Greek tragedies as plays for performance

202 Pages·2017·8.885 MB·English

by  D. A. Raeburn

Greek Tragedies as Plays for Performance
Greek Tragedies as Plays for Performance
David Raeburn
This edition first published 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Raeburn, D. A., author.
Title: Greek tragedies as plays for performance / David Raeburn.
Description: Chicester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016032959 (print) | LCCN 2016036064 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119089858 (cloth) |
ISBN 9781119089896 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119089889 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119089933 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Greek drama (Tragedy)–History and criticism. | Theater–Greece–History–To 500.
Classification: LCC PA3131 .R28 2016 (print) | LCC PA3131 (ebook) | DDC 882/.0109–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032959
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Red-figure volute krater with an actor holding his mask, from Ruvo, c.410 BC (ceramic),
Pronomos Painter (c.420-390 BC) / Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy / Bridgeman Images
Set in 10/12pt Warnock by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Figure 0.1 Bacchae, Cloisters, New College, Oxford 2013. Source: Reproduced by permission of the Archive
of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama.
vii
Contents
Preface ix
About the Companion Website xi
1 Introduction 1
2 Aeschylus 15
3 Persae 21
4 The Oresteia 33
5 Sophocles 81
6 Antigone 87
7 Oedipus Tyrannus 105
8 Electra (Sophocles) 123
9 Euripides 137
10 Medea 143
11 Electra (Euripides) 157
12 Bacchae 173
Appendix A: Glossary of Greek Tragic Terms 189
Appendix B: Rhythm and Meter 191
Index 195
ix
Preface
It is a remarkable fact that many of the tragedies which have survived from ancient Athens
still have the power to move an audience in the theater today nearly two thousand millennia
after their original performance. This is true although they were composed in a form and
under conditions largely alien to the modern theater and entirely so if compared with our
experience of drama in the cinema or on the television screen. One important reason for this
strange phenomenon must be the universality of their themes which makes them relevant
today as they were in the fifth‐century bc. These plays are also powerful dramatic constructs
and it greatly aids our appreciation to explore how the three great Attic tragedians set about
the task of engaging and sustaining their own audience’s attention, exciting emotion and
stimulating thought.
For its proper understanding an ancient Greek vase demands to be viewed not only as an
artefact in its own right but also as an object of its own time. Similarly, a Greek tragedy should
be regarded as a play for performance, with account also taken of the medium in which it was
composed, the resources that the dramatist had at his disposal, the social and historical con-
text in which it was first produced, the subject matter on which the poet drew and the ideas
which may have inspired him as an individual artist.
In this book I attempt to give an account of 10 of the 33 extant tragedies that have survived
from ancient Athens in more or less complete form. My aim is to demonstrate how these plays
were contrived and operated as pieces essentially composed for theatrical performance.
The ten – four by Aeschylus and three by each of Sophocles and Euripides – have been chosen
as they are generally considered among the very finest Greek tragedies and, in almost all
cases, frequently revived today. In particular, the Oresteia and the two Electra plays comple-
ment one another in being based on the same myth and so well illustrate the differences in
artistic approach between the three dramatists. As a classical scholar I have studied all these
plays from various academic standpoints and have taught them to students in the original
Greek. I have also engaged with them in the many live productions that I have directed with
students in schools and universities, whether in the original or in translation. Some of them
have been mounted in open‐air spaces in which it has been possible roughly to reproduce the
spatial relationships between actors, chorus and audience which would have characterized a
play’s performance in the ancient theatre. These productions have never aspired to recon-
struct a play’s original performance. Too little is known of many aspects, such as music and
choreography, to make that conceivable. Nevertheless, I believe that some features of the
form and style of ancient tragedy are essential to the effective communication of a classical
text in the modern theater.
x Preface
I hope, therefore to blend some of the insights of scholarship into Greek tragedy with the
practical artistry of the theater. The aim of bridging the study and the stage in this kind of way
inspired the influential Prefaces to Shakespeare, published between 1927 and 1944, by Harley
Granville Barker, an actor, playwright and director who broke new ground in the presentation
of Shakespeare’s plays for the audiences of his time. It is in a similar spirit that I have
approached my task in the exploration of my chosen Greek tragedies.
