Aeneas. O Dido, patroness of all our lives,
When I leave thee, death be my punishment!
Swell, raging seas! frown, wayward Destinies!
Blow, winds! threaten, ye rocks and sandy shelves!
This is the harbour that Aeneas seeks:
Let's see what tempests can annoy me now.
Dido. Not all the world can take thee from mine arms.
But the second call is imperative. With constraining pathos Dido implores him not to go. When that cannot melt his resolution the resentment of thwarted love breaks out in passionate reproach. This again changes to the wailing of sorrow as he turns and leaves her. Anna is sent after him to beseech his stay.
Dido. Call him not wicked, sister: speak him fair,
And look upon him with a mermaid's eye....
Request him gently, Anna, to return:
I crave but this—he stay a tide or two,
That I may learn to bear it patiently;
If he depart thus suddenly, I die.
Run, Anna, run; stay not to answer me.
Anna returns alone. Frantic schemes of pursuit, dangerously near to madness, at length crystallize into the last fatal resolve. The pile is made ready. Her attendants are all dismissed. One by one the articles left behind by Aeneas are devoted to the flames.
Here lie the sword that in the darksome cave
He drew, and swore by, to be true to me:
Thou shalt burn first; thy crime is worse than his.
Here lie the garment which I clothed him in
When first he came on shore: perish thou too.
These letters, lines, and perjured papers, all
Shall burn to cinders in this precious flame.
When all have been consumed she leaps into the fire and so perishes.
The character of the Queen of Carthage sufficiently demonstrates that Marlowe could paint a faithful and impressive likeness of a woman when he chose. Possibly his fiery spirit would have proved less sympathetic to a gentler type. Yet there are touches in the slighter portraits of Abigail and Queen Isabella which reveal flashes of true insight into the tender emotions of a woman's heart. Had Marlowe died before writing Edward the Second we should have said that he was incapable of portraying any type of man but the abnormal and Napoleonic. He showed himself to be a daring and brilliantly successful voyager into untried seas. In the face of what he has left behind him it would be a bold critic indeed who named with confidence any aspect of tragedy as outside the empire of his genius.
The verse of Dido, Queen of Carthage shows no signs of retrogression from the steady advance to a more natural and perfect style which we have traced in the progress from Tamburlaine to Edward the Second. An exception to this improvement will be found in certain portions of Aeneas's long speech in the second act, of which it is probably not unjust to surmise that Nash was the author. There are in Dido's own speeches elements of wild extravagance, but they are natural to the intensity of her passion. Does not Shakespeare's Cleopatra rave in a manner no less fervid and hyperbolic? and in Enobarbus's description of her magnificence when she met Antony is there not a reminiscence of the oriental splendour of Dido's proposed fleet?
We quote part of the farewell scene between Dido and Aeneas.