Saue from this paynefull punishment
To Dian’s temple safely borne:
The barbarous Moores, to rudenesse bent,
Then[33] Princes Courtes in Rome forlorne
Haue farre more Cyuile curtesie:
For there doth straungers death appease
The angry Gods in heauens on hie,
But Romayne bloude our Rome must please.[34]
There could be no greater contrast than between Appius and Virginia, with its exits and entrances, its changefulness and bustle, its mixture of the pompous and the farcical; and the monotonous declamation, the dismissal of all action, the meagreness of the material in the Octavia. And yet they are more akin than they at first sight appear. Disregard the buffoonery which the mongrel “tragicall comedie” inherited from the native stock, and you perceive traits that suggest another filiation. The similarity with the Latin Play in its English version is, of course, misleading, except in so far as it shows how the Senecan drama must present itself to an early Elizabethan in the light of his own crude art. The devices of the rhetorician were travestied by those who knew no difference between rhetoric and rant, and whose very rant, whether they tried to invent or to translate, was clumsy and strained. Hence the “tenne tragedies” of Seneca and the nearly contemporary Mixed Plays have a strong family resemblance in style. In all of them save the Octavia the resemblance extends from diction to verse, for in dialogue and harangue they employ the trailing fourteen-syllable measure of the popular play, while in the Octavia this is discarded for the more artistic heroic couplet. In this and other respects, T. N., as Nuce signs himself, is undoubtedly more at his ease in the literary element than others of the group; nevertheless he is often content to fly the ordinary pitch of R. B. This is most obvious when their performances are read and compared as a whole, but it is evident enough in single passages. The Nurse, for example, says of Nero to Octavia:
Eft steppèd into servile Pallace stroke,