THE SHAPE OF GREEK TRAGEDY

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21436, 30 March 1935, Page 15

THE SHAPE OF GREEK TRAGEDY

An address delivered by Mr L. H. G. Green'.vood, Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to tho Classical Association, at Canterbury College, on Thursday evening. I. 1. Many titles mislead: and the original title of this paper* may suggest something which it is not meant to suggest. Its subject is Greek tragedy, and not modern religious worship. I hope to use what we know about modern religious worship to help our understanding of Greek tragedy, and not vice versa. And I wish, at the outset, to stress the word worship. "Religious worship," not "religion," nor "religious belief," We are to consider rather the outward form than the inward content of religion as we know it to-day. And the same is true of what is, as I have said, my real subject. I will i not attempt any general account of I Greek tragedy. lam concerned with I one aspect of it only, its outward I form. We have, preserved to us i through 23 centuries and more, some '3O specimens of it, all by one or other of the three great masters of tragic poetry. That is to say, the words of these plays have been preserved. We know less than we could wish, to be sure, of other things upon which the total effect of an ancient tragedy depended: the buildings and scenery, the dresses, the gestures, the dancing, the music, and much besides. Still, even of these things we know something and can safely guess more; we have the words, and may claim to understand their meaning fairly well; putting all together, j we may say that we know what the i form of a Greek tragedy was. That this form is interesting and beautiful, most of those who have been able to make its acquaintance are disposed to agree. But it is also a strange form. It does and must appear strange to those who have read modern plays, and seen modern plays : performed, and then come to 1 read Greek tragedies, whether lin Greek or in English, and even, ! with luck, to see Greek tragedies j performed. The feeling of strangei ness wears off. like other things, with time and familiarity, to a great extent; but it seldom wears off completely. We may cease to wonder that an old Greek play is so unlike a modern play; we never quite cease to wonder that an old Greek play is what it is. 2. Even a single reading of a single tragedy in an English rendering brings out the chief peculiarities !of it clearly enough. Often there ! are two speaking actors only on the stage at once; never more than four at once, and very seldom more than three. They come and go on the stage; but below the stage is the orchestra or dancing-floor, where a chorus of 15 similar persons, having once entered, very early in the play, remains (with rare exceptions) till the play is done, watching and hearing what is done on the stage above them, taking some slight part in the action of the various scenes, and between one scene and the next singing a lyric ode, which is sometimes short, but often very long. All that is spoken and sung, by actors and by chorus, is in verse; no word of prose is allowed; and apart from this, the style of speech is highly poetical, far removed from the style of even the most formal and exalted prose. Long set speeches, without the smallest interruption by other speakers, are common. Equally common are dialogues in which each speaker has one line at a time, neither more nor less, for 30 or 40 lines together. Before the spectators' eyes, hardly anything happens, of a purely physical kind. Scenes of violence are in general forbidden; the battles, or murders, or suicides, that are often part of the storv, occur off stage, and are merely reported, again in long continuous speeches, by messengers. What-we hear spoken on the stage is mainly the thoughts and emotions of the characters about what has happened, or about what will 01

may happen. All this we learn from the written text of the plays, and much more besides that seems odd to modern taste. When we learn in addition, from other sources, that all the actors wore masks, so that facial expression could have been no part of the acting; that their costumes and high buskins must have made all their bodily movements large and slow, and prevented the small quick ones that are frequent in modern plays; that the same actor would take as many as four or five parts successively in a single play—we see that tragedy was a highly formal and stylised affair; that it did not even attempt to reproduce, as exactly as possible, to the eye or to the ear. the events represented, or to create in the audience any sort of illusion. Illusion is. roughly speaking, the aim of the modern playwright and producer; and illusion was, though less completely, the aim of Shakespeare and contemporaries. But Greek tragedy offered symbolism rather than illusion; its actors represented, rather than fully impersonated, the characters of the story. The Greek audience had to use its imagination to an extent never required of a modern audience in a modern theatre. One would not indeed suppose that seeing a Greek play performed made the facts of the story much clearer, or excited the appropriate emotions much more strongly than would have been done by simply hearing it. recited by a competent recitei, in the manner in which epic poems, like the Iliad and Odyssey, commonly were recited.

