Both from his enterprise and from the world;
His crown bequeathing to his banish’d brother,
And all their lands restored to them again
That were with him exiled.
Finally, not to extend this list unduly, in Molière’s Tartuffe by the time that Orgon has at length unmasked the hypocrite he had played into his hand to such an extent, by deeding him his property and by intrusting him with incriminating papers, that it is impossible to conceive how he can be extricated. But at this crisis an officer of police in the name of the French king (almost a divine figure in those days) rescues him from his troubles:
Monsieur, dismiss all anxious fears. We live beneath a prince the foe of fraud,—a prince whose eyes can penetrate all hearts; whose mind the art of no impostor can deceive.... This one was powerless to mislead him; those wily schemes he instantly detected, discerning with his keen sagacity the inmost folds of that most treacherous heart. Coming to denounce you, the wretch betrayed himself; and by the stroke of some high justice the prince discovered him, by his own words, to be a great impostor, ... In a word, the monarch ... ordered me to follow him here and see to what lengths his impudence would go, and then to do justice on him for your sake. Yes, I am ordered to take from his person the papers which he boasts of holding, and place them in your hands. The king, of his sovereign power, annuls the deed you made him of your property; and he forgives you for the secret to which your friendship for an exile led you. [Wormeley’s translation.]
Who, with such examples of artificial and mechanical dénouements before him, will cast the first stone at the deus ex machina of the Greeks?[363]
In a technical sense “prologue” came to denote the histrionic passage before the entrance song of the chorus (the parodus) (see [p. 192], above). Such prologues are not found in Aeschylus’ Suppliants and Persians, which begin with the choral parodus. The earliest prologue of which we have knowledge occurred in Phrynichus’ lost play, the Phoenician Women (476 B.C.), in which a eunuch opens the action by spreading places in the orchestra for the counselors of the Persian empire and at the same time announcing the defeat of Xerxes in Greece. On the other hand, according to a late authority, prologues were the invention of Thespis.[364] In my opinion this contradiction is to be explained as a confusion between the technical and non-technical uses of the term. There is every reason for believing that prologues in the technical sense just mentioned did not go back to the time of Thespis. But the fully developed prologue was naturally employed as a vehicle for the exposition, and the task of acquainting his audience with data preliminary to the action and necessary for comprehending the plot of course confronted Thespis no less than later playwrights. Now it is evident that he could accomplish this in any one of three ways: (1) He could utilize the choral parodus for this purpose, as Aeschylus partially did in his Agamemnon. Though this play has a prologue, the parodus is employed to rehearse the story of Iphigenia’s sacrifice and other pertinent events. Somewhat similar is the parodus of Aeschylus’ Persians, which in the absence of a regular prologue opens the play. Accordingly, the ancient argument to this play remarks: “A chorus of elders ‘speaks the prologue’” (προλογίζει), using the word in a popular sense. (2) The drama might begin with a dialogue or duet between the chorus and an actor, somewhat in the manner of the pseudo-Euripidean Rhesus. It is perhaps unlikely that this technique was employed as early as Thespis. (3) The exposition might be intrusted to the character who speaks first after the choral parodus. Since the drama was then in the one-actor stage, such a “prologue” would necessarily be monologic. Some justification for this nomenclature may be found in the ancient argument to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, where it is stated that Oedipus προλογίζει. Since Antigone and a stranger take part in this prologue as well as Oedipus, the verb must here mean that Oedipus “makes the first speech.” Now whatever may be true about Thespis having employed (1) or (2), he certainly must have employed the third type of exposition, and a “prologue” of this non-technical sort he can truthfully be said to have invented.
It is a peculiarity of Euripides that he oftentimes combined startling innovations with a reversion to archaic, or at least much earlier, technique. Therefore, it is not surprising that he preferred prologues which smack somewhat of this primitive type. Of course this statement is not to be taken so literally as to imply that he placed his prologues after the parodus. It means that instead of retailing the essential antecedents of the action piecemeal in the manner of Sophocles and Ibsen, he regularly set the whole body of data before the spectators at once in an opening soliloquy. This is normally succeeded by a dialogue with which the dramatic action really begins. In other words there is a prologue within a prologue: the histrionic passage before the choral parodus (the prologue in the technical sense) opens with a sharply differentiated monologue (a prologue in the old, nontechnical sense). In my opinion the latter must be regarded as consciously harking back to Thespian practice. An excellent example of this technique is afforded by the Alcestis. Here Apollo apostrophizes the palace of Admetus, thus revealing the location of the scene (see [p. 206]). He then proceeds to relate in detail how he had been forced to serve in the house of a mortal, how considerately Admetus had treated him, how in gratitude he had tricked the Fates into permitting Admetus to present a voluntary substitute when premature death threatened him, how Queen Alcestis is the only one found willing to die for the king, that this is the day appointed for her vicarious act, etc. It is noticeable that scant regard is here paid to dramatic illusion: Apollo tells what the spectators need to know and because they need to know it. He explains his leaving the palace on the ground of the pollution which the death of Alcestis would bring upon all indoors at the time (vs. 22). But no excuse is provided for his long soliloquy. We have seen that the apostrophe to the palace served another purpose; and in any case, since (unlike the elements) houses were never regarded by the Greeks as either divine or even animate, it would be no adequate motivation for the monologue. The prologue concludes and the action proper is set in motion by a quarrel between Apollo and Death, who is now seen approaching.
This prologue is one of Euripides’ best. They are often interminable and marred by long genealogies and other jejune matter. Some of them are not undeserving of the strictures which critics, both ancient and modern, have heaped upon them. Yet they served many useful purposes, too, and there is no warrant for utterly condemning the type as a whole. We have already seen ([p. 258], above) that such a device enabled a dramatist to circumvent the conditions which caused the conventional observance of the unities of time and place and to bring earlier events more explicitly within the scope of his play. The fact that Euripides more often chose different themes for the plays in each group instead of writing trilogies or tetralogies made brevity of exposition a desideratum. Again, a desire for novelty and the fact that Aeschylus and Sophocles had anticipated him in so many of his subjects caused him to depart widely from the traditional accounts. Unless some warning of this were given, it would sometimes be almost impossible for the ordinary spectator to comprehend the action, and no other place was so appropriate for such an explanation as the prologue. For example, in the Helen, Euripides abandoned the account given by Homer and most others in favor of the version invented by Stesichorus. The audience had to comprehend not only that Helen had been the chaste and loyal wife of Menelaus throughout but also that there were two Helens—one the true Helen who spent the years of the Trojan War in Egypt, and the other a cloud-image Helen who eloped with Paris and was recovered by Menelaus at the capture of the city. Surely a very clear statement was required to render such a revamping of the legend clear to everyone. Even the genealogical table was not without its utility in this prologue, for the Egyptian king Theoclymenus and his sister would mean nothing to most spectators until their lineage was traced to the familiar names of Proteus and Nereus.