Euripides Our Contemporary

257 Pages·2009·1.889 MB·English

by  J. Michael Walton

EURIPIDES OUR CONTEMPORARY
J. Michael Walton is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the
University of Hull. He studied Greek under Kenneth Dover
andDouglasYoungattheUniversityofStAndrews,wherehe
directed the first of over fifty subsequent productions with
professionalorstudentcasts.AtHullhewasfounder-director
of the Performance Translation Centre and he has been a
Getty Visiting Scholar. He was General Editor of the sixteen
volumes of Methuen Drama’s Classical Greek Dramatists
series, to which he also contributed nine translations. His
books include Greek Theatre Practice, The Greek Sense of
Theatre: Tragedy Reviewed, Living Greek Theatre: A
HandbookofClassicalPerformanceandModernProduction,
MenanderandtheMakingofComedy(withPeterD.Arnott)
andFoundinTranslation:GreekDramainEnglish.Heedited
CraigonTheatreand,withMarianneMcDonald,AmidOur
Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy and The
CambridgeCompaniontoGreekandRomanTheatre.
bythesameauthor
AmidOurTroubles:IrishVersionsofGreekTragedy
(editedwithMarianneMcDonald)
TheGreekSenseofTheatre:TragedyReviewed
GreekTheatrePractice
EURIPIDES OUR
CONTEMPORARY
J.MichaelWalton
MethuenDrama
13579108642
ThiseditionfirstpublishedintheUnitedKingdomin2009by
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Copyright©2009byJ.MichaelWalton
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Contents
Introduction 1
I.DomesticatingTragedy
1. PlaymakerandImage-Breaker 11
2. TheFamilySaga 29
PhoenicianWomen,Bacchae,IphigeneiaatAulis
3. WomenandMen 44
Alcestis,Medea,Hippolytus
4. TheComicTouch 62
Cyclops,Ion,Orestes,Electra,Bacchae,ChildrenofHeracles,
Helen
II. PowerfulForces:TheGrandPassions
5. WarandtheMilitary 81
Rhesus,TrojanWomen,Suppliants,IphigeneiaatAulis
6. Revenge 97
Electra,Hecuba,ChildrenofHeracles,Andromache,Medea
7. ImmortalsandMortals 115
Alcestis,IphigeneiaAmongtheTaurians,Electra,Rhesus,
Ion,Hippolytus,Bacchae
8. Sanity,MadnessandResponsibility 131
Orestes,Heracles,Bacchae,Electra
III. TheatreTheatrical
9. PlayingtheGame:IllusionandReality 151
Hecuba,Suppliants,Ion,Rhesus,Helen,Bacchae
10. GreatRoles 168
Medea,Alcestis,Heracles,Hippolytus,IphigeneiaatAulis,
Hecuba,Electra,Helen,Bacchae
11. HeirstotheLegacy 192
Shaw,Strindberg,Brecht,Pirandello,Anouilh,Sondheim,
Frisch
Appendix:Aplotsummaryofallnineteensurvivingplays 213
SelectBibliography 235
Index 245
Acknowledgments
Ishouldliketotakethisopportunitytoconveymyenormousgratitudeto
Methuen Drama publishers and the various umbrella companies under
which they have flourished. Over the last twenty-five years individual
commissioning and copy-editors, collaborators and readers too
numeroustomentionhavenursedmethroughdiversevolumes,savingme
from countless errors of style or taste with notable tact and baffling
tolerance. Among the copy-editors, however, I must single out by name
Georgina Allen for her unflagging eye and ear, as well as her good
humourandpatienceovermanyvolumesincludingthepresentone.This
I realise is my twenty-third publication under the Methuen Drama
imprintaseditororauthor.Toallmydeepthanks.
