fact is that the _donnée_ is very much more of the Romantic than of
the Classical description, and offers much greater conveniences to the
Romantic than to the Classical practitioner. With minor variations,
the story as generally dramatised is this. Merope, the widowed queen
of the murdered Heraclid Cresphontes, has saved her youngest son from
the murderer and usurper, Polyphontes, and sent him out of the
country. When he has grown up, and has secretly returned to Messenia
to take vengeance, Polyphontes is pressing Merope to let bygones be
bygones and marry him, so as to reconcile the jarring parties in the
State. Æpytus, the son, to facilitate his reception, represents
himself as a messenger charged to bring the news of his own death; and
Merope, hearing this and believing the messenger to be also the
assassin, obtains access to the chamber where he is resting after his
journey, and is about to murder her own sleeping son when he is saved
by the inevitable _anagnorisis_. The party of Cresphontes is then
secretly roused. Æpytus, at the sacrifice which the tyrant holds in
honour of the news of his rival's death, snatches the sacrificial axe
and kills Polyphontes himself, and all ends well.

There is, of course, a strong dramatic moment here; but I cannot think
the plot by any means an ideal one for classical tragedy. At any rate
the Aristotelian conditions--the real ones, not the fanciful
distortions of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism--are very ill
satisfied. There is bloodshed, but there is no tragic bloodshed, as
there would have been had Merope actually killed her son. The
arresting and triumphant "grip" of the tragic misfortunes of Oedipus
and Orestes, the combination of the course of fate and the [Greek:
hamartia] of the individual, is totally absent. The wooing of Merope
by Polyphontes is not so much preposterous as insignificant, though
Voltaire, by a touch of modernism, has rescued it or half-rescued it