126 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



action, the drama "lies in the fateful suspense that hangs over the 

 issue; in the shifting tempestuous movements of the half-mad king's 

 mind, and the echo which they find in the corresponding movements 

 of hope and confidence, alarmed sympathy, consternation, dismay 

 and finally solemn resignation, in the minds of his hearers." 



With the whole play before an intelligent reader I do not see how 

 he could possibly dissent from the following verdict of one of the 

 keenest and most open-minded literary judges in England, writing 

 under the nom de plume of Senex : 



The plot is so contrived that all the action passes after the manner of French 

 tragedy, and with no great violence done to probability, in a single scene — the 

 hall of audience in Herod's palace in Jerusalem. An Elizabethan breadth and 

 daring of imaginative treatment, with a Greek parsimony of characters and 

 issues, and a French observation 'of the unities at least of place, — such are the 

 main structural characteristics of the new tragedy; and it is needless to say that 

 they make it from the outset quite unlike any other modern English work of 

 stagecraft. 



In Nero the plot, to voice a candid personal opinion, is not handled 

 with any real mastery. That a character-study can be made a great 

 play has been shown by Hamlet and other examples; but there is 

 almost as much difference between the treatments of Shakespeare 

 and Mr. Phillips as there is between the characters of the Danish 

 prince and the Roman emperor. In the Elizabethan play the drama 

 grows, in the modern it is forced — a feeling from which one rarely 

 escapes, even under the charm of the author's many beautiful pas- 

 sages and skilful scenic auxiliaries. What plot there is must find its 

 center in Agrippina, and perhaps the mere adopting of her name for 

 the drama would have made us less captious in our criticism. Racine 

 was wise enough to call his play on the period Britannicus; but in 

 the drama of Mr. Phillips the character-study deals primarily with 

 the eponymous persona, while the plot interest centers about another. 

 If Agrippina had been given just a trifle more prominence and her 

 name had appeared as the title, we should have felt that the play 

 had a beginning, a middle, and an end; whereas even the most 

 friendly critics must confess that the present play hardly fulfils 



