Similarly, a character is oftentimes forced to remain upon the scene of action when he would not naturally do so. Thus, in Plautus’ Menaechmi, owing to a failure to distinguish Menaechmus I from his brother, his father-in-law and a physician consider him insane and make arrangements, in his hearing, for his apprehension. Notwithstanding, when they both leave the stage at vs. 956 he makes no attempt to escape—an act which would transfer the next two scenes elsewhere—but unconcernedly awaits developments.
Finally I may mention one especially amusing artifice. In Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, Orestes has left the scene and is now supposed to be some distance away. Notwithstanding, Athena addresses him and apologetically adds: “For, though absent, you can hear my voice, since I am a goddess” (vs. 1447). The same situation recurs, without apology, at vs. 1462 and in Euripides’ Helen, vss. 1662 ff.
Likewise, the unity of time arose, not from the whim of ancient writers, but from the same theatrical arrangements which resulted in the unity of place, viz., the absence of a drop curtain and the continuous presence of the chorus. Under these conditions an intermission for the imaginary lapse of time could be secured only by the withdrawal of the chorus, and without such intermissions the constant and long-continued presence of the same persons in the same place without food or slumber was in danger of becoming an absurdity. Now we have seen how difficult it was to invent motives for the successive reappearances of actors; to motivate the movements of a body of twelve (fifteen) tragic or twenty-four comic choreutae was naturally still more difficult (see [pp. 229-33] and [150-52], above). Consequently the chorus is rarely removed from the stage during the action. Two instances have already been mentioned ([p. 247], above). In the Ajax advantage is taken of the withdrawal to change the scene slightly; naturally a slight interval of time is also supposed to elapse, but in this instance this is negligible and without significance. In the Eumenides the case is different. Here the scene is not shifted a few rods merely but from Delphi clear to Athens. As the crow flies this was a distance of about eighty miles and, in view of the physical conditions and ancient methods of travel, would require two or three days to traverse. Accordingly a considerable lacuna in the dramatic time of the play must be assumed. What is still more remarkable is that, except for the empty stage, the spectators are given nothing to help “digest the abuse of distance.” At vs. 80 Apollo dispatches Orestes to the city of Pallas, at vs. 179 he begins to drive the chorus of Furies from his shrine, at vs. 234 he leaves the stage and the scene is empty. Up to this point we are still at Delphi. In the very next verse (235) Orestes rushes into the theater and exclaims, “O queen Athena, I come at the bidding of Loxias.” He has reached Athens! In Euripides’ Alcestis the chorus forms part of the queen’s funeral cortège and is absent during vss. 747-860. Although it is not usually so regarded I am inclined to think that there is a slight change of scene here (see [p. 235], above); there is also a slight condensation of time, but neither constitutes a serious violation of these unities. This is one of the rare cases where the withdrawal of the chorus resulted naturally from the normal development of the plot. For if the choreutae had been present when Heracles announced his intention of rescuing Alcestis from death (vss. 840 ff.) the poet must have invented a reason for their not reporting this news to Admetus or have spoiled certain features of the finale. It was much simpler to avoid the difficulty by allowing the chorus to do the natural thing. In the following instances apparently no change of scene or undue compression of time is involved. In Euripides’ Helen (vs. 385) the chorus accompany their mistress inside the palace to consult the seeress Theonoe and re-enter at vs. 515. The only advantage that seems to accrue from this maneuver is to prolong Menelaus’ uncertainty as to the identity of his newly recovered wife. In Aristophanes’ Women in Council (vs. 311) the women of the chorus, disguised as men, leave for the assembly in order to vote the management of the state into their own hands, returning at vs. 478. Unless the playwright wished to have the assembly scene enacted before the audience he had to withdraw the chorus. As it is their doings are reported by a messenger (Chremes) in vss. 376 ff. In the pseudo-Euripidean Rhesus the chorus is absent during vss. 565-674, being sent in front of the camp to receive Dolon (cf. vss. 522 ff.). The presence of Trojan guards would have prevented the intervening scene between the Greek marauders, Odysseus and Diomedes. It will be noted how few are the instances of the withdrawal of the chorus in the extant plays and that the observance of the unities figures in just half of them. In New Comedy the chorus appeared only between acts (see [p. 145]) and it would have been feasible to assume a lacuna several times in each play. That this was not done was probably due to the fact that the other practice had become stereotyped and that concentration of action resulted in greater unity of plot. Sometimes the stage is left empty before the entrance of the chorus by the retirement of all the actors on the scene either between the prologue and the parodus or between monologues (or dialogues) in the prologue. Euripides’ Alcestis (vs. 77) furnishes an example of the former and his Iphigenia among the Taurians (vs. 66) of the latter. So far as I have observed such pauses are not made use of to accelerate the time unduly.
