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very much bored. In many minds there will be left a feeling that,
whether they have enjoyed the play or not, they are puzzled: there are
odd effects, conventions, suggestions.
For example, the main deed of the Tragedy, the slaying of hero or
heroine, is not done on the stage. That disappoints some modern minds
unconsciously avid of realism to the point of horror. Instead of a fine
thrilling murder or suicide before his very eyes, the spectator is put
off with an account of the murder done off the stage. This account is
regularly given, and usually at considerable length, in a "messenger's
speech." The messenger's speech is a regular item in a Greek play, and
though actually it gives scope not only for fine elocution, but for real
dramatic effect, in theory we feel it undramatic, and a modern actor has
sometimes much ado to make it acceptable. The spectator is told that all
these, to him, odd conventions are due to Greek restraint, moderation,
good taste, and yet for all their supposed restraint and reserve, he
finds when he reads his Homer that Greek heroes frequently burst into
floods of tears when a self-respecting Englishman would have suffered in
silence.
Then again, specially if the play be by Euripides, it ends not with a
"curtain," not with a great decisive moment, but with the appearance of
a god who says a few lines of either exhortation or consolation or
reconciliation, which, after the strain and stress of the action itself,
strikes some people as rather stilted and formal, or as rather flat and
somehow unsatisfying. Worse still, there are in many of the scenes long
dialogues, in which the actors wrangle with each other, and in which the
action does not advance so quickly as we wish. Or again, instead of
beginning with the action, and having our curiosity excited bit by bit
about the plot, at the outset some one comes in and tells us the whole
thing in the prologue. Prologues we feel, are out of date, and the
Greeks ought to have known better. Or again, of course we admit that
tragedy must be tragic, and we are prepared for a decent amount of
lamentation, but when an antiphonal lament goes on for pages, we weary
and wish that the chorus would stop lamenting and _do_ something.
* * * * *
At the back of our modern discontent there is lurking always this queer
anomaly of the chorus. We have in our modern theatre no chorus, and
when, in the opera, something of the nature of a chorus appears in the
ballet, it is a chorus that really dances to amuse and excite us in the
intervals of operatic action; it is not a chorus of doddering and
pottering old men, moralizing on an action in which they are too feeble
to join. Of course if we are classical scholars we do not cavil at the
choral songs; the extreme difficulty of scanning and construing them
alone commands a traditional respect; but if we are merely modern
spectators, we may be respectful, we may even feel strangely excited,
but we are certainly puzzled. The reason of our bewilderment is simple
enough. These prologues and messengers' speeches and ever-present
choruses that trouble us are ritual forms still surviving at a time when
the _drama_ has fully developed out of the _dromenon_. We cannot here
examine all these ritual forms in detail;[35] one, however, the chorus,
strangest and most beautiful of all, it is essential we should
understand.
Suppose that these choral songs have been put into English that in any
way represents the beauty of the Greek; then certainly there will be
some among the spectators who get a thrill from the chorus quite unknown
to any modern stage effect, a feeling of emotion heightened yet
restrained, a sense of entering into higher places, filled with a larger
and a purer air--a sense of beauty born clean out of conflict and
disaster.
A suspicion dawns upon the spectator that, great though the tragedies in
themselves are, they owe their peculiar, their incommunicable beauty
largely to this element of the chorus which seemed at first so strange.
Now by examining this chorus and understanding its function--nay, more,
by considering the actual _orchestra_, the space on which the chorus
danced, and the relation of that space to the rest of the theatre, to
the stage and the place where the spectators sat--we shall get light at
last on our main central problem: How did art arise out of ritual, and
what is the relation of both to that actual life from which both art and
ritual sprang?
* * * * *
The dramas of AEschylus certainly, and perhaps also those of Sophocles
and Euripides, were played not upon the stage, and not in the _theatre_,
but, strange though it sounds to us, in the _orchestra_. The _theatre_
to the Greeks was simply "the place of seeing," the place where the
spectators sat; what they called the sk{-e}n{-e} or _scene_, was the
tent or hut in which the actors dressed. But the kernel and centre of
the whole was the _orchestra_, the circular _dancing-place_ of the
chorus; and, as the orchestra was the kernel and centre of the theatre,
so the chorus, the band of dancing and singing men--this chorus that
seems to us so odd and even superfluous--was the centre and kernel and
starting-point of the drama. The chorus danced and sang that Dithyramb
we know so well, and from the leaders of that Dithyramb we remember
tragedy arose, and the chorus were at first, as an ancient writer tells
us, just men and boys, tillers of the earth, who danced when they rested
from sowing and ploughing.
Now it is in the relation between the _orchestra_ or dancing-place of
the chorus, and the _theatre_ or place of the spectators, a relation
that shifted as time went on, that we see mirrored the whole development
from ritual to art--from _dromenon_ to drama.
* * * * *
The orchestra on which the Dithyramb was danced was just a circular
dancing-place beaten flat for the convenience of the dancers, and
sometimes edged by a stone basement to mark the circle. This circular
orchestra is very well seen in the theatre of Epidaurus, of which a
sketch is given in Fig. 1. The orchestra here is surrounded by a
splendid _theatron_, or spectator place, with seats rising tier above
tier. If we want to realize the primitive Greek orchestra or
dancing-place, we must think these stone seats away. Threshing-floors
are used in Greece to-day as convenient dancing-places. The dance
tends to be circular because it is round some sacred thing, at first a
maypole, or the reaped corn, later the figure of a god or his altar. On
this dancing-place the whole body of worshippers would gather, just as
now-a-days the whole community will assemble on a village green. There
is no division at first between actors and spectators; all are actors,
all are doing the thing done, dancing the dance danced. Thus at
initiation ceremonies the whole tribe assembles, the only spectators are
the uninitiated, the women and children. No one at this early stage [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]