Give us some light on the stage, electrician. How can we
Playwrights and actors put forward
Our images of the world in half-darkness? The dim twilight
Induces sleep. But we need the audience’s
Wakeful-, even watchfulness. Let them
Do their dreaming in the light.
and when Yeats writes that in the theatre ‘the essential thing is always full or almost full light because the actor comes first’, and how he would like to compel a theatrical producer to ‘produce some Shakespearian play with all the stage lights in every scene’, applying that principle even to the storm scene in King Lear; when Peter Brook brought the house lights up at the end of the first act of King Lear, before the blinding of Gloucester; when Poel looked for a lighting which ‘evoked the open air’; and when Granville Barker’s plans for an ‘exemplary theatre’ included ‘provisions for performing in daylight’, a suggestion his biographer calls ‘wonderfully radical’ – when all these men of the theatre made these statements and gestures, they were expressing, in their various ways, a deep nostalgia for the theatre of daylight.
The Greeks had no need of a lighting system to ‘evoke the open air’. They had such a system in the sun, which linked audience and performers in a common light. There was no atmospheric darkening of the stage for illusionary effect, nor to conceal such a spectacle as the Oedipus with gouged eye sockets. Voltaire’s suggestion, in his note to Corneille’s preface to Oedipe, that dim lighting might make that terrible image tolerable would make no sense to Sophocles, who has the blinded king described as a ‘spectacle’, something to be looked at, a theama, from the same root of the verb ‘to see’ that gives us ‘theatre’. It is also as a ‘spectacle’, in the same Greek word, that Prometheus in Prometheus Bound draws attention to himself and the injustice he ‘suffers at the hands of Zeus’. His final cry is to the ‘common light’ that unites actor and audience, theatrical space and outside world, the imaginary and the real.
This ‘light common to all’ (‘pantōn koinon phaos’, Prometheus Bound, 1091–2) is the first essential of ancient drama. The light is the first thing to be addressed by Prometheus or Alcestis or Ion, and it is not only the illumination in the sense of the lighting that unites audience and performer in a shared experience, but also in the sense of spiritual understanding. Things are brought, as Oedipus says, ‘eis to phōs’, ‘to the light’, or as we might say, ‘to the light of day’. Shared space and shared light. How different from the darkened auditoria of our day.
A Greek theatrical mask is part of the existential survival gear. It gives the bearing of survival to the actor wearing it. It represents a commitment to seeing everything through the eyes that never close. It represents a commitment to going on speaking when the always-open eyes have witnessed something unspeakable. The masks must witness the unendurable. That is why they are created with their eyes open. The mouth must continue to speak in situations where the human being would be speechless or screaming and unable to articulate its agony. The shared space and light allow this seeing and this speaking. The shared light begs a common language. The mask is always ‘presented’. It sees the audience looking at it. It seems to see more people than a human eye. A chorus of masks patrols the attention of the audience. If you know you are seen, you know you are being addressed, and you attend.
The space and light and the mask are created for a communal act of attention, a deep concentration in which the spellbinding metrical language also plays a primary part. Performability is not something injected afterwards into a text. Greek texts are created with the performability for that known space in the conditions of shared light, and created to be spoken in masks to an audience that is seen and never cut off in darkened seats. Above all, since the expression ‘to see the light’ in Greek means ‘to live’, the final sense is that of shared life. And it is to that life that the masked upright figure of Hecuba commits herself and us at the very end of The Trojan Women of Euripides, and not to the ‘total nihilism’ that Sartre found in the play.
