NEW READINGS AND NEW RENDERINGS

OF

SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES

VOL. II.

NEW READINGS & NEW RENDERINGS

OF

SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES

BY

HENRY HALFORD VAUGHAN

SOMETIME Fellow of oriel college, and somETIME REGIUS professor of
MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

C. KEGAN PAUL & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQUARE

Malone H. 144t

[The rights of translation and of reproduction are

reserved]

EXPLANATORY NOTICE.

Of the four plays comprised in this volume the three latter, unlike the preceding historical tragedies, had, before its preparation for the press, not been the subject of any illustrative or emendatory notice on my part. Never attracting or affecting me quite as the other works of Shakespeare, nor indeed ever seeming to me to be his works, they had never been so perused as to engage me in spontaneous interpretation or restoration. Even up to the present hour too, of Shakespeare's close, bold, and subtle reasoning; his epigrammatic play of words and ideas; his grace and dignity of dialogue; his psychological curiosity; his metaphorical prodigality; his disclosed fruits of pensive experience; his encased kernels of consolidated thought; his touches of human nature, here finely caught, there mysteriously inspired; his world-wide illustration; his magical imagery of outward things reflected from the innermost sense of them; all involved in a stream of melody whose onflow becomes in itself pathetic;-of these from the three parts of Henry the Sixth I still miss some sensible measure.