Unmasking Electra

Last night, I attended a virtual talk on Eugene O'Neill's trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra by the mother-daughter team of Carole and Beth Wynstra.

Beth, who is an associate professor at Babson College, noted that her mother Carole, the co-president of the Eugene O'Neill Foundation Board, is a much better parent than the character of Christine in the play. Carole said that's a pretty low bar, being that Christine is an adulterous and murderous fiend.

Masks come up frequently in the play, including in the stage directions. Not only were masks used by actors in ancient Greece, but O'Neill originally intended the play to be performed masked, as was his earlier play The Great God Brown when it premiered in 1926. Later, O'Neill decided to discard the mask idea, and when Mourning Becomes Electra premiered in 1931, it was performed unmasked.

O'Neill based the work on another trilogy, The Oresteia by Aeschylus. However, the story of Electra was also told by other Greek dramatists. Both Wynstras agreed that the version by Sophocles is probably the best. Euripides also wrote a play called Electra, though, which goes a little off the rails in spots. In his version of the story, Electra is forced to marry a peasant, but is later rescued by her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades.

In O'Neill's telling of the story, that doesn't happen, but there's still plenty of room for other varieties of familial dysfunction. As the Mannon family tears itself apart, the action is commented upon by the community. In Greek plays, this would have been done by the chorus. While O'Neill did not introduce a chorus per se, he did provide the character of Seth to provide a choral element, along with several minor characters. Carole noted that the singing of the song "Shenandoah" also adds to the feel of a chorus.

Beth pointed out that the actress who originally played Christine, the Clytemnestra figure in O'Neill's work, also appeared in soap advertisements at the same time as she was featured in the play on Broadway. The actress, Alla Nazimova, seemed to be playing with her own image, both on and off stage, emphasizing her own good looks even as she acknowledged that she was an older woman. Nazimova, by the way, went on to perform other important roles on Broadway, including the Priestess in Bernard Shaw's The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles.

The Electra-like role of Lavinia was originally played on Broadway by Alice Brady, who later performed in numerous Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Apparently, she and Nazimova did not get along. (Neither did their characters, as Lavinia plans her own mother's murder.) Carole mentioned that there was also a film made in 1947 with Rosalind Russell as Lavinia.

Next month, the play is scheduled to run at the Eugene O'Neill Festival in Danville, California. Tickets are already sold out, though, so you'll have to settle for the movie, or perhaps reading the play.

Shelley's Mythic Dramas

I very much enjoyed attending the conference of the British Association of Romantic Studies in Glasgow, but the conference isn't quite over yet. Today and tomorrow, numerous sessions are being held online.

This morning, I zoomed in for a panel chaired by Francesca Saggini and a roundtable put together by Omar Miranda. I was most interested, however, by a paper Pablo San Martín Varela delivered this afternoon as part of a session on Manifestos, Uprisings, Rebellions and Revolutions.

Varela spoke on "The Making and Unmaking of Social Structures in Shelley’s Later Dramas" including Prometheus Unbound, Swellfoot the Tyrant, and Hellas. Unlike P.B. Shelley's frequently performed play The Cenci, these dramas are all based on Greek models, and likely weren't meant for performance.

Prometheus Unbound is inspired in part by Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, which had a lost sequel by the same name as Shelley's drama. Varela said Shelley's play shows a mind trying to remake the world through imagination and love. By using myth, he argued, Shelley was able to create an alternate way of representing history in which violence did not have to beget more violence.

Swellfoot the Tyrant is a literal way of translating Oedipus Tyrannus, but Shelley's burlesque has more in common with the Old Comedy of Aristophanes than with any tragedy by Sophocles. He wrote the play in the wake of the Queen Caroline affair in Britain, and it largely reflects contemporary politics. Varela noted that the chorus of swine in the play turns into a chorus of horned bulls when they become no longer just passive representatives of the masses.

I've previously written about Shelley's Hellas, which is a reworking of another Aeschylus play, The Persians. It portrays the uprising of Greek patriots against the Ottoman Empire, but just as Aeschylus told his story of freedom from the oppressor's point of view, Hellas focuses on the Ottoman Emperor Mahmud II. Shelley opposed violence for any reason, and Varela noted that the play depicts rebels as resorting to the same violent means as their oppressors.

The online portion of the conference continues tomorrow. I'm hoping to catch a session on Rewriting Narratives of the East.

Mourning Becomes Electra

It's the Fourth of July, so I want to blog about a great American playwright, Eugene O'Neill, whose trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra says a lot about this country.

Set just after the Civil War, the play tells the story of a proud New England family whose history echoes that of the House of Atreus in Greek mythology. As the title suggests, Mourning Becomes Electra loosely reworks the first great surviving trilogy of plays, The Oresteia by Aeschylus.

The first part of the trilogy, Homecoming, portrays the return of the victorious Brigadier-General Ezra Mannon. (Get it? Ezra Mannon? Agamemnon?) His wife Christine hates him, though, and has fallen in love with a ship captain named Adam Brant, whom O'Neill describes as having "a romantic Byronic appearance." Needless to say, things do not go well for Ezra Mannon.

Christine is in constant conflict with her daughter Lavinia, the Electra figure of the trilogy. Even in Homecoming Lavinia wears a "plain black dress," but in the next play, The Hunted, the whole household has gone into mourning. Lavinia's brother Orin returns, and she and Christine battle each other trying to win him over. Lavinia proves the truth to Orin about their mother and Adam Brandt, and things don't go well for Brandt, or for Christine, either.

The third part of the trilogy, The Haunted, departs the most from Aeschylus's version of the story. While the ancient Greek writer ends the myth with forgiveness and redemption, O'Neill portrays an America where such things are impossible. Christian theologians identify pride as the deadliest of all sins, in part because sinners indulging in pride can think so much of their transgressions as to believe forgiveness of them is impossible. They cannot comprehend of a force greater than their own wickedness.

