The messenger speech is crucial to Greek tragedy. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
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Course
H408/21 Greek Theatre
Institution
OCR
30/30 A* answer to the OCR Classical Civilisation 'Greek Theatre' exam question: ' The messenger speech is crucial to Greek tragedy. To what extent do you agree or disagree?'
The messenger speech is crucial to Greek tragedy. To what extent do you agree or
disagree?
I agree that ‘the messenger speech is crucial to Greek tragedy’, as it plays both a dramatic and moral
role as well as a practical role in the play. By looking at Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Euripedes’
The Bacchae, the messenger speech is revealed to hold an extremely important role in the structure
and message behind a Greek tragedy; the importance of these speeches in terms of practicality, the
creation of dramatic tension and the inclusion of moral messages relative to a contemporary audience.
The messenger speech is essential to the structure and format of a Greek tragedy, in that it provides a
pivotal turning point in the play and ensures movement and structure for the tragic events. It describes
explicitly something that cannot be shown on stage, whilst also providing the climax and advancing
the plot in order for the play to reach a conclusion. At a base level, it is a dramatic device used to
structure the play and allow for the moment of peripeteia that is significant to any Greek tragedy. The
messenger speech usually comes in the form of a character entering the stage in order to relay news to
more important characters; and often this news is what shifts the play entirely, releasing the build of
tension created by the playwrights and revealing the characters’ tragic fates. In Oedipus the King, a
messenger speech is exactly what shifts the entirety of the play and leads directly to Oedipus’ moment
of anagnorisis. Here, a messenger is used as a vehicle of revelation, as he provides Oedipus with the
knowledge that his adoptive father Polybus had died, whilst simultaneously revealing that Polybus is
not his biological father: as a shepherd had given Oedipus to Polybus as a baby. The words of the
messenger form a chain reaction, as the shepherd mentioned by the messenger is summoned to speak
to Oedipus and later tells him that he was, in fact, adopted and is not the biological son of Polybus.
The messenger speech is what reveals Oedipus’ situation to him, and ensures that the moment of
peripeteia that is fundamental in any Greek tragedy is achieved. This moment of peripeteia and
anagnorisis is significant in ensuring that Sophocles’ audience experiences feelings of catharsis, as
pity and fear are invoked when they watch Oedipus’ downfall and reflect on themselves. This links to
Aristotle’s ideas in Poetics, as he believed a good tragedy should be able to create feelings of
‘catharsis, fear, and pity’ - all of which Sophocle’s achieves through the news revealed in the
messenger speech.
Fear and pity were also emotions created by the inclusion of graphic, often disturbing details of the
plot that messenger speeches tend to involve. Again, in Oedipus the King, the messenger is the one to
expose to the audience the horrifying consequences of Oedipus’ hamartia: ‘over and over raising the
pins, raking them down his eyes. And at each stroke blood spurts from the roots [...] nerves and clots -
black hail of blood pulsing, gushing down’. The use of such emotive and graphic description ensures
that the audience is at once flooded with some form of fearful pity, as the true horrors of what Oedipus
has done to himself are left up to the imagination. Julia H. Caverno argues that ‘Certain pathological
details of madness, horrible in fact, horrible in repetition, may be less than that in presentation’1,
highlighting that hearing such horrific details through the messenger instead of seeing them attempted
on stage is often much more impactful. This is further expanded upon during a similar scene that
occurs in Euripides’ The Bacchae; as the messenger relays to the audience Pentheus’ horrific fate after
his moment of peripeteia. ‘One of them was carrying a forearm, one a foot with a sandal still on it; his
ribs were laid bare by the tearing, and all the woman, bloody handed, were playing catch with the
flesh of Pentheus’: the, once again, horrifying use of close description enables the audience to imagine
the bacchants tearing Pentheus apart themselves - without doubt forming a lasting image of fear and
1
The Messenger in Greek Tragedy - author(s): Julia H. Caverno, Smith College
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