he

to

was compelled by stage conventions retain; retain; but the legends themselves often gave him opportunities of bringing on his heroes with their romantic glamour hidden under a disguise of beggar's rags; and his fondness for this device occasioned that classic passage in Aristophanes 10 where Dicaeopolis, needing a disguise, comes to borrow from Euripides' theatrical stock-in-trade of old clothes. But not only does he bring down the mighty from their seats; he exalts the lowly, the loyal slaves of play after play, the honest yeoman of the Electra who shows himself so much more genuinely noble than the neurotic, wolfish children of Agamemnon. With an anticipation of the motto, "Every Man in his Humour down to the Fourth Citizen," he gives even his minor characters character; it is sufficient to contrast for instance the secondary persons of French Classical Tragedy, compared by Coventry Patmore to the brazen automata who waited in the house of Hephaestus. And here too, this "touching of things common,' this portrayal, criticized by Sophocles, of men and women, hero and slave, "as they are," 11 was to make Euripides the master of later Greek and thence of Roman Comedy. Again,

comic relief, found occasionally in the tragedies of Eschylus and Sophocles, plays a much larger part with him; and the Orestes with its ludicrous Phrygian slave and its happy ending of marriage and reconcilement, the Alcestis with its rollicking Heracles, the ironic humour of the Electra, the whole light-hearted atmosphere of the Helen, which reads like a selfparody, are explorations of a new territory which the dramatists of another age were to make their own. The Alcestis looks forward to the Winter's Tale and the romantic drama of the Elizabethans.

Next may be considered his general handling of character. First, some stock-parts may be traced back to him: such as the nurse-confidante of the Medea and Hippolytus (who may be distantly related by way of Seneca to the greatest of all her kind, the nurse of Juliet, not to mention the endless confidantes of the French stage), the ghost, the virgin-martyr, even the villain and the madman. Ghosts indeed of Darius and Clytemnestra appear in Æschylus; but it is rather the prologizing ghost of Polydorus in the Hecuba who is the progenitor, again through Seneca with his spectres of Tantalus and Thyestes, of the

phantom-armies of the Elizabethans, from the majestic shade of Hamlet to the swarming apparitions of minor Revenge Tragedy such as Chapman's Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, where no less than five ghosts appear at once.

Of the virgin-martyr again there is no nobler example than the Antigone of Sophocles; but in study after study-Macaria, Polyxena, Iphigenia, as well as the older Alcestis and Andromache-Euripides made the theme of woman's self-devotion peculiarly his own; and Renaissance humanism was quick to find in the parallel of Jephthah's daughter with Iphigenia an opportunity of combining the inspiration of Holy Writ and pagan tragedy.

Then too, the melodramatic villain who is so often the real hero of sixteenth-seventeenth century drama is descended both from Machiavelli and from Seneca, the pupil of Euripides. Villains may be divided into two kinds, "robustious, periwig-pated" villains and cold, calculating villains, Tamburlaines and Iagos. In the one may be recognized the Senecan tyrant, in the other the popular notion of Machiavelli, but not without indebtedness also to the Senecan Odysseus. But Seneca's types are in their turn imitations, or the one

hand of the Lycus and Eteocles, on the other of the Odysseus and Menelaus, of the Greek. Still here conjecture must pause; the medieval Mystery, in all innocence of the Classics, had produced in a rudimentary form both rampaging villains like Tiberius and Herod, who "rage" with the fullest stage directions, and sly villains like Judas; and the Elizabethans would have been quite capable of inventing for themselves such obvious types as we have discussed. It is the greatness of their demonstrable indebtedness that makes it so hard to fix where exactly their borrowing stopped.

In the same way and with the same proviso the succession of madmen from Hieronimo in the Spanish Tragedy to "Tilburina stark mad in white satin and her confidant stark mad in white linen" in Sheridan's Critic, may be followed back to the Heracles Mad of Euripides, by way of Seneca's adaptation. Madder indeed than the hero of the latter nothing could be, although the prevailing insanity of almost all that dramatist's characters deprives him of his proper prominence. But in the hypnotism of Pentheus in The Bacchants of Euripides, the hallucinations of the hero of the

Orestes and the Iphigenia in Tauris, that tireless observer of the minds of men has produced studies of a subtlety unsurpassed for two thousand years to come.12

Yet the stage-types of his devising really matter less than the advance he made in the art of individual characterization itself. The persons of Eschylus are Titanic, those of Sophocles heroically ideal; but a subtler psychology, the staging of the struggle, not between man and destiny in the world, but between passion and passion in the soul, begins with Euripides. Eschylus, the forger of iron colossi, the creator of Clytemnestra with her adamantine purpose and yet, with it, that superbly true nervous reaction after the deed is done, knew indeed the human heart. Yet his men and women do not introspect, they act; we do not hear the debate of the two voices in their souls. He was a master of silence as well as of speech; the unspeaking majesty of Prometheus or Niobe, whose grief, like Job's, sits silent through whole scenes, is as noble as the silence of Homer's Ajax to Odysseus in the world below. But the utterance of their conflicting passions by the figures of Euripides, which lets us watch the death