'A bout with Death! Where didst thou close with him?'
'At the tomb. I lay in wait, rushed forth, and gripped.'
And no one has anything more to ask! Admetus indeed, by noticing at this moment the silence of Alcestis, suggests the thought that she perhaps may explain. But no; she is not to speak till the day after to-morrow; and this for a mystic reason which, stated baldly and in such a connexion, produces an effect like that of burlesque. In expounding the play it is now regular at this point to bid the reader observe (with Elmsley) that, if there was a religious reason why Alcestis should not speak, there was also a practical reason; inasmuch as, if she had, the play, which by means of changing masks could now be performed with two main actors capable of elocution, would in this scene have required three. And up to a certain point we must go with this observation. Undoubtedly the way in which her silence and the cause of it are treated by Euripides, the abruptness with which the subject is raised and dropped, and especially the coolness with which the mysterious precept is given and received, just as if it were some trivial apothecary's prescription about diet or exercise, are exactly calculated to prompt, in minds acquainted with the history of Athenian drama, the reflexion of Elmsley. But the inference is that the author intended to prompt it, or in other words, to give to the situation a touch of awkwardness and absurdity; for that his embarrassment was involuntary we really cannot believe. Long before the production of the Alcestis, and all through the career of Euripides, three-part scenes had been in regular use. Even if we suppose, what is sufficiently improbable, that all the three other plays which the author, as we know, exhibited with this, consisted wholly of two-part scenes, the Alcestis itself would show that he had no difficulty in obtaining such 'extras' as he wanted. He does not hesitate, because two actors are already on the stage, to introduce the effective but needless part of the orphan child[1], a part surely much harder to fill than it would have been to procure some one capable of delivering a verse or two, all that would here be needed or admissible, in the character of Alcestis. In the conditions of Greek performance it would
- ↑ v. 393.
