At Athens, the poets who contended for the tragic prize, were expected to exhibit three pieces, which, from their number, were called collectively a trilogy, together with a fourth, satirical, drama, which came last in the order of representation, like our farces now. Often they chose for the argument of these tragedies different events in the same story, so that the three formed a connected whole: of which an instance, the only instance extant, remains in the Agamemnon, Choephoroi, and Eumenides of Æschylus. The tale which has just been narrated is well fitted for this kind of representation, and would furnish materials not unworthy even of that poet’s genius. In the first play we may imagine an insulted queen and deserted wife, brooding over past injuries, rejoicing in the prospect of revenge, and urging the savage temper of her son to seek it in the blood of those who should have been dearest to him; the play terminating with the death of Leonora de Guzman, and the escape of her sons, preserved, like Orestes, to be at once the ministers of vengeance and the instruments of further crime. For the second the unsuspecting confidence of Don Fadrique, his rejection of the signs and warnings, which were offered in vain, and the successful machinations of a wicked, perhaps a rejected woman, acting upon the proud and cruel Pedro, are well suited; while the chorus would find a fitting part, at first, in dark and indistinct presages of evil, and lamentations over the blindness with which the fated victim rushed into the snare; and at the end, in indignant description of the circumstances of horror narrated in the ballad, and in joining the aged nurse to bewail the death of her foster son, and denouncing vengeance upon the murderer’s head. The third would contain the capture of Pedro, the mutual defiance and death–struggle of the brothers, and the barbarous exposure by Henry of his brother’s corpse: while at the end the impression of these horrors might be relieved by the constant love of Maria de Padilla, who, now neglected and despised, still watched over the forsaken body of her monarch and lover, with a fidelity worthy of a purer bosom.[25]