she weeps, rather, it would seem, from spite than grief. The Duke (Act IV., Scene 3) tells her that Claudio's "head is off and sent to Angelo." Is she crushed by the unexpected blow? Does she grieve? Is her spirit subdued by her bereavement, and the fate of her brother? No: her first thought is of a vixen's vengeance upon the adversary who has overreached her. She exclaims, "O, I will to him and pluck out his eyes!" After this, as we learn from the remarks of the Duke and Lucio, she weeps. But it is noteworthy that her tears are not spoken of in very complimentary terms even by the Duke. He does not call them "holy drops," or anything of the kind, but "fretting waters;" and the only consolations which he deems at all likely to be efficacious with this very holy and "very virtuous" maid, are promises of revenge, and gratified ambition. "If you can, pace your wisdom A second interview with Angelo (Act II., Scene 4) is almost a repetition of the first. He tells her that her brother cannot live; and her brief, calm, acquiescent reply is, "Even so,-Heaven keep your honour." [Retiring. Angelo, to obtain the opportunity for his base proposal, is obliged to provoke her into an attempt to change his determination; and then she goes at it like the senior wrangler of some future female college. To quote the characteristic parts of this Scene would be to give the whole of it. There are one or two very decided expressions of feeling, in reply to the attack made upon that particular virtue which she has made her hobby; but not one tender word to show that she is moved to sorrow or compassion for her brother, or that she has a woman's heart beneath her marble bosom. Her exceeding adroitness in special pleading becomes positively amusing when she turns the tables upon Angelo, who asks her, "Might there not be a charity in sin, Not disconcerted for an instant, she replies, I'll take it as a peril to my soul, O women, who long to let the light of your intellect shine before men, see how repulsive this creature is to men, in spite of her beauty and her intellect, as she stands victoriously quibbling with a judge, while she cannot plead for or excuse her erring brother! How men would love and reverence her if, though utterly unable to reply to Angelo, she had besieged him with the pathetic eloquence of woman's tenderness and woman's grief! But as it is, she is merely a clever talker and "very virtuous;" and clever talkers, men can find by hundreds among themselves; while that virtue upon which Isabella so prided herself, they are accustomed to regard as a quiet and conservative, and not a militant and progressive quality, and one which exists in absolute perfection when in the positive degree. They do not believe in the crescendo-— virtuous, quite virtuous, very virtuous, more than in the diminuendo-virtuous, pretty virtuous, almost virtuous. To return to our Scene.-It is more chilling than a North-West Passage to hear this beautiful woman, whose brother's life hangs on her tongue, admitting with arid curtness the positions which her adversary takes as the basis of his argument. Ang. Admit no other way to save his life," &c. Our sympathy is with her cause, but not with her; and when, thinking that she has Angelo on the hip, she who could not entreat, assumes the bully, and thus threatens him: "Isab. Ha! little honour to be much believed, And most pernicious purpose!—seeming, seeming !I will proclaim thee, Angelo; look for't; Sign me a present pardon for my brother, Or, with an outstretch'd throat, I'll tell the world Aloud, what man thou art." Then, with all our pity for Claudio and our detestation of Angelo, we cannot but feel a sort of satisfaction that the latter is not so entirely in the clutches of this beautiful she Rhadamanthus, and that the pardon of Claudio is not obtained exactly in that way. Claudio himself appreciates exactly the strong points of his sister's character; for, in the first sentence of the play which apprises us of her existence, he tells Lucio, "She hath prosperous art When she will play with reason and discourse, And well she can persuade."-Act I., Scene 2. And it is quite remarkable that the "prone and speechless dialect, such as moves men," of which he speaks, is not in her, but, be it noticed, "in her youth." Angelo, too, bears evidence to the fact that she is a very intellectual woman, in fact quite an intelligence.' She does not touch him by her devotion, or her winning ways, or the pathos of her appeals for her brother's life; but admiring at once her person and a sharp specimen of the argumentum ad hominem with which she favours him, and quibbling after the fashion of Shakespeare's day, he says, aside, "She speaks, and 'tis Isabella's frigidity with Angelo is unredeemed by any tenderness to her brother. It does not melt even in the furnace of his affliction. Her first announcement of his fate is cold and merciless enough. "Lord Angelo, having affairs to heaven, But when, after some discussion, in which she utters several fine things about what Claudio ought to do, and what she would do under other oircumstances, she again directs hin to prepare for execution, with an impassibility absolutely frightful, this sheriff in petticoats says to her brother, "Be ready, Claudio, for your death to-morrow." Sheriff! There wasn't a headsman in Austria who could have done it with a more professional and businesslike air. Claudio, stunned by this cold-blooded barbarity, and left without consolation in his extremity, becomes cowardly, and shrinks from death even at the expense of his sister's chastity. That she remains firm, would be to her honour, were not the spirit in which she does it so pitiless, so utterly uncompassionate, the feeling which she expresses so inhuman, not to say so unwomanly, and the language which she uses so obdurate and so savage. Hear the gentle votaress of Saint Clare, the "very virtuous maid!"