Enter Rollo. By one of Fletcher's sudden conversions, he has changed to a subtle hypocrite and appears humble, repentant, begging for pity and love, "in whiteness of my wash'd repentance, In my heart's tears and love of truth to Edith, In my fair life hereafter." Edith, surprised and unnerved, gradually forgets her purpose, and as she informs the audience in several asides, is yielding; when--Enter Hamond and the guard. Hamond, a brave blunt soldier, is seeking revenge on Rollo because the tyrant has killed his brother and outraged him by commanding him to murder the noble Audrey. Hamond announces that he has come to kill Rollo, who seizes Edith and interposes her as a defense. She, aroused now to Rollo's real nature, draws her dagger, but he snatches it from her. In the struggle that follows Rollo and Hamond are both killed. All this occupies only one hundred and fifty lines of verse and must be accounted a most skillful bit of playmaking, a scene such as only Fletcher among the Elizabethans could contrive. But there is neither truth to life nor dramatic logic; on the contrary, there are two improbable conversions of character. It is not tragedy, it is hardly serious drama, it is theatrical claptrap; yet Fletcher's poetry is as fine, and, for all that one can see, as sincere as in the scene of genuine passion. Such dramatic impossibilities as this Fletcher faced with eager recklessness, and gayly spurred his Pegasus for the leap. "The Bloody Brother" further illustrates the union of the material and methods of the Beaumont-Fletcher romances with the conventions of the tragedy of revenge and lust. That union, manifest also in Fletcher's "Valentinian," is henceforth characteristic of the tragedy of the age. The dramatists belonged to a late period of an artistic development and had many examples both native and foreign to draw upon. They were men of talent or even genius whose creations were independent and original but rarely without large indebtedness to their predecessors. While Shakespeare and Jonson were often borrowed from, the majority of the tragedies clung to the examples of Webster and Tourneur or mingled revenge and horrors with the romantic plots and novel technic of Beaumont and Fletcher. A marked similarity consequently exists in the plays of men of different temperaments and purposes. Lustful tyrants and their intriguing favorites, love crossed by honor and often allied with revenge, illicit and abnormal passion, romantic princes and princesses, an action confined to the rooms of a palace, situations involving seduction or temptation, stage-effects whether by horrors or by masques and pageants, and a style more equable, less fantastic than in the early drama,--these are the ingredients which characterize tragedy for the quarter century after Shakespeare's death.