satyric drama, in which Æschylus and Pratinas were very famous. With Euripides this kind of play was unusual—he only composed eight of them, but as each tetralogy was supposed to conclude with one, he substituted short plays of a melodramatic character, like the Alcestis. The seriousness of the poet's face and the sadness of his other poetry might have led us to infer that the quality of humour was denied him, and that a joke from Euripides would have been a strained and unnatural phenomenon. Yet, as it were for the purpose of upsetting all such theories, it is from him alone that one of these peculiar farces is preserved; in which there is a real fund of mirth, and which, but for the coarseness of some of the jokes, would make a good acting play on a modern stage.[1]
The ancients carefully distinguished satyric dramas, always written by tragic poets, from comedies, which comic poets wrote; and the distinction, when closely examined, turns out to be something like the modern contrast between comedy and pantomime. In our pantomimes some well-known fairy-tale is represented by actors, who take no part in the buffoonery and the irrelevancies of a tolerably fixed and conventional group of figures with which they are surrounded. Thus, while the subject of the play or extravaganza varies, these accessories—the clown, pantaloon, columbine, and even the policeman—re-appear as fixed elements. Now this was precisely what occurred in the satyric drama so far as the Cyclops and other lesser evidence can warrant. The adventures of Odysseus and his companions with the atheist monster,[2] Polyphemus, are dramatised in close adherence to the story as told in the ninth book of Homer's Odyssey. There are no liberties whatever taken with the character or acts of
- ↑ The reader may judge for himself by consulting the translation by Shelley, who has effaced the objectionable passages.
- ↑ The franchise brutale of Polyphemus, in declaring his contempt for the gods, is quite a peculiar and a striking piece of character drawing, which merits more attention than it has yet received.