Since it was not often possible to suspend the audience’s sense of time by removing the chorus, the poets had recourse to the next best expedient, the choral odes. Inasmuch as several of these occurred in every play, this artifice was far more available than the other. In many respects the chorus moved upon a different plane from the actors, and we are now dealing with one of these differences. As Professor Butcher expressed it: “The interval covered by a choral ode is one whose value is just what the poet chooses to make it. While the time occupied by the dialogue has a relation more or less exact to real time, the choral lyrics suspend the outward action of the play and carry us still farther away from the world of reality. What happens in the interval cannot be measured by any ordinary reckoning; it is much or little as the needs of the piece demand. A change of place directly obtrudes itself on the senses, but time is only what it appears to the mind. The imagination travels easily over many hours; and in the Greek drama the time that elapses during the songs of the chorus is entirely idealized” (op. cit., p. 293). Thus the choral songs were roughly equivalent to the modern intermission, and after them the action is often farther advanced than the actual time required for chanting them would warrant. For example, during a single stasimon of Aeschylus’ Suppliants (vss. 524-99) the Argive king must leave the scene, summon his subjects to public assembly, state the object of the meeting, and allow discussion before the final vote—all in time for Danaus to report the people’s decision at the beginning of the following episode! An analogy to ancient practice occurs in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, where Time as Chorus announces the passage of sixteen years between Acts III and IV.
But at the same time that the chorus conferred this liberty it restricted it. The presence of such a body of performers at all the scenes of a play could seldom be entirely natural. Yet that the same persons should be found standing about, in the same place, at various intervals during the day is conceivable, though it does not often happen. But that they should be found there at every moment chosen for representation during weeks or months or years is inconceivable and ridiculous. Only by shortening the supposed action of the piece and the supposed lacunae in the plot could the convention be tolerated at all. However, Professor Verrall was lacking in historical imagination when he maintained that “the point at which the discrepancy between the facts presented and the natural facts began to be flagrant and intolerable was when the audience were told to pass in imagination from day to day. Night is the great natural interrupter of actions and changer of situations” (op. cit., p. 1). To the spoiled theatergoer of today this would seem to be true. But the ancient drama knew no lighting effects (see [p. 224], above). On the stage day and night looked the same to them. Scenes at midday, in the darkness of night, in the gloom of Hades, were alike enacted in the glare of the sun. Ostensibly the entire action of the anonymous Rhesus and much of that in Euripides’ Cyclops fell within the hours of night, and characters frequently addressed the heavenly constellations in (actual) daylight. So far were the playwrights from avoiding the discrepancy involved in passing from one day to another that in Terence’s translation of Menander’s Self-Tormentor, when a night is supposed to elapse between Acts II and III, attention is deliberately called to it by Chremes’ words, “It is beginning to grow light here now” (vs. 410). In my opinion this play extends over about as much time as the conditions which obtained in ancient drama would normally allow; and it should be noted that it does not exceed the twenty-four hours permitted by the unity of time.
In the third place, perhaps it is unnecessary to point out that acceleration of time is possible in all drama quite apart from an empty stage or choral songs. Instances can be cited even from dramatists who owned no allegiance to the unities—note, for example, the striking of the half-hour every twenty or twenty-five lines at the close of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. In Aristophanes’ Plutus the blind god is escorted from the stage for a night’s treatment in the temple of Asclepius (vs. 626), the chorus remaining in its place but apparently not singing.[321] At the very next verse one of the escort returns to announce that Plutus has recovered his sight and to relate the events of the night! But here again, despite the transition from one day to another, the action does not exceed twenty-four hours. In the same writer’s Acharnians, Amphitheus goes from Athens to Sparta and returns again during the dialogue contained between vss. 133 and 174. There is no hint, however, that his reappearance is premature or that his trip would occupy more than the apparent space allotted it.
