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CYRIL TOURNEUR.

The Revenger’s Tragedy.—­The reality and life of the dialogue, in which Vindici and Hippolito first tempt their mother, and then threaten her with death for consenting to the dishonor of their sister, passes any scenical illusion I ever felt.  I never read it but my ears tingle, and I feel a hot blush overspread my cheeks, as if I were presently about to proclaim such malefactions of myself, as the brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, in words more keen and dagger-like than those which Hamlet speaks to his mother.  Such power has the passion of shame truly personated, not only to strike guilty creatures unto the soul, but to “appall” even those that are “free.”

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JOHN WEBSTER.

The Duchess of Malfy.—­All the several parts of the dreadful apparatus with which the death of the Duchess is ushered in, the waxen images which counterfeit death, the wild masque of madmen, the tomb-maker, the bellman, the living person’s dirge, the mortification by degrees,—­are not more remote from the conceptions of ordinary vengeance, than the strange character of suffering which they seem to bring upon their victim is out of the imagination of ordinary poets.  As they are not like inflictions of this life, so her language seems not of this world.  She has lived among horrors till she is become “native and endowed unto that element.”  She speaks the dialect of despair; her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale.  To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit:  this only a Webster can do.  Inferior geniuses may “upon horror’s head horrors accumulate,” but they cannot do this.  They mistake quantity for quality; they “terrify babes with painted devils;” but they know not how a soul is to be moved.  Their terrors want dignity, their affrightments are without decorum.

The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona.—­This White Devil of Italy sets off a bad cause so speciously, and pleads with such an innocence-resembling boldness, that we seem to see that matchless beauty of her face which inspires such gay confidence into her, and are ready to expect, when she has done her pleadings, that her very judges, her accusers, the grave ambassadors who sit as spectators, and all the court, will rise and make proffer to defend her, in spite of the utmost conviction of her guilt; as the Shepherds in Don Quixote make proffer to follow the beautiful Shepherdess Marcela, “without making any profit of her manifest resolution made there in their hearing.”

  “So sweet and lovely does she make the shame,
  Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
  Does spot the beauty of her budding name!”

I never saw anything like the funeral dirge in this play for the death of Marcello, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the Tempest.  As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy.  Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.