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Allusion
Explanation and Analysis—The Underworld:
At the end of Act III, Scene 4, Barabas makes the fateful decision to not only poison his daughter, but an entire nunnery. In an attempt to justify this monstrous action, Barabas compares his daughter to a fiend from hell, using allusion to conjure up an image of the Underworld:
In few, the blood of Hydra, Lerna's bane:
The juice of hebon, and the Cocytus' breath,
And all the poisons of the Stygian pool
Break from the fiery kingdom; and in this
Vomit your venom and invenom her
That like a fiend hath left her father thus.
Barabas alludes heavily to several figures from Greek mythology in this passage: Hydra (a giant snake-like monster with nine heads, which was rumored to have lived in the marshes of Lerna, near Argos); Cocytus (the river of lamentation in the underworld and one of the five rivers surrounding Hades); and the "poisons of the Stygian pool" (this refers to the river Styx, the river separating Hades from the mortal realm). In Barabas's mind, his daughter has abandoned him and deserves the worst that hell has to offer. She is no longer a loved one, as evidenced by the fact that Barabas uses a simile to compare her to a "fiend." Barabas constructs this elaborate series of allusions and similes to characterize his daughter in this way and, in doing so, he effectively tries to justify murdering her.
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