This is where O'Neill's play seems to intersect with American Exceptionalism. Traditionally, we think of American Exceptionalism being about America's inherent goodness, and how no country on earth could ever be better. The flip side, however, is a pathological focus on the wickedness of America. No other country has ever had slavery! No other country has ever fought such a bloody civil war! No other country has been as treacherous and deceitful as the United States of America! All of this is hogwash, of course. In terms of evil, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and Mao's China can all give us a run for our money.

But the characters in Mourning Becomes Electra are so focused on their own crimes that they can't even imagine redemption. While Orestes is given mercy in the original, O'Neill's Orin denies himself peace, in spite of the saintly Hazel seemingly ready to forgive anything out of her love for him. Lavinia is beloved by Peter, who if he knew the truth, would probably marry her anyway and be happy about it. "Love isn't permitted to me," Lavinia says. And why not? Lavinia explicitly states that she will not ask God or anyone else for forgiveness. Instead, she says she will forgive herself.

That is something she cannot do. Only by going beyond the self can we ever find forgiveness, and to say that no one else can forgive us is a tremendous act of pride, the sin of the entire Mannon family.

Old Comedy

Classicists often refer to the philosophical and political plays of Aristophanes as "Old Comedy" to distinguish them from the more situational "New Comedy" of Menander, whose works influenced the later Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence.

However, Aristophanes was not the only playwright penning philosophical and political comedies during the Golden Age of Athens. He is the only comic dramatist of his era for whom whole scripts survive, but we do have fragments of plays by other writers who appear to have written in a similar vein.

One writer whose plays have only survived in fragments is Metagenes, who wrote Homer or the Athletes and Thurio-Persians. While The Persians is a famous tragedy by Aeschylus about the defeat of the splendid Persian Empire, the comedy Thurio-Persians seems to combine the luxuriousness of Persia with the Italian city of Thurii, which likewise had a reputation for opulence.

How opulent was life in Thurii? According to the play, the city had a river with food just floating on it, including barley loaves, cakes, and meat. According to one translation, "Fish slices that barbecue themselves fly from above right into the mouth." However, pescatarians should be cautioned that in a play by the rival comic poet Archippus, there are political negotiations between Athenians and the fish to establish a truce between them.

Another author of Old Comedy whose plays survive only in fragments is Crates, who acted in the comedies of Cratinus before writing his own works. In his play The Knights, Aristophanes praises the writings of Crates, who in Wild Beasts depicted animals objecting to being eaten (perhaps like the fish in the comedy by Archippus). The play depicts inanimate objects performing labor all by themselves, including automatically pouring pitchers and self-rinsing cups.

According to Aristotle, Crates turned away from making personal attacks on individuals. This was not true of Aristophanes, whose play The Clouds directly satirizes the philosopher Socrates. The few fragments we have of plays by the contemporaries of Aristophanes seem to indicate that Old Comedy was quite diverse in both its themes and its comic methods.

The Persians

Aeschylus is known to us today primarily for writing trilogies of related plays. The only fully surviving trilogy of tragedies we have from ancient Greece is his Oresteia, which tells the story of the fall of the House of Atreus. There was also originally a satyr play, Proteus, that accompanied the trilogy, but alas the satyr play has been lost.
 
The tragedy Prometheus Bound is also generally attributed to Aeschylus. It formed a trilogy along with Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus Firebringer, but only fragments of those plays remain. Still, it’s easy to see how the plays all related. (I mean, they all have the same Titan in the title!) If all of Aeschylus’s trilogies had related subject matter, it’s harder to tell how The Persians fit in with the other two plays in its trilogy, Phineas and Glaucus.
 
In Greek mythology, Phineas was involved with the voyage of the Argos, and Glaucus was a sailor who became immortal, so perhaps the three plays were just thematically related, all pertaining to the sea (maybe even all relating to the Hellespont). In any case, The Persians, which is the oldest full play script in existence, tells the story of the historic naval battle at Salamis. The battle is not shown onstage, but is described in the play, and that description must have been fairly accurate, since Athens at the time of the play’s composition was filled with numerous veterans of the battle, including Aeschylus himself.
 
Most Greek tragedies begin with a prologue in which a character or characters provide the background for the action. In The Persians that “character” is actually the choral leader (also known as the koryphaios). He introduces himself and the chorus, chanting (in Ian Johnston’s translation):
 
     We are here as trustworthy delegates
     for all those Persians who have marched away
     to the land of Greece. Thanks to our old age,
     we are the guardians of the royal home,
     so rich in gold, the men Xerxes himself,
     our king, son of Darius, has chosen
     to supervise his realm.
 
However, the delegates are troubled, because the Persian army invaded Greece a long while ago, and they have yet to receive word of how things have gone. The chorus members themselves then recite what is generally referred to as the parodos, the song they chanted while dancing onto the stage:
 
     Obliterating cities as it moves,
     our royal army has already marched
     to neighbouring lands on the facing shore,
     crossing the Hellespont, that narrow sea
     which gets its name from Athamas’s child,
     on a floating bridge tied down with cable
     and throwing the yoke of a tight-knit road
     across the neck of the sea.
 
When the army of the Persian Emperor Xerxes invaded Greece, they did in fact cross the Hellespont, the straight in present-day Turkey that separates Europe from Asia. (The straight is named for Helle, the daughter of Athamas, who according to Greek mythology fell into it from off the back of a flying ram.) The army crossed it on a floating bridge made from boats they tied together with rope and then covered with boards and dirt.
 
The chorus is fearful of what might have happened to the army as they see the approach of the Queen Mother. Historically, this was Atossa, the wife of Darius and the mother of the present emperor. Darius had previously invaded Greece and failed, after his army was defeated at the Battle of Marathon. In the play, the queen (whose name is never given) complains to the chorus, saying:
 
     The common folk do not respect great wealth
     unless backed up with men, and though the poor
     may have great strength, the light of their success
     will never shine. Now, we have wealth enough,
     but still I fear for what I hold to be
     our finest treasure, true riches in the home,
     the lord and master’s eye. Since that is so,
     Persians, you old trustworthy counsellors,
     advise me what to do, since all my hopes
     for level-headed guidance rest on you.
 
