KING RICH.-Know'st thou not any whom corrupting gold Would tempt unto a close exploit of death?

Our tragic villain has become a tyrant of comic opera! He falls into line in our minds with Mr. Gilbert's Mikado, gloating over the invention of a fresh torture, "something with boiling oil in it," and with Alice's Queen in Wonderland, who never opens her lips but to shout, "Chop off his head!"

It says much both for Sir Henry Irving's acumen and for his courage that, despite all stage traditions to the contrary, he not only perceived the transformation of Richard, in relation to the public, but insisted upon giving full effect to it on the stage. There was not a comic feature of Richard's villainy which he did not bring into relief. He made the man openly laugh at himself, and revel in his crimes. When the humorist in Richard is at his best as when he plays Don Juan with Lady Anne, or Tartuffe with the Lord Mayor-then Sir Henry was at his best, too. But, as I began by saying, if he made the most of the fun, it was peculiarly true of him that he was "funny without being vulgar." He was "always a gentleman-not a vulgar stabber," as was once said of an earlier actor in the part. Charles Lamb speaks of "the lofty genius, the man of vast capacity, the profound, the witty, the accomplished Richard." Sir Henry showed us these qualities; but he showed them to us in the right light, as not inconsistent with what has now become an essentially comic character.

A Renaissance Play

“Dr. Faustus.”—In Mr. Thomas Hardy's "Woodlanders" a village girl says to her tempter, "You go on like the Devil to Dr. Faustus in the penny book." We are to conclude that a chap-book familiar to Londoners in the days of Elizabeth is still read in the heart of Wessex. Though no copy of it happens to have fallen into my hands, I am quite sure that it is unlike "The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus," which Christopher Marlowe is said to have founded on it. For the play is what no chap-book could ever be, a severely academic exercise. It is written for scholars, about scholars, by a scholar. It bristles with Latin quotations, and, what is even more significant of the public to which it was addressed, with incomplete quotations-passages terminating abruptly in an "etc.," as though merely indicated by a University lecturer to an audience who are no less familiar than he is with the context. Faustus himself is, in Marlowe's picture of him, pre-eminently a scholar. Every undergraduate is aware that there is always a great man of

his "year," a prodigy of erudition, who has taken the Hertford, and the Craven, and the Ireland, and is reputed in his "viva" to have floored all the examiners. Faustus is that man. What he doesn't know isn't knowledge. The same halo of omniscience is over him as was over the late Master of Balliol. He is the archetype of the undergraduate's hero, and the play is the typical bookworm's play. This Faustus is not the magic-monger of the chap-book, nor the ironic philosopher of Goethe, still less, of course, the sentimental Don Juan of Gounod's librettists, but simply a bookman. Throughout the play Marlowe makes books the great factor in Faustus's life, and they even become important stage "properties." In the very first scene you have Faustus taking up the Hundred Best Books of the period one by one, and reading extracts from them aloudAristotle and Galen and Justinian and Jerome's Bible. "Books that have influenced me," he might call them all, in the style attributed to celebrities by the modern interviewer. By means of a book Mephistophilis confers magical powers upon Faustus—

Here, take this book, peruse it thoroughly;

That is the bookman's

and Faustus's final cry as the devils are carrying him below is, "I'll burn my books." notion of the supreme sacrifice.

Even when Faustus is

not taking books and perusing them thoroughly, he is asking other people questions out of them.

Sometimes

the subject is astronomy, as when he asks Mephistophilis

"How many heavens, or spheres, are there?" and

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Why have we not conjunctions, oppositions, aspects, eclipses, all at one time, but in some years we have more, some less?" Sometimes it is climatology, as when he explains to the Duchess of Vanholt how "the year is divided into two circles over the whole world; that, when it is here winter with us, in the contrary circle it is summer with them, as in India, Saba, and farther countries in the East." Even when he goes to

Rome, it is not to do as the Romans do, but, as the chorus gravely informs us, "to prove cosmography "oddly enough anticipating the feat which M. Zola performed after the same expedition-and Mephistophilis is not so much a tempter as a cicerone who has crammed up the guide-book, and imparts useful information to his pupil, as Mr. Barlow imparted it to Harry Sandford. So that at times the play has the air of an examinee's nightmare.

Looking at this aspect of the play, you will be tempted to compare Marlowe's picture of Faustus's mind, or rather his projection of his own mind into Faustus's, with the passion for knowledge as knowledge of Diderot and the Encyclopædists. But of course this passion was an even more conspicuous characteristic of the men of the Renaissance, and Marlowe's intellectual curiosity is easily paralleled in Montaigne and Rabelais, and, to take an extreme instance, in that last-born child of the Renaissance, Sir Thomas Browne. There is another peculiarity of the Renaissance which is very strongly

marked in Marlowe's play. I mean its queer hybrid quality, its incongruous juxtaposition of things Christian and things Pagan, its medley of Mediævalism and Hellenism. Zwinglius (whom, I hasten to say, I have not had the pleasure of reading; my authority is M. Émile Faguet's "Seizième Siècle ") provoked the indignation of Bossuet by peopling heaven pell-mell with Adam, Jesus, Moses, Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, and Cato: and in the "Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum" of Ulrich von Hutten, you find Jesus compared to Cadmus and Semele to the Virgin Mary. So in Marlowe you have Faustus striving to forget Lucifer and the mediæval hell with Helen of Troy, and dreaming the dream of Ronsard and Wordsworth, the dream of being in a creed outworn":

a pagan suckled

I will be Paris, and for love of thee,

Instead of Troy shall Wertemberg be sacked;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumèd crest :
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.

The same curious jumble of past and present ideas is seen in the desire of the Emperor of Germany to be shown the spirits of Alexander and his "paramour." In short, "Dr. Faustus" breathes the spirit of the Renaissance in every line. It is the glorification—for of course one sees that the dramatist's sympathies are with Faustus throughout-of intellectual curiosity generally, and, more particularly, of that "goût de l'exotique