HISTORICAL CHARACTERS. (continued 2)

And in a very opposite mood, when struggling with the consciousness of her own helpless situation, the same susceptible and excitable fancy still predominates:—

It is the power of imagination which gives so peculiar a tinge to the maternal tenderness of Constance; she not only loves her son with the fond instinct of a mother's affection, but she loves him with her poetical imagination, exults in his beauty and his royal birth, hangs over him with idolatry, and sees his infant brow already encircled with the diadem. Her proud spirit, her ardent enthusiastic fancy, and her energetic self-will, all combine with her maternal love to give it that tone and character which belongs to her only: hence that most beautiful address to her son, which coming from the lips of Constance, is as full of nature and truth as of pathos and poetry, and which we could hardly sympathize with in any other:—

It is this exceeding vivacity of imagination which in the end turns sorrow to frenzy. Constance is not only a bereaved and doating mother, but a generous woman, betrayed by her own rash confidence; in whose mind the sense of injury mingling with the sense of grief, and her impetuous temper conflicting with her pride, combine to overset her reason; yet she is not mad: and how admirably, how forcibly she herself draws the distinction between the frantic violence of uncontrolled feeling and actual madness!—

Not only has Constance words at will, and fast as the passionate feelings rise in her mind they are poured forth with vivid, overpowering eloquence; but, like Juliet, she may be said to speak in pictures. For instance:—

And throughout the whole dialogue there is the same overflow of eloquence, the same splendor of diction, the same luxuriance of imagery; yet with an added grandeur, arising from habits of command, from the age, the rank, and the matronly character of Constance. Thus Juliet pours forth her love like a muse in a rapture: Constance raves in her sorrow like a Pythoness possessed with the spirit of pain. The love of Juliet is deep and infinite as the boundless sea: and the grief of Constance is so great, that nothing but the round world itself is able to sustain it.

An image more majestic, more wonderfully sublime, was never presented to the fancy; yet almost equal as a flight of poetry is her apostrophe to the heavens;—

And again—

Not only do her thoughts start into images, but her feelings become persons: grief haunts her as a living presence:

And death is welcomed as a bridegroom; she sees the visionary monster as Juliet saw "the bloody Tybalt festering in his shroud," and heaps one ghastly image upon another with all the wild luxuriance of a distempered fancy:—

Constance, who is a majestic being, is majestic in her very frenzy. Majesty is also the characteristic of Hermione: but what a difference between her silent, lofty, uncomplaining despair, and the eloquent grief of Constance, whose wild lamentations, which come bursting forth clothed in the grandest, the most poetical imagery, not only melt, but absolutely electrify us!

On the whole, it may be said that pride and maternal affection form the basis of the character of Constance, as it is exhibited to us; but that these passions, in an equal degree common to many human beings, assume their peculiar and individual tinge from an extraordinary development of intellect and fancy. It is the energy of passion which lends the character its concentrated power, as it is the prevalence of imagination throughout which dilates it into magnificence.

Some of the most splendid poetry to be met with in Shakspeare, may be found in the parts of Juliet and Constance; the most splendid, perhaps, excepting only the parts of Lear and Othello; and for the same reason,—that Lear and Othello as men, and Juliet and Constance as women, are distinguished by the predominance of the same faculties,—passion and imagination.

The sole deviation from history which may be considered as essentially interfering with the truth of the situation, is the entire omission of the character of Guy de Thouars, so that Constance is incorrectly represented as in a state of widowhood, at a period when, in point of fact, she was married. It may be observed, that her marriage took place just at the period of the opening of the drama; that Guy de Thouars played no conspicuous part in the affairs of Bretagne till after the death of Constance, and that the mere presence of this personage, altogether superfluous in the action, would have completely destroyed the dramatic interest of the situation;—and what a situation! One more magnificent was never placed before the mind's eye than that of Constance, when, deserted and betrayed, she stands alone in her despair, amid her false friends and her ruthless enemies![88] The image of the mother-eagle, wounded and bleeding to death, yet stretched over her young in an attitude of defiance, while all the baser birds of prey are clamoring around her eyry, gives but a faint idea of the moral sublimity of this scene. Considered merely as a poetical or dramatic picture, the grouping is wonderfully fine; on one side, the vulture ambition of that mean-souled tyrant, John; on the other, the selfish, calculating policy of Philip: between them, balancing their passions in his hand, the cold, subtle, heartless Legate: the fiery, reckless Falconbridge; the princely Louis; the still unconquered spirit of that wrangling queen, old Elinor; the bridal loveliness and modesty of Blanche; the boyish grace and innocence of young Arthur; and Constance in the midst of them, in all the state of her great grief, a grand impersonation of pride and passion, helpless at once and desperate,—form an assemblage of figures, each perfect in its kind, and, taken all together, not surpassed for the variety, force, and splendor of the dramatic and picturesque effect.

QUEEN ELINOR.

Elinor of Guienne, and Blanche of Castile, who form part of the group around Constance, are sketches merely, but they are strictly historical portraits, and full of truth and spirit.

At the period when Shakspeare has brought these three women on the scene together, Elinor of Guienne (the daughter of the last Duke of Guienne and Aquitaine, and like Constance, the heiress of a sovereign duchy) was near the close of her long, various, and unquiet life—she was nearly seventy: and, as in early youth, her violent passions had overborne both principle and policy, so in her old age we see the same character, only modified by time; her strong intellect and love of power, unbridled by conscience or principle, surviving when other passions were extinguished, and rendered more dangerous by a degree of subtlety and self-command to which her youth had been a stranger. Her personal and avowed hatred for Constance, together with its motives, are mentioned by the old historians. Holinshed expressly says, that Queen Elinor was mightily set against her grandson Arthur, rather moved thereto by envy conceived against his mother, than by any fault of the young prince, for that she knew and dreaded the high spirit of the Lady Constance.

Shakspeare has rendered this with equal spirit and fidelity.

Queen Elinor preserved to the end of her life her influence over her children, and appears to have merited their respect. While intrusted with the government, during the absence of Richard I., she ruled with a steady hand, and made herself exceedingly popular; and as long as she lived to direct the counsels of her son John, his affairs prospered. For that intemperate jealousy which converted her into a domestic firebrand, there was at least much cause, though little excuse. Elinor had hated and wronged the husband of her youth,[89] and she had afterwards to endure the negligence and innumerable infidelities of the husband whom she passionately loved:[90]—"and so the whirligig of time brought in his revenges." Elinor died in 1203, a few months after Constance, and before the murder of Arthur—a crime which, had she lived, would probably never have been consummated; for the nature of Elinor, though violent, had no tincture of the baseness and cruelty of her son.

BLANCHE.

Blanche of Castile was the daughter of Alphonso IX. of Castile, and the grand-daughter of Elinor. At the time that she is introduced into the drama, she was about fifteen, and her marriage with Louis VIII., then Dauphin, took place in the abrupt manner here represented. It is not often that political marriages have the same happy result. We are told by the historians of that time, that from the moment Louis and Blanche met, they were inspired by a mutual passion, and that during a union of more than twenty-six years they were never known to differ, nor even spent more than a single day asunder.[91]

In her exceeding beauty and blameless reputation; her love for her husband, and strong domestic affections; her pride of birth and rank; her feminine gentleness of deportment; her firmness of temper; her religious bigotry; her love of absolute power, and her upright and conscientious administration of it, Blanche greatly resembled Maria Theresa of Austria. She was, however, of a more cold and calculating nature; and in proportion as she was less amiable as a woman, did she rule more happily for herself and others. There cannot be a greater contrast than between the acute understanding, the steady temper, and the cool intriguing policy of Blanche, by which she succeeded in disuniting and defeating the powers arrayed against her and her infant son, and the rash confiding temper and susceptible imagination of Constance, which rendered herself and her son easy victims to the fraud or ambition of others. Blanche, during forty years, held in her hands the destinies of the greater part of Europe, and is one of the most celebrated names recorded in history—but in what does she survive to us except in a name? Nor history, nor fame, though "trumpet-tongued," could do for her what Shakspeare and poetry have done for Constance. The earthly reign of Blanche is over, her sceptre broken, and her power departed. When will the reign of Constance cease? when will her power depart? Not while this world is a world, and there exists in it human souls to kindle at the touch of genius, and human hearts to throb with human sympathies!

There is no female character of any interest in the play of Richard II. The Queen (Isabelle of France) enacts the same passive part in the drama that she does in history.

The same remark applies to Henry IV. In this admirable play there is no female character of any importance; but Lady Percy, the wife of Hotspur, is a very lively and beautiful sketch: she is sprightly, feminine, and fond; but without any thing energetic or profound, in mind or in feeling. Her gayety and spirit in the first scenes, are the result of youth and happiness, and nothing can be more natural than the utter dejection and brokenness of heart which follow her husband's death: she is no heroine for war or tragedy; she has no thought of revenging her loss; and even her grief has something soft and quiet in its pathos. Her speech to her father-in-law, Northumberland, in which she entreats him "not to go to the wars," and at the same time pronounces the most beautiful eulogium on her heroic husband, is a perfect piece of feminine eloquence, both in the feeling and in the expression.

Almost every one knows by heart Lady Percy's celebrated address to her husband, beginning,

and that of Portia to Brutus, in Julius Cæsar,

The situation is exactly similar, the topics of remonstrance are nearly the same; the sentiments and the style as opposite as are the characters of the two women. Lady Percy is evidently accustomed to win more from her fiery lord by caresses than by reason: he loves her in his rough way "as Harry Percy's wife," but she has no real influence over him: he has no confidence in her.

The whole scene is admirable, but unnecessary here, because it illustrates no point of character in her. Lady Percy has no character, properly so called; whereas, that of Portia is very distinctly and faithfully drawn from the outline furnished by Plutarch. Lady Percy's fond upbraidings, and her half playful, half pouting entreaties, scarcely gain her husband's attention. Portia, with true matronly dignity and tenderness, pleads her right to share her husband's thoughts, and proves it too

Portia, as Shakspeare has truly felt and represented the character, is but a softened reflection of that of her husband Brutus: in him we see an excess of natural sensibility, an almost womanish tenderness of heart, repressed by the tenets of his austere philosophy: a stoic by profession, and in reality the reverse—acting deeds against his nature by the strong force of principle and will. In Portia there is the same profound and passionate feeling, and all her sex's softness and timidity, held in check by that self-discipline, that stately dignity, which she thought became a woman "so fathered and so husbanded." The fact of her inflicting on herself a voluntary wound to try her own fortitude, is perhaps the strongest proof of this disposition. Plutarch relates, that on the day on which Cæsar was assassinated, Portia appeared overcome with terror, and even swooned away, but did not in her emotion utter a word which could affect the conspirators. Shakspeare has rendered this circumstance literally.

There is another beautiful incident related by Plutarch, which could not well be dramatized. When Brutus and Portia parted for the last time in the island of Nisida, she restrained all expression of grief that she might not shake his fortitude; but afterwards, in passing through a chamber in which there hung a picture of Hector and Andromache, she stopped, gazed upon it for a time with a settled sorrow, and at length burst into a passion of tears.[92]

If Portia had been a Christian, and lived in later times, she might have been another Lady Russel; but she made a poor stoic. No factitious or external control was sufficient to restrain such an exuberance of sensibility and fancy: and those who praise the philosophy of Portia and the heroism of her death, certainly mistook the character altogether. It is evident, from the manner of her death, that it was not deliberate self-destruction, "after the high Roman fashion," but took place in a paroxysm of madness, caused by overwrought and suppressed feeling, grief, terror, and suspense. Shakspeare has thus represented it:—

So much for woman's philosophy!

MARGARET OF ANJOU.

Malone has written an essay, to prove from external and internal evidence, that the three parts of King Henry VI. were not originally written by Shakspeare, but altered by him from two old plays,[93] with considerable improvements and additions of his own. Burke, Porson, Dr. Warburton, and Dr. Farmer, pronounced this piece of criticism convincing and unanswerable; but Dr. Johnson and Steevens would not be convinced, and, moreover, have contrived to answer the unanswerable. "Who shall decide when doctors disagree?" The only arbiter in such a case is one's own individual taste and judgment. To me it appears that the three parts of Henry VI. have less of poetry and passion, and more of unnecessary verbosity and inflated language, than the rest of Shakspeare's works; that the continual exhibition of treachery, bloodshed, and violence, is revolting, and the want of unity of action, and of a pervading interest, oppressive and fatiguing; but also that there are splendid passages in the Second and Third Parts, such as Shakspeare alone could have written: and this is not denied by the most skeptical.[94]

Among the arguments against the authenticity of these plays, the character of Margaret of Anjou has not been adduced, and yet to those who have studied Shakspeare in his own spirit, it will appear the most conclusive of all. When we compare her with his other female characters, we are struck at once by the want of family likeness; Shakspeare was not always equal, but he had not two manners, as they say of painters. I discern his hand in particular parts, but I cannot recognize his spirit in the conception of the whole: he may have laid on some of the colors, but the original design has a certain hardness and heaviness, very unlike his usual style. Margaret of Anjou, as exhibited in these tragedies, is a dramatic portrait of considerable truth, and vigor, and consistency—but she is not one of Shakspeare's women. He who knew so well in what true greatness of spirit consisted—who could excite our respect and sympathy even for a Lady Macbeth, would never have given us a heroine without a touch of heroism; he would not have portrayed a high-hearted woman, struggling unsubdued against the strangest vicissitudes of fortune, meeting reverses and disasters, such as would have broken the most masculine spirit, with unshaken constancy, yet left her without a single personal quality which would excite our interest in her bravely-endured misfortunes; and this too in the very face of history. He would not have given us, in lieu of the magnanimous queen, the subtle and accomplished French woman, a mere "Amazonian trull," with every coarser feature of depravity and ferocity; he would have redeemed her from unmingled detestation; he would have breathed into her some of his own sweet spirit—he would have given the woman a soul.

The old chronicler Hall informs us, that Queen Margaret "excelled all other as well in beauty and favor, as in wit and policy, and was in stomach and courage more like to a man than to a woman." He adds, that after the espousals of Henry and Margaret, "the king's friends fell from him; the lords of the realm fell in division among themselves; the Commons rebelled against their natural prince; fields were foughten; many thousands slain; and, finally, the king was deposed, and his son slain, and his queen sent home again with as much misery and sorrow as she was received with pomp and triumph."

