Ancient Tragedy Research Articles

The Rebirth of Tragedy: Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of Cuchulain

The Rebirth of Tragedy:Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of Cuchulain Michael Valdez Moses (bio) I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons; State and Nation are the work of intellect, and when you consider what comes before and after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet. —W. B. Yeats, 1937 I Nearly all theorists of drama from G. W. F. Hegel to the present assume that the advent of modernity increasingly renders classical forms of tragedy aesthetically moribund and politically irrelevant. According to this historicist view, the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles survive, but only as historical artifacts within the culture museum of modernity. They may inspire modern thinkers and artists, but their forms, themes, and contexts cannot be revived except as an exercise in antiquarianism. Friedrich Nietzsche and W. B. Yeats provide striking, if rare instances of the critic and dramatist who refused to accept the historicist premises underlying the modern view of Attic tragedy. Nietzsche, no less than Hegel, regards the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles as antithetical to many of the values and institutions of European modernity, but for that very reason, [End Page 561] in his The Birth of Tragedy, he looks to the modern operas of Richard Wagner as both marking a genuine rebirth of the spirit of classical tragedy and heralding a revolutionary antimodern turn in the cultural history of modern Europe. Yeats, whose dramatic and critical works were influenced by Nietzsche, attempted, in no less hubristic a manner, to effect a rebirth of premodern, ritualized, and aristocratic tragedy within the apparently uncongenial confines of contemportary Irish politics. What Yeats found so attractive in Nietzsche was a shared hostility, even repugnance, to what both men considered the defining features of European modernity, and a common conviction that the forces of modernization might be resisted by bringing about a cultural rebirth of the spirit of ancient tragic drama. Yeats's drama and theatre criticism thus represent a sustained effort, a lá Nietzsche, to resist the notion that aristocratic tragedy and ritual theater are historically irrecoverable. Yeats saw his efforts to assist in the rebirth of ancient tragedy as an essential part of a militant cultural and political program to free modern Ireland from imperial British rule. Yeats's literary midwifery aimed to establish a free and independent Irish nation that would offer a counterweight to the forces of (English or British imperial) modernity. Though nationalism itself might be said to be a distinctively modern ideology, Yeats hoped to cultivate an independent Irish nation on nominally premodern or non-modern grounds. As the twentieth century wore on, however, Yeats grew increasingly disenchanted with the actual Irish Free State that emerged after 1921 and with the forms of Irish nationalism that predominated in the 1920s and 1930s. Oddly, his disappointment did not lead him to abandon, but rather to intensify his efforts to promote an "anachronistic" form of dramatic tragedy, which he imagined would serve as a kind of cultural counterweight to the increasingly modernizing Irish nation-state that came into existence after formal independence. Yeats's continuing efforts to create a ritualistic, heroic, cultic, and antidemocratic form of dramatic tragedy from 1916 onwards represented his vigorous attempt to cultivate an "alternative" form of Irish modernity that was as much at odds with the British imperialism (and English culture) as it was with the predominant and increasingly official strains of modern Irish nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s. As a founding member of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, and later a leading dramatist, co-director, manager, and polemicist for the Irish National Theatre Society (founded in 1902 and better known after 1904 as the Abbey Theatre), Yeats looked to an "ancient" form of tragic verse drama to play a leading, even decisive role in revivifying and remaking Irish national culture at a time when prospects for Irish Home Rule, to say nothing of Irish national independence, were bleak. But despite his dominant position in the Abbey Theatre in its early years, Yeats ultimately found that his own heroic verse...

What Oedipus Did When He Married Jocasta or What Ancient Tragedy Tells Us About Agents, Their Actions, and the World

What Oedipus Did When He Married Jocasta or What Ancient Tragedy Tells Us About Agents, Their Actions, and the World

What Oedipus Did When He Married Jocasta or What Ancient Tragedy Tells Us About Agents, Their Actions, and the World

In the first part of this paper, it is shown in what a conspicuous way the story of Oedipus illustrates a central feature of human agency, namely, that any action may turn out to be of quite another nature than it was thought, or intended, to be. The story of Oedipus provides further insight on comparing ancient and modern man's outlook on agents, their actions, and the world. It emerges that we moderns are lacking an adequate conceptual scheme for an understanding of human agency that lives up to the demands of an enlightened picture of the world. This problem should be one of the central topics of a philosophical theory of action, rather than the misguided questions, e.g. about the causal nature of reasons for action that are usually treated there. Accordingly the sketch of a critique of action theory is being offered.

Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy

Modern readings of ancient Athenian drama tend to view it as a presentation of social or moral problems, as if ancient drama showed the same realism seen on the present-day stage. Such views are belied by the plays themselves, in which supremely violent actions occur in a legendary time and place distinct both from reality and from the ethics of ordinary life. Offering fresh readings of Attic tragedy, Anne Pippin Burnett urges readers to peel away twentieth-century attitudes toward vengeance and reconsider the revenge tragedies of ancient Athens in their own context. After a consideration of how our view of Elizabethan drama has obscured an accurate view of the ancient tragedies, Burnett reviews early Greek notions of vengeance as expressed in the Odyssey, Heracles' tales, Pindar's odes, Attic judicial processes, and the legend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Then, setting aside post-Platonic and Judeo-Christian notions of criminality, she provides new interpretations of all the Attic tragedies in which revenge is a central theme: Aeschylus' Libation Bearers, Sophocles' Ajax, Electra, and Tereus, and Euripides' Children of Heracles, Hecuba, Medea, Electra, and Orestes. Burnett shows that for the ancients, revenge meant a redress of imbalances in both human and divine worlds, achieved through human actions. The vengeful heroines thus appear in a new light. Electra, Hecuba, Medea, and others cease to be the picture of depravity in dramas that are grotesque and sensational, and are instead representative human figures who respond with grandeur to the outsize demands of necessity and supernatural powers.

Medea and British Legislation Before The First World War

Euripides' Medea has penetrated to parts of modernity most mythical figures have not reached. Since she first rolled off the printing presses half a millennium ago, she has inspired hundreds of performances, plays, paintings, and operas. Medea has murdered her way into a privileged place in the history of the imagination of the West, and can today command huge audiences in the commercial theatre. Yet in Britain, at least, her popularity on the stage is a relatively recent phenomenon. Medea has transcended history partly because she enacts a primal terror universal to human beings: that the motherfigure shouldintentionallydestroy her own children. Yet this dimension of the ancient tragedy was until the twentieth century found so disturbing as largely to prevent unadapted performances. On the British stage it was not until 1907 that Euripides'Medeawas performed, without alteration, in English translation.

