was dubbed "classical" because it was 
 held to inhere in the drama of Greece and to have been first set 
 forth by Aristotle. There is more justification for the former of 
 these statements than for the latter. While it is possible for us 
 to point to instances in the Attic plays — the Agamemnon of 
 ^schylus and the Antigone of Sophocles, for instance — where at 
 least one of the unities is violated, the fact remains that the Greek 
 drama as a whole conforms to the dictates of the unities. But the 
 statement that the theory of the three unities was enunciated by 
 Aristotle is today discredited. The facts, briefly, are as follows. 
 
 Aristotle did clearly and specifically set forth the unity of 
 action. In the sixth chapter of the Poetics we read: "Every 
 tragedy has scenic apparatus, manners, and a fable, and, in a 
 similar manner, sentiment. But the greatest of these is the combi- 
 nation of incidents. Men are persons of a certain character, 
 according to their manners; but according to their actions, they 
 are happy or the contrary. The end of tragedy, therefore, does 
 not consist in imitating manners, but it embraces manners on 
 account of actions; so that the action and the fable are the end 
 of tragedy. But the end is the greatest of all things. Moreover, 
 without action, tragedy cannot exist; but it may exist without 
 manners. . . . The fable, therefore, is the principal part, and 
 as it were the soul of tragedy." And in the seventh chapter, on 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 9 
 
 the unity of the fable, we read: "It is requisite, therefore, that as 
 in other imitative arts one imitation is the imitation of one thing, 
 thus also, the fable, since it is an imitation of action, should be the 
 imitation of one action, and of the whole of this, and that the parts 
 of the transactions should be so arranged, that any one of them 
 being transposed or taken away, the whole would become different 
 and changed. For that which when present or not present pro- 
 duces no sensible difference, is not a part of the fable.'* 
 
 Here we have enunciated the theory of the unity of action, a 
 theory that almost up to our own day has been accepted as forming 
 the basis of intelligent and constructive dramatic criticism. In 
 practice, at least, succeeding dramatists did not always agree with 
 Aristotle in laying the principal emphasis on action or plot and 
 making the characters subordinate and even incidental — certainly 
 Moliere did not in his comedies of manners like Tartuffe and 
 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme — but critics have been all but unanimous 
 in accepting the unity of action as a matter of course, as a postulate 
 essential to any well ordered and well advised appreciation of any 
 sort of dramatic offering. 
 
 But what of the other unities, those of time and place? They 
 were "educed*' from the Poetics by writers on the drama in the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of Aristotle's apparently 
 casual statements of fact — that tragedy endeavors as far as possible 
 to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun {Poetics y chap, v) — 
 was elaborated into a rule by certain Italian critics. Giraldi 
 Cinthio (1504-1573) held that the action of a play should not 
 extend over a greater period than twenty-four hours, Francesco 
 RoborteUi (1516-1567) reduced Cinthio's time limit by one half, 
 and Gian-Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550) held the unity of time to 
 be accepted by all save unlearned writers. 
 
 Learned writers were supposed to be aware that the unity of 
 time was observed in the Greek drama. For the most part it 
 was; perhaps, as Lessing suggests,^ because the members of the 
 chorus who impersonated Athenian citizens or Argive maidens 
 could hardly be expected to remain out of their houses for more 
 than several consecutive hours; but there are several instances 
 where the time represented in a Greek play occupies more than a 
 single revolution of the sun. As Butcher points out: 
 
 Hamburgische Dramaturgie. 
 
10 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE' S 
 
 **In the Eumenides months or years elapse between the opening 
 of the play and the next scene. The Trachiniae of Sophocles 
 and the Supplices of Euripides afford other and striking instances 
 of the violation of the so-called rule. In the Agamemnon, even 
 if a definite interval of days cannot be assumed between the fire- 
 signals announcing the fall of Troy and the return of Agamemnon, 
 at any rate the conditions of time are disregarded and the march 
 of events is imaginatively accelerated.*'^ 
 
 The unity of place was first suggested by Joseph Caesar Scaliger 
 (1484-1558). The most doughty champion of the unities in Italy 
 was Lodovico Castelvetro (1505-1571), who, in his commentary 
 on the Poetics of Aristotle (1561), not only insists upon the neces- 
 sity of the unity of time and the unity of place, but even subordi- 
 nates to them the unity of action. All three unities are necessary, 
 he says, but the unity of action is made necessary by the unity 
 of time and the unity of place. "And so," as Professor Saintsbury 
 picturesquely remarks, "the Fatal Three, the Weird Sisters of 
 dramatic criticism, the vampires that sucked the blood out of 
 nearly all European tragedy, save in England and Spain, for three 
 centuries, make their appearance." 
 
 Just when "the Fatal Three" crossed over into France, we do 
 not know; but we do know that they were unsightly hags in the 
 eyes of at least one playwright and critic — Frangois Ogier, of 
 whose personality we know little but of whose attitude toward the 
 unities there can be no doubt. As early as 1628 — and the date 
 has a special importance in view of the fact that Chapelain is 
 commonly credited with having introduced the theory of the 
 unities into France — there appeared a play entitled Tyr et Sidon 
 by an obscure writer whose name was de Schelandre or d'Ancheres, 
 with a preface by Ogier. That preface, antedating the production 
 of Corneille's Cid by eight years, is written in a key of revolt 
 against the unities. Ogier recognizes their sway — "cette regie que 
 nos critiques veulent nous faire guarder si religieusement a cette 
 heure" — but chafes under the yoke. He is rabidly anti-classical. 
 He shows that the alleged unity of time is violated by Sophocles 
 in the Antigone. He protests against the extraordinary conici- 
 dences whereby, "comme par art de magie," the characters in 
 the Greek drama appear at the psychological moment. He 
 
 ' Aristotle s Theory of Poetry, ch. vii, p. 291. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 11 
 
 concedes that the Greek theater and its rules may have served 
 well enough for its time and its people, but he insists that with 
 other times and climes and folks should come other rules of 
 dramaturgy. 
 
 We have given FranQois Ogier more attention than at first 
 sight he might seem to deserve; but he is worth while, first, because 
 his preface shows that the theory of the unities had found favor in 
 France earlier than has been hitherto supposed; and secondly, 
 because he is an example in the literary world of one born out of 
 due time, a premature advocate of a reaction that had not as yet 
 set in — "sports'* botanists would call such — somewhat as Chatter- 
 ton prematurely sensed the spirit of the Romantic revolt in 
 EngHsh poetry. It need hardly be added, in the fight of the class- 
 ical tendencies of the seventeenth century in France, that Ogier 's 
 protests had little if any influence; he was verily the voice of one 
 crying in the wilderness. In the very next year appeared Sophon- 
 isbe, the first "classical" French tragedy, from the pen of Jean de 
 Mairet (1604-1686). 
 
 When, under the patronage of the great Cardinal Richefieu, the 
 formation of the French Academy and the influence of artistic 
 coteries typified by the Hotel Rambouillet, literary criticism 
 became a favorite mode of expression on the part of scholars and 
 writers, adherence to the unities was the touchstone of good form. 
 Of course, it was Richelieu himself who was mainly responsible 
 for bringing this about. We are told^ that the cardinal first heard 
 of the unities in a conversation with Jean Chapelain (1595-1674), 
 his dependent and faithful henchman, in 1632. A quarter of a 
 century later that man of many parts, Frangois Hedelin, Abbe 
 d'Aubignac, the preceptor of the cardinal's nephew, the Due de 
 Fronsac, made a plea in favor of the unities in his Practique du 
 ThSdtre. It is interesting in this connection to observe that when 
 the Abbe wrote plays to exemplify his conceptions of the classical 
 rules he failed to achieve even so much as a succes d'estime. An 
 unkind but succulent bit of criticism — sometimes attributed to 
 the great Conde, sometimes to the Prince de Rohan-Guemene — 
 was ehcited by d'Aubignac's tragedy, ZenobiCy in 1647. The 
 author boasted that the play had been written in the light of 
 principles derived from Aristotle. "I cannot excuse Aristotle," 
 the critic said, "for having made the Abbe write such a tragedy." 
 
 3 Pellisson et d'Olivet, Histoire de V Acadimie franqaise. 
 
12 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 The production of Le Cid in 1636, a play from the pen of one of 
 RicheHeu*s *'five poets/* Pierre Corneille (1606-1687), who in 
 that moment sprang into the front rank among the dramatists of 
 France and of the world, focused attention more than ever upon 
 the question of the unities. We cannot here enter upon any details 
 concerning the controversy that then arose regarding a drama 
 which some of the learned professed to sneer at but to which the 
 masses were quick to testify their admiration. Richelieu and the 
 Academy condemned Le Cid, and Chapelain had thrust upon the 
 task of condemning, in the name of the Academy, one of the 
 dramatic masterpieces of the world because it did not conform 
 to the "classical" unities.* The bitterness engendered by Cor- 
 neille's sin against the unities was not mollified by the fact that 
 he had sinned with wide open eyes. Professor Matthews, when 
 he tells us that "when he [Corneille] wrote this play [Le Cid], he 
 had never even heard of the doctrine of the unities," overlooks the 
 preface to Clitandre, where Corneille says: "Si j'ai renferme 
 cette piece dans la regie d'un jour, ce n*est pas que je me repente 
 de n*y avoir point mis MSlite, ou que je me sois resolu a m*y 
 attacher dorenavant. Aujourd'hui, quelques-uns adorent cette 
 regie, beaucoup la meprisent; pour moi, j'ai voulu seulement 
 montrer que si je m'en eloigne, ce n'est pas faute de la connaitre." 
 That was in 1630, six years before the Le Cid. But some twenty 
 years later, Corneille, in his Discours du poeme dramatique, de 
 la tragSdie, des trois unites, professed himself, with reservations, 
 a convert to the classical view of the dramatic art. It is to be 
 feared that his poverty rather than his will consented to this 
 change of literary faith, that his conversion was little more spon- 
 taneous than was the conversion of Shylock. 
 
 The most succinct and inclusive presentation of the French 
 conception of the unities is given us in the Art PoStique (1674) of 
 Boileau (1636-1711): 
 
 "Qu'en un lieu, qu'en un jour, un seul fait accompli 
 Tienne jusqu'a la fin le theatre rempli." 
 
 There the devotees of the "classical" unities found their inspiration 
 and their text; and there too they found their ideal: 
 
 "Mais nous, que la raison a ses regies engage. 
 Nous voulons qu'avec art Taction se menage." 
 
 * Sentiments de VAcadSmie sur le Cid, 1638. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 13 
 
 There Racine (1639-1699) found a medium of expression which 
 fitted admirably his dramatic genius; there MoUere (1621-1673) 
 found a Procrustean bed, comfortable for the most part, perhaps, 
 but which proved inadequate to support Don Juan; there, for 
 two hundred years, the writers for the French stage found a 
 strange god to worship until Romanticism asserted itself and 
 Victor Hugo, in the preface to Cromwell (1827) and the premier 
 of Hemani (1830) blasted the "classical" shrine. 
 
 Though in Spain the theory of the unities of time, place, and 
 action was not carried into practice, it was known to Spanish 
 writers years before it had caused a battle of the books in France. 
 Here, for instance, is Cervantes (1547-1616) — a neo-classicist in 
 theory though a romanticist in practice — ^protesting, through the 
 mouth of the curate in Don Quixote (part I, chap, xlviii), against 
 the violation of the unities on the part of dramatic writers — 
 including Cervantes himself. It is unfortunate, he contends, for 
 foreigners who with great precision observe the laws of the drama 
 "nos tienen por barbaros e ignorantes." The impropriety of 
 babes in arms raising whiskers, which later on was to shock 
 Boileau and scandalize burly Ben Jonson, meets with the curate's 
 spirited censure : 
 
 "Que mayor disparate puede ser en el sujeto que tratamos, 
 que salir un nino en mantillas en primera escena del primer acto, 
 y en la segunda salir ya hecho hombre barbado? . . . Que 
 dire pues de la observancia que guardan en los tiempos en que 
 puedan 6 podian suceder las acciones que representan, sino que 
 he visto comedia que la primera Jornada comenzo en Europa, la 
 segunda en Asia, la tercera se acabo en Africa, y aun si fuera de 
 cuatro jornades, la cuarta acabara en America . . . ?'* 
 
 Thus wrote Cervantes — we may venture to susp)ect with his 
 tongue in his cheek — a good quarter of a century prior to the 
 quarrel concerning Le Cid. Breitinger'' cites numerous other 
 proofs that the unities, before they had been generally recognized 
 in France, were in Spain knowingly honored in the breach. The 
 sprightly Tirso de Molina (1571-1648) includes in his Cigarrales 
 de Toledo a discussion of one of his own dramas. El Vergonzoza en 
 Palacio. In the course of the discussion one character castigates 
 Tirso for his insolence in overstopping "the salutary limits assigned 
 
 ' Unites d^ArUtote avant le Cid de Corneille. 
 
14 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE*S 
 
 to the dramatic form by its originators,** for exceeding the period 
 of twenty-four hours, and for ignoring the unity of place. Then 
 arises another character, the mighty Don Alejo, who vigorously 
 defends Tirso's procedure and points to the great Lope de Vega 
 (1562-1635) as a conscious sinner against the canons of the ancients 
 and as "el reformador de la commedia nueva." This was twelve 
 years prior to the quarrel concerning Le Cid. Lope himself, whose 
 critical acumen was in inverse ratio to his dramatic fertility, pro- 
 tested his admiration of the Aristotelian unities, but he continued 
 to write plays that flouted them. And as for Calderon de la Barca 
 (1600-1681), in the very year, 1636, in which Corneille's master- 
 piece was produced and traduced in France, the Spanish genius 
 presented at the Bonn Retiro a play called Los tres mayores Pro- 
 digios, of which the three acts were each produced on a separate 
 stage and by a distinct company of players. It approximated to 
 the * 'classical" unities about as closely as would a present day 
 three-ringed circus. 
 
 The first recognition of the unities we meet with in English 
 criticism occurs in the dedication of a play by George Whetstone 
 (1544P-1587?). The work bore the title: The right excellent and 
 famous History e of Promos and Cassandra: divided into two Com- 
 micall Discourses, and was published in London in 1578. The 
 plot, taken fron Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithiy was utilized 
 by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure. The author, about to 
 depart on a voyage of discovery with Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 
 dedicates his play "To his worshipful Friende and Kinseman, 
 William Fleetewoode, Esquier, Recorder of London." Like all 
 the scholars of his time, Whetstone worships at classical shrines. 
 He paraphrases Plato and eulogizes Menander, Plautus, and Ter- 
 ence; but he falls decidedly foul of the contemporary drama which 
 he dismisses as consisting of "try f els of yonge, unadvised, and 
 rashe witted wryters." He condemns the French, Italian, and 
 Spanish drama for being lascivious, and the German for being 
 "too holye;" then he takes his own countrymen to task for their 
 sins against the unities : 
 
 "The Englishman in this qualitie, is most vaine, indiscreete, 
 and out of order: he first groundes his worke on impossibilities: 
 then, in three howers ronnes he thro we the world: marry es, gets 
 children, makes children men, men to conquer kingdomes, murder 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 15 
 
 monsters, and bringeth Gods from Heaven, and fetcheth divels 
 from Hel." 
 
 "The right noble, vertuous, and learned Sir Phillip Sidney- 
 Knight,'* as he was described, not fulsomely, by Olney, the 
 publisher of the Apologie in 1595, is commonly regarded as the 
 first English writer to advocate the unities. The fact that 
 Whetstone preceded him in recognizing the unities does not take 
 from the interest of Sidney's reference to the classical rules, 
 written about 1580. Sidney (1554-1586) complains that the drama 
 of his day observes the rules "neyther of honest ciuilitie, nor of 
 skilful Poetrie." He pays a tribute to the excellence of Gorhoduc, 
 but grieves that Sackville's is not a model tragedy. "For it is 
 faulty both in place, and time, the two necessary companions of 
 all corporall actions. For where the stage should alwaies represent 
 but one place, and the vttermost time presupposed in it, should be, 
 both by Aristotle's precept, and common reason, but one day: 
 there is both many dayes, and many places, inartificially imagined." 
 And he further protests against the violations of the unity of place 
 by pointing to other dramas wherein are depicted "Asia of the 
 one side, and Africk of the other, and so many other under- 
 kingdoms, that the Player, when he cometh in, must ever begin 
 with telling where he is." 
 
 The most distinguished defender of the unities in England was 
 Ben Jonson (1573-1637) whose reverence for classical precedents 
 so influenced him both in theory and practice as to set him against 
 the English genre of drama as exemplified by Marlowe, Shakes- 
 peare, and Beaumont and Fletcher. Thus, in the Prologue to 
 Every Man in His Humour (the prologue did not appear until 
 1616, though the play had been presented as early as 1598), he 
 indulges in a fling at violations of the unity of time that half a 
 century later was to find an echo in Boileau: 
 
 "To make a child, now swaddled, to proceed 
 
 Man, and then shoot up, in one beard, and weed, 
 
 Past threescore years." 
 
 Such absurdities, we are told, the author of the present play will 
 not be guilty of, but 
 
 "He rather prays you will be pleased to see 
 
 One such to-day as other plays should be; 
 
 Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas; 
 
 Nor creaking throne comes down, the boys to please; 
 
10 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 But deed, and language, such as men do use: 
 And persons, such as comedy would choose, 
 When she would show an image of the times/* 
 
 Jonson defended the unities; but in England as in Spain the 
 unities were beyond defence. Alaham and Mustafa, by Sidney's 
 friend, Fulke Greville Lord Brooke, were stillborn. It but re- 
 mained for John Dryden (1631-1700), at a time when the unities 
 were revered in France, to cast the last stone at them in England; 
 **It is not enough that Aristotle has said so, for Aristotle drew his 
 models of tragedy from Sophocles and Euripides; and, if he had 
 seen ours, might have changed his mind." 
 
 Thus, the procedure of playwrights and the findings of critics 
 are agreed in regarding the so-called "classical" unities as not 
 essential to the notion of the dramatic. All three unities may, 
 indeed, exist in a play, but a play may exist without the unities. 
 This applies especially to the un-Aristotelian unities of time and 
 place. Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, has in his usual 
 straightforward and common-sense fashion set down the elastic 
 limits under which the unity of time can be practically effective: 
 "In few words, my opinion is this . . . that the imaginary time 
 of every play ought to be contrived in as narrow a compass as the 
 nature of the plot, the quality of the persons, and variety of 
 accidents will allow." This is something very different from the 
 cast-iron conception of dramatic unity entertained by Cinthio 
 and Castelvetro and Boileau; it is merely a tentative application 
 of the general principle of economy to the art of playwriting, the 
 principle which Shakespeare, despite his indifference to the unities, 
 employed frequently — ^for instance, in Julius Caesar where he 
 marks no appreciable interval between the two battles of Philippi 
 and where he has Caesar assasinated, buried, and twice eulogized 
 all in one day. 
 
 And so it is with the unity of place. There are plays in which it 
 can with profit be introduced — in Ibsen's Pillars of Society, for 
 example, and Mr. John Galsworthy's The Pigeon — but there are 
 other plays which have flouted it, with manifest advantage. Thus, 
 an ignoring of the unity of place in Shakespeare's Merchant of 
 Venice gives us in the first half of the play those remarkably effec- 
 tive alternations of Venice and Belmont, each place representing 
 a distinct strand of the plot, the strands being twisted together 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 17 
 
 about the middle of the play. Calderon employs the same device 
 in an almost similar way in La Vida es Sueno. 
 
 Though more nearly essential than the satelhte unities of time 
 and place, the unity of action has been at times — though by no 
 means at all times — disregarded by successful dramatists. A 
 modern instance is afforded in Milestones, a drama of exceptional 
 force and charm by Mr. Arnold Bennett and Mr. Edward Knob- 
 lauch. It has no appreciable plot, but furnishes instead three 
 pictures of the same family, each picture representing a different 
 generation. The lover and his lass of the first act are the grand- 
 parents sitting by the fire in the last act. Each act yields a com- 
 pleteness of impression and constitutes in reality a one-act drama. 
 Here there is not one dramatic action, but three, all equally 
 prominent. 
 
 And so, while the so-called "classical" unities of action, place, 
 and time warrant the attention of both playwright and critic, 
 while they possess for us more than a mere historic interest, while 
 they find acceptance in certain species of the drama, they are far 
 from constituting the fundamental laws of the dramatic art. As 
 Dryden has well said: "If by these rules (to omit many others 
 drawn from the precepts and practice of the ancients) we should 
 judge our modern plays, 'tis probable that few of them would 
 endure the trial : that which should be the business of a day, takes 
 up in some of them an age; instead of one action, they are the 
 epitomes of a man's life; and for one spot of ground, which the 
 stage should represent, we are sometimes in more countries than 
 the map can show us." 
 
 We must perforce admit that the drama cannot be confined 
 within the boundaries of the unities, unless we adopt the ultra- 
 Aristotehan attitude of the diverting critic, Mr. Trotter, in Bernard 
 Shaw's Fanny*s First Play, and dismiss all the dramatic master- 
 pieces not in conformity with the unities by dogmatically damning 
 them: "They are not plays." 
 
 Let us now consider three other attempts to answer the ques- 
 tion: What is the underlying and essential constituent of the dramatic? 
 
 One answer comes out of Germany. . After Lessing (1729- 
 1781), by means of his own plays and by means of his commentaries 
 on the plays of others in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, had in a 
 measure succeeded in the dual task of restoring the German 
 stage to power and delivering it from the thraldom of "classical" 
 
18 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 precepts, there came the famous and fertile "Sturm und Drang" 
 period — which gave us Goethe and Schiller — in the second half 
 of the eighteenth century. We have called the "Sturm und 
 Drang" period fertile; in the fact of its fertility lay its strength 
 and its weakness. Early in the nineteenth century its strength 
 was evident; some years later thoughtful critics were aware of 
 its weakness. Among them was Gustav Freytag (1816-1895), 
 a successful playwright whose many-sided mind and manifold 
 activities as editor, novelist, critic, soldier, philologist, and states- 
 man enabled him to unite to his knowledge of stagecraft an 
 outlook upon the course of dramatic history in his own and in 
 other countries. 
 
 Freytag was not long in perceiving that while at one time 
 the German drama had been crippled by excessive formality, it 
 was now ailing for lack of definite constructive rules. "We 
 suffer," he writes in the introduction to his Technik des Dramas 
 (1863), "from the opposite of narrow limitations; we lack salutary 
 restraint, form, a popular style, sureness of touch, a definite 
 range of dramatic material; our work has become at all points 
 haphazard and uncertain. And so it is that today, eighty 
 years after Schiller, the young poet finds it difiicult to make 
 himself at home on the stage." 
 
 Accordingly, Freytag sought to formulate certain rules whereby 
 the art of playwriting might be subjected to salutary limitations 
 both as regards choice of subject and treatment of material. 
 He did this with full knowledge that his work must necessarily 
 be both tentative and temporary; and furthermore he strove, not 
 to spin theories a priori and apply them in a dogmatic way, but 
 to examine the great plays of the world and seek to find in them 
 those principles of sound construction which the dramatists of 
 his own time so sorely needed to apply in their work. The result 
 is his book. Die Technik des Dramas. 
 
 First of all, Freytag asks himself. What is the dramatic? He 
 replies that the dramatic includes those emotions of the soul 
 which manifest themselves by means of external action. "Action, 
 in itself, is not dramatic; passionate feeling, in itself, is not 
 dramatic. Not the presentation of a passion for itself, but of a 
 passion which leads to action, is the business of dramatic art." 
 (" . . . der Leidenschaft, welche zu einen Thun leitet, ist 
 die Aufgabe der dramatischen Kunst.") Action he defines as 
 
HISTORICAL PLATS 19 
 
 an event dominated by an idea and interpreted by characters. 
 (" . . . einer Idee angeordnete Begebenheit, deren Inhalt 
 durch die Charaktere vorgefUhrt wird.") 
 
 This, his generic and foundation principle, Freytag applies 
 to the constructive side of the dramatic art by indicating five 
 successive stages or sections in the development of a play. These 
 are: the Exposition, the Rise, the Chmax, the Fall, and the Catas- 
 trophe. He illustrates the theory by means of the familiar 
 pyramidal diagram in which the Rve stages are represented by 
 successive letters of the alphabet, thus: 
 
 According to Freytag's theory, the Exposition or Introduction 
 (Einleitung) states conditions, gives explanations and starts the 
 action; the Rise (Steigerung) introduces the exciting forces or 
 complications and carries the action on to the Climax (Hohen- 
 punkt) where the action takes a definite set toward the final and 
 inevitable Catastrophe which it reaches by way of the Fall (Um- 
 kehr). He finds, likewise, in every well constructed drama 
 three dramatic forces or crises: one (das erregende Moment) 
 between the Exposition and the Rise, the second (das tragische 
 Moment) between the Climax and the Fall, the third (das Moment 
 der letzten Spannung) between the Fall and the Catastrophe. 
 Thus he finds eight component parts in the drama, all of which, 
 save the second and third crises, he regards as essential. 
 
 Freytag, of course, did not originate the notion of a five-fold 
 division of the drama. Corneille {Des trois unitSs) reminds us 
 that Horace favored the plan, and Voltaire, in his commentary 
 on Corneille, elaborates the idea thus: "Cinq actes nous paraissent 
 necessaires: le premier expose le lieu de la scene, la situation des 
 heros de la piece, leurs inter^ts, leurs moeurs, leurs desseins; 
 le second commence I'intrigue; elle noue au troisieme: le quatrieme 
 prepare le denouement, qui se fait au cinquieme. Moins de 
 temps precipiterait trop Faction; plus d'etendue Tenerverait. 
 
20 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 II en est comme d'un repas d'appareil; s'il dure trop peu, c'est 
 une halte; s'il est trop long, il ennuie et degoiite."* The division 
 into five stages was suggested to Freytag by the five acts into 
 which the Shakespearean plays have been divided by editors. 
 The German playwright was not in a position to know that 
 Shakespeare himself used no such scheme of division, but con- 
 tended himself with splitting his plays into an indeterminate 
 number of scenes. But taking the plays of Shakespeare as he 
 found them, Freytag had no great diflSculty in using them to 
 illustrate his theory; and Professor Moulton has carried the 
 application much further with a wealth of detail and with an 
 astonishing outlay of analytic ingenuity.' 
 