This passage seems to have furnished the groundwork of the character as it is developed in these plays with no great depth or skill. Margaret is portrayed with all the exterior graces of her sex; as bold and artful, with spirit to dare, resolution to act, and fortitude to endure; but treacherous, haughty, dissembling, vindictive, and fierce. The bloody struggle for power in which she was engaged, and the companionship of the ruthless iron men around her, seem to have left her nothing of womanhood but the heart of a mother—that last stronghold of our feminine nature! So far the character is consistently drawn: it has something of the power, but none of the flowing ease of Shakspeare's manner. There are fine materials not well applied; there is poetry in some of the scenes and speeches; the situations are often exceedingly poetical; but in the character of Margaret herself, there is not an atom of poetry. In her artificial dignity, her plausible wit, and her endless volubility, she would remind us of some of the most admired heroines of French tragedy, but for that unlucky box on the ear which she gives the Duchess of Gloster,—a violation of tragic decorum, which of course destroys all parallel.

Having said thus much, I shall point out some of the finest and most characteristic scenes in which Margaret appears. The speech in which she expresses her scorn of her meek husband, and her impatience of the power exercised by those fierce overbearing barons, York, Salisbury, Warwick, Buckingham, is very fine, and conveys as faithful an idea of those feudal times as of the woman who speaks. The burst of female spite with which she concludes, is admirable—

Her intriguing spirit, the facility with which she enters into the murderous confederacy against the good Duke Humphrey, the artful plausibility with which she endeavours to turn suspicion from herself—confounding her gentle consort by mere dint of words—are exceedingly characteristic, but not the less revolting.

Her criminal love for Suffolk (which is a dramatic incident, not an historic fact) gives rise to the beautiful parting scene in the third act; a scene which it is impossible to read without a thrill of emotion, hurried away by that power and pathos which forces us to sympathize with the eloquence of grief, yet excites not a momentary interest either for Margaret or her lover. The ungoverned fury of Margaret in the first instance, the manner in which she calls on Suffolk to curse his enemies, and then shrinks back overcome by the violence of the spirit she had herself evoked, and terrified by the vehemence of his imprecations; the transition in her mind from the extremity of rage to tears and melting fondness, have been pronounced, and justly, to be in Shakspeare's own manner.

which is followed by that beautiful and intense burst of passion from Suffolk—

In the third part of Henry the Sixth, Margaret, engaged in the terrible struggle for her husband's throne, appears to rather more advantage. The indignation against Henry, who had pitifully yielded his son's birthright for the privilege of reigning unmolested during his own life, is worthy of her, and gives rise to a beautiful speech. We are here inclined to sympathize with her; but soon after follows the murder of the Duke of York; and the base revengeful spirit and atrocious cruelty with which she insults over him, unarmed and a prisoner,—the bitterness of her mockery, and the unwomanly malignity with which she presents him with the napkin stained with the blood of his youngest son, and "bids the father wipe his eyes withal," turn all our sympathy into aversion and horror. York replies in the celebrated speech, beginning—

and taunts her with the poverty of her father, the most irritating topic he could have chosen.

By such a woman as Margaret is here depicted such a speech could be answered only in one way—with her dagger's point—and thus she answers it.

It is some comfort to reflect that this trait of ferocity is not historical: the body of the Duke of York was found, after the battle, among the heaps of slain, and his head struck off: but even this was not done by the command of Margaret.

In another passage, the truth and consistency of the character of Margaret are sacrificed to the march of the dramatic action, with a very ill effect. When her fortunes were at the very lowest ebb, and she had sought refuge in the court of the French king, Warwick, her most formidable enemy, upon some disgust he had taken against Edward the Fourth, offered to espouse her cause; and proposed a match between the prince her son and his daughter Anne of Warwick—the "gentle Lady Anne," who figures in Richard the Third. In the play, Margaret embraces the offer without a moment's hesitation:[95] we are disgusted by her versatile policy, and a meanness of spirit in no way allied to the magnanimous forgiveness of her terrible adversary. The Margaret of history sternly resisted this degrading expedient. She could not, she said, pardon from her heart the man who had been the primary cause of all her misfortunes. She mistrusted Warwick, despised him for the motives of his revolt from Edward, and considered that to match her son into the family of her enemy from mere policy was a species of degradation. It took Louis the Eleventh, with all his art and eloquence, fifteen days to wring a reluctant consent, accompanied with tears, from this high-hearted woman.

The speech of Margaret to her council of generals before the battle of Tewksbury, (Act v. scene 5,) is as remarkable a specimen of false rhetoric, as her address to the soldiers, on the eve of the fight, is of true and passionate eloquence.

She witnesses the final defeat of her army, the massacre of her adherents, and the murder of her son; and though the savage Richard would willingly have put an end to her misery, and exclaims very pertinently—

she is dragged forth unharmed, a woful spectacle of extremest wretchedness, to which death would have been an undeserved relief. If we compare the clamorous and loud exclaims of Margaret after the slaughter of her son, to the ravings of Constance, we shall perceive where Shakspeare's genius did not preside, and where it did. Margaret, in bold defiance of history, but with fine dramatic effect, is introduced again in the gorgeous and polluted court of Edward the Fourth. There she stalks around the seat of her former greatness, like a terrible phantom of departed majesty, uncrowned, unsceptered, desolate, powerless—or like a vampire thirsting for blood—or like a grim prophetess of evil, imprecating that ruin on the head of her enemies, which she lived to see realized. The scene following the murder of the princes in the Tower, in which Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of York sit down on the ground bewailing their desolation, and Margaret suddenly appears from behind them, like the very personification of woe, and seats herself beside them revelling in their despair, is, in the general conception and effect grand and appalling.

She should have stopped here; but the effect thus powerfully excited is marred and weakened by so much superfluous rhetoric, that we are tempted to exclaim with the old Duchess of York—

QUEEN KATHERINE OF ARRAGON.

To have a just idea of the accuracy and beauty of this historical portrait, we ought to bring immediately before us those circumstances of Katherine's life and times, and those parts of her character, which belong to a period previous to the opening of the play. We shall then be better able to appreciate the skill with which Shakspeare has applied the materials before him.

Katherine of Arragon, the fourth and youngest daughter of Ferdinand, King of Arragon, and Isabella of Castile, was born at Alcala, whither her mother had retired to winter after one of the most terrible campaigns of the Moorish war—that of 1485.

Katherine had derived from nature no dazzling qualities of mind, and no striking advantages of person. She inherited a tincture of Queen Isabella's haughtiness and obstinacy of temper, but neither her beauty nor her splendid talents. Her education under the direction of that extraordinary mother, had implanted in her mind the most austere principles of virtue, the highest ideas of female decorum, the most narrow and bigoted attachment to the forms of religion, and that excessive pride of birth and rank, which distinguished so particularly her family and her nation. In other respects, her understanding was strong, and her judgment clear. The natural turn of her mind was simple, serious, and domestic, and all the impulses of her heart kindly and benevolent. Such was Katherine; such, at least, she appears on a reference to the chronicles of her times, and particularly from her own letters, and the papers written or dictated by herself which relate to her divorce; all of which are distinguished by the same artless simplicity of style, the same quiet good sense, the same resolute, yet gentle spirit and fervent piety.

When five years old, Katherine was solemnly affianced to Arthur, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Henry VII.; and in the year 1501, she landed in England, after narrowly escaping shipwreck on the southern coast, from which every adverse wind conspired to drive her. She was received in London with great honor, and immediately on her arrival united to the young prince. He was then fifteen and Katherine in her seventeenth year.