My book is intended first of all for students who may be reading these plays, whether in the
original or in translation. I would encourage them to view the texts as the script for a continu-
ous and highly structured theatrical performance and to visualise them in action, as far as
possible, as they might have been performed in the theater for which they were composed.
In this latter regard, I have occasionally suggested stage directions of my own, where this has
posed a major problem to scholars.
I also hope that my detailed discussions of individual plays will prove of interest to a wider
readership. The last fifty years or so have seen a remarkable revival in the live performance of
Greek tragedy not only in schools and universities but also in the professional theater, on the
cinema screen and even on television. New translations have abounded and also “acting ver-
sions” or adaptations by distinguished poets which can be regarded as new plays in their own
right. The unfamiliar form of the ancient texts, however, is often baffling to new audiences or
readers. My book hopes to guide this broader group of aficionados towards an understanding
and fuller appreciation of this kind of drama.
If my accounts of the plays can be of value to actors and directors, as Granville Barker’s
Prefaces have been, then so much the better. Actors may be particularly interested in the
ancient tragedians’ approach to characterization, while directors may find it useful to con-
sider how intimately content and form are interconnected in these challenging dramas. If the
question that concerns them is, “How do I use this text to create my own original piece of bold
and exciting theatre?” they will probably not find this book very helpful. The approach needs
to be more in the spirit of an orchestral conductor studying a score prior to rehearsal, such as:
“How can I best engage with the creative mind that gave birth to this ancient text, in the light
of the form in which he composed it, the conditions under which it was first performed and
(maybe) its own political and historical background – in order to bring it to life for a modern
audience in a clear, interesting and vibrant realization?” That question, indeed, is the one with
which this book is primarily concerned.
There are several whom I need to thank for their help in this enterprise. Andreas Knab
attended some lectures I gave on the subject matter of this book and encouraged me to write
it by transcribing my notes. Ryan Kourakis Beadle and Kresimir Vukovic between them typed
up my manuscript drafts. Ben Cartlidge, Lucy Jackson, Philomen Probert and Guy Westwood
joined me in doing the readings for the recordings, expertly engineered by Jamie McIntyre
and financed by the New College Ludwig Fund for Humanities Research. I am also indebted
to my colleagues at New College, Oxford, Jane Lightfoot and Robin Lane Fox, especially for
their encouragement of the productions I have mounted with their talented students in the
College Cloisters during recent years. Several of the illustrations in this book are photographs
taken by Jane Lightfoot.
I dedicate the book to the memory of my late wife, Mary Faith, and to the innumerable
students in schools and universities and at the Greek Summer Schools sponsored by the Joint
Association of Classical Teachers, who have taken part in the many productions of Greek
tragedies that I have directed. It is thanks to them that I have been able to develop the approach
that I have adopted in these pages.
xi
About the Companion Website
The recordings can be accessed on the book’s companion website at:
www.wiley.com/go/raeburn
1
1
Introduction
Greek tragedy was an art form initiated in ancient Athens towards the end of the sixth century
bc and developed during the fifth century bc. Although tragedies continued to be acted and
composed during the fourth century and later, all that survives to us in more or less complete,
as opposed to fragmentary, form consists of 33 plays, said to date from 472 to 406 bc and
traditionally attributed to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.1
These plays have been studied and valued in later times for a variety of reasons. Most of them
survived in the first place because they were selected in late antiquity or the Middle Ages as ‘set
books” in schools for the purpose of teaching the grammar and syntax of the ancient Greek
language. Although there were occasional performances from the Renaissance onwards, they
were primarily regarded as materials for pedagogic purposes or textual criticism until the early
twentieth century, when interest in them as major works of drama became established among
a wider public. In due course this inspired a plethora of new translations or original plays based
on them. Scholars have explored their stagecraft as well as their literary qualities. Much recent
work has examined the plays as socio‐historic documents which help to illuminate the period
in which they were composed on general issues such as group identity, gender and class. Finally,
the last century has seen an unprecedented rise of public interest in those ancient texts as plays
for performance on stage by professional or amateur actors.
The aim of this book is to focus on four tragedies of Aeschylus, three of Sophocles and three
of Euripides, exploring each play on its own in terms of its original status as a theatrical arte-
fact. I try to show how these ten texts “work” as drama and, more specifically, how the three
great poets used the characteristic form of the Greek tragic genre to create dramatic sequences
that would engage and hold their audiences’ attention and stir their emotions in the theater,
while at the same time encouraging them to reflect on matters of profound importance. This
introductory chapter attempts to define the ancient poet’s task in terms of this form, the
social context in which the plays were composed to be presented, and the human and other
resources that were available at the time. All these factors dictated their composition and are
important to their consideration as works of art.
