Gloucester. What, fellow, naught to do with mistress Shore?
I tell you, sir, he that doth naught with her,
Excepting one, were best to do it secretly alone.
Brakenbury. What one, my lord?
Gloucester. Her husband, knave--would'st thou betray me?
The feigned reconciliation of Gloucester with the queen's kinsmen is
also a masterpiece. One of the finest strokes in the play, and which
serves to show as much as anything the deep, plausible manners of
Richard, is the unsuspecting security of Hastings, at the very time
when the former is plotting his death, and when that very appearance
of cordiality and good-humour on which Hastings builds his
confidence arises from Richard's consciousness of having betrayed
him to his ruin. This, with the whole character of Hastings, is
omitted.
Perhaps the two most beautiful passages in the original play are the
farewell apostrophe of the queen to the Tower, where the children
are shut up from her, and Tyrrel's description of their death. We
will finish our quotations with them.
Queen. Stay, yet look back with me unto the Tower;
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes,
Whom envy hath immured within your walls;
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones,
Rude, rugged nurse, old sullen play-fellow,
For tender princes! The other passage is the account of their
death by Tyrrel:
Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn
To do this piece of ruthless butchery,
Albeit they were flesh'd villains, bloody dogs,--
Wept like to children in their death's sad story:
O thus! quoth Dighton, lay the gentle babes;
Thus, thus, quoth Forrest, girdling one another
Within their innocent alabaster arms;
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
And in that summer beauty kissed each other;
A book of prayers on their pillow lay,
Which once, quoth Forrest, almost changed my mind:
But oh the devil!--there the villain stopped;
When Dighton thus told on--we smothered
The most replenished sweet work of nature,
That from the prime creation ere she framed.
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