Errant sous les cyprès des rives escartees.
She has waited only to pay the due rites, but now she is free to breathe her last on her lover’s corpse:
Que de mille baisers, et mille et mille encore
Pour office dernier ma bouche vous honore.
Et qu’en un tel devoir mon corps affoiblissant
Defaille dessur vous, mon ame vomissant.
3. ENGLISH FOLLOWERS OF THE FRENCH SCHOOL.
“THE WOUNDS OF CIVIL WAR”
The Marc Antoine is the best tragedy on a Roman theme, and one of the best imitations of Seneca that France in the sixteenth century has to show. It deserved to find admirers on the other side of the Channel, and it did. Among the courtly and cultured circles in whose eyes the Latin drama was the ideal and criterion to which all poets should aspire and by which their achievements should be tested, it was bound to call forth no little enthusiasm. In England ere this similar attempts had been made and welcomed, but none had been quite so moving and interesting, above all none had conformed so strictly to the formal requirements of the humanist code. In Gorboduc, the first of these experiments, Sidney, lawgiver of the elect, was pleased to admit the “honest civility” and “skilful poetry,” but his praises were not without qualification:
As it is full of stately speeches and well sounding Phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his stile, and as full of notable moralitie, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtayne the very end of Poesie: yet in troth it is very defectious in the circumstaunces: which greeveth mee, because it might not remaine as an exact model of all Tragedies. For it is faulty both in place, and time, the two necessary companions of all corporall actions. For where the stage should alwaies represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it, should be, both by Aristotles precept, and common reason, but one day: there is both many dayes, and many places, inartificially imagined.[58]
Nor in such respects were things much better in the Misfortunes of Arthur, by Thomas Hughes, which was composed in 1587, the year after Sidney’s death. But meanwhile France had been blessed with a play at least the equal of these native products in poetry and pathos, and much more observant of the unities that scholars were proclaiming. If the scene was not absolutely unchanged, at least the changes were confined within the area of a single town. If the time was not precisely marked, and in Plutarch’s narrative slightly exceeded the orthodox limits, still Garnier had so managed it that the occurrences set forth might easily be conceived to take place in a single day. It seems just the modern play that would have fulfilled the desire of Sidney’s heart; and since it was composed in a foreign tongue, what could be more fitting than that Sidney’s sister, the famous Countess of Pembroke, who shared so largely in Sidney’s literary tastes and literary gifts, should undertake to give it an English form? It may have been on her part a pious offering to his manes, and in 1590, four years after her brother’s death, her version was complete.[59] She was well fitted for her task, and she has discharged it well. Sometimes she may take her liberties, but generally she is wonderfully faithful, and yet neither in diction nor versification is she stiffer than many contemporary writers of original English verse. Here, for instance, is Diomed’s eulogy of Cleopatra’s charm: