y,--which is like a broad summer
landscape strewn with many-coloured flowers that flash and glitter in
the sun, while slowly a muttering thunder-storm gathers and lowers, and
presently sweeps overhead, casting one black shadow as it passes, and
leaving the fragrant and glistening plain all the brighter and sweeter
for the contrast with its defeated menace and vanishing gloom.

XX.

RICHARD MANSFIELD AS RICHARD THE THIRD.

The ideal of Richard that was expressed by this actor did not materially
differ from that which has been manifested by great tragic actors from
Garrick to Booth. He embodied a demoniac scoffer who, nevertheless, is a
human being. The infernal wickedness of Richard was shown to be impelled
by tremendous intellect but slowly enervated and ultimately thwarted and
ruined by the cumulative operation of remorse--corroding at the heart
and finally blasting the man with desolation and frenzy. That,
undoubtedly, was Shakespeare's design. But Richard Mansfield's
expression of that ideal differed from the expression to which the stage
has generally been accustomed, and in this respect his impersonation was
distinctive and original.

The old custom of playing Richard was to take the exaggerated statements
of the opening soliloquy in a literal sense, to provide him with a big
hump, a lame leg, and a fell of straight black hair, and to make him
walk in, scowling, with his lower lip protruded, and declare with
snarling vehemence and guttural vociferation his amiable purpose of
specious duplicity and miscellaneous slaughter. The opening speech,
which is in Shakespeare's juvenile manner--an orotund, verbose manner,
which perhaps he had caught from Marlowe, and which he outgrew and
abandoned--was thus utilised for displaying the character in a massed
aspect, as that of a loathsome hypocrite and sanguinary villain; and,
that being done, he was made to advance through about two-thirds of the
tragedy, airily yet ferociously slaying everybody who came in his way,
until at some convenient point, definable at the option of the actor, he
was suddenly smitten with a sufficient remorse to account for his
trepidation before and during the tent-scene; and thereafter he was
launched into combat like a meteoric butcher, all frenzy and all gore,
and killed, amid general acclamation, when he had fenced himself out of
breath.

That treatment of the character was, doubtless, in part a necessary
consequence of Shakespeare's