The tragedy of “Adrea,” by Belasco and Long, is a composition of exceptional imaginative scope and of great dramatic power. Its scene is a royal court of a conjectural kingdom, situated on an imaginary island in, perhaps, the Adriatic Sea. Its time is named as about the fifth century of the Christian era,--a time well chosen for poetic and romantic purposes; for the vast Roman Empire had then become extinguished in Western Europe and was slowly crumbling to pieces in the East, and minor monarchies can credibly be supposed to have flourished in such an era of transition and a martial chieftain out of Noricum to have dallied with the daughters of a Roman Prince. It is a play without historic basis; an authentic creation of the inventive brain; a vigorous and splendid work of art, moving freely in a broad field. It deals with great themes,--great passions, crimes, and sorrows; great and terrible punishments of sin, and the spectacle of great character made sublime by grief. Much of its movement proceeds in the open air: some of it beneath the vault of night; and its web involves the terrors of tempest and the mystery and dread of spectres from the realm of death. The form and color of it are modern,--a form and color of rosy amplitude and voluptuous luxuriance; but the feeling that pervades it is the ominous feeling of the old Greek tragedies of fate and doom. Its defect is excess--an excess of persons, objects, pictures, emotions, and words; the superflux that proceeds from intensely passionate feeling in the conception of the story and especially in the conception and development of its central character. An affluence of fancy is, however, more grateful than the frigid sense of want. This is a synopsis of it: The action begins in a spacious scene, in front of the royal palace of the monarchs of the island kingdom. The _Princess Adrea_ is the blind daughter of _Menethus_, _King of the Adrean Isles_. She is older than her sister, the _Princess Julia_, and on the death of her father she would succeed to the throne, if she were not blind: for the law of _Menethus_ has ordained that “No sovereign shall wear the crown who is not, both in mind and body, sound.” The play opens on the hundredth day after the death of _Menethus_. The _King_ is dead, and the hour has come for the crowning of his successor. The _Princess Julia_, long known as “the imperial wanton,” with a company of her kind, is holding a festival. _Kaeso_, born a barbarian, but later a pretorian tribune, having come to Adrea, with his troops, intent on usurping the throne of _Menethus_, sees a readier way of conquest, in a marriage with the _Princess Julia_, soon to be _Queen_. He has been made her favorite, and marriage with him is to follow her coronation.