Gloucester. Now, Joan of Acon, let me mourn thy fall.
Sole, here alone, now sit thee down and sigh,
Sigh, hapless Gloucester, for thy sudden loss:
Pale death, alas, hath banish'd all thy pride,
Thy wedlock-vows! How oft have I beheld
Thy eyes, thy looks, thy lips, and every part,
How nature strove in them to show her art,
In shine, in shape, in colour and compare!
But now hath death, the enemy of love,
Stain'd and deform'd the shine, the shape, the red,
With pale and dimness, and my love is dead.
Ah, dead, my love! vile wretch, why am I living?
So willeth fate, and I must be contented:
All pomp in time must fade, and grow to nothing.
Wept I like Niobe, yet it profits nothing.
Then cease, my sighs, since I may not regain her;
And woe to wretched death that thus hath slain her!
(2)
Joan. Madam, if Joan thy daughter may advise,
Let not your honour make your manners change.
The people of this land are men of war,
The women courteous, mild, and debonair,
Laying their lives at princes' feet
That govern with familiar majesty.
But if their sovereigns once gin swell with pride,
Disdaining commons' love, which is the strength
And sureness of the richest commonwealth,
That prince were better live a private life
Than rule with tyranny and discontent.
If Peele wrote The Battle of Alcazar, which seems probable, he benefited by the mistakes of the previous play. It is a martial tragedy, imitating the verse and style of Marlowe's Tamburlaine or Greene's Alphonsus, King of Arragon. Acts and scenes delimit the stages of the course of events, the distraction of humorous prose scenes is banished, independent plots are forbidden their old parallel existence, everything moves steadily towards the tragic conclusion. Lest there should still arise uncertainty as to the drift of the various incidents as they occur, a 'Presenter' is at hand to serve as prologue to each act and explain, not merely what must be understood as having happened off the stage in the intervals, but what is about to take place on the stage, and the purpose that lies behind it. The verse is regular and often vigorous, though the vigour sometimes appears forced, and the constant stream of end-stopt lines becomes monotonous. Murders that cannot find room elsewhere are perpetrated in dumb-show, ghosts within the wings cry out Vindicta!, and the leading characters suffer the usual inflatus of windy rant to make their dimensions more kingly. Still the play fails to achieve the right effect. There is no dominant hero, the central figure, if such there is, being the villain, Muly Mahamet the Moor. But his is not the career, nor his the character, at all likely to win either the sympathy or the interest of an English audience. Defeated, exiled, twice seen in desperate flight, treacherous, and incapable of anything but amazing speeches, he thoroughly deserves the ignominious fate reserved for him. Of the three other claimants to pre-eminence, Sebastian lends his aid to the base Moor and is defeated and slain; Stukeley, the Englishman, is a traitor to his country, and is murdered on the battlefield in cold blood by his comrades; while Abdelmelec, who is alone successful in war, does not appear in more than five of the thirteen scenes, and is killed in the last battle. In action, too, there is a divided interest. The first act is entirely devoted to the campaign which places Abdelmelec on the throne of the usurping Moor; not until the fourth scene of the second act does King Sebastian of Portugal come upon the stage; only from that point onward are we concerned with his unsuccessful attempt—in which he is assisted by Stukeley—to restore the crown of Morocco to Muly Mahamet. Once more we have to lament that absence of unity and grip, though under improved conditions, which we noticed in Peele's former plays.
Captain Stukeley was a more interesting character off the stage than on; the details of his life may be found in Fuller, or in Dyce's prefatory note to the play in his edition of Peele's works. The surprising thing is that he was not hissed from the boards by indignant patriots. But his exploits, and his thoroughly English pride, seem to have awakened the sympathies of his countrymen, for his memory was cherished as that of a popular hero. His traitorous intention to conquer Ireland for the Pope, however, receives noble reproof from Peele in the mouths of Don Diego Lopez and King Sebastian. The latter's speech well deserves perusal. But we have quoted sufficiently already from Peele's patriotic eloquence.
The extravagant language of the Moor has been made immortal by Shakespeare: a line from one of his extraordinary speeches to his wife, Calipolis, in exile, is adapted by Pistol to his own rhetorical use (Second Part of Henry the Fourth, II. iv). To show the inconsistencies over which rant unblushingly careers, we give two consecutive speeches by this terrible fellow.
[The Moor's Son has just given a highly coloured description of the enemy's forces.]
The Moor. Away, and let me hear no more of this.
Why, boy,
Are we successor to the great Abdelmunen,
Descended from th' Arabian Muly Xarif,
And shall we be afraid of Bassas and of bugs,[61]
Raw-head and Bloody-bone?
Boy, seest here this scimitar by my side?
Sith they begin to bathe in blood,
Blood be the theme whereon our time shall tread:
Such slaughter with my weapon shall I make
As through the stream and bloody channels deep
Our Moors shall sail in ships and pinnaces
From Tangier-shore unto the gates of Fess.
The Moor's Son. And of those slaughter'd bodies shall thy son
A hugy tower erect like Nimrod's frame,
To threaten those unjust and partial gods
That to Abdallas' lawful seed deny
A long, a happy, and triumphant reign.
[At this point a Messenger enters, reports general disaster, and urges flight.]