But even that commitment to life was not the end of the drama. The broken Trojan refugees were not the final image. After every third play in a group of three tragedies, as The Trojan Women was, would come a satyr play written by the same author, with a chorus of what we can see as men in their animal condition, represented as half or three-quarters man with horse or goat attributes and an erect phallus. The unease that is felt and has long been felt at the idea of the bloated celebrant following hard on the heels of the sufferer has been responsible, along with natural oblivion, for the loss of these plays, which amount to a quarter of the whole large output of the great dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
With the loss of these plays we are lacking important clues to the wholeness of the Greek imagination and its ability to absorb and yet not be defeated by the tragic. In the satyr play, that spirit of celebration, held in the dark solution of tragedy, is precipitated into release, and a release into the worship of the Dionysus who presided over the whole dramatic festival. In the one complete surviving satyr play, the Cyclops of Euripides, the very last line allows the chorus the prospect of being liberated finally from the dark shadow of the Cyclops Polyphemus and spending the rest of the time in the service of Bacchus. This journey back into the service of the presiding god seems to be paralleled by the release of the spirit back to the life of the senses at the end of the tragic journey. It is unlikely that the quaffing promised to the Dionysian band was one in which a drop was taken from the cup for the sufferers of the preceding tragedy, as at Passover one drop of wine is removed from the cup of joy for each of the ten plagues which befell Egypt at the time of the exodus, but the sensual relish for life and its affirmation must have been the spirit of the conclusion of the four plays. The satyrs are included in the wholeness of the tragic vision. They are not forgotten or forced out by pseudo-‘refinement’.
Without the satyr play we cannot know enough about the way in which the Greek spirit coped with catastrophe. The residue of a few tragedies might give us the illusion of something resolutely high-minded, but it is a distortion, with which post-Christian culture has been more comfortable than with the whole picture. The thought of tragedy and satyrs co-existing has not been easy even for the most comprehensive of scholars. Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, to whom we are all indebted for the description of the material environment of Greek drama, has a problem characteristic of the scholarship on it:
The problem which is baffling to modern and Christian readers – how it was possible for the same audience, possibly even on the same day, to be absorbed in the noblest tragedy and pass immediately to the grossness, which … comedy displayed for at least a century and a half – would not have been appreciated by the Athenians of the fifth century, and it is one which will never be completely solved.
The stress on Christian and readers helps us to understand the problem. Christianity, with what D. H. Lawrence called its ‘lust … for the end of the world’, certainly drove a wedge into human nature and subverted the wholeness of an earlier imagination. The shrivelled private scope of readership rather than presence in shared light and space made both parts of the Greek spirit harder to accommodate. The essential catholicity of Greek drama, the unity of tragedy and satyr play, has been betrayed into divided and divisive categories, ‘high’ and ‘low’. The Byzantine compilers helped to initiate this process by choosing only a few representative tragedies for study. Discoveries outside of this ancient selection include those plays that help to undermine the view of drama as uniformly high-minded, even, given its early period of history, straining for an acceptable monotheistic maturity! The so-called ‘alphabet’ plays of Euripides included not only the one surviving satyr play, but also the category-disturbing Alcestis, often termed ‘proto-satyric’ because Euripides offered it in place of the satyr play as the fourth play of his competition entry. In this play Euripides introduced his ‘satyr’, in the shape of Herakles, into the
very body of the tragedy: the celebrant admitted before the tragic section had come to an end. The playwright thus showed both elements intertwined, doing what Johnson said of Shakespeare, depicting neither ‘tragedy’ nor ‘comedy’ but the real state of ‘sublunary nature’ in which ‘at the same time the reveller is hasting to his wine and the mourner is burying his friend’, or, in the case of Herakles in Alcestis, getting drunk while Admetus is burying his wife. It is, of course, precisely this quality in Shakespeare that has given those who want their genius more ‘refined’ the same problems that classicists have had with Greek drama. One such characteristic voice was that of Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930:
Shakespeare should not be put into the hands of the young without the warning that the foolish things in his plays were written to please the foolish, the filthy for the filthy, and the brutal for the brutal; and that if out of our veneration for his genius we are led to admire or even tolerate such things, we may be thereby not conforming ourselves to him, but only degrading ourselves to the level of his audience, and learning contamination from those wretched beings who can never be forgiven their share in preventing the greatest poet and dramatist of the world from being the best artist.
