The revenge tragedy, a distinct species of the tragedy of blood, may be defined as a tragedy whose leading motive is revenge and whose main action deals with the progress of this revenge, leading to the death of the murderers and often the death of the avenger himself.

This type, as thus defined, probably first appeared on the Elizabethan stage in the Spanish Tragedy and the original Hamlet.2 Of these two plays the old Hamlet is not extant and can only be reconstructed conjecturally; the Spanish Tragedy represents, therefore, the origin of the type. Just what the ultimate sources of the type may have been, is not a question which enters our discussion. In the Spanish Tragedy the influence of Seneca is marked as in much early English tragedy,1 and there may be some indebtedness to contemporary French and Italian drama of the Senecan sort.2 We are not, however, to examine the Spanish Tragedy in connection with the influence of Seneca but in connection with a long succession of Elizabethan revenge plays; and for such an investigation it serves well enough as a starting point. Thomas Kyd was the author of this play and probably, as Dr. Sarrazin 3 has shown, of the old Hamlet. He may safely be taken as the introducer of the revenge tragedy upon the English stage, and his work may be considered one of the many dramatic innovations of the Elizabethan period.

At the end of his entertaining biography, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald scouts the vogue alleged by Sterne of his Tristram Shandy in France. “Such men as D'Holbach and Diderot might have it on their tables and affect to read a few pages, but to the mass of even educated foreigners, it must have been a book of cabalistics.” “It is very different,” resumes Mr. Fitzgerald, “with the Sentimental Journey. It has been received with delight by all Europe. The French have openly made it their own, and translated it over and over again.”

The question of the original home of the Beves saga has often been discussed, but no satisfactory conclusion has been reached. The conjectures regarding it have been various, but as yet unconvincing.

Amaury Duval 1 places the scene of the story in France at Antonne, but without giving definite grounds for this supposition. Turnbull 2 and Kölbing3 both adopt this view without argument. Pio Rajna4 was the first to suggest a Germanic home for the saga, locating Hanstone (Hamtoun) on the continent near the French border of Germany. The arguments given are unimportant, but this view of the origin has been accepted by Gaston Paris,5 although he takes exception to Rajna's wildest suppositions as to the name Hanstone. Albert Stimming6 has exposed the weakness of Rajna's reasoning, but even he leaves the question still unsettled. Later in his introduction, he gives impartially the arguments in favor of French as well as those in favor of Germanic origin, but does not regard them as sufficient ground for forming an opinion. These comprise the conjectures thus far advanced, and all are weakly supported and inconclusive.

There are few questions concerning Anglo-Saxon literature which have been more widely discussed than the interpretation of the so-called First Riddle of Cynewulf. The subject was introduced by Heinrich Leo in 1857, in his celebrated monograph Quae de se ipso Cynewulfus Poeta Anglosaxonicus tradiderit. Before that time the line shad attracted little attention. As is well known, they occur in the Exeter Book, the collection of verse left by Bishop Leofric to his cathedral church in the eleventh century. Thorpe, in his edition of this manuscript, did not venture to translate them, which is scarcely to be wondered at, since both language and grammatical construction are unusually obscure. The investigations of Leo, however, with those of his followers and opponents, at once gave great interest and importance to the almost unnoticed lines. It may be well to mention briefly the principal theories which have been founded on this bit of verse, some of which rival in ingenuity the familiar attempts to establish a Baconian cypher in the works of Shakespeare.

In the preceding article my friend Mr. Lawrence has shown clearly that all indications point to an Old Norse source for the Anglo-Saxon poem usually termed The First Riddle of Cynewulf. After he had come to a conviction on this point, he communicated his theory to me in private conference, in the hope that I might perhaps be able to supply confirmatory evidence by showing what that source was. It was my fortune to make what I believe scholars will agree to be the correct identification of the material, and, with the new light thus thrown on its meaning, to interpret the poem more satisfactorily, I think, than has hitherto been done.