Racine Redux?: The Operatic Afterlife of Phèdre

Racine Redux?: The Operatic Afterlife οι Phèdre Downing Thomas IMAGINE PHÈDRE AS OPERA. The idea is only slightly less ludicrous, or scandalous, now than it was in 1733, the year of the premiere of Hippolyte et Aricie, the first tragédie en musique by fifty-year-old newcomer Jean-Philippe Rameau and his aging librettist, the abbé Simon Joseph Pellegrin. Yet Racine was no stranger to opera.1 Marc Fumaroli has argued that with Phèdre Racine simultaneously staged the apocalypse of classical tragedy "pour dénoncer le théâtre comme parole criminelle," and definitively rejected the temptation of opera. The latter makes its fleeting appearance in the failed idyll of Hippolyte and Aricie with its pastoral atmosphere and implicit references to Tasso's Aminta, an idyll that vanishes like a mirage at the end of the play within "le récit de Théramène, dont l'oraison funèbre d'Hippolyte est un admirable tableau d'opéra à machines" (Fumaroli, 516). One only has to recall Hippolyte's melodious, lyrical alexandrines: "Présente, je vous fuis, absente, je vous trouve;/Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit;/La lumière du jour, les ombres de la nuit,/Tout retrace à mes yeux les charmes que j'évite;/Tout vous livre à l'envie le rebelle Hippolyte" (2.2.54246 ). Racine was never closer to opera. In the end, though, Théramène 's speech sublimely exorcizes the monstrosity of the operatic spectacle through the figure of the "Indomptable taureau, dragon impétueux," which slaughters Hippolyte (5.6.1498-1593). Fumaroli concludes that Phèdre represents "[Ie] jugement demier du théâtre sur le théâtre" (517). If Phèdre can be read as a final statement, a gesture of confession toward a past at Port-Royal and an ingenious mise-en-abîme of operatic spectacle in all its excess, then Hippolyte et Aricie, as Rameau 's first opera, might be read as a response to Racine and a commentary on the situation of the lyric theater in the wake of classical tragedy. Racine had used the specter of opera in Phèdre to define tragedy against its lyric rival, as he had earlier in the preface to Iphigénie. I want to examine what was at stake for Rameau, Pellegrin, and their public in revisiting Racine's tragedy in 1733. I will argue that Rameau 's work could only succeed by simultaneously embodying and erasing Phèdre, and even tragedy itself. From its beginnings in the early 1670s with Lully and Quinault, the 82 Summer 1998 Thomas tragédie en musique was seen by critics as the other of classical tragedy, an object of intense promise and idealization for some, a vehicle of moral danger and aesthetic min for others. On the one hand, as a fantasmatic version of ancient tragedy, the "reinvention" of opera held out the promise of resuscitating the mythical presence of Greek theater while correcting its faults. ClaudeFran çois de Ménestrier's description of the music of the ancients, for example , published in 1681, bears an uncanny resemblance to Lully's and Quinault's operas, as if the tragédie en musique had simultaneously reincarnated ancient tragedy and superseded it.2 Similarly, by 1715, l'abbé Terrasson considered that opera had perfected ancient tragedy and remarked that it made both tragedy and epic obsolete.3 On the other hand, many saw the operatic spectacle and its music as vacuous , sensual pleasure with no rational underpinning—the perverted twin of classical tragedy. Concerned with the lyric theater's lack of adequate theorization , Antoine-Louis LeBrun observed that "la Tragédie a pour son objet la terreur & la compassion; la Comedie a pour le sien l'instruction, & la réforme des moeurs: mais on ne sçauroit dire précisément quel est celui de l'Opéra."4 For Saint-Évremond, more starkly, opera had abandoned the mimetic foundation of art. Like many others, he accused opera of being the principal force behind the decline of tragedy.5 Opera's perceived aesthetic monstrosity was echoed by many commentators who spoke of its generic deformity and irregularity . André Dacier, for example, termed operas "les grotesques...

The Barbarous Ancients: French Classical Poetics and the Attack on Ancient Tragedy

L'A. revient sur les textes des poeticiens du XVII e siecle qu'il analyse, et montre comment ils attaquaient les modeles grecs anciens, leurs reflexions critiques se faisant autour de trois problematiques relatives respectivement: au fait que l'intrigue repose sur les actes d'un personnage de haut rang devoye; aux problemes de l'emotion provoquee dans le public; et a la question de l'aspect moral et didactique de la tragedie

Greek tragedy in modern times: Cacoyannis, Pasolini—and Enoch Powell

The conviction with which Aristotelian (and Aristophanic) judgements of Attic tragedy are promoted over reconstruction of “the tragic” through study of extant dramatic texts is attested by critics' evaluation of films based on ancient tragedy. Thanks to faith in an Aristotelian version of tragedy, which the British politician and scholar Enoch Powell espouses, Cacoyannis may be credited with “fidelity”: to the spirit of ancient drama, while Pasolini may be downgraded for the liberties that he is accused of taking with it. This article questions the grounds for this comparative evaluation, and goes so far as to argue that the sense of dislocation that Pasolini'sEdipo Re produces in the modern spectator may be closer to the fifth-century experience of tragedy than is, say, Cacoyannis'sIphigenia.

Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression.

