ramatic which is not
consistently dramatic in substance and form be accepted as wholly
satisfactory from any other point of view?

The trilogy on Mary Queen of Scots must remain the largest and most
ambitious attempt which Swinburne has made. The first part,
_Chastelard_, was published in 1865; the last, _Mary Stuart_, in 1881.
And what Swinburne says in speaking of the intermediate play,
_Bothwell_, may be said of them all: 'I will add that I took as much
care and pains as though I had been writing or compiling a history of
the period to do loyal justice to all the historic figures which came
within the scope of my dramatic or poetic design.' Of _Bothwell_, the
longest of the three plays--indeed, the longest play in existence,
Swinburne says: 'That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive piece
of work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by the
old Shakespearean term of a chronicle history.' Definition is not
defence, and it has yet to be shown that the 'chronicle' form is in
itself a legitimate or satisfactory dramatic form. Shakespeare's use of
it proves only that he found his way through chronicle to drama, and to
take his work in the chronicle play as a model is hardly more
reasonable than to take _Venus and Adonis_ as a model for narrative
poetry. But, further, there is no play of Shakespeare's, chronicle or
other, which might not at least be conceived of, if not on the stage of
our time, at least on that of his, or on that of any time when drama was
allowed to live its own life according to its own nature. Can we
conceive of _Bothwell_ even on the stage which has seen _Les Burgraves_?
The Chinese theatre, which goes on from morning to night without a
pause, might perhaps grapple with it; but no other. Nor would cutting be
of any use, for what the stage-manager would cut away would be largely
just such parts as are finest in the printed play.

There is, in most of Swinburne's plays, some scene or passage of vital
dramatic quality, and in _Bothwell_ there is one scene, the scene
leading to the death of Darnley, which is among the great single scenes
in drama. But there is not even any such scene in the whole of the
lovely and luxurious song of _Chastelard_ or in the severe and strenuous
study of _Mary Stuart_. There are moments, in all, where speech is as
simple, as explicit, as expressive as speech in verse can be; and no
one will ever speak in verse more naturally than this:

Well,