e., that of
restoring to life or health the slain, or suffering, representative of
the Vegetation Spirit.
This presumption gains additional support from the fact that it is in
this character that the Doctor appears in Greek Classical Drama. Von
Schroeder refers to the fact that the Doctor was a stock figure in the
Greek 'Mimus'[4] and in Mr Cornford's interesting volume entitled The
Origin of Attic Comedy, the author reckons the Doctor among the stock
Masks of the early Greek Theatre, and assigns to this character the
precise role which later survivals have led us to attribute to him.
The significance of Mr Cornford's work lies in the fact that, while he
accepts Sir Gilbert Murray's deeply interesting and suggestive theory
that the origins of Greek Tragedy are to be sought in "the Agon of the
Fertility Spirit, his Pathos, and Theophany," he contends that a
similar origin may be postulated for Attic Comedy--that the stock
Masks (characters) agree with a theory of derivation of such Comedy
from a ritual performance celebrating the renewal of the seasons.[5]
"They were at first serious, and even awful, figures in a Religious
Mystery, the God who every year is born, and dies, and rises again;
his Mother and his Bride; the Antagonist who kills him; the Medicine
Man who restores him to life.
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