In the fifth act the tidings of the murder of Aldobrand are brought to the convent by Imogine, who, in a frantic state of mind, rushes in which her child. The monks and the knights of St. Anselm hasten to the castle. Bertram has locked himself up in a chamber where he has passed all the night with the dead body; at the summons of the prior, however, he opens the door and suffers himself to be arrested.—The last scene is laid in a dark wood where Imogine, who has lost her reason, is lingering in a cavern. The way which leads Bertram to the place of execution passes by the cavern, and he, who has up till now shown no repentance, sinks down when he hears the piercing shrieks of Imogine. She comes out and expires at the sight of him, whereupon Bertram snatches the sword of one of the knights and stabs himself.
As a drama, Bertram is not well constructed. The plot is curiously void of consistency and inner logic; when the talk is interrupted by action, it seems to happen more or less at random. The effect of the shipwreck in the first act is destroyed by the sudden appearance of all the banditti who are saved in a manner altogether inexplicable and whose preservation, moreover, is quite unnecessary. They do not in any way interfere in the events; Bertram kills Aldobrand with his own hands, and when the deed is done, he receives no help from his companions: they disappear from the play as mysteriously as they enter it. The final determination of Bertram to take Aldobrand’s life is very imperfectly accounted for. He must, surely, have been aware that Aldobrand, if cognizant of his presence, would adopt vigorous measures for his persecution, whence his sudden rage when informed of this is rather surprizing. He exclaims, with reference to the calamity he has brought over Imogine:
’Twas but e’en now, I would have knelt to him
With the prostration of a conscious villain;
I would have crouched beneath his spurning feet;
I would have felt their trampling tread, and blessed it—
For I had injured him—
but then he forgets that Aldobrand knows nothing of his relation to Imogine, or his repentance, or even of the fact that he has promised the prior to give up his trade and retire where the voice of man is never heard. Here, however, it must be mentioned that in the original manuscript of the play, Bertram is prompted to the committal of his crimes by an evil spirit who dwells in the forest and whom he insists on visiting. After his visit to the demon he seems so altered, and the stamp of an intercourse with a supernatural being is so visible upon him, that his own robbers shrink from him. These passages Maturin expunged on the advice of Scott, and, accordingly, made respective alterations in his play, though he consented to do so with great reluctance. The scenes in question were afterwards published by Scott in another connection;[72] he bestows high praise on their poetical beauty and hints, by way of comparison, at the effect produced upon Macbeth by the appearance of the witches. His motive for recommending Maturin to suppress them was that they were, in his opinion, unsuitable on the stage.[73] Generally speaking, a psychological argumentation certainly is, in a drama, preferable to a direct interference of a supernatural being who never appears himself; but here this argumentation is so weak that there also is some truth in the remark of another critic,[74] that without those scenes ‘the change from the Bertram of the second act to the Bertram of the fourth is inexplicable.’ Thus in either version the decisive point in the action is unsatisfactorily motived. Nor is it difficult to detect other implausibilities and makeshifts of a clumsy kind. The road of Aldobrand to the convent, for instance, is stopped by a flood which he is unable to cross even on horseback—because he must, some way or other, be brought back to the castle; but the flood does not hinder Imogine, the same night, from making the same journey on foot, carrying her child to boot. The child is introduced into the play in order to make an end of the second and third acts; what it has got to say sounds very unnatural. All the finales are ineffective, not least that of the fifth act. When Bertram has stabbed himself the prior rushes to him:
Ber. (struggling with the agonies of death)