figure. He is only indirectly characterized by his influence on the woman of Samaria.

These dramas cannot properly be called passion plays, since in none of them does the suffering and death of Jesus form the central plot. Within the last few years however prominent authors have turned to the passion for their fable and have given us passion plays. The author of The King of the Jews, whose aim is a glorification of the Messiah, still accepts the supernatural view of the plot, and so defeats himself as a dramatist, while the author of Jesus endeavors to give us a natural interpretation of the Gospel story. He aims to produce a modern drama out of the Christian saga by stripping it of all its supernatural elements. He forgets however that the dramatist must count upon the cooperation and collaboration of his public, which is still, if not dogmatically, at least traditionally Christian, and hence indisposed to accept a natural interpretation of the Christian story of Jesus. But a rationalistic dramatization of the Christian legends is bound to cause a disillusionment to the most unprejudiced mind. It is just as impossible to give, in literature, a natural interpretation of the Christian mythology, as it is of the Greek mythology. The rationalization of the supernatural in the Bible has been abandoned long ago by our theologians as absurd. But try as a playwright might, he will find it almost impossible to remove the supernatural element completely out of the passion story and yet have an intelligent plot, comformable to logic. Deviations from the plot abound for this reason in the two passion plays under discussion, and yet the subject-matter has not been made dramatic according to our present-day conceptions of the drama in either of them, as the writer hopes to point out.

In Jesus we are assured on a fly-leaf at the beginning of the book that "the persons who founded Christianity (?) are here stripped of supernatural embellishment; and they are represented as simple, real, ardent Orientals in the throes of a great and impending tragedy." How many of the numerous persons in the five

9 The King of the Jews: A Sacred Drama. From the Russian of "K. P." (The Grand Duke Constantine). By Victor E. Marsden. Funk & Wagnalls Co. This play was performed at the Imperial Theater at St. Petersburg in December, 1913, and January, 1914, with the author in the role of Joseph of Arimathæa. The "K. P." appearing on the title-page is a printer's error. The initials always used by the late Grand Duke Constantine were "K. K." (Konstantin Konstantinovitch).

Jesus: A Passion Play. By Max Ehrmann. Baker & Taylor Co.

M. Dearmer's The Soul of the World: A Mystery Play of the Nativity and the Passion (1911), has a religious motive, but is of small literary value. Walter Nithak-Stahn's German play, Christusdrama (1912) has been inaccessible to me.

long acts of this drama1o the author includes among those who have founded Christianity is for the writer hard to tell. He surely cannot mean the priests, traders and money-changers, who are in the majority in this play, and who talk the language of our present-day peddlers. But this much is quite evident, that Jesus has been divested in this passion play of the aureole of divinity, and represented as a rebel-prophet, but not in rebellion against the Romans, as Karl Kautsky, the eminent socialist, once interpreted the "Lamb of God" to have been, but against the rich traders, and the priests and scribes, who are in their employ. The people revolt against the greedy traders and money-changers in the temple, who are paying high rent to the priests for the privilege of doing business and robbing the poor in the house of God, and yearn for a strong man to lead them against their oppressors; and when Jesus with his large following of Galilean peasants appears in the court of the temple, they immediately see in him the desired leader and lend him their support in his rebellion against the temple authorities.

Of the miracles with which the Gospel writers credit Jesus, we hear in this passion play only from the mouth of Judas, but he does not claim to have been an eye-witness. The raising of Lazarus from the dead by Jesus was told him when he later came to Bethany. All other miraculous acts of his master he also knows only from hearsay. The only miracle he saw was when Jesus commanded the sea, but then, as one of his hearers, an Alexandrian, remarks, no doubt the storm had spent itself.

The play does not however ignore Jesus's claim to the Messiahship; and this it is which is used by the priests as pretext for his death. He is, as his brother Joses sees him, "a fool upon whom a terrible thought has seized that he was the Son of Man told of by the prophet Daniel." And not only Pilate sees in Jesus “a manloving fool who fancied himself to be a god," but even Joseph of Arimathæa, who once dreamed the same dreams, acknowledges that by his claim to the Messiahship Jesus greatly erred, but "he is not the first, nor will he be the last to fancy himself touched with fire from the clouds, and called by heavenly voices in the night." In this interpretation of the character of Jesus the author of this passion play has undoubtedly been greatly influenced by Gerhard Hauptmann, whose hero, Emanuel Quint, in Emanuel Quint: Ein

10 Each act has a list of persons as in Hauptmann's The Weavers (1892). 11 Although when he later pleads with the priests for the life of Jesus he allows himself a falsehood and claims to have seen the miracles his Master is credited with, with his own eyes.

Narr in Christo (1910),12 a Silesian pietist, who in all honesty believes himself to be the re-incarnated Christ, is only a symbolic figure for the Galilean Essene.

The character of Judas is drawn in this modern passion play very sympathetically. He is not the God-murderer who sells his Master for thirty pieces of silver, but an unwise Stürmer, outwitted by the cunning priests. Judas is impatient with Jesus, he wants to bring a crisis into his life and to force him to declare himself. He realizes that the worldly people in Jerusalem cannot be so easily won over as the Galilean peasants and that Jesus would have to show his Father to the people before he could convince them of the approaching judgment day. Judas does not lead the soldiers upon Jesus in the night, they follow him against his will to discover the hiding-place of his master. Neither does he betray Jesus by a kiss; the kiss which he wants to bestow upon his worshiped teacher as a greeting and which is refused him, is not by any means a pre-arranged sign of identity. Jesus is pointed out to the Roman guards not by Judas, but by one of the money-changers. And Judas has not lost his faith in his master till the last minute. From the moment that the soldiers take Jesus captive in the Garden of Gethsemane, till he is led to the cross, Judas does not cease urging him to show that he is the Son of God and to free himself by the divine power within him, in which Judas has not the least doubt. Moreover Judas is the only one of his disciples that remains loyal to Jesus. It is he who of all his disciples pleads for him with the accusers and finally shares his fate at the hands of the Roman soldiers.

But though we gladly forgive the author for his deviating from the traditional character of Judas, which is indeed incomprehensible, we cannot do so in the case of Mary Magdalene. Mary, who came from Magdala, and out of whom seven devils had been driven, who was the most faithful and loving of all the women that followed Christ from Galilee, who brought spices to the tomb, and who later was privileged to clasp Christ's feet, has been identified by some with the sinner who anointed and kissed Christ's feet in the house of Simon, and according to medieval belief was also the same as the sister of Lazarus and Martha,13 but she can by no means be identified, as in this play, with the adulteress. Adultery, according to Old

12 This master-piece of the greatest of all living German writers has recently been made accessible to English readers by the New York publisher B. W. Huebsch. The translation is by T. Seltzer.

13 In Maeterlinck's play Mary Magdalene is identified with the sinner in the house of Simon the Leper, but not with the sister of Lazarus. On the other