The Story of Drama - Tragedy, Comedy, and Ritual PDF

2 Tragedy, Comedy and Ritual Although tragedy and comedy are closely entwined, it is the former which has fascinated critics the more, largely because of the problem of suffering. Why does it happen, what does it mean and what can be done about it? We might even say that tragedy is a response...

2 Tragedy, Comedy and Ritual Although tragedy and comedy are closely entwined, it is the former which has fascinated critics the more, largely because of the problem of suffering. Why does it happen, what does it mean and what can be done about it? We might even say that tragedy is a response to the problem of evil. Why does a supposedly loving God create a world where privation, misery and wretchedness seem to be the common lot of all creation? Such serious questions seem to preclude comedy and yet it too is concerned with the fall of man, not because he ate an apple, but because he slipped on a banana skin. This chapter will look at the differences between tragedy and comedy before arguing that they have a common origin in sacrificial ritual. It will show that the kinship between tragedy and comedy is evident, to a certain extent, in their etymology and in the myth of Dionysus, the god of theatre. It will then look at Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy, which puts Dionysus at its heart, before moving on to consider the Cambridge Ritualists and some of their critics. Finally it will clarify the relationship between drama and ritual and say why it is important to appreciate the spectral presence of ritual in tragedy and comedy as they develop over time. Tragedy and comedy: The same or different? The differences between tragedy and comedy are easy to spot. Tragedy ends in death, and comedy in marriage; tragedy focuses on the high- born, and comedy on the low-born; tragedy focuses on an individual, and comedy on the community; tragedy celebrates resignation, and comedy celebrates improvisation; tragedy is of the mind, and comedy is of the body; tragedy is the acquisition of self-knowledge and comedy thrives on self-ignorance; and so on. No doubt the reader can add to this list. But while these distinctions have a certain validity, they are by no means absolute. Tragedy, for example, does not always end in death as the example of Cresphontes (425 BCE)1 shows, nor does comedy always end in marriage, as is apparent in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598). 12 THE STORY OF DRAMA Nor does the distinction between high- and low-born characters stand up to scrutiny. Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), as his name suggests, is not a high-born figure but he is often regarded as a tragic one, while Alceste in Moliere’s The Misanthrope (1666) is both comic and high-born. And while there are certainly tragic heroes like Oedipus and Lear who suffer into truth there are others, such as Sophocles’ Antigone and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, who make little progress in understanding themselves. They are much poorer in self- knowledge than some comic characters. By the close of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1598/1599), Benedick and Beatrice realize that they really love each other, while Glyn in Alan Ayckbourn’s Time of My Life (1993) has to face the consequences of his affair and learn the true meaning of happiness. This is not to say that there are no differences between tragedy and comedy, only that they are ones of emphasis rather than substance. Tragedy and comedy are closely related because they both grew out of sacrificial ritual which connects death with the celebration of new life. As such, sacrificial ritual may itself be an expression of what Freud considers to be the two main instincts of human beings, Eros and Thanatos: the one strives for ever more complex forms of life, and the other for its dissolution, for a return to an inorganic state. These instincts are separate but they are also ‘fused, blended and alloyed with one another’.2 Of course we cannot prove this, and Freud’s theory of the instincts may well have been supplanted by the science of genetics, but it remains an intriguing proposition. The story of tragedy and comedy is one of divergence as they develop from their common origin. Not only do they appear different from one another but, over the centuries, each genre begins to internally diversify so that tragedies from one period barely resemble those from another and the same applies to comedies. These changes are largely to do with the conventions of tragedy and comedy; their nature, possibly rooted in the structure of the human psyche, remains largely the same. But, as the genre of tragedy in particular begins to decline due to urbanization, the rise of science and the development of democracy, this nature seeks new forms of expression. We will come to those in their proper place. Etymology Tragedy and comedy are usually considered separately. Yet they are linked not just by sacrifice but also, though more tenuously, by terminology. The Greek tragōidia, from which we get our term ‘tragedy’, meant both serious and sportive tragedy.3 Tragōidia is formed from tragos meaning ‘goat’ and ōidē meaning ‘song’. The term could also refer to the prize of a goat for the best actor or tragic chorus. Tragos has one further meaning, ‘spelt’, a form of Athenian grain used in brewing beer which connects the term with Dionysus,  TRAGEDY, COMEDY AND RITUAL 13 the god of theatre who was the god of beer before he was the god of wine. The word ‘comedy’ has several derivations. At one time it was believed to be a combination of kōma sleep and ōidē. In sleep we dream, and dreams, so Freud tells us, are the expression of forbidden desires which are analogous to the scatological humour, slapstick violence and anarchic sexuality of comedy. Another possible derivation of the word ‘comedy’ is the word kōmē, which means ‘country village’. Kōmē is related to comedy because behaviour that was prohibited in the city was permitted in the country. Erich Segal says that the ‘orgiastic indulgence’4 of country festivities were socially sanctioned activities providing outlets for excess energies that might otherwise disrupt the smooth working of society. But the most likely source for our word ‘comedy’ is komoidia, the song of the kōmos, a procession characterized by singing, dancing and drinking. Those taking part wore masks and costumes and shouted abuse at individuals along the way. They also carried with them a huge phallus to promote fertility. Although tragedy and comedy are different words they are both forms of song and they have similar connotations. Each is associated with intoxication – tragedy because of its etymological links with beer, and comedy because drink was an integral part of the kōmos. Both tragedy and comedy are also associated with the instinctual life – tragedy because it is derived from the ancient Greek for goat, a creature which symbolizes animal passions, and comedy because it arose from the celebrations which gave free rein to such passions. In short, tragedy and comedy overlap to the extent that they were originally types of song both of which were associated, in their different ways, with the pleasures of sensuous existence. But etymology alone will not disclose their various meanings. Segal, indeed, wonders whether we can ever exhaust the explanations for comedy. In his delightfully witty phrase, it is ‘a revel without a cause’.5 Dionysus Aristotle (384–322 BCE) said that tragedy and comedy had their roots in religious ritual. Tragedy arose from the dithyramb which was a hymn in honour of Dionysus, while comedy arose from phallic songs which were also associated with his worship. Given that Dionysus seems to be the source of both tragedy and comedy, it is not surprising to learn that he was the god of theatre. The story of Dionysus is similar to that of other deities described by Frazer in The Golden Bough. That is to say, he is killed and brought back to life. The basic elements of the myth are constant but the details vary. Zeus, the king of the Olympians, is Dionysus’ father and his mother, in most accounts, is Semele, a mortal woman. Hera, Zeus’ wife, is jealous, and wants to kill Dionysus. In one version of the myth she tries to do this by tricking Zeus into incinerating the pregnant Semele; in another she asks the Titans, a race 14 THE STORY OF DRAMA of giants, to kill the infant Dionysus which they do by cutting him into little pieces, a ritualistic act known as sparagmos. In the first version of the myth Zeus rescues Dionysus from the flames and sews him into his thigh; in the second, the Titans eat every part of him except his heart which is rescued and used to bring him back to life. Zeus then has Dionysus transformed into a kid or ram and sends him to be educated by nymphs on Mount Nysa where he invents wine. The constant presence of females makes Dionysus often appear womanly in appearance and behaviour. Hera recognizes him when he eventually leaves Mount Nysa and drives him mad. He wanders all over the world introducing the cult of the vine6 and demanding recognition for his divinity. After various adventures, including battling the Amazons, a tribe of warlike women, and escaping from pirates, he enters Greece. Having established his worship throughout the world he ascends to heaven and sits on the right hand of Zeus. The killing of Dionysus supplies tragedy with its theme of death while his rebirth supplies comedy with its theme of life. This reflects the two parts of the ancient ritual, the sacrifice and the celebrations of new life that followed. The sacrifice evolves into the death of the high-born hero in tragedy and the celebration of new life evolves into the marriage with which comedies conventionally end, at least until the eighteenth century. There are other aspects of the Dionysian myth that underpin tragedy and comedy. He is, for instance, a supreme actor, being able to transform himself at various times into a bull or a goat. He is also a rather androgynous figure, mainly due to his upbringing by nymphs, an experience that proves useful when he pretends to be female. This aspect of his identity feeds into the play with gender found in particularly Shakespearean comedy, where a part like Viola in Twelfth Night (1601–1602) calls for a boy actor to dress as a girl to dress as a boy. Disguise is a prominent feature of comedy, a lot of its humour arises from cases of mistaken identity. But it is also featured in tragedy. Hamlet, for example, pretends to be mad while Edgar, in King Lear (c. 1603/1606), disguises himself as a beggar. In tragedy disguise is related to questions about the nature of man. Is he no more than the part he plays? But it is also an attempt to escape the confines of the self, a desire that has its roots in Dionysian ecstasy. The wine and the collective worship did not, though, just offer the chance of liberation; they were also a way of getting in touch with fundamental life forces, of being in contact with cosmos and feeling the unity of creation. On a more mundane level Dionysus is also the prototype for hubris because, by mounting his father’s throne and ‘mimicking the great god by brandishing the lightning in his tiny hand’,7 he exhibits the pride that causes the tragic hero’s downfall. He may also be seen as an early draft for the tragic villain since he commits a number of brutal murders in order to  TRAGEDY, COMEDY AND RITUAL 15 gain recognition of his divinity.8 This ruthlessness is certainly in evidence in Euripides’ The Bacchae (405 BCE). King Pentheus bans the women of Thebes from worshipping Dionysus. The god therefore causes them to escape to the Mount Cithaeron, led by Pentheus’ mother Agave. He also tricks Pentheus into spying on the women’s activities but, in their frenzy, they mistake him for a wild animal and tear him apart, as Dionysus was once torn apart by the Titans. Dionysus’ final contribution to drama was the satyr play which was performed after the trilogy of tragedies at the festival of the City Dionysia in Athens. The satyrs themselves were a combination of human