When taken prisoner his thought is not of himself:
“O, this will make my mother die with grief.”
He is a woman-child in unselfish sympathy.
The whole of the exquisitely pathetic scene between Hubert and Arthur belongs, as one might have guessed, to Shakespeare, that is, the whole pathos of it belongs to him.
In the old play Arthur thanks Hubert for his care, calls him “curteous keeper,” and, in fact, behaves as the conventional prince. He has no words of such affecting appeal as Shakespeare puts into Arthur's mouth:
“I would to heaven
I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert.”
This love and longing for love is the characteristic of Shakespeare's Arthur; he goes on:
“Are you sick, Hubert? You look pale to-day.
In sooth, I would you were a little sick,
That I might sit all night and watch with you:
I warrant, I love you more than you do me.”
A girl could not be more tender, more anxious for love's assurance. In “The Troublesome Raigne,” when Hubert tells Arthur that he has bad news for him, tidings of “more hate than death,” Arthur faces the unknown with a man's courage; he asks:
“What is it, man? if needes be don,
Act it, and end it, that the paine were gon.”