How far we already are from that shared space and light of the Greeks. The divided art is perpetuating divided audiences, divided societies. This audience of Shakespeare’s time, so despised and patronised by the Poet Laureate, is exactly the same as that which Alfred Harbage thought should take some of the credit for the greatness of Shakespeare’s plays. It was due in part to that ‘obvious reciprocity’ which also existed abundantly in ancient Athens. Harbage’s account of the audience in Shakespeare’s theatre immediately shows up all that is thoroughly undemocratic in the view of Bridges:
Mere coincidence will not explain why every Elizabethan play addressed to a sector of the people, high or low, learned or unlearned, is inferior in quality; why neither university nor law school, nor guild hall, nor princely banquet house begat dramatic poetry comparable to what came from the public theatres; or why Blackfriars failed to sustain the level achieved at the Globe. The drama reached its peak when the audience formed a great amalgam, and it began its decline when the amalgam was split in two.
If we stress the ‘free’ and the ‘men’ of ‘freemen of Athens’, we have a similar ‘great amalgam’ in ancient Athens, despite the fact it seems highly likely that slaves and even women were not at the theatres. A recent survey has shown that modern theatre audiences are composed of elite and privileged sectors of our society. For two of the greatest moments in world drama it seems to have been otherwise. W. B. Stanford has shown that the Athenian audiences were not simply intellectuals and sophisticated citizens, but ‘farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, manual labourers, in far greater numbers than the priests, poets, philosophers and sophists’. He tells us that we should do well to remember that when it came to voting for the groups of four plays submitted in the competition, the vote of a shoemaker was as good as a vote from a philosopher. The social composition of the audience in that shared space and shared light was not only a ‘great amalgam’ but could see that it was. Those gathered together had that kind of recognition of each other as belonging to the same society, but would only gather together on these important festival occasions; the uniqueness of the event also united them. We might say that TV reaches such an amalgam, but it is not present in the same space: TV viewers are not aware of each other attending, and therefore sharing not only the space and the light, but the illumination in the spiritual sense. When drama lost those conditions, it became less able to bear and digest the worst things it could imagine. Dramas became texts divided into ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. The loss of satyr plays is both a symptom and a consequence of this division. What is lost is a clue to the wholeness of the Greek imagination and its deep compulsion to unite sufferer and celebrant in the same space and light. In the end those who feel excluded from ‘high’ art and relegated to ‘low’ will sooner or later want to destroy what they are not allowed to inhabit.
If we have a nostalgia for the theatre of daylight, it is a sign of regret for a culture where the celebrant is born out of tragedy before our eyes. With us the masque and the anti-masque are as divided as they were when Shelley saw that division as both the ‘sign and the thing signified’ in his regrettably uncompleted drama Charles I of 1819:
Ay, there they are –
Nobles, and sons of nobles, patentees,
Monopolists, and stewards of this poor farm,
On whose lean sheep sit the prophetic crows,
Here is the pomp that strips the houseless orphan,
Here is the pride that breaks the desolate heart.
These are not the lilies glorious as Solomon
Who toil not, neither do they spin, – unless
It be the webs they catch poor rogues withal.
Here is the surfeit which to them who earn
The niggard wages of the earth, scarce leaves
The tithe that will support them till they crawl
Back to her cold hard bosom. Here is health
Followed by grim disease, glory by shame,
Waste by lame famine, wealth by squalid want,
And England’s sin by England’s punishment.
And, as the effect pursues the cause foregone,
Lo, giving substance to my words, behold
At once the sign and the thing signified –
A troop of cripples, beggars, and lean outcasts,
Horsed upon stumbling jades, carted with dung,
Dragged for a day from cellars and low cabins
And rotten hiding-holes, to point the moral
Of this presentiment, and bring up the rear
Of painted pomp with misery!
