Greek Tragedy in Action

Oliver Taplin

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134414925
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Altertum

Oliver Taplin's seminal study was revolutionary in drawing out the significance of stage action in Greek tragedy at a time when plays were often read purely as texts, rather than understood as performances.
Professor Taplin explores nine plays, including Aeschylus' agamemnon and Sophocles' Oedipus the King. The details of theatrical techniques and stage directions, used by playwrights to highlight key moments, are drawn out and related to the meaning of each play as a whole. With extensive translated quotations, the essential unity of action and speech in Greek tragedy is demonstrated.
Now firmly established as a classic text, Greek Tragedy in Action is even more relevant today, when performances of Greek tragedies and plays inspired by them have had such an extraordinary revival around the world.

1 The visual dimension of tragedy

Behind the dialogue of Greek drama we are always conscious of a concrete visual actuality, and behind that of a specific emotional actuality. Behind the drama of words is the drama of action, the timbre of voice and voice, the uplifted hand or tense muscle, and the particular emotion. The spoken play, the words which we read, are symbols, a shorthand, and often, as in the best of Shakespeare, a very abbreviated shorthand indeed, for the actual and felt play, which is always the real thing. The phrase, beautiful as it may be, stands for a greater beauty still. This is merely a particular case of the amazing unity of Greek, the unity of concrete and abstract in philosophy, the unity of thought and feeling, action and speculation in life. (T.S.Eliot)

This extraordinarily succinct and perceptive passage from T.S.Eliot’s early essay, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translations’, puts the theme of this book in a nutshell. Behind the words of Greek tragedy there is action, behind the action emotion: the abstract and concrete are made one, the emotion and the meaning are indivisible. The actual and felt play is my subject. Greek tragedy is often thought of as static, verbal, didactic and irretrievably alien: I hope to show, rather, how it is theatrical, emotional, absorbing—and so can still speak directly to us.

Great playwrights have been practical men of the theatre, never mere scriptwriters—Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Molierè, Racine, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht…. They have wrought, not just written, plays. They have supervised the rehearsal, directed the movement of their works, overseen their music, choreography and design, and often have acted themselves. They composed works to be performed before an audience. For them the play is realized, finds its finished state, in the theatre.

The text, which is inevitably all we have, is no more than a transcript, a scenario. The play’s the thing. Shakespeare seems to have paid no attention to the publication of his plays: he put his energies into having them seen and heard and understood in the performance. But this applies even more to the Greek dramatists of the fifth century B.C. The very word ‘theatre’ first occurs in the fifth century: theātron means a place where things are seen, the audience are hoi theātai— those who look on, the spectators. So, too, with the word drāma: something that is acted out, a communication through action. The Greek tragedians must have written their words down, but that was incidental; the verbs used were ‘to make’ (poiein), and, synonymously and no less commonly, ‘to teach’ (didaskein). The playwright himself instructed his chorus and actors, he was both director and producer. His task ended not with the script but with the performance.

‘Euripides maligns us’, complains a wife in Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria (383ff.), ‘wherever there are theatres, tragedies, choral songs.so that as soon as our husbands come home from the auditorium they look suspicious….’ Not ‘whenever they read Euripides…’: the book is not yet the paramount vehicle for literature (though it was for more prosaic writings). It is during the hundred years after the flowering of Greek tragedy that reading replaces performance as the primary mode of literary communication. Aristophanes and Plato take for granted the audience-directed nature of drama; it is not until Aristotle’s Poetics, nearly a century later, that we first encounter the notion that plays might be best read. Though he is ambivalent on this—and he is unbalanced by his reaction against Plato who fiercely criticized the theatre—Aristotle sows the suggestion that the performance is a distracting encumbrance, the province of rude mechanicals; and since then this view has been widespread (especially in the nineteenth century). But these days all but a lunatic fringe of students of Greek drama would accept the primacy of performance, and I shall take it as read without labouring the argument.¹

