The reception of Aeschylus’ plays through shifting models and frontiers 9789004331150, 9004331158

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The Reception of Aeschylus’ Plays through Shifting Models and Frontiers

Metaforms Studies in the Reception of Classical Antiquity

Editors-in-Chief Almut-Barbara Renger (Freie Universität Berlin) Jon Solomon (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) John T. Hamilton (Harvard University) Editorial Board Kyriakos Demetriou (University of Cyprus) Constanze Güthenke (Oxford University) Miriam Leonard (University College London) Mira Seo (Yale-NUS College)

VOLUME 7

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/srca

The Reception of Aeschylus’ Plays through Shifting Models and Frontiers Edited by

Stratos E. Constantinidis

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover photo: Carl Orff’s Prometheus, directed by Lemi Ponifasio and conducted by Peter Rundel. In the role of Prometheus Wolfgang Newerla 2012. Photo courtesy of Klaus Rudolph, 2016. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Constantinidis, Stratos E., editor. Title: The reception of Aeschylus’ plays through shifting models and frontiers / edited by Stratos E. Constantinidis. Other titles: Metaforms ; v. 7. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2016. | Series: Metaforms, studies in the reception of classical antiquity ; volume 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016042754 (print) | lccn 2016043088 (ebook) | isbn 9789004331150 (hardback) : alk. paper) | isbn 9789004332164 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Aeschylus--Appreciation. | Aeschylus--Criticism and interpretation. Classification: lcc pa 3829.z9 r43 2016 (print) | lcc pa3829.z9 (ebook) | ddc 882/.01--dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042754

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2212-9405 isbn 978-90-04-33115-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-33216-4 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Kathryn Bosher (1974–2013) In Memoriam

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Contents Acknowledgments IX List of Illustrations XI Notes on Contributors xii Introduction 1 1 Editing Aeschylus for a Modern Readership: Textual Criticism and Other Concerns 23 A.F. Garvie 2 Aeschylus and His Afterlife in the Classical Period: “My Poetry Did Not Die with Me” 51 Johanna Hanink and Anna S. Uhlig 3 Prometheus Bound in Translation: “The True Promethean Fire” 80 J. Michael Walton 4 Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes: War, Women, and the Hecht/Bacon Translation 107 Deborah H. Roberts 5 Aeschylus in the Balance: Weighing Corpses and the Problem of Translation 131 Rush Rehm 6 Cognitive Theory and Aeschylus: Translating beyond the Lexicon 147 Peter Meineck 7 Aeschylus and Western Opera 176 Sarah Brown Ferrario 8 Aeschylus’ Cassandra in the Operas of Taneyev and Gnecchi 213 Dana L. Munteanu 9 Pop Music Adaptations of Aeschylus’ Plays: What Kind of Rock was Prometheus Fastened to? 236 Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

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Aeschylus as Postdramatic Analogue: “A Thing Both Cool and Fiery” 250 Paul Monaghan

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Voices of Trauma: Remaking Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in the Twentieth Century 280 Lorna Hardwick

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The Oresteia in Kannada: The Indian Context 304 Vijaya Guttal

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Two Centuries, Two Oresteias, Two Remakes 319 Helen E. Moritz Bibliography 343 Index 401

Acknowledgments “Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do” Stanley Fish wrote in Profession (1989: 15–22). It is still hard 27 years later! Therefore, I am indebted to the Department of Greek and Latin, the Middle East Studies Center, the ­Department of English, the Creative Writing Program, and the Department of ­Theatre for co-sponsoring at my request a two-day interdisciplinary symposium on ­Aeschylus’ plays that I organized at the Blackwell Inn on the Columbus c­ ampus of The Ohio State University. In particular, I want to thank nine individuals who assisted me with the formation of the symposium panels – Lee Abbott, Anne Carson, Richard Dutton, Fritz Graf, Gregory Jusdanis, Bruce Heiden, A ­ nthony Kaldellis, Alam Payind, and Bethany Rainsberg. The ­symposium would not have been as successful as it was without their help. The symposium and this book were made possible by three grants from the Ohio State University – one for faculty study from the Office of International Affairs, one for research and creative activity from the College of Arts and ­Humanities, and a small grant from the College of Arts and Sciences. The money from the first two grants was earmarked to bring together scholars from different disciplines to cooperate and contribute new insights to further our knowledge about the plays of Aeschylus. Each discipline, as it happens, slices up the study of his plays, establishing its own methods and lines of inquiry with terms which are often tainted by metaphoric language. The two-day ­symposium was not long enough, however, to bring about an interdisciplinary synthesis of the various disciplinary perspectives. For this reason I conceived of this book as a way of identifying and overcoming (over time) some of the major tangible difficulties that interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects face with the works of Aeschylus. I am grateful to the fourteen c­ ontributing authors for their trailblazing thoughts on editing, analyzing, translating, adapting, and remaking the plays of Aeschylus for the page and the stage. Their chapters illustrate what motivates or regulates such ­disciplinary exchanges, and they open up an interdisciplinary space in readerresponse and audience-response studies for the interface of editing, analyzing, translating, adapting, and remaking the plays of Aeschylus. Each contributing author has played a seminal role in shaping the profile of this volume. It has been a pleasure and a privilege working with all of them on this important project. The contributing authors and I are also appreciative of the anonymous ­referees who offered us their expertise by reading and evaluating every essay

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in the volume. Their constructive criticism and provocative questions were ­essential to the successful completion of this project. Their sound advice helped all of us to improve the appeal and range of this book. Stratos E. Constantinidis

List of Illustrations 6.1 6.2 7.1 12.1

View of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens 157 Detail of the Pronomos Vase 168 Carl Orff’s Prometheus 209 Clytemnestra announcing the fall of Troy in Orestis Purana 316

Notes on Contributors Stratos E. Constantinidis is author of two monographs on critical theory and historiography; editor of ten interdisciplinary books, nine interdisciplinary journal volumes, and four special issues on Greek drama, cinema, and culture. He is also translator of three Greek plays which have been produced and published. He was director of the Comparative Drama Conference (2000–2004) and served as editor of Text and Presentation (McFarland, 2000–2008) and of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003–2006). Sarah Brown Ferrario is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Greek and Latin at The Catholic University of America in Washington, dc. She is the author of ­Historical Agency and the ‘Great Man’ in Classical Greece (Cambridge ­University Press, 2014). With composer A ­ ndrew Earle Simpson, she is the translator and librettist of The Oresteia ­Project, which set all three dramas of Aeschylus’ O ­ resteia as new one-act operas in English. Alex F. Garvie graduated in Classics from the University of Edinburgh in 1955, and from ­Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1959. He was a member of the Department of Greek (from 1988 the Department of Classics) in the University of Glasgow from 1960 to 1999, when he retired as Emeritus Professor of Greek. His publications include editions of Aeschylus’ Choephori (1986) and Persae (2009). Vijaya Guttal is a graduate of Karnataka University, Dhār wad. Her PhD dissertation is a ­comparative study of the Indian and Greek epics, The Ramayana and The Iliad. Her areas of interest are classics, translation, and women’s writing. She has published nearly sixty research papers in reputed journals and has authored nine books. She has taught English in various universities. She learned ancient and modern Greek at the University of Athens and translated Aeschylus’ Oresteia into Kannada. Her translation won the State Translation Academy Award. Johanna Hanink is Associate Professor of Classics at Brown University, where she is also a ­member of the Graduate Field Faculty in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. She works primarily on the intellectual and performance

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cultures of classical Athens, and has published widely on Athenian tragedy and its reception in antiquity. She is author of Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Lorna Hardwick is Emerita Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University in uk. She is author of Translating Words, Translating Cultures (Duckworth, 2000) and ­Reception Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2003). She is also founding editor of the Oxford journal Classical Receptions Journal and co-editor of the ­Oxford University Press series Classical Presences. She has a particular interest in the impact of various kinds of translation and adaptation that rework ­classical material in post-colonial contexts. Peter Meineck is Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University and the founder of Aquila Theatre. He has published several translations of ancient Greek plays with Hackett Publishing Company and numerous articles and chapters on ancient theatre. He has directed and/or produced fifty-one professional productions of classical drama, which have been presented at venues as diverse as Lincoln Center, the Ancient Stadium at Delphi, Carnegie Hall and the White House. He studied with Pat Easterling at University College London (ba) and Alan ­Sommerstein at the University of Nottingham (PhD). Paul Monaghan is an academic and professional director/dramaturg. He is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the School of Performing Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, where he was formerly Head of Postgraduate Studies and Research, and Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies. He is also co-convener of the Dramaturgies Project, and co-editor of Double Dialogues. Helen E. Moritz is Associate Professor of Classics Emerita at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California. Her PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago was on the choral odes of Aeschylus. She has published on Greek tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry, as well as on comparative drama. She served on the Executive Board of the Comparative Drama Conference and on the editorial board of its annual volume, Text and Presentation. Dana L. Munteanu is Associate Professor of Classics at Ohio State University. Her scholarly interests include ancient drama, philosophy, and the reception of classics in later

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literature and music. She is the author of Tragic Pathos: Pity and Fear in Greek Philosophy and Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Rush Rehm is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and Classics at Stanford. He has written extensively on Greek tragedy, including Aeschylus’ Oresteia: A Theatre Version, Greek Tragic Theatre, Marriage to Death, The Play of Space, and Radical Theatre. He has contributed essays to many volumes, including Brill Companion to Sophocles, Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre, Antigone’s Answer: Essays on Death and Burial, Family and State in C ­ lassical Athens, and Agamemnon in Performance. Founder and Artistic Director of Stanford Repertory Theater (a professional company), he recently directed Clytemnestra: Tangled Justice in Nafplion and Athens. Deborah H. Roberts is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Haverford College. She has written on Greek tragedy, on Aristotle’s Poetics, and on the reception and translation of classical literature. She is currently completing (with Sheila Murnaghan) the book For Every Age: Childhood and the Classics, 1850–1970. She has translated Aeschylus’ P­ rometheus Bound and other tragedies. Anna S. Uhlig is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Davis. Her work focuses on archaic and classical lyric poetry, fifth-century drama, and performance practice both ancient and modern. J. Michael Walton is a theatre historian, translator and Emeritus Professor of Drama at the ­University of Hull, uk. He has written a number of books on Greek Theatre, including Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English (Cambridge ­University Press, 2006) and Translating Classical Plays: Collected Papers (Routledge, 2016). As General Editor of the sixteen volumes of Methuen Classical Greek Plays, he has translated more than twenty Greek or Roman plays, most of which have been published and/or produced. He has also directed more than fifty productions with professional or student casts. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is Professor and Chair of Theatre at Loyola Marymount University. His books include Athenian Sun in an African Sky (McFarland, 2002), Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre (McFarland, 2003), and Black Medeas

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(Cambria, 2013), in addition to dozens of articles in such publications as Revue de Littérature Comparée, International Journal of the Classical ­Tradition, Theatre Journal, The Classical Review, and Text and Presentation. He also works as an actor, director and stage combat choreographer.

Introduction Stratos E. Constantinidis 0.1

Disciplinary Tasks and Crossovers

There are several useful monographs and collections of essays examining, separately, each of the ways in which Classical Greek drama has been transmitted through editions, analyses, translations, adaptations, remakes, or restagings in different countries – from England to Japan.1 Some of these collections were spearheaded by a handful of British classicists who were in search of a new goal and a new role for Classical Studies in the 21st century that would take research “outside the confines of academic institutions and published scholarship,” as Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh wrote in 2005.2 However, there is no collection of essays in English that includes in its purview all of Aeschylus’ surviving plays and fragments3

1 Relatively recent examples include: Karelisa Hartigan, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theatre, 1882–1994 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995); Helene Foley, “Modern Performance and Adaptation of Greek Tragedy” Transactions of the American Philological Association 129 (1999): 1–12; Kevin Wetmore Jr., Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre (Jefferson: McFarland, 2003); Helene Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Melinda Powers, Athenian Tragedy in Performance: A Guide to Contemporary Studies and Historical Debates (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2014). 2 Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914, (eds.) Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005: ix). 3 Except perhaps for Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus, (ed.) Rebecca Kennedy, which is forthcoming. A single article on Aeschylus can also be found in these collections: Edith Hall, “Aeschylus, Race, Class, and War in the 1990s” in Dionysus in 69, 169–197; Helene Foley, “Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound in the United States: From the Threat of Apocalypse to Communal Reconciliation” in Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, 154–159; Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, “James Thomson’s Tragedies of Opposition” in Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, 1660–1914, 99–127. A total of two articles can be found only in the following of the above-mentioned collections of essays: Edith Hall, “Aeschylus’ Persians via the Ottoman Empire to Saddam Hussein” (167–199) and Gonda Van Steen, “Enacting History and Patriotic Myth: Aeschylus’ Persians on the Eve of the Greek War of Independence” (299–329) both in Cultural Responses to the Persians Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium, (eds.) Emma Bridges, et al.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004332164_002

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as well as all the major ways in which they are disseminated systemically rather than geographically4 or chronologically.5 Each Aeschylean play and each of its restagings are shaped by a long chain of middlemen/women before they are served up to the public. It is therefore vital that a restaging of an Aeschylean play is also seen systemically mainly because the audience response to it in any place and at any time depends on the work of these middlemen/women who have developed different degrees of expertise (and qualified habits) in the way they study and stage his plays. Regardless of their spatial (geographical) and temporal (historical) limitations, these people sometimes interact with each other in order to better understand an Aeschylean play and occasionally influence each other as they try to resolve anticipated problems or to eliminate unintended consequences. The problems and consequences can be best understood in the way these middlemen/women share their specialty and expertise with each other. When, for instance, an Aeschylean play encounters a problem in a director’s mise-enscène in the theatre, it is conceivable that the problem originated months or years earlier on the desk of a textual critic, a literary critic, or a translator. The exchange of information, which has helped to overcome disciplinary insularity, can also help to coordinate and improve the cumulative know-how about reading and staging Aeschylus. This volume is a step in that direction. It analyzes some of the major intertextual multidisciplinary challenges that his plays present to their reception (from editing them to remaking them) while, at the same time, it introduces a new conceptual model to facilitate fresh discussions of Aeschylean drama in reception to emerge. Under the philological model, his plays are studied principally as texts and the archaeological record is reexamined to ascertain how his plays were staged and performed in the surviving theatres of Greece and Magna Graecia. Under the reception model (which includes in its purview the surviving copies of his plays along with their translations, adaptations, and remakes as both texts and performances) the meaning and significance of his plays are renegotiated in a plethora of mediating settings. In this volume, under the 4 Geography is a major focus in exemplary publications such as Paul Monaghan, “Greek Tragedy in Australia, 1984–2005” in The Staging of Classical Drama around 2000, (eds.) Pavlina Sipova and A. Sarkissian, 38–58 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007); Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, and Patrice Rankine, (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 5 Periodization is traceable in such pioneering studies as Cultural Responses to the Persians Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium, (eds.) Emma Bridges, et al. (2007); Agamemnon in Performance: 458 bc to ad 2004, (eds.) Fiona Macintosh, et al. (2005).

Introduction

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systemic model, a connection is drawn between the tasks of editing, analyzing, translating, adapting, and remaking Aeschylus’ plays for the page and the stage.6 This project sees these tasks as interrelated components which are essential for the reception of his plays by readers and audiences in any culture (or subculture) willing to finance some or all of them. Every time an Aeschylean tragedy is “reconstituted” (translated), “transposed” (adapted), or “revised” (remade), it affects readers and audiences differently. “Translated, adapted, staged, […],” Edith Hall wrote, “Greek tragedy has proved magnetic to writers and directors searching for new ways in which to pose questions to contemporary society and to push back the boundaries of theatre.”7 One could agree with Hall that Aeschylus’ ideas work like magnets on those specialists who study and stage his tragedies in various forms – from prose to poetic drama and from classic to rock opera. Plato illustrated the magnetism between an author and his readers as well as between a performer and his audiences by using the metaphor of “the stone which Euripides called the Magnetian” (Ion 533d). Seen through the lens of Plato’s metaphor, an Aeschylean play appears to attract a group of specialists who also exert a pull on one another and form a chain or a cluster of professional types – textual critics, literary critics, translators, adapters, remakers, and dramaturgs, not to mention directors, designers, composers, choreographers, and performers. In turn, these professionals fascinate their readers and audiences by illustrating Aeschylus’ ideas when they edit, analyze, translate, adapt, remake, and restage his plays. Readers and audiences, who feel inspired by what they read or see, spread the force of these ideas, along with their own, through additional writing or word of mouth. The tasks of editing, analyzing, translating, adapting, remaking, or simply adjusting the plays of Aeschylus has been the subject of several studies, but, so far, each task has been studied separately. Even though the interdependence of some of these tasks has been realized, it has never been systematized.8 This 6 Several paradigms can co-exist and function side by side, without replacing one another, except in the case of paradigm shifts. See, Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970: 12). 7 Dionysus since ’69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, (eds.) Edith Hall, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004: 2). 8 Franz H. Link showed the necessity for cooperation between playwrights, translators, dramaturgs (he called them “dramatic advisors”), directors (he called them “stage managers”) and scholars by systematizing the interdependence between translating and adapting a play in his essay, “Translation, Adaptation, and Interpretation of Dramatic Texts” in The Languages of Theatre: Problems in the Translation and Transposition of Drama, (ed.) Ortrun Zuber, 24–50 (Oxford & New York: Pergamon Press, 1980: xiii–xiv, 24–25).

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volume aims at creating an interdisciplinary space in reader-response and audience-response studies for the interface of editing, analyzing, translating, adapting, and remaking the plays of Aeschylus for the page and the stage. The many-sidedness of the intertextual process is tackled fruitfully here by a team of specialists from different disciplines and backgrounds. Each specialist wrote a chapter from his/her distinct professional viewpoint and disciplinary concerns on one or more of the above fundamental ways in which Aeschylus’ plays have been dealt with. The order of the tasks – from editing to remaking his plays – determined the order of the chapters. This order was not influenced by chronology (historical periodization) or geography (cultural topography). Each specialist’s disciplinary focus serves as a reminder that Aeschylus’ present and future appeal depends on a wider interdisciplinary knowledge, which is derived from collective multidisciplinary efforts, not just from individual accomplishments in just one discipline or in only one of its areas. Each discipline (from Classical Studies to Theatre Studies) has developed dominant methods and standards for studying and interpreting his plays for the classroom and the stage. These methods and standards are not always compatible,9 and, as it happens, one discipline may have little use or regard for the methods or standards of other disciplines. This collection is intended to inspire a transdisciplinary conversation of intertextuality among specialists with different academic training and priorities who are, nonetheless, interested in bridging the divide between the cultures or discourses of separate academic disciplines. Aeschylus constructed his plays by accepting or changing (to a degree) the codes and traditions which his predecessors had established for composing and staging tragedies, but also by accepting or changing (to a degree) the codes and traditions derived from companion art forms such as dance, music, sculpture, painting, and poetry. When specialists converge to discuss complex intertextual issues in the work of a playwright such as Aeschylus, their disciplinary training and differences sound more pronounced. Each of them relies on a heap of specialized knowledge which is not immediately accessible to others from separate disciplines. Collections such as the present one help everyone 9 For the issue of incompatibility, see pg. 75 of Jane Montgomery Griffiths’ article, “The Experiential Turn: Shifting Methodologies in the Study of Greek Drama” New Voices in Classical Reception Studies 2 (Spring 2007): 73–90. For some of the conflicting methods of “reading” plays, see: Simon Goldhill, “Modern Critical Approaches to Greek Tragedy” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, (ed.) P.E. Easterling, 324–347 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997). For some of the conflicting methods of “reading” performances, see: Marvin Carlson, “Theatre Audiences and the Reading of Performance” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, (eds.) Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie, 82–98 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989).

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become aware of how diverse disciplinary perspectives and practices – which lead to disparate assumptions and ways of studying and staging his plays – can become manageable, comprehensible, and welcoming. Each chapter encourages specialists to understand how the reception of Aeschylus’ plays is viewed by their colleagues in neighboring disciplines and how new developments in the way they are studied and staged could be advanced by crossing over disciplinary boundaries. As the chapters in this volume swing between antiquity and modernity, they invite their readers to consider two things about the plays of Aeschylus: how their transmission has enlightened readers and audiences in other time periods about Athenian theatre and culture, and how their reception has taught them (and us) about their (and our) theatres and cultures. Interdisciplinary conversations that explore the uncharted spaces between areas of knowledge can be “transformative in some way, producing new forms of knowledge.”10 Transdisciplinary conversations, on the other hand, put together a better and bigger picture of an issue because, in their search for solutions, they cross several disciplinary boundaries to integrate diverse forms of research methods and results.11 Even so, no reader should expect that, in a collection of essays such as this, the contributors will be in agreement with me and each other on all issues and all theoretical models. Nonetheless, I encouraged collaborative thinking among the contributing authors by asking them to read the final draft of every chapter in the volume. Their cross-reading is evident in the ways in which they established interconnections by cross-referencing each other’s research foci. The volume describes some of the transdisciplinary intertexual challenges that the tragedies of Aeschylus present during their reception. Each chapter identifies and explains at least one challenge (and sometimes a trend) among the above-mentioned tasks. The best way to read a chapter is by seeing the link to the chapter that precedes it, or follows it, as well as to the chapters that it cross-references. For the sake of introduction, I will connect a few dots from chapter to chapter in the next section in an effort to highlight the set of salient questions tackled in this volume and to briefly explain the reasons why the chapters were selected and their topics were chosen. In doing so, I will use the

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Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity (London: Routledge, 2002: 16). Bernard Choi and Anita Pak, “Multidisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in Health Research, Services, Education and Policy: Definitions, Objectives, and Evidence of Effectiveness” Clinical and Investigative Medicine 29/6 (2006): 351–364; also see: Basarab Nicolescu, (ed.), Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice (Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2008).

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words “translation,” “adaptation,” and “remake” in their Greek sense below for the sake of brevity. In other words, “translation” is a “meta-phrasing” (μετάφρασις) of meaning which is “reconstituted” and “rearticulated” rather than “transferred” from one language and its culture into another.12 An “adaptation” is a “fitting” (προσαρμογή) of meaning to a new “setting” or “environment” when a play is transposed from the medium of the page to another medium (such as the stage), or from the form of prose drama to another form (such as the opera), or from the mode of tragedy to another mode (such as the mode of melodrama or the mode of parody).13 A “remake” is the “revision” (διασκευή) of meaning when a play from the same or a different culture is re-envisioned and revamped (including being re-equipped and dressed up) to suit, attract, and affect a different group or generation of readers and audiences.14 In their Greek sense, the terms “translation,” “adaptation,” and “remake” are not interchangeable synonyms. Adaptations, for instance, are characterized by intermediality and intermodiality in ways that translations typically are not. It follows that the “restaging” (ἀναδιδαχή) of a play is not necessarily a “revision” (διασκευή) of that play. This seems to have been the case with the Syracusians who saw a “restaging” rather than a “revision” of Aeschylus’ Persians at the

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For an early (1680) use of the English term “metaphrase,” see John Dryden, “On Translation,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, (eds.) Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, 17–31 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992: 17). For the dubious “connection, still intact, between translation and metaphor,” i.e., between the Latin “translatus” (as the part participle of “transfero”) and the Greek “metafero” (μεταφέρω) with its derivative “metaphor” (μεταφoρά), see John Sallis, “The End of Translation,” in Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture, (eds.) Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko, 52–62 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008: 53). My definition of adaptation is closer to Julie Sanders’ definition than to Linda Hutcheon’s definition. For Sanders, adaptation can be a transpositional practice when a specific mode of drama (e.g., tragedy) is cast into another mode (e.g., melodrama). See Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2006: 18). For Hutcheon, on the other hand, adaptation is a somewhat arcane practice that she describes as repetition without replication. See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2013: 7). For example, Terence’s Adelphoe, which Roman readers and audiences enjoyed during the second quarter of the 2nd century bc, was a remake of Menander’s Adelphoi and/or Diphilus’ Adelphoi, which the Athenian readers and audiences enjoyed during the last quarter of the 4th century bc.

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Theatre of Hiero in Syracuse during the second quarter of the 5th century bc – the first known “restaging” of a Greek tragedy.15 Throughout the twentieth century, textual critics, literary critics, and translators tended to see themselves as mediators between two linguistic traditions, while adapters, remakers, and dramaturgs (along with the producers who employ dramaturgs, directors, choreographers, designers, and performers) tended to see themselves as mediators between two theatrical traditions. Increasingly, an Aeschylean tragedy (in a new edition, a new essay, a new translation, a new adaptation, a new remake, or a new performance) was treated as an open signifier with existing and potential meanings that are infinitely malleable. When, for instance, the processes of rewriting16 and restaging “bend” or “break” the medium, the form, or the mode of an Aeschylean tragedy by turning it into a film, an opera or a melodrama respectively, they usually justify the resulting reinterpretation by more or less erasing the traces of textual resistance which they had to overcome. A modern retrospective reinterpretation of the past, which cannot (or will not) gloss over the cultural divide between it and Aeschylus’ ancient interpretation of the same past, reveals the magnitude of the rift – even though it attempts to bridge it by offering yet another reconceptualization. An Aeschylean tragedy and some of the best known palimpsests of its reception have been reworked by many generations of writers over a very long period of time. The meaning and significance of his plays are supported by a chain of past responses that to a great extent condition the way in which his plays are read and performed at a given place and time. In a sense, Aeschylus is what the specialists and their readers or audiences have made of him over the centuries. His tragedies have been seen in one of two ways, depending on the manner in which they were restudied and restaged: (1) as plays whose foreign linguistic and cultural codes needed to be understood and appreciated in Aeschylus’ ancient social and historical context mainly through analyses and translations; or (2) as plays whose codes, once analyzed and translated, have become “familiar” enough to also be understood and appreciated in the readers’ and audiences’ modern social and historical context mainly through adaptations and remakes.

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Charles Blomfield, Aeschyli Persae (London: J. Mawman, 1826: xxviii–xxix). The terms “rewriting” and “restaging” are not used pejoratively. See Edward Said’s essay “On Originality” in Uses of Literature, (ed.) Monroe Engel, 49–65 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).

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In view of the above, this project was initiated to cut a new path by exploring the degree to which the intricate process of introducing an Aeschylean play to the culture of a new audience depends on the evolving interplay between scholarly erudition and artistic imagination.17 The goal is to get the specialists from various disciplines to improve the study and the staging of Aeschylus’ plays by understanding and assisting one another. The plays of Aeschylus could use some help because their reception (except for Agamemnon) has not been as frequent or as widespread as the reception of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. And, more importantly, a significant portion of what has been said about the reception of Athenian tragedy across the board,18 and about the reception of Sophocles,19 Euripides,20 Aristophanes,21 or Menander22 individually is not always applicable to the reception of Aeschylus in each country and across the centuries. This volume is of great value for a number of reasons: it addresses the need for an integrated approach to the study and staging of his plays; it offers an invigorating discussion about their transmission and reception; it explores the ­interrelated tasks of editing, analyzing, translating, adapting and remaking them for the page and the stage; and it reshapes current debates about their 17

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Notable precedents are Oliver Taplin’s pioneering study, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) and the second edition of Greek Tragedy in Action (London: Routledge, 2003); as well as Simon Goldhill’s How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Relatively recent examples include: The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, (ed.) Patricia Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Dionysus since ’69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, (eds.) Edith Hall, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914, (eds.) Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); A Companion to Greek Tragedy, (ed.) Justina Gregory (Malden, Oxford & Carlton: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005); Cultural Responses to the Persians Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium, (eds.) Emma Bridges, Edith Hall, and P.J. Rhodes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Brill’s Companion to Sophocles, (ed.) Andreas Markantonatos (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Brill’s Companion to Euripides, (eds.) Rosanna Lauriola and Kyriakos Demetriou (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Martin Holtermann, Der deutsche Aristophanes: Die Rezeption eines politischen Deichters im 19. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004); Hellmut Flashar, The Originality of Aristophanes’ Last Plays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Anton Bierl, Ritual and Performativity: The Chorus of Old Comedy, trans. Alexander Hollmann (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). Sebastiana Nervegna, Menander in Antiquity: The Contexts of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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place in the curriculum and the repertory in a scholarly manner that is accessible and innovative. While some of the chapters show the tensions between traditional scholarship and innovative analysis in reception studies and performance studies, others explore new methods and new frontiers for studying and staging his plays. Each chapter makes a significant and original contribution to its selected topic, but the collective strength of the volume rests on its simultaneous appeal to readers in theatre studies, classical studies, performance studies, comparative studies, translation studies, adaptation studies, and, of course, reception studies. The volume addresses the interdisciplinary interests of readers who belong not only to different academic communities but also to different professional categories – from teachers to students, and from researchers to dramaturgs. 0.2

Major Challenges and Exchanges

The plays of Aeschylus have had a lasting appeal over the centuries even though most of them were less popular than the plays of Sophocles and Euripides during the Hellenistic period, the medieval period, and the modern period. During the revival of classical learning in the Byzantine era, for instance, which is partly reflected in the Souda Lexicon from the 10th century, Constantinopolitan readers such as Michael Psellus (ca. 1017–1078) had little praise for Aeschylus’ profound ideas and dignified language (lines 54–57), and summarily repeated the clichés about his way of writing (lines 61–64) that echoed opinions initially expressed in Aristophanes’ Frogs.23 And, of course, each generation of ancient and medieval scribes made their share of errors and alterations when they copied down Aeschylus’ plays by hand for nearly twenty centuries – from the 5th century bc to the 15th century ce. His surviving tragedies were first printed in Greek by the press of Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1518. This basic edition was followed by better ones such as those carried out by Francesco Robortello with Michael Sophianos in 1552, and by Petrus Victorius with Henricus Stephanus in 1557. The first edition of Aeschylus’ tragedies in England was published in Greek by Thomas Stanley in London in 1663. It subsequently became the job of textual critics to examine the available medieval manuscript copies for each play in order to complete four fundamental tasks: to determine which manuscript copy is closest to the lost original;

23

Michael Psellus, The Essays on Euripides and George of Pisidia and on Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, (ed.) Andrew R. Dyck (Vienna: Östereichischen, 1986: 44).

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to establish the identities of the author and the scribes by respectively studying their “idiolects” and “hands,” including those of any possible collaborators or ghostwriters; to identify and remove transcription errors from the selected Greek manuscript copy; and to publish in Greek a coherent and readable print edition of the selected medieval manuscript copy. Most textual critics analyze the ancient manuscript tradition down to the 14th century, and they use an increasing number of detailed collations of manuscripts – from twenty-six (e.g., Denys L. Page) in 1972 to forty (e.g., Martin West) in 1990.24 In short, the process of studying and staging Aeschylus’ plays and the problems of interpreting “his” intent begin when well-meaning textual critics try to read the handwriting of ancient and medieval scribes by highlighting textual differences to stimulate diverse interpretations or by deemphasizing textual indeterminacy to make their interpretation less ambivalent. The reception of Aeschylus’ tragedies in modern times begins with the textual critics. In recent years, however, a textual critic’s challenges have gone beyond the mere traditional task of establishing, to the extent possible, an error-free print copy for each of Aeschylus’ tragedies, and of explaining the difficulties of grammar, syntax and semantics. In the first chapter, Alex Garvie synthesizes in a lucid and accessible manner some of the major challenges that textual critics and commentators face when they realize that the desire to stabilize an Aeschylean text creates more problems than it solves. He then focuses on the most important trends in Aeschylean interpretation that fuel current discussions about the manner in (and the degree to) which such issues should be tackled in commentaries. Textual critics and commentators have begun considering the performance aspects of Aeschylus’ surviving texts and what exactly his plays mean as both texts and performances to later generations. Changes such as the above are initially seen as professional dilemmas before they gradually gain wider acceptance and then start to dominate and dictate the ways in which the plays of Aeschylus are reedited, reanalyzed, or retranslated in view of their ancient and/or modern performances. The act of conceptualizing and explicating each of Aeschylus’ plays accurately and convincingly, which is commonly referred to as interpretation, places a different set of demands and challenges on textual critics, literary critics, and translators, affecting the reception and popularity of Aeschylus as 24 Aeschyli Septem quae Supersunt Tragoedias, (ed.) Denys L. Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Aeschyli tragodiae cum incerti poetae Prometheo, (ed.) Martin L. West (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1990; corrected edition, 1998). Also see: Martin L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique, Applicable to Greek and Roman Texts (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1973); Charles Martindale, Redeeming the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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their attention and imagination “strays” away from the page to the stage.25 In the second chapter, Johanna Hanink and Anna Uhlig look into the restaging and status of Aeschylus’ plays in antiquity. The challenge here is daunting because the identity of his many ancient interpreters (from chorus coaches to scholiasts) is as irretrievably lost today as many of his other plays. The scarce evidence suggests that there might have been a rich culture of Aeschylean restaging beginning even before his death. Hanink and Uhlig draw this conclusion after painstakingly analyzing the evidence preserved in the surviving works of comedy, oratory, philosophy, and material culture of the period. Sources such as these suggest that Aeschylus inhabited a singularly important role in the 5th century before his standing was gradually eclipsed in subsequent centuries. By the same token, Aeschylus’ importance was gradually restored in modern times mainly thanks to literary critics (especially classical scholars) who proved to be instrumental for his reception. They devoted their time to analyzing his plays, dividing each play into its constitutive parts, scrutinizing its composition and ethos, appraising its ability to edify and entertain, and exploring the relationship of its imagined world to truth or reality mainly in philological, philosophical, psychological, sociological, or historical terms. Ever since they gave each of his plays a “classic” status,26 they and their institutions have acted as gatekeepers for which interpretations should count as legitimate.27 Their unending, imaginative (and imaginary) dialogue with Aeschylus through his texts has made it possible for his tragedies to transcend their historical period by treading on such slippery ground as authorial intention, historical context, and genre specification. The assumed transcendence, however, is a challenge, and it is based, in part on: (1) the critical acumen of the literary critics to recognize Aeschylus’ 25

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According to Friedrich Schleiermacher, for example, the activity of translating is radically different from merely interpreting. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “From ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’,” trans. Waltraud Bartscht, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, (eds.) Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, 36–54 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992: 38). Frank Kermode, The Classic (London: Faber & Faber, 1975); The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change, rev. edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). Also see Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 19.8.15; The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, (ed.) and trans. John Rolfe, 3 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946–1952); and C.A. SainteBeuve, Literary Criticism of Sainte-Beauve, (ed.) and trans. Emerson Marks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971: 83). Charles Martindale, “Dryden’s Ovid: Aesthetic Translation and the Idea of the Classic,” in Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture, (eds.) Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko, 83–109 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008: 84).

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ability to interpret and represent foreign experience and perspectives in his plays; and on (2) the linguistic skills of the translators to represent this ability of Aeschylus by “reconstituting” his plays for their modern or postmodern readers and audiences. Some of these interpreters try (while some others avoid) to reconstruct a political positioning for Aeschylus.28 Either way, the fact of the matter is that Aeschylus’ rhetorical devices mark a major difference between his Athenian audience and all of the subsequent ancient or modern audiences that saw his plays restaged in Greek or in translation. His contemporary Athenians were an integral part of his linguistic, cultural, and historical horizon and sometimes could sense his intent by “reading” between the lines. In later centuries, his lines became “all Greek” to both Greek and non-Greek readers and in need of intralingual or interlingual translation. Each translation depends on prior reading and performance practices. A translated Aeschylean tragedy is like a “resident alien” in a new cultural environment. It can be made to speak to the domestic issues of its new readers and audiences by sharing with them its ancient Greek experience which is foreign to them. The way translations shape and reshape the perceptions of readers and audiences about an Aeschylean play can be both challenging and enlightening. In the third chapter, Michael Walton discusses how for most readers and audiences, in the words of Lawrence Venuti, “the translation enacts an interpretation that does not simply stand for the foreign text, but comes to be indistinguishable from it and in fact replace it.”29 The translation history of ­Prometheus Bound is used as a case study, and it is scrutinized with a healthy sense of humor to show how the form of this play in translation changed from being a dramatic poem to being a piece of drama and then a piece for performance. These retranslations reveal that the relationship between ­Aeschylus’ Greek plays and their English translations has a synchronic dimension (horizontal axis) and a diachronic dimension (vertical axis). Curiously, the translations which help his plays to transcend time and space have a relatively limited “shelf life” in their modern languages and cultures. N ­ onetheless, 28

29

For details, see: A.J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966). For misgivings about this type of political allegorizing in the absence of explicit evidence, see: Simon Goldhill, “Modern Critical Approaches to Greek Tragedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, (ed.) P.E. Easterling, 324–347 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997: 344). Lawrence Venuti, “Translation, Interpretation, Canon Formation,” in Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture, (eds.) Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko, 27–51 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008: 35). It should be noted, however, that Walton appreciates the issue of “neutrality” and he understands that the immediate target for most translators of plays is the creative team of a theatre company rather than the general readers.

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they are worth studying because they show how the reception history of an Aeschylean play is constituted by a series of changing perceptions. However, it is not only the translators’ perceptions about the form and content of an Aeschylean play that have changed. What has also changed is their perception about its significance for modern viewers who allegedly prefer to see and recognize the reflection of their own culture in a foreign play. With this view in mind, Aeschylus’ accounts of ancient wars are adjusted by some translators and dramaturgs so as to comment meaningfully about modern wars between nations with technologies which were not part of Aeschylus’ experience or horizon. The prevalent perception is that his plays are revitalized when translations challenge and dilute the ancient cultural specificity of his plays. But even translators who consciously respect that cultural specificity and see themselves as restoring what earlier translators have lost sight of may at the same time seek to respond to their own socio-historical environment as they address a contemporary audience. In the fourth chapter, Deborah Roberts shows how the expansive linguistic choices of the Bacon and Hecht translation of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes (1973) not only realize a particular reading of the play but also make explicit the brutal mistreatment of women anticipated by the chorus; and in making vivid the horrors of ancient warfare they also remind the reader of civilian suffering in the ongoing war in Vietnam. “Those seeking the ‘correct’ translation,” as Charles Martindale so aptly put it, “are thwarted by linguistic difference and history ever on the move.”30 The lack of an exact fit between Greek and English indicates that any equivalence drawn between Greek and English expressions is not equivalent to sameness. The rift between equivalence and sameness is revealed by expressions that are “untranslatable.”31 Aeschylus’ figures of speech sometimes introduce expressions that have no identical counterparts in English and, therefore, pose a challenge to their translators. His expressions (most of them colorful 30 31

Charles Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993: 86). For a nuanced meaning of “untranslatability” and Walter Benjamin’s “translatability” in interpreting evidence and the rhetorical techniques used to represent the “classical” past, see Neville Morley, “‘Das Altertum das sich nicht übersetzen lässt’: Translation and Untranslatability in Ancient History,” in Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture, (eds.) Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko, 128–147 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For the “untranslatability” of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, see Wilhelm von Humboldt, “From the Introduction to His Translation of Agamemnon,” trans. Sharon Sloan, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, (eds.) Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, 55–59 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992: 55).

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and many of them metaphoric) make perfect sense in Greek, but little or no sense in English. Subsequently, when Aeschylean characters speak in English, they sometimes sound bland or confused. The problems of translating just one of Aeschylus’ metaphors into English are discussed in the fifth chapter by Rush Rehm. The image and metaphor of balance-scales appears in six of his surviving plays (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Goddesses of Goodwill, Persians, Suppliant Women, and Seven against Thebes) but also in the fragments of three of his lost plays (Phrygians, Psychostasia, and The Ransom of Hector). Rehm convincingly brings out the importance of the idea of ‘weighing in the balance’ and the heavy significance of the human corpses in these plays, exemplifying both the cultural divide (weighing by direct comparison rather than by electronic means) and the effort to “de-traumatize” (contemporary out-sourcing of handling the dead) that separates Aeschylus’ world from our own. It would seem that some translations do not clarify the meaning of the Greek text so much as they aim to fix a meaning in it by creating formal and semantic possibilities that work in the English language and culture. The various verbal choices through which a translator inscribes an interpretation are eventually expanded from being speech acts on the page to being performative enactments on the stage. In the sixth chapter, Peter Meineck moves translation efforts on the plays of Aeschylus in a new and challenging direction with recourse to the findings of cognitive science. What if the presumed timelessness and timeliness of an Aeschylean play in performance do not depend on a set of imaginary and intangible common systems of ethics that modern humans think that they share with the ancients, but on a set of real and tangible common cognitive properties that the brains of both ancient and modern audiences share alike?32 Aeschylus’ plays were written for an open-air architectural space and a set of theatrical conventions that called for a method of acting about which little is known, and for this and other reasons it is difficult to replicate it on the modern stage. Is it possible to translate Aeschylus beyond the lexicon if the findings from neuroscience could be applied to the ancient brain with the intent to help translators to better understand how an Aeschylean tragedy functioned in performance? Where can one anchor such a “performative” translation? Will the translation and its performance be based on the surviving iconography of fragmented paintings and statues? Will they rest on the decontextualized quotes excerpted from extant literary, philosophical, or historical accounts? Will they be grounded on the chosen Aeschylean text itself? 32

Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, (eds.) Bruce McConacie and F. Elizabeth Hart (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).

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It is a major challenge to answer questions such as the above with any degree of reliability. If Gorgias’ and Plato’s views of tragedy are applicable to Aeschylus’ plays, then tragedy as a mode of drama that enacted “alien sufferings” (ἀλλότρια πάθη) offered Athenian audiences a way to experience that which was foreign to them. The characters who personify the experience of the alien (in the sense of the foreign, the unfamiliar, or the other, with or without an attitude of hostility or presumption of unnaturalness) are deeply engrained in his tragedies, inviting the Athenians to understand themselves by empathizing with “the others” – be they Persians, Argives, Thebans, or Egyptians – men or women. Athenian drama, according to Froma Zeitlin, “uses the feminine for the purposes of imagining a fuller model for the masculine self, and ‘playing the other’ opens that self to those often banned emotions of fear and pity.”33 These two emotions (and nine more) have been incisively analyzed by David Konstan who postulates that the fear and pity of the ancient Greeks were in some significant respects different from the fear and pity of modern Americans and other national or ethnic groups. “The attitudes that entered into the ideological construction of the emotions in ancient Greece are not the same as ours,” Konstan concludes. “The change in perspective is no doubt in part associated with the relative neglect of the categories of honour and insult in modern social life, at least in the United States.”34 Aeschylus represents the “alien” emotions, attitudes, views and voices in his plays in his own Athenian idiom, i.e., a verbal language which was supplemented by ‘foreign’ paraverbal and body languages that, for the most part, are not marked in the surviving medieval copies of his manuscripts. How can modern readers and audiences be reasonably certain that their understanding of an “alien” impersonation in an Aeschylean play is the same as the understanding of the ancient readers of the same play? Can the historical and cultural distance be bridged by studying the familiar and the foreign in the emotions described or displayed in the tragedies of Aeschylus and the Histories of Herodotus? The ancient footing of this diachronic bridge has to rest on what was operative in the 5th century bc and is reported in the surviving texts and the archeological record. The modern footing has to rest on what is operative in the 21st century ad, and on the supposition that such emotions as grief (which Aristotle seemingly left out of his Rhetoric and Poetics) and the displays of such emotions in life and the theatre since the 5th century bc, are shared by all people – with 33 34

Froma I. Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996: 363). David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006: 260).

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some quantitative or qualitative changes – because emotional expressions are channeled differently due to changes in language, culture, age, gender, education, and ethnicity. Aeschylus can no longer control the response of readers and audiences to his plays, if he ever did (or thought he did) during his life. The remaining chapters confront some of the challenges involved in the process of coming to terms with an Aeschylean play – more frequently with its translations than with its Greek text. Whether the translations are adapted, remade or simply adjusted, the relevance of an Aeschylean play is updated and its efficacy is revved up to express tough issues in such a way that might resonate with target readers and audiences from different cultures in modern societies. It is not always clear if the transposition of the dramatic world of an Aeschylean play from ancient to modern times and places is carried out by grafting an old story and characters onto new experiences, or new experiences onto an old story and characters. Unlike translators, the adapters, the remakers, and the dramaturgs transpose an Aeschylean play (or, more likely, one or two of its translations) from one medium into another, from one form into another, or from one mode into another – not necessarily from one language into another. If translations, adaptations, and remakes are forms of interpretation that are different in both degree and kind, then no adaptation is the “right” one and no remake is “better” even if it is privileged by audiences and critics as being more appealing to them. The autonomy of adaptations and remakes has been debated because, on the one hand, they are openly and provocatively derivative works, but, on the other, they are the result of medial, formal, or modal shifts which would merit being appraised in their own right according to the different rules and standards of the new medium, the new form, or the new mode into which an Aeschylean play or its translation has been fitted. In short, the adaptations and remakes of a translated Aeschylean play depend on the new “contexts” within which they are restaged and consumed. Historically, opera and melodrama represent two of the earliest efforts to fit an Aeschylean play or its translation into a different form and mode by veering away from the rules, standards, or conventions of Athenian tragedy and its presentation. The transition has always been a challenge for the tragedies of Aeschylus. Librettists and composers were often inspired, for instance, by the same stories that Aeschylus employed, but not by the specific forms in which he cast them. Indeed, some of the signature features of Aeschylean drama – limited plots, lapidary heroes, and strong but sometimes unvarying emotions – seem to have conflicted with the cultural preferences that so significantly impacted the development of opera, a situation that began to shift only during the latter part of the 20th century. Herodotus’ account of the Persian Wars, for instance, was

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preferred over Aeschylus’ eyewitness account of the naval battle at Salamis.35 In the seventh chapter, Sarah Brown Ferrario lists and methodically analyzes the important reasons why Aeschylus’ plays have posed challenges in operatic adaptation, and then she focuses on six operas from different national traditions that manifest a wide range of adaptation practices. An operatic adaptation avoids replicating an Aeschylean tragedy mainly because it does not aspire to become a copy of it. Operatic adaptations introduce novelty as an element of surprise when they rewrite the well-known characters (i.e., viewpoints) and well-known plots (i.e., situations) of an Aeschylean tragedy. Consider, for example, Jean-Marie Clement’s Médée (1779) and his articulate attack on the way the story and character of Medea had been treated since Euripides.36 In revisiting the history of operas with Greek topics, Michele Napolitano concluded that these operas could be divided into two groups: operas which are adaptations or remakes of specific Greek tragedies by resetting them to music; and operas which are not modeled on any Greek tragedies but draw their plots and characters from Greek mythology.37 In the eighth chapter, Dana Munteanu explains why such an endeavor is a challenge and how the tragic status of the Aeschylean characters was modified in two operas, Andrei Taneyev’s Oresteia (1895) and Vittorio Gnecchi’s Cassandra (1905). The popularity of Aeschylus grew during the second half of the 20th century. His Oresteia alone inspired more than thirty musical works, surpassing that of Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus.38 Ideally, readers and audiences experience the adaptation of an Aeschylean tragedy as a palimpsest through their memory of the Greek text or its translations. However, for those readers and audiences who cannot read Greek, the translations take the place of the Greek text. As for those who have not read any of its translations, it is the adaptation that becomes the “original.” What is at stake when a rock-opera adaptation or a rap-opera adaptation of one of his plays challenges the original or becomes the “original” for a new generation of audiences? In the ninth chapter, Kevin 35

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David Kimbell, “Operatic Variations on an Episode at the Hellespont” in Cultural Responses to the Persians Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium, (eds.) Emma Bridges, Edith Hall, and P.J. Rhodes, 201–230 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For a comparative analysis, see: Michael Ewans, Opera from the Greek: Studies in the Poetics of Appropriation. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007: 66–67). Michele Napolitano, “Greek Tragedy and Opera: Notes on a Marriage Manqué,” in Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage, (eds.) Peter Brown and Suzana Ograjenšek, 31–46 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010: 31–32). Peter Brown, “Greek Tragedy in the Opera House and Concert Hall of the Late Twentieth Century,” in Dionysus since 69, (eds.) Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Amanda Wrigley, 285–309 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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Wetmore Jr. examines the pop-music adaptations of four of Aeschylus’ plays and shows how adaptations shape audience perceptions of Greek tragedy by filtering each tragedy through the elements and tropes of the music employed.39 It would seem that adaptation has become the prevalent choice for staging and viewing an Aeschylean play. Translations are routinely adapted by dramaturgs (including directors and commissioned authors). Some of these rewriters acculturate an Aeschylean play to such a degree that it loses its Greek manners of speech, gesture, and thought. The Americanization of a Greek tragedy,40 for instance, usually serves its director’s vision about which scenes and lines might be performable and appealing to audiences in the usa. And the entire process of adapting a Greek tragedy through rewrites, workshops, or rehearsals repeatedly confirms the belief that no translation is necessarily performable just because it is faithful and readable. This process was initially proposed by Peter Burian when he wrote that “the availability of serviceable and attractive translations is now more than ever an indispensable tool in the breaking-down of cultural boundaries and the expanding of [our] cultural horizons.”41 The role of a dramaturg in this process is presented by Paul Monaghan in the tenth chapter. He favors a different form of stage adaptation, which is known as post-dramatic theatre,42 because it abandons the assumptions and conventions of modern drama. Post-dramatic theatre applies a series of compositional strategies to an Aeschylean play. These strategies form a post-dramatic analogue of the play either by retaining (but also interrupting) its language or by emphasizing (and also heightening) the physicality of the performers. Depending on the affinity of a dramaturg (or a director) with the methods and philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Hegel, Martin Heidegger, or Jacques Derrida, the well-crafted plot and the well-drawn characters of an Aeschylean 39

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See also the following essays: Helene Foley, “Will Power’s Seven,” in Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, 104–107 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Helene Foley, “Musical Theater” in Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, 107– 116 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); and Helene Foley, “Generic Ambiguity in Modern Productions and New Versions of Greek Tragedy” in Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, (eds.) Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop, 137–152 (London: Duckworth, 2010). Helene Foley, “Americanizing Greek Tragedy” in Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, 1–26 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012: 6). Peter Burian, “Tragedy Adapted for Stages and Screens: The Renaissance to the Present” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, (ed.) P.E. Easterling, 228–283 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997: 271). Lehmann, Hans-Thiess. The Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).

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tragedy are “tempered,” “sublated,” “destroyed,” or “deconstructed” respectively. The dialectics of conflict and the teleology of the events in the plot are aborted; the illusion created by the characters in action is shuttered; and the audience is prevented from experiencing the performance as a structured composition which has anticipated their degree of involvement and range of responses.43 Such adaptations can be challenging and even baffling to readers and audiences for two reasons: they decenter plot and character, which have been the bedrock of earlier adaptation strategies, and they favor intertextuality in order to recover the power of Aeschylus’ poetry and performance. Monaghan focuses on the dramaturg’s affinity with the methods and philosophy of Nietzsche. Interpretation, rewriting, appropriation and acculturation are present (in various degrees) in all of the five fundamental ways in which the tragedies of Aeschylus have been dealt with in intertextual studies. However, acculturation is at its most intense in remakes. As a result, some remakes look and sound as if they were new works that were made for the first time in the language and culture of their remakers. It is a challenge even for a highly trained ear to detect the fading echo of the Aeschylean voice in a remake. His Agamemnon, like many other translated Classical Greek texts in Ireland and England, has played a crucial role in the way Irish authors reformulated present-day experiences, debates and identities.44 In the eleventh chapter, Lorna Hardwick reconsiders some of the fundamental ways in which Aeschylus’ plays have been dealt with in intertextual studies, and discusses how his Agamemnon shows its face behind the masks of modernity (colonialism) and postmodernity (postcolonialism) in the texts of two Irish authors: the so-called “poetic translation” (1936) of Louis MacNeice; and the creative reworking (1996) of Seamus Heaney.45 Hardwick offers useful insights about the way tragic and traumatic experiences from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon are transformed and resonate through the poetry of MacNeice and Heaney. Aeschylean adaptations and remakes are more likely to occur in countries with cultures that no longer have a vital interest in translating and showcasing the Greek cultural treasures. The practice of translating Greek plays into English, which, according to Hardwick, “is now conventionally regarded as 43 44 45

Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996: 169–176). Lorna Hardwick, Translating Words, Translating Cultures (London: Duckworth, 2000: 80). For an analysis of Seamus Heaney’s poetic tragedy, The Cure at Troy (1990), in the context of the cultural politics of Ireland, see Oliver Taplin, “Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Seamus Heaney’s and Some Other Recent Half-Rhymes” in Dionysus Since 69, (eds.) Edith Hall et al.,145–167 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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a language of imperialism,” smacks of appropriation and an “admission of inferiority.”46 The connection between imperialism and inferiority is eloquently illustrated in the twelfth chapter by Vijaya Guttal who presents an interesting development in the appropriation of Greek drama by colonial and post-colonial cultures. Sanskrit drama, one of India’s cultural treasures, was “discovered” by the British who colonized India (1612–1947) and credited themselves for introducing tragedy, as a mode of drama, to Indian culture. The Parsi theatre companies which fanned out from Bombay (now Mumbai) to other towns in India in the 19th century were initially companies of amateurs directly connected with British-run schools. Paradoxically, however, the Indians came to learn about Greek tragedy from the British at a time when the British were keen on establishing the hegemony of the English language and culture in India: [Thomas Babington] Macaulay [1800–1859] explicitly linked British culture to classical Greek culture and the colonial project when he wrote, “in the same way that Britain received the fruits of Greek and Roman cultural labour during the Renaissance, so she will pass on to colonized countries not only her own treasures but also those of the ancient Mediterranean lands.” Clearly both English-language drama and classical culture were being used to disseminate the values of the British Empire.47 Greeks and Indians came into contact with each other during the invasion of Alexander i in 326 bc, but it would seem that it was British colonial politics that brought Indians in touch with Greek tragedy. Indians would not concede to the dominance of the British language and theatre because they felt that their language and theatre were older and richer. Reportedly, the British introduced ancient Greek tragedy as a part of their own western culture in an effort to overcome the resistance of the Indian intelligentsia. The decision by some Indian intellectuals to translate Greek plays instead of British plays into 46

47

Lorna Hardwick, “Translated Classics around the Millennium: Vibrant Hybrids or Shattered icons?” in Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture, (eds.) Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko, 341–366 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008: 343). Erin Mee, “Classics, Cultural Politics, and the Role of Antigone in Manipur, North-East India.” In India, Greece, and Rome, 1757 to 2007, (eds.) Edith Hall and Phiroze Vasunia, 131–142 (London: The University of London Institute of Classical Studies, 2010: 133). Mee, however, focuses on the staging of adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone in postcolonial times such as the one in 1984, which addressed government violence against the MarxistLeninist Naxalite movement in the state of Tamil Nadu.

Introduction

21

Kannada could be interpreted as a challenge and a form of resistance to British hegemony. Srikanthaiah, a veteran Kannada writer, for instance, chose to adapt Greek tragedies (such as Aeschylus’ Persians in 1935), instead of English tragedies such as Shakespeare’s. Like an adaptation, a remake is a reconceptualization and transculturation of its source text. A remake uses an Aeschylean play as its cornerstone and transmutes it into something fresh and original for a new generation of readers and audiences, though not necessarily into something that is unrecognizably different. Two popular remakes of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies, are Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a three-part American drama, and Yael Farber’s Molora (2009), a three-part South African drama. In these remakes, as in most remakes, the Aeschylean ideological and aesthetic sensibilities have been modified to express and address new ones. Since Aeschylus’ Oresteia is the information network on which many of the amplified meanings of its remakes are based, should it not be treated as a “fixed” value against which its remakes could be measured and assessed? In the thirteenth chapter, Helen Moritz addresses this challenge by tracing the intertextual connections between the Oresteia and two of its remakes – Mourning Becomes Electra and Katharine Noon’s Home, Siege, Home (2009). Each remake reflects its respective cultural context with O’Neill following Seneca’s model for Clytemnestra and Noon following that of Aeschylus. These then are some of the major challenges (or problems) that Aeschylus’ tragedies present to reception. His plays are sometimes regarded as “masterpieces” and as specimens of an “elitist” art and culture for reasons which have little or nothing to do with Aeschylus and his culture. Antonin Artaud’s call for “no more masterpieces” in 1938 has had an increasing appeal to European and American directors, including Peter Brook and Richard Schechner. However, not every director and every academic responded readily or positively to Artaud’s call; nor have they abandoned the culture of the book (text) for the culture of the stage (performance) in an effort “to free Greek tragedy from the strictures of the scholar’s study and return it to the stage” as Martin Evermann and Peter Wilson put it.48 A sizable number of academics, such as Seth Schein, have not privileged performance over text;49 and Edith Hall, among others, made this clear when she wrote: “Drama originated in 48 49

Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin, (eds.) Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008: 2). Schein acknowledges that there are many other kinds and purposes of translation intended for readers and audiences beyond the study room and the classroom. Seth Schein, “Translating Aeschylean Choral Lyric: Agamemnon 367–474,” in Translation and the

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enactment rather than literary culture, but this does not mean that we privilege performance reception over literary reception. By the time that ancient drama became consolidated into a canon, Aristotle could already decree that a good tragic plot could induce emotion in readers as well as spectators (Poetics 14.1453b).”50 It is precisely this dual perspective during the process of editing, analyzing, translating, adapting, and remaking the plays of Aeschylus that ties together the thirteen chapters in this volume, encouraging a transdisciplinary conversation of intertextuality among specialists who have different academic training and priorities, but are willing to bridge the divide between the cultures or discourses of separate academic disciplines brick by brick.

50

Classic:­Identity as Change in the History of Culture, (eds.) Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajiko, 387–406 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008: 387, 404). Edith Hall, “Towards a Theory of Performance Reception” in Theorizing Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, (eds.) Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop, 10–28 (London: Duckworth, 2010: 12).

chapter 1

Editing Aeschylus for a Modern Readership: Textual Criticism and Other Concerns A.F. Garvie 1.1 Introduction The problems of editing Aeschylus for a modern readership are, to some extent, the same as those involved in editing any Classical Greek or Latin text. In confronting the cultural divide between the 5th century bc and the 21st century ad, the modern editor is faced immediately with the gradual decline in the study of Greek language in schools and universities throughout the 20th century, but especially in its second half. There are now inevitably fewer potential readers for the kind of edition that assumed at least some degree of proficiency in the language, while there are fewer still for the more advanced kind of edition that expects its readers to be at home with a full apparatus criticus and lengthy discussion of textual problems. The price of such editions tends, therefore, to be disconcertingly high. On the other hand, the rapid rise in the popularity of Classical Studies and Classical Civilization courses in both schools and universities in the last fifty years or so has led to a welcome proliferation of translations, often with a few or even extensive notes, which are aimed at readers who do not require an explanation of elementary syntactical or grammatical irregularities. Many teachers who in the 1960s or 1970s first found themselves teaching, with some reluctance and suspicion, courses that involved little or no Greek language were astonished to discover that these students might produce more mature literary, or, in the case of tragedy, dramatic criticism than their fellows who had to spend most of their time worrying about the optative mood or the correct forms of – μι verbs. To read Aeschylus’ Agamemnon was no longer the privilege of those who could cope with Fraenkel’s massive edition,1 and, in any case, given the average length of a university term or semester, many such students must have been frustrated by the failure of their teacher to reach the end of that long play. Students now can read not only the whole of Agamemnon but the whole of Choephori and Eumenides as well. Moreover, in their teaching of such students modern professional 1 Fraenkel (1950).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004332164_003

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Classicists have themselves in general learnt much from their colleagues in other disciplines. Many of the issues involved with editing Aeschylus are similar to those involved in editing the other tragedians, some of them to the editing of any Classical work, some also to the editing of a literary text in any language ancient or modern.2 My own aim, while dealing with the main practical issues that confront the editor of Aeschylus, has been to focus in particular on those which are peculiar to him. Even when studied in translation, in some respects he presents more problems than the other two tragedians.3 Even in his own time, or at least soon after it, Aeschylus’ language, with its compound epithets and other neologisms, seems to have been considered difficult, highfalutin, and obscure, if we may judge from the way in which Aristophanes parodies it in Frogs. Moreover, although he was popular enough for an edict to be passed after his death, allowing his plays, exceptionally for that time, to be restaged at the Athenian City Dionysia, in the 4th century it was the other two tragedians, especially Euripides, whose plays were most often revived. From one point of view that is a blessing for the textual critic of Aeschylus’ plays, in that, apart from the end of Septem, they are largely free from the probable or certain interpolations of 4th-century actors which bedevil the text especially of Euripides. In our own day Greek language students are much more likely to begin their study of tragedy with the “easier” Sophocles or Euripides, before they turn to Aeschylus, if indeed they ever reach him. It is not surprising that for his delightful parody of the language of Greek tragedy A.E. Housman turned mainly not to Sophocles or Euripides but to Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. 1.2

The Establishment of a Text

It would, however, be wrong to conclude that editions with a full apparatus criticus and a full treatment of textual problems are outmoded and unnecessary.­ Readers of translations, versions, and adaptations have a right to take it for 2 Most (1998) goes back to first principles with the opening words of his Preface, “What is an edition?” and then remarks that the theoretical issues of editing have been discussed less by Classical philologists than by scholars in other fields. His own volume contains only one paper on Greek tragedy, Dawe on “Editing Sophocles for the Third Time.” Most (1999) begins his Preface similarly with “What is a commentary?” and includes one paper on Greek tragedy, Goldhill on “Wipe your Glosses,” which, as it deals with commentaries on Aeschylus, is highly relevant to the subject of the present chapter. 3 See Rader (2011); Griffith (2009: 4–5).

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granted that they too are based on the most up-to-date understanding of what Aeschylus actually wrote in his plays. Their translators,4 therefore, depend heavily on those who have themselves wrestled with the problems of the transmission of Aeschylus’ text. I recall a student some years ago who wrote a splendid paper on a particular metaphor in Agamemnon, which she was able to relate to Aeschylus’ use of all the recurring imagery in the play. I was upset at having myself missed this occurrence in Agamemnon, until I discovered that it was in fact the invention of Robert Fagles in his Penguin translation.5 This of course introduces the separate problem of how to translate Aeschylus, to which I shall return briefly at the end of this essay. When, as a student, I was first introduced to the textual transmission of Aeschylus’ plays, it seemed to be a simple affair. Apart from Supplices and Choephori, which, we learned, are preserved only in M, the famous Laurentianus Mediceus (32.9), plus one or two of its apographa (copies),6 we were taught also that the text of Agamemnon and Eumenides, depending on only a very few later manuscripts, is not much more securely based, whereas for the Byzantine triad, Prometheus, Septem, and Persae, the plays selected for copying at an uncertain date during the Byzantine period, we had to take account of a small number of manuscripts copied in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, all of them descended from a mysterious lost hyparchetype called [Φ], itself copied from the same archetype, and at the same time, as that of M. We were only dimly aware of the existence of over 100 other manuscripts of the triad, most of them unread and uncollated. And on the basis of that small selection it was felt possible to construct stemmata, or family-trees, of all the known manuscripts, beginning with the supposed uncial archetype which had emerged from the Dark Ages to be the source of the minuscule M and [Φ]. Such was the state of affairs when in 1955 Gilbert Murray published the second edition of his Oxford text of Aeschylus.7 He was much influenced by the earlier edition of Wilamowitz, which was based on 14 manuscripts, and he was able also to take account of the attempt of Alexander Turyn to draw 4 Even those translators who claim that their own ignorance of the source language does not matter, for whom see the comments of Walton (2006: 179–181). 5 Fagles (1966). 6 At that time M was usually dated to about ad 1000, but now a little earlier. The view of Friis Johansen (1970: 28–35), and in Friis Johansen and Whittle (1980), i 70–76, that one of the apographa of M was actually an independent witness to the text of Supplices, has not found general acceptance, but there may still be something to be said for it. Even if it is true, it makes little difference to our understanding of the text of the play. 7 Murray (1955).

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up stemmata of the relationships among 135 manuscripts.8 In 1972 Murray’s edition was replaced by the very different Oxford Classical text of Denys Page, who profited from the work of Roger Dawe, who, on the basis of his collation of 16 manuscripts, proved9 that this approach to the study of the manuscript tradition was fundamentally flawed. At every stage, Dawe showed, the text was transmitted horizontally as well as vertically, by scribes who had in front of them more than one manuscript, some of them already containing variant readings. Stemmata were largely useless, and at most one could identify groups of manuscripts that tended to share the same errors or unusual readings. But an individual manuscript would often present a reading that seemed rather to belong to a different group. At one stroke [Φ] disappeared. One can no longer assume that it is safe to ignore a reading found in only a single manuscript; it may somehow have preserved the truth. Page’s edition is based on 27 manuscripts, some of them collated for the first time, plus a further three to which he refers less often. Gone are the stemmata. Instead, his apparatus criticus presents long lists of all the witnesses to every reading. This does not make for easy reading. For that we had to wait for the appearance of Martin West’s Teubner edition.10 He succeeded, if not in eliminating, at least in greatly reducing the long lists of manuscripts by devising symbols to describe each of the loose groupings which Dawe and he had identified. A further, and perhaps even greater, service to scholars is that his edition is based for the first time on knowledge of every manuscript dated to the fourteenth century or earlier.11 No doubt scholars will still wish to consult a manuscript for confirmation of a particular reading, and there are almost certainly minor corrections to be made and gaps to be filled.12 But it seems unlikely that anyone will ever again need to examine so many of them systematically in the way that West has done. Like editors still to come, I am grateful to him for saving me from that task in the preparation of my edition of Persae.13 All of this means that out of all the surviving Greek tragedies Supplices and Choephori are exceptional in that for them we may safely say that M presents the one and only transmitted text. Their apparatus criticus is therefore 8

9 10 11 12 13

Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1914); Turyn (1943 and 1967). Turyn made it clear that many of these manuscripts he had, because of wartime conditions, been unable to collate or even to see personally. Page (1972); Dawe (1964). West (1990a and 1998). West (1990b: 319). As is shown for Prometheus by Taufer (2011a) and (2011b). Garvie (2009a).

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a comparatively simple affair. The editor’s task is mainly to report M’s readings and to record the conjectures of scholars. I myself became painfully aware of the difference when, some years after the publication of my edition of Choephori,14 I turned my attention to Persae. The editor of any play, however, has still to decide what text he or she is going to print by judging whether or not the transmitted text, as far as it can be determined, is true to what the author wrote, or whether it needs to be emended, and how much of all this should be communicated to the reader, either in an apparatus criticus or in a commentary or footnotes. For some kinds of edition an abbreviated apparatus may suffice, while even full-scale editions can omit trivial discrepancies in the manuscripts or questions of orthography. It is possible in an apparatus to create symbols to indicate variant readings without specifying the manuscripts in which they appear.15 In a full-scale edition with a commentary that contains lengthy discussions of textual problems it has been found helpful to enclose them in square brackets, so that they can be skipped by readers who have no taste for such matters16 – not that it is always easy to separate textual discussion of a passage from explanation of its sense. Certainly it is a pity if the readers of any kind of edition or translation of Aeschylus are given the impression that what they are reading is unquestionably what Aeschylus wrote. It is understandable that some editors are reluctant to burden their readers with too many obeli, or square or angled brackets, but sometimes it is right to confess to uncertainty. Sommerstein’s recent Loeb edition of Aeschylus and Collard’s translations of all the plays are models of what can be done for readers who have little interest in textual matters.17 The most contentious task for any editor is, as it always was, to decide, when the manuscripts are divided, which reading to prefer, and, whether or not they are divided, to determine where emendation is required, and, if so, to make the most appropriate choice. The editor of Aeschylus is fortunate in that, with inevitably a few omissions, the thousands made before 1965 have been 14 15

16 17

Garvie (1986). In Garvie (1994) I borrowed this system from Macleod (1982a); a signified a reading, different from that in the text, which appeared in one or more witnesses, while b, and, if necessary, c, could be used for further variant readings. A similar form of simplification is adopted for Sophocles by Schein (2013). I am not sure who was the first to adopt this practice; it appears already in the first (1944) edition of Dodds’ Bacchae. Sommerstein (2008); Collard (2002) and (2008). Although Collard does not provide a Greek text, he is punctilious in pointing out to his readers where the text that he translates is conjectural and insecure.

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collected by Wecklein and by Dawe, while West provides a useful supplement to both these collections.18 As they contemplate the tiny proportion which have received general acceptance, new editors might well feel a reluctance to add to their number by printing their own suggestions. Certainly the days are long past when what used to be called “palmary” conjectures could remove the most obvious corruptions. And it is unlikely that, at one extreme of critical endeavor, many new editions will be published that are replete with the corrections, or “improvements” of editors who think that their familiarity with the style of Aeschylus entitles them to rewrite what Aeschylus, in the judgment of others, did in fact write. In our time the danger may come rather from the work of scholars at the other extreme, those who describe themselves as “conservative critics,” and who see it as their task to defend at all costs the transmitted text against the “interventions” of those who wish to emend it. The very word “intervention,” when used in this context, may suggest that there is something perverse about it. I have argued elsewhere19 that the textual critic’s job is not to defend the transmitted text, but to establish, as far as possible, the text as it left the hands of Aeschylus himself.20 It is true that, in the case of a writer as difficult as Aeschylus, grammatical or syntactical anomalies or illogicalities which have seemed to some to be clear signs of corruption have often been satisfactorily explained by others. Too many emendations have been intended simply to restore “normal” Greek, and have taken no account of Aeschylus’ poetic style. It is, however, equally true that the text may be corrupt even when there is no such obvious sign. Not all interpolators were incapable of writing correct Greek, and at every stage in the transmission copyists were capable of “correcting” real or imagined errors. So the transmitted text may make some kind of sense, but it is not necessarily the right sense. Supplices and Choephori, which may seem easy to deal with because there is only one transmitted text, should actually serve as a warning. What would they have looked like if they had been preserved in all the manuscripts that include the Byzantine triad, among which M is seen to be far from perfect? Even the 18 19 20

Wecklein (1885), with the enlarged Appendix of 1893; Dawe (1965); West (1990b: 378–400). Garvie (2001) and (2009b). West (1973: 55), arguing against those scholars “who will dismiss a conjecture from consideration on the ground that it is ‘unnecessary’,” puts it well: “it does not have to be ‘necessary’ in order to be true; and what we should be concerned with is whether or not it may be true.” West’s slim book provides much sound practical advice for the preparation and presentation of a text and apparatus criticus for a scholarly edition.

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reliability of the apparently few lines in Aeschylus’ text that have remained free from emendation cannot be taken for granted. It is right that conjectures should continue to be made. Even if few are likely to receive general acceptance, they may at least stimulate consideration and understanding of how to interpret the text. If not many have been accepted, that does not necessarily mean that they have been proved to be mistaken; it may be simply that there is not sufficient evidence to prove that they are correct. The final problem for an editor is to decide whether a conjecture deserves to be printed in the text, or whether it should at least be reported in the apparatus criticus, sometimes with an obelus in the text, or whether it should be passed over in silence. If it is the editor’s own conjecture, a degree of impartiality and humility is obviously required. In all of this future editors will have to take account of the project which has been initiated by Citti at the University of Trento, to carry out a thorough survey of the history of the text of every play.21 A problem for editors of Aeschylus, like that which Rhesus presents for editors of Euripides, is what to do with Prometheus. There is no evidence that its authenticity was ever questioned in antiquity, but in 1977 Mark Griffith published a book that rapidly persuaded most scholars, including me, that Aeschylus is unlikely to have been its author.22 He showed that, while every play of Aeschylus differed in one respect or another from every other play, Prometheus was the only one that differed from all the others in almost every respect, in particular in its lyric meters. It remains to be seen whether an edition of the plays of Aeschylus will ever be published that omits that play. In his own edition of Prometheus, published eight years later, Griffith without changing his mind expresses himself more cautiously, “I have certainly enjoyed dealing with the play as a tragic drama – whoever wrote it,”23 and the title of the book, as it appears on the dust-jacket and title page, gives no hint that there is any doubt about its authenticity. West includes the play in his edition, but his title makes it clear that for him Aeschylus is not its author.24 This is the correct procedure, partly because not everyone is convinced that the play is un-Aeschylean, partly because it shares the same textual history as the other members of the Byzantine triad and therefore cannot be treated in isolation from them, and partly because commentators on the other plays or on Prometheus itself will find it convenient to have the text of all seven plays in the same volume for purposes 21 22 23 24

See Citti, in Taufer (ed.) (2011b:93). Published so far are Novelli (2005) and Citti (2006). Griffith (1977). Griffith (1983: viii). West (1990a); see his discussion in (1990b: 51–72).

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of contrast or comparison. Other editors, feeling unable to decide, may prefer to keep their options open.25 1.3

The Role of Grammatical and Syntactical Explanation within a Commentary

Long gone are the days when a commentary on Aeschylus was expected to confine itself, apart from discussion of textual matters, to explanations of the sense of the Greek and of grammatical and syntactical peculiarities, with due attention to appropriate parallels drawn preferably from Aeschylus’ other plays, but also from the other tragedians, and more widely if necessary. That is still part of the editor’s job. I think that it was Malcolm Willcock who once pointed out to me that the best way to explain the sense of a difficult passage is often to provide a literal translation of it, perhaps accompanied by a translation in more idiomatic English. The author of a complete translation is of course faced with the more difficult, some would say impossible, task of producing a translation which is both accurate and idiomatic. How far it veers towards one or the other doubtless depends on its intended readership. The reader of an edition which combines a Greek text on one page with a translation on the facing page might be expected to need assistance with understanding the Greek, and therefore to be looking for accuracy rather than for idiomatic English. For the more difficult problems facing a translator for the modern stage see p. 49. 1.4

The Place of Literary and Dramatic Criticism in a Commentary

The modern editor is expected to provide a great deal more than this.26 It may be an exaggeration to say that in the second half of the 20th century 25 26

As is done successfully by Ruffell (2012), not in an edition but in his Companion to Prometheus; see earlier Podlecki (2005: 195–200). It goes without saying that he or she must be familiar with the work of previous editors and commentators: since 1980 Friis Johansen and Whittle (1980), Griffith (1983), Hutchinson (1985), Garvie (1986) and (2009), Bowen (1986), Podlecki (1989) and (2005), Sommerstein (1989) and (2008), West (1990a), Hall (1996), Sandin (2005), Raeburn and Thomas (2011), Bowen (2013), but in this chapter which is concerned with editing Aeschylus for English-speaking readers and translators it should be pointed out that important editions continue to appear also in other languages; for example, Bollack and Judet de La Combe (1981), Sier (1988), Belloni (1994).

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Greek tragedy was discovered to be not only literature, but also drama which was originally intended to be performed in a theatre before a live audience. Certainly, however, it was in those years that such matters came to occupy an ever-increasing place in the standard editions. I remember my own astonishment in discovering, not from an edition, but from Kitto that “the Greek dramatist was first and last an artist, and must be criticized as such.”27 His general approach to Greek tragedy has influenced me all my life. As for the relevance of modern dramatic criticism in particular, Fraenkel, as early as 1950, was able to write, “for Greek tragedy there exists also [i.e. in addition to minutiae of grammar] also something like a grammar of dramatic technique.”28 The study of that grammar really began with the ground-breaking book of Oliver Taplin, which offered much more than its modest subtitle promised, and which has influenced every later editor of Aeschylus.29 Relevant too has been a bewildering succession of movements and approaches to tragedy which have often been pioneered in monographs, journals, and conference papers, but which have not always found their way into commentaries on tragedy – structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, narratology, post-modernism, civic consciousness, cognitive science, to name but a few, along with words unknown to the earlier editors – metatheatricality, focalization, intertextuality, the “Other” with a capital O, etc. Editors will not find it easy to decide on how much of such material they can afford to include in the commentary, without overbalancing the whole edition, and they will always be faced with the problem of distinguishing between approaches which are fashionable now, but likely to become dated, and those which are fundamental to any serious understanding of a play. It would be even more difficult, perhaps indeed impossible, to predict what new movements may appear in the course of the 21st century. Fowler (1990) already speculates about the role of the commentary in the age of electronic media. Gumbrecht (1998) sees signs of the emergence of gender-specific styles of editing. In the following three sections of this essay I comment on three approaches to tragedy that currently seem to be regarded

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Kitto (1961), v. The quotation is taken from the third edition, but my astonishment must have been based on my reading of the second edition of 1950. The first edition was published as early as 1939. A useful summary of these developments may be found in Rutherford (2012: 22–28). Fraenkel (1950: ii 305). Taplin (1977).

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as important, and on which, therefore, editors should be prepared to give guidance to their readers. 1.5

The Place of Reception Studies in a Commentary

During the 1990s much work centered on the relationship between Greek tragedy and the institutions of the democratic polis in which it was performed. That work continues, but it has perhaps been overtaken in the present century by the blossoming of Reception, and Performance Reception, Studies.30 What is their place in an edition of Aeschylus, especially, but not exclusively, one in which the commentary is intended primarily for those who are reading his plays in the original Greek? David Wiles complains, no doubt justifiably, that “it is a received convention that editions of Shakespeare give substantial space to stage history, while it is still unheard of for editions of Greek plays to do the same.”31 Certainly modern performances should influence our thinking about Greek plays, as may the efforts of other generations to interpret them.32 At the very least Reception Studies should remind us that every age has had its own culturally-determined approach to Greek tragedy, and that our age is no exception. Our attitudes to death and funerals, our values and even the kind of expressions which we use to describe our emotions are not necessarily the same as, or do not necessarily correspond precisely to, those of a 5th-century

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See the helpful chapters in Part 3 of Easterling (ed.) (1997a). For recent volumes of essays on the theoretical problems involved see Hall and Harrop (eds.) (2010), Parker and Matthews (eds.) (2011). For students of performance reception the databases and publications of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (apgrd) are an invaluable aid. See especially Hall and Macintosh (eds.) (2005). In Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley (eds.) (2004) the chapter by Hall, 169–197, is the most relevant for Aeschylus. Wiles (2010:50). Schein (2013) in the Introduction of his recent edition of Sophocles Philoctetes, devotes 43–58 to “Reception,” and (justifiably, given the intended readership) only 58–59 to “The transmission of the text.” A chapter on Reception is included in each of the Duckworth Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy; for Aeschylus Goward (2005), Rosenbloom (2006), Torrance (2007), Mitchell-Boyask (2009), Papadopoulou (2011), Ruffell (2012). The story of the reception of Aeschylus begins already with Sophocles and Euripides, as has long been recognized by editors of the two younger tragedians. “The reception of an ancient play through performance is always an active, creative and transformative process” (Fischer-Lichte [2010]: 40).

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Athenian audience.33 If we are to understand why in Supplices the Danaids are so averse to marriage with their cousins we cannot ignore the vexed question of the status of heiresses in 5th-century Athens. We cannot take it for granted that in Septem the original audience would have shared our attitude to the apparent misogyny of Eteocles. What, however, in an edition should be the balance between Reception Studies and a more traditional approach? In, for example, a commentary on the “carpet”-scene of Agamemnon, how much of their limited space should editors allocate to a discussion of the complicated symbolism that was involved in the staging of Aeschylus’ original production (see page 48) and how much should they devote to what modern practitioners have made of it? Where should the emphasis lie? It is a pity if, as some may feel, there is a greater interest now in what Aeschylus has meant to later generations than there is in Aeschylus himself. In accordance with the mantra that the meaning of a text is created only at the point of its reception, it is not surprising that many rightly concern themselves with what Aeschylus’ plays have meant to later successive generations, and particularly to our own, but it is surprising that so many critics now tell us that we should not consider what he may, or must, have intended them to mean to his original audience. They can hardly reason that Aeschylus did not have any particular intentions. The argument seems usually to be either that his culture, the Other, is so different from ours that his intentions can be of no interest to us (which I do not believe; see below), or that it is too difficult for us to establish what they were. Certainly it is dangerous to assume that the original audience was a homogeneous body, every member of which responded in the same way, for example, to Aeschylus’ presentation of the Areopagus in Eumenides.34 Scholars may of course disagree about Aeschylus’ intentions, but that should not prevent editors from guiding their readers as to the possibilities. Should they not encourage them to consider why in Eumenides the voting in the Areopagus is not overwhelmingly for acquittal (see page 48)? Did 33

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See, for example, the seminal work of Cairns (1993); also (2003) and (2008), Cairns (ed.) (2005); Gill (1996); Goldhill (1997), 340–343; Konstan (2007); Konstan and Rutter (eds.), (2003). For discussion of some specific cultural differences in the present volume see especially R. Rehm, “Aeschylus in the Balance: Weighing Corpses and the Problem of Translation.” For the careful efforts of Aeschylus to accommodate very different views see Macleod (1982b); also Sommerstein (1989: 31–32); Podlecki (1989: 17–21); and, in general, Easterling (1997b: 28), “Right from the start the plays will have been open to very different political readings.”

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Aeschylus want simply to point out the etiological connection with 5th-century legal procedure, or was he hinting that the sense of closure at the end was not to be quite complete? Is it wrong for editors to discuss whether the Athenian audience of Persae, who presumably, when they entered the theatre, were disposed to hate their Persian enemies, still did so at the end of the play, or whether, as I should prefer to believe, their hatred had now turned into sympathy? If the latter is true, it is reasonable to conclude that this was the reception that Aeschylus intended to produce, and to go on then to analyze the remarkable skill with which he constructed his plot in order to do so (see page 38). At the beginning of this chapter I argued35 that the first task of editors is, as far as possible, to present the text of Aeschylus’ plays as he composed them. I am equally convinced that it is not only their right, but their duty, to consider why he wrote them in the way that he did, and what their effect may, or must, have been on their first audience.36 1.6

Historicist and Universalist Approaches to Tragedy and Its Editing

A different, but related, problem concerns the inability of modern scholars to agree on whether Greek tragedy is valuable (a) because it deals with characters who, despite all the differences between the 5th century bc and the 21st century ad, are essentially like ourselves, with problems which are true to our experience of life, or (b) because it belongs to a culture that is so different from ours that we can use it to define our own culture by contrasting each with the other.37 I suspect that the “historicist” approach predominates at present. The “Other” has become a familiar term in criticism, and belief in the “universalist” appeal of tragedy is somewhat out of fashion.38 Yet the success of so 35 36 37

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Garvie (2009), especially xvi–xxii and xxxii–xxxvii; also Garvie (2007) and (2011). For helpful discussion of the distinction between the concept of the intention, use, and effect of tragedy see Heath (2006: 253–281). The essays in Parker and Mathews (eds.) (2011) are concerned with translating rather than editing, and have little to say about Aeschylus, but the question which Parker poses in the Introduction 21 applies equally to editing: “The arguments in all chapters about the complex situation of texts in culture and in tradition face the translator with one overarching question: should s/he recover, witness to, or alienate the past?” A recent exception is Seidensticker (2009: 217 n. 41); “Im übrigen kann man die Differenz zwischen der Antike und der Moderne in dem Bereich des menschlichen Denkens und Fühlens auch übertreiben.” (“By the way one can also exaggerate the difference between ancient and modern in the sphere of thought and feeling.”) In the context of his discussion of the attempts of translators and directors to make Greek tragedy more relevant for

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many modern productions of Greek tragedy surely indicates that for modern audiences it speaks in some way39 to their own condition, rather than that its characters and problems belong to a culture that has nothing to do with their own. They do not simply observe with detachment the traumas experienced by the characters, but are somehow able to share in them. It is not only in 5th-century Athens that someone is forced, like Agamemnon, through no fault of himself, to choose between two alternatives, each of which is bound to lead to disaster, and who then has to accept responsibility for that decision. In both ancient and modern times matricide is a heinous crime, and some at least of the original audience may have had some doubts about Orestes’ acquittal in Eumenides. Many scholars, in their attempts at reconstructing the lost final play of the Danaid trilogy, have strangely favored a trial of Hypermestra, the one girl who did not murder her husband on her wedding-night, rather than a trial of the 49 who did. Was that really acceptable behavior, and would it arouse no misgivings at all in the 5th century bc? Eumenides is perhaps the most difficult Aeschylean play to relate to modern concerns. A recent reviewer, commenting on “the current fashion for historicism in the study of ancient Greek drama,” writes correctly that “it seeks to place drama in its social context in various sophisticated ways, most often by considering how the plays made sense to their original audience.”40 For Eumenides, perhaps more than any other play, that is certainly necessary. But is it sufficient? Many readers must have felt that, while the first two plays of the trilogy present problems that seem to be essentially timeless and universal, the third finds an apparent solution to these problems in terms that are appropriate only to the specific culture of 5th-century Athens.41 Seaford indeed, in his attack on those who find lack

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a modern audience by introducing a contemporary political agenda, Goldhill (2007: 133) (cf. 145, 168–169), warns us on “how fine the line can be between necessary distance and engaging relevance.” In the present volume see especially the contributions of D.H. Roberts, “Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes: War, Women, and the Hecht/Bacon Translation”; and J.M. Walton, “Prometheus Bound in Translation: ‘the true Promethean fire’”. It is not so easy to determine what that way is. “We find it much easier to point to the many different reasons that make ancient drama appeal to different people, than to answer the question of what all these people have in common when they are attracted to ancient drama,” Budelmann (2010), 108 (cf. 117–120). In the same volume for an aesthetic approach, see Martindale (2010); contra Goldhill (2010), especially 63–65; see also Foley (2010: 138–139). Carter (2011: 181). See for example Hardwick (2010: 200), who points out that the South African director Yael Farber in Molora, an adaptation of the Oresteia, found it necessary to omit Eumenides.

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of closure everywhere in Greek tragedy, is right to maintain that Eumenides does provide answers;42 the court of the Areopagus will henceforth replace the blood vendetta, and the new cult of the Erinyes will ensure the future prosperity of Athens, provided that its citizens behave themselves. But what do these answers mean to us in the 21st century? I have been arguing that editors should do their best to respect the intention of Aeschylus in writing his tragedies. They should, however, be careful not to fall into the trap of writing or speaking as if part of his intention was to instruct us in the 21st century about life in ancient Athens. It is perfectly legitimate for students of ancient history, politics, religion, and thought to use his plays as source material, provided that they do not assume that that is why he wrote them. They may teach us much about Athenian democracy, and, if readers are to understand something of what Aeschylus’ plays meant to the original audience, the editor must provide this kind of information. For the original spectators, however, these things formed the background to the action; they did not need to be taught them. The description of the Battle of Salamis in Persae, written by a poet who probably himself, like many in his audience, took part in the battle, is inevitably and rightly used as source material by modern historians. It is the earliest account of the battle that we have, and some historians have therefore been tempted to prefer Aeschylus’ narrative to the later history of Herodotus. But there is much in Persae that is almost certainly historically untrue. Aeschylus makes no claim to be a historian. He does not set out to be inaccurate, but it is the dramatic requirements and logic of his plot, not historical truth, that at every stage determine the use of his material. 1.7

The Didactic Approach to Tragedy and Its Editing

Much more controversial is the question of how far his aim was to instruct his own audience, whether on religious or ethical or political or even military matters.43 At one time editors who dealt with these matters at all tended to take it for granted that Aeschylus’ aim was to improve the morals of his spectators, to make them better people. Tragedy was therefore to be seen as part of a long

42 43

Macintosh (1997a: 301), reports that Reinhardt’s 1911 Munich production of the Oresteia dropped Eumenides when it transferred to Berlin. Seaford (1996: 290–292). I wonder how many audiences or readers, ancient or modern, have ever taken seriously the claim of “Aeschylus” at Ar. Frogs 1021–1022 that his Septem inspired the Athenians to be good fighting men. For “the wisdom of Greek tragedy” see Rutherford (2012), Chapter 9.

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tradition of Greek didactic poetry, and no one questioned Aristophanes’ seriousness in putting into Dionysus’ mouth the words, τοῖς μὲν γὰρ παιδαρίοισιν ἔστι διδάσκαλος ὅστις φράζει, τοῖσιν δ’ ἡβῶσι ποιηταί, “for children have a teacher who instructs them, while adults have poets.”44 Editors therefore thought that it was possible to encapsulate the “message” of a play in a few words, generally along the lines of “hybris [like the more modern concept of sin] is a bad thing and leads to punishment from the gods, while sophrosyne is good and will lead to prosperity.” Against all the evidence, it was taken for granted that hybris was basically a religious concept, that it described the pride and arrogance of someone who crossed the line that should separate man from god, and it came to dominate much discussion of the religious teaching of the tragedians, especially Aeschylus and Sophocles. With the work of Fisher and others a clearer picture began to emerge.45 There is perhaps still not complete unanimity as to whether hybris can denote a disposition (pride?) as well as an action, but most would probably agree that it is essentially an offence directed by one human being against another, as in Supplices, where the term occurs 10 times (out of a total of only 18 for Aeschylus + Prometheus), used always by the Danaids of the offensive behavior of their cousins against themselves. Persae has only 2 occurrences, both in a single speech (808 and 821), and yet it is the hybris of Xerxes and the Persians, including its salutary punishment, that have seemed to so many to provide the moral of the play. Readers are entitled to a more searching examination of the problems of responsibility as Aeschylus presents them. A more recent concern of scholars has been to relate the plays to the political and social context in which they were produced.46 Stress has been laid on the undoubted fact that they were presented at the great civic festival of Dionysus before an audience that was composed largely of the same people who voted in the democratic Assembly. Is it, then, legitimate to think of tragedy as “politics by another means” and to take it for granted that Aeschylus used his plays to give advice to his audience on the matters with which they were currently concerned in the Assembly? Those who hold this view have never succeeded in pointing to any specific occasion on which such advice had any influence on a decision of the Assembly. There was, of course, nothing to stop members of an audience from finding a play relevant in some way to the political situation at Athens in their own day, and it is certainly conceivable, though hard to prove, that this might have 44 Ar. Frogs 1054–1055; cf. Pl. Gorg. 501e; Dover (1993: 16). 45 Fisher (1992); Cairns (1996: 1–32). See Garvie (2009a: xxii–xxxii). 46 For a recent balanced treatment of this controversial subject see Carter (2007).

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indirectly influenced their general political views, and even their vote on some specific occasion in the Assembly. If so, Aeschylus must have been aware of this possibility. But that is very different from saying that it was for this reason that he wrote his plays. Even Eumenides, which certainly has a great deal to say about matters of current concern, the role of the Areopagus and the Athenian alliance with Argos, does so in such a way that modern scholars have been unable to agree about what advice Aeschylus was actually giving (see p. 33 above). In Supplices, too, the Argive alliance is relevant, but a simple belief in Aeschylus’ political intention should have been dented by the ease with which the play now seems to many to fit the political situation of the 460s, when with equal ease it could once be made to fit that of the 490s. More helpful is the view that the presentation of Argos as a democracy in Supplices, and the contrast between democracy and tyranny, which plays so large a part in Persae, may have helped the Athenian audience to define itself and its own institutions by contrast with the “Other.”47 Hall shows how it is after the first production of Persae that the Athenians’ negative attitude to the eastern barbarians first began to develop. But this need not mean that Aeschylus wrote his plays with the express intention of inculcating such a negative attitude. In my view, when an editor feels it necessary to explain why a given passage or theme occurs in a play, it is methodologically wrong for him or her to ask first how it serves as a comment on the political situation at the time of the play’s production, instead of asking what its function is in the play’s dramatic structure. Most people in Aeschylus’ audience probably believed that democracy was the ideal constitution. He did not have to teach them this. Rather, he can use that belief to guide them into the response that he wants them to have. If Pelasgus in Supplices is a constitutional monarch, it becomes easier for the audience to sympathize with him in his tragic dilemma. And if, at Persae 241–245, the contrast appears between Athenian democracy and Persian despotism, we should first ask why it does so at this particular point in the play, and why as part of a dialogue between the Chorus leader and the queen mother, who is so ignorant about Athens that she does not even know where it is. 1.8

The Introduction to an Edition

Editions which contain a commentary will normally be provided also with an introduction, and it is not always easy for an editor to apportion his or her material between them. Normally one would expect the introduction to deal 47

For the latter see especially Hall (1989) and (1996); Harrison (2000).

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in more general and comprehensive terms with themes that will appear in greater detail in the commentary. Given the state of the evidence, the life of Aeschylus may be passed over fairly briefly, but his introduction of the second actor deserves to be mentioned, as does the popularity which led, exceptionally, to the reproduction of his plays after his death. For an edition of Persae his probable participation in the battle of Salamis is obviously relevant. It may be appropriate to say something about the pre-Aeschylean treatment of the myth that provides the subject of the tragedy, in art as well as poetry. In the case of Septem, Supplices, and Prometheus one expects some discussion, necessarily speculative, of the relationship of the play to the other members of its trilogy or tetralogy (with all due caution as to whether Prometheus belonged to a trilogy at all). Persae will require special treatment, in that of all the surviving plays it alone deals with a recent historical event and does not belong to a connected trilogy.48 Care should be taken to warn the reader that, as Agamemnon, Choephori, and Eumenides constitute the only complete trilogy to survive, it should not be assumed that all the lost trilogies were closely connected with each other in quite the same way. An editor of Prometheus will naturally want to say something about the problem of its authenticity, even if only to confess uncertainty about it. Many will find it appropriate to discuss the relationship between a play and the political situation in Athens at the time of its production. They are helped in this task by the fact that five of the seven plays, unlike many of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, can be securely dated (Persae, Septem, Agamemnon, Choephori, and Eumenides), while there is fairly general agreement that Supplices was first produced in the 460s, between Septem and Oresteia.49 The introduction may include some account of the Festival of the City Dionysia, while any discussion of the history of the text will naturally vary in length according to the intended readership. It is right that both introduction and commentary should devote most space to the play itself, its tragic ideas, dramatic structure, style, and staging, and that this should often involve comparison with Aeschylus’ other plays. In all of this the editor should avoid giving the impression that the playwright’s development can be traced from his early to his later career. With the revised dating

48 49

For the view, however, that there were thematic links between the plays produced on the same occasion in 472 bc see Sommerstein (2008: i 7–9, iii 32–39, 256–259). The evidence for the date of Supplices is Oxyrhynchus Papyri 2256.3, first published in 1952. See Garvie (1968/2006). Scullion (2002: 90–101) would push the date back to about 470, which is not impossible, but, as far as I know, no one now believes in a really early date for the play.

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of Supplices, we know that all of his surviving plays, excluding Prometheus, belong to a period of 14 years, beginning when he was already over fifty. We can therefore only speculate about his earlier work before his introduction of the second actor at an unknown stage of his career. As for the surviving plays, there are one or two features which may seem to reveal some development from Persae (472 bc) to Oresteia (458 bc), but these should not be exaggerated. The most perceptible difference is between Oresteia and the earlier plays taken as a group, with Prometheus, as we have seen, differing from the other six in almost every respect. 1.9

The Role of a Commentary in Explicating the Dramatic Structure and Unity of a Play

With the recognition that every play was conceived with its own literary and dramatic unity modern editors are less likely to treat it as a series of disconnected short sense-units or, worse, single lines, each requiring its own isolated comment. See Goldhill (1999), 411–418, who warns also (397) against the use of a bald “cf.” in citing a parallel passage without explaining what is the point of the comparison. One note may embrace a group of lines, and every major sense-unit, be it episode or scene or choral ode or kommos, is likely to be given its own introduction relating it to the structure of the play as a whole. Alternatively, the general discussion of a scene may follow the detailed notes. In both kinds of note, and at every stage of the drama, editors should remember that the original audience did not share their knowledge of how the play was going to end. Aeschylus, in particular, liked to play upon his audience’s knowledge of previous treatments of a myth, in order to create false expectation for the sake of a later dramatic surprise.50 So, at Choephori 554–584 when Orestes makes his plans they center on the killing of Aegisthus as he sits on Agamemnon’s throne, the version of the story which would be familiar to the audience from vase-paintings and no preparation is made for the killing of Clytemnestra. When, therefore, the great door of the palace opens at 668, and it is his mother who is standing there, it comes as a shock to the audience which has almost forgotten that it is matricide that 50

Garvie (1978), and (2009a: 229). Taplin (1977: 92–98), strangely argues that the device of false preparation is not often found in Greek tragedy. Rather different is the technique whereby the playwright manipulates the audience into momentarily forgetting what it really does know is going to happen. “It is no great double-think to experience the plot even when ‘knowing’ the outcome,” says Ruffell (2008: 43).

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is imminent. At Sept. 742–749, when the Chorus sings of the oracle of Apollo which stated that if Laius wished to save the city of Thebes he must die without offspring, editors and critics have tied themselves in knots in their attempts to explain how, after Laius did produce Oedipus as his offspring, the city will apparently be saved at the end of the play, and only the family will be destroyed. They forget that, since the audience at this stage of the play does not know how the play is going to end, it naturally assumes that Aeschylus is following the usual version of the story, in which Thebes will in fact be destroyed in the next generation; the end of Septem will come as a surprise. In the parodos (or opening anapests and lyrics) of Persae the anxious Chorus tells (50) of how Xerxes has set out to impose a yoke of slavery on Greece, and (65–85) describes the great bridge of boats with which he has conveyed his huge army over the Hellespont. Modern critics, who have of course read the rest of the play, interpret all this in terms of the moral that will much later be propounded by the ghost of Darius. But the Chorus says nothing about hybris. It is certainly anxious that the expedition may fail because it is dangerous to be as successful as the Persians have been in the past. But to “yoke” a river or stretch of water by building a bridge is not immoral, and the idea of yoking it is a cliché in Greek prose-writing as well as poetry. Later in the play we shall learn that the yoking of the Hellespont has angered Poseidon, but there is no suggestion of that in the parodos. For the moment the Chorus is merely proud of Xerxes’ achievement.51 If the spectators do not know in advance how the plot will proceed, and may indeed be misled by the playwright, it is certainly true that he expects them to look back and to remember what has happened and what has been said earlier in the play. Some indeed will be more alert, and will have better memories, than others, but it is hard to believe that Aeschylus did not know what he was doing when he constructed the extraordinary series of echoes and repetitions which constitute perhaps the most important feature of the style of the Oresteia, especially the first two plays, and which distinguish it from the earlier plays with their, on the whole, simpler use of such devices.52 Editors whose concern is with the unity of the play or trilogy as a whole can hardly fail to draw attention to them, either in the introductions to individual scenes or in the more detailed commentary. They involve both imagery and repeated themes, and they generally serve to arouse foreboding and anxiety,

51 52

For a fuller discussion see Garvie (2009a: xxix–xxxii, 46–49). Garvie (1986: xxxvi–xxxviii). For the imagery of Aeschylus see now especially Rutherford (2012: 128–137).

