Epic Performances from the Middle Ages Into the Twenty-First Century 0198804210, 9780198804215

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E P I C P E R F O R M A N C E S F R O M T H E M I D D L E AG E S INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Frontispiece. Paper Cinema Odyssey (2012) Poster. APGRD collection. © Nic Rawling.

Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century Edited by

FIONA MACINTOSH, JUSTINE MCCONNELL, STEPHEN HARRISON, AND C L A I RE K E N W A RD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison, Claire Kenward, and the several contributors 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950688 ISBN 978 0 19 880421 5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements During the first few years of the new millennium, the Graeco-Roman epics regularly featured in staged, musical, dance, operatic, and film performances. Yet there was no systematic study of the long history of epic-inspired performances in various media across previous millennia. The three-year APGRD Leverhulme-funded ‘Performing Epic’ project, based at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), University of Oxford, sought to address this largely untold history.¹ The project has grown along the way, just like the epics that inspired it, and with this development have come numerous debts. As ever, we are truly grateful to the marvellous team at OUP: to Charlotte Loveridge and Georgie Leighton; and to Tom Perridge, who initially oversaw the commissioning process. We are also indebted to our scrupulous copy-editor Rowena Anketell, to our proof reader Brian North, to our Production Manager Saranya Jayakumar, and to our outstanding indexer Cheryl Hunston, whose patience and skills have considerably enhanced this APGRD volume. We wish to thank the following in particular for their help and support in various ways: Tania Demetriou for kindly giving us advance copy of her forthcoming major study of Homer in the early modern period after other commitments prevented her from contributing to the volume; to Helen Slaney and to Susanne Wofford too for their very stimulating papers at the first of our workshops. Rachael White has performed a brilliant task on the Bibliography and done so with characteristic precision and good humour. Huge thanks to Hannah Silverblank, Lily Aaronovitch, Peter Swallow, and Zoe Jenkins for their help in cataloguing the epic material. We are also enormously grateful to the Performing Epic Advisory Board members: Edith Hall, Oliver Taplin, Stephe Harrop, Rachel Bryant Davies, Henry Stead, and Marchella Ward. Last but by no means least, we remain indebted to all APGRD colleagues for their ongoing support, and encouragement, not least Peter Brown, Felix Budelmann, Constanze Güthenke, Naomi Setchell, and Tom Wrobel.

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Note on Nomenclature, Spelling, and Texts

xi xv xxi

I. DEFINING TERMS 1. ‘Epic’ Performances: From Brecht to Homer and Back Fiona Macintosh

3

2. Performing Epic and Reading Homer: An Aristotelian Perspective Barbara Graziosi

16

3. Shakespeare and Epic Colin Burrow

31

4. Theatre on an Epic Scale Tim Supple

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II. CROSSING GENRES 5. Encountering Homer through Greek Plays in Sixteenth-Century Europe Tanya Pollard 6. Epic Acting in Shakespeare’s Hamlet David Wiles

63 76

7. ‘I am that same wall; the truth is so’: Performing a Tale from Ovid Marchella Ward

90

8. Monsters and the Question of Inheritance in Early Modern French Theatre Wes Williams

103

9. The Future of Epic in Cinema: Tropes of Reproduction in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus Pantelis Michelakis

119

10. From Epic to Lyric: Alice Oswald’s and Barbara Köhler’s Refigurings of Homeric Epic Georgina Paul

133

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Contents

11. Choreographing Epic: The Ocean as Epic ‘Time-Space’ in Homer, Joyce, and Cunningham Arabella Stanger

149

12. Epic Bodies: Filtering the Past and Embodying the Present—A Performer’s Perspective Marie-Louise Crawley

164

III. FORMAL REFRACTIONS 13. A Harmless Distemper: Accessing the Classical Underworld in Heywood’s The Silver Age Margaret Kean

181

14. Epic Poetry into Contemporary Choreography: Two Twenty-First-Century Dance Adaptations of the Odyssey Tom Sapsford

194

15. Voicing Virgil: Dante Performs the Latin Epic Robin Kirkpatrick

209

16. Homer as Improviser? Graeme Bird

228

17. ‘Now hear this’: Text and Performance in Christopher Logue’s War Music (1959–2011) Henry Power

250

18. Unfixing Epic: Homeric Orality and Contemporary Performance Stephe Harrop

262

19. Multimodal Twenty-First-Century Bards: From Live Performance to Audiobook in the Homeric Adaptations of Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald Emily Greenwood 20. Homer ‘Viewed from the Corridor’: Epic Refracted in Michael Tippett’s King Priam Emily Pillinger

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289

IV. EMPIRE AND POLITICS 21. Institutional Receptions: Camões, Saramago, and the Contemporary Politics of The Lusíads on Stage Tatiana Faia

307

Contents 22. Achilles in French Tragedy (1563–1680) Tiphaine Karsenti 23. The Spectacle of Conquest: Epic Conflicts on the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Stage Imogen Choi

ix 322

336

24. Epic on Stage in the Dutch Republic Frederick Naerebout

351

25. ‘Marpesia cautes’: Voicing Amazons, England and Ireland, 1640 Deana Rankin

361

26. After the Aeneid: Ascanius in Eighteenth-Century Opera Stephen Harrison

377

27. Epic Performance through Invencão de Orfeu and An Iliad: Two Instantiations of Epic as Embodiment in the Americas Patrice Rankine 28. Performing Walcott, Performing Homer: Omeros on Stage and Screen Justine McConnell

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404

V. HIGH AND LOW 29. ‘Of arms and the man’: Thersites in Early Modern English Drama Claire Kenward 30. Classical Epic and the London Fairs, 1697–1734 Edith Hall

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31. Classical Epic in Early Musical Theatre: The Case of Kane O’Hara’s Midas Henry Stead

461

32. Epic Transposed: The Real and the Hyperreal during the Revolutionary Period in France Fiona Macintosh

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33. Sacrilegious Translation: The Epic Flop of François Ponsard’s Ulysse (1852) Cécile Dudouyt

493

34. Epic Cassandras in Performance, 1795–1868 Laura Monrós-Gaspar

508

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Contents

35. ‘Of the rage, sing Goddess’: Epic Opera Margaret Reynolds

524

36. Fish, Firemen, and Prize Fighters: The Transformation of the Iliad and Aeneid on the London Burlesque Stage Rachel Bryant Davies

540

Epilogue. Voices, Bodies, Silences, and Media: Heightened Receptivity in Epic in Performance Lorna Hardwick

558

Bibliography Index

573 619

List of Illustrations Frontispiece. Paper Cinema Odyssey (2012) Poster. APGRD collection.

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© Nic Rawling.

1.1. Marina Carr’s Hecuba (2015) at the RSC. Hecuba on the throne.

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Photograph by Topher McGrills © RSC.

4.1. Peter Brook’s Battlefield (2016).

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Photograph by Richard Termine. © Richard Termine.

8.1. L’Histoire éthiopique d’Héliodore [. . .] Traduite de grec en françois, par Maistre J. Amiot conseiller du Roy [etc.] (Paris: Chez Anthoine de Sommaville, 1626), facing p. 635.

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9.1. ‘Engineer disintegrates into primordial waters’. Frame capture from DVD edition by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012).

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© 20th Century Fox.

10.1. Epic (model). Numbers denote characters in the narrative; letters denote (implied) locations.

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10.2. Lyric (model). The lyric images are held simultaneously in the space of the poem.

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12.1. Marie Louise Crawley in mask as Myrrha. Photograph by Christian Hunt. © Christian Hunt.

14.1. Clemmie Sveaas in Nest.

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Photograph by Barnaby Churchill Steel. © Barnaby Churchill Steel.

14.2. Nest performance image.

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Photograph by Sandra Ciampone. © Sandra Ciampone.

14.3. Sonya Cullingford and Aaron Vickers in ‘Choreographing the Katabasis’. © Cathy Marston.

16.1. Homer’s Iliad, 1.1 15. Greek taken from Lord (2000), 143.

205 234

© 1960, 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. © renewed 1988 by Alfred Bates Lord.

16.2. Homer’s Iliad, 1.1 15.

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English translation by the author.

16.3. Musical notation by Graeme Bird.

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16.4. Musical notation by Graeme Bird.

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16.5. Musical notation by Graeme Bird.

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List of Illustrations

16.6. Musical notation by Graeme Bird.

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16.7. Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’, Improv 1, p. 1. © Graeme Bird.

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16.8. Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’, Improv 1, p. 2. © Graeme Bird.

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19.1. Copies of Alice Oswald’s Memorial, and Simon Armitage’s Homer’s Odyssey and Walking Home held in a sample of UK public libraries. Compiled by the author.

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27.1. Timothy Edward Kane in the Court Theatre, Chicago production of An Iliad (2011). © Michael Brosilow.

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28.1. Photo of Joseph Marcell in Omeros, by Derek Walcott, directed by Bill Buckhurst, in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe (2015). Photograph by Pete Le May. © Shakespeare’s Globe.

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29.1. Title page to Thomas Heywood’s The Second Part of the Iron Age (1632).

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30.1. William Hogarth’s Southwark Fair engraving (1734). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.

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30.2. Engraving of the Trojan Horse in Troy, reproduced from the 3rd edn. of The Works of Virgil, Containing his Pastorals, Georgics and Aeneis, translated into English by Mr Dryden (London: J. Tonson, 1699). Reproduced by permission of Paul Hartle. The engravings were reproduced from those in John Ogilby’s translation (1654).

445

30.3. Title page of the Southwark Fair edition of The Siege of Troy droll (1707). Reproduced by permission of King’s College Library.

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30.4. Title page of Settle’s Troy Opera (1702), variously entitled Cassandra: The Virgin Prophetess and The Virgin Prophetess; or The Fate of Troy. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

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30.5. Frontispiece and title page to The New History of the Trojan Wars and Troy’s Destruction (1750 edn., London: J. Hodges). In the author’s private collection.

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31.1. Kane O’Hara by Edmund Dorrell. Etching, published 1 November 1802. NPG D5391. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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31.2. The Blind Enthusiast. Cartoon, British Museum, image no. AN361549001. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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List of Illustrations 32.1. Pierre Gardel as Télémaque. Painting by Sébastien Cœuré in the collection of Jean Louis Tamvaco, Paris.

xiii 488

32.2. Angelica Kauffman, Telemachus and the Nymphs of Calypso (1782). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.

32.3. William Hamilton, Calypso Receiving Telemachus and Mentor in the Grotto (1782).

489 490

Private collection. Public domain.

34.1. Siege of Troy Playbill. © Senate House Library, University of London.

513

34.2. ‘Hodgson’s Characters in the Giant Horse: Descent of the Greek spies from the giant horse’. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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34.3. ‘Hodgson’s Characters in the Giant Horse’. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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36.1. Astley’s Playbill, Siege of Troy. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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36.2. ‘The Pas de Déesses at Her Majesty’s Theatre’, Illustrated London News, 1 August 1846.

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36.3. ‘The “Talking Fish”’, Illustrated London News of the World, 14 May 1859, p. 292.

548

List of Contributors Graeme Bird studied Classics at Auckland University in his native New Zealand, before coming to the US and earning a music degree in jazz piano from the Berklee College of Music, and then a PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard University. His publications include a monograph on the Ptolemaic Papyri of Homer’s Iliad, as well as a chapter on Critical Signs in the tenth-century Iliad manuscript Venetus A. He currently teaches Linguistics and Classics at Gordon College in Wenham, and Mathematics at the Harvard University Extension School in Cambridge, both in Massachusetts. Rachel Bryant Davies holds an Addison Wheeler Fellowship in the Department of Classics at the University of Durham and is an Early Career Associate with the APGRD. Her first book, Troy, Carthage and the Victorians: The Drama of Classical Ruins in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (2017) was researched during her Doctoral Fellowship with the Leverhulme-funded Cambridge Victorian Studies Group. Forthcoming publications include an edition of a critical anthology of Victorian Epic Burlesque and, with Barbara Gribling, Childhood Encounters with History in British Culture, 1750–1914. Her current project is ‘Classics at Play: Graeco-Roman Antiquity in British Children’s Culture, 1750–1914’. Colin Burrow is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His most recent book is Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (2013). Imogen Choi is Associate Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the ways in which early modern Spanish and Latin American literature acts as a medium for political thought and discussion of the ethics of war in Spain’s far-flung empire. Her publications to date have applied this approach to the Hispanic epic tradition. Marie-Louise Crawley studied at the University of Oxford and was vocationally trained with Marcel Marceau at his school in Paris. Marie-Louise began her professional performance career with Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil (2003–9). Since 2010, she has been working in the UK as an independent choreographer and dance artist with companies as diverse as Birmingham Opera Company, Marc Brew, Gary Clarke, Ballet Cymru, and Rosie Kay Dance Company. New choreographic work has included pieces for a TATE/ ARTIST ROOMS exhibit and for the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. She was recently Artist-in-Residence at the APGRD (2017) and is currently a PhD candidate at C-DaRE (Centre for Dance Research), Coventry University.

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List of Contributors

Cécile Dudouyt is Assistant Professor at the University of Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité, where she teaches Translation and Translation Studies. Her research explores the reception of translated ancient Greek theatre in English and French from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Tatiana Faia is both a scholar and a poet affiliated to the Centre for Classical Studies of the University of Lisbon. Her doctoral thesis studied characters and characterization in the Iliad. She works on classical reception in contemporary Portuguese literature. Recently published work explores the links between the poetry of Herberto Helder, Adrienne Rich and the myth of Orpheus, and Fernando Pessoa on Antinous; and forthcoming is a study on Pessoa’s theatre and Fantin-Latour’s paintings. She is one of the editors of the literary journal/ small press Enfermaria 6, a project committed to curate the best of Lusophone contemporary writing. Barbara Graziosi is Professor of Classics at Princeton University. Her numerous publications include Homer (2016), The Gods of Olympus: A History (2013), and Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (2002); and with Johannes Haubold, Homer: Iliad Book VI (2010) and Homer: The Resonance of Epic (2005). Emily Greenwood is Professor of Classics at Yale University. She is the author of Thucydides and the Shaping of History (2006) and Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (2010). She has published widely on ancient Greek historiography, the adaptation and translation of various Greek authors, and the broader reception of classical antiquity. Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at King’s College London and Co-Founder and Consultant Director of the APGRD. She has published twenty-five books on ancient culture and its reception, the most recent being Introducing the Ancient Greeks (2014) and Happiness: Ten Ways Aristotle Can Change your Life (2017). She is the recipient of the 2015 Erasmus Prize of the European Academy and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Athens. Lorna Hardwick is Emeritus Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University, UK and an Honorary Research Associate at the APGRD, University of Oxford. She is (with James Porter) the editor of the Classical Presences series (Oxford University Press) and was the founding editor of the Classical Receptions Journal. She is Director of the Reception of Classical Texts Research Project and author of Translating Words, Translating Cultures (2000) and Reception Studies (2003, also translated into Greek), and co-editor of Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (2007), Companion to Classical Receptions (2007), and Classics in the Modern World: A ‘Democratic Turn’? (2013).

List of Contributors

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Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature, Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, and Adjunct Professor at the universities of Copenhagen and Trondheim. He has published extensively on Latin literature and its reception, including A Commentary on Vergil, Aeneid 10 (1991), Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace (2007), Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English (ed. 2009), Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays (jointly edited with Amanda Wrigley, 2013), and Classics in the Modern World: A ‘Democratic Turn’? (jointly edited with Lorna Hardwick, 2013). He is a member of the APGRD Advisory Board. Stephe Harrop is Senior Lecturer in Drama (Shakespeare and the Classics) at Liverpool Hope University. Her research focuses on the reperformance of ancient drama and epic, the traditional arts on modern British stages, and contemporary storytelling practices. Stephe is also an associate of the APGRD. Tiphaine Karsenti is Assistant Professor in Performance Studies at ParisNanterre University. She is a specialist in French theatre of the early modern period and author of Le Mythe de Troie dans le théâtre français, 1562–1715 (2012). She is co-organizer, with Cécile Dudouyt, of the APGRD/HAR annual joint colloquium. Margaret Kean is the Dame Helen Gardner Fellow and Tutor in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Her research focuses on the works of John Milton, John Dryden, early modern theatre, the epic tradition and its reception history. She also has a teaching interest in children’s literature. She has recently completed Inferno: A Cultural History of Hell (2018) and is the editor of John Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Sourcebook (2005). Claire Kenward is Archivist and Researcher at the APGRD. Her publications include ‘The Reception of Greek Drama in Early Modern England’ in A Handbook to the Reception of Greek Drama (2016) and ‘Sights to Make an Alexander? Reading Homer on the Early Modern Stage’ in Homer and Greek Tragedy in Early Modern England’s Theatres: Special Issue of Classical Receptions Journal (2017). Forthcoming publications focus on the reception of Hecuba and Homer’s Iliad in science fiction and speculative fantasy. Claire is also co-author and curator of the APGRD’s two multimedia, interactive ebooks: Medea—A Performance History (2016), and Agamemnon—A Performance History (2019). Robin Kirkpatrick is Emeritus Professor of Italian and English Literature at the University of Cambridge. As well as a verse translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (Penguin, 2012), he has written a number of books on Dante and on the Renaissance, including The European Renaissance, 1400–1600 (2002) and English and Italian Literature from Dante to Shakespeare: A Study of Source, Analogue, and Divergence (1995).

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List of Contributors

Fiona Macintosh is Professor of Classical Reception, Director of APGRD, and Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Dying Acts: Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (1994), Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1900 (with Edith Hall, 2005), and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (2009). This is the seventh APGRD volume that she has edited. Justine McConnell is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. She is author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (2013), and co-editor of three volumes: Ancient Slavery and Abolition: from Hobbes to Hollywood (2011), The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (2015), and Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 (2016). Pantelis Michelakis is Reader in Classics at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Greek Tragedy on Screen (2013), Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (2006), and Achilles in Greek Tragedy (2002). He has also co-edited The Ancient World in Silent Cinema (2013), Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC to AD 2004 (2005), and Homer, Tragedy and Beyond: Essays in Honour of P. E. Easterling (2001). He is a member of the APGRD Advisory Board. Laura Monrós-Gaspar is Associate Professor of English and Head of the Area of Performing Arts at the Universitat de València. She is also a Research Associate of the APGRD. She is the author of Victorian Classical Burlesques. A Critical Anthology (2015), Cassandra the Fortune Teller: Prophets, Gipsies and Victorian Burlesque (2011), and various articles and book chapters on Victorian literature and culture. Frederick Naerebout is Lecturer in Ancient History at Leiden University. His research centres on Greek and Roman religion, especially the non-verbal aspects of ritual (dance), and on cultural contact, especially within Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire. The reception of the ancient world is another major research area. Georgina Paul is Associate Professor of German at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in German at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is author of Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature (2009) and editor of An Odyssey for Our Time: Barbara Köhler’s Niemands Frau (2013). Emily Pillinger is Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature in the Department of Classics at King’s College London. She has written on the supernatural voices of prophets, witches, and the dead in the poetry of the ancient world, and her book Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature is forthcoming (2019). She has also published on classical reception in music and is currently researching the use of Graeco-Roman myth and history in music composed after the Second World War.

List of Contributors

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Tanya Pollard is Professor in English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Centre, New York. Her books include Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (2017), Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (2005), Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (2004), and three co-edited collections of essays. Henry Power is Associate Professor of English at the University of Exeter. He specializes in English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is author of Epic into Novel: Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (2015), Homer’s Odyssey (2011), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640–1715 (with N. McDowell, 2018). One current project is on the Homeric translations of Christopher Logue. Deana Rankin is Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. She specializes in English and Irish Literature of the early modern period. Her publications include Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (2005) and the first scholarly edition of Landgartha: A Tragie-comedy by Henry Burnell (2013). Patrice Rankine is Professor of Classics and Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Richmond. He is author of Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (2006), which was named in 2007 by Choice magazine as one of the outstanding academic books and is currently in its second printing; and Aristotle and Black Drama: A Theater of Disobedience (2013). He is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (2015). Margaret Reynolds is Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London. Her publications include The Sappho History (2003), The Sappho Companion (2000), and (with Angela Leighton) Victorian Women Poets (1999). Her critical edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1996) won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize. She is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Adventures in Poetry’. Tom Sapsford is Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts NYU, an Early Career Associate with the APGRD, and was previously a Lecturer in the Department of Classics at the University of Southern California. Prior to the study of Classics, Tom was a professional dancer and choreographer working with institutions such as the Royal Ballet, the Royal Opera House, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Arabella Stanger is Lecturer in Drama: Theatre and Performance at the University of Sussex. She previously held the post of Lecturer in Dance Studies at the University of Roehampton and received her PhD and MA in Theatre and Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London. Before studying for

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List of Contributors

her BA in Classical Studies with English Literature from King’s College London, Arabella trained professionally in classical ballet and contemporary dance in London. She is currently preparing a monograph on choreographic space and is engaged in new research projects on sabotage, and performance and light. Henry Stead is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in English and Classical Studies at the Open University, UK. He is author of A Cockney Catullus (2015) and co-editor of Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform (2015). Tim Supple is a multi-award-winning British theatre director, who has directed and adapted theatre across the world. He is co-director of Dash Arts, a company that produces theatre, dance, music, and art events in collaboration with artists around the world. His recent projects include The Tempest at The National Centre for Performing Arts in Beijing. Marchella Ward recently completed her doctorate in Classics at St Hilda’s College, Oxford on blindness and the theatre. She has a background in Classics and English and is currently Archivist and Researcher at the APGRD. In 2017 she was the specialist researcher on a BBC Four documentary, produced in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, ‘Ovid from the RSC: The World’s Greatest Storyteller’. David Wiles is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter, and a member of Wolfson College, Oxford. He spent much of his career in the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, before moving to Exeter in 2013. His major areas of historical interest have been Greek and Elizabethan theatre, and key themes in his work have been festival, mask, and space. His Theatre and Citizenship (2011) covered a broad historical span with a focus upon the French Enlightenment. With Christine Dymkowski, he edited the Cambridge Companion to Theatre History (2013). He is currently working on the history of acting, more specifically the rhetorical method derived from antiquity. He has had a long association with the APGRD. Wes Williams is Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford. His main research interests are in the field of early modern literature: they encompass the study of genre and of subjectivity, and the intersection of medicine, law, and literature in the period. His first book was Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: ‘The Undiscovered Country (1998) and his most recent is Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture; ‘Mighty Magic’ (2011). Currently working on the long (and continuing) history of ‘Voluntary Servitude’, he also teaches European film and literary theory, and writes and directs for the theatre.

Note on Nomenclature, Spelling, and Texts For ancient texts and authors, we have adopted the standard spellings and abbreviations in The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edn.) and the citations from ancient authors are taken from the Oxford Classical Texts editions, unless otherwise indicated. Translations are the author’s own, unless stated. Spelling throughout is UK, unless referring to a US particular place/ institution.

I Defining Terms

1 ‘Epic’ Performances From Brecht to Homer and Back Fiona Macintosh

During the course of the APGRD’s Leverhulme-funded ‘Performing Epic’ project, epic performances provided the theme for one of the joint annual colloquia with the ‘Histoires des arts et des représentations’ (HAR), Université de Paris, Nanterre.¹ On this particular occasion, the cross-disciplinary dialogue during the colloquium proved, at first, surprising and occasionally disorienting; and it took some time for everyone to realize just how instructive the initial crosstalk in fact was. It was the terminology that proved a stumbling block here: whilst for the Paris-based performance scholars/theatre historians, Brecht’s ‘Epic Theatre’ was self-evidently what ‘performing epic’ meant, the Oxford-based classicists were puzzled to find this particular German playwright/theorist providing the subject for discussion. Brecht’s Epic Theatre, which the playwright developed both in theory and practice from the late 1920s onwards, may have loomed long and large on the modern stage, either as model or as foil to theatre practitioners and theorists, but for classicists it has generally been regarded as marginal to their concerns.² Although Martin Revermann has recently demonstrated how mistaken such ¹ For details of the Leverhulme funded ‘Performing Epic’ project: . And for details of the partnership with HAR, see: . This volume grew out of three work shops, especially the last two that focused on the Middle Ages to 1800 and from 1800 into the twenty first century respectively. Additional chapters began life in the APGRD lecture/seminar series (those by Supple, Burrow, and Paul); others were newly commissioned (those by Choi, Crawley, Faia, Power, Karsenti, and Ward). ² The fullest account is Brecht’s ‘Notes on the Opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’ (1930), which includes the first (and best known) schema in tabular form of Epic versus Dramatic Theatre. Brecht (2015), 61 71. For the perspective of one practitioner, see Supple, Ch. 4 in this volume. The studies by classicists, Silk (2001) and Revermann (2013) and (2016), are the exceptions that prove the rule.

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Fiona Macintosh

an oversight is for studies of tragedy and the tragic,³ Brecht is often only acknowledged by classical scholars as a rewriter of Hölderlin’s boldly eccentric translation of Sophocles’ Antigone. When ‘Epic Theatre’ is considered by classicists, it is narrowly construed as simply ‘narrative’ theatre with very little, if anything, to do with the Greek and Roman epic poems. Cast by Brecht in contradistinction to what he termed bourgeois, illusionist, ‘Aristotelian’ theatre, Epic Theatre advocates the deployment of Verfremdungseffekte (very loosely ‘distancing’ techniques⁴), which are designed to disrupt the flow of the action, rupture the fourth wall, and thereby render a critical stance on the part of the spectators in order to effect radical change within society at large. The employment of film projections in Epic Theatre, designed to usher in real-life experiences, both extends and segments the theatrical space by turns; and, perhaps most importantly, these stage technologies effect temporal disjunctions within the dramatic action, resulting in multilayered/ multi-perspectival performances. It is important to concede that the epic performances discussed in this volume are very often interventionist, as Brecht advocated; and they routinely extend theatrical space (albeit vertically to the realm of the divine and horizontally across continents) in their handling of the ‘big themes’, which Brecht maintained provided the requisite subject matter of Epic. They also focus intently on the here and now: as the theatre director Tim Supple suggests in this volume, epic theatre must be both big and small—handling the generalities and the specificities of life. Temporally too the epic performances discussed in this volume are very often disjunctive in Brechtian terms as their action leaps back and forth across time. However, what the epic performances discussed here do not adopt in any systematic fashion is Verfremdung—the concept generally considered to be central to Brechtian theatre.⁵ They may well include deliberate features that set these performances at some remove from reality, as with Homeric epic’s stylized dactylic hexameter, which clearly effected in practice a degree of Verfremdung;⁶ or, say, through the use of a choric/narrator figure who mediates the action for the spectators.⁷ It could be argued that many epic performances under discussion here, and not just those in opera and dance, depend absolutely on the very spellbinding qualities that Brecht demonizes and associates with the intoxication of bourgeois/‘Aristotelian’ theatre. But is Brecht’s Epic Theatre really so far from the epic performances under discussion in this volume? Were we Oxford-based classicists, then, initially

³ Revermann (2013), Revermann (2016). ⁴ I follow the editors of the 3rd edition of Brecht (2015), who admit to finding no satisfactory English equivalent of Brecht’s use of Verfremdung. ⁵ Silk (2001). ⁶ Cf. Graziosi, Ch. 2 in this volume. ⁷ For Tippett’s adoption of an Epic narrator figure, see Pillinger, Ch. 20 in this volume.

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too quick to emphasize the differences between epic performances and the towering twentieth-century, Epic Theatre model? We slowly realized that we needed to take heed. For even if Brecht’s ‘approach to acting, playmaking, scenography, and music has not been accepted outside Germany’, his ‘approach to staging, storytelling, technology, and ensemble acting has triumphed’.⁸ Moreover, whilst Brecht in the late 1920s and early 1930s followed Schiller and Goethe in his apparent misapprehension that, according to Aristotle, epic and drama were opposites,⁹ by 1935 both his position and his understanding of any Aristotelian polarity had evolved. In his ‘Thoughts for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction’, there is more nuance and greater room for overlap between the two genres: The term ‘epic theatre’ seemed self contradictory to many because, following Aristotle, the epic and the dramatic forms of presenting the plot are held to be distinct . . . [But] Aristotle himself distinguished between the dramatic and epic forms as a difference in their construction . . . [and] there was the ‘dramatic element’ in epic works and the ‘epic element’ in dramatic works.¹⁰

Now, it seems, ‘epic drama’ and ‘dramatic epic’ are both possibilities according to his schema. During the course of the APGRD’s ‘Performing Epic’ project and in the commissioning and editing process for this volume, it has become apparent that formal questions—Brecht’s modes of ‘construction’—are central to an understanding of epic performances in the modern world. And Brecht has turned out not to be the outlier: his multilayered, multifaceted action, segmentation, and discontinuity all reappear in the epic plots in evidence in this volume. Brecht, as Silk has demonstrated, has borrowed much from Aristotle on epic (not least the notion of epic segmentation, which comes from Poetics chapter 26, where he speaks of epic as less unified than tragedy); and Brecht very often provides coherence to Aristotle’s theory where there is none.¹¹ And just as Brecht’s Epic Theatre demystifies the theatrical conventions associated with the neoclassical unities and the deus ex machina,¹² so epic performances from the late seventeenth century were deemed to be in breach of those ‘unities’ and were consequently confined to performance spaces where the ‘rules’ were not applicable—in the fairs, in the opera house. Brecht, then, despite our initial conviction to the contrary, has turned out to be a very helpful guide in analysing the epic performances under discussion here. Just as Brecht can illuminate tragedy,¹³ so his theory is by no means unhelpful when it comes to analysing epic on stage. And as so often with

⁸ Supple, Ch. 4 in this volume, p. 56. ⁹ Silk (2001), 186. ¹⁰ Brecht (2015), 109. ¹¹ Silk (2001). See too Graziosi, Ch. 2 in this volume, for Aristotle on epic. ¹² Giles, in Brecht (2015), 17. ¹³ Revermann (2016).

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interdisciplinary dialogue, the initially slow process of discovery has afforded exciting new perspectives that a classical lens, tout court, occluded.

EPIC CONTENT When it was explained that the principal research focus for the APGRD’s Leverhulme project was the content of the Graeco-Roman epics in performance, it is true to say that there was a degree of bemusement on the part of the members of HAR, the Paris-Nanterre theatre research group. The subtext of the dialogue was something on the lines of: ‘How could ancient “epic” content constitute a “research” focus?’ And ‘How could source-spotting provide serious research findings?’ It took some explaining to make it clear that ‘Performing Epic’ entailed rather more than source-spotting and data collection (however important that was for the APGRD database).¹⁴ The project was designed, inter alia, not only to trace systematically the afterlife of the ancient epics in performance; it was seeking also, and most importantly, to examine the multiple reasons behind the continuous attraction of ancient epic material to theatre and film directors, to playwrights, composers, and choreographers down to this day. Indeed, it was developments in theatre into the twenty-first century, when ‘epic performances’ have enjoyed considerable prominence in theatrical repertoires around the globe, that prompted the research project in the first place. For some contemporary theatre makers, such as Peter Brook, epic material has provided a staple and a reference point throughout a long career. Late in 2015 at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris and then early in 2016 at the Young Vic Theatre in London, Brook returned to the subject of his epic-scale, nine-hour Mahabharata (1985, made into a six-hour film in 1989 after four years’ touring internationally) with a short episode entitled Battlefield from Vyasa’s Sanskrit epic.¹⁵ This internecine struggle between the Bharata family members is set against the backdrop of the Kurukshetra War; and as Aeschylus was said to have done with Homer, Battlefield takes a ‘slice’ from Vyasa’s epic ‘banquet’ in order to make some sense of the tragedies of families torn apart by the horrors of war. Brook’s engagement with epic had initially been fed by his interest in living oral indigenous epic performances in India and in traditional societies around the world. In recent years, verse narratives of quest, adventure, and destiny— the Greek and Roman Iliad, Odyssey, Argonautica, Aeneid, Metamorphoses alongside Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, the Inuit Atanarjuat, and the West African Sundiata—have been inspiring new theatrical, danced and sung ¹⁴ See the APGRD performance database. ¹⁵ See Fig. 4.1, p. 57.

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productions in every continent of the world. Numerous productions, such as the Franco-Indian collaborative version of The Odyssey by Footsbarn Travelling Theatre and the Kerala-based Abhinaya Theatre Group (1995), and the Ramayan-Odyssey (2001) by the Tara Arts Company in London, have been discovering new resonances in the collision of Eastern and Western epics in an intercultural performance arena.¹⁶ This volume is very aware of these wider epic traditions even if the focus is more squarely upon Graeco-Roman epic poetry and, generally speaking, defines ‘ancient epic’ as a long hexameter poem in either Greek or Latin. It was this corpus that provided the staple of the early operatic repertoire (Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689), and Handel’s Acis and Galatea (1739) take their inspiration from the Metamorphoses and the Aeneid). Moreover, in many ways the very performativity of epic poetry is related not simply to its compelling narratives, but also to its inherent dramatic potential. Pollard argues in this volume that, since Homer’s ‘great banquet’ provided ‘slices’ for Aeschylean tragedy, Troy was understood in the early modern period through ancient tragedy as it was mediated on the popular stage. Indeed, epic is understood at this time as a kind of ‘protodrama’:¹⁷ with Aristotle’s guidance, the term ‘epic’ referred not just to thirdperson narrative (diegesis) but also to direct speech (mimesis). For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as Burrow argues in this volume, epic was potentially, if not actually, linked to theatre from the outset. Moreover, the early vernacular translations of the Homeric epics and the example of Virgil, especially, led to theatrical innovation across Europe. Demetriou has demonstrated that ‘the trajectory of the epics’ vernacularisation [in England] took them first through the commercial theatre’.¹⁸ Chapters in this volume by Choi, Naerebout, and Karsenti reveal that the interconnections between vernacular translation and performance in the Golden Age Spanish and Dutch theatrical traditions and in early modern French theatre were broadly similar. The technological innovations in the theatre into the eighteenth century seem equally to have been fuelled by new epic content;¹⁹ and translation, technology, and theatrical mastery lie at the heart of Hall’s account here of Settle’s enduring droll Siege of Troy (1709). In recent years, the Graeco-Roman epics have provided an especially rich storehouse of themes for creative artists working in divergent traditions. If the

¹⁶ See further Supple and Crawley, Ch. 4 and Ch. 12, respectively, in this volume. ¹⁷ I am most grateful to Tania Demitriou for allowing me to quote from her lecture ‘Shakespeare’s Homer: Laughing and Weeping with the Iliad’, delivered in Thessaloniki, 2016. ¹⁸ Demitriou, ‘Shakespeare’s Homer’. ¹⁹ See Kean, Ch. 13 in this volume, on the relationship between the underworld/hell and the trapdoor in London’s popular playhouses; Macintosh (2018) on Inigo Jones; and Macintosh and McConnell (forthcoming).

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sea, above all, could be said to conjure up the Homeric world in Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros, then this is equally true of one of his primary sources, Joyce’s Ulysses. And it is Homer’s ‘wine-dark’ sea, as Stanger demonstrates in this volume, that unites Homer, Joyce, and Merce Cunningham through the non-verbal medium of dance in the choreographer’s epic journey, performed in a circular space, Ocean (1994). Tim Supple and Simon Reade’s adaptation of Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid (1999) for the stage brought ‘Ovid’ home to the Royal Shakespeare Company, as Ward demonstrates—a move more recently celebrated in the RSC season at Stratford-upon-Avon in 2017 marking 2,000 years since the death of Ovid. These epic performances have been mounted within other major cultural institutions: witness, for example, the three dance–design collaborations of the Royal Opera House/National Gallery, Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, which formed part of London’s Cultural Olympiad.²⁰ In 2013 at the Greek Festival of Epidaurus, Stathis Livathinos premiered his three-and-a-half-hour modern-day version of the Iliad, translated into modern Greek by Dimitris Marionitis, which has gone on to tour in Spain, Romania, Canada, and Chile. A cast of fifteen actors all took different roles and each assumed the role of rhapsode/narrator during the course of the performance.²¹ Even readings of the whole of the Homeric epics have proved appealing: in 2015, there were hugely popular readings of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, organized by (and concluding at) the Almeida Theatre in London as part of their Greeks Season, which drew crowds to the British Museum and then, in the case of the Odyssey, various locations around London to hear multiple actors read the twenty-four books over a fifteen-/twelve-hour period respectively.²² In 2017 the European Festival of Latin and Greek organized what was billed as the biggest ever worldwide reading of the Odyssey, Odyssée 24.²³ But, perhaps more consistently, these epic performances have come from emergent, experimental theatre companies, such as Paper Cinema’s meta-cinematic/puppetry version of Homer’s Odyssey (2012),²⁴ and dreamthinkspeak’s [sic] Don’t Look Back, an immersive retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice between 2003 and 2008, which toured the UK and then Australia, Russia, and Malaysia.

²⁰ Macintosh (2019). ²¹ Trubotchkin (2014). ²² See and . ²³ The event took place on 24 March 2017, . The Oxford organizers, Oliver Taplin and Arabella Currie, read their versions, together with other local translators, of Odyssey Book 5: . ²⁴ McConnell (2013b), 169. Paper Cinema’s Odyssey moves entirely away from ‘text’, con taining no dialogue at all: it is a ‘live animation’, with the silent film being produced live at each performance by the artist Nic Rawling, a puppeteer, and three musicians. See too the cover and frontispiece to this volume.

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So how does one account for this recent ‘epic turn’ in performance? One possible answer may well be related to epic’s perceived ‘pedagogical’ function, which can be dated from at least the fifth century BCE, when the Homeric texts acquired a status analogous to that accorded to sacred texts in other cultures. In the modern Western world, and in Britain today in particular, there is increasingly vigorous debate about the fragmentary nature of the teaching of history within the school curriculum. In the absence of any ‘big picture’ narrative of history, in a world where only multiple and competing versions of the grand narrative are possible, it may well be that traditional epics, from ancient Greece and Rome together with those from India, Africa, and other ancient cultures, are now being sought out by audiences hungry for the excitement and tension supplied by the ‘good’ story per se—what Nick Lowe has delineated Homer’s ‘end game’.²⁵ As Simon Perris has argued, epic narratives have an ‘open closure’: they close, if at all, thematically rather than on the level of plot and thus lend themselves readily to constant rewritings and adaptions.²⁶

EPIC FORM However, it is not simply epic content that is of value and interest to recent theatre practitioners. Certain formal features of ancient epic have been significant in prompting its reperformance in various media. In theatres that are not bound by neoclassical rules, and in turn by the conventions of the fourth wall and nineteenth-century realism, ‘epic’ scale and scope have provided the mainstays of the repertoire. These are precisely the performance traditions admired by Brecht: from Asia, the Soviet Union, Elizabethan England, cabaret and music hall, German agitprop and especially Piscator’s political theatre and, not least, American silent cinema (above all, Chaplin). As Szondi has argued, cinema is not filmed theatre but an epic art form;²⁷ and as Michelakis discusses in this volume, it has been engaged in an agon with epic since its inception. What happens to performance scripts once epic subject matter and elements are introduced? The pagan epic decent to the underworld (katabasis), for example, was translated, with the aid of a sophisticated trapdoor, on to the popular early modern stage as hell-mouth by Thomas Kyd, John Dekker, and Thomas Heywood (see Kean, Ch. 13 in this volume). Representing the katabatic descent of Odysseus in Book 10 of the Odyssey in dance provided a recent, and most fruitful, challenge to the choreographer Cathy Marston (Sapsford, Ch. 14 in this volume). Epic journeying across time and place into the realm of the ²⁵ Lowe (2000).

²⁶ Perris (2011).

²⁷ Szondi (1987), 68.

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hyperreal/le merveilleux, both before and after neoclassical strictures, is explored in various chapters in this volume (by Michelakis, Ch. 9 on film, by Williams, Ch. 8 in early modern French theatre, by Macintosh, Ch. 32 in dance). When epic material finds its way on to the early modern French and Spanish stages it becomes tragicomedy and/or proto-Romance (see Williams, Ch. 8 and Choi, Ch. 23 in this volume). And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when epic was deemed incompatible with serious spoken drama on the ground that it breached verisimilitude, it became per force opera or danced performance (Macintosh Ch. 32, Harrison Ch. 26, Reynolds Ch. 35 in this volume) or a combination of these, in the all-singing, all-dancing burlesque performances (Hall Ch. 30, Stead Ch. 31, Monrós-Gaspar Ch. 34, and Bryant Davies Ch. 36 in this volume). Since the Homeric poems were delivered by a rhapsode who, according to Plato’s account in his dialogue Ion, was a star performer, the performative dimension of epic is recognized as one of its hallmarks. That Odysseus himself in his eponymous epic is an ingenious performer is significant too: his polyvalent epithet polytropos (‘much turning’) refers equally to his intellectual acumen and boundless resourcefulness in his adoption of multiple disguises on the perilous and protracted journey home. Perhaps the best illustration of Odysseus’ ‘much turning’ occurs with his assumption of the role of narrator, when he gives a mesmerizing account to the Phaeacian people of his travels in Books 9–12 of the poem. The Narrator/bard figure has featured regularly on the modern stage at least since Dante’s Virgil stepped into the highly liturgical Commedia (see Kirkpatrick, Ch. 15 in this volume). The Portuguese epic poet and imitator of Virgil, Camões, has himself enjoyed an afterlife as bard/national hero. If his epic poem Os Lusíadas, which celebrates Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India, has been discarded from the curriculum in a postcolonial age, Faia shows that it may bear rereading. The bard and his text, she argues, provide no jingoistic celebration of empire per se; instead, and as revealed in recent stage versions, Camões proffers a subtle reworking of the epic hero, who is subject to the multiple pressures of a court, in which the ideal ruler is presented as a challenge to the young king, Dom Sebastião (Ch. 21 in this volume). Greenwood’s discussion (Ch. 19 in this volume) shows that this bardic figure is not only a figure of the pre-modern world but haunts, no less intensely, contemporary poets such as Armitage and Oswald in their reperformances of epic material. Perhaps, not surprisingly in Tippett’s modern godless world, Hermes in the multiply refracted epic opera, King Priam (1962) is refigured as bardic/Brechtian narrator figure (see Pillinger, Ch. 20 in this volume). In many instances, especially for recent emergent and experimental theatre companies, the oral nature of ancient epic makes reinvention not only legitimate but also deeply appropriate. Early twentieth-century advances in Homeric scholarship by Milman Parry, including his fieldwork in 1930s Yugoslavia into the formulaic nature of Serbo-Croatian oral poetry, were arguably only made possible by the two previous decades of jazz performance. And in many

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ways, Parry’s research lies behind numerous twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury engagements with epic in performance. The links between jazz and Homeric formulas have been previously delineated;²⁸ and Christopher Logue’s jazz-inspired recreations of Homer for the radio provide ample evidence of the creative synergies between mid-twentiethcentury readings of Homer and jazz composition (see Power, Ch. 17 in this volume). But it is equally important to stress that elements of jazz composition can throw new light on Homeric oral poetics, as jazz pianist and academic Graeme Bird explains Ch. 16 in this volume. Stephe Harrop looks at how liberating the idea of an oral/improvisatory Homer has been to the work of the ‘unfixed’ performances of the poet Kate Tempest, in particular (Ch. 18 in this volume). Marie-Louise Crawley provides another example of a contemporary artist who is liberated by the fluidity of epic oral conventions, as her account of her own devised solo bodily enactment of an oral medium makes clear (Ch. 12 in this volume). And as Sapsford shows, the question of multiple authorship in Homeric scholarship has led to at least one collaborative promenade dance retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, NEST (2013) (Ch. 14 in this volume). The question of multiple authorship aside, epic performances move between multiple perspectives—the narrator’s and the characters in the action; the gods and the mortals, something that film and the filmic aspects of Logue’s style capture so brilliantly (cf. Graziosi and Power, Ch. 2 and Ch. 17, respectively, in this volume). In the lyric sequence Niemands Frau by the German poet Barbara Köhler, this bifurcation is beautifully articulated, as Paul reveals in Ch. 10 in this volume, in the seemingly seamless shift in German between a third-person singular feminine pronoun, sie (‘she’), and a third-person plural pronoun, sie (‘they’). An intriguing example of this epic feature in English can be found in Marina Carr’s rewriting of Euripides’ Hecuba (2015), which renders Euripides’ text in a way that is strikingly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s denigration of Euripides. In chapter 12 of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche holds Euripides responsible for having destroyed tragedy and for producing instead ‘das dramatisierte Epos’ (‘dramatized epic’).²⁹ What Nietzsche was objecting to, and what in turn Brecht and others have sought to replicate, was the sense of viewing at a critical distance that he detects in Euripides’ tragedies. Listen to Hecuba’s opening speech in Carr’s play, with the Trojan queen literally knee-deep in what remains of her family, acting as if she were spectator of her own grief (Fig. 1.1): So I’m in the throne room. Surrounded by the limbs, torsos, heads, corpses of my sons. My women trying to dress me, blood between my toes, my sons’ blood, six of them, seven of them, eight? I’ve lost count, not that you can count anyway, ²⁸ Silk (2004). ²⁹ For comment, see Silk and Stern (1981), 359 60. See Bentley (1948), 184 for how German critics saw Hauptmann’s episodic Die Weber (1892) as an example of ‘Die Episierung des Dramas’.

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Fig. 1.1 Marina Carr’s Hecuba (2015) at the RSC. Hecuba on the throne. Photograph by Topher McGrills © RSC.

they’re not complete, more an assortment of legs, arms, chests, some with the armour still on, some stripped, hands in a pile, whose hands are they? Ears missing, eyes hanging out of sockets, and then Andromache comes in screaming, holding this bloody bundle. My grandson, intact except for his head, smashed off a wall, like an eggshell. They’re through the south gate, she says, they’ve breached the citadel, they’re here.³⁰ ³⁰ Carr (2015), 1 2.

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Here in the opening speech, we witness more diegesis than mimesis, reiteration and commentary rather than action pure and simple. And in encounters between characters in Carr’s Hecuba, instead of dialogue, we witness a complex shift both between temporalities and between perspectives (between subjectivity and objectivity). This is from the first exchange between Agamemnon and Hecuba: You saw our beautiful city, our valleys, our fields, green and giving. You had never seen such abundance. You wanted it. You must have it. You came to plunder and destroy. AGAMEMNON: She rattles on about their paved streets, their temples, their marbled libraries, their Holy Joe priests, their palaces of turquoise and pink gold. I say, where’s Helen? We can’t find her. HECUBA: Helen? Helen? Helen was never here and well you know it!³¹ HECUBA:

It is important to emphasize that what features in these lines is not the aside— which Brecht said was always only comic.³² Instead, what happens in delivery is much more like, what is termed in relation to the novel, ‘free indirect speech’; and when Brecht writes that ‘Naturalistic drama borrowed from the French novel, both its subject matter and the epic form’, it may well be this mixed mimetic/diegetic ‘free indirect style’ to which he is referring above all.³³ With or without Brechtian echoes, then, Carr has truly ‘epicized’ tragedy in her Hecuba and, perhaps unwittingly, intuited and then replicated the very multiperspectival features of Euripidean style that so greatly affronted Nietzsche.³⁴

BACK TO BRECHT? Since David Quint’s influential Epic and Empire (1993), it has become fashionable in certain quarters to regard Greek and Roman epic as a literary form intimately related to the experience and era of European colonization, its divine machinery as metaphysically obsolete in a post-Darwinian age, and its poetic form as historically destined to cede pre-eminence to the nineteenthcentury realist novel. This volume shows how mistaken this view is in relation to epic performances. The figure of the Amazon, mediated via multiple ancient mythical traditions on the English and Irish stages in the first half of the seventeenth century, exemplifies an early anti-imperialist dramatic intervention: the Amazon in Thomas Burnell’s Langartha, in particular, serves as mouthpiece for Catholic ³¹ Carr (2015), 216. ³² Brecht (2015), 54. ³³ Brecht ‘Latest Stage: Oedipus’ (1929), in Brecht (2015), 54. ³⁴ On this Euripidean multiple viewing, see Arnott (1981).

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resistance against English Protestant colonial aspirations in Ireland (Rankin, Ch. 25 in this volume). The Virgilian figure of Ascanius in eighteenth-century opera brings the politics of the Habsburg Empire centre stage (Harrison, Ch. 26 in this volume). Much more recently, the imperial legacy of epic in Brazil is explored by Jorge de Lima in his epic poem Invention of Orpheus (1952), which results in a mode of hyper-literacy and a reified text that serves metonymically for the absent bodies destroyed by colonialism (Rankine, Ch. 27 in this volume). Analogously when Walcott’s Omeros, considered primarily as written text, is translated into a film installation by Isaac Julien (2002) and a stage performance at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (2014–15), as well as into a film script by Walcott himself, the mosaic impressions of Walcott’s text reflect the fragmentation inherent in Afro-Caribbean histories as a result of the horrors of the Middle Passage (McConnell, Ch. 28 in this volume). The politics of classical burlesque performances have begun in recent years to receive serious critical attention.³⁵ This volume demonstrates how important epic burlesques were and, as Hall suggests, ‘it was at the fairground, and perhaps especially at the puppet shows, that the wars over the ownership of classical stories [for over 150 years] were fought with the greatest intensity’.³⁶ In France, any attempts to breach the institutional barriers erected between serious spoken drama and epic material were doomed to fail because ‘towering’ epic—the one genre that neoclassical France had failed to improve upon— either had to be negotiated through burlesque or on the operatic/balletic stage (Macintosh Ch. 32, Dudouyt Ch. 35, Reynolds Ch. 33 in this volume). Indeed ‘towering’ epic, with its vast canvas, its divine machinery, its intimidating status and scale, has always proved a challenge. David Wiles explores the links between epic acting and the problem of excessive emotion, with reference to the players in Hamlet—seemingly miles away from Brecht’s dicta and Epic Theatre’s eschewal of emotional engagement in the late 1920s and early 1930s; and yet Hamlet, he argues, choreographs the actors in the dumbshow in a Brechtian ‘epic’ sense.³⁷ As Burrow explains, epic style in the late sixteenth century was ‘grand[iloquent]’ and teetered on the brink of ‘tumidity’—again a far cry from Brechtian folk-like, pared-down traditions. The epic plot, as Aristotle pointed out, is loose and baggy; and Alfred Döblin, the novelist whom Brecht identifies as pioneer and guide in the modern ‘Epic’ style, maintained that the epic plot, unlike the dramatic plot, could be cut with scissors and yet still be understandable.³⁸ ³⁵ Hall and Macintosh (2005), Monrós Gaspar (2016b), Richardson (2003); for epic bur lesques, in particular, see Bryant Davies (2018). ³⁶ Hall, Ch. 30 in this volume. See also Stead Ch. 31, Monrós Gaspar Ch. 34, Bryant Davies Ch. 36 in this volume; and Hardwick, Epilogue to this volume, on the need to view epic in performance ‘on the edges’. ³⁷ NB Brecht does allow for emotion later, see Brecht (2015), 194. ³⁸ Brecht (2015), 110. This is also from Aristotle, Poetics ch. 26, on less unified epic plot that can supply material for numerous tragedies. See Silk (2001).

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Excessive, overblown, or at least constantly on the brink of both—maybe; yet simplicity too is at the heart of epic performances. As Silk has eloquently argued of Homeric style in general, its hallmark is a consistent combination of both stylization and immediacy.³⁹ And as the theatre director Tim Supple insists in this volume, ‘epic’ theatre is not ‘spectacular’ theatre—it is not about the director ‘conducting’ from afar. Indeed, the challenge and the power of epic performances derive from their need to be both capacious and intimate at one and the same time.

³⁹ Silk (2004).

2 Performing Epic and Reading Homer An Aristotelian Perspective Barbara Graziosi

There are two long-recognized obstacles to dramatic performances of ancient epic. The first is the grand scale of the action and the second is the portrayal of the gods. I argue here that these two features have been important for emerging definitions of literature—that is to say, definitions of what is characteristic of literature as opposed to the performing arts. I start with Aristotle, because he identified both scale and the gods as issues that differentiate epic from tragedy, and because his distinction between the two genres, as expressed in the Poetics, was foundational for the development of both literary criticism and performance studies, as I argue in the second section of this chapter. In the final section, I offer a discussion of Simon Armitage’s recent adaptations of the Iliad and the Odyssey for the stage and, subsequently, for radio. The Last Days at Troy, directed by Nick Bagnall, was first performed at the Manchester Exchange in May 2014, then at Shakespeare’s Globe in London in June 2014, and finally dramatized in 2015 for BBC Radio 4. The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead, also directed by Bagnall, opened at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in September 2015, toured five theatres (including the Globe in November), and was broadcast in two episodes on BBC Radio 4, on 30 April and 7 May 2016. The aim of this final section is to demonstrate, by way of concrete example, that contemporary theatre still operates within a clearly recognizable Aristotelian framework, especially when it comes to modern stage versions of ancient epic.

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ARISTOTLE ON EPIC S CALE AND THE IM PRO B ABILI T Y OF T HE GODS Aristotle insists that ‘the size of the composition’ is a key feature that differentiates epic from drama.¹ This point is important, but has been obscured by other claims Aristotle makes, in the Poetics, about the relationship between epic and drama. The most influential is, arguably, the view that Homer comes close to composing tragedies, in that he does not attempt to depict the whole Trojan War, but focuses rather on a small part of it. Aristotle uses this observation to distinguish between the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the authors responsible for the poems of the Epic Cycle—epics which, in antiquity, were sometimes attributed to Homer, but which Aristotle takes to be the works of less dramatic and hence less impressive poets: out of ‘the Iliad or the Odyssey only one tragedy can be made, or two at most, whereas out of the Cypria several’.² This judgement about Homer, the poets of the Epic Cycle, and drama cemented the association between Homeric epic and tragedy, but also obscured some differences between the two which Aristotle, in fact, acknowledges. If, on the one hand, Aristotle insists that the Iliad and the Odyssey only provide material for one or, at most, two tragedies each, he also points out that dramatic versions of Homeric epic would need to be highly selective, drastically cutting down in size and reducing the number of episodes in relation to what Homer allows into his poems: One must remember, as I have often said, not to make a tragedy an epic structure, by which I mean a multiple plot structure as if one were, for instance, to make one drama out of the whole Iliad. In epic, because of its length, the parts can have their proper size, but in plays the result is full of disappointment. And the proof is that all who have dramatized the Sack of Troy as a whole, and not, like Euripides, piecemeal, or the Niobe story as a whole and not like Aeschylus, either fail or fare badly in competition . . . ³

Some scholars see Aristotle’s various statements about epic and tragedy as difficult to reconcile,⁴ but it seems to me that they can in fact be taken to offer a coherent view. Homer is selective: he does not attempt to tell the story of the whole Trojan War, and in that sense his choices are close to those of a tragedian; yet at the same time his Iliad includes many different episodes, which add variety and, in some cases, allude to the beginning and the end of ¹ Poetics 1459b18. ² This is how Poetics 1459a30 b4 concludes. On the (problematic) influence of this passage on subsequent views of the Epic Cycle, see Griffin (1977) with subsequent correctives by Nagy (1990) and Burgess (2001). Purves (2010), 24 64 illustrates how this passage from the Poetics can be used, and used effectively, to read the Iliad, particularly in its treatment of space and time. ³ Poetics 1456a10 18. ⁴ See e.g. Lanza (1987), 181.

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the war. Such episodes would have no place in dramatic versions of the Iliad. On this view, the ‘Catalogue of Ships’, for example, ought not to feature in a version of the Iliad for the stage—a point to which I return in the final section of this chapter. The difference between the extended episodes included in epic and the concision of tragedy is stated with equal clarity in relation to the Odyssey: In plays, episodes must be concise; in epic they are extended. The main story of the Odyssey is not long: a man is absent from home for many years, and is persecuted by Poseidon, and is all alone. Moreover, his affairs at home are in such a state that suitors are consuming his resources, and plotting against his son. Then he himself, after being storm tossed, arrives, reveals his identity to some, and launches an attack: he saves himself, and destroys his enemies. That is the essence, the rest is episodes.⁵

In stark contrast with current views of the poem, Aristotle’s summary of the Odyssey focuses on its overarching narrative of return and revenge.⁶ Aristotle’s reading is teleological and political: after a period of absence and isolation, the protagonist returns, defeats his enemies, secures his line of inheritance, and resumes his rightful place in society. This is not how the Odyssey is understood today: there is no emphasis, in Aristotle’s summary, on Odysseus’ quest for knowledge, or on his adventures at sea. Modern perceptions of the poem are influenced by countless subsequent adaptations, ranging from Dante’s encounter with Odysseus in the Divine Comedy to Charles Lamb’s transformation of the Homeric poem into an adventure tale for boys.⁷ Still, the difference between Aristotle’s summary and modern perceptions of the Odyssey cannot be explained simply with reference to the intervening history of the poem’s reception. It is also true that Aristotle offers an account of how, in his view, epic ought to be. In other words, his emphasis on a tight plot is not just descriptive, but normative.⁸ As well as the insertion of sizable episodes, Aristotle identifies the possibility of representing simultaneous action as a feature contributing to the expansiveness of epic: Epic has a special advantage which enables the length to be increased, because in tragedy it is impossible to represent several parts of the story as going on

⁵ Poetics 1455b16 23. ⁶ For a brief but intelligent discussion of this summary, which is used to problematize the notion of ‘plot’, see Lowe (2000), 4 5. ⁷ On Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses (1808), see Hall (2008), 90 1, who explores the colonial dimension of his account: the Odyssey was adapted to entertain and inspire boys destined to oversee the vast mercantile and military operations of the British Empire. For a succinct discussion of the reception of the Odyssey, also specifically in relation to Aristotle’s summary, see Graziosi (2016), 117 25. ⁸ Lanza (1987), 181 makes this point.

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simultaneously, but only to show what is on the stage, that part of the story which the actors are performing; whereas, in epic, because it is narrative, several parts can be portrayed as being enacted at the same time. If these incidents are relevant, they increase the bulk of the poem, and this increase gives the epic a great advantage in grandeur as well as the variety due to the diverse incidents; for it is monotony which, soon satiating the audience, makes tragedies fail.⁹

Simultaneous action creates a complex architecture which, Aristotle points out, lengthens the narrative as well as enhancing its interest.¹⁰ Apart from scale of composition, Aristotle draws attention to two other differences between epic and drama. The first is metre—an issue I do not discuss here because, for all that it is crucial to Brecht’s Epic Theatre, it remains only of tangential interest in relation to this volume.¹¹ The second is the treatment of the implausible and, more specifically, the gods. Here it seems expedient to start with Aristotle’s famous declaration that the poet’s task is to ‘tell not what happened, but the kind of thing that would happen, that is to say: what can happen according to probability or necessity’.¹² The problem with this definition of poetry is that depictions of the gods, particularly in epic, seem bound by neither probability nor necessity.¹³ This is not a matter of our own modern perspective: the problem had already attracted centuries of debate before Aristotle came to write about it. This is the reason why he can simply use shorthand, that is to say ‘Xenophanes’, in order to refer to the long-established view that epic depictions of the gods seem improbable and, indeed, objectionable: Supposing, in addition, the charge is ‘That is not true’, one can solve the problem by saying ‘But perhaps it ought to be’, just as Sophocles said that he portrayed people as they ought to be and Euripides as they are. If neither of these will do, then ‘Because that is what people say’, as is the case concerning the gods. Probably ⁹ Poetics 1459b22 31. ¹⁰ Zielinski (1901) famously argued that the Homeric mindset struggled to grasp simultan eous action, which was as a result represented as consecutive in the Iliad and the Odyssey; this view disagrees with Aristotle’s reading, and many critics now disagree with Zielinski, including e.g. Scodel (2008) and Graziosi (2013b). ¹¹ Metre is discussed at Poetics 1459b17 60a2. An investigation of this difference between epic and tragedy would start with the mimetic qualities of the iambic trimeter, the main verse used in drama which, according to Aristotle, most closely resembles ordinary speech. His insistence that the epic hexameter is further removed from everyday experience would then lead into a discussion of Brecht’s Epic Theatre, that is to say, a form of theatre that emphasizes the alienation and estranging of the audience from what happens on the stage and Brecht’s insistence on performance as something other than the imitation of life. On Brecht and the reception of Aristotle, see Silk and Stern (1981), 297 9 and Silk (2001); on Brecht’s Epic Theatre and its position in relation to the main concerns of this volume, see Macintosh, Ch. 1 in this volume. ¹² Poetics 1451a37 8. ¹³ There was a very developed ancient discourse on epic depictions of the gods as improbable and unnecessary; see most recently Whitmarsh (2015), whose emphasis on ancient ‘atheism’ is in my view distorting, but who reliably traces ancient criticism of popular conceptions of the gods.

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what is said (about them) is neither true nor better than the truth, but possibly what Xenophanes argues still, all the same, that is what is said about the gods.¹⁴

Elsewhere in his work, Aristotle presents Xenophanes as an early philosopher and hence a predecessor but, on this occasion, he acknowledges the merits of his views on the gods only to set them to one side.¹⁵ Rather than follow Xenophanes’ line of attack on the gods of epic (as Plato did),¹⁶ Aristotle appeals to convention, ‘what people say’, in order to explain how the gods are depicted in both epic and drama.¹⁷ The trouble with his approach is that it explains little, or rather shifts explanation from poetry to broader social convention. The poets, it seems, imitate what people say about the gods, rather than the gods themselves. Aristotle is prepared to accept improbable or unnecessary language, when it comes to popular views of the gods. What he refuses to accept is improbable or unnecessary action. His criticism focuses on events, in both epic and tragedy, where the intervention of the gods alters what would otherwise happen: Clearly the outcome of each plot should also be the result of the plot itself and not, as in the Medea, produced by [a god appearing from] a machine, or as in the incident of the embarkation in the Iliad.¹⁸

Scholars have long discussed cases of ‘double motivation’ in Homeric epic, that is to say, events that have a divine explanation but can also be accounted for in purely human terms.¹⁹ Thus, for example, at the beginning of the Iliad, Achilles refrains from killing Agamemnon because Athena pulls him back by his hair and tells him not to do it.²⁰ Since Athena appears only to Achilles, from the point of view of the internal audience witnessing the scene and the external audience listening to the Iliad, the restraining effect of the goddess is easily equated with Achilles’ own better judgement. Aristotle has no problem with this kind of divine action. His criticism focuses on instances when events make no sense in human terms and we have a purely divine explanation for what happens. Medea would never get away scot-free, after killing her children: the only reason she does in Euripides’ tragedy is that the Sun god Helios appears from a crane and carries her off to safety. Similarly, in the second book

¹⁴ Poetics 1460b32 7. ¹⁵ See Metaphysics 986b18 27, where Xenophanes is identified as the founder of Eleatic philosophy, and cf. Plato, Sophist 242c d. ¹⁶ See e.g. Xenophanes, fr. 11 DK: ‘Homer and Hesiod ascribe to the gods every action that causes shame and reproach among human beings: theft, adultery, and mutual deception’. ¹⁷ Plato launches a full attack on traditional polytheism precisely by demolishing the portrayal of the gods in Homer and Hesiod: this demonstrates that he sees the connection between epic poetry and popular religion. See esp. the Republic Book 2, together with Roochnik (2009). ¹⁸ Poetics 1454a37 b2. ¹⁹ The fullest and most authoritative discussion is still Lesky (1961). ²⁰ Iliad 1.193 222.

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of the Iliad, after Agamemnon suggests to the troops that they give up on fighting and sail home, they all rush to the ships, full of hope, dust lifting under their feet: ‘and now against destiny they would have had their homecoming, had not Hera spoken to Athena’.²¹ When something ‘impossible’ is depicted in poetry, such as the rescue of Medea or the sudden reversal of the embarkation, ‘this is a mistake’, concludes Aristotle. Still, that kind of mistake can be excused when it helps to achieve ‘the aim of poetry’ which, in one famous passage of the Poetics, he defines as ‘effecting, through pity and fear, the catharsis of those emotions’.²² More generally, in the Poetics, poetry is associated with ekplēxis, ‘the thrill of shock’. Divine intervention can be justified when it produces that effect: If something impossible has been portrayed, that is an error. But it is justifiable if the poet thus achieves the aim of poetry (what that aim is has been already stated) and makes that part or some other part of the poem more thrilling.²³

Here we begin to perceive a disjunction between poetry as imitation of reality, (mimesis), and poetry as something designed for emotional impact. Miracles do not happen in reality, but they may happen in poetry, because they are thrilling and shocking. This means that depictions of the gods in poetry are explained not in terms of religious truth or even religious experience, but by reference to the aim of poetry and the experience of audiences. It is at this point in the argument that Aristotle begins to differentiate between epic and tragedy. Representations of the gods seem neither probable nor necessary in either genre, but representations on stage remain closer to reality, because they are constrained by what can be made to happen on stage: Now the marvellous should certainly be portrayed in tragedy, but epic affords greater scope for the unaccountable (which is the chief element in what is marvellous) because we do not actually see the agent on stage.²⁴

In epic, Athena can look like an ordinary mortal and then suddenly fly off in the guise of a bird; Poseidon can stride down a mountain in three steps and cause an earthquake; and Hera can travel from Mount Ida to Olympus at the speed of thought.²⁵ These thrilling occurrences are characteristic of epic. Plays cannot quite match them: after all, even the deus ex machina is just an actor dangling from some ungainly stage contraption. Precisely because we hear (or read) epic, rather than see it represented on stage, there are no constraints on the visual imagination. This insight contributes to emerging definitions of

²¹ Iliad 2.155 6. ²² Poetics 1449b28 9. ²³ Poetics 1460b23 6. I find the discussion of this passage in Feeney (1991), 28 9 particularly helpful. Its influence on this chapter will be obvious. ²⁴ Poetics 1460a12 14. ²⁵ Odyssey 1.319 23; Iliad 13.17 19 and 15.78 86.

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literature as an autonomous field in relation to the performing arts: the gods of epic come to define what literature alone can do.²⁶

HOMER BETWEEN LITERARY CRITICISM A N D T H E P E R F OR M I NG ARTS It would be difficult to overstate the influence of Aristotle on the later criticism of both literature and the performing arts: in what follows, I identify two lines along which Aristotle’s theories developed. It was probably within his school, the Peripatus, that the views expressed in the Poetics were first codified into neat categories:²⁷ 1. history, historia, an accurate account of the truth; 2. fiction, plasma, something plausible; 3. myth and the imagination, mythos, phantasia. Within this scheme, the gods came to preside over that final category. They did not feature in the proper writing of history (Thucydides had already established that before Aristotle²⁸), nor did they belong to plausible fictions that imitated real life. They became the stuff of myth and the imagination. And that is where they still belong today, for all that it took many centuries of debate, disagreement, and, last but not least, religious revolution, in order to contain the gods of epic within that third category.²⁹ Here is a statement by David Benioff, the scriptwriter of Troy, a 2004 Warner Bros. movie based on Homer’s Iliad: ‘I didn’t want to see an actor in a toga throwing CGI thunderbolts from the top of a CGI Mount Olympus because it becomes a different movie. It really becomes much more about the effects and a magic kind of fantasy. I think the truly tragic, truly human element to this story is without the gods.’³⁰ In effect, what Benioff states here, using his own Hollywood idiom, is that tragedy (and hence his own movie) is plausible fiction, whereas the Iliad turns into fantasy as soon as it introduces the gods. There is no reason to suppose Benioff is particularly well versed in ancient literary criticism: ²⁶ This thesis is explored at length in Calasso (2002). ²⁷ For discussion, see Feeney (1991), 31. ²⁸ Poetics 1451a b can be usefully compared to Thucydides, 1.22.1 4, where the historian explains that he cannot report public speeches with word for word accuracy and that he therefore writes what would have been said; that is to say, he conjectures on the basis of probability and necessity. On the connections between Thucydides and Aristotle, see further Woodman (1988), 24. ²⁹ I discuss the process in detail in Graziosi (2013a). See also Seznec’s seminal study (1995); Barkan (1986), specifically on Ovid; and Bull (2005) for the rebirth of the gods in the Renais sance. ³⁰ Epstein (2004).

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the point, rather, is that current criticism (particularly popular criticism of the kind Benioff exemplifies) is still, via Christian mediation, ancient Aristotelian criticism.³¹ The same observation holds true for the second major feature which, in Aristotle’s account, differentiates epic from tragedy: the complexity, variety, and sheer scale of the narrative. Here too, it is possible to trace a line linking Aristotle’s Poetics to contemporary assumptions about both literature and the performing arts. One important development in the history and theory of dramatic performance, and one specifically inspired by Aristotle, is the idea that playwrights should respect the three unities of action, space, and time. This expectation was first articulated by Lodovico Castelvetro in his La poetica di Aristotele volgarizzata of 1570, a text that had tremendous impact on French Renaissance and neoclassical theatre, and eventually started affecting English drama as well: indeed, Shakespeare was criticized for not respecting the unities.³² As many have remarked, and the reading of the Poetics I offered in the first section confirms, there is little normative emphasis, in Aristotle’s work, on the unities of time and, though tightness of plot is indeed a concern—and here expectations of epic and drama do differ. The theory of the three unities exerted its full force only for a limited period in the history of European theatre but, in less direct ways, continues to shape both critical discourse and dramatic practice. There is still an expectation that performances on stage be more economical in scale and scope than, say, a novel. And it is no coincidence that ancient epic is often associated precisely with the novel, the most canonical (and monumental) genre in modern literature.³³ Composition on a grand scale, simultaneous action, flashbacks and flash-forwards, and the ramification of individual action for a vast range of different characters, who do not simply represent a uniform community (like the Greek tragic chorus)³⁴ but have their own experiences and personalities: these features differentiate epic from drama and, in turn, assimilate epic to the novel.³⁵

³¹ See Laird (2006), 1: ‘Accepting that ancient literary criticism is something distinct from literary criticism in general must amount to conceding that the judgements of classical writers have little to do with contemporary production, evaluation, and theory of literature.’ This chapter militates against making such a concession. ³² Shakespeare’s plays are immune from the prescription but Jonson, for example, began his Volpone (1605/6) with this programmatic statement: ‘The laws of time, place, persons he observeth’, and eventually Shakespeare’s own plays started to be criticized precisely because they did not respect these ‘laws’: see e.g. Dryden, An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668). ³³ Rieu’s 1946 Penguin translation of the Odyssey is a case in point; for a broader discussion, see Hall (2008), ch. 4. ³⁴ See Goldhill (2007a), ch. 2 for discussion. ³⁵ Lowe (2000) traces a line of development from ancient epic to the ancient novel empha sizing that, to this day, Aristotelian notions of plot are reflected in popular modern approaches to narrative.

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Such approaches distinguish between literature and performance, as can be illustrated, with special clarity, in relation to Homer. Debates about the nature and origins of the Iliad and the Odyssey have long focused on the question whether they should be considered examples of oral composition in performance or written works of literature. A decisive contribution to this question was made in the 1930s, when two Harvard classicists, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, travelled to what was then Yugoslavia, recorded the oral epics performed there by illiterate singers, and established that South Slavic techniques of composition resembled those employed in the making of Homeric poetry. Parry and Lord did not thereby prove that the Iliad and the Odyssey are ‘oral poems’ (after all, what we have are written texts), but they did demonstrate beyond doubt that techniques designed to enable extemporaneous composition and recomposition in front of live audiences affected, as Parry put it, ‘the making of Homeric verse’.³⁶ Their pioneering work fuelled a lively debate—a debate that, from the start, was affected by Aristotelian definitions of literature. Parry and Lord observed, for example, that while South Slavic singers composed much shorter epics than the Iliad or the Odyssey, some of them could, upon request, offer epics of similar length. The illiterate singer Avdo Medjedović from Bijelo Polje famously delivered a version of The Wedding of Smilagic Meho of some 12,000 verses, a length comparable to that of the Homeric poems.³⁷ Ensuing arguments and comparisons focused, as a result, not only on epic scale, but also on complexity and variety of plot—seen as defining marks of literary quality. In general, and to this day, scholars who focus on the monumental architecture of Homeric epic tend to postulate the role of writing in composition and to insist on the decisive contribution of a single, exceptionally gifted poet.³⁸ Conversely, the greater the interest in techniques of oral (re)composition in performance, the weaker the emphasis on monumental complexity and individual authorship.³⁹ The Iliad and the Odyssey are regularly presented as the first great literary works in a Western canon which also includes Virgil, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Joyce, and other greats. At the same time, Homeric epic is seen as an example of oral poetry similar to performances that are, in many cases, deemed neither literary nor Western. Despite this enduring dichotomy,⁴⁰ there are signs that literary criticism and performance studies are beginning to converge in the study of Homer. This is partly because critical discourse is moving ‘away from

³⁶ Parry (1971). See also Lord (2000). ³⁷ He is the ‘singer of tales’ in Lord (2000). ³⁸ The introduction to West’s edition of the Iliad (1998 2000) may be taken as representative of this position. ³⁹ The journal Oral Tradition, founded by John Miles Foley, gives a good impression of the topics investigated by scholars focusing on oral poetry, and the methods used in answering them. ⁴⁰ This dichotomy is explored, from several angles, in Graziosi and Greenwood (2007).

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the creation and evolution of the poems to questions concerning their reception by an audience and the interaction of the poet and his listeners’.⁴¹ After all, no matter who composed the Homeric poems, and whether writing was involved, one fact is certain: they were not intended for appreciation through reading, but rather through live performance. At the same time, it is also true that they were not addressed to casual audiences, enjoying extemporaneous entertainment while sipping a coffee.⁴² The Iliad and the Odyssey are too massive in scale and too complex in structure for that. So, we must postulate committed audiences and at least a degree of institutional support.⁴³ Once we move away from attempts to separate literature from performance, and indeed refuse to take shelter under the label ‘oral poetry’, which often serves to obscure rather than clarify, the task of interpretation can be broken down into specific questions, such as what kind of ancient performance the Iliad and the Odyssey presuppose, and what kind of audience they demand. There is a lot that can be said in answer to these questions, for example by considering the articulation, structure, and division of the poems;⁴⁴ the ability to visualize, appreciate, and follow grand narrative structures in performance;⁴⁵ and the impact of sound in the production of meaning.⁴⁶ We can also ask similar questions of later reworkings of ancient epic in performance: what audiences do they require? What kind of skills do they demand?

The Last Days of Troy and The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead I investigate the effectiveness of ancient epic in modern performance by focusing on Simon Armitage’s recent adaptations of the Iliad and the Odyssey for the stage. In his introduction to the published version of The Last Days of Troy, Armitage pays tribute to Homer’s power of selection in standard Aristotelian fashion: ‘Rather than chronicle the entire war, Homer chose to concentrate on a relatively short period of time—about fifty days.’⁴⁷ At the same time, and again in Aristotelian fashion, he acknowledges that in order to put the Iliad on stage and fit it within ‘two or three hours of performance’ it is necessary drastically to cut the poem to size and, in particular, to eliminate hundreds of minor human and divine characters.⁴⁸ Where Armitage departs ⁴¹ Strauss Clay (2011), 15. ⁴² Parry and Lord carried out most of their fieldwork in Bosnian coffee houses: epic perform ances were far from casual entertainment (in fact, they shaped cultural and historical conscious ness) yet did not require continuous performance over several days. ⁴³ See Graziosi (2016), 39. ⁴⁴ See e.g. Taplin (1992). ⁴⁵ See e.g. Strauss Clay (2011). ⁴⁶ See e.g. Graziosi and Haubold (2015). ⁴⁷ Armitage (2014a), v; compare Aristotle’s Poetics 1459a30 b4, quoted earlier. ⁴⁸ Armitage (2014a), vii.

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from Aristotle and, indeed, from the Iliad itself is in extending the narrative well beyond the encounter between Achilles and Priam and the funeral of Hector, which conclude the Homeric poem. For reasons he mentions only in passing, he extends the narrative all the way to the end of the war, basing his account on the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘After some 15,000 lines, the Iliad comes to its enigmatic and poetic conclusion, but at that point we are still no nearer finding out what happened to its leading characters, or who won the war.’⁴⁹ There is, in Armitage’s view, a problem of closure. This is interesting: there is little evidence that, in antiquity, audiences shared his view: their knowledge of a common mythical tradition meant they knew how the war ended, and what happened to the major characters in the Iliad. Armitage rightly assumes no such knowledge on the part of modern audiences and, perhaps for this reason, feels the need to inform us about how the story continued and the war ended. The result is, arguably, disappointing: The Last Days of Troy may focus, like the Iliad, on only a handful of days; indeed, it may offer a radically shortened version of the Homeric poem, but the play feels long. Like all didactic enterprises, the concluding scenes risk boredom. In antiquity, it was the Odyssey rather than the Iliad that attracted criticism on the ground that it lacked closure. It may be useful, before assessing Armitage’s treatment of the poem, to summarize its ending, since it is often ignored in modern versions. Two factions gather in an assembly on Ithaca: half the people support Odysseus; the other half seek revenge for all the deaths he caused since getting back. Odysseus himself explains to his son Telemachus the nature of the problem:⁵⁰ In any community if anyone kills just one man, even one who has no great number to avenge him afterwards, that man goes into exile, abandoning his relatives and land; and we have killed the bulwark of the city, those who were by far the best of Ithaca’s young men. I ask you to consider this.

Despite this acknowledgement, Odysseus refuses to go into exile: there is, to be sure, a prophecy embedded in the poem predicting that he will have to leave home again, but this prediction is projected forward, beyond the end of the Odyssey, and has nothing to do with civil unrest.⁵¹ At the end of the Homeric poem, the two factions face each other in battle. Athena allows Eupeithes, leader of the avengers, to be killed, but then suddenly orders the two sides to separate and stop fighting. Terrified, the men obey—all except Odysseus, whose onslaught is arrested only by a thunderbolt thrown by Zeus. The ⁴⁹ Armitage (2014a), v. ⁵⁰ Odyssey 23.118 22. ⁵¹ I discuss how the prophecy affects the architecture and reception of the Odyssey in Graziosi (2016), 117 25.

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hostilities are interrupted by precisely the kind of divine intervention that Aristotle so firmly criticizes in the Poetics: as discussed in my first section, it does not seem probable, let alone necessary, that a conflict already marked by the death of a leader suddenly stop. We have, in short, a case in which ‘double motivation’ fails and an event is explained with reference only to divine action. As if the thunderbolt were not enough of a narrative cop-out, Zeus also recommends collective amnesia. This is shocking, particularly because epic was a technology for collective memory, so Zeus’ final injunction to forget the civil war militates against the very poem within which it is expressed. Ancient readers were dissatisfied with the conclusion of the Odyssey: scholars working in the library of Alexandria on the first ‘editions’ of the poem thought that the epic should have ended at line 23.296, when Penelope and Odysseus go to bed together.⁵² This solution, however, would not solve all problems. The flexibility of oral composition and the uncertainties of textual transmission (both of which are much in evidence at the end of the epic) testify to the difficulty of concluding a story about Odysseus. He is, by definition, the hero who survives,⁵³ and this makes it hard to put an end to his story. At least, it makes it hard for some: Armitage has no problem. He concludes his play as the Alexandrian scholars recommended, with Penelope and Odysseus in bed together. Armitage’s choices in relation to epic scale and plot suggest that he has low expectations of his audiences. He extracts from the Odyssey ‘a popular key for narrative composition’ defined by ‘the happy ending, something already noticed by Aristotle (Poetics 13.1453a30–5) as more attractive to groundling taste than the more emotionally challenging resolutions he preferred’.⁵⁴ The reunion of husband and wife in The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead, and the end of the war in The Last Days of Troy offer straightforward conclusions which mask the main political challenges posed by the Homeric epics. The Iliad dramatizes, in painful detail, what the wrath of Achilles and his refusal to fight mean for those left on the battlefield: line after line, book after book, hour after hour after hour of recitation, we experience how the war is prolonged by Achilles’ absence, and how the death toll increases, with each individual casualty.⁵⁵ In the Odyssey, wild tales of adventure and survival at sea give way to a disenchanted investigation of power and its consequences: what happens when a man who has been absent for twenty years returns and reasserts his role in society is not simply a matter of celebration; it involves a conflict that cannot be settled or avoided by human means.⁵⁶ In short, ⁵² Jong (2001), 561 2 for a brief but helpful discussion and Montanari (1998) on Alexandrian editions. ⁵³ This, I take it, is one of the important theses in Pucci (1995). ⁵⁴ Lowe (2000), 129. ⁵⁵ Griffin (1980), 50 80 is still the best discussion of minor characters in the Iliad. ⁵⁶ Di Benedetto’s commentary on the Odyssey (2010), and particularly his Introduction, is the best discussion I know of the issue.

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reducing the Iliad and the Odyssey ‘to a cast of about a dozen’ easily, and perhaps even unavoidably, flattens the political dimension of the two ancient epics.⁵⁷ Far more successful than his handling of epic scale and its political implications is, in my view, Armitage’s treatment of the gods. In The Last Days of Troy, he strips them of all their powers, except for one: immortality. The question then arises where the gods might be, given that they cannot be dead. The play opens with Zeus as a pedlar in modern Hisarlik, the site of ancient Troy, reliving his memories of the siege. The stage directions read: ‘Spraypainted in gold and impersonating a statue, Zeus stands on a wooden box with a collection tin at his feet and a sign saying ZEUS. Behind him, on his small cart, are souvenirs and trinkets from the story of the Iliad, including action figures in the shape of Achilles, Agamemnon, Priam et al.’⁵⁸ This is clever, not least because it acknowledges the sudden possibility that art and literature (over which, as I argued, the gods of Olympus traditionally preside) can suddenly come alive. You just need to drop a coin into the collection tin. There are other advantages. One is that the gods and their demise can be exploited for comic effect. In this respect, Armitage’s approach resembles that of Douglas Adams who, in his detective novel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, presents us with impoverished yet immortal deities who work in the advertising industry.⁵⁹ Putting food on the table becomes a major concern for both Adams’s and Armitage’s deities. The living statue, the action figures, and the souvenirs (‘There’s a tour bus over the hill. Bring your mementoes and relics—we’ll eat tonight’⁶⁰) suggest that Armitage’s gods keep themselves alive by remembering the past. Within that framework, Zeus becomes the main narrator, taking over the role of the poet and the Muses: he even delivers a successful ‘Catalogue of Ships’—a set piece that, according to Aristotle, belonged to epic but could not possibly be made to work on stage.⁶¹ Finally, and precisely because of their comic incongruity, the gods mark out the realm of the imagination. Zeus and Hera indulge in an extended bout of mythological reminiscing, which culminates in the predictable request, on the part of Zeus, to be told about his great powers of seduction: ZEUS :

Tell me you remember how we met. You appeared as a bird. ZEUS : Not just any bird. HERA : A cuckoo. With a damaged wing. HERA :

⁵⁷ Armitage (2014a), v. Wilson (2017), 21 reviews Colm Tóibín’s new novel, House of Names (2017), which takes its cue from Greek tragedy (specifically Aeschylus’ Oresteia), and makes an argument similar to mine. Moving from the tragic stage to the (epic) novel involves a much broader network of characters and, she argues, a deeper engagement with politics. ⁵⁸ Armitage (2014a), 7. ⁵⁹ Adams (1988). ⁶⁰ Armitage (2014a), 131: Hera addresses this line to Zeus. ⁶¹ Armitage (2014a), 32 4. See discussion in my first section.

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ZEUS :

A poor little cuckoo with a broken wing. The illusion was quite astonishing. HERA : I lifted you into my arms. ZEUS : To your breast, Hera. Lifted me to your breast. And the rest, as they say, is history. HERA : In fact these days they say it’s mythology. Because audiences are asked to imagine rather than see how Zeus and Hera first met, the exchange proves satisfying. Hera’s final line, which reminds us that we are indeed in the realm of the imagination, reliably provokes laughter in the theatre.⁶² The gods are effective here precisely because they allow drama to turn into narrative storytelling, the audience to imagine rather than see, and the play to reflect on what changes and what remains the same: domesticity and its interruption; Zeus asking Hera to ‘bake a cake’ in one scene followed by ‘the filthy business’ of war in the next.⁶³ In The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead, Armitage also acknowledges that epic is best read and imagined—rather than fully enacted. In this case, the play develops on two separate levels: the cabinet minister Smith disappears on his way back from attending a football match in Turkey, while his son Magnus reads the Odyssey at home (which makes him ‘see’, or rather imagine, his father as Odysseus). The structure recalls the journey of Telemachus in the Odyssey, which coincides with the final stages of Odysseus’ return. Significantly, in Armitage’s set-up, the gods of Olympus belong to the real-life narrative of Smith and his disappearance, rather than to the son’s journey of the imagination, where minor nymphs and monsters haunt the hero’s return. Zeus is the prime minister and Athena is his daughter. Her favourite means of transport is a helicopter, and in that sense she is a proper dea ex machina, but there is nothing unlikely about her. Divine power becomes, quite simply, political power—and politics, in this play, is reduced to the clash of two families belonging to the same party, grappling with paparazzi, opinion polls, and (fake) news. Much creative energy is devoted to finding an appropriate contemporary counterpart for each aspect of the Odyssey—except for the unlikely tales Odysseus delivers himself in Books 9–12, which become what the son of the cabinet minister reads and imagines. In the main narrative, meanwhile, Penelope flirts with inopportune yet somehow flattering journalists, who besiege her house, haggling to buy her memoirs. Some reviewers complained that there is too little Greek poetry and too much British politics in the play,⁶⁴

⁶² It did when I saw the play at the Globe and was told that it did on other nights too. ⁶³ Armitage (2014a), 71, 72. ⁶⁴ See e.g. Claire Allfree in The Telegraph, 1 October 2015: , last accessed 13 May 2017.

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but Armitage’s treatment reveals something important about the Odyssey: the poem is just as adaptable and bent on survival as its protagonist. It can arguably take on more, and more disparate, disguises than the Iliad.⁶⁵ The difficulty with Armitage’s approach lies in his very determination to find a credible contemporary disguise for all aspects of the main ancient narrative: it is for this reason that Zeus and Athena seem reduced. They become plausible and, as a result, uninteresting. * * * * * There are many ways to think about epic performances from the Middle Ages into the twenty-first century, as this volume demonstrates. What I hope to have offered here is a framework for interpretation grounded in a reading of Aristotle’s Poetics and illustrated by reference to two recent adaptations of Homer for the stage. The main contention here is that the grand scale of ancient epic and the bewildering nature of the gods have long challenged audiences and readers but also—and importantly—shaped a tradition of criticism that encompasses both literature and the performing arts. ⁶⁵ A point Goldhill (2007b) makes eloquently.

3 Shakespeare and Epic Colin Burrow

What did epic mean to Shakespeare? The traditional answer to that simple-sounding question might in the past have been ‘not very much’. It has been said that he did not have much affinity with Virgil, and that his knowledge of Homer was skimpy.¹ The traditional view of Shakespeare—heteroglossic, playful, unlearned in anything much except the human heart—has almost nothing in common with the traditional view of ‘epic’ as the ultimate unitary, solemn, and learned genre dealing in the ‘absolute past’.² All aspects of this traditional picture have, however, been radically altered over the past century. Critics now tend to emphasize the heterogeneity of genres in general and of the epic genre in particular,³ while students of Shakespeare are now thinking again in serious ways about what he read and the various things he did with that reading. A series of recent and forthcoming studies have shown the depth and subtlety of his responses to Virgil and to Homer, with the result that ‘Shakespeare and Epic’ now looks like a subject of study rather than an empty set.⁴ But there is still much to do. The aim of this discussion is to move beyond analysis of Shakespeare’s direct influences among epic poets and to reconstruct the attitudes to genre in general, and to epic in particular, in Shakespeare’s milieu, and how those played out on the stage. I will take my cue from Gérard Genette’s apparently paradoxical claim that ‘it is impossible to imitate a text, or—which comes to the same—that one can imitate only a style: that is to say, a genre’.⁵ The implications of Genette’s remark are profound. A direct verbal replication of or allusion to an earlier text is not an imitation of it, since

¹ Martindale and Martindale (1990), 94; Martindale (2004); cf. Miola (1986). ² Bakhtin (1981), 17. ³ e.g. Derrida (1980) and Harrison (2007a), 207 40. ⁴ Miola (1986); James (1997); Tudeau Clayton (1998); James (2001); Wilson Okamura (2010); Burrow (2013), 51 91; and Pollard and Demetriou (2017). Other articles in the same special issue of Classical Receptions Journal also enrich our understanding of Shakespeare’s relations to the Greeks. ⁵ Genette (1997), 83. Cf. the approach in Wilson Okamura (2013).

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imitation of an author or of a genre does not simply entail possessing knowledge of what a particular author wrote, or of the representative instances of a particular genre, and reproducing that knowledge. It requires what we might call modal knowledge of that author or genre. That is, the imitator has to have a set of expectations and beliefs about the kinds of thing which a particular author might say, or the rhetorical characteristics which a reader would expect to find in a text which belonged to a particular genre. Those expectations and beliefs underlie the practice of imitation. This has two concomitants of radical significance for work on literary influence. The first is that someone could ‘imitate’ a text or an author without necessarily repeating a single word from the earlier text. Imitation could be of a stylistic register, or of a set of rhetorical figures, or of a way of writing about storms which was believed to be characteristic of the author or genre imitated. And if a writer shared a well-developed cultural understanding of a particular genre or author, that writer could accurately be said to ‘imitate’ that genre or author without having read it at all. The second concomitant of Genette’s claim about imitation tames some of these potentially counter-intuitive implications. The main reason literature has a history is that forms of modal knowledge about particular authors and genres change through time. In different periods and to different people, being ‘Homeric’ or ‘epic’ might mean repeating formulaic elements in the description of a battle, or it might mean recording the deeds of heroes in high style, or it might mean, as it does for Alice Oswald, producing a series of similes for deaths.⁶ As a result, identifying a text or elements within a text as ‘epic’ is not simply a matter of noting verbal reminiscences of a particular set of texts. It entails reconstructing the distinct form of modal knowledge which underlay the imitation. Attempting to understand what a particular author regarded as ‘epic’ is consequently the precondition for assessing what he or she did with that genre. As a result, studying imitation from a perspective informed by Genette is far from incompatible with historical scholarship, and indeed perhaps has that kind of scholarship as its enabling condition: analysing what ‘epic’ meant within a particular milieu is a precondition for understanding what authors in that milieu were doing with that concept. The first section of this chapter will present a history of the word ‘epic’ in English. This is designed to show two things. One is incidental but perhaps surprising. It was a very rare word in England during Shakespeare’s lifetime: only around a dozen usages are known to us. As a result the spread and changing character of the word can be charted with some clarity. The second point which arises from the history of the word is more substantive. It enables us to position Shakespeare within the history of the concept of heroic writing, and to cast light on a range of moments in his plays which appear to imitate

⁶ Oswald (2011a).

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Virgil or Homer, but which have often made critics uneasy about the tone and intent of those imitations. Until its very recent third edition the OED traced the history of the word ‘epic’ in English—as it did with much of the classicizing vocabulary of poetics—to George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie of 1589. Puttenham refers to the fifteenth-century chronicle poet John Hardyng as ‘a Poet Epick or Historicall’.⁷ This is Puttenham’s only use of the word ‘epic’. In linking the word with a particular kind of historical content, Puttenham was in fact more a follower of fashion than its leader. He treated ‘epic’ as a synonym for the much more common terms ‘heroic’ or ‘heroical’, which he, like most of his contemporaries, used either as a term for an elevated metrical form (he speaks of Chaucer’s ‘meetre Heroicall of Troilus and Cresseid’)⁸ or for a literary kind principally defined by its subject matter: Such therefore as gaue them selues to write long histories of the noble gests of kings & great Princes entermedling the dealings of the gods, halfe gods or Her oes of the gentiles, & the great & waighty consequences of peace and warre, they called Poets Heroick, whereof Homer was chief and most auncient among the Greeks, Virgill among the Latines.⁹

As well as being relatively old-fashioned in his beliefs about the ‘heroic’ poem, Puttenham was not in fact the first person in England to refer to this literary kind by the word ‘epic’. The first known usage of the word in print was admittedly a not-quite English usage, but it still was extremely influential. It is found in Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (printed in 1570, but composed from the earlier 1560s onwards): The trew difference of Authors is best knowne, per diuersa genera dicendi [through different characters of style], that euerie one vsed. And therfore here I will deuide genus dicendi [ways of speaking or the characters of style], not into these three, Tenuè, mediocrè, & grande, but as the matter of euerie Author requireth, as in Genus. (Poeticum. in Genus. (Historicum. in Genus. (Philosophicum. in Genus. (Oratorium.¹⁰

Having divided discourse into these genera, Ascham then subdivides the poetic genera dicendi into comicum, tragicum, epicum, and melicum. He goes on, characteristically, to reminisce about conversations he had with John Cheke at St John’s College, Cambridge in the 1540s about the relationship between poetic theory and practice. There are two significant features of Ascham’s passage. The first is that the earliest reference to ‘epic’ in an English work of criticism figures as part of an ⁷ Puttenham (1970), 62. ⁸ Puttenham (1970), 61. ⁹ Puttenham (1970), 25. ¹⁰ Ascham (1904), 283. I am grateful to Micha Lazarus for directing me to this passage.

