The Public Value of the Humanities

Jonathan Bate

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781849660631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Recession is a time for asking fundamental questions about value. At a time when governments are being forced to make swingeing savings in public expenditure, why should they continue to invest public money funding research into ancient Greek tragedy, literary value, philosophical conundrums or the aesthetics of design? Does such research deliver 'value for money' and 'public benefit'? Such questions have become especially pertinent in the UK in recent years, in the context of the drive by government to instrumentalize research across the disciplines and the prominence of discussions about 'economic impact' and 'knowledge transfer'.
In this book a group of distinguished humanities researchers, all working in Britain, but publishing research of international importance, reflect on the public value of their discipline, using particular research projects as case-studies. Their essays are passionate, sometimes polemical, often witty and consistently thought-provoking, covering a range of humanities disciplines from theology to architecture and from media studies to anthropology.

PART ONE

Learning from the Past

1. Live Classics: Or ‘What’s the use of Aeschylus in Darfur?’

Mary Beard (University of Cambridge)¹

Fram, Trackers and classics

Tony Harrison’s play, Fram, brought the Arctic icecap to the British stage in 2008. It traces the career of Fridtjof Nansen from polar explorer (‘Fram’ was the name of his ship) to philanthropist, campaigner and Nobel Laureate for his efforts in relieving the Russian famine of 1922. Quirky as well as brilliant, written in rhyming couplets, the play is partly the resurrection of a forgotten hero: for Nansen’s polar exploits were soon surpassed by Roald Amundsen’s, and his beloved League of Nations was quickly sidelined by the events of the 1930s. It is also a play of big questions and ideas: on the nature of heroism, the fragility of human survival and the power of language to change the world. In one memorable scene, a group of well-meaning but ineffectual do-gooders, who are debating the relative merits of colour and black-and-white photography to open the eyes of the world to the suffering of Russia, are upstaged, literally, by the character of Sybil Thorndike, who in a mesmerizing speech demonstrates the power of words alone to evoke the horrors of starvation (Nemser 2008: 149–56).

Yet there is another set of questions to which Harrison repeatedly returns in Fram. In what ways does the classical world still make a difference our own? What is the point of Greek tragedy now? How can its study be justified? Or, as one of the play’s first reviewers put it, ‘What’s the use of Aeschylus in Darfur?’ (Nightingale 2008) At first sight these questions make an incongruous pairing with the story of polar exploration and interwar famine relief. But the play has a second hero, in the character of Gilbert Murray, Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford between 1908 and 1936. Like Nansen, Murray had several strings to his bow. He was a prolific and immensely successful translator of Greek tragedy, and almost single-handedly responsible for bringing ancient drama to a wide popular audience in Britain. His research was instrumental in changing forever our assumptions about ancient Greek culture and religion: Murray and his friends showed that underneath its calm, intellectual, apparently rational exterior, Greek culture retained a primitive, bloody and irrational side. He was also, like Nansen, a driving force behind the League of Nations and other liberal causes. His translation of Euripides’ Medea was performed at women’s suffrage meetings, as the tale of a woman provoked to the most terrible acts of infanticide by her powerlessness in a man’s world; and his translation of Trojan Women, a tragedy about the terrible consequences that war wreaks on non-combatants, was famously staged in thirty-one locations through the American Mid-West in 1915 as part of the Women’s Peace Movement. In Fram, Tony Harrison gives Murray an unlikely new role: emerging from his tomb in Westminster Abbey, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death and with Dame Sybil in tow, he is to write a play – a play within a play – on the life of Fridtjof Nansen.

Murray’s part in Fram prompts all kinds of questions about the value of research in classics; and about what counts as worthwhile discovery and exploration, from the polar wastelands to the world of the ancient Greeks. ‘Tragedy was my Fram’, as Murray remarks at one point (Harrison 2008: 78). In characteristic fashion, Tony Harrison’s answers are simultaneously trenchant, visionary and ambivalent. For although Murray in the end smashes to the floor the Greek tragic mask that has been his classical symbol and totem throughout the play, there are many occasions earlier where his engagement with the ancient world has proved not only eye-opening, but central to the political and humanitarian goals the drama espouses. In fact, Sybil Thorndike’s brilliantly persuasive soliloquy on the horrors of famine derives directly from the conventions of Greek tragedy, which always chose words over images when it came to conveying agony, violence and brutality. Murray is our guide in trying to understand quite how, and why, those words could be so powerful – and why they cannot be written off, to quote one of the boorish bit-part players, who has no truck with culture of any sort, as ‘ancient tragic shit’ (Harrison 2008: 41).

Harrison had explored some of these themes before. His 1988 The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus brought to life a play by the Athenian tragedian Sophocles, which had been rediscovered in 1907 by a couple of British classicists digging in the buried piles of wastepaper in a small town of Roman Egypt. Trackers is not itself a tragedy, but a burlesque in which the god Apollo, with the help of some grossly phallic ‘satyrs’, tries to track down his herd of cows, stolen by a prankster junior deity, the baby Hermes. It is a rare survival of the bawdy, subversive comedies conventionally performed for light relief, after the original fifth-century audience had sat through several hours of wrenching tragic drama. For Harrison, Trackers was an opportunity to explore this lusty populist side of classical culture. His production, first at Delphi and then at London’s National Theatre, was almost the first time the play had been performed in over 2,000 years.²

The ‘Trackers’ of the title has two senses, for Harrison frames the performance of the ancient comedy with the story of its two young discoverers, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, who are also in the business of ‘tracking’: not stolen cattle, but the material from the classical world that we have lost. They are searching in the rubbish dumps of Roman Egypt for the precious fragments of Greek and Roman writing. Here too, in the different priorities of Grenfell and Hunt, Harrison focuses on the question of why we want to study the classical world. What are we doing it for? Both men are keen to recover the rich scraps from the Roman wastepaper baskets, but they are after scraps of a different sort: the down-to-earth Hunt is entranced by the documents of real life in the ancient world (the desperate petitions of the Roman homeless, for example); the donnish and slightly dotty Grenfell has eyes only for the remains of ancient poetry. What, Harrison is asking, is the study of the ancient world all about? Is it a history of politics, power, deprivation, slavery and misogyny? Or of creative literature that can still engage and inspire? (Parsons 2007)

Greek drama now

Harrison himself has done much to prove the extraordinary power that Greek drama can still have over a modern audience – from his prize-winning translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, directed by Peter Hall in 1981, to his version of Euripides’ Hecuba for the Royal Shakespeare Company almost three decades later, which played in London, the USA and Greece, with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role. But Harrison is only one voice – uniquely privileged though he is, as both dramatist and classicist by training – in an extraordinary flowering of ancient drama on the contemporary British stage. Greek plays are now performed more often than they have been at any time since the second century AD. In Britain, more than anywhere else, a series of notable productions over the last thirty years has had enormous cultural and political impact, as well as critical and commercial success. They have played both in London and the regions (Trackers itself moved to Saltaire in Yorkshire after the National), both in mainstream and experimental theatre. For example, Punchdrunk, a radical theatre company singled out by one Labour minister of culture for its commitment to ‘access’ combined with ‘excellence’, reconfigured The House of Oedipus as a live action installation within a vast garden at Poltimore House in Devon in 2000.³ Several of these productions have turned into distinguished British cultural exports, from Bombay (Liz Lochhead’s Medea) to Broadway (both Jonathan Kent’s and Deborah Warner’s Medea, as well as Harrison’s Hecuba).

The best of them have prompted admiration, reflection and debate, going beyond the array of prizes that they have won. True, Diana Rigg’s role as Medea (in Kent’s production) brought her a Tony Award in New York; Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner both won Evening Standard Awards in 2001 as actor and director, for their Medea; and an Olivier Award went to Clare Higgins for her part in Jonathan Kent’s Hecuba in 2004 (one of three Hecubas playing on the London stage in the space of a year). But even more impressive has been the powerful cultural resonance of these performances. In addition to the trio of Hecubas, with their stark focus on the human cost of war, director Katie Mitchell’s productions for the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company have memorably linked Euripides’ war tragedies (The Phoenician Women, Iphigenia at Aulis and Women of Troy) to new areas and methods of military conflict, from the Balkans to Iraq. Even closer to home, in the spring of 1992 the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Electra was performed to nightly standing ovations in a sports stadium in Londonderry. A terrifying analysis of revenge, passed down from generation to generation, corrupting human feelings, values and aspirations, the play coincided with one of the bloodiest weeks of sectarian violence in the province. The audience got the point.

