HEROD IN THE DRAMA

BY J. B. FLETCHER

I was led to read some of the dramatic accounts of the domestic infelicities of Herod first, because browsing among writings of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, I had come across Hans Sachs' quaint old play on the subject, then on Lodovico Dolce's Senecan tragedy, then on Calderon's "cloak-and-sword" adaptation, then on Sampson and Markham's " tragedy of blood," then on Alexandre Hardy's tragi-comedy, then on Philip Massinger's version under Italian names in the "Duke of Milan." Then I began to wonder how many more there might be.

In the second place, while I was still wondering and hunting, Stephen Phillips's Herod appeared. Together with Rostand's Cyrano, Phillips's play made quite a furore. The drama in verse seemed to have really come back.

Appearing nearly at the same time, the Cyrano de Bergerac and the Herod formed an interesting contrast both in theme and in treatment. In the Cyrano, love is shown rising almost fantastically superior to jealousy; in the Herod, jealousy most brutally tramples on love. In keeping with his romantic theme, Rostand embroidered in nearly every device of romance-mistaken identities, heroically unequal combats, mysterious midnight meetings, "disastrous chances," "moving accidents by flood and field," "hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach." And Rostand's style was as variegated, as capricious, as startling as his matter. And to cap the Gothic fantasy, there was the gargoyle Nose! In Phillips's piece, on the contrary, all was prim, pruned, precise, classic; the complex personal equation of his hero was reduced to its lowest terms; no character, no episode, no scene, no line but subserved, and of necessity, the logical catastrophe. His verse and vocabulary strained after the same severe simplicity. Rostand took us back to Victor Hugo; Phillips to Voltaire.

There was another difference between the literary performances which happened at the moment to interest me. Rostand had discovered the dramatic Cyrano; his creation was unique. Phillips had to differentiate his hero from many previous dramatic por

traits, of which the first-and by no means least dramatic-was that painted by the historian of the Jews, Josephus himself. After him there had been, as I had by this time counted, fully twentyfive plays about Herod.1

The dramatic possibilities of Herod's story are indeed rich. Phillips himself has been quoted somewhere as saying that the story is the most dramatic in history. More than this, not only is the motive of a great tragedy embedded in the brief narrative of Josephus, but, as the editor of Tristan l'Hermite's Mariane pointed out early in the seventeenth century, Josephus also provides all the dramatis personae, and prescribes the conduct of the action "selon les règles les plus etroites d'Aristote et du bon sens.” Yet for some reason the theme has not proved a very lucky one for those who essayed it. Even Voltaire at the height of his popularity, extracting and chiselling this tragedy already roughhewn by Josephus, failed to please even his own peculiar public. Friedrich Hebbel, in Germany, staked his dramatic reputation on his very special rendering of the story; and his play was laughed off the stage. Lodovico Dolce was in general a successful playright; Symonds thought his Marianna the one Cinquecento tragedy "in which a glimmer of dramatic light is visible; " Dolce's play observed the strictest Senecan requirements; it was lavishly staged in Venice in the palace of the Duke of Ferrara, where they managed those things well; yet, as the author laments in his preface, the piece fell flat. Phillips's piece had indeed its moment of glory; but the one real hit appears to have been made by Calderon, and his play to-day would still make a hit, if put-where it belongs-. in the movies.

Precisely because Herod's story, though richly tragic, seems also to be somehow rather unmanageable for the dramatist, comparative study of it is repaying. Dramatists have tried to put it into all the moulds of drama. They have made all kinds of people out of the historical personages named and described by Josephus. They have twisted the plot every which way, and have intertwisted it with other plots, sometimes taken from Herod's other misadventures, sometimes invented. To observe their results, is a very good way

1

A monograph by Marcus Landau (Zeitschrift f. Vergleichenden Litt., VIII, 1894) also helped. I have drawn upon his analyses of plays that I was unable to get at.

to realize in effect the methods of the various historical schools of drama; for since the matter is one in common, the treatments in their differences stand out. I cannot undertake, indeed, any systematic or thorough discussion on dramaturgical lines. Neither space nor my own competence permits. I shall give only a few random reflections from my reading.

There is not one story of Herod, but several. The dramatists used them all, either separately or together. There is the biblical Herod, persecutor of Christ, slaughterer of the Innocents, who figures in many a "mystery " play. There is Herod, the man of destiny, another Tamburlaine, wading through blood to supreme power-evident opportunity for a dramatic study in Marlowe's vein of magnificent, briefly successful, and then tragically punished Egotism; or, if the gory means are stressed instead of the superb ends, fit theme for an Elizabethan "tragedy of blood." Again, there is a still vaster conception of Herod,-product of metaphysical Germany, according to which Herod figures as a great Symbol in world-history, the incarnation of Judaism triumphant allied with Paganism triumphant, as incarnate in Cæsar Augustus, both arrayed but in vain against Christianity nascent. This symbolism is predominant in Hebbel's piece; it is pervasively implied in Phillips's.

