Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/260

Rh times, for when the King is led in humiliation through London, the Queen's spirit is roused, and she encourages her depressed Consort to lion-like resistance. “Bushy. Madam, your majesty is too much sad : You promis'd, when you parted with the King,

To lay aside life-harming heaviness, And entertain a cheerful disposition.

Queen. To please the King, I did ; to please myself, I cannot do it; yet I know no cause

Why I should welcome such a guest as grief, Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest As my sweet Richard : yet, again, methinks, Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune's womb, Is coming towards me; and my inward soul

With nothing trembles: at something it grieves More than with parting from my lord the King.

Bushy. Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, Which shew like grief itself, but are not so :

For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, Divides one thing entire to many objects, Like perspectives, which rightly gaz'd upon Distinguish proper form, but eyed awry, Shew nothing but confusion,--So your majesty, Looking awry upon your lord's departure, Finds shapes of griefs more than himself to wail ; Which, look'd on as it is, is nought but shadows

Of what it is not. Then, thrice-gracious queen, More than your lord's departure weep not ; more's not seen ; Or if it be, ’t is with false sorrow's eye, Which, for things true, weeps things imaginary. Queen. It may be so ; but yet my inward soul Persuades me it is otherwise :

Howe'er it be,

I cannot but be sad ; so heavy sad, As—though, in thinking, on no thought I think—

Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink.” In the above quotation, I have ventured with diffidence to alter the lines in italics from the original, in which, by some accident of writing or printing, the sense appears to have been perverted to the very contrary of that which it seems to me evident that it was intended to convey. In the original, the