Even though the victors wend their way securely home, what those dead suffered yet may work them ill—that pain which never sleeps.
It has never slept for her throughout the years—that pain which one dead girl suffered. So much to win our sympathy the poet allows himself, but in all that follows he draws boldly in clear, firm outline the picture of a strong woman without a single weakness; calm and proud and sure of herself; scornful of opposition; never doubting that what she determines she can carry through alone, with help from no one. So does she do; she murders her husband and coming out through the palace doors, she proclaims her deed:
Lies, endless lies I spoke to serve my purpose.
Now I gainsay them all and feel no shame.
Long years ago I planned. Now it is done.
Old hatred ended. It was slow in coming,
but it came—
I stand here where I struck. So did I.
Nothing do I deny. I flung around him
a cloak, full folds, deadly folds. I caught him,
fish in a net. No way to fly or fight.
Twice did I strike him and he cried out twice
and his limbs failed him and he fell. Then—then
I gave him the third stroke—
So there he lay and as he gasped, his blood
spouted and splashed me with black spray—a dew
of death, sweet to me as heaven’s sweet raindrops
When the cornland buds…. Oh, if such a thing might be
over the dead to pour thank-offerings,
over this dead it would be meet and more,
who caring not, as if a beast should die
when flocks are plenty in the fleecy folds,
slew his own daughter—dearest anguish borne
by me in travail—slew her for a charm
against the Thracian winds.
CHORUS: Loud words of boasting—and the man your husband.
CLYTEMNESTRA: Call me to trial, like any silly woman?
Curse me or bless—all one to me.
Look: this is Agamemnon,
my husband, dead, struck down by my right hand,
a righteous workman. So the matter stands.
Here lies the man who scorned me, me, his wife,
the fool and tool of every shameless woman
beneath Troy’s walls.
Her last words, addressed to her lover angered at the people’s outcry, and the last words of the play,* are:
Dogs will bark. Who cares to listen? What avails this empty talk?
You and I are lords here. We two now will order all things well.
Lady Macbeth is a second Clytemnestra through the earlier acts, as sure of her purpose, as resolute, as untroubled by a doubt. When Macbeth wavers she has strength enough to make him strong. Would he, she asks him, by failing to carry through his determination, live a coward in his own esteem? The words have the very ring of Clytemnestra’s. So too in her great speech she is one with the Grecian queen exulting in the stains upon her from her husband’s blood:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
When Duncan is dead and Macbeth comes to her with the daggers that should have been left by the attendants as proof they were guilty, she bids him carry them back and smear the men with blood, and to his horrified refusal:
I am afraid to think what I have done;
Look on’t again I dare not.
she answers scornfully,
Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures…
Even so would Clytemnestra have spoken and have done. The portrait of Lady Macbeth is drawn up to her last appearance as simply, in as clear outline, as Æschylus could have done it, with only one slight and yet significant exception. While she is waiting for Macbeth to kill the king, and fearing that his purpose will not hold, she speaks to herself:
Had he [i.e. the king] not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done’t.
That sentence blurs the clear outline. Did Clytemnestra have a moment of anguish, a sharp memory to stab her, when her husband rose from the bath for her to throw the cloak around him? Be sure if she had, Æschylus would never have put it in his picture. Clytemnestra’s inmost personal life was not his concern. To him her significance, her importance, lay in what was clear for all to see, outstanding, uncomplicated, a great and powerful nature brought to ruin by a hatred within her she could not resist because it was the instrument of fate. When death at her own son’s hand came upon her she met it as unflinchingly as she had dealt it. Lady Macbeth at the end, broken, pitiful, forever washing the hands which all the perfumes of Araby will never sweeten, shows a contradiction completely foreign to the Greek stage. She is the victim of her own most individual reaction to the murder she had planned and desired above all things. Her tragedy is within. Shakespeare was looking at what was deepest and what was loneliest in her.
