Greek Audience Research Articles

The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (review)

218Philosophy and Literature TL· Poetics ofGreek Tragedy, by Malcolm Heath; vü & 221 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987, $32.50. Aristode, it seems, was right after aU (except ofcourse when he was wrong): the purpose of tragedy is to give an audience pleasure, die pleasure which accompanies strongemotions (notjust pity and fear—Aristode misspoke himself here, according to Malcolm Headi). The intention of the Greek tragedians was to ehcit this pleasure, and though other pleasures and poetic embeUishments may be on offer, these are subsidiary. AU the surviving tragedies, except PrometheusBound , do this perfecdy weU. Modern problems in interpreting Euripides or the so-caUed diptych plays of Sophocles are the faüures of "intellectualizing" approaches to tragedy. So runs the "emotive-hedonist" theory of tragedy presented in this prickly but chaUenging book. Heath is an intentionalist. Echoing E. D. Hirsch's distinction of meaning and significance, he differentiates between interpretation and application. The goal ofinterpretation is to find outwhat the authorintended, thatis, how he intended to arouse emotional response. Though he insists that "application"—what the Oresteia, for example, may seem to say about the nature ofjustice—is not "a derogatory term set in competition with 'interpretation' " (p. 77), in practice he finds most applications wrong and impediments to understanding the play. This book is not for the faint of heart. The Greekless wül find reams of transliterated but untranslated passages from Aristode, Plato, Gorgias, and scholia. The tone can also disconcert: the views of Heath's opponents range, it seems, from "frivolous" and "insidious" to "disastrous" and "utterly worthless." Some critiques are salutary: his insistence on performable meaning is certainly right—one wishes, however, for more performance analysis on the lines of his very interesting state/event distinction—and his discussion of "Euripides the traditionalist" is most welcome. Two large assumptions must be questioned: the author's notion of myth and its role in tragic causality. Heath shows that Aristode's notion of causal connection is broader and less centered in persons than we tend to think. He uses without argument, diough, a notion of a unitary, omnipresent body of myth, invokable at wül to supply causality: the intervention of Lyssa ("Madness"), for example, in the Heracles is fuUyjustified by the mythic "datum" of Hera's anger against Heracles. Is any hostile action by an antagonistic god then justified in any plot at any time? Myth and tragic causality are more complex than Heath acknowledges. Even more interesting are the unargued assumptions about personality and emotional response. Heath notes that it is natural for Antigone to feel more famüial obhgation to her dead brother than does Creon (and equaUy natural for audiences to find male figures in general more spoudaios [noble] and therefore more tragic) without noting how completely the notion "natural" ironizes Reviews219 and undercuts his whole project. If inteUectual content is whoUy secondary to emotionalresponse, dien Greek tragedy's status as a "classic" is wholly dependent on the possession or recreation of a personality that responds as the Greek audience did. For whom today must Oedipus be nobly born to be tragic? The unintended consequence is to make tragedy unperformable, despite Heath's interest in performance, for where wül we find such an audience? "Understanding " tragedy in his sense is left only to readers who never ask embarrassing questions about justice or the gods, which might complicate or deflect the evocation of emotion. One wonders if the sacrifice is worth it. Universität KonstanzNiall W Slater Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema, edited byJoseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan; 209 pp. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987, $29.50. The tide rather accurately reflects the contents ofthis coUection often essays. The lead off essay is Stanley CaveU's revision of his Weigert Lecture, originaUy delivered to the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1985. Of the nine essays that foUow, two (those by Timothy Gould and Karen Hanson) are primarily explorations of CaveU's ideas; three Oby Stanley R. Palombo, WUliam Rothman, Micheline Klagsbrun Frank) draw upon Cavell in passing; and four (by Robert Winer, Irving Schneider, Bruce Sklarew, Stephen M. Weissman) show litde or no indebtedness to CaveU. Winer's primary influence...

