Dramatic Romances

Transcriber's Note:
Stanza and section numbers have been moved to the left margin, and periods that follow them have been removed.
Periods have been omitted after Roman numerals in the titles of popes and nobles.
Quotation marks have been left only at the beginning and end of a multi-line quotation, and at the beginning of each stanza within the quotation, instead of at the beginning of every line, as in the printed text.
The egotism of the Ferrara husband outraged at the gentle wife because she is as gracious toward those who rendered her small courtesies, and seemed as thankful to them as she was to him for his gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name, opens up for inspection the heart of a husband at a time when men exercised complete control over their wives, and could satisfy their jealous, selfish instincts by any cruel methods they chose to adopt, with no one to say them nay. The highly developed artistic sense shown by this husband is not incompatible with his consummate selfishness and cruelty, as many tales of that time might be brought forward to illustrate. The husband in The Statue and the Bust belongs to the same type, and the situation there is the inevitable outcome of a civilization in which women were not consulted as to whom they would marry, and naturally often fell a prey to love if it should come to them afterwards. Weakness of will in the case of the lovers in this poem wrecked their lives; for they were not strong enough to follow either duty or love. Another glimpse is caught of this period when husbands and brothers and fathers meted out what they considered justice to the women in In a Gondola. The Grammarian's Funeral gives also an aspect of Renaissance life—the fervor for learning characteristic of the earlier days of the Renaissance when devoted pedants, as Arthur Symons says in referring to this poem, broke ground in the restoration to the modern world of the civilization and learning of ancient Greece and Rome. Again, The Heretic's Tragedy and Holy-Cross Day picture most vividly the methods resorted to by the dying church in its attempts to keep control of the souls of a humanity seething toward religious tolerance.