The queen has reason to be worried. She had a dream that seemed to portend ill for her son, and afterward saw another ill omen when she went to make a sacrifice to appease the gods. The leader of the chorus advises her to pour out libations to her dead husband, Darius, so that he will bless the Persians from beneath the earth. Before she can do this, however, a messenger arrives with news. In a naval battle near the island of Salamis, the Greeks (though they had far fewer ships) managed to encircle the Persian fleet. The messenger describes the battle this way:
 
     At first, the bulk of the Persian forces
     held them back. But with so many vessels
     confined inside a narrow space,
     our ships could provide no help to other Persians.
     Instead their bronze prows rammed their own fleet’s ships
     and smashed the banks of oars.
 
Hearing this wretched news, the queen exits in grief, and the chorus sings an ode (known as a stasimon) lamenting the recent defeat. When the queen re-enters, it is without her royal train. She offers her libations to the spirit of dead Darius and invites the chorus to sing an incantation to raise his spirit. The ghost of Darius then appears, and when he hears the news, he blames the disaster on Xerxes insulting the gods through pride. As Darius puts it:
 
     He wished to check the sacred Hellespont
     by tying it down with chains, just like a slave,
     and that holy river, too, the Bosporus.
     He built a roadway never seen before,
     enclosing it with hammered manacles,
     creating there a generous causeway
     for his enormous force. Though a mortal man,
     he sought to force his will on all the gods,
     a foolish scheme, even on Poseidon.
 
Darius’s ghost goes back to the underworld, and hearing that Xerxes will arrive with torn garments, the queen goes off to find fresh clothes for him to wear. The chorus sings another stasimon, lamenting the loss of the good old days they enjoyed under Darius. Then, at the end of the play, Xerxes appears in torn clothing and sings a lamentation that alternates with that of the chorus. As he first comes onstage, Xerxes cries out:
 
     O my situation now is desperate!
     My luck has led me to a cruel fate
     which I did not foresee! How savagely
     a demon trampled on the Persian race.
     What must I still endure in this distress?
     As I look on these ancient citizens,
     the strength in my limbs fails. O how I wish
     a fatal doom from Zeus had buried me
     with all those men who perished!
 
That last cry, that it would be better to be dead than to suffer the shame of defeat, marks The Persians as an extraordinary feat of imaginative sympathy. The first great Greek drama to have survived to posterity does not brag about a victory, but laments the loss faced by an adversary.

Getting Married

On May 12, 1908, Bernard Shaw premiered a new play called Getting Married at the Haymarket Theatre in London.

Shaw subtitled the piece "A Disquisitory Play" which means it relates to a disquisition. Okay, so what the heck is a disquisition? A legal term borrowed from Norman French, a disquisition is an inquiry. Appropriately enough, the play inquires into the state of marriage and how it can be reformed.

Recently, Justine Zapin had an article in the journal Shaw comparing Getting Married to Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts. On the surface, at least, the two plays could not be more different. Ghosts is a painful tragedy, while Shaw's comedy sparkles and bubbles without ever feeling terribly serious. However, both pieces look back to classical drama. Ghosts reworks the Oresteia of Aeschylus, while Shaw stated in a note with the published text that "the Greek form" of unified action "is inevitable" in a play like Getting Married where "drama reaches a certain point in poetic and intellectual evolution."

Shaw's play is closer to the work of Aristophanes than that of Aeschylus, as it focuses on the happy idea that two young people might find out right before their wedding how unjust England's marriage laws are and refuse to go through with the ceremony. Just as Aristophanes often provides plucky female characters, Getting Married presents the audience with a number of women willing to challenge conventional ideas. Zapin's article focuses on three: Lesbia Grantham, Mrs. George Collins, and Edith Bridgenorth.

Lesbia, as her name might suggest, rejects men entirely and embraces spinsterhood rather than marriage. Mrs. George (as she is refereed to in the play) is a different matter. A powerful mayoress who also has humble roots in the tradesman class, she maneuvers to solve everyone's marital difficulties. When her practical-mindedness fails to untie the Gordian knot of modern marriage, however, she enters a trance-like state and begins to prophesize like a pythoness from ancient Greece:

When I opened the gates of paradise, were you blind? was it nothing to you? when all the stars sang in your ears and all the winds swept you into the heart of heaven, were you deaf? were you dull? was I no more to you than a bone to a dog? Was it not enough? We spent eternity together; and you ask me for a little lifetime more. We possessed all the universe together; and you ask me to give you my scanty wages as well. I have given you the greatest of all things; and you ask me to give you little things. I gave you your own soul: you ask me for my body as a plaything. Was it not enough? Was it not enough?

There is seemingly no answer to Mrs. George's question, yet to adopt the attitude of Lesbia will lead only to barrenness. It is up to Edith Bridgenorth to work out a compromise between the imperfect state of marriage in our society and the unattainable ideals marriage claims for us. Zapin interprets Edith's surname as indicating that she is literally a bridge to the future.

The play was not a success when it was originally staged, but it later made its Broadway debut at the Booth Theatre in 1916, running for 112 performances.

An Oresteia without Aeschylus

Last night, I saw Robert Icke's original drama Oresteia, a Euripidian meditation on the Iphigenia myth that also includes the story of her brother.

You might be thinking, "Wait, didn't Aeschylus write Oresteia? Isn't it about... you know... Orestes...? Hence the title? What does this play have to do with Euripides and Iphigenia?

The answer is everything. Icke's mis-named four-act drama, which does have some passing resemblances to Aeschylus's trilogy, begins with what is essentially an adaptation of the Euripides play Iphigenia in Aulis. This is the longest act in the play. (Or at least it felt like it.)

What's wrong with adding yet a fourth play onto the cycle Aeschylus wrote (other than that it makes the performance four hours long)? After all, Greek tragedies were originally performed as a tetralogy, with three tragedies followed by a satyr play? (Sadly, we don't have the satyr play that originally accompanied the three tragedies in Aeschylus's Oresteia.)

Nothing's wrong with it, I suppose (other than the disturbing tonal shifts it creates and the before-mentioned four-hour-long running time), but it's not what Aeschylus would have done, or indeed any other Greek dramatist, for that matter. As Aristotle wrote, the ancient Athenians believed that tragedy was the imitation of an action, not a recital of an epic tale. (That was kept for epic poetry.)

Aristotle observed in his Poetics that playwrights "who have dramatized the whole story of the Fall of Troy, instead of selecting portions... either fail utterly or meet with poor success on the stage." Aeschylus's Oresteia (including its lost satyr play Proteus) tells only the story of what happened in the aftermath of the Fall of Troy. By including the the story of Iphigenia, Icke expands the play to include events that happened even before the fighting at Troy began.

Perhaps the thinking was to include the things that ultimately caused the events in the Oresteia, but Aeschylus makes it clear that ultimate causes extend back generations. If one is to include Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis, why not also include Seneca's play Thyestes, since it tells the story of how the troubles of the House of Atreus actually started? Well, never mind. Icke includes an adaptation of Euripides before sending the audience off on a 15-minute intermission.

The play's second act roughly recounts the events of Agamemnon, the first play in Aeschylus's cycle. Occasionally, Icke includes some sly allusions to passages Aeschylus wrote, such as Klytemnestra discussing global communications in a manner reminiscent of that character's speech about signal fires in Aeschylus. What this play lacks, however, is a chorus, though perhaps the reporters are supposed to be stand-ins for the chorus.

After Aeschylus, the role of the chorus declined, and many of the plays of Euripides can easily be portrayed with no chorus at all. The elimination of the chorus makes this play feel more modern, as Euripides tends to be in general. Icke's third act (performed after a second intermission of ten minutes) sometimes mirrors the Libation Bearers of Aeschylus, but in spirit, it feels closer to the cynical Electra of Euripides.

A third five-minute intermission in Icke's drama is followed by a trial scene somewhat similar to that of The Eumenides by Aeschylus. Icke also takes advantage of some logical inconsistencies in Libation Bearers to create an interesting plot twist that does not exist in Greek mythology. The result is somewhat interesting, but why call this play Oresteia and why list Aeschylus as the playwright?

Had this original drama not claimed to be by Aeschylus, I probably wouldn't have seen it, and therein might lie the answer. If you want to see original plays that actually claim to be original, you might instead want to go to the Secret Theatre in Queens this Saturday, August 13th for the semifinals of their one-act festival.

My play My Fellow Americans made it to the semifinals, so you'll be able to see it on Saturday if you missed it earlier in the run. For more information, watch this space!

Atalanta in Calydon

The Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne is probably best known for his 1866 book Poems and Ballads, but the year before that he published a rather curious verse drama called Atalanta in Calydon.

Just as Swinburne's hero Percy Shelley had written Prometheus Unbound inspired by a lost play by Aeschylus, Atalanta in Calydon takes as its jumping-off point a lost play by Euripides, Meleager. At the beginning of his own drama, Swinburne quotes a Greek fragment from Meleager, roughly translated as: "Do good to them while they live, for every man when he is dead is earth and shade, and nothingness comes to nothing."

Atalanta in Calydon tries to mimic Greek tragedy in form as well as content. Greek dramas typically began with a prologue prior to the entrance of the chorus. In some cases, like Antigone by Sophocles, this prologue was a dialogue between two characters, but Euripides frequently had a single actor relating the prologue, often portraying a character who might never again appear in the play. This is what Swinburne does, having a "Chief Huntsman" recite a hymn to Artemis at the beginning of the play.

The huntress goddess is also honored by the chorus, which sings a classical parados while entering. Their opening lines are frequently anthologized:

     When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,

         The mother of months in meadow or plain

     Fills the shadows and windy places

         With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;

     And the brown bright nightingale amorous

     Is half assuaged for Itylus,

     For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,

         The tongueless vigil and all the pain.

The fact that the chorus is singing about Philomela and Procne hardly bodes well. To avenge the rape of her sister Philomela, Procne murdered her own son Itylus and fed his flesh to her husband, the King of Thrace, who was also Philomela's rapist. In the world of this play, children are precious, but siblings more so.

Atalanta, the title character, is not so much the protagonist of the play as is Althea. The legendary mother of Meleager, Althea had heard the Fates say that her son's life would only last as long as a brand burning in the fire. She plucked the brand from the fire, doused its flames, and preserved it so that her son might live. Althea relates this story to the chorus, who then sing a new hymn:

     Before the beginning of years

         There came to the making of man

     Time, with a gift of tears;

         Grief, with a glass that ran;

     Pleasure, with pain for heaven;

         Summer, with flowers that fell;

     Remembrance fallen from heaven,

         And madness risen from hell;

     Strength without hands to smite;

         Love that endures for a breath:

     Night, the shadow of light,

         And life, the shadow of death.

This grim view of existence precedes the entrance of Meleager, who catalogs all of the heroes assembled to hunt the famous Calydonian boar that is wreaking havoc on the land. It is only after the chorus sings another hymn that Atalanta finally enters. Meleager praises her virtue and beauty, but the other members of the hunting party just want him to shut up so they can go after the boar.

Atalanta is a great huntress, which is why Meleager invited her along on the boar hunt to begin with, but the men want nothing to do with her. Meleager's sexist uncle Plexippus goads him, saying, "Why, if she ride among us for a man, / Sit thou for her and spin; a man grown girl / Is worth a woman weaponed...." Later, he suggests the way she can help with the hunt is by being a human sacrifice. Atalanta speaks up for herself, though, and proclaims her own worthiness.