As Harrison suggests in Fram and Trackers, the success of ancient drama on the modern stage depends on a dynamic collaboration between the theatre and the academy, a symbiosis of stage professionals and academic research. Brilliant as the ancient plays are, they are not transparent timeless creations, waiting to be rediscovered by an enterprising director and a talented company of actors. They are difficult texts. In many cases the Greek is very difficult to understand, and the underlying sense of the words is often elusive. It takes years of learning to begin to make sense of Aeschylus’ Oresteia in Greek. The texts are also culturally very dense. For, although tackling issues that are as close to universal as we could imagine (passion, incest, jealousy, betrayal, cruelty…), these plays are also deeply embedded in the society, politics, myth and religion of the ancient Greeks. They are simultaneously familiar to us and very foreign indeed. It requires knowledge, expertise and hard work to see how their significance can best be represented for a wide modern audience. Greek drama does not simply speak for itself.

One aspect of that symbiosis is the practical collaboration between theatre professionals and academic researchers. Oliver Taplin (University of Oxford), for example, has worked side by side with Harrison and Mitchell; Edith Hall (Royal Holloway, University of London) has collaborated with Colin Teevan, who translated Euripides’ Bacchae for the National Theatre, and with Peter Hall (no relation); Ian Ruffell (University of Glasgow) worked with John Tiffany and David Greig on a National Theatre of Scotland production of the Bacchae; Vanessa Redgrave read and talked to Simon Goldhill (University of Cambridge) in preparing the part of Hecuba. This is not merely to cast the academic in the role of pronunciation adviser and fact-checker, though I am sure they sometimes do both. Nor is it simply a question of commissioning a likely ‘expert’ to write the programme notes, though such experts have been responsible for excellent, accessible essays to accompany many a production. In the most fruitful of these collaborations, it is the interaction and dialogue between the scholar and the director, translator or actor that lies at the very heart of the production and its interpretation of the dramatic text.

However, at a deeper level than that, the freshness and innovation of these productions depends on their engagement with up-to-date British research in ancient Greek literature more generally. One of the clearest examples of this lies in the whole area of theatrical technique and staging. How Greek tragedies were performed in antiquity itself, and in what kind of space, has exercised classical research for generations. In fact, it was precisely this issue that first stimulated the revival of wider interest in stage performances of Greek drama at the end of the nineteenth century. The most influential productions of that period were devised not by dramatists, but by archaeologists attempting to solve what they called the ‘Greek theatre question’: namely, did Greek actors originally perform on a raised platform? The answer proved to be a definite ‘no’, and that once bitterly fought controversy has long been forgotten. But these practical archaeological simulations of the Greek theatre turned out to be successful in theatrical terms and kick-started the modern tradition of Greek drama in performance. It is a nice example of the serendipity and unpredictable consequences of so much research. A narrowly archaeological puzzle opened the way for more than a century of creative theatrical productions.

More recently academic concerns have focused on the problems of masking in Greek drama: not whether the actors were originally masked (they were), but rather what difference the masks must have made to the articulation and scripting of the play, to the characterization of the actors and to the effect of the performance on the audience. This strand of research was developed by Peter Hall, both in his production of Harrison’s Oresteia and in his later Oedipus Plays at the National Theatre, where the actors were all masked. This was not merely an experiment in archaeological authenticity. Hall has come to see masks as essential to the performance of Greek tragic drama and, in particular, to the effective recreation of a Greek chorus. ‘I think the plays were telling us to go back to masks,’ Hall has said (Hall 1996). Not all would agree, but this stress on masking has been taken up, very differently, by Punchdrunk. Their radical redefinition of the theatre as an all-encomp...

Table of contents

• The Public Value of the Humanities
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Jonathan Bate (University of Warwick)
• Part One: Learning from the Past
• Part Two: Looking Around Us
• Part Three: Informing Policy
• Part Four: Using Words, Thinking Hard
• Index