f shame. In places the
shadow deepens: death intrudes itself on the scene, as among other
[175] things "a great disguiser," blanching the features of youth and
spoiling its goodly hair, touching the fine Claudio even with its
disgraceful associations. As in Orcagna's fresco at Pisa, it comes
capriciously, giving many and long reprieves to Barnardine, who has
been waiting for it nine years in prison, taking another thence by
fever, another by mistake of judgment, embracing others in the midst of
their music and song. The little mirror of existence, which reflects
to each for a moment the stage on which he plays, is broken at last by
a capricious accident; while all alike, in their yearning for untasted
enjoyment, are really discounting their days, grasping so hastily and
accepting so inexactly the precious pieces. The Duke's quaint but
excellent moralising at the beginning of the third act does but
express, like the chorus of a Greek play, the spirit of the passing
incidents. To him in Shakespeare's play, to a few here and there in
the actual world, this strange practical paradox of our life, so unwise
in its eager haste, reveals itself in all its clearness.

The Duke disguised as a friar, with his curious moralising on life and
death, and Isabella in her first mood of renunciation, a thing "ensky'd
and sainted," come with the quiet of the cloister as a relief to this
lust and pride of life: like some grey monastic picture hung on the
wall of a gaudy room, their presence cools the heated air of the piece.
For a moment we [176] are within the placid conventual walls, whither
they fancy at first that the Duke has come as a man crossed in love,
with Friar Thomas and Friar Peter, calling each other by their homely,
English names, or at the nunnery among the novices, with their little
limited privileges, where

If you speak you must not show your face,
Or if you show your face you must not speak.

Not less precious for this relief in the general structure of the
piece, than for its own peculiar graces is the episode of Mariana, a
creature wholly of Shakespeare's invention, told, by way of interlude,
in subdued prose. The moated grange, with its dejected mistress, its
long, listless, discontented days, where we hear only the voice of a
boy broken off suddenly in the midst of one of the loveliest songs of
Shakespeare, or of Shakespeare's school,* is the pleasantest of many
glimpses we get here of pleasant places--t