And now D'Annunzio, as if he wished to demonstrate his fitness in the handling of any dramatic form, conceived and executed a species of poetic melodrama in which the life of a feudal period is unrolled before us in five glowing tableaux. Prodigality of colour, bloody war, horrid lusts, are mingled artistically with the processional attitudes of tirewomen, sweet singing, and interludes of lyric passion. As in a mirrored dream of Burne-Jones, Francesca moves slowly from rapt maidenhood to forced marriage; from unhappy marriage to deception and death. Not content to follow the bare lines of the ancient chronicle, the playwright weaves into his symphony of adulterous passion historic episodes and pictures of manners. It is one epoch of strange, repellent contrasts. Souls are danced to the tune of graceful madrigals, and roses often dyed a deeper hue by blood. In the sphere of action the play mostly lives, though there are some halting moments of poetic delicacy and introspection set over against operatic episodes. We first assist at a scene of jester and damsels which recalls Bandello or Boccaccio. It is gay and humorous, with the coarse, unseemly humour of the time. Alberich, teased by the three mermaids in Rheingold, is recalled. Two brothers of Francesca indulge in fierce recriminations during which a veiled accusation of attempted parricide is made, with the result that murder is barely escaped. Francesca is deliberately betrayed by her brother, Ostasio Polenta, into the arms of the "Lamester" Giovanni Malatesta. She believes that she is wedding his brother Paolo, called the handsome one, skilled in the fine arts, of goodly presence, a warrior and a lover of sport. By a device near the close of Act I he is made to pass and be seen by Francesca. She goes to her doom willingly. She loves, but does not know that Paolo is a married man. In the second act, a year later, Francesca, in a Saracenic headdress, seems to have aged ten years. On the battlement of her husband's fortress, amid the enginery of war, Greek fire boiling in the caldron, darts flaming, missiles, catapults, ballista, and outlandish weapons that crowd the summit of the tower, she stands. There is a terrific din; crossbows twang, shoutings and tocsins are heard. Francesca, displaying true mediæval immobility at all these sights and sounds, hovers about the platform, questioning, curious. She insists on tampering with a torch of the deadly Greek fire, and it evokes from the poet a flock of his flaming images that Swinburne alone might parallel. As Paolo enters, eager for the fight, Francesca's attitude shifts. At once we see her aroused interest. She loved him, loves him. Their interview contains some striking speeches. "And then I saw your face, silent between the spears of the horsemen," she tells him, and adds that then she longed for death. He replies in a like exalted strain. He exposes himself at the open portcullis, and she trembles but is brave.