For this particular book, I have greatly appreciated the constructive
criticismofreadersofthemanuscript,amongthemMary-KayGameland
Herbert Golder. I also wish to thank my frequent co-translator and co-
editor Marianne McDonald for her always valuable and supportive
suggestions at every stage. I exonerate her completely from any
responsibility for the more idiosyncratic interpretations of individual
plays.
vi
Introduction
In1964,thePolishcriticJanKott’sbookonShakespearewaspublished
in England as Shakespeare Our Contemporary.1 It was in the form of a
seriesofessays,eightonvariousofShakespeare’stragedies,threeonhis
comedies. Peter Brook wrote a brief foreword in which he described
meetingKottatanightclubinWarsawandspendinghalfthenightwith
him trying to secure the release of one of Kott’s students who had been
arrestedbythepolice.Brookwassurprisedthat,atthepolicestation,the
policecalledKott‘Professor’andaskedhimwhathewasaprofessorof.
‘Of drama,’ replied Kott. This seemed a revelation to Brook and not
without reason. In 1964 there were only three independent Drama
departments in British universities, at Bristol, Manchester and Hull – a
fourth was about to open at Birmingham – and only two professors of
Drama.
Kott’s book was greeted with enthusiasm by numerous critics and
practitionersforcombiningseriousstudyofthetextswithanawareness,
derived from his own political situation and circumstances, of the
historicalandsocialclimatethatspawnedthem–‘scholarlywithoutwhat
we associate with scholarship’ was Brook’s verdict. The essays were
accessible and informative to actors and directors as well as to students
and teachers. To put it another way, this was an academic book with a
minimumoffootnotes.TheotherfactorthatmadeKott’sstudyunusual
among books on Shakespeare was that it looked forwards as well as
backwards, the index including references to the major European
theatricalinfluencesofthe1960s,Adamov,Artaud,Brecht,Dürrenmatt,
Genet,Ionesco,Sartreand,aboveall,Beckett,aswellCamus,Kafkaand
Malraux.
Two years later, in 1966, Kott began work on a further volume, this
timeaboutGreektragedy,whichwaspublishedin1970asTheEatingof
the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy.2 This second book, a
series of essays on Aeschylus’ Prometheus, Sophocles’ Ajax and
Philoctetes and Euripides’ Alcestis, Bacchae and related topics, proved
less influential than the first, perhaps because Kott needed recourse to
1 Jan Kott, szekspirze wspólczesny (1965), trans. Bolesaw Taborski, published as
ShakespeareOurContemporary,London:Methuen,1964,revised1967.
2PublishedbyRandomHouse(1973)andsubsequentlyinGreatBritainbyEyreMethuen
(1974). Taborski was again the translator, this time in collaboration with Edward J.
Czerwinski.
1
EURIPIDESOURCONTEMPORARY
scholars of ancient Greek. Though he turned to the work of major
luminariesinthefield,amongthemRichardJebb,A.W.Verrall,Gilbert
Murray, George D. Thomson, Maurice Bowra, T. B. L. Webster, E. R.
Dodds,HumphreyKitto,BernardKnoxandPeterD.Arnott,nevermind
philosophers and anthropologists, Heidegger, Lévi-Strauss, Graves and
Auerbach, the work of such giants on the classical world is not always
compatible. The resultant essays vary from provocative insight, worthy
of the author of Shakespeare Our Contemporary, to awkward
generalisation1andactualinaccuracy.2Nonetheless,itisinappreciation
of Kott that the present book acquired its title. Euripides Our
Contemporary is intended both as an acknowledgment of the need for
Drama professors from time to time to re-investigate the earliest
manifestations of the world’s theatre repertoire and a strong belief that
thekindofinterrogationthathasbeenappliedtoShakespearemaybejust
asappropriateforEuripides.
AsfarasGreektragedyisconcerned,afargreaterinfluencethanKott
has been William Arrowsmith, a formidable scholar and translator of
Greekdrama.His‘EuripidesandtheDramaturgyofCrisis’wasinitially
alecturedeliveredatColumbiaUniversityin1984.3Thisreassessmentof
Euripidesasaplaymaker,inthelightofhisconglomerationofstyles,his
scepticism and sheer theatricality, went a long way to identifying
Euripides’ significance for a twentieth-century world. This is not to
suggest that there has been any dearth, either before or after 1984, of
books and articles on Euripides and his nineteen plays which have
survived, in close to six hundred English translations since Lady Jane
Lumley’sElizabethanIphigeneia.Twothousandfourhundredyearsafter
hisdeath,itmightnotbeunreasonabletowonderwhatsortofbookcan
anylongerbewrittenaboutEuripides.Thelinguisticdetailsandtextual
peculiarities which formed the basis of school and university study for
longerthanbearthinkingaboutaresurelyanexhaustedseam;toolittle
isknownforabiography;individualplayshavereceivedtheclosestand
1Forexample‘Alcestisisaheroineoftragedy,buthasahusbandtakenfromcomedy’,
p.83;‘OfallGreekplays,TheBacchaeseemstobemostpervadedbyeroticism’,p.224.
