Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewGreek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages. Tanya Pollard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+331.Nick MoschovakisNick MoschovakisBethesda, Maryland Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDid the classical Greek tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—inspire Shakespeare? Most twentieth-century scholars answered this question simply: no. Finding few Greek books domestically printed in Renaissance England, and even fewer translations of Greek plays into English, they generally inferred that such texts were little known to readers outside the most elite cultural settings. And they tended to accept the inherited view that Greek went untaught, or barely taught, in sixteenth-century grammar schools. (Recall Ben Jonson’s reference to Shakespeare’s “small Latin and less Greek.”)1 From these premises they concluded that the Greek dramatic canon was all but a blank to Shakespeare.Each of the premises was flawed, however. A generation ago, a handful of dissident scholars—Emrys Jones, Louise Schleiner, and others—began pointing out likely transmission channels for Greek tragedy, especially Euripides, beyond the world of Elizabethan universities and aristocratic libraries. They suggested that the dissemination of Latin translations by humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus and George Buchanan might explain seeming parallels between Greek dramatic texts and English plays for the public stage. At first a slow trickle of studies, this current grew stronger after the 2000s, eventually yielding a new school of Greek-informed studies of Shakespearean drama. (In addition, Micha Lazarus has now shown that the Elizabethan literary scene was better stocked with Greek readers than we thought; not just the universities, but many English grammar schools by the 1570s required serious Greek study.)2The major facts and arguments driving this revisionist program are now synthesized in a book by Tanya Pollard. An ambitious work combining bibliography, theatrical history, and thematic and genre criticism, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages builds on the growing scholarship in this area—much of it produced during the past decade, and some of it by Pollard herself. Not the least of the book’s virtues is that it serves as an excellent guide to this expanding field: Pollard’s citations are about as comprehensive as one could fairly hope for. She not only succeeds in coordinating Shakespeare and early modern drama scholarship with classical reception studies, but also dips frequently into the voluminous classics literature, as well as into recent research on humanist philology and translation.While offering us a much-needed overview of current knowledge, Pollard also presents a challenging argument about Greek tragedy as a formative influence on the Elizabethan stage—indeed, as a source of key motives in Shakespeare, shaping some of his central preoccupations. Pollard claims Greek tragic origins for three iconic figures who animate many Elizabethan plays, both tragic and comic:1. The passionately suffering mother—bereaved, vengeful, or both: a Hecuba, Jocasta, Clytaemnestra, or Medea.2. The victimized daughter—a virgin heroically or haplessly sacrificed, like Iphigeneia or Polyxena (who is slain to appease Achilles’s ghost in Euripides’s Hecuba).3. The loving wife revived—one who is lost, believed dead, but in the end miraculously recovered, like Alcestis.In her six main chapters, Pollard rings the changes on these three iconic roles, focusing on texts that span Shakespeare’s lifetime. First she highlights the passion of mothers, the pathos of suffering daughters, and their joint affective force in two Euripidean adaptations of the 1550s and 1560s: one is the free prose translation of Iphigenia in Aulis by Jane, Lady Lumley; the other the Jocasta of George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh (made chiefly if not exclusively from a loose Italian rendition of Phoenissae). Next, Pollard relates the examples of Hecuba and Iphigenia to Elizabethan stage plays: first Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, then Titus Andronicus—stressing the contributions of George Peele, who as a university man might have nudged Shakespeare to read Euripides more closely—and finally Hamlet. Turning to Shakespearean comedy, Pollard then considers the Greek romance setting and hints of tragic suffering in The Comedy of Errors; the barely averted sacrificial outcome of Twelfth Night; and the restitutions of lost and wronged maidens, wives, and mothers in Much Ado about Nothing, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale (all variously related to Alcestis). A final chapter argues that Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair pays tribute to these Greek tragic avatars in Shakespeare, mocking them in ways that register their popularity, while enabling Jonson himself to play a modern Aristophanes—one as wittily satirical as his ancient precursor in appropriating Euripidean tragic tools for comic use.Woven throughout all these individual readings is a strong claim about literary origins: that Greek female protagonists (mostly Euripidean) spurred the invention of Renaissance tragic affect. Not just one set of character types among others, these Greek “female icons” are instead radical archetypes; they showed Elizabethans “the power of theatrical performance to transmit emotions sympathetically from readers to audiences” (221). Even male roles, such as Hamlet’s and Hieronimo’s (in The Spanish Tragedy), derive their emotive power from this Greek feminine matrix.Like most