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Mrs. Behn founded the plot of The Dutch Lover upon the stories of Eufemie and Theodore, Don Jame and Frederic, in a pseudo-Spanish novel entitled ‘The History of Don Fenise, a new Romance written in Spanish by Francisco de Las Coveras, And now Englished by a Person of Honour, London, Printed for Humphrey Moseley,’ 8vo, 1651. There is of course no such Spanish author as ‘the ingenious Don Francisco de las Coveras’. The chief merit of the book is purely bibliographical: it is a very rare volume and difficult to meet with. The Bodleian indeed contains a copy, but it is not to be found in the British Museum library. The somewhat morbid theme of overwhelming passion barred by consanguinity eventually discovered to be false, which is here exemplified in the love of Silvio for Cleonte, occurs more than once in the later Jacobean and Carolan drama. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragicomedy A King and no King (1611: 4to, 1619), we have Arbaces enamoured of Panthea, his reputed sister; similar motives are to be found in Arthur Wilson’s The Swizzer (1631); but in Middleton’s Women beware Women (circa 1612: 4to, 1657), no contrivance can legitimize the incestuous loves of Hippolito and Isabella, and death is the only solution. In Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat (1621: 4to, 1639), the demoniac Malefort pursues his daughter Theocrine with the same baleful fires as Francesco Cenci looked on Beatrice, but the height of horror, harrowing the soul with pity and anguish, culminates in Ford’s terrible scenes Tis Pity She’s a Whore (4to, 1633), so tenderly tragic, so exquisitely beautiful for all their moral perversity, that they remain unequalled outside Shakespeare.

In the Restoration Theatre the theme of consanguinity was originally dealt with no less than three times by Dryden: comically, in The Spanish Friar (1681), when Lorenzo—after all the love-brokerage of pursy Father Dominic—discovers Elvira to be his sister: tragically, in Don Sebastian (1690), when Sebastian and Almeyda are separated by the disclosures of old Alvarez: sentimentally and romantically, in Love Triumphant (1693-4), when Alphonso wins Victoria whom he has long loved, even whilst she was supposed to be his sister. Otway it will be remembered turns the pathetic catastrophe of The Orphan (1680), upon a deceit which produces similar though unhappy circumstances. In 1679, Oedipus, a joint production of Dryden and Lee, was brought out with great success at the Duke’s Theatre, Dorset Gardens.

Unhallowed and incestuous passions again form the plot of The Fatal Discovery; or, Love in Ruins (4to, 1698), produced at Drury Lane, a play seemingly derived from Bandello, Part II, Novel 35, which coincides with the thirtieth tale of the Heptameron. In various forms, however, this legend is to be found in the literature of all countries, and a cognate tradition is even attached to certain districts. Innocence Distress’d; or, The Royal Penitents, a tragedy by Robert Gould (ob. 1709), never performed but published by subscription (8vo, 1737), for the benefit of his daughter Hannah, is based on the same story. Gould’s work is weak and insipid.

Later in the eighteenth century we have Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (8vo, 1768), an unacted drama of extraordinary power and undissipated gloom on the same terrible theme; whilst Shelley’s The Centi, published in 1819, which the poet most emphatically intended for the boards, remains a masterpiece of supreme genius.

Wagner in Die Walküre shows the irresistible passion of Siegmund and Sieglinde, brother and sister, from whose union sprang the mighty hero Siegfried; and in Gengangere (Ghosts), 1881, Ibsen threw, by the sickly craving of the fibreless Oswald Alving for Regina, a lurid light across that awesome tragedy of shadows, Nemesis, and blank despair.