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attempt to develop what were often in the Latin rhetorical tradition called the ‘characters of style’, or the high, middle, and low genera dicendi, into a more sophisticated and comprehensive system for describing different literary kinds.¹¹ The second is curious and apparently incidental: this way of thinking about genre in general and epic in particular is strongly associated with what was by the mid-sixteenth century pretty much the ultimate elite Protestant venue, St John’s College, Cambridge. This fact is significant because it appears that the first person to have used the word ‘epic’, rather than Ascham’s Latin epicum, in English was a little-known graduate of St John’s College called Brian Melbancke, who wrote a work called Philotimus in 1583. This was an imitation of John Lyly’s massively popular prose narrative Euphues, which was itself deeply influenced by Ascham’s Scholemaster.¹² Melbancke uses the word ‘epic’ when he is describing a character who is unable to make a comparative judgement between the merits of two speakers who have had a disputatio. Their styles are just so different, he says: Corriualls that combat so brauely in their listes, that neither matcheth other, & both surpasse, may triumph that their valure is counted peareles, & embrace ech other for alliaunce of quallities. Were it meete that Ennius excelling in Epicks, shoulde dispraise Cecilius a Comicall Poet, or despite [despise] Pacunius [sic; Pacuvius is meant] for his wofull Tragedies.¹³

‘Epicks’ here may carry a metrical sense (‘Ennius excels in epic hexameters’); but Melbancke’s usage (like Ascham’s) is linked with distinctions between kinds of speech, genera dicendi, so distinct that comparison cannot be made between them. The word is also associated with rivals combating ‘bravely in their lists’. Furthermore it is accompanied by references to pre-Augustan epic and tragic poets Ennius and Pacuvius. All of these points have longer-term significance, as we shall see. In 1594 another Cambridge man, John Dickenson, wrote another of the many imitations of John Lyly’s Euphues, called Arisbas, Euphues amidst his slumbers. This describes the treasures of Parnassus: There laie enrolde in euerlasting lines, Epique records wrapt in heroique stile: There laie enclosde in those eternall shrines, Sweete Hymns and Odes that lyriques did compile, And Elegies, and Epigrams sharpe file, With th’other graces of a laureate quill, Whence hony sweets do copiously distill.¹⁴

¹¹ Ad Herennium 4.11 16; Cicero, De Oratore 3.45; Quintilian, 12.10.58 65. On the history of the grand style, see Shuger (1988), 21 30. ¹² Ascham (1904), 194 5 says that being euphuēs, ‘apte by goodnes of witte’, is the prime necessity for pupils. ¹³ Melbancke (1583), 79. ¹⁴ Dickenson (1594), sig. G2r.

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‘[E]nrolde’ and ‘records’ suggest that Dickenson thought of the ‘heroique stile’ of ‘Epique’ as suitable for recording past deeds, as Hardyng’s Chronicle had done. When set beside Melbancke’s and Puttenham’s usages this might imply that the paradigmatic Elizabethan ‘epic’ might have been something like Ennius’ Annales, a chronicle history in the high and ancient style.¹⁵ The other noteworthy features of Dickenson’s passage is that ‘Epique’ appears as one element within a relatively sophisticated vocabulary for distinguishing between literary kinds—Odes, Elegies, and Epigrams. And with Dickenson the word ‘epic’ begins to migrate outwards from the elite conversations described by Ascham in The Scholemaster. Dickenson translated Aristotle’s Politics and enjoyed the patronage of Robert Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney’s brother.¹⁶ By writing fiction which imitated Euphues he bridged a gap between those elite activities and texts which were familiar reading-matter for later sixteenthcentury dramatists and their audiences. The word ‘epic’ hit the London literary scene at the very end of the sixteenth century, and perhaps significantly some of the highest profile usages were by poets who were also dramatists. Michael Drayton (who is known to have written more than twenty lost plays) associates ‘epic’ with a grave stylistic register in the preface to The Barons’ Wars of 1603. Drayton defends his use of ottava rima in his heroical and historical narrative by saying, ‘The Sestin hath Twinnes in the base, but they detaine not the Musike, nor the Cloze (as Musicians terme it) long enough for an Epicke Poem.’¹⁷ That is, a six-line stanza lacks the gravity and slowness appropriate to epic. Within a few years ‘epic’ had become a word which a poet might use to suggest that his own grasp on literary form and literary criticism was better and more up to date than that of his rivals. The person who shows this most clearly is the most aspirationally classical poet-playwright of them all, Ben Jonson. His epigram 112 ‘A Weak Gamester in Poetry’ (printed in 1616, but quite possibly composed a decade or more before) describes an endless battle between himself and another nameless rival to outstrip each other in generic invention: I cannot for the stage a drama lay, Tragic or comic; but thou writ’st the play. I leave thee there, and, giving way, intend An epic poem; thou hast the same end.

¹⁵ Fragments of Ennius had been gathered together in Estienne and Estienne (1564), but most Elizabethans would have known the Annales from the regular citations of his work in the Roman rhetorical tradition. For the earlier influence of Ennius on Renaissance poetry, see Goldschmidt (2012). ¹⁶ See Gavin Alexander’s ODNB entry, ‘Dickenson, John’, , accessed 4 August 2018. ¹⁷ Drayton (1961), 2.4.

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Colin Burrow I modestly quit that, and think to write Next morn an ode: thou mak’st a song ere night.¹⁸

Again ‘epic’ appears as one element within a larger vocabulary for describing a taxonomy of literary genres, and Jonson’s choice of that word reinforces the claim which he makes in the poem. He shows how far he is ahead of his rival by deploying the outré and sophisticated flavour of the word ‘epic’—a term he uses again in his Discoveries when he lists the genres in a form reminiscent of Ascham or his school: ‘whatever sentence was expressed, were it much or little, it was called an epic, dramatic, lyric, elegiac, or epigrammatic poem’.¹⁹ Jonson pointedly supplements Ascham’s list of poetry with the epigram, a form which he had claimed as his own with the publication of his Epigrams in the 1616 Folio. By the end of the sixteenth century the word ‘epic’ was not just becoming a polemical tool for claiming greater sophistication than one’s rivals. It also was coming to acquire associations in vernacular criticism with distinct formal properties. This is best illustrated by William Scott’s manuscript treatise The Model of Poesy, which was composed in the summer of 1599. Scott (who was a keen reader of Shakespeare) writes of ‘the heroical or epic, which may be defined to be a poem or imitation simply narrative of great and weighty things in weighty and high style, to raise the mind by admiration to some glorious good’ (my emphasis).²⁰ That definition deliberately goes beyond the discussion of heroic poetry in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie, a work which Scott sought at once to emulate and overgo. Simply by using the modish word ‘epic’, which Sidney himself never used, Scott marked himself as belonging to a new age. Sidney had emphasized the ethical influence of works which he called ‘heroical’ in the Defence of Poesie (which was printed in 1595 but composed in the 1580s), rather than their stylistic or formal properties. The representation of heroes in the ‘Heroicall’ kind of poetry ‘doth not only teach and move to a truth, but teacheth and moveth to the most high and excellent truth: who maketh magnanimity and justice shine throughout all misty fearfulness and foggy desires’.²¹ Scott by contrast follows Plato and Aristotle in insisting that epic is ‘simply narrative’—which is to say it is related in the voice of the poet rather than in the voice of characters. He also states that it is in high style, the highest of the traditional three characters of style. Scott enables us to give a relatively clear narrative to the understanding of ‘epic’ in the later sixteenth century. The word migrated from St John’s College, Cambridge, into a competitive literary marketplace. As it did so, it acquired

¹⁸ Jonson (2012), 5.177. ¹⁹ Jonson (2012), 7.579. Cf. ‘The most notable be the Heroic, Lyric, Tragic, Comic, Satyric, Iambic, Elegiac, Pastoral’, Sidney (1973), 103. ²⁰ Scott (2013), 18. For the date, see Scott (2013), xxviii. ²¹ Sidney (1973), 119.

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accidental associations with poetical rivalry as well as conceptual links with both high style and with poetry that was narrative and not dramatic. The history of this word reflected what were probably the two greatest changes in English poetics during this period: the rise of vocabulary for describing and distinguishing poetic genres and the slow emergence of modes of poetics which subordinated ethical and rhetorical to formal characteristics. Shakespeare’s relationship to that larger story is characteristically oblique. His vocabulary sets him apart from more overtly learned poet-playwrights such as Jonson and Drayton, since he never used the word ‘epic’. He is also notably sparing even in his usages of ‘heroic’ and ‘heroical’. But that does not mean that he did not share the broad outlines of his contemporaries’ modal knowledge of epic. Shakespeare’s work from around 1600 shows a clear awareness of the fashion for dividing and subdividing poetry into increasingly scrupulous categories. But he sees that fashion not as a guide to composition but as a tonal resource which can be exploited. He leaves the taxonomical analysis of genres to the pedant Polonius in Hamlet, who praises the players as ‘The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historicalpastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral; scene individable, or poem unlimited’ (2.2.333–6).²² There is more than a trace of Sidney’s discussion of hybrid genres here: Now in his parts, kinds, or species (as you list to term them), it is to be noted that some poesies have coupled together two or three kinds, as tragical and comical, whereupon is risen the tragi comical. Some, in the like manner, have mingled prose and verse, as Sannazaro and Boethius; some have mingled matters heroical and pastoral.²³

But there is a striking difference. Polonius’ aria on genre is silent about the ‘heroical’. Instead he produces the unprecedented phrase ‘poem unlimited’. This is not just a unique phrase. It is also very odd, since the word ‘unlimited’ in the sixteenth century was almost always used in conjunction with ‘power’, ‘ambition’, or ‘monarchy’. Editors scratch their heads and say that Polonius probably means a play or poem which does not stick to the unities of place and time.²⁴ This is possible but not certain. ‘Poem unlimited’, a long, dilated poem unlimited in time or place, may well function as a Polonian circumlocution for the ‘heroical’. Shakespeare’s coyness about using the word ‘heroical’ relates to a wider point. In early modern England two conceptions of what we call genre coexisted. The first (which influenced Puttenham’s discussion of genre in the Arte of English Poesie, and which can be traced back to the rhetorical work of Menander Rhetor via its literary adaptation in Julius Caesar Scaliger’s ²² Quotations from Shakespeare in this chapter are from Shakespeare (1986). ²³ Sidney (1973), 116. ²⁴ Shakespeare (1982), 259.

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Poetics) made increasingly fine-grained distinctions between generic categories.²⁵ Its offshoots include the passages from Dickenson and Jonson considered above. This coexisted with a much longer-standing and much simpler way of thinking about literary style, which underpins the passage from Ascham which introduced the word epic into vernacular writing. This strand in thinking about genre derived from the description of the three genera dicendi of style, the high, the middle, and the low, in the Latin rhetorical tradition. These distinct and themselves internally confusing ways of thinking about genre overlapped, and the most striking instance of this overlap concerned the ‘high style’. Shakespeare’s admirer William Scott put it very succinctly: ‘the heroic and tragic is suited with the high style’.²⁶ Epic is high style, but high style also could encompass tragedy. The generic division between tragedy and epic is therefore bridged by a shared genus dicendi. All of this meant the high or grand style was a valuable theatrical resource, but was also a tricky beast to control. As the author of the Ad Herennium (who was in 1600 generally still thought to be Cicero) made clear, it could teeter over from the weighty and the elevated into the ‘tumid’ or ‘inflated’ style: ‘cum aut novis aut priscis verbis aut duriter aliunde translatis aut gravioribus quam res postulat aliquid dicitur’ (‘when a thought is expressed either in new or in archaic words, or in clumsy metaphors, or in diction more impressive than the theme demands’).²⁷ As a result the style adopted by writing that aspired to be ‘heroic’ in the later sixteenth century rested on radically shaky foundations, consisting of all or any of the following: historical content, morally elevated behaviour, an elevated register which was potentially appropriate for tragedy but dangerously close to the proximate vice of tumidity, and a weighty metrical or stanzaic form. If we combine with that fusion of fissiparous concepts the increasing emphasis on the formal properties of texts described as ‘epic’ we have more or less constructed what might be called a Shakespearean moment for the heroical, which was a beautiful mess grounded on a mass of potentially conflicting conceptual foundations. That mess created practical problems for a dramatist. How in practice would one differentiate between the heroical and the not heroical onstage in a play in blank verse without succumbing to tumidity, or (say) making an aspirant heroical speaker sound like a spouter of bombastic verbiage? In the narrative poem Lucrece (printed in 1594, just as John Dickenson was publishing his Lylyan prose references to ‘epic’) Shakespeare signified that his poem had ‘heroical’ aspirations in a straightforward way. He added an extra line to the stanza form he had used in Venus and Adonis the previous year. That, combined with his ostentatiously high and copious style in the work, and

²⁵ On Menander Rhetor and sixteenth century generic terminology, see Burrow (2010). ²⁶ Scott (2013), 57. ²⁷ [Cicero] (1954), 4.10.15. See Parker (1996), 220 8.

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augmented by his inclusion in it of an extended ekphrasis of the siege of Troy, made Lucrece live up to the promise of a ‘graver labour’ which Shakespeare had offered in the preface to Venus and Adonis in 1593. Given that Lucrece had this formally ‘heroical’ bulk combined with Roman historical content it is not surprising that William Scott duly included the poem in his list of ‘heroic’ poems in The Model of Poesy.²⁸ Lucrece hit exactly the register of high style as it was experienced by Elizabethan critical ears. Significantly, though, William Scott also singles out a particular line from Lucrece for criticism, and he does so in a way that highlights the instability within the modal knowledge of epic at the Shakespearean moment. Scott describes the line ‘The endless date of never-ending woe’ as ‘a very idle, stuffed verse in that very well-penned poem of Lucrece her rape’.²⁹ That apparently offhand comment reveals a great deal about both Elizabethan literary criticism and attitudes to the high style in the period. The ‘heroical’ could very easily topple over into the ‘stuffed’ or the tumid style. On the stage that danger was particularly acute. Characters who speak ‘heroically’ within a dialogue have an inherent tendency to sound at odds with their interlocutors in ways that could make them appear absurd, or akin to Plautus’ braggart soldiers— something Shakespeare was to exploit through the high-sounding verbal explosions of Ancient Pistol in 2 Henry IV. Furthermore, by the mid-1590s any attempt to make a character speak in a ‘heroical’ vein ran a further risk. The heyday for imitations of the ‘high astounding terms’ of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (printed in 1590) had passed by that period, as Pistol’s frequent parodies of Marlowe’s idiom mercilessly reveal. A high ‘heroical’ style in the later 1590s consequently risked censure not only for rhetorical tumidity, but also for being simply old-fashioned. The intimate relationship between the high style, epic, tragedy, and the tumid was therefore almost impossible in practice to control on the late Elizabethan stage; or rather a practical dramatist had to exploit or contain rather than simply to stun the potential for the heroical to come out sounding mock-heroical, antiquatedly Marlovian, or tumid. This helps to explain a consistent feature of Shakespeare’s allusions in his earlier plays to one particular epic poem: Virgil’s Aeneid. Shakespeare’s allusions to Virgil in the earlier part of his career tend to occur on theatrical occasions in which the rhetorical circumstances make the use of high style unquestionably appropriate. So Egeon in the prologue to The Comedy of Errors (performed in 1594) speaks of his ‘griefs unspeakable’ (1.1.34), his ‘infandum dolorem’ (Aeneid 2.3), and gives a description of the storm that he has endured in language that further recalls the Aeneid. The fact that these allusions appear in a speech in a courtroom and not in a dialogue is significant. Egeon’s speech is rhetorically

²⁸ Scott (2013), 20.

²⁹ Scott (2013), 53.

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and scenically tagged as a piece of forensic oratory in high style, which makes it appear distinct in register from the surrounding drama. Its forensic setting and its theatrical function as a virtual prologue might be described as ways of controlling any risk of tumidity within the grand or high style: in such a formal forensic setting an orator has a licence to sound heroical without also appearing ridiculous. So one might say that ‘epic’ was at this stage in Shakespeare’s career not incorporated into his drama, but is almost actively disincorporated. It is treated as a separate register used for lengthy narrations of heroical matter. It also is associated with the eristic milieu of the courtroom. A relic of this early way of situating allusions to epic within theatrical situations that licence grandeur of style persists in Othello of 1604. Othello delivers a speech to the council of Venice in 1.3 in which he explains that he won Desdemona by relating a narrative about his exploits and travels. That narrative distantly but distinctly recalls Aeneas’ alluring narrative to Dido in the Aeneid, but it does so in a formal speech of persuasion and self-defence, which is delivered in front of the Venetian grandees in what is more or less an impromptu court of law.³⁰ Even here of course the critical arguments that used to rage about the character Othello—is he the noble Moor or a self-deceiving windbag?—testify to the volatility of the grand style when it was, as it were, removed from the container of a formal forensic setting. Iago highlights this problem at the very start of the play when he describes Othello as uttering speeches full of ‘a bombast circumstance | Horribly stuffed with epithets of war’ (1.1.12–13). That volatility of style—grand in one setting, windy in another—Iago and the play as a whole both exploit. Indeed Othello might be crudely described as a drama which explores what happens if you set the high style loose in the bedchamber. The grandeur of epic blends seamlessly into the violence of domestic tragedy—and the fact that the climax of the play consists of a high-speaking hero stifling the wind out of his female victim suggests that the death of Desdemona is almost a graphic realization of the dangers of the high style. Stuffing—a cushion—stifles her breath of life. These examples help us to understand Shakespeare’s most explicitly ‘epic’ moment, the player’s speech about the death of Priam in Hamlet. This is presumably the kind of work Polonius means by his ‘poem unlimited’. The style and effect of the player’s speech is extremely hard to gauge, and it has sometimes been read as a satirical pastiche of Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage. Given the associations of the word ‘epic’ in this period with rivalry between authors, it would not be surprising if this were one element in its origin; but whether that is the case or not, the player’s speech is designed to be audibly ‘heroical’, in the sense of sounding old and startlingly different from the style of the surrounding drama. Metrically it hits the beat of sword

³⁰ For Shakespeare’s familiarity with forensic rhetoric, see Skinner (2014) and Hutson (2015).

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on sword in old style combat where the antagonists fight in slow motion, encumbered by the epic apparatus of similes: But as we often see against some storm A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still, The bold winds speechless, and the orb below As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder Doth rend the region; so, after Pyrrhus’ pause, A rousèd vengeance sets him new a work; And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fall On Mars his armour, forged for proof eterne, With less remorse than Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword Now falls on Priam. (2.2.485 94)

This is Shakespeare’s ‘heroical’ idiom c.1600, and it ends with a half-line which may well be deliberately Virgilian in flavour.³¹ The speech is not so much an imitation of Virgil or of Marlowe as an imitation based on Shakespeare’s modal knowledge of epic. To put that in a more shocking way, it could be regarded as a moment when Shakespeare is imitating the high old spondaic style of Ennius and Pacuvius, examples of whose works scatter the manuals of rhetoric which he certainly knew well, in which tragedy and epic fuse in a high style which is old-sounding, epithet-laden, heavily alliterative, and ingrained with woe. This claim is a little less outrageous than it might sound since this part of Hamlet can be plausibly traced not only to Cicero’s De Oratore (2.46.193–4)—where Hamlet’s tears at the death of Hecuba have their origin in a passage about a performance of a play by Pacuvius—but specifically to Shakespeare’s reading of Melanchthon’s commentary on that passage, which cites Virgil’s description of Priam’s death to illustrate the affective power of rhetoric.³² The player’s speech is epic reimagined through the rhetorical tradition and through later sixteenth-century modal knowledge of the genre. The other crux for any discussion of Shakespeare’s relationship to epic is Troilus and Cressida, written probably within a year or so of Hamlet. The play has often perplexed critics. Is it an imitation of Homer, of Chaucer, of Henryson, of Caxton’s narrative of Troy? Is it an ‘epic’ play or a satire à clef which is driven by rivalry between theatrical companies? Troilus is perhaps best thought of as a drama which splices together many of the potentially incompatible things that were ‘known’ about epic in this period, and which explores them through a range of stylistic registers. That is, Troilus and Cressida contains multiple versions of the ‘epic’ voice, some of which are indeed almost satirical. The Prologue talks of ‘massy staples’ (17) and ‘princes orgulous’ (2) to large up the language. He then skips over ‘the vaunt and ³¹ See Baldwin (1993), and for the half lines themselves Sparrow (1931). ³² Burrow (2018). Cf. Wiles, Ch. 6 in this volume.

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firstlings of those broils | Beginning in the middle’ (27–8). That presents the play as not just lexically in high style but also claims for it a formally ‘epic’ structure which plunges in medias res—though it does so in a typically offcentre way, since it actually begins in the middle of a muddle rather than with a particularly significant event.³³ The Prologue even slips in a Virgilian halfline ‘To Tenedos they come’ (11) in order to add another epic element. These features suggest that Shakespeare was not simply prone to identify ‘epic’ with a high stylistic register. The fact that his Prologue is armed intimates that the association between epic and rivalry between poets was part of his modal knowledge of the genre; but he also ‘knew’ epic as the literary kind associated in contemporary criticism with particular modes of narrative and with a high register of style so stuffed with archaism and neologism that it could overinflate at any point into tumidity. Within Troilus and Cressida itself a deliberately high register of style is often linked with other formal markers of the epic. So during the final battle scenes both Agamemnon and Nestor adopt the role of messengers-cum-narrators of the fighting. They adopt the ‘epic’ mode as defined by William Scott, following Aristotle, as a ‘poem or imitation simply narrative of great and weighty things in weighty and high style’.³⁴ Agamemnon, in particular, can sound like Homer or Virgil in military mode: The fierce Polydamas Hath beat down Menon; bastard Margareton Hath Doreus prisoner, And stands colossus wise, waving his beam Upon the pashèd corpses of the kings Epistrophus and Cedius; Polixenes is slain, Amphimacus and Thoas deadly hurt . . . (5.5.7 13)

This is Shakespeare deliberately supersizing a narration, larding it with big names and big objects, colossuses and beams, in order to evoke a Homeric grandeur. Positioned on the divide between the tragic messenger speech and an epic voice of direct narration, it is perhaps one of the purest instances of the ‘high epic style’ in Shakespeare.³⁵ Immediately afterwards ancient Nestor uses his reedy voice to upscale the action onstage into epic dimensions: There is a thousand Hectors in the field. Now here he fights on Galathe his horse, And there lacks work; anon he’s there afoot, And there they fly or die, like scalèd schools Before the belching whale. (5.5.19 23)

³³ Martindale and Martindale (1990), 93. Cf. Nuttall (2004), esp. 215 19. ³⁴ Scott (2013), 18. ³⁵ Martindale and Martindale (1990), 94.

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This is an epic historic present, in which the act of narration enlarges and ennobles as it describes. Nestor has throughout the play particularly strong associations with the Elizabethan idea of the ‘heroical’. He is described by Hector as a ‘good old chronicle’ (4.7.86), and he might be thought of as a version of Hardying’s Chronicle on spindly shanks, whose voice is ‘instructed by the antiquary times’ (as Ulysses describes him, 2.3.246). He is also, though, a bit of an old windbag. That is more than a point about his character and his much-vaunted age. It indicates that one of the things going on in Troilus is a dialogue between different versions of the high, epic style, distinct aspects of which are associated with different characters in the play.³⁶ Patricia Parker has explored ways in which the high style in Troilus tends to over-inflate itself into tumidity, the style that the Ad Herennium describes as the proximate vice to the grand style, and has seen inflation in its various senses as pervading the entire play.³⁷ But the over-inflation of the high style in Troilus is not systemic. It tends to be linked to particular characters and occasions. ‘Epic’, that is to say, is not the genre of the play, but a rhetorical idiom that emerges in particular theatrical occasions, and its instability has localized theatrical effect. There are bubbles of tumid gaseousness in dear old Nestor’s belching whale, which is a vast but also a windy beast. But wind is the particular preserve of the ‘heroical’ braggart soldier Ajax. The only moment when Ajax, normally a monosyllabic and grunting hero, most clearly aspires towards the high, heroic style is when he urges a herald to create a lot of noise by expelling wind through a trumpet: Now crack thy lungs and split thy brazen pipe. Blow, villain, till thy spherèd bias cheek Outswell the colic of puffed Aquilon. Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood. (4.6.7 10)

This is an exemplary instance of the tumid or inflated style, which displays just the blend of archaism and neologism described as characteristic of that style in the Ad Herennium. If we recall that it was common in the sixteenth century to present the heroic poet as someone who preserves the fame of a hero, and that Fame is usually presented blowing a trumpet—well, the thrasonical Ajax has a style so sufflated that it threatens to burst its own heroical sides by strenuously blowing its own trumpet. Ajax is a gas: epic transforms itself into wind. The unstable conception of epic c.1600 thus enables the genre to migrate into a localized mode of speech. It also enables that genus dicendi itself to slip

³⁶ For George Chapman’s similar rhetorical characterizations of Homeric heroes, see Wolfe (2015a), 242 304. ³⁷ Parker (1996), 220 8.

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between comical and heroical registers, and to move between and be transformed by characters within a play. This is perhaps not surprising. William Scott relates the different levels of style to different dispositions or characters: ‘forms of style are reduced to one of these three: either high or noble, low or base, mean [i.e. middling] or indifferent. For these are, as it were, the complexions of our speech’.³⁸ He also links the different ‘characters’ of style in the traditional sense of the genera dicendi with the notion that individual characters, as we now use the word, speak in different ways: And this is very aptly besides called character, for speech carries a certain stamp, impression, or image as well of the thing as of the nature or affection of the deliverer, according to that of Tully, where he saith every motion of the mind hath proper to it some countenance, behaviour, sound, or voice to be expressed by, and so he discerns as many differences in style as there are persons that write.³⁹

The association between the different characters of style and different Homeric characters goes back at least to Quintilian; but a passage in Aulus Gellius (whose Attic Nights Scott certainly knew) is particularly germane. It relates the different characters of style to different characters in Homer: ‘Sed ea ipsa genera dicendi iam antiquitus tradita ab Homero sunt tria in tribus: magnificum in Vlixe et ubertum, subtile in Menelao et cohibitum, mixtum moderatumque in Nestore’ (‘But in the early days these same three styles of speaking were exemplified in three men by Homer: the grand and rich in Ulysses, the elegant and restrained in Menelaus, the middle and moderate in Nestor’).⁴⁰ The word ‘genus’ was also often used in a non-technical sense in the rhetorical tradition to refer to ‘kinds’ of style which might be particular to individual orators: in De Oratore 2.89, Crassus has a ‘genus’ of speaking all of his own, and in 3.27 the genera scribendi of a range of epic and tragic poets are distinguished from each other.⁴¹ The ‘characters of style’ therefore were poised to contribute to the rhetorical aspect of what we now call ‘characters’: theatrical voices with their distinctive and imitable modes of speech. Troilus and Cressida is a rhetorical experiment in multivocal theatrical epic. It was written, and could only have been written, at a moment when the relatively crude rhetorical model of the three registers of style was being transformed into a more sophisticated critical language for distinguishing both individual genres and the stylistic ‘characters’ of individual speakers. It was also written during a period in which writers for the stage were consciously attempting to outdo each other in their generic aspirations and performances. ‘Epic’ in Troilus is therefore not one thing. It diffuses outwards into several different forms and voices, into ‘as many differences in style as there are persons who speak’. ³⁸ Scott (2013), 51. ³⁹ Scott (2013), 51. ⁴⁰ Gellius (1946), 6.14.7; cf. Quintilian, 12.10.64 5.

⁴¹ See Fantham (1979).

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* * * * * We might finally dart back to the bright young wits who first brought the word ‘epic’ into English at St John’s College, Cambridge. Literary terminology did not simply ooze down through the sixteenth century from the fens to grammar school boys like Shakespeare. The relationship was bidirectional. An undergraduate play called The Return to Parnassus was performed at Roger Ascham’s old college in about 1601. In that play Shakespeare’s clown Will Kempe satirically derides the excessive learning of university men, who stuff their plays with too much Ovid and classical learning, and goes on to make the mysterious claim that Shakespeare had given Ben Jonson ‘a purge that made him bewray his credit’.⁴² It has often been suggested that this refers to Troilus and Cressida, and in particular implies that the character of the windily epical Ajax is a satirical portrait of Ben Jonson. It is impossible to be certain about this, but the author(s) of the Parnassus plays did have intimate knowledge of the Elizabethan public stage. The word ‘epic’ entered the English language through academic discourse, then migrated into the vocabulary of professional writers. As it did so it became associated with characters of style, with form, and, through the proximity of the high style to tumidity, with satire, with rivalry among poets, and with the voices of particular theatrical characters. Then a clever student from St John’s appears to have witnessed Troilus in about 1600, a play which was ‘epic’ in all of these ways at once. What this student heard in that play seems to have been something more like satire than what we think of as epic. He incidentally drew attention to the fact that the relationship between players and universities had more or less reversed in the half-century or so since the scenes described in Ascham’s Scholemaster. The undergraduates of St John’s were no longer providing professional writers with the modal knowledge to enable them to write in a particular genre. It was the literary practitioners, the professional writers and players, who were by then relaying a version of ‘epic’ back to the universities. In the course of the sixty or so years between Ascham’s conversations about the genera dicendi at St John’s and Troilus and Cressida, ‘epic’ had mutated and migrated: the practice of the stage had taken over from the academy as the place that was believed to produce the most significant innovations in criticism.

⁴² Leishman (1949), 337, ll. 1765 72. He suggests (369 71) that this refers to Dekker’s Satiromastix; Bednarz (2001) argues for Troilus.

4 Theatre on an Epic Scale Tim Supple

It has been whispered abroad—tentatively in the London press, with more confidence in New York—that British theatre is enjoying a Golden Age. Why is this feeling in the air? Our playwrights are strong, successful, and numerous: from the old and grand, to the world-conquering middle, to the emerging young and the radical dead. Our actors and directors are streaming from the London stages to New York and beyond, to screen and television. Our new musicals and big shows are trampling opposition all over the world. The more I travel, the more I appreciate the particular vitality of the British theatre—our unique blend of commercial, subsidized, and fringe. This vitality is especially irrepressible and widespread at present, more than at any time in my short 50 years. Two generations of subsidy are bearing fruit in every area of theatre making: we are so much more exposed now to international inspirations and have started to absorb them into our work; the alternative, fringe attitude that arrived in the 1960s has been welcomed with open arms and absorbed into the heart of mainstream practice; and audiences appear ever more ready, hungry even, for new, good, and serious theatre. But is this a Golden Age? It is probably impossible to know from the inside and it might not even be an interesting question. It is relevant to me today because it brings to mind the great achievements of past theatre cultures: Greek, Spanish, Elizabethan. If we are to compare ourselves to brilliant past eras—a dubious pastime—we cannot escape the fact that our predecessors created theatre that we could call ‘epic’. As soon as that word is brought into the room, it begs a question: What do we mean by epic theatre? Specifically, I have been asked in this chapter to address Theatre on an ‘epic scale’, which begs further questions than the E-word on its own. These are questions I am indeed very interested in: What do we mean by epic scale? Do we have such theatre? Do we want or need such a theatre? Which brings me back to the Golden Age. All this talk is a transatlantic affair really: a continuation of the century-old infatuation between the entertainment

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industries of the UK and US; or, perhaps, really between London and New York. Further afield, in Berlin, Moscow, Mumbai, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, I’ve never heard such a thought thrown around. Certainly the British theatre, as it is known here, or the London stage, as it is more commonly known, is largely respected. This respect is based on various perceptions: some are historical, based either on Shakespeare or our grand theatrical acting traditions; some arise from the revolution in modern theatre writing triggered, and sometimes sustained, by the Royal Court; some from modern touring companies such as Complicité and Cheek by Jowl; some from our blockbusters like Mamma Mia! and War Horse. But we must keep level in our own perspective. We are largely irrelevant to many of the greatest theatre cultures in the world: the radical conceptual theatre of central Europe, the post-Stanislavski theatre of Moscow, the highly stylized opera theatre of China, the ancient religious folk and classical theatre of India, the modern dance-theatre of South America . . . our Golden Age shines dimly in all these places. Think of theatre in its natural state—free of the cumbersome and distracting adornments of business, celebrity, formality, artifice, even theatres themselves. When we think of it raw and in the flesh, we have two essential images that can easily contradict: one is large and public, the other is small and intimate. The first is embodied in an arena or amphitheatre or street: it is spectacular and tells of gods and heroes; it shows defining moments of myth, legend, or history; it touches the community or nation or religion. The second is embodied in the clearing or small room: it is personal and tells of individual trial and struggle; it exists more in suggestion and imagination; and it touches each witness privately. Of all places in the world, I have experienced these two primary images of theatre most vividly in India. That is partly because in India you can still find ancient theatre played as freshly as if it were modern theatre. Of course it would be wrong to romanticize—some of the ancient traditions are played as fixed and unchanging and so have no more life than Madame Tussauds. But in India we see that it is not necessarily a choice between dead theatre or new theatre. It is possible to continue the line of a tradition and do so with life. And we are lucky because in India we can see theatre as it was 500 or 1,000 years ago, and it can be entirely vital. It is as if we were able to see commedia dell’arte or Passion plays today, as they were and not as quaint museum forms or reconstructions. In India I saw all-night performances of episodes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana played to hundreds in villages and temples with music, masks, dance, comedy, and great and colourful costumes. Gods and heroes brought to life and epic encounters replayed to audiences who knew them as well as we know the Easter story. As much as anything I have seen, this was, naturally, ‘epic’ theatre. I also sat in courtyards and clearings, on mats with a few dozen others, and saw one dancer and a few drummers summon the spirits and

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transform from man to old woman to god and back via trance, collapse, and resuscitation. I saw wild acrobatics so close that the audience shrieked in terror. I saw a woman, who had trained for fifteen years in a Kerala theatre form, act with her eyes and neck and mouth with such intensity that one felt as if her whole being was animated. These were all intimate theatre experiences of indelible human quality. And I’m sure everyone can think of potent experiences they have encountered in big and small spaces, that have awed or touched you or if you are lucky: both. For here, in the combination of the two primary colours of theatre—epic and intimate—lies the rub. If we are going to try to find out what we mean by ‘epic’ theatre, we have to think about what theatre we strive for. Because epic, like ‘awesome’, ‘huge’, ‘massive’, ‘great’ is so overused, so widely available a word that it can mean many things to many people. Let us try to seek out a meaningful definition of the idea of ‘epic theatre’. And for that, the question of intimacy might be useful. Let’s start by looking at the range of options open to us: what examples exist before us that can be called epic? If a contemplation of theatre on an epic scale is going to focus on the size of the event then we can start in the stadium. London’s 2012 Olympic opening ceremony was, it might be said, theatre on an epic scale. It was conceived by a team well versed in theatre and it borrowed from a range of theatrical elements: characters, themes, ideas, mini-narratives, designed scenes, emotional atmospheres conjured through music and light. We are also now well used to the stadium play or musical or opera: the recent Jesus Christ Superstar (dir. Laurence Connor, 2012), umpteen versions of Carmen or Aida, and, most aptly, Ben Hur. Apt because there is something in these stadium spectaculars that combines the big ‘gig’ experience with the movie experience in a large theatrical melange that, to me, feels Roman. And when I say Roman, that implies something exciting, lavish, brilliant and also decadent, insatiable, even disturbing. Disturbing? I speak as a theatre maker here, as someone who experiences theatre in relation to how I would like to make it. And I am yet to see how events of this scale can avoid two processes that I believe are anathema to what I understand as living, true theatre. First, a small group of people—the creators or producers—make something happen for a huge group of people—the spectators. Whatever the former chooses to do for the latter, whether the latter will be asked to watch passively or in some way participate, it will always involve a distancing, a removal of the creator from the spectator. Like a live-action camera editor in a box removed from the heartbeat of the action, or a film editor in a hermetic room, the stadium theatre maker becomes a conductor from afar, orchestrating the machinery of theatre with no connection to heartbeat of the living moment of its performance. They have to manipulate, however nicely, the event. When I went to the dress rehearsal of the Olympic opener, I was struck by the warm and friendly manner of the volunteers—much commented upon—who told us

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what to do and when with gestures and coloured lights to wave: like scores of aircraft stewards. It was, in effect, a giant holiday camp participation event. When I helped stage one of the Make Poverty History gigs around the G5 meeting in Edinburgh in 2005, I was fascinated by the machinery that grew around the small group of very well-intentioned conductors at its centre. From a small creative bunker came a gig/rally lasting for hours with music, speeches, comedy, and film that sailed on the sea of feeling and fashion leaving thought far behind. When you have Davina McCall leading the charge to the barricade, you really have reached an ultimate moment in postmodernist protest. Secondly, the large group of people, the tens of thousands who are watching, can certainly engage with the action. They can feel things, they can think and talk and discuss and marvel individually. But something hard to define cannot happen—or at least I have never seen, felt, heard of it happening. And that is the entering of a story-brought-to life in action into the mind, heart, and memory of the audience; and the entering of the audience into the fabric of the event. The audience in a stadium is treated en masse and so will respond en masse. Strangely there is, on the one hand, too great a distance and, on the other, too overwhelming a manipulation for the essential balance of theatre between collective presence and intelligent, individual response to take place. It is neither magical nor rational enough. It is something else; and it was best understood by the Romans and the Nazis and we should leave it there in my opinion. We should certainly be wary of it and at the least call it what it properly is: spectacle, not theatre. So am I saying that theatre is not possible in stadiums? I wouldn’t be so foolish as to say that. But I am saying that I have never seen or heard of theatre on this scale that fulfils the essential task of theatre and that it is certainly very difficult. Is there a number of spectators, a scale, beyond which theatre is less possible and within which it is more? Possibly. Let us look to the past to consider this question of scale. The biggest theatre experiences that we know of are the Christian Passion Plays in Europe and the Sh’ia Ta’zieh in Iran. As is well known, the Passion Play seems to have emerged in the medieval era and reconstructs the trial, suffering, and death of Jesus Christ. It was originally a highly ritualized account, based around a cathedral, performed outdoors, and used music, song and basic speech, and drama. It evolved into a more sophisticated drama, created by and for a city rather than simply the church, performed on large stages in town centres with more complex staging and exploration of situation, character, and action. It faded sometime in the seventeenth century. The Ta’zieh, surely a cousin, perhaps even an ancestor, seems to have emerged sometime in the tenth century and enacted the story of the martyrdom of a Persian hero called Seyavash. Interestingly this dynamic theatrical form, enacted in city streets and involving an ecstatic medley of poetic speech, epic drama, music, song, and dance, was gradually co-opted by Sh’iaism; and Seyavash was transformed

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into Husayn and his story, his martyrdom became its content. It is fascinating to ponder for a moment the question of influence: did the Christian Passion also co-opt an older tradition in Europe? Or did it emerge from the Persian Ta’zieh? And was the Ta’zieh the great influence that led to the richest epic religious theatre in the world—that of South East Asia? Or vice versa? Certainly religious theatre in India is far older, or at least the evidence of theatre is far older in India, but where and how did the epic first emerge—the crossfertilization between India and Persia being endless . . . ? Anyway, unlike the questions that hang over stadium theatre for me, this street theatre of martyrdom in both monotheistic religions is certainly theatre on an epic scale. Not only is it big, it tells a story in which epochal characters and their actions were examined and the conditions of their death explored. Thus the other meaning of epic—pertaining to scale of content not simply scale of production—is satisfied. And there is little doubt, according not only to accounts that we have but also our intelligent imagination, that audiences were deeply connected to and affected by the action. So much so that they wanted to see the same thing each year! And the event transcended the mere moment of entertainment and became something else: communal ritual and commemoration. The action entered the spectators and the spectators entered the action. Literally. This was what we call traditional theatre (characters on a stage going through a narrative represented in linear scenes), combined with what we now call site-specific and immersive and promenade and community theatre. Interestingly, while modern reconstructions of Passion Play and Ta’zieh are often empty, formulaic, and archaic, a Port Talbot Passion in 2010 was produced by National Theatre of Wales by Michael Sheen and by many accounts succeeded in using the contemporary suggestions of sitespecific, promenade, community, and immersion very successfully. It was talked of as a fine and intensely moving theatrical event by any standards. So this is theatre on an epic scale: the arena is the city or town; the audience is in the tens of thousands; the events are of huge narrative and symbolic proportion; and from what we know, it could, certainly in Iran, take audiences to a state of ecstasy. Whether or not this last is something we expect or want from theatre is something we shall come back to. But it is certainly one of the potentials of theatre in its ancient self and while it is far from the modern goal—post-Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht, and so on—it must not be disregarded. But while it belongs in the front rank of theatrical evolution, does this kind of epic theatre get to our goal? Not quite. What is our goal? It is the possibility that the ‘epic theatre’ is the essence of theatre: that is, it embraces the intimate experience; and that while it is necessarily big in scale (because of its content and intentions), it is also highly sophisticated and nuanced in the processes it embodies as drama. Is the problem with the Passion/Ta’zieh again its size? Perhaps not. The problem might be its didactic intention. The same story told every year with the purpose of inducing the same reaction. The hero without

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flaw and his opponents without choice, trapped as they are by the simple fact of historical replay. The whole enterprise driven by assumption rather than enquiry. This for me is religion not theatre. And yet theatre as we know it— dramatic embodiment rather than simply telling a story—probably arose from religion: to tell religion, to embody it. True. But as soon as theatre exists, it is something separate, distinct, and individual. It does not have to be religion. I would say that once it is religion it cannot be entirely theatre. What can best demonstrate this distinction? Two great theatre cultures—perhaps the two greatest. One long dead and yet its influence rolls on unabated; the other still alive and yet little known outside its homeland: the Greek theatre and the Indian theatre. Both religious theatres but ones that bring us closer to our goal. My knowledge of Greek theatre comes from years of reading, watching, and some producing. I never read Greek nor studied the plays. This was theatre on an epic scale in two ways: the content and the audience. Up to 8,000 people would sit to watch the great narratives of Agamemnon and his family, Oedipus and his descendants, Dionysus, Phaedra, and so on in the fifth century BCE. These events would be felt and wondered at in a huge collective act of attention, listening, and contemplation. Considering the size of the communities of the time it was a remarkable event. And yet the numbers performing, the scale of performance, was not epic. One, then two, then three leading actors and a chorus of twelve to fifteen, as far as we know. This suggests not only that the art of mask making, of acting and speech and song, and of amphitheatre acoustics was unparalleled but also that something deep in the core of the drama unleashed the quality we call ‘epic’. It wasn’t spectacle, noise, design; it wasn’t volume. It was something in the words, or something the words unlocked. It was in the ideas, the characters’ actions. It was in the story and its events. Crucially to me, it was not empty pageant or repeated replay that held 8,000 people in their seats while three people spoke and twelve people danced. It was the vitality and complexity of human action, choice, and experienced outcome. While the theatrical occasion was grounded in religion—in the festival of Dionysus—and the attendance and performance were part of a religious observance, the theatre itself, the event of the play, was alive with intellect, investigation, and splintered possibility. Here, indeed, was a theatre that enacted large events, in a highly sophisticated form, to thousands of people within which one actor could communicate with the audience as individuals, acoustically, not as a mass, through technology. Here there was no need for Andrew Lloyd Webber to tell the audience what to feel and when; nor for millions of pounds in designs to tell audiences what to imagine; nor indeed for the lovable Danny Boyle to ask the audience to wave their pixels now . . . This is a theatre of poetry, of detailed human experience, of imagination through suggestion, and of thought. Here was the template of modern Western theatre. In itself it doesn’t exist and it is

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hard to feel the truth of it in reconstructions. As with Shakespeare, it feels rather quaint and old and stiff. And the ancient theatres are hard to use now: in Greece itself, the ancient theatre is honoured as important history rather than living theatre. Shows that try to command those great spaces are rather doomed to emptiness; distance and the feeling that we are as minnows to the ancients leave us running back to the amplified reassurance of our own festival of Dionysus—the rock festival. I once produced a play to considerable success in theatres of up to 1,200. We were asked to present it in the amphitheatre in Verona and even with three-quarters of the seats ignored and an audience of around 2,000, we couldn’t really command the space. We may do the Greek plays but we tend not to do them in masks; rather we modernize them in style and content. The influence, however, of this period, those theatres, plays, actors, and critics is still overwhelming. In India, on the other hand, the ancient theatre—epic and intimate, classical and folk—is alive and well. It remains the most vital element of Indian theatre— more so than the modern, Western style that has been imported and is enjoyed in the major cities to some degree. In India we can glimpse the most ancient roots of theatre—we can guess at its origins: in the Shaman. One night in Kerala, southern India, I stood with a few dozen others, half of them children, in a clearing on a hot night and attended a Teyyam. I alluded to this earlier when I spoke of one dancer and a number of drummers evoking a story in which the dancer embodies an old woman, who in turn wishes to be transformed into a young woman and succeeds through imploring the gods. In becoming the old woman, who becomes the young woman—and returns—the dancer himself momentarily embodies the god whom the old woman implores. All of this is achieved over a long and intense process of drummed ecstasy, at the height of which the dancer faints, and it is in that state of higher consciousness that he communes with the god and can be asked any question that the audience wishes to ask of the god. The outcome is a huge wild dance that involves the whole audience in a literally delirious mosh pit. Of this night, I have unshakeable memories of a totally other experience of theatre. India is in fact the richest soil on earth in which to experience theatre in its pre-modern, non-Western forms—so rich that I would urge anyone curious about theatre outside the Greek-European-American line to get there at least once in their lifetime; and when there get away from the big cities to the rural hinterlands of Bengal, Manipur, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Orissa, and Karnataka. Not only will you find the longest-surviving continuous theatre traditions in the world, you will find a thriving myriad of theatrical cultures: from the classical, formal ‘high’ forms like Katakali, Bharatnatayyam, and Koodiyattam to the still massively popular folk forms such as Chau, Terukkuttu, and Yakshaganam. Like Indian food, the range and variety of theatre that you find as you move from region to region, from town to country, from season to season, is unique. Amongst this richness, the ‘epic’ is the norm.

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In form, content, venue, and sheer length we can find a true epic theatre alive in India. Like the Greek theatre, the staple texts are the great religious, mythic epics that provide the source for the shared culture: the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The common duration is an all-night performance, nine hours or so, in a village, on a crossroads, in a clearing. The expected form will mix narrative, drama, music, song, and dance, with heightened expression such as Gods and Heroes in make-up alongside demotic characters such as clowns, commentators, provocative innocents. Gods, demons, and humans share the arena and well-known narratives are endlessly reimagined. The forms vary so widely that it is hard to give a sketch or summary, but there is no question that in India the true qualities of ‘epic’ meet in entirely natural equilibrium. I spent my wedding night on a crossroads in rural Tamil Nadu watching a Terukkuttu epic. Terukkuttu is famous for its irreverence and there are two clowns who have licence to question and satirize the great figures of the narrative for which they are often beaten as in the slapstick of commedia dell’arte. When the audience liked an actor’s work they would get up and give them money—mid-scene. When they didn’t like the show, they would complain and the actors would, well, do it better! This was an epic theatre audience at work and worth travelling many miles for—even on our wedding night! Yet, however popular and still relevant to lives in India, this is not a theatre of now and of here. If we want an epic theatre here and now, it couldn’t look like that—though we could learn a great deal from it. One thing that is strange and extraordinary about traditional theatre in India is that while it is fresh and reinvented by each generation, it is not a modern theatre: it does not try to update or change characters and situations to address the modern world directly. Other epic theatre movements (or moments) have done exactly that. The Elizabethan theatre in England, for example, staged great narratives from English and others’ history in ways that were unashamedly contemporary in style and character and speech. They also wrote new plays about new and imagined subjects; and if it was politically too difficult to show the times exactly, the veil of parallel was very thin. And they certainly wrote epic plays. Tamburlaine, our Kings and Queens, the people, the Romans, battles, the supernatural, myth and legend animated our stages. And if the form was resolutely that of the emergent modern play, some more ancient epic fabrics are still very much in evidence: not just in the songs and dances and narrators, but also in the structures and juxtapositions and soliloquys and narrative imperative. Shakespeare will never fit into a purely modern mindset, try though we might. The Spanish, too, in their Golden Age produced contemporary plays of an epic form—look no further than Lope de Vega and Calderón and de Molina. In China the ‘Opera’ form—as in Beijing Opera, Sichuan Opera—was and is continuously popular and unmistakably ‘epic’ in essence, even if it can’t boast the huge audiences and settings of Indian folk theatre. Once again we see a small number of well-known religious narratives

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form the core content and a highly refined and sophisticated combination of ways of telling: mask, comedy, acrobatics, fighting, song, and dance. My personal favourite is the Sichuan Opera where a narrative loosely holds together a dazzling and wildly entertaining variety show. Rather like our pantomime but much, much better. If you’ve never come across Bian Lian or face-changing, I’d urge you to hop on a plane. By some closely guarded secret method, the actors literally change their face—their mask swiping into a different mask at the flash of a hand. These different faces express different emotions or states within one character: a brilliant epic technique if ever there was one. In nineteenth-century Germany there was an attempt to create a new, ‘epic’ theatre for then and there: Goethe’s Faust and Wagner’s Ring cycle are two stunning products of that folk poetic nationalist thrust. One could also say that the Victorian theatre in London and its equivalent in New York contained a kind of ‘epic’ show, but I would argue that we are back to spectacle and really en route to the modern stadium show. With hindsight, the experiment with lavish technical possibilities—ELEPHANTS LIVE ON STAGE! A REAL SEA BATTLE! BUNNY RABBITS IN A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM!—was most significant for the impact it was to have on the first real and concerted attempt to create an ‘epic theatre’. The Victorian spectacle was literal, melodramatic, and sentimental, therefore not truly ‘epic’, despite its scale. But the use of technology was new and was to inspire something very important in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Indeed it is time—you may have wondered why it has taken me so long. You cannot talk about the E word without the B word and his A-effect. By rights the discussion should start with him. Well, whether we mention him directly or not, Brecht’s writings, thinking, and creating about and within the concept of ‘Epic Theatre’ set the terms within which we still discuss it. So in effect he was in my words from the start. Here are a few key things that Brecht wrote that are helpful to us today: The epic theatre is the theatrical style of our time. To expound the principles of the epic theatre in a few catch phrases is not possible . . . They include repre sentation by the actor, stage technique, dramaturgy, stage music, use of the film and so on. The essential point of the epic theatre is perhaps that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectators’ reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things. At the same time it would be quite wrong to try to deny emotion to this kind of theatre. It would be much the same thing as trying to deny emotion to modern science.¹ The only kind of acting I find natural: the epic, story telling kind. It’s the kind the Chinese have been using for thousands of years. Among modern actors Chaplin is one of its masters . . . The actor doesn’t have to be the man he portrays. He has to

¹ Brecht (1978), 23 (emphasis added).

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describe his character just as it would be described in a book. If Chaplin were to play Napoleon he wouldn’t even look like him; he would show objectively and critically how Napoleon would behave.² The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too Just like me It’s only natural It’ll never change The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh. The epic theatre spectator says: I’d never have thought it That’s not the way That’s extraordinary, hardly believable It’s got to stop The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary That’s great art: nothing obvious in it I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.³ Stylistically speaking there is nothing all that new about the epic theatre. Its expository character and emphasis on virtuosity bring it close to the old Asiatic theatre. Didactic tendencies are to be found in the medieval mystery plays and the classical Spanish theatre . . . These theatrical forms corresponded to particular trends of their time, and vanished with them . . . Most of the great nations today are not disposed to use the theatre for ventilating their problems. London, Paris, Tokyo and Rome maintain their theatres for quite different purposes.⁴ Alienation: A representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar. The classical and medieval theatre alienated its characters by making them wear human or animal masks; the Asiatic theatre even today uses musical and pantomimic A effects. Such devices were certainly a barrier to empathy, and yet this technique owed more, not less, to hypnotic suggestion than do those by which empathy is achieved.⁵ The actor will [ . . . ] do all he can to make himself observed standing between the spectator and the event.⁶ [The actor] narrates the story of his character by vivid portrayal, always knowing more than it does and treating its ‘now’ and ‘here’ not as a pretence made possible by the rules of the game but as something to be distinguished from yesterday and some other place.⁷ Just as the actor no longer has to persuade the audience that it is the author’s character and not himself that is standing on the stage, so also he need not pretend that the events taking place on the stage have never been rehearsed, and are now happening for the first and only time.⁸ The exposition of the story and its communication by suitable means of alien ation constitute the main business of the theatre.⁹

Brecht’s lifelong agenda of creating an Epic folk theatre was as political as it was aesthetic. When he defines the Dramatic Theatre against the Epic Theatre he ² Brecht (1978), 68. ⁵ Brecht (1978), 192. ⁸ Brecht (1978), 194.

³ Brecht (1978), 71. ⁶ Brecht (1978), 58. ⁹ Brecht (1978), 202.

⁴ Brecht (1978), 75 6. ⁷ Brecht (1978), 194.

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does so thus: plot versus narrative; implicates the spectator versus turns spectator into observer; wears down a capacity for action versus arouses capacity for action; provides sensations versus forces decisions; gives experience versus picture of the world; spectator is involved versus has to face something; makes suggestion versus argument; arouses instinctive feelings versus recognition; human being taken for granted versus human is object of enquiry; eyes on finish versus eyes on course; growth versus montage; linear versus curves; evolution versus jumps; human fixed versus human as process; thought determines being versus social being determines thought; feeling versus reason. Brecht makes the strong point that an Epic Theatre is only possible in certain places at certain times and there is much in his manifesto that is not pertinent now. But there is much that has been so absorbed as to become commonplace. And his description of theatre, the bringing forth of ancient, epic traditions from elsewhere into contemporary Western conditions still makes for urgent and compelling reading. Broadly speaking, I would say that while Brecht’s approach to staging, storytelling, technology, and ensemble acting has triumphed, his approach to acting, playmaking, scenography, and music has not been accepted outside Germany. And his writings still stand as a unique and thorough attempt to create an Epic Theatre in theory and practice, in form and content, in scale and meaning. And brilliantly, he redefines the meaning of Epic, away from the classical definition of the heroic central character and towards the experience of the commoner (Mother Courage, the Good Woman, Macheath, and so on) and the group around them—an essential step for the modern Epic. There was a time when Brecht, Piscator, Meyerhold, et al. threatened real change. The conditions Brecht talked about—state subsidy, revolutionary movements, industrial audiences—were present in Berlin and Moscow but they couldn’t hold. Nazism, Bolshevism, and the war overwhelmed these conditions and by the fifties the avant garde were looking for more abstract expression, while the popular vote went to the smaller play with a graspable number of characters in a coherent and recognizable situation. And this still rules the roost: just look at the Royal Court and how it teaches playwriting all over the world. Just look at what plays triumph in the West End and on Broadway. There’s a real irony here: Brecht’s vision of an Epic Theatre was a popular theatre, a folk theatre, as he called it, to be enjoyed like sport. This is not the fate of his work nor of most of those who have consciously followed his lead. Clearly something else is needed. If he was the prophet, then we are still waiting for the Messiah. So, who since Brecht have taken on the task of creating Epic Theatre? A number of playwrights have employed elements of his approach: David Hare, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, Howard Barker, John Osborne, Brendan Behan, John Arden, Edward Bond in the UK, and Miller and Odets in the US. We see bits of Brecht everywhere. But those who have searched for a more comprehensive Epic approach are fewer and not writers but directors.

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Fig. 4.1 Peter Brook’s Battlefield (2016). Photograph by Richard Termine. © Richard Termine.

Joan Littlewood scored a direct hit with her Oh, What A Lovely War! The use of popular songs, the use of technology in the giving of information, the alienation of the Pierrot, end-of-pier frame, the retelling of an epic familiar tale. But this wasn’t ancient myth but recent history and the making of it unacceptable and avoidable was exemplary Epic Theatre of now and for here. And it was immensely entertaining, of course. Peter Brook (Fig. 4.1) always understood Brecht and his intentions brilliantly, though his genius prevented him from following too slavish an agenda, nor ever producing quite as universal a piece as Littlewood’s triumphs at Stratford East. What Brook did do—as well as employing Epic shock tactics throughout his career (the Marat/ Sade telling the story of the death of Marat as performed by the inmates of the asylum, rehearsed by de Sade; A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired by Chinese Circus; a huge phallus at the end of Oedipus at the Old Vic despite all attempts by Olivier and Gielgud to dissuade him and so on) was to create one of the greatest ‘epic’ works of modern times in his Mahabharata. Unlike Littlewood, this was not overtly a play for us here and now, but a conscious attempt to absorb the epics of elsewhere and render them meaningful throughout the world. Its nine-hour duration and faithfulness to the core narrative grounded it in Indian theatre, yet it shed all the formal elements such as mask and dance and music; and with its international cast and exceptional simplicity, it did something that I believe will reverberate through the generations: it reached beyond place and time and sought a theatre of fundamental

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shared human character, belonging to no particular land or people or epoch. In pure form we could see here all the essential elements of epic theatre— narrative, episodic structure, music, the large-scale workings of gods and men and the crucial objective eye on all actions—and the result was something entirely original and intoxicating. Another tireless exponent of epic theatre, also working in Paris, is Ariane Mnouchkine and her Théâtre du Soleil. Also working with an international ensemble, Mnouchkine takes on the big core matter: 1789, the Greeks, the collapse of Socialist idealism in the First World War. She creates tellings that are more than plays on a large stage and, like Brook, keeps her audience sizes under 1,000. Like Littlewood and Brook, Mnouchkine creates epic theatre with intimate impact, which is essential in marking out the difference between truly epic theatre and the mere big spectacle. So there is such a thing as epic theatre that is NOT simply the big show. Musical blockbusters like Billy Elliot and sensations like War Horse, big new plays about our times at the National Theatre like those of David Hare and Edgar, and big site-specific events don’t quite get there despite certain epic elements; and nor do the smaller plays with big themes such as classics by Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, and Miller. And NO we don’t have an epic theatre alive today and YES we do need one. Why? Because we need an epic, narrative, literary, historical theatre that tells us a greater story than that we see around us and witness in the news and in documentary. We need a theatre that takes the longer, wider, deeper view. We need a theatre that expresses difficulty, complexity, violence, and the forces that shape our lives. We need a theatre of living myths. We need a theatre that has great appeal but without easy simplification and emotional bribery. Without it we are smaller selves. And without it we certainly can’t claim to be enjoying a Golden Age.¹⁰

POSTSCRIPT: THREE EXAMPLES OF THE LOSS OR LACK OF AN EPIC S ENSIBILITY IN OUR THEATRE When I wrote this piece in 2012, I was undertaking research into a play about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet and post-Soviet experience with artists in the post-Soviet region. It was my intention to create a new work that addressed the epic trajectory. It has not proved possible. I have not found the writer nor myself found the means of approaching the task. Russian and post-Soviet writers are much more interested in microscopic social experience. There is a ¹⁰ This chapter was first delivered as a talk at the APGRD on 22 October 2012.

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huge gulf between the perceived enormity of what has been lived through and the means of expression deemed possible, right, desirable. This may reflect economics, theatrical fashion, taste, or simply the preference of a generation to avoid the public arena and to dramatize the private space, but the gulf is there and I personally cannot fill it. In my search for an epic approach I have returned to the austere objective eye of the Greeks and am developing a postSoviet version of the Oresteia. This is a touch ironic given the predilection of Soviet theatre makers for avoiding the censors through working the classics rather than making new work. Another project I have been developing for some time is a multilingual, cross-national King Lear that will evolve from a peripatetic investigation into the contrasting approaches of the world’s great theatre traditions and practices.¹¹ It is a search that is founded on a core belief that Lear can transcend the restrictive vision that sees theatre as specific to linguistic, cultural, and national contexts. During the course of our work it has struck me that we have become distanced from the ability to see that play in its epic form. We have been seduced by the family drama, the painful portrayal of parent–child relations, and the unbearable tracking of the ageing process. We know that it is also profoundly concerned with the workings of power, the nature of governance, the ethics of authority, the workings of law, the struggle of humanity to come to terms with fate and to endure life’s sufferings and disappointments. But we have become less comfortable with the dramatic expression needed to animate these aspects of the play, less able to access them. We believe ourselves much more when we play Shakespeare as a modern realist than when we attempt the much tougher task of scaling the giddy heights of Shakespeare as an elemental, metaphysical, epic social dramatist. Shakespeare the ancient eludes us. My last observation is very much attached to the theatre of the moment in which I write this postscript in June 2015. Our politicians and the plane of existence on which they walk do not seem epic to us anymore. They are diminished, very like us, living in grey suits and sitting in rooms of mediocre furnishings. We are painfully aware of their private failings and see their decisions and responsibilities in this light. A very successful recent Oresteia at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2015 has key qualities: they are peopled by Blair-lookalikes—lean and anxious suits—and they use the language of modern speech-making, in particular the filmed interview, to strong effect. But they discard entirely the epic dimension. They do not access that plane at all. The production discards the chorus and the public arena and brings the drama into the home, the family and further into the mind. We are happier there— the magnificent vista of the epic range is mysterious and terrifying. All the more reason why we must not avoid its challenge.

¹¹ Dash Arts: .

II Crossing Genres

5 Encountering Homer through Greek Plays in Sixteenth-Century Europe Tanya Pollard

Homer’s originally oral epics circulated in sixteenth-century Europe as printed literary texts. The period’s audiences, however, also encountered Homeric material in performance, through indirect routes. As Tania Demetriou has shown, the density of intervening responses to Homer meant that in this period he was intimately linked with the layers of literary imitation through which his texts were typically first encountered.¹ This chapter argues that early modern responses to Homer’s epics were indebted to the fifth-century Greek plays that dramatized Homeric material, which both reflected and shaped Homer’s identification with performance. Aeschylus reportedly claimed, in a phrase widely circulated in the sixteenth century, that ‘his own tragedies were steaks cut from Homer’s great banquets’.² For early moderns, these servings were by no means the most familiar of the literary responses to Homer; Virgil and Ovid claim those privileges. Yet through their links with performance, and their status as models for dramatic genres, the plays had an important role in shaping perceptions of Troy and its aftermath. I propose that the versions of Homer transmitted through Greek plays contributed not only to early modern understandings of Homer, but also to the development of the early modern popular stage. Although at a casual glance the worlds of Homer and the commercial theatre seem remote from each other, I suggest that Homer’s legacy had a crucial role in driving the success of sixteenth-century commercial stages. In particular, his poems, and the plays they inspired, modelled strategies for capturing audiences’ emotions through challenging expectations of genre and dramatic structure. For early ¹ Demetriou (2008), 33 4: ‘The discovery of Homer was first a “rediscovery backwards” of the Homer already known . . . . In discovering Homer it is the known that is first rediscovered.’ See also Demetriou (2006) and (2011). ² Athenaeus (2007), 347e.

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moderns, the fall of Troy came to represent the epitome of tragedy, identified especially with female grief, while the afterlives of its luckier survivors suggested the generative possibilities of comedy, identified especially with male wit.³ The intimate interdependence of these stories, however, suggested a similarly complex relationship between the genres they embodied, prompting new literary possibilities.

HOMER AND PERFORMANCE Homer’s poems have been identified with theatrical forms from their earliest appearances in critical conversations. In the Poetics, Aristotle famously identified Homer as the original source of both tragedy and comedy: ‘Just as Homer was the supreme poet of elevated subjects . . . so too he was the first to delineate the forms of comedy . . . thus Margites stands in the same relation to comedies as do the Iliad and Odyssey to tragedies’ (48b–49a).⁴ Aristotle presents Homer’s tonal range as the key factor linking his epics with tragic and comic drama respectively, but others saw further grounds for commonality. The De Homero, attributed to Plutarch in this period and included in most early editions of Homer, identified the poems with both tragedy and comedy, claiming: ‘In short, his poems are nothing other than dramas.’⁵ Aristotle and the pseudo-Plutarch praise the affinity they describe between Homer and the theatre, but other observers offered more critical, and more telling, perspectives on the shared spirit they saw. Plato linked Homer with tragedians based on their shared ability to elicit powerful emotional reactions in audiences. In the Republic, he famously condemned the pleasurable emotional surrender experienced by listeners who ‘listen to Homer and any of the other tragic poets representing the grief of one of the heroes’.⁶ For Plato, Homer counts as one of the tragic poets because his poems include not only direct imitation, but specifically direct imitation of suffering: a volatile combination designed explicitly to seduce audiences into abandoning themselves to their passions. As Plato also noted, this seduction could have commercial consequences. In the Ion, he explicitly links Homer’s emotional intensity with the lucrative power of performance. When Socrates asks Ion if he notices his performances’ effects on audiences, Ion confirms that he does:

³ On early modern identification of tragedy with Troy and female grief, see Pollard (2017). ⁴ Aristotle (1995), 41. ⁵ Plutarch (1996), 202 3. ⁶ Plato (2013), 605D; my emphasis. On the identifications of poetry with hedone, see ‘ἡδυσμένην Μοῦσαν’ (607A); ‘ἡδονὴν ποιητικὴ’ (607C4 5); and ‘ἡδεῖα’ (607D6 E2).

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Yes, very fully aware: for I look down upon them from the platform and see them at such moments crying and turning awestruck eyes upon me and yielding to the amazement of my tale. For I have to pay the closest attention to them; since, if I set them crying, I shall laugh myself because of the money I take, but if they laugh, I myself shall cry because of the money I lose. (535E)

Later writers would discover that providing audiences with the alternate release of laughter could also prove profitable; Plato raises this possibility in the Republic, when Socrates scolds, ‘there are jokes you would be ashamed to tell yourself, but which you would enjoy very much if you heard them in a comic imitation . . . that part of you that wants to play the fool and which you repressed through reason for fear of being thought of as a buffoon, you now let out freely’ (606C). Ion emphasizes the seductive power of tragedy, but he shows no interest in developing a distinction between surrender to passionate suffering and surrender to helpless laughter. Instead, he makes the point that Homer’s affective impact on live audiences is good for business. The ability to harness this affective power, in fact, is precisely the reason that Ion is able to build a successful career as a public performer, catering to large popular audiences, independent of the contingencies of private wealth and patronage. As Greek texts emerged into visibility in sixteenth-century Europe, the Poetics, De Homero, Republic, and Ion each circulated widely in Greek, Latin, and vernacular translations.⁷ Their lessons about the strategic value of providing audiences with the pleasures of emotional intensity found ready ears. Sixteenth-century genre theorists including Lodovico Castelvetro and Jacopo Mazzoni cited Aristotle as proof that ‘poetry was invented for the sole purpose of providing pleasure and recreation . . . to the souls of the common people and the rude multitude’,⁸ and that ‘as a recreation [poetry] should have for its end pleasure alone’.⁹ Giraldi Cinthio similarly emphasized that the playwright’s primary goal must be to please the audience. Describing the ‘particular delight’ of tragedy, Giraldi explained that ‘in this weeping is found a secret pleasure which delights its auditors and makes their minds attentive and fills them with marvel’. A play that successfully induces this secret pleasure, moreover, will effectively solicit high attendance: ‘because the tragic fable makes man experience that which is proper to him, having compassion for the miseries of others, viewers will return eager to rewitness a tragedy’.¹⁰ Early moderns continued a long tradition of recognizing Homer as the originating source of Greek literature, and by extension, of all literature.¹¹

⁷ On the impact of Aristotle’s Poetics on the period’s genre theory, see Javitch (1998); on the broader impact of classical audience centred literary criticism, see Cronk (1999); on English poetic responses to Renaissance Neoplatonism, see Healy (2013). ⁸ Castelvetro (1984), 19. ⁹ Mazzoni (1962), 378. ¹⁰ Giraldi (2011), 254. ¹¹ For recent overviews, see Demetriou (2008), Wolfe (2015a) and (2015b), and Demetriou and Pollard (2017).

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In the context of the widespread sixteenth-century interest in the practical consequences of poetry’s affective impact, I suggest that they also saw him as a model for how literary entrepreneurs could win the allegiance and funds of paying audiences in public performance, by appealing to the pleasures of experiencing passionate emotions.¹²

S T A G I N G HO M E R I C S T O R I E S The nexus of associations between Homer and the affective power of performance similarly shaped early modern responses to the Greek plays that dramatized Homeric material. The plays did not recreate Homer in any straightforward sense; as critics including Barbara Graziosi have pointed out, Athenian playwrights seem to have largely avoided direct adaptations of scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey, looking instead to and beyond the epic cycles more broadly.¹³ Yet plays such as Hecuba, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Tauris, both Electras, Orestes, Cyclops, Ajax, Agamemnon, Andromache, Trojan Women, Philoctetes, and Helen drew on both the prestige and emotional force of what we might more broadly call Homeric material, even if their stories fall outside Homer’s direct purview. These plays were certainly understood as ‘Homeric’ in the early modern period. Gasparus Stiblinus, who edited an influential 1562 Greek–Latin edition of Euripides’ complete plays, described Euripides’ Cyclops as echoing and amplifying Homer. ‘Our poet’, he wrote, has borrowed this story about the Cyclops from Book 9 of the Odyssey and very successfully furnished it with a dramatic appearance: and in fact, he also rendered certain passages more brilliant by wonderfully adding tragic power to them.¹⁴

For Stiblinus, Euripides’ dramatic treatment of Homeric material formed part of a spectrum of responses to Homer, and accordingly constituted part of Homer’s legacy. In particular, Cyclops represents and amplifies Homer’s ‘dramatic’ qualities, especially those with ‘tragic power’. Euripides is not Homer’s only heir, but he inherits, highlights, and transmits a crucial aspect of the poems: their power to capture audiences through engaging theatrical structures and effects. Stiblinus’ emphasis on the theatrical power implicit in Homeric material offers important insights into sixteenth-century conceptions of Homer. If we ¹² Scholarship on early modern English theatre has emphasized playwrights’ interest in creating pleasure by evoking strong emotions in audiences; see esp. Steggle (2007), Pollard (2011), Craik and Pollard (2013), and Hobgood (2014). ¹³ Graziosi (2008). ¹⁴ Stiblinus (1562), 493, cited from Mastronarde.

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understand Homeric plays as some of the forms through which Renaissance audiences encountered Homer, exploring these plays’ reception offers a way to trace responses to Homer as an orally performed medium. For these plays were understood not only, or even primarily, as literary texts, but also, and especially, as documents of performance. Because their sixteenth-century emergence into widespread European circulation was intimately linked with a set of conversations about dramatic genres, Greek plays were understood as the authoritative points of origin for tragedy and comedy.¹⁵ As such, they were frequently upheld as models for defining these genres, and their forms and commentaries reveal otherwise invisible assumptions about them. As Greek plays entered widespread circulation, after the 1495 onset of their printing, debating the nature of dramatic genres became an important project among European literati.¹⁶ These conversations have typically been attributed to the new visibility of Aristotle’s Poetics, but Daniel Javitch has argued persuasively that interest in the Poetics was a consequence of interest in the newly visible Greek plays, which Aristotle offered a guide to understanding and recreating.¹⁷ Although scholarship on the sources of early modern tragedy and comedy still tends to focus on Seneca and Plautus, the period’s genretreatises linked them forcefully with their Greek origins, frequently printing the words in Greek letters and situating them in aetiological stories of Greek literary and cultural developments.¹⁸ Sixteenth-century printings of the popular treatise De Tragoedia et Comoedia consistently departed from their customary Latin to present the etymological origin of tragedy as ‘ἀπό τοῦ τράγου’, from tragos (goat), and of comedy as ‘ἀπό τοῦ κωμάζειν’, from komazein (to revel).¹⁹ Vernacular treatises, in English as well as in European languages, followed suit. Describing ‘the Tragedy writers’ in 1586, William Webbe began with ‘Euripides, and Sophocles’, and characteristically claimed, ‘Tragedies had their inuention by one Thespis’.²⁰ In his 1589 Art of English Poesie, George Puttenham wrote that ‘forasmuch as a goate in Greeke is called Tragos, therfore these stately playes were called Tragedies’; and in his 1599 Model of

¹⁵ See Pollard (2013). ¹⁶ The first printed edition of Greek plays featured Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis, and Androm ache, edited by Lascaris for the Alopa press in Florence. In Venice, Aldus Manutius went on to print the complete works of Aristophanes in 1498, Sophocles in 1502, Euripides in 1503, and Aeschylus in 1518. ¹⁷ See Javitch (1998). Lurie (2012), 442 similarly argued that as early as 1534, ‘interpretations of Greek tragedy and of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy seem already inextricably intertwined’. For earlier arguments about Italian genre theory and its debts to Aristotle, see Spingarn (1908) and Weinberg (1961). ¹⁸ For accounts of Senecan and Plautine influence on early modern drama, see Cunliffe (1893), Braden (1985), and Miola (1992) and (1994). ¹⁹ ‘De tragoedia et comoedia’ (1567), 118. ²⁰ Webbe (1586), C1r. Other references to Thespis as originator of tragedy include Heywood (1612), D1v and D2r; and Rainolds (1599), 20.

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Poesy, William Scott similarly referred to ‘tragedy so named because the reward was a goat’.²¹ These associations reached commercial playwrights, who followed critics in linking the new genres with their Greek origins. In his 1579 defence of the theatre, Thomas Lodge attributed ‘the name of tragedy . . . to his original of tragos, hircus, et ode, cantus, so called for that the actors thereof had in reward for their labor a goat’s skin filled with wine’.²² Heywood observed that ‘Homer . . . composed his Illiads in the shape of a Tragedy, his Odisseas like a Comedy’, while the actual dramatic forms ‘in Athens . . . had their first originall’.²³ In their attention to notable Greek words, genres, and authors, these and other writers reflect a widespread identification of the new dramatic forms with their Greek roots. Invested with the authority of literary and theatrical origins, Greek texts and their commentaries shaped conversations about the nature of dramatic forms and their effects on audiences. The rise in publishing Greek texts, and debating their genres, coincides with a change that Frederick Boas has noted in English college account books’ terms for performances, from ludus, lusores, and interludia to the Greek generic terms comedia and tragedia by the middle of the sixteenth century, just before a similar shift on the public stage.²⁴ Similarly, Renaissance literary treatises in all languages employed an explicitly Greek vocabulary—tragedy, comedy, chorus, prologue, epilogue, protasis, epitasis, catastrophe—to analyse dramatic genres and their conventions, frequently printing these terms in Greek letters, and exploring their etymologies. In England, Roger Ascham emphasized the primacy of Greek plays as models for their genres when he argued that ‘In Tragedies, (the goodliest Argument of all . . . ) the Grecians Sophocles and Euripides far ouer match our Seneca in Latin’.²⁵ Given the extensive sixteenth-century associations between dramatic genres and the Greek plays that embodied their origins, examining plays that attracted attention in the period suggests likely factors in their appeal. Many printed editions contained the complete extant works of a given author, but printers also issued Greek plays in single or partial editions, providing some grounds for speculating on their principles of selection. The plays most popular in print in the period disproportionately featured Homeric material. Euripides’ Hecuba stands out conspicuously as the most prominent Greek play in the period: the first tragedy to be translated (by Erasmus, in 1503) and performed (in Belgium, 1506–14), the most frequently printed and translated in the sixteenth century, and the object of praise from critics including Philip Sidney, ²¹ Puttenham (1589), 27; Scott (2013), 23. ²² Lodge (1579), 35. ²³ Heywood (1612), sigs. E4r, F1v; see Demetriou and Pollard (2017). ²⁴ Boas (1914), 11 12. We can similarly see the increasing instances of comedy and tragedy, relative to interludes, masks, and pageants, in the lists of English plays in this period; see Harbage (1989). ²⁵ Ascham (1589), 52v.

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J. C. Scaliger, and Antonio Minturno.²⁶ Erasmus’ translation proved enormously influential; it inspired not only multiple reprintings, but also multiple imitations, in Latin and vernacular languages. Iphigenia in Aulis, also translated by Erasmus and frequently printed together with Hecuba, was the next most visible; before 1600, Hecuba appeared in fifty-two individual or partial editions, and Iphigenia in Aulis in thirty-nine.²⁷ Erasmus’ attraction to these particular two plays has gone largely unexplained, but conspicuous symmetries between them offer suggestive hints. Both plays dramatize the tragic urgency of partings between grieving mothers and sacrificial virgin daughters, and the sacrifices that occasion these partings both serve as bookends to the Trojan War. Iphigenia’s death begins the sea voyage that will bring the Greeks to Troy, while Polyxena’s puts Achilles’ ghost to rest. By singling out for international visibility two plays marking the start and endpoint of Troy’s downfall, Erasmus implicitly anointed Troy as the proper material for tragedy. There is a substantial gap between the popularity enjoyed by Hecuba and Iphigenia and the next most visible Greek plays in this period. Yet their implicit mandate for identifying authoritative tragedy as rooted in Troy seems to have carried over to other popular selections. Other frequently printed plays include the Homeric-based Ajax (13), the Electra plays of Sophocles (11) and Euripides (3), Orestes (5), Andromache (5), Cyclops (4), and Trojan Women (3). There were popular Greek plays that did not treat Homeric material—most notably Medea, Alcestis, and The Phoenician Women—but roughly two-thirds of the tragedies that appeared in individual or partial editions featured Homeric material. This is not our modern canon, dominated especially by Oedipus, Medea, and Bacchae, nor does it accurately reflect either the portions of the extant plays themselves, or preferences in antiquity or Byzantium. These numbers suggest that early modern printers—and the readers whose tastes presumably spurred and justified these selections—found Homeric stories to provide the most compelling versions of the newly prestigious tragic form. Just as book history has shown the value of tracing printed editions, the more recent rise of performance reception has shown the different kind of information we can get from tracing productions. The APGRD, in particular, has made it easier to explore the performance tradition through which Greek plays circulated. Documented sixteenth-century performances of Greek

²⁶ On Hecuba’s exceptional status, see Heath (1987), Mossman (1995), Pollard (2012), and Foley (2014); on the play’s earliest performance, see the entry in the APGRD online database, at . Hecuba had also been the subject of the first partial Latin translations of Greek drama: the Calabrian Greek scholar Leontius Pilatus translated the first 146 lines in 1362, followed by similar work by Francesco Filelfo (1398 1481) and Pietro da Montagnana ( fl. 1432 78); see Garland (2004), 96 7. ²⁷ For details of editions and translations, see appendices in Pollard (2017). Earlier discussions of Greek plays’ early modern circulation include Bolgar (1964), 508 25; Hirsch (1964); and Saladin (1996).

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tragedies in Europe (including both the Continent and England) suggest that Homeric plays were disproportionately visible on the stage as well as on the page. Of the twelve documented performances of or based on plays by Sophocles, eight, or two-thirds, feature Homeric material: four versions of Ajax, two of Electra, and two of Philoctetes (the other productions include three versions of Oedipus and one of Antigone).²⁸ With Aeschylus, there are fewer performances, and nearly all adaptations, but three of the four are versions of Homeric material: three versions of Agamemnon, versus only one production of Persians.²⁹ The balance is not quite as striking with Euripides, whose Medea was also especially popular in performance, but of twenty recorded sixteenth-century performances, twelve of them, or 60 per cent, are Homeric: four productions or adaptations of Hecuba, three versions of Iphigenia, three of Orestes, and two of the Trojan Women.³⁰ Together, the recorded performances of the three tragedians show that twenty-three of thirty-six, or nearly two-thirds, of these performances featured ‘Homeric’ plays. We cannot set too much store by these numbers, which are small and certainly incomplete, but they gain support from the similar ratio in printed editions. Together, then, print history and performance history indicate that Greek plays on Homeric material attracted particular interest, disproportionate to the extant plays at large. This suggestion raises a clear question: why? What did sixteenth-century printers, translators, readers, writers, and audiences find especially compelling about plays on Homeric topics?

STAGING HOMERIC HYBRIDITY The prestige of Troy certainly offered its own attractions, as did the authority of Erasmus, but these seem unlikely to have been the only factors driving ²⁸ The Ajax productions include a planned staging in 1564 and an actualized one in 1571, both in England, as well as performances in France in 1575 and 1587; the versions of Electra took place in France in 1537 and in Hungary in 1558; and the Philoctetes performances both took place in England between 1540 and 1560. The three versions of Oedipus were performed in Italy in 1556 and 1565, and in Germany in 1585; the Antigone took place c.1580 in England. See the APGRD database, and appendices in Pollard (2017), for details. ²⁹ The versions of Orestes were staged in 1550, 1567, and 1599, all in England; the versions of Agamemnon appeared in Germany in 1554, and in England in 1584 and 1599. The staging of Persians took place in Greece in 1571. See the APGRD database for details. ³⁰ The four productions or adaptations of Hecuba took place in Flanders in either 1506 or 1514, in Wittenberg in 1525, in Dubrovnik in 1559, and in France in 1584; the versions of Iphigenia took place in Germany in 1555, England c.1575, and France c.1575; those of Orestes in 1550, 1567, and 1599, all in England; and the two of or based on the Trojan Women in France in 1579 and Italy in 1589. See the APGRD database and Pollard (2017). I note that there are two plays identified with both Euripides and Aeschylus in the APGRD’s lists; for tallying purposes I have aligned them with Euripides, given the relative invisibility of Aeschylus in this period.

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sixteenth-century interest in tragedies featuring Trojan material. Early modern commentaries on these plays suggest that their generic complexity or hybridity was understood to bring them a distinctive moving power. Hecuba is a useful example because the play’s popularity stands out so conspicuously, and because contemporary critics commented on it at length. In his preface to the play, Stiblinus describes it as having first place among the tragedies because of the intensity of Hecuba’s suffering; ‘whom’, he asks, ‘would she not move?’³¹ In 1543 Giraldi Cinthio saw its portrayal of Hecuba’s suffering as an acutely vivid representation of maternal pain; he wrote that Hecuba most marvelously observes her character as a mother when she bewails the wretchedness of her daughter and wishes to die instead of her, or at least to end her wretched days with her most fitting conduct in view of the motherly pity and the magnitude of grief which she was experiencing.³²

Hecuba herself appears as the epitome of unhappiness in texts by Ariosto and Rabelais, among others, and in the first English neoclassical tragedy, Norton and Sackville’s 1561 Gorboduc, she is described as ‘the wofullest wretch | That euer liued to make a myrour of ’.³³ When Hamlet asks ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?’, he does not simply reflect on the nature of theatrical illusion: he directly confronts the period’s icon for the classical tragic tradition.³⁴ But despite the widespread emphasis on Hecuba’s sorrow, Euripides’ play does not simply dramatize straightforward grief. Hecuba transforms her laments into revenge on her malefactor, and takes great satisfaction from her success. When Polymestor asks Hecuba, ‘You take joy in committing outrage against me, you knavish creature!’, she replies, ‘What? Should I not enjoy my revenge on you?’ (Euripides, Hecuba 1257–8).³⁵ Early modern readers noticed this twist. The sixteenth-century scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger objected to Hecuba’s successful revenge because of its anti-tragic turn: ‘since the issue of tragedy should be unhappy, and Hecuba is a tragedy, Hecuba ought to have been made more miserable at the end than at the beginning; this is certainly not done, for the end furnishes some scant relief to her misery’.³⁶ As Scaliger’s concern shows, the encroachment of triumph onto pathos implies an intrinsically mixed genre, complicating the standard sixteenthcentury definition of tragedy. Influenced especially by Donatus, tragedy was primarily understood in the period as a story that begins well and ends unhappily.³⁷ Not only does Hecuba draw on wit to achieve some slight mastery ³¹ Stiblinus (1562), 38, cited from Mastronarde. ³² Giraldi (2011), 242. ³³ Norton and Sackville (1912), 3.1.14 15. ³⁴ Shakespeare (1997), 2.2.536 7; Pollard (2012). ³⁵ Euripides (1995), 513. ³⁶ Scaliger (1905), 61. ³⁷ Donatus wrote, ‘illic [comedy] prima turbulenta, tranquilla ultima, in tragoedia contrario’; Donatus, 1.21; on the circulation and influence of this treatise in the sixteenth century, see Pollard (2013). On early modern definitions of ‘tragedy’, see Hagen (1997).

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over her devastation, but her blinding of Polymestor, as Froma Zeitlin has noted, echoes the successful cunning of Odysseus’ blinding of Polyphemos, which was widely identified with the origins of tragicomedy.³⁸ Hecuba’s popularity coincided with Giraldi’s justification of ‘tragedies with happy endings’, which he rooted in the premise that it was wrong ‘to displease those for whose pleasure the play is put on the stage’.³⁹ Going further, Giraldi argued that ‘tragedies that end terribly can serve for texts to be read (if it appears that spectators hate them); those that end happily can be for the stage’.⁴⁰ Although their ideas frequently diverged, in this emphasis on pleasing audiences he followed Castelvetro’s claim that ‘poetry was invented for the sole purpose of providing pleasure’.⁴¹ But Giraldi makes an important distinction between texts for reading, in which terrible endings might be acceptable, and plays for the stage, in which audience pleasure is an absolute requirement. The darkly ‘happy ending’ of Hecuba’s successful punishment of Polymestor offers some satisfaction not only to her, but to audiences as well. If Hecuba, a figure from the tragic Iliad, could evoke the mixed genre of tragicomedy, it is an intriguing irony that this hybrid status implicitly aligns her with Odysseus: her key adversary in the play, and the protagonist of the Odyssey, the purportedly comic epic. Although Hecuba was the most popular Greek play in the period, Cyclops became an especially fertile source of critical debates about tragicomedy. In his famous treatise on tragicomedy, written towards the end of the sixteenth century, Giambattista Guarini singled out the play as a classical model for generic mixing. Rhetorically asking why it shouldn’t be possible to mix tragic and comic modes in the same play, he pointed out that it was: Certainly Euripides did this in his Cyclops, where he mixed grave danger for the life of Odysseus, a tragic character, with the drunkenness of the Cyclops, which is a comic action. And among the Latins, Plautus did the same thing in the Amphitryo . . . ⁴²

As was frequently noted in the period, Amphitryo was the earliest play to use the term ‘tragicomoedia’, so Guarini’s identification of the term with Euripides marks a significant rethinking of the genre’s roots. By doing so, he posited an origin for the genre that is not only Greek, but ultimately Homeric, and rooted specifically in Homer’s juxtaposition of pathos and witty triumph.

³⁸ See Zeitlin (1996), 194 8; I am grateful to David Quint for calling this to my attention. Florent Chrestien’s preface to his Latin translation of Euripides’ Cyclops (published 1605, but completed earlier) explicitly identified this play with the origins of tragicomedy; see also Herrick (1955), 7 13; and Pollard (2015). On Renaissance identification of the Odyssey with the origins of tragicomedy, see Dewar Watson (2005), esp. 24 8. ³⁹ Giraldi (2011), 218. On Giraldi’s ‘tragedy with a happy ending’ in relation to tragicomedy, see Herrick (1955), Ristine (1963), and Dewar Watson (2007). ⁴⁰ Giraldi (2011), 218. ⁴¹ Castelvetro (1984), 19. ⁴² Guarini (1962), 508.

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Elsewhere in the same treatise, Guarini again compares these two classical models—‘The Amphitryo of Plautus has more of the comic, the Cyclops of Euripides more of the tragic’—and insists that they are both equally tragicomic: Yet it is not true that the first or the second is not a tragicomedy, since neither of them has as its end the purging of terror and compassion, for this purgation cannot exist where there is laughter, which disposes the spirits to expand, and not to restrain themselves.⁴³

Like Giraldi before him, Guarini promoted tragicomedy specifically because of what he saw as the genre’s effects on audiences’ emotional responses. And although his preference for a modified version of catharsis differed with typical readings of Aristotle, he, like Giraldi, was conspicuously indebted to Aristotle’s discussion of ‘tragedy with a happy ending’, which similarly cited Homer as a model.⁴⁴ Guarini was not the only one to single out Cyclops as rivaling Amphitryo in providing an early model, and classical mandate, for the genre of tragicomedy. Florent Chrestien’s Latin translation of Cyclops, published in 1605 but completed before his death in 1596, presented the play as an example of classical tragicomedy. At the start of the notes to his translation, Chrestien wrote, I do not know whether to call this play a tragedy, for it does not have a sad ending, according to the common definition . . . and in fact the characters are mixed from tragic and comic examples . . . . And so, as Plautus prefaced his Amphitryo, I think that this play could be called a tragic comedy.⁴⁵

Chrestien’s translation enjoyed considerable attention, especially in England. In the notes to his 1611 masque Oberon, Ben Jonson referred both to Euripides’ Cyclops and to a treatise with which this translation was printed, Isaac Casaubon’s De Satyrica Graecorum poesi, indicating familiarity with the edition.⁴⁶ I suggest that it is no coincidence that tragicomedy rose rapidly in prominence following these critical writings, not only in erudite plays in continental Europe but also in England’s commercial playhouses.⁴⁷ John Fletcher, who is widely credited with a central role in introducing the genre to England, discussed Guarini’s critical writings in the published preface to his 1607 play The Faithful Shepherdess, which itself directly responded to Guarini’s Pastor Fido.

⁴³ Guarini (1962), 524 5. ⁴⁴ See Aristotle, Poetics 1453a30 9; Dewar Watson (2007); and Pollard (2015). ⁴⁵ Chrestien (1605), 32; Sutton (1998). ⁴⁶ See Casaubon (1605); Sutton (1998); and Jonson (1941), 341 2. Jonson’s masque also features a number of characters titled ‘satyre’. ⁴⁷ See Pollard (2015).

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Within Troy’s legacy, Odysseus arguably represents Hecuba’s radical opposite. Just as the queen who loses everything represents Troy’s sufferings at their most extreme, the wily Greek who eventually returns to a warm marital embrace represents the happiest outcome for the Achaeans. Yet the two figures served similar functions in the sixteenth century, representing the theatrical power of mingling tragedy’s sorrows with comedy’s satisfactions. It is a testament to the emotional and generic complexity of Homer’s poetry that even these extremes of tragic loss and comic gain became identified with the ambiguities of tragicomic hybridity. And as early modern responses to their protagonists show, gender is central to their generic legacies, with Odysseus’ heroic masculine wit more easily evoking the pleasurable aspects of tragicomedy than Hecuba’s uncomfortably violent vindication. Just as critics attributed the triumph of Odysseus’ survival to his manly prudence and restraint, they praised the maternal roots of Hecuba’s grief as the source of her moving power.⁴⁸ Despite their differences, Hecuba and Odysseus both share a direct tie to Troy: they were there. Other Homeric figures, absent from the front lines of the war, acquired different meanings and attractions, especially to a particular set of early modern audiences. Although Hecuba appeared most frequently in printed editions, and Cyclops garnered the most critical scrutiny in relation to the controversial topic of tragicomedy, the children of Agamemnon enjoyed disproportionate interest in England. Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis was the first Greek play translated in England, by Erasmus in 1506, and into English, by Lady Jane Lumley in the 1550s; it was translated into English again by George Peele in the 1570s, and performed in the 1570s by St Paul’s boys, as well as possibly in a private performance in Lumley’s Nonsuch estate.⁴⁹ Iphigenia’s brother, Orestes, similarly attracted English interest. There are no recorded sixteenth-century performances of Orestes plays in continental Europe, but England saw at least three productions of plays featuring Orestes before 1600, and another in 1609, alongside the two productions of Iphigenia and two more featuring Agamemnon.⁵⁰ Documented performances of Greek tragedies in England show a ratio of Homeric material similar to that seen both in printed editions and in overall European performances.⁵¹ But in contrast to continental European performance traditions, England’s performances focus especially on the aftermath of the house of Atreus. ⁴⁸ See Stiblinus (1562), Chrestien (1605), and Pollard (2012). ⁴⁹ See Pollard (2017); for arguments supporting a 1550s Nonsuch performance, see Findlay (2006) and Wynne Davies (2008). ⁵⁰ Westminster boys performed Euripides’ Orestes in 1567; John Pickering’s Horestes appeared in 1567; an Orestes’ Furies played at the Rose Theatre in 1599; and Thomas Goffe’s Tragedy of Orestes was performed in Christ Church, Oxford, c.1609. An Agamemnon and Ulysses was performed in 1584; and the Rose Theatre performed an Agamemnon in 1599. ⁵¹ On additional sixteenth century documented English performances of Greek or Greek based plays, see APGRD and appendices in Pollard (2017).

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These are, of course, small numbers and cannot bear much weight. Yet Agamemnon’s children offered distinctive variations on Greek, or Homeric, generic mixing. Orestes, the most prominent in England, appears in Euripides’ titular tragedy as a maddened and murderous young man who suddenly becomes docile and accepts Apollo’s command to cease raging and marry his cousin. His next-most-visible vehicle in the period, the condensed text of the Oresteia, similarly cut the bloody bits and focused on the pardon and hopeful future of Orestes.⁵² With Orestes’ averted violence and a happy ending featuring two mandated marriages, Euripides challenges restrictive notions of tragic conventions.⁵³ Describing the ending, Stiblinus wrote: At this point, while the affair is poised on the edge of a sharp knife (as we say) and is in its greatest moment of crisis, Apollo appears unexpectedly, arranges every thing, and curbs the awful attempts of Orestes. From here the story receives its happy and clearly comic end.⁵⁴

Orestes’ visibility in sixteenth-century England was indebted to John Pickering’s Horestes (published 1567), a hybrid morality play mixing revenge with slapstick comedy.⁵⁵ But Pickering’s attraction to the subject also suggests the appeal of a frenzied adolescent male, moving from violence to the relief of a quasi-comic ending, for the schoolboys who were the primary readers, translators, and actors of classical tragedy in sixteenth-century England. Orestes, like Odysseus, offered them a model for the possibility of resolution following the horrors of Troy. Yet Orestes, younger than either Odysseus or Hecuba, represented the next generation, suggesting a future still to come. As a prototype of the melancholy malcontent male revenger, Orestes even more than Hecuba or Odysseus suggests a model of tragedy in which some version of triumph is as significant as loss and grief. His sex, moreover, offered English audiences a more palatable version of the vindictive triumph that jarred some early modern responses to Hecuba. I suggest that the dark generic mixing of Euripides’ play, rooted in Homer’s complex engagement with the emotional effects of poetic structure, offered a crucial model for both the black comedy of revenge drama and the pleasures of tragicomedies—genres crucial to the rise of English theatre’s commercial success. Merging sorrow with satisfaction, figures such as Hecuba, Odysseus, and Orestes offered crucial channels for transmitting Homer’s complex legacy of mixing genres and emotions to writers and playgoers working towards a commercial theatre.

⁵² See Ewbank (2005). ⁵³ On the play’s generic tensions, see Dunn (1989). ⁵⁴ Stiblinus (1562), 88, cited from Mastronarde; my emphasis. ⁵⁵ See Pickering (1982). Pickering’s version of Orestes draws primarily on William Caxton’s translation of Recueil des Histoires de Troye, c.1475; see Pickering (1982), 29 30 and Phillips (1955), 227 44.

