Page:The thirty-six dramatic situations (1921).djvu/90

 88 THIRTY-SIX DRAMATIC SITUATIONS Suetonius); a similar example, although fragmentary, exists for A 2, in the beginning of Shakespeare's "Pericles." B 1 may be reversed, the stepson's passion being unre- quited by his father's wife, a case which is certainly not uncommon. We may also suppress the complicity in B 3, in C 1, and in C 2, allowing the infatuation to subsist upon one side only. Without going so far as the criminal act, a study of mere temptations or desires, well or ill controlled, has furnished subtile chapters in the psychologies of Seventeenth Century grandes dames, such as Victor Cousin took delight in. Finally, we may interlace the threads of each of these species of incest with one of the seven other classess of Crimes of Love ; under the form of ignorance, the fifth and sixth classes are mingled in one of the episodes of "Daph- nis and Chloe." Add the usual incidental rivalries, adul- teries, murders, etc. Sixth: Homosexuality in its two senses, the branches of pederasty and tribadism: D (1) - - A Man Enamored of Another Man, Who Yields: -- Example from fiction: "Vautrin." Dramatic examples: the "Laius" of Aeschylus; the "Chrysippus" of Euripides. The latter tragedy appears to have been one of the finest, and perhaps the most moving, of all antiquity. Three situations were there superposed with rare success. Laius having conceived a passion, unnatural and furthermore adulterous, for the young Chrysippus, an epithalamium as terrible as that of Ford must have resulted, for here appeared and spoke the first man who had ever experienced such desires and dared to express and gratify them, and in his words lay the explana- tion of the wavering and fall of Chrysippus. Then fol- lowed the most indignant and pitiless jealousy on the part of Jocaste, wife of Laius. Against Chrysippus she roused the old envy of the young man's two brothers, an envy of the same type as that which armed the sons of Jacob against Joseph, but an envy which shows itself strangely menacing at the mere announcement of the names of these two brothers, -- Atreus and Thyestes! The fratricide is accomplished, to the fierce joy of the queen; Laius learns the details from the lips of the dying Chrysippus himself.