Dowell, to interpret properly, the artist must speak in our terms. Our dramatic terms are vastly different from those of Sophocles and Seneca, and an interpretation even of their times, or of their themes, must not follow their methods too closely. Even Athalie is a little too close to the Latin method to be successful on our stage. Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris, which comes about as near as may be to catching the classical atmosphere (although the subjective treatment of the Furies is modern), is a failure on the stage. The past may be interpreted to us with a vast wealth of detail, but the proper interpreter in this fashion is rather the novelist than the dramatist. Thackeray in Henry Esmond, and Sienkiewicz in Quo Vadis, for instance, have caught the true atmosphere of the times they portray, but the form they utilize is one quite distinct from the drama, and free from its restrictions.

The remarkable thing about Catiline, then, is not that Jonson failed, but that he did so well under the circumstances.

A final word ought, perhaps, to be said about the historical significance of Catiline and its companionpiece, Sejanus. Such a word must of necessity be both. brief and guarded, for the evidences here are intangible and elusive. Nettleton, although possibly a

little over-zealous in his efforts to establish the autonomy of the English drama in the Restoration and the immediately succeeding period, has yet shown conclusively the influence of Jonson on later comedy. Briggs, in his article, Influence of Jonson on Seventeenth Century Tragedy, has collected a number of interesting parallels which indicate that Jonson's contemporaries utilized

1 In English Drama of the Restoration, etc.

2 In Anglia 35. 277 ff.

freely either his works or his sources, to which he had probably directed their notice. Briggs also calls attention to the increasing Senecan elements in English tragedy after the appearance of Jonson's tragedies, and to the accumulation of plays on Roman themes. These conclusions support forcibly the a priori notion that all students of Jonson must have, as to his influence on later drama. When we come to the 'classical' period, this a priori notion is further strengthened by the patent evidence that Jonson's works were being read and discussed. Dryden cited, in his Essay of Dramatick Poesy, the rimes in Catiline and Sejanus as a justification of his heroic couplets. Shadwell, in the preface to his Sullen Lovers, defended Jonsonian comedy against the animadversions of Dryden and others, who had cried it down as lacking in wit; and again took up the cudgels in the preface to his Humourists, and elsewhere. taire, who in his day was practically literary dictator for both England and France, read and criticized Catiline, and in his Catilina endeavored to 'improve' upon Jonson's handling of the theme. Then, too, Catiline was acted at least up to 1691.

Vol

On the other hand, to offset these considerations, is the stubborn fact that neither the manner nor the matter of the 'classical' tragedy is Jonsonian. Cato and Irene, to select examples of this tragedy at its height, are at a far remove from the manner of Catiline or Sejanus. But then, too, they are at a remove not much less from the manner of Racine and Corneille. Indeed, in intrinsic dramatic worth and force, Catiline is nearer Athalie than is Cato. All of these plays are rhetorical, but in Jonson and the French dramatist there is fire blazing beneath, and through, the ice of the rhetoric, whereas the English 'classical' tragedy is almost totally frigid. The tone of the 'classical' tragedy is, it would seem to me,

due rather to the temper of the times than to French influences. When we examine the matter of the Queen Anne and Restoration tragedy, we find no Jonsonian borrowings unmistakable enough to warrant definite assertions.

In view of Jonson's undoubted weight of authority and the fact that he endeavored, long before the 'classical' school arose, to write tragedy on a strictly classical theory; and in view of the fact that the 'classical' tragedies themselves resemble the French tragedies more in accidentals than in essentials, I should hazard it as my opinion that a 'classical' tragedy of some sort was, in the course of a natural evolution, bound to appear in England, and that, even without French models, it would not have differed greatly in its methods and tone from the tragedy that did appear. The French impetus probably hastened its actual appearance, and gave it a certain bias, but was hardly responsible for its coming into being.

E. EDITOR'S NOTE

The following list of abbreviations obtains in the footnotes to the text:

FI= Yale Library copy of the 1616 Folio.

Yale Elizabethan Club copy of the 1616 Folio.
First Quarto.

Second Quarto.

Third Quarto.

1640 Folio.

1692 Folio.

In the collations I have endeavored throughout to avoid the irrelevant. Mere changes of spelling I have omitted, and changes of punctuation I have only admitted when they entail a real change in meaning. A few obvious misprints in the Folio text have been corrected.