Читать книгу The Rape of the Locks (Perikeiromenê) - Menander - Страница 3
ОглавлениеPREFACE
One of the most conspicuous gaps in our salvage of Greek literature is the loss of the plays of Menander, the most famous representative of the "New Comedy." Born in 342 b.c., about 140 years after Euripides, 80 years after Plato, 40 after Aristotle, he was a contemporary of Epicurus and Zeno the Stoic. Like Sophocles he wrote over a hundred plays. Like Euripides he was not successful with the official judges, but attained, over their heads as it were, immense and lasting fame throughout the Hellenic world. Anthologies are extant purporting to give famous apophthegms and "single verses" of Menander. The quotations from him collected in Kock's Comicorum Fragmenta number over 1,100. The Roman stage of the first century b.c. subsisted entirely on translations or adaptations of the New Comedy somewhat blunted or coarsened to suit Roman taste, and Terence in particular based himself on Menander. Indeed, if Aeschylus is called the inventor of tragedy, Menander or his older contemporary, Philêmon, may be considered the inventor of polite comedy in the modern sense.
At the beginning of this century it looked as if the great gap was perhaps going to be filled. Papyrus manuscripts began to be discovered in Egypt, and in 1907 M. Lefèvre of the French Institute in Cairo published one containing 34 pages of Menander. Five plays were represented, none of them complete or nearly complete. The find was extremely tantalizing. One could at last appreciate the charm of Menander's style, the "Attic salt" of the dialogue, the sensitiveness of the character-drawing. Scholars hoped eagerly for further discoveries, and a few turned up, but they gave us no complete play and did little towards filling our lacunae. At last, I am half ashamed to say, I was unable to resist the temptation to patch up by conjecture—or at times by sheer invention—the missing parts of at least one play and to see what the result looked like. I wanted one in which the characters seemed attractive and the plot amusing and fairly clear, and ultimately chose not the Epitrepontes or Arbitration, which is much the best preserved, but the Perikeiromenê, a title which is difficult to translate. "The Shorn Woman" is simply incorrect. I have tried "He Clips her Hair"; Mr. Frost has "The Shearing of Glycera." On Mr. Bernard Shaw's suggestion, I have ventured on "The Rape of the Locks." About half the play is genuine Menander and half my conjectural restoration. I deliberately refrain from indicating which is which or what grounds I have had for particular suggestions. This is not a work of exact scholarship.[1]
I have written at some length about Menander in my book on Aristophanes and need add little here. To ancient critics Menander's art seemed the very summit of naturalness and closeness to life. "O Menander, O Life," cries one of them, "which of you has imitated the other?" They could hardly have thought otherwise. They saw him in contrast both to the wild extravagances of the Old Comedy and to the heroic legends and "large utterance" which formed the theme and the method of tragedy. Menander's characters are ordinary men and women, not divine nor heroic nor even royal. His incidents are such as occur in real life, or at least did occur in the real life of that stormy and distressful age, when the successors of Alexander were fighting for the great Conqueror's inheritance. His dialogue does no violence, either in diction or order of words, to the ordinary usage of conversation. Yet on a modern reader, accustomed to a drama which has for centuries been striving towards realism, the effect will be very different. Menander will come more into the class of polished and artificial comedians, the class of Congreve and Sheridan, of Molière and Beaumarchais.
He uses without scruple various stage devices which seem to us unnatural and old-fashioned: prologues, asides, soliloquies, eavesdroppings, "strawberry marks" and "recognitions." Moreover he writes in verse, accurate verse, with specific licences to differentiate it from the verse of tragedy, but no irregularities or lapses into prose. In one scene indeed the verse is actually tragic, a change which I have tried to indicate by turning from blank verse to the rhymed couplet. More than this, we have at times to remember that ancient comedy, like tragedy, was a Sacer Ludus, a "Sacred Play," performed on the festival of Dionysus and in his consecrated precinct. If we regard Dionysus as in essence a Year Daemon or Vegetation Spirit of the type made familiar by the Golden Bough or Miss Harrison's Themis, then, broadly speaking, comedy showed his "Kômos" or marriage revel, tragedy his sacrificial death. The ritual, as we know it from various sources, has a number of recurrent items, among them a Year-Baby of unknown parentage who is ultimately recognized as the divine or royal being that he really is, a Contest, a Victory and a Marriage Revel with appropriate indications of fertility. After that point comedy ceases, and tragedy with its sequence of Pride and Punishment begins.
The Old Comedy of Cratînus and Aristophanes was essentially a Kômos, a wild phallic dance sublimated into a great work of art, but still showing signs of its origin. The New Comedy expurgated drastically the grosser elements of the Old, but, unless I am mistaken, seems to have kept the essentials of the Dionysiac Fertility Ritual. We find habitually in Menander a mysterious foundling baby or alternatively a pregnant heroine who bears a child to an unknown or secret father; sometimes instead of one baby there are twins. At the end the baby is always "recognized," which causes a "Peripeteia," or reversal of fortune. There is always a Revel, always a final Marriage or pair of Marriages; very often there is some wrecking or threatened wrecking of a house, as Dionysus in the tradition wrecked the houses of Lycurgus and Pentheus. This is not the place to elaborate these suggestions or to discuss the similar incidents of ritual origin which had already found a place in Euripides.
The monotonous recurrence of these exposed babies and violated maidens in the New Comedy has always been a puzzle to critics. Was there some peculiar lack of inventive power in these successive generations of highly original dramatists? Or again, was the age which produced Aristotle and the great Stoic moralists so totally lost to social decency that seductions and exposures were the rule rather than the exception and all children of any importance were foundlings? Neither explanation seems adequate. It is true, no doubt, the exposure of children was in ancient times legally permissible, and consequently roused little moral condemnation. By the ordinary patria potestas the father had a right to rear or refuse to rear any child born to him, and one must recognize that in times of great distress most populations try, in one way or another, to avoid the economic burden of children. These facts must be borne in mind. They would explain an occasional foundling, but not an omnipresent foundling. At most they made it easier for the incidents of the traditional ritual to be accepted on the stage without criticism. The workings of tradition in all the art that we, in our arrogant modern manner, call "creative"—the Greeks said "imitative"—are extremely subtle. When strongest they are unconscious. We merely do without question the thing we are in the habit of doing. Consciousness comes in when there is some clash between the tradition and the artist's own desires. It is impossible to estimate the degree of such clash or such consciousness in Menander. Are we to imagine him taking his Year-Babies and Revels and Recognitions and Reversals as unquestioningly as we take the details of our Nativity Plays or our festoons of holly and mistletoe at Christmas, or on the contrary, as rebelliously murmuring to himself: "I could make a better play without all this ritual lumber, but I suppose the Priest of Dionysus would object"? He stood no doubt somewhere between, but it would need a bold man to say exactly where!
CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY
Philînus, a crabbed Old Man Pataecus, a kindly Old Man The Goddess Ignorance Polemo, a Colonel of Light Infantry Sôsias, a Corporal, his Batman Glycera, beloved by Polemo Moschio, a Young Man Davus, Moschio's Servant Doris, Glycera's Maid Myrrhinê, a rich Lady, adoptive Mother of Moschio Habrônis, a Dancer Some Soldiers, a Cook, a Porter.
[The scene is a street in Corinth showing two houses; to the right Polemo's house, to the left Myrrhinê's. An exedra, or open-air seat, to the left, a tree to the right.]
