lmes type we must turn to the pages of Shakespeare. In the
number of his victims, the cruelty and insensibility with which he
attains his ends, his unblushing hypocrisy, the fascination he can
exercise at will over others, the Richard III. of Shakespeare shows how
clearly the poet understood the instinctive criminal of real life. The
Richard of history was no doubt less instinctively and deliberately an
assassin than the Richard of Shakespeare. In the former we can trace
the gradual temptation to crime to which circumstances provoke him. The
murder of the Princes, if, as one writer contends, it was not the work
of Henry VII.--in which case that monarch deserves to be hailed as
one of the most consummate criminals that ever breathed and the worthy
father of a criminal son--was no doubt forced to a certain extent on
Richard by the exigencies of his situation, one of those crimes to which
bad men are driven in order to secure the fruits of other crimes. But
the Richard of Shakespeare is no child of circumstance. He espouses
deliberately a career of crime, as deliberately as Peace or Holmes or
Butler; he sets out "determined to prove a villain," to be "subtle,
false and treacherous," to employ to gain his ends "stern murder in the
dir'st degree." The character is sometimes criticised as being overdrawn
and unreal. It may not be true to the Richard of history, but it is very
true to crime, and to the historical criminal of the Borgian or Prussian
type, in which fraud and violence are made part of a deliberate system
of so-called statecraft.

Shakespeare got nearer to what we may term the domestic as opposed to
the political criminal when he created Iago. In their envy and dislike
of their fellowmen, their contempt for humanity in general, their
callousness to the ordinary sympathies of human nature, Robert Butler,
Lacenaire, Ruloff are witnesses to the poet's fidelity to criminal
character in his drawing of the Ancient. But there is a weakness in
the character of Iago regarded as a purely instinctive and malignant
criminal; indeed it is a weakness in the consistency of the play. On two
occasions Iago states explicitly that Othello is more than suspected of
having committed adultery with his wife, Emilia, and that therefore he
has a strong and justifiable motive for being revenged on the Moor.
The thought of it he describes as "gnawing his inwards." Emilia's
conversation with Desdemona in the last act lends some colour to the