Alcestis

Alcestis

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Title: Alcestis
Author: Euripides
Release Date: December 23, 2003 [EBook #10523]
Language: English
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THE ALCESTIS
OF
EURIPIDES

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE
WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY
GILBERT MURRAY, LL D, D LITT, FBA
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
OXFORD

1915

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

The influence of this "classicist" tradition has led to a timid and
unsatisfying treatment of the Alcestis, in which many of the most
striking and unconventional features of the whole composition were
either ignored or smoothed away. As a natural result, various
lively-minded readers proceeded to overemphasize these particular
features, and were carried into eccentricity or paradox. Alfred Schöne,
for instance, fixing his attention on just those points which the
conventional critic passed over, decides simply that the Alcestis is a
parody, and finds it very funny. (Die Alkestis von Euripides, Kiel,
1895.)
I will not dwell on other criticisms of this type. There are those who
have taken the play for a criticism of contemporary politics or the
current law of inheritance. Above all there is the late Dr. Verrall's
famous essay in Euripides the Rationalist, explaining it as a
psychological criticism of a supposed Delphic miracle, and arguing that
Alcestis in the play does not rise from the dead at all. She had never
really died; she only had a sort of nervous catalepsy induced by all the
"suggestion" of death by which she was surrounded. Now Dr. Verrall's
work, as always, stands apart. Even if wrong, it has its own excellence,
its special insight and its extraordinary awakening power. But in
general the effect of reading many criticisms on the Alcestis is to make
a scholar realize that, for all the seeming simplicity of the play,
competent Grecians have been strangely bewildered by it, and that after
all there is no great reason to suppose that he himself is more sensible
than his neighbours.
This is depressing. None the less I cannot really believe that, if we
make patient use of our available knowledge, the Alcestis presents any
startling enigma. In the first place, it has long