Greek Tragedy as a Genre
“Greek tragedy is a hybrid form, and the different parts of the drama are differentiated in form
and style” (Rutherford 2012, 29). All our surviving plays follow a standard pattern, a sequence
of discrete sections akin to the “movements” of a classical symphony or the “numbers” of an
Greek Tragedies as Plays for Performance, First Edition. David Raeburn.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Companion website: www.wiley.com/go/raeburn
2 Greek Tragedies as Plays for Performance
eighteenth century oratorio and in modern music theater. Put as its simplest, these movements
alternate between spoken “episodes” (scenes) for one to three solo actors and “odes” (songs)
performed by a chorus. The normal meter for the former is the iambic trimeter, while the latter
are delivered in a variety of so‐called lyric meters. Variations on this pattern are mentioned
later but it is enough at this point to note the hybrid character of Greek tragedy and the par-
ticular challenge that it presented to the ancient dramatist in creating a continuity in unfolding
his story on stage to his audience in a compelling and satisfying way. To understand how these
plays “work” as drama, we need to analyse the “structure of feeling,” the controlled sequence of
emotional responses implicit in this basic alternation of movements for chorus and solo actors
and to observe how these two disparate elements are united in the individual texts.
This peculiar form calls for some explanation. Here we have European drama in its infancy
and we need to ask how it came about. Unfortunately, the detailed evidence for the origins
of Greek tragedy is difficult and obscure; we can never be entirely sure how or when it began,
and this book is not the place to argue a problematic issue.2 Tragedies were certainly being
performed at Athens by the end of the sixth century and we have the firm date of 472 bc for
our first surviving example of the genre, Aeschylus’ Persae. An answer to the question, “How
did Greek tragedy take the hybrid form that it did?” may be more easily sought if we briefly
examine the performance genres which existed in Greece earlier in the sixth century.
The ancestor of the tragic chorus is surely to be found in the so‐called genre of “choral lyric,”
that is the performance of cult poetry sung and danced by a choir to the accompaniment of
the lyre or other musical instrument. These performances were originally “sacral,” religious
acts offered in honour of gods or heroes in the hope of blessings for the local community.
Examples would include the “paean” performed in honour of Apollo, or the “dithyramb”
which was associated particularly with Dionysus, the god of wine and (later) of the dramatic
festivals at Athens. Subsequently, choral lyric could be essentially secular, as in the epinikion,
a hymn celebrating the victory of an athlete in one of the great inter‐state festivals like the
Olympics, an art perfected in the fifth century by the poet Pindar. The whole genre evidently
goes back to the seventh century and was mainly developed in the southern part of Greece,
the Peloponnese, not so much in Athens itself, though an Attic vase dated to 560–50 bc3
offers evidence for pre‐dramatic performances by a chorus of satyrs, who were always associ-
ated with the worship of Dionysus. It is significant that the choral songs of Attic tragedy adopt
certain features of the Doric dialect which was spoken in some cities of the Peloponnese.
The other performance art from which Greek tragedy fairly obviously derives was the pub-
lic recitation of epic verse by professionals known as “rhapsodes.” By 514 at the latest, and
very possibly earlier, competitions in the recitation of Homeric verse were held in Athens at
the Great Panathenaea, the quadrennial festival in honour of the city’s patron goddess Athena,
alongside contests in athletic and equestrian events. The Iliad and Odyssey themselves derive
from a tradition of oral recitation in a preliterate culture and make perfect performance
poetry in their combination of third‐person narrative and speeches, often quite long, that are
put into the mouths of the various characters. Epic poetry would doubtless have demanded
the kind of projection of voice and personality that was associated with acting or any form of
public speaking; it must also have included an element of impersonation in the delivery of the
speeches. The rhapsodic contests can thus be seen as leading naturally into tragedy, in which
a story was presented by masked actors individually impersonating a variety of characters,
with the narrative element covered by more nondescript “messengers,” through whom the
audience could learn, by ear, of such events in the story as could not convincingly be enacted
before their eyes.