Arthur, as it is well known, survived his marriage only five months; and the reluctance of Henry VII. to refund the splendid dowry of the Infanta, and forego the advantages of an alliance with the most powerful prince of Europe, suggested the idea of uniting Katherine to his second son Henry; after some hesitation, a dispensation was procured from the Pope, and she was betrothed to Henry in her eighteenth year. The prince, who was then only twelve years old, resisted as far as he was able to do so, and appears to have really felt a degree of horror at the idea of marrying his brother's widow. Nor was the mind of King Henry at rest; as his health declined, his conscience reproached him with the equivocal nature of the union into which he had forced his son; and the vile motives of avarice and expediency which had governed him on this occasion. A short time previous to his death, he dissolved the engagement, and even caused Henry to sign a paper in which he solemnly renounced all idea of a future union with the Infanta. It is observable, that Henry signed this paper with reluctance, and that Katherine, instead of being sent back to her own country, still remained in England.

It appears that Henry, who was now about seventeen, had become interested for Katherine, who was gentle and amiable. The difference of years was rather a circumstance in her favor; for Henry was just at that age, when a youth is most likely to be captivated by a woman older than himself: and no sooner was he required to renounce her, than the interest she had gradually gained in his affections, became, by opposition, a strong passion. Immediately after his father's death, he declared his resolution to take for his wife the Lady Katherine of Spain, and none other; and when the matter was discussed in council, it was urged that, besides the many advantages of the match in a political point of view, she had given so "much proof of virtue, and sweetness of condition, as they knew not where to parallel her." About six weeks after his accession, June 3, 1509, the marriage was celebrated with truly royal splendor, Henry being then eighteen, and Katherine in her twenty-fourth year.

It has been said with truth, that if Henry had died while Katherine was yet his wife, and Wolsey his minister, he would have left behind him the character of a magnificent, popular, and accomplished prince, instead of that of the most hateful ruffian and tyrant who ever swayed these realms. Notwithstanding his occasional infidelities, and his impatience at her midnight vigils, her long prayers, and her religious austerities, Katherine and Henry lived in harmony together. He was fond of openly displaying his respect and love for her; and she exercised a strong and salutary influence over his turbulent and despotic spirit. When Henry set out on his expedition to France, in 1513, he left Katherine regent of the kingdom during his absence, with full powers to carry on the war against the Scots; and the Earl of Surrey at the head of the army, as her lieutenant-general. It is curious to find Katherine—the pacific, domestic, and unpretending Katherine—describing herself as having "her heart set to war," and "horrible busy" with making "standards, banners, badges, scarfs, and the like."[97] Nor was this mere silken preparation—mere dalliance with the pomp and circumstance of war; for within a few weeks afterwards, her general defeated the Scots in the famous battle of Floddenfield, where James IV. and most of his nobility were slain.[98]

Katherine's letter to Henry, announcing this event, so strikingly displays the piety and tenderness, the quiet simplicity, and real magnanimity of her character, that there cannot be a more apt and beautiful illustration of the exquisite truth and keeping of Shakspeare's portrait.

Sir,

My Lord Howard hath sent me a letter, open to your Grace, within one of mine, by the which ye shall see at length the great victory that our Lord hath sent your subjects in your absence: and for this cause, it is no need herein to trouble your Grace with long writing; but to my thinking this battle hath been to your Grace, and all your realm, the greatest honor that could be, and more than ye should win all the crown of France, thanked be God for it! And I am sure your Grace forgetteth not to do this, which shall be cause to send you many more such great victories, as I trust he shall do. My husband, for haste, with Rougecross, I could not send your Grace the piece of the king of Scots' coat, which John Glyn now bringeth. In this your Grace shall see how I can keep my promise, sending you for your banners a king's coat. I thought to send himself unto you, but our Englishmen's hearts would not suffer it. It should have been better for him to have been in peace than have this reward, but all that God sendeth is for the best. My Lord of Surrey, my Henry, would fain know your pleasure in the burying of the king of Scots' body, for he hath written to me so. With the next messenger, your Grace's pleasure may be herein known. And with this I make an end, praying God to send you home shortly; for without this, no joy here can be accomplished—and for the same I pray. And now go to our Lady at Walsyngham, that I promised so long ago to see.

At Woburn, the 16th day of September, (1513.)

I send your Grace herein a bill, found in a Scottishman's purse, of such things as the French king sent to the said king of Scots, to make war against you, beseeching you to send Mathew hither as soon as this messenger cometh with tidings of your Grace.

The legality of the king's marriage with Katherine remained undisputed till 1527. In the course of that year, Anna Bullen first appeared at court, and was appointed maid of honor to the queen; and then, and not till then, did Henry's union with his brother's wife "creep too near his conscience." In the following year, he sent special messengers to Rome, with secret instructions: they were required to discover (among other "hard questions") whether, if the queen entered a religious life, the king might have the Pope's dispensation to marry again; and whether if the king (for the better inducing the queen thereto) would enter himself into a religious life, the Pope would dispense with the king's vow, and leave her there?

Poor Katherine! we are not surprised to read that when she understood what was intended against her, "she labored with all those passions which jealousy of the king's affection, sense of her own honor, and the legitimation of her daughter, could produce, laying in conclusion the whole fault on the Cardinal." It is elsewhere said, that Wolsey bore the queen ill-will, in consequence of her reflecting with some severity on his haughty temper, and very unclerical life.

The proceedings were pending for nearly six years, and one of the causes of this long delay, in spite of Henry's impatient and despotic character, is worth noting. The old Chronicle tells us, that though the men generally, and more particularly the priests and the nobles sided with Henry in this matter, yet all the ladies of England were against it. They justly felt that the honor and welfare of no woman was secure if, after twenty years of union, she might be thus deprived of all her rights as a wife; the clamor became so loud and general, that the king was obliged to yield to it for a time, to stop the proceedings, and to banish Anna Bullen from the court.

Cardinal Campeggio, called by Shakspeare Campeius, arrived in England in October, 1528. He at first endeavored to persuade Katherine to avoid the disgrace and danger of contesting her marriage, by entering a religious house; but she rejected his advice with strong expressions of disdain. "I am," said she, "the king's true wife, and to him married; and if all doctors were dead, or law or learning far out of men's minds at the time of our marriage, yet I cannot think that the court of Rome, and the whole church of England, would have consented to a thing unlawful and detestable as you call it. Still I say I am his wife, and for him will I pray."

About two years afterwards, Wolsey died, (in November, 1530;)—the king and queen met for the last time on the 14th of July, 1531. Until that period, some outward show of respect and kindness had been maintained between them; but the king then ordered her to repair to a private residence, and no longer to consider herself as his lawful wife. "To which the virtuous and mourning queen replied no more than this, that to whatever place she removed, nothing could remove her from being the king's wife. And so they bid each other farewell; and from this time the king never saw her more."[100] He married Anna Bullen in 1532, while the decision relating to his former marriage was still pending. The sentence of divorce to which Katherine never would submit, was finally pronounced by Cranmer in 1533; and the unhappy queen, whose health had been gradually declining through these troubles of heart, died January 29, 1536, in the fiftieth year of her age.

Thus the action of the play of Henry VIII. includes events which occurred from the impeachment of the Duke of Buckingham in 1521, to the death of Katherine in 1536. In making the death of Katherine precede the birth of Queen Elizabeth, Shakspeare has committed an anachronism, not only pardonable, but necessary. We must remember that the construction of the play required a happy termination; and that the birth of Elizabeth, before or after the death of Katherine, involved the question of her legitimacy. By this slight deviation from the real course of events, Shakspeare has not perverted historic facts, but merely sacrificed them to a higher principle; and in doing so has not only preserved dramatic propriety, and heightened the poetical interest, but has given a strong proof both of his delicacy and his judgment.

