very highest fabrics fashioned after their own great will by the
supreme architects of song. Of these plays, and of these alone among the
maturer works of Shakespeare, it may be said that the best parts are
discernible from the rest, divisible by analysis and separable by memory
from the scenes which precede them or follow and the characters which
surround them or succeed. Constance and Katherine rise up into
remembrance apart from their environment and above it, stand clear in our
minds of the crowded company with which the poet has begirt their central
figures. In all other of his great tragic works,--even in _Hamlet_, if
we have grace and sense to read it aright and not awry,--it is not of any
single person or separate passage that we think when we speak of it; it
is to the whole masterpiece that the mind turns at mention of its name.
The one entire and perfect chrysolite of _Othello_ is neither Othello nor
Desdemona nor Iago, but each and all; the play of _Hamlet_ is more than
Hamlet himself, the poem even here is too great to be resumed in the
person. But Constance is the jewel of _King John_, and Katherine is the
crowning blossom of _King Henry VIII_.--a funeral flower as of "marigolds
on death-beds blowing," an opal of as pure water as "tears of perfect
moan," with fitful fire at its heart, ominous of evil and sorrow, set in
a mourning band of jet on the forefront of the poem, that the brow so
circled may, "like to a title-leaf, foretell the nature of a tragic
volume." Not indeed that without these the ground would in either case
be barren; but that in either field our eye rests rather on these and
other separate ears of wheat that overtop the ranks, than on the waving
width of the whole harvest at once. In the one play our memory turns
next to the figures of Arthur and the Bastard, in the other to those of
Wolsey and his king: the residue in either case is made up of outlines
more lightly and slightly drawn. In two scenes the figure of King John
rises indeed to the highest height even of Shakespearean tragedy; for the
rest of the play the lines of his character are cut no deeper, the
features of his personality stand out in no sharper relief, than those of
Eleanor or the French king; but the scene in which he tempts Hubert to
the edge of the pit of hell sounds a deeper note and touches a subtler
string in the tragic nature of man than had been struck by any poet save
Dante alone, since the reign of the Greek