n changing moods; so that Richard was shown as
a creature of the possible world of mankind and not as a fiction of the
stage.

The part was acted by him: it was not declaimed. He made, indeed, a
skilful use of his uncommon voice--keeping its tones light, sweet, and
superficial during the earlier scenes (while yet, in accordance with his
theory of development, Gloster is the personification of evil purpose
only beginning to ripen into evil deed), and then permitting them to
become deeper and more significant and thrilling as the man grows old in
crime and haggard and convulsed in self-conflict and misery. But it was
less with vocal excellence that the auditor was impressed than with the
actor's identification with the part and his revelation of the soul of
it. When first presented Gloster was a mocking devil. The murder of
King Henry was done with malice, but the malice was enwrapped with glee.
In the wooing of Lady Anne there was both heart and passion, but the
mood was that of lightsome duplicity. It is not until years of scheming
and of evil acts, engendering, promoting, and sustaining a condition of
mental horror and torture, have ravaged his person and set their seal
upon him, in sunken cheek and hollow eye, in shattered nerves and deep
and thrilling voice, surcharged at once with inveterate purpose and with
incessant agony, that this light manner vanishes, and the demeanour and
action of the wicked monarch becomes ruthless, direct, and terrible.
Whether, upon the basis of a play so discursive, so episodical, so
irresolutely defined as Shakespeare's _Richard the Third_, that theory
of the development of its central character is logically tenable is a
dubious question. In Shakespeare the character is presented full-grown
at the start, and then, through a confused tangle of historical events,
is launched into action. Nevertheless in his practical application of it
Mansfield made his theory effective by a novel, powerful, interesting
performance. You could not help perceiving in Mansfield's embodiment
that Gloster was passing through phases of experience--that the man
changed, as men do change in life, the integral character remaining the
same in its original fibre, but the condition varying, in accordance
with the reaction of conduct upon temperament and conscience.

Mansfield deeply moved his audience in the repulse of Buckingham, in the
moody menace of the absent Stanley, in the denunciation of Hastings, and
in the