Ultimately, Atalanta not only joins in with the hunt, but even helps to kill the boar. After Althea gets this news, however, she receives darker tidings. Her two brothers have been killed, and by the hands of her own son. A messenger relates how Meleager tried to give the boar's head and hide to Atalanta, but this enraged Plexippus and his brother Toxeus, who assaulted her. Defending Atalanta, Meleager killed both his uncles, an act that sends Althea into a rage.

Of course, Althea had the means to exact revenge on her son. She burns the brand she once plucked from the fire, and Meleager wastes away and dies. Greek tragedies frequently ended with a kommos, or mixed song shared by both the chorus and main characters. During the final kommos in Atalanta in Calydon, Meleager and Atalanta say their final farewells, and then the young man enters eternal night.

Swinburne went on to write other plays in imitation of older styles, and Poems and Ballads contains a verse drama called The Masque of Queen Bersabe, written in a medieval style and subtitled A Miracle-Play. The poetry of Atalanta in Calydon has had a longer-lasting impact, though.

Aristotle's Poetics

When discussing Greek drama, the subject of Aristotle's Poetics frequently turns up, since not only is it a fascinating piece of criticism, but it also gives us a lot of evidence about the origins and history of classical tragedy.

It was Aristotle who suggested that tragedy grew out of the dithyramb. He also credited Aeschylus with first increasing the number of actors from one to two, and Sophocles with adding a third actor. Sophocles, according to Aristotle, also introduced painted scenery to tragedy.

The sixth chapter of The Poetics is the most famous. In it, Aristotle lays out his theory of catharsis, a purgation through pity and fear. He also catalogues the component parts of tragedy: plot, character, language, thought, spectacle, and melody. Of these, The Poetics singles out plot as the most important, since tragedy is not an imitation of people, but of their actions.

Plot, according to Aristotle, must be complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In order to be beautiful, it must also have a size or magnitude appropriate to it. Plays must not be so long that we cannot hold them in our memory, and Aristotle writes that at one time tragedies were timed by water clocks, or at least some people people say so. (I wonder what would have happened if a play went over the time limit!)

Aristotle is opposed to episodic drama, in which actions follow one another in no probable or inevitable sequence. Instead, he recommends the use of reversals and recognition scenes, which work best when they go together to cause suffering, or pathos.

Later on, Aristotle's vague suggestions got taken for hard-and-fast rules all playwrights had to follow. If we take his advice as it was meant, helpful hints rather than dictates, The Poetics can be a useful resource for dramatists even today.

Prometheus Bound

One of the great tragedies of the ancient Greek theatre is Prometheus Bound, which has generally been attributed to the playwright Aeschylus.

At the beginning of the play, the figures of Might and Power carry out the mission given to them by Zeus to bind the immortal Prometheus to a rock. To do this, they need the help of the smith god Hephaestus, who is a bit reluctant to chain up a fellow immortal. 

Since Prometheus does not speak during this first scene, it might originally have been staged with the binding of a massive effigy of Prometheus (since he was a titan, after all). Then, a masked actor might have emerged as the double for the giant effigy, though this is purely guesswork.

When Prometheus does speak, it is to attack Zeus for unjustly punishing him for helping humanity. "Behold what ignominy of causeless wrongs / I suffer from the gods, myself a god," he complains. "See what piercing pains shall goad me / Through long ages myriad-numbered!" Prometheus emphasizes the injustice of his punishment, since his only crime was bringing fire to mankind.

Next comes the parados, the part of the play where the chorus enters, singing and dancing. The chorus in Prometheus Bound is made up of the Oceanides, the daughters of the titan Oceanus. They attempt to bring comfort to Prometheus, singing:

               Fear nothing: for a friendly hand approaches;

               Fleet rivalry of wings

               Oar'd us to this far height, with hard consent

               Wrung from our careful sire.

               The winds swift-sweeping bore me: for I heard

               The harsh hammer's note deep deep in ocean caves,

               And throwing virgin shame aside, unshod

               The winged car I mounted.

Prometheus then relates his story to the Oceanides. He used to give counsel to the titans, but after they stopped listening to him, he accepted the friendship of Zeus. It was with Prometheus's advice that Zeus overthrew his father Kronos and imprisoned most of the titans. The final straw came when Zeus decided to destroy mankind and build a whole new race of mortals, hence Prometheus's decision to steal fire and save mankind.

Oceanus then enters and expresses sympathy for Prometheus, but also warns his fellow titan not to anger Zeus, the new boss in town. For his part, Prometheus tells Oceanus that he should watch himself, too, since if Zeus turned on him, the Ocean god could be next. Hearing this, Oceanus takes off, and the chorus sings another hymn.

The next visitor is Io, the Argive princess who had an affair with Zeus and got changed into a cow by Hera as punishment. What's more, Hera sent a gadfly to torment Io so she could never find rest and had to wander almost endlessly. To Prometheus, the fate of Io is just more proof that Zeus is an unjust tyrant who betrays even his most faithful friends.

Hermes is the last visitor Prometheus gets in the play, and the messenger of the gods warns him once more to repent. Prometheus, however, remains defiant, and challenges Zeus, saying:

               Let the harsh-winged hurricane sweep me

               In its whirls, and fling me down

               To black Tartarus: there to lie

               Bound in the iron folds of Fate.

               I will bear: but cannot die.

Though Hermes urges the Oceanides to abandon Prometheus, they pledge to stay with him, and the final lines of the play are given by the bound titan, captive, but still defiant.

However, that's not how the story ends. Prometheus Bound was originally a part of a trilogy that also contained Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus Fire-Bringer. The Prometheus Unbound by Aeschylus should not be confused with the choral drama of the same name by Percy Bysshe Shelley. In Aeschylus's version of the story, it is Herakles who frees Prometheus from his captivity. (Shelley takes the myth in a different direction)

Though the play is now lost, the Roman writer Cicero translated a lengthy passage of Prometheus Unbound into Latin. The passage appears to have Prometheus addressing the chorus, saying:

               Offspring of Titans, allied in blood,

               See me bound to rugged rocks

               And chained to stones,

               Like a ship on the sea, amidst a dreadful din.

