the original intention of the artist's hand which began to draw and
relaxed its hold of the brush before the first lines were fairly traced.
And in the last, the worst and weakest scene of all, in which York pleads
with Bolingbroke for the death of the son whose mother pleads against her
husband for his life, there is a final relapse into rhyme and rhyming
epigram, into the "jigging vein" dried up (we might have hoped) long
since by the very glance of Marlowe's Apollonian scorn. It would be
easy, agreeable, and irrational to ascribe without further evidence than
its badness this misconceived and misshapen scene to some other hand than
Shakespeare's. It is below the weakest, the rudest, the hastiest scene
attributable to Marlowe; it is false, wrong, artificial beyond the worst
of his bad and boyish work; but it has a certain likeness for the worse
to the crudest work of Shakespeare. It is difficult to say to what
depths of bad taste the writer of certain passages in _Venus and Adonis_
could not fall before his genius or his judgment was full-grown. To
invent an earlier play on the subject and imagine this scene a surviving
fragment, a floating waif of that imaginary wreck, would in my opinion be
an uncritical mode of evading the question at issue. It must be regarded
as the last hysterical struggle of rhyme to maintain its place in
tragedy; and the explanation, I would fain say the excuse, of its
reappearance may perhaps be simply this; that the poet was not yet
dramatist enough to feel for each of his characters an equal or
proportionate regard; to divide and disperse his interest among the
various crowd of figures which claim each in its place, and each after
its kind, fair and adequate share of their creator's attention and
sympathy. His present interest was here wholly concentrated on the
single figure of Richard; and when that for the time was absent, the
subordinate figures became to him but heavy and vexatious encumbrances,
to be shifted on and off the stage with as much of haste and as little of
labour as might be possible to an impatient and uncertain hand. Now all