411 KING JOHN AND MATILDA: A TRAGEDY, BY ROBERT DAVENPORT. ACTED IN 1651. JOHN, not being able to bring MATILDA, the chaste daughter of the old Baron FITZWATER, to compliance with his wishes, causes her to be poisoned in a nunnery. SCENE. JOHN. The Barons: they being as yet ignorant of the murder, and having just come to composition with the King after tedious wars. MATILDA's hearse is brought in by HUBERT. John. Hubert, interpret this apparition. Hub. Behold, sir, A sad-writ tragedy, so feelingly Languaged, and cast; with such a crafty cruelty Would weep to lay their ears to, and (admiring Told thee thou hadst a daughter. O, look here! Barons. Matilda! Fitzw. By the labouring soul of a much-injured man, Bruce. Sweet niece! Leic. Chaste soul ! John. Do I stir, Chester? Good Oxford, do I move? stand I not still To watch when the grieved friends of wrong'd Matilda That in a thousand prayers they might be happy? 1 Fitzwater: son of water. A striking instance of the compatibility of the serious pun with the expression of the profoundest sorrows. Grief, as well as joy, finds ease in thus playing with a word. Old John of Gaunt in Shakspeare thus descants on his name: Gaunt, and gaunt indeed;" to a long string of conceits, which no one has ever yet felt as ridiculous. The poet Wither thus, in a mournful review of the declining estate of his family, says with deepest nature: The very name of Wither shows decay. A man of tears. O, immaculate Matilda, These shed but sailing heat drops, misling showers, Till it amaze the mourners. Hub. Unmatch'd Matilda; Celestial soldier, that kept a fort of chastity Fitzw. Not to be a queen, [reed: Would she break her chaste vow. Truth crowns your John. O take into your spirit-piercing praise And steal true tears so sweetly from all these Insinuates a chaste soul in a clean body, To make our griefs ingenious. Let all be dumb, Chest. His very soul speaks sorrow. Oxf. And it becomes him sweetly. John. Hail maid and martyr! lo, on thy breast, I offer (as my guilt imposes) Thy merit's laurel, lilies and roses; Lilies, intimating plain Thy immaculate life, stuck with no stain; Roses red and sweet, to tell How sweet red sacrifices smell. Hang round then, as you walk about this hearse, Bruce. My noble brother, I have lost a wife and son1 A public benefit2. When it shall please, Fitzw. Do any thing; Do all things that are honourable; and the Great King Make you a good king, sir! and when your soul Shall at any time reflect upon your follies, Good king John, weep, weep very heartily; It will become you sweetly. At your eyes Your sin stole in; there pay your sacrifice. John. Back unto Dunmow Abbey. There we'll pay To sweet Matilda's memory, and her sufferings, A monthly obsequy, which (sweeten'd by The wealthy woes of a tear-troubled eye) Shall by those sharp afflictions of my face Court mercy, and make grief arrive at grace. SONG. Matilda, now go take thy bed In the dark dwellings of the dead; Rest there, chaste soul, fix'd in thy proper sphere, [This scene has much passion and poetry in it, if I mistake not. The last words of Fitzwater are an instance of noble temperament; but to understand him, the character throughout of this mad, merry, feeling, insensible-seeming lord, should be read. That the venomous John could have even counterfeited repentance so well, is out of nature; but, supposing the possibility, nothing is truer than the way in which it is managed. These old playwrights invested their bad characters with notions of good, which could by no possibility have coexisted with their actions. Without a soul of goodness in himself, how could Shakspeare's Richard the Third have lit upon those sweet phrases and inducements by which he 1 also cruelly slain by the poisoning John. 2 i. e. of peace; which this monstrous act of John's in this play comes to counteract, in the same way as the discovered death of Prince Arthur is like to break the composition of the king with his barons in Shakspeare's play. 3 The Dauphin of France, whom they had called in, as in Shakspeare's play. attempts to win over the dowager queen to let him wed her daughter? It is not Nature's nature, but Imagination's substituted nature, which does almost as well in a fiction.] THE PARLIAMENT OF BEES: A MASQUE. ULANIA, a female Bee, confesses her passion for MELETUS, who loves ARETHUSA. not a village fly, nor meadow bee, That traffics daily on the neighbouring plain, Yet in his full invention quick and ripe, (Our hive being clean-swept, and our day's work done,) Then there's Amniter, for whose love fair Leade To drink May dews and mead in. Yet none of these, It 1 Whether this singular production, in which the characters are all bees, was ever acted, I have no information to determine. it is at least as capable of representation as we can conceive the "Birds" of Aristophanes to have been. 2 Prettily pilfered from the sweet passage in the Midsummer Night's Dream, where Helena recounts to Hermia their schooldays' friendship : We Hermia, like two artificial gods, Created with our needles both one flower, Could I affect, until this strange bee came; He labours and toils, Extracts more honey out of barren soils Than twenty lazy drones. I have heard my father, A wing or leg against a twig; alive, Or dead, he'll bring into the master's hive Our bees could scarce keep wing; then fell such rain, And fly to garrison: yet still he stood, And 'gainst the whole swarm made his party good; On damask roses, and the leaves of pines, I have seen him write such amorous moving lines Has, when I read them, envied her desert; And wept and sigh'd to think that he should be PORREX, Viceroy of Bees under KING OBERON, describes his large prerogative. To Us (who, warranted by Oberon's love, Write Ourself Master Bee), both field and grove, (Where the amorous wind plays with the golden heads |