6 Epic Acting in Shakespeare’s Hamlet David Wiles

Given the importance of Homeric recitation in classical Athens, notably at the annual Panathenaea,¹ epic performance seems a lacuna in the classically oriented culture of the European Renaissance. The uncertainty of Renaissance scholars as to whether Homeric epic in antiquity was a spoken form or sung to the sound of the lyre does something to explain this near invisibility. After flourishing in the medieval world, the recitation of epic poetry appears to have been relegated to the Celtic and Balkan fringes, to the child’s bedside, and to the domain of the folk singer. Theatre, on the other hand, trumpeting its moral authority derived from antiquity, went from strength to strength as a bastion of Western culture. It has been a frustration to many modern scholars, therefore, that when Plato chose to write about the art of the performer, he introduced us to Ion the rhapsode rather than to an actor of tragedy. Why did he make that perverse choice, we ask ourselves? Perhaps Ion served Plato’s turn better because he recited words of the Iliad that had been performed many times before, with the consequence that his craft was more obviously a second order of mimesis. Furthermore, the rhapsode did not wear a mask, so the paradoxical nature of his emotional state was open to public scrutiny. Early modern dramatists were no keener than fifth-century Athenian tragedians to invite an invidious comparison by adapting canonical epic poems directly for the stage. Shakespeare’s decision in Hamlet’s player scene (3.2) to draw from Virgil part of Aeneas’ speech to Dido was in this context an unusual one, and it was designed to raise questions about the nature of the actor’s mimesis. My concern in this chapter will be not with the reception of epic texts, but with classically informed definitions of ‘epic acting’. I will show why classical epic had a crucial part to play in Shakespeare’s own remarkable exploration of the art of the actor.

¹ Nagy (2009a) offers a useful overview.

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Ben Jonson, in his 1601 play The Poetaster, transposed to Augustan Rome the literary milieu of Elizabethan London. The plot concerns a law student who yearns to be a poet, and is commissioned by a company of professional actors to write a play with the help of a dramaturge. The poetaster of the title is self-evidently John Marston, an Inns of Court lawyer who wrote for the new small-scale boys’ company at St Paul’s Cathedral, and in the climax of Jonson’s play Marston vomits up many of his awful neologisms. Jonson’s satire of the London literary world includes a scene where boy actors audition for roles in classic adult plays, reminding us of Rosencrantz’s jibe at the ‘little eyases’ who ‘berattle the common stages’ (Hamlet, F 2.2.337 and 340). In the climax of the play, Jonson brings on the figure of Virgil, summoned from his country retreat by Caesar to function as poet-legislator and call the unruly poets of London/ Rome to order. Invited to perform a random sample of his work, Virgil reads from his throne or professorial chair the famous account of how Dido seduces Aeneas.² The passage is noteworthy for Jonson’s use of the heroic couplet, a form which was borrowed from Chapman’s recent 1598 supplement to his Homer, and which would soon become normative for English renditions of classical epic, as also for tragedy in the heroic mode. Jonson turns to epic in The Poetaster because of its moral and political authority, in contrast with the low, anarchic world of the theatre. It is significant that Virgil reads rather than recites, and thus lends no physical embodiment to his performance. At the start of the nineteenth century, the English elocutionist Gilbert Austin equated the ‘epic’ style of delivery and gesture with the sublime art of the tragic actor, endowed with a ‘magnificence’ and ‘boldness’ rarely required in the ‘rhetorical’ register, and never in the ‘colloquial’.³ Austin follows here the tripartite division of rhetorical styles familiar from Roman texts such as the Rhetoric for Herennius (formerly attributed to Cicero).⁴ Half a century earlier, John Hill in his treatise on acting, praised the actor James Quin for his command of the sublime style. And in the context of a London revival of Comus, Hill wrote that the very language of Milton seems contrived on purpose for the voice of Mr Quin, and the voice of Mr Quin, while he is speaking it, seems formed on purpose for the language of Milton. Whoever has heard him read any part of the Paradise Lost of that divine author, knows the full force of what we are advancing; but to those who have not had that pleasure, we may recommend his playing Comus.⁵

Evidently Quin gave some readings from England’s most celebrated epic poem to a select private audience, but there was no public space for such a tour de force of pure vocalization.

² The Poetaster 5.2. Jonson translates Virgil, Aeneid 4.160 f. ⁴ Ad Herennium 4.8. ⁵ Hill (1750), 99 100.

³ Austin (1806), 452 8.

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It was Brecht who rendered the term ‘epic acting’ common currency in twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussions of acting, and for him the point about epic was not its sublime or high tragic register but its emphasis on simple storytelling, detaching the person of the actor from the character whom he or she presented. As Brecht explained in his notes on The Mother (1932), the actor in this new epic or non-Aristotelian type of drama will ‘do all he can to make himself observed standing between the spectator and the event’.⁶ Brecht describes how Helene Weigel in the titular role of the mother in the first scene of that play stood in a particular characteristic attitude in the centre of the stage, and spoke the sentences as if they were in the third person; and so she not only refrained from pretending in fact to be or to claim to be Vlassova (the Mother), and in fact to be speaking those sentences, but actually prevented the spectator from trans ferring himself to a particular room, as habit and indifference might demand, and imagining himself to be the invisible eye witness and eavesdropper of a unique intimate occasion.⁷

This vision of epic as a form, which militated against instinctive emotional identification and the surrender of judgement, is a far cry from the vision of Plato. While Brecht set up a dichotomy between epic and Aristotelian tragedy, Plato described the effect of Ion’s epic performance precisely in terms of the three ‘tragic’ emotions designated by Aristotle—pity, fear, and wonder: SOCRATES :

When you recite epic verses well and most amaze the audience [theomenous, lit. ‘spectators’] . . . singing some sad passage about Andromache or Hecuba or Priam—are you then in your right mind? Or are you beside yourself and, under the influence of inspiration, do you imagine you are present at the events you are describing . . . ? ION : When I recite a sad [eleinon] passage, my eyes fill with tears; when it is something frightening or terrifying [deinon], my hair stands on end with fear and my heart jumps . . . SOCRATES : Then do you realise that you rhapsodes have exactly this effect on most of your audience too? ION : . . . Every time I perform I look down at them from the stage and see them weeping and looking terrified and marvelling at what is being said. For I have to pay close attention to them: if I make them weep I shall be laughing myself as I take my money but if I make them laugh, I shall be weeping myself because I will lose money.⁸

⁶ Brecht (1964), 58. ⁷ Brecht (1964), 58. ⁸ Trans. Sheppard in Bychkov and Sheppard (2010), 7 8.

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For Plato, it was the emotionalism of epic that defined the genre, and he was no less mistrustful of such emotion than Brecht. Ion’s eye to the money points up the moral depravity of theatrical emotion. Quintilian, in his account of an orator’s education, understood that the representation and embodiment of emotion was a necessity of his art, not a moral evil to be avoided. The key to the performer’s success, he explains, is the visual imagination—in Greek, the phantasia. His examples of such visualization are drawn from Virgil: the mother of Euryalus who drops a shuttle symbolic of the thread of life when she hears of her son’s death; the smooth skin of Pallas’ breast penetrated by a stab wound; the picturing of his home town by the dying Antores. Quintilian has no qualms about the notion of identification: we must become those of whose plight we complain, he argues, and each of us must so persuade his own animus (soul/mind). When he wants to reinforce his argument by making reference to the performer, Quintilian has no professional rhapsode as a reference point, so necessarily turns to tragedy, where he reports on his observation of actors weeping after they have removed their masks at the end of the play. This leads him back to the educational practice of declamation, whereby children at school improvise quasi-theatrical speeches in fictional situations such as a shipwreck: why assume a persona (character/mask), he asks, if not also to assume the relevant emotion? Which leads him to the climax of his discussion, where he describes his own professional practice: he himself weeps real tears and his skin becomes pale in a true simulation of pain.⁹ His art is effectively the same as that of Ion, but carries the opposite moral connotations because Quintilian believed in the cultural centrality of public speech. Renaissance authorities on rhetoric were reluctant to follow Quintilian and engage with performance technique, but they could not sidestep the question of emotion. Philip Melanchthon, the famous rector of the Protestant University of Wittenberg, was the author of rhetorical textbooks widely used directly or indirectly in Elizabethan grammar schools.¹⁰ In his commentary on Cicero’s recently recovered De Oratore, he observed that the arousal of emotion requires not only the moral attributes identified by Cicero but also Quintilian’s phantasia, and he gave a new turn to the discussion with his minute analysis of word order. For example this passage from Virgil on the slaughter of Priam: Altaria ad ipsa trementem Traxit et in multo lapsantem sanguine gnati. (Aeneid 2.550 1)

⁹ Quintilian, 6.2.26 36. Cf. the supplementary discussion of visualization in 8.3.70 1, which also draws on Virgil. ¹⁰ Baldwin (1944), 19, 30, etc.

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Here each individual word has an associated emotion. First he amplifies the savageness of the killing because it happened at the altar, later the pathos invades the eyes with trementem (quivering). Likewise Traxit (dragged); likewise lapsan tem (slipping) and rolling about in sanguine (blood): but the most appalling of all is that he rolls about in the blood of gnati (child). In this way he held back the highest point of emotion for the last place.¹¹

Yet again we see Virgil used as the exemplary text for discussing how the orator should create affect. The slaughter of Priam, the famously heartrending moment that came to Melanchthon’s mind, was also the moment that came to the mind of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600).¹² When Hamlet encounters the players, he welcomes them to Elsinore, and immediately asks them for ‘a taste of your quality, come a passionate speech’. The First Player asks which speech he should choose, and Hamlet replies: ‘I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted, or if it was, not above once, for the play I remember pleased not the million, ’twas caviary to the general, but it was as I received it and others, whose judgements in such matters cried in the top of mine, an excellent play.’ This play, scorned by the general public but admired by the intellectual elite, turns out to be an adaptation of Virgil. Hamlet goes on to specify that he loved one speech in particular, namely ‘’twas Aeneas’ talk to Dido, and there about of it especially when he speaks of Priam’s slaughter’. When Hamlet recites the opening lines of this speech, Polonius praises him for speaking it so well ‘with good accent and good discretion’.¹³ In other words, Hamlet knows how to parse the grammar and find the metre, but there is no indication that he knows how to create the relevant emotion. The First Player evidently has no such difficulties and many modern performances have demonstrated the power of his text to grip an audience. Like Quintilian, the First Player by the end of his oration has ‘turned his colour, and has tears in’s eyes’. With his closing words the Player in the role of Aeneas declares how the cries of Hecuba cannot but milk tears from the eyes of heaven, and create ‘passion in the gods’.¹⁴ Quintilian and Cicero took it for granted that passions in the orator would be transmitted directly to the listener, but Shakespeare’s text fails to reveal just how far an emotionally alienated Hamlet and an intellectually desiccated Polonius visibly shared the affective condition of the Player.¹⁵ The Player’s speech is often taken to parody ¹¹ Mack (2011), 121. I have reframed the citation of the Latin. ¹² Cf. Burrow’s account of this overtly Virgilian sequence, Ch. 3 in this volume. ¹³ Hamlet 2.2.427 ff. Here and subsequently I have used the text and punctuation of the Second Quarto (1604), with modernized spelling. Line references are from Harold Jenkins’s Arden edition. ¹⁴ Hamlet 2.2.513 16. ¹⁵ The phraseology in the First Quarto ‘Why these players here draw water from eyes’ hints at Hamlet’s own reaction.

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the ‘mighty line’ of Christopher Marlowe, whose Dido Queen of Carthage incorporated another version of Aeneas’ speech. Published in 1594, Marlowe’s Dido does not seem to have been part of the public professional repertoire, and may well have been a failure on the public stage. Whether or not Shakespeare alludes to Marlowe,¹⁶ the key purpose of the speech is clear: to raise questions about the authenticity of expressed emotion. In the monologue which follows, Hamlet ponders how an actor in a mere dream of passion Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all the visage wanned, Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit;¹⁷

The project of Cicero and Quintilian was precisely this: to exercise persuasion on one’s own animus in order to effect bodily change. Hamlet contrasts the actor’s motive and cue for passion with his own, which in theory should have induced him to drown the stage in tears and split the eardrums of the audience, creating shock and awe. When he tries the brief experiment of shouting—‘bloody, bawdy villain . . . !’—he experiences himself as some kind of prostitute, a common jibe thrown at actors. The failure of this exercise in passionate self-expression leads him to formulate a new strategy, which turns upon the ‘cunning of the scene’ rather than upon its emotional force. He sets up an experiment in audience research, where his focus will be on the emotional temperature of the spectator as distinct from the actor. In his next encounter with the players, Hamlet offers them his famous advice on how to perform: HAMLET :

Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue, but if you mouth it as many of our Players do, I had as lief the town cryer spoke my lines, nor do not saw the air too much with your hand thus, but use all gently, for in the very torrent tempest, and as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness, oh it offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to totters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows, and noise: I would have such a fellow whipt for o’er-doing Termagant, it out Herods Herod, pray you avoid it. PLAYER : I warrant your honour.

¹⁶ On the nature of how Marlowe’s play worked its influence, see Maguire and Smith (2015). ¹⁷ Hamlet 2.2.546 51.

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Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor, suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’er-step not the modesty of nature: For any thing so o’er-done, is from the purpose of playing, whose end both at the first, and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the Mirror up to nature, to show virtue her feature; scorn her own Image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure: Now this over-done, or come tardy off, though it makes the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of which one, must in your allowance o’er-weigh a whole Theatre of others. O there be Players that I have seen play, and heard others praised, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that neither having th’accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, Pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature’s Journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.¹⁸

Many modern critics and directors have assumed that Hamlet voices the views of Shakespeare, begging the question of why a young student from Wittenberg, a self-confessed failure as an actor, should see fit to counsel an experienced group of professionals. Peter Hall, for example, declares that ‘Hamlet’s advice to the players defines Shakespeare’s taste’; and again that ‘Hamlet gives us Shakespeare’s style of acting confirmed: tripping speech, witty delivery, modest, temperate, perhaps cool—to use a word in modern parlance—as well as smooth.’¹⁹ In the earliest substantive account we have of English acting, Charles Gildon in 1710 offered a more nuanced view, in a book which purported to record the words of the great actor Thomas Betterton, connected to Shakespeare by a line of direct transmission. Educated himself in the rhetorical tradition, Gildon endorses Hamlet’s advice insofar as it pertains to the art of speaking, but he turns to Hamlet’s soliloquy about the player’s ‘dream of passion’ in order to describe the ‘Soul and Art of Acting’. Though Shakespeare may not have been a great actor himself, Gildon claims that he understood the actor’s need to create ‘Fire in Anger’ and ‘Tears in Grief ’. This is the true art of theatre, for ‘Passions are wonderfully convey’d from one Person’s Eyes to another’s; the Tears of one melting the Heart of the other, by a very visible Sympathy between their Imaginations and Aspects.’²⁰ Linguistic skills need to be complemented by an appropriate physicality, and Gildon finds appropriate guidelines in Henry V’s rallying call to a soldier: Then imitate the Action of the Tyger. Stiffen the Sinews, summon up the Blood; ¹⁸ Hamlet 3.2.1 35. ¹⁹ Hall (2000), 45; Hall (2003), 61. Cf. Barton (1984), 6. ²⁰ Gildon (1710), 81, 71.

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Disguise fair Nature with hard favour’d Rage; Then lend the Eye a terrible Aspect . . .

Hamlet’s reference to the ‘modesty of nature’ is dismissed as hopelessly ambiguous because no one can agree what ‘nature’ really is.²¹ Like Hamlet in Act 2, Scene 2, Gildon takes it as axiomatic that the business of acting is to represent and communicate passion. To this end, Virgil is an incomparable resource. To play a character like Hamlet is to understand the nature of his passions, and the controlled courage of Aeneas is not the same as the courage of Turnus, which combines fury with the magnanimity; Turnus’ fury when he fights is conjoined with grief, in contrast to the barbarous joy of Mezentius.²² Virgil was long regarded in the rhetorical tradition as an orator’s primer for the understanding of emotion. Gildon identifies and attempts to reconcile the tension between two different aesthetics. On the one hand, the rhetorical tradition identified acting with oratory as a systematic art of public persuasion, and the arousal of physical signs of emotion in the orator or actor was a sure way to generate emotion in the spectator. The grand style of epic had the objective of maximizing the emotional force of language. On the other hand, over against these principles lay another set of aesthetic values based upon the classical principle of mimesis, and set down by Hamlet in his advice to the players. The ultimate aim here is the imitation of humanity. The artist should aim to hold ‘the mirror up to nature, to shew virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’—in other words, like a mirror or wax imprint, the play should represent with precision the moral qualities of both individuals and of society. For the metaphor of the mirror, the Roman source was a familiar axiom attributed by Donatus to Cicero, which stated that comedy should be an ‘imitation of life, a mirror of custom, and an image of truth’. Donatus was the editor of Terence’s comedies, and Ben Jonson places this axiom in the mouth of his artistic spokesman in a new comedy set in Elizabethan London written for performance by Shakespeare’s company at around the time Shakespeare was writing Hamlet.²³ Hamlet’s application of this realist principle not to comedy but to the sublime genre of tragedy was a departure from orthodoxy. Hamlet’s advice to the players is inflected by the gentlemanly ideal of decorum, a recurrent theme in Quintilian, and most of Hamlet’s advice is in fact firmly grounded in Quintilian. For example, when Hamlet refers to passion as a torrent, tempest, or whirlwind, there is a clear allusion to Quintilian’s account of the grand style. Quintilian describes the force of language as a

²¹ Gildon (1710), 117 18, slightly misquoting Henry V 3.1.6 9, 88. ²² Gildon (1710), 35 6, referencing Aeneid 10. ²³ Every Man Out Of His Humour (1599), 3.6.203 9.

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torrent (torrens) that will sweep the judge away, alluding to the river Araxes in Aeneid 8.728; and he likens Ulysses’ deployment of the grand style in the Iliad to a snowstorm.²⁴ Hamlet’s critique of overacting is borrowed from Quintilian’s scathing critique of the populist orator who has not benefited from his own programme of training. These people, however, also claim a reputation for ‘strong’ speaking by their delivery [pronuntiatio]. They shout at every point, and bellow everything out, with ‘uplifted hand’ (as they say), with much running up and down, panting, gesticulating violently, and tossing their heads like madmen. Clapping your hands, stamping on the floor, striking your thigh and chest and forehead, are all wonderfully effective with the dingier part of the audience [pullatum circu lum]. But the educated speaker, just as he knows how to lower the tension often in his speech and constantly vary his style and arrange his material, also knows, in his delivery, how to suit his action [actum] to the tone of each part of his speech; if there is any rule which deserves to be always observed, it is to keep, and be seen to keep, within the bounds of decency [modestus].²⁵

Quintilian dismisses as mere violence what rival orators term vis or ‘force’. Hamlet’s dismissive attitude to the groundlings, the core paying public of Shakespeare’s theatre, is pure Quintilian—with the small proviso that in the Roman law court the dingy uneducated spectators gathered in a circulum (circle) around the edge of the performance space rather than at the foot of the stage. The advice that Hamlet gives to the players is entirely consistent with the viewpoint of a young man who had studied rhetoric at the feet of Melanchthon in Wittenberg. Shakespeare, like Jonson but unlike Marston, was not a university graduate, and there is no reason for him to have endorsed wholeheartedly the artistic views of a prince who seems to be the victim of over-education. However, Hamlet does not lecture the players in order to show off his erudition, but in order to realize a practical objective. We know that he has in the past enjoyed tragedies performed in public theatres, pushing passion to an extreme by means of the grand style, but now his needs are different. He wants to catch the conscience of the King. In an uncompromising Platonist anecdote about the tyrant Alexander of Pherae, Plutarch tells how a brutal tyrant was moved to tears by the fate of Hecuba and Andromache in Euripides’ Trojan Women. The point of Plutarch’s story is not that the tyrant’s conscience was touched, but rather that emotions induced by a skilled actor in the theatre have no bearing on moral conduct in real life. Both Philip Sidney and Plutarch’s translator Thomas North tried to take the edge off this story by granting tragedy a glimmer of moral efficacy,²⁶ yet it is precisely because of the ²⁴ Quintilian, 12.10.61 2. ²⁵ Quintilian, 2.12.9 11, trans. Russell. ²⁶ Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas 31. For Sidney and North, see the useful discussion in Clary (1998).

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disconnect between tragic emotion and moral conduct in real life that Hamlet insists upon what Peter Hall dubs a ‘cool’ performance. Hamlet instructs the actor to moderate and temper emotion, lowering his voice and reining in his gestures, in order to focus upon an accurate representation of reality. Hamlet needs to know that the ghost spoke the truth, and a precise representation of the facts is therefore what he requires. If the First Player were to perform with all the rhetorical skill he demonstrated in Act 2, Scene 2, then the murder of Gonzago would reduce Claudius—like Alexander of Pherae—to tears whether or not he were guilty of fratricide. The experiment would be of no avail. The text of ‘The Mousetrap’ has received relatively scant critical attention. Critics have for the most part retreated from an unrewarding quest to identify the twelve to sixteen lines which Hamlet promised to insert. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions focused upon the audience rather than the play, the players performing either with their backs to the audience or removed to a remote upstage recess, in order to leave Hamlet himself as the centre of attention. Modern productions have commonly attempted to impose a physical theatricality upon the text rather than find bridges to Shakespeare’s language. Moreover, no convincing aesthetic rationale has been found for Hamlet’s inclusion of the dumbshow, to which Claudius fails to respond, for no obvious reason. To unpick this mystery, we need first to take account of Hamlet’s radical change of plan. When Hamlet decides to insert a short passage into an old play, inspired by the First Player’s rendition of Priam’s fate, he is working on the assumption that a powerful performance will ‘make mad the guilty and appal the free’. He describes actors as the ‘abstract and brief chronicles of the time’, in other words public broadcasters, and he knows that the boy actors have been successful as satirists, their mere words intimidating gallants who sport rapiers. What Hamlet intends at this point is evidently a public exposé of the usurping king. In the course of his long soliloquy, having failed to generate in himself an appropriate expression of rage, Hamlet decides that he must first gain definitive proof of the facts. This necessitates a very different kind of performance. The text that the actors subsequently present is an excruciatingly bad one. The opening is a pastiche of Seneca’s copious style, and a mathematical nonsense because thirty solar years do not correlate with thirty dozen moons, but in fact represent close to thirty-one dozen lunations, and rhetorical amplification here creates an absurdity. The body of the text then takes the form of an academic disputation about remarriage, arguments on either side of a prescribed theme being a staple of classical and renaissance educational practice. The disputation is couched in mechanical couplets unrelieved by any enjambement, and characterized by repeated antitheses organized around a midline caesura. Gonzago’s major speech is constructed as a chain of Ciceronian sententiae (pithy moral axioms), followed by a formal summary: ‘But orderly

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to end where I began . . . ’ A rhetorical manual compiled at the Inns of Court in 1599 laments this stylistic device of creating a text from a string of sententiae, echoing Quintilian’s critique of the same fault. Those who write in this way, declared Quintilian, are ‘lightweight, frigid and inept’.²⁷ The final section of text reverts to Senecanism, with narrative tension undermined by a sequence of feminine rhymes. For an Elizabethan spectator with the barest rudiments of a rhetorical education, the conclusion is obvious: this is an execrable piece of student writing, and the only possible author of the whole text is Hamlet. For Shakespeare’s audience, the dramatic interest lay in the spectacle of professional actors wrestling with an unprofessional academic text that offered them no scope for any convincing physical and vocal expression of emotion. The pictorial phantasia which lent so much emotional power to the account of Pyrrhus’ rampage has given way to pure abstraction. In ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ uneducated amateurs sought to engage with classical tragedy, and ‘The Mousetrap’ constitutes a reversal of that dynamic. Shakespeare characterizes Hamlet as a man soaked in Greek and Roman classical texts. He scorns the old medieval plays of Herod, and arriving from Wittenberg he is dismayed by Claudius’ indulgence in wassailing, a crude folk tradition which gives Denmark a bad name abroad.²⁸ He thinks of his father as Hyperion, his mother and himself as antitheses of Niobe and Hercules, while his mind could be in the domain of Vulcan. The memory of Hyperion leads him to characterize his father in relation to Jove, Mars, and Mercury. His fellow student Horatio interprets the ghost in relation to the death of Julius Caesar, unlike Marcellus who refers to the New Testament. This remorseless classicizing does much to explain the enigma of the dumbshow, which is not a conspicuous feature of medieval theatre. Dumbshows did characterize two celebrated early experiments in neoclassical dramaturgy at the Inns of Court, Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc (1561) and Gascoigne and Kinwelmershe’s Jocasta (1566), but the idiom there was allegorical; in accordance with medieval modes of thought, they portrayed in emblematic terms the moral import of the static and declamatory drama that would follow. As a reader of Quintilian, Hamlet’s obvious reference point is ancient pantomime. Charles Gildon had no hesitation in making the connection in 1710, though Dieter Mehl’s 1965 survey of the dumbshow genre ignores the ancient origins completely.²⁹ And plainly on the strength of Hamlet, Andrea Perrucci observed in 1699 that only in England was the ancient art of gesticulatio said to have survived.³⁰

²⁷ Hoskins (1935), 39 40; Quintilian, 8.5.25 31. ²⁸ Hamlet 1.2.9 19. ²⁹ Gildon (1710), 24 5. John Weaver in The Loves of Venus and Mars (1717) made the first serious attempt to revive the ancient genre. ³⁰ Perrucci (2008), 56.

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In a groundbreaking treatise on gesture published in 1620, the Jesuit Louis de Crésolles explained how movements of the whole body belonged to the stage whilst gestures of the hand belonged to oratory.³¹ The effeminate and pantomimic body language of the stage is regularly contrasted by Quintilian with the masculine, semiotic body language of the orator.³² In the context of this binary opposition, we can see how the total performance event at Elsinore has been designed to separate bodily expression from verbal expression. The body becomes a vehicle for the representation of passion, while language is used to represent thought. The stage direction for the dumbshow describes how the Queen makes ‘passionate action’ as she pretends to mourn, and the whole piece is a vehicle for the expression of a sequence of emotions: protestation, trust, ambition, grief, desire, harshness, and prime amongst them love.³³ Once these emotions have been presented through the body, the spoken text that follows can be stripped of emotion and reduced to argument. If we read the dumbshow as a radical experiment in classicism rather than a folksy piece of medievalism, then the incomprehension of Claudius and Gertrude becomes more understandable. This dumbshow is essentially a mimesis of lust, and Hamlet establishes a context for it by refusing a chair, laying his head on Ophelia’s lap and speaking punningly to her of ‘country matters’, identifying himself as a maker of obscene jigs. The actors of the dumbshow, driven by their passions, resemble automata controlled by the music, as Hamlet indicates when he speaks of Ophelia’s love in terms of puppetry, and confirms when he later takes one of the players’ recorders and claims that his companions are trying to play him like a pipe. The figures who speak, by contrast, enjoy freedom of will. Whether Claudius rises because of the play or because of Hamlet’s goading is immaterial once we think of Hamlet as the Chorus controlling the show that he has both choreographed and scripted. By dissociating the physical domain from the verbal domain, Hamlet creates epic acting in the modern sense, a Verfremdungseffekt that Brecht might have been proud of. The alienation effect is not only an aesthetic device but also a representation of Hamlet’s own torn psyche. He is shown to be a man who cannot reconcile his feelings with his rational beliefs. I have sketched in this chapter a radical rereading of Hamlet’s activity as a dramaturge, suggesting that in the critical and theatrical reception of Hamlet there has been a sustained failure to appreciate the pleasures of Shakespeare’s ‘Mousetrap’. My exploration serves to point up the importance of studying classical reception today, and the reception of epic in particular, when scholars and performers no longer have at their fingertips the classical references ³¹ Ludovicus Cresollius, Vacationes Autumnales, cited in Bulwer (1644), 40 1. ³² See Lada Richards (2008). ³³ In the stage direction at 3.2.134, the Folio text significantly adds the words ‘very lovingly’ to qualify the first entrance.

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shared by earlier generations. An audience with a classical, rhetorical education will necessarily view the play differently. Of course, not all Elizabethan spectators had such an education, and Hamlet raises complex issues about the diversity of Shakespeare’s audience. The First Quarto of 1603 trumpets the success of the play in the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but substitutes the Senecan introduction and academic disputation at the centre of ‘The Mousetrap’ with a much more accessible and fluid piece of text. Shakespeare himself had access to the classical tradition on the strength of his grammar school education, but he also had other cultural resources—like the mystery plays which he probably saw in Coventry, quasi-pagan popular festivals and street performance in different genres. Educated eighteenthcentury readers like Gildon lacked the same plurality of reference, and in particular they came to Hamlet with very different assumptions about the nature of classical gesture from those that prevailed in the Elizabethan age. It has been my contention that a second point of critical blindness relates to the debate about acting. The problem is a long-standing one. Cicero and Quintilian subjected the art of the rhetorical performer to close interrogation because they were committed to the moral value of their profession as orators. Christian writers steeped in the rhetorical tradition, such as Augustine and Erasmus, worried about the place of technique within Christian oratory where the word of the preacher was a conduit to the word of God; and this mistrust of the performer has never completely vanished, as evidenced by the hegemony of literary and textual study over speech and orality within the modern classroom. It was only in the twentieth century that, as an educated man of leisure, Stanislavski could sit down and write about performance with the same sophistication born of a lifetime’s experience as Quintilian. Stanislavski, particularly after the Russian Revolution, was no longer forced to consider that performing on stage was demeaning for a gentleman. With no socially endorsed discursive language available to analyse the subtleties of stage acting, Shakespeare used the medium of theatre to address the nature of stage acting and its relationship to the human condition. Elizabethan acting was clearly the subject of informal debate amongst its practitioners, and it underwent constant change. The idea that Hamlet’s advice to the players constitutes a timeless set of rules derives from a modernist assumption that the authentic artwork is not the contingent moment of performance but the enduring Shakespearean text. Thirdly, and perhaps less contentiously, I have signalled the importance of epic within the history of debate about acting. By stripping out spectacle and the direct mimesis of character, ancient Greek epic was a performance art that focused directly on the creation of ethos and pathos. While the Iliad was in a sense our first rhetorical manual, offering case studies of efficacious public speech-making, the Aeneid contextualized the ethos of its hero in a profusion of emotive situations, which both in antiquity and in the Renaissance fed the

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imagination of children, and helped to educate the future orator, whose success relied upon understanding the complexity and depth of the fundamental human passions. The Virgilian speech of the First Player is an object lesson in the art of creating emotion through painting pictures with words, a central aspect of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy on the bare stage of the Globe. The last two centuries have been characterized by visual overload, and listening in theatres has become increasingly difficult—and for this reason, a re-engagement with epic performance seems particularly important. We heed at our peril Hamlet’s attempt to reform a troupe of epic performers in the name of realism. Hamlet the conceptual and all-powerful director is scarcely less problematic as a model for performance today.

7 ‘I am that same wall; the truth is so’ Performing a Tale from Ovid Marchella Ward

In February 2014, a dispute broke out on the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), following the publication of Michael Silk’s review of Colin Burrow’s Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity.¹ The letters by Silk, Burrow, and Brian Vickers focused on how best to characterize Shakespeare’s classical learning, and the role played by Jonson’s famous remarks about Shakespeare’s ‘small Latin and less Greek’.² At the intervention of Peter Wiseman, the discussion turned to a specific moment in Shakespeare’s reception of Ovid: the chink in the wall that separates Pyramus and Thisbe in Book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its reception in the inset play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.³ Wiseman’s letter introduced another voice to the conversation, alluding to Fredrick Clayton’s Jackson Knight Memorial Lecture, The Hole in the Wall, and specifically to the emphasis Clayton places on the influence of Juvenal and Claudian on the mechanicals’ play-within-a-play.⁴ For Wiseman, Clayton’s argument is further proof that Shakespeare read a number of texts in Latin and drew from them directly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, Clayton’s lecture does not list Juvenal and Claudian as simply further evidence of Shakespeare’s linguistic ability in Latin. Rather, he is interested in a specific phrase, tenuis rima (‘slender crack’, Metamorphoses 4.65), the hole in the wall through which the lovers in the Metamorphoses converse, used by Juvenal and Claudian in ways Clayton understands to be

¹ ‘Letters to the Editor’, TLS, 28 February, and 7, 14, and 21 March 2014; Burrow (2013). ² Jonson (1623), prefixed to the first Folio. See Burrow (2013), 1. ³ ‘Letters to the Editor’, TLS, 21 March 2014. ⁴ Clayton’s lecture is his only published work of non fiction, despite a lifelong interest in the interactions between Shakespeare and Latin poets. As Wiseman notes in his letter, it has gone relatively unnoticed in Shakespearean studies.

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influential on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.⁵ Clayton also posits Martial (this time an unspecified rima, not tenuis) as a possible influence—who resurfaces later in Shakespeare’s career in the appearance onstage of a Martial-influenced Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale. Wiseman’s focus on Ovid’s tenuis rima recalls not only the work of Clayton but also of Don Fowler, for whom Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe tale is a parable of genre, centring around the image of the tenuis rima.⁶ This chapter adopts Fowler’s understanding of the ‘crannied nook or chink’ as central to the transformation of genre in Ovid’s tale. It demonstrates that it is Ovid’s phrase tenuis rima, as well as the non-Ovidian rimae, that prompt the tale’s shift from epic into drama in both the inset play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595) and the closing poem in Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid, published in 1997 as a series of twenty-four poems, and subsequently adapted for the stage by Tim Supple and Simon Reade in 1999. Both Shakespeare’s and Hughes’s versions exhibit a self-conscious interest in genre in performance, which interacts with the difficulty inherent in generic readings of the Ovidian version.⁷ Hughes was equally familiar with both the Shakespearean and the Ovidian versions, having studied English at Cambridge before being persuaded to change his course to Anthropology.⁸ In 1992, he had published a monograph entitled Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, and there is a clear chain of receptions that links Hughes, Shakespeare, and Ovid through Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses in 1567.⁹ Questions of genre are central to receptions of Ovid, and Don Fowler’s discussion of how genre is problematic in the tale, including the characters’ inability to read the semiotic codes of certain genres, provides a helpful lens through which to examine the generic transformation that occurs when the tale of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ migrates from hexameter epic poem to the stage.¹⁰

O V ID ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ appears within a framework of three stories in the fourth book of the Metamorphoses, narrated by the daughters of Minyas as they avoid the worship of Bacchus. The tale does not easily fit within a recognized genre, and Ovid invites the reader to consider both its explicit ⁵ Clayton (1977). ⁶ Fowler (2000). ⁷ The difficult, hybrid genre of the Metamorphoses has been much discussed, see n. 13, and Harrison (2007a) on the flexibility of genres in antiquity. Cf. also Burrow’s comments, Ch. 3 in this volume, on the hybridity of epic as understood by early modern critics and Shakespeare. ⁸ A turning point described in The Burnt Fox, published in Winter Pollen (1994). ⁹ Cf. Lyne (1996), Braden (2009). ¹⁰ Fowler (2000).

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orientalism (‘quas Oriens habuit’, ‘whom the Orient held’, and Thisbe as Babylonia) and its novelty (the daughter chooses to narrate the tale ‘haec quoniam vulgaris fabula non est’, ‘since the story is not well known’).¹¹ The genre of the tale’s source material is equally problematic, with critics claiming that Ovid looked both to the Greek novel and to New Comedy in the composition of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’.¹² Alongside the critical insecurity about the genre of this tale, runs a long-standing discussion as to how great an involvement elegy has in the epic world of the Metamorphoses.¹³ It has become almost axiomatic in modern criticism to note that the genre of the Metamorphoses is not straightforward, something Ovid commented on in his poetry, even foreshadowing the discussion of performance of the Metamorphoses in Tristia 2.519.¹⁴ Fowler examines the tale in terms of the genre and gender of its poetics, noting of the daughters of Minyas that ‘their crime has been in part to flee from the manly epic demands of Bacchic poetics into the female elegiac world of private emotion’.¹⁵ He reads ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ as an analogy of generic juxtaposition, centred around the image of the tenuis rima, the crack in the wall which Fowler interprets as an emblem of love elegy: ‘Like their elegiac sensibility, this crack is “tenuis” (65) but it allows the murmured lovers’ complaints to pass through in safety.’ Fowler draws on a tradition of ‘slender’ elegy, which is most famously advocated by Callimachus and characterized by Horace’s exiguos elegos (‘little elegies’) in the Ars Poetica.¹⁶ The door that conventionally separates the lovers in elegiac poetry can, notes Fowler, be read into the wall since it transforms both lovers into exclusus amator (‘excluded lover’) figures.¹⁷ Fowler’s interest is in the nutu signisque (‘nods and signs’) that Pyramus and Thisbe exchange, and in reading the two characters as lovers who wish to move ‘from the realm of the symbolic to the realm of the imaginary’ and efface the barriers of language in order to achieve perfect communication unhindered by words.¹⁸ ‘Language and meaning can only exist if there is also the possibility of deceit and misunderstanding’, Fowler affirms, attributing the tragic failure of Pyramus and Thisbe’s escape to their dependency on language.¹⁹ This attempt to read a parable of the perils of genre into the opening sequence of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ suggests a further development of the importance of genre to the tale. The presence of the wall turns Pyramus and Thisbe into elegiac lovers; and Ovid then describes their departure from the ¹¹ Ovid, Met. 4.56, 4.99, 4.53; see Rudd (1979). ¹² See Holzberg (1988). ¹³ Harrison (2002), Keith (2002), etc. ¹⁴ Cf. Otis (1966); Conte (1992), 119 ff.; Barchiesi (1997), 12 ff.; Gildenhard and Zissos (2000); Brown (1999), 2. ¹⁵ Fowler (2000), 158. ¹⁶ Fowler (2000), 159; Callimachus, Aetia fr. 1.24; Horace, Ars Poetica 77. ¹⁷ Fowler (2000), 160. ¹⁸ Fowler (2000), 161. ¹⁹ Fowler (2000), 161.

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city, the place of elegy: ‘urbis quoque tecta relinquant’ (‘they leave behind the city and its roofs too’).²⁰ Genre is further complicated by the epic phrasing that occurs throughout the episode, including the intertext with the fourth book of the Aeneid (‘quid non sentit amor’ picks up ‘quis fallere possit amantem’).²¹ Epic notes are equally struck in the pipe simile, which is an epic simile used bathetically for a non-epic purpose, a frequent Ovidian device.²² Amidst the language of epic, Pyramus and Thisbe leave the city of elegy to enter the forest of tragedy, and this change of genre causes Pyramus to misinterpret what has happened, a misinterpretation that leads to his death.²³ This move from elegy to tragedy is signalled in the tragic foresight of line 74, which is played out in the interlaced word order of ‘nunc tegis unius, mox es tectura duorum’, and the ‘una . . . urna’ of line 166. The elegiac genre cannot function outside the elegiac city, and Pyramus’ generic mistake leads to his tragic downfall.

O V I D’S OVI D The reception history of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ picks up on these generic transformations in the tale. Ovid’s reception of his own work begins in the Metamorphoses but occurs particularly in his exilic poetry, and often entails generic transformation.²⁴ The flood, which is an essential creative force in Metamorphoses 1.293–303, causes irreparable destruction in Tristia 3.10.31–49, displaying a subversion of the mood from its earlier appearance. Seneca in the Controversiae portrays Ovid selecting for preservation the three lines that his friends choose for deletion.²⁵ As well as suggesting the obvious rhetorical playfulness of Ovid’s work, Seneca’s anecdote also implies a plurality of possible readings of Ovid, even among his earliest readers. Colin Burrow reads these examples of Ovid’s self-reception as cues that are taken up by Renaissance imitators of Ovid in their own receptions, although he does not relate this to Ovid’s experiments with genre.²⁶ Martindale points to a similar phenomenon in medieval romance, where Ovid’s Heroides 3 prefigures the generic transfer by placing a love interest at the centre of the battle at Troy.²⁷ Other Latin uses of Ovid’s phrase tenuis rima, observed by Clayton in his lecture, may also have cued early modern imitators in their understanding ²⁰ Keith (2002), 256; Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.86. ²¹ Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.68. Cf. Virgil, Aeneid 4.296. ²² Henderson (1979); and Hill (1985), 237. ²³ Fowler (2000). ²⁴ The earliest examples of reception of the Metamorphoses are found later in the poem itself: Orpheus’ allusion to the rape of Proserpina (Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.29), for example, is a tale told by his mother in Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.385 437; Ovid returns to Pythagoras after his speech in Metamorphoses 15.60 478 in Tristia 3.3.65; cf. Brown (1999), 17 21 and Burrow (2002), 301 2. ²⁵ Seneca, Controversiae 2.2.12 ff. ²⁶ Burrow (2002). ²⁷ Martindale (1989), 18.

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of Ovid. Juvenal uses the phrase tenui rima in Satire 3, in the context of a discussion of effeminate Athenian actors, in which characters from Terence’s Eunuch are mentioned: ‘vacua et plana omnia dicas | infra ventriculum et tenui distantia rima’ (‘you would say that everything below his little belly was flat and empty and divided by a slender crack’).²⁸ Clayton identifies various more general similarities between Juvenal’s Satires and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including the children mocking an ass’s head in Satire 11; the flute player in Satire 3, who Clayton suggests resembles Shakespeare’s Flute, the bellows-mender; and the recurrence of the moon throughout the Satires. He reads an Ovidian wall into Juvenal’s Satires, and suggests intertexts with the rima in Martial.²⁹ Of particular importance for the early modern reception of Ovid’s transformation of genre, however, is Martial’s use of rima at 11.98, in a complaint that kisses pervade every chink (rather than being obstructed by the wall, as they are in Ovid). There is an obvious comedy to the inversion of the motifs from ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, which suggests a transformation of genre away from the tragic close of Ovid’s tale. Just as Burrow suggests of Shakespeare, Martial and Juvenal’s reworkings of the Ovidian wall take their cue from clues within Ovid’s self-reception, resituating Ovid’s tenuis rima within a strikingly different genre. For Juvenal, this is in a context of discussions of performance, which prefigures Shakespeare’s adaptation of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ as drama (drawing perhaps on Ovid’s reminder to Augustus of the performance of the Metamorphoses in Tristia 2.519–20); for Martial, it is a comic inversion that feeds into the comedy of Shakespeare’s inset play.

SHAKESPEARE ’ S OVID’ S OVI D If Ovid, as Burrow suggests, had cued Renaissance imitators in their attitude towards translating his work into a different genre, and Juvenal and Martial had broadened the scope of genres latent in Ovid’s tenuis rima, then the obvious Shakespearean moment to examine is the mechanicals’ play-withina-play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Receptions of Ovid recur throughout Shakespeare’s plays, with the Metamorphoses, in particular, refigured in the plays of the 1590s. This influence is clear not only in the green comedies, in which the relevance of the Metamorphoses to Shakespeare’s pastoral comic tales of love and transformation is obvious, but also in the appearance of the physical book itself onstage in Titus Andronicus.³⁰ This multiplicity of meanings of Ovid in Shakespeare is itself evidence of the

²⁸ Clayton (1977); Juvenal, 3.96 7. ³⁰ See Bate (1993).

²⁹ Clayton (1977); Martial, 1.34 and 11.98.

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playwright’s attitude to the genre of the Metamorphoses: Ovid’s poem can signal tragedy (as it does in Titus Andronicus—the audience understands Lavinia’s rape and dismemberment by anticipating the tale of Philomel through the onstage presence of the Metamorphoses) and comedy (the transformative powers of green landscapes in Shakespeare’s early comedies, as well as the transformation at the end of The Winter’s Tale are inherited from Ovid). This variation in the genre of Ovidian receptions in Shakespeare is prompted by the complexities of genre within the Metamorphoses itself. Critics have long agonized over the meaning of the play-within-a-play at the close of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Burrow suggesting that ‘the subject of the story they enact displays a more primitive violence than the actions of the Shakespearean drama’.³¹ It is difficult, however, to read the violence of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ as more ‘primitive’ than the opening scene of the play, with its implications of enforced marriage coupled with threats such as ‘either to die the death or to abjure | Forever the society of men’.³² For Bate: ‘It is the translation of . . . elements out of the play-within and into the play itself that transforms A Midsummer Night’s Dream into Shakespeare’s most luminous imitatio of Ovid.’³³ Martindale, by contrast, calls for an analysis of the reception of Ovid in Shakespeare which foregrounds the difference rather than the ‘sameness’ and resists readings that see Ovid’s mulberry bush in the love-in-idleness flower.³⁴ Indeed, the lack of metamorphosis in the Ovidian play that Quince and his players are preparing points to difference rather than sameness and shifts the focus from Ovid’s narrative to his generic complexity. Shakespeare’s version is a pastiche of what Brown calls the tale’s ‘original tragic form’, and its ‘comic dispersal of potentially tragic elements’ is a firm fixture of Shakespeare’s 1590s plays.³⁵ At the close of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Ovidian tale (and its thematic proximity to Romeo and Juliet) provides the tragedy, whilst the pastiche mode of the speeches renders the tale comic. The genre of the play is clearly problematic, since Philostrate is unable to define it: And tragical, my noble lord, it is For Pyramus therein doth kill himself; . . . . . . but more merry tears The passion of loud laughter never shed.³⁶

³¹ Burrow (2002), 308. ³² Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.65 6. ³³ Bate (1993), 132. ³⁴ Martindale (2000). ³⁵ Brown (1999), 60. The opening scene of The Comedy of Errors is iconic of the practice, opening as if it were a tragedy with ‘Proceed Solinus, to procure my fall | And by the doom of death end woes and all’ and with a shipwreck which looks forwards to its generically variant analogues in Twelfth Night, The Tempest, and Pericles. A Midsummer Night’s Dream equally prepares for tragedy in its opening scenes. ³⁶ Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.66 70.

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Shakespeare returns to the play-within-a-play device later in Hamlet, where it is used tragically. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare multiplies the suggestive generic cues in Ovid. Bate asks an important question: ‘If he [Shakespeare] wished to proclaim himself as an Ovidian dramatist, why did he not simply stage Pyramus and Thisbe?’³⁷ One possible answer is that by setting ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ within A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare draws attention to his generic transformation of the tale. The jokes in the rehearsal scene (3.1) rely on a knowledge that the narrative of the play-within-a-play does not come from a theatrical source. They therefore heighten the audience’s sense of watching a translation not only from Latin to English but also from epic to drama. The mechanicals are comically concerned that an excess of dramatic realism might result from a staged rendering of the Ovid (‘a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing’) and worry that the audience will be overly credulous of the resulting play (‘will not the ladies be afraid of the lion?’).³⁸ Quince also insists that their translation of the Ovidian tale must be literal: ‘we must have a wall in the great chamber; for Pyramus and Thisbe, says the story, did talk through the chink of a wall’.³⁹ It may be far-fetched to posit an insistence upon the presence of Ovid’s tenuis rima here, but in the context of Golding’s lively and Englished translation, this seems like a joke at the expense of slavishly literal translators, like Bottom.⁴⁰ It also, however, highlights the difficulties attendant on transforming an episode out of epic poetry into tragedy. The presence of an onstage audience for the play-within-the-play also allows Shakespeare to dramatize an Ovidian reading of this generic metamorphosis. Like the daughters of Minyas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Theseus rejects various tales before opting for ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, and the tale is told to pass the time: ‘Is there no play | To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?’⁴¹ Theseus functions here as a humanist reader, much like Horatio in Hamlet or Marcus in Titus Andronicus. As such, he has a role to play in understanding the appropriation of Ovid in Shakespeare. Theseus’ rejection of other possible stories, ‘The battle with the centaurs, to be sung | By an Athenian eunuch to the harp’ and ‘The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, | Tearing the Thracian singer in

³⁷ Bate (1993), 131. ³⁸ Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.29 30, 26. ³⁹ Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.58 60; cf. Bate (1993). ⁴⁰ Cf. Lucking (2011); on literalism as ‘translation’, see Bate (1993), 131 2. Dunstan Gale’s 1596 ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ poem (published 1617) may also be the butt of the joke here see Taylor (1990). For other early modern versions of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, see Farrad (1930). ⁴¹ Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.36 7; cf. Brown (1999).

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their rage’, is based on his reading of these tales in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books 11 and 12.⁴² Critics often read Theseus as a fusion of Plutarch and Chaucer, but his function in the final act is also that of Ovidian reader.⁴³ Theseus alludes to the transformation earlier in the play, anticipated from his knowledge of Ovid and from his own extra-dramatic ‘other life’ as a privileged observer in Metamorphoses Book 8: ‘With the help of surgeon he might yet recover, and prove an ass’ and later in the same scene he expects tragedy to surround ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’: ‘it would have been a fine tragedy’.⁴⁴ Theseus, who knows his Ovid, reads the play differently from the other onstage characters because he is aware that it exists elsewhere in another genre. Shakespeare would later adapt Ovid formally, and much more closely, as a long narrative poem, but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the point is, indeed, difference rather than sameness.⁴⁵

HU GHES ’S S HAKESPEARE’S OVI D’ S OVID The influence of Shakespeare’s inset play on later receptions of Ovid’s ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ equally centres on this transformation of genres. Just as Ovid’s self-reception and the use of the tenuis rima image by other Latin poets cued Shakespeare’s dramatization of Ovid, so Shakespeare’s dramatization of Ovid cues later receivers of the Pyramus and Thisbe myth to introduce a multiplicity of genres, and in particular an insistence upon drama. The impulse to dramatize the Metamorphoses is evident in Zimmerman’s 2001 play, and Supple and Reade’s 1999 dramatization of Tales from Ovid, the 1997 collection that featured Ted Hughes’s poetic retelling of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ as its final poem. The affinity between Ovid and Hughes (much like the relationship Meres suggests between Ovid and Shakespeare, to which Hughes refers in the introduction to Tales from Ovid) has long been established.⁴⁶ Hughes notes of Ovid, in the introduction to Tales from Ovid, that ‘his attitude to the material is like that of the many later poets who have adapted what he presents. He too is an adaptor’; and places himself within this framework of adaptation as an act of metamorphosis.⁴⁷ ⁴² Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.44 5 and 48 9; cf. Rudd (1979). ⁴³ The first of many is Sidgwick (1908). ⁴⁴ Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.298 9 and 345 6. ⁴⁵ Martindale (2000). Shakespeare returns to Pyramus and Thisbe in his plays, in a variety of genres. Thisbe is mentioned by Mercutio in jest, and Jessica lists her alongside Virgil’s tragic heroine Dido in The Merchant of Venice (5.1.7 9). ⁴⁶ Meres (1598); Hughes (1997), vii; Rees (2009). ⁴⁷ Hughes (1997), viii. Hughes also here comments on Shakespeare’s relationship with Ovid.

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Like Ovid’s preoccupation with revisiting his own work in another genre, and Shakespeare’s reworking of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in both a comic and a tragic vein, Hughes’s reception of Ovid is also a reworking of his own poetry. Take, for example, the love-knot imagery at the end of his rendering of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’: And the two lovers in their love knot, One pile of inseparable ashes, Were closed in a single urn.⁴⁸

This image picks up the same phrase used in ‘Lovesong’ from the Crow cycle (which itself has undertones of the Oedipus myth that he had translated, via Turner’s Seneca, in 1969): ‘He showed her how to make a love-knot.’⁴⁹ Hughes commented on this practice, in a draft copy of his introduction to Tales from Ovid: ‘Even when I introduce a flourish of my own, usually just a metaphor, I take my cue from Ovid.’⁵⁰ As well as characterizing his mode of adaptation as an Ovidian one, Hughes also includes various subtle alterations in his version of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ that acknowledge the generic difference between Hughes’s three-line stanza version and Shakespeare’s dramatic renderings. Hughes takes from Shakespeare’s version an understanding of the multiplicity of genre latent in Ovid. The comedy of Shakespeare’s ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ has been banished in Tales from Ovid (even from the pipe simile) and Hughes instead reminds us of moments of tragedy in previous receptions of the tale. The lack of explanation of parental motives, in particular, recalls Shakespeare’s tragic rendering of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in Romeo and Juliet: For angry reasons, no part of the story, The parents of each forbade their child To marry the other.⁵¹

The ‘story’ Hughes alludes to here is not part of either Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but is part of Romeo and Juliet. This is followed later in Hughes’s poem by a frustration of the comic twists of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When Thisbe discovers Pyramus, Hughes reports that ‘She screamed to him | To wake up and speak to her’ which recalls Shakespeare’s ‘Lysander, if you live, good sir, awake’, this time with

⁴⁸ Hughes (1997), 254. ⁴⁹ Hughes (2003), 256; cf. Jacobsen (2009) and Talbot (2006). Other examples of Hughes’s Ovidian style self reception abound; see e.g. the relationship between Hughes’s 1979 poem ‘Actaeon’ and the version of Actaeon in Tales from Ovid. Hughes adds to his second version of the tale the sympathy that Ovid allows Actaeon in his own second version, in Tristia 2.103 9 but not in Metamorphoses 3. ⁵⁰ Draft copy of Tales from Ovid, Emory MSS 644, Box 135, fo. 11; cited in Tatham (2009), 180. ⁵¹ Hughes (1997), 246.

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tragic consequences.⁵² Lysander wakes, but Hughes’s Pyramus will not, and the juxtaposition heightens the generic discrepancy.⁵³ Hughes also removes the elegiac reference from his version of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. His ‘fissure’ or ‘crack’ does not obviously suggest elegy, in the way that tenuis rima does, although Hughes does preserve the lengthy dialogue with the wall that is characteristic of Latin love elegy.⁵⁴ Shakespeare’s comic chastising of strict literalism through Quince and the mechanicals is echoed here in Hughes’s awareness of the differences in genre between Ovid, Shakespeare, and his own versions of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. The closing stanzas of Hughes’s Tales from Ovid collection insist on the aetiological element that is important in Ovid but is neglected in both of Shakespeare’s dramatic versions: ‘Remember how we died. Remember us | By the colour of our blood in your fruit.’⁵⁵ There is a finality to the lovers’ urn in Tales from Ovid that is not evident in either Ovid or Shakespeare’s versions. In this sense, Hughes is a generic translator into tragedy of both Ovid and Shakespeare in his insistence on the final tragic metamorphosis collection, rather than on the apotheosis ending of the Metamorphoses, or the peaceful acknowledgement of comic closure in Puck’s Ovid-influenced summary of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The final metamorphosis of Hughes’s translation is from the comedy of the inset play into the tragedy of the close of Tales from Ovid, just as the metamorphosis in Shakespeare was not from lovers to mulberry bush, as in Ovid, but from epic to drama.

AFTER SHAKESPEARE Hughes’s first translations from Ovid were made not for his own collection, Tales from Ovid, but for Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun’s 1994 anthology After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, featuring versions of tales from Ovid by a number of poets including Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Carol Ann Duffy. It is not Hughes’s ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, however, which appears in the Hofmann and Lasdun collection, but Fred D’Aguiar’s version. This version similarly takes an interest in the tale’s generic history and takes its dramatic potential from Shakespeare’s play-within-a-play. Hughes translates in its form the dramatic potential of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ from Shakespeare’s play-within-a-play. D’Aguiar divides the Pyramus and Thisbe tale into two poems, ‘Pyramus to Thisbe’ and ‘Thisbe to Pyramus’, with each of the lovers addressing the other in the form of a dramatic dialogue. Alongside this dialogue form is an interest in race that is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet.⁵⁶ ⁵² Hughes (1997), 253; Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.2.101. ⁵³ See also Hughes’s ‘Cleopatra to the Asp’ for the use of Shakespeare to mediate a multiplicity of classical influences, as discussed in Rees (2009) and Talbot (2006). ⁵⁴ See e.g. Tibullus, 1.2.7 ff. ⁵⁵ Hughes (1997), 254. ⁵⁶ D’Aguiar’s mid 1990s novels The Longest Memory and Feeding the Ghosts both contain relationships that are forbidden or discouraged by other characters on the grounds of racial

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D’Aguiar elaborates on the reason behind the two families’ decision to forbid the relationship between Pyramus and Thisbe in After Ovid: I am black and you’re white What’s the day without night To measure it by and give It definition; life. We’ll go where love’s colour Blind and therefore coloured.⁵⁷

Like Shakespeare, D’Aguiar tells the story of Pyramus and Thisbe twice, in the After Ovid collection and in his classically allusive novel The Longest Memory, published the same year but set on a Virginian plantation. D’Aguiar’s novelistic ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ also relies on a Shakespearean precedent, and the consistent presence of Shakespeare’s ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ puts performance at the centre of both his novel and the duologue poem. In an interview about his novel, D’Aguiar commented on the multitude of narrative voices, using the image of a tenuis rima: ‘fissures open up in the text as characters add to and subtract from what others have said’, noting that this technique ‘is something I picked up from the theatre’.⁵⁸ D’Aguiar’s ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ cannot escape the sense that drama is inherent to the tale and that Shakespeare’s dramatic reception is now its predominant version. Indeed, it seems that after Shakespeare, it is impossible to conceive of Ovid’s ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ without performance, such that the tale becomes iconic of any attempt to dramatize Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is therefore somewhat surprising to find that the concluding tale of Hughes’s collection is conspicuous by its absence from Supple and Reade’s 1999 dramatization. However, although Supple and Reade do not include ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, they do characterize their dramatic version as if it were an extension of the Shakespearean inset play. In the published text of their play, Supple and Reade include a programmatic introduction: exceptional tales of extraordinary transformation spun from ancient history, from Greek myth, and Roman folklore, from the stories of Babylon and Eastern civilisation and from pagan legend, as related by the Latin poet Ovid in the ‘Metamorphoses’ difference. For this emphasis on racism as the cause of Pyramus and Thisbe’s separation, see most famously Bernstein’s musical version of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story. ⁵⁷ D’Aguiar (1994). ⁵⁸ Frías (2002), 423.

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two thousand years ago and retold by Ted Hughes at the end of the twentieth century

This exposition claims the same origin for the tales that Hughes insists on in his retelling of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’: Throughout the East men spoke in awe of Thisbe A girl who had suddenly bloomed In Babylon, the mud brick city.⁵⁹

Supple and Reade’s introduction makes a clear link not only between Hughes and Ovid, but also between Shakespeare’s dramatic version of Ovid and their own: Pyramus and Thisbe, we might infer, did not need to take the stage in Supple and Reade’s play version because their story informed the whole piece. Indeed, this dramatization of Ovid was as much an homage to the Elizabethan dramatist as to the Latin poet. Not only was Simon Reade the RSC’s literary manager at the time, the production also made recurrent allusions to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As Charles Spencer noted: ‘Supple, for instance, clearly intends us to spot the similarity between the disputatious Jupiter and Juno and Shakespeare’s Oberon and Titania, while Midas’s eventual fate anticipates Bottom’s translation into an ass.’⁶⁰ Supple and Reade’s dramatized version of Tales from Ovid performs a Shakespearean metamorphosis of Ted Hughes’s poem, casting the audience proper in the roles of Theseus, Hippolyta, Philostrate, and the lovers, who make up the onstage audience for Shakespeare’s dramatization of Ovid in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

CO NCLUSION Clayton and Wiseman are no doubt justified in bringing Juvenal, Claudian, and Martial to bear on Shakespeare’s reading of Ovid. What is at stake here, however, is not whether Shakespeare actually read Juvenal, Claudian, Martial, or even Ovid. Rather, these intertexts demonstrate that the potential for generic transformation in Ovid’s tale was apparent to ancient readers of the Metamorphoses, and in turn prompted Shakespeare’s influential dramatization of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. The tale shifts from epic to drama in Shakespeare, and this potential for performance has become axiomatic of Ovid’s tale in its post-Shakespearean reception, to the extent that,

⁵⁹ Supple and Reade (1999), 1; Hughes (1997), 246.

⁶⁰ Daily Telegraph, 22 April 1999.

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like Hughes’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, it haunts even those dramatic versions of tales from the Metamorphoses in which the doomed lovers do not appear. After Shakespeare, the dramatic potential of the Pyramus and Thisbe tale becomes a kind of aetiology for any act of generic metamorphosis of the Metamorphoses, remaining from the earliest version but indelible proof that it has been transformed—like the blood-red colour of the mulberry bush.⁶¹

⁶¹ I am grateful to Peta Fowler for the many formative and enlightening conversations she had with me on the topic of this chapter.

8 Monsters and the Question of Inheritance in Early Modern French Theatre Wes Williams

PROLOGUE: HOLDING BACK Je vais presentement mettre sous des liens Pour vous ne nuire plus, mes monstres et mes chiens. (I will now call to harness so as to harm you No longer my monsters and my dogs.)¹

The words are those of the goddess Diana, speaking as prologue to a play written in celebration of a marriage that took place in 1609, possibly in the presence of the French king, Henri IV, in the castle at La Flèche. The goddess is explaining that she has arranged for the story to start just before the end, at the point at which she undergoes a change of heart: she will stop tormenting the young lovers and give them, finally, their just reward. Diana tells us this before it happens ‘live’ on stage, but, she stresses, the play to which she serves as prologue nonetheless has a good deal of dramatic tension in it. For a brief moment things will look bad; very bad. The young girl, Chariclea, will be led to the sacrificial altar by her own father, acting in ignorance of the fact that the girl he wishes to offer to the Moon in thanks for his victory in battle over the Persians is his own daughter. Her mother, despite knowing the secret of Chariclea’s identity, will not be able to stop him; nor will Theagenes, the Greek young man who is her would-be lover, as ignorant as the father about who she really is. At the very last minute, the royal nursemaid will intervene; and all will be well—subject to certain conditions. The apparently foreign girl must be recognized not just as exotic and strange, but also as a creature at once home-grown and monstrous. The Ethiopian king and queen must acknowledge the implausibly ¹ Genetay (1609), Prologue. All translations from the French are mine.

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white Chariclea as their own daughter, and they must allow her to marry Theagenes, despite his having thus far passed for her brother. If, Diana suggests, all these conditions are met, then the unwelcome spectres of war, child sacrifice, incest, and adultery, will all be laid to rest by the reconstitution of family lines, and by the stronger magic of marriage underwritten by love. The audience, meanwhile, will have witnessed the birth of a new form of politically charged spectacle, born of the coupling of epic and romance.² Octave de Genetay’s L’Éthiopique: Tragicomédie des chastes amours de Théagène et Chariclée introduces to the wedding celebrations in the town where Descartes would one day attend school, and Hume would write his Treatise of Human Nature, characters, figures, and themes taken from Heliodorus’ ancient Greek romance, the Aethiopica. Genetay’s was not the first French theatrical version of this romance, which, following its ‘rebirth’ in the early sixteenth century, spent the next 150 years or so being edited, translated, painted, dramatized, and otherwise transposed, as well as being cited in a range of discursive contexts, from medical and legal treatises to histories of climactic and larger cultural change.³ Heliodorus seems to have meant many things to many different readers over this period, but central to the reception of his tale was the notion—the pleasures and the techniques—of what today we call ‘suspense’. The twinned themes of suspense and spectacular recognition underscore the rich reimagining of the Aethiopica as dramatic poetry on the neo-Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, and English stages across the early modern period. In this chapter I want to sketch out a few further figures in the specifically French line of this family of plays, in which the triangulated family romance—with the roles of potential victim, rescuing hero, and threatening monster variously distributed—functions both as a medically credible explanation of what were commonly called ‘monstrous births’, and as a genealogy of cultural and political change. To pay close attention to the tale of Theagenes and Chariclea is to stray somewhat from the declared—epic—theme of this collection. But to indulge this ‘error’ is to be sanctioned by Diana, whose opening words can be heard as emblematic of a number of specifically theatrical moves performed at the conjunction of epic and romance over the course of the early modern period.⁴ Some of these moves I have already explored elsewhere; but I want to rework, and rethink, a few of them here. I want, more particularly, to suggest that the insistence on holding back which structures this ancient Greek romance makes a particular kind of political sense in the early modern context. That

² For the play’s context, its argument in relation to ‘lineal descent’, and its relation to English plays on this theme, see Ndiaye (2016). I first came across this tremendous article as I was rewriting my chapter for publication. ³ The reception of the Aethiopica is the ‘fil rouge’ through Williams (2011). ⁴ For more on this conjunction, see Burrow (1993).

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is to say not only the specific context of this dynastic marriage in La Flèche, but also that of the recently concluded and still fragile peace, following half a century of singularly brutal civil conflict across France. For Diana’s locally inflected promise, echoed here by the Queen within the play as well as in the presence of the cross-confessional King Henri IV, serves as a reminder that the monsters and dogs of war have been not so much destroyed as temporarily held in check. Drawing attention to the dynamic of the unfolding of the events that are to follow, and to the degree of agency assigned to women as actors on the political stage, Diana asserts the need for a state of temporarily suspended animation. She invites us, by way of (this) tragicomedy, to agree, for a time, to reimagine epic on stage as romance.

P U B L I C S PE C T A C L E : POËMES DRAGMATIQUES OU THÉÂTRES CONSÉCUTIFS In the Proësme to his French version of the Aethiopica, the great Hellenist and translator Jacques Amyot drew specific attention to the way in which the tale grafts the standard epic technique of starting a story in medias res on to romance, and in so doing generates an altogether new kind of experience. For, by opening his narrative with a situation which is not so much in process as wholly incomprehensible, Heliodorus provokes ‘great amazement’ in his readers; this in turn ‘engenders within them a passionate desire to hear the beginning. But through the ingenious plotting of the links in the tale, he keeps us waiting, and wanting more, until the end of the fifth book.’ On reaching this, the middle point of the novel, when we finally discover what had happened at the outset, we also find ourselves burning with ‘even greater desire to see [de voir] the end of the story than we had to see [de voir] the beginning’. The reading of romance is, for Amyot, a species of specifically visual amazement, anticipation, and . . . finally, pleasure. Our desire for knowledge is held, frustrated, in suspense (suspendu), until the end, when the reader is ‘satisfied, as are those who finally come into possession of something which they have desired intensely, and anticipated long’.⁵ Starting in the middle, then, Heliodorus’ suspenseful romance folds back on itself with a five-book flashback, before advancing towards its famously extended recognition scene, in which—strikingly—women rescue women. The gallant Theagenes proves (for all his valour and skill at wrestling with giants) unable to ⁵ Amyot (1547), ‘Proësme du translateur’, fo. Aiiir: ‘satisfait, de la sorte que le sont ceux, qui à la fin viennent à jouyr d’un bien ardemment desiré, et longuement atendu’. See also Plazenet’s excellent critical edition (2008). For a critical discussion of suspense and recognition in Heliodorus, see Cave (1988), 16 21, 130 8; and (2009).

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play the determining role of the rescuing hero, and this role is taken, rather, by the nursemaid, who deflects attention away from the public square and into the royal bedchamber. She calls for the painting that hangs above the royal bed to be brought forth and displayed in public: it is a painting of Andromeda (Fig. 8.1). Being both a knowing and a wise woman, skilled in the mysteries of conception and childbirth, the nursemaid understands what has happened. The time for secrets has passed, and so she explains to the crowd that Queen Persinna’s attention to this particular image at the moment of conception explains the appearance of the child about to be sacrificed. The literal collocation of painting and daughter—each the image of the other—before the eyes of the assembled nation then enables everyone present to know what all the women already knew: that Chariclea is both a product of her mother’s imagination, and her father’s flesh and blood. Andromeda made flesh, Chariclea is also their very own daughter. The assembled crowd thrills to the wonder of the scene. Maternal impression, the ancient theory which underscores Heliodorus’ story, is used both to explain anomalous physical experiences—such as the trauma, or the blessing, of a misshapen, disfigured, or inexplicably coloured child—and to account for the ways in which the imagination conceives of its own processes and products. The mystery of Chariclea’s colour is ‘solved’ with reference to the image of Andromeda which hung above the marital bed, but not until that original scene of conception had generated the full ten books of circumstantial events and encounters. And the Aethiopica itself later lends life to a rich and hybrid family of tales, images, and arguments, all of them animating the staging of at once colourful and dramatic monsters throughout the early modern period. The ambition behind Octave de Genetay’s specifically theatrical intervention in this suspenseful tradition is registered by the distinctive marker he gives to his play: Tragicomédie. The name serves both as an index of the generic boundary-crossing which the story he inherits already enacts, and as a measure of his understanding of how Heliodorus’ romance is also a story about the agon between the painterly scene and dramatic action. It also serves to mark the play’s generic kinship with an earlier French version of this story, produced by the ingenious, prolific, but little-studied Alexandre Hardy, one of France’s most successful but least well-known playwrights. Born in about 1570, Hardy died of the plague in 1632, having composed in the interim more than 500 plays, encompassing—like Hamlet’s players—‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited’.⁶

⁶ Hamlet 2.2.334 6 (Folio), in Shakespeare (2006), 262.

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Fig. 8.1 L’Histoire éthiopique d’Héliodore [ . . . ] Traduite de grec en françois, par Maistre J. Amiot conseiller du Roy [etc.] (Paris: Chez Anthoine de Sommaville, 1626), facing p. 635.

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In subject matter, Hardy’s plays range from Alexander, Achilles,⁷ and Dido all the way through to Alceste, ou La Fidélité, and Elmire ou L’Heureuse bigamie. Less than forty of these works are extant, not least since Hardy was so resistant to setting the plays in print, for fear (in part) of other troupes using his material. That he started seeing his collected works through the press at all seems to have been in part due to the success of his first adventure into print: Les Chastes et Loyalles Amours de Théagène et Cariclée, Réduites du Grec de l’Histoire d’Héliodore en huict poëmes dragmatiques [sic] ou Théâtres consécutifs; ‘reduced and carried over from the original Greek of Heliodorus’ History into eight dramatic poems or consecutive shows’.⁸ First published in Paris in 1623, the play, which marks itself as a tragi-comédie by printing the word at the top of each facing page, was performed far earlier than this; almost definitely before the 1609 marriage celebrations in La Flèche which gave rise to Genetay’s version of the story, and possibly even as early as 1600–1. Hardy’s theatrical imagination is epic in scale. He transforms the Aethiopica into a series of eight poëmes dragmatiques, each of them a ‘Day’ long—in practice they might each take about two hours to perform. Taken together they make for a piece which Polonius would justifiably have called a ‘poem unlimited’, during which Heliodorus’ recognition scene is replayed and reworked a full three times. This theatrical extension of an already extended narrative scene, underscores Hardy’s self-conscious exploration of dramatic, and especially suspenseful, representation, in terms of both its narrative complexity and its political purposes and effects. The first mention of the mystery behind Chariclea’s birth in Hardy’s drama is found on Day 1, Act 2 of the play. The young woman has locked herself away in a self-made prison, stricken as she is by anxiety about being in what she takes to be the foreign and strange land of Ethiopia, and by a lovesickness she cannot otherwise hide. She eventually permits a doctor to visit her; this ‘doctor’ turns out to be the old and benevolent trickster who accompanies her throughout her many adventures, Calasiris, in disguise. Calasiris’ ‘cure’ for lovesickness consists of a restorative narrative, revealing to Chariclea her own secret—at once royal and Ethiopian—origins. In a long, long speech, which begins unpromisingly with a comparison of the princess’s fate to that of Oedipus, Calasiris tells of how her mother, the Queen, fearing that the suspicion of adultery would fall on her because of her startlingly white child, had handed the princess over to him, extracting from him the promise that he would one day return her to her true family and her rightful home. They are thus in fact already ‘home’, and the time is now right for revelation. ⁷ On Hardy’s La Mort d’Achille (1607), see Karsenti, Ch. 22 in this volume. ⁸ Hardy (1623). A second edition, with a rich array of liminary poems in Greek, Latin, and French followed in 1628; for a modernized (but poorly copy edited) recent edition of this, see Hardy (2014).

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Calasiris explains that he will arrange for the public display of a painting of Andromeda, of whom the young woman was herself now the picture, and that this display will itself explain all: Outre, qu’une Andromède au chevet de son lict Despeinte à vous semblable efface tout delict. Car l’imaginative à l’heure qu’on engendre Tout ainsi qu’il lui plaist nostre forme fait prendre. (Furthermore, an Andromeda, placed at her bedside, The very picture of you, effaces all wrongs. For the imagination can, at the moment of conception, Make our bodies take on whatever form it pleases.)⁹

Once the secret at the heart of the family has been resolved, the ‘doctor’ suggests, Chariclea will be able to marry the young man whom she loves. This is the first mention within the body of Hardy’s play of the painting of Andromeda that lies at the origin of the mystery of Chariclea’s identity. For the resolution here promised by Calasiris, however, we have to wait until the Eighth and last ‘Day’ of Hardy’s epic—in the dual modern sense of terrific and really long—spectacle. When it finally comes, it does so twice: first as onstage action, then as offstage wonder. It is worth focusing on each of these moments in turn. The first, Hardy’s full-blown onstage recognition scene, which sees the princess’s identity acknowledged by her father, her mother, and by a nation celebrating the successful conclusion of bloody wars, is a fine and remarkable piece of staging. This dramatic reworking of Heliodorus’ already intensely theatrical mise en abyme of the force of the imagination, and the undecidable difference between Nature and Art, is located midway through Act 2 of the Final Day. The scene begins with the Queen’s Adviser, Sisimithras, taking on the role (and the words) of ‘the doctor’, now explaining to King Hydaspes, returned triumphant from battle, how the theory of maternal impression works. Talking first of Persinna and then of her daughter, Chariclea, he explains how Un portrait engravé au chevet de son lict Que l’imaginative en concevant remplit, Vertu qui peut adonc par dessus la nature, Ce pourtaict d’Andromède enserre la figure.¹⁰ (A portrait engraved at her bedside Even as she conceived, filled out by her imagination, A force that can reach in this way beyond nature, This portrait of Andromeda captures her face/shape.) ⁹ Hardy (1623), 24 5; (2014), 216. ¹⁰ Hardy (1623), 25 of Day 8; the pagination starts again for the Final Day.

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Sisimithras’ language is both punning and orthodox, turning as it does on the relation between conception and ‘vertu imaginative’—one of early modern medicine’s occult qualities. The formulation ‘par dessus la nature’ is a conjugation of the standard relational terms in which actual as opposed to disguised doctors, from Paré to Paracelsus, by way of Licetus and Aldrovandi, explain how monsters are created by an imagination whose power extends beyond the normal workings of nature.¹¹ But Hardy’s drama is not a medical treatise, and Sisimithras is no more a real doctor than Calasiris was when he introduced the theory of maternal impression by way of his account of the portrait of Andromeda back on Day 1. As if to emphasize the point, Hardy reworks the medical tradition to intensely dramatic effect by way of a remarkable correctio, which reverses the order of representational priority in play: Que dis je d’Andromède? en luy vous verriez peint Ces yeux, ce front, ce nez, ceste bouche & ce teint. (Why am I saying ‘of Andromeda’? In that portrait you’d see painted These eyes, this brow, this nose, this mouth, this colour.)¹²

The painting of Andromeda is here reimagined as in truth a copy of Chariclea. And the repeated deictics in the second line reinforce the point, insistently: ‘Look! Here! This is the one, the monster you might otherwise only have heard of in legend, the creature who reverses the order of nature: here, she is, now, live onstage!’ To make good on this claim concerning his daughter—or to set it to the test—the King orders: ‘Qu’on le face apporter’ (‘Bring it [the wonderworking portrait] here’). ‘Conferez ce tableau’ (‘Set the picture alongside her’), he commands, once the painting has made its passage from private bedchamber to public stage. With art and nature made to confer by way of a recognition scene in which Andromeda proves to be the image of his daughter, and his daughter a copy of the painting, the King can only exclaim: ‘Sa difference est nulle’ (‘There’s no difference at all’). Hardy stages one final ‘take’ on the recognition scene and on the question of the wonder-working picture in the final act of the entire eight-day sequence. It is a form of messenger speech, in which one ‘Citoyen’ recounts the entire story to (although he does not know it) Charicles, a priest from Delphi who had acted as the girl’s father for a time, and from whom she had her name. Having lost her earlier in the narrative, Charicles has now come to Meroé in the hope of finding his adoptive daughter alive. The Citizen concludes his long narrative with a retelling of events earlier that day: a ‘miracle des Cieux’, which had ¹¹ For more on this medical tradition, see Daston and Park (1998), Lyons (2005), Maclean (2006), and Williams (2011). On the specific questions of skin colour and ‘race’, see esp. Ndiaye (2016), and Iyengar (2005), 19 43; see also Doniger’s discussion of Heliodorus (2003), 1 44. ¹² Hardy (1623), 25 of Day 8.

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brought about the return of the King’s daughter. In a collocation of the miraculous and the monstrous, he outlines, one last time, the theory of maternal impression, putting both the theory and the painting that explains Persinna’s apparent infidelity into studiedly ekphrastic words: (Or, l’imaginative, autre âme de l’amour Altera la couleur en ceste créature) Ne lui imprima point des parents la figure, Ains d’un rare pourtrait que vis à vis du lict Notre Princesse avoit quand son ventre s’emplit! Pourtraict representant la fille de Cephise, Nue, en beaute parfaicte, et au monstre soumise.¹³ ((For the imagination, love’s second soul, Altered the colour of this creature) Imprinting not her parent’s image on her, But that of a remarkable portrait which hung opposite the bed Belonging to Princess when her belly filled out! The portrait represented the daughter of Cepheus, Naked, perfectly beautiful, and subject to the monster.)

Hardy’s Citizen has the image of Andromeda and her monster imprinted on his memory: the last line here suggests he is seeing both again as he speaks. His narrative of the recognition scene (which extends over several pages and almost destroys poor Charicles who wants to know if his adoptive daughter has survived) bears further witness to an event, which the Citizen, like Hardy’s audience, had seen staged in the previous act. The potential invraisemblance (unlikelihood) of the entire drama, of the uncanny likeness of the girl to the painting, and of the medical theory that explains it all is sublimated by Hardy’s generic transposition of the Greek romance into a species of tragicomic miracle play. For Hardy knows that what matters most to the early modern French Citizen witness(es) to this compelling tale is the political force of the ‘miracle des Cieux’ that it places centre stage: the Queen was not a double dealer; the daughter survived; the nation has a rightful heir; the war is over; we can all go home.

S E C R E T S T O R I ES : ‘ MA RAISON EN SUSPENS BALANCÉE’ In returning once more to Octave de Genetay’s suspenseful tragicomedy and to Diana, with her dogs and her monsters held back on that leash, we see that, like both its Greek model and Hardy’s early stage reworking of it, L’Éthiopique ¹³ Hardy (1623), 34 of Day 8; Hardy (2014), 620.

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turns on the question of the wonder-working power of the image which explains the generation of its heroine, Chariclea. Genetay’s approach to this question is, however, striking: he redirects the audience’s attention away from the public aspects of the Aethiopica, to make of his drama a tragicomic romance at once political and intensely private. This is most clearly evident in the compressions and changes he instigates to the recognition plot: Hardy’s several scenes are reduced to just the one; and although (as noted above) the action begins just as the sacrifice is due to take place before the watching nation, the play never (quite) opens out into public space. Genetay’s tragicomedy figures the uncanny image of Andromeda not as part of a public spectacle—as it is in both Heliodorus’ romance and Hardy’s poëmes dragmatiques—but as an emblem of error, and the erroneous workings of (post-war) memory: of suspicion, internal turmoil, and disorder, recalled within the privacy of the home. L’Éthiopique displaces the focus of attention from Chariclea, the daughter, on to Persinna, the mother, and in so doing makes its audience privy to the internal turmoil of the Queen. Recalling how the girl she had earlier seen being readied for sacrifice had struck her as somehow more than simply foreign, she is reminded of that other girl, the one in the picture above her bed. Now talking of a ‘prodige’, now a ‘merveille’, she struggles to give words to what she thinks and feels, before settling on a comparison: Voyant son teint si blanc & son œil si benin Je remarquois en elle un air du tout divin, Et l’estimay du tout à Andromède égale Depeinte en un tableau dans la chambre royale.¹⁴ (On seeing her there, so white, and her kindly eye, I saw in her some air, something altogether divine, And judged her altogether equal to Andromeda Pictured in the painting hung in the royal bedroom.)

I saw, I noticed, I judged; but I can’t get the image out of my mind, for it reminds me of another enduring picture: that of my own—lost—daughter: Elle me fait encor de celle souvenir Qui sortit de mes flancs & que je fis bannir Pour oster le soupçon que je fusse adultère Pour n’avoir la couleur de père ni de mère.¹⁵ (She still makes me remember again the one, Born of my womb, but whom I banished, To remove all suspicion of adultery from me, Her being the colour of neither father nor mother.)

¹⁴ Genetay (1609), 36.

¹⁵ Genetay (1609), 36.

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Genetay does not have the painting of Andromeda brought out into public space by the servants on the orders of the King, as Heliodorus does, and as Hardy, along with other dramatists and painters, will do later in this story’s early modern history. Instead, he makes of the image a private memory, something like a secret, shared by the Queen only with the priest Sisimithras, to whom she is talking here; but unbeknownst to her, the Chorus of Ethiopian Courtiers observes and listens to the action throughout. The Queen has not, yet, made the full set of connections between the strangely compelling girl, the picture above her bed, and the theory of maternal impression of which both are (it seems) the sign. Nor does the priestly adviser—Sisimithras, who doubles as the explanatory doctor in Hardy—yet make things explicit either to the Queen or to the audience. Persinna’s words convey the effects that the sight of the girl has had on her, but the order in which she recalls to mind the images and events is revealing. For the stranger first looks divine, and then looks very like the Andromeda painting, and only then, by way of a kind of after-image—‘encor’—does she remind Persinna of her own lost daughter. The point is that if (in accordance with the theory of maternal impression) the one image did generate the other, then it has done so here only within the mother’s mind, and in these confidences, minimally shared on stage. This is, in other words, not a politically charged recognition scene, performed in front of an excited crowd, still less a medical explanation of a monstrous birth. It is, rather, something like a stage secret: told in confidence, behind the partially closed door that is theatre’s fourth wall (but with the Chorus, like the audience, listening, and watching, hard). Crowded out by questions pressing in from all sides, by anxieties concerning the potentially illicit nature of her secretly articulated desires about the girl being her long-lost daughter, and by the sheer improbability of what she finds herself hoping might happen, the Queen wonders how it is she could want such a thing? How could the girl reasonably prove to be hers? D’où seroit elle éclose? & quoy? m’est il loisible De me représenter une chose impossible? (Where could she have sprung/hatched from? And can I really Imagine a thing altogether impossible?) Ainsi divers soucis vont troublant ma pensée Qui tiennent ma raison en suspens balancée.¹⁶ (So it is that many thoughts trouble my mind And hold my reason captive in suspense.)

The first couplet could be construed as a dramatist’s knowing wink to an audience: will you allow me to show you impossible things onstage? And it is ¹⁶ Genetay (1609), 36 7.

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true that such generic self-consciousness concerning the consent required for the mimetic contract to operate fully often serves as a mark of recognition for the tragicomic genre in the early modern period.¹⁷ But there is more going on in this couplet; for it also privatizes the question of narrative credibility, articulating it not as a problem for dramatist and audiences, but as one which a mother asks of herself, and of her own imagination. The second couplet could be read as a further self-consciously generic marker: as we have seen, cognates of the term ‘suspense’ are central to the history and poetics of the French strain of Heliodorian romance from at least Amyot onwards. But these lines also transfer into the mind of the mother the kind of suspenseful attention which Heliodorus famously generated in his readers: attention to the structures, the politics, and the laws of doubt, inheritance, and desire. Genetay’s Queen anticipates others who will follow her into turmoil in the suspenseful history of French tragedy. In a trope which will be reworked all the way through to Racine, the tension of doubt makes of the Queen a captive of her own reason, as of the trouble which she cannot bring herself to name. And if Racine’s Phèdre is the end of the line, the last word in the poetics and the politics of epic descent transposed by way of Heliodorus’ family romance, then Genetay’s L’Éthiopique perhaps serves to inaugurate its dramatic, theatrical internalization. For, as we have seen, Genetay’s play both announces and defers the full-scale, theatrical, and public recognition scene for which its source had become so well known: the Andromeda painting is never brought on stage, never set alongside the monstrous girl. But the pathology of the imagination is nonetheless not altogether left to its own, private, or unspoken devices. Indeed Genetay seems strangely concerned to make the at once genealogical and medical facts of the Princess’s case publicly known; more especially, he seems determined to displace common misconceptions both about this particular girl and about other monsters of her kind. So, following the private discussion between the Queen and her Adviser, as Persinna leaves to share the news with her husband, offstage, the Chorus, the Courtiers who have been observing and listening throughout the play, deliver six octaves of corrective explanation, concerning the manner, the mechanics, and the meaning of Chariclea’s conception. Addressing the audience directly, the Chorus begin with a nod to the aesthetic tastes of the gods, asserting that some of us are born white and others black because of the divine desire to introduce ‘ornement’ into the world and its ‘divers manoirs’. But they move, as the first stanza concludes, to their startling claim: Chariclea’s skin colour is not due to any of the causes adduced by contemporary medical ‘error’, which they list in turn:

¹⁷ See Mukherji and Lyne (2007); for the Aethiopica’s relation to ancient drama, see Montiglio (2013), 106 58; and Walden (1984).

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Ce n’est point ni la semence, Ni l’imagination Ni la châleur trop immense Ni la froide région.¹⁸ (It is neither the seed, Nor imagination Nor too great a heat Nor the coldness of those climes.)

Students of the history of poetics will know that there is nothing unusual about such cross-contamination of medical and theatrical theory. From as far back as Aristotle’s Poetics, at least, the two have shadowed each other across time; and they still do, as both catharsis and suspense become reconceived as at once functions of sensorimotor resonance and specific forms of kinesically embodied cognition.¹⁹ What Aristotle had said in the Generation of Animals also remains true: ‘Chacun forme en son semblable’ (‘Each of us creates in our own likeness’); and each person expects to do so ‘Selon qu’il a le couleur’ (‘According to his own colour’).²⁰ How, then, can it be that Chariclea’s body is white? The clue lies in the ‘chacun’ who does the forming of the child: Et si quelqu’un vient à naistre De teint qui soit différent, Il tient de quelque ancestre Qui l’a eu tel apparent.²¹ (And should someone chance to be born Of a different hue, Then this is due to some ancestor or other Who was of a similar appearance.)

The mark of difference in this story derives, then, from ‘quelque ancestre’; and what is remarkable about Genetay’s play is, as Ndiaye rightly stresses, its radical, enthusiastic espousal of the theory of what legal scholars today call lineal descent. Chariclea’s colour is inherited, rather than imagined, and, in the context of early modern medical, pictorial, and dramatic practice, this reconceptualization of the force of the picture hanging above the Queen’s bed proves to be at once countercultural and revolutionary. The theory of maternal impression and the much-reworked image of the startlingly white Andromeda are, in effect, dismissed offstage. There is, the

¹⁸ Genetay (1609), 42. ¹⁹ See, for one instance among many, George Graves (2016), clearly operating from within the ‘embodied cognition’ paradigm. ²⁰ Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals Book 4, 767b7. ²¹ Genetay (1609), 42.

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Chorus argue, no mystery here at all, since this is ‘chose bien aisée’: Cariclée (Chariclea) is white because of her (rhyming) ancestor, ‘Persée’ (Perseus): Premier de son royal sang. Et ne pensons qu’il procède De la vue d’un tableau, Car noire estoit Andromède Bien qu’elle eust le corps tresbeau.²² (His royal blood came first. So don’t let’s imagine that this follows From looking at a painting, For Andromeda was black Even though her body was very beautiful.)

We are beautiful, and black, the Ethiopian Chorus proclaim; Chariclea’s singularity derives from her white ancestor, the (then) stranger Perseus; Andromeda, like us, was always already black. This is not a story about the remarkable effects of the imagination, and it is not about the girl in the painting at all; it is, more than anything, a demonstration of the (potentially) monstrous power of inheritance, as of blood.

E P I L O G U E : A F T E RLI V E S No detailed records of the performance of either play discussed here have, to my knowledge, survived. Neither play has either stage directions, or illustrations, or—like, for instance, a later play in this sequence, Corneille’s remarkable and enormously successful Andromède—a Dessein (booklet) published separately from the text, explaining how this or that effect was achieved. We do not know what those who actually sat, or stood, through all eight days of Hardy’s epic transposition of the Aethiopica into theatre made of them; we don’t know if Genetay’s Chorus—if the play was indeed performed at the wedding ceremony in La Flèche—wore blackface to argue their case, or if his Chariclea chalked up so as to stand out from her family and kin by her dramatic whiteness. We don’t know if Corneille saw, or read, either of the plays discussed here by way of preparation or inspiration for his extraordinary stage version of the story, although we do know, from his own theoretical writing, that he worried a good deal about why the painterly tradition avoided representing Andromeda as black.²³ ²² Genetay (1609), 43; for this tradition, see McGrath (1992), 1 18; Crewe (2009), 129 42; and Spicer (2010), 307 35. ²³ See Williams (2011), ch. 4: ‘Corneille’s Andromeda: Painting, Medicine and the Politics of Spectacle’.

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What is clear is that Genetay’s Chorus conclude the staking of their claim concerning the cause for their heroine’s colour with a curiously inflected comparison. They set Chariclea’s case alongside (not a painting, but) that of another famous family line, bearers of an inherited sign which seems to be the inverse of her own: children born with the dark mark of ‘la flèche’ (spearhead) imprinted on their bodies. The point of the comparison is that not all Spartoi bear this mark. From time to time Nature errs, or perhaps even sins, and forgets to express the sign: ‘la nature pêche | Un temps [et] ne la mist point hors.’²⁴ Chariclea’s case is, then, akin to that of someone unquestionably descended from the House of Thebes, but mysteriously born without the mark. The example, as Genetay’s classically minded readers might have known, is derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, where the Theban birthmark figures—along with Odysseus’ scar—as an example of the ‘least artistic form of recognition, which, from poverty of wit, is most commonly employed— discovery by tokens, or signs’.²⁵ The reference to the birthmark in Aristotle is now thought to be from a lost version of Antigone, in which Creon ‘recognizes’ the child of Antigone and Haemon by just this sign. Genetay’s early seventeenth-century recollection of this otherwise lost trace from the performance archive suggests that his Chorus, in their conjunction of a discredited medical theory with a dramatic device which risks seeming too far-fetched to command assent, are also arguing a particular—dramatically inflected—cause. You can make use of birthmarks if you have to, but the theory of maternal impression won’t wash any more. To try to pass off a painted image of a white Andromeda as somehow instrumental in the generation, from black parents, of a white girl; to set that girl alongside a painting of her as part of your closing recognition scene, live, onstage is just poor stage business. To make a public spectacle of that kind is to do a Hardy; to be monstrous in a properly theatrical sense: contrived and invraisemblable. Racine will, later in the century, comment on the spearhead birthmark and other such tokens of recognition in his notes on the Poetics, as he develops his own particular tragic method, practice, and cause.²⁶ It is also not impossible that Racine read both plays discussed here. That it seems at least likely that he did so, is due to the fact that he held a sustained passion for the Aethiopica; a passion originally conceived in childhood, and then stillborn as his now lost first play. Racine’s biographers tell us that the young would-be playwright offered a dramatized version of the story to Molière for use by his troupe. The older man turned the young hopeful down, but not before urging him to try

²⁴ Genetay (1609), 44. ²⁵ Aristotle, Poetics 1454b (ch. 16). It is perhaps not too fanciful to see in Genetay’s choice of example an instance of ‘wit’: drawing attention to questions of descent by way of ‘la flèche’, at La Flèche, the recently constructed castle of a recently ennobled house. ²⁶ Racine (1966), 929.

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his hand at tragedy instead. Racine takes up Molière’s suggestion, leaves Chariclea and her unlikely story behind, and focuses his dramatic attention to those that bear that other sign: the mark of the troubled House of Thebes.²⁷ The rest is history; but history is, of course, only half the story. For the truth is that the supposedly purist neoclassical Racine never quite forgot the hybrid tale—part epic, part romance, and wholly dramatic—which Heliodorus tells; the tale of strangely vulnerable child whose sacrifice was both required and averted by the force of the mother’s imagination. Chariclea’s story is reborn time and again throughout Racine’s theatre, structured as it is by an obsession with children at once adored and marked as monstrous—from the early Thébaide all the way through to Phèdre, and indeed beyond: all the way, that is, through to the extraordinary irruption of violence into the inner sanctum of the stage, the final recognition scene, with its release of the monsters and the dogs which concludes Racine’s very last play, the civil war poem, at once dramatic, biblical, and epic that is Athalie. But that really is another story. ²⁷ Racine’s first extant play, La Thébaide, turns on precisely such questions; for Racine’s early reading of Heliodorus, see Collinet (1988).

9 The Future of Epic in Cinema Tropes of Reproduction in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus Pantelis Michelakis

The terms ‘epic’ and ‘epic science fiction’ do not normally appear in science fiction encyclopedias. However, as Lorenzo DiTommaso points out, there is a whole group of science fiction films that must be distinguished from ‘the standard “space opera” or heroic fantasies’ because they display thematic and aesthetic preoccupations associated with ‘largeness of scale and the connexion between the protagonists and the race, nation, or empire of which they integrally are a part and whose future course they help determine’.¹ Such films have close affinities with ‘film epic’ as understood by Gilles Deleuze to bring together the monumental, the antiquarian, and the ethical, not least in terms of setting forth a ‘strong and coherent conception of universal history’.² The aim of this chapter is to explore the ways in which the generic label of ‘epic’ might be deemed relevant for one such film, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, and more broadly for the ways in which a discussion about the meanings of epic in early twenty-first-century cinema might be undertaken outside the genre of ‘historical epic’. The discussion proceeds in two stages. The first section argues for the need to explore how ‘epic science fiction’ operates in Scott’s Prometheus in ways that both relate and transcend common definitions of the term ‘epic’ in contemporary popular culture and the entertainment industry. ¹ DiTommaso (2007), 284 5, referring to Gunn (1988) and Clute and Nicholls (1993). On attempts to define science fiction, see also Gunn (2002), vii; Asimov (1995), 286 7; James (1994), 103 13; and, in relation to classics, Rogers and Stevens (2012a) and (2015) with bibliography. ² Deleuze (1986), 141 59. On the use of the word ‘epic’ as a generic label in cinema and in contemporary culture, see also the seminal work by Elley (1984) and Sobchack (1990) and more recently Burgoyne (2006) and (2010), Santas (2008), Hall and Neale (2010), Paul (2013), and Elliott (2014). On the emergence of epic as a generic label in early film criticism and publicity, see Michelakis (2013a).

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The second section focuses on the unorthodox models of biological evolution with which the film’s narrative engages and suggests ways in which they can help with reflection on methods of film analysis and genre criticism. What models does biology provide for the interpretation of contemporary artistic narrative and for the interpretation of the history of a genre? In what ways and to what extent can the analogy between genres and species be sustained? In addressing such questions, I argue for the morphological flexibility of epic that explains its re-emergence in contemporary cultural production and creativity, and more specifically for the need to relate it to practices of copying in the age of genetic and digital reproduction and to the anxieties they generate.

