Enter Groom. GROOM. Hail, royal prince! K. RICH. Thanks, noble peer; The cheapest of us is ten groats too dear. What art thou? and how comest thou hither, Where no man never comes, but that sad dog That brings me food, to make misfortune live? GROOM. I was a poor groom of thy stable, king, When thou wert king; who, travelling towards York, With much ado, at length have gotten leave To look upon my sometimes master's face. wears her cap out of fashion, richly suited, but unsuitable; just like the brooch and the toothpick, which wear not now.” MALONE. That the word brooch was applied to a particular kind of ornament is certain; but it also signifies a jewel in general: and it appears to me, that Richard means to say that love to him was a strange jewel in an all-hating world, without any reference to the fashion of wearing brooches. M. MASON. in this all-hating world.] I believe the meaning is, this world in which I am universally hated. JOHNSon. I think, he rather means a world in which the spirit of hatred was prevalent. M. MASON. * Where no man never comes, but that sad dog-] It should be remembered that the word sad was in the time of our author used for grave. The expression will then be the same as if he had said, that grave, that gloomy villain. So, in Holinshed, p. 730: "With that, the recorder called Fitzwilliam, a sad man, and an honest," &c. STEEVEns. 5 sometimes master's face.] Sometimes was used for formerly, as well as sometime, which the modern editors have substituted. So, in Speed's History of Great Britaine, 1611:— "A catalogue of the religious houses, &c. sometimes in England and Wales." MALONE. The old copy, redundantly · sometimes royal master's face. STEEVENS. O, how it yern'd my heart, when I beheld, How went he under him? GROOM. So proudly, as if he disdain'd the ground. K. RICH. So proud that Bolingbroke was on his back! That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand; Rode he on Barbary?] This story of Roan Barbary might have been of Shakspeare's own invention. Froissart, however, relates a yet more silly tale concerning a favourite grey hound of King Richard's, "who was wont to lepe upon the King, but left the King and came to the erle of Derby duke of Lancastre, and made to hym the same frendly countinaunce and chere as he was wonte to do to the King," &c. Froissart, Vol. II. fo. CCC.xxx. STEEVENS. 7 by jauncing Bolingbroke.] Jaunce and jaunt were synonymous words. Ben Jonson uses geances in his Tale of a Tub: "I would I had a few more geances of it: STEEVENS. Enter Keeper, with a Dish. KEEP. Fellow, give place; here is no longer stay. [To the Groom. K. RICH. If thou love me, 'tis time thou wert away. GROOM. What my tongue dares not, that my heart shall say. [Exit. KEEP. My lord, will't please you to fall to? K. RICH. Taste of it first, as thou art wont to do. KEEP. My lord, I dare not? sir Pierce of Exton, who Lately came from the king, commands the contrary. K. RICH. The devil take Henry of Lancaster, and thee! Patience is stale, and I am weary of it. [Beats the Keeper. KEEP. Help, help, help!. Enter EXTON, and Servants, armed. K.RICH. How now? what means death in this rude assault? Villain, thy own hand yields thy death's instrument. [Snatching a weapon, and killing one. Go thou, and fill another room in hell. [He kills another, then ExTON strikes him down. That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire, That staggers thus my person.-Exton, thy fierce hand Hath with the king's blood stain'd the king's own land. Mount, mount, my soul! thy seat is up on high; Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die. [Dies. here to die.] Shakspeare in this scene has followed Holinshed, who took his account of Richard's death from Hall, as Hall did from Fabian, in whose Chronicle, I believe, this story of Sir Piers of Exton first appeared. Froissart, who had been in England in 1396, and who appears to have finished his Chronicle soon after the death of the King, says, "how he died, and by what meanes, I could not tell whanne I wrote this cronicle." Had he been murdered by eight armed men, (for such is Fabian's story,) "four of whom he slew with his own hand," and from whom he must have received many wounds, surely such an event must have reached the ears of Froissart, who had a great regard for the King, having received from him at his departure from England "a goblet of silver and gilt, waying two marke of silver, and within it a C. nobles; by the wych (he adds) I am as yet the better, and shal be as longe as I live; wherefore I am bounde to praye to God for his soule, and wyth muche sorowe I wryte of his deathe.” Nor is this story of his murder consistent with the account (which is not controverted) of his body being brought to London and exposed in Cheapside for two hours, ("his heade on a blacke quishen, and his vysage open,") where it was viewed, says Froissart, by twenty thousand persons. The account given by Stowe, who seems to have had before him a Manuscript History of the latter part of Richard's life, written by a person who was with him in Wales, appears much more probable. He says, "he was imprisoned in Pomfrait Castle, where xv dayes and nightes they vexed him with continuall hunger, thirst, and cold, and finally bereft him of his life, with such a kind of death as never before that time was knowen in England, saith Sir John Fortiscute," probably in his Declaration touching the Title of the House of Yorke, a work yet, I believe, somewhere existing in MS. Sir John Fortescue was called to the bar a few years after the death of Richard: living therefore so near the time, his testimony is of the highest weight. And with him Harding, who is supposed to have been at the battle of Shrewsbury, in 1403, concurs: "Men sayd for-hungered he was." Chron. 1543, fol. 199. So also, Walsingham, who wrote in the time of Henry V. and Polydore Virgil. The Percies in the Manifesto which they published against King Henry IV. in the third yeare of his reign, the day before the battle of Shrewsbury, expressly charge him with having "carried EXTON. As full of valour, as of royal blood: Both have I spilt; O, would the deed were good! For now the devil, that told me—I did well, Says, that this deed is chronicled in hell. This dead king to the living king I'll bear;Take hence the rest, and give them burial here. [Exeunt. his sovereign lord traiterously within the castell of Pomfret, without the consent or the judgement of the lordes of the realm, by the space of fiftene daies and so many nightes, (which is horrible among Christian people to be heard,) with hunger, thirst, and cold, to perishe." Had the story of Sir Pierce of Exton been true, it undoubtedly must have reached them. Their not mentioning it is decisive. If, however, we are to give credit to Sir John Hayward, this controverted point will not admit. of dispute; for in The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV. 4to. 1599, after relating the story of King Richard's assassination, he very gravely tells us, that "after being felled to the ground, he with a faint and feeble voice groaned forth these words: "My great grandfather Edward II." &c." Mr. Hume, in his entertaining, but often superficial, History of England, has not been weak enough to insert this fictitious dying speech. He might, however, have inserted it with as much propriety as an abridgement of the oration of the Bishop of Carlisle, on the deposition of the King being propounded in parliament, which Hayward feigned in imitation of Livy, grounding himself on a few sentences preserved in our old Chronicles, which he has expanded into thirteen quarto pages. The writers of The Parliamentary History have in this matter been as careless as Mr. Hume. MALONE. 9 Dies.] The representation here given of the King's death is perfectly agreeable to Hall and Holinshed. But the fact was otherwise. He refused food for several days, and died of abstinence and a broken heart. See Walsingham, Otterbourne, the Monk of Evesham, the continuator of the History of Croyland, and the anonymous Godstow Chronicle. RITSON. |