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"The Castilian," Sir Thomas Talfourd's last tragedy, is not perhaps so inferior to "Ion," his first, as it is superior to "The Athenian Captive," and "Glencoe," his second and third. Its fitness for the stage is, at the best, doubtful. But it makes highly "agreeable" closet~reading. Shakspeare (now for a truism of the biggest!) would have made it something above and beyond the "agreeable." But there have been, and are, other dramatists, of repute withal, in whose hands it would probably be something awkwardly below that mark. The amiable author has produced a tragedy of no very signal pretensions to the sublime in conception, the profound in sentiment, the artistic[3] in construction, the forcible in action, or the original and life-like in impersonation. So far as his characters are real to us, they are so by faith and not by sight; we believe in them as we do in any other set of fictitious agents, in whose doings and destiny we consent to be interested, while perusing the novel or play in which their lot is cast: but our philosophy in so doing is of the Nominalist, not the Realist school; the faith we exercise in their Castilian actuality is conventional only; of the book bookish; and more easily to be dropped with the curtain, at the close of the fifth act, than to be roused into active service with the progress of the first. Nevertheless, interest is excited and maintained—interest of a tranquil, literary nature—in behalf of these dramatis personæ, who rather stroll and ruminate than strut and fret their hour upon the stage, and to whom we owe much graceful verse, ennobling thought, and tuneful philosophy.
The story of "The Castilian" is founded on a narrative in Robertson's "Charles V.," of the insurrection at Toledo headed by Don Juan de Padilla, against the Emperor's viceroy, the Cardinal Adrian. Padilla is here regarded as a high-minded, pure-hearted, and profoundly religious soldier—a man of essentially conservative and loyal sentiments, whom the force of circumstances impels to almost unconscious rebellion. His wife is a woman of "unbounded ambition," refined, however, by an "equally unbounded admiration of her husband." In the third act is introduced the unhappy Joanna, the Emperor's mother, whose sanction to the revolt of the Commons is made available to the fatal purpose of the tragedy—that sanction being obtained during what Padilla believes to be a lucid interval on her part, and becoming in effect the seal of his own ruin. It is a highly impressive scene, that in which the queen awakes from her long lethargy to a transient exercise of mental activity—the gradual restoration—the dallying with painful memories—the
- ↑ The Castilian. An Historical Tragedy. In Five Acts. By T. N. Talfourd. London: Moxon.
- ↑ Supplement to "Vacation Rambles," consisting of Recollections of a Tour through France to Italy, &c., &c. By T. N. Talfourd. London: Moxon. 1854,
- ↑ There is, however, careful and effective art in the management of the Queen Joanna episode, Act III.
