It has often been maintained that the abrupt endings of so many modern plays is due to the fact that we possess a drop curtain which can be brought down upon the action with a bang, and that the quieter endings of, for example, Elizabethan plays arise from their being written for curtainless theaters. I do not entirely disapprove of this suggestion, but wish to point out that the difference originates, at least in part, also in a difference in taste at different times and among different peoples. It is true that the Greeks probably had no drop curtain and that their dramas usually end upon a note of calm. But the same kind of close is normal in other fields of their literature, where the presence or absence of a curtain did not enter into consideration. For example, there is a distinct tendency for modern orators to close speeches with a peroration which is intended to sweep auditors off their feet. Not so in Greek oratory. “Wherever pity, terror, anger, or any passionate feeling is uttered or invited, this tumult is resolved in a final calm; and where such tumult has place in the peroration, it subsides before the last sentences of all.”[319] The same situation obtains likewise in the case of the Greek epic as in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
The unities, sir, are a completeness—a kind of a universal dovetailedness with regard to place and time—a sort of a general oneness, if I may be allowed to use so strong an expression. I take those to be the dramatic unities, so far as I have been enabled to bestow attention upon them, and I have read much upon the subject, and thought much.—Charles Dickens.
CHAPTER VI
THE INFLUENCE OF PHYSICAL CONDITIONS (CONTINUED): THE UNITIES[320]
The dramatic unities, three principles governing the structure of drama and supposedly derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, are a subject of perennial interest. They are known as the unities of time, place, and action, respectively, and require that “the action of a play should be represented as occurring in one place, within one day, and with nothing irrelevant to the plot.” The essential facts concerning them were recognized at least as long ago as the publication of Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767). But so deep-rooted is the popular impression that the Greeks formulated these rules arbitrarily and observed them slavishly that no attempt to state the true situation can be superfluous. The current doctrine is based on the fact that the classic dramatists in France and Italy blindly obeyed the rules as a heritage of the past, without regard to the demands of the theater at their own disposal; and, consequently, the inference has been easily and naturally drawn that the ancient practice was equally irrational.
But in the Greek theater, where there was no drop curtain, no scenery to shift, and a chorus almost continuously present, a change of scene was difficult to indicate visually. Nevertheless Aristotle nowhere mentions the unity of place, and the Greek dramatists not infrequently violate it. The most familiar instances occur in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Sophocles’ Ajax. The former play opens at the temple of Apollo in Delphi, whither the avenging Furies have pursued Orestes after his mother’s murder. During a momentary lapse from their watchfulness Orestes makes his escape, but the Furies soon awaken and take up the trail once more. The scene is thus left entirely vacant (vs. 234) and is supposed to change to Athens, where all parties presently appear for the famous trial before the Council of the Areopagus. The beginning of the latter play takes place before Ajax’ tent, and Sophocles wished to introduce the very unusual motive of having a scene of violence enacted before the audience. As the presence of the chorus was an insuperable obstacle to such a deed, Ajax was allowed to leave the scene and, suspicion being soon aroused, the chorus was sent in search of him (vs. 814). Thus, the scene is again entirely deserted by both actors and chorus, and Ajax returns, not to his tent, but to some lonely spot near the seashore (see [pp. 129] and [244], above). This was by far the most natural and logical method of leading up to a change of scene, was infinitely superior to Shakespeare’s practice in King Henry V, where Chorus is introduced in the prologue of each act to acquaint the spectators with the scene of the succeeding action, but was so difficult to motivate that only some half a dozen examples are known to us in the whole Greek drama. On the other hand, such a technical device was usually not well adapted to represent considerable shifts of scene, since it would seem unnatural for so large a body of persons as the chorus always to accompany the dramatic characters to widely separated localities. To this general restriction, however, the Eumenides furnishes a brilliant exception, because it was the especial duty of the Furies to track the guilty Orestes wherever he might flee. In Old Comedy, ever fantastic and intentionally impossible, greater freedom was naturally allowed than in tragedy, so that in Aristophanes’ Frogs no less than five different scenes are successively required (see [pp. 88-90], above).
At the same time the need of such scene-shifting was largely obviated by the arbitrary placing of almost all scenes before a building, by the exclusion of interior scenes, and by the various devices substituted therefor (see [pp. 237-42], above). In particular the use of the messenger’s speech enabled dramatists to bring indirectly before their audiences events which had taken place, not merely in the scene-house interior, but at far distant spots. Very commonly the unity of place was observed by conventionally bringing together as close neighbors structures or localities which would actually be separated by considerable intervals. Thus the murderers of Agamemnon would not wish his grave to stare them in the face and to remind their subjects of their crime; nevertheless in Aeschylus’ Libation-Bearers palace and tomb stand side by side. Likewise in Euripides’ Helen, King Theoclymenus has buried his father in front of his palace. Now these arrangements are not to be interpreted in the light of the prehistoric custom of placing the dead within the house or before its threshold. It is purely a theatrical convention, and Euripides shows what he thought of it by deeming it necessary to put an excuse on the Egyptian king’s lips:
Hail, my sire’s tomb!—for at my palace-gate,
Proteus, I buried thee, to greet thee so;