Robert Garnier (1545-1601) was a far stronger man than any of these three. He was born at La Ferté-Bernard, was a magistrate all his life, and was finally made Counsellor of State by Henry IV. Garnier was much less open to the reproach of being “a barren rascal” than Jodelle, Grevin, or La Taille. His list of plays is of respectable length. _Porcie_ was written in 1568, _Cornélie_ (translated into English by Kyd) in 1574, and _Marc Antoine_ in 1578. _L’Hippolyte_, the _Troade_, and the _Antigone_ are translations or adaptations of Sophocles and Euripides. There are two other plays more original than either of these--_Les Juives_ (1583), a “Sacred Tragedy” founded on the story of Zedekiah; and _Bradamante_ (1582), a romantic drama founded on passages in Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_.[100] These two plays are of special interest. _Les Juives_ is an example of all that could be done with Garnier’s model. The story supplies just such a catastrophe as was fit to be treated in the measured, and, when good, stately Senecan fashion. The prophet, to whom Garnier gives no name, Zedekiah and his mother Amutal (Sédécie and Amital in the French), the King of Babylon and his general Nabuzardan, are exactly the characters required; while the chorus is abundantly provided with matter for lamentations, reflections on the instability of all human things, the justice of God, and the cruelty of the wicked. In this case also the chorus of Jewesses, to which the play owes its name, though less truly a personage in the drama than it is in the _Œdipus the King_ or the _Agamemnon_, is not a mere voice used to fill up the intervals between the acts. Garnier was very free from the want of taste which allowed Jodelle to drop into vulgarity. He had an instinct for the “grand manner,” and does not fall below his subject. The _Bradamante_ is a still more interesting play than _Les Juives_. There is something almost pathetic about it, for in the _Bradamante_ Garnier may be said to have brought French literary drama to within touch of emancipation from the tyranny of Seneca’s form. If he had gone a step further, or had found a worthy follower, the work of Corneille might have been antedated by half a century, and in happier circumstances. The subject is neither classical nor Biblical, and this perhaps gave Garnier the courage to drop the chorus. As the _Bradamante_ is not, in the full sense of the word, a tragedy, since it has a happy ending, the chorus was not strictly necessary; but as it was not meant to be a comic piece, the natural course at the time would have been to supply one. As has been noted above, the chorus was habitually introduced into pieces which were meant to be serious even when the subject was not classical. At the same time Garnier showed, by introducing a “confidant,” that he had a real sense of the theatre. He knew that over and above the main personages there must always be some who explain, or to whom explanations are made, and to whom it falls