The nature of the treatise probably also accounts for several frustrating passages. Notable among these is Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy as “the reproduction of a weighty, self-contained action of some consequence…which through pity and fear achieves the katharsis of such emotions” (chapter 6). The final clause has proved inexhaustibly fascinating to critics despite—or because of—its deep obscurity. Elsewhere in the treatise, Aristotle speaks of the production of pity and fear as the goals of tragedy. But what is meant by katharsis, a word that generally denotes cleansing or purgation of a ritual sort? Does tragedy cleanse us of these feelings, leaving us “calm of mind, all passion spent”? Or does it somehow purify the emotions themselves? How does it do this? It is as if we have missed a previous lecture, or are hearing a teaser for a future one.
An equally intractable problem confronts us in chapter 13, in which Aristotle asserts that the best tragedies depict protagonists who are not “outstanding in virtue and justice” and who do not come to grief “through wickedness or viciousness, but through some hamartia.” This passage is ultimately responsible for the tenacious myth of the “tragic flaw” from which tragic protagonists are thought to suffer. Yet the word hamartia does not normally imply a character defect or weakness; it connotes an “error” or “mistake” of some sort. Aristotle’s own examples are Oedipus and Thyestes. The former certainly errs in believing his parentage to be other than it is. Thyestes is a murkier case; we do not know what play Aristotle had in mind, but the mutual vendetta he wages with his brother Atreus involves plenty of wickedness and vice. And how would the term apply to extant revenge plays like the Medea or Hecuba? The answer may be that such plays simply do not meet Aristotle’s standards for the ideal tragedy. For when Aristotle discusses actual plays, his goals are not purely descriptive; he seeks to define the characteristics of the “best” tragedies (as he sees them). His definition does not fit—was never intended to fit—the full range of surviving dramas.
For Aristotle, plot is central, “the soul of tragedy” (chapter 6). Character is subsidiary. Still less important are style, versification, and staging. This focus on the mechanics of storytelling makes him the father of what we would now call narratology. Critical to a good plot, in Aristotle’s view, is unity of action; a play should depict a coherent and self-contained sequence of events. (In modern terms, it should resemble a well-crafted sitcom episode, not the nightly news.) Purely episodic plots stem either from incompetence on the playwright’s part or from a desire to curry favor with actors. An example of such a play would be the Prometheus Bound, whose entire action consists of Prometheus receiving a succession of visitors. Another is Euripides’ Phoenician Women, a play riddled with actors’ additions, which manages to condense almost the whole Theban cycle into a single drama. A mess by Aristotelian standards, it was one of the ten Euripidean plays selected for canonization by later critics, and one of the three most studied in the Byzantine period—a reminder that Aristotle’s preferences are not necessarily representative even of ancient audiences and readers.
For Aristotle the best tragic plot is complex. Often it will involve a surprising reversal of fortune (peripeteia) and scenes of discovery or recognition (anagnorisis). Dorothy L. Sayers is not the only reader to have noted the affinity of this “best plot” with that of the detective novel. Indeed, one of the two plays Aristotle cites most frequently, Oedipus the King, is a kind of whodunit in which a murder is committed, an investigation undertaken, witnesses questioned, and the identity of the killer finally revealed—even if the solution violates one of the commandments laid down by Sayers’s fellow novelist Ronald Knox (“The detective must not himself commit the crime”). Indeed, in talking about his “best” tragedy, Aristotle frequently reminds one of the modern mystery critic, not only in his prescriptive tone and his fascination with the nuts and bolts of plotting, but also in his sense that tragedy, like the detective novel, is a fundamentally moral genre, despite the often horrific events it represents. In some ways the work’s truest descendants are not Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie or Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature, but W. H. Auden’s “The Guilty Vicarage” and Raymond Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder.”
But detective stories, of course, are not the only kind of story. It is no indictment of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that it is not The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The limitations of Aristotle’s prescriptions can be seen by trying to apply them to some of the plays included in this volume. The Trojan Women, for example, is a play with no single protagonist—a true ensemble piece. Nor is it easy to charge the leading characters with errors or mistakes (other than being Trojan and women). The play is not complex (in the Aristotelian sense); it is a series of episodes that could be reordered, reduced, or added to without fundamentally affecting the plot. Yet the large number of modern productions testifies to the play’s enduring emotional power; if this is a poor tragedy, then there is something wrong with our—or Aristotle’s—criteria.
Aristotle’s analysis also ignores a number of aspects of tragedy that have seemed important to later observers. One is religion. Whatever its exact origins, tragedy was a religious ritual, performed as part of a religious festival, and it remained so throughout its classic period. Religion is incidental to some plays (the Helen, for example), but one cannot make sense of the Oedipus at Colonus without understanding the Greek institution of the “hero cult,” through which favored mortals become protective guardians of a particular place after their death.
Likewise neglected is the political side of tragedy. Tragedy was a primarily (though not uniquely) Athenian art form; its public performance at a state festival provided a venue in which the polis could talk to itself, about itself. Sometimes the political message is explicit, as it is in Aeschylus’ Persians. More often it is present by implication. As many modern critics have noted, the dysfunctional monarchic households of tragedy (Thebes, the House of Atreus, and the rest) serve as implicit foils for democratic Athens. They also supply a kind of mental arena in which familiar tensions (between individuals and society, state and household, men and women) can be played out.
