perfunctory adoption of the Tudor doctrine
that Richard was a blood-boltered monster; but in a larger degree it was
the result of Cibber's vulgar distortion of the original piece. The
actual character of the king,--who seems to have been one of the ablest
and wisest monarchs that ever reigned in England--has never recovered,
and it never will recover, from the odium that was heaped upon it by the
Tudor historians and accepted and ratified by the great genius of
Shakespeare. The stage character of the king has been almost as
effectually damned by the ingenious theatrical claptrap with which
Cibber misrepresented and vulgarised Shakespeare's conception, assisted
by the efforts of a long line of blood-and-thunder tragedians, only too
well pleased to depict a gory, blathering, mugging miscreant, such as
their limited intelligence enabled them to comprehend. The stage
Richard, however, may possibly be redeemed. In Cibber he is everything
that Queen Margaret calls him, and worse than a brute. In Shakespeare,
although a miscreant, he is a man. The return to Shakespeare,
accordingly, is a step in the right direction. That step was taken some
time ago, although not maintained, first by Macready, then by Samuel
Phelps, then by Edwin Booth, and then by Henry Irving. Their good
example was followed by Richard Mansfield. He used a version of the
tragedy, made by himself,--a piece indicative of thoughtful study of the
subject as well as a keen intuitive grasp of it. He did not stop short
at being a commentator. Aiming to impersonate a character he treated
Shakespeare's prolix play in such a manner as to make it a practicable
living picture of a past age. The version was in five acts, preserving
the text of the original, much condensed, and introducing a few lines
from Cibber. It began with a bright processional scene before the Tower
of London, in which Elizabeth, Queen of Edward IV., was conspicuous, and
against that background of "glorious summer" it placed the dangerous
figure of the Duke of Gloster. It comprised the murder of Henry VI., the
wooing of Lady Anne,--not in a London street, but in a rural place, on
the road to Chertsey; the lamentation for King Edward IV.; the episode
of the boy princes; the condemnation of Hastings,--a scene that
brilliantly denotes the mingled artifice and savagery of Shakespeare's
Gloster; the Buckingham plot; the priest and mayor scene; the
temptation of Tyrrel; the fall of Buckingham; the march to