Clytemnestra’s tragedy was without; her adversary was fate. Æschylus, like the Greek architect building his temple, was not looking at her alone; he did not see her isolated with her fate in her own hands, or rather, within her own self, as Shakespeare saw Lady Macbeth. He had in view much else besides; he saw her against the background of the past, terrible deeds of old that must work out in evil for her and hers; the thread of her web of life spun far back in dim years of old; she herself, for all her great spirit, doomed before ever she began. Crime upon crime through the generations behind her; the Trojan War brought about by her sister; because of it her daughter made to die, and she, killing her husband, killed in turn by her son. That is life, said the Greek tragedian, human beings each weaving a bit of the web of sorrow and sin and suffering, and the pattern made by a power before which the heart stands still. Against that background an individual vagary or inconsistency does not stand out. Only a clear outline can be discerned, simplified down to the dominating, the essential, that which past all question stamps a man for what he is.
Hecuba in Euripides’ Trojan Women is in all outside circumstances comparable to Lear. She too is old and royal and most miserable. She was queen of Troy; now Troy has fallen, husband, sons, are dead; she and her daughters wait beside the ruined walls while the Greek princes draw lots for them. Hecuba’s opening speech shows her complete. All the rest of the drama only confirms that first impression of a woman able to suffer to the uttermost, in misery and helpless old age, unbroken. When the play begins she wakes from her bed on the ground and speaks:
Up from the earth, O weary head!
This is not Troy, about, above—
Not Troy, nor we the lords thereof.
Thou breaking neck, be strengthenèd!
Endure and chafe not…
Who am I that I sit
Here at a Greek king’s door,
Yea, in the dust of it…
A woman that hath no home.
Weeping alone for her dead—
All kings we were,
And I must wed a king. And sons I brought
My lord King, many sons…all, all are gone.
And no hope left that I shall look upon
Their faces any more, nor they on mine.
And now my feet tread on the utmost line:
An old, slave woman…
The Greek herald tells her one of her daughters has been sacrificed on Achilles’ Tomb; the Greek soldiers carry off her other daughters one by one; they cry to her,
Mother, see’st then what things are here?
She answers:
I see God’s hand that buildeth a great crown
For littleness and hath cast the mighty down.
The last to go, Andromache, her son Hector’s wife, she counsels:
/> Lo, yonder ships: I ne’er set foot on one,
But tales and pictures tell when over them
Too strong breaks the o’erwhelming sea: lo, then
All cease and yield them up as broken men
To fate and the wild waters. Even so
I in my many sorrows bear me low,
Nor curse, nor strive that other things may be.
The great wave rolled from God hath conquered me.
Thou—thou—let Hector and the fate that fell
On Hector, sleep. Weep for him ne’er so well,
Thy weeping shall not wake him. Honor thou
The master that is set above thee now,
And make of thine own gentle piety
A prize to lure his heart.
Such is Hecuba from first to last, placed by the mysterious workings of fate, through no fault of her own, upon the height of misery, and able to remain there; outside, a pitiful old woman, but within, no variableness nor shadow of turning; raised above human weakness even though completely human in her power to suffer.
The contrast Lear shows is obvious the moment one thinks of him, his passionate temper, his unreasoning folly, that brought him to such a pass; the Trojan War and all that followed it, could do no worse to Hecuba. As Goneril and Regan carelessly comment to each other:
’Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.
The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash.
Yet so lovable, a high and careless spirit, slow to mark a slight:
KNIGHT:—to my judgment, your highness is not entertained with that ceremonious affection as you were wont…for my duty cannot be silent when I think you highness wronged.
LEAR: I have perceived a most faint neglect of late; which I have rather blamed as mine own jealous curiosity than as a very pretense and purpose of unkindness. I will look further into ‘t—But where’s my fool?
All the little touches that bring him near us. His struggle to control his rage when terror is at his heart:
LEAR: Deny to speak with me? They are sick? They are weary?…Fetch me a better answer.
