To filthy vices lore one easly broke,
Of Divelish wicked wit this Princocks proude,
By stepdames wyle prince Claudius Sonne auoude;
Whome deadly damme did bloudy match ylight,
And thee, against thy will, for feare did plight.[35]
These words might almost suit the mouths of Appius and his victims.
But leaving aside the affinities due to the common use of English by writers on much the same plane of art, the London medley is not immeasurably different from or inferior to the Roman Praetexta, even when confronted with the latter in its native dress. In both the characterisation is in the same rudimentary and obvious style, and shows the same predilection for easily classified types. There is even less genuine theatrical tact in the Latin than in the English drama. The chief persons are under careful supervision and are kept rigidly apart. Nero never meets Octavia or Poppaea, Poppaea and Octavia never meet each other. No doubt there are some successful touches: the first entrance of Nero is not ineffective; the equivocal hopefulness of the last chorus is a thing one remembers: the insertion of Agrippina’s prophecy and Poppaea’s dream does something to keep in view the future requital and so to alleviate the thickening gloom. Except for these, however, and a few other felicities natural to a writer with long dramatic traditions behind him, the Octavia strikes us as a series of disquisitions and discussions, well-arranged, well-managed, often effective, sometimes brilliant, that have been suggested by a single impressive historical situation.
2. THE FRENCH SENECANS
These salient features are transmitted to the Senecan dramas of France, except that the characterisation is even vaguer, the declamation ampler, and the whole treatment less truly dramatic and more obviously rhetorical; of which there is an indication in the greater relative prominence of monologue as compared with dialogue, and in the excessive predilection for general reflections,[36] many of them derived from Seneca and Horace, but many of them too of modern origin.
At the head of the list stands the Julius Caesar of Muretus, a play which, even if of far less intrinsic worth than can be claimed for it, would always be interesting for the associations with which it is surrounded.