Classical Greek Drama in Modern Greece: Mission and Money

Classical Greek Drama in Modern Greece: Mission and Money Stratos E. Constantinidis Introduction Lines 1164-1165 in the éxodos of Aristophanes' Ecclesiazousae are generally assigned to Praxagora's drunk maid. She tells Vlepyros "And you too, move your feet in the Cretan manner." Textual evidence suggests that she urges him to perform a "high stepping" dance: the little girls (meirakes) who accompany the chorus, are told to mark the rhythm "with the whole leg" (1167), and the chorus members urge each other to "Get it up" (1179) as they make their exit. High step, straight back, head held high are features of Minoan Cretan dancers (Lawler 1964: 94-95). The drunk maid bequeathed modern directors a quandary: should they use a modern Cretan dance, or concoct—lacking archeological records—an allegedly "archaic" one? Alexis Solomos, the first director to revive Aristophanes' comedies at the Epidaurus theatre , gave his productions a flavor of the 1950s rather than stage shaky inferences about how the ancient Greeks supposedly performed in their amphitheatres. "My purpose," Solomos said, "was not so much to present an artificial revival as to prove a natural survival " (Solomos 1974: 11). The maid's lines circumscribe a wider problem in the revival of classical drama on modern Greek stages: should a theatre company "translate" the verbal and visual aspects of the ancient plays to suit the understanding and tastes of modern audiences or preserve the verbal, paraverbal, and non-verbal elements? Historically, this problem has proven to be a tough one for the modern Greek theatre, having caused great conflict between the advocates of rival production styles. There is no exact equivalent in the English theatrical tradition for this kind of conflict. The present study aims at describing the issues and tensions that have resulted from reviving classical Greek plays in modern Greece. Their history, in brief, consists of the century-long amateur 15 16 Stratos E. Constantinidis productions (1830-1930) followed by half-a-century of professional (subsidized) productions (1931-81). The focus here is on the first period . From the Neoclassics to the Classics Modern Greek theatre was born outside Greece in the large Greek communities of Bucharest (Romania), Alexandria (Egypt), Odessa (U.S.S.R.), Vienna (Austria), Venice (Italy), and Constantinople (Sideris 1970: 151). High school based community theatres produced Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes in translation for ideological purposes. The productions, say, of Hecuba (Bucharest 1817)—a collation of passages from Homer's Iliad rather than Euripides' tragedy (Zoras 1967: 509)—and Sophocles' Philoctetes (Odessa 1818), served as tools for instructing the subjugated Greeks against the Turkish domination. Rigas Pheraios' Map of Greece (1797), for example, which portrayed an ideal Greece stretching from Crete to the Danube, bears a drawing of an ancient Greek amphitheatre in the upper left-hand corner, thus affirming the importance of theatre as a cultural expression of Greek unity (Kambanis 1948: 129-130; Dimaras 1964: 162-163). Between 1791 and 1821 the Greek Enlightment turned out some 65 plays in translation such as Pietro Metastasio's Orpheus and Euridice (l797), Goethe's Iphigenia Among the Taurians (1818), and Vittorio Alfieri's Orestes (1820) (Sideris 1976: 18). Published and produced translations of the Greek classics such as Sophocles' Ajax (1817) divided the plays into acts and scenes and incorporated the original choral lines into the dialogue. This spirit of adapting the classics to current esthetics was an initial approach to reviving ancient Greek drama (Sideris 1976: 17). During the 1835-36 season, several actors and intellectuals went to Athens, the capital of new Greece, to assist in the rebirth of drama (Veis 1940: 19). Costas Aristias, for example, came from Bucharest and became artistic director of the amateur Friends of Drama Company. This company set a double goal for itself: to teach a generation of young actors to perform ancient Greek plays in Athens and other major towns and to re-educate the modern Greek audiences to the cultural treasures of their own past apart from Italian and French melodramas (Paraskinia 1938: 269-273). Ironically, the company produced Vincenzo Monti's Aristodemus (1840) and then disbanded. Aristias returned to Romania while melodramas and operettas dominated the theatre of Athens from 1840 to...