If we also call to mind that in this play Katherine is properly the heroine, and exhibited from first to last as the very "queen of earthly queens;" that the whole interest is thrown round her and Wolsey—the one the injured rival, the other the enemy of Anna Bullen—and that it was written in the reign and for the court of Elizabeth, we shall yet farther appreciate the moral greatness of the poet's mind, which disdained to sacrifice justice and the truth of nature to any time-serving expediency.

Schlegel observes somewhere, that in the literal accuracy and apparent artlessness with which Shakspeare has adapted some of the events and characters of history to his dramatic purposes, he has shown equally his genius and his wisdom. This, like most of Schlegel's remarks, is profound and true; and in this respect Katherine of Arragon may rank as the triumph of Shakspeare's genius and his wisdom. There is nothing in the whole range of poetical fiction in any respect resembling or approaching her; there is nothing comparable, I suppose, but Katherine's own portrait by Holbein, which, equally true to the life, is yet as far inferior as Katherine's person was inferior to her mind. Not only has Shakspeare given us here a delineation as faithful as it is beautiful, of a peculiar modification of character; but he has bequeathed us a precious moral lesson in this proof that virtue alone,—(by which I mean here the union of truth or conscience with benevolent affection—the one the highest law, the other the purest impulse of the soul,)—that such virtue is a sufficient source of the deepest pathos and power with out any mixture of foreign or external ornament: for who but Shakspeare would have brought before us a queen and a heroine of tragedy, stripped her of all pomp of place and circumstance, dispensed with all the usual sources of poetical interest, as youth, beauty, grace, fancy, commanding intellect; and without any appeal to our imagination, without any violation of historical truth, or any sacrifices of the other dramatic personages for the sake of effect, could depend on the moral principle alone, to touch the very springs of feeling in our bosoms, and melt and elevate our hearts through the purest and holiest impulses of our nature!

The character, when analyzed, is, in the first place, distinguished by truth. I do not only mean its truth to nature, or its relative truth arising from its historic fidelity and dramatic consistency, but truth as a quality of the soul; this is the basis of the character. We often hear it remarked that those who are themselves perfectly true and artless, are in this world the more easily and frequently deceived—a common-place fallacy: for we shall ever find that truth is as undeceived as it is undeceiving, and that those who are true to themselves and others, may now and then be mistaken, or in particular instances duped by the intervention of some other affection or quality of the mind; but they are generally free from illusion, and they are seldom imposed upon in the long run by the shows of things and superfices of characters. It is by this integrity of heart and clearness of understanding, this light of truth within her own soul, and not through any acuteness of intellect, that Katherine detects and exposes the real character of Wolsey, though unable either to unravel his designs, or defeat them.

She rather intuitively feels than knows his duplicity, and in the dignity of her simplicity she towers above his arrogance as much as she scorns his crooked policy. With this essential truth are combined many other qualities, natural or acquired, all made out with the same uncompromising breadth of execution and fidelity of pencil, united with the utmost delicacy of feeling. For instance, the apparent contradiction arising from the contrast between Katherine's natural disposition and the situation in which she is placed; her lofty Castilian pride and her extreme simplicity of language and deportment; the inflexible resolution with which she asserts her right, and her soft resignation to unkindness and wrong; her warmth of temper breaking through the meekness of a spirit subdued by a deep sense of religion; and a degree of austerity tinging her real benevolence;—all these qualities, opposed yet harmonizing, has Shakspeare placed before us in a few admirable scenes.

Katherine is at first introduced as pleading before the king in behalf of the commonalty, who had been driven by the extortions of Wolsey into some illegal excesses. In this scene, which is true to history, we have her upright reasoning mind, her steadiness of purpose, her piety and benevolence, placed in a strong light. The unshrinking dignity with which she opposes without descending to brave the Cardinal, the stern rebuke addressed to the Duke of Buckingham's surveyor, are finely characteristic; and by thus exhibiting Katherine as invested with all her conjugal rights and influence, and royal state, the subsequent situations are rendered more impressive. She is placed in the first instance on such a height in our esteem and reverence, that in the midst of her abandonment and degradation, and the profound pity she afterwards inspires, the first effect remains unimpaired, and she never falls beneath it.

In the beginning of the second act we are prepared for the proceedings of the divorce, and our respect for Katherine heightened by the general sympathy for "the good queen," as she is expressively entitled, and by the following beautiful eulogium on her character uttered by the Duke of Norfolk:—

The scene in which Anna Bullen is introduced as expressing her grief and sympathy for her royal mistress, is exquisitely graceful.

How completely, in the few passages appropriated to Anna Bullen, is her character portrayed! with what a delicate and yet luxuriant grace is she sketched off, with her gayety and her beauty, her levity, her extreme mobility, her sweetness of disposition, her tenderness of heart, and, in short, all her femalities! How nobly has Shakspeare done justice to the two women, and heightened our interest in both, by placing the praises of Katherine in the mouth of Anna Bullen! and how characteristic of the latter, that she should first express unbounded pity for her mistress, insisting chiefly on her fall from her regal state and worldly pomp, thus betraying her own disposition:—

That she should call the loss of temporal pomp, once enjoyed, "a sufferance equal to soul and body's severing;" that she should immediately protest that she would not herself be a queen—"No, good troth! not for all the riches under heaven!"—and not long afterwards ascend without reluctance that throne and bed from which her royal mistress had been so cruelly divorced!—how natural! The portrait is not less true and masterly than that of Katherine; but the character is overborne by the superior moral firmness and intrinsic excellence of the latter. That we may be more fully sensible of this contrast, the beautiful scene just alluded to immediately precedes Katherine's trial at Blackfriars, and the description of Anna Bullen's triumphant beauty at her coronation, is placed immediately before the dying scene of Katherine; yet with equal good taste and good feeling Shakspeare has constantly avoided all personal collision between the two characters; nor does Anna Bullen ever appear as queen except in the pageant of the procession, which in reading the play is scarcely noticed.

To return to Katherine. The whole of the trial scene is given nearly verbatim from the old chronicles and records; but the dryness and harshness of the law proceedings is tempered at once and elevated by the genius and the wisdom of the poet. It appears, on referring to the historical authorities, that when the affair was first agitated in council, Katherine replied to the long expositions and theological sophistries of her opponents with resolute simplicity and composure: "I am a woman, and lack wit and learning to answer these opinions; but I am sure that neither the king's father nor my father would have condescended to our marriage, if it had been judged unlawful. As to your saying that I should put the cause to eight persons of this realm, for quietness of the king's conscience, I pray Heaven to send his Grace a quiet conscience and this shall be your answer, that I say I am his lawful wife, and to him lawfully married, though not worthy of it; and in this point I will abide, till the court of Rome, which was privy to the beginning, have made a final ending of it."[101]

Katherine's appearance in the court at Blackfriars, attended by a noble troop of ladies and prelates of her counsel, and her refusal to answer the citation, are historical.[102] Her speech to the king—

is taken word for word (as nearly as the change from prose to blank verse would allow) from the old record in Hall. It would have been easy for Shakspeare to have exalted his own skill, by throwing a coloring of poetry and eloquence into this speech, without altering the sense or sentiment; but by adhering to the calm argumentative simplicity of manner and diction natural to the woman, he has preserved the truth of character without lessening the pathos of the situation. Her challenging Wolsey as a "foe to truth," and her very expressions, "I utterly refuse,—yea, from my soul abhor you for my judge," are taken from fact. The sudden burst of indignant passion towards the close of this scene,

is taken from nature, though it occurred on a different occasion.[103]