GLOUCESTER: My dear lord,
You know the fiery quality of the duke…
LEAR: The king would speak with Cornwall; the dear father
Would with his daughter speak, commands her service;
Are they informed of this? My breath and blood!—
Fiery? The fiery duke?—Tell the hot duke, that—
No, but not yet—may be he is not well—
And most endearing, most moving of all, his weakness:
No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep;
No, I’ll not weep—
I have full cause of weeping—
Toward the end those most piteous words that strip him bare:
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Four score and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
So, just as Clytemnestra and Lady Macbeth, the old queen and the old king stand over against each other, she the victim of fate, he of his own self; her character given broadly without detail, simplified down to the dominant; his individual composition, like no one’s else, given to us unanalyzed. Lear has the whole stage to himself; Hecuba only a part. We have no need to question what she stands for; we look past her; her pain and her ruin point us to that which no one ever shall understand, what Ajax saw when he was driven innocent to death:
All strangest things the multitudinous years
bring forth and shadow from us all we know.
Falter alike great oath and steeled resolve,
and none shall say of aught, This cannot be.
A Greek temple makes the spectator aware of the wideness and the wonder of sea and sky and mountain range as he could not be if that shining marvel of white stone were not there in sharp relief against them, and, in the same way, a Greek tragedy brings before us the strangeness that surrounds us, the dark unknown our life is bounded by, through the suffering of a great soul given to us so simply and so powerfully, we know in it all human anguish and the mystery of pain.
But simplicity of characterization is not the same thing as lack of characterization. It is true in fact that characters simply drawn are almost never distinctly individualized, but Greek tragedy is the great example of how it can be done. The personages of a Greek play are clearly characterized. Hecuba is not in any respect one with Clytemnestra; each of them has her own way of meeting the determined things of destiny. Shift about the scene for them and Hecuba would never have avenged her daughter’s death upon her husband; with Clytemnestra in Hecuba’s place the Greek soldiers would have found their task less easy. Their portraits have been simplified; much is omitted from them, but all is there that is necessary to make each live, her own self and no one’s copy. An artist can make an outline of a face which shows the individual as unmistakably as a minutely detailed portrait could, and in the same way the Greek tragedian while simplifying could individualize.
The point is one that must be stressed because it is generally held that the personages of the Greek drama were not people at all but only types, abstractions of humanity. This is not true in fact and it could not be true in theory. As regards the fact, an example of individualization more easily perceived than either Hecuba or Clytemnestra, is Electra as each of the three tragedians saw her. They all left dramas in which she is a chief figure, and they all conceived her in a completely different way. She is Clytemnestra’s daughter who has continued to live on in the palace after her father’s death, with one hope only, that her brother Orestes will come back from exile and avenge the murder. All three plays open when Orestes returns to find her living in utter wretchedness, refusing to make terms with her father’s murderers and insulted and ill-treated by them.
In Æschylus’ play when she enters, she is carrying offerings to her father’s grave, sent by her mother, who is terrified because of a dream. Her first words, addressed to the chorus, slave-women of the household and devoted to her, show her troubled and uncertain:
Women, who order well all in our house,
be my advisers.
These offerings of sorrow—while I pour them
upon the grave, tell me the words to say.
What can I speak of good? How voice my prayer?
Say that I bring this from a loving wife
to a loved husband—sent by my own mother?
Not that—I have not courage. What then? Speak.
Shall I in shame and silence, as he died,
pour out the offering for the earth to drink?
The chorus bid her pray for “one to come who shall take life for life,” but she shrinks back:
Can it be righteous for me to make prayer
to God for such a gift?
Assured by them it is her very duty, she prays, but in veiled words. She cannot ask for her brother to come and take vengeance upon her mother:
My father, pity me, and dear Orestes.
I pray, may he come home with happy fortune.
And I—O grant that I may be more pure
of heart, more innocent of hand, than she,
my mother. For your enemies, my father,
may retribution come, the slayers slain.
That is the utmost she can say. No passionate reproaches against her mother, no crying out for revenge. She is not passionate but very quiet, self-contained in all her sorrow, and yet when Orestes appears and she knows him, she is eagerly, warmly loving. She calls him:
My joy, my four loves, father, mother, sister,
The Greek Way Page 24