I?
BULLER.
Yea—you.
NORTH.
Richard III. is a hypocrite—a hard, cold murderer from of old—and yet you bear him. I suppose, friends, chiefly from his pre-eminent Intellectual Faculties, and his perfectly courageous and self-possessed Will. You do support your conscience—or traffic with it—by saying all along—we are only conducting him to the retribution of Bosworth Field. But, friends, if these motions in Macbeth, which look like revealings and breathings of some better elements, are sheer and vile hypocrisy—if it is merely his manhood that quails, which his wife has to virilify—a dastard and a hypocrite, and no more—I cannot abide him—there is too much of a bad business, and then I must think Shakspeare has committed an egregious error in Poetry. Richard III. is a bold, heroic hypocrite. He knows he is one. He lies to Man—never to his own Conscience, or to Heaven.
TALBOYS.
What?
NORTH.
Never. There he is clear-sighted, and stands, like Satan, in open and impious rebellion.
BULLER.