—- What a terrible and yet what a truthful sa'ire is written in this character of Isabella! But she caps the climax of her indifference and her deference to routine duty when the Duke, entering at this moment, in his holy character and habit, asks her, as she is about retiring precipitately, to wait,-promising that it shall be for her benefit. Does she catch at a chance of comfort for poor Claudio? Hear her prompt reply: "I have no superfluous leisure: my stay must be stolen out of other affairs; but I will attend you a while." She has no leisure. She is a woman of business; and her stay must be stolen out of other affairs. She has wasted as much time upon her brother as she has to spare-nevertheless, she has done or offered to do nothing to prepare him for his death, and now she is impatient to be off to her duties at the convent, and leave him to his fate. Unless her apologist, Mrs. Jameson, is even a better special pleader than she is herself, her case seems hopeless; for she is here judged out of her own mouth, and those of her brother and her admirer. Lucio is incidentally made a quasi eulogist of Isabella, by the erroneous punctuation of some editions, and by Mr. Knight specifically, who says of her that, "in the eyes of the habitual profigate with whom she comes in contact, she is, 'a thing ensky'd and sainted.'' But Lucio does not say so. He does say, according to the original, which Mr. Collier has thus almost exactly followed in his excellent edition of the genuine works of Shakespeare (8 vols. 8vo. 1844)— ""Tis true. I would not, though 'tis my familiar sin With maids to seem the lapwing, and to jest, As with a saint."-Act I., Scene 5. He holds her as ensky'd and sainted by her renouncement. There is no warrant even in the almost utterly worthless punctuation of the first folio for any other construction of the passage; and even if there were, the points in such a carelessly printed volume are not to be set for one minute against the obvious or even the implied sense of its words. As Malone 1 marks, in a comment directed to entirely another point in the passage, Lucio says to Isabella, "I consider you, in consequence of your having renounced the world, as an immortal spirit, as one to whom I ought to speak with as much sincerity as if I were addressing saint." This is A an expression entirely in accordance with the veneration with which recluses were regarded in the Middle Ages, by even the worst of men; while to make Lucio utter such a sentiment, simply from a knowledge of Isabella's character, is to entirely falsify his own, the chief element of which is an utter want of reverence for anything. Besides, the punctuation necessary to Mr. Knight's use of the line, not only breaks the natural sequence of the thought, but rudely disturbs the flow of the verse. It makes three successive lines close each with a completed sense and a falling inflection; than which nothing could be more stiff, disjointed, unmusical, un-Shakespearian; as will be evident upon a perusal of the passage so punctuated :— "to jest Tongue far from heart,-play with all virgins so: This will never do. But the last and the insuperable objection to this reading of the passage is, that, on Lucio's own evidence, he could not hold her "ensky'd and sainted" except as a nun; for he knew nothing else of her, and had not even seen her before the occasion on which he makes this remark within two minutes of the commencement of their interview. As he enters the convent, she presents herself to him, and he asks her, if she can procure him an interview with herself: "Lucio. Hail, virgin, if you be,-as those cheek roses Proclaim you are no less! Can you so stead me Isab. Why her unhappy brother? let me ask; I am that Isabella, and his sister."