3. The method of representation, then, was symbolical suggestion, not realistic illusion. It may well seem a strange method to us to-day, whether we do or do not, upon consideration, approve it. And hardly, ■ L at all, less strange is the fixed and regular uniformity with which, in play after play, the method is employed. Suppose a person, quite unfamiliar with Greek tragedy before, to read six or seven tragedies in succession. He will be apt to feel, having done this, that any one of them is just like any other. Ido not mean that they are alike in content, in the mental and moral attitude, towards human life, character, and destiny, expressed or implied by actors and chorus in what they st'v or do. Such resemblance we do also find: but what lam thinking oi now is the resemblance of outward form. This resemblance is not absolute. There are many minor variations of detail; indeed, no two plays, out of all our 30, are exactly alike in form. But this very absence of exact likeness makes the great likeness that we do find seem the more remarkable. Always some very long speeches; always -some passages of one-line dialogue; always lyric odes by the chorus at roughly similar intervals; always the chorus present and aware of all that is said on the stage, however inconvenient their presence may be, and however (from the realistic point of view) unnatural and improbable; always the actors confined to the stage and the chorus confined to the orchestra, however much the run of the story may call for some other disposition; always some lyric solo, always some messenger's speech—l will not continue the catalogue of formal features that we always find, nor begin another catalogue of other features found nearly always. It all comes to this—that the shape and form of a Greek tragedy may lairlv be described as ritual. 4. For all of us, I suppose, the primary associations of the word ritual are religious. Ritual is not, indeed, confined to religious worship. It is found in the proceedings of Parliament, of debating societies, of most forms of public meeting. It is found, in a high degree, at a fashnable dinner-party. It is certainly not absent from a cricket match. Life in the army and navy is framed r and controlled by a ritual of the most elaborate kind. But just as the word is chiefly used, so the thing itself is conspicuously found, in communal religious life. We all know what is meant by calling a man a ritualist, and his practice ritualism. No form of Christian worship is free from ritual. It is perhaps neither possible nor desirable that it should be; in any case, it is not. The ritual of one religious body diifers from that of another in being more or less complex, more or less rigid, more or less compulsory; but all of them—even that of a Quaker meeting—are complex, rigid, and compulsory in some degree. Within a certain fixed framework, we find different degrees of freedom from any one occasion, and different degrees of variability as between one occasion and another. But a fixed framework of some kind there always is. This framework is in the main, and usually, the gradually evolved product of time and tradition; and this is so whether, at any given time and in any given body, the authority for its observance is the ordinances of a great hierarchy, as in the Roman and Anglican churches, or the spontaneous will of a particular congregation, as in a gathering of Plymouth Brethren or a meeting of the Society of Friends. Just such a framework of ritual controlled the composition and production of an ancient Greek tragedy. The modern drama, for good or evil, is perfectly free. It lias conventions; but these conventions are matters of convenience, not of propriety; so far as they are imposed, they are imposed by necessity, not by tradition or authority or public opinion; the playwright dispenses with some or all of them, if, and so far as, he can and will. But, for good or evil, Greek tragedy was not free. How far the restrictions that bound it could have been broken through by a poet who chose to break through them is an interesting and important question, to which, unhappily, no sure answer can be given. We hardly know at all by what agency, or with how much difficulty, changes in tragic ritual were effected. One has the impression that even slight changes were not made easily; that public authority, and public opinion, were conservative; that the would-be innovator had to exercise much caution, and much ingenuity, and even so might fail to win public approval for his innovations. Greek audiences were as critical of their poets, in ritual matters, as Christian congregations are critical of their ministers. Within narrow limits, there was complete freedom. Outside those limits, there was almost no freedom at all. (To be concluded.)