But neither the ordinary acceleration of time in drama nor the use of stasima nor yet the stage left empty by the retirement of chorus and actors tells the whole story of Greek practice. Nowadays the playbill clearly informs us how much time has elapsed between acts, and the piece is constructed accordingly. If a character in the third act has occasion to refer to something which occurred in the first act ten years or so ago he must not speak of it as if it happened yesterday. Not so in ancient drama. The Greek audiences had no playbills, and even the introductions to Greek plays prepared by Alexandrian scholars contained no such information as this. I fancy that the Greek dramatist never laid his finger upon a given line and said: “Here we must assume a lapse of several days, or months, or years.” The events of a drama, regardless of actualities, were conventionally treated as occupying no more than twenty-four hours. A like convention was customary in the Greek epic: when once a Homeric character was given a definite age or form he maintained each unchanged throughout.[322] For example, Telemachus is introduced in the first book of the Odyssey as a young man just reaching his majority, ready and anxious to assume the duties of manhood; but nine years before, when he could not have been more than twelve years of age, he is spoken of as just as old and as already a man among men (cf. Book xi, vss. 185 f. and 449). Again, in the third book of the Iliad, Helen is pictured in the prime of youth and beauty; ten years later and thirty years after her elopement with Paris she is likened to the same goddess as is the Maiden Nausicaa (cf. Odyssey iv. 121 f. and vi. 102 ff.). In Greek drama time relations are similarly ignored. At the opening of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon the watchman sights the signal fire which announces the capture of Troy, and within a few hundred lines Agamemnon has finished the sack, traversed the Aegean, and appeared before his palace! No hint is given, however, that there is anything unusual about all this; not a word[323] indicates that the action is disconnected at any point.
This is the most flagrant instance, and I conceive that it is to be interpreted as follows: The performance of Greek drama in the fifth century was continuous in the sense that with negligible exceptions (see [pp. 250 f.], above) actors or chorus or both were constantly before the audience. Notice that this is not the same as saying that the time of the plays was continuous. When critically examined it is found to have been interrupted by numerous gaps, as we have already seen and shall see again. But the continuity of performance gave a semblance of continuity also to the action. Therefore when a modern playwright like Pinero restricts his action to one day and represents the lapse of several hours by the fall of the curtain between acts, he does not thereby observe the unity of time in the Greek sense. The dramatic events were tacitly treated by the poets as if they occupied no more than a day and were so accepted by the public. By “tacitly” I mean that if such crowding involved a physical or moral impossibility the dramatists never stooped to apologize or explain but placed their events in juxtaposition just the same. In Plautus’ Captives, Philocrates travels from Aetolia (the scene of action) to Elis and back again between vss. 460 and 768. In real life such a trip would have required several days, but in the play it consumes less than one! Do we positively know this? Beyond the shadow of a doubt. A parasite is introduced at intervals during the play scheming to be invited to a meal. He is first seen at vs. 69 and does not get a satisfactory invitation until vs. 897. A more detailed statement would show conclusively that the same day’s meal is under discussion throughout. Moreover, this is no mere lapsus calami, such as a few phrases which are found in an opposite sense,[324] but is unmistakable in its import and is closely interwoven with the plot. If anyone feels amazed at so deliberate a contradiction he may console himself with a study of the use of “double time” in Shakespeare. It would be possible, but is quite unnecessary, to cite other plays in which restriction of time to a single day is indicated with sufficient exactness. Of course the Greek dramatists did not consistently introduce references to the precise date or to the time of day. In general they were wise enough to act upon the principle which Corneille[325] expressed as follows: “Above all I would leave the length of the action to the imagination of the hearers, and never determine the time, if the subject does not require it.... What need is there to mark at the opening of the play that the sun is rising, that it is noon at the third act, and sunset at the end of the last?”
It is somewhat remarkable that Professor Verrall, who fully recognized the dependence of this unity upon local conditions and published eminently sensible observations on the subject, nevertheless felt constrained to challenge the obvious interpretation of two plays in which a glaring violation of the unity of time occurs. In the Agamemnon he supposed the watchman and the populace (including the chorus) to be misinformed as to the meaning of the beacon and that it really served to Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and their supporters as a warning of Agamemnon’s being close at hand! His elucidation of Euripides’ Andromache was still more ingenious and complicated.[326] But to bolster up such interpretations Mr. Verrall ought to have explained away all similar instances as well—to explain, for example, how in Euripides’ Suppliants an Attic army can march from Eleusis to the vicinity of Thebes and fight a battle there, and how tidings of the victory can be brought back to Eleusis, all between vss. 598 and 634, which, as Dryden[327] expressed it, “is not for every mile a verse.” Nevertheless not the slightest attention is paid to such patent impossibilities, and in every case the whole action is unmistakably supposed to fall within a day.