III. 97.

TRAGEDY, COMEDY, MIMES

Although tragedy resembles this epic poetry, it differs in rarely introducing persons of the lower classes, such as messengers, merchants, sailors, and the like. Comedies, on the other hand, never admit kings, save in such a rare instance as the Amphitryon of Plautus. I would limit this generalization of course to those plays which employ Greek characters and the Greek dress, for the Romans have admitted at will the dignified toga and trabea. The wanton characters of the satyric plays are drinking, joking, jolly, sarcastic fellows. The mime employs cloth-fullers, shoemakers, butchers, poulterers, fish-dealers, and market-gardeners. Such characters, indeed, were admitted in the Old Comedy, as well, for the subject-matter of the Old Comedy was not very different from that of the mimes, and the difference between the two forms was largely in the division into acts, and the introduction of the chorus. Tragedy and comedy are alike in mode of representation, but differ in subject-matter and treatment (ordo). The matters of tragedy are great and terrible, as commands of kings, slaughters, despair, suicides, exiles, bereavements, parricides, incests, conflagrations, battles, the putting out of eyes, weeping, wailing, bewailing, funerals, eulogies, and dirges. In comedy we have jests, reveling, weddings with drunken carousals, tricks played by slaves, drunkenness, old men deceived and cheated of their money. To satyric plays belong dancing, banquets, potations, and biting raillery; to mimes, plebeian, ignoble trafficking, frauds, rustic pranks, drawling speeches, panderings, jokes, jests, deceits. The performances of the satyrs, at the close as at the beginning, are impudent, capricious, unexpected, varied, and inco

herent. The action of the mimes is abrupt; thus if one character leave the stage, all the rest leave too, even though not much of a situation has been worked out. The characters run and skip about, they rail at one another, they are lazy and silly. Parodies imitate, but so imitate as to subvert that which is serious, and give a thought an unexpected turn. Thus, to cite an example, Euripides says, ‘Jusjurandum si violandum est bibendi causa; caeteris rebus Tieîv colas (A violated oath is cause for drinking; see to it that you cultivate your drinking on other grounds).' Cicero parodied the passage as follows: 'Regnandi causa et pietatem colas (To rule, cultivate piety).' He thus plays upon words in pieta and muîv, and subverts the sense.

Now a tragedy, provided it is a genuine tragedy, is altogether serious, but there have been some satyrical plays which differed little from comedies save in the gravity of some of the characters. We have an illustration in the Cyclops of Euripides, where all is wine and jesting, and where the outcome is so happy that all the companions of Ulysses are released, and the Cyclops alone suffers in the loss of his eye. The conclusion of this play was not unlike that of a mime, for the stage was wholly deserted on the exit of Ulysses, the giant with the rock alone remaining. There are, on the other hand, many comedies which end unhappily for some of the characters. Such are The Braggart Captain, The Persian, and the Asinaria of Plautus. So too, there are not a few tragedies which end happily. Thus in the Electra of Euripides, except for the slaughter of Aegisthus, joy came to many. In the Ion and the Helen the outcome was happy. Again, though The Eumenides of Aeschylus contains tragic events, for example slaughters and furies, its treatment is more like that of comedy. The opening part is gratifying to the guard, and disturbing to Clytemnestra because of the arrival of her husband; then comes the murder, which makes Electra and Orestes happy; and then succeeds the dénouement, which brings happi

ness to all-Apollo, Orestes, the people, Pallas, and the Eumenides. Hence it is by no means true, as has hitherto been taught, that an unhappy issue is essential to tragedy. It is enough that the play contain horrible events.

When authors take their plots from history, they must be careful not to depart too widely from the records. In the early writers such care was by no means taken. Thus Aeschylus followed Greek history in binding Prometheus to the rock, but he invented the fiction of his undoing by the thunderbolt, for tragic effect. There should be no dire event at the end, but only at the beginning, where he is bound to Caucasus. However, some have it that the eagle was driven away by Hercules; others that he killed it with his arrows; and still others that Prometheus was set free by Jupiter himself, because he had warned the god not to cohabit with Thetis, lest she should bear him a son more illustrious than the father. Euripides invented stories about Helen which were utterly contrary to well-known history. The same author has been censured for bringing wicked and impure women into his plays. What is viler, the critic says, than Phaedra, Jocasta, Canace, and Pasiphae, by whose infamy society is corrupted? But we reply that these women were not creatures of his imagination, but were taken from life. Forsooth, if we are to hear of no wickedness, history must be done away with. So those comedies should be prized which make us condemn the vices which they bring to our ears, especially when the life of impure women ends in an unhappy death.

