A Hero for All Seasons: Hercules in French Classical Drama

Abstract

A Hero For All Seasons: Hercules In French Classical Drama Ronald W. Tobin Hercules is undoubtedly the most widely known of all mythological heroes because his life and feats strike a responsive chord in popular culture as well as in literature.1 He first appears in a half-dozen extant plays by Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles. Long a traditional figure in Sicilian farce, Hercules assumes heroic proportions in Euripides’ Herakles and in the Trachiniae of Sophocles. However, the major source of the treatment of the Hercules myth in modem dramatic literature, especially in France, was Seneca and his two important tragedies Hercules Furens and Hercules Oetaeus. Parallel to this literary tradition has always existed the popular con­ ception of Hercules as, for example, a muscle-bound illiterate, or perhaps the incarnation of heroism. The two traditions, literary and popular, are alive today as we can witness in, for instance, the new play of Archibald MacLeish, Herakles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), on the one hand, and the existence of a perfectly frightening “ children’s” cartoon television program called the Herculoids, in which the abominable creatures who are the title characters are nonetheless the saviors and protectors of humanity— an unusual but not necessarily unique conception of the Hercules myth to which we will again refer near the end of this paper. But to begin really at the beginning, who is this Hercules or Herakles? His name itself is mysterious. Does it mean, Hera-kleos, the “ glory” or “pride” of Hera as the ancients believed? If so, why is Hera always depicted as the lifelong persecutor of Hercules? Perhaps the name Herakles means more simply and more in accordance with our modem conception, the “hero” or the “young hero.” If this be the case, we can better understand how Hercules can resume in himself a veritable summa of myths in which he constantly appears as the invincible warrior. As a matter of fact we do know that the idea of heroism was so closely associated with the figure of Hercules that he is the only pan-Greek mythological personage; that is, all of the separate Greek traditions accept Hercules, whereas Theseus, for example, belongs specifically to the Athenian mythology. Hercules’ particular parentage further explains the extraordinary attractiveness of his myth. Born of a human-divine liaison, he binds 288 Ronald W. Tobin 289 together the cosmos and humanity, a model of perfection for mankind, and in his cosmic aspects, the conscience of the universe. Inevitably, through the typological interpretation of pagan mythology practiced by the Fathers of the Church, Hercules, like other legendary figures, became a type prefiguring episodes and lessons of the life of Christ. In the world of literature, particularly of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance, therefore, Hercules is often transformed into a Christfigure , and his ascension to this lofty position is due fundamentally to three texts: a Canzone to Hercules thought to be by Dante, the enor­ mous treatise of Coluccio Salutati, De laboribus Herculis, and finally Ronsard’s poem Hercule Chrétien.2 Behind this heroic, exemplary stance of Hercules one often also perceives, in the literary treatment, the tortured image either of the mad Hercules or of Hercules in love. In fact those parts of the Hercules story which concern the hero suffering as a consequence of his folly or of his amorous entanglements were the most attractive to the serious dramatists of the sixteenth^ and seventeenth centuries in France, whereas the purely heroic feats, as found in the three master mythographers of the Renaissance, Cartari, Conti, and Giraldi,4 became the stuff of poetic versions of the myth. If we limit ourselves to the serious dramatic representations which are indebted to Hercules, we might do well to recall very briefly the plots of the two Senecan tragedies which are the source books for this tradition. In Hercules Furens the hero returns home to slay Lycus, the tyrant who had been persecuting his family. Then, seized by a fit of madness, Hercules slays his own wife and children. Upon awakening from the faint that followed his seizure, he contemplates self-destruction but is persuaded to live in exile. Hercules Oetaeus presents the well-known story...