All students of the theatre—indeed anyone who has thought about human communication—must be aware that the written quotation of any spoken sentence is a very incomplete transcript of what was conveyed by the utterance itself. On one level we miss the tone of voice, nuance, pace, stress; and we miss facial expression, gesture and the physical posture and positioning of the speaker and addressee. Even more profoundly, the transcript does not convey the roles and social or personal relationships of the real people involved, their past, their shared assumptions, the full circumstances of the speech-act. It lacks context. All these attendant circumstances conflow to turn a lifeless sentence, such as may be delivered thousands of times every day, into a unique and expressive communication. (Think how many different accentuations and contexts might be given to the four-word sentence ‘Pass the knife, please’—some mundane, others a matter of life and death.) Such matters have recently become the object of intense study from psycho-linguists, social psychologists and philosophers of language. But, of course, dramatists—from Athens onwards—have always been fully, if instinctively, aware that the words are the mere tip of a vast rootwork of context. For the medium of the playwright is the bodies and the voices of his actors, and by these means he has, in a very limited space of time, to build up a complex of relationships and communications of sufficient depth and interest to capture his audience. So the meaning of the play, what it is about, is heard and seen; and the artist is going to have to use voice and action with all the skill he commands. When we read a play, what we are doing—or what we should be doing—is hearing and seeing the play in the theatre of the mind. If we do not, then we are failing to do justice to the appropriate genre—a possible but perverse and unproductive procedure.

This contrasts very obviously with other genres that we read—epic poetry, or at the furthest extreme, the novel. Most novels contain a lot of dialogue, but the accompaniments of tone, gesture, etc. have to be added in narrative form. Similarly the ramifications of setting, of background, and of reaction, are all filled out by expository narrative. This gives the novelist scope for complexity, particularly of internal psychology: the loss, compared with drama, is one of immediacy and concentration. ‘He thought’ or ‘she felt’ are the stock-in-trade of the novelist: the dramatist must constrict thought and feeling so as to convey them through dialogue and action. He has to contain himself within the ‘two hour’s traffic’ of his stage; and he has to convey all that he wants to convey in the course of an unfaltering movement not much less rapid than the pace of ordinary speech—that is to say, he has to put across everything at the same time as the dialogue.

Another evident and fundamental difference from the novel (in fact, from most other literature) is the presence of a large audience. The novel is, as a rule, read silently, contemplatively, by the individual in privacy: the play is presented to a public, in the Greek theatre to an experienced, demanding and appreciative audience of more than 10,000. As we read we must also feel the presence of the audience: not only because every sound and movement is, ultimately, directed at them, but also because their shared experience is part of the play as a whole. The play is so designed as to take the thoughts and emotions of the audience along with it.

So we must do our best to see and hear Greek tragedy, and not in an arbitrary or uninformed way, but in the way that the dramatist himself meant it to be seen and heard.² The performance, the play in action, is all part of his work, and is—as I hope to show—an important element in the way he conveys what he has to convey.

My subject is, then, the Greek dramatists’ visual technique, the way they translated their meaning into theatrical terms. I hope both to establish as far as possible what was seen, and to indicate its significance. The approach is not novel; nearly all students of Greek tragedy would admit its validity and advocate its application. And yet there has been remarkably little sustained work on the subject. It crops up here and there in books and articles, but there are only two books, both in German, where it is a central concern (Reinhardt and Steidle). It is becoming a sour joke that classicists trail along about a generation behind the critical advances pioneered by their colleagues in English studies. In so far as I am attempting the same sort of thing for Greek tragedy as (if it is not too presumptuous a claim) Granville-Barker did for Shakespeare in his Prefaces (1927–47), this is true in my own case too. But this aspect has not yet advanced very far in English studies, and there is still much to be done.³ I think I may claim that the application of some of my methods and principles to Shakespeare and other more recent dramatists would produce results which would not appear grossly unsophisticated and antique to the practitioners in those fields.

