He makes the earl appear
everywhere with a noble and knightly grace, and talk in language
suitable to it; nay, he sometimes puts very beautiful and even
elevated passages, into his mouth. At the same time he is very far
from writing after the manner of Schiller, who was fond of painting
the devil black, and whose moral approval or disapproval of the
characters which he presented could be heard in their own words. With
Shakespeare, and also with Goethe, every character, as long as he is
on the stage and speaking, seems to be absolutely in the right, even
though it were the devil himself. In this respect let the reader
compare Duke Alba as he appears in Goethe with the same character in
Schiller.
We make the acquaintance of the Earl of Northumberland in the play of
_Richard II_., where he is the first to hatch a plot against the King
in favour of Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry IV., to whom he even offers
some personal flattery (Act II., Sc. 3). In the following act he
suffers a reprimand because, in speaking of the King he talks of him
as "Richard," without more ado, but protests that he did it only for
brevity's sake. A little later his insidious words induce the King to
surrender. In the following act, when the King renounces the crown,
Northumberland treats him with such harshness and contempt that the
unlucky monarch is quite broken, and losing all patience once more
exclaims to him: _Fiend, thou torment'st me ere I come to hell_! At
the close, Northumberland announces to the new King that he has sent
the heads of the former King's adherents to London.
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