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with ever greater intensity as the trilogy progresses. There is constant shifting between literal and metaphorical uses of the same image, and the language is often such that it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. The literal light of the beacons with which Agamemnon begins, and which is the subject of Clytemnestra’s long speech to the Chorus at 281–350, indicates victory and triumph, but that speech ends disquietingly with the idea that the final beacon that has crashed down like a thunderbolt on the house of Agamemnon at Argos is descended from the destructive fire that destroyed Troy. At Choephori 131 Electra prays that Orestes may return like the light of salvation for the house, but it will not be until the very end of the trilogy that, with the torchlight procession with which the company leave the stage, the idea of light will at last become positive and healthy; similarly with the theme of the perverted sacrifice and with the imagery of Clytemnestra as the female viper. We are not to think that Aeschylus was strangely obsessed with snakes. Rather, he uses the image to help us to understand the connections between the various stages in the development of the plot. When we hear one of the characters expressing the wishful hope that things may turn out well in future, we remember that when we last heard that hope expressed it was not fulfilled, and our foreboding is increased, as it is also by the frequent repetition of the idea that once blood has been shed it can never be replaced.53 Although this technique is most obvious in the Oresteia, it is not confined to it. In Persae the yoke of slavery which Xerxes intended to impose on Greece by yoking the Hellespont will turn into the yoke with which he rules his empire, but which will now be broken when that empire collapses as a result of his defeat at Salamis.54 Less striking, but not, I think accidental, is the use of π-alliteration to connect up all the references to the bridge of boats.55 1.10

The Problem of the Chorus

Many, though not all, of such passages are to be found in a choral ode or in a lyric or semi-lyric epirrhematic passage or kommos, shared between a chorus and an actor or actors. Since the language here is usually more poetic than that of the spoken iambic episodes, modern readers and audiences require

53 54 55

Garvie (1986: xxxviii–xl, 48). Garvie (2009a: 50). Garvie (2002: 7) and (2009a: 65–72). I have examined this phenomenon for Persae, but not systematically for the other plays.

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more help from an editor. Moreover, the very presence of a singing and dancing chorus in a play is largely alien to the modern theatrical tradition, apart from opera. This presents more of a problem for editors of Aeschylus than of Sophocles and Euripides, whose choral songs are generally shorter than those of Aeschylus, both in themselves and in proportion to the total number of lines in a play. And, although editors are less likely than they once were to dismiss many of Euripides’ choral odes as merely decorative interludes, it remains true that in most of Aeschylus’ plays the relationship between the choral singing and the action is closer and more intricate than in Sophocles and Euripides. From this point of view Supplices and Eumenides require special treatment from an editor. In the former the plot centers on the fortunes not of a character represented by an actor but of the Chorus itself, the fifty daughters of Danaus represented by the twelve (less probably fifteen) members of the Chorus, one of whom will probably emerge in the lost final play of the tragedy as a named character in her own right, and another in the satyr-drama that followed the three tragedies. The tragedy of Pelasgus, the technical protagonist, while not unimportant, is subordinate to that of the Chorus. In Eumenides the dramatic interest is shared more equally between the Chorus of Erinyes and the single character Orestes, but it is with the former that the whole trilogy ends. I have argued elsewhere that, in giving so important a dramatic role (as opposed to merely longer songs) to his chorus, and in forming it out of familiar named characters from the world of myth or religion, Aeschylus was innovating.56 His original audience may have found this almost as unusual as a modern one. An editor of Supplices or Eumenides should provide some guidance on these matters, while sparing his or her readers too thorough a disquisition on the vexed question of the origins and early development of Greek tragedy. What is important, however, is that emphasis should be laid on the fact that a chorus sings and dances, and that qua chorus it never speaks in unison. Some editions and translations fail to distinguish between its songs,57 or lyric 56

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Garvie (1968/2006: 106–120) (and xii-xiii of the 2006 edition). Aeschylus was not the first to do so; his older contemporary Phrynichus composed lost plays entitled Aigyptioi and Danaides, presumably on the same subject as Aeschylus’ trilogy. Taplin (1977), 207 and Scullion (2002: n. 42), object to my description of the normal and traditional chorus as “anonymous,” but its members have literally no individuality and no names, and no existence at all beyond the confines of their play. Ewans (1996: xxii n. 36), is unusual in his view that “individual choros members were equally important, and both dialogue and lyrics were normally subdivided between them;” more fully earlier (2005: xxiii-xxv). Modern Greek directors are among the most successful in their handling of the chorus. In the Teatro Technico 1965 London production of Persae, directed by Karolos Koun, “it was the chorus that was a revelation to those who

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participation in an epirrhema, and the part played by its leader in a spoken dialogue with an actor. It is, however, impossible to understand the effect of a Greek tragedy on its original audience if we do not take account of this, even though we cannot recover the original music or choreography. Recent work has contributed much to our understanding of the complexity of the choral identity and its perspectives, and of the dramatic effects that can be produced by transitions between spoken and lyric voices.58 The editor should anticipate also the problems of a modern producer of a Greek play, perhaps in a modern theatre with a proscenium arch, and, unless it is in Greece itself, usually with no orchestra to provide space for the dancing of the twelve or fifteen choristers who were available to Aeschylus.59 If a modern production is less than successful, it is often because the producer compromises with a chorus of three or four, who stand in a line reciting,­not singing, in doleful unison, and who for the rest of the time encumber the stage and look embarrassed. A chorus consisting of a single actor is not much better. The audience of a play of Aeschylus has to hear every word that the chorus sings, and it is remarkable that in a vast open-air theatre it was evidently able to do so. The whole of the parodos of Agamemnon is vital for the understanding of the tragedy, with its lyric account of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which introduces the whole problem of human responsibility, and in effect turns the events of ten years ago into part of the present plot. The great kommos of Choephori, the most complex choral composition in surviving Greek tragedy, is equally essential for our understanding of the responsibility of Orestes. No matter what the intended readership, the editor must make some attempt to explain the structure of the choral odes, for example the way in which strophe is balanced by antistrophe, sometimes with the language and thought as well as the meter corresponding, and sometimes with a non-responding epode.60 We are expected to notice that, if at the end of Persae the audience assumes that the final choral stanza will be balanced by an antistrophe, it will be disappointed when it turns out to be an epode with no responsion. There is no

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had come to conceive of the Greek tragic chorus as an archaic encumbrance” (Macintosh [1997a]: 309). See for example Goldhill (2012); Gagné and Hopman (eds.) (2013), in which several papers, including one by Goldhill, are of particular interest to editors of Aeschylus. Goldhill (2007: 45) puts it simply: “If the chorus isn’t right, the play cannot work.” His whole book is full of wise analysis of all the problems involved in staging Greek tragedy today. Collard (2002) and (2008) makes a valiant attempt to reproduce the correspondence between strophes and antistrophes even in his English translation.

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sense of closure at the end.61 There are more troubles to come for the Persians; the disaster of Plataea, as the ghost of Darius has foretold, lies ahead. In the kommos of Choephori it is not just the thought that matters. Equally important is the intricate pattern of strophes and antistrophes, with Orestes, Electra, the Chorus, and the Chorus-leader all playing their separate parts. The intended readership will determine the amount of information to be provided about the individual lyric meters that Aeschylus employs. In both my Choephori and Persae editions I followed the practice of leaving the scansion of all the lyric passages to an Appendix at the end of the volume. One reviewer criticized me for this on the grounds that it might suggest to the reader that “serious work on tragedy is possible without an understanding of this topic.”62 He may have been right to do so, but the practicalities have to be considered. The editor of Aeschylus may have an advantage over editors of Sophocles and Euripides in that on the whole his lyric meters are simpler and less problematic than those of his successors. Nevertheless, many readers might still be daunted by having to struggle through pages of metrical minutiae and perhaps discussions of colometry and textual problems before they reach the commentary on the dramatic function of each ode or epirrhema. Certainly something should be said about the meters in the introductions to the individual songs. The effect of dominant dochmiacs, for example, should be pointed out, as should the sudden switch from ionics to lyric iambics in the parodos of Persae at the point when the Chorus’s thoughts turn from pride in the bridge of boats to anxiety about the dangers of success. Equally important is the use of trochaics to indicate anxiety and foreboding in the parodos of Agamemnon and other plays. 1.11

The Staging of the Original Production

If readers of an edition are to be shown, and to take seriously, the fact that the plays of Aeschylus were written to be performed before a theatre audience, much attention should be paid to the staging of that first production. There is of course no reason why those who are responsible for modern productions or

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See Scott (1984: 157–158); Garvie (2009a: 342, 368–369). “Xerxes is reintegrated into the community, albeit as chief mourner rather than military leader,” says Hopman (2013: 73). I would prefer a different emphasis: “it is only as chief mourner, not as military leader, that Xerxes etc.” Finglass (2011: 35).

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adaptations of Greek plays should feel restricted by this. The different shapes and theatrical resources of most modern theatres, as well as the different expectations of modern audiences, make this inevitable. The director’s aim is to attract the audience, not to repel it by putting the stress on everything that is alien to its modern theatrical experience. It is difficult even to define what a truly “authentic” performance would look like.63 Every director will have to decide for himself or herself whether to have men or women playing women’s parts, and whether to use masks. For the problem of the chorus see the previous paragraph. We owe much to editors and translators of Aeschylus who themselves have experience of directing his plays on the stage, and we should take it seriously when they tell us that something has been proved to work or not to work in the theatre. At the same time we should remember that what they have found to succeed on the modern stage is not necessarily the way that Aeschylus himself, his own producer, did it; there may be different roads to success. In any case, it should be helpful for a modern producer to be given some idea of the original production, as so often its staging has an important bearing on Aeschylus’ conception of the tragedy.64 It does not matter greatly whether the editor does this comprehensively in the introduction or scene by scene in the commentary, or, as on the whole I would prefer, generally in the introduction and in more detail in the commentary. An edition is not the place for a lengthy account of all the archaeological problems concerning the shape of the Theatre of Dionysus, but there should be room for some cautious reference to the form of the orchestra – with scholars still divided as to whether it was circular or rectangular.65 Whether or 63

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See Goldhill (2007: 336–340); Gamel (2010: 153–170). She remarks (159) on the paradox whereby “the closer a modern production approaches the formal conditions of its original production, the stranger it will be to a modern audience. The stranger the effect on a modern audience, the more different their reactions will be from those of the original audience.” She rightly emphasises, however, the importance of music and dance (164). See also, in the same volume, in the context of masks and costume, Wyles (2010), especially 172–175; for masks also Wiles (2004). On different contemporary approaches to choral dance see also Meineck (2013); Macintosh (2013). As Goldhill (2007: 44) puts it, “Any production that has not explored the symbolics of space and movement written into these scripts [i.e. the scripts of tragedies] will end up struggling with the form and significance of the play [ … ]. The job of a modern director is not to reproduce the conditions of ancient theater but to see how the modern theater can respond to the vividly constructed spatial dynamics of the old plays.” Circular, for example Scullion (1994: 3–66); rectangular, Goette (2007: 116–121); Seidensticker (2009: 212); for bibliography see Mastronarde (1990: 248 n.3).

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(probably) not there was a raised stage does not require much discussion, but the 5th-century skene or background-building, the roof of which provided an additional acting area, should certainly be described. The general consensus is that it was introduced to the theatre after the production of Persae, Septem, and Supplices and before that of the Oresteia in 458 bc But the fact that it was evidently not used in the earlier plays does not necessarily mean that it was not there to be used by any of the competing playwrights who wished to use it. The reference to “this ancient building” at Persae 140–141 has never been satisfactorily explained by those who deny the existence of the skene in that period. It is generally assumed that it had one door, and one door only, in the middle of its frontage, but I have argued elsewhere that the staging of Choephori makes sense only if there was a side-door through which Clytemnestra emerges from the women’s quarters at 885.66 Perhaps there were two sidedoors, flanking the central door on either side. Again it is dangerous to assume that if any stage-feature was not used it cannot have been available to the playwright. Taplin was the first to stress the importance of the central door in the Oresteia, the way into the palace which is dominated by Clytemnestra, which no one else can enter except on her terms.67 Quite apart from the practical difficulty of staging her entrance at Choephori 885 if there was only one door, the symbolism of a side-door, used here for the first time in the trilogy, should be obvious: Clytemnestra has lost her domination over the central door, and it will be Orestes who a few lines later will emerge from it. The eccyclema is relevant probably only for Agamemnon and Choephori, in the mirror-scenes where the revelation of the corpses of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in the second play mirrors that of Agamemnon and Cassandra in the first.68 The mechane was probably used in Prometheus, at least for the entrance of Oceanus (see below), and some scholars consider it possible for the entrance of Athena in Eumenides.69 Each of the seven plays presents its own staging problems. The editor (or director) of Persae and Choephori has to consider where to place the tombs of Darius and Agamemnon respectively, and in the case of the former how Aeschylus contrived to get the second actor into place behind the tomb without 66 67 68 69

Garvie (1986: xlvii–lii). Taplin (1978: 33–35). Some (e.g., Ruffell [2012]: 83, 95–96) believe that it was used also in Prometheus. Sommerstein (1989: 153); more strongly Jouanna (2009: 79–80), who argues (69–71, 93, 118) that it may have been used also for the entrance of Clytaemestra’s ghost in the prologue. It was probably employed in Psychostasia (see Podlecki [2009]: 363).

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the audience seeing him (if indeed that was what happened). For Septem a decision has to be made as to whether, in the great central scene in which the messenger reveals the disposition of the Argive champions at the seven gates, and Eteocles announces his own arrangements, the audience sees all seven depart, or whether some have already gone off to their posts. Whatever decision is taken by the editor will affect our understanding of the relationship between fate and Eteocles’ own decision. Supplices requires discussion of the form taken by the hill with its statues of the gods, at which the Chorus takes refuge. In Agamemnon the most celebrated use of the central door is when Clytemnestra persuades her husband to walk over the dark-red fabrics to his death inside the palace. Much has been written about the symbolism – the color of the fabrics (blood-red, not “purple,” as the word is often translated), the victory of female over male, the hybris of Agamemnon in trampling on what should be reserved for gods, but much less on when the fabrics should be removed. If they are taken away by the servants immediately after Agamemnon has disappeared into the palace,70 the stress will be on the fact that he is alone in his act of hybris, but if they remain in view of the audience until the departure of Cassandra at 1330 the idea may be that she is united with Agamemnon in her death. There is still little agreement among scholars as to how the prologue of Eumenides was staged. Later in that play the audience watches as each member of the jury drops his vote into the urns. Does Athena vote once or twice – once only when she decrees that if the human votes are equal that will count as acquittal, twice if she first votes along with the human jury, and it is her vote that produces the equality that leads to acquittal? The first view is widely accepted by scholars,71 but I believe the second to be supported by the text. The question has a vital bearing on our attitude to the apparent closure at the end of the trilogy; with the first view the human voters are equally divided as to whether Orestes deserves to be acquitted, while with the second they actually vote to condemn him, and it takes Athena’s arbitrary decision to have him acquitted. Most serious are the problems of staging Prometheus. Where would we place the hero, nailed or chained to his rock throughout the play, how do the Chorus and Oceanus appear before the audience, the former flying through the air on a chariot or chariots, the latter riding on a griffin, and how did the playwright stage the earthquake at the end?72 70 71 72

So Taplin (1977: 309). For discussion and bibliography see Sommerstein (1989: 222–226); Podlecki (1989: 211–213). For the most recent discussion see Ruffell (2012: 83–96).

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Translation for the Modern Stage

This chapter has been concerned with editions rather than translations, but editors should be aware of the issues involved in translating for the stage. Morrison describes how, my concern in adapting classics for the stage has been to produce texts that are speakable rather than [ … ] unspeakable; texts that [ … ] have drive, energy, resonance and the inflexions of contemporary speech; texts that … are playscripts not scholarly translations. Of course to produce such scripts I first have to immerse myself in already existing English translations – preferably annotated scholarly translations – in order to understand what it is I’m adapting. But there comes a point when you have to set aside your inhibitions about line-by-line fidelity and let rip.73 My only doubt here concerns Morrison’s reference to the “inflexions of contemporary speech.” A translation which is too colloquial may give the modern audience the wrong impression of the style of Aeschylus, who could write in simple Greek when he wanted to, but whose language must have often sounded to the original audience far from the inflexions of its own contemporary speech. 1.13 Conclusion The translator and the editor of Aeschylus in their different ways share the task of presenting to a modern audience or readership a play which was composed for a society with what may seem to be very different cultural assumptions. I return, therefore, in conclusion, to the division between the historicist and the universalist approaches to tragedy. I have maintained that the editor has 73

Morrison (2010: 253). In the same volume see also Hardwick (2010); Harrop (2010), especially 235–256. Helpful too are Burian (1997: 271–276); Goldhill (2007), Chapter 5; Walton (2006) and (2008); Schein (2008), who remarks (404) that a translation should not be “too readable and comprehensible, so that those who work with it cannot easily assimilate it to the norms of their own language and culture.” The problems of translating for the stage are fully discussed by other contributors to the present volume, e.g., J.M. Walton, “Prometheus Bound in Translation: ‘the true Promethean fire’”; R. Rehm, “Aeschylus in the Balance: Weighing Corpses and the Problem of Translation”; P. Meineck, “Cognitive Theory and Aeschylus: Translating Beyond the Lexicon”; and P. Monaghan, ‘Aeschylus as Postdramatic Analogue: “a thing both cool and fiery”’.

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indeed a duty to set the play in its historical context, and to establish as far as possible the playwright’s intention. But I have argued also that it is not enough for the editor to cater for the antiquarian curiosity of his or her readers, or even to help them to define or question their own cultural assumptions by contrasting them with those of the original audience. Not the least important duty, or privilege, of the modern editor is to show that the trauma of bridging the divide may not after all be so great. On the other hand, in so far as Aeschylus invites, or forces, us to identify with his characters, we are forced also to share in their traumas. I remember a child who at the end of La Boheme, her first opera, wept uncontrollably, and who, when asked why she was crying, sobbed, “Because it is so sad.” She rightly refused to accept the consolation that “it is only a story.” Why a spectator or reader deliberately exposes himself or herself to the experience of traumas, which can have this effect, is of course another question, and not one for this chapter.

chapter 2

Aeschylus and His Afterlife in the Classical Period: “My Poetry Did Not Die with Me” Johanna Hanink and Anna S. Uhlig 2.1 Introduction When an ancient dramatic text crosses the boundary between its (imagined) original and intended context into the realm of reception, reperformance, and adaptation, classicists often speak of its “afterlife,” a translation of the German term Nachleben. In English the term carries a resonance that the German lacks, namely that of human mortality and an individual’s life after death. All adaptation may require the transgression of a final (if not fatal) boundary,1 but the metaphor of life after death is particularly apt for considering the continued dynamism of the plays of Aeschylus in the wake of their first performances. For his modern readers and audiences, Aeschylus comes into view only after his death. Our earliest evidence for his life begins to emerge in the late 5th century, decades after Aeschylus was dead and buried. Surprisingly, this first picture is a product not of punctilious historians or pedantic grammarians, but of comic poets who invented a playwright to inhabit the topsy-turvy world of the Athenian stage. The comic poets’ appropriation of their dead tragic predecessor embedded the fate of Aeschylus permanently in that of tragedy’s sister genre.2 For decades after his death, Aeschylus and his verses would live on in comic plays: exalted, parodied, and lambasted.3 At least two plays, Pherecrates’ lost Krapataloi and Aristophanes’ Frogs, even literalized Aeschylus’ early “afterlife” by bringing the dead poet onstage to speak for himself.4 Elsewhere in this volume Rush Rehm discusses the challenges presented by Aeschylean drama’s 1 See, for example, the definition of “world literature” set out by Damrosch (2003). 2 On the intertwining of these genres see e.g., Foley (2008), Rosen (2006), Silk (2000: 42–98), Conti Bizzarro (1999) and Taplin (1986) and (1996). 3 See Silk (1990: 302–305) and Bakola (2010), especially 118–179. On the comic characters of “Mr. Aeschylus” and “Mr. Euripides” in Frogs see Heiden (1991: 99–107). 4 Other plays of Old Comedy may have featured the dead Aeschylus as a character; cf. Henderson (1995: 177–178). For a recent discussion of the circumstances attributed to the death of Aeschylus in Sicily (which we do not discuss here) see Polli Palladini (2013: 267–284); see also her 285–289 on evidence that the poet was honored with a kind of hero cult in the west; see further her 308–316 on Athenian reactions to his death. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004332164_004

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many corpses (“Aeschylus in the Balance: Weighing Corpses and the Problem of Translation”), but critics and historians of Athenian drama must often confront the difficulty of one Aeschylean ghost in particular: the tragedian’s own. Tellingly, neither Pherecrates’ nor Aristophanes’ play offered a picture of a living poet; rather both conjured an Aeschylus who was emphatically, insistently dead. Only one line of Aeschylus’ speech in Pherecrates’ Krapataloi survives, but his role in the play as dead and distant exemplar is clear. At the heart of the comedy lay a descent into Hades (a katabasis).5 The extant fragments give little detail as to the circumstances of the journey, which unsurprisingly seems to have involved a great deal of ribald humor.6 Aeschylus was likely just one of the shades that the primary characters encountered along the way. Whatever the motivation for his appearance, the dead Aeschylus makes clear to his interlocutors that he is aware, from his vantage in the Underworld, of the influence that his work has had on later generations of poets: “I am the one who gave them this great skill,” he boasts, “since I built for them a house of it.”7 These words presage the similarly architectonic praise that the chorus showers on the poet in Aristophanes’ Frogs,8 when they address him as “You who first of the Greeks built a tower of holy speech.”9 In the late first century bc Antipater of Thessalonica borrowed Aristophanes’ metaphor of tower-building in an epitaph for Aeschylus (Greek Anthology 7.39), and still later the same comic line would be quoted at the beginning of the late Life of Aeschylus as a testament to the poet’s greatness. Thus a comedian’s praise of the dead poet – and no quotation from Aeschylus himself – came to stand as sign, symbol, and proof of the tragedian’s poetic excellence for all posterity; in the hands of comic poets Aeschylus became, in one sense, more productive in death than he had been in life. The first “cultural divide” that we can detect between Aeschylus’ audiences therefore occurs already in the 5th century, in the playwright’s native city. The comic poets viewed (or at least constructed) a chasm between the era of 5 Pollux 9.83 explains that the eponymous krapatalos was a currency that Pherecrates used in Hades. On the comic theme of the katabasis see Young (1933). The Underworld is also a setting in e.g., Pherecrates’ own Metalles, Aristophanes’ Gerytades and Frogs, and possibly Eupolis’ Demoi. Resurrection is staged in e.g., Cratinus’ Plutoi, Cheirones, and possibly Archilochoi. 6 See, e.g., Pherecrates, Krapataloi frr. 87 and 93 Kassel-Austin. 7 Preserved in a scholion to Aristophanes’ Peace (ad 749a.1 = Pherecrates fr. 100 Kassel-Austin): ὅστις [γ’] αὐτοῖς παρέδωκε τέχνην μεγάλην ἐξοικοδομήσας. 8 Pherecrates is known to have been composing comedies as early as 437 bc and was still alive in 411 bc, which suggests that it is likely (though not certain) that Krapataloi predated Frogs. The biographical testimonia are discussed by Quaglia (2005). 9 Aeschylus, Frogs 1004: ὦ πρῶτος τῶν Ἑλλήνων πυργώσας ῥήματα σεμνά.

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Aeschylus’ life and the years of dramatic production that followed, and this divide was punctuated exactly by the trauma that Aeschylus’ passing inflicted upon his genre. His presence as dead, dramatic construct – and his absence from the world of the living – is actually one of the brightest threads in the tapestry of his earliest reception and reperformance. 2.2

Reperformance during Aeschylus’ Lifetime

In Pherecrates’ Krapataloi and Aristophanes’ Frogs, Aeschylus is already dead and removed from the contemporary world of Athens and its theater. However lively he was as a persona of the later 5th-century stage, the comic Aeschylus exists only in the shadow cast by his own death. The comic playwrights even equated his death to the end of tragedy in the city: as an unknown speaker in an unknown play of Aristophanes declares, “there is darkness now that Aeschylus has died.”10 But there is much to suggest that Aeschylus’ works were already being adapted in the poet’s own lifetime. The story of Aeschylus’ afterlife begins before the playwright’s death in Sicily, in the years when his success at the Great Dionysia in Athens first carried his poetry across the Greek Mediterranean. There is, it must be stressed, almost no contemporary evidence for the performance of Aeschylus’ plays during the poet’s lifetime, whether for premiers or for reperformances and revivals. Some limited records survive for the competitions that he entered at the Great Dionysia. These exist in the form of dramatic inscriptions and didascalic notices, though the latter in particular may be highly mediated, as they are preserved primarily in hypotheseis (summaries) of the plays that were written centuries after Aeschylus’ death.11 Even within the seemingly straightforward realm of Athenian premiers there is much that remains obscure. Only in the second half of the 20th century was the erroneous attribution of the Danaid trilogy to the earliest phase of Aeschylus’ career corrected by a chance papyrus discovery that dated its debut to no earlier than 470 bc.12

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Aristophanes fr. 720 Kassel-Austin: σκότος γάρ ἐστιν Aἰσχύλου τεθνηκότος. See Millis and Olson (2012) for a new edition of the inscribed dramatic records (including the Fasti, ig II2 2318, the catalogue of victors at the Great Dionysia which was first inscribed in Athens between 346 and 343 bc). P.Oxy. 2256 fr. 3; Garvie (1969) 1–28 claimed a terminus post quem of 466 bc, but a somewhat earlier date is now accepted in light of the arguments of. Scullion (2002: 87–101), a position acknowledged by Garvie (2006: ix–xi).

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Likewise Prometheus Bound, a play admired for centuries as the pinnacle of Aeschylean tragic artistry,13 is no longer generally accepted as a genuine work of Aeschylus.14 Still, the limited evidence for the performance history of the six (or seven) extant plays is a feast compared to what scraps remain of the vast majority of Aeschylus’ dramatic works. Scores of plays that, in antiquity, helped to establish Aeschylus’ position within the tragic canon are all but unknown to us now.15 With so little that is certain about Aeschylean premiers, any attempt to reconstruct a history of the early reperformance of his work might seem a fool’s errand. But while the search for decisive proof of historical veracity must be largely abandoned, a speculative sketch based on cautious interpretation of the evidence that is available can serve, at least, to outline some of the possibilities. As is the case of the premiers, much of what is known (or thought to be known) about early reperformances of Aeschylus’ plays is owed to late sources and to the ancient biographical tradition. Though written centuries after Aeschylus’ death, works such as Plutarch’s Life of Cimon and On Exile, Athenaeus’ Scholars at Dinner, and the late antique Life of Aeschylus preserve what little information is transmitted about the playwright’s life. These texts paint a rich, and at times conflicting, picture of the poet, but they also present suggestive possibilities for repeat performances of Aeschylus’ plays during his own lifetime. Without any positive contemporary evidence to corroborate the claims of these late sources, it is important to retain a healthy skepticism in confronting them.16 Nevertheless, taken together these later chroniclers create an impression that a lively and widespread culture of dramatic reperformance existed well before the playwright’s physical death. The play most often discussed today in terms of potential for reperformance while Aeschylus still lived is Persians. Awarded first prize in the Great Dionysia of 472 bc,17 Persians is unique amongst the extant corpus in many 13

14 15 16 17

For a panorama of the play’s reception (especially amongst radical thinkers) see Storey (2012) Ch. 5; Storey also notes that “Even if a pastiche of Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound has been informing the idea of Aeschylus since the 4th century bc and perhaps earlier” (10). See most importantly Griffith (1977) and below for discussion of how the misattribution may have occurred. Ancient sources claim between seventy and ninety titles: Aeschylus test. 1 §13; 2 (= Suda σ 357) lines 6–7; 78 Radt. On the fictionality of Greek biographical traditions see especially Fairweather (1974) and Lefkowitz (1981; revised 2012). See the hypothesis transmitted with the scholia vetera (ed. Dindorf); the inscriptional evidence corroborates that Aeschylus was victorious in this year (during the archonship of Menon) – and that Pericles served as his choregos: ig II2 2318.10-11 Millis-Olson.

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respects:18 it is the earliest Aeschylean composition to survive;19 it is, as far as we know, the only play that Aeschylus wrote concerning historical events;20 it is also the only extant Aeschylean drama that is not part of a narratively connected trilogy.21 Exceptionally, an explicit notice about the play’s production history survives. The Life of Aeschylus mentions only five of Aeschylus’ plays by name and offers little information about productions. The text does however record that Persians was reperformed in Sicily at the request of Hieron, the tyrant of Syracuse.22 The notice, which provides no further information, comes at the very end of the Life in a short sentence appended in isolation after Aeschylus’ epitaph.23 Questions abound: did such a (re)performance truly take place? If so, was the play performed on its own, or in combination with the other plays with which it originally appeared? Was the performance part of a dramatic contest in Syracuse, at a festival comparable to the Great Dionysia at Athens, or was the play performed without formal competition?24 Was Aeschylus present for the reperformance, or was the play staged under the direction of some other chorus-director (khorodidaskalos)?25 What was the composition of the audience at the theater at Syracuse? And, perhaps most pressing here, were reperformances of Aeschylus’ work a regular part of the song culture of Syracuse at that time? Most discussions of the Life’s tantalizing final claim focus on the well-worn debate over whether Aeschylus rewrote Persians, at least in part, for its Sicilian reperformance. The seed of this theory was sown by Aristophanes, whose Dionysus in Frogs fondly remembers attending a performance of Persians and delighting as the chorus cried out in joy (iauoi!) at the death of Darius.26 18 19

Bosher (2012: 98–101). According to the Marmor Parium Aeschylus’ first victory had been a dozen years earlier, in 484: FGrH 239 A50 = Aesch. test. 54a Radt. 20 Garvie (2009a: ix–xvi). 21 The hypothesis states that the winning tetralogy consisted of Phineus, Persians, Glaucus Pontius, and Prometheus [Fire Starter]; on the tetralogy see Garvie (2009a: xlii–xlvi). 22 Life of Aeschylus (= Aeschylus test. 1 Radt) §18: ἀναδιδάξαι τοὺς Πέρσας ἐν Σικελίαι καὶ λίαν εὐδοκιμεῖν. See Poli Palladini (2013: 28–35) for a recent extended discussion of some of the issues that we raise here. 23 This may suggest that the notice was a later addition. 24 Possible venues for performance are assembled by Burnett (1988: 129–133), also Morgan (2012: 37–39). Wilson (2007: 354–358) argues that some form of dramatic choral competition took place in Sicily in the 5th century, so too Taplin (2012: 239). 25 Most scholars allow that Aeschylus was present for the performance; see Bosher (2012: 103), with bibliography. 26 Aristophanes, Frogs 1028–9: Ἐχάρην γοῦν, ἡνίκ’ ἐκώκυσας περὶ Δαρείου τεθνεῶτος | ὁ χορὸς δ’ εὐθὺς τὼ χεῖρ’ ὡδὶ συγκρούσας εἶπεν · “Ἰαυοῖ! ”

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It has proven impossible to locate this moment in the extant text of Persians, a conundrum that already plagued Aristophanes’ earliest critics: the Hellenistic scholar Eratosthenes first identified the play’s Sicilian reperformance as the source of a possible second, revised text.27 The idea that Aeschylus revised Persians before its performance in Syracuse has gained support in recent decades in the wake of an increased scholarly interest in the Athenian content and context of tragic performance.28 Persians, one of the most overtly pro-Athenian of dramas (so the thinking goes) must have been altered to suit the tastes of the Syracusan dictator.29 Yet which lines, or scenes, would have been changed to suit Hieron’s “tyrannical” appetite is far from evident. Conversely, it is easy to see how Persians, with its pronounced “Greek-‘barbarian’” dichotomy, might have appealed to Hieron, who commissioned other works on the theme of the Greek wars against the Persians.30 Some modern scholars have found Persians so amenable to the style of the Sicilian court that they postulate a Sicilian premier, with the play debuting on the Athenian stage only after its success in the Greek west.31 Despite such rich fodder for controversy, it is unlikely that the surviving text conceals the key to the play’s history. Apart, moreover, from the puzzle of Aristophanes’ phantom lines, there is no reliable external evidence for any of these theories. A Sicilian premier is as possible as a first performance in Athens, and Dionysus’ perplexing claim could as readily result from as a simple misstatement or error as from a revised second (or later) staging. Embedded in these debates over the particulars of textual revision is a farther-reaching question about the uniqueness of the play’s Syracusan reperformance. Persians is the only Aeschylean play for which we have a concrete notice of performance outside of Athens.32 But again, the Life makes no 27

28

29 30 31 32

See the scholion to line 1028 of Frogs (= Aeschylus T 56a Radt). It was not impossible for 5th-century playwrights to alter the texts of their plays after a first performance: Aristophanes is said to have rewritten Clouds after its failure at the Great Dionysia of 423; for discussion see Dover (1968: lxxx–xcviii) and recently Marshall (2012). For a recent discussion of the problem see Constantinidis (2012). He examines the possibility that Aeschylus (or someone else) might have revised the play for a subsequent restaging in Athens. Most recently see Duncan (2011: 73–74), with bibliography. See Kowalzig (2008), Duncan (2011) 73, Morgan (2012) 49. On the “panhellenism” of Persians, see Taplin (2006), Rosenbloom (2011). Dover (1968: lxxx–xcviii). Bosher (2012: 101). Bosher’s claim that the necromantic themes at the heart of the play are exceptional is refuted by the evidence of Psychagogoi and Eumenides; cf. Bardel (2000) and (2005: 154–157).

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mention­of the majority of performances in Aeschylus’ lifetime. Silence can hardly be taken as positive proof that no other performances occurred outside of Athens. Despite its lacunose account of Aeschylean performance, the Life does emphasize strong connections between Aeschylus and the island of Sicily. It tells, for example, of the Sicilian premier of Aeschylus’ Women of Etna, a tragedy commissioned by Hieron in honor of his re-founding of the city of Etna.33 A still more suggestive glimpse into the reperformance of Aeschylean drama in Sicily is offered by Athenaeus. According to a speaker in his Scholars at Dinner, “it is not surprising that Aeschylus, who had lived in Sicily, used many Sicilian words” in his plays.34 Other ancient sources confirm this view. According to one scholiast, Aeschylus could be considered “a native” Sicilian in view of how much time he spent there;35 Macrobius even went so far as to call him “practically Sicilian.”36 From our modern vantage, it is difficult to determine the entire extent to which Aeschylus’ works made use of Sicilian terminology.37 But if Sicilian references (and perhaps a fortiori, Sicilianisms) in dramatic scripts are signs, as Easterling has proposed, that a playwright anticipated performances of his works on the island,38 then the horizons for thinking about reperformance during Aeschylus’ lifetime are wide. Of course, Sicilian themes and language are no substitute for positive proof, and no contemporary evidence attests to the reperformance of any of Aeschylus’ plays, not even Persians, in Sicily during the first half of the 5th century. Yet again, however, a lack of evidence does not falsify all speculations, and the possibilities for 33

34 35 36 37

38

Life of Aeschylus (= Aeschylus test. 1 Radt) §9: ἐλθὼν τοίνυν εἰς Σικελίαν Ἱέρωνος τότε τὴν Aἴτνην κτίζοντος ἐπιδείξατο τὰς Aἴτνας οἰωνιζόμενος βίον ἀγαθόν τοῖς συνοικίζουσι τὴν πόλιν. On the Aetnaeae see Poli-Palladini (2001). Athenaeus 9.402c: ὅτι δὲ Aἰσχύλoς διατρίψας ἐν Σικελίᾳ πoλλαῖς κέχρηται φωναῖς Σικελικαῖς oὐδὲν θαυμαστόν; cf. Herington (1967: 79). Scholion to line 73 of Aristophanes’ Peace. Saturnalia 5.19.17: vir utique Siculus. For a discussion of the credibility of these claims see Herington (1967) 79; see also Griffith (1978), Csapo (2010: 39–40), Duncan (2011: 71–76). Herington (1967: 78–79) submits that all of the surviving and many of the fragmentary plays (with the surprising exception of Persians) make use of Sicilian vocabulary or forms. Griffith (1978: 106–109) (whose primary aim is to dispute the idea that Aeschylus himself travelled to Sicily) casts doubt over many of the terms that Herington adduces as Sicilian; the language of the play nevertheless displays a degree of dialectal “coloring.” Willi (2008) offers a comprehensive analysis of the Sicilian dialect; see also Smith (2012) on the possibility that Aeschylus’ Sicilianisms influenced later tragedians. Easterling (1994).

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reperformance­there should not be ignored. After all, there is almost no evidence for the performance of these plays in Athens during the same period.39 As the traditional location of his death (which supposedly came about when he was struck on the head by a falling tortoise shell40), Sicily is a fitting point of departure for an exploration of the poet’s afterlife.41 Yet before following Aeschylus into the world of the dead, it is worth wondering just how unique a location Sicily represents. If there were many tragedies, like Persians, that enjoyed success in both east and west – and so confirmed Aeschylus’ status as a poet not only of Athens, but of the Greek world – is it not then likely that reperformances occurred in places other than Sicily? Little in the historical record links the playwright with other performance locales, though there is reason to believe that Aeschylus’ plays were also reperformed in theaters other than Athens’ Theater of Dionysus during his lifetime. The most powerful argument in favor of the spread of Attic tragedy throughout the Greek Mediterranean in the first half of the 5th century is the archaeological record.42 By the end of the 5th century, theaters had been built not only in Syracuse, but in Metapontum and Elea in South Italy, as well as at Argos, Dion, and possibly Chaeronea in Boeotia.43 The construction of permanent theater buildings was a costly endeavor and would likely only be undertaken after the practice of dramatic performance had been established for some time.44 Cities such as these may have enjoyed the reperformance of successful plays from the Athenian stage during Aeschylus’ lifetime. Within Attica itself, a handful of deme-theaters (at the published sites of Thorikos, Ikarion and Piraeus) can be dated to the mid-late decades of the 5th century.45 These theaters may well have served as venues for the reperformance of plays that had been successful at the Great Dionysia, as part of the celebrations of the (little understood) Rural Dionysia held in the demes during the winter.46 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Far more evidence exists for the 4th century. See below for the literary evidence from Athens, but also esp. Taplin (2007) on the importance of vase painting as evidence for the spread and reperformance of Athenian tragedy in South Italy and Sicily during the 4th century. His Ch. 2 addresses “vases that may be related to Aeschylus” (the present chapter focuses on the 4th-century evidence from Athens). Life of Aeschylus (= Aeschylus test. 1 Radt) §10. Aeschylus was not the only Attic tragedian to find success in Sicily: see Csapo (2010: 40). For summary accounts of this diffusion (and other evidence for it) see esp. Taplin (1999) and Csapo (2010: 89–103). Csapo (2010: 99), with bibliography at 114. Taplin (2012: 228–229). On deme theaters in the classical period see especially Paga (2010) and Goette (2014). For a collection of evidence relating to the Rural Dionysia see Pickard-Cambridge (1988: 42–101); see also the recent discussions of Csapo (2010: 89–95), on the importance of the

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Herodotus’ anecdote concerning the poor reception of Phrynichus’ Sack of Miletus offers further basis for speculating about reperformance in Attica. The play, which dramatized the sufferings of Athenian allies (the Ionian Milesians) soon after their defeat by the Persians in 494, supposedly provoked tears and outrage in its Athenian audience. As a result Phrynichus was fined and a ban was placed on any future performance of the play.47 An explicit prohibition of this sort would only be appropriate if there was some expectation that a play could be reperformed in Attica following a successful premier in the city.48 The hints left in these scattered sources suggest that Aeschylus’ plays were being reperformed regularly and in a wide variety of venues throughout the poet’s career. Without a significant increase in the evidence currently available the first phase of Aeschylean reperformance, the one which the playwright himself oversaw, will remain in the shadowy realm of reasoned speculation. A somewhat clearer picture can only be found by shifting sights to the later 5th century – and by turning our gaze to the world of the dead. 2.3

From the Death of Aeschylus to the End of the 5th Century

Aristophanes’ Frogs is the most important witness to Aeschylean reception in late 5th century Athens. This is hardly to say that the text provides a transparent window onto the city’s reperformance culture: its representation of the tragedians is clouded by layers of comic discourse; its characters cannot be assumed to espouse popular views about tragedy and the tragedians; and the play contains no clear reference to an actual tragic revival. Nevertheless, the entire contest (agōn) of Frogs rests on a principle of reperformance. Throughout the scene both “Aeschylus” and “Euripides” informally perform snippets of their own and each other’s works before a dramatic judge, the god of theater himself. This contest is all the more remarkable for the half century that separated the premier of Frogs from Aeschylus’ death. Euripides’ own death in 406 had likely provided much of the impetus for the comedy, but Aristophanes’ choice to pit Euripides against the far longer-dead Aeschylus attests both to Aeschylus’ endurance in the city’s consciousness and to the potency of

47 48

demes to the diffusion of Athenian drama and Wilson (2010), on the financing of deme festivals. See too below on Rural Dionysia and Aristophanes’ Acharnians. Herodotus 6.21.13-14: καὶ ἐπέταξαν μηκέτι μηδένα χρᾶσθαι τούτῳ τῷ δράματι. It is also possible the Herodotus’ account was anachronistic, and filtered through the theatrical practices of the latter half of the 5th century.

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his voice as one that could still speak to – and advise – Athens from beyond the grave. Within the play’s contest scene, Euripides assumes the role of antagonist, who from the outset forces Aeschylus into a defensive position. When Euripides first attempts to lay hands on Aeschylus’ “Chair” (θρόνoς) in tragedy, Dionysus warns the newly-dead tragedian to check himself, or risk an enraged Aeschylus bashing in his skull. As the contest proceeds Euripides begins each round by attacking outdated aspects of Aeschylus’ dramatic style: his use of long silences and abstruse vocabulary; the illogicality and redundancy of his prologues; and the repetitive patterns of his lyrics. Like Hesiod in the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, the Euripides of Frogs is cast as challenger of the defending champion. This configuration of the poetic rivalry reflects the generational gap between the two tragedians. Aeschylus had decades to consolidate his claim to the Underworld’s tragic throne before Euripides’ recent arrival in Hades. And yet Aristophanes’ representation of Euripides as aggressor in the contest has a mandate in more than biographical chronology. On the one hand, Aeschylus and Euripides come to stand in Frogs as ciphers for, respectively, “old” and “new” – in terms of values, politics, and poetry.49 But this tension was not merely an invention of the comic poet. Euripides’ own tragic compositions display a similar desire to challenge his predecessor on points of dramaturgy, plot, and poetics. To be sure, these challenges are issued in sophisticated and subtle fashion, as classical tragedy did not admit of an overt “poetics of competition” between playwrights. Tragedy, for example, had no formal parabasis through which the tragedian might construct a poetic persona and set himself in opposition to his rivals.50 Nor did the tragedians explicitly construct for themselves what Biles has termed “stage biographies,” as a part of their agonistic discourses.51 Nevertheless, a palpable competitive streak runs through Euripides’ own poetry, and Aeschylus, though already dead for decades when Euripides’ career began to flourish, is regularly the target of that competition. Aristophanes, in figuring the relationship between Aeschylus and Euripides as he does, throws the far more delicate discourses of tragic rivalry into relief. 49

50 51

For account of the contest see the summary of Dover (1993: 10–37) and the more recent studies of Hunter (2009), Ch. 1, to which Halliwell (2011) Ch. 3 offers an extended response. See also now Griffith (2013), Chs. 3 and 4. Though see the brief and curious remark of the grammarian Pollux (Onomasticon 4.111) who identifies exceptional cases of tragedies that did include parabaseis. Biles (2002) develops this concept. A revised version of the article appears as Ch. 4 in Biles (2011).

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In the most famous example of Euripides’ dialogue with Aeschylus, the poetics appear to be overtly agonistic. A passage of Euripides’ Electra (ca. 422–16 bc?52) responds directly and critically to the recognition scene of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, from the Oresteia trilogy of 458 bc. In both plays Orestes’ footsteps and a lock of his hair are markers of the exile’s return. In Libation Bearers Electra accepts the footprint and hair, identical to her own, as proof of Orestes’ homecoming. Euripides’ heroine, however, dismisses the plausibility of either as recognition tokens. Orestes’ hair, she reasons, would hardly match hers, nor could the imprint of their feet be the same: Orestes is a man and Electra is a woman.53 This shrewder Electra relies on the sure marker of identity (τεκμήριoν), Orestes’ childhood scar.54 Electra’s reasoned rejection of the tokens offers a pointed criticism of Aeschylus’ work, a poetic challenge by the younger playwright.55 Euripides also engages in poetic re-writing of Aeschylus on a larger scale: Aeschylus’ Oresteia loomed large for the later playwright, and single Euripidean plays (such as Iphigenia in Tauris and Orestes) seem to tackle the whole of the trilogy.56 Aristophanes relied on a notion of reperformance when he brought the dead poets onstage, but Euripides also, in a sense, restaged Aeschylus’ work when he embedded it in the bones of his own plays. Passages of Euripidean tragedy thus contain precedents for the competitive poetics that 52 Finglass (2007: 1–4). 53 Euripides, Electra 520–537; cf. Aeschylus, Libation Bearers 164–211. 54 Euripides, Electra 533–535. For discussions of the scar and the relationship between this recognition scene and that of Odyssey 19 see Goff (1991) and Tarkow (1981). 55 Jouanna (1997), Zeitlin (2012). See also e.g., the case of Euripides’ Phoenissae: the Hypothesis ii Dindorf to Phoenician Women claims that its plot came from Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes “except concerning Jocasta” (ἡ μυθοποιία κεῖται παρ’ Aἰσχύλῳ ἐν Ἑπτὰ ἐπὶ Θήβας πλὴν τῆς Ἰoκάστης: lines 3–4); see too the scholiast’s remark on Phoenician Women 752, where Euripides might appear to be criticizing the long messenger speech (at lines 422–652) in Aeschylus’ Seven: see Mastronarde (1994) ad Euripides, Phoenician Women 751–2 and now Torrance (2013: 94–102), on how Euripides rewrites the ekphrasis of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes in Phoenician Women. Aristophanes of Byzantium’s hypothesis to the Bacchae identifies the source of that play’s mythopoieia as Aeschylus’ Pentheus. This sort of dialogue between tragedians had earlier roots: the hypothesis to Aeschylus’ Persians claims that Persians was “modeled upon” (παραπεποιῆσθαι) Phrynichus’ own Phoenician Women; for a recent discussion see Munteanu (2012: 153–155). 56 See Zeitlin (2005) and Hall (1993b) respectively. See also Torrance (2011: 177–178) on Euripides’ engagement with the Oresteia (she discusses the case of Iphigenia in Tauris at 192–199); see further Torrance (2013) Ch. 1, “Euripides and the Oresteia” with 45–61 on Euripides’ Orestes. Easterling (2005: 30–33) treats the echoes of the language of Agamemnon in later 5th-century tragedy.

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Aristophanes went on to stage and caricature so elaborately in the Frogs of 405. With the death of Euripides, an opportunity arose for Aristophanes to imagine how Aeschylus might have responded to the younger poet’s competitive sallies. The lifespans of the two tragedians likely never allowed them to vie directly at the Great Dionysia, but Hades presented the perfect setting for Euripides at last to challenge his great predecessor directly – and for Aeschylus to issue a response. We can only speculate as to the variety of reactions that audience members might have had to Euripides’ shows of rivalry with his deceased predecessor, whether in his poetry or in propria persona in Frogs. By the premier of Euripides’ Electra, roughly forty years had passed since the Oresteia made its debut at the Great Dionysia in 458 bc. By what means were the earlier plays kept alive in the minds of Euripides’ spectators? Were allusions to Aeschylean poetry recognizable to more than the keenest students of Athens’ tragic tradition? Revermann has used the recognition scene of Euripides’ Electra and its engagement with Libation Bearers to frame a related question concerning the “competence” of 5th-century audiences as spectators and interpreters of tragic drama.57 He emphasizes that the experience of choral participation, shared by a great number of Athenian male citizens, would have meant that many spectators were also highly competent consumers of dramatic (and dithyrambic) poetry and performance. Some older audience members at the premier of Electra may have sung and danced in the original Oresteia production, thereby providing a physical, embodied link between performances of the two plays. Such considerations of the practicalities of Athenian theatrical life also serve as a reminder that tragedy had a material history. One hint as to how the physical artifacts of tragedy might have survived is preserved in Aristophanes’ Acharnians: in that comedy, Dicaeopolis visits Euripides at his home, where he is shown the wardrobe that contains the props and costumes from Euripides’ past productions.58 While the Realien of drama were preserved in the private storerooms and libraries of Athens and its dramatic families, tragedy’s songs and lyrics were engraved on the tablets of many citizens’ minds.59 Extracts of tragedy were 57

Revermann (2006: 100–101). Some scholars have suggested that the Euripidean scene is an interpolation. For a discussion of the criticisms and defence of its authenticity see Davies (1998). 58 Aristophanes, Acharnians 394–489. 59 On the “song culture” of the period, see Herington (1985), Bacon (1994–1995), Kurke (2000: 59).

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sung and recited in informal contexts, at symposia and amidst the unremarkable moments of everyday life.60 Towards the end of Aristophanes’ Clouds, Strepsiades recounts how he came to blows with his son Pheidippides over a request for poetry. Strepsiades describes how, after dinner, he had asked his son to take up the lyre and sing a song (μέλoς) of Simonides. When Pheidippides responded that this was too old-fashioned for his tastes, Strepsiades offered an alternative: ἔπειτα δ’ ἐκέλευσ’ αὐτὸν ἀλλὰ μυρρίνην λαβόντα τῶν Aἰσχύλου λέξαι τί μοι · κᾆθ’ οὗτος εὐθὺς εἶπεν· “ἐγὼ γὰρ Aἰσχύλον νομίζω πρῶτον ἐν ποιηταῖς – ψόφου πλέων, ἀξύστατον, στόμφακα, κρημνοποιόν.” κἀνταῦθα πῶς οἴεσθέ μου τὴν καρδίαν ὀρεχθεῖν; ὅμως δὲ τὸν θυμὸν δακὼν ἔφην·“σὺ δ’ ἀλλὰ τούτων λέξον τι τῶν νεωτέρων, ἅττ’ ἐστὶ τὰ σοφὰ ταῦτα.” ὁ δ’ εὐθὺς ᾖσ’ Eὐριπίδου ῥῆσίν τιν,’ ὡς ἐκίνει ἁδελφός, ὦλεξίκακε, τὴν ὁμομητρίαν ἀδελφήν.61

(1365)

(1370)

Then I told him to take a myrtle wreath and recite some Aeschylus for me. And he responded at once: “I regard Aeschylus first among poets – for being full of noise, chaotic, bombastic and craggy.” Can you imagine how my heart palpitated at that? All the same I restrained myself and said: “then recite something from the newer poets, whatever these clever things are.” And he no sooner recited some speech of Euripides, about how a brother was screwing – heaven forbid! – his very own sister. This passage of Clouds dramatizes private reperformance and a conflict of tastes, and marks another instance in which a dead Aeschylus enters into competition with a still-living Euripides. Here reperformance should be understood in an expansive sense of the term: at stake in these lines is not a fully staged revival, but rather the choice of a single poetic passage.62 Other comedies of Aristophanes also contain snapshots of informal recitations of tragic

60

Csapo (2010: 171–172) and Biles (2006–2007: 24 n.64) collect evidence for the performance of extracts from drama (tragedy and comedy) at symposia in the 5th and 4th centuries bc. 61 Aristophanes, Clouds 1364–72. 62 For discussions of the passage see esp. Nagy (1990) 107–110 and Dover (1968) ad loc.

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poetry. In Wasps Philocleon explains the benefits of serving on juries in Athens with reference to a kind of reperformance: if a case involves Oeagrus (a famous tragic actor), the jury can detain him until he has recited the finest speech from (Aeschylus’?) Niobe.63 Despite tantalizing testimonia such as these, no lines of Aristophanic comedy, or of Old Comedy as a fragmentary whole, presuppose formal, theatrical reperformance of an entire Greek tragedy at the Great Dionysia. Although Athenians may have enjoyed revivals of complete plays in the 5th century, the category of old tragedy (παλαιὸν δρᾶμα) was not introduced to the Great Dionysia until the spring of 386 (see below). Nevertheless, one “red herring” passage in Aristophanes led even ancient scholars to suppose that Athenian law provided for reperformances of Aeschylean tragedy already in the 5th century. This assumption remains largely entrenched in modern studies of the Greek theater, despite the complete lack of reliable testimony or corroboration. The passage occurs at the beginning of Aristophanes’ Acharnians. Dicaeopolis, the main character, tells in his prologue of the “tragic suffering” that he experienced when, expecting to see a play by Aeschylus, the herald instead pronounced: “lead out your chorus, Theognis!”64 The Theognis in question is likely the tragic playwright who competed against Nicomachus and Euripides at the end of the 5th century.65 If so, it is doubtful that Theognis himself ever faced off against Aeschylus in a tragic competition. Dicaeopolis must have been expecting to see a revival of a piece by Aeschylus. The setting of Dicaeopolis’ disappointment could not, however, have been the Great Dionysia: the custom of the proagon, at which playwrights probably announced their titles before the competitions began, should have prevented confusion.66 63

The particular Niobe play is not specified (Sophocles, too, wrote one) but Aeschylus’ version enjoyed the hardiest afterlife: see Aeschylus test. 154a-167b Radt. For a list of Aeschylean plays to which Aristophanic comedy refers see Aeschylus test. Gm Radt. Radt gives this section the heading of Fabulae post mortem denuo doctae, but the mention of these tragedies by characters of Aristophanes is hardly tantamount to evidence for full reperformance. 64 Aristophanes, Acharnians 9–11. For discussion of this passage and its implications for Aeschylean reperformance see Biles (2006–2007: 16–22), with bibliography. 65 Relative dates can be established by the Suda ν 397, and the epigraphical evidence that Nicomachus lived well into the 4th century (seg xxvi 203 col. ii line 3); see Millis and Olson (2012: 121). A further reference to Theognis at Acharnians 138 also seems to situate Theognis as a contemporary poet. See the discussion in Biles (2006–2007: 17–21) of the temporal framework of Dicaeopolis’ complaint: Aeschylus here is associated with “pleasures belonging to an unobtainable past” (20). 66 See in particular Sommerstein (2010: 20–25).

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Five different ancient sources, ranging from Greek scholia to Quintilian, report that Aeschylus’ plays were so beloved by the Athenians that after his death the demos issued a decree that anyone who wanted to stage a revival of one of his plays would be granted a chorus for the Great Dionysia. The most expansive account of that decree is preserved in the Life of Aeschylus: Ἀθηναῖοι δὲ τοσοῦτον ἠγάπησαν Aἰσχύλον ὡς ψηφίσασθαι μετὰ θάνατον αὐτοῦ τὸν βoυλόμενον διδάσκειν τὰ Aἰσχύλου χορὸν λαμβάνειν.67 The Athenians loved Aeschylus so much that after his death they voted that whoever wanted to direct (διδάσκειν) plays by Aeschylus would receive a chorus. Biles, however, has recently and convincingly demonstrated not only that all of the sources for the decree ultimately derive from the notice of a single commentator, but also that this commentator inferred the story from a mistaken interpretation of the Acharnians passage discussed above (one of the sources is a scholion to line 10 of that comedy).68 What, then, was the context in which Dicaeopolis found himself so sorely disappointed, if not the Great Dionysia? One possibility may be the Lenaea festival, or he may have been referring to a festival in one of the Attic demes.69 In Acharnians Dicaeopolis is portrayed as fond of the Rural Dionysia that were celebrated outside the city, and after concluding his own separate peace with Sparta he holds a small Rural Dionysia of his own.70 Dicaeopolis’ woeful day in the theater should therefore most probably be understood as having occurred at a deme celebration.71 Like this passage of Acharnians, the entire contest of Frogs also seems to presuppose some sort of contemporary dramatic reperformances of Aeschylus’ work, again most likely in (at least) the demes. 67 68 69

Life of Aeschylus (= Aeschylus test. 1 Radt) §12. Biles (2006–2007: 32–33). As Csapo (2010) 103 notes, “we have by c. 440 bc certain evidence for five regular festivals where dramatic performances took place, and certain to possible evidence for fourteen. […] There is every reason to believe that these numbers represent only the view of the ‘tip of the iceberg’ permitted by the random and fortuitous survival of the evidence.” 70 Aristophanes, Acharnians 250: τὰ κατ’ ἀγροὺς Διονύσια. See Biles (2006–2007: 21–22) for discussion of the Rural Dionysia as represented in this play. 71 As Wilson (2000: 21) reminds us, “We should imagine the deme Dionysia, with their more flexible patterns of performance, as an important context for an early date of reperformance.” Cf. Biles (2006–2007: 5–6 and 21, with n.56). See also Csapo (2010: 89–95) for possible epigraphical evidence of reperformances of Sophocles and Euripides in the demes.

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At the outset of that scene, “Aeschylus” hesitates to face “Euripides” because, Aeschylus­claims, such a contest would be unfairly skewed against him. When Dionysus asks why, he responds: ὅτι ἡ ποίησις οὐχὶ συντέθνηκέ μοι, τούτῳ δὲ συντέθνηκεν, ὥσθ’ ἕξει λέγειν.72 Because my poetry did not die with me, but his died with him, so he will be able to recite it. In a moment of trademark comic literal-mindedness, here “Aeschylus” argues that because his own plays are still being performed in the world above, he does not have his scripts to hand in Hades.73 Adopting the thinking of the comic Aeschylus, one might then look to those dramatic scripts that he left behind, most likely in the possession of his children, who carried on the family business.74 One way in which the next generation kept their father’s work alive was by producing plays which Aeschylus had left uncompleted or un-staged at the time of his death. The Life claims that Aeschylus won a number of victories after he died,75 and the Suda reports that his son, Euphorion, was victorious with four plays that his father was unable to debut while alive.76 No other evidence serves to substantiate this account, but parallel stories about other tragedians suggest that this may have been the case.77 Goaded by the intriguing notice of the Suda, some scholars have set out to determine which plays might have been produced in this posthumous fashion. Despite the lack of evidence, one candidate for a posthumously-produced play is now widely accepted, namely Prometheus Bound. In order to understand why Prometheus Bound has been singled out on these grounds from the other undated plays in the Aeschylean corpus, it is first necessary to untangle a bit of modern scholarship. Prometheus Bound, once praised as Aeschylus’ greatest play, is no longer viewed by the majority 72 Aristophanes, Frogs 868–869. 73 See Dover (1993), ad loc.: “The comic idea that [Aeschylus] will not be able to quote from [his plays] in the Underworld because he has left them on earth is not exploited further, understandably.” 74 Sutton (1987); Griffith (1977: 347 n.55). 75 Life of Aeschylus (= Aeschylus test. 1 Radt) §13. 76 Suda ε 3800: ὃς καὶ τοῖς Aἰσχύλου τοῦ πατρός, οἷς μήπω ἦν ἐπιδειξάμενος, τετράκις ἐνίκησεν. 77 West (1990: 68–69).

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of classical scholars as the poet’s own work. The campaign to exclude the tragedy from the genuine corpus began in the mid-nineteenth century, as German scholars bristled at (what they saw as) the play’s unflattering portrayal of Zeus. For more than a century the debate continued, but for the moment it has largely been quelled by Griffith’s presentation of overwhelming evidence (based primarily on stylistic analysis) that Prometheus Bound differs from the other works attributed to Aeschylus.78 Nevertheless, and in contrast with many other persistent textual quandaries, modern suspicions about Prometheus Bound have no ancient endorsement. On the contrary, ancient sources from the late 5th century onwards are unanimous in accepting the play as authentic.79 If the current general consensus that Prometheus Bound is spurious is indeed correct, then how did the play earn Aeschylean attribution at so early a date? One way that scholars have accounted for the problem of the play’s apparent stylistic anomalies is to assign Prometheus Bound to the roster of Aeschylean plays that were produced posthumously by Euphorion. In this case, Euphorion may have done more than ensure that his father’s play reached the stage: it is conceivable that he was the true author (or at least heavy reviser) of the work, and merely submitted it to the archon under his father’s name (perhaps, West suggested, in the hope of winning greater favor from the judges).80 If this suggestion is correct, Aeschylus would not only have been winning dramatic victories from beyond the grave; he would also, in a sense, have been writing new plays from beyond it. Barring the appearance of new evidence, it is impossible to put the hypothesis to the test. So little solid evidence exists for theatrical reperformance in this period that even the most plausible of claims will suffer from uncertainty. Perhaps for this reason, the fertile possibilities for speculation about reperformance in the late 5th century have attracted those seeking solutions to other perennial textual problems. The complex textual history of Persians, discussed above, has also been attributed to interventions in the later 5th century. Rather than trace a divergent textual tradition back to the 470s, some critics, responding in large part to the modern perception that the play lacks any suspenseful 78

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Griffith (1977). He provides a thorough history of the ascription. The most important defense of the play’s authenticity before Griffith is Herington (1970). Since the publication of Griffith’s stylistic analysis, few counter-arguments have been put forth: Hubbard (1991), also Sullivan (1997). Cratinus alludes to our Prometheus Bound in his Ploutoi, Bakola (2010: 122–134); Aristophanes quotes from our extant text at Peace 319–320 and parodies the play passim in the Knights. See Olson (2003) ad Aristophanes, Peace 319–320 and West (1990: 65). West (1990) 67–72 and (2000). As noted by Griffith (1977: 322 n.127), this suggestion was first made with reference only to the choral lyrics.

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dramatic action, have investigated the possibility that Aristophanes’ Dionysus based his account of the play on a more recent revival. As part of that revival, an eager didaskalos may have inserted some additional lines rejoicing in the Persian defeat – lines designed to rouse the spirit of an Athenian audience as hopes of victory against Sparta were dissolving. But again, there is little way to determine the historical truth.81 A similar textual debate concerns the end of Seven against Thebes. As with Prometheus Bound, in antiquity no part of Seven against Thebes was doubted to be authentically Aeschylean. Many scholars now rightly question the genuineness of the pay’s final scene, which they suspect to have been composed after Aeschylus’ death.82 Modern critics’ main concern is that the extended lament of Antigone, who has not previously appeared onstage,83 seems not to conclude this play (the last of the trilogy) so much as to introduce a new plot sequence: the problem of the burial of Polyneices.84 While it is by no means universally accepted that this ending is spurious,85 those who view the play’s final lines as interpolation generally appeal to the close parallels between the sisters’ concerns and the plot of Sophocles’ successful (and certainly reperformed) Antigone; the end of the Seven against Thebes seems to presuppose a world of Theban myth which already knew of the innovation introduced by Sophocles’ Antigone.86 Could an aspiring didaskalos 81 82 83

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Constantinidis (2012), with bibliography. Good overviews can be found in Lloyd-Jones (1959: 80–81) and Hutchinson (1985: 209–211) (ad 1005–78). The sisters are mentioned in the play only at lines 861–5, where they are introduced onto the stage. But if lines 1005–78 are spurious, then those lines should also be considered corrupt. Indeed, many editors would bracket the text until 874; for a fuller discussion, see Hutchinson (1985: 190–191). The arguments are set out by Dawe (1967) and (1978). Dawe’s linguistic arguments are challenged by Barrett (2007: 322–50), who nevertheless concurs that the final scene did not appear in the original play. There are nearly as many opinions as there are critics. Lloyd-Jones (1959) claimed the scene to be entirely authentic (though he chose not to reprint the article in his collected papers), followed by Flintoff (1980) in which the lines are printed without brackets by Murray (1937); Brown (1976) retains the final scene, but rejects lines 1026–1053 (on which he blames the whole confusion) as spurious. Judet de la Combe (2011) takes an odd middle ground, regarding the lines as spurious but nevertheless organic to the drama. Official scripts of Attic tragedy were supposedly collected in the 330s; thus there is a narrow historical window in which variants attested by the Alexandrians must have occurred. For the view that the passage dates to the late 5th century, see Judet de la Combe (2011). Others claim the lines date no earlier than the early 4th century; so Hutchinson (1985: 211) (with bibliography), who also claims that the final scene must date to after

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have altered Aeschylus’ play so as to make it fit more seamlessly with that of Sophocles? And what venue or occasion would have hosted such a revival? Would the play have been performed as a stand-alone production, or might it have been combined with plays from outside its original trilogy (perhaps as an introduction to Sophocles’ Antigone, and as part of a cycle of “greatest hits” of Thebes)?87 Would the initial audiences of a revised Seven against Thebes have been aware that the script had been altered? Was such an adaptation accepted as part and parcel of the living nature of myth, a sign of how fluid dramatic authorship remained even as individual playwrights were lionized and lampooned on the comic stage?88 All of these hypotheses are good to think with yet, ultimately cannot be tested. As with so many other similar proposals, they are a symptom and reminder of how frustratingly little is known for sure about early dramatic reperformance in Greece. 2.4

A Disappearing Afterlife: The Fourth Century

The evidence for Aeschylus’ Athenian afterlife becomes even thinner in the decades after the production of Frogs, and the continued trajectory of this tendency into the modern era is discussed elsewhere in this volume by Sarah Ferrario Brown (“Aeschylus and Western Opera”). Aristophanes’ play shows the acme of Aeschylus’ posthumous authority. His shade rules the Underworld from his tragic throne, while his plays continue to enjoy successes in the world above. Afterwards, the evidence for Aeschylean reception in Athens disappears almost entirely underground for centuries, particularly in comparison with the evidence for the afterlives of Sophocles and Euripides. This is all the more surprising given that the 4th century saw a most vibrant partnership between old and new tragedy in Athens. The inscribed victory records of the Great Dionysia (the Fasti) record that tragic actors first began exhibiting palaion drama, “old

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Euripides’ Phoenissae. The recent claims of Lech (2008) for a first revival of the Septem between 411 and 405 bc are unconvincing. On reperformance of Antigone cf. Demosthenes, On the False Embassy 246–247. Hutchinson (1985) ad 1005–1078. Similarities with Euripides Phoenissae are also cited, though it is not clear which way the allusive relationship runs; see above and Lamari (2009). A modern comparison might be John Barton’s 1963 Wars of the Roses cycle, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s entire first historical tetralogy (Henry vi Parts 1–3 and Richard iii). Barton consolidated the four plays into a single trilogy and wrote nearly 1500 new lines in an attempt to tie the plays together. The practice of passing off one’s own verse as the work of a greater predecessor is well established in archaic Greece, see e.g., Ford (1985), Nagy (1996: 17–26, 215–225).

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drama,” at the festival in 386 bc.89 For the rest of the century, spectators at the Great Dionysia could expect to take in revivals of older tragedies as part of programs that still assigned a high status to new dramatic premiers.90 And yet comparatively limited testimonia attests to Aeschylus’ circulation in this period.91 As Scodel has argued, it is likely that “We can safely assume that the dominance of Euripides and to a lesser extent Sophocles in our sources reflects theatrical reality.”92 On the whole, fewer actors’ interpolations seem to have been incorporated into the surviving works of Aeschylus than is the case for the plays of Sophocles and Euripides: this too may suggest that Aeschylus was less often reperformed in the 4th century.93 How, then, can we begin to reconcile the status of Aeschylus as one of Athens’ great tragedians with this comparative silence? Aeschylus is most noticeably absent from the 4th-century corpora of oratory and comic fragments, two genres that served as important sites for moments (however brief) of informal tragic reperformance. The first known direct quotation of tragedy in the courtroom comes from Aeschines’ speech Against Timarchus (346 bc), in which Aeschines calls lines of Homer and Euripides as witnesses in his attack on Timarchus.94 Here one of Aeschines’ citations consists in lines from Euripides’ Phoenix, a choice of passage which Demosthenes would later critique in his On the False Embassy (343 bc). Demosthenes there suggests that Aeschines would have done better to recite and reflect on lines from Sophocles’ Antigone.95 The most extensive single tragic citation occurs in 89

ig II2 2318.1009–11 Millis-Olson. Productions of old drama at the Great Dionysia were noncompetitive until the 3rd century; on the date when such contests were introduced see Summa (2008). 90 See, for example, the evidence of the didascalic inscription ig II2 2320, which provides information about the plays at the Great Dionysia between 341 and 339 bc. The year 340 in particular saw two notable productions: a revival of Euripides’ Orestes, and Astydamas’ victory with a new slate that included his Parthenopaeus – on account of which the demos supposedly awarded him a statue: see Astydamas test. 2a-8b Snell and Goette (1999). 91 E.g., Scodel (2007: 130–133); Nervegna (2014). 92 Scodel (2007: 131). 93 We are grateful to Martin West for pointing this out to us. On actors’ interpolations see esp. Page (1934: 30–32) on Seven Against Thebes and 80–85 on other interpolations into Aeschylean plays; cf. also West (1990) passim. The external evidence for such interpolations is called into question by Hamilton (1974). 94 Aeschines, Against Timarchus 142–53; on Aeschines’ use of poetic quotations see Ford (1999: 250–255). 95 Aeschines, Against Timarchus 152 (Euripides fr. 812 Kannicht) and Demosthenes, On the False Embassy 246–247 (Sophocles, Antigone 175–190), respectively.

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Lycurgus’ speech Against Leocrates from 330.96 Within a protracted section of poetic quotations, each of which illustrates the virtue of defending and fighting for one’s homeland, Lycurgus recites an entire monologue from Euripides’ lost Erechtheus. In this speech Euripides thus becomes largely and surprisingly assimilated to the character of “Aeschylus” from Frogs, where Aeschylus had boasted that his tragedies, unlike those of Euripides, were “full of Ares.”97 His plays, he claims, had inspired Athenian citizens to competitive emulation of the great warriors that they depicted.98 In a radical revision of the dichotomies between Euripides and Aeschylus that had been established by Aristophanes, Lycurgus’ Euripides is the tragedian who most resembles Homer and Tyrtaeus for his poetry’s martial quality.99 The distribution is similar in the case of 4th-century comedy, fragments of which preserve some allusions to Sophocles, a number to Euripides, and very few to Aeschylus.100 In a fragment of Anaxilas’ roughly mid-4th century Cooks, one character declares “I’d much rather roast little fish than verses of Aeschylus.”101 In Menander’s Shield (from the late 4th or early 3rd century) the character Daos spews forth a torrent of tragic quotations, but is cut off just after he has started to quote from Aeschylus’ Niobe.102 He begins to say something about Aeschylus himself (“Aeschylus, the [poet of] lofty [words?]…”), when his interlocutor Smicrines silences him with the question: “Are you gnomologizing, you horrible wretch?”103 Direct allusion was not the only route by which later productions could call Aeschylean drama to mind: in a scene from Timocles’ 4th-century 96 Lycurgus, Against Leocrates 100–110. The three long quotations in this section are Euripides’ Erechtheus fr. 360 Kannicht (at 100), Homer, Iliad 15.494-99 (at 103) and Tyrtaeus 10 West (at 108). 97 Aristophanes, Frogs 1021. 98 Ibid., 1039–1042. 99 “Aeschylus” implies that the effects of his poetry are like those of “the divine Homer” at Frogs 1034–36. 100 On these see Hanink (2014) Ch. 5, Cusset (2003), and Slater (1985). Play titles such as Seven Against Thebes (Alexis fr. 83 Kassel-Austin and Amphis fr. 16 Kassel-Austin) may point to mythological comedies that spoofed Aeschylus’ play in particular, but as Kassel-Austin note ad Alexis fr. 83, the title was common (cf. e.g., the title Athamas, which is attested for Aeschylus, Sophocles, Xenocles, Astydamas, Ennius, and the comic playwrights Amphis and Antiphanes). 101 Anaxilas, Cooks fr. 19.1-2 Kassel-Austin (from Athenaeus 3.95a-b): τῶν Aἰσχύλου πολὺ μᾶλλον εἶναι μοι δοκεῖ | ἰχθύδ΄ ὀπτᾶν. 102 Aeschylus fr. 154a15-17 Radt. 103 Menander, Shield 414. Daos’ interrupted line is “Aἰσχὐλος ὁ σεμνά–.”

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Orestautokleides, the pederast Autokleides is depicted in a tableau that gestures to the first episode of Eumenides: Autokleides is surrounded by sleeping “Furies” (in this case, likely prostitutes).104 Similarly, the opening scene of Menander’s Perikeiromene, which featured the silent, solitary, and veiled character of Glycera onstage, may have displayed a degree of “inter-visuality” (the term used by Petrides),105 with the scene from Aeschylus’ Niobe – a scene which “Euripides” derides in Frogs.106 In both cases, the scenes must have presupposed audience familiarity with Aeschylean staging. Nevertheless, both comic fragments which explicitly allude to Aeschylus (those of Anaxilas and Menander) offer a kind of negative evidence for his reperformance: Anaxilas’ character expresses a preference for fish over Aeschylus, just as Aristophanes’ Pheidippides had rated Aeschylus below Euripides. Menander’s Daos, on the other hand, is cut off before he can say his piece about Aeschylus.107 This is not to conclude that comedy made a regular habit of raising the name of Aeschylus only to dismiss it. Yet the nature of these few sources, combined with Aeschylus’ absence from surviving oratory, raise the question of what happened to Aeschylus’ plays in the 4th century, and why these years give so little notice of an Aeschylean afterlife. Already in Aristophanes’ Frogs, three tragedians – Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles – came to stand for the pinnacles of Athens’ tragic tradition. As Dionysus saw it, the recent death of Sophocles (the last of the three to die) had rendered the future of that tradition dangerously uncertain. In the third quarter of the 4th century, this same tragic triad is affirmed in the form of the so-called “Lycurgan law.” The law, attributed to the Athenian statesman Lycurgus, dictated that “that bronze statues of the poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides be erected and that their tragedies be written down and conserved publicly…”108 Heracleides of Pontus’ composition of a work “On the Three 104 Timocles fr. 27–8 Kassel-Austin; see Nervegna (2014) who also discusses further evidence for ancient awareness (if not first-hand knowledge) of Aeschylean plays in performance. This scene of Eumenides may be the same as that which is depicted on two South Italic vases from the early to mid-4th century: an Apulian bell-krater from the 360s (Saint Petersburg State Hermitage Museum 349) and a kalyx-krater from the 350s (Boston mfa 1976.144): see Taplin (2007: 64–66) and Giuliani (2001). 105 Petrides (2010). 106 At lines 911–20. 107 Whereas both Dicaeopolis and Pheidippides were upset at being denied a form of Aeschylean reperformance, here the conceit is inverted: Smicrines himself is the one to interrupt Daos before he can “perform” his Aeschylean citation. 108 [Plutarch] Lives of the Ten Orators 841f. This text raises a number of questions about the conditions of (re)performance in this part of the 4th century; for more expansive discussions­

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Tragedians” sometime in the 4th century would also seem to confirm the fixity of the Aristophanic (and Lycurgan) canon.109 Yet Athens’ tragic heritage was not always necessarily understood in terms of a trifecta. For much of the 4th century, the Aeschylean thread essentially vanishes from the corpora of indirect testimony to the reception and reperformance of 5th-century tragedies in Athens. Inscriptional evidence confirms Euripidean revivals in roughly Lycurgus’ own era,110 and Demosthenes refers to performances of Euripides’ Cresphontes and Hecuba, as well as of Sophocles’ Antigone and Oenomaus.111 No contemporary source, however, gives any explicit notice of an Aeschylean reperformance. What is more, Aeschylus’ name is noticeably absent from a few scattered references to 4th-century discussions of Sophocles and Euripides. The historian and tyrant Duris of Samos, born in the mid-4th century, is credited with a work not “On the Three Tragedians” but rather “On Euripides and Sophocles.”112 A late lexicon indicates that the 4th-century orator Philinus delivered a speech Against the Statues of Sophocles and Euripides.113 If, as seems probable, this speech disputed the statues mandated by the Lycurgan law, the omission of Aeschylus’ name is more puzzling still: was Philinus content for a statue of Aeschylus to be installed, but opposed to statues of the other two? Or was Philinus referring to another proposed of the law see especially Scodel (2007) and Hanink (2014) Ch. 2 on the intellectual and cultural contexts and significance of the law, and Prauscello (2006: 69–83) and Battezzato (2003) on the nature of the texts that would have been publicly preserved. The later provision in the law that it was forbidden for actors to perform the texts out of accordance with the official scripts was likely a response to the practice of actors’ interpolation – the same practice that likely led to the instability of e.g., Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes as discussed above. 109 Heracleides Ponticus, Περὶ τῶν τριῶν τραγῳδοποιῶν: fr. 179 Wehrli. In the 4th century bc Aristoxenus of Tarentum also wrote a Περὶ τῶν τραγωδοποιῶν (fr. 113 Wehrli). 110 ig II2 2320 records victory information for the Great Dionysia in the years 341–339 and preserves the names of two revived Euripidean plays: an Iphigenia (likely in Tauris) in 341, and Orestes in 340 (lines 4 and 15 Millis-Olson). Euripides was also apparently the author of the palaion drama put on in 339 (line 35). Nervegna (2014) discusses the (often suspect and late) anecdotal tradition for performances and revivals in the 4th century. 111 Cresphontes (likely by Euripides) and Oenomaus: Demosthenes 18.180; Hecuba: Demosthenes 18.267; Antigone: Demosthenes 19.246-247. In each case Demosthenes is referring to performances that went wrong thanks to Aeschines’ poor acting ability or poor comprehension of the significance of his tragic lines. 112 Duris FGrH 76 70 fr. 29, quoted at Athenaeus 4.184e. Chamaeleon, a student of Aristotle’s and Peripatetic, wrote individual works “On Aeschylus” as well as “On Thespis”: frr. 39–42 and 38 Wehrli respectively. 113 Harpocration 154 Dindorf (s.v. Θεωρικά), from the 2nd century ce.

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statue group, which in this case depicted only the two Peloponnesian War-era playwrights – and left the great veteran of Persian War battles by the wayside? Within the much later Plutarchan corpus, both “canons” of great Athenian tragedians would appear: Alexander requested that the plays of all three be sent to him while he was on campaign,114 but with Alexander’s conquests the children of Persia, Susa, and Gedrosia learned to chant the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides.115 Sophocles and Euripides may seem a natural duo because they were close contemporaries: Aeschylus had fought at Marathon, but Euripides (so the story goes) was not born until the day of the Battle of Salamis a decade later.116 Aeschylus was clearly associated with the “Greatest Generation” of the Persian Wars, as the epitaph preserved by his Life proudly emphasizes.117 The material record (constituted primarily by vases) does suggest that Aeschylus remained popular in performance during the 4th century in South Italy and Sicily.118 But Athens, as Taplin reminds us, remained the central hub of theatrical activity, and thus the silence on Aeschylus is all the more surprising.119 The Lycurgan law that incorporated Aeschylus as a key representative of Athens’ tragic heritage may have marked yet another move to rescue the poet from the world of the dead, and to re-activate his afterlife in the city. As a heroic veteran of the Persian Wars, Aeschylus’ inclusion in this configuration of the city’s dramatic history would have served at once to remind the spectators

114 Plutarch Life of Alexander 8.3. For the triad as in effect see also Mor. 348d (On the Glory of the Athenians, where at one point it is Sophocles, Aeschylus, and the 4th-century playwrights Astydamas and Carcinus who are together invoked as a metonymy for the whole of the great Athenian tragic tradition: 349e). 115 Plutarch Moralia 328d. 116 Life of Euripides (= test. A 1 ia Kannicht) §1. 117 Aeschylus test. A1.11 Radt with Pausanias 1.14.5, who draws attention to Aeschylus’ sole emphasis upon his participation at Marathon in this supposedly self-authored epitaph. Both Sophocles and Euripides would also be remembered for their wartime contributions to Athens: One of the (three) hypotheses transmitted with the play even states that Sophocles was elected general (in 440 bc, before the expedition to Samos) because of his Antigone, while Euripides was credited with saving the lives of Athenians taken captive in the Sicilian Expedition: those who could perform Euripidean lyrics for the Sicilians were given food and/or set free by their masters (Plutarch, Life of Nicias 29.2-4). 118 The usefulness of depictions on vases in reconstructing reperformance practice is thorny and controversial; for optimism see Taplin (2007), building on Taplin (1993); for skepticism see e.g., the review of Taplin (2007) by Small (2009). Nervegna (2014) attempts to reconstruct 4th- and 3rd-century South Italian performance repertoires partially on the basis of early Roman Republican drama. 119 Taplin (2012: 227).

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of his tragic achievement and of Athens’ self-styled role as the savior of Greece when under threat of invasion from abroad.120 Perhaps not coincidentally, the period that saw the passage of Lycurgus’ famous law also witnessed the first systematic account of tragedy in the form of Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle’s treatise represented a watershed in literary criticism. The work inaugurated a new phase of critical thinking about poetry in which, as Ford has argued, the study of texts took on a clearly defined “technical” character.121 In its own era, the Poetics provided a systematic theoretical basis for evaluating tragic compositions, and perhaps contained the first set of objective measures for judging how successfully “tragic” a playwright’s work had been. But for all of Aristotle’s desire to present a new universal standard for the genre, the Poetics was also very much a work of its time and place: Aristotle illustrates his broad principles with examples from (Athenian) tragic poets past and present and occasionally even refers to contemporary performance events and practices.122 In keeping with the broader trends of his time, Aristotle rarely mentions Aeschylus. His name appears only four times in the Poetics,123 and of the scores of plays adduced over the course of the treatise just five are by Aeschylus.124 Even from these sporadic and cursory discussions, Aristotle presents a distinct picture of Aeschylus’ work as the unsophisticated precursor to the complex drama of Sophocles and Euripides. Yet Aristotle generally says little about Aeschylus, whether in terms of praise or blame. In Frogs the tragic contest saw “Euripides” attempt to unseat “Aeschylus” from the tragic chair of the Underworld. Aristotle’s silent neglect of Aeschylus in the Poetics suggests that by the later 4th century, Aeschylus’ hat was no longer even in the ring. For Aristotle, the battle of dead tragedians was to be waged between Sophocles and Euripides, whose names and plays blanket the Poetics. With his two younger rivals firmly positioned as the definitive “classical” tragedians, 120 Zanker (1995: 42–57) presents a reading of the Lycurgan statues, on the basis of putative Roman copies, which emphasizes the portrayal of these poets as above all else model Athenian citizens. 121 Ford (2002), especially 250–271. 122 See Hanink (2011) on Aristotle and the contemporary theater, Sifakis (2002) on evidence for 4th-century acting from throughout the Aristotelian corpus, and Karamanou (2011) on the lost 4th-century tragedies mentioned in the Poetics. 123 Poetics 1449a17, 1456a17, 1458b20 and 22. 124 Poetics 1455a4: Libation Bearers; 1456a1-2: Phorkides and Prometheus; 1456a17: Niobe; 1458b22: Philoctetes. By contrast, Aristotle refers to twelve plays of Sophocles, and twenty of Euripides, returning to a number of these multiple times in the course of the work: see Green (1994: 50).

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Aeschylus was pushed back further into the past, his archaism inflated to the point of irrelevance. The Poetics places the Aeschylean oeuvre so early in the development of tragedy that it has almost nothing to contribute to contemporary criticism of the genre. This position is exemplified by Aristotle’s identification of two Aeschylean dramas, Phorkides and Prometheus, as paradigms of the “simple” plot structure, the least desirable of the four types of plot available to the tragic genre.125 Similarly dismissive is a subsequent mention of Niobe – one of the most popular Aeschylean plays126 – in so cursory a manner that the brief positive assessment risks passing almost unnoticed.127 It is, however, in his history of the tragic genre that Aristotle most clearly asserts the preliminary nature of Aeschylus’ work. In his history of tragedy’s origins and evolution, Aristotle credits Aeschylus with having introduced the second actor, reducing the importance of the Chorus, and placing greater emphasis on dialogue.128 Sophocles, whom Aristotle mentions next, is said to have increased the number of actors to three and to have inaugurated the use of painted scenery (σκηνoγραφία).129 The Life of Aeschylus on the other hand indicates that some ancient scholars of the theater attributed the addition of the third actor and the innovation of scene painting to Aeschylus himself.130 Perhaps even in direct reaction to Aristotle’s characterizations, the Life takes a generally more sympathetic approach to its biographical subject and the challenges that he confronted: τὸ δὲ ἁπλοῦν τῆς δραματοποιΐας εἰ μέν τις πρὸς τοὺς μετ’ αὐτὸν λογίζοιτο, φαῦλον ἄν ἐκλαμβάνοι καὶ ἀπραγμάτευτον · εἰ δὲ πρὸς τοὺς ἀνωτέρω, θαυμάσειε τῆς ἐπινοίας τὸν ποιητὴν καὶ τῆς εὑρέσεως. οὕτω δὲ δοκεῖ τελεωτέρος τραγῳδίας ποιητὴς ὁ Σοφοκλῆς γεγονέναι, ὀρθῶς μὲν δοκεῖ, λογιζέσθω δὲ ὅτι πολλῷ χαλεπώτερον ἦν ἐπὶ Θέσπιδι, Φρυνίχῳ τε καὶ Xοιρίλῳ 125 Poetics 1456a1-2. 126 If indeed the reference is to Aeschylus’ Niobe, as Sophocles also authored a tragedy of that name. On the 4th century reception of the Niobe see, Keuls (1978), Moreau (1995: 302–303), Taplin (2007: 74–79). Fracchia (1987: 200–202) argues that the play’s popularity in South Italy was less than often supposed. 127 Poetics 1456a17. 128 Poetics 1449a15-18. 129 Poetics 1449a18-19. On the problematic attribution of these developments to Sophocles see Brown (1984), who proposes that this passage is not authentically Aristotelian. 130 Else (1945), against whose position see Glucker (1969) and (2000). For Aristotle’s brief account of the history of tragedy in Poetics Ch. 4, see especially Cantor (1991), an attempt to make sense of the narrative, and Scullion (2002: 102–110), who challenges the accuracy of Aristotle’s account.

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ἐς τοσόνδε μεγέθους τὴν τραγῳδίαν προσαγαγεῖν ἢ ἐπὶ Aἰσχύλου εἰσίοντα εἰς τὴν Σοφοκλέους ἐλθεῖν τελειότητα. If one wanted to compare the simplicity of [Aeschylus’] dramatic art to dramatists after him, one might think it insignificant and unsophisticated. But if one compared his work to his predecessors, one would be amazed at the poet’s intelligence and inventiveness. Anyone who thinks that the most perfect writer of tragedy is Sophocles is correct, but he should remember that it was much harder to bring tragedy to such a height after Thespis, Phrynichus and Choerilus, than to reach Sophocles’ perfection after Aeschylus.131 But by assigning the advancements of the third actor and set-painting to Sophocles, Aristotle excludes Aeschylus from the era of tragedy’s maturity (the age in which it had at last achieved its true physis). For Aristotle, Aeschylus is simply a forerunner to the more perfected tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. As the discussion turns to language and style in the final chapters of the Poetics, we encounter the sole instance in which Aeschylus becomes an object of outright inquiry. Yet Aristotle’s judgmental eye, far from rehabilitating Aeschylus’ standing as a critical third player, only serves to reinforce his status as simplistic progenitor of more sophisticated successors. Noting how the use of unusual words or idioms can lend distinction to verse, Aristotle offers a case in point by comparing two nearly identical trimeters of Aeschylus and Euripides. Most remarkably, Aristotle singles out Euripides for his elevated and rarefied word choice. “Because of the change of a single word” Aristotle reflects, “and the use of noble speech in place of common, the one verse [of Euripides] is beautiful, but the other [of Aeschylus] trifling.”132 Aristotle’s brief analysis here fits unproblematically with the characterization of Aeschylus that is presented throughout the Poetics, and would hardly merit further discussion were it not for the surprising point of criticism. That Aeschylus could be censured for his use of pedestrian language, particularly in comparison to Euripides, would surely come as a surprise to either contestant in Frogs. Such is the shift in the critical discourse between Aristophanes and Aristotle: far from being overlooked because of the demanding complexity of his work, Aeschylus is, in Aristotle’s eyes, the symbol of tragedy’s earlier, plainer beginnings.

131 Life of Aeschylus (= Aeschylus test. 1 Radt) §16. Trans. Lefkowitz (1981: 159) (modified). 132 Poetics 1458b20-22: οἷον τὸ αὐτὸ ποιήσαντος ἰαμβεῖον Aἰσχύλου καὶ Eὐριπίδου, ἓν δὲ μόνον ὄνομα μεταθέντος, ἀντὶ κυρίου εἰωθότος γλῶτταν, τὸ μὲν φαίνεται καλὸν τὸ δ’ εὐτελές.

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Conclusion: Deaths and Returns of the Author

The ancient sources show how, for decades after his death, Aeschylus continued to haunt the stages of Athens as a comic construct whose voice still offered guidance to his city and whose plays still remained in its consciousness. Yet precious little secure evidence survives to tell us about the afterlife of his plays, an afterlife that began (perhaps in Syracuse, perhaps in the Attic demes) while Aeschylus still lived. Although our surviving evidence provides few focused glimpses of theatrical revivals, the sum of these snippets nonetheless points to a vibrant culture of reperformance that manifested itself in a number of forms and contexts: in comedy, in the courtroom, as after-dinner entertainment, in the memories of former choreutes, and surely on the stage. The questions that we have raised here are intended to underscore our ignorance of specific instances of reperformance and their mechanics, but they also serve to illuminate the sheer range of possibilities – none of which is to be wholesale excluded – for the ways that Aeschylus was continually revived after his death. The surviving evidence does, however, also gesture to another fate that we may have only very closely escaped, namely the disappearance of Aeschylus – and even his ghost – from the tragic canon. In the 4th century we nearly lose sight of him, even as the names of Sophocles and Euripides repeatedly appear in rhetoric, comic fragments, and amongst the indirect testimonia for staged reperformances of plays. When Aeschylus emerged after his death as a comic persona, his poetry was at once constructed as always and already “old”: full of archaisms, bombast, and representative of the martial values that Athenian society had somehow lost. These were precisely the values which the city so sorely needed that Dionysus felt compelled to restore a living Aeschylus to Athens as the curtain fell on Frogs. But in the 4th century, this essential “oldness” inched him closer to irrelevance. Even for Lycurgus, whose law saw to the installation of three tragic statues at the Theater of Dionysus, Euripides had usurped Aeschylus as the embodiment of the poetry and values that characterized the illustrious Athenian past. These early years of Aeschylus’ Nachleben were far more wide-ranging, animated and tumultuous than is often allowed. In the century or so following his death – a death which the comic playwrights framed as a traumatic blow to their sister art – Aeschylus went from exalted exemplar to primitive ancestor. A cultural divide was always understood as separating Aeschylus’ life and career from those of the later 5th-century tragedians, but with the passing of time the perceived value of the far side of that divide declined. Aeschylus’ plays, once quoted by all, were displaced by the more famous lines of his younger rivals; his voice, once the pillar of tragic poetry, went increasingly unheard.

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As in every culture, the tides of taste in classical Greece were subject to their ebbs and flows. Aeschylus, like so many other poets, was not above the pull of the current. Remarkably, however, the 4th century in Athens did not mark the end of Aeschylus’ afterlife, and in the centuries that have followed many more seekers have made the figurative trip to retrieve him from his tragic throne amongst the shades. This article is dedicated to the memory of Kathryn Bosher, a historian of the Greek theater whom we both deeply admired.

chapter 3

Prometheus Bound in Translation: “The True Promethean Fire” J. Michael Walton 3.1 Introduction The recent proliferation in means of electronic sourcing has ensured that access to the history of translation of the Classics has become a simpler and cheaper process. Early translations of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, once to be read only under Rare Books restriction, or through diligent scrutiny of booksellers’ lists, are now readily available on line, often for free. Searching for factors that account for the popularity to translators of certain ancient plays and the unpopularity of others can now properly raise the profile of translation. No longer should translation be seen merely as a peripheral refinement of classical studies, signifying little more than the amount of spare time available to eighteenth-century clerics and nineteenth-century men and women of letters. Now the selection of plays can properly be linked to socio-cultural and historical concerns and preoccupations. It is this area which I wish to address in this chapter with reference to Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. The choice of translations and examples is necessarily confined to those in the English language, and further refined by sensitivity to the original and the attitude of the translators towards the process of translation itself. Such a historical approach will lead to considering how and when translators began to appreciate that the Greek tragedians had created pieces for stage production rather than for the kind of literary analysis which once dominated their appearance in the curricula of schools and universities. This is especially significant for a play which is as amenable to stage production as Prometheus Bound. Most translations from the last seventy years have taken such issues into consideration. Accordingly, this study will concentrate on the earliest translations. Edith Hamilton’s Prometheus Bound of 1927/37 will be the terminus, though some comparative illustrations from other periods will be offered alongside specific quotations. A search in 2006 for the number of published translations in English of the forty-four surviving Greek plays from the classical period (Menander was excluded because no complete comedy of his was discovered until 1957) revealed that the most popular single tragedy has been Aeschylus’ Agamemnon of which © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004332164_005

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ninety-one different translations were known. This was followed by Sophocles’ Antigone with eighty-nine and Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound with eighty-two, ahead of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, and leaving anything by Euripides or Aristophanes trailing behind. Least popular were Aeschylus’ Suppliants (twenty-eight), and Euripides’ Suppliants and Rhesus (both with fourteen).1 These figures raise a number of questions. Why should Agamemnon be the most favored when it is only the first part of a trilogy, the other plays of which have also come down to us? As cogently, why are Prometheus Bound and Rhesus at opposite ends of the “hit parade” when they are the two plays whose authenticity has been most challenged?2 Though the entire list does not merit further exposure here, some tendencies are revealed. Agamemnon can stand alone either as a poetic statement or as a dramatic entity. Then again, Prometheus Bound and Rhesus contravene many of the assumptions about the formulaic nature of Greek tragedy, never mind its staging, which is quite enough for generations of the literary and literal-minded to have opposed the right of these two plays to a place in the canon. Rhesus (whose authorship by Euripides was not disputed until recent times) is a brisk and stimulating adventure story which plays with theatre conventions, but at first sight may seem to amount to not much else. What Agamemnon, Antigone, and Prometheus Bound have in common is that they are all plays about those who fight back and refuse to submit to ruling authority. Martyrs make better heroes than suppliants, and if Aeschylus’ portrait of Clytemnestra is hardly that of a browbeaten wife, the myth reminds us of what happened to her daughter in order for the Trojan War to take place. Prometheus stands out as an archetypal figure defying punishment in the face of authority, represented as the will of Zeus. So does Antigone, though in her case the resistance is to temporal authority, not to the higher powers that control the universe. Whether or not any or all of Prometheus Bound is by Aeschylus, and notwithstanding the fact that there is even argument about whether it was first or second play in a trilogy, the image of the Titan crucified against a rock for defying the supremacy of the gods is irresistible. This offers reason enough for the play to be visited time and again by those attracted to its 1 A list of the translators, translations and publication details can be found in the appendix to Walton (2006a). Since publication, as anticipated, others have turned up which for one reason or another I had overlooked. The overall pattern and “batting order” has not been affected. 2 The case for rejecting Prometheus Bound as written by Aeschylus was most strenuously argued by Mark Griffith (1977). It would nonetheless be unthinkable to publish a book about Aeschylus without including the play.

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message while accounting for the present book’s subtitle in both the ‘trauma of adaptation,’ and the historical circumstances of ‘cultural divide.’3 Translations of Greek tragedy into English reach back to the middle of the sixteenth century. The precocious Lady Jane Lumley’s The Tragedie of Euripides called Iphigeneia translated out of Greake into Englishe (sic) was best part of two hundred years before any kind of systematic approach to rendering Greek drama into English.4 The Renaissance enthusiasm for Seneca provides part of the cause for such an omission, and there was certainly no lack of classical influence and background in the original plays of the Jacobean period and of the Restoration.5 Two of Shakespeare’s plays are set in the world of ancient Athens, the origins of another lie probably in a New Comedy of Posidippus, and a fourth is set during the Trojan War. 3.2

The First Translators of Aeschylus

There was no translation into English of any play of Aeschylus until the Rev. Dr. Thomas Morell’s Prometheus in Chains of 1773. Nor, incidentally, by 1773 had there been any play in English which featured Prometheus as a character. Morell, who had published his translation of Euripides’ Hecuba in 1749, would seem to be the obvious starting point for looking at Aeschylean translation, were it not for the publication by Charlotte Lennox in 1759 of her own rendering from the French into English of the Jesuit Père Pierre Brumoy’s Le théâtre des Grecs (1730). Lennox was the daughter of the lieutenant-governor of New York. Sent to England at the age of fifteen, she became a lady of letters, a novelist and performed playwright, as well as a translator from the French. Brumoy’s formidable three-volume work is a mix of commentary, résumés of every extant

3 For the relationship to translation see Susan Bassnett’s Prologue to Parker, Jan and Timothy Mathews (eds.), Tradition, Translation, Trauma: the Classic and the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011: 1–9). 4 Lady Jane Lumley appears to have been only in her mid-teens when she translated Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis sometime in the mid-1550s. She omitted most of the Chorus, but otherwise follows Euripides closely, though perhaps working from Erasmus’ Latin translation rather than the Greek. Her text was not published until 1909. There was no further translation of Greek tragedy in English until Christopher Wase’s polemical Sophocles’ Electra of 1649, and Lewis Theobald’s three Sophocles plays (1714–1715). See Walton (2009). 5 Hall and Macintosh (2005) give the fullest account.

