A KING AND NO KING.
Act IV. Speech of Tigranes:—
She, that forgat the greatness of her grief
And miseries, that must follow such mad passions,
Endless and wild as women! &c.
Seward's note and suggestion of 'in.'
It would be amusing to learn from some existing friend of Mr. Seward what he meant, or rather dreamed, in this note. It is certainly a difficult passage, of which there are two solutions;—one, that the writer was somewhat more injudicious than usual;—the other, that he was very, very much more profound and Shakspearian than usual. Seward's emendation, at all events, is right and obvious. Were it a passage of Shakspeare, I should not hesitate to interpret it as characteristic of Tigranes' state of mind,—disliking the very virtues, and therefore half-consciously representing them as mere products of the violence, of the sex in general in all their whims, and yet forced to admire, and to feel and to express gratitude for, the exertion in his own instance. The inconsistency of the passage would be the consistency of the author. But this is above Beaumont and Fletcher.