Now, when I urge that Greek tragedy must be visualized, must be seen to be believed, I am not talking about the mechanics of the staging. The permanent features of the theatre—the stage building, machinery, etc.—are interesting enough (see chapter 2); but my concern is not so much with how the play was stage-managed as with what is being acted out within it. It is the dramatized visible event, with the unique significance its context gives it, that I am after. This means, in effect, the movements and stances of the participants, the objects they hold and exchange, the things they do to each other, their shifting spatial relationships, and the overall shaping of these stage events into meaningful patterns and sequences.

First of all we have to extrapolate the stage-directions and other signals from the text (or other evidence, if any is available). Once that is done, we go on to ask what the dramatist meant by it. He has arranged his visual composition in this way rather than any other; this is the way he himself put his drama into action. Why has he done it this way? It is, surely, only fair (not to say humble) to suppose that a great playwright will produce his work purposefully, and use his scenic resources so as to communicate to his audience. So, communicate what? It is here that the critic has to call on every resource at his disposal: the whole dramatic context, the conventions of the genre, the literary background, the social, legal, religious and intellectual background. For it is, I take it, the task of literary criticism to elucidate what the author communicates; and hence ultimately to show why anyone should—or should not—spend time and trouble on a certain work of literature.

My approach through the visual or active dimension is not a rival or an alternative to literary criticism, it is only a part of literary criticism, perhaps more rightly termed ‘dramatic’ or ‘theatrical’ criticism. It is only one approach. And if I have seemed to depreciate the ‘mere’ words of Greek tragedy in my attempt to highlight the importance of what is seen, then that impression should be redressed. I hope the central chapters, and the quantity of direct quotation, will do that in any case. The words—which are, after all, almost all we have—contain and explain the visual dimension: there could be no play and no meaning without them. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are also great poets. But they are not just great poets with a certain theatrical facility—that is an inapplicable disjunction. Visual meaning is inextricable from verbal meaning; the two are part and parcel of each other. They are the vehicles of the dramatists’ meaning.

I have spoken of the dramatist’s meaning, of what he is trying to convey, in full awareness that the concept of ‘the author’s intention’ is a battleground of literary critical theory.⁴ What I am talking about is the author’s intention to communicate that which has found expression in the work in question. All art, indeed all writing and speech, is communication (except in some marginal and negligible circumstances). The artist communicates with his audience; the good artist communicates things which are worth communicating, and he does it well. So it makes obvious and elementary sense to enquire into his meaning. The existence of the author’s communicative intention is a precondition of the existence of his work. While it is possible to take no notice of it, to do so would be not only blind and arbitrary, it would be ungrateful, arrogant and egocentric.

But while the author’s meaning remains necessarily unchanged, the audience is no less necessarily always changing. We are now the audience of Greek tragedy, but it was others yesterday and will be others again tomorrow. But is the audience the author’s original audience, in this case the Athenians at the first performance? That audience certainly has special claims on our attention because the dramatist took them for granted, and so they became from the beginning inextricable from his meaning. But they are long dead: we are now the audience; and we are not, and never can be, fifth-century Athenians. Just as it seems to me quite pointless to say ‘Shakespeare’ (or whoever) ‘would have said…if he were alive today’—he is not—so it seems pointless to pretend that one can become an Elizabethan or an Athenian. It is not just that the exercise is doomed to failure; it is to turn our backs upon ourselves.

There are then the two parties: the author’s immutable meaning and his new, unforeseeable and ever-changing audience with all its different expectations and preoccupations. And it is the critic’s task to attempt to reconcile these two parties. It is also very important that that latter party (us) is not unchangeable. One way we may be changed is by being brought into close contact with great works of genius; and so it is desirable for us to learn from the original audience. We will appreciate the work—and life in general— better if we are to add to our experience the sensibility of a particularly gifted audience from the past.

