Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 5.djvu/262

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

[12 S. V. OCT., 191&.

naturally : while Lee makes him perish in a supernatural manner as if the heavens were taking revenge on his foul crimes. More- over, to take only the more obvious dis- similarities, Rome, in ' Piso's Conspiracy,' is shown cor am, populo burning (Act III. scene ii., " Scene Rome, a Fire "), with all the accompanying emotions concomitant to that event. In Lee the incident is omitted entirely, for Lee was more interested in the fires of the heart than in the fires of reality.

Variant as the anonymous tragedy is in the matter of plot, it differs too in the region of style. Lee's play was of the " heroic " cast, and was penned largely, if not quite, in rhymed verse. It is rampant, as we have seen, in bombastic exclamations, just such as are so prominent in Lee's other dramatic productions : " Furies ! and Hell ! " (' Gloriana,' Theatre Royal, 1676), " Night ! Horrour ! Death ! Confusion ! Hell ! and Furies ! " (' CEdipus,' Dorset Garden, 1679), " Death and Devils ! Daggers ! Poison ! Racks and Fire ! " (' Caesar Borgia,' Dorset Garden, 1680), k ' Furies and Hell ! " (' Duke of Guise,' Theatre Royal, 1683), while the bombastic heroics contained in it are hardly to be matched even in other productions of the same cast. Nero's wild rage in the second act could, I think, only have been written by Lee, although Dry den might have run him close in exaggerated absurdity : When I look sad, whole Hecatomb* should fall, Ha ! who are they? my fretting Blood does rise : Hands, rest : Fie try to blast him with my Eyes. Make me Basilitk, but one short hour, Some GOD, that would be Nero's Emperour. On reading ' Piso's Conspiracy ' we are thankful that such remarkable "furious" declarations are conspicuous by their absence ! That play, in point of fact, is written almost completely in more or less chastened blank verse, which, however, has been apparently most severely handled by the printer who set it in type. In Act IV. Scene iii., for example, a speech of Poppea appears in this wise :

I know not, but this Youth does strangely move

My mind ;

His Face, me-thinks, is more Angelical,

Than Earthly.

Oh ! his words invade

My weak'ned Senses, and o'r-come my Heart,

and another, by a Friend of Seneca, in an even more mangled form :

To our own Losses do we give these Tears,

That lose thy Love, thy Boundless Knowledge

Lose,

Lose the unpattern'd Sample of thy Vertue,

Lose whatsoe'r may Praise, or Sorrow

Move ;

In all these Losses

and so on for another dozen or so of linesj This, surely, can be nothing but the some-1 what crude notions of a seventeenth-century compositor as to the visual " shape " of] verse !

Overlooking such typographical eccea- y tricities, however, ' Piso's Conspiracy,' little read as it seems to be, even by responsible- critics, is by no means a contemptible pro- -j duction, and whoever the anonymous author he stands well on the same plane as- that of the writer of ' The Tragedy of Nero/ ; Lee's play irritates us by its loyalty and gods and kings, all spoken of in capital letters... His conception of royal excellence has- marred what otherwise would have pre-. sented an ideal subject for a Restoration- blood-tragedy. The anonymous dramatist has not fallen into this pitfall, but has led, us into a world of real vice, not vice imagined merely in exaggerated heroics and swayed to a bias of the mind. Nor does he lack those telling lines which, few as they are inv. number when compared to those of Lee, yet tell of a considerable power of diction and of^ imagination. The last act is very much superior to that of ' Nero ' and does not lose in tone from the fine opening words of the- Emperor :

Enough is wept, Poppea, for thy Death, Enough is bled ; so many Tears of others Wailing their Losses havewip'd mine away. Who in the Common Funeral of the world Can mourn one Death ? ' Piso's Conspiracy ' is not in the British Museum, but there is a well-preserved copy in the Malone collection of the Bodleian. Library (No. 52), where also is that unique specimen of "The Tragedy of Nero ' (evi- dently a presentation copy) which contains what are without doubt the manuscript corrections and additions of the author himself. When Malone bought it it was richly bound in a finely gilt cover ; now r unfortunately, it has been added to other first editions of Lee's plays to make up a single collected volume. Most of the cor- rections are merely ones of spelling or orthography, but on pp. 26 and 29 occur- two added lines : " Thy honour's lost. I read it in thy eyes," and " Prettily shruggs and witty prayers does make," which could have come from none but the author's own pen.

Both plays, like so many others of the* forgotten Restoration tragedies, are well worth our re-reading, even in our modern- sophisticated age. Unnatural and artificial as they often are, they tell of a fertility of imagination not lost from the earlier days