That part of the play where the chief interest should lie, namely, in the scenes preceding the death of Aldobrand, is without any interest at all, from the nature of the plot; for there is nothing left either to hope or to fear; and not only is there no possibility of good, but there is not even a choice of evils. The struggle of Imogine is a mere alternation of senseless exclamations. Her declaring of her husband, ‘By heaven and all its hosts, he shall not perish,’ is downright rant. She has no power to prevent his death; she has no power even to will his safety, for he is armed with what she deems an unjust power over the life of Bertram, and the whole interest of the play centres in her love for this Bertram. Opposite interests destroy one another in the drama, like opposite forces in mechanics. The situation of Belvidera in Venice Preserved, where the love to her father or her husband must be sacrificed, is quite different, for she not only hopes to reconcile them, but actually does reconcile them. The speech of Bertram to the Knights after he has killed Aldobrand, and his drawing off the dead body, to contemplate it alone, have been much admired, and there is certainly something grand and impressive in the first suggestion of the idea; but we do not believe it is in nature. We will venture a conjecture, that it is formed on a false analogy to two other ideas, viz. to that of a wild beast carrying off its prey with it to its den, and to the story which Fuseli has painted, of a man sitting over the corpse of his murdered wife. Now we can conceive that a man might wish to feast his eyes on the dead body of a person whom he had loved, and conceive that there was no one else ‘but they two left alone in the world,’ but not that any one would have this feeling with respect to an enemy whom he had killed.
Mr. Kean as Bertram did several things finely; what we liked most was his delivery of the speech, ‘The wretched have no country.’ Miss Somerville as Imogine was exceedingly interesting; she put us in mind of Hogarth’s Sigismunda. She is tall and elegant, and her face is good, with some irregularities. Her voice is powerful, and her tones romantic. Her mode of repeating the line,
‘Th’ Elysian dreams of lovers, when they loved,’
had the true poetico-metaphysical cadence, as if the sound and the sentiment would linger for ever on the ear. She might sit for the picture of a heroine of romance, whether with her form
‘—— decked in purple and in pall,
When she goes forth, and thronging vassals kneel,
And bending pages bear her footcloth well;’
or whether the eye
‘—— beholds that lady in her bower,
That is her hour of joy; for then she weeps,