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After the dumb show, enter Two PAGES, the one with tapers, and the other holding a chafing dish with a perfume in it; ANTONIO in his nightgown and a nightcap, unbraced, following after.

ANT.

FIRST PAGE.
ANT.

SECOND PAGE.
ANT.

The black jades of swart night trot foggy rings
'Bout heaven's brow. [Clock strikes twelve.] 'Tis

now stark-dead night.

Is this Saint Mark's Church?

It is, my lord.

Where stands my father's hearse?

Those streamers bear his arms. Ay, that is it.
Set tapers to the tomb, and lamp the church.
Give me the fire. Now depart and sleep.

I purify the air with odorous fume.

[Exeunt pages.]

Graves, vaults, and tombs, groan not to bear my

weight;

Cold flesh, bleak trunks, wrapt in your half-rot

shrouds,

I press you softly with a tender foot.

Most honoured sepulchre, vouchsafe a wretch

Leave to weep o'er thee. Tomb, I'll not be long
Ere I creep in thee, and with bloodless lips

Kiss my cold father's cheek.

I prithee, grave,

Provide soft mould to wrap my carcase in.
Thou royal spirit of Andrugio,

Where'er thou hoverest, airy intellect,

I heave up tapers to thee (view thy son)

In celebration of due obsequies;

Once every night I'll dew thy funeral hearse
With my religious tears.

O blessed father of a cursèd son,

Thou diedst most happy, since thou livedst not
To see thy son most wretched, and thy wife
Pursued by him that seeks my guiltless blood!
Oh! in what orb thy mighty spirit soars,
Stoop and beat down this rising fog of shame,
That strives to blur thy blood, and girt defame
About my innocent and spotless brows.
Non est mori miserum, sed misere mori.
[GHOST OF ANDRUGIO rises.]

GHOST OF AND. Thy pangs of anguish rip my cerecloth up,
And lo! the ghost of old Andrugio

Forsakes his coffin. Antonio, revenge!

I was empoisoned by

Revenge my blood!
Revenge my blood!
Only to frustrate thy
Is blazed unchaste.

Piero's hand.

Take spirit, gentle boy; Thy Mellida is chaste : pursuit in blood

Thy mother yields consent

To be his wife, and give his blood a son
That made her husbandless, and doth complot
To make her sonless; but before I touch
The banks of rest my ghost shall visit her.
Thou vigour of my youth, juice of my love,
Seize on revenge, grasp the stern-bended front
Of frowning vengeance with unpaiz'd clutch :
Alarum Nemesis, rouse up thy blood!
Invent some stratagem of vengeance,

Remember this:

Which, but to think on, may like lightning glide
With horror through thy breast!
Scelera non ulcisceris, nisi vincis.1

The ghost is as good as his word.

He seats himself

on Maria's bed, and addresses her in terms of mild reproach for her fickleness; after which he allows her to retire to repose, and courteously draws the curtains. Antonio, having been made acquainted with the truth, is not, like Hamlet, slow to act. Having taken counsel with of Feliche, he contrives to When Strotzo, at the trial

his mother, and with the father countermine the plot of Piero. of Mellida, comes into court with his confession, Piero takes the opportunity to get rid of an inconvenient accomplice by actually strangling him; but, on giving orders for the arrest of Antonio, the Duke hears that the latter has evaded his power by throwing himself into the sea. As a matter of fact, Antonio has transformed himself into a court jester; but his supposed death breaks the heart of Mellida, and her lover, in his fool's dress, only enters her chamber in time to hear her dying speech. Rendered desperate by this misfortune, Antonio begins his revenge by killing Piero's young son, Julio; and this success being announced to the rest of the conspirators, they all of them arrange to serve up the body to the tyrant at a banquet. This is done, and when Piero has eaten, they dance around him, tie him down in his chair, cut out his tongue, and after turning him adrift make Antonio Duke in his place.

Such is the jumbled hash of bloody recollections from the Thyestes of Seneca and Shakespeare's Hamlet by which Marston proposes to reveal to the spectators "the sense of what men were and are," and the

common

1 Antonio's Revenge, Act iii. Sc. 1.

prologue to which Charles Lamb compares to the sublime imagery of the Revelation of St. John!

