Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/103

 INTRODUCTION xcix ���and his triumphant, " I am not wicked," when his innocence has been attested, are without dignity or pathos. The tri- umph of love is illustrated by the Queen of Cyprus and her lover Lauredan. The women are more successfully repre- sented than the men. There is the real play of contending emotions in the portrayal of the Queen. Love, jealousy, hope, suspicion, despair, claim her in turn, and one of the most spontaneous passages in the play is expressive of her anger and grief when she discovers the deceptions that have induced her to banish her lover. In Blanfort we see pictured one of the astonishingly rapid emotional developments so frequent in contemporary tragedy. His hot-headed love for the queen reaches its height, and declines, and the old love for Marina reasserts itself with pristine vigor, all within seven hours. Marina is the most interesting personality in the play. She is a strictly romantic heroine. She would be an appropriate Sylvia, for instance, for the Daphne of the Aminta. She is apparently Ardelia in the stage of expe- rience represented by the Lines to Prior and the translations from Tasso. The character of* Marina reminds one of,/ Wordsworth's conjecture that Lady Winchilsea gave up love-poetry because she could not sufficiently temper its transports. The chief characteristics of Marina's love are its extravagance and self-abnegation. Her conception of " immortal blisse " is to have "her lover stretch at her feet for hours imprinting kisses on her hand by thousands." Soft, modest, tender by nature, poetic, sensitive, dreamy, she lives in her emotions, but in endurance of injuries inflicted by a false lover she is a very patient Griselda. With none of the dash, sparkle, and independence of Rosalind, with no abet- tors like Celia and the Fool, Marina is driven by love to a more strenuous enterprise than their holiday visit to the Forest of Arden. Alone, disguised as a man, she seeks a foreign court, consorts with rough soldiers, listens to the ��� �