Strangers in court do take her for the queen : Till Suffolk gave two dukedoms for his daughter." 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: "Go, speak not to me-even now begone. O go not yet! Even thus two friends condemn'd Yet now farewell; and farewell life with thee!" which is followed by that beautiful and intense burst of passion from Suffolk "T is not the hand I care for, wert thou hence: So Suffolk had thy heavenly company; For where thou art, there is the world itself, In 3 Henry VI., 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 "She-wolf of France, and worse than wolves of France, Whose tongue more poisons than the adder's tooth"and taunts her with the poverty of her father, the most irritating topic he could have chosen : 66 'Hath that poor monarch taught thee to insult? That beggars, mounted, ride their horse to death. * O tiger's heart, wrapp'd in a woman's hide! To bid the father wipe his face withal, Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless!" 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 IV., 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 III. In the play, Margaret embraces the offer without a moment's hesitation:* 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 should 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. * See 3 Hen. VI. iii. 3. 199: "Queen Margaret. Warwick, these words have turn'd my hate to love; And I forgive and quite forget old faults, And joy that thou becom'st King Henry's friend.” ཟླ་ It took Louis XI., 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 (v. 4. I fol.) 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 "Why should she live to fill the world with words?" 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 IV. There she stalks around the seat of her former greatness, like a terrible phantom of departed majesty, uncrowned, unsceptred, 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. "Duchess. O, Harry's wife, triumph not in my woes; God witness with me, I have wept for thine! Queen Margaret. Bear with me, I am hungry for revenge, And now I cloy me with beholding it. Thy Edward he is dead, that kill'd my Edward; Thy other Edward dead, to quit my Edward: Thy Clarence he is dead, that stabb'd my Edward; The adulterate Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, Grey, And send them thither. But at hand, at hand, Ensues his piteous and unpitied end: Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar for him; saints pray Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I pray, That I may live to say, The dog is dead." 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 "Why should calamity be full of words?" [From Dowden's "Shakspere." *] Whether any portions of the first part of Henry VI. be from the hand of Shakspere, and, if there be, what those portions are, need not be here investigated. The play belongs, in the main, to the pre-Shaksperian school. Shakspere finds his own genius for the dramatic rendering of history for the first time distinctly in the second and third parts of Henry VI. The writer of the first part does not stand above the characters which he creates; he is violently prejudiced against some, and he feels a lyrical delight in singing the praises of others. But in the treatment of the characters of the King, of Gloster, of York, of Rich*Shakspere: a Critical Study of his Mind and Art, by Edward Dow den: American ed. (New York, 1881), p. 153 fol. |