Dramatic character and ‘human intelligibility’ in Greek tragedy

Abstract

Plays, we say, are about people, about people doing and saying things. What they say and do gives us access to the kind of people they are – their personalities, their individuality, their ‘character’. And we find people interesting. Simply, crudely put, this is the basis of what we call our interest in dramatic character. It is in her clear-sighted attention to this simple but central fact that Mrs. Easterling's essay on ‘Presentation of character in Aeschylus’ is at its most effective. But as we go on to ask further questions, about precisely what our interest in dramatic personality amounts to, about what it springs from and what are its necessary conditions in dramatic and theatrical form, further discriminations become necessary. I am not at all sure, for example, that it is true, as Mrs. Easterling suggests, that ‘the people and events of Aeschylean drama … convince us with the same kind of blinding authenticity as we find in Shakespeare and George Eliot'. We may have to distinguish between very different modes of authenticity. Again, Mrs. Easterling's appeal to ‘human intelligibility’ seems to me not without ambiguity. This paper is an attempt to forward discussion of dramatic personality in the context of Greek tragedy by examining some of the ambiguities inherent in the concept and to offer some possible discriminations. It is a contribution to an argument rather than a statement of a position.