SCIENCE F ICTION AND EPIC Ridley Scott’s film Prometheus was released in late spring and early summer 2012 across more than eighty countries. An extensive advertising campaign preceded it, that included not just conventional promotional trailers, posters, and interviews but, most effectively, teaser video clips that disseminated online via video-sharing websites, social media, and email. Upon its release, the film was met with financial success and extensive critical responses, both in print and online.³ Since then, Prometheus has maintained a strong presence in online discussion groups, supported by the release first of a single-disc DVD edition with deleted scenes, then of a single-disc Blu-ray edition, a book on the making of the film, a four-disc 3D edition with more special features including in-depth documentary and audio commentaries, inclusion in DVD box sets, and extensive speculation about a sequel (finally released in 2017 under the title Alien: Covenant). ‘But what is this genre?’ asks Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books, to which he provides the following answer: Call it the speculative science fiction epic willing to flirt with cosmic pessimism; the eternally recurring saga of the space voyage toward our point of origin or ultimate destiny (they generally turn out to be pretty much identical); the drama of metamorphosis in which animals become human and humans become ma chines; the proleptic chronicle of a future depicted as so endangered it may not even come to pass, and so unappealing we might well wish it wouldn’t.⁴

³ On the box office success of Prometheus, see the relevant data at Box Office Mojo: , last accessed 15 August 2018. A list of online reviews can be found in the film’s entry on the Internet Movie Database: , last accessed 15 August 2018. ⁴ O’Brien (2012).

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The marketing and critical discourses around Scott’s Prometheus suggest that the word ‘epic’ was by no means the only generic term used to describe the film. But the term was used persistently, in a variety of contexts, to describe a range of different aspects of the film and its production. For instance it was used to describe the ambitious scope of the film’s narrative, its atmosphere, and the big themes it addresses: ‘A big-deal, serious science-fiction epic’ was Quentin Tarantino’s assessment of the film;⁵ and his view was shared by many reviewers who called it ‘Ridley Scott’s recent sci-fi epic’;⁶ ‘Scott’s scary new 3-D space epic’;⁷ and who associated it with an ‘epic landscape’⁸ and ‘epic cosmological mysteries’.⁹ The word ‘epic’ was also applied to the technologies behind its cutting-edge visual effects and the scale of its gigantic sets: ‘The HD cameras used exclusively on the shoot were the RED EPIC systems, which are capable of extremely high 5k resolution’;¹⁰ ‘The set is all around you. It’s as big as a soccer pitch’;¹¹ ‘We were able to shoot a lot of live action around something of an enormous scale which suggested something of an even more enormous scale.’¹² In marketing and critical discourses around Prometheus, then, the term ‘epic’ was used in the way it is commonly understood in popular culture and especially in the entertainment industry to denote magnitude, the spectacular, and the fantastical. The film itself, however, does not confine itself to this rather conventional understanding of epic. Rather it makes specific allusions to the world of mythology, and more specifically to the world of Graeco-Roman mythology in numerous ways, both visually and verbally. The film’s iconography associates this world with the godlike beings from which the human species is supposed to have originated. This is the world of larger-than-human characters with ‘marble-white skin and exaggerated muscle definition recalling classical statuary’;¹³ figures reminiscent of ‘Greek Titans’,¹⁴ whose remains crumble or weather like stone (Fig. 9.1), a world of subterranean temples with giant portrait statues, urns, murals, and celestial spheres (as well as pyramids, subterranean caverns, and primitive paintings). The film also makes explicit verbal references to the world of GraecoRoman mythology. ‘The Titan Prometheus’, explains the elderly CEO of the corporation that funds the expedition to his crew members, ‘wanted to give mankind equal footing with the gods and for that, he was cast from Olympus. Well, my friends, the time has finally come for his return.’ If visual references to classical antiquity are related to the world of gods from outer space, verbal references to classical antiquity are related to the world of the human characters. ⁵ Tarantino, quoted in Wales (2013). ⁶ Britt (2012). ⁷ Hart (2012). ⁸ Hart (2012). ⁹ Scheib (2012). ¹⁰ ‘Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” Uses Red Epic Cameras’, , last accessed 15 August 2018. ¹¹ Salisbury (2012), 21. ¹² Salisbury (2012), 70. ¹³ Stevens (2012). ¹⁴ Crocker (2012).

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Fig. 9.1 ‘Engineer disintegrates into primordial waters’. Frame capture from DVD edition by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012). © 20th Century Fox.

Prometheus features not simply in a passing mythological reference (even if a well-established one through the attention it receives in the first of the film’s promotional video clips, ‘TED Talk 2023’¹⁵). He is mentioned again and again as the name of the film’s spaceship. As a cutting-edge, deep-space exploration vehicle, Prometheus becomes the technological vessel that propels the narrative of the film forward and makes possible the transportation of the characters and the audience to the distant planet where the action of the film takes place. The spaceship Prometheus is associated not only with technology and progress; its landing on the surface of the distant planet of its destination ‘had an almost anthropomorphic quality to it’, says the film’s production designer; ‘the Bridge was the head and the legs were the engines’.¹⁶ The destruction of the spaceship at the end of the film to save planet Earth goes a step further in bringing out the associations of the Titan with daring, punishment, and suffering for the benefit of humanity. Moving beyond specific visual and verbal allusions to classical antiquity, the film shows a preoccupation with epic material that ranges from myths of origin and creation to myths of succession and cosmic struggle between good and evil, myths of successive races, and myths of gods, mortals, and monsters. The film draws on a number of ancient civilizations, fusing diverse images, symbols, and narratives from Egypt, the Mayas, Sumeria, Babylonia, and Mesopotamia. If the film privileges Graeco-Roman references, it also displays a strong tendency towards mythological syncretism and an equally strong Christian undercurrent which includes discussions among the characters

¹⁵ Available online at , last accessed 15 August 2018. ¹⁶ Arthur Max, in Salisbury (2012), 69.

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around faith (‘Even after all this . . . you still believe, don’t you?’), passing references to the crucifixion of Christ (‘we thought it was a little too on the nose’, admits Scott of the more explicit references initially envisaged¹⁷) and John Milton’s religious epic poem Paradise Lost as a source of inspiration (‘I started off with a title called Paradise,’ says Scott in another interview).¹⁸ Prometheus’ narrative is at once eclectic and universalizing. As such it can be seen as satisfying an encyclopedic desire that the return to epic seeks to satisfy, a desire that goes against both realism and the modern scientific perspective in their compartmentalization of knowledge and in their separation of the modern individual from things that become religious dogma or moral law. Ridley Scott’s interest in epic as a genre with specific associations with classical antiquity and mythology while also encompassing a wider range of cultural references, is not surprising in view of the rest of his film work. The director of cult science-fiction films such as Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) is also the director of commercially successful and critically acclaimed historical epics, from the New World story of 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) to the Crusades-inspired Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and the biblically inspired Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). Most relevant for the purposes of this discussion is Gladiator (2000), the film that single-handedly brought the genre of historical epic back to the big screen after a generation-long absence.¹⁹ If according to Burgoyne, the formal characteristics of historical film epic have to do with ‘its design-intensive mise-en-scene, its use of spectacle and its style of sensory expansiveness—as producing an affective and emotional relation to the historical past, creating a fullness of engagement and amplitude of consciousness’,²⁰ Prometheus shows how some of those characteristics can thrive in other environments as well, such as that of science fiction. Like Gladiator, Prometheus engages with features that Burgoyne associates with the kinaesthetic experience and political righteousness of epic cinema, nostalgia on the one hand for a certain moral code and for family values, and ‘a powerful sense of anticipatory consciousness’ on the other.²¹ The transfer of epic operations from the sand of the Colosseum to the dust of a remote moon may seem to require a huge leap of faith, but in fact the two films expose very similar preoccupations with infrastructures of political and/or corporate power. What is more, they both show how a quest for freedom or knowledge needs to exploit such infrastructures (in the way a virus takes over its host, to anticipate one of the tropes to be discussed in the ‘Genre Criticism and the Genetic Imaginary’ section below) if epic is to be rewritten not from the centre but from the periphery. Ridley Scott is not unique among film directors to have made his reputation in both science fiction and epic. Zack Snyder made his films of the Persian ¹⁷ Jagernauth (2012). ¹⁸ O’Connell (2012). ¹⁹ On Ridley Scott and the rebirth of the historical epic, see most recently Richards (2014). ²⁰ Burgoyne (2006), 109. ²¹ Burgoyne (2006), 111.

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Wars (300 in 2006 and 300: Rise of an Empire in 2014) in the same period that he also produced fantasy films such as Watchmen (2009) and Man of Steel (2014). Similarly, Stanley Kubrick directed Spartacus in 1960 and 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. Jean-Luc Godard directed his adaptation of the Odyssey, entitled Contempt, in 1963, just two years before his noir sciencefiction film Alphaville in 1965. Fritz Lang, director of seminal science-fiction films such as Metropolis (1927) and Woman in the Moon (1929), also directed epics such as Die Niebelungen (1924)—not to mention his role as film director of an Odyssey-within-an-Odyssey in Godard’s Contempt. And Georges Méliès, director of what is arguably the first science-fiction film in the history of cinema, uses the same optical tricks in A Trip to the Moon (1902) as in one of the earliest film adaptations of a literary epic, his Island of Calypso; Odysseus and the Giant Polyphemus (1905).²² In cinema the generic universes of science fiction and epic are not just parallel but also interconnect or even converge. The work of any of the above directors could be used to demonstrate this point. Science fiction films have been identified as epic in critical and advertising discourses for most of cinema’s history. Their narratives are often filled with allusions to mythological stories, characters, and themes from around the world. And they often collapse the distinction between future and past by being set ‘long, long ago . . . in a galaxy far, far away’,²³ a narrative topos that often goes hand in hand with ‘a nostalgically backward looking to earlier visions of the future’²⁴ on and off the cinematic screen. The opening line of George Lucas’s Star Wars films stands for a much wider group of films that belong to this category. This conflation of future and past is a feature that science fiction films share with science fiction as a literary genre but also as a broader artistic and cultural phenomenon associated with folk tales, fantasy adventure, the Gothic novel, historical romance, crime, horror, and popular science. Consider, for instance, the role of Prometheus in an unacknowledged influence on Scott’s film, Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.²⁵ Or the persistent popularity of another, this time acknowledged, influence on the film, Erich von Daeniken’s pseudoscientific claims about extraterrestrial influences on early human culture in books such as Chariots of the Gods? and Gods from Outer Space.²⁶ Prometheus’ engagement with the temporalities of nostalgia and the allure of totality, moving forward by seeking to restore political and social structures, ethical values, and regimes of knowledge that may have never existed, is at

²² On Méliès’s Island of Calypso; Odysseus and the Giant Polyphemus, see further Michelakis (2013a). ²³ Sobchack (1998), 276. ²⁴ Sobchack (1998), 276. ²⁵ Rogers and Stevens (2012b). ²⁶ Scott, in Salisbury (2012), 13.

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once creative and regressive. If Prometheus is ‘a movie about creation’,²⁷ as one of the film’s screenwriters puts it, it is less about the wonders of creation and more about its unanticipated horrors and unattainable ideals. This chapter cannot do justice to the parallel histories and the many points of contact and convergence between the two cinematic genres of epic and science fiction. Nor can it trace the complex ways in which those histories and points of contact and convergence are internalized within science fiction or epic as cinematic genres, let alone as broader artistic and cultural phenomena.²⁸ What it offers instead is an exploration of how, in Scott’s Prometheus at least, some of these issues are played out against an intense concentration of biological tropes. The modern conditions that make the cinematic return of epic a necessary but unsuccessful venture—and Scott’s Prometheus itself another example of modern epic as failed epic²⁹—are linked in the film to anxieties about identity, agency, technology, and ethics in the age of genetic engineering.

GENRE CRITICISM AND THE GENETIC I MAGINARY In criticism, artistic genres are often seen in biological terms. This can be traced from contemporary ecocriticism all the way back to the organic unity of works of art in the writings of ancient authors such as Aristotle and Plato, via Franco Moretti’s ‘Literary Evolution’, Richard Dawkins’s discussion of cultural transmission in terms of genetic transmission in the Selfish Gene, biological metaphors that inform much of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, botanical and zoological analogies in Vladimir Propp’s structuralist approach to narrative, and the organic forms in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Romantic criticism.³⁰ As Tzvetan Todorov points out, ‘the concept of genre (or species) is borrowed from the natural sciences’. However, there is a profound ‘difference between the meanings of the terms “genre” and “specimen” depending on whether they are applied to natural beings or to the works of the mind’.³¹ As Todorov puts it, ‘the impact of individual organisms on the evolution of the species is so slow that we can discount it in practice’. In the realm of art, on the other hand, ‘evolution operates with an altogether different rhythm; every work modifies the sum of possible works, each new example alters the species’.³²

²⁷ Damon Lindelof, in Gilchrist (2012). ²⁸ For perceptive discussions of some of the issues around this larger topic, see DiTommaso (2007); Rogers and Stevens (2012a) and (2015). ²⁹ Moretti (1996). ³⁰ Moretti (1996) and (1988), Dawkins (1976), Frye (1957); on Propp, see Steiner and Davydov (1977); on romantic ecology and its legacy, see Coupe (2000). ³¹ Todorov (1973), 5. ³² Todorov (1973), 6.

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In artistic practice, genres from different ages and different stages in their historical development are routinely mixed together in ways that embrace anachronism and defy historical logic. Rick Altman addresses in a head-on manner the metaphor of evolutionary biology that often informs critical discussions of genre: ‘in the multi-era imaginary world of a Jurassic Park . . . the categories of a previous evolutionary state continue to exist. In the genre world . . . everyday is Jurassic Park day. Not only are all genres interfertile, they may at any time be crossed with any genre that ever existed.’³³ Taking its cue from Altman, my discussion here focuses less on classificatory and taxonomic distinctions between science fiction and epic and more on issues of generic interaction and change. Rather than asking questions about the common features that hold together films under the same generic label, the discussion undertaken here considers the role of what Jackie Stacey calls ‘the genetic imaginary’ in drawing up and naturalizing family ties and boundaries between genres as distinct classes.³⁴ In other words, the discussion proposed here examines processes of dissemination and transformation of genres and the often-paradoxical ways in which genealogies in the biological sense of procreation and reproduction, and in the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony, begin to intermingle. Scott’s Prometheus begins at the beginning, with a myth about creation. Mighty rivers, gigantic valleys, and glacial cuts surrounded by big mountains provide a sense of the dawn of time. A self-sacrificial male descends from the sky and disintegrates into primordial waters. Human life is born out of this act. The scene begins with bird’s-eye views of the vast landscape below. It continues with views of a humanoid witnessing his own disintegration (Fig. 9.1). And it concludes with microscopic views of fluids gashing through lesions, of particles flowing through the air, and of strands of DNA breaking apart, swirling through the water, then rebuilding. The scene brings together the macro level of mythological archetypes and the micro level of biology, creationism and evolution, fiction and science. This is not simply the film’s theory for how human life appeared on Earth but also a reflection on the film’s own genesis. As the strands of DNA begin to rebuild and blood cells to multiply, clean white lines appear gradually, forming letters that spell the film’s title, Prometheus. The narrative of the film is born out of mythological imagery broken down and reassembled as biological spectacle for an age of genetic engineering. With a gigantic flash-forward spanning more millennia than the opening of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, we next find ourselves in the year 2093 CE, on board ‘the trillion-dollar ship Prometheus . . . en route to a distant world’.³⁵ The humans on board ‘Prometheus’ think they have an invitation to visit the

³³ Altman (1998), 24.

³⁴ Stacey (2010).

³⁵ Ebert (2012).

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world of the so-called Engineers, but contact with them turns out to have unintended and unanticipated consequences. The arrival of the spaceship Prometheus on the distant planet sets in motion processes that lead to disorder and chaos. As the film progresses, the clear distinction between the engineers, the humans, and their robots begins to break down. Humans experiment on engineers, and robots experiment on humans: It’s a weird family tree that the movie constructs as the end of the movie gives birth to the progeny of all three generations this is what happens when an android gets involved in ‘fertilising’ something that was invented by The Engin eers with a human host which then has sex with another human who gives birth who then recombines with The Engineer.³⁶

Contamination leads to death, violent mutation, and the birth of monsters. Bodies are ‘invaded, transmuted, tortured, split open, devoured’.³⁷ As the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the body collapse, what separates humans from their ancestors and robots is no longer clearly defined. Similarly, the distinctions between science and fiction, between epic, futuristic adventure, mystery, and horror become confused. By the end of the film, all that is left on the remote planet of this encounter between different species and genres is a post-apocalyptic landscape of death and destruction in which the monstrous children of mutated humans and their superhuman ancestors roam free. The only survivor of the spaceship Prometheus is the female protagonist of the film, the scientist Dr Shaw, who together with the remains of the robot David, prepares for her final exit. As we take our eyes away from the post-apocalyptic landscape of the planet that the film has failed to make its home, and we look upwards, through the clouds, towards the blue skies beyond, epic reasserts itself through the most conventional of devices, that of the voice-over. An all-too-vulnerable female narrator records a brief, prosaic report on behalf of a vessel that no longer exists, about a point of origin that should be avoided, with the help of a medium whose transmission and reception by an audience is only speculative: Final report of the vessel Prometheus. The ship and her entire crew are gone. If you’re receiving this transmission make no attempt to come to its point of origin. There is only death here now, and I’m leaving it behind. It is New Year’s Day, the year of our Lord, 2094. My name is Elizabeth Shaw, the last survivor of the Prometheus. And I am still searching.

However, the film also ends with the promise of a narrative reboot, with a proleptic return to origins, the launching of another attempt to recover epic. The conversation between Dr Shaw and David points towards a world where ³⁶ Damon Lindelof, in Lyus (2012).

³⁷ O’Brien (2012).

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humans can meet gods, where religion can coexist with knowledge, fiction with science, the future with the past: DR SHAW :

You said you could understand their navigation . . . use their maps. DAVID : Yes, of course. Once we get to one of their other ships finding a path to Earth should be relatively straightforward. DR SHAW : I don’t want to go back to where we came from. I want to go where they came from. Do you think you can do that, David? DAVID : Yes. I believe I can. May I ask what you hope to achieve by going there? DR SHAW : They created us. Then they tried to kill us. They changed their minds. I deserve to know why. DAVID : The answer is irrelevant. Does it matter why they changed their minds? DR SHAW : Yes. Yes, it does. DAVID : I don’t understand. DR SHAW : Well, I guess that’s because I’m a human being and you’re a robot. The ending restores the taxonomical distinction between gods, humans, and robots as well as the hierarchical distinction between human hope and desire in the driving seat and an emasculated technology at their service (and literally in the bag). The ending is both an averted end of the world as we know it and an attempt to redraw the boundaries of time. What appeared at the beginning of the film as the dawn of time proves part of a much larger continuum that only now we can begin to grasp in its entirety. As the world of horror is left behind and the blue skies of another quest for origins open up ahead of us, the ending re-establishes order at all levels, including that of genre. The film, effectively, presents us with two views of epic. One is based on the fantasy of recovering epic as a singular, pure genre. The other is based on the practice of genetic contamination between different genres and of genetic mutation within genres. The former approach can be associated with the imagined, desired origins of science fiction as offspring of an ancient and illustrious poetic type. The latter approach relates to the realities of science fiction as a genre that flirts with numerous other genres, past and present, among which epic is only one, engendering offshoots ‘like the alien life-forms that proliferate in the black corridors’ of the film.³⁸ At the end of the film, the traditional search for origins, continuity, and coherence is reinstated even if the rest of the narrative deals ‘a blow to a regime of truth that denies the ambiguous beginnings, vicissitudes, and incongruities of [generic] existence’.³⁹ But the fantasy of recovering epic played out at the end of the film, no less than

³⁸ O’Brien (2012).

³⁹ Quinby (1995), xii xiii.

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the reality of generic mutation in the middle, is busy performing another genetic experiment. It collapses the distinction between engineers, gods, parents, kings, and artists. It also collapses the distinction between humans, children, machines, subjects, and works of art. Effectively, it collapses the distinction between religion, biology, technology, politics, and art. The ethics of reproduction, the fears and anxieties of unchecked replication, the loss of singularity and identity may be scrutinized by the plot and the characters at one level, but they are also given free rein at levels beyond or below the thematic preoccupations of the plot and the characters. In Prometheus heretical or outdated models of evolutionary change take centre stage, whereas ideas associated with Darwin’s evolutionary theory, with their focus on random variations and selection pressures, are pushed to the background. While this reasserts in certain ways the stereotype that fiction and science are not very compatible, it also demonstrates how the scientific orthodoxies of biological evolution and the artistic realities of cultural evolution work in different but symbiotic ways: (1) Mutation. In opposition to the slow evolution of Darwinian theory, mutation leads to sudden and large-scale transformations and the instantaneous establishment of new species through an accelerated evolutionary tempo. Sudden leaps in evolution come at a cost for the organisms involved, associated as they are with transgression, violence, and variation leading to genetic decline. At the end of the film and against such a depiction of mutation (and its channelling through contamination, non-consensual sex, violent births, and sexually transmitted disease), an assumed norm of chronologically and hierarchically separate species that do not interbreed emerges as a horizon of (epic) expectations. (2) External forces. Mutations and the genetic and narrative complexity that accompanies them are not the symptom of spontaneous variations, nor are they driven by internal forces and developments. Rather they are the result of external factors (as with interstellar visitations—when aliens bring life to a primordial earth or when the film’s human characters bring destruction to a remote moon), external socio-economic and technological conditions (‘My company paid a trillion dollars to find this place and bring you’) and environmental pressures (‘the murals are changing. I think we’ve affected the atmosphere in the room’). (3) Agency. By contrast to the Darwinian sense of inability to foresee what would be advantageous and ‘the interplay of random mutation and blind selection’, external forces ‘transform the concept of selection from the traditional passive filter to a far more activist, deliberate, foresightendowed entity’.⁴⁰ Evolution is taken in the hands of a self-sacrificial

⁴⁰ Winthrop Young (1999), 33.

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Engineer whose genetic material fertilizes a primordial earth, a selfinterested multibillionaire that wants to extend his life, and a robot whose artificial consciousness makes it want to kill its creators. Despite the number of characters that behave as if they were gods, only for their limitations to be exposed and punished, the principle itself of the benevolent creator does not go away. If anything, it survives as the ultimate origin and point of destination at the film’s end. (4) Stringing together. The stringing together of a new genetic code, that is the rearrangement of chromosomes that leads to a large systemic mutation, visualized emblematically as the film title emerges in the opening scene, raises questions about the creation of the film’s narrative that can be related to and seen as the equivalent not only of ‘the formalist notion of nanizyvanie or “stringing together”’,⁴¹ but also of stitching as a metaphor for epic composition.⁴² The film thematizes the device of stringing together, of the use of separate stories related to biology and mythology as raw materials for the construction of a new artistic reality.⁴³ The tinkering that necessitates ‘work[ing] with whatever material happens to be at hand rather than the omnipotence to design every thing anew’,⁴⁴ and that makes it possible for a genre ‘to absorb novelties or survive geographical transplantation without disintegration’,⁴⁵ is practised extensively throughout the film but in such ways as to advocate the rejection of most regenerative processes associated with it.

CONCLUSIO N The possibilities that Prometheus opens up for the encounter between a classical genre and biologically inflected modes of reproduction need to be set against other examples of recent science fiction that turn to classical antiquity to make sense of the contemporary fascination with and anxieties around genetic engineering. From Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) to Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 (2003), Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013), and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), a whole range of recent science-fiction films retrace generational fantasies and discords in a variety of classically inspired contexts (from Sophoclean tragedy to Ovidian mythology), from the biological to the theological, and from the literary to the historical. ⁴¹ Winthrop Young (1999), 31. ⁴² Ford (1988). ⁴³ On this formalist concept introduced by Victor Shklovsky in 1925, see Shklovsky (2009). ⁴⁴ Winthrop Young (1999), 28. ⁴⁵ Winthrop Young (1999), 28.

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In doing so, such films scrutinize the replication of biological information and the reproducibility of the art object in ways that have a direct bearing not only on contemporary anxieties about genetics but also on the cinema’s own postcelluloid aesthetic of imitation and artifice. While a more detailed discussion of how these films relate to one another in their engagement with classical antiquity lies outside the scope of this chapter, a brief consideration of Code 46 alongside Prometheus can shed light on points of convergence and divergence between the two. Code 46 is an art-house film rather than a global blockbuster, and the classical genre implicated in it is tragedy rather than epic. The ‘film explores the dangers of the end of Oedipus in a world of fetal cloning’, but ‘it simultaneously enacts an Oedipal return’ as the protagonists vainly attempt to escape ‘to an outside’ which makes their subsequent punishment and ‘exile seem like an inevitable repetition’.⁴⁶ While the film airs tragically modulated anxieties about desire in the age of genetic engineering, it also performs its own impulsive love affair with the maternal body of a canonical text of Western literature and thought. ‘Multiplicity . . . threatens the singularity and individuality which lie at the heart of modern aspirations of subjecthood’,⁴⁷ but at the same time it seems to open up new possibilities for artistic creativity: ‘Diet, climate, environment, chance, surgery, the stars, God. We aren’t prisoners of our genes,’ claims a DNA analyst in a sequence halfway through the film, at the same time that dark clouds begin to gather above the narrative and its protagonists. If in Prometheus the focus is on anxieties about change (how humans/texts or species/genres can cope with violent change), in Code 46 the focus is on anxieties around cloning (how humans/texts or species/genres can cope with the violence of non-differentiation).⁴⁸ What a biological and more specifically evolutionary model of film analysis and genre criticism does is create pressure to search for an equivalent of the micro-scale analysis undertaken by genetics. That equivalent might well be some form of formalism.⁴⁹ At the same time, the use of a biological model of evolution creates pressure to look for an equivalent of the large-scale analysis undertaken by histories of the longue durée.⁵⁰ Oscillating between the two levels of analysis, one may do well to ask what is the object of such a critical project. Is it the work of art itself or something at once smaller and bigger? At the micro-scale level, there are genre markers such as themes, techniques, ⁴⁶ Stacey (2010), 173. ⁴⁷ Stacey (2010), 150. ⁴⁸ For a more detailed discussion of Code 46 in relation to Greek tragedy, see Michelakis (2013b), 222 4. ⁴⁹ Winthrop Young (1999), 31 on Moretti’s model of literary history (1996). See e.g. recent classical research on generic hybridity in Roman epic by Harrison (2007a) on Virgil’s Aeneid and Papaioannou (2008) on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. ⁵⁰ See e.g. postcolonial takes on hybridity in literature in Young (1995), Moslund (2010), and Guignery (2012).

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or devices operating within texts, whose function is prone to change. At the macroscale level, there is the concept of genre itself as something transcending individual texts and creating shifting expectations with which individual texts must engage. What introduces further variation into the complexities of the relation between biology and art is the fact that Scott’s Prometheus draws on competing models of biological reproduction and evolution. The film does not engage with specific epic texts. It does not support a dialogical model of reception where the interaction or convergence between species and genres is mutually illuminating. Epic appears in nightmares of genetic engineering that spiral out of control and in nostalgic fantasies about benevolent, self-sacrificial fathers begetting obedient and grateful offspring. Like Dr Shaw we can search for a deeper, more unifying lesson in the distant origins of generic or cultural evolution. Alternatively, we can search for a deeper, more unifying lesson in the polyvalence of epic in the present of genetic engineering. Either way, the film suggests that when it comes to cinematic intertextuality, a discussion about generic taxonomies and transformations cannot be conducted at the beginning of the twenty-first century without reflecting on the tropes that cinema animates and the fears it enacts at the heart of our genetic imaginary.⁵¹ ⁵¹ Earlier versions of this chapter were presented in Bristol, Oxford, Paris, and Warwick. I am very grateful to the organizers and audiences of those occasions for stimulating discussions. Research for this chapter could not have been undertaken without the generous support of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University.

10 From Epic to Lyric Alice Oswald’s and Barbara Köhler’s Refigurings of Homeric Epic Georgina Paul

This chapter considers work by two contemporary poets, the English poet Alice Oswald and the German poet Barbara Köhler, both of whom have recently published works that respond, albeit in quite different ways, to Homeric epic. In Niemands Frau (Nobody’s Wife), a cycle of twenty-one poems and three poetic afterwords, published in 2007, Barbara Köhler draws threads from Homer’s Odyssey in order, via a Penelopean poetics,¹ to reweave them into a new, highly complex poetic form. (Penelope is, of course, the eponymous Nobody’s Wife.) Köhler’s work is discussed here alongside Alice Oswald’s ‘excavation’² of Homer’s Iliad in her long poem Memorial of 2011. What links these two quite distinctive works in the reading presented here is that they share an interest in countering the epic narrative mode of Homer’s masterpieces in favour of what I shall be arguing is a gender-inflected preferment of the lyric dynamic. In so doing they draw our reading of Homer into their own lyric orbit. My reading of these two texts is prefaced by some thoughts on epic and lyric as poetic modes; and I include some reflections on the poems in performance, which is central to these poets’ conceptions of both poetic modes. In a recent essay on Barbara Köhler’s explorations of ancient Greek literature, Hans Jürgen Scheuer comments on the relationship of epic and lyric with reference to a short text by Köhler entitled ‘THE MOST BEAUTIFUL’.³ This text, first published in 2010, three years after the completion of Niemands Frau, combines a contemplation of two apparently unrelated phenomena.

¹ See Clayton (2004).

² Oswald (2011a).

³ Köhler (2012).

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The first is the lyric poet Sappho’s ‘rescue’⁴ of the figure of Helena from her role as the cause of the war between Greece and Troy in Sappho’s ode to Anactoria (Fragment 16 in Lobel–Page’s numbering), of which Köhler provides a new German translation in her text. The second is the 1961 double-slit experiment with which the German physicist Claus Jönsson demonstrated the wave nature of electrons. This experiment, which was instrumental in advancing understanding of the principles of quantum mechanics, was nominated ‘the most beautiful experiment in science’ by the readers of Physics World magazine in 2002.⁵ Quantum theory will prove surprisingly relevant to thinking about lyric poetry, a point to which I will return later. I begin, though, with Sappho.⁶ οἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον οἰ δὲ πέσδων οἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ᾽ ἐπὶ γᾶν μέλαιναν ἔμμεναι κάλλιστον, ἔγω δὲ κῆν᾿ ὄτ τω τις ἔραται· πάγχυ δ᾿ εὔμαρες σύνετον πόησαι πάντι τοῦτ᾿, ἀ γὰρ πόλυ περσκέθοισα κάλλος ἀνθρώπων Ἐλένα τὸν ἄνδρα τὸν πανάριστον καλλίποισ’ ἔβα ’ς Τροΐαν πλέοισα κωὐδὲ παῖδος οὐδὲ φίλων τοκήων πάμπαν ἐμνάσθη, ἀλλὰ παράγαγ᾿ αὔταν . . . . . . [ . . . ] με νῦν Ἀνακτορίας ὀνέμναι σ᾿ οὐ παρεοίσας, τᾶς κε βολλοίμαν ἔρατόν τε βᾶμα κἀμάρυχμα λάμπρον ἴδην προσώπω ἢ τὰ Λύδων ἂρματα καὶ πανόπλοις πεσδομάχεντας. (Some say a host of horsemen, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the dark earth: but I say, it is what you love. Full easy it is to make this understood of one and all: for she that far surpassed all mortals in beauty, Helen, her most noble husband Deserted, and went sailing to Troy, with never a thought for her daughter and dear parents. The [Cyprian goddess] led her from the path . . . . . . . . . . . . . [Which] now has put me in mind of Anactoria far away; Her lovely way of walking, and the bright radiance of her changing face, would I rather see than your Lydian chariots and infantry full armed.)

⁴ Scheuer (2013), 60; my trans.

⁵ Köhler (2012), 245.

⁶ Page (1955), 52 3.

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In this still beautiful, though now fragmented poem, Sappho places the figure of Helena, the most beautiful of women, between a narrative account of her desertion of her home to undertake the fateful journey that would spark the Trojan War, and Sappho’s vivid recollection of Anactoria, the radiant woman whom she loves or, as Köhler’s translation has it, who moves her to love. (Köhler translates ‘ἔγω δὲ κῆν᾿ ὄτ-/τω τις ἔραται’ as ‘doch mir: das, was jemand zu lieben bewegt’: ‘but to me: that which moves someone to love’.) Through the movement of the poem, Sappho transposes the figure of the ‘most beautiful’ conjured by the name of Helena from an epic context to a lyric one, preferring the dynamic radiance of the absent beloved to the subject matter of male-focused heroic epic such as Homer’s Iliad, as implied by the military topoi of the opening and (what is probably) the closing strophes. Scheuer notes the aspect of contest between the poetic genres, but he also sees Sappho in Köhler’s translation as sidestepping the contest. What is ‘the most beautiful’ is not, after all, decided here in terms of genre hierarchy: Rather, Anactoria to judge by her lithe, light footed gait, a dancer, and to judge by her name, a chorus leader conducts the amatory movement out of the narrative frame. In this manner, she abducts Helena for a second time: dancingly out of the epic and into the dynamically spatial [areale] imagination of the lyric form. In other words: Helena is cunningly prised away from Homer by Sappho and the most beautiful liberated in the name of Anactoria, the chorus leader, as a phantasma of the absent beloved, moved purely by the dynamic of the ode.⁷

Scheuer’s reading of Sappho’s ode, in which he finds retrospective evidence of Köhler’s ‘search for her own, non-epic voice’ in Niemands Frau,⁸ opens up a potentially fruitful way of thinking about the contrast between epic and lyric forms. On the one hand, there is epic’s commitment to narrative, the organization of events and characters into a storyline, like the progress of an alphabet from A to B to C up to omega or Z, or of a row of numbers, 1, 2, 3: ‘Helen, her most noble husband | Deserted, and went sailing to Troy, with never a thought for her daughter and dear parents’ and so on, until the war is lost, the city destroyed, and the victors set off on the journey home and into the next epic (Fig. 10.1). On the other hand, there is lyric’s suspension of narrative, its linguistic recreation of an image held intensely in the mind’s eye—‘[Which] now has put me in mind of Anactoria far away | Her lovely way of walking, and the bright radiance of her changing face’—the making-present of something or someone absent. Striking is the ability of skilfully descriptive lyric language to hold the moment timelessly, passing its presence-even-in-absence down through the ages. For isn’t it true that Anactoria’s bright radiance beguiles us still,

⁷ Scheuer (2013), 63.

⁸ Scheuer (2013), 63.

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Georgina Paul Epic (model) .....1…........................2[A]...................>............... ‘Helen, her most noble husband / Deserted, and ….........>..........>....B...,.................->>> her daughter and dear parents’

Fig. 10.1 Epic (model). Numbers denote characters in the narrative; letters denote (implied) locations. Notable is the forward momentum of the narrative line, albeit narrative retrospection is possible, even if it does not enter the mind of the character.

thousands of years after Sappho was momentarily put in mind of her? So that Sappho’s long-gone ‘now’ is reactivated as our ‘now’?⁹ This highlights that lyric is (potentially) scenic. However, Scheuer’s reading also suggests that, as a linguistic structure, lyric is spatial, an Areal. This key term in Köhler’s poetological vocabulary means a ‘space’, ‘area’, or ‘terrain’. Within that imaginative Areal (Fig. 10.2), the poetic/verbal elements may be positioned or placed, but they should not be regarded as static. Rather, they are both full of movement in themselves—see ‘Her lovely way of walking’, ‘her changing face’—and are also the product of, and reproduce in the reader, mental movement, as in the associative leap of the imagination—‘[Which] now has put me in mind of ’— that connects Helena and Anactoria in Sappho’s poem. The dynamism of lyric means, among other things, that reading or listening to it in performance, we are intent on connecting up words, images, and also sonic elements such as assonance or rhyme, across the structure of the poem in ways which might not be clearly determined and are certainly not linear. Meaning is created in the form of webs of connection rather than through following the progress of a storyline. The notion of the lyric poem as an Areal in which the elements of the poem are in a dynamic relation to each other may seem to be relevant above all to our approach to it as readers. On the page, the poem self-evidently occupies a certain space determined by page layout, and the eye of the reader moves between the different elements, construing connections across the poem’s

⁹ See Culler (2015), 14 and 37 on the propensity of lyric to recreate presence.

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Lyric (model) AREAL

‘[Which] now has put me in mind of Anactoria far away / Her lovely way of walking, and the bright radiance of her changing face’

Fig. 10.2 Lyric (model). The lyric images are held simultaneously in the space of the poem. Though Anactoria is elsewhere, ‘far away’, the verbalized mental images make her present within the space.

terrain according to her idiosyncratic impulsions. Can the poem be an Areal when it is performed? Both Köhler and Oswald are interested in Homeric epic as poetry that is realized in oral performance, with Oswald insisting of the Odyssey: ‘It is not a spatial text, but something temporal and sounded.’¹⁰ Oswald’s recitals of Memorial from memory without reference to the text, conveying to her audiences an idea at least of ancient rhapsodic performance, have become legendary to those who have witnessed them. The experience of listening to the seemingly miraculous emergence of poetic speech from the mouth of the poet during a recital of some ninety minutes’ duration gives a forceful impression of why the ancients thought of poetic speech as divinely inspired. Interestingly, the repetition of the passages of simile in Memorial, which some critics found an irritation on the page,¹¹ comes into its own when heard aloud. The first recital of the simile unfolds on the linear temporal axis. When it is completed, the listener has a sense of the whole shape of the passage and all its elements. During the recital of the repetition, the listener both hears that complete shape again and is able now to construe aurally the relations between the simile’s words and images within that dynamic shape as well as in relation to the short biography that preceded it (and indeed to other similes so far heard, since patterns are detectable in the imagery of the entire poem). In fact, the poem becomes a sonic Areal, with the sound waves of recital if anything more dynamic than the words on the page as the instigators of mental movement in the listener.

¹⁰ Oswald (2014).

¹¹ See Logan (2012).

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Köhler similarly invites the listener to project backwards to a time before print and reading were crucial to the preservation of cultural memory: sag vers und sag zeile maschine sag READ ONLY MEMORY & vergisses vergiss diese sp rache als eine als seine beherrschte (say verse & say line machine say READ ONLY MEMORY & forgeddit forget this langu age as one as the one he has mastered)¹²

Köhler’s use of what she calls the ‘box’ form, in which each line has the same number of characters, creating a strictly justified appearance of the poem on the page, might seem to privilege the printed form of the text and a visual reading over the poem’s orality. In recital, however, the sternness of the form transpires to create a kind of contained virtual space within which the voice resonates dynamically. Reading aloud, Köhler makes reference to the printed form by taking a breath at line breaks, even when the sense runs on. The effect is to lend syncopation to what is now apprehended as a strong rhythmic shape, and she underpins the ‘choreography’ of the reading with an idiosyncratic gestural play with her right hand, like a metronome above the lectern, visualizing each poem’s rhythms before the eyes of the audience. Moreover, while the density of meaning in and across Köhler’s lines can be offputting to the reader, who struggles to grasp the sense in poems that are highly resistant to unambiguous understanding, for the listener the musicality of the recital becomes compelling (as the opening invocation of the Muse(s) and the ‘SIRENS’ poem explicitly address, with their references to song¹³) and the ear is strangely more adept than the eye at picking up the verbal crossreferences that weave patterns between the different poems in the cycle. This provides a context for thinking further about the contest between the poetic genres. Sappho might, as Scheuer argues, elegantly sidestep that contest by appealing to what moves us to love, but her poem is nonetheless haunted by the issue of genre hierarchy, as Scheuer’s reading itself demonstrates. Historically, the genre of epic has long counted, not necessarily as the most beautiful, but certainly as the most skilful and most elevated of all the poetic forms. This is in part to do with the influence of Aristotle, Western culture’s great arbiter of taste, who, though ultimately persuaded of the superiority of tragedy because of its greater unity of action, nonetheless acknowledged epic’s ‘grandeur of effect’ in chapter 24 of the Poetics: But the scope for considerable extension of length is a particular attribute of epic’s. [ . . . ] epic, on account of its use of narrative, can include many

¹² Köhler (2007), 12.

¹³ Köhler (2007), 10 12, 46 8.

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simultaneous parts, and these, provided they are integral, enhance the poem’s dignity. This lends epic an advantage in grandeur.¹⁴

Hundreds of years later, another arbiter of taste, Samuel Johnson, writing on Milton, continued to assert the superiority of epic: By the general consent of criticks, the first praise of genius is due to the writer of an epick poem, as it requires an assemblage of all the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions. [ . . . ] History must supply the writer with the rudiments of narration, which he must improve and exalt by a nobler art, must animate by dramatick energy, and diversify by retrospection and anticipation; morality must teach him the exact bounds, and different shades, of vice and virtue; from policy, and the practice of life, he has to learn the discriminations of character, and the tendency of the passions, either single or combined; and physiology must supply him with illustrations and images. To put these materials to poetical use, is required an imagination capable of painting nature, and realizing fiction. Nor is he yet a poet till he has attained the whole extension of his language, distinguished all the delicacies of phrase, and all the colours of words, and learned to adjust their different sounds to all the varieties of metrical modulation.¹⁵

As Johnson’s criteria imply, since one can discern behind them the model of epic’s greatest attainment, part of the reason for epic’s place at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of the poetic genres is not least the supreme artistry of Homer. Emerging from the shadows of preliterate culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey are works of astonishing poetical accomplishment which, precisely because they are foundational for Western culture, set the standard against which the ambitions of later poets are measured. To excel in the epic form, though, to master its grandeur of scale and its demands on the moral and verbal imagination, is to subject oneself to an immense intellectual discipline. Virgil spent the last decade of his life afflicted by self-doubt as he struggled to complete the Aeneid, while his close friend Horace stuck to writing lyric about what he loved the most.¹⁶ As the case of Virgil pointedly demonstrates, the writer of epic might, as a reward for his self-discipline and virtù, attain a place for himself in the pantheon of the nation, the lonely desk worker alongside the great commanders of armies and rulers of men. The master of words conflates with his hero as the master of destiny, as is demonstrated by Aeneas’ journey to glory in Rome, pre-empting that of his maker, or through the thoughtful and eloquent passage to heaven of Dante’s alter ego. The great epic poems of world history are admired so much because they demand a vast and divineseeming skill, like Hephaistos’ in creating the shield of Achilles in Book 18 of

¹⁴ Halliwell (1987), 59.

¹⁵ Johnson (2009), 100.

¹⁶ Eyres (2013), 15 16.

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the Iliad, a piece of art that stands in the poem as an emblem for that poem itself in presenting to our admiring eyes a panoply of human life.¹⁷ In the confrontation of epic and lyric, then, we have, in brief, on the one hand, supreme mastery, and on the other, what moves someone to love. In the commercially oriented culture which has developed over the course of the millennia that lie between Homer and us, love might consistently attract us, but it is also synonymous with weakness, or so Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno argue in their essay on the Odyssey in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: In the world of exchange the one who gives more is in the wrong; but the one who loves is always the one who loves more. [ . . . ] The inability to master himself and others demonstrated by his love is reason enough to deny him fulfillment.¹⁸

Odysseus, by contrast, is for Horkheimer and Adorno the very model and prototype of the Enlightenment subject, who learns to master his emotions and apply his calculating reason in order to escape the clutches of the mythical creatures with whom his long journey home confronts him. Such mastery, self-discipline, and self-containment are regarded as the most admirable qualities in our culture, while the narrative line of epic, to the degree that it successfully organizes and regulates the multiple strands of the mythical stories which preceded Homer’s epic structure, produces, as Horkheimer and Adorno suggest, that unity of the self which is the mark of the modern (male) subject and the prerequisite for his self-preservation. This points to a formal parallel between epic’s grand narrative organization and the sort of qualities regarded as the most admirable. Nonetheless, to insist on the narrative aspect, as most definitions of epic do, is to overlook the centrality to great epic poetry of non-narrative aspects. The aforementioned Achilles’ shield, or more precisely, the making of Achilles’ shield by the god Hephaistos, is described in a striking passage of well over a hundred lines of ekphrasis in Book 18 of the Iliad (ll. 478–607). It is an exceptional example of Homer’s suspension of the linear narration of the story in favour of an Areal that works like lyric poetry in that, though it unfolds as sequential description, it is spatially defined.¹⁹ The shield forms a surface on which are elaborated the multiple scenes of everyday life that Hephaistos’ masterly metalwork and Homer’s lines of poetry depict. In an important article published over thirty-five years ago, Oliver Taplin observed in detail how the quotidian scenes on Achilles’ shield both summon into the

¹⁷ See Hubbard (1992). ¹⁸ Horkheimer and Adorno (2002), 57. ¹⁹ Hubbard (1992), 28 argues that the ekphrasis falls into four parts corresponding to different genres of poetry, of which only 18.590 606 (‘The dancing place’) refer to the tradition of lyric poetry. But he also notes that ‘the dancers themselves form the periphery of the shield’s symbolic land’ (32), which supports my reading of the shield of Achilles as a lyric Areal.

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epic poem’s account of a bloody and terrible war the memory of happy daily life in peacetime and also connect, through verbal repetition and through similarity of images, to other parts of the poem and indeed to other parts of Homer’s oeuvre.²⁰ As Taplin’s article itself reveals, the prevailing attitude towards the description of Achilles’ shield amongst the leading scholars of Homer at the time, at least in the Anglo-American field, was that it represented a sort of detour from, or derailment of, the overall narrative purpose of the epic poem, a kind of weakness on Homer’s part since he was held to have fallen too much in love with his description and let it get out of hand. To such scholars, the passage on Achilles’ shield appears as an aberration, rather like the extended similes which likewise arrest the narrative flow and draw references to the natural world and to everyday peacetime domestic and agricultural life into the Iliad’s representation of the warring sides and of battling heroes. G. S. Kirk, for example, refers to the similes and the Achilles’ shield passage as ‘intrusions’ in the poem, concluding: ‘what is happening here is that the subsequent poetical tradition has allowed these occasional flashes of humanity to illuminate the severer architecture of the heroic soul’.²¹ Taplin, by contrast, sees in Homer’s appreciation of the beauty of peacetime life—its dancing, singing, pastoral pleasures, celebrations of marriage and love, and human beings’ kindnesses to one another—a deliberately placed counterworld to the world of ‘force’ represented in the scenes of fighting. Taplin’s vision of Homer draws on the French philosopher Simone Weil’s reading of the Iliad as a ‘poem of force’.²² Weil, while emphasizing the epic poem’s depiction of violence, nonetheless sees its true greatness as lying not in its celebration of mastery, but in its ability to move us to love: Justice and love, totally out of place in this depiction of extreme and unjust violence, subtly and by nuance, drench all with their light. Nothing of value, whether doomed to die or not, is slighted; the misery of all is revealed without dissimulation or condescension; no man is set above or below the common human condition; all that is destroyed is regretted.²³

The light mentioned by Simone Weil here may well be the same light as inspired Alice Oswald. In her preface to Memorial, Oswald draws a distinction between the ‘nobility’ that most commentators since Matthew Arnold have admired in the Iliad, and what the ancient critics valued: ‘its “enargeia”, which means something like “bright unbearable reality”. It’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.’²⁴ Oswald’s poem is, in a sense, a translation of Homer’s Iliad, albeit a selective translation which radically cuts out the plot to leave only the accounts of the men who in the course of the poem are killed on the battlefield before Troy (the passages in ²⁰ Taplin (1980). ²¹ Kirk (1976), 11; original emphasis. See Taplin (1980), 13. ²² Cited in Taplin (1980), 17. ²³ Holoka (2003), 64. ²⁴ Oswald (2011a), 1.

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Homer’s poem generally referred to as the ‘short biographies’ or, in Christos C. Tsagalis’s terminology, the ‘short obituaries’) together with a number of the passages of simile, arranged antiphonally. The result is a new poem, clearly influenced by Weil’s reading of the Iliad,²⁵ which does not celebrate the self-mastery of the hero glorious in battle, but rather mourns the loss of those who were ineffably dear to their families and friends, placing death and loss in relation to the rhythms of the natural world which are the prominent subject-matter of the similes. Justifying her approach in the preface, Oswald writes: This version, trying to retrieve the poem’s enargeia, takes away its narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church to remember what you’re worshipping. What’s left is a bipolar poem made of similes and short biographies of soldiers, both of which derive (I think) from distinct poetic sources: the similes from pastoral lyric (you can tell this because their metre is sometimes compressed as if it originally formed part of a lyric poem); the biographies from the Greek tradition of lament poetry.²⁶

Oswald’s poem reproduces the entire structure of the Iliad: the deaths her poem records occur in the same order as they do in Homer’s poem, from Protesilaus, ‘[t]he first to die’ (the opening words of Memorial) to Hector, who, since he has no plot to support him, is made equal to all the other men whose deaths we have witnessed in the course of the poem: ‘And HECTOR died like everyone else’.²⁷ I hesitate, because of its status as a translation of an epic structure, to define Memorial as a lyric poem, but as Oswald’s statements in the preface about the perceived traces of pastoral lyric and choral lyric retained in Homer’s epic poem reveal, what is at issue for her is to bring to the fore the lyric elements in Homer and to reconnect to their original social function. In her preface, Oswald draws attention to her different treatment of the two types of poetry she has used as the basis for her own poem: the ‘biographies’ are ‘paraphrases of the Greek’ while the similes are ‘translations’. Her paraphrases gather from across the Iliad, and in some cases reorder, information about each soldier killed. While they remain committed to the epic’s narrative mode, in that each passage tells the story of the individual’s death, they also notably give emphasis to the emotional response to those deaths, mentioning the dead men’s families, mothers, and wives who are left grieving. The accounts of the deaths of Protesilaus and Simoisius are good examples,²⁸

²⁵ Weil writes: ‘Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it. Exercised to the extreme, it makes the human being a thing quite literally, that is, a dead body. Someone was there and, the next moment, no one’ (Holoka 2003, 45). Oswald quotes the last sentence in Memorial (Oswald 2011a, 33). ²⁶ Oswald (2011a), 1. ²⁷ Oswald (2011a), 71. ²⁸ Oswald (2011a), 13, 15.

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with the emotional response to the deaths placed in each case in the rhetorically powerful final position, before the antiphonal simile. It is in the rendering of the similes, however, that the full lyrical force of the contemporary poet comes to the fore. Oswald describes the passages of simile as ‘translations’, though she acknowledges that her approach to translation is ‘fairly irreverent’.²⁹ An example is the simile embedded in Homer’s account of the death of Euphorbas in Lattimore’s translation: As some slip of an olive tree strong growing that a man raises in a lonely place, and drenched it with generous water, so that it blossoms into beauty, and the blasts of winds from all quarters tremble it, and it bursts into pale blossoming. But then a wind suddenly in a great tempest descending upon it wrenches it out of its stand and lays it at length on the ground; such was Euphorbos of the strong ash spear, the son of Panthoös, whom Menelaos Atreides killed . . . ³⁰ (Iliad 17.52 60)

Oswald transforms it into a simile in which her own voice and passions as a poet and horticulturalist shine vibrantly through the relation of the words to the Homeric text (‘Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth . . . It became a wood pile in a lonely field’).³¹ In collections such as The Thing in the GapStone Stile (1996), Dart (2002), and Woods Etc. (2005), Oswald’s close knowledge and observation of the natural environment inform her poetry. Inhabiting the role of lyric poet in a very ancient manner, she mediates between human activity and the forces of nature that contain and sometimes oppose us, something that is reflected in the antiphonal relation of the two types of poetry in Memorial. Her translations of Homer’s similes seem to spring from her own experience of the countryside which gives them a vivid presence, a sense of ‘now’ rather than a translation of ‘then’. The particular quality of lyric strangeness, of stepping through into a parallel world to the battlefield, whether of nature or of domestic daily ritual, that characterizes the passages of simile in Homer too, is exacerbated in Oswald’s poem through her treatment of Homer’s similes as free units. She lifts them out of their original context and reattaches them in new ones. For example, this simile from the opening of Book 16 in Homer: Meanwhile Patroklos came to the shepherd of the people, Achilleus . . . . . . . . . . . . and swift footed brilliant Achilleus looked on him in pity,

²⁹ Oswald (2011a), 2.

³⁰ Lattimore (2011).

³¹ Oswald (2011a), 31.

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Georgina Paul and spoke to him aloud and addressed him in winged words: ‘Why then are you crying like some poor girl, Patroklos, who runs after her mother and begs to be picked up and carried, and clings to her dress, and holds her back when she tries to hurry, and gazes tearfully into her face, until she is picked up? You are like such a one, Patroklos, dropping these soft tears.[’]³² (Iliad 16.5 13)

Oswald repositions it as an antiphon to one of the short obituaries. A passage that in Homer has something of the taunt about it (Achilles calling Patroclus girlish) is here turned into something different. In Oswald’s context, the two passages (and two distinctive types of poetry) are connected through the linking word ‘help’ (‘Now Artemis with all her arrows can’t help him up . . . Like when a mother is rushing | And a little girl clings to her clothes | Wants help wants arms’).³³ And as the reader or listener construes what is in fact a disjunctive relationship between short obituary and simile, the man Scamandrius gets translated into a female child in a relationship of dependency with the mother, perhaps identifiable with the goddess Artemis who even ‘with all her arrows’ was unable to protect him. Furthermore, the simile reaches out to our own identification with the position of the child, especially in its invitation to us to think of ourselves in extremity, ‘Wanting to be light again | Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted | And carried on a hip’. At least, that is how I read it. But the point about disjunctive relations between proximate words and phrases, which is a characteristic of much highly rated contemporary lyric and the aspect on which poetry’s continuing mystery depends, is that we are as readers or listeners left to our own devices in how we construe relations between the disjunctive parts. What is achieved through the exacerbated dissimilarity between the two elements of the simile in Memorial is a heightening of the function of the simile in Homer’s poem, as described by Tsagalis: since similes refer to the physical world and not to the epic past, they conjure up, in the listeners’ minds, multiple mental image mappings. The condensed or abbreviated form of Homeric similes engages the audience in an active interplay, since the mental template of each listener will allow him [sic] to visualize the simile’s short story according to his own experiential storage.³⁴

These ‘multiple mental image-mappings’ take us back, albeit from the perspective of the audience member rather than the writer, to Köhler’s idea of the lyric poem as an Areal in which the connections between words and images in the space of the text are not linear and not clearly determined in their relationship to each other and are not dependent on a model of forward progression (like narrative). Rather, the lyric verse is constituted by words ³² Lattimore (2011).

³³ Oswald (2011a), 18 19.

³⁴ Tsagalis (2008), xxii xxiii.

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which entertain multiple potential relationships with each other and with the mind of the listener responding to them. We react to those words not only in terms of what they mean and what images they conjure up, but also in terms of how they sound (in the examples above, the instances of alliteration and assonance are very striking), how we perceive the patterns they make (the repetition of the word ‘want’ is prominent in the last example from Oswald), as well as whether and how they activate reminiscences from what Tsagalis calls our ‘experiential storage’, triggering our emotional responses. Moreover, as long as there is a perception of some degree of connection, the more disjunctive the relationship between things that are posited as similar becomes (each passage of simile in Oswald begins with the word ‘like’), the more our minds become energized to instigate connections, perhaps in quite creative ways, between the disjunctive elements, whereby different listeners will instigate connections differently from one another. Or we might perhaps even be moved to relinquish the will to connect in any sort of rationalized way and simply to accept the beauty of the mystery of connection—like when we are moved to love. Barbara Köhler’s poem cycle Niemands Frau, even more radically than Oswald’s Memorial, disintegrates the narrative line of the Homeric epic. Rather than consisting of one long poem, as with Oswald, Köhler’s cycle is made up of twenty-one poems and three afterwords that remain poised between the genres of explanatory commentary and poetic speech. Significantly, the twenty-four texts in total that make up the cycle correspond in number to the twenty-four books of the Odyssey, so that Köhler’s response to the Odyssey is in a sense reproducing its entire structure, as Memorial does with the Iliad. The sequence of invoked names in Köhler’s texts, as Scheuer points out, largely follows that of Homer’s poem: from the invocation of the Muse via Polyphemus, Circe, Hades/Persephone, the Sirens, Scylla, Calypso and Ino/Leucothea to Penelope, with only Nausicaa and Helen changing their places in the sequence. Oswald’s text entertains a relationship of translation to the Iliad. This is less evidently the case in Köhler’s cycle, though a sentence in the third and final afterword tantalizingly refers to the project as a translation not one-to-one, but ‘eins zu anders’, one-to-other.³⁵ Rebecca May Johnson has taken up this suggestion to argue that we should look at Köhler’s Niemands Frau as a translation from er to sie.³⁶ This can be understood in a number of ways. Firstly and most obviously, Köhler ‘translates’ the focus of the Odyssey from the singular male hero, Odysseus, to a plurality of female figures. This also has implications for the change of genre, from the epic storyline that follows the fate of a central character to what is presented as literally a network or web of interrelated female

³⁵ Köhler (2007), 87.

³⁶ Johnson (2013).

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characters. For example, in the poem ‘NAUSIKAA: RAPPORT’, Odysseus, the er, contemplates the many mythically interconnected female figures: Persephoneias schatten Kirke Sirenen Kalypso und Ino Leukothea: von fünf göttinnen ist seine rede. Sie sind eins sie ist viele. Mächtig & rede begabt nennt er sie, sängerin wissende vom Großen Gewebe in dem er sich an den faden hält an das schiffchen das hin&her geworfne lässt sich erzählen: (Persephone’s shades Circe Sirens Calypso and Ino Leucothea: of five goddesses is his speech. They (she) are one she (they) is many. Powerful & talented in speaking he calls her/them, songstress the one/s who know/s of the Great Web in which/while he holds on to the thread to the shuttle/little ship tossed hither and thither enables storytelling:)³⁷

As this passage demonstrates, Köhler’s reading of the Odyssey in her poem emphasizes the narrative thread, or what Odysseus’ voice later in the same poem calls ‘MEINE GESCHICHTE’ (‘my story/history’), as the storyline that supports the making of a singular male subject, an er. ‘His’ story becomes the epic narrative of an ich or ‘I’, adopting a centralized perspective as a means of organizing experience. By contrast, the female characters are associated with a more complex web, also of connection to each other, which, as Köhler’s poem subtly alludes to, is created by verbal echoes between different parts of the poem. Moreover, the female figures are intriguingly suspended between singularity and plurality, a position, if it can be called that, with which the ich of Köhler’s lyric persona is identified: the final phrase of the poem is the grammatically impossible ‘sie ist die/Ich sind’ (‘she is who/I are’). The difficulty of pinning down whether some of Köhler’s phrases refer to a singular or plural female accusative object in the lines quoted arises from the ambiguity of the pronoun sie in German—and it is this that adds another layer to what might at first sight seem a feminist-impelled project to shift the gaze of the reader from the male hero to the multitude of female figures in Köhler’s ³⁷ Köhler (2007), 22. The ‘Großes Gewebe’ is Steinberg’s German translation of the ‘great web’ (‘megan histon’, Homer, Odyssey 19.139) woven by Penelope, which resonates with the web that Circe is seen to be weaving in Book 10.

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response to Homer. Where the German pronoun er can only denote the masculine singular nominative, sie simultaneously denotes the feminine singular, the ungendered plural, and (since Köhler habitually uses lower case, where upper case in normal orthography would mark the difference) the formal second-person address: Sie. In other words, Köhler is not just interested in shifting the perspective from the hero er to the female figure or figures sie, but is interested in the polysemy of the word sie which becomes a figure for the issue of plural probabilities in the construction of meaning in the poems (and poetry) more generally. Unlike telling a story, where single meanings count (er zählt = erzählt), Köhler, undoing the great web that Homer made and reweaving it differently, makes a sequence of textual Areale in which we are at liberty to construct meaning variously as we seek to make our own connections between the many recurring words, motivic phrases, and intertextual allusions that occur within and between the separate poems of the cycle. Sie becomes what Rebecca May Johnson calls the ‘quantum linguistic particle’ of the cycle.³⁸ In quantum mechanics, entities such as electrons are conceptualized in terms of being both particles (occupying a single location) and waves (enabling the conceptualization of velocity or movement). The ‘wave function’ is a form of calculation intended to deduce the most likely values for the velocity and location of a particle and depends not just on ‘real’ numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.), but on the use of ‘imaginary’ numbers, designated ‘i’. The relation of real to imaginary in so-called ‘complex’ numbers can be thought of as two lines orthogonal to each other like the x and y axes on a graph. For example 3+4i means 3 units along the x axis and 4 units up the y axis. It enables a calculation to be made that can take different values at every point of space and time to deduce the multiple probabilities of location in space and velocity. This is what quantum theorists mean by a ‘field’. The ‘wave function’ of quantum theory corresponds to the dynamic movement of multiple probabilities of meaning within the Areal of the lyric poem, as I have been presenting it here. Through the references to quantum theory in her poems, Köhler draws attention to the ‘isomorphism’³⁹ between quantum mechanics and poetry. But by suggesting, too, a relation between the way her own poems work and how Homer’s poem works as a poem, she encourages us to reconceptualize Homeric epic, focusing not on the narrative line, but on the function of the poetic language within the vast Areal that is that poem. How each of us hears the multiple possible connections between words and images across the poem is not predetermined or linear, but impelled by a certain dynamic—perhaps expressible as ‘what moves us to love’.

³⁸ Johnson (2013), 81.

³⁹ Littler (2013), 176.

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The experience of the poems as decisively and necessarily sound objects is as compelling for the reciter as the listener. I have read several times with Barbara Köhler at bilingual readings, performing my English translations of her texts alongside her performance of the German—in some cases literally ‘alongside’, since in recent readings we have performed the ‘SIRENS’ poem in German and English simultaneously, creating a thrilling overlap of different languages and voices that enacts the poem’s exploration of a twofold or ‘selbanders’ form of selfhood.⁴⁰ The live reading is undoubtedly more impactful than the voice recording (both Oswald’s Memorial and Köhler’s Niemands Frau are available as CD recordings by the poets), not least because of the aspect of control of vocal performance within the specific recital space. As anyone will know who has read poetry before an audience, the performer feels for the space of the room as the outer limit of the voice projection. At best, one hears one’s voice resonating back from the bounds of the walls as the affirmation that every member of the audience can hear clearly. This is the creation of sonic space in action. The recital room becomes the quantum Areal within which the particles of speech and meaning are projected, evoking in response the ‘multiple mental image-mappings’ that are the mind’s and the minds’ dynamically imaginative answer to the strange, unquotidian language that is poetry. For Köhler, thinking back to the way Homeric epic would once have been performed, this makes of the collective of listeners ‘ein geteiltes erwidertes ungehöriges | beisein in dem wir sind’ (a presence or togetherness ‘shared reciprocal im | proper in which WE are’)⁴¹—a possibility for both epic and lyric when performed, not read silently.⁴²

⁴⁰ Köhler (2007), 46 8. ⁴¹ Köhler (2007), 11. ⁴² Quotations from Niemands Frau. Gesänge are reproduced by kind permission of Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin.

11 Choreographing Epic The Ocean as Epic ‘Time-Space’ in Homer, Joyce, and Cunningham Arabella Stanger

turns and returns of the sun, this march or dance in the round. Victor Bérard, The Phoenicians and the Odyssey¹

Made in 1994 by choreographer Merce Cunningham, Ocean is a theatre dance performed in the round. The work was premiered at the Cirque Royal, Brussels on 18 May 1994 and has since been presented in circular spaces including a riverside conference centre, a former steam engine repair shed, and a granite quarry sunk 150 feet beneath the earth’s surface.² Performed by Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the work consists of fifteen dancers moving upon the surface of a circular stage, witnessed by a seated audience surrounding that stage’s circumference. The audience is in turn surrounded by an outer ring of over 100 unconducted musicians: an orchestra that plays Andrew Culver’s score, itself a realization of plans that had been laid down by Cunningham’s lifelong collaborator John Cage before he died in 1992. Ocean possesses no determined or discernible narrative and, like the large part of Cunningham’s oeuvre built after the foundation of his company in the early 1950s, the dance is meant neither to present any resolute characters nor to instigate any particular set of interpretative responses. A little like a dancerly version of Samuel Beckett’s reading of James Joyce, in Cunningham’s

¹ Trans. Michael Seidel, cited in Seidel (1976), 24. ² The conference centre was Belfast’s Waterfront Hall (27 9 November 1997), the engine repair room was London’s Roundhouse (21 4 September 2006), and the quarry, Minnesota’s Rainbow Quarry in Waite Park (11 13 September 2008).

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choreographic practice ‘form is content, content is form’ and each dance work is, like Ocean, ‘not about something [but] it is that something itself ’.³ In spite of the obscurity of its figurative content, Ocean possesses an originating idea, one that dance critic Alistair Macaulay detects in the production. ‘Amid these dances,’ writes Macaulay of the Rainbow Quarry performance, ‘it’s possible at times to see strange seabirds, shoals, boats, mariners, modernist takes on imagery from the Odyssey . . . though they don’t cohere.’⁴ The comment both characterizes this dance as being somehow sea-like and infers the literary tradition that inspired its inception. Cunningham has explained that Ocean began in an idea born from a conversation between himself, Cage, and Joseph Campbell (with whom Cunningham and Cage were friendly in mid-century New York) about Joyce’s fascination with water. Taking that recollection as a point of departure, this chapter argues for Ocean as a choreographic iteration of high modernist epic and does so through an excavation in the dance of both Joycean and Homeric representations of oceanic scale.

BEGINNIN GS Cunningham has spoken with Nancy Dalva about the origins of the dance, and it is worth quoting him at length here, given the implications of this recollection for the idea of an ‘epic’ choreography. Cunningham tells the story: I’ve forgotten when, but Joseph Campbell, the mythologist who was a friend of ours, was talking once about Joyce, that he thought the next work Joyce would have done would have been about water Ocean. That’s how it began. And John Cage began putting ideas about it with Andrew Culver’s help into the computer. This would be a large work. We had both decided it could be 90 minutes and we both liked the idea of . . . no intermission, because I thought, well, that’s the length of movies and people don’t expect an intermission. So we could begin to think that way. And then there were, again from Joyce, I think it’s Ulysses that has 17 parts. Finnegan the Wake has 18. So we assumed that this could be 19. So in my choreographic scheme, I decided there would be 19 sections. That had nothing to do with the length of any given section, except the whole thing would be 90 minutes.⁵

There are three areas of this recollection to be unravelled. The first is the biographical detail. As a dancer at the start of his career in 1940s New York, Cunningham had performed, for Martha Graham and in independent concerts, alongside Jean Erdman who was married to Campbell. In 1944, the same

³ Beckett (1976), 14.

⁴ Macaulay (2008).

⁵ Cunningham and Dalva (2012).

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year in which Campbell published his and Henry Morton Robinson’s Skeletal Key to Finnegans Wake, Cunningham stopped dancing for Graham and presented his first concert of solo dances. He went on to found his own company in 1953 and the success of a 1964 world tour cemented his position as a leading artist of the New York neo-avant-garde, one who had forged a path away from earlier North American dance modernisms.⁶ By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 2009, Cunningham had choreographed over 150 dances, most of which had come to life through collaborations with visual artists, composers, film-makers, and computer programmers. Ocean was the final work that Cunningham would devise with Cage, his partner and most vital collaborator. Returning to the story of Ocean’s inception: Cunningham’s recollection mixes up the numbers. It is, in fact, Ulysses that has eighteen parts and Finnegans Wake seventeen. The number nineteen, which would determine the number of episodes for both Cunningham’s dance and the Cage–Culver– David Tudor musical composition, was selected, according to Culver, because nineteen seemed to Cage to be infinitely more ‘Joycean’ than sixteen.⁷ The final point of elucidation concerns the performance space. It was Cage who specified that this work should be done in the round, envisioning a surroundsound experience that would match in its sonic completeness the encyclopedic wordiness of Joyce’s novels. So it is here that Cunningham began: a ninetyminute work, sectioned into nineteen parts, performed in the round, and somehow imagining what Joyce would have done next with the subject of water. The spatial and temporal roundness of Ocean is also that which permits a reading of the dance in the light of this chapter’s epigraph by Joyce’s favourite Homerist, Victor Bérard. Invoking the sun as a means of clarifying the importance of cyclicality in the Odyssey, Bérard pictures that poem as ‘a dance in the round’ and so illuminates a compositional legacy that extends from Homer, via Joyce, to Cunningham. Indeed, Macaulay is not the only critic who has caught echoes of Homer in the design and performance of Ocean. Dalva, too, imagines that audiences might experience ‘Ocean as an episodic adventure along the lines of the Odyssey’;⁸ and the work’s designer, Marsha Skinner, explains not only that ‘to go with James Joyce [she] turned to Moby Dick for lighting inspiration’ but also that she turned to ‘Homer’s ⁶ For detail on Cunningham’s (contested) relationship to his ‘progenitors’ in North American dance modernism, including Graham, George Balanchine, and Isadora Duncan, see Copeland (2004), 25 51 and Franko (1995), xii. ⁷ Culver (1994). In addition to Culver’s score for musicians, David Tudor prepared an electronic soundscape (Soundings: Ocean Diary), ‘derived from peripheral “ocean” sources: sea mammals, arctic ice, fish, telemetry and sonar, ship noises’, that could be heard in performance underneath and around the orchestral music (Tudor 1994). ⁸ Dalva (2005).

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“wine-dark sea” for the source of the costumes’.⁹ It is from these suggestive allusions that an exploration of Cunningham’s Ocean as choreographic epic is possible. The dance is not a staging of the Odyssey, nor of Ulysses nor even Finnegans Wake, but it may nonetheless be understood as a late twentiethcentury choreographic legatee of the Homeric epic, crystallized—or shattered— through the mediating presence of Joyce’s modernist prose. It is important to understand the shared fabrics of these works, which are interwoven in the concept of an epic ‘time-space’. Conceived in Mikhail Bakhtin’s long essay on time and the novel, the idea of the chronotope is useful here because it both underlines the inseparability of time and space since Einstein—a turn in thinking that resonates across modernist artistic practices including Joyce’s own—and locates the specificity of literary genres in their typical representations of these dimensions. Bakhtin writes that the word chronotope describes ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ and that ‘it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions’.¹⁰ He goes on to include a short passage about the chronotopic arrangements of ‘classical epic’ and presents some ideas that chime with time and space in Homer, Joyce, and Cunningham. Epic, Bakhtin claims, achieves a penetration of historical time that is in its own way unique and profound, but nevertheless localized and limited. [ . . . ] Individuums are repre sentatives of the social whole, events of their lives coincide with the events of the life of the social whole, and the significance of such events [ . . . ] is identical. [ . . . ] all the details of [common everyday life . . . ] are comparable to the major events of life; it is all equally important and significant. There is no landscape, no immobile dead background; everything acts, everything takes part in the unified life of the whole.¹¹

The importance of this passage for this chapter lies in its identification of something of a paradox in the spatio-temporal scheme of classical epic. In this generic context (and Bakhtin mentions the epics of Homer specifically), individual, localised, and limited slices of time-space stand always in relation to the unified, expanded, and completed whole. Classical epic depends upon forces of expansion and wholeness as much as it does upon forces of contraction and fragmentation; to fragment time-space is not so much to minimize and reduce as it is to maximize and expand so that the world in its entirety may be revealed. Following Bakhtin, I argue that Cunningham’s contemporary dance work embodies a kind of epic form precisely because it is shaped by these chronotopic forces of expansion and contraction as they have come to define the watery epics invoked in the story of Ocean’s genesis. ⁹ Skinner, cited in Finke (2012).

¹⁰ Bakhtin (1981), 84.

¹¹ Bakhtin (1981), 218.

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It is important to note that Ocean is not a production that adapts or even necessarily refers to the maritime worlds of Homer’s Odyssey or Joyce’s Ulysses. By thinking about the ocean instead as a ‘perfect paradigm’ for something of an epic spatiality in both Homer and Joyce, I want to suggest that Cunningham’s formal presentation of the oceanic chronotope exposes the ways in which his work more broadly might be characterized as a species of epic choreography.¹² Roger Copeland has made a parallel claim, arguing for Cunningham’s relationship to Bertolt Brecht by citing the former’s disruption of experiential totality in his performance environments and defining that disruption as a variant of the latter’s distancing effect.¹³ The propositions of this chapter are inspired by Copeland’s commitments to locating Cunningham’s performance practice in a tradition of epic, but diverge from those commitments in terms of the specific artistic locality of that tradition. Given Cunningham’s and Cage’s stated indebtedness to Joyce,¹⁴ but more specifically the common chronotopic manipulations that run through the Odyssey, Ulysses, and Ocean (which all, as will be shown, include a certain embrace of fractured holism), the practice of epic with which Cunningham’s choreographic space shares the richest terrain is in Joyce’s literary treatment of the spatial imaginaries of Homer.

HOMERIC AND JOYCEAN CHRONOTOPES The Odyssey presents space and time as plural entities. Edith Hall observes as much when she characterizes the poem’s spatial and temporal shape. ‘The travelling across geographical space’, she explains, ‘is represented aesthetically in the meandering narrative, with all its false trails, mini-biographies, digressions and embedded anecdotes.’¹⁵ From the geographical sweep of the framing nostos, to the impressive collection of locales encountered in its characters’ voyages, to the internal worlds created by narrative refractions away from and back towards the present ‘time and place’ of Odysseus’ homecoming, the fictive space of the Odyssey is compound. And because space proliferates, so must time. As Hall explains: ‘The poem juxtaposes time levels through dialogues with the dead, prophecies and simultaneous actions in both real, known places and supernatural ones.’¹⁶ Through techniques of temporal juxtaposition as well as broad sweeps back and forth in the mode of flashback, ¹² Lawrence (1981), 201. ¹³ Copeland (2004), 138 40. ¹⁴ Perhaps the clearest artistic statement of this joint indebtedness is an earlier dance work on which Cunningham and Cage collaborated, Roaratorio (1983), which represents the pair’s respective and mutual attempts to imagine in performance the sonic and kinetic imagery of Finnegans Wake. ¹⁵ Hall (2008), 47. ¹⁶ Hall (2008), 9 10.

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shifts in geographical location are bound with shifts in historical place, composing the poetic landscape of manifold chronotopes. The Odyssey’s tendency to narrate multiple time-spaces is accompanied, as Bakhtin notes, by a totality afforded through the proliferation of parts. As Oliver Taplin has observed: ‘for all its range of time and place, the Odyssey is centred on one man and his close associates’.¹⁷ Indeed, the poem offers not so much a disintegrated world of dispersed trajectories as a tightly detailed centripetal universe, orbiting around Odysseus. Homer sets in motion, in other words, a tension between the division and unity of time-space, in which ‘the multiple’ is harnessed in service of ‘the complete’. We may find in Aristotle’s Poetics acknowledgement that the Homeric narrative pivots between expanse and unity: As for length [ . . . ] it should be possible to perceive the beginning and the end [of an epic poem] as a unity . . . But the scope for considerable extension of length is a particular attribute of epic’s. This is because tragedy will not permit the rep resentation of many simultaneous parts of the action, but only the one on stage involving the actors; while epic, on account of its use of narrative, can include many simultaneous parts, and these, provided they are integral, enhance the poem’s dignity. This lends epic an advantage in grandeur, in changes of interest for the hearer, and in variety of episodes . . . ¹⁸

This passage underscores some problems that will invest my later discussion of Cunningham’s dance epic, namely the problems of how to end an artwork of epic scale and of the (im)possibility of presenting ‘simultaneous parts of the action’ during a stage performance. For now, though, it suffices to observe that Aristotle maps out the Homeric chronotope: a scheme of representation in which space and time are expanded (made grand and various by techniques of multiplication and simultaneity) but nevertheless also contracted (made unitary and complete by a fully integrated action). Indeed, as E. M. W. Tillyard has claimed, even in Aristotle’s critique of epic in the light of tragedy (that more tightly ‘unitary’ form), we are directed not only to the ‘greater amplitude in the epic’ but also to epic’s greater capacity for completeness: its ‘ability to deal with more sides of life’.¹⁹ The epic practice of multi-sidedness is especially significant here because it contains the very combination of expansion and contraction that is magnified in Joyce’s treatment of the Odysseus myth and then incorporated into Cunningham’s Joycean Ocean. If in Homer the oscillation between proliferation and completeness carves out a narrative setting, then for Joyce it becomes a full aesthetic preoccupation. The preoccupation can be expressed in a nutshell in the way Joyce describes his Odysseus: Leopold Bloom. ‘I see him from all sides’, explained Joyce to ¹⁷ Taplin (2000), 25. ¹⁹ Tillyard (1973), 46.

¹⁸ Poetics ch. 24, trans. Halliwell (1987), 58.

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Frank Budgen, ‘therefore he is all-round in the sense of your sculptor’s figure. But he is a complete man as well—a good man. At any rate, that is what I intend that he shall be.’²⁰ For Joyce it is the multi-sidedness of Bloom—the fact that we are shown him, exhaustively, from every angle—which makes him complete, and as with the single character so with the entire novel. While Ulysses observes so neatly Aristotle’s tragic unities of space, time, and action (one city, one day, the converging journeys of two men), it also fragments this compacted chronotope into a vast expanse of mundane detail; it offers, as has been attested by many readers of Joyce, an encyclopedia of the everyday. Like Bloom, and as with the Aristotelian epic chronotope, it is the multisidedness and the polyvocality of Ulysses that makes this novel whole. Rainer Emig has similarly observed Joyce’s tendency to ‘divide wholes into smaller parts’ and create ‘new universes, new macrocosms, out of [those] microscopic episodes’.²¹ One passage of Ulysses—taken from the seventeenth episode, or ‘Ithaca’ in the Homeric scheme—presents this tendency through the novel’s most extended passage on water, in which water becomes a kind of epic environment par excellence. The episode is narrated as a list of questions and answers in the style of a catechism, and early in the passage Joyce offers the following: What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units:²²

—and so on for over fifty lines more. It is possible to glimpse in this passage the kind of chronotopic forces conjured by Bakhtin in his depiction of classical epic. Here we find an environment that is, in all its vastness, made up of independent units: Joyce’s particles are Bakhtin’s Individuums. In the universality by which those particles visit all points of the expanse, this environment is also one in which ‘everything acts, everything takes part in the unified life of the whole’. For Karen Lawrence, water for Joyce, very much like for Homer, is ‘the perfect paradigm’; and Joyce uses water here as a figurative conduit for his textual combination of the fragment with its whole.²³ First the fragment: water in this episode is divided textually into catalogue form. Through the taxonomic procedure of the catechism, the ocean is solidified and then broken down, or pried open, and separated into a set of

²⁰ Joyce, in Budgen (2004), 259. ²³ Lawrence (1981), 201.

²¹ Emig (2004), 2.

²² Joyce (1992), 783.

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discrete properties. This exhaustive listing of properties not only harks back to the Homeric catalogue but also anticipates Cunningham’s later choreographic listing process. However, it is also a ‘solid’ whole: it is in this set of entries— each separated in print by a colon—that we catch a glimpse of the macrocosm. Here is the ocean shown in all its fullness as the total expanse of its varied significance is summoned. In a textual concentration of both Aristotle’s and Bakhtin’s Homeric chronotopes, Joyce harnesses plurality in service of presenting a multi-accented totality.

EX P A N SI ON AN D C ONT R A C T I ON I N CUNNINGHAM’ S OCEAN If one concept of classical epic time-space refers to a vast simultaneity of parts making up an integrated whole (as Aristotle reads Homer) and a set of shattered pieces showing a completed day and a complete man (Joyce’s Ulysses), how, then, does Ocean whirl these qualities into choreographic form? In the conspicuous absence of any definite, fictive terrain that might position Ocean as a choreographic adaptation of the Odyssey or Ulysses, we might consider the formal ways in which Cunningham splinters his performance environment while presenting it totally. Ultimately, this is a dance around that ‘perfect paradigm’ of water, which inherits the pluralizing and totalizing urges of Joyce’s high modernist epic. Cunningham was fascinated by the way Joyce wrote and described it as something that moves ‘from paragraphs, to sentences, down to words—and now to words themselves separated, so you don’t have even a whole word, you just have part of a word’.²⁴ Cunningham’s observation aligns not only with Emig’s notion that Joyce divides ‘wholes into smaller parts’ (as exemplified in the Ithaca episode) but also with the reading of Joyce offered in Joseph Campbell’s Skeletal Key, in which we find the claim that Joyce sought literary ‘protractor[s] for opening out words and sentences’.²⁵ Whether or not Cunningham drew his analysis of Joycean form out of his earlier conversations with Campbell, what is quite clear is the transposability of this analysis for Cunningham’s treatment of his own materials, which are, of course, not words on the page but bodily movement in time and space. Ocean presents a situation, typical of Cunningham’s choreographic form, in which the stage space, duration of the work, movement episodes, and even the dancers’ bodies are broken into multiple separate parts. Such an aesthetic came about in Cunningham’s work in the early 1950s and in conjunction ²⁴ Cunningham, in Schiphorst (1997), 89.

²⁵ Campbell and Robinson (1959), 292.

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with his discovery, initially under the guidance of Cage, of aleatoric methods for composition.²⁶ In the development of a chance-driven choreography, Cunningham cultivated both a practice of listing and an aesthetic of spatiotemporal division that places his work in dialogue with the literary epics of Joyce and Homer. Evolved with the help of various techniques and technologies over the duration of his career, Cunningham’s system of chance composition depends on taxonomies and sorting processes. Typically, a large set of choreographic variables—positions of body parts, sets of dance steps, directions in space, durations of time, number of dancers, and so on— are collected into a chart of possible elements. Chance operations are then enacted—often using the I Ching—to determine how all variables will be arranged into a fixed score, which is then taught to the dancers.²⁷ This is an intensive process. Cunningham recalled that for the ninety-minute Ocean it took him around one hour to determine every fifteen seconds of the choreography because of the expanded set of variables necessitated by the 360° spatial aspect.²⁸ The calculable implication here is that Cunningham had to work in the studio for a full 360 hours before rehearsals even began. Aside from the identical number on the compositional hour count and the spatial degree of the work—a coincidence worthy of the author responsible for literature’s most ‘colossal leg-pull’²⁹—Ocean shares with its epic forebears its emergence from the art of the exhaustive list. It is not only the amplified timeline of its composition, though, that makes Ocean somewhat Joycean in its proportions. Cunningham’s process of accumulating and then sorting by chance a large set of variables also produces a disjointed choreography akin to Joyce’s textual divisions. We may glimpse this aesthetic in the choreographic texture of Ocean’s 360° stage space and in the bodily architecture shaped by its dancers. Diagrams from Cunningham’s choreographic notes show a fully circular performance environment divided in varying ways according to a ‘Joycean’ numerical scheme (from one division up to nineteen) so that the stage space viewed diagrammatically from above resembles a pie with multiple slices.³⁰ These slices of space (recalling Joyce’s water particles and Bakhtin’s Individuums) are vital for the performative division of the dance action. The stage is conceived by the choreographer

²⁶ Charlip (1998); Vaughan (1997), 58. ²⁷ In the early 1960s Cunningham experimented not only with chance but also with a certain degree of indeterminacy and has explained (Cunningham and Lesschaeve (1985), 150) that in some few cases he invited dancers to make their own decisions during performance regarding ‘tempo, direction, and whether to do certain movements or not’. This was the case in 1963, for example, with both Field Dances and Story. For the vast majority of his dances, however, decisions regarding movement content were predetermined by Cunningham himself. ²⁸ Cunningham (1994), 44. ²⁹ Oliver Gogarty [1939], cited in Ellmann (1983), 722. ³⁰ These notes include drawings of systematic circular floor plans bearing various titles including ‘Whirlpool Space’ and ‘Tides’. Cunningham (1993).

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and experienced by those who navigate it as a set of segments, each of which contains its own little choreographies that may happen simultaneously to but separately from action in a neighbouring segment. It is worth recalling Aristotle’s claim that stage performances cannot ‘permit the representation of many simultaneous parts of the action’. With his conception of the stage as a place of autonomous zones, Cunningham challenges such a compositional problem by choreographing a trope of epic form: space is here divided into individual units so that a body of separate localities may be presented all at once. As is dictated by Cunningham’s chance process, the dancer’s body, too, is abstracted into pieces. Across Cunningham’s notes are lists of body parts: head, arms, shoulder, legs, torso, and so on.³¹ These elements are waiting to be placed into choreographic arrangement by chance procedures, a process that ultimately produces a bodily idiom in which anatomical zones work in isolation from each other and in which the body appears dissected in performance. During an episode of Ocean occurring at around thirteen minutes into the programme, for instance, the mutual isolation of the dancers’ intra-bodily zones is brought to the fore of the performance. Six dancers perform a repetitive sequence—the same steps for each but each in a different order—that displays a dissective choreography. Following a steady pulse, the dancers rise swiftly, over and over again, on to the tiptoe of one foot while the other leg repeatedly finds a different position in the air (bent to the side, bent to the back, bent to the front). The arms stay stretched out broadly to the side but the head takes its own journey, moving variously up, down, tilted to the side, straight ahead. The sequence shows the dancer’s body in composite form: the ‘up’ head does not emerge compositionally through a process of holistic coordination with the ‘bent to the front’ leg, for example, but has been placed there, by chance, just as it may have been placed in combination with any other differently positioned anatomical part. The effect of this compositional process is that the dancers, while having taken the phrase fully into their bodies and while finding elasticity in the awkwardness of the orientational combination, appear to be scrolling through a finite set of options. The corporeality here recalls a computational process: Cunningham’s choreography works as a set of instructions, calling up individual movements from a database of discrete units and asking the dancers to process those units into a single kinetic figure.³² As with Joyce’s sentences, so ³¹ Examples of such lists can be found especially in Cunningham’s notes for works of the 1950s, including Untitled Solo (see Cunningham 1998) and Minutiae (see Cunningham 1954), dances for which he made his early forays into aleatory composition. ³² By the time of Ocean’s production, Cunningham was using a computer program called LifeForms to assist and expand the possibilities of his chance generated choreography. While an exploration of the interrelationships between computational process, device, and aesthetic in Ocean is beyond the scope of this chapter, context for this dimension of Cunningham’s work

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too with Cunningham’s movement combinations: these phrases have undergone the work of a choreographic protractor, ‘themselves separated’ into a collection of parts ready for various recomposition. Such an array of discrete entities, all playing on stage at the same time, speaks to the spatial tradition of epic implicit in both the Odyssey and Ulysses. Cunningham produces a space that is, to borrow from Aristotle’s perception of Homeric epic and in accordance with Cunningham’s own perception of Joyce’s prose, composed of ‘many simultaneous parts’. By composing Ocean out of a set of autonomous variables, Cunningham divides the performance environment into a density of coexisting elements, giving this work an expanded internal scale. Ocean, nevertheless, reconciles its fragmented spaces into an all-over unity. It is clear enough that as a stage production the dance is spatially and temporally bounded. The audience both surrounds and is surrounded, with the dancers in front and the orchestra behind. Forming three concentric circles, the musician, audience, and dancer spaces not only close in on themselves as individual circular loops but also contain the entire performance activity within a holistic environment. Because it takes place in the round, the dance also addresses itself to all directions. While audience members are seated in one spot, they see the dancers in the same way that Joyce sees Bloom: ‘from all sides’. Or, to borrow again from Beckett as he characterizes the writing of Finnegans Wake: ‘movement is non-directional—or multidirectional, and a step forward is, by definition, a step back’.³³ There is no singular front to Ocean and so the dancers when moving move in all directions at once, vitalizing the space in its fullness. Because fragmentation exists in taut relationship to spatial wholeness, Ocean would seem to choreograph a quality of Joyce’s epic prose, namely an amplification of the chronotopic paradoxes carried in Homer’s tales of wanderings and homecomings. Indeed, the spaces of all these works are both expanded into many parts and contracted into a completed whole. Cunningham, though, creates perhaps a more total work than Joyce because he allows his dance to have a clear culminating moment, presenting not only a spatially but also a temporally ‘total’ work. Above the performance space of Ocean are some large digital clocks. Visible from any seat, these clocks begin their counters at zero when the first dancer enters the space and end at ninety minutes, the moment at which that same dancer exits to signal the end of the performance.

may be found in Schiphorst (1997) and Copeland (2004), 183 203. For the computational valences of Joyce’s prose, consider Jacques Derrida’s (1984), 147 characterization of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as ‘1000th generation computer[s]’ and see Lydia H. Liu’s chapter ‘Sense and Nonsense in the Psychic Machine’, in Liu (2010), 99 151. ³³ Beckett (1976), 22.

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The time of Ocean, then, is measured by a reverse countdown: the audience has been informed by its programme note that this is a ninety-minute work and all present are able to observe time methodically moving, second by second, towards the appointed ending. As with the bounded, circular space, the temporal scheme is orientated, in a highly visualized way, towards its own closure. With this, Cunningham offers a representation of time and space that seems at first glance to be most Joycean. Like Ulysses, Ocean presents an environment characterized by an excess of fragmented parts but which also, like Joyce’s singular day and bordered city, plays with the multiple so as to emphasize completeness. Yet, in its embrace of the certainty of its ending, Ocean departs from the temporality of Joyce’s novels. Beckett is clear on Joyce’s relationship to endings when comparing the world of Finnegans Wake to that of Dante’s epic: A last word about Purgatories. Dante’s is conical and consequently implies culmination. Mr. Joyce’s is spherical and excludes culmination. [ . . . ] In the one, absolute progression and a guaranteed consummation: in the other, flux progression or retrogression, and an apparent consummation.³⁴

Beckett’s observations here speak of the way in which Joyce writes his novels to a close: Finnegans Wake does not end but seems almost to loop;³⁵ Ulysses ends with a life-giving ‘petit mort’. With these endings Joyce circumvents culmination and the finality of absolute closure, which is a circumvention with which Cunningham was also enamoured.³⁶ As a presenter of performance, though, Cunningham has to deal with his own set of medium-specific conventions that come to delimit the artwork within a definite open and close. The differences between these conventions as they shape literature and dance respectively also qualify the extent to which Cunningham may resist the aesthetics of culmination to which Beckett gestures. Just as a book must have a final word so a performance must have a final action. We might ask, though, whether the problem of the compulsory ending is more acute for performance practitioners and for audiences of performances than it is for writers and readers of books. A reader of Joyce (or indeed of any author) may begin their book again directly after having read the final ³⁴ Beckett (1976), 21 2. ³⁵ Campbell and Robinson (1959), 297 write of Finnegans Wake: ‘seemingly, this last word loops back to join immediately with the first’. ³⁶ Cunningham has written (1998, 38 9) that ‘it is clear that life goes on regardless, and further that each thing can be and is separate from each and every other, viz: the continuity of the newspaper headlines. Climax is for those who are swept by New Year’s Eve.’ It seems that this sensibility is bound up with his development of chance procedures since he has also observed (Cunningham and Lesschaeve (1985), 82), of one of his earliest dances composed according to chance (Untitled Solo, 1952), that ‘This doesn’t in that sense have any resolution. It just ends. It’s a form of spinning that I had to do several times, my head’s up in the air, my arms somewhere and then it’s incredible: stop!’

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word of it—here there is a licence to immediate return, and one that we are tempted to test with the closing word of Finnegans Wake: the. Readers, also, may navigate a book’s inscriptions in any way they choose for the duration or durations of the time in which they are reading. The audience member of a live performance of Ocean (or indeed of any theatrical performance), however, is not afforded that same licence to wander through the work’s temporality, being in some fundamental ways bound to the sequential duration of the show.³⁷ An audience member, for instance, cannot (customarily) request that a performance be begun again directly after its final moment, as if it could be played out for them ad infinitum in a kind of eternal Joycean loop. Amongst the many difficulties that would block this hypothetical request is the issue of the efforts of the people involved in the live realization of a work: dancers can be employed for a limited amount of time and in any case are usually ‘danced out’ by the time their performance is finished. The cultural conventions of theatre-going in Cunningham’s material performance contexts (largely confined to theatre or gallery spaces and public events, all operated according to specific ‘opening’ hours) also dictate the need for audiences to leave the site of the show after its determined ending. Permanent, large-scale performance venues at some point eject their audiences so that they might close up shop, and even temporary places set up for the performance of touring theatre dance companies such as Cunningham’s do not typically carry an expectation that the people gathered will stay in place much longer beyond the ‘curtain’ call. Amidst this discussion of the implausibility of the never-ending performance in the formal theatrical cultures of Cunningham’s practice, a more specific question arises. Does Cunningham find choreographic devices with which to undercut the inevitable moment of (literal) temporal closure— turning, for instance, to aesthetics of looping, return, or any other cyclical extension of time—as does Joyce within the terms of his own literary materials? Joyce’s books do end, but in ending (as with Homer’s Odyssey) they seem to begin again. Endings are not tantamount to culminations in Joyce’s prose and it is this (for Beckett) that distinguishes his peculiar species of epic time from Dante’s. The reverse countdown clocks for Ocean, by contrast, provide a highly visible aestheticization of finality. This count-up to ninety minutes is not so much a crescendo to a peak moment out of which further action is sure ³⁷ When watching Ocean at London’s Roundhouse in September 2006, I observed a tendency of audience members to wander in and out of the auditorium. Such a culture of spectatorship undermines Cunningham’s (tongue in cheek) assumption that audiences are necessarily com mitted to concentrating for a full ninety minutes without break. The observation also testifies to the avoidance of ‘climax’ in Cunningham’s work. Cunningham performances often feel longer than they are and demand something of an open field rather than a singular line of attention. That being so, even wandering audience members for Ocean are bound to experience the sequence of events in the order in which they are presented on stage.

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to emerge (as with Molly Bloom’s ‘Yes!’); yet neither is it a return to a new beginning (as would be an actual countdown to zero). Instead the flicking numbers of the clocks move steadily towards the moment at which the performance will close, and so the work culminates in both an emptying of space and an expenditure of time. There is a way, however, in which Ocean inscribes a temporal cyclicality that lends itself to Beckett’s idea about Joyce’s ‘exclusion of culmination’ and so brings us back to the epic chronotope in which wholeness consists in multisided flux. Ocean is cyclical not only because of its presentation in the round but also in its refusal, on account of this roundness and of its audience’s placement around it, to designate destinations (which are both spatial and temporal things) in any absolute terms. As has been established already through Beckett, a step forwards in Ocean is always also a step back. In moving towards someone upon this round stage, the dancers are always also moving away from someone else and so they, ontologically speaking, are suspended in a recurring simultaneity of back-whilst-forth. For the duration of their dance, the dancers cannot reach any firm destination because they are always in a state of ‘progression [at once with] retrogression’, as Beckett states of the Joycean Purgatory, and so in their spatial all-roundness they are placed inside a kind of temporal limbo. While Ocean does culminate at its ending, within the broader spatial fabric of the work, culminations in miniature are constantly deferred.

