moral obligation, which is the essence of drama. Her scornful rejection of the advances of Monsieur (II, ii), though her husband palliates his conduct as that of "a bachelor and a courtier, I, and a prince," proves that she is no light o' love, and that her surrender to Bussy is the result of a sudden and overmastering passion. Even in the moment of keenest expectation she is torn between conflicting emotions (II, ii, 169-182), and after their first interview, Bussy takes her to task because her "Conscience is too nice, And bites too hotly of the Puritane spice." But she masters her scruples sufficiently 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 

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