and animal characteristics. They accompanied Dionysus on his travels along with the Maenads, his female followers. Satyr plays were an ancient form of tragicomedy based on the stories of Greek mythology but the form in which they were sung, the dithyramb, was exclusive to the god. From the little evidence we have, the satyr plays appear to have been a mixture of drunkenness, brazen sexuality and general merriment. Nietzsche (1844–1900), The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy revives the importance of Dionysus for the modern world. He contrasts him with Apollo claiming that the former stands for the world of reality and the latter for the world of appearance. From this basic distinction flow several others which, in many ways, parallel Freud’s characterization of the conscious and the unconscious. Apollo, for example, is intellect while Dionysus is instinct. In Nietzsche’s view, the tragic hero represents Apollo and the satyric chorus represents Dionysus. Each symbolizes a different state of being. The hero stands for the individual while the chorus stands for the unity of all things. We experience the first through speech and the second through music. Music gives us direct access to this unity; speech gives us the idea of it. The satyric chorus plunges us into the very heart of it, and the tragic hero presents it for our contemplation. By doing so he or she protects us from too great an exposure to the ecstasy that is the essence of the ‘primal Oneness’.9 But the tragic hero doesn’t just mediate between us and the ‘primal Oneness’; he or she also stands for the value of the individual. The individual is the ground of a number of values including beauty, moderation and self- knowledge. Nevertheless, the greatest desire of the tragic protagonist is ‘to achieve universality … to escape the spell of individuation’.10 He or she does this by destroying the moral and social order. Consequently all distinctions, such as those between good and evil, are dissolved, and all sense of separation between self and other, self and world, are abolished. For Nietzsche, the supreme act of destruction is incest. That is why he hails Oedipus as the greatest hero of tragedy. His actions break the taboo on which society is 16 THE STORY OF DRAMA founded in order to experience the deep truth about the nature of existence, namely that everything is one. It has to be said that this interpretation is hard to sustain for the simple reason that Oedipus, far from wanting to commit incest, actually tries to avoid doing so. All the same Nietzsche’s point about the desire to merge with the life force cannot be completely dismissed because it harks back to tragedy’s origins in ritual where one aspect of the celebrations was indeed a desire to transcend the self by becoming one with divinity and the vital forces of nature. The echo of ritual is also apparent in Nietzsche’s claim that the tragic hero is a sacrificial figure because he or she endures life’s violent beauties and fierce energies on our behalf. He or she takes ‘the entire Dionysiac world on his back and relieves us of its burden’.11 He or she is destroyed by the Dionysiac force in order that we might live. And yet the death of the tragic hero is not a real death at all; it is a return to ‘the Primal Mother, eternally creative, eternally impelling into life, eternally drawing satisfaction from the ceaseless flux of phenomena’.12 This, indeed, is the basic doctrine of tragedy. The satyr chorus consoles us with the thought that whatever superficial changes may occur, no matter how heart-rending they may be, ‘life is, at bottom, indestructibly powerful and joyful’.13 Tragedy initiates us into an ‘understanding of the unity of all things’; it teaches us that individuation is ‘the prime source of evil’ and that art breaks ‘the spell of individuation’14 and hopefully restores us to a state of oneness with nature. Nietzsche tries to make us experience this by writing in a heightened, dramatic, intoxicated style – a style, in short, that is Dionysiac. Nietzsche’s ideas may tell us less about Greek tragedy than they do about the time in which he was living. The Birth of Tragedy was first published in 1872 at the dawn of the modern age – a time characterized by growing mechanization, the spread of urban living, the rise of mass culture, growing secularization and the spread of democracy. One consequence of these changes was that many felt cut off from traditions and ways of life that had previously sustained them. Nietzsche talks about this in The Birth of Tragedy when he writes that ‘modern man has begun to sense the limitations of the Socratic delight in knowledge, and yearns for a shore from the wide and barren sea of knowledge’.15 His characterization of Greek tragedy is therefore intimately related to his sense of the spiritual impoverishment of late nineteenth-century Europe. In a world drained of meaning and significance, argued Nietzsche, we look to art to save us ‘to heal the wound of existence’ by turning it into an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’.16 The Cambridge Ritualists and Tragedy A more detailed consideration of the part Dionysus plays in the genesis of tragedy and comedy can be found in the work of the Cambridge Ritualists. They were influenced by Frazer’s The Golden Bough and also,  TRAGEDY, COMEDY AND RITUAL 17 like Nietzsche, by the upheavals of modernity. In particular they sought in myth a connection to the past, the old ones having been broken by the industrial revolution, the growth of mass society and ‘the death of god’. The group’s main members were the poet Francis Macdonald Cornford (1874–1943), the linguist and feminist Jane Harrison (1850–1928) and the public intellectual Gilbert Murray (1866–1957).17 They were all also classical scholars who attempted to explain myth and early forms of drama in terms of ritual, chiefly those dealing with the death and resurrection of the ‘Year Spirit’, that is gods like Baal, Adonis and, of course, Dionysus. Harrison’s epic work Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912) provided the intellectual underpinnings of the group. She argued that religion began as the sacrifice of a ‘year-god’, or eniautos daimon, whose death and resurrection was a ritual re-enactment of the life cycle of the crops, but which then developed into the god’s promise of immortality to all men in the form of the great mystery religions of Dionysus and Orpheus. Murray applied some of these ideas to the study of Greek tragedy. It originated, he argued, in a ritual dance in honour of Dionysus, but it was also shaped ‘by the epic, by hero cults and by various ceremonies not connected with Dionysus’.18 Nevertheless, Murray continues, while the content of tragedy may have strayed from the story of Dionysus, ‘the forms of tragedy retain clear traces of the original drama of the Death and Rebirth of the Year Spirit’.19 He identifies six elements which can be found in the myth of Dionysus and other gods. First there is an agon or contest; secondly there is the pathos, the ritual slaying of the god; third a messenger announces the death of the god; fourth there is a threnos or lamentation; fifth there is anagnorisis, a recognition of the mutilated god; and sixth there is theophany, the resurrection of the god and a change from sorrow to joy. Murray detects this basic pattern in the tragedies performed at the City Dionysia, a festival held in honour of the god. Each playwright presented three tragedies, followed by a satyr play. Collectively, they were known as a tetralogy. A number of these elements can be found in The Bacchae. The agon, whose source is the conflict between winter and spring, lies in the confrontation between Dionysus and Pentheus over the worship of the god; the ritual slaying of the god is evident in the Bacchae tearing Pentheus to pieces, and the messenger announcing the death of the god is evident when a messenger in the play recounts that horror. Murray says that the other two elements would have appeared in the satyr play which ‘represented the joyous arrival of the Reliving Dionysus and his route of attendant daimones’.20 The fact that Murray locates the fifth and sixth elements in the satyr play is a reminder that, in general, the elements he describes are distributed over the tetralogy as a whole. Most Greek tragedies have survived as single plays. The exception is Aeschylus’ Oresteia (458 BCE). This highlights a big difference between our experience of tragedy and that of the ancient Greeks. We see tragedies as individual works; the ancient Greeks saw them 18 THE STORY OF DRAMA as a trilogy ending with a satyr play. So while we may think of tragedy in terms of loss, the Greeks were more likely to view it in terms of loss and restoration, hence Aristotle’s remark that the best tragedies end happily.21 The Cambridge Ritualists and Comedy But what of comedy? Can we find elements of ritual in comedy as well as in tragedy? Cornford’s answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Looking particularly at Aristophanes, he examines the phallic songs from which Aristotle said that comedy sprang. While no one can be sure of the exact forms of the songs, they were certainly a feature of the worship of Dionysus. From the available sources it seems that phallic songs were divided into two parts. The first was an invocation to Phales, a satyr and companion to Dionysus, and the second consisted of abuse and invective. The first part was intended to promote fertility and the second was meant to expel any evil influences. The songs, which were divided between a leader and a chorus, were part of a drunken procession called a kōmos, which moved to the place of sacrifice and then onto another place where, most likely, there would be more singing, dancing and drinking. Cornford’s analysis of phallic songs and their relation to comedy is more subtle than I can indicate here. He shows that the phallic songs began to evolve into folk drama when people started to impersonate Phales or the spirits which had to be expelled if the harvest was to be successful. Driving out those spirits gradually evolves into a conflict between good and evil that is personified by two antagonists, which represents another stage in the development of drama. The battle between good and evil corresponds to ‘the succession of the seasons, each in his turn has his separate reign, the period during which he triumphs over his rival’.22 Many folk dramas feature a battle between a young and old king which, Cornford argues, is really a battle between summer and winter. The claim is familiar from Frazer. The old king is a force of evil and obstruction because he has grown senile and yielded to the decay of winter. The young king is a force for good. Standing for the vigour of youth, he facilitates sexual union and fertility. His association with marriage has its roots in the kōmos which was also a wedding procession. In some versions of the conflict, it is the young king who is killed but then, like Dionysus, he is later restored to life. How, then, does all this relate to the comedies of Aristophanes (c. 445 BCE–c. 383 BCE)? Cornford begins his study by noting that the plays usually conclude with the chorus leading the hero out of the orchestra in triumph.23 He was also accompanied by a female character who appears only at this point in the play. She is not related to what has gone before nor has anyone mentioned her existence. Her sudden entrance is a mystery. Who is she? Why is she partnering the hero? Cornford suggests that we look for the explanation in ritual. The singing and dancing of the chorus, the kōmos,  TRAGEDY, COMEDY AND RITUAL 19 the uniting of male and female together with the honours with which the hero was in some plays bestowed, are all reminiscent of the sacred marriage where the bride and bridegroom represent spirits of fertility. Furthermore, Cornford continues, the celebrations surrounding the hero have their roots in those ceremonies designed to greet the new king after he has successfully banished the old one. Not content with general parallels, Cornford argues that the basic structure of Aristophanes’ plays has the formal character we associate with religious ritual. First there is the prologue which establishes the scene, introduces the characters and signposts the main themes; second there is the parodos, or entry of the chorus; third there is the agon, or contest; fourth there is the parabasis or address by the chorus to the audience; fifth there are several miscellaneous scenes, usually of a farcical nature; and sixth there is the exodus or final scene which usually involves festivities of some kind. The most important element in this list is the agon for this is the central feature not only of Aristophanes’ comedies, but also of rituals and folk drama. One example is the contest in The Frogs (405 BCE) over who is the best dramatist to inspire Athens to beat back the Spartans gathering at her walls, Euripides or Aeschylus. Such arguments, claims Cornford, can be traced back to the conflict in folk drama between summer and winter, which itself reaches back to the ritual of sacrifice to ensure a successful harvest. The parabasis, which has seven parts,24 comes after the agon. Cornford argues that the parabasis ‘closely resembles the Phallic Songs’25 in that, like them, it contains invocation and invective, the calling up of the god, and the satire used to scatter evil spirits. Moreover, the very form of the parabasis mirrors how the phallic songs were performed, that is by a leader and a chorus. But despite the obvious parallels between the parabasis and the phallic songs the two are not the same. The biggest difference is that invocation and invective are not directed at gods or spirits but at social problems. The parabasis in The Wasps declares that the poet’s aim is to drive off ‘all those plagues, fears and nightmare shapes/That came and hovered by your beds at night,/Smothering fathers, choking grandfathers,/And pinning lawsuits, summonses, and writs,/On harmless, peaceful folk’.26 This is the secular version of the expulsion of evil spirits. The poet, too, is the human version of the god, taking on monsters, ‘to purge the land of grievous ills’ and ‘sow a crop of new ideas’.27 The miscellaneous scenes and the exodos evoke, either separately or together, the sacrificial feast that follows the sacrifice. After the killing of the god, usually in the form of an animal, the meat was shared between the worshippers, an act that expressed both oneness with the deity and communal solidarity. Cornford detects references to the sacrificial feast in Aristophanes. In The Wasps (422 BCE), for instance, the debate between Procleon and his son Anticleon28 about the worth of the jury system concludes with preparations for a ceremony followed by the drinking of soup. Incidentally, this conflict between father and son is an echo of that 20 THE STORY OF DRAMA between the old and the young king. Freud will eventually rewrite this struggle in terms of the Oedipus complex, with the small boy wishing to eliminate his father. Coming after the agon, the feast is a victory celebration. It has echoes of the festivities surrounding the death of the god. His various body parts were either devoured by his worshippers or scattered across the fields to help fertilize the crops. In either case, it was believed he would be resurrected. Cornford’s claim is that the agon recalls the original sacrifice because it is ultimately about death and new life. The eating and drinking which follow the agon resemble the consumption of the god, while the practice of throwing little barley cakes in the form of phalli to the audience is strongly reminiscent of strewing the god’s parts across the land. In both cases the intention is to spread ‘the beneficent influence of the fertility rite throughout the community’.29 It should be added, however, that Aristophanes disapproved of this custom. In The Wasps, Xanthias, a slave, tells the spectators that no one is going to come on with a basket and distribute food to them. The Wasps is the sort of play that is ‘a bit more intelligent than the usual knockabout stuff’.30 Ritual and Drama Not everyone agrees that the origins of Greek tragedy and comedy, let alone the later manifestations of both genres, lie in sacrificial ritual. A. W. Pickard-Cambridge (1873–1952) famously stated that tragedy and ritual were quite different because in one the central character does not return to life and in the other he does.31 But this assumes that the Cambridge Ritualists were arguing for exact parallels between ritual and tragedy which they were not. They were simply pointing out those features of tragedy which suggested it had developed from ritual, something which Pickard-Cambridge himself accepted since he wrote that the dithyramb was ‘primarily Dionysiac [in] character’, that tragedy was ‘originally Dionysiac’ and that both tragedy and comedy are closely associated with ‘intoxication’.32 In fact Pickard-Cambridge’s real quarrel with the Cambridge Ritualists is aesthetic. He simply cannot countenance the idea that ‘the noble seriousness of tragedy can have grown … out of the ribald satyric drama’.33 Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) does not share Pickard-Cambridge’s views on the nobility of tragedy but he too downplays the role of ritual in theatre. ‘Theatre may be said to be derived from ritual’, he says, ‘but this is only to say that it becomes theatre once the two have separated’.34 Brecht’s criticism of ritual was part of his desire to create a new type of theatre, one which encouraged the audience to take a more critical approach to the events portrayed on stage – to think how they came about, how characters respond to them and how the social order can always be changed. Ritual had no place  TRAGEDY, COMEDY AND RITUAL 21 in this project because it reinforced the religious message that suffering was inevitable and that, if people wanted to please God, they should accept their lot in life. What’s more Brecht had seen the danger of putting ritual at the heart of society. The Nazis with their parades, torchlight rallies and ideology of the Volk had brought disgrace and ruin to Germany and devastation to Europe. Others, though, had a more positive view of ritual. Colonialism had made European populations more aware of different cultures. A number of modernist artists such as Paul Gaugin (1848–1903) in painting, D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) in literature and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) in music saw the world of myth and ritual as offering a more authentic, spiritual and fulfilling way of life than could be found in their own supposedly more advanced societies.35 Drama also saw a turn to ritual which resulted in a greater emphasis on dance, music and gesture than on the interactions of character. The stage designer Gordon Craig (1872–1966) advocated getting rid of ‘the play’ to concentrate on the true art of theatre: action, words, line, colour and rhythm. The French director and drama theorist Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) also wanted to dispense with the script and return to a theatre of masks, costume and stylized actions. Both men were convinced that by reviving the ritualistic element of theatre they would put the audience in touch with vital forces, pure emotion and profound truths about humanity and its relation to the cosmos. Conclusion The debate about ritual and drama often seems to be asking us to choose one or the other, but it is sometimes hard to tell them apart. For example, the claim that ritual is religious and drama is secular collapses as soon as we think of Medieval morality plays. Another frequently cited difference is that ritual is efficacious and that is it is intended to bring about a desired result, while drama is entertainment. But this ignores how, from the time of the ancient Greeks right up to at least the nineteenth century, it was believed that plays should promote good behaviour by rewarding virtue and punishing vice. It has also been argued that drama is an expression of a freer and more egalitarian society, while ritual suggests hierarchy and compunction. Can Shakespeare’s England be described as free and egalitarian? Yet again the boundary between ritual and drama begins to blur.36 The argument is not that there are no differences between the two, only that they are much more closely related than we sometimes think. It is time we gave ritual the recognition it deserves. We can start by acknowledging that there is a kinship between sacrificial ritual and tragedy and comedy. And, despite the development of drama over the centuries and the decline of tragedy this kinship is still evident. Which 22 THE STORY OF DRAMA prompts the question of what ritual brings to drama. This is very difficult to answer without reference to specific plays which we will do in the following chapters. However we can say that ritual gives shape to drama. It provides it with a template, the death of a god, and the celebrations which follow. Both are a means of understanding such things as the origin of society, the meaning of community, the nature of divinity and the relationship between life and death. In short, ritual provides drama with a framework that allows us to comprehend the world and our place in it. It is important to be clear on this point. Sacrificial ritual does not supply drama with a set of beliefs about these matters; rather it is a mode of perceiving them. In that respect it seems to tell us something about human psychology, namely that our minds are predisposed to look at the world from a particular point of view; for example, it seems we must always deal with problems by finding a scapegoat for them. Thus one reason for the survival of sacrificial ritual in drama is that it reflects our mental make-up, the particular way that our brain makes us apprehend the world and organize all its various phenomena. Again it is important to be clear. The claim is not that sacrificial ritual is the key to how our minds perceive things, only that it appears to be a factor in how we see and conceive them. There are many other factors that shape our vision and understanding but what is remarkable about sacrificial ritual is that, despite the rise and fall of different belief systems, all of which drama registers, it remains a fairly constant presence. The following chapters will attempt to flesh out this claim.  