CONCLUSIO N When reviewing Ocean, Macaulay was moved to write: ‘you feel its horizons, its depths and skies, its mercurial changefulness. The multidimensionality of Mr. Cunningham’s work was exceptional long before he created Ocean, but there may be no work in which it registers more.’³⁸ By thinking about this dance as a dance with Homer and Joyce and by viewing it through the prism of Bakhtin’s notion of an epic chronotope, Macaulay’s impressions might be couched in a literary tradition in which epic worlds are made from oceanic landscapes. What Cunningham inherits from Homer, strictly via Joyce, is not so much a narrative world set adrift in the voyage of its protagonists as epic’s peculiar conception of time and space in which the expanse of the ocean is invoked through environments made multiple. In its environmental roundness, its zonal and corporeal production of compound localities, and its dancerly suspension of singular destinations, ³⁸ Macaulay (2008).

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Ocean is a dance that opens up space and presents many chronotopes all at once. To return to Joyce’s hymn to water in Ulysses: the ocean is a place characterized both by ‘the independence of its units’ and by ‘the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard’. In Cunningham’s Ocean time-space is similarly broken into pieces and presented as a totalizing whole, both expanded and contracted into an obscure seascape. It is here—in this pair of dimensional paradoxes—that Cunningham moves through Joyce as an interpreter of Homer’s wine-dark sea.³⁹

³⁹ Research for this chapter was made possible by access granted to archival holdings at the New York Public Library, for which I thank the Merce Cunningham Trust. I would like also to offer my thanks to Fiona Macintosh, whose commitment to finding throughways from ancient performance to contemporary dance helped to inspire and shape this work.

12 Epic Bodies Filtering the Past and Embodying the Present—A Performer’s Perspective Marie-Louise Crawley

For me, performance is about creating an alternative present. Although [it] may be a filter for the past, it is powerful because it is happening in the moment and it is immediate, ephemeral, and transient. The quote that I always seem to come back to in my work is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: ‘What we were yesterday and are today, we will not be tomorrow.’¹

When first thinking about the performance of epic or, more specifically, about performing epic, I was struck by what Suzy Willson, choreographer and artistic director of Clod Ensemble, has to say about the act of performance itself. Her idea of performance as being about the creation of ‘an alternative present’ seems a fitting departure point for an exploration from a performer’s perspective of how we might reconcile the performance of epic as both a ‘filter for the past’ and an embodiment of the present moment. My own experience of performing epic is twofold: as an actress and as a dancer/choreographer. In my career to date, I have encountered epic both as part of an ensemble and as a solo performer. As a young actress, my first experiences of performing epic were in two collectively devised productions with Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil: Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) (2003), a very contemporary epic about refugees and asylum seekers narrating the ‘terrible odysseys of those men and women wandering all over the planet, those Ulysses who never return home’;² and Les Éphémères (2006), which might be considered an epic of the everyday. Later in my performance career and this time as a dancer, I performed in ¹ Willson and Eastman (2010), 430, citing Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.214. ² Mnouchkine (2005), 62; my trans.

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Spellbound (Rama and Sita) (2015),³ an ensemble production by the UK outdoor arts collective Walk the Plank and directed by Nick Clarke. Based on the Sanskrit epic the Ramayana, this production combined shadow theatre and bharata natyam dance. Today, in my movement practice as a choreographer, and principally in my work with the performance ensemble Avid for Ovid,⁴ I am engaged in exploring the potential of principles from the ancient Roman solo pantomime form, tragoedia saltata, for creating emotionally resonant dance-theatre performance. In this work, Ovid’s playfully epic text, Metamorphoses, becomes a source text for finding new possibilities for twentyfirst-century performance. My aim in this chapter is to investigate the various ways in which the performer remediates epic forms and texts into embodied contemporary performance. Tracing my experience of performing epic as a filter for past texts and past forms, along with an inherent understanding of performance as the art of the embodied and present moment, this chapter will consider, from the performer’s perspective, what it is about epic that makes it so striking. How and where do we site epic in the body? What is an epic body? How does the solo, as opposed to the ensemble form, affect the performance of epic? In performing and dancing epic, is it indeed possible simultaneously to filter the past and embody the present? If it is, how do these shifting temporalities operate within the performing body?

LE THÊÂTRE DU SOLEIL: THE PRESENCE OF THE ACTOR AND THE PRESENTNESS OF THEATRE Before exploring my own encounters with epic, I would like to provide an overview of my own understanding of theatre as the art of the embodied and present moment. My thinking around this undeniably originates from the training I received as a young performer, first in mime with the legendary Marcel Marceau at his school in Paris (where I trained 2003–4) and then during my years as an apprentice performer and later comédienne with Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil (2003–9). My training very quickly instilled in me certain ‘rules’ for performance. Notes that I made during early rehearsals for Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) at the Théâtre du Soleil indicate ³ Spellbound (Rama and Sita) first toured the UK in 2013. Not in the original cast, I joined the production for performances in 2015. ⁴ Avid for Ovid (A4O) is a performance ensemble comprising myself, dancer choreographers Susie Crow and Ségolène Tarte, and musician Malcolm Atkins. In summer 2013 we participated as practitioners in the TORCH Oxford University research project Ancient Dance in Modern Dancers, and subsequently formed Avid for Ovid to explore from our perspective as performers the potential for using principles of ancient dance and music in contemporary performance.

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Mnouchkine’s key and oft-repeated instructions to us actors: écouter (listen), recevoir (receive), être au présent (be in the present moment). Such directions reveal how, for Mnouchkine, performance is absolutely about the present moment. Author and playwright Hélène Cixous, an important collaborator with the Théâtre du Soleil who was also involved with the early rehearsal process of Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), agrees: ‘Le théâtre est au présent. Doit toujours être au present’ (‘The theatre is in the present. It must always be in the present’).⁵ If theatre must always be in the present moment, then, so too must the actor-performer. Given performance’s ontology of disappearance, at least according to performance theorist Peggy Phelan (1993), then what we might term a performer’s presence is their ability to stay in the present moment in a series of continually renewing presents. Mnouchkine has compared this ability to be ceaselessly living the present moment to the ‘naivety’ of the child at play: En principe les acteurs ne mentent pas lorsqu’ils ont gardé l’enfance, la naïveté [ . . . ] Un naïf, c’est celui qui naît à chaque instant. Les vrais acteurs vivent l’instant et ne le truquent pas. A la longue, leur jeu devient tellement transparent que c’est la vie. (In theory, actors don’t lie when they stay childlike, naïve [ . . . ] naïve in the sense of one who is born in each moment. True actors live the present moment and don’t cheat. And so, in the end, their acting becomes so transparent that it is life.)⁶

Connected to this presentness is another of Mnouchkine’s golden rules for the actor: ‘chercher le petit pour trouver le grand’ (‘seek the small things to find the great’). Mnouchkine often reiterated to us that living the smallness (le petit) of each present moment is what will lead to finding the ‘grandeur’ of theatre in each of those moments. Furthermore, the actor must live the detail of every present moment through the body. We might call this embodiment, but for me it goes further than that: Mnouchkine sometimes uses the term ‘incarnation’, and the visceral, fleshy quality of this term seems to describe better what the actor is trying to achieve. ‘Chercher le petit pour trouver le grand’ also seems to be a useful dictum to bear in mind when approaching the performance of epic. Following its logic, there can be no true epic grandeur without the detail of the live, embodied, incarnated present.⁷ From my earliest days as an apprentice performer, then, I understood the necessary association of the seemingly insignificant detail (le petit) with the significant events of the story (le grand). History cannot be dissociated from the reality of the individual; epic stories cannot be told ⁵ Cixous (1984), 5; my trans. ⁶ Mnouchkine (2005), 15; my trans. ⁷ This idea of le petit being necessary for le grand chimes well with what Michael Silk (2004) has to say about the interplay between stylization and immediacy in Homer’s Iliad, especially the way in which ‘heroic endeavour is described forcefully and without inhibition, even if that means presenting the grand in terms of the everyday’ (Silk (2004), 55).

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without the necessary presence, or presentness, of the performer (and their receptivity to and incarnation of every passing moment). There is a clear symbiosis between presentness and epic. Both of the Soleil productions in which I performed certainly situate themselves within a tradition of epic. Although perhaps more obliquely than the company’s earlier productions, they are also situated within an even wider lineage of the Asian epic theatrical traditions that have often influenced and inspired the company’s work. There is a clear tradition of epic performance at Soleil: I am thinking here of Hélène Cixous’s L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge (1985) which takes as its framework the period from 1955 to 1979 in Cambodia covering Sihanouk’s various exiles from his country and the rise of the Khmer Rouge; and Cixous’s L’Indiade ou L’Inde de leurs rêves (1987) which takes as its subject the life and times of Gandhi. However, Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) and Les Éphémères are créations collectives, collectively devised productions with no one designated author but created by all company members through improvisational work around a theme. These are ensemble pieces and, as such, unlike the previous epics taking a Sihanouk or a Gandhi as a central character, they do not deal with the story of one main protagonist but with various protagonists and therefore with multiple viewpoints. Yet it is safe to say that we can consider both Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) and Les Éphémères as epics, productions of vast scope and proportion scanning various locations and/or time periods, and with lengthy running times (both productions in their fullest versions lasted six hours).⁸ As the title of the play indicates, Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) dramatizes the various journeys undertaken by refugees and asylum seekers across the world. With the nod to Homeric epic in its very title (although note the plural), it portrays the epic present of the world’s refugees. The scale of the production was extensive, with the action shuttling from Iran to Afghanistan to Australia to Africa to France and Britain, and the play was marked by an urgency to tell stories gathered from all over the world. There were hundreds of improvisations during rehearsal, which were then narrowed down to the forty-odd vignettes (or récits) of the final production, and hundreds of characters were born. As an example of just one of the cast’s thirty-three actors, I played both a Turkish woman and an Englishwoman, although some of my fellow actors played up to eight or nine different characters of various nationalities. As such, the production gave voice to the individual: there was not one but hundreds of epic heroes and heroines. Each of their stories was essential.

⁸ Cf. Supple, Ch. 4 in this volume, on how Mnouchkine ‘creates epic theatre with intimate impact’ and how it is this ‘intimacy’ (which again we might equate to le petit) that marks the essential difference between epic theatre and spectacle.

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As fellow actress Shaghayegh Beheshti recounts, the company researched the piece by going out to speak to asylum seekers on the island of Lombok in Indonesia and in the Sangatte refugee camp near Calais and by collecting their stories: Les Afghans [ . . . ] nous faisaient confiance. Ils nous disaient: ‘S’il vous plait, racontez notre histoire’ [ . . . ] Nous avons promis de transmettre leurs récits [ . . . ] nous avons pris l’engagement auprès des réfugiés de témoigner pour eux. (The Afghans trusted us. They said to us, ‘Please tell our stories’ [ . . . ] We promised to transmit their stories [ . . . ] We promised the refugees that we would bear witness for them.)⁹

In Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), these are real stories that are evoked. During one of the play’s early scenes set in a Red Cross clinic at Sangatte, one of the refugee characters, picking up a crutch as a pretend flute, utters in broken French: ‘Écoute la flûte: ça raconte des histoires . . . de séparation (‘Listen to the flute: it tells tales . . . of separation’). The action of miming playing the flute and of telling a true story through song functions as a mise en abyme for the whole production. In addition, the vignettes were interjected with voice-over recordings of actual refugees telling their own stories. We might term this the ‘degree zero’ of theatre where the ‘character’ is a real person telling a real story. This was perhaps most strikingly illustrated at the opening of the play when, as the house lights went down, we heard Mnouchkine’s voice reading out a letter she had written to Nadereh, one of the refugees she had spoken to on the island of Lombok. She asks Nadereh to pass on the news of the theatre to the other refugees that they have met: Je voudrais que tu leur dises que nous avons finalement fait le spectacle que nous leur avions promis de faire il y a de cela un an, presque jour pour jour. Nous avons rassemblé des moments de leur histoire, des fragments de leur vie, quelques instants qu’ils nous avaient racontés quand nous étions ensemble sur l’île de Lombok. Toi aussi ma chère, tu es dans le spectacle. Bien sûr, tu ne t’y appelles pas Nadereh mais dans toutes les femmes afghanes qui apparaissent il y a un peu de toi. Nous travaillons beaucoup. C’est difficile. Nous ne savons pas toujours comment racon ter toutes ces parcelles de vie que tant d’entre vous parfois en pleurant nous ont conté. Il [Sayed Nabi] est dans le spectacle. On entend sa voix, sa vraie voix. Tu sais, on entend aussi la tienne. Tu as une si belle diction qu’on dirait que tu chantes. (I want you to tell them that we have finally made the play that we promised them we would, a year ago almost to the day. We have put together moments of their stories, fragments of their life, those instants they told us about when we were together on Lombok. You too, my dear, you are in the play. Of course, you’re not ⁹ Beheshti interviewed by Catherine Bédarida, ‘Le Théâtre du Soleil porte la voix des réfugiés’, Le Monde, 1 April 2003; my trans.

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called Nadereh, but in every Afghan woman that appears, there is a little bit of you. We are working hard. It is difficult. We don’t always know how to tell all these bits of life that so many of you told us, sometimes through tears. He [Sayed Nabi, another refugee] is also in the play. We hear his voice, his actual voice. We hear yours too, you know. Your diction is so beautiful it sounds as though you are singing.)¹⁰

In Le Dernier Carvansérail (Odyssées) a multiplicity of stories are offered, each one as valid and valuable as the next. With scenes acted not only in French (the company’s working language) but also in Farsi, Pashto, Kurdish, and Russian,¹¹ diverse languages and voices can be heard. As Mnouchkine’s letter to Nadereh reminds us, in this play we hear not only the actors speaking but also, in the interludes between acted scenes, the refugees’ own voices telling their stories. Although the title of the play clearly evokes a literary model, the Homeric Odyssey, and Hélène Cixous’s introduction in the programme notes explicitly alludes to this epic tradition,¹² the odysseys evoked in this play are not a literary but a very real experience. This may explain the parenthesis and plural in the title: here, real stories displace literature. In Hélène Cixous’s Tambours sur la digue (1999), the Soleil production directly preceding Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), one of the characters, Duan, evokes war and her desire to get out of the story somehow: Cette nuit j’ai vu la guerre [ . . . ] Oh mon cœur désire sortir de cette histoire (‘Tonight, I saw war [ . . . ] How my heart longs to get out of this story’).¹³ In Le Dernier Carvansérail (Odyssées), the ‘real’ characters experience the effects of war too, but do not wish to ‘get out of the story’. Instead they survive to tell the tale. Like Odysseus himself amongst the Phaeacians in Books 9–12 of Homer’s Odyssey, they become the narrators of their own stories. By speaking in their own words and narrating the epic of their own lives, the characters of Le Dernier Carvansérail (Odyssées) fulfil a need first articulated by Cixous when she began writing for the theatre: Je crois que nous avons besoin aujourd’hui plus que jamais de notre propre théâtre, le théâtre dont notre cœur est la scène, sur laquelle se jouent notre destin et notre mystère, et dont nous voyons très rarement se lever le rideau [ . . . ] Nous sommes les personnages d’une épopée qu’ils nous est interdit, par les lois de la médiocrité et de la prudence, de vivre. Pourtant, c’est une épopée. Et ce qu’il y a d’effrayant

¹⁰ Opening lines of Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées); my trans. ¹¹ The whole company had Farsi lessons and we were encouraged to learn other languages as necessary for our scenes, coached by those of our fellow actors for whom those languages were their mother tongues. ¹² ‘Au commencement de nos mémoires, il y eut la Guerre. L’Iliade en fit un récit. Après la Guerre, l’Odyssée.’ (‘At the beginning of our memories was War. The Iliad told War’s story. After the War, the Odyssey’). Cixous (2003), programme notes to Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées); my trans. ¹³ Cixous (1999), 71; my trans.

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et de beau c’est que, si majestueuse que paraisse être l’épopée des nations, ses mobiles ce qui cause les guerres, les paix, les massacres, les héroïsmes à y regarder de près, en écartant le rideau, sont les infimes et puissants humains [ . . . ] Le Théâtre a gardé le secret de l’Histoire que Homère avait chanté: l’Histoire est faite d’histoires de maris, d’amants, de pères, de filles, de mères, de fils, de jalousie, d’orgueil, de désir. (I think that today more than ever we need our own theatre, the theatre where our own heart is the stage, upon which our own destiny, our own mystery, is played out and on which we very rarely see the curtain open [ . . . ] We are characters in an epic which we are forbidden, by the laws of mediocrity and prudence, to live out. And yet, it is an epic. And what is terrifying and beautiful is that as majestic as the epic of a nation can seem, if you look closer, behind the curtain, its motives what causes wars, peace settlements, massacres, heroic exploits are powerless and powerful human beings [ . . . ] The Theatre has kept the secret of History as sung by Homer: History is made of the stories of husbands, lovers, fathers, daughters, mothers, sons, of jealousy, of pride, of desire.)¹⁴

Alluding to Homeric epic, Cixous reminds us here that History (or what we might, after Mnouchkine, term le grand) is made up of individual, human stories (le petit). As a performer in Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées), I had always to remember to keep true to the little details of each moment of the story I was telling, to remain forever in the present moment of those ‘little’ details. The need for this absolute presence, or presentness, struck me not only when I was a protagonist within a scene—the mother at a Turkish mine collecting her small children after their day’s work and desperately collecting enough money to move on, or the young English volunteer welcoming refugees to Dover—but also when I was witness to the action in other scenes as I manipulated other actors on their wheeled platforms. This staging mechanism whereby actors moved across the stage on platforms manipulated by other actors (pousseurs) may be read as a metaphor for the refugee never reaching terra firma, yet there was something about the relationship between the actor and their pousseur that underlined the strength of the ensemble and the collective experience. As a pousseur, you were intently focused on your protagonist: you watched their every move, breathed with them, and remained utterly present to their present. For me, this was akin to the ancient chorus: the pousseur being the one who watches, who witnesses, who survives, and who goes on to tell the rest of the story, or indeed another story, in the next vignette. The stories gathered pace as the play progressed, sometimes quite relentlessly, with the action literally cascading down, such as in the opening scenes where huge swathes of silk representing the many rivers and seas crossed by refugees billowed across the stage. Together with the urgency of ¹⁴ Cixous (1987), 254 5; my trans.

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what we called the opéra (the interludes connecting the vignettes where the workings of the theatre and preparations for the next story were suddenly revealed, with actors running at breakneck speed to gather up props or sweep the stage clean), the relentless pace of the action, gathering in intensity as the six hours progressed, increased our performers’ sense of urgency; the urgency to keep going, to tell another story. There was a need to embody the present moment of a scene and then, once the curtain had come down on that particular moment, to press on to the next present. For me, it was this dedication to the continually renewing series of presents that lent Le Dernier Caravansérail its sense of epic grandeur: it was the petit that made the grand. It was the attention to the detail of each individual story, of each separate récit, that paradoxically created the play’s sense of epic narrative. * * *

* *

Les Éphémères, the production that followed Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) in 2007, and which I like to think of as an epic of the everyday, is also marked by this connection between le petit and le grand. Set primarily in middle-class twenty-first-century France, Les Éphémères is also a series of interrelated vignettes, but this time seeks to explore those ‘little’ moments in everyday life that in fact turn out to be significant, for they are the moments when everything changes. They are moments of fragility, of grace, of disappointment, of joy: a doctor calming an older woman lying in a hospital bed, a day out at the fair, a divorce settlement, a birthday. The title of the play reveals this emphasis on the present moment: humans are an ephemeral species and the present moment is all we have. Once again, this was a production of wide scope, with a multiplicity of characters and sets. This time, the intricately detailed sets were on constantly revolving, circular platforms, again manipulated by pousseurs and spiralling on- and offstage in precise choreographies. The connecting thread linking several (but not all) of the vignettes is the overarching story of Jeanne, a young woman who, following her mother’s death, is researching her family history. Over the course of her research, she discovers that her Jewish grandparents were deported to Auschwitz during the Nazi Occupation of France. As such, the twenty-first-century scenes are interspersed with scenes set in Paris and Brittany in 1942.¹⁵ Within Les Éphémères there is a direct interplay between the past and its influence on the present. It is a play about personal memory as much as it is about ephemerality. As in Le Dernier Caravansérail, we see that it is the individual’s story and the little details of our own ephemeral yet epic lives which, in the end,

¹⁵ I played the young pianist, Douschka Menuhin, a member of Jeanne’s Jewish family in wartime France.

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make History. Les Éphémères blends History, the archival,¹⁶ the recorded, with individual histories, the unrecorded but still half-remembered, the ephemeral. The cinematic flashback technique used in certain vignettes underlines this shuttling between the archival and the ephemeral, between the past and the present, and stages the slippage of temporality that occurs in the moment of remembering. The blurring of the archival and the ephemeral is something that I pick up in my own choreographic work, albeit in a very different way, but it is interesting to note that I had begun to encounter some of its dramatic possibilities while still at Soleil.

MASKED PRESENCES: FROM ENSEMBLE T O S O L O P R A C TI C E In 2015, I was invited to perform as a dancer in Walk the Plank’s Spellbound (Rama and Sita). This dance-theatre production of the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, blends classical bharata natyam dance and Western contemporary dance, shadow theatre, mask-work, and stunning pyrotechnics. As we narrated the epic story with our bodies through movement, a live narrator told the story, her voice underscored by the music. Spellbound is again an ensemble piece, with four dancers playing all of the parts: I played the golden deer (the disguised demon Maricha) who is hunted down by Rama, Rama’s stepmother Kaikeyi, the eagle god Jaitayu, and, together with the three other dancers, the ten-headed, multi-limbed Ravana. In Spellbound, we were channelling an ancient epic tradition as well as an ancient dance-theatre form, but these were updated for a twenty-first-century audience. Despite being an epic, Spellbound condensed the Ramayana to a running time of just thirty minutes. The epic was pared down to its very essential: having only thirty minutes to tell the story pushed us as dancers to focus on fully embodying, or incarnating, the emotions of the characters conveyed. From a performer’s point of view, the most striking feature of Spellbound was the use of the elaborate masks that enabled us to incarnate the various characters. The masks helped me to effect total transformation as I shifted from deer to demon to queen to eagle, each one allowing me to remain in the absolute present of each of my characters. For me, it is the mask that can offer itself in performance as a site for Willson’s ‘alternative present’, where the epic and the individual, the past and the present, collide and where the slippage of ¹⁶ A key character in the play is the archivist who helps Jeanne find out what happened to her grandparents during the Occupation. During the research and rehearsal period, the company was indebted to Caroline Piketty, archivist at the French Archives nationales, for her invaluable knowledge and guidance.

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Fig. 12.1 Marie Louise Crawley in mask as Myrrha. Photograph by Christian Hunt. © Christian Hunt.

temporalities I have alluded to above might also surface. In any case, when I assume the mask in one of my most recent solos Myrrha (2015), this slippage is precisely what occurs (Fig. 12.1). Myrrha, one of my choreographic works for Avid for Ovid and based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses 10.298–502, marks a turning point in my practice as research as a performer and as a choreographer. It also marks a shift from ensemble work to the solo form. Myrrha, a harrowing tale of father–daughter incest, teenage pregnancy, and giving birth is essentially the narrative of what it means to become a mother and then to have to give up a child. The solo follows Ovid’s plot, but disrupts its chronology; shuttling between past and present, the audience sees Myrrha as a frightened, ashamed teenage motherto-be, witnessing her journey from the young woman enchanted by her own brand-new seductiveness to the outcast about to give birth to her father’s child all alone in the desert. Despairing because death seems too easy and yet to go on living is impossible, Myrrha begs the gods to deny her both life and death by changing her into some other form (cf. Metamorphoses 10.487 ‘mutataeque mihi vitamque necemque negate’). Her plea is granted and she is transformed into a myrrh tree. As tree-woman, she labours and gives birth to a son, Adonis, whom she then has to give up. It is a solo performance, accompanied by a live musician, and I perform it masked. Whilst an ancient epic text (Ovid’s Metamorphoses) is again a springboard for the work, I focus on one episode. Although there are several characters

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involved, I ‘zoom in’ on Myrrha herself and play everything from her perspective. This is a conscious choice because I want to restore a live body to the young woman whose story has been appropriated by others, Ovid included. While this solo is based on principles of the ancient Roman dance form tragoedia saltata, it is very much ‘contemporary’ dance, performed in the present moment. To date, Myrrha has been performed in both theatre and museum settings. Within the context of the museum in particular, the performance operates on a multiplicity of temporalities: the slippage between the past historical ‘dead’ form and the present ‘living’ performance. Once again, in this performing of epic, we see an interplay at work between archive (of the ancient form, of the ancient epic text) and ephemerality (of the performance). The problem of the binary notion of performance as ephemeral and the archive as permanent has, of course, been widely investigated by various performance studies scholars,¹⁷ and I will not dwell on it at length here except to say that the concept of the moving, dancing body as ‘countermemory’,¹⁸ to use Rebecca Schneider’s reworking of Michel Foucault’s term, is integral to my practice in Myrrha. In particular, it is Schneider’s commentary on Diana Taylor’s argument, and the need for ‘emphasizing the archive as another kind of performance’¹⁹ that provides a discursive framework for my own practice as research: an understanding of archive as living performance and performance as living archive.²⁰ I am interested in how the performing of epic in Myrrha offers the fluid, porous temporalities of a performance archivepast and an embodied present; it presents an opportunity to create the ‘alternative present’ alluded to by Suzy Willson, where the performer is filtering the past but the process is powerful because it is happening in the here and now, in the visceral, incarnated, present moment. When I perform Myrrha, I am indeed tapping into a bodily (incarnated) archive on many layers: the embodiment of an ancient Roman text, an embodied history of Roman dance theatre, and the re-embodiment of my own bodily and somatic history as a woman who has herself given birth.²¹ In so many ways, the performance of Myrrha becomes ‘an alternative present’, just as it is an alternative archive for the ancient dance form, as well as the living archive of my own dancer’s and female body. As a performance, it lives in the present moment yet at the same time each new performance carries traces of the previous times I have danced it. In dancing Myrrha, my epic body is a living, ¹⁷ Most notably Rebecca Schneider (2001) in response to Peggy Phelan (1993); Diana Taylor (2003); and then Schneider again (2011). ¹⁸ Schneider (2011), 105. ¹⁹ Schneider (2011), 108. ²⁰ This in turn echoes performance theorist André’s Lepecki’s (2010) formulation of the moving ‘body as archive’. ²¹ It useful here to cite dance theorist Susan Foster’s concept of ‘bodily writing’ (Foster (1995), 4): ‘there are physical traces in the body, series of material remains, or remnants of the past, within our contemporary somatic expression’.

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breathing archive of multiple presents, of multiple presences, a palimpsest of tenses and temporalities. It is important to note at this point that Myrrha is thus more complicated than simply the revival of the ancient pantomime form. For revival suggests that something existed previously in similar form to be revived, and whilst there are elements of revival in the work I create, it is not a straightforward revival. In the performance of Myrrha, I am connecting with the past through the present moment(s) of moving, ‘reviving’ an ancient dance form while simultaneously exploring new possibilities for contemporary performance. Am I in fact re-membering, or dis-membering, an ancient form? If I am dismembering an ancient form, then I am quite literally tearing it apart, breaking it down and fragmenting it in order to reassemble it in another way, as the ancient oral poet reassembled lines from multiple sources. Performance thereby becomes a process of reassembling scattered fragments in new formations.²² Even when the pieces are joined together again, the cracks are still (perhaps even more) present. Between the reassembled fragments appear gaps and lacunae, those spaces-between which offer the possibility for unrealized potential histories to form and appear.²³ For me, this is where the work becomes interesting: it is these gaps that provide space for the slippage between past and present, a site of the surfacing of those previously unrealized stories (le petit) behind the ‘epic’ story (le grand). I would like to suggest that it is the dancing body that can exploit the gaps between temporalities to allow for previously unrealized histories to surface; and thereby claim a new space for the live, female body in the performance of epic. For me, in the performing of Myrrha it is the neutral mask that both accepts and bridges these gaps between the past and present. The mask offers a valuable potentiality, a state of between-ness. Its very neutrality, the fact that it is a neutral mask, ensures this potentiality: I remain in the present but at the same time this mask is Myrrha’s own, the mask of a woman from the ancient past. The choice of the neutral mask as a performative mask is significant. In choosing it, I am consciously breaking mask and theatre teacher Jacques Lecoq’s conventions.²⁴ The fact that I perform Myrrha with the neutral mask means a constant negotiation back and forth between off-balance extremes of emotion (grief, shame, desperation) and the neutral, ‘centred’ body that exists before all action. As such, the mask forces me to be in a constant state of receptivity to the present

²² This reassembling of fragments is of course akin to what happens in the creative process of improvisation. Cf. Graeme Bird on jazz improvisation and Homer, Ch. 16 in this volume. ²³ I am indebted here to Heike Roms’s recent work on performative methods of oral history and what she coins a ‘historiodramaturgical’ approach, as outlined in her paper ‘Mind the Gaps: Evidencing Performance and Performing Evidence in Oral Histories of Performance Art’, given on 14 June at IFTR 2016 Presenting the Theatrical Past: Interplays of Artefacts, Discourses and Practices, Stockholm University. Roms suggests that redo is not simply re enactment but in itself creates a different present so that other previously unrealized potential histories may be given form. ²⁴ For Lecoq, the neutral mask is a non performance mask.

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moment. It pushes me to be present precisely because, as Lecoq reminds us, it is the neutral mask that ‘essentially develops the presence of the actor in the space around them, placing them in a state of discovery, of open-ness, of availability, of being able to receive’.²⁵ In addition, the neutral mask has no expression, which means that it is capable of every expression. Denied of emotions that can be read in facial expressions, the neutral mask puts the emphasis on the embodiment of emotion in different parts of the body, which paradoxically seems to make the audience ‘see’ a range of emotions (passion, shame, despair, Myrrha’s first and only smile at her newborn child) flicker across the face of the mask, even though these facial expressions cannot, in reality, actually be there. As well as revealing the extreme, somewhat alien, physicality of the piece, the mask also expresses Myrrha’s very human vulnerability. I have tried to play Myrrha without the mask in rehearsal and when doing so I felt very vulnerable as a performer. In putting on the mask, I am able to let go of my own performer’s vulnerability and allow Myrrha’s vulnerability to surface. The mask also ensures that this vulnerability is sited in the body, or at least ensures a shift in the viewer’s focus to the performer’s body. In a solo that narrates a very female experience of the body and that stages pregnancy, childbirth, and maternity, the mask, paradoxically fleshy and alive, reclaims a site for the live female body within the context of both the ancient form and the epic text. With every character I play, I deliberately start work by choosing an energy source that is clearly located in some specific part of the body from which a character’s energy radiates out, and it is this energy source located in that centre that leads the rest of the body through space. Emotion is not excluded from this process but is at its very core: I try to make an emotional as well as a physical commitment to that centre. Myrrha’s centre is unsurprisingly located in her womb, and with some sense of kinaesthetic empathy audiences have often remarked, without knowing about my process of working from movement centres, that they have felt the energy of the performance resonate in their viscera too. They ‘feel’ the burden that Myrrha carries in her womb, the child conceived in darkness, the weight of her shame. In such a way, Myrrha is a visceral work, in the truest sense of the word. The ancient form is no longer missing, presumed dead; Myrrha is no longer missing, presumed dead. She is live and present in every performance, her flesh my flesh, resonating not only in my body but also in the bodies of the spectators. Speaking recently on dance in the museum,²⁶ dance scholar Gabriele Brandstetter has evoked the historeme, the anecdotal, the unpublished (or ²⁵ Lecoq (2007), 49; my trans. ²⁶ Gabriele Brandstetter, keynote address ‘The Museum in Transition: How do Performing Artists Affect Historiography?’ given on 13 June at IFTR 2016 Presenting the Theatrical Past: Interplays of Artefacts, Discourses and Practices, Stockholm University.

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the not-yet-published) as opposed to the grand récit, and suggests that performance in the museum might offer a challenge to critical historiography. For while traditional historiography tells history with a(n Aristotelian tragic) beginning, a middle, and an end, performance, precisely because of its (Aristotelean epic-like) fragmentary nature, offers an opportunity for the anecdotal, the not-yet-published, to be displayed.²⁷ Such ideas of the anecdotal versus the grand récit seem not too far removed from Mnouchkine’s distinction between le petit and le grand, nor indeed from Willson’s idea of performance creating an ‘alternative present’. If I have learned anything at all from performing epic it is that you cannot have le grand without le petit; it is, in fact, the smallest, personal, fragmentary details that in the end make up the larger epic picture.

²⁷ The potential for fragments, gaps, and lacunae to offer alternatives to received narratives of history in turn leads me too to think of French philosopher Paul Ricœur’s explorations of intra temporality and the complex relationships that exist between time (le temps) and narrative (le récit) (Ricœur 1983, 1984, 1985). While for Ricœur, semantics and semiotics play an important role in written discourse (narrative) as a temporally oriented process, in those ‘archives available for individual and collective memory’ (Ricœur (1991), 107), I am interested in how narrative works as a temporally oriented process when sited in and ‘written’ on the body.

III Formal Refractions

13 A Harmless Distemper Accessing the Classical Underworld in Heywood’s The Silver Age Margaret Kean

The katabatic journey to the underworld within classical epic is a carefully regulated narrative unit. Landscape coordinates and recognized obstacles help to plot an imaginative geography for the living hero’s transit down into (and upward return from) the land of the dead. To cross over into Hades on a mission to acquire knowledge or a specific object or to rescue a lost friend is a thrilling but transgressive action. Topographical and structural safeguards are put in place because of the substantive incompatibility of the narrative premise: a living person in the afterlife. Odysseus will remain on one side of a boundary trench when he converses with the deceased, but Hercules, Orpheus, Aeneas, and others must travel in Charon’s ferry if they wish to continue their descent quests. The epistemological uncertainty of the journey will only increase as the literary tradition moves towards modernism, but it always exploits a disconnect between the vitality of the hero engaged in a forward temporal motion and the fundamental inertia of the past. New challenges for the descent narrative are met in every generation but the transfer of the motif across genre makes particular demands. The immediate mechanics of performance set specific requirements and these must be gauged alongside the inherited technical aspects of the literary motif. The discussion here assesses the use of the katabatic motif on the early modern London stage. It pays particular attention to recent critical advances in the study of early modern English drama, concentrating on the collaborative nature of dramatic production, the circulation of materials in a London marketplace, and the dynamic interaction between players and audience which is always a constituent part of profitable pleasure and compatible comprehension.¹ ¹ Stern (2009), Clare (2014).

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Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587?) gives us the most stable appropriation of an epic underworld in its descriptions of the afterlife. Famously, the play opens with the entry of a ghost. Andrea is a recently deceased Spanish courtier, willing to offer the London audience his credentials in the form of a lengthy opening speech liberally dusted with erudite Virgilian references.² It is a traveller’s tale from one who has only recently travelled in Charon’s barge, and who has faced judgement in front of not only Minos, Eacus, and Rhadamant but also the king and queen of the underworld, Pluto and Proserpina. Yet, although it functions as a checklist of key reference points, this is not a katabatic journey. The trapdoor on the stage is most probably employed as the threshold between supernatural secrets and the world of the living; but the play’s action does not venture a descent. Andrea accesses daylight but he is no more than a ghostly observer, and the trajectory of the dramatic narrative is not a descent story, which allows a hero to face the past before making a contribution to the future; instead, it is a preliminary reminder of an eternal punishment system that remains the basis against which to evaluate current human activities and convict one’s enemies. A similarly conclusive framework is developed in a number of comic devilplays of the period, whereby infernal scenes function as the limiting perimeter set around depictions of human complacency, moral fallibility, and social corruption. This is the case, for example, in the Elizabethan comedy Grim the Collier of Croyden and in Ben Jonson’s Jacobean satire, The Devil is an Ass (1616).³ However, Thomas Dekker’s If It Be Not Good, the Devil is in it (1612) is the best example for our purposes as its performance needs at the Red Bull Playhouse in north London complement well those of the major katabatic play staged in the period, Thomas Heywood’s The Silver Age. Dekker’s title page announces ‘A New Play, as it hath bin lately Acted, with great applause, by the Queenes Majesties servants: At the Red Bull’. The standard critical view that the Red Bull catered merely for plebeian tastes with boisterous comedy, noisy fight scenes, and military spectaculars has been re-examined in recent years. Theatre historians now know more about the distinctive nature of this playhouse, which was in use by the autumn of 1607, and about the technical prowess of the early Jacobean company which played there, the Queen’s Servants. The early Jacobean plays associated with the Red Bull are particularly skilled in their use of pyrotechnics and stage mechanics, and are acclaimed for spectacular fight scenes; but there is growing evidence for a range of repertory materials and playing styles

² See Erne (2001), 58 for the likely date of this play; pp. 51 5 for a detailed comparison of Kyd’s description to Aeneas’ journey through Hades. ³ Grim the Collier of Croyden; or The Devil and his Dame: with the Devil and Saint Dunstan is extant in a printed drama collection dating from 1662 but is thought to be by the Elizabethan playwright William Haughton.

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at the theatre, and for engagement with a more elite market through print publication of their plays.⁴ Dekker’s play is both a glorious romp and a witty contemporary satire comparable to his Lucianic prose text, Newes from Hell; Brought by the Divells Carrier (1606). The special effects within the play alert us to the artisanal skills of the theatre company for whom he writes and, in the entrances of the diabolic golden Head which is more than once raised from the stage and returned down to hell, is a nod to a static set piece in Robert Greene’s highly popular Elizabethan comedy, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594).⁵ Dekker’s play has fight scenes and fireworks, cavorting devils accessing the stage through multiple trapdoors, a star comic turn from a disgruntled Charon, a building in flames on stage, an underpinning argument about monarchical rule, moral exhortations, and a stirring revelation using the discovery space at the back of the stage of the eternal retribution meted out to traitors. The ending of the play snaps back from a somewhat generic anti-Catholic moralism to contemporary London interests, shifting focus from the hypocrisies of Naples to the infernal punishment of Guy Fawkes. The theatre historian Eva Griffith includes this final scene of judgement in hell when she lists the recurrence of courtroom scenes within the Red Bull repertoire.⁶ * * * * * Thomas Heywood’s Ages plays span the four ages of classical mythology. (There are five plays in total as the Iron Age comes in two parts.) The sequence provides a sweeping action-packed account of key classical stories, particularly those based around Ovidian tales of Jove’s amours, and the history of the Fall of Troy. The title page for The Golden Age reports that it was ‘sundry times acted at the Red Bull, by the Queenes Maiesties Seruants’ and the publication date is 1611. The title page for the second play in the sequence The Silver Age has a publication date of 1613, so too The Brazen Age. It is most probable that all three plays were in performance at the Red Bull playhouse by or before 1612, though this cannot be proved with certainty.⁷

⁴ Bentley (1941 68), vol. 6, 238 47 provided the standard negative view but this was questioned by Gurr (1987). More recent critical work includes Graves (1999), Astington (2006), Munro (2006), Straznicky (2006), Gurr (2010), Griffith (2013). See further Kenward, Ch. 29 in this volume. ⁵ This point is worth making partly because of the critical interest in Heywood’s Silver Age and Brazen Age which circles around the possible connections between their material and previous Elizabethan theatrical productions centred on Hercules. See Arrell (n.d.). Recycling and adapting material is commonplace in early modern drama, and the recirculation of stage props associated with the figure of Hercules has a remarkably long stage history, dating back at least to Aristophanes, The Frogs. ⁶ Griffith (2013), 245. Silver Age also concludes with an infernal jury scene but is not on Griffith’s list since a Red Bull connection for this play cannot be conclusively proven. ⁷ The Iron Age plays probably date from around this same time but are not printed until 1632.

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Douglas Arrell has shown that Heywood is indebted not only to transmission of the classical texts through a moralized medieval reception history (though Heywood does lean heavily at times on The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (c.1475), a translation by Caxton of work by Raoul Lefèvre and others) but also returns directly to classical sources. Arrell identifies the second act of Silver Age as derived directly from Plautus’ Amphitryon and also cites instances within the sequence where close attention is paid to Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, and to George Chapman’s English translation of The Iliad and Arthur Golding’s translation of Metamorphoses.⁸ A further example of Heywood’s competitive response to Golding’s translation of Ovid will be given here and further direct engagement with classical texts proposed. A cursory glance at Silver Age’s subject matter shows Ovidian materials: a retelling of Jove’s amours with Semele and Alcmena, and of the love interest his brother Pluto shows in Proserpine. However, the focus on Jove which runs across Golden Age and on into the opening acts of Silver Age is thereafter overshadowed by the dramatic attractions of the hero, Hercules. Hercules’ life, labours, and death annex not just the remainder of Silver Age but all of Brazen Age. This makes it usual to analyse the Silver and Brazen Ages together but their stagecraft is quite distinct. It is to the advantage of the Silver Age to view it separately, as its narrative and technical coherences reveal a crafted theatrical unit. The narrative within Silver Age settles on two significant myths associated with the history of Thebes—the story of Semele (mother of Bacchus) and the story of Hercules (born to the Theban lady Alcmena)—and the most audacious spectacles balance Semele’s burning bed raised to the heavens with two infernal fiery descents: first Pluto in his chariot exits with the abducted Proserpine, and later the hero Hercules sinks from the stage to recover Ceres’ lost daughter from Hades.⁹ This is a play organized around a Theban context and constructed to profit from a theatre company’s technical expertise. Strong winching machinery is definitely required but (multiple) trapdoors would also suit the action well. The play takes full advantage of movement on a vertical axis and is of singular significance for its theatrical rendition of a classical hero’s katabatic journey.¹⁰ Its attempt to recreate classical environs without resort to moral exegesis is laudable; the inevitable slippage between pagan and Christian interpretative criteria intriguing and revealing.

⁸ Arrell (2014). ⁹ The full print title is The Silver Age, Including. The love of Jupiter to Alcmena: The birth of Hercules. And the Rape of Proserpine. Concluding, With the Arraignement of the Moone (1613). ¹⁰ Theatre historians have so far focused mainly on the lifts within this play, for example Mann (2013), but more generally Griffith (2013), 103, 106 has identified the need for a sturdy winch at the Red Bull and the carpentry skills required to provide the numerous below floor entry points in Dekker’s devil play.

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Pluto’s first entry has the stage direction: ‘Thunder. Enter Pluto, his Chariot drawne in by Divels’.¹¹ It suggests something of a drumroll for this appearance. The dark lord’s chariot and entourage dominate the stage and are presumably intended to unnerve the audience. This is in part achieved because of the immediate segue between classical and Christian cultural references. There are practical advantages in costuming the menial spirits as devils: not only is such clothing readily available but it will trigger a particular wariness in audience response whereby an expectation of entertaining subversive behaviour is combined with residual apprehension.¹² Pluto’s first speech explains his presence against a backdrop of cosmic unrest. Following the war between his brother Jove and the Giants, Pluto has come to earth to check that there are no cracks or fissures that might let light into his own underworld domain. Typhon is now imprisoned under Mount Etna but the giant continues to struggle and the movement is causing earthquakes. Pluto does not want unwelcome daylight to penetrate his murky realm, so he has come to test the integrity of earth’s bedrock. Happy that all seems secure, and that there is no danger to Hades, he now intends to depart: Our Iron Chariot That from his shod wheeles rusty darknesse flings, Hath with our weight, prov’d mountaines, dales and rocks, And found them no where hollow; All being well, Wee’l cleave the earth, and sinke againe to hell.¹³

The description of the movement of the chariot’s wheels as sparking off rusty darkness is both apt and a highly imaginative conceit. It picks up on Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s phrase, ‘obscura tinctas ferrugine’ (Metamorphoses 5.404), as ‘their rusty bridle reins’ (lit. ‘dark-dyed reins’) but relocates placement of the adjective to extremely good atmospheric effect.¹⁴ The rather grand first speech from the king of the underworld anticipates his exit strategy but that departure is to be somewhat delayed. He next sees Proserpine, falls immediately in love, and decides to carry the vocally unwilling maiden off. The scenario is taken directly from Ovid (Metamorphoses 5.346–571) but without

¹¹ Heywood (1874), 135. ¹² Pluto’s opening line includes the term ‘hurly burly’ and this has encouraged some com mentators to identify an immediate iniquitous accent in his lexis. However, this is likely to be a case of culturally accrued meaning, based on our contemporary familiarity with the witches in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606; 1616). The term ‘hurly burly’ also occurs within the stage directions for the dumb show at the start of the second act of Silver Age (see Heywood (1874), 96), without any sense of the uncanny. Even so, one might pursue the sinister inference by reference to the early theatre history for Macbeth, in particular the influence of Ben Jonson’s court masque, The Masque of Queens (1609) upon interpretation of Shakespeare’s weird sisters. Griffith (2013), 156 9 argues that the Queen’s Servants may well have been engaged by Queen Anne to assist with the acting roles in this masque. ¹³ Heywood (1874), 136. ¹⁴ Forey (2002), 165 (l. 505).

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the explanatory mention of Cupid’s interference. This omission leaves the god looking remarkably impulsive and perhaps excuses his chat-up line, which could certainly have done with a little more work. By Lethe, Styx, Cocytus, Acheron, And all the terrors our blacke Region yeelds, I see and love, and at one instant both. Kisse me.

The costuming and lexis for the early modern stage feels like a clash of two world orders. Pluto’s register is pleasingly pedantic but this is counterpointed by Proserpine’s identification of him as ‘foule fiend’ and ‘Hell-hound’ and her rather vernacular imperative, ‘Claws off Divell’.¹⁵ Pluto is deaf to her pleas and impervious to her distress but it is unlikely that the audience is unaffected. One of the few critics to discuss the staging of the Proserpina story in Silver Age is Jonathan Bate. He approves the practical application made by Heywood of Ovid’s poignant comment that the innocent Proserpina grieves for the loss of her newly picked flowers, whereby the dropped flowers are employed as a prop and remain discarded on the stage as a marker of spoilation and bereavement. Bate refers to Silver Age during his discussion of the scenes in Shakespeare’s Pericles (1607) where Marina as flower maiden/Proserpina figure is abducted from the strand by pirates. It is the start of a stylish enlacement of Proserpina-myth connections across Shakespeare’s late plays, with Heywood’s alternative form of Ovidianism a recurrent comparator. In the main, Bate favours Shakespeare as the greater technical innovator in the metamorphic mode but he is generous in his enthusiasm for the pastoral interlude, when Ceres and her daughter first grace the stage in Heywood’s Silver Age, and suggests a possible cross-fertilization of ideas between this scene and the masque of Ceres within Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11).¹⁶ Bate notes that Proserpina is an appropriate story to include in a play entitled The Silver Age because hers is the aetiological myth that explains the seasons of the year and man’s reliance on agriculture.¹⁷ However, seasonality is not Heywood’s concern. At her first entry in Silver Age, Proserpine is to be ‘attired like the Moone’, and Heywood will rely on that affiliation when it comes to providing a resolution of the dispute between Ceres and Pluto.¹⁸ It is an active decision by the playwright not to follow the conventional aetiological interpretation of the Proserpina myth, an active choice by the theatre company to explicate a balance of light with dark by reference not to seasonality but rather to the waxing and waning of the moon’s cycle.¹⁹ Heywood’s Silver ¹⁵ Heywood (1874), 136. ¹⁶ Bate (1993), 221 2, 257 63. ¹⁷ Bate (1993), 257. ¹⁸ Heywood (1874), 133. ¹⁹ The company may have approved the plot modification based on the availability of costumes and expertise with artificial light effects. See Graves (1999), 208 12 for information on professional stage effects for moons and stars.

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Age is certainly interested in the legal status of marriage. It goes so far as to stage a jury trial where Pluto’s right to keep his wife is judged by the moon’s peers, the planets. Their deliberations deem her bound to her husband, as well as doomed by her consumption of pomegranate seeds. Olympian Jove as final arbitrator does retain the argument that Ceres brings fertility to the earth and so must be appeased, but he identifies Proserpine’s lunar influence to be over the seas and the tides. Seasonality is more or less ignored at the climax of the play, as is any agricultural link for the figure of Proserpine (as distinct from Ceres), unless Heywood is to be promoted as an early proponent of moon gardening. It is worth spending a little longer on Heywood’s reconstruction of the Proserpina myth, in particular the somewhat surprising entry of Hercules into the storyline or more accurately the appropriation of the Proserpina myth into the play’s depiction of the life and adventures of the Theban hero, Hercules. The approach is innovative in its imposing depiction of Pluto on stage, its theatrical enactment of the katabatic motif, its reconfiguring of the labours of Hercules and adoption of this classical hero as a dramatic champion capable of the emancipation of souls from the clutches of Hades, its emphasis on legal debate at the closure of the play, and its central involvement of the planets within the myth of Proserpina. The small detail of the exclusion of Juno and Cupid from this version of the tale is also significant. It would have been simple enough to involve these figures as Juno is a major presence elsewhere in this play. It seems therefore that a conscious decision has been made to concentrate the theatrical displays of her malice. Her antagonism is directed towards the two Theban women whom Jove has taken as lovers— Semele is burnt alive, Alcmena is caught in the pangs of childbirth—and Juno’s hostility then transfers to Hercules, as the son of Alcmena and Jove, but does not extend further. The pastoral song associated with Ceres is a delight but such rural recreations have been positioned as foil for the entry of the god of the underworld. All eyes turn immediately to Pluto. Although there has been little critical interest shown in Pluto’s chariot, the god’s declamatory speeches draw our attention to it repeatedly: Cleave earth, and when I stampe upon thy breast Sinke me, my brasse shod wagon, and my selfe, My Coach steeds, and their traces altogether Ore head and eares in Styx. . . . . . . . . Eternall darkenesse claspe me where I dwell Saving these eyes, wee’le have no light in hell.²⁰

²⁰ Heywood (1874), 137.

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Such writing offers another spectacular opportunity to any theatre company; and some technical expertise in the exit of Pluto seems undeniable. The lines on stamping the ground are adapted from Ovid but adjusted to function within the medium of theatre. Such an action is likely to be a cue to the technicians: a signal either to open a trapdoor or to set off a covering smokescreen while the devil-stallions pull the chariot offstage or into a curtained discovery space. If it is not a cue to others, the actor playing Pluto may himself be going to kick open a smoke box at ground level. Directly following the exit of Pluto with his prize, Ceres returns to the stage in search of her daughter. Her puzzlement at the charred track of a chariot, which has entered but not left the stage, is built into the script and might be given further embodiment through stage business. The descent of Pluto with Proserpina is unheimlich in Ovid’s poem. On the stage, the landscape of unease is not employed but the chariot’s sudden and unnatural disappearance from the stage is promoted. (It is stated at three separate points by Pluto either that he will ‘sinke’ or that the earth will ‘cleave’.) To what extent should we be intrigued by such a foregrounded promise of an extraordinary removal of the chariot from sight? Does the potential challenge set for early modern stage engineers stem solely from Heywood’s reading of Ovid? It might be worth testing whether there is something even more epic in the mix. The locus classicus of the earth cleaving to allow a chariot to make its way to Hades is in Statius’ Thebaid. It would not be necessary to have read every word of that epic poem to be aware of the stunning final sortie of Amphiaraus at the close of Book 7. It is a famous episode and something which an extremely competent classicist such as Heywood, with a professional interest in the dramatic presentation of battle scenes, might well have encountered.²¹ Amphiaraus’ arrival in Hades shocks the inhabitants of the underworld, just as his unexplained disappearance unnerves those left behind on the battlefield. The plummeting chariot disturbs a scene of judicial process, at which the three infernal Judges, alongside the Fates, the Furies, and the king of the underworld are present. Pluto complains at the hateful light of day invading Tartarus and at the incursion upon his territory: anne profanatum totiens chaos hospite vivo perpetiar? me Pirithoi temerarius ardor temptat et audaci Theseus iuratus amico, me ferus Alcides, tunc cum custode remoto ferrea Cerbereae tacuerunt limina portae; ²¹ John Lydgate in The Siege of Thebes (c.1421 2) alters this scene until it is hardly recogniz able and so is not a plausible medium for its transmission to Heywood. Also well known from the Thebaid is the temple of Clemency in Athens, possibly acknowledged at the opening of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613). See L. Potter (1997), 139.

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ast ego vix unum, nec celsa ad sidera, furto ausus iter Siculo rapui conubia campo: nec licuisse ferunt; iniustaeque a Iove leges protinus, et sectum genetrix mihi computat annum. (Thebaid 8.52 6, 61 4) (Must I so oft endure the profanation of Chaos by living strangers? The rash ardour of Pirithous provoked me, and Theseus, sworn comrade of his daring friend, and fierce Alcides, when the iron threshold of Cerberus’ gate fell silent, its guardian removed . . . [and Orpheus] Yet I have scarce ventured one stolen journey, nor was that to the stars on high, when I carried off my bride from the Sicilian mead: unlawfully, so they say, and forthwith comes an unjust decree from Jove, and her mother cheats me of half a year.²²)

Two separate journeys are referred to in these lines.²³ Yet the juxtaposition in the Latin might lead one to fuse or otherwise confuse the tales. This is not to say that the only way to muddle the storylines is to read Statius: the reception history here, as with so many classical myths, is complex.²⁴ What is intriguing is the cumulative relevance of salient details for Heywood’s presentation: the god of the underworld loathes light infiltrating into Hades; a chariot disappears from the surface of the earth without trace; the association of the underworld with judicial activity; the cast list of identifiable infernal roles; the backstory for how Proserpina came to be Pluto’s bride; Pluto presents his shared domestic arrangements as unjust; and, not least, Pirithous and Theseus’ friendship is discussed back to back with Hercules’ victory over Cerberus at the gates to Hades. No one element is uncommon but the collective semblance is striking. Hercules’ route to the underworld in Heywood is somewhat more conventional but strongly inflected by performance needs. The location for the opening action of the final act is clearly identified as Tainaron the southernmost point on the Mani peninsula in Greece and a notable geographical marker within many Greek myths for a katabatic journey. The staged entrance to the underworld is described variously by the three noble Thracians who are Hercules’ companions as ‘the mouth of hell’, ‘blacke Tartarus Ebon gates’, ‘hels-mouth’, and ‘the rusty gates of hell’. They know this spot to be where the monster Cerberus has his lair and, in advance of the arrival of Hercules, they

²² Statius (1969), 198 9. ²³ A helpful footnote in the Loeb edition states, ‘Hercules descended into Hades to fetch away Cerberus, Pirithous, in order to carry off Proserpine’. See Statius (1969), 201. ²⁴ An amalgamation of the two adventures is made by Caxton, though his version of Proserpina’s abduction is highly moralized and deviates widely from Ovid (and Heywood). The point here is simply that Heywood as a strong classicist may have made direct recourse to a number of Latin texts.

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decide to challenge ‘the triple-headed dogge’, ‘Hels tri-shap’t porter’, ‘the hellhound’.²⁵ The noblemen beat on the gates, rouse Cerberus, and fight to the death. Perithous has been killed onstage and Theseus wounded before Hercules enters and restrains the beast. This victory anticipates what is usually the final (twelfth) labour for Hercules and recalibrates its significance. The capture of Cerberus is here no more than a preliminary obstacle in a more profound adventure, and there is no suggestion that Hercules should not employ a weapon in the fight. The staging provides ocular proof that lesser heroes than Hercules are not capable of passing an archetypal threshold leading to a mythic descent.²⁶ The crossing point is clearly a literary convention but both the lexical choices and the stage property (‘Adamantine gates’, ‘Iron percullis’) carry further strata of cultural memory.²⁷ The gates to hell are said to be broken down, a garrulous porter is swept aside, devils are scattered, and an infernal tyrant overthrown in what amounts to an early modern secular variant on the Harrowing of Hell within a medieval mystery play cycle. Moreover, a typological link between Hercules and Christ has come full circle, with medieval motifs for the Christian drama of salvation reinvested on the (Protestant) early modern stage to tell a story from classical myth. Hercules claims a great deal when he says ‘And all the horrid tortures of the damn’d | Shall at the waving of our club dissolve’, but substitute the classical hero’s club with the Saviour’s crozier and this would have been a late medieval theatrical verity.²⁸ Hercules speaks of Charon’s barge as the appropriate means to gain further access into the underworld and the actor may mime an appropriate movement across the stage. If so, then an accompanying line of fireworks is a distinct possibility.²⁹ His katabatic undertaking does in any case see him descend into infernal comic disorder: Hercules sinkes himselfe: Flashes of fire; the Divels appeare at every corner of the stage with severall fire workes. The Judges of hell, and the three sisters run over the stage, Hercules after them: fire workes all over the house. Enter Hercules.³⁰

It was perhaps inevitable that a theatre audience’s expectation of capers, squibs, and diabolic disarray would be met at some point. Such diversions are commonplace in early modern devil-plays and have their roots in medieval ²⁵ Heywood (1874), 156 7. ²⁶ Hercules tells Theseus to guard Cerberus while he proceeds on the quest alone but somehow Theseus, Philoctetes, and Cerberus all appear on stage at Pluto’s court in time to take a bow at the end of proceedings. Heywood (1874), 158, 164. ²⁷ Heywood (1874), 158. In addition, the play’s narrator, Homer, tells us that Hercules’ journey is to the ‘vaults below’ (Heywood (1874), 155). Such phrasing even from the mouth of such an antique figure would resonate for Jacobean audiences against their understanding of the diabolical machinations exposed by the recent Gunpowder Plot. Pluto repeats the term (Heywood (1874), 160). ²⁸ Heywood (1874), 159. ²⁹ Griffith (2013), 106, 114. ³⁰ Heywood (1874), 159.

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drama: for example, Grim the Collier of Croyden opens with just such comic confusion with St Dunstan ineffectively chasing demons around the stage. Silver Age employs such frolics as hell’s holiday, and then builds towards a more serious staged confrontation between powerful adversaries. This is a fresh scenario, a thrilling moment of melodrama when the monarch of the pagan underworld and a great hero for humanity come to blows without the audience knowing the outcome in advance. It is hard to say who will win when the hero is Hercules not Christ, and the figure to be saved is Proserpina not Alcestis.³¹ Martial prowess on stage is likely to be the determining factor and many within a Red Bull playhouse audience would have been particularly appreciative of a good club fight, as fencing with cudgels and the small shields known as bucklers was a favourite exercise and pastime for London apprentices.³² It is hardly a disparagement of that audience if even the gods at the Red Bull turn out to know a thing or two about clubs and maces. Pluto was probably carrying such a prop on his first entry; he certainly mentions that he has been testing ‘th’earths basses with our mace’. Now, in response to Hercules’ incursion, the lord of the underworld returns armed to the stage: Enter Pluto with a club of fire, a burning crowne, Proserpine, the Judges, the Fates, and a guard of Divels, all with burning weapons.³³

The play builds to its anticipated fight scene by way of some high-calibre bombast. The champions behave like vernacular versions of Homeric warriors and hurl insults at each other: my flaming Crowne Shall scortch thy damn’d soule with infernall fires. My vassaile Furies with their wiery strings, Shall lash thee hence, and with my Ebon club Il’e ding thee to the lowest Barathrum.³⁴

‘Ding’ is not yet an archaic term but it is rather more onomatopoeic than might be thought decorous. The threat is of a buffet so strong it propels the recipient into the lowest pit. ‘Barathrum’ sounds ominous but may also be a ³¹ The version of Proserpina’s abduction in Caxton is highly moralized but involves Hercules felling Pluto with one blow and saving Proserpina (wife to Orpheus) from hell. See Sommer (1894), 321 37. ³² See Griffith (2013), 17 for further information on heroic and martial interests in early Jacobean London. ³³ Heywood (1874), 159. The crown may be no more than a paint effect; see Graves (1999), 216 17 for examples of costumes embroidered with cloth flames or decorated with paint effects, but the burning weapons and in particular the club of fire have intrigued critics as to whether pyrotechnics were involved. See Griffith (2013), 112 14 for information on the fire effects and skill set of the Queen’s Servants. ³⁴ Heywood (1874), 159.

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classicist’s joke, in that it identifies the area under the stage, accessible through a trapdoor/hell-mouth property, as the belly or maw. It is also the first of two scripted indicators that further descent is conceptually possible because the design of the stage makes it physically possible. When the champions do finally clash, Hercules is the victor. Death, however, still holds proprietary rights. A legal judgement on Proserpine’s fate will be required and the judicial arbitration within Silver Age is bespoke. A stately procession of the planets was offered to Semele but she turned that spectacle down. Now, the planets are nominated by Hercules as a courtroom jury for the arraignment of the moon. Both Mars and Venus have speaking parts: Venus favours the rights of the lover in the case (Pluto), while Mars speaks up for martial prowess. Their interaction is a puff for their own love story, which will be staged in Brazen Age; but it is noteworthy that here at the climax of Silver Age, Venus and Mars dispute the masculine attributes most worthy to win the girl. Jove’s ultimate adjudication mediates between all characters but favours the vigour of the early modern stage over inherited aetiologies. The lunar cycle is another means of promoting conceptual and dramatic engagement with movement on a vertical axis, and exit from the stage is also choreographed to emphasize this same theatrical imperative. Gods and planets are to return to the heavens. Hercules is directed to walk off on what will be a long hike up to the earth’s surface. Hercules exits with the friends he saved from the jaws of Cerberus and the dog itself—the animated creature now transforming into a trophy and stage property—though it is not quite clear how they got from Tainaron to Pluto’s court. Infernal residents look set for a final downward journey, despite the fact that the current action is set in Hades. Performance presentism outweighs narrative logic, as treading the boards of the public stage always constitutes a surface level from which it is physically possible to descend—the trapdoor is a proven asset within Silver Age, why not use it one more time? * * * * * The discussion here has considered the importance of performance and other dramaturgical criteria within the use of the katabatic mytheme on the early modern public stage. Sadly, there is no evidence which would prove conclusively that Heywood’s Silver Age play followed Golden Age to the Red Bull playhouse. There are, however, extant records for a court performance of Silver Age at Greenwich Palace when the Queen’s Servants and actors from the King’s Men come together to perform two Heywood plays, The Silver Age and The Rape of Lucrece, in the presence of Queen Anne and Prince Henry.³⁵ ³⁵ Eva Griffith argues that the performative style and pyrotechnical skills of the Queen’s Servants may have led to regular employment within the production of court masques and other royal entertainment needs. Griffith (2013), 146 60.

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Jonathan Bate in 1993 noted a ‘collocation’ between Silver Age and The Tempest in that ‘the two plays were in the repertory at the same time’ and that Silver Age was played at court by a combined acting force. He saw this as giving ‘Shakespeare’s company’ ‘direct contact with Heywood’s song to Ceres’, and proposed a thematic link of harvest blessings between the scene of pastoral plenty in Silver Age and the harmonies developed within Prospero’s masque.³⁶ This was an important critical insight but, a generation on, a residual canonical and literary bias can be detected within Bate’s analysis. A katabatic journey necessarily inflects previous master narratives, and so a Theban collocution across the play practice of the two companies might now be proposed. The storyline for The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613), as developed by the collaborating playwrights William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, relies heavily on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.³⁷ But the stimulus to tackle Theban materials may lie with the King’s Men’s involvement in performance of Silver Age, and its (in)direct engagement with Statius. The references to Hercules in the opening scene of Two Noble Kinsmen connect to Heywood, though they remain somewhat generic; so too the knowledge that Theseus has completed a descent to Hades. More concrete is the precis from the two noble Theban kinsmen of their city’s mythic history as tied to Juno’s ‘ancient fit of jealousy’ (1.2.22).³⁸ The striking covalency is the acceptance of Mars and Venus as planetary influences on a maiden’s destiny.³⁹ The theme of untimely death would only have deepened in resonance since the actors staged Silver Age for the Queen and her oldest son in January 1612. By the following year, any London audience would have been all too aware that even heroes cannot easily deny Death his due.⁴⁰

³⁶ Bate (1993), 262. ³⁷ Potter (1997), 44 argues that the dramatists would also have known the Thebaid, ‘if only because of John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, a retelling of Statius, which was first added to Chaucer’s Works in Stowe’s edition of 1561 and reprinted by Speght in his 1598 edition (revised in 1602)’. ³⁸ Potter (1997), 160 explains, ‘Her hatred for Thebes is an important part of its legend [ . . . ] Provoked by Jupiter’s seduction of two Theban women (Alcmena, the mother of Hercules, and Semele, the mother of Bacchus), it led to her destruction of all royal descendants of Cadmus, the city’s founder.’ ³⁹ Cooper (2004), 140 1. ⁴⁰ Potter (1997), 13 links the melancholic mode of Two Noble Kinsmen to the death of Prince Henry.

14 Epic Poetry into Contemporary Choreography Two Twenty-First-Century Dance Adaptations of the Odyssey Tom Sapsford

In short the Verbal Copyer is incumber’d with so many difficulties at once, that he can never disintangle himself from all. He is to consider at the same time the thought of his Authour, and his words, and to find out the Counterpart to each in another Language: and besides this he is to confine himself to the compass of Numbers, and the Slavery of Rhime. ’Tis much like dancing on Ropes with fetter’d Leggs: A man may shun a fall by using Caution; but the gracefulness of Motion is not to be expected: and when we have said the best of it, ’tis but a foolish Task; for no sober man would put himself into a danger for the Applause of scaping without breaking his Neck.¹

In the preface to his translation of the Heroides, Dryden set out his now famous theory of translating classical poetry into a contemporary idiom. In describing his tripartite theory of metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation, Dryden chooses the middle course for his own rendition of Ovid’s Latin into seventeenth-century English.² Yet in pointing out the dangers of the work of translation, he gives his reader the simile of a fettered tightrope dancer. This image gives a sense of the scope of latitude available to the translator and dance artist alike: step too far and peril will ensue, remain too closely

¹ Dryden (1956), 115 16. ² ‘Metaphrase, or turning an Authour word by word, and Line by Line, from one Language into another . . . Paraphrase, or Translation with Latitude . . . Imitation, where the Translator . . . assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sence, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion’ (Dryden (1956), 114). For discussion of Dryden’s translation theories from this preface in 1680 onwards, see Hopkins (2010), 113 29.

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‘on beam’ and the performance will be dull. With such issues in mind, this chapter explores not how ancient Greek epic poetry might be rendered into contemporary English but rather how it might be adapted into a contemporary dance idiom through a discussion of two recent adaptations of Homer’s Odyssey: Nest, New Movement Collective’s 2013 site-specific promenade performance and ‘Choreographing the Katabasis’, a project led by choreographer Cathy Marston at the APGRD in Oxford, with support from Dance Scholarship Oxford (DANSOX) and St Hilda’s College in 2015. When turning their attention to classical antiquity, contemporary dance makers have most often engaged with Greek tragic material. Martha Graham’s reimaginings of tragic heroines such as Jocasta and Medea and Pina Bausch’s reworking of Iphigenia in Tauris have been lauded and discussed by scholars and critics alike.³ Likewise the Virgilian ‘tragedy’ of Dido and Aeneas has found notable dance incarnations through the works of Mark Morris (1989) and Sasha Waltz (2005).⁴ Homer, however, has not been a frequent inspiration for contemporary choreographers. Yet recently a cluster of works has emerged which do engage with the text of the Odyssey. Both Ivan Putrov’s Ithaca (2012) for his own company, Men in Motion, and Patrick Delcroix’s evening-length work, Die Odyssee (2015), for Aalto Ballet in Essen have adapted the poem into a contemporary balletic form, and in 2016 choreographer Mark Bruce created a dance-theatre version of the epic poem in collaboration with Wilton’s Music Hall. Unlike these recent Odyssey dance adaptations, neither Nest nor ‘Choreographing the Katabasis’ was a traditional theatrical presentation per se, yet both projects engaged with the poem in ways that have historically been of interest to classical scholars. Nest was a multi-authored work that allowed its audience agency in their viewing experience; its creation process and method of performance reflected the sense of multiplicity which scholars have examined both in terms of the Odyssey’s mode of creation and its process of narration. ‘Choreographing the Katabasis’ was a week-long residency at the University of Oxford, which allowed Marston to engage with several scholars and which resulted in a ninety-minute lecture demonstration at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies. During this week Marston explored Homer at a micro-level by looking at short sections of the Greek text from Odyssey Book 11. Her adaptation explored the interplay of rhythm and representation in verbal and nonverbal languages, as well as engaging with the formulaic aspects of the hexameter text.

³ For Graham, see Zajko; for Bausch, see Zanobi and Meisner: all in Macintosh (2010). ⁴ For Morris, see Jordan (2011) and Martin (1999). For Waltz, see Roy (2007).

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NEW MOV EMENT COLLECTIVE, N E S T New Movement Collective (NMC) are a group of choreographers who began working together in 2009. Their members are dance artists with a long history of collaborative creation in terms not only of dance production but also of interdisciplinary work. NMC’s earliest projects were with the Architectural Association Interprofessional Studio which, as NMC member Malgorzata Dzierzon states, led the group both to explore ways of making their creation process more egalitarian and to create dance works for architecturally interesting performance spaces.⁵ Indeed, it was the challenge of creating work for an unusual building that provided the starting point for NMC’s 2013 adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, in this case the semi-derelict Norman-style Welsh Chapel on Shaftesbury Avenue, London, designed and built by James Cubitt in 1888. NMC were invited to create the work by the arts organization Stone Nest to celebrate a new period of activity in the building’s history which had formerly been a Presbyterian church, a nightclub, an Australian-themed pub ‘the Walkabout’, and most recently a squat. As NMC member Alexander Whitley describes it, the group’s initial reaction to the Welsh Chapel was to create something which reflected the ‘epic’ proportions (namely, size and atmosphere) of the building, which consists of a domed central space, a large basement, and an attached manse. One early concept was to make a dance adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, and although this was eventually rejected, a trace of this initial idea remained in the final work in that the large basement space eventually became a Hades into which the audience descended to view the deathly hordes from Odyssey Book 11. NMC had a fondness and familiarity with Bantam Books’ Choose Your Own Adventure series. These books, popular in the 1980s and originally created by Edward Packard, were written in the second person and provided their young readers with a series of choices as to how their narrative could progress.⁶ This starting point steered NMC in terms of both form and content. The series led them towards the figure of the epic hero and the idea of the quest; moreover, its process of reader interaction served as a direct model for NMC’s strategy for audience participation in their own piece. Ultimately, the ‘ur-quest’ from Troy to Ithaca, as related in the Odyssey, served as the source for the Stone Nest commission; contemporary popular literature, however, still held a place within the creative process, for the 2012 graphic novel

⁵ Malgorzata Dzierzon in discussion at Performing Epic into the Twenty First Century, 19 September 2014. NMC first collaborated with the Architectural Association Interprofessional Studio on Seed to Scene (S2S) in 2010 and are currently consultants on AAIS’s MA/MFA in Spatial Performance Design. ⁶ Conversation with Alexander Whitley, 13 September 2014, London.

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adaptation of the Odyssey by Seymour Chwast became a useful source of inspiration for NMC during their creation of Nest.⁷ The performance of Nest opened with a series of fighting pairs reminiscent of the final skirmishes at Troy and ended with the reunification of Odysseus with his wife Penelope. During the course of the performance audience members were also invited to trace their own path through a series of fantastical dance episodes arranged throughout the semi-derelict space. The creative team reimagined the epic poem by filling the Welsh Chapel with familiar scenes staged in unfamiliar and haunting ways: Penelope suspended in a tangled web of her own weaving; travellers caught transfixed in the blinding oculus of a giant circular mirror. The gloomy basement was peopled with the ghosts of Hades and Odysseus’ crew, spellbound as swine, who whiled away their captivity by playing knucklebones in abandoned corridors. Although Nest opened and closed with two scenes which were easily recognizable from the poem (the sack of Troy mentioned in the Odyssey’s opening lines and the scene of reconciliation between Odysseus and Penelope in Book 23), in essence the piece was a free adaptation which at times drifted far from its source material. Certain scenes in Nest were completely reimagined with only passing reference to their source text. For example, the Cyclops was alluded to only by the circular shape of a huge rotating mirror, whose monstrous reflective orb both distorted and transfixed the bodies of dancers captured in its frame. Nest’s biggest difference from its source was the complete removal of Odysseus’ son Telemachus and his search for help in vanquishing the suitors destroying the household. NMC’s removal of Telemachus moved their adaptation away from the poem’s prominent concern with the transfer of household power from father to son, and rather made the return of husband to wife the performance’s driving force: the former roving unfamiliar and dangerous spaces by ship, the latter rooted in place at home defending her honour and household from local threats. Nest was notable in that, as a promenade performance, it afforded the audience an opportunity to take their own journey through its space and duration. The audience’s movement through the piece was as choreographed as the scenes they viewed. On arrival audience members were handed maps and divided into two groups. Then after viewing the opening battle scene from balconies above the main domed space, one group was led to view the Cyclops episode while the other went downstairs to experience Hades. After the two groups had switched locations and scenes, they returned to the central space to watch a shipwreck scene. The audience then had a period during which they were free to roam the building’s smaller spaces where the more intimate scenes of Penelope weaving, the transformed sailor-swine, and Elpenor were staged.

⁷ Conversation with Clemmie Sveaas, 15 September 2014, London.

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Alongside these vignettes a psychedelic chill-out room provided a land of the Lotus-eaters which showed projections of events occurring throughout the building, giving the audience a synoptic view of the work. Lastly the performers and audience reconvened in the lower level of the central space for the final scene of reunification between Odysseus and Penelope. The organization of the audience’s progression through the space was planned to allow them a sense of agency while also providing them with a structured narrative experience. This overall experience echoed in the most general way the structure of the epic: strife and separation leading to peace and reunification. NMC are a group of dance artists who equally share the labour of both the conception and realization of their works; even in dance terms NMC’s level of collaboration is unusual. Most frequently in the contemporary dance world dancers are encouraged to generate movement material which is then shaped, structured, and ultimately presented under the name of a single choreographer. Good examples of this form of creation are works of Siobhan Davies, Wayne McGregor, and Matthew Bourne, with whom indeed some of NMC’s artists have worked closely in the past. With the removal of a titular creator, however, NMC’s model of co-authorship is highly unusual—collaboration in the dance world is rarely so egalitarian. That Nest was a product of such multiple authorship seems utterly apt for an adaptation of Homer whose name, for classicists, brings to mind possibilities of multiple modes of creation. There have been several proposals for the authorship of the Homeric epics: different poets for the different poems, an oral or improvisatory mode of creation from which our received text is but a snapshot, or a process of crystallization from oral to written forms resulting in the text as transmitted to us today.⁸ Nest’s multiple authorship was reflected too in the way it presented its source material. No one dancer was assigned the role of any particular character from the Odyssey but rather each took on various guises at different moments in the performance. For instance, two Elpenors wandered through the space: one tumbling through a tightly cramped passage and the other alone in an open dark room awaiting, one imagines, proper burial rites and peace at last in Hades. In Nest’s closing section each performer took on the persona of either an Odysseus or a Penelope as the full cast danced different moments of the same reconciliatory duet. By experiencing the performance from multiple viewpoints and seeing it performed by multiple performers simultaneously, we are reminded of the epic’s own quality of multiplicity famously announced in the poem’s opening line with Odysseus’ epithet andra polutropon, ‘the man of many ways’.

⁸ There is a vast amount of literature on the ‘Homeric question’, i.e. the authorship and creation of the Iliad and Odyssey. For an overview of the issue and further bibliography, see Fowler (2004b).

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One of the elements of the original poem that this dance adaptation so successfully brought to the fore was the difference afforded to each gender in terms of both agency and spatial freedom. Thus perhaps one of the most arresting images from Nest was of Penelope rooted in place, her limbs and dress attached to a series of elastic strips (Fig. 14.1). These flexible cords alluded both to Penelope’s overall situation in the poem (as captive to the suitors in her own household) and to her specific narrative (her secret unravelling of her weaving to delay impending marriage). Beyond these moments of engagement with the source text, the elastic cords also enabled a particular form of kinetic language whereby the performer Clemmie Sveaas was able to move with a limited range of motions whose affect oscillated between powerlessness and a sense of being protected. Thus being anchored in space allowed Sveaas to lean far beyond her centre of gravity: this facilitated a physical vocabulary of reach and longing which, when the inevitable pull of the elastic cords would recall Sveaas’s body weight back to its fixed starting point, emphasized her character’s lack of agency. Yet at the same time the enclosing structure of threads surrounding Sveaas provided her with a screen through which she could assertively view her close-up audience and which too provided a protective barrier between them and her. In contrast, male dancers in Nest roamed the performance space. Such male agency and spatial freedom can be seen in the two solos for Elpenor: one through a narrow corridor (this cramped space perhaps emphasizing the struggle involved in the hero’s

Fig. 14.1 Clemmie Sveaas in Nest. Photograph by Barnaby Churchill Steel. © Barnaby Churchill Steel.

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journey); the other through the cavernous basement space (emphasizing the vastness of crossing the epic landscape). Yet during this homecoming whenever the male traveller encounters female characters he is burdened, delayed, or diverted in his progress. For instance, in a scene loosely based on the Sirens episode, two women in turn lie as dead weights across the male dancer’s back. He pushes forward, digging a trench in a floor covering of black sand with the crown of his head only to be pulled backwards, then forced to repeat the movement anew with the Siren’s sister. This aspect of male as wanderer and female as rooted to her geographic space is evident too in the source text. For instance, in the Odyssey females are either associated with (and tethered to) specific locations as are Penelope on Ithaca and Nausicaa on Scheria; or they provide Odysseus with considerable delay as do Circe and Calypso, or, worse, with the threat of destruction as in the case of Scylla, Charybdis, and the Sirens. Oliver Taplin has remarked that the word histos neatly reveals this spatial male/female dichotomy in the poem. So whereas histos means ‘mast of a ship’ when used in the realm of men (i.e. the masculine active realm of nautical exploration (e.g. Odyssey 5.254)), it also means a loom for weaving when it appears in a domestic and markedly feminine setting (e.g. Odyssey 1.357).⁹ Indeed the mast and the loom become synecdochic for both Odysseus’ and Penelope’s spheres of influence of adventuring and domesticity respectively which, by extension, serve as markers for these characters’ identities. By coincidence this synecdochic connection is present also in Nest in that a series of wheeled metal structures (Fig. 14.2) are arranged together at different moments in the performance, either to form the structure of a boat (where histos would be a mast) or to form a house (where histos would be a loom) and provide a scenographic image of the binary between Penelope at home and Odysseus adventuring the seas. This opposition between male/female in terms of agency and range reaches its choreographic climax in the duet that ends Nest, and which features as a movement motif, the male and female dancers in circling motion. Notably, in this motif the female figure always remains as a fixed anchor point around which the male revolves or, to use the technical dance term, promenades. In the first of these promenades Malgorzata Dzierzon tilts her body weight out on to her partner Renaud Wiser as he circuits around her. A short time later, with one foot rooted to the centre of the space like John Donne’s compass point in ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, Dzierzon leans her other foot forwards, far beyond her centre of balance, out on to Wiser’s shoulder. This off-balance pose creates a more precarious circuit whose successful completion clearly demands determination and concentration from both performers in order to maintain choreographic shape and balance. As with Odysseus’ and ⁹ Taplin in conversation during the Performing Epic into the Twenty First Century confer ence, Oxford, 19 September 2014.

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Fig. 14.2 Nest performance image. Photograph by Sandra Ciampone. © Sandra Ciampone.

Penelope’s terse and ambiguous reunification in the poem, this move signals the careful negotiation of pressure, power, and weight distribution demanded by both parties for its successful resolution. Lastly the pair stand face to face and circle each other by slowly shifting their weight from side to side. Again Dzierzon remains in the centre of the performance space while Wiser almost imperceptibly travels around her. This circling motif ties up the various strands of the piece: a circle spatially signals departure and return, and whereas in epic poetry ring composition provides a temporal cue that a specific section of the poem has reached its end, in Nest such ring composition announces that the performance has come to its completion.¹⁰

C A T H Y M A R S T O N , ‘CHOREOGRAPHING THE K A T A B A S I S’ Trained at the Royal Ballet School, Cathy Marston first began to work as a dancer in Switzerland at the Zurich Ballet and later with both the Lucerne ¹⁰ De Jong (2001), xvii: ‘ring composition: when the end of a passage repeats its beginning . . . the device is used mainly to enclose a chunk of explicit characterization, an analepsis, or a description’.

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and Bern ballets. The latter has been both a creative and geographical home for Marston, who went on to direct Bern Ballet from 2007 to 2013 and choreographed thirteen new works for the company during her tenure. As a choreographer Marston has a history of reworking literary texts into dance adaptations. She has previously made works based on Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest), Ibsen (Ghosts, A Doll’s House), and Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) to name a few. She has also made dance that engages with classical mythology, and with Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular, on several occasions: Orpheus and Persephone (2005), Echo and Narcissus (2007), Reflection choreographed to Louis Andriessen’s ‘Overture to Orpheus’ (2013), and Orpheus for Ballett im Revier (2013). With her experience in adapting canonical literary works into contemporary dance, Marston seemed an appropriate artist to invite to the APGRD, with the challenge of choreographing the Odyssey from a perspective in counterpoint to NMC’s. Whereas Nest adapted the entire epic poem, Marston was invited to look at a specific section of the work—Odysseus’ encounters with the dead in Book 11. And while NMC were working with the poem in translation, Marston was asked to engage with the Homeric text itself. Marston was provided with sections of the Greek both spoken and sung in metre by Armand D’Angour.¹¹ She was also given a week’s studio space at Oxford, two dancers (Sonya Cullingford and Aaron Vickers), and access to a group of scholars from both the Classics Faculty and beyond with whom to discuss the work and from whom she could draw expertise. In preparation for her time at Oxford, Marston decided that the whole of Book 11 would be too large a task to adapt within the time frame of a week, and therefore chose to concentrate solely on the interactions between Odysseus and his mother Anticlea. Thus with a pared-down text her residency in Oxford began with a meeting of scholars who each gave their own perspective on the poem. These presentations explored Graeco-Roman culture’s fascination with a hero’s journey to the underworld (katabasis—lit. a descent) and the legacy of this literary topos beyond antiquity. In response to the muchdebated proposition by A. P. David that epic poetry was in its earliest incarnation a form of danced performance, Felix Budelmann discussed Bacchylides 5.¹² This poem, written for Hieron’s Olympic victory in 476 BCE, ¹¹ D’Angour provided two recordings of the Homeric text: the first with the hexameter spoken in rhythm; the second also in rhythm but sung following the melodic pitch accents of the words across a series of four notes (a b c′ e′); cf. West (1992), 208 9, 328. ¹² David (2006), 8 9: ‘The most obvious evidence that Homeric poetry originated in dance is in its metre, and in particular, the specific way in which the ancients described the elements of metre. The components of a hexameter line, or a lyric period, are, literally, “feet”, or steps whose rhythm can be properly actualized by the movement of human legs.’ David’s suggestion that the modern day Greek round dance, the syrtos, is somehow an ancestor of epic dactylic,

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describes Heracles’ journey into the underworld to retrieve Cerberus (5.56–175), and being a victory ode would have necessarily involved some form of choral dancing in its original performance context.¹³ Thus, as Budelmann pointed out, it serves as our earliest extant example of a katabasis being danced in some manner. Helen Slaney traced the connection between epic poetry and dance onwards into Roman culture by discussing pantomime’s fascination with adapting epic texts. Margaret Kean, Georgina Paul, Susan Jones, and Justine McConnell gave presentations on katabatic texts in their periods of early modern, modern, and postcolonial culture respectively. In the studio Marston was intrigued by the Odyssey’s emotional content but became quickly frustrated by its relentless form. For her, there seemed to be a disconnect between the rich and tender imagery she read in Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the poem and the sound of the Greek text in metre and modulating pitch as recorded by D’Angour. To an ear unfamiliar with the sound of ancient Greek, it was difficult for Marston to reconcile the imagery she had read with the sound texture she was hearing. And admittedly drawn more often to using emotive imagery and dramatic situations than rhythm and form as impulses for movement creation, Marston did, however, attempt to use the repetitive hexameter rhythm underpinning the Homeric text as a way of generating movement. To this end, following A. P. David’s suggestion that the syrtos (a dance form still extant in modern-day Greece) is closely related to, if not a direct survival of, a form of round dance originally performed at epic poetry recitals, Marston had Vickers and Cullingford learn the foot pattern of this dance in an attempt to get the hexameter rhythm physically absorbed into their bodies. Over the first few days of creation time Marston’s attempt to reconcile with the poem’s unwavering rhythmic form, the hexameter, was put aside and instead she began to make movement material based on the poem’s content. Of particular fascination to Marston were the ideas of corporeality and consciousness described of the dead in Hades. What puzzled her most was that the shades seemed to have some form of consciousness and somatic ability in their dead state; yet this was coupled with an inability to recognize others until they had drunk Odysseus’ sacrificial libation of blood, honeyed milk, and wine. For instance, the roving hordes of the dead are depicted as having sensate spirits when at 11.39 young maidens are described as having ‘neopenthea thumon’ (‘a spirit with sorrow still fresh’). Yet Odysseus’ mother, Anticlea, lingers around the libation pit for much of the opening narrative seemingly senseless from line 84 onwards until at line 153 the text reads 102 11 (based on Georgiades (1956), 129 31) was generally rejected by Hagel (2009), 296, and received rather damning acquiescence from West (2008), 182 who described David’s hypothesis, while ‘interesting’, as ‘neither new nor verifiable’. ¹³ Carey (2009), 28.

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‘she approached and drank the dark-clouded blood; and immediately she recognized me’. Furthermore, Marston had to negotiate the fact that the dead and the living are afforded no physical contact with each other in Homeric epic.¹⁴ Thus when Odysseus attempts to embrace his dead mother’s ghost her form flies from his hands ‘like shadow or a dream’ (Odyssey 11.207). Therefore in creating her duet Marston needed to address how she would approach both somatic and cognitive presence in her physicalized account of the Odysseus/Anticlea episode. To convey the idea that a shade has some form of limited consciousness and one, moreover, which looks back to an individual’s past life, Marston developed a movement motif for Cullingford as Anticlea in which she gathered one leg in her hands and wrapped it close to her chest. This gesture echoed the action of a mother suckling a baby and the maternal image was further reinforced by a circling of the knee with one hand, like a mother tenderly wiping her child’s head. When it came to developing a partnering vocabulary for the two dancers that allowed them to interact but which also reflected the text’s dictum prohibiting physical contact between the living and the dead, Marston kept the dancers from having any hand-to-hand contact for the majority of the choreography. Rather the dancers stood, leant, and wrapped around each other using unusual contact points. For instance, the duet’s opening position had Cullingford providing a plinth for Vickers to stand atop as he performed a solo of libation into the space below him. Partway through the duet Cullingford leans parallel to the floor, chest to ceiling, balancing wedged between the backs of Vickers’s thighs and calves (Fig. 14.3). Although on paper this may sound rather acrobatic, on the bodies of the dancers this vocabulary became smooth and weightless with practice. Moreover, these off-balance lifts and tilts allowed the dancers to establish a movement language, which reflected the sense of being in a supernatural realm where the laws of gravity were not quite at play as in the waking world. Marston did, however, include one prominent moment of hand-to-hand contact between the dancers at the very end of her duet. Rather than a fleeting and frustrated moment of human form passing through phantom body as described in the Homeric text, the two dancers held hands in a long offbalance tilting promenade. Their hands met then slowly slipped away—the dancers’ physical and emotional contact at this moment became both precious and temporally finite. Midway through the residency, Martin West came to rehearsal. Since he had such a wealth of expertise on epic poetry and such particular opinions on

¹⁴ This moment of frustrated embrace between living and dead, which occurs also between Achilles and Patroclus at Iliad 23.99 101, becomes a topos of epic poetry: cf. Virgil Aeneid 2.792 4, 6.700 2; Dante, Purgatorio 2.80 1. A balletic parallel is found in Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot’s Giselle (1841) where in Act 2, when Albrecht first encounters the ghost of his dead lover Giselle in a moonlit woodland glade, he is initially unable to grasp her ethereal form.

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Fig. 14.3 Sonya Cullingford and Aaron Vickers in ‘Choreographing the Katabasis’. © Cathy Marston.

the creation and original performance contexts of the Homeric poems, his visit was a formidable prospect.¹⁵ West seemed initially baffled by what gain there might be in choreographing Homer. Did the text really need any further amplification? Conversely, Marston was struggling with trying to establish her own embodiment of the material and felt constrained by the rigidity of the Homeric form. Their dialogue was initially terse but opened up some useful ground on the parameters of translation and adaptation. Most notably there was agreement that the combined effect of movement and sound was markedly different for West, who could understand the accompanying Greek text, than for Marston, who couldn’t. Choreographer and scholar were having different experiences based on their individual expertise. As an experiment in equalizing their perception Marston removed the words from the equation ¹⁵ West (1999), 364 considered the epics to be by two separate poets, and argued that Homer was a name derived from the performers of the epics, the Homeridai, and not the other way around (376). He believed epic poetry was sung in tetratonic song (as in D’Angour’s recordings for Marston) with its rise and fall governed by the melodic accent of the words and was either accompanied by the four sting phorminx (West (1981), 115 16) or later accompanied by a staff during the era of the rhapsodes (124).

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completely and instead had Sonya Cullingford, a trained and very competent singer, chant the pattern of the pitched hexameter to a repeated syllable. The effect was quite extraordinary. With words removed, the contour of the pitched hexameter had the effect of a heartbeat or breathing cycle. As Cullingford executed the movement material while repeating the chanting pattern, its sound modulated in fascinating ways: growing faint as she faced away from the audience, strong when facing it. Its sound quality altered according to her relation in space, so she sounded different when upright to when prone; it changed, too, depending on the level of freedom or restriction that the movement material afforded her ribcage and diaphragm. Several minutes into Marston’s choreography Cullingford’s voice grew raspy and weak from physical exertion and gave out completely. Cullingford’s breathlessness offered a remarkably Homeric image of loss as she beat out the rhythm on her chest with her fist until regaining her breath to continue chanting.¹⁶ This moment was strikingly reminiscent of archaic Greek depictions of female performances of lamentation and remained in the final presented duet. Subsequent to the initially uncomfortable conversation between West and Marston, it was illuminating to see how both seemed genuinely engaged by the experiment. Adding the element of these non-verbal vocalizations had given an affective layer to the work which seemingly shifted the project away from a translation of word into movement and rather towards an adaptation of one performative text into a new, but related, artistic entity. The scholar appeared happily to acquiesce to a level of freedom from (or perhaps more accurately within) the original text; the choreographer by stepping away from the Greek had inadvertently absorbed the Homeric form—namely its ever-present hexameter rhythm—and made it the organic centre of her re-envisioning of this epic episode. On 5 June 2015 as the culmination of her week’s residency, Marston gave a ninety-minute lecture demonstration in the Ioannou Classics Centre, during which she discussed some previous examples of her dances adapted from famous works of literature. She then detailed the creative process during her time at Oxford and afterwards presented the material she had choreographed to the Odyssey. The seven-and-a-half-minute duet was performed with Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the text read aloud by actor and Samuel Beckett scholar Rosemary Pountney alongside Cullingford’s vocalized syllabic hexameter. Pountney’s evocative narration was carefully rehearsed to sit alongside Cullingford’s so that the verbal and rhythmic texts lay temporally parallel to one another. Lattimore’s translation, which is in a free six-beat line unlike Cullingford’s line (with its fixed repeated form), allows a variety of rhythms and is ‘to be read with its natural stress, not forced into any system’.¹⁷

¹⁶ Cf. Odyssey 8.526.

¹⁷ Lattimore (1951), 55.

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Therefore Pountney’s and Cullingford’s voices ran contrapuntally against one another. The effect of this soundscape was to disembody the verbal text from the dancers’ kinetic and sonic text, which in turn reinforced the other-worldly quality of Marston’s imagining of the underworld. Having Pountney, then in her seventies, sit onstage as narrator, also drew our attention to the poem’s original context: not as canonical text, but rather as oral performance. The appearance of Pountney in one sense looked back towards tradition: whether to Homer as master bard and consummate performer of the poems, or to one of the many narrators within the poem—Phemius, Demodocus, or Odysseus himself; Pountney’s gender, however, reclaimed the narration process and simultaneously signalled the role of the many female voices within the poem—Anticlea, Circe, Penelope, Helen et al.—and metatheatrically announced this present performance as being by a female artist, Marston, and its presence as a Homeric response and not simply a Homeric translation.¹⁸ * * * * * This chapter opened with a quote by Dryden that used an image of tightrope dancing to convey artistic limitation. In notable contrast to Dryden, the Odyssey provides us with a similarly acrobatic image to convey the freedom from reality that dance, like storytelling, can afford its audience: Then Alkinoös asked Halios and Laodamas to dance all by themselves, since there was none to challenge them. These two, after they had taken up in their hands the ball, a beautiful thing, red, which Polybos the skillful craftsman had made them, one of them, bending far back, would throw it up to the shadowy clouds, and the other, going high off the ground, would easily catch it again, before his feet came back to the ground. (Odyssey 8.370 6, trans. Lattimore (1965))

With their acrobatic imagery the two passages propose quite opposite consequences for dance as a pursuit: falling in Dryden’s preface and flying in the Homeric poem. Despite writing shortly after the reversal of Puritanical prohibitions against public perfomances, Dryden still appears to be sceptical about the power and place of dance within his contemporary Restoration society. His image of the fettered dancer has a negative connotation absent from the Homeric poems. Dance for Dryden registers as an idle diversion (‘when we have said the best of it, ’tis but a foolish Task’), which if successfully executed can elicit the audience’s applause at most. In the Homeric world, however, such skill imparts wonder and, through the dancers’ apparent defiance ¹⁸ This may in part be due to the several conversations Marston had throughout the residency week with Georgina Paul, whose contribution to this volume (Ch. 10) on her collaboration/ translation with Barbara Köhler on Niemands Frau discusses the issue of female voice in the Odyssey in more detail.

