Unsuitable for Women and Children?: Greek Tragedies in Modern British Theaters

Abstract

Unsuitable for Women and Children? Greek Tragedies in Modern British Theaters Ruth Hazel In the 1960 trial of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in London under the Obscene Publications Act, Mr. Griffith-Jones, for the Prosecution, asked the jury: “Would you wish your wife or servants to read this book?” The implication was that Lawrence’s novel breached class as well as sexual codes in revealing to anyone who could read the faults and misdemeanors of ‘their betters’ through describing the impotence of ‘the ruler’ shamed by the avid sexuality of his wife and the joyous virility of his servant. But even in asking this, Mr. Griffith-Jones had unwittingly set himself up as an object of derision , since to pose such a question in 1960 (even in Britain) was to reveal a lamentable lack of awareness of the realities of contemporary life, in which very few of those interested in the case, and almost certainly none of the jury, had servants anyway, and those of his male auditors who were married were unlikely to be able to exert over their wives the kind of Victorian domestic censorship he was suggesting. On the face of it, there might seem to be a closer connection between the subject matter of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and ancient Greek mime than between that novel and the subject of my paper, Athe- 260 Syllecta Classica 10 (1999) nian tragedy: an impotent husband; a sexually overactive wife; a randy servant; the inversion of social norms. For the dinosaurish dikastes of the Prosecution the problem with Lawrence’s novel was that it was not a comedy—and so defused and controlled by the conventions and expectations implied by that genre—but a serious work of subversive intent which threatened the Establishment, affronted bourgeois taste, and, in its use of taboo words and explicit descriptions of sex, seemed to bring literature itself into disrepute. The relevance of this brief excursion into the history of the twentieth-century novel might not be immediately apparent, but Mr. Griffith-Jones’ reaction, it seems to me, is not unlike what may well have happened when Euripides’ “proto-feminist” plays were first seen by old men brought up on Aeschylus: that this was not material they would want their servants, slaves, sons—and certainly not their wives—to see. Quite apart from the ongoing question of whether women and slaves would have been present in the audience anyway, it is possible to guess that there were some plays that Athenian citizens might have considered ‘unsuitable for women and children’ (particularly when ‘child’ or ‘boy’ might be used to mean servant or slave).1 Times change. In Britain, the novels of D.H. Lawrence have for some time been texts for ‘A’ Level study (that is, for High School students of sixteen to eighteen years of age). More recently, Theatrein -Education companies have used adaptations of Greek drama texts as well as the narrative of Greek myth for work with primary school Line citations refer to the following editions: Antigone, A. Brown, ed. and trans. (Warminster 1987); Medea, D. Kovacs, ed. and trans. (Cambridge, Mass. 1994). 1 For the texts which are most commonly cited as evidence for a female presence in the audience see E. Csapo and W.J. Slater’s invaluable The Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor 1994) 286–305. For a résumé of the debate about the consistency of the audience, see S. Goldhill, “The Audience of Athenian Tragedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, P.E. Easterling ed. (Cambridge 1996) 61–5, and on the likelihood that women were present in the audiences, see J. J. Henderson, “Women and the Athenian Dramatic Festivals,” TAPA 121 (1991) 133–47. In the absence of conclusive evidence that women and children were excluded from the audience at dramatic festivals, it may be presumed that if they did attend it was subject to the permission of their kyrios. Hazel: Unsuitable for Women and Children? 261 children. In 1994, for example, Dukes Theatre-in-Education group used Agamemnon and Iphigeneia at Aulis as the basis for their workshop drama for ten-year-olds, The Iron...