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 helly 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—­assuredly 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 shifting 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.