3 Greek Drama Greek tragedy was a product of fifth-century Athens though it did spread to other Greek cities, like Thebes and Corinth, during the fourth century. Comedy had more diverse beginnings. Sixth-century vases from different parts of Greece show costumed choruses that anticipate those found in Athenian Old Comedy. Aristotle was hampered in his search for the source of comedy because, he said, it was not taken seriously and therefore there were no records of its development. In addition, he added, ‘the form was already partly fixed before the first recorded comic poets and so we do not know who introduced masks, prologues, numerous actors and so on’.1 Aristotle does, however, suggest that comic plots came from Sicily. He did write more on comedy but the work, which was to have formed the second half of Poetics, has been lost. The First actor and reactions to Tragedy The first actor was a man called Thespis who lived in the sixth century. The introduction of the actor was a crucial step in the change from ritual to drama. The actor represented a person separate from the chorus and he spoke with a single voice to their collective one. The dialogue between self and society had begun. It was reputed that Thespis disguised his face either with white lead or a white mask. Thespis is also credited with taking his ‘plays’ round the local villages and performing them on wagons. Ritual remained a key ingredient of these performances, partly because they centred round the death and resurrection of the god and partly because they were shown at local Dionysiac festivals. Solon (c. 638 BCE–c. 558 BCE) was a statesman and lawmaker who had laid the foundations for democracy by, among other things, establishing an assembly where male citizens would meet to discuss and vote on decrees that affected every aspect of Athenian life.2 The Greek historian and biographer Plutarch (c. 46–127 CE) tells the story of his perhaps 24 THE STORY OF DRAMA apocryphal encounter with Thespis. Because he himself was a poet and because he was, as Plutarch tells us, naturally fond of learning anything new, he was keen to find about this latest thing called tragedy. Plutarch does not tell us what Solon saw but he does tell us about Solon’s reaction. The old man accosted Thespis and asked him if he were not ashamed to tell such lies in the presence of so many people. Thespis replied that there was no harm in saying such things in a play to which Solon responded by ‘striking the ground sharply with his staff declaring: “Soon, however, if we give plays of this sort much praise and honour, we shall find them in our solemn contracts.”’3 Solon, in short, thought that tragedy glorified lying and that, as a result, falsehood would permeate the polity. The Athenian tyrant Peisistratus (c. 668 BCE–c. 527 BCE) was unencumbered by such worries. He brought rural festivals honouring Dionysus into the city. He was also responsible for introducing tragedy into the Panatheniac Festival for which Thespis won the first ever prize. The Festival, which consisted of religious ceremonies, athletic competitions and cultural events such as the reciting of Homer, was created by Peisistratus to consolidate his power and promote pride in Athens. After him came Cleisthenes (570 BCE–508 BCE) whose reforms earned him the nickname ‘the father of Athenian democracy’. One of the most important was the replacement of a political system based on a small number of aristocratic families with one based on areas of residence known as demes. This also involved increasing the number of tribes from four to ten, each being named after one of the legendary heroes of Athens. The effect of these changes was to make the various institutions of the city, such as the Boule or council, which governed Athens on a day-to-day basis, more representative and to make the inhabitants loyal to the city rather than to their village or small town. The emergence of the actor, the inclusion of tragedy in the Panatheniac Festival and the first tentative steps towards democracy form the backdrop to the Great Dionysia which was established in about 500 BCE. The Great Dionysia The Great or City Dionysia was established in about 500 BCE and took place annually at the end of March or the beginning of April. A competition for the best tragedy and satyr play, it was both an act of worship and a display of civic identity. As a big, international event it was different from the other two drama festivals held in honour of Dionysus. The first, the Lenaea, was also held in Athens, or just on the outskirts, and took place in January while the second, the Rural Dionysia, was celebrated in December. Each festival had a slightly different conception of Dionysus. In one he was the liberator, in the other he was the god of wine and, in the third, he was Dionysus of the field. A reminder, perhaps, that Dionysus had a number of identities, which made him an ideal deity for the theatre.  GREEK DRAMA 25 There were several events in the days leading up to the Great Dionysia which lasted four days. The first was the procession of the statue of Dionysus to a temple in Eleutherae, a village near Athens. The statue was then returned to the theatre in Athens where sacrifices and hymns were performed. The presentation of playwrights and performers, known as the proagōn, was the second event leading up to the Great Dionysia itself and this was followed by a grand ceremonial procession called a pōmpe, in which the participants carried a variety of sacred objects as well as the phalluses associated with the worship of Dionysus. The procession concluded with the sacrifice of bulls in the sanctuary of the god. Finally, there was the kōmos the celebratory revel which was discussed in the previous chapter. All citizens, that is adult males with the right to vote, were required to attend the Great Dionysia. Those who could not afford the entry fee were subsidized from the city’s Thoric or Festival Fund. There is some controversy over whether foreigners, resident aliens and women could attend the theatre but there is partial evidence that they did.4 The seating arrangements reflected the different sections of society. One block, for example, was reserved for the council or government of Athens, another for visiting ambassadors, priests and other dignitaries, while still another was for ephebes, young men whose fathers had been killed in combat and who now were about to join the armed forces. The survival of lead tokens, used as tickets, bore the names of different tribes, suggesting that seating was also organized on tribal lines. Before the plays began, there were four rituals. The first, performed by a priest, was a sacrifice of piglets whose blood was scattered round the playing area. This was followed by a libation poured out by ten leading political and military figures. The second ritual consisted of a herald reading out the names of citizens who had made a contribution to the state and received, in return, a crown. The third was a show of tributes paid to Athens by her allies. Servants carried in bars of silver bullion and paraded them round the theatre. Finally, the ephebes were exhibited to the audience. The state had paid for their upbringing and education and now, appearing in their military uniform, before approximately 18,000 people, they swore by the gods to fight and die for Athens as their fathers had done. They then took their seats in their designated spot and the performances began. It is clear that these rituals were designed to glorify Athens and to uphold a model of democratic citizenship. How then, asks the classics scholar Simon Goldhill, are we to make sense of tragedy since it ‘show[s] a world ripped apart, civic foundations shattered and the noble values of citizenship turned against themselves in violence, confusion and horror’.5 In part, the answer lies in the fact that most Greek tragedies were set in the distant past and in places other than Athens. Audiences were therefore asked to contrast their well-ordered city with the chaos that had reigned in ancient Thebes or Corinth. Athens represented advancement, progress, and civilization. But the warnings were clear. Tragedy showed what can happen 26 THE STORY OF DRAMA when things go wrong. Those who did not honour the gods, those who went against the order of nature, those who put their own interest above those of the polis, or city, brought anarchy and destruction in their wake. Tragedy, then, reinforced the social order but, as Edith Hall argues, it also subverted it by giving voice to those like women, foreigners and slaves who were ‘silenced in the public discourse of the city’.6 More generally, tragedy taught the audience the art of debate. Many citizens had received little formal schooling and what they learnt from the exchanges between the protagonist and the chorus was how to discuss an issue and to be aware that it could be viewed in different ways, an important skill if Athenian democracy was to work. They also had to learn to distinguish between substance and style in discussion, a key theme in Euripides’ plays. Tragedy, in short, did not simply reflect moral and political ideas; it also explored and questioned them and, in the process, helped to create an informed, self-aware body of citizens. It valued hierarchy but it also uprooted it; it promoted conformity but it was also a form of critique. Aeschylus (525–456 BCE), The Oresteia (458 BCE) Aeschylus is regarded as the father of Greek drama because he introduced a second actor into his plays. Prior to that time there was only a single actor and a chorus. Aeschylus is reputed to have worked in a vineyard until Dionysus appeared in a dream and told him to write tragedies. His encounter with Dionysus is a reminder of the relation between drama and ritual. Sacrifice involves violence. So too does revenge. The relationship between the violence of sacrifice and the violence of revenge is one of the most complex in the history of tragedy. Both are forms of exchange. The priest sacrifices to the gods in the hope of something in return while those seeking vengeance are intent on repaying an injury done to them. In the first case the violence is public and socially cohesive; in the second it is private and socially divisive. Both types of violence are evident in Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Oresteia. Indeed, they are closely linked to one another for it is Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his and Clytemnestra’s daughter, Iphigenia,7 that initiates the cycle of revenge in the play. Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon who is then murdered by their son, Orestes, who, in turn, is pursued by the Furies8 only escaping their vengeance by the intervention of Athena who establishes the law and replaces revenge with justice: ‘the time of brute force is past./ The day of reasoned persuasion,/With its long vision,/With its mercy, its forgiveness,/Has arrived’.9 As these words show, The Oresteia deals with the passage from savagery, defined as revenge, to civilization, defined as law, a process that culminates in the Furies renouncing their primal urge to destroy those who murder members of their own family in return for a position of honour and respect in Athens. In addition, they will receive tributes ‘at marriage and  GREEK DRAMA 27 childbirth/Where strangers are united in love/And a new being is brought out of chaos’.10 These tributes are a reminder of the uses of sacrifice, how it strengthens communal ties and promotes fertility. The Furies’ renunciation of their powers will result in healthy animals and large harvests. ‘We can’, they say, even ‘persuade great Pan/To bring twin lambs/From every ewe.’11 The meaning is clear: civilization is built on sacrifice, especially that of giving up the right of revenge. This accords with those theories which state that sacrifice marks the boundary between the domestic and the wild, between nature and culture.12 But the position is a little more complicated than that, if only because the act of revenge already implies some form of social organization. That apart, the true sacrifice in The Oresteia is not the self-sacrifice of the Furies but the killing of Clytemnestra. At first glance her death does not look like a sacrifice but like revenge. Orestes stabs his mother – itself a sexually symbolic act – because she killed his father. However, from another angle, Clytemnestra’s death takes on the appearance of a sacrifice. Why? Because it was demanded by Apollo. He it was who ‘appointed the stroke of the sword-blade/That dispatched [Orestes] mother’.13 But the fact that Apollo required Clytemnestra’s death is not, of itself, sufficient to turn it into a sacrifice. For it to acquire that status it also needs to have a beneficial effect. And what the slaying of Clytemnestra achieves is nothing less than the establishment of a new pantheon of gods and the founding of the new Athens. Athene and Apollo represent the new gods and the Furies the old ones, the latter recognizing that their laws are now ‘obsolete’14 and so they accept the invitation to be part of the new order. Athene establishes a new Athens by creating a permanent court and instituting trial by jury, two things that will make the city’s name ‘resound throughout the nations’.15 Clytemnestra’s death, in short, makes Athenian civilization possible. Or to put this in a more extreme manner, without her death, there would be no poetry, philosophy or democracy. The whole edifice of Western civilization rests on her butchered body. It is the dramatic equivalent of the ancient Greek custom of sacrificing an animal or, in some cases, a human, whose remains were buried under the foundation of a new building in order to give it ‘strength and stability’ and ‘to guard it against the intrusion of enemies’.16 This civilization has a distinctly masculine character. Athene may be a female goddess but she