Thucydides 3. 52-68 and Euripides' Hecuba

UNTIL RECENTLY INTERPRETATIONS of the Hecuba were reasonably similar in their assessment of the affective powers of the play. Most commentators have felt that Hecuba's suffering is treated sympathetically in the first half of the play, but that her character suffers grotesque distortion during the revenge scenes; Odysseus has usually been described as cynical and brutal, Polyxena is the selfless martyr, Agamemnon a pusillanimous, intimidated King, while Polymestor appears to be a surprising variation on the role established by Hecuba.' But accepted opinion, ably represented and culminated by Conacher, has been contested by A. W. H. Adkins in Basic Greek Values in Euripides' Hecuba and Hercules Furens.2 Adkins' arguments on Greek values and the and co-operative excellences are now well known. Believing that traditional competitive values continued to hold the field in the twenties and that their use in the Hecuba would have significantly conditioned audience reaction, Adkins has directly and indirectly assailed several commonplaces of recent criticism. Among other positions which fall if Adkins' argument is valid are those which suppose that Odysseus' private debt to Hecuba would be considered by the audience more compelling (obligatory) than the public debt to Achilles: in Adkins's view Odysseus can reasonably demand the life of the slave Polyxena, and the Greek audience wasted no great sympathy on her, at any rate not so much as to affect its judgment. Throughout the play we are urged to see the claims of arete and philia, in the traditional sense, taking precedence over claims and persuasive definition pertaining to dike and charis. More fundamentally, what Adkins has taken from the play is the sense of conflict. Though the debate may be lively, Hecuba not only has no chance

Death in Greek Tragedy

Of the many reasons, religious, aesthetic, and technical, generally adduced to explain the apparent reluctance of Greek tragedians to represent the moment of death on the stage, none seems to me to give sufficient weight to certain dramatic exigencies internal to the context of the plays themselves in which such deaths occur. The issue has too often been obscured by tenuous assumptions about the scarcity of professional actors (as if the total pool of professionals which the dramatist could draw upon was restricted to three), religious taboos associated with the celebration of the Great Dionysia and other festivals, the squeamishness of Greek theatre audiences, or the practical difficulties of stage management. It is not my intention to discuss these assumptions in detail. Some of them have already been effectively refuted, others may in fact have influenced consciously or unconsciously the presentation of particular death scenes. For no one denies that there are many problems connected with the presentation of death on the stage, and even the modern playwright, in spite of all the illusionist resources of the modern theatre, may well boggle at the attempt. Further, the passage from life to death must seem at a certain level a trivial activity in comparison with the tremendous impact it has on the dead person's immediate circle of friends and relations. Violent death and its gory accompaniments may well appeal to sensational melodrama but the Greek dramatist could justly have considered its representation per se as μιαρόν and ἀτεχνότατον τῆς ποιητικῆς. However, the real point at issue is whether the Greek tragedian went out of his way to get round the presentation of the moment of death for reasons external to the dramatic context. I shall try to show in this paper that whenever a character is apparently hustled out of sight for the purpose of being killed, some internal dramatic consideration was in fact uppermost in the playwright's mind.

Sea Thoughts from The Odyssey

These few reflections were suggested by a recent coastwise voyage with the Odyssey as only book-companion, and the sea is the main theme.The sea, of course, figures largely in the Odyssey, and how true it all is! Clearly Homer was thoroughly familiar with every aspect of sealife, and we may be sure that his Greek audiences down the years found in him a satisfying interpreter of their own experience as members of a seafaring race.Homer's stock adjectives and verbs are the quintessence of observation, but observation coloured with artistic imagination. His sea-pictures, with all their vividness, are not photographic, or scientific—if that means abstracting and explaining. Let me illustrate.A net, to anyone who has made or used one, is a perpetual source of wonder. He knows its knots and its changing shapes, but how is he to describe it—universally? Not, certainly, in the terms of Dr. Johnson's dictionary definition: ‘anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.’ In the last resort he hails with delight Homer's childlike, invincible, πoλνωπóχ (xxii. 386), for, after all, ‘many holes’ sums up to the eye of imagination the idea of net. True, these ‘holes’ are regularly bounded, but why insist on that when the reader knows it perfectly well and only likes to be re-minded of the general impression? Even Johnson had a glimmering notion that ‘holes’ had something to do with it, for he defines ‘reticulated’ as ‘formed with interstitial vacuities’.