“Chimney-pieces!” &c.
The whole of this speech seems corrupt; and if accurately printed,—that
is, if the same in all the prior editions,—irremediable but by bold
conjecture. “_Till_ my tackle,” should be, I think, “_While_,” &c.
Act iii. sc. 1. B. and F. always write as if virtue or goodness were a
sort of talisman, or strange something, that might be lost without the
least fault on the part of the owner. In short, their chaste ladies value
their chastity as a material thing,—not as an act or state of being; and
this mere thing being imaginary, no wonder that all their women are
represented with the minds of strumpets, except a few irrational
humourists, far less capable of exciting our sympathy than a Hindoo who
has had a basin of cow-broth thrown over him;—for this, though a debasing
superstition, is still real, and we might pity the poor wretch, though we
cannot help despising him. But B. and F.’s Lucinas are clumsy fictions. It
is too plain that the authors had no one idea of chastity as a virtue, but
only such a conception as a blind man might have of the power of seeing by
handling an ox’s eye. In _The Queen of Corinth_, indeed, they talk
differently; but it is all talk, and nothing is real in it but the dread
of losing a reputation. Hence the frightful contrast between their women
(even those who are meant for virtuous) and Shakespeare’s. So, for
instance, _The Maid in the Mill_:—a woman must not merely have grown old
in brothels, but have chuckled over every abomination committed in them
with a rampant sympathy of imagination, to have had her fancy so drunk
with the _minutiæ_ of lechery as this icy chaste virgin evinces hers to
have been.
It would be worth while to note how many of these plays are founded on
rapes,—how many on incestuous passions, and how many on mere lunacies.
Then their virtuous women are either crazy superstitions of a mere bodily
negation of having been acted on, or strumpets in their imaginations and
wishes, or, as in this _Maid in the Mill_, both at the same time. In the
men, the love is merely lust in one direction,—exclusive preference of one
object. The tyrant’s speeches are mostly taken from the mouths of
indignant denouncers of the tyrant’s character, with the substitution of
“I” for “he,”" and the omission of the prefatory “he acts as if he
thought” so and so. The only feelings they can possibly excite are disgust
at the Æciuses, if regarded as sane loyalists, or compassion if considered
as Bedlamites. So much for their tragedies. But even their comedies are,
most of them, disturbed by the fantasticalness, or gross caricature, of
the persons or incidents. There are few characters that you can really
like (even though you should have erased from your mind all the filth
which bespatters the most likeable of them, as Piniero in _The Island
Princess_ for instance),—scarcely one whom you can love. How different
this from Shakespeare, who makes one have a sort of sneaking affection
even for his Barnardines;—whose very Iagos and Richards are awful, and, by
the counteracting power of profound intellects, rendered fearful rather
than hateful;—and even the exceptions, as Goneril and Regan, are proofs of
superlative judgment and the finest moral tact, in being left utter
monsters, _nulla virtute redemptæ_, and in being kept out of sight as much
as possible,—they being, indeed, only means for the excitement and
deepening of noblest emotions towards the Lear, Cordelia, &c. and employed
with the severest economy! But even Shakespeare’s grossness—that which is
really so, independently of the increase in modern times of vicious
associations with things indifferent (for there is a state of manners
conceivable so pure, that the language of Hamlet at Ophelia’s feet might
be a harmless rallying, or playful teazing, of a shame that would exist in
Paradise)—at the worst, how diverse in kind is it from Beaumont and
Fletcher’s! In Shakespeare it is the mere generalities of sex, mere words
for the most part, seldom or never distinct images, all head-work, and
fancy drolleries; there is no sensation supposed in the speaker. I need
not proceed to contrast this with B. and F.
“Rollo.”
This, perhaps, the most energetic of Fletcher’s tragedies. He evidently
aimed at a new Richard III. in Rollo;—but, as in all his other imitations
of Shakespeare, he was not philosopher enough to bottom his original.
Thus, in Rollo, he has produced a mere personification of outrageous
wickedness, with no fundamental characteristic impulses to make either the
tyrant’s words or actions philosophically intelligible. Hence the most
pathetic situations border on the horrible, and what he meant for the
terrible, is either hateful, τὸ μισητὸν, or ludicrous. The scene of
Baldwin’s sentence in the third act is probably the grandest working of
passion in all B. and F.’s dramas;—but the very magnificence of filial
affection given to Edith, in this noble scene, renders the after scene (in
imitation of one of the least Shakespearian of all Shakespeare’s works, if
it be his, the scene between Richard and Lady Anne) in which Edith is
yielding to a few words and tears, not only unnatural, but disgusting. In
Shakespeare, Lady Anne is described as a weak, vain, very woman
throughout.