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Outline Study of Cicero's Defense of the

Proposed Manilian Law*

66 B. C., spring or early summer.

SUPERINTENDENT A. T. SUTTON, CHELAN, WASHINGTON.
Cicero's age, 40.
Pompey's age, 40.

Delivered by Cicero, a praetor, from the rostra to the Roman citizens assembled in the Forum.

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I. I appreciate the honor of addressing you from a place where none but the most eminent ought to stand.

II. Why I have not ascended the rostra before.

2. Body of the oration.

a.

Discussion of the situation: Chapters II-IX.
I. Chapters II-VII.

(A) Character of the war in the Asiatic provinces.
(1) It is a defense of pecuniary as well as of
national honor.

(B) The people demand that Pompey take Lucullus' place.

Character of the war in detail.

Glory, friends, and revenue at stake.

(C)

(1)

(2)

Mithridates: recollection of the massacre

of the Romans in Asia.

(D) Allies desire Pompey sent to them.

(E) It is Rome's duty to defend her sources of revenue and her dependencies.

II. Chapters VIII, IX.

(A) Magnitude of the war.

For similar Outlines on Caesar's Gallic War and the Catilinian Orations by the same author see Education for Nov., 1914, Feb., March, May, October, December, 1915, and September, 1916. Attention is called to an error in the title of the Outline printed in September Education, which should have read: "Cicero's Second, Third and Fourth Catilinian Orations."

(B) Tribute to Lucullus: why he did not close the

war.

(C) Defeat of our veteran army.

b. Panegyric on Pompey: chapters X, XXII.

I. Chapter X.

(A) Pompey's military skill and experience. II. Chapters XI-XIV.

(A) All the warlike virtues are found in Pompey. III. Chapters XV-XVI.

(A) His personal influence.

(B) Can you hesitate to appoint him to conduct the

war?

IV. Chapter XVII-XIX.

(A) On Hortentius' subjection to the Manilian Law:

"The power ought not to be trusted to one individual."

(1) Affairs before the passage of the Gabinian Law.

(2) Result of its operation.

(B) Cicero favors the appointment of Gabinius as Pompey's lieutenant.

V. Chapters XX-XXIII.

(A) Catulus' objection: "If all hope is in Pompey what would we do if something befell him?" (B) The extraordinary powers with which he already has been invested.

(C) The necessity of sending a man like Pompey to the Asiatic war.

3. Conclusion.

(1) Our unpopularity among foreign nations. (2) Do not hesitate to entrust anything to Pom

pey.

a. Chapter XXIV.

I. I praise the law of Caius Manlius.

II. I devote all my ability to the carrying of this resolution.

(A) I plead this case, not for my selfish interest

but solely for the sake of the republic.

A Comparison between Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" and Brooke's "Romeus and Juliet"

ELEANOR W. THOMAS, HEAD OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, ST. MARY'S SCHOOL, RALEIGH, N. C.

T

¤ HE truth that "great poets do not invent their own myths" is hardly more applicable to the writers of Greek tragedy confined as they were to heroic legend than to Shakespeare, whose subject matter could be whatever men did, thought, or imagined. We are familiar with the fact that he used now an old play, now a prose romance, and now a poem as the source of his incidents, his power not being in his invention but in his imagination, his interpretation of the story, his vitalizing of the characters, his strength, charm, and fitness of phrase. So it was with that first tragedy of his, the tragedy of the heedless passion of ardent youth-"Romeo and Juliet"; its source was an old story in verse and in spite of faults in the manner of its telling, an interesting and pathetic story it is. No wonder Shakespeare seized upon it as fulfilling that first requirement of a successful play-a strong and sufficient story-one likely to hold the attention of a theatrical audience. Closely, however, as the great dramatist seems on first reading to have followed the poem, how different is his conception of the story, and how skillful and correct the changes whereby the loosely knit narrative becomes the swiftly-moving, compact drama.