WhatofHippolytus?
2‘PrometheusBoundistheonlyGreektragedyinwhichtheChorusperisheswiththehero’,
p.36–neitherdies;‘Medeadoesnotaddressthegods.Theydonotexistforher,justasthe
worlddoesnotexist,asherchildrendonotexist’,p.237–sheinvokesHecate,Themis,
Artemis,HeraandZeus,nevermindhergrandfather,Helios.
3ArrowsmithdeliveredthefourBamptonlecturesatColumbiain1984,inthefirstofwhich
heexploredthenotionof‘anachronization’inEuripides.Thisfirstlecturewaspublished
posthumouslyin1999,butatthetimeofwritingtheotherthreeremainunpublished,his
prematuredeathin1992havingpreventedrevision.
2
INTRODUCTION
mostingeniousofscrutinies;locatingtheplaywrightwithinthesocialand
political context of his time is a well-trodden path, if still a contentious
one.LessexploredhasbeenEuripides’impactonlatergenerations.Itis
inthiskindofterritorythatthepresentstudyistobelocated.Theaimis
specific.WhatEuripideswasinhisowntimeislessimportantherethan
whyheshouldstillhavesomethingtosayaboutourhecticcontemporary
world when concerns such as global warming, nuclear proliferation,
terrorist infiltration and bank failures dominate the headlines. How, in
short,andwhymayEuripidesstillresonate?
If this were to be simply a book listing topics to show how
‘contemporary’ the plays of Euripides may prove, it could be short
indeed.WhatarethesubjectsofthisancientGreekplaywright?War,its
causesandconduct;moralityandpower;theinfluenceofoligarchyina
notional democracy; domestic strife; old age, illness and bereavement;
sickness within society; personal responsibility; refugees and immi-
gration; religion and ideology; sacrifice and self-sacrifice. No difficulty
finding comment on such themes in Euripides. His plays are filled with
people who constantly fiddle with the truth, gods, heroes, soldiers,
politicians, even messengers. At a symposium on ‘Contemporary
Performance of Greek and Roman Drama’ held at the J. Paul Getty
Museum in June, 2002, the American director, Peter Sellars, told his
audiencehehadjustreturnedtoAmericaaftertwoyearsaway:‘andI’m
shocked at the absence of dissent in this country.The absence of public
voiceoverthingsthatabsolutelymustbespokenof.So,ofcourse,Iam
now working with Euripides. That’s simple . . . and the reason I’m
working on The Children of Heracles, it’s about refugees and
immigration.’ To give his words their full political context, they were
deliveredalmostexactlyatmidpointbetweenthedestructionoftheTwin
TowersandthesecondinvasionofIraq.
ThisbooktakesSellars’positionasastartingpointandaimsfurther.
CommentontheirowntimewasfilteredbytheGreektragediansinaway
thattranscendsperiod.Euripidesmayhavenoknowledgeofthespecific
problems of our age, but any comment on his own age was strictly
deflected. He and his contemporaries set their tragedies, with minor
exceptions,intheworldofmyth.Theadvantageofmythisthatitsstories
are basic but malleable. Entrenched in an unspecific Greek past as
nebulousasthatofShakespeare’sTroilusandCressida,TimonofAthens
orAMidsummerNight’sDream,theplotsofallthreeGreektragedians
engaged topical issues from an oblique perspective. The Trojan War
servedasameansofviewinganywar,itsavoidabilityorunavoidability,
itsheroicsandmock-heroics,itsconsequences,itsfutilityanditsmisery.
3