Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/136

116 shall fill the stage and our thoughts. It is those in whose fate we are and must be most deeply interested that are most constantly before us, and with the decision of their fate the play ends. Webster's division of the tragedy into the story of a crime and the story of its avenging has interfered with this concentration and proportioning of the interest. Those for whose fate our feelings are really engaged appear fitfully, and slip from our notice before the play ends. Vittoria is magnificently presented in the opening scenes of The White Devil, whispering murder to her lover, baffling her accusers. But thereafter she falls too much into the background, re-emerging in her first splendour only for one moment at the end to cry—

"My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,                   Is driven I know not whither."

In like manner, after the terrible scenes describing the torture and death of the Duchess of Malfi, the last act drags, beautifully wrought as it is. Our passionate sympathy has attained the highest pitch when her brother's remorse awakens in the words —

"Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle:  she died young."

Shakespeare would have hastened the catastrophe, that all might perish in the same high-wrought moment.

The "propriety" of the characters is as carefully studied by Webster as the structure of the plot.