Whatever may be the character he may have wished to depict in Philip, we expect a Spanish king to be a gentleman. And such an ending of a scene susceptible of the tenderest pathos, where the heroine and another of the principal personages of the drama are in presence, argues a wonderful dulness of perception of the beautiful.
Worse than all, however, is his treatment of Cardinal Pole.
Shakspere puts a few words of Latin into the mouth of Cardinal Wolsey in a scene in Henry VIII., in which he and Cardinal Campeggio are endeavoring to bend the queen to the king’s will. But it is a wonderful touch of nature. It is one of those profound intuitions for which the great dramatist is so distinguished. So seemingly simple an incident reveals, at a touch, as it were, the preoccupation of Wolsey’s mind, and the hollowness at once and difficulty of the duty he had suffered to be imposed upon him. They had paid her ostensibly a private visit, as friends. But Wolsey, oppressed with the difficulty of his undertaking, and meditating how he should set about it, forgets himself, the old habit crops up, and he begins as if he were beginning a formal ecclesiastical document:
“Tanta est erga te mentis integritas, regina serenissima.”
It is a slip. The queen stops him. He recollects himself, and we hear no more Latin.
But in this drama the poet literally makes a cardinal, and such a cardinal as Pole, address Queen Mary with the angelic salutation to the Blessed Virgin, and in Latin:
“Ave Maria, gratia plena, benedicta tu in mulieribus!”
Upon the whole, the defects of this drama are so many and so serious, so radical and fundamental, that no competent criticism can pronounce it other than a failure; and a failure more complete than would have been thought possible to a poet of so great a reputation as Mr. Tennyson.[3]