cries the queen-mother, and Constance is ready with the daring retort: Let me make answer, thy usurping son ! Nor is boldness unsupported by violence; with vehement tongue and bitter speech she heaps reproaches upon her mother-in-law, until we feel that the King of France was right in his rebuke :— Peace, lady, pause, or be more temperate ; To these ill-timed repetitions.-ii. 1, 196. and that Elinor had a good deal of justification for her denunciation of Constance as An unadvisèd scold. This violence has been excused on the plea that it is only produced by her depth of mother love; but can this theory be proved from the play? Is it not rather true that there is a strain of unreality about her affection for Arthur, finely though she expresses it? A true mother loves best the weakling of her flock, and lavishes most affection on that one which stands most in need of it; but Constance frankly confesses that if her boy had been ugly or deformed she would have experienced very different feelings towards him. She loves him and regrets his misfortunes, it is true, but she tells him that if he were Full of unpleasing blots and sightless stains, I would not care, I then would be content; For then I should not love thee; no, nor thou This is not true mother love. The vein of unreality of which we have spoken runs not only through her affection, but through her grief. Constance has, in fact, a good deal of the poet in her, and she enjoys her sensations because they give her occasions for eloquent outpourings. Like Hamlet and like Richard II. she indulges in bursts of rhetoric in the most critical and distressing moments of her life; she trades as it were on her sorrow, and gains an added importance from her grief. She will not obey the summons of the kings, they must rather obey the summons of her woe : I will instruct my sorrows to be proud, For grief is proud and makes his owner stoop. To me and to the state of my great grief That no supporter but the huge firm earth Can hold it up; here I and sorrows sit ; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.-iii. 1, 68. This is fine imagery couched in magnificent language, but the greater the grief the simpler is the form in which it finds expression; there has probably never been any utterance which so completely conveys the idea of grief, as the few and simple words of David's lament: "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" The deepest sorrow can never be uttered in any human words : My lighter moods are like to these And tears that at their fountain freeze. But Constance loves her grief, dallies with it, fondles it and encourages it. Before Arthur is taken from her, it is ambition as much as sorrow which inspires her utterances; if she cannot compel the world to listen to her as a sovereign, she will at least compel it to listen to her as an insurgent! Arm, arm, yon heavens, against these perjured kings, A widow cries; be husband to me, heavens ! Let not the hours of this ungodly day Wear out the day in peace; but, ere sunset, Set armed discord twixt these perjured kings! AUSTRIA. Lady Constance, peace! CONS. War! war! No peace! Peace is to me a war.-iii. 1, 108. In vain the unfortunate Arthur implores her to cease from advocating his claims and to allow him to remain in safe obscurity: Good, my mother, peace! I would that I were low laid in my grave: I am not worth this coil that's made for me. Arthur's happiness, his peace, his safety even, weigh as nothing with her in comparison with his crown, and she continues her turbulent course until the natural result is accomplished, and her son is torn from her arms. Then, indeed, her grief breaks forth in a burst of passion beyond all bounds of reason : I defy all counsel, all redress, But that which ends all counsel, true redress, And I will kiss thy detestable bones, And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows, And ring these fingers with thy household worms, And be a carrion monster like thyself. Come, grin on me and I will think thou smilest, O come to me! Pandulph may well say in answer to this wild invocation :- Even in this moment of agony there is a false ring in the note of her love. Her pride in Arthur's personal beauty is still strong within her; she does not mourn for the sufferings that he may have to undergo in his imprisonment, but for the harm that those sufferings may work upon his outward form. Since the birth of Cain, the first male child, When I shall meet him in the court of heaven I shall not know him: therefore never, never There is certainly ample justification for King Philip's remark :- but Constance, with her ready wit and nimble fancy, turns his satire aside and starts upon a new train of thought : Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, My life, my joy, my food, my all the world! My widow-comfort and my sorrow's cure!-iii. 4, 93. With these words she goes off the stage and we see her no more, and all that we hear of her afterwards is the rumour of her death. She has loved with frenzy, hated, chided, and lamented with frenzy, and therefore we feel that we can give every credence to the messenger's tale :- The lady Constance in a frenzy died. Such is Constance as depicted by Shakespeare, the only mother of whom he has given a detailed portrait; but after studying her character, can we say that he has here portrayed the perfection of motherhood? Every other phase of woman's life he has entered into with the marvellous sympathy of genius : Cordelia is an ideal daughter, Imogen and Desdemona are ideal wives, Juliet and Miranda are perfect types of "maiden lovers," Isabella is an ideal sister, Celia and Rosalind give the lie to the well-worn sneer at women's friendship; Paulina is a type of the faithful attendant who passes her life in devotion to her mistress, Lychorida of the loving nurse who fills a mother's vacant place, and whose grave is covered with flowers and watered with tears by the child whom she has cherished. But where is the ideal mother? The tenderest expression of maternal feeling that we meet with in the plays is to be found in Hermione's greeting to her restored Perdita : Yon gods, look down, And from your sacred vials pour your graces Upon my daughter's head. Tell me, mine own, Where hast thou been preserved ?—where lived ?-how found Thy father's court? for thou shalt hear that I, Knowing by Paulina that the Oracle Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserved Myself to see the issue.-The Winter's Tale v. 3, 121. But Hermione as a mother is merely a sketch and not a completed picture, while Thasia is touched in with even fainter strokes. My heart Leaps to be gone into my mother's bosom, cries Marina, and Thasia replies : Blest, and mine own! But Pericles, in the moment of reunion, greets his daughter with an ecstasy of rapture :— O, Helicanus, strike me, honoured sir. And drown me with their sweetness.-O, Helicanus, As thunder threatens us, this is Marina !- Whether the circumstances of Shakespeare's own life account in any way for his unusual treatment of the maternal character can be now but a matter of conjecture. Of Mary Arden we know too little to determine what she was in herself, or what effect she produced upon her poet son; while, though it is clear that there was a close tie of love between Shakespeare and his daughters, there is nothing to show what terms existed between them and their mother. Anne Hathaway will always remain one of the problem characters of history, and the "second best bed" will continue to be hurled as a crushing argument by her detractors and her defenders alike. The dust of Shakespeare's life lies undisturbed, as well as the dust of his mortal body; we may seek to reconstruct it, but we can only reconstruct it according to our own fancy. This only we know of certain knowledge, that although Shakespeare has sounded with the plummet of his genius all the depths of woman's love as wife, daughter, sister, servant, and friend, he has left unexplored that mighty power of motherhood which is one of the great elemental forces of the world, and of which, when found in its perfection, it may be truly said that it "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." MARY BRADFORD-WHITING. |