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Greek play, comparative versions, and a limited number of full translations of Greek tragedies (none of them by Aeschylus), beginning with Sophocles’ Oedipus [Tyrannus]. Descriptions of the plays of Aeschylus appear in the second volume, beginning with Prometheus in Chains. Lennox is no slave to Brumoy. In her Preface to the volume, before presenting her own seven translations from the French of Brumoy’s Sophocles and Euripides, Lennox is critical of Brumoy as “a good critic, and an excellent translator, but he is a bad and tedious writer.”6 Nevertheless, she does translate Brumoy’s thoughts on translation and seems to have sympathy with them: My opinion of translating these poets is this. To disfigure is not to translate them. Therefore we must take an exact medium between too scrupulous an exactness, which disguises them, and too great licence, which alters them. What I call disguising an author, is, to expose him in a foreign language, with an exactness which is foolish, malicious or superstitious. Every language has the arrangement of its own ideas, its phrases, be they noble or base, strong or feeble, lively or faint. This is a point not to be denied. Whoever would translate the ancients word for word into French, and still follow the Greek phraseology, must without doubt travesty those authors, and render them ridiculous at very little expence (sic). This is the first degree of that false exactness, of which I have been speaking. The second, and the worst, is to change, as Monsieur Perrault did, the finest expressions that antiquity held in use, into low and vulgar terms. This may be called Parody. The third degree is, to keep to a scrupulous slavery in explaining all the epithets, and to form from one beautiful Greek word, one very bad French phrase; or, to use a proper extension, which deadens the fire of those poets, notwithstanding all the pains they have taken to enliven their poetry.7 Lennox’s thoughts on translation reveal attitudes that are partly her own, but relate as much, it would seem, to the prevailing feelings about translation in France in 1730: Monsieur Brumoy has not translated any one entire tragedy of Eschylus (sic). He quotes Monsieur le Fevre to justify his opinion, that such an attempt, if not impossible, would be very disadvantageous to the Greek

6 Lennox (1759: i, Preface, v). 7 Lennox (1759: i, xii–xiv from Brumoy’s “A Discourse upon the Theatre of the Greeks”).

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original … Eschylus must have excited aversion rather than admiration, if he had been fully translated.8 This is a reservation apparently shared in England. In 1759 there was still no Aeschylus in English. After Morell’s Prometheus in Chains of 1773 there would be no translation of the rest of Aeschylus until Robert Potter’s in 1777. It was Potter (following up with the whole of Euripides except for Cyclops, then Sophocles), who set in train the considerable translation industry of Victorian England. The curiosity is that during the seventeenth century translation was a major talking point. Works on how to translate were already circulating. John Dryden (who knew his Aristotle), poet laureate and a translator of Virgil, Lucretius, and Horace, had discussed his being “troubled with the disease (as I may call it) of translation” in his Preface to Sylvae in 1685.9 He would later propose that: A translator that would write with any force or spirit of an original must never dwell on the words of an author. He ought to possess himself entirely and perfectly comprehend the genius of his author, the nature of his subject, and the terms of the art or subject treated of.10 This looks like a pretty good recipe for the translator of Greek tragedy, but the man who co-wrote with Nathaniel Lee an Oedipus, which was performed at the Duke’s (Dorset Garden) Theatre to acclaim in 1678, rejected Sophocles in favor of a strange concoction of which the best that can be said is that it was original. Brumoy and Lennox offer an uncontentious description of the plot of Prometheus Bound, but conclude with an interesting observation: “It is not impossible but that the subject … is an allegory upon kings and perhaps upon Xerxes or Darius, which must necessarily be pleasing to a republic.”11 Here is a significant recognition of the fact that Greek tragedy used myth as parable, and that the setting of most tragedies in a deep but fluid past was a means of confronting contemporary issues by a deflecting shield. For the translator this is a major issue. And it brings us directly to Morell and Potter.12 8 9 10 11 12

Lennox (1759: i, Preface, vii). Dryden (1962: ii, 18). Dryden (1962: i, 214–215). Lennox (1759: i, 2, 136). The choice of translations on which to focus here has been dictated by those which made most impact in their own time, and translators who stand out as moving forward the argument over the translator’s priorities. If most are English, rather than American, that is a bias which reflects where the large majority originated. It is also a result of offering a historical survey, and paying less attention to translations from those of the last hundred

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Thomas Morell may have been the first translator of Aeschylus but he is better known as Handel’s last and most prolific librettist (including Judas Maccabeus, Joshua, and Jephtha). His Hecuba, published twenty-four years before Prometheus in Chains, had an introduction “To the Reader” which began: As this Translation was entirely design’d for the use of the English Reader, I mean those who do not understand the original language, or such young Gentlemen as are now entering on the study of it, it may be necessary to premise a few things relating to the Author, and this Play in particular, by way of Advertisement.13 In other words it was a crib, of the kind which forms a substantial proportion of all the Greek translations to be found in the nineteenth century. Morell admitted as such when he later describes it as “a bare translation” even though he does suggest that: I cannot but think that were some of these ancient Plays judiciously translated, and the Choric-songs reduced to proper Measure, and masterly set and perform’d, a more engaging and rational Entertainment could not be desired by the most polite Audience.14 A similar interest in production seems to emerge in his subsequent Prometheus in Chains. The introduction opens with an apparent apology for a Christian’s study of the classics and Prometheus in particular whom “some philologists reduce to Noah.” He concludes that: [I]n this piece many extraordinary passages will occur to the Christian reader, if at all acquainted with the Scriptures; relating to the destruction and renovation of mankind, the fall of Lucifer and his angels; and the just grounds whereon the fathers found the analogy referred to on v. 233.850 (sic) of the original.15 The relevant lines read in Morell’s translation:

13 14 15

years than to those where the choice of play was dominated by the nature of its possible interpretation. Morell (1749: v). Ibid., xii. This despite the abject failure of Richard West’s Hecuba at Drury Lane in 1726: Hall and Macintosh (2005); Walton (2006a). Morell (1773), Introduction, no page numbers.

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And in due time you will bring forth a son. Hence call’d black, Epaphus, the son of Jove, Whose empire shall extend through the land.16 epônumon de tôn Dios gennêmatôn texeis kelainon Epaphon, hos karpôsetai hosên platurrous Neilos ardeuei chthona (850–852)17 Compare with David Grene (1956): You shall bear Epaphos, dark of skin, his name recalling Zeus’s touch and his begetting. This Epaphos shall reap the fruits of all the land that is watered by the broad flowing Nile.18 Already it is apparent that Prometheus Bound is the most protean of tragedies, a quality shared with only the greatest of plays of any age. Morell’s translation is in what might be described as erratic pentameters, with choral odes varying from four to eight syllables, and Io’s initial speech in suitably fractured rhythms. The use of words such as “convict,” “shackles,” “chains,” and “handcuffs” underlines the penal context and there are some nice turns of phrase. The river Araxis “guggles down,” and Hermes (Vulcan, for Morell) is described rather surprisingly as the “errand-boy of Zeus,” the insult of choice in many subsequent translations, including some of the most recent. Lines like Prometheus claiming “I have extirpated the fear of death,” or the Chorus demanding of him “Hear you yon horned damsel’s plaintiff cries?” (a line usually assigned anyway to Io), are rare archaisms to a modern ear, but Morell’s reading of Prometheus’ opening speech, a lodestar for any translation of Prometheus Bound, is disappointing:

16

Where there is a quotation from an old or more recent translation, an anglicized version is based on the Oxford Text, with an alternative translation or translations from a different period, for cross-reference rather than as a statement of preference. 17 Transliteration is included for those who might wish to check the sound against the original, but necessarily ignores the accents. 18 “The Prometheus is perhaps the most difficult of all [the four plays of Aeschylus other than the Oresteia]. Both vocabulary and expression are relatively simple. Parts are downright prosy, but the great passages are of the highest flights of Greek dramatic poetry” (Grene: 1956: vi).

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Thou circumambient air; swift-winged winds; Ye crystal springs, and rivers; and ye seas, Waving with vast expanse, and O thou earth Parent of all; and thou broad eye of day, All-seeing, all-enlivening; O, behold. What I, a god, now suffer from the gods. ô dios aithêr kai tachupteroi pnoai potamôn te pêgai, pontiôn te kumatôn anêrithmon gelasma, pammêtor te gê. kai ton panoptên kuklon heliou kalô; idesthe m’ hoia pros theôn paschô theos. (88–92) Compare with Paul Roche (1998): Come, sweet celestial space and quick-winged airs, Come, springing streams and deep sea-dimpled seas in crinkled laughs; Come, mother-of-All, great Earth, and round all-staring sun – I call on you to see my hurt: a god’s but done by gods. Or Marianne McDonald (2007): I call on you bright light of day; swift-winged breezes; you flowing rivers; unquenchable laughter of the sea’s waves; Earth, mother of all, and lastly, circle of the sun, that sees all things. See a god’s suffering, inflicted on me by other gods.19 Robert Potter, another Cambridge-educated clerk in holy orders, but nothing like as well-connected as the old-Etonian Morell, may well have been provoked by him to try his own hand at translation. Potter was already a poet of note but approaching sixty. The poor curate of a parish in rural Norfolk, far from his 19

“Of these three great tragedians whose work we have, Aeschylus gets the prize for poetry. He used bold metaphors and invented some words. He is certainly the most difficult to translate” (McDonald 2007: Preface, 4).

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native Somerset, Potter was eking out his living teaching in a local school when he published his volume of Aeschylus in 1777. He became, if not an overnight celebrity, someone whose name was talked about in literary society. His translations of the whole of Euripides (1781 and 1783), with the exception of the satyr play Cyclops, which possibly offended his sense of decency or devalued his vision of the exalted nature of Greek tragedy, and then Sophocles (1788), would eventually lead to an appointment as a Prebendary of Norwich Cathedral, and much more comfortable circumstances in his old age. When the first reviewers grumbled that his Aeschylus lacked critical notes, he speedily corrected the omission, adding a substantial introduction for a new edition. Here he suggested, with some humility, that: “[T]he translator did not think himself at liberty to deviate from the manner of composition prescribed by his author.”20 He would later write: “It appears to me that a translator should not only endeavor to preserve the sense & spirit of his author, but even the form of the original composition, as far as the rhythms of a different language will permit.”21 He succeeded to such an extent that, in the face of subsequent stiff competition, his Seven Plays of Aeschylus was still being reissued a hundred years later, but without his notes and introduction. The 1892 edition for Routledge’s series, “Sir John Lubbock’s Hundred Books,” axed all but Potter’s actual text in favor of a brief and florid eulogy from Henry Morley. Potter’s rendering of Prometheus’ test-piece opening runs as follows: Ethereal air, and ye swift-winged winds, Ye rivers springing from fresh founts, ye waves That o’er the interminable ocean wreathe Your crisped smiles, though all-producing earth, And thee, bright sun, I call, whose flaming orb Views the wide world beneath, see what, a god, I suffer from the gods; “Crisped smiles” for anêrithmon gelasma [literally “countless laughter”] is a strange choice, as are coinages such as “cumbrous,” “bryze” (for the Greek muops, simply a “goad” in Morell but more usually “gadfly”), and “glozings,” which go back to Chaucer and Spenser, though these are nothing like as

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Introduction to the corrected version of 1819, 27n. Stoker (1993) gives a thorough overview of Potter’s translations in publication. Stoker (1993: 294, n. 19), in an undated draft of a letter to Hans Stanley.

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arcane usages as are to be found in the 1880s Aeschylus of E.D.A. Morshead and George Warr.22 The most significant difference between Potter’s Prometheus Chained and that of Morell is a complete absence of any attempt to give a Christian slant to a pagan civilization. Potter was a purist whose subsequent translations represent not only the first attempt to publish the entire tragic canon but a substantial stimulus to those in the nineteenth-century who sought to emulate him. Potter treated Aeschylus as a dramatic poet rather than a poetic dramatist; the same would subsequently apply to both his Euripides and Sophocles. He accords them respect with the best linguistic rendering he can manage, offering little intervention on his own account or concession to the preoccupations of his own time. There is, of course, no inkling that what he was translating were pieces originally designed for performance in front of an audience, nor any indication that this might be something to exercise a translator of Greek tragedy.23 3.3

The Prometheus Variations

Political, social, and intellectual upheavals in Europe were so momentous between Potter’s Aeschylus of 1777 and the next Prometheus of 1822 (a literal, in prose, anonymous and unremarkable) that it must seem that Europe during those years was too interested in the future to have time or energy to devote to the past.24 But for the ancient Greeks the future was behind them, unseen and unpredictable, the past in front, imprinted on their memories. Something of this rubbed off. The Enlightenment was in fact enthralled by ancient Greece. In the early years of the nineteenth century the French and English systematically plundered the antiquities of Greece and Egypt. From 1801 to 1803 half the sculptures of the Parthenon were shipped back to London by Lord Elgin, vandal or conservationist according to one’s allegiance, and went on display behind Piccadilly Circus in 1807, triggering even greater enthusiasm for the classical world. The final defeat of the French at Waterloo in 1815 made travel to

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Stray (1996) talks about the extent of Morshead’s idiosyncratic language; Walton (2006b) compares his opening to The Oresteia to that of the even more tortuous George Warr. For Potter’s translations, see also Roberts in this volume “Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes: War, Women, and the Hecht/Bacon Translation” (Ch. 4). It was certainly one of the most barren periods for the drama everywhere but in Germany.

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Europe from England possible again, for those who could afford it. Prometheus had always been a popular figure in Romantic art for, as Byron, vehemently hostile to Elgin, identified in his poem of 1816 entitled Prometheus: Thou art a symbol and a sign To mortals of their fate and force;25 In 1818 Mary Shelley entitled her novel Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus. Prometheus Unbound, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s imaginative sequel to Aeschylus, was published in 1820. Prometheus, for sure, was an icon for the age of Romanticism, both as creator and victim. The subsequent end of the Ottoman control of Greece after the uprising of 1821 and the agitation proved an inspiration to poets and travelers alike. Translation of Greek literature, poetry and especially drama, dormant since Potter’s Sophocles of 1788, began to flourish for those whose direct access to the classics was limited. The twentyeight years between 1822 and 1850 saw fourteen new English translations of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound alone, and not only in England; among them was a rather tortuous one from Henry David Thoreau (1843), notable primarily for his unalloyed enthusiasm for Prometheus’ stance against authority. Two others were much more interesting, both, unusually, by the same translator: Elizabeth Barrett, in 1833 when she was still Barrett, and 1850 when she was Barrett Browning, now a wife and mother. By the end of the century there would be another fourteen. Only a small number of these can be considered here, but then, various as they all were, it is only a small number that can be said to have advanced the translator’s art into a broader perspective than Potter’s. Among those of significance alongside the two Barretts, are two more by women writers, Augusta Webster (1866) and Anna Swanwick (1873).26 What is most noteworthy about Elizabeth Barrett Browning is that for the first time the universal advances for the whole human race claimed by Aeschylus’ Prometheus, in Barrett Browning become highly personal. In poor health throughout her life, largely self-educated, and somewhat isolated, it is unsurprising that she should emphasize the hero’s solitariness 25 26

Byron (1816: 45–46). Considerable attention has been paid in recent years to the importance of these women translators, most notably from Yopie Prins (on Barrett 1991, and Barrett, Case, and Hamilton, 2010), Lorna Hardwick (on Swanwick and Webster, 2000b and 2000c), Jennifer Wallace (on Barrett, 2000), Clara Drummond (on both Barretts, 2006), Patricia Rigg (on Webster, 2010), and Alice Falk (on both Barretts, 1988). To all I owe a debt. They make my simple survey both harder and easier.

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and suffering. So does Aeschylus. What amounted almost to an obsession at that point in her life was exaggerated by a close attachment to an older neighbor, the blind Hugh Stuart Boyd. She and Boyd met regularly, and it was he who suggested she translate Prometheus. Jennifer Wallace makes more of their relationship: The erotic perversity of Barrett Browning’s attraction to Boyd, and the resulting association of reading Greek with lusting after withered masculinity, was reflected in such translations as that of Bion’s “The Lament for Adonis.”27 It is easy enough to see how Elizabeth might have become fixated by their rapport, but the evidence from her first Prometheus Bound is not that strong. No sooner had the twenty-four year old Barrett committed her translation of Prometheus Bound to print than she began to regret it. “How I have wished that I had never done so,” she wrote in her diary, describing her efforts as “as cold as Caucasus.”28 Her Preface is, perhaps, more interesting than her 1833 translation. She justifies a new translation – there were not many recent ones of merit – by observing that: A mirror may be held in different lights by different hands … All men since Aesop’s time and before it have worn various-coloured spectacles. They cannot part with their colour, which is their individuality by itself. If Potter shows us Aeschylus through green spectacles, and another translator, though in a very inferior manner, shows us Aeschylus through yellow ones, it will become clear to the English reader, that green and yellow are not inherent properties of the Greek poet: and, in this respect, both the English reader and the Greek poet are benefited.29 This cogent statement on the role of the translator gives perfect license to the much freer second translation of 1850. Indeed the Preface is all that survives into the new translation, written when her much-opposed marriage to Robert Browning had resulted in such an improvement to her health that she 27

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Wallace (2000: 339). Her somewhat fevered account of Barrett Browning’s choice of language in her translations should not hide the importance of the observation that “Like other women writers later in the 19th century – notably Augusta Webster and Amy Levy – Barrett Browning rewrites Greek mythology from a female perspective,” 345. Prins (2010: 168–169). Barrett (1833: 3–4).

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had given birth to a son at the age of forty-three, and could create a translation of Aeschylus infinitely better than her husband’s “Browning version” of Agamemnon.30 Most striking is her growing conviction in the time between 1833 and 1850 of the need to identify and replicate “the spirit more than the words of Aeschylus.”31 So comprehensively has the comparison between the two translations been investigated by Clara Drummond in her “A ‘Grand Possible’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Translations of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound” (2006) that there is little left to say about Elizabeth’s approach to translation by 1850. Drummond offers a context to Elizabeth’s life, detail of her largely self-inspired “Passion for Greek,” and her development as a poet. She provides a voluminous examination of the circumstances of the two translations, the disputes on detail and, most notably, their reception, without neglecting choice of language, and the more Christian slant of the second translation.32 One aspect, though, is overlooked. This is the place, perhaps, to rehearse those general aspects of Prometheus Bound which will inevitably most exercise any translator. Prometheus’ evaluation of his contribution to human progress (so wide-ranging as to encompass any age and political motivation) needs a frame of reference. How the frenzied Io expresses her anguish is another concern, as is the “geography lesson,” Prometheus’ prophecy for Io’s future wanderings, which must have had some special significance at the time of the first performance (perhaps in Sicily), but today reads as little more than a travel supplement. And what of the choral lyrics and their relationship in English to dialogue which is itself more heightened than that of either of the later tragedians? Then there is the strong sense of allegory in Prometheus’ situation, chained to a rock, a lonely figure visited by those who, for better, or worse, all enjoy physical movement if not mental freedom. Here lies the play’s abiding appeal and its chameleon-like quality, variously confronted from Potter to modem times. Beyond all these, however, there is another factor which early translators and critics tended to overlook. A play is not simply a vehicle for ideas. It is an 30

The popularity of Robert Browning’s The Agamemnon of Aeschylus provided the title for Terence Rattigan’s play The Browning Version (1949) about an elderly schoolmaster. Edith Hamilton described the Browning Agamemnon as “without question one of the worst translations ever made.” On Robert Browning and his wife’s Prometheus Bound, see Prins (1991). For Robert Browning’s Agamemnon, see especially Macintosh (2005: 154–157), and Walton (2006a: 46–49). 31 Drummond (2006: 533). 32 Ibid., 552–561.

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exercise in dramatic and theatrical ingenuity, part of a synthetic art form originally created, rather than written, to be seen by an audience in performance by actors. The fact that in the nineteenth century this was not happening should not absolve the translator from taking into account Aeschylus’ manipulation of a sense of space, sound, and movement, from the opening sequence with Hephaestus, Strength and Force (Barrett Browning’s preferred identities) to the apparently aerial entries of the Chorus and Oceanus, and the climactic earthquake. These are, or should be, as much of a challenge to the translator as any of the other aspects of the play, poetic, linguistic or mythical: not in finding staging solutions, seldom the translator’s job, but in being aware of how a visual dimension was written into the original text. 3.4

The Performance Dimension of Greek Drama

Augusta Webster’s Greek, like Elizabeth Barrett’s, was largely self-taught, alongside the education of a brother. Brought up in Cambridge, Augusta Davies was daughter of the Chief Constable. She wrote poetry and a novel under the male pseudonym of Cecil Homes. Only after her marriage in 1863 did she publish two Greek tragedies under her married name of Webster.33 Prometheus Bound (1866) was the first of these. She went on to compose a number of original verse plays between 1874 and 1887 on historical subjects, two set in ancient Rome. A critic, too, she published articles on translation, in one of which she reviewed the Agamemnons of E.D.A. Morshead and Robert Browning for The Examiner.34 Beyond her literary pursuits she was a major pioneering figure in the agitation for social and educational reform, seven of her essays on the position of women being published in 1878 as A Housewife’s Opinions.35

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Hardwick (2000c: 193–194). Her superbly barbed verdict on Browning that “We could wish nothing better for literature than that Mr. Browning, having translated the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, should go on to translate the Agamemnon of Robert Browning” has a lightness of touch not immediately obvious in her own translations. Clearly, however humble about her own talents, Webster was no doormat even if her husband’s Preface to her translation states that “[…] my wife wished for some better guarantee of accuracy than a lady’s name could give […]” (Webster 1866: 2). Webster (1879); Hardwick (2000b) gives a succinct and informative comparison of Webster’s work with that of Amy Levy and Anna Swanwick; Hardwick (2000c) for Swanwick and Webster.

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Webster remained diffident about her own translations of Prometheus Bound and Euripides’ Medea. She corresponded with John Stuart Blackie in 1870, sending him both her translations, knowing well enough that Blackie himself had published a Prometheus in his two volumes of The Lyrical Dramas of Aeschylus twenty years earlier.36 Webster’s translation offers no homage to Blackie and seldom rivals his clear, if on occasion dour, rendition. So Blackie’s sneer at Hermes offers alliteration for Aeschylus’ quadruple syllables: This solemn mouthing, this proud pomp of phrase Beseems the lackey of the gods. semnostomos ge kai phronêmatos pleos ho muthos estin, hos theôn hupêratou (953–954) Such a response is a far better insult than Webster’s: The speech in sooth, is of portentous phrase And prideful for a varlet of the gods; While Prometheus’ response to the Chorus’ optimism over his eventual release receives from Webster the turgid: Nor yet is it laid on completing Fate To bring this so to pass, but by much woes And pangs bowed down thus shalt I scape these chains. For art is very weak before The Must. ou tauta tautê Moira pô telesphoros kranai peprôtai, muriais de pêmonais duais te kamphtheis hôde desma phunganô technê d’ anangkês asthenestera makrô (511–514) For which Blackie had come up with the admirably clear:

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Webster’s “self-deprecation” and the context of her translation and the “circumstances of gender turmoil” receive their fullest exploration from Patricia Rigg (2010) whose exemplary article on “Augusta Webster and the Discourse of Translation Theory” gives a thorough and wide-ranging context to her work.

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This may not be; the destined course of things Fate must accomplish; I must bend me yet ’Neath wrongs on wrongs, ere I may ’scape these bonds. Though Art be strong, Necessity is stronger.37 Compare with Emily Hilburn (1980): Fate has yet to make your hope come true. She won’t, until infinities of pain sap me. Then I will be free. Necessity is stronger than craft.38 More pertinent for Webster was the choice of plays to translate. No two Greek tragedies are more open to a contemporary application than Prometheus Bound and Medea, each having a figurative dimension that can move them out of the world of classical myth.39 It is only fair to record that her translation of Prometheus Bound was well received at the time for its faithfulness to Aeschylus.40 Augusta Webster was a major pioneer in the history of the women’s movement, if a lesser literary figure. It is difficult not to believe she would have preferred to be remembered that way. Anna Swanwick has attracted less critical attention, surprising in that her output in translation was more substantial than Webster’s. Her first translations, after she and her sister went to live and study in Berlin, were Plato into German; and out of German, Schiller’s Maid of Orleans, Goethe’s Egmont, and Torquato Tasso, culminating in Parts One and Two of Goethe’s Faust in 1876.41 The British Library tentatively identifies her as the A. S. who edited the entire works of Shakespeare for Bohn in 1851. She was twenty-four years older than Augusta Webster, but died four years after her in 1899. And in the course of a life largely devoted, as was Webster’s, to the issues of women’s suffrage and education, she found time to 37 38

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Blackie (1850). “To treat one’s own language at an almost pre-verbal level, to focus on both the smallest linguistic and etymological elements and also on the Gestalt of the whole – that is, I think, what translation is about” (Hilburn 1980: 74). Hall (1999). Rigg (2010: 7–8); and Hardwick (2000b: n. 12). “Review quotations are from Works by the Same Author with Opinions of the Press,” an appendix to Augusta Webster, The Sentence: A Drama (London: Unwin, 1887: i–x). Hardwick (2000b, 2000c) gives further details of her life and background.

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translate the whole of Aeschylus. She is considered here after Webster because her translation of the complete plays which include Prometheus Bound was not published until 1873, seven years after Webster’s, though eight years after her own Oresteia. Swanwick came from a strong Unitarian background, which served as the guiding motivation behind all her published writing, and enabled her to look at the ancient Greeks as Hardwick suggests, as “progressing towards a fully Christian perception of religious and political morality.”42 Her Oresteia was a landmark, and set a precedent for many subsequent translators. Though using iambics for most of the dialogue, she would, on occasion break into a freer verse, as when Clytemnestra addresses Aegisthus in Agamemnon. It is less of a surprise, then, when she fractures the iambics for Prometheus’ opening speech. Her choruses include a variety of verse patterns including rhyme, which Gilbert Murray would later adopt for whole plays. In the 1865 Preface to the Trilogy she outlined her approach to translation, as well as her justification for the use of rhyme: Considerable diversity of opinion prevails respecting the propriety of employing rhymed metres as substitutes for the complex forms of classical poetry; hence it may not be inexpedient briefly to state my reasons for adopting them as affording in my judgment the only adequate vehicle for reproducing the choral odes of the Greek dramas. With regard to the principles which should guide the translator in the execution of his (sic) task, it is, I believe, universally recognized that a translation ought, as faithfully as possible, to reflect the original, both in spirit and in form [my italics], and that any willful or unacknowledged deviation from it is tantamount to a breach of trust. The difficulty of rigidly applying these principles to the translation of the choral odes will be apparent when we remember that the medium through which the thought of the ancient poet has to be re-embodied differs so essentially from that of the original as to render the principle of imitation with reference to their musical intonations, inapplicable.43 Here, influenced, perhaps, by Schlegel’s revolutionary lectures on Greek drama first delivered in 1808 in Vienna and published the following year, Swanwick revealed a clear understanding of the performance dimension of Greek drama. 42 43

Hardwick (2000b, 2000c) talks about the influence of Rev. James Martineau, minister of a Unitarian Chapel in Liverpool, on her, 184–185. Swanwick (1865: vii–viii).

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She opted for what was most in harmony with the spirit of the original because the choral odes are linked “not only with music, but with choral dance.”44 It is unfortunate, then, that Swanwick’s actual translation, looks now as stilted as Webster’s. The Chorus responding, not in a lyric passage, to Prometheus’ claims to help mankind, seems less sympathetic than graceless: Unseemly woe thou bearest. Driven astray Flounders thy judgment, and like sorry leech Falling distemper’d spiritless thou art, No remedies canst find thyself to cure. peponthas aikes pêm’; aposphaleis phrenôn planê, kakos d’iatros hôs tis es noson pesôn athumeis kai seauton ouk echeis heurein hopoiois pharmakois iasimos (472–474)45 Compare with Rex Warner (1946): You have suffered shamefully, and now you are astray, driven out of your wits, and, like some bad physician, fallen ill, you lose your courage and know not yourself and how to find the drugs by which you can be cured.46 Io’s nightly voices urge the hapless Io in Swanwick: Spurn not thou, O child, The couch of Zeus. su d’, ô pai, mê ’polaktisês lechos to Zênos. (651–652) Compare with Frederick Raphael and Kenneth McLeish (1991): 44

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Ibid., ix. Swanwick uses line numbering in the main text according to her translation, but it has been left here as in the Aeschylus. See also Roberts in this volume “Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes: War, Women, and the Hecht/Bacon Translation” (Ch. 4) for translations by Potter, Morshead and, in particular, Swanwick. Numbering from the Greek text. “The revival of translation … is probably no more than the fruit of that demand each generation makes for translations contemporary to itself” (Warner 1966: xxvi).

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Zeus burns to sleep with you. To sleep with you, lord Zeus! Don’t spurn him.47 Swanwick’s Chorus later reflect, now in rhyme: Wedlock, when equal-yoked, to me Nought dreadful seemeth terror-free. But ne’er may mighty god, with eye of love, Escape forbidding, mark me from above. emoi d’ hote men homalos ho gamos aphobos; hon de dedia, mê kreissonôn [theôn] erôs aphukton omma prosdrakoi me. (901–903) Compare with Frank Laurence Lucas (1968): Not equal-matched love I fear – but from above Bent on me ruthlessly some glance divine.48 At long last in the latter years of the nineteenth century, Greek tragedy returned to the stage, at first in the original language but, as the performance dimension began to exercise translators, for the wider public, too.49 E.D.A. Morshead was an unlikely pioneer. Edmund Morshead was a classics master at Winchester, the oldest of the English public (i.e., fee-paying) schools, for nearly thirty years from 1874. An eccentric either by nature or by design, Morshead appreciated that English public schoolboys are likely to pay greater attention to those at whom they can direct derision. His fondness for quaint pronunciations was paralleled by the introduction of personal coinages, of which (it must be admitted) there is no shortage of examples in Aeschylus, too.50 The opening speech of the Morshead Prometheus (1899) may sound consciously antiquated, but is better than many: 47 48

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“The verse metres were those of both music and dance” (Raphael and McLeish 1991: xv). “Translations are not made for scholars. Scholars do not need them” (Lucas 1968: xiii). Lucas’ translations from all five Greek playwrights were inexcusably omitted in Walton (2006a). Hall and Macintosh (2005), especially Chapters 16 and 17. Stray (1996) gives an account of the satirical “Pronouncing Dictionary” published by Morshead’s students in various editions.

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O Sky divine, O winds of pinions swift, O fountain-heads of Rivers, and O thou, Illimitable laughter of the Sea! O Earth, the mighty Mother, and thou Sun, Whose orbed light surveyeth all – attest, What ills I suffer from the gods, a god!51 A sense of real dramatic interaction in the dialogue scenes of Morshead’s The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus (1899), notably the opening scene and the exchange between Prometheus and Hermes, may well have inclined Frank Benson to turn from the more recent but pedestrian George Warr to his old teacher at Winchester, before directing the first English production of Aeschylus’ The Orestean Trilogy. “Mushri” Morshead’s Oresteia was first published as The House of Atreus in 1881.52 Morshead allowed himself to relax from the original text in order to emphasize what was dramatically charged. It may still seem dated in places, but it does point to why Greek tragedy should have returned to the stage in the latter part of the nineteenth century and on into the 20th. He also includes some stage directions which, if hardly practical, at least pay lip-service to the theatrical background.53 Janet Case, the second woman translator of Aeschylus highlighted in Yopie Prins’ article on “The Sexual Politics of Translating Prometheus Bound,”54 brought translation into the 20th century, not least because she was herself an actress. Closely associated with Girton College, Cambridge, she played the lead in Sophocles’ Electra in 1883, and was cast as Athena in an otherwise all-male Eumenides in the Cambridge Greek play of 1885 (both in the original Greek). She too joined the women’s suffrage movement, and at the time she was preparing her translation of Prometheus Bound, was tutoring Virginia Woolf who would later write her Times obituary in 1937.55 Janet Case’s The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus was her only translation from Greek tragedy, a comment in itself on the unique stimulus she found in the play and its statement which could be related to her own strong political sympathies. She was especially taken with the manner in which Aeschylus

51 For the Greek and other versions see the excerpts variously cited above (86–88). 52 Walton (2006b and 2016). 53 “The chorus alight from their winged cars. Enter oceanus, mounted on a griffin;” “The rocks are rent with fire and earthquake, and fall burying prometheus in the ruins.” On stage directions see Walton (2006a: 69–75). 54 Prins (2010: 169–173). 55 See Alley (1982).

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shows the Chorus of “Ocean Nymphs” taking the side of the rebel.56 There is, however, no bias here, no propaganda. Case’s translation is in prose. This is not in itself a novelty. From the multitude of nineteenth century translations there are quite enough literals to of­ fend both the playwright’s memory and the reader’s sensibility.57 Case’s prose, by contrast, which extends to the lyrics as well as to dialogue, is rather good. Her decision to place the Greek on the left page of a small pocket edition, her English on the right, has a disarming honesty. One example will have to suffice. When Prometheus is outlining the range of his gifts to the human race, he describes how naïve mortals were before he intervened to make them aware of their persecution by the gods: Men [she uses the masculine] [W]ho erst though looking vain, and listening heard not; but like dream-shapes through the long years confounded all things heedlessly. hoi prôta men blepontes eblepon matên. kluontes ouk êkouon; all’ oneiratôn alinkioi morphaisi ton makron bion ephuron eikê panta …(447–450) Compare James Scully and John Herington (1975): Men and women looking saw nothing, they listened and did not hear, but like shapes dragging out their long lives bewildered they made a hodgepodge of everything …58

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Prins (2010: 171). See Walton (2006a: 106–125), for a more detailed comparison of the virtues of prose and verse. Translators’ lines 639–644, layout as on printed page. “Mostly, however, idiomatic speech has been used to take graphic images and, without rubbing off all their strangeness, make them accessible” (Scully and Herington 1975: 24).

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Bestselling Translators

It is a coincidence that the Case translation of Prometheus was published in the same year (1905) that Gilbert Murray made a “guest” appearance in the person of Adolphus Cusins in Shaw’s Major Barbara. Murray was a formidable and influential scholar, well-known in London theatre circles from 1904 when Hippolytus, the first of his Greek translations, reached the London stage at the Lyric Theatre. Later in the year it was revived at the Court under the VedrenneBarker management, to be followed by three more plays by Euripides (The Trojan Women, Electra, and Medea) between 1905 and 1907. Murray’s Prometheus Bound was not published until 1931, by which time his printed translations had sold more than 300,000 copies, undoubtedly more than all those that had gone before, and probably since. And yet, among Murray’s considerable achievements, translation of Greek tragedy and comedy cannot be said to be the most enduring.59 One reason for this has to be his insistent use of rhyme throughout. Ingenious though some of his solutions can be, there are strained results in his Prometheus Bound: “unshakably” to rhyme with “agony”; “throne” with “one”; “dwell” with “miserable”; “taught” with “not”; “contumely” with “not I”; “son” with “wind-blown.” All might be excused were there any justification for the use of line-end rhyme in the first place, but it is a thoroughly un-Greek conceit.60 Distortions in Murray are compounded by self-conscious archaism, reminiscent of the worst excesses of Victorian romantic poets, and sounding more stilted than the eighteenth-century translations: kratos: I see a caitiff punished caitiff-wise. Come; cast about his limbs the swathing bands. kratos: horô kurounta tonde tôn epaxiôn all’ amphi pleurais maschalistêras bale. (71–72) Compare with Potter (1777):

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T.S. Eliot concluded that when Sybil Thorndike had difficulty playing Murray’s Medea, “[…] it is because Professor Murray has no creative instinct that he leaves Euripides quite dead” (1932: 64). Others have been even less sympathetic. “To rhyme Aeschylus is like rhyming Isaiah” (Hamilton 1937: 18).

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kratos: I see him honoured as his deeds deserve. But haste thee, fix this strong habergeon on him. Murray again: prometheus: Woe’s me! hermes: That is a word Zeus knoweth not. prometheus: By Time and Age full many things are taught. hermes: Small wisdom have they taught to thee withal. prometheus: True, or I ne’er had parleyed with a thrall. prometheus: ômoi hermes: [ômoi?]tode Zeus toupos ouk epistatai. prometheus: all’ ekdidaskei panth’ ho gêraskon chronos. hermes: kai mên su g’oupô sôphronein epistasai. prometheus: se gar prosêudôn ouk an’ onth’ hupêretên (980–984) Compare with Morell (1713): prom: Alas! alas! mercury: Unknown to Jove is such distressful sound. prom: It may be so; in stranger things old Time Often instructs us. hermes: – But Time hath not yet Restor’d to you due sanity of mind. prom: True; or I had not demean’d myself, To hold discourse with thee, Jove’s messenger. Murray does attempt to provide stage directions. For the opening: The scene represents a desolate landscape. At the back towers a great Rock against which stands the gigantic figure of prometheus.61 He is guarded by the two Daemons kratos and bia (might and force), who also carry the tools of hephaistos, the hammer, chains, fetters and spike of adamant. hephaistos stands a little way off.

61

He prescribes to the largely discredited and unnecessary notion that Prometheus was originally played by an actor standing behind “a gigantic wooden figure” (Murray’s note 1, 75).

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For the closing scene he suggests: A fiery thunderbolt strikes the Rock, which descends to the abyss, bearing with it prometheus and the daughters of ocean. Neither direction seems to take account of the fact that in the open Greek theatre of the 5th century bc actors came on and went off in full view of the audience. Hephaestus, Prometheus, Kratos, and Bia do have to make an entrance, the Chorus and Prometheus an exit.62 A far more reasoned and theatrically-aware approach to performance issues can be found from Edith Hamilton, the last translator whose work will be considered in this chapter. Though her translation of Prometheus Bound appeared in book-form in her Three Greek Plays (1937), the first publication was ten years earlier in Theatre Arts Monthly, the wide-ranging and respected theatre history periodical produced between 1916 and 1964.63 This submission to Theatre Arts Monthly was no one-off. Hamilton, another translator to study the classics originally in Germany where she was born in 1867, was a regular contributor to Theatre Arts Monthly in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with articles on, among other topics, Aeschylus (“The First Man of the Theatre”), Sophocles, Euripides, Comedy, “The Greek and the English Genius,” and the size of the Chorus in Greek tragedy. Her approach was less as a classical scholar than as someone who wished to make ancient plays accessible as drama. Her 1937 Prometheus Bound was published alongside Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ The Trojan Women. Hamilton reads like a theatre historian, a rarity in this field. She is aware how little is really known about the staging of Greek drama (though more now than in the 1920s), and applies the minimum of stage directions to render the play comprehensible. Yopie Prins makes a direct comparison between the language employed by Hamilton in her Prometheus and Janet Case in hers, Hamilton opting for clarity above all, and what Prins describes as “a contemporary idiom that was more distinctly American than the English translation by Case.”64 Anyone alarmed that this might suggest that Hamilton’s version anticipated the appalling Women of Trachis of Ezra Pound (1956), need have no qualms. Hamilton, in her Introduction in Theatre Arts Monthly, set out her belief that, “The Prometheus 62

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A simpler solution is that the rock was preset on an ekkuklêma (wheeled platform), which was simply withdrawn into the skênê, the earthquake being presented in dance by the Chorus (as in Euripides’ Bacchae). Hamilton (1927: 545–562). Prins (2010: 175).

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Bound is unlike any other ancient play…a psychological drama.” Though many a modem scholar and practitioner might argue the same for some of Sophocles and much of Euripides, Hamilton bases her translation on an assumption that each of the minor characters “is an individual, clearly characterized.”65 The play, nonetheless, is peopled by monsters: personifications of Force and Violence (Bia and Kratos); a four-footed bird which, Hamilton plausibly argued, underlines Ocean as a comic figure; the half-girl, half-cow Io (in Murray “Horned like the Moon,” presumably in homage to Peter Starveling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream); and a peevish Hermes, “I heard you were quite mad,” a singularly ineffective god.66 In the more substantial essay “On Translating,” included as a prelude to Three Greek Plays, Hamilton went into more detail about her approach. After some stringent criticism of Browning, Fitzgerald, and Pope, she concluded, “No, a bold word-for-word translation of a Greek play would accomplish nothing at all. The reader would not get the slightest idea what the play was about.” She then proceeded to the question of the balance between faithfulness to the text, and faithfulness to the spirit of the text.67 Despite her claim for accuracy as a priority over making her translation readable – hence lines of varying length, rather than following any strict rhythmic plan – Hamilton does come up with telling sentiments. From Prometheus: There is a sickness that infects all tyrants, they cannot trust their friends.68 enesti, gar pôs touto tê turannidi nosêma, tois philoisi mê pepoithenai. (224–225) Ocean to Prometheus (with reference to Zeus): You see, he’s savage – why not? He’s a tyrant He doesn’t have to hand in his accounts. horôn hoti trachus monarchos oude hupeuthunos kratei. (323–324) 65 Hamilton (1927: 545). 66 Hamilton (1937: 91–94) for Prometheus as “A Greek Psychological Drama.” 67 Ibid., 11–12. In a bizarre, but prescient, reference she attributes to an unknown source that Aeschylus “does somehow spoil one’s taste for twittering.” 68 Ibid.

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Compare with Gilbert Murray (1931): Stern-hearted is the king who rules us and abides no questioning.69 And Hamilton’s final lines of the play: Oh, holy Mother Earth, O air and sun, behold me. I am wronged. aithêr koinon phaos heilissôn, esoras m’ hôs ekdika paschô. (1092–1093) Compare with Gilbert Murray (1931): ’Tis here – O Earth, O Mother mine Most holy, O thou Sky divine, Whose light is shed on all, ye see? My anguish and my wrong!70 And Hamilton, in Prometheus’ opening speech against which all translations may be judged, proves to be, if not the best, up there among the best: O air of heaven and swift-winged winds, O running river waters, O never-numbered laughter of sea waves, Earth, mother of all, Eye of the sun, all-seeing on you I call. Behold what I, a god, endure from gods. It is always possible that Edith Hamilton’s own early retirement in 1922 from her post as Headmistress of Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore made the plight of Prometheus an appealing one on which to focus. What it did open up was a writing career on which she might never have embarked, and the eventual accolade of honorary citizenship of Athens bestowed on her by the King of Greece in person, in the Theatre of Herodes Atticus. In the Introduction to her Three Greek Plays Edith Hamilton wrote “Until the perfect, the final, translator comes, the plays should be perpetually 69 Murray (1931). 70 Ibid.

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retranslated for each generation.”71 I doubt, as I think Hamilton doubted, if the perfect translator ever will turn up. Perhaps we all have our own Prometheus, as we all have our own Antigone, Hamlet or Peer Gynt. Certainly the only reason for embarking on the translation of an already translated play is the belief that we can improve on what has come before. 3.6 Conclusion What emerges from this, I hope, evenhanded study of Prometheus Bound in translation, is that the appeal of the play, because of the adaptability of its context, has been for the most part constant. Today the versatility of the theme has been matched by a versatility of medium and consequent redefinition of the term “translation” in “adaptation.” In the history of Prometheus Bound in English it must be significant how many women have seen in Prometheus a myth that strikes a chord, from Lennox to Barrett Browning, Webster, Swanwick, Case and Hamilton, as Hardwick and Prins in particular have identified. None of the translators have addressed all the issues of translating a play, but they have all invited the reader, if not the audience-member, to treat Prometheus as one of the most powerful metaphors in all drama. Perhaps Berowne has it right, if slightly out of context, in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost: From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive: They are the ground, the books, the Academes, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.72 What emerges most clearly from this brief summary is how long it took for the plays of Aeschylus to be seen as more than the shining glory of a beautiful but dead culture. Not only did readers, especially those who had no Greek, come to appreciate that the plays of Aeschylus were written on mythical themes but that such myths were of significance for the manner in which they could be decoded in a whole variety of contemporary contexts. Far from being at a distance from modern life, the often gruesome tales of trauma, torture and persecution could be recognized less as poems about a dim and distant past, than live dramas, as immediate and relentlessly painful as they had been for their first audiences in the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens almost two and a half thousand years ago. 71 Hamilton (1937: 15–16). 72 Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost iv, 3, 348–350.

chapter 4

Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes: War, Women, and the Hecht/Bacon Translation Deborah H. Roberts 4.1 Introduction One of the first translations to appear in the new series initiated by William Arrowsmith in the 1970s (and currently edited by Peter Burian under the ­title Greek Tragedy in New Translations) was the collaborative version of Seven against Thebes by Anthony Hecht and Helen H. Bacon (Oxford University Press, 1973). Hecht had recently received a Pulitzer Prize for his second book of poetry, The Hard Hours (1967); Bacon was the author of a monograph (Barbarians in Greek Tragedy) and of several articles, published between 1958 and 1966, whose approach to ancient literature anticipated developments that in the early 1970s were beginning to transform the field.1 This pairing of a poet and a classicist (standard for the series, except where poet and classicist are the same person) reflected Arrowsmith’s view that “our most urgent present need is for a recreation of these plays – as though they had been written […] by masters fully at home in the English of our own times,” and that at the same time a translation must avoid “‘colonializing’ [the play] or stripping it of its deep cultural differences.”2 Arrowsmith’s goal for the series seems to suggest a mode of translation that is (in the language of recent translation theory) at once domesticating in its linguistic and chronological displacement of the source text and foreignizing in its commitment to cultural difference.3 In their introduction, Bacon and Hecht declare their own commitment to “literal accuracy, insofar as that was possible within the limitations of our own imaginations and understanding,” except in places where it seemed helpful to incorporate in the text information a modern audience might not have; they express the belief that they have not “violated the tone or dramatic intention of the play.”4 But their introduction is significantly framed by references to the 1 Hecht (1967), Bacon (1961), Bacon (1958), Bacon (1959), Bacon (1964), Bacon (1966). 2 Hecht/Bacon (1933: vii). 3 See Venuti (1995) on these approaches and their history; see also for an earlier and related formulation Schleiermacher (2012), originally published 1813. 4 Hecht/Bacon (1973: 3).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004332164_006

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context in which the translation was written, or rather to two different contexts of reception, one literary and one political, and both of these have an impact on their practice as translators. The two translators begin by noting the general (although not universal) disregard in which Seven against Thebes had been held since the 19th century, and express the hope that “the translation offered here – which is also an interpretation, as any translation must be – will help restore to the play some of the dramatic and literary interest it deserves to have even for those with no knowledge of Greek.”5 They conclude by commenting on the political situation at the time of their writing, and, in particular, the impact of the ongoing war in Vietnam on their translation: [This translation] was undertaken, finally, at a time that can be regarded as possibly the most shameful in our nation’s history; in which we have  prosecuted a war for which there can be no moral, political, or military justification. A nation can rarely redeem itself from its follies and ­errors, the cost of which in human misery is incalculable. It is our ­forlorn but continuing hope that our government may look with some charity upon the young men who thought it from the first a foolish, brutal, and dishonorable undertaking. Our commitment to the work involved in this translation has, in some measure, been colored by these feelings.6 The translation thus responds to what Bacon and Hecht perceive as the ­inadequacy of readings (both historical and contemporary) of the play; it also reflects their reaction to the futility and savagery of the ongoing war in ­Vietnam. Their interpretive and political responses together inform in a ­particularly striking way a series of passages describing the invasion and prospective violent sack of the city: specifically, they force the reader to confront the idea of rape, both as reality and as metaphor. In so doing, they give weight to the female voices that some of their predecessors dismiss as hysterical. Their attention to symbol and enigma reflects both the centrality of these modes of discourse in Aeschylus and the translators’ debt to Freud.

5 Ibid. Cf. Arrowsmith’s comment in his foreword that the translation “redeems a play ­commonly regarded as ‘minor,’” Hecht/Bacon (1973: xi). At least one reviewer pointed out that this view was exaggerated; see Stevens (1976: 179). 6 Hecht/Bacon (1973: 17). They also mention the 1967–1974 regime in Greece of the military junta.

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Previous Translations of the Play

Seven against Thebes was first translated into English by Robert Potter, who published a complete Aeschylus in 1777; a number of versions followed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, among them translations (in verse or prose) by Theodore Alois Buckley (1849), J.S. Blackie (1850), E.H. Plumptre (1868), Anna Swanwick (1873), A.W. Verrall (1886), Lewis Campbell (1890), E.D.A. ­Morshead (1908), T.G. Tucker (1908), C.E.S. Headlam (1909), Edwyn R. Bevan (1912), H.  Weir Smyth (1922), and Gilbert Murray (1935). Mid-20th century translations, preceding Hecht and Bacon, include David Grene’s 1956 translation (in the Chicago series), Philip Vellacott’s Prometheus Bound and Other Plays (1961), and versions by Peter Arnott (1968), and Christopher Dawson (1970).7 Bacon and Hecht are responding to previous scholarly work and accounts of the play for the general reader as well as to translations, but an examination specifically of the play’s translation history will provide the most helpful context for their attempted restoration and redemption of this play for readers and audiences. I begin by following the trajectory of the play’s reception by those translators who preceded Hecht and Bacon, with a selective focus on their shifting esteem for the play, their attitudes to the play’s treatment of war, their views of the shield scene, and their comments on the chorus of Theban women. Robert Potter begins the preface to his translation by lamenting the loss of the rest of the trilogy to “the ravenous jaws of time, that have devoured these precious morsels of antiquity,” and continues: It is said that Aeschylus particularly valued himself upon this tragedy: not without reason; for it has all that bold painting with which we might expect his martial genius would embellish such a subject […]. Longinus has remarked on the sublimity of the dialogue; it is worthy an experienced veteran and a brave young king arming in defence of his crown, his life, and his honour; it is worthy of Aeschylus. The characters of the Seven Chiefs that command in the attack are exquisitely marked and varied […]. The shields of six of these chiefs are charged with armorial bearings expressive of their characters, and as regular as if they had been 7 In most of these, Seven against Thebes appears as part of a collection of some or all of the works of Aeschylus; in some (Verrall, Tucker, Smyth), the translation is an accompaniment to Greek text and commentary. For a more extensive list of translations before Hecht/Bacon, see the bibliography, and see also the extensive and helpful Appendix on Greek tragedy in translation in Walton (2006a).

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­ arshalled by a herald-at-arms: the impresses are devised with a fine m imagination and wonderful propriety.8 Potter, who sees an “intrinsic beauty” in the play, is alluding to Longinus’ reference in On the Sublime to the playwright’s “most heroic imagings” (φαντασίαι ἡρωϊκώταται); he may also have in mind the description of the drama as “filled with Ares” (῎Αρεως μεστόν) in Aristophanes’ Frogs.9 For Potter what is most striking about the play is its “martial genius” and its depiction of war, with the shield scene as a particularly fine instance of the kind of display appropriate to military leaders. The next two translators, writing in the middle of the 19th century, continue to express admiration for Seven against Thebes and its depiction of war, but draw attention to its shortcomings specifically as drama. Theodore Buckley (1849) admires the “high tone of Grecian chivalry which reigns throughout,” and notes that the “­description of each warrior [in the shield scene] is not only a physical and heroic, but an ethical picture”; but the play is “doubtless an early play, and is as undramatic as the Persians.”10 J.S. Blackie, whose translation appeared in 1850, takes a similar view: the play’s “spirit is everywhere manly and noble, and instinct with the soul of the warlike action which it describes,” but its structure exhibits “the deficient skill of the early dramatists,” and the shield scene, though singled out as one of the best parts, is “epic, not dramatic.”11 A.W. ­Verrall (1887) attributes the play’s declining popularity to its “supposed want of any merit properly called dramatic,” although he argues that this judgment is ­largely based on a misunderstanding.12 This view of the play as epic rather than dramatic persists through the 19th century and beyond, both among those who admire the play and among those who see it as a lesser example of the p ­ laywright’s work. Anna Swanwick accepts the description “dramatic epos,” Lewis Campbell sees in the play “something of the grandeur, and also of the indeterminateness, of Epic poetry,” and T.G. Tucker calls it “epic put upon the stage” and reiterates the peculiarly “epic character” of the shield scene.13

8 Potter (1886: 81–82). 9 Longinus, On the Sublime, ch.15; Aristophanes, Frogs 1023; cf. the remark attributed to ­Gorgias in Plutarch, Table Talk 7.10. Many translators cite (or use without citing) variants on the expression “filled with war.” 10 Buckley (1849: x). 11 Blackie (1850: 158). 12 Verrall (1887: v, xxxvii). 13 Swanwick (1899: 194); Campbell (1906: 74); Tucker (1908: xlvii, xlix).

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The early focus on the play as a drama of war also persists, but with an i­ncreased distance from the kind of immediacy of appreciation found in ­Potter, Buckley, and Blackie. E.H. Plumptre, whose translation appeared in 1868, shares his predecessors’ view that the play is “warlike,” but observes that “the fact that [Aeschylus] was writing of a mythical, not of an actual war in which living men had taken part, robs the Seven against Thebes, indeed, of the interest which attaches to the Persians.”14 Perhaps in compensation, he suggests that the play possessed for its Athenian audience a contemporary ­relevance in its political message: opposition to the Athenian subjugation of other Greek states.15 Subsequent translators similarly seek to validate the play’s treatment of war as having a specific message or resonance, though not necessarily the same one. T.G. Tucker (1908) reads the play as supporting the policy of ­fortifying ­Athens in the years after the Persian sack of the city. E.D.A. Morshead finds the play’s appeal in its own day not in a political message but in patriotic nostalgia, imagining that the audience may have admired certain features of the play (including “the battle-fever that burns and thrills throughout”) as the work of a veteran of Marathon and Salamis.16 These readings – in contrast to Potter’s, Buckley’s, and Blackie’s admiring responses to the play’s warlike qualities – involve a search for historical meaning in something presumed to be no longer fully accessible to modern readers. Tucker draws a similar conclusion about the play’s description of the impact of war on the city’s population, something he sees as one of the elements of the play his own contemporaries lack the experience to respond to: If it seems easy for us to realise the tremors which might pass through an audience when the Chorus depicts the miseries of slaughter, desolation, and enslavement in a captured city, we still can hardly experience them with the same liveliness as a people who recognized their literal truth and to whom they were more or less imminent possibilities.17 Edwyn R. Bevan, writing at around the same time, sees the depiction of the horrors of war (rather than the idealized version of mythical warfare) as that part of the play which spoke to Aeschylus’ original audience: 14 15 16

17

Plumptre (1868: xxxvii). Plumptre (1868: xxxvii–xxxviii). Cf. Swanwick (1899: 269). Morshead (1908: xiii); C.E.S. Headlam, who calls the play “more a pageant of war than a play” also sees it as reflecting Aeschylus’ own experience of the Persian wars (Headlam/ Headlam 1909: xii, and n.1). Tucker (1908: xlviii). On the treatment of the “horrors of the battlefield” in the Seven see also Campbell (1906: xvii).

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War in the twentieth century a.d. seems to have horrors added to it which ancient warfare did not know; it is fair to remember that ancient warfare had also horrors from which modern warfare is free. When Aeschylus wrote, in the wars between the Greek city-states it was common for the people victorious to carry off into slavery the whole population of a conquered town. When, therefore, the Theban maidens in our play express almost hysterical terror at the possible fate awaiting them if the city is taken, that would have had a note of dreadful actuality to the first hearers of the play.18 Like Tucker and Bevan, Gilbert Murray emphasizes not martial glory or battlefever but what he describes as Aeschylus’ strikingly vivid, even (with the ­exception of the markedly archaic shield scene) realistic portrayal of the ­horrors of war. For Murray, however, writing after the First World War, these horrors are no longer as distant from modern experience; the chorus reminds him “of those crowds of terrified women that were to be seen during the airraids on East London.”19 Still, like many of his predecessors, he calls the play “rhetorical rather than dramatic” and sees its virtues as somehow limited by and to its treatment of war: on his view, Aeschylus misses the opportunity to do justice to the curse, to the issue of Dike (Justice) and to the problem inherent in a man’s making war against his own city. Instead: “We have here merely the vivid and unforgettable picture of the population of the besieged city, and one clearly outlined individual character.”20 Murray’s sympathetic account of the chorus’ anticipation of the city’s sack does not prevent him from belittling their behavior: they are “out of hand” and “like a mob,” interrupting each other and screaming.21 Earlier translators comment on the chorus as typical of their gender; they show “the natural t­ imidity of the female character” (Potter), their “flurry and feverish excitement” contrast with Eteocles’ “manly self-possession” (Campbell); and, in language strangely reminiscent of descriptions of female choruses in Gilbert and Sullivan, they are “a bevy of scared Cadmean maidens” (Morshead).22 Swanwick is a notable exception. Citing Hegel, she asserts that the chorus “represents in the Greek theatre the moral conscience of the age,” and she sees this play’s chorus as a

18 19 20 21 22

Bevan (1912: ix). Murray (1935: 13). Ibid., 19. Ibid., 13. Potter (1886: 82), Campbell (1906: xviii), Morshead (1908: xii).

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notable exemplar.23 They may at first appear as “timid Theban women,” but their fear results naturally from their anticipation of “the brutal outrages offered to women after the capture of a beleaguered city.”24 Swanwick stresses the wisdom of their later speeches to Eteocles and their role in supporting the two principles represented respectively by Antigone and Ismene. Indeed, she sees the chorus’ final appearance as Aeschylus’ protest against the attitudes “embodied in the insolent language addressed by Eteocles to the Chorus at the commencement of the drama,”25 and suggests that the chorus of this play might have served as an example for women’s education and the wider civic involvement of women, two causes to which Swanwick was herself committed:26 Such examples as that of the Theban women may have inspired the wise utterance of Plato, who declares that for the legislator to leave women without education, and without sufficient scope for their energies, is ­materially to cripple the power of the state.27 The trends I have noted so far persist through the middle of the 20th century. The play is still seen as lacking in action (David Grene, Philip Vellacott, ­Peter Arnott);28 the subject matter is “remote from the interest of a reader today,” (Grene) and is supposed to have derived its interest in its own day from ­political associations of one kind or another (Grene, Vellacott).29 The shield scene, once praised by Potter for its aptness and its depiction of character is now “long and static” (Vellacott) and the least successful thing about what Grene calls “this strange, archaic play.”30 “Who,” he asks, “can take seriously a play with almost no action, in which the main event is the recital of the blazonry on the shields of the Seven Champions?”31 Grene acknowledges that the play is “very powerful,” at once “undramatic” and “very theatrical,” and suggests that it is “better understood by a modern reader in the mood in which he would now attend a ritual ceremony, a church service, or a pageant such 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Swanwick (1899: 268). Ibid., 268. Ibid., 269. On Swanwick’s life and her work as a translator see Hardwick (2000c) and Prins (2017), Ch. 2. Swanwick (1899: 269). Grene (1956: 260), Vellacott (1961), Arnott (1968) 10. Grene (1956: 260), Vellacott (1961: 16). Ibid., Grene (1956: 260). Grene (1956: 260).

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as the coronation of an English monarch.”32 Vellacott and Arnott restate the centrality of war in familiar terms (the play is “full of martial spirit,” and “full of war”), but the former stresses the successful defense of the city, the second (with most early 20th-century translators) the suffering war brings.33 Grene doesn’t even mention war. Christopher Dawson, whose translation appeared in 1970, is Hecht and Bacon’s most immediate predecessor. Like them he neither dismisses the play nor limits its merits to those of a vivid portrayal of war, with more meaning for the original audience than for modern readers, and like them he provides in his introduction an extensive reading of the play. He does, however, recall earlier translations in his treatment of the chorus of women. Although he compares Eteocles’ “violent attack” on the chorus to the misogynistic speeches of Euripides’ Jason and Hippolytus, he goes on to argue that these “frantic young women” may “wreck the morale” of the city, and that “all [Eteocles] is trying to do may be undone by the irrational emotions of women.”34 In a footnote on a debated passage he refers to them as “a bunch of scared girls.”35 Translators of this play move, then, from unstinting admiration for the play to limited respect for a work they generally regard as undramatic and through a variety of conceptions of and responses to the play’s depiction of battle and siege warfare.36 The shield scene comes in for both praise and baffled dismissal. Some translators seem to regard the play’s treatment of war as indistinguishable from that of their own day (Potter); some see it as analogous to that of their own day (Murray); some find it of merely historical interest (Morshead, Vellacott); and still others find it of little interest in itself at all (Grene). Earlier translators are more likely to emphasize the play’s depiction of martial glory; later translators, its picture of the horrors of war and of conquest. The chorus of Theban women, who offer the most vivid depiction of these horrors, are frequently described as hysterical, frantic, or irrational, but may also evoke sympathy and respect.

32 Ibid. 33 Vellacott (1956: 16), Arnott (1968: 10). 34 Dawson (1961: 5). 35 Ibid., 24. Helen Bacon’s copy of Dawson’s translation includes a number of marginal comments, most often in the form of check marks to indicate agreement and exclamation points to show (I infer) strong disagreement or dismay. Dawson’s dismissive comments on the chorus get exclamation points. 36 See Paul Monaghan’s essay (“Aeschylus as Postdramatic Analogue”) in this volume on the 21st century postdramatic theater as capable of both capturing and transforming the “­pre-dramatic” aesthetic of this play and other Aeschylean tragedies.

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The Hecht/Bacon Translation

It is against this background that Hecht and Bacon present their translation. They react to the reception of the play as “undramatic,” “ritualistic,” and merely “a war story,” by offering a translation in which the play is “profoundly unified and profoundly dramatic.”37 At the same time they respond to the play as in some central sense a war story by their emphasis on “the noise of battle and the noise of lamentation.”38 The vividness with which this translation evokes the frightening prospect of defeat, especially for women, may be in part – as the introduction suggests – a reflection of the translators’ reaction to the brutality of the war in Vietnam and its effects on the civilian population. The story of the My Lai massacre, in which a company of United States infantry killed several hundred unarmed inhabitants of a village, including women (some of whom were raped), children, and old men, had become public as Bacon and Hecht were completing their work. Hecht and Bacon’s introduction makes clear their disagreement not only with general claims that the play is strange and undramatic but specifically with Murray’s claim that Aeschylus falls short in his treatment of the curse, of Dike (Justice), and of Polyneices’ invasion of his motherland. On their reading, the Fury is the play’s “organizing principle,” whose force, set in motion when Dike is violated, breaks out and subsides in four stages. (1) “Eteocles calls on her in conjunction with his father’s Curse, to defend the city”; (2) she “comes to the defense of Dike by implementing the Curse;” (3) “Dike is t­emporarily re-established [with the brothers’ deaths] and the Fury seems to subside;” (4) the play’s final scene, here (contrary to the view of most modern scholars) accepted as genuine, presents “a new outbreak of the Fury” with the decision to deny burial to Polyneices.39 The shield scene evokes the play’s central issues and is itself (as Bacon had argued in an influential article in Arion)40 an act of riddle-reading and apotropaic divination by Eteocles, whose own name is here said to constitute a kind of riddle, since it can be read both as “truly famous” and as “truly lamented.”41 The repetitive violence engendered by the Fury and the repetition of Oedipus’ riddle-reading (the instrument of his defeat of the 37 38 39 40 41

Hecht/Bacon (1973: 7). Hecht/Bacon (1973: 8). Ibid., 7. Bacon (1964). Hecht/Bacon (1973: 14, 72–73). This interpretation, in keeping with the theme of significant or ominous names and supported by a change in the standard punctuation at line 8 in the Greek and by a punning reading of a supplement to the text at 830, was the subject of an article Bacon never published; correspondence preserved in the Barnard archive suggests that this was partly because of its length and partly because Bacon’s argument

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Sphinx) by his son Eteocles coincide with and entail the repetition of Oedipus’ incest as enacted by both sons, one seeking to invade, the other to retain possession of the motherland. Like other translators, Bacon and Hecht suggest that the play had specific historical resonances for its Athenian audience, but rather than argue for the play’s relevance to contemporary policy debates they point to the parallel between Polyneices’ return and the attempted return of the exiled tyrant Hippias in the context of the first Persian invasion in 490 bc. They cite a story first recorded in Herodotus (but possibly older) that Hippias believed his successful return was predicted by a dream in which he slept with his mother; on their reading, this would have reinforced for an Athenian audience the connection in the play between Oedipus’s act of incest with his mother and his son’s intended conquest of his motherland.42 The elements of Hecht and Bacon’s reading are clearly reflected in the translation, which does a formidable job of realizing their interpretation for the audience, often by making explicit what they see as implicit.43 The Fury (the Erinys) is mentioned at a number of points in Aeschylus’ text,44 but the Hecht/ Bacon translation also introduces the Fury where she is present in the Greek only by association: φίλου γὰρ ἐχθρά μοι πατρὸς μέλαιν’ ἀρὰ ξηροῖς ἀκλαύτοις ὄμμασιν προσιζάνει aeschylus, 695–696

Yes, for the hateful Curse of the father who should have loved me sits close by me with dry, tearless eyes. sommerstein, 695–696

It is true. The hateful Fury, the black Curse of my beloved father has picked out its meat. It settles down with dry and tearless eyes. hecht/bacon, 878–880

42 43

44

about the double meaning of Eteocles’ name was insufficiently convincing. But see ­Zeitlin (2009: 22, n. 31), who calls this reading brilliant. Hecht/Bacon (1973: 6–7). In what follows I give the Greek text from Gilbert Murray’s oct (second edition), since this is what Hecht and Bacon used; immediately after the Greek, for readers without Greek I have provided Sommerstein’s translations from his recent Loeb edition; I note places where either of the translations is using a Greek text different from Murray’s. Hecht/Bacon (1973), lines 70, 574, 700, 723, 791, 887, 976, 988, 1055 (including instances from the play’s ending, which Bacon and Hecht accept as genuine).

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Since the Fury is identified with the curse of Oedipus at line 70 (Ἀρά τ’ Ἐρινὺς πατρὸς ἡ μεγασθενής, “O mighty Curse and Fury of my father”) and since the Erinyes identify themselves as curses in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (417), Bacon and Hecht (like Potter, but no other translators I have found) can be seen as simply reminding the reader of that identification at 695–696, where Eteocles refers to the curse.45 The personification of the curse and the mention of the Fury in the very next speech also support this choice. But Bacon and Hecht add the Fury a little earlier as well, in place of the more general “god”: where the Greek has (689) ἐπεὶ τὸ πρᾶγμα κάρτ’ ἐπισπέρχει θεός (“Since the god is plainly hastening things to their conclusion”) they write, “Since the Fury brutally forces on the event.” Their stage directions, moreover, have Eteocles carry a shield on which the Fury appears, to oppose the figure of Dike on his brother’s shield.46 In these two instances, the introduction of the Fury is less clearly supported by the Greek text. Bacon and Hecht’s translation of the shield scene, in which a messenger reports the devices on the attackers’ shields, and Eteocles, commenting on these devices, assigns to each attacker a Theban champion, seeks to emphasize Eteocles’ divinatory riddle reading. His response to the herald’s report on Parthenopaeus, who carries a sphinx on his shield, ends (562) with the declaration “If the gods are willing, what I speak will be the truth” (θεῶν θελόντων κἂν ἀληθεύσαιμ’ ἐγώ); Bacon and Hecht emphasize the parallel with Oedipus by translating, “With the help of the gods, I, too, may rightly answer her riddle.” They also draw attention to the use of the word πρόβλημα both of Parthenopaeus’ shield (540) and of Eteocles’ own armor (676); and their translation suggests a play on words in which this noun evokes along with its obvious meaning (something put in front as a defense) an unusual (and unlikely) sense, “riddle,” attested in the Septuagint.47 Here is the second of the two passages: φέρ’ ὡς τάχος κνημῖδας, αἰχμῆς καὶ πέτρων προβλήματα. aeschylus, 675–676

Give me my greaves at once, to protect me against spear and shaft.48 sommerstein, 675–676

45 46 47 48

Potter (1886) has for these lines: “My father’s curse, a stern relentless fury,/ Rolling her tearless eyes, looks on….” Hecht/Bacon (1973) stage direction and note on lines 895–896. Πρόβλημα can also have the sense of a problem in geometry or (in Aristotle) a “question as to whether a statement is so or not” (lsj). Sommerstein’s text has πτερῶν, “feather,” here in the sense of a feathered arrow, rather than πέτρων.

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Quickly, bring my armor, the masking metal riddle to ward off stones and spears. hecht/bacon, 847–848

The riddle of Eteocles’ own name, with its proposed play on meaning (“truly lamented” or “true cause of lamentation” as well as the etymologically correct “truly famed”) is introduced in the opening lines of the play (4–9) by a change in punctuation and emphasized in the translation by added repetition.49 εἰ μὲν γὰρ εὖ πράξαιμεν, αἰτία θεοῦ· εἰ δ’ αὖθ’, ὃ μὴ γένοιτο, συμφορὰ τύχοι, Ἐτεοκλέης ἂν εἷς πολὺς κατὰ πτόλιν ὑμνοῖθ’ ὑπ’ ἀστῶν φροιμίοις πολυρρόθοις οἰμώγμασίν θ’ – ὧν Ζεὺς Ἀλεξητήριος ἐπώνυμος γένοιτο Καδμείων πόλει. aeschylus, 4–9

For if we should be successful, the responsibility would be god’s; but if on the other hand disaster were to strike (which may it not!) then Eteocles’ name alone would be repeatedly harped on by the citizens throughout the town amid a noisy surge of terrified wailing – from which may Zeus the Defender, true to his title, defend the city of the Cadmeans. sommerstein, 4–9

If things go well for us, it’s because of the god. If, on the other hand, a disaster should strike (which heaven forbid) the moiling, the tidal groans, the sea-lamentation would sound the name “Eteokles” as wail and dirge all through the city. And I, Eteokles, alone the cause of weeping, Eteokles bewept, would be multiplied in the surge and raving of all your voices, 49

As Bacon explains in a note (and at greater length in her unpublished “The Name of ­ teocles”) her interpretation entails putting a dash after Ἀλεξητήριος, so that in the E ­following line ἐπώνυμος γένοιτο refers to Eteocles, not Zeus, and completes the apodosis of the condition rather than constituting a wish.

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and so prove fitly named for the city of the Kadmeians. May Zeus, Averter, forbid it. hecht/bacon, 5–17

The play on Eteocles’ name reemerges after the death of the brothers in the chorus’ response (827–831), which in this translation both confirms the meaning of Polyneices’ name and interprets Eteocles’ name in the manner he feared at the outset. ἢ τοὺς μογεροὺς καὶ δυσδαίμονας ἀτέκνους κλαύσω πολεμάρχους, οἳ δῆτ’ ὀρθῶς κατ’ ἐπωνυμίαν 50 ὤλοντ’ ἀσεβεῖ διανοίᾳ; aeschylus, 827–831

or shall I weep for the wretched, ill-starred, childless warlords who have verily perished in a manner appropriate to their names – with “true glory” and with “much strife” – because of their impious thoughts? sommerstein, 827–831

The manuscripts have in line 830 only καὶ πολυνεικεῖς, which alludes to ­Polyneices’ name, but some scholars have argued for a preceding lacuna and suggested (as in Murray’s text, given here, which follows Hermann), a supplement of some kind that refers to Eteocles’ name.51 Bacon and Hecht do not indicate their departure from Murray’s text, but in her unpublished essay,

50 51

Since the second half of this line is in the mss (as Murray recognizes in his first edition) its inclusion in the brackets here seems to be a mistake. Sommerstein accepts Hutchinson’s proposed ἐτεοκλειεῖς for the supposed lacuna, but the sense is the same as in Murray’s text. Some of those who reject the idea of a lacuna see κατ᾽ ἐπωνυμίαν as an allusion to Eteocles’ name in the sense “truly called”; see Verrall (1887) ad loc. Translators into English are divided, with most in the 19th century retaining the ms reading (Swanwick is an exception) and most in the 20th accepting a supplement (Grene is an exception). See also Lupas and Petre (1981) ad loc.

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“The Name of Eteocles,” Bacon proposes “something like κλαυτoί τ᾽ἐτύμως or ἀπoκλαιόμενoι,”52 and she and Hecht translate: or shall I instead bewail the pitiful, unkindly-godded, and hatefully misbegotten warriors; who, out of grave, unholy motives, perished in clear accordance with their names: Eteokles, true cause of weeping, And Polyneices, full of strife? hecht/bacon, 1048–1054

For them, the meaning Eteokles has tried to evade is enacted in the final lament, and like the meaning of Polyneices’ name, is shared by both brothers.53 In all the instances I have just described, the Hecht/Bacon translation clearly reflects the conviction of the translators that the play is no mere episodic account of war, and that the enactment of the curse must be understood in part as a reiteration of the story of Oedipus; the Fury is the emblem and realization of the workings of wrath and desire in this family from start to end and riddle and divination play a central narrative role. But it is in Hecht and Bacon’s depiction of the invasion of the city as a figure for and thus as a repetition of Oedipus’ act of incest that their interpretation of the drama comes together with their response to the brutality of war; the result is a particularly stark and explicit vision of the sexual violence done to women in wartime. In a series of passages that follow the chorus’ first terrified words, Hecht and Bacon evoke the actuality of rape as a corollary of conquest, the figure of rape as a metaphor for conquest, and conquest itself as a figure of incestuous sex between son and mother.54 They began by expanding the chorus’s initial appeal to the gods (109–115) in order to make plain its implications: θεοὶ πολιάοχοι χθονὸς ἴτ’ ἴτε πάντες, ἴδετε παρθένων ἱκέσιον λόχον δουλοσύνας ὕπερ· κῦμα περὶ πτόλιν δοχμολόφων ἀνδρῶν καχλάζει πνοαῖς Ἄρεος ὀρόμενον. aeschylus, 109–115

52 53 54

Bacon (n.d.:10). Hecht/Bacon (1973: 15). On the treatment of rape in the Seven against Thebes see especially Byrne (1997).

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Gods who dwell in this city and land, come hither, all of you, behold this company of maidens supplicating you to save them from slavery. A wave of men, their crests at an angle, breaks loudly over the city, raised up by the blasts of war. sommerstein, 109–115

Now all gods of this land, city’s defense look down on us, take care of this pathetic legion of suppliants, mothers, young brides, virgins who make this prayer, and stand in danger of slavery, rape, and death. The helmet crests, blown in the brilliant air, are foam-froth flung by Ares’ lustful breath. hecht/bacon, 140–145

Here all women are at risk, not just “maidens,” and the women are not just “supplicating you to save them from slavery,” as in the Greek, but “stand in d­ anger of slavery, rape, and death”; the specifically sexual threat is further underlined by the translation of πνoαῖς Ἄρεoς as “Ares’ lustful breath.” Eteocles tries to silence the women or to bring them to more hopeful speech, but in places his words have the opposite effect, and when he alludes to a saying that the gods desert a captured city, they reply: μήποτ’ ἐμὸν κατ’ αἰῶνα λίποι θεῶν ἅδε πανάγυρις, μηδ’ ἐπίδοιμι τάνδ’ ἀστυδρομουμέναν πόλιν καὶ † στράτευμ’ ἁπτόμενον πυρὶ δαΐῳ.55 aeschylus, 219–222

Never while I live may this assembled company of gods desert us, nor may I behold this city stormed through by the enemy, and people devoured by their fire. sommerstein, 219–222

55

On the textual issue in line 221 and for alternate readings (including that followed by Sommerstein) see Page (1972), Lupas and Petre (1981), Hutchinson (1985), Sommerstein (2008).

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O may I die, may I be safely dead before the gods remove from the city, before the sacred gods have fled; and may I never live to see the breaching of walls, the brutal shame of penetration, the home and shrine aflame. hecht/bacon, 265–270

Hecht and Bacon’s language here recalls Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” in its simultaneous evocation and identification of invasion and rape; the term “penetration” is simultaneously a literal description of each and a metaphor in which each stands for the other. After Eteocles’ departure for the city walls, the chorus continue to appeal to the gods and express their terror; here the prospect and then the fact of rape emerge clearly from the Greek, but Hecht and Bacon make the act more explicit and more vivid. Where the chorus (in the second strophe, 321–332) describe women (old and young) as being dragged by the hair with their clothes torn off, Hecht and Bacon’s translation elaborates the scenario of exposure and brutality; women’s torn clothes leave them with breasts bare, and the mixed uproar of the city’s sack includes not only vague “shouts” but “brutal jokes.” οἰκτρὸν γὰρ πόλιν ὧδ’ ὠγυγίαν Ἀίδᾳ προϊάψαι, δορὸς ἄγραν δουλίαν, ψαφαρᾷ σποδῷ ὑπ’ ἀνδρὸς Ἀχαιοῦ θεόθεν περθομέναν ἀτίμως, τὰς δὲ κεχειρωμένας ἄγεσθαι, ἒ ἔ, νέας τε καὶ παλαιὰς ἱππηδὸν πλοκάμων, περιρρηγνυμένων φαρέων·βοᾷ δ’ ἐκκενουμένα πόλις λαΐδος ὀλλυμένας μειξοθρόου. βαρείας τοι τύχας προταρβῶ. aeschylus, 321–332

For it is pitiful that so ancient a city should be cast down to Hades, the enslaved plunder of the spear, contemptuously ravaged and turned to flaky ashes by an Achaean man, with divine permission,

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while the women are taken captive and led away – ah, ah! – young and old together, dragged by their hair like horses, their clothes being torn off, and the city cries out as it is emptied of this wretched plunder from which rises a mingled clamour. Grievous indeed is the fate I fear! sommerstein, 321–332

Pitiful and terrible it would be to deliver so august, so famous a city to the Dark House of Death; brought down in flaking ashes, like a felled beast, rent without pity or honor by the enslaving rod, the wooden-shafted spear hurled by a fellow Hellene, backed by a god, and terrible, a pity for all these women assembled here today, the withered and white-headed, the young and fair, to be led off, like horses, by the hair, their clothing ripped, their breasts exposed to the conqueror’s view. Eviscerated, the stunned city screams. Ulooloo, Ulooloo The booty hauled away. Shouts. Brutal jokes. I quake. I dream the most terrible of dreams. hecht/bacon, 396–412

In the antistrophe that follows, Hecht and Bacon reinforce (333–341) the association they set up earlier by introducing rape as a metaphor for the sacking of the city immediately after a description of young girls undergoing a forced alternative to marriage. κλαυτὸν δ’ †ἀρτιδρόποις ὠμοδρόπων†56 νομίμων προπάροιθεν διαμεῖψαι δωμάτων στυγερῶν ὁδόν. 56

On the textual issue here see Lupas and Petre (1981), Hutchinson (1985), Sommerstein (2008). Sommerstein has ἀρτιτρόφoυς ὠμoδρόπoυς.

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τί; τὸν φθίμενον γὰρ προλέγω βέλτερα τῶνδε πράσσειν· πολλὰ γάρ, εὖτε πτόλις δαμασθῇ, ἒ ἔ, δυστυχῆ τε πράσσει, ἄλλος δ’ ἄλλον ἄγει, φονεύει, τὰ δὲ πυρφορεῖ· aeschylus, 333–341

And it is lamentable when those just reared are plucked unripe and traverse, before the lawful time, a hateful path away from their homes: I declare that even the dead fare better than they do. For a city when it is conquered – ah, ah! Suffers many disasters. One man leads another captive, or slays, or ravages with fire… sommersten, 333–341

O terrible, before a woman is ripe, without accustomed procession, accustomed song, to go the awful road from her own home under the sword’s compulsion. I say the man who dies in battle is better off than this. For when a city is doomed to armored rape, blades flash in the firelight; murderers throng the streets. hecht/bacon, 414–421

Their note comments, “The sack of the city is imagined as an inverted marriage ritual whose consummation is rape and death.”57 Finally, in the second antistrophe (363–368), the diction and physical detail of Hecht and Bacon’s translation confronts the reader with the violence and violation of sexual assault.

57

See Byrne (1997) on the relationship between rape and marriage in the play. The prospect of unwanted marriage as rape plays a role in Aeschylus’ Suppliants; see Zeitlin (1986), Zeitlin (1996).

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δμωίδες δὲ καινοπήμονες †νέαι τλήμονες εὐνὰν αἰχμάλωτον†58 ἀνδρὸς εὐτυχοῦντος, ὡς δυσμενοῦς ὑπερτέρου ἐλπίς ἐστι νύκτερον τέλος μολεῖν, παγκλαύτων ἀλγέων ἐπίρροθον. aeschylus, 363–368

Slave-girls new to suffering a captive coupling with a lucky man, for they can expect to come to nocturnal consummation with the dominating enemy the climax of their utterly wretched affliction sommerstein, 363–368

And by the rule of strife, the pale, unfamilied girl become the whore and trophy of her captor, forced to spread for the sweating soldier, triumphant, hate-inflamed. Perhaps a dark deliverance may occur in that foul bridal, the untamed violence of that battle-grounded bed. And there may come to her a species of relief, an end of tidal groans, weeping, and grief.59 hecht/bacon, 442–451

In this sequence of choral passages, Hecht and Bacon have made the reader see rape as both literal horror and horrific metaphor, and as standing in both a metonymic and a metaphoric relationship to the sack of the city, which brings 58

59

On the textual and linguistic problems in these lines and for alternative readings see L­ upas and Petre (1981), Hutchinson (1985) and Sommerstein (2008). Sommerstein here has δμωίδες δὲ καινoπήμoνες †νέαι/τλήμoνες† εὐνὰν αἰχμάλωτoν. The conclusion of this passage includes the problematic word ἐπίρρoθoν e0pi/rroqon whose usual meaning (helper) seems difficult here; some translators take Aeschylus to be envisioning death as a release. See on this problem Lupas and Petre (1981), Hutchinson (1985) and Sommerstein (2008).

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about and is identified with the experience of the conquered women.60 The emphatic identification of rape and invasion not only seeks to bring home to the audience the realities of war but also lends strength to Bacon and Hecht’s reading of the working out of the curse as a replaying of Oedipus’ incest. This reading is made most explicit in two passages in the shield scene. In describing Amphiaraus, the one good man of the Seven, the herald cites this unwilling attacker’s warning to Polyneices. The language of Hecht and Bacon’s translation of lines 584–586 suggests not only that the invasion is a repetition of Oedipus’ incest but also that it replaces marriage with rape. μητρός τε πηγὴν τίς κατασβέσει δίκη, πατρίς τε γαῖα σῆς ὑπὸ σπουδῆς δορὶ ἁλοῦσα πῶς σοι ξύμμαχος γενήσεται; aeschylus, 584–586

What claim of justice can quench the mother-source, and if your fatherland is conquered by the spear thanks to your incitement, how can you expect it to be your ally? sommerstein, 584–586

What natural or divine law, what Dike, could sanction the quenching of the maternal spring and source of your life? How can your mother land, wife to your father, ravaged by your lust and looming spear, accept and espouse you? hecht/bacon, 722–727

The report that follows, on the fateful seventh attacker, represents Polyneices as fully aware of the implications of his act, since the image of Dike on his shield sexualizes possession and makes plain the equation of conquest and incest (646–648): Δίκη δ’ ἄρ’ εἶναί φησιν, ὡς τὰ γράμματα λέγει· “Κατάξω δ’ ἄνδρα τόνδε, καὶ πόλιν 60

See also the chorus’s response (452–456) to Capaneus’ threat during the shield scene; the Greek expresses their fear of being forcibly taken from the girls’ quarters (πωλικὰ ἑδώλια); Hecht and Bacon sexualize the language, so that the attacker “mounts the house in bestial lust” and the girls’ quarters become “my penetralia, my dark and sacred room.”

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ἕξει πατρῴαν δωμάτων τ’ ἐπιστροφάς.” aeschylus, 646–648

And as the writing proclaims, she says that she is Justice, “and I will bring this man back from exile, and he will possess his father’s city and the right to dwell in his home.” sommerstein, 646–648

“I shall bring this man to his harbor and he shall enjoy his father’s city, shall tumble and make free with his house.” hecht/bacon, 803–810

There is a final confirmation of this reading, and an acknowledgment of the psychoanalytic perspective that informs much of Bacon’s work, in a slight but telling verbal shift at lines 832–833, in which the chorus is responding to the brothers’ deaths; what other translators describe as the curse of Oedipus, Hecht and Bacon call “the Oedipal Curse:” ὦ μέλαινα καὶ τελεία γένεος Οἰδίπoυ τ’ Ἀρά,

aeschylus, 832–833

O black, fulfilled curse of the family and of Oedipus! sommerstein, 832–833

O black, conclusive prayer of Laios’ race, Oedipal Curse, O dark. hecht/bacon, 1055–1056

4.4 Conclusion Bacon and Hecht’s translation was nominated for a National Book Award and was in general well received in both classical journals and literary reviews.61 61

For a selection of reviews see Cameron (1975), Dimock (1974), Elliott (1974), Knox (1979), Lloyd-Jones (1974), Stevens (1979); for particularly negative reviews see Spackman (1975) and Taplin (1976).

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Reviewers commented on the translation as “exciting reading,” as “technically dazzling as well as deeply moving,” and as “forceful and idiomatic and also surprisingly close to the original.”62 But although many reviewers were willing to see the translation as true to what Aeschylus meant, if not exactly what he said, they questioned some particulars of the interpretation (the “masking metal riddle” of Eteocles’ armor, the proposed word play in his name, the hypothetical Fury on his shield) as realized in the translation and stage directions, and were in some cases disconcerted by the amount of interpretive expansion and elaboration in passages such as those I have noted here.63 Bacon and Hecht describe their translation as going beyond the literal only in order to make clear what readers might not otherwise understand; but their expansions go well beyond the providing of information, and beyond the expansion that is in general typical of translation, given the tendency of translators to clarify through elaboration.64 They may have been motivated in part by the desire to make their translation suitable for performance, since audiences have no access to explanatory footnotes; they may also be compensating both for the loss of a particular cultural and literary context in which words had a different weight and for the absence of modes of expression specific to the ancient Greek theatre. In his review of this translation, Bernard Knox (commenting on one of the passages discussed above), suggests that “the shock effect of […] ‘whore’ provides an English equivalent for the Greek’s re-creation, in relentlessly formal metrical patterns, of the waste and horror of the city’s fall,” and that Hecht (lacking music, dance, and the tradition of ritual mourning), must make his words “work three times as hard.”65 But Hecht and Bacon are not only concerned to clarify what they take to be the play’s central patterns of signification and to compensate for lost theatrical resources, especially those associated with the chorus. They also seek to confront the readers of their day directly and forcefully with what the chorus’s terror anticipates. The emphasis on wartime violence and violation in many of the passages we have considered here recalls the centrality of human suffering in Hecht’s body of poetry as a whole. His military service at the end of the Second World War exposed him not only to combat but also to newly-revealed cruelties; he participated in the liberation of one of the Nazi concentration camps, and critics have commented on his concern as a poet with “the special

62 63 64 65

Cameron (1975) 205, Knox (1979) 61, Stevens (1976: 179). Cameron (1975) 205, Stevens (1976) 179, Knox (1979) 62, Lloyd-Jones (1974: 1221). See on expansion as one of the “deformations” of translation Berman (2012: 246). Knox (1979: 61). On issues in translation for performance, see especially Walton (2006).

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horrors” of the 20th century.66 In her introduction to Tradition, Translation, Trauma: the Classic and the Modern, Jan Parker notes that sometimes “translation’s task is to bear witness to trauma.”67 Free to evoke for their readers the trauma of wartime rape in ways that were not open – given the social taboos on sexual content and language – to their predecessors in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Hecht and Bacon make the prospect (and memory) of that trauma explicit. By this explicitness they not only attempt to bridge the cultural divide that earlier translators may note but do not directly address in their translations, but to bear witness as well to the ongoing trauma of the war in Vietnam. In this respect their translation recalls Louis McNeice’s translation of Agamemnon, whose reworking of Aeschylean trauma Lorna Hardwick discusses in this volume as resonant with the recent trauma of the First World War.68 If, however, their translation emphasizes and elaborates on the text’s violence to convey and bear witness to trauma, Hecht and Bacon do not conceive of themselves as thus doing violence to the Aeschylean text; on the contrary, they seek to heal and to repair; they thus describe themselves in their introduction as “hoping to restore to the play some of the dramatic and literary interest it deserves to have.”69 Arrowsmith uses the same term – restore – to describe their accomplishment: “What Hecht and Bacon have restored is not only a true and powerful tragedy (in place of the flawed episodic set-piece of the handbooks), but the feeling and thought on which that tragedy rests.”70 Both translators and editor thus see this version as giving back something that had been lost to 20th-century readers and audiences. But the expression they use also recalls those projects of restoration – especially in architecture and the visual arts – that freely reconstruct on the basis of a particular understanding and that thus in retrospect most tellingly reveal the impact of the context of reception. For readers in the 21st century, this powerfully interpretive translation is clearly a product of its own time: in its political sensibilities, in its psychoanalytic inflection, in its open acknowledgment of sexual violence, and in its critical attention to ambiguity and interpretation. The fact that (in Charles Martindale’s well-known words) “meaning […] is always realized at the 66

67 68 69 70

Leithauser (1989: 4). See also other essays in Lea (1989), In light of these horrors, it is ironic that some earlier translators, such as Bevan and Tucker, saw the chorus’ fears as unlikely to resonate with modern audiences. Parker and Matthews (2011: 18). “Voices of Trauma: Remaking Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in the Twentieth Century.” Contrast Jan Parker’s comments on the use of “disruptive, dismembering translation…to animate or express political discourses” (Parker and Matthews 2011: 18). Hecht/Bacon (1973: 3, xi).

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point of reception”71 means that each era creates its own version of an ancient text – and this is most literally true of translation. Still, the perspective granted to translators by virtue of their own temporal and cultural situation can help both to uncover the previously unnoticed and to speak to later times and readers whom the text reaches in its remade form. Seven against Thebes was already ceasing to be a neglected text as Hecht and Bacon were writing; but elements in the political and social context of their writing remain unhappily familiar. Their translation, a work of restoration that is very much of its own day, creates a Seven against Thebes that might now speak to a time when nations continue to pursue wars with no “moral, political, or military justification” and when rape is not only an adjunct to conquest but a weapon of war. This chapter is based on a paper that was given at the meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, as part of the panel, “Honoring the Scholarship of Helen H. Bacon,” organized by Barbara Pavlock. I am grateful to the organizer and participants for their comments and questions and to Aryeh Kosman, Seth Schein, and the editor and anonymous reviewers of this volume for their helpful criticisms. 71

Martindale (1993: 3).

chapter 5

Aeschylus in the Balance: Weighing Corpses and the Problem of Translation Rush Rehm 5.1 Introduction In the famous agôn between Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes’ Frogs, Aeschylus proposes that Dionysus weigh out his verses against those of Euripides (Ra. 1365–1367). Comparing the contest to weighing cheese (1369), the god agrees, and a large balance [stathmos 1365, 1381] appears onstage. On the first go, Euripides speaks the opening “winged words” from his Medea – “Would that the Argo had never winged over the sea.” However, Aeschylus’ pan sinks ­lower with a line from his (lost) Philoctetes about the river Sperchios, p ­ rompting ­Dionysus to liken the poet to a merchant who soaks his wool to make it heavier and thus able to weigh down the scales. On the second a­ ttempt, ­Euripides’ line  – “Persuasion has no other shrine but language” – proves no match for Aeschylus’ “Alone of the gods death loves no gifts” from his (lost) Niobe. As ­Dionysus explains, Aeschylus’ pan dips lower [repei, 1393] because death is much heavier than the ethereal language of persuasion. In the final trial, Euripides makes a mighty effort to “talk tough” with his verse of tragic poetry – “he seized an iron-clamped mace in his right hand” – but Aeschylus’ massive “chariot on chariot, corpse on corpse” (from his lost Glaukos of ­Potniae) easily wins (Ra. 1365–1410).1 Aristophanes’ comic invention draws on the everyday practice of weighing cheese and wool, but the scales that his Aeschylus asks for also suggest the weighing of human fates found in Homeric epic.2 Fulfilling his promise to ­Thetis to make the Greeks suffer in battle, Zeus weighs out the fates of the Trojans and Greeks, and the death-day of the latter proves heavier (Iliad 8.69-74). In an almost exact reversal near the end of the poem, Zeus weighs out  the fates of Achilles and Hector, and the Trojan’s pan dips lower (Iliad 22.209-213). 1 Aristophanes sets up the contest earlier in the play, when the household slave of Pluto (­frequently referred to as Aiakos, but see K.J. Dover, (ed.), Aristophanes, Frogs (Oxford, 1973: 50–53)) tells Xanthias, “Amazing things will come into play here. / Yes indeed – the art of poetry will be weighed out in scales!” (kai gar talantôi mousikê stathmêsetai, Ar. Ra. 796–797). 2 C.H. Whitman, Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cambridge, ma, 1964: 243).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004332164_007

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These epic passages set the pattern for later occurrences in Greek literature, where “the sinking down of the heavier pan in the scale means death.”3 In ­Aristophanes’ Frogs, however, the heavier pan indicates the opposite, not defeat and death but victory for Aeschylus and his ultimate release from Hades back to the world of the living. In their chapter, Hanink and Uhlig have more to say about the Aeschylus’ “afterlife” in old comedy. Aristophanes also may be referring to Aeschylus’ lost Psychostasia (Weighing of the Souls) mentioned by Plutarch (Moralia 16f-17a). In Homeric fashion, Aeschylus’ title refers to Zeus’ weighing the fates of Achilles and Memnon (like Achilles, a short-lived son of a goddess), who meet in battle at Troy. Although no identifiable fragments of the play survive, several Attic vases depict scenes of the weighing out of these combatants’ souls, perhaps reflecting ­Aeschylus’ original staging of Psychostasia.4 We have better evidence for a relevant ­weighing scene in Aeschylus’ lost Phrygians, or The Ransom of Hector. There, Achilles weighed Hector’s corpse in the scales, balanced by the gold ransom brought by Priam. This scene takes up the Homeric passage (Il. 22.346-54) in which Achilles vows he will not return the body for burial even if Priam were to offer Hector’s literal weight in gold.5 Whatever its inspiration, Aristophanes’ use of on-stage scales – to weigh out spoken verses and to decide the fate of humans already in the underworld – provides a multi-layered comic version of an (epic-influenced) Aeschylean tragic theme. The scene in Frogs encourages us to consider references to the balance in Aeschylus’ extant plays, especially where the scales are linked to death and corpses. In the process, I will confront some intractable issues facing a translator or adapter. How does one convey the idea of a balance in a digital world,

3 A.F. Garvie, (ed.) Aeschylus, Persae (Oxford, 2009, line 346). See Iliad 16.658, 19.224-5, 12.432-38, also discussed in Garvie’s insightful commentary. More generally, J.V. Morrison, “­Kerostasia, the Dictates of Fate, and the Will of Zeus in the Iliad” Arethusa 30/2 (1997): 276–296. 4 A.H. Sommerstein, (ed.), Aristophanes, Frogs (Warminster, 1996, line 1365). O. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977: 431–433), argues that Zeus did not appear on stage in Psychostasia, nor were there on-stage scales. For a different view, see C. Sourvinou-Inwood, Tragedy and Athenian Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003: 463–464). The scene of Zeus’ weighing the souls of Achilles and Memnon occurs on Attic vases as early as 540, but there are also mid-5th century examples: limc I.1, 172–175, and I.2, pl. 797–805 (“Achilleus”), and VI.1, 451–453, and VI.2, pl. 14–25 (“Memnon”). See also J. March, Cassell Dictionary of Classical Mythology (London, 1998), “Memnon,” 251. 5 See A. Sommerstein, (ed.), Aeschylus iii, Fragments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008: 262–269); also scholia to Iliad 22.351, and E. Frankel, (ed.), comm., and trans., Aeschylus, Agamemnon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950, line 438).

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which has virtually abandoned comparative weighing (an analog technology) for the almost instantaneous totaling of digitalized information,6 processes that bear little relationship to the idea of a scale that compares things to each other or to a standard weight.7 Even more importantly, how does a translator evoke the reality of dead bodies, given that many contemporary societies ­(including my own) find the reality of dying and death repellant and either make it a graphically intriguing visual event or strive to keep it out of sight?8 In Aeschylus’ day, family members prepared a kin’s corpse for burial, oversaw the laying out of the body (prothesis), and handled all other aspects of the funeral ritual. The dead remained “in the family,” so to speak; they were not farmed out to experts (morticians, funeral homes, crematoria, etc.) as they are now, pawns in the enormously profitable business of death.9 Moving from death-ritual to death in combat, ancient sources indicate that Aeschylus fought against the Persians at Marathon and also (perhaps less convincingly) 6 Although we occasionally meet some form of balance-scales (for babies in the hospital, in doctor’s offices, and in old-fashioned gyms – usually “steelyard” scales rather than simple balances), most weighing in the developed world uses digital weigh scales. In these devices, a scale structure contains (covers) one or more load cells, consisting of one of more strain gauges. These gauges signal the transformation or deformation of some material (usually metal) and convert that deformation into an electronic signal, which in turn generates a numerical figure corresponding to the “weight” of the object placed on the scale. Lost in the process of digital weighing is any sense that one material object is compared to, and ­balanced against, another. 7 To be sure, the idea (and image) of balance scales continues to be useful. A recent op-ed about home evictions in the New York Times (November 30, 2012, A27), “Tipping the Scales in Housing Court,” includes the drawing of a large balance scale. In one pan, small (poor peoples’) houses and trailers rise high (fewer lawyers, less power, more evictions), while large, wealthy homes tip the opposite pan down (more money, more lawyers, fewer evictions). Imagine the difficulty of the author presenting this image using digital weigh scales (previous note). 8 Contemporary films and television often celebrate the violence associated with killing, but in a way that removes it, and the bodies involved, from the real world. The report from the us Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Children, Violence, and the Media (September 1999), ­concluded that by the age of 18, a child living in the United States will have seen 16,000 ­simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence. With the increased popularity of video games, the numbers have certainly risen, although no full-scale study seems to have been undertaken since 1999. 9 On funeral rites and family roles in 5th-century Athens, see R. Rehm, Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994: 21–29). For the business of death in the contemporary United States, see Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death Revisited (New York: Vintage Books, 2000).

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at Artemisium, Salamis, and Plataea.10 As with the other tragedians, his plays frequently deal with death on the battlefield, and these as well as other ancient sources indicate the violent, hand-to-hand, blood-drenched nature of ancient Greek warfare.11 One must assume that tragic references to combat and wartime death carried a sensory and emotional power for the original audience that most moderns cannot – and would not wish to – imagine, as Garvie notes in his chapter on editing Aeschylus. In Dominion of the Dead, Robert Harrison reflects on another contemporary change affecting Americans’ attitude towards the dead, a transformation which he believes helps to account for a sense of groundlessness and loss of place: For the first time in millennia, most of us don’t know where we will be buried, assuming we will be buried at all. The likelihood that it will be alongside any of our progenitors becomes increasingly remote. From a historical or sociological view this is astounding. Uncertainty as to one’s posthumous abode would have been unthinkable to the vast majority of people a few generations ago. Nothing speaks quite so eloquently of the loss of place in the post-Neolithic era as this indeterminacy.12 Harrison’s observations speak indirectly but tellingly to the problem of conveying basic realities in Aeschylus’s world, in particular the role of the dead as it affects the living. Without a sense of the place of the dead, and our own place with the dead, we resemble the old men in the Chorus of Agamemnon, “­wandering, a dream in the daylight” (Agamemnon 82). As is often the case, the challenge of translating Aeschylus is not what gets lost “in translation” (a linguistic/poetic problem), but what already has been lost to the society doing the translating (a cultural problem). I know of no way to avoid that challenge, nor do I have any answers for it – although the theatre may offer some help, which I will suggest at the end of the chapter. But first let us explore some passages relevant to the question, so that we may better 10

11 12

Biographical information about Aeschylus remains scanty and much of it suspect. See S. Radt, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, Vol. 3, Aeschylus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985: 58–66); A. Haigh, The Tragic Drama of the Greeks (Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 1896: 46–60) is still useful; see also M.R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981: 67–74). See V.D. Hanson, (ed.), Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience (London: Routledge, 1993), passim, but esp. J. Lazenby, “The Killing Zone” (1993: 87–109). R.P. Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003: 31).

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understand what is at stake – and in the balance – when Aeschylus evokes and exposes the dead. Weighing involves comparing as accurately as possible the mass of two ­objects, an activity essential to many forms of commerce, as it enables the peaceful and confident exchange of a multitude of goods. Before more ­accurate means were developed, humans held things in both hands, implicitly comparing their relative weights. With the invention of the balance – consisting of scales with equal arms and two pans – hands weighing things became irrelevant. We may contrast space and distance measurement, where the body provided the point of departure for much longer.13 In the Mediterranean, the balance (stathmos in Greek) dates back at least to the second millennium bc. In Greece and elsewhere, it was used for weighing just about anything that could fit into the scales, and it played an important role in the gradual standardizing of the weights, and corresponding values, of coinage.14 Given that the equilibrium of loads is indicated when the beam of the balance remains perfectly horizontal, the image of balanced scales became associated with ideas of evenhandedness, equity, and – eventually – justice.15 Using derivatives of the verb repo, “sink or incline the scale,” Aeschylus ­frequently – albeit indirectly – uses the image of a balance as a metaphor for thinking and decision-making. He applies the term dichorropôs16 (always with a negative – “not with the scales wavering”) to describe clear or decisive mental acts, reflecting decisions or conclusions that “don’t oscillate,” but which ­possess clarity and certainty without wavering or ambiguity. In Supplices, ­Danaos i­nsists that the Danaids offer prayers and sacrifices to the Argives as

13 14 15

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B. Kisch, Scales and Weights: A Historical Outline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965: 1–7 and 26–51). See R. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994: 199–206); also R.S Stroud, “An Athenian Law on Silver Coinage” Hesperia: 43/2 (1974): 157–188. Consider, for example, the concept of isonomia in 5th-century Athens. Ideas of ­equality and balance seem inherent in the term, summarized by John Lombardini, “Isonomia and the Public Sphere in Democratic Athens,” History of Political Thought (Summer 2013): 323–420. “[I]mplicit in the concept of isonomia is the idea that the equal balance of forces it represents produces a well-ordered political regime. This line of reasoning is connected with the argument, found in Greek medicine, cosmology, and social and political thought, that equality produces harmony and mitigates stasis.” The adverb derives from the verb repein, “preponderates” in the evocative rendering of W.W. Merry, (ed.), Aristophanes, Frogs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905, line 1393). The verb is used in the Homeric passages cited in the text for weighing of souls, and in many mundane and commercial contexts.

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their saviors “ou dichorropôs,” “without any wavering” (Supplices 982).17 In Agamemnon, Cassandra uses the same term to describe her fellow Trojans, all of whom mocked her prophecies “ou dichorropôs,” “without exception,” “­unwaveringly” (1272).18 Aeschylus introduces imagery of balancing scales earlier in Agamemnon, in the famous (and famously complex) choral hymn to Zeus in the parodos: Weighing all things in the balance [epistathômenos], I am unable to liken him [Zeus] to anything but Zeus, if I am truly to cast off the vain weight of grief from my thoughts. agamemnon 163–167

Richard Seaford provides a relevant gloss: … a statement of his incomparability (nothing may be likened to Zeus, except Zeus) … becomes, with the image of weighing, the impossibility of equivalence … . If the chorus are to be rid of the weight from their mind, not even all things put on the scale will be enough. Only Zeus will be enough, who is, because set apart from all material things, commensurable with anguish in the mind.19 Aeschylus confronts the impossibility of measuring the immeasurable (grief) by appealing to the grandeur and magnitude of Zeus himself, the only way to balance the scales. Later in the play, Aeschylus employs the metaphor of weighing to decision-making and to the (apparently) different fates measured out to the Greeks and the Trojans. Consider Clytemnestra’s extraordinary evocation of the sack of Troy (­320–350). She begins by stressing how different the fates of the Greeks and the Trojans are: “Pour oil and vinegar in the same jar – / they draw apart 17

18 19

In the Chorus’ prayer to Zeus in the parodos of Agamemnon, Aeschylus employs the same metaphor of “weighing thoughts” or “thinking things through,” using a form of the verb for “weighing out” that Aristophanes picks up in Frogs (above note 1). For other occurrences, see Supplices 605, 982; Agamemnon 349, 815, 1272. R. Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004: 303). His discussion of incommensurability (301–304) bears directly on the ­questions raised in this essay. See also D. Raeburn and O. Thomas, The “Agamemnon” of Aeschylus; A Commentary for Students (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011: 84–86).

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[­dichostatount’] like enemies […]” (322–323). Clytemnestra contrasts the prospects facing the victims (the survivors clinging to the bodies of the dead and facing a future of slavery or worse, a subject treated in Deborah Roberts’ chapter on the Bacon/Hecht translation of Aeschylus’ Septem) with the good ­fortune of the victors (freely roaming the city, enjoying the spoils of conquest). She wishes that the good fortune that has come to the Greeks may prevail ou dichorropôs (349), “with no ambiguity,” “without wavering,” or, perhaps, “with nothing to counterbalance it.” At this point in the play, we might think that the balance imagery indicates a clear distinction between victor and victim, the scale pans “drawing apart like enemies” much as the scales do in Frogs. However, Clytemnestra’s warning that the Greeks must not succumb to excess in their triumph gives us pause: Let no passion make them ravage what they should not, conquered by what they have won. They face a long home journey, doubling back on their course, to win a safe return. And even if they honor the gods and make it home, the agony of the dead may wake and fresh evil break out … agamemnon 343–347

Clytemnestra undermines her wish for certainty – ou dichorropôs – in the Greek victory. By emphasizing the inevitable “doubling-back” of the Greek fleet, the prospect that hubris will lead to divine punishment, and the fear that the anguish of the slaughtered will unleash new suffering on the living,20 she implicitly recalls past violence and projects its outbreak in the future. While the scales of fate appear to have moved unequivocally in favor of Agamemnon and his army, we cannot miss the suggestion that a counter-balance lies ahead. Indeed, the very idea of weighing by using a balance depends on finding an equivalent “weight” in the other pan of the scale. That notion finds its expression in the next scene, with the Herald’s account of the Greek’s sacrilegious destruction of Trojan holy sites (525–529), the ten-year horror for the Greek 20

As D. Page, (ed.), Aeschylus, Agamemnon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, lines 345–347) observes, “By pêma tôn olôlotôn [‘anguish of the dead’], Clytemnestra refers to Iphigeneia; the Chorus understand her to mean the dead at Troy […].” Cassandra points out still other dead whose anguish will haunt the offspring of Atreus, namely Thyestes’ children. Whatever lies behind Clytemnestra’s utterance, the dead indeed undermine the certainty of Agamemnon’s triumph, shifting the scales of his fate in the balance.

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soldiers (555–562), and the god-sent storm that destroyed most of the Greek fleet on its return (648–573). On his arrival home, Agamemnon describes the gods’ decision to give the Greeks victory, using the balance/weighing metaphor to suggest the unwavering decision-making of a jury voting to arrive at its verdict: Hearing no oral pleas for justice, the gods made their verdict clear: manslaughter and the death of Troy. Without wavering [ou dichorropôs] they cast their ballots into the urn of blood; at the other urn hope lingered, but no hands would fill it. agamemnon 813–817

In this passage, Aeschylus exploits the web of legal language and metaphor that runs through the trilogy, culminating in the trial of Orestes in Eumenides. There, twelve Athenian jurymen walk between two urns set up in the orchestra. Placing their hands inside the urns, each man keeps his vote hidden from view by dropping his pebble in the urn for conviction or for acquittal.21 As suggested in Agamemnon’s description of the gods’ voting, the arms of the Athenian jurists lingering over the urns resemble the arms of the balance “weighing out” justice for Orestes, choosing between “the urn of blood or hope,” to pick up the earlier metaphor. We find a similar association of voting and weighing-in-the-balance in Supplices. Danaos reports that the Argives voted “ou dichorropôs” (“without wavering”) to help the Danaids, as “the air bristled with raised right hands / in a full assembly” (605–608). This passage emphasizes public voting in a democratic assembly, rather than the “secret ballot” for jurists in Eumenides who constitute the first homicide court. In Supplices, hands are lifted for all to see; in the Oresteia, hands are held over two urns, with the pebble dropping unseen into one of them. Lest the association of balancing scales, voting, and judicial verdicts seem forced, consider Aeschylus’ frequent depiction of justice as holding a balance. Appealing to Pelasgos for help, the Danaids argue that “Zeus, related by blood to both sides, oversees them both / with his balance inclined one way [heterorrepês], distributing punishment on the wicked, as is fitting, / and righteousness 21

For a description of the actual voting process in the play, see A.J. Podlecki, (ed.), Aeschylus, Eumenides (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1989: 208). For its close parallel in Athenian law courts, see D.M. MacDowell, The Law in Classical Athens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978: 252).

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on those who uphold the law” (402–406).22 In the parodos of Agamemnon, the Chorus asserts that Justice (Dikê) tilts the scales one way or the other: “Justice inclines the scales [epirrepei] so that we learn by suffering” (250–251). In Choephoroi, the Chorus observe that “the scale of Justice keeps close watch, / falling swiftly on some still in the light; / while on others sorrows wait, / as justice keeps swelling /, taking its time in the twilight” (61–65).23 These passages help us better understand Agamemnon’s description of the gods’ verdict on Troy and its relationship to the trial of Orestes. At Troy, divine justice is delivered (in Agamemnon’s view) with unwavering certainty and unanimity. Given the apparent clarity regarding the fate of Troy, the “wavering” of the jury at Orestes’ trial in Eumenides indicates how problematic determining his innocence or guilt has become. The human votes are equal for conviction and acquittal, and Athena must introduce her “casting ballot” to exonerate Agamemnon’s son.24 Following the verdict and Orestes’ departure for Argos, the Furies threaten to destroy Athena’s city. The goddess placates them by offering a place of honor in Athens, again invoking the image of balancing scales: “But if you do not want to stay, / how unjust it would be to bring the scale down [epirrepois] against this city, / spreading wrath and anger and harm on the people” (­Eumenides 886–890). Athena combines the idea of weighing out fate (doom on her city) with that of distributing justice. Although the Furies do not prevail in Orestes’ trial, Athena insists that these old goddesses are essential to the workings of both destiny and civic justice: Powerful are the Furies among the gods, both above and below. And for humans, they work their will fully and clearly: for some, rejoicing; for others, life blinded by tears. … Do them great honor and your eminence will shine forth, leading your land and city on the straight path of justice. eumenides 950–955, 993–995

22 23 24

Later the Chorus appeal to Zeus in similar fashion: “Yours are the balance-scales. / What is there without you / that comes to fruition for mortals?” (Supplices 822–825). The passage is corrupt, but my version gets the basic meaning; see A.F. Garvie, (ed.) A ­ eschylus: Choephori (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, lines 61–65). On the voting outcome in Eumenides, see Podlecki (1989, lines 211–213).

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Athena’s “balancing act” – acquitting Orestes and incorporating the Furies into Athens – offers a restorative version of Clytemnestra’s implicit “balancing” of Troy’s defeat with the dangers that face the triumphant Greeks on their voyage home.25 Even before the Chorus knows of the storm that destroys the Greek fleet, or of Clytemnestra’s plan to murder her husband, they acknowledge that Zeus inflicts similar fates on both sides in the conflict: Soldiers massed, broken to their knees, fixed in the dust. Spears crack! a first offering, the same, the same Greeks and Trojans. polla palaismata kai guiobarê, gonatos koniaisin ereidomenou diaknaiomenês t’ en proteleiois kamakos, thêsôn Danaoisi Trôsi th’ homoiôs. agamemnon 63–67

We find a similar move from diametrically out-of-balance to tragically ­mirrored fates in Seven against Thebes. At the outset Eteocles proclaims, “Up to this ­moment, the gods incline the scales [repei] (21) towards our city’s cause.” The Theban leader correctly understands the will of the gods, for Thebes does indeed survive the Argive invasion (792–799). However, Eteocles and his brother Polyneikes end up all-too-equally balanced in death [houtôs ho daimôn koinos ên amphoin agan], each slain by the other (810–812). As Thalmann points out, “[…] the brothers are spoken of together as a pair. They have been allotted equal fate, and the presence of their bodies, together, stresses this ghastly impartiality.”26 We find this pattern time and again in Aeschylus. For all the apparent “unwavering” of the balance in thinking, voting, and weighing out of fate, the dipping of one pan in the scale usually generates a counter-balance. Aeschylus’ most striking use of the balance scales occurs in the first stasimon of Agamemnon, where the Chorus imagine death on the battlefield as a ­perverse commercial transaction in which Ares exchanges the ashes of 25

26

R.P. Winnington-Ingram, “Clytemnestra and the Vote of Athena,” in Studies in Aeschylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983: 101–131), explores how the goddess is “the counterpart of Clytemnestra and serves as the poet’s final comment on her character and motives” (125). W.G. Thalmann, Dramatic Art in Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978: 101–102).

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the dead for a once-vital man. Earlier (408–428) the Chorus recount Menelaus’ pain at Helen’s departure for Troy, contrasting his singular (and markedly ­aristocratic) sense of loss with that felt by the Greek families whose loved ones never return from Troy, except as ashes in funerary urns.27 The Chorus then ­describes the war-god Ares as a trader holding his balance, exchanging the dust (cremated remains) of the dead for the living human who went to Troy: Great anguish spreads through Greece. Survivors sit in grief, their hearts cut deep home after home. They know the ones they sent off, but take back an urn of ashes instead of a man. War is the gold-changer of bodies whose balance rests on the point of the spear. Out of the fire of Troy, he sends dust that weighs heavy, soaked with tears.28 Urns swollen with ashes take the place of a man. agamemnon 429–444

ho chrusamoibos d’Arês sômatôn kai talantouchos en machêi doros purôthen ex’ Iliou philoisi pempei baru psêgma dusdakruton, antênoros spodou gemizôn lebêtas euthetous. 27

28

For a valuable discussion of class elements in the trilogy, especially as they relate to issues of justice, see P.W. Rose, Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992: 197–265). Although Aeschylus does not directly refer to the reunion and homecoming of Menelaos and Helen, his lost satyr play to the Oresteia, Proteus, dealt with Menelaus’ return from Troy. The couples’ relatively happy post-war life figures prominently in Odyssey (especially Books 4 and 17), and also in Euripides’ Helen. The fact that the ashes are much wept over, and hence heavier than they might otherwise be, may anticipate the “soaked verse” that Aeschylus reads into his scale pan in ­Aristophanes’ Frogs.

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This lyric passage calls to mind a fragment from Heraclitus: “All things are an equal exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods are for gold and gold for goods” (puros te antamoibê ta panta kai pur hapantôn hokôsper chrusou chrêmata kai chrêmatôn chrusos, dk B90). As Andrea Nightingale explains, “Heraclitus refers to the ‘interchange’ of material opposites in the cosmos, while also identifying Fire as the universal standard against which all things are measured.”29 The Aeschylean passage also exploits the idea that gold represents the universal medium for exchanging goods (chrusamoibos 437), while comparing the fire that extracts pure gold from ore to funeral pyres at Troy that convert corpses into ash.30 For the tragedian, however, neither gold nor fire ultimately emerges as the universal standard; rather, it is death against which the value of everything should be measured. By the end of this stasimon, the Chorus claims that the deaths of so many Greeks at Troy have unleashed the people’s anger at home against Agamemnon and Menelaus, the leaders responsible for the Achaean expedition (456– 474). Much as the Trojans come to view the arrival of Helen and Menelaus as a disaster for their city (737–749), so the Greeks eventually see the Trojan War as a nightmare, and they curse the leaders who championed it. “Lightning strikes the tallest mountain” (469–470), the Chorus announce, hinting ominously that Agamemnon himself may suffer at the hands of Zeus. Their fears prove prophetic, for Agamemnon’s triumphant return gives way to his ignominious murder at the hands of Clytemnestra. Like many of the wives and mothers left suffering at home (427–436, 445–448), Clytemnestra will not forget the death of her child – Iphigenia – killed in the service of a foreign war.31 The actions of waging and winning a foreign war have unintended consequences, for the gods and fate have a way of evening the score. On many occasions in the Oresteia trilogy we hear versions of this equalizing principle. “Who acts must suffer” (Agamemnon 1564) the horrified Chorus remind the blood-spattered Clytemnestra. Frequently these rebounding ­actions are linked to the balancing principle of justice (dikê), manifest in the 29

30

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A.W. Nighingale, “The Philosophers in Archaic Greek Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece, (ed.) H.A. Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 187). See H.W. Smith, tr. Aeschylus ii, with Appendix and Addendum by H. Lloyd-Jones (­Cambridge: Harvard University Press, rpt. 1992: 39, note to Ag. 423); Seaford (1994: 222) and (2004: 157–158) also discusses the Heraclitus passage in relationship to money (coinage) as the “new” medium of exchange, noting the analogy with Agamemnon 437–444. In her welcome to Agamemnon, Clytemnestra also evokes the experience of war for those left behind (Agamemnon 858–876, 887–894). Aeschylus seems drawn not only to the soldiers’ experience of battle (the Herald’s striking evocation of the horrors of a foreign war, 555–569) but also to the suffering of the non-combatants waiting at home for news.

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lex talionis, punishment equal to the crime. So the Chorus in Choephoroi asserts that “Justice cries out: / word for word, hate for hate, / the debt is paid. / Blow for blow, blood for blood – / who acts must suffer” (309–313). Following the murder of Agamemnon and Cassandra, Clytemnestra exults over the corpses she has paid back, but the Chorus hammer home the message that the law of retribution does not stop with any particular act of vengeance: “Blow for blow you will pay” (Agamemnon 1430). As any student of the Oresteia knows, Aeschylus presents a mirror image of this gruesome scene in Choephoroi, when Orestes stands over the bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. In both scenes, a murdered ruler lies beside his adulterous partner; the corpses are revealed from within the palace, where the murders took place, recalling earlier kin bloodshed in the house of Atreus; the killer celebrates over the victims and ­justifies their murder, until the realization that a “counterbalancing” may haunt the future. In Agamemnon, the Greek commander and a Trojan princess lie united in death, offering a theatrical equivalent to the multitude of paired corpses on the battlefield at Troy noted above, “the same, the same, Greeks and Trojans” (­63–67). In Choephoroi the exposure of the corpses of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus prepares for the emergence of the Furies, initially visible only to Orestes, but soon fully realized as the Chorus of the final play. As discussed above, Eumenides ultimately transcends the need for more corpses, replacing the twinned dead of the first two plays with the balanced votes of the Athenian jury.32 In the Oresteia, the balance-scale metaphor offered Aeschylus a means of suggesting on the earthly plane the struggle for equilibrium that also operates in the greater “cosmos.” Forces beyond the human help determine the inevitability of actions generating reactions, and Dikê (with Zeus as its champion) strives to shape those reactions towards a kind of reciprocity and even (over time) commensurability.33 The trilogy dramatizes the struggle towards a just “weighing” of crimes and punishments, one that doesn’t simply shift the ­balance from one disaster to the next. In contrast to the Oresteia, Aeschylus’ Persians seems to epitomize divine “ou dichorropôs” pure and simple. The gods punish Xerxes and his expedition in no uncertain terms, their defeat apparently representing the final 32

33

We find a simpler example of the same phenomenon near the end of Seven against T ­ hebes, when the corpses of the mutually slain sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polyneices, are borne onstage through the parodoi and mourned by the Chorus. See Taplin (1977: 69–76 and 357–359). H. Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley: University of California, 1971), especially 86–95.

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“­counterbalance” to the hubristic outrage of yoking the continents in order to enslave a free people. As the Messenger reports, “Do you think we were outnumbered in the battle? / No, it was some divine power that wiped out the army, / weighing down the scales with unequally balanced fortune [talanta brisas ouk isorropôi tuchêi]” (344–346). The Messenger finds himself using the same metaphor to explain to the Queen that his initial description of the defeat needs amplification: “Please understand – I am not yet half way through the horror: / So great was the disaster for them / that it outweighs what I’ve described twice over [dis antiksêkôsai ropêi]” (435–437).34 The phrase “gone, dead and gone” (translating oichomenôn) echoes throughout the play, emphasizing the Persians’ total defeat – soldiers, sailors, chariots, ships, imperial ambitions – by the Greeks. Unlike the Oresteia, Aeschylus here shows little interest in imagining future oscillations of the scales of history, ­except perhaps to warn anyone else against undertaking a Persian-like invasion. The defeat of Xerxes’ expedition provides a divinely sanctioned lesson regarding imperial expansion. Significantly, corpses make the case patently clear: So great will be the mass of clotted gore, spilled by the Dorian spear on the earth of Plataea, that the heaps of the dead bodies shall make known even to the third generation, a voiceless record for the eyes of mortals that mortals must not go too far. Hubris, when it has flowered fully, brings forth a crop of disaster, reaping a harvest of nothing but tears. persians 816–822

The sheer number of the dead will speak across time, manifesting the lesson that arrogance and violence generate reciprocal disaster on the perpetrators. In addition to employing a range of narrative strategies to communicate the massive Persian losses,35 the Messenger and the Chorus literally recount 34

35

Garvie (2009, lines 433–471). Adopting the metaphor, the Queen urges the Messenger to continue his tale of woe: “What is this other disaster that struck the army, / sinking the scale lower with a greater weight of misery [elthein kakôn prepousan es ta massona]?” (Persians 439–440). The Messenger then shifts his description from the Persian disaster at Salamis generally to the horrific butchery on Psyttaleia. R. Rehm, “Aeschylus,” in Space in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek N ­ arrative, Mnemosyne Supplement 339, (ed.) I.J.F de Jong (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012: 308–310).

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the dead, invoking 51 Persians by name.36 Aeschylus’ decision to name so many of the Persian dead must have suggested to the Athenian audience something of the specificity of Persian losses. In these situations, specificity matters, for grief and loss affect the human psyche most powerfully when we can associate a human face to what otherwise appears a numbing statistic.37 5.2 Conclusion Our brief examination of the metaphor of “weighing in the balance” in Aeschylus suggests that, like Homeric epic, his plays ultimately balance living beings with corpses. The votes of the gods in Agamemnon, of the Argives in Supplices, and of the Athenian jurors in Eumenides relate directly to life-and-death issues. As Orestes says at his trial, “The end has come: is it darkness [hanging] or the light of day?” (Eumenides 746). At a certain level, this stark contrast reflects tragedy’s genre-driven interest in suffering and death. But as Aristophanes retrospectively reminds us, even in the comic underworld Aeschylus (and Euripides) cannot avoid dying and the dead. Aeschylus’ corpses “have weight,” whether they lie together on the battlefield or appear in pairs on the stage. A contemporary translator’s efforts to render Aeschylus’ language or a director’s efforts to convey the power of Aeschylus’ stage-image faces serious challenges here. For the mounds of the dead in Persians, many of them named and mourned, American popular culture offers a flood of corpses that wash over movie screens and video monitors, death on death without a sense of death’s reality, or of our place in those deaths. The United States’ government provides Vietnam era-like boasts of (mostly) unnamed “terrorists,” killed by unmanned drones – the trigger pulled thousands of miles away in an air-conditioned office. Until people can feel the weight of the life-and-death decisions made in their name, and feel the dust of the dead in the balance with the living, they will remain far removed from the world that Aeschylus evokes in his plays. Barring a radical change in contemporary culture, I fear that this divide is one that translation, no matter what its quality, will have a hard time bridging. 36 37

R. Rehm, The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002: 240–251). See, for example, R.J. Lifton, “Beyond Psychic Numbing: A Call to Awareness,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatrics 52/4 (1982): 619–629; P. Slovic, “‘If I look at the mass I  will ­never act’ – Psychic Numbing and Genocide,” in Judgment and Decision Making 2/2 (2007): 79–95.

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The theatre can provide some help, but not by resorting to graphic visuals or adopting cinematic special effects. In my view, these tend to deaden us to violence and, at least in some, excite a strange sort of voyeuristic pleasure. Within the context of other design choices, however, a stage director might present a somber display of coffins, a long funeral cortège, a litany of the names of the dead as a counterpoint to the choral lyric, projected images of a military cemetery extending into the distance, the picture of a grieving family at the graveside, a display of the dead stripped of romance, beauty, or prurience. Such directorial efforts could augment the translated text, allowing us to regain some sense of the cost of war that Aeschylus and his audience would have known and felt, first-hand. I thank my friend and colleague Andrea Wilson Nightingale for her generous help in improving this essay, and the anonymous readers of this volume for ­valuable suggestions.

chapter 6

Cognitive Theory and Aeschylus: Translating beyond the Lexicon Peter Meineck 6.1 Introduction In April 2007, Joshua Bell, one of the finest concert violinists in the world, was asked by the Washington Post to perform an environmental experiment.1 Bell, then 38, dressed in jeans, long sleeved t-shirt and a baseball cap, went to the L’Enfant Plaza station on the Washington dc Metro, found a spot in a busy atrium, took his 3.5 million dollar Stradivarius violin from its case, and began to play. The first piece he selected was Chaconne by Johann Sebastian Bach from Partia No 2 in D minor, one of the most difficult pieces for any violinist to master. The experiment was simple: if great art is removed from its normal context will anyone notice the great art? That morning, one thousand and ninety-seven commuters hurried past Joshua Bell on the way to their various destinations. Twenty-seven of them dropped money into his case, and only seven stopped for a few seconds to listen and watch. Only one person actually recognized Joshua Bell. This experiment shows that environment matters a great deal when it comes to the perception of a performance. Joshua Bell usually sells out large concert halls at prices in excess of one hundred dollars a ticket, yet on a busy morning in the dc metro, people fixated on the task of getting to work, going home or running errands, all but ignoring him. Greek drama as it is perceived today, faces a similar set of environmental problems: Aeschylus’ plays have come to us as texts mediated by generations of copyists, lexicographers, scholars, and translators, and yet the original intent of these works was in the form of a live performance set in specific environmental, cultural, religious, and political contexts.2 One of the traumas of translation is that we are forced out of necessity to place the creative focus on the

1 Gene Weingarten, “Pearls before Breakfast” in the Washington Post, 8 April 2007. 2 See Johanna Hanink and Anna Uhlig, “‘My poetry did not die with me’: Aeschylus and his Afterlife in the Classical Period” in this volume.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004332164_008

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words of Greek drama and translate them out of context, reimagining them as operating on a modern stage, in a classroom, or read silently as poetry.3 Of course, the art of the translator is to produce a new work for a specific purpose: Alan Sommerstein’s Aris and Phillips parallel text translations of Aeschylus are excellent resources for the close study of the text, but may not be the right choice for performance, just as Ted Hughes’ poetic version of the Oresteia would not be regarded by most scholars as an “accurate” translation. All translations are therefore refracted by the intent and interpretation of the translator. In this paper, I suggest that a cognitive approach that places the words of ancient drama in their original performative contexts can provide the translator with another set of tools with which to bridge the cultural divide between 5th century Athens and today; but not as a means of creating more “accurate” translations, rather as a method of understanding more about how these words functioned live in the theatre. Many translators have benefited from psychoanalytical, anthropological, structural, and post-structural interpretations of ancient cultures, and incorporated them into their work in order to gain a better understanding of the original function of the text. Recently there has been a good deal of cognitive and neuroscience studies that have focused on the performing arts, examining music, dance, theatre, and the history of theatre.4 In addition, studies that have focused on human affective responses to performance can be particularly relevant, as ancient sources frequently refer to the emotional power of theatre. For example, in Herodotus we learn how the tragedian Phrynichus was said to have caused the entire theatre to fall into tears with his performance of The Sack of Miletus in the early 5th century (6.21.10); Xenophon tells of the actor Callipides who was renowned for his ability “to fill a theatre because he could move the entire audience to tears” (Symposium 3.11); and both Aristotle and Plutarch write about Euripides’ Cresphontes, which caused a mass emotional response in the theatre, with the spectators jumping to their feet in terror.5 Similarly, one of the most widely known anecdotes about Greek tragedy also tells of extreme audience emotions – we hear in a late and mostly fanciful 3 See A.F. Garvie, “Editing Aeschylus for a Modern Readership: Textual Criticism and Other Concerns” in this volume. 4 B. Bläsing, M. Puttke, and T. Schack, (eds.) The Neurocognition of Dance: Mind Movement and Motor Skills (New York: Psychology Press, 2012); J. Lutterbie, Toward a General Theory of ­Acting: Cognitive Science and Performance (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2011); A.D. Patel, Music Language and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 5 Aristotle, Poetics, 1454 a5 and Nicomachean Ethics 1.17.3; Plutarch Moralia 998E; Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. 456.

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­biography, the Life of Aeschylus, that when the audience first saw the chorus of Furies in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, children fainted and women miscarried.6 ­Likewise, Aristophanes has Euripides say of Aeschylean language that it could rip the audience “from their minds” (Frogs 962), and Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, and Polybius all described drama as psychagogikotaton – that it had the power to “move the soul.”7 Greek drama’s reputation for emotionality even inspired Lucian to tell a fantastical story of how the entire population of Abdera went temporally insane and displayed extreme physical symptoms after experiencing a visiting company perform Euripides’ Andromache.8 Clearly, Greek drama was powerfully enthralling, emotional, and embodied live experience – so much so that Aristotle described it as leading to catharsis through empathy and fear, and Plato thought it could corrupt people’s souls. If we recognize that ancient Greek drama was primarily regarded as a live, emotional experience, then it must follow that the application of research from the cognitive sciences, particularly those that deal with human responses to space and environment, multisensory processing, and affective states, have value in attempting to better understand this art form. But can research carried out on modern people be relevant for the study of ancient cultures? As the relatively new field of cultural neuroscience is demonstrating, cognition is not an immutable universal function. Brains are highly plastic and cognition abilities are formed by a combination of innate evolutionary mechanisms coupled with environmental and cultural conditioning. All humans are therefore bio-cultural beings – it is minds that make cultures, and, in turn, cultures that make minds. Therefore, a bio-cultural approach to antiquity places both biological studies of the present human mind alongside cultural information about the society under scrutiny. Human cognition is not confined to the biology of the brain but is extended into the surrounding environment, embedded in the prevailing culture, ­enacted by movement and embodied by the relationship of our entire ­bodies to the space we inhabit. This process is a constant cognitive feedback loop from brain/body environment and back again, what Philosopher Andy Clark has described as “extending the machinery of the mind out into the world.”9 With 6 Radt, TrGF vol. 3 T. A1.30–32. 7 Plato’s Minos 321a; Isocrates’ Evagoras 2.10 & 2.49; Aristotle’s Poetics 1450b.16–21; Polybius’ Histories 2.56.11; Gorgias Helen, 10. 8 Lucian, How to Write History, 1.1–20. 9 Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008: xxvi); Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The extended mind” Analysis 58/1 (1998): 7–19.

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this in mind, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has stated, “it is not only the separation between mind and brain that is mythical: the separation between mind and body is probably just as fictional. The mind is embedded in the full sense of the term, not just embrained.”10 In the same vein, Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, has written, “in the first place, we must recognize that consciousness is experienced in terms of a triadic r­ elationship among the brain, the body, and the environment [ … ] the brain is embodied, and the body and brain are embedded in the world. They act in the world and are acted upon by it.”11 Similarly, Joe LeDoux, who has done pioneering work on emotional processing, writes, “the opportunity for bodily feedback during emotional reactions to influence information processing of the brain and the way we consciously feel is enormous.”12 If human cognition is extended out into the environment in a constant sensory feedback loop between brain, body, and surroundings, then the environmental aspects of the ancient theatre also need to be considered as an important part of the total experience of ancient drama. Live drama is an embodied, affective, and aesthetic experience and theatre exists in the cognitive space between actor and spectator – its effects and affects are felt and thought, and these two cognitive processes are not mutually exclusive. The cognitive sciences cover a vast scientific and theoretical landscape from psychology, anthropology, and philosophy to neuroscience. Here, I will briefly highlight four approaches that can be applied to an ancient text as examples of a cognitive approach. These are: the multisensory effect of spoken language on the listener; the cognitive influence of the open-air environment of the ­theatre; the cognitive function of the skene; and the emotional and attentional assets of the dramatic mask. 6.2

Multisensory Language

What multisensory experiences were available to the audience of the Oresteia seated in the theatron on a March morning in 458 bc? This means everything 10

11 12

Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Random House, 2008: 118). See also Antonio Damasio and Gil B. Carvalho, “The Nature of Feelings: Evolutionary and Neurobiological Origins” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14/2 (2013): 143–152. Gerald M. Edelman, “The Embodiment of Mind” Daedalus 135/3 (2006): 26. Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998:29).

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that was available to the sensorial cognitive system of each spectator that synthesized the entire theatrical experience as the performance happened – olfactory, auditory, haptic, and optical. Of this total multisensory experience, taste and smell were prominent, and we know that a large number of animals were sacrificed in the sanctuary adjacent to the theatre as the performances took place.13 This meat was then roasted and served later at a great feast in honor of the god and the audience would have been fully aware of the smell of the sacrifices and cooking of meat going on immediately behind the skene. The cultural associations between sacrificial practice and Athenian drama are well known but the olfactory experience created more immediate sensorial connections. For example, when Cassandra reels back from the doorway of the House of Atreus in Agamemnon and cries, “The House reeks with bloody slaughter!” and the chorus leader responds “but it is only the smell of the sacrifice at the hearth.” (1309–10). The mimetic scene is reinforced by the real smells of blood and cooked meat emanating from the sanctuary next to the ­performance space. Auditory sensory information would have included the music, now lost to us, and speech sounds, which we can at least discern from the surviving texts. ­Poetic language, especially when conceived for live performance, conveys a large amount of sensory information, and Gabriella Starr has described this as “the subjective experience of sensation without corresponding sensory input.”14 Language that describes or sounds like a sensory experience activates the same areas of the brain associated with tangible sensory inputs and the processing of memory. This is something the translator must struggle with – how to transform Greek terms that convey sensory information by aural ­association into a new language? Furthermore, such sensory associations also convey ritual, political, and social information distinct to the ancient culture that may have little meaning to the modern one. Aeschylean dramatic language is replete with words that communicated a multiplicity of meanings and metaphorical phrases that operated quite differently when uttered live than they do when read on the page. One notable example occurs at Agamemnon 612 when Clytemnestra is speaking to Agamemnon’s messenger. She sends him back to her husband with a message of her own regarding her fidelity, and says that she “knows as much about the 13

14

As many as 240 bulls in 333 bc. See Bruit Zaidnam L. Bruit and Pantel P. Schmitt (trans. Paul Cartledge), Religion in the Ancient Greek City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 30). G.G. Starr, “Multisensory Imagery,” in Cognitive Cultural Studies, (ed.) Lisa Zunshine, 276–279. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

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pleasures of another man as she does of steeping metal.” In Greek the word for “steeping” is baphas – a term that would have evoked a specific set of sense memories with important ritualistic connotations for the audience. The word means to “dye” fabric or “temper” metal. When spoken it sounds like the very thing it describes – a plosive sound like the submerging of a swath of fabric into a vat of liquid dye, or the plunging of a hot piece of metal into cold water. The English word baptize is derived from it. But baphas can also be used as a noun and applied to a dyed garment, particularly one of ritual import. Noticeably, Aeschylus uses it to describe the crimson dyed tapestries that Agamemnon walks on to enter his house (Agamemnon 960); the robe that enmeshed him in death (Libation Bearers 1013); and the saffron dyed veil of Iphigenia that is imagined by the chorus as slipping from her head at the moment of her death (Agamemnon 238). It is this last instance that connects Clytemnestra’s use of baphas at 612 with the baphas of Iphigenia. At 238 the chorus describe the moment of Iphigenia’s death thus: κρόκου βαφὰς δ᾽ ἐς πέδον χέουσα The saffron veil poured onto the ground. Compare this line to Clytemnestra’s words to the messenger at 612: ἄλλου πρὸς ἀνδρὸς μᾶλλον ἢ χαλκοῦ βαφάς. Of another man, than of steeping metal (bronze) The key terms here are κρόκου βαφὰς – krokou baphas (“saffron veil”) and χαλκοῦ  βαφάς – chalkou baphas (“steeping metal”). When Clytemnestra addresses the Herald, the audience has not heard the distinctive word baphas since the story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia told by the chorus during their entrance song. Yet, the phrase takes on another sensory dimension when we consider that the chorus sings how Iphigenia was killed at Chalkis (190) – the name meaning something like “metal” or “bronze town” – and that Clytemnestra uses the word chalkou for “metal.” Thus, a sensory interpretation of the associations between the heard words signify a deeper and more highly charged connotation within Clytemnestra’s claim of fidelity that means something like “I measure my fidelity based on the events at Chalkis.” Yet Clytemnestra’s phrase does not only look back to evoke the murder of her daughter, it also anticipates that metal ax that she will plunge into Agamemnon – a baphas of blood. Aeschylus was evidently famous for these kinds of linguistic sensorial flourishes, leading Aristophanes to describe his poetry as κωδωνοφαλαροπώλους

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(kōdōnophalaropōlous) – “with clattering horse bronzes” (Frogs 963). In ­performance, these kinds of sensory associations in Aeschylean dramatic speech and song would also have been supported and enhanced by the rhythm, pitch, and tonal qualities of music that accompanied it. Yet even without the musical soundscape that was such a large part of the Greek theatrical experience, the surviving language perceived in its original live context can still provide the translator with a good deal of important sensorial information that can inform their own creative process of translation. Haptic information was communicated not through the sensations of direct touch, but via the sense of kinesthetic empathy that was heightened by masked movement, a topic I will explore further below. Yet, language about movement also stimulates the brain areas concerned with the preplanning and enactment of individuated movement. For example, in the opening scene of the Oresteia the Watchman compares himself to a dog and that he is “propped up” on his elbows (3). His sense of discomfort and exhausted restlessness is further communicated by the palpable description of his “sopping bed” where he lies “tossing and turning” all night. Fear “sits by his side” keeping him awake, and he desperately wishes he could just close his eyes and sleep (15). We can hear in the Greek, the alliteration of the beta sound surrounded by long vowels, and the cadence of the meter create a sensory experience of the Watchman’s fatigue that goes beyond a narrative description of his situation to the verbal embodiment of sheer exhaustion. τὸ μὴ βεβαίως βλέφαρα συμβαλεῖν ὕπνῳ To mê bebaiôs blephara sumbalein hupnô 6.3

Visual Cognition

Although the bulk of our knowledge of ancient drama comes from the process of textual transmission, we are faced with the dilemma that these words were originally created for performance where they would have been received only in audio form and never read silently or analytically. In cognitive perceptual tests the visual stream has been conclusively shown to always overwhelm the auditory stream and the higher order neural networks employed for speech processing. This is proved by the so called “McGurk Effect.” Here two people stand back to back. One faces the audience and mimes the phrase “ba, ba, ba, ba” over and over, while the person behind them and facing away from the ­audience utters the same phrase. However, when the person facing the

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a­ udience changes their mime from “ba” to “fa” the spectators all hear “fa” even though the unseen speaker is still saying “ba.”15 With this basic cognitive fact in mind translators should be mindful of how spoken text operates within the visual environment of the theatre and further question Taplin’s famous assertion that “there was no important stage action that was not also signaled in the words.”16 Though on page a word is perceived as a stable entity, in performance the semiotic information provided by contextual visual information can radically change the way in which the spoken word is perceived. The text certainly does not reign supreme in the predominantly visual environment of live theatre. As for the optical array available to the audience, the very meaning of theatre in Greek is “the seeing place,” and with this in mind my three remaining cognitive examples are all different aspects of visual perception. While some may point out Aristotle’s famous relegation of opsis to the bottom of his list of the parts of drama, I would suggest that this might also be a product of the trauma of translation. In Poetics Aristotle names opsis as the mode that is the “manner” of realizing tragic mimesis (1450a, 10–15), the way in which it is organized/displayed (kosmos) and a necessary part of tragedy, (1449b, ­31–33).17 For Aristotle opsis is ἀτεχνότατον (Poetics 1450b, 16–20). Malcolm Heath translated this as “very inartistic” and Richard Janko as “very artless,”18 yet the word can also mean “intrinsic,” the kind of simple rudeness that is associated with important objects of cult such as the tiny statue of Pallas Athena – the ­bretas, a simple small wooden idol that was said to have fallen from the sky, yet was one of the most precious religious objects the Athenians possessed. This is the statue of Athena that Orestes seeks out in the Eumenides. In the same ­passage Aristotle goes on to state that opsis has the power “to move the soul” (ἡ δὲ ὄψις ψυχαγωγικὸν μέν) and later advises dramatists to create their plays while performing movements and gestures so they might visualize the action and πρὸ ὀμμάτων τιθέμενoν “keep the play before their eyes” (Poetics 1455a, 21–30). 15

16

17 18

See Harry McGurk and John MacDonald, “Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices” Nature 264 (1976): 746–748. For a digital video demonstration of the McGurk Effect recorded by the bbc program Horizon, “Is Seeing Believing?” (2010–2011): http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0. Oliver Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: the Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977: 29–30). For the opposing view see Douglas L. Cairns, Body Language in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2005: xiv). For example, Janko, R., Aristotle, Poetics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987); 8 has “the ornament of spectacle.” M. Heath, Aristotle Poetics (Penguin: London/New York, 1996); and Janko, ibid.

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Clearly then, Aristotle, who we should remember never saw a 5th century drama, was well aware of the power of theatrical visuality. The translator can do the same thing that Aristotle advised and visualize the ancient words within the performative context for which they were created. Such a multi-sensory reading of a play places meaning beyond the definitions of the lexicon and sets them in their live, experiential context. Here we will attempt something similar and focus our attention on the first ten lines of the Watchman’s speech that opens Aeschylus’ Oresteia. θεοὺς μὲν αἰτῶ τῶνδ᾽ ἀπαλλαγὴν πόνων φρουρᾶς ἐτείας μῆκος, ἣν κοιμώμενος στέγαις Ἀτρειδῶν ἄγκαθεν, κυνὸς δίκην, ἄστρων κάτοιδα νυκτέρων ὁμήγυριν, καὶ τοὺς φέροντας χεῖμα καὶ θέρος βροτοῖς λαμπροὺς δυνάστας, ἐμπρέποντας αἰθέρι ἀστέρας, ὅταν φθίνωσιν, ἀντολάς τε τῶν. καὶ νῦν φυλάσσω λαμπάδος τό σύμβολον, αὐγὴν πυρὸς φέρουσαν ἐκ Τροίας φάτιν ἁλώσιμόν τε βάξιν: Gods! Free me from these labors! I’ve spent a whole year up here, watching, propped up on my elbows on the roof of this house of Atreus, like some dog. How well I’ve come to know night’s congregation of stars, the blazing monarchs of the sky, those that bring winter and those that bring summer to us mortals. I know just when they rise and when they set. So I watch, watch for the signal pyre, the burning flame that will tell us, Troy is taken! aeschylus Agamemnon 1–10 19

6.4

Spatial Cognition

Can we visualize the environment within which these words were uttered? Evidence from material culture, epigraphy, and literature allows us to make some reasonable assumptions. For example, we know the performance was 19

Peter Meineck, Aeschylus’ Oresteia. (Cambridge/Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998).

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part of an important festival to the god Dionysus, that it was funded by the state, and that it was staged on the southeast slope of the Acropolis in the open air. We also know that the plays were performed during the day and can make a reasonable guess, based on the most recent archaeological evidence, that there was an audience of about five to six thousand in attendance, seated on wooden benches, probably on a frontal axis.20 The festival’s dramatic program included the performance of three tragedies followed by a satyr drama, and at some point in the 5th century – a comedy. The old and popular idea that the Oresteia began at dawn is unsupported by any evidence and would have most likely been impractical as the logistical challenge of moving a large number of people into the theatre in darkness would have been problematic. Therefore, one of the most basic assumptions we can make about the environment within which the watchman spoke these words, was that it was in an open-air venue and that it was daylight. This is significant if we place ourselves in the position of the ancient spectators and examine their relationship to their surroundings from an experiential perspective. These spectators sat in a theatron of wooden stands built up on the slope of the Acropolis, and what they saw from there was far more than just the actors and chorus in the performance area. The southeast slope of the Acropolis offered panoramic views of the Sanctuary of Dionysus, the old southern city, the mountains of the Attic countryside, the sea, and the largest element in the visual field of the spectator – the huge expanse of open sky (Fig. 6.1). It seems clear that the location of the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus was deliberately chosen at some point during the mid-6th century bc to provide a place that offered such an expansive view. This ties in with what we know of the cult of Dionysus and the name of his sanctuary: ­Eleuthereus – named after the Attic mountain border town of Eleutherae to the north. Eleutherae ­overlooks  Mount Cithaeron in Boeotia, the mythical birthplace of Dionysus – a god associated with liminal paces such as mountains, wild countryside, and marshlands. Though the civic sanctuary of Dionysus was placed in the very heart of Athens – at the center of Attic political and cultural life – the people gathered there looked out beyond their city to the traditional liminal realms of the god. If we consider the optical array available to the ancient spectator in the theatre, by far the largest element in the visual field was the sky. This is particularly important when evaluating the experiential aspects of the spatial environment 20

Peter Meineck, “The Embodied Space: Performance and Visual Cognition at the Fifth Century Athenian Theatre” New England Classical Journal 39 (2012): 3–46.

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Figure 6.1 View of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens from the West. Note the view and the ­immensity of the open sky in the visual field. Photo courtesy of the author, 2013.

on the basis of embodied cognition. Neuropsychologist Fred Previc helped revolutionize the way in which space is regarded by creating a new model of embodied spatial processing based on 4 divisions of 3-Dimensional functional space. These ideas had a practical application, in that Previc was part of a research team tasked by the us Air Force to understand why pilots became disorientated and often crashed when they lost vertical postural control and could no longer orientate themselves with the horizon.21 Previc’s theory posits that human beings process perception based upon their bodily relationship to external objects in visual fields. His four divisions of functional space were designed to differentiate perceptual motor actions in different spatial fields. They break down as follows: Peripersonal space (used for objects that can be immediately touched). Focal extrapersonal space (used for scanning, object recognition, and focus). 21

F. Previc, “The Neuropsychology of 3-D Space” Psychological Bulletin 124/2 (1998): 123–164.

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Actional extrapersonal space (used for spatial orientation or navigation through landmarks). Ambient extrapersonal space (used for aerial space furthest from one’s body). Ambient extrapersonal space is the place where Previc’s pilots were losing their bearings, becoming disorientated, and crashing their planes. For the audience gathered to experience the Oresteia in 458 bc this was their expansive view of the sky. It is still remarkable today to sit on the southeast slope of the Acropolis overlooking the sanctuary of Dionysus and get the sense of looking out at the vastness of this view (Fig. 6.1). It certainly seems that all of the 5th and 4th ­century bc theatres that we know of took full advantage of the relationship between spectator and ambient extrapersonal space.22 The Romans, on the other hand, preferred to deny their spectators this spatial field, creating the scenae frons to block any exterior view. During testing in flight simulators, when pilots lost the horizon and vertical postural control, thus becoming disorientated, many participants reported experiencing “out of body” feelings. Many even described the experience of being able to look back at themselves in the cockpit.23 Previc maintains that it is one’s relationship to this concept of “ambient” or distant space where one can experience “out of body” feelings, such as disorientation, dizziness, and a sense of the divine. He notes how language itself orientates itself along vertical postural lines connected with our relationship to ambient extrapersonal space. For example, terms such as “on high” or “exalted” are frequently used in English to describe the divine, with the language of “highness” being usually positive, and the opposite pole of the vertical axis: below, negative. This spatial division is certainly true of the Oresteia where the Olympian gods are placed above, while the distinctly chthonic Furies are darker and visually abhorrent. This ambient extrapersonal distinction is made by the Watchman who has a wholly positive attitude to the night sky above him, though his own “sopping bed” is miserable, and places Clytemnestra waiting in the house below, in an immediate vertical dichotomy. This is reinforced at line 27 when he uses a form 22 23

G.K. Bosher, Theatre on the Periphery: A Social and Political History of Theater in Early S­ icily, PhD Thesis (The University of Michigan: 2006: 151–160, tables 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3). James E. Whinnery and Angela M. Whinnery. “Acceleration-induced Loss of ­Consciousness: A Review of 500 Episodes” Archives of Neurology 47/7 (1990): 764–776; Enrico Facco and Christian Agrillo, “Near-death Experiences between Science and Prejudice” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012): 209–217.

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of the term ἐπανατέλλω (“arise”) as if she were a celestial object, like the moon or a star. His first word, theoús, is an appeal to the divine from a small figure surrounded by the stunning optical array of ambient extrapersonal space. The sense of religiosity and spirituality that pervades Greek drama was also greatly cognitively enhanced by the dominance of the sky in the visual field. Previc has also suggested that ambient extrapersonal space plays an important role in the neurochemistry of religious activity. Dopamine is released in the brain during spiritual activity and the ventral dopaminergic pathways ­activated are most closely aligned with the actional extrapersonal system of perceptual-motor interactions. These pathways have been shown to be biased toward ambient extrapersonal, distant and especially, upper spatial fields, which are also associated with hallucinations and dreams.24 This is also the space of deep thought and contemplation – the ancient theatre was not insecure about letting its audience’s eyes wander in marked contrast to most modern drama. We attempt to engage with ambient extrapersonal space whenever we need to think deeply about something. Notice how a person’s gaze tends to move upwards when trying to recall a specific memory or consider an abstract idea even when exterior “aerial space” is not in the current visual field. “Looking up” to experience an altered reality also lies at the heart of Plato’s Theory of Forms and the allegory of the cave. These ideas were presented in the form of theoria (spectacle festivals) of the mind, where one person leaves the confines of a dark nether region lit artificially by fire and walks upwards towards the natural light and the sky (Republic 7. 514a–520a). There his thoughts are “elevated” to begin to behold the true “forms.” An example of the cognitive effects of gazing up into the sky can be found in Euripides’ Bacchae when Cadmus tells Agave to look up into the sky in order to change her “former state of mind” (1265–71). After she does so and comments on how different the sky seems, she is able to clearly see the head of her son that she holds in her hands. In the same way, Aristophanes created entire theatrical worlds based around this concept of the mind-altering properties of aerial space. In Birds, the Hoopoe tells Pisthetaerus to look up and “twist his sight” in all directions to behold the “pole of the sky” and create a new polis in the air – the city of “Cloudcuckooland” where absolutely anything seems possible (175–85). Similarly, in Knights (169–75), the Sausage-Seller is encouraged to stand on a basket as if it were the vault of the earth and survey a vast realm of possibilities.

24

F. Previc, “The Role of the Extrapersonal Brain Systems in Religious Activity” C ­ onsciousness and Cognition 15 (2006): 500–539.

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As he strains his eyes to see, the Sausage-Seller replies that it is a blessing to have such “twisted vision.” The term diastrephõ, used here and in Birds, carries the sense of a distorted, warped, or alternate vision. This kind of cognitive effect Previc attributes to ambient extrapersonal aerial space. How might we approach the start of the Watchman’s speech with this cognitive spatial model in mind? The first word of the trilogy is significant. There was no curtain that opened to reveal a set, no dimming house lights alerting the audience that the play was starting, and no stage lights to concentrate spectator attention on a particular place. It is not unreasonable to concur that there could have been some sort of pre-play announcement, but this would still not provide the kind of attentional framing device a performance needs to begin. The Watchman’s first word, theous – “Gods” and his location, on the roof of the skene, would have immediately created the sense of attention and focus the play needed, as well as reinforcing the theatre’s status as a sacred place. The word theous commands instant attention, and the line that follows, in the form of a powerfully active appeal, creates a sense of urgency and the desire on the part of the audience to know more. The spectators are immediately and effectively hurled into the world of the play. The watchman’s spatial location is also significant. It is more than likely that he appeared on the roof of the skene. How he was revealed is unknown, but the force of the opening line strongly suggests a sudden entrance. Perhaps the actor was pre-positioned, set under a blanket before the audience arrived. Alternatively, he may have entered from a ladder behind the skene or even from a trap door in the roof. The Watchman’s location and the word theous forces the audience’s attention upwards, first to the skene roof (perhaps the first time it had been used in this way)25 and then at line 3 up into the imagined starry night, conjured under a real sky – a place of spirituality and infinite possibilities. As he continues, the Watchman creates the first mental image of the play – the “night’s congregation of stars” – and he says that he knows the evening sky so well that the perpetual cycle of the firmament brings him comfort in its constancy. The sight of the beacon fire will soon disturb this celestial harmony. This is Clytemnestra’s signal from Troy, and it shines in the sky – which in Greek culture is a divine male entity. In this respect, the arrival of the beacon fire is like a new, woman-made star – a celestial usurper that bodes of the overthrow of male power that is to come.

25

R. Hamilton, “Cries within and the Tragic Skene” The American Journal of Philology 108/4 (1987): 585–399.

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The Surrogacy of the Skene

In the second and third lines of the play, the Watchman tells us that he is atop the roof of the House of Atreus. Very quickly the audience is informed about the time (the mythological past), place (the Argolid in the Peloponnese), and the political context (an important aristocratic or “royal” house). They soon learn that it is the time of the Trojan War, and they now know that Agamemnon is away and Clytemnestra remains. This is a significant amount of information gleaned from one or two very short phrases. What else was available to the spectator’s eyes that informed this scene? As far as we can tell, there is no other actor on stage and the chorus has yet to arrive. The current archaeological evidence for the theatre at this time, suggests a non-circular playing space fronted by a wooden theatron with a small wooden skene, probably upstage center of the rectilinear orchestra.26 We have very little information to go on, and the site itself is problematic, having been significantly renovated and rebuilt several times since its original construction around 530 bc. Was the skene a simple temporary wooden hut or was it painted and dressed to reflect a variety of settings? In the Oresteia alone it had to represent the House of Atreus in Argos; the same house some seven years later; the temple of Apollo at Delphi; and a building on the Acropolis in Athens, if not Athena’s own temple, which had yet to be rebuilt after the destruction by the Persians some twenty years earlier. The truth is that we don’t know anything about the skene in 458 bc. We assume there must have been some kind of stage house because it seems as though the Watchman is on a roof and that a doorway dominates these three plays. While we cannot know if the Oresteia was the first production to use the skene, it certainly plays a major role in the plays of the trilogy.27 In the Agamemnon, entrances from the skene door introduced the element of sudden visual revelations directly into the foveal (focused) view of the audience, as opposed to the far more fluid and gradual arrivals from the eisodoi. The Watchman’s reference to Clytemnestra inside the house introduces the presence of the doors and raises the audience expectations of what is behind them. This doorway provides something entirely new in drama – an “event boundary,” and the cognitive shift, which can be experienced by 26

27

C. Papastamati-von Moock, “The Wooden Theatre of Dionysos Eleuthereus in Athens: Old Issue, New Research,” in The Architecture of the Ancient Greek Theater, International Conference, (eds.) R. Frederiksen, E. Gebhard, and A. Sokolicek, 27–30. (Athens: The Danish Institute at Athens, 2012). R. Hamilton, “Cries within and the Tragic Skene” The American Journal of Philology 108/4 (1987): 585–599.

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c­ rossing such a threshold, creates the need to refresh personal understanding of ongoing events.28 Many of us have experienced this cognitive memory shift as we set out on a predetermined task, then step into another room, and completely forget what we had originally set out to do, as if the memory of the task at hand had been completely wiped away. For an audience, the act of watching a performer enter the space through a prominent doorway creates an on-stage event boundary that can abruptly shift the cognitive focus of the narrative action of the play. One such event boundary may occur at the end of the Watchman’s speech (36–40). It has been assumed that he silences himself because the chorus is entering via the eisodoi, a long gradual entrance that would take a good deal of stage time. However, it is also entirely possible that the skene door opened here to reveal women performing sacrifices, or even Clytemnestra silently performing a ritual act. This might explain the Watchman’s sudden silence and the direct reference to Clytemnestra by the chorus early in their first choral song (83–86). If we examine the skene door entrances that are more clearly indicated by the text, we see that they do in fact cause abrupt attentional and narrative shifts. At 587 Clytemnestra enters the Messenger scene from the doorway and usurps his authority of knowledge, by stating, “there is no need for you to tell me anymore.” Likewise, when the door opens in the tapestry scene at 855, Agamemnon’s entrance is both physically and narratively blocked, and towards the end of Agamemnon, the opening of the doors to reveal the ekkyklema containing the dead bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra has the effect of stopping the chorus from any form of intervention. While, we can only speculate about what the skene may have looked like and its dimensions, from a cognitive perspective this physical ambiguity is actually a dramatic advantage. If the skene were a simple unadorned wooden structure then it would have been more effective than a more realistic set in that it would have represented a “surrogate” of a real place, and this representation may have been more powerful. Andy Clark has recently been examining the issue of ­cognitive surrogacy as it concerns material culture.29 He points out that 28

29

G.A. Radvansky, S.A. Krawietz, and A.K. Tamplin, “Walking through Doorways Causes Forgetting: Further Explorations” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 64/8 (2011): 1632–1645; J.M. Curiel and G.A. Radvansky, “Mental Maps in Memory Retrieval and Comprehension” Memory 10 (2002): 113–126. A. Clark, “Material Surrogacy and the Supernatural: Reflections on the Role of Artefacts in ‘off-line’ Cognition,” in The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, (eds.) Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, 23–28. (Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs, 2010).

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humans are highly likely to construct “surrogate situations” to aid with mental processing, and prefer to embody their cognitive processes with exograms, such as a pencil and paper, lines drawn in sand, models, hand held personal devices, and gestures. Clark cites a well-known study by J.S. DeLoache from 1991 that found how young children actually preferred symbolic representations (“models”) rather than realistic representations.30 DeLoache had twoand three-year-old children watch a scale model of a toy as it was placed under a model chair and was hidden from view. The children then were required to find the real toy under the real chair in the next room. The study found that the more realistic the model the poorer the children performed in discovering the real hidden toy. When the experiment was repeated with the children watching the models from behind a glass wall their success rate increased. It seems that the more symbolic the representation or surrogate is, the more the child can successfully process abstract relationships between a model and a real target object. Clark points out two key features of surrogate situations: they bring attention to important elements by actually diminishing specificity, and they relax temporal constraints on reasoning.31 Clark’s theories on cognitive surrogacy are particularly apt when considering what kind of semiotic associations the audience may have made when processing the first visual image created on stage, and then taking in the narrative information provided by the text. In much the same way, the Watchman scene is staged with semiotic cognitive markers highly reminiscent of an important ritual that would have been quite familiar to the Athenian (and even non-Athenian) audience. During the month of Skirophorion (June/July) there was an important Attic festival called the Skira (after which the month was named). The festival was performed to mark the coming of the end of the Attic year and the beginning of the new one. Little is known of the Athenian Skira, except for two references in Aristophanes that strongly suggest it was a women’s festival,32 and a fragment of Lysimachides reported by Harpocration, that states how the priestess of Athena, the priest of Poseidon, and the priest of Helios, all from the Eteoboutad family (the genos which was said to be descended from the mythical kings of Athens), walked from the Acropolis to a place called Skiron on the outskirts of Athens.33 The Skira may have originated as a threshing festival, 30

J.S. DeLoache, “Symbolic Functioning in Very Young Children: Understanding of Pictures and Models” Child Development 62 (1991): 763–752. 31 A. Clark, ibid., 25. 32 Aristophanes Thesm. 834 and Eccl. 18. 33 Lysimachides, F.Gr.Hist. 366 F 3 ap. Harpocration, Skiron.

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a time of dry wind and heat, associated with the coming of the dog-star Sirius at the height of summer. Sirius was an important celestial body in the ancient world: it could apparently be seen in the daytime sky at this time of the year, and in Egypt it was used as the signal for the annual flooding of the Nile.34 Sirius is referenced at a key moment in the Agamemnon. At the culmination of the tapestry scene, Clytemnestra invokes the star as Agamemnon walks into the house of Atreus on the crimson fabrics: As long as the root survives, new leaves will return to spread their shade against the searing dog-star Agamemnon 966–967

It has been well established that Agamemnon’s entry into the House of Atreus in Agamemnon was meant to remind the audience of the Bouphonia: the sacrifice of a bull to Zeus Polias at the Dipolieia festival that took place just two days after the Skira.35 Aeschylus may have purposefully intended his audience to recall the Skira at the opening of the Oresteia. This would have established an unsettling sense of transition and uncertainty, reflecting the liminal temporality of the “Old and New Year” and introduced the theme of usurped ritual practice.36 As A.M. Bowie has pointed out, “the festivals at the end of the Athenian year marked dissolution, the breakdown of normality and the reversal of roles.”37 Clytemnestra’s reference to Sirius at this crucial moment in the play refers back to the watchman’s surrogate skira and acts to justify Clytemnestra’s motives for killing Agamemnon as if he were a telos – a “fulfillment” or “perfect sacrifice” – demanded by the new-year ritual (971–974). We have little evidence of the Skira in Athens, but Walter Burkett provides a useful account of the Skira on the island of Keos (Kea), the nearest island citystate to Attica and one closely allied to the Athenian state. Here the priests kept vigil on the highest point for the appearance of Sirius and, when it was spotted, announced its arrival. Two days of ritual followed including the Keans waiting 34 35 36

37

M. Robertson, “Athena’s Shrines and Festivals,” in Worshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon, (ed.) J. Neils (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996: 57). R. Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005: 187–191). The transition between Athenian months was called the “Old and New Day” and it was a time when debts had to be repaid. In Aristophanes’ Clouds (1170–1205) Stepsiades feels empowered not to repay his debts during this time as his son, newly educated in rhetoric, argues that one day cannot possibly be both old and new at the same time, just as a woman cannot be both young and old. A.M. Bowie, “Religion and Politics in the Oresteia,” in Oxford Readings in Aeschylus, (ed.) Michael Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007:354).

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under arms to sacrifice a bull or a ram in the hope of averting the dog-star’s searing gaze, and instead gain cooling winds.38 The parallels between the Skira and the Watchman are very strong indeed. First, Aeschylus presents his audience with a figure alone on the highest point of his performance space, just like the lookout priest of the Skira. The Watchman tells us that he has been waiting an entire year to see a point of light in the night sky – i.e., the beacon fire from Troy – and this is very similar to waiting to see the dog-star, which appeared annually. The sight of the beacon glimmering like a new star in the night sky causes the Watchman to immediately shout to wake Clytemnestra so she will ὀλoλυγμὸν εὐφημoῦντα τῇδε λαμπάδι “praise the signal fire with the hallowed cry” (28).“Hallowed cry” is an imperfect translation for the o­ lolugmos – the ululating song associated with female rites, a feature of the Athenian Skira known from Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae 58–59. This attempts to preserve some of the onomatopoeia of the Greek, which captures the ululating sound of this celebratory chant. The fact that the Watchman’s shouts initiate female rites is strongly implied at 88–97 by the chorus, who excitedly refer to the “blazing offerings” that are fueled by “offerings from the chambers of the Queen.” At 594–595 she associates the ololugmos with “women’s sacrifices.” The Oresteia begins with a reference to female ululation, which, via the very sound of the word itself, would have created a powerful ritual auditory ­association, and it ends with one sung by the Erinyes (Eumenides 1104).39 Thus, the entire Oresteia is framed by a representation of women’s ritual song. The surrogate properties of the non-descript skene greatly helped facilitate these kind of shifting, yet inter-linked ritual associations. As Clark has pointed out, surrogates allow “richer contact with episodic memory systems and explicit stored knowledge.”40 Therefore, the skene, on which the Watchman stands, signifies both the roof of the ancient House of Atreus, and also the highest point in the city for spotting the dog-star at the start of the Athenian Skira ­festival. The ambiguity and lack of specificity of the skene actually enhanced its ­dramatic strength. Just as the Hoopoe in Birds is able to persuade Pisthetaerus to convert the abstract concept of the “pole of the sky” into a physical “polis of the birds” (175–85), so the Athenian stage was a place of surrogate settings informed by the cognitive associations triggered by music, language, staging, 38 39

40

W. Burkert, Homo necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing, (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983: 109–112). I missed it in my own translation of the trilogy in 1998. The Ololugmos is also invoked when the chorus of women imagines the deaths of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus at Libation Bearers 387. A. Clark, ibid., 26.

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and visual referents.41 Understanding this type of visual and ritual scenic device is yet another way in which to attempt to bridge the aesthetic gap between the ancient and modern stage. 6.6

The Watchman’s Mask

We have located the Watchman within the ambient extrapersonal space of the ancient open-air theatre and placed him on the mutable skene with its strong ritual associations, but there is another vital visual theatrical component that has a direct bearing on the way in which this text was performed – and that is the theatrical mask. The tragic mask was essential for the successful presentation of dramatic narrative in a vast open-air space. Without it, the kind of attentionality and emotional intimacy required of drama might never have been possible, and the translator must be aware that Aeschylus composed for masked actors. An informal experiment demonstrates the simple theatrical power of the mask. This involves taking one person and asking them to walk out into a public space, take up a position and simply stand and do nothing. Just like Joshua Bell in the dc Metro, everybody will pass the subject by without a thought as to what he or she is doing or thinking. The same experiment is repeated, except this time the subject wears a mask and the result is always completely different. From the outset people stop and stare, and a crowd quickly gathers with the expectation that the subject is about to do something. This impromptu audience expects a performance. What takes place is what performance theorist Richard Schechner has described as a spontaneous “performance eruption.”42 The mask acts as a distinctive visual call for attention – it creates theatre. Masks also have a profound impact on the spoken word. Oliver Taplin, in a review of Peter Hall’s masked production of Tantalus at the Denver Theater Center in December 2000, noted that the masks “made the audience listen better. The masks drew attention to the words.”43 This was not because of any 41

42 43

On the powerful cognitive associations created by music, see P.N. Juslin, “From Everyday Emotions to Aesthetic Emotions: towards a Unified Theory of Musical Emotions” Physics of Life Reviews 10/3 (2013): 235–266. Juslin has created the BRECVEMA model of musical emotional cognition, which includes eight mechanisms: Brain Stem Reflex, Rhythmic Entrainment, Evaluative Conditioning, Contagion, Visual Imagery, Episodic Memory, Musical Expectancy, and Aesthetic Judgment. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1977: 153–154, Fig 5.2). Oliver P. Taplin, “Masks in Greek Drama” Didaskalia, 5/2 (2001).

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kind of “megaphone mouth effect,” for which there is absolutely no evidence for 5th century masks, rather the focused and precise movements of the actors, combined with the spoken text, heightened the attention of the audience to what was actually being said. The Director Peter Hall, who has mounted several notable masked productions, including Tony Harrison’s translation of the Oresteia at the National Theatre in 1981, has reinforced this point. He has stated that, for him, masks resemble the iambic pentameter meter of Shakespeare.44 What Hall seemed to be trying to express is that the masks convey the emotional heart of the play and that there is a discipline and structure to performing in a mask, not unlike the hundreds of intricate katas (poses) that must be learned by the masked Japanese Noh performer. Performing in a mask can never be naturalistic. This has a great bearing on the type of language composed for a masked theatre. Subsequently, we find Greek dramatic dialogue and song heightened and rather stiff and out of date to modern sensibilities. Even ancient Greek comic language, which is structured on the much looser frame of iambics, is propelled by a heightened sense of obscenity, satire, and inter-genre references to other art forms and the popular cultural and social concerns of the day. Some of Aristophanes’ funniest moments are when his actors parody a scene from tragedy, establish a homemade festival, or convene a kitchen-sink courtroom. The language of comedy oscillates wonderfully between the high and the low, but in its extremism it completely suits the bulbous, grotesque, oversized comic masks worn by its actors. Comic gestures were equally exaggerated. This does not mean that tragic acting was in contrast, static and restrained. Movement, gestures, and dance are key elements in surviving mask theatre traditions such as Indian Kathakali and Japanese Noh, and there is no reason to think that Greek drama was any different, as removing the face from the spectator actually heightens cognitive attention to movement and the body. Just as modern directors should feel no compulsion to stage their versions of ancient drama in masks, neither should the translator have to construct their language for masked acting. What both should do is realize that the original work was created for the mask, and a significant amount of emotional content was conveyed by the actor’s mask in combination with gestures and movements. If Greek tragedy sometimes seems static or staid, it is because we suffer from a form of literary prosopagnosia – i.e., we are blind to the full affective potential of the face of the mask.

44

Simon Goldhill, How to Stage a Greek Tragedy Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007: 62).

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What do we know about the mask that Aeschylus’ Watchman wore in the Oresteia? Vase paintings and sculptural monuments from the 5th century show that a lightweight mask was used, probably made of linen, which fitted the performer’s face comfortably. The best evidence is the Pronomos Vase produced in Athens 420–400 bc and found in South Italy (Fig. 6.2).45 This depicts the cast of a Satyr drama gathered around Dionysus and Ariadne. One actor is costumed as Herakles and this mask provides an excellent archetype for the form of the tragic mask in the 5th century. It had white eyes with small holes that the performer looked through, and these would have resembled dark pupils

Figure 6.2 Detail of the Pronomos Vase, showing Herakles, the ­Papposilenos performers, the faces of two chorus ­members, and a female mask. Attic red-figured volute krater by the Pronomos Painter, 425–375 bc. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples (nm 81673). Photo permission, Museo Archeologico Nazionale Napoli. 45

See O.P. Taplin and R. Wyles, (eds.), The Pronomos Vase and its Context (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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to the spectators. The masks had a relatively small mouth aperture with no type of megaphone device, with a thick lower lip, normal sized or even fairly small noses, high foreheads with eyebrows, and smooth features. These were all important structural elements of the mask that helped facilitate its ability to seemingly change expression. The tragic mask was attached to the performer’s head by a soft hood, or sakkos, with hair attached. This realistic head and facial hair gave the mask a sense of life and movement. These masks were not that much larger than the head of the person who wore them, and they seemingly left space for the performers’ own ears so that the performer could hear clearly – essential for acting, singing, and dancing. The masks’ features were schematic but otherwise naturalistic and the evidence suggests that rather than a specific expression, masks had an ambiguous aspect, which also helped facilitate its ability to seemingly change emotional states. The Watchman wore such a mask. We have no description of his features but we might infer from his demeanor that he is a low status male of middle age or older. He does not seem to be a slave. Agamemnon is his king, but he is certainly a household retainer who remembers things from at least ten years ago. His eyes would have gazed directly out at the audience seated before him, and this frontal engagement was essential to the cognitive functioning of the mask in performance. In an earlier paper I have shown that the Greek tragic mask is fully capable of appearing to change its emotional countenance.46 In demonstrations held in several different countries with masks made by David Knezz based on this research, all participants reported being able to perceive the emotions of the mask change as it was moved and accompanied by distinct postures and gestures. A major finding of this work is that audiences are capable of reading at least five to six emotions in the mask when moved by an actor into certain positions without speaking. For example, a slowly lowered head will universally be perceived as sadness, quick jerky movements and the raising up of the head will be seen as joy and so on. Spectators report that they see the six “basic emotions” described by Paul Ekman: fear, joy, sadness, surprise, anger, and disgust (or contempt). What is reported as impossible to see clearly on the mask is sometimes surprising: feelings such as jealousy, love, and frustration are impossible to discern. Audiences report to have seen far more nuanced expressions on the mask when text is added to its movements. In this sense the mask, as I have argued, is far more expressive than the human face, as the individual audience member is imagining a mask’s features changed based on  certain symbolic g­ estures and body movements widely understood across cultures. 46

Peter Meineck, “The Neuroscience of the Tragic Mask” Arion 19/1 (2011): 113–158.

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This is a deeply moving element of tragedy that words on a page alone can never convey. The Watchman goes through a dizzying narrative of emotional states in a very short space of time. He begins his speech angry and frustrated, he wonders at the universe above, hopes for the arrival of the beacon, loathes Clytemnestra, complains about his conditions, feels sad, and then he is shocked, excited, happy, decisive, hopeful, suspicious, and silent. This seems a lot for a fixed mask to be asked to do. Of course, all of the above emotional states (if they are all indeed emotions) are purely subjective: another reader might propose a completely different, yet equally plausible, list. What can be agreed upon is that the Watchman presents many differing emotional states in quite a short space of time. It must have been a remarkable, compelling, and highly nuanced performance. The mask also acts as a kind of cognitive surrogate for the human face. The representation of a face creates a powerful cognitive response as the human facial recognition systems work to interpret the ambiguous visage of the mask when moved by the actor. Far from a device for disguise or facilitating doubling, by wearing a mask the ancient performer was actively enhancing the spectator’s cognitive attention to the body and therefore increasing the emotional and empathetic responses. But we should not view the mask in isolation from the actor’s body or the speech that emanated from it. This has also been a common tendency in scientific studies of the human face. A 2009 study by Cognitive Scientist, Beatrice de Gelder found that 95% of social and affective neuroscience studies focused on faces, while of the remaining 5% most used scenes and auditory inputs.47 On a human level, this is rather strange. In reality we engage with the face as a part of the body, and its movements are not perceived in isolation from the total human. In fact we should rightly feel quite alarmed if we ever encounter a disembodied head in real life, yet this is the way in which most participants in almost all affective processing studies encounter the face. But this situation is changing and recently there has been a growing body of research finding that humans also communicate affective information to each other via the body, not only in visually perceptive terms, but also as a means of transferring kinesthetic empathy between humans.48 47

48

See Beatrice de Gelder, “Why Bodies? Twelve Reasons for Including Bodily Expressions in Affective Neuroscience” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364/1535 (2009): 3475–3484. For example, Nicole Zieber et al., “Infants’ Perception of Emotion From Body Movements” Child Development 85/2 (2014): 675–684; Ursula Hess and Agneta Fischer, “Emotional Mimicry: Why and When We Mimic Emotions” Social and Personality Psychology ­Compass

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The relationship of the face with the body in emotional communication was well known by the Greeks. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia (3.10.1–8), Socrates is depicted visiting with Parrhasios the painter and Cleiton the sculptor, and asking them how they went about achieving a lifelike quality in their respective art forms. Socrates asks the painter if he is able to capture the “ethos of the soul” in his work and lists a number of examples of good qualities such as, lovability, friendliness, attractiveness, and desirability. Parrhasios responds that this would be impossible, as these are attributes that cannot be seen and therefore cannot be reproduced in form or color. Socrates then enquires if it is true that people usually express empathy and disgust by their looks, and whether or not these feelings can be imitated in the face, if so is it then possible to make a copy of these expressions as well as the looks of joy and sorrow? Parrhasios replies that this is of course entirely possible. Then Socrates visits Cleiton the sculptor and asks him if by replicating the emotions that affect the body he is able to beguile the spectator. When Cleiton responds in the affirmative, Socrates suggests that the fierce look in the eye of a fighter can be copied, and the look of pleasure in the face of a victor imitated. Cleiton agrees, and Socrates concludes that the sculptor does indeed represent the inner workings of the soul. Xenophon’s story proposes that a person’s êthos can be visually replicated through mimesis, and that character and emotions “show through” the face, eyes, and movements of the body.45 Xenophon’s description could be just as aptly applied to the tragic mask, a crafted object whose formation involved the plastic skills of the sculptor, the two dimensional mastery of line and color of the painter, and the form-fitting expertise of the third artist Socrates visits, Pistias the armourer (Memorabilia 3.109–15).46 In fact, Socrates’ description to Parrhasios, the painter of the visible display of emotions (3.10.5), could be equally applied to masked acting. His four key terms – prosôpon “face”; skhêma “form”; stasis “stillness”; and kinêsis “movement” are the essential elements in kinesthetic empathy and emotional contagion. These have been described as the synchronization of expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with another person, which can lead to feelings that are similar to the other person.49 These elements, which we might broadly describe as katas (borrowed from the intricate system of Noh

49

8/2 (2014): 45–57; F. Julia and Beatriz Calvo-Merino, “Dance as a Subject for Empirical Aesthetics” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 7/1 (2013): 76. Maiken Hillerup Fogtmann, “Kinesthetic Empathy Interaction: Exploring the Possibilities of Psychomotor Abilities in Interaction Design.” In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Physicality, (eds.) Devina Ramduny-Ellis, Alan Dix, Joanna Hare, and Steve Gill, 37–42. (University of Wales Institute Cardiff Press: Cardiff, 2007).

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mask movements), must be coordinated within an organized narrative framework – a plot – and operate in tandem with space, music and words. Thus, when Aristotle wrote in Poetics that the elements of tragedy are “conveyed” by the visual elements and the music (1450a) – and when it comes to the ­visual elements (opsis), the skeuopoios, or mask maker, is more skilled than the poet (1450b) – he may well have had the mask in mind in its role as the visual ­focalizer of the live theatrical experience. The face is also an intricate moving part of the body. It is what neuroscientist John Skoyles has called, a “motor exposure board.” It contains hundreds of muscles capable of generating a number of easily identifiable macro-expressions and a much larger number of seemingly imperceptible “micro-expressions.” When engaged in communication with another, the face is in a state of almost constant movement.50 What’s more is that studies have shown that when we watch a face our own faces have a tendency to “mirror” the macro expressions we perceive with our own micro-expressions – we embody the emotional states being communicated to us and can even start to feel those same emotions.51 It has also been observed that an infant will mirror the facial expressions of its caregiver. As the child has never seen its own face, and therefore has no visual sense of how by manipulating certain facial muscles one can produce a smile or a frown, it has been posited that this is an innate ability, and may also be connected to the function of the human Mirror Neuron System.52 The Mirror Neuron System facilitates connections between the visual and motor cortexes, allowing humans to quickly learn behavior through both ­observation and kinesthetic understanding.53 In the last ten years there has been a large amount of research to determine whether humans possess action-­ perception matching mechanisms or even an “empathy response.”54 As Cook et al. have recently pointed out “there is now a substantial body of evidence suggesting that mirror neurons are indeed present in the human brain.55 50 51

52 53 54 55

John R. Skoyles, “Why Our Brains Cherish Humanity: Mirror Neurons and Colamus Humanitatem” Avances en Psicología Latinoamericana 26/1 (2008): 99–111. Jamil Zaki and Kevin Ochsner, “Neural Sources of Empathy: An Evolving Story,” in ­Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Social Neuroscience 214 (eds.) S. Baron-Cohen, et al. (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013). Y. Sugita, “Innate Face Processing” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 19 (2009): 39–44. G. di Pellegrino, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, “Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study” Experimental Brain Research 91 (1992): 176–180. A good basic introduction to this research is M. Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New ­Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Picador, 2008). Richard Cook, et al. “Mirror Neurons: from Origin to Function” Behavioral and Brain S­ ciences 37/2 (2014): 177–192. Also see Alfonso Caramazza, et al., “Embodied Cognition and Mirror Neurons: A Critical Assessment” Annual Review of Neuroscience 37/1 (2014): 1–15.

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Several recent studies have suggested that this kind of mirror neuron motor simulation plays an important role in the development and maintenance of empathy as an evolutionary mechanism of social cohesion as we mirror, either purely cognitively or with micro-expressions, the perceived affective states of others.56 With this in mind, I suggest that the Greek dramatic mask was capable of producing a heightened empathetic response in the spectator and that it operated as a kind of “supra-face”- its schematic and ambiguous features, manipulated correctly, were able to create a deeply personal kind of motor-action empathy in the observer and then place cognitive attentionality on the movements of the masked actor’s body. This is clearly depicted in the movements of the masked actors depicted in Greek vase paintings of the period, with their expressive elongated fingers, outstretched arms with prominent gestures, deliberate dance steps and the careful placement of the feet. This is also observed in modern actors, when they use masks, in that the extremities – fingers, toes, limbs – become far more expressive and gestures much more precise. Although the question of how empathetic responses are generated remains debatable, there can be little doubt that based on the current science available, the Mirror Neuron System plays a vital role in this most important aspect of human inter-personal social cognition. The human Mirror Neuron System developed to help us understand the predicaments of others in order to enhance mutual survivability and group cohesion, and we rely on it to help generate a “theory of mind” – the ability to perceive another’s state of being. The mask removes a key element of our emotional and empathetic recognition mechanism – the moving face. Instead, we are forced to rely on other contextual clues; body movements, gestures, music and language, and the mind works harder and is more absorbed and engaged in piecing together perceptual signals. Affective responses are a key cognitive component in facial perception, and studies have shown that the emotional and memory processing center of the brain, the amygdala, acts as part of the perceptual network to tag an affective value to faces.57 This produces embodied affective responses in the ­spectator, such as chills, increased heart rate and shifts in skin temperature. These neurochemical responses form part of a dynamic network with the a­ nterior temporal 56 57

L. Braadbaart, et al. “The Shared Neural Basis of Empathy and Facial Imitation Accuracy” NeuroImage 84 (2014): 367–375. Dean Mobbs, et al., “The Kuleshov Effect: the Influence of Contextual Framing on Emotional Attributions” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 1/2 (2006): 95–106. Also see Jamin Halberstadt, et al., “Emotional Conception How Embodied Emotion Concepts Guide Perception and Facial Action” Psychological Science 20/10 (2009): 1254–1261; Jan Van den Stock, et al., “How Affective Information from Faces and Scenes Interacts in the Brain” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9/10 (2014): 1481–1488.

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r­ egions that store and coordinate contextual frames that have been collected through prior experiential contact. This information is then processed in the prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function, which also engages the Mirror Neuron System. These “top-down” signals then provide an interpretation of the facial expression of the mask, and this produces a deeply personal and empathetic response in the spectator. The Greeks called the mask a prosôpon: something before the gaze of the spectator – the essence of the theatrical experience.58 The Watchman’s mask would have operated in this way, heightening words and movement and increasing audience empathy, helping them to generate visceral feelings about the situations he describes, “propped up on his elbows like a dog” with “fear” beside his “sopping bed.” Then when he sees the beacon his excitement is articulated by words of movement: dancing, hurling dice, and even shaking the hand of the returning King. Yet, once the Watchman checks himself and remembers the secrets of the house of Atreus, his words and movements are abruptly halted and he tells us “a great ox is standing on my tongue.” Now his stillness, silence and fixed mask communicate so much more than words alone ever could. The mask heightened the transference of this kind of kinesthetic empathy – the ancient audience members were literally moved when they experienced the Watchman’s speech enacted in performance. 6.7 Conclusion A common, yet pervasive myth about Greek drama is that the plays stand in a long tradition that can be traced back through different theatrical periods of western drama, through the Middle Ages, Rome and Byzantium and back to 5th century Athens. This is a fallacy. As Carol Symes has remarked, “The division between what was seen at the Dionysia and what was transmitted to posterity began at the moment of tragedy’s inception, and continues up to the present day.” This is the trauma that needs to be acknowledged. We are forced to reconstruct ancient drama from texts that did not exist at the time of the original performance, and from the merest of material and literate evidence. In this brief examination of just ten lines of the Watchman’s speech, and by setting these words in their environmental, visual and affective contexts, we can come closer to bridging the cultural divide between 5th century Athens 58

The earliest occurrence of the term applied to a mask seems to be the word prosop[on] on an Attic inscription dated to 434–433 bc (ig 13 343.7.) This may relate to the use of a mask in ritual practice.

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and today – at least in terms of understanding more about how these words functioned in performance. One of the most traumatic aspects of the translator’s craft is to attempt to equate these ideas across not only temporal but also cultural divides. In this respect we should accept that what we call “Greek drama” was an entirely different experience from almost all of the theatre works seen in the West today: the festival environment, open-air venues, social organization, funding system, casting, and creative process would be hard to replicate in New York or London. And even if we knew exactly how to stage a Greek play as the ancients experienced it, would we even want to? This might be a fascinating academic exercise and even have great artistic merit, but would the play continue to be regarded as drama in the minds of the modern audience? The reality is that many modern translations, adaptations, and productions of ancient Greek plays fall somewhere in the middle, attempting to evoke some kind of theatrical otherness or forced ritualism, while the actors who must enact these words can drown in “translationese” – an odd hybrid of the English language, ancient Greek word order, and philological concepts. The result is often neither a close translation nor a workable version for the stage. At the end of the day a translation is a brand new conceptual work and plays must be adapted to suit new environments and audiences or they will become relics and irrelevant to the culture for which they were created. But nothing should be cut, changed, or adapted because it is not understood – a common mistake of many directors and adapters. A cognitive approach can help us comprehend more and it can orientate translators to consider the ­effect of their words in live time and space, and the environment within which these plays were created. Knowledge is power for the translator and the power to adapt and change should always be part of keeping these ancient plays alive in the modern theatre and in the minds of those who come to watch them.

chapter 7

Aeschylus and Western Opera Sarah Brown Ferrario 7.1 Introduction In this chapter, I want to gather together as many factors as possible, from antiquity to modernity, that seem to have negatively affected the adaptation of Aeschylean tragedy into opera, a process that by its very nature confronts a vast ‘cultural divide’ created by differences not only in genre, but also in time, space, and ethos. Indeed, the very structure and content of Aeschylus’ surviving dramas have likely contributed significantly to their limited use for opera, a situation that has only begun to even out since the later part of the 20th century, when changing musical and dramatic aesthetics increasingly fostered the deliberate embrace of the artistic challenges inherent in Aeschylean texts. The first section of this chapter begins by briefly reviewing the reception of Aeschylus’ dramas from the 4th century bc through the Renaissance (the time of Western opera’s accepted ‘birth’),1 noting some ways in which composition and content appear to have affected the plays’ impact. It then highlights some important trends in the reception of tragedy into non-comic opera2 from the latest 16th through the 18th centuries and suggests that even from the genre’s beginnings, Aeschylean dramas did not readily lend themselves to prevailing operatic styles. The second section offers some more specific reasons why this might have been the case. It first examines some general challenges associated with presenting Aeschylean scenic composition, choruses, and characters in operatic contexts, and notes some ways in which these features of Aeschylean tragedy converge with or diverge from the organizational principles visible in opera down through the 18th century. Next, this section looks more closely at 1 Iacopo Peri’s Euridice of 1599 (premiered in 1600) is the earliest surviving work for the musical stage that is conventionally acknowledged as an ‘opera.’ Peri’s similar Dafne of c. 1597, based on the Apollo-Daphne myth, is now lost: see Porter (1965), especially 170–172. 2 While Italian operas of the 17th century, for example, might incorporate lighter elements into their otherwise nominally dramatic plots, I nevertheless include them in this analysis. My definition of “comic” opera therefore excludes from this discussion later developments in the 18th century and beyond, such as German-Viennese Singspiel, Italian opera buffa, and French opéra bouffe, including explicitly comic treatments of ancient tragedy and mythology like Jacques Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers (1858, rev. 1874) or La belle Hélène (1864).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004332164_009

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Aeschylean content to highlight some cultural concerns and matters of taste that may have circumscribed the use of this material for earlier opera. The third section of this chapter moves forward into the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries to note briefly some important changes in operatic aesthetics that seem to have invited increasing numbers of artists in more recent times to confront the challenges discussed in the second section. The result is that Aeschylus has enjoyed burgeoning levels of operatic interest in the later 20th and 21st centuries. A total of six operas receive closer discussion in Sections ii and iii: Legrenzi’s Eteocle e Polinice (1675), Salieri’s Les Danaïdes (1784), Taneyev’s Oresteya (1895), Orff’s Prometheus (1968), Theodorakis’ Antigone (1999), and Simpson’s The Furies (2006). 7.2

Aeschylus from Antiquity through the Early Centuries of Opera

Aristophanes’ comic Frogs of 405 bc presents what we might consider the earliest ‘review’ of Aeschylean drama. The play features representations of the deceased poets Aeschylus and Euripides, who are to compete, through their poetry, for the privilege of returning to the mortal world. In a staged confrontation between the two dramatists (Ra. 830–1478), Euripides is portrayed as creating baser characters, focusing on a plainer style of speech, depicting highly emotional women, composing his music in a newer style, and having little respect for traditional social values, including religion;3 Aeschylus is noted for the contrived structure of his dramas, his emphasis upon heroic and martial themes, the complexity of his language, and his piety.4 In the end, of course, it is Aeschylus, the old-fashioned edifier, whom Dionysus decides to bring back to Athens (Ra. 1471) for the social and political good of the city (Ra. 1419–1421, 1433–1436). Despite its lampoons of individual figures and situations, traditionalism and civic loyalty to the rule of the dêmos were characteristic of Old Comedy,5 and the Aeschylus character seems to have served in this case as a metonym for those impulses. An Aeschylean victory in the contest of the Frogs was also in keeping with the general artistic history of the 5th century. Euripides, after all, won far fewer prizes during his lifetime than either Sophocles or Aeschylus did. The statistics are still striking: with a ‘victory’ being awarded to a set consisting of three 3 E.g., Ra. 841–842, 846, 850, 888–894, 937–991, 1045–1056, 1063–1098, 1301–1363. 4 E.g., Ra. 834, 839, 859, 886–887, 911–935, 1004–1005, 1013–1045, 1056–1062, 1249–1299. Ra. ­1119–1248 represents the dissection of each poet’s prologues by his opponent, and therefore preferences wordplay over thematic criticism. 5 This is Henderson’s central argument (1990).

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tragedies and a satyr play, Aeschylus is credited with as many as 90 plays and either 13 or 28 victories, Sophocles with up to 123 plays and either 20 or 24 victories (with the added honor of never having placed third), and Euripides with as many as 92 plays and just 4 victories.6 However, after his death Euripides seems to have been by far the most popular amongst the three poets. The testimonia from the revival contests for ‘old plays’ that began in Athens in the 4th century bc, the quotations in later classical literature, and the fragments preserved on papyri from Egypt all favor Euripides through sheer numbers.7 The Roman era witnessed a critically important development: the digest of Greek tragedy by another culture. Roman use of Greek tragedy involved not only wholesale readership and exemplary quotation,8 but also translation and adaptation.9 In the latter two categories in particular, Euripides’ influence again seems to be palpably stronger than that of Aeschylus, not only in the transformations accomplished by Seneca,10 but also in adaptations by other authors, most notably Ovid.11 These two Roman writers in particular were to play important roles in the development of Renaissance drama, and Ovid’s works especially would eventually contribute many plots and characters to opera.12 6 7

8 9 10

11 12

Easterling and Knox (1985: 761 Aeschylus, 764–765 Sophocles, 768 Euripides). The revival contests were introduced in 386 bc (did A 1 201–3), and all of the reliable ­victory-entries are for productions of Euripidean plays: did A 2a 1–3, A 2a 16–19, A 2a 32–3, B 8, B 11 1–2 (references collected in Ferrario (2006: 79 and n. 4); all of the didaskaliai [did], or ancient production notices and testimonia, are reproduced in Snell with Kannicht (1986)). On Euripidean quotations in 4th-century Greek literature, e.g., Perlman (1964: 162–164); on Euripides in the papyri, see Morgan (2003: 187), the likely published version of a conference paper originally cited in Garland (2004: ix, 268). On the widespread employ of Euripides (particularly his Phoenician Women) in education during and after the Hellenistic age, and on the impact that such usage appears to have had on reception and readership, see Cribiore (2001). See Garland (2004: 58–62), especially 60, with references; on the readership of and reference to Euripides in Roman education, see Bonner (1977: 215–216) and footnote 7 above. In general, see Garland (2004: 57–65). For more specific discussions, see the essays collected in the second and third sections of Gildenhard and Revermann (2010). On Seneca’s complex relationship with Euripides, see Boyle (1997), passim, but e.g., 85–89, 122–133. Tarrant (1995) discusses how Seneca often receives and transforms Greek material through other Roman literature, or at least through a Roman lens. See most recently Curley (2013). The discussion ibid., 188–192 (with references) in particular offers the reminder that Euripides could transform Aeschylus, as well. See Sternfeld (1988), updated as Sternfeld (1993: 1–30). On Ovidian influences even in the first opera known to be based on historiography, see Ketterer (1998) (noting this particular feature in his opening line); for another way of reading Ovid in “early modern opera” (title), see Heller (2013).

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The preference for Euripides over Sophocles and Aeschylus seems to have continued in the Byzantine period, with Euripidean reproduction on all scales, from quotation to manuscript copying, outweighing that of the other two tragic poets in the Greek-speaking world.13 But an important accident also helped to tip the quantitative balance still further in Euripides’ favor. At some point in the textual transmission of the plays, part of a large alphabetical edition of Euripides was preserved and supplied a group of nine dramas beginning with the letters eta through kappa,14 while the work of the other two tragedians was culled more completely as the ‘Byzantine triads,’ the three most frequently read works by each poet, came to dominate the tradition.15 Euripides therefore entered the Renaissance with more plays still in existence: nineteen works credited to him remained, in contrast to seven each for Aeschylus and Sophocles.16 At almost precisely this time,17 the printing press came into use in Europe. Printed editions were commodity goods that could be exchanged for prestige or (more often) profit, and so the existence of a real or potential market for a given literary work is more likely if the number of associated printed products is comparatively high. Again, it is worth comparing Aeschylus with Euripides. The first printed edition of Euripides was the Lascaris edition in Florence, c. 1495, which included only the Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis, and Andromache.18 But Aeschylus was not put into print until 1518, at the famous press of Aldus 13 14

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Marciniak (2009: 83 and n. 51), with references. Gregory (2005: 254) cites Reynolds and Wilson (1991: 76–77). Wilson (1983: 254–255), especially 254 n. 23 (citing “Turyn 1957: 224ff”), notes that Turyn first credited the Byzantine scholar Demetrius Triclinius with the development of a complete edition of surviving Euripides that integrated the ‘alphabetic plays’ with the rest of the corpus. Of particular note within Turyn’s discussion are 224–258 and especially 241. Garland (2004: 77) thinks that this process (likely selecting the dramas with the goal of providing edification) took place c. 500; Gruys (1981: 209) sees it as being completed by the 12th century; Marciniak (2009: 77 n. 11) would place it in the 12th or 13th centuries; but Marciniak views the derivation of the triads not as a narrowly defined set of events but rather as “a process influenced by various factors” (ibid., 76–77). Garland (ibid., 197) provides a convenient list of the members of the triads for each of the tragedians: for Aeschylus, they are the Persians, the Seven against Thebes, and the Prometheus Bound. I include the Prometheus Bound and the Rhesus in these numbers, since their respective attributions to Aeschylus and Euripides were apparently not questioned (with isolated exceptions) until more recent times. On the history of inquiries into the authorship of Prometheus Bound, see Griffith (1977: 1–3); into that of Rhesus, see Liapis (2012: lxvii–lxxii), with additional references. For an accessible overview of the life of Johannes Gutenberg (d. 1468) and his work on the movable-type printing press, see Füssel (2003), especially 10–15. E.g., Garland (2004: 105); Wilson (1992: 99).

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Manutius in Venice.19 And that disparity continued over time: there were far fewer known printed projects dealing with Aeschylus from the 16th century than there were focused upon Sophocles and Euripides.20 This gap may be due in part to the difficulty of Aeschylus’ Greek – and that challenge may also be a reason why Aeschylus generally received renderings in the vernacular later than did the other tragedians.21 The next stage of the journey, from readership to performance, and specifically to opera, was for all three of the tragedians somewhat protracted. By the 16th century, ‘rediscovered’ (from the perspective of western Europe) tragedy had already spawned a vibrant and innovative theatrical tradition, with writers using ancient literature as both source and inspiration to craft new tragedies, “draw[ing] in the values and aesthetic principles of the past to give dramatic expression to their own culture.”22 In the meantime, dramatic treatments of ancient subjects in general, often with varying degrees of musical enhancement, had also been circulating in Italy,23 with the late 15th and 16th centuries witnessing such diverse theatrical projects as Plautine comedies, mythological and historical dramas, and intermedi, or elaborate musical-theatrical scenes designed as interludes between sections of plays.24 Beyond the dramatic and poetical texts, the stories, and the myths, a further contributing factor from antiquity emerged: the reception of ancient Greek ­ideals into early opera. This was significantly shaped not only by artistic interests, 19 20 21

22

23 24

Lachmann and Cranz (1971: 6). For a complete description of this edition, see Gruys (1981: 17–21). Mund-Dopchie (1984), quoted by Dawe (1985: 247), counts 21, 48, and 75 examples (primarily texts and commentaries) for Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, respectively. Garland (2004: 113, 202), pointing to vernacular translations of Aeschylus in the 17th and 18th centuries. Garland’s listing of translations (ibid., 202–206) demonstrates that translators tended to turn to Euripides and Sophocles sooner than they did Aeschylus. However, Blasina (2006) shows that the earliest vernacular rendering of Aeschylus can now be pushed back into the 16th century with the Italian Prometeo of Marcantonio Cinuzzi (1578): see McCallum-Barry (2008). Di Maria (2005: 429–430), quote at 429, discussing Italy in particular. However, the same might be said of other European work during this period: see Burian (1997: 228, 230–234). The profound influence of Seneca – writing in the more approachable Latin – upon Renaissance tragedy must also not be overlooked: e.g., the survey by Boyle (1997: 141–207), especially 141–166. Pirrotta in Pirrotta and Povoledo 1982, Part i. E.g., Pirrotta in Pirrotta and Povoledo (1982: 37–77); on intermedi, see especially 46–77, 173–236 (the latter section on what Pirrotta calls at 174 “aulic” or “courtly” intermedi, “those which were intended to celebrate some particularly important event in the life of a court and to impress all the guests with their inventiveness and extravagance,” 173).

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but also by intellectual considerations ranging from ancient Greek music theory to ideas attributed to Aristotle in the Poetics (particularly those having to do with mimesis and with the relationships between music and drama).25 Given, however, that 16th- and 17th-century Italian interpreters often stretched and even deliberately violated ‘Aristotelian precepts’ in their approaches to theatre,26 it is helpful here to recall some of the basic preferences of the Poetics. If the Poetics has a favorite drama, it is Sophocles’ Oedipus the King,27 but the essay also calls Euripides (while admitting that he does not always “arrange things well,” euoikonomei) the “most tragic” (tragikotatos) of the dramatists,28 and provides comparatively abundant citation and discussion of his plays.29 Aeschylus is given much less attention: he is credited with adding a second actor and with prioritizing soloists over the chorus; he is acknowledged as writing a deductive recognition scene in Libation Bearers and creating an appropriately selective version of the story of Niobe; his Phorcides (lost) and (his?) Prometheus receive passing mention, and he is criticized for a rather pedestrian report of the wound of Philoctetes.30 But that is all. Aeschylus’ very limited treatment in the Poetics may have helped to further restrict his intellectual appeal amongst the humanists, theorists, and artists who were attempting

25 26 27

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E.g., Palisca (1985: 23–50, 396–401, 408–412, ­418–426). E.g., Heller (2010: 69–74). “Oedipus” is cited several times as an example throughout the text, for a variety of reasons. See especially Poetics 11 (on anagnorisis), 13 (on the choice of a tragic dynasty and protagonist), 14 (on the arousal of pity and fear), 15 (on character and “the irrational” [trans. Butcher]), 16 (on methods and varieties of anagnorisis), 24 (once more on the role of “the irrational”), 26 (on the impact of compact storytelling). Poetics 13, cited in Hoxby (2005: 255 n. 10). Hoxby (ibid., 256) suggests that praise of Euripides in the Poetics is likely to have influenced Renaissance ideas about the ability of tragedy to manipulate the emotions. E.g., at least Poetics 11, 14, 16, 17 (Iphigeneia in Tauris), 14 (Medea, Cresphontes [lost]), 15 (Orestes, Melanippe [lost], Iphigeneia at Aulis), 18 (Ixion [lost], dramatization of parts of the story of the sack of Troy, separation of the chorus from the main plot of the drama), 22 (Philoctetes [lost]), 25 (realistic portrayal of characters, Aegeus [lost], Orestes). It is not clear to which poet the Mysians mentioned in Poetics 24 belonged. Not all of the attention paid to Euripides is positive, however: as noted by Fyfe (1932: 48–49) ad Poetics 13: “Against Euripides Aristotle makes the following criticisms: (1) his choruses are often irrelevant; (2) the character of the heroine in his Iphigeneia in Tauris is inconsistent; (3) in the Medea the deliberate killing of the children is ineffective and the play is inartistically ended by the machina; (4) the character of Menelaus in the Orestes is needlessly depraved; (5) Melanippe is too philosophical for a woman.” Poetics 4, 16, 18, 22.

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to use the treatise as a framework, a guidebook, or even simply a point of artistic departure.31 For these and doubtless other reasons, Aeschylus was already in theory a much less likely source for early opera than Sophocles or Euripides. In practice, Aeschylus was even further marginalized by the fact that, despite the extensive conversations about Greek drama that seem to have surrounded opera’s birth,32 17th-century librettists in the Italian tradition tended to limit their employ of ‘straight’ tragedy in the first place.33 Pastoral and mythological stories dominated contact with antiquity in the earlier part of the century, with Orpheus, the quintessential musician, being a favorite topic, and Ovid in general a favorite source.34 Even with the passage of time and the introduction of ancient historical topics into the repertory,35 librettists of this era tended to favor significant adaptations derived from a combination of mythology, (sometimes) tragedy, and pure fiction,36 in order to contrive structure and content that best satisfied their audiences.37 Two elements that were highly preferred were romance (in the sense of love-relationships), and the lieto fine, or “happy

31 32

33 34 35

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See the observations of Hoxby in footnote 28 above. Palisca (1989: 1–11) provides a brief summary of the nature of the Florentine Camerata, an artistic and intellectual circle of the 16th century that took a special interest in the relationship of music and drama and in the development of stage works by Peri and others (cf. footnote 1 above), but points out that the story of opera’s birth is more complex than a simple attribution of this new art form to the Camerata alone would suggest. The interest in Greek tragedy (and in antiquity in general) on the part of the Camerata’s members was shared by others, as well: see Pirrotta and Povoledo (1982) (cited in Palisca 1989: 3 n. 7), in particular Pirrotta’s chapters 1–2 and 5–6. Heller (2010: 75); Ketterer (2003). See note 78, below; and cf. the case studies in Buller (1995). Ketterer (2009: 22–23) demonstrates that Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643, libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello) was actually part of larger trends that contributed to the use of historical subjects in opera, rather than being a “creation ex nihilo” (22). Brown and Ograjenšek (2010: vi) note that “the use of surviving Greek tragedies can be traced only back to the 1660s, starting with Antigona delusa da Alceste (‘Antigone tricked by Alcestis,’ libretto by Aurelio Aureli, music by Pietro Andrea Ziani, Venice, 1660), based in part on Euripides’ Alcestis (but not at all on Sophocles’ Antigone!)”; see also Strohm (2010: 166–167). But cf. Heller (2010: 75–76), noting the ways in which the work was expanded, decorated, and altered from the original as a distinct product of its day – and arguing for the influence of Euripides’ Trojan Women upon Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone of 1641. The situation is not entirely clear-cut during this period. Heller (2010: 74–75).

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ending.”38 In France, the major stylistic alternative was provided by the tragédie lyrique.39 It shared with the Italian way of writing opera a distinct preference for the lieto fine, but tended under the influence of French stage tragedy to hew somewhat more closely to the dramas, whether ancient or otherwise, from which it took its libretti.40 It did this, however, only when such affinity to a source presented no challenges to the established social and political order or to the structural expectations that had come to characterize the genre: a five-act structure, a programmatic prologue, the incorporation of dance, and the inclusion of a lavish quantity of spectacle.41 But even on terms such as these, Aeschylus was unlikely to furnish either the framework or the decorative material for opera of this type. The narrowly focused plots, spare character lists, limited action, and even at times restricted emotional range of many of his extant plays42 (in particular the Byzantine triad43 and the Suppliant Women) seem to have counted against him even when the general subject-matter in which he shared held documented appeal for leading artists. Strohm notes, for example, that in the case of Francesco Cavalli’s Hipermestra (1654, libretto by Giovanni Andrea Moniglia), “a link with Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women has been considered, but unconvincingly. It is certainly based on prose texts about the myth of the Danaids.”44

38 39

A recent articulation of these concepts is Questa (2008: 101–102). The ‘serious’ (as opposed to comic) operatic tradition in 17th- and 18th-century Germany and Austria tended to patronize, respond to, and dialogue with Italian and French operatic styles: Varwig (2006), especially 125–132, shows that the question as to what might define particularly German opera before the 19th century remains both complex and open, due to the cosmopolitan nature of artistic life in a part of Europe distinguished by language and culture but not politically united. Grout (1946) provides a useful summary of the impact of Italian and French operatic traditions in Germanspeaking territories and of some Germanic approaches to opera in the later 17th and earlier 18th centuries. 40 Giroud (2010: 19–22). 41 Ibid. 42 See below for more detailed discussion of these problems. 43 See footnote 15 above. 44 Strohm (2010: 166), citing Apollod. Book 2 and Hyg. Fab. 168. Neither the summary of the festivities at which Cavalli’s opera was first performed (Rucellai 1658), nor the plot of another libretto adapted from Moniglia’s (Cristoforo Ivanovich’s La costanza trionfante, 1673: see Walker and Dubowy (1992)) betray any sense of an Aeschylean source, save as ‘back story.’ The elaborate presentation of Cavalli’s opera in 1658 included a mock battle, but the context is that of Lynceus storming Argos where Danaus reigns (contra Aeschylus) “pour venger ses frères” (“to avenge his brothers”) (Decroisette 1972), not the Egyptian

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A good case study in this regard is Giovanni Legrenzi’s Eteocle e Polinice (libretto by Tebaldo Fattorini after Statius’ Thebaid),45 which is traditionally recorded as having premiered in 1675,46 in Venice, during Carnival. This opera specifically does not represent direct dealings with Aeschylus, but it is emblematic of the ways in which artists of the 17th century often handled classical texts and subjects – and of the reasons why Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes was unlikely to be chosen on its own as the foundation for a baroque opera. The story of the family of Oedipus was the subject in antiquity of a great number of literary works;47 several Greek tragedies on the clan survive, including Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone; Euripides’ Phoenician Women;48 and, of course, Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. This same expanded narrative was also treated in other literature; in Latin, the most extensive versions of it available during and after the Renaissance were to be found in Seneca’s Latin tragedy Oedipus, the “Senecan”49 Phoenician Women, and Statius’ epic Thebaid. Statius is the only author cited in Fattorini’s prefatory material to the libretto of Legrenzi’s opera, and the Thebaid does indeed seem to have supplied nearly all of the source material for the plot – reminding thereby that in spite of invocations of Greek models for opera, much, if not most, access to classical antiquity in Western Europe during this period derived from Latin translations or from Latin literature.50 The Italian musical nonprofit iamr further notes a close correspondence between Fattorini’s libretto and Racine’s 1664 drama La Thébaïde, and implies that Racine may actually have been Fattorini’s immediate source for the narrative originally laid out by Statius.51 Whether Fattorini was reading French or Latin (or both) in order to prepare his text, he discusses his own goals for the project in the prefatory material to the libretto:

45 46 47 48

49 50 51

forces attacking as in the extant Aeschylean tragedy. The possibility of influence from Ovid, Heroides 14 should also be considered in this time period: see footnote 78, below. On the likely sources for Statius’ Thebaid, including its potentially tenuous relationship with Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, see e.g., Vessey (1973), especially 69–70. Although it probably actually opened in December 1674: Selfridge-Field (2007: 113). Poetics 13, in fact, cites this dynasty as an especially rich one for tragic storytelling. See Edmunds (2006: 37–38), summarizing the extant and fragmentary Euripidean sources: note that Euripides’ Suppliant Women deals with the aftermath of the battle for Thebes. Fantham (1995). Ketterer (2003). http://www.iamr.eu/giovanni-legrenzi/.

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You will find this drama has not followed the rules laid down by the authors because it was composed to be performed in these theatres and the author followed no rule other than that of delight, and followed no goal other than that of universal enjoyment. Therefore read it with charitable understanding, and be satisfied, in seeing it represent everything that renders it more beautiful.52 In other words, there are significant departures in the libretto from the ancient literature. Corrigan, upon whose synopsis and analysis the discussion in this paragraph depends, points out that “with the introductory ‘Si finge’ [‘it is pretended here that…’], which had already become traditional, [Fattorini] develops his own plot.”53 Most of the alterations are directed towards a complicated web of love-relationships. As Corrigan notes, in Statius, Adrastus, the king of Argos, has two daughters. Argia is eventually married to Polynices, the son of Oedipus, and Deipyle is married to Tydeus, an Aetolian prince. In Fattorini, however, these relationships are sketched only as engagements, in order to admit the possibility of greater romantic crisis. Fattorini “pretends” that Antigone is in love with Tydeus, and Eteocles with Deipyle. This allows for three couples in total.54 But in order to have three couples, it will not of course do to have the myth play out in the usual ancient way, with the brothers Eteocles and Polynices killing each other. Contra Racine and Statius (and Aeschylus), therefore, as Corrigan describes, Fattorini spares Polynices and has him captured instead. Faking Deipyle’s death loosens both Eteocles’ iron grip on the throne and his hatred for his brother, and the couples are all happily united.55 Of the Aeschylean version of this story, then, there remains virtually no trace; indeed, its actual influence on Statius may have been very limited, as well.56 It might perhaps be argued that with the degree of rewriting habitually practiced by Fattorini and by others of his age,57 any Greek tragedy could conceivably have provided the general theme for an opera and had its contents – even down to the level of life and death – altered to suit audience tastes. But Fattorini’s structural goals, particularly the lieto fine brought about 52

Fattorini libretto (Venice: Nicolini, 1675: 5), cited and quoted in this translation by Pietropaolo and Parker (2011: 35). 53 Corrigan (1973: 253–254). 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 See footnote 45 above. 57 On the origins in early Venetian opera of this kind of improvisation on ancient and other literary paradigms, see Rosand (1991: 176–178).

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by the settling of multiple romantic disputes, were clearly better-served by beginning with the much more complicated and wide-ranging Statius, whose possibilities would have allowed for the crafting of a variety of different scenes and confrontations.58 The entire concept of building a libretto from an ancient source in this manner had actually been justified some two decades before by reference to the Poetics,59 a further testimony to the influence of that text upon the choices made by the creators of opera during this period. Moving forward, the later 17th and early 18th centuries in general witnessed more direct reception of Greek tragedy into opera,60 not only with a lesser degree of contaminatio61 than before, but also with greater evident interest in tragic techniques of plot and character. The 18th century, for example, brought the first known operatic Oedipus from Sophocles, Pietro Torri’s Edipo (libretto by Domenico Lalli), premiered in Munich in 1729: in discussing this work, Strohm also sees Euripidean influence in the opera’s depiction of the added character Ismene.62 Ketterer argues that the early 18th-century librettist Agostino Piovene, who took a number of his topics from Roman history but who also created two translations of Greek tragedy (an Oedipus the King and a Phoenician Women), allowed his experiences with the latter to inform his work upon the former, coloring his libretti with influences from Sophocles and Euripides.63 58

59

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Such diversity seems in fact to have been not only a response to contemporary trends, but a hallmark of Legrenzi’s work: see Gelli and Poletti (2007: 1526–1527), s.v. “Legrenzi, Giovanni.” Rosand (1991: 177 and n. 49), quoting in translation the preface to Nicolò Minato’s libretto Artemisia (1658): “Now, following the precepts of the master of all, Aristotle, and wishing, as he teaches, to invent on the basis of history to compose this drama, I have undertaken to imagine that […]. ” Although Rosand does not specify to which section of the Poetics Minato is alluding, it is probably 9. Strohm (2010: 168–170), explaining some cultural reasons for this shift; see also Ketterer (2010: 139), pointing to the influence of the Arcadian Academy. On the Arcadian movement in general, see Tcharos (2011), especially 29–45. I borrow the particular usage here from Ketterer (2010: 155), who connects Piovene’s adaptation techniques in his libretti with the contaminatio for which Roman comedians could be criticized (e.g., Ter. An. 1–27), i.e. the blending of elements from multiple older sources. Strohm (2010), especially 171, 174 (where he notes that this Ismene is not Oedipus’ daughter, but seems to owe something to Euripides’ treatments of Polyxena). “Lalli’s [work] is the response of an Italian librettist not only to the challenge of the French classicist tradition as renewed in Voltaire’s drama, but also to a new wave of Italian tragedie per musica on ancient themes in the second and third decades of the century” (Strohm 2010: 173). Ketterer (2010), especially 140–143 and 150–159. The Piovene tragedies he discusses are Edipo and Le Feniciane, respectively dated 1711 and “date unknown.”

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And although Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), one of the most successful librettists of any age, did not produce operatic texts based directly upon or apparently indebted to surviving Greek tragedies, he did depend almost exclusively upon ancient subjects.64 Burden has suggested that, influenced by the ideas of the contemporary Arcadian movement, Metastasio seems to have viewed certain elements of his work as being inspired by various tragic paradigms, both intellectual and dramatic.65 Another redefinition of ‘the tragic,’ however, was to take place in the later portion of the 18th century, when what were perceived as excesses in both the French and (especially) Italian national traditions became a motivating force behind operatic ‘reform.’66 The influential work of the composer Christoph Willibald von Gluck, particularly with his ‘reform’ operas Orfeo ed Euridice (premiered 1762), Alceste (1767), Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), provided new models for engagement with classicism that transcended the boundaries between the Italian and French traditions and the particular Viennese tastes that governed the reception of both.67 But although the operatic reform of this era did advocate for the simplification of plots and spectacle, the elimination of excess and artificiality, and the heightening of emotive and dramatic expression,68 it is by no means a strict demarcation point for the adaptation of (nearly) entire tragedies into opera. Various

64

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See Neville (1992b), in particular the accompanying works list with its chronological register of composers who set each of Metastasio’s libretti. Neville also shows that the majority of Metastasio’s libretti were completed before the 1740s. Particularly as filtered through particular understandings of the Poetics: Burden (2010). See also the discussion of Metastasio’s relationship to the Arcadian movement in Neville (1992b). So strongly felt was the tradition of the tragédie lyrique, however, that even ‘reform’ operas for French audiences might respect some of its characteristics: an instructive example is discussed by Howard (1974). On Gluck’s “classicism,” see Goldhill (2010). On Gluck and the operatic culture of Vienna at the time of the reform, see Youell (2012). This vision is traditionally associated with Gluck and the librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, and dated to their collaboration on Orfeo ed Euridice in 1762 (the opera also exists in a French version, Orphée et Eurydice, dated 1774), but they were by no means the first or only individuals working with these ideas. For succinct acknowledgements of some of the intellectual influences upon the operatic reform concentrated in the third quarter of the 18th century, see Cuillé (2011), especially 69–72; Zinar (1971: 84–85); Heartz (1967: 8); Garlington (1963), especially 484–487. Howard (1964) is a brief, Gluck-centered project that nevertheless surveys artistic and musical forerunners in chapters 1–3; for a more current discussion focused specifically on Vienna, see Youell (2012).

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treatments of Euripides’ two Iphigenia stories, for example, had been staged throughout western Europe for decades before Gluck’s versions emerged, although the earlier Aulis ones, even those created in the Italian tradition, had generally been filtered through the significant changes introduced by Jean Racine in his Iphigénie of 1674.69 What reform seems to have brought, rather, is a particular brand of neoclassicism that tended to advocate limitation or removal of the extra decoration that had been so characteristic of earlier Italian opera seria in particular. Such decoration ranged from improvised vocal ornamentation all the way up to the level of inserted subplots, fictionalized characters, altered endings, and a degree of stage display that had come to be seen by the reformers as distracting. Reform in Italian opera in turn influenced reconsideration within the French tradition, particularly regarding the role of spectacle, a long-established part of French musical stage production that, while significantly discussed, was by no means eliminated.70 A central goal of reform in both musical cultures, however, was the illumination of the text itself and of the drama – in the sense of powerful affectation – that the text could convey.71 That affectation was specifically planned to emerge from the human emotions of the characters, as experienced by the audience.72 A good example of the navigation of international operatic tastes – and of the treatment of ancient subjects – during this era is Antonio Salieri’s Les D ­ anaïdes, (libretto by François Louis Du Roullet and Ludwig Teodor Tschudi, based on Ranieri de’ Calzabigi’s Ipermestra, after several versions of the myth of the Danaids), which premiered in 1784 at the Paris Opera. Here, again, the potential employ of Aeschylus has been effectively avoided. Aeschylus’ S­ uppliant Women would likely have been a challenging source for an opera in any case

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Cumming (1995: 217–221). Cumming suggests (221–222) that the popularity and success of Racine’s play should be at least partially credited with the burgeoning of operatic treatments of Iphigenia – and with the turning of poets and composers interested in reform to Tauris rather than to Aulis: “Racine’s authority was so great that every libretto on the subject had to come to terms with his version. Real reform could not be accomplished with a subject that had already become a modern classic in its own right” (1995: 222). Zinar (1971: 83) notes the entrance into opera of Iphigenia as a “new heroine from the pages of Greek tragedy” around the beginning of the 18th century, but offers no explanation. See Cuillé (2011), especially 69–72; Garlington (1963); and cf. Brown and Rushton (1992) s.v. § 11, “Italian reform operas.” Brown and Rushton (1992). See Goldhill (2010: 215, 219–220).

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(cf. the more detailed discussion below), but the librettists’ ­approach73 here seems to have addressed the issue by skipping this drama’s part of the story entirely and using other literary sources to fill out the myth as Aeschylus’ orig­ inal set of Danaid plays74 would have done – although, of course, with different details and a different ending. The foundations here may indeed have been built, as Neville suggests, upon the mythological compendia of Apollodorus and Hyginus.75 But there is also another major ancient source for this story: Ovid, Heroides 14,76 the letter from Hypermestra to Lynceus. In Ovid’s treatment, Hypermestra, imprisoned by Danaus for her disobedience, vividly reviews the events that took place from the wedding through the murders, highlighting her own internal torment as she hesitates to kill Lynceus – the same kind of torment that she seems to experience in this opera when she wrestles with her father’s edict before the fateful wedding night.77 Ovid enjoyed significant popularity both as literature and as a source for libretti from the time of opera’s very beginnings,78 and is known to have been a source for some of Calzabigi’s other projects.79 It is quite likely, therefore, that the Heroides might also have provided material for this libretto. There are some points at which it is especially tempting to suggest contact, particularly the Bacchic 73

74 75 76 77

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See Rice (1998: 310, 315–317) on the respective roles of Du Roullet, Tschudi, and Calzabigi in the evolution of the libretto – and on Calzabigi’s frustration at the limited acknowledgement that he ultimately received. For a more detailed discussion of this group of plays, see at footnote 91 below; two of the three original tragedies and the accompanying satyr play are lost. Apollod. 2.1.4-5; Hyg. Fab. 168, both cited by Neville (1992a). See Fulkerson (2003: 125–127) for a detailed treatment of the various sources for the myth, including Hor. Carm. 3.11. Indeed, Fulkerson (2003) argues that the rhetoric of this poem is “cleverly designed” to arouse the sympathies of both Lynceus and Danaus, as a kind of insurance should the communication fall into the “wrong” hands. In Du Roullet and Tschudi’s treatment, passages of particular note for the Hypermestra-Danaus relationship include their confrontations near the conclusion of Act ii (“Quand tes soeurs ont juré”), at the opening of Act iv (“Ecoutez-moi, mon père”), Hypermestra’s outburst at the wedding celebrations in Act iii (“Mon père … mon époux … Dieux!”), and near the opening of Act v (“Ma vengeance est-elle remplie?”). E.g., Sternfeld (1993: 4–7), although focusing more significantly (with good cause) upon the Metamorphoses; see also on the Heroides in particular Heller (2010: 79 and n. 31), citing Heller (2003), especially chapter 3. Most notably, Ovid’s Metamorphoses was one of the sources for Gluck’s and Calzabigi’s Orfeo (1762); see e.g., Howard (1981: 8). The Heroides formed the basis for their Paridi ed Elena (1770); see e.g., Heartz (1995: 232).

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overtones of the wedding celebrations (Ov. Her. 14.29–34, with the opening of Act iii) and Danaus’ (anticipated) abuse of Hypermestra (the ­entire setting of Ov. Her. 14 as well as the imagined sufferings of 14.9–13 and the arrest of 14.79– 84, with the opening of Act v). Although the settings are different, one might also point to Hypermestra’s tortured soliloquys as she deliberates between her loyalty to her father and the horrible act that he demands of her (Ov. Her. 14.53–66, with the conclusion of Act ii). The major difference is that any love or affection that Ovid’s Hypermestra feels for Lynceus is barely revealed,80 whereas in the opera, rather predictably given the traditions of the genre, the two characters are devoted to one another. The libretto premises only the pre-existing feud between Danaus and his (now deceased) brother Aegyptus, rather than any detailed knowledge of the part of the story that survives in Aeschylus. The opera begins with a large choral scene in which the two branches of the family, now reconciled, pledge peace and loyalty to be sealed through the cousins’ marriages; then Hypermestra and Lynceus, left alone, express their love for one another. Act ii, set in a shrine of the destructive goddess Nemesis, shows Danaus demanding that his daughters become his instruments of revenge upon his hated brother’s memory by killing their husbands on their wedding night. The Danaids agree; Hypermestra objects, but her father is unmoved. Act iii opens with the wedding, again a large choral scene, now decorated with songs to Bacchus, the god of wine. At the festivities, Hypermestra seems sad and preoccupied, even tortured, but Lynceus cannot discover why. As Act iv begins, Hypermestra again confronts Danaus but is unable to change his mind. When Lynceus approaches her with declarations of love, Hypermestra begs him to escape – but only the shouts of his brothers as they are being killed finally drag him from her side. In the fifth and final act, Danaus confronts Hypermestra and orders the rest of the Danaids, now fresh from the murders and singing to Bacchus as a god of frenzy, to hunt down Lynceus. But Lynceus and his men (offstage) subdue the Danaids. When Danaus tries to kill Hypermestra, he is cut down by the captain of his own guards. Lynceus flees with Hypermestra, and the last scene of the opera shows the Danaids and their father in Hades being tormented by demons. This treatment of the story shifts the focus significantly from the ancient literature. Whereas the Aeschylean drama focuses upon the issues of supplication and sanctuary (of critical importance in antiquity, but far less likely to resonate in 18th-century Europe) and the Ovidian ‘letter,’ as Fulkerson shows, explores the tension between the different varieties of pietas that Hypermestra might be expected to display (towards her father, towards social norms and 80

Fulkerson (2003: 123, 127). Fulkerson views this as a deliberate rhetorical strategy.

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the laws of nature, towards her husband),81 the opera emphasizes the emotional pressure experienced by Hypermestra as she is torn between her loyalty to her father and her love for Lynceus. It also accommodates the expectations of French audiences of this era, when even post-reform French opera still revealed important debts to the 17th-century model of the tragédie lyrique.82 The desire for the traditional five-act structure, in Rice’s view, helps to explain the distribution of crisis points in the opera – and the creation of episodes like  the peace ceremony at the beginning. Ample opportunity for spectacle and gore is presented in the crowd scenes, especially where both choruses, male and female, are involved.83 The careful organization of the libretto extends to some points of literary symmetry and reversal, as well. Whereas the wedding festivities in Act iii are presented as a hedonistic Bacchic revel, the Danaids fresh from the murders at the opening of Act v represent the other side of Dionysus: they play the part of enraged Bacchantes, still frenzied from bloodshed (“Gloire! Gloire! Evan!”), and sing of having lost their “rien d’humain,” their “human nature.” Plancippe, an invented character, serves as their leader, and her mention of Pentheus provides a clue to the likely inspiration for this scene: it seems to draw upon Euripides’ Bacchae, perhaps in particular the chorus at E. Bacch. 977–996, where Pentheus and his mother are mentioned in close succession, just as they are by Plancippe. As so frequently elsewhere in opera generally, Euripidean coloration seems to have entered in. From a musical standpoint, a particularly striking feature of this work is its pacing, which represents a significant change from either Aeschylus or Ovid. The longer-breathed layout employed by Aeschylus’ original tetralogy (at least as suggested by the scenic structure of the Suppliant Women) is utterly avoided by the opera, which is crowded with short, diverse numbers, many of which move the action along quite quickly, in richly accompanied recitative. Such an aesthetic choice was probably designed to enhance audience appeal – as indeed also was the final choral scene at the conclusion of the opera, showing the Danaids being tortured in Hades, where the promise of the demons that snakes will devour the Danaids’ entrails over and over again seems to owe something to the myth of Prometheus’ liver being eaten by the vulture. By this point in operatic history, then, neither the mythological pastorals of the early 17th century nor the romance- and intrigue-decorated opere serie of the later 17th and earlier 18th with their interests in lamenting heroines, lavish 81 Ibid., 138–139. 82 Rice (1998: 315–317). On tragédie lyrique in general, see footnote 41 above. 83 Rice, ibid.

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spectacle, and tangled plots, had seen fit to make much use of Aeschylus; he was also not preferred by the French tragic tradition, whether on the spoken or the musical stage. Although by the 18th century, particularly during the era of the reform, a greater proportion of ancient dramatic material might be employed for an operatic libretto, Euripides still remained the most influential of the Greek tragedians.84 This is therefore a useful time to consider what might happen when a librettist is in search of a tragic subject. If a writer is planning to fashion a pastiche or concoct fiction, then the actual content or ‘flow’ of the source tragedy is much less important. But if the tragedy’s general outline or specific contents will be more closely reflected in the finished product, then the shape of that tragedy and even its moral framework85 become significantly more important. Considered in this light, the organization and the subjectmatter of Aeschylus’ dramas both seem to have worked against their potential employ for opera, at least until the 20th century. While no literary challenge is completely insurmountable, the development of operatic libretti that are not merely functional or appropriate, but also successful is such a complex task that it may often have been easier for writers to select a non-Aeschylean source whose basic features required less compensation. 7.3

Aeschylean Operatic Challenges: Explaining the Limitations

Many of Aeschylus’ surviving dramas in their transmitted form present challenging plots, or special staging issues, or both. They also tend to lack the romantic possibilities and joyful resolutions that became near-essential elements of opera during its foundational era. Only Furies and Suppliant Women provide even the possibility of an optimistic conclusion, but they do so in contexts that for operatic purposes are highly compromised. Plot is perhaps the most critical element in the formation of narrative opera86 – as it is, indeed, famously considered by the Poetics to be the most 84 85

86

Cf. above on adaptations of Euripides’ Iphigenia plays. E.g., Phillippo (2005: 80–81) on the moral tastes of the 18th century and some reasons why the Oresteia is unlikely to have provided an appropriate response to them; cf. also Heller (1998) on the moral position of gender behaviors at the time of operatic reform, as filtered through the presentation of an ancient hero, Achilles. See Eaton (1982), especially 71: it should be further noted that Eaton is writing from the perspective of a successful operatic composer. The rather infelicitous phrase “narrative opera” that I use here is intended to describe opera that uses music and stage action to relate a story from a starting- to an ending-point, and that does so in a manner at least

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important feature of Greek tragedy.87 But several of Aeschylus’ plots share features that would be difficult to transfer unaltered to the operatic stage. Persians, for example, contains on the one hand a number of smaller structural elements that have attractive performance potential: a significant female role in the Queen, a dramatic messenger speech (distributed in parts across lines 249–514), the conjuring of a king’s ghost (623–680; the ghost enters at 681), the presentation of another king reduced to abject misery (908–1077). But the main point of tension in the drama, foreshadowed from the opening of the play – the fate of the Persian force sent with Xerxes to invade Greece – is resolved by the Messenger’s report extremely early on,88 leaving the rest of the action to depend upon smaller concerns: the question as to whether the Persians can ever defeat the Greeks (787–822), or the way that Xerxes will look and act when he finally appears. In essence, the remainder of the drama after the recapitulation of Salamis is an extended coda, and the reservation of Xerxes to its conclusion, while perhaps characteristic of Aeschylus’ dramatic technique89 and likely also immensely satisfying for the Persian War veterans in the original audience of 472 bc, risks paling in contrast to the grandiose horrors described by the very Messenger who foretold his coming. The issue of the tension-point arises again in the case of Suppliant Women, where the fifty daughters of Danaus seek protection from Pelasgus, the king of Argos, in order to avoid marriage with their cousins. The establishment and, closely upon it, the testing of this suppliant relationship constitute the two essential points of crisis. Although they are located in a more typical – and more dramatic – position, further into the play (Hik. 600–965),90 these events are essentially inconclusive. The refuge at Argos is by its nature temporary; the ­Egyptians still pursue the Danaids, and the play ends with a celebratory song that is nevertheless clouded by uncertainty. A likely reason for this is the structure not of this individual play, but of the collection from which it comes: S­ uppliant Women was probably the first drama of a “Danaid tetralogy,”91 detailing how the Danaids eventually married their hated cousins but at the behest of Danaus killed the men on their wedding night. Only one

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partially dependent upon chronology. All pre-modern opera, and most of the 20th- and 21st-century operatic corpus as well, would fall under this rubric. Poetics 6–7. West (1990: 4). At least as characterized by Aristophanes: Ra. 911–926. West (1990: 4). Consisting of Suppliant Women, Egyptians, Danaids, and the satyr play Amymone: Gantz (1980: 134, 141–142); Taplin (1977: 195–198); Garvie (1969: 12–28), especially 13 (with references).

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sister, ­Hypermestra, is supposed to have spared her groom, Lynceus. While the precise distribution of these individual actions across the several plays is necessarily unknown, the titles, if correct, suggest that the dénouement may have only occurred in the third and final tragedy of the group. The postulated chorus of fifty protagonists could easily have been reduced to a practical level in an operatic staging, but Aeschylus’ depiction of the very portion of the myth most likely to appeal to operatic audiences – the experiences of Hypermestra – remained irretrievably lost. The Seven against Thebes was also originally part of a connected tetralogy, on the family of Oedipus. The hypothesis transmitted along with the Seven lists it as the third and final tragedy of the group, preceded by a Laius and an Oedipus.92 Since each of the three serious plays, to judge from the titles, dealt with the travails of a different generation, Seven does not share the potential operatic problems of Suppliant Women: the dramatic climax of this particular myth, the confrontation between the two brothers, does indeed appear in the play. However, Polynices never appears on stage (unless perhaps his corpse was shown) and the legendary fight to the death is, in keeping with tragic convention, only reported by messenger. The plot and staging challenges with Seven lie instead in the manner in which the tension is built up throughout the drama. The body of the play centers around the assignment by Eteocles of the seven heroic defenders to meet the attackers approaching the gates of T ­ hebes, building to his naming himself as the opponent to his own brother (Seven against Thebes ­653–676).93 No additional action takes place: there is no contrast to or relief from the inevitable destruction that awaits, no varied exploration of emotion (save the chorus’ constant fear), or even of human relationships beyond that of leader and led. Only in the final transmitted scene does the mood shift, as Antigone and Ismene, the sisters of Eteocles and Polynices, appear for the first time to lament their loss and the destruction of their family, and Antigone is forbidden to bury Polynices (961–1053, with the final chorus following at ­1054–1078). This conclusion, which points so neatly towards Sophocles’ Antigone, has provoked serious questions about the passage’s authenticity,94 but its very existence documents the desire of readers, perhaps as early as the 5th century bc, for a humanization of the traumatic events that have taken place, and for an e­ motional connection to a well-known character from another phase of 92 93 94

Argum. A. Hept. = Radt (2009: T 58a, 58b). West (1990: 4). For a brief history of the early exploration of this problem, beginning in the mid-19th century, see Lloyd-Jones (1959: 80–81). Flintoff (1980: 244 n. 2) and Orwin (1980: 187 n. 1) update the bibliography.

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the story.95 For members of opera audiences sufficiently interested in Greek tragedy and mythology to know the story of Antigone, Seven would likely not have provided sufficient fodder, even in its looming fratricide and its intentionally pathetic conclusion, to sustain a typical extended baroque opera.96 The scenario of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound is itself simultaneously a problem of plot and of staging. Its hero is indelibly fixed in place, chained to a rock for the duration of a play whose tension derives solely from Prometheus’ unwillingness to yield to Zeus. Added interest is created only by a series of other characters who visit to observe the protagonist’s sufferings and urge him to reconsider his position. The variety of their reactions would potentially offer material for virtuosic character pieces on the operatic stage, but the sheer length of their confrontations with Prometheus (Oceanus at Pr. ­284–396, Hermes at 944–1079, and especially Io at 561–886) would likely not have found an easy home within the conventions of baroque opera, which tended to prefer much shorter musical units. Cuts in the texts more severe than usual would seem to have been a potential solution, but then little else would remain of the play. The binding and final fate of Prometheus at the opening and closing of the drama97 would in principle provide opportunities for spectacle, but holding that single performer on stage and on display for the duration of an entire opera represents a level of demand that may not have been viewed as commensurate with the potential ‘payoff’ of the eccentric plot. Easing the physical presentation of the hero would further limit the impact of the narrative; trying to create a more conventional storyline would require creative writing that reached outside the scope of the play. It is perhaps for these reasons that despite the fascination of the Romantics in particular with the figure of Prometheus,98 Aeschylus’ drama has seen little representation in opera, with

95

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On the popularity of Sophocles’ Antigone in ancient revival performances, e.g., Ferrario (2006: 79–80). On the possible re-performance of the Seven during the later 5th century bc, see Lech (2008). Such a potential restaging may not only have given the play its common name (see Lech 2008: 661 [citing at n. 4 Sommerstein (1996: 97)], 664), but also perhaps presented an opportunity – and even a call – for the altered ending. Cf. the discussion of Legrenzi’s and Fattorini’s Eteocle e Polinice (1675) above. It is not actually clear what happens to Prometheus at the end of the play: he seems to be on the verge of deeper tortures, as witnessed by the natural disasters taking place around him (Pr. 1080–93). E.g., Bertagnolli (2007), especially 1–25. Richard Wagner’s apparent affinity for Prometheus seems to have chiefly manifested itself in spirit or attitude, rather than in a particular finished artistic product: Goldhill (2008: 457); Ewans (1982: 256–260). See also at note 120, below, on the relationship of Wagner’s Ring cycle to the Oresteia.

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the most notable exception, Carl Orff’s Prometheus, coming only in the 20th century.99 Despite its recognized status as Aeschylus’ masterpiece, even the Oresteia presents problems of plot and of staging that would likely have challenged operatic librettists, composers, and producers. While one might question the operatic viability of the enormous choral odes of the Agamemnon or (perhaps along with Euripides himself)100 the plausibility of the recognition scene in the Libation Bearers (Ch. 164–263), these are issues that can easily be solved by the cutting that must occur naturally when a spoken drama is set to music: it takes much longer to sing or even to chant a given line of text than it does to speak it. Larger structural issues instead create by far the greatest potential obstacle in the Furies. On the one hand, some likely difficulties raised by the physical setting of the ancient theatre would have posed no problems in the early modern operatic one. The initial revelation of the sleeping Furies,101 for example, or the possible secondary change of scene from the Athenian Acropolis to the Areopagus,102 could be handled in almost any way an operatic director wished. Other complications, however, are intrinsic to the structure of the play and cannot be avoided. How, for example, does one maintain the terrifying qualities of the Furies when the audience has the entire length of the drama to become accustomed to their appearance and their ways?103 How does one maintain tension or even interest through the extended trial sequence – and how does one deal with Athena’s idiosyncratic explanation for her ­all-important judgment? An additional strike against this particular drama’s employ for ­opera is that, again, it (here quite literally) contains no depictions of human relationships. The conflict between chthonic and Olympian divinities, between vendetta and justice, emotion and reason, darkness and light, has significant literary and

99 See the discussion of this opera in section iii below. 100 West (1990: 232) suggests that E. El. 534 is a subtle criticism of Aeschylus’ use of the highly contrived footprints as a token of recognition in Ch. 101 Sometime between Eu. 34 and 140, on which issue e.g., Brown (1982: 26–28), with discussion of selected previous arguments. 102 At some point before Eu. 566, on which issue e.g., Herington (1986: 145–146) and Podlecki (1989: 14–15) (the former in favor of a construed scene change within Athens and the latter against it), and cf. Sommerstein (1989: 123) ad Eu. 235–98, arguing that the shift is a “change in imaginary location.” 103 I am grateful to Andrew Simpson for raising this issue, both in conversation and in practice. Stories about the degree of horror inspired by the Furies in antiquity have been transmitted in the Vita of Aeschylus: see Lefkowitz (2012: 74, 148).

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aesthetic appeal,104 but for operatic creators of the 18th century in particular, the parts of Orestes’ story that reunite him with his sisters (whether with Electra or with Iphigenia) and show him avenging his father’s death seem to have held far greater emotional and dramatic potential.105 From the standpoint of content, it cannot be overlooked that certain of Aeschylus’ extant plays are politicized to the point of topicality. The clearest examples of this are the Persians and the three dramas of the Oresteia (especially the Furies). The Persians, the only surviving tragedy that is openly historical, stages the Persian reaction to their defeat by the Athenians at the naval battle of Salamis. The battle took place in 479 bc; the play was performed in 472, doubtless with many veterans of the Persian Wars in the audience.106 The ­Oresteia (458 bc) contains increasing numbers of references to historical Athens.107 In the first two dramas, a recent controversial alliance with Argos (461 bc) seems to be the explanation for the relocation of Agamemnon’s capital from the Homeric Mycenae to the site of Athens’ newest political partner (Ag. 24 and thereafter). In the Furies, the goddess Athena is shown on stage creating part of the Athenian legal system, essentially the council of the Areopagus,108 and the play and trilogy conclude with a procession escorting the Furies to the sanctuary beneath the Athenian Acropolis where they were still worshiped in real life as guardians of justice. Even beyond its topicality, Aeschylean politicization, while it may be ­pro-aristocratic, is clearly anti-tyrannical. It therefore might have been interpretable by European readers and audiences, at least in certain contexts, as anti-monarchical. This was by no means anathema (Venice, for example, a major operatic center, was staunchly proud of its republican government and

104 And indeed, these features seem to have attracted attention even as the play was being passed over for operatic adaptation: see most recently Mitchell-Boyask (2009: 121–124) and the more general bibliography collected by Collard (2002: lxxiii). 105 The listings in Zinar (1971) are not complete but do provide a good sense of proportion: see 86, 90–91, 93. 106 Perhaps also including Aeschylus himself: a variety of ancient testimonia have him as a veteran of Marathon, including his (traditional) epitaph: see Lefkowitz (2012: 71–72). On the story that Aeschylus’ brother Cynegirus was killed at Marathon, see Hdt. 6.114. 107 On ancient politics in the Oresteia in general, e.g., Sommerstein (1989); Podlecki (1989), (1966); Macleod (1982); Dodds (1960). 108 On the controversy as to whether Aeschylus supported or opposed the Areopagus reforms carried by Ephialtes in 462 bc, just a few years before the Oresteia was staged, see e.g., ­Macleod (1982: 127–129).

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had a long history of celebrating this in the arts),109 but it could cause potential political problems if not appropriately handled. Opera began as an aristocratic project (although in various times, places, and circumstances it has both courted and received wider, though still stratified,110 popular embrace), and it has also served throughout its history as an important vehicle for political and social communication.111 As such, ideas about good and bad leadership, and, in the early modern era, about monarchy in particular, found frequent expression on the operatic stage, and operas were often tailored to tell particular stories about the virtues of good authority. Aeschylus’ version of good authority, however, is highly specific. Born around 525 bc, Aeschylus was probably a preadolescent child when the brother of the ruling tyrant of Athens was assassinated in 514 bc, an impressionable teenager when the Athenian democratic government was founded upon a popular uprising in 507, and of military age during the Persian Wars that created Athens’ own ‘greatest generation.’ As such, he was steeped in the heady, turbulent political world of the early Athenian democracy, and many of his surviving dramas reflect the ethos of that age. It can be partially captured in an inherent aversion to absolutist rule, especially in the image of tyranny whose demise Athens celebrated in a wide variety of civic monuments and civic rituals – including the civic ritual par excellence, tragedy. Perhaps nowhere does Aeschylus’ anti-tyrannical sentiment emerge more clearly than in the Persians, where after a period of dramatic delay and reservation the drama is at last consummated by the entry of the Persian king Xerxes in abject mourning for the losses his forces have suffered at Salamis. The image of the defeated barbarian king serves as a mirror image of the triumphalism celebrated not only by the theatrical audience, but by the City Dionysia festival itself. The destructive possibilities inherent in monarchical rule are also featured strongly in the Seven against Thebes, where the context is a civil war between the sons of Oedipus, the princes Eteocles and Polynices, fighting over the right of succession to the Theban throne. 109 Rosand (1991: 11–15) provides a basic introduction; for a more detailed account of the musical manifestations of the ‘myth of Venice’, see Rosand (1977). 110 Reminders of this are articulated by Rosselli (1998: 81–89). 111 The organization of Bianconi and Pestelli (1998) permits a chronological overview of these phenomena as manifested in Italy: see in particular (in order) Piperno (1998: 1–43); Rosselli (1998: 81–89, 99–114, 146–160); Nicolodi (1998: 165–177, 188–218). See also e.g., Zelechow (1991) on elitism in operatic consumption as an attitude that developed in the 20th century (contra the late 18th and the 19th), but Storey (2002) views 20th-century operatic consumption as being more inclusive.

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The same impulses appear, if in a more nuanced fashion, in the Oresteia. There, the many deaths that Agamemnon has perpetuated, from his own sacrificed daughter to the warriors fallen at Troy, are weighed up against him, not merely by his vengeful wife Clytemnestra, but by Zeus, as mover of the universe.112 Agamemnon is a disturbing character not only in his past destructiveness but in his present oblivion: his triumphant entrance onto the stage is darkened by the presence of the captured Trojan princess Cassandra, but even more so by his inability to perceive the impending threat to his throne and his life. Kingship, the drama suggests, is a complicated, precarious, dangerous, distasteful thing – and it remains so as the next two successions to the throne occur amidst death and agony, while Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon and is herself killed in return by her son, Orestes. The solution to this problem of dynastic destruction comes in the rule of law. In the Furies, the third drama of the Oresteia, Orestes flees to Athens, where the goddess Athena herself creates the first ‘jury trial,’ leading to Orestes’ acquittal and eternal gratitude for the redemption that only true, rational justice can provide. Orestes is shown to be dependent for his life and his throne upon the decisions made by a very different kind of government, and answerable, at least on some level, to a body of citizens and the goddess who sanctions them, rather than to a king or a set of magistrates. 7.4

Aeschylus and Opera from the 19th to the 21st Centuries

One might think that following upon the French Revolution of 1789 and the related political and social changes that took place in Europe during the earlier 19th century, a drama like the Furies, for example, might have something to say to audiences in a post-monarchical age. But with some notable exceptions, the new styles and concerns that entered into opera, particularly in the last three quarters of the 19th century, found antiquity in general and extant tragedy in particular to be less appealing sources.113 Giroud offers a useful summary of the situation in France, where Luigi Cherubini’s Médée (1797) was really an 112 See Lloyd-Jones (1962). 113 The entries in the appendix to McDonald (2001: 243–338) for the 19th century show a notable drop in ancient subjects in general (see especially 318–326). Zinar’s assertion (1971: 86) that “from 1830 to 1900 there were fewer than fifteen operas based on Greek tragedy” sounds pessimistic at first glance, but a careful perusal of McDonald’s list suggests that Zinar’s estimate, while conservative, may be near the mark if tragic-style treatments of other ancient myths and subjects are explicitly excluded.

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example of the temporary endurance of 18th-century models;114 and despite Napoleon’s “‘almost obsessive interest’ in classical antiquity,”115 ancient topics staged under his reign ranged from the mythological to the historical to the utterly fictive.116 Giocchino Rossini’s Ermione (1819) was likely his closest operatic contact with ancient tragedy, but its creation for French audiences probably helps to explain its literary source: Racine’s Andromaque.117 Rossini represented the continuation of a line of Italian operatic composers who staged their work significantly or occasionally in France, a tradition that continued down through the 19th century with Giuseppe Verdi,118 and that helped to contribute to some of the shared tastes of the era of ‘grand opera.’ While temporally distant and exotic settings were pleasures enjoyed by audiences in both musical traditions, the search for subjects that would furnish “a deeper, more authentic, and more powerful emotional expression” and speak more directly to national experience seems to have encouraged a larger shift away from Greco-Roman antiquity and towards European culture and history.119 This motion also helps to contextualize, for example, the work in Germany of Richard Wagner, whose four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (preparation distributed over the third quarter of the 19th century, from 1848 until the premiere of the entire set in 1876) drew heavily on Germanic and Norse mythology. But while it is by no means a setting of Greek tragedy in any conventional sense, Wagner’s Ring also incorporates heavy coloration from Aeschylus.120 The story of Romantic-era opera connected with Greek tragedy, then, is largely a narrative of individual cases, rather than of trends. Perhaps in ­keeping

114 115 116 117 118 119

Giroud (2010: 93–94, 102; 106–107). Ibid., 107, quoting Pounder. Ibid., 111–112. Ibid., 121. See Bartlet (2003). Tomlinson (1986: 44–45), quote at 45, speaking specifically of Italy but noting that Italian advocates of Romanticism were calling for increased intellectual and artistic attention to trends from northern Europe; see also Grey (2006), and cf. Smart (2004: 30–31) and the broader description of Zinar (1971: 86). On “national experience,” the connection of the works of Verdi with the Italian Risorgimento is a meaningful example: see e.g., Smart (2004 and 2001). 120 This connection has been increasingly well-documented: see Trippett (2010); Foster (2010), reviewing (242–247) and collecting relevant bibliography in multiple languages (242 n. 24). Amongst Trippett’s references in English, cited frequently elsewhere are Goldhill (2008); Lee (2003); Lloyd-Jones (1982: 126–142); Ewans (1982); add also Roller (1992 and 1992a), and cf. the references and descriptions compiled by Saffle (2002: 365–367).

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with the ethos of the age, several composers who conceived operas variously grounded in this particular ancient art form seem to have done so for profoundly personal reasons. In addition to Wagner, good examples are also offered by Hector Berlioz (Les Troyens, libretto by the same, composed 1856–1858) and ­Sergei Taneyev (Oresteya; see the more detailed discussion below),121 the broad outlines of whose projects and experiences are similar in a number of ways. Although the direct indebtedness of Les Troyens to a specific work of Greek tragedy can be traced to some limited acknowledgement of Euripides’ Trojan Women, Berlioz’ nearly exclusive dependence upon books 2 and 4 of Vergil’s Aeneid for the remainder of the opera premises significant tragic influence.122 Both Berlioz’ and Taneyev’s projects were grand and ambitious conceptions inspired by especially extensive works of ancient literature; both composers were significantly invested in the careful development of their singing texts, and both were deeply attracted to their subjects, even from childhood.123 Their cleaving to material that was unusual for the times and that (from their perspectives, at least) demanded treatment on a vast scale also led in the end to both composers’ having to struggle in mounting their original visions to the stage.124 Taneyev’s Oresteya (libretto by Alexandre Venkstern, after Aeschylus’ Oresteia), which premiered in 1895 in the Mariinsky Theatre of St. Petersburg, sets the whole of the Oresteia in a single, three-act project (one tragedy per act), but it does so in the context of traditional 19th-century Russian opera.125 Venkstern and Taneyev made significant changes from Aeschylus, most notably shortening the text, but also adding some material and moving some plot points. Belina collects many of these changes, including the relocation of the entrance of Aegisthus to right after the announcement of the sack of Troy in the Agamemnon act, the staging of Clytemnestra’s evil dream (complete with an appearance by Agamemnon’s ghost) at the opening of the Libation Bearers, the accelerated recognition of Orestes by Electra in the same drama, and the 121 With regard to Taneyev and his work, I depend in this paragraph upon the biographical sketch and background to the opera provided by Belina in Belina and Ewans (2010: 258–264). 122 On Vergil’s use of Greek tragedy in the Aeneid, e.g., recently Panoussi (2009). 123 On Berlioz’ profound emotional connection to his subject and particularly to Vergil, see Cairns (1988) and (1968), both passim. 124 No complete performance of Les Troyens took place during Berlioz’ lifetime: on the challenges of staging it, its performance history, and its reception, see Goldberg (1988). Belina’s account of the performance history and reception of Taneyev’s Oresteya reveals some similar challenges: see Belina and Ewans (2010: 281–283). 125 See also Munteanu’s chapter in this volume, where she discusses this opera and focuses on the character of Cassandra.

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opening of the Eumenides (the title of Taneyev’s last act) with Orestes being pursued by the Furies. Belina points out that while these and other alterations would have helped to make the narrative clearer to an audience less familiar with the myths, the changes also serve to highlight values like fraternity and redemption (more clearly evident, of course, in the last two dramas of the trilogy) that were emphasized in the literary and artistic thought of the period.126 They further contribute dramatic depth to some of the characters. Because Belina in particular has examined Taneyev’s opera and the documentary sources that inform it in such authoritative detail,127 I will confine my discussion here to Taneyev’s specific relationship with Aeschylus. Taneyev’s project has often received attention because it uses a “non-nationalist” subject in a period when Russian operas tended to draw on Russian stories and Russian styles.128 But as Frolova-Walker has argued, it may be fallacious in general to posit such an inextricable connection between nationalism and ­Russian opera, which she analyzes as being significantly indebted to European (­specifically French) operatic paradigms, and as having had its history and reception scripted into disproportion by Soviet propaganda.129 Viewed in this light, Taneyev’s Oresteya becomes unusual not so much because it is a Russian version but because it is an Oresteia at all in an era when Greek tragedy was rarely used as a central subject for opera. One passage in Taneyev that is worthy of more detailed exploration is the conclusion of Act i, Scene 1, where a wholly invented meeting and conversation take place. Aegisthus’ relocated entrance and reflection on the experiences of Thyestes (based on Ag. 1577–1611), now moved to follow immediately upon the announcement of the fall of Troy, leads into a newly created exchange with Clytemnestra about her plans to kill Agamemnon herself. No such encounter exists in Aeschylus – in fact, Aegisthus and Clytemnestra in Aeschylus are only once onstage together while alive.130 Belina’s general suggestion that Taneyev’s 126 Belina (2009a: 3–8); for greater detail, see Belina (2009) and (2008). Ewans in Belina and Ewans (2010: 264–280) traverses the whole of the opera, describing its dramatic and musical adaptations of Aeschylus. 127 See the works cited in footnote 126 above. 128 E.g., Frolova-Walker (2011: 130–131); Taruskin (2011: 133–134). See Frolova-Walker (2011: ­116–117) for some proposed categories that may be used to define the extent to which a given operatic project may be viewed as “Russian.” 129 Frolova-Walker (2003), especially 344–345. 130 This is at the very end of Agamemnon (Ag. 1654–1673), during the dispute with the chorus. The only lines that the characters actually address to one another are Ag. 1654–1656, 1662–1664, and 1672–1673. Orestes claims to stand over Clytemnestra and Aegisthus dead at the moment of the ekkyklema in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers (Ch. 965–966).

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Clytemnestra is more comprehensible and even more sympathetic than is ­Aeschylus’ version of the same character131 is especially strongly supported by this scene. In this section of the opera, Clytemnestra explains her motivations (in particular the death of Iphigenia), reflects on her long consideration of the murder, and expresses her love for Aegisthus. More than clarifying the myth,132 this scene also provides psychological depth for the character: in short, it humanizes her. Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra in the first two dramas of the ancient Oresteia,133 on the other hand, is an ominous and almost inscrutable figure. Hints of the darkness that lies within her emerge throughout the first half of the Agamemnon, but it is only at the moment of her prayer to Zeus when Agamemnon finally enters the palace (Ag. 973–974) that her plans are suggested more clearly. Beyond her recollections of the slain Iphigenia (Ag. 1417–1418, 1432, 1525–1527)134 and two limited expressions of affiliation with Aegisthus,135 she shows no trace of genuine affection for anyone. Her fawning behavior towards Agamemnon on his return (Ag. 855–972) is as false as her expressions of grief at the news of Orestes’ death in the Libation Bearers (Ch. 691–699) or her invocations of motherhood later in that play when her son threatens her life (Ch. 896–898, 908). Only her cry of loss at Aegisthus’ death (Ch. 893) might perhaps be taken as ‘real,’ but it is immediately cheapened by Orestes’ suggestion that their physical union continue in the tomb (Ch. 894–895). Act ii, Scene 1 of Taneyev’s Oresteya also represents added material136 that casts new light on a previously less-developed character: here, Venkstern and Taneyev have taken the chorus’ report to Orestes of Clytemnestra’s dream in the Libation Bearers (Ch. 523–553) and changed it from an indirect account into a direct staging. As Ewans notes, this recasting presents Electra as an ­audience to her mother’s terrors, and although Electra agrees to make Clytemnestra’s 131 Belina (2008: 77–78). 132 See Belina (2008: 63). 133 The ghost of Clytemnestra, who appears as a character in Aeschylus’ Furies, is not employed in Taneyev’s Oresteya, and so is omitted from the discussion here. 134 The vision of Iphigeneia embracing Agamemnon in the afterlife (Ag. 1555–1559) follows directly upon a promise of sacrilegious, inappropriate, and incomplete funerary rites, as Clytemnestra states that she herself, the killer, will bury Agamemnon unlamented (Ag. 1552–1554). The joyful approach of Iphigeneia’s shade to her dead father therefore represents ironic pathos employed to magnify Iphigeneia’s innocence and further vilify Agamemnon. 135 The sexual innuendo at Ag. 1435–1436, and calling him philtat’, “most beloved” at Ag. 1654, though the latter is followed by no other endearments. 136 See note 126, above.

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offerings, she informs the audience that she will use the ritual to “plead for vengeance, and not forgiveness,” rendering her a far more decisive and active character than she is in Aeschylus.137 Further, Aeschylus’ Electra delivers her last line at Ch. 507; she is a spectator to Orestes’ conversation with the chorus about the dream, and is then instructed by her brother to go inside and keep vigil (Ch. 554, 579), but after Ch. 584 is never seen or heard from again. Venkstern and Taneyev, however, further dramatize Electra’s duplicity by including her in the section of Act ii, Scene 2 where Orestes gains entrance to the palace as a Phocian traveler. Alongside Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, Electra feigns ignorance and asks for tidings of her brother, then pretends sorrow at the news of his death. She and Orestes even exchange asides, expressing incredulity at Clytemnestra’s own false grief. Taneyev’s Electra, then, is quite capable of dangerous deception, and is much more of a co-conspirator with Orestes than Aeschylus’ character is. The world in which Taneyev lived and worked, of course, was shortly about to undergo cataclysmic changes. Particularly after the world wars, the reception of Greek tragedy in general looks very different. In her opening survey chapter to Dionysus since 69,138 Hall analyzes the burgeoning of modern artistic responses to Greek tragedy, particularly since the late 1960s. She points to increasing political turmoil and warfare, changes in sexual mores and intergenerational relationships, growing awareness of cultural differences, interests in psychology and literary theory, and a trend towards artistic experimentation as some of the factors that have contributed towards the more recent growth of tragedy’s sway.139 Perhaps most striking amongst modern approaches is not only the growing presence of Aeschylus, but the variety of ways in which he is received and interpreted. While Theodorakis’ Antigone, for example, is substantially indebted to perspectives on Hellenism that can only have arisen after the country’s turbulent experiences in the mid-20th century, it also occasionally demonstrates the kind of Romantic nationalism that some have observed in Taneyev. The Aeschylean portion of Theodorakis’ project, in fact, is an especially effective place to observe this. Mikis Theodorakis’ Antigone (libretto by Mikis Theodorakis, after Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, Sophocles’ Antigone, Oedipus the King, and ­Oedipus at Colonus,140 and Euripides’ Phoenician Women) premiered in 1999, in the 137 Ewans in Belina and Ewans (2010: 273–274), quote at 273. 138 Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley (2004). 139 Hall (2004); cf. also Hall (2004a), especially 173–176. 140 Act i, Scene i, which presents a conversation between Oedipus and the chorus and functions in context like a prologue, takes place after Oedipus’ blinding, and ends with

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­ egaro Mousikis (Concert Hall) in Athens. The composer’s total operatic M output consists of five completed works (Kostas Kariotakis, Medea, Electra, ­Antigone, and Lysistrata), four of which are based on ancient dramas, and three of which are tragic. Antigone is the last entry in the composer’s “trilogy” on ancient tragic heroines, each of which he dedicated to a different Italian operatic composer.141 In so doing, he made an implicit claim for the relevance of his projects to the history of Western opera,142 but the ways in which he adapts his subject-matter for performance are typically deeply indebted to his ideas about Greek tragedy, which he views as a kind of civic ritual – not only for the ancient world, but for the modern one, as well.143 In his Antigone, as Holst-Warhaft demonstrates, these instincts manifest themselves in a focus on the destruction within the family of Oedipus, inspired in significant part by Theodorakis’ experiences during and after the Greek Civil War (1946–1949).144 The Aeschylean portion of the opera is limited to the “first episode” of Act i, Scene 2, which borrows from the beginning of the Seven against Thebes. A number of apparently small changes are made, but likely with good reason. The opening speech of Eteocles from Aeschylus’ play (Th. 1–38) is omitted, the context for the opera as a whole having already been provided by Oedipus in Scene i, and the beginning of the speech of Aeschylus’ Messenger (Th. 39–47) is used to fashion the address of Theodorakis’ Coryphaeus to Eteocles at the start of the episode. Eteocles’ prayer (Th. 69–77) is both anticipated and echoed by the chorus, which twice uses Th. 71–73 as its interjection. From that point forward, the libretto’s material is selected from Th. 74–232, with all of the text assigned as in Aeschylus, until the end of the episode. Two points regarding the chorus are of particular note. Firstly, Theodorakis’ chorus is of mixed gender and employs the usual four modern vocal parts, soprano, alto, tenor, and bass (satb), rather than being all male (as in antiquity) or all female (as ancient role-playing might dictate). Given Theodorakis’

141 142 143 144

his seeming apotheosis. Holst-Warhaft (2001: 219) correctly points out that some of the details in this section are taken from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, despite the temporal setting. Wagner in the liner notes to Theodorakis (1999: 25) further points out that in performance there would also be a “pantomimic prologue” ahead of the Oedipus scene, displaying Eteocles’ usurpation of sole power over Thebes. Medea is dedicated to Giuseppe Verdi, Electra to Giacomo Puccini, and Antigone to Vincenzo Bellini. Simpson (2010: n.p.). Simpson (2011: n.p.); see also Holst-Warhaft (2001: 221–222). Holst-Warhaft (2001: 217–218), further noting (218) that the political fallout from the Civil War should be viewed as ending in 1974, i.e. with the fall of the military dictatorship known as the junta.

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d­ ocumented interest in ‘speaking’ to a broader audience,145 the traditional choral voicing here may be viewed not only as a nod to Western operatic tradition, but also as a representation of the fullness of humanity. But the question remains as to the nature of that humanity: is the intended – or even the favored – audience of this opera’s messages comprised specifically of Greeks? One clue that Greeks in particular are important addressees comes from the ‘recycling’ of Seven against Thebes 71–73, the lines from Eteocles’ prayer, which read, “Do not let our enemies destroy the altars of my city, a city that speaks in Greece’s tongue.”146 In Theodorakis’ operatic treatment, those lines are actually delivered first by the chorus, then sung again (with the text slightly expanded and with different music) by Eteocles, then repeated by the chorus in the original form, with the melodic and harmonic structure maintained. The net effect is a miniature ABA form, and since Eteocles’ entrance (the B section) is also his first in the entire opera, it is implicitly charged with importance. A version of the anti-fratricidal message of the opera as a whole,147 then, is here encapsulated. Sentiments that Aeschylus originally assigned to Eteocles alone are in the opera introduced and repeated by a more universal body of performers, the male and female members of the chorus, who claim their membership in the community of Greeks as their cause. Theodorakis’ treatment of the Seven against Thebes omits the Aeschylean dénouement: the report of the deaths of Eteocles and Polynices is instead provided to Creon in Scene 3, which along with the “second episode” of Scene 2 is taken from Euripides’ Phoenician Women. Holst-Warhaft has suggested that this is because Theodorakis was drawn to the figure of the suffering mother in Jocasta and to the possibility of direct confrontation between Eteocles and Polynices.148 This is a compelling reading in light of Theodorakis’ politics, and one that again points to the human interest that seems to have so invited operatic treatments of Euripides. But it is also of interest to consider why Theodorakis stopped using Aeschylus’ text at the point where he did. The Seven had clearly not left his consciousness: in fact, at the conclusion of Act i, Scene 2, when Eteocles and Polynices are dueling onstage to the death, the libretto briefly turns away from Euripides and returns to Aeschylus, with the chorus repeating verbatim (and again with the melodic and harmonic material reused) the same prayer to the gods that they delivered earlier, selected from Seven against Thebes 128–170. But other potentially fertile operatic opportunities from Aeschylus are omitted, most notably the mourning by Antigone and Ismene that concludes the Seven 145 146 147 148

Ibid., especially 221–222. Trans. Panagiotou, in the liner notes to Theodorakis (1999: 34). See footnote 144 above. Holst-Warhaft (2011: 218).

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against Thebes as we have it. In this case, a dramatic explanation seems the most likely: the lament (selected from Euripides’ Phoenician Women 1498–1538) is given to Antigone alone, not only to lead smoothly into her confrontation with Creon that is maintained from Euripides and then taken up (Act i, Scene 4 and thereafter) from Sophocles, but also to maintain focus upon her individual experiences and emotions. Ismene, as Antigone’s sister, was recognized by Sophocles (and likely therefrom by the creator of the conclusion of the Seven against Thebes)149 as the single person in the world who was most likely to share Antigone’s feelings, not only her grief for their lost brothers but her pain at her origins and the state of her family. Indeed, Sophocles’ Antigone begins with Antigone’s address to her sister as koinon autadelphon kara, “my own sister, linked to myself” (S. Ant. 1, trans. Lloyd-Jones). In an operatic context, such sympathy from Ismene might have diluted the isolation that Theodorakis is constructing for Antigone (he also omits her scene with Oedipus at the conclusion of Euripides’ Phoenician Women). Further, the sisters’ disagreement about how to deal with the burial of the disgraced Polynices (S. Ant. 1–99) would in an operatic context have essentially provided dramatic redundancy to the resistance that Antigone is already receiving from Creon. The purely aesthetic temptation of a female duet for either of these Ismene scenes was apparently viewed by Theodorakis as insufficient compensation for these liabilities. In contrast to the detailed reworking evident in Theodorakis’ libretto, other recent Aeschylean operatic projects have taken the closer approach of highlighting the plot, contents, and flow of Aeschylus’ own text. I discuss here two very different examples. Carl Orff’s Prometheus (libretto in the original ancient Greek, after Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound) premiered in 1968, in Stuttgart. Orff is best known amongst modern audiences for his Carmina Burana (1936), a cantata-like performance piece, intended for staging, based upon medieval poetry. But Orff’s interest in the past extended more frequently to antiquity than it did to the Middle Ages. The companion-pieces designed for performance alongside Carmina Burana were Catulli Carmina (1943), a treatment of poetry by the Roman author Catullus, and Trionfo di Afrodite (1951), a blending of texts by Catullus and Sappho. In this context, Orff’s choice to set operas on ancient tragedy becomes considerably more explicable – and, indeed, Prometheus is actually his third such work after his Antigonae (1949) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1959). Antigonae and Oedipus der Tyrann both employ texts in German, but Prometheus preserves Aeschylus’ original ancient Greek throughout – and Orff sets the entire text. This has a variety of artistic and dramatic consequences, not least of which is the immense challenge of working through a large word 149 See footnote 94 above.

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count in a reasonable period of time. As noted above, it takes much longer to sing a line than it does to speak it, and so if Orff wished to avoid cuts, he had to turn to declamatory methods that would speed up delivery. This is likely one of the major reasons that the score includes chanting and speaking as well as singing. The employ of multiple “registers” of delivery is of course not without precedent in ancient tragedy itself, and the exercise of these registers can therefore be used (as it likely was in antiquity, although in very different ways), to explore a variety of artistic effects and emotional states, something that Holland points out was a major priority for Orff.150 The presence of the ancient Greek also creates a special set of aesthetic experiences. Firstly, there is a significant distancing effect created, much as in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1927), with its deliberately artificial Latin libretto.151 Performing in a language that is no longer employed in this form by any native speakers, the characters in Orff’s opera – Prometheus in particular – appear to the audience as abstract, almost lapidary figures. Psychological intimacy does not seem to be one of the opera’s goals, a decision that ironically helps to solve one of the drama’s likely difficulties for the modern stage: the inherently alien – and alienating – quality of Prometheus’ plight. Stein, Thomas,152 and others have noted Orff’s fascination with the sound of language, and Thomas has pointed out that the possibilities for exploration in this piece are heightened by its use of the Greek. After consultations with scholars about pronunciation, prosody, and meter, Orff seems to have designed his own unique musical treatment for the ancient text.153 The instrumental sound world that he creates to support his virtuosic treatment emphasizes the words above all else. A wide variety of percussion instruments are used for interludes, outbursts, and underscoring; the rest of the orchestra calls for “six flutes, six oboes, six trumpets, six trombones, four pianos, four banjos, four harps, organ, and nine double basses.”154 The overall sound, however, is remarkably austere and clearly functions as accompaniment to the drama as a whole, reinforcing and enhancing the emotion that the play itself already contains. 150 Holland (1999). 151 On the unusual qualities of the Latin in this text, see Farrell (2001: 117–123). 152 Stein (1977), especially 124–126; Thomas (191: 588ff) via http://www.orff.de/en/works/ theatrum-mundi/prometheus.html. 153 Thomas, ibid. The available commercial recordings (two only, a studio version conducted by Ferdinand Leitner, who also led the premiere, on Arts Music 43007, and a live version conducted by Rafael Kubelík on Orfeo C526992I) differ only in the identities of their three chorus leaders; otherwise, their casts are the same. They employ what might best be termed an Erasmian pronunciation. 154 As iterated by Allison via http://www.classical-music.com/review/orff-2.

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Figure 7.1 Carl Orff’s Prometheus, conducted by Peter Rundel, 2012. PHOTO COURTESY OF KLAUS RUDOLPH, 2016

The opening passages for the two most significant characters, Prometheus and Io, demonstrate Orff’s techniques well. Prometheus’ first speech introduces many of the multiple types of singing that the character employs throughout. Solely within the lines at Pr. 88–101, a passage that occupies approximately three minutes in performance, Prometheus opens with a lament to the ­elements of nature, filled with sustained pitches, rapid melismas, and octave leaps. Held notes in the upper portion of the baritone range generally exhibit audible ­tension, and Orff exploits these throughout as designators of Prometheus’ suffering and pain. The character is next joined by percussion interjections before moving into a free-recitative style of delivery, and then back to the lament again. This small section ends with a sustained orchestral outburst of a type frequently used thereafter to introduce the entrances of other characters. The first segment of Io’s scene (561–573) also presents significant distinctions in vocal delivery, encompassing actual screaming; free, ordinary speech; sung lamentation; and spoken chanting in rhythm accompanied by percussion. Rather than trying to minimize or eliminate some of the features of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound that would be challenging for the operatic stage, then, Orff has deliberately embraced them. The static quality of the plot has been used to create an atmosphere of escalating tension, greatly assisted by the unrelenting quality of the music and the virtuosic, unconventional vocal delivery. Andrew Earle Simpson’s The Furies (libretto by Sarah Brown Ferrario, from The Oresteia Project [2001–2006], after Aeschylus’ Furies) premiered in 2006,

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at The Catholic University of America in Washington, dc.155 It directly confronted what the composer and librettist saw as a significant dramatic problem: that despite the richness of its message the Furies is the drama of the Oresteia least naturally suited to modern theatrical tastes. Beyond the structural and thematic concerns discussed above in Section ii, this drama does not confine itself to re-rehearsing a familiar episode from Greek mythology. It offers no single main character for modern psychologizing tastes to embrace or despise. It contains no opportunities for love-affairs or any other deep human relationships. And yet, it is potentially in many ways the most powerful drama of the Oresteia, because it consciously uses the action of the play to transfer the themes of the trilogy from the world of myth to the real world. In so doing, it advocates a form of rational justice that The Oresteia Project sought to render not only comprehensible but meaningful to modern audiences. One of the central tenets of The Oresteia Project was that it would include nothing in the operas that did not come from Aeschylus. Since no rapid speaking or chanting, as Orff had used, was employed, judicious cuts were necessary, but these preserved as much as possible of the relative proportions of the individual scenes and even of the richly layered imagery that characterizes the ancient dramas. The goal was not to try to reconstruct ancient performance practices, but rather to permit the small-scale and large-scale structures of the trilogy to speak for themselves. In this version of The Furies, then, the music of the opera supports the ideas unfolding on stage, not only aesthetically, but also symbolically. For example, as Simpson characterizes it, “the motion of both play and trilogy from vendetta to justice, from darkness to light, from chaos to order, is represented by a motion from dissonant, thickly textured music to a sound world that is much more consonant,” open, and at times even intentionally luminous. The contrasts can be particularly appreciated when the music for the Furies from earlier in the drama is compared with that near its conclusion. The Furies sing angular, rapid-fire, jagged lines in their early choruses, whereas once they are reconciled with Athena and agree to give their blessings to her city they join her in a soaring, lyrical ensemble, “I make my home now with Athena.” This passage exploits the now-traditional operatic form of soloist singing over chorus, here used to demonstrate the newly allied purposes of both.

155 Archival websites and streaming video are available at http://music.cua.edu/oresteia. An article on the details of the trilogy (concentrating on the first two operas) is Ferrario and Simpson (2006).

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Ancient methods of characterization also helped to shape the musical depictions throughout the entire operatic trilogy of The Oresteia Project. In Greek tragedy, where physical violence is not generally depicted on stage, language is equated with power. Characters who are eloquent, who make long speeches, who dominate the stage time, who are able to alternately convince and conceal, are construed as pivotal, powerful figures. Similarly, in opera, the strength of a character can be represented by vocal power: singers whose roles are more virtuosic and dramatic tend to be received as dominant. Clytemnestra is without question the most powerful character in Agamemnon, and so in this treatment her texts are vivid and challenging, and her music is highly complex. Correspondingly, in The Furies, as Simpson states: Athena, the virgin goddess who symbolically replaces the murderous queen, must be shown to have equivalent vocal power, and indeed have even greater strength of character. Athena’s opening aria, then, “I heard your cry,” shows her to be, vocally, the equal of Klytemnestra. Providence College, February 4, 2008

As a closing example, there has been some scholarly debate over precisely to whom the last lines of Aeschylus’ Furies are to be assigned. The chorus of the drama, of course, consists of the Furies alone, but many translators and dramaturgs find the end of both the play and the trilogy a tempting point to posit an added semi-chorus of citizens to join in the final hymn of praise to Athens. This opera also makes that choice, again to demonstrate that the Furies and the lessons that they represent have now become a real and present force in the historical world. The setting that Simpson created for this closing song, “Go to your homes,” is tonal, with chromatic inflections that are reminiscent of folk music. Its strophic setting is additive on multiple levels: not only does it include more lines and voices on every repetition, but it also builds upwards by a half-step each time to emphasize the transformative redemption that has taken place. 7.4 Conclusion In a post-monarchical world that has experienced warfare on an ­unprecedented scale, dramas that expand beyond the human emotions to question absolutism, show the brutality of conflict, and perhaps even advocate for a just society have found an increasingly hospitable home. And in an era that welcomes

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new ways of generating art, traditional liabilities are ever more frequently and creatively confronted. Such is certainly the case with Aeschylus, who has been staged as spoken drama much more often in recent times,156 and who has also received much more frequent operatic treatment than in the past. The case studies treated here represent only a tiny fraction of the growing number of Aeschylean operas and related musical-dramatic works, although it is ­particularly worth noting that the Oresteia (whether whole or broken apart into its components), once generally left aside, now enjoys pride of place as a subject.157 156 The history of the reception of Agamemnon makes an instructive case study in this regard. On performances of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, see the collection by Macintosh et al., (2005), especially the contribution by Wrigley. As a corollary, on Agamemnon in the visual, literary, and performing arts, see Reid (1993: 69–73) and the remainder of the bibliography assembled by Wrigley (2005: 362). 157 See Brown (2004), especially 294–296, 301–302, 305–307, and cf. the chronology of 20thcentury operas by Simeone (2005: xviii–xlvii). Important material from this chapter was presented in an earlier form on March 23, 2013, as the keynote address for the symposium “Ancient Drama in Film and on the Modern Stage,” organized by Carol King at the Grenfell Campus of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. I would like to express my gratitude to her and to Grenfell for the invitation to address that audience; to Andrew Earle Simpson, my husband and longtime operatic collaborator, whose ideas have significantly influenced my thinking on the issues discussed here; to Joseph Wilson, who served as my research assistant for this project; and to the editor, whose expert and patient support has guided this volume to completion. Special acknowledgement should also be given to the collective scholarly contribution made by Brown and Ograjenšek (2010); debts to the individual essays within that volume have been separately cited throughout.

chapter 8

Aeschylus’ Cassandra in the Operas of Taneyev and Gnecchi Dana L. Munteanu 8.1 Introduction Opera composers and librettists throughout the centuries have been drawn to the passionate heroines of Greek tragedies.1 However, Aeschylus’ dramas, particularly Agamemnon, have seldom been a source of operatic inspiration.2 The Agamemnon gained popularity at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, which led up to its spectacular revival during the second half of the 20th century.3 Two operas marked the beginning of this trend. In Russia, 1 A couple of excellent studies have shed light on the reception of ancient Greek drama in opera: Marianne McDonald, Sing Sorrow: Classics, History, and Heroines in Opera (Westport, ct: Greenwood Press: 2001) and Michael Ewans, Opera from the Greek: Studies in the Poetics of Appropriation (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2007); but neither deals with the musical recreations of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. More recently, Belina and Ewans have written on an opera based on Oresteia that I consider here: “Taneyev’s Oresteia,” in Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage, (eds.) Peter Brown and Suzana Ograjensek (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2010: 258–284). On the overall operatic adaptations of Aeschylean drama, see also Sarah Brown Ferrario’s essay in this volume, which contains in the last section a brief review of Taneyev’s opera. 2 Several essays mention the musical reception of Agamemnon in the collection edited by Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Edith Hall, and Oliver Taplin, Agamemnon in Performance: 458 bc to 2004 ad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): e.g., Dimitry Trubotchkin’s “Agamemnon in Russia” (255–271) is of particular interest to our topic because it presents at length the history of the performances and adaptations of the Aeschylean play in Russia and devotes space to Taneyev’s opera (257–262); others mention the operatic reception of the Agamemnon in passing, for example, Margaret Reynolds, “Agamemnon: Speaking the Unspeakable” (119–138), especially 130–134 deals with Strauss’ Elektra, alluding to the Aeschylean play; Michael Ewans, “Agamemnon’s Influence in Germany” (107–117), especially 114 where he discusses the play’s influence on Wagner’s Das Rheingold. See also Belina and Evans (2010), and footnote 5 below. 3 Among these revivals of the trilogy I find worth mentioning (1) a series of compositions – oratorio/ballet by Iannis Xenakis: a first section (1967), with an added second part for bass and percussion “Kassandra” (1987), and a third final part entitled “La Déese Athéna” (1992). For details on this see the ny Times article by Allan Kozinn, “An Opera of An Epic,

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Sergei Taneyev’s Oresteia, a three-part opera based on Aeschylus’ trilogy, premiered in St. Petersburg in 1895, and was considered an ambitious project as well as a rarity. At the time, most of Taneyev’s fellow-composers preferred to use stories from Russian folklore. Ten years later (1905) in Italy Vittorio Gnecchi produced his Cassandra, an opera inspired by Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. This was also an unusual topic to choose in an environment that was moving from the romantic repertoire to the realism (verismo) of Puccini.4 My analysis will show how each of the above operatic adaptations relates to the Greek original,5 focusing especially on the figure of Cassandra. After a review of Cassandra’s scene in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, (1) I will examine the contextual characteristics of these adaptations, as determined in each case by the place, the time, and the taste of the artists recasting Aeschylean drama; (2) I will compare the two adoptions to each other; and (3) I will discuss how the history of subsequent performances was influenced by the musical taste of the audiences and a varied interest in Aeschylus as a tragedian. Although the two composers worked independently, their operatic adaptations of Aeschylus’ play had a similar fate – i.e., they had successful initial productions; then Composed in Stages” (September 14, 2008) page E3 of the New York Edition; (2) Wim Laman, “Oresteia,” an opera – not much has been written on this, but the musical score can be found: Oresteia: Opera in Three Acts. A Libretto after Aeschylos’ Oresteia. Amsterdam: Donemus, 1996; (3) Liza Lim, “The Oresteia: Memory Theatre (Opera) in 7 Parts Based on Aeschylus’ Drama” (­Melbourne: Ricordi, 1993) on which a dissertation was written, i.e., Darren Howard, An Examination and Analysis of Two Australian New Music Theatre Works: Liza Lim’s The Oresteia and David Chesworth’s Two Executioners (Melbourne: Monash University, 1999). Some s­ ubtitles of this Australian opera sound intriguing: “Cassandra’s dream song,” “Memory spills from the split skulls of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon,” “Cassandra” (The banquet), “The Furies,” “Clytemnestra’s ghost,” etc.; (4) Andrew Simpson (composer) and Sarah Brown (­librettist) devised the “Oresteia” project as one-act contemporary operas based on each of the Aeschylean plays: “Agamemnon” (composed 1999–2003), “The Libation Bearers” (­2001–2004), “The ­Furies” (2005–2006) – cf. the authors’ article “Aeschylean Structure and Text in New Opera: The Oresteia Project” Didaskalia 3 (2006) – online journal: www .didaskalia.netissues/vol6/no3simpson _ferrario.html. For a fuller list of relevant recent operas, see Peter Brown, “Greek tragedy in the Opera House and Concert Hall of the Late Twentieth Century,” in Dionysus Since 69, (eds.) E. Hall et al., (Oxford 2004: 305–307, with discussion at 294–296). 4 Working with Gnecchi’s librettist, Luigi Illica, Puccini premiered his famous Madama Butterfly at La Scala in 1904, only a year before Cassandra. 5 There is a recent and extremely informative essay on Taneyev’s Oresteia from a classicist perspective (Anastasia Belina and Michael Ewans, already mentioned in footnote 1 and 2). The same cannot be said about Gnecchi’s opera: most of the bibliography is in Italian, and generally dealing with the musical aspects of the opera.

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they were nearly forgotten, receiving very few restagings and recordings, but later they enjoyed renewed attention in the last decades of the 20th century. 8.2

The Cassandra Scene in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon

The “Cassandra scene,” which comprises the fourth episode (1035–1330), reveals riveting visions of the past and the future of the house of Atreus. The scene, which is always gripping when performed, has received less scholarly attention than the rest of the play, perhaps because it does not advance the plot in a clear manner.6 Nevertheless, as Rehm has convincingly argued, this scene is the key for understanding the dramatic progression of the play because it connects the past with the present and future. It also gives Clytemnestra an additional reason to kill her husband besides her other reasons – i.e., her revenge for the sacrifice of Iphigenia, her desire for political power, and her affair with Aegisthus. The murder of Cassandra, an innocent maiden, by Clytemnestra becomes a counterpoint to the murder of Iphigenia by Agamemnon ten years earlier.7 Each section of this scene is difficult to interpret. Clytemnestra asks Cassandra to go inside the palace (1035–1046). Even though the request sounds perfectly clear to the chorus (1047–1049), the prophetess appears disturbed and seems unable to understand. Her silence prompts Clytemnestra to speculate that Cassandra, a Trojan captive, might not understand Greek. The queen loses her patience and goes back inside the palace (1064–1068), while the chorus speculates that Cassandra may be in need of an “interpreter” (hermeneos, 1062). Their assumption that Cassandra, as a foreigner, cannot communicate seems reasonable except for the fact that a common convention of Attic tragedy is to present barbarians as if they were fluent in Greek. This convention becomes more ironic when the old men of the chorus fail to understand the meaning of Cassandra’s prophecies, even though she speaks in their language.8 Starting with an invocation to Apollo (1085),9 Cassandra describes her visions about the 6 Seth Schein, “The Cassandra Scene in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon” Greece and Rome 29/1 (1982): 11. 7 Rush Rehm, “Cassandra – The Prophet Unveiled,” in Agamemnon in Performance 458 bc to ad 2004, edited by F. Macintosh et al., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005: 343–358). 8 Pascale-Anne Brault, “Playing the Cassandra. Prophecies of the Feminine in the Polis and Beyond,” in Denise Eileen McCoskey and Emily Zakin (eds.), Bound by the City. Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference, and the Formation of the Polis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009: 202–204). 9 Alan Sommerstein, The Tangled Ways of Zeus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010: 169) with earlier bibliography, emphasizes the theological problems raised in the Agamemnon

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horrifying past of the house of the Atreidae (1085–1097) and about two new crimes (1099–1149), including her own murder (1136–1149). Then she laments the marriage of Paris, and once again she deplores her own fate which will be to sing her prophecies by the rivers Cocytus and Acheron in Hades (1156–1161). Throughout the scene the metaphor of the wedding, which will occur after her death, dominates both her language and performance. Cassandra first evokes the image of Iphigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter who was lured to her sacrifice under the pretext of getting married to Achilles. Then, Cassandra’s references to wedding rituals point to her own marriage to Apollo after her death.10 In the following ode Cassandra continues with an invocation of the sorrowful demise of Troy which she compares to her own approaching murder (1166–1172). She promises the chorus to speak clearly so that they can understand her – no longer speaking like a bride who is looking out from under her veil (1178–1180).11 Then she projects her visions of crimes from the past and the future (1214–1238 and 1256–1294), making numerous references to Agamemnon’s assassination by Clytemnestra. Cassandra predicts Clytemnestra’s murder by alluding to gender reversals such as “female shall strike down male” (1231–1232), and to a generational struggle which will end with Orestes taking revenge by killing Aegisthus and Clytemnestra (1280–1281). The fearful chorus understands her references to the past and the myth of Thyestes (1243–1245), but they are unable to understand her prophecy about the immediate future.12 To make her vision crystal clear

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(e.g., the gods allowing the murder of Agamemnon and especially of the innocent Cassandra who seems to have been mistreated by Apollo earlier; the chorus asks how Zeus can be the cause of all, but no answer is given, etc.). For Cassandra being a sacrificial victim like Iphigenia, see Froma Zeitlin, “Postscript to Sacrificial Imagery in the Oresteia (Ag. 1235–37)” Transactions of the American Philological Association 97 (1966): 645–653; Robin Mitchell-Boyask, “The Marriage of Cassandra and the Oresteia” Transactions of the American Philological Association 136 (2006): 269–297 explores in detail the metaphors describing Cassandra as a bride of Apollo whose marriage is to be consummated in the underworld. Translations from Aeschylus are Lattimore’s (1953) or slightly adapted. As Simon Goldhill remarked in Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984: 85), “it is interesting that as Cassandra promises to speak clearly (1178ff) she expresses herself in three similes.” It is perhaps worth emphasizing that at this point the chorus does not fail to understand Cassandra entirely, so it makes some progress, but refuses to comprehend the future. Barbara Goward, Aeschylus: Agamemnon. London: Duckworth (2005: 56) insightfully remarks: “the chorus, while accepting that her knowledge of the family’s past is accurate, simply cannot connect it to Agamemnon’s forthcoming murder and are blind to Clytemnestra’s role in it.”

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to them, the exasperated prophetess speaks plainly: “I tell you, you shall look at Agamemnon dead” (1246).13 However, the chorus is still in denial and tries to quiet her down: “peace, peace, poor woman; put those bitter lips to sleep” (1247). Finally, Cassandra walks into the palace, knowing that she is going to be murdered (1322–1330). Several aspects of this scene continue to puzzle scholars. For instance, Cassandra’s failure to communicate clearly contributes to the failure of the chorus to prevent the murders from happening. What accounts for the uncommunicativeness of her prophetic language? As Pascale-Anne Brault writes, “in addition to being a woman and a ‘foreigner,’ Cassandra is also a prophetess – a threefold reason, then for being unintelligible.”14 Indeed, the chorus doubts that Cassandra, as a foreign woman, is a true prophet. Her prophecies contain metaphors which are difficult for them to decode. However, the chorus chooses to ignore her warning even when she speaks as unambiguously as possible (1246).15 Some scholars interpret the chorus’ “choice” psychoanalytically. They claim that the chorus are “being in denial” and are refusing to face a threatening reality.16 Nonetheless, the chorus’ lack of understanding could still be seen within the mythical tradition. According to the myth, Apollo granted Cassandra the gift of prophecy but took away her credibility. Therefore, based on this tradition, the problem did not lie in the nature of Cassandra’s language, but in the fact that she could not make herself understood by divine decree. Her effort to find clearer means of expression was therefore useless. Related to this mythical tradition, her relationship with Apollo is presented ambiguously in the play.17 Regardless of the cause ­(linguistic, theological, or both), Cassandra’s inability to prompt the chorus to action raises another question: what is the use of knowing the future if that­ 13 14 15

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Denniston and Page (1957: 183) note on this line: “Here, at last in unambiguous words Cassandra reveals what is to be: this is the first time that she has named Agamemnon.” Brault (2009: 205). David Raeburn and Oliver Thomas, The Agamemnon of Aeschylus: A Commentary for Students (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011: 201) comment on lines 1246–1247 and propose that the Coryphaeus tries to quiet Cassandra because her ill-omened speech can influence the events negatively – an idea often present in Aeschylus’ plays. Conversely, Cassandra acknowledges that her words cannot change the future (1240). For example, see Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude (New York: Free Press, 1975: 293); for a useful review of linguistic-psychological interpretations, see Brault (2009: 214–215). The chorus remains baffled about Apollo’s role in Cassandra’s fate (1201–1213), and rightly so as Paula Debnar has convincingly argued in “The Sexual Status of Aeschylus’ Cassandra” Classical Philology 105/2 (2010): 129–145. Cassandra’s relationships with Apollo and Agamemnon remain ambiguous in the play.

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knowledge ­cannot improve one’s destiny? The question about the ineffectiveness of oracular knowledge is not unique to this tragedy. It is also p ­ resent in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, for example, among other tragedies, but it is rarely as tantalizing as in Aeschylus’ trilogy.18 Since Cassandra cannot influence the action of the chorus, what then is her dramatic function? It would seem that she broadens the temporal perspective of the tragedy by revisiting the past and the future. She predicts the murder of Agamemnon as well as her own murder, and she vividly describes to the audience the two murders which will soon take place out of the view of the audience. This technique seems to instill in the audience a sense of anticipation about the immediate doom of Agamemnon and Cassandra.19 Cassandra appears to have simultaneously fulfilled several dramatic functions in the original performance in the 5th century bc, which classicists continue to explore. She provided the mythical background and foreshadowed the action of the trilogy. She increased the dramatic tension first by keeping silent and then by speaking about the imminent murders. She emphasized symbolic connections by being a sacrificial maiden who laments her fate, and a bride in the underworld. When at the turn of the 20th century composers and librettists became interested in the Oresteia, they rightly saw the doomed prophetess as a pivotal character of the Agamemnon. To what degree were they able to maintain the layers of ambiguity and complexity of the Aeschylean Cassandra? The following two sections survey the adaptations of Aeschylus’ trilogy (especially the “Cassandra scene”) in the operas of Taneyev and Gnecchi. 8.3

Cassandra in Taneyev’s “Oresteia”

Sergei Taneyev (1856–1915) was an influential figure in the cultural life of ­Russia at the end of the 19th century. He was known as a pianist, composer of symphonies, and teacher of famous musicians. He became the director of the Moscow Conservatory (1885–1889) and counted among his friends famous musicians such as Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein, and writers such as Turgenev 18

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Prophecy bridges past and future, with gloomy undertones in the Oresteia. Simon Goldhill, Aeschylus. The Oresteia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2004 [1992]: 55–60) neatly underlines the persistent tension that exists in the trilogy between doom and hope beyond Cassandra’s prophecy, even in the last play of the trilogy, the Eumenides. As Eduard Fraenkel puts it in Agamemnon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962: 516), Aeschylus, through Cassandra’s repeated accounts of the murders, makes us imagine something “infinitely more forcible in its effect than anything actually shown on stage could be.”

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and Zola. He composed the musical trilogy Oresteia between 1882 and 1894, and revised it in 1900, after the opera had premiered in October 1895, using a libretto by Aleksey Alekseyevich Venkstern.20 The choice of the subject was a rarity at a time when composers clearly preferred to write operas based on Russian folklore.21 As expected, the characters of the opera consist of Athena (soprano), ­Cassandra (soprano), Electra (soprano), Clytemnestra (alto), Orestes (tenor), Aegisthus (baritone), Apollo (baritone), Agamemnon (baritone), Areopagus (bass), Coryphaeus (bass), the Watchman (bass), warriors, slaves, and citizens. The plot generally follows Aeschylus’ trilogy, with the following notable modifications in the first part (Agamemnon): the watchman offers additional information to the audiences;22 Aegisthus plays a more important role than in the Greek original and comes on stage earlier; after killing Agamemnon, ­Clytemnestra expresses deep remorse and psychological turmoil. Cassandra, as a mythological figure, fascinated the 19th-century artists, perhaps because of her power to symbolize various ideas. On the one hand, she was connected with Romanticism due to her ability to open up her subconscious and to become inspired. On the other hand, she was associated with revolutionary movements and the emancipation of women because she refused to obey Apollo to some degree and showed courage in the face of death.23 For Taneyev too, Cassandra is a striking figure. The Cassandra scene is crucial for understanding his operatic adaptation. The composer and librettist preserved the Aeschylean essence of the scene but with some simplifications, abbreviations, and interesting changes in staging. They made the language of the prophetess less metaphorical. For instance, Cassandra will

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For basic information about the composer and his Oresteia I have used Anastasia Belina’s “Introduction” to Sergei Taneyev, Oresteia Opera. Full Score (München: 2010: 1–6). Ibid, 2. Belina notes that only Modest Mussorgsky among Taneyev’s younger contemporaries attempted to write an opera on Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, but he abandoned the project. Anastasia Belina and Michael Ewans (2010: 264–266) have explained that composer and librettist could not rely on the audience’s pre-knowledge of the myth, so the watchman has to outline the background. On the reception of Aeschylus’ Cassandra in the 19th century (with emphasis on the Romantic aspects), see Fiona Macintosh, “Viewing Agamemnon in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Agamemnon in Performance (2010: 139–163), particularly for the figure of the prophetess, 159–162, and, (with emphasis on the emancipation aspects), Laura MonrósGaspar, “The Voice of Cassandra: Florence Nightingale Cassandra (1852) and the Victorian Woman,” New Voices in Classical Reception Studies 3 (2008): 61–76.

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not speak from under a veil like a newly-married bride in Aeschylus’ text (1178–1183), but in the operatic adaptation, she lifts her veil and speaks out rather directly: Lifting the veil that conceals the future like the morning wind, or like the rays of the sun that bring daylight, I announce to you the king is dead.24 i.viii, 98, 10–13

The operatic adaptation preserves the prophecies concerning the murders of Agamemnon and Cassandra as well as the revenge taken by Orestes, including Cassandra’s visions about the past of the house of Atreus such as the murder of Thyestes’ children. In the opera, however, there is an unexpected change: the ghosts of Thyestes’ children appear on stage and are visible both to the characters and the audience, whereas, in Aeschylus’ play, they are only present in Cassandra’s mind.25 This change gives the horrific murder of the children a stage presence.26 Several details in Taneyev’s adaptation remove the ambiguity which is present in the Aeschylean text, and they mark the dramatic conflict differently at times. For example, Clytemnestra’s hostility towards Cassandra becomes transparent when she threatens her: “You do not want to obey? You are annoyed that you arrived here as a captive, as a slave. Give me time. I will teach you obedience.”27 In Aeschylus’ tragedy, however, Clytemnestra simply loses patience with Cassandra and leaves the stage. Clytemnestra’s departure in the Aeschylean text is less harsh than in the operatic adaptation; yet, her triumphant return to the stage to brag about the murders of Agamemnon and Cassandra is more shocking than in the opera. Another subtle but significant change in the operatic adaptation occurs in Cassandra’s arioso. Cassandra sharply contrasts her present misery as a slave in a foreign land to her former happy life at her home in Troy. She remembers her 24 Text is as printed in Belina and Ewans (2010: 269), who also offer additional details on the style of the libretto. 25 Ibid. 26 Later on theatrical directors and producers have opted for similar changes. I agree with Rush Rehm (2010: 356–357), who comments on a well-known 1977 theatrical production of Agamemnon at Lincoln Center, directed by Andrei Serban, in which Cassandra’s vision also became embodied, showing ghost children on stage: “Such picture-making interventions indicate a deep distrust of the actor’s capacity to use language to open the audience’s imagination.” 27 Sergei Taneyev, Oresteia. Vocal Score. (Leipzig: Belyaev Publishing House, 1990: 96–97).

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fatherland and Scamander River. In the Aeschylean text, however, Cassandra laments about her misfortune (1313, 1322), remembering Apollo in addition to her homeland, and she becomes resolute about facing her death.28 Her unhappiness had already started at home. However, in the operatic adaptation this detail was eliminated. According to Belina, Taneyev, by making this change, underscored the reversal of Cassandra’s fortune and, in this way, he placed her in the “gallery” of Russian operatic heroines who suffer undeservedly – such as Liza in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades (1890) and Tatiana in Eugene Onegin (1881).29 Consequently, Taneyev presented Cassandra at Troy as serene. Therefore, her relationship with Apollo becomes less problematic in the opera than in the Aeschylean play. Some other changes in the Cassandra scene of the operatic adaptation gloss over the theological riddles of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. The house of Atreus is no longer “hating the gods,” but it is rather “hated by the gods” (Taneyev 1900: 100). Cassandra, whose musical leitmotif is associated with an oboe, sings about the crushing power of fate.30 Cassandra’s song is borrowed from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, in which she throws away her garland and staff when she realizes that there is “no escape” (Ag. 1299). However, in the operatic adaptation, the sense of fatality is enhanced by the repetition of the musical leitmotif about the overpowering force of fate. The ancestral curse, which afflicts the house of Atreus, entangles her in this “torrent” of misfortune. In the Aeschylean text Cassandra is a more ambiguous tragic character because she is also burdened by her own past and her prophetic gifts. Finally, from a musical point of view, Belina and Ewans consider the ­Cassandra scene as the “most powerful scene in Taneyev’s Oresteia, as it is in Aeschylus.”31 They praise the composer’s use of instruments which, in their opinion, convey great pathos. The solos for oboe, for horn, and for full strings come as Cassandra is exiting to die, after her final crescendo. Generally, all the changes in the libretto seem designed, on the one hand, to provide the Russian audience with a clearer view of the characters’ intentions, and, on the other, to simplify some of the Aeschylean ambiguities. 28

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For this interesting argument proposing a type of “ring composition” in Cassandra’s speech, see Marcel Andrew Widzisz, Chronos on the Threshold. Time, Ritual, and Agency in the Oresteia (Langham: Lexington Books, 2012: 61–69). Anastasia Belina, “Representation of Clytemnestra and Cassandra in Taneyev’s Oresteia” Studies in Musical Theatre 2/1 (2008): 76–77. Ibid., 74. Peter Brown and Suzana Ograjenšek (2010: 271).

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Taneyev’s Oresteia was initially well received by the public and by some critics such as Herman Laroche, who admired its originality. However, after its premiere, it received only eight performances.32 The reduced number of initial performances was due in part to a disagreement between the conductor, Napravnik, who wanted to shorten the duration of the trilogy, and Taneyev, who agreed to make some cuts but could not fully satisfy Napravnik’s requests.33 Not all contemporary critics were enthusiastic. For instance, one wrote that Taneyev composed a dead opera after a drama in a dead language.34 Tchaikovsky is reported to have said to Taneyev that he preferred realistic, living characters. He would never have picked Aeschylus’ trilogy as a subject for an opera, with its horrific murders and with the Furies as characters.35 After the composer died in 1915, the opera had a period of brief revival in the Soviet Union. It was performed thirty five times at the “Theater of the Soviet Workers’ Deputies.”36 The new order and justice proclaimed at the end of Eumenides fit the Socialist agenda because it presented a new and improved society. Afterwards, the opera was rarely performed in Russia, and it remained little known to the West. Two recordings have circulated on compact disc. One, released in 2005, was based on a 1958 performance with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, with Gemal Dalgat conducting. The other, released in 1991, was based on a 1978 performance, with Tatiana Kolomizheva conducting. The latter is easier to find and has received a less than enthusiastic review by Harlow Robinson in Opera Quarterly,37 which I would like to discuss briefly here, mentioning some technical aspects, and especially its references to Aeschylus. One critic’s view should not normally be of interest to my topic, but, in this case, I think, it is significant because, given the scarcity of the cd recordings available, it exemplifies the response to Taneyev’s opera in the West, in the last decades of the 20th century. 32 33

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Belina (2010: 4). Trubotchkin (2005: 259): “the cutting of the Agamemnon was obviously destructive because of its special musical composition.” Those cuts, in Trubotchkin’s view, do no longer allow for smooth musical transitions in the opera. Anon (1895); for the full citation see Belina (2008: 62). Belina (2008: 61) with additional bibliography for the Russian reception of the classics at the time. Belina (2010: 4). Harlow Robinson, “The Oresteia. Sergei Taneyev” The Opera Quarterly 8 (1991): 159–161.

