A Modern Play by Euripides

Extract

Among the most interesting of Euripides' plays are two of his latest, Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis, the first so often read, the second so seldom—far more rarely than it deserves. This last is incomplete, it is true, and full of difficulties in the text. But it is full too of the qualities most associated with Euripides, the man who depicted human beings as they really were. It is by now a commonplace to compare Euripides with Mr. Shaw, but in this play we have, if not a Shavian, at least a very modern treatment of a traditional theme. The men and women here are the old names, but they have not that quality—call it what you will—which a later writer named τὸ ὔΨος, and which in Shakespeare or in Sophocles deepens for us and universalizes the emotions, but at the same time sets the characters as it were far off, like lofty giants and princes in a tale which, sympathize as we may, is not quite on our earth. To-day we are more accustomed to characters we can see as men and women like ourselves, whom we can love, feel for, laugh at, and even despise. And when we see them in the stories of tradition or history, it is perhaps an added pleasure to feel that these men and women whose fame we know were really no less human than ourselves. It is perhaps this feeling which has popularized the modern school of biographers led by Lytton Strachey. And we find it in such plays as Caesar and Cleopatra, St. Joan, Richard of Bordeaux, or The Rose without a Thorn. It is here, too, in the Iphigenia in Aulis, perhaps the most modern of all Euripides' plays, and claimed as marking the transition to the Middle Comedy. The traditional form is still there, but little else of the Old Tragedy. The chorus with all its utterances could be deleted without the loss of anything essential to the play. There are rhetorical passages, particularly in the scene between Menelaus and Agamemnon, which leave us a little cold. But the play is full of real characters, real humour, and real pathos. And it will best be represented in English not in the traditional form of decasyllabic verse and archaic or Swinburnian diction, but in the realistic dialogue of a modern play. We may lose something of poetry and something of the atmosphere of the traditional which is still faintly discernible behind its forms. But we shall gain more of the real thing in it, the thing which reminds us of Shaw and the Realists, and which went farthest to endear Euripides to his contemporaries.