The volume and essential vitality are Beaumont's: the cruel desertion of Aspatia, her lyric self-obliteration and desperate rush on fate; the artful revelation of Evadne's character, of her duplicity, her effrontery, her shamelessness; the stirrings of a soul within her, its gradual recognition of the inevitable,—that unchastity cannot be atoned even by vengeance, nor cleansed by blood,—and its true birth through love desired to love achieved in death; the bewilderment of the innocent but shuffling hero, blinded by circumstance and besotted by loyalty to the lustful author of his wrongs,—yet idealized by virgin and wanton alike; the spiritual elevation of Melantius, and the conflict between honour and friendship, pride and sacrifice, which ennobles the comradeship of that blunt soldier with the deluded Amintor; the pestilent King; and Calianax, the poltroon whose braggadocio is part humorous and part cunning, but all helpless and hopeless. These are Beaumont's; and his, too, the wealth of dramatic situation and device: the enthralling exposition, the silver sound and ecstasy of the masque in the first act; the shrewd development of motive, and the psychic revolutions of movement in the second and third acts; whatever of tenderness or of intricate complication the fourth displays—in fact, all that is not palpable violence. His, the breathless suspense and the swiftly urgent, unexpected sensations that crowd the last scene of the fifth and crown the catastrophe; and his, the gleaming epigram and the poetic finality.
In his Tragedies of the Last Age, licensed in 1677, Rymer attacked The Maides Tragedy violently for its lack of unity, unnaturalness, improbability of plot, and inconsistency of delineation. Perhaps, as Rymer insisted, the title is a misnomer: perhaps the play might better have been called Amintor, or the Lustful King, or The Concubine. But The Maides Tragedy is a more attractive name, and it may be justified. For I do not find that the action is double-centred. It springs entirely out of Amintor's desertion of the Maid for a woman whom he speedily discovers to be 'bed-fellow' to the King. The pathetic devotion of Aspatia is essential to our understanding of Amintor's tragic weakness, his hamartia. His failure to act in accordance with the dictates of honour toward Aspatia is prophetic of the indecision that costs him the respect of Evadne, nay extinguishes that first flicker of love which then was but desire. Vile as she was, she would have kissed the sin off from his lips if on their wedding-night he had unquestioningly slain the man to whom she had sold herself. The Nemesis, too, of Amintor is not Evadne nor the King, but Aspatia, thrust out of mind though not forgotten:
I did that lady wrong. Methinks I feel
A griefe shoot suddenly through all my veins,—[238]
... The faithless sin I made
To faire Aspatia is not yet revenged;
It follows me.—[239]
His Nemesis is Aspatia, constant unto death,—and in her death, awakening such remorse that he must die to be with her: "Aspatia!" he cries—
The soule is fled forever, and I wrong
Myselfe so long to lose her company,
Must I talke now? Heres to be with thee, love![240]
Rymer's criticism and that of a recent essayist,[241] of "the irrelevance of the motives that Beaumont employs" in the characterization and conduct of Evadne have logicality of appearance, but are based upon incorrect premises. The facts, as Beaumont gives them, are that Evadne was "once fair" and "chastely sweet,"—before she met the King; that she was already corrupt when she took Amintor as her husband; that her "delicacy of feeling" after the marriage, in presence of her Ladies of the Bedchamber, is an assumed delicacy; that she loves the King "with ambition not with her eyes" (III, 1); that she "would bend to any one that won his throne"; that she has accepted Amintor as a screen, but speedily lusts for him, and is willing to give herself to him if he will forthright kill the King (II, 1, 179):
Wilt thou kill this man?
Sweare, my Amintor, and I'le kisse the sin
Off from thy lips.
But Amintor is cautious and obliquely conscientious, not the kind of man to satisfy her new desire, and ambition too. He could never win her by winning the throne,—too lily-livered:
"I wonnot sweare, sweet love," says he, "till I do know the cause";—