 It is undeniable that many great plays — including some by 
 Sophocles and Calderon — ^may be analyzed according to the 
 pyramid diagram, and it is not less undeniable that the rules 
 formulated by Freytag constitute a serviceable scaffolding for 
 the aspirant who would learn how to write a drama; but it must 
 be admitted that many more great plays are not susceptible of 
 the pyramid analysis and that many dramatists have learned 
 their trade without the assistance of Freytag's five stages and 
 three crises. To take but a few instances of many, the (Edipus 
 ColoneuSy El Gran Teatro del Mundo, the First Part of King Henry 
 Fourth, Chanticler, Lady Windermere's Fan, Man and Superman 
 and The Pigeon are all dramas that have stood the crucial test of 
 presentation on the stage and that are recognized by everybody 
 who knows as being in the true sense dramas; yet not one of them 
 will be found to square at all points with the elaborate theory of 
 Freytag. Thus, the Greek play has no exposition, the Spanish 
 play has no climax, the Galsworthy play has no conclusion. And 
 how could the Freytag theory be applied to Sardou's Cleopatre 
 with its six acts, each of which is so self-sufficing as to be practially 
 independent of the others, a play with no climax, with six crises 
 and with a conclusion — the death of the protagonists — which 
 finds its motives and dramatic preparation only in the final act 
 in which it occurs.^ 
 
 So much for the applicability of Freytag's rules of construction. 
 What of his fundamental principles, of his conception of the nature 
 of the dramatic? According to him, the essential of the drama is 
 
 • Quoted in CEuvres des deux Corneille, tome second, p. 387. 
 ''Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 21 
 
 passion manifesting itself in external action. This holds good for 
 many, perhaps most, of the great plays of all countries and of all 
 times; but it by no means holds good for all, especially for many of 
 the plays which in France and Germany and England and the 
 United States have been born in our own day and generation. 
 Passion that leads to action may, without undue stretching, be 
 made a concomitant of the tragedy in Greece, of the '*capa y 
 espada" theater in the golden age of Spanish literature, of the 
 drama of blood and intrigue which was so conspicuous in the 
 Elizabethan epoch; but it cannot be held to be representative of 
 the twentieth century drama in America and Europe. It accorded 
 well enough with the plays in which Richard Burbage acted; it 
 does not accord with the plays in which Mr. John Drew appears. 
 Passion leading to action would seem to be an essential ingredient 
 in one form of the drama, namely, melodrama — a form which, 
 dispite the ill repute in which it is sometimes held, is found in 
 many of the great plays of the world, and which will to some extent 
 always be with us, whether in the cavortings of Herod in the 
 moralities or the launching of the curse of Rome in Richelieu or 
 the flight of sixteen horses in Ben-Hur, But there are many 
 plays which are not in the least melodramatic; and there are 
 many plays which, though they include certain melodramatic 
 episodes, depend on non-melodramatic elements for their dramatic 
 effectiveness. Thus, in HamleU though we have several decidedly 
 melodramatic scenes, such as the visitation of the Ghost, the 
 play within the play, and the passage at foils between Hamlet 
 and Laertes, the play as a whole certainly cannot be consistently 
 summarized as an example of passion leading to action; rather it 
 is a demonstration of intellect resulting in inaction, — where 
 "enterprises of great pith and moment . . . lose the name of 
 action." And so, too, passion leading to action does not strike 
 the keynote of MoUere*s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme nor of Wilde*s 
 sparkling farce. The Importance of Being Earnest; in both there is 
 action but no passion; and does not Freytag plainly tell us that 
 action alone does not constitue the dramatic? ("Nicht dramatisch 
 ist die Action an sich.") 
 
 Another and even more noteworthy endeavor to formulate the 
 underlying principle of the dramatic is that which was fathered 
 by the distinguished critic and unapproachable prosateur, the late 
 Ferdinand Brunetiere (1849-1906). In the first and the fifteenth 
 
22 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 conference of his Odeon course on Les Epoques du Tkidtre Frangais 
 {1636-1850), given during the winter of 1891-1892, Burnetiere 
 jBrst set forth his theory. In his conference on Corneille's master- 
 piece, he is led into a distinction between two kinds of hero typified 
 by the leading characters in Gil Bias and Le Manage de Figaro. 
 He says: 
 
 "Les ressemblances y sont nombreuses: la difference en est 
 profonde. Et en quoi consiste-t-elle ? Essentiellement en ceci, 
 qu'il n'arrive a Gil Bias aucune aventure, heureuse ou malheureuse, 
 dont il soit proprement Partisan, rien qu'il ait prevu, ni deliber^, 
 ni voulu; tandis qu'au contraire il n'arrive rien a Figaro qui ne 
 soit finalement le fruit ou la recompense de son activite, de sa 
 ruse, et de son habilete ... Et ce n'est, si vous le voulez, 
 qu'une difference de procedes, en un certain sens, mais, en un 
 autre sens, vous verrez qu'elle va jusqu'au fond des choses, parce 
 qu'elle resulte effectivement d'une difference de conception du 
 monde et de la vie." (Page 19.) 
 
 Here is the basis, founded on actualities of literature and life, 
 upon which Brunetiere was later on to construct his famous theory 
 of the drama, and it is a classification which the student of litera- 
 ture and life cannot afford to ignore. In books and in life we have 
 two sorts of characters — the active and the passive, the conquerors 
 and the conquered, the dynamic and the static, the developing 
 and the stationary, the biters and the bitten, the eaters and the 
 eaten, the doers and the done. The former have glimpsed the 
 practical significance of Don Quixote's aphorism, "The strong man 
 carves out his fortune, and every man is the son of his own works"; 
 the world is their oyster, which they with sword must open; they 
 shape, mold, modify their environment, bending it by force of 
 wiU. The latter are chameleons, taking their color from their 
 surroungings; sensitive souls, influenced by every passing cloud; 
 free lances, flinging the bridle over their horse's head and caring 
 not which road they take; drifters — though often extremely 
 charming persons — following always the shimmering and fragrant 
 path of least resistance. 
 
 This classification of human beings received its application to 
 the dramatist's art in the last conference of the series on Scribe 
 and Musset. The critic lays down two "lois essentielles du 
 theatre," the first of which — and one that need not detain us 
 here — being that a plot, to be truly dramatic, must deal with 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 23 
 
 some topic of general interest, a moral problem, or a social ques- 
 tion. Then he proceeds (page 369) : 
 
 "Une autre loi n*est pas moins essentielle: [Later Brunetiere 
 came to consider it as far more essential] c'est elle qui veut qu'ime 
 action de theatre soit conduite par des volontes, sinon toujours 
 libres, mais toujours au moins conscientes d'elles m^mes; . . . 
 mais ce qui fait a travers les Htteratures, depuis les Grecs jusqu'a 
 nous, Tunite permanente et continue de I'espece dramatique, c*est 
 le spectacle d'une volonte qui se deploie; — et voila d'abord pourquoi 
 Taction et Taction ainsi definie, sera toujours la loi du theatre.'* 
 
 Here we have in a brief form the theory which later on its 
 author was more amply to develop. There are two kinds of char- 
 acters, those who will and those who do not will; those who will, 
 and who manifest their will in action, are the dramatic characters. 
 Hence the drama represents will in action. 
 
 The complete and perfected presentation of this theory of 
 the will in the drama we get from Brunetiere in the preface which 
 he wrote for Les Annales du ThSdtre et de la Musique for 1893. 
 The preface, entitled La Loi du TkSdtre, begins in the form of a 
 delightfully familiar epistle to Edouard Noel, one of the authors 
 of Les Annales, but as it proceeds it loses something of its inform- 
 ality and becomes a severe, though sprightly, academic essay. 
 Brunetiere assures us that there is a difference between the laws 
 of the drama and the rules of the drama, and that he for one does 
 not believe in the "pouvoir mysterieux des regies," for conditions 
 change from age to age and therefore rules of dramatic writing 
 based on those conditions — such as the celebrated unities — must 
 change with them. But it is different with the laws of the drama, 
 and he proposes to formulate the theory — or at least a theory — 
 which embodies a recognition of the fundamental law of the theater: 
 **Drame ou vaudeville, ce que nous demandons au theatre, c'est 
 le spectacle d'une volonte qui se deploie en tendant vers un but, 
 et qui a conscience de la nature des moyens qu'elle y fait servir." 
 Furthermore since the will in action implies conflict, we have the 
 basis of classification of the species of the drama according to the 
 nature of the obstacle which the will is seeking to surmount. 
 Thus, if the obstacle is serious and unsurmountable, we have 
 tragedy; if the obstacle takes the form of prejudice or social 
 convention, we have the romantic play or else the bourgeois 
 drama; if the obstacle is less serious, we have comedy. 
 
^ CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 In the course of the numerous examples from French Hterature 
 which Brunetiere cites to elucidate his views, he turns once more 
 to Gil Bias and Le Manage de Figaro. He shows that Le Sage's 
 hero, being a man who does not exercise his volition but trusts 
 to a beneficent chance and takes things as they come, would not 
 make a suitable character for a play, while Beaumarchais' hero 
 — ^a doer of things, a captain of destiny, a shaper of environment, 
 and a molder of men — because he does exercise his volition, is 
 an eminently dramatic character. 
 
 Such is the volitional theory of the drama as set forth by 
 Brunetiere. It is less than a quarter of a century old, yet already 
 it has attained a wide vogue, and deservedly so, for unquestionably 
 it serves to explain very many of the great plays of all literatures 
 and of all times. The attempt has been made to show that it is 
 old as Arsitotle and that earlier writers, including Goethe, Hegel, 
 and Coleridge, had enunciated it prior to the French critic; but 
 the fact remains that, whatever his debt may have been to pre- 
 ceding thinkers — and I am strongly of the opinion that it was a 
 very light debt indeed — to Brunetiere belongs the distinction of 
 developing and clarifying the theory and of putting it into a 
 form that makes it accessible to all who run and read. 
 
 Brunetiere*s theory deserves our respect and has a practical 
 application to the drama and to life. It is difficult to over- 
 estimate the importance of the r61e played by the will in the book 
 world, the stage world, and the workaday world. Brunetiere 
 rightly says:^ 
 
 "L'intelligence est maitresse dans le domaine de la speculation, 
 mais la volonte est reine dans Tordre de Taction, et par consequent 
 dans I'historie. C'est la volonte qui donne le pouvoir; et on ne le 
 perd guere que par une defaillance ou une demission de la volonte." 
 
 There is, indeed, so much of the volitional element in human 
 life, and so much of its manifestation by means of external action, 
 that literature, the drama, music, painting, and sculpture have 
 gladly accepted it as something characteristic of much of the life 
 of many men, as something in which most men at most times are 
 certain to feel an interest. It is not a differentia of the drama; 
 it is present likewise in other forms of art. It is even present in 
 journalism. In an address at the first session of the annual 
 
 ' Annate*, p. xiv. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 25 
 
 conference of teachers of journalism, held at Columbia University 
 on December 29, 1914, Mr. Chester S. Lord, formerly managing 
 editor of the New York Sun, is reported to have said: "But were 
 you to ask me to name the kind of news for which the people surge 
 and struggle — the most popular kind of news printed — I surely 
 must reply that it is the details of a contest — n fight, whether 
 between men or dogs or armies."* 
 
 The theory of volition, then, is searching and stimulating; 
 but is it at all points adequate? It will, as we have already said, 
 serve to explain very many of the great plays of the world; but 
 will it serve to explain every successful play.f* We concede that 
 the volition theory brings out what is a frequent concomitant of 
 the drama; but does it touch upon what is absolutely essential to 
 the drama? Mamy true dramas have been written in which the 
 element of volitional conflict is a very prominent element; is it 
 possible to write a play in which the element of volitional conflict 
 is not in evidence? 
 
 For answer we have two Greek tragedies, both of them regarded 
 as among the supreme dramatic pieces of the world. In the 
 Agamemnon of JEschylus where do we find a conflict of wills? 
 A trap is set, and the victim unwittingly walks into it — something 
 dramatic unquestionably, but something not dependent on the 
 volitional element. Clytemnestra manifests fixity of purpose, 
 and fixity of purpose is sometimes mistaken for exercise of will; 
 but even so, it is precisely here that we have the weakest and least 
 dramatic element in the play. Clytemnestra*s fixity of purpose 
 does not thrill us; but we are deeply moved by the approach of the 
 conquering hero who goes unknowingly to his death. And in 
 the CEdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles — sometimes held to be from the 
 technical point of view the supreme drama of all time — there is 
 actually an even more notable absence of the element of volition. 
 True, (Edipus has striven to flee from the rulings of fate that 
 prophesied so sternly against him; but that was years ago, and 
 before the drama begins. During the play itself, there is no 
 manifestation of volition, no conflict of wills; there is merely the 
 agonized writhing of a despairing victim bound irrevocably to the 
 wheel of fate. 
 
 Nor, in our endeavor to find a play devoid of the element of 
 volition, are we compelled to restrict ourselves to the ancient 
 
 » New York Times, December 30, 1914. 
 
26 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 classical drama. Everybody, I presume — except the late Count 
 Tolstoy and Mr. Bernard Shaw — will admit that Shakespeare's 
 
 <l As You Like It is a true play. It is, to say the very least about 
 it, a dramatic classic; yet we find in it nothing — except in detached 
 episodes like the wrestling match — of the volitional element, noth- 
 ing of the overcoming of obstacles, nothing of the conflict of wills 
 which Brunetiere insists upon as essential to a conception and a 
 realization of the dramatic. The characters in whom we admit 
 the greatest interest — Rosalind, the banished Duke, Jacques, 
 and Touchstone — are precisely the characters who refrain from 
 any perceptible assertion of will power. Every one of them unre- 
 sisting floats — smilingly or frowningly according to his disposition 
 — adown the stream of circumstance. The Forest of Arden is a 
 veritable land of aboulia; who enters there leaves will behind. 
 It is idle and infantile to object that there is will in the play — that 
 Orlando wants Rosalind and that Rosalind wants him to want her. 
 Even if the interest which the hero and the heroine feel in each 
 other can be classified under the head of volition — and Shakespeare 
 himself is rather careful to give us to understand that here is a 
 
 y case of love at first sight where the lovers love willy nilly — it is a 
 decidedly sterile sort of volition and does not, as Brunetiere says 
 it must do, manifest itself in some kind of conflict. 
 
 Again, I am quite sure that Brunetiere would promptly admit 
 that Calderon is a great dramatist and La Vida es Sueno a great 
 play. Yet here is obviously a drama which, though it contains 
 plenty of action in an incidental way, has for its protagonist the 
 pathetic figure of a young man whose tragedy is that he absolutely 
 cannot exercise volition. And what would Brunetiere say to that 
 diverting picture of life, drawn by Mr. Arnold Bennett, which 
 makes a good novel as Buried Alive and a better play as The Great 
 Adventure? Here, both in the novel and in the drama, the central 
 character is a man who is utterly incapable of making up his mind 
 about anything, and therefore doesn't try, and therefore lives 
 happily amid all sorts of circumstances. And what, in the light 
 of the volition theory, are we to think of one of the most successful 
 and searching plays of our day. Chains, by Miss Elizabeth Baker? 
 Chains has been happily described by Mr. Hamilton as, "not an 
 assertion, but a negation, of human wills. It presents, at most, a 
 struggle of wills with a minus sign in front of them. The entire 
 point of the play is that nothing can happen to the characters. 
 
HISTORICAL PLATS 27 
 
 Their wills are paralyzed by an environment which renders them 
 incapable of self-assertion." The same play is thus briefly 
 analyzed by Mr. William Archer: "There is absolutely no *story' 
 in it, no complication of incidents, not even any emotional tension 
 worth speaking of. . . . A city clerk, oppressed by the deadly 
 monotony and narrowness of his life, thinks of going to AustraUa — 
 and doesn't go : that is the sum and substance of the action. Also, 
 by way of underplot, a shopgirl, oppressed by the deadly monotony 
 and narrowness of her life, thinks of escaping from it by marrying 
 a middle-aged widower — and doesn't do it." 
 
 This list of examples of dramas wherein the conflict of wills 
 does not figure, though not typical of the majority of successful 
 plays, might easily be lengthened; but as it stands it is suflScient 
 to disprove the claims of the voHtion formula as an essential and 
 fundamental law of the drama. We have undeniable dramas to 
 which it does not apply. 
 
 Again, the volition theory, is not distinctive of the dramatist's 
 art. It serves to explain, as has been conceded, many of the 
 great plays of the world; but is might also serve to explain many of 
 the great narrative poems and many of the great prose novels. 
 It is not a true differentia of the drama. There is more of a conflict 
 of wills in the Iliad than there is in Hamlet, there are more obstacles 
 to overcome in Vanity Fair than there are in the CEdipus Tyrannus. 
 And Brunetiere's assumption that LeSage's Gil Bias would not 
 make a successful play is gratuitous. How does he know? The 
 thing might be done tomorrow, and the success of the play would 
 be dependent on factors other than the hero's volitional status. 
 
 A similar objection may be urged against a theory of the drama 
 diffidently set forth by Mr. William Archer in his book, Play- 
 Making: a Manual of Craftsmanship, where, after taking issue with 
 the vohtional theory, he suggests one of his own. Though Mr. 
 Archer fears dogmatism with a great fear, he finds the necessity 
 of formulating some definition of the drama. While admitting, 
 therefore, that "the only really valid definition of the dramatic is: 
 Any representation of imaginary personages which is capable of 
 interesting an average audience assembled in a theater," he is 
 constrained to be more specific and definitive, and accordingly 
 we have the presentation of his theory, as follows: 
 
 "What, then, is the essence of the drama . . . ? What is 
 the common quality of themes, scenes, and incidents, which we 
 
^ CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE'S 
 
 recognize as specifically dramatic ? Perhaps we shall scarcely come 
 nearer to a helpful definition than if we say that the essence of 
 drama is crisis. A play is a more or less rapidly developing crisis in 
 destiny or circumstance, and a dramatic scene is a crisis within a 
 crisis, clearly furthering the ultimate event. The drama may be 
 called the art of crises. . . . The Greek drama 'subjected to the 
 faithful eyes,' as Horace phrases it, the culminating points of the 
 Greek epic; the modern drama places under the lens of theatrical 
 presentment the culminating points of modern experience.** 
 (Play-Making, bk. i, chap, iii.) Mr. Archer, foreseeing the objec- 
 tion that his alleged differentia of the drama applies with equal 
 force to the novel, explains further that the fundamental difference 
 between the novel and the play is that while the former embraces 
 * 'considerable segments of many lives," the latter gives "only the 
 culminating points, or shall we say the interesting culminations ? 
 — two or three destinies.** 
 
 But are we not justified in demanding grounds more relative 
 than this? Is the drama nothing more than a novel or an epic 
 purged of unessentials.f^ Unquestionably, the dramatist — es- 
 pecially the dramatist who has not at all points mastered his 
 craft — does well when he concerns himself with the portraying 
 of interesting culminations; but so does the novelist and the 
 narrative poet; so, for that matter, does the artist generally. If 
 art be the purgation of superfluities — and to a very large extent 
 it is just that — it must perforce squeeze out the unessentials of 
 life and retain what remains, and what remains is likely enough 
 to prove the culminating points. Thus, the painter who wishes to 
 transfer St. Augustine to canvas acts wisely when he takes some 
 interesting culmination in the saint's life — the "toUe, lege** 
 scene in the garden, for instance — and focuses attention on that; 
 such was the procedure of Ary Scheffer when he represented St. 
 Augustine and St. Monica discoursing of things heavenly at 
 Mantua shortly before the mother's demise. The Discobolus of 
 Myron illustrates the same principle in sculpture; and a casual 
 survey of Scott's Lady of the Lake will show the importance of 
 culminating points in the structure of the narrative poem. 
 
 The value of the crisis is undeniably very great in the drama 
 generally; but it is by no means indispensable. We have ad- 
 mittedly dramatic scenes — such as the conversation between 
 Lorenzo and Jessica in the last act of The Merchant of Venice—in 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 29 
 
 which no crisis is reached; and we have admittedly good plays — 
 such as Mr. Louis N. Parker's Pomander Walk and Mr. Granville 
 Barker's The Madras House — which present no especially interest- 
 ing culmmations. Where the element of crisis appears most 
 nearly necessary is in the short story and in the one-act play. 
 Both of these forms have been sometimes defined as cross-section 
 views of life; but that definition, if it is to be accepted at all, 
 depends entirely on the character of the section selected for repre- 
 sentation. The dramatist has yet to be born who would dream of 
 putting Mr. Kipling's story. The Taking of Lungtungpen into a 
 play; yet it is a remarkable example of interesting culminations. 
 Crisis explains, as nothing else can explain, Bret Harte's Luck 
 of Roaring Camp and Robert Louis Stevenson's Markheim, neither 
 of which would seem to offer much inducement to one on drama- 
 tization bent. One-act plays — ranging all the way from Box and 
 Cox to Mr. Alfred Sutro's The Man in the Stalls and Mr. James M. 
 Barrie's Twelve Pound Look — apparently need to utilize the element 
 of crisis, for they lose their point if in their brief traffic on the 
 stage — usually less than half an hour — they fail to bring out 
 some interesting culmination of the life they depict. But what 
 is ture of the short story and of the one-act play is not necessarily 
 true of the full length novel and the complete drama. 
 
 Mr. Archer's views are stimulating and illuminating; but they 
 prove too much. At any rate, we cannot consistently accept 
 the element of crisis as the differentia of the drama; it has closer 
 applicability to the short story and to a specific dramatic form, 
 the one-act play. Besides, it does not carry us very far from 
 Freytag. Instead of the five definite stages and the three definite 
 moments insisted upon by the German critic, Mr. Archer would 
 give us an indefinite number of stages or high places or interesting 
 culminations. 
 
 Yet Mr. Archer has brought us very near to the truth. There 
 is very much of crisis in the drama. And why? Because crisis,^ 
 or the culminating point, or the interesting culmination is depend- 
 ent upon and frequently associated with something else — some- 
 thing that has its roots very deep in the life of man and that has a 
 claim to be considered the true differentia of the dramatic form. 
 What that something is we shall presently see. 
 
II. 
 
 THE ELEMENT OF CONTRAST 
 
 In his review article entitled, "Contrast in the Drama," pub- 
 lished in The Bookman of New York City for January, 1914, 
 Mr. Clayton Hamilton set forth the theory of dramatic art and 
 dramatic construction that bids fair to answer with complete 
 satisfaction the fundamental question : What is the underlying and 
 essential constituent of the dramatic? After showing, in view of the 
 existence of such dramas as Lady Gregory's Workhouse Ward, 
 Mr. Arnold Bennett's Great Adventure, and Mr. John Galsworthy's 
 The Pigeon, that the theories of conflict and of crisis do not apply 
 to all specimens of dramatic art, Mr. Hamilton proceeds : 
 
 "Is there, after aU, such a thing as an essential element of drama? 
 Is there a single narrative element without which a dramatic scene 
 cannot succeed? I think that there is; but I am willing to revoke 
 this decision so soon as any writer shall show me an exception to 
 the rule. It seems to me at present that the one indispensable 
 element to success upon the stage is the element of contrast, and 
 that a play becomes more and more dramatic in proportion to the 
 multiplicity of contrasts that it contains within itself. 
 
 "The sole reason why The Workhouse Ward produces a dramatic 
 effect is that the two beggars are emphatically different from each 
 other. The moonlight scene in The Merchant of Venice is inter- 
 esting on the stage because of the contrast between the contribu- 
 tions of the two lovers to their lyrical duet. Both The Pigeon and 
 The Madras House derive their value from the fact that they 
 exhibit a series of contrasts between characters. The Great 
 Adventure is dramatic because the drifting hero is wonderfully 
 contrasted with the practical and sensible heroine and every scene 
 of the play reveals some minor contrast between antithetic minds. 
 What is the dramatic element in the soliloquies of Hamlet? Do 
 they not derive their theatrical effectiveness from the fact that 
 they present a constant contrast between very different human 
 qualities which, in this case, happen to have been incorporated 
 in a single person ? Such a play as Every Man in His Humour 
 stands outside of the formula of Brunetiere, because it exhibits 
 no struggle of contending wills; it also stands outside the formula 
 of Mr. Archer, because it exhibits neither a crisis nor a series of 
 
 30 
 
 / 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 31 
 
 crises; but it is a great comedy, because it exhibits an unintermitted 
 series of contrasts between mutually foiling personalities." 
 
 Perhaps the readiest way of appreciating the bearing and the 
 significance of Mr. Hamilton's theory of the drama is to find the 
 degree of its applicability to everyday life. There are certain 
 moments, certain events, certain combinations of circumstances 
 in the lives of even the most prosaic of us that we designate dram- 
 atic. Even though the frequent use of the word has worn away 
 something of its pristine sharpness of contour, the milling has 
 not been entirely effaced. When persons speak of a dramatic 
 scene or a dramatic experience or a dramatic meeting or a dramatic 
 enterprise, they indubitably mean something. What do they 
 mean? 
 
 Clearly, I think, they mean contrast. If, morning after morn- 
 ing, a college instructor enters his classroom after a given fashion 
 under given conditions and with his students calmly- awaiting 
 his appearance, no one would think of designating any such 
 entrance as dramatic; but should the students, not anticipating 
 his approach, engage in a more or less unacademic display of 
 activity — one of them, let us say, even essaying to give a grotesque 
 imitation of the instructor — and should the instructor, considerably 
 flustered and out of breath and obviously indignant, suddenly 
 fling open the door — that certainly would be a dramatic situation. 
 And it would be so because it involves a very obvious contrast, 
 external and internal. Again, there is so little of the dramatic in 
 the ordinary sermon preached by the ordinary preacher in the 
 presence of the ordinary congregation that it unfortunately 
 possesses a pronounced soporific quality; but should the preacher, 
 in the midst of his discourse, point a long finger at a certain smooth 
 and nodding head and solemnly declare: "I am certain that that 
 man, sitting there in the aisle seat of the fourth pew on my left, 
 deserves to be hanged by the neck until he is dead,*' then a dram- 
 atic element, farcial or tragic, would be injected into the sermon. 
 We have learned not to expect personalities, especially harrowing 
 personalities, in sermons; their presence would constitute a dis- 
 concerting contrast. To take a more serious example, a little 
 drama never staged in the theater but played with pathetic 
 verisimilitude in a city street : A mother one morning had a dispute 
 with her grown son. As he left the breakfast table to go to his 
 work she called after him in a paroxysm of rage: '*I hope 1*11 
 
32^ CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE' 8 
 
 never see you alive again!" A few hours later she was summoned 
 by a strange man who told her that her son needed her. She 
 burst through a ring of idle spectators and fell down in the dust 
 beside the lifeless body of her son, the victim of an accident, and 
 cried repeatedly, "Is it possible that you're dead!" The tragedy 
 here is a drama of contrast upon contrast. 
 
 So, too, when we say of a man that he has a dramatic view of 
 life, we really mean that he has formed the habit of noting the 
 contrasts underlying even the simplest events of the workaday 
 world. He may be a pessimist or a cynic or a humorist, according 
 to the temperamental spectacles through which he regards the 
 contrasts, but the recognition of the contrasts themselves justifies 
 us in calling his a dramatic outlook. This is plainly the explana- 
 tion of the so-called dramatic note in Browning. Browning was 
 not a dramatist, and yet there is a very pronounced dramatic 
 element in almost everything he wrote; it is more than mere 
 visualization, more than intuitive perception of the state of mind 
 of others, more than ability to put character into action, for many 
 of his most dramatic poems — My Last Duchess, for example — 
 have no action at all. It is an almost uncanny perception of 
 layer upon layer of contrasts in life and character and environ- 
 ment. Browning's dramatic vision is a vision of contrasts. 
 
 Or, let us turn to history, to the story of the past, where we 
 find a multitude of persons and events, of times and motives and 
 circumstances and causes and results. Which of those numerous 
 episodes do we style dramatic? Assuredly, those that involve 
 contrast. What is the glamour of war if not the dramatic quality 
 of contrast .f* Why is it that historians from the very beginning 
 have slurred over such racial and national pursuits as agriculture, 
 building, sanitation, and cooking, and devoted page after page to 
 such topics as personal adornment, athletic carnivals, slavery, 
 and carnage.'^ The contrasts afforded in the latter group give a 
 suflScient answer. Many a farmer has followed the plough, but 
 the only farmer who forms promising dramatic material is the 
 Cincinnatus who runs off from his plough to follow the flag; many 
 a cook has moved poets to song, but the only cook who has suc- 
 ceeded in getting before the footlights is the old woman who 
 slapped King Alfred's face.^° 
 
 '° For a study of the plays in whiclj this legend figures see King Alfred in 
 Literature, by L. W. Miles. Baltimore>4902. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 33 
 
 To reach the same conclusion in a slightly different way, let 
 us suppose that upon us devolved the task of writing the great 
 American play — a drama that would embody the true American 
 spirit and tell in a dramatic way the story of America's past. 
 What episode in American history should we select as the focal 
 point of our intended play ? Whatever our ultimate choice might 
 be — the War of the Revolution or the Civil War, territorial 
 expansion or the romance of business, the period of the pioneer or 
 the period of the skyscraper — one thing is certain: Our topic of 
 predelection would be a topic involving the element of contrast. 
 
 So much for what we call the dramatic element in life and its 
 foundation on the underlying or apparent contrasts in the career 
 of the individual and the story of the nation and the race. Let us 
 now examine some of the admittedly great dramas of the world 
 in the light of this theory of contrast. 
 