He had before him the task of transforming a poem following the methods of the Elizabethan romance-prolix, full of description of scene and character, stuffed with comment and with long speeches moralizing or artificial, observing loosely a chronological order with little foreshadowing of events, and practically halved by the death of Tybalt-into a drama in which there is such unity and logical coherence that the result is dreaded from the first and the audience is ever expectant of ensuing events, which follow quickly one upon the other, a drama where we see char

acters drawn with psychological veracity and are spectators of the clash of human wills with circumstances not to be overcome. The questions that arise are: What specific changes did Shakespeare make, and for what specific reasons? Why did he retain certain apparently improbable or inartistic features of the old narrative?

The most obvious difference in the drama and the poem is that in time, the nine months of the latter being reduced to five days. This acceleration of events is in accordance with Shakespeare's conception here of youthful passion: "all is youth and spring— it is youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies, it is spring with its odors, flowers, and transiency:—the same feeling commences, goes through, and ends the play": the love is "too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;

Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be

Ere one can say 'It lightens'."

The tragedy is deepened, emotion purified by the brevity of the love, and furthermore the story adapted to hearers in a theatre, rather than readers in a library.

The First Act.

The prologues of the two authors suggest another contrast in their interpretation of the myth. Brooks summarizes a story of love, marriage, separation, and tragic death with never a word of the cause of the tragedy-the feud between two families. Shakespeare emphasizes the enmity of the two houses, from which

"A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Do with their death bury their parents strife."

"The two hours' traffic" of his stage is of a passion deathmarked by hatred from its birth-“an inevitable tragedy." This, then, is the idea for impressing which he invents the opening scene. In the poem, there is at the beginning a general account of the feud, to which attention, except for one brief reference, is not again directed until after Romeus and Juliet have been married several months. In the theatre, the spectators remember only what they see, and therefore Shakespeare, who must impress them with the cause of the future tragedy, first of all presents to them a particular brawl wherein even the servants of the rival houses

are involved, so cankered is the hate of the masters, and also gives motive and preparation for later events by introducing the fiery Tybalt as party in the strife. The poem does not mention Tybalt until the fray in which he dies. Shakespeare gives further significance to what is to occur by representing the Prince as pronouncing the death penalty on the participants in any possible future disturbance. Lady Montague naturally thinks at once of her son Romeo, and in sweetest poetry contrasting with the preceding lines relating the quarrel, we are told of the heaviness of that son, who then appears and confesses to Benvolio his love for Rosaline. The dramatist makes here a striking change in order. It is after the banishment and departure of the Romeus of the poem that Paris is approached by Capulet with the proposal of marriage to Juliet; in the drama, it is before Juliet has even met Romeo that Paris sues for her hand and she is informed of his proposal. To make Romeo's going to the house of his foe seem more probable, the playwright adds the incident of his chance meeting with the servant, and Benvolio's inducement that he might see Rosaline at the feast, and furthermore gives Romeo the premonition of evil to come from the daring venture. In the account of the feast, Shakespeare varies from his original in identifying the Capulet who objects to the Montague's presence with Tybalt, who threatens that though old Capulet protects the intruder when under his roof, he-Tybalt-will later convert the "now-seeming sweet" to "bitter gall." The poem and the play agree in representing Romeo and Juliet as falling in love at first sight, but in the poem Juliet almost at once declares her love to Romeo, and Mercutio is sitting with them at their first meeting; a theatrical audience would not brook under such circumstances the presence of a third party. The young couple in the drama both feel that it portends no good to them that each loves an enemy. In this first act Mercutio assumes far more importance than he does in the poem; the audience must be prepared for his later prominence in the calamitous dual, and must be pleased not only by the comic relief springing from the presence of the nurse and servitors, but also by the more subtle wit and the airy fancy of this chivalrous, heedless, loveable creation of Shakespeare's imagination.

Shakespeare, then, changed the earlier incidents of the story.

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