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QUEEN KATHARINE.
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etiquette due to her, or refuses her the queenly title. Even to death she retains this unquenchable pride, and Shakespeare himself gives these as her last words
" Embalm me, Then lay me forth : although unqueen'd, yet like A queen, and daughter to a king, inter me. I can no more."[1]
- ↑ This paper suggests the reflection that to Heine every woman who disregarded the seventh commandment was an angel, and every one who kept it a devil. He finds something divine, adorable, or attractive in Tamora, Cressida, and Cleopatra, even in Margaret, hut Queen Katharine is to him altogether repulsive. And all her great and noble qualities are to him absolutely nothing because Doctor Samuel Johnson admired her! All the power of Shakespeare's genius, he declares, failed to exalt her, because " this great pot of porter" praised her. Call you this criticism? It is not even excellent fooling, it is the fade frolicking of a freshman trying to seem wicked, while the suggestions that Henry bored his wife with his accomplishments, and she him with her virtues, are wretchedly forced fun of a kind which "has not even novelty for merit." This misapplied trifling is carried out to the very end, for the last words of Queen Katharine, as given in full in the original text, are inspired with anything but the heathen wrath and evil pride which Heine
