their husbands. If this be not a sentimental conception of things, I wonder what sentimentality consists of.
Perhaps the objection will be raised that Shakespeare often heightens the effect of pathetic passages by the mentioning of children. This, however, is only partially true. Babies occur, where the plot requires them, as in C. o. E., Winter’s T., Rich. III, Macbeth, and elsewhere, and are spoken of in sympathetic words. The murder of children—“flowering infants” as they are called in Hen. V, III, iii, 14—is repeatedly spoken of as the height of terrors, pity being accordingly represented once as “a new-born babe striding the blast” (Macb. I, vii, 22). But in all this there is nothing particularly sentimental, certainly not in the description of the Roman citizens, who, to see Pompey, climbed up to “the chimney-tops, your infants in your arms.” In contradistinction to this we do find, it is true, the “motif” of babies employed to delineate a situation that is “larmoyante,” viz. in 1 Hen. VI, I, i, 49:
await for wretched years
When at their mother’s moist’ned eyes babies shall suck, etc.
and 1 Hen. VI, III, iii, 48:
As looks the mother on her lowly babe…
But it is interesting to see that both passages belong to an evidently non-Shakespearian part of the trilogy![1]
But this is not the only portion of the speech that breathes another atmosphere than Shakespeare’s world. The different atmosphere makes itself felt, also, when the speaker admonishes the rebels:
Wash your foule mynds with tears, and those same handes
That, etc.
Would Shakespeare have made an orator ask a seditious crowd to commence a general whining by shedding tears of compunction in public? This too, as will be shown later on, is more like Heywood than like Shakespeare.
There is also something distinctly unShakespearian in the use of the term “inhumanitie,” which corresponds with this difference. It has been stated above that the word “inhumanitie” does not
- ↑ For Hen. VI, see Else von Schaubert, Drayton’s Anteil an Heinrich VI, 2 u. 3 Teil (Schücking und Deutschbeins Neue Anglistische Arbeiten, No. 4), Cöthen, 1920, a book that has not perhaps received the attention which it deserves.
