Commentary

Swinburne scholarship has hiterto recognized only two reviews of Swinburne's first published volume The Queen-Mother and Rosamond (London: Pickering, 1860). In his 1970 volume Algernon Charles Swinburne in the Critical Heritage series, Clyde K. Hyder identifies two short unsigned notices, in the Spectator and the Athenaeum and states that “apparently” these two reviews are the “only notices of The Queen-Mother and Rosamond during 1861” (3). In his 1982 Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Bibliography of Secondary Works, 1861-1980, Kirk H. Beetz lists only the two reviews cited by Hyder, and Rikky Rooksby's 1997 biography A. C. Swinburne: A Poet's Life also mentions only the Spectator and Athenaeum reviews, both of which were negative.
The review below, from the April 6th, 1861 issue of John Bull is noteworthy both for its length and for its positive and sympathetic opinion of Swinburne’s work.

The Queen Mother. Rosamond. Two Plays. By Algernon Charles Swinburne.—London: B. M. Pickering, 1861.

This little volume (beautifully executed, by the way, in point of typography) must by no means be thrown aside with the poetic trifles of the season. Mr. Swinburne has grave deficiencies, but he has at the same time several points about him which indicate the spirit of a true poet. He has obviously studied with intense pains the dramatists of the Elizabethan age, and he has drawn from this study a remarkable power over their modes of thought and diction, so that his language blooms redundantly with all the conceits and elaborate imagery which was characteristic of that time, and these expressed in forms of phraseology which partake to a great degree of those which were current at the same period. This phraseology gives to Mr. Swinburne's writing a somewhat quaint and affected air; nevertheless it is manifest as you read that the style is one which he has made his own by habit and congeniality of thought, and that he is no mere imitator of antique diction.
These compositions should be called dramatic poems rather than plays, as they are not in any wise adapted for the stage. There is not enough action about them for dramatic purposes; and yet Mr. Swinburne has no doubt had before his eyes the histrionic strut and rage of our older dramas, and has followed that model in his dialogues. But the involved meaning, the crowded and often far-fetched metaphors, and the contorted phraseology in which Mr. Swinburne's characters express themselves, will make their language quite incomprehensible to a theatrical audience. The entire lack of any human and moral interest about them would be equally fatal to their success on the stage. The author evidently loves to delineate the morbid aspects of human nature, and he delineates them in a highiy spasmodic style of art. If, however, you are willing to overcome your repugnance to this sort of thing, and will take the trouble of construing Mr. Swinburne's difficult scenes, you will be forced to own in many places the signs of a rich fancy, and a powerful grasp of ideas.
In the first of these plays the character of Catherine di Medici disappoints us. The motives and feelings by which she was actuated would no doubt be dark and latent enough in her real life; but it is the business of the dramatic poet to lay bare by some means or other the workings of these dark spirits. But we have a much more lively idea of Catherine from Miss Freer's biographies than from Mr. Swinburne's dramatic presentment. The character of Charles IX., however, is admirably drawn, and with great historic accuracy. The uncontrolled passion with which he gloats fiercely on the coming Bartholomew, alternating with his relenting words, and the relations of both to the feelings with which he regards his mistress Denise, are the fruits of a very high poetic invention. The horrors of the massacre, too, are brought vividly before the reader's fancy with an artistic power of no common order.
The tragedy of Rosamond is conceived in a similar spirit. The contrast is finely drawn between the gentle, loving, sorrowing Rosamond and the hard and haughty Eleanor; but the scenes in which this contrast is delineated, are expressed in language that is so difficult to construe, in conceits that are so forced and artificial, that we fear Mr. Swinburne will not attract the attention that his poem really deserves. He has much to learn before his verse will become popular; he must restrain the redundant imagery in which his fancy revels, and which so overloads his phraseology as to obscure the sense; and he must refrain from going out of his way to catch unnecessary metaphors.