us the Clytemnestra and the Orestes of him beware how he trespassed there, as Eschylus; but Prometheus, the willing profaner feet have since? Besides, is it sufferer for the benefit of mankind, finds not possible that even Shakespeare's no counterpart in the Shakesperian dra- knowledge of human nature failed him ma. Lear and Cordelia remind us of the when he tried to picture to himself the blind king at Colonos and his dutiful unfolding of the aloe-blossoms of the daughter, but there the resemblance world's garden, the feelings of nobly exstops; the Antigone of Sophocles has no ceptional men and women in hours which parallel among Shakespeare's tragedies. were exceptional even in their own good Nor has our great dramatist conceded to lives? Not content with such a compara man's brow the crown which he has re-atively external delineation as would have fused to place upon a woman's. The for- satisfied the Greek stage, may not Shakegotten Latin bards, whose ballads survive speare, with the modesty of true genius, for us in Livy's exquisite prose, fired the have owned to himself that he did not yet young Roman's imagination by many a possess the materials requisite for the fullstory of how his ancestors had devoted er portraiture? Let us hope that to the themselves to death for their country.greatest uninspired student of human naBut the tale of early Rome which Shake-ture such rare instances of its excellence speare dramatizes is a history of selfish- did not seem incredible. Let us feel asness rather than of self-sacrifice; he de-sured that he did not deliberately reject picts to us Coriolanus marching against them as subjects for his art, because he his country, not Regulus calmly going to thought them uninteresting compared certain death at Carthage for its sake. with creatures

Not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food;

It is impossible to assign with any certainty the reason why the greatest of dramatists thus turns away from what since, had Shakespeare undertaken the would seem the noblest of tragic sub-task, he would have performed it with jects. Shall we say that it was a mere such due regard to the mingling of weakaccident; that conspicuous acts of self-ness with man's strength as to retain our sacrifice were infrequent in those popular fellow-feeling for a being still, however histories and tales of Shakespeare's day exalted, "of like passions with ourwhich were selected by circumstances selves." But be the cause what it may, rather than by his own deliberate choice the fact is certain, that none of Shakeas the groundwork of his plays? so judg-speare's plays turns on a death voluntaing, shall we deem that had the poet in rily endured for some great object; the his retirement at Stratford seen the years English tragedies on such subjects are by of the two great Greek tragedians, his inferior hands to his. lengthened leisure might (among other precious fruits) have rivalled or outdone their two masterpieces? Or shall we look deeper for a reason, and say instead, that self-devotion in its noblest form had been exemplified in England too recently when Shakespeare wrote for him to find pleasure in depicting its lower manifestations; while those fires which his father may have seen blazing in Smithfield, had consumed sacrifices too holy to be represented on the English stage? and that thus it was that innate reverence of the poet for sacred things which his readers thankfully acknowledge, which fenced round from him the most awful grove of all the Muses' haunts, and bade

must

Not such has been the fate of themes of self-sacrifice in the two other great national European dramas, the Greek and the Spanish. In them they have engaged the attention of the greatest poets. As we have already said, of the few surviving tragedies of Eschylus and Sophocles, in each case one represents an act of self-devotion. In the more numerous remains of Euripides, such subjects are only too common; they are made cheap by frequent repetition.

Like the Greek, the Spanish stage was founded on its country's religion. Each alike does not shrink from presenting to its spectators the most sacred personages of its creed. What Shakespeare gener