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of gravity, invites its audience to re-evaluate the capabilities of human agency in the face of the laws of nature. In their adaptations of the Odyssey both NMC and Cathy Marston provide insight into the challenges of choreographing Homer. And to conclude this discussion, Dryden’s three versions of translation provide a useful hermeneutic to which to return. Thus metaphrase, word-for-word equivalence, which sails as close as possible to its source, is criticized by Dryden for its slavishness.¹⁹ This process is impossible for choreographers by the very nature of translation across different media: a word can never have an exact kinetic signifier. Dryden’s admittedly preferred process paraphrase, which sails a midcourse of proximity to its source while at the same time allowing the source’s spirit to take precedence over its exact content, reflects Marston’s approach to the poem. Her interaction with both the text and the scholars working on it guided her creative choices.²⁰ But it was by following her own artistic impulses that she discovered the affecting space between Greek text, sung rhythm, and English translation, which her duet eventually inhabited. Imitation, ‘taking only some general hints from the Original’ as Dryden puts it, indeed best sums up NMC’s approach to the Odyssey: the poem’s structure was loosely followed, images from within it were selected and staged in manifold ways.²¹ Yet somehow, although being located far from its textual source, the site-specific promenade dance piece reflected many elements of the poem’s construction and concerns in rich and often unexpected ways.²²

¹⁹ Dryden (1956), 115 16. ²⁰ Dryden (1956), 118 19. ²¹ Dryden (1956), 114 15. ²² I would like to thank both New Movement Collective and Cathy Marston for their comments on this chapter and for supporting my exploration of their work. I would also like to thank the organizations and scholars who made the ‘Choreographing the Katabasis’ project possible: APGRD, DANSOX, St Hilda’s, Felix Budelmann, Armand D’Angour, Susan Jones, Margaret Kean, Claire Kenward, Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Georgina Paul, Rosemary Pountney, Helen Slaney, and Martin West. It is with deep sorrow that I have to mention the deaths of both Rosemary Pountney and Martin West not long after the completion of the project.

15 Voicing Virgil Dante Performs the Latin Epic Robin Kirkpatrick

Francis Fergusson, in his classic The Idea of a Theater (1949), maintains throughout that the purest example of drama in the Western tradition is to be found in Dante’s Commedia, most particularly in its central cantica, the Purgatorio. Classicists might well be dubious about this. And I do not particularly want to invite any arm-wrestling between Aeschylus and Alighieri. Yet there is a good deal to be said, I suggest, in favour of Fergusson’s position. Thematically, the Purgatorio is as concerned as the Oresteia is with hubris, guilt, and expiation. Form, however, is more important than theme—at least for my present argument. And if, as I take it, the fundamental characteristic of dramatic form is action, manifested as rhythm, then the Purgatorio undoubtedly deserves to be brought into consideration. This would be true even in thematic terms. Dante’s concern here is with the recovery of that unity of action in relation to God’s own creative act, which is lost or dissipated through sin. Correspondingly—but in terms of form—the rhythm of Dante’s narrative is impelled and punctuated by effects of crisis and resolution and also, as we shall see, by recognition scenes comparable to any that are found in drama, from Oedipus to Lear to Da Ponte and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It is, moreover, a particular characteristic of Dante’s poetry that it should seek to involve readers in an active collaboration with the author, as if they constituted an unseen chorus. The poem is scanned by explicit addresses to the reader.¹ But as we shall see, there are also aspects of Dante’s poetic voice— illuminated by his general theory of language—that ignite a directly physical— or, better, a psychosomatic—response. No contribution to performance studies would nowadays be complete without some mention of mirror neurons. But

¹ Also relevant here are Ahern (1997), Armour (2007), and esp. Webb (2016).

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Dante’s lines have for centuries been echoing, singing, and sometimes rasping around the amphitheatre of the neurological imagination.

VOICING D ANTE THROUGH VIRGIL The best way to substantiate the claims that I have been making is to concentrate on the details of the text and—best of all—insist that the text is meant for reading aloud, perhaps chorally. So the most important parts of this essay are the quotations that follow, each of them representing and inviting a performance. Thus the first example is one to which I draw attention because the passage is the subject of an extremely relevant essay by Erich Auerbach, ‘Camilla and the Re-birth of the Sublime’ in his Literary Language and Its Public (1965). This passage describes how Dante’s progress through Hell is impeded by the appearance of Medusa the Gorgon and the Furies. Waiting for an angelic messenger to assist their advance, Virgil protects Dante’s endangered eyes: ‘Volgiti in dietro e tien lo viso chiuso; ch’è se il Gorgòn si mostra e tu ’l vedessi, nulla sarebbe del tornar mai suso’. Cosí disse ’l maestro; ed elli stessi mi volse, e non si tenne alle mie mani, che con le sue ancor non mi chiudessi. O voi ch ’avete li ’ntelletti sani, mirate la dottrina che s’asconde sotto ’l velame de li versi strani. E già venía su per le torbid’onde un fracasso d’un suon, pien di spavento, per che tremavano amendue le sponde, non altrimenti fatto che d’un vento impetuoso per li avversi ardori, che fier la selva e sanz’alcun rattento li rami schianta, abbatte e porta fori; dinanzi polveroso va superbo, e fa fuggir le fiere e li pastori. (‘Turn round! Your back to them! Your eyes tight shut! For if the Gorgon shows and you catch sight, there’ll be no way of ever getting out.’ He spoke and then, himself, he made me turn and, not relying on my hands alone to shield my eyes, closed his own on mine. ‘All you whose minds are sound and sane, look at the doctrine which is hidden beyond the curtain of this alien verse.’

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Already across the turbid swell there came a shattering resonance that, charged with panic, evoked great tremors down each riverbank. In this way, too, a driving wind impelled by clashing currents through the burning air strikes at a grove and, meeting no resistance, splinters the branches flat and bears them off. So proudly on it goes, in clouds of dust, shepherds and beasts all fleeing in its path.²) (Inferno 9.55 72)

Dante, so Auerbach argues, in an early phase of the Inferno rediscovers a mode of epic sublimity, which justifies comparison with Homer’s description of Poseidon in the Odyssey Book V. Any precise allusion must have been intuitive, since Dante did not know Homer’s text directly. But one notes the address to the reader at lines 61–3, which underlines, among other things, Dante’s literary ambition and also his aim to involve the reader directly in a collaborative performance. As to Virgil—author of the Camilla episode in Aeneid Book 11—Dante not only knew the Latin text in precise linguistic detail but also, in the narrative of his otherworldly explorations, chooses Virgil to be his guide for almost two-thirds of the journey described in the Commedia. It is on Dante’s highly complex relationship with Virgil that I mean here to concentrate, taking three principal examples. An initial point—which I shall have no opportunity to develop here—is that Dante’s relationship with Virgil cannot be seen in terms either of medieval allegorization or of Renaissance conceptions of imitatio. One needs, rather, to define a specific form of engagement which is simultaneously celebratory and critical, impelled by an urgency which is reperformative to the extent, even, of being at times polemical in its recasting of Virgilian motifs and linguistic characteristics. Complexities of this order are evident from the opening canto of the Inferno where, in the dark wood, the Christian author enlists a classical poet as his mentor on the road to salvation. How is it possible that an ancient poet—who on Dante’s own account dwells eternally in Limbo—should assist a Florentine Christian to escape from the wilderness of his present confusions? It cannot be that Dante believed—as some of his contemporaries did—that Virgil was a wizard or oracle, as witnessed in the sortes virglianae.³ After all, in Canto 20 Dante draws a subtly extended distinction between Virgil and such pagan soothsayers—now damned to the lower reaches of Hell—as Tiresias, Lucan’s Arruns, or the Eurypylus of the Aeneid itself. But already in Inferno 1.70–85, ² All translations in this chapter are the author’s own unless otherwise stated. ³ See the prevailing evidence offered by Comparetti (1997), with the new introduction by Jan M. Ziolkowski.

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Dante has identified two of the most significant considerations that underlie his representation of the Latin poet. [‘]Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto figliuol d’Anchise che venne da Troia, poi che ’l superbo Iliòn fu combusto. Ma tu perché ritorni a tanta noia? perché non sali il dilettoso monte ch’è principio e cagion di tutta gioia?’ ‘Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte che spandi di parlar sí largo fiume?’ rispuos’io lui con vergognosa fronte. ‘O delli altri poeti onore e lume, vagliami ’l lungo studio e ’l grande amore che m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume. Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore; tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore. ([‘]I was a poet then. I sang in praise of all the virtues of Anchises’ son. From Troy he came proud Ilion razed in flame. But you turn back. Why seek such grief and harm? Why climb no higher up that lovely hill? The cause and origin of joy shines there.’ ‘So, could it be,’ I answered (my brow in shy respect bent low), ‘you are that Virgil, whose words flow wide, a river running full? You are my teacher. You my lord and law. From you alone I took the fine tuned style that has already brought me so much honour.’) (Inferno 1.73 87)

The first point of significance here is political and ethical. Virgil, without offering his name, locates himself as an imperial Roman, flourishing in the imperial epoch. This is entirely consistent with Dante’s unwavering—if idiosyncratic—political position as developed in his Convivio and De Monarchia. Historically, Dante suffered a sort of personal Fall of Troy when in 1301 he was unjustly exiled from his native Florence, never to return. But from that point on he looks increasingly to the imperial ideal as his only remedy. In his prose treatises, he argues that imperial Rome is an institution established by God himself to be the agent of that Universal Justice that he—and the world at large—so grievously long for. He is even prepared to argue (beginning in Convivio 4 and later in De Monarchia 1) that the Emperor, as appointed by God, may bring humanity to perfect happiness in our earthly life.⁴ ⁴ Gilson (1968).

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Such thinking, from a historical point of view, may be rather unrealistic, to say the least, and verges on the heretical. But Virgil—always rational, calm, and considerate—is, in one aspect, an embodiment of what the Empire, in Dante’s view, always ought to be. And Dante himself as represented in the Commedia may, with some caution, be assimilated to Aeneas, searching always for a new—and newly virtuous—homeland. Most significantly, there is poetry, too. Dante utters the name that Virgil withholds and not only rejoices in the flow of Virgilian eloquence, but claims that his own style—and the honour it has brought him—derives from his attention to Virgil’s example (lines 79–87). This claim needs to be viewed with a certain caution. Nonetheless, the possibly megalomaniac seriousness of the assertion anticipates the episode in Inferno 4 where Dante represents himself as the sixth member of that great school of poets that includes Virgil, Homer, Lucan, Ovid, and—for ample measure—Horace. Auerbach’s reading is here explicitly vindicated. It is, in practice, a consequence of such emulous motivations that, at least in the first half of the Inferno, Dante alludes repeatedly to Aeneid 6. There is little medieval devilry, fire, or pitchforks in this part of Hell. But there is many a Sisyphean punishment, along with imposing guardians of the underworld such as Charon, Pluto, and Minos. Or rather, considering the following lines, not so imposing, after all: Stavvi Minòs orribilmente, e ringhia: essamina le colpe nell’entrata; giudica e manda secondo ch’avvinghia. (Minos stands there horribly there and barking. He on the threshold, checks degrees of guilt, and judges and dispatches with his twirling tail.) (Inferno 5.4 6)

The grim solemnity of Virgil’s own Minos at Aeneid 6.432–3,⁵ as now rewritten in Inferno 5, has been furnished with a donkey-like tail, which he twirls to indicate the number of the circle to which each sinner has been allotted. More than mere emulation, Dante here displays a kind of adolescent (or protoBloomian) truculence towards his literary father. This is one aspect of the critique that Dante practises on the Virgilian text. But another, more radical departure has been registered as early as Inferno 2, where Virgil speaks of the mandate he received from Beatrice, to assist in Dante’s salvation: Io era tra color che son sospesi, e donna mi chiamò beata e bella, tal che di comandare io la richiesi.

⁵ ‘Quesitor Minos urnam movet; ille silentium / conciliumque vocat, vitasque et criminal discit.’

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Robin Kirkpatrick Lucevan li occhi suoi piú che la stella; e cominciommi a dir soave e piana, con angelica voce, in sua favella: (With those I was whose lives are held in poise. And then I heard a Lady call so blessed, so beautiful I begged her tell me all she wished. Her eyes were shining brighter than the stars. Then gently, softly, calmly, she began, speaking, as angels might, in her own tongue:) (Inferno 2.52 7)

Here, at the very moment when Virgil has so surprisingly been chosen as Dante’s guide, he reveals a certain incompetence and needs to invoke the aid of a power beyond his comprehension, Beatrice herself. And the appeal he makes is cast in the lexical and rhythmic style that Dante had developed in his early love lyrics, long before he could claim to have been influenced by Virgil’s epic sublimity. The critical implications of this will be seen when I reach my final example. Surprise—which is an obvious feature of drama but not, perhaps, of Virgilian narrative—is a constant factor in Dante’s representation of Virgil. Consider here just two instances, both from the Purgatorio. While it is surprising enough that Dante should have chosen Virgil as his guide in Hell, it is doubly so that Virgil should accompany him through Purgatory. After all, Virgil not only wrote about the underworld in Aeneid 6 but is also, in Dante’s fiction, an inhabitant of Hell, albeit of that suburb, free of pain but deeply melancholic, known as Limbo. How is he qualified to progress to the purgatorial realm, which, for Dante, is an earthly mountain in the southern hemisphere, peopled by Christian penitents? Both of the following passages explicitly acknowledge the question. And the answer each provides is not only surprising but also painful to the point of tragedy. The first passage concerns the reliability of Virgil’s Aeneid in regard particularly to the subject of prayer: io cominciai: ‘El par che tu mi nieghi, o luce mia, espresso in alcun testo che decreto del cielo orazion pieghi; e questa gente prega pur di questo: sarebbe dunque loro speme vana, o non m’è ’l detto tuo ben manifesto?’ Ed elli a me: ‘La mia scrittura è piana; e la speranza di costor non falla, se ben si guarda con la mente sana; ché cima di giudicio non s’avvalla perché foco d’amor compia in un punto ciò che de’ sodisfar chi qui si stalla;

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e là dov’io fermai cotesto punto, non s’ammendava, per pregar, difetto, perché ’l priego da Dio era disgiunto.[’] (I thus began: ‘It seems that you, my Light, deny overtly in a certain text that prayers can ever bend what Heaven dictates. And yet these folk are praying just for that. Could it then be the hopes they have are vain? Or is it that your words aren’t clear to me?’ And he to me: ‘The words I write are plain. And yet if you look closely with sane thought, the hope that these all have will never fail. God’s justice at its summit does not sink because, in one sharp point, the fire of love completes what those who dwell here expiate. So, in the passage where I made this point, no flaw could ever be redeemed by prayer. For prayer was then not linked or joined to God.[’]) (Purgatorio 6.28 42)

The reference here is to Aeneid 6.375, where prayer is said to be useless in deflecting the will of the gods: ‘desine fata deum flecti sperare precando’. In Purgatory, however, Dante is constantly pestered by the penitents for prayers on their behalf once he returns to earth. Are they wrong in their expectations? Or was the Aeneid mistaken? In response, Virgil is shown, somewhat tetchily, to assert the veracity of the Aeneid: his pronouncement there referred to an age before the coming of Christ, who restored the relationship in prayer between human beings and their Creator; before that restoration, prayer was indeed futile but since then is once more effective. Yet if this argument preserves the authority of the Aeneid, it also reveals the tragic fact of Virgil’s own fate, since—born as he was before the coming of Christ— prayer in his case can be of no avail. The dark implication of this argument has been foreshadowed, less explicitly, in the simile that opens the same canto: Quando si parte il gioco de la zara, colui che perde si riman dolente, repetendo le volte, e tristo impara; con l’altro se ne va tutta la gente; qual va dinanzi, e qual di dietro il prende, e qual dallato li si reca a mente; el non s’arresta, e questo e quello intende; a cui porge la man, più non fa pressa; e così da la calca si difende.

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Robin Kirkpatrick (When punters split off from some gambling game, the loser stays behind, all misery, to check the throws once more and, sadly, learn while with the winner all the rest goes off. Some buttonhole the man, some pluck his tails, and some his sleeve ‘Just think of me,’ they mean. He doesn’t stop but listens to them all And when he gives them something, they stop And so he can fend off the pressing throng.) (Purgatorio 6.1 9)

The penitents harassing Dante are here compared to gamblers who, losing, throng around the winner of the game—in this case Dante—hoping for his favour. But is this not to suggest that prayer itself is a gamble, dependent on the sheer luck of being born one side or the other of the chasm between the Christian and pre-Christian eras? A further, more extended example will indicate how far Dante is from baulking at the contradictory, or aporetic, implications that are voiced in his representation of Virgil. The episode unrolls in Cantos 21 and 22 of the Purgatorio, where Dante and Virgil encounter the only spirit who completes his penance in the course of Dante’s three-day journey through the second realm of eternity. And who is this paragon? None other than the Latin poet Statius, author of that malignant, Oedipal epic, the Thebaid. Now it is true that Statius was born some forty years after the birth of Christ, whereas Virgil died more than twenty years before that event. There is no historical evidence that Statius ever converted to Christianity. Dante, however, undeterred, invents that missing history: Statius was indeed a Christian but, living in the age of persecution, was too timid to make any open confession. Adding further to this invention, Dante proceeds to compare Statius, scandalously, at the point of his first appearance in Purgatorio 21 to the risen Christ accompanying his disciples on the way to Emmaus. Why does Dante go to such extraordinary lengths? As the episode proceeds, it becomes clear that Dante’s purpose in all of this double-think is precisely to celebrate Virgil. At the first, Statius does not know that he is in the presence of Virgil. But proudly he does identify himself by claiming (rather as Dante did in Inferno 1) that his own epic art was ignited by the sparks of Virgil’s divine example: [‘]Stazio la gente ancor di là mi noma: cantai di Tebe, e poi del grande Achille; ma caddi in via con la seconda soma. Al mio ardor fuor seme le faville, che mi scaldar, della divina fiamma onde sono allumati piú di mille; dell’Eneida dico, la qual mamma fummi e fummi nutrice poetando: sanz’essa non fermai peso di dramma.[’]

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([‘]My name is Statius to the people there. I sang of Thebes and then of great Achilles, but stumbled carrying that second load. The seed my ardour sprang from was a spark which warmed me through that most sacred flame from which a thousand and yet more are lit. I’m speaking of the Aeneid a mum to me, my nurse in poetry. Without that, I’d not weigh a single gram.[’]) (Purgatorio 21.91 9)

Statius, then, acknowledges the Aeneid as the ‘mother and nurse’ of his own achievement. (One notes here the maternal metaphors—to which I shall return.) But then, once Virgil’s identity has at last been revealed, the encomium takes a further, more vertiginous step; not only did Statius become a poet through reading Virgil, he also became a Christian: ‘per te poeta fui, per te cristiano’ (‘Through you I was a poet and a Christian, too’) (Purgatorio 22.73). Virgil’s text, it seems, can inspire in others a belief in Christ, even though he himself is eternally excluded from the benefit of such belief. To use Dante’s own, very moving simile, Virgil is like someone travelling at night, who carries a lantern over his shoulder, illuminating the path for others, but which is of no use at all to himself (Purgatorio 22.67–9): [‘]Facesti come quei che va di notte, che porta il lume dietro e sé non giova, ma dopo sé fa le persone dotte, quando dicesti: “Secol si rinova; torna giustizia e primo tempo umano, e progenie scende da ciel nova”. Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano:[’] ([‘]You acted then like someone who, at night, bears at his back a lamp no use to him, but teaching those the way who come behind when once you said: “The years begin anew, justice returns, so, too, Man’s earliest time. A new race, born of Heaven, now descends.” I was, through you, a poet and a Christian, too:[’]) (Purgatorio 22.67 73)⁶

Up to a point, Dante’s position here is consistent with both medieval and Renaissance readings of the classics. For the text that led to Statius’ conversion, along with the Scriptures, was not the Aeneid but Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue.

⁶ Cf. Statius Thebaid 12: ‘nec ti divinam Aeneida tempta / sed longe sequere et vestigina semper adorna’.

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Indeed Virgil in the present episode is significantly described as the ‘cantor de’ bucolici carmi’ (‘the singer of pastoral songs’) (22.57). To the Middle Ages, the Fourth Eclogue, in describing how the Golden Age returns with the birth of a well-favoured boy, was frequently taken to be a prophecy of Christ’s Incarnation. And from Boccaccio onwards, the Renaissance saw classical myth, in general, as a repository of ‘poetic theology’.⁷ Dante offers his own version of this understanding at the climax of the Purgatorio: [‘]Quelli ch’anticamente poetaro l’età dell’oro e suo stato felice, forse in Parnaso esto loco sognaro. Qui fu innocente l’umana radice; qui primavera sempre ed ogni frutto; nettare è questo di che ciascun dice’. ([‘]Those who in times long gone composed those poems that sang the Age of Gold and all its joys thought, maybe, here’s Parnassus when they dreamed. Here, once, the root of man was innocent. Here, there is always spring and every fruit. And that’s the nectar they all speak about.’) (Purgatorio 28.139 44)

Here Dante, in the company of Statius and Virgil, enters the Garden of Eden, which he also sees as the golden world of antiquity, and speaks of how this was the place that ancient poets dreamt of in their mythic imaginings. Myth certainly does matter to Dante. But also in the Statius episode there are indications of an even more specifically Dantean point of interest. One notes that Dante’s text explicitly alludes to the Fourth Eclogue line 5: ‘magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo’—except that it does so in an Italian translation: ‘Secol si rinova . . . ’. It is this act of translation that introduces the issue I advertised in my title, ‘Voicing Virgil’. If Dante does reperform Virgil he does so most radically by testing Latin, on a linguistic level, against the resources of his own native vernacular.

VOI CIN G VIRG IL I N THE VERNACU LAR I want briefly to look aside to the linguistic and poetic theory developed in Dante’s prose treatises, particularly in his De Vulgari Eloquentia (Concerning

⁷ See Boccacio’s Genealogia deorum, esp. Book 15 ch. 8, and Wind’s classic account in Wind (1958).

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Vernacular Speech).⁸ Of course, theory never adequately describes practice; and in fact the De Vulgari is a reflection on the highly sophisticated love-lyrics that Dante was writing prior to the Commedia. There are only hints here of the impact that Virgil’s epic will shortly make upon him. The treatise, however, does offer a very full reflection on the relation between Latin and the mother tongue. In the De Vulgari Latin is throughout described as a grammatica—a grammar. Latin, on Dante’s understanding—which is about as unhistorical as his view of the Roman Empire—was formulated artificially by scholars, to exemplify the rules of syntax and rhetoric that underlie all language, and also to provide a medium for international communication in the areas of law, science, philosophy, and theology. It is a kind of Esperanto or even MLA style sheet. By contrast, the vernacular—that is to say, all vernaculars not simply Italian—are natural languages. And ‘natural’ here is meant in a very strong sense. A vernacular is defined, in the opening chapter of the treatise, as the language we learn as an infant, suckling at the breast of the mother or its wet nurse: ‘vulgarem locutionem asserimus quam sine omni regola nutricem imitantes accipimus.’ It is for this reason that Statius’ reference to Virgil as a nurse, or indeed as a very vernacular mamma (‘mummy’), is significant, though also intriguingly problematic. From this point on, Dante maintains—knowing full well how counter-intuitive this must seem—that the vernacular is superior to Latin, even though the discussion is itself pursued in scholarly Latin. The argument is, emphatically, not that the vernacular can promote some democratically outward reach. Being the mother tongue, the vernacular, rather, moves inward to engage and articulate the very core of our natural being, even in its creaturely and physical dimension. To be sure, the vernacular is unstable, inclining at times to inarticulate babble. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely here that it displays its superiority. The mother tongue reveals our existential status and points to a dependency which—though in the Commedia more than in the De Vulgari—will ultimately make known our inarticulate dependency on the God who first created us, body as well as soul. Scholars may talk in Latin but human beings—even as babies—are more than talking heads, however scholarly these heads might be. Up to a point, Dante’s conception of the vernacular is consistent with the sermo humilis sought by Bible translators such as St Jerome in resisting the rhetorical pomp of classical Latin.⁹ Yet Dante’s position in no way excludes the Latin grammar any more than the Commedia will exclude Virgil. Vernacular poets, Dante insists, must ‘lean on’ the grammar. But their aim will not, primarily, be to imitate or emulate the ancient achievement. The ⁸ The view that I am relying on here is developed in Kirkpatrick (1978). ⁹ As Auerbach (1965) has shown.

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recommendation is, rather, linguistic and practical—to the point of being workmanlike. Attention to the grammar will alert the vernacular poet to the linguistic exercises that need to be performed if the mother tongue is to realize its own specific potentialities. It is, in fact, in this spirit that Virgil makes his appearance in the De Vulgari. In 2.4.10 Dante cites Horace to emphasize the care and deliberation that every poet must exercise in assessing his subject and linguistic style. But then he goes on to make one of his earliest references to the Aeneid, comparing the labours appropriate for any ambitious poet to the travails of Aeneas as he descends to and then returns from the underworld: Sed cautionem atque discretionem hanc accipere, sicut decet, hic opus et labor est . . . Et hii sunt quos poeta Eneidorum sexto Dei dilectos et ab ardente virtute sublimatos ad ethera deorumque filios vocat, quanquam figurate loquatur. (But to learn, as is right, caution and discretion that is the real task and the real labour . . . It is those who in the sixth book of the Aeneid the poet calls the chosen ones of God, those who are raised to the heavens by their burning virtue, the sons of the gods.)¹⁰

Virgil’s appearance here remains, for the moment, relatively minimal. The De Vulgari is concerned, primarily, with the love-lyric tradition and does not register that complex conversion to the narrative epic that is so vividly dramatized in the early cantos of the Inferno. Still, the reference strikingly makes the Aeneas of Aeneid 6.129 the very model of what Dante is beginning to think a poet should be. This is partly to claim for the poet a visionary and prophetic or even a political role, travelling ad inferos so as to learn his destiny and receive the promise of glory. But the emphasis also falls upon the difficult, technical labour that all of this will involve. It may be hard to go to the underworld. It is harder still to come back and deliver a message that will benefit one’s reader. This, says Dante, citing Aeneid 6.129, is the real task in hand: ‘hoc opus, hic labor est’. Here, as always for Dante, the true poet is a workman—a fabbro—not a dreamer. His function is to craft, to its highest competency, the language that he shares with his immediate audience—the vernacular. And the grammatical model will provide an instrument—indispensable and yet no more than an instrument—in realizing that particular goal. In many ways, the relation between Dante and Virgil that is depicted in the Commedia can be seen as a dramatization of the issues raised in the De Vulgari. Virgil, at all points in the narrative, supplies a clear outline in regard both to language and understanding. Dante, as fictional character and equally as poet, plunges childlike into the working depths of experience: he thereby ‘performs’ his epic and gives ‘voice’ to Virgil. However, there is an aspect of

¹⁰ Dante (1968).

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Dante’s linguistic performance that surely cannot be paralleled in Virgil’s practice. The following passage marks the conclusion of Convivio Book 1 where Dante discusses for the first time the status of Latin in relation to the vernacular. Here, while writing in the vernacular, he acknowledges the superiority of Latin; but he also associates the writing and reading of his own vernacular prose with a liturgical or sacramental participation in the Eucharist: Questo sarà quello pane orzato del quale si satolleranno migliaia, e a me ne soperchieranno le sporte piene. Questo sarà luce nuova, sole nuovo, lo quale surgerà là dove l’usato tramonterà, e darà lume a coloro che sono in tenebre e in oscuritade per lo usato sole che a loro non luce. (This [the philosophical prose of the Convivio] will be the barley bread which will satisfy the appetite of thousands and leave me with overflowing baskets. This will be that new sun, that new light which will rise where the former sun is setting, this will give light to those who dwell in darkness and in shadows where the former sun no longer shines upon them.) (Convivio 1.13.12)

Two features of the passage will emerge with renewed significance in the Commedia. The first concerns ‘participation’—or, let us say, participatory performance. Dante may not be a modern democrat but he is concerned in all his writings to engage the audience in an active and collaborative pursuit of philosophical and political truth. The title of this vernacular treatise is the Convivio—the ‘Banquet’ or even ‘Living-with-in-Communion’. And the metaphor of nutrition is one that Dante repeatedly applies to his own poetry. As loving mothers feed us, so may vernacular poets also, on the milk of Rectitude and Justice, so lamentably lacking in the Florence from which Dante himself was unjustly exiled. But there are hints here of theological as well as philosophical and ethical considerations. In a comparison as scandalous as his comparison of Statius to Christ, Dante here represents his own vernacular as equivalent to the bread that Christ broke in feeding the 5,000. Christ’s act was a foreshadowing of the Eucharist, the supremely liturgical and indeed performative act. Can Dante, in ‘voicing’ Virgil, suppose that he is translating the Latin original into a liturgical performance? The last two examples from the Paradiso and the Purgatorio will, I hope, unambiguously suggest that this is indeed the case. In the first of these Dante sees coming towards him his grandfather thrice-removed, the crusader Cacciaguida: sí pia l’ombra d’Anchise si porse, se fede merta nostra maggior musa, quando in Eliso del figlio s’accorse. ‘O sanguis meus, o superinfusa gratia Dei, sicut tibi cui bis unquam coeli ianua reclusa?’

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Virgil has long since disappeared; and if the Latin poet has to some degree acted as an imaginary father, Dante now draws upon his own family history to evoke another father figure. And Cacciaguida now proceeds to prophesy the fate that his descendant will suffer—the bitterness of his exile from Florence— and urges him to pursue in poetry a moral and political crusade of his own against the corruptions of his native city. Yet is Virgil really so very far away? After all, the whole episode is explicitly compared at lines 25 to 30 to the meeting of Anchises and Aeneas in the underworld. Moreover, Cacciaguida’s words, incomprehensible to Dante, are in Latin and draw directly on Virgilian vocabulary—as, for instance, at Aeneid 6.835. On the other hand, the terzina at large is hardly Virgilian. Rather, it conflates the Virgilian phrase with words that are characteristic of St Paul’s Epistles and which eventually find their way into the Christian liturgy. Then too, at Canto 17 lines 127 to 129, in recommending how Dante should behave as a poet, the words that Cacciaguida is given conform to no principle of heroic decorum or rota virgiliana. Dante is to speak out against the decadent inhabitants of modern Florence and ‘let them scratch wherever they itch’ (‘e lascia pur grattar dov’è la rogna’). This is not simply the vernacular. It is the cut-and-thrust polemic of the Florentine gutter. The Cacciaguida episode, in a number of ways, reflects but also updates and extends the issues between Latin and the vernacular that were first raised in the Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia. So, too, does my final example. This is the crucial moment at the climax of the Purgatorio, in which Dante comes to meet the Lady celebrated in his early love-lyrics, the long-dead but now resurrected Beatrice, who will accompany him throughout the Paradiso. And please note—in relation to the vernacular as ‘mother tongue’—that Beatrice is a woman, as Virgil, Cacciaguida, and Dante himself are not. Dramatically, the scene is a recognition scene, and is sometimes analysed in terms of dramatic anagnorisis.¹¹ Dante slowly recognizes Beatrice; and she, searchingly, recognizes him. But the moment of Beatrice’s appearance is also the moment of Virgil’s disappearance. Correspondingly, the rhythms of the encounter trace, at one and the same time, the recovery of a forgotten unity and the desolate fragmentation of a hitherto vital relationship. If, as has been ¹¹ As e.g. in Boitani (1989).

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suggested, rhythm is the essential factor in dramatic action, then rhythm is certainly the essential feature of this culminating episode, so much so indeed that no discursive analysis can hope to be as revealing as a reading—or live performance—could properly be. Quali i beati al novissimo bando surgeran presti ognun di sua caverna la revestita carne alleluiando; cotali in su la divina basterna si levar cento, ad vocem tanti senis, ministri e messaggier di vita etterna. Tutti dicean: ‘Benedictus qui venis!’, e fior gittando di sopra e dintorno, ‘Manibus, oh; date lilia plenis!’ .

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E lo spirito mio, che già cotanto tempo era stato che alla sua presenza non era di stupor, tremando, affranto, sanza delli occhi aver piú conoscenza, per occulta virtú che da lei mosse, d’antico amor sentí la gran potenza. Tosto che nella vista mi percosse l’alta virtú che già m’avea trafitto prima ch’io fuor di puerizia fosse, volsimi alla sinistra col rispitto col quale il fantolin corre alla mamma quando ha paura o quando elli è afflitto, per dicere a Virgilio: ‘Men che dramma di sangue m’è rimaso che non tremi: conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma’; ma Virgilio n’avea lasciati scemi di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre, Virgilio a cui per mia salute die’mi; né quantunque perdeo l’antica matre, valse alle guance nette di rugiada, che, lacrimando, non tornasser atre. ‘Dante, perché Virgilio se ne vada, non pianger anco, non piangere ancora; ché pianger ti conven per altra spada’. (As when the Last New Day is heralded, and happy souls will rise keen from their caves, dressed in new voice, to echo ‘Alleluiah’; so now, ad vocem tanti senis, there arose above the hallowed chariot a hundred angels, all bearing news of eternal life.

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To speak (inadequately) in analytical terms, one notes that nothing is here as one might have anticipated. One might have expected that Beatrice would be pleased to see Dante here, at last. One might have expected that she would offer some words of thanks to Virgil for his guidance, as she seems to have promised to do in Inferno 2. Nothing of the sort. Her first words to Dante launch a stinging reproof: ‘Why are you here? And why are you weeping? Don’t you know that people in this place are happy? And if you are weeping because Virgil has evaporated and gone back to Limbo, then don’t. You have quite enough on your conscience to weep for.’ Beatrice’s words are so prickly (Dante compares their effect to nettle rash) that the angels who accompany her plead, as a chorus might, that she should be more compassionate towards her faithful devotee. Yet this little act of kindness is itself enough to reduce Dante to further sobbing, sighs, and inarticulate snivellings. It is all very embarrassing; and the poet at line 63 admits as much, turning to the reader to excuse himself for having, in such circumstances, to inscribe his own name.

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The first word that Beatrice utters is in fact ‘Dante’. This is the only occasion on which the poet’s name is recorded in the Commedia. How demeaning that it should be at such a moment! Now it would take many pages to spell out, in thematic terms, the philosophical and theological implications of this crucial encounter. But my concern remains a concern, pre-eminently, with form—and performance— particularly in regard to narrative construction and linguistic detail. So, let me finally concentrate on just two points of detail. Consider lines 1 to 20. These are explicitly epic, describing, with the arrival of the imperious Beatrice, the culmination of the triumphal procession that has extended over the whole of the preceding canto. There are solemn, marcato rhythms here that would certainly qualify, in Erich Auerbach’s view, as sublime. In subsequent passages, epic similes are introduced, even at the height of Dante’s nervous breakdown, to evoke the agony he experiences at having to raise his eyes to meet Beatrice’s censorious gaze: ‘as when oaks are torn up by winds from the north or else from the Libyan realm of Iarbas’ (Purgatorio 31.70–2).¹² Yet, as one by now would expect, this is epic much modified. And the most daring modification occurs when, bursting out of the text at line 21, come three lines of Latin acclamation. The last of these three directly cites Aeneid 6.883—with the addition of a plangent, vernacular ‘Oh!’—where the young Marcellus is seen in a parade of Roman heroes. Marcellus died an untimely death. And so did Beatrice, with this difference that Beatrice could look forward to the resurrection of the dead and Marcellus could not. The Christian Dante perceives redemptive possibilities that the pagan Virgil could never have envisaged. Still, Virgil’s verse is placed at the crescendo of a liturgical sequence in which the Song of Songs—Veni sponsa— typologically anticipates the Gospel verse Benedictus qui venit—which, in turn, is sung during Mass as the consecration of the Host begins. Do we have, then, a critique of Virgil’s pagan fatalism, or a celebration of his place—and the place of literature itself, perhaps—in the pursuit of christological truth? Or could it, aporetically, be both in a single breath? Aporetically, I let those questions hang in the air, as likewise the questions raised by line 48: ‘conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma’ (‘I recognize the signs of ancient flame’). This is an all-but-transliterated version of the line that Virgil gives to Dido in Aeneid 4.23: ‘agnosco veteris vestigia flammae’. And the interplay here could well be the same as it was in the Marcellus allusion. Dido feels guilty at the recrudescence of her erotic passions. But no Christian lover—at least of Dante’s ilk—need feel any such guilt, since eros in scholastic philosophy is sanctified as the innate desire which impels each of us towards the love of God. One reason why Beatrice gets so annoyed with

¹² Cf. Aeneid 4.440 ff. and 6.694.

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Dante is that he seems to have forgotten this happy formula. Notably the rhythms and diction leading up to the Virgil reference have shifted back from epic to lyric, reflecting accurately the delicately psychosomatic agitations—the tremors and the transfixings—that characterize Dante’s early poems in praise of Beatrice. Clearly, while Latin has been, instrumentally, of the utmost importance to Dante, he has never abandoned his vernacular origins. So ‘conosco i segni . . . ’ may be seen as a one-line reprise of the De Vulgari Eloquentia. Supporting himself on Virgil’s ‘grammar’, Dante boldly demonstrates the eloquence of the mother tongue. And ‘mother’ here must again be the appropriate word. For as the episode develops Beatrice proves to be as much a mother as a lover. Indeed, at line 44, Virgil himself is strikingly referred to as the ‘mother’ to whom, childlike, Dante turns in his distress. The realm that he is about to enter is one where existential dependency and a corresponding humility of speech must all be realized in his performance. In fact, Dante cannot even utter the word ‘yes’ in response to Beatrice’s severely maternal criticism. That simple word fails on his lips, like a bolt shot from a shattering crossbow—a simile which, ironically, is epic in its form. But this is also true of the words ‘conosco i segni . . . ’. These words, in proud emulation of the Aeneid, are never actually uttered. Virgil is no longer there to hear, so the verse, expressing confused recognition, hovers silently in the void. In a theological perspective, the silence dramatized in the present episode anticipates the silence in which Dante finally approaches God at the end of Paradiso 33. As it happens, this canto also is punctuated by Virgilian references—notably an allusion to the scattering of leaves envisaged by the Sybil (Aeneid 6.74). Beyond that, however, all language is said to be absolutely inadequate—and therefore, to follow Dante’s own simile, neither more nor less than the tongue of a baby still suckling at its mother’s breast. Omai sarà piú corta mia favella, pur a quel ch’io ricordo, che d’un fante che bagni ancor la lingua alla mammella. (And now my spark of words will come more short even of what I still can call to mind than baby tongues still bathing in mum’s milk.) (Paradiso 33.106 8)

To appreciate how all this is performed in Dante’s text, one needs as I suggest, to read his text aloud. However, I end with a merely theoretical indication, drawn from the first book of the De Vulgari Eloquentia: Oportuit ergo genus humanum ad comunicandas inter se conceptiones suas aliquod rationale signum et sensuale habere: quia, cum de ratione accipere habeat et in rationem portare, rationale esse oportuit; cumque de una ratione in aliam

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nichil deferri possit nisi per medium sensuale, sensuale esse oportuit. Quare, si tantum rationale esset, pertransire non posset; si tantum sensuale, nec a ratione accipere nec in rationem deponere potuisset. (It was important therefore, if members of the human race were to communicate conceptions one to another, that they should have a rational and a sensuous sign. Since this conception needed to receive its content from reason and convey it back there, it had to be rational. But since nothing can be conveyed from one reasoning mind to another except by means perceptible to the senses, it had also to be based on sensory perceptions.) (De Vulgari Eloquentia 1.3.2)

Words, then, for Dante are rational and sensuous signs, and ‘sensuous’ here is emphatic. For Dante, the rhythms of our body—the vibrations of the larynx, the twang of the lips—are the rhythms we offer up in love poetry and liturgy. Voicing Virgil, Dante’s epic is the epic of the body resurrected.

16 Homer as Improviser? Graeme Bird

As my title suggests, I am posing the question as to whether Homer, as the composer—and performer—of the Iliad and Odyssey, can be considered to have anything in common with a modern jazz musician. Indeed it may seem counter-intuitive that there should be any connection between the ancient art of Greek epic poetry and the relatively recent phenomenon of jazz improvisation. There is the huge time difference, not to mention differences in geography and culture and language—and genre.¹ But in this chapter I seek to look for precisely such connections, exploring possible parallels in the ways the two art forms were and are structured and performed. Along the way, I emphasize the need for a close and careful examination of such crucial terms as composition, performance, and perhaps most problematic of all, the very word ‘improvisation’. Other important terms such as formula and theme need to be carefully scrutinized, as do the concepts of memorizing, remembering, and recalling. I begin with two quotations, the first from Michael Silk, a classical scholar who has a keen interest in jazz (he plays jazz trumpet on a regular basis²): Any performer or student of jazz could have told Milman Parry something about oral composition, its products and its practitioners: the creative individuals who learn their craft from a living tradition of fellow artists in a milieu of mutual respect, personal ambition and restless experiment . . . Jazz was improvisatory when it began and, in all its many varieties, has remained essentially improvisatory and yet musical literacy has been absorbed into it for two full generations. The jazz soloist, in particular, may improvise his performance; he may have memorised it, in whole or part, from an earlier performance or from

¹ Also perhaps the mutual suspicion that has sometimes existed between the jazz community and the academy. The recent appointment (in 2014) of jazz pianist Herbie Hancock as Harvard’s Norton Professor of Poetry, in which role he presented the Norton Lectures titled ‘The Ethics of Jazz’ represents a welcome change in this regard. ² See his web page: .

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practice or even from a score, composed by himself or an arranger; he may read the solo from such a score: the same solo might result . . . We have here a clear equivalent to a more or less standardised formulaic or thematic mode of poetic composition.³

The second quotation is from Gregory E. Smith, a musical scholar, who has also thought seriously about the Serbo-Croatian and Homeric poems: The way we conceive improvisation, and the terms we use to describe it, are issues central to the study of jazz. For as the research of Parry and [Albert] Lord demonstrates, the image one holds in mind of the compositional process condi tions the relationships one is predisposed to bring out through analysis. Lord remarks of the generations of classical scholars who approached the Homeric texts with the picture of a writing author in mind that they ‘could formulate the most ingenious speculation’ to account for the ‘peculiarities of language and structure’ they found in the poems. But their accounts were always couched in terms of written practice since they ‘failed to realize that there could be some other way of composing a poem than that known to their own experience’.⁴

What is particularly striking in these two quotations is that scholars in two seemingly distantly related disciplines are urging fellow practitioners to look closely at the other’s field in order to learn more about their own areas of specialization: students of Homer can learn much from jazz improvisers, and students of jazz improvisation can benefit from looking closely at the work of Parry and Lord regarding oral composition. The references to Milman Parry and Albert Lord indicate the far-reaching influence of these two Harvard classical scholars, who in the 1930s travelled to what was then Yugoslavia in order to study living oral (and illiterate) poets/ singers who were still performing traditional songs of considerable length in front of live audiences.⁵ Parry and Lord’s analysis of these songs led them to realize that Homer’s poems shared the same characteristics—in particular, the use of ‘formulaic’ language and themes in the construction of lines of verse. As well as their influence on oral poetics and folklore, their theoretical conclusions eventually also came to the attention of scholars of various musical genres.⁶ Ironically, Lord himself, as I will argue, while disliking the term ‘improvisation’ with regard to Homer, in actuality did a great deal to show that Homer was, in fact, an improviser in the truest sense of the word. A few points of contact immediately come to mind on reading these quotations: the role of writing/literacy; different concepts of the compositional process; the term ‘living tradition’; and especially the suggestion that a jazz performance is in some way ‘equivalent to a more or less standardised—formulaic or thematic— ³ Silk (1987), 22 3. ⁴ Smith (1991), 34, citing Lord (1960), 11. ⁵ Parry (1971), Lord (2000); also Lord (1991). ⁶ See e.g. Treitler (1974), with regard to Gregorian chant.

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mode of poetic composition’.⁷ In what follows, I take my cues from these two passages in order to build on the two interdisciplinary perspectives, and to see if further examination can lead us to deeper insights about the relationships between Homeric oral poetry and modern jazz improvisation.

I M P R O V I SA TI O N It is deeply ironic, from my perspective, that Albert Lord was not particularly fond of the concept of improvisation as applied to Homeric poetry, or, for that matter, to oral poetry in general.⁸ Lord points to the ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘considerable confusion’ that may arise when the term is used with reference to oral poetry. He himself prefers to use the expression ‘composition by formula and theme’.⁹ He considers the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the verb ‘improvise’ (I look here at definitions 1a and 1b): a. intr. To compose and perform music, poetry, drama, etc., spontaneously or without preparation; to speak or perform extemporaneously. b. trans. To compose and perform (music, poetry, drama, etc.) spontaneously or without preparation; to deliver (a speech) extemporaneously.¹⁰ Following the OED’s definition, Lord understands ‘improvisation’ as making up ‘a new nontraditional song from predominantly nontraditional elements’.¹¹ This is, of course, the complete opposite of what the ‘traditional’ oral poet does. It is easy to see why Lord is unhappy with the OED definition: it gives the impression of randomness, and ignores the prerequisites to genuine improvisation—namely, the use of pre-existing material, plus the intense practice required to improvise with any skill or effectiveness.¹² I propose that the definition of the term ‘improvise’, as it appears in the OED, needs to be expanded (as Silk implies) to encompass a more comprehensive view of the process—a process that jazz musicians already understand and employ. For example, we find in the The Harvard Dictionary of Music: improvised music is not produced without some kind of preconception or point of departure. There is always a model that determines the scope within which ⁷ Silk (1987), 23. ⁸ Much human activity can be considered as improvised, including, for example, regular speech. But I am dealing here with two special forms of improvisation, for special occasions live performances, before an audience of jazz music and epic poetry. ⁹ Lord (1991), 76. ¹⁰ OED: s.v. ‘improvise’ (verb) . ¹¹ Lord (1991), 76. ¹² Lord (1991), 234 7 expands on the concept of ‘improvisation’ to some degree; on 235 he seems to consider ‘pure improvisation’ as one type of composition in performance; on 237 he also differentiates between ‘memorizing’ and ‘remembering’.

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a musician acts. In the case of jazz, the model may be a series of harmonies that determine pitches to be selected for a melody; or a melody that is subjected to variation; or a set of motifs from which a selection is made.¹³

This formulation, so appropriate and informative in the case of jazz (although perhaps not obvious to a non-musician), is also much more congenial to the oral poet, Homer:¹⁴ 1. the harmonies are analogous to his themes and episodes; 2. the melody that is subject to variation corresponds to the ‘storyline’ that may be modified in different retellings; 3. the set of motifs recalls the pervasive use of formulas and formulaic expressions. Indeed, this very redefinition or refinement of the term ‘improvisation’ immediately opens up connections and correspondences that were hitherto not only far from evident, but also seemed foreign to the sense of improvisation denoted and connoted by the OED definition. One can take this a few steps further, and think about ‘Degrees of Improvisation’, going from least to greatest variation of the original melody, as outlined by Smith:¹⁵ 1. embellishment or ornamentation: minor variations on the melody. 2. paraphrase: ‘a more subtle transformation [of precomposed material] in which original and additional notes blend into a new melody of homogeneous design [ . . . ] The performer passes from interpreter to composer’.¹⁶ 3. ‘harmonic improvisation’: the improvised melody may not resemble the ‘original’ melody, but it still follows the underlying harmonic structure. A listener with ‘good ears’ can tell that the performer is ‘improvising over’ ‘Night and Day’.¹⁷ There is even a fourth ‘degree’ of jazz improvisation, so-called ‘free jazz’— where, in fact, brand new unrehearsed un-precomposed elements may be performed, not related to any existing harmonic structure.¹⁸ In this fourth kind of improvisation, there is a much smaller ‘fan base’: with such ‘progressive’ jazz, it is much harder to tap one’s foot, or feel the underlying chord structure (if it exists at all); indeed there may not be any harmonic instrument in such a group; one famous group, The Fringe, consists of saxophone, bass, and drums.¹⁹

¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹

Randel (2003), 406: s.v. ‘improvisation’. Cf. Smith (1991), 37; also Janko (1998), 3 4. ¹⁵ Smith (1983), ch. 2. Smith (1983), 33 4; my emphasis. See also Givan (2003b), for different ways of classifying types of improvisation. e.g. Ornette Coleman’s 1961 album, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. George Garzone on tenor sax.

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As I hope to make clear in what follows, musical improvisation, while including some of the ‘spontaneity’ implied by the OED definition, also generally involves the use of pre-existing material, formulas, or musical motifs. Moreover, it can aptly be described as ‘composition in performance’.²⁰ The following basic features, shared by the oral poet and the jazz improviser, will prove fundamental: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

using ‘pre-composed’ materials, or ‘formulas’; varying the ‘original’;²¹ expansion and contraction of episodes; learning by listening to others; practising at great length to perfect one’s craft; performing within a tradition, while retaining individuality.

I discuss the first three of these key features in pairs: the first in each case as it applies to Homer and the second to jazz improvisation.

THE F ORMULA IN HOMER The formula is one of the key components of oral poetry, and with this in mind we start with the well-known chart taken from Albert Lord’s 1960 book The Singer of Tales.²² In this chart Lord analyses the first fifteen lines of Homer’s Iliad Book 1, placing a solid line beneath phrases that occur at least once elsewhere in Homer (Iliad and/or Odyssey) in this same position, and labelling these as ‘formulas’.²³ He places a dashed line beneath phrases that are not repeated exactly, but are lexically and/or syntactically similar, and metrically equivalent, to other passages that do occur. These he calls ‘formulaic expressions’.²⁴ The numbers below each line of text, associated with the solid and dashed lines, refer to notes at the end of Lord’s book where the parallel passages are listed.

²⁰ For the case of Homer, see e.g. Lord (1991), 76, and Nagy (2004), 83; both also use the phrase ‘recomposition in performance’. This last sounds even more applicable to jazz impro visation. In the case of jazz, see Porter, Ullman, and Hazell (1993), 453: ‘Every jazz musician is a composer, because he or she composes music while improvising.’ ²¹ Although Lord (2000), 100, stressing the significant differences between written and oral poetry, goes so far as to say that ‘In oral tradition, the idea of an original is illogical’. Compare Porter, Ullman, and Hazell (1993), 31, referring to the frequently recorded jazz piece ‘Tiger Rag’: ‘There was no single composer: The music was still part of an aural tradition.’ ²² 2nd edn. 2000; the chart is in Lord (2000), 143. ²³ Parry’s classic definition of a formula, quoted by Lord (2000), 4: ‘a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’. ²⁴ Lord already uses this system in his analysis of Serbo Croatian poetry, Lord (2000), 46.

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Formulas and formulaic expressions together form a system remarkable for its efficiency and economy; indeed the immediate visual impression created by this chart is that virtually everything is either a formula or a formulaic expression. The implications of this are far-reaching: it is claimed that the Iliad and Odyssey are based on a system of formulaic diction that is at once traditional, ancient, flexible, and economical.²⁵ Look at the same passage in an English translation (basically my own, with some reference to Fagles and one or two other sources)²⁶ (Figs. 16.1 and 16.2). I retain Lord’s system of solid and dashed underlining as far as possible, allowing for the different word-order of Greek and English. In the English translation, the numbers in parentheses appear at the end of a word or phrase that has a solid underline. The figure indicates that this particular word or phrase occurs identically that many times elsewhere in Homer, and in the same position in the line.²⁷ For example, the phrase ‘of Achilles son of Peleus’ occurs in this identical form and location seven other times (five in the Iliad and two in the Odyssey). The phrase ‘godlike Achilles’ occurs in fifty-three other places in this identical form, and in the same line-final position. This last phrase is of the type that Parry studied at great length, those phrases containing so-called ‘ornamental epithets’. Other examples include ‘swift-footed Achilles’ (thirty-one occurrences), ‘rosyfingered Dawn’ (twenty-seven occurrences), and ‘crafty Odysseus’ (eightyone occurrences). These adjectives have been called ‘ornamental’ because they frequently do not seem to be describing the person or thing in its context: Achilles may be described as ‘swift-footed’ even when he is sitting down, and, as an extreme example, Aegisthus (killer of Agamemnon and seducer of his wife Clytemnestra) is called ‘blameless’ by Zeus (Odyssey 1.29), as Zeus is recounting how Agamemnon’s son Orestes killed Aegisthus in an act of vengeance.²⁸ However, the system of formulas is by no means confined to these adjectives: rather, Lord emphasizes that the formulas are all-pervasive.²⁹ Starting with his observation that well over 90 per cent of the first fifteen lines of the

²⁵ I am well aware that much scholarship since Parry and Lord has found fault with the ‘one hundred percent formulaic character of Homer’, as described in Finkelberg (2012), 75. Finkelberg (2012), 76, claims that ‘at least one third of our text of Homer consists of expressions that cannot be considered formulaic’. Even if only two thirds of Homer can be shown to be ‘formulaic’, the point of my comparison still holds. In fact, as I point out in my discussion below (p. 241) the proportion of identical ‘formulas’ in jazz improvisation is significantly less than in Homer, and it is to be expected that musicians, with their greater level of creative ‘freedom’, will regularly play material that may seem ‘non formulaic’. ²⁶ Fagles (1990). ²⁷ As n. 1 on p. 235 indicates, lines 12 15 contain complex layers of formulas that are not done justice by the expression ‘1+’. ²⁸ Parry (1971), 249, calls this use of ornamental epithets ‘irrational’. ²⁹ Lord (2000), 142; my emphasis.

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Fig. 16.1 Homer’s Iliad, 1.1 15. Greek taken from Lord (2000), 143. © 1960, 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. © renewed 1988 by Alfred Bates Lord.

Iliad exhibit either solid or dashed underlines, and combined with Parry’s exhaustive study of Homeric formulas, Lord concludes that, ‘The formulaic technique in the Homeric poems is, indeed, so perfect, the system of formulas, as Parry showed, is so “thrifty”, so lacking in identical alternative expressions, that one marvels that this perfection could be reached without

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Iliad 1:1–15 Sing the rage, goddess, of Achilles son of Peleus (7) The baleful (3) rage, that put pains (1) uncountable onto the Achaeans, And hurled down to Hades (1) many strong souls Of heroes (5), and made their bodies food for dogs 5

And all birds, and the will of Zeus was being fulfilled (1), From the point when (1) first (6) they broke and clashed,

The son of Atreus (6), king of men (22), and godlike Achilles (53).

Now, which of the gods drove them together to fight (1) in strife? Leto’s and Zeus’ (1) son; for he, angry at the king 10 Sent an evil (5) plague throughout the camp (1), and the people (1) were perishing, Because (40) the priest Chryses had been dishonored by

Atreus’ son (42); for he (Ch.) had come to the swift ships of the Achaeans (1+)1

Intending to ransom his daughter, and bringing a priceless ransom (1+),

And holding in his hands the wreaths of far-shooting Apollo (1+),

15 Leaning on a golden staff, and he pleaded with all the Achaeans (1+) . . .

1 Lines

12–15 contain multiple systems of formulas; see Lord (2000), 292–3 for details.

Fig. 16.2 Homer’s Iliad, 1.1 15. English translation by the author.

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the aid of writing.’³⁰ We need to bear in mind that this quote comes from chapter 7; Lord has already (in chapter 3 ‘The Formula’ and chapter 4 ‘The Theme’) made an intensive study of a living (at least at that time) oral poetic tradition, namely the Serbo-Croatian. Having witnessed first-hand contemporary oral poets composing in performance, employing the techniques of formula and theme, he now had very good grounds for applying the theory to the texts of Homer. Lord describes at length how and why the formula is an essential feature of oral poetry: ‘The poetic grammar of oral epic is and must be based on the formula.’³¹ The formula is an inherent and integral part of the process of composition in performance: in the ‘heat of performance’, the poet uses phrases and lines that he or she has heard, has used before, and hence has ready at hand. A writing poet is under no such pressure, and hence will not have anything like the same need for using ready-made formulaic material. Based on his and Parry’s extensive research on the use of the formula in Serbo-Croatian (and other) oral poetry, Lord thus convincingly showed that Homer was an oral poet. This is, in some sense, now a ‘given’ in Homeric studies, although not without vigorous debate in the past.³² In short, Homer’s poetry differs from written epic poetry (such as Apollonius of Rhodes or Virgil) in that it contains frequently repeated formulas, whole lines, and groups of lines; and that it employs ‘ornamental epithets’ on a scale unmatched in a literate author.

THE F ORMULA (OR MELODIC MO TIF) I N J A Z Z I M P R OV I S ATI ON In much the same way that oral poetry makes extensive use of the formula, jazz improvisation includes melodic motifs that can be repeated and altered.³³ In fact, improvised (non-written) melodic lines differ from written music in that they contain a high proportion of these melodic ‘formulas’ or motifs.³⁴ ³⁰ Lord (2000), 144. ³¹ Lord (2000), 65: ‘The singer’s mode of composition is dictated by the demands of performance at high speed.’ ³² One of the most vociferous opponents of Parry’s conclusions is Shive (1987), whose preface begins with the dramatic words: ‘Homeric oral poetry is in crisis’ and concludes on p. 139: ‘I have tried to help cure Homer of blindness and put a pen in his hand if only like Milton.’ ³³ I note that there are many ways to improvise in jazz, including harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically. In this chapter I focus on melodic improvisation. ³⁴ Although it must be recognized that carefully written ‘classical’ music compositions can and often do contain frequently occurring and modified motifs: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, 1st movement; Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, 4th movement; and Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2,

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And as well as sometimes being repeated note for note (or as we might say in the case of verbal formulas, ‘verbatim’), they are frequently modified in various ways, giving the equivalent of Lord’s ‘formulaic expressions’. In the same way that we looked at Lord’s chart of the first fifteen lines of the Iliad, we now look at a jazz standard, ‘Night and Day’, by Cole Porter. At the conference upon which this chapter is based, I first played the chords and melody of ‘Night and Day’ as written on the lead sheet. Then, before improvising, I played examples of musical motifs or formulas, as given below, which I myself had come up with in the process of creating a suitable improvised melody.³⁵ Musical Motifs:³⁶ 1. Semiquavers (sixteenth notes): four-note phrases

Fig. 16.3 Musical notation by Graeme Bird.

These phrases have various characteristics (Fig. 16.3): the first five consist of consecutive notes, both ‘diatonic’ (belonging to a scale³⁷) and ‘chromatic’ (including sharps and flats); in terms of direction, some are descending, some ascending, and some do both; finally, the last two do not involve scale notes but rather notes belonging to a chord, or ‘arpeggio’.³⁸ Since they all share a similar rhythmic structure, they can be considered as a ‘formulaic system’. 3rd movement, to give a few well known examples. However, it can be fairly claimed that this written music differs in kind from jazz improvisation. ³⁵ My live performance consisted of the following elements, only the second of which is presented here: (1) Play through the ‘head’ (or original melody); (2) Play the written improvisa tion (improv #1); (3) Play a second improvisation (not pre written, improv #2); (4) Play a more harmonic or chordal improvisation (improv #3); (5) In a normal performance I would have finished by playing the ‘head’ one last time. I omitted this in the interests of time. ³⁶ These Musical Motifs can be heard on the ‘Performing Epic’ page of the APGRD website: . ³⁷ Scales include various types of major and minor, as well as ‘modes’ such as Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian. A particular style of jazz employs the ‘pentatonic’ scale. ³⁸ Arpeggios come in various types such as major, minor, diminished, and augmented. These have traditionally been constructed with intervals of a third; however, a significant subgenre of jazz employs intervals of a fourth.

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2. Quavers (eighth notes): four-note phrases—‘swung’ as opposed to ‘straight’

Fig. 16.4 Musical notation by Graeme Bird.

These phrases are played with a ‘swing feel’ (Fig. 16.4); and when the last note is followed by a rest, that last note is given additional stress—it is ‘accented’. These phrases are all ‘chromatic,’ with a variety of directions; again there is a formulaic system. 3. Quavers (eighth notes): three-note triplet phrases

Fig. 16.5 Musical notation by Graeme Bird.

Here is another formulaic system (Fig. 16.5): these phrases also exhibit a variety of possibilities in terms of direction and note choice. 4. Crotchets (quarter notes): three-note triplet phrases

Fig. 16.6 Musical notation by Graeme Bird.

Once again there is a formulaic system of phrases, showing a variety of direction, note choice (diatonic and chromatic), and also scalar versus arpeggiated notes (Fig. 16.6). A performing jazz improviser would generally have a similar (but much larger) collection of musical formulas already at hand, and use them in the process of creating improvised melodies. I had actually first created an improvised melody for ‘Night and Day’, and after writing it down, I took from it

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the musical formulas shown above. So my procedure was somewhat reversed, for the purposes of the presentation. Below I give a transcription of my own improvisation, using the above musical motifs as well as other material. This may seem a little bit artificial and even counter-intuitive: as mentioned, I had earlier sat down and played some improvised motifs, only writing them down when I thought they sounded satisfactory. As I told my live audience, they would have to be the judge(s) of whether the result sounded musically inspiring . . . or even just musical. In a sense I ‘dictated’ these improvised lines to myself; and indeed one of several theories of the origins of our text of Homer includes one by which the performer dictated his poetry line by line to a scribe.³⁹ I have followed Lord’s system of solid underlines for formulas repeated exactly, and dashed underlines for formulas that are similar but not identical, along the lines of Lord’s distinction between ‘formulas’ and ‘formulaic expressions’. I challenged my audience to determine whether my improvisation, although far from resembling anything by Bill Evans or any other famous pianist, sounded like any of the following: (a) random notes played in no particular order, ‘anything goes’? (b) mechanical use of formulas used to fill the awkward silences? (c) something with a degree of creativity and musicality? Fortunately for my argument (and self-esteem), there seemed to be a consensus that at least (a) and (b) did not apply.

MY WRITTEN AND PLAYED IMPROVISATION In Figs. 16.7 and 16.8 one can see some ‘layering’ of formulas in bars 9 and 11, 25–8, and 43–4, similar to the situation in Iliad 1.12–15.⁴⁰ My point is that jazz improvisation, at both elementary and advanced levels, involves systems of musical ‘formulas’, in similar ways to the Homeric poems. The main difference here may be in terms of degree: whereas in Lord’s diagram roughly half of the first fifteen lines of the Iliad have solid underlines, indicating formulas repeated identically elsewhere, in my improvisation—and

³⁹ See e.g. Lord (2000), 126 8. Also earlier, Lord (1953) = ch. 2 in Lord (1991); also Janko (1998). ⁴⁰ See Lord’s chart discussed above. As previously stated, I am using my own music motifs and improvisation to illustrate my point, chiefly for the sake of simplicity and clarity. There are many available examples of analysed improvised solos from prominent jazz musicians; each of them exhibits a much more complex but correspondingly much more creative and musically inspiring system of motifs. My improvisation can also be heard on the ‘Performing Epic’ page of the APGRD website: .

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Fig. 16.7 Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’, Improv 1, p. 1. © Graeme Bird.

I suspect in improvised music in general—there is a smaller percentage of identically repeated motifs, and correspondingly a significantly larger quantity of ‘formulaic phrases’—motifs that are similar to each other but differing in subtle ways, such as direction and rhythm. The jazz performer (like Homer),

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Fig. 16.8 Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’, Improv 1, p. 2. © Graeme Bird.

in the ‘heat of performance’, can and does use repeated motifs in his or her improvisation. But a large part of the enjoyment of jazz improvisation comes from creatively exploring the possibilities of modifying and developing musical motifs, with a degree of freedom somewhat greater than that of the oral poet, who is more closely tied to the given storyline.⁴¹ Formulas can be a distinctive mark of a prominent performer: Porter, Ullman, and Hazell introduce the term ‘lick’ (equivalent to the term ‘motif ’ or ‘formula’);⁴² as well as being an integral part of improvisation, capable of being modified in various ways, the types of licks a player uses will frequently be an unmistakable sign of who the performer is.⁴³ There are two important issues relating to musical formulas: (1) where does one formula end and the next one begin? (2) how does one determine which formulas are part of a ‘formulaic system’, or in other words, which may be considered ‘essentially equivalent’? Unlike verbal formulas, there is no semantic way of telling that a particular motif has ended.⁴⁴ There are no nouns, verbs, or other ⁴¹ See Givan (2003b), for discussion of formulaic and non formulaic improvisation. ⁴² Porter, Ullman, and Hazell (1993), 454. ⁴³ The jazz magazine Downbeat used to have a ‘Blindfold test’, in which a player, after listening to a recording of a well known performer, was asked to identify the performer. If the player was an experienced enough listener, he or she would be able to identify the performer by listening to their style, and in particular by recognizing their licks. ⁴⁴ And yet see n. 75 below: the subtitle of Monson (1996) is ‘Jazz Improvisation and Interaction’; a suggestive indication that improvisation involves some kind of ‘language’.

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grammatical units.⁴⁵ Smith deals with both these issues by identifying three parameters: direction, distance, and type of melodic motion.⁴⁶ These he shows can be used for determining the ‘boundaries’ of musical formulas, as well as for determining which formulas are ‘essentially equivalent’.⁴⁷

THE EXISTENCE OF SIGNIFICANT VARIANTS I N OUR T EX T OF HOME R: ‘MULTI-TEXTUALITY’ The surviving manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (exceeding in number those of all other classical Greek and Latin authors, and surpassed only by the manuscripts of the Greek New Testament) preserve a wealth of textual variants, ranging from simple spelling errors, to variation in word choice, to the appearance of ‘new’ lines. This last type of variant is chiefly found in the so-called ‘Ptolemaic Papyri’, the earliest manuscripts that bear witness to Homer’s poetry.⁴⁸ The term ‘Ptolemaic’ refers to the date of these papyri: fourth to second century BCE, the period after the death of Alexander the Great, when the Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt. The texts of these papyri present more significant textual variations from the ‘regular’ text than do all the other surviving manuscripts; because of this they have been dubbed ‘wild’ or ‘eccentric’.⁴⁹ In particular, as noted above, they contain a good number of new lines, also called ‘plus verses’ or even ‘interpolated lines’.⁵⁰ One can see from the way these lines are labelled ‘new’ or ‘interpolated’ that the assumption is that we are working from an established and ‘correct’ original, from which all else is a variation, deviation, or even corruption. Indeed this type of textual evidence is small in quantity, and is frequently dismissed as insignificant by scholars. However, my argument has been that the performer of Homer’s poetry (like the jazz improviser) will have produced versions of the poems that differ from each other in perhaps significant ways. I suggest that these fragmentary papyri may in fact be seen as ‘transcriptions’ ⁴⁵ Smith (1991), 37. See Katz and Pesetsky (2009) for the claim that ‘The “syntactic compo nents” of music and language are formally identical’, although this highly technical article examines a Mozart piano sonata rather than improvised music. ⁴⁶ Smith (1991), 38: ‘A way must be devised for identifying passages that are equivalent in essence but not in details.’ ⁴⁷ Smith (1991), 39 48. He applies these parameters to a piece of jazz piano improvisation by Bill Evans. ⁴⁸ Bird (2010). ⁴⁹ Allen (1924), 302, claims to have been the first to call these papyri ‘eccentric’. See also West (1967), Bird (2010). ⁵⁰ West (1967); Bird (1994) and (2010).

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from such live performances, performances differing from the performance that has resulted in our more familiar text.⁵¹ In fact even the ancient scholia (marginal notes found chiefly in medieval manuscripts), many of which can be traced back to Aristarchus (chief librarian in the library of Alexandria in the second century BCE), seem to assume that there is but one correct reading for any given location in the text. In spite of this, these scholia are immensely valuable, in that they discuss the other ‘incorrect’ readings, sometimes at great length, giving reasons for and against them, and suggesting to us that there were many more ‘versions’ of the epic poems in existence than we might otherwise have believed. Indeed, a much later medieval (tenth-century) parchment manuscript of Homer’s Iliad, known as Venetus A, contains copious information about variant readings that must have been current in the second century BCE.⁵² An example of the type of variation that the Ptolemaic papyri offer comes from a passage in Iliad 3.330 and following. Paris and Menelaus are arming in preparation for a one-to-one duel over Helen (the mistress of the first and wife of the second), the result of which purportedly will effectively end the Trojan War. The ‘standard’ text presents these lines (my translation): First he (i.e. Paris) put the greaves around his legs, fine ones, fitted with silver ankle pieces. Second he put on his breastplate about his chest, of his brother Lycaon; and fitted it to himself. And about his shoulders he threw his silver studded sword of bronze, and then his shield great and sturdy. And upon his mighty head he put a well made helmet with horse hair crest; and terribly did the plume nod from above. And he took a stout spear, which fitted his hands. And likewise warlike Menelaus donned his battle gear.

330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339

A Ptolemaic papyrus, dated between 285 and 250 BCE,⁵³ gives the following version of the later lines (earlier lines extremely fragmentary): And he took two stout spears, tipped with bronze. And likewise Menelaus donned his warlike armour, His shield and shining helmet, and two spears And fine greaves fitted with ankle pieces, And about his shoulders he threw his silver studded sword.

338 339 339a 339b 339c

⁵¹ Bird (2010). Cf. Rainey (1993), 3.6, referring to singers of medieval Latin lyrics: ‘The poet/ singer doubtless frequently improvised on the instant thus creating many of the textual variants that still puzzle scholars.’ ⁵² See Bird (2009); also Nagy (2004) for detailed discussion of Aristarchus’ methodology. ⁵³ P40, edited in S. West (1967), 40 ff.

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The lines marked 339a, 339b, and 339c are examples of ‘new lines’ or ‘plus verses’, since they are not in our more familiar text.⁵⁴ The general practice has been to dismiss these lines as ‘inferior’ to the standard text, for literary or other reasons. In my earlier work,⁵⁵ I rally to their defence; for now, I suggest we consider the possibility that they might have arisen from a particularly inspiring performance: our poet Homer is setting us up for a crucial duel—and one where Paris is in seriously over his head. So after Paris has been given nine lines to arm himself, the poet, in the full heat of his performance, decides to give Menelaus not one but four lines for his arming.⁵⁶ One can imagine an audience both being inspired by the poet, and also inspiring him to ‘expand’ this scene beyond its more familiar form. Needless to say, the traditional theory and practice of textual criticism assumes the existence at some point in time of an ‘autograph’ or manuscript created by the author. The goal is to use the available surviving textual (and other) evidence to reconstruct what was the author’s actual text. Published classical texts generally print what is thought to be this ‘original’ text in the main part of the page, and put as many of the variants as are considered ‘significant’ at the bottom of the page; this is generally known as the apparatus criticus (critical apparatus). In the case of the Iliad, the best-known edition has been the Oxford Classical Text (OCT);⁵⁷ more recently, we have the Teubner edition in two parts by Martin West, with an even greater wealth of textual variants, as well as ancient witnesses to the text.⁵⁸ A different approach, followed by the ‘Homer Multitext Project’,⁵⁹ is to take into account the ‘evolution and the resulting multiformity of the textual tradition’ by not privileging any one particular text or even a particular variant reading in a given case. The goal is to present all existing variants in a parallel fashion, allowing the reader to make choices in the process of reading.

⁵⁴ As mentioned above, they are also often labelled as ‘interpolated’. For a detailed discussion of the concept of ‘plus verses’, see Nagy (2009a), 14 ff. From a different perspective, see West (2001), 11 ff. ⁵⁵ Bird (2010), ch. 3. ⁵⁶ I am here emphasizing the performance aspect: at every moment the performer, whether Homer or the jazz improviser, makes choices as to what comes next; in each case these choices are constrained by the underlying story (for Homer) and the underlying harmonic structure (for the jazz musician). But in each case the performer also has an element of freedom, which is conditioned by factors such as his or her individual skill and experience, audience interaction, and emotional intensity. ⁵⁷ Monro and Allen (1920). ⁵⁸ West (1998 2000). ⁵⁹ . Needless to say, this approach has not met with universal agreement.

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JAZZ IMPROVISATIONS ARE ALWA YS D IFFERENT Compared to the Homeric situation, that jazz improvisations are always different is completely obvious. No one ever went to a live jazz performance expecting to hear the ‘original’ version of ‘Night and Day’ played by Bill Evans. Instead he or she went hoping to hear—either for the first time, or as a regular listener—an inspiring improvised version of the tune. There is no ‘right’ version, and it is only by means of technology that a particularly inspired recorded version may become ‘definitive’; and even in such cases it will never be heard again live in exactly the same form.⁶⁰ Porter, Ullman, and Hazell’s book on the history of jazz has a very useful appendix containing advice for those wanting to learn to listen to jazz with insight and understanding.⁶¹ From the perspective of Homer and oral composition, this section of the book is particularly apposite. The second half of the appendix begins: ‘The best way to study improvisation is to compare different versions of the same piece, by the same artist and by different ones, from the same era and from several eras.’⁶² This is precisely what Lord refers to when he is studying Serbo-Croatian songs: ‘a song is the story about a given hero, but its expressed forms are multiple, and each of these expressed forms or tellings of the story is itself a separate song, in its own right, authentic and valid as a song unto itself ’.⁶³ He displays side by side several versions of poems in order to illustrate the use of formula and theme in this poetry.⁶⁴ Porter, Ullman, and Hazell do something similar in their appendix when they set out improvised versions of parts of the song ‘Embraceable You’:⁶⁵ Original melody by Gershwin Billie Holiday, vocal version Pee Wee Russell, clarinet solo Charlie Parker, alto saxophone solo, take 1 Charlie Parker, alto saxophone solo, take 2 Ornette Coleman, tenor saxophone solo.

Each version is accompanied by a commentary and analysis, describing how the artist takes the existing song and ‘tells’ it in his or her unique way, staying closer to or venturing further from the underlying chord progression, each employing recognizable melodic motifs. As Porter, Ullman, and Hazell say:

⁶⁰ Occasionally an LP or CD will include multiple ‘takes’ of a piece; they would be included precisely because each has qualities that would be lost if only one version were saved. Such multiple takes should not be considered as various ‘drafts’ of the final product, as is suggested by two authors quoted disapprovingly in Smith (1991), 31 2. ⁶¹ Porter, Ullman, and Hazell (1993); app. 1 is on pp. 449 59. ⁶² Porter, Ullman, and Hazell (1993), 454. ⁶³ Lord (2000), 100. ⁶⁴ Lord (2000), esp. ch. 4, ‘The Theme’, 68 98. ⁶⁵ Porter, Ullman, and Hazell (1993), 455 9.

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‘The jazz musician’s traditional task is spontaneously to compose new melodies that fit the chord progression.’ Indeed, they continue: ‘a nearly infinite number of melodies may fit any song’s chord progression’.⁶⁶ And for the person listening and attempting to understand better: ‘a listener should try to become familiar with the jazz traditions which inform a particular performance’.⁶⁷ Throughout their book, Porter, Ullman, and Hazell are constantly using such language in their descriptions of jazz improvisation, language that resonates with the student of Homer. Needless to say, the quantity of available material of improvised jazz solos is almost limitless, that of the Serbo-Croatian poems somewhat less so but still substantial, while the Homeric evidence of different ‘versions’ is by far the least copious. This last situation is at least partially due to the fact that over time the Homeric ‘received text’ or ‘vulgate’ has achieved prominence to such a degree that competing versions have been almost completely eradicated: the standard text has driven out all competitors, particularly the sorts of textual variations found in the ‘eccentric’ Ptolemaic papyri.⁶⁸ (Also, of course, physical deterioration over the centuries has led to the disappearance of the vast majority of manuscripts that once existed.)

EXPANSION AND CONTRACTION, E S P E CI A L L Y I N ‘T YP E S C E NE S ’ By including or excluding particular elements, the oral poet can create shorter and longer versions of episodes, particularly the so-called ‘type scenes’.⁶⁹ Continuing with the arming scene theme, we compare several significant arming scenes in the Iliad, those of Paris, Agamemnon, Patroclus, and Achilles.⁷⁰ I start with that of Paris, already examined above for slightly different reasons. This arming scene is the shortest of the four, perhaps reflecting Paris’ ‘un-warrior-like’ status in comparison with the other three, or perhaps because it is the first arming scene in the Iliad. At any rate, I use it here as the ‘basic’ arming scene, from which the other three are expanded versions; all four share a common ‘core’ of lines which are repeated identically in each case—and hence are ‘formulas’ in Lord’s sense. Paris’ arming contains nine lines, of which eight are repeated identically or nearly so in the other three cases; and always in the same order. I label them from a to h. The fourth line in ⁶⁶ Porter, Ullman, and Hazell (1993), 449; compare the use of the word ‘infinite’ in the subtitle of Berliner (1994). ⁶⁷ Porter, Ullman, and Hazell (1993), 450. ⁶⁸ See Nagy (2004), 27 ff., for an account of how the textual fluidity of the Homeric poems evolved into textual fixity over a period of several centuries. ⁶⁹ These include sacrifices, feasts, duels, invocations, and arming scenes. ⁷⁰ Lord (2000), 89 ff. also discusses these arming scenes.

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Paris’ arming scene is a ‘personal’ line, in which we are told something specific about Paris’ breastplate. In comparison, Agamemnon gets nine lines expanding on his breastplate. Table 16.1 illustrates the situation visually. First he (i.e. Paris) put the greaves around his legs, a fine ones, fitted with silver ankle pieces. b Second he put on his breastplate about his chest, c of his brother Lycaon; and fitted it to himself. specific to warrior And about his shoulders he threw his silver studded sword d of bronze, and then his shield great and sturdy. e And upon his mighty head he put a well made helmet f with horse hair crest; and terribly did the plume nod from above. g And he took a stout spear, which fitted his hands. h

Table 16.1 illustrates both the use of formulas when the same thing is being said, and also how the basic arming scene can be expanded depending on the occasion, and specifically on the stature of the warrior who is arming himself. So, the four warriors all have the same first three lines; then follows one or more ‘personal’ lines, in which details about the breastplate are given (interestingly, Achilles doesn’t have any of these lines). Next we have the sword, with a variant and two extra lines for Agamemnon, and then the shield. Paris and Patroclus have no added details about their shields, whereas Agamemnon and Achilles, the two greatest of the Greeks, have twelve and seven lines respectively for detailed descriptions of their shields.⁷¹ Then follow helmet Table 16.1 Warrior, book

Paris, 3

Agamemnon, 11

Patroclus, 16

Achilles, 19

greaves ankle pieces breastplate personal details sword shield helmet crest, plume spear concluding lines

a b c 1 line d e f g h (var.)

a b c 9 lines d variant + 2 e variant + 12 f variant g h (var.) 3 lines

a b c 1 line d e f g h (var.) 5 lines

a b c 0 lines d e+7 f g+4 h (var.) 4 lines

TOTAL LINES

9

34

14

23

⁷¹ In the previous book of the Iliad 18.478 606, Achilles’ new shield has been described in extraordinary detail, in the form of an ekphrasis, celebrated in W. H. Auden’s poem ‘The Shield of Achilles’.

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and crest, and finally the spear(s). In the case of Patroclus, who is wearing Achilles’ armour, it is specifically said that he did not carry Achilles’ famous spear; and in Achilles’ arming, we are told that he is carrying his personal spear, the one that no other Greek could wield. Again, we see that an arming scene can range from nine lines to almost four times that many; and that significant parts of it are made up of repeated formulas, with plenty of room for expansion.

JAZZ MUSICIANS CAN PLAY LONGER/SHORTER V ERSIONS OF THEMES, AND OF WHOLE S ONGS Smith puts this point succinctly: ‘Like an epic tale, a jazz improvisation is of indefinite length—dependent for the most part on the circumstances surrounding the particular performance.’⁷² We might think of the way a jazz soloist chooses to play one, two, or more choruses before giving the lead to another player.⁷³ And the audience can play a role in whether a performer chooses to continue playing or to ‘lay out’—much as we might imagine Homer’s audience to have interacted with him.⁷⁴ On a smaller scale, an improviser always has the option of playing non-stop over a given chord progression, or else of pausing for one or more bars, before starting to play once more (or in musical terms, playing fewer notes and more ‘rests’). Space does not allow me to discuss at length another important area of contact between Homeric poetry and jazz improvisation, namely intertextuality in Homer and ‘intermusicality’⁷⁵ in jazz. Suffice it to say that just as jazz musicians love to ‘quote’ pieces of other songs within their solos (often to the delight of the audience), so the topic of intertextuality, readily understandable in written texts, has recently begun to be explored in texts of oral poets such as Homer.⁷⁶

⁷² Smith (1991), 37. ⁷³ An ‘extreme’ example: at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956, tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves played twenty seven consecutive choruses of a piece with Duke Ellington’s band. See . The more usual would be one to four. ⁷⁴ In Plato’s Ion we see an example of a ‘performer’ of Homer’s poetry describing his interactions with his audience; however, the account is rather tongue in cheek and unflattering. ⁷⁵ The title of ch. 4 of Monson (1996). Note too how in her title the words ‘Saying Something’ are used to describe wordless musical improvisation. See also Berliner (1994), ch. 8: ‘Composing in the Moment: The Inner Dialogue and the Tale’. ⁷⁶ See e.g. Tsagalis (2008). Also in Bird (2010), ch. 3, I examine how a Ptolemaic variant in Iliad 6.280 92 creates intertextual links with other parts of the Iliad and Odyssey, heightening the emotional level of the original passage. Another fruitful, but more technical, topic of comparison is enjambment.

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CO NCLUSION I have attempted to show that the concept of ‘improvisation’—when properly understood—is applicable in similar ways to both Homer and jazz, and that in each, the peculiarities of form and style as compared to their written equivalents—e.g. Virgil and Beethoven—can best be explained by understanding how they were composed and performed (and transmitted). Further, the fact that each relies heavily (although not necessarily exclusively) upon the use of formulas/motifs, which are repeated and modified to a degree far exceeding that of their written counterparts, in no way undermines their creativity and artistic excellence.⁷⁷ Finally, each of these two genres encompasses compositions that are both traditional and individual. The performer is part of a tradition, but is also able to show his or her individuality and brilliance through skill, inspiration, and experience. I end, fittingly I think, with Lord, who although originally referring to the Serbo-Croatian singer, could equally be referring to Homer or to the jazz improviser: The singer of tales is at once the tradition and an individual creator . . . [who] at the moment of performance, . . . produces something unique.⁷⁸

⁷⁷ Smith (1991), 36 suggests that new models of analysis are needed for evaluating improvised music as opposed to written music, just as they are for oral poetry versus written poetry. See also Love (2016), for ‘a new aesthetic of the improvised jazz solo’. ⁷⁸ Lord (2000), 4, 279 n. 7.

17 ‘Now hear this’ Text and Performance in Christopher Logue’s War Music (1959–2011) Henry Power

The Literary voice is a fabrication. In verse, sound and sense are inextric able. Read silently, or aloud, poems perform. Logue, Prince Charming (1999)

Christopher Logue’s first translation from the Iliad was broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme in 1959. Logue had been commissioned by a young producer named Donald Carne-Ross to create a version of the passage in the Iliad where Achilles fights the River Scamander. The poem, which was published in Encounter in the same year, opens with Achilles taunting the dying Asteropaeus (unnamed by Logue) about his inferior ancestry: From a duck’s egg, a duck. Doubtless his relative Scamander Will cleanse this dead, wet, wreck of an obstinate man. A River king came in his mother’s mother’s slit so, proud of it, He went for me, the one plain King’s grandchild, and got killed.¹

These first four lines give a strong foretaste of Logue’s later Homeric poems. Concepts have been imported from later or parallel traditions. ‘From a duck’s egg, a duck’—which Logue always read with a heavy pause at the comma— seems to turn on its head the Finnish tradition that the universe hatched from a duck’s egg; neither Achilles nor Asteropaeus—nor anyone else in the Iliad— can escape their heredity. The opening phrase is a statement of the obvious, which borders on the bathetic. There is something odd, too, in its appearance in direct speech. Achilles—not for the last time in Logue’s poem—has a frame ¹ Logue (2015a), 315. Further page references to the Collected War Music are given in the text, preceded by CWM.

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of reference that goes way beyond that of his Homeric counterpart. His epic grandiloquence has dropped away, and been replaced by a jarring—even crude—colloquialism. That change of register is made more striking by the way in which Logue has grafted in phrases which have no equivalent in the Greek, and which seem to have borrowed from elsewhere. ‘From a duck’s egg, a duck’ is one example. The reference to Zeus as ‘the one plain king’—possibly inspired by, or lifted from, Henry V’s description of himself as a ‘plain king’ (Act 5, Scene 2)—is another. Achilles’ over-sexualized account of Asteropaeus’ lineage perhaps owes something to Logue’s sideline as a writer of pornographic fiction; also in 1959, desperate for cash, he published Lust under the pseudonym ‘Count Palmiro Vicarion’. ‘If you particularise too closely about the union,’ Carne-Ross wrote in his comments on a first draft, ‘you will sound very like Logue and not at all like Homer.’² All the same, Logue retained the word ‘slit’, which Carne-Ross had asked him to replace with ‘sex’. In any case, it is beyond doubt that Logue brings idioms from a wide range of sources into play, making no attempt to maintain the register of the Greek. What does survive, however, is the energy of Achilles’ vaunting dismissal of his rival. In his autobiography, Prince Charming (1999), Logue gives an account of the way he composed this first Homeric translation: As time went by, when I walked up to the Gate for a newspaper or as far as Kensington Gardens for a stroll, I found myself thinking of Achilles and Scamander, running through the events listed as easily as I might the alphabet. More, I could reverse the sequence to test its strength overall, as painters hold a canvas to a mirror to inspect its composition afresh. And when this my inspec tion, so to speak provoked ideas of what might be added to it from a different part of the Iliad, or for that matter, from the day’s newspaper, I would realize I had come without means to write, and repeating the possibilities in my head, I hurried to the nearest newsagent’s for a jotter and a pencil.³

Looking through Logue’s archives, it is apparent that he often failed even to make it to the shops for a notepad. He scribbled on whatever he could find: paper napkins, bus tickets, takeaway menus. And, just as often, he scribbled nothing himself, simply cutting—or tearing—an apposite turn of phrase or an adaptable image out of a newspaper or magazine. Logue inherited his interest in clippings from his father who (we learn from Logue’s autobiography) ‘liked to clip absurd stories from the newspapers’.⁴ Logue kept scrapbooks throughout his life, and in the 1960s was to become one of the best-known gatherers of clippings in the country; he compiled two weekly columns for Private Eye: ‘True Stories’ and ‘Pseud’s Corner’ (the latter of which is still running).

² Carne Ross to Logue, 2 February 1959, Christopher Logue Papers, Paterno Library, State College, PA (Box 12, Folder 5). ³ Logue (1999), 222. ⁴ Logue (1999), 87.

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Each fortnight he selected a handful of excerpts—some selected for their implausibility, others because they were comically pretentious—from dozens that were sent in by Private Eye readers. Favourite reader submissions were pasted into scrapbooks and preserved (Logue did not like to throw clippings away); several huge scrapbooks now survive in Logue’s archives. The success of Logue’s version of Iliad 22 encouraged him to undertake further translations—if that is quite the right word; Logue called them ‘accounts’—of Homer over the next five decades. The final instalment of Logue’s Homer, to which he gave the global title War Music, was Cold Calls, published in 2005. As the years went by, Logue’s idiosyncratic working methods became more pronounced: the disparate origins of his Homeric poem were ever clearer. To give one prominent example, the lines with which Zeus surveys the Trojan plain after a day’s fighting were taken verbatim from a New Yorker piece on the first Gulf War: ‘He looks | Back to the Ridge that is, save for a million footprints, | Empty now.’⁵ And the title of Logue’s 2002 instalment (from which those lines are quoted) seems at first to be an indistinct but evocative description of the angry haze of Homeric battle scenes: All Day Permanent Red. But the phrase is in fact the name of an Estée Lauder lipstick used by Logue’s wife.⁶ By the time Logue came to write All Day Permanent Red, he was physically assembling his accounts of Homer out of his various clippings. Snippets from adverts and magazines, together with Post-it notes on which Logue had written his found phrases, were pasted on to spools of printer paper. Besides the lifelong interest in culling phrases and passages from unlikely places, Logue also indulged another habit from an early age: theft. Logue was frequently in trouble as a child for stealing from a newsagent, or for robbing a small girl of her ice cream ‘at toy pistol point’. He was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for stealing Army Pay Books in 1945. His greatest act of theft, though was of a distinctly literary nature, when an 8-year-old Logue was asked to write out a poem: ‘Secretly, I put my name, not Kipling’s, at the end of my fair copy of “Gunga Din”. I took care that Miss Crowe did not learn of this.’ It is hard not to connect Logue’s habit of stealing—or, more pertinently, his tendency to linger over moments of theft when writing his memoirs—with his use of found or borrowed materials to piece together his Homer.⁷ There is interesting work to be done on the way in which Logue’s borrowings, clippings, and thefts relate to the work of earlier translators—and above all the early eighteenth-century versions of Alexander Pope. Pope, though he did

⁵ Cf. Hersh (2000), 49 82: ‘That afternoon, Le Moyne took Linda Suttlehan on a helicopter tour. “I flew around expecting to see a battlefield,” Suttlehan told me. Instead she saw “millions of footprints in the sand” among hundreds of smoking vehicles.’ ⁶ Rosemary Hill, personal correspondence, 13 November 2015. ⁷ On Logue’s interest in theft, see Wilson (2016).

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not exactly share Logue’s interest in newspaper clippings and advertisements, also translated Homer while drawing on existing literary resources; one cannot read a hundred lines of his translations without encountering a fragment of Virgil, Shakespeare, or Milton.⁸ Logue, though he sometimes objected to the decorous formality of the poet he dismissed as ‘Miss Pope’, was well aware of Pope’s working methods, and approvingly marked up his own copy of Pope’s Iliad to indicate where Pope had repurposed a line from an earlier poet.⁹ For now I want simply to stress the fact that both poets approached the act of translation as a kind of collage. As H. A. Mason wrote (echoing Coleridge) of Pope’s famous version of the scene of the Trojan campfires at the end of Book 8, the passage seems ‘composed uniquely of the best ingredients’.¹⁰ Logue also shared with Pope a particular interest in the typography and layout of his poems.¹¹ In Logue’s case this no doubt stemmed from his simultaneous work in the emerging field of poster poetry; over the course of the 1960s (and working with several collaborators), he created a number of works whose meaning resided in the physical arrangement of words on the page. This aspect of Logue’s work had a huge impact on War Music, in which typography is manipulated to startling effect. To give one striking example, at the moment when Apollo deals Patroclus his final blow, the god’s name is stretched out in huge capitals across two pages, and the main verb—struck— delayed to the top of the following page (CWM, 246–8). Elsewhere, the names of Greek and Trojan warriors are arranged into fighting formation—like football teams in matchday programmes (CWM, 164). * * * * * Logue’s proclivities and working methods—his fixation on the physical assembly of his manuscript and the physical presentation of his text—might seem at odds with the origins of War Music in radio broadcast. But for Logue the visual presentation of the text was a crucial part of its performative aspect. Not only did the changes in font size and layout register—or perhaps memorialize—specific aspects of the poem’s intended performance, serving as a reminder of the poem’s orality. They can also be a kind of performance in and of themselves; the arrangement of Greek warriors’ names into match formation does not help the reader to translate text into sound. Instead, it directly communicates a sense of the spatial layout of the battlefield, as well as providing a kind of visual simile not available to listeners. Such visual play was ⁸ For the best account of Pope’s borrowings, see Mack (1967), liii lxii and Hopkins (2012), 179 81. ⁹ I have consulted Logue’s annotated copy of Pope’s Iliad, ed. by Stephen Shankman (Pope 1996), now in the possession of the poet’s widow, Rosemary Hill. ¹⁰ Mason (1972), 67. On this passage, see further Hopkins (2012), 188 91; Sowerby (2005), 301 10. ¹¹ On Pope’s interest in typography, see McLaverty (2001).

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familiar to Logue, since much of his creative output from 1958 onwards was in the form of poster poems—works whose innovative typography is fundamental to their meaning. One such example is the 1969 poster Manifesto, made in collaboration with the artist Derek Boshier: WHEREAS IN FORMER TIMES POEMS WERE WRITTEN FOR PRINT WE DECLARE THE BOOK HAS EXPLODED THE ANCIENT WAY IS THE NEW WAY. THE POET’S SHOP IS IN HIS THROAT. HIS FACTORY HIS BODY. HIS PACKAGING DEPARTMENT IS HIS MIND. HIS CUSTOMERS ALL THOSE WHO FEEL THE COLD. A BOOK IS NO MORE THAN A STORAGE UNIT FOR POEMS.¹²

The poster illustrates the tussle that one often finds within Logue; his modernist aesthetic is awkwardly—fruitfully—at odds with his yearning for an older, purer form of poetry. Manifesto, with its words capitalized, centrejustified, and displayed against a grid of lime green and shocking pink, acts as its own performance; there is little sense that it is designed to be read aloud. But it suggests an affinity between the age that produced it—in which ‘THE BOOK HAS EXPLODED’—and the ancient world, where poetry was a fundamentally aural experience. Logue announces the return of a time when a written text cannot be directly (that is, sensually) experienced, but can form the basis of such an experience.¹³ The poster poem occupies a curious position in this narrative; it is a printed text that has managed to escape the confines of the book in order to offer an immediate quasi-sensual experience to the passing reader. Nonetheless, Manifesto makes it clear that Logue regards a poem’s life and meaning as being closely bound up with its orality: ‘THE POET’S SHOP IS IN HIS THROAT.’ And in fact, many of the scraps that Logue has gathered into his manuscript are precisely intended to awaken the senses. Logue told the Paris Review in an interview in 1993: ‘Homer is full of noises. So, although I know it sounds a bit daft, I collect noises, the sound of steel keys hitting concrete perhaps, or a letter dropping into a half-filled post box.’¹⁴ War Music is indeed full of such found noises, though their eventual form is often surreally enlarged. The Greeks unsheathe their swords and ‘this dis-scabbarding was heard in Troy | Much like a shire-sized dust-sheet torn in half ’ (CWM, 90). They shout their support for Agamemnon, and it is ‘As if the hides from which 10,000 shields were ¹² Christopher Logue and Derek Boshier, Manifesto (1969), 101.5 × 64.5 cm, screenprint. ¹³ On the relationship between written and spoken texts in the ancient world, see Starr (1991). ¹⁴ Guppy (1993).

