The Herodian trilogy is the clearest illustration of this, because the material has been reduced to its simplest elements. It is, too, a good example of the poet’s dramatic art in its final manner, since therein is developed almost to an extreme her compacted, elliptical method of presentation. She had from the first a gift of seizing character into expression which, though intensely poetical, was often abrupt, fragmentary, and disjointed; the swift words leaping from the cloud of passion like lightning in a night of storm, and laying bare in one instant the whole earth and sky. In these plays, and especially in Queen Mariamne, this characteristic economy is practised to an extent which sometimes almost defeats itself.
Only two plays of the trilogy were completed, Queen Mariamne and The Accuser. But neither suffers from the absence of the third; for while the first is the tragedy of Mariamne and the second the tragedy of Herod, the two together form a complete dramatic presentment of the historical figure of Herod the Great. It is a subject made for drama; and although for a century before Michael Field no great rendering of it had been made, the flair of the early seventeenth-century dramatists had unerringly tracked it down and fastened upon it. Fenton’s Mariamne (a hundred years later) is a rather blustering affair, mainly occupied with intrigue and family feuds, and presenting Mariamne as an inferior kind of gramophone with a very limited number of records.
But a pleasing and significant fact about the origins of Michael Field’s Queen Mariamne is that this was the subject of the first English drama ever published by a woman. In 1613 a play appeared called The Tragedie of Mariam, the faire Queene of Jewry, written by that learned, vertuous and truly noble Ladie, E. C. And although there has been some question as to which of two possible individuals this “truly noble” E. C. represented, both of them were women; and it seems to have been established now that the author was certainly Lady Elizabeth Carew. Whether our poets knew of this play and its authorship does not appear: they seem to have gone straight to Josephus for their material, and to have been completely loyal to him. Indeed, so close do they keep to the historical record of their persons, that the transformation they effect is the more magical. They take the rugged facts, and breathe life into them. Thus their Mariamne grows out of history like a tree out of a bare hillside, made from the rock and rooted in it, and yet a new and living thing. She is very clearly and strongly drawn, a nature that clings with racial tenacity fast to the ties of family, and which therefore cannot forget the dead grandfather and brother who lie between herself and Herod. She does not wish to avenge them: she possesses an integrity which holds her loyal to the man her husband “who had slain her kin”; but she cannot love him, and she finds it impossible to be polite to his relatives. That intriguing Idumean set! Mariamne the Maccabee, impolitic and proud, allows herself to sneer at their Edomite origin and their creeping ways. But she will not countenance, either, the plots of her own mother; and stands alone, a noble if scornful figure, between their snarling camps.
The question as to whether Herod’s passion for Mariamne does at last win her love is one which attracts the modern romantic, though it was, of course, irrelevant to Josephus. To him the damning fact about her was that she permitted herself to be haughty to her husband; and Michael Field respects her original so far as to leave the question unsolved. Yet it is possible to see in a hint or two the gradual filming over, so to speak, of the wounds that Mariamne had suffered at Herod’s hands; and an appeal to his love, as to a refuge, from the spiteful, clamorous hatreds of both their families. The tentative response makes her tragedy the more poignant. But even had she loved Herod, her pride could not have borne the insult of that fatal summons to his pleasure. The Asmonean princess denied the Edomite, and, lighting up his wrath, thereby fell into the hands of those malignant enemies their relatives. These, when Herod would have annulled the death-sentence passed on her, fanned his jealousy and outraged pride, and compassed her end.
Mariamne’s death, even in the plain statement of the historian, is one of the sublime tragedies of the world. Our poet does not move a hair’s breadth from the facts, nor colour them. She was probably tempted to do so, for there is a sense in which the facts were undramatic enough to defeat her. Mariamne makes no defence when she is accused, no protest when she is condemned; and the poignancy of her tragedy lies largely in her silence and her isolation. This pitiful loneliness is difficult to handle as drama; and the poet has been so true to the record that, after the short crucial scene at the beginning of Act V which provokes the catastrophe, Mariamne has no more to say than a single line as she goes to her execution. Yet the whole act is permeated by her personality and visibly moved by the forces that the poet has set alight in her. Thus even Salome and Herod’s mother, spying fearfully upon Herod after the sentence has been decreed, are obsessed by the thought of her:
Cypros. Do you hear him—;hear my son; his ceaseless treading
As the creatures tread at night?
Salome. I hear him, mother;
He is stepping out her doom.
Cypros. You hear his treading,
Soft on the carpet, struck against the marble?
Would she were dead, who hated him to death!
. . . . .
Salome. Had he but looked on her,
Those mournful, sable eyes and lids in shadow
Under the pearl-laced crown, that brow in shadow,
And the obdurate mouth had been a charm
To honour as to fortitude. But, mother,
She strives to send no message; she is silent
As trophies or cold statues.
Act V, Scene 2
Thus Herod, the first fury of his anger spent, begins to be possessed by the haunting apparition of Mariamne which will not leave him any more; and to dream, while there is yet time, of reprieve:
Herod. But there are fortresses—;
Masada by the Dead Sea coast;
There I could bury her as in a coffin,
Each sigh of wind a death-song over her.
Were not that best? A tower her monument,
Yet she not dead, not out of all account,
Still mortal....
Unseen of living nature, but alive....
With the cloud eyes of her, the silken cheek,
Even the voice of rough-edged undertone,
Enamouring offence. There none would love her,
None! But my treasury
Would have sealed riches, not a destitute,
Defaulting cave. Among the coins and jewels,
Locked-up regalia and spoil—;a queen....
The difference!...
There in the rusty gloom accessible.
The difference! I think she shall not die.
Act V, Scene 2