portrayal of the fearful struggle between
wicked will and human weakness was in a noble vein of imagination,
profound in its sincerity, affecting in its pathos, and pictorial in its
treatment. In the earlier scenes his mood and his demeanour had been
suffused with a cool, gay, mockery of elegant cynicism. He killed King
Henry with a smile, in a scene of gloomy mystery that might have come
from the pencil of Gustave Dore. He looked upon the mourning Lady Anne
with cheerful irony and he wooed her with all the fervour that passion
and pathos can engender in the behaviour of a hypocrite. His
dissimulation with the princes and with the mayor and the nobles was to
the last degree specious. One of his finest points was the temptation of
Buckingham to murder the princes. There, and indeed at all points, was
observed the absence of even the faintest reminiscence of the ranting,
mouthing, flannel-jawed king of clubs who has so generally strutted and
bellowed as Shakespeare's Gloster. All was bold and telling in the
manner, and yet the manner was reticent with nature and fine with
well-bred continence.

With the throne scene began the spiritual conflict. At least it then
began to be disclosed; and from that moment onward the state of Richard
was seen to be that of Orestes pursued by the furies. But Mansfield was
right, and was consistent, in making the monarch faithful in his
devotion to evil. Richard's presentiments, pangs, and tremors are
intermittent. In the great, empty, darkening throne-room, with its
shadowy nooks and dim corners, shapeless and nameless spectres may
momentarily come upon him and shake his strong spirit with the sinister
menace of hell. Along the dark plains, on the fateful night before the
battle, the sad ghosts may drift and wander, moaning and wailing in the
ghastly gloom; and in that hour of haunted desolation the doomed king
may feel that, after all, he is but mortal man, and that his pre-ordered
destruction is close at hand and not to be averted; but Richard never
deceives himself; never palters with the goodness that he has scorned.
He dies as he has lived, defiant and terrible.

Mansfield's treatment of the ghost scenes at Bosworth was novel,
original, and poetic, and his death scene was not only a display of
personal prowess but a reproduction of historical fact. With a detail
like this the truth of history becomes useful, but in general the actor
cannot safely go back of the Shakespearean scheme. T