Page:William Hazlitt - Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817).djvu/264

234 You may partake of any thing we say: We speak no treason, man—we say the king Is wise and virtuous, and his noble queen Well strook in years, fair, and not jealous. We say that Shore's wife hath a pretty foot, A cherry lip, a passing pleasing tongue; That the queen's kindred are made gentlefolks. How say you, sir? Can you deny all this? Brakenbury. With this, my lord, myself have nought to do. Gloucester. What, fellow, naught to do with mistress Shore? I tell you, sir, he that doth naught with her, Excepting one, were best to do it secretly alone. Brakenbury. What one, my lord? Gloucester. Her husband, knave—would'st thou betray me?"

The feigned reconciliation of Gloucester with the queen's kinsmen is also a master-piece. One of the finest strokes in the play, and which serves to shew as much as any thing the deep, plausible manners of Richard, is the unsuspecting security of Hastings, at the very time when the former is plotting his death, and when that very appearance of cordiality and good-humour on which Hastings builds his confidence arises from Richard's consciousness of having betrayed him to his ruin. This, with the whole character of Hastings, is omitted.

Perhaps the two most beautiful passages in the original play are the farewelfarewell [sic] apostrophe of the queen to the Tower, where her children are