ally is content with implying, the Span- as the sequel to all that had gone before, ish, like the Hellenic dramatists, openly as the concluding acts of that great Theexpress; the deepest truths known to ban tragedy with which Eschylus and them, the beliefs most cherished by their Sophocles had previously made their stage audience. That lively faith in the un- resound. And to judge it rightly now, we seen, in which alone genuine self-sacri- must recall those former plays to our refice can have its root, is strong in Calde-membrance; the anguished despair of ron as in Sophocles. The truths on which each based his tragedy were universally accepted by the spectators, and the assurance of their unfaltering sympathy supported the poet in his task. We can therefore place "The Steadfast Prince" of Calderon by the side of the "Antigone" of Sophocles, as the product of the same spirit in the romantic, as his in the classic, drama. Nor shall we do amiss, when seeking to imagine how Shakespeare would have treated a similar subject, if we take our idea of the plot from Calderon, and of the characters from Sophocles, prophetic as he often is of Shakespeare in his turns of thought. We must remember, however, that neither the Greek nor the Spaniard can give us any notion of that wit and humour which are the unique heritage of the English dramatist; playing, as they do in "Lear" or "Hamlet,” like summer lightning before the advancing storm, only to enhance by contrast its awful and gloomy grandeur.

Edipus on discovering the two crimes which he has unwittingly committed, the curse on his two sons, the gallant advance and downfall of the "Seven against Thebes," and the wail of the two sisters when Eteocles and Polynices have fallen by each other's hands- when "the Chorus echo the beat of the oars in that ship which is moving with the fallen chieftains' souls "* over the ways of Acheron to the unseen land. That funeral procession was disturbed by the entrance of the herald forbidding the burial of Polynices, as an enemy to his country. And the "Antigone" opens (as the "Seven against Thebes" closes) with the resolution of the heroine to resist that decree to the utmost. It proceeds from the new ruler of Thebes, Creon,‡ brother to the wretched Iocaste, whose own life (prolonged by Euripides in his "Phænissæ " to the time of her sons' death) Sophocles has followed Homer by terminating as soon as she has discovered the fatal secret of her second marriage. The great The "Antigone" is last, in order of question on which the play turns is the time, of the three plays founded by Soph-righteousness of such a decree; whether ocles on the misfortunes of Edipus and it can ever be just to punish the dead, or his house. Excelled by the first (the most complete of all tales of woe) in tragic horror, it is yet the most pathetic of the three in this, that it represents the sufferings of a perfectly innocent victim. Edipus is the cause of his own miseries, by the rash blow which he aims at the unknown Laius. His daughter's sorrows are the result of her own right-doing. The "Antigone does not, like the

66

Its

whether all vengeance directed against those who now stand before a higher tribunal than man's is not an impious thing.

* Copleston's "Eschylus" ("Ancient Classics for English Readers").

"Stirred by wind of wailing cries,
Beat your heads in strokes that fall
Timed to oars sad, musical,

Which o'er Acheron ceaseless rise

From that ship black-sailed and mourning;

(Ship Apollo may not tread,

By no sunbeam visited;

Ship which opes her hold to all)
To the unseen shore returning."

-Seven against Thebes, line 839, &c.

King Edipus," astonish the mind by an amazing reverse from the greatest outward prosperity to the most hopeless misery; it begins, as it ends, in woe. predecessors run through a longer scale This stern tyrant of the Greek stage appears in a of emotions, the first descending, the sec- more amiable, though supremely ludicrous light, in a ond in ascent; and therefore impress the juvenile production of Racine's "Les Frères Ennemis," mind more strongly. But to the original reconciles himself to his son's death, with the exclamawhere, transported with love for his niece, he readily audience the "Antigone" would appear|tion, “J'étais père et sujet, je suis amant et roi."

This question being decided against |
Creon, by the common feeling of the tra-
gedian and his audience, the second ques-
tion is raised: how far active resistance
to an unrighteous law is to be justified.
An extreme case is purposely set forth;
that of a subject withstanding the ruler
of the state, of a woman disobeying the
man who has over her the authority of a
father. And so the true justification of
such disobedience is placed in the clearer
light, as reverence to the higher law,
through fear of transgressing which alone
the lower is broken. Thus the irony of
Sophocles (to use Bishop Thirlwall's
phrase) is as conspicuous in the "Anti-
gone" as in his other dramas.
strong sense of the startling contrasts
frequent in human life between the
parent and the real, which in the "Phi-
loctetes" delights to show us in a weak
and suffering man the arm on which the
fall of Troy, in truth, depends, sets be-
fore us here, in the king (the seeming as-
serter of the majesty of the law), a tyrant
whose edicts violate that true law which
is the foundation of all the rest; in the
maiden, who defies his authority and suf-
fers for her crime, the real reverencer of
that higher Law for the sake of keeping
which she dies a martyr.

