found in any author. The history of Philomela, in Ovid's " Metamorphoses," is not by far so awful, for the very hands of the wretched Roman maiden are hacked off lest she should betray the prime movers of the dreadful piece of wickedness. As the father by his stern manliness, so the daughter by her grand feminine dignity, reminds us of the more moral past; she dreads not death but dishonour; and deeply touching are the words with which she implores mercy of her enemy, the Empress Tamora, when the sons of the latter will defile her person :
"'Tis present death I beg ; and one thing more,
That womanhood denies my tongue to tell :
0, keep me from their worse than killing lust,
And tumble me into some loathsome pit,
Where never man's eyes may behold my body :
Do this, and be a charitable murderer."[1]
In this virginal purity Lavinia forms the fullest contrast to the Empress Tamora; and here, as in most of his dramas, Shakespeare places two entirely different types of woman together, and renders their characters clearer by the contrast. This we have already seen in Antony and Cleopatra, where our dark, unbridled, vain and ardent Egyptian comes forth more statuesquely by the white, cold, moral, arch -prosaic and domestic Octavia.
- ↑ Titus Andronicus, act ii. sc. 3.
