appearance is before the court, on trial for her husband’s murder.  The scene is celebrated, and has been much disputed by critics.  Relying on her own dauntlessness, on her beauty, and on the protection of Brachiano, Vittoria hardly takes the trouble to plead innocence or to rebut charges.  She stands defiant, arrogant, vigilant, on guard; flinging the lie in the teeth of her arraigners; quick to seize the slightest sign of feebleness in their attack; protesting her guiltlessness so loudly that she shouts truth down by brazen strength of lung; retiring at the close with taunts; blazing throughout with the intolerable lustre of some baleful planet.  When she enters for the third time, it is to quarrel with her paramour.  He has been stung to jealousy by a feigned love-letter.  She knows that she has given him no cause; it is her game to lure him by fidelity to marriage.  Therefore she resolves to make his mistake the instrument of her exaltation.  Beginning with torrents of abuse, hurling reproaches at him for her own dishonour and the murder of his wife, working herself by studied degrees into a tempest of ungovernable rage, she flings herself upon the bed, refuses his caresses, spurns and tramples on him, till she has brought Brachiano, terrified, humbled, fascinated, to her feet.  Then she gradually relents beneath his passionate protestations and repeated promises of marriage.  At this point she speaks but little.  We only feel her melting humour in the air, and long to see the scene played by such an actress as Madame Bernhardt.  When Vittoria next appears, it is as Duchess by the deathbed of the Duke, her husband.  Her attendance here is necessary, but it contributes little to the development of her character.  We have learned to know her, and expect neither womanish tears nor signs of affection at a crisis which touches her heart less than her self-love.  Webster, among his other excellent qualities, knew how to support character by reticence.  Vittoria’s silence in this act is significant; and when she retires exclaiming, ‘O me! this place is hell!’ we know that it is the outcry, not of a woman who has lost what made life dear, but of one who sees the fruits of crime imperilled by a fatal accident.  The last scene of the play is devoted to Vittoria.  It begins with a notable altercation between her and Flamineo.  She calls him ‘ruffian’ and ‘villain,’ refusing him the reward of his vile service.  This quarrel emerges in one of Webster’s grotesque contrivances to prolong a poignant situation.  Flamineo quits the stage and reappears with pistols.  He affects a kind of madness; and after threatening Vittoria, who never flinches, he proposes they should end their lives by suicide.  She humours him, but manages to get the first shot.  Flamineo falls, wounded apparently to death.  Then Vittoria turns and tramples on him with her feet and tongue, taunting him in his death agony with the enumeration of his crimes.  Her malice and her energy are equally