CHAPTER VIII

DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION-TRILOGIESDRAMAS OF RECONCILIATION-SATYRIC PLAYS1

ARISTOTLE has made the somewhat obvious remark that a tragic action must have a beginning, middle, and end. A truth which is scarcely less obvious, but sometimes ignored, is that the tragic poet aims not merely at a series of vivid effects, but at a grand totality of impression. This is true in the main even of Euripides, though he is too often led aside by the interest of some incidental situation or by his own genius for graphic description, or by the desire to create surprise through an unexpected diversion or strange catastrophe. Still, the action of every Greek drama may be traced through five stages, corresponding to the five acts of a modern play: (1) the start, (2) the rise, (3) the height, (4) the change, (5) the close. One of the dramatist's

1 Books to consult : Aristotle's Poetics; Sophocles in Green's “Classical Writers" (Macmillan and Co.); Art. “Drama” in Ency. Brit.; Moulton's Ancient Drama; Jonson's Discoveries.

chief difficulties is to sustain the interest through the fourth act, while reserving "a trot for the avenue," as Sir Walter Scott puts it. Euripides takes occasion by means of a second turn, or peripeteia, to "pile up the agony" still higher.

All

Not much of subtilty is apparent in the progress of an Aeschylean play. All is "straight hitting from the shoulder," to borrow an art-critic's phrase. The characters are introduced; they speak their sentiments frankly and without reserve, unless there is a motive for dissimulation patent to the spectators (as in Clytemnestra's reception of Agamemnon, or Orestes' speech to Clytemnestra in the Choëphoroe), in which case they dissemble strongly and unhesitatingly. have much the same largeness of utterance and grandiloquence of tone. Yet with what a sweep and impetus, when the poet so wills it, does the action move, carrying along with it in one broad current the emotions of the chief persons, of the Chorus, and of the auditory! Take, for example, the Persae, one of the simplest in construction of all dramas. At the opening all the persons are in suspense, and the anxiety is intensified by the recital of Atossa's dream. The Elders have partly succeeded in calming her fears and suppressing their own, when the Messenger arrives, and suddenly, without preface, announces the

whole extent of the calamity.1 At this point we are not one fourth part through the play, and the reader naturally asks himself, how is tragic interest after this to be maintained? It is maintained most simply, yet most effectively, by what Sainte-Beuve has called the Epic of Salamis, which is not merely a drama within the drama (having a climax and consummation of its own), but the most vital part of the drama itself, because every successive onset of disaster, as it is freshly told, falls with an immediate crushing effect on the queen-mother and on the Persians who are there. When the narrative ends, the peripeteia, or turn of fortune, has already taken place. In modern phraseology, the curtain has fallen upon the third act. After so tremendous an impression, how is interest to be further maintained (as we should say) through the fourth act? We shall see. The poet is not yet at the end of his resources. Transgression and retribution are not yet full. Narrative has run its course, but there is still room for prophecy. For though Salamis is over, Plataea is to come. In order to quench the last struggling rays of hope and give completeness to calamity, Aeschylus resorts to the expedient of raising the spirit of Darius and

1 Sophocles would have followed Herodotus, according to whom the tidings of the taking of Athens had reached Susa before the report of the defeat at Salamis.-Her. viii. 54.

bringing the dead monarch upon the scene.

The introduction of this incident at the particular juncture where it occurs, and in relation to existing beliefs about the state of the dead, must have been a stupendous coup de théâtre. Darius reads the lesson of the situation and predicts the extermination of the army left in Hellas, then sinks again beneath the ground. Atossa, with a mother's weakness, goes to fetch the best apparel for Xerxes, whose actual return, in rags and humiliation, and his melancholy responses to the sad reproaches of the Elders, add a touch of milder pathos to the exodos (or fifth act) of the play.

The

This

Plain and straightforward as the action is, of which a sketch in outline is here given, the reader will have observed that it is notwithstanding rich in organic structure, climax, gradation. anapaestic parodos (which is also the prologos) is immediately followed by an ode, recalling in magnificent strains the going forth of the great army, for whose return all in Asia are longing. is followed by the entrance of Atossa, which forms part of the first epeisodion, but really contributes to the exposition or groundwork of the drama, the exaltation of interest attending on Atossa's dream being expressed in a trochaic dialogue. The scene, when so far heightened, is broken in upon by the coming of the Messenger, whose brief announcements are met with short lyrical outbursts

on the part of the Chorus (giving a commatic effect). Then the interview between Atossa and the Messenger is continued for two hundred and twenty-five lines, and followed by a remark of the Chorus-leader and speech of Atossa to him, with which the long scene terminates. The interest has now culminated. The first stasimon which follows this (and which comes like that in the Oedipus Coloneus at the centre of the play) expresses the feeling of the Elders at the ruin of the host. Atossa's second entrance is contrasted with the first. Then she was mounted upon a car, and gorgeously arrayed; now she comes unadorned upon foot, with offerings for the dead. Her speech of twenty-four lines is hardly enough to count for an epeisodion, and therefore the choric strain which follows it, and is really part of the scene, should not be regarded as a stasimon (dividing scene from scene), but should rather be classed with those appeals to divine powers, accompanied with special gestures, which do not interrupt the action but are continuous with it. (See especially Soph. Electra, 1384-1397; Oed. Col. 1556-1578. Supra, Chap. VII. hyporchema). The excitement caused by the appearance of Darius is marked by a recurrence to the long trochaic measure. His disappearance and the exit of Atossa are followed by the second stasimon, and this by the (anapaestic) entrance of

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