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made | Came back to life and bellowed all at once’ (CWM, 82). The thunder heard on the Trojan plain is ‘The kind that sounds like cloud-sized snooker balls knocking together’ (CWM, 327). Some of Logue’s noises are just noises. He is good at transcribing the ‘thock’ of an axe blade hitting the side of a tree, the ‘eee eee’ sobbed out by Achilles after Patroclus’ death, or the ‘whumping’ of a helicopter in the dunes.¹⁵ All this suggests that Logue paid close attention to the sound of his poem— something that is strongly apparent in those first four lines of ‘Achilles Fights the River’. Here, the heavy comma (over which, as we have heard, Logue always lingered in performance) in the opening phrase (‘From a duck’s egg, a duck’) adds to the sense of bathos. And there is something strongly mimetic about the cluster of stressed, assonant syllables in the second line: ‘Scamander | Will cleanse this dead, wet, wreck of a man.’ These are words that demand to be picked through, as Achilles foresees the river picking Asteropaeus’ bones clean. As a producer, Carne-Ross had a strong commitment to the spoken word, and a resistance to turns of phrase that might prove unable to lift themselves off the paper. As we will see, this commitment reveals itself clearly in his correspondence with Logue, where he repeatedly distinguishes between what will work on the radio and what might work in print. What Logue strives to do above all else is to conjure the battle scenes for his listeners—or, rather, to make his listeners see them for themselves. Each radio broadcast of War Music was cut through with injunctions to the listener to assist the speaker in realizing a particular vision. The start of Kings (1991), which corresponds to the opening lines of the Iliad, is a case in point: Picture the east Aegean sea by night, And on a beach aslant its shimmering Upwards of 50,000 men Asleep like spoons besides their lethal Fleet. Now look along that beach, and see Between the keels hatching its western dunes A ten foot high reed wall faced with black clay Split by a double doored gate; Then through the gate a naked man Run with what seems to break the speed of light Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible Beneath inch high waves that slide Over each other’s luminescent panes; Then kneel among those panes, burst into tears, and say: ‘Mother . . . (CWM, 9)

¹⁵ On Logue’s sound effects, see Greenwood (2009).

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The line that eventually took its place in the collected War Music was altered from the first published (and broadcast) version: ‘Think of the east Aegean sea by night’, and the final version perhaps offers a clearer instruction to the reader.¹⁶ But in any case, the opening of the poem is (like the opening of the Iliad itself) imperative in mood; first we are told to conjure an image of the Aegean shore, next to look along it—to place ourselves within the picture we have created. The third imperative verb—see—governs the rest of the second paragraph and the listener’s act of visualization gives way to Achilles’ actions only as he emerges from the gate and runs to the waves to address his mother. The final line of the paragraph is left ambiguous. A careful reader, picking through the syntax, will appreciate easily enough that kneel is governed by see—and that we are asked to imagine Achilles (the ‘naked man’) kneeling in the waves. But a listener might not. As Matthew Reynolds puts it, ‘the hint of imperative lingers, and holds out an invitation to readers to think of themselves, too, running and kneeling and bursting into tears, and speaking with the voice of this man whom we have not yet been told is Achilles’.¹⁷ This immersion in the narrative depends on its performance. And Logue’s poem is full of instructions: ‘Now hear this’ (CWM, 225); ‘Imagine wolves’ (CWM, 230); ‘Hear the child | Shouting the shouts of an heroic Lord’ (CWM, 158); ‘Slip into the fighting’ (CWM, 166); ‘See if you can imagine how it looked’ (CWM, 237). Often these imperatives are given in the language of film-making (‘reverse the shot | Go close’, CWM, 21) But what they encourage is not simply a visualization of, but an immersion in, the battle scenes of the Iliad. One especially brutal example comes in All Day Permanent Red: Drop into it. Noise so clamorous it sucks. You rush your pressed flower hackles out To the perimeter. And here it comes: That unpremeditated joy as you The Uzi shuddering warm against your hip Happy in danger in a dangerous place Yourself another self you found at Troy Squeeze nickel through that rush of Greekoid scum! Oh wonderful, most wonderful, and then again more wonderful A bond no word or lack of words can break, Love above love! And here they come again the noble Greeks, Ido, a spear in one a banner in his other hand

¹⁶ Logue (1991), 3; my emphasis. The poem was first broadcast on Radio 3 on 24 March 1991. ¹⁷ Reynolds (2011), 221.

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Your life at every instant up for Gone. And candidly, who gives a toss? Your heart beats strong. Your spirit grips. King Richard calling for another horse (his fifth). King Marshal Ney shattering his sabre on a cannon ball. King Ivan Kursk, 22.30 hrs, July 4th to 14th ’43, 7000 tanks engaged, ‘ . . . he clambered up and pushed a stable bolt Into that Tiger tank’s red hot machine gun’s mouth And bent the bastard up. Woweee!’ Where would we be if we had lost? (CWM, 167 8)

No amount of careful unpicking will ever reveal the precise relationship between speaker, warrior, and listener at this moment. We have slipped sufficiently far into the fighting that it is impossible to determine whether Logue is addressing a Trojan fighter, experiencing a kind of epiphany on the battlefield, or whether it is Logue’s reader/listener who is imagined to have found another self at Troy. The discordant anachronisms and ever-widening frame of reference—the shuddering uzi, the quotation from Love’s Labour’s Lost (‘Oh wonderful, most wonderful . . . ’), the roll-call of historic generals— all implicate the audience. The most striking example of Logue’s immersion of his audience comes at the start of Patrocleia. The words with which Logue opens the section—‘Now hear this’—invite the audience to listen attentively; the passage which follows describes the pivotal moment in the poem: Patroclus’ visit to Achilles’ tent in order to ask if he can take his friend’s place in battle. But listeners may alternatively feel themselves being positioned emphatically and vividly within the time, the place, and the particularity of the episode: Now. Here. This. These are in fact the first uttered words of War Music (since Logue never chose to include ‘Achilles Fights the River’ in any collected edition), and they prepare the reader for the immersive experience that follows. * * * * * When we consider Logue’s commitment to the orality of War Music, we need to remember not only its origins in radio, but also the oral origins of the Iliad itself. In Prince Charming, Logue recalls conversations in which Carne-Ross stressed the poem’s origins in a long oral tradition. When Logue ‘wanted to know exactly what it was Homer said in the first instance’, Carne-Ross replied that ‘There is no exactly, no first instance’.¹⁸ Carne-Ross would read Homer aloud to Logue in Greek, and in his commentaries on the drafts of early sections, he urges him to ¹⁸ Logue (1999), 223.

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recapture the sound of the Greek—not the actual sound, presumably, since Logue was Greek-less, but the fact of its sound. Here he is in February 1959, commenting on an early draft of ‘Achilles Fights the River’: How many times has one read about ‘swift footed’ Achilles, or even, better, Achilles, ‘that great runner.’ Then you write: Aoi! But that Greek could run! And the thing comes alive. The reality, the pressure of reality that catches at one from the Greek words, however often they are repeated, is there. The savage enormous figure whooping over the dry Greek soil. You are the only person so far who has had the wits, or perhaps just the ability, to take on from where Ezra left off, with his Murmur of old men’s voices And his other unforgettable Homeric echoes. The whole thing is wildly exciting.¹⁹

It is notable that the elements of Logue’s translation actively encouraged by Carne-Ross are the oral aspects—the exclamations. Carne-Ross’s image of Achilles ‘whooping over the dry Greek soil’ is an interesting one, since the situation described by Logue in ‘Achilles Fights the River’ is far from arid; here we see Achilles ‘thigh-deep’ in the Scamander. It seems that Carne-Ross identifies the poet with Achilles at this point—rising above the dryness of Greek scholarship.²⁰ It is his orality—his savage whooping—which elevates him. Carne-Ross sees Logue as a successor to Ezra Pound, whom Logue idolized as a young man and whose Cantos are a major influence on War Music. When Carne-Ross relates the sound of War Music to Pound’s ‘Murmur of old men’s voices’, he refers Logue to a celebrated passage from early in the Cantos. And the wave runs in the beach groove: ‘Eleanor, ἑλέναυς and ἑλέπτολις!’ And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat, Ear, ear for the sea surge, murmur of old men’s voices: ‘Let her go back to the ships, Back among Grecian faces, lest evil come on our own, Evil and further evil, and a curse cursed on our children, Moves, yes she moves like a goddess And has the face of a god and the voice of Schoeney’s daughters, And doom goes with her in walking, Let her go back to the ships, back among Grecian voices.’²¹ ¹⁹ Carne Ross to Logue, undated letter, probably written in February 1959. Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin, Logue papers 4.4. ²⁰ One parallel would be Dryden’s comparison of his own labours in translating the Aeneid to that of Aeneas in carrying his father from the burning ruins of Troy. See Davis (2008), 181 3. ²¹ Pound (1970), 24.

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Pound strives in this passage to capture in English the sound of the Greek in two particular Homeric passages. In his essay on the ‘Early Translators of Homer’ Pound recalls the noise made by the sea—παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης (Iliad 1. 34)—as ‘the magnificent onomatopoeia, as the rush of the waves on the sea beach and their recession’, while he also finds in Iliad 3.156–60 ‘the authentic cadence of speech’—which he finds an equivalent for in the ‘murmur of old men’s voices’.²² The Cantos are an interesting point of comparison for War Music, and not only because Logue shares with Pound a preoccupation with assembling his poem from a range of disparate sources. There is also a tension in both poems between the impulse towards orality, on the one hand, and their remarkable textuality (the use of pictograms, the manipulation of typography) on the other. But while Pound provides echoes of specific Homeric passages, Logue makes no attempt to put the reader ‘back among Grecian voices’. Rather, he offers an account (to use his preferred term) of the Iliad, in which he strives to make the reader/ listener hear. Thanks to the efforts of Christopher Reid, all of Logue’s Homeric accounts are now gathered into a single volume. But though that volume is welcome, it cannot be called a definitive, or stable, text. Logue was, as Reid writes in his editorial note in the collected edition, ‘a habitual, and even an obsessive, reviser of his work’ (CWM, 300). Logue regarded his own practice as a piecer-together and reworker of poems as analogous to that of Homer. He had read a certain amount of material on the oral origins of Homeric epic while working on the earliest sections of War Music, when Donald Carne-Ross would provide him with important pieces of secondary reading; and both Carne-Ross and the classicist Peter Levi continued to recommend works of Homeric criticism to Logue over the next decade. As was the case with much criticism from the middle decades of the twentieth century, these works were often concerned with processing the findings of Milman Parry’s work on the oral formulas in Homeric epic. One such work was Ann Chalmers Watts’s The Lyre and the Harp, an enthusiastically (and somewhat combatively) annotated copy of which survives among Logue’s papers. One line singled out by Logue for particular approval (underlined, with a double tick in the margin) is Watts’s statement that the ‘art of composition, which is simultaneously the art of performing, in an epic song inevitably results in originality’, and there is no doubt that he was attracted by the parallels between Homer’s technique and his own.²³ In 1969, he wrote (in an introduction to Pax that was never published): Homer composed the poem in his head and published it with his mouth. No doubt he worked the same way as literalistic poets, trying this beside that,

²² Pound (1954), 250.

²³ Chalmers Watts (1969), 33.

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swapping this for that until it was as good as he could get it. Performance would have played a critical function. Testing a section in public would lead to revision.²⁴

We might note that this introduction was written in the same year as Logue and Boshier’s poster poem Manifesto—and its terms are strikingly similar, the moment of performance being identical with the act of composition (‘THE POET’S SHOP IS IN HIS THROAT | HIS FACTORY HIS BODY’). Logue is also committed to the idea of the Homeric text as something intrinsically fluid—something that is gestured towards at various points within War Music. When Patroclus insists on fighting in Achilles’ place, the narratorial voice interjects: In this way, in words Something like those written above, Patroclus begged for death.²⁵

The lines reflect both on the impossibility of translation from one language to another, and on the unfixed nature of the Homeric text—this oral poem of which (as Carne-Ross told Logue) ‘there is no exactly, no first instance’. This view of Homer, while it no doubt has its basis in Logue’s reading, also reflects his own practice of ‘swapping this for that’, and suggests that Logue saw his own working practices as fundamentally similar to Homer’s. Logue may not have worked in his head—indeed his working methods generated paper on an extraordinary scale—but the various sections of War Music went through countless iterations. For every page of verse, Logue wrote (and preserved) several slightly different drafts (sometimes as many as fifty), which record his gradual alterations to the text. Nor did the process of revision end with publication. Logue also marked up published copies of his work, and incorporated changes into subsequent editions. Indeed the lines quoted above about the uncertainty of Patroclus’ precise words, written in 1962, were themselves amended for the 1981 edition of War Music. In all editions from that date the narrator tells us simply: ‘And so he begged for death’ (CWM, 226). The reflection on the instability of the text has disappeared—but that very erasure underlines the text’s fluidity. It seems that Logue regarded the act of assembling his text—brought together from so many disparate sources, and obsessively reworked—as a kind of performance in itself. But often Logue’s alterations—like those he imagined Homer making—would emerge from the process of rehearsal and live performance. Logue continued to write his accounts of Homer with performance in mind, and these were always broadcast on the radio before appearing in print. Subsequently, Logue (together with the actor Alan Howard

²⁴ Unpublished introduction to Pax, c.1969, Harry Ransom Center.

²⁵ Logue (1962), 5.

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and the director Lianne Aukin) would put on staged readings of the various instalments. The staging of these performances tended to reinforce the sense of the text emerging during the performance itself, with Logue seated at a writing table to the rear of the stage, and responsible for the narratorial directions and instructions, while Howard performed to the front. As Howard put it in an interview, Logue ‘is sort of there as the person who documents and produces a text. And then somebody else wants to get up and say it!’²⁶ The relationship between the various performances was a dynamic one. This was partly out of necessity; to give one example, when Kings was first broadcast on Radio 3, in March 1991, it had a running time of 107 minutes. When Howard and Logue performed it at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe later that summer it had to be cut to 70 minutes. Logue told an interviewer in the same year that poetry readings have a rather poor reputation, rightly, and it’s partly because the readers are unprofessional; they give the impression they are doing the audience a favour. [ . . . ] But also most poetry readings are not critical events. They are full of self indulgence. I’ve found that when I’m working on text with Lianne and Alan it’s a critical event, because I alter the text in relation to what I hear. I start off with one text and I finish with another.²⁷

Logue would mark up printed editions of War Music during rehearsals and then incorporate revisions into subsequent editions; the changes to the start of Kings (discussed above) are a case in point. But this insistence on the alteration of the text as a result of live performance—and indeed, the staging of the live performance to suggest composition in performance—is part of a broader view of the creation of the text as a performative act. Carne-Ross, in an early essay on Logue’s Patrocleia, describes Logue as reviving a lost form of response to Homer. He is, says Carne-Ross, ‘in the position of the Homeridae, who would have felt free to retouch their great inheritance’.²⁸ The Homeridae were, it should be noted, a group of oral performers whose adaptations of the Homeric texts would have been undertaken during (and as a consequence of) performance. Carne-Ross is, of course, paying tribute to the extraordinary freedoms of Logue’s Homer, and his determination to make it speak to the current age (he spoke similarly of Pope). But the remark also points to Logue’s peculiar approach to the physical assembly of his text—and his readiness to revise it continually, both before and during its broadcast and live performance.

²⁶ Jeremy Kingston, ‘Compact Imagination of an Actor and A Poet’, The Times, 15 August 1991. ²⁷ Logue interviewed by Stephanie Billen, Scotland on Sunday, 18 August 1991. ²⁸ Carne Ross (1962).

18 Unfixing Epic Homeric Orality and Contemporary Performance Stephe Harrop

Almost a century ago, Milman Parry began to formulate a radical response to the so-called ‘Homeric Question’.¹ Identifying a series of recurring formulas operating within the Iliad and the Odyssey, he argued that these were markers of in-performance composition, a process by which pre-existing units of metrical phrasing could be combined and recombined in the moment of an epic’s live performance. This work was enriched by fieldwork among South Slavic epic-singers operating within living traditions, research which (following Parry’s early death) resulted in the seminal text The Singer of Tales (1960) written by his student Albert Lord.² Parry and Lord’s major innovation was to identify Homer as ‘a poet singer among poet singers’.³ Their Homer was an oral artist, making new songs on old themes, integrating traditional elements of poetic composition with the individual singer’s invention.⁴ According to this model, ancient epic songs were repeatedly and flexibly remade by generations of such poet-singers, rather than being the products of individual literary artists. Lord argues that ‘The songs were ever in flux and were crystalized by each singer only when he sat before an audience and told them the tale’.⁵ Since their first publication, all of these claims have been extensively contested and refined.⁶ But the central thesis of oral-poetic scholarship, that Homeric epic emerged out of oral traditions capable of generating works of great complexity and power, rooted in a shared corpus of heroic songs flexibly composed and recomposed during their live performance, has proved a major ¹ On the range of issues covered by the ‘Homeric Question’, see Turner (1996). ² For a summary of this work, see Foley (2002), 109 13. ³ Lord (2000), 150. ⁴ How far Parry and Lord saw the use of formulas as mechanical, and how much emphasis they gave to the singer’s individual creativity, is an area of ongoing debate. See Sale (1996), 377. ⁵ Lord (2000), 151. ⁶ For reflections on this process, see Foley (1996), Russo (1996), and Edwards (1996).

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stimulus both to scholars and to artists. This chapter examines the impact of these ideas upon the work of recent performance-makers, considering what a putative oral Homer means to contemporary artists, and how such ideas can inform or inspire the creation of new responses to ancient epic. Adaptations of epic are fast becoming part of the common currency of arts programming, and an increasingly visible component of classical reception studies. However, the influence of oral-poetic theories upon contemporary performancemakers is (as yet) an under-explored area of study, neglected by scholars whose literary expertise leads them to focus on dramatic texts and production histories, with each revisionary text or production regarded as a single, stable, and repeatable entity. The field of classical reception studies at present lacks the conceptual and theoretical means to engage effectively with works which deliberately exploit elements of ‘in-performance’ composition, and which positively value the qualities of fluidity and flexibility evoked by oral-poetic interpretations of ancient epic. Responding to this lacuna, this chapter uses the terminology of ‘fixed’ and ‘unfixed’ in order to identify a range of approaches to the modern reperformance of epic narratives. These terms are adapted from director Tim Carroll’s model of ‘fixed’ and ‘flowing’ elements within The Factory’s version of The Odyssey (discussed in more detail below). In a text which clearly echoes elements of Parry and Lord’s oral-poetic scholarship, Carroll writes: This principle of the fixed and the flowing is manifested in every part of the poem. Just as the formulas are fixed while their use is flowing, so Odysseus’ journeys flow around the Mediterranean while Penelope remains fixed on Ithaca. And this, I hope, is how it will be with our performance. The events of the story we have to tell are fixed; the circumstances in which we tell them will flow unpredictably.⁷

Carroll’s discussion does not imply a hierarchy between the ‘fixed’ and the ‘flowing’, but positions them as complementary and mutually constitutive elements of a single process of epic creativity. Similarly, this chapter’s proposed terminology aspires to highlight some of the ways in which ‘fixed’ and ‘unfixed’ elements can interact in order to create engaging reperformances, revisions, and recreations of ancient epic. For the purposes of the present discussion, the term ‘fixed’ denotes a text or production (or a part of a production) which, once made, remains relatively stable and consistent. In contrast, the term ‘unfixed’ describes performance structures designed to evolve, adapt, and respond to circumstance, their resulting unpredictability becoming a defining characteristic of the emerging work. But this is never a straightforward either/or situation. As Michael Wilson argues in Storytelling and Theatre (2006), the assumption that a performance is either wholly ‘learned’ (‘fixed’) or entirely ‘improvised’ ⁷ Carroll (2010).

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(‘unfixed’) seriously underplays the complexity of both the processes by which creative works are produced, and the (always, to some degree, variable) conditions of their live performance.⁸ The contemporary discipline of performance storytelling represents an important site for ‘unfixed’ reperformances of Homeric epic, perhaps the most prominent example being the work of Hugh Lupton and Daniel Morden, whose celebrated The Odyssey and The Iliad have toured both nationally and internationally, and who were awarded the Classical Association prize in 2005. The storytelling formats Pandvani 108 (a fast-paced series of extracts from world myth and epic, created in 2011 by Ben Haggarty of the Crick Crack Club) and Myth Off (a high-octane, slam-style competitive event, introduced to the UK by Clare Murphy in 2013) also offer fascinating examples of how oral traditions of epic- and myth-telling can inspire new fusions of ancient and modern performance practices. Contemporary storytelling practitioners, often explicitly drawing inspiration from oral-poetic traditions, emphasize the liveness of their craft, and the ways in which the in-performance recomposition of an old tale can give rise to new versions of inherited stories. However, current debates within UK storytelling also highlight the potential difficulties of any attempt to establish a rigid distinction between ‘fixed’ and ‘unfixed’ performances. Veteran storyteller Taffy Thomas offers a note of caution, describing how his own unscripted stories tend to ‘settle’ after repeated retellings, becoming more or less consistent, and only liable to change when ‘the performer is feeling especially creative’.⁹ In the light of such complexities, the ‘fixed’/‘unfixed’ continuum proposed within this chapter is best conceptualized not as a rigid binary, but as a sliding scale, with different performance works, and even different iterations of a single work, displaying ‘fixed’ and ‘unfixed’ characteristics to varying degrees, and at different moments. A brief survey of some recent remakings of Greek epic might help to indicate how reference to this ‘fixed’/‘unfixed’ continuum can promote a more nuanced understanding of the variety of ways in which current performance-makers respond to and adapt ideas of ancient orality. At the ‘fixed’ end of the scale are dramatic revisions of epic which are themselves scripted, stable, and repeatable, often associated with a famous modern author. Such play-texts frequently contest the events and meanings of ancient epic, sometimes explicitly citing the idea of an oral tradition, and the ability of poetsingers within such a context to generate multiple versions of an epic narrative, as authorizing their own revisionist strategies. For example, in the Author’s Introduction to The Penelopiad: A Play (2007) Margaret Atwood locates the drama as ‘an echo’ of an originating mythic event, already filtered through ‘the ⁸ Wilson (2006), 46. See also Foley’s arguments concerning the limitations of dichotomous thinking: Foley (2002), 36 8. ⁹ Wilson (2006), 192 3. Wilson’s use of the term ‘fixed’ in his interview with Thomas informs my own usage throughout this discussion.

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motherlode of mythic and legendary and therefore originally oral Trojan War material—fluid in nature, with different stories told in different ways in different places’.¹⁰ In the play, like the novel upon which it is based, Penelope challenges the ‘official version’ of the Odyssey,¹¹ complaining: ‘they turned me into a story; though not the kind of story I would have preferred to hear’.¹² ‘I’ll spin a thread of my own’ this Penelope announces, her respinning of the epic’s ‘official’ narrative drawing on a corpus of alternative myths which Atwood characterizes as those not selected for inclusion when the earliest, oral Odysseys became the singular epic poem familiar to modern readers.¹³ In this way, the Odyssey’s oral roots authorize the modern writer’s project of returning to a mythic ‘motherlode’, reselecting and recombining narrative elements which were once freely available to all performers of Odysseus’ homecoming, and which provide the twenty-first-century artist with a potent means of critiquing the ancient poem’s misogyny and violence. However, despite their frequent allusions to Homeric epic’s oral roots, it is also important to recognize that such works present their revisions of epic within formats which are themselves largely ‘fixed’. Even where a play-script (like The Penelopiad) takes up a subversive posture towards its own literary antecedents, the performance of such work most frequently aspires to be a skilful repetition of an agreed and unchanging ‘fixed’ text. An Iliad (2010),¹⁴ by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, highlights the very limited degree to which later reperformers might be expected (or permitted) to ‘unfix’ elements of this kind of authored play-text. The drama’s central figure is called ‘The Poet’, a world-weary witness of war, whose battered presence invokes notions of an ancient, oral bard. He is, according to the Authors’ Note, ‘a man (or woman) who ekes out a living by begging a crowd to stop, listen, and imagine for a while’. In this sense, he perhaps recalls Derek Walcott’s singer ‘Blind’ Billy Blue in his 1992 stage adaptation of The Odyssey.¹⁵ But, at key moments of the play, The Poet’s recollections of Troy become entangled with his remembrance of other, later wars. Concerned that the Homeric Catalogue of Ships is meaningless to his current audience, he explains: The point is, on all these ships, are boys from every small town in Ohio [ . . . ] the boys of Nebraska and South Dakota . . . the twangy boys of Memphis . . . the boys of San Diego, Palo Alto, Berkeley, Antelope Valley . . . ¹⁶

¹⁰ Atwood (2007), v. ¹¹ The eponymous heroine of the stage version is a more trustworthy narrator than her counterpart in the novel, which repeatedly implies that Penelope’s narrative may be concealing, rather than revealing, truths. See e.g. Atwood (2005), 150, 169, 180. ¹² Atwood (2007), 4 5. ¹³ Atwood (2007), 5, v. ¹⁴ On An Iliad, see also Rankine, Ch. 27 in this volume. ¹⁵ Peterson and O’Hare (2014), 11. See further McConnell, Ch. 28 in this volume. ¹⁶ Peterson and O’Hare (2014), 27.

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And the list goes on. An authorial footnote explains that the play’s later producers should ‘pick a couple of nearby places that produce enlisted men and women, and insert them’,¹⁷ in order to find an equivalence for the play’s address to local communities in proximity to its earliest performance spaces. A comparable moment occurs towards the drama’s close, when the death of Hector sets The Poet seeking a comparison through a five-page litany of the world’s major conflicts, beginning with the Peloponnesian War and finishing with: Iraq Pakistan Afghanistan Libya Syria . . .¹⁸ The authors’ final ellipsis again cues an advisory footnote for future directors/ performers: As time goes on, it may be necessary to add a war or wars at the end of the list to reflect current events. This should be done with great restraint and include only major conflicts.¹⁹

This is a relatively rare instance of a ‘fixed’ dramatic text authorizing its later performers to introduce their own additions, based on future global events.²⁰ However, Peterson and O’Hare’s tone is markedly cautious. Such alterations should be made with ‘great restraint’, and only in response to ‘major’ armed conflicts. The play’s writers explicitly evoke the importance of ‘ancient oral tradition’ in shaping their understanding of an epic story ‘spoken out loud and passed from storyteller to storyteller for centuries before it was ever written down’, and their footnotes do potentially allow later artists some small degree of flexibility, aimed at ensuring that The Poet’s song will ‘stay current’.²¹ However, these limited concessions do not seriously challenge the authoritative status of the play’s ‘fixed’, authored text. Rather, in their delineation of the precise moments at which textual flexibility might, under certain circumstances, be permitted, their concessions may actually serve to enhance the customary authority of the ‘fixed’ dramatic script. By contrast, the ‘unfixed’ end of the continuum is characterized by works which have significant elements of performer autonomy deliberately built into their format and structure. For example, The Factory’s version

¹⁷ Peterson and O’Hare (2014), 27. ¹⁸ Peterson and O’Hare (2014), 80 4. ¹⁹ Peterson and O’Hare (2014), 84. ²⁰ Compare Atwood (2007), 28, which authorizes the reinstatement of an excised passage, rather than the introduction of new text. ²¹ Peterson and O’Hare (2014), 13.

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of The Odyssey (first performed in 2012) locates its own ‘unfixed’ status at the heart of the work’s identity. The company made its name devising irregular pop-up performances of Hamlet and The Seagull in which revolving casts of actors had their roles decided via pre-show games of chance, and incorporated random props (brought along by the audience) into each one-off restaging of these classic texts. The company’s version of The Odyssey goes even further, abandoning the ‘fixed’ scripts which structured its previous shows to create almost wholly ‘unfixed’ performances. In The Factory’s The Odyssey, the twenty-four books of the ancient epic are improvised in response to a series of challenges and constraints generated by audience members pulling shards of pottery (each inscribed with an instruction) out of a passed-around hat.²² The notion of an oral Homer is central to this structure, as Carroll explains: We have learnt some fixed elements, especially of song and dance; but how these ‘formulas’ combine to tell the story will change from one performance to the next. Like ‘Homer’, we will have to decide in the moment which stories to tell and which to leave out; and, like ‘Homer’, we will have to adapt the telling of our stories to many different circumstances.²³

Depending on the particular audience(s) involved, and their degree of knowledge (or concern) regarding ‘correct’ responses to classical epic narrative, these interactions can lead to some striking revisions of familiar Homeric episodes. For example, at a performance of The Odyssey at The Nursery, London (July 2013), when Menelaus asked the audience for advice regarding the Old Man of the Sea, he was instructed ‘bite him’. He did, and the resulting scene diverged significantly, and with splendid absurdity, from its model in standard editions of the epic. The results of The Factory’s working methods may sometimes be chaotic, but such ‘unfixed’ performances should not be written off as mere undisciplined anarchy. As Carroll’s account of the group’s preparation (with its embedded appeal to Homeric ‘formulas’) reveals, a significant degree of training is required for a company to be able to improvise together effectively, and their ‘in-performance’ creative decisions are often underpinned by a shared repertoire of exercises, games, and songs. Storytelling practitioners, such as Morden and Lupton, similarly undertake rigorous and extensive training processes in order to be able to improvise fluently and engagingly before, and in response to, their changing live audiences. In Audience Participation in Theatre (2013) Gareth White borrows the term ‘procedural authorship’ from computer game designers to designate the process of establishing a

²² Sapsford, Ch. 14 in this volume, discusses another Odyssey in which audience members make decisions about the route taken through epic material, collaboratively created by New Movement Collective. ²³ Carroll (2010). See also Harrop (2013a).

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series of rules, practices, and protocols, which allow a performer to respond skilfully, in the moment of live encounter, to unpredictable interactions with an actively participating audience.²⁴ This term offers a useful way of conceptualizing the task of the performer within ‘unfixed’ performance works. Rather than learning the lines of a ‘fixed’ script,²⁵ the performer of ‘unfixed’ epic is more likely to be engaged in developing a deep personal knowledge and understanding of a given story, learning to improvise fluently within a group of collaborating artists, or mastering a series of skills, competencies, and creative procedures which may be called upon at any moment of their performance.²⁶ The resulting ‘unfixed’ works may benefit (as does The Factory’s The Odyssey) from an overt sense of jeopardy, with the audience wondering how (and, indeed, whether) performers will manage the feat of reperforming an epic narrative without the support of a ‘fixed’ text. However, they are also predicated upon what John Miles Foley calls ‘rule-governed flexibility’,²⁷ their characteristic combination of meticulous preparation and in-performance spontaneity serving as a profound imaginative link with practices of ancient epic as evoked by oral-poetic scholarship. There are also performances which occupy a middle ground, developing a complex, shifting fusion of the ‘fixed’ and the ‘unfixed’ within a single event. Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients offers a striking recent example of a performance work containing a significant degree of interplay between ‘fixed’ and ‘unfixed’ elements. The remainder of this chapter will analyse this example in detail, not only identifying the presence, but also beginning to analyse the potential value, of ‘unfixed’ elements within contemporary performances responding to ancient epic.²⁸ Brand New Ancients was developed by and first performed at the Battersea Arts Centre (London) in 2012, and is an extended poetic text following the lives of two brothers growing up in South London. The ‘Brand New Ancients’ of the title are our modern selves, trapped in daily drudgery and deprived of a sense of mythic context that might lend meaning and even grandeur to our struggles.²⁹ The piece passionately argues that

²⁴ White (2013), 31. ²⁵ In the Authors’ Note to An Iliad, line learning is represented as a crucial virtue for any potential performer of The Poet’s role. Peterson and O’Hare (2014), 13. ²⁶ Bird’s discussion of jazz improvisation, Ch. 16 in this volume, offers an illuminating parallel. ²⁷ Foley (2002), 132. ²⁸ The following discussion is based on my observations of four different performances of Brand New Ancients, in four different spaces: at the Battersea Arts Centre (Council Chamber) in September 2012, at the Royal Court Theatre in November 2013, at the Lyric, Hammersmith in January 2014, and at the Battersea Arts Centre (Grand Hall) in April 2014. This last was the work’s final performance. ²⁹ Tempest (2013), 3.

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the plight of a people who have forgotten their myths and imagine that somehow now is all that there is is a sorry plight;³⁰

Thus, the poem focuses on ‘Small heroics. Everyday epics’.³¹ Like Derek Walcott, Tempest (whose work as a writer and performer synthesizes spoken-word poetry and rap) claims never to have finished reading the Odyssey, and she has described parts of the Iliad as ‘boring’.³² And, despite a scatter of famous names (Pandora, Medea, etc.) used to point up the contrast between the world of myth and the modern mundane, this isn’t a poem which directly follows the plot of any extant ancient epic. However, a closer consideration of Brand New Ancients onstage offers a clearer sense of how the idea of an oral Homer may be informing Tempest’s performance strategies. Brand New Ancients is, in Tempest’s own description, a poem ‘written to be read aloud’.³³ But the stage set-up for the show goes some way beyond this modest prescription, with a four-piece band (cello, violin, drums/electrics, and tuba) ranged on a curved rostrum behind a central microphone. The positioning of this mic, downstage centre, would seem to fix the poet’s position. But from the get-go, Tempest subverts the formality (and implicit hierarchy) of this spatial arrangement, popping into the space in front of the mic to talk to her audience before the poem proper begins, to (in her own words) ‘say hi’. In November 2013, at the Royal Court Theatre, she used this moment to express her admiration for the building she found herself in, and for the writers who had worked in the space before her. She also talked about working with a ‘brilliant fucking storyteller called Daniel Morden’,³⁴ and gave a brief retelling of a fable she learned from him, about the need to clothe truth in the fabrics of story. She then introduced the band, and moved on to address the role of the audience in the event about to kick off: ‘I don’t want you to feel that you have to be invisible,’ she said. (A few months later, at the Lyric, Hammersmith—another formal theatre setting—Tempest said something similar: ‘I don’t want you to feel like you have to pretend you’re not here.’ Then she adds, ‘fourth wall . . . fuck that’, chuckling gruffly at her own naughtiness.) There is a lot going on in this low-key, off-the-cuff preamble. Tempest’s referencing of the Royal Court’s tradition of radical playwriting positions her as a (slightly overawed) successor to generations of literary artists, but her mention of Morden (a performance storyteller) also aligns her with orally inspired approaches to creating and transmitting narratives. The performing poet implicitly figures herself as poised between two traditions just as, spatially, ³⁰ Tempest (2013), 4. ³¹ Tempest (2013), 29. ³² McConnell (2014), 200. Tempest has, however, spoken about her admiration for Christo pher Logue, whose poetic responses to the Iliad inspired her own poem ‘War Music’. ³³ Tempest (2013), prefatory material. ³⁴ See further Wilson (2006), 166 70.

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she locates herself between the upstage ‘performance’ space (delineated by the fixed mic and the stage’s lighting state), and the more social, shared space of the auditorium. This positioning, like her invitation to the audience to resist ‘invisibility’,³⁵ runs counter to both the divisive architecture of the proscenium arch and the naturalist heritage of the Royal Court Theatre (famous for pioneering ‘kitchen sink’ dramas like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger). This is a smart choice. Tempest’s audience isn’t necessarily the Royal Court’s usual demographic. The evening after I was in the audience, David Jubb (Artistic Director of the Battersea Arts Centre) tweeted: ‘In @royalcourt main theatre with audience full of 20 & 30 somethings. Beer has just poured off circle in to the stalls #brandnewancients.’³⁶ In addressing this audience directly, framing the ‘fixed’ text of Brand New Ancients with an ‘unfixed’ preamble rich in selfdeprecating humour, Tempest establishes the ‘rules’ or (in Foley’s phrase) ‘the keys to performance’, which will characterize the coming experience.³⁷ This ‘unfixed’ moment becomes an opportunity to subvert preconceptions about the status of writing, the hierarchies of the performance space, and the relationship between stage and auditorium. Passages of ‘unfixed’ playfulness also emerge later in the evening, often arising as moments of interplay between the formal text of Brand New Ancients, the poet’s commentary on her own work, and her developing perceptions of how each gig is going. For example, at the Royal Court Theatre, Tempest followed up the phrase ‘like mime artists in France’ (describing the overdone insistence of drunk executives) with a comic aside: that’s ‘one for the theatre crowd’ she says. The ‘mime artists’ line isn’t improvised—it is present in the poem’s published text.³⁸ But the choice to highlight it in this particular way is a direct response to the current situation and location. Tempest’s voice is both cocky and crooning, she is deep in the narrative moment and mood, yet also able to glance out at our real, shared situation. Tempest’s urban th-fronting, which means that she pronounces the initial ‘th’ of ‘theatre’ as an ‘f ’, adds a note of double-edged self-deprecation to the aside, cheekily alert to the class dynamics of her own presence within the artfully distressed environs of the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs. There is a characteristic piece of physical business that sometimes accompanies such moments: an open-palmed shrug (usually off-balance, with a horizontal twist to the shoulders), which is part sheepishness and part sheer chutzpah. This gesture can be fluid in its meanings: sometimes it starts out looking like an apology for a moment of bathos, or for an uneasy rhyme

³⁵ This invitation is supported by a lighting plot which subtly raises the house lights at a series of key moments, especially those when the poet performer moves outside the world of the emerging story, for passages of reflection, interpretation, and direct exhortation. ³⁶ David Jubb (@davidjubb), 16 November 2013. ³⁷ Foley (2002), 164. ³⁸ Tempest (2013), 33.

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(‘shoulders’/‘soldiers’), but often it ends up looking like a celebration of Tempest’s own daring and dexterous swooping between linguistic registers. In a wordless gesture of self-commentary, the poet can slide from rueful to gleeful in an instant, acknowledging and manipulating her audience’s reactions to her words, before slipping back into the rhythms of the show’s rehearsed and scored text. At moments like this, the poet’s ‘unfixed’ commentary on her scripted performance draws her audience into an intense feedback loop of mutual observation and reciprocal pleasure.³⁹ Comic banter also plays a key role in Tempest’s ‘unfixed’ interactions with her audience. Onstage at the Lyric, Hammersmith (January 2014), she follows up her unflattering depiction of graphic artist Tommy’s colleagues (‘arseholes everywhere’⁴⁰) by looking out and asking (in a phrase we would more usually expect to hear during a stand-up comedy set): ‘Any advertising executives in tonight?’ There’s laughter from the crowd, the odd cry of ‘yeah’. ‘This one’s for you’ the poet mutters darkly, only to stop herself a couple of lines later, to modify the abrasiveness of this exchange, and insist she was only joking. Then she picks up her ‘fixed’ text again, or tries to, but hesitates, pauses, and loses her thread. She consults with the band about her next line. They confer with each other. They laugh. Shrug. Tempest turns back to the audience: ‘That’s how live this shit is’ she says. Again, the poet strays beyond her fixed text, developing free vocal interactions with her audience, and embracing the unpredictable consequences of these (even when disruptive).⁴¹ Tempest’s ability to create such moments of ‘unfixed’ communication with her audience plays a key role in creating a mood which is more akin to the comedy or the storytelling club, the poetry slam or the music gig, than it is to formal, fourthwall ‘theatre’. Theatre critic Lyn Gardner describes Tempest as an artist who is ‘acutely responsive to her audience’: ‘It matters that we are there; it matters that these stories are told. It matters that we listen.’⁴² In the case of Brand New Ancients, it is often the moments of ‘unfixed’ comedy and self-commentary— playful, cheeky, scathing, endearing—which facilitate this trademark responsiveness, guaranteeing that each show develops into a unique iteration of the poet’s epic narrative of ordinary people finding heroism in their everyday lives. The published text of Brand New Ancients may be ‘fixed’, but live performance allows for the creation and elaboration of a series of ‘unfixed’ elements and exchanges. Tempest has described how, over the course of making and performing the show, she progressed from feeling like the author of a text to ³⁹ On the ‘feedback loop’ in modern performances inspired by ancient epic, see Harrop (2013b), 84 6. ⁴⁰ Tempest (2013), 29. ⁴¹ Compare Jensen (2005), 46 7. ⁴² Gardner (2012). The first drafts of Brand New Ancients were written as part of a scratch process supported by the Battersea Arts Centre so that, from the outset (as Tempest observes): ‘I knew that it was a piece that was going to be performed for audiences.’ Kate Tempest in conversation with Justine McConnell, APGRD (University of Oxford), 24 February 2014.

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‘being a performer of something that exists’. The latter state, she said, means that ‘you are able to perform without the fact that you wrote it getting in the way, so you can change it if you want to’,⁴³ bringing her performance of Brand New Ancients close to Foley’s category of ‘Voiced Text’, a ‘type of oral poetry that begins life as a written composition only to modulate to oral performance before a live audience’.⁴⁴ This category shift makes possible the off-the-cuff riffs and remakings of extant material which promote such a powerful sense of liveness, reciprocity, and ‘unfixedness’ in performances of Brand New Ancients. So what’s the place of a (notional) oral Homer in this performance? Justine McConnell has described Tempest as a ‘brand new Homer’, arguing that ‘performance poetry is the modern descendant of the oral poetry scene which gave us the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey’.⁴⁵ However, such confident alignments of a contemporary artist with ‘Homeric’ performances can be problematic, since there is no direct lineage of surviving practices for the modern reperformer of ancient Greek epic to inherit.⁴⁶ Contemporary performers can only reactivate classical epic using their own, distinctively modern, skill sets,⁴⁷ engaging their listeners through performance contexts which are meaningful to twenty-first-century audiences (and often significantly unlike the kinds of environments in which an archaic, oral Homer might have sung). Positioning a work like Brand New Ancients within a direct Homeric lineage overstates the degree to which the archaic compositional and performance techniques proposed by oral-poetic scholarship might (practically) be available to the present-day artist. It simultaneously downplays the vital role played by some distinctly modern performance disciplines, and their creative communities, in developing environments within which ancient epic poems, and their associated oral practices, can be explored, adapted, and appropriated by new generations of performing artists. Tempest herself has described how her sense of ancient poetic practices was first stimulated as a result of her embeddedness within contemporary genres of public poetic speech. It was through ‘rap artists that I knew’, she says, ‘that’s how I found out about Homer’.⁴⁸ Like jazz at the beginning of the twentieth century, contemporary spoken-word practices have created a generation of artists who display virtuosic skill in the

⁴³ McConnell (2014), 199. ⁴⁴ Foley (2002), 43. ⁴⁵ McConnell (2014), 195, 198. ⁴⁶ Performance storytelling offers a comparable situation. Ben Haggarty is accurate in his assertion that present day, Western, urban storytellers have ‘no living masters’, and little (if any) access to authentic, indigenous, epic traditions (2005), 14. On the modern, ‘revival’ storyteller as ‘orphaned to tradition’ (a phrase first used by French storyteller Muriel Bloch), see also Heywood (1998), 16. ⁴⁷ For a discussion of parallels between ancient epic and contemporary rap and hip hop, see Hall (2008), 21 2. ⁴⁸ Kate Tempest in conversation with Justine McConnell, APGRD (University of Oxford), 24 February 2014.

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creation of (wholly or partially) ‘unfixed’ performances. To modify one of John Miles Foley’s ‘proverbs’ describing oral performance, it is the current genres of rap and spoken-word poetry, and not a revived or recovered ‘Homeric’ orality, which ‘enable’ the emergence of Brand New Ancients,⁴⁹ and which fuel the ‘unfixed’ reciprocity of the show’s performance dynamics. And yet, Tempest’s fusion of contemporary techniques with mythic archetypes is profoundly informed by an underlying sense of ancient epic as a genre of performance within which a poet stands up in front of a co-present, live audience, reaching for and finding eloquent words to address shared experiences. ‘In the old days,’ the text of Brand New Ancients begins, ‘the myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves.’⁵⁰ Homer as evoked by Tempest is not a literary artist, but an in-performance maker of rhymes. As the poet says: ‘People have been rapping words since Homer, and before.’⁵¹ In this way, Tempest positions her own modern practices within a quasi-mythic heritage of performed poetry stretching back to ancient epic. Historical authenticity (modern artists literally doing what ‘Homer’ did) isn’t the issue here. What matters in this formulation is an urgent sense of an imagined oral Homer as authorizing the present-day public speech of poets and rappers and rhymers of all kinds, each bringing their own improvised, provisional eloquence to bear upon the age-old struggles of living. This Homer is a legend, a myth; perhaps best understood as an enabling fantasy. But what Barbara Graziosi has described as the ‘fictionality’ of this ancestral presence does not diminish the impact of an oral Homer upon a whole range of contemporary artists who invoke the ancient epic-singer, an ‘imaginary and multiform figure’,⁵² to authorize their own projects of devising, improvising, and generally ‘unfixing’ ancient epic narratives. As this chapter has contended, a notional oral Homer informs a diverse array of contemporary theatre texts and performance practices,⁵³ and a full appreciation of the different ways in which oral-poetic theory can influence the creation of these depends upon an ability to identify and interpret the interplay between ‘fixed’ and ‘unfixed’ elements both within particular performances, and within different iterations of the same production or event. For the authors of play-texts, the example of an oral Homer is most often evoked in order to contextualize and facilitate their own revisionary literary

⁴⁹ See Foley (2002), 130 3. This ‘proverb’ asserts that ‘Performance Is the Enabling Event, Tradition Is the Context for That Event’. ⁵⁰ Tempest (2013), 1. ⁵¹ Quoted in McConnell (2014), 197. ⁵² Graziosi (2002), 250. On the deployment of this figure by ancient rhapsodes, see Graziosi (2002), 48. ⁵³ This phenomenon can be located within a wider tendency, among contemporary theatre makers and performers, towards the creation of works which question, subvert, or bypass conventional notions of dramatic authorship. See Radosavljević (2013), Rebellato (2013).

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strategies, giving rise to a stimulating range of new epic dramas which, nevertheless, remain largely ‘fixed’ in their content. However, for contemporary performers across (though not limited to) the genres of devised theatre, performance storytelling, and spoken-word poetry, an imagined oral Homer is just as likely to serve as inspiration for the creation of deliberately unpredictable ‘unfixed’ performances which strive to generate present-day equivalents for the flexibility and spontaneity attributed to the earliest, preliterary, performances of epic. Focusing on ancient epic as a set of performance practices, rather than a series of narrative or poetic tropes, such contemporary works require new modes of analysis and interpretation, capable of acknowledging performer training (like the practices of The Factory), ‘procedural authorship’ (creating flexible or interactive performance structures, rather than ‘fixed’ scripts), and performers’ ‘unfixed’ interactions with their live audiences (like Tempest’s metatextual commentaries on/in performances of Brand New Ancients) as critical sites for current receptions of Homer. There is also challenging work yet to be done in exploring the role played by contemporary performance practices in creating a rich variety of ‘enabling’ events for ‘unfixed’ re-makings of ancient epic. The oral-poetic Homer evoked (both explicitly and implicitly) by today’s devising theatre companies, performance storytellers, and spoken-word poets may not, ultimately, be locatable as a historical personage, but despite (perhaps because of ) this mythic elusiveness, the ancient epic-singer is inspiring a provocative new emphasis on epic orality and ‘unfixed’ modes of performance among twenty-first-century artists.

19 Multimodal Twenty-First-Century Bards From Live Performance to Audiobook in the Homeric Adaptations of Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald Emily Greenwood

The bard is both a fertile and a largely fictional presence in contemporary British poetry. Arguably this figment of the poetic imagination is nowhere more alive than in contemporary adaptations of Homer, which engage with the question of what it might mean to adapt Homeric orality into contemporary poetic idioms. Taking the ‘Homeric’ works of two high-profile contemporary British adapters of Homer, Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald, this chapter explores the way in which the absent/present, anachronistic figure of the bard is a foil for the poet’s live voice. I suggest that, in both poets, the idea of the Homeric bard encapsulates the complex, inter-medial, multimodal, remediated status of contemporary Homeric adaptations. Armitage and Oswald both evoke Homer as bard in their different ways. In Armitage’s case, fascination with Homer-the-bard is spelled out most explicitly in his serio-comic travel journal Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey, which narrates an experimental poetry tour of the Pennine Way undertaken in the summer of 2010.¹ The premise was that Armitage would walk the 256 miles of the Pennine Way as a ‘penniless poet’ earning his food and accommodation by giving poetry readings in each of the towns where he stopped for the night. In the preface to the travel journal he explains the project in terms of age-old poetic traditions, telling readers that ‘Poetry has always wandered’ and characterizing himself as ‘a traveller-poet’.² At the end of the journal, Armitage concludes that the occupation of wandering poet is not economically viable as ¹ The English edition of this book, published by Faber and Faber in 2012, bears the subtitle ‘Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way’. All quotations from Walking Home are taken from the American paperback edition, published by Liveright in 2014. ² Armitage (2012), ix.

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a sole source of income and that there are limits as to how far he would be prepared to wander: ‘to keep selling my wares I’d have to stray further and further afield in search of new audiences, become more of a stranger every day, both at home and abroad’.³ The conceit of the bard or wandering poet is a thin one: ultimately the wandering figure who inspires Armitage’s project is Odysseus rather than Homer. To make this connection explicit, Armitage records how, on one of his way-stops (the town of Richmond in North Yorkshire), he browses a copy of the Odyssey: From the crammed bookshelf I prise out a Penguin paperback copy of the Odyssey, well thumbed and riddled with marginalia written in an alien hand, and drift off to sleep with Odysseus still several years from home.⁴

Odysseus inspires Armitage’s project as a character who combines action and mental and physical endurance with an occasional turn as a bard: [T]o embark on the walk is to surrender to its lore and submit to its logic, and to take up a challenge against the self. Physically, I’d assumed I wasn’t up to it, and it turned out I was. Mentally I thought I was more than equal to the task; turned out I wasn’t. My other challenge was to validate myself as a travelling poet, and on the face of it, I succeeded.⁵

This conflation of Armitage the wandering poet into Armitage as muchenduring Odysseus is reminiscent of the Odyssey, where aspects of the bard are grafted onto Odysseus narrating his own story in Books 9–12. This analogy is also explored in a famous simile in Book 21 where Odysseus stringing his bow is likened to a skilled bard in a famous simile (lines 406–9).⁶ In her study of the cultural poetics and the intellectual history of wandering in ancient Greek culture, Silvia Montiglio notes how, in Book 8 of the Odyssey, Odysseus the itinerant bard upstages Demodocus the resident, sedentary bard in the palace of King Alcinous, and stands as an intra-diegetic cipher for the wandering poet,⁷ described by Eumaeus in Book 17.⁸ In Armitage’s mediation of ³ Armitage (2014b), 280. ⁴ Armitage (2014b), 175. ⁵ Armitage (2014b), 278. ⁶ See also Odyssey 17.518 21, where Eumaeus compares Odysseus the beggar’s narrative of his tales to the effect of an epic poet (aoidos) reciting tales. For the narrative tension in the Odyssey between the Homeric poet, narrator of the epic narrative (aoidê) in which Odysseus features, and Odysseus as internal narrator of his own tale (epos), see Bakker (2013), 7 12 (‘Just like an aoidos’). ⁷ Montiglio (2005), 96 8. Montiglio also suggests that the association between Odysseus’ errancy, and error and lies, means that Odysseus the wandering bard is never fully endorsed as a model for the bard inspired by the gods. ⁸ Odyssey 17.382 6: ‘Who would of his own accord approach and invite a wandering stranger in unless he were a craftsman who worked for the whole community, a prophet, a physician, a carpenter, or even a divine minstrel who can give pleasure with his songs (ἢ καὶ θέσπιν ἀοιδόν, ὅ κεν τέρπῃσιν ἀείδων)? For all the world over such guests as those are welcomed’ (trans. from Rieu (2003)).

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the Odyssey’s experiment with travelling poetry, Odysseus models the physical and mental endurance of the latterday Homeric poet’s labours qua performing, travelling bard. Arguably, the Homeric poet who invented the version of Odysseus now familiar to us in his own poem, also ‘chose to be Odysseus’ in his own self-fashioning.⁹ While I derive this reading from the Odyssey’s narrative blurring of epic poet (aoidos) and Odysseus as hero, wanderer, and internal narrator, this reading is also inescapably shaped by the rich biographical tradition about Homer in which performing bards’ self-identification with Homer helped to foster ‘the Homer of archaic legend’, ‘modelled on the figure of the rhapsode’.¹⁰ If we consider Armitage’s self-fashioning in Travelling Home, the identification with Odysseus is part of the physical performance of his identity as poet, evoking the ponos (physical and psychological) of wandering, as well as his attempt to reclaim his native landscape—a latter-day version of Odyssean nostos. In fact, the title Walking Home is a prosaic translation of the Greek noun nostos. It is not enough to give nightly poetry readings (Armitage is clear that he always gave readings rather than performing from memory), the exertion of wandering and climbing hills performs authorship and the occupation of the poet in a particularly physical way—poetic performance can be plotted on a map. In Armitage, the Homeric bard has been engulfed by his most successful character, Odysseus; furthermore, Armitage repeatedly deflates the seriousness of his own bardic conceit: ‘I’ve given readings in some very peculiar places, sometimes to some very peculiar people, and by my own admission I have given some very peculiar performances and read some very peculiar poems.’¹¹ As we shall see when we turn to Armitage’s actual forays into Homeric adaptation, the bard is still a fertile figure, but it is Shakespeare rather than Homer who is the pertinent bard.

ALICE OSWALD’S MEM ORIAL In Oswald’s Memorial, we encounter a more historicized concept of the Homeric bard (aoidos). However, the invocation of the Homeric bard remains a paradoxical conceit. This conceit is exemplified by a nine-line simile in which Oswald likens AGELAOS in the fall of death to a tree felled by a storm: ‘Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth . . . It became a wood pile ⁹ I borrow the phrase ‘choosing to be Odysseus’ from Silvia Montiglio, who uses it to describe the influence of Odysseus on the self fashioning of the Herodotean narrator and on Herodotean theōria. See Montiglio (2005), ch. 6 (‘Choosing to be Odysseus: Herodotus and Ionian Theōria’). ¹⁰ Quoting Graziosi and Haubold (2005), 26. ¹¹ Armitage (2014b), 161.

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in a lonely field [repeated].’¹² Oswald’s epic simile, adapted from a simile at Iliad 17.53–8, where it applies to Euphorbus,¹³ recalls the verbal art of the Homeric narrator.¹⁴ Similarly, the device of word-for-word repetition, which sees Oswald repeat her own epic similes in Memorial verbatim, evokes the importance of formulaic repetition for our understanding of the nature of Homeric verse in modern classical scholarship.¹⁵ But it does so almost parodically, as a self-reflexive gesture of remediation, advertising her own repetition of Homer with difference. Stephe Harrop and Elizabeth Minchin have interpreted Oswald’s simile doublets as melancholic in their effect, modelled on the antiphonal structures of laments in ancient Greek song culture.¹⁶ In this case, Oswald would be engaging in oblique evocation of Homeric repetition, routing it through a specific tradition of oral poetry associated with women’s voices. Memorial’s simultaneous existence off the page as a poem in performance, which Oswald performs from memory, sometimes prefaced by a hymn,¹⁷ also invokes the persona of the Homeric bard. In her Preface, Oswald is explicit about this relation, remarking that her translation ‘presents the whole poem as a kind of oral cemetery’ and suggesting that her free approach to selectively recreating the Iliad ‘is compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable, but always adapting itself to a new audience’.¹⁸ Yet Oswald’s evocation of Homeric oral poetry also sounds the differences and distance from Homer’s traditional art.¹⁹ The majority of Oswald’s audiences first encounter the poem in the printed word and the world of the poem alludes to this literate and literary world, as in Oswald’s coinage ‘wind-dictionary’, which both textualizes the landscape of nature and the Homeric simile and reminds us of the paraphernalia of scholarship through which we access Homeric poetry.²⁰

¹² Oswald (2011a), 31. The capitalization of names is a lapidary convention, alluding to the lapidary names of war memorials. ¹³ ‘Like the shoot of an olive tree that a gardener nurtures in a place of its own, where there is enough water for it to drink and grow fine and healthy; the breezes of all the winds shake it, and its bursts into white blossom, but suddenly there is a great gust of wind which uproots it from its trench and lays it flat on the ground’ (trans. Rieu (2003), 300). Oswald narrates the death of Euphorbus fleetingly: ‘EUPHORBAS died | Leaving his silver hairclip on the battlefield’ (alluding to the description of Euphorbus’ hair at Iliad 17.51 2), Oswald (2011a), 64. ¹⁴ See Minchin (2015), 203 4 on the Homeric similarities and differences in Oswald’s repetitions. Minchin also discusses Oswald’s use of lists and catalogues of warriors (pp. 204 7). ¹⁵ Namely, the formulaic repetition associated with the composition in performance of the Homeric bard or rhapsode, as studied and analysed by Lord (2000) and Parry (1971). ¹⁶ Harrop (2013b), 81; Minchin (2015), 12. ¹⁷ See p. 286. ¹⁸ Oswald (2011a), 2. ¹⁹ I use the phrases ‘Homer’s traditional art’ and ‘verbal art’ after Foley (1998) and (2002). ²⁰ As a Classics graduate, Oswald perhaps unsurprisingly refers to the mediation of scholar ship in her Preface, citing ‘ancient [literary] critics’ and describing her approach to translating the Iliad (Oswald (2011a), 1 2). Scattered anachronisms, such as ‘motorbike’, ‘parachutes’, and

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Even for audiences who watch and hear Oswald perform Memorial live, from memory, this is an oral performance in full knowledge of the printed text of the poem. We are in the realm of Walter Ong’s secondary or simulated orality, which is underwritten by and dependent on the printed word and electronic technologies.²¹ And yet, as media historians remind us, the live or recorded performance of a poem is not reducible to the text of that poem;²² nor can the text of a poem be understood in the absence of sound.²³ Over and above the capacity of every printed poem to evoke the physical, human voice in general, the history of Oswald’s live performance of this poem, and the poem’s simultaneous existence as an audiobook matter for any reading of this poem: they are part of its matter. Drawing on Adriana Caravero’s inquiry into the ontology of the voice, we should construe Oswald’s conceit of the Iliad as ‘a kind of oral cemetery’ as connoting a translation/adaptation that takes the vocal tradition of the Iliad seriously,²⁴ but which also explores the relationship between oral-derived traditional art and the vocal uniqueness and materiality of the receiving poet’s single voice.²⁵ In this sense, Memorial combines the familiar idea of the poet of the Iliad as preserver and transmitter of kleos with the preservation of Oswald’s own voice, and poses an interesting experiment in the reception of voice(s) in poetry across time. In the printed text, the presence of the bard remains moot and mute without the poet’s voice and performance to animate and evoke the poem’s oral poetics. This is not to say that reading poetry is a silent activity. On the contrary, reading is aural and ‘phonemic’ as Garrett Stewart argues, evoking the phrase ‘to hear with eyes’ from Shakespeare’s twenty-third sonnet.²⁶ Furthermore, as we have seen, the oral poetics of Memorial are discernible and palpable in the printed text, for instance in the similes, or in the vocative addresses to the listener and the invocative addresses to characters, which Oswald highlights in the front matter to the poem.²⁷ However, in the absence

‘headlights’, further break the spell of an archaic, oral culture (Oswald (2011a), 72, 45, and 48 respectively). See Minchin (2015), 218 for discussion. ²¹ See Ong (1982), 11 for a description of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ orality. See Bednar (2010) for discussion. ²² See Rubery (2016), 245 6. ²³ See Caravero (2005) on vocality as a challenge to the logocentrism of the Western philosophical tradition. For an analysis of ‘textual vocality’ and the ‘phonographic claim’ of Greek and Latin texts, see Butler (2015). Butler situates his study in relation to Caravero (2005) and Dolar (2006). In turn, Caravero situates her analysis of vocality in relation (and subtle contrast) to Zumthor (1984) see Caravero (2005), 12. ²⁴ Oswald (2011a), 2. ²⁵ Caravero (2005), 12 14. ²⁶ See Stewart (1990), 1 65: Prologue (‘Silence Speaking Words’) and ch. 1 (‘ “To hear with eyes” Shakespeare as Proof Text’). ²⁷ Oswald (2011a), 2 remarks on this feature in her Preface: ‘The Iliad is a vocative poem. Perhaps even (in common with lament) it is invocative.’ Examples of Oswald’s vocative ad dresses to her readers/audience are: ‘You can see the hole in the helmet just under the ridge’ (14);

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of live performance, the figure of the bard and the oral, rhapsodic performability of Memorial remains dormant. The poem’s trans-media existence as text, audiobook, recorded reading, and live performance places it at the centre of debates in the study of oral poetry. Each of the poem’s simultaneous modes of publication blurs the written and spoken word: the written text can be read silently or aloud, as well as various states in between in which the poem is read silently but some words or lines are vocalized and heard not just by the inner ear, but the outer ear as well. The poetry reading, in which poet/performer/narrator reads out a text of poetry— whether or not they are the author—makes the oral and vocal potential of the words on the page explicit, but keeps the text at the centre. The live poetry performance/recitation subverts this relationship, putting oral performance centre stage, but with text-as-script underwriting the performance offstage.²⁸ The audiobook is a conflation of written and oral: a ‘talking book’, to revert to an earlier term.²⁹ What is the relationship between you or I reading Memorial silently, a YouTube clip of Alice Oswald reading the text of Memorial aloud, where the printed text of the poem is visible throughout as she reads from it,³⁰ Alice Oswald performing Memorial from memory in front of a live audience at the Southbank Centre in London, and a listener/reader listening to the poem as an audiobook on CD? Taken together, the simultaneous existence and circulation of Memorial in these different contexts and media fosters a perception of the poem as an intermedial or multimodal poem and gives rise to the phenomenon of what we might call the poet’s distributed voice (the poet’s voice as a hybrid of the different media in which it is distributed)—a late twentieth- and twenty-first-century manifestation of the poet as bard. In her decision to commit the entire poem to memory, and to perform the poem from memory in different venues, Oswald channels one dimension of the bard, both inscribing herself in the long biography and, indeed, performance tradition of the Iliad, and at the same time shaping her own biography

and ‘What was that shrill sound?’ (33). Examples of invocative addresses to characters are: ‘Come back to your city SOCUS’ (42); and ‘Oh ASIUS ASIUS’ (48). ²⁸ The cultural politics of poetry performances are rich and fraught. As analysed by Novak (2011), there is something of a divide between performance poetry (many types of slam poetry might be an example of the former) and poetry in performance (more traditional poetry readings and recitations are examples of the latter). The audiences for the two do not overlap significantly and the literary establishment is biased towards the latter. ²⁹ See Rubery (2016) for the history of the audiobook. Rubery traces the transition from the phonograph to talking books for blind people, commercial books on tape, and the audiobook a term adopted as the industry standard by the Audio Publishers Association (APA) in 1994 (later merged into the single noun ‘audiobook’). Rubery (2016), 2. ³⁰ See a video clip produced by the Poetry Society, published online on 2 December 2013, on the occasion of Alice Oswald winning the Popescu Prize 2013. This particular clip is itself a media hybrid, a video recording that blurs printed text (viewers can read the printed text) and phonograph (Oswald’s reading/performance).

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as a poet who, rhapsode-like, recites her own poetry live within a bardic, Homeric tradition.³¹ In a well-known article on the phenomenon of the poetry reading, published in 1985, Donald Hall quotes from correspondence with Joseph Epstein, who had written a negative critique of the place of poetry readings in contemporary literary culture, arguing that they merely served to promote the iconicity of the poet, giving members of the public an opportunity to ‘gaze upon’ figures they admired and to be in their presence.³² In contrast, Hall explores the dynamic potential of the poetry reading and cites the way in which Dylan Thomas’s American poetry tour transformed the nature of the poetry reading: ‘he sang other poets’ poems as well as his own, read beautifully, and traveled not only as the Poet himself but as the Voice of Poetry, rhapsode and reciter’.³³ To view Oswald’s live performances of Memorial from memory as consciously engaging with the long biography of Homer and the Iliad, with Oswald taking on the mantle of the rhapsode, is not to imply the reproduction of Homeric epic performance. Donald Hall parodies this conceit, suggesting that ‘Celebrators of the poetry reading find it the restitution of poetry’s collective oral origins, as if the rows of sophomores resembled Homer’s shaggy listeners.’³⁴

PRESEN CE/ABSENCE Recent scholarship on live poetry overturns the silencing of orality and the spoken voice in scholarship and literary criticism. In doing so, it rightly restores the person and physical voice of the poet to the creation, production, and dissemination of poetry. For the purposes of my discussion here, I follow Julia Novak’s definition of live poetry, according to which ‘live poetry is [ . . . ] a specific manifestation of poetry’s oral mode of realization’, and ‘is characterized by the direct encounter and physical co-presence of the poet with a live audience. The poet will predominantly perform his/her own poetry and is thus cast in the double role of “poet-performer”.’³⁵ In thinking about the presence and absence of the contemporary bard, this stress on the poet’s body and physical performance needs to be counterbalanced by an acknowledgement of the relative inaccessibility of the person of the poet and the distance of the live event from all but a restricted audience.

³¹ The idea of the ‘long biography’ of a poem is taken from Middleton (2005), 3, where it refers to the dense reception of a poem in time and space. ³² Hall (1985), 64. ³³ Hall (1985), 64. ³⁴ Hall (1985), 72. ³⁵ Novak (2011), 12 and 62.

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Alice Oswald’s live performances of Memorial are not interchangeable, nor do they constitute a repeated ritual whereby audiences at different times and in different places all partake in some constant performance. The essence of the poem is not immanent in any one performance. Instead, each live performance is a version. Hence the importance for documenting live performances as unique, historical episodes in the reception of the poem. This comes through clearly in Stephe Harrop’s account of Oswald’s Memorial in performance, which draws on and documents aspects of two performances: Oswald’s performance of Memorial at the APGRD (University of Oxford) on 12 November 2012, and an earlier performance at the Southbank Centre, London on 8 February 2012.³⁶ When Alice Oswald performed Memorial at Yale in October 2012, she was polite but firm in declining permission for a recording of the poem, insisting on the importance of the single occasion in which a poem is performed in a particular venue in front of a particular audience, which cannot be repeated. Both Oswald and Armitage have published texts of their poems and audiobook versions.³⁷ In Oswald’s case, printed book and audiobook were published simultaneously. In Armitage’s case, his dramatic adaptation of the Odyssey stemmed from a commission for BBC Radio 4, which was broadcast in Summer 2004. As such, it is properly a radio drama and ‘audio-born’ before being published in print, although writing/typing clearly furnished the script for the drama. The audiobook, consisting of a full-cast dramatization of the poem as broadcast on the radio, was released in 2004, two years ahead of the publication of the text of the poem. In comparing Armitage and Oswald as contemporary adaptors of Homer and contemporary bards, there are very clear differences. We might see the audio text of Memorial in live performance and the audiobook as the recorded voice of the poet, as guarantors of the poem’s orality and as aspects that underwrite the status of the poet as bard. In the case of Armitage, the recording of the poem for radio and its circulation as audiobook precede the independent life of the printed poem. In the Introduction to the published text of his version of Homer’s Odyssey, Armitage attempts to bridge this gap and any dissonance between the coexistence of the same work as radio play, play-script, and book,-length poem: One more thing: Although this version of the Odyssey was developed as a radio play and is presented here in script form, it was always in the back of my mind that it should have further life as a piece of writing. Not just something to be performed, but something to read. A book, in fact.³⁸

While Armitage the poet can perform his multi-voiced poem, he cannot single-handedly perform the play as originally performed by a full cast. In ³⁶ Harrop (2013b).

³⁷ Armitage (2004), Oswald (2011b).

³⁸ Armitage (2006), vi.

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this sense, Shakespeare is the more proximate bard for Armitage in mediating Homeric epic, and in ‘transforming’ the narrated discourse of Homer’s characters into dialogue. With the important qualification that Armitage’s poetic voice is complicated by his dramatic adaptation of the poem, it is interesting to compare the split identity of the poet’s voice in different media. The audiobook is not the same as the audio text, which is the highly singular and ephemeral version of the poem as a live poetry event, produced on the occasion of its performance, never to be repeated in exactly the same way again.³⁹ But the live poetry performance is itself a mixed genre, since it may take the form of a formal ‘reading’ from texts of the poems, or it may be a performance from memory. These different versions of the poem, and their temporally and spatially diffuse coexistence, complicate the idea of the poet’s voice and presence as well as how we conceive of the nature of Armitage’s and Oswald’s poems. The birth of the modern, commercial audiobook (as opposed to the phonograph or early instantiations of the ‘talking book’) co-opted the bard as a figure for the acoustic dissemination of the poet’s voice through sound technologies. Matthew Rubery notes that the audiobook company Caedmon, which specialized in recordings of poetry, exploited the oral performance tradition of ancient epic as a model for the audio recording as a live and venerable cultural form.⁴⁰ In listening to its records, customers were supposedly partaking in a tradition stretching back to Homer. This strategy was deliberate, as Caedmon’s founders—Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantell—had studied Classics at Hunter College and collaborated with classicists.⁴¹ While both the idea of an unbroken oral tradition and the idea that modern sound recordings have anything to do with Homeric oral epic are patent fictions, they are suggestive fictions, and continue to influence the mediation of live poetry in contemporary poetry. The notion of the bard as a metaphor for the verse audiobook raises questions about the distribution and presence of audiobooks. The recorded voice of the poet might seem like a medium for the popular dissemination of her/his work and its sonic qualities: this is the closest you can get to the poet reading and performing their own work, short of being in the same room as them while they perform. In the case of Oswald’s Memorial, where book and audiobook are published simultaneously and are complementary ³⁹ Charles Bernstein (2011), xvi draws a helpful distinction between the audio voice of the audiobook and the voice of the poet in live performance: ‘Unlike “live” performance, gram mophony is a textual experience: you hear it but it doesn’t hear you. Like writing, the audio voice is always a voice that conjures the presence of the speaker but invokes the speaker’s absence. For this reason, all voice recording is at some fundamental, if unusually subliminal level, ghostly.’ ⁴⁰ See Rubery (2016), 185 216, esp. 190, the subheading ‘The Bardic Tradition’. See also Rubery (2016), 6 7. ⁴¹ Rubery (2016), 186 and 192 3 with nn. 31 4.

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manifestations of the same poem, it makes sense to ask how they are distributed/disseminated and where they are located. It is possible to gain a rough impression of the accessibility of audiobooks vis-à-vis printed copies of Memorial by investigating the availability of the poem in these media in British public libraries. According to figures published by LISU (Loughborough University’s Research and Information Centre for Library and Information Services), in the year 2012–13 there were 4,191 public libraries in the United Kingdom (excluding academic libraries). Many of these libraries have searchable online catalogues, so it is possible to track copies of Oswald’s Memorial and Armitage’s Homer’s Odyssey available to the public for free in public libraries. I offer a brief snapshot in Figure 19.1, sampling a handful of UK public libraries/library groups. On the basis of this very selective sample, access to the printed text is evidently much more common than access to audiobooks,

Library

Memorial Memorial Printed Book Audiobook

Armitage Armitage Armitage, Homer’s Homer’s Walking Home Odyssey, Odyssey, Printed Book Audiobook

Aberdeenshire

—

—

—

—

3

Cambs.

1

—

3

1

28 + 1 audio

Camden, Lndn

1

—

—

1

4

Devon

6

—

3

1

10 + 1 audio

Edinburgh

2

—

7

—

7 + 2 audio

Highlands

—

—

1

—

3 + 1 audio

Leics.

—

—

1

Manchester

1

_

5

N. Yorks

1

—

12

Oxfordshire

3

—

2

—

9

Pembrokeshire

—

—

1

—

3 + 1 audio

Wakefield

1

—

2

W. Sussex

2

—

1

4 + 1 Audio —

22 22 + 2 audio

1 + 1 audio 1

3 + mp3

Fig. 19.1 Copies of Alice Oswald’s Memorial, and Simon Armitage’s Homer’s Odyssey and Walking Home held in a sample of UK public libraries. The data in this table was taken from online library catalogues and was conducted in October 2014. Compiled by the author.

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which are scarcely available at all.⁴² In the sixth column, I have included library holdings for audio recordings of Armitage’s Walking Home to illustrate the poor availability of poetry audiobooks contrasted with prose audiobooks.⁴³ Factors to consider when comparing the availability of Oswald’s Memorial and Armitage’s Homer’s Odyssey are that Armitage has had a longer career and is on the GCSE English Literature syllabus. But much more thorough and penetrating research would be needed to draw any firm conclusions. This brief sample is merely intended to establish that the theoretical coexistence and complementarity of printed text and audiobook are not borne out in terms of public availability. While the audiobook might seem to offer more intimate access to the poet’s voice, this fictional intimacy needs to be contrasted with the availability of the medium. One option taken by publishers, and poetry presses in particular, is to publish poetry texts with an audio recording included on CD, in a jacket sleeve. As a publishing decision this has commercial implications, but the fact that this was not done for Oswald’s Memorial and Armitage’s play suggests that, from the publisher’s point of view, the audio text is not considered part of the essential experience of the poem. In terms of the publishing market, the viability of audiobooks is not their autonomous aesthetic status, nor their complementarity to the printed book, but rather the fact that they broaden the audience and sales figures for a poet’s work. Readers who like to access poems in print are served by the printed book and those who like to listen to poems being read are served by the audiobook. There is some cross-fertilization between the two, with audiences encountering the poem in one medium and then wanting to buy the poem in another medium, which again is good for sales. In terms of our interpretation of Oswald as poet-translator of Homer’s Iliad, these different media enhance the symbolic identity of the poet as bard. The fact that a reader of the printed text of Memorial knows that Alice Oswald performs the poem live in different venues—better still, that she performs it from memory—increases Oswald’s bardic potential. The availability of an audiobook also contributes to this effect, as a second-order encounter with the (recorded) voice of the poet. This bardic effect does not strictly depend on encounters with the voice of the poet. Undoubtedly there is overlap between these different interpretative communities encountering Oswald’s poem in different media, but a reader or a listener or a spectator does not need to encounter Oswald in another medium in order for the effect to work. In fact, arguably the bard effect, inflected by preconceptions of both the Homeric bard and Shakespeare the ⁴² It would be interesting to ascertain whether public libraries consider people with visual impairments as the primary constituency for audiobooks (this is clearly the case with large print formats). Rubery (2016), 59 181 analyses the origins of audiobooks in talking books for blind people. ⁴³ Rubery cites the statistic that audiobooks account for roughly 5% of revenues for major publishers (Rubery (2016), 279 with n. 2). Poetry sales are marginal to the audiobook market.

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bard, is particularly effective at uniting the poet’s different guises and amplifying the poet’s voice. There may be a connection here with the trend for adaptation and reworking of classic texts (not necessarily Homer) as observed by Peter Middleton. In the context of a discussion of what he calls the ‘new memoryism’, Middleton points to the prominence of the Graeco-Roman classics in the works that were awarded the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in the period 1990–2000 (eleven prizes in total). Of the poets and works and poetry that Middleton lists, Michael Longley’s Gorse Fires (1991), Tony Harrison’s The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992), Seamus Heaney’s The Spirit Level (1996), and Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid (1997) all rework and/or evoke Greek and Roman classical texts. Other winners, like Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf (1999), rework classics from other traditions. Middleton relates this turn toward the classics to the popularity of the predominantly Internet-based genre of fan fiction, explaining that, like the authors of fan fiction, ‘when poets write back to the classics they are readers who are becoming cowriters’.⁴⁴ He continues: A classic narrative is one that lots of readers know and can be treated not as a complete text that is fixed beyond refurbishment but more like an evolving house and grounds onto which more text can be added, reshaping existing plots and leading characters into new sequels.⁴⁵

The ‘new memoryism’ that Middleton describes is a different version of a very old phenomenon in which poetry is fundamentally linked to memory, from Mnemosyne as the mother of the Muses, to the evocation of the Muses to assist the Homeric bard with feats of memory in the Iliad and Odyssey. In the one live performance of Memorial that I have attended,⁴⁶ Oswald prefaced her performance of Memorial with another of her poems, also recited from memory: the ‘Hymn to Iris’ published in the collection Woods etc., whose first line is ‘Quick-moving goddess of the rainbow’.⁴⁷ While there is no extant Homeric hymn to Iris, this poetic ritual alludes to the tradition of the so-called Homeric hymns as prologues to epic performances, like extra-textual invocations of the Muses. In Oswald’s case, Memorial’s excavation of the Iliad is not a symptom of a trend for co-writing the classics influenced by the preponderance of the Internet. It is more direct and explicit than that; it is a self-proclaimed experiment that partakes in the resurrection of a vanished oral tradition to authorize a powerful mode of poetic performance, in which the poet acts as a vehicle for communal remembrance and the text of her poem as a site for communal commemoration: a literal memorial to the fallen in Homer’s poem who stand, synecdochically, for the dead of all wars, mythical and historical.

⁴⁴ Middleton (2005), 149. ⁴⁵ Middleton (2005), 150. ⁴⁶ A performance of Memorial by Alice Oswald at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University on 31 October 2012. ⁴⁷ Oswald (2005), 39.

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In Armitage’s adaptation of The Odyssey for the stage, traditional features of Homeric oral performance evoke the Homeric bard while also alluding to Shakespeare the bard. We see this clearly in Armitage’s prologue, where an invocation to the Muses doubles as a metadramatic address reminiscent of the Shakespearean prologue:⁴⁸ Remind us, Muse, of that man of many means, sent spinning the length and breadth of the map after bringing the towers of Troy to their knees; of the lessons he learned in the cities of great minds, and the heartbreak he suffered, roaming the seas to land his shipmates and salvage his life. But for all the torture and grief he sustained his comrades were lost; heedless fools, they gorged on the flesh of the Cattle of the Sun. In turn, the God of the Sun made death their domain. Muse, daughter of Memory and Zeus, where to start this story is yours to choose.⁴⁹

This bardic doubling continues throughout the play, as Armitage uses interventions to signal the presence of the author-as-dramatist controlling and ordering the text, while always translating the conventions of Homeric narrative. In Armitage’s prologue, Muse half-rhymes with Zeus in the penultimate line, underscoring the traditional genealogy, and it is certainly Zeus who directs the action in Armitage’s version. Zeus comments, ‘My memory—it’s like a museum. Infinite rooms, covered in dust,’⁵⁰ before he engineers things so that the gods can watch Calypso and Odysseus, which doubles as a metatheatrical scene transition from Olympus to Ogygia: ‘Here, I’ll blow a hole in the clouds. Let’s watch.’ It is also Zeus who gets the last lines in Armitage’s version of the Odyssey: Now, bring the clouds together in gentle thunder over the earth and close this human story from our God like eyes. Thunder reverberates over Ithaca.

CO NCLUSION The conceit of the bard in Oswald’s and Armitage’s adaptations of Homeric epic is a multiplying fiction. As Ruth Scodel has cautioned, with its talk of traditional oral poetics and its appeal to the Homeric audience, Homeric ⁴⁸ Most obviously, the invocation ‘O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend | The brightest heaven of invention’, spoken by the Chorus in the prologue to Henry V. ⁴⁹ Armitage (2006), vii. ⁵⁰ Armitage (2006), 34.

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scholarship has romanticized the idea of Homeric performance, suggesting a pristine world of poetry in which bards communicated seamlessly with early audiences.⁵¹ This may be, as Scodel suggests, because scholars desire to authenticate their own interpretations by evoking an ur-performance in which the entire ‘aggregative archive’ of Homeric interpretation and reception was available to the earliest audiences of the poems.⁵² But it may also be because the ideal bard, as opposed to the real bard, holds out the promise of the immersive experience of poetry, in which performance is immanent to us through the material medium of sound, embodied in the poet’s bardic voice.⁵³ The final twist to this story is suggested by James Porter, who points out the importance of the recovery of the voice as a physical relic or ‘museum object’ of classical antiquity for the very ideal of the classical.⁵⁴ In this interpretation, the material relationality of the voice is integral to the classical relay. This phenomenon is surely also part of Oswald and Armitage’s experiments with bardic personae in their translation of Homer qua classic. ⁵¹ Scodel (2002), ch. 1 (‘What are we talking about when we talk about tradition?’). ⁵² Scodel (2002), 8. I quote the phrase ‘aggregative archive’ from Middleton (2005), 23. ⁵³ In recent years, sound studies scholars have mounted a strong critique of the immersivity paradigm as fostering an affective rather an epistemic response to auditory media. See Schrim shaw (2015). ⁵⁴ Porter (2009), 105 6.

20 Homer ‘Viewed from the Corridor’ Epic Refracted in Michael Tippett’s King Priam Emily Pillinger

Michael Tippett’s opera King Priam, first performed in 1962, retells and extends the narrative of the Iliad. Unlike much ancient epic, with its internal narrators, flashbacks, and ekphrases, King Priam is in many ways straightforwardly linear in its narrative, and it is presented largely from the perspective of the Trojan victims.¹ However, in its music, libretto, and staging, the opera never settles on one single figure or theme around which to shape its story, flitting instead from character to character, episode to episode, creating a newly fractured version of events. Individual and community identities—Greek–Trojan, divine–mortal, elite–slave, man–woman, singer–instrumentalist, performer–listener—find themselves reflected in each other, and these oppositions in turn highlight the internal conflicts of the central characters in the myth.² The opera offers a multiply refracted production of the Trojan War that shuttles between emotional realism and Brechtian ‘epic’-style alienation, between classicism and modernism, between tonality and post-tonality; the work’s ultimate form appears to question the nature—perhaps even the possibility—of a truly sympathetic response to others’ suffering. Throughout the opera the fragmented actions and feelings portrayed are processed ‘in the corridor’ between the stage and the audience. Attempts to draw harmony and understanding from the dissonant narrative are negotiated by the ultimate marker of distances and communications: the god Hermes, whose role here not only parallels that of Brechtian-style ‘epic’ narrator, but also recalls that of ancient bard/rhapsode.

¹ On the narratological complexity of ancient epic, informed particularly by Genette’s work, see e.g. Fusillo (1985), De Jong (2004). ² Whittall (1999), 17 describes Tippett’s ‘polarized imagery’; Kemp (1984), 340 his ‘unity of pluralities’.

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ENGAGEMENT AND ALIENATION Tippett’s opera King Priam was first performed at the Coventry Cathedral Festival of 1962 before moving to Covent Garden later in the year. The consecration of the new cathedral was designed to mark the healing of the architectural and emotional scars left after the devastating bombing of Coventry in the Second World War, but the Cold War was now establishing new challenges and fears. King Priam, like his earlier A Child of Our Time and like Britten’s War Requiem (whose first performance the Coventry festival would host the day after King Priam), is also a piece about the horror of violence for an individual and his wider community. Tippett takes the same sympathy for the oppressed that went into A Child of Our Time, and puts it to the service of the Trojans in the Trojan War. However, the opera is a sound world away from A Child of Our Time, and marks a major turning point in Tippett’s compositional style.³ More rebarbative, less lyrical and lush than any work of Tippett’s that had come before, the opera was not warmly received by contemporary critics.⁴ It took Tippett three years (1958–61) to write King Priam. Although he had been dipping into classical literature since childhood and had spent some years studying Latin and Greek at school, this was a new venture into composing on a text from the ancient world.⁵ Tippett describes the strange feeling of familiarity and novelty he experienced as he decided on his approach to the Homeric material, when he imagines himself physically travelling between the ancient spaces inhabited by the Greeks and Trojans: ‘I cannot remember when I first moved over from the Greek ships and tents, where I had always seemed to belong, through the walls of Troy and into the city.’⁶ The composer’s transition from one camp to another establishes one of the many dualities that would structure Tippett’s work. It also aligns the fundamental opposition between Greek and Trojan with Tippett’s own sense of tradition (his original identification with the Greeks) and his desire for reconfiguration (his new sympathy for the Trojans). This fluctuation in the composer’s sense of his own proximity to the epic’s opposing forces also shapes his aspirations for King Priam’s effect on its audiences, an effect that

³ Kemp (1984), 324 explains it most cogently: ‘It seems no accident therefore that precisely when the scars of war were being healed and the promise of a more open and compassionate society was being vigorously pursued Tippett should have forged the new language of King Priam, an opera about the inevitability of war, the destructiveness of personal relationships and the futility of illusions.’ ⁴ Stannard (2013); Jones (1996), 108. ⁵ Tippett (1991), 2, 7. ⁶ Tippett (1980), 231; originally written for Music and Musicians (June 1967). Kemp (1984), 494 n. 29 points out an intriguing connection with Berlioz’s Les Troyens (staged at Covent Garden in 1957) whose sympathetic portrayal of the Trojans both at Troy and in Carthage might well have been at the forefront of Tippett’s mind.

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he anticipated would involve feelings both of engagement and of alienation. In an early commentary on the piece, Tippett expresses the hope that appropriate traditional epic material, handled in a certain way, would provide the tragic story, to be played out upon the stage in the actual Present of an evening’s performance, yet distanced by being in the Past. A theatrical practice which the Greek dramatists used in their time: as Shakespeare did in his; as Brecht and others have done in ours.⁷

Tippett’s mention of Brecht evokes the precepts of ‘Epic Theatre’ as they were developed and practised by the playwright/director, particularly the concept of Verfremdungseffekt.⁸ Intrigued by these tenets, Tippett began his compositional process by mapping out a narrative that would keep the audience at an emotional arm’s length from the action. He planned to tell his Iliadic story through eight distinct scenes representing eight ages of man: Birth, Boyhood, Young Love, Warriors, Women, Judgment, Mercy, Death.⁹ These disjointed movements still structure the final piece, but the fourth ‘Warriors’ episode grew disproportionately to encompass important moments and transitions in the story, particularly the scene between Achilles and Patroclus. As this unbalanced the original structure, Tippett ended up placing a superstructure of three acts composed of dramatic scenes and contemplative interludes on the opera, creating in the process more of a sense that human decisions create consequences that drive through the narrative from beginning to end.¹⁰ Tippett was still working with an explicitly Aristotelian appreciation for the emotional investment of his audience, despite his deployment of Brechtian anti-Aristotelian ‘epic’ features: ‘the pity and the terror, and the exaltation strangely intermixed with these, which we feel in the theatre before the great tragic spectacles of the past, are both possible and appropriate as a spectacle of the present’.¹¹ Yet his ambivalence about this assertion can be heard towards the end of King Priam when Hermes turns to the audience and instructs them: ‘Oh, but feel the pity and terror as Priam dies.’ The language of Aristotle embedded here in the libretto can be argued as proof that Tippett was not truly interested in sustaining a Brechtian sense of alienation throughout his work;

⁷ Tippett (1980), 224 (composer’s emphases); originally from a broadcast in German, March 1962. ⁸ Brecht (2015), 149 96. ⁹ Whittall (1999), 55; Kemp (1984), 356 7. ¹⁰ On the choral interludes within the broader structure of King Priam, see Kemp (1984), 357 8 and Ewans (2007), 131. ¹¹ Tippett (1980), 226; originally broadcast in German, March 1962. Ewans (2007), 131 2 and 148 51 argues that Tippett’s Aristotelian leanings, though genuine, cannot be successfully reconciled with the Brechtian fragmentation and ‘non developing music’ of King Priam. How ever, note that from 1935, emotion is important in Brechtian theory: see Silberman in Brecht (2015), 102 5.

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for others, the very fact that Hermes breaks the fourth wall and directly instructs the audience suggests quite the opposite.¹² Indeed, Tippett had wrestled with the question of whether or not to sweep his audience along harmonically and dramatically for as many as thirty years. His history of Communist sympathy (and brief Party membership in the 1930s) encouraged a suspicion of facile emotional triggering, which was seen as a tool whereby Fascists controlled the passive masses.¹³ At the same time he had always resisted the hardest expression of this, distrusting Marxism’s categorization of an individual’s tragedy as pure sentimentality, and over time his critique of Marxism hardened.¹⁴ He always championed music’s power to move the emotions beneficially: Hermes’ sublime ‘hymn to music’ towards the end of King Priam (‘O divine music, | Melt our hearts, | Renew our love’) is sufficient illustration of this. This may be why Tippett’s experiments with Jungian analysis became so important to him, supporting as they did a balanced approach to the value of both reason and instinct in responding to music and theatre. In the end, Tippett himself makes it clear that he is adopting what best suits his aesthetic vision: ‘[Racine’s] sense of tragedy gave me exactly the correct entry into the vast epic story surrounding King Priam. But Claudel and Milhaud, and of course Brecht, taught me how to pare away all the dross of the story, so that only the essentials—those essential scenes to this work—are there.’¹⁵ The tension between these different dramatic approaches would ultimately contribute to the work’s vital sense of controlled fragmentation: a combination of melodrama and cold commentary, emotional realism and theatrical artifice. Even the roles within the opera are a jumble of named figures (e.g. ‘Priam’, ‘Helen’), unnamed figures in the mould of Jungian archetypes or stock characters from ancient drama (‘Nurse’, ‘Old Man’, ‘Young Guard’), and undifferentiated chorus members whose role shifts from one scene to the next. To match this defamiliarization of the dramatic setting, Tippett splits the traditional opera orchestra into multiple smaller ensembles. For example, the very first blast of scattered fanfares and human cries that open the opera come from every angle within the performance space: the trumpets are performed onstage by ‘heralds’ as well as in the orchestra,

¹² Discussed by Harrison (2002), 229; Pollard and Clarke (1999); and Ewans (2007), 132. ¹³ Bullivant (2013), 77 8, unpicking Tippett’s Trotskyite sympathies. ¹⁴ Tippett (1980), 223. ¹⁵ Tippett (1980), 223; originally from a broadcast in French, March 1962. Though he may have known of it, it is unlikely that Tippett saw a performance of Claudel and Milhaud’s Oresteia trilogy. In this French broadcast Tippett mentions that he both saw Barrault’s production of Claudel and Milhaud’s Christophe Colombe in London in 1956 and read a paper by Barrault about the experience of working with Claudel just as he was beginning work on King Priam. For these French influences, including Lucien Goldmann’s work on Racine, Le Dieu caché (1955), see Pollard and Clarke (1999) and Harrison (2002), 221.

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while the chorus sings offstage.¹⁶ Tippett also throws himself into a ‘newly modernist language’ of music, whose harmony ‘simultaneously resists and embraces tonality’.¹⁷ The opera is indebted to the Brechtian epic ‘montage’ mode in all its aspects—it is ‘a mosaic construction composed of selfcontained paragraphs’—but it also sustains the audience’s emotional involvement from beginning to end.¹⁸

REFLECTIONS ONSTAGE Tippett wrote that ‘the deep relationship between all dualities is a problem of abiding fascination for me’.¹⁹ The doubling and inverting of humans and their life experiences pervades the opera through endless mirroring, pairing, layering, splitting, displacing, and replacing. The most fundamental doubling of characters in the opera is that of father and son: Priam and Paris. This relationship underpins the entire work, as the narrative tells of life from birth to death (according to Tippett’s original eight-part schema), but the life itself is split between the son, who is newly born at the beginning of the opera, and the father, who dies at its conclusion. (Paris is also assumed to have been killed just before Priam dies, but this is glossed over with Priam’s abrupt ‘He is already dead’ (Act 3, Scene 4).) The opera is a single biography of two men.²⁰ Their story is defined by further dualities, the most important being that each character is faced with a terrible choice in Act 1—a choice that Priam is also forced to make twice. In the first scene Priam must make the devastating decision whether or not to have his son killed for the good of the rest of the family and city, and he decides to let him die. In the following scene, when Paris is found alive, Priam revokes his initial decision: ‘Now I must choose afresh.’ Then in the third scene Paris is faced with his moment of choice, and he elects to take Helen from Sparta to Troy.²¹

¹⁶ Clarke (2001a), 80: ‘Tippett deploys . . . musical elements across an imaginary space that extends from the inner, mental world of individual characters to a vanishing point in the outer world beyond the stage set. This horizon is evoked by the amount of material that emanates from off stage.’ ¹⁷ Clarke (2001b), 510. ¹⁸ Clements (1985), 65, picking up on Tippett’s own description of the opera as ‘a sort of mosaic of music gestures’: Tippett (1980), 225; originally written for Music & Musicians (June 1967). ¹⁹ Tippett (1995), 296, ‘Too Many Choices’, discussed and problematized in Whittall (1999), 57. ²⁰ Ewans (2007), 134 5. ²¹ Though these are the central choices in the opera, the theme is embedded throughout the work: e.g. the boy Paris declares ‘I choose, I choose the life in Troy’ (Act 1, Scene 2). See Whittall (1999); Routh (1972), 286.

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Within the family another pairing emerges as the two brothers, Paris and Hector, jostle for status after Paris is clumsily reintegrated into the family. As one of the chorus of guests at Hector’s wedding notes, ‘once they knew they were brothers, Hector and Paris never got on’ (Act 1, Interlude 2). Towards the end of the opera Priam suggests that he would have had no hesitation in sacrificing one son if he had known that this would safeguard the other: PRIAM :

Oh, I could have spared you well for Hector; for Hector my son. Are you my son? No. .... I have no son, Paris. I had a son, Hector, but he is dead. (Act 3, Scene 2)

The Nurse questions Priam’s belief in this inhuman law of exchange, voicing a criticism of the king that Priam himself, through his own ‘soul’s echo’, seems to acknowledge is just. Tippett would expand and universalize this message in a commentary on the scene: If Hector was Priam’s beloved son, Paris was surely his rejected son. We are all rejected in some way or other; perhaps nowadays more than ever. I mean, that nowadays, lying behind the eternal rejections of persons, are the rejections of whole races. So that the collective anguish reinforces the personal.²²

Doubling is not limited to the Trojan royal family. In the Greek camp, the motif of one man’s pairing or replacement with another is itself replicated when Tippett explores the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles. The scene that takes place between the two warriors presents the most haunting music of the opera: a simple guitar accompanies Achilles as he laments alongside Patroclus, with clear resonances of Achilles playing the lyre at Iliad 9.185–91. As Venn writes on this episode: ‘Though the words and expansively lyrical lines speak of nostalgia, the sinewy counterpoint and barely repressed frustration of the guitar accompaniment suggest more complex emotions.’²³ In fact the motif of suppressed homosexual desire is foregrounded in the libretto too. ACHILLES :

O rich-soiled land of Phthia Where we grew to manhood You and I, Patroclus; Shall we tread After the war The homeland again?