Drawing on philosophical and psychoanalytic methods of interpretation, Richard Kuhns explores modern transformations of an ancient poetic genre, tragedy. Recognition of the philosophical problems addressed in tragedy, and of their presence up through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical texts, novels, and poetry, establishes a continuity between classical and modern enactments. Psychoanalytic theory in both its original formulations and post-Freud developments provides a means to enlarge upon and inform philosophical analyses that have dominated modern discussions. From Aeschylus' classic drama Persians to the hidden tragic themes in Merchant of Venice, from the aesthetic writings of Kant to Kleist's narrative Michael Kohlhaas, Kuhns traces the writing and rewriting of the themes of ancient tragedy through modern texts. A culture's concept of fate, Kuhns argues, evolves along with its concepts and forms of tragedy. Examining the deep philosophical concerns of tragedy, he shows how the genre has changed from loss and mourning to contradiction and repression. He sees the fact that tragedy went underground during the optimism of the Enlightenment as a repression that continues into the American consciousness. Turning to Melville's The Confidence Man as an example of Old World despair giving way to New World nihilism, Kuhns indicates how psychoanalytic understanding of tragedy provides a method of interpretation that illuminates the continuous tradition from the ancient to the modern world. study concludes with reflections on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Each poet's celebration of the body, and the contribution of the senses to reason, perception, and poetic intuition, is seen as an embodiment of the modern tragic sensibility.

A King and a Star: The Cosmos of Morante's L'isola di Arturo

Elsa Morante's L'isola di Arturo has always provoked the question of genre. The book has been compared to biblical and Germanic myth, Arthurian romance, folklore, and fairy-tale-and has even invited the suspicion that the novelistic mode is but a pretext for isolated lyrical moments, such as the epigraphic poem, A Remo N., that precedes the novel.1 For others, Morante's Arturo recalls classical heroes of epic and tragedy: Oedipus, Achilles, Odysseus. L'isola di Arturo may be, as Garboli puts it, an Odyssey in reverse: a journey that consists in the nostalgic recollection of home.2 In her own response to nine questions on the novel, Morante pointedly blurred generic distinctions, equating the novel with epic and romance, prose with poetry. In her view, the goal of the novelist is to transform individual, contingent, prosaic experience into an incorruptible and universal poetic truth.3 In L'isola di Arturo the particular experience of one southern Italian boy is rendered universal in at least two ways. One involves a vast array of literary allusion (ancient tragedy, medieval romance, Neapolitan song, the Divine Com-

In and out of the mind: Greek images of the tragic self

The representations of mind in Greek tragedy are central to Western views of inwardness. Tragedy speaks of inwardness as woundable, dark, invaded by destructive passions. this wide-ranging work Ruth Padel relates ancient tragedy to the biology and daemonology of the time, exploring Greek conceptions of the human interior and the ways in which Greek tragic literature shaped how we speak about our inner selves today. In and Out of the Mind reflects the cross-fertilization of the author's classical training with anthropology, history of religion and medicine, gender studies, and psychoanalysis. Arguing that Greek tragic language connects images of consciousness, even male consciousness, with the darkness attributed both to Hades and to women, Padel analyzes tragedy's biological and daemonological metaphors for what is within. Although these images are part of our inherited culture, their use in tragedy reveals attitudes toward feeling that are alien to modern readers. The author provides important background to fascinating aspects of Greek life, such as entrail divination, impurity rituals, and belief in divinity inside and outside human selves, showing how these relate to the Greek understanding of mind. Central to her discussion is the question of how and why all human beings, female and male, suffer.

Ancient tragedy and the origins of modern science

Through a close reading of Sophocles Ajax, Descartes Discourse on Method, Plato's Meno, Davis argues that ancient tragedy and modern science are alternative responses to the human longing for autonomy or striving to be a god.Tragic heroes assume that through politics they can exert more control over the world than the world will allow. To them the whole world is politics, or polis. Scientists seek to control by mastering nature, which, in essence, means to transform the whole of the world into a Polis. Thus the issues and motivations in modern science were already present in ancient tragedy.

