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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2021
Recently Richard Schechner has attacked critics of the drama for relying so heavily on the views of the Cambridge school of comparative anthropology, at a time when their evidence for the ritual origins of Greek drama is viewed skeptically by most classical scholars [Approaches to Theory/Criticism, T32]. Whether right or not, he states, “origin theories, I think, are irrelevant to studying theatre,” and in place of a fruitless search for the origins of drama, he puts forward a critical approach of his own. The subject is an important one. But it seems to me that Schechner's discussion of the ritual question rests on a narrow, possibly a too academic, approach and misses its significance, while his own system of analysis is likely to lead us further from a sensitive appreciation of the drama than the theories it is intended to supersede.
1 Murray, Gilbert, Aeschylus the Creator of Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940; paperback edition, 1962).Google Scholar
2 See “Greek Drama: (A) Origin” in “Drama,” Encyclopedia Britannica, Fourteenth Edition. (Now replaced by a more skeptical article by Donald William Lucas, but the editions containing Murray's article must still be current in thousands of libraries.) Also, Francis Macdonald Cornford's Origin of Attic Comedy, recently published in paperback (New York, 1961)Google Scholar, with references translated into English and a foreword by Theodor H. Gaster supporting the main features of Cornford's thesis.
3 But see, among recent publications, Bentley, Eric, The Life of the Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 113Google Scholar; Else, Gerald Frank, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Chapter I; and Williams, Raymond, Modern Tragedy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), p. 42.Google Scholar
4 See Preface to Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis (Second Edition, 1926), p. viiiGoogle Scholar; also p. 476.
5 Quotations of Nietzsche, are from The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Golffing, Francis (New York: Anchor Books, 1956).Google Scholar
6 Preface to Themis, p. viii.
7 Themis, p. 256.
8 Gilbert Murray, to his credit, allowed his interest in ritual origins to cloud his literary estimates of Greek tragedy far less than have many of his successors.