260 WORK AT CAMBRIDGE 



(and would) have been doubled. As it was they were 

 crowded so as to interfere with the effect, and their 

 wings had to be made so short as to "seem ridiculous. 

 But it is, I am sure, a mistake to attempt a Greek 

 comedy. It was pitiable to see an educated audience 

 convulsed with laughter just- because one fellow is 

 giving the stick to another, and there is a great deal 

 of stick work in the play. No one enjoys more than 

 I do seeing the clown pursuing a policeman with a red- 

 hot poker and any rough work of the kind in a panto- 

 mime, because it is according to nature — otherwise the 

 red-hot poker would not 4iave been there — but it does 

 not seem natural for Greeks to indulge in common 

 buffoonery. It grated upon one's ears to hear the men 

 laugh in English ; one expected that they should have 

 done it differently and I would have had them laugh in 

 Greek if that were possible. . . . 



Yours very truly, 



Alfred Newton. 



Twenty years later the Birds was played again at 

 Cambridge, and Newton was much vexed by the pro- 

 ducers' attempt to introduce the Scarlet Ibis, the Rosy 

 Spoonbill and the Blue Jay, all American birds, in place 

 of the more sombre members of their families known to 

 Aristophanes. 



Simultaneously the Greek play The Birds is coming 

 on this next week, and I am going to a rehearsal of it 

 to-night. The last time they did it, they made a very 

 pretty thing of it, and I hope this time it will be as 

 good. I have had some trouble to stop the appearance 

 of a Platalea ajaja in the chorus, just as on the last 

 occasion I had \s^th Ihis rubra, which, as I dare say you 

 know, is in the popular mind the Sacred Ibis. I re- 

 member a picture painted by an R.A. in which it was 

 introduced in the courtyard of an Egyptian temple, 

 with Pharaoh's daughter or Potiphar's wife feeding it ! * 



* Letter to G. E. H, Barrett-Hamilton, November 21, 1903. 