Comedia and Trauerspiel: On Benjamin and Calderón

COMPAEATIYE drama 1 Volume 16 Spring 1982 Number 1 Comedia and Trauerspiel: On Benjamin and Calderon Anthony J. Cascardi Nowhere but in Calderon could the perfect baroque Trauerspiel be studied. Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) is a dense and difficult book. “Conceived,” as its dedication evasively states, in 1916, written in 1925, and published three years later, the work is the single full-length book by a critic whom Frank Kermode could hail as “matchless in intuitive power.”l Benjamin specialized in aphorisms, essays, and, as one translated collection calls itself, “reflections.” These are widely known to a broad segment of readers. His essays on Proust and Baudelaire are masterpieces of lyrical prose; his study of Karl Kraus is a trenchant analysis of modem narrative. His essays on photography, as all his work, are marked by a deep vein of philosophic concern. Indeed, none was as philosophical as the Ursprung, a book Benjamin sub­ mitted as his University Habilitationsschrift, the rough equivalent ANTHONY J. CASCARDI is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. 1 2 Comparative Drama of a dissertation. Rejected by various departments as inappro­ priate or incomprehensible, the text remains among the lesserknown of Benjamin’s writings. On the one hand, it deals with relatively arcane materials, with the Trauerspiel (the term is significant) of the German Baroque—the work of Gryphius, Opitz, Sigmund von Birken—with late seventeenth-century collections of heraldic emblems, with occultist tracts and odd word lists; on the other, it is grounded in a philosophy strongly flavored by German Romanticism (there are major debts to Schopenhauer, Novalis, Nietzsche), yet directly anticipating the dialectical materialism of the so-called Frankfurt School to which Benjamin would later be tangentially related. It was, in fact, the opening section of the Ursprung that proved seminal in the development of Theodor Adorno’s thought. Walter Benjamin is also a thinker in a long line of Germans with a profound admiration for and interest in the Spanish comedia. On these grounds, Benjamin warrants comparison to Schlegel, Goethe, and Tieck. The Ursprung is to be sure not the only text in which he trained his powers of thought on the Spanish Baroque theatre. The essay “ ‘El mayor monstruo, los celos’ von Calderón und ‘Herodes und Mariamne’ von Hebbel” is a characteristic investigation of what Benjamin called the “melodrama of fate,” the Schicksalsdrama. As in the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin focuses intensely on the privileged function of objects and on the workings of fate in the Herod plays. Through­ out his work, he finds that the German plays are particularly poignant, but circumscribed in their range of sadness and melancholia. In comparison, the Spanish court and martyr plays of Lope, Tirso, and Calderón are superior in sheer poetic effect, in delicacy of motive, in intricacy of execution. Stylistic features like these are worth noting because Benjamin is a staunchly aesthetic thinker; convinced that there is a significance to the inner hollowness of the Baroque world, he turns consistently to what seem superficial aspects of style. But in addition, Ben­ jamin’s own style is of a density and syntactic weld that could only be matched by the supremely ordered verse of a Calderón. In Susan Sontag’s words, Benjamin’s style of thinking and writing is like “freeze-frame baroque. . . . It was as if each sentence had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes.”2 Why the concern with Trauerspiel and not tragedy? The Anthony J. Cascardi 3 distinction is crucial to an understanding of whatever special variations on the tragic pattern of feeling that the Spanish comedia and late Renaissance and Baroque drama may, on the whole, contain. The first distinctions are categorical. Tragedy deals with myth. Its metaphysical foundation is that of ritualistic and heroic sacrifice. It is transcendental in thrust. Not so the Trauerspiel. As its name signifies, the Trauerspiel opens onto a realm of sadness and mourning rather than to the devastating wretchedness of painful destruction felt in ancient tragedy. Its action works in and through history, not myth (“The...

