HOW GREEK DRAMA BEGAN

Otago Witness, Issue 3085, 30 April 1913, Page 79

HOW GREEK DRAMA BEGAN

By Jessie Mackay

1 It is to Greece that the world turns for the first conception of the drama. Deep in cultured speech, as it relates to histrionic art, are embedded the old Attic words we now write, “tragedy,” “comedy,” and the like, each eniolding memories of half iuiantine belief and custom reaching back inferentially three thousand years ago, and certainly long preceding that golden age of Greek art which illumined old Hellas five centuries before our era. These dim conceptions have formed the ground of many a pretentious volume, and have been lately summed up briefly in a little manual by Lionel D. Barnett, M.A., of Cambridge. Mr Barnett, of course, recognises the inseparable connection between the germ of the drama and the rude Nature-wor-ship at the root of all myths, as well as those of Hellas. The first banding together of men in a rhapsody of imitative motion was the tribal ecstasy which has been called “ sympathetic magic,” being a show to influence the desired actions of the gods on _ their behalf. In the days when man invented artless un-moral tales about the gods, whom he believed creatures more powerful but scarcely higher than himself, ethically speaking, these beings were believed peculiarly open to the suggestion Or the spell of orgiastic mummery or roughlyacted prayer. The sun, the eartn,. the > water —the dimply apprehended sources of physical sustenance and deliverance from the terrors of night—all these forces, personified to the child-like mind of primitive man, had to he encouraged, con-

strained, to do their part bounteously, by an imitative frenzy of joyous "worship. r How far back was it when the rapture of wine was first found to supply the flagging energy of the worshippers, whose ecstasy was thus to move the gods on their behalf? None can tell; but it was, we learn, the joy and fury of Bacchantic worship that formed the foundation of that stately edifice of art, the Greek drama. A wild and rustic thing it was, this dance-play of rude Thracian peasants, back in days older than Troy; yet from it is traced the line that ended in the refined art of Sophocles and the sublime tragedy of ASechylus. There has been much confusion of thought about Bacchus, whose name was imposed in later ages, with all the gross and grotesque elements it typified, upon the once loftier character and beneficent attributes of Dionysos, the true wine-god of Hellenic worship. Dionysos, the ancient Nature-god of Thrace—some say of India, —who personified the beneficent life-]Knver of vegetation, is not portrayed in Greek art as the reeling, red-faced Bacchus of later days, but as a stately, reflective, and well-favoured person. True, his worship was from earliest time associated with seasons of frenzy, when his wild priestesses, the Mcenads, roamed the northern valleys of Greece with strange dances and mystic rites which no man might behold and live. But there u-> reason to believe that Dionysos was not a wine-god at the first, and it was only as the stimulation of alcohol came to be universally relied on to produce that rapture which the gods desired to see in man that his character became narrowed ' and degraded to that conception, and the calm beneficence of his earlier tradition was changed for the license and folly of later days. But it was round Dionysos that there grew up the first play-acting of Greece, perhaps of Europe. It was a taking of the parts of those troll-like Nature-spirits supposed to accompany Dionvsos on his beneficent journeys as the god of vegetable growth. To encourage these kindly beings, primitive man offered them the rude but hearty compliment of rustic imitation. The idea of solemnity we attach to worship was unknown to these merry mummers, who demand their gods pleased with the same uncouth gestures and gross pleasantries that accompanied their own harvest homes and seasons of jollity. The clowns of old Greece doubtless were much nearer to the worshipful company of Bottom, Snout, Starveling, and the* rest of Shakespeare's rustic creations in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” than we, with our preconceived ideas of Greek art and dignity, are able readily to realise. These woodsprites, known in oldest Hellenic story as the Silenoi, were roughly presented with the greatest grotesquorie. They appear on old reliefs, as bald-headed, snub-nosed, and wearing horses’ ears and tails. Another group of uncouth Nature-spirits, which were originally not connected with Dionysos or the country of Thrace, were the S a tyros or Tragos, the goat-footed and coarsely-jovial companions of the Arcadian shepherds. The “great god Pan” was the chief of these homely divinities. From these wassailing, goat-footed Tragoi, the attendants of the ancient hero, Adrastos, came the name and the institution of the “tragic” chorus, which was a company of country mummers in goatskins to represent those grotesque beings of the woods. By the middle of the sixth century b.c. those mummers had made their way from rustic Arcadia to cultured Attica, and were transferred from the service of Adrastos to that of Dionysos, who was already firmly entrenched among the Hellenic gods. The village dance and song of invocation addressed to the Nature-spirits of growth had retained only a semi-religious character. The features of the archaic mummery were changing into those of drama, one might almost say of opera. The wild song and dance were now transformed into the choral lyric, and the rough jests interspersed in the early ritual were changing into set speeches, in keeping with the more ordered motions of the performers. The primeval imitative folkdisplay to impress the stolid gods was now a performance addressed to a very human and responsive audience. From this old orgiastic Nature-worship,

then, two distinct orders of performance had now taken their rise. One was the old comedy of Athens, with its essential chorus, and the other was the satyr-play of Attica, developing into the tragedy. About the beginning of the seventh century b.c. a great innovation was made in the shape of the strophe and the antistrophe, these being the singing of a certain poem by one part of the company while the remainder answered with another song in the same metre. There was now a clear, distinction between the graver tragoidia or tragedy, once the rough Doric clown-farce or satyrikon, and the lighter komoidia, or comedy, once the. Attic chorus (komoi), in fanciful dresses and playing set human parts. (To be concluded.)