When a sentiment has two modes of expression, the tragedy throughout is to rest upon each, for together they constitute, as it were, a sustaining column or pillar for the entire structure. A sentiment may be put simply and definitely, as when we say, 'Death makes the good happy,' or it may be expressed figuratively at greater length, as when the above sentiment is thus expressed: 'Be not willing to think of good men as perishing, whose souls, per se immortal,

take their flight from out these miseries to those seats whence they had departed.' A sentiment may also be relieved of its plainness by being put into the mouth of some person; thus Socrates is made to speak in the Apology and in the Phaedo.

The events themselves should be made to have such sequence and arrangement as to approach as near as possible to truth, for the play is not acted solely to strike the spectator with admiration or consternation—a fault of which, according to the critics, Aeschylus was often guiltybut should also teach, move, and please. We are pleased either with jests, as in comedy, or with things serious, if rightly ordered. Disregard of truth is hateful to almost every man. Therefore, neither those battles or sieges at Thebes which are fought through in two hours please me, nor do I take it to be the part of a discreet poet to pass from Delphi to Athens, or from Athens to Thebes, in a moment of time. Thus, Aeschylus has Agamemnon killed and buried so suddenly that the actor has scarcely time to breathe. Nor is the casting of Lichas into the sea by Hercules to be approved, for it cannot be represented without doing violence to truth.

The content of a play should be as concise as possible, yet also as varied and manifold as possible; for example, Hecuba in Thrace, Achilles forbidding her return, Polydorus already killed, the murder of Polyxena, and the blinding of Polymnestor. Since dead persons cannot be introduced, their apparitions, or ghosts, or spectres, are substituted. Thus, as noted above, Aeschylus introduces the apparitions of Polydorus and Darius, and in Ovid, Ceÿx appears to Alcyone. If a tragedy is to be composed from this last story, it should not begin with the departure of Ceÿx, for as the whole time for stage-representation is only six or eight hours, it is not true to life to have a storm arise, and the ship founder, in a part of the sea from which no land is visible. Let the first act be a passionate lamentation, the

chorus to follow with execrations of sea life; the second act, a priest with votive offerings conversing with Alcyone and her nurse, altars, fire, pious sentiments, the chorus following with approbation of the vows; the third act, a messenger announcing the rising of a storm, together with rumors as to the ship, the chorus to follow with mention of shipwrecks, and much apostrophizing of Neptune; the fourth act tumultuous, the report found true, shipwrecks described by sailors and merchants, the chorus bewailing the event as though all were lost; the fifth act, Alcyone peering anxiously over the sea and sighting far off a corpse, followed by the resolution, when she was about to take her own life. This sample outline can be expanded by the introduction of other characters.

The greatest of care should be exercised in the choice of a title, for it ought to be derived from the most conspicuous event, or the person most conspicuous in rank or suffering, or who figures most prominently in the plot as a whole. Thus the Hecuba of Euripides is so called because Hecuba is everywhere in evidence from beginning to end. But since the issue of tragedy should be unhappy, and Hecuba is a tragedy, Hecuba ought to have been made more miserable at the end than at the beginning; this is certainly not done, for the end furnishes some scant relief to her misery. Then too, Seneca's The Trojan Women is not rightly named, for there is nothing about Troy in it. Nor have the poets been happy in naming their plays after choruses; for why the name The Phoenician Women, when the play was devoted to so great a slaughter of Theban men? Especially why does the poet go so far afield for a title, for the women were Thebans, and not Phoenicians? So too the title The Trachinian Women is bad, for what had the women to do with the burial of Hercules? Certainly no grave mishap befell the Trachinian women. Euripides found a happier name than this of Sophocles in Hercules of Oeta, and better still was the title The Seven Against Thebes, used by Aeschylus.