THE YOUTH
’Tis but
The anti-masque, and serves as discords do
In sweeter music. Who would love May flowers
If they succeeded not to Winter’s flaw;
Or day unchanged by night; or joy itself
Without the touch of sorrow?
SECOND CITIZEN
I and thou –
A MARSHALSMAN
Place, give place!
And the Marshalsmen of division go on crying, ‘Place, give place!’ in all our palaces of culture still.
II
In 1907, Grenfell and Hunt, the Holmes and Watson of Oxford papyrology, discovered the tattered remains of a lost satyr play of Sophocles, the Ichneutae (‘The Trackers’). The discovery of the papyrus with some four hundred incomplete lines was announced at the Annual General Meeting of the Egypt Exploration Society by Dr Hunt, in the following words:
… Three years ago we were indebted to Oxyrhynchus for some extensive remains of a lost tragedy of Euripides, the Hypsipyle. It is now the turn of Sophocles: and most fortunately the discovery to which I refer represents a side of the poet concerning which we have been very much in the dark. As you know, it was customary to produce tragedies in trilogies, or sets of three, which were followed by a Satyric drama, a lighter piece in which the chorus consisted of Satyrs, and the high tension of the preceding tragedies was relaxed. Only one specimen of such a Satyric drama has come down to us, the Cyclops of Euripides. Of the work of Sophocles, as of Aeschylus, in this line there exist only short disjointed fragments preserved in citations by grammarians and others. I am glad to say that for Sophocles what may be considered a fair sample is now recovered.
When found, the papyrus in question was, as usual, much broken up; in fact, the various fragments were not even all obtained in the same year. But they have fitted together remarkably well, and as now arranged make up the first sixteen columns of the play, accounting for over 400 lines, of which about one half are complete or easily completed, and many more sufficiently well preserved to be intelligible. Since the length of a Satyric drama seems to have been considerably less than that of the ordinary tragedy, the amount recovered may well represent as much as half of
the original whole. The play is the Ichneutae, or ‘The Trackers’, of which practically nothing beyond the title was previously known. It is based upon the familiar myth of the exploits of the infant god Hermes – his theft of Apollo’s cattle and his invention of the lyre. Apollo, in an opening speech, announces the loss of the cattle, for which he has vainly sought, and offers rewards to the finder. Silenus then appears with his attendant Satyrs, and proposes to join in the search. Encouraged by Silenus, the chorus start out on the quest – they are the ‘Trackers’ from whom the play is named. They soon discover traces of the cattle, leading to the entrance of a cave; but here they are alarmed by curious sounds which they do not understand – the notes of the newly-invented lyre with which Hermes is amusing himself down below. Silenus upbraids them for their timidity, and at length himself knocks at the barrier, and a nymph emerges. In answer to their questions, she explains that she is the nurse of the child who has been lately born to Zeus, and whose abnormal growth is so startling, and tells them of his invention of the lyre. But she stoutly defends him against the imputation of being concerned in the theft. They remain unconvinced; some cowhide admittedly has been used in making the lyre, and there are tell-tale tracks on the ground. While the dispute is in progress Apollo returns, and accepts the evidence offered by Silenus and the Satyrs as entitling them to the promised reward. Here the papyrus breaks off; no doubt in the sequel Hermes appeared on the scene and appeased Apollo by the gift of the lyre, as narrated in the Homeric hymn.
The piece was thus slight enough. Like the Cyclops of Euripides, it is a short and simple dramatisation of a well-known story, to which a Satyric setting was appropriate. An element of comedy was supplied by the grotesque figures of Silenus and the chorus, whose imitation of dogs upon the scent lends itself to some rather broad humour. While bearing the unmistakable Sophoclean stamp, this play thus differs entirely in theme and treatment from the other plays of Sophocles which we possess; and it fills up to some extent a gap in our knowledge of the dramatist’s art.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 17