“How these vain weak nails
May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls.”
To Richard music is “sweet music,” as it is to all the characters that are merely Shakespeare's masks, and the scene in which Hamlet asks Guildenstern to “play upon the pipe” is prefigured for us in Richard's self-reproach:
“And here have I the daintiness of ear,
To check time broke in a disordered string;
But for the concord of my state and time,
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.”
In the last three lines of this monologue which I am now about to quote, I can hear Shakespeare speaking as plainly as he spoke in Arthur's appeals; the feminine longing for love is the unmistakable note:
“Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!
For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard
Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world.”
And at the last, by killing the servant who assaults him, this Richard shows that he has the “something desperate” in him of which Hamlet boasted.
The murderer's praise that this irresolute-weak and loving Richard is “as full of valour as of royal blood” is nothing more than an excellent instance of Shakespeare's self-illusion. He comes nearer the fact in “Measure for Measure,” where the Duke, his other self, is shown to be “an unhurtful opposite” too gentle-kind to remember an injury or punish the offender, and he rings the bell at truth's centre when, in “Julius Caesar,” his mask Brutus admits that he
“... carries anger as the flint bears fire
Who much enforcèd shows a hasty spark
And straight is cold again.”
If a hasty blow were proof of valour then Walter Scott's Eachin in “The Fair Maid of Perth” would be called brave. But courage to be worth the name must be founded on stubborn resolution, and all Shakespeare's incarnations, and in especial this Richard, are as unstable as water.
The whole play is summed up in York's pathetic description of Richard's entrance into London: