III. The Plays: General Considerations

Extract

On the level of purely subjective response there is no inherently incorrect or unjustifiable approach to the interpretation of character within the plays: the modern reader, like the ancient audience, is free to interpret according to individual experience or personal prejudice, and like all great writers Aeschylus has injected sufficient ambiguity into his creations to appeal to a wide spectrum of potential response. Of more objective concern on the other hand is the response Aeschylus aimed to produce, and the degree of importance he attached to the creation of character within the actual plays. In recent times the once popular exaltation of character, which viewed the figures on the stage as rounded and consistent wholes, has given way to a more Aristotelian assertion of economy in character portrayal, and its function of giving credibility to the more important element of plot. Thus Lucas states ‘most of the figures in Aeschylean tragedy are presented with the minimum of characterization; they are what the plot requires them to be and no more’. The earlier view, however, continues to be advanced, often in the more extreme guise of psychoanalysis, but while one cannot deny the useful insights the method sometimes produces, the exaggerated and wholly unrealistic claims advanced for it have proven totally counter-productive. At the opposite extreme is the insistence that portrayal of character lies totally at the mercy of transient dramatic necessity, making any quest for consistency doomed to failure from the start. It is a view that was first propounded for Sophocles by Tycho Wilamowitz and later applied to Aeschylus by Roger Dawe. Certainly in terms of logic Dawe’s proposition is hard to fault, and its very forthright expression serves as a welcome touchstone for others, but as P. E. Easterling observes, dramatic necessity is in many respects a sterile criterion of literary judgement. Somewhat similar in its final result if not in approach is the importance at times attributed to the divine factor in determining the actions of characters - the onset of Ate or an unspecified daimon that leads a man like Agamemnon to his doom. Again we cannot deny a role for the divine in the action of the plays, but to emphasize it to the exclusion of intelligibility in human terms risks negating belief that the characters portrayed are human beings at all rather than playthings of the gods.