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for the sake of presenting a perfect specimen . The reviewer shall therefore " state the case' and give his commentary in his own words .
" To us the collection of horrors made by Webster appears exactly such as the ingenuity of a bonne , half a century ago , would have hit upon to produce i * striking effect in the nursery . The Duchess having married her butler , * her brother Ferdinand shuts her up in a prison , and torments her with various trials of studied cruelty . By his command , Bosola , ( the reader will remember that Italy continued to be the land of monsters till the days of Mrs . KaddifFe , ) the instrument
of his devices , shows her the bodies of her husband and children counterfeited in wax , as dead . ' The Duchess takes the figures ( which , by the by , were made « by the curious master in that quality , Vincentio Laurio > la' ) to be true substantial bodies . * Next to this ' she is kept waking with noises of madmen ; and / at last , is strangled by common executioners / But the denouement is furthermore prepared by a ' dance of sundry sorts of madmen , with music answerable thereto ; after which Bosola ( like an old man ) enters . ' "
After Bosola " s appalling declaration that what he has said was to bring the Duchess to mortification by degrees , her dirge commences— " the living person ' s dirge . " Lamb notices these two latter points as characteristic of a power " beyond the ordinary conceptions of vengeance and beyond the imagination of ordinary poets . " He has grave thoughts touching Master Webster . But our petit maltre of the London Iteviewy nothing moved , dances forward on his way , with all the levity of pert insensibility .
*• To carry on this laudable design , a pretty long dirge is sung . " The reviewer then quotes the two last lines , and presently falls foul of one of those fine Shakspearian touches , which the name of Shakspeare has alone preserved in his own writings , from the insult of all the incompetent . Thiswriter—he who undertakes to expose the old dramatists—has to learn that nature , on the principle of extremes meeting , when wrought to a high degree of passion , no matter of what kind , is not only apt , but generally compelled , ( by a law , which is understood by those whose
business it is to deal with these deep questions of humanity , ) to break off suddenl y from its course ; the abrupt cessation of the storm being the commencement of a train of the simplest thought and feeling , frequently manifested in some trifling characteristic peculiarity , but more commonly in some little domestic circumstance touching the affections . After this relief of tlie heart , this beginning of life and passion over again from the first , there may be re-actions as powerful and as prolonged as the circumstances , and the nature of the individual , allow and induce . Just before the Duchess is murdered , seeing that all hope is
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No . m . It
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The London Review v- The British Drama . , 241
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1836, page 241, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2656/page/49/
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