“She carries with her an infectious grief,
That strikes all her beholders.”[130:2]
Her father is distressed beyond measure; her betrothed, “servile ‘iure divino’ royalist” as he is, is stricken with the keenest remorse. Even the apparently buoyant Evadne is moved to pity.
Perhaps, in the scene between Aspatia and her waiting women, the wronged woman loses a little of our sympathy. The dramatists have evidently succumbed to the Muse of Poetry and Aspatia’s laments become drawn-out and a little monotonous. Yet the poetry is at times almost perfect; it is only her continual harping on the subject of “Man, Oh that beast man!”[130:3] which makes us fear lest melancholy become
raving madness. When she subsides at last into “dull silence,” our love for her is at its height: she is indeed “like Sorrow’s monument.”
In the last act she appears once more,[131:1] in the disguise of a supposed brother, with the seeming intention of killing her faithless lord. A tragic Viola indeed, she succeeds in getting wounded, and eventually dies, not without witnessing the death of Evadne and holding Amintor’s hand in token of reconciliation.
The girl Euphrasia, in “Philaster,” has less of tragedy and more of romance, more even of Shakespeare’s own poetry. In her disguise as Bellario, Philaster’s page, she appears as a “pretty, sad-talking boy,”[131:2] and it would seem to be rather the prince, who sits “cross-armed,” “sighs away the day” for love of Arethusa, and talks furthermore in several places of going mad,[131:3] who should come under this category of melancholiacs. But he himself proves to his own satisfaction that he is sane enough; and though such a statement is not always to be believed, it seems for once to correspond with the point of view of the author. But Euphrasia herself is continually reminding us of her melancholy, which has all the appearance of being conceived as similar to that of Aspatia, although it is less pronounced. It springs
from love, it is nowhere put down to a mere caprice, and although in neither of these two plays is any cure attempted, this is because the characters are subordinated to others and for the sake of a unified plot.
The melancholy of Mistress Constance, in Brome’s “Northern Lass,” was probably meant by the author to be taken more seriously than most people would find possible to-day. In conception it resembles the melancholy-madness of Fletcher’s “Passionate Madman.” Its cause, to go no further, is the same. Love has “overwhelmed her spirits, and turned the faculties of all her senses into a rude confusion, sending forth the uses of them extravagantly.” The method of her cure, according to Pate (disguised as a Doctor) is as simple as are the lightning cures of Fletcher: “The party that she loves must be the doctor, the medicine and the cure.” This médecin malgré lui, however, finds his patient too much for him. “I fear she is wiser than all of us, that have to do with her. She knows my gown better than I do; for I have had but two hours’ acquaintance with it.” Constance, though at times she sings snatches of song, does not rave like Shattillion or the Gaoler’s Daughter; the prevailing symptom of her melancholy is depression. As a character she is peculiarly lacking in charm, though the title-page of the play, which declares it to
be “a comedy often acted with good applause,” in high places, would suggest that the heroine was popular enough at the time.