[Footnote 5:  And, after all, Mr. Shaw does not run counter to the legend.  He exhibits Caesar and Napoleon “in their well-known attitudes”:  only, by an odd metempsychosis, the soul of Mr. Shaw has somehow entered into them.]

CHAPTER XIV

THE PERIPETY

In the Greek theatre, as every one knows, the peripeteia or reversal of fortune—­the turning of the tables, as we might say—­was a clearly-defined and recognized portion of the dramatic organism.  It was often associated with the anagnorisis or recognition.  Mr. Gilbert Murray has recently shown cause for believing that both these dramatic “forms” descended from the ritual in which Greek drama took its origin—­the ritual celebrating the death and resurrection of the season of “mellow fruitfulness.”  If this theory be true, the peripeteia was at first a change from sorrow to joy—­joy in the rebirth of the beneficent powers of nature.  And to this day a sudden change from gloom to exhilaration is a popular and effective incident—­as when, at the end of a melodrama, the handcuffs are transferred from the wrists of the virtuous naval lieutenant to those of the wicked baronet, and, through the disclosure of a strawberry-mark on his left arm, the lieutenant is recognized as the long-lost heir to a dukedom and L50,000 a year.

But when, as soon happened in Greece, the forms appropriate to a celebration of the death and resurrection of Dionysus came to be blent with the tomb-ritual of a hero, the term peripeteia acquired a special association with a sudden decline from prosperity into adversity.  In the Middle Ages, this was thought to be the very essence and meaning of tragedy, as we may see from Chaucer’s lines: 

  “Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,
  As olde bokes maken us memorie,
  Of him that stood in gret prosperitee,
  And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
  Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly.”

Aristotle cites a good instance of a peripety—­to Anglicize the word—­“where, in the Lynceus, the hero is led away to execution, followed by Danaus as executioner; but, as the effect of the antecedents, Danaus is executed and Lynceus escapes.”  But here, as in so many other contexts, we must turn for the classic example to the Oedipus Rex.  Jocasta, hearing from the Corinthian stranger that Polybus, King of Corinth, the reputed father of Oedipus, is dead, sends for her husband to tell him that the oracle which doomed him to parricide is defeated, since Polybus has died a natural death.  Oedipus exults in the news and triumphs over the oracles; but, as the scene proceeds, the further revelations made by the same stranger lead Jocasta to recognize in Oedipus her own child, who was exposed on Mount Kithairon; and, in the subsequent scene, the evidence of the old Shepherd brings Oedipus himself to the same crushing realization.  No completer case of anagnorisis and peripeteia could well be conceived—­whatever we may have to say of the means by which it is led up to.[1]