Lastly, the circumstance of her being called back after she had appealed from the court, and angrily refusing to return, is from the life. Master Griffith, on whose arm she leaned, observed that she was called: "On, on," quoth she; "it maketh no matter, for it is no indifferent court for me, therefore I will not tarry. Go on your ways."[104]

King Henry's own assertion, "I dare to say, my lords, that for her womanhood, wisdom, nobility, and gentleness, never prince had such another wife, and therefore if I would willingly change her I were not wise," is thus beautifully paraphrased by Shakspeare:—

The annotators on Shakspeare have all observed the close resemblance between this fine passage—

and the speech of Hermione—

But these verbal gentlemen do not seem to have felt that the resemblance is merely on the surface, and that the two passages could not possibly change places, without a manifest violation of the truth of character. In Hermione it is pride of sex merely: in Katherine it is pride of place and pride of birth. Hermione, though so superbly majestic, is perfectly independent of her regal state: Katherine, though so meekly pious, will neither forget hers, nor allow it to be forgotten by others for a moment. Hermione, when deprived of that "crown and comfort of her life," her husband's love, regards all things else with despair and indifference except her feminine honor: Katherine, divorced and abandoned, still with true Spanish pride stands upon respect, and will not bate one atom of her accustomed state

The passage—

would apply nearly to both queens, yet a single sentiment—nay, a single sentence—could not possibly be transferred from one character to the other. The magnanimity, the noble simplicity, the purity of heart, the resignation in each—how perfectly equal in degree! how diametrically opposite in kind![106]

Once more to return to Katherine.

We are told by Cavendish, that when Wolsey and Campeggio visited the queen by the king's order she was found at work among her women, and came forth to meet the cardinals with a skein of white thread hanging about her neck; that when Wolsey addressed her in Latin, she interrupted him, saying, "Nay, good my lord, speak to me in English, I beseech you; although I understand Latin." "Forsooth then," quoth my lord, "madam, if it please your grace, we come both to know your mind, how ye be disposed to do in this matter between the king and you, and also to declare secretly our opinions and our counsel unto you, which we have intended of very zeal and obedience that we bear to your grace." "My lords, I thank you then," quoth she, "of your good wills; but to make answer to your request I cannot so suddenly, for I was set among my maidens at work, thinking full little of any such matter; wherein there needeth a longer deliberation, and a better head than mine to make answer to so noble wise men as ye be. I had need of good counsel in this case, which toucheth me so near; and for any counsel or friendship that I can find in England, they are nothing to my purpose or profit. Think you, I pray you, my lords, will any Englishmen counsel, or be friendly unto me, against the king's pleasure, they being his subjects? Nay, forsooth, my lords! and for my counsel, in whom I do intend to put my trust, they be not here; they be in Spain, in my native country.[107] Alas! my lords, I am a poor woman lacking both wit and understanding sufficiently to answer such approved wise men as ye be both, in so weighty a matter. I pray you to extend your good and indifferent minds in your authority unto me, for I am a simple woman, destitute and barren of friendship and counsel, here in a foreign region; and as for your counsel, I will not refuse, but be glad to hear."

It appears, also, that when the Archbishop of York and Bishop Tunstall waited on her at her house near Huntingdon, with the sentence of the divorce, signed by Henry, and confirmed by act of parliament, she refused to admit its validity, she being Henry's wife, and not his subject. The bishop describes her conduct in his letter: "She being therewith in great choler and agony, and always interrupting our words, declared that she would never leave the name of queen, but would persist in accounting herself the king's wife till death." When the official letter containing minutes of their conference was shown to her, she seized a pen, and dashed it angrily across every sentence in which she was styled Princess-dowager.

If now we turn to that inimitable scene between Katherine and the two cardinals, (act iii. scene 1,) we shall observe how finely Shakspeare has condensed these incidents, and unfolded to us all the workings of Katherine's proud yet feminine nature. She is discovered at work with some of her women—she calls for music "to soothe her soul grown sad with troubles"—then follows the little song, of which the sentiment is so well adapted to the occasion, while its quaint yet classic elegance breathes the very spirit of those times, when Surrey loved and sung.

They are interrupted by the arrival of the two cardinals. Katherine's perception of their subtlety—her suspicion of their purpose—her sense of her own weakness and inability to contend with them, and her mild subdued dignity, are beautifully represented; as also the guarded self-command with which she eludes giving a definitive answer; but when they counsel her to that which she, who knows Henry, feels must end in her ruin, then the native temper is roused at once, or, to use Tunstall's expression, "the choler and the agony," burst forth in words.

With the same force of language, and impetuous yet dignified feeling, she asserts her own conjugal truth and merit, and insists upon her rights.

And this burst of unwonted passion is immediately followed by the natural reaction; it subsides into tears, dejection, and a mournful self-compassion.

Dr. Johnson observes on this scene, that all Katherine's distresses could not save her from a quibble on the word cardinal.

When we read this passage in connection with the situation and sentiment, the scornful play upon the words is not only appropriate and natural, it seems inevitable. Katherine, assuredly, is neither an imaginative nor a witty personage; but we all acknowledge the truism, that anger inspires wit, and whenever there is passion there is poetry. In the instance just alluded to, the sarcasm springs naturally out from the bitter indignation of the moment. In her grand rebuke of Wolsey, in the trial scene, how just and beautiful is the gradual elevation of her language, till it rises into that magnificent image—

In the depth of her affliction, the pathos as naturally clothes itself in poetry.

But these, I believe, are the only instances of imagery throughout; for, in general, her language is plain and energetic. It has the strength and simplicity of her character, with very little metaphor and less wit.

In approaching the last scene of Katherine's life, I feel as if about to tread within a sanctuary, where nothing befits us but silence and tears; veneration so strives with compassion, tenderness with awe.[108]

We must suppose a long interval to have elapsed since Katherine's interview with the two cardinals. Wolsey was disgraced, and poor Anna Bullen at the height of her short-lived prosperity. It was Wolsey's fate to be detested by both queens. In the pursuance of his own selfish and ambitious designs, he had treated both with perfidy; and one was the remote, the other the immediate, cause of his ruin.[109]

The ruffian king, of whom one hates to think, was bent on forcing Katherine to concede her rights, and illegitimize her daughter, in favor of the offspring of Anna Bullen: she steadily refused, was declared contumacious, and the sentence of divorce pronounced in 1533. Such of her attendants as persisted in paying her the honors due to a queen were driven from her household; those who consented to serve her as princess-dowager, she refused to admit into her presence; so that she remained unattended, except by a few women, and her gentleman usher, Griffith. During the last eighteen months of her life, she resided at Kimbolton. Her nephew, Charles V., had offered her an asylum and princely treatment; but Katherine, broken in heart, and declining in health, was unwilling to drag the spectacle of her misery and degradation into a strange country: she pined in her loneliness, deprived of her daughter, receiving no consolation from the pope, and no redress from the emperor. Wounded pride, wronged affection, and a cankering jealousy of the woman preferred to her, (which though it never broke out into unseemly words, is enumerated as one of the causes of her death,) at length wore out a feeble frame. "Thus," says the chronicle, "Queen Katherine fell into her last sickness; and though the king sent to comfort her through Chapuys, the emperor's ambassador, she grew worse and worse; and finding death now coming, she caused a maid attending on her to write to the king to this effect:—

"My most dear Lord, King, and Husband;

"The hour of my death now approaching, I cannot choose but, out of the love I bear you, advise you of your soul's health, which you ought to prefer before all considerations of the world or flesh whatsoever; for which yet you have cast me into many calamities, and yourself into many troubles: but I forgive you all, and pray God to do so likewise; for the rest, I commend unto you Mary our daughter, beseeching you to be a good father to her, as I have heretofore desired. I must intreat you also to respect my maids, and give them in marriage, which is not much, they being but three, and all my other servants a year's pay besides their due, lest otherwise they be unprovided for: lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.—Farewell!"[110]

She also wrote another letter to the ambassador, desiring that he would remind the king of her dying request, and urge him to do her this last right.