 The basic dramatic motif of the Sophoclean masterpiece, the 
 CEdipus TyrannuSy is the helplessness of a man in the coils of fate. 
 Here we have on the one side impotence and on the other side 
 omnipotence. When the drama opens, CEdipus has ceased to 
 rebel against the decrees of fate; he has ceased even to seek to 
 evade their consequences. The play shows him struggling, indeed, 
 but struggling with no prospect of freeing himself from that which 
 is ordained. It is the contrast of a passive victim and an active 
 fate. The contrast is heightened by the fact that the protagonist 
 is no ordinary man. He is a king, a man of prowess and prestige, 
 a man who by reason of his training, his experience of life, and his 
 regal station might be looked upon as among the mighty ones of 
 earth; yet we find him bowed down in unwilling but impotent 
 submission before the rulings of something invisible, impalpable, 
 yet infinitely more powerful than he. And still more force is 
 given the contrast in that CEdipus has been a good man; he has 
 not knowingly transgressed either the laws of man or the laws of 
 nature; he has striven to be a pious son, a faithful husband, a 
 devoted father, a benevolent ruler. His sins have been unwitting 
 sins. Yet he is punished, punished in mind and body, punished 
 in the full light of day and in the eyes of the world. The CEdipus 
 Tyr annus is thus a tragedy of contrasts. 
 
 In another type of tragedy, best exemplified in Shakespeare's 
 Macbeth, we find a similar dependence for dramatic force and 
 intensity on the element of contrast. The contrast centers in the 
 
 K 
 
34 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 personality of the murderer before and after the commission of 
 his crime. The Macbeth who stalks on murder bent into the 
 sleeping king's chamber, bidding the sure and firm set earth hear 
 not his steps, is a very different being from the Macbeth who 
 staggers into the courtyard a few moments later, his face haggard, 
 his limbs atremble, his hands gilded with the royal blood that all 
 great Neptune's oceans cannot wash away. Before the murder 
 of Duncan, Macbeth saw in the possession of the golden round 
 of sovereignty the greatest happiness that earth can give; after- 
 ward, the crown sears his guilty brow and he longs to be with the 
 dead whom he to gain his peace has sent to peace. Formerly a 
 noble man, he now hires murderers and slays helpless women 
 and unoffending babes; formerly a brave man, he now quails 
 alike before a witch's prophecy, a spirit's apparition and a subject's 
 sword. And this fundamental contrast is set off by a group of 
 minor contrasts in character and situation and events. DeQuin- 
 cey's superb analysis of the knocking at the gate in the second act 
 brings out the involved contrast between the world of crime 
 within the castle walls and the world of retribution that clamors 
 for admittance. 
 
 When Calderon conceived the idea of his admitted master- 
 piece. La Vida es Sueno^ he did so in the spirit of contrast. The 
 unhappy Segismundo leads two contrasting lives in two contrasting 
 environments; and the forces playing upon him are so compelling 
 in each case that he appears alternately two contrasting person- 
 alities. Now he is a grimed and famished prisoner chained Uke 
 another Prometheus to the barren rock; now he is a prince with 
 regal sway surrounded by subservient courtiers and illimitable 
 possibihties of enjoyment. Now he is a humble suppliant, 
 begging the prayers of passers by; now he is master of his princely 
 sword, able to threaten and command. Now, bowed down 
 beneath the yoke of sorrow and chastened by affliction, he is soft 
 and gentle as a woman; now, raised to courtly pomp and intoxi- 
 cated with power, he is as a wild beast uncaged. Minor contrasts 
 cross and recross through the play and give significance to the 
 other characters from the gradoso to the king; but the supreme 
 contrast, from which the drama receives both its power and its 
 name, is found in the personality and circumstances of Segismundo. 
 
 Another type of tragedy, depending upon another type of con- 
 trast, is furnished in the social dramas of more recent years. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 35 
 
 notably in the most representative work of Ibsen. In this species 
 of drama the individual is arrayed against the social order and 
 is ultimately crushed beneath the weight of heredity or of environ- 
 ment. Many such plays fall within the bearing of Brunetiere*s 
 formula, for they often involve a conflict; but in others of them 
 there is no conflict, the victim, as in Ghosts^ drifting along with the 
 irresistible current. But whether conflict exists or not, the grip 
 of the drama is due to cleverly conceived contrasts. Such is the 
 case in Hedda Gabler. From the opening of the play even to its 
 somber close we are confronted with the contrast between a woman 
 and a pistol. She fires at the bric-a-brac, she fires at her visitors, 
 she fires at herself. The pistol in the hands of Hedda is typical 
 of the contrasts that are involved in the woman's attitude to her 
 environment. A creature of impulse, the daughter of old General 
 Gabler finds herself wedded to the most negative, ineflficient, and 
 colorless specimen of manhood conceivable — ^the conventional 
 college professor. She, with her splendid body, her aggressive 
 soul, and her constant need of excitement, is set off against the 
 weak, watery, old womanish Tesman. And — a contrast within a 
 contrast — she sees her husband measured on the same scale with 
 such men as Brack and Loveberg. The contrasts thicken as the 
 play proceeds. When Hedda thrusts the pistol into the hands of 
 Loveberg she directs him to "do it beautifully": and he does — ^by 
 shooting himself, in the bowels. And the element of contrast is 
 carried to the heights — or to the depths — of tragic irony when, 
 just after Hedda has shot herself with one hand while playing the 
 piano with the other. Brack exclaims: "Nonsense! Women don't 
 do such things!" 
 
 Turning to one of the supreme comedies of manners, Moli^re's 
 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, we find that here again the element of 
 contrast is responsible for the dramatic values of the play. Compli- 
 cations involve contrasts; and humorous complications are the 
 stuff of which comedy is made. And so, in the story of Monsieur 
 Jourdain as unfolded by Moliere. we find a series of contrasts in 
 situation, in character, and in fundamental ideas. There, for 
 instance, is the contrast afforded by the uneducated educators 
 whom the leading character brings in to instruct him. Each of 
 them is an admitted master in his own field, be it philosophy or 
 fencing; yet all of them manifest a most unacademic impatience of 
 subjects other than their own and present some of the lamentable 
 
36 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 consequences of an evil that was not by any means confined to 
 Moliere's generation, the evil of narrow specialization. Another 
 contrast is that of unprincipled gentility. The scions of the 
 nobility, of whom we are led to expect honor and probity, are 
 singularly lacking in both. But the dominant contrast, and one 
 which gives point and pertinence to the delicious satire, is the con- 
 trast of clothes and caste. Monsieur Jourdain is convinced that 
 it is the clothes that make the man; he has money and leisure and 
 the material surroundings of aristocracy; but he cannot live down 
 his shopkeeping origin. He is an embodiment of contrast — 
 a bourgeois gentilhomme. 
 
 A form of dramatic composition which must of necessity be 
 included in this survey is the artificial comedy, the conventional 
 society play, the drama of epigram. Its most successful exponent 
 is Oscar Wilde. The keynote of contrast in Lady Windermere* s Fan 
 is struck by "dear Agatha," the Duchess's "little chatterbox," 
 who on every occasion and under all manner of provocation has 
 nothing to say but, *'Yes, mamma," and who thus by her "clever 
 talk" elicits the maternal rapture: "My dear one! You always 
 say the right thing." There, with perfectly absurd simplicity, we 
 have the very bones of contrast — and of the dramatic — laid bare. 
 The speaker is a nonentity, as is her mother before her; and as, 
 indeed, are all the characters in the play — ^with one exception. 
 That exception is Mrs. Erlynne, the one dramatic character, and 
 the one character in whom we find contrast. And the one con- 
 trast in character — the woman who, though far from being a model 
 mother, elects to become a social pariah to secure her daughter's 
 social salvation — alligns herself with the underlying dramatic 
 idea of the play, that of a daughter being rabidly jealous of her 
 own mother. The merest reflection on the construction of the 
 drama will serve to remind us that the climacteric scene, where the 
 presentation fan is found by Lord Windermere in Lord Darlington's 
 rooms, is a scene which depends entirely for its effectiveness on the 
 contrast inherent in it. Some critics have been unkind enough 
 to say that plays like Lady Windermere* s Fan live by reason of their 
 i= epigrams alone. Be it so; contrast is the essence of epigram. It 
 may very possibly be that the plays of Oscar Wilde are true 
 dramas because they exploit paradoxes in evening dress. 
 
 If contrast is at the bottom of the comedy of manners and the 
 comedy of epigram, it is not less in evidence in the comedy of 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 37 
 
 situation. Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, Sheridan's School for 
 Scandal, Hoyt's A Texas Steer — ^all three, like Are You a Mason? 
 and Charley's Aunt and Little Miss Brown and ever so many others 
 including several made in France that must not be so much as 
 named among us — ^win the tribute of our smiles and our laughter 
 essentially by reason of the humorous contrasts they depict. 
 They may incidentally show a conflict of wills and they may be 
 arranged in a series of crises; but they could get along very well 
 without either. The comic scenes that live in our memory are 
 scenes depending for their eiOficiency on contrast. Thus, the 
 famous screen scene in The School for Scandal has no volitional 
 element in it whatever; but it has a delightfully bewildering collec- 
 tion of contrasts in both character and situation. So, too, in the 
 farce that a few years ago set the United States in a roar, Seven 
 Days, there is a scene consuming several minutes — ^not of stage 
 time but of standard time — in which a burglar repeatedly slides 
 up and down in a dumb waiter while a policeman repeatedly 
 rushes down and up a parallel pair of stairs. Possibly there may 
 be a conflict of wills in it, but the audience does not laugh on 
 that account. The scene is funny because of the contrast, a 
 contrast heightened in this case by reason of the fact that the 
 burglar wears orthodox felt slippers and the policeman wears 
 squeaking number twelves. 
 
 We should have to look far for a better example of the romantic 
 drama than Mr. Justin Huntley McCarthy's colorful // I Were 
 King; and in this genuinely entertaining story of Frangois Villon 
 we have yet another manifestation of contrast constituting the 
 foundation of the dramatic art. Villon himself — ^sufficiently so 
 in history and excessively so in legend — is a veritable child of 
 contrast. He is a master of arts and a pickpocket, a cavalier 
 and a tippler, a poet and a brawler, a lover and a rowdy. Tattered 
 and tipsy, this scholar, poet, and housebreaker takes his stand 
 in a disreputable tavern and recites his ballade, "If Villon were 
 the King of France," while the actual King of France, Louis XI, 
 lends an unsuspected ear. Louis — ^likewise in both fact and 
 fiction — is a monarch of contrasts; and he so manages matters 
 that the next morning Villon comes forth splendidly attired, 
 like another Christopher Sly, and finds himself, by royal grace 
 and favor, actually the shaper of France's destinies — ^for a few 
 brief days. And so the stage pictures succeed one another, each 
 
38 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 throwing into prominence some special phase of the general 
 contrast of the scapgrace poet who, acting in the name of the 
 King, is more kingly than he in diplomacy and love and war. 
 
 Melodrama is just now a term of reproach and Hterature pro- 
 fesses to have nothing to do with it. We might urge that melo- 
 drama finds a place in some of the great plays of the world — 
 including the Prometheus Bound and Hamlet — and that, whatever 
 its literary status may be, its dramatic status is assured. The 
 popular theater has generally been the stamping ground of melo- 
 drama, and we can hardly afford to leave out the popular theater 
 in any adequate discussion of dramatic values. Such being the 
 case, can we find any melodramatic scene — ranging all the way 
 from the medieval miracle plays to the dramas of Lope de Vega 
 and thence to In Old Kentucky and Nelliey the Beautiful Cloak 
 Model — in which the element of contrast has not been the domin- 
 ant element? The characters in the most beloved species of 
 melodrama are paired off to emphasize contrast — the hero and 
 the villain, the heroine and the adventuress, the defaulting banker 
 and the honest policeman. In scene the melodrama is unsparing 
 of resources to secure contrast, breaking the heart of Boileau and 
 the letter of the unities of time and place by ranging from the 
 peaceful village at noon to Brooklyn Bridge at midnight and the 
 White Mountains three years later. And as for the plot of 
 melodrama — the type of plot that led the fourteenth century 
 crowds agape after the pageant through the winding streets of 
 Coventry, that fifty years ago set the gallery gods stamping, 
 hissing, and whistling in London and New York, and that even 
 today, though carefully disguised, affords surcease to the frazzled 
 nerves of the commiserable tired business man — ^what manner 
 of plot is it if not one of incessant, bewildering, breath-taking 
 contrasts ? 
 
 But, admitted that the element of contrast is found in every 
 species of dramatic composition and that it appears to be essential 
 to every piece of organic narrative acted on a stage before an 
 audience, it is a true differentia of the dramatic form? Do we 
 not find the element of contrast likewise in the epic, the novel, 
 and the short story? Is there not a pronounced element of 
 contrast in all forms of art? Is contrast a distinctive character- 
 istic of the drama ? 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 39 
 
 Certainly, contrast exists in all forms of art. For contrast 
 exists in life; and if we accept art, in the broadest sense of the 
 word, as a representation and interpretation of life, we must 
 naturally expect to find in art a reproduction of characteristics 
 which are prominent in life itself. The painter acts wisely when 
 he masters the principles of contrast; so does the orator, the poet, 
 the sculptor, the architect, the novelist. The dramatist is by no 
 means alone in his dependence upon the element of contrast. 
 But he is alone in his essential and fundamental dependence 
 upon it. Contrast is often found in the novel, but it is not essen- 
 tial to the novel; contrast is often found in the narrative poem, 
 but it is not essential to the narrative poem; contrast is often 
 found in the musical composition, but it is not essential to the 
 musical composition. But contrast is always found in the 
 drama, and it is absolutely essential to the drama. Retaining 
 the form while altering the substance of the shibboleth evolved 
 from Brunetiere's theory of dramatic art, we may truly say: 
 No contrast, no drama. 
 
 In this connection it is profitable for us to consider for a moment 
 a hybrid form of art which undoubtedly has its place in the world 
 and which has its respectable minority of defenders and advocates. 
 I refer to what is known as the closet drama. The closet drama 
 might be roughly defined as a poem that looks like a play. Some 
 eminent poets — Browning and Tennyson, for example — wrote 
 excellent closet dramas; Stafford is one, Becket is another. Both 
 poems, as it happens, were intended by their authors to be plays; 
 but neither Browning nor Tennyson, though achieving clear-cut 
 characterization and recognizing the principles of proportion, 
 was capable of sustained dramatic effort. The poet in both of 
 them was constantly coming to the fore; and though Stafford 
 came near to being presented on the stage and though Becket — 
 entirely on account of the prestige of the late Sir Henry Irving — 
 really got before the footlights, both poems remain poems in 
 substance though dramatic in form. And should we go into the 
 matter more thoroughly and seek to discover the why of it, we 
 should find that the closet drama is not a true play because in it 
 there is not sufficient importance given to the element of contrast. 
 
 On the other hand, it is by no means an uncommon experience 
 to come across a novel — or rather a considerable portion of a 
 novel — that would obviously lend itself to dramatic representa- 
 
40 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE' S 
 
 tion. Thus, the unforgettable scene in Henry Esmond where 
 Esmond breaks his sword in the presence of the Young Pretender 
 is recognized as intensely dramatic; and it is so because of the 
 group of contrasts underlying it. The scene is dramatic in sub- 
 stance though not dramatic in form. Often, indeed, the novelist, 
 when writing a scene of dramatic substance and scope, finds 
 himself approximating to the conventionalities of dramatic 
 dialogue. Such was the case with the late Frank Norris in one 
 of the most impressive chapters of The Octopus. He had conceived 
 a forceful, symbolical contrast; side by side, he shows us one 
 group of characters feasting sumptuously in the glow of a gorge- 
 ously appointed dining room and another group of characters 
 starving to death in the streets of San Francisco. It is significant 
 that in presenting the contrasting scenes, so eminently dramatic 
 in substance, Norris seized upon a distinctively dramatic form of 
 expression. Those few pages picked up at random would lead 
 the reader to believe that both in form and substance The Octopus 
 is not a novel but a play. 
 
 The process of looking into the seeds of time and telling which 
 will grow and which will not finds its analogue in determining 
 which novels will and which will not successfully undergo the 
 operation of dramatization. But of one thing we can at least be 
 sure: No novel which is scant in the element of contrast will 
 make a satisfactory play. This is by no means the only considera- 
 tion, but it is the vital and fundamental consideration. An 
 impartial survey of the many poor novels that have made at 
 least passable plays and of the several passable novels that have 
 made atrocious plays will bring us back to the insistent formula: 
 No contrast, no drama. 
 
 The theory of contrast, though it displaces the theories set 
 forth by Freytag, Brunetidre, and Archer, by no means negatives 
 them. Many an excellent piece of dramatic composition is 
 arranged according to the Theile und Stellen urged by the German 
 playwright and critic; in fact it may be said that, were some of 
 our present day dramatists to drill themselves more rigidly in the 
 processes of dramatic construction set forth in Die Technik des 
 Dramas, audiences would suffer less and art would profit more. 
 So much of conflict is there in life that necessarily we look for it 
 in the drama; and just as most of the great plays of the past turn 
 on some phase of the human will, so in all probability will most 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 41 
 
 of the great plays of the future. And so with the crises, the 
 interesting culminations underscored by Mr. Archer; there are 
 critical moments in life and therefore in art, and the dramatist 
 does well when he grasps them. 
 
 Nor are the theories of Freytag, Brunetiere, and Archer in 
 blank and utter opposition to the theory of contrast; in them we 
 may see the truth, as in a glass darkly. The elaborate technical 
 devices for which Freytag pleaded derive their undoubted value 
 from the fact that they serve to frame and set off the imderlying 
 contrasts assumed to be existing in the material of the drama. 
 Given a group of contrasts of sufficient variety and magnitude, 
 they are in many cases shown forth to best advantage in some 
 such scheme of arrangement as Freytag laid down. If we probe 
 behind the fact of volitional conflict or volitional action generally, 
 we are fairly certain to come upon a contrast or a series of con- 
 trasts which, as Hamlet put it, puzzles the will; hence the dramatic 
 value of Brunetiere's conflict of wills lies in its indication of con- 
 trasts. And as for the crises in life and in art, what are they 
 after all but bursts of spray produced by the counterflow of 
 contrasts? They have their place in the drama; but that which 
 makes a play a play, that which furnishes the essential and under- 
 lying constituent of the dramatic, is contrast." 
 
 " Though Mr. Clayton Hamilton is, to my best knowledge, the first writer 
 to set forth the theory of contrast as a true differentia of the drama, he is 
 by no means alone in the recognition of contrast as a desideratum of the 
 dramatic form. Thus Dr. Albert Vogele in his masterly study, Der Pessi- 
 mismus und das Tragische in Kunst und Leben brings out the importance 
 of discord in the drama and calls attention to its existence in ancient and 
 modern plays. Contrast in the drama likewise received some recognition 
 from A. W. Schlegel in his commentary on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. 
 
ra. 
 
 THE ENGLISH HISTORICAL PLAYS 
 
 The aim of the present monograph is to examine, with reference 
 to the theory of dramatic contrast, Shakespeare's use of his 
 sources in the EngHsh historical plays. Our purpose is not to 
 compare Shakespeare's dramas with the actual facts of history, 
 but to study his sources on the one hand and his plays on the 
 other, to note the more important instances in which he diverged 
 from those sources and to discover to what extent the theory of 
 contrast offers an explanation of such divergences. 
 
 The English historical plays have been selected for this investiga- 
 tion for three reasons. In the first place, the sources are accessible 
 and the fact of their being sources is universally admitted. Sec- 
 ondly, in the historical plays Shakespeare employed for the most 
 part definite historical material rather than plot ideas that had 
 previously been cast in fictional form, so that his manipulation of 
 it represents his own choice and shaping of the material. Thirdly, 
 the historical plays were written during a period (1591-16^2) which 
 roughly covers his entire career as a dramatist, and hence this 
 study should afford some valuable suggestions bearing upon the 
 genesis of Shakespeare's artistic ideals. The ten historical plays 
 are taken, therefore, not in the order in which they correspond 
 to the facts of English history, but in the order in which they were 
 written. 
 
 Dates of Composition 
 
 King Henry F/, Parts 7, II, and III. — Shakespearean scholars 
 are all but unanimous in giving 1591 and 1592 as the approximate 
 dates of authorship. Shakespeare, in the Epilogue to King 
 Henry F, makes it clear that the plays commemorating the reign 
 of Henry VI antedated that play: 
 
 Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned King 
 Of France and England, did this King succeed; 
 
 Whose state so many had the managing, 
 
 That they lost France and made his England bleed : 
 
 Which oft our stage hath shown. 
 
 Greene's posthumous essay, The Groatsworth of Wit bought with a 
 Million of Repentencey pubHshed late in 1592, contains an obvious 
 42 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 43 
 
 parody on the line in /// Henry VI y **0 tiger's heart wrapt in a 
 woman's hide." (I. iv. 137.) Published in the same year was 
 Nash's Pierce Penniless, in which we have a distinct reference to 
 the Talbot scenes in I Henry VI.! 
 
 "How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, 
 to think that after he had been two hundred years in his tomb 
 he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones embalmed 
 with the tears of ten thousand spectators (at least at several 
 times), who, in the tragedian that represents his person, behold 
 him fresh bleeding." 
 
 An entry in Henslowe's diary informs us that Henry VI was 
 performed as a new play in March, 1591; and, of course, the ad- 
 mittedly Shakespearean passages in the three plays reveal their 
 emanation from a very early stage in his career as a dramatist. 
 
 King Richard II. — ^The composition of this play is assigned to 
 1593. Scholars find in it the influence of Marlowe's Edward 11, 
 which dates from about 1590, and the source of parallel and sup- 
 posedly plagiarized passages in Daniel's Civil Wars (1595). Two 
 quartos of King Richard II, one of them with Shakespeare's name 
 on the title-page, were published in 1597. In this, as in numerous 
 other instances, the presentation of the play preceded by several 
 years its first appearance in print. 
 
 King Richard III. — The date of composition is set about 1594. 
 In this play Shakespeare shows himself most strongly under the 
 influence of Marlowe, Richard in his unrelieved villainy being in 
 conception closely akin to the "ideal villain" beloved of Marlowe. 
 The play first appeared in print in 1597. 
 
 King John. — ^This is one of the plays mentioned by Francis 
 Meres in the Palladis Tamia of 1598. Relying solely on internal 
 evidence, critics place its date of composition about 1595. 
 
 / Henry IV. — ^The date of composition is assigned to 1596 or 
 1597. Among the pieces of external evidence cited in support of 
 that generally accepted view are: A mention in the Palladis 
 Tamia; a reference to Falstaff in Jonson's Every Man Out of His 
 Humour, staged in 1599; a reference to the drawer Francis in the 
 Pilgrimage to Parnassus, the Cambridge Christmas play of 1598; 
 two allusions in the play to current events — the Spanish expedition 
 in 1596 (I. 1.) and the corn famine of the same year (II. 1.). 
 
 II Henry IV. — ^This play, "at once the supplement and epilogue 
 of the first part, and the preparation for the ensuing dramatic 
 
44 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 history of Henry V," was written about two years later. Jonson 
 has a reference to Justice Silence in Every Man Out of His Humour. 
 King Henry V, — Sufficient evidence of the date of composition 
 is furnished in the Prologue to the fifth act. 
 
 The general of our gracious empress, 
 
 As in good time he may, from Ireland coming, 
 Bringing rebellion broached on his sword, 
 
 is an unmistakable allusion to the famous expedition of the Earl 
 of Essex; so the play must have been acted some time between 
 March 27 and September 28, in 1599. 
 
 King Henry VIII. — ^The Shakespearean portions of this play 
 bear out the critics in their contention that Henry VIII came very 
 late in the dramatist's career. The eulogy of King James in the 
 fifth act points to a date of composition subsequent to the death of 
 Queen Elizabeth. We have an unusual piece of external evidence 
 in the destruction by fire of the Globe Theater on June 29, 1613, 
 while this play was being enacted for the first time. The assigned 
 date of composition is therefore 1612. 
 
 While scholars differ somewhat as to the exact years in which the 
 historical plays were written, they are practically unanimous in 
 assigning them to the order of composition just indicated. Here 
 and there is raised a dissenting voice, as when Sir Sidney Lee 
 holds that King Richard III was written earUer than King 
 Richard II; but, in general it is agreed that Shakespeare served 
 his apprenticeship in writing the three parts of King Henry VI, 
 that he was strongly influenced by Marlowe in King Richard II 
 and King Richard III, that he tentatively struck an epic note in 
 King John and carried it, through the two parts of King Henry 
 IVy to a glorious fulness in King Henry V, and that very late in 
 his career as a dramatist he collaborated in writing King Henry 
 VI IL All in all, we are warranted in accepting the approximate 
 dates and the general order of composition as a sufficient chron- 
 ological basis for our proposed inquiry into Shakespeare's manipula- 
 tion of his material. 
 
IV. 
 THE THREE PLAYS OF KING HENRY VI 
 
 Our investigation of the three parts of King Henry VI is 
 entered upon with the assumption that, though it is more than 
 likely that they are the work of several hands, Shakespeare had a 
 considerable part in their composition. Not all critics take the 
 extreme view of Malone {Dissertation on the Three Parts of King 
 Henry VI) : "My hypothesis then is, that the first part of King 
 Henry VI as it now appears (of which no quarto copy is extant), 
 was the entire or nearly the entire production of some ancient 
 dramatist; that The Whole Contention of the Two Houses of York 
 and Lancaster, etc., written probably before the year 1590, and 
 printed in quarto in 1600, was also the composition of some 
 writer who preceded Shakspeare; and that from this piece, which 
 is in two parts (the former of which is entitled. The first part of the 
 Contention of the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with 
 the death of the good duke Humphrey, etc., and the latter, The true 
 Tragedie of Richard duke of Yorke, and the death of the good King 
 Henrie the Sixt), our poet formed two plays, entitled the Second 
 and Third Parts of King Henry VI as they appear in the first 
 folio edition of his works." 
 
 Owing to dearth of external evidence, any attempt to decide 
 more definitely on the authorship of these plays is necessarily 
 futile; and tests made solely on data furnished by internal evidence 
 are quite as useless, since the Shakespeare who here tries his 
 'prentice hand is far from being the Shakespeare who later is to 
 limn for us the heroic figure of King Henry V and search out the 
 secrets of lago's heart. The common denominator of Shakes- 
 pearean criticism seems to be the assumption that, though it is 
 very possible that Shakespeare revamped older plays and had 
 collaborators in writing these three dramas, there is enough of 
 his work in them to warrant us in including them among his 
 complete works. Be that as it may, the question of authorship 
 is not a vital one in this study. Courtenay's attitude, as expressed 
 in his Commentaries (vol. 1, p. 213) is deserving of emulation: 
 "Since, however, these plays are included in all editions of Shak- 
 speare's works, and are read with the rest, . . . it is equally 
 my business to examine them, whether he wrote them or not. 
 
 45 
 
 I 
 
46 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 And let it not be supposed that I decide the question when I 
 speak of the author as Shakspeare.'* All that we insist upon is, 
 that to whatever extent Shakespeare was indebted to earlier 
 dramatic versions of the stories circling about the Wars of the 
 Roses and other events in the reign of Henry VI, he exercised the 
 final decision as to what form the material would take in the 
 three plays directly associated with his name. 
 
 The material employed by Shakespeare, either or both directly 
 and indirectly, in the three plays of King Henry VI we find in 
 Holinshed's Chronicles. In general, the plays follow the chronicles 
 closely; but they necessarily make a selection of material, follow 
 a different principle of proportion, indulge in numerous anachron- 
 isms and in places introduce incidents which are not warranted 
 in the historical sources of the dramas. Shakespeare's anachron- 
 isms, which are characteristic of all the historical plays, we shall 
 reserve for further discussion; our purpose here is to investigate 
 his manipulation of his material and in particular to find out to 
 what extent his deviations from Holinshed may be accounted for 
 on the hypothesis of dramatic contrast. 
 
