Death and the Horseman- "African Characters"

But into this time of sorrow steps Simon Pilkings, the colonial district officer who decides that he have to prevent Elesin's killing himself. This choice is based, perhaps, in part due to the fact he finds the ritual barbaric and the Africans that he is charged with governing barbaric themselves for approving of it. But mostly he wants to shelter Elesin's son, Olunde, who is studying medicine in London whilst Pilkings pays his fees. Olunde is as a son to Pilkings humself, and he wants to spare him the grief that would come with his father's death.

And so Pilkings does stop the ceremony - but in interjecting himself into a location that he does not belong and into the lives of men and women whom he may love but does not understand - he brings about genuine tragedy. Elesin dies anyway, and Olunde must commit suicide himself to restore the ordered globe in between humans and gods and that Pilkings has harmed. From the end, everybody hands are bloodied.

The most obvious Western design of playmaking that this play follows is Aristotle's company dictates on a three unities of space, time, and action. The tragedy from the play occurs, if we follow this model, simply because Pilkings breaks these unities. Aristotle's model is usually presented like a convenience for ones audience, who will be riveted towards seats by the simple fact that everything happens so quickly.


The play is unified in action - everything that occurs revolves within the resolution with the horseman's death - and it is also unified as to space, while here Soyinka plays close to with Aristotle's concept. The play is significantly about space, for the city of Oyo, and about what happens after people leave the place that they have been born to. The tragedy would not have occurred if Pilkings had stayed at home, but it would also not have occurred if Olunde had stayed at home. The world of colonial Africa is fragmenting, and Soyinka understands the price of this and so has crafted a classical play wherever we understand in ancient terms the synergy of a moment along with a place.

But this rule of three unities has one more reason as well: Aristotle understood the connections in between events to bound closely together not merely on a stage but from the globe as well. The very good tragedy of this play is that issues are not allowed to happen when law and custom (and the will of the gods) dictates that they must. Aristotle's insistence on temporal unity reflects his belief that once the gods have set a thing into motion humans must obey its dictates. Attempts to break this unity of time, attempts to thwart the forward action of human life as Pilkings does, will only anger the gods and bring very good sorrow.

cal play is supposed to take in location in between one sunrise and another and all in 1 place are supposed to imbue the action with a compelling intensity. And there's no denying that this can be true: This sort of a structure does draw an audience in.

Of all three of these models it's striking how the one that Soyinka's play have to closely resembles is that of Aristotle. We tend to believe of the Greeks as becoming the progenitors of Western society, and this is of course in several methods true. We claim Aristotle as 1 of our founding cultural fathers, and this can be not wrong to do. But the Greeks (unlike the Romans) have been not fully Western.

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