his ways,
becomes a Christian. This mere outline of the play is given to suggest
points of resemblance between it--the first sketch of this kind of
drama of passion, the frenzy of the soul and senses--and the
masterpiece of this type, _Romeo and Juliet_.

Many passages in the plays of Roswitha remind us of Shakespeare, but
it is not possible to deal adequately with them here, nor does it seem
material to do so. There is no reason why Shakespeare should not have
seen a printed collection of her dramas. He, like Dante, seems to have
had the power of attracting material from every possible source, and
it should not be forgotten what a sensation was caused by Celtes
printing in 1501 Roswitha's MS. But, on the other hand, the
similarities we notice may be a mere coincidence, or, as is much more
likely, the details in each case may have been common property handed
down from one generation to another.

In her play of _Paphnutius_, Roswitha made use of a story taken from
the _Historia Monachorum_ of Rufinus, a contemporary of St. Jerome,
who had journeyed through Palestine and Egypt to visit the Hermits of
the Desert. The mention, too, at the beginning of Rufinus's account,
of a musician who tells of his retirement to a hermitage in order to
change the harmony of music into that of the spirit, evidently
suggested to her a discussion on music and harmony, probably adapted
from Boethius's _De Musica_. In this discussion lies the chief
interest of the play as giving us some idea of the sort of
intellectual exercises probably practised by women in convents in the
tenth century. The play opens with a truly mediaeval scene,--a
disputation between a hermit and his disciples on the question of
harmony between soul and body, suggested by the want of it in the life
of the courtesan Thais. Such harmony _should_ exist, says the holy
man, for though the soul is not mortal like the body, nor the body
spiritual like the soul, we shall, if we follow the method of the
dialecticians, find that such differences do not necessarily render
the two inharmonious. Harmony cannot be produced from like elements or
like sounds, but only by the right adjustment of those which are
dissimilar. This discussion on harmony naturally leads to one on
music, which is divided, according to the then received writers on the
subject, into three kinds--celestial, human, and instrumental. Music,
in the Middle Ages, was, for dialectical purposes, treated in
accordanc