 In reviewing the loosely constructed plays of King Henry VI 
 we find ourselves impressed with four sets or series of contrasts, 
 which we may conveniently label as follows : The War of the Roses, 
 the Winchester-Gloucester Feud, the Pucelle-Talbot Episodes 
 and the Queen Margaret Scenes. Each of these will, on analysis, 
 reveal an effort — ^perhaps unconcious — on the part of the dramatist 
 to present contrasting characters in action; and examination of 
 the plays in reference to the corresponding passages in Holinshed 
 will show that it was very largely by the principle of dramatic 
 contrast that the dramatist was governed in selecting his material 
 and in inventing episodes. 
 
 The War of the Roses has its inception in the Temple Garden 
 (/ Henry VI, II, iv.), where the partisans of the rival houses of 
 York and Lancaster discuss the right of Henry's succession to the 
 crown of England. In the midst of the peaceful garden are heard 
 the first ominous growlings of civil strife. The other participants 
 in the scene group themselves about the two central figures, 
 Richard Plantagenet and the Earl of Somerset. The plucking of 
 the roses with its inherent contrast is emphasized with a reserve and 
 a simplicity that makes this scene easily the most artistic in the 
 three plays. Says Plantagenet : 
 
 I 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 47 
 
 Let him that is a true-born gentleman, 
 And stands upon the honour of his birth. 
 If he suppose that I have pleaded truth. 
 From off this briar pluck a white rose with me. 
 
 Whereupon pleads Somerset: 
 
 Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer, 
 But dare maintain the party of the truth. 
 Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me. 
 
 And a little later, after the noblemen present have definitely 
 taken sides by plucking roses red and white, the following dialogue 
 takes place between Somerset and Plantagenet: 
 
 Plan. Now, Somerset, where is your argument? 
 
 Som. Here in my scabbard, mediating that 
 
 Shall dye your white rose in a bloody red. 
 
 Plan. Meantime your cheeks do counterfeit our roses; 
 For pale they look with fear, as witnessing 
 The truth of our side. 
 
 Som, No, Plantagenet, 
 
 *Tis not for fear but anger that my cheeks 
 Blush for pure shame to counterfeit our roses, 
 And yet thy tongue will not confess thy error. 
 
 Plan. Hath not thy rose a canker, Somerset? 
 
 Som. Hath not thy rose a thorn, Plantagenet ? 
 
 Plan. Ay, sharp and piercing, to maintain his truth; 
 
 Whiles thy consuming canker eats his falsehood. 
 
 Som. Well, I'll find friends to wear my bleeding roses, 
 That shall maintain what I have said is true. 
 Where false Plantagenet dare not be seen. 
 
 This passage illustrates, among other things, the sometimes 
 irritating fondness of the young Shakespeare to play upon words 
 and to indulge freely in verbal antitheses — characteristics which 
 he never entirely lost but which are very pronoimced in the 
 English historical plays. It may be well at this point to call 
 attention to the fact that antithesis is essentially founded upon 
 contrast and that many a scene of undeniable dramatic force, 
 both in Shakespeare's plays and out of them, is simply an extended 
 antithesis, an antithesis cast into narrative sequence. The 
 episode of the plucking of the roses in the Temple Garden has no 
 mention in Holinshed and no warrant in history; it is a delightful 
 invention of the dramatist to typify an element of contrast. 
 
48 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE' S 
 
 In succeeding scenes (/ Henry VI, III. iv. and IV. i.), we find 
 a further visualization of the contrast involved in the War of the 
 Roses in the quarrel between two members of the rival factions, 
 Vernon and Basset. Both are historical personages who took 
 opposite sides in the civil strife, but Shakespeare invented their 
 personal quarrel. 
 
 The War of the Roses reaches its culmination in the second 
 act of III Henry VI when the white rose blooms, though drenched 
 in blood, and the red rose hangs limp in defeat. A notable varia- 
 tion of Shakespeare from his sources occurs in II. ii. 81 ff. where he 
 introduces the leaders of the two houses and allows them to engage 
 in a spirited and unseemly wrangle. The scene does not percept- 
 ibly advance the dramatic action of the play, it does not serve 
 to elucidate character, it does not by any means contribute to 
 what students of the drama sometimes designate '^relief"; but it 
 most emphatically does bring out and sustain the contrast of the 
 War of the Roses, and in such capacity it has its dramaturgical 
 justification. 
 
 A similar explanation must account for two contrasting episodes 
 in II. V. where a son discovers that he has killed his own father, 
 and a father discovers that he has killed his own son. If Shake- 
 speare had any historical basis for this dual scene, it is to be found 
 only in the general remarks made by Hall concerning the Battle 
 of Towton {^5Q): 
 
 "This conflict was in manner unnatural, for in it the son fought 
 against the father, the brother against the brother, the nephew 
 against the uncle, and the tenant against his lord." 
 
 Here we have the antithesis of civil war formulated by the 
 chronicler and visualized by the dramatist. And the contrast is 
 enhanced by the presence of King Henry, who laments the unhappy 
 occurrences of which he himself has been the unwitting occasion. 
 
 The War of the Roses shows mainly Shakespeare's invention of 
 episodes to illustrate dramatic contrast; the Winchester-Gloucester 
 Feud affords an excellent example of his modification and shaping 
 of existing material for the same purpose. Here, as in so many 
 other instances throughout the historical plays, though Shakespeare 
 distorts isolated facts, he succeeds in bringing out the general 
 truth. Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester and later Cardinal, 
 the grand uncle of King Henry VI, is described by Holinshed as 
 "haughty in stomach, high in countenance, disdainful to his kin," 
 
 d 
 
HISTORICAL PL.\YS 49 
 
 and strong "in malice and mischief" (212) ; Humphrey Plantagenet, 
 Duke of Gloucester and uncle of the King, was indeed "the good 
 Duke Humphrey. "^^ The enmity between these two eminent 
 men is one of the scandals of English history. And it is true that 
 the churchman, by devious ways, succeeded in driving his nephew 
 into disgrace. Shakespeare puts the two noblemen in strikmg 
 contrast. 
 
 Thus, he gives Winchester an occasion which did not exist in 
 fact for increased resentment against Gloucester. Soliloquizes 
 the Bishop (/ Eenry VI. I. i.) : 
 
 Each hath his place and function to attend. 
 I am left out; for me nothing remains. 
 But long I will not be Jack out of office. 
 
 In both Hall (115) and Holinshed (III, 585) it is expressly stated 
 that the custody of the youthful Henry VI was appointed to 
 Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. He was not, therefore, 
 "Jack out of office." 
 
 In the second act of II Henry VI (scene i) the dramatist brings 
 the Winchester-Gloucester Feud to focus. In the royal presence 
 the lords protectors bandy words and both so far forget their 
 dignity that they arrange for a duel. A contrast within a contrast 
 is furnished in the Cardinal's readiness to take the sword and the 
 Duke's fluency in quoting churchly Latin. A careful reading of 
 the entire scene, which is considerably above the level of the play 
 in dramatic effectiveness, will show that its success is conditioned 
 by the contrast pointed out between the rival nobles. 
 
 To make the ultimate defeat of the Duke in the Winchester- 
 Gloucester Feud more apparent, Shakespeare juggles his dates 
 and has Winchester deposed from the protectorship on the occasion 
 of his wife's trial for witchcraft (// Henry VI. II. iii.). And in the 
 scene (III. i.) in which the unfortunate Duke is arrested on a 
 charge of high treason, Shakespeare has builded upon Holinshed's 
 material with the obvious purpose of setting the nobility of the 
 defeated man in efiFective contrast with the malice of his arch- 
 enemy, the Cardinal. 
 
 We now come to a consideration of what we have termed the 
 Pucelle-Talbot Episodes. The character of the Blessed Jeanne 
 
 " For a succinct account of his practical interest in schools and scholars 
 see Einstein's Italian Renaissance in England, chap. I. Gloucester's private 
 life was^by no means flawless. 
 
50 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 d'Arc as depicted in / Henry VI has been justly described as a libel 
 upon the truth of history, and eflForts have been made time and 
 again to show either that Shakespeare did not write the objection- 
 able play or else that in writing it he fell a victim to national 
 prejudice. I here venture to suggest an interpretation of the 
 Pucelle scenes which is deduced from Mr. Hamilton's theory of 
 contrast in the drama. 
 
 In the Pucelle-Talbot Episodes (Z Henry VI I. ii., I. iv., I. v., 
 I. vi., II. i., II. ii., III. ii., IV. i., IV. v. vi. vii., V. iii. V. iv.) we 
 find a more or less conscious effort on the part of the dramatist 
 to personify a contrast that runs through the play. The general 
 contrast is England versus France. The English King is set over 
 against Charles the Dauphin, but that contrast of personality — 
 owing largely to the weak character of Henry — is not sufficient 
 to symbolize the international antithesis; at least, not from the 
 English point of view, which is openly the point of view of the 
 dramatist. Therefore, he makes the contrast take the form of 
 conflict and to emphasize and sustain the contrast he singles out 
 a champion on either side. For England he selects Lord Talbot, 
 for France la Pucelle. 
 
 Shakespeare here faced a problem that a superficial reading of 
 / Henry VI will not reveal; one must have had some actual 
 experience in the construction of plays and some practical knowl- 
 edge of what is and what is not theatrically effective to be in a 
 position to understand the dramaturgic necessity, in view of the 
 facts in the case, of Shakespeare's doing what he did. King 
 Henry, after whom the play is named, should be the hero of the 
 drama and the champion of England; but he is neither. There- 
 fore Talbot, who fills both roles in lieu of the King, must be as 
 nearly as possible an ideal hero and warrior and man; and one 
 way to make him such is to have his adversary on the French 
 side assume the proportions of an ideal villain. Talbot, the real 
 hero of the play, must be painted white; and to intensify his 
 whiteness, la Pucelle must be painted black. The result may not 
 be pretty and it may not be true; but to the audience for whom 
 Shakespeare wrote — and in matters pertaining to the drama we 
 cannot afford to ignore the audience — it was rattling good English 
 drama. 
 
 And so we find Shakespeare (I. iv.) early enlisting our sympathy 
 for Talbot by having that hero relate to Lord Salisbury and a 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 51 
 
 group of English knights at Orleans the details of his sufferings 
 and humiliations while in the enemy's hands, of the "scoffs and 
 scorns and contumelious taunts." And that we may not fall 
 into the mistake, however remote the possibility, of mistaking 
 this hero for a weakling like unto his King, the dramatist has him 
 give details of his prowess, too: 
 
 Then broke I from the ofl&cers that led me. 
 
 And with my nails digg'd stones out of the ground. 
 
 To hurl at the beholders of my shame: 
 
 My grisly countenance made others fly; 
 
 None durst come near for fear of sudden death. 
 
 Both champions being introduced, Shakespeare has them meet 
 in an indecisive duel (I. v.), in the course of which Talbot takes 
 pains to remind the audience that Jeanne is a "witch" and a 
 "strumpet." And in order to bring out properly the unworthy 
 character of the French adversaries, Shakespeare immediately 
 afterward (I. vi.) shows us Charles the Dauphin and the French 
 leaders threatening to confer all but divine honors on the same 
 Pucelle. Says Charles: 
 
 'Tis Joan, not we, by whom the day is won; 
 For which I will divide my crown with her, 
 And all the priests and friars in my realm 
 Shall in procession sing her endless praise. 
 A statlier pyramis to her I'll rear 
 Than Rhodope's or Memphis' ever was : 
 In memory of her when she is dead. 
 Her ashes, in an urn more precious 
 Than the rich-jewel'd coffer of Darius, 
 Transported shall be at high festivals 
 Before the kings and queens of France. 
 No longer on Saint Denis will we cry, 
 But Joan la Pucelle shall be France's saint. 
 
 It need hardly be stated that there is, neither in Holinshed nor 
 elsewhere, any warrant for this scene. 
 
 Having seen that the hero Talbot has suffered and is brave, 
 the audience must now have evidence of his cleverness; and so, 
 out of the whole cloth, Shakespeare manufactures that scene 
 (II. iii.) in which the English champion outwits the mythical 
 Countess of Auvergne and so impresses that lady with his sterUng 
 qualities that she, who intended to make him her prisoner, 
 expresses her delight at having an opportunity of feasting so great 
 
52 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE' 8 
 
 a warrior in her house. And that still another angle of the 
 hero's character may be seen, Talbot must, not without some 
 very theatrical rhetoric, in presence of the King and court, tear 
 the knightly garter from the recreant leg of Fastolfe (IV. i.). To 
 what extent Shakespeare in this instance stretched his sources 
 may be seen from Holinshed's statement (III. 601.) that not 
 Talbot, but Bedford, took from Sir John Fastolfe "the image of 
 St. George and his garter; though afterward, by means of friends 
 and apparent causes of good excuse, the same were to him again 
 delivered, against the mind of the Lord Talbot. ^^ Finally, accepting 
 a truthful but inadequate historical basis in Holinshed, Shakes- 
 peare paints in warm tones the closing scenes of his hero's life 
 (IV. v., vi., vii.), beautifully mingling love and pathos and intro- 
 ducing a minor contrast in the person of the old warrior's stripling 
 son. His boy's dead body held close to his breast, Talbot dies 
 with a verbal contrast on his lips: 
 
 Now my old arms are young John Talbot's grave. 
 
 In contrast with Talbot's noble strategy in the castle at Auvergne 
 is the ignoble strategy whereby la Pucelle succeeds in getting 
 her soldiers into Rouen (III. ii.). In contrast with Talbot's 
 greatness in stripping the cowardly Fastolfe of the insignia of 
 knighthood is la Pucelle's smallness in winning Burgundy over to 
 the side of the Dauphin (III. iii.). Here is another of Shake- 
 speare's deliberate anachronisms, since Jeanne d'Arc's death 
 preceded by four years Burgundy's reconciliation with Charles. 
 The scene (V. iii.) wherein la Pucelle holds converse with her fiends 
 serves to make her assume an even darker hue than formerly; 
 and as for the unspeakably revolting episode of her examination 
 before Warwick and the Duke of York, it is undeniably in gruesome 
 contrast with the death scene of the good Talbot. 
 
 In his contrast between Talbot and la Pucelle Shakespeare 
 clearly showed two tricks of the amateur: He put his colors on too 
 thick, and he was more free with his black paint than with his 
 white paint. Talbot, though something of a monstrosity of 
 goodness, is more nearly human than la Pucelle. Deeper was his 
 knowledge of life and more skilled his craftsman's hand when later 
 on Shakespeare had recourse to the same sort of dramatic contrast 
 in Julius Caesar. There he uses his white paint on the Brutus of 
 history, and on the Caesar of history his black paint — or is it an 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 53 
 
 inoflFensive drab? At all events in the case of Julius Caesar he 
 presented his contrast of character with more of artistic reserve. 
 
 A further instance of Shakespeare's manipulation of his materials 
 with a view to dramatic contrast is found in the Queen Margaret 
 Scenes. This gifted, beautiful, and masculine woman he makes 
 the center of a series of dramatic events, including her amour with 
 the Duke of Suffolk, her personal spite against the Duchess of 
 Gloucester, and her sharply defined contrast in personahty with 
 her royal husband. 
 
 For the attachment existing between the Queen and Suffolk the 
 dramatist found in Holinshed some slight foundation, but certainly 
 one not sufficient to justify the lengths to which he carries it in 
 these plays. Suffolk did indeed arrange for Henry's marriage 
 with Margaret of Anjou, but he certainly did not carry out his 
 commission with the wealth of amorous details given in / Henry VI 
 (V. iii.). Shakespeare has the impressionable Duke fall precipi- 
 tately in love with the lady who is destined to be England's Queen, 
 and in // Henry VI he gives us rather definitely to understand that 
 Suffolk's love was not unrequited. We find no account taken in 
 the plays of the historical facts that Suffolk was some years older 
 than Margaret's father. King Regnier of Provence, and that his 
 wife, Alice Chaucer, accompanied the Enghsh nobleman on the 
 occasion of his visit to France as the proxy of King Henry. In 
 the scenes devoted to the relations of Margaret and Suffolk (not- 
 ably / Henry VI, V. iii. and // Henry VI, III. ii.), Shakespeare, 
 like so many other dramatists, has sensed the underlying contrasts 
 existing in love — especially in ilhcit love; and the dramatic value 
 is in this case considerably enhanced by the fact that Margaret in 
 her softer moods is in striking contrast with the vigorous virago 
 she shows herself in other parts of the plays. 
 
 With a skill worthy of a better cause, Shakespeare brings out 
 the personal animus existing between the Queen and the Duchess 
 of Gloucester and makes of it the unfaihng dramatic theme of 
 woman against woman. Eleanor dreams — ^her dream as often the 
 offspring of desire — ^that she is seated 
 
 In the cathedral church of Westminster, 
 And in that chair where kings and queens are crown'd: 
 Where Henry and dame Margaret Imeel'd to me, 
 And on my head did set the diadem. 
 
 {II Henry VI, I. ii.) 
 
54 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 And Margaret admits to Suflfolk: 
 
 Not all these lords do vex me half so much 
 
 As that proud dame, the lord protector's wife. 
 
 She sweeps it through the court with troops of ladies, 
 
 More hke an empress than Duke Humphrey's wife: 
 
 Strangers in court do take her for the queen: 
 
 She bears a duke's revenues on her back. 
 
 And in her heart she scorns our poverty : 
 
 Shall I not live to be avenged on her ? 
 
 Contemptuous base-born callet as she is. 
 
 She vaunted 'mongst her minions t'other day, 
 
 The very train of her worst wearing gown 
 
 Was better worth than all my father's lands. 
 
 (// Henry VI, I. iii.) 
 
 This ladies' battle reaches its climax when in the presence of the 
 King and court Queen Margaret gives the Duchess a box on the 
 ear. Shakespeare shows the Queen and Suffolk taking steps to 
 discover the Duchess in the midst of the evil practices which 
 brought her to disgrace. Dates are badly twisted to bring about 
 this dramatic contrivance. In point of fact, Eleanor of Gloucester 
 had been arraigned and sentenced in 1441, four years previous to 
 Margaret's coronation in May, 1445. So the woman-against- 
 woman strand of plot is a manifest fabrication. 
 
 Another and contrasting aspect of the character of the Queen 
 Margaret of the plays is furnished in the scene wherein she mani- 
 fests her vindictiveness and warlike mettle. Holinshed gives two 
 versions of the fall of York — one that he died on the field of 
 battle, the other that he became the Queen's prisoner and as such 
 suffered the molehill coronation and other indignities. It is 
 significant that the latter version Shakespeare selected as better 
 suited for dramatic presentation; and he failed not to embellish 
 it freely the more decisively to bring out the contrast between the 
 fallen standard bearer of the House of York and the triumphant 
 heroine of the House of Lancaster (III Henry VI, I. iv.). No 
 historical foundation exists for York's lengthy reply to Margaret's 
 gibes and taunts; but from the dramaturgic point of view it serves 
 to stress the contrast. 
 
 The same thing may be said of Margaret's intrepid battle speech 
 before the fatal fight at Tewksbury {III Henry F/, V. iv.), a 
 speech which prompts the young Prince Edward to exclaim: 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 55 
 
 Methinks a woman of this valiant spirit 
 Should, if a coward heard her speak these words. 
 Infuse his breast with magnanimity, 
 And make him, naked, foil a man at arms. 
 
 According to Hall (297), Margaret's attitude on this occasion was 
 far otherwise. "She, like a woman 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." 
 
 To have portrayed Margaret thus before Tewksbury would have 
 been dramatic inasmuch as it would contrast with her ordinary 
 bold and unquenchable spirit; but it would not have been in 
 harmony with the larger contrast upon which the Queen Margaret 
 Scenes are based — the contrast of the mannish Queen with the 
 womanish King. There can be no doubt that Henry is a dramatic 
 figure — a fact which no theory of the drama but that of contrast 
 can suflSciently explain. The formula of "passion in action'* will 
 not serve, for in Henry there is neither one nor the other. Mr. 
 Archer's suggestion of "crises" is as little to the purpose, for the 
 King is least dramatic in "culminating moments" and most 
 dramatic when the action of the play is temporarily suspended — 
 when, for example, disguised and bearing a prayer-book in his 
 weakling hand, he strolls soliloquizing in the north woods (77/ 
 Henry VI, IH. 1.). Nor does the explanation, "conflict of wills," 
 explain King Henry, for obviously it takes two to make a fight. 
 No; King Henry is dramatic for the same reason that Prince 
 Hamlet is dramatic — because he is in contrast with every one about 
 him and is the tragic victim of contrasts within himself. 
 
 In the royal personage after whom these three plays are, almost 
 ironically, named, Shakespeare presents to us a type of the con- 
 ventional "good, pious soul" who means pathetically well, who is 
 irritatingly addicted to devotional ejaculations, who is profoundly 
 impressed by the conviction that this earth is a vale of tears, but 
 who is utterly incapable of judging men, prone to do injury frora 
 pious motives, and in general altogether unsuited for the work in 
 the world that circumstances call upon him to do. It is char- 
 acteristic that on an occasion necessitating action. King Henry 
 very consistently faints away (77 Henry VI, III. ii.) ; and there is 
 a certain grim humor in a very modern interpretation of Somerset's 
 remedial suggestion: 
 
 Rear up his body; wring him by the nose. 
 
56 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE'S 
 
 Such is the man who is placed in contrast with Margaret of 
 Anjou; and just as Shakespeare tampered with his sources in 
 etching the Queen, so did he Hkewise in portraying the King. 
 In these words he makes Margaret describe her lord and master: 
 
 But all his mind is bent to holiness, 
 
 To number Ave-Maries on his beads; 
 
 His champions are the prophets and apostles, 
 
 His weapons holy saws of sacred writ. 
 
 His study is his tilt-yard, and his loves 
 
 Are brazen images of canonized saints. 
 
 I would the college of the cardinals 
 
 Would choose him pope and carry him to Rome, 
 
 And set the triple crown upon his head : 
 
 That were a state fit for his holiness. 
 
 {II Henry VI, I. iii.) 
 
 Kindlier far is Holinshed (III. 691.): "He was plain, upright, far 
 from fraud, wholly given to prayer, reading of scriptures, and 
 alms-deeds." And Hall (303) suppHes several softening details 
 missing from Shakespeare's lines both in letter and in spirit: 
 "King Henry was of stature goodly, of body slender, to which 
 proportion all other members were correspondent; his face beauti- 
 tiful, in the which continually was resident the bounty of mind 
 with which he was inwardly endowed. He did abhor of his own 
 nature all the vices, as well of the body as of the soul; and, from his 
 very infancy, he was of honest conversation and pure integrity; 
 no knower of evil, and a keeper of all goodness; a despiser of all 
 things which were wont to cause the minds of mortal men to slide 
 or appair. Besides this, patience was so radicate in his heart 
 that of all the injuries to him committed (which were no small 
 number) he never asked vengeance nor punishment, but for that 
 rendered to Almighty God, his Creator, hearty thanks, thinking 
 that by this trouble and adversity his sins were to him forgotten 
 and forgiven." 
 
 This is not the Henry of Shakespeare, but the Henry of whom 
 Sharon Turner has said: "No sovereign seems to have possessed 
 purer feehngs, or more upright intentions than the meek and 
 gentle Henry."" But it is a Henry who, under the circumstances 
 set forth in the plays and in view of the characters swirling about 
 the throne, would be immeasurably less dramatic than the feeble 
 
 ^'Quoted in French's Shakeapearana Genealogica, p. 178. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 57 
 
 warrior who after the battle of St. Alban's "slily stole away and 
 left his men" (/// Henry VI, I. i.), and whose watery character 
 gives bitter irony to the words of the leering Gloucester who has 
 just driven his blade into Henry's heart: 
 
 What, will the aspiring blood of Lancaster 
 Sink in the ground? I thought it would have mounted. 
 
 {Ill Henry VI, V. vi.) 
 
 Before leaving the three plays of King Henry VI we must 
 briefly call attention to a few of the numerous minor contrasts 
 scattered through the scenes, most of them with no historical 
 warrant. For example, there is the Mayor of London's whimsical 
 comment on the Winchester-Gloucester Feud: 
 
 Good God, these nobles should such stomachs bear! 
 I myself fight not once in forty year. 
 
 (Z Henry VI, I. iii.) 
 
 Likewise it is in the spirit of contrast that Hume's soliloquy is 
 devised (77 Henry VI y I. ii.). He has been playing a part with 
 the Duchess of Gloucester; now he removes the mask and shows 
 his shrewd, scornful countenance. Again, in the "miracle" scene 
 (77 Henry VI, II. i.) Shakespeare brings out the absurd contrast 
 more clearly by having the fakir feign not only blindness but 
 lameness. Sir Thomas More tells the story in a Dialogue that was 
 accessible to Shakespeare, but has no reference to the assumed 
 lameness of the imposter. So too, in the second and third scenes 
 in the fifth act of 77 Henry VI, there is no historical matter except 
 the bare fact that Somerset and the elder CHfford are killed. 
 Shakespeare has Clifford fall by the hand of the Duke of York, 
 thus preparing for the retribution to be wreaked by yoimg Clifford 
 on York and the young Duke of Rutland. 
 
 Contrast was likewise the principle upon which the dramatist 
 shaped his material in constructing the Jack scenes (77 Henry VI, 
 IV.). This accounts for the humorous effect of the episode 
 (scene ii.) where the inflated Cade sings his glories and Dick 
 Butcher and Smith the weaver act as an ironic chorus: 
 
 Cade. My father was a Mortimer, — 
 
 Dick, (aside). He was an honest man and a good bricklayer. 
 
 Cade. My mother a Plantagenet, — 
 
 Dick (aside). I knew her well; she was a midwife. 
 
 Cade. My wife descended of the Lacies, — 
 
58 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 Dick (aside). She was, indeed, a pedler*s daughter, and sold 
 many laces. 
 
 Smith (aside). But now of late, not able to travel with her 
 furred pack, she washes bucks here at home. 
 
 Cade. Therefore am I of an honourable house. 
 
 Dick (aside). Ay, by my faith, the field is honourable; and 
 there was he born, under a hedge, for his father had never a house 
 but the cage. 
 
 In general, the Cade band in Holinshed is not composed of the 
 "crazy Cahbans" depicted by Shakespeare. 
 
KING RICHARD II 
 
 Time and again it has been asserted that King Richard II is 
 not an acting play, which means not a play at all. Thus, Dr. 
 Johnson complains that "it is not finished at least with the happy 
 force of some of his other tragedies, nor can be said much to affect 
 the passions or enlarge the understanding" — in the face of which 
 dogmatic condemnation we must perforce stand silent if uncon- 
 vinced. And Coleridge, sadly wagging his head, admits that 
 *'this tragedy is ill suited to our present large theatres. But, "he 
 hastens to add, "in itself, and for the closet, I feel no hesitation 
 in placing it as the first and most admirable of all Shakespeare';^ 
 purely historical plays." In our own day Professor Matthews 
 accepts the undramatic quality of King Richard II as a matter of 
 course. It "lacks action, it is barren in striking situations; 
 events merely happen and are not brought about by deliberate 
 intent. The movement is sluggish, and it is epic or eligiac rather 
 than dramatic. ... In other words, the play as a play is 
 weakened by a dearth of dramatic motive, of that assertion of the 
 human will which is ever the most potent force in the theatre. 
 . . . The central figure of this tragic history is fundamentally 
 undramatic."^* 
 
 Are not these and similar strictures based upon too narrow 
 a conception of what constitutes the dramatic ? If we insist upon 
 action — action with a beginning, a middle and an end — as essential 
 to the drama, then certainly the play of King Richard II is not 
 dramatic. And the conviction that the play is not dramatic and 
 the leading character is not dramatic will readily lead us to believe 
 that here we have a piece of artistic work not suited for presenta- 
 tion on a stage before an audience. In proof of his assertion that 
 the play is unactable. Professor Matthews quotes the actor, 
 Macready. But is an actor, even a Macready, the best judge of 
 the dramatic character of a play ? And is it not possible that with 
 the elimination of the large theatres of Coleridge's time and the 
 ranting style of acting of Macready's time, the play of King 
 Richard II, competently and sympathetically staged, might grip 
 
 1* Shakespeare as a Playvyright, pp. 92-94. 
 