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Robinson starts his critique with general musical observations: Taneyev excelled more in instrumental than in operatic music; his only opera, the Oresteia, is based on “stand and sing solos (there are very few ensembles)” which resemble an “oratorio” rather than an opera seria.38 The critic notes the reduced presence of the chorus, which was so crucial to the Aeschylean play. However, the choral presence in the first act of the trilogy is strong, and, according to other critics, the use of orchestral innovations compensates for the choral absence and enhances the dramatic power of the opera, as, for example, in the scene marking Cassandra’s exit.39 Robinson proceeds with a satiric description of the performance: the singing of the soloists is likened to shouting;40 the sound of the orchestra is criticized as harsh, perhaps due to the poor recording.41 The soprano Nelli Tkachenko in the role of Cassandra receives praise and is seen as an exception to the general disastrous musical execution of the opera. For the record, I personally found the voices of the performers and the sound of the recording to be agreeable, although I am not an opera critic. Since Robinson’s criticism takes into account the way Taneyev adapted the Aeschylean text, I would now like to address his criticisms. Robinson states that Taneyev used: a pallid and stodgy adaptation of Aeschylus’ classical drama by the obscure Russian writer Venkstern. Both composer and librettist display remarkably little interest in the often sensational events of the tragedy, which fairly drips with verismo blood and guts. The murders of Agamemnon, Cassandra, Clytemnestra, and Aegisthus – all take place off-stage and produce little more than a ripple in either the musical or dramatic texture.42 38 39

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Ibid. 160. After interacting with the chorus, Cassandra predicts Orestes’ revenge in triumphant crescendo. Belina and Ewans (2010) find Taneyev’s use of the instruments to be excellent. For disagreements among contemporary musical critics and composers whether the opera had memorable melodies, see Belina (2008: 62–63). “Almost all of the soloists, like so many Russian singers, seem to believe that volume equals intensity. There is a great deal of unpleasant and monochromatic shouting” (Robinson 1991: 161). Ibid., 161: “Due to the poor quality of either the technology, or the instruments, or the original recording, the orchestra emerges thin and unbalanced, most notably in the rackety ‘Apollo’s Temple in Delphi’ that sounds more like cans being recycled in Detroit.” Ibid., 160.

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It is surprising to read that Robinson complains about Taneyev and his ­librettist for not keeping up with the Aeschylean gore because they avoided showing the murders on stage. Robinson seems to think that the murders occurred on stage in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. The Cassandra scene, as we have seen, anticipates and describes the murders of Agamemnon and Cassandra. The audience does not see the murders acted out on the stage but only sees ­Clytemnestra stand over Agamemnon’s dead body after the murder (1372). Clytemnestra points to Cassandra’s corpse saying: “here lies she, the captive of his spear” (1440).43 Robinson’s review, which is based on his misunderstanding of the Greek theatrical tradition, exemplifies the prejudices against Taneyev’s opera. Those prejudices pertain to: (a) musical elements: the composer was skilled at composing symphonies, but he was not good enough at using human voices in a dramatic manner; (b) the geographical area: the performances and their recordings were of poor quality because they were mostly confined to the ussr where there was a lack of quality instruments and proper musical training; (c) the interpretation of the Aeschylean text: the composer and the librettist fail to capture the dramatic splendor of the Greek tragedian. Recent performances of Taneyev’s Oresteia may dispel some of the musical reservations and criticisms.44 However, it is the last of the three points that interests me here. Some of Taneyev’s contemporaries attacked him for his choice of the subject matter itself. To them, the adaptation of Aeschylus appeared to be inappropriate – first, for not conforming to the more fashionable and nationalistic dramatization of Russian folklore and, second, for a lack of realism in Greek drama – if I interpret Tchaikovsky’s words correctly. For a short period of time the Soviets liked what they interpreted as a social message in the Oresteia. Without always providing accurate examples, Western opera 43

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In Aeschylus’ play, verbal descriptions emphasize details about the corpses of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, e.g., the chorus laments: it would have been better to be swallowed by the earth than to see the body of Agamemnon lies still in the silver bath (1539–1540); Clytemnestra brags about how she assassinated her husband who is still covered in an entangled cloth (1382–1384); on the importance of these verbal allusions see John Herington, Aeschylus (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986: 120). For example, Taneyev’s Oresteia was performed very recently and for the first time in the United Kingdom at the University of Leeds on November 2010 (for a review, see https:// bachtrack.com/22/296/view/110) and received its us premiere in July 2013 at Bard College.

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critics who had only sporadic access to the opera recordings between 1970 and 2005 found fault with the way in which Taneyev and his librettist reworked the text of Aeschylus. Finally, Belina and Ewans between 2007 and 2010 carefully compared the opera to the Aeschylean text, and reached rather different conclusions in favor of Taneyev. Beyond cultural fashions, how should we judge Taneyev’s opera? Musically, critics could question whether the composer should have used more choral ensembles, because the chorus does play a crucial role in the Agamemnon and seems to be less important in the operatic adaptation of the Oresteia. From a dramatic point of view, we could question whether it was right to cast Cassandra in the opera as less mysterious than in the Aeschylean play, or whether it was necessary to make her visions concrete at times by bringing the ghosts of the children on stage.45 Are there any correct answers to the question of how artists ought to adapt an Aeschylean play? The necessity of any adaptation to be faithful to the original remains open for debate. A musical refashioning of a tragedy, more than a simple theatrical performance, can use additional means of expression to render dramatic meaning, so instrumental interludes may be understood as a replacement for choral parts. The contemporary audiences of Taneyev may have been entirely puzzled by a Cassandra whose suffering started in Troy, and no lectures on Aeschylus usually accompany an operatic performance, so certain details had to be simplified or adapted for the historical audiences. Taneyev’s Cassandra is different from Aeschylus’ Cassandra in three fundamental ways. Taneyev emphasizes Clytemnestra’s animosity toward Cassandra whom she perceives as her rival. He presents the suffering of Cassandra mostly as a consequence of her being a war captive, and he overlooks her association with Apollo in Aeschylus’ play. Even classicists are surprised by Aeschylus’ choice to make Cassandra primarily a victim of Apollo as his unwilling bride, and only secondarily a victim of the Trojan War. While Aeschylus might have played on the expectations of his own audience,46 Taneyev eliminated the theological conundrum from the libretto.

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Belina and Evans (2010), for instance, do not comment on the necessity or effect of this change, but Rehm (2010) discusses similar staging choices in a different context and deems them to be unnecessary and diluting the poetic strength of the original. As Mitchell-Boyask (2006: 274) points out, the first words (“Apollo, Apollo”) from Cassandra in Aeschylus’ play, after her long silence, appear shocking because what she says contradicts what the audience sees. While we expect the Trojan captive to deplore her current misfortune, which is obvious to all, Cassandra shifts the blame to Apollo.

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The libretto gives the visions of Cassandra a solid embodiment on the stage instead of making them imaginary. In this way, Taneyev and Venkstern removed the ambiguity surrounding Cassandra, and they presented a plotline that was easier for their audience to follow. What is astonishing for a classicist to see is how the composer and the librettist changed the text of Aeschylus as they disambiguated and simplified Cassandra. Their modifications of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in the libretto (no matter how slight they are) produce a straightforward dialogue which often dilutes the metaphors and innuendos of the original text. In conclusion, understanding the relationship between the Aeschylean play and its operatic adaptation requires rethinking the historical contexts of both Aeschylus and Taneyev. Past aesthetic judgments on whether or not the operatic adaptation of the Aeschylean text was appropriate or successful tend to be formed on subjective criteria. While Taneyev’s version of Cassandra seems to be a simplified version of the Aeschylean character, the simplification comes as a necessary change for presenting the character as relatable to Taneyev’s historical audiences. 8.4

Cassandra in Vittorio Gnecchi’s Opera

Vittorio Gnecchi Ruscone (1876–1954), born in an aristocratic Italian family in the area of Milan, was the son of a rich silk industrialist and patriot with philanthropic and scientific interests in Roman antiquities.47 The family owned several magnificent villas in northern Italy, which were often used for cultural events. Vittorio received a splendid education and was encouraged to cultivate his musical aptitude by studying with the best teachers of the time, including Michele Saladino, who also taught the composer Mascagni. However, Vittorio did not pursue a career in music. Instead, he acquired a law degree, which better fit his father’s expectations. It was perhaps Gnecchi’s wealth, legal training, 47

I am using as the main source for the life and work of Gnecchi: Marco Iannelli, Il caso Cassandra. Vittorio Gnecchi, una storia del Novecento [The Cassandra Case: A Story of the Nineteen Century] (Milano: Edizioni Bietti: 2004). This is the standard book on the ­composer – and most of the (previous) bibliography is composed of articles in Italian, written generally from the perspective of musicologists, not classicists. Marco Iannelli (Head of the Archives), in collaboration with Alessandra Gnecchi Ruscone (President) and Nikolaos Velissiotis (Artistic Director), has also created a very useful bilingual website (Italian and English) meant to restore the reputation of the composer and to present his works to the public: Associazione Musicale Vittorio Gnecchi Ruscone: http://www.associ azionegnecchi.org/eng/?page_id=2 (consulted in August 2012).

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and rare taste for Wagner that led some music critics to dismiss his compositions as the work of a dilettante.48 Vittorio made his debut as a composer in 1896 with a pastoral drama in two acts entitled Virtù d’Amore (“Virtue of Love”) performed at his parents’ Verderio Villa. The show had a distinguished cast and was reviewed favorably.49 His next major project was an opera based on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Luigi Illica, his friend, wrote the formal libretto. The opera, entitled Cassandra, was composed independently from any school of composition, although some critics have recognized a Wagnerian influence in it.50 It caught the interest of Arturo Toscanini who directed the premiere at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna in 1905. Although the first performance was a success, the interventions by the inexperienced and anxious Gnecchi during rehearsals so annoyed Toscanini that he declined to re-perform the opera or work with its composer again.51 The event that definitely cast a shadow over the subsequent performances of Cassandra was not Toscanini’s reaction, but the premiere of Strauss’ Elektra at Dresden Opera in 1909. The musicologist Giovanni Tebaldini recognized musical and dramatic similarities between Strauss’ opera and Gnecchi’s. He wrote an article in which he spoke of “musical telepathy” between the two composers.52 Other critics soon accused either Strauss or Gnecchi of plagiarism, although Gnecchi’s opera was staged a few years earlier. Even though both composers denied the accusations, the criticisms persisted. The controversy had such a devastating effect on Gnecchi’s Cassandra that it fell into oblivion.53 48 49

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As Mario Nordio, Il “caso” Gnecchi, Roma (1932: 1–15) suggests, these reasons compelled some critics of Gnecchi to call him amateurish; on this see also Iannelli (2004: 31–32). The musical score is available in libraries: Vittorio Gnecchi, Virtù d’amore: azione pastorale in due atti (Milano: Recordi, 1910). For details on the original performance see the Associazione Gnecchi website: http://www.associazionegnecchi.org/eng/?page_id=102 (consulted in August 2012). In an interview given to Piccolo di Trieste (20 of January 1931), cited by Iannelli (2004: 50), Gnecchi says: Scrissi la sceneggiatura del libretto e Luigi Illica compose i versi. Senza alcuna influenza di scuoli, di Conservatori, io maturavo in piena libertà di spirito e di indirizzo artistico, la mia personalità musicale [I wrote the outline of the libretto and Luigi Illica composed the lines. Without any influence of schools, of Conservatories, I developed in absolute freedom of spirit and free artistic direction my musical personality] (The translation is mine). http://www.associazionegnecchi.org/eng/?page_id=110 (consulted in August 2012). Giovanni Tebaldini, “Telepatia musicale. A proposito dell’ ‘Elektra’ di Richard Strauss” [Musical Telepathy. Regarding “Electra” of Richard Strauss] Rivista Musicale Italiana 16/2 (1909): 400–412, followed by a second part with the same title in the next issue, 16/3 (1909). Gnecchi continued, however, to compose music: a ballet, Atalanta (1929) and two more operas, La Rosiera (1909, on a libretto by Zangarini) and, again with Illica as librettist, Judith (finished in 1952). On these later creations, see Iannelli (2004: 171–199).

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The opera was ostracized especially from Italy following its performance in Milan in 1913.54 What are the much-debated similarities? A musical theme from Gnecchi’s prologue is echoed by a similar theme in Strauss’ Elektra, when Agamemnon’s children recall the crimes of their mother.55 The operas of both Gnecchi and Strauss end with the name of Orestes. In Gnecchi’s opera, Cassandra sings “Oreste” right before her death. In Strauss’ opera, Chrysothemis screams “Orest” after Electra collapses from a tumultuous dance. The prevalent view among musicologists nowadays excludes the accusation of plagiarism. Strauss was familiar with the music of the Italian composer, but he was not in possession of the musical score. So it is most likely that his mind retained subconsciously certain details that resurfaced later in his own opera. In my opinion, a particularly unfortunate result is that, in general, scholars have not analyzed the opera Cassandra per se but have mostly concentrated on its relationship to Strauss’ Elektra. Gnecchi’s Cassandra, based on Illica’s libretto, has two parts preceded by a prelude-prologue.56 The prelude entitled O Glauco Cielo d’Elade (“Oh, ClearBlue Sky of Greece”) starts the opera in a rather strange manner. The orchestra performs an agitated melody (allegro furioso) and the voices of the chorus of the Eumenides, who accompany a personified Prologue, predict the death of Agamemnon (Onde di sangue ha il mare – “The sea has waves of blood”). In a calmer middle section the Eumenides announce the return of Agamemnon as his ship is entering the harbor. After this, the orchestral turmoil returns: the Eumenides repeat their warning, strangely summon Cassandra (O Cassandra 54

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As the fame of Strauss increased, so did the prejudice against Gnecchi’s opera. A story goes that when duke Visconti di Modrone (father of the famous cinema director Luchino Visconti), chairman of the La Scala opera program, asked the theater director Mingardi to include Gnecchi’s Cassandra among the productions, the latter responded that he could not comply, so that he would “not displease Mr. Strauss.” http://www.associazionegnecchi.org/ eng/?page_id=110 (consulted in August 2012). For the fate of Gnecchi’s Cassandra, see also Ottavio de Carli, “La ‘Cassandra’: un destino di silenzio” Bresciamusica 60 (1998): 16–22. Tebaldini (1909). The cast includes the following characters: the Prologue (baritone), Agamemnon (tenor), Clytemnestra (soprano), Cassandra (mezzo-soprano), Aegisthus (baritone), Orestes (mute character), Electra (mute character), a libation bearer (mezzo-soprano), and a chorus of Eumenides A useful synopsis of the opera is provided by the website Associazione Gnecchi: http://www.associazionegnecchi.org/eng/?page_id=225. I have looked at this, and I used the available cd (2000, Diemecke conductor) for basic information about the structure of the opera.

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preparati a presagi, “Oh Cassandra be ready to deliver your omens”), and even announce the arrival of Orestes, placing heavy emphasis on Fate. This unusual beginning merits attention for several reasons. First, it replaces the speech of the watchman from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon with the choral ensemble of Eumenides that alludes to the other two plays of the trilogy, the Choephoroe and the Eumenides. Secondly, the reason for the change does not seem to arise from a need to provide additional background information to the audience, as is the case with Taneyev’s Oresteia, (including the details given by the watchman), but rather from a need to foreshadow more clearly and much sooner than in Aeschylus the horrors to come as well as the final outcome of the trilogy. Consequently the beginning of the opera is much less ambiguous than the speech of the Aeschylean watchman whose mood oscillates between hope for the return of his king and (muted) fear. Such a swing between fear and hope remains essential for the chorus of the Agamemnon, as well as for the trilogy in general. Thirdly, while ambiguity is lost, the beginning both anticipates and doubles Cassandra’s prophecies. The first part opens with a serene theme of joy. The chorus of citizens is happy to welcome Agamemnon. Clytemnestra, standing apart from the joyous citizens, confesses her hatred for her husband, who has sacrificed Iphigenia, and her immense love for Aegisthus (“I love him – the gods themselves do not know how to love more,” L’amo come più amar non san gli dei). Aegisthus, whose role is more prominent here than in Aeschylus’ play, enters the stage and a duet follows. During the duet Clytemnestra reassures Aegisthus that she wants to spend her life with him. When Agamemnon arrives, the citizens sing joyously. At the same time, Clytemnestra expresses her despair and Aegisthus his hatred for Agamemnon, while the orchestra with contrasting themes accentuates the divided reaction to the king’s return. From a classicist’s perspective, it is interesting that, even though the title of the opera bears Cassandra’s name, Cassandra’s entrance is delayed (as it was in Aeschylus’ play). Certain changes of the Aeschylean text appear to be designed to make the characters’ intentions less ambiguous, as was also the case in Taneyev’s Oresteia. Perhaps this type of change was prompted by the belief of the librettists that the Italian and the Russian audiences lacked familiarity with the myth and the Greek tragedy. However, when the operatic adaptation clearly articulates Clytemnestra’s position from the very beginning, it takes away some of the dramatic tension that is exquisitely maintained in Aeschylus’ play. The second part proceeds with a “welcoming” scene. Agamemnon approaches Clytemnestra and declares his love to her, while she pretends to be

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glad to see him. This makes the operatic Agamemnon less haughty and more sympathetic than the Aeschylean character. Then a mysterious female figure, Cassandra, comes out of the ship screaming “blood” (sangue). Clytemnestra reacts with fear and Agamemnon tries to calm her. Cassandra’s entrance and screams are unexpected for those who are familiar with the Aeschylean text. However, Cassandra’s exclamation contains a certain vagueness which is compatible with the ambiguous language of the character later in the Aeschylean scene. When she shrieks “blood” does she refer to the future of the palace or does she remember what she has seen in Troy? Clytemnestra takes it in one way, whereas Agamemnon takes it in another. The composer and the librettist enhanced the contrasts. For example, while Cassandra remembers Troy, now burned and lost, the crowd admires the war spoils and the slaves that are paraded. Similarly, while Taneyev’s opera introduced the idea of Cassandra’s “happy” past at home in contrast to her present misery as a captive, Gnecchi’s work underscores her unhappiness in contrast to the collective joy of the victors. Neither contrast exists in Aeschylus’ tragedy, which presents a more nuanced and difficult to interpret atmosphere. There Cassandra displays tremendous anxiety as she experiences her visions of imminent death. The chorus, while listening to her, also becomes terribly fearful and does not exult with unrestrained joy at the return of the king. In Gnecchi’s opera Agamemnon suddenly discovers the presence of ­Aegisthus, who claims that he has come to Agamemnon’s palace by accident, taking refuge from a storm. When Agamemnon orders Aegisthus to leave, Cassandra has a horrifying vision. Her predictions achieve substance ­immediately as two children, Electra and Orestes, appear on stage. Their father, Agamemnon, hands them a sword. The orchestra accompanies this scene with the agitated leitmotif of the prelude (onde di sangue ha il mare – “the sea has waves of blood”). The effect of this staging innovation is that the obscure predictions of the Aeschylean Cassandra, which the chorus cannot comprehend, are manifested concretely when Agamemnon gives his children his sword (a symbol of revenge). Then Agamemnon follows Clytemnestra into the palace, signaling to Cassandra to follow them. She does not, but instead sings “I see” (vedo), continuing with her premonitions of “misfortune” (sventura). As in Aeschylus’ tragedy, she envisions her own murder and the murder of Agamemnon. In the opera she feels conflicted about Agamemnon’s fate – she is happy that he will be assassinated, but she feels pity that he will suffer. Her second mood prevails. The idea of noble forgiveness leads Cassandra to sympathize with Agamemnon. Illica writes in an undated letter to the

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composer that a picture described in Philostratus shows Cassandra embracing the statue of the goddess Athena and praying for the wellbeing of Agamemnon. Illica thinks that a bas-relief at the villa Borghese derives from this tradition.57 Consequently, Illica’s libretto has Cassandra decide to save the king by warning the drunken crowd of bystanders that Agamemnon will be killed. However, the crowd ignores her warning and continues to celebrate the victorious return of their king. Then Cassandra accuses them of participating in the crime (popolo acheo, uccidi il tuo re – “you Achaean people are killing your king”). Her accusation makes the chorus culpable because of its inability to take preventive action. After the audience hears the screams of Agamemnon, who is being murdered off-stage, the gates of the palace open. The audience sees Clytemnestra standing over the corpse of Agamemnon. She brandishes the axe that she used to murder him and proclaims defiantly: “Iphigenia is avenged” (Iphigenia è vendicata). To this, Cassandra dares to reply: “you are lying, adulteress!” (Adultera, tu menti!). Clytemnestra strikes her with the axe. Before dying, Cassandra utters the name of Orestes, forecasting an avenger. Her last word parallels her one-word entrance at the beginning of the opera. The voices of the Eumenides are heard predicting more gloom while the crowd falls silent. Obviously, the murders of the king and his Trojan captive take place in a different sequence than in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, where Clytemnestra murders both of them inside the palace. The change enables the audience of the opera to witness one of the murders immediately and question Clytemnestra’s motives. In Aeschylus’ tragedy, the queen’s adultery and lust for power exist as a latent motif, but they are not stated so obviously as a reason for murder. The extraordinary dramatic power of the Agamemnon lies partly in its poetic capacity to suggest things rather than to state them in an obvious manner. Naturally, some of the changes made in the opera were necessary for presenting the modern audiences with a clear story line. However, these plot alterations simplify the complex beauty of the Greek tragedy. 57

Iannelli (2004: 37 and note 15), provides the text of the letter: La nostra Cassandra…si basa anche sopra i due unici documenti che esistono: la definizione lasciata da Filostrato di un quadro che ha esisto, e un bassorelievo esistente a Villa Borghese Cassandra che abbracia la statua di Minerva scongiurandola a salvare Agamemnone [Our Cassandra … is based also on a couple of unique documents which exist: Philostratus’ definition of a painting which existed and an existing bas-relief at Villa Borghese Cassandra: embracing the statue of Minerva and imploring her to save Agamemnon]. (The translation is mine). The only basrelief available to see from Villa Borghese seems to me (from what I could find) to be a Renaissance representation of the “Rape of Cassandra,” in which, indeed, Cassandra clasps the statue of Athena to avoid being taken away by Locrian Ajax.

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Because of the scandal involving Strauss’ Elektra, Gnecchi’s Cassandra was rarely performed in the decades after its composition: fifteen times from 1920 to 1930, five times from 1930 to 1940,58 and only very sporadically afterwards: once in the 1940s, and then not again until one performance in 1975 and another in 2000.59 But since then Cassandra has already received six performances, perhaps under the influence of musicologists like Iannelli, who have tried to rekindle interest in Gnecchi’s work. Ironically, four of the six were in Berlin, where Cassandra was performed together with Strauss’ Elektra (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011). The following elements in Gnecchi’s operatic adaptation are noteworthy to classicists: (1) It is based closely on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, but its altered title and focus shift the emphasis from the fall of the victorious king to the misfortune of the captive Trojan woman. This change reflects a growing interest in tragic heroines which is expressed by other Italian composers who were influenced by verismo. (2) It enhances the Romantic liaisons and conflicts – such as Clytemnestra’s love for Aegisthus and Cassandra’s affair with Agamemnon – by explaining the murders as crimes of passion. (3) It keeps Cassandra’s doomed relationship with Apollo marginal (as in the Russian operatic adaptation), and it simplifies the ambiguity of the Aeschylean text. (4) It points to the social tension between an exceptional woman and an indifferent society that fails to protect its king and to benefit from her sensible warning and advice. 8.5 Conclusion The first part of Taneyev’s Oresteia is closer to Aeschylus’ Agamemnon than Gnecchi’s Cassandra, perhaps because Gnecchi’s opera combines allusions to Aeschylus’ entire trilogy in a single opera. Both composers and their librettists try to simplify the plot and to clarify the thoughts and actions of certain characters. For example, Clytemnestra’s actions are unambiguously marked as motivated by hatred for her husband and love for Aegisthus. Both composers give a concrete presence to Cassandra’s visions – Taneyev by having the children of the past (Thyestes’ sons) present on the stage and Gnecchi by bringing the children of the future (Electra and Orestes) on the stage to indicate that Agamemnon’s murder will be avenged.

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Iannelli (2004: 141–169) provides interesting details for the early performances, up to 1939. For a complete list see http://www.associazionegnecchi.org/eng/?page_id=259.

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Both the Russian and the Italian opera enjoyed initial success at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Then they were ­relatively ignored until the first decade of the 21st century for different reasons. The isolation of the Soviet Union from the West can explain the lack of performances for Taneyev’s Oresteia. The unfortunate and confusing accusations of plagiarism that linked Gnecchi and Strauss can account for the way in which the Cassandra has been ignored. There seem to be similar reasons for the neglect and revival of these two operatic adaptations. Neither Taneyev nor Gnecchi were viewed as experienced opera composers. Taneyev was recognized as a teacher and a composer of symphonies. Gnecchi, though splendidly trained in musical composition, did not have a formal degree in music and was dismissed by some critics. The decline of interest and then the renewal of interest in the production of the two operas could perhaps correspond to a broader movement in the reception of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which also has undergone a period of revival since the last decades of the 20th century. A testimony of this revival is the great number of new operas that have been based on the Oresteia in recent years.60 Musically, no one has yet emphasized, as far as I can tell, the resemblance between these two operatic adaptations of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Even though the adaptations were composed independently, both Taneyev and Gnecchi used several similar musical features, such leitmotifs, instrumental interludes, and complex vocal textures. It is likely that they were both influenced by Wagner. However, in Gnecchi’s case, musical comparisons always concentrate on links to Strauss’ opera, as one critic observes: “the influence of Wagner and the opera’s mythical subject matter must have had limited appeal for a public hungry for a strictly Italian form of 20th-century realism.”61 Only very recently Belina-Johnson has analyzed the Wagnerian elements in Taneyev’s trilogy in both subject matter, which may account for the relative lack of success among the original audiences, and in what she calls “anticipation and reminiscence motifs”- a total of seven (the wrongdoing motif, the murdered children motif, two Furies motifs, the Cassandra motif, the Orestes motif, and the Apollo motif). These motifs are more variable in sound and contextually linked to the 60

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For example, see the list I have provided in note 3. For non-operatic revivals see Amanda Wrigley’s, “Appendix: Agamemnon on the apgrd Database,” in Agamemnon in Performance, (eds.) Macintosh et al., (Oxford, 2005: 359–435); with updated listings on the database: www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk. Mudge, Stephen. “In Review: Montpellier (Gnecchi’s Cassandra),” Opera News (2000): 65–65, 68.

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­emotional states of the characters in Taneyev’s Oresteia than the Wagnerian strict musical letimotifs. Yet, they still have a recognizable repeated structure.62 From an aesthetic point of view, the critics may agree or disagree with the changes in plot, staging details, or textual emphasis in the operatic adaptations. Taneyev’s Oresteia and Gnecchi’s Cassandra are not only the product of their composers’ love for Aeschylus, but also testimonies of how the audiences of their time and place perceived Aeschylus. With respect to the character of Cassandra, both operatic adaptations present her as speaking more clearly than in the Greek text. Ironically, this need for clarity agrees with the wishes of the chorus in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Gnecchi has said famously: per la musica, l’esecuzione è la vita. Un’ opera non ha il respiro perenne di un quardro: nascosta essa è polvere for music performance is life. An opera does not have the everlasting breath of a painting: hidden it is dust.63 Aeschylus’ Agamemnon has been subjected to many “restorations” like a famous painting.64 Its revivals – whether traditional or innovative – are always thrilling to see as drama or as opera. These two rarely studied operatic adaptations should be of great interest to those who study the reception of the Greek classics. They revived the interest of 20th-century composers and audiences in Greek drama by setting a trend which was followed by more prominent composers such as Strauss and Stravinsky who then produced more glamorous and popular operatic adaptations of Greek tragedies. The p ­ ioneering efforts of Taneyev and Gnecchi made it possible to reestablish Cassandra as a relevant heroine for early 20th-century European audiences accustomed with operas based on folkloric or realistic subjects. Separated by more than two millennia from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, these two operatic adaptations dealt differently with the problem of fidelity to the 62 63

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Belina-Johnson, “One Can Learn a Lot From Wagner, Including How Not to Write Operas: Sergey Taneyev and His Road to Wagner.” in Wagner in Russia (2013: 13–18). The quotation in Italian is on the back cover of Iannelli’s book (2004) and at the top of the website Associazione Gnecchi (I have used the website translation, consulted August 20, 2012). As Paul Monaghan concludes in his essay in this volume, the notion of the “Aeschylean text” is in itself problematic, not only because the transmitted Greek text, with its variants and lacunae, is not the “original” but also because it is only very rarely used in theatrical productions.

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­original text. Unsurprisingly, both the Russian and the Italian operatic adaptations transformed the Aeschylean original in order to make it more accessible to their audiences, by simplifying the plot line and the language of Cassandra. However, there were specific differences. Taneyev attempted something inherently difficult by reproducing a trilogy in operatic form. He continued his loyalty to Aeschylus in imitating to some degree the static structure of early tragedy, something that seemed rather strange to modern critics who compared his opera to an oratorio. In fact, the Russian composer sometimes drew criticism for his effort to remain faithful to Aeschylean dramatic features, such as showing the murders of Agamemnon and Cassandra off stage. Gnecchi approached the problem of transposing the Oresteia into a conventional operatic form as a single piece, concentrating on the Agamemnon, and added some allusions to the rest of the trilogy by introducing the Furies into a prologue/epilogue form. He managed to create focus on the conflict between Cassandra and Clytemnestra, making the prophetess a more central character than she is in Aeschylus. These transformations may seem to classicists a bit crude and conventional, but they sharpened the dramatic conflict effectively for the audiences unaccustomed to Aeschylean drama. Regardless of our preferences, Taneyev and Gnecchi dared to produce with vigor and ingenuity musical adaptations of Aeschylus’ trilogy, at the time when these were not popular in Russia and Italy, and their unique operas have deservedly received recognition of late.

chapter 9

Pop Music Adaptations of Aeschylus’ Plays: What Kind of Rock was Prometheus Fastened to? Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. 9.1 Introduction One manner in which the cultural divide between 5th century Athens and contemporary America has been bridged within production/adaptation is through the use of music. Adaptations shape audience perceptions of Greek tragedy by filtering it through the elements and tropes of the music employed in the adaptation. Elsewhere in this volume, Sarah Brown Ferrario and Dana L. Munteanu in separate chapters explore Aeschylus adapted as opera, itself until recently a popular form, the latter arguing that Aeschylean adaptation changed as musical tastes changed. A growing trend for the past three decades has been the appropriation of popular music styles into productions of classical plays. While Shakespeare has dominated the trend, Greek tragedy in general and the plays of Aeschylus in particular have not been immune, with several adaptations using pop music (rock, hip hop, etc.) to translate not only the Greek tragic experience but to shape the reception of Aeschylus by contemporary American audiences. Pop music-mediated productions of Aeschylus reinscribe the plays using a new series of referents, Americanizing the plays and blending them with elements of youth culture and pop culture. After examining the double reception of pop music adaptations of Aeschylus’ dramas for performance, I will consider the appropriation/adaptation of four kinds of pop music into four productions of Aeschylus’ plays: Will Power’s The Seven, (a hip-hop “­ad-raptation” of Seven Against Thebes, developed between 2001 and 2008), Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s bluegrass/country-rock version of The Oresteia, performed in 2009, the American Repertory Theatre’s 2011 rock production of Prometheus Bound, and the Troubadours’ 2014 Abbamemnon, which filtered the first play of The Oresteia through disco culture in general and the music of Swedish pop group abba specifically, each of which approaches the plays of Aeschylus in a different way in order to shape the reception of the original through pop music. I find myself in agreement with Lorna Hardwick who, elsewhere in this volume states, “Symbolic rewriting may enhance rather than destroy the aesthetic and political agency of trauma.” I would further argue that the musical styles © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004332164_011

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employed in adaptation bring their own history of narrative of trauma as well as a mechanism for coping with and healing trauma. Hip-hop engages urban trauma, bluegrass was born out of the hardscrabble existence in Appalachia and its songs explore the trauma caused by the railroad, lost or unrequited love, and the challenges of farming and mining, while rock and roll, a music of youth and rebellion, could not exist without traumatic narrative. The music used to adapt Aeschylus frequently reshapes the original play’s trauma by serving as a vehicle for making that trauma accessible to contemporary audiences, and in doing so, gives these plays agency in the present. I thus must disagree somewhat that adaptation is a trauma to the original text. Trauma is an injury caused by external force, whether physical trauma or emotional trauma. Yet in the case of adaptation the original text remains unharmed, existing side by side with the adaptation. Those who perceive in adaptation a desecration to the original seem to ignore the idea of trauma being necessary not only for tragedy, but for catharsis. Aristotle’s theory of catharsis as a cure for theatre-induced post traumatic (or should I say dramatic) stress seems to suggest that the original tragedy itself is traumatic by nature. In one sense, all contemporary productions of Greek tragedy are double translations, adaptations filtered through contemporary sensibilities both in terms of the spoken language of the play and also the visual and referential cultures of production. Rock and pop Aeschylus thus involves double reception, in which the Greek original is filtered through both popular music and popular audience conceptions of “Greek tragedy”, and the public performance is received as both. The overall concern, if reviews of the productions below are consulted, is the relevancy of Greek tragedy to us today and the authenticity of an adaptation. Multiple reviews of the American Repertory Theatre’s Prometheus Bound cite how “relevant” the tragedy is to the world today in terms of its themes of resistance to tyranny. It is also relevant in another sense: it appeals to young audiences who are more likely to go to concerts than classical theatre: “[Prometheus is] still the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind, and got chained to a mountainside for his troubles; but he’s also every eyeliner-wearing, damn-The-Man scene kid who ever got grounded for staying out late and huffing paint,” proclaimed the review in Time Out Boston.1 Multiple reviews of Will Power’s The Seven, on the other hand, expressed concerns of authenticity: it is hip-hop, but is it Aeschylus? In pop music appropriations of Aeschylus, the goals of relevancy and authenticity stand in tension. Can the audience relate to Aeschylus’ play, and what themes of the play 1 Jenna Scherer, “Review: Prometheus Bound” Time Out Boston. March 15, 2011. http://timeout boston.com/ arts-culture/theater/67695/review-prometheus-bound.

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are pertinent and significant for contemporary theatre-goers? In finding “relevant” themes, do the adapters somehow lose their connection to the original, thereby making the new work somehow less “authentic”? Perhaps to assuage these critics, a better model for “authenticity” may be found in Mary-Kay Gamel’s “Revising ‘Authenticity’ in Staging Ancient Mediterranean Drama,” in which she argues that “textual accuracy” and the use of ancient performance conventions are only one form of authenticity. Instead, we might consider “inductive authenticity,” in which the adaptation is “intended or likely to arouse effects on the audience,” so that modern adaptation of ancient play “resembles ancient performance in effect.”2 The four adaptations discussed here offer to do just that: blend music, movement and text in a manner different than original Greek practice, in narratives based on Greek originals, but “engage [audiences] as the original production might have done.”3 Simultaneously, the adaptations discussed here reshape Aeschylean tragedy through and into American popular music. The overall effect of pop music adaptations is to Americanize Aeschylus, to make the narratives appeal to hybrid audiences of both traditional theatre goers and (younger) pop fans, and to reshape Aeschylean dramas through the tropes of popular music. As rock and roll, as well as Blues, Soul, R&B, Bluegrass and hip-hop/rap, are all American inventions (albeit admittedly having become globalized), to use American popular music styles in America renders the plays less Greek and more Green Day, less Athenian and more Anthrax. The plays of Aeschylus, filtered through American pop music thus become Americanized in terms of cultural transmission, context and style. In one sense, the four adaptations considered here are not actual Aeschylus but rather a new form of pop – Greek tragedy adapted for modern audiences through the musical identity of the show employing the same narrative as the Aeschylean original: Hip hop furnishes the basis of The Seven, the rock concert format dominates the audience’s experience of Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue presents The Oresteia, and the progressive activism of Serj Tankian overlays Prometheus Bound. These productions place the name of Aeschylus front and center, but they are less presentations of Greek tragedy than appropriations of its narrative and characters. Yet, the simultaneous focus on both Aeschylean original and pop milieu yokes high culture and pop culture equally together. I will consider 2 Mary-Kay Gamel, “Revising ‘Authenticity’ in Staging Ancient Mediterranean Drama,” in Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, (eds.) Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop (London: Duckworth, 2010: 160). 3 Gamel (160).

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each of these productions in chronological order for how they Americanize Aeschylus, use pop convention to frame the narrative and thus appeal to those who would not otherwise seek out Greek tragedy while investing enough of the original in the adaptation to appeal to those who would. Will Power’s The Seven originated in September, 2001 in a workshop production at Thick Description Theatre Company in San Francisco, the same group which had produced Will Power’s seminal work Flow.4 Subsequently, Power revised and remounted the play in New York in January, February and March of 2006.5 Finally, the play was mounted at the La Jolla Playhouse in Southern California in February and March of 2008.6 This makes it both the first and the longest running of the adaptations I consider here, as well as the one seen by the most geographically diverse audiences. Helene P. Foley reads the adaptation as evolving from “a semi-satirical, often humorous analysis of family dynamics and contemporary culture/politics to the tragic battle between brothers and their deaths,” which is an accurate summary.7 However, the play also transculturates the narrative through the tropes and techniques of hip hop to recreate Greek tragedy for a modern urban (or suburban) audience. The Seven functions as a hip-hop “sampling” of Aeschylus and a “mashup” of the Aeschylean original and various hip-hop texts.8 In hip-hop, to “sample” is to use a small but recognizable piece of music, frequently looping it so it plays over and over, and then rapping over the sample in order to create a new work. For example, “Mo Money, Mo Problems” by Notorious B.I.G., P. Diddy and Mase, samples the chorus of Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out”; Eminem’s 4 Mark de la Viña, “Tragedy of ‘Seven’ transcends years” San Jose Mercury News (23 August 2001): 1F. 5 For reviews and analyses of the New York Seven, see Michael Peter Bolus “Review: ­Hecuba / The Seven” Theatre Journal 59/1 (March 2007): 121–123; Jennifer Dunning, “He’s taking ­Aeschylus Hip-Hop” New York Times (10 February 2006): E1; Charles Isherwood, “Hip Hop of the Gods” New York Times (26 February 2006): B4; and Peter Meineck, “Live from New York: Hip Hop Aeschylus and Operatic Aristophanes” Arion 14/1 (2006): 145–168. 6 For reviews and analyses of the San Diego Seven, see Charles McNulty, “Aeschylus Gets ­Remixed” Los Angeles Times (20 February 2008): E3; Peter Ng, “Toward a more magnificent ‘Seven’” Los Angeles Times (17 February2008): F4.; Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., “Aeschylus Got Flow: Afrosporic Greek Tragedy and Will Power’s The Seven,” in The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas, edited by Kathryn Bosher, Justine McConnell, and Patrice Rankine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015: 543–555). 7 Helene P. Foley, Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012: 105). 8 See Wetmore (2014).

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“Stan” uses lines and music from Dido’s “Thank You.” No prior knowledge of the sample by the listener is assumed, but a listener who knows the source, then generates further meaning by combining references from the original song and the new lyrics. A “mashup” involves taking two or more texts and blending them together in a way that each frames and comments on the other. The best example is Danger Mouse’s 2004 The Gray Album, a mixing of Jay-Z’s The Black Album with The Beatles’ White Album. In The Seven, Will Power samples Aeschylus and mashes up Seven against Thebes with elements of hip hop culture in order to create an adaptation that is aimed at an audience that knows more about Lady Gaga than Laius. Hip-hop expropriations of Shakespeare (and for that matter Shakespearean appropriations of hip-hop) are rooted in what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. refers to in The Signifying Monkey as “signifyin(g).”9 “The impetus of African-American signifying,” states James R. Andreas, Sr., “is the search for the ‘black voice’ in the ‘white written text.’”10 In The Seven, Will Power seeks to find the “black voice” in the ostensibly “white text” of Aeschylus, as well as the “American voice” in the “European text.”11 Power utilizes hip hop music and culture (both AfricanAmerican and black) to retell the narrative of the Aeschylean drama for a contemporary audience that is American, yet often ethnically mixed. He incorporates the techniques and tropes of hip hop and the narrative and characters of not only Seven Against Thebes but the later Oedipus plays of Sophocles in order to tell a story of the legacies of violence and power not just as presented by Aeschylus but also as they relate to violence and disempowerment in the American Black community. Power’s adaptation does not retain Aeschylus’ dramaturgy. Seven Against Thebes shows little and reports much. The play shows Eteocles interacting with the chorus as he waits for his brother Polynices to attack. There is no Oedipus, no Polynices in the original, and the eponymous seven are off-stage for the main event, the results of the battle being reported by a messenger. The Seven, 9

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Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., “Big Willie Style: Staging Hip-Hop Shakespeare and Being Down with the Bard,” in Shakespeare and Youth Culture, (eds.) Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. ­Wetmore, Jr. and Robert York (New York: Palgrave, 2006: 148). James R. Andreas, Sr., “Signifyin’ on The Tempest in Mama Day.” In Shakespeare and Appropriation, (eds.) Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (London: Routledge, 1999: 105). Although I have argued elsewhere that Power himself does not see this dynamic occurring as he believes Aeschylus was appropriating Egyptian cultural material and thus Power is reclaiming an Afrocentric text: see Wetmore (2014). However, Power’s own interpretation of the relationship between African culture and ancient Greek culture is irrelevant to an audience member who watches an Americanized, hip-hop adaptation of what the audience member perceives as an ancient European (read: white) text.

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however, begins with the introduction of the dj, who serves as choral figure. Power then dramatizes everything that Aeschylus conveys through narrators. The Seven brings the two brothers, and the seven champions onstage, and even Oedipus makes an appearance, dressed as a 70s pimp, telling the audience “y’all don’t know who ya fuckin’ with” and referring to himself punning-ly as “The Original Mutha Fucka,” deploying a term from hip-hop culture and 70s blaxspoitation cinema that inspired it, to refer to Oedipus’s own lack of knowledge concerning his wife/mother and his incestuous relationship with Jocasta. This joke alone shows how The Seven was aimed at multiple audiences. The Seven attracted a variety of audiences depending on where it was performed, how it was marketed, and the audience base of the area. The production in San Francisco, while still attracting mixed-race audiences, saw a predominantly African-American audience; while New York attracted more mixed audiences, with more Euro-Americans than other ethnicities. The La Jolla production, located in the suburbs of a wealthy suburb of San Diego saw a significantly older audience with a much higher percentage of ­Euro-Americans than the New York and San Francisco audiences. The hybrid audience of La Jolla, with fewer hip hop heads and more cultural elites who could afford the significantly more expensive tickets, required that all constituencies be able to get at least some of the references. Thus, some of the Greek references might have passed over the heads of those who got the odb and Wu Tang references. For San Diego, Power further adapted his adaptation for a more general, less urban audience. Perhaps the best indication of Power’s approach came at the beginning of the performance, when after the dj presented herself to the audience she played a record of a sonorous voice reciting lines from Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes (in English translation) in a stereotypically stilted classical style: “O house of endless tears / O hopeless end / It is the curse of your father that bears fruit in you / And the harvest is no blessing.” Power and his onstage alter-ego use this “sample” to remind us of the original, but like all good djs, they loop it, flip it and reframe it: “Yo, kinda pessimistic, right? But his voice sound tight. Kinda like Freddy Kruger if he went to Harvard or somethin’.” The Seven is as much comment on Greek tragedy and the popular idea of how it is performed as it is actual adaptation of Greek tragedy. It has a kind of respect for the original, but it will now sample it, comment on it, and tell it through deconstructed narrative and outside references. The traditional actor’s voice is “tight” (a compliment), and both threatening (“Freddy Kruger”) and smart (“if he went to Harvard”). The playing of the sample reminds the audience of what Aeschylus is “supposed to sound like,” and the production then proceeds to instead perform the story following the conventions of hip hop.

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The actual combat between champions was not reported as a series of offstage combats but instead performed onstage as a series of rap and dance battles. Hip-hop battles and break dancing emerged in part as a means to fight without harming one’s opponent, a direct response to the rise in Black-onBlack crime in the United States. Beginning in the late 60s and surging through the 80s and continuing into the present, rising urban unemployment, the development of gang culture and economies, and the introduction into urban areas of comparatively inexpensive, highly addictive narcotics such as crack cocaine resulted in skyrocketing violence in the black community, much of it black-on-black crime.12 As young black men saw their unemployment numbers rise as manufacturing jobs left the urban areas, they also saw the rates of violent crime and incarceration increase. Most of those killed in American cities from the 80s to the present were victims of black-on-black crime. It is this reality that Power sought to present on stage. The final fight between Eteocles and Polynices, in New York a complex dance-combat routine choreographed by Bill T. Jones, received an additional opening ritual for the La Jolla production which framed the fight as a mythic battle between brothers that would shape an entire nation. Polynices thus moves from an off-stage presence in Aeschylus to one who receives as much stage time as Eteocles in Power’s show. The additional sequence expanded the frame of reference to comment on black-on-black crime from Cain and Abel to Biggie and Tupac and the war in Iraq. These references grounded the production in rap technique but also served to ground the production in and contemporary American culture. Power claims the final fight was influenced by the Wu Tang Clan, a rap group who was also referenced by Oedipus, who claimed to be “the original odb” – a reference to rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard, a member of Wu Tang.13 The music changed from production to production, as the sound of hip-hop changed from 2001 to 2006. Even the two year transition between 2006 and 2008 required that the music be rewritten and/or remixed to keep up with current hip hop sounds. In order to maintain authenticity of hip hop, the beats needed to reflect current trends, which can shift tremendously in two years. Since trends in the rap world change so rapidly, the hip hop in the “ad-raptation” of The Seven against Thebes Power needed to be constantly updated to maintain authenticity. The music of the 2001 San Francisco production was changed for the 2006 New York staging, and changed again for the 2008 La Jolla staging. Thus The Seven was always bringing Aeschylus up-to-date. 12 13

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2010: 41). Ng F4.

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Foley cannily observes that hip hop “evolved as a ritualized attempt to mediate street violence with language and stories.”14 Yet hip hop music also became a chronicle of that violence, witness such songs as Ice-T’s “New Jack Hustler” or “O.G. – Original Gangster”, or N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton” or Eazy-E’s “Boyz-n-the-Hood”, which were accused of glorifying the same violence that they ostensibly mediated. In one sense, this is another example of Gamel’s “inductive authenticity” – Aeschylus’s texts were written by a citizen soldier who had seen the types of violence his plays describe (especially if we consider inter-poleis combat as a form of metaphoric fratricidal violence). Likewise, hip hop artists write of the violence they have seen and, like Aeschylus the solider, may have even perpetrated themselves. In contrast, Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue, a vaudeville and theatre troupe founded by Debra Buonaccorsi and Steve McWilliams and based in Washington d.c., approached Aeschylus through a panoply of classic rock styles that did not need to change, but that also shaped reception. The troupe’s website proudly proclaims: If the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus had gone on tour with Led Zeppelin, Woody Guthrie and a carnie troupe, this is what he would have written. A tale of blood, guts and vengeance, this is Aeschylusʼ Oresteia, re-charged. Rowdy, raucous, loud and literate.15 This claim is a standard ploy in marketing adaptations: had the playwright been alive today under the present cultural influences, the classical play would have been written in the way the present company is adapting it. Rather than bring us closer to understanding Aeschylus on his terms, the production reinscribes Aeschylus’ text using the tropes of particular types of rock and roll, thus giving us Aeschylus on our terms. Athena, for example, sings Gospel, while the Furies sing punk. Presented in 2008 as part of the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, and again in 2009 at the Church Street Theatre, this Oresteia was an 80-minute reduction of the original set in a sort of 1930s dust bowl carnival. Simultaneously, however, the production set about to establish a rock concert atmosphere: the set suggested a travelling rock concert, with props and instruments pulled from trunks and cases. Before the show cast members sold beer to attendees and performed vaudeville tricks such as juggling in front of the curtain. The 14 15

Foley (106). Description taken from Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s website: http://www.getdizzywithlizzie.com/ productions.php.

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overall effect was to lessen the sense of classical tragedy and instead create the milieu of a carnival or rock concert. The mixing of bluegrass, classic rock and the visuals of a 30s carnival to tell the story also served to Americanize the play. The performance began with a Greek history lesson, telling the story of the Trojan War, so the audience would have all the necessary backstory. The show then introduced Clytemnestra (Maria Egler) and Agamemnon (Steve McWilliams), following the story of the Oresteia through the murder of Agamemnon, the revenge killing of Clytemnestra and a descent into hell by Orestes with three Furies in black leather fetish outfits and neon wigs tormenting him until freed by Athena. A silent Iphigenia also dances through the piece, reminding audiences of the cause of the cycle of murder. The story is told through a blend of rock and roll, burlesque, vaudeville, profanity, and beer. Particular styles of rock music were used to define character. As noted above, Athena, a goddess, sang gospel, suggesting that her concerns were not the immediate but rather her concern for Orestes’ salvation aimed at the eternal. The Furies, on the other hand, employed punk, an angry, destructive nihilistic rock, rooted in three chords and fast, angry playing. Critical response focused on the event as a rock spectacle. “Who knew an ancient Greek tragedy could be so fun?” asked one critic.16 While some observed that the idea of a soldier’s return from a long war to family violence on the home front could be seen as socially relevant, instead the show presented the tragedy as pop performance: “Even with such bloody subject matter, the show is a comedy.”17 One reviewer connected the rock concert style with the performing of “the epic story,”18 a comment that would seem to link the production concept more to Homer than Aeschylus. In other words, Aeschylus’ narrative was filtered through the variety of subgenres of rock and visual spectacle for entertainment purposes. The next adaptation to be considered here is the American Repertory Theatre’s 2011 staging of Prometheus Bound. This production was strongly identified with its creators and adaptors: director Diane Paulus, nominated for a Tony award for her revival of the rock musical Hair, book and lyric writer 16

Jon Rochetti, “The Oresteia – If Greek Mythology Were This Fun … We’d All Be Quoting Homer.” Planet Eye Traveler.com. 16 July 2009. http://www.planeteyetrevaler.com/2009/ 07/16/the-oresteia-if-greek-mythology-were-this-funwed-all-be-quoting-home/. 17 Maureen O’Rourke, “The Oresteia” dc Theatre Scene. 21 July 2009. http://dctheatrescene .com/2009/07/21/the-oresteia-2/. 18 Ibid.

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Steven Sater, best known for authoring the rock musical Spring Awakening, and especially Armenian-American composer and political activist Serj Tankian, best known as the founder and lead singer/songwriter for the progressive alternative rock band System of a Down (soad), whose songs frequently focus on issues of social justice. All four members are of Armenian descent and they frequently condemn the Armenian Genocide of 1915, American atrocities in the wars on terror and in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the actions of corporations. Their music is hailed as progressive, both politically and artistically. It is Tankian’s identity as a rock star dedicated to social justice and fighting tyranny that becomes conflated with Prometheus in the art adaptation. The program for the performance featured essays by Paulus, Sater and Tankian, all of whom emphasized the human rights issues around which the production focused. Sater calls the play “the most searing indictment of tyranny ever written,” and Tankian wrote, “the Prometheus story really resonated with me in terms of injustice and tyranny.”19 Following these notes is a letter from Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast Regional Director for Amnesty International, announcing “The Prometheus Project,” a partnership to raise awareness by dedicating specific performances to eight prisoners of conscience: Jafar Panahi (Iran), Survivors of Sexual Violence (Democratic Republic of Congo), Dhondup Wangchen (China), David Kato (Uganda), Tran Quoc Hien (Vietnam), Doan Van Dien (Vietnam), Doan Huy Chuong (Vietnam), Norma Cruz (Guatamala), Reggie Clemons (United States), and Nasrin Sotoudeh (Iran) who are equated with the mythic titan Prometheus.20 Amnesty International volunteers were in the lobby before and after the performance, soliciting donations, encouraging the signing of petitions, and providing information about political prisoners all over the world. Without exception, every review mentioned Amnesty International as a sponsor and motivating aspect of the performance. The local Amnesty International webpage featured the production before and during the run of the show. By partnering with Amnesty the production transformed Prometheus into the original prisoner of conscience. Yet, as Megan Stahl observed, “the leather-clad performers, techno-inspired lighting, and pounding choral repetition prevented such political commentary from resonating in the dance club atmosphere.”21 Esti Bernstein agrees, noting, “Emily Rebholz’s costumes, characterized by studded belts and excessive eyeliner, turn the Greek chorus into 19 20 21

“Writer and Lyricist’s Note” and “Composer’s Note” from Prometheus Bound program: 11, 12. Prometheus Bound program: 13–16. Megan Stahl, “Review: Prometheus Bound” Theatre Journal 64/1 (March 2012): 116–117.

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a group of rebellious, subversive teenagers.”22 In other words, the rock show overwhelmed the political themes of the drama. The production had its origins in Sater translating Aeschylus’s play and sending the script to Paulus. He asked her if she heard music, and “the music she heard was rock ‘n’ roll.”23 They agreed to ask Tankian to compose the music. “He has that kind of anarchy and that rebelliousness and defiance, ‘cause it’s rough and its aggressive,” Paulus surmised.24 Rock music is the music of rebellion and defiance. It is the heart of youth culture. Rock music transforms Prometheus Bound into a tale of youthful rebellion against tyranny, that will not back down or play by anyone else’s rules. Prometheus is a “rebel with a cause,” a young man resisting the older generation’s demands for conformity and acceptance of its values. Interestingly, the original Prometheus was not a young rebel at all – as a Titan he is, in fact, older than Zeus. Prometheus was thus technically an “old rebel,” refusing the dictates of a tyrannical younger generation. The irony, of course, is that by the first decade of the 21st century, rock and roll is not particularly defiant anymore and rock and roll musicals have been commonplace for years. High school kids perform Rent and Spring Awakening. Rock festivals such as Lollapallooza and Vans Warped Tour ordinarily offer numerous opportunities for political action, including voter registration, free hiv testing, and opportunities to volunteer for various causes. All of this further serves to frame the presence of Amnesty International at the a.r.t. as part of a socially progressive rock and roll event. Prometheus Bound celebrates Aeschylus as a “radical” playwright who constructed Prometheus “as the first prisoner of conscience.”25 He is a teen rebel. He is an American. And, as the above rock festivals show, social activism is just another part of rock culture. While it is reductivist to Aeschylus, it also promotes Aeschylus to a sizable young audience of popular music enthusiasts by bringing the knowledge of the original through its adaptation: Prometheus Bound was one of the most popular shows at the a.r.t. during the 2011 season. Reviewers from student newspapers from the colleges in the area reported attending the production multiple times, just as they would a band they were particularly fond of. 22

Esti Bernstein, “Greek mythology latest subject for the a.r.t.” Tufts Daily (March 8, 2012) . 23 Laura Collins-Hughes, “A Greek tragedy, now set to rock music” Boston Globe February 20, 2011. http://boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/02/20/prometheus_bound_is _a_greek_tragedy_set_to_rock_music. 24 Ibid. 25 Prometheus Bound program: 6.

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The final production under consideration here is the summer 2014 performance of Abbamemnon by the Troubadour Theatre Company (“The Troubies”) of Los Angeles. The play, directed by Troubie Artistic Director Matt Walker and created by the company was the latest in a series of classical play/pop music mashups. The company is known for blending a Shakespeare play with the music of a specific group, such as in Fleetwood Macbeth, The Comedy of Aerosmith, Much Adoobie Brothers About Nothing, As U2 Like It, and Hamlet, The Artist Formerly Known as Prince of Denmark. The company had twice before adapted Greek material in the same manner: 2009’s Oedipus the King, Mama (Sophocles’ play mashed up with the music of Elvis, his gyrations explained by his hobbling at birth!) and 2011’s For the Birds, Artistophanes’ comedy blended with the music of the Eagles, The Black Crows, the Byrds, Wings and Sheryl Crow. Abbamemnon, on the other hand, is a disco-inspired adaptation of Aeschylus that recognizes the audience might be more familiar with the music of abba than the Greek tragedy and employs that fact in a metatheatrical manner throughout the show to deconstruct the idea of seeing a Greek tragedy in the present. The chorus after the watchman’s monologue lists a number of names and then, after “Helen of Troy”, tells the audience, “That’s the last name you’ll recognize tonight.” They comment throughout the choral ode on Aeschylus’s choice of images (“that one is particularly gross”) or even just paraphrasing (“there’s a whole thing here about two eagles we are not going to get into”), which seems to imply that what is truly Aeschylean about The Oresteia is not the language but the narrative itself, which the Troubies relocate to Southern California (something they do with all of the plays they adapt). Abbamemnon is thus “King of Malibu,” who sailed to Troy. The watchman at play’s beginning stands atop a lifeguard tower, a replica of the ones on the beaches of Malibu. Topical references also are dropped quickly, for example, Clytemnestra is referred to as “worse than the Kardashians” and Odysseus is compared to Captain Philips. In short, the text is adapted freely and much is discarded in the name of accessibility and keeping the narrative flowing forward. It is in the adaptation not only of Aeschylus’s play but also the music of abba that trauma is also presented. Lyrics are changed and adapted for the play in order to advance the story. In some cases, however, the original lyrics are kept and seem remarkably in tune (pardon the pun) with Agamemnon as written by Aeschylus. “Mamma Mia” is replaced by the words “Abbamemnon,” giving both the background of the Trojan war and setting up the character before his ­appearance. The use of this song is an exemplar of the Troubies and this practice at their best. Clytemnestra sings the opening lyrics of the original: “I’ve been cheated by you since I don’t know when / So I made up my mind, it must

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come to an end.” Audiences unfamiliar with Aeschylus but who know their abba immediately had the context of the story. The original song suggests a person whose lover is constantly philandering and whom she takes back every time as he is irresistible. The song also contains the repeated lyric, “Mamma mia, does it show again? / My my, just how much I’ve missed you / Yes, I’ve been brokenhearted / Blue since the day we parted,” which the Troubies used to explain the separation of Clytemnestra and “Abbamemnon” for ten years. Subsequently, abba songs are used to further Aeschylus’s narrative: “Dancing Queen” introduces Clytemnestra, and, of course, “Cassandra” introduces that character, the eponymous seer singing the opening lines: “Down in the street they’re all singing and shouting / Staying alive though the city is dead,” transforming the disco anthem into a dirge for Troy. “Voulez Vous,” a song ostensibly about sexual conquest, takes on new meaning when Abbamemnon sings it about Troy in a bloody flashback to the war. As with the other adaptations, Abbamemnon uses the tropes and themes of the musical style to inform its translation of Aeschylus for modern audiences. Unlike the other three productions analyzed here, however, Abbamemnon does not adapt the tragedy or the trauma. When the messenger enters to tell of Abbamemnon’s imminent arrival, he has a false spear through him, leading to many sight gags. The tragedy does not run deep and the tongues in this play are firmly in the cheeks of the performers, even as they recite Aeschylus’s lines, and the reason is the type of music employed. Disco itself (from “discotheque,” a French word for “library of phonograph records”) is a dance music developed in the 70s relying upon driving beats and developing out of funk and psychedelic music from the late 60s and early 70s. The themes of disco music include desire, sexual promiscuity, endless ­partying and dancing and having a good time. There are no sad ballads in disco, nor any traumatic songs. Thus, disco as a form is inherently untragic. The Troubies’ Abbamemnon is in many ways a parody of Aeschylus, or, more accurately, a disco version of The Oresteia. And just as disco versions of previously existing songs like Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” and Louis Clark’s “Hooked on Classics” and even Meco’s “Star Wars Theme” take a known melody and put it to a disco beat, thus serving as a form of classical adaptation within music, so, too, does the Troubie’s Abbamemnon put Aeschylus to a danceable beat, but in doing so remove some of the weight and all of the tragedy from it. The reason why the other three adaptations discussed here maintain Aeschylus’s tragic milieu is that the musical forms employed to adapt the plays not only Americanize them, they also are capable of maintaining the tragic nature of the narrative. Disco, without a mode for the tragic, is incapable of keeping Aeschylus tragic.

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9.2 Conclusion All four of these adaptations reinscribe Aeschylus’ plays in an American cultural space. Can we only accept the Greeks on our own terms? Not necessarily, but the commercial and critical success of all four of the productions considered here would seem to suggest that filtering Aeschylus through popular music is a successful strategy to generate audience attention. And in doing so, as Gamel theorizes, they ultimately resemble ancient Greek performance in effect on the audience rather than fidelity to text, and give a modern/ancient, Greek/ American Aeschylus.

chapter 10

Aeschylus as Postdramatic Analogue: “A Thing Both Cool and Fiery” Paul Monaghan 10.1 Introduction In How to Stage a Greek Tragedy Today (2007),1 Simon Goldhill highlights the many ways in which modern (primarily dramatic) productions of Greek tragedy during the 20th century have struggled to meet the challenges posed by the form, content, and contexts of the genre. The mask, mythical personae (­including non- and extra-human beings), the chorus and its dance and song, the auletes, and the heightened poetic language of Greek tragedy, as well as the religious, political, gender, and democratic contexts of the plays, all continue to prove significant obstacles to the conventions and assumptions of modern dramatic theatre. While the great value of productions of Aeschylus’ tragedies as modern drama is that they transmit – in performance – t­ranslations of these texts as they have come down to us, Aeschylean tragedies were in no way “plays” in the sense of modern drama. As Peter Wilson comments, tragedy was “much closer to what we might term ‘choral opera’ than ‘theatre.’”2 Martin Puchner makes the point that modern drama resembles Plato’s radical reform of tragedy into “dramatic” dialogues more than it does tragedy itself.3 Moreover, modern drama has been heavily influenced by Aristotle’s Poetics and Hegel’s Aesthetics, both of which transform ancient tragedy in different ways. Staging Aeschylean tragedy as modern drama, then, already constitutes a transformation of Aeschylus’ theatrical mode, and as Goldhill’s analysis d­ emonstrates, it is frequently a transformation that weakens rather than strengthens the power of Aeschylus’ tragic visions in performance.

1 Simon Goldhill, How To Stage A Greek Tragedy Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 2 Peter Wilson, “The Musicians among the Actors,” in Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, (eds.) Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, 41–70 (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2003: 39). 3 Martin Puchner, The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theatre and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010: 7–10, 125).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004332164_012

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The crucial issue here is not that Aeschylean tragedy cannot be communicated through other means, but as Goldhill points out, “how to construct a convincing form of representation which transcends the world of the ­human [­dramatic] actors.”4 Precisely this issue was highlighted at the end the 19th ­century by Nietzsche, who in The Birth of Tragedy pictures Euripides – whom he identifies as the instigator of the death of tragedy – pondering “the discordant and incommensurable elements in the nature of Aeschylean tragedy,” especially the centrality of the chorus. Perplexed by the way that, in every feature of the plays, “even the clearest figure always had a comet’s tail attached to it which seemed to suggest the uncertain, that which could never be illuminated,” Euripides impelled tragedy “to self-destruction” by destroying both its Apollonian and Dionysian elements, thus reducing tragedy to “bourgeois drama.”5 In Nietzsche’s own time, this phenomenon had manifested as “modern drama,” a mode which continued to dominate much of the 20th century. Using Goldhill’s analysis and Nietzsche’s critique of Euripidean drama as a springboard,6 in this chapter I argue that while the assumptions and conventions of “modern” drama are unsuited to accommodating the “comets tail” of uncertainty and resistance to illumination that Nietzsche accurately identifies in Aeschylean tragedy, these same “discordant and incommensurable elements” may be surprisingly reanimated by what Lehmann calls the “aesthetics of undecidability” that underpins “postdramatic theatre,”7 a contemporary form of composition and performance in which the conventions of drama have been abandoned. Despite the obvious differences between ancient and postdramatic dramaturgies, I argue that certain aspects of this contemporary aesthetic are able to rediscover and redefine the dramaturgies of Aeschylus’ “pre-dramatic” tragedy (a term coined by Lehmann).8 Postdramatic treatments of Aeschylean tragedy amount to what Remshardt refers to as the “mediated strangeness” of 4 Goldhill (2007: 204). 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (ed.) Walter Kaufmann, (New York: The Modern Library, 2000: 80–81, 85, 77). 6 In drawing on Nietzsche’s comments here, I am not suggesting that his views on tragedy are unproblematic or necessarily to be taken at face value. Nor am I conducting a “Nietzschean” analysis of modern drama in relation to the performance of tragedy. Rather, I am using his prescient comments on Euripides to introduce my own analysis of the problems associated with “dramatic” productions of Aeschylus. 7 Hans-Thiess Lehmann, The Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. (London and New York: Routledge, 2006: 100). 8 Hans-Thiess Lehmann, Theater und Mythos (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1991: 2).

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postdramatic “analogues,”9 that is, performances that are thematically, structurally, or affectively similar to ancient tragedy but different in their compositional strategies. An Aeschylean “analogue” does not seek to create a totally new work, but rather to preserve – by transforming – the poetic visions of an artist who was “in many ways the most radically experimental” of the three extant tragedians.10 My argument engages directly with the twin themes of this book: the cultural divide between the ancient context of Aeschylean tragedy and 21st-century performance, and the trauma of adaptation caused not only by translation and adaptation per se, but also by postdramatic challenges to well-established “dramatic” conventions for staging the tragedies. As I argue in the next section and throughout, the process of staging an existing play-text, no matter where and when, always involves a set of interpretive decisions that tie the text down in some ways, while simultaneously the exigencies of performance open it up again to multiple and shifting interpretations. The postdramatic productions I analyze here are no different in kind in this respect, even if at times they are more extreme in degree. And while there is little doubt that postdramatic treatments of Aeschylean tragedy tend to disrupt the “culture of the Aeschylean text” and thereby cause trauma to some, perhaps many, I argue both that the notion of an “Aeschylean text” is highly problematic and that postdramatic strategies generally attempt to preserve the “poetic inner dream” of each play even while radically transforming its textual dress. For the purposes of this chapter, I categorize two major tendencies within the postdramatic paradigm under the rubric of Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian principles. This distinction has also been made by Erika ­Fischer-Lichte in her analysis of the Berlin Schaubühne’s Antiquity Project. She notes that the productions in that project, by Peter Stein and Klaus Michael Grüber, were in important ways “a battle between the Dionysian principle (embodied by ecstatic dancing, running, falling bodies) and the Apollonian principle (embodied by the symbolic order of language).”11 I categorize postdramatic responses to Aeschylean tragedy as “Apollonian” when they retain tragedy’s focus on language, but subject Aeschylus’ already “fiery” text to a set of “cooling” procedures, in relation both to the text that is performed as well 9 10 11

Ralf Remshardt, “Dionysus in Deutschland: Nietzsche, Grüber, and The Bacchae” Theatre Survey 40/1 (May 1999): 45. Goldhill (2007: 125). Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Thinking about the Origins of Theatre in the 1970s,” in Dionysus Since ’69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, (eds.) Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Amanda Wrigley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004: 329–360; quote from 358).

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as the way it is performed. “Dionysian” responses transform his language into increasingly physicalized and choric theatre, a transformative process that at its most intense amounts to a burning away of Aeschylus’ text in an attempt to communicate his visions to the contemporary world in a new and dynamic way. In between these poles, at the “warmer” end of the Apollonian continuum, Aeschylus’s texts are converted into dense, polyglossic textual landscapes. Both the Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies can be seen as attempts to achieve that “convincing form of representation which transcends the world of the human [dramatic] actors” sought by Goldhill.12 10.2

Processes of Interpretation

Some initial points need to be made in order to set up my argument. There cannot be a production, translation, and/or adaptation of an existing play, no matter when the play is written and when the production is staged, that does not, by necessity, involve a set of decisions based on the relevant creative agents’ interpretation(s) of the play’s form, “feel,” and meaning(s). The process of staging an existing play-text involves that text’s transformation from a potential to an actual (but not the actual) manifestation. In performance, as ­Fischer-Lichte argues, “the text as such does not appear on stage;”13 it is concretized by those interpretive decisions. But it is also re-opened to m ­ ultiple interpretations by the co-presence in performance of space, bodies, light, sound, objects, performer interactions, and so on, not to mention the shifting individual receptions of the production by spectators at that particular performance, in that performance space, at that particular moment in time. Translation involves processes often described as “thinking oneself into the mood of the poet,”14 and trying to “follow, and faithfully mirror, the creative workings of that mind.”15 But translating works intended for performance also involves ascertaining “the gaps between the words. The feeling behind the words. What is left unsaid […].” In other words, it is the “spirit behind the 12 13

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Goldhill (2007: 204). Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Performance as Event: Reception as Transformation,” in Theorizing Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, (eds.) Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop, 29–42. (London: Duckworth, 2010: 35). Wilhelm Von Humboldt, “From the Introduction to His Translation of Agamemnon,” trans. Sharon Sloan, in Theories of Translation, (eds.) Rainer Schulter and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992: 59). John Clifford, “Translating the Spirit of the Play,” in Stages of Translation, (ed.) David ­Johnston, 263–270, (Bath: Absolute Classics, 1996: 263).

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words” that Frederico Garcia Lorca deemed impossible to translate.16 Addressing this issue in the introduction to his 1816 translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Wilhelm Von Humboldt noted that poetic “obscurity” is often “a result of the brevity and the boldness” with which the ideas and emotions emerge from “an impassioned soul.” Such ideas, he writes, “are linked together with a disdain for any mediating connective sentences,” and he cautioned against introducing reductive clarity in translation where the original “allows itself metaphors whose correlation is hard to grasp.”17 This is precisely Nietzsche’s point in relation to Aeschylus and “bourgeois drama.” Moreover, as Fischer-Lichte also argues (with countless others), “the reception of an ancient play through performance is always a creative and transformative process” because interpretation is inevitably culturally and historically situated.18 Here the process of interpretation also involves understanding the mediating circumstances of the play’s original performance conditions, and “translating” that mediation into one that is necessarily different, and sometimes radically different. When contemporary English director, Peter Brook, described this process as seeking/interpreting the play’s “poetic inner dream,” and finding contemporary “theatrical correlatives” that express that “dream” rather than simply respecting it’s “textual dress,”19 he was merely articulating and extending a process that always and necessarily occurs. Mary-Kay Gamel has coined the term “inductive authenticity” to describe an attempt to create, for contemporary audiences, an effect equivalent to that which one

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Ibid., 263–264. Wilhelm Von Humboldt in Theories of Translation, (eds.) Rainer Schulte et al. (1992: 58–59). Erika Fischer-Lichte in Theorizing Performance, (eds.) Edith Hall et al. (2010: 40). See also Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Grimm, Gunter in Rezeptionsgeschichte: Grundlegung Einer Theorie: Mit Analysen und Bibliographie. (Munich: W. Fink, 1977) emphasises the active nature of this transformative process by using the term “productive reception.” David Jones, Great Directors at Work: Stanislavksi, Brecht, Kazan, Brook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986: 202). By using Brook’s phrase, I am not engaging with or countenancing what has been called his “Orientalism.” See Gautam Dasputa, “Peter Brook’s Orientalism,” in Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from paj, (eds.) Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Disputa, 75–82 (New York: paj Publications, 1991); and Russtom Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1993: 68). Rather, I am using the phrase “poetic inner dream” as shorthand for the kind of process that inevitably takes place whenever a play is read, staged, adapted, or consciously transformed.

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­ nderstands the play to have been dramaturgically designed to generate in the u ancient Athenian audience.20 These interpretive processes are certainly open to critique, but what prevents interpretation, translation, staging, adaptation, and attempts at “inductive authenticity” from randomness is a respectful yet creative response to the dramaturgical strategies embedded in the original work. An understanding of how central these strategies are to whatever play is under examination, and to the theatrical mode for which it was created, provides solid foundations from which its “poetic inner dream” can be ascertained/interpreted and translated into contemporary performance. In the case of both the Apollonian “cooling” and Dionysian “burning” procedures I discuss in this chapter, this process of interpretation, translation and “redress” ranges from mildly to radically transformative. The strategies respond to Greek tragedy on the one hand, and dramatic theatre on the other. The two provocations come together in productions and adaptations of tragedy as modern drama, a style I have elsewhere called “hysterical realism,” and described as a disjunction between realist/naturalistic assumptions and melodramatic performance conventions.21 In response to the significant difficulties in dealing with Greek tragedy experienced by the more “realist” side of modern drama, there were many attempts during the 20th century to stage tragedy using “antirealist” conventions and to rewrite tragedies in either “realist” or “anti-realist” styles.22 But the more productions moved in this direction, especially in the second half of the century, the more they left behind the dominant conventions of modern drama and headed towards the “postdramatic.” 20

21

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Mary-Kay Gamel, “Revising ‘Authenticity’ in Staging Ancient Mediterranean Drama,” in Theorizing Performance, (eds.)Edith Hall, et al. (2010: 160ff). See also Kevin Wetmore’s contribution to this volume in the preceding chapter. Paul Monaghan, “Greek Tragedy in Australia: 1984–2005,” in The Staging of Classical Drama Around 2000, (eds.) Pavlina Sipova and A. Sarkissian (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007: 38–58). Examples of such early productions include Max Reinhardt’s productions of Elektra (1903), Oedipus (1910), and Oresteia (1911). Examples of the 20th century re-writing of tragedies include Reinhardt Sorge’s proto-Expressionist Prometheus: A Dramatic Sketch (1911) (for which, see Monaghan, Paul, “Embodied Re-imaginings: Greek Tragedy, Nietzsche, and German Expressionist Theatre,” in Embodying Transformation: Transcultural and Transnational in Performance, (ed.) Maryrose Casey (Melbourne: Monash ­University Press, 2015: 33–51); Vyacheslav Ivanov’s enigmatic Prometej (a version of Prometheus Bound written during the years 1906–1915), Sartre’s Les Mouches (1943: a rewriting of the Orestes story from all three ancient tragedians), Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (1944), Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone (1948), and many others.

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Aeschylus and the Postdramatic Theatre

Lehmann’s The Postdramatic Theatre (2006) remains the primary examination of recent shifts in theatrical practice now referred to as “postdramatic.” His analysis of the various movements of the 20th century reveals the extent to which they remain caught in the assumptions of drama.23 On the other hand, in Lehmann’s analysis, disjunctive aspects of some of these movements and styles have, over time, accumulated and developed. In postdramatic theatre the underlying assumptions of modern drama no longer apply, or at least not to a degree that would still classify them as drama: When it is obviously no longer simply a matter of broken dramatic illusion or epicizing distance; when obviously neither plots, nor plastically shaped dramatis personae are needed; when neither ­dramatic-dialectical collision of values nor even identifiable figures are necessary to produce “theatre”… then the concept of drama – however differentiated, ­all-embracing and watered down it may become – retains so little substance that it loses its cognitive value.24 Lehmann uses the term “paradigm”25 to cover a range of postdramatic tendencies, all of which relate to, but have left behind, these dramatic conventions to a greater rather than lesser degree. They “operate beyond drama, at a time ‘after’ the authority of the dramatic paradigm in theatre.”26 The term “modern drama” needs some explanation. As Szondi points out, “drama” in the form we have come to understand it is a time-bound concept. It began in Elizabethan England and developed into its “modern” form during the 17th and especially 18th centuries.27 The primary style of modern drama is commonly referred to as “realism” or naturalism, but “anti-realism” (including 23 24 25 26

27

Lehmann (2006: 13). Ibid., 34. Ibid., 24–25. Ibid., 27. As Lehmann details (ibid., 46ff), the prehistory of postdramatic theatre includes late-19th- and early-20th-century movements such as Symbolism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. Artaud`s call in the 1930s for a theatre that was not based on dialogue but rather “composed of everything filling the stage, everything that can be shown and materially expressed on stage […]” is fulfilled in postdramatic theatre. See Antonin Artaud, “‘Mise en scène’ and Metaphysics,” in Artaud on Theatre, (eds.) Claude Schumacher and Brian Singleton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001: 103). Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, trans. M. Hayes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987: 4–5).

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Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism, the Absurd, and so on) is also encompassed by the term.28 Modern drama relies for the most part on the centrality of a whole and coherent story and plot (which enacts the “progression of a story with its internal logic”), character (on the Hegelian and Freudian models), and the creation of a separate fictive world in the performance space that represents the real.29 As assumed also by Aristotle, drama’s representation brings order, coherence, and wholeness to the chaos of lived experience, and proclaims this wholeness “as the model of the real.”30 As I detail further, below, postdramatic theatre privileges presentation over representation, and relies on none of these assumptions and conventions. While an increasing number of new works and performances in the last decade can aptly be described as postdramatic, it is important to note that, apart from some minor artistic and academic polemicizing, practitioners and scholars of the postdramatic do not seek to eliminate other kinds of theatre. Dramatic theatre clearly continues to flourish. New works of postdramatic theatre can be “devised,” in the sense of being composed in workshop situations by one or more persons in response to a stimulus of some kind (an idea, visual image, socio-political issue, existing dramatic play, and so on). But they can also be “written” by a solo writer or “auteur” as a text or scenario to be performed, sometimes with, in addition, highly detailed information relating to stage action and scenographic composition (as, for example, in Romeo Castellucci’s “text” of Agamemnon).31 Productions and adaptations of existing plays can, of course, also be performed in a postdramatic style. But because the term “postdramatic” relates both to the writing or creation of works for theatre, as well as the way that these (as well as dramatic, and ancient) works are performed, it is more accurate to use the phrase “postdramatic theatre” than the more limiting terms “postdramatic performance” or “postdramatic staging.”

28

Eric Bentley, Theory of Modern Stage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968: 13). See also Damien Grant, Realism (London: Methuen, 1970: 9, 19). 29 Lehmann (2006: 21ff, 26, 31, 48, 36, 39, 48–49). 30 Aristotle, Poetics iv 1448b 15–17. See also Lehmann (2006: 40, 22). 31 Romeo Castellucci, “Agamemnon: Excerpted from Romeo Castellucci’s Oresteia (Una Commedia Organica?)” trans. Joseph P. Cermatori Theater 37/3 (2007): 49–71. Examples of postdramatic “devised” work, in this sense, include much of the work of Dood Paard, Goat Island, and Forced Entertainment. Examples of postdramatic theatre created by solo “writers” include the work of Heiner Müller, Sarah Kane, Charles Mee, and Martin Crimp. Examples of postdramatic compositions by solo “auteurs” including those of ­Robert ­Wilson, Jan Fabre, and Romeo Castellucci.

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By using the Apollonian/Dionysian polarity, I am, for the purposes of this chapter, somewhat oversimplifying a more complex continuum. The “cooler” Apollonian use of language and text in postdramatic theatre, for example, can also “heat up” as it tends towards Dionysian “burning.” There are also other ways in which the postdramatic “de-dramatizes” theatre: the use of puppets or mannequins, a heightened use of objects and scenography, “cinematic” ­techniques such as the dominating use of visual images and music, fragmented narrative structures, the use of 1970s-like “happenings,” and so on.32 But focusing on what I am calling Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies will allow me to discuss, within the scope of this chapter, some of the different ways in which postdramatic theatre is able to reanimate and analogize Aeschylean tragedy while avoiding the pitfalls of staging tragedy as modern drama that I will outline during the course of my analysis. It will become clear during my analysis that the interaction between ­Aeschylean tragedy and postdramatic theatre works in two complementary directions. As Bierl notes, “ancient tragedy and, especially, the exemplary Agamemnon (and the Oresteia), have been at the forefront of theatrical experimentation and development across Europe as a whole in the past few decades.”33 On the other hand, postdramatic theatrical strategies generated through other means are also presenting themselves as dynamic approaches to communicating the power of Aeschylean tragedy in today’s world. 10.4

“Cooling” Procedures of the Postdramatic Apollonian: Text

The Apollonian, or language-focused side of the postdramatic paradigm retains tragedy’s – and dramatic theatre’s – focus on language, but “cools” or de-dramatizes the form in two complementary ways: firstly, reformulating the “textual dress” of tragedy, and secondly, transforming how that “textual dress” is delivered in performance. Both strategies disrupt the delivery, in performance, of Aeschylus’ texts as they have come down to us and to an increasing degree as these strategies move closer to the Dionysian end of the spectrum. But I will argue at the end of this section that, despite this apparent loss, 32 33

These and other strategies are discussed by Lehmann (2006: 68–133). Die Orestie des Aischylos auf der Modernen Bühne [The Oresteia on the Modern Stage] (Stuttgart: M&P, 1997: 305). There have been many other instances of this phenomenon: see Paul Monaghan, “Embodied Re-imaginings: Greek Tragedy, Nietzsche, and German Expressionist Theatre,” in Embodying Transformation: Transcultural and Transnational in Performance, (ed.) Maryrose Casey, 33–51 (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2015).

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the postdramatic Apollonian is able to effectively communicate core thematic and experiential aspects of Aeschylus’ work to the contemporary world in new and dynamic ways. The language of Aeschylean tragedy, with its stichomythia, messenger speeches, formal rhesis, and highly poetic choral song, has been a major problem for productions of his work as modern drama. Collard remarks that, as a poet, Aeschylus is “grand, magisterial, craggy, sonorous, colorful, brilliant; but he is also delicate, natural, everyday […].”34 Anne Carson notes how in Aeschylus’ language “there is a leakage of the metaphorical into the literal and the literal into the metaphorical,” and every character “sets fire to language in a different way.” Indeed, she compares Aeschylus’ use of language to the way 20th century artist Francis Bacon wields paint, assaulting the senses in order to uncover what lies beneath consciousness – a motif that will reoccur during this chapter. Both artists, says Carson, attempt to “‘trap the living fact alive’ in all its messy, sensational, symbolic overabundance.”35 Buying into dramatic conventions in translation simply raises a range of expectations that the language of Aeschylean tragedy cannot fulfill. As Goldhill notes, with his “strange, choral majesty and architectural, non-realistic action […] Aeschylus, of all the tragedians, resists the drive towards simple clarity and a naturalistic aesthetic.”36 The issue here is that Aeschylus’ language, like that of Shakespeare, was ­designed for a very different kind of theatre, one that relied more on the excitement of the ears than the eyes.37 Modern drama tends to transpose this emphasis into a less aural and more visual mode, but without the level of ­visual abstraction appropriate to the art of Aeschylus. States describes how a similar tension between “seeing and hearing,” between the virtuosity of the playwright’s verbal trapeze act and what is taking place in the actual p ­ erformance space, is experienced in Shakespeare. “The very thickness of Shakespeare’s world is

34 35 36 37

Christopher Collard, Aeschylus: Persians and Other Plays, trans. Christopher Collard (­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008: lxv). Anne Carson, An Oresteia (New York: Faber and Faber, 2009: 5, 3, 5–6). Goldhill (2007: 158–159). Greek society during the 5th century bc was still very much an aural performance culture. As Rush Rehm argues, “The areas of politics, law, religion, athletics, festivals, music, and poetry shared with the theatre an essentially public and performative nature, so much so that one form of cultural expression merged easily with another.” Rush Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992: 4). He further reminds us (9), citing Havelock, that “We read as text what was originally composed orally, recited orally, heard acoustically, memorized acoustically, and taught acoustically […]” See also Peter D. Arnott, Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre. (London: Routledge, 1989: 75).

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derived from the way in which poetry triumphs over neutral space”38 – that is, over the open platform stage of the Globe theatre, a version of the Greek performance space. The striking contrast between the Greek and Shakespearean performance spaces on the one hand, and the cluttered naturalistic stages of 19th and 20th century drama on the other, is telling in this regard. To “cool” and defamiliarize the fiery “textual dress” of Aeschylean tragedy, postdramatic writers frequently either combine several ancient texts to form a new work, or insert their own writing into a work in order to draw directly on contemporary experiences. Einar Schleef’s 1986 Die Mütter, for example, which I discuss in more detail below, combined Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes and Euripides’ The Suppliant Maidens, but did not substantially change the text of either play.39 Charles Mee’s Trojan Women 2.0 (1994), however, intersperses material taken from interviews with Holocaust and Hiroshima survivors, and other texts, between selected segments of Euripides’ tragedy. Mee’s explanation for this strategy, noted at the end of the play, is that his work has been developed “the way Max Ernst made his Fatagaga pieces at the end of World War i: incorporating shards of our contemporary world, to lie, as in a bed of ruins, within the frame of the classical world” (80). Mee’s Big Love (2000, based on Aeschylus Suppliant Women) employs a slightly different strategy. Here Mee has recast Aeschylus’ Suppliants as a contemporary work, with the dialogue written in a casually naturalistic style.40 The new play follows the plot of the original to a large extent, but draws on both Mee’s 38 39 40

Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (­Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985: 56). Dreyer, Matthias, “Prospective Genealogies: Einar Schleef’s Choric Theatre.” Theatre Research International 34/2 (July 2009): 138–145. There have been many such adaptations. An example from early in the play illustrates the kind of language and dialogue used by Mee throughout. In the following, Lydia approximates the coryphaeus from Aeschylus’ play, while Giuliano represents his uncle, Piero, who approximates the king. Lydia explains to Giuliano why the women have arrived. “lydia: There are fifty of us altogether. giuliano: Fifteen? lydia: Fifty. Fifty sisters. giuliano: [laughing awkwardly] I…I don’t think even I know anyone who has fifty sisters. And you were all to get married to your cousins? lydia: Yes. giuliano: To your cousins? lydia: Yes. We’re looking for asylum. We want to be taken in here so we don’t have to marry our cousins. giuliano: You want to be taken in as immigrants? lydia: As refugees. giuliano: Refugees? lydia: Yes. ­g iuliano: From … lydia: From Greece. giuliano: I mean, from, you know: political oppression, or war … lydia: Or kidnapping. Or rape. giuliano: From rape. lydia: By our cousins. giuliano: Well, marriage really. lydia: Not if we can help it. [Silence] ­g iuliano: I see. lydia: You seem like a good person, Giuliano. We need your help. [Silence] giuliano: I think you should talk to my uncle.” Mee, Charles, Big Love. Available online at www .charlesmee.org/big-love.shtml (accessed February 21, 2013: 7–9).

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own new writing and existing texts from over eleven other writers. It incorporates some very modern humor, and makes many references to the contemporary world (for example, the men arrive in a helicopter). What makes this play postdramatic is a number of explicit instructions by the playwright. The set “should not be real, or naturalistic,” but rather “something against which the piece can resonate.” As an example, Mee suggests “a bathtub, 100 olive trees, and 300 wine glasses half-full of red wine.”41 There are matching scenes within the play in which, firstly, the three representative female characters, and then later the three representative male characters, enact a very non-naturalistic, choreographed, physical expression of their frustrations. The scene in which the women murder their male cousins is a typical postdramatic presentation of violence (using means that acknowledge the actions as performance for an audience) rather than its realistic representation: plates are smashed, wedding dresses are splattered with fake blood, and wedding cake is stuffed into actors’ mouths and spat out again, and so on. The aim of the whole work is clearly to communicate the central issue at the heart of Aeschylus’ earliest surviving tragedy in a way that transmits to a contemporary audience both the play’s serious themes and the experience of these themes in performance. While some critics (for example, Rush Rehm) have derided the play, others have appreciated the way it presents a contemporary critique of the violence at the centre of our own, supposedly civilized world.42 Dood Paard has employed a variation of this technique. In their 2001 Prometheus, the script follows the plot, characters, and dialogue of the original, but the language consists of what the company refers to as “primal Euro speak,” a poetic, polyphonic combination of all the languages of Europe mixed together.43 While the effect of this technique is certainly alienating on the 41 Charles Mee, Big Love. Available at www.charlesmee.org/big-love.shtml (accessed ­February 21, 2013: 3). 42 For a negative critique of the play, see Rush Rehm, “Supplices, the Satyr Play: Charles Mee’s Big Love.” American Journal of Philology 123/1 (2002): 111–118. For a positive response, see Mark Chou, “Postmodern Dramaturgy, Premodern Drama: The Global Resurgence of Greek Tragedy Today” Journal for Cultural Research 15/2 (2011): 141–145. 43 Dood Paard, “Dood Paard Plays Prometheus” (production media release 2001), available at http://www.doodpaard.nl/project/48/. The effect of the company’s “Eurospeak” can be gauged from the start of Prometheus’ opening monologue: “O himmlische sky / Und die winde mit dem wings / Whoesh so fast / La source de l’eau l’acqua dans das Mer / D ­e ­rivieren zo oud als la luna and the waves / Of the ocean the big blue sky / / Et l’aarde – screaming mother met boven you / The big fire in the sky / With burning eyes watching me / God door goden gestraft / Suffering torturé tourmenté begoeid / In der tausendjährigen Zeit / Special treatment special chains / Especially created pour moi le poor one /

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page, I imagine that in performance the effect would have been striking and effective in communicating the power and enigma of the ancient play in which enigmatic language and coded storytelling play such a prominent role. The company’s medEia, which I discuss further below, uses a strategy resembling Elfriede Jelinek’s so-called Sprachflächen (surfaces or planes of language), consisting of “montages of playfully and deconstructively manipulated quotes from a wide variety of different spheres and genres […].”44 Peter Stein’s 1980 production of the Oresteia at the Berlin Schaubühne is an example of how a production of Aeschylus based mainly in the conventions of drama began to move in the direction of such collage techniques. In performance, both the chorus and the personae used a combination of simultaneous and overlapping German translations and Greek words.45 Extending techniques such as these, at the “warmer” end of the Apollonian continuum we also find new and poetically dense language compositions or text-scapes, in which monologues, collage, montage and repetition have almost entirely replaced drama’s ordered, sequential exchanges of views, positions, and desires. As text becomes “warmer” in this way, drama’s dialogue turns into a “textual landscape,” a polyglossic “theatre of voices” or “audiolandscape” filled with polyvalent associations,46 for which Gertrude Stein’s modernist “landscape plays” provide a model. In Heiner Müller’s triptych, Despoiled Shore – Medeamaterial – Landscape with Argonauts (1982), for example, densely intertextual and poetic monologue in the first and third sections surrounds what at first approximates a standard dramatic dialogue between Medea, Jason, and the Nurse in the middle section. But the “dialogue” soon becomes a long, vicious rant by Medea that draws associatively from different stages of the narrative in Euripides’ play. Interestingly, Aeschylus’ plays do not seem to have attracted this kind of treatment, perhaps because his language, as noted earlier, is already so densely poetic.

44 45 46

By the new boss of bosses the new Führer / Of the immortals / I scream and I shout I cry and I weep / All das heutige leed und all das von tomorrow / wo ist – was ist die Grenze van mijn ellende / What am I talking about / Why am I talking like this / Wat zit ik nou te klagen / Ik weet wat komen gaat / I know I can see it / The future that is / De toekomst da’s voor later / I know what is going to happen.” Dood Paard’s Tekst Prometheus, ­unpublished, 5. Karen Jürs-Munby, “The Resistant Text in Postdramatic Theatre: Performing Elfriede Jelinek’s Sprachflächen” Performance Research 14/1 (2010): 46. Erika Fischer-Lichte in Dionysus Since ’69, (eds.) Edith Hall, et al. (2004: 347ff). See also Sue-Ellen Case, “Peter Stein Directs The Oresteia” Theatre 11/3 (Summer 1980): 24, 26. Lehmann (2006: 78).

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“Cooling” Procedures of the Postdramatic Apollonian: Performance

The second major strategy concerns how text is delivered, and involves dismantling one of the cornerstones of dramatic theatre, namely “the organically unifying relationship between text, voice and embodied character.”47 The effect of this dismantling is to privilege presentation over representation; a strategy that recalls important aspects of 5th century tragic performance practice, in which this “organically unifying relationship” was never a feature.48 The notion of “character” relies on one of the key premises of modern drama, especially since Hegel, namely the autonomous dramatic agent capable of free choice, decision, desire, and action. The notion of drama as “the representation of human characters and passions in conflict” mirrors the way Hegel believed history evolved as a continuous sequence of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.49 The means of expressing this clash of wills in drama has primarily been dialogue. The term “character” in the 20th century is most strongly associated with the work of the Russian director and actor-trainer, Konstantin Stanislavski, and his immediate and more distant successors, who conceive of the agents of drama as psychologically and physically corresponding to the “actual” human being with his/her “continuous existence” in real-world private and public spheres.50 The naked face of the realist actor, and to some extent even the “character” mask, offers a mirror up to the spectator, but as I have argued elsewhere, although it is impossible to know for certain how the Ancient Greek mask operated in practice, the relatively featureless Greek tragic mask most likely distanced the actor, and the audience, from themselves.51 As ­Calame 47 48

49

50 51

Ibid., 48 in reference to Jelinek. As David Wiles reminds us, “Stanislavskian theatre celebrates the fusion of actor and role, and thus abhors doubling, but Greek theatre celebrated the ability of the actor to change his identity completely” through the use of the mask: David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000: 160). Loren Kruger, “Making Sense of Sensation: Enlightenment, Embodiment, and the End(s) of Modern Drama,” in Modern Drama: Defining the Field, (eds.) Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins and W.B. Worthern (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003: 81). See also G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2nd volume (1975: 1159). See Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski and the Actor (London: Methuen Drama, 1998). See Paul Monaghan, “Mask, Word, Body and Metaphysics in the Performance of Greek Tragedy” Didaskalia 7/1 (2008): n.p. I base my argument in that article on numerous factors, including practical work conducted by David Wiles and Chris Vervain, as reported in Chris Vervain and David Wiles, “The Masks of Greek Tragedy as a Point of Departure for Modern Performance” New Theatre Quarterly xvii/3 (2001): 254–272. Calame’s discussion of the tragic mask also suggests this “distancing” effect; see Claude Calame, The Craft of

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a­ rgues, the frontal gaze of the Greek tragic mask was “a gaze which offers the spectator an image of the different, of that which lies beyond himself.”52 Goldhill precisely identifies some of the problems with approaching tragic personae as if they are “characters.” Actors used to the conventions of realism are confronted by “the lack of small talk, the lack of business, and the lack of props,” and especially, as one actor remarked, by the fact that there are “no chairs and no telephone.”53 And if drama has a problem with tragic personae, it has an even greater one with gods, ghosts (like that of Darius in Persians), demons (such as the Eumenides in the Oresteia), and idealizations of human characteristics like beauty (for example, Helen in Euripides’ Helen). As Goldhill notes, “Greek tragedy is the opposite end of the spectrum from a Dickens novel,” and the realist actor’s search for internal “motivation” in Aeschylus is fraught, because motivation – for example in the Oresteia – is not internal and discoverable by the actor, but explicit and external (i.e. the socio-political need for revenge, pursuit by the Furies, and so on).54 Given the nature of Aeschylean language, the more believable Aeschylean personae are as (modern dramatic) characters, the more we wonder why they appear to us as “people speaking in funny voices.”55 The speaker allocation “someone – no matter who” in a postdramatic text by Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek56 is a paradigmatic expression of the dismantling of the unifying relationship between text, voice, and embodied character, which postdramatic composition and performance achieve in different ways. In Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, for example, although the text is designed to be delivered as written, no speaker allocations are provided, cast numbers can vary, and rehearsal involves discovering the speaker(s) for each line. The same approach is required for emblematic postdramatic works like many of those by Jelinek, Sarah Kane, and Heiner Müller (for example ­Hamletmachine and Medeamaterial). In much postdramatic writing and

52 53

54 55 56

Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece, trans. Janice Orion (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995: 97–138). Claude Calame (1995: 111). Goldhill (2007: 82). States argues that the chair is the sine qua non of modern realist drama, because it facilitates realistic, private dialogue between characters. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985: 43–46). Goldhill (2007: 109–110). In Euripides, on the other hand, “what makes a man kill his mother is a very real question […] a full range of internal motivations is set in play” (115). Ibid., 108. Cited by Karen Jürs-Munby, “The Resistant Text in Postdramatic Theatre: Performing ­Elfriede Jelinek’s Sprachflächen” Performance Research 14/1 (2010): 49.

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­production, two or more actors are allocated the words of one character, gender lines are frequently crossed, performers “play only the personae of ‘themselves,’” or openly take on other personae from one speech to the next as if donning a costume (techniques used in Dood Paard’s medEia and Persians).57 The musicalization of language delivery in postdramatic theatre – a t­ echnique that recalls the presentational nature of tragedy’s musically accompanied choral lyric and “singing actors”58 – further distances the words from the speaker. Jelinek is known for the way she turns language into a “musical flow of voices and counter-voices,” such that performers “become instruments in a polyphonic composition that exhibits language as something pre-existing the individual who enters it.”59 Theatergroep Hollandia, in their productions of Prometheus (1989), Persians (1994), Oresteia (1995) and Ifigeneia in Aulis (1998) employed a similar technique, mixing “sounds and rhythms, voice and bodily awareness into their theatrical imagery.”60 In their Persians, translator Herman Altena rendered Aeschylus’ verse patterns into metrical Dutch (iambics for spoken parts, anapaestic dimeters for “recitative” sections, and a mixture of trochees, cretics, and choriambs for choral sections),61 and chorus and actors used “rhythmic patterns and pauses” and at times a monotone delivery as part of the musicalized textual landscape.62 Evoking what it might have been like to listen to the ancient tragic actor, whose mask most likely distanced both 57 58

59 60

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Karen Jürs-Munby, “Lexicon: Postdramatic Performing” Performance Research 13/3 (2006): 96. The phrase, “singing actors” is used by Edith Hall in Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, (eds.) Pat Easterling and Edith Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003: 3). Karen Jürs-Munby, “The Resistant Text in Postdramatic Theatre: Performing Elfriede Jelinek’s Sprachflächen” Performance Research 14/1 (2010): 46, 49. Henk Oosterling, “Hypocritical Theatre: Hollandia’s Intermedial Multiverse” (Rotterdam: Centre for Philosophy and Arts, Erasmus University, n.d.): 2 at http://www2.eur.nl/fw/ cfk/…/PDF/art%20performance.pdf. Freddy Decreus, “Authenticity and the War against Clichés in Staging Classical Tragedies: Peter Sellars (1993) and Hollandia (1995) Perform ‘The Persians,’” in The Philologist and the Director: Decoding the Directions in the Texts. Fourth International Symposium on Ancient Greek Drama, Nicosia 1997, (eds.) Costas Hadjigeorgiou and Nicos Shiafkalis, 230–242 (Ghent: Ghent University Academic Bibliography, n.d.): 240 at http://hdl.handle .net/1854/LU-267743. Emilie van Opstall, “Aeschylus’ Persians When the Ink is Still Wet: an Interview with Paul Koek and Herman Altena, Theatre Company Hollandia” Didaskalia 5 (December 1994): n.p. In rehearsal, actors were asked to experiment delivering text “as in Japanese Bunraku theatre: crazy sounds, tone pitches from all the way up to very low” (Lehmann 2006: 92).