That

ap

timid as she is, prefer death with her sister to life without her.

But in the first scene of the play the altercation waxes hot :

Ismene. Mean'st thou to bury him against the law?

Antigone. My brother and thine also? Yea, even if

Thou aid not; ne'er will I be found a traitor. Then Ismene raises her voice in behalf of prudence and caution. Women cannot be expected to fight against men; the calamities of their house may well warn ts two last survivors against rashness: May my dead kindred forgive me," is her conclusion, "since I neglect them not by free-will, but by constraint; but I shall obey the law: to act otherwise would show no good sense."

66

Ant. I would not bid thee do it; if thine aid
Were freely offered now, I would not have it.
Go where thou wilt, I go that man to bury.
If for such deed I die, I die with honour,

To lie, beloved, beside my brother loved,
Righteous in my transgression; since 'twill
Longer to please the dead than please the
profit
living;

For with them I shall ever rest; but thou
Despise (if such thy choice) what gods revere.

Ismene confesses herself too weak to

Seven chieftains fierce against the seven gates fighting

Sophocles does not depict his heroine as perplexed by any conflicting thoughts share in the exploit, which she at once of the duties of citizenship and kindred. blames and admires her sister for perHe ascribes to her that "honest heart forming; and Antigone departs alone. which is the best casuist ;" that intuitive When she is gone, the Chorus of citizens sense of right, which may find it hard occupy the vacant stage. They sing of (as Antigone does afterwards) to justify the recent deliverance of Thebes; of the its own convictions to others, but which peril brought on his hapless country by never falters in them itself. Never after- Polynices, the chieftain whose body now wards, not even when the gods seem to lies unburied outside their gates; the have declared against her, does Antigone eagle about to swoop upon them, and wish her deed undone. The moral gov-rend them with his talons, but disapernment of the universe, the after-conse- pointed of his prey by the patron deity of quences of right-doing, may seem to her their city: how for a moment painfully uncertain; but she never allows herself to think that she could have acted differently. With this strong and noble maiden is contrasted a gentle, weaker sister, Ismene, who clings to her with a passionate attachment, which after a time lifts up her own feebler nature to a momentary heroism, but who is incapable of sharing Antigone's lofty purpose. She thus provokes her sister's greater but sorely-tried spirit, to treat her with scarcely warrantable harshness in the two critical moments in which alone we see them together; that such harshness was the exception, not the rule, of their intercourse, we have the fullest assurance afterwards, when we see Ismene,

Found each his match, and lost their brazen

arms,

Zeus at his will their manly hearts affrighting.
But the two, brothers in their hate severe,
Raised weapons, fraught for each with deadly
And (common lot of death on both alighting)
Fell cach by brother's spear.

harms,

Presently Creon enters, to explain and glory in his law against the burial of Polynices before the assembled citizens. They assure him, with trembling lips, that no one will dare to break it; and while they are doing so, the frightened guardian of the corpse appears with the

news that it has been transgressed. He | If still thou count my deed for foolishness details the tokens which prove that there Haply a fool of folly finds me guilty.

has been a performance of sepulchral rites, hasty indeed, and imperfect, but sufficient according to Greek ideas, to avert those penalties which await the unburied in the under-world. Creon is very angry, and dismisses the watchman with the command to discover the transgressor or to suffer in his room. The interval caused by his absence is filled up, as usual, by a Choric Ode. But the suspense of the audience is not of long duration. It is soon terminated by the watchman's reappearance with the captive Antigone, whom he had seized while visiting her brother's body for the second time. He gives the king a circumstantial account of the maiden's horror on seeing it cruelly despoiled of the earth which her pitying hand had cast upon it; of her shrill and bitter cry, like a bird that has found her nest emptied of its young; " of her attempt to renew her offerings, and of her capture undismayed and owning the whole charge. Then the tyrant and the maiden confront one another: the asserter of arbitrary power, and the maintainer of the justice of heaven.