 5» 
 
60 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 an audience far more than at all times it has gripped the reader? 
 Certainly readers who visualize as they read, who read always 
 with an eye to theatrical effect and dramatic force and stage 
 conditions and the existence of an imaginary audience, sense in 
 this play strong acting possibilities. Let us fling aside, for the 
 moment at least, traditional opinions concerning the drama in 
 general and this drama in particular and investigate King Richard 
 II from the point of view of dramatic contrast. 
 
 What has the theory of contrast to tell us in regard to the 
 dramatic or undramatic character of the pensive King in Shake- 
 speare's play ? For one thing, the theory of contrast will prevent 
 us from saying that any character is in himself dramatic or un- 
 dramatic. Hamlet is not dramatic in himself; lago is not dramatic 
 in himself; Lear is not dramatic in himself. All three are dramatic, 
 not because their personalities are shown to be such and so, but 
 because they are contrasted with other personalities. Hence we 
 miss the point when we take it for granted that Richard II, 
 because he is passive, or because he is inconsistent, or because he 
 is weak, is an undramatic figure. Such was the case with Henry 
 VI, and such, in a somewhat different way, is the case with 
 Richard II. 
 
 In painting the character of Richard, both in the self-revealing 
 speeches he puts into the mouth of the King and the sayings he 
 attributes to the other characters, Shakespeare flew quite free of 
 his sources — mainly Hohnshed — and conceived a Richard II far 
 more likable and far more sinned against than the Richard of the 
 chronicler. The play gives us no hint that Richard was "prodigal, 
 ambitious, and much given to the pleasure of the body," that 
 furthermore "there reigned abundantly the filthy sin of lechery 
 and fornication, with abominable adultery, especially in the 
 King" (Holinshed III. 507-8). There is no doubt that Richard 
 is the hero of the drama and that as such he has the sympathy of 
 the audience. In this respect Shakespeare achieved a greater 
 success than in the preceding historical plays, in none of which is 
 Henry VI the hero. And the sympathy of the audience is a 
 growing sympathy; there is little of it in the first act where the 
 King is colorless, and little of it in the interview with the old 
 Gaunt (11. i.); but here the young, active King, thrown into 
 contrast with the old, dying subject, wins our understanding, 
 though not our approval, and we fear for his future. This scene. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 61 
 
 SO rich in contrasts, is another of Shakespeare's invention. It 
 has no foundation in Holinshed who simply records the fact of 
 Gaunt's death (III. 496.). Following Holinshed but in the 
 barest outline, Shakespeare makes of the third scene of the third 
 act a brilliant and impressive exposition of contrasts — ^not merely 
 between Richard and his external foes but between Richard and 
 his internal self. He, formerly so peremptory, so proud, so 
 despotic, faces the prospect of his deposition with almost slavish 
 submission, and the dreamer in him idly paints an impossible 
 future : 
 
 I'll give my jewels for a set of beads. 
 My gorgeous palace for a hermitage, 
 My gay apparel for an almsman's gown, 
 My figured goblets for a dish of wood. 
 My sceptre for a palmer's walking-staff, 
 My subjects for a pair of carved saints. 
 And my large kingdom for a little grave. 
 
 All this and much more of the same tenor while his active enemies 
 have driven him to the wall and are waiting impatiently to despoil 
 him of his regal estate. 
 
 In order to sustain Richard as a dramatic figure, the dramatist/ 
 places him in contrast with two characters widely different in 
 themselves and in the reactions they produce in the King — the 
 Queen and Bolingbroke. In the case of the Queen we have on 
 the part of Shakespeare a deliberate deviation from his sources, a 
 deviation that only the theory of contrast can render significant. 
 The historical facts concerning Richard's wife are briefly as 
 follows : 
 
 Anne of Bohemia, Richard's first wife, died in 1394, after twelve 
 years of married life. Two years later Richard married the Lady 
 Isabel of France — the Queen of the drama — ^who was of very 
 tender years. Most authorities maintain that she was only 
 twelve years of age at the time of her husband's deposition in 
 1399 ; at any rate, she could not have been much beyond that age 
 when she became the child-wife of the English monarch. 
 Naturally, the scenes in which she figures in King Richard II 
 have no historical warrant, especially the first scene of Act V 
 wherein Richard bids her adieu. He never saw her again after 
 leaving on his Irish expedition which is over and done with earlier 
 in the play. 
 
€2 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE S 
 
 No child-wife is the gentle, loving, and sweetly sagacious Queen 
 of the drama. Whether she laments the absence of her royal 
 husband and senses impending disasters (II. ii), or whether she 
 listens to the conversation of the gardeners and finally breaks upon 
 them in the throes of that noble indignation that makes the woman 
 forget she is a queen, she is ever in striking contrast with Richard. 
 The garden scene (III. iv.) is conceived in a fine spirit of contrast 
 with the scenes of war and intrigue which precede and follow it. 
 And a genuine dramatic charm inheres in the dialogue between the 
 sorrowing Queen and her attendant (lines 1-23). 
 
 Contrasting in another way with the King is his rival and 
 supplanter, Bolingbroke. And it is in his exposition of this 
 contrast that Shakespeare has done his least effective work in the 
 play. He adhered more closely than was his wont to the concep- 
 tion of Bolingbroke given by the chroniclers, with the result 
 that Bolingbroke secures the crown not so much because he is 
 strong as because Richard is weak. The King and his successor 
 are like blades that clash but strike out no sparks. Bolingbroke 
 does not stand out in bold relief as a champion, even of an unjust 
 cause; he has rather the appearance of an individual in a crowd 
 who is thrust forward and by force of circumstances assumes a 
 role of prominence. In short, the relations of Richard and 
 Bolingbroke are less dramatic than they might have been had the 
 dramatist made of the future Henry IV a more commanding, 
 decisive, aggressive figure, thereby putting him in gripping contrast 
 with the pliant, inconsistent, and passive Richard. 
 
 An inkling of what Shakespeare might have done with BoHng- 
 broke were he so disposed is given us in the fourth scene of Act 
 I where mention is made of Bolingbroke's "courtship of the common 
 people." Here is a suggestion of the wily politician and diplomat 
 who makes to him friends on all sides by his kindness, his affability, 
 his paternal solicitude, and who fights against the man he aims to 
 overthrow with the powerful weapon of slantwise suggestion. Had 
 this trait been developed, it would have been in impressive contrast 
 with the inconsiderateness and lack of tact displayed by Richard 
 prior to his reverses of fortune. 
 
 Bolingbroke's "courtship of the common people" is not men- 
 tioned in Holinshed, but note is made of the interest the common 
 people took in the Duke's personality and how they testified their 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 63 
 
 devotion to him on the occasion of his departure from England as 
 a result of his dispute with Mowbray: 
 
 "A wonder it was to see what number of people ran after him 
 in every town and street where he came, before he took the sea; 
 lamenting and bewailing his departure, as who would say that 
 when he departed the only shield, defense, and comfort of the 
 commonwealth was faded and gone.'* (III. 494.) 
 
 The most successful presentation of the contrast between Richard 
 and Bolingbroke we find in the deservedly famous passage wherein 
 the Duke of York describes to his wife the entrance of the rivals 
 into London, 
 
 Where rude misgoverned hands from windows' tops 
 Throw dust and rubbish on King Richard's head. 
 
 Thus the Duke proceeds : 
 
 Then, as I said, the duke, great Bolingbroke, 
 Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed. 
 Which his aspiring rider seem'd to know. 
 With slow but stately pace kept on his course. 
 Whilst all tongues cried "God save thee, Bolingbroke!" 
 You would have thought the very windows spake, 
 So many greedy looks of young and old 
 Through casementt darted their desiring eyes 
 Upon his visage, and that all the walls 
 With painted imagery had said at once 
 "Jesu preserve thee! welcome, Bolingbroke!" 
 Whilst he, from the one side to the other turning. 
 Bareheaded, lower than his proud steed's neck, 
 Bespake them thus: *T thank you, countrymen": 
 And thus still doing, thus he passed along. 
 
 As in a theatre the eyes of men, 
 
 After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, 
 
 Are idly bent on him that enters next, 
 
 Thinking his prattle to be tedious; 
 
 Even so, or with much more contempt, men's eyes 
 
 Did scowl on gentle Richard; no man cried "God save him!" 
 
 No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home : 
 
 But dust was thrown upon his sacred head; 
 
 Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off, 
 
 His face still combating with tears and smiles. 
 
 The badges of his grief and patience. 
 
 That had not God, for some strong purpose, steel'd 
 
 The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted, 
 
 And barbarism itself have pitied him. 
 
 (V. ii.) 
 
64 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE S 
 
 Let US now turn to a consideration of a scene which is not 
 only the most dramatic in this play but which ranks very high 
 indeed among the dramatic scenes in the whole of Shakespeare — 
 the abdication scene. Its theatrical possibilities are so vast and 
 its appeal to the audience so tense and searching that we have 
 diflficulty in understanding how, in view of the existence of that 
 one scene, the myth that King Richard II is not an acting play 
 still finds credence. 
 
 In this truly remarkable fourth act we are introduced to the 
 somber and lofty hall of Westminster, where are gathered the 
 princes and prelates of the realm, their many-hued fourteenth 
 century costumes in contrast with the place and with the occasion, 
 for they have come to witness the abdication — or deposition — of 
 a king. Not only the hush of expectancy but likewise the stir of 
 conflict is in the air. Hardly have the proceedings begun when 
 eyes flash fire and gages are exchanged. Then, like the beating 
 of unseen wings, comes mention of the dead; and all heads are 
 bowed as a churchman tells of how the Duke of Norfolk, having 
 fought 
 
 For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field, 
 Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross 
 Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens 
 
 at Venice gave 
 His body to that pleasant country's earth. 
 And his pure soul unto his captain Christ, 
 Under whose colours he had fought so long. 
 
 Comes mention next of "plume-pluck'd Richard;" and BoHng- 
 broke stands forth and cries : 
 
 In God's name I'll ascend the regal throne. 
 
 But in God's name he is forbidden. The Bishop of Carlyle 
 boldly flings defiance in the teeth of the usurper and his supporters, 
 and threatens the vengeance of heaven upon those who raise 
 their hands against the anointed king. 
 
 Then King Richard enters, and throughout the scene his pensive 
 thoughts uttered aloud prick sharply into the consciences of his 
 persecutors. He is a marvelously dramatic figure to the end. 
 "God save the king!" he prays; then adds, "Will no man say 
 Amen?" He takes the golden band of royalty and extends it to 
 the aspiring Bolingbroke. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 65 
 
 Here cousin; 
 
 On this side my hand, and on that side yours. 
 
 Now is this golden crown Hke a deep well 
 
 That owes two buckets, filling one another. 
 
 The emptier ever dancing in the air, 
 
 The other down, unseen and full of water: 
 
 That bucket down and full of tears am I, 
 
 Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high. 
 
 I give this heavy weight from off my head 
 And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand. 
 The pride of kingly sway from out my heart; 
 With mine own tears I wash away my balm, 
 With mine own hands I give away my crown. 
 With mine own tongue deny my sacred state. 
 With mine own breath release all duty's rites. 
 
 But the contrasts of character in the unhappy King come once 
 more to the surface; all is not sad-eyed submission. He calls his 
 enemies traitors; and when Northumberland seeks to interrupt 
 him with, **My Lord," the King answers in anger: 
 
 No lord of thine, thou haught, insulting man. 
 Nor no man's lord; 
 
 And straightway he is once more the melancholy dreamer of 
 dreams of fallen greatness. He calls for a mirror wherein to look 
 upon the Richard that is, to contrast him with the Richard that 
 was; then he dashes the glass to the ground where it lies, 
 
 crack'd in a hundred shivers. 
 Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport. 
 How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. 
 
 At the end Richard begs a boon of his successor. 
 
 Bolinghroke. Yet ask. 
 
 Ki7ig Richard. And I shall have? 
 Boling. You shall. 
 
 K. Rich. Then give me leave to go. 
 Boling. Whither.^ 
 
 K. Rich. Whither you will, so I were from your sights. 
 Boling. Go, some of you convey him to the Tower. 
 
 K.Rich. O, good! Convey.? Conveyers are you all. 
 That rise thus nimbly by a true king's fall. 
 
 Truly, as an exit speech and as a "curtain" episode, this is not 
 badly conceived! And, truly, he who reads that abdication scene 
 
66 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE 's 
 
 with mind active and imagination alert must perforce concede 
 that he has reached an appreciation of one of the supreme scenes 
 in the EngKsh drama. And if he is curious enough to go over the 
 scene in an analytic mood and probe for the causes of its dramatic 
 effectiveness, he will find that it is wrought of contrast upon 
 contrast. 
 
 In the composition of the abdication scene, to what extent has 
 Shakespeare departed from his sources? In the first place, the 
 abdication of Richard took place privately in the Tower, not 
 publicly in the hall at Westminster. Then, too, the hteral 
 surrender of the crown by Richard into the hands of Bolingbroke 
 has no mention in Holinshed. The merest outhne of the event is 
 given in Froissart which, if Shakespeare used it, he amplified 
 wondrously and made of it the most impressive and typical episode 
 in the entire scene. In both these instances it is evident that the 
 deviation from historic fact was made in the interests of dramatic 
 contrast. 
 
 And so, too, with certain minor episodes. The dispute of 
 Aumerle with the lords is sharpened and vivified from Holinshed's 
 prosaic recital. In Holinshed the account (III. 505) of Boling- 
 broke's assuming the kingship is detailed and reflects creditably 
 on him. We are told that Bolingbroke, "rising from the place 
 where before he sat, and standing where all those in the house 
 might behold him, in reverent manner made the sign of the cross 
 on his forehead and likewise on his breast," modestly made open 
 his claims to the crown; after which "he returned and sat him 
 down in the place where before he had sitten." In stronger 
 contrast with Richard is Shakespeare's BoHngbroke who briefly 
 says: 
 
 In God's name 111 ascend the regal throne. 
 
 In Holinshed he does not ascend the regal throne unaided. The 
 Archbishop of Canterbury "going to the duke, and kneehng down 
 before him on his knee addressed to him aU his purpose in few 
 words. The which when he had ended, he rose, and, taking the 
 duke by the right hand, led him into the king's seat (the Arch- 
 bishop of York assisting him), and with great reverence set him 
 therein, after that the duke had first upon his knees made his 
 prayer in devout manner unto Almighty God." 
 
 Before leaving the play of King Richard II, it will not be amiss 
 to call attention to the Aumerle conspiracy as therein set forth. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 67 
 
 an episode undeniably dramatic and eminently susceptible of 
 interpretation from the point of view of dramatic contrast. The 
 facts themselves were dramatic facts, and Holinshed in his account 
 caught something of the spirit of them, and gave Shakespeare 
 material already worthy of dramatic presentation. And Shake- 
 speare followed Holinshed closely, visualizing and detailing when- 
 ever necessary and making only one addition to the characters, 
 that of the Duchess of York. That that is a notable addition 
 can be perceived by fancying what the conspiracy scenes (V. ii., 
 iii.) would be without the contrasts afforded by the mother who 
 pleads for her guilty son to her husband and to her king. It is an 
 addition that supplements the contrast of Prince Hal and Aumerle 
 with the contrast of the Duke pleading for justice and the Duchess 
 pleading for mercy. In inventing the Duchess of York, Shake- 
 speare had to do violence to the facts of history. Aumerle*s 
 mother was dead years before the events commemorated in the 
 play, the Duchess of Shakespeare being only his step-mother. 
 The Duke of Aumerle was in reality a despicable character, who 
 was implicated in the murder of his uncle, Gloucester, who shifted 
 repeatedly in his allegiance to Richard, and who was informed by 
 the latter that he was unworthy of nobility." 
 
 " French, Shaks, Gen., p. 28. 
 
VI. 
 KING RICHARD III 
 
 A distinction is advisedly drawn between the theatrical and 
 the dramatic. Both are based on the fundamental principle of 
 contrast manifesting itself in volitional conflict or incongruity or 
 emotional stress or variety of viewpoint or some other form of 
 presentation in which the underlying antithesis in character or 
 plot is developed and explained; and both carry conviction to the 
 audience. But after that they break away from each other; for 
 while the dramatic continues to impress a member of the audience 
 as true and natural and inevitable when, to recall Wordsworth's 
 fine phrase, it is recollected in tranquility, the theatrical on sub- 
 sequent analysis proves to be unreal and strained and forced — 
 thrilling rather than emotional, laugh-provoking rather than 
 humorous, clever rather than great. The scene in King Lear 
 in which Lear curses his daughter, Goneril, is dramatic; the scene 
 in Richelieu in which the Cardinal invokes the curse of Rome is 
 theatrical. The scene in Twelfth Night in which Malvolio appears 
 before Olivia wearing cross-garters and yellow stockings is dram- 
 atic; the scene in Are You a Mason? in which the supposed grand 
 master reluctantly discovers his long lost daughter is theatrical. 
 Similarly, Hamlet and Falstaff, as presented in the setting and 
 with the characters selected for them by Shakespeare, are dramatic 
 characters, while Claude Melnotte in The Lady of Lyons and the 
 chocolate soldier in Arms and the Man are theatrical characters. 
 What is dramatic is coin that rings true; what is theatrical is 
 stage money. 
 
 It can be readily seen from this brief exposition that a scene or a 
 character conceived in the true dramatic spirit may promptly 
 degenerate into theatricalism; in other words, the dramatic often 
 tends to fall into the melodramatic. Should the dramatist, in 
 his endeavor to illustrate and set forth the underlying contrast, 
 give it undue accentuation or carry it beyond the bounds of 
 probability as those bounds are determined in actual life, he 
 constructs a scene or portrays a character that will possibly be 
 impressive and successful on the stage and for the moment but 
 which will be recognized ultimately as untrue to life. Thus the 
 adapters of Robert Louis Stevenson's story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
 
 68 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 09 
 
 Hyde, took an eminently artistic novel and made of it a notoriously 
 inartistic play; they were wise in recognizing in the obvious contrast 
 of the two personalities suitable material for stage presentation, 
 but they were unwise in manipulating that material in such a way 
 as to make of it, not an impressive dramatic work, but a piece of 
 cheap and tawdry theatrical claptrap. 
 
 Unquestionably the most melodramatic play that Shakespeare 
 wrote and the most theatrical character that Shakespeare created 
 are King Richard III and its ranting protagonist. Having limned 
 a theatrically ideal villainess in La Pucelle, he now seeks to present 
 a theatrically ideal villain; and he succeeds. He gives his Richard 
 the center of the stage; he makes him tell the audience, repeatedly 
 and unequivocally, that he is a bold, bad man; he gives him a most 
 uncanny and inexplicable power over women; he makes him phys- 
 ically hideous; he robs him of every tender human feeling; he 
 sends him horrible dreams. We need no knowledge of history to 
 assure ourselves that the Richard of Shakespeare is the caricature of 
 an English king, for we clearly discern that he is the caricature of 
 a human being. 
 
 When Shakespeare set himself the task of creating the Duke 
 of Gloucester and building around him the play of King Richard 
 III, Horace Walpole had not written his Historic Doubts and more 
 recent writers like Sir Clements Markham had not continued the 
 difficult task of whitewashing the man whom Sir Thomas More had 
 blackened, rightly or wrongly, for all time; but he found in Holin- 
 shed a curtailed version of More ready to hand, and doubtless in 
 legends and traditions coming to him by word of mouth he dis- 
 covered a singular unanimity of opinion as regards Richard's 
 moral obliquity. He had but to select his material and shape it 
 according to desire. 
 
 It is interesting to conjecture what manner of play he would 
 have made out of the material had he approached the task some 
 ten years later — let us say about the time that he was writing 
 Othello. Richard would still be a villain, but it is safe to say that 
 he would not be ideal in his villainy. The influence of Marlowe 
 and Tamhurlaine would have had waned, the hand of the dramatic 
 craftsman would be surer in its touch, into Shakespeare's unform- 
 ulated principles of composition would have come the saving grace 
 and suggestive potency of artistic reserve. His perception of 
 underlying contrasts would be as keen, but his presentation of them 
 
70 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 would be more finely shaded, his coordination of them more 
 skilled. The result would be less theatrical and more dramatic. 
 
 But Shakespeare, fresh from his apprentice work with the 
 tragedy of blood and still under the spell of the titanic genius of 
 Marlowe, wrought his material into a fabric which, slight in its 
 artistic value and shallow and distorted in its truth to life, lives 
 even today because of its compelling theatricalism. The play is 
 especially worth while as a contribution to the theory of dramatic 
 contrast; in it we have not contrast merely, but contrast in the 
 raw. 
 
 One reason why this play, despite its inherent weaknesses — to 
 say nothing of the added ills foisted upon it in the stage version 
 perpetrated by CoUey Gibber — still holds the stage, is because 
 prominent actors favor it; and prominent actors favor it because 
 it is a one-man play. The author may have erred when he named 
 Julius Caesar; he sinned not against the fitness of things when he 
 named Richard III. Gloucester is the dominant, the eye-arrest- 
 ing, the ear-compelling, the all-absorbing figure. The other 
 characters are but so many foils who set him off by contrast. 
 The plot — would Brunetiere call it a conflict of wills? — is the 
 projection of Richard's personality. The play is, indeed, the 
 thing; but Richard is the play. 
 
 To make and to keep Gloucester blackly, unrelievedly, and 
 consistently wicked, to hold him unintermittently before the 
 attention of the audience, to intensify his wickedness by making 
 him so deep a villain that the other characters, if they are good, 
 shine by contrast, and, if they are evil, must in his presence pale 
 their ineffectual fires — such was the direct dramatic purpose of 
 Shakespeare in King Richard III, and such was the view toward 
 which he manipulated his material. There was no finesse, no 
 complexity, no tangled skein of motives in his deviation from 
 HoHnshed; he was intent simply on contrast — any contrast and 
 all contrasts that would at all serve to make and keep the protagon- 
 ist an ideal villain. 
 
 And so we have, quite early in the play, a characteristic instance 
 of Shakespeare's compression of time. In point of fact the funeral 
 of King Henry VI was held in 1471; the arrest of Clarence took 
 place six years later. It is to the interest of Shakespeare to syn- 
 chronize the events, and he does so. The dramatic effect of his 
 procedm-e is the impression that flows out to the audience of 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 71 
 
 Gloucester's double-dyed duplicity and callousness in crime. 
 After witnessing those two scenes, we are already convinced that 
 Gloucester is a very villain and also a resourceful and dangerous 
 villain. His brother Clarence, by Gloucester's contrivance, is 
 being conducted to the Tower; here is one of Gloucester's pros- 
 pective victims. The remains of Henry VI, slain by Gloucester's 
 hand, are being borne to the tomb; here is one of Gloucester's 
 actual victims. Thus far the scene is dramatic as distinguished 
 from theatrical; but straightway Gloucester stops the funeral 
 procession, crosses wits with the mourning Lady Anne, woos and 
 wins the daughter-in-law of the king he had murdered, and 
 concludes by soliloquizing for the express benefit of the audience: 
 
 Was ever woman in this humour woo'd? 
 Was ever woman in this humour won ? 
 I'll have her; but I will not keep her long. 
 What! I, that killed her husband and his father. 
 To take her in her heart's extremest hate. 
 With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes. 
 The bleeding witness of her hatred by. 
 
 This is not human passion; it is rather akin to the amours and 
 assassinations of the late Mr. Punch. The contrasts are obvious 
 and gripping; and to make then doubly so Shakespeare has his 
 protagonist explicitly call attention to them in a lengthy soliloquy. 
 That soliloquy, of course, Shakespeare did not find in Holinshed; 
 and neither did he find there or elsewhere the contrast-teeming 
 dialogue in which Richard proposes marriage and is tacitly ac- 
 cepted. Seemingly, indeed, Shakespeare cannot give us too much 
 of this sort of thing. Later on (IV. iv.) he must needs halt Richard 
 on the way to the war and have him conduct a proxy wooing, 
 and successfully. The fact he found in Holinshed; the details — 
 more contrasts similar to those found in the courtship of the Lady 
 Anne — are Shakespeare's own, as is Richard's brief but pointed 
 soliloquy : 
 
 Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman! 
 
 On the other hand, Shakespeare was prompt to utilize every 
 hint afforded by Holinshed regarding Gloucester's assumed devo- 
 tional spirit and his palpably artificial reluctance to accept the 
 crown. HoHnshed (III. 727-731) follows More, and Shakespeare 
 (III. vii.) follows Holinshed, omitting numerous trivial incidents 
 connected with Buckingham's speech but focusing attention on 
 
72 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 the dissembling scoundrel who, having waded riotously in the 
 blood of his kindred, now smirks hypocritically as he finds footing 
 on the steps of the throne. The prayer book and the bishops are 
 eflPective stage properties and Shakespeare would by no means 
 leave them out. 
 
 More and Holinshed made Richard an unmistakably evil 
 character. Shakespeare took their portrait, intensified the blacks 
 and blackened the neutrals, and wrote in large characters beneath 
 the effigy, "This is a villain!'* His sources expressed at least some 
 doubt regarding Richard's responsibility for the murders of Clar- 
 ence, the Lady Anne, and the two princes; Shakespeare paints 
 out the doubts with a few vigorous strokes of his brush. His 
 sources indulged in occasional conjectures concerning the details 
 of Richard's villainy; Shakespeare renders that villainy unmistak- 
 able and self-confessed. Holinshed has Richard say; *T have with 
 strict penance and salt tears expiated and clearly purged my 
 offenses;" but Shakespeare has Richard say: "Conscience is but a 
 word that cowards use." And, on the eve of Richard's day of 
 retribution, that the audience might be once again reminded of 
 the King's murderous career, Shakespeare contrives a procession 
 of ghostly victims who ban Richard and bless his rival, Richmond. 
 
 A hint, and a hint only, of the visit of the victims, Shakespeare 
 got from Holinshed. We read in the chronicle (III. 755.) : "The 
 fame went, that he had the same night a dreadful and terrible 
 dream; for it seemed to him, being asleep, that he did see divers 
 images like terrible devils, which pulled and haled him, not 
 suffering him to take any quiet or rest. The which strange vision 
 not so suddenly struck his heart with a sudden fear, but it stuffed 
 his head and troubled his mind with many busy and dreadful 
 imaginations." 
 
 Note how Shakespeare, accepting the hint, makes of it one of 
 the most effective contrasts in the play. Instead of the "divers 
 images like terrible devils," he introduces the ghosts of Prince 
 Edward, King Henry VI, Clarence, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, 
 Hasting, the two princes. Lady Anne, and Buckingham. The 
 contrast is furthered by the simple device — of which no hint is 
 given in Holinshed — of having each of the ghosts, after cursing 
 Richard, turn toward the tent of Richmond and bless his emprise. 
 
 The portrait of Richard is so malignly black that it might be 
 supposed to defeat its own purpose; a massing of shadows unrelieved 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 73 
 
 by lights hardly conveys the desired impression of blackness, 
 unless it be hung in the midst of pictures less sombre. And 
 therefore — ^though Richard is never out of our minds and rarely 
 out of the minds of the persons in the play — ^we find scenes of 
 considerable length in which he is not physically present but in 
 which his blackness is set off by comparison with other characters 
 in varying degrees less black than he. Thus, the scene in the Tower 
 (I. iv.) which describes the dream of Clarence, the conversation 
 of the murderers, and the killing of the Duke, finds its explanation 
 in the theory of contrast. The murderers are the conventional 
 stage murderers, so indispensable in the tragedy of blood, and util- 
 ized so effectively by Shakespeare in Macbeth — supposedly hard- 
 ened criminals, professional burkers who nonchalantly kill people 
 for a consideration; yet, in a few revealing strokes, Shakespeare 
 here institutes a contrast between the two assassins themselves 
 and another between them and Gloucester who has hired them. 
 The audience witnessing this scene gets the specific impression 
 that Clarence is bad, the second murderer worse, the first murderer 
 worse yet; but that Gloucester is bad in the superlative. The very 
 slender foundation for this scene of contrast within contrast is 
 found in HoHnshed's statement (III. 703.) that Clarence "was 
 cast into the Tower, and therewith adjudged for a traitor, and 
 privily drowned in a butt of malmesie, the eleventh of March, 
 in the beginning of the seventeenth year of the king's reign." 
 
