Sophocles

Mr. Shaw is an educated man.

He must have studied at some time or other the "Electra" of Sophocles, the "Trojan Woman" of Euripides, and the "Poetics" of Aristotle.

He cannot honestly plead ignorance of the principles and practice of the most strictly architectonic drama that the world has ever known, and, when he says that "Getting Married" is classical in form, he is talking with his tongue in his cheek.

Not even Mr. Shaw can make a bad play look like a good play by writing a criticism of it which he knows to be a lie.

The exercise of any art, as R.L.S. has told us, is nothing but the playing of a game, and the game of the dramatist is to interest the public of his time, assembled in the theater of his time, in the predetermined antics of the actors of his time.

The playwright, because of the conditions of his craft, is required to appeal to the immediate many instead of the ultimate few, and his efforts to interest a helter-skelter audience must stand or fall by the democratic verdict of the public towards which he has directed his immediate appeal.

Such representative great dramatists as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Ibsen succeeded amply in attracting the applause of their immediate contemporaries and thereby laid the basis for a favor that has been bestowed upon them by succeeding generations.

Their plays are still produced by commercial-minded managers because the fact has been established that there is a public willing to patronize them.

Demosthenes lamented to him that although he was the most laborious of all the orators and had almost used up the vigour of his body in this calling, he had no favour with the people, but debauchees, sailors, and illiterate fellows were listened to and held the bema, while he himself was ignored.

You are right, Demosthenes, said Sotirus, but I will quickly remedy the cause of all this, if you will consent to recite offhand for me some narrative speech from Euripides or Sophocles.

Demosthenes did so, whereupon Sotirus, taking up the same speech after him, gave it such a form and recited it with such appropriate sentiment and disposition that it appeared to Demosthenes to be quite another.

Persuaded now how much of ornament and grace action lends to an oratory, he considered it of little or no use for a man to practise declaiming if he neglected the delivery and disposition of his words.

Macedonia has not room for thee.

And since Philip saw that his son's nature was unyielding, and that he resisted compulsion, but was easily led by reasoning into the path of duty, he himself tried to persuade, rather than to command him.

And because he would not wholly entrust the direction and training of the boy to the ordinary teachers of poetry and the formal studies, feeling that it was a matter of too great importance, and in the words of Sophocles, a task for many bits and rudder sweeps as well, he sent for the most famous and learned of philosophers, Aristotle, and paid him a noble and appropriate tuition fee.

The city of Stagira, that is, of which Aristotle was a native, and which he had himself destroyed, he peopled again, and restored to it those of its citizens who were in exile or slavery.

One of the stories is that it was Julius Caesar's attacking forces that set fire to ships in Alexandria's harbor in 48 BCE, and then the flames spread up to destroy the library.

We don't know what was lost, but it's possible that there were hundreds of tragedies, comedies, and epic poems by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as a whole lot of scientific and philosophical treatises.

They gathered knowledge from around the world, but of course with so much knowledge concentrated in a single library, when it burned down, the loss to humanity was immense.

It's an immense loss indeed.

With your well-modulated and empty tones you have so labored for rhetorical effect that the body of your speech has lost its vigor and died.

Young men did not learn set speeches in the days when Sophocles and Euripides were searching for words in which to express themselves.

In the days when Pindar and the nine lyric poets feared to attempt Homeric verse, there was no private tutor to stifle budding genius.

I need not cite the poets for evidence, for I do not find that either Plato or Demosthenes was given to this kind of exercise.

And this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught as in the school of Hebraism.

Sophocles and Plato knew as well as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews that without holiness, no man shall see God, and their notion of what goes to make up holiness was larger than his.

But the intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal, and which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

This energy of faith in its ideal has belonged to Hebrewism alone.

The higher the quality of the work, the clearer the disclosure of the spirit, which fashioned it, and gave it the power to search and liberate.

The plays of Sophocles are, in many ways, the highest and most representative products of the Greek literary genius.

They show the genius at the moment, when all its qualities were in harmony with and perfectly balanced between the spiritual vision which it formed of life, and the art form to which it commits the precious and impalpable possession.

One of the distinctive qualities of these plays is their objectivity, their detachment from the moods and experiences of the dramatist.

He considered that the job of educating his son was far too important for the ordinary run of teachers.

It needed, in Sophocles' words, guidance and restraint.

So he summoned Aristotle.

Aristotle was a philosopher with an enthusiastic and wide-ranging intellect.

and Nizmini.

For people who need a little refresher on their Sophocles, these are Oedipus's daughters, subjects of a famous play.

Their brothers have killed each other trying to control Thebes and Creon as the new ruler.

He's praised one and refused to let the other be buried on punishment of death.