Wednesday, May 29, 2013

What similarities does Death and the King's Horseman share with Greek tragedy?

The distinguishing feature of Greek tragedy that relates
it to Soyinka's play Death and the King's Horseman is that the hero
suffers death (or some other horrific consequence like blinding and exile) as a result
of a tragic flaw in his character that leads to a fatal mistake or decision resulting in
vastly horrible consequences, including the hero's own tragic end. In Soyinka's play,
this scenario plays out exactly as in Greek
theatre.


Elesin's tragic flaw is his womanizing
vanity:


readability="6">

ELESIN: Come then. this market is my roost. When
I come among the women I am a chicken with a hundred mothers. I become a monarch whose
palace is built with tenderness and
beauty.



This flaw, his vain
enjoyment of his prowess with women and his thirst for
them,



ELESIN:
... the smell of their flesh, their sweat, the smell of indigo on their cloth, this is
the last air I wish to breathe
...



is what causes him to
make his fatal mistake: He becomes distracted from his purpose in the love embrace of a
woman whom he has never seen before on the night of his ritual sacrifice for the king's
death.


The horrible consequences of his fatal mistake are
that he fails to enact his ritual soon enough; he is arrested so that Pilking, a British
civil representative in Nigeria, is not compromised before the visiting Prince of
England; his eldest son, who is disgusted with his father's failure, ritualistically
offers his own life for the dead king so the balance of the universe may be maintained
according to custom.


The final consequences of Elesin's
fatal mistake is that, even though chained and in prison, he manages to perform his
ritual sacrifice after Iyaloja and his new bride, pregnant with Elesin's child, bring
his son's body to show him the fatal consequence of his failure.

No comments:

Post a Comment

What is the meaning of the 4th stanza of Eliot's Preludes, especially the lines "I am moved by fancies...Infinitely suffering thing".

A century old this year, T.S. Eliot's Preludes raises the curtain on his great modernist masterpieces, The Love...