The Strangeness of Tragedy by Paul Hammond

Abstract

REVIEWS The Strangeness ofTragedy. By Paul Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. xi+199 pp. ?30. ISBN 978-0-19-957260-1. Paul Hammond's The Strangeness of Tragedy queries the language, psychology, and conflicts of notable tragic characters in plays fromGreek drama to Racine's Phedre. 'Through the estrangement and the decomposition the tragic protagonist we are brought face to facewith the fragilityof our identity,and the fragilityof the languages through which we makes sense of that identity (p. 5). Hammond offers a series of short investigations that consider how tragic drama creates new and unconventional spaces ofmental and physical anguish. Considering 'this terrain intowhich tragedy transforms our world' (p. 12) allows these engaging readings of notable tragedies to investigate how authors use language and situations to push audiences far into the shatteredminds of tragic figures. Starting with Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy,Hammond uses Agamemnon to look at 'formsof estrangement between the speaker and his words, or between the image and its referent' (p. 42). Agamemnon's inability to create tangible links between elements of his immediate environment develops a disturbing theatrical effect for audiences by suspending them in a similar limbo. Tragedy may best be understood as theatre that creates an impassable threshold space made even more troubling by characters' inability to cross through that space. In Sophocles' Electra, Electra herself 'seems to have no future, or at least no future among the living' (p. 64). Tragedy here results from her being pushed unwillingly 'into the territory of the unheimlichy where protagonists do not know the strange from the familiar, or rather, accept as familiar thatwhich is strange' (p. 72). Hamlet's father becomes another example of such an uncanny or unheimlich space created inHammond's view of tragedy. Oedipus theKing can be seen as the tragedy of one man being both shaped and undone by thewords of all those around him, from Teiresias to Jocasta to the Sphinx. The riddling effectof this story's constant evolution through revelation and subsequent reversal of accepted definitions is the real tragedy of this play: 'The play moves around the danger of speech, feeling how far speech is from being truthful' (p. 76). The Strangeness ofTragedy looks into three Shakespeare plays (Macbeth, Othello, King Lear) to focus on personal responsibility aswell as the fragmentation of prota gonists' worlds. InMacbeth Hammond tackles questions of agency. Does Macbeth really have a choice when a dagger appears to him guiding him to Duncan's chamber? Relationships between thewords 'do', 'deed', and 'done' are explored as verbal signifiers,with thewitches functioning as a visual signifier of the fractured nature of Scotland. In Othello theworld imposed upon everyone is a by-product ofOthello's mind, and slowlywe watch as he tactically makes real-world language and symbols carrywith them the psychological weight of his own fears.Authored by Iago, 'Othello's private chronology' (p. 153) becomes a dangerous second text existing alongside the normalcy ofOthello's world and characters. 'Fatally,Desde 812 Reviews mona and Cassio are transposed into this alternative time frame' (p. 153). InKing Lear 'it is Lear who begins tomake language the subject as well as themedium of tragedy' (p. 161). The power ofwords, statements, and verbal accounting between characters makes up the bulk of the play, constantly giving birth to an evolving tragic symbolic tableau' (p. 179). Hammond closes his series of theatrical investigations with Racine's Phedre, considering 'the labyrinth of Phaedra's psyche, the dangerous and intricate space created by her desire' (p. 189). This collection of short pieces on major works of tragedy reads well and effectively links these tragic worlds together through in triguing examples of Freud's unheimlich. The ultimate strangeness of tragedymay be how 'thatwhich impels the protagonist, and seems to be a source of strength love, ambition, duty?turns against him to undo him' (p. 199). University of New Brunswick Peter Kuling The Oxford History ofLiterary Translation inEnglish, vol. i:To 1550. Ed. by Roger Ellis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008. x+485 pp. ?105. ISBN 978 0-19-924620-5. Stately as a galleon thisOxford volume enters port; so stately that its editor has retired and one contributor (the respected and much-loved Stephen...