devoted to this exposition I of course include the whole of the death-
scene of Gaunt, as well the part which precedes as the part which follows
the actual appearance of his nephew on the stage; and into these scenes
the intrusion of rhyme is rare and brief. They are written almost wholly
in pure and fluent rather than vigorous or various blank verse; though I
cannot discern in any of them an equality in power and passion to the
magnificent scene of abdication in Marlowe's _Edward II_. This play, I
think, must undoubtedly be regarded as the immediate model of
Shakespeare's; and the comparison is one of inexhaustible interest to all
students of dramatic poetry. To the highest height of the earlier master
I do not think that the mightier poet who was as yet in great measure his
pupil has ever risen in this the first (as I take it) of his historic
plays. Of composition and proportion he has perhaps already a somewhat
better idea. But in grasp of character, always excepting the one central
figure of the piece, we find his hand as yet the unsteadier of the two.
Even after a lifelong study of this as of all other plays of Shakespeare,
it is for me at least impossible to determine what I doubt if the poet
could himself have clearly defined--the main principle, the motive and
the meaning of such characters as York, Norfolk, and Aumerle. The
Gaveston and the Mortimer of Marlowe are far more solid and definite
figures than these; yet none after that of Richard is more important to
the scheme of Shakespeare. They are fitful, shifting, vaporous: their
outlines change, withdraw, dissolve, and "leave not a rack behind." They,
not Antony, are like the clouds of evening described in the most glorious
of so many glorious passages put long afterwards by Shakespeare into the
mouth of his latest Roman hero. They "cannot hold this visible shape" in
which the poet at first presents them even long enough to leave a
distinct image, a decisive impression for better or for worse, upon the
mind's eye of the most simple and open-hearted reader. They are ghosts,
not men; _simulacra modis pallentia miris_. You cannot descry so much as