painted lips of a corpse. Comets blaze, there are many portents, the time is ever midnight, the scene the graveyard, the air smells of corruption, skulls and corpses are the _dramatis personae_. Every means seems to be employed to make theatrically effective the horrors of death and decay. And once, at least, these means are used with tremendous power in the riot of madness, torture, and corruption that preludes the death of the Duchess of Malfi. All or nearly all of the active characters are black with sin. The extraordinary exploitation of villany in Elizabethan tragedy here reaches its culmination. The arch-villain as ruthlessly devoted to crime as Hoffman, the accomplice assiduous in revolting baseness, the villain touched by remorse, the malcontent reviling human life,--all these appear--sometimes all combined in one person--and play their parts along with unshrinking prostitutes and lustful monarchs. The study of villany, however, has gained intensity and plausibility over the earlier plays. If none of the villains take to themselves much individuality, most of them have moments of dramatic impressiveness, and they are intended to be realistic. They are drawn with an accumulation of detail, a fondness for probing into depravity, with a sense of the dramatic value of devilry, and with a bitterness and cynicism that often seem sincere and searching. It is this cynicism which gives character to the reflective elements of these plays. The Kydian soliloquy on fate has given way to the prevailing satirical and bitter tone that finds its favorite themes in the sensuality of women and the hypocrisy and greed of courts, and its favorite means of expression in the connotation of the obscene and bestial.