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Characters, looks,

One has to take

To get the full

nothing in which intelligent persons differ more than in this. The reason is that in a printed play there are fewer aids to the imagination than in other forms of fiction. gestures, etc., are not described. the trouble of imagining them. enjoyment out of a play of Shakespeare, for example, when read “in the closet " requires either more than average gifts or a special training. One main object of the present work has been to place my readers, if I could, in a more advantageous position for appreciating, if not at first hand then through translations, the master-pieces of Greek dramatic art, to enter more fully into their significance, and to understand how the several parts or elements bear upon each other.

Another aid which is not to be despised is dramatic reading. Supposing the translation to be one that will bear the test (and it is the most crucial test conceivable), then if it is read aloud by one who has studied the particular drama and can read, the true effect will be carried home to many people's hearts to whom the printed page would have appealed in vain. Or again, if several persons combined, as at a Shakespeare reading, to distribute the parts amongst them, dividing the Chorus between four or five, and after sufficient study and rehearsal delivered themselves to an

audience—supposing the reading to be equally good, the effect would be more complete. The only difficulty here is that the art of reading aloud, and especially of dramatic reading, is so little cultivated; else this method would have some advantages over what at first sight seems the more complete and perfect one of representation on the stage. This is well worth attempting, but is surrounded with difficulties.

Before enumerating these, it may be well to review the history of such attempts in England and elsewhere. Many instances of such revival have been, no doubt, forgotten. For example, it is more than probable, considering the character of the age, that the Antigone of Alemanni and that of Rotrou, the Electra of De Baïf, of Vondel, or of Christopher Wase, were really performed in Italy, France, and the Low Countries respectively. The Oedipus of Dryden and Lee (1679) is hardly more removed from Sophocles than Dryden's All for Love is from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. The model suffers in both cases, but it is still the model. L. Theobald's much closer rendering of the Electra of Sophocles was certainly acted in London about the middle of last century. Such performances, both in public and private, have in the present

1 See the Dramatic Miscellany of 1760.

century had considerable vogue in Germany, where the appreciative criticism of Lessing had long since helped to create a taste for them. They received a great stimulus in the year 1841 when Mendelssohn was the royal Capellmeister at Berlin,1 and wrote music for the Antigone and Oedipus Coloneus in Donner's translation, which followed closely the metres of the original. The choral parts were specially revised for the occasion by August Boeckh.2 This part-dramatical, partmusical production was transferred to England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1845, and was rendered memorable by the fact that Helen Faucit, now Lady Martin, acted the part of Antigone -the play having been translated, with omissions, by Mr. Bartholomew. Similar performances, in which, however, Mendelssohn's music has been the principal attraction, have taken place repeatedly in recent years at the Crystal Palace.

Glancing back to an earlier period, we find English schoolmasters, such as Parr and Valpy, encouraging their pupils to recite the original dialogue of some Greek tragedies in costume. One of Dr. Parr's audience when the Trachiniae was thus presented at Stanmore (1772) was Sir William Jones, the famous Oriental scholar;3

1 See Grove's Dict. of Music, vol. ii.

2 It is observable that A. Boeckh's Antigone in Greek and German was published in 1842.

3 Monk's Life of Dr. Parr.

and one of Dr. Valpy's auditors at Reading (1810) was young Talfourd, afterwards Serjeant Talfourd, who, in the Dedication to his tragedy of Ion, gracefully acknowledges the stimulus he had then received.

The countrymen of Corneille and Racine have not been insensible to the acting possibilities of Greek tragedy. An adaptation of the Antigone by Messieurs Auguste Vacquerie and Paul Meurice was acted in Paris at the Odéon (as I have been told by Mr. Swinburne) in May 1844. And a rhymed version of the Oedipus Tyrannus, by the late M. La Croix, has been repeatedly mounted at the Théâtre Français (first in 1858), no less distinguished actors than Geoffroy, in 1861, and Mounet-Sully, in 1881-1890, having assumed the title-rôle; and at least one considerable actress Mdlle. Lerou, is known first to have made her mark in the part of Jocasta. Les Erinnyes, a successful play of Leconte de Lisle, repeatedly produced at the Odéon, is in effect a spirited rhymed version of the most dramatic parts of the Agamemnon and the Choëphoroe.

The year 1873 saw the unconscious beginning of a series of similar attempts in Great Britain. The late Professor Fleeming Jenkin,' whose private stage in his house at 3 Great Stuart Street was for

1 Papers and Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, by R. L. Stevenson ; Memoir, pp. 126, 127.

many years a centre of intellectual life in Edinburgh, produced in that year, with the help of his dramatic friends, the principal scenes from the Frogs of Aristophanes in Hookham Frere's translation.1 On the same stage, in the spring of 1877, under Professor Jenkin's management, a recently-published version of the Trachiniae of Sophocles was performed, the part of Deianira being played by Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin. This gave so much pleasure that it was again brought out with good effect in the Town Hall, St. Andrews, in the autumn of the same year. The Professor's well-known dramatic enthusiasm warmed more over this than any of his previous undertakings, and on the appearance of Browning's Agamemnon he wrote an article in which the glow of that enthusiasm was clearly reflected. This was published in the Edinburgh Review for 1878, and has since been reprinted amongst his collected papers. In concluding it he says: "One object of this article has been to draw attention to the extraordinary merits of some Greek plays as dramas fit for representation on the stage."

He had a practical aim in view when he wrote thus of the Agamemnon, and less than two years subsequently, after long and anxious preparation, some six hundred of his friends witnessed on the

1 Papers and Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, by R. L. Stevenson vol. i. pp. 35-44. 2 Vol. i. pp. 3-34.

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