Obviously, in such dramatic treatment of Herod, the motif of his marital jealousy may well recede into the background, or even disappear altogether. The "mystery" plays know it not. Hans Sachs uses it only to adorn his moral tale by the way. His five-act "chronicle play" of 1552 is the first to dramatize the Herod of Josephus as distinct from the Biblical Herod. It moralizes the consequences of Herod's egotism, first in the judicial murder of his wife at the end of the second act, then in the successive executions of his several sons. Precisely Sachs's proportions are observed in an English "tragedy of blood," written by William Sampson and Gervase Markham, and acted in 1622. Their title indicates the dual motive: The true tragedy of Herod and Antipater, with the death of the faire Marriam. As in Sachs's piece, Mariamne is killed off in two acts; the last three deal with Herod's troubles as a father. Four generations appear on the stage, or five, if we count the numerous ghosts of the fifth act as a re-generation. The main point of the play seems to be a competition in family murder

between father and son. Herod is given a start of two, for before the curtain goes up, he has already killed his wife Mariamne's father and grandfather. At the end of the fourth act, however, Antipater is only one behind, having since the curtain rose, compassed the deaths of Mariamne herself, her mother, her brother, and her alleged paramour. Herod meanwhile has added to his list Mariamne's two sons and his own sister. In the fifth act, however, Herod kills Antipater, and then himself; and so wins. When the curtain falls, all the principal characters are dead; but they are still conscientiously carrying on-as ghosts.

Besides Sachs and Sampson-Markham, the only dramatist to combine both motifs of Herod's nemesis,-his reversal of fortune as husband and as father, is the modern German lyric poet, Friedrich Rückert; who so makes a cycle entitled Herodes der Grösse, in two plays, Herodes and Mariamne and Herodes und seine Söhne. For the rest, in the great majority of cases, the judicial murder of Mariamne is made the central catastrophe. But even this motif is complicated in the account of the facts by Josephus, who seems to offer two kinds of explanation of Herod's act. On the one hand, Herod appears to have been moved by natural and human causes. A cumulation of circumstantial evidence of his wife's infidelity works havoc in the passionately jealous temper of the King. A tragedy developing this situation alone would be purely psychological in its interest, a study of domestic jealousy like Shakspere's Othello, for instance. Indeed, at least one later playwright borrowed color from Shakspere to adorn his play of Herod. In 1694 appeared an "heroic drama" of the Drydenesque type. Its author, Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, seems to have followed in the main Tristan l'Hermite's piece of 1636. In Boyle's finale, however, Herod comes to murder Mariamne sleeping, as Othello murders Desdemona. There is no hint of this in Josephus or in the other Herod dramas. Also in Calderon's El Tetrarca, just before Mariamne's death, her tire-women, undressing her, sing to her an old mournful song. We are reminded, as Ticknor says, of Desdemona singing her "Willow" song as she undresses on the fatal night. Again, as Desdemona defends her lord to the last, so Calderon's Mariamne defends Herod against Octavius, when the latter urges her to flee with him from her husband's violence.

The second motive of Herod's murderous act suggested by Josephus, if followed out, leads to a "drama of destiny." It seems to have been foretold of Herod that he would one day kill the thing he loved most. This motive is hinted at by Cypros, Herod's mother, in Phillips's piece:

Did not the great astrologer foretell:

"Herod shall famous be o'er all the world,

But he shall kill that thing which most he loves?"

Cypros, jealous of the influence of Mariamne over her son, is trying to turn against her daughter-in-law the prophecy once dreaded by Herod, but never thought of in connection with his idolized wife. Taken together with the more famous prophecy, because of which Herod slaughtered the Innocents, the prophecy that a mysterious King of Peace was to depose him and to usurp his dynasty, the astrologer's utterance deepens the shadow of mystical fate that hung over Herod. Phillips treats it as a stormcloud distantly impending over the daylight foreground scene of his domestic and psychological tragedy. In the handling of the Spanish dramatist, Calderon, however, the actually effective cause of Mariamne's death is this working of Fate,-of Fate in the most crudely and amusingly literal sense. His Herod is jealous, to be sure; but he really kills his queen unintentionally and by merest accident-by a "fated" dagger. The dagger is the real culpritor at any rate the diabolical power that controls it.

Calderon is the only one to make a fate-play in the full sense out of the Herod material. His piece also heads a very special group of Spanish plays on the subject. Besides stressing the motif of Fate, the Spanish group shape the material to the not very appropriate Spanish type of the "cloak-and-sword comedy." George Ticknor, in company with more than one patriotic Spanish critic, rates Calderon's piece very high, not only among Calderon's own dramas, but even in comparison with Othello. "Othello's jealousy," he says, "with which it (Herod's) is most readily compared, is of a lower kind, and appeals to grosser fears." It may be so; but the reader may judge presently for himself.

Most dramatists have adopted, or at least adapted, Herod's story as told by Josephus; Calderon treats Josephus, all history, with sovereign contempt. His boldest invention, indeed, is dramatically effective, and perhaps might have happened. Josephus tells that