against the will of his sons he gives him his daughter Lavinia, who is already betrothed to Bassianus; and in his faithful zeal he even kills one of his refractory children. At the same time he gives the new emperor the captive Gothic queen, Tamora, whose son he had just slaughtered as a sacrifice for his fallen children. The emperor sees her, leaves Lavinia, and marries Tamora; and Titus, who thus experienced the base ingratitude of him whose benefactor he had been, now expects thanks from Tamora for her elevation, when he had just before murdered her son! The revengeful woman, on the contrary, commands her own sons to slay Bassianus; and to dishonor and mutilate Lavinia. The father, Titus, does not guess the author of the revengeful act. The daughter hears the authors of the deed guessed and talked over; she hears her brothers accused of having murdered her husband, Bassianus; her tongue cut out, she cannot speak, but it seems also as if she could not hear; they ask her not, she can only shake her head at all their false conjectures. At length by accident the way is found to put a staff in her mouth, by which she writes in the sand the names of the guilty perpetrators. The dull blusterer who hitherto has been Brutus indeed and in the literal sense of the word, now acts the part of Brutus, and the crafty Tamora suffers herself to be allured into the snares of revenge by the same clumsy dissimulation as that by which Titus himself had been deceived. Whoever compares this rough psychological art with the fine touches with which in the poet's first production, Venus and Adonis, even amid the perversion of an over-refined descriptive style, those two figures are so agreeably and truly delineated that the painter might without trouble copy them from the hand of the poet, will consider it scarcely possible that the same poet, even in his greatest errors, could have so completely deadened that finer nature which he nowhere else discards. If it be asked, how it were possible that Shakespeare with this finer nature could ever have chosen such a play even for the sake alone of appropriating it to his stage, we must not forget that

the young poet must always in his taste do homage to the multitude, and that in the beginning of his career he would be stimulated by speculation upon their applause, rather than by the commands and laws of an art ideal.-GERVINUS, Shakespeare Commentaries.

THE PRINCIPAL DEFECT OF THE PLAY

How much of what is horrible is met with in the universally admired Greek tragedies, the myths of Atreus and Thyestes, Orestes and Clytemnestra, Edipus and his family, the sources of the Greek tragedy! Is not Gloster's fate in King Lear horrible? are we not also at times seized with horror in Macbeth and Othello? In single cases, therefore, it is perfectly allowable; the fault lies only in the fact that that which, in accordance with its nature, is but an isolated, special, and exceptional reality, appears here as the general, sole, form of the tragic element. The drama itself, its substance and ideal character is a mere representation of the tragic, degenerating into the horrible, which indeed necessarily takes place when, in the universal decay of the state and people, even a good and noble character (like Titus) breaks through the most indispensable, the most sacred ties of nature, owing to a want of clearness of moral consciousness, of power, and self-control, and tramples upon all parental feelings. It is this deed, which is spun out into the fearful tissue of the following scenes of horror, that first awakens the fiend in Tamora's nature, and the brute in Aaron. When evil is challenged by the good itself, it not only annihilates itself, but the good as well, which, of course, is then no longer truly good. It is from this point of view that the whole drama is composed; it forms the organic center in which all the separate rays converge. But the horrible, when so accumulated, and made such an ordinary, natural element of life, requires a deeper and more accurate foundation. It is not sufficient simply to presuppose a general state of decay, because the horrible is not necessarily the

general form of the tragic, even in such a state of things. However even this fault is one that could be tolerated, at least, it is not wholly wanting in motive. The principal and actual defect is, in reality, the total absence of the conciliatory element in the tragic pathos. Titus Andronicus dies without having even once come to the consciousness and conviction of his guilt, to the duty of submitting to the will of the gods, in short, without that which is good and beautiful in him having been purified and sublimated by the tragic pathos. It is the same with his younger sons; nay, even Lavinia, whose character is intended to be one of noble womanliness, can, with cold indifference, hold the basin which is to catch the blood of the two victims, and is herself killed by the dagger of her own father while assisting at the horrible repast. Aaron, Tamora, and Saturnine die as they have lived, and Lucius marks his elevation to the dignity of governor with the command for the inhuman and revolting execution of the Moor. Thus the drama ends in a shrill discord which is but little relieved by the abrupt and cold declaration of the new ruler:

"Then afterwards to order well the state

That like events may ne'er it ruinate-"

although it somewhat reminds one of Shakspeare's later manner of concluding his tragedies. We do not feel sure that things will not continue to proceed, behind the scenes, in the way they have begun; we turn with horror from such a view of human nature, nay, we are almost forced in despair, to ask, Why was such a race ever called into existence?-ULRICI, Shakspeare's Dramatic Art.

A FINISHED PRODUCTION

Titus Andronicus is certainly as unlike Shakespear's usual style as it is possible. It is an accumulation of vulgar physical horrors, in which the power exercised by the poet bears no proportion to the repugnance excited

by the subject. The character of Aaron the Moor is the only thing which shows any originality of conception; and the scene in which he expresses his joy "at the blackness and ugliness of his child begot in adultery," the only one worthy of Shakespear. Even this is worthy of him only in the display of power, for it gives no pleasure. Shakespear managed these things differently. Nor do we think it a sufficient answer to say that this was an embryo or crude production of the author. In its kind it is full grown, and its features decided and overcharged. It is not like a first imperfect essay, but shows a confirmed habit, a systematic preference of violent effect to everything else. There are occasional detached images of great beauty and delicacy, but these were not beyond the powers of other writers then living. The circumstance which inclines us to reject the external evidence in favor of this play being Shakespear's is, that the grammatical construction is constantly false and mixed up with vulgar abbreviations, a fault that never occurs in any of his genuine plays.-HAZLITT, Characters of Shakspear's Plays.

A PLAY NOT TO BE OVERLOOKED

It is quite unnecessary for any opponent of blind or exaggerated Shakespeare-worship to demonstrate to us the impossibility of bringing Titus Andronicus into harmony with any other than a barbarous conception of tragic poetry. But although the play is simply omitted without apology from the Danish translation of Shakespeare's works, it must by no means be overlooked by the student, whose chief interest lies in observing the genesis and development of the poet's genius. The lower its point of departure, the more marvelous its soaring flight.-BRANDES, William Shakespeare.