What the historian relates, Shakspeare realizes. On the wonderful beauty of Katherine's closing scene we need not dwell; for that requires no illustration. In transferring the sentiments of her letter to her lips, Shakspeare has given them added grace, and pathos, and tenderness, without injuring their truth and simplicity: the feelings, and almost the manner of expression, are Katherine's own. The severe justice with which she draws the character of Wolsey is extremely characteristic! the benign candor with which she listens to the praise of him "whom living she most hated," is not less so. How beautiful her religious enthusiasm!—the slumber which visits her pillow, as she listens to that sad music she called her knell; her awakening from the vision of celestial joy to find herself still on earth—

how unspeakably beautiful! And to consummate all in one final touch of truth and nature, we see that consciousness of her own worth and integrity which had sustained her through all her trials of heart, and that pride of station for which she had contended through long years,—which had become more dear by opposition, and by the perseverance with which she had asserted it,—remaining the last strong feeling upon her mind, to the very last hour of existence.

In the epilogue to this play,[111] it is recommended—

alluding to the character of Queen Katherine. Shakspeare has, in fact, placed before us a queen and a heroine, who in the first place, and above all, is a good woman; and I repeat, that in doing so, and in trusting for all his effect to truth and virtue, he has given a sublime proof of his genius and his wisdom;—for which, among many other obligations, we women remain his debtors.

LADY MACBETH.

I doubt whether the epithet historical can properly apply to the character of Lady Macbeth; for though the subject of the play be taken from history, we never think of her with any reference to historical associations, as we do with regard to Constance, Volumnia, Katherine of Arragon, and others. I remember reading some critique, in which Lady Macbeth was styled the "Scottish queen;" and methought the title, as applied to her sounded like a vulgarism. It appears that the real wife of Macbeth,—she who lives only in the obscure record of an obscure age, bore the very unmusical appellation of Graoch, and was instigated to the murder of Duncan, not only by ambition, but by motives of vengeance. She was the grand-daughter of Kenneth the Fourth, killed in 1003, fighting against Malcolm the Second, the Father of Duncan. Macbeth reigned over Scotland from the year 1039 to 1056—but what is all this to the purpose? The sternly magnificent creation of the poet stands before us independent of all these aids of fancy: she is Lady Macbeth; as such she lives, she reigns, and is immortal in the world to imagination. What earthly title could add to her grandeur? what human record or attestation strengthen our impression of her reality?

Characters in history move before us like a procession of figures in basso relievo: we see one side only, that which the artist chose to exhibit to us; the rest is sunk in the block: the same characters in Shakspeare are like the statues cut out of the block, fashioned, finished, tangible in every part: we may consider them under every aspect, we may examine them on every side. As the classical times, when the garb did not make the man, were peculiarly favorable to the development and delineation of the human form, and have handed down to us the purest models of strength and grace—so the times in which Shakspeare lived were favorable to the vigorous delineation of natural character. Society was not then one vast conventional masquerade of manners. In his revelations, the accidental circumstances are to the individual character, what the drapery of the antique statue is to the statue itself; it is evident, that, though adapted to each other, and studied relatively, they were also studied separately. We trace through the folds the fine and true proportions of the figure beneath: they seem and are independent of each other to the practised eye, though carved together from the same enduring substance; at once perfectly distinct and eternally inseparable. In history we can but study character in relation to events, to situation and circumstances, which disguise and encumber it: we are left to imagine, to infer, what certain people must have been, from the manner in which they have acted or suffered. Shakspeare and nature bring us back to the true order of things; and showing us what the human being is, enable us to judge of the possible as well as the positive result in acting and suffering. Here, instead of judging the individual by his actions, we are enabled to judge of actions by a reference to the individual. When we can carry this power into the experience of real life, we shall perhaps be more just to one another, and not consider ourselves aggrieved, because we cannot gather figs from thistles and grapes from thorns.

In the play or poem of Macbeth, the interest of the story is so engrossing, the events so rapid and so appalling, the accessories so sublimely conceived and so skilfully combined, that it is difficult to detach Lady Macbeth from the dramatic situation, or consider her apart from the terrible associations of our first and earliest impressions. As the vulgar idea of a Juliet—that all-beautiful and heaven-gifted child of the south—is merely a love-sick girl in white satin, so the common-place idea of Lady Macbeth, though endowed with the rarest powers, the loftiest energies, and the profoundest affections, is nothing but a fierce, cruel woman, brandishing a couple of daggers, and inciting her husband to butcher a poor old king.

Even those who reflect more deeply are apt to consider rather the mode in which a certain character is manifested, than the combination of abstract qualities making up that individual human being; so what should be last, is first; effects are mistaken for causes, qualities are confounded with their results, and the perversion of what is essentially good, with the operation of positive evil. Hence it is, that those who can feel and estimate the magnificent conception and poetical development of the character, have overlooked the grand moral lesson it conveys; they forget that the crime of Lady Macbeth terrifies us in proportion as we sympathize with her; and that this sympathy is in proportion to the degree of pride, passion, and intellect, we may ourselves possess. It is good to behold and to tremble at the possible result of the noblest faculties uncontrolled or perverted. True it is, that the ambitious women of these civilized times do not murder sleeping kings: but are there, therefore, no Lady Macbeths in the world? no women who, under the influence of a diseased or excited appetite for power or distinction, would sacrifice the happiness of a daughter, the fortunes of a husband, the principles of a son, and peril their own souls?

The character of Macbeth is considered as one of the most complex in the whole range of Shakspeare's dramatic creations. He is represented in the course of the action under such a variety of aspects; the good and evil qualities of his mind are so poised and blended, and instead of being gradually and successively developed, evolve themselves so like shifting lights and shadows playing over the "unstable waters," that his character has afforded a continual and interesting subject of analysis and contemplation. None of Shakspeare's personages have been treated of more at large; none have been more minutely criticized and profoundly examined. A single feature in his character—the question, for instance, as to whether his courage be personal or constitutional, or excited by mere desperation—has been canvassed, asserted, and refuted, in two masterly essays.

