Old Greek Wine in New Bottles: Michael Field’s Dionysiac Poetics

Abstract

The Hellenic poetics of Michael Field — the pseudonymous identity of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper — mark something of a departure from the highly politicized lyrics of Webster, Levy and Pfeiffer. More subversive allegories than overt political commentaries, the Hellenic poetics of Bradley and Cooper reflect Michael Field’s interest in drama, rather than activism. Like many of their male contemporaries, Katharine and Edith drew upon the rich resources of Hellenism in order to explore issues of contemporary significance. In 1892, Edith Cooper completed a prose play entitled Old Wine in New Bottles. The play, which was never published, serves as a useful metaphor for Michael Field’s extensive appropriation of ancient Greek literature and myth. Their plays, poems and journal entries are saturated with classical allusions, ancient myths and Hellenic figures. For much of their early career, Michael Field celebrated and venerated the Greek gods with Bacchic enthusiasm. Hellenic subjects also feature heavily in much of their later work, including the volumes Sight and Song, Underneath the Bough, Wild Honey and Noontide Branches. Their identification with ancient Greece was, in fact, not only professional, but personal. The couple’s association with Hellenism was so extensive that Robert Browning, a personal friend and mentor, hailed Bradley and Cooper as ‘my two dear Greek women’.1 Katharine and Edith revelled in the ancient past, to the extent that they had altars to Dionysus built in the garden and the study of their home in Surrey. Yet, their obsession with the ancient past was, of course, conspicuously ‘modern’. One is in fact struck by the very interdisciplinary and intertextual nature of Michael Field’s Hellenism. But which particular Greece, which nineteenth-century vision of Greece, was theirs?