The
Gaveston and the Mortimer of Marlowe are far more solid and definite
figures than these; yet none after that of Richard is more important to
the scheme of Shakespeare. They are fitful, shifting, vaporous: their
outlines change, withdraw, dissolve, and "leave not a rack behind." They,
not Antony, are like the clouds of evening described in the most glorious
of so many glorious passages put long afterwards by Shakespeare into the
mouth of his latest Roman hero. They "cannot hold this visible shape" in
which the poet at first presents them even long enough to leave a
distinct image, a decisive impression for better or for worse, upon the
mind's eye of the most simple and open-hearted reader. They are ghosts,
not men; _simulacra modis pallentia miris_. You cannot descry so much as
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.
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