Page:Plays of Roswitha (1923) St. John.djvu/26

In Callimachus, Abraham, and Paphnutius, Roswitha sets out to describe the war between the flesh and the spirit, and the long penance which must be done by those who have allowed the flesh to triumph. It is not enough for them to be converted and to realise their crime against the infinite beauty and goodness of God. They are called on to take practical measures to cleanse themselves. Callimachus is the first of these plays, and by no means the best, although it timidly sounds a note of passion, rare, if it exists at all, in medieval literature. Some commentators have laboured to establish a resemblance between Callimachus and Romeo and Juliet, and there are curious parallels. In both you see a sepulchre, a woman's open grave, and the shroud lifted by the desperate hand of a lover. In both two men come to this tragic scene, bowed down by grief, yet able to control it—in Romeo and Juliet, Capulet and Friar Lawrence, in Callimachus, the husband of the dead woman and the Apostle John. It would be idle to strain the parallels too far. They might not strike the attention at all if Callimachus did not possess a touch of the spirit of Romeo and Juliet. It is this which makes the play seem to belong to a later period than the others, and gives it a different character. The passionate language employed, the romance of the story, the colour of the earlier scenes are extraordinary when we remember that the play was written in the 10th century. Haltingly, and apparently without any conscious intention, Roswitha describes the