Guide To Greek Theatre And Drama

Kenneth McLeish, Trevor R. Griffiths

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781408149843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A new and definitive guide to the theatre of the ancient world

The Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama is a meticulously researched and accessible survey into the place and purpose of theatre in Ancient Greece. It provides a comprehensive author-by-author examination of the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander, as well as giving an insight into how and where the plays were performed, who acted them out, and who watched them. It includes a fascinating discussion of the function of the essential characteristics of Greek drama, including verse, rhetoric, music, comedy, and chorus. Above all it offers a fascinating viewpoint onto the everyday values of the ancient Greeks; values with a continuing influence over the theatre of the present day.

Euripides

Life

Euripides was born in the 480s (traditionally in either 485 or 480), in the area of Phlye on the honey-producing slopes of Mount Hymettos some 5km south-east of Athens. His family owned a hereditary priesthood of the local shrine of Apollo, an honour which implies that they were middle or upper class; the fact that Aristophanes mocks him by calling his mother a ‘greengrocer’ suggests that they may have been nouveaux riches rather than old aristocracy. He seems to have been wealthy: he was challenged to antidosis (a custom where a rich person could be invited to undertake someone else’s tax obligations for a given year or else exchange possessions), and he owned property on the island of Salamis. (Later legend said that this included a ‘cave’ where he wrote his plays, thus giving rise to the idea that he was a recluse. But the word translated as ‘cave’ also means any kind of ‘retreat’, for example a secluded villa.)

Euripides’ career began in the heyday of Athenian grandeur, and by the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War he was in his fifties, with over twenty years of professional activity behind him. All his surviving plays except Alkestis and Rhesos belong to the period of the war, and many reflect wartime issues (the nature of generalship, say, or the duty conquerors owe the conquered) and climates of opinion (uncertainty about the gods, say, or the despair engendered by endless conflict). Euripides was also affected by the growing fifth-century movement towards abstract thought, towards rationalisation and objectivisation of opinion on every conceivable issue. He was temperamentally an intellectual, a book-reader (something almost unheard-of at the time, when books were luxuries) and a friend of philosophers and other radical thinkers.

As well as working in Athens, Euripides is thought to have spent time in Corinth and in Sicily, where his reputation stood high. In 408, when Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War was only months away, he retired to Macedonia, dying there some eighteen months later.

Works

Euripides’ first known play, Pelias’ Daughters (about the children of Pelias, persuaded by Medea to ‘rejuvenate’ their aged father by boiling him alive), was produced in 455 when he was in his mid twenties or early thirties. It is now lost. He went on to write 91 other works, chiefly tragedies but a few satyr plays. Known titles (including Antiope, Chrysippos, Kresphontes, Philoktetes, Telephos and Theseus) show that – as in the extant plays – he took subjects from a wide range of myth-stories; the Trojan War and its aftermath, however, inspired over a third of his output. Nineteen plays survive: Alkestis (438), Medea (431), Herakles’ Children (430-27), Hippolytos (428), Andromache (c. 425), Elektra (425-13), Hekabe (c. 424), Suppliants (c. 422), Herakles (?c. 417), Women of Troy (415), Iphigeneia in Tauris (c. 412), Helen (412), Ion (c. 412), Phoenician Women (c. 409), Orestes (408), Bacchae and Iphigeneia at Aulis (performed posthumously, c. 405), Cyclops (date unknown), Rhesos (date unknown; thought by some not to be by Euripides).

Style and approach

Of the three Athenian tragic dramatists whose works survive, Euripides is the most firmly rooted in the religious and dramatic culture of his time, and has been most misunderstood by critics and scholars of later ages who judged religious drama in general, and Greek tragedy in particular, by the standards of their own Christian upbringing. If Euripides had written the surviving plays in an atmosphere of Christian belief and worship, if the Athenian dramatic festivals had been anything like the European festivals of later eras, if Olympianism had had even the smallest points of contact with the ideas and practice of Christianity, he might have deserved some of the obloquy which has come his way. But his art, its circumstances and the thinking which underlies it are so alien to later ideas that the critical tradition can hinder understanding rather than help it.

