Elizabethan stage, and would perhaps have done without a Chorus
altogether. In Aeschylus Greek tragedy had been a thing of traditional
forms and clear-cut divisions; the religious ritual showed through, and
the visible gods and the disguised dancers were allowed their full
value. And Euripides in the matter of outward formalism went back to the
Aeschylean type and even beyond it: prologue, chorus, messenger, visible
god, all the traditional forms were left clear-cut and undisguised and
all developed to full effectiveness on separate and specific lines. But
Sophocles worked by blurring his structural outlines just as he blurs
the ends of his verses. In him the traditional divisions are all made
less distinct, all worked over in the direction of greater naturalness,
at any rate in externals. This was a very great gain, but of course some
price had to be paid for it. Part of the price was that Sophocles could
never attempt the tremendous choric effects which Euripides achieves in
such plays as the _Bacchae_ and the _Trojan Women_. His lyrics, great as
they sometimes are, move their wings less boldly. They seem somehow tied
to their particular place in the tragedy, and they have not quite the
strength to lift the whole drama bodily aloft with them.... At least
that is my feeling. But I realise that this may be only the complaint of
an unskilful translator, blaming his material for his own defects of
vision.

In general, both in lyrics and in dialogue, I believe I have allowed
myself rather less freedom than in translating Euripides. This is partly
because the writing of Euripides, being less business-like and more
penetrated by philosophic reflections and by subtleties of technique,
actually needs more thorough re-casting to express it at all adequately;
partly because there is in Sophocles, amid all his passion and all his
naturalness, a certain severe and classic reticence, which, though
impossible really to reproduce by any method, is less misrepresented by
occasional insufficiency than by habitual redundance.

I have asked pardon for an ill deed done twelve years ago. I should like
to end by speaking of a benefit older still, and express something of
the gratitude I feel to my old master, Francis Storr, whose teaching is
still vivid in my mind and who first opened my eyes to the grandeur of
the _Oedipus_.

G. M.

CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY

OEDIPUS, _supposed son of Polybus, King of Corinth; now elected King