A Study of Shakespeare Part 7

_Edward_. Still do I see in him delineate His mother's visage; those his eyes are hers, Who, looking wistly {262a} on me, made me blush; For faults against themselves give evidence: l.u.s.t is a fire; and men, like lanterns, show Light l.u.s.t within themselves even through themselves.

Away, loose silks of wavering vanity!

Shall the large limit of fair Brittany {262b} By me be overthrown? and shall I not Master this little mansion of myself?

Give me an armour of eternal steel; I go to conquer kings. And shall I then Subdue myself, and be my enemy's friend?

It must not be.--Come, boy, forward, advance!

Let's with our colours sweep the air of France.

Here Lodowick announces the approach of the Countess "with a smiling cheer."

_Edward_. Why, there it goes! that very smile of hers Hath ransomed captive France; and set the king, The dauphin, and the peers, at liberty.-- Go, leave me, Ned, and revel with thy friends. [_Exit_ PRINCE.

Thy mother is but black; and thou, like her, Dost put into my mind how foul she is.

Go, fetch the countess. .h.i.ther in thy hand, And let her chase away these winter clouds; For she gives beauty both to heaven and earth. [_Exit_ LODOWICK.

The sin is more, to hack and hew poor men, Than to embrace in an unlawful bed The register of all rarieties {263a} Since leathern Adam till this youngest hour.

_Re-enter_ LODOWICK _with the_ COUNTESS.

Go, Lodowick, put thy hand into my purse, Play, spend, give, riot, waste; do what thou wilt, So thou wilt hence awhile, and leave me here. [_Exit_ LODOWICK.

Having already, out of a desire and determination to do no possible injustice to the actual merits of this play in the eyes of any reader who might never have gone over the text on which I had to comment, exceeded in no small degree the limits I had intended to impose upon my task in the way of citation, I shall not give so full a transcript from the next and last scene between the Countess and the King.

_Edward_. Now, my soul's playfellow! art thou come To speak the more than heavenly word of yea To my objection in thy beauteous love?

(Again, this singular use of the word _objection_ in the sense of offer or proposal has no parallel in the plays of Shakespeare.)

_Countess_. My father on his blessing hath commanded--

_Edward_. That thou shalt yield to me.

_Countess_. Ay, dear my liege, your due.

_Edward_. And that, my dearest love, can be no less Than right for right, and render {263b} love for love.

_Countess_. Than wrong for wrong, and endless hate for hate.

But, sith I see your majesty so bent, That my unwillingness, my husband's love, Your high estate, nor no respect respected, Can be my help, but that your mightiness Will overbear and awe these dear regards, I bind my discontent to my content, And what I would not I'll compel I will; Provided that yourself remove those lets That stand between your highness' love and mine.

_Edward_. Name them, fair countess, and by heaven I will.

_Countess_. It is their lives that stand between our love That I would have choked up, my sovereign.

_Edward_. Whose lives, my lady?

_Countess_. My thrice loving liege, Your queen, and Salisbury my wedded husband; Who living have that t.i.tle in our love That we can not bestow but by their death.

_Edward_. Thy opposition {264a} is beyond our law.

_Countess_. So is your desire: If the law {264b} Can hinder you to execute the one, Let it forbid you to attempt the other: I cannot think you love me as you say Unless you do make good what you have sworn.

_Edward_. No more: thy husband and the queen shall die.

Fairer thou art by far than Hero was; Beardless Leander not so strong as I: He swom an easy current for his love; But I will, through a h.e.l.ly spout of blood, {264c} Arrive that Sestos where my Hero lies.

_Countess_. Nay, you'll do more; you'll make the river too With their heartbloods that keep our love asunder; Of which my husband and your wife are twain.

_Edward_. Thy beauty makes them guilty of their death And gives in evidence that they shall die; Upon which verdict I their judge condemn them.

_Countess_. O perjured beauty! more corrupted judge!

When, to the great star-chamber o'er our heads, The universal sessions calls to count This packing evil, we both shall tremble for it.

_Edward_. What says my fair love? is she resolute?

_Countess_. Resolute to be dissolved: {266} and, therefore, this: Keep but thy word, great king, and I am thine.

Stand where thou dost; I'll part a little from thee; And see how I will yield me to thy hands.

Here by my side do hang my wedding knives; Take thou the one, and with it kill thy queen, And learn by me to find her where she lies; And with the other I'll despatch my love, Which now lies fast asleep within my heart: When they are gone, then I'll consent to love.

