given the dialogue a native turn and an ease which were at this period too often lacking in similar versions from the French.
In 1825, T. P. Cooke visited Paris and appeared as Le Monstre at the Porte-Saint-Martin in Planché’s melodrama which proved a remarkable success, running for no less than eighty nights.
The Vampire or The Bride of the Isles has its place among the repertory of Hodgson’s “Juvenile Drama,” and this in itself is an indication of no small popularity.
In The Second Maiden’s Tragedy,[52] a Globe play of 1611, licensed for the stage by Sir George Buc on 31st October of that year, a macabre drama now generally attributed to Tourneur,[53] there are some remarkable scenes which culminate in something very like necrophilia, and a perverse ill-omened melancholy pervades the whole action. In Act IV the Tyrant, a usurper, ordering soldiers to attend him with “Lanthornes and a pickax” makes his way at midnight to the Cathedral, crying:
Death nor the marble prison my love sleeps in
Shall keep her body lockt up from mine arms.
I must not be so cozened.
A little later: “Enter the Tirant agen at a farder dore, which opened, bringes hym to the Toombe wher the Lady lies buried; The Toombe here discouered ritchly set forthe.” He adjures the sepulchre:
The house of silence and the Calms of rest
After tempestuous life, I claim of thee
A mistress one of the most beauteous sleepers
That ever lay so cold.
The vault is forced, whilst the lover soliloquizes:
O the moon rises; what reflection
Is thrown about the sanctified building,
E’en in a twinkling, how the monuments glisten
As if Death’s palaces were all massy silver
And scorned the name of marble. Art thou cold?
I have no faith in’t, yet I believe none.
Madam; ’tis I, sweet lady, pry’thee speak
’Tis thy love calls on thee; thy king, thy servant.
No! not a word, all prisoners to pale silence
I’ll prove a kiss.