 From other scenes in which Richard does not appear in person 
 we derive a similar impression of his sinister character and motives; 
 we do not see the spider, but we do see the tightening of his web 
 and the fruitless squirmings of the snared flies. Thus Stanley, 
 dreaming that "the boar had razed his helm," is by Hastings 
 ridiculed for his fears (III. ii.); and presently the tusks of the 
 boar have searched the scoffer's vitals. And then, in contrast 
 with the male victims of the King, we have the futile curses and 
 reproaches and lamentations of his women victims — Queen 
 Margaret and Queen Elizabeth; the Lady Anne, his doomed wife; 
 the Duchess of York, the sad-eyed mother who bore him. The 
 contrast (IV. iv.) between the mother of the murderer and the 
 mother of two of his victims, and the further contrast occasioned 
 by the increasing bruit of Richard's warlike approach are entirely 
 of Shakespeare's invention. 
 
74 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 A refreshing relief from the prevaiUng theatricahty of the play 
 is Shakespeare's presentation of the httle princes — ^the youth who 
 for so brief a time bore the title of King Edward V and his brother, 
 the Duke of York. The latter Shakespeare conceives as a pre- 
 cocious youngster, perhaps rather too pert to suit every taste, but 
 withal an amiable boy (II. ii.). And the young King, more 
 winsome even than his brother, enlists the deepest sympathy of 
 the audience as he rides so unsuspectingly to the Tower and his 
 doom (III. i.). Some of Shakespeare's happiest touches bring 
 out with dramatic, as distinguished from theatrical, clarity the 
 contrast between the guileless princes and their guilty uncle. 
 The sallies of wit engaged in by the Duke of York at Gloucester's 
 expense evoke tears rather than smiles, for we anticipate the 
 thoroughness of Richard's pending retaliation; and a deeply 
 dramatic significance attaches to Richard's comment on the 
 young King's juvenile philosophy : 
 
 So wise, so young, they say, do never live long. 
 
VII. 
 KING JOHN 
 
 For once, at least, in the course of this investigation, we may 
 dispense with Hohnshed. In his Life and Death of King John 
 Shakespeare gives no evidence — save in one or two immaterial 
 instances — of his having made direct use of the chronicle. His 
 materials were supplied by a play, the identity of whose author 
 remains conjectural, entitled The Troublesome Raigne of John, 
 King of England, which was first printed in 1591. This older 
 drama is — not two plays, as has been sometimes stated — ^but a 
 double-length play; and the most obvious task that Shakespeare 
 faced when he set about fashioning a new version of The Trouble- 
 some Raigne, was to condense the play by half. He had, neces- 
 sarily, to make a flection of material; and he did, in fact, modify 
 the material selected. Let us now examine his manipulation of 
 the older play in the light of the theory of dramatic contrast. 
 
 Selection implies rejection. Shakespeare, in his ehmination 
 of numerous episodes that found place in The Troublesome Raigne 
 cleared the way for an intelligent treatment of the episodes that 
 remained. The older play, which begins with John's seizure of 
 the English throne and ends with the acceptance of Prince Henry 
 as King and the making of peace with the Dauphin of France, he 
 wisely decapitated and curtailed. Episodes in the older play 
 which did not find their way into King John are : The capture of 
 Queen Elinor by the French and her subsequent rescue, briefly 
 recounted by Shakespeare (III. ii.); a scene in which Peter of 
 Pomfret figures conspicuously but needlessly and irrelevantly; the 
 temporary conversion of the barons, through the pleadings of 
 Faulconbridge, to their allegiance to John; a call for papal aid 
 sent by the King to Cardinal Pandulph, and Faulconbridge's 
 protest against John's subserviency to the Pope; the solemn oath 
 sworn by the barons, before the altar of Edmundsbury, to renounce 
 their allegiance to John. Of such episodes Shakespeare was 
 unquestionably well rid; in one way or another each of them would 
 have clogged and not clarified the audience's perception of the 
 major contrasts upon which the dramatic value of the play 
 depends. 
 
 75 
 
76 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE 's 
 
 Two scenes, both of which figure in the older play, Shakespeare 
 entirely ignored; and while his procedure must win the hearty 
 approval of all good monks as monks, from the point of view of 
 dramatic efficiency it is open to question. One of those scenes has 
 reference to the poisoning of King John, to which Shakespeare 
 causes Hubert to advert (V. vi.) : 
 
 The king, I fear, is poison'd by a monk. 
 
 There is no *T fear" in the older play. One of the monks, because 
 John contemned the Pope and never loved a friar, takes a solemn 
 oath to administer poison to the King. The other scene — 
 undeniably in bad taste, but undeniably good drama to an Eliza- 
 bethan audience, wherein are depicted, with horseplay comedy 
 effect, certain alleged irregularities in English monasteries — ^has 
 left not even a trace in Shakespeare's play. We know, indeed, 
 that Faulconbridge goes on an extorting tour among the monas- 
 teries, but we do not follow him in his travels or share in his 
 discoveries. 
 
 Shakespeare manifests a finer sense of proportion than the 
 unknown author of the older play, by giving less attention to 
 Queen Elinor and more attention to the Lady Constance. I 
 know that many critics do not consider the Lady Constance a 
 womanly woman, and that many actors — and actresses — ^regard 
 hers as an impossible r61e; but there can be no doubt as to the 
 dramatic value of the scenes in which she appears, whether they 
 be her scolding match with the English Queen or her reproaches 
 leveled at the inconstant King of France or her lamentations over 
 the capture of her son. Throughout she is in clearly defined 
 contrast with the two kings, with Elinor, with the Cardinal, with 
 all the world; much of her impressiveness is due to her splendid 
 isolation. Shakespeare might have minimized Constance in the 
 play and given more prominence to the English Queen; but his 
 dramatic intuition — this time sure — led him to select for special 
 attention not the woman who shared the throne of England, but 
 the woman who, absolutely alone, could crouch upon the cold 
 earth and cry : 
 
 Here I and sorrow sit; 
 
 Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it. 
 
 Less felicitous was Shakespeare's adoption of Faulconbridge, 
 a character who in The Troublesome Raigne is "a hardy wild head, 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 77 
 
 tough and venturous," who aspires to the hand of the Lady 
 Blanch of Spain, and who, when Austria decHnes to fight with 
 him because of their unequal rank, is instanter created Duke of 
 Normandy by King John. Here Shakespeare had a character as 
 isolated, though in a vastly different fashion, as the Lady Con- 
 stance, a character eminently fitted to play Talbot to John's 
 Henry VI, a character who could be easily employed to prevent 
 this play from being what it actually is, a drama without a hero. 
 Some such design was evidently in the author's mind while writing 
 the first act, for there Faulconbridge holds the center of the stage 
 while grave affairs of state are thrust aside by King, Queen, and 
 court that the audience may learn all the details of Faulconbridge's 
 edifying family history. But Shakespeare changed his mind, and 
 we have Faulconbridge not as hero but as chorus; though his wit 
 is nimble and his sword arm strong, he is employed mainly to 
 talk at the audience, to call their attention to the existence of the 
 contrasts which form the foundation and the texture of the play. 
 Shakespeare when he employs the soliloquy is at his best and at 
 his worst; in Othello and Hamlet the soliloquies are eminently 
 dramatic because they embody contrasts; in King Richard III 
 and King John they are eminently undramatic, because they 
 stand entirely outside the play and merely point to contrasts that 
 exist within the play. No hint of Faulconbridge's soliloquies 
 (I. i.; n. i.; IV. iii.) is found in the earlier drama. 
 
 Certain individual scenes which Shakespeare took bodily from 
 The Troublesome Raigne he nevertheless so reshaped and modified 
 that the process inevitably recalls the hackneyed but illustrative 
 brick-and-marble metaphor. Thus, what is in Shakespeare the 
 first scene of the third act was essentially contained in the old 
 play, but in a form stilted, lifeless, mechanical; the cogs of con- 
 trasts did not grip; there was no setting off of character against 
 character, motive against motive, mood against mood. How 
 different is all this in Shakespeare! He sets the two kings side by 
 side, he pairs off Austria and Faulconbridge, Elinor and Constance, 
 the Dauphin and his betrothed, from whose side he leaps at war's 
 alarms. He stages, too, that magnificent verbal duel between the 
 Cardinal and the King — an episode that not even the most be- 
 draggled barn-stormers can enact without eliciting from the 
 audience a responsive thrill, when the red robed figure representing 
 
78 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 the might of Rome launches, swift and unerring, the bolt of the 
 Church's ban. 
 
 Another scene wherein Shakespeare showed his mastery — this 
 time mastery evidenced by reserve and delicacy in etching an 
 obvious contrast that might easily have degenerated into rank 
 theatricalism — is given us in the King's incitement of Hubert to 
 murder Prince Arthur. The Hubert of history — the illustrious 
 de Burgh, a descendant of Charlemagne and the most serviceable 
 man in the kingdom during the days of John and Henry III — 
 Shakespeare probably did not know; at all events, his Hubert is 
 not a nobleman and seems devoid of courtly arts and graces. 
 This sinister, laconic, shaggy henchman is in contrast at all points 
 with the fawning, garrulous, and polished King, who deftly 
 suggest his wishes and promises liberal and vague rewards. 
 
 Again does Shakespeare show his mastery in the justly popular 
 scene between Hubert and the boy Arthur (IV. i.) . If Hubert has 
 been in contrast with King John, he is now in even keener con- 
 trast with this child whom — not warranted at all points either by 
 his source play or by history — Shakespeare makes young and gentle 
 and patient and thoroughly amiable. Numerous touches in the 
 scene accentuate the underlying contrast between the innocent, 
 helpless youth and the guilty, all sufficient man. Arthur has a 
 genuine affection for Hubert: 
 
 I would to heaven 
 I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert. 
 
 In sooth, I would you were a little sick, 
 
 That I might sit all night and watch with you. 
 
 Tensely dramatic in its impressive reserve is Arthur's reception of 
 the cruel news : 
 
 Arthur. Must you with hot irons burn out both mine eyes ? 
 
 Hubert. Young boy, I must. 
 
 Arthur. And will you? 
 
 Hubert. And I will. 
 After begging that the executioners be sent away, the anguished 
 boy, hearing a sympathetic comment made by one of them, sighs 
 for having chid away an unsuspected friend : 
 
 He hath a stern look, but a gentle heart. 
 And when the burning iron cools: 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 79 
 
 There is no malice in this burning coal; 
 
 The breath of heaven hath blown his spirit out 
 
 And strewed repentent ashes on his head. 
 
 The material employed by Shakespeare in the second scene of 
 the fourth act he made over from The Troublesome Raigne, shift- 
 ing and stressing in accordance with the principle of contrast. 
 He makes much, compared with his predecessor, of John's change 
 of heart concerning the slaying of Arthur, and devotes more 
 space to his reproaches to Hubert, thus placing the episode in 
 contrast, point for point, with the third scene of Act III; he sounds 
 in an impressive crescendo the rising bruit of civil strife in the 
 protests of the barons, the prophecies of Peter of Pomfret, the 
 reports brought in by Faulconbridge and Hubert, and the rumor 
 
 of a many thousand warlike French 
 That were embattailed and rank*d in Kent; 
 
 and he shows the King already the antithesis of the bluff monarch 
 who earlier in the play sent back Chatillon to be the trumpet of 
 his wrath and lightning in the eyes of France. 
 
 Shakespeare, then, unquestionably improved on his sources, 
 and unquestionably his deviations therefrom may be accounted 
 for on the principle of dramatic contrast; but the play of The Life 
 and Death of King John remains nevertheless a play of shreds and 
 patches — shoddy shreds and purple patches — a, play not well 
 articulated, extremely uneven in structure, and characterized by a 
 notable lack of central theme. As we have seen, several individual 
 characters are placed in an environment that renders them 
 indubitably dramatic and several individual scenes are arranged 
 with an alert eye to contrast; but the play, as a whole, lacks a 
 fundamental contrast that would supply the needful central 
 theme and introduce a salutary proportion. 
 
 The need of some such "big" idea is not my discovery. Most 
 of Shakespeare's critics and commentators have called attention 
 to the same deficiency; and one of them, no less a person than 
 CoUey Gibber, Esquire, attempted to supply the lack. In 1745, 
 during one of those periodic outbreaks of anti-CathoHc feeUng 
 that we have come to regard as characteristic of London, Gibber 
 brought out at Govent Garden a freely revised version of Shake- 
 speare's King John which had a successful run of ten nights. The 
 play was entitled Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John. 
 
80 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE* S 
 
 I should hesitate to say that the play — though Gibber modestly 
 claimed it to be superior to Shakespeare's — is a good play; but 
 the title is an excellent title. It conveys an idea of contrast — 
 which might or might not take the form of conflict — and suggests 
 that underlying anthithesis which Shakespeare's play needs, but 
 has not. In his dedication of the play to the Earl of Chesterfield, 
 Gibber tells why he was moved to the undertaking, and his words 
 are well worth quoting: 
 
 **In all the historical plays of Shakespear there is scarcely any 
 fact that might better have employed his genius than the flaming 
 contest between his insolent Holiness and King John. This is so 
 remarkable a passage in our histories, that it seems surprising 
 that our Shakespear should have taken no more fire at it; especially 
 when we find from how much less a spark of contention in his 
 first act of Harry the Fourth he has thrown his Hotspur into a 
 more naturally fomented rage than ever ancient or modern author 
 has come up to, and has maintained that character throughout 
 the play with the same inimitable spirit. How then shall we 
 account for his being so cold upon a so much higher provocation ? 
 Shall we suppose, that in those days, almost in the infancy of the 
 Reformation, when Shakespear wrote, when the influence of the 
 papal power had a stronger party left than we have reason to 
 believe is now subsisting among us; that this, I say, might make 
 him cautious of offending? Or shall we go so far for an excuse 
 as to conclude that Shakespear was himself a Gatholic? . . . 
 If then he was under no restraint from his religion, it will require 
 a nicer criticism than I am master of to excuse his being so cold 
 upon so warm an occasion." 
 
 Gibber here makes it plain that, though he was at a loss to 
 account for Shakespeare's failure to conceive and develop a 
 central theme, he recognized what is without doubt the organic 
 weakness of the play. And so, in his version. Gibber proceeded 
 to ''inspirit his King John with a resentment that justly might 
 become an English monarch, and to paint the intoxicated tyranny 
 of Rome in its proper colours." "Intoxicated tyranny," however 
 its absurdity might today provoke a smile, was taken seriously 
 enough by the Govent Garden audiences who gave the play, 
 says Gibber, their "honest, cordial applauses"; and there can be no 
 doubt that the implied contrast between Ghurch and State would 
 have furnished Shakespeare a basic idea susceptible, indeed, of 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 81 
 
 an interpretation other than that elected by Gibber, but in any 
 case an idea eminently dramatic. 
 
 To attempt to discover Shakespeare's reasons for not utilizing 
 some such idea is beyond the scope of this study" and besides, to 
 borrow Gibber's words, would "require a nicer criticism than I 
 am master of." It may have been Gatholic sympathies; or again 
 it may have been Protestant sympathies, for the dramatist who 
 would set forth the relations between King John and the Holy 
 See must, however reluctantly, admit that the English monarch 
 was worsted in the conflict which he himself had begun. It may 
 have been a lapse of insight, due perhaps to carelessness and haste 
 in composition and to too exclusive an absorption in the work of 
 condensing The Troublesome Raigne. At all events, the fact 
 remains that, in manipulating the older play, Shakespeare, by 
 means of contrast, rendered more dramatic individual scenes and 
 individual characters, and that, by neglecting to bring out a 
 pervading and fundamental contrast, he failed to impart a unified 
 dramatic quality to the play as a whole. 
 
 *• Some unique and, at times, diverting views on this subject are presented 
 by Wilkes in Shakespeare from an American Point of View. 
 
VIII. 
 THE FIRST PART OF KING HENRY IV 
 
 The two plays of King Henry IV and the play of King Henry V 
 might be appropriately styled the Prince Hal Trilogy, for Harry 
 of Monmouth, Prince of Wales and afterward King of England, 
 is their undisputed hero. The story they tell — a story made up 
 of many strands and sometimes, as in the second drama of the 
 trilogy, told haltingly enough — is the story of Prince Henry*s 
 life and fame and fortunes, of his relatives and companions and 
 servants and enemies and friends. Prince Hal does not dominate 
 the plays as compellingly and insistently as Gloucester dominates 
 King Richard III, nor does he achieve and maintain his place as 
 protagonist invested with the constantly growing pathos which 
 appears in the figure of King Richard II ; in the two plays of King 
 Henry JF he shares his prominence with Hotspur and Falstaff, 
 but the dramas are so contrived that both Hotspur and Falstaff 
 are closely bound up with the interests of the leading figure. 
 
 These three plays are further remarkable for embodying the 
 only notable instances in the English historical dramas where 
 Shakespeare from time to time bids the deep browed muse of 
 history wait in the wings while he summons the muse of comedy 
 to disport herself on the stage. The alternation of scenes grave 
 and gay, which so deeply offended Voltaire and other continental 
 critics, seems to be one of the heritages bequeathed to the English 
 drama from the religious plays of the Middle Ages, wherein a 
 laugh-provoking devil and a blustering Herod were wont to follow 
 hard upon the heels of saints and virtuous abstractions, and a 
 shepherd to engage in horseplay immediately before the angels 
 announce the glad tidings on the hillside at Bethlehem. In those 
 plays Shakespeare took a perceptible stride in his development 
 as a dramatist; while continuing to follow his sources with a fair 
 measure of closeness in the strictly historical scenes, he gave 
 himself more latitude in the introduction and elaboration of 
 humorous episodes. 
 
 For his historical scenes in I Henry IV Shakespeare continued 
 to draw freely upon Holinshed and derived a few unimportant 
 
 82 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 83 
 
 details from the chronicle of Stowe; for his comic scenes he is 
 himself almost entirely responsible. True, he undoubtedly found 
 some material for his Eastcheap and Gadshill episodes in an old 
 play entitled The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which was 
 acted as early as 1588 and which found its way into print in 1594; 
 but his indebtedness to this drama is by no means so great as was 
 his indebtedness to The Troublesome Raigne in King John. He 
 did not follow The Famous Victories in detail; most of it he wisely 
 ignored, and what he did take from it he thoroughly revised, 
 expanded, and transmuted. 
 
 The First Part of King Henry IV gives us a wealth of material 
 for a discussion of Shakespeare's manipulation of his scenes and 
 characters in the light of the theory of contrast — the theory, by 
 the way, that comes nearest to explaining the dramatic value of 
 alternating tragedy and comedy in the one play. The theory of 
 contrast, applied to / Henry IV, furnishes adequate reasons for 
 Shakespeare's selections and rejections from Holinshed and for 
 his very considerable expansion and remolding of the suggestions 
 he adopted from The Famous Victories. 
 
 In the person of the young Prince of Wales Shakespeare was 
 supplied, ready-to-hand, with a character who involved contrasts 
 within himself. It is pretty generally agreed upon by scholars 
 that the stories of the Prince's youthful follies — ^stories that held 
 their ground largely because of their inherent dramatic quality — 
 had but a slender basis in actuaUty; but this Shakespeare was 
 obviously not in a position to know. The chroniclers stressed 
 young Henry's wild oats era and so did the old play, and Shakes- 
 peare eagerly accepted a version that involved the striking con- 
 trast of a man who, leading a wild and tumultuous life as the son 
 of the King, forthwith becomes a model man and a brilliant ruler 
 when he ascends the throne. 
 
 Shakespeare accepted this version, but he did so with a dif- 
 ference. Throughout the play he takes pains to impress us with 
 the behef that Henry is in the slums but not of them, that he 
 associates with the scum and riffraff of London society and yet 
 keeps himself unspotted of the mad world in which he takes his 
 pleasure. Into the mouth of the Prince he puts a clear and 
 explicit declaration of motives (I. ii.) : 
 
84 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE* S 
 
 I know you all, and will a while uphold 
 The unyoked humour of your idleness: 
 Yet herein will I imitate the sun, 
 Who doth permit the base contagious clouds 
 To smother up his beauty from the world, 
 That when he pleases again to be himself, 
 Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at. 
 By breaking through the foul and ugly mists 
 Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. 
 
 My reformation, glittering o'er my fault. 
 Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes 
 Than that which hath no foil to set it off. 
 I'll so offend, to make offence a skill; 
 Redeeming time when men think least I will. 
 
 A conventional criticism of these lines is that in them Prince 
 Hal shows himself to be a good deal of a prig and a hypocrite, 
 that he has not the mettle to face his faults like a man but gives 
 himself specious reasons for doing the things he should not do. 
 That criticism rests upon a misconception of the function of the 
 soliloquy in which the lines appear. As has been suggested in 
 our study of King John, we find two distinct classes of soliloquies 
 in Shakespeare — those which reveal the character and motives of 
 the person thus thinking aloud and those which really constitute 
 a direct statement of things to the audience. Now, in the soliloquy 
 just quoted. Prince Hal seems to be revealing his own character 
 and motives, he seems to be thinking aloud; but the soliloquy is in 
 fact one of the other type, and the Prince is forced by his creator 
 to engage in the ungrateful task of acting as his own chorus. Shake- 
 speare, rather than the Prince, speaks to the audience; and he 
 tells them, plainly enough, to expect the unexpected, to be on the 
 lookout for contrasts in the career of this scion of royalty. The 
 device is crude and inartistic and as little dramatic here as it is 
 when employed in the soliloquies of Faulconbridge in King John; 
 but it does serve to call attention to the contrasts which, inhering 
 in the life of the future King Henry V, make him a dramatic 
 figure. 
 
 Note, too, that Shakespeare takes pains, in that soliloquy and 
 elsewhere, to tone down the contrasts in Prince Hal's life; he is 
 extremely careful to make of him an experimenter with vice, a 
 taster rather than a thirster for the cup of iniquity. Had he, 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 85 
 
 following his sources blindly, given us a Prince Hal who is a 
 thoroughly bad lot, who is a brawler, a drunkard, a lecher, and a 
 thief, and suddenly changed such a one into an ideal king, there 
 would assuredly be contrast, but contrast that overleaps the 
 bounds of probabihty. Theatrical often, but dramatic never, is 
 the sudden conversion of villains. Some such contrast in the raw 
 Shakespeare might have accepted in his apprentice days, the 
 days that brought forth Talbot and la Pucelle; but now he was 
 a*rer of himseK and had learned the value of artistic repression, 
 frhe numerous contrasts in / Henry IV are not the bUnding and 
 Unconvincing contrasts of black and white; the master has by 
 ..^s time learned somewhat the significance of shades and tones. 
 This is brought home to us by reflection on an omission that 
 Shakespeare made when writing the second scene of Act III, an 
 omission trivial enough in itself but suggestive as bearing on the 
 development of the dramatist and on his manipulation of his 
 sources. According to Holinshed (III. 539.), when the Prince 
 went to the coiu-t, "apparelled in a gown of blue satin, full of 
 small eyelet holes, at every hole the needle hanging by a silk 
 thread, with which it was sewed," he was accompanied "with 
 such a number of noblemen and other his friends that wished 
 him well, as the like train had seldom been seen repairing to the 
 court at any one time in those days." Going in alone to his 
 father, "then grievously diseased," he knelt down and pleaded 
 his affection and loyalty. He concluded by drawing his dagger 
 after the fashion of Cassius in the tent at Sardis — extending it to 
 the King and exclaiming: "I beseech you, most redoubted lord 
 and dear father, for the honour of God, to ease your heart of all 
 such suspicion as you have of me, to despatch me here before your 
 knees, with this same dagger." Verily, here was something to 
 feast the eyes and spht the ears of the groundlings; but Shakes- 
 peare left it out. He saw in it a contrast that would be dramatic 
 in Julius Caesar but theatrical here. Instead, he constructed a 
 scene stately in tempo and devoid of movement and yet which 
 is absorbingly dramatic— the Bolingbroke, now King, who drove 
 Richard from the throne, makes his peace with the son who has 
 caused him grief. Beautifully does the King point out the con- 
 trast between his own youth and that of his wayward son: 
 
86 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE' S 
 
 Had I so lavish of my presence been, 
 So common hackney'd in the eyes of men, 
 So stale and cheap to vulgar company. 
 Opinion, that did help me to the crown, 
 Had still kept loyal to possession, 
 And left me in reputeless banishment, 
 A fellow of no mark nor likelihood. 
 
 Thus did I keep my person fresh and new; 
 My presence, like a robe pontifical, 
 Ne'er seen but wonder'd at: and so my state. 
 Seldom but sumptions, showed like a feast. 
 And won by rareness such solemnity. 
 
 The dominant contrast in / Henry IV is that between Prince 
 Hal and Hotspur, a contrast which affords an excellent illustration 
 I of Shakespeare's selection from the material at his disposal and of 
 his pi;ocess of piecing out that material the better to subserve his 
 ends.l The Hotspur of history was a gallant soldier, and that is 
 """^ubsTantially all that is known of his personal traits. He was 
 called Hotspur, according to one account, "from his much prick- 
 ing"; according to another (Knighton), "because, in the silence 
 of the night, and while others reposed in sleep, he would labor 
 indefatigably against his enemy, as if heating his spurs." But, 
 historically, as Courtenay" explains, "the surname of Hotspur 
 had no reference to his disposition of temper," which was a brilliant 
 invention of the dramatist. 
 
 Admirable is the manner in which Shakespeare brings out the 
 
 .contrasting characters of the two Harrys. Though they do not 
 
 I meet face to face until the decisive day at Shrewsbury, all through 
 
 the play the audience is forced to keep them in mind and to 
 
 ; institute a detailed comparison. The difference between them is 
 
 i much in the King's thoughts, and elements in the comparison are 
 
 being furnished by remarks put into the mouths of the other 
 
 j characters; the two Harrys, indeed, speak of each other, and in 
 
 I eminently characteristic style. As the "madcap Prince of Wales" 
 
 j is brought into relief by contracts with his father, his brother, and 
 
 1 his companions of the tavern, so "the Hotspur of the north; he 
 
 ' that kills me some six or seven doxen of Scots at a breakfast, 
 
 i washes his hands, and says to his wife *Fie upon this quiet life! 
 
 1 I want work,' " is made distinct and clear cut by a series of con- 
 
 ^' Commentaries, II. 89, 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 87 
 
 trasts with his slow going father, his foxy uncle, the perfumed 
 lordling, the wearisome Glendower, the winsome LadyPerc^. 
 No historical warrant exists for Shakespeare's presentation of 
 Glendower as a bore against whom the practical, impatient 
 Hotspur protests (III. i.) : 
 
 O he is as tedious 
 As a tired horse, a railing wife; 
 Worse than a smoky house: I had rather live 
 With cheese and garlick in a windmill, far, 
 Than feed on cates and have him talk to me 
 In any summer house in Christendom. 
 
 And the contrast between Hotspur and his wife — a contrast which 
 so finely sets in relief the abruptness and stubbornness of the 
 man — is likewise Shakespeare's invention; history records nothing 
 more than the bare fact of Lady Percy's existence. __ 
 
 With consummate art Shakespeare brings the contrasts of the 
 two Harrys to a splendid culmination on the field of Shrewsbury. 
 For the first time the rivals meet face to face. Igrmring the-iact 
 that the Hotspur of history was at the very least as old as Prince 
 Hal's father, Shakespeare heightens and points the contrast by 
 making them of the one age; jSrigi^nd brilliant is their conversa- 
 tion; they fight, and Harry Percy falls. "Adieu," cries the 
 chivalrous victor, never more a prince than now, "and take thy 
 praise with thee to heaven!" Here once more Shakespeare 
 deviated from his sources; Hotspur fell by an unknown hand. 
 
 If I Henry IV is rich in contrasts of character, it is not less so 
 in contrasts of scene. The tavern scenes, wherein the Prince 
 appears often and Hotspur never, are set off against the home 
 scenes, wherein Percy dominates and the Prince never intrudes. 
 A further contrast exists between the court scenes and the battle 
 scenes, in the former of which the two Harrys are flitting visitants, 
 in the latter meeting for the only time in life. This is something 
 inbfe than the mere alternation of scenes grave and gay; it is the 
 contrast, exquisitely shaded and blended, of four varying environ- 
 ments, each a background shaped and adapted for throwing into 
 rehef the people in the play. Two scenes in / Henry /F, in both 
 of which Shakespeare transcended his sources, merit special 
 attention. One of them, the fourth scene in the fifth act, is as 
 fine a presentation of the ironic contrasts of life as Shakespeare 
 ever conceived. The two Harrys have fought, and Percy lies 
 
88 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 dead, "food for worms." Near by Kes Sir John Falstaff, feigning 
 death. The hero of the north and the braggart of Eastcheap — ^he 
 who had thought 
 
 it were an easy leap, 
 To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon, 
 
 and he who had declared that same honor to be "a mere scutcheon" 
 — ^lie side by side; and the rigid body of the fiery Hotspur is pre- 
 sently borne off on the back of the chuckling knight. The spectacle 
 recalls the words but a moment before uttered by the Prince : 
 
 lU-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk! 
 When that this body did contain a spirit, 
 A kingdom for it was too small a bound. 
 
 The other scene (II. iv.) has been declared, and apparently 
 with justice, the most comical stage picture in Shakespeare. 
 Through it contrasts, singly and in battalions, play back and 
 forth; and while Mistress Quickly screams her admiration and 
 Bardolph's nose shines beaconlike through the foetid air, Sir John 
 Falstaff explains how it is that he was a coward on compulsion. 
 And then, the same Sir John, the uncrowned king of Eastcheap, 
 assumes for the nonce the trappings of mock royalty: "This 
 chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre, and this cushion 
 my crown"; and forthwith he plays the Prince's father "in King 
 Cambyses' vein." Nor is that all. Conditions are speedily 
 reversed; the madcap Prince impersonates the King, Falstaff plays 
 the Prince; and in that role saves the scene from anticlimax and 
 carries it to a glorious fulness by his mock heroic plea — ^for himself: 
 ^*Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world." 
 
IX. 
 THE SECOND PART OF KING HENRY IV 
 
 Mr. Herford, in The Eversley Shakespeare, writes: "The 
 pohtical movements of Henry IV's reign, as told by Shakespeare's 
 standard authorities, Holinshed and Hall, offered little salient 
 matter for the dramatist. Nevertheless it is here that he most 
 decisively abandons the boldly reconstructive methods of Mar- 
 lowe; here that he unfolds with consummate power his own method 
 of creating character and detail within the hmits of a general 
 fidelity to recorded fact. His most direct divergences from the 
 tale of the chroniclers amount to little more than compressions of 
 isolated and scattered events. But he supplements their tale 
 and interprets their silence with a prodigal magnificence of in- 
 vention unapproached in the other Histories. Hence Henry IV 
 presents analogies to the group of brilliant Comedies with which 
 it was nearly contemporary, not only in its obvious wealth of 
 comic genius, but in the points at which this is exercised. The 
 historic matter, Hke the serious story of Twelfth Night or Much 
 AdOy is taken over without substantial change; while within its 
 meshes plays a lambent humour which, ostensibly subordinate 
 and by the way, in reality reveals the finer significance of the 
 derived story itself, and forms, as literature, the crowning glory 
 of the whole." 
 
 In both plays of King Henry IV it is needful that we draw this 
 distinction between the historical and the humorous elements; 
 but while in the First Part the two classes of scenes stand in vivid 
 contrast and each admirably sets off the other, in the Second Part 
 the contrast perceptibly weakens and the result is a vastly inferior 
 play. Justice Shallow and Master Silence — ^both, of course, of 
 the dramatist's own invention — are well defined and enjoyable 
 characters; yet, somehow, the scenes in which they figure do not 
 fit into the scheme of the play as a whole. Shakespeare does 
 somewhat better with the tavern and street scenes, but even here 
 the contrast with the court scenes is less gripping, and therefore 
 less effective, than in the First Part. Should we strive to reach 
 the wherefore of the generally admitted fact that the keystone 
 play of the Prince Hal trilogy is, taken by and large, a drama 
 inferior to its predecessor, we shall not go astray if we apply to it 
 
 80 
 
90 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 the theory of contrast and in the Hght of the theory discover the 
 real secret of its weakness. 
 
 And conversely, the structure of this play throws additional 
 light on dramatic contrast itseK. It helps to clarify our conception 
 of what is and what is not contrast. Nobody would think of 
 saying, for example, that a contrast exists between LucuUus and 
 the fourth dimension, for the all sufficient reason that, in so far as 
 normal mind can probe, LucuUus and the fourth dimension have 
 nothing in common; but it is quite possible to establish a contrast 
 between Lucullus and Robert Herrick, between the fourth dimen- 
 sion and, let us say, thickness, because in these cases we have 
 some underlying similarity or some other than wholly arbitrary 
 association upon which our comparison, to result in contrast, 
 must rest. 
 
 Contrast in the drama, therefore, is something more than 
 taking two persons or two events or two environments and placing 
 them opposite each other and saying with Hamlet, "Look here 
 upon this picture and on this." We may indeed look, but we 
 perceive nothing dramatic if we fail to sense the underlying 
 something in common. Hamlet did in fact call his mother's 
 attention to a contrast — that is, to the points of difference in two 
 things fundamentally similar — in "the counterfeit presentment 
 of two brothers"; there would have been no contrast had he 
 presented to the lady's attention, not two kings, but Claudius 
 and the front elevation of, the battlements of Elsinore. Shake- 
 speare set forth a true contrast when in I King Henry IV he showed 
 side by side the royal court at Westminster and the mock court in 
 Eastcheap; his procedure was less felicitous when, in II Henry /F, 
 he showed on the one hand the last moments of King Henry IV 
 and on the other the visit of Falstaff to the home of Justice Shallow* 
 
 In // Henry /F, Shakespeare's adherence to his authorities in 
 the historical scenes of the play is especially noteworthy. True, 
 he continues to flout chronology; true, he modifies several of the 
 characters with subtle touches of delineation; true, he senses the 
 spirit of the truth of history behind the reputed facts of history 
 and not infrequently is false to the letter that he may be true to 
 the s pirit. But, in the main, he continues to take his Holinshed 
 unprotestingly and occasionally accepts a touch or two from 
 Stowe. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 91 
 
 This closeness is well exemplified in a comparison that might 
 readily be made between the impression of Henry IV we receive 
 from this play and the summary of his character furnished by 
 Holinshed (III. 541.): *The king was . . . quick and 
 lively and of a stout courage. In his latter days he showed 
 himself so gentle that he got more love amongst the nobles and 
 people of this realm than he had purchased malice and evil will 
 in the beginning. But yet, to speak a truth, by his proceedings 
 . . . he was himself more hated than in all his lifetime (if it 
 had been longer by many years than it was) had been possible for 
 him to have weeded out and removed." 
 
 Shakespeare certainly drew his portrait of the last days of 
 Henry BoHngbroke in the light of that brief description. Henry 
 grows upon us in this play, and he really enlists our sympathies. 
 His noted apostrophe to sleep (III. i.) is Shakespeare's own 
 invention — a dramatic bit filled with minor contrasts and embody- 
 ing the doleful thoughts of a man who had for the sake of pros- 
 pective happiness usurped the throne. But it is in the crown 
 scene (IV. v.) that Shakespeare's manipulation of his material is 
 shown to unusual advantage — a manipulation which, while not 
 outraging the spirit of truth, yet deals freely with the body of 
 fact. Here is the story as related by Holinshed (III. 541) : 
 
 "During this his last sickness, he caused his crown (as some 
 write) to be set on a pillow at his bed's head. And suddenly his 
 pangs so sore troubled him that he lay as though all his vital 
 spirits had been from him departed. Such as were about him, 
 thinking verily that he had been departed, covered his face with 
 a Hnen cloth. The prince, his son, being hereof advertised, 
 entered into the chamber, took away the crown, and departed. 
 The father, being suddenly revived out of that trance, quickly 
 perceived the lack of his crown; and, having knowledge that the 
 prince his son had taken it away, caused him to come before his 
 presence, requiring of him what he meant so to misuse himself. 
 The prince, with a good audacity, answered: *Sir, to mine and 
 all men's judgments you seemed dead in this world; wherefore 
 I, as your next heir apparent, took that as mine own, and not as 
 yours.' *Well, fair son,' said the king with a great sigh, Vhat right 
 I had to it, God knoweth.' 'Well,' said the prince, 'if you die 
 king, I will have the garland, and trust to keep it with the sword 
 against all mine enemies, as you have done.' Then said the 
 
92 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 king, *I commit all to God, and remember you to do well/ With 
 that he turned himself in his bed, and shortly after departed to 
 God in a chamber of the abbot's of Westminster called Jerusalem." 
 The conduct of the Prince of Wales, as set forth in Holinshed, 
 could be variously interpreted. His "good audacity" Shake- 
 speare accepted in the most favorable sense, and set him in con- 
 trast with his dying father. The most difficult part of the drama- 
 tist's task was to give a reason for Prince Hal's taking the crown that 
 would not in some way reflect on his filial devotion and that would 
 not violate inherent probabiHty. He solved the problem by 
 having the Prince estimate the true worth of the crown as a trouble- 
 some bedfellow, "polished perturbation, golden care," and by 
 having him thus express himself when he fancied his father to be 
 dead: 
 
 Thy due from me 
 Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood. 
 Which nature, love, and filial tenderness, 
 Shall, O dear father, pay thee plenteously : 
 My due from thee is this imperial crown, 
 Which, as immediate from thy place and blood. 
 Derive itself to me. Lo, here it sits. 
 Which God shall guard. 
 
 Warwick, having summoned the Prince a little later at the King's 
 command, tells how he 
 
 found the prince in the next room, 
 Washing with kindly tears his gentle cheeks, 
 With such a deep demeanor in great sorrow. 
 That tyranny, which never quaff'd but blood. 
 Would, by beholding him, have wash'd his knife 
 With gentle eye-drops. 
 
 The King, sending away all the others, reproaches Prince Hal 
 for his unseemly haste; whereupon Shakespeare, who knew the 
 psychological importance of repetition, has the son explain his 
 motives: 
 
 Coming to look on you, thinking you dead, 
 
 And dead almost, my liege, to think you were, 
 
 I spake unto this crown as having sense. 
 
 And thus upbraided it: "The care on thee depending 
 
 Hath fed upon the body of my father; 
 
 Therefore, thou best of gold art worst of gold: 
 
 Other, less fine in caret, is more precious, 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 9S 
 
 Preserving life in medicine potable; 
 
 But thou, most fine, most honour'd, most renowned, 
 
 Hast eat thy bearer up." Thus, my most royal liege, 
 
 Accusing it, I put it on my head. 
 
 To try with it, as with an enemy 
 
 That had before my face murdered my father, 
 
 The quarrel of a true inheritor. 
 
 But if it did infect my blood with joy. 
 
 Or swell my thoughts to any strain of pride; 
 
 If any rebel or vain spirit of mine 
 
 Did with the least affection of a welcome 
 
 Give entertainment to the might of it, 
 
 Let God forever keep it from my head, 
 
 And make me as the poorest vassal is. 
 
 That doth with awe and terror kneel to it. 
 
 But why is the dramatist so insistent on making it trebly clear t 
 that Prince Hal acted worthily in taking away the crown ? Be- ^ 
 cause Prince Hal, the hero of the trilogy, must not be found doing 
 anything that would lessen his heroicity. That heroicity is in 
 this instance made to shine by contrast — the contrast symbolized 
 by the speeches of the King before and after his son's explanation, 
 the contrast found in the lives of all heroes who are forced to 
 embrace the appearance of evil while refraining themselves from 
 the evil itself. Among the braggarts, blades, and brawlers of 
 Eastcheap, Prince Hal is in the world but not of it; among the 
 thieves of royal crowns — his own father being one — ^Prince Hal 
 is in motive sui generis. 
 
 As in the First Part, so here, Shakespeare continues to paint 
 the hero's portrait by means of contrasting pictures. We observe 
 the comparison impHed between Hal and his brother John. Fal- 
 staff, is at pains to tell us that John, "this same young sober- 
 blooded boy dot h not love me, nor a man cannot make him laugh, 
 but that's no marvel, he drinks no wine" — truly a deadly indictment 
 drawn against a total abstainer, though coming possibly from a 
 prejudiced source. This same "sober-blooded" John of Lancaster 
 plays a decidedly shabby trick on Archbishop Scroop and the 
 rebels (IV. ii.), a ruse that is unworthy of him. It was surely in 
 the interests of the contrast between John and his elder brother 
 that Shakespeare here painted in a few unjustified strokes. For it 
 was not Prince John of Lancaster, but the Earl of Westmoreland, 
 whom Holinshed holds responsible for the strategic deception in 
 Gaultree Forest. Furthermore, John can hardly merit Falstaff's 
 
M CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 censure in regard to wine drinking. Stowe recounts the story of an 
 affray that took place in 1410 between some citizens and two of 
 the King's sons in Eastcheap, one very early morning, "after 
 supper"; and not Henry, but John and Thomas, were the royal 
 revelers. 
 
 The contrast between Prince Hal and Falstaff, begun in the 
 First Part, is in this play effectively set forth in the guise of two 
 kinds of development. The Prince develops upward; the knight 
 develops downward. The Falstaff we meet and laugh with in 
 I Henry IV is a lovable old rascal, his wit shrewd and piercing, 
 his humour abundant and contagious. His famous "catechism of 
 honor** is like the bottle of sack which he draws in lieu of a pistol 
 on Shrewsbury field — a property designed mainly for humorous 
 effect. He is not repulsive, even in the flights of merriment that 
 do not readily lend themselves to quotation; vulgar he may be at 
 times, but he is never crass or revolting. Were we to see no more 
 of old Jack Falstaff after he puts his tongue in his cheek and makes 
 one more promise to "leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman 
 should do," we should be justified in styling him, as Brandes has 
 done, "one of the most glorious creations that ever sprang from 
 a poet's brain." 
 
 But we meet Falstaff again; and in // Henry IV we find him a 
 less amiable and a less keen-witted Falstaff. We still laugh with 
 him, it is true; but we find ourselves also laughing at^him. Is it 
 because his humour cloys upon us.'^ Rather is it because his 
 humour is thinner and grosser and less spontaneous. His tongue 
 continues to run on and on — ^witness his chuckling outbreak to 
 his page concerning the Prince's smooth cheek (I. ii.) — but there 
 is here less substance to his wit. His cleverness is on the wane. 
 Now and again it flashes out in its old time brilliancy, as when, 
 with the same astounding self-sufficiency with which he once 
 narrated his heroism at Gadshill, he now loftily tells the Chief 
 Justice that he had not obeyed the summons of the court because 
 he was so advised by his "learned council in the laws of this land 
 service," and shortly afterward, having escaped prison and dis- 
 grace, has the impudence to ask the magistrate for the loan of a 
 thousand pounds; but the general impression we get from the play 
 is that the gout which afflicts his great toe is exerting a subtle 
 influence on his florid fancy and his stock of verbal pyrotechnics. 
 Old Jack Falstaff is hard pressed indeed when he has to admit: 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 95 
 
 "A good wit will make use of anything: I will turn diseases to 
 commodity." 
 
 It is evident that in this play the degeneration of Falstaff, 
 mentally and morally, is well advanced. But once do we find 
 him in company with his former boon companion the Prince of 
 Wales; and that rather disgusting scene (II. iv.) does not in any way 
 redound to Falstaff's advantage. Sir John finds it difficult to 
 explain the scurrilous language he has used in speaking of the heir 
 apparent, and his explanation, in comparison with his immortal 
 coward-on-instinct argument (7 Henry IV, II. iv.) comes off 
 haltingly. It is significant that the foils of his wit in II Henry 
 IV are not the agile Prince and the clever Poins, but the Hostess 
 and Mistress Doll, the blustering Pistol and the silly Justice 
 Shallow, A verbal swordsman inevitably gravitates to foemen 
 worthy of his steel. 
 
 And, just as plainly as we see Falstaff's degeneration, do we 
 see the Prince's regeneration. He is more rarely tlmn formerly 
 in the Boarshead tavern, and less in harmony with the environment 
 of Eastcheap. In the First Part emphasis was laid on his externall 
 commonness; in the Second Part stress is laid rather on his interna^ 
 nobility. Hal's upward development is perceptibly advancing; 
 in this play he stands midway between the madcap Prince of 
 I King Henry IV and the ideal monarch and man of action of 
 King Henry V. 
 
 The continued contrast between Prince Henry and Sir John 
 Falstaff Shakespeare brings to focus in the fifth scene of Act V, 
 where, for the last time, the young King and his old companion 
 meet face to face. Foul and travel-stained, out at knees and 
 elbows, the fat knight and his frowsy friends, Bardolph and Pistol, 
 take their stand near Westminster Abbey. The coronation 
 procession approaches, and Falstaff recognizes the famihar face 
 of Prince Hal. But, with an unwonted sinking of the heart, he sees 
 that the madcap Prince is strangely altered; dignity and grace 
 have set their stamp upon the youthful brow. Unaccustomed 
 forebodings tugging at his heart, Falstaff shouts his salutation: 
 "God save thy grace, King Hal! My royal Hal! . . . My 
 king! My Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!" A sudden silence 
 falls upon the crowded street; and then the young King speaks; 
 
 I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; 
 How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! 
 
96 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 To what extent Shakespeare has here transmuted the material 
 at hand may be seen from this excerpt from Hohnshed (III. 543.) : 
 
 "But this king even at first appointing with himself, to show that 
 in his person princely honors should change public manners, he 
 determined to put on him the shape of a new man. For whereas 
 aforetime he had made himself a companion unto misruly mates 
 of dissolute order and life, he now banished them all from his 
 presence (but not unrewarded, or else unpref erred) ; inhibiting 
 them, upon a great pain, not to approach, lodge, or sojourn within 
 ten miles of his court or presence." 
 
 Minor contrasts, for which Shakespeare is entirely responsible, 
 abound in the play. He invents the third scene of Act III and 
 the pleadings of Northumberland's wife and daughter-in-law, the 
 better to show the hedging father of the impetuous Hotspur in 
 contrast with the daring and self denying Archbishop Scroop. 
 That prelate's speech in the council of war (I. iii.) embodies a 
 brief presentation of some of the contrasts running through the 
 historical plays : 
 
 What trust is in these times ? 
 They that, when Richard lived, would have him die. 
 Are now become enamour'd on his grave: 
 Thou, that threw'st dust upon his goodly head 
 When through proud London he came sighing on 
 After the admired heels of Bolingbroke, 
 Criest now '*0 earth, yield us that king again. 
 And take thou this!" O thoughts of men accursed! 
 Past and to come seems best; things present, worst. 
 
 The contrast of a bishop faring forth to war, above all to civil 
 war, is thus indicated in the lines Shakespeare gives to Westmore- 
 land (IV. i.): 
 
 You, lord Archbishop, 
 Whose see is by a civil peace maintain'd. 
 Whose beard the silver hand of peace hath touch'd, 
 Whose learning and good letters peace hath tutor'd. 
 Whose white investments figure innocence. 
 The dove and very blessed spirit of peace, 
 Wherefore do you so ill translate yourself 
 Out of the speech of peace that bears such grace. 
 Into the harsh and boisterous tongue of war; 
 Turning your books to graves, your ink to blood, 
 Your pens to lances, and your tongue divine 
 To a loud trumpet and a point of war? 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 97 
 
 Finally, Shakespeare had no warrant for Falstaff's comic 
 opera exploit in the capture of Coleville of the Dale (IV. iii.), 
 which is faintly reminiscent of the contrast secured in the final 
 act of the First Part between the heroic Hotspur and the craven 
 knight. Coleville is simply mentioned by Holinshed (III. 530.) 
 as one of the conspirators beheaded at Durham. 
 
KING HENRY V 
 
 In King Henry V we have the crowning play of the Prince Hal 
 trilogy; and, as is eminently fitting, the dominant figure is the 
 King. Previously we have received our dramatic impressions of 
 Henry from seeing him form with Hotspur a contrast of rivalry 
 and with Falstaff a contrast of development. But now the method 
 of presentation is changed. The former Eastcheap reveller has 
 become not only a good man and a wise and warlike monarch, 
 but a national hero whose praises must be sung on every anni- 
 versary of Agincourt, a superman whose daring and indomitable 
 spirit flung the English yoemen over the walls of Harfleur. In 
 this play he is presented to us, not by means of the contrast of 
 conflict or the contrast of character, but by means of the contrast 
 inhering in supremacy. He dominates; therefore he contrasts. 
 
 At the same time we cannot afford to forget that an adequate 
 comprehension of the dramatic contrast afforded in King Henry 
 V depends greatly on an intimate knowledge of the other plays of 
 the trilogy. Nobody ever got a fair conception of Falstaff solely 
 by watching his cavortings in The Merry Wives of Windsor; to be 
 appreciated rightly in that drama, Falstaff must be followed 
 through both parts of King Henry IV. Similarly, we do not 
 grasp the full force of the drama of King Henry V until we see it 
 against the background of its predecessors in the Prince Hal 
 trilogy. At every turn the pious King is in contrast with the 
 seeming-impious Prince. 
 
 This contrast with the King that is with the Prince that was is 
 stressed by Shakespeare in the opening scene of the play. The 
 Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely praise him at 
 length as "full of grace and fair regard," "a true lover of the holy 
 church." Says Canterbury: 
 
 The courses of his youth promised it not. 
 
 The breath no sooner left his father's body, 
 
 But that his wildness, mortified in him, 
 
 Seem'd to die, too; yea, at that very moment. 
 
 Consideration like an angel came 
 
 And whipp'd the offending Adam out of him, 
 
 Leaving his body as a paradise. 
 
 To envelope and contain celestial spirits. 
 
 98 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 99 
 
 The prelate, after paying a glowing tribute to the King's learning 
 and piety and valor and sagacity, marvels thereat — 
 
 Since his addiction was to courses vain, 
 His companies unlettered, rude and shallow, 
 His hours fiU'd up with riots, banquets, sports. 
 And never noted in him any study. 
 Any retirement, any sequestration 
 From open haunts and popularity. 
 
 Whereupon moralizes his lordship of Ely : 
 
 The strawberry grows underneath the nettle. 
 And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best 
 Neighbour'd by fruit of baser quality: 
 And so the prince obscured his contemplation 
 Under the veil of wildness, which, no doubt. 
 Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night, 
 Unseen, yet crescive in his faculty. 
 
 The device here employed by Shakespeare has since become a 
 stock dramaturgic procedure. A group of village maidens in 
 the Way Down East type of play of two decades ago took up a 
 considerable portion of the first act discussing the beauty, the 
 intelligence, and the general desirability of the heroine. The 
 result was that, when one of the group ran to the wobbly white 
 picket fence near the back drop and shouted excitedly, "Here she 
 comes now," the audience — unless it happened to be extremely 
 sophisticated — sat up in breathless expectation. The entrance 
 of the heroine at that point is undeniably dramatic — seriously so 
 if she squares with the picture of her drawn by her admirers, 
 comically so should she prove at all points its antithesis. In the 
 case of King Henry V the device has a thorough justification, 
 for the audience may be reasonably expected not to form their 
 conception of the young King solely from what the bishops say 
 but from previous knowledge of the Prince and his upward develop- 
 ment. The prelates in that first scene really supplement the 
 work of the chorus; they tell us that which we ourselves do know. 
 
 For the remainder of the first act of King Henry V Shakespeare 
 thumbs his Holinshed. The chronicle he follows closely, not 
 omitting the fine contrast afforded in the episode of the tennis 
 balls. But in the second scene of Act II he adds to the dramatic 
 effectiveness of the conspirators' condemnation by having them 
 unwittingly name their own doom. Almost entirely original is 
 
100 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 Henry's condemnation speech, as may be seen on comparing it 
 with Holinshed's version (III. 548): 
 
 "Having thus conspired the death and destruction of me, which 
 am the head of the realm and governor of the people, it may be, 
 no doubt, but that you likewise have sworn the confusion of all 
 that are here with me, and also the desolation of your own country. 
 To what horror, O Lord, for any true English heart to consider, 
 that such an execrable iniquity should ever so bewrap you, as for 
 pleasing of a foreign enemy to imbrue your hands in our blood, 
 and to ruin your own native soil. Revenge herein touching my 
 person though I seek not, yet for the safeguard of you, my dear 
 friends, and for due preservation of all sorts, I am by office to 
 cause example to be showed. Get ye hence, therefore, ye poor 
 miserable wretches, to the receiving of your just reward, wherein 
 God's majesty give you grace of his mercy and repentance of your 
 heinous offenses." 
 
 This pedestrian prose Shakespeare transmutes into a speech 
 bristling with contrasts : 
 
 You would have sold your king to slaughter. 
 His princes and his peers to servitude. 
 His subjects to oppression and contempt, 
 And his whole kingdom into desolation. 
 
 Throughout the play Shakespeare thus takes the baser metal 
 of the chronicler and, without falsifying the underlying truth, 
 shapes it anew in the alembic of his own personality. Here, for 
 instance, is the basis he found in Holinshed (III. 55^.) for Henry's 
 reply to Montjoy's demand to surrender (III. vi.) : 
 
 "Mine intent is to do as it pleaseth God. I will not seek 
 your master at this time; but, if he or his seek me, I will meet 
 them, God willing. If any of your nation attempt once to stop me 
 in my journey towards Calais, at their jeopardy be it; and yet 
 wish I not any of you so unadvised as to be the occasion that I 
 dye your tawny ground with your red blood." 
 
 The tawny ground and the red blood Shakespeare incorporated 
 into the spirited reply he has the English King fling into the 
 herald's teeth; for naught else here was he indebted to Holinshed. 
 The speech he makes lengthy — lengthy, that is, as compared with 
 the speech cited by Holinshed — and therefore important. He 
 permits Henry frankly to admit to his enemies. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 10 1 
 
 My people are with sickness much enfeebled, 
 My numbers lessen'd, and those few I have 
 Almost no better than so many French. 
 
 The King begs God's forgiveness for that playful bragging: "This 
 your air of France,'* he explains whimsically to Montjoy, "hath 
 blown that vice in me." Then he continues: 
 
 Go, therefore, tell thy master here I am; 
 My ransom is this frail and worthless trunk, 
 My army but a weak and sickly guard; 
 Yet, God before, tell him we will come on. 
 Though France himself and such another neighbour 
 Stand in our way. 
 
 And — in a way the most typical contrast of all — this tattered 
 leader of an army of scarecrows, never forgetting that he is a king, 
 tosses a purse to the gaily attired herald: "There's for thy labor, 
 Montjoy." 
 
 The fourth act opens with an indication on the part of the 
 chorus of the contrast between the two camps, where 
 
 Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames 
 Each battle sees the other's umber'd face. 
 
 Then follows "a little touch of Harry in the night," and we have 
 that wonderfully dramatic scene wherein the King, disguised as a 
 common soldier, passes here and there through the camp, listens 
 to the conversation of his soldiers, and good humoredly picks a 
 quarrel with the stolid WiUiams. For this scene, as well as for 
 the soliloquy that follows it, when the King, never so awfully 
 alone as now, thinks royal thoughts aloud, there is no warrant in 
 Holinshed. 
 
