tly to play the thorough-going
dissembler when she meets her husband, and she keeps up the pretence
when she declares to Bussy before the Court (III, ii, 138), "Y'are one I
know not," and speaks of him vaguely in a later scene as "the man." So,
too, when Montsurry first tells her of the suspicions which Monsieur
has excited in him, she protests with artfully calculated indignation
against the charge of wrong-doing with this "serpent." But the brutal
and deliberate violence of her husband when he knows the truth, and the
perfidious meanness with which he makes her the reluctant instrument of
her lover's ruin, win back for her much of our alienated sympathy. Yet
at the close her position is curiously equivocal. It is at her prayer
that Bussy has spared Montsurry when "he hath him down" in the final
struggle; but when her lover is mortally wounded by a pistol shot, she
implores his pardon for her share in bringing him to his doom. And when
the Friar's ghost seeks to reconcile husband and wife, the former is
justified in crying ironically (V, iv, 163-64):

"See how she merits this, still kneeling by,
And mourning his fall, more than her own fault!"

Montsurry's portraiture, indeed, suffers from the same lack of
consistency as his wife's. In his earlier relations with her he strikes
a tenderer note than is heard elsewhere in the play, and his first
outburst of fury, when his suspicions are aroused, springs, like
Othello's, from the depth of his love and trust (IV, i, 169-70):

"My whole heart is wounded,
When any least thought in you is but touch'd."

But there is nothing of Othello's noble agony of soul, nor of his sense
that he is carrying out a solemn judicial act on the woman he still
loves, in Montsurry's long-drawn torture of his wife. Indeed a
comparison of the episodes brings into relief the restraint and purity
of Shakespeare's art when handling the most terrible of tragic themes.
Yet the Moor himself might have uttered Montsurry's cry (V, i, 183-85),

"Here, here was she
That was a whole world without spot to me,
Though now a world of spot."

And there is something of pathetic dignity in his final forgiveness of
his wife, coupled with the declaration that his honour demands that she
must fly his house for ever.

Monsieur and the Guise are simpler types. The former is the ambitious
villain of quality, chafing at the thought that there is but a thre