One further theoretical point. Faced with the suggestion of some new point in a work of literature, particularly if it is a point of some subtlety, sceptics—particularly classical scholars—are inclined to ripost ‘I don’t believe any such thing crossed the author’s mind’. This betrays a naive view of human consciousness and of the creative process. The human mind does not work on two rigid and mutually exclusive levels, the fully conscious and the rest. There is, rather, a multiplicity of overlapping levels. And the mind of the great artist is one that sorts out experience and gives it expression in a particularly subtle and complex way. Much surely goes into the artefact—is part of its meaning—beyond what is expressly formulated in the mind on a fully conscious level. (That is the reason why the artist’s own explication of his work, while important, is not definitive.) The only question we can ask when faced with some alleged critical point is this: is it there or is it not?

‘Is it there?’ If the point is to be accepted, it should (broadly speaking) meet three conditions: it should be prominent, coherent and purposeful. There is no definitive court of appeal on this (though time and the community of informed opinion form a lower court). Ultimately the interpretation of art is subjective and personal; it is not verifiable. But this does not in any way diminish its interest and value: on the contrary it is the need for the exercise of judgement, of taste and of thoughtfulness that makes it so worth while.

And just as the author does not consciously articulate everything he puts into a work, so an audience does not explicitly formulate everything that it gets out of it, particularly not a theatre audience. You have only to think of what it is like to go to a play for this to be clear. And yet the sceptics are for ever complaining that ‘an audience could not possibly think of (or notice or appreciate)…’. When in an audience one does not consciously analyse everything in the play which is having an effect on one’s reaction; that would be a completely inappropriate, as well as impracticable, thing to attempt. Many levels of consciousness are involved; much that one is not fully aware of will be having its effect. And yet it is precisely the critic’s task to spell out in longhand what makes the audience respond during the performance. The result is nothing in the least like a re-creation of being at a performance, since it has to spend whole pages over what is felt and thought in a single moment.⁵ None the less the critic does hope to clarify and enrich his readers’ appreciation when they next experience the drama.

To look at Greek tragedy in action is an approach which, I think, both interprets the author’s meaning and brings home his communication to us, his present audience. The test of whether it really does throw light on the author’s own meaning, created and fixed nearly 2,500 years ago, rests in the central chapters (4-9) of this book; and I must leave it to the reader to decide whether the meanings which I extricate are prominent, coherent and purposeful—whether they really are there or not.

So that must wait: but I shall offer, finally, some reasons for thinking that this is an approach which may have much to offer to us now. The discriminating theatre-going public is larger than ever before. The scenic aspects of drama come in for more and more attention in literary studies; and practical performance has become the central concern of burgeoning departments and schools of drama. Also non-verbal communication is a developing subject in various fields, including anthropology, philosophy, and social psychology.⁶ There is everywhere a more sensitive awareness of the crucial place of action (in the broadest sense) in human relationships.

Furthermore, humanity shares much more than just ‘birth, copulation and death’, and this is especially clear in the irreducible physical aspects of life whose dramatization are my chief concern. Much of the visual dimension of Greek tragedy is immediately accessible to us with little qualification or adjustment. Thus, it could be transferred to the contemporary stage with little apology or explication. While I hope I have done justice in this book to the deep and manifold differences between Greek culture and our own, it is, by the very nature of my subject, the similarities that I shall be emphasizing.

The nineteenth century tended simply to assimilate the ancient world to its own: our own less self-confident century has been more relativist and less innocent, and there has been a healthy reaction against such a naive equation. The chief catalyst to this more detached vision of the Greeks has been the rise of the comparative anthropology of primitive societies, which has made us ever more aware that other societies have coherent and valid social structures and world pictures, yet quite other than our own. And it is clear that the ancient Greeks shared a great range of cultural features, alien to us, with various ‘primitive’ societies that still exist (or existed until recently). The re-examination of the Greek world in this relativist light has been an invigorating and valuable movement. But to lay exclusive stress on the differences is no less of a distortion than to assume unqualified similarity. Difference is a matter of degree and quality. And ultimately it is the almost uncanny similarity or timelessness of the Greeks which demands our attention. How can poets of so long ago have understood so deeply the human condition of the twentieth cen...