In the
_Yorkshire Tragedy_ the submissive devotion of its miserable heroine to
her maddened husband is merely doglike,--though not even, in the
exquisitely true and tender phrase of our sovereign poetess, "most
passionately patient." There is no likeness in this poor trampled figure
to "one of Shakespeare's women": Griselda was no ideal of his. To find
its parallel in the dramatic literature of the great age, we must look to
lesser great men than Shakespeare. Ben Jonson, a too exclusively
masculine poet, will give us a couple of companion figures for her--or
one such figure at least; for the wife of Fitzdottrel, submissive as she
is even to the verge of undignified if not indecorous absurdity, is less
of a human spaniel than the wife of Corvino. Another such is Robert
Davenport's Abstemia, so warmly admired by Washington Irving; another is
the heroine of that singularly powerful and humorous tragi-comedy,
labelled to _How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad_, which in its central
situation anticipates that of Leigh Hunt's beautiful _Legend of
Florence_; while Decker has revived, in one of our sweetest and most
graceful examples of dramatic romance, the original incarnation of that
somewhat pitiful ideal which even in a ruder and more Russian century of
painful European progress out of night and winter could only be made
credible, acceptable, or endurable, by the yet unequalled genius of
Chaucer and Boccaccio.
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