But
this last scene no doubt is more in Scott's way. He can always paint
women in their more masculine moods. Where he frequently fails is in
the attempt to indicate the finer shades of women's nature. In Amy
Robsart herself, for example, he is by no means generally successful,
though in an early scene her childish delight in the various orders
and decorations of her husband is painted with much freshness and
delicacy. But wherever, as in the case of queens, Scott can get a
telling hint from actual history, he can always so use it as to make
history itself seem dim to the equivalent for it which he gives us.
And yet, as every one knows, Scott was excessively free in his
manipulations of history for the purposes of romance. In _Kenilworth_
he represents Shakespeare's plays as already in the mouths of
courtiers and statesmen, though he lays the scene in the eighteenth
year of Elizabeth, when Shakespeare was hardly old enough to rob an
orchard. In _Woodstock_, on the contrary, he insists, if you compare
Sir Henry Lee's dates with the facts, that Shakespeare died twenty
years at least before he actually died.
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