SOURCE: Vieth, David M. “Psychological Myth as Tragedy: Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus.” Huntington Library Quarterly 39, no. 1 (1975): 57-76.

In the following essay, Vieth argues that the key to understanding Lucius Junius Brutus lies in the author's use of fantasy and myth to expound tragic features of generational conflict.

The brief, brilliant flowering of “affective” tragedy in England between 1677 and 1682 can be ignored by writers on tragedy, and especially on the theory of this genre, only at their peril.¹ Coming less than a century after the unquestioned triumphs of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but already circumscribed by intellectual developments that were pressing toward a more “modern” sensibility, these plays constitute a successful creation of tragedy under marginal conditions: they strain the genre to its limits and carry meaningful implications for our own time. A case in point is Nathaniel Lee's outstanding but neglected play Lucius Junius Brutus.

Typical of...