R430218A. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.
The Athenæum, 18 February 1843, p. 166.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 400.
Drury Lane.—If to pain and perplex were the end and aim of tragedy, Mr. Browning’s poetic melodrama, called “A Blot on [sic] the ’Scutcheon,” would be worthy of admiration, for it is a very puzzling and unpleasant piece of business. The plot is plain enough, but the acts and feelings of the characters are inscrutable and abhorrent, and their language is as strange as their proceedings. The subject is of Spanish nature in an English guise—revenge for a stain on the honour of an ancient and noble house being the main passion. Lord Tresham is as proud and fierce as a Castilian, and as jealous of “a blot on the ’scutcheon” of his family. In the first scene, Earl Mertoun, a gallant youth, “noble among the noblest,” appears, a suitor to Lord Tresham for his sister’s hand; in the next, he enters her chamber-window at midnight, a cherished lover. The brother learns his sister’s shame, and accuses her before her kindred of the double baseness of inveigling an honourable lover while harbouring a paramour: yet she is silent, although a word would have averted the catastrophe that follows. Lord Tresham waylays the nocturnal visitor; they cross swords, and the lover falls mortally wounded, though he had revealed himself as Earl Mertoun. The slayer, who but the moment before spurned his adversary as a “miscreant,” now repents: he seeks his sister’s chamber, to whom he imparts the horrible tidings; she blesses him and dies; and he dies also. A few of the audience laughed, others were shocked, and many applauded; but it is impossible that such a drama should live, even if it were artfully constructed, which this is not. The acting of Mr. Phelps and Miss Helen Faucit, as the brother and sister, and Mr. Anderson as the lover, though not faultless, was powerful and effective.
[The review concludes with a few comments on A Thumping Legacy which we omit.]
Reviewed:
Bells & Pomegranates. No. V. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1843.
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