The talent which Ibsen had for arousing controversy among his contemporaries is well known. Beginning with Love's Comedy as early as 1863, and reaching a climax with the challenging cluster of social reform plays A Doll's House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People in the years 1879-82, Ibsen's plays fulfilled as no other Scandinavian literature of the day Georg Brandes’ dictum that literature should “put problems into debate.” All literate Scandinavia in the late 1870's and early 1880's may be described as a gigantic debating society, in which people of sharply opposing views on social, political, and religious subjects came to grips with each other. In such discussions Ibsen's plays more often than not provided the point of departure for the clash of opinion.

Let me say at the outset of this lecture that I am not going to play that ancient game of trying to define the indefinable. Names of literary genres are but tags for works of art which have certain historical relations, but there is no more reason to believe that Hamlet and the Eumenides have a common essence than there is to insist that Louis Capet and Louis Philippe have a common essence, or that the Lever Building in New York and Lincoln's log cabin have a common essence. People have been trying for years to give satisfactory definitions of such terms as “tragedy,” “comedy,” “novel,” even “poetry,” and they have never succeeded. The reason for their failure is clear enough. Words have a history. When they are first used, it is likely that they are unambiguous, but as times goes on, they are applied to more and more different things.

The reader no sooner begins to pry into the poetic world fashioned by Lorca in his lyric poetry, ballads and plays, than he feels himself being immersed in a strange atmosphere. It is an apparently normal setting of popular scenes and people, all perfectly recognizable. But the air is, so to speak, inhabited by forebodings and threats. Metaphors cut across it like birds of ill omen. So, for example, summer “sows rumours of tiger and flame.” Day breaks in a most peculiar manner like a shadowy fish: “Great stars of white frost—come with the fish of shadow—that opens the road of dawn.” The wind is an enormous man pursuing the maiden “with red-hot sword.” These metaphors do not have a decorative function; they are an extension of meaning. They herald what is unusual and mysterious in this world. They proclaim that something is being prepared; they proclaim an imminence of fatality. For the poetic kingdom of Lorca, so brilliantly illuminated and at the same time so enigmatic, is under the rule of a unique, unchallenged power: Death.

In the Aeschylean version of the material with which Sophocles is dealing in his Electra, there appear a few important characteristics the awareness of which lends perspective to the Sophoclean tragedy.

For the purpose of this study, we only need to concern ourselves with the second part of the Aechylean trilogy, the Oresteia, namely the Choephoroe. The first part deals with the antecedents of the events. Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces, who sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to appease the goddess Artemis and to regain divine favor for the storm-bound fleet at Aulis, returns, after Troy's destruction, victoriously to his land of Argos where Clytemnestra, his wife, has been nurturing her hatred of him because of his consent to Iphigenia's death. She has joined forces with Aegisthus, who, for savage cruelties committed against his family, is also burning with a desire for revenge on Agamemnon. Aegisthus not only becomes Clytemnestra's ally, but dishonors Agamemnon at the same time.

The prolog to the Electra has sometimes been called unSophocIean. The moment is too propitious: the dawn brings a golden sunlight and the voices of nesting birds. Orestes and his friends move alertly, confidently, on the verge of deeds. The young hero prepares to act with a kind of unspoiled alacrity. As Orestes recites his assignment in revenge, while the Paidagogos listens to correct his errors, we begin to feel that the briskness and dispatch are somehow suspect and shallow. We are in the dimension of action, but the action proceeds upon a single level according to a plan whose elements are logically conceived and causally connected. Orestes will obey Time, but it is one-dimensional Time, interpreted as a succession of events leading to a mechanical and inexorable conclusion.

There is a sentence in Arthur Mizener's preface to Volume I of the Carleton Drama Bulletin which may serve to point the direction of my remarks this evening. It is our ambition, he says, “to pull together the drama as a thing alive on the stage and the drama as a thing read, contemplated, and discussed“—in other words, to conjoin drama in the concrete, as presented to our eyes, ears, and emotions by producers and actors, with drama in the abstract, as brought to our minds through the concepts and reasonings of dramatic critics. The chief concern of Mr. Mizener was properly with the kinds of plays that would best promote a union of the living stage and the stage as a formulated art. My concern, on the other hand, will be with the second element in the combination: namely, with the conditions under which, in such a program, the reading and study of dramatic criticism may help to advance rather than to hinder the realization of its double aim.

The poet and dramatist, Federico García Lorca, has had an extraordinary popularity since his death in 1936. His poems have been translated into numerous languages and his plays acted in many countries. In the United States his popularity has been much greater among amateur theatrical groups than on the professional stage, where, it must be admitted, his success has been very mediocre. But among the amateurs, and especially here in Minnesota, his works have been performed repeatedly. Every one of his principal plays has been acted in this state, and a number of them on more than one occasion.

Sophocles’ version of the Electra theme has been a constant source of trouble to the critics of Greek tragedy. Many of them conclude that it is a beautiful play, but a very poor tragedy. Other critics will defend the play on the grounds that if Sophocles wrote it, it must be good. Finally, there are those critics who try to infuse meaning into the play by forcing it into a philosophic framework which the critic has assumed prior to his analysis of the play. Let us look, briefly, at some of the conclusions reached by these critics.

Attention must be paid! “I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”

Is there anything really tragic about the death of a salesman? After three decades of seeing ourselves as little men lost in the anonymous masses of the modern city, can we really pay attention? Can we really believe that the failure and death of a little man is a terrible thing? Arthur Miller has tried to write a tragedy about a little, ordinary man of our day. But tragedy is a great affirmation, a great proclamation of belief. It is a probing of the depth of pain and defeat and despair to find a solid base from which the spirit can rise.