represents law, restraint and rationality, traditional ‘male qualities’ that she uses to douse the fiery instincts of the female Furies. Clytemnestra is like the Furies to the extent that she is female and because she acts from vengeance. The difference is that she is killed and the Furies are incorporated into the new society. Why is this? One reason is that Clytemnestra exhibits both male and female qualities. She has ‘a man’s dreadful will in the scabbard of her body’.17 Such gender confusions could not be tolerated as they may lead to the dangerous blurring of social boundaries. If women came out of the 28 THE STORY OF DRAMA home, what was to stop slaves from rebelling? There was also a fear that women’s desires could disrupt the ordered world of men.18 Clytemnestra’s taking a lover, Aegisthus, is one example of how female sexuality could undermine the institutions of society. This sexuality was most evident in fertility goddesses such as Gaia and Demeter. Cybele, known as the ‘great mother’, was another important goddess and her rites, celebrated in spring, were accompanied by drinking, wild music and abandoned dancing.19 Such behaviour was a threat to the social order and the killing of Clytemnestra can be seen, in part, as the repression of the anarchic female goddess and her powers of generation. If civilization was to flourish, the feminine had to be repressed. This is apparent in the difference between the rites associated with Cybele and those invoked by Athene at the end of The Oresteia. The former belong to the tradition of the kōmos, the drunken wedding procession, but the latter is an altogether more stately and dignified affair. ‘Pour out the wine./Let the pine bough crack and blaze …/ So God and Fate, in a divine marriage,/Are made one in the flesh/Of all our people–/ And the voice of their shout is single and holy.’20 This is a cleaned-up kōmos, one that aims at political unity rather than sexual release. The killing of Clytemnestra represents the removal of the excess associated with the feminine. It therefore fulfils one of the functions of sacrifice, the expulsion of ‘evil’ by projecting it onto another who is either ceremonially slain or cast out from the community. Nancy Jay’s theory of sacrifice may also be relevant here.21 She argues that sacrifice is a response to the fear of female sexuality which, because it cannot be contained, creates doubts about paternity. Sacrifice addresses this anxiety by creating an artificial form of patrilineal descent. Only males are allowed to perform sacrifice, and they pass on its various offices to their descendants. William Beers (b. 1948) argues that sacrifice is the result of men’s ‘narcissistic anxiety’.22 The male infant cannot identify with the all-powerful mother and resents his dependence on her. In sacrifice this anger – even rage – is directed at the scapegoat, but it can also erupt against women as the source of the problem. Orestes’ murder of his mother may have a deeper source than her killing of Agamemnon. But while Clytemnestra’s death has some of the features of sacrifice, it lacks others. She is not, for example, made holy or consecrated, which, as we saw in the first chapter, is a vital part of the sacrificial process. Nor is she killed in a ritualistic manner and the motive for her murder remains revenge. So is her death a murder or a sacrifice? It appears to be both. A similar ambiguity attends the death of Agamemnon. On the one hand it is a murder; on the other it has the appearance of a sacrifice. The chorus refer to it as a ‘murder’ and an ‘unfathomable evil’,23 a view echoed by Orestes who damns his mother as a ‘killer’.24 Yet the description of Agamemnon’s killing recalls the ritualistic slaying of sacrifice. He arrives in a chariot, is hailed by the chorus and has a purple cloth spread at his feet before being ritually cleansed. Clytemnestra even refers to him  GREEK DRAMA 29 as ‘a sacrificial victim … ready at the altar’.25 She makes a display of his remains in a manner reminiscent of the ritualistic display of the slain god and when she describes his death she tells the chorus that his blood showered her ‘like a warm spring rain/That makes the new-sown corn swell with joy/And the buds split into blossom’,26 words that suggest that Agamemnon’s death, like that of the sacrificial animal, brings about fertility. The ambiguous nature of killing in The Oresteia suggests that the violence of revenge and the violence of sacrifice are not as distinct as we earlier claimed. Each has elements of the other, but both are spectacular forms of violence. Burkert believes that this shared dramatic quality was derived from the hunt and developed in sacrifice. The hunters’ dance, enacting the killing of the prey, laid the foundation for the elaborate rites leading up to the ritual slaughter of the animal on the altar.27 The key motive for the killings in The Oresteia is revenge which Burkert again relates back to hunting and sacrifice. He claims that the hunter had to make reparation to the animal for killing it; otherwise its spirit would seek retribution. Sacrifice generated a similar anxiety, with some participants objecting to the whole blood-soaked affair.28 These anxieties were to some extent allayed by making the creature live again. Hunters did it by adopting a reverential attitude to its bones or by using its skin for warmth and its teeth for decoration. In sacrifice, too, the animal could be resurrected. After the ox was killed in the ancient Athenian sacrifice known as the Bouphonia or ‘murder of the ox’,29 its skin was filled with straw, sewn up and the stuffed animal was then harnessed to a plough. More generally, sacrifice justified ritual slaying on the grounds that the god whom the creature represented had to die in order to be reborn. The main point, however, is that these various elements of hunting and sacrifice – spectacle, revenge and the fear that the dead will return – may account for why murder, sacrifice and revenge are all mixed up together in The Oresteia. The way the past moulds the present helps us to understand another aspect of The Oresteia, the tension between fate and free will which, incidentally, is one of the recurrent themes of tragedy. Clytemnestra, who appears to be both free and not free, embodies this tension. On the one hand she accepts full responsibility for killing Agamemnon. ‘See my work perfected,’ she says when she displays his body. ‘I don’t disown it.’30 But, on the other, she says to Orestes, ‘Do not blame me I was in the hands of Fate.’31 How can we account for this apparent contradiction? The simple answer is that Clytemnestra makes these conflicting remarks in different circumstances. She utters the first as a queen and the second as a mother pleading for her life at the hands of Orestes, and her words reflect her state of mind at those times. But while this may explain Clytemnestra’s behaviour within the terms of the play, it does not help us understand the more general condition, that of destiny versus self-determination, which afflicts so many tragic protagonists, of whom Clytemnestra is only one example. 30 THE STORY OF DRAMA Perhaps some light may be thrown on this wider problem if we look at the strange behaviour of the participants in the Bouphonia. The sacrifice is unusual in that it had the character of a serious crime.32 No one wanted to take responsibility for the killing of the creature, not even the priest who struck the fatal blow. Instead, everyone blamed everyone else for the ox’s death until, in the end, the knife used to kill it was held to be responsible and cast into the sea.33 The fact that the participants point the finger at each other implies that the ox was killed as a matter of choice. But the ceremonial nature of the slaying implies the opposite – that the ox’s death was the result of a divine demand, an obligation laid upon the community to perform the sacrifice or else suffer the consequences. In short, what we find in the Bouphonia is the same impasse between human autonomy and divine diktat that we find in tragedy. This is not to say that the Bouphonia alone is the source of that clash between fate and free will which is part of the dynamic of tragedy but if we accept that drama grew out of ritual, then it is reasonable to assume that it was, to some extent, shaped by it. Certainly we find a fatalistic strain in the act of sacrifice. In one Babylonian ceremony the priest would address the bull he had just killed with these words: ‘This deed was done by all the gods, I did not do it,’34 words which closely echo Clytemnestra’s defence of her actions quoted above and also those of Orestes who, like his mother, first of all declares that he is a free agent, ‘we must find the means in ourselves’,35 but later states that ‘the great god commanded me [to kill my mother]’.36 It should be clear from the above that past and present are mixed together. Despite Athene’s fine words at the end of The Oresteia, there is no complete transition from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilization’. Athens can always regress to an earlier stage of development, as an individual can regress to an earlier stage of his or her instinctual development. Indeed, The Oresteia can be loosely interpreted in terms of the Oedipus complex. First the underlying cause of the drama is a variation of the Oedipus story, as the young Paris steals the wife of King Menelaus. Second, the drama takes place within the family unit, and third the shift from female riot to masculine reason parallels the little boy’s separation from his mother and identification with his father. But the Oedipus complex is never fully resolved. Repressed instincts, such as aggression towards the father, threaten to return. In The Oresteia, though, it is not the father who may erupt into the present but the mother. Clytemnestra could be seen as a substitute for the father because of her masculine qualities and hence when Orestes kills her he is, in a sense killing Agamemnon, his father. But the very fact that he is stabbing Clytemnestra also suggests he desires to penetrate his mother. Be that as it may, the key point is that Clytemnestra’s murder is not dealt with properly because her killer goes unpunished. Her corpse props up civilization, but her soul cries out for justice and no one hears. This creates the potential for her unquiet ghost to rise and seek vengeance, the dramatic equivalent of the return of the repressed in psychoanalysis.  GREEK DRAMA 31 Oedipal desires and Clytemnestra’s restless spirit put a strain on the underlying sacrificial structure of The Oresteia. The former, for example, symbolize degeneration, the loss of fertility which sacrifice is intended to secure. There are a number of references in the trilogy to the failure of sacrifice. Priam, the king of Troy, ‘pours libations/To lubricate the favours of the heavens in vain’,37 while Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia is ‘A sacrifice that cannot be eaten/A sacrifice that poisons the heart.’38 Such misgivings about the efficacy of sacrifice, which are also found in Oedipus the King,39 highlight the main argument, which is that the straightforward sacrifice of the Furies and the more problematic ‘sacrifice’ of Clytemnestra neither bring about the end of savagery nor the beginning of civilization. Right at the very start of our journey, we find that sacrifice is flawed, that it cannot bring about the desired end. This has implications for our understanding of the term which, in the fullest sense of the term, is way of ordering and making sense of ourselves, of our relation to others, of life and death and of our connection to both nature and the heavens. So, when sacrifice falters, the cosmos cracks. Where there were answers, there are now questions. The failure of sacrifice gives rise to the birth of philosophy already evident in those thoughts about the nature of life that we find scattered throughout tragedy: ‘we use what we love dearly to buy what we loath’.40 And yet sacrifice does not disappear; its presence continues to be felt in tragedy and comedy right up to the present. It no longer embraces all of life, nor expresses our relation to the circumambient universe, yet we do not seem to be able to do without it. Old Comedy Aristophanes wrote about forty plays of which eleven survive. There were competitions for the best comedies just as there were for the best tragedies. The Lenaea was originally intended only for comedies; tragedies were introduced around 430 BCE. The first three days of the City Dionysia were devoted to tragedies and their accompanying satyr plays; on the fourth and final day single comedies by five playwrights were performed. The rivalry between competitors could be intense. Aristophanes dismissed Cratinus (519–422 BCE), his elder contemporary who was victorious six times at the City Dionysia, as an incontinent, drunken has-been, while he himself was accused of plagiarism. Both men wrote what is known as Old Comedy.41 The only examples we have of this genre are Aristophanes’ surviving plays. Of the other writers of Old Comedy, Cratinus, Eupolis (446–411 BCE) and Hermippus (dates unknown) only fragments remain. Old Comedy differs from tragedy in terms of plot, character, subject matter, representation, language and production values. In tragedy the tightly organized plot mimics the inevitability of fate. What had to happen, happened; nothing could be otherwise. 