HERACLES
voice both critics and scholars from Aristotle to the present
have reported the dislocation of the play as an insuperable
blemish. The Heracles, they say, is "broken-backed,"2 a
tragedy that "falls so clearly into two parts that we cannot
view it as a work of art/'3 But in so saying, they report, I
think, as much their own outraged Aristotelianism as the obvi-
ous facts of the play's structure.
Beyond question the play falls starkly into two discrete but
continuous actions, and between these two actions there is
neither causal necessity nor even probability: the second ac-
tion follows but by no means arises out of the first. Through
the close of the chorus which celebrates the slaying of Lycus
(1. 814), we have one complete action as conventional in
movement as it is in subject: a familiar tableau of suppliants,
their cruel antagonist, an agon in which the tormentor is slain
by the savior, and a closing hymn in praise of the hero and the
vindicated justice of the gods. This melodramatic action is
shattered by the appearance of Madness and Iris, and the play,
in violation of all probability, careens around to commence a
wholly new action. Utterly unexpected and without causal
ground in the first part of the play, the madness of Heracles
and the murder of his wife and children are simply set down
in glaring contrast to the preceding action. Against theodicy
is put the hideous proof of divine injustice; against the great-
ness and pietry and arete of Heracles in the first action is placed
the terrible reward of heroism in the second; against the as-
serted peace and calm and domestic tenderness which closes
the first action is set the utter annihilation of all moral order
in the second. The result is a structure in which two appar-
ently autonomous actions are jammed savagely against each
other in almost total contradiction, with no attempt to mini-
mize or even modulate the profound formal rift.
That rift is, of course, deliberate; nothing, in fact, has been
omitted which might support the effect of total shock in this
reversal. Moreover, even a cursory review of the material which
Euripides used for his tragedy shows how carefully that ma-
2. Gilbert Murray, Greek Studies, p. 112.
3. Gilbert Norwood, Greek Tragedy, p. 229.
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