Mishima's Cosmic Noh Drama: "The Damask Drum"

tions and opinions . . . and after discarding all our everyday pretenses . . . shows us in a state of absolute helplessness, disclosing, giving and finding ourselves. Through shock . . . we will be able to give ourselves to that something that we cannot describe, but in which Eros and Caritas live.5 literary text, which for Grotowski had never been anything more than a point of departure reduced to its essentials, can now be dispensed with entirely. Performance likewise was never more than a means, not an end in itself. In Grotowski's paratheatrical activities, actor and viewer merge into participant or celebrant in a process whereby inner inhibitions and acquired habits are thrown off in an effort to reach the spiritual essence common to all. evolution of Grotowski's visionary goals has ever been toward greater purification: first the playwright was abolished, then the stage, finally the actor. All that remains are the celebrants and the master. In his paratheatrical seminars and exercises Holiday, The University of Explorations of the Theatre of Nations, Opening, Special Projects, Venture Mountain and The Tree of People Grotowski has brought together people of various nationalities and professions, ages and races, meeting in different countries and settings, as part of his unending quest to break down barriers that prevent man from reaching what lies hidden in his soul. Both Grotowski's poor the tre and his paratheatrical activities have in common the desire o strip away false layers of convention, to penet ate the myths that link past, present and future, and to uncover the symbols that are common to all. In his ay, Grotowski declares, we can re-create the feeling of unity and purification known in ancient tragedy but lost to us in modern society. Suggesting that each of us can participate in the cosmic drama that constantly surrounds us, Grotowski most recently advises that we should forget ourselves, make less nois and e rn to coexist with the wind, trees and s ars.6 true theatre is everywhere around us.

The Lost Days in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Journal Article The Lost Days in A Midsummer Night's Dream Get access Anne Paolucci Anne Paolucci ANNE PAOLUCCI, University Research Professor at St. John's University, New York, has published on Shakespeare, Hegel, Dante, ancient tragedy, modern drama, and the Renaissance. Her most recent books are on Edward Albee and Luigi Pirandello; her collected short stories and poems are soon to be published by Griffin Books. Founder and editor of the Review of National Literatures, she serves as executive director of the Council on National Literatures. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 28, Issue 3, Summer 1977, Pages 317–326, https://doi.org/10.2307/2869081 Published: 01 July 1977

Didaskalia w przekładzie tekstu dramatycznego (na przykładzie Orestei Ajschylosa)

Stage directions in the translation of drama (in the Aeschylus’ Oresteia)We all know that in the ancient tragedies there are no written stage directions. But it does not mean that there are no stage instructions. Without no doubts the fifth century BC tragedies were the theatre productions. And they were influenced by the Athenian theater of the day – its natural location, architecture, theatre equipment and stage design. In every age the drama is influenced by the theatre of its days. The authors of the translations I am interested in this article inserted the stage directions in their translations. And I would like to examine what kind of staging they suggest. And whether they are devoid or not of the influences of or the references to the stages and theatres of authors’ time.

Chrześcijańska Antygona, czyli interpretacja tragedii Sofoklesa dokonana przez Juliusza Osterwę pod wpływem wybuchu II wojny światowej

Christian Antigone
 Sophocles’ Antigone is one of the most famous ancient tragedy in Polish culture and it is also most often translated one into Polish. In 1939/1940 Juliusz Osterwa, famous actor, director and leader of the Reduta theatre, translated Sophocles’ Antigone into Polish. The outbreak of the II World War, that moved Osterwa very deeply, and his ideas of the Christian roots of European culture as well as the ideas of the crisis of spirituality in modern culture, that crystallized at that time, caused that he filled his translation of Greek tragedy, on its every possible level, with as many elements connected with Christian religion as possible. It makes Osterwa’s Antigone one of the units in the long translation chain, in which Greek Antigone becomes Polish Antigone. But most of all it makes Osterwa’s Antigone very significant and characteristic witness of its own time.

Ancient Tragedy In Modern Greece

A performance lasting ninety minutes, a language few of the audience can understand, a play more than 2,400 years old, and the immediate result—continuous applause for more than twenty minutes. This is a measure of the success of ancient tragedy in modern Greek translations and productions when on tour. In Greece itself, performances are frequently attended by audiences of twelve to fourteen thousand, most of whom have come from considerable distances, such as the 112 miles from Athens to Epidaurus.

