“He has no children!”
and then surges back to his own pitiful state, transformed for a moment into an infuriated creature, all instinct, from which a hell-kite has stolen his mate and pretty brood.
By what marvelous flash of poetic power Shakespeare in this mighty passage lifts that humblest image of parental care, a hen and chickens, into the heights of human passion. Ah! as one sees a hen with a brood of chickens under her,—how she gathers them under her wings, and will stay in the cold if she can but keep them warm,—one’s mind turns to those words of profound pathos spoken over the unloving Jerusalem; there was the voice of a nature into which was gathered all the father’s and the mother’s love. In these two passages one sees the irradiation of poor feathered life with the glory of the image of the highest.
How important a part in the drama of King Richard III. do the young princes play; as princes, indeed, in the unfolding of the plot, yet as children in the poet’s portraiture of them. We hear their childish prattle, we see their timid shrinking from the dark Tower, and then we have the effect of innocent childhood upon the callous murderers, Dighton and Forrest, as related in that short, sharp, dramatic account which Tyrrel gives:—
“Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn
To do this ruthless piece of butchery,
Although they were flesh’d villains, bloody dogs,
Melting with tenderness and kind compassion
Wept like two children in their deaths’ sad stories.