Shakespeare alone could have made her as
interesting as Imogen or Cordelia; though these have so much to do and
dare, and she after her first appearance has simply to suffer: even
Webster could not give such individual vigor of characteristic life to
the figure of his martyr as to the figure of his criminal heroine. Her
courage and sweetness, her delicacy and sincerity, her patience and her
passion, are painted with equal power and tenderness of touch: yet she
hardly stands before us as distinct from others of her half-angelic
sisterhood as does the White Devil from the fellowship of her comrades
in perdition. But if, as we may assuredly assume, it was on the
twenty-third "nouell" of William Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_ that
Webster's crowning masterpiece was founded, the poet's moral and
spiritual power of transfiguration is here even more admirable than in
the previous case of his other and wellnigh coequally consummate poem.
The narrative degrades and brutalizes the widowed heroine's affection
for her second husband to the actual level of the vile conception which
the poet attributes and confines to the foul imagination of her envious
and murderous brothers.
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