Less satisfactory is an almost contemporary volume on ‘Greek Tragedy,’ which covers the same ground. Altho Professor Norwood has not found his profit in Brunetière or Archer, he makes a valiant effort to visualize actual performance in the Theater of Dionysus more than twenty centuries ago. He deals with Greek plays as poetic dramas and not merely as dramatic poems. But he has fallen victim to the wiles of the late Professor Verrall, one of the most ingenious of undramatic critics; and in his discussion of ‘Agamemnon’ of Æschylus he gives Verrall credit for having solved a series of difficulties. Professor Norwood even goes so far as to declare that “Verrall’s theory should probably be accepted.” I doubt if a single one of the alleged difficulties even occurred to any of the spectators present at the first performance of the play. The action of ‘Agamemnon’ is swift, irresistible, inevitable; and the audience was allowed no time for cavil. As the story unrolled itself in the theater it was convincing; and if any doubt arose in the mind of any spectator as to anything that had occurred, it could arise only after he had left the theater; and then it was too late. As a play, performed by actors, in a theater, before an audience, ‘Agamemnon’ triumphs. Only when it is considered in the study do we perceive any “difficulties.” In fact, when so considered one difficulty is likely to strike many readers; and it repays consideration. The play begins with a long monolog from a watchman of the roof of Agamemnon’s palace. The king is at the siege of Troy; and when the beleaguered city is taken a series of beacons on the intervening hills will be lighted, one after another, to convey the glad news. Suddenly the watchman sees the distant flame, the wireless message that Troy has fallen and that the monarch is free to return home. In real life it would be two or three weeks before Agamemnon would arrive; yet in the play, before it is half over, the king comes in; he enters his palace, where he is done to death by his guilty wife and her paramour, Ægisthus. The exigencies of the two hours’ traffic of the stage often compel a playwright to telescope time; but no other dramatist has ever dared so violent a compression as this.