               Saturn's son Jupiter nailed me here;

               Jove's power of Mulciber bound me;

               A cruel one, he made his will be done...

Saturn is the Roman name for Kronos, Jupiter is Zeus, and Mulciber is an alternate name for Hephaestus (generally known as Vulcan to the Romans). The passage is interesting, but unfortunately it does not give us much insight into how the rest of the play went.

Even less is known about Prometheus Fire-Bringer, which is generally assumed to be the third play in the trilogy, in spite of the fact that the gift of fire was made before Prometheus Bound even begins. We've only got one line of the play: "Quiet, where need is; and talking to the point." That's not much to go on, especially considering we're not even sure who says it.

So without the rest of the trilogy, all we're left with is one really good play. Instead of agonizing over what is lost, we probably should just value what we still have.

Staging Medea's Chorus

I just saw the Argus Eyes production of Medea at Saint Peter's University in Jersey City. Staging a Greek chorus in a modern-dress production can often be a challenge, but director Mason Beggs found some interesting ways to make it work.

Argus Eyes used the new Robin Robertson translation, which was first published in 2008. The opening passage, given by Euripides to the nurse, instead came over the loud speaker:

                    If only it had never happened like this.
                    If the Argo hadn't opened its sails and flown
                    to Colchis through the Clashing Rocks.
                    If the pines were still standing
                    in the glens of Mount Pelion,
                    not cut and turned 
                    to oars for the Argonauts.
                    If Pelias the king hadn't sent those heroes
                    off to do his bidding, to cross the sea
                    and steal the Golden Fleece.
                    It would all be different. Not as it is.

Periodically, the production returns to the loudspeaker device, which makes sense, as audiences today are more familiar with voiceovers in movies than with soliloquies addressed on stage to an audience.

This first passage, however, is not a from the chorus. The choral lines, if I am not mistaken, were divided among characters listed in the program as "Maid" and "Handmaiden" and--most interestingly--Agathe.

Agathe? I don't remember a character with that name in Medea. But Beggs creates a nosey neighbor who comes over bearing cupcakes and scant comfort for Medea. Why she is named Agathe, I'm not sure, but the device works.

Of course, the chorus in Euripides is usually more peripheral than it is in Aeschylus or Sophocles. The star of this play is clearly Medea, as comes through in Robertson's translation. In one passage, Medea eloquently laments:

                    Of all living, sentient creatures,
                    women are the most unfortunate.
                    We must save and raise a dowry;
                    then the man agrees to marry us
                    becomes master of our bodies:
                    a second burden greater than the first.
                    Loss and insult: that is all we have.

If you'd like to see this production, you have two more chances: Saturday at 2:00 and then again at 7:00 at the Roy Irving Theatre at Saint Peter's University.

Re-imagining Aeschylus

In the preface to his lyrical drama Hellas, Percy Shelley said the play is "so inartificial that I doubt whether, if recited on the Thespian wagon to an Athenian village at the Dionysiaca, it would have obtained the prize of the goat."

The reference is to the legend that a tragedy (which means "goat song" in Greek) was originally performed by the actor Thespis, who traveled about Greece in a cart. When Athens instituted Dionysian festivals, it is presumed that a goat was the prize for a first-place tragedy.

According to Shelley, "The only goat-song which I have yet attempted has, I confess, in spite of the unfavorable nature of the subject, received a greater and a more valuable portion of applause than I expected or than it deserved." One might assume this refers to Shelley's only tragedy, The Cenci, which deals with the unfavorable topic of incest. I suspect, however, that he is actually speaking of Prometheus Unbound, another "lyrical drama" that aims to recreate the lost sequel to Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus.

Hellas takes as its model another play by Aeschylus, The Persians. Shelley writes in his preface that in 1821, the year he wrote the piece, the Greek struggle against an Eastern despot was still ongoing. Thus, as he was dramatizing the Greek War of Independence, and not the Second Persian War depicted by Aeschylus, he could not show a defeated tyrant returning home from war. Instead, he chose to grant a vision of a triumphant future he believed must someday come to humanity, regardless of the outcome of the present war.

The parallels with The Persians of Aeschylus are striking, but so are the differences. Aeschylus has a messenger return to the East to tell of the Greek victory at Salamis. Shelley instead has the character of Hassan come to tell the Sultan Mahmud II of a Greek's defeat. However, he makes it clear that the military defeat of the Greeks at Wallachia was actually a moral victory. Shelley describes the scene this way:

          The band, intrenched in mounds of Turkish dead,
          Grew weak and few. — Then said the Pacha, 'Slaves,
          Render yourselves — they have abandoned you —
          What hope of refuge, or retreat, or aid?
          We grant your lives.' 'Grant that which is thine own!'
          Cried one, and fell upon his sword and died!

Just as Aeschylus brings on the ghost of Darius in The Persians, Shelley resurrects the spirit of Mahomet II, who conquered Constantinople in 1453. The phantom warns Mahmud that the empire awaiting him is not of the world of the living, but of the dead.

Death, it turns out, would soon come for Shelly, who died the following year, in 1822. The Shelley scholar James Bieri speculates in his biography of the poet that he composed Hellas from late August into November of 1821. Shelley drowned on July 8 the next year.

However, during his brief life, Shelley established a lasting legacy. According to Bieri, "Hellas rightfully has been considered the pre-eminent artistic work of the Panhellenic movement."

Whose Tragedy Is It?

The destruction of the Inca Empire had all of the elements of tragedy: overreaching ambition, a brilliant but flawed leader, and a magnificent downfall. Dramatists have repeatedly turned to the conquest of Peru when seeking inspiration for great tragedy. But whether they recognized it or not, before they ever set pen to paper, they always had to answer a simple question: Whose tragedy is it?

The End of Atau Wallpa, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro, and Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun each come up with a different answer to this question. As a result of the heroes they choose, they end up creating very different plays.

