Simon Goldhill and Edith Hall, eds., Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition

Abstract

109 BOOKREVIEWS Simon GOLDHILL and Edith HALL, eds., Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi + 336. Cloth,$99.00. ISBN978-0-521-88785-4. This Festschrift is a tribute to Pat Easterling’s contributions to the study of Greek tragedy and the history of its performance. It assembles essays written by leading scholars, many of whom testify to the profound influence of Pat Easterling both as a scholar and as a Mensch. Many Festschriften are characterized by sloppy editing and essays that are hastily thrown together. Not this one. Typographical errors are few and minor, and the essays are generally well conceived and cogently written—nothing less would passmuster as homage to Pat Easterling. The essays are divided into three parts. The first explores the relationship of actor and audience, and the ways in which this relationship reflects the political preoccupations(broadly conceived) of the Athenianpolis. The second offers four essays centered on the figure of Oedipus, while the last examines the development of the tragic genre in both ancient and modern contexts. The editors optimistically suggest a coherence to the offerings, especially in the dust jacket blurb, but any such attempt to tie these essays together is bound to be a stretch. Indeed, the variety of topics should be seen as a strength of this volume, not least because it is a fitting tribute to the range of Pat Easterling’s interests. Aeschylus and Euripides , Astydamas and Plutarch, Shakespeare and Yeats all enjoy their moment in the sun, and “the Greek Tragic Tradition” in the title is meant as a catch-all phrase to encompass the many pages that have little or nothing to do with Sophocles . In the first chapter (“Sophocles: the state of play,” pp. 1–24), SimonGoldhill and Edith Hall introduce the volume as a whole by assessing how scholarly interests have developed over the last century or so. They choose Jebb and his 1900 edition of Antigone as a watershed for contrasting what went before (Victorian idealism and obsession with the beauty of tragedy) with what followed (already in 1903 we have Hofmannsthal’s dark and violent interpretation of Electra). What makes this overview particularly valuable is the attempt to place individual oeuvres into their wider cultural and intellectual context—by tracing for exam- 110 BOOK REVIEWS ple, the influences of anthropology, psychology, and new theories about dance and ritual on Hofmannsthal, and noting the challenge these new interpretations presented to the privileged position of Greek culture as the intellectual ancestor of Western civilization. The chapter offers a provocative discussion of the intellectual pedigree and contributions of scholars such as Reinhardt, Kitto, Bowra, Knox, Winnington-Ingram, Vernant, Vidal-Naquet, Segal, Zeitlin, Foley, and Loraux, and acknowledges the recent explosion in performance of Greek tragedy (more expansive treatment of this important area would have been welcome). It also makes broader observations about how continuity and change occur in scholarly trends—the degree, for example, to which lag plays a part, with critics writing against the backdrop of the previous generation’s work (a lag, of course, that is also evident inthe approaches taken in this volume). The chapterthenlays out four areas in which Sophoclean scholarship is currently engaged: (i) the political sphere (how political/how Athenian is tragedy?); (ii) performance studies, which have now moved from purely practical/dramaturgical considerations to cultural dimensions of performance, including other sites of “performance” in the city; (iii) the language of tragedy (especially its ambiguity); and (iv) the performance history of plays, both in ancient and modern times. These four areas, not coincidentally,are the primary focus of the present volume. Part One: Between Audience and Actor Simon Goldhill (Chapter 2, “The audience on stage: rhetoric, emotion, and judgement in Sophoclean theatre,” pp. 27–47) makes an ambitious attempt to develop a theory of the audience that can account for democracy’s belief in the collective deliberative ability of citizens. He examines how Sophocles dramatizes the process of being (in) an audience through the dramatic device of creating an on-stage audience (beyond the chorus, which serves continuously in this capacity , offering a helpful alternative model to the “chorus as sounding...