In the previous presentation of the story of
Meleager, Heywood has improved upon the brilliant and passionate
rhetoric of Ovid by the introduction of an original and happy touch of
dramatic effect: his Althaea, after firing the brand with which her
son's life is destined to burn out, relents and plucks it back for a
minute from the flame, giving the victim a momentary respite from
torture, a fugitive recrudescence of strength and spirit, before she
rekindles it. The pathos of his farewell has not been overpraised by
Lamb: who might have added a word in recognition of the very spirited
and effective suicide of Althaea, not unworthily heralded or announced
in such verses as these:
This was my son,
Born with sick throes, nursed from my tender breast,
Brought up with feminine care, cherished with love;
His youth my pride; his honor all my wishes;
So dear, that little less he was than life.
The subsequent adventures of Hercules and the Argonauts are presented
with the same quiet straightforwardness of treatment: it is curious that
the tragic end of Jason and Medea should find no place in the
multifarious chronicle which is nominally and mainly devoted to the
record of the life and death of Hercules, but into which the serio-comic
episode of Mars and Venus and Vulcan is thrust as crudely and abruptly
as it is humorously and dramatically presented.
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