In all likelihood, the first tragic poets to have dealt with the fall of the Inca were Native Americans. Their work does not come to us directly in written form. Still, numerous "Dances of the Conquest" have come down through the oral tradition. These no doubt changed over the years, and by the time they were written down and translated into Western languages, they might have become unrecognizable when compared with early indigenous dramas.

In spite of these questions of authenticity, the Bolivian play The End of Atau Wallpa provides a convenient example of what the first tragedies on the conquest of Peru might have looked like. The Spanish version that we have from Jesús Lara dates to the mid-twentieth century, but it conveys how Native Americans in the sixteenth century likely viewed the fall of the Inca.

The Inca Emperor Atahualpa, or Atau Wallpa, begins the play with a literary device common in tragedy, a prescient dream of ill fortune.

"I saw the Sun, our purifying Father, hidden in thick black smoke," he says, "Maybe death is hovering near."

This typical tragic speech is reminiscent of Cassandra's cry to another sun god in Aeschylus's Agamemnon: "Apollo, Apollo! Leader of Journeys, my destroyer! Where have you led me? Oh! what fearful house is this?"

But while Cassandra is prophesying a tragedy in which she is only a secondary actor, Atau Wallpa remains firmly at the center of his own tragedy. Having deposed his brother, Inca Husácar, he must face a new conqueror. Ultimately, Atau Wallpa must bend before Francisco Pizarro, just as he once made others bend before his will. Like King Lear, who after being stripped of his powers literally strips himself on the heath, Atau Wallpa hands over all the symbols of his authority, including his golden headpiece, mace, and sling.

After a long lament, Atau Wallpa is slain by the base conquistador Pizarro. If it is not already clear that Atau Wallpa is the tragic hero, the King of Spain makes it explicit, lambasting Pizarro and praising his fallen enemy. While the memory of Atau Wallpa lives on, Pizarro dies and his body is cast on a fire. By the king's orders, nothing is to remain of the "infamous soldier."

The End of Atau Wallpa is a simple enough tragedy. The hero is a king, the stakes involve the fate of nations, and the action follows a tremendous reversal of fortune. When the German Romantic dramatist August von Kotzebue tackled the same material, he shifted the focus away from the king and made the noble Inca Rolla his hero. In both Kotzebue's play Die Spanier in Peru, and in Sheridan's English adaptation of it, Pizarro, this shift in heroes accompanies an overall change in aesthetic from a classical notion of tragedy to a more Romantic ideal in which individuals of exalted spirit are more important than kings or empires.

Rolla's entrance in Pizarro quite literally identifies him as a hero, as Alonzo cries out before Rolla comes on stage: "'Tis Rolla comes, the first and best of heroes."

This hero enters accompanied by trumpets, and in the next scene he is embraced by the Emperor. It is Rolla who wins the battle against the Spanish, and Rolla who undertakes the rescue of Alonzo.

The rescue of this single man, rather than the fate of an army or an empire, occupies the heart of the play, another indication that Pizarro is a Romantic rather than classical tragedy.

The machinations of Kotzebue's plot sometimes tip the play into melodrama, yet Rolla remains a dignified tragic hero. Even the ruthless Pizarro is moved by Rolla's nobility of spirit.

In his adaptation, Sheridan grants Rolla the elevated and stoic language of a tragic hero, giving him such poetic lines as, "To triumph o'er ourselves, is the only conquest." As a result, when Rolla dies, the effect is tragic, not merely evoking the pathos of melodrama.

Both Rolla and Pizarro die in the end, but it is Rolla's body that is lamented while Pizarro’s corpse is carried off in infamy. In that respect, the finale is similar to that of The End of Atau Wallpa, but in Atau Wallpa characters lament a king and fallen civilization, whereas in Pizarro they lament one man.

The fate of the Inca Empire is almost irrelevant in Sheridan's play. The Spanish are vanquished for the time being, but history dictates that the Inca will not last long. Sheridan does not invite us to contemplate this fact, however, instead emphasizing the tribute paid to Rolla's memory. Atau Wallpa is a lament for a nation, while Pizarro laments a single individual.

In a post-Romantic era, audiences are less inclined to elevate one person over the fate of a civilization. They are also unlikely to believe in the soaring (sometimes unbelievable) goodness of a character like Rolla, or to be moved by the fall of a dynastic monarchy so remote from modern democracy. To engage a twentieth century audience, Peter Schaffer undertook something very different from either Atau Wallpa or Pizarro: He took the man who had been the villain of the story and made him the tragic hero of The Royal Hunt of the Sun.

Little is known about the historical Francisco Pizarro. All dramatizations of the conquest, however, seem to latch onto one fact about the conquistador — his infamous low birth.

Both Atau Wallpa and Pizarro use the general's humble origins as a way of denigrating him and perhaps explaining why he behaves as such a philistine in the face of the civilized Inca. Writing in a more democratic age, however, Shaffer uses Pizarro's lowborn status as a way to appeal to the audience's sympathies.

Instead of covering up his background, Shaffer has Pizarro revel in it, indulging in the baseness of his past. His first line is, "I was suckled by a sow." Later on he declares, "I learnt my trade as a mercenary, going with who best paid me." He professes himself illiterate and completely lacking in chivalry, but his boastfulness in his lowliness comes, he tells us, from the world constantly saying "No" to him. Now that he is able to, he will take what the world refused to give him.

This is not the language of a villain, but rather of an anti-hero. Shaffer's Pizarro has more in common with the protagonists of Christopher Marlowe than with the evil conquistador he is portrayed as in Atau Wallpa and Pizarro.

What makes The Royal Hunt of the Sun truly extraordinary, however, is the way Shaffer transforms this anti-hero into a legitimate tragic hero, a man who over-reaches, but in the quest for something more than simple self-aggrandizement. Shaffer's Pizarro embarks on a quest for literal gold, but in his encounters with the Inca, he begins to hunger for a spiritual gold. His royal hunt becomes no longer for an earthly sun-like substance, but for the Sun itself, and all the spiritual qualities with which mythology endows the Sun.