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the actor and the spectator from themselves, Lehmann notes that the effect of strategies like these in many postdramatic works is to “[bring] to light that the word does not belong to the speaker. It does not organically reside in his/her body but remains a foreign body.”63 Associated with this abandonment of character is what Lehmann refers to as a “cool” delivery of text, a technique that recalls Brecht’s “report” or “demonstration” acting.64 This presentational style of delivery exemplifies how performance can transform a text, whether or not that text is also adapted. The postdramatic actor is more likely to “report” on situations and emotions than embody them as if their own, a strategy that results in an “astonishing depathization” of drama.65 As Lehmann puts it, “one often feels as though one is witnessing not a scenic representation but a narration of the play presented.”66 Thus, while the “hysterical” dramatic actor struggles to embody and represent Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Cassandra and so on, let alone the ghost of Darius and the Furies, the “cool” postdramatic actor presents these figures as theatrical fictions for the purpose of reporting and narrating, and in this way avoids the disjunctions typical of productions of Aeschylus as dramatic (hysterical) realism. In the work of Klaus Michael Grüber, for example, whose productions of Euripides’ Bacchae (1974), Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (1986), Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (1998), and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (2003) have all been significant in the development of the postdramatic aesthetic, actors tend to speak of horrors in “cool” tones. The spectator at these performances “is there to witness the pain the actors speak of,” and the “precise articulation” of the actor’s voice is experienced as “a reverberation of past events.”67 It is as if the “cool” actor fulfills the functions of the “messenger” who narrates the action, and/or the chorus who comment on and contextualize it. Both persona and chorus have undergone a significant de-pathization in relation to their dramatic counterparts. Postdramatic “coolness” is also present in works manifesting what has been called the “dramaturgy of the everyday.” Performances of this kind take on “the mantle of an everyday prosaic,” and actors “speak in seemingly ‘authentic,’ often prosaic terms, for and about themselves. This is coupled with the extensive 63 64 65 66 67

Lehmann (2006: 147). Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (ed.) and trans. John Willet. (London: Methuen, 1964: 121ff). Lehmann (2006: 118). Ibid., 109. Ibid., 76.

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display of everyday materials and experiences.”68 In this mode, the structured tension and movement towards crisis and resolution that we are used to in drama is simply absent. Mee’s Big Love (2000) and Dood Paard’s Prometheus (2001), medEia (1998–2007), and Persians (2013), all present their serious material and themes in this paradoxically prosaic style. Indeed, Dood Paard’s 2013 Persians is exemplary of both Apollonian postdramatic strategies themselves and the ways that the mediating influence of performance can transform our experience and interpretation of Aeschylean (and other Greek) tragedy. In the company’s earlier medEia, under the conceit of speaking as a chorus who cannot intervene in the action, three actors stood facing the audience for almost the entire show, and – explicitly as themselves – told the story of Euripides’ Medea. The actors did not “become” a stable or even identifiable character or express a character’s emotion in the story for more than a moment; even the co-incidence of actor and character gender was momentary. Persians retains the main elements of this approach. At the start of the performance, the three actors, their faces covered in golden make-up ­evocative of Schliemann’s Mycenaean “mask of Agamemnon,” pour libations while intoning sounds as if chanting religious ritual. But what they are pouring is coca cola, they wear white singlets and casual pants, and the setting is a kind of pan-European café with stools and chairs. After this quasi-ritualistic beginning, the actors (as the chorus) begin to tell the story, directing their lines as much to the audience as to each other. Gradually, they begin to enact aspects of the story, and the actors increasingly approximate an emotional expressivity that is “dramatically” appropriate to the role they are playing at that moment. But the approximation is always temporary and retains a sense of reporting. There are more theatrical effects here than in medEia (entrances and exits, lighting, a smoke machine), but they retain a make-shift sense about them. When the Queen enters, for example, she does so on what looks like a motorized shopping trolley; as she slowly makes her way through the chairs and stools, the other actors move them out of the way. When the third actor appears as the ghost of Darius (on a ladder above and behind a backdrop), he holds a stool upside down over his head as a crown. It is as if they are evoking the kind of “tragic acting” of modern drama, only to continually pull back and undercut it. The de-pathization and transformations inherent in the strategies of the postdramatic Apollonian may be viewed as a negative development for ­Aeschylean tragedy, perhaps even an admission of impotence. There will 68 Peter Eckersall and Eddie Paterson, “Slow Dramaturgy: Renegotiating Politics and Staging the Everyday” Australasian Drama Studies 58 (Apr 2011): 180–181.

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c­ ertainly be many who are less than happy about these transformations. But the effect of these various textual and performance strategies is not to deny the experience and pathos of tragedy; in fact, the opposite is frequently the case, at least when the new plays/performances are created with skill, and with understanding and sympathy for the original works. While these strategies undoubtedly involve some loss in respect to Aeschylus’ wonderful texts, I suggest they also offer a significant gain in respect to experiencing the “poetic inner dreams” (according to the interpretation, as inevitably and always, of the relevant creative agents involved) of those texts in performance. Rewriting texts, or inserting other texts in between segments of existing tragic texts, and so on, is neither productive nor unproductive in itself; the results depend on the quality and integrity of the work. The power of Heiner Müller’s Medeamaterial, for instance, is palpable.69 In regard to postdramatic theatre’s preference for presentation over representation, two points need to be made here. Firstly, as I argued earlier, the kind of representation that is common in modern drama was never a feature of ancient tragedy, and already constitutes a transformative theatrical “translation.” There is nothing about a more presentational style, in itself, that reduces the impact of ancient plays. Secondly, in a society where it seems that every facet of daily life (cooking, clothes shopping, sport, singing, renovating, and so on) is presented as conflict and “drama” on tv news and “reality” shows, the choice to present deeply moving experiences in a less emotive, more detached way has the power to penetrate our otherwise desensitized and drama-weary perceptual mechanisms. As Lehmann notes, the overabundance of images in our media-saturated world tends to destroy our ability to actually “see” any image.70 Dood Paard’s medEia and Persians show how a “cool” and frequently amusing presentation of a diverse mix of sources can most effectively frame and shape a deeply emotional experience of Greek tragedy. 10.6

Heating and Burning: The Postdramatic Dionysian

The postdramatic Dionysian is characterized by a form of composition that Lehmann calls the “scenic poem,”71 in which music, significant physicalization, 69

70 71

For an extensive discussion of this work, see Marianne McDonald, Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992: 147–158). Lehmann (2006: 89). Ibid., 110f. The term “scenic écriture” is also used in this context on 74. The scenic poem is exactly what Artaud called for in the 1930s (see footnote 25 above).

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movement, harrying imagery, and choric performance (both actual choruses and choral strategies) tend to predominate over language. In the scenic poem, the dramatic text, if there is one at all, is simply one element amongst many, and of no absolute or necessary importance as an offer or inscription of meaning. Whereas “coolness” is characterized by a sparse aesthetic, a “low density of signs,” the scenic poem is more often characterized by excess and “plethora,” and the profusion of images subverts drama’s preference for wholeness and synthesis.72 The director in this mode “composes fields of association between words, sounds, bodies, movements, light, and objects,” and the spectator takes on the role of an interpreter “who gathers the human, spatial, tonal signifiers scattered across the stage.”73 The actor here does not “report” in the same detached way as in the postdramatic Apollonian, but as Lehmann notes, s/he “is often no longer the actor of a role, but a performer offering his/her presence on stage for contemplation.”74 While choric theatre breaks down drama’s reliance on individualized, real-world ‘characters’ and dialogue, a heightened use of the body promotes a more poetically experiential dimension than is possible in dramatic theatre. The dance and song of the tragic chorus, not to mention the presence onstage of the auletes during the entire tragedy,75 cannot be accommodated within the tendency of modern drama towards a more or less realistically mimetic correspondence to lived experience, and the desire of especially naturalistic realism to elide the theatrical frame.76 There are countless examples of dramatic productions of tragedy where this failure to find a key to the chorus has been painfully demonstrated.77 72 73 74 75

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Ibid., 90f. The postdramatic scenic poem, like a Francis Bacon painting, assaults our senses to uncover what lies beneath our consciousness. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 135. Peter Wilson argues that, in all probability, “the sole musical resource deployed in performance was provided by a single instrumentalist, playing [the] distinctive set of double pipes,” the aulos. See Peter Wilson, “The Musicians among the Actors,” in Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, (eds.) Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, 41–70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003: 42). A typical response to the chorus in modern drama was given by a Viennese director at the end of the 19th century who lamented that the chorus was “an enchanted castle to which one can no longer find an entrance.” David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000: 141). As examples I suggest the 1984 Melbourne production of Medea, starring Zoe Caldwell (in which a chorus of three women were confined, almost unmoving, to an upstage corner of the stage), Katie Mitchell’s 2001 London production of Iphigeneia in Aulis (in which a chorus of five women clutching handbags dithered and cackled), and Peter Hall’s 1981 Oresteia (in which a masked and all-male chorus squandered an excellent opportunity

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The postdramatic chorus is strongly associated with the work of Einar Schleef, who first used a chorus (or rather, three choruses) in his only production based on Greek tragedy, his 1986 Die Mütter (The Mothers, a combination of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes and Euripides’ The Suppliant Maidens).78 From then on all of his productions until his death in 2001 made use of a dominant chorus. In Die Mütter, the three choruses dominated the entire production, both physically in that they constituted a constant presence in the performance space, and experientially in that their actions and heightened physicality posed a threat to both the personae of the play and the spectators. Schleef’s theory that modern drama had abolished the chorus “because it wanted to forget the interdependence of the collective and the individual,”79 was manifested in performance by means of the frequent confrontations between the chorus and individual actors, and by the chorus’ aggression towards the audience.80 Klaus Michael Grüber’s earlier Die Backen (1974) was among the first to explore the power of the chorus in postdramatic theatre,81 and Elfriede Jelinek has also insisted on the chorus, for example in her 1998 Ein Sportstück (A Sports Play). The scenic poem also highlights how the text of an Aeschylean or other tragedy is mediated – both in antiquity and in the modern world – by the specific conditions of its performance. Theodoros Terzopoulos, whose work Heiner Müller described as “a search for the lost keys of unity between body

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to manifest the power of masked, choral performance by remaining naturalistic in body, voice, and identity). See Matthia Dreyer, “Prospective Genealogies: Einar Schleef’s Choric Theatre” Theatre Research International 34/2 (July 2009): 138–145; and Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Ritual, Sacrifice: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2005: 240ff). Lehmann (2006: 131). The chorus “occupied and ruled the space,” and “made itself felt as an act of violence done on the individual by the community as well as on the community by the individual, over and over again.” The tension between Eteocles and the women of Thebes “was settled by a constant shift of position on the catwalk” which formed a central part of the performance space. See Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Ritual, Sacrifice: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2005: 244–245). Remshardt calls this production “the most significant German-language production of […] Euripides’ final play in Germany.” Ralf Erik Remshardt, “Dionysus in Deutschland: Nietzsche, Grüber, and The Bacchae” Theatre Survey 40/1 (May 1999): 31. Grüber also directed Prometheus Bound, trans. Peter Handke, in September 1986, in Berlin, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Kolonus (2003, also trans. Handke), and Oedipus at Kolonus (using Goethe’s text, 1998).

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and speech,”82 incorporates pared back texts with heightened physicality and choric strategies in many of his postdramatic productions, including but not limited to his productions of tragedy such as Persians (1990, 2003, 2006), Prometheus Bound (1995, 2008, 2010), Bacchae (1986, 2001), and Müller’s Liberation of Prometheus (1991) and Medeamaterial (1996). Terzopoulos’ productions of Greek tragedy have been described as a “field aflame. A field where one can set everything on fire.”83 His various productions of Prometheus Bound and Persians exemplify how an ancient tragedy can be powerfully communicated despite having undergone both Apollonian textual fragmenting (somewhat in the style of Müller) and a transformation of performance mode into postdramatic scenic poem. In the May 2006 production of Persians in Istanbul, Turkey (in the Byzantine Church of St. Irene),84 the same all-male cast of Greek and Turkish actors played both the chorus (representing the victims of the many wars between the two countries) and the characters. At the start of the performance, all fourteen actors as the chorus rose from the semi-circular synthronon at the back of the church and moved forward towards the audience in unison, each holding photos of victims, blood-red towels, and military boots. Their rhythmic and synchronized movements included an increasingly frenzied wiping of the floor with the towels as if cleaning up blood. Indeed, physicality was heightened throughout, and the commonality of suffering was emphasized by the fact that, as Kim reports, “during the ninety-minute performance, all of the fourteen male actors suffered from extreme shock, howled in pain, and rolled and crawled on the floor with fear.”85 Language was fragmented, and in some scenes consisted of a rhythmic mixture of Turkish and Greek accompanied by clapping, wailing, and stamping. To play a female character, the

82 83

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Cited at http://www.attistheatre.com. Eleni Varopoulou, “Prologue,” in Theodoros Terzopoulos and the Attis Theatre: History, Methodology, and Comments, (eds.) Theodoros Terzopoulos, et al. (Athens: Agra Publications, 2001: 9). The following details derive from an analysis of the production in Jae Kyoung Kim, International Theatre Olympics: Exchanging National Traditions and Leading New Trends in Theatre (University of Georgia: PhD thesis, 2012: 107–116). Ibid., 111. The company’s first production of Prometheus Bound in 1995 at the ancient theatre at Delphi featured a similarly intense physicality influenced by Meyerhold’s constructivist biomechanics. As Kim reports, the five performers were arranged in a geometric pattern, with Prometheus in the centre: “a perfectly balanced but intense microcosm.” Each actor was a “geometric living statue with controlled, understated, but ecstatic movements.” The fact that all entrances and exits had been eliminated from the performance only added to the intensity of their physicality. Ibid., 34–35.

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male actor simply spoke her words with no attempt to represent female vocal or physical characteristics. As the postdramatic Dionysian heats up, language is increasingly set on fire, both in the sense of being pushed to extremes, and being “burnt off” into a subsidiary position or replaced by harrying images that rely on the active heat of the actor’s body or intense soundscapes. In Müller’s Die Befreiung des P­ rometheus (The Freeing of Prometheus, a segment of his 1972 work, Zement) and Medea Spiel (Medea Play, 1974), both of one page or less, there are no designated spoken words at all, only descriptions of a situation, actions and theatrical images.86 Taking the musicalization of tragic text to its limit, Heiner Goebbels’s 1990s production of Müller’s Die Befreiung des Prometheus consisted of fragments of spoken text amidst an onslaught of challenging contemporary music.87 Where language is used, for example in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s 1995–1996 Orestea (discussed below), it is “pushed to the extreme limits of its possibilities, beyond which there is silence […].”88 The performer’s body is the raw material of this theatre, and the company is known for its use of bodies that are obese or emaciated, tall or dwarfed, armless, or otherwise “on the margin of standardized aesthetics of their time.”89 Jan Fabre’s Troubleyn Company is similarly known for its extremely physical and provocative performances. The company’s 2011 Prometheus-Landscape ii vehemently rejects the psychological foundation of modern drama, and features the protagonist suspended in mid-air for the entire performance, silent until 75 minutes into a 95 minute performance. The architecture of Aeschylus’ tragedy is retained, but the new text by Jeroen Olyslaegers both radically pares 86

According to Fore (2010: 127), Müller was interested in myth because of “the dialogue that [it] makes possible across historical time.” Müller’s 1967–1968 more conventional translation of Prometheus Bound, Oedipus Rex (1967) and Pholoctetes (1968) were all responses to what he saw as the destruction of the socialist economy in East German during the 1960s (126). 87 Goebbels writes (http://www.heinergoebbels.com/en/archive/texts/material/read/516; accessed 19/11/12) that he felt he could not do justice to Müller’s text using “ordinary theatrical means,” and instead chose to use musical and filmic means such as song-forms, collages, cutting and flashbacks in tandem with text. 88 Ibid., 52. In an interview with The Dramaturgies Project (Melbourne) in 2006, Castellucci said that when he talks about danger in theatre, “I talk about tearing apart the law that governs language as we know it. Language we belong to, but language keeps us prisoners.” Peter Eckersall, Melanie Beddie, and Paul Monaghan, “The Dramaturgies Project Interviews Romeo Castellucci” (2006, unpublished). 89 Eleni Papalexiou, “The Body as Dramatic Material in the Theatre of Romeo Castellucci” Prospero European Review 2 (2011): 1.

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back the original (to shortened speeches by Hephaestus, Kratos, Bia, Oceanus, Io, Hermes, and Prometheus), but also adds speeches by Athena, Epimetheus, Dionysus, and Pandora. The non-textual elements of the performance consist of a profusion of physicalized images, including very often naked bodies performing manic and sexualized rituals of lighting and extinguishing fires, associated here with rebellion, intellectual vigor, and sexual passion. There are also references to Hitler, contemporary pop culture (for example, song fragments from The Doors), and the Hare Krishna movement. 10.7

Setting Aeschylus on Fire: Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Orestea

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Orestea (1995–1996) brings together many of the aspects of the postdramatic Dionysian I have discussed, and contrasts well with the way that Dood Paard’s medEia and Persians illustrate key aspects of the postdramatic Apollonian. Under the direction of Romeo Castellucci, the company aims to completely dismantle traditional notions of representation in performance. In its place, they seek to establish, as Novati puts it, “a succession of different images that correlate to one another through ideas, rather than through a linear narrative.”90 Documentation of the production of Orestea, including the published “text” (if one can call it that) of Agamemnon,91 reveals just how transformative an analogue of Aeschylus’ tragedy it was. The original work may be glimpsed beneath the new work, but it has undergone what Fischer-Lichte refers to as a radical fragmentation and “dismemberment,”92 and is seen through the distorting mirrors of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The “text” of Agamemnon consists mainly in descriptions of action, with condensed sections of Aeschylus’ tragedy mixed with excerpts from Carroll’s “Alice” stories.93 The production descends into a kind of Dionysian madness, and as the text of Agamemnon stipulates, “the words of the Coryphaeus 90 91

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Gabriella Calchi Novati, “Language under Attack: The Iconoclastic Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio” Theatre Research International 34/1 (2009): 56. Castellucci (2007). Bierl’s analysis of the production provides much insight into the work: Bierl, Anton, Die Orestie des Aischylos auf der Modernen Bühne [The Oresteia on the Modern Stage] (Stuttgart: M&P, 1997: 90–106). Fischer-Lichte (2005: 234–235). The parados, for example, begins with the Rabbit pulling a watch out of his coat-pocket, saying “It’s late … how late it’s getting! Already ten years have passed. It was then that King Menelaos and Agamemnon […],” Romeo Castellucci, “Agamemnon: Excerpted from Romeo Castellucci’s Oresteia (Una Commedia Organica?),” trans. Joseph P. Cermatori

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­penetrate deeper and deeper into a corporeal density of language, into a dimension free from the burden of communication.”94 In Eumenides, as Bierl notes, isolated fragments of Aeschylus’ text are heard, but the trial becomes “an incomprehensible thick mesh of words” and spasmodic screaming. On the whole, he says, “Aeschylus’ distant world turns into an incomprehensible surrealistic babble of voices, a tapestry of sound.”95 Dramaturgically active casting combines in this production with the director’s usual flair for startling imagery. The entire Agamemnon is presented as if through the eyes of the Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, who plays the coryphaeus leading a chorus of miniature toy mechanical rabbits, all of whose heads eventually explode. Agamemnon is played by an actor with Downs Syndrome. A hugely corpulent and naked Clytemnestra is transported around on a floating bed. When Agamemnon’s body is revealed, Clytemnestra literally showers in (fake) blood, and yells obscenities. Cassandra, Clytemnestra’s double, is imprisoned in a tight, rectangular glass container. Her incomprehensible cries eventually turn into language, and then revert once again to babble. After she is apparently pulverized by an industrial piston, her glass cage is splattered in blood. Aegisthus, who wears a leather outfit that fails to cover his posterior and prowls the performance like a stage-hand, beats the Rabbit to a pulp and hangs him by the ears. Bierl reports that in Choephoroi, Elektra has the appearance of a “fat little children’s fairy,” and Pylades (whose head resembles an egg) and Orestes are emaciated and naked, until Pylades clothes them in a metal corset-like machine. Orestes’ new metal arm carries out the killing of his mother outside of his own control, while Electra laughs sadistically. In Eumenides, Apollo is played by an actor with no arms, standing on a pedestal like the many now armless ancient statues. Live animals feature throughout: horses in Agamemnon, donkeys in Choephoroi, and the Eumenides are a troupe of monkeys.96 In Castellucci’s own words, this production “sets fire” to Aeschylus – a process that effects a violent penetration into the spectator’s defensive shell.97 Francis Bacon’s assault on the senses is foregrounded once more here, as Bierl

94 95 96 97

T ­ heater 37/3 (2007): 51. At the end of Agamemnon, the Rabbit speaks a long monologue from the start of Alice’s descent into the rabbit hole (Ibid., 68ff). Castellucci, (2007): 68. Bierl (1997: 103, 100). Ibid., 101ff. Valentina Valentini, Bonnie Marranca and Romeo Castellucci, “The Universal: The Simplest Place Possible” paj: A Journal of Performance and Art 26/2 (May 2004): 16–17. See also Bryoni Trezize, “Spectatorship that Hurts: Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio as Meta-affective Theatre of Memory” Theatre Research International 37/3 (October 2012): 206.

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cites Bacon, along with German performance artist Joseph Beuys and Picasso’s Guernica, as strong influences on Castellucci’s theatrical strategies.98 The use of this kind of dramaturgical “fire” is central not only to their work in general, but also to the company’s approach to reanimating the “poetic inner dream” of ancient tragedy in contemporary times. Castellucci is interested in classical texts because a “spiritual connection exists between us and the classics; through them it’s possible to reconnect with the individual and with the universality of the individual.”99 But there is an “unbridgeable distance” between Greek tragedy’s first life and the present,100 and to stage them, one has to “put them to the test of fire, in order to better determine their supportive structure, which leads exactly to the revelation that they speak to everyone, to the frail and private nature of every individual.” Putting classics to “the test of fire” means, for Castellucci, freeing them from “the burden of narrative, and also from the burden of the written word, from its visibility: the word should go back to being invisible.”101 This strategy is in line with Castellucci’s view of the nature of dramaturgy, which he sees as a process of continual reduction until the nucleus of the idea (or, what Brook calls the “poetic inner dream”) is manifested, like a sculptor chipping away at stone until the form of the sculpture is revealed.102 Having found what Brook calls the “essential living heart” of the work, however, Castellucci rebuilds this nucleus into a “burning” postdramatic form. Paradoxically, the form he discovers seems to most fully manifest the notion of ­Aeschylean tragedy as, in Nietzsche’s words, “a manifestation and projection into [­Apollonian] images of Dionysian states, as the visible symbolizing of music, as the dream-world of a Dionysian intoxication.”103 Nietzsche proposed that every aspect of Aeschylean tragedy suggests “the uncertain, that which could never be illuminated,” but under the burning heat 98

99 100 101 102 103

Bierl (1997: 92). Similarly, Oosterling reports that Theatergroep Hollandia’s productions of tragedies, including Prometheus, 1989, Persians, 1994, and Xenakis’ adaptation of the Oresteia, 1995, combine text, music, ritualized physicality, and intermediality in a way that works on your nerves “as the paintings of Francis Bacon do” to produce an “affective disorientation.” See Henk Oosterling, “Hypocritical Theatre: Hollandia’s Intermedial Multiverse” (Rotterdam: Centre for Philosophy and Arts, Erasmus University, n.d.): 4, 1 at http://www2.eur.nl/fw/cfk/…/PDF/art%20performance.pdf. Valentina Valentini, et al. (May 2004): 16. Bierl (1997: 91). Valentini, Marranca and Castellucci, (May 2004): 16–17. Peter Eckersall, Melanie Beddie and Paul Monaghan. “The Dramaturgies Project Interviews Romeo Castellucci” (2006, unpublished). Friedrich Nietzsche (2000: 92).

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of the Dionysian postdramatic, suggests Lehmann, a “seeing takes place that leads to the invisible with seeing eyes.”104 10.8 Conclusion I have argued that the various “cooling” and “burning” strategies I have discussed in this chapter, under the rubric of Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian principles, are able to both recall and reconstitute Aeschylean dramaturgies in a new and exciting way. In part, this is no doubt because the postdramatic offers tragedy a new set of tools with which to reawaken our perceptual mechanisms. As Felski notes, “the friction created by the jagged edge of historical difference sparks fresh moments of revelation and insight.”105 I have also argued, however, that in responding to Aeschylean dramaturgies in ways that modern drama has been unable to, these strategies offer a range of experiential performance dimensions that have been missing in productions of Aeschylus for some considerable time. Indeed, I suggest that, in its combination of text, music, soundscape, body, imagery, and spatialization, the Dionysian “scenic poem” provides the most comprehensive analogue, as postdramatic theatre, of the archaic yet somehow also experimental majesty that is Aeschylean tragedy, even where the “textual dress” of his work has been pared back or burnt off. There is no doubt that the postdramatic treatments of Aeschylean tragedy that I have analyzed in this chapter disrupt what might be called the “culture of the Aeschylean text.” Scholars and spectators used to productions of Aeschylus in the dramatic mode may well be traumatized. But several points need to be made here. Firstly, as I argued earlier, postdramatic theatre is not a totalizing, abolitionist movement. It does not, on the whole, seek to abolish drama, dramatic productions of tragedy, or the private reading of translations of tragedy as modern drama. It simply offers a different set of strategies with which to respond to the many challenges of communicating these plays – in performance  – to a contemporary audience. I do, however, consider these strategies to be an exciting set of remedies to the largely disjunctive and reductive set of conventions with which dramatic theatre has responded to these challenges over the past century or more. Secondly, the “culture of the Aeschylean text” is a problematic notion, as it seems to assume there is such a thing as “the” Aeschylean text. The Greek text, 104 Lehmann (2006: 172). 105 Rita Felski, Rethinking Tragedy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008: 23).

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as it has come down to us, is presumably “the” text, but productions using the Greek are extremely rare. Moreover, apart from an ever-present, nagging uncertainty as to the accuracy of the text we have – an issue dealt with at length by Garvie in this volume – one would also want to know which version of the “original” text qualifies for that title: the one Aeschylus handed – or recited – to the actors at the start of rehearsals? The one that was modified during rehearsals? The one lodged in the Athenian treasury later in the 4th century bc? If it is not the “original” Greek text, then is the text a particular translation into a particular language? But which translation, and in which language? As I argued earlier, every translation from an ancient Greek text necessarily involves a set of decisions based on the relevant translator’s interpretation(s) of the play’s form, feel, and dramaturgy; of the words, the “spirit behind the words,” and the rich poetic metaphors with which especially Aeschylean tragedy abounds; and ultimately, of course, of the plays’ meaning(s) or at least its “creative inner dream.” Every production of an existing play-text involves that text’s transformation from a potential to an actual (but not the actual) manifestation, concretized by interpretive decisions but also re-opened to multiple interpretations by the exigencies of performance. Moreover, the translation of an ancient play is always culturally situated, and involves a translation of the mediating influence of one set of performance exigencies into another, necessarily different set. Postdramatic treatments of Aeschylean tragedy simply take this process one step further. Nietzsche, George Steiner, and countless others have claimed that tragedy is dead, but I suggest that the conditions which have generated postdramatic theatre may well be more in tune with those that generated Aeschylus’ tragic visions than at any point during the period of modern drama’s exclusive dominance. Terry Eagleton argues that “late modernity has recreated in its own way some of the conditions which gave birth to this scapegoat song in classical antiquity.” He points to, amongst other factors, the fragility of the once-sovereign subject, its exposure to enigmatic, impenetrable forces, its lack of agency and quickened sense of mortality, the inevitable conflict of goods in a pluralistic culture, the complex density of a social order in which human damage spreads like typhoid … .106 Similarly, Michael Maffesoli argues that the “philosophical foundation of the modern West: free will, the decisions of individuals or social groups acting 106 Terry Eagleton, “Commentary,” in Rethinking Tragedy, (ed.) Rita Felski (2008: 340–341).

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together to make history”107 is increasingly seen by many as an illusion. An awareness of “tragic” limitation, of the sense that “everything mysteriously takes its course without there really being the possibility of intervention,” has been, argues Maffesoli, “a secret or unobtrusive structural presence during the last two or three centuries which were largely dominated by a dramatic notion of the world.” This sense of the tragic is “now tending to assert itself ever more vigorously,”108 and manifests in part as an increasing tendency to revert to various kinds of tribalism. The resurgence of the chorus in postdramatic theatre may be seen as an expression of this phenomenon. For our world is one, as Lehmann notes, in which “political conflicts increasingly elude intuitive perception and cognition,” and in which “almost any form has come to seem more suitable for articulating reality than the action of a causal logic with its inherent attribution of events to the decisions of individuals.”109 Many factors in the post-modern world combine to make us painfully aware of our tragic limits. Goldhill remarks on the way that Greek tragedy “exposes the cracks in our own edifice of self-knowledge and self-assertion,” and that the prevalence of religious wars in the 20th and 21st centuries finds its chilling echo in Greek tragedy’s “fascination with extremism and the rhetoric of divine support.”110 Eagleton notes the disjunction between intention and effect in the postmodern world.111 Felski suggests that tragedy is “the form that most eloquently dramatizes the stubborn persistence of human blindness, vulnerability, and error.” What makes tragedy “so resonant to modern theory,” she writes, “is its gesturing towards what lies beyond the limits of human understanding.”112 This is exactly what Nietzsche found so appealing in Aeschylus, and what he postulates was so unappealing to Euripides, and to modern “bourgeois” drama. In this light, the future of Aeschylean tragedy in postdramatic theatre seems assured, even if the texts may suffer some damage. The rupture between intention and effect, the sense of disintegration, dismantling, and deconstruction that increasingly seems to dominate our experience of the contemporary world was a constitutive feature of Aeschylean tragedy. This experience of rupture is central to not only the protagonists of Aeschylean tragedy (one thinks here of Xerxes, Eteocles, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Prometheus, 107 Michael Maffesoli, “The Return of the Tragic in Postmodern Societies,” in Rethinking Tragedy (ed.) Rita Felski (2008: 326). 108 Ibid., 321. 109 Lehmann (2006, 175: 180). 110 Goldhill (2007: 145, 209). 111 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Malden: Blackwell, 2003: 180–183). 112 Rita Felski, Rethinking Tragedy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008: 1, 3).

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and the choruses of all the plays), but also to the spectator/reader who witnesses the play of forces in these works as they hover, in a typically Dionysian way, between destruction and affirmation. The world that produced both Greek tragedy and postdramatic theatre is a “damaged world.”113 But both Aeschylean tragedy and its postdramatic analogues respond by means of what Goldhill calls a “dynamics of distance.” Greek tragedy “is set in other places, at other times, and involves other people,” but by taking a “detour to tragedy’s otherness,” he writes, “it turns out to be about us.”114 This is precisely the opposite of the assumption (which Nietzsche accuses Euripides of introducing) that to be “accessible” to a modern audience, tragedy needs the familiarity of “characters” that resemble us, and explicit allusions to contemporary events. Similarly, in the “mediated strangeness” of the postdramatic analogue, the dramaturgies of the oldest surviving tragedian reappear, and postdramatic theatre’s “aesthetics of undecidability,” as Lehmann calls it,115 is able to echo Aeschylus’ tragic visions with striking prescience. 113 Jürs-Munby, “Introduction,” in Hans-Thiess Lehmann, The Postdramatic Theatre, (2006: 12). 114 Goldhill (2007: 151, 125, 127, 126). 115 Lehmann (2006: 100).

chapter 11

Voices of Trauma: Remaking Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in the Twentieth Century Lorna Hardwick 11.1 Introduction This chapter moves away from rigid distinctions between the categories of translation, adaptation, and remaking and explores how these overlap in their relationship to Aeschylus’ text and to the literary traditions in which the new work is itself embedded.1 Any reading or performance, including those in the original language and theatre space, involves a process of aesthetic and intellectual translation and re-interpretation. Thus the performance and literary histories of Aeschylus’ plays require and enable interplay between the specificities of the moments and contexts of any particular reception and their temporal, spatial and cultural trajectories. When an example is compared with other performances and readings the result is a “thick” critical mass of understanding.2 In their contribution to this volume (“‘My poetry did not die with me’: Aeschylus and His Afterlife in the Classical Period”), Hanink and Uhlig analyze how Aeschylus’ plays were performed and adapted in antiquity. Their approach provides a very useful corrective to simplistic ancient/modern divides in typologies of reception. Aeschylus was remaking mythological narratives through performance and that aesthetic practice was adapted by his successors in antiquity. Analysis from a 21st-century perspective has to take account of that constantly evolving dynamic. It also has to take account of the multiple agencies involved. Deborah H. Roberts’ chapter in this volume puts collaborations prominently on the agenda. In Roberts’ case, her emphasis is on collaborations between scholars and poets in working with Seven against Thebes. This is one thread in a wider web of collaborations. Some of these involve a group of theatre practitioners, translators, re-writers, and audiences who come together in the context of performance creation. Other “collaborations” are not synchronic but result from

1 As the playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker put it, “if anything is altered, it’s an adaptation” (In Conversation with Margaret Williamson, Classics Centre, Oxford, 1 December 2012). 2 David Hopkins (2010: 13).

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exposure and creative response to the iterative dynamic of the replaying and rewritings of Aeschylus’ works. Research on the hermeneutic nexus created by translations, adaptations and remakes has frequently emphasized the accretion of elements that adhere to the source text and may progressively change its character. However, in this discussion I refocus the lens to include examination of the other side of the coin: aspects of Aeschylus’ poetic imagination that persist even when rewritings and restagings seem to shift the cultural perspective. The agency of a source text has a formal, poetic and theatrical dynamic that triggers and shapes subsequent realizations of the play. That agency is also nurtured by its contexts and referents, especially when both the ancient and modern texts are rooted in human experiences such as violence, suffering, pain, love. This chapter focuses on how memory of the trauma associated with violence and war is actualized, refined and passed on through translation and rewriting of Aeschylus. In order to explore such conjunctions, my discussion focuses on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and explores two main areas in modern translation, adaptation and remaking. The first is the iteration of poetic images associated with trauma. This will be considered through comparison between passages in Agamemnon of Aeschylus and the translation by Louis MacNeice (1936). The second is the affective communication of violence and attitudes to it, including its capacity to reveal fault lines in the persona and environment of the modern writer (which may then link back to the material and metaphorical persistence of trauma). As an example of this, I examine the presentation of the Watchman and Cassandra in Seamus Heaney’s poem “Mycenae Lookout” (1996), which includes a literary reworking of parts of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. These examples challenge some aspects of Slavoj Žižek’s claim that subsequent rewritings of an iconic text necessarily erase or repress the substance of traumatic encounters or that the structural persistence of trauma resists rewriting.3 Contra Žižek, I suggest that such tensions can be creative. Symbolic rewriting may enhance rather than destroy the aesthetic and political agency of trauma.4 In Aeschylus, when Clytemnestra addresses the Chorus on Agamemnon’s return from Troy she uses the lexis of trauma to signify wounds that he was rumored to have suffered (line 866). However, she extends the metaphor to liken the effect to the holes of a net, an ironic anticipation of his imminent death at her hands. MacNeice translated the image as: “then he 3 Slavoj Žižek (2000: 676). 4 For discussion of the theory and praxis of interruption, see Bonnie Honig, 2013, Part 1. The epigraph to her Introduction includes Walter Benjamin’s claim that “To cite a text means to interrupt its context” (Honig, 2013: 1).

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would be gashed fuller than a net has holes!”5 The associations of trauma in tragedy have been extended in modern usage, an example perhaps of “semantic stretch” that blurs dichotomies between literal and metaphorical.6 I use a notion of trauma that embraces both social catastrophe with its fragmentation of the uniting bonds of justice and stability and the injury, pain and suffering of the individual. Both individual and social trauma have far-reaching and long-lasting implications that interweave the physical, the psychological, the individual and the social. Thus the inscription of trauma involves ways of looking at the past, the present and the future of both the individual subject and the community. The psychology of trauma is not confined to desire for healing, containment and even repression but also includes ways in which its characteristics in a particular time, place and cultural context, and ways of handling it, can be communicated and transmitted to future generations as testimony to human experience and as part of the construction of cultural memory. The thread permeates Christa Wolf’s work Cassandra: I am testing for pain. I am probing my memory the way a doctor probes a limb to see whether it has atrophied. Perhaps pain dies before we die. That information, if true, must be passed on; but to whom? Of those here who speak my language, there is none who will not die with me.7 To explore how trauma presents itself and is handled by Aeschylus I have chosen three excerpts from his Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia trilogy. The first is the Watchman’s speech (1–39), which provides a prologue to the play. In this sequence, the Watchman speaks of his wait for news from Troy and of the need to keep silent about what has happened in Agamemnon’s absence. The passage contains the well-known reference to the ox which is lying on his tongue, a proverbial expression for keeping silent but also an anticipation of images later taken up by Clytemnestra to describe how Agamemnon died. The second is the Herald episode (503–661), especially the Herald’s speech (551–582). This episode provides a nexus between anxieties about what has happened in Argos (felt, rather than articulated by the Chorus) and the hazards involved in bringing home the truth about the voyage from Troy. The H ­ erald is initially triumphant to be home but then reflects on what is involved in being a 5 Louis MacNeice (1936: 42). 6 Geoffrey Lloyd (2012: 90). 7 Christa Wolf 1983; trans. Van Heurck (2013: 11).

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herald, overcoming the temptation to speak the “lovely falsehood”8 that would free the Chorus of Elders from knowing about the Aegean Sea that was “flowering with corpses” of the Greeks amid the wreckage of the ships after the storm, (Aeschylus line 659).9 The anthos vocabulary, the use of words connected with flowering is, like Clytemnestra’s reference to wounds, deeply ironic when the “flowers” or “blooms” are the dead and decaying bodies that result from the wounds imposed by war. Reflecting on his task, in his third and final rhesis, the Herald speaks of how: despair in his face, a messenger brings to a town The hated news of a fallen army – One general wound to the city and many men Outcast, outcurst, from many homes By the double whip which War is fond of […] But when our cause is saved and a messenger of good Comes to a city glad with festivity, How am I to mix good news with bad, recounting The storm that meant God’s anger on the Greeks? macneice 1936: 34–35

Thirdly, I have chosen Cassandra’s monody. This, especially in Aeschylus lines 1214–1241, is concerned with the misery of truthful prophecy, and then moves into a provocative lament because she will not be believed and must die. Aeschylus, in the 5th century bc used images and stories from mythology and history, including allusions to Homer, as the basis for his own exploration of Greek cultural memory. Through these he created perspectives on the agonies of knowledge and repression, communication and silence in human experience and understanding. The three excerpts summarized above represent different aspects of trauma that are interwoven with temporalities – the past (including the mythical past with which Aeschylus is concerned); the challenges of telling the past in the present; the agony of telling the future in the present. The framing motifs are of silence/lack of knowledge and hence absence of ­understanding and of commitment to the imperative for truth. Analyzing 8 MacNeice (1936: 34). 9 David Raeburn and Oliver Thomas (2011: 90) point out in their commentary on the use of the anthos vocabulary that it in addition to its implications for blooming it could be used to describe the texture of fabric, with consequent resonances for the tapestry scene (Raeburn and Thomas: 162–163, ad loc.).

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a ­limited number of significant passages as a means of approaching larger ­questions may open up more nuanced perspectives on trauma across cultural divides.10 This method also provides tools for interrogating theory (although that is not my primary purpose here). MacNeice wrote a translation of Agamemnon, designed for performance (1936). Heaney, a Nobel Prizewinner for Literature, excerpted elements of Aeschylus’ play as the basis for a poem, “Mycenae Lookout” (1996), a work which has been described as his equivalent to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot’s poem, composed in the aftermath of the First World War but subsequently read in the light both of that and of the European trauma of the 1930s, used classical images and quotations in a collage that provided the basis for his exploration of cultural crisis.11 Heaney’s shorter poem focuses on the relationship between the Troubles in the north of Ireland in the last part of the 20th century and his personal crises as a poet, a bystander and an Irishman. I have selected from MacNeice’s translation his handling of a theme that is transhistorical and transcultural – the experience of war and how this is communicated. MacNeice is important for the history and practice of translation of Greek plays for several reasons. He was a professional classical scholar and worked directly from the original languages. His translations usually kept closely to the form and lexical range of the Greek, with some “interpretative expansion” to explain material that might otherwise be obscure to modern readers. He also had a deep and sustained interest in drama, demonstrated not only in his Agamemnon but also in his composition and production of plays for bbc Radio (Wrigley and Harrison 2013). Furthermore, MacNeice’s prose criticism includes discussion both of translation practice and of staging. 11.2

Traumatic Encounters

Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) was born in Belfast, in the north of Ireland. He was brought up in Carrickfergus, County Antrim where his father was a Church of Ireland rector, i.e., a Protestant and so associated with the English Ascendancy in Ireland. This was a problematic heritage which saw him educated at an English public school and yet in later years reclaimed as an Irishman. MacNeice studied at Oxford and was then appointed at a young age to a lectureship in Classics at Birmingham University (1929–1936) under the patronage of the 10 11

See Richard Rutherford (2012: 1). David Reynolds (2013: 196–197).

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eminent classicist E.R. Dodds, with whom he worked closely. Dodds, also an Irishman, became his literary executor and edited an edition of the Collected Poems (1966).12 MacNeice then lectured at Bedford College, London and spent a year in America, joining the bbc in 1941 where he remained for the rest of his career as a producer in the Features Department. In addition to his poetry MacNeice also wrote plays and prose fiction. His Autumn Journal (1939), a verse meditation, was prompted by the Munich crisis of 1938 and took the form of a London diary in the run up to World War Two. This also contained material on visits he made to Spain in the 1930s, before and during the Civil War. The Journal also included comment on the nationalist Catholic ethos of the Irish Free State, on the impact of the Depression in the North of England in the 1930s and on the politics of the ancient world. In the 1930s MacNeice was associated with a new generation of “leftish” English poets such as Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and W.H. Auden, all of whom then or later produced some important work derived from classical sources. The association between MacNeice and Auden was quite close and they co-authored Letters from Iceland (1937). This group of poets was thought to combine modernity of subject matter with modernity of tone and diction (Brown 2007). Their modernism differed from that of the “high modernists,” such as Pound and Eliot in that their language was more democratically “available,” as was their politics. Subsequent critics have commented on how MacNeice’s poetry was not only responsive to the moods and attitudes of its time but also striking in its articulation of pain and loss.13 Peter McDonald has pointed out MacNeice’s sensitivity to the notion of “pity,” especially in work published in Poems 1925–1940, including poems written at the outbreak of the Second World War, arguing that: […] for any poet of MacNeice’s generation, “pity” was a word with a potent literary (and literary-political) charge, especially when given a definite article in “the pity.” This derives from Wilfred Owen’s draft “Preface:” “My subject is War and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity.”14 2007: 201–221

12 13 14

The standard Collected Poems is now the one edited by Peter McDonald, 2007, which sets the poems closer to their original contexts. Stephen Regan (2007: 150). Regan is quoting Philip Larkin. Peter MacDonald, Louis MacNeice Memorial Lecture, 2007, reprinted in the Times Literary Supplement, December 21 and 28, 2007: 20–21.

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MacNeice’s affective use of the poetics of pity underlies his rendering of Cassandra’s monody (1256–1257) in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon as: Ah what a fire it is! It comes upon me. Apollo, Wolf-Destroyer, pity, pity … . macneice 1936: 5615

The fact that MacNeice worked directly from the source language and was a professional scholar allows comparisons with translators such as his distinguished predecessor Gilbert Murray, who was Professor of Greek at Glasgow at the age of 23 and subsequently Regius Professor at Oxford. That MacNeice was a poet, not on a small scale but one of the Auden/Spender group, also allows comparisons with predecessors like the nineteenth-century poet Robert Browning, whose translation of Agamemnon prompted Ezra Pound’s oftenquoted verdict on Aeschylus in English: “A search for Aeschylus in English is deadly, accursed, mind-rending.”16 The 19th-century poet and critic Augusta Webster said of Browning’s attempt to render Agamemnon into English in a way that preserved the shape of the Greek that it was a good thing that readers had Aeschylus to go back to in order to understand Browning.17 The combination of classical scholarship and belief in the artistic merit of contaminatio is important for MacNeice’s Agamemnon, as is his perception of the potential of theatre poetry – “In the lyric the poet speaks with one voice only. In the drama he can do justice to the many different people within him.”18 MacNeice’s deep and sustained interest in drama opened him up to new types of theatre which by-passed the middle-class audiences of the West-End of London. He valued the fringe and the experimental, including the Group Theatre, founded in 1932 by the dancer Rupert Doone (who later staged MacNeice’s Agamemnon). After MacNeice ceased to be an academic and took up a career in the bbc, he was instrumental in commissioning and producing radio drama, including adaptations of classical material. His own translation of Agamemnon was subsequently broadcast on bbc Radio’s Third Programme in 1946 and 1950.19 The translation of Agamemnon was, however, written with performance in mind and for the staged production MacNeice added at the 15 16 17 18 19

An example of MacNeice’s interpretative translation, phrased in order to explain the adjective Lycaean that Aeschylus applied to Apollo in the original. Peter France (2000: 358). Lorna Hardwick (2000b: 194–195). Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry (1938: 193). Amanda Wrigley (2005: 221–228).

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end of the play the first Choral ode from Aeschylus’ Choephoroi (Libation bearers, the second play in the Oresteia trilogy), signaling foreboding in the context of Europe in 1936.20 However, MacNeice’s theatrical expertise did not extend to directing the work so there are important questions about what was done to and with his text in its translation to the stage. As a play, his Agamemnon proved vulnerable to the direction and the staging, and the event became something of a cause célèbre. In his introduction to the published text, MacNeice stated that he had written the translation primarily for the stage.21 This led him to “consciously sacrifice certain things in the original, notably the liturgical flavor of the diction and the metrical complexity of the Choruses. It is my hope that the play emerges as a play and not as a museum piece.”22 He also acknowledged that the translation of some passages was a joint effort between himself and E.R. Dodds.23 The play was staged at the Westminster Theatre in November 1936, directed by Rupert Doone. The production details have been researched by Michael Sidnell (1986) and published under the title “Another Death of Tragedy: Louis MacNeice’s translation of Agamemnon in the context of his work in theatre.” The production was recognized to be topical, not only for its resonances with the causes and progress of wars, but also because of its perceived allusions to the First World War, with its traumatic experience for participants and for the families of the dead, as well as to the political events in the Europe of the 1930s. This effect was underscored by verbal anachronisms in the Chorus, such as comment on the plans of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus to “set up a dictatorship in the state.” In the performance (according to a Review) Aegisthus’ soldiers gave the Nazi salute.24 This was no doubt prompted by the translation, in which the Chorus lamented that Iphigenia’s cries “counted for nothing with those militarists.” MacNeice’s stage directions drew on what was implicit in his text but it is clear from his notes on the typescript of the play-text and his letter to Doone of 23 July 1936 that he also wanted Doone to create stage action, with Agamemnon and Cassandra entering in two chariots (to martial music)25 and Aegisthus’ guards confronting the Chorus with “stylized threats and counter-threats 20 21 22 23 24 25

Ibid., 224. MacNeice (2008 [1936]: 8). Ibid., 8–9. Ibid., 9. Michael Sidnell (1986: 326). The young Benjamin Britten composed music for the production.

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approximating to a dance.” Agamemnon “might wear a cloak such as some of the Homeric heroes have on the vases – very patterned, all over stars and rosettes.” However, in the event, according to a reviewer, the Chorus was: […] dressed in dinner jackets and goggles […]. Clytemnestra with a headdress of a Chinese mandarin backed by a scroll, Agamemnon with a jester’s cap, slaves in purple tarbushes and veils […] more slaves dressed like the Klu Klux Klan, Cassandra as an Arab […] with an Elizabethan ruff and lastly Aegisthus in a Christmas cracker helmet and black evening cape. sidnell 1986: 326

The director, Doone, explained that the dinner jackets were intended to make a connection with the audience. The classicist E.R. Dodds was furious at the anachronism (which in any case did not reflect the sartorial habits of the audience) and in his memoirs recalled: Small wonder that the aged W.B. Yeats who was sitting in the stalls murmured to me at the interval, “We are assisting, my dear Dodds, at the death of tragedy.” But he had the grace to add that the translation deserved a better producer. dodds 1968: 132

A subsequent Regius Professor of Greek, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, also praised MacNeice’s work as the most successful translation into English.26 So far as the translation is concerned, although MacNeice commented on what he had left out in terms of the metrical quality of the Chorus, he did convey something of the variety of diction and register in Aeschylus. The means he used perhaps draw on the poetic traditions that he thought would be effective in communicating to his audience. In spite of the disaster of the stage production, the poetics of trauma reverberate in the play-text. The most important of the poetic traditions that powered MacNeice’s translation are evident from the ways in which the diction of the Herald’s speech, resonant of Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen, drew on the transformation of perceptions of the First World War brought about by the subsequent publication of poetry by participants. The poetry that emerged from the experiences of the war (much of it not published until later and so fresh in the minds and ears of readers and audiences of the 1930s) had shattered any easy identification of soldiers with the ethos of 26

E.R. Dodds (1968: 116).

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­Homeric heroes and the kleos of a good death that had characterized some of the poetry of the early years.27 Aeschylus was himself a serving hoplite soldier so the detail that he provided in the Herald’s speech was doubly resonant for ancient and modern audiences. MacNeice’s translation of the passage resonates with the emotions and diction of poetry generated from the lived experiences of the trenches, e.g., Gurney’s “Billet” and “Pain,” Rosenberg’s “Louse Hunting” and “Dead Man’s Dump” and Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “The Show:” If I were to tell of our labours, our hard lodging, The sleeping on crowded decks, the scanty blankets … Continuous drizzle from the sky, dews from the marshes Rotting our clothes, filling our hair with lice. macneice 1936: 31–32

Isaac Rosenberg had written from the Front, in a letter postmarked 5 January 1917 to his friend and mentor, Gordon Bottomley, that he wondered whether Aeschylus had experienced the same kind of lice, an indication perhaps that Rosenberg had read Agamemnon in translation: I cannot remember whose translations I’ve read; but what I’ve read have been very few of the Greeks; I have read some of the great dramas but have always felt (except in Shelley’s) the translator uses his English in a foreign unnatural way. Not like the Bible translators. I wonder if Aeschylus as a private [sic] in the army was bothered as I am by lice. qtd in vandiver 2010: 140

Elizabeth Vandiver points out in her study of classical receptions in British First-World-War Poetry that it is impossible to tell from this letter whether or not Rosenberg had already read Agamemnon or whether Bottomley was offering to send him a translation. If the autodidact Rosenberg had read the play, it could have been in Robert Potter’s late 18th-century translation,28 although it is possible that he had also read Browning’s. Either or both would account for the poet’s comment about style and diction. It is also noteworthy that, unlike most of the influential First-World-War poets, Rosenberg’s poetry was not written in recollection but while on active service. Many of the penciled manuscripts are mud-stained.29 He was killed on the night of 31 March/1 April 1918. 27 28 29

Elizabeth Vandiver (2010). Ibid., 141, n.151. Jean Liddiard (2003: 28).

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Lice became a topos for linking the experiences of the Greeks at Troy, the Athenians of Aeschylus’ time and the soldiers of 1914–1918, providing the “realistic” underpinning to a shared psychology of trauma.30 Combined with the Herald’s reflections on the unpopularity of the messenger who brings bad news, the resonances for audience and readers in MacNeice’s time would be strong. Wilfred Owen’s Preface to his poems, cited above, had also stressed the obligation of the poet to be a truthful witness.31 Aeschylus’ Chorus insists that in contrast to the “new self-glory and madness […]. The reckless lust that brings black Doom upon the house […]. Honest Dealing is clear/Shining in smoky homes.”32 MacNeice’s prose criticism is also illuminating, especially that written in the 1930s (and therefore the most relevant in relation to his Agamemnon). He addressed questions concerning the target audience and especially the assumptions that writers and directors might make. He distinguished acerbically between genuine political engagement and propaganda, which he castigated as complacent and “under the aegis of Victor Gollancz [a left-wing publisher] and the shadow of Spain.”33 He seems to have regretted the “loss of reverence” that had been associated with the beginnings of theatre. Even though drama was now secular, he maintained, it should still be thought of as critical, like drama in ancient Athens. However, since modern theatre lacked the polis context, it was no longer the case that a large proportion of the [citizen] population could see a play simultaneously. Modern theatre also lacked the sense of “event” created by the drama festivals of ancient Athens and Attica. Most of all, it lacked the frame of reference shared between audience and writers that had been afforded by mythology. MacNeice attacked the “star system” of actors, directors and writers because he thought it discouraged critical energy. He wrote that his hopes for theatre “would rest mainly on a change in the structure of society but failing that, on the spread of secondary education.”34 30

31 32 33 34

In the present day, Peter Meineck’s publicly funded project in the United States uses Greek tragedy as a therapeutic tool in enabling veterans and communities to engage with ptsd and other effects of modern war, see Meineck (2009) for discussion of the relationship between tragedy and the experiences of the Athenian spectators. Jon Stallworthy and Jane Potter (2011: xlviii). Wilfred Owen was killed in 1918, shortly before the war ended. MacNeice (1936: 38–39). Alan Heuser (1987: 91–99). See Seth Schein (2008). For secondary education he found in the usa the encouraging example of the “Great Books” courses that were intended to provide a shared basis of ­cultural knowledge for people from many different backgrounds, including recent immigrants.

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In his critical writing MacNeice also addressed some aspects of translation practice. His discussion of Gilbert Murray’s translation of Aeschylus’ The Seven against Thebes was damning:35 Professor Murray is our leading Hellenist and no one would impugn either his scholarship or his enthusiasm. But as a verse translator of the Greek dramatists he is, though readable, neither a good translator nor a good poet. That he is readable is shown by his sales […]. Those who have a little Greek will most likely want a fairly exact crib; this Professor Murray does not provide. Those who have no Greek will want either a version which “puts across” the original or something which will stand on its own feet as a work in English. spectator 10 May 1935

In his Agamemnon MacNeice clearly aimed both to communicate the source text and to create a work that was authentic as a poetic drama in the English language. MacNeice ends his discussion of Murray: “His Greek original is so real to a scholar like Professor Murray that it is probably never out of his mind and so he cannot see what the English looks like just as English.”36 MacNeice goes on to give his own views on translation practice: “a translation should start from the Greek, preferably line for line. Diction and rhythm will then differentiate.” Then the poetry can be infused – so “we improve both rhythm and diction and so make the whole more real” (italics added). Then comes his key line: “This is perhaps when the non-scholar may translate better than the scholar.”37 MacNeice’s Agamemnon and its place in his life, work and thought is suffused with his re-inscription of trauma – trauma in the Aeschylus, trauma in the poetry from the First World War, and trauma that he sensed was to come as the international political situation of the 1930s gathered intensity. His engagement with Aeschylus in English is far from the “deadly, accursed and mind-rending” process that Pound denigrated, but is, rather, timely, rich and provocative. It combines close attention to the Greek with a poet’s aim to produce a work of literary merit in its own right. MacNeice’s sensitivity to English and Irish literary tradition brings these into an integrative relationship with Aeschylus, invoking and reforging a poetic memory that fuses previous voices with the new directions shaped by contemporary experience.38 35 The review was probably written while he was working on the Agamemnon. 36 Spectator (10 May 1935). 37 Ibid. 38 See Gian Conte (1986) on integrative allusion as poetic technique.

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The Communication of Violence and Its Associative Resonances

Although Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) authored two versions of Greek plays for the stage: Cure at Troy (1990), a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and Burial at Thebes (2004), a version of Sophocles’ Antigone. He was not primarily a dramatist and his plays are better known for their poetry, especially in the Choral Odes. That said, Heaney (like MacNeice) followed the formal structures of Greek theatre closely and, although not trained in classical Greek, he did use commentaries and referred closely to scholarly translations. Scholarly translations have the advantage both that they are scholarly and also that they were not in competition with his work on account of their poetry – so he was unlikely to unwittingly import a resonant phrase into his own work.39 Classical allusions, intertextualities and translations of key passages from classical authors form a major thread in Heaney’s poetry, ranging from his translation from Aeneid Book vi (“The Golden Bough” in Seeing Things, 1991) to the leaps of imagination and sensibility that connect texts and places in “Sonnets from Hellas” and “Bann Valley Eclogue” (in Electric Light, 2001). An early poem “Personal Helicon” (in Death of a Naturalist, 1966) is especially prescient for its association between the figure of Narcissus and the image of the poet (as a child) looking down into the farmyard well – “I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” The same collection includes the first of his Antaeus poems, in which Heaney uses the myth of Antaeus to point up the way in which his poetry is rooted in rural Ireland and hence vulnerable to disruption as he travels further in his career (both physically and imaginatively): Let each new hero come […], He may well throw me and renew my birth, But let him not plan, lifting me off the earth, My elevation, my fall. heaney 1966

In the poem “Hercules and Antaeus” in his later collection North (1975), it is the figure of Hercules that is developed; “sky born and royal,” “feeding off

39

In his otherwise excellent Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, Bernard O’Donoghue alludes to Heaney’s interest in Greek drama, dismissing it as a distraction from Heaney’s “primary poetic purpose” (O’Donoghue, 2009: 9–10). On the contrary, as my discussion here demonstrates, poetic imagination and dramatic structure are closely interwoven in Heaney’s response to Aeschylus.

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the territory” he “lifts and banks Antaeus […] a sleeping giant, / pap for the dispossessed.” Heaney studied Latin at school and while the poetry of Virgil has been especially influential (often as a way into engagement with Dante) his work as a whole reveals that it is the invocation of Greek texts and images that provides him with a field in which he can work through his most fundamental anxieties about violence, revenge and the histories of resistance and conflict in the rural Ireland in which he grew up and in the modern situation in which he was writing. This is especially the case at points of crisis – aesthetic, personal or political. It is at the traumatic intersections of his personal and political anxieties that Heaney seeks resolution through the themes and aesthetic of Greek theatre poetry. The rural context of the cultural and experiential roots that Heaney invoked through his mythical imagination in the Antaeus poems also provided the environment in which, through the centuries, Irish nationalism and resistance to British rule has been both devastated and re-nurtured. Heaney visualized this historically and metaphorically in his poem “Requiem for the Croppies” (in Door into the Dark, 1969): Until on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave. Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon. The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave. They buried us without shroud or coffin And in August the barley grew up out of the grave. In the last part of the 20th century, the “Troubles” in the North of Ireland saw the provisional ira (Irish Republican Army) in conflict with the Loyalist paramilitaries (who wished the North to continue to be part of the United Kingdom rather than joining with the independent Irish republic in the South). The Provisional ira and the Loyalist groups were in conflict not only with each other but also with the British authorities, who continued to maintain a military presence, with watch-towers in the dangerous rural areas in the border counties between North and South and troops in the main cities. For Heaney the Irish countryside is the rural environment of his origins and early experiences. It represents a crucial thread in the Irish poetic tradition, especially in poets such as Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967) who was a key influence on Heaney. Kavanagh also used classical emblems, especially from Homer’s epics which he read via E.V. Rieu’s popular translations. The multi-faceted relationship between Kavanagh, classical poetry, and Heaney reveals that interactions are not always uni-linear and that mediations of classical material via translations

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and via other poets can be as influential as direct encounters with the ancient author.40 For Heaney, rural Ireland was also a lived emblem of the historical violence, killing and cruelty that accompanied resistance to British rule. This trauma was further intensified in the late-20th century conflicts in which sectarian atrocities and killing of dissidents within political groups often obscured the political issues of Irish and British identity and the fragile negotiations within and between communities as the north edged towards, or retreated from, truce and peace.41 Such situations intensified Heaney’s increasingly acute sense of personal and political crisis and its implications for how a poet can speak and how his words are interpreted. Heaney was a Catholic Irish nationalist but there is a wide difference on the nationalist spectrum between constitutional nationalism at one end and the various forms of nationalism/republicanism that in turn shade into militant republicanism at the other end. Furthermore, internal divisions (in both loyalist and nationalist traditions) could be as intense as the external polarities between them. Heaney was criticized by republicans for being insufficiently politically outspoken and by loyalists for the cultural and political nationalism of his heritage and his poetry. There was also multi-faceted criticism from literary commentators. Some, including the influential cultural critic Declan Kiberd, argued that claiming to be “in doubt” does not constitute a virtuous political standpoint.42 Others reacted against Heaney’s “distancing” use of the material of pre-history as a site for his reflections on human emotions and behaviors. The Belfast poet Ciaran Carson seized on Heaney’s archaeological images of ritual murder in the Bog poems of Part One of North to describe him as “the laureate of violence.” Blake Morrison saw a possible granting of “a historical respectability” to sectarian killing through the resonances drawn in the poem “Punishment” between the poet’s voyeuristic response to the murder of the adulteress drowned in the bog and to the modern “tarring and feathering” of women who consorted with occupying troops.43 Eventually, as sectarian violence in Belfast and Londonderry intensified, Heaney left the north of Ireland in 1972 for a self-imposed exile in the south.44 40 41

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Hardwick (2011). The themes of the “Troubles” in the north of Ireland also resonate in the poetry of Heaney’s contemporary Michael Longley, who explores them through exploration of Greek themes and images, especially from Homer, see Hardwick (2007, 2009). Bernard O’Donoghue (2009: 7). Dillon Johnston (2003: 114 ff.). There is a sense of a shared understanding of imagined or actual poetic exile in Heaney’s sensitivity to the experiences of Eastern European poets, especially the Russians

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There runs through Heaney’s poetry a glittering and ominous thread in which the imperative to avoid speaking out also involves a delicate balance between the need for a poet to stand aside from direct involvement precisely in order to become commentator and messenger. This is in tension with the concomitant threatening and potentially suffocating sense that silence was the safest way to survive.45 Heaney’s continuing struggle with this dilemma is reflected in poems such as “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” with a verse like “the tight gag of place and times” (North, 1975) and “Terminus” with verses like “Two buckets were easier carried than one. / I grew up in between” (The Haw Lantern, 1987). His awareness of the implications is not confined to the social and political contexts. He uses the grammatical term “the middle voice” to characterize the aesthetic of social and linguistic convergence (Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, 1988). In relation to Greek language, the term “Middle Voice” is associated with self-advantage; that is, doing something for one’s self or getting it done for one’s self or doing it to one’s self; it does not point to a “golden mean.”46 Nevertheless, critics using the term frequently stress the idea of balance – for example in claims that the “middle voice” holds the balance “between English and Irish poetics, between loyalty to parish and to the broad mainstream of literature.”47 This is compatible with the “doing for one’s self” aspect, but the application of the grammatical sense of the word to Heaney’s approach also incorporates insistence on the role of the poet himself as both agent and aesthetic authority. This in turn tightens the lens on how balance is conceived and communicated and therefore raises the possibility that the poetry might retain ambivalence

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­ andelstam and Brodsky, the Poles Milosz and Herbert and the Czech Holub, especially M through the lens of “poets under pressure” (Quinn 2009: 92–105). Cf Aeschylus’ Chorus Leader in the Agamemnon, “Silence is my stock prescription” (MacNeice, 1936: 31). Evelyn Abbott and E.D. Mansfield’s Primer of Greek Grammar specifies that in the Middle Voice “the Subject of the Verb is also the Recipient or Remoter Object” (Abbott and Mansfield, revised ed.1963: 65). O’Donoghue (2009: 91). In Station Island 32–33 Heaney comments that he is “adept at dialect,” “driving the stranger through my own country.” In his 2004 sequence “Testimony: The Ajax Incident” he brought together his engagement with Greek tragedy and the vocabulary of the aggressive agrarian history of Ireland in order to lay bare the psychological anatomy of the hero’s failure to adjust to the change of status brought about by cessation of hostilities. The poetics of Homer and Sophocles are embedded in the vernacular of the farm and the abattoir (Heaney, tls no. 5304, 26 November, 2004 and for further discussion see Hardwick in Monaghan (ed.), 2016, forthcoming).

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and provide an interruption or even a radical de-stabilization of the conventional wisdom. Heaney’s poem “Mycenae Lookout” (The Spirit Level, 1996) is his major reflection on the themes of silence, speaking out and the self-reflexive status of the poet. It forms part of a collection, The Spirit Level, permeated with a sense of “self-burdening” that the narrative voice acknowledges.48 Yet it is itself a poem that, for all its anguish and violent diction, also aspires to a negotiation between visceral exposure and aspiration for resolution. That tension is reflected in the formal structure and tone of the poem. As Heaney wrote in his discussion of Robert Lowell in Government of the Tongue, the middle voice is “neither dramatic monologue exactly, nor confessional lyric” (143). The forceful confessional demotic of the Cassandra sequence is followed by the Yeatsian “His Reverie of Water,” which contemplates an alternative to the seemingly inexorable cycle of violence.49 Heaney used the situation of the Watchman at the beginning of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (1–39) as the spring board for an agonized meditation on war and suffering and how it is viewed and communicated. His exploitation of the dramatic poetry of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon at this time was especially significant not only because of the universality of Troy as an icon of the vulnerability of power but also because of the significance of the Trojan War in Irish political poetic imagery. Early Irish poetry identified the Irish with the Greeks and the English with the Trojans – an early epigram translated from the Irish into English in the 18th century promised that “even Troy must fall” as so, by extension, would the English: The world laid low, and the wind blew like dust Alexander, Caesar, and all their followers. Tara is grass; and look how it stands with Troy And even the English – maybe they might die.

kinsella, 1986, no. 152, 218; see hardwick, 2000: 82

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Neil Corcoran (1998: 192). Like Yael Farber in her Molora (2008), Heaney avoided the third play in the Oresteian trilogy, the “Eumenides,” probably because the Aeschylean resolution depends on the Athenian historical context for the court – room reconciliation in which Orestes is acquitted of the murder of Clytemnestra and the cycle of revenge brought to an end. Both Heaney and Farber substitute their own contexts, Farber by framing her play in a court-room scene analogous to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (see n. 63 below), Heaney by a quasi-religious meditation on the healing powers of water, informed by his Catholicism, but challenged by the persistence of violence from which humans who are “bogged down” in the mud of the past cannot quite escape.

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This tradition of allusion continued, notably in Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations. Heaney’s poem also impacted on cultural politics because it followed shortly on the ira ceasefire of 1994.50 It focused attention not just on the razing of an iconic city but also on the price to be paid for victory by both victors and vanquished, including the repression and festering of underlying unresolved traumas. In Aeschylus’ play the Watchman is on the battlements waiting for the beacon that will signal Agamemnon’s return from Troy. He feels an “ox on the tongue,” a phrase used as the epigraph to Heaney’s poem (“The ox is on my tongue”). Aeschylus’ Watchman dares not say what he knows about the house of Atreus and does not directly interact with the action,51 but Heaney’s Watchman expatiates more extensively on the process of repression. The passage creates a variation on the rural hinterland of violence in Ireland and the imagery of Aeschylus’ play, a variation that in its turn provided a basis for further integrative allusion in poetic responses to Aeschylus: And then the ox would lurch against the gong And deaden it and I would feel my tongue Like the dropped gangplank of a cattle truck Trampled and wrattled, running piss and muck All swimmy-trembly as the lick of fire A victory beacon in an abattoir. The “ox on the tongue” becomes a metaphor conveying the magnitude of the burden of the atrocities that must remain unarticulated but can be communicated through the image of the almost-sounded-gong and the simile with the transportation of cattle for slaughter. The bovine vernacular carries the allusion to the tradition of “omerta,” or silence, in rural Ireland. This tradition, extended to the cities, precluded the giving of any information to the authorities about those involved in republican resistance, or killings, or bombings.52 There is also a textual affinity with Tony Harrison’s film-poem Prometheus (published text 1998), which was also inspired by a tragedy attributed to Aeschylus and was played out against a backdrop of social and ethical trauma.

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John Wilson Foster in O’Donoghue (2009: 218). Michael Longley’s poem “Ceasefire” used the scene between Achilles and Priam in Homer Iliad 24 to explore the occasion. Richard Rutherford (2012: 296). For discussion of the oath-bound secret basis to Republican resistance, starting with the Irish Republican Brotherhood (irb), see Townshend (2013: 188).

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Harrison adopted comparable poetic techniques in deploying the vernacular as an agent of integrative allusion – a fusion of an older poetic voice with a new direction, what Conte called a “dynamic emulative poetics” that deviates as well as emulates in that it pushes the former tradition towards new territory, making an individual poem part of a poetic process.53 In Harrison’s film-poem, workers (in that case coalminers) were transported across Europe like animals in a cattle truck.54 There are wider resonances in Harrison’s poem with the abyss of recent European history, and Io’s journey touches Auschwitz and Birkenau.55 Harrison’s prologue “Fire and Poetry” discusses how poetry is related to fire-gazing and how it is thus put at risk of being silenced: […] poetry will either be tempered in that burning history or disappear. The meditative hearth now contains the Holocaust and the H – bomb. harrison 1998: xx

He adds that if Aeschylus’ Prometheus has not yet acquired: […] the accretions of our bestial and barbaric human history, I would have to add that I think that Aeschylus gazed into what, for him in the 5th century bc, was an equivalent historical destruction, the eradication of an entire civilisation in the razing of the city of Troy. harrison 1998: xxi

Harrison might have added that Aeschylus, and his spectators, had also shared in the very recent trauma of the destruction of the Acropolis by the Persians. So Heaney’s conversation in the Watchman sequence is multi-directional, reaching out retrospectively to Aeschylus and prospectively to Harrison. This creates a kind of “emulative enactment” in which other voices are retained and transformed, providing the energy for reflection.56 Corcoran describes this as: […] an interiorized reflection on the matter of the play, during which the Watchman becomes expositor, commentator, judge, confidant and visionary, in all of which roles he is both involved and detached, an accessory to the crimes and guilt he evokes, who is also their articulate interpreter. 1998: 200

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Conte (1986: 63–67). “Anyone who has to go / has to use his helmet as a po” (Harrison 1998: 38). Tony Harrison (1998: 57–61). Richard Armstrong (2008: 183).

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Such inter-textualities do not necessarily follow “straight lines” of derivation and allusion. Depending on the point at which readers and spectators enter the web of connective imaginings, and depending on their own cultural and experiential base, traumas with different histories are brought into affective and mutually illuminating relationships. In Heaney’s “Mycenae Lookout” the Watchman’s moment of insight is eventually repressed: But inside me like struck sound in a gong That killing-fest, the life-warp and world-wrong It brought to pass still augured and endured Then: Next thing I would waken at a loss, For all the world a sheepdog stretched in grass, Exposed to what I knew, still honour bound … What was to come Out of that ten years’ wait that was the war Flawed the black mirror of my frozen stare ... . I balanced between destiny and dread The image of balancing (like holding a bucket in each hand) is a frequent thread in Heaney’s poetry but the next section of “Mycenae Lookout” challenges this. The sequence “Cassandra” breaks the mold of the poem’s diction, syntax and verse structure: No such thing as innocent bystanding. The narrator/poet then describes Cassandra (no romanticized prophetess here): Her soiled vest, her little breasts her clipped, devastated, scabbed punk head, the char-eyed

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famine gawk – she looked camp-fucked and simple. Heaney’s Cassandra is not a seer. She may give voice to a “bleat of clair- / voyant dread” but the image presented is of a lamb going to slaughter. Here, she does not evoke what Rush Rehm has characterized as existential ends: “By her example, the audience glimpses what death might mean, if one were brave enough to confront it before it happens.”57 Nevertheless, Heaney’s image of a debased Cassandra crosses times and places.58 It is a devastating image of the captive after the destruction of her city and a long voyage to a hostile place. As a quasi-dramatic monologue the poem also resonates with staged versions of the play, notably those directed by Silvio Purcarete (staged in Romanian for the National Theatre of Craiova, 1998, with international tour) and Katie Mitchell (The Home Guard, adapted from the version in English by Ted Hughes, staged in 1999 by the Royal National Theatre, London, with international tour).59 Purcarete had Cassandra arrive in a closed wagon decorated like a Roma caravan, which was attacked by the Chorus of civic elders in bowler hats, their walking sticks synchronized in a visual representation of the dynamics of gang-rape. Mitchell presented Cassandra’s entry as that of an abused waif, semi-naked in the bloodied remnants of her clothing and the counterpart of the sacrificed Iphigenia, whose ghost followed Agamemnon as he enters the house over the tapestry made of the blood-stained dresses of little girls. However, Heaney’s poetics are also grounded in the “middle voice” which threads through his own oeuvre. The sequence invokes a poet rewriting Aeschylus for himself, commenting on the watchman/poet as himself as “voyeur,” obliquely looking perhaps at the images of sacrificed women that Heaney had written into his Bog poems. It is also an indictment of the contemporary practice (in Ireland as elsewhere in Europe) of shaving, tarring and feathering the heads of women who were thought to have collaborated with the enemy. It is almost as if it is only through conjuring the image of a mythical figure from epic and tragedy that Heaney can break the repressive silence that is both personal and societal and speak of the demons within him and within his own place and tradition. Neil Corcoran has described the poem as Heaney’s “most

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Rush Rehm (2005: 358). It is noticeable that critics who discuss it end up by quoting (as I have). The sequence defies paraphrase or description. See Hardwick (2005).

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unpredictable and original self-representation as a poet […] written for the self, and in the mode of meditative version-translation, a literary gloss.”60 And, as with the Watchman, the moment does not last. The Cassandra sequence ends – The shadow-hinge swings unpredictably and the light’s blanked out. In problematizing his own voice, Heaney still denied Cassandra hers. Perhaps, as in Aeschylus’ play, words from her would not have been understood.61 The moment of insight passes and she dies along with her captor. The poet’s description of Agamemnon as “the Troy reaver” re-anchors the poem in the Irish context and in the psyche of the narrator (“My own mind was a bull-pen”). This is intensified by the allusion to the iconic city Tara (the repeated “Cities of grass” picks up the description of the obliterated Tara from the Irish epigram). Following on from the shattered syntax and fractured images of the depiction of Cassandra, the sequence “His Dawn Vision” quails at the sheer untranslatability of the past into the language of the present. The poet-narrator “felt the beating of the time-wound / We lived inside.” There seemed no way out of this claustrophobic and traumatic existence which yet provided their life’s blood: No element that should have carried weight Out of the grievous distance would translate.’ Our war stalled in the pre-articulate.62 In “The Nights” the poet/Watchman/narrator’s “cross-purposed silence” persists, “The ox’s tons of dumb / inertia stood, head-down / and motionless as a herm.” In the closing sequence of the poem, “His Reverie of Water,” the poet attempts some kind of catharsis by invoking the cleansing power of water (a trope in Heaney’s work as a whole), but in returning from the abyss to his own farm the image becomes one of “men puddling at the source/through tawny mud.” They return to the surface from this katabasis, “like discharged soldiers testing the safe ground.” The phrase spans a density of associations from the 60 61 62

Neil Corcoran (1998: 200). Gail Holst-Warhaft (2011: 215). This provides rather a strange gloss on the claim of O’Donoghue that “Mycenae Lookout” involves the remaking of Heaney’s poetic identity (O’Donoghue 2009).

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war experiences of Aeschylus’ Herald through the poetry of Rosenberg and Owen to aspiration for the regeneration of Irish identity in the modern context. In adapting Aeschylean trauma, it is the combination of the materialities and metaphors of mud, lice, and the ox that provide hermeneutic tools that bridge the fractures and interruptions in self-reflection and communication. 11.4 Conclusion The traumas underlying Agamemnon, embedded in the foundational myths of the House of Atreus and the Trojan Cycle, were adapted by the ancient dramatist Aeschylus in a text that in its turn energizes a seemingly endless thread in emotional and ethical responses to literature and theatre.63 The iterations and reshaping of cultural memory loomed large in Aeschylus through the myth and the Trojan cycle and their interaction with the experiences and horizons of his audiences. Those densities have also been layered into contemporary consciousness in the poetics explored in their different ways in the voices and techniques of MacNeice and Heaney. To end by returning to the beginning of this chapter: the Aeschylean sequences I have discussed energize poets, and through poets the wider public, to recognize and articulate the unnamable and inexpressible. The process also involves grappling with the language in which pain can and cannot be communicated and agonizing about how knowledge of its causes and effects can be passed on (as Wolf asked). MacNeice’s translation of Agamemnon brought Aeschylus into dialogue with the war-torn Europe of the era after the First World War and before the Second World War and transposed into contemporary consciousness the Herald’s reflection on the role of the Messenger who brings bad news. MacNeice’s text was aesthetically vandalized by a stage production that disrupted the relationship between the language and tone of MacNeice’s translation and the poetry generated by the traumas of the early 20th-century, but was revived through the medium of radio and in its influence on subsequent adaptations and remakes of Agamemnon. In The Government of the Tongue, Heaney meditated on the role of the poet as witness – “solidarity with the doomed, the deprived, the victimized, the 63

More recently, the South African dramatist Yael Farber drew on Aeschylus’ trilogy and various translations, including MacNeice’s Agamemnon, for her play Molora, an enactment through Greek tragedy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For discussion of the staging and translation issues, see Hardwick (2010). For the South African cultural and political context, see Betine Van Zyl Smit (2011).

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under-privileged” (xvi) and then reflected on Zbigniew Herbert’s view of the task of the poet to “salvage justice and truth out of the catastrophe of history” (xviii). In Heaney’s case that included coming to terms with the implications of his own stance.64 His poetic response to Aeschylus’ play challenged not only himself and his society but also his readers, both to recognize the force of silence and repression and also to find the means to step outside it. Aeschylus’ text and the responses of MacNeice and Heaney have further implications beyond the frames that they themselves set. They contribute to wider understanding of how poetry moves across and between the borders between individual and social and between present, past and future. And so in the context of debates about the differences between the material effects of war and the refractions that re-imagine war and violence in the cultural memory,65 Aeschylus’ play both resists repression and recognizes the “interruptions” that mark rewriting. Mud, lice and wounds are both physical and metaphorical expressions of trauma. I thank the anonymous reader and Stratos E. Constantinidis for the ­constructive criticisms and the suggestions they made on a preliminary version of this essay.

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His stance continues to raise problematic questions; see Hardwick in The Oxford Handbook on Greek Drama in the Americas, (eds.) Kathryn Bosher, et al. (2015: 819–840) of text changes made in Heaney’s work for performances in the us. David Reynolds (2013).

chapter 12

The Oresteia in Kannada: The Indian Context Vijaya Guttal 12.1 Introduction Lawrence Venuti, commenting on communication through inscription, asked the following question: “Can a translation ever communicate to its readers the understanding of the foreign text that foreign readers have?” Venuti answered his own question in the affirmative. “Yes, I want to argue, but this communication will always be partial, both incomplete and inevitably slanted towards the domestic scene. It occurs only when the domestic remainder released by the translation includes an inscription of the foreign context in which the text first emerged.”1 Through domestic inscription translation establishes a linguistic “zone of contact” between the source and the target cultures. There is a paradox at the heart of translation activity in the sense that the issues of both “cultural meet” and “cultural divide” are implicit in it. Perhaps the apparent “cultural divide” reinforces the fascination for the foreign text and the effort to interpret it in domestic terms. The translations and adaptations of Greek drama in general and Aeschylean drama in particular were made possible in Kannada due to various cultural compulsions. The “cultural divide” may be perceived in the widely different life perspective of the Indians which had sought to accommodate the stark tragic reality within the fold of the regenerative principles of life. Even Aeschylus’ chorus says in Agamemnon “Let good prevail” (121). Translations and adaptations of Greek tragedy bridge the divide by introducing the tragic experience to the Kannada audience; but the trauma of adaptation was such that in order to accommodate the foreign perspective, the Kannada translator had to restructure and adapt the traditional Indian myths to the Greek tragic form. The path-breaking translations and adaptations of Greek drama by B.M. Srikanthaiah, a veteran Kannada translator, illustrate the effects of cultural grafting in an effort at assimilation.

1 Lawrence Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia” in The Translation Studies Reader, (ed.) Lawrence Venuti, (New York and London: Routledge, 2000: 473).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004332164_014

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The Dynamics of Translation

Notwithstanding the fact that contacts between India and Greece date back to the times of Herodotus and Alexander the Great, in modern times, the Indian encounter with Greek literature was mediated by the British colonial enterprise. Recent studies of imperial textuality have shown that complicity existed between colonial ideology and the introduction of English language and literature to contain native populations of the colonies. The “English text” was converted as the medium of the colonial civilizing mission. Gauri Viswanathan, a postcolonial critic, draws attention to: […] the irony that English literature appeared as a subject in the curriculum of the colonies long before it was institutionalized in the home country. As early as 1820s, when the classical curriculum still reigned supreme in England despite the strenuous efforts of some concerned critics to loosen its hold, English as the study of culture and not simply the study of language had already found a secure place in the British Indian curriculum.2 It was Thomas Babington Macaulay’s historical minute which inaugurated the introduction of English education in India as a common policy even when the basis of education back home was still the classical text. The obvious intention was to create an army of clerical staff to assist colonial administration, although the whole enterprise fell under the rubric of the civilizing mission. The intervention of political and historical forces was instrumental in establishing the hegemony of English studies, and the mask of humanistic commitment led to its internalization by the native communities. Though the situation in the larger multilingual Indian context shared common characteristics, each one of its major linguistic traditions had their own unique literary histories. Curiously, translations of Greek classics are found in almost all the major Indian languages which are featured as part of the colonial heritage of India. Kannada is one of the four Dravidian languages of South India, spoken in the state of Karnataka. Kannada scholars debating the issue of the translation practice of Greek texts into Kannada have put forth diverse arguments. Apparently the colonial valorization of classical literature along with English literature was responsible for the commencement of translating Greek texts in the regional languages of India. V.B. Tarakeshwar, a Kannada 2 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest (London: Faber and Faber, 1989: 3).

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scholar of Translation Studies, offers an interesting argument for the arrival of the classical text into India: Apart from English, the translators (in Kannada) were attracted only to Greek. For the English had projected the Greco-Roman culture as their own. The languages and literary traditions of the regions they ruled (e.g., Sanskrit, Tamil, Kannada, etc.) were older than the English literary tradition. Hence in order to overcome their inferiority complex, it was necessary for the British to claim Greco-Roman literature as their own along with English Literature.3 It is possible to account for the projection of Greek and Latin literatures by the colonial masters as a strategy of maintaining their cultural hegemony. Foregrounding English literature along with classical literature perhaps affirms the mutually reinforcing relationship between the two. Although the colonial powers were successful to a considerable extent in consolidating imperial authority by insisting upon English as the standard and thereby enforcing the inferiority of colonized cultures, very often it led to the production of “anti-colonial counter textuality.” The knowledge of English language and literature was appropriated to shape indigenous realities with the help of various forms of translation. Commenting on Homi K. Bhabha, Leela Gandhi writes: The grim polarities of the colonial encounter, he maintains, are necessarily bridged by a “third space” of communication, negotiation and by implication, translation. It is in this indeterminate zone, or “place of hybridity,” where anti-colonial politics first begins to articulate its agenda […]4 The practice of translation has long been acknowledged as creating new modes of cultural communication. It underscores the process of transformation which is in a way double-edged, visible in both the source-text as well as target-text traditions. When the source text is translated, it invariably undergoes transformation to suit the cultural context and the linguistic resources of the target language. On the other hand, the translated text transmits alternate perspectives into the target language culture. The translated text, which is a hybrid, is also the locus (topos) which engenders anti-colonial politics. Although 3 Tarakeshwar V.B., Vasahatushahi mattu Bhashantara [Colonialism and Translation] (Hampi: Kannada University, 2006: 66). 4 Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998: 130–131).

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Niranjana argues that “translation as a practice shapes and takes shape within the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under colonialism” (Niranjana 1992),5 the history of literary translations in Kannada attests to the fact that the western text was appropriated to create new forms and perceptions by breaking off from the shackles of the rigid traditional system. As Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon observe, it is interesting to note: […] the paradoxical results of cultural and literary contact. On the one hand, it is known that massive influence from the West created heavily imitative forms of expression in India, as in other colonized areas; on the other, we know that this same influence had the effect of provoking the emergence of totally new forms.6 12.3

The First Two Phases of Translations into Kannada

Translation is central to the formation of Kannada literary culture – as it has also been for other modern Indian languages. Ganesh Devy, a nativist scholar, has argued that when modern Indian languages started developing their own independent literatures, they began with translations of works – such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – which were written in Sanskrit. However, these “translations” were later identified as adaptations or remakes because the “translator” did not closely follow the original. In fact, the liberties that a translator took with the Sanskrit texts were identified as a mark of his skill and talent. These “translators” appropriated the original Sanskrit text in an effort to enrich the regional literary culture. For Devy, the intense activity of translating, adapting, and remaking the classics in modern times is comparable to that of about a thousand years ago (1993: 98).7 The first phase of translations of the Western text in the late 19th century began with the plays of Shakespeare which were adapted by toning down their cultural differences. For instance, the Shakespearean characters were given Indian names. The translators of this period, who were not highly educated, were for the most part theatre professionals whose primary concern was to create a successful performance for the local audiences. They sometimes borrowed 5 Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation, (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1992: 2). 6 Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon, “Shifting grounds of exchange: B.M. Srikantaiah and Kannada translation” in Post-colonial Translation edited by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London and New York: Routledge, 1999: 163). 7 G.N. Devy, In Another Tongue (this edition Delhi: Macmillan, 1995: 118).

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plots from the plays of Shakespeare which they cast into the mold of Indian myths and legends. A good example of this trend is Srikantheshgowda’s adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Pramilarjuniya. Most of the adaptations from that period were executed in prose. Since their goal was to provide entertainment, the subtle ironies of Shakespeare’s plots and poetry were lost in translation. For reasons that remain unknown, the Kannada language, which has a literary history of a thousand years, did not have a dramatic tradition of its own until the 17th century. However there is some evidence about the existence of folk performances during this long period of time. It was in the late 19th century that the translations and adaptations of both Sanskrit and English texts began to forge a dramatic tradition in Kannada. Translation theorists argue that this phenomenon, which is also common to most other Indian language traditions, is perhaps due to the ban on all dramatic activity under Muslim rule. Sanskrit literature, which dates back to the pre-Christian era, had a rich dramatic tradition with such great playwrights as Bhasa, Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti, Shudraka and many others. The translations and adaptations played a major role in providing new dramatic models. Sanskrit drama was closely translated into Kannada because it belonged to the same culture, whereas the plays of Shakespeare were adapted to accommodate for cultural differences. The second phase of translation in Kannada began around the Navodaya period or the “modern” Renaissance which coincides with the beginning of the 20th century. This period was heavily influenced by western education, the reformist movement, the nationalist movement and the growing awareness about the formation of Kannada identity. Those Kannada scholars, who were educated by the English, were motivated to strengthen Kannada literature largely through translation. The history of their translations shows that they subtly subverted some of the English texts that they rendered into Kannada. B.M. Srikanthaiah, a professor of English and a fervent Kannada activist commonly known as BMSri, revitalized the Kannada language and literature by exposing the Kannada authors and audiences to new genres and topics through his translations of western texts. Some of his invaluable contributions to reshaping the Kannada poetic idiom and style of writing can be found in his English Gitegalu (a collection of translations from English Romantic poetry) and his translations of Greek drama. BMSri prompted his disciples to bring the best from other languages to Kannada literature in order to help it break away from the domination of the Sanskrit tradition. If his English Gitegalu succeeded in introducing lyric poetry and newer poetic techniques, then his

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translations of Greek drama introduced the genre of tragedy to the Kannada literary public. Tragedy as a literary genre did not exist in India in the past. A traditional Sanskrit play always began with a prayer (called “naandi”) and ended with a benediction called (“Bharatavakya”). However, the concept of tragedy existed in native folk forms of drama performed in rural settings as part of the oral tradition of Indian literature. The only exception to this was Bhasa’s play, Urubhanga, but it did not set a trend. Sanskrit plays may display emotions of terror, grief and pity, but they are always expected to end on an auspicious note. As Horace Hayman Wilson (Theatre of the Hindus: 1827) observed long ago: The Hindus in fact have no Tragedy […] The absence of tragic catastrophe in Hindu dramas is not merely an unconscious omission; such a catastrophe is prohibited by positive rule. The conduct of what may be termed the classical drama of the Hindus is exemplary and dignified.8 BMSri’s translations of Greek drama initiated a debate among Kannada intellectuals about the relevance of tragic drama in the context of Indian literature and philosophy. Sanskrit drama is based on a different philosophy of life than Greek tragedy. Death is only an episode, not the final reality, in Indian culture because the idea of rebirth gives hope for another life. In Greek culture, on the other hand, the idea that death is final renders the fate of man tragic and poignant. It was the moving power of the tragic fate of man presented in some of the Greek tragedies that impressed Indian translators such as BMSri and K.V. Raghavachar. BMSri has translated three plays. All of them were inspired by his acute sense of the absence of tragedy in Kannada. His first play Gadayuddha, meaning The Battle of Mace (1926), is the adaptation of a Kannada epic by the same title. The epic itself was an adaptation of the ancient Indian epic, The Mahabharata, by Ranna, a 10th-century Kannada poet. BMSri cast the play into the mold of a tragedy, so Duryodhana, the anti-hero of The Mahabharata is represented as a tragic hero. His second and more well-known play, Ashwathaman (1927) is modeled on Sophocles’ Ajax, so Ashwathama, another immortal hero from the Mahabharata, is transformed into a human hero by the author to enable him to meet his tragic end. The play breaks with the traditional image of Ashwathama as one blessed with the gift of immortality and provides BMSri a tragic plot similar to Ajax in its outline. 8 Horace Hayman Wilson, Theatre of the Hindus (1827), Quoted by M.R. Kale in his edition of Swapnavasavadatta of Bhasa, (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas, first pub1945; reprint 2002: xvi).

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The plots of Ajax and Ashwathaman share many common features. For instance, the enraged Ajax resents the Greek leaders’ decision to give Achilles’ weapons to Odysseus, so he attempts to attack them at night. However, he ends up killing cattle and sheep by mistake and he is so embarrassed that he commits suicide. Similarly, Ashwathama attempts to avenge the death of his father (who had been deceitfully killed by the Pandavas) by attacking them at night. However, he ends up killing their young children; and he is so embarrassed that takes his own life. BMSri’s translation of Ashwathaman modeled after the Greek play was the most successful of the three plays both as a text and as performance in terms of its tragic intensity. Nonetheless, he also faced negative criticism because some critics were of the opinion that in his attempt to adapt the genre of tragedy, BMSri had turned traditional villains into tragic heroes. BMSri was the first to translate a play by Aeschylus. He translated Aeschylus’ The Persians (Parasikaru) in 1935. This is a close translation of the original, and perhaps it was for this reason that it failed to impress the audience as much as Gadayuddha and Ashwathaman. The Persians is the only play which is based on the historic victory of the Greeks over the Persians – a subject that did not have much to say to the Kannada audiences at that time. In his three plays, BMSri carries out three different experiments in translation: in Gadayuddha, he turns an epic into a tragedy; In Ashwathaman, he adapts a native myth into tragedy; and in the Parasikaru, he closely translates a Greek tragedy. His experiments demonstrate his efforts to create an Indian tradition of tragic drama. It was thanks to him that later writers like Kuvempu were able to write tragedies like Raktakshi (The Crimson Eye) and Smashana Kurukshetra (The Graveyard of Kurukshetra). He established a tradition that was later followed by major playwrights such as Samsa, Girish Karnad, Lankesh P., and Chandrashekhara Kambar. These translations, adaptations, and remakes of Greek tragic drama were pivotal for the introduction of the genre of tragedy into the Kannada theatre culture. 12.4

Aeschylus and the Third Phase of Translations into Kannada

Kannada culture has been a fertile ground where translations have flourished. The process of translation involves a complex linguistic and cultural ­negotiation. The Kannada culture has not only demonstrated accommodative resilience, but has also shown an ability to find its own benefit in these translations. Greek literature has mainly come to Kannada via the English language, though there have been a few scholars who knew Greek. More than twenty

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Greek plays have been translated into Kannada so far, and sometimes the same play has been translated more than once into Kannada. For instance, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon has four Kannada translations; King Oedipus and Antigone have three each. During its “modern” Renaissance (the “Navodaya” period), the Kannada culture – which had been diluted throughout its colonial period – found in Greek tragedy a significant source for alternative worldviews. The assimilation of translations and adaptations may be regarded as a part of the process of restructuring cultural identity. The translation process into Kannada has been able to achieve three objectives: (a) it helped to shake off the domination of Sanskrit tradition; (b) it initiated a resistance to purely imitative forms; and (c) it satisfied the intense desire to reconstruct cultural identity. The translation of Greek drama into Indian languages has been part of the larger cultural and colonial politics during the early decades of the 20th century. BMSri was not only the first to translate Aeschylus into Kannada, but he was also successful in forging a band of disciples who shared his enthusiasm for Greek drama. He even inspired some of them to learn Greek before they attempted to adapt Greek plays into Kannada. For instance, of the four Kannada translators of Agamemnon (i.e., K.V. Raghavachar, S.V. Ranganna, C.P. Krishna Kumar and Vijaya Guttal), the first two were followers of BMSri. This period, which introduced Greek plays to the Kannada stage, involved serious scholars who turned to translation to satisfy an elite audience which had become conscious of the status of Greek tragedies as world classics. BMSri was the only translator who also tried his hand at adaptation. Almost all of the subsequent translators produced close translations of the Greek tragedies because they felt confident that their readers and audiences had become familiar enough with Greek drama to appreciate its uniqueness and “otherness.” The Kannada poetic idiom had grown strong enough to accommodate the representations of another culture without resorting to adaptation. K.V. Raghavachar was the first to translate Aeschylus’ Agamemnon into Kannada. Along with Agamemnon, he also translated all seven plays of Sophocles and Frogs by Aristophanes. He took great pains to learn Greek from H.K. Moulton, a professor of Greek who taught at the United Theological College in Bangalore. In his preface to Agamemnon, Raghavachar states that he mainly made use of Verral’s edition of the play for his translation, and that he went on to consult the editions of John Dewar Denniston and Denys Page, Lewis Campbell, Philip Vellacot, and Edward Fraenkel. He also mentions that the Central Sahitya Akademi, (a government-funded literary academy) commissioned him to do a prose translation of the play – though his personal preference was for a verse translation.

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By contrast, his translation of Sophocles’ King Oedipus is both in verse and in old Kannada. These two choices, which were in vogue at the time of his translation, eventually became outdated and his translation is no longer readable by subsequent generations. He completed translating Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in 1962, and his translation was published in 1965 with an introductory essay (“Greek Tragedy”) written by H.D. Kitto. The essay was written at the request of the British Council in Bangalore, and Raghavachar translated it into Kannada. The essay places Raghavachar’s translation of Agamemnon in the proper context. The translation of the play reads quite well, but at times the language is stiff and affects the flow of dialogue. Raghavachar, who knew Greek, also made an effort to render the pronunciation of Greek proper names and place names into Kannada – not always correctly or successfully as in the case of “Klutaimestra” for Clytemnestra and “Ayaskhulos” for Aeschylus. The second translation of Agamemnon is by S.V. Ranganna, a professor of English, a close follower of BMSri, and author of Western Tragic Dramas from the Greeks to the present. His translation of Agamemnon was published posthumously in 1999 with a brief preface which he wrote to contextualize the conflict between human agency and fate in the play and to explain the ethical and religious principles behind its structure. However, he did not state which English translation or bilingual edition he used for his translation of the play into Kannada. His focus seems to have been more on the thematic aspects of the play rather than on the formal aspects of his translation. His translation followed the original closely and he included stage directions for the movements of the chorus. C.P. Krishnakumar is the third translator to render Aeschylus’ tragedies into Kannada. He translated the three plays that make up the Oresteia trilogy. The translation of Agamemnon appeared long before the translations of Choephori and Eumenides which were published in 1991. The language of his translation is closer to the Kannada vernacular than the translation of S.V. Ranganna. ­Krishnakumar translated all seven plays of Aeschylus and some of the plays by Euripides, which was a significant contribution. However, his translations are mechanical and lack supporting material. Vijaya Guttal is the fourth translator to have rendered Aeschylus’ plays into Kannada. She was a student at the University of Athens, Greece, and she studied Greek language and literature from 1983 to 1985. She has translated the three plays of The Oresteia, paying particular attention to their unity and the connectivity of their tragic vision. Her translation of The Oresteia as a whole, introduces the Kannada readers to the concept of a trilogy because the three plays that comprise The Oresteia had not been previously translated all t­ ogether. The philosophy and the value systems which governed Athenian

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drama in the 5th century bc and Indian drama in the 2nd century ad are very different. Any translation of a Greek play into an Indian language has to circumvent these issues to find a place in the Indian psyche in general and the Kannada psyche in particular. Guttal’s translation of the Oresteia was published by the Central Sahitya Akademi in 2010, and received an award for translation in 2010 by Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati, the Karnataka State Translation Academy. Guttal added to the book a Kannada translation of select sections from Philip Vellacot’s essay. The prefatory essay puts the reader in touch with the trilogy’s Greek mythological background and with the philosophical perspective necessary for the appreciation of the trilogy. The book also includes a brief critical introduction to each play of the trilogy to make the transition of the Greek text into Kannada more harmonious. Unlike most other Kannada translators who resort to the Latinized forms of the Greek names, Guttal has tried to provide Greek pronunciations of the place names and the character names in the play. Apart from the Oresteia and The Persians, one more Aeschylean play, Prometheus Bound (Baddha Prometheus) was translated by T.V. Venkatachala Shastri in 1966. He was also a disciple of BMSri. He kept the BMSri tradition alive in his translations of Prometheus Bound and Women of Trachis. He was a serious scholar and provided an exhaustive critical introduction to the play ­together with end notes and a bibliography. He was an extremely capable translator, except for the fact that he too was unable to overcome BMSri’s enthusiasm for old Kannada diction. The old Kannada form has been out of date for a long time, thus making the reading and staging of the plays very difficult. It is interesting to note that Agamemnon was translated four times and The Oresteia twice. The Kannada fascination for Greek drama speaks of two main upshots: the appreciation of the greatness of another culture by Kannada people; and the introduction of tragedy as a genre to the Kannada literary public. The awareness of different possibilities of dramatic vision made Greek drama an important source of aesthetic inspiration for Kannada culture. These translations were also part of the enrichment program of Kannada language and literature. It is possible to identify two main trends in the translation of Aeschylus’ plays into Kannada: close translations made by translators such as BMSri, Raghavachar and Guttal, who knew Greek and were able to create the right kind of ambience; and “translations” made by translators such as S.V. ­Ranganna and Krishna Kumar C.P., who did not know Greek and depended completely on English translations of Aeschylus’ plays. Their inability to place their translations in the proper perspective accounts for the element of strangeness in the translations.