Cyril Tourneur, an imitator of Marston, owes whatever reputation he possesses entirely to modern times. A short account of his plays is given by Langbaine,1 but it does not appear from this that they ever enjoyed extraordinary popularity; and, as far as I can remember, his name is not mentioned by Dryden, who speaks of most of the dramatic poets in the preceding age whose plays were still acted. A contemporary rhymer says of him :

His fame unto that pitch was only raised,

As not to be despised, nor too much praised.2

Mr. Swinburne, however, following Lamb, calls him a dramatist of the first order.3

Two only of his "tragedies" survive,-The Revenger's Tragedy, and The Atheist's Tragedy,—and from these Lamb has selected several scenes for his Specimens. Of the two scenes which he has chosen from The Revenger's Tragedy, the first (in which the hero of the play, Vindici, is represented soliloquising before the skull of his dead mistress) is a mere travesty of a really beautiful episode in Dekker's Honest Whore, which is itself largely indebted to Hamlet's soliloquy on Yorick's skull; of the second, Lamb says: "The reality and life of this dialogue passes any scenical illusion I ever felt. I never read it but my ears tingle, and I feel a hot blush spread my cheek, as if I were about to 'proclaim' some such 'malefactions' of myself as the brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, in words more keen and dagger-like than those that Hamlet uses to his mother. Such power has the passion of shame truly personated not only to strike guilty creatures unto the soul, but to appal even those who are free." 4

Every reader of taste must have felt that, in the scene between Hamlet and his mother, Shakespeare has touched the extreme verge of what is permissible in art, and that only the tragic height of the whole situation renders the 1 Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691), pp. 505-506. 2 Ibid. p. 506.

3 Article "Tourneur" in the Encyclopædia Britannica (ninth edition). 4 Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (Bohn, 1803), p. 168.

dialogue endurable; but the "malefaction " to which Lamb refers is a scene in The Revenger's Tragedy, in which Tourneur imagines a mother endeavouring to corrupt the chastity of her own daughter! So great was the delight of Lamb in realising imaginary situations that he did not pause to reflect that the "malefaction" he speaks of lay solely in the imagination of the dramatist. If it be urged, "Such things may be," the answer is that no great dramatist has ever attempted to represent them, understanding well the truth of Aristotle's principle that "probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities." Sincerely as I respect and admire the genius of Lamb, I should be false to historical duty if I failed to give expression to the indignation I feel at finding the name of a poetaster like Tourneur coupled with that of Shakespeare.

Of his life absolutely nothing seems to be known; but he began to seek a literary reputation as early as 1600, when he published a poem called The Transformed Metamorphosis, which belongs to the school of pedantic satire, exemplified in Marston's Scourge for Villainie and Middleton's Micro-cynicon. The author claims credit for virtue by affecting a cynical hatred of the villainies of the age, and for genius by adopting a style which may compare with the most sublime nonsense of Barnabe Barnes. A few lines from the address of "The Author to his Booke" will show the reader that I am not exaggerating :

O were thy margents cliffes of itching lust,
Or quotes to chalke out men the way to sinne ;
Then were there hope that multitudes would thrust
To buy thee; but sith that thou dost beginne
To pull the curtaines backe that closde vice in,
Expect but flowts, for 'tis the haire of crime

To shunne the breath that doth discloude it sinne.1

Of the intention thus announced, it is sufficient to say that the reader of the poem will peruse it from beginning to end without discovering what metamorphosis is spoken of, or in what way the writer means to draw back the curtains from vice it is, in fact, merely one of the impudent 1 The Transformed Metamorphosis (1600).

prologue to which Charles Lamb compares to the sublime imagery of the Revelation of St. John!

Cyril Tourneur, an imitator of Marston, owes whatever reputation he possesses entirely to modern times. A short account of his plays is given by Langbaine,1 but it does not appear from this that they ever enjoyed extraordinary popularity; and, as far as I can remember, his name is not mentioned by Dryden, who speaks of most of the dramatic poets in the preceding age whose plays were still acted. A contemporary rhymer says of him :—

His fame unto that pitch was only raised,
As not to be despised, nor too much praised.2

Mr. Swinburne, however, following Lamb, calls him a dramatist of the first order.3

Two only of his "tragedies" survive,- The Revenger's Tragedy, and The Atheist's Tragedy,—and from these Lamb has selected several scenes for his Specimens. Of the two scenes which he has chosen from The Revenger's Tragedy, the first (in which the hero of the play, Vindici, is represented soliloquising before the skull of his dead mistress) is a mere travesty of a really beautiful episode in Dekker's Honest Whore, which is itself largely indebted to Hamlet's soliloquy on Yorick's skull; of the second, Lamb says: "The reality and life of this dialogue passes any scenical illusion I ever felt. I never read it but my ears tingle, and I feel a hot blush spread my cheek, as if I were about to 'proclaim' some such 'malefactions' of myself as the brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, in words more keen and dagger-like than those that Hamlet uses to his mother. Such power has the passion of shame truly personated not only to strike guilty creatures unto the soul, but to appal even those who are free." 4

Every reader of taste must have felt that, in the scene between Hamlet and his mother, Shakespeare has touched the extreme verge of what is permissible in art, and that only the tragic height of the whole situation renders the 1 Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691), pp. 505-506. 2 Ibid. p. 506.

3 Article "Tourneur" in the Encyclopædia Britannica (ninth edition). 4 Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (Bohn, 1803), p. 168.

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