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124 appears in Shakespeare; (2) Gloucester is killed by Lapoole and not by Norfolk; (3) the King is presented in an unsympathetic light throughout; (4) its end, with the King in the hands of the barons, does not join on with the beginning of Shakespeare's play.

Shakespeare's allusive treatment, it must be said, of the historical events of a reign two centuries removed from the time of his production presumes a familiarity on the part of the play-going public due either to other plays on the earlier part of the reign or to the persistent discussion of Richard II in poems like Daniel's and histories like Haywarde's First Part of the Life and Raigne of Henrie the IV. All these it is likely that Shakespeare used, not as source, but rather as background.

The first edition of the Ciuile Wars of Samuel Daniel (1595) stands in a different relation. R. G. White had the idea that two editions of Daniel's work appeared in 1595, the second of which showed several modifications in the sense of conformity to Richard II. Unfortunately, there is no objective evidence for this belief, and the modifications really date from 1599 and 1601. Aside from verbal parallels like C. W. I. 83 with III. ii. 106–111, I. 60 with I. i. 9, and IV. 90 with II. i. 44, there are at least two important departures from Holinshed common to both. One is the representation of Queen Isabel as of woman's estate, meeting and lamenting with her husband in his disgrace. The other is Richard's soliloquy in Pomfret Castle, just before his murder.

There is no proof that there was borrowing by either author from the other; since, however, in both cases Daniel's passages are cruder and tamer, besides being far from identical in substance with Shakespeare's, it seems more likely that the latter took the ideas of Daniel, infusing the soliloquy with