Worth noting, finally, is Aristotle’s lack of interest in the theatrical side of theater. It is this indifference to performance that led the French scholar Florence Dupont to describe him as a “vampire” sucking the lifeblood of Western drama. His exaltation of the script at the expense of production is perhaps not surprising. Athenian tragedies originally enjoyed only one performance; while some of the fifth-century classics were revived in Aristotle’s day, he may never have seen many of the plays he discusses in performance. This perhaps helps explain his relative neglect of Aeschylus, the master of impressive stagecraft among the Big Three tragedians. Readers trained by the Poetics may be able to poke holes in the recognition scene in the Libation Bearers, but they will miss the stunning tableaux of Aeschylean theater: Agamemnon walking up a trail of blood-red carpets into the house where he will die, the apparition of Darius’ ghost in the Persians, the torchlit procession that welcomes the Furies to their new role as Eumenides. (Aristotle’s apparent indifference to these elements contrasts with the loving parodies of the tragedians’ stagecraft in Aristophanes’ comedies, notably the Frogs and Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria.)
No one would deny that the Poetics provides us with some useful tools for thinking about drama. Indeed, many of these are now so familiar to us that we may not recognize them as innovations: the distinction between plot and character (and between plot, story, and myth), the concept of the “recognition scene,” or the idea that works of art should be integral wholes with a beginning, middle, and end. Aristotle was a great critic writing about a genre he clearly loved, and what he has to say deserves our careful attention. But he cannot provide a shortcut to the interpretation of tragedy, or a substitute for our own experience of it. In this respect as in others, the plays themselves remain their own best introduction.
FURTHER READING
&nbs
p; Translations of the Poetics are numerous and vary in reliability. Readers will be in good hands with the Penguin version by Malcolm Heath (London, 1996), the Focus/Hackett translation by Richard Janko (Indianapolis, 1987), the World’s Classics version by Anthony Kenny (Oxford, 2013), or Stephen Halliwell’s version in the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); the last includes a facing Greek text. Halliwell’s The “Poetics” of Aristotle (London and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) is closer to paraphrase than translation and omits some of the more technical passages, but it is equipped with a helpful commentary. Even Greekless readers can benefit from the edition and commentary by D. W. Lucas, Aristotle: Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
The modern literature on the work is vast. The most significant book-length study is Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s “Poetics” (London and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), which includes a chapter on the work’s later influence. A number of useful studies are collected in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s “Poetics” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Dorothy L. Sayers’s “Aristotle on Detective Fiction” can be found in her Unpopular Opinions (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947).
APPENDIX E
THE POSTCLASSICAL RECEPTION OF GREEK TRAGEDY
Mary-Kay Gamel
Theater and Literature. More Greek drama is being produced now than at any time in history—on the stage, in musical renditions, in film, and in other genres. There are many reasons for this remarkable interest—the plays are both exotically different from contemporary life and hauntingly familiar; they raise significant moral and ethical issues; they offer magnificent roles to actors and great opportunities to directors; in a post-Freudian age, when the unconscious is much on our conscious minds, they offer ways to access primal emotions and impulses; their perspectives on power, gender, and sexuality are often provocative and disturbing; their tragic vision of life may seem truer than the optimistic visions offered by monotheistic religions; their established reputations, like that of Shakespeare, may more easily attract audiences—and more.
Yet for a thousand years the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were little known. After the fall of the Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek declined in Europe, but libraries in the eastern part of the former empire guarded Greek manuscripts. When Constantinople was conquered by Ottoman troops in 1453, Greek scholars fled to the West, and the rediscovery of Greek helped to fuel the Renaissance (“rebirth”) of classical texts and humanistic thought. Greek tragedies were first printed in the early sixteenth century. In the same century there were academic productions in Latin translation at various European universities, but the most celebrated performance was a staging of Oedipus the King at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza (1585). The play was chosen because of its prominence in Aristotle’s Poetics (see appendix D in this volume). A stone theater modeled on Roman theater design was built, music was composed for the choral songs, and the performance was regarded as a triumph.
Such an attempt at recreating ancient stagings of Greek tragedy was not typical. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, productions typically featured free adaptations, adding subplots that often included love stories to soften the harshness of tragedy and make it more appropriate for female audiences. Jean de Rotrou’s Antigone (1638) amplifies the relationship between Antigone and Hémon so tenuously sketched in Sophocles’ play. In Jean Racine’s Phèdre (1677), Hippolyte is not a misogynist, as in Euripides’ play named for him, but loves the daughter of his father’s enemy, and all the characters try to resist their passions—without success. In their Oedipus (1678), John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee add a myriad of new characters (including the ghost of Laius) plus love interests and subplots, and they conclude with the stage full of dead bodies. John Milton took another tack, combining biblical subject matter with classical form (as its name indicates) in Samson Agonistes (1671).
