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178 ard III. more closely than over any other play. If we could see and know everything that Andrew Wise or Valentine Sims knew, when the one brought the manuscript copy to the printing-office of the other in 1597 and set the printers to work on the first quarto, we might explain many other things that, as it is, are wholly confounding. Allowing for the lines and passages which cannot be his, the quartos give us a little less and the folios a little more than Shakespeare himself wrote of the play. It is clear that some of the added lines in the folio were never written by him. Whom were they written by? We are quite willing to make a present of them to the Baconians. But one cannot help turning over and considering and reconsidering Andrew Wise's book of the play. For one thing, it tells us in so many words what the playgoer of 1596 or 1597 expected when he went to see Richard III. played on a summer's afternoon. He counted particularly, it is evident, upon Gloster's "treacherous plots against his brother Clarence" and his "pittiefull murther of his innocent nephewes"; and in a general way he was prepared to enjoy the spectacle of his "tyrannical usurpation, with the whole course of his detested life and most deserved death." All this was set forth in the open title-page that was probably exposed, as the custom was, in the shop-windows of "Paul's" yard. The folio changed the counts in the placard of the play, if so it may be called, into "the landing of Earle Richmond and the Battell of Bosworth Field": which again seems to hint at a clapping of the historian's over the playwright's label and announcement of his wares.

The Cheapside prentices of 1597 may have been disappointed not to see the "pittiefull murther" of the princes in the Tower enacted on the open stage. But there was much to gratify them. The murder of Clarence was enough to make the fortune of any play, with its novelty of a malmsey-butt in an imaginary adjoining chamber, and the "I'll drown you," and "exit with the body" and swift return of the first murderer at the close. The attributing of Clarence's murder to Gloster was not, as one used to think it was, Shakespeare's invention. Professor Churchill of Amherst, in his encyclopædic study of the Richard saga contributed to Palæstra, shows us that the murder of Clarence had already been added to Richard's crimes by the lumbering old moral ballad-monger who wrote "The Mirror for Magistrates." Professor Churchill, too, dates the ghost-business before Bosworth as far back as the chroniclers who wrote the history of Croyland Monastery (the second part of it), and who, being contemporaries of Richard and writing shortly after his death, may very well have been repeating what was an accepted and credited account of that night of demons and shadows which set Richard against Richard.

The Croyland scribe did what he could to perpetuate, thus early, the sinister fable of a Richard who was demon-directed, and who was the evil opposite of his successor, the heaven-sent Richmond. Then came John Rous, chaplain of Guy's Cliff, Warwick, another Richmond partisan (who, however, carried Richard no nearer his crookback than "insequales humeros," shoulders unequal), and Alderman Fabyan, who gave what we may call the city view of Richard's character, and cited the couplet often heard then and afterwards in London streets,—

The hog, or its heraldic equivalent, as Richard made use of it, which became Margaret's "abortive rooting hog" and Richmond's "usurping boar," figures, as we should expect, in most of the popular tags and rhymes of the Richard legend, and reappears with effect in the "Mirror for Magistrates":

Lord Bacon, who had a boar for his crest, too, might have been tempted, if he had ever written of Richard, to idealize him and redeem the rooting hog. Sir Thomas More, who did write of him, and who did more than any one before Shakespeare to establish his character for all time, certainly did not flatter Richard:—"Crokebacked, his left shoulder much higher than his right, and such