of individualism in England produced the thoroughly individualised drama of Marlowe, Shakspere, and their followers; just as its inferior development in Spain allowed the allegorical personages of Calderon's autos sacramentales[1] to retain their intense interest for a Catholic audience; so its rapid development in Athens made mere types of character more and more grotesque, and less and less in keeping with serious thought. In this way, far more than through any sense of restriction, the habit of taking dramatic personages from the early Greek myths aided the fall of Attic tragedy; for though, as has been often observed, the tragedians were by no means tied down to any one view of a mythical character, their use of these types must have strongly militated against the seriousness of tragedy as soon as individualism of character came to be expected by the audience. Comedy, accordingly, after a time stepped into the shoes of tragedy, and applied to its own purposes the worn-out properties of the tragic stage. But the farther progress of Athenian individualism (much like the same progress in modern Europe) failed to find even a comic interest in typical and allegorical personages at all to be compared with the ridiculous little units of everyday life, and so the new comedians made their own kith and kin the puppets of their stage.[2]
- ↑ Thus in Belshazzar's Feast the dramatis personæ are the King Belshazzar, Daniel, Idolatry, Vanity, and a curious personage, called "The Thought," who in the first scene enters, dressed in a coat of many colours, as the fool. Among the dramatis personæ of the Divine Philothea are Sight, Hearing, Paganism, Judaism. See Denis Florence McCarthy's translations of these autos sacramentales.
- ↑ Bearing in mind the historical development of the dramatic chorus at Athens as given above, we cannot but regard certain imitations of the classic form in modern times as singularly incongruous. The introduction of the Athenian chorus among the Hebrews in such plays as Racine's Athalie or Milton's Samson Agonistes is like writing Hebrew ideas for an English or French audience in Greek words. Yet the presence of the Athcnian chorus and stock characters (the Κῆρυξ and Messenger, in Samson