-Act I., Scene 5. When he discovers who she is, he regards her merely as Claudio's sister, and one devoted to a religious life any other of the sisterhood or novices would have been equally ensky'd and sainted, in his eyes. Isabella too adds her own testimony, needless though it is, in confirmation of this interpretation of the passage. In reply to this very speech, in which Lucio calls her a saint, she says, "You do blaspheme the good in mocking me:" showing plainly that she accepted, nay, commanded, his reverence as but a formal and becoming tribute to the holy calling which she was just about to take upon herself. As if to show by contrast the unloveliness of Isabella's character, Shakespeare has given us ir Mariana one of the most loveable and womanly of his feminine creations. We see little of her: indeed, she does not appear until the fourth Act; in the first Scene of which she says very little, in the last scene but eight words, and in the fifth Act not a great deal. But the few touches of the master's hand make a charming picture. Every word she utters shows that she is exactly Isabella's opposite. Turn to the fifth Act, and hear her plead,--plead for the man whom she has loved through lonely years of wrong, the man whose life is justly forfeit for taking, as she thinks, the life of another, in a course of crime which involved a sin against her love. Timid and shrinking before, she does not now wait to be encouraged in her suit. She is instant and importunate. She does not reason or quibble with the Duke; she begs, she implores, she kneels. She even drags down that beautiful graven image, Isabella, upon her knees, by her impetuous prayers: “O my good lord !—Sweet Isabel take my part : "Isabel, Sweet Isabel, do yet but kneel by me; And No dialects, no right-angled triangles here. This is a woman, pleading like a woman. does not her very prayer for Angelo make his crime seem more detestable as well as her more loveable? How the fulness of her heart wells up from her lips! These few words of selfdevotion and of impulse throw a halo around her, whose tender glow makes the glittering light of Isabella's intellect seem as false and as chilly as that reflected from an icicle. There is opportunity enough for Mariana to inveigh against unchastity; but she says not one word. And yet who doubts her? What man would not as soon trust the honour of his name with her as with Isabella,-aye, sooner! Contrast Isabella's virtue with that of Shakespeare's noblest woman,-Imogen. Compare the cold, reasoning continence of the one, with the immaculate and instinctive purity of the other's passionful nature. Isabella, as if dreading a riot in her blood, seeks the protection of laws and sentinels and bolts and bars, and before she has tried them, begs to have them doubled; when, in truth, the suit of the young god of Day himself would fail to stir the gelid lymph that loiters through her veins. Imogen, who could give her love unasked to one below her station, yet lose no dignity as princess, or as woman, whose nature was as fond as Desdemona's and as passionful as Juliet's, finds in her own inherent but unobtruded modesty a watchful sentinel and a triple wall of defence against a libertine's attack. Such is Shakespeare's marvellously truthful portraiture of a type which, sad to say, does exist among womankind.-Women whose existence is bound up in a love of propriety, a pride of intellect, and an ostentatious submission to the dictates of an austere religion. Perhaps they should be pitied rather than condemned; but it would tax any power, short of omnipotence, to make them loved. Coleridge says, in a brief paragraph of his Table Talk, devoted to this play: "Isabella herself contrives to be unamiable." The remark is severe; for it needlessly attributes a bad motive. Isabella needed no contrivance to such an end: her unamiability, like the reading and writing spoken of by Dogberry, "comes by nature." Isabella is a woman with too much brain or too little heart. A woman cannot have too fine an intellect, or one too large, if, only, her affections be finer and larger: but the moment that she shows an excess of the first, she becomes unfeminine, repulsive, monstrous. Shakespeare has given us an ideal of every type of man and womankind; and he could not pass by this. Its unloveliness was not to deter him from the task: though the effect of that is somewhat modified by the personal beauty of his subject; which, too, was necessary to the dramatic movement of the play. But he does not always set up his greatest creations as models for our imitation. He drew an Iago and an Angelo among men; among women, why should he withhold his hand from a Lady Macbeth and an Isabella? Coleridge, in the little paragraph just mentioned, complains that, "our feelings of justice are grossly wounded at Angelo's escape." No, no! indeed, no! It is for Mariana's sake that Angelo is pardoned. What is the injustice of his pardon to the justice of giving her her husband? Her suffering, her long and lonely sorrows, are the condition of the happy termination of the play; and shall she not have her reward? Yes, truly. Tears like her's would wash away the blood on the stern statute-books of Draco. Hallam finds fault with the Duke's hinted intention of marrying Isabella; and calls it "one of Shakespeare's hasty half thoughts." One of Shakespeare's hasty half thoughts! Pray, how many such has he left us? With all deference to the Historian of the Literature of Europe, this was exactly the best disposition which could have been made of Isabella. The Duke, a wellmeaning, undecided, feeble-minded, contemplative man, needed somebody to act for him and govern him; she, after having listened solemnly to his arguments, probably found him guilty-not of love, that would have been unpardonable-but of preference for a female, under extenuating circumstances, and-married him. He needed a "gray mare;" and Shakespeare, with his unerring perception of the eternal fitness of things, gave him Isabella. "Isab. If he had been as you, and you as he, You would have slipped like him; but he, like you, Would not have been so stern."