Part of the problem is the sheer number of surviving plays, something like one-fifth of Euripides’ output. We have so small a proportion of the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles – if the same amount of Shakespeare’s work had survived, we would be defining his art from one or at most two plays – that it is easy to pontificate, on practically no evidence, about the kind of drama they wrote, the nature of Athenian tragedy in general and their relationship to it. But enough of Euripides’ plays survive – the equivalent of seven or eight by Shakespeare – to reveal artistic development, experiment and varied approaches to the structures and strategies of the drama of his time. In particular, they show him applying a sharply quizzical mind to every technique he chooses, every character he creates and every scene he writes. Nothing is sacrosanct. He writes formal tragedy (in the mode later approved by Aristotle), comedy, melodrama, rhetorical and philosophical debate. His verse style ranges from lyric to doggerel. His use of such conventions as choral odes, messenger’s speeches and appearances of the deus ex machina confounds expectation as often as it confirms it. Above all, his work is consistently ironical, concerned with the contrast between ‘reality’ and the depiction of ‘reality’ – an approach which uses the dramatic form not to preach at its spectators or ‘emend’ them (goals of Christian drama), but to disturb, challenge and entertain. Some have objected that a religious festival was not the place to do this – but as Aristophanes’ work also shows, not to mention the many ‘Euripidean’ moments in Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ surviving plays, whatever happened in other sacred precincts and other parts of the festival rituals, this was exactly what people expected in the Theatre of Dionysos.

Structure

Euripidean irony involves consistently playing against expectation – sometimes even, in a kind of double irony, confounding our expectation that this is what will happen. Nothing can be taken at face value. In many plays, a god or mortal opens the action by telling the audience directly what has occurred till now and what is to happen next – and this ironises the entire spectacle, as we watch the action confirming or confronting that prediction. At the end of many plays, a god or messenger from the gods appears and declares that the direction the action has taken is not that required by Fate, that the characters’ stories must progress to a different conclusion – an alienation device which prises apart the ‘meaning’ of what we have just seen, forcing us to reassess both it and the assumptions, religious, political, ethical or otherwise, on which it seemed to be based. In the middle of some plays – Elektra and Iphigeneia in Tauris are examples – the chorus sing odes about obscure corners of the original stories, then turn to the audience and say ‘All that’s just myth’. At the heart of many plays, the arguments for and against a particular point of view are presented in a long rhetorical discussion, often in striking contrast with the tormented emotions and desperate situation of the characters who engage in it – as when Hekabe and Helen in Women of Troy, about to be shipped away as slaves after the fall of Troy, debate the extent of Helen’s guilt and her behaviour throughout the Trojan War. Very little of all this conforms to Aristotle’s views about unity of form in drama, but it is consistently and thrillingly dramatic.

One of the main areas in which all three tragic dramatists, but Euripides in particular, surprised and disappointed some later commentators was the way they blurred the supposed distinction between tragedy and comedy. This was claimed to downgrade the dignity of the tragic form, and of tragic characters. Herakles in Alkestis, about to work a transforming miracle, first plays a drunk scene. In Bacchae Kadmos and Teiresias, about to go to Mount Kithairon to take part in the sacred rituals of Dionysos, parade before us in doddering, self-delighted ecstasy and in fancy dress. The servant in Hippolytos fusses indignantly about the bother Phaedra’s mental distress is causing her (the servant), and then tells her bluntly that the best cure for her passion for Hippolytos is to have sex with him. Evadne, about to commit suicide in Suppliants by throwing herself from the battlements into the funeral pyres of the Seven Against Thebes, first has a petulant-teenager argument with her aged father. Similar instances occur in almost every surviving play, and some (Helen, Ion, Iphigeneia in Tauris, Elektra) indulge in such elaborate interplay between ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ that there has been earnest debate about precisely what kind of plays they are. When Helen, at the start of Helen, confides in us that her problem is that she is a perfectly ordinary woman who just happens to be the most beautiful person in the world, do we laugh at her condition, enter into it, or do both at once? When the soldier-messenger describes Agave and her women playing catch with lumps of Pentheus’ flesh in Bacchae, the horror of what he is saying is heightened, not lessened, by the absurdity of the metaphor he uses. The terrible is ‘absurd’ (in the sense that it defies logic and confounds expectation), but in Euripides’ hands, as so often in everyday life, it is often also ludicrous, the surreal enhancing, extending and explaining what is real.