Changing Fashions in Ancient Drama—I

Ancient drama is frequently said nowadays to be unsuited to the taste of modern audiences, and when one sees modern productions of ancient plays one is inclined to agree. And yet the plays read well, and they certainly appealed to a wide variety of audiences in ancient times. Can it be that it is the production and not the play that is at fault? Apart from the obvious fact that most modern producers are unable or unwilling to handle a chorus effectively, it does seem very often that the production is based on an interpretation of the play, which, if it is not actually misguided, is at any rate hesitant. There are two factors which make it extremely difficult to interpret or appreciate an ancient play. First, the influence of Aristotle has caused us to judge ancient drama by the rules which he laid down and to measure all tragedies by the standard of Sophokles' Oedipus the King, although it is obvious that the poets were not guided by Aristotle's rules and that many tragedies aimed at effects quite different from those of the Oedipus the King. Thus we expect ancient tragedy to be ‘tragic’ in our sense of the word, and we are baffled when we find no ‘tragic’ element to satisfy our expectations. Secondly, the knowledge that drama originated as part of the cult of Dionysos impels us to label it ‘ritual drama’, and to feel that it must be solemn and conventional and must concern itself with weighty moral and theological problems. We are slightly surprised to find that it is not confined to a re-enactment of the Dionysos myths, and we hardly dare to contemplate the possibility that poets dealt very freely with the myths and legends which they took as their subjects. But ancient drama had to appeal to mixed audiences. It could not afford to be bound by academic rules or by excessive subservience to tradition. The fact that dramatic performances were organized as competitions was in itself an inducement to introduce new methods of handling the traditional material; and, if we look at the plays which have survived, we can see that drama changed constantly to suit the inevitable changes in public taste.

Boethius' Definition of Persona and Mediaeval Understanding of the Roman Theater

IT has been widely supposed that only a very few learned men of the Middle Ages understood how the plays of ancient Rome were actually performed, by actors impersonating the characters with voice and gesture. The information on representation by comedians and tragedians, histriones and mimi, transmitted by Isidore of Seville in the Etymologiae (xviii, 42-51) was bare and limited, at second hand, chiefly from late sources of the empire when formal drama was already dead;' errors in understanding the ancient drama accumulated in later learned tradition, reaching a peak in the fourteenth century. With a general blurring of literary categories already indicated by fourth-century grammarians and Isidore, comedy and tragedy were interpreted in tenth-century manuscripts of Terence, and in the work of mediaeval grammarians, poets, and commentators with increasingly circumstantial detail as forms of narrative which were recited, sometimes with the accompaniment of mute miming.2 The general mediaeval ignorance of the Roman modes of performing formal drama before its early decline is familiar enough; but probably, as Professor Gustave Cohen has suggested, we have exaggerated it, at least for some times and places, notably the centers of humanistic learning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.3 Recent histories of mediaeval drama have cited only Honorius in the Gemma Animae (ca 1100) and John of Salisbury in the Policraticus (1159) as showing a truer historical understanding.4 Honorius pictured the priest as like a tragic actor, by his gestures representing to the people the combat of Christ in the theater of the church an extension of a traditional Augustinian metaphor which urged the wonders of Christian belief as substitutes for the inordinately popular Roman spectacles of the empire.' But Honorius also thought of the representation of ancient tragedies as a form of recitation. With his great knowledge of Cicero and of his beloved Terence and many other classic authors, John of Salisbury seems to have had a really clear conception of the way in which Roman comedies were performed by gesture and speech.' Extraordinary as John's learning was, it is hardly likely that among the humanistic scholars of the twelfth century he was alone in that knowledge of the Roman theater. In two articles (one presented with comment by Professor Cohen) Professor Loomis has quoted a series of interesting mediaeval passages, several hitherto unfamiliar, which use the traditional terminology of the theater, and which often imply notions of similarity between the ludi scenici of antiquity and secular theatrical representations of some kind in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.7 Professor Bigongiari, in a learned article opposing most of Professor Loomis's inferences, quoted many more mediaeval passages using a traditional Latin vocabulary of the theater.8 Whatever the difficulties of interpreting allusions in which literary tradition and contemporary reference are wonderfully mixed, many of these passages at least