 Again, we have Holinshed's prosaic statements concerning 
 Montjoy 's second embassy to the English King (III. 554.) : 
 
 "Here we may not forget how the French, thus in their joUity, 
 sent an herald to King Henry to inquire what ransom he would 
 offer. Whereunto he answered that within two or three hours he 
 hoped it would so happen that the Frenchmen should be glad to 
 common rather with the Englishmen for their ransoms than the 
 English to take thought for their deliverance, promising for his 
 own part that his dead carcass should rather be a prize to the 
 Frenchmen than that his living body should pay any ransom." 
 
102 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 Shakespeare scented the dramatic possibilities of this passage, 
 and the result is the contrast-teeming speech (IV. iii.) beginning 
 with 
 
 Bid them achieve me and then sell my bones. 
 
 One remarkable variation rung on his sources by Shakespeare 
 deals with the speech made by Henry before the battle of Agin- 
 court. "The fewer men, the greater share of honour" is a senti- 
 ment taken almost bodily from Holinshed (III. 553.); but 
 Shakespeare carefully avoided anything like the following passages: 
 
 *'If God of his clemency do favor us and our just cause, as I 
 trust he will, we shall speed well enough. But let no man ascribe 
 victory to our own strength and might, but only to God*s assist- 
 ance; to whom I have no doubt we shall worthily have cause to 
 give thanks therefore . . . but if we should fight in trust of 
 multitude of men, and so get the victory (our minds being prone to 
 pride), we should thereupon perad venture ascribe the victory not 
 so much to the gift of God as to our own puissance, and thereby 
 provoke his high indignation and displeasure against us." 
 
 In the great St. Crispin's eve speech (IV. iii.) all this expression 
 of humility and resignation is curtailed into a bluff "God's will!'^ 
 and a curt "God's peace!" Why did Shakespeare make the 
 omission? Certainly not because he considered pious sentiments 
 in the mouth of Henry out of character; his King Henry V is 
 depicted as a whole-souled and reverential monarch, with prayers 
 coming hot from the heart often on his lips. Manly piety, the 
 devotional spirit that makes a strong man stronger, Shakespeare 
 understood, and such a spirit he bestowed upon this his highest 
 type of royalty. But on this particular occasion, just before the 
 battle of Agincourt, he deliberately eliminates the pious speeches, 
 put into the King's mouth by the chronicler. Why? 
 
 I think the only satisfactory explanation is to be found in the 
 theory of dramatic contrast. An ordinary man in the King's 
 place would undoubtedly have prayed, and prayed out loud. 
 The prospective battle looked like a slaughter with the English 
 enacting the role of victims. The odds were unmistakably against 
 them. If they were not to receive the help of heaven, they were 
 certain to lose the day. Such is what an ordinary man would 
 have thought, such is what Henry's fellows in arms did actually 
 think; but Shakespeare's superman is made of sterner stuff. 
 Alone, in the silence of the night, the King has indeed raised his. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 103 
 
 hands to heaven; but now — he buckles on his sword. The 
 ordinary man would have thought much of God before the conflict 
 and would have forgotten all about Him after the victory. Shake- 
 speare's heroic monarch reserves his piety and his devotion for 
 use after the battle : 
 
 O God, thy arm was here; 
 And not to us, but to thy arm alone, 
 Ascribe we all . . . . Take it, God, 
 For it is none but thine! 
 
 Come go we in procession to the village: 
 And be it death proclaimed through our host 
 To boast of this or take that praise from God 
 Which is his only. 
 
 Do we all holy rites; 
 
 Let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum. 
 
 Dr. Johnson maintains that the great defect of King Henry V 
 is "the emptiness and narrowness of the last act.'* In a way the 
 great lexicographer is right. That last act is narrow and is 
 empty — in itself. And, again, if we were to assume that the theme 
 of the play is the victories of Henry V, then indeed the fifth act 
 shows a decided falling off in dramatic efficiency. But that act 
 must be considered in the first place as an integral part of the play, 
 and secondly the play must be considered as a dramatic glorifica- 
 tion of an English King. As we have already said, King Henry 
 dominates the play; he must perforce dominate the last act of it. 
 
 The greater part of the fifth act of King Henry V is taken up 
 with the courtship of the Princess Katharine by the English 
 monarch. That scene was conceived in the spirit of contrast. 
 To begin with, we have the never-failing theatricalism of a blunder- 
 ing use of language — the Princess talking absurdly inelegant 
 Enghsh and the King talking desperately improper French. 
 Again, we have the comical complication that the course of true 
 love does not run smooth without the aid of an interpreter. Then 
 there is the contrast between the courtly and very young princess 
 — for in point of fact Henry had already unsuccessfully tried to 
 marry two of her elder sisters — and the bluff, war-grimed monarch. 
 Those contrasts would lend the scene sufficient dramatic impor- 
 tance to hold an audience. 
 
104 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 But the major contrast in the courtship scene centers in the 
 King. Here we have still another side of his varied character. 
 This man, last seen falling devoutly on his knees after gaining a 
 brilliant victory, now perplexedly scratches his head and sweats 
 for it in his effort to surmount a linguistic obstacle and tell a 
 princess that he loves her. And this is the Prince Hal of East- 
 cheap, the *'Harry Le Roy" who accepted Williams' gage, the 
 King Henry who won the field of Agincourt. "We see him," 
 says Gervinus, " "in a short time alternate between the most 
 different emotions and positions, ever the same master over 
 himself, or we may rather say, over the opportunity and the 
 matter which lie for the moment before him." 
 
 Because King Henry thus dominates the play, the minor 
 contrasts are here relatively few. We have a fleeting, second- 
 hand vision of the dying Falstaff plucking at the sheets and 
 babbling of green fields; we have the episode of Pistol's ridiculous 
 capture of the French soldier (IV. iv.) which Shakespeare found 
 in The Famous Victories of Henry Fifth, and materially bettered 
 in his conveyance thereof; we have our old acquaintances, Bar- 
 dolph and Mistress Quickly, and Corporal Nym and the boy — a 
 boy whose preternatural wisdom sets off the stupidity of the other 
 members of the group. Most distinctively, however, we have 
 Fluellen the W^elshman, Macmorris the Irishman, and Jamy the 
 Scotsman, each of them contrasting deliciously with the others. 
 The obvious purpose of the few scenes which lead us within the 
 enemy's lines is to enable us to form more vividly and in greater 
 detail the contrast between the two camps. 
 
 ^^ Shakespeare Commentaries, vol. I. 
 
XI. 
 KING HENRY VIII 
 
 On entering upon a study of King Henry VIII we must remem- 
 ber that we have here a drama for which Shakespeare alone does 
 not stand responsible. In 1758 the question of the Shakespearean 
 authorship of the play was raised by Roderick (in Edward*s 
 Canons of Criticism), who called attention to three metrical 
 peculiarities in portions of King Henry VIII that are not found in 
 other Shakespearean plays. Almost a century later James 
 Spedding in his article on Who Wrote Shakespeare* s Henry VIII? " 
 presented a careful and scholarly discussion of the problem; and 
 his views are today accepted almost without cavil. His study is 
 really one of the high water marks of English literary criticism, 
 for it is neither merely impressionistic nor solely scientific, but 
 represents a happy union of the two styles of analysis. The 
 impression made upon him by an alert reading of portions of the 
 play is thus described by Spedding: 
 
 "The opening of the play seemed to have the full stamp of 
 Shakespeare, in his latest manner: the same close-packed expres- 
 sion; the same life, and reality, and freshness; the same rapid and 
 abrupt turnings of thought, so quick that language can hardly 
 follow fast enough; the same impatient activity of intellect and 
 fancy, which having once disclosed an idea cannot wait to work 
 it orderly out; the same daring confidence in the resources of 
 language, which plunges headlong into a sentence without knowing 
 how it is to come forth; the same careless metre which disdains to 
 produce its harmonious effects by the ordinary devices, yet is 
 evidently subject to a master of harmony; the same entire freedom 
 from book-language and commonplace; all the qualities, in short, 
 which distinguish the magical hand which has never yet been 
 successfully imitated." 
 
 But, Spedding goes on to say, in other portions of the play the 
 Shakespearean characteristics he found markedly absent; and, 
 profiting by a hint from Tennyson, "a man of first rate judgment 
 on such a point," he concluded that the non-Shakespearean 
 portions of King Henry VIII are decidedly in the manner of 
 
 ^^Gentleman's Magazine, 1850. 
 
 105 
 
106 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE' S 
 
 John Fletcher. The same conclusion was almost simultaneously 
 reached by Hickson, "^^ and was subsequently confirmed after two 
 series of metrical tests by Fleay and Abbott {Shakespearean 
 Grammar), Robert Boyle ^^ urged the possibility of Massinger's 
 being in part responsible for the play, and some recent critics have 
 professed to discover therein the work of a third hand; but — 
 excepting some eminent heretics, including Singer, Knight, Ward, 
 and Ulrici — the mass of critical opinion does not materially deviate 
 from the views set forth nearly three quarters of a century ago by 
 Spedding. 
 
 We are justified, therefore, in assuming the fact of collaboration 
 in King Henry VIII. And such being the case, to what extent 
 are we warranted in including the play in a study of Shakespeare's 
 dramaturgic procedure? We shall find our bearings more readily 
 by recalling that there are two sorts of collaboration, for a splendid 
 differentiation between which we are indebted to Professor 
 Matthews : 
 
 "First of all, there is the true collaboration, that of Erckmann- 
 Chatrian and of Augier and Sandeau, in which the pair of authors 
 really labor in common, inventing and creating in consultation. 
 They make the plot together, they develop the characters, and 
 they assign to one another the more mechanical task of the actual 
 writing. Then there is a second kind of collaboration, falsely so 
 called, in which the two writers do not consult, and may not even 
 meet for consultation, but in which one of them merely revises or 
 amplifies or modifies what the other has already written, and in 
 this case there is not a genuine partnership. And under these 
 circumstances it is sometimes possible to separate the respective 
 shares of the two writers and to identify what the reviser has 
 added to the work of the inventor. He may have made it better 
 or he may have made it worse, but in neither case did he create it 
 originally. There has been only a mechanical mixture of their 
 several contributions and not a chemical union. But in true 
 collaboration there is a chemical union of the several contributions, 
 and this forbids any successful effort to identify the respective 
 shares of the several collaborators." ** 
 
 20 Notes and Queries, II. 198; III. 33. 
 
 '1 Transactions of the New Shakespeare Society, 1880-1885. 
 
 22 Shakespeare as a Playright, pp. 347-8. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 107 
 
 Professor Matthews finds in King Henry VIII such a "chemical 
 union" of Shakespeare and Fletcher and is therefore incapacitated 
 from identifying their respective portions. But in this realm of 
 conjecture the opposite view seems to me more credible; and it has 
 the weight of Spedding's investigation behind it. Therefore the 
 problem of collaboration is an important problem in any discussion 
 of King Henry VIII. It was a relatively unimportant issue in 
 our investigation of King Henry VI, for in those three plays Shake- 
 speare, to whatever extent he borrowed from and was influenced 
 by The True Contention and older plays, had the last word in defin- 
 ing the ultimate form which the plays would take; his "collabora- 
 tors" were certainly not at his elbow suggesting elisions and 
 protesting against alterations. But in the case of King Henry 
 VIII we have a play which was obviously begun by Shakespeare 
 and finished by Fletcher — the Shakespearean portions not extend- 
 ing beyond the third act. Here, therefore, Fletcher, and not 
 Shakespeare, had the last word; and here, if we wish to examine 
 the play with reference to Shakespeare's use of his historical 
 material, we must confine ourselves to the admittedly Shake- 
 spearean portions. 
 
 A reading of the first half of the play must convince us that here 
 Shakespeare designed to set three characters in effective contrast — 
 the King, Queen Katharine, and Cardinal Wolsey. This he could 
 have done without sacrificing historic truth as that truth was 
 embodied in the leading sources which he employed — again Hall 
 and Holinshed, possibly George Cavendish's Life of Wolsey which 
 was circulated in manuscript form in Shakespeare's day, and 
 possibly also Fox's Acts and Monuments of the Church, a work 
 which was utilized by Fletcher for the fifth act. This, indeed, he 
 did do, until that point is reached where the original mood of the 
 play changes, and what started out as a condemnation of Henry, a 
 beatification of Katharine, and a swift and pagent-like display of 
 Wolsey's greatness and fall, becomes a vague, weak, uncertain 
 succession of shifting scenes and a glorification of the infant 
 Queen Elizabeth. King Henry VIII is not the finest of the 
 English historical plays, not, as is sometimes said, because it has 
 too much pageantry, but because it has too little of sustained 
 contrast. 
 
 Certainly, the play begins impressively. We hear the story 
 of the Field of the Cloth of Gold; then comes a natural transition 
 
108 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE* S 
 
 to the subject of the Cardinal; and then appears the lordly Wolsey 
 himself. Here is one of Shakespeare's greatest dramaturgical 
 triumphs. Wolsey appears but for a moment, he says scarcely 
 anything; yet he dominates the scene. In such stage pictures 
 Shakespeare truly dramatized history; that is, without being 
 false to the story of the past, he shredded that story of its super- 
 fluous men and events and set its essentials in contrast one with 
 another. The characters in the first scene of the play he found 
 in Holinshed; he found, too, many of the sentiments he puts into 
 their mouths; but the essentially dramatic situation, secured by 
 the simple device of having the much talked of Wolsey pass 
 across the stage and a little later the ominous net fall upon Buck- 
 ingham, is his own invention — an egg easy enough to make stand 
 upright once the thing has been done. 
 
 The three-cornered contrast in King Henry VIII would not be 
 complete without Queen Katharine, so Shakespeare introduces 
 her in the second scene of Act I, where she intercedes for the people 
 against the exactions being made by Wolsey in the King's name. 
 Thus the three contrasting characters are set in one compact 
 group. This is a clear deviation from Hall and Holinshed who, 
 while taking account of the exactions, have absolutely nothing to 
 say concerning any interference on the part of the Queen. The 
 device is a felicitous stroke made solely in the interests of dramatic 
 contrast. 
 
 Another palpably invented scene we have in the third scene 
 of Act II wherein Anne BuUen converses with an old lady of the 
 court. Ann Bullen is in contrast, naturally enough, with Queen 
 Katharine; and that we may see what manner of person Anne 
 Bullen is, Shakespeare puts her in contrast with a fictitious 
 character — an old lady who contrasts with Anne's youth and 
 beauty. The scene, for all its brevity, is a subtle bit of character 
 portraiture. "How you do talk!" exclaims the demure maid of 
 honor. *T swear again I would not be a queen for all the world.'* 
 Subsequent events showed that here the lady protests too much. 
 
 Building prodigally upon the meager details afforded him by 
 his sources, Shakespeare constructed that splendid scene, shim- 
 mering with contrasts, in which the King reveals his knowledge 
 of Wolsey's great possessions (III. ii.). This, for the Cardinal, 
 is the beginning of the end, and the contrast of the prelate's 
 perturbation with the monarch's studious composure is graphically 
 
HISTORICAL PLATS 109 
 
 outlined in the conversation of the attendants, in the brief, over- 
 devoted protestations of Wolsey, in the envenomed reminiscences 
 of Henry who concludes with : 
 
 Read o'er this ; 
 
 And after, this: and then to breakfast with 
 
 What appetite you have. 
 
 In describing (II. iv.) the Queen's appeal and her repudiation 
 of Wolsey, Shakespeare found little to change in HoHnshed. 
 The scene was waiting for him, ready made. And yet we have 
 here a striking instance of Shakespeare's method, observable 
 throughout the English historical plays, of adopting his sources. 
 His method took generally two forms: He followed his original 
 closely, sometimes taking entire clauses word for word, leaving 
 out no important idea and introducing no innovation; and again 
 he regarded the text of the chronicle as a fit subject freely to 
 paraphrase and expand, producing a result very different in form 
 from the original but singularly true to its spirit. 
 
 Both these phases of the dramatist's method we have in this 
 scene. How closely he could, on occasion, adhere to his source we 
 see by a comparison with the appeal of Katharine as given by 
 Shakespeare with the following account of it from Holinshed 
 (III. 907.): 
 
 **I desire you to do me justice and right, and take some pity 
 upon me, for I am a poor woman, and a stranger, born out of 
 your dominion, having here no indifferent counsel and no assurance 
 of friendship. Alas, sir, in what have I offended you, or what 
 occasion of displeasure have I showed you, intending thus to 
 put me from you after this sort ? I take God to my judge, I have 
 been to you a true and humble wife, ever conformable to your 
 will and pleasure; that never contraried or gainsaid anything 
 thereof, and, being always contented with all things wherein you 
 had any dehght, whether Uttle or much, without grudge or dis- 
 pleasure, I loved for your sake all them whom you loved, whether 
 they were my friends or enemies. I have been your wife these 
 twenty years and more, and you have had by me divers children. 
 . . . The King, your father, was in his time of excellent wit, 
 and the king of Spain, my father, Ferdinando, was reckoned one 
 of the wisest princes that reigned in Spain many years before. 
 It is not to be doubted but that they had gathered as wise counsel- 
 lors unto them of every realm as to their wisdoms they thought 
 
110 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 meet, who deemed the marriage between you and me good and 
 lawful. Wherefore, I humbly desire you to spare me until I may 
 know what counsel my friends in Spain will advertise me to take, 
 and, if you will not, then your pleasure be fulfilled." 
 
 On the other hand, the second phase of Shakespeare's method of 
 adopting his sources — ^that of bringing into clearer light the con- 
 trasts of character — is to be observed by comparing Queen Katha- 
 rine's speech beginning, "I will, when you are humble," with 
 Holinshed's account told in the third person: 
 
 "Here is to be noted that the queen in the presence of the whole 
 court most grievously accused the cardinal of untruth, deceit, 
 wickedness, and malice; which had sown dissention between her 
 and the king, her husband : and therefore openly protested that she 
 did utterly abhor, refuse, and forsake such a judge as was not only 
 a most malicious enemy to her but also a manifest adversary to 
 all right and justice; and therewith she did appeal unto the Pope, 
 committing her whole cause to be judged of him." 
 
 In his deviation from as well as in his adherence to his sources in 
 King Henry VIII Shakespeare continues to carry into execution 
 the principles of dramatic contrast. Had he succeeded in handing 
 over to Fletcher, not only the unfinished manuscript of the play, 
 but likewise his conception of the underlying contrast, and withal 
 something of his masterly command of his resources, there is 
 little doubt that King Henry VIII would dominate the entire 
 group of English historical plays. As it stands it is splendid in its 
 promises — ^promises unfulfilled. 
 
XII. 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
 In the course of this monograph we have investigated, as briefly 
 as is consonant with our general purpose, the principal theories 
 of dramatic construction which have been suggested by critics of 
 the theater as expositions of what constitutes the essence and 
 fundamental notion of the dramatic. The theory of the "classical** 
 unities, concerned with the external forms of the drama; the 
 volitional conflict theory, concerned with the psychology of the 
 drama; the theories of passion in action and crises, which touch 
 upon both the internals and the externals of the drama, have all 
 been examined in their relation to representative plays of the past 
 and of the present, and all of them have been found inadequate. 
 The theory of Mr. Hamilton, which suggests internal contrast 
 embodied in external contrast as the true and adequate differentia 
 of the drama, has been applied to a large variety of the plays, and 
 has not been found wanting. 
 
 A specific and detailed application of the theory of contrast 
 to a group of ten Shakespearean plays seems to warrant us in 
 assuming that, certainly in so far as those ten plays are concerned, 
 the notion of contrast was the guiding principle of the dramatist in 
 selecting and shaping this material. We have seen that Shake- 
 speare, in composing the English historical plays, in many instances 
 deviated from his sources; and the result of our study is the 
 impression, growing stronger and stronger as the investigation 
 progressed, that the theory of contrast offers the only reasonable 
 and consistent explanation of Shakespeare*s manipulation of his 
 materials; that he sensed the dramatic value of contrast early in 
 his career as a dramatist and that he used it more and more effec- 
 tively as he grew in knowledge of life, mastery of expression, and 
 command of his technical resources. 
 
 One group of variations, in number very considerable, has been 
 instanced but rarely in the course of our investigations. That 
 group consists of chronological divergences. Shakespeare juggled 
 dates ruthlessly. After making a liberal allowance for such chro- 
 nological variations as are due to carelessness or misconception on 
 the part of the dramatist, it is evident that for the most part 
 when Shakespeare disagreed with his sources regarding dates, he 
 
 111 
 
112 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE's 
 
 was prompted by a sense of the dramatic value of contrast. The 
 operation known in the moving picture art as "speeding the film'* 
 — compressing into an hour the events of a day and into a day the 
 events of a year — has the sanction of the usage of many other 
 dramatists besides Shakespeare; and the reason for its vogue 
 seems to be that it affords unparalleled opportunities for the setting 
 forth of contrasts. Instead of showing things as they ordinarily 
 happen in life, in succession measured by the passing of time, the 
 dramatist endeavors to show things happening either synchro- 
 nously or in unmeasured succession. Instead of showing his pictures 
 of men and manners in a series of dissolving views, he strives, 
 whenever practicable, to exhibit his pictures side by side and at 
 the same time, or else in a succession so quick and abrupt as to 
 convey the impression of their being almost coincident. 
 
 It may be well to add here, the better to preclude the possibility 
 of misconception, that our study of Shakespeare's manipulation 
 of his sources in the English historical plays has not been designed 
 to support the contention that the dramatist had a conscious and 
 clearly defined theory of dramatic contrast or that, when he de- 
 parted from his sources, he said to himself, "Go to, I shall now build 
 a scene founded on the contrasts existing between men and men 
 and things and things." To what extent Shakespeare wrought 
 consciously in building up his contrasts in the historical plays is a 
 question that must perforce remain untouched; it may be an inter- 
 esting field for conjecture, but as such is quite outside the scope 
 of the present study. He may have aimed at contrast consciously; 
 he may have achieved contrast intuitively; he may have sensed 
 contrast sometimes deliberately and sometimes subconsciously. 
 We must be content with the fact that, quite irrespective of the 
 subjective attitude of the dramatist, contrast was the guiding 
 principle of Shakespeare in his variations from his sources in the 
 English historical plays. 
 
 Furthermore, while finding in the course of this investigation 
 the inadequacy of certain theories of the theater — some of them 
 truly luminous and all of them worthy of respect — we are very far 
 from implying that such theories have ceased to be, within certain 
 set limits, true and vital. All that we insist upon is that those 
 theories do not give a satisfying answer to the fundamental 
 question: What constitutes the essence of the dramatic? Con- 
 trast, as we have discovered, is the only adequate answer; but 
 
HISTORICAL PLATS 118 
 
 often it is contrast presented in action, or contrast shown through 
 the medium of human passion, or contrast suggested by a series of 
 crises, or contrast taking the form of a voHtional conflict. Not 
 one of those theories has the same depth and scope as the theory 
 of contrast; but, on the other hand, not one of them can the student 
 of the drama afford to ignore. Even the unities of time and place 
 represent a suggestive principle to the budding dramatist, a prin- 
 ciple which often he will find it helpful to embrace; all he need 
 remember is that good plays have been constructed in the past in 
 defiance of the "classical" unities, and good plays of today may 
 or may not ignore them and yet be none the less — and none the 
 more — ^good plays. 
 
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 1905. 
 
HISTORICAL PLAYS 117 
 
 GoEBEL, Juuus, Ueber tragische Schuld und SUhne. Berlin, 1884. 
 
 Gould, George, The Greek Plays in Their Relations to the Dramatic 
 Unities. London, 1883. 
 
 Hamilton, Clayton, Theory of the Theater. New York, 1910. 
 
 The Undramatic Drama. The New York Bookman 
 for December, 1913. 
 
 Contrast in the Drama. The New York Bookman for 
 January, 1914. 
 
 Hegel, G. W. F., Vorlesungen tiber die iEsthetik. (3 vols.) Berlin, 1838. 
 
 Jarry, Louis, Essai sur les OEuvres dramatiques de Rotrou. Paris, 1858. 
 
 JussERAND, J. J., Le Th^tre en Angleterre depuis la Conqu6te jusqu'aux 
 Pr^decesseurs imm^diats de Shakespeare. Paris, 1881. 
 
 Lemaitre, Joseph, Corneille et Aristote. Paris, 1882. 
 
 Lessing, G. E., Hamburgische Dramaturgic. Stuttgart, 1893. 
 
 Mantzius, Karl, A History of Theatrical Art in Ancient and Modern Times. 
 Translated by Louise von Cossel. (5 vols.) London, 
 1904. 
 
 Matthews, Brander, The Development of the Drama. New York, 1903. 
 A Study of the Drama. Boston, 1910. 
 
 Men^ndez y Pelayo, M., Historia de las Ideas Est^ticas en Espafia. (9 
 
 vols.) Madrid, 1890-1896. 
 
 Pellisson et d'Olivet, Histoire de I'Acad^mie frangaise. Paris, 1859. 
 
 Perger, Arnulf, System der dramatischen Technik, mit besonderer Unter- 
 suchung von Grabbes Drama. Berlin, 1909. 
 
 PoLTi, Georges, Les trente-six Situations dramatiques. Paris, 1895. 
 
 Price, Wiluam T., Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle. 
 New York, 1908. 
 
 Rennert, Hugo Albert, The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega. 
 
 New York, 1909. 
 
118 CONTRAST IN SHAKESPEARE'S 
 
 Saintsbury, Geobge, a History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe. 
 (3 vols.) New York and London, 1902-1904. 
 
 Savitb, Jocza, Von der Absicht des Dramas. Munich, 1908. 
 
 ScHLAG, Hermann, Wesen, Theorie, und Technik des Dramas. Essen, 1909. 
 
 Sidney, Sib Philip, Apologie for Poetrie. Edited by Edward Arber. 
 Westminster, 1895. 
 
 Spinqarn, Joel Elias, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. 
 New York, 1899. 
 
 Sullivan, Sir Edward, English Drama in the Making. Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury and After for July, 1911. 
 
 Thorndike, Ashley H., Tragedy. Boston, 1908. 
 
 TicKNOR, George, History of Spanish Literature. (3 vols.) New York, 
 1854. 
 
 Trench, R. C, An Essay on the Life and Genius of Calder6n. London, 
 1886. 
 
 V5GELE, Albert, Der Pessimismus und das Tragische in Kunst und Leben. 
 Freiburg, 1910. 
 
LIFE 
 
 Brother Zachary Leo (Francis Gallagher Meehan) was born in 
 San Francisco, California, in 1881. After completing the courses 
 prescribed in the Novitiate and Normal School of the Brothers 
 of the Christian Schools at Martinez, California, he made his 
 collegiate studies and received from St. Mary's College, Oakland, 
 CaHfornia, the degrees of A. B. in 1903 and M. A. in 1908. 
 
 As a member of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian 
 Schools he has occupied the following positions: Instructor in 
 English, Sacred Heart College, San Francisco, 1903-1905; Head of 
 the Department of English and History, ibid., 1905-1908; Professor 
 of English, St. Mary's College, Oakland, California, 1908-. . . . ; 
 Dean of the School of Arts and Letters, ibid., 1911- 
 
 The academic year of 1914-1915 he has spent in graduate study 
 and research at the Catholic University of America, Washington, 
 D. C, following courses under Dr. P. J. Lennox, Dr. Edward A. 
 Pace, Dr. Thomas E. Shields, and Dr. Francis J. Hemelt. He is 
 happy to have this occasion to express his appreciation of the 
 kindly interest manifested in his studies by numerous members of 
 the teaching institute to which he belongs and by the instructors 
 who have so materially aided him during his stay at the Catholic 
 University. In particular, he wishes to record his deep indebted- 
 ness to Dr. Lennox, Professor of the English Language and Litera- 
 ture. 
 

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