o present Richard as
he probably was would be to present a man of some virtue as well as
great ability. Mansfield's acting revealed an amiable desire to infuse
as much goodness as possible into the Shakespearean conception, but he
obtained his chief success by acting the part substantially according to
Shakespeare and by setting and dressing the play with exceptional if not
altogether exact fidelity to the time, the places, and the persons that
are implicated in the story.

Shakespeare's Richard is a type of colossal will and of restless,
inordinate, terrific activity. The objects of his desire and his effort
are those objects which are incident to supreme power; but his chief
object is that assertion of himself which is irresistibly incited and
steadfastly compelled by the overwhelming, seething, acrid energy of his
feverish soul, burning and raging in his fiery body. He can no more help
projecting himself upon the affairs of the world than the malignant
cobra can help darting upon its prey. He is a vital, elemental force,
grisly, hectic, terrible, impelled by volcanic heat and electrified and
made lurid and deadly by the infernal purpose of restless wickedness. No
actor can impersonate Richard in an adequate manner who does not possess
transcendent force of will, combined with ambitious, incessant, and
restless mental activity. Mansfield in those respects is qualified for
the character, and out of his professional resources he was able to
supply the other elements that are requisite to its constitution and
fulfilment. He presented as Richard a sardonic, scoffing demon, who
nevertheless, somewhere in his complex nature, retains an element of
humanity. He embodied a character that is tragic in its ultimate effect,
but his method was that of the comedian. His portrayal of Richard,
except at those moments when it is veiled with craft and dissimulation,
or at those other and grander moments, infrequent but awful and
agonising, when it is convulsed with terror or with the anguish of
remorse, stood forth boldly in the sunshine, a crystallised and deadly
sarcasm, equally trenchant upon itself and all the world, equally
scornful of things human and things divine. That deadly assumption of
keen and mordant mockery, that cool, glittering, malignant lightness of
manner, was consistently sustained throughout the performance, while the
texture of it was made continuously entertaining by diversity of colour
and inflection, sequent o