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Aeschylus on the Kannada Stage

Staging the performances of Greek plays in Kannada has been a challenge for Indian theatre directors and actors because they did not know how to deal with long speeches and minimal action. BMSri’s Ashwathaman was the first play which was staged in the tradition of Greek tragedy, and it was directed by BMSri himself. K.V. Rajagopal’s comments on this production are especially revealing: At a time when our own theatre performances had several drawbacks, the success of this play (Ashwathaman) was very significant. When the very idea of curtains, arrangement of light and the stage were very vague, it is important to note that the performance of this play was able to attract even the traditionalists and also the new critics. We need to recognize the fact that it played an important role in gathering educated audiences for a new Kannada drama performance. Given the conditions of the time (approximately from 1925 to 1930) the performance of the play seems to have been extraordinary.9 However, BMSri was not deterred by the conditions of his time, and he made constant efforts to involve students and theatre enthusiasts in the performance of the translations of Greek tragedies. Many scholars recorded their experiences and commented on the performances positively. Reportedly, even the ­general audiences appreciated the performances of Gadayauddha and Ashwathaman which were staged in the tradition of Greek tragedy. ­Post-Independence stagings of such translations became more knowledgeable thanks to the Schools of Drama that were established. Basavalingaiah C., a well-known theatre director in Kannada who also served as Director of Rangayana, a theatre school in Mysore, reported that Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and The Persians (Parasikaru) had been performed on several occasions by theatre enthusiasts. He stated that he himself directed Sophocles’ King Oedipus and Euripides’ Medea, two of the most popular plays on the Kannada stage. In his opinion, the performances of Greek plays evinced a lot of interest as they familiarized the native audience to the concept of tragedy. Even the average Indian theatergoer was impressed by the way these Greek plays in translation presented the naked truth about human existence. 9 K.V. Rajagopal, “Ashwathaman: A Critical Analysis,” in Srinidhi (Sri Centenary Volume), ­edited by G.S. Shivarudrappa (Bangalore: BMSri Smaraka Pratishthana 1985: 256). The translation is mine.

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They were more impressed by the way these plays staged the tragedy of the human condition than by their mythology. In Basavalingaiah’s opinion, these Greek tragedies made the auspicious endings of Sanskrit drama appear unrealistic by comparison. He thought that the murder of King Agamemnon by Clytemnestra was more convincing than the love affair of Shakuntala and King Dushyanta. Laxmi Chandrashekhar reported that King Oedipus was performed in 1973 with Girish Karnad, a Kannada playwright and actor, playing the lead role. Sophocles’ King Oedipus and Euripides’ Medea were quite popular and were often performed by college students. Medea was successfully directed by Malati, a female director, who addressed contemporary feminist issues. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata also appealed to the Kannada audiences and has been staged many times to this date, as well as Euripides’ Trojan Women. Most of these theatre performances took place in state-sponsored theatres like Ravindra Kalakshetra and Rangashankara in Bangalore, the capital of the State of Karnataka. ­Ninasam, a well-known theatre school which is located in Heggodu in the State of Karnataka, has produced both Indian and Western plays – such as King Oedipus and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. The school’s travelling players (the Tirugata) have performed these plays during their annual tour to various towns in the state. Venkataramana Aital, the director of Ninasam, also staged The Oresteia (in Guttal’s translation) but under a different title: Orestis Purana. He staged it with non-professional local actors using minimal props and elaborate costumes at the Rangashankara Theatre in Bangalore in 2015. Orestis Purana was performed in the style of Yakshagana, a folk theatre form which is native of the coastal area of the state and it enacts Indian myths and legends by combining music, dance, and dialogue. The costumes, the make-up, the movements, and the dances followed the style of Yakshgana and they transported the audiences to the world of Greek myth through a stylized performance (Fig. 12.1). Aital held classes to familiarize the actors with the Greek background of the translation – from the Greek myths and legends to the history and geography – and to help them bring the spirit of the drama to their Indian audience. The ritualistic environment of Oresteia found a congenial ground in the Yakshagana form as rituals form part its dramatic tradition. The ritual worship which Clytemnestra performs in “Orestis Purana” is designed in such a way that after she offers worship to the traditional Greek gods, she is made to turn to face the audience and offer worship to the stage, a common Indian stage ritual, indicating the merging of two cultures. Some stage strategies of the play also follow the “Theyyam” from Kerala, where the arrival of fierce characters like the Rakshasas is marked by loud music and fast beating of the drum.

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Clytemnestra announcing the fall of Troy in Orestis Purana. PHOTO PERMISSION, VENKATARAMANA AITAL, 2015.

Similarly, the arrival of the leading characters like Clytemnestra and Agamemnon is accompanied by the sound of the drum and music. The steps and the movements of these characters are more accentuated than those of other ordinary characters. Stand-in actors are employed for the presentation of the different moods of major characters such as Clytemnestra and Orestis. The crown designed for Clytemnestra resembles the crown worn by violent Yakshagana characters like Hidimba (a female character from the epic Mahabharata) known for her ferocity. If Athena’s crown resembles the crown of the younger gods, Apollo wears one which is common to the various deities. The crown worn by Cassandra shows the influence of Indonesian style. The Furies wear crowns with shapes of snakes on them suggesting the element of horror. Japanese music is used in two places to highlight the somber atmosphere and pathos. On the whole the performance is highly impressive, and the poetic impact of Aeschylus comes across powerfully. If BMSri’s translation of Aeschylus mediated the assimilation of the tragic form, Aital’s direction of the performance of Orestis Purana has lent it a new existence altogether. Both instances ­underscore the migratory nature of translation, exhibiting the resilience of adopting local colors and flavors. The present performance provides a distinctive perspective and a unique experience of the merging of cultures on the contemporary Indian stage. The Kannada adaptation of the Greek myth brings to the fore different backgrounds and intents, allowing for a variety of

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interpretations. It underscores the flexibility of the original myth while at the same time highlighting the universality of human spirit. What is interesting about this performance is that although it is rooted in the Aeschylean text, there is a distinct fusion of the local and the universal. The accent of the performance is clearly on the reconciliatory spirit of the drama. 12.6 Conclusion It is significant that all the seven extant plays of Aeschylus were translated in a distant regional Indian language like Kannada at a time when modern technological facilities which connect the globe today were still unprecedented. It speaks volumes for the manner in which cultures travel from one part of the world to another despite adverse conditions and make the dissemination of ideas possible. These translations, which crossed national and cultural boundaries, introduced alternative modes of thought. As Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon comment, Though they are often initiated through violence, translations, as forms of contact, also put into play systems of interaction whose outcomes introduce new terms of exchange. What recent post-colonial theory alerts us to is the need to restore complexity to our understanding of alterity, of oppositional identities created through struggle. The heritage of imperialism, according to Edward Said, is paradoxical. Although it led people to believe that they were “exclusively Western, or Oriental,” in fact “(i)mperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale.”10 said 1993: 336

The translations of Aeschylus thus involved the complexities of cultural transfer and represented at once both forms of alterity and assimilation. In spite of the implicit asymmetry of languages and cultures, these translations have made the creation of new literary genres and identities possible. The translational act in the Kannada context corroborated the fact that translations provoke cultural change and also connect communities. 10

Vanamala Viswanatha and Sherry Simon, “Shifting Grounds of Exchange: B.M. Srikantaiah and Kannada Translation,” in Post-colonial Translation, (eds.) Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London and New York: Routledge, 1999: 176); also see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).

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The translations of Aeschylus and other Greek playwrights not only imported tragic consciousness and a new genre into the Kannada literary world, they also opened up new possibilities of dramatic creation, thus helping to bridge the cultural divide to a considerable degree. BMSri’s translations of Greek plays had set a new trend both in play-writing and play-acting. At the same time, as the charges leveled against BMSri reveal, the interaction had been traumatic in more than one sense. In order to create a tragedy of our own, BMSri had appropriated the traditional myths and legends which were part of the Mahabharata, an epic that has shaped Indian consciousness for centuries. As a result, in order to embody the tragic experience in Gadayuddha, BMSri transformed Duryodhana, an anti-hero into a hero. Similarly, in his Ashwathaman, an adaptation of Ajax, the deathless Ashwathama meets a tragic end. Such alterations of the epic structure did not find easy acceptance and reveal the fact that the entry of tragedy into the Kannada consciousness was traumatic. Although in comparison with Greek tragedies, the auspicious endings of Sanskrit drama may appear almost unrealistic to the modern spectator, the extent of violence characteristic of Greek tragic plays poses its own problems of presentation on the Kannada stage. On the technical side, the concept of a trilogy remains unfamiliar, whereas the use of chorus forges a common bond between the two modes of drama, as the chorus was a familiar feature of Kannada folk drama. The Indian translator of Oresteia may perhaps find it significant and something closer to home that the trilogy goes beyond the tragic catastrophe in Eumenides and moves towards harmony with an emphasis on the regenerative forces of life. The “new terms of exchange” thus underscore the complexities of the translational process which unleash unforeseen developments. It is interesting to note that on the one hand Aeschylus and Greek drama were instrumental in introducing tragedy as a genre to Kannada literature; on the other hand, the final reconciliatory note on which the Oresteia closes helps to bring it within the domain of the Indian dramatic framework.

chapter 13

Two Centuries, Two Oresteias, Two Remakes Helen E. Moritz 13.1 Introduction In this chapter I examine two remakes of Aeschylus’ Oresteia that reflect a cultural divide between the early 20th and the early 21st centuries in social mores and theatrical practice. These are Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) and Katharine Noon’s Home Siege Home (2009). While O’Neill’s play observes the conventions of realistic theatre, Noon’s is boldly ­postmodern. As background, I consider briefly some major treatments of the House of A ­ treus in antiquity and the persuasive explanation of Edith Hall for some differences among them. I then analyze how O’Neill’s play incorporates a realistic ­re-visioning of the Oresteia, while Noon’s a more free-wheeling treatment. I also discuss how Noon’s play reinstates some aspects of the Oresteia abandoned in the meantime. Aeschylus’ Oresteia arguably engendered more subsequent tragedies in the ancient world than any other 5th-century play.1 Even among the extant Greek tragedies, the theme of the House of Atreus has been treated by all three great Athenian tragedians, and, indeed, by the Roman Seneca. The Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides are not merely alternative treatments of pre-existing myth, but display direct influence from Aeschylus. To mention the most specific instances, Clytemnestra’s death cries in Sophocles’ Electra (1415–1416) actually quote those of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ play of that title (1343, 1345); the token scenes in both Sophocles’ Electra (871–919) and Euripides’ (513–546) allude to that in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers (166–237). Further, Euripides’ Trojan Women (308–343) borrows the frenzied prophetic Cassandra of Agamemnon (­1072–1172) and her throwing off of her prophetic regalia (tw 451–454, Ag. 1264–1268).2 1 In Agamemnon in Performance (edited by Macintosh et al.) Pat Easterling observes, for example, that “everyone recognizes the [Oresteia] as seminal for the development of Attic drama” (2005: 23) and speaks of “the generative power of this play for subsequent Greek culture” (2005: 35). 2 See also Easterling’s discussion (2005: 27 with notes, and 31–32). See Chapter Two in this volume where Johanna Hanink and Anna S. Uhlig discuss, inter alia, Euripides’ engaging “in

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The monumental trilogic form of the Oresteia enabled Aeschylus to pre­ sent Clytemnestra as a successful and triumphant adulteress and murderer before she becomes the victim of her avenging son Orestes who is then tried for matricide. Sophocles’ and Euripides’ single plays focus on the punishment of ­Clytemnestra and Electra’s complicity in that, with or without anticipation of consequent punishment for Orestes (Eur. El. 1250–1267, Soph. El. 1424–1425). Edith Hall’s intriguing hypothesis about the near dearth of evidence for a re-staging of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in antiquity can be applied as well to ­Sophocles’ and Euripides’ choice of subject matter for their single plays: Hall writes that it may have been “ideologically virtually impossible to perform ­Aeschylus’ ­Agamemnon (or any imitation with a similarly androgynous, autonomous, proactive, amoral, and politically triumphant queen) in isolation”; the other two plays “are actually required if Clytemnestra is to be punished for her insurrection, and formally subordinated” (60, cf. 56; 60, n. 23; 74). This notion is also suggestive for the treatment of a Clytemnestra-figure in two other plays: in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis Clytemnestra is a sympathetic figure.3 Deianira in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, with its returning-hero-murdered-by-wife plot parallel to that of Agamemnon, is an unwitting killer.4 In Rome in the mid-1st century ad Seneca returns to the general plot of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in his own play of that name, but with the addition of Electra spiriting Orestes away with Strophius (929–945), Clytemnestra threatening Electra from her position as queen (961, 964–966), Aegisthus confining Electra to a cave (997–1000), and Cassandra foretelling retribution for Clytemnestra (1012). Although at the end of this play Clytemnestra has successfully killed her husband with the help of her lover Aegisthus and nominally remains in charge, Edith Hall identifies a significant difference between Seneca’s queen and Aeschylus’: according to Hall Seneca’s Clytemnestra is an “unstable poetic rewriting of Aeschylus on a large scale.” Line references to the ancient plays are cited from the following editions: Sommerstein’s Loeb edition of Aeschylus. Oresteia. Agamemnon [Ag.], Libation-Bearers [lb]. Eumenides [Eum.]; Lloyd-Jones and Wilson’s Oxford Classical Text of Sophocles Fabulae; Kovacs’ Loeb editions of Euripides. Electra [El.], Trojan Women [tw], and Iphigenia at Aulis [ia]; and Fitch’s Loeb edition of Seneca’s Agamemnon. Any translations are my own. 3 See Edith Hall in Agamemnon in Performance, (eds.) Macintosh et al. (2005: 57, 69). 4 While one might object that Medea’s crimes in Euripides’ play go as unpunished as Clytemnestra’s in the Agamemnon, Edith Hall counters, “There is no real parallel in Euripides’ Medea, in which the ancients could tolerate a rebel wife and filicidal mother escaping the end of her play unpunished: Medea does not install herself as tyrant of a Greek polis, and anyway her access to the mēchanē puts a question mark over her mortal status, and therefore over the generic requirement that she be punished at all” (2005: 60–61).

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­adulteress,” and not a strongly maternal or political figure (65–66). Certainly the Senecan Clytemnestra who struggles – ineffectually – to reclaim her pudor contrasts dramatically with the Aeschylean Clytemnestra who exults over her husband’s corpse that her lover “lights the fire on her hearth” (1434– 1436) and luxuriates in how the murder of Cassandra has “added spice to her bed” (1446–1447). And though Seneca’s Clytemnestra plays the tyrant (regina, 965) with Electra, she is a far cry from Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra who faces down the armed elders of Argos (1379–1394, 1401–1406, and 1412–1425) and closes the play by sweeping into the palace on the arm of her lover (1672–1673). At the end of Seneca’s play Clytemnestra is upstaged by Cassandra who retains a dignified autonomy even as she walks to her death (1004–1011) and who speaks the final words of the play, a foreshadowing of retribution for Clytemnestra (1012). Edith Hall writes of the long shadow cast by Seneca’s Clytemnestra on subsequent literary and theatrical history: “Along with Ovid’s sexy heroine, the most influential Clytemnestra until 130 years ago was Seneca’s neurotic adulteress” (63), this influence being seen even in Eugene O’Neill’s 1931 Mourning Becomes Electra (74). According to Hall, “the manslaying Amazon, who prioritized the mother-daughter relationship over that between husband and wife, simply could not become resonant again until…the chronological point at which women’s rights as both political agents and as parents finally began to be discussed with gravity […]. The authentic Aeschylean Clytemnestra was in […] retreat for well over two millennia” (74–75). The two millennia have now passed, and the two plays I have chosen for analysis illustrate a reversal of the shift from an Aeschylean to a Senecan ­Clytemnestra noted by Edith Hall while also incorporating the very different production values that reflect the times in which they emerged.5 If O’Neill’s Clytemnestra is an “unstable adulteress” in the mode of Seneca, in Noon’s play we see the return of the fiercely maternal Clytemnestra of Aeschylus. Noon’s Clytemnestra is also political, if reluctantly so; but her trilogy is political, not only in sharing the anti-war stance found in other versions,6 but especially in 5 Hartigan does not treat either of these plays, Home Siege Home because it post-dated her book, Mourning Becomes Electra because, in her view, it falls into a category of plays that “seek to express their message via the myths themselves and do not pretend to be r­ e-creations of an Athenian original” (1995: 5, note 3). I am not alone in not sharing Hartigan’s view with regard to Mourning Becomes Electra. The trilogic form itself is an allusion to Aeschylus’ O ­ resteia. Inter alia, see also Moorton, “O’Neill’s American Eumenides.” 6 Inter alia, David Rabe’s 1973 The Orphan, Robert Auletta’s 1994 Agamemnon, Andrew Ordover’s 1994 Agamemnon, Charles Mee’s 1994 Agamemnon, and Amy Russell’s 2000 Millennium Project; see Helene Foley (2005: 330–335, 340).

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resurrecting the public judgment of Orestes notably lacking in many.7 These two plays, very much products of their times, also vividly illustrate a “cultural divide” with respect to scenic design, playwright’s authority, and plot elements selected for inclusion. Despite the differences between their plays, both playwrights confronted at least two similar challenges in creating their r­ emakes. Of necessity it was a challenge to contemplate bringing an entire trilogy, first produced in a daylong Athenian festival setting, to an American audience accustomed to a few hours’ evening entertainment. As David Ng wrote of Katharine Noon’s Home Siege Home in the Los Angeles Times, “epic plays […] require a down payment of time and energy that only truly devoted audiences are usually prepared to fork over […]. It’s an investment that promises an immersive experience transcending the normal boundaries of the art form.” Theatre-goers in 1931 may have been used to longer plays than today’s viewers, but reviews in both The New York Times and The New York Post made special note of the length of Mourning Becomes Electra: J. Brooks Atkinson in the Times led with its sixhour playing time and John Mason Brown in the Post alluded more generally to “the hours [the] performance so freely consumes.”8 By comparison, Noon’s Home Siege Home, at approximately three hours 45 minutes, was of relatively moderate length for this theme. Still, critics of her play made sure to warn potential play-goers about that length. Both David Ng of the Los Angeles Times and Robert Machray in his blog recommended seeing the production over two evenings rather than in a single go. Similarly, undertaking a remake of so monumental a work as the Oresteia requires time and reflection. Neither O’Neill’s nor Noon’s remake was swiftly produced. O’Neill first conceived the idea of Mourning Becomes Electra in 1926 after reading versions of the Electra story; he began work on his trilogy in 1929

7 Andrew C. Ordover’ Agamemnon (1994), which is set in the Balkans, collapses Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Libation Bearers into one condensed play, but omits Eumenides (Foley 2005: 333–334 and note 75); in Mark Jackson’s Messenger #1 (2000) there is a happy, but cynical, ending. Foley says, in sum: “Dissatisfaction with the resolution of the [Aeschylean] trilogy has led to radical experiments with tone in the performance of Eumenides, rewriting, or the substitution of another Greek tragedy for an alternative conclusion” (Foley 2005: 339). 8 Still, enormous length seemed to become normative for theatrical productions of the Atreus myth. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Greeks (1981) began at nine hours over three evenings and settled into six hours over two (Hartigan 1995: 74); the Guthrie’s “Clytemnestra Project” (1992) was seven hours long (Hartigan 1995: 76–77); Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides (1992) was comprised of four plays over 10 hours (Hartigan 1995: 79). Foley, on the other hand, speaks of productions of the Oresteia per se as “usually abbreviated” (2005: 307, cf. 311).

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and went through six drafts before production.9 An early version of a piece of Noon’s trilogy was produced (with Christopher DeWan) in 2001 as Clyt at Home: The Clytemnestra Project; this version incorporated an Aegisthus character (Foley, 322–323). Eight years elapsed between this and the Home Siege Home produced in 2009 without an Aegisthus.10 13.2

Mourning Becomes Electra

O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, consisting of three plays entitled The Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted, may have been the first remake of Aeschylus’ Oresteia mounted on the American commercial stage.11 It was born in a time of quickened attention to classical drama: Herbert Weir Smyth’s translation of the Oresteia in the Loeb Classical Library was published in 1926, a year in which O’Neill spent time in New York, when his work notes indicate he read a version of Electra, and when he began the study of Greek.12 Directed by Philip Moeller, Mourning Becomes Electra opened in 1931 to “instant acclaim” and was instrumental in O’Neill being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1936.13 We have noted above that the Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides were already, in a way, revised versions of a portion of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Inter alia, both Sophocles and Euripides diverged from Aeschylus in giving Agamemnon’s daughter the driving role in the demand for Clytemnestra’s punishment, a change evident already in their titles: Aeschylus had named his entire trilogy for the son, the other two titled their single plays after the daughter. Once this shift had been made, the role of Electra was rarely again 9

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See Georgia Nugent (1991: 56, 69, n. 6). O’Neill wrote of the effort it took to write Mourning Becomes Electra in a letter to his friend George Nathan: “It has been one hell of a job! Let’s hope the result in some measure justifies the labor I’ve put in.” In the inscription dedicating the finished product to his wife Carlotta Monterey, O’Neill speaks of “the impenetrable days of pain in which you privately suffered in silence that this trilogy might be born” and “the travail we have gone through for its sake.” See Nugent (1991: 65 and notes). I am grateful to Katharine Noon for sending me the script of her 2009 trilogy which is the basis for my remarks. Foley acknowledges Noon’s providing her a draft of her 2001 script and a phone interview in that year (2005: 323, n. 55). Foley notes that “O’Neill’s trilogy was first performed […] before any commercial version of Agamemnon or the trilogy” (2005: 311), and that, “What seems to have been the first commercial production of Agamemnon […] [appeared] off-Broadway in 1957” (2005: 309). Cf. Moorton, “O’Neill’s American Eumenides” (1991: 117, n. 14) and references there. Foley (2005: 311); John Patrick Diggins (2007: 215).

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consigned to the insignificance it possessed in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers.14 Indeed, although he adapted the full trilogy from Aeschylus, O’Neill borrowed from Sophocles and Euripides for the title of his trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra.15 O’Neill is quoted as saying that “Electra is to me the most interesting of all women in drama” and that he wanted “to give Electra a tragic ending worthy of her.”16 Despite this focus and despite using Electra’s name in his title, O’Neill did not use the original Greek names for his characters, but rather employed names that, while in most cases at least suggestive of the names in the Greek myth, were suitable to the time of his dramatic action – Puritan New England in the wake of the Civil War. Thus, Agamemnon becomes Ezra Mannon, Clytemnestra Christine, Orestes Orin, and Electra Lavinia – supposedly after Laodicea, Electra’s “Homeric equivalent”;17 Aegisthus became Adam Brant, the least close in sound or spelling. O’Neill followed the general outline of each play in Aeschylus’ trilogy – return and murder of the husband in the first play, death of the mother in the second, resolution in the third – and incorporated many of the elements in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: the play takes place in the aftermath of an iconic war, a victorious general is murdered on his return by an adulterous wife, the wife’s lover is a cousin of the general who is seeking revenge for a wrong done his parent by a parent of the general, the daughter detests her mother for killing her father and for her infidelity, the lover is killed in turn by the general’s son, and, in succession, mother, son, and in this case daughter as well, all pay the penalty for their crimes. But O’Neill judiciously excluded those components that would not have been realistic in 1931, or indeed in 1865: the general neither sacrificed a child for success in the war nor brought home a captive from the war as concubine (hence the Clytemnestra figure, though moved by adulterous 14

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Foley notes that both Jack Richardson’s 1960 The Prodigal and David Rabe’s 1973 The Orphan “give a far less significant role to the Electra figure,” but Kelly Stuart’s 2000 Furious Blood “restores Electra to a […] prominent position in the family psychological drama” (2005: 313). Admittedly in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers Electra performs a ritual of mourning along with the chorus and Orestes, but in Aeschylus she has only a minor role and disappears about halfway through the action. Cf. Moorton, “The Author as Oedipus” (1991:177, 187, n .22); Nugent (1991: 64 and 71, n. 35). Interestingly, O’Neill has Orin say to Lavinia, regarding the family history he is writing, “I found you the most interesting criminal of all” (1931: 222). All page references to Mourning Becomes Electra are taken from the 1931 edition published in New York by Horace Liveright, Inc. Jeffrey Hirsch (1982: 16). Throughout the play Lavinia is regularly called “Vinnie.”

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passion, had cause neither for jealousy nor for maternal revenge); the mother had no political ambitions; the son did not kill his mother to avenge his father. There are suggestions of some of these, but they are much diluted. Christine tells Lavinia that “When [Orin] had gone there was nothing left – but hate and a desire to be revenged […]” (52); she blames Ezra for having “forced [Orin] into your horrible war […]. Orin is dead, isn’t he?” (75). But Orin (note the change of gender from Iphigenia), though wounded, returned in good health (75–76).18 Orin’s accusations of adultery against Christine, and his report of having murdered Adam Brant (177), lead Christine to take her own life (180–181) – but Orin is not legally responsible for her death. Even the elements that are incorporated are altered: Christine kills her husband, not for revenge, but to be free to run away with her lover because she is disgusted, sexually and otherwise, by her husband (50, 92–93). Orin kills his mother’s lover, not to avenge his father, but because of disgust at her affair and sexual envy (177–178). Lavinia is moved by pretty much the same factors as the ancient Electra, attachment to and desire for revenge for her father (e.g., 37, 78, 96); but this, too, is complicated by her feelings for Adam (41, 223, 254). Nonetheless, Orin blames himself for his mother’s death (181) and is ridden by guilt for that and for the murder of Adam Brant, and the ancestral portraits in the house function as Furies of a sort: both Orin (e.g., 217, 239) and Lavinia (202, 242) perceive the portraits as judging them.19 There is no public trial, since Orin’s role in killing Adam remains undiscovered (177–178) and Christine takes her own life (180–181). Driven by guilt (and somewhat goaded by Lavinia), Orin commits suicide (238–242 and passim).20 Consistent with the emphasis on Electra/Lavinia adumbrated in the title of the trilogy and with O’Neill’s goal of giving her a tragic end, it is Lavinia who suffers the most severe punishment, engineered by Orin. By composing an account of events in the house (221–222) and arranging that it should be opened in the event Lavinia married Peter Niles (232–233), Orin removes any chance for Lavinia to lead a normal life. Hence, she makes herself a prisoner of the family curse and of the house that encloses it, having the shutters nailed fast (256). Indeed, the title of 18 19

20

Later, when nearly driven mad by guilt, Orin does tell Hazel, his one-time prospective fiancée, “The Orin you loved was killed in the war” (1931: 238). Contrary to the opinion of other O’Neill critics, Richard Moorton, Jr. argues that The Haunted is, in fact, “Eugene O’Neill’s American Eumenides” (1991: 105–118); I wholeheartedly concur. Moorton remarks, “The task of adapting Aeschylus’s trilogy to the modern world required O’Neill to transfer a plot conceived in the shame culture of Greek antiquity to the fundamentally distinct guilt culture of Puritan New England” (1991: 111).

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the trilogy is borne out in that mourning “becomes,” i.e., suits, Electra who lost father, brother, two potential suitors, as well as a (unmourned) mother, and in that mourning is what Electra becomes – her life frozen, like Niobe’s, in the aftermath of the events in the house.21 Hence, O’Neill focuses on family dynamics, as did Aeschylus, and there is a generational heritage of wrongdoing. But the focus is more Oedipal than in Aeschylus: Adam’s love for Christine is to some extent displaced from love for his mother, whom Christine eerily resembles (especially in respect of her hair, 37–38). Orin has an excessive and inappropriate love for his mother, and she for him; similarly, Lavinia has an unhealthy attachment to her father, especially evident at his homecoming (73–78), and her unfulfilled passion for Adam Brant is also tantamount to a wish to replace her mother in his affections (cf. 223). This Freudian focus, however simplistic and unrealistic,22 is doubly reflective of the culture of its time – not only was there general contemporary interest in Freudian psychology but O’Neill himself underwent analysis about the time he conceived the idea for the play.23 Moorton argues that Mourning Becomes Electra is a disguised account of the dynamics of O’Neill’s own family that were more openly portrayed in Long Day’s Journey into Night written in 1941 (though not produced until 1956 after the playwright’s death).24 In Mourning Becomes Electra itself O’Neill also represents the generational heritage of wrongdoing as a kind of fate. In his work diary in 1926, O’Neill mused, “Is it possible to get modern psychological approximation of the Greek sense of fate into […] a play, which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by?”25 Nugent notes that, “Whereas others have seen economic determinism as the modern equivalent for the ancient concept of tragic fate,” O’Neill insisted that “fate from within the family is modern psychological approximation 21

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Jeffrey Hirsch (without citation) quotes O’Neill as saying that the play’s title “convey[s] that mourning befits Electra; it becomes Electra to mourn; it is her fate; black is becoming to her and it is the color that becomes her destiny.” Cf. Harry Cronin (1976: 48–49) and notes; Nugent (1991: 57–59); Moorton, “The Author as Oedipus” (1991:183, 187, n.35). Diggins includes “Freudian allusions to the Oedipal and the carnal” among the “observations on the nature of American society in the twenties” visible in Strange Interlude (2007: 177); O’Neill underwent psychoanalysis in 1926 with Dr. Gilbert Hamilton who, “[a]fter six weeks of therapy […] concluded that O’Neill had an Oedipus Complex.” See Moorton, “The Author as Oedipus” (1991: 172). Moorton, “The Author as Oedipus” (1991: 171–188). O’Neill, “Working Notes and Extracts from a Fragmentary Work Diary” (1988: 394).

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of the Greek conception of fate from without, from the supernatural” (56).26 In Roger Brown’s view, O’Neill “used repetition, undesired but irrepressible repetition in Electra in the form of the mysterious Mannon curse that corrupts one generation after another” (41). In Mourning Becomes Electra this notion is expressed most explicitly in Orin’s reason for writing a history of the Mannons. He tells Lavinia, “I’ve tried to trace to its secret hiding place in the Mannon past the evil destiny behind our lives! I thought if I could see it clearly in the past I might be able to foretell what fate is in store for us, Vinnie” (222). Overall, O’Neill’s play is a model of what Brenda Murphy says “drama in the realistic mode should be: a representation of the playwright’s conception of some aspect of human experience in a given milieu, within the fourth-wall illusion and in the low mimetic style […] [with] characters who were individuals as well as social types, a setting that aimed at producing the illusion of the milieu as fully as possible […], thought that expressed the social issues of the milieu and the psychological conflicts of the characters in dialogue they would naturally speak, a form that was derived from the human experience being depicted, and a structure designed to produce the fullest illusion for the audience that the action onstage was taking place in reality” (49). With respect to scenic presentation O’Neill’s “theatrical style [was] congenial to modern realism,”27 but the influence of ancient production conventions is also clear in Mourning Becomes Electra. Ancient theatrical productions were masked, and for a time O’Neill even considered using that convention in this play, but decided against it. He wrote: With Mourning Becomes Electra, masks were called for in one draft of the three plays. But the Classical connotation was too insistent. Masks in that connection demand great language to speak – which let me out of it with a sickening bump! […] So it evolved ultimately into the ‘masklike faces,’ which expressed my intention tempered by the circumstances.28 Each of the Mannons is described with virtually the same stage direction: “One is struck at once by the strange impression [Christine Mannon’s face] gives in repose of being not living flesh but a wonderfully life-like pale mask” (21). O’Neill intended this “mask concept” as a “dramatic arresting visual symbol of the separateness, the fated isolation of this family, the mark of their fate which makes them dramatically distinct from rest of the world”; but in addition, he 26 27 28

Ibid., 399. Foley (2005: 313). O’Neill, “Memoranda on Masks” (1988: 409).

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said that he could “visualize the death-mask-like expression of characters’ faces in repose suddenly being torn open by passion as extraordinarily effective.”29 Jeffrey Elliott Sands argues that O’Neill “depend[ed] on the stage directions to ensure that actors carried out – or at least understood – his intentions,” and that “O’Neill, perhaps more than any other modern playwright, could not separate the act of writing from the idea of performance” (203). Sands further argues that, “Without the stage directions, the plays remain open to a broad range of interpretations on the stage” (203). By inference, then, O’Neill sought in some sense to assume the role of director in addition to that of playwright. This push for control of production is of a piece with O’Neill’s insistence on his originality in the creation of this trilogy, his recurrent tendency to downplay, if not deny, the influences of Aeschylus or Freud.30 Ironically, by this push for control, O’Neill partially reclaims for himself the dual roles of playwright and director played by the ancient Greek tragedians. O’Neill extended his mask concept to the Mannon house, as well. His directions for the principal stage setting stipulate “a large building of the Greek temple type that was the vogue in the first half of the 19th century. A white wooden portico with six tall columns contrasts with the wall of the house proper which is of gray cut stone” (9–10). This backdrop, which was the dominant visual image in the trilogy, being used for two scenes in each of its three plays, fairly closely recapitulated the simple architectural setting of the ancient skene. But O’Neill adds: “The temple portico is like an incongruous white mask fixed on the house to hide its somber gray ugliness” (17), and, in Act Three, “The pure white temple front seems more than ever like an incongruous mask fixed on the somber, stone house” (69). Although in the ancient theatre interiors could not be shown realistically, O’Neill’s staging drew on the capabilities of the proscenium stage of his time to incorporate three settings inside the Mannon house as well as Adam Brant’s clipper ship at the dock. Nonetheless, O’Neill remains true in spirit to the spare, minimalist backdrops of antiquity. In The Homecoming, Act One, the study is described as “stiff, austere,” with “plain plastered surfaces” (47). In the bedroom “none of [the] details can be discerned at first because the 29 30

O’Neill, “Working Notes and Extracts from a Fragmentary Work Diary” (1988: 400). On O’Neill denying the influence of Freud, cf. Roger Brown (1991: 41); Nugent (1991: 56); Diggins (2007: 39, 217–218); but, when O’Neill’s psychotherapist concluded that he had an Oedipus Complex, the playwright is said to have joked, “Why, all he had to do was read my plays.” See Moorton, “The Author as Oedipus” (1991: 172), and notes. On O’Neill’s ambivalence about acknowledging the influence of Aeschylus, see Moorton, “O’Neill’s American Eumenides” (1991: 105–106).

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room is in darkness […]” (89). In The Hunted, the sitting-room is described as “like the study,” its “interior composed of straight severe lines,” and its walls, again, “plain plastered surfaces” – “a bleak room without intimacy,” the furniture “stationed about with exact precision” (119). Suggestive of the austerity of the ancient skene, the simplicity of O’Neill’s staging reinforced, but did not distract from, the timeless actions of passion and revenge on which O’Neill concentrated in his trilogy. 13.3

Home Siege Home

Fast forward 78 years to 2009, the year in which Home Siege Home was produced. In the meantime women assumed new roles in public life, most notably Madeleine Albright as the first female Secretary of State of the United States (1996–2001) and Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy for the vice presidency in a major party (1984). Women have also achieved notable success as playwrights, Beth Henley (1981), Wendy Wasserstein (1990), and Paula Vogel (1998) receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, inter alia. Realism in the theatre has often been abandoned in favor of other approaches such as minimalist staging (e.g., Beckett’s 1953 Waiting for Godot) or fantasy spectacle (The Lion King, 1997), to take but two examples. The wars in which the United States has been engaged in recent decades have been controversial at best (especially those in Viet Nam and Iraq). Daily life and especially communication have been inundated by technology. All of these factors find resonance in Katharine Noon’s trilogy. Whereas O’Neill’s play was an early version of the Oresteia mounted on the American commercial stage, Katharine Noon’s trilogy was produced as a recent entry in an explosion of plays based on the Oresteia and related ancient plays.31 If O’Neill’s play fell in the category of theatrical realism, Noon’s is postmodern. ­Oscar Brockett notes that “postmodernism” is “an imprecise label, but one that suggests a significant break with ‘modernism’” (585).32 This characterization 31

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Foley speaks of “a rash of millennial performances in 2000–1” and notes that “both Agamemnon and the trilogy have never been more popular in the us than they are at the moment” (2005: 311); see also the plays named in footnotes 6, 7, and 14 above. Philip Auslander notes that, as a periodizing concept, “[t]he term ‘postmodern’ is often used to identify a particular historical period usually though to have begun after World War ii” but “postmodernism in performance is largely a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s” (2004: 98). He also notes, “pluralism is historically a postmodern phenomenon in the theatre […]. The vast majority of the playwrights produced on the modern, AngloAmerican and European stages well into the 1960s were white males […]. As a result of

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works well for Noon’s play. If O’Neill strove to control the delivery of his play, Katharine Noon describes her trilogy as “ensemble devised” and “developed in workshop with the Ghost Road Company,” and shares the copyright with the Ghost Road Company. Philip Auslander notes that postmodern performances “destabilized the hierarchical apparatus of modern theatre through their frequent elimination of the playwright in favor of collectively devised performances” (114). Again, Noon breaks the illusion of the fourth wall by having a character named Hermione speak directly to the audience (Cl. 1.1 and passim) and adopts nontraditional casting in specifying that Hermione (Helen’s daughter and Clytemnestra’s niece) be played by a man (Or., under “Characters”; cf. Auslander 102).33 In contrast with realism, postmodern drama “call[s] attention to the fact that [the play] was being made and how it was made” (Brockett, 585). In Home Siege Home stage directions stipulate that scene changes are indicated by light and that scenery is moved in full view of the audience, often by the actors themselves. In Noon’s play, as in O’Neill’s and Aeschylus,’ the house of the male protagonist is the setting of the action. But in Noon, only the interior is depicted. And while the settings in O’Neill are fixed, the house in Noon is composed of movable panels and boxes, the configurations of which are frequently changed.34 Contrasted with the spare-ness of O’Neill’s settings, the house in Noon is cluttered with objects, the paraphernalia of the here and now. Props

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the influence of theatrical movements directly informed by the identity politics of social movements in the late 1960s and 1970s, women playwrights [emphasis added], playwrights of color, and queer playwrights are now much better represented […]” (2004: 102). Not only by style, then, but by dates and consequent social expectations, O’Neill and Noon are, respectively, exemplars of realism and postmodernism in the theatre. Paul Monaghan’s chapter on postdramatic theatre in this volume also contains much that is relevant to Home Siege Home. It should be noted that the character Hermione, an addition by Noon, functions to some extent as a Chorus, giving background and commentary; the ancient Chorus also “broke the fourth wall,” so this feature may be as much a reinstatement of an ancient practice as a postmodernist one. Similarly with the casting of a male to play a female character: in ancient Greek theatre, all roles, male or female, were played by men. Hermione opens the trilogy by sliding two boxes apart (Cl. 1.1) and closes it by closing the sides of a box (Or. 17.80); see also Cl. 1.2, 4.32, Or. 2.1 and 5.13. References to Home Siege Home are made to the type-script that was sent me by Katharine Noon, by play (Cl. For Clytemnestra, El. For Elektra [the spelling used by Noon], and Or. for Orestes), scene, and page number: thus, Cl. 1.1 indicates Clytemnestra, Scene 1, 1.

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are ubiquitous – clothing, a dress form, playing cards, cameras and photographs, wine, funerary urns – and especially suitcases and trunks. Brockett further points out that “Postmodernists […] were undisturbed by lack of consistency or continuity. They allowed disparities to exist without seeking to mask them and they juxtaposed styles and moods that previously would have been incompatible or inconsistent” (585). Similarly, Amy Green describes the “postmodern theatrical vocabulary” as consisting in a “juxtaposition of clashing elements, anachronism, and reliance on visual modes of expression” (101). The postmodern clash of elements is seen in Noon’s trilogy most vividly in a combination of hyper-modern stage settings with ancient plot elements that are unrealistic in current times. In Home Siege Home, comprised of individual plays entitled Clytemnestra, Elektra, and Orestes, Noon retains the original character names and the overall sequence of events from the Oresteia. It is not surprising that, in the 21st century, she reprises a political Clytemnestra, but in her present-day modern-dress setting, it is jarring that she includes the sacrifice of Iphigenia for the war effort.35 The most arresting difference from O’Neill, and most reflective of contemporary life, is the incorporation of technology, of electronics, in the action: from the telephone to the web cam, technology pervades, most densely in the first play. The play opens with a constantly replayed, projected video of waves breaking against a shore, with a girl’s dress “blowing down the shore” (Cl. 1.1 and passim), a representation of the sacrifice at Aulis that drives the tensions and interactions in the house. Elektra and Orestes communicate with their absent father by computer (5.36–39). Clytemnestra learns of Agamemnon’s return in a telephone call, not by means of a beacon signal (8.41). A commemoration of Iphigenia’s sacrifice (2.16–21), the general’s return (11.53), and public announcements by Athena (Or. 8.37) and Apollo (11.57–58) are broadcast on television. After Agamemnon’s murder Elektra employs radio announcements to drum up opposition to her mother (El. 7.49) and to assure the people of Orestes’ imminent return (e.g., El. 1.5). These elements are set in the context of a war, but what war? By choosing a specific war for the dramatic date of his play O’Neill imposed upon himself the necessity of using plot elements that could work in that time frame. Noon’s choice of war is less clear. In the prologue of Clytemnestra Hermione speaks of having been sent to Clytemnestra’s home when “it [i.e., the war] all began,” 35

This and other incongruous elements of Noon’s play to be noted in the course of the analysis arise from the fact that Noon “upset […] the Aeschylean […] culture” without significantly upsetting the “Aeschylean text.”

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and she identifies Helen “[…] of Troy?” as her mother and Clytemnestra’s sister (1.1). Thus, presumably this is the Trojan War, and the event of Agamemnon’s “sacrific[ing] his daughter for the cause” (1.1) is a corollary of reviving Aeschylus’ Oresteia. But Noon’s is not a straightforward revival and she is not consistent in representing the war as Trojan. In fact, except for this reference in the prologue, the war is anonymous, referred to as “this conflict,” “our cause”; Agamemnon says that Iphigenia sacrificed “for our country and the light of freedom” (2.17–18). This language, combined with the relentless modernity of scenic and technological detail, is more suggestive of the current and recent east–west conflicts of the u.s. in the Middle East in the wake of 9/11.36 The hybrid of ancient and modern enables Noon to do two otherwise incompatible things simultaneously: to incorporate the sacrifice of a daughter for the sake of a war and ask how a mother might respond to that, and to create a woman who could credibly assume a position of leadership in her society. In Noon’s trilogy, as in O’Neill’s, the general has no war prize concubine, but Noon’s Clytemnestra, unlike O’Neill’s, has no lover. So in Noon, maternal revenge for the sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia, not jealousy over a Cassandra37 or passion for an Aegisthus, is Clytemnestra’s sole motivation for killing her husband. Noon does borrow the Aeschylean motif of the urns returned from war in place of the men who were sent forth (Ag. 433–451). Clytemnestra’s friends and supporters, who eventually become her Furies, make much of delivering these urns to the bereaved families (Cl. 7 and 8.41–46). Noon transforms the anger of the people reported by the chorus in Agamemnon into rocks thrown at the women delivering the urns (8, 41–42). So the theme of senseless loss of young life in war is generalized in this play. On the anniversary of Iphigenia’s death Agamemnon associates her death with the loss of life of all the soldiers in the war: “On this day I think back to the first casualty of this conflict […] my daughter, Iphigenia” (2.17). Noon borrows from Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis the issue and the open question of whether Iphigenia sacrificed herself willingly, and whether she actually had the freedom to make the choice (Cl. 1.8 and 16.68; El. 6.48, 7.51; cf. Iphigenia’s massive change of heart in Euripides’ Iphigenia at 36

Foley notes that “A theatre professor at Columbia reported to me that colleagues on his theatre research email list (American Society for Theatre Research) identified the Oresteia as the play of choice to teach in response to the 9/11 crisis” (2005: 340). 37 In Home Siege Home Cassandra’s name does make a cameo appearance: Hermione, skeptical about Elektra’s confidence in a dream that Orestes was on his way home, says, “I knew a girl in my high school, Cassandra […] she said she could see things but it turned out she was just on drugs and she died” (El. 1.7).

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Aulis between pleading for her life (1211–1240, 1283–1335) and being eager to save Greece (1368–1401, 1416–1420)). But, whatever may have been Iphigenia’s genuine feeling, Clytemnestra holds Agamemnon responsible in both Euripides and Noon. The most visually arresting scene in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon is that in which Agamemnon is made to walk into his palace across a path of crimson tapestries representing the blood spilled during and before the war, including Iphigenia’s (905–957). The carpet scene is a public recapitulation of Agamemnon’s criminality, a justification for the vengeance Clytemnestra takes once he has entered the palace. Having incorporated the sacrifice of Iphigenia into her play, Noon also incorporates a scene in which Clytemnestra compels Agamemnon to reenact the sacrifice: in their bedroom she asks Agamemnon to describe to her the sacrifice and his specific role in it. Reluctantly he re-creates the relative positions of himself and his daughter and how he drew a knife across her throat (Cl. 12.55–59). Disturbingly, the emotion of reliving that moment leads to sex between husband and wife, and horrifically, after sex, Clytemnestra takes Agamemnon’s position with Iphigenia and cuts her husband’s throat in the identical manner (14.64).38 The vulnerability of the bedroom is substituted for the vulnerability of the bath in Aeschylus (cf. Or. 6.30). But Noon’s Clytemnestra doesn’t have the single-minded goal of revenge from the start, as does Aeschylus.’ We see multiple other consequences of her loss of her daughter and a progression to the revenge. First, we are presented with Clytemnestra’s obsession with Iphigenia, displayed in her constant replaying of a video of the seashore at Aulis and her daughter’s dress blowing down the shore. She is barely pried from compulsively and repeatedly watching this video to make some public remarks on the one-year anniversary of the sacrifice (Cl. 1.2–8). And Clytemnestra also suffers from a strong sense of personal guilt: in the speech she made during the ceremony in honor of Iphigenia she said, “I will always remember telling her it was fine, that she would be safe […] I will always remember my unknowing complicity in her sacrifice” (Cl. 1. 20). This explains the next step, Clytemnestra’s attempt to commit suicide to punish herself for the death. In this (less than credible) attempt she is interrupted by Athena who, after mocking her for trying clearly futile means, dissuades her from suicide and encourages her, rather, to “take something from 38

In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon Clytemnestra announces that the murder of Cassandra has “added a relish to the luxury of her bed” (1446–1447); Noon’s version seems to draw from that. In Mourning Becomes Electra Christine sleeps with Ezra on the night of his return before murdering him in the morning; Ezra wonders if she was “so willing to give [her] self” in hopes it would bring on a heart attack (1931: 91).

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[Agamemnon] […] the smart way,” and promises, “I will back you in anything you want to do; for this country, for your family” (4. 32–36, esp. 35–36). Athena clearly appears to have some personal agenda in this, but her message is deeply ambiguous. She says, “This situation demands justice and you are in a position to provide justice […].” Although she has promised to back Clytemnestra in anything she might do she also says, “Don’t shed more innocent blood in [Iphigenia’s] name.” (4.35). Clytemnestra understands Athena to be recommending the murder of Agamemnon (whom, of course, she doesn’t regard as innocent), and therefore is shocked when, after the murder, Athena tells her she cannot support her and that Clytemnestra has misunderstood (Cl. 16.64–67). Noon never makes clear what Athena thought Clytemnestra should do, nor what Athena’s role in the society is. It is influential, surely, but evidently not official and certainly not divine. The hybrid of ancient and modern is especially incongruous at this point, and Noon leaves it to the spectator to resolve or merely accept this incongruity among others. Though Clytemnestra has committed murder and lost the support of Athena, she suffers no public consequence: she is not arrested, and indeed she appears to have assumed some role in which she is supported by the public. Elektra: “I don’t know how you run things like you do […] and they love you” (Cl. 10.51, cf. 4.35).39 It is left for Elektra and Orestes to mete out the punishment. O’Neill’s Christine went similarly unpunished by the authorities, but O’Neill had given Ezra a bad heart and Christine’s substitution of poison for heart pills went undetected outside the family (63, 76, and passim). The death of Adam at Orin’s hands was reported in the press as probably caused by waterfront thieves (177–178). But in Noon, there is no way to hide Agamemnon’s murder, and yet there is no public consequence. Noon’s second play, Elektra, follows Sophocles’ play of the same name more closely than it does Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers.40 Elektra publicizes her mother’s crime outside the house and anticipates Orestes’ homecoming (El. 1.5, 7.49 39

40

Whatever else she may have had in mind, Athena had supported a leadership position for Clytemnestra. In her ambiguous encouragement of Clytemnestra’s taking some action, she had said, “I saw those people today [at the anniversary ceremony]. They think of you as their leader. The people need you […]. I need you […]. Those people see themselves in you. You suffer and they suffer. They like you. I may get things done but people don’t exactly find me […] warm. They look at you and see someone who cares” (Cl. 4.35). Foley notes that “From the late nineteenth century, Electra, and especially Sophocles” Electra, became one of the three most popular Greek tragic figures on the U.S. stage […] (2012: 12), and that “From the New York production starring Mrs. Campbell in 1908, Hofmannsthal’s Elektra and Richard Strauss’s later opera Elektra (based on Hofmannsthal)

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and passim). Clytemnestra has dreamt of having given birth to a snake and suckled it, only to be killed by it (2. 14–18). She sends offerings to Agamemnon’s grave, only to have them intercepted by Elektra (3. 22–23 and 4.36–39). There is a confrontation between mother and daughter in which Clytemnestra chastises Elektra for embarrassing her family and Elektra recriminates with her mother about Agamemnon’s death (7.49–55). Orestes is commanded by Apollo to avenge his father’s death (5.42–45). A false report of Orestes’ death is delivered to Clytemnestra (7.55–58, cf. 5.41) and Orestes brings an urn purportedly containing his own ashes; Elektra doesn’t recognize her brother at first and begs to have the urn (8. 65–66). Soon Elektra does recognize Orestes, whose return spares her the need of killing Clytemnestra herself (8.70). Orestes enters the house, does the deed, and re-emerges all bloody (8.73). Again in Noon’s play we find the clashing of disparate elements. In particular, the terror of Clytemnestra’s dream is undermined by her friends’ disparagement of dreams, or Freudian interpretations thereof (2.14–17), but Clytemnestra takes it seriously enough nearly to faint when recalling it and to send offerings to Agamemnon’s tomb. Hermione plays the Chrysothemis role in carrying the offerings, but Elektra intercepts them, not to interfere with the appeasement of Agamemnon’s spirit but because she has Agamemnon’s ashes with her in the alley (4.38).41 In the meantime we see Apollo tell Orestes it is his duty to avenge his father’s death – but on what authority? Apollo says he was Agamemnon’s best friend (5.42), but he is no god. It is Apollo himself who brings (false) word of Orestes’ death, but his story is merely, and without circumstantial detail, that Orestes had suffered a fall (7.56); the account is devoid of any of the heroic quality accorded it in Sophocles (680–763). The effect achieved in Sophocles, that Orestes was living an active, indeed glorious, life while Electra wasted away in wretched conditions, is hinted at, but barely: though slow to recognize her brother,42 once she does know him, Noon’s Elektra comments that

41

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have influenced the representation of a succession of nearly mad or at least neurotic Sophoclean virgins” (2012: 14). This appears to be an allusion to Luis Alfaro’s (2006) remake of the Electra story, Electricidad, in which the title character has Agamemnon’s corpse (which she has stolen from the funeral home) with her out in front of her mother’s house (66 and 69). That Noon’s Agamemnon playfully calls his daughter “Shocker” when they are communicating by webcam (Cl. 5.37) and that she herself uses “Electric Elektra” as her broadcast name (El. 6.45) also seem to be plays on Alfaro’s title. This is unrealistic in Noon, where Orestes has been gone less than three years: Elektra tells her radio audience “Today is day number 822 since I have had word from my brother” (El. 1.5).

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Orestes is “all fit and tan” and looks like he’s “been having a great time” (8.69). In Sophocles’ play, set in an era when avenging a father was honorable, indeed, even imposed by a god, the absent Orestes could be described as a hero in Panhellenic games. In Noon’s contemporary mis-en-scène, in which the warrant for vengeance is highly problematic, Orestes in his absence appears merely to have been working out in the weight pits at Venice Beach. Nonetheless, Noon’s second play is mostly Sophoclean. However, Sopho­ cles’  single play makes Orestes’ vengeance relatively straightforward and unproblematic – an effect indicated by the near-absence of any hesitation on Orestes’ part and reinforced by closing with Aegisthus’ more easily justified murder rather than with the murder of the mother. But Noon’s second play will be followed by a version of the Eumenides, and the playwright anticipates this when Orestes emerges all bloody from the house: Elektra asks, “Is it done?” Orestes replies, “It’s done…but it’s not over” (8.73).43 In Noon’s third play, Orestes, we find the major elements from Aeschylus’ Eumenides: Apollo supports Orestes because it was the son’s duty to avenge his father (5.14, 18); the Furies want “true justice, our justice” (12.64), things to be “the way they’ve always been” (12.61), and they harass Orestes for killing his mother (Scenes 6 and 9); Athena is also interested in justice: she identifies the issue as whether Orestes was justified in his admitted killing and she wants the people to decide (8.37–39, cf. Eum. 426–428); in the end she manipulates the Furies into endorsing the new system (16.71–76). While the major and many minor Aeschylean elements are present, their presentation here requires a strong suspension of disbelief. In this play the people have risen up in the wake of Clytemnestra’s killing but are about evenly divided on the issue,44 virtually on the verge of civil war (8.38, cf. 16.71). Apollo wonders why the populace are up in arms now, when they had done nothing at Agamemnon’s death; Athena replies that they didn’t care about that: apparently in the aftermath “things were looking up under Clytemnestra and she was taken away” (5.16–17). Athena announces a plebiscite – not a trial – in which “every man and woman will vote” on whether Orestes should die or go free (8.37), but again her authority for taking this action is not provided. Apollo thinks it “sick” to have a vote on whether Orestes should live or die (8.37–38) 43

44

This may be meant to recall the exchange in Sophocles after Clytemnestra’s murder in which Electra asks Orestes, “How have you fared?” and he replies, “As to things in the house, well, if Apollo prophesied well” (1424–1425). In Noon’s play, too, Orestes had agonized over whether killing his mother was indeed his duty, what his father would want, as Apollo assures him it is (5.42). A trope from the equal division of votes in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, 753.

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and proclaims his support for Orestes, but this amounts to no more than a tardy and ineffectual televised announcement encouraging acquittal (11.57–58). Apollo’s support was already in some doubt in the opening tableau when he turned his back on Orestes holding out his bloody hands in appeal (1.1); it was Elektra, not Apollo, who purified her brother’s hands (4.9–10, cf. 6.33). In this play Clytemnestra’s friends and bridge partners – and drinking buddies – Meg, Tess, and Alex, have become her Furies.45 They sing a “Fury Lament,” a kind of “binding song” (3.3, cf. Eum. 307–396) and raise a toast to themselves, “To the Furies!” (3.9). In this capacity they are determined to avenge their friend and punish Orestes, but divided as to the means: should his torment be psychological – guilt (Tess) or painful memories (Meg) – or should he die (Alex. 3.6–7, cf. 12.62)? They torture him, admonishing him with his mother’s murder (6.30) and later compelling him to look at photographs of supposedly happy times they say illustrated his mother’s love for him (though Orestes doesn’t remember things as they describe them) (9.42–48). This torment and the doubt it instills drive Orestes to contemplate suicide and to invite Elektra to join him in the act, but in the end they decide to await the outcome of the vote (9. 50–56).46 In Noon’s play we do not see the climactic confrontation between son and mother of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, the scene in which Clytemnestra’s appeal to her motherhood causes Orestes to hesitate and his resolve is restored only by his friend Pylades’ terse injunction to remember Apollo’s command (900–902). But the confrontation’s emotional turmoil leaves traces in three scenes in Noon’s trilogy. When Apollo reviews the murder plan with Orestes and indicates that Orestes will deliver the urn supposedly containing his ashes, he says, “They’re going to let you have access right to her”; Orestes replies, “So 45

46

Though collectively identified as such in stage directions in the first two plays (Cl. 7.41, 13.59; El. 2.9, 4.27), Clytemnestra’s friends had not played the role of Furies prior to Clytemnestra’s death, except perhaps in tormenting Elektra for her unfounded confidence in Orestes’ imminent return and her diatribes against her mother (El. 4.27–34). Here Noon may be drawing on the mutual suicide pact between Orestes and Electra at the end of Suzuki Tadashi’s Clytemnestra; in Mourning Becomes Electra Orin, driven by guilt, takes a different tack: he asks Lavinia, “[…] why don’t you murder me? I’ll help you plan it […] so there will be no suspicion on you. And I’ll be grateful! I loathe my life!” (225). The suicide pact in Suzuki leads to an incestuous embrace between the siblings, which itself echoes Orin’s suggestion of an incestuous relationship with Lavinia in Mourning Becomes Electra: “I love you now with all the guilt in me – the guilt we share! Perhaps I love you too much, Vinnie! […] there are times now when you don’t seem to be my sister, nor Mother, but some stranger with the same beautiful hair – ” (238–239). For Suzuki, see Foley (1999: 7–8).

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I have to talk to her? I can’t look her in the face […]. You never told me I was going to have to look her in the face” (El. 5.41); in this play Apollo in person, but with some difficulty, convinces Orestes he must avenge his father’s death (5.41–45). In the following play, as Elektra washes Orestes’ hands, she compels him to re-live the murder for her, telling her whether Clytemnestra was scared (“Yes.”), whether she cried (“Yes, she cried a lot.”), how many times the blade went through (“[…] six […],” Or. 4.11–12). This scene is analogous to that in the first play in which Clytemnestra forces Agamemnon to re-live the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Elektra makes Orestes answer her questions allegedly because, “Maybe if you tell me it will help” (Or. 4.10). Without even a pretense of altruism the Furies later also catechize Orestes, “Do you remember what it was like to kill your mother? […] Did she kneel there in front of you […]. And beg you not to kill her. Did she look scared? […] Was it messy?” (Or. 9.47–48). This forced recollection, and the reminders of supposedly happy times proving Clytemnestra’s mother-love, are the Furies’ torment of the murderer. When Apollo has made his announcement calling Orestes a hero, the Furies become enraged. They object to Apollo and Athena making “private family business” into a “public matter,” and fear Apollo’s influence as someone who “looks good” and “speak[s] well”; they decide that they in turn “need to give Clytemnestra a voice” (Or. 12.60–61). The Furies’ intervention evidently has the desired effect in that Athena reports to Apollo that the vote didn’t go Orestes’ way, as she had anticipated it would. There is reference to the vote’s being “close,” but this is left vague (15.67–68). Many scholars have found the resolution in Aeschylus’ Eumenides unsatisfactory in that Athena, while establishing a system of public justice in place of the vendetta, reinforces a subordinate role for women.47 Noon incorporates problematic aspects into Athena’s resolution, but differently. In the ancient play the jurors’ very public vote – Athena orders the ballots to be shaken out in full view of the audience (Eum. 742–743) – had been evenly divided and the goddess Athena, on Zeus’ authority, broke the tie in Orestes’ favor as she had announced at the outset she would do if the votes should be even (Eum. 741). In that play the Furies, stuck in the way things had always been and enraged at the dishonor of their function, threaten blight and pollution on Athens; Athena wins them over by promising them an important place in her city if they abandon their threats (Eum. 778–891). In Noon’s play Athena expects victory, and when the vote (of which only Athena seems to know the tally) narrowly goes the other way (Scene 15), she lies to the Furies (16.68–77). She tells 47

Most classically and influentially, Winnington-Ingram (1948) and Zeitlin (1978).

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them that, although the outcome was not what they had hoped, it had been decided by a fair process in which the people had a voice (16.71). She compliments the arguments the Furies had used with the people (16.69) and invites them to join “her team” by first signing an agreement “retracting their previous statement” and endorsing the new “system that brought about a fair decision” (16.74). Athena says, “I’m asking you to think bigger than yourselves,” and “You are making this too personal.” Alex replies, “It is personal” (16.72). Alex is also skeptical: if Athena has won, why is she seeking to enroll them? Here Noon’s Athena echoes the ancient goddess: the people want order and there is order in the fear that the Furies instill (16.74–75; cf. Eum. 690–699, 927–937). When all three have reluctantly signed, Athena declares the outcome a “win-win” (16.76). But these Furies have not really become Eumenides, or “spirits of blessing”: when Athena has left the Furies again sing their binding song: “The law is everlasting and we enforce the law. We will see the guilty pay” (16.77). Noon is true to Aeschylus in having the Furies represent biological imperatives: they call Orestes’ murder of his mother “a crime against nature,” and likewise condemn Agamemnon’s killing of his daughter Iphigenia (Or.12.63, cf. 16.73, cf. Eum. 606–608). In Aeschylus Apollo bases his support of Orestes on two points: one, that the marriage bond is as sacred as motherhood (Eum. ­211–224), and two, that the father is biologically the only true parent (Eum. ­658–666). Noon’s Apollo doesn’t address marriage or reproductive biology; rather, he appeals to patriotism and asserts that Clytemnestra’s “bloodthirsty” killing of Agamemnon “spit on the grave” of those who “heroically sacrificed themselves for the good of this state” (11.57). Both Aeschylus’ Athena and Noon’s are primarily concerned with replacing vengeance with a new system.48 In Aeschylus, however, the goddess sided with the male and reinforced only a religious role for women in the public sphere. Noon’s mortal Athena, though she did not support Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband and does support Orestes’ acquittal, did support Clytemnestra as a leader and enlists the (female) Furies to join her on some sort of political team. In doing the latter, however, Athena ironically and cynically abrogates the outcome of the vote in which the Furies’ position had prevailed. Indeed, in light of Edith Hall’s discussion of the long wait for a revival of the Aeschylean Clytemnestra, we can say that Noon has restored a Clytemnestra

48

After the murder of Agamemnon Athena remonstrates with Clytemnestra, “You’ve set back my agenda significantly […]. Our agenda; justice […]” Clytemnestra replies, “I just performed justice.” Athena: “No. What you did was an eye for an eye. You took your husband’s life in revenge […]. Nothing’s changed.” (Cl. 16.66–67).

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who is driven by maternal outrage for her slain daughter49 and one who assumes a public role. Noon has also reinstated a public judgment of Orestes’ murder of his mother. And perhaps she has righted the Aeschylean Athena’s wrong by having her Athena support women in public life – giving the vote to women as well as men and creating a “team” of powerful women. But Noon has not created an Amazon. Her Clytemnestra resists her public responsibilities in the first play (Cl. 1.2–10; 4.33–36), performs them well (but without evident enthusiasm) in the second,50 and is of course gone in the third. And the impressiveness of the women is undermined: both Alex and Athena tell Clytemnestra that her inactivity and inability to move on make her “look weak” (Cl. 1.9, 4.36); the Furies boast that the way women get things done is over a liquid lunch (Or. 16.70), and Athena in fact plies them with vodka to bring them around (Or.16.69–70). Noon’s postmodern version of Aeschylus destabilizes the boundaries between ancient and modern, divine and mortal, and among sources of power. In a world marked by technology no public notice is taken of a returning general’s murder. In the wake of that deed the murderous wife “runs things” – rather well, evidently, but in virtue of no official position identified. In this same materially modern world several years later there is no official mechanism to respond to the murder of a mother, and the populace descends into partisan rioting while the perpetrator remains free. The murder of a mother is described as “private family business.” Individuals declare a concern for justice but there is no justice system in place, and the new public resolution is not a trial but a vote after what is tantamount to a political campaign.51 The question of whether a killer’s action is justified is raised but never specifically argued or adjudicated. Private citizens (not gods, not elected officials) assume authority to control the process. These persons are hardly disinterested: though Athena’s position is left vague, Apollo is Agamemnon’s best friend, the Furies Clytemnestra’s. Voting results are known only to a single private individual and are falsely reported. 49

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Even Clytemnestra’s friends acknowledge that she has not been equally devoted to her other children; in the mausoleum, after her death, Alex proposes a toast: “Let’s raise a glass – the best mother…uh…a good mother. To a mother” (Or. 3.4); cf. Cl.1.2–3. When Elektra tells her mother that she is trying “[t]o make the people rise up and take you out,” Clytemnestra responds, “You should check my popularity rating before you get your heart set on raising an army” (El. 7.50). That tone is sounded by Elektra in her radio broadcast declaring Orestes’ return is imminent. She says, “Raise your voices, stake signs in your yards, stickers on your cars” (El. 1.9). The partisan speeches of Athena and Apollo and, eventually, the Furies, in advance of the vote reinforce the notion (Or. 8.37, 11.57–58, 12.61 and 64).

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13.4 Conclusion To quote Amy Green on the effects of postmodernist theatre, “The aggregate impact of such jumbled images gives new meaning to the old sense of classical ‘timelessness’” (3). Oscar Brockett makes a related point: “Sometimes […] works (especially classics) have become so enshrined within accepted interpretations that we can see them afresh only upon being subjected to a radically different (even ‘blasphemous’) interpretations” (585). Indeed, by means of her hybrid approach Noon makes the scenario of Aeschylus’ trilogy raise contemporary questions. Aeschylus has Athena’s all-male jury evenly split over Orestes’ guilt – and thus over the relative value of the male and the female parent. But would the votes in Aeschylus have been different if there had been women on the jury? The decision in Noon’s play, on which both men and women vote, goes against Orestes. Had Aeschylus’ Furies prevailed, their torment of Orestes would have been worse than death. But is it “sick” to have people vote on whether someone lives or dies, as Noon’s Apollo asserts? Currently, 17 states and the District of Columbia have abolished the death penalty. Though the American system of justice, like Athena’s court, is intended to remove the personal element from judicial decisions, is the current prerogative of family members of a murder victim to make a statement before sentencing reintroducing a personal call for vengeance? Does the u.s. system of justice operate sine ira et studio, differently from our political campaigns, or are some trials controlled by politics? One thinks of the very public O.J. Simpson trial and John Burrus’ refrain, “If it doesn’t fit you must acquit.” What is given away to achieve political goals? Both Aeschylus’ Athena and Noon’s in effect bribe their opponents to abandon their position in favor of a resolution for the state. We have seen that the cultural divide between ancient Athens and Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra in the early 20th century necessitated the omission of some aspects of Aeschylus’ trilogy and the reinterpretation of others. The cultural divide between the early 20th century and the early 21st century is evident in the vastly different production techniques used by Eugene O’Neill and Katharine Noon. But, ironically, Noon’s postmodern approach enabled her to ignore, if not nullify, a cultural divide between Aeschylus’ time and our own and to reformulate the political issues raised in Aeschylus’ trilogy as still resonant in our own time. Noon’s juxtaposition of ancient and modern is jarring in many ways, but reminds us of how messy and complex human actions and motives are, how constant the negative aspects of human nature, especially of humans as political actors. Nonetheless, if O’Neill recreated a version of fate to dominate the action of his characters, Noon has rejected family history and economic determinism

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as definitive and reinscribed human choice. In the first play, after the murder of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Elektra address this topic directly. Elektra asserts, “Iphigenia chose to sacrifice for the cause.” Clytemnestra replies, “You are disgracing Iphigenia when you defend what your father did […]. He had a choice. He chose to go to war. He did not choose us. He made choices that affected me. They affected all of us.” Elektra counters, “We all have to make choices.” Clytemnestra: “Yes, we do […]. What do you choose, Elektra?” Elektra: “Justice.” Clytemnestra: “I performed justice.” (Cl. 17.68–69). In the next play Orestes tells Apollo, “Dad made a hard choice when he killed Iphigenia.” Apollo responds, “Exactly. This is your hard choice.” Orestes: “Let’s just do it now and get it over with. I can’t think about it anymore” (El. 5.45). Though Orestes seems unconvinced here, the trilogy ends with his full acknowledgement of responsibility. As Orestes continues to be tormented by his deed (albeit having escaped execution), Elektra regrets that she hadn’t performed the deed herself. She says, “You didn’t even know if you wanted it. I’m the one who talked you into it, Orestes.” Orestes: “Elektra, there was this point. There was this crystal clear point when I was there with mom in the room and I could have walked away […] but I didn’t.” Elektra: “Why didn’t you?” Orestes: “I made a choice.” (Or. 17.78–79).

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Index Achilles 310 actors, number of 40 Adam (Brant) 324–6, 328, 334 adaptation (πρoσαρμoγή) 6n, 7, 250–79, 280 Aegisthus 229, 230, 232, 236, 237, 240–9, 304, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 316, 317, 318, 323 Aeschines: Against Timarchus 70 Aeschylus (also Eschylus) passim 148–9, 152, 319–21, 319–20n, 323–4, 325n, 326, 328, 328n, 330, 331n, 332–3, 333n, 336, 339, 340-1 Agamemnon 8, 14, 19, 80–1, 92, 92n, 93, 93n, 96, 103, 134, 136–8, 139, 140–3, 145, 151–3, 196, 197, 199, 201, 202n, 203, 211, 212n, 213–8, 219, 220, 225, 228, 229, 230, 231–5 passim, 257–8, 273–4, 304, 311, 312, 313, 314, 319–20, 332–3, 319–20n, 322n, 323n, 329n, 333n Byzantine triad 179, 179n, 183 Choephori 143, 312 Danaids 183, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194 Danaid trilogy 53 Eumenides (also Furies and Goddesses of Goodwill) 14, 99, 138, 139–40, 143, 145, 154, 192, 196, 197, 199, 202, 203n, 209, 210, 211, 312, 319–20n, 321n, 322n, 325, 325n, 328n, 336, 336n, 337–40, 337n, 340n Glaukos of Potniae 131 Libation Bearers 14, 61, 62, 152, 181, 196, 201, 202n, 203, 319, 324, 334, 337, 319–320n, 322n, 324n Life of 52, 54, 55–57, 65–6, 76 Niobe 131 Oresteia 17, 21, 61, 62, 86n, 89n, 96, 99, 150–65, 192n, 195n, 196, 197, 199, 202, 209, 210, 212, 214, 218, 222, 224, 225, 232–3, 236, 243–4, 248, 258, 272–6, 304, 312, 313, 315, 318, 319–20, 322–4, 329, 331–2, 319n, 319–20n, 332n Persians 6n, 14, 21, 54–9, 67, 143–5, 179, 193, 197, 198, 265, 267–8, 273, 310, 313, 314 Philoctetes 131 Phorkides 76

Phrygians or The Ransom of Hector 14, 132 Prometheus Bound 12, 54, 66–8, 76, 80–106 passim, 179n, 179n, 195, 207, 209, 237, 244, 246, 261–62, 266, 267, 313 Proteus 141n Psychostasia 14, 132 Ransom of Hector 14 Seven against Thebes 13, 14, 68–9, 107–130 passim, 140, 143n, 179n, 184, 194–5, 195n, 198, 204, 205, 206–7 shield scene 109–10, 112–5, 117, 126n Suppliant Women (also Suppliants or ­Supplices) 14, 81, 124n, 135–6, 138–9, 140, 143n, 145, 183, 188–9, 191, 192, 193, 194, 236, 240, 241, 242 Women of Etna 57 Agamemnon 151, 161, 319, 331, 333–6, 338–40, 342 death of 51–3, 58 agency 280, 281 Aital, Venkataramana 315, 316 Ajax 310 Alex 337, 339–40, 340n Alexander (the Great) 20, 74, 305 Alfaro, Luis Electricidad 335n alien sufferings (ἀλλότρια πάθη) 15 Alley, Henry M. 99n Amazon 321, 340 American Repertory Theatre 236–7, 244–5 Americans 15 Amnesty International 245 Amphiaraus 126 Anaxilas (comic playwright) 71–2 ancient treatises on tragedians 72–3 Antaeus 292 Antigone 113, 182n, 185, 194–5, 195n, 206–7 Antipater of Thessalonica Apollo 215–7, 219, 225, 233, 316, 331, 335–42, 340n Apollonian 251–3, 258–9, 269 Areopagus 33–4, 38 52 Ares 121 Argives 15

402 Aristophanes 8, 24, 36–7, 110, 110n, 159, 163, 177, 193n, 311, 315 Acharnians 59, 62, 64–5 Birds 159, 165 Clouds 63 Ecclesiazusae 165 Frogs 9, 51–3, 55, 59–62, 65, 69, 71–2, 75, 77–8, 131–2, 141n, 153, 311 Knights 159 Lysistrata 315 Wasps 64 Aristotle 15, 117n, 148–9, 154–5, 237, 250, 257 Poetics 15, 22, 75–7, 154, 181, 184n, 186, 187n, 192–3, 250 Rhetoric 15 Arnott, Peter 109, 113–4, 114n Arrowsmith, William 107, 108n, 129 Artaud, Antonin 21 Ashwathama 310 Ashwathaman (trans.) 309–10, 314, 318 Athena 316, 331, 333–6, 338–40, 339n, 340n Athenaeus: Scholars at Dinner 54, 57 Atkinson, J. Brooks 322 Auletta, Robert: Agamemnon 321n Aulus Gellius: Noctes Atticae 11n Auschwitz 298 Auslander, Philip 330, 329n Bacon, Helen H. 13, 107–30 passim Bacon, Francis 259 Baddha Prometheus (Prometheus Bound) (trans.) 313 Bangalore 312, 315 Bartscht, Waltraud 11n Basavalingaiah 314 bbc Radio 286 Beatles, The 240 Bell, Joshua 147, 166 Benjamin, Walter 13n Berlioz, Hector 201 Berman, Antoine 128n Bevan, Edwyn R. 109, 111–2, 112n, 129n Bhabha Homi K. 306 Bharatavakya 309 Bhasa 308, 309 Bhavabhuti 308 Bierl, Anton 8n Biguenet, John 6n, 11n, 13n Blackie, John Stuart 94, 95n, 109–10, 110n, 111

Index Blomfield, Charles 7 bluegrass 237–8 BMSri 308–14, 316–8 Bombay (Mumbai) 20 Bosher, Kathryn 2n Bowie, A.M. 164 Boyd, Hugh Stuart 8–9 Bridges, Emma 1n, 2n, 8n, 17n British Council 312 Brockett, Oscar 329–31, 341 Brook, Peter 21, 254, 275 poetic inner dream 252, 254–5, 268, 275 Brown, John Mason 322 Brown, Peter 17n Brown, Roger 327, 328n Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 90–1, 91n Browning, Robert 92, 92n, 93, 93n, 104, 286 Brumoy, Père Pierre 82–3, 83n, 84 Buckley, Theodore Alois 109, 110, 110n, 111 Burian, Peter 18, 107 Burkett, Walter 164 Byrne, Lucy 120n, 124n Byron, Lord George Gordon 90, 90n Cadmean (also Kadmeian) 112, 118–9 Callipides 148 Cameron, H.D.  128n Campbell, Lewis 109, 110, 111n, 112, 112n, 311 Capaneus 126n Carlson, Marvin 4n Carpet scene 333 Carson, Anne 259 Case, Janet 90n, 99–101, 103, 106 Cassandra 151, 213–35, 281, 283, 286, 288, 300, 301, 316, 332n, 319, 320–1, 332, 332n, 333n Castellucci, Romeo 257, 272–6 Central Sahitya Akademi 311, 313 Chandrashekhar, Laxmi 315 Choi, Bernard 5 chorus 42–5, 82n, 86, 93–4, 96, 97–8, 99n, 100, 103, 103n, 109, 111–4, 114n, 119–20, 122, 126n, 127–8, 129n, 215–9, 229, 250–1, 269–70 Christine 324–7, 334 Chrysothemis 335 Clark, Andy 141, 162–3, 165 Clement, Jean-Marie: Médée 17 closure 45, 48 Clyt at Home: The Clytemnestra Project 323

403

Index Clytemnestra 21, 151, 158, 160, 215–6, 219, 220, 224, 229–31, 281, 283, 286, 315, 316, 320–1, 331–40, 333n, 337n, 339n, 340n, 342 cognitive theory 147–75 contaminatio 286 corpses 131–2, 143–5 Cronin, Harry 326n curse 112, 115–7, 120, 127 Damasio. Antonio 150 Danger Mouse 240 Dawson, Christopher 109, 114, 114n de Gelder, Beatrice 170 DeLoache, J.S. 163 deme theaters 58, 65, 78 Demetriou, Kyriakos 8n democracy 32, 35–6, 37–8 Demosthenes: On the False Embassy 70 Denniston, John Dewar 311 Denver Theater Center 166 Derrida, Jacques 18 Devy, Ganesh 307 DeWan, Christopher 323 didactic approach 36–8 didascalic notices 53 Diggins, John Patrick 323n, 326n, 328n Dike also Justice 112, 115, 117, 126–7 Dionysian 251–3, 258, 268, 276, 279 Dionysus 156 Diphilus: Adelphoi 6n Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue 236, 238, 243–4 Dodds, E.R. 285, 287 Dood Paard 261 medEia 262, 265, 267–8, 273 doors 47–48 Drummond, Clara 90n, 92, 92n Drury Lane Theatre 85n Dryden, John 6n, 11n, 84, 84n Duke’s Theatre (Dorset Gardens) 84 Duris of Samos 73 Duryodhana 309, 318 Dushyanta, King 315 Dyck, Andrew R. 9 Eagleton, Terry 277–8 Easterling, Patricia E. 4n, 8n, 12n, 18n, 319n eccyclema (also ekkuklêma) 47, 103n

Edelman, Gerald 150 Egyptians 15 Eisodoi 161–2 Ekman, Paul 169 Electra (also Elektra) 319, 322–5, 324n, 323–4, 331, 332n, 334–8, 332n, 335n, 335n, 337n, 340n, 342 Eleuthereus 156 Elgin, Thomas Bruce 7th Earl of 89–90 Eliot, T.S. 101n, 284 emendations, editorial 27–8 Engel, Monroe 7 England 9 English Gitegalu (trans.) 308 epirrhema 42, 44 equalizing principle 142–3, 144 Erasmus 82n Erinys also Fury 115–7, 117n, 120, 128 Eteocles 112–6, 116n, 117–8, 118n, 119, 119n, 120–2, 128, 185, 194, 198, 205–6 Euphorion (son of Aeschylus) 66–7 Euripides 3, 8–9, 17, 80, 81–2, 82n, 83–4, 88–9, 94, 101, 101n, 103, 103n, 104, 148–9, 177–82, 184, 186, 188, 191–2, 196, 201, 204, 206–7, 251, 312, 314, 319, 323–4, 332–3, 320n Andromache 149 Bacchae 159 Cresphontes 73, 148 Cyclops 84, 88 Electra 61–2, 101, 319–20 Hecuba 73, 82, 85, 85n Helen 141n Hippolytus 101 Iphigeneia in Aulis 82, 320, 332 Iphigenia in Tauris 61 Medea 94, 95, 101, 101n, 131, 314, 315, 320n Orestes 61 Phoenix 70 Rhesus 81 Suppliants 81 Trojan Women 101, 103, 315, 319 Evermann, Martin 21 Ewans, Michael 17n Ezra 324–5, 334, 333n Fabre, Jan: Prometheus Landscape ii 272 Falk, Alice 90n Farber, Yael 21, 296n, 302n Molora 21

404 fashions, in criticism 31 Fate 326–7, 341 fear 15 Ferrario, Sarah Brown 17 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 252–3 Flashar, Hellmut 8n Foley, Helene 1n, 18n, 323, 321n, 322n, 323n, 324n, 327n, 329n, 332n, 334n, 337n Fraenkel, Edward 311 Freud, Sigmund 108, 326, 326n, 328, 328n, 335 Friel, Brian 297 Fuchs, Elinor 19n funeral practice 133 Gadayuddha, (trans.) 309, 310, 314, 318 Gamel, Mary-Kay 254 inductive authenticity 254–5 Gandhi, Leela 306 Garvie, Alex 10 Ghost Road Company 330 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von 187–8, 189n Gnecchi, Vittorio 17, 214, 218, 226–35 Cassandra 17 Goethe, Johann Wolgand von 95 Goldhill, Simon 4n, 8n, 12n, 250–1, 253, 264, 278–9 Gorgias 15, 110n grammar and syntax 30 grand opera 200 Great Dionysia 53–5, 58, 62, 64–5, 69–70 Proagon 64 Green, Amy 331, 341 Green Day 238 Gregory, Justina 8n Grene, David 86, 86n, 109, 113, 113n, 114, 114n, 119n Griffiths, Jane Montgomery 4n Grüber, Klaus Michael 252, 266 Die Backen 266, 270 Iphigenia in Tauris 266 Oedipus at Colonus 266 Gurney, Ivor 288, 289 Guthrie Theater: The Clytemnestra Project  322n Guttal, Vijaya 20, 311, 313 Hades 122 Hall, Edith 1, 1n, 3, 3n, 8n, 17–20n, 21, 22n, 82n, 85n, 95n, 98n, 319–21, 339, 320n Hall, Peter: Tantalus 166–7

Index Hamilton, Dr. Gilbert 326n Hamilton, Edith 8n, 9n, 16n, 17–8, 19n Hanink, Johanna 11, 319n Hardwick, Lorna 19, 19–20n, 90n, 93n, 95n, 96, 96n, 106, 113n, 129 Harrison, Robert 134 Harrison, Tony 297, 298 Harrop, Stephe 18n, 22n Hart, Elizabeth F. 14n Hartigan, Karelisa 1, 321n, 322n Hazel 325n Headlam, C.E.S. 109, 111n Heaney, Seamus 19, 281, 284, 292–6, 302, 303 The Cure at Troy 19 Heath, Malcolm 154 Hecht, Anthony 13, 107–130 passim Hegel, Georg 18, 112 Aesthetics 250 Heidegger, Martin 18 Helen 330, 332 Heracleides of Pontus 72 Heraclitus 142 Hercules 292–3 Herington, John 100, 100n Hermione 330–1, 330n, 332n, 335 Herodotus: Histories 15–6, 59, 116, 148, 305 Hidimba 316 Hieron (tyrant of Sicily) 55–7 Hilburn, Emily 95, 95n Hip-hop 236–41 Hippias 116 Hippolytus 114 Hirsch, Jeffrey 324n, 326n historicist and universalist approaches 34– 6, 49–50 Hollmann, Alexander 8n Holtermann, Martin 8n Homer 244 Iliad 131, 132 Odyssey 141n Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 84 Hughes, Ted 148, 300 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 13n, 254 Hutcheon, Linda 6n hybris 37, 41, 48 hypotheseis (summaries of plays) 53 imagery and themes 41–2 India 20 innovation 43

Index inscriptions 53 intention, of Aeschylus 33–36, 49–50 interdisciplinary conversations 5 interlingual translation 12 interpolation 24 intralingual translation 12 Iphigenia 152, 287, 331–4, 338–9, 342 Ireland 19n, 284, 293–4, 297 Ismene 113 isonomia 135n Italian opera (20th century) 214, 226–7, 234–5 Jackson, Mark, Messenger #1 322n Janko, Richard 154 Jason 114 Jelinek, Elfriede 262, 264–5, 270 Jones, Bill T. 242 Jürs-Munby, Karen 18n Kalidasa 308 Kambar, Chandrashekhar 310 Kannada 21, 304–14, 316–8 Karnad, Girish 310–5 Karnataka 305 katabasis 301 Kathakali 167 Kavanagh, Patrick 293 Kennedy, Rebecca 1n Keos 164 Kerala 315 Kermode, Frank 11n Kimbell, David 17n kinesthetic empathy 170 Kitto, H.D. 312 kleos 289 Knezz, David 169 Knox, Bernard 128, 128n kommos 42, 44 Konstan, David 15, 15n Krishna Kumar C.P. 311–3 Kuhn, Thomas S. 3n Kuvempu 310 Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati 313 Laius 127 La Jolla Playhouse 239, 241 language 23–4, 28, 42–3 Lankesh, P. 310 Lauriola, Rosanna 8n

405 Lavinia (Vinnie) 324–7, 324n, 337n Lea, Sydney 129n LeDoux, Joe 150 Lee, Nathaniel 84 Legrenzi, Giovanni Eteocle e Polinice (opera) 177, 184–6, 195n lieto fine 182–183, 185 Lehmann, Hans-Thiess 18n, 251, 256, 266, 268–9, 276, 278–9 Leithauser, Brad 129n Lenaea (festival) 65 Lennox, Charlotte 82–3, 83n, 84, 84n, 106 Levy, Amy 91n, 93n Lianeri, Alexandra 6n, 11–13n, 20n, 22n Link, Franz H. 3n literary and dramatic criticism 30–1 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh 128n, 287 London 9 Longinus 109–10, 110n Longley, Michael 297n Lucas, Frank Laurence 98, 98n Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) 84 Lumley, Lady Jane 82, 82n Lycurgus: Against Leocrates 71 law on tragedians 72–3 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 20, 305 Machray, Robert 322 Macintosh, Fiona 1, 1n, 2n, 8n, 17n, 82n, 85n, 92n, 98n, 319n, 320n MacNeice, Louis 19, 281, 284, 289, 290, 291, 302 Magna Graecia 2 Mahabharata, The 307, 309, 316, 318 Malati 315 Mannon 327, 328 Manutius, Aldus 9 Markantonatos, Andreas 8n Marks, Emerson 11n Martindale, Charles 10n, 11n, 13n, 129, 130n Marxist-Leninist Naxalite movement 20n masks 116–74, 250, 263, 265–6, 327–8, 327n McConachie, Bruce 4n, 14n McConnell, Justine 2n McDonald, Marianne 87, 87n “McGurk Effect” 153–4 McLeish, Kenneth 97, 98n McNeice, Louis 129 mechane 47 Medea 17

406 Mee, Charles 260–1 Agamemnon 321n Big Love 260–1, 267 Trojan Women 2.0 260 Mee, Erin 20n Meg 337 Meineck, Peter 14 Menander 8, 80 Adelphoi 6n Perikeiromene 72 Shield 71 Metastasio, Pietro 187, 187n meter (also verse and rhythm) 43–5, 86, 88, 93, 96, 98n, 100n, 104 mirror neuron system 172–4 Mitchell, Katie 300 Mnouchkine, Ariane, Les Atrides 322n Modern drama 250–1, 255–7 Moeller, Philip 323 Monaghan, Paul 2n, 18, 19, 114n, 330n Monterey, Carlotta 323n Moorton, Richard 321n, 323–25n, 326, 326n, 328n Moran, Joe 5 Morell, Thomas 82, 84–5, 85n, 86–9, 102 Moritz, Helen 21 Morley, Henry 88 Morley, Neville 13n Morshead, Edmund Doidge Anderson 89, 89n, 93, 97–8n, 99, 109, 111, 111n, 112, 112n, 114 Moulton, H.K. 311 Müller, Heiner 262, 264 Liberation of Prometheus 271–2 Medeamaterial 271 Medea Spiel 272 multisensory language 150–4 Munteanu, Dana 17 Murphy, Brenda 327 Murray, Gilbert 296, 101, 101n, 102, 102n, 104–5, 105n, 109, 112, 112n, 114–5, 116n, 119, 119n, 286, 291 My Lai massacre 115 Naandi 309 Nachleben 51, 78 Nadu, Tamil 20n Napolitano, Michele 17, 17n Nathan, George 323n

Index Navodaya 308, 311 Nervegna, Sebastiana 8n Ng, David 322 Nicolescu, Basarab 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 18, 19, 251, 254, 275, 277–9 Nightingale, Andrea 142 Niles, Peter 325 Ninasam 315 Niranjana, Tejaswini 307 Noh 167, 171–2 Noon, Katharine 21, 319–23, 329–41 passim, 323n, 330n, 331n, 333n, 335n, 337n Home, Siege, Home 21, 319, 321n, 322–3, 329–31, 329–30n, 332n Clytemnestra 331 Elektra 331, 334 Orestes 331, 336 Notorious B.I.G. / Biggie Smalls 239 Nugent, Georgia 323n, 324n, 326, 326n, 328n Odysseus 310 Oedipus 115–7, 120, 126–7, 326, 326n, 328n Ograjenšek, Suzana 17n old drama (παλαιὸν δρᾶμα) 64, 69 O’Neill, Eugene 319–42 passim, 323–30n Long Day’s Journey into Night 326 Mourning Becomes Electra 21, 319, 321, 321n, 323, 323n, 324, 324n, 326–7, 333n, 337n, 341 The Homecoming 323, 328 The Hunted 323, 329 The Haunted 323, 325n Strange Interlude 326n opsis 154 orchestra 44, 46 Ordover, Andrew, Agamemnon 321n, 322n Orestes 216, 219, 220, 232, 233, 322, 331, 332n, 334–9, 337n, 340n, 340–2 Orestis 316 Orestis Purana 315, 316 Orff, Carl: Prometheus (opera) 177, 196, 207–9, 210 Orin 324–7, 324n, 325n, 334, 337n “Other” the 31, 34, 38 Ovid 11n, 178, 182 Heroides 14 184n, 189–191 Owen, Wilfred 288, 289, 290, 302

Index Page, Denys L. 10, 10n, 311 Pak, Anita 5 Pandavas 310 Parasikaru (trans.) 310, 314 Parker, Jan 129, 129n parodos 45 Parsi theatre companies 20 Parthenopaeus 117 Paulus, Diane 244–5 Persian 15, 110–1, 116 Persian Wars 16, 74 Pherecrates 51–2, 53 Philinus, Against the Statues of Sophocles and Euripides 73 Phrynichus Sack of Miletus 59, 77, 148 Pity 15 Plato 3, 15, 113, 159 Ion 3 Plumptre, E.H. 109, 111, 111n Plutarch 110n, 132, 148 Life of Cimon 54 On Exile 54 Podlecki, A.J. 12n Polybius 149 Polyneices 115–6, 119–20, 126 Posidippus 82 Postdramatic Theatre and analogues 250–79 Postmodern(ism) 319, 329–30, 330n, 331, 340–1 Potter, Robert 84, 87–8, 88n, 89, 89n, 90–2, 97n, 109, 110, 110n, 111–2, 112n, 113–4, 117, 117n Pound, Ezra 103, 286 Power, Will: The Seven 236–43 Powers, Melinda 1n Pramilarjuniya (trans.) 308 Previc, Fred 157–9 Prins, Yopie 90n, 91n, 92n, 99, 99n, 100n, 103, 103n, 106, 113n Prometheus 298 Pronomos Vase 168 prophecy 215–8 Psellus, Michael 9, 9n Purcurete, Silvio 300 Rabe, David, The Orphan 321n, 324n Racine, Jean 184–5, 188, 188n, 200

407 Raghavachar K.V. 309, 311, 313 Rajgopal, K.V. 314 Rakshasa 315 Raktakshi 310 Ramayana 307 Ranganna S.V. 311–2 Rangashankara 315 Rangayana 314 Rankine, Patrice 2n Ranna 309 rape 108, 115, 120, 120n, 121–4, 124n, 125–6, 129, 130 Raphael, Frederic 97, 98n Rattigan, Terence 92n Ravindra Kalakshetra 315 Realism 319, 327, 329–30, 330n Reception Studies 32–4 Rehm, Rush 14 remake (διασκευή) 6n, 7 reproduction 24, 39 restaging (ἀναδιδαχή) 6n, 7 Revermann, Martin 21n rewriting 7 Rhodes, P. J. 8n, 17n Richardson, Jack: The Prodigal 324n riddle 115, 117–8, 120, 128 Rieu, E.V. 293 Rigg, Patricia 90n, 94n, 95n Roberts, Deborah 13 Robortello, Francesco 9 Roche, Paul 87 rock and roll 237, 238, 244 Rolfe, John 11n Rosenberg, Isaac 288, 289, 302 Royal Shakespeare Company: The Greeks  322n Rural Dionysia 58–9, 65 Russell, Amy: Millennium Project 321n Russian opera 214, 218–9, 226–7 Said, Edward 7, 317 Sainte-Beuve, C.A. 11n Salamis 17, 111 Salieri, Antonio : Les Danaïdes (opera) 177, 188–91 Sallis, John 6n Samsa 310 Sanders, Julie 6n Sands, Jeffrey Elliott 328

408 Sanskrit drama 20 Sarkissian, A. 2n Sater, Steven 245 scales 133n, 135 scenic poem 268–9, 276 Schechner, Richard 21 Schein, Seth 21, 21n Schiller, Friedrich 95 Schleef, Einar: Die Mütter 260, 270 Schlegel, Friedrich 96 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 11n, 107n Schulte, Rainer 6n, 11n, 13n Scully, James 100, 100n Seaford, Richard 136 Seneca: Agamemnon 21, 319–21 Shakespeare, William 21, 32, 95, 106, 106n, 236, 240, 247, 259–60, 307, 308 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 104, 308 Love’s Labours Lost 106, 106n Shakuntala 315 shame culture 325n Shastri, Venkatachala T.V. 313 Shaw, George Bernard 101 Shelley, Mary 90 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 90 Shudraka 308 Sicilianisms 57 Sicily 53–8, 74 Simon, Sherry 307, 317 Simpson, Andrew: The Furies (opera) 177, 196n, 209–11 Sipova, Pavlina 2n skene (also skênê) 47, 103n, 161 Skira festival 163–4 Skoyles, John 172 Sloan, Sharon 13n Smashana Kurukshetra 310 Smyth, H. Weir 109, 109n, 323 Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio: Orestea 273 Sommerstein, Alan 116n, 117, 117n, 118, 119, 119n, 121, 121n, 123–7, 148, 320n Sophianos, Michael 9 Sophocles 8–9, 17, 80–1, 82n, 83–4, 88–90, 99, 103–4, 177–82, 184, 186, 194, 195n, 204, 205n, 207, 240, 319, 323–4, 335n, 336 Ajax 309–10, 318 Antigone 17, 20n, 68–70, 73, 81, 309, 311–12 Electra 82n, 99, 319, 320, 334, 334n, 335–6, 336n

Index Oedipus Tyrannus also King Oedipus 17, 81, 83, 311–12, 314–15 Oenomaus 73 Women of Trachis 103, 313, 320 Souda Lexicon 9 South African drama 21 spatial cognition 155–60 Sphinx 116, 117 Srikanthaiah B.M. 21, 304, 308 Srikantheshgowda 308–9 stage directions 99, 99n, 102–3 staging 39, 43–8 Stanislavski, Konstantin 263 Stanley, Thomas 9 Starr, Gabriella 151 States, Bert O. 259, 264n Statius 184–6 statues of Athenian tragedians 72 Stein, Peter: Oresteia 252, 262 Stephanus, Henricus 9 Stevens, P.T. 108n, 128n Stoker, David 88n2 Strauss, Richard 227–8, 232, 234 Elektra 232 Stray, Christopher 89n, 98n structure 39–40 Stuart, Kelly: Furious Blood 324n style 39, 41–2 surprise 40–1 surrogacy 161 Swanwick, Anna 90, 90n, 93n, 95–6, 96n, 97, 97n, 98, 106, 109–10, 110–11n, 112–3, 113n, 119n symbolism 33, 47–8 Symes, Carol 174 symposia 63 Syracuse 7 Syracusians 6n System of a Down 245 Szondi, Peter 256 Tadashi, Suzuki: Clytemnestra 337n Tamil 306 Taneyev, Sergei: Oresteya (opera) 17, 177, 201–4, 214, 218–26, 233–4 Tankian, Serj 238, 245 Taplin, Oliver 8n, 19n, 166 Tarakeshwar V.B. 305 Terence: Adelphoe 6n Terzopoulos, Theodoros 270–1

409

Index Bacchae 271 Liberation of Prometheus (Müller) 271 Medeamaterial (Müller) 271 Persians 271 Prometheus Bound 271 Tess 337 text, establishment of 24–30 Theatregroep Hollandia Ifigeneia in Aulis 265 Oresteia 265 Persians 265 Prometheus 265 Theatre of Hiero 7 Theatre of the Hindus 309 Theatre Studies 4 theatron 156 Thebans 15 Theobald, Lewis 82n Theodorakis, Mikis: Antigone (opera) 177, 204–7 Theognis (tragedian) 64 Theyyam 315 Thoreau, Henry David 90 Timocles: Orestautokleides 71 Tirugata 315 tragédie lyrique 183, 187n, 191 Translation 253–4, 280–1, 284, 291 as meta-phrasing (μετάφρασις) 6n problem of 24–25, 30, 49 transliteration 86n trauma 129, 129n, 236–7, 280–2, 284, 291, 302 trilogy 39 Troubadour Theatre Company (“Troubies”): Abbamemnon 236, 247–8 Tucker, T.G. 109, 109n, 110–1, 111n, 112, 129n

Venuti, Lawrence 12, 12n, 107n, 304 Vergil 201 Verrall, A.W. 109, 109n, 110, 110n, 119n, 311 Victorius, Petrus 9 Vietnam 13, 108, 115, 129 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Naso) 84 visual cognition 155–60 Viswanatha, Vanamala 307, 317 Viswanathan, Gauri 305 voting 138–9

Uhlig, Anna S. 11, 319n United States of America 15 Urubhanga 309

Xenophon: Memorabilia 148, 171 Xerxes 193, 198

Vandiver, Elizabeth 289 Van Steen, Gonda 1n Vasunia, Phiroze 20n Vellacott, Philip 109, 113, 113n, 114, 114n, 311, 313 Venice 9

Wagner, Richard 195n, 200, 227, 233–4 Wallace, Jennifer 90n, 91, 91n Walton, J. Michael 12, 81n, 82n, 85n, 89n, 99n2, 100n, 109n, 128n warfare 108–9, 110, 110n, 111, 111n, 112, 114–5, 120–1, 126, 128–9, 130 Warner, Rex 97, 97n Warr, George 89, 89n, 99 Wase, Christopher 82n Watchman 281, 296, 297, 301 Webster, Augusta 90, 90n, 91n, 93, 93n2, 94, 94n, 95, 95n, 96–7, 106, 286 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 280n West, Martin 10, 10n West, Richard 85n Wetmore, Kevin Jr. 1, 17–8 Wilson, Horace Hayman 309 Wilson, Peter 21, 21n, 250 Winnington-Ingram, R.P. 338n Wolf, Christa 282 women 109, 112–5, 120–4, 126 Woolf, Virginia 99 Wrigley, Amanda 17n Wu Tang Clan 241–2

Yakshagana 315–6 Yeats, W.B. 122, 287 Zajko, Vanda 6n, 11n, 12n, 13, 20n, 22n Zeus 118, 118n, 119 Zeitlin, Froma 15, 116n, 124n, 338n Zuber, Ortrun 3n