Herod. The dead between us, Mariamne? Doe
Of the high places.... How?
Mariamne. My grandfather ...
[He grips her wrist.
[In a whisper.] My brother....
Herod. Peace! Were you drowning in my arms,
Your voice would sink before me so, your thoughts
Would drop bewildered so....
. . . . .
Mariamne. Spare Joseph, merciful!
Herod. Mariamne, I would reason with you. Speak!
I would question the great blood in you: a servant
False to his oath, a soldier in accord
With foes, a sentinel
Who to the nearing spy betrays the path—;
Can such men live? Are they for kings to use?
[She moves away, looking out over the
tombs of her ancestors. He follows.
Flesh of their dust, pronounce: can such men live?
The poets call their Borgia a period-play; and in its large scale, its manner of handling history, and its elaborate construction it resembles their earlier chronicle-plays rather than those of the last period. Written in six acts and a great many scenes, it has not the simplicity of design of Mariamne, A Messiah, or Ras Byzance. It moves through a wider circuit, embraces many more incidents, and develops character at greater leisure. It has, of course, a complex and exacting theme; one of no less magnitude, indeed, than the Italian Renaissance, centred upon the portentous Borgia trinity—;Pope Alexander VI and his children Cesare and Lucrezia.
Nevertheless, though the full measure of the play cannot be gauged except by reference to the complexity and sheer extent of its material, the tragedy is reducible to much simpler terms. For it is as the rise and fall of Cesare Borgia that one finally sees it: his stupendous ambition dominates it; and the last and deepest impression of it is the news of his end brought to Lucrezia by his page Juanito, who had found his mangled body:
Juanito. Dawn found me tangled by the night, and crying
In the alien, stone wilderness, a captive.
They brought his arms,
His sparkling arms; they questioned of the Prince
Who wore them.
Lucrezia. But the moment....
Juanito. Of a sudden
The foe retreated, leaving me: I reached
The rough-hewn gorge....
[Near to her and in a changed voice.
He lay there, naked;
He lay—;his face under the sky: his wounds
A hero’s—;twenty-three; across his loins
A bloodied stone, his life-blood round the rocks,
His hair a weft of red. How beautiful,
And wild and out of memory was his face!
The great wind swept him and the sun rose up....
Act VI, Scene 3
That scene is a lasting memory, as, indeed, are others to which we shall come; but the play’s the thing. The poets seem to indicate this in their sub-title, suggesting that the value of the work is its value as a whole; and bare courtesy would constrain one so to regard it. But that is not an easy thing to do. Poetic drama always draws heavily on the concentration and imaginative sympathy of its readers; and this one more than most makes that demand if one is to appreciate it fully. As tragedy—;that is, as pure art—;its appeal is direct and irresistible, and could not be escaped by the most casual person who is likely to take up a book of this kind. But the casual person will not, perhaps, perceive its other significance—;in values of history, of portraiture, of the marshalling, selecting, and grouping of facts, of the evocation of atmosphere, of what is, in short, the re-creation of a very brilliant epoch.