On the other hand, the character of Lady Macbeth resolves itself into few and simple elements. The grand features of her character are so distinctly and prominently marked, that, though acknowledged to be one of the poet's most sublime creations, she has been passed over with comparatively few words: generally speaking, the commentators seem to have considered Lady Macbeth rather with reference to her husband, and as influencing the action of the drama, than as an individual conception of amazing power, poetry, and beauty: or if they do individualize her, it is ever with those associations of scenic representation which Mrs. Siddons has identified with the character. Those who have been accustomed to see it arrayed in the form and lineaments of that magnificent woman, and developed with her wonder-working powers, seem satisfied to leave it there, as if nothing more could be said or added.[112]

But the generation which beheld Mrs. Siddons in her glory is passing away, and we are again left to our own unassisted feelings, or to all the satisfaction to be derived from the sagacity of critics and the reflections of commentators. Let us turn to them for a moment.

Dr. Johnson, who seems to have regarded her as nothing better than a kind of ogress, tells us, in so many words, that "Lady Macbeth is merely detested." Schlegel dismisses her in haste, as a species of female fury. In the two essays on Macbeth already mentioned, she is passed over with one or two slight allusions. The only justice that has yet been done to her is by Hazlitt, in the "Characters of Shakspeare's Plays." Nothing can be finer than his remarks as far as they go, but his plan did not allow him sufficient space to work out his own conception of the character, with the minuteness it requires. All that he says is just in sentiment, and most eloquent in the expression; but in leaving some of the finest points altogether untouched, he has also left us in doubt whether he even felt or perceived them; and this masterly criticism stops short of the whole truth—it is a little superficial, and a little too harsh.

In the mind of Lady Macbeth, ambition is represented as the ruling motive, an intense over-mastering passion, which is gratified at the expense of every just and generous principle, and every feminine feeling. In the pursuit of her object, she is cruel, treacherous, and daring. She is doubly, trebly dyed in guilt and blood; for the murder she instigates is rendered more frightful by disloyalty and ingratitude, and by the violation of all the most sacred claims of kindred and hospitality. When her husband's more kindly nature shrinks from the perpetration of the deed of horror, she, like an evil genius, whispers him on to his damnation. The full measure of her wickedness is never disguised, the magnitude and atrocity of her crime is never extenuated, forgotten, or forgiven, in the whole course of the play. Our judgment is not bewildered, nor our moral feeling insulted, by the sentimental jumble of great crimes and dazzling virtues, after the fashion of the German school and of some admirable writers of our own time. Lady Macbeth's amazing power of intellect, her inexorable determination of purpose, her superhuman strength of nerve, render her as fearful in herself as her deeds are hateful; yet she is not a mere monster of depravity, with whom we have nothing in common, nor a meteor whose destroying path we watch in ignorant affright and amaze. She is a terrible impersonation of evil passions and mighty powers, never so far removed from our own nature as to be cast beyond the pale of our sympathies; for the woman herself remains a woman to the last—still linked with her sex and with humanity.

This impression is produced partly by the essential truth in the conception of the character, and partly by the manner in which it is evolved; by a combination of minute and delicate touches, in some instances by speech, in others by silence: at one time by what is revealed, at another by what we are left to infer. As in real life, we perceive distinctions in character we cannot always explain, and receive impressions for which we cannot always account, without going back to the beginning of an acquaintance, and recalling many and trifling circumstances—looks, and tones, and words: thus, to explain that hold which Lady Macbeth, in the midst of all her atrocities, still keeps upon our feelings, it is necessary to trace minutely the action of the play, as far as she is concerned in it, from its very commencement to its close.

We must bear in mind, that the first idea of murdering Duncan is not suggested by Lady Macbeth to her husband: it springs within his mind, and is revealed to us, before his first interview with his wife,—before she is introduced or even alluded to.

It will be said, that the same "horrid suggestion" presents itself spontaneously to her, on the reception of his letter; or rather, that the letter itself acts upon her mind as the prophecy of the Weird Sisters on the mind of her husband, kindling the latent passion for empire into a quenchless flame. We are prepared to see the train of evil, first lighted by hellish agency, extend itself to her through the medium of her husband; but we are spared the more revolting idea that it originated with her. The guilt is thus more equally divided than we should suppose, when we hear people pitying "the noble nature of Macbeth," bewildered and goaded on to crime, solely or chiefly by the instigation of his wife.

It is true that she afterwards appears the more active agent of the two; but it is less through her preëminence in wickedness than through her superiority of intellect. The eloquence—the fierce, fervid eloquence with which she bears down the relenting and reluctant spirit of her husband, the dexterous sophistry with which she wards off his objections, her artful and affected doubts of his courage—the sarcastic manner in which she lets fall the word coward—a word which no man can endure from another, still less from a woman, and least of all from a woman he loves—and the bold address with which she removes all obstacles, silences all arguments, overpowers all scruples, and marshals the way before him, absolutely make us shrink before the commanding intellect of the woman, with a terror in which interest and admiration are strangely mingled.

Again, in the murdering scene, the obdurate inflexibility of purpose with which she drives on Macbeth to the execution of their project, and her masculine indifference to blood and death, would inspire unmitigated disgust and horror, but for the involuntary consciousness that it is produced rather by the exertion of a strong power over herself, than by absolute depravity of disposition and ferocity of temper. This impression of her character is brought home at once to our very hearts with the most profound knowledge of the springs of nature within us, the most subtle mastery over their various operations, and a feeling of dramatic effect not less wonderful. The very passages in which Lady Macbeth displays the most savage and relentless determination, are so worded as to fill the mind with the idea of sex, and place the woman before us in all her dearest attributes, at once softening and refining the horror, and rendering it more intense. Thus, when she reproaches her husband for his weakness—

Again,

And lastly, in the moment of extremest horror comes that unexpected touch of feeling, so startling, yet so wonderfully true to nature—

Thus in one of Weber's or Beethoven's grand symphonies, some unexpected soft minor chord or passage will steal on the ear, heard amid the magnificent crash of harmony, making the blood pause, and filling the eye with unbidden tears.

It is particularly observable, that in Lady Macbeth's concentrated, strong-nerved ambition, the ruling passion of her mind, there is yet a touch of womanhood: she is ambitious less for herself than for her husband. It is fair to think this, because we have no reason to draw any other inference either from her words or actions. In her famous soliloquy, after reading her husband's letter, she does not once refer to herself. It is of him she thinks: she wishes to see her husband on the throne, and to place the sceptre within his grasp. The strength of her affections adds strength to her ambition. Although in the old story of Boethius we are told that the wife of Macbeth "burned with unquenchable desire to bear the name of queen," yet in the aspect under which Shakspeare has represented the character to us, the selfish part of this ambition is kept out of sight. We must remark also, that in Lady Macbeth's reflections on her husband's character, and on that milkiness of nature, which she fears "may impede him from the golden round," there is no indication of female scorn: there is exceeding pride, but no egotism in the sentiment or the expression;—no want of wifely and womanly respect and love for him, but on the contrary, a sort of unconsciousness of her own mental superiority, which she betrays rather than asserts, as interesting in itself as it is most admirably conceived and delineated.

Nor is there any thing vulgar in her ambition: as the strength of her affections lends to it something profound and concentrated, so her splendid imagination invests the object of her desire with its own radiance. We cannot trace in her grand and capacious mind that it is the mere baubles and trappings of royalty which dazzle and allure her: hers is the sin of the "star-bright apostate," and she plunges with her husband into the abyss of guilt, to procure for "all their days and nights sole sovereign sway and masterdom." She revels, she luxuriates in her dream of power. She reaches at the golden diadem, which is to sear her brain; she perils life and soul for its attainment, with an enthusiasm as perfect, a faith as settled, as that of the martyr, who sees at the stake, heaven and its crowns of glory opening upon him.