Godfrida : a Play in Four Acts. By John Davidson.
(John Lane.)—This seems to us a piece of work quite unworthy of Mr. Davidson's talent. It is written for the stage, and it seems to us of the stage stagey. Not a single person in the whole numerous assembly lives for a moment ; all the complications of the intrigue seem purposeless and futile, down to the final denouement, when, for some reason to us perfectly unintelligible, Isembert, the plotting Chancellor, suffers the Duchess Ermengarde to be killed, and so entirely defeats his own ends. There are of course fine lines here and there or it would not be Mr. Davidson's work ; these, for instance, in Godfrida's speech before her accusers reminding one of Othello's If there be any here, who feel, who think, Whose hearts say now or who remember still What love is, I beseech them to believe That nature was the only sorceress,
And passion all the magic that we knew- Siward and I, bewitching and bewitched."
But there are also a terrible number of passages where the transition from prose to verse is marked only by a division into lengths ; and a good many more where the effort after force ends only in violence of style.
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