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searching the common elements of human evil, out of which witchcraft sprang like a venomous and obscene toadstool.

After this outburst against the hypocrisies of a society with which she is at open war, the wretched creature takes solace with her familiar in a scene grotesquely ghastly:

I am dried up

With cursing and with madness; and have yet
No blood to moisten these sweet lips of thine.
Stand on thy hind legs up-kiss me, my Tommy,
And rub away some wrinkles on my brow,

By making my old ribs to shrug for joy
Of thy fine tricks.

The effects of her damned traffic with the fiend are

obvious in murder, suicide, domestic ruin.

But as time

goes on, her power wanes, and the familiar deserts her.

She calls upon him, famished, in her isolation:

Still wronged by every slave? and not a dog
Barks in his dame's defence? I am called witch,
Yet am myself bewitched from doing harm.
Have I given up myself to thy black lust

Thus to be scorned? Not see me in three days!
I'm lost without my Tomalin; prithee come;
Revenge to me is sweeter far than life :
Thou art my raven, on whose coal-black wings
Revenge comes flying to me. O my best love!
I am on fire, even in the midst of ice,

Raking my blood up, till my shrunk knees feel

Thy curled head leaning on them! Come, then, my darling;

If in the air thou hoverest, fall upon me

In some dark cloud; and as I oft have seen

Dragons and serpents in the elements,

Appear thou now so to me.

Art thou i' the sea?

Muster up all the monsters from the deep,

And be the ugliest of them; so that my bulch

ROWLEY'S CONCEPTION OF WITCHCRAFT.

Show but his swarth cheek to me, let earth cleave,
And break from hell, I care not! could I run
Like a swift powder-mine beneath the world,
Up would I blow it all, to find thee out,
Though I lay ruined in it. Not yet come!
I must then fall to my old prayer.

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The dog appears at last, but changed in hue from black to white-the sign, he mockingly assures her, of her coming trial and death. We do not see her again till she is brought out for execution, with the rabble raging round her :

Cannot a poor old woman have your leave
To die without vexation?

Is every devil mine?

Would I had one now whom I might command

To tear you all to pieces!

Have I scarce breath enough to say my prayers,
And would you force me to spend that in bawling?

The part, from beginning to ending, is terribly sustained. Not one single ray of human sympathy or kindness falls upon the abject creature. She is alone in her misery and sin, abandoned to the black delirium of Godforsaken anguish. To paint a witch as she is here painted-midway between an oppressed old woman and a redoubtable agent of hell-and to incorporate this double personality in the character of a common village harridan, required firm belief in sorcery, that curse-begotten curse of social life, which flung back on human nature its own malice in the form of diabolical malignity.

The attention I have paid to these five domestic tragedies may seem to be out of due proportion to the

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scheme of my work. I think, however, that I am justified by their exceptional importance. Works of finer fibre and more imaginative quality illustrate in a less striking degree the command of dramatic effect which marked our theatre in its earliest as in its latest development.

CHAPTER XII.

TRAGEDY OF BLOOD.

I. The Tough Fibres of a London Audience-Craving for Strong Sensation-Specific Note of English Melodrama-Its Lyrical and Pathetic Relief. II. Thomas Kyd-'Hieronymo' and 'The Spanish Tragedy'— Analysis of the Story-Stock-Ingredients of a Tragedy of BloodThe Ghost-The Villain-The Romantic Lovers-Suicide, Murder, Insanity. III. 'Soliman and Perseda'-The Induction to this Play'The Tragedy of Hoffmann.'-IV. Marlowe's use of this Form-'The Jew of Malta'-'Titus Andronicus'-' Lust's Dominion '-Points or Resemblance between 'Hamlet' and 'The Spanish Tragedy '-Use made by Marston, Webster, and Tourneur of the Species.-V. The Additions to 'The Spanish Tragedy'-Did Jonson make them?— Quotation from the Scene of Hieronymo in the Garden.

N.B. All the Tragedies discussed in this chapter will be found in Hazlitt's Dodsley.

I.

THE sympathies of the London audience on which our playwrights worked might be compared to the chords of a warrior's harp, strung with twisted iron and bulls' sinews, vibrating mightily, but needing a stout stroke to make them thrill. This serves to explain that conception of Tragedy which no poet of the epoch expressed more passionately than Marston in his prologue to 'Antonio's Revenge,' and which early took possession of the stage. The reserve of the Greek Drama, the postponement of physical to spiritual anguish, the tuning of moral discord to dignified

and solemn moods of sustained suffering, was unknown in England. Playwrights used every conceivable means to stir the passion and excite the feeling of their audience. They glutted them with horrors; cudgelled their horny fibres into sensitiveness. Hence arose a special kind of play, which may be styled the Tragedy of Blood, existing, as it seems to do, solely in and for bloodshed. The action of these tragedies was a prolonged tempest. Blows fell like hailstones; swords flashed like lightning; threats roared like thunder; poison was poured out like rain. As a relief to such crude elements of terror, the poet strove to play on finer sympathies by means of pathetic interludes and lyrical interbreathings'-by the exhibition of a mother's agony or a child's trust in his murderer, by dialogues in which friend pleads with friend for priority in death or danger, by images leading the mind away from actual horrors to ideal sources of despair, by the soliloquies of a crazed spirit, by dirges and songs of 'old, unhappy, far-off things,' by crescendos of accumulated passion, by the solemn beauty of religious resignation. This variety of effect characterises the Tragedies of Blood. These lyrical and imaginative elements idealise their sanguinary melodrama.

II.

Thomas Kyd-if 'Hieronymo' and 'The Spanish Tragedy' are correctly ascribed to him-may be called the founder of this species. About his life we know absolutely nothing, although it may be plausibly con

I have adhered throughout to the spelling Hieronymo, though the first part of the play in the 4to of 1605 is called Ieronimo.

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