Cr. Thou, thou who standest with eyes bent
on earth,

Dost thou confess these deeds, or else deny?
Ant. I own I did them and deny them not.
Cr. (to the Watchman.)

Thou then betake thee where thou listest, free,
By this acquittal, of a heavy charge.
(To Antigone.)

But thou, say briefly, not in long harangue,
Knew'st thou this act had been proclaimed un-

lawful?

Ant. I did; how could I else? The law was public.

Cr. And yet hadst boldness to transgress the

law?

Ant. Yea, for it was no Zeus who published it;

Nor Justice, dweller with the gods beneath,-
They never made such laws for men to keep.
Nor could I see strength in thy proclamations,
Being mortal, such as to o'erstep the unwritten
And never-to-be-shaken laws of gods.
For these began not now nor yesterday,
But ever live, none having seen their birth.
For breaking these, through fear of any man,
I will not be condemned before the gods.
Full well I know that I must die (who does

not?

E'en hadst thou held thy peace; but if for this
I die before my time I count it gain.
For who, as I, can live in many griefs
And not by death be gainer? Thus to me
To meet such fate shall not cause any pain.
But had I left my mother's son, when dead,
To lie a corpse unburied, then my heart
Had pained me, as it does not pain me now.

He

The Chorus are terrified, Creon is irritated by this display of courage. threatens instant death to Antigone and to her sister, her presumed accomplice. The same want of self-control which leaves him at the close of the play to sink beneath the burden of adversity, makes him now powerless in prosperity to bear opposition to his will. Furious at the thought of a woman's having dared to disobey him, he is even yet more enraged at her for afterwards glorying in the deed. To deprive her of that boast, he condescends for a moment to employ argument. He charges her with impiety towards her other brother, Eteocles, by paying honours to his slayer's corpse. Her answers are fine and pathetic.

Ant. It was no slave who perished, 'twas a brother.

Cr. Wasting this land- for which the other fought.

Ant Still death demands that both have equal rites.

Cr. Not that the bad be equalled with the good.

Ant. Who knows if good be there the same as here?

Cr. Not even death can make our foe our
friend.

Ant. Sharer of love, not hatred, was I born.
Cr. If thou must love our foe, go seek him

out

Beneath the earth, and love him in his grave.

Ismene's entrance follows this brutal rejoinder. She stands as a mourner, bathed in tears, to plead for her sister's life; or, if that may not be, for leave to share her death. Her temporary courage, which is born of affection only, throws into stronger relief the higher and more enduring courage of Antigone, sprung as it is, not more from affection than from duty. No wonder that in the heroine's sight it is almost contemptible; that she can scarcely believe in the sincerity of this late offer to share in the glory and the danger of the deed which Ismene left itself unperformed; and that_a_proud satisfaction in knowing that Polynices' burial by one sister only, and that herself, will be the theme of future song, mingles with Antigone's softer gladness at the thought that, though she must die, yet her gentle young sister may live. But to us the timid, shrinking Ismene is an interesting figure; we are glad that her generous offer to share the reponsi-bility of the deed from which she dis-suaded her sister is rejected, partly, in

deed, because we fear that her brief cour- | give serious heed to these threats, and age might have failed her after all but provoked by them to greater fury, propartly, also, because we could not bear to see such a fair young thing subjected to the terrible ordeal through which all Antigone's fortitude has much ado to bear her. It is thus that Ismene's entreaty for an after-share in her sister's glorious crime is rejected.