The feigned reconciliation of Gloucester with the Queen’s kinsmen, is also a master-piece. One of the finest features in the play, and which serves to shew, as much as any thing, the deep duplicity of Richard, is the unsuspecting security of Hastings, at the very time when the former is plotting his death.
Perhaps the two most beautiful passages in the original, are the farewell apostrophe of the Queen to the Tower, where her children are shut up from her, and Tyrrel’s description of their death. We will finish our quotations with them:—
Queen. Stay, yet look back with me, unto the Tower;
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes,
Whom envy hath immured within your walls;
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones;
Rude, rugged nurse, old sullen playfellow,
For tender princes!
The other passage is the account of their death by Tyrrel:—
Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn