The action begins in a spacious scene, in front of the royal palace of the monarchs of the island kingdom. The Princess Adrea is the blind daughter of Menethus, King of the Adrean Isles. She is older than her sister, the Princess Julia, and on the death of her father she would succeed to the throne, if she were not blind: for the law of Menethus has ordained that “No sovereign shall wear the crown who is not, both in mind and body, sound.” The play opens on the hundredth day after the death of Menethus. The King is dead, and the hour has come for the crowning of his successor. The Princess Julia, long known as “the imperial wanton,” with a company of her kind, is holding a festival. Kaeso, born a barbarian, but later a pretorian tribune, having come to Adrea, with his troops, intent on usurping the throne of Menethus, sees a readier way of conquest, in a marriage with the Princess Julia, soon to be Queen. He has been made her favorite, and marriage with him is to follow her coronation.
In the course of the revel the blind princess, Adrea, passes, led by an Egyptian named Garda, on her way to the temple, in which she is to be secluded, so that her presence at court may not trouble her sister Julia, whom the people of the kingdom detest. It is premised that in Arcady, where Adrea had dwelt with her father, she had known and loved Kaeso, then one of the King’s martial chieftains, and that he had sworn to marry her, but had proved faithless. Now, at the Princess Julia’s festival, Kaeso and Adrea meet again, and Kaeso kindly greets the blind girl. This enrages the Princess Julia, who thereupon commands him to declare to Adrea that he does not love her, but loves her sister Julia. This cruelty he must commit, as the price of the kingdom. He submits; the imperious Julia leads her train away; and he is left alone with Adrea, to whom he discloses himself, and who receives him with the deepest tenderness of faithful love. To her his presence can mean only that he has come to keep his oath by marrying her. Kaeso forgets Julia, his ambitions—everything but the woman who has come into his arms. The watchful Princess Julia, apprised by a spy, the Court Fool,—Mimus, the Echo,—returns to see the lovers in their ecstasy of reconciliation, and she at once determines on a terrible revenge. Kaeso, seeing Julia, starts away from Adrea, and Mimus, who madly loves the blind princess, takes his place. This Mimus happens to be in an armor like that of Kaeso, which he has put on in a frolic; and when Adrea reaches to find Kaeso her hands touch Mimus, and she eagerly claims him, believing him to be her plighted lover. “And you shall marry him!” says the Princess Julia; grimly adding, as a response to Kaeso’s look of horror: “It is the price of Adrea!”
A lapse of five hours is supposed. The scene is the same. The time is near dawn. Soldiers are on guard. Challenges pass. Rumors have been heard of ill to the beloved Princess Adrea. Kaeso’s lieutenant, Arkissus, devoted to Adrea, has heard these rumors, and he demands an explanation of them from the now drunken and frenzied Kaeso. They quarrel, and are about to fight, when a fearful cry is heard and they halt. Then, staggering down the palace steps, moaning in agony, comes the Princess Adrea, alone. Her prayer, like that of Ajax, is for light. She beseeches the gods to grant her one moment of sight, so that she may see the man to whom she has been given. The Fool enters, to drag her away,—for the Princess Julia, now Queen, has decreed banishment of Adrea and the Fool, and they must leave her kingdom before the dawn. There is an ominous roll of thunder. The Fool seizes Adrea. Suddenly the heavens seem to answer her agonized supplication. A bolt of lightning shatters the statue of her father, to which she has been clinging, and there is an instant of darkness. When the light is restored, a chaos stands revealed, in which Princess and Fool are prostrated. Adrea revives, and, with a wild cry, realizes that she can see. Soon she remembers, and gazing down upon a “painted, hideous, gibbering thing, in red and white,” she knows him for the Fool, who has been described to her. She lifts his limp body and stares at his vacant eyes: then she drops it and whispers, in horror: “Gods! You!”
The action now shifts to a structure called “The Tower of Forgetfulness.” To this Adrea goes, not thinking to take her throne, but only wishing to die, and thus bury her shame. The Tower of Forgetfulness is an obelisk of great antiquity, built half on the land and half on the sea. Its door is never closed. Here the wretch who is weary of life can drink “the cup of oblivion,” and, through “the door of release,” sink into the sea, and be at rest. It is Adrea’s purpose to die. Then suddenly she hears the royal trumpets, the marriage song, and Kaeso’s song of battle. At the same moment her father’s ghost appears and enjoins her to reign, for vengeance. Looking down upon the ocean, she beholds Kaeso and Julia, who are returning to the palace, after their marriage. They are in her father’s royal galley, with his effigy at the prow. “Stop them!” commands Adrea. “Bring my father’s galley here! Say that Queen Adrea, rides to her coronation!” Arkissus appears with his legions, and executes her will.
The coronation of Adrea ensues. Kaeso is brought before her, in order that he may sue for pardon—which the heart of the injured Queen is ready to grant. But Kaeso is haughty, and the Queen dismisses her court, that she may judge him alone. She is temperate, lenient, and fond. She pours out all her heart; but it is only to be dazed by Kaeso’s declaration that his regret is solely for his lost ambition. He tells her that he knew of her spoliation, and allowed it. The Queen recalls her court. “Set him upon a horse of state,” she says, “drest in a robe of gold. Strew his way with roses! Let heralds go before him and cry ‘Conqueror!’ ‘Imperator!’ Let maidens chant songs! And when he has reached my gates, and his men and galleys are in sight,—whip him! Whip him to his empty camp, and hold him captive there till the manner of his death is decided.”
The scene changes to the Queen’s Cabinet. Kaeso is brought in on the way to execution. It is the supreme moment of Adrea’s life. The man she loves is on the way to death. In spite of all her wrongs she will look upon his face again, before it is mangled by wild horses’ hoofs. Her heart still cries out for him. Even now she would save him, if she could. But frenzied multitudes surround the palace, maddened with knowledge of the outrages that the Queen has suffered; and she is powerless to save. Queen Adrea must tell Kaeso the manner of his death. Kaeso had thought to die as a soldier should—upon his sword, but his death is to be that of a beast, trampled beneath the iron hoofs of horses. This fate she proclaims, but, when the first shock of horror is past, Kaeso confesses that he deserves his doom, and declares that he will die well: and then he says that he has always loved Adrea, but has put his love aside, for the sake of his ambition. Again the Queen relents. She will, at least, save him from a death of ignominy. She offers him the sword of Menethus, with which to kill himself. But his hands are chained. “You!” he begs. The thought is unendurable. She turns away. But suddenly, turning back, she cries out, “Yes!” and drives the blade through her lover’s heart.
The scene changes to Arcady. Eight years have passed. Queen Adrea has come to Arcady, and there she would remain at rest. But her people call her back to Adrea. The stanch Arkissus,—who has always loved her, whose one thought is of duty, and whose duty is to obey,—brings the prayer of her subjects that she will return and rule over them. But here are green fields, summer skies, and the shepherds and their pastoral music: it is a halcyon place and time; and she would remain, and linger, and die here, and rest beneath the sod that she and her first lover once trod together. A trumpet sounds, and a captive youth is brought into her presence. He is the son of Kaeso and Julia, and he has sought the throne of Adrea. He is vanquished, and his mother, Julia, has been slain. But there are tears in Queen Adrea’s eyes, as she looks upon him, and her arms open to him—for he has the port and lineaments of Kaeso. The Queen and the captive play a game,—“the Game of Being King.” Adrea places the youth on her throne, sets her crown on his head, puts her sceptre into his hands, throws her ermine on his shoulders, and bids him “Reign in love.” “Open the casement,” cries the captive boy, “Let in the sun, if you play fair and set no trap for me!” “At the King’s command,” she answers; and in those words ordains her fate, for Adrea cannot again look upon the sun without loss of her vision. She flings the casement wide open, and, in the sudden blaze of light, goes blind: then, when the agony is past and night has come again, she staggers to the throne and cries, “Long live the King!” For still the law of succession is inexorable,—and so Prince Vasha reigns, and Adrea is once more only Adrea of Arcady.
