FOOTNOTES:
——The gods approve
The depth, and not the tumult of the soul.
Wordsworth.
"Il pouvait y avoir des vagues majestueuses et non de l'orage sans son cœur," was finely observed of Madame de Staël in her maturer years; it would have been true of Hermione at any period of her life.
[49] Winter's Tale, act v scene 11
[50] Only in the last scene, when, with solemnity befitting the occasion, Paulina invokes the majestic figure to "descend, and be stone no more," and where she presents her daughter to her. "Turn, good lady! our Perdita is found."
[51] Act iii, scene 3.
[52] Which being interpreted into modern English, means, I believe, nothing more than that the pattern was what we now call arabesque.
[53] There is an incident in the original tale, "Il Moro di Venezia," which could not well be transferred to the drama, but which is very effective, and adds, I think, to the circumstantial horrors of the story. Desdemona does not accidentally drop the handkerchief; it is stolen from her by Iago's little child, an infant of three years old, whom he trains and bribes to the theft. The love of Desdemona for this child, her little playfellow—the pretty description of her taking it in her arms and caressing it, while it profits by its situation to steal the handkerchief from her bosom, are well imagined, and beautifully told; and the circumstance of Iago employing his own innocent child as the instrument of his infernal villany, adds a deeper, and, in truth an unnecessary touch of the fiend, to his fiendish character.
[54] Consequences are so linked together, that the exclamation of Emilia,
O thou dull Moor!—That handkerchief thou speakest of
I found by fortune, and did give my husband!—
is sufficient to reveal to Othello the whole history of his ruin.
[55] Decamerone. Novella, 9mo. Giornata, 2do.
[56] Vide Dr. Johnson, and Dunlop's History of Fiction.
[57] See Hazlitt and Schlegel on the catastrophe of Cymbeline.
[58] More rare—i. e. more exquisitely poignant.
[59] Characters of Shakspeare's Plays.
[60] Vide act 1. scene 7.
[61] The character of Cloten has been pronounced by some unnatural, by others inconsistent, and by others obsolete. The following passage occurs in one of Miss Seward's letters, vol. iii p. 246: "It is curious that Shakspeare should, in so singular a character as Cloten, have given the exact prototype of a being whom I once knew. The unmeaning frown of countenance, the shuffling gait, the burst of voice, the bustling insignificance, the fever and ague fits of valor, the froward tetchiness, the unprincipled malice, and, what is more curious, those occasional gleams of good sense amidst the floating clouds of folly which generally darkened and confused the man's brain, and which, in the character of Cloten, we are apt to impute to a violation of unity in character; but in the some-time Captain C——, I saw that the portrait of Cloten was not out of nature."
[62] i. e. full of words.
[63] Dryden.
[64] King Lear may be supposed to have lived about one thousand years before the Christian era, being the forth or fifth in descent from King Brut, the great-grandson of Æneas, and the fabulous founder of the kingdom of Britain.
[65] She is commemorated by Lord Byron. Vide Childe Harold Canto iii.