Such genuinely good wine as this needs no bush. But from this point onwards I can find nothing especially commendable in the remainder of the scene except its brevity. The King of course abjures his purpose, and of course compares the Countess with Lucretia to the disadvantage of the Roman matron; summons his son, Warwick, and the attendant lords; appoints each man his post by sea or land; and starts for Flanders in a duly moral and military state of mind.

Here ends the first part of the play; and with it all possible indication, though never so shadowy, of the possible shadowy presence of Shakespeare. At the opening of the third act we are thrown among a wholly new set of characters and events, all utterly out of all harmony and keeping with all that has gone before. Edward alone survives as nominal protagonist; but this survival--a.s.suredly not of the fittest--is merely the survival of the shadow of a name. Anything more pitifully crude and feeble, more helplessly inartistic and incomposite, than this process or pretence of juncture where there is no juncture, this infantine s.h.i.+fting and shuffling of the scenes and figures, it is impossible to find among the rudest and weakest attempts of the dawning or declining drama in its first or second childhood.

It is the less necessary to a.n.a.lyse at any length the three remaining acts of this play, that the work has already been done to my hand, and well done, by Charles Knight; who, though no professed critic or esoteric expert in Shakespearean letters, approved himself by dint of sheer honesty and conscience not unworthy of a considerate hearing. To his edition of Shakespeare I therefore refer all readers desirous of further excerpts than I care to give.

The first scene of the third act is a storehouse of contemporary commonplace. Nothing fresher than such stale pot-pourri as the following is to be gathered up in thin sprinklings from off the dry flat soil. A messenger informs the French king that he has descried off sh.o.r.e

The proud armado (_sic_) of King Edward's s.h.i.+ps; Which at the first, far off when I did ken, Seemed as it were a grove of withered pines; But, drawing on, their glorious bright aspect, Their streaming ensigns wrought of coloured silk, Like to a meadow full of sundry flowers, Adorns the naked bosom of the earth;

and so on after the exactest and therefore feeblest fas.h.i.+on of the Pre- Marlowites; with equal regard, as may be seen, for grammar and for sense in the construction of his periods. The narrative of a sea-fight ensuing on this is pitiable beyond pity and contemptibly beneath contempt.

In the next scene we have a flying view of peasants in flight, with a description of five cities on fire not undeserving of its place in the play, immediately after the preceding sea-piece: but relieved by such wealth of pleasantry as marks the following jest, in which the most purblind eye will be the quickest to discover a touch of the genuine Shakespearean humour.

_1st Frenchman_. What, is it quarter-day, that you remove, And carry bag and baggage too?

_2nd Frenchman_. Quarter-day? ay, and quartering-day, I fear.

_Euge_!

The scene of debate before Cressy is equally flat and futile, vulgar and verbose; yet in this Sham Shakespearean scene of our present poeticule's I have noted one genuine Shakespearean word, "solely singular for its singleness."

So may thy temples with Bellona's hand Be still adorned with laurel victory!

In this notably inelegant expression of goodwill we find the same use of the word "laurel" as an adjective and epithet of victory which thus confronts us in the penultimate speech of the third scene in the first act of _Antony and Cleopatra_.

Upon your sword Sit laurel victory, and smooth success Be strewed before your feet!

There is something more (as less there could not be) of spirit and movement in the battle-scene where Edward refuses to send relief to his son, wis.h.i.+ng the prince to win his spurs unaided, and earn the first-fruits of his fame single-handed against the heaviest odds; but the forcible feebleness of a minor poet's fancy shows itself amusingly in the mock stoicism and braggart philosophy of the King's rea.s.suring reflection, "We have more sons than one."

In the first and third scenes of the fourth act we may concede some slight merit to the picture of a chivalrous emulation in magnanimity between the Duke of Burgundy and his former fellow-student, whose refusal to break his parole as a prisoner extorts from his friend the concession refused to his importunity as an envoy: but the execution is by no means worthy of the subject.

The limp loquacity of long-winded rhetoric, so natural to men and soldiers in an hour of emergency, which distinguishes the dialogue between the Black Prince and Audley on the verge of battle, is relieved by this one last touch of quasi-Shakespearean thought or style discoverable in the play of which I must presently take a short--and a long--farewell.

Death's name is much more mighty than his deeds: Thy parcelling this power hath made it more.

As many sands as these my hands can hold Are but my handful of so many sands; Then all the world--and call it but a power-- Easily ta'en up, and {269} quickly thrown away; But if I stand to count them sand by sand The number would confound my memory And make a thousand millions of a task Which briefly is no more indeed than one.

These quartered squadrons and these regiments Before, behind us, and on either hand, Are but a power: When we name a man, His hand, his foot, his head, have several strengths; And being all but one self instant strength, Why, all this many, Audley, is but one, And we can call it all but one man's strength.