Let it nothing tell against me, that my play must first begin;
See that, through the afterpieces, back to me your memory strays;
Keep your oaths, and well and truly judge between the rival plays.
Be not like the wanton women, never mindful of the past,
Always for the new admirer, always fondest of the last.
[Rogers’ translation]
This close juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy at the same festival must have strengthened a practice which in any case would have been inevitable, viz., that the comic poets should parody lines, scenes, or even whole plots of their tragic confrères. In a community as small as Athens it was impossible that advance knowledge of a tragic plot or even the exact wording of striking lines should not sometimes reach the ears of a comic playwright and be turned to skilful account by him. Even when the secret had been guarded until the very moment of presentation, it must have been feasible for a comedian whose play was to be produced on a subsequent day of the festival to incorporate a few lines or a short scene in his comedy overnight. But this is mere theorizing, for I remember no passage where such “scoops” are mentioned. The parodying of tragedies brought out at previous festivals, however, was exceedingly common. The extant plays preserve some instances of this, and the scholiasts tell us of many others. Parodies of no less than thirty-three of Euripides’ tragedies are preserved in the remains of Aristophanes’ comedies. But the situation is too well known to merit further amplification here, cf. Murray, op. cit., passim.
On the other hand, though tragedy, comedy, and satyric dramas were juxtaposed at the festivals, they were not intermingled. The lines of demarcation were kept distinct. With very rare exceptions, like the Alcestis, the audience always knew what kind of a play it was about to hear, and (what was even more important) the poet always knew what kind of a play he was supposed to write. Of course, this is not the same as saying that all Greek tragedies were alike or that all Greek comedies seemed to be poured from the same mold. Within the type there was room for the greatest diversity, but the types did not overlap or borrow much from one another. This practice was a natural outgrowth of the Greek love for schematizing which displayed itself in the formulation and observance of rigid laws in every branch of art and especially in literature; in the field of drama this tendency was strengthened by the festival arrangements. Contrast with this the modern confusion of all the arts and all the literary genres which, in the sphere of drama, results in plays harder to classify than Polonius’ “tragical-comical-historical-pastorals.” This is one of the things that Voltaire had in mind when he declared that Shakespeare wrote like “a drunken savage.”
The simplicity of the Greek effect is aptly characterized by Mr. Clayton Hamilton:[297] “Although the ancient drama frequently violated the three unities of action, time, and place, it always preserved a fourth unity, which we may call unity of mood.” Possibly regard for this fourth unity caused Euripides to employ the deus ex machina at the conclusion of his Iphigenia among the Taurians. It is well known that this is the play that lends least support to the frequent charge that Euripides used the deus to cut the inextricable tangle of his plots. Here the final, insurmountable difficulty is of the poet’s own choosing. Orestes and his party have at last got their vessel free of the shore, and all the playwright needed to do was to allow them to sail on in safety and thus bring his play to a close. But arbitrarily he causes a contrary wind and sea to drive their ship back to land, making divine intervention indispensable. Of course this device enabled him to overleap the unity of time and bring events far in the future within the limits of his dramatic day, and frequently that was all that Euripides had in mind in having recourse to this artifice (see [p. 295], below). But in the present instance I think he had an additional motive, one which has a place in this discussion. The gist of the matter is well expressed by Mr. Prickard:[298] “If the fugitives had simply escaped, snapping their fingers at Thoas, the ending would have been essentially comic: perhaps, after the grave and pathetic scenes which have gone before, we should rather call it burlesque. But the appearance of the deus ex machina, a device not itself to be praised, enables the piece to be finished after all with dignity and elevation of feeling.”
In connection with the foregoing arises another point: when the line between tragedy and comedy was drawn so sharply, we should hardly expect to find the writer of tragedies and the writer of comedies united in one and the same person. As a matter of fact not a single case is known in all Greek drama. “The sock and buskin were not worn by the same poet”;[299] the Greek theater knew no Shakespeare. This very versatility of the Elizabethan poet helps to explain why his tragedies contain much that is humorous and his comedies much that is painful, a characteristic which has been so offensive to his French critics. Very similar is the situation among the actors. At the City Dionysia, beginning with 449 B.C., a prize was awarded to the best actor in the tragedies brought out each year, and about 325 B.C. a contest was established for comic actors. At the Lenaea, prizes were offered for comic and for tragic actors from about 442 B.C. and about 433 B.C., respectively. These arrangements would tend still further to keep each actor within his specialty. No performer in both tragic and comic rôles is indubitably known until Praxiteles, who performed at Delphi in 106 B.C. as a comedian and nine years later as a tragedian. Two other instances occurred a little later. In the second century B.C. Thymoteles seems to have been both a tragic poet and a comic actor. These examples exhaust the list in pre-Christian times.