Gloster's case "with sad unhelpful tears" we catch the very cadence of
Shakespeare's voice. But he does not confine his emendations to
the speeches of one personage: the sorrows of the lovers interest him as
their affection interested him in the "First Part of Henry VI.," and the
farewell words of Queen Margaret to Suffolk are especially
characteristic of our gentle poet:
"Oh, go not yet; even thus two friends condemned
Embrace and kiss and take ten thousand leaves,
Leather a hundred times to part than die.
Yet now farewell; and farewell life with thee."
This reminds me almost irresistibly of Juliet's words when parting with
Romeo, and of Imogen's words when Posthumus leaves her. Throughout the
play Henry is the poet's favourite, and in the gentle King's lament for
Gloster's death we find a peculiarity of Shakespeare's art. It was a
part of the cunning of his exquisite sensibility to invent a new word
whenever he was deeply moved, the intensity of feeling clothing itself
aptly in a novel epithet or image. A hundred examples of this might be
given, such as "The multitudinous seas incarnadine"; and so we find here
"paly lips." The passage is:
"Fain would I go to chafe his paly lips
With twenty thousand kisses and to drain
Upon his face an ocean of salt tears,
To tell my love unto his dumb deaf trunk
And with my finger feel his hand unfeeling."
It must be noticed, too, that in this "Second Part" the reviser begins
to show himself as something more than the sweet lyric poet. He
transposes scenes in order to intensify the interest, and where enemies
meet, like Clifford and York, instead of making them rant in mere blind
hatred, he allows them to show a generous admiration of each other's
qualities; in sum, we find here the germs of that dramatic talent which
was so soon to bear such marvellous fruit. No better example of
Shakespeare's growth in dramatic power and humour could be found than
the way he revises the scenes with Cade. It is very probable, as I have
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