32 THE STORY OF DRAMA This is not the case in comedy where the plot structure is much looser and where the general impression is of a chaotic rather than an ordered universe. Similarly while part of the meaning of tragedy lies in the fixed nature of the heroes which determines their actions, that of comedy lies in the fluid nature of the heroes which enables them to adapt to situations and improvise their way out of trouble. Of course both the tragic and the comic protagonist are subject to misfortune but it is of a different kind and they deal with it in different ways. The subject matter of tragedy is largely based on myth – that of Old Comedy on current events. One of Aristophanes’ frequent targets was the statesman Cleon (died 422 BCE), whom he saw as a warmonger and a demagogue. Aristophanes’ plays were considered to be such an accurate reflection of contemporary life that when Plato was asked by the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse (432–367 BCE) to explain the Athenian system of governance the philosopher responded by sending him Aristophanes’ complete works. Although tragedy deals with myth, it presents it in a fairly realistic manner. The characters are psychologically consistent and there is a respect for the physical laws of nature. This is not the case in Old Comedy which is characterized by magic and fantasy and where characters behave in a haphazard fashion. Similarly, where tragedy seeks to maintain the dramatic illusion, Old Comedy constantly breaks it with appeals and addresses to the audience. Tragedy is written in a high style. Old Comedy spans a range of styles from the colloquial to the artificial. It is bawdy, rude and revels in bodily functions. It parodies the metre42 and sentiments of tragedy and uses its noble idioms for the most ignoble subjects to hilarious effect. This does not mean that Old Comedy lacks seriousness. On the contrary, Aristophanes aimed to make his audience think critically about their society, in particular about the deceptive art of political rhetoric: ‘He’s taught you all their tricks, and now you never let them cheat you,’ he writes of himself in The Acharnians (425), adding that he will ‘carry on impeaching/Every abuse he sees, and give much valuable teaching,/Making you [the audience] wiser, happier men’.43 Old Comedy was more expensive to stage than tragedy, partly because the chorus of twenty-four members was nearly double that of tragedy and partly because it had to be more lavishly costumed. Fantasy choruses of wasps, frogs and clouds abounded. The chorus in Aristophanes’ The Birds (414 BCE), for example, were required to represent twenty-three different species of fowl. Money didn’t just go on costumes; it was also spent on training the chorus and choreographing their every move so as to create an arresting display. Spectacle, indeed, was a strong element of Old Comedy and therefore more use was made of props, stage machinery and special effects than was the case in tragedy.  GREEK DRAMA 33 These differences, though, should not make us overlook the fundamental similarity between tragedy and Old Comedy, namely that they both stem from sacrificial ritual. Moreover, as we shall see, Old Comedy is in continuous dialogue with tragedy and, by the time we get to Menander, comedy has taken on some of the features of tragedy. Aristophanes (c. 445 BCE–c. 383 BCE), Women at the Thesmophoria (411 BCE) The connection between ritual and Old Comedy is obvious in Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria because the Thesmophoria was a religious festival in honour of Demeter, goddess of agriculture, and her daughter Persephone, goddess of the corn.44 It took place in autumn before the sowing of the winter seed. It lasted three days and was attended only by married women. Thesmophoria derives from thesmoi, or laws which govern the working of the land.45 Both the myth and the name make clear the festival’s connection with fertility. Persephone was kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld. Consequently her mother forbade the earth to produce any food until her daughter was found. Zeus could not allow humans to starve and so he negotiated with Hades that Persephone be permitted to return to the upper world for six months of the year thus ensuring that humans will be fed.46 The story of Demeter and Persephone was at the heart of the Thesmophoria. The action takes place at the temple of Demeter and the first words of the chorus leader are: ‘Silence, silence! Pray you to Demeter and the Divine Maiden [Persephone].’47 One of the rituals, moreover, involved digging up items that had been buried the previous year.48 Another ritual, according to a contemporary source, consisted of the women verbally abusing one another. This rather strange activity was a re-enactment of that part of the myth where Iambe momentarily lifts Demeter’s grief by insulting Hades and relating crude tales; comedy provides comfort as well as crops. Iambe gave her name to the iambic, the metre in which comedy was written. The word ‘iambic’ itself comes from the Greek iambizein, which means to lampoon. Iambe’s ridicule and satire derives from the invective found in phallic songs whose purpose was to ensure fertility by expelling evil influences. We find numerous examples of insults and abuse in Women at the Thesmophoria. The drama itself stems from Euripides’ fear that the women who attend the festival are going to debate his downfall because he denigrates them in his tragedies. ‘The things he says about us! Is there any crime he has not accused us of? Wherever there’s a stage … there he is, coming out with his slanders.’49 Euripides’ relative, Mnesilochus, offers to go to the Thesmophoria to speak in Euripides’ defence, though he has to be disguised as a woman, which 34 THE STORY OF DRAMA involves not only shaving his face but also burning off his pubic hair. Once there, Mnesilochus tries to placate the women by reminding them that there are far worse things that Euripides could say about them if he only knew what they really get up to. ‘Why is it that we blame him for these things … when all he’s done is mention two or three of our little tricks. There are thousands of other things he doesn’t know.’50 A remark which initiates the agon or contest which is central to comedy and whose roots go back to the complex relation between life and death which lies at the heart of sacrifice. The women are at first insulted, then outraged and finally incandescent at Mnesilochus’ scandalous remarks. But before they can reply in kind Cleisthenes, a prominent Athenian gay man, enters and informs them that Euripides has sent a man dressed as a woman to spy on them. Suspicion immediately falls onto Mnesilochus and turns to certainty when Cleisthenes and Mica, one of the Athenian women, remove his clothing. He is then detained, guarded by Critylla, Mica’s friend. This episode is followed by a parabasis, where the chorus leader addresses the audience on how women are unfairly perceived as ‘a plague and a curse, the source of trouble and strife/And grief and war and sorrow and pain – everything dire in this life!’51 Her remarks are endorsed by the rest of the chorus who claim that a woman can surpass any man the spectators care to mention. So ends the first act of Women at the Thesmophoria. But what have we learnt? That the play contains two elements of ritual. The first is the insult and the second is the agon. The two are closely connected as invective is an integral part of conflict. But this is a play, not a ritual, which leaves us with the problem of how to interpret these elements. As we have seen abuse, insult and invective were intended to rid society of those things which might prevent a successful harvest but they do not appear to have that purpose here. Aristophanes’ concern is with city, not country matters. Having said that he does sometimes describe the role of the dramatist in terms that evoke the functions of ritual. In The Wasps (422 BCE), for example, Aristophanes claims he is a ‘Champion’ who ‘sought to purge the land of grievous ills’ with a view to ‘sow[ing] a crop/Of new ideas’52 but unfortunately he was not successful. The exchange of insults in Women at the Thesmophoria covers a range of social grievances from how men view women to how they prevent them from playing a full part in Athenian society. And yet these political issues are not entirely divorced from the concern with fertility that lies at the heart of sacrifice. Many of Mnesilochus’ remarks about women reflect fears about their fidelity – about whether or not they are faithful to their husbands. Euripides, says Mnesilochus slyly, never mentions ‘the woman who spread her skirt out wide to show her husband how nice it looked in the sunlight, while smuggling her boyfriend out underneath it’.53 This fear of female sexuality was central to The Oresteia. We saw how, in that play, the killing of Clytemnestra was, in part, an attempt to replace the principle of female fertility with that of male rationality. Clytemnestra  GREEK DRAMA 35 was a danger because of her sexuality and her ability to transcend gender boundaries; she was both female and male. The same idea is present, but in a comic fashion, in Women at the Thesmophoria. Mnesilochus dressing as a woman and Cleisthenes’ femininity are examples of Aristophanes playing with the categories of male and female. The anxiety about gender boundaries – which is a big part of comedy right up to the present day – is partly explained by the age-old dread that if sexuality falls into confusion through incest or same-sex desire, then the crops will fail. But it may also express, however obscurely, a desire for a return to that androgynous state which Aristophanes described in the Symposium. It is characterized by a sense of oneness, for which Freud used the term ‘oceanic feeling’.54 He found its source in the infant’s union with the mother, a state that reappears in love when ‘the boundary between the ego and the object threatens to melt away’.55 Whatever we may think of Freud’s explanation it is at least worth noting that the dramatist and the psychoanalyst both recognize the existence of something fundamental in the human make-up, namely a deep desire to abolish the distance between self and other, self and world. From one angle, this is the instinct for life, because it means joining with another, embracing the outside; but from another angle it is the instinct for death because it means losing or surrendering the self. The unsettling proximity between life and death finds expression in the intimate relation between tragedy and comedy. Euripides is threatened with death in Women at the Thesmophoria and so too is Mnesilochus. In addition, Mnesilochus, in a scene based on Euripides’ Telephus (438 BCE),56 snatches Mica’s baby and grabs