Sometimes changes in plots were made to avoid offending audiences. Medea’s murder of her children was especially problematic. Pierre Corneille’s version (1635, based on Seneca as well as Euripides) includes the infanticide, but British authors delete it: in Charles Gildon’s version, called Phaeton; or, The Fatal Divorce (1698), the locals murder the children without Medea’s knowledge; after learning of their deaths she goes insane and commits suicide. In Richard Glover’s Medea (1767), Jason’s abandonment of his wife is a momentary lapse; he begs her pardon, but the protagonist kills the children in a fit of madness. The need to treat female behavior carefully was surely influenced by King Charles II’s 1662 decree that female roles on the British stage be played by actual women.
In eighteenth-century Europe, the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a pioneering art historian and archaeologist, sparked new interest in Greek art. In the nineteenth century, archaeological discoveries in Greece, and the Greek war of independence that began in 1821, aroused further attention, leading to the hugely influential neoclassical movement in visual arts, literature, music, architecture, and theater. In 1841, Ludwig Tieck aimed to revive Greek tragedy by staging Antigone, sponsored by the king of Prussia. In addition to using the latest knowledge about Greek theater, this production included music by Felix Mendelssohn. Opening in Potsdam and going on to Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, its influence was felt all over Europe. Its success did not keep Edward Leman Blanchard from burlesquing the play in Antigone Travestie (1845), which featured a single actor as the Chorus performing “monopolylogues,” patter songs in which he took all the parts. The success of this burlesque led to many others of all three Greek playwrights, usually written in doggerel verse with lots of alliteration, bad puns, anachronisms, song parodies (familiar tunes with changed lyrics), and dance featuring cross-dressed actors of both genders. In 1850, Frank Talfourd wrote a burlesque of Alcestis with the subtitle The Original Strong-Minded Woman that was performed in New York, while Robert Brough produced Medea; or, The Best of Mothers with a Brute of a Husband in 1856, each against the background of a debate about divorce legislation. Despite their mockery these burlesques increased non-elite audiences’ awareness of Greek drama.
Another very influential nineteenth-century production was Jules Lacroix’s Oedipus the King, first staged in Paris (1858) and frequently thereafter, including a performance in 1881 with the powerful actor Jean Mounet-Sully as the lead and the young Sigmund Freud in the audience. Only five years later, Sophocles’ play was prohibited in Britain because of its incest theme; in 1910, Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, who had recently completed his own translation of the play, led a successful appeal to lift the ban. His translation was staged in London in 1912, directed by the Austrian Max Reinhardt. This production was remarkable, featuring a vast acting space with a chorus of three hundred, eliminating the usual distance between audience and actors so that the audience was immediately involved in the events. This was a bold step forward in the staging of Greek tragedy.
Besides these commercial ventures there were academic productions—relatively few in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more in the nineteenth, in both Britain and the United States. In 1881 Oedipus the King was performed in Sanders Theater at Harvard in a lavish production with original music that attracted six thousand spectators over its five-night run. Many other colleges and universities followed suit; some of these productions were in ancient Greek, and some universities have continued the tradition of the annual Greek play up to the present day. Some also aimed to recreate ancient Athenian performance, including outdoor settings, and a number of theaters were built on the model of ancient theaters. One prominent example is the Hearst Greek Theatre (1908) at the University of California, Berkeley, which was modeled on the ancient theater at Epidaurus and holds 8,900 spectators. This theater saw performances by the remarkable actress Margaret Anglin in Antigone (1909), Sophocles’ Electra (1913), and a triple bill of Iphigenia in Aulis, Electra, and Medea (1915). Anglin was very influ
ential in bringing naturalism to the performance of Greek tragedy.
The twentieth century saw an explosion of Greek tragedies in performance—more productions of more plays in more ways and in more places than ever before. Here are a few especially significant productions of some of the plays in this volume, with suggestions on what made them significant:
Aeschylus’ Oresteia directed by Max Reinhardt opened in Munich 1911 and toured throughout Europe; like his Oedipus, it was characterized by strong interaction between actors and audience. Eugene O’Neill’s three-play adaptation Mourning Becomes Electra, set in New England, was staged in New York in 1931, offering a strikingly dark and Freudian vision in the midst of anti-Depression whoopee. Mabel Whiteside staged the trilogy in Greek with an all-female cast in a stone outdoor theater at Randolph-Macon College, Virginia, in 1954; this venue is currently used for “original practices” Greek productions by Amy Cohen. In London (1981), Peter Hall directed Tony Harrison’s version in Anglo-Saxonese verse (four-beat lines, use of compound words such as “bloodclan” for “family,” “she-child” for “daughter,” etc.); this production, with an all-male cast in masks and a strong score by composer Harrison Birtwhistle, is available on video. In Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides (1992), a ten-hour extravaganza, a large company of actors using a variety of multicultural performance styles and much music and dance played in Paris and on tour to great acclaim. Mnouchkine’s inclusion of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis as a “prequel” and her sympathetic portrayal of Clytemnestra gave a strong feminist tone to the production.
The Greek Plays Page 97