No student of Roman history needs to be told that among the women of Rome (and at one time all Italy was circumscribed within the capital) there were females illustrious for almost celestial virtues and females portentous for the monstrosity of their hideous crimes. The authors of “Adrea” neither distorted nature nor exaggerated fact in their portraiture of the two princesses, Adrea and Julia, who are opposed and contrasted in this remarkable drama of love, crime, frenzy, retribution, atonement, and peace. Adrea is not nobler or more virtuous than Valentinian’s Eudoxia, nor is Julia more malignant, treacherous, and cruel than Justinian’s Theodora. In this tragedy the purpose, obviously, was to present, amid regal accessories and in all the paraphernalia of semi-barbaric splendor, a woman of lofty mind, potent character, and impetuous passions, and, by making her the victim not alone of blighted affection but of deadly outrage, to involve her in a complex tangle of torment; to make her terrible in the delirium of exasperated feeling; to display her emotional perturbation and fierce and ferocious conduct in a vortex of tempestuous struggle; and, finally, to depict her noble expiatory conquest of herself, and to leave her, in her lonely majesty, a sublime image of triumphant virtue, gentle fortitude, and patient grief. That purpose has been superbly accomplished. To superficial observers, indeed, the presentment of “Adrea” appealed chiefly by reason of its implication of theatrical situation, its startling effects of climax, and its gorgeous scenic investiture. To thoughtful minds it came home as an illuminative and significant exposition of human nature, artfully made through the medium of a wonderful picture of human life in the antique world,—and in that it reached much further than merely to the fulfilment of any immediate theatrical need. Like the more classic dramatists of the Garrick era, its authors drew their inspiration from the great fountain of historic antiquity—adjusting, rearranging, and emphasizing old types and old examples to exhibit actually (and not by any dubious method of old symbolism) what is in our own hearts and of what fibre we are all made. Their play is an honor to them, and it is a rich and permanent addition to the literature of the Stage.
Mrs. Carter impersonated Adrea, and finding in it a part into which she could entirely liberate all her emotional power, without losing control of it, she rose to the occasion. She had hitherto acted in comedy, “sensation,” or sentimental, drama. The character of Adrea is wholly tragic. Through the wide range of conflicting emotions implicated in her experience—the misery of blindness and loss of royal inheritance, the ignominy of desertion by her idolized lover and of betrayal into the lewd embraces of an odious menial, the paroxysm of anguish when, to save her lover from a death of horror and shame decreed by herself, she strikes him dead, and the humility of surrender when, after years of bleak remembrance, she invites again the black eclipse and forlorn disablement of blindness and delivers her kingdom to the rule of her slaughtered lover’s son—Mrs. Carter moved firmly, steadily, triumphantly,—commanding every situation and rising to every climax. No denotement in Mrs. Carter’s acting of Du Barry had even remotely indicated such depth of tragical feeling and such power of dramatic expression as she revealed in the scenes of the tempest, in pronouncing Kaeso’s doom, and, above all, in the terrible, piteous, tragic self-conflict through which the Woman became the incarnation of Fate and the Minister of Death. Mrs. Carter had long been known for her exceptional facility of feminine blandishment, her command of the enticing wiles of coquetry and the soft allurement of sensuous grace,—known, likewise, and rightly admired for the clarity and purity of her English speech, always delightful to hear: but observers studious to see and willing to be convinced had not supposed her to be an actor of tragedy. It took a long time for Belasco to bring her to a really great victory, but she gained it in Adrea. The impersonation possessed many attributes of beauty: symmetry, for the eye; melody, for the ear; unity, continuity, sincerity, and sustainment, for the critical sense; poetic atmosphere, for the imagination; but it possessed one supreme attribute of terror,—absolute knowledge of human misery. “Look into your heart, and write,” is an old poetic precept. “Look into your heart, and act” ought to be joined with it: but God pity the heart into which the true poet and the true actor must sometimes look!
“Adrea” was first performed in Washington, D. C., on December 26, 1904, and in New York on January 11, 1905,—at the first Belasco Theatre. The following is the original cast of that play: