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 66 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

Herod twice voluntarily put himself into the power of his enemies. The first time, he went personally to Antony, to clear himself of the charge of having murdered Aristobulus, high priest and too popular brother of Mariamne. The second time, he went to Octavius, to ingratiate himself with the victor at Actium. Now, as Josephus relates, on each of these occasions, Herod left behind secret instructions that if he did not return from his perilous enterprise, his queen, Mariamne, should be put to death. He had perhaps not unreasonable fears that his jealously-loved and beautiful lady might become the prey of the Roman, whether Antony or Octavius. There was the precedent of Cleopatra !

So, in a sense, Herod meant well. Unhappily, however, several things went wrong. The confidential agents, to whom Herod had entrusted the job of assassinating Mariamne in the event of his not returning, happened to be clandestine lovers of the queen; and each betrayed to her her royal husband's unkindly kind arrangement for safeguarding her honor. It appears that she, perversely enough, failed to apreciate the affectionate precaution; and when he did return, was more than cold to him. In the conjugal debate which followed, she betrayed her knowledge of the secret order. That was enough for the jealous king. He knew his agents, middle-aged and reliable men. One, Joseph by name, was his own uncle and brother-in-law; the other, one Sohemus, he had raised from an obscure soldier to be military governor of a province. The one possible motive either could have had for betraying his master's confidence was love, guilty love, for the lady concerned. So Herod, to make assurance doubly sure, had them both killed; and then himself killed Mariamne.

Now for dramatic purposes, neither of these two elderly gentlemen was a very eligible lover. There is bathos as well as unpleasantness in casting a lady's uncle-in-law as her paramour. It certainly lacks the romantic touch. Amelie Rives, in her rather hysterical Herod and Mariamne, published in 1888, is almost the only dramatist to cast Uncle Joseph as the one effective rival of Herod. And, although the highly benevolent disposition of her really chaste Joseph' accentuates the mad suspiciousness of Herod, the situation verges on the comic. Nor does she much mend matters by attributing such an uncommon bloodthirstiness to Herod himself, who, just after beheading poor Joseph, soliloquizes:

I said that I'd have blood,-I said so,—ay,
But there is not enough in all the land
To slake my humor's thirst. Oh that I were
Another Pharoah, and another Moses

Would turn the Nile to blood a second time,

That I might swim through the encrimsoned waves!
Oh that I were a thing of quenchless thirst,

A vampire monstrous, flattened at the throat

Of one vast body, which should be the flesh
Incorporate of everything alive!

Manifestly, Miss Rives had been reading the Elizabethans; but, even so, her Herod's thirst is rather too Gargantuan.

Governor-General Sohemus, the other historically possible paramour, was, as I have said, a grizzled veteran. In these days of resolute realism, he might well enough serve. But the playwrights of the Herod theme who did use him, felt bound to explain away, or to do away with, his unromantic quality. Lodovico Dolce takes refuge in the reflection that feminine taste is notoriously capricious, even perverse. Moreover, Mariamne herself was not in her first bloom. The Counsellor in his play tries to persuade the jealous king that there could be no guilty love between such a middle-aged pair. As to Mariamne, he says,

Sohemus

and

Now passed and gone for her is the green age
When love is wont to have in us most force.

Is somewhat pale of face, and fierce of eye.

As to age, he hurries to life's close.

Herod, however, is unconvinced. There is no fool like an old fool; and a woman, whose bloom is passing, is in the dangerous age. Phillips passingly insinuates the same cynical paradox. Herod's mother, the Iago-like Cypress, answers her son's doubt that his beautiful queen could stoop to the low-born and elderly soldier:

Know, son, that women the most delicate,

And most high-born, feed often on strange fancies.

Other playwrights, while accepting Sohemus, make him over to suit the case. Elijah Fenton, in his Mariamne of 1723, draws him as a masterful Machiavellian plotter for Herod's throne. He woos and wins like the hump-backed Gloucester in Richard III. Luigi