the sacrificial knife, ready to ‘stain the altar with its bleeding veins’.57 But this potential tragedy is instantly turned to comedy when Mnesilochus discovers that the ‘baby’ is in fact ‘a full skin of wine complete with Persian booties’,58 a bundle that does credit to Mica’s ingenuity if not her piety. One of the most striking features of Women at the Thesmophoria is that it contains more allusions to Euripides’ tragedies than any other of Aristophanes’ plays.59 The tragedy it most resembles is The Bacchae for in both a man infiltrates a ritual that is meant for women only. In the one he escapes, and in the other he is torn to pieces. The presence of tragedy in comedy and, indeed, comedy in tragedy is a legacy of their common origin in sacrificial ritual where the continuity or appearance of new life depended on the spilling of blood. No one has their throat cut in Women at the Thesmophoria but that doesn’t mean there are no potential sacrificial victims. To Euripides, Mnesilochus and the ‘baby’, we can add ‘the Scythian’ who guards Mnesilochus in the second act. He has no name and is known only by his country of origin. He is a ‘barbarian’, a term used by the ancient Greeks to signify anyone who was not Greek. The Scythian’s status as an outsider is reflected in his grammatically weak and heavily accented language: ‘you keep mouth shut! 36 THE STORY OF DRAMA I fetch da mat. Den I guard you’.60 And it is his status as an outsider that marks him as the true sacrificial victim of the play. The ‘sacrifice’ takes the form of his being hoodwinked by Euripides. The playwright hires a dancing girl to distract the Scythian from his guard duty. He promises the Scythian that, if he pays one drachma, the girl will sleep with him. The Scythian gives the money but she vanishes leaving him running round the stage trying to find her. And when the chorus deliberately send him in the wrong direction, crying ‘good riddance’,61 his role as sacrificial victim is confirmed. But what does his ‘sacrifice’ achieve? Nothing less than the reconciliation between Euripides and the women. He promises not to say another bad word about them if they help him to rescue Mnesilochus and they agree. Harmony is restored between the sexes. The fear of ungoverned female desire is projected onto the lascivious Scythian and vanishes with him. Uniting against the outsider restores the right relations between men and women; reproduction is regulated and promiscuity is banished. This sacrificial aspect of the play is not self-evident. We can only find it if we are attuned to what Mnesilochus says to the women and to how his words relate to the Scythian. They alert us to worries about sexuality which were rife in the Oresteia. But this does not mean we should overlook the social dimension of Women at the Thesmophoria. Aristophanes is clearly addressing tensions in the relations between men and women in contemporary Athens. The problem is how to connect these two levels of the play. My argument is that, since drama grew out of ritual, it is to some extent shaped by it. Or, to put this another way, the structure of sacrifice partly conditions how the social issues are played out, not just in Women at the Thesmophoria but in tragedy and comedy generally. The social, we might say, is filtered through the sacrificial, though this is an artificial distinction since the sacrificial is itself social as we saw in the first chapter. Semantics aside, I am not claiming that the sacrificial structure of Women at the Thesmophoria is the key to understanding it. My point is only that we need to acknowledge it and to relate it to other elements of the play. Here again there is an obvious analogy with Freudian psychoanalysis, one of whose axioms is that what happens in the early stages of our development strongly influences our later behaviour. Self- knowledge largely depends on the ability to connect past to present, and the same is true of a society. It can never come to terms with the nature of its institutions and characteristic forms of representation if it ignores its artistic and cultural past. These force us to look beneath the surface of its habitual forms of life where we may encounter surprising and possibly disturbing truths about ourselves. Returning to the play, we have said that sacrifice is the matrix in which the action takes place. There are also numerous references to its associated rituals: invocations to the gods, the selection of a victim and drinking and  GREEK DRAMA 37 dancing. One song refers directly to Dionysus, calling on ‘The god of joy/The madcap boy’ to lead them in ‘their Bacchic frenzy’.62 But there are important differences. For example, the Scythian is a sacrificial victim because he serves as a scapegoat for the disruptive effects of desire, but he is not treated with the reverence normally reserved for that role. This also applies to Mnesilochus, one of the potential sacrificial victims in the play. In fact, what the chorus seek in deciding to burn him is ‘vengeance … For your wrongs we shall repay you’.63 We noted the close connection between the violence of sacrifice and the violence of revenge in our discussion of the Oresteia, and here we can make the further point that sacrifice is also seen as a form of punishment for wrongdoing. Mnesilochus has not only infiltrated the women’s sacred mysteries; he has slandered them and snatched a ‘baby’. He is therefore a ‘criminal’ as well as a potential sacrificial victim. The link between sacrificial victim and criminal is evident in public executions which provided both the spectacle of sacrifice and performed one of its functions, the expulsion of those who flout society’s norms and break its laws. ‘Spectacle’ forms a bridge between ritual and drama. Among the elements included in the spectacle of Greek theatre were masks, phallic props, pictures hung to create scenery and a crane that gave the impression of a flying actor. Aristotle believed spectacle was the least important part of drama, particularly tragedy, whose main concern should be plot, that is the imitation of an action which has a beginning, a middle and an end. Nevertheless he thought that spectacle, like the other features of tragedy – plot, character, diction, thought and song – was a form of mimesis, a representation of reality. But, as Aristophanes demonstrates, theatre can be the art of illusion as much as the art of imitation, the art of improvisation as much as the art of faithful reproduction. In this context, spectacle is a display, even a flaunting, of the creative power of theatre – no longer a reflection of reality, but a revelling in its power to make it or bend it to our will. It is this idea of spectacle that dominates the second act of Women at the Thesmophoria which centres on Euripides’ various attempts to rescue Mnesilochus. Each of these attempts is based on an incident in one of Euripides’ plays. For example, Euripides improvises a scene from his Helen64 by pretending that he is the shipwrecked Menelaus arriving in Egypt and that Mnesilochus is Helen of Troy. They then both treat the guard, Critylla, as if she were Theonoe, the character who helps them escape from that country. Another example comes from Euripides’ Andromeda (412 BCE). In myth, Andromeda was to be sacrificed to a sea monster in order to appease Poseidon.65 She is, however, rescued by Perseus. There is no hero to rescue Euripides and Mnesilochus; they have to rely on their wits but the end result is the same: they avoid being killed. In general, comedy transforms a sword into a tickling stick and the community is cleansed by laughter, not bloodshed. 38 THE STORY OF DRAMA What, though, is the significance of Aristophanes’ use of Euripides? There are several answers. First, it challenges the boundaries between tragedy and comedy in just the same way that Mnesilochus challenges the boundaries of gender by dressing as a woman. What is tragic may become comic and, conversely, what is comic may become tragic. Second, it demonstrates, in a comic fashion, the human powers of invention, improvisation and creativity. These show that we are not merely the playthings of the gods, but that we can control our own destiny. The idea that we can control our own destiny calls into question at least one of the functions of sacrifice, namely the scapegoat. If we are responsible for our own lives, then there is no need to find someone else to blame when things go wrong. Here is the most important point: that the artifice of theatre clashes with the rationale for sacrifice. The idea of theatre and the idea of sacrifice stand in opposition to one another. It is true that they are both forms of spectacle but these spectacles mean different things. The spectacle of theatre stands for freedom and self- fashioning, the spectacle of sacrifice for obedience and subservience to the gods. To put this another way there is, in Women at the Thesmophoria, a clash between the religious and the secular view of the world. One result of that is to undermine the belief in the efficacy of sacrifice. We found a similar scepticism about sacrificial ritual in The Oresteia but for different reasons. There it was to do with the complex Oedipal structure of the play; in Women at the Thesmophoria it is to do with foregrounding the idea of theatre as a spectacle. The radical implication of Aristophanes’ use of Euripides is not just that drama but that all forms of spectacle can be reworked to produce quite different effects. Ritual and religious ceremony therefore have no greater authority than any other form of representation. They may be sanctioned by tradition, visually arresting, full of mystery and deeply embedded in the culture, but put any one of its elements in a different context and laughter rather than reverence might be the response. On the other hand, we must reckon with the fairly common human need to feel that there is a power in the cosmos that cares for us. This power, whether it is god or some other entity, will watch over us if we worship it and keep its commandments. It offers safety and security in a harsh and dangerous world, and that is a very hard thing to resist. We desire love and protection as much as, if not more than, truth. We know that theatre is the art of making, but there is a part of us that wants to believe the illusion. Aristophanes may expose the mechanisms of ritual by foregrounding the art of theatre but Women at the Thesmophoria is still based round a sacrificial ceremony. New Comedy Like Aristophanes, Menander was a great admirer of Euripides and was fond of composing moral maxims, an activity not normally associated with comic  GREEK DRAMA 39 poets. They must have been good though because Menander was quoted by, among others, Julius Caesar (110–44 BCE) and St Paul the Apostle (c. 5–c. 67).66 But he is best known as the sole practitioner of Athenian New Comedy. Between Old Comedy and New Comedy come the innovations of Middle Comedy which include plots of deception and mistaken identity, the reduction of the role of the chorus and the cessation of political attacks on individuals and institutions.67 From now on, comedy would have to find its subject matter in everyday life. It found it in love. Love can be regarded as sublimated version of the sexuality found in sacrificial ritual. Marriage has replaced the orgy. The basic plot of New Comedy, lovers having to overcome obstacles, usually parents, in order to be together, is presented in a realistic manner. Everything takes place in a single location in real time. There are no visits to other worlds nor is the dramatic illusion broken as it is in Old Comedy. Similarly we do not find in New Comedy the sort of extravagant and exuberant language that we do in the Old. The classics scholar N. J. Lowe maintains that many of these changes, such as the unity of place and time, were ‘the direct result of the increased influence of tragedy’.68 According to Aristotle, tragedy often depends on ‘recognition’, a move from ignorance to knowledge. Oedipus, for example, recognizes that he is the criminal for whom he searches while in Euripides’ Ion (412 BCE) the eponymous hero eventually realizes that Creusa is his mother. Recognition is a key feature of New Comedy too because its plots often depend on disguise and mistaken identity. Indeed it is to Menander, says Lowe, ‘that we owe the western comic tradition’s reliance on ridiculously convoluted, coincidence-heavy, farcical plots centred on misunderstandings (especially of identity)’.69 That is quite an achievement for a man who left only one more-or-less-complete play, Dyskolos (316 BCE), usually translated as The Bad-Tempered Man, the surviving seventeen of the hundred or so he wrote being like classic statues with missing parts. New Comedy is also indebted to tragedy for its more realistic portrayal of character. But while Menander’s characters are certainly more credible than those of Aristophanes’ they are better described as types than as individuals. This is probably because Menander was influenced by Theophrastus (371–287 BCE) who is best known for The Characters (c. 286), a work which may have been written as an appendix to a treatise on how to write comedy. It contains thirty portraits with titles like ‘The Chatterer’, ‘The Authoritarian’, ‘The Tiresome Man’ and ‘The Avaricious Man’. The claim that a person can be understood in terms of a single characteristic – the ‘bad-tempered’ man – hardly does justice to the complexity of human nature, but Theophrastus’ portraits at least offer an explanation for why people behave the way they do and, to that extent, they mark the beginning of psychological ‘realism’. The fact that New Comedy has acquired some of the features of tragedy underlines, yet again, the deep connection between the two genres. 