even to join in their morris. From this time forward the underplot is hopelessly degraded, both by its being drawn out to an absurd length and by its ending in the coarsest of scenes which leads to what we are asked to believe is the girl’s complete restoration to sanity.
The Wooer first acquaints the Gaoler with his sweetheart’s complaint.[85:1] We learn that it has been preceded by the natural irritation which is common in such cases, and that she has answered her father’s questions:
“So childishly,
So sillily, as if she were a fool,
An innocent.”
Since we have last seen her, her senses have quite gone. She constantly repeats phrases which tell of her trouble—“Palamon is gone,” “Palamon, fair Palamon,” and the like. She even plagiarises Desdemona, and sings nothing but “Willow, willow, willow.” She has been playing and garlanding herself with flowers; now she weeps, now smiles, now sings; reckless of danger, she sits by a lake, and attempts to drown herself at the Wooer’s approach. She appears at length[85:2] and carries on the same kind of conversation, fancifully constructing long trains of imagination from the smallest incidents. While ever and anon the theme of
Palamon recurs: he is still in love with her—“a fine young gentleman,” and he “lies longing” for her in the wood.
This her father reports to the Doctor: “She is continually in a harmless distemper, sleeps little; altogether without appetite, save often drinking; dreaming of another world and a better; and what broken piece of matter so e’er she’s about the name Palamon lards it.”[86:1] The Doctor is out of his depth. He understands little of the mind diseased, holding the popular notion that it is “more at some time of the moon than at other some,” and confessing that he “cannot minister” to her “perturbed mind.” The remedy which he proposes is of the crudest. The Wooer is to dress as if he were Palamon, satisfy all the girl’s desires, and wait for her to return to her right mind. Both Wooer and Gaoler protest against the extreme application of this “cure,” but the Doctor is so insistent that they give in, and when in the last scene Palamon enquires after the girl who procured his escape and who, he has heard, has been ill, he is told that she is
“well restor’d
And to be married shortly.”[86:2]