Release Date: December 23, 2003 [EBook #10523]
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*** Start of this project gutenberg
EBOOK Alcestis ***
Produced by Ted Garvin, Charles M. Bidwell and the
Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE
GILBERT MURRAY, LL D, D LITT, FBA
The Alcestis would hardly confirm its author’s
right to be acclaimed “the most tragic of the
poets.” It is doubtful whether one can
call it a tragedy at all. Yet it remains one of
the most characteristic and delightful of Euripidean
dramas, as well as, by modern standards, the most
easily actable. And I notice that many judges
who display nothing but a fierce satisfaction in sending
other plays of that author to the block or the treadmill,
show a certain human weakness in sentencing the gentle
daughter of Pelias.
The play has been interpreted in many different ways.
There is the old unsophisticated view, well set forth
in Paley’s preface of 1872. He regards
the Alcestis simply as a triumph of pathos,
especially of “that peculiar sort of pathos
which comes most home to us, with our views and partialities
for domestic life.... As for the characters, that
of Alcestis must be acknowledged to be pre-eminently
beautiful. One could almost imagine that Euripides
had not yet conceived that bad opinion of the sex
which so many of the subsequent dramas exhibit....
But the rest are hardly well-drawn, or, at least,
pleasingly portrayed.” “The poet
might perhaps, had he pleased, have exhibited Admetus
in a more amiable point of view.”
This criticism is not very trenchant, but its weakness
is due, I think, more to timidity of statement than
to lack of perception. Paley does see that a
character may be “well-drawn” without necessarily
being “pleasing”; and even that he may
be eminently pleasing as a part of the play while
very displeasing in himself. He sees that Euripides
may have had his own reasons for not making Admetus
an ideal husband. It seems odd that such points
should need mentioning; but Greek drama has always
suffered from a school of critics who approach a play
with a greater equipment of aesthetic theory than
of dramatic perception. This is the characteristic
defect of classicism. One mark of the school is
to demand from dramatists heroes and heroines which
shall satisfy its own ideals; and, though there was
in the New Comedy a mask known to Pollux as “The
Entirely-good Young Man” ([Greek: panchraestos
neaniskos]), such a character is fortunately unknown
to classical Greek drama.