40 THE STORY OF DRAMA The free-wheeling nature of Old Comedy, like the mobile sexualities of sacrificial ritual have been disciplined and codified, made into a set of rules that will govern the development of New Comedy until at least the eighteenth century. But does that mean that sacrifice has disappeared from New Comedy? Not at all. We can still see its basic pattern at work in The Bad-Tempered Man. Menander (c. 341 BCE–c. 290 BCE), The Bad-Tempered Man (c. 316 BCE) Knemon is the bad-tempered man of the title. He is so called because he is irritable and shuns all company. He talks to himself, he throws things at people when they appear on his land, he refuses to help them and wishes that he could turn people who annoy him into stone. Knemon has a daughter called The Girl with whom Sostratos, a rich young man, falls in love. Knemon wants his daughter to marry someone ‘like himself’.70 The Girl has a half- brother called Gorgias who at first suspects Sostratos’ intentions but later is prepared to help him in his quest. Knemon, after being rescued from falling down a well, is happy for his daughter to marry Sostratos though that is the first he has heard of the matter. This rather bald summary touches on some of the issues we have already covered. For example, there is a hint of incest in Knemon’s desire that his daughter marries someone like himself and the fact that his daughter has no name is another, albeit minor, manifestation of the elision of the female that we noted in both The Oresteia and Women at the Thesmophoria. The play also echoes some of the themes that can be found in tragedy but in a more subdued form. Sostratos oscillates between believing that he controls his life and that the gods do and, like the tragic hero, Knemon gains a degree of self-knowledge. His remark that ‘Troubles alone, it seems, can teach us’71 echoes what the chorus say in The Agamemnon that ‘The truth/ Has to be melted out of our stubborn lives/By suffering.’72 One of the ways in which The Bad-Tempered Man differs from tragedy and Old Comedy is that it has no chorus, at least not in the conventional sense. The chorus had many functions: it offered advice; it upheld the principle of hierarchy; it shaped how the audience viewed the central character and it provided a moral commentary on the action. It was, in short, an active participant in the drama. But in The Bad-Tempered Man, as in the rest of Menander’s plays, its role has shrunk to providing entertainment in the interludes between the acts. Daos, Gorgias’ slave, heralds the end of the first act with the words ‘For I can see some worshippers of Pan/Approaching here, a bit the worse for drink;/It’s not the time to bother them, I think.’73 Daos gives us a picture of the chorus that is more like the old, riotous kōmos than the well-drilled unit audiences would marvel at in tragedy and comedy.  GREEK DRAMA 41 Moving the chorus to the margins of the drama revealed social divisions that had previously been concealed. Acting as the voice of the polis and positioned in the orchestra, the dancing area in front of the stage, the choruses of tragedy and Old Comedy projected the image of a cohesive society, no matter what befell characters in the play. But when the chorus cease to have a central role in the drama, unity is replaced by division. This is manifest, in The Bad-Tempered Man, in the difference between the rich and the poor, with the former coming from the city and the latter from the country. The opposition between city sophisticate and country bumpkin will be a constant in the development of comedy. It represents, in part, the weakening of man’s ties with nature and the decay of those rituals through which he expressed his relationship to it. And it’s worth noting that these divisions between rich and poor, country and city are also gendered. It is Sostratos who is rich and urbane and The Girl who is poor and rustic. Her reduced circumstances can, at a push, be seen as another example of the exclusion of the principle of female fertility that was at work in The Oresteia. The division between rich and poor is touched on several times in The Bad-Tempered Man. One character notes that Knemon is simply one of many poor farmers who barely eke out a living from the thin soil, while Gorgias warns Sostratos not to ‘despise us poor men’.74 The problem of the play, then, is how to heal this division. The ritual of sacrifice creates unity through the killing or casting out of a scapegoat. Comedy does it through marriage. Sostratos weds The Girl. But he also does something which is very rare in the history of comedy, which is to step outside his social circle and work with those at the bottom of society. ‘This’, says Gorgias, ‘is how a man’s true nature is revealed, when though he’s rich/He’s prepared to lower himself to the level of the poor.’75 His remark implies that there is such a thing as true identity but, if the history of tragedy and comedy tells us anything, it is that this identity is elusive to the point of non-existence. The fact that marriage, rather than scapegoating, is the solution to social division in The Bad-Tempered Man may suggest a rupture between drama and ritual, but this is not the case. Much of the play’s action stems from Sostratos’ mother, another unnamed female, organizing a sacrifice to Pan, who speaks the prologue and whose shrine is visible on stage throughout. The purpose of her sacrifice is to ensure the dream she had about her son being fettered, that is married, ‘turns out for the best’.76 This suggests that sacrifice is linked to a belief in predestination and all that humans can do is to accept the determinations of the gods with good grace. But it’s not the beliefs underpinning sacrifice that command the audience’s attention; it’s the difficulties the cook, Sikon, faces in preparing the feast such as getting a sheep to the shrine. What matters is the mundane, not the sacred. Knemon is well aware that a religious ceremony is often no more than an excuse for eating and drinking and having a good time. ‘They bring their picnic 42 THE STORY OF DRAMA hampers and their jars/Of wine not for the gods but for themselves/… they put on/The altar only … the parts they cannot eat,/And guzzle down the rest themselves.’77 We are reminded of Mica smuggling a wine skin in as a baby in Women at the Thesmophoria. The preparations for sacrifice show, then, that New Comedy is still indebted to ritual for its humour and spectacle. But, one might object, isn’t that humour evidence of scepticism towards the institution of sacrifice? If so, then The Bad-Tempered Man suggests that New Comedy, if it hasn’t actually broken free from its beginnings in sacrifice, at least has developed a critical attitude towards it. The argument is persuasive only until we delve a little deeper into the play. New Comedy may rely on marriage to create social unity but marriage is nothing more than the socially approved and sanitized form of the ancient fertility festival. Moreover, it’s not marriage alone that can heal divisions in The Bad-Tempered Man; a scapegoat is also required. The relation between the two is quite complex but what seems to happen is that, over the course of the play, the division between rich and poor gradually becomes the problem of how to rid Knemon of his misanthropy and incorporate him into society. A matter of economics, in other words, is turned into a matter of personality and, in the process, the whole question of inequality is sidelined. Knemon fulfils the role of scapegoat because he is both inside and outside the community. One character says that while Knemon is ‘sharp- tempered … he’s not/The only one, they’re [poor farmers] nearly all like this’.78 At the same time, Knemon himself wishes that he ‘could take wings in high/And never meet the men who walked on earth’.79 These two quotations, moreover, show the two sides of Knemon: his economic position and his psychological disposition – a man who, as Pan puts it in the prologue, is ‘cross-grained to all’.80 It is perhaps fitting, then, that Knemon suffers the fate of the sacrificial victim not once but twice. The first time is when he falls in the well and the second is when he is the object of a practical joke by two characters to whom he earlier refused to lend a bucket and a stewing pot for the sacrificial feast. This second sacrifice therefore has an element of revenge to it, a combination which we have already encountered in The Oresteia. The first sacrifice may not seem like a sacrifice at all. How can falling down a well and being rescued possibly be regarded as an offering to the gods? There is no mention of any deity nor does it produce any discernible benefit. Well, there may be no mention of a deity but Knemon’s symbolic death and rebirth comically recalls the death and rebirth of Dionysus or the year god. It is also reminiscent of Odysseus’ descent into the underworld, by means of which he is able to find his way home. This was Freud’s favourite episode in The Odyssey because it was an allegory of psychoanalysis. The patient visits his or her unconscious in order to learn the truth about themselves so that they are able to live a more rounded  GREEK DRAMA 43 life. And this is precisely what happens to Knemon. The accident puts him in a wheelchair temporarily but it has benefitted him mentally because it makes him realize that he had been ‘wrong’81 to isolate himself from others. Finally, Sostratos has a semi-conscious wish to see his prospective father-in-law drown. He thought it was fun to watch, did nothing and, when pressed to help, ‘nearly sent him to his death/Three times at least’.82 His actions allude to the basic function of sacrifice, the removal of what is old to make way for what is new. The problem with this first ‘sacrifice’ is that it doesn’t work. Knemon may admit to having been mistaken in the past but he doesn’t change. Moreover he claims that his way of life actually had some merit: ‘if all men behaved like me,/Law courts would no longer exist …/… war would cease [and] all would live content with less’.83 Perhaps so. But implicit in this defence is a rejection of law which, as we saw in The Oresteia, is the very basis of civilization. And that cannot be allowed to happen. The law must be maintained at all costs. There is therefore another ‘sacrifice’, one that humiliates Knemon, the comic form of sacrificial slaying, in order to integrate him into society. Getas and Sikon, the two characters who had earlier asked to borrow some u