-Act II., Scene 2. The last comma should not exist in the last clause of this sentence. As it stands above, and is always printed, it means that Claudio would be like Angelo, and yet not so stern; for "like you" is made parenthetical. But "like" is evidently used here with the force of "as;" and Isabella means to say that, if their situations had been changed, Claudio would not have been so stern as Angelo. Read,― As that the sin hath brought you to this shame; "Showing we would not serve heaven," &c. This appears to be required by the context, and to be a permissible correction of a probable misprint. Still "spare" is defended in Black wood's Magazine, on the ground that to spare heaven is to refrain from sin, while to serve heaven is to do good actively. The plea for the old reading has the merit of some subtle ingenuity, but hardly more. “Juliet. Must die to-morrow! O, injurious love, That respites me a life,, whose very comfort Is still a dying misery.' An obvious and easy misprint in the original makes utter nonsense of this passage. How does Juliet's injurious love for Claudio respite her a life? It was the law which took his life and respited her's, although, as she confesses, the offence "was mutually committed," and,—as the Duke decides, with her assent, although her sin was, therefore, "of heavier kind than his." It was this law that she calls "injurious." Read, "Must die to-morrow! O injurious law, That respites me a life," &c. This correction was made by Sir Thomas Hanmer; and yet, strange to say, "love" has been retained by all more modern editors; although it does not afford even the least gleam of sense. Johnson, and some with him, have supposed that Juliet attributes to her love the preservation of her life, because "her execution was respited on account of her pregnancy, the effects of her love." But she was not under sentence of death. The law did not touch her life. As the story on which the play is founded tells us, the law in question decreed that the man who broke it "should lose his head, and the woman offender should ever after be infamously noted, by the wearing of some disguised apparrell:"-perhaps something like the Scarlet Letter which Hawthorne's pen has made to glow upon the bosom of that figure whose haughty loveliness lives for ever in our memories. The love of Juliet could have no influence in securing her exemption from death; and there was no need that it should. The law secured her that; and because the same law took Claudio from her she calls it an "injurious law." "Angelo. heaven hath my empty words Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue, Anchors on Isabel; heaven in my mouth As if I did but chew his name," &c. For "heaven" in this speech we should evidently read God. That the text was thus, as Shakespeare wrote it, is plainly shown by the last line, As if I did but chew his name,' that is, God's name. The change was made by the publishers of the first folio, in conformity with the statute of James I. before alluded to; but they neglected to make a corresponding change in the pronoun. "Ang. Admit no other way to save his life, (As I subscribe not that, nor any other, But in the loss of question) that you, his sister, Finding yourself desir'd of such a person, Whose credit with the judge, or own great place, Could fetch your brother from the manacles Of the all-binding law; and that there were No earthly mean to save him, but that either You must lay down the treasures of your body To this suppos'd, or else to let him suffer, What would you do?" The clause in parentheses in this long sentence is exceedingly difficult; in fact, absolutely incomprehensible. What does Angelo mean by saying that he could not subscribe to any way to save But, in the case of question, that you his sister, * * What would you do?" * * Mr. Singer (as I find by a paragraph in Blackwood's Magazine, August, 1853, p. 190, which sustains him) supposes that he gets rid of the difficulty by considering "the loss of question" to mean, the looseness of conversation.' But even if this very violent distortion of the phrase be admitted, the great difficulty, the separation of "but" from "that" in the third line, is not obviated; and if regard be had to this main consideration, Mr. Singer's suggestion falls to the ground. For if we substitute the one phrase for the other, we find that we cannot say, "Admit no other way to save his life, (As I subscribe not that nor any other) But, in the looseness of conversation, that you, his sister, Finding yourself desir'd," &c. The fact is, that nearly the whole of this speech is one huge parenthesis encircling other gradually diminishing parentheses. This appears, briefly, thus. The essentials, the parts not parenthetical, are only the first and last lines,— it being remembered that Angelo has previously made known his purpose. "Admit no other way to save his life |