As Pizarro and the Inca Emperor Atahuallpa march towards one another in Act I, both claim to be gods, but Atahuallpa actually believes in his godhead, while Pizarro cynically uses the idea of godhood in his game of conquest. Pizarro seems to believe in no god, Inca or Christian, any more than he believes in chivalry or honor. The only thing he does seem to believe in is death, which he views with the cold eyes of realism, draining death of the romantic notions that elevate Rolla's fall in Sheridan's play.

In fact, Pizarro's idea of death seems antithetical to the existence of tragedy at all. "Does anyone ever die for anything?" he asks, adding, "I thought so once. Life was fierce with feeling." In order to become a tragic figure, Pizarro must first get that feeling back. Only then can his death possibly have any meaning.

The feeling Pizarro finally does recapture in Act II comes not from Christianity, but from the Inca religion. In Equus, Shaffer would later probe more fully the appeal of Paganism to the alienated modern world, but in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, he is more interested in Paganism's appeal to one man, a man he will ultimately elevate to being a tragic hero.

The Christians are nominally coming to convert the Inca, but it is Atahuallpa who instead Inca-izes Pizarro. When Atahuallpa gives him an Inca earring, Pizarro, seeing his reflection in a knife, declares, "I have never seemed so distinguished to myself." Atahuallpa teaches Pizarro how to dance and how to laugh. When Pizarro's soldiers demand that he kill Atahuallpa, the man who once believed in nothing but death finds he cannot give the order.

Atahuallpa gives Pizarro a way out. Since he is a god, he cannot die, and if they strike him down, he will only be resurrected. This Pagan belief finally gives Pizarro faith, and even if it is a false faith, it is at least something in which he can believe. At last, Pizarro has something to die for.

After the Spanish execute Atahuallpa, Pizarro waits for his resurrection. When the Inca does not rise, Pizarro feels his faith has been betrayed. Yet for once he has felt faith. For the first time, Pizarro begins to cry, something the villains of Atau Wallpa and Sheridan's drama could never do.

It might seem odd that Kotzebue and Sheridan, living in what we perceive as a less enlightened age, should choose a Native American hero, while Shaffer, in the comparatively progressive 1960s, chose to elevate a conquistador, the very symbol of everything wrong with Western imperialism. However, Rolla manifests a euro-centric myth of the noble savage. He might be Inca in name, but in reality he personifies Western Romantic ideals. Shaffer’s Pizarro, though a Westerner, attempts to grasp a non-Western ideal.

It is easy to criticize Shaffer for falling prey to exoticism and for projecting onto Inca society that which he sees lacking in his own, but in spite of that, The Royal Hunt of the Sun remains a braver play than either Atau Wallpa or Pizarro. By focusing on the least likely tragic hero, Shaffer makes tragedy possible in an age notoriously hostile to tragic sensibilities.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun is neither a classical nor a Romantic tragedy. Instead, it is a modern tragedy which glories in the banality and senselessness of death, but at the same time reaches beyond that to transcend a world that no longer believes in the possibility of transcendence.

The Tragedies of Voltaire

Voltaire understood the limits of neoclassicism, yet still had difficulty surmounting them. Beginning with a French version of Oedipus in 1718, Voltaire wrote a number of tragedies, including Zaire, which dealt with Christian-Muslim relations. Voltaire acted in that play himself, and according to one account, forgot his lines and made up half a dozen new verses on the spot.

His play Mahomet, first performed in 1741, actually portrays the Muslim prophet onstage, a big no-no in Islam, so for that reason alone, I imagine the play is un-performable today. It’s not particularly kind to the prophet, but Voltaire seems to have intended the play as an attack on the Catholic Church, using Islam as a cover to shield himself from local authorities.

Voltaire’s play The Orphan of China reworks Ji Junxiang’s classic Yuan-era play The Orphan of Zhao. Though it wasn’t the first French adaptation of the Chinese play, the fact that this version was by Voltaire no doubt brought special attention to the piece, and the Comedie Francais premiered it in 1755. Unfortunately, many people attacked it for not maintaining unity of time, place, and action.

However, Voltaire himself campaigned against critics who felt rules were more important than drama. In his “Discourse on Tragedy” he wrote:

I know very well that the Greek tragedies, besides the superior ones in English, have erred in often taking up horror for terror, and the disgusting and the unbelievable for the tragic and the marvelous. The art was in its infancy in the time of Aeschylus, as in London in the time of Shakespeare; but despite the great faults of Greek poets, and even of ours, one finds a real pathos of singular beauty; and if some French who do not know the tragedies of different standards but in some translations and by hearsay, condemn them without any restriction, they are, it seems to me, like some blind men who affirmed that a rose could not have vibrant colors, because they in considering it had felt the thorns.

Voltaire went on to say that the Greeks, and especially the English, were inclined to surpass the boundaries of decorum, but that French writers often failed to achieve the truly tragic because they were too afraid of being indecorous.

While Voltaire’s dramas were progressive for the eighteenth century, he was still too stuck in the conventions of his own time to appeal to later generations of Frenchmen. Writing in the nineteenth century, Emile Deschamps concluded that while Voltaire was inventive in his plots and original in his thinking, he was still inferior to dramatists of the Golden Age such as Racine and Corneille. As Deschamps put it:

His Turks, Chinese, Arabs, and Americans are much more French than the Greeks and Romans of Racine and Corneille, and since they are Frenchmen of the age of Louis XV, rather than of Louis XIV, their language is less grand, less pure, and less idealized. They are addressing Madame de Pompadour rather than Madame de Valliere.

Nevertheless, Voltaire’s tragedies, more than fifty in all, continued to have an impact on the French theatre well into the nineteenth century. Once Deschamps’ friend Victor Hugo had his play Hernani performed in 1830, however, Voltaire’s neoclassical plays looked quite old-fashioned, and today they are largely forgotten.