strong origin stories, Pollard’s can feel overextended at times. Once an element of plot or character has been tagged as a legacy from Greek tragedy, it arguably risks becoming a token in an interpretive “Greekness” game, invoked repeatedly as proof of Shakespeare’s debt to Greece (even at multiple removes through mediating sources in English, Italian, etc.). This is not to allege any dereliction of duty. Even as Pollard presents a clearly thesis-driven argument, she is at pains to nuance her global emphasis on neglected Greek influence by pointing out widely cited non-Greek sources for particular Shakespearean texts. Such conscientiousness at least ensures that readers have a fair chance to follow her lead, explore rival arguments, and make their own judgments.Still, more might have been done to clarify the book’s relation to other well-developed critical accounts of Renaissance tragic origins, whether competing, parallel, or converging. For instance, exactly how might Pollard’s narrative mesh with that of Lynn Enterline, who derives unstable Shakespearean masculinities from Latin school exercises in female personation?3 And, from another point of view, what about the more misogynistic resonances of Greek tragic women for Elizabethan writers? Consider Thomas Nashe’s “raging Hecuba” with “hollow eyes … That midwife to so many murders was.”4 Or, again, William Scott’s aspersion that Euripides was “surnamed Hate-woman” because he “always brought bad ones on the stage.”5 Yet Pollard’s notes are full enough as they are. One can understand why, rather than pursue such avenues, she chose instead to make the most of her core insight: that the Greeks steered Elizabethan playwrights toward stories of heroic female suffering and sacrifice. Such an eye to the main chance is often needed—even at some risk of redundancy—simply to ensure that readers receive a consistent key message.At the end of the book, to underline her evidence for Greek influences on Renaissance drama, Pollard includes appendix tables summarizing what she has been able to document about sixteenth-century European editions of Greek plays “in Greek,” “in Latin (or Bilingual Greek-Latin),” and in vernacular translation, as well as extant references to sixteenth-century performances “by (or based on) Greek playwrights.” She then adds, for comparison, two more tables of vernacular Seneca translations and of performed plays “by (or based on) Seneca”—her point being that these last two categories appear to contain fewer entries than their Greek counterparts, suggesting a greater interest in Greek than in Latin drama during the period. But Pollard herself is careful to qualify this suggestion with caveats about bias and uncertainty in her data (not to mention the anomaly that Aristophanes is counted in the Greek tables, but Plautus and Terence are excluded from the Latin ones). Although the appendixes thus prove little about the comparative influence of Greek and Latin drama on Shakespeare’s generation, they are nevertheless useful and convenient. However provisional and incomplete, they will be indispensable for researchers in the near future.All in all, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages admirably achieves its primary purpose: to put Attic tragedy permanently on the map for scholars of English Renaissance drama. Deploying considerable erudition, Pollard makes a compelling case for “taking seriously early modern attractions to Greek tragic heroines” (14)—especially those of Euripides, whose “female protagonists attracted strikingly more attention than males” in the early modern reception of his work (229). Questions may linger about whether Greek tragic women really exerted an influence quite as dominant as that described by Pollard. Also, significant dimensions of Greek tragedy and its Renaissance imitations simply fall outside her purview (such as the role of Continental neo-Aristotelian theory, recently reinterpreted in a major study by Blair Hoxby,6 or the importance of formal debates in Euripidean drama, a prominently retained feature in tragedies like Jocasta). But all of these topics can and will be debated more fruitfully as a result of Pollard’s work.In closing, I note with admiration that the Greek typography and orthography in this book are refreshingly free from the howlers too often found in recent publications on early modern English literature (although, a bit oddly, Pollard sometimes spells ancient words using the Greek alphabet and sometimes transliterates them). Not only does this fidelity attest to Pollard’s scholarly precision and authority in dealing with Greek, but it also commends the scrupulousness of her Oxford editors in ensuring its accurate reproduction. Notes 1. Ben Jonson, “To the memory of my beloved, the author Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us,” in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), fol. A4r–v.2. Micha Lazarus, “Greek Literacy in Sixteenth-Century England,” Renaissance Studies 29, no. 3 (June 2015): 433–58.3. Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).4. Thomas Nashe, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, lines 1782–84, in Works, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, vol. 3 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 289.5. William Scott, The Model of Poesy, ed. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 11.6. Blair Hoxby, What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon (Oxford University Press, 2015). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 4May 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708343HistoryPublished online February 12, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.