Melt into tears.’
The Duchess of Malfy is not, in my judgment, quite so spirited or effectual a performance as the White Devil. But it is distinguished by the same kind of beauties, clad in the same terrors. I do not know but the occasional strokes of passion are even profounder and more Shakespearian; but the story is more laboured, and the horror is accumulated to an overpowering and insupportable height. However appalling to the imagination and finely done, the scenes of the madhouse to which the Duchess is condemned with a view to unsettle her reason, and the interview between her and her brother, where he gives her the supposed dead hand of her husband, exceed, to my thinking, the just bounds of poetry and of tragedy. At least, the merit is of a kind, which, however great, we wish to be rare. A series of such exhibitions obtruded upon the senses or the imagination must tend to stupefy and harden, rather than to exalt the fancy or meliorate the heart. I speak this under correction; but I hope the objection is a venial common-place. In a different style altogether are the directions she gives about her children in her last struggles;
‘I prythee, look thou giv’st my little boy
Some syrop for his cold, and let the girl
Say her pray’rs ere she sleep. Now what death you please—’
and her last word, ‘Mercy,’ which she recovers just strength enough to pronounce; her proud answer to her tormentors, who taunt her with her degradation and misery—‘But I am Duchess of Malfy still’[[22]]—as if the heart rose up, like a serpent coiled, to resent the indignities put upon it, and being struck at, struck again; and the staggering reflection her brother makes on her death, ‘Cover her face: my eyes dazzle: she died young!’ Bosola replies:
‘I think not so; her infelicity
Seem’d to have years too many.
Ferdinand. She and I were twins:
And should I die this instant, I had liv’d