The Second Person Singular, and Other Essays

Alice Meynell's essays move with startling range, from Shakespeare's vision of kingship to the private sorrows of imprisoned women, from Elizabethan song to the ironies of modern taste. She sees royalty in Shakespeare as spiritual and poetic as much as political, finding hidden majesty in humble figures and tragic grandeur in Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, where power is inseparable from mortality. From there she laments the loss of England's earliest poetry and celebrates the transitional brilliance of the Elizabethan age, especially Robert Greene, whose songs such as "Sephestia's Song to Her Child" shine with musical ease, tender imagery, and distinctly native freshness. The essays then widen into meditations on memory, suffering, and historical imagination, before turning to Arabella Stuart's tragic letters, where obedience, love, and resistance are crushed by confinement and royal authority. John Evelyn's Italy becomes another lens on loss, contrasting cultivated beauty with industrial decay.