The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

The pure drama of consciousness and the drama of pure objectivity are alike in that their characters have no secrets; the audience knows all about them that there is to know. One cannot imagine, therefore, writing a book about the char­acters in Greek tragedy or the characters in the morality plays; they themselves have said all there is to say. The fact that it has been and always will be possible to write books about the characters in Shakespeare's plays, in which different critics ar­rive at completely different interpretations, indicates that the Elizabethan drama is different from either, being, in fact, an attempt to synthesize both into a new, more complicated type.

Actually, of course, the Elizabethan dramatists knew very litde about classical drama and owed very litde to it. The closet tragedies of Seneca may have had some influence upon their style of rhetoric, the comedies of Plautus and Terence pro­vided a few comic situations and devices, but Elizabethan drama would be pretty much the same if these authors had never been known at all. Even Ben Jonson, the only "high­brow" among the playwrights, who was strongly influenced by the aesthetic theories of the humanists, owes more to the morality play than he does to Latin Comedy. Take away Everyman, substitute for him as the hero one of the seven deadly sins, set the other six in league to profit from it, and one has the basic pattern of the Jonsonian comedy of humors.

The link between the medieval morality play and the Eliza­bethan drama is the Chronicle play. If few of the pre-

Shakespearian chronicle plays except Marlowe's Edward II are now readable, nothing could have been more fortunate for Shakespeare's development as a dramatist than his being com­pelled for his livelihood—judging by his early poems, his youthful taste was something much less coarse—to face the problems which the chronicle play poses. The writer of a chronicle play cannot, like the Greek tragedians who had some significant myth as a subject, select his situation; he has to take whatever history offers, those in which a character is a victim of a situation and those in which he creates one. He can have no narrow theory about aesthetic propriety which separates the tragic from the comic, no theory of heroic arete which can pick one historical character and reject another. The study of the human individual involved in political ac­tion, and of the moral ambiguities in which history abounds, checks any tendency towards a simple moralizing of characters into good and bad, any equating of success and failure with virtue and vice.

The Elizabethan drama inherited from the mystery plays three important and very un-Greek notions.

The Significance of Time

Time in Greek drama is simply the time it takes for the situation of the hero to be revealed, and when this revelation shall take place is decided by the gods, not by men. The plague which sets the action of Oedipus Rex

in motion could have been sent earlier or postponed. In Elizabethan drama time is what the hero creates with what he does and suffers, the medium in which he realizes his potential character.

The Significance of Choice

In a Greek tragedy everything that could have been other­wise has already happened before the play begins. It is true that sometimes the chorus may warn the hero against a course of action, but it is unthinkable that he should listen to them, for a Greek hero is what he is and cannot change. If Hippol- ytus had made a sacrifice to Aphrodite, he would have ceased to be Hippolytus. But in an Elizabethan tragedy, in

Othello, for example, there is no point before he actually murders Desdemona when it would have been impossible for him to control his jealousy, discover the truth, and convert the tragedy into a comedy. Vice versa, there is no point in a comedy like The Two Gentlemen of Verona at which a wrong turning could not be taken and the conclusion be tragic.

The Significance of Suffering