A subject of this kind, when attempted at all, suggests painful reflections if failure, emphatic failure, is the result. A goose essaying an eagle's flight would scarcely present a more absurd figure. Mr. Swinburne has fallen immeasurably below the level of a subject whose level is greatness. Not because he has chosen to paint Mary, Queen of Scots, as a fiend, is this judgment passed on his work. Milton has proved that Satan can be converted [pg 348] by genius into the most powerful dramatic villain that ever trod the stage. Lady Macbeth may thrill us with horror, but she never causes us to yawn. The author of Bothwell was at liberty, by the license allowed to poets, to make his heroine wicked enough even to satisfy his fastidious taste, and still have given us a drama that of its own force and brilliancy and coherence would have extorted the admiration of the unfortunate queen's most ardent defenders. But even her heartiest haters could not resist the tendency to nod over the cumbrous wickedness, the very heavy villany, of Bothwell, which is simply a dilution of Froude with a tincture of Swinburne, well watered and administered in the largest possible doses, or, in plain English, a few scenes of the history of the period stitched loosely together and set to measured lines of blank verse.
Five hundred and thirty-two pages, with thirty lines to the page, in five acts and sixty scenes, make a tragedy indeed. Such is Bothwell. Yet, notwithstanding its alarming proportions, it only extends from the death of Rizzio to the battle of Langside, thus omitting the scene that of all others is the most thrilling and effective—Mary's execution. This may have been done with a purpose; for even malevolence falters there. Such an end, preceded by her long captivity, so patiently borne, were she even as wicked as Mr. Swinburne would make her, might almost expiate any crime, as it sanctifies her innocence.
The entire first act, entitled “David Rizzio,” is absorbed by the murder of the character after which it is named. As far as its necessary connection with the drama goes, it might have been entirely and very profitably omitted. It serves, indeed, to introduce many of the characters, but to no special purpose that might not have been accomplished in any of the other acts. The author forgets that he is not writing history, but a drama. We do not want the minutiæ, everything that everybody said at any time, in any place, and under any circumstances while Mary, Queen of Scots, was living, which Mr. Swinburne seems to think he was bound to give us, and in blank verse too, in Bothwell. We want the situations, the great facts. What led up to them may be told or hinted at in a few lines. Mr. Swinburne does not seem to have realized this, and, as a consequence, his drama is crowded with scenes, incidents, and personages that not only hinder, but are utterly irrelevant to, the main action of the piece, if indeed the piece can be truly said to possess any main action. Thus it takes the entire first act, consisting of five scenes and eighty-nine pages, to kill Rizzio. At last he is happily despatched, to the relief, it must be said, of the reader, who, already wearied, finds the second act entirely devoted to a similar sanguinary operation, performed on Darnley this time. With a nice sense, notwithstanding his pronounced communistic sympathies, of what is due even to second-hand royalty of the Darnley order, Mr. Swinburne, regardless of the liberal allowance of space allotted to the stabbing of Rizzio, feels it incumbent on him to devote one hundred and forty-seven pages and twenty-one scenes to the blowing up of Mary's husband. Thus, although two hundred and forty pages in all are given over mainly to the killing of these two characters, the tragedy can be scarcely said to have begun, [pg 349] there being still three dreary acts to face.
The question naturally suggests itself here, What in the name of common sense, if not of tragedy, has Mr. Swinburne been doing with his space? Perhaps we have reason to congratulate ourselves after all that he did not pursue his unhappy victim into England, and insist upon murdering her also; for it is impossible, in the contemplation of such an event, to form even a wild conception of when and where Mr. Swinburne's tragedy was likely to terminate. The truth is, he is no dramatist at all; he is a writer of speeches, good, bad, or indifferent, as may be, but no more. Livy or Sallust have almost as just a title to be styled dramatists as Mr. Swinburne; Homer far more so. Speeches form perhaps the least, certainly the easiest, portion of a drama; and the speeches in Bothwell are more or less ready made. Mr. Swinburne cannot grasp a situation; he can only write about it. He cannot picture it to us in a few telling lines. He cannot hint a future; he must foretell it in full, or wait until it comes. He cannot content himself with leaving well alone. The Earl of Leicester's historic “nod” that meant so much is of course a very amusing caricature; but the point of a caricature lies in the kernel of truth which it covers. Perhaps the most necessary of dramatic faculties is the capability of saying much in a little; and that faculty Mr. Swinburne does not possess in the slightest degree. If anything, his special tendency lies in an opposite direction; he says remarkably little in a very great deal. Instead of mastering his material, he has become hopelessly embarrassed by it, and, like the miser in the story, perishes from want in the midst of the treasures piled up around him. His characters, instead of being moved at his will, move him at theirs. When one, no matter of how great or how little importance, opens his or her mouth, not even Mr. Swinburne himself can say when it will close. Speeches pages in length are thrown into anybody's mouth on the slightest provocation, and all pitched more or less in the same key. If Mary curses—for Mr. Swinburne is more liberal than discreet in his distribution of strong language—she is not content with one good, round, blasphemous oath once in a while, but must indulge in half a dozen or so offhand. If Knox argues or preaches, he does so at as great length almost as when in the flesh. One of his speeches fills thirteen pages without a break. If the inevitable “first, second, and third citizen” enter—who, for the manner of their speeches or the matter of them, might with equal propriety be dubbed “first citizen” or “fifty-second citizen,” or anything else—they talk and talk and talk until they talk themselves off, as they would beyond all doubt talk an audience out of their seats. Almost two-thirds of the play is to the reader simply wearisome jabber, whose sense, like Gratiano's “infinite deal of nothing,” is as “two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff.”
The drama is so interminable that we can only call attention to the chief character, which is not Bothwell, as the title would seem to imply, but Mary, whose alleged amours with Bothwell form the groundwork of the piece. As this article does not pretend to enter into an historical investigation, this is not the place to advance reasons for disagreeing with Mr. [pg 350] Swinburne's estimate of Mary. One or two words, however, may be permitted.
The story that forms the foundation of this play has been torn to shreds by writers of every shade of opinion. Its truth, based mainly on the “casket letters,” was never accepted even at the English court. Elizabeth herself was compelled to acquit her cousin of all such scandalous charges. Yet on this Mr. Swinburne, with the chivalry of a poet and the honesty of a man who must have read history, builds his nauseous drama. Again, Mary was, by all concession, a lady. High and royal spirit she had indeed, of which in some notable instances she gave ample proof; but she has never been accused of indulging in language unworthy the royal woman she was, or savoring in any sense of coarseness. She was also a consistent and practical Catholic, who knew her religion and how to hold it, even against that fierce Calvinistic wolf, John Knox, to whom it were a happiness had his insulted sovereign only meted out the measure he persistently advocated for all Catholics. But she was too gentle-natured to adopt means of enforcing silence and obedience more congenial to the spirit of her English cousin, who had a very summary manner of dealing with theological difficulties. This much being premised, let us now look at the Mary of Mr. Swinburne.
Here we have her in the very first scene of the first act. Rizzio is pleading with her the recall of Murray:
Queen. “What name is his who shall so strengthen me?”
Rizzio. “Your father gave him half a brother's name.”
Queen. “I have no brother; a bloodless traitor he is,