..."
Here we have the philosopher playing with his own thoughts; but soon the
Hamlet-melancholy comes to tune the meditation to sadness, and
Shakespeare speaks to us directly:
"Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again; and by and by
Think, that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing; but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing."
Later, one hears Kent's lament for Lear in Richard's words:
"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.
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