Realism

It is a characteristic feature of Euripides’ work, as of that of his younger contemporary (and possibly friend) Aristophanes, to play games with the nature of reality itself, to present the grand in terms of the mundane and to elevate the ordinary. Euripides belongs less to the tradition of Aeschylus and Sophocles who (in their extant plays at least) consistently make a distinction between their ‘high’ and ‘low’ characters, and more to that of Homer’s epics, where ‘high’ and ‘low’ are aspects of the same character. Rulers, gods and heroes are constantly given ‘ordinary’ human feelings and preoccupations and are placed in the situations of everyday life, while servants, rank-and-file soldiers and farm workers take part in ‘great’ events and share the ethical and moral feelings and concerns of their ‘betters’.

To some extent, this democratisation was part of a growing philosophical and political climate of thought in the city itself. But that climate had, in part, been created by drama, by the way it admitted ordinary people (in the form of audiences) into a kind of dialogue with the ethical and moral issues being presented onstage, encouraging them to make judgements and hold opinions, and showing how those judgements and opinions could be articulated. By Euripides’ heyday, no stage play was simply a ‘show’, a presentation. All drama was open-ended and speculative. Collaboration between writer, performer and spectator had become essential to the medium.

Euripides was a master at the balance between philosophical discussion on the one hand and psychological investigation (often of the same situations) on the other. He used the fact that drama is able simultaneously to show two or three quite different kinds of thing to refract the emotional and intellectual implications of each situation inextricably into one other. Medea is both about how supernatural powers and nature can be reconciled with mortal emotions and sensibilities, and the depiction of an individual driven by suffering to madness and murder. The Trojan captives and Greek conquerors in Women of Troy on the one hand articulate two sides of a debate about the duties and agonies of war, and on the other show what happens to ordinary people caught up in that situation. Theseus in Suppliants is a heroic king from myth who has to cope with the dilemmas of everyday politics. No actions, either of mortals or gods, take place in an emotional vacuum. Their consequences are debated, and worked out in blood and tears, before our eyes.

The importation of realism is not just a matter of what people think and say, but of the words they use to say it. Euripides seldom gives his characters ‘grand’ language as a matter of course – in fact quite the opposite. In Aeschylus a watchman grumbling during a night shift and a god outlining the future of the universe use similar language, syntactically elaborate and enhanced by music and metaphor. In Sophocles the ‘ordinary’ people imported into scenes borrow, for the most part, the high emotions and ethical concerns of the princes and heroes they are addressing. In Euripides no one, of any degree or condition, uses high style at all unless it is for specific, brief effect, as in ordinary life when someone might express an emotion, or utter an idea, with particular linguistic vehemence. His verse-rhythms are subtle and varied, but are for the most part closer to ordinary speech than to ‘high’ literature or drama – a characteristic they share with comedy. His syntax is plain and his poetry precise and blunt. An Aeschylean chorus might begin an ode on becoming birds and flying free from trouble with some grand invocation of ‘the Aether which enfolds the Earth’; a Euripidean chorus says crisply, ‘Seagulls, flocking on the shore. Gods, take us there’. The more racked the emotions, the more tortuous the intellectual issues, the simpler the language. Orestes, reflecting on the nature of virtue in Elektra, begins, ‘It’s hard to get this right’; Medea, having made up her mind to ease her soul by murder, says bluntly, ‘No choice. I have to kill the children and escape to Corinth.’ The servants who report terrible events use the gasping, graphic language of people giving eye-witness accounts of a street accident: ‘they tore off his limbs and played catch with them’; ‘flesh oozed from her face like resin when you gash a pine-tree’; ‘as the toddler huddled down, his father took aim and fired at him’. Everything is stripped to its bones – an alienation technique which forces spectators to enter the experience and ponder it. It is impossible, offhand, to think of a single line, speech or scene in which Euripides cossets his audience.

The disconcerting nature of this kind of writing is felt most strongly by those who think of Greek tragedy as religious drama. God, to Euripides – as again to Ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Athenian Theatre
• Aeschylus
• Sophocles
• Euripides
• Aristophanes
• Menander
• Aristotle’s Poetics and Greek Tragedy
• Key Myths
• Glossary
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Footnotes
• Imprint