²² Tippett (1980), 227; originally from a BBC broadcast, May 1962. ²³ Venn (2013), 275. See further Clarke (2001a), 69.

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Oh, there still lives my father, With Neoptolemus my son. (You loved him, Patroclus.) Shall we kiss, After the war, My tall son again? Patroclus, who has been sitting with his head in his hands, is now visibly sobbing. (Act 2, Scene 2) The tensions within this interlude were beautifully brought out by the staging of English Touring Opera’s 2014 production (dir. James Conway). After Achilles’ suggestively repeated question ‘Shall we kiss | After the war . . . ?’ he suddenly delivers a cruel twist with the fortissimo follow-up: ‘My tall son again’. Patroclus’ tears fall openly when he realizes that Achilles is not inviting him to embrace, but is instead speaking of their shared affection for his son.²⁴ The language of a father–son relationship has undercut that of a loving gay couple. Yet both, for Tippett, provide a legitimate framework within which Patroclus can become a stand-in for Achilles. Achilles notes that Patroclus’ plan is one that Achilles himself might have come up with: one hero is standing in for another in an act of emotional and intellectual identification. To Patroclus’ claim that ‘I shall be you in all but body’, Achilles replies: ‘The scheme is worthy of my fertile brain’ (Act 2, Scene 2). The question of who loves whom, and who replaces whom, is played out in the predictable aftermath of this scene. Paris kills Patroclus, which brings Achilles back into battle against Hector. Andromache explicitly disparages this exchange of her husband for Achilles’ beloved: ‘Husbands are worth more than comrades’ (Act 3, Scene 1). Priam, however, understands that there is no hierarchy of value or anguish in these tragic scenarios. When Priam goes to ransom Hector’s body from Achilles, the exchange is clear. As at Iliad 24.485–506, Priam secures Achilles’ sympathy by reminding him of his father: ‘Think on your father, Achilles, the lone old man in Greece, waiting for you to return’ (Act 3, Scene 3). Their exchange then continues with a mutual longing for death, in which both Achilles and Priam seem strangely reassured by the parallel information provided by the other. Achilles learns that he will be killed by Paris, Priam’s son, and Priam learns that he will be killed by Neoptolemos, Achilles’ son. There is a painful balance in their shared trauma at having lost the men closest to them, and the acts of vengeance by their respective offspring that will bring the release in death they both desire.

²⁴ In the exchange that follows, Achilles picks up on the simile at Iliad 16.5 11 of Patroclus as a little girl crying to her mother. Harrison (2002), 216 17 discusses the textual resonances and divergences.

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Perhaps the most important doubling in the opera, but also the most problematic, comes through the relationship between Helen and Paris. Helen and Paris fall in love through a mutually reflected narcissism. The end of Act 1 skips forward from an interlude describing Hector’s glorious wedding to Andromache in Troy, to a final scene set in Sparta where Paris and Helen are seducing each other by compulsively asserting their own identities. The first words of the scene involve the two of them singing each other’s name, and then their own: PARIS :

Helen! Paris! PARIS : Are you woman or witch that you enchant me so? HELEN : I am Helen. PARIS : And I am Paris . . . (Act 1, Scene 3) HELEN :

After Helen leaves him for the night, Paris ventriloquizes her in attempting to justify his knowledge that war will break out if they do run away to Troy: ‘You will answer Helen: do we choose at all when our divided bodies rush together as though halves of one? We love’ (Act 1, Scene 3). This description of lovers as two parts of a single entity evokes Aristophanes’ account of human desire in Plato’s Symposium, as well as Jung’s theory of the unconscious animus and anima and their role in determining sexual attraction. As each voice articulates the other’s self-exculpation, Helen and Paris are both portrayed as selfobsessed and reckless, absolving themselves of responsibility for the choices they make, and yet strangely ‘whole’ in their love, compared with everyone else in the opera.

COMMUNITIES IN THE CORRIDOR The pairings that structure the opera are accompanied by more complex groupings that are used to ponder the troubled individual and communal identities within the work. The number three is meaningful in terms of both the drama and the music. As Francis Routh notes, aside from the three-act structure it is found in the threefold repetition of the opening chorus’ cries, the final ‘war’ chord, and Achilles’ war cry at the very centre of the opera.²⁵ The three main male roles—Priam, Paris, and Hector—are matched by three female roles—Hecuba, Helen, and Andromache. Tippett also gathers groups of three characters to reflect upon the main drama either through direct ²⁵ Routh (1972), 286. On Achilles’ war cry imitating Achilles’ threefold shout at Iliad 18.228 9, see Harrison (2002), 217.

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commentary or through a replaying of events in a different mode. These different groups weave in and out of the main action and morph unsettlingly from one role to another, in the mode of an estranging Brechtian ‘epic’ chorus.²⁶ More confusingly still, these groups operate alongside another chorus that operates more like a conventional operatic chorus, in the role of the hunters, wedding guests, and servants who participate in the background of the action and offer their own helpless observations.²⁷ A Child of Our Time was populated by characters without names: the main roles were ‘Boy’, ‘Aunt’, and so forth. King Priam also gestures to this with three roles that have no proper names. These characters, along with the god Hermes and the larger chorus, blend in and out of the scenes and interludes within each act, while the named characters are strictly limited to the action that takes place within the scenes. The first scene in the opera opens with Hecuba and Priam pondering the meaning of Hecuba’s ominous dream concerning the baby Paris. Alongside these main figures are introduced the three unnamed figures: ‘Nurse’, Priam’s nurse; ‘Old Man’, a wise elder who interprets Hecuba’s dream as a sign that the baby will bring about the death of his father; and ‘Young Guard’, the character instructed to kill the baby Paris. The status of these unnamed figures is slippery, and shifts from one moment to the next. After the first scene of the first act segues into the first interlude, the named figures disappear offstage. The unnamed figures remain and then dissolve into a chorus that collectively contemplates the moral difficulties with which they and the audience have just been presented. Tippett makes the process explicit in his stage directions and his reference to the style of singing demanded by the different roles: By some easily manipulated change of dress, or by a mask perhaps, or a gesture, they can become a commenting Chorus. When speaking as Chorus they declaim; when speaking as expressive of their roles they do not declaim. (Act 1, Scene 1)

This chorus goes on to comment on the roles that they have just played: for example, the Old Man describes himself in the third person: ‘the wise man read the dream’, while the Young Guard instructed to kill Paris reflects on Priam’s horrific decision: ‘How can a young man know enough to dare to make such a choice?’ (Act 1, Interlude 1).

²⁶ Pace Ewans (2007), who argues that the ‘Chorus of three’ (as he calls the chorus of the Nurse, Old Man, and Young Guard) works not to distance the audience from the action but, on the contrary, ‘to build bridges between the principal characters and the audi ence’ (132). ²⁷ On the relationship between ancient choruses and operatic choruses at specific moments in the development of the operatic genre, see Savage (2013) and Billings (2013).

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As the scene draws to a close, the three figures deliver a series of shared comments on the action: (Chorus): Time alone will tell. We shall judge from the story. AND NURSE (Chorus): For life is a story from birth to death. Scene will change into scene before you; time rolling with each scene away. Thus we follow the story. (Act 1, Interlude 1)

OLD MAN AND YOUNG GUARD YOUNG GUARD ALL :

As the scene has become interlude, and as the characters have gone from singing solo to pairs to a trio, so the libretto sets the singers at an increasing distance from the action. Their words go from a statement that describes and shapes, in its prophetic performativity, the whole narrative arc of the opera (‘The dream means that Paris . . . will cause . . . his father’s death’) to assessment of the narrative (‘We shall judge from the story’), to generic aphorism (‘Life is a story’), to explicit stepping back from the events onstage and closer identification with the audience (‘Scene will change into scene before you . . . Thus we follow the story’). Throughout this profoundly Brechtian ‘epic’ episode the passage of time is highlighted: the time that passes as Paris will grow to adulthood, but also the time that passes as the opera progresses: ‘time rolling with each scene away’. The interlude concludes with the Old Man returning to a point of equilibrium somewhere between performer and audience, as he delivers a compressed narration, recitative-style, of the years that follow: ‘the father-king . . . was favoured at first . . . Hector grew to a fine lad . . . The city calm and flourishing; occasion for hunting and the arts of peace’ (Act 1, Interlude 1). The slightly disjointed phrasing gives the impression that stage directions have been transmuted into the substance of the opera itself, resonant of the Brechtian expressionist stage directions that were projected on screens onstage, and implicating the audience in the technicalities of the score even as the Old Man steps a little closer back into the action. In the following scene of the bull hunt (Act 1, Scene 2) Priam will reflect on the actions of these unnamed characters in the first scene, who seem to be both involved in and detached from the drama. When Priam learns that the baby Paris was not killed, he turns to the ‘shadows from the past who haunt my dreams’, and addresses them directly. Their presence makes no sense except as part of Priam’s psychological disturbance— indeed towards the end of the opera they will appear once again to the king as ‘Phantoms! Phantoms from that fatal hour’ (Act 3, Scene 2)—but here he describes them as ‘Actors indissolubly joined with me to play a

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crucial scene’ (Act 1, Scene 2).²⁸ These strange figures are figments of Priam’s tortured self-examination but also embodiments onstage; they are subject to the king’s thoughts but also critical of them and even, as in the case of the Young Guard’s initial rescue of Paris, capable of defying his decisions. A variation on this theme is found at the beginning of the third act, where singers from the larger chorus play the role of ‘serving women’ (as marked in the score) or, as they explicitly call themselves in the libretto, ‘slaves’. In the first scene of this final act Troy is falling and Hecuba, Andromache, and Helen are blaming each other for the events taking place around them. After their squabbling dies down and the scene gives way to an interlude, the serving women of the palace gather to comment on the scene that has just taken place: (Chorus): We always know. Yet who are we? Not the names that figure in the drama. Un-named. Slaves. (Yes.) Slaves. To whom the fate of towered Troy is but a change of masters. What else? Rape! Death! Are these Greek or Trojan? They laugh. Yet we could tell the story too, the pathetic story of our masters. Viewed from the corridor. Cries off stage. SERVING WOMEN

The women draw attention to their lack of individual names—‘Not the names that figure in the drama’—without even the abstract titles of ‘Old Man’, ‘Nurse’, and ‘Young Guard’ that distinguish each one of the smaller chorus occasionally formed of those three characters. Their social standing as slaves parallels their lack of agency within the drama itself.²⁹ In a distant echo of the Negro spirituals that punctuate A Child of Our Time, the song of these slaves offers a commentary on the action they follow, though this time there is nothing of the religious or harmonic consolation of the spirituals. Instead the women make a bitter political point of their role as an observing chorus. For them the structuring dualities of the opera are meaningless (‘Are these Greek or Trojan?’); they point out that their narrative would look very different: ‘we could tell the story too’. The sound of action filters through via ²⁸ Jones (1996), 104 describes them as ‘perhaps . . . too involved in the tragedy to be agents in a Brechtian “alienation” process’. ²⁹ This scene anticipates Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad. For an exploration of these dynamics in postcolonial and anticolonial literature, see McConnell (2013a).

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offstage cries after this claim, briefly granting the audience an impression of their elliptical perspective. Their opera is constructed ‘from the corridor’: neither quite detached nor fully involved; neither well developed nor completely silenced. Returning to the first act, there is yet one further example of the fragmentation of the agents involved in the opera. Not content with constructing multiple and diffuse choral communities that step away from the action to comment on its progress and moral standing, Tippett makes the bold decision to engage with a different kind of onlooker: the gods of Greek myth—the onlookers of ancient epic, rather than drama. He does so by staging the Judgement of Paris, a scene that is entirely absent from the Iliad but underpins the whole series of disastrous events leading to the Trojan War.³⁰ This mythic episode is intrinsically odd, in part because it inverts the normal power dynamics between mortal and immortal: instead of divine figures exerting their control over hapless humans, the most forceful goddesses in the Greek pantheon submit to the ruling of a flawed and selfish man. The third scene of the first act of King Priam pauses after Paris and Helen have engaged in their mutual preening and flirting. Helen has left the stage, but not before she has promised to leave with Paris, though she has effectively given him the responsibility of initiating the elopement (‘If you fetch me, I will come’). As Paris engages in tortured philosophical musings on the situation in which he finds himself, he appeals to Zeus: ‘Is there a choice at all? | Answer, father Zeus, divine lover! | Answer.’ Zeus is silent, but Hermes appears onstage. The score marks no movement into an interlude: this is still part of the final scene of the act. Hermes’ entry represents a newly revealed dimension to the human world, not a detached commentary on it. Hermes does not answer Paris’ question directly, but he sets up a scenario that embeds the divine pantheon in the human psyche, and specifically undermines Paris’ claim that he has no real choice over whether to take Helen to Troy.³¹ Hermes claims to bring a message from Zeus, commanding that Paris make his famous choice of the most beautiful of the goddesses. The scene delves into Paris’ mind—he sings ‘I dream, I dream!’—exploring the psychological conundrum with which the hero is faced. As Paris approaches each goddess, the staging reveals that Athena is performed by the same singer as sings the part of Hecuba, Hera is performed by Andromache, and Aphrodite by Helen. Athena (Hecuba) promises Paris brilliance in battle, and Hera (Andromache) promises him a happy marriage. To both of these figures Paris responds in a way that casually uncovers their alias:

³⁰ Hinted at in Iliad 24.25 30. ³¹ Tippett appears to have been influenced by Freud’s essay on the myth: ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’; see Kemp (1984), 358 9. Ewans (2007), 138 43 argues that human choice in King Priam is problematically constrained by Brechtian tenets of fixity and predetermined outcomes, in a way that works against the norms of ancient tragedy.

Epic Refracted in Tippett’s King Priam PARIS

(rudely): You speak like my mother Hecuba. . . . . . . . .

PARIS

(with exasperation): You speak like my brother’s wife, Andromache.

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However, Aphrodite (Helen) simply provokes a repetition of the lustful exchange of names that had taken place earlier in the scene between Helen and Paris. PARIS :

Will you not speak, O Goddess of all love that is desire? Paris! PARIS (involuntarily): Helen! APHRODITE : Paris! PARIS : O Aphrodite, shall I honour you? (Act 1, Scene 3) APHRODITE :

Paris’ decision is made: he awards the apple to Aphrodite, Hera and Athene curse him, and as the scene grows to a crashing crescendo Paris shouts in distress, like Priam recollecting the unnamed trio implicated in his first decision to kill Paris: ‘You are phantoms.’ Paris’ decision to offer the apple to Aphrodite, to take Helen as his prize and accept the tragedies that must ensue, is his human choice, but it is one that is made on both a conscious and an unconscious level. This strange scene of dream-therapy, enacted by the ancient Greek gods, uncovers these levels and gives them both an individual and a collective dimension. Each of the three goddesses is exposed as a kind of archetype of the sort Jung argued emerges from the collective unconscious: a warring aspect of Paris’ psyche, certainly, but also a symbolic value shared more widely: the city and its violence (Athena), family (Hera), and sex or death (Aphrodite). Indeed, later in the opera Hecuba, Andromache, and Helen all pray to their patron goddess (Act 3, Scene 1), revealing that the identification between the individual women and goddesses is not only constructed in Paris’ mind, but also part of the mind-world of the opera as a whole.

REFRACTIVE RESPONSES In this opera whose structure, themes, and characterization are mapped on to a complex system of reflections and triangulations that create a sense of controlled fragmentation, it is remarkable that there remains such a sense of coherence to the work as a whole. Much of this comes down to what is still a deeply felt emotional verisimilitude to the opera: all the schisms and contradictions are marked as part of the human condition. The characters are convincingly flawed, whether named, unnamed, or nameless, and their

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emotions appear true to life. The music, despite the criticisms of its alienating dissonance and lack of development, has a raw power to match the appeal of the characters. But to reconcile this engaging dimension of the opera with the principles of Verfremdungseffekt, Tippett needed a mediating figure. This he found in Hermes, the messenger god of Greek myth turned narrator of Brechtian drama, who stage-manages the fragmented elements of the opera and orchestrates both cynical and sympathetic responses to them. In a seminal article of the early 1960s Vernant describes Hermes: ‘Nothing about him is settled, stable, permanent or restricted or definite. He represents in space and in the human world movement and flow, mutation and transition, contact between foreign elements.’³² Tippett’s Hermes, composed just a couple of years before that article’s publication, describes himself as the god ‘who’s tied to nothing’ (Act 2, Interlude 1), repeating the point in the following interlude: ‘I am not tied to Troy’ (Act 2, Interlude 2).³³ He is named but not mortal, and limited neither to the action in the scenes nor to the commentary in the interludes. Sometimes emphasizing the distance between the multiple dimensions operating within the work, sometimes drawing them closer together, Hermes offers a way into the opera’s structural and emotional complexities, and a way out of them as well. Hermes physically leads characters between the Trojan city and the Greek camp, marking the same route that Tippett described himself as treading when he first developed his take on the story of the Trojan War. In the second act Hermes takes the Old Man to watch the exchange between Achilles and Patroclus, sandwiching that scene between two interludes and lending a disconcerting layer of voyeurism to an already erotically charged episode. In a version of his role as psychopompos, Hermes also negotiates the transition into the dreamlike dimensions of the Judgement of Paris, which transcends the boundaries between mortal and immortal power-play, or conscious and unconscious decision-making. Later, Hermes does not explicitly escort Priam to ransom the body of Hector from Achilles (despite Priam’s claim that ‘Led by Hermes I am here’), but he does emerge in the interlude that follows to offer an extended reflection on the closural events of the story.³⁴ This interlude takes the audience into the final scene of the opera in which Priam awaits his death at the altar in his palace. This last scene provides more of a coda than a conclusion, as the third act is the only act to contain four, not three, scenes. In this prefatory interlude Hermes reaches out to mediate between the audience and the action onstage.

³² Vernant (2006), 159, quoted and discussed in Goldhill (1986), 71. ³³ Compare Hermes’ description of the Old Man: ‘Old phantom tied to Troy’ (Act 2, Interlude 1). ³⁴ Kemp (1984), 362 points out that the chorus’ comments have gradually faded away as the opera develops, giving way first to a purely instrumental interlude, and finally to the god’s voice.

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Hermes introduces himself and the scene to come. This is necessary, particularly for those who have read the Iliad and expect him to be Priam’s protector on the journey back to Troy, not the ‘messenger of death’. As the opera draws to an end, even this divine character begins to morph between named and choral role: Hermes enters as messenger of death. (Chorus): I come as messenger of death. For the story will soon end. A music played in time. HERMES (Role): Do not imagine all the secrets of life can be known from a story. Oh, but feel the pity and the terror as Priam dies. He already breathes an air as from another planet. The world where he is going, Where he has gone Cannot communicate itself through him, (He will speak only to Helen in the end) But through the timeless music. (Act 3, Interlude 3) HERMES

In his own transitional stage, Hermes’ words are soaked in the traditions of poetry and its criticism that value the recalibrating of emotions and reconciling of dichotomies. Not only does Hermes utter the strangely Aristotelian adjuration to the audience—to ‘feel the pity and the terror as Priam dies’—that creates such debate over Tippett’s balancing of emotional engagement and alienation, but he also describes the music ‘played in time . . . timeless music’, terms resonant of T. S. Eliot’s critical writings on ‘classic’ poets’ consciousness, then transcendence, of their contemporary language and history.³⁵ Back in his choral role, Hermes delivers his ‘hymn to music’, the ‘divine music’ in which souls drown: HERMES

(Chorus): While we sit watching from the bank The mirrored world within, for ‘Mirror upon mirror mirrored is all the show.’ (Act 3, Interlude 3)

Now part of the audience he had previously been addressing (‘we sit watching from the bank’), Hermes meditates upon ‘the mirrored world within’. Hermes quotes Yeats’s poem ‘The Statues’; Tippett packs the line with melismatic meandering and for once uses inverted commas to make his quotation

³⁵ It is worth noting that Eliot republished ‘What is a Classic?’ (originally delivered in 1944) in 1956, just before Tippett started work on King Priam. See Routh (1972), 281 on Eliot’s influence on Tippett.

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explicit. Yeats’s poem is a meditation on the power of art, no matter how technically contrived, to awaken its audience’s dreams and emotions. The layers of artifice in King Priam that are now being exposed by Hermes, the mirrors upon mirrors, are no less capable of representing a kind of inner truth. The audience looks (and listens) outwards, but sees (and hears) inwards. As Hermes goes on to point out, in the final scene Priam will refuse to speak to Hecuba or Andromache, but will have a brief exchange with Helen. Helen and her absolute centredness—self-centredness—represent the transcendent (but empty) ‘whole’ with which Priam’s disjointed story most contrasts. In their exchange, Helen announces with her cold simplicity once again: ‘I am Helen’, and this time not Paris but Priam answers: ‘For you are Helen’ (Act 3, Scene 4). Now, though, Priam joins Hermes as an increasingly detached spectator of his own final moments.³⁶ He takes over the language just introduced by Hermes, describing his own vision of mirrors:³⁷ PRIAM :

I see mirrors, Myriad upon myriad moving The dark forms Of creation. (Act 3, Scene 4)

In the ultimate act of fragmentation Priam leaves his role as ‘King Priam’ to join the chorus of voices and viewers that are getting to grips with the messy complexity of his story, and the truth that lies in its refracted, oblique telling. The last bars of the opera see Neoptolemus rushing on stage to kill Priam, in a final breaching of the space between the Greek camp and the Trojan city. This is accompanied by jumbled cries that echo the opening cries of the opera—shouts that evoke war as well as the labouring of Hecuba in Paris’ childbirth.³⁸ All the firm distinctions that have shaped the opera are now collapsing. The scene closes, but not before Tippett inserts some last disjointed notes that he describes as follows: ‘There is a sudden silence. Then a few curious sounds that might represent our inward tears.’³⁹ Tippett is helping his audience—‘us’, including himself—to make the transition from the lives of others, from the past, to our own lives, and the present. As Hermes instructed, and Priam demonstrated, our feelings are embedded in the story, but are also reflected back to us as items for detached scrutiny.

³⁶ On this as the fulfilment of the Marxist Goldmann’s theory of god hidden tragedy, see Pollard and Clarke (1999), 172. ³⁷ In the English Touring Opera production, the chorus held up little mirrors at this point, providing shimmering reflections like candlelight. ³⁸ Kemp (1984), 370. ³⁹ Tippett (1980), 230; originally from a BBC broadcast talk, May 1962.

IV Empire and Politics

21 Institutional Receptions Camões, Saramago, and the Contemporary Politics of The Lusíads on Stage Tatiana Faia

POET AND NATION Camões’s statue oversees the main district in Lisbon’s old town. The poet, whose statue was placed there in the 1860s, towers above the centre of the city, one of the many manifestations that Camões’s reception assumed in the nineteenth century. It is also one of the ways in which the author’s status as a national symbol is officially implied. The central role that his epic poem, The Lusíads, has played in Portuguese culture for over 400 years, and with it the myth of Camões as the quintessential poet of the Portuguese language, can be explained by a combination of historical momentum, the poem’s relationship to the classical tradition, and, to some extent, the narrator’s role in the narrative. The Lusíads became central to the Portuguese literary canon at a time when Portuguese intellectuals sought to celebrate in epic verse, along the lines of Homer or Virgil, the exploits of Portuguese history and, more specifically, the explorations that led to Portugal becoming the first global empire of the early modern age.¹ Camões’s ambition to become the author of such a poem met the expectations of his peers; and he dreamt of becoming Portugal’s Virgil probably from a young age.² However, it is the interplay between the historical context depicted in the poem and the classical tradition that more adeptly explains The Lusíads’ status as Portugal’s national poem. If Vasco da Gama’s historical journey uncovering the sea route to India is used as a framework to depict other key moments in the history of Portugal, the web of allusions to Graeco-Roman tradition woven

¹ See Rocha Pereira (1988), 114 15. ² Camões, Eclogue IV. See also Costa Ramalho (1986), 94 5.

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throughout the poem is not only designed to show the events and characters from Portuguese history as the rightful heirs to that tradition; it is also intended to emulate and challenge that tradition. This classical frame includes ancient gods, myths, and a web of literary allusions that span from Homer to Virgil, and include direct or indirect echoes of Apollonius, perhaps Callimachus,³ Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Pindar, and Seneca (to mention only a few).⁴ It is relevant to mention the Aeneid not only because it is one of The Lusíads’ main sources,⁵ but also because, not unlike Virgil, Camões in his epic sets out to create a national mythology to sing of a new age. The parallels between The Lusíads and the tradition of European epic poetry, then, are many. Not unlike the Homeric poems (and the Aeneid itself), The Lusíads quickly became the most representative poem of the epic tradition from which it emerged. Like Dante and Milton, Camões has Virgil as a source (if not as poetical role model), which means that Camões’s epic inscribes itself in a tradition of European poetry that can be traced ultimately back to Homer. The Lusíads’ scope and ambition attracted praise from Garcilaso de la Vega, Herrera, and Tasso. If one were to take the praise of these illustrious readers as an early indication of the canonical status the poem was to assume, part of the explanation for that praise lies in the fact that by forging for his epic a place among the ‘further voices’ of the classical tradition, Camões incidentally gives to Portuguese history and its agents a global outlook,⁶ strongly rooted in the wider context of the classical tradition, which was the common currency of the intellectuals of his time. That this global orientation is a crucial part of The Lusíads’ poetical (and political) agenda is made explicit from the very first stanzas: Boast no more about the subtle Greek Or the long odyssey of the Trojan Aeneas; Enough of the oriental conquests Of great Alexander and of Trajan; I sing of the famous Portuguese To whom both Mars and Neptune bowed. Abandon all the ancient Muse revered, A loftier code of honour has appeared. (Lusíads 1.3)⁷

³ On which see Lourenço (2004), 271. ⁴ Virgil’s Aeneid is the main classical influence on The Lusíads: see Almeida Pavão (1986), Costa Ramalho (1980) and (1986), Rocha Pereira (1988). See Rocha Pereira (1988), 118 on the Odyssey as an overlooked source for The Lusíads. Lourenço (2004) focuses on the question of Camões as a reader of the Odyssey. Lourenço (2011) traces the translations of Homer to which Camões might have had access. Arruda Franco (2011) surveys the overall influence of Horace on Camões. Almeida (2013) offers a discussion of the relevance of Cicero and Seneca in the poem’s moral outlook. See Ascenso André (2011a) and (2011b) for the reception of Ovid in Camões’s works. ⁵ Camões’s earliest commentator, Manuel de Faria e Sousa in the seventeenth century, traced the allusions to Virgil. ⁶ As noted by White (2008), xiii. ⁷ Throughout the chapter, translations of The Lusiads are by White in Camões (2008).

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Another element that may well account for the poem’s status as Portugal’s national poem is the centrality of the narrator’s perspective. At once a breviary of Portuguese national pride and a handbook fiercely denouncing the status quo, often casting a severely disenchanted glance at the nation, it is mostly through the narrator’s asides that this ambivalence is voiced. This ambiguity lends to The Lusíads the unique perspective of an individual, often dissenting, voice. In a poem that otherwise comprises glorification of Portuguese history and a praise of empire, this strikes a powerfully dissonant chord. Indeed, it may well be this element that begins to account for the poem’s post-1974 popularity, in a postcolonial context, amongst both left- and right-wing intellectuals. The importance assumed by the narrator in the poem has often led scholars to cast Camões as the poem’s hero. The philosopher Eduardo Lourenço has described the role of the Romantic period, which lionized not only the author as genius but especially Homer as the font of all poetic wisdom, in forging Camões’s reception: The identification of Portugal with Camões, by a conjugated work of historical momentum and Romanticism’s cultural revolution, is a unique case in the broader context of European culture. During the whole of our [the Portuguese] nineteenth century there is a kind of constant coming and going between the reading we make of our collective destiny and the image of Camões. Or, better perhaps, of his Book, which will become the monument of the commander of our culture and its guardian angel, judge and hope for redemption.⁸

Needless to say, the ‘Book’ is The Lusíads, and what Lourenço struggles to define here is the crucial role, not least through casting his narrator as a voice to be heard in his epic poem, that Camões came to play in the creation of a sense of national identity and collective memory. If Camões indeed embodies a unique case of identification between nation and national poet, so much so that the poet’s identity, or better his ‘Book’, can be proclaimed not only as a national poem but also as a symbol of collective identity, how has that identity been appropriated and reflected in that most public of arenas, the stage? This chapter surveys the link between the biographical construct of Camões proposed by José Saramago’s 1980 drama What Shall I Make of This Book? (O que Farei com este Livro?) and the ethical and political standpoint assumed by the narrator of The Lusíads. I find it surprising that this relationship has been neglected both by commentators on the play and by professional readers of Camões.⁹ Saramago self-consciously inscribes his play within a tradition of readings, in Portuguese twentieth-century literary texts and scholarship

⁸ Lourenço (1999), 27. Translations are my own, unless stated otherwise. ⁹ For a discussion of the influence of Saramago’s immediate political context (i.e. Portugal post 1974) on the play, see Frier (1998). For an overview of the reception of Camões in the context of Saramago’s works, see Vichinsky (2009).

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alike, of Camões as the hero/anti-hero at the core of the poem.¹⁰ Lourenço’s quote above, by muddling the poem and the poet as if they were one and the same entity, provides an example of this type of reading. The chapter goes on to make especial reference to two texts that were written in contexts of official commemorations of Camões: Jorge de Sena’s essay on the volume Camões and the National Identity (1983) and Vasco Graça Moura’s ‘Camões: A Few Challenges’ (1980).¹¹ I argue that both these essays struggle with the question that gave Saramago’s play its title as well as representing the different stages in the wider reception of The Lusíads in post-1974 Portugal.

THE L USÍADS ON STA GE Theatrical adaptations of The Lusíads were few until relatively recently. From the Romantic period onwards, playwrights have been fascinated with the poet’s biography;¹² and the enduring centrality of Camões’s biography on stage is no doubt related to the Romantics’ focus on his image. However, it is equally the case that the image that the narrator of The Lusíads forges for himself has played a decisive role in the enduring appeal that his biography has exerted over playwrights. This trend in Camões’s literary reception continues well into the twentieth century and is equally evident in other literary genres.¹³ On the contemporary stage it has assumed its most relevant expression in Saramago’s drama What Shall I Make of This Book?¹⁴ Originally performed in 1980, during the commemorations of the quatercentenary of the poet’s death, and staged again in 2008, What Shall I Make of This Book? is set between 1570 and 1572, in the aftermath of Camões’s return from India and Mozambique after a seventeen-year absence. The play depicts the poet’s struggle to see his book published, and poses timeless questions ¹⁰ A paradigmatic essay exploring this interpretation also dates from the same period: see Helder Macedo (1981). ¹¹ Sena (1983), 27 38 and Graça Moura (1980), 23 45. ¹² These are listed by Rebello in Saramago (1980), 163 4 and total four dramas in Portugal between 1847 and 1880. Rebello notes that these tend to portray Camões as no more than a conventional figure. Maria Aparecido Ribeiro (1987), surveying the Brazilian and Portuguese contexts, lists a total of thirty five plays, the majority of which focus on Camões’s life (including plays by Machado de Assis and, almost contemporary with Saramago’s play, Natália Correia and Jaime Gralheiro). ¹³ e.g. Sena (1963) and (2006), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (2015), António Lobo Antunes (1988). ¹⁴ In his foreword to the first edition of the play, Rebello places it in the wider context of its reception by noting that Camões had had in Garrett and Gomes Leal poets to commemorate him, in Jorge de Sena an author of fiction to recreate his life, and that what he had lacked until Saramago’s play was a playwright to place him on stage.

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about the relationship between artists and politics; as such, it reflects the context in which the epic poem originated. It also underpins the audience’s awareness that the classic-in-the-making, at that point no more than the anonymous object named in the title, is merely one in a myriad of others. The play focuses on the relationship of an author with his work at the point when it is available only to a very small group of readers, the author’s closest friends. The perspective that spectators of the play have on the book is not therefore one that would normally characterize a classic: the reception of a wider readership. That perspective is, to some extent, stripped out of Saramago’s play; what is foregrounded instead is the fragility of the status of a text that is yet to find its audience. The play emphasizes the relationship between creator and creation by showing The Lusíads as an object still in the making, liable to be affected by the events witnessed by Camões upon his return. It also depicts the ethical stance assumed by the poet during that crucial period between arrival and publication, about which very little is known, and suggests that this is a valid lens under which to read the epic. Whereas for much of the twentieth century The Lusíads was institutionally approached in schools, universities, and in propaganda as a fixed object, whose meaning could be controlled (or at least edited), Saramago’s play offers a gaze at a writer in his workshop, at a point when a text can still be cut, expanded, amended, and most of all, affected by its context.¹⁵ However, by depicting Camões’s successive encounters with friends, courtiers, legendary intellectuals, a censor, a printer, and a former lover, the play gradually emphasizes the question of the poem’s reception: the last scene shows him facing the audience and asking, ‘What will you make of this book?’, as a chorus starts to read the initial lines of the poem.¹⁶ There is interplay here between what the audience knows will be the later reception of the poem and a moral critique of the indifference of official authorities, as we watch Camões’s seemingly hopeless struggle to obtain the funds and permissions required to ensure his book sees the light of day. In this sense, the play indirectly toys with notions of institutional opportunism, and goes so far as to show the poet’s humiliation by Vasco da Gama’s descendants, who refuse to contribute in any way to the publication of a book that celebrates the major feat of their most distinguished ancestor. Witness this disturbing episode with da Gama’s family: Let da Gama be grateful to the muses That they love the country as they do, Being constrained to honour in poetry His title, fame, and exploits in war; For in truth, neither he nor his lineage

¹⁵ Saramago (1980), 48.

¹⁶ Saramago (1980), 157.

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Tatiana Faia Condescend to be Calliope’s friend, Nor encourage the nymphs of Tagus to trim Their cloths of gold and sing instead of him. (Lusíads 5.99)

We also witness Camões’s successive meetings with the censor, Frei Bartolomeu Ferreira, during which Camões is at pains to keep control over the shape of his poem. By privileging the poet’s perspective, Saramago himself ingeniously manages the disparity between the idea of The Lusíads as the national poem, of which no spectator sitting in Teatro de Almada would be unaware, and the private and seemingly minor drama of an ageing author, who has just moved back home to live with his mother, a widow who has for many years lived alone with little news of her son. This man, who has returned after many years abroad, now struggles to find the money to pay for the publication of his book, upon whose success his future hinges.

T R A N S L A T I N G C A M Õ E S : F RO M THE LU SÍ A D S TO THE S TAGE The Lusíads is shaped by a poetical vision that is in the end committed to the idea of literature as a challenging and changing force, politically as much as poetically. Saramago’s character resembles Camões’s narrator insofar as his attitude inherits the dissonance present in the narrator’s interventions, often intended as comments on the status quo Camões found upon his return. Saramago’s Camões can, to some extent, be read as a counterpart to this narrator. He left as a young man, who now returns to a country in disarray that he struggles to recognize, and which (perhaps, implied in the reversal of the key question at the end of the play) might be at odds with the very way the country as a collective is depicted in the poem. At one critical point in the play Camões confesses to Francisca de Aragão, an aid to the queen and his former lover, and one of the play’s most clear-sighted and generous characters (a combination of traits not unusual in Saramago’s major women characters), that he is old and tired: FRANCISCA DE ARAGÃO:

You were out of your mind, Luís Vaz. Where have you been living to believe that the king would have listened to you in there, when he was on his way to the council? LUÍS DE CAMÕES: And in some other time, some other place, will he listen? Will Luís de Camões have to kneel on his two knees for his lines to be heard? . . . For seventeen years I had to suffer overseas what one usually suffers overseas, plus the share of what was my own to

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endure. I brought back a bunch of papers in verse, which is everything I own.¹⁷ During Camões’s absence, Portugal had faced the first round of a dynastic crisis that would prove fatal to its sovereignty upon King Sebastião’s death in the disastrous campaign of Alcácer-Kebir in 1578. The king ascended to the throne at the age of 3 and while he was an infant, the regency was secured first by his grandmother, Catarina of Austria, and then by his great-uncle, Cardinal Henrique. The king was just 14 when he became the de facto ruler. Saramago’s play emphasizes the point that the royal house, without descendants other than the ruling king, and by extension the whole country, is in a precarious position. In the opening scenes of the play we are told that the court has abandoned Lisbon and gathered in Almeirim because a plague has broken out in the city, killing at least 60,000 people. The first scene is a dialogue between two counsellors of the king, Martim da Câmara and Luís da Câmara, who discuss an anonymous pamphlet which has been circulated in Coimbra, accusing them of delaying the king’s marriage to protect their own position. The brothers discuss the king’s refusal to marry, not without Luís conceding that such reluctance serves his own Jesuit interests well. The dialogue moves to an innuendo about the king’s rumoured impotence (hence his refusal to get married), and ends with Martim mentioning the delight the king takes in riding on foggy mornings, for the thing he loves most is ‘riding blind’.¹⁸ As Saramago’s audience would have been well aware, the key feature of the popular myth that originated after the king’s death in Alcácer-Kebir is that he would come back one day to rescue his country, riding on a horse, on a foggy morning. This political tableau is further explored in the next scene, which stages an encounter between the two former regents, Catarina of Austria and Cardinal Henrique. The queen blames Henrique, who had allowed the Câmara brothers to become prominent in court, for their excessive influence over the king. The cardinal replies that what pleases the king about the Câmara brothers is that they have relieved him of the burden of ruling. When the queen reminds Henrique that he was the king’s tutor, Henrique utters the speech that fixes the king’s character for the rest of the play: I educated him to rule over the people, not to waste his time in hunting games. I educated him to revere God and His word, not for the excesses of religion in which he takes pleasure and for which his royal duties have no use. I educated him so that he would listen to the advice of those who were more experienced and older, not to surround himself with the unwise who distract him from ruling and urge him to conquering adventures that will bring no good to Portugal.¹⁹ ¹⁷ Saramago (1980), 69, 71.

¹⁸ Saramago (1980), 22.

¹⁹ Saramago (1980), 28.

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The king, although at the centre of the political intrigue, is an elusive (if not apathetic) figure who, in his only appearance on stage, shies away from Camões without uttering a word when the poet, kneeling on the ground, prepares to read him the dedication of The Lusíads, which is addressed to him. The effect of the scene is dumbfounding. Historical truth may not be a concern in any of the many adaptations of historical events depicted in Saramago’s works,²⁰ but the fictional enactment of their encounter portrays the king as a speechless, almost out-of-worldly creature, who abandons the stage surrounded by his court, leaving the poet alone and startled, an apt metaphor for the relation between Camões and the country to which he returns. The political background that Saramago depicts, nevertheless, can be traced back to The Lusíads itself and provides the subject of a number of the epic narrator’s asides, which tend to be concentrated in the final stanzas of each of the cantos. What scholars have dubbed ‘the anti-epic spirit of the poem’ accounts for the political instability in King Sebastião’s court. If it is the inclusion of the narrator’s perspective that pulls the epic into its historical present and affords it glimpses into the future,²¹ it is also true that the narrator’s addresses to the young king urging him to right action also include the occasional dissonant note of what scholars concur is a criticism of the king’s rule.²² The biographical element in these digressions often comes across in the ethical perspective implied or signalled explicitly in the narrator’s asides. A few of these instances fuel the intrigue in Saramago’s play. In the opening stanzas of The Lusíads, the address to the king frames the poem in such a way that it is possible to read it as an address from the narrator: Descend a little from such majesty For I see in your youthful countenance Already inscribed that maturity You will bear to eternity’s temple; Bend those royal and benign eyes Earthwards, and behold this loving tribute; The most valiant deeds of modern times Given to the world in sure, well cadenced rhymes. (Lusíads 1.9) ²⁰ Saramago has often discussed this topic. In an interview for the Paris Review (1981) he sums up his position as follows: ‘Is history truth? Does what we call history retell the whole story? History, really, is a fiction not because it is made up of invented facts, for the facts are real, but because in the organization of those facts there is much fiction. History is pieced together with certain selected facts that give a coherence, a line, to the story. In order to create that line, many things must be left out. There are always those facts that did not enter history, which if they had might give a different sense to history. History must not be presented as a definitive lesson. No one can say, “This is so because I say it happened this way.” ’ ²¹ As noted by Macedo (1981), 61. ²² See e.g. Leal de Matos (2011b), 498; Saraiva in Camões (1999), 369.

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The opening stanzas provide a didactic frame of the kind found in a speculum regi: Camões offers the young king exempla on how to rule, taken not from myth but from Portuguese history, thus challenging him to live up to that past. But just as the action starts in medias res, with Vasco da Gama’s fleet sailing off the coast of Mozambique, the poem does not so much end by means of coming to its natural conclusion (Vasco da Gama reaching India and the sailors being granted a poetical reward under the form of the Isle of Love in Canto 9), but rather grinds to a halt with a caveat, again focused on the king: No more, Muse, no more, my lyre, Is out of tune and my throat hoarse, Not from singing but of wasting song On a deaf and coarsened people. Those rewards which encourage genius My country ignores, being given over To avarice and philistinism, Heartless and degrading pessimism. I do not know by what twist of fate It has lost that pride, that zest for life, Which lifts the spirits unfailingly And welcomes duty with a smiling face. In this regard, my king, whom Divine Will has set on the royal throne, Take note of other nations, and applaud The excellence of those who call you lord. (Lusíads 10.145 6)

This criticism of the country’s state of affairs is not without precedent. In Canto 3, while describing the deeds of the kings of the first dynasty, this is how the narrator portrays King Fernando: From just and rigorous Pedro sprang (Witness Nature’s strange contradictions!) Gentle Fernando, lazy and negligent, Who left the borders defenceless; At which the King of Castille, seeing The land unguarded and exposed, Brought it close to complete devastation; So a weak king weakens the strongest nation. (Lusíads 3.138; emphasis added)

A number of assumptions about ruling are at stake in this passage: above all, that self-restraint makes for sound rule and that the type of leadership reflects on the moral of the ruled. Lack of restraint cancels the possibility of ‘valiant deeds’. If Camões’s narrator is aware in Canto 3 that a weak king weakens a

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strong people, the closing stanzas of the poem, as we have heard, become an admonition to the young king that he should prove worthy of his subjects, whose collective virtues have been so adeptly sung, and indeed of the poem offered to him. Another passage sheds further light on the concept of virtuous rule: He [Cupid] saw Actaeon, so austere in the chase, So blind in his brutish pleasures, That, to pursue ugly, ferocious beasts He shunned the lovely female form; As harsh, sweet punishment, he planned To unveil to him Diana’s beauty; Take care, Actaeon, you are not supper for The very dogs you so much adore! . . . . . . . He saw those whose duty was to show God’s love to the poor and charity to all, Fawning instead on power and wealth, In a parody of truth and justice; They call foul tyranny order, And false severity firmness, Passing laws in the interest of the king, While the rights of the people are decreasing. (Lusíads 9.26, 28)²³

Commentators on this passage, dating back to Faria e Sousa in the seventeenth century, have noted the similarities between Actaeon and King Sebastião in their common love of hunting and blatant misogyny.²⁴ Leal de Matos reads stanza 27, with its allusion to the duty of charity, as a condemnation of the influence the brothers Câmara held over the king and therefore as a manifestation of Camões’s sense of civic duty.²⁵ Members of religious orders took vows of poverty, and the Jesuits were no exception. In the context of a court so divided, one should remember the ties of friendship Camões held with another religious order, the Dominicans, an aspect of the poet’s life depicted in Saramago’s play.²⁶ The baffling benevolence of the poem’s first censor, Frei Bartolomeu Ferreira, a Dominican, has led scholars to speculate about the role played by those ties, as well as the influence of the Vimioso house, which in the past had sponsored a number of Camões’s other works, in the censor’s appraisal ²³ Vichinsky (2009), 146 suggests that this is the passage on which Saramago bases his characterization of King Sebastião. ²⁴ For further discussion and bibliography, see Pimpão in Camões (2000), 465. ²⁵ Leal de Matos (2011b), 498 9. For another possible allusion to Martim da Câmara, uttered in the same tone, see Lusíads 8.54 5. For a discussion of that passage, see Pimpão in Camões (2000), 425. ²⁶ Saramago (1980), 44.

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of the poem.²⁷ The fact that no paratext acknowledges any patronage or sponsorship in the publication of The Lusíads means that this discussion is bound to remain in the realm of speculation.²⁸ Saramago, nevertheless, staging his play merely six years after the fall of the Estado Novo, depicts Camões’s encounters with Frei Bartolomeu Ferreira as a little less than benevolent. The intrigue of the play stems from these political and cultural concerns and a set of characters and situations to which Camões alludes in his poem, often in a veiled manner. In this sense, Saramago’s play can be interpreted as a reading of the impact discernible in the poem of the first two years that Camões spent in Portugal after his return. The crucial act of biographical interpretation in Saramago’s play accounts for what Hue has alluded to as the eloquent silence of The Lusíads’ paratext.²⁹ In Saramago’s play this silence does not go unnoticed. António Gonçalves, the poem’s printer, asks Camões why there is no dedication, and Camões replies that the poem failed to attract any sort of official sponsorship, because ‘it was not worthy of it’.³⁰ Camões then proposes a deal to António Gonçalves: to sell him the rights to the book for the next ten years, as payment for printing, plus a sum of 50,000 réis. The book would then become the property of the printer. Had this happened in reality, Camões would never have retrieved the equivalent of the rights of his magnum opus because he died before the privilege expired. Nevertheless, this is where Saramago crucially fills in the blank, offering an interpretation possible only within the realm of fiction. Portugal’s national poem, the subject of a play staged within the wider framework of state-sponsored commemorations, comes to light due to a private agreement between the poet and a minor agent of no political influence. In the first decade of the seventeenth century successive reprints of the book were made at short intervals, and Aguiar e Silva points out that we have no reason to doubt that the same was not true for the first ten years of its publication.³¹ Within sixty years of the publication of The Lusíads, and under the dual monarchy, Camões was revered in Portugal and Spain alike in terms equivalent to that of contemporary Poets Laureate. In this sense, fiction and scholarship intertwine in Saramago’s play to interrogate the poem’s reception. Camões’s agreement with the printer is the boldest act of interpretation within the historical framework of the play. It is still fresh in the audience’s mind as the final question is uttered to the audience, ‘What will you make of this book?’

²⁷ ²⁸ ²⁹ ³¹

Leal de Matos (2011a), 92 3. For a discussion of the absence of paratextual evidence, see Hue (2003), 115 34. Hue (2003), 115 34. ³⁰ Saramago (1980), 145 6. Aguiar e Silva (2008), 59.

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VERSIONS OF CA MÕES The history of Camões’s reception in the twentieth century in Portugal is in part the history of its institutional reception. By the beginning of the century the poem was incorporated into school programmes, and whereas up until 1936 The Lusíads was read in its entirety (with the exception of Canto 9, omitted due to its erotic content), subsequently teachers themselves selected the passages to be studied. In the programmes of 1948 and 1954 all the passages underscoring or questioning imperial decadence were edited out of the official selection. Passages that could be used to underscore the ideology of the Estado Novo were to be taught.³² In his study of the reception of The Lusíads in Estado Novo’s school programmes, Carlos Cunha notes that the context of Camões’s reception occurs within a wider trend of emphasizing the aesthetical elements of certain texts as a way of diverting attention from the ‘potentially subversive aspects of certain authors’.³³ Saramago’s play re-enacts in Camões’s trajectory the old question of artistic freedom and institutional pressures. To some extent, the episode of the arrest of another intellectual by the Inquisition, Damião de Góis, can be seen as a warning to Camões, as the poet’s exchange with Frei Bartolomeu Ferreira suggests.³⁴ But it is also a reminder of the consequences of freely voicing one’s opinions in a context lacking freedom of speech (something of which Saramago himself would be well aware, writing six years after the fall of the Estado Novo). In this sense, the play problematizes the legitimacy of institutional appropriation of The Lusíads, and the relationship between institutional and moral legitimacy. Camões’s decision to sell the contemporary equivalent of the rights of his book to the printer seems to imply that in the absence of moral legitimacy for ruling powers to lay claim to the meaning of a given literary work, institutional legitimacy should not be pursued. The idea that The Lusíads offers an ethical perspective on what it means to be Portuguese and that the poem was conceived with that agenda in mind, is then left to the audience: the poem becomes what reception makes of it. But then again, what has reception made of this epic? Coming to light in the context of the official commemorations of Camões’s fourth centenary, Saramago’s play is contemporaneous with a wider backlog of discourses that deal with the question that gave his play its title. Saramago’s own play was preceded by a two-month schedule of events organized by the Teatro de Almada, focusing on Camões and his era: institutionalized celebrations, expressed

³² I draw here on Cunha (2012), 255 6. ³³ Cunha (2012), 256. Entire generations of readers of Camões had their first contact with The Lusíads through these programmes, and whereas a number of passages, not least a few discussed in this essay, were edited out, it is tempting to see some inclusions as surprising. Such discussion, however, is not within the scope of this chapter. ³⁴ Saramago (1980), 127 9.

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through debates, conferences, op-eds, essays, and exhibitions. During this period, a number of the most prominent Portuguese writers and thinkers wrote about their relationship with Camões, invariably bringing to the fore the question of the reception of The Lusíads.³⁵ Two texts written in this context, which are explicitly concerned with issues of institutional appropriation of Camões in relation to the author’s reception, provide my focus here. They demonstrate a wider view of the intellectual context in which Saramago’s play emerged, and highlight a trend in its reception that was then taking shape. Jorge de Sena belongs to the same generation as Saramago. Four years his senior, he moved into exile in 1959, first in Brazil and then in the United States, after taking part in an attempt to overthrow Salazar’s regime. An engineer by training and one of the most distinguished writers of his generation, he wrote his doctoral thesis about Camões, a subject to which he returned throughout his prolific career as a scholar and writer. Sena’s text was presented as a speech during the official celebrations of Camões Day in 1977. In the first lines, he writes that in his thirty years of working on Camões, he has sought to reinstate Camões’s true image as a ‘dramatic and divided’ poet, ‘subversive and revolutionary’, ‘a man of our time in every respect, who could join the spirit of the revolution of 1974’.³⁶ The first lines of Sena’s speech may proclaim scholarly accuracy, but they are no doubt an expression of his own reception. On grounds of his creative work alone, the Camões he envisages in a short story like ‘Super Flumina Babylonis’³⁷ to a large extent fits this description, as does the Camões of another of his poems, perhaps one of the most subversive poems penned under Salazar’s dictatorship, ‘Camões Addresses His Contemporaries’.³⁸ The terms in which Sena envisages Camões have much in common with the main character in Saramago’s play. In both instances Camões comes across as a creator who decides not to compromise and whose voice is set against the status quo. In his speech Sena describes the experience of first coming in contact with The Lusíads under the Estado Novo’s school programmes. He recalls the tedious grammar exercises based on the poem’s syntax and the censored version of the poem.³⁹ In a passage typical of his polemical style, Sena labels this approach as a literary, social, and moral crime. He concludes by stating that faith and empire ‘were not for Camões what they were for Dr Salazar’.⁴⁰ He elaborates on this last point by saying that the poet never shies away from denouncing the vices of Portuguese society.⁴¹

³⁵ The texts collected in the 1983 collection Camões e a Identidade Nacional are illustrative of this point. ³⁶ Sena (1983), 27. ³⁷ Sena (2006), originally published in 1964. ³⁸ Sena (1963). ³⁹ Sena (1983), 32 3. ⁴⁰ Sena (1983), 33. ⁴¹ Sena (1983), 36 7.

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In a text from 1980, a key writer from a younger generation, Vasco Graça Moura (1942–2014), recalls the reluctance of his left-wing teachers in teaching The Lusíads: I must say that I grew up in a time when a certain left which to some extent dominated the literary education of the youths we were in high schools and at universities at the end of the 1950s would value in Camões the lyric poetry rather than The Lusíads and pass onto us, in relation to that, the suspicion that Camões was placed at the service of perfidious doctrines of expansion and not least of hated ideologies of war. The arsenal of arguments was rather impressive and, because we were dumb (one has to face it), many of us would faithfully say amen to those learned sermonists, especially because, let’s be fair, officially rhetoric would call for it, instrumentalizing Camões as much or more and most of all in a more ignorant way than the faction that would promote his lyrical poetry.⁴²

In this somewhat personal essay, Graça Moura states that it is as a citizen and a writer that he wishes to speak about Camões. He mentions his reassessment of The Lusíads after 1974 in light of the new political context and envisages the poem as written both as a repository for national myths and against the spirit of its time: Camões as a nonconformist.⁴³ He emphasizes the need for a globalizing and open reading of The Lusíads, one that takes into account the poem’s contradictions and historical background.⁴⁴ Sena’s speech, Graça Moura’s essay, and implicitly Saramago’s play all ask how one generation, now living in a completely different political climate from the one in which it had first encountered The Lusíads, has set the tone for the poem’s reception after its appropriations at the hands of the former political regime. Through Camões’s trajectory Saramago depicts a context familiar to all members of his audience: one of social crisis, censorship, and especially a sharply divided political milieu, in which ethical questions are raised about institutional sponsorship of the arts. In a recent essay, Hélio Alves has reassessed the scholarly shortcomings of this wider reception trend, by emphasizing the extent to which The Lusíads can be read as representative of a set of imperialist and religious claims and interests that are far from being against the grain of its time, and that these should be acknowledged in any reading of the text.⁴⁵ Alves has particularly in mind the danger of ahistorical scholarship, which becomes entangled with its own receiving context.⁴⁶ Paradoxically, Saramago’s play is both within and outside the scope of this theoretical discourse. As a text that fits within and embodies a postcolonial thread in the reception of Camões, it runs the risk of emphasizing the premises

⁴² Graça Moura (1980), 24. ⁴⁴ Graça Moura (1980), 26 7.

⁴³ Graça Moura (1980), 24. ⁴⁵ Alves (2015), 197 213.

⁴⁶ Alves (2015), 209.

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of a wider (post-1974) tendency in the reception of the text—the one Hélio Alves has in mind—of allowing reception and critical readings to overlap. As a literary object and a product of its own time, nevertheless, What Shall I Make of This Book? then becomes a lens through which to read its own context, just as The Lusíads has traditionally been appropriated to underpin successive contexts as soon as his work was incorporated into the Iberian literary canon. That Saramago’s play favours a biographical episode over the poem itself in order to articulate and appropriate the political ambivalence inscribed in the poem is a tribute to the notion that the origins of The Lusíads’s inner tensions, which may or may not verge on the point of contradiction, will never be retrieved entirely.

22 Achilles in French Tragedy (1563–1680) Tiphaine Karsenti

With the revival of ancient theatrical genres in France in the second half of the sixteenth century, Achilles, legendary hero of the Iliad, quickly becomes a tragic protagonist. The epic character, though he rarely appears in the surviving ancient theatrical canon,¹ commands considerable interest for early modern French playwrights, who bring him on to the stage more than ten times between 1563 and 1680. Not only do these playwrights refigure the sacrifice of Iphigenia, following Euripides, whose tragedy had been translated by Thomas Sébillet in 1549; they also innovate with plays on a hitherto unseen subject, the death of Achilles.² The first of these was Nicolas Filleul’s Achille of 1563,³ in which the Greek hero, enraged by the death of his friend Patroclus, kills Hector, and is then killed in turn by Hecuba and her sons.⁴ Very early, then, in the history of French tragedy,⁵ Achilles establishes himself as a tragic figure for the stage, even though the ancient tradition had not laid much groundwork for him. This striking ¹ Achilles plays only a supporting role in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and does not appear in any of Seneca’s tragedies. He is the subject of Aeschylus’ fragmentary Myrmidons, which was the first in the trilogy Achilleis, and dealt with Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon, his refusal to fight, and Patroclus’ death at Troy (cf. Iliad, Books 1 17). The second play in the trilogy, Nereids, dealt with Achilles and his mother, Thetis, and (presumably) his acquisition of new arms; the third, Phrygians, dealt with the ransom of Hector’s body. For a full discussion of Achilles in Greek tragedy, see Michelakis (2002). ² The Italian humanist, Antonio Loschi, in his Latin Achilles, had treated this subject c.1390. But French playwrights do not draw upon that text, which was probably unknown to them. See Chevalier (2010). ³ Achille was staged at the Collège d’Harcourt in Paris on 21 December 1563, and published the same year in Paris. ⁴ This Hecuba, a violent tigress who calls for a bloody response to her son’s death, is largely inspired by the sixteenth century’s paradigmatic Greek tragedy, Euripides’ Hecuba. See Heath (1987); and for its agonistic relationship with Hamlet, see Pollard (2012). ⁵ The first French tragedy on a mythological subject is Médée by Jean de La Péruse, staged in 1553 and published in 1556; this is followed by two Agamemnon plays, by Charles Toutain (1556) and Le Duchat (1560). Three other tragedies draw their subjects from ancient history:

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phenomenon derives from the conjunction of two major factors: first, the numerous representations of Achilles, from antiquity to the Renaissance, made him complex and multivalent, which facilitated his transformation into a tragic figure; and secondly, the historical context of sixteenth-century France—marked by wars, both civil and foreign, and violent conflicts between nobles and state power—meant that heroic figures were routinely sited at the heart of contemporary affairs. This chapter analyses the ways in which French playwrights appropriated this epic figure in order to translate him into a flexible tragic hero, one who could adapt to evolving tastes and aesthetics, as well as serve as a sounding board for contemporary concerns.

A P OLYMORPHOUS ACHILLES A pioneer in the dramatization of Achilles, Nicolas Filleul brings together two episodes from myth: a victory—the death of Hector—and a defeat—the murder of Achilles in the temple where he is about to marry Polyxena. In the seventeenth century, playwrights generally treated these two moments in the Greek hero’s story separately. Achilles’ death forms the subject of three spoken tragedies:⁶ by Alexandre Hardy (1607),⁷ Isaac de Benserade (1636), and Thomas Corneille (1673). Two other tragedies, by Vincent Borée (1627) and Adrien Sconin (1675), stage Achilles’ killing of Hector, but they do not show the hero’s death.⁸ There are three seventeenth-century adaptations of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis: by Jean de Rotrou (1640), Jean Racine (1674), and Michel Le Clerc and Jacques de Coras (1675). Here, as in Euripides, we see Achilles defy Agamemnon, who has used a marriage with the Greek hero as a false pretext to lure his daughter to Aulis. To this corpus can be added two tragedies with special status. In the first, Polyxène by Claude Billard de Courgenay (1607), which seems very much cast in contradistinction to Euripides’ Hecuba, Achilles appears in the first act of the play, but only in the form of a ghost, to demand to be united with the Cléopâtre captive by Étienne Jodelle (1553), Sophonisbe by Mellin de Saint Gelais (1556), and César by Jacques Grévin (1561). ⁶ There is also a lyric tragedy: Achille et Polyxène, libretto by Jean Galbert de Campistron, music by Jean Baptiste Lully and Pascal Collasse (1687). ⁷ On Hardy’s dramatization of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, see Williams, Ch. 8 in this volume. ⁸ Another tragedy treats the death of Hector, but it takes place entirely in the Trojan camp and never shows Achilles on stage: Hector by Antoine de Montchrestien (1603). Two other known tragedies treated this subject, but we do not have the published texts: Hector by Monléon is supposed to have been staged in 1630, but was never published; La Mort d’Hector, an anonymous tragedy written for performance in schools, in French and in Latin, was performed in 1698, and its programme, presenting a summary of the acts, was published by the widow of Claude Thiboust in Paris in 1704.

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woman he was supposed to marry at the moment when he was treacherously assassinated. Achille by Jean de la Fontaine, written between 1680 and 1685, remains unfinished and we possess only two acts, which appear to follow the events of Iliad Books 1–17: the first showing an enraged Achilles, offended by Agamemnon, refusing to fight; the second the death of Patroclus. But we do not know how the play ended. It is thus an Achilles who is by turns vanquisher and vanquished, warrior and lover, who comes to the stage in these French tragedies. Yet this seemingly contradictory characterization is inherited from the ancient and medieval literary traditions, which invest Achilles with varied, and even antithetical, traits.⁹ The heroic reading of his character, which derives notably from the Iliad, can be found in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, in which the protagonist praises the fallen warrior in the presence of Neoptolemus: deemed excellent by his compatriot, Achilles is said by Philoctetes to have distinguished himself from the other men by virtue of a superiority that is at once moral and military, which makes him the ideal model for an aristocratic ethic that holds glory as its supreme value.¹⁰ There is a second tradition, which elaborates Euripides and develops what is latent in Homer and is found in particular in Roman orators and poets (notably Cicero, Virgil, Catullus, Horace, and Ovid), and which depicts Achilles as the incarnation of violence and military brutality.¹¹ The warrior Achilles is thus viewed in either a positive or a negative light, as the paragon of noble ambition or the embodiment of unbridled savagery. But there is another Achilles, already sketched in the Iliad, who enjoyed great success in Roman antiquity, and then in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In Homer, the ‘shield’ of Greece shows himself capable of abandoning the fight in order to retire to his tent and play music.¹² The Latin sources, particularly the elegiac ones, develop and reinterpret this second aspect of his character, depicting him as a (mainly heterosexual) lover.¹³ In the Ilias latina,¹⁴ which becomes a central reference in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Achilles plays the zither in his tent not only to recount events of ⁹ For a full discussion of Achilles’ reception from antiquity to the Middle Ages, see Callen King (1987). Homer was very well known in seventeenth century France, although seldom read in Greek: see Hepp (1968). See Bizer (2011) for the sixteenth century, when Homer enjoyed eminent valence, especially for political thought, even if not all authors had direct knowledge of his texts. ¹⁰ Sophocles, Philoctetes 5.1312 13. ¹¹ Virgil, for example, calls Pyrrhus the ‘inheritor of his father’s violence’ (Aeneid 2.490). This tradition follows Plato and the Stoics’ philosophical condemnation of the passions. ¹² Homer, Iliad Book 9. ¹³ Although, in the fifth and fourth centuries, Aeschylus, Plato, and Aeschines depict Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship as same sex, this tradition rarely occurs in Latin poetry or in the medieval romans. Benoît de Sainte Maure, though, evokes it in an insult hurled by Hector at Achilles (Roman de Troie 13183 4). See Callen King (1987), 171 2. ¹⁴ This text, attributed to Baebius Italicus and dating from the first century CE, is an abridged Latin translation of the Iliad.

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the war to Patroclus, but also to appease his own romantic suffering. Ovid, in his Heroides, composes a letter from Briseis to Achilles, which receives a reply in the sixteenth century in a counter-epistle by Michel d’Amboise.¹⁵ In his Achilleid, Statius emphasizes the love between Achilles and Deidamia at the court of King Lycomedes; and Dares and Dictys, two supposed eyewitnesses of the Trojan War, whose accounts (for a long time considered to be authentic) constitute a definitive source for medieval novelists and playwrights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, link the death of Achilles to his love for the Trojan princess Polyxena.¹⁶ This version of Achilles’ death, which deviates from the epic tradition, is taken up and disseminated by Benoît de SainteMaure’s Roman de Troie in the twelfth century. The heroic Achilles is thus in competition with an enraged Achilles and a heterosexual romantic Achilles, which the mythographers help to combine by offering an implicit synthesis between the Homeric and post-Homeric traditions. In early modernity, this ambiguous figure allows the tragic stage to invoke some issues of acute relevance to France in this period: the question of war and its resolutions during the civil conflict that bloodied the second half of the sixteenth century; tensions between the nobility and state power when, at the end of the Wars of Religion, the position of Les Grands is called into question; and the moral value of the passions, especially love and ambition, in a Christian world. To limit the scope here, plays that deal with the sacrifice of Iphigenia or the death of Hector, in which Achilles is only a minor character, are largely excluded. Dares and Dictys both link the death of Achilles to his love for Polyxena, and in both cases, this love leads to the imagined possibility of a marriage between the Greek and the Trojan and of peace between the two camps. In Dictys, however, agreement is never reached: when Achilles asks for the young woman’s hand, Hector refuses; then later, when Priam, who has come to claim his son’s body, offers his daughter in exchange, Achilles prefers not to accept, judging the moment inopportune. Dares, on the other hand, creates the possibility of peace, by describing a unique negotiation between Achilles and the Trojan royal family: they grant him Polyxena in exchange for an end to the fighting. This episode therefore rests on a reversal of character and situation, which leads to the death of the protagonist. It corresponds perfectly to the structure of tragic action, as Aristotle defines it: a character renders himself guilty of an ‘error’ that brings about his misfortune. In this particular case, however, Achilles’ error is twofold: first, he falls in love despite being a warrior; ¹⁵ ‘La troisième épître d’Achille à Briséis’, Amboise (1541), fo. 15r. ¹⁶ The Ephemeris belli trojani by Dictys of Crete and the De excidio Trojae historia are two Latin prose narratives that date from the fourth and fifth centuries CE respectively. They purport to be translations of manuscripts in Punic characters, which were first translated into Greek (there is indeed a Greek original of the Dictys text that dates most likely from the second century CE). See Frazer (1966).

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second, because he is in love with an enemy, he plans to undermine the established power relations by securing peace and survival for the Trojans. Order is disrupted on two levels: the individual (that of the hero’s character) and the collective (that of the unfolding of History). Such a structure thus provides the playwrights with both narrative and formal possibilities. Indeed, they can develop the paradoxical motif of a peaceful Achilles and take advantage of the gallant potential of the subject. They can also stage the reactions of the two camps: the Trojans faced with the opportunity for a peace of compromise, and the Greeks faced with the personal initiative of one of their own that puts their supremacy in jeopardy. Each playwright handles this material differently, reflecting the changes in aesthetics, historical context, and taste, as well as a range of contrasting moral receptions of the Homeric hero. Between the Achille of Nicolas Filleul (1563) and La Mort d’Achille of Thomas Corneille (1673), we can observe an important development in the romantic motifs in tragedy.¹⁷ Achilles loves Polyxena from the earliest plays, but, starting around the 1630s, playwrights introduce romantic rivalries: between Achilles and Memnon over Polyxena (Borée, 1627); between Briseis and Polyxena over Achilles (Benserade, 1636); between Achilles and Pyrrhus over Polyxena (Thomas Corneille, 1673); and between Achilles and Hector over Helen (Adrien Sconin, 1675). This evolution of the treatment of the protagonist is accompanied by a reversal of the moral depiction of his character, which corresponds to critiques, increasingly numerous under the reign of Louis XIV, of the character’s brutality.¹⁸ For Thomas Corneille (1673), Sconin (1675), or La Fontaine (1680–5), Achilles has lost his heroic stature, often to the advantage of another character. We also note a change in perspective on the war around the 1610s: during the Wars of Religion (1562–98) and their immediate aftermath, playwrights systematically chose a Trojan focus, adopting the perspective of war victims; from La Mort d’Achille by Alexandre Hardy (1607) onwards, the plays more often sided with the Greeks, defending the victorious camp from divisive internal forces which threatened it.

EN D OF HE R OI S M Nicolas Filleul (1563) sets his play predominantly in the Trojan camp.¹⁹ At its heart lie two opposing approaches: that of the good King Priam, ready to do ¹⁷ On the development of Achilles as a lover in tragedy, see Barbafieri (2008). ¹⁸ See Hepp (1979) and Grosperrin (2006). See further Kenward, Ch. 29 in this volume for the shift in attitude in early modern England to Achilles. ¹⁹ Most of the action takes place in Troy, and Achilles intervenes twice in two non specific places, when he is alone: to invoke the spirit of Patrocles (Act 1), and to rejoice over his marriage to Polyxena (Act 4).

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anything to attain peace, and that of his wife, Hecuba, who cannot give up on revenge. The queen appears blinded by her maternal feelings, which transform her into a ‘tigress’ and lead her into an infinite cycle of bloodshed that shows no sign of abating: ‘blood must, must by other blood be avenged’.²⁰ Filleul, however, chooses to begin his tragedy before the death of Hector, so that the murderous act against Achilles appears to mirror the one that brought down Hector in the middle of Act 3. Achilles and Hecuba are striking parallels of each other, each embodying the same emotionally driven and bloody logic. Unable to control his emotions from the very first scene, the Greek warrior allows himself to be overcome with anger to the point of planning to take it out on his own people: furious over the loss of Patrocles, he initially blames Agamemnon before the spirit of his friend intervenes to dissuade him.²¹ Filleul’s innovation in the plot here echoes the situation in France at that time, which had just emerged from its first War of Religion (1562–3). Finally, when the enraged mother manages to exact revenge on Achilles in the temple where he had entered, unarmed, to be married, it is the fierce logic that presides over both of their characters that wins the day. In the context of 1563, Filleul thus represents the failure of Priam’s strategy, which nonetheless appears to prevail in reality: the French king had just signed a first religious peace treaty, which allowed for the prospect of an end to conflict. The playwright thus legitimizes, by default, a politics of compromise that avoids, in reality, what the tragedy has probed in its fiction. The great epic warrior becomes, in the traumatic context of civil war, a negative example of the human incapacity to put rational interest before instinct. After the end of the Wars of Religion, as France gradually emerges from its trauma, it is no longer a matter of demonizing the political system, but rather of questioning the place of the aristocratic ethic in a society that has just regained cohesion. In both periods, before and after the wars, Achilles, to whom tradition accords an impetuous character, is a figure of excess: an embodiment of the power of disorder that jeopardizes the community. In 1607, for Alexandre Hardy, Achilles’ love has the effect of separating him from the group to which he belonged: his unilateral decision to broker peace triggers hostility from his own side. The hero’s excellence appears as a mark of distinction that threatens the unity of the group. The warrior follows an individualistic logic, without taking the collective interest into account; and his compatriots are forced to band together against him. Presiding over the council of the Greeks, before whom Achilles has been called, Agamemnon thus finds himself constrained to call to order an individual who has been driven mad by love: ²⁰ Filleul (1563), l.1155. ²¹ Filleul (1563), 1.151 2: ‘Leave it, Achilles, Achilles, leave in peace | Our people who are devastated, weary! as they ever were!’ All translations are by Amanda Gann.

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The warrior tries to conceal the love that he feels for Polyxena from the Greeks, but his body betrays him. Ajax then describes a hero beside himself: L’impatient nous fuit coléré sans résoudre, Ses deux yeux comme éclairs, avant coureurs d’un foudre.²³ (The man flees us in anger and haste, with no resolution, His two eyes flash, precursors of some thunderbolt.)

The abrupt reversal of Achilles, from his yearning for victory to his desire to stop fighting the Trojans, causes an internal conflict that manifests itself in a staging of the frictions between the heroic ethic and the community.²⁴ Overwhelmed by anger and pride, and concerned with satisfying his own desires, Achilles destroys the unity of the Greeks and weakens both the victory and the cohesion of his camp. After his death, the wise Ulysses asserts that choosing his successor is a priority: to ensure the continuity of the group and the survival of the community in spite of individual contingencies. From the first scenes of Isaac de Benserade’s play (1636), Achilles is presented as a model of the chivalric and courtly hero,²⁵ lover of Briseis. Then his meeting with Polyxena literally inverts these aspects of his character: he abandons his lover and abruptly wishes for peace, renouncing his country to join the family of the enemy. Priam himself is astonished to see Achilles give up his traditional anger in favour of love: Mais est il bien possible, et le devons nous croire, . . . . . . . . Que cette passion ait calmé son courroux?²⁶ (But is it even possible, and ought we to believe it? . . . . . . . . That this passion has appeased his wrath?)

²² Hardy (1607), Act 2, Scene 3, p. 35. ²³ Hardy (1607), Act 2, Scene 3, p. 40. ²⁴ Méniel (2004) shows how this issue is central to epic from the Middle Ages on. ²⁵ Love and glory are the two crowning virtues of his ethic, as he tells Briseis: ‘You are not the only object of my care, | Glory is my mistress, and I love her as well.’ Benserade (1636), Act 1, Scene 1, p. 4. ²⁶ Benserade (1636), Act 2, Scene 1, p. 18.

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At the end of the second act, Achilles expounds the new rules by which he will live, which privilege love over war: ‘I prefer to be loved by Venus than by Mars.’²⁷ A switching of camps doubles this change of tutelary divinity, as Achilles literally adopts a Trojan identity in order to turn against his own: Tournant contre les miens ma colère et ce fer, L’on verra par Achille Ilion triompher.²⁸ (Turning against my own this rage and this sword, They will see Ilium triumph by Achilles’ hand.)

The war then moves into the Greek camp, where the former national hero comes up against his compatriots. Ulysses, the first one he meets, denounces the dangers of dissension, and stigmatizes the aristocratic pride of an individual who believes that he can make use of ‘absolute power’.²⁹ For Vincent Borée (1627), Achilles is incapable of ‘bridling [his] will’,³⁰ and he ends with a blasphemous rant: Dieux injustes, cruels, barbares, inhumains! Revêtez vous de corps, et venons en aux mains. Traîtres, vous enviez la vaillance des hommes, Plus maudits, plus méchants mille fois que ne sommes. . . . . . . . . . Je vous abjure tous, et votre fausse loi.³¹ (Unjust, cruel, barbarous, inhuman Gods! Take some human shapes, and let us fight hand to hand. Traitors, you envy the valour of men, you who are a thousand times more damned and vicious than we. . . . . . . . . . I renounce you all, and your false law.)

The excessive character of the profane hero, who has no control over his impulses, is thus presented as an anti-model, marked by immoderation and pride. Borée presents, in contradistinction to Achilles, the ideal of a heroic and Christian prince, whom he identifies with his dedicatee, Thomas de Savoie, in a conventional gesture of praise.³² This profane Achilles refuses to subjugate his will, to bring his desire in line with reason or with the choices of his community. As he tells Nestor, who attempts to convince him to release Hector back to the Trojans: ‘To your suspect opinions I cannot agree. [ . . . ] ²⁷ Benserade (1636), Act 2, Scene 4, p. 34. ²⁸ Benserade (1636), Act, 2, Scene 2, p. 23. ²⁹ Benserade (1636), Act 3, Scene 1, p. 37. ³⁰ Borée (1627), Act 1, Scene 3, p. 228. ³¹ Borée (1627), Act 2, Scene 3, pp. 249 50. ³² In the dedication of the play, Borée (1627), 206 compares Thomas de Savoie to Achilles, to whom he is considered superior: ‘that prince would only appear under the protection of some courage which resembled his own. Yet it is such that yours not only resembles his, but rather surpasses it.’

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I will do as I please.’³³ Indeed, the links between secular ethics and Christian morality attract much attention from the Jesuits at this time, notably in Nicolas Caussin, La Cour Sainte, the first volume of which was published in 1624, in which the author confronts each secular maxim with its contradictory Christian equivalent. Thus we find here the same representation of Achilles as a magnanimous hero, deserving of the glory that he receives, but constituting an Iliadic threat to the group because he follows an individualistic logic and refuses to bend to the common rules. At the end of Benserade’s play, a dispute pits Ajax against Ulysses over who will receive the weapons of the deceased warrior: it is the clever king of Ithaca who wins, figuring the symbolic substitution of the adviser for the warrior as a pillar of the state. The chivalric model that underpins the aristocratic ethic is thereby called into question in a France shot through with tensions arising from the establishment of a new form of state. The nobles of the sword (noblesse d’épée), accustomed to occupying the highest positions in the kingdom, see themselves progressively supplanted by the nobles of the robe (noblesse de robe), made up of magistrates better suited to govern an increasingly centralized state.³⁴ This conflict expresses itself in particular in the opposition between the Queen Mother, Marie de Médicis, and Cardinal Richelieu during the first years of the reign of Louis XIII. The Queen Mother, supported especially by the landed nobles, receives a harsh defeat in 1630 on the ‘Day of the Dupes’, when the King decides to shut her out definitively in favour of his cardinal-minister. The epic hero thus embodies in the theatre a problematic magnanimity that brings to the fore contemporary ethical and political questions. Already we begin to see the critical stance that will devalue the figure of Achilles and contest his heroism through the ethical debates of the second half of the century.

NOSTALGIA FO R HEROISM If tragedy confronts the epic ideal with its limitations, prefiguring what Paul Bénichou has called ‘the destruction of the hero’,³⁵ it also allows for the emergence of nostalgia for this balance between human will and history.³⁶ ³³ Borée (1627), Act 3, Scene 3, p. 276. ³⁴ On the evolution of the noble model with the establishment of the modern state, see Schalk (1986) and Jouanna (1989). ³⁵ Bénichou (1948). ³⁶ A similar mechanism can be seen in Sophocles’ Ajax. The epic hero appears to be inadequate to the civic Athenian values which the other characters defend. But he is still honoured and respected insofar as he embodies the ancient (epic) virtues, a lost nobility, combining military prowess and a sense of justice that should not be forgotten. See Jouanna (1989) and Zanker (1992).

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Achilles embodies the violence of a desire that does not stop at legal limits and, as such, runs the risk of destabilizing the social order. But he also represents confidence in the possibility of founding a strong community on the basis of heroic values. In early modern French tragedies, the epic figure thus constitutes both a counter-example and an ever-present potential, even if this alternative is presented as inadequate, outdated, or ideal. Within the system of characters, Achilles is often called into question by other figures, wiser or more pragmatic; but the values that the hero embodies—the epic world view that he carries with him—is not therefore rejected out of hand. For Filleul’s Achilles, love inspires him with pacifist thoughts: he formulates the aspiration to a universal concord, an ontological order that nothing can shatter. The moral ideal embodied by the warrior hero is thus transposed into a register of peace, giving him more pastoral than epic aspect. So in Filleul, in Act 4, Achilles renounces the age of iron in favour of what could well be a new golden age: Jetons ce fer, banni du bon siècle ancien, Œuvre du dieu boiteux, forgeur sicilien.³⁷ (Let us throw away this iron [sword], forbidden by centuries past, Made by the limping god, Sicilian forger.)

Through these highly performative lines, the hero decrees a new world order in which there will be no place for warriors or for disability, here invoked as a metaphor for social dysfunction. Similarly, for Alexandre Hardy, love makes Achilles into an idealist. The clouded gaze of the hero, in the throes of ‘mania’,³⁸ prevents him from seeing the disparity between his love and the interests of Greece, because he dreams of a world in which all would aspire to peace: Père tu sais très bien que ma licite flamme Rien de déloyauté ne souffre dedans l’âme. L’un ni l’autre parti trahir je ne prétends, Ains d’un horrible hiver éclore un gai printemps, Sécher ces gros torrents de sang humain qui coulent.³⁹ (Father, you know full well that my lawful flame Admits no disloyalty in its soul. To betray one party or the other I have no intent, As from a brutal winter bursts forth a bright spring, To dry up these great rivers of human blood spilled.)

Hardy’s Achilles sincerely believes in the rationality of peace. His conciliatory project, which aims to stop the carnage, cannot but win others over, even if it ³⁷ Filleul (1563), Act 4, ll. 1175 6, pp. 108 9. ³⁹ Hardy (1607), Act 4, Scene 2, pp. 73 4.

³⁸ Hardy (1607), Act 2, Scene 3, p. 35.

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remains unrealistic. The epic hero paradoxically becomes the bearer of an impossible pacifist ideal in the tragic world of the play. At the moment of the hero’s death, in Hardy’s play, Agamemnon does not deny the hero’s legacy. After choosing his son, Pyrrhus, as the hero’s successor, Agamemnon delivers a eulogy in his honour.⁴⁰ The community is thus symbolically inscribed in the continuity of this figure, distinguished by his ‘rare virtues’. Whilst the group affirms its priority over the individual, it nevertheless claims the heroic paternity of Achilles, who remains exemplum. His idealistic viewpoint, then, is not rejected out of hand; it is, rather, set aside in a world of pragmatism that does not believe in, or no longer believes in the possibility of, idyllic peace. The epic world has been supplanted by a tragic one, in which disorder and war are irrevocable. But this polemical mode of thought, which echoes the theories of the Italian Machiavelli, does not exclude regret for a more optimistic vision of history, illustrated notably by the pacifist theories of Erasmus. Achilles as convert to love thus becomes the vector for a positive anthropology, entirely confident in the possibility of a universal harmony between magnanimous souls, which, though it does not align with the tragic universe, is not held here in contempt. This anti-tragic perspective presents itself as ahistorical, situated in a mythological or pastoral elsewhere, a parenthesis opened by the fantasy of a hero who is accustomed to seeing his desires become reality. The correspondence between the hero’s will and the world that prevails in epic is thus presented as inaccurate in tragedy, but it expresses nonetheless a profound aspiration towards an impossible harmony. Claude Billard de Courgenay radicalizes this representation of the epic hero into the figure of a prehistorical golden age, by depicting Achilles as entirely heroic but already dead. In his Polyxène of 1607, the young Trojan woman is genuinely in love with Achilles. In the second act, she affirms her desire to die in order to join him. When she is finally sacrificed on the tomb of her lover, she rejoices in escaping the corruption of her century, for she acknowledges the divide between her world view, constructed on the epic model, and historical reality, which bears no relation to it: Moi qui ne pensais pas qu’il y eût rien sur terre Digne de mes beautés . . . . . . . . Je m’égalais aux dieux, et parfois en moi même Croyais qu’un Jupiter quittant le diadème De sa divinité, s’écoulerait des cieux, Brûlé de mon amour, enchanté de mes yeux. Rien n’était impossible aux pensers de mon âme. ⁴⁰ Hardy (1607), Act 4, Final Scene (= Scene 2), pp. 95 102.

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Toutes ces vanités, maladies de l’âge, M’ont passé de bien loin, depuis que le carnage, Les meurtres, les combats, un siège de dix ans, Un amour passager qui s’offrit à mes sens, Et le meurtre d’Hector rempart de cet empire, Me firent soupçonner le mal que je soupire.⁴¹ (I, who never thought anything on earth Could be worthy of my beauties . . . . . . .

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I compared myself to the gods, and sometimes in my heart Believed that some Jupiter throwing off the crown Of his divinity, would float down from the heavens Burning with love for me, enchanted by my eyes. Nothing was impossible to the imaginations of my soul. . . . . . . . . All these vanities, vices of the age, Have long since left me, since the carnage, The murders, the battles, a siege of ten years, A fleeting love that offered itself to my senses, And the murder of Hector bastion of this empire, Made me discover the evil that I lament.)

Put to the test by a catastrophic reality, the heroic pride of Polyxena has ceded place to tragic humility. As such, it is only in death that she can hope to accomplish the ideal union of great souls that she thought she had found in her marriage to Achilles. From the tragic world, epic anthropology is perceived as a desirable but impossible ideal, which brings the imperfection of the historical present into relief. Whether one finds a resolution for this disparity through political pragmatism, as does Ulysses, or melancholy, like Polyxena, the conclusion is the same: human history is made of violence and corruption, a far cry from the epic ideal. In Thomas Corneille, the heroic horizon is also present, but in an inverse form. The pairing of Achilles–Pyrrhus serves similarly to separate the two faces of the epic hero—violence on the one hand, heroism on the other—and to create a tension between actual corruption and the aspiration to purity.⁴² But, in marked contrast to Billard, Corneille reverses the roles. Achilles is no longer the ardent pacifist, quite the opposite: inhabited by an amorous fury, he causes disorder by starting a violent conflict with Briseis and Pyrrhus. Indeed, ⁴¹ Billard de Courgenay (1607), Act 2, fo. 7r. ⁴² In the unfinished play by Jean de La Fontaine (1680 5), we find the same bifurcation of epic heroism: Achilles embodies a heroic ethos subverted by love, Patroclus offers an opposing model by choosing to join the battle in spite of his love.

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he abandons his own lover for Polyxena, and sets himself up as his son’s rival, who loves and is loved by the Trojan woman. Achilles here embodies the emotional chaos that dominates the world, in accordance with the view developed by moralists in the second half of the seventeenth century. He presents his love as an inevitability, which he cannot resist in spite of his desire to conform to his own heroic ethos: Quand l’amour malgré nous l’emporte sur la gloire, Qu’un grand cœur est gêné d’une telle victoire, . . . . . . . . J’ai beau voir quels malheurs en peuvent arriver, J’adore Polyxène et ne puis m’en priver. C’est mon destin; j’en suis le décret immuable.⁴³ (When love, in spite of us, defeats glory So a great heart feels shame at such a victory . . . . . . . . Though I can see full well the misfortunes that might befall me I love Polyxena and cannot be without her. It is my fate; I follow its immutable decree.)

Achilles’ heroic ethos is entirely defeated by his passion. But before him arise new heroic figures, inheritors of those qualities that the warrior has lost: Pyrrhus and Polyxena show themselves capable of renouncing their love for the common interest. The ethical subversion of the hero of the Iliad thus finds itself wrapped up in a generational conflict: an old, corrupt warrior opposes a heroic young couple. It is no longer a hero of the past who carries the ideal, but rather the next generation, young people who embody the future of the tragic world. The union of Pyrrhus and Polyxena gestures towards the aspiration of a new heroic age, one which would no longer be outside history. In the France of Louis XIV, the melancholy of the aftermath of the Wars of Religion is no longer the order of the day: though the mechanisms of the human heart may be observed with lucidity, and in all their darkness, the future is regarded with a conquering eye. However, the tragedy ends with the failure of peace and the return of war: Achilles is killed by Paris at the moment when he would have married Polyxena, who had resigned herself to hide her love for Pyrrhus in the hope of obtaining peace between the two nations. Thomas Corneille thereby builds a tension between the implacable power of passion and a heroic aspiration, both of which correspond to the two major tragic aesthetics of the period—Cornelian tragedy and Racinian tragedy—and which both equally conform to the public taste for tragic emotion and epic aspiration.

⁴³ Corneille (1673), Act 4, Scene 1, p. 406.

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Because he is great as well as flawed, Achilles makes for a good tragic protagonist: his character is magnanimous, fuelled by an admirable drive towards glory; but he is capable of excess, violence, and transgression. Above all, he transcends, by virtue of his greatness, moral axiologies: his extreme character makes him ‘sublime’, according to the definition given by PseudoLonginus, translated by Nicolas Boileau-Despéraux in 1674.⁴⁴ The fate of Achilles in French tragedy can doubtless be explained, in part, by the ambiguity of his character or the narrative structure of the episode of his death.⁴⁵ This figure who rebels against power in the name of an ideal—peace, love, or his own glory—and whose revolt brings about his own death, possesses an ambiguity necessary to the construction of equivocal tragedies, suggesting both the necessity of order and the possibility of disorder, the aspiration to harmony and the pleasure of dissent. As such, tragedy looks at the epic world through the lens of law and morality, to paraphrase the famous phrase that Walter Nestle applied to Greek tragedy.⁴⁶ Depending on the playwrights, the heroic ethos of Achilles is conquered more or less by his passion, making him a guilty man who can be more or less innocent; in any case, though, something of his epic origins remains in the rhetoric of magnanimity that he invokes. Moreover, the gap that tragedy forges between this heroic characterization and the behaviour of the theatrical character who proves himself capable of sedition, even infidelity and deceit, becomes for the playwrights a way to make contemporary questions resonate with the myth. In the context of France during the Wars of Religion and the establishment of a modern, rational, and centralized state, it allows first of all for internal tensions between opposing ideologies to be reflected: partisans of the ‘Catholic League’, aiming to eradicate the Reformed Protestants, and the ‘Politiques’, who advocated religious tolerance, during the time of civil conflict; and then between the nobility and absolute monarchy later on. With the reign of Louis XIV and the king’s definitive victory over the Frondeurs, tragedy limits itself to emotional conflicts and puts aside high political stakes: instead, the epic hero figures the contradictory ethical tensions that run through court society, between the Jansenist moral order and the heroic representations of the Sun King. In all these cases, the tragic perspective on the epic hero reveals the paradoxes of a France caught between pragmatism and idealism, its aspiration to ancient glory and its Christian values, its claim to order and its will to please.

⁴⁴ ‘He does not properly persuade, but rather he delights, he transports, and produces in us a certain admiration mixed with astonishment and surprise, which something quite other than mere pleasure or persuasion:’ Boileau Despréaux (1674), ch. 1. ⁴⁵ The same qualities can be found and have been used in Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. ⁴⁶ Cited by Vernant and Vidal Naquet (2001), 25.

23 The Spectacle of Conquest Epic Conflicts on the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Stage Imogen Choi

For a long time, Spanish epic poetry of the Renaissance was thought of as an épica culta (learned epic), a rarefied literary form produced by and accessible to only a narrow circle of elites, who intended primarily to emulate the classical canon. In recent years, it has become clear that epic also participated in popular culture in myriad ways. Miguel Martínez (2011) shows that, in the sixteenth century, the form was appropriated by the ordinary soldiery of the multinational imperial armies as much as by humanists and courtiers. This épica de la pólvora (gunpowder epic), as he calls it, depicted the brutal realities of contemporary technological warfare and realpolitik as a counterweight to the flights of fancy of other poems into the realms of myth and chivalric legend. Printed in cheap, messy, portable editions, it circulated widely among those engaged in the actual business of waging Spain’s dirty wars. More broadly, Mercedes Blanco (2012) has demonstrated that even those authors who embarked on the exacting adventure of composing a more conventional epic poem strove to speak to the present as well as the future, to be known widely and popularly in their own day as well as attaining the coveted wreath of literary immortality: Pretendían algo que hoy llamaríamos crear un mito, y en los términos de entonces, componer una obra ‘deleitable’, una buena historia que se hiciera popular en cortes y ciudades, volviéndose cantera de novelas, canciones, obras dramáticas e imágenes, como lo eran en Italia el Orlando furioso y la Jerusalén liberada. (They strove to do something which today we would call creating a myth, and in the terms of the time, composing a ‘delightful’ work, a good story which would

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achieve popularity in courts and cities, becoming a quarry for novelas, songs, dramatic works, and images, as the Orlando furioso and Gerusalemme liberata had been in Italy.)¹

Of the hundreds of epics composed in Spanish between the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, two in particular achieved this goal of ‘creating a myth’ for their own times. Both dealt with the notoriously long, complex, and bloody warfare waged along one of the furthest frontiers of the Spanish Empire. From the 1550s until after the end of the colonial period, the indigenous Mapuche people groups of southern Chile, popularly known as araucanos or Araucanians, mounted a sustained political, cultural, and military resistance to Spanish hegemony. Control of the territory passed back and forth between the two sides across what became the effective border of the River Biobío. The first author to bring the conflict to widespread attention was Alonso de Ercilla, an educated courtier who had spent a traumatic year and a half in his youth fighting to suppress the first major Araucanian uprising in 1557–8. Over the succeeding decades, comfortably settled again in Europe, he painstakingly translated his own memories and the fruits of his historical investigations into an epic poem in three parts, La Araucana (The Araucaniad), published in Madrid in 1569, 1578, and 1589–90 respectively and addressed to the Spanish monarch, Philip II. As in the earlier épicas de la pólvora, the poet-narrator is fascinated by the dangerous games of military and diplomatic strategy played out on both sides, and unflinching in his description of the carnage wrought by modern weaponry in battle and the violence of Spanish reprisals on prisoners. Yet he also views the campaign through the lens of humanist historiography, Iberian lyric, and classical epic. Educated at court in the entourage of the young Prince Philip, Ercilla’s poetic voice is steeped in Virgilian echoes, which his imagination freely employs when describing the feats and festivals of the Araucanian warriors. Equally prominent are the allusions to Lucan’s Pharsalia.² The classical rendition of the battle between Pompey and Caesar for the Roman Republic was highly regarded in Spain, which claimed the Spanish-born Lucan as its own. Like La Araucana, it depicted a recent war, and dwelled at length on the horror and brutality, as well as the fascination, of violence. For Ercilla, the Araucanians who fought with such order and strategy yet rejected monarchy could best be described in the terms of classical and contemporary republicanism. Here, too, Lucan provides an attractive perspective on the struggle between imperium and republic, although, to complicate matters further, the two adversaries can at different moments occupy both conceptual categories.³ While the large Spanish cast of the epic is depicted in low relief, the Araucanian warriors and their chaste, lamenting consorts assume the stature

¹ Blanco (2012), 17. All translations are my own. ³ Sutton (2014).

² Quint (1993).

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of classical heroes and heroines. We meet the industrious and youthful Lautaro, who turns his back on the Spaniards whom he had served as an auxiliary to win a series of lightning victories for the Araucanians before perishing, unarmed, in a surprise nocturnal attack during a first night with his beloved; the proud and furious Rengo and Tucapel, ever at odds; the massive and dignified general Caupolicán, whose prudence cannot turn the tide of fortune, and who eventually endures an ignominious execution, naked and impaled, after a deathbed conversion to Christianity. The poet-soldier often digresses, too, beyond the battlefield in Chile to witness other scenes of interest: the parallel theatre of war in Europe, the portentous cavern of an indigenous mage, the festivals and courtships of the Araucanians at peace, or the narrator’s own alleged exploration into the unknown lands of the far South. La Araucana proved to be one of the bestsellers of its age. The three parts of the epic went through countless editions, authorized and otherwise, and several translations. It plays a cameo part in Don Quixote’s first, ridiculous, duel, and captured the imagination of the anonymous composers of the popular romance ballads intended for oral performance as well as of subsequent epic poets. In the late sixteenth-century ballads, the events have already lost much of their historical specificity to become universal, idealized dramas of love and death;⁴ and it is at this point that the dramatists discussed in this chapter pick up the tale. Meanwhile, however, La Araucana had proven a rather uncomfortable read for one influential noble family, the Hurtado de Mendozas. García Hurtado de Mendoza (1535–1609), marquis of Cañete, was the governor general under whom Ercilla had served, and who had received distinctly faint praise in the poem from his former officer, who still harboured a grudge for having been disciplined, imprisoned, and almost executed for a quarrel during the campaign. García had subsequently been appointed viceroy of Peru (1590–6), where he proved a similarly controversial figure, at which point he determined to mount a concerted propaganda campaign to promote his manifold services to the Crown with a view to attaining the lasting rewards he believed he and his family deserved.⁵ One of the first steps in this campaign was to commission an epic to rival and counter that of Ercilla. Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado (Arauco Tamed) (Lima, 1596), the debut work of an ambitious young graduate of the Universidad de San Marcos, born to a Spanish officer in Chile, and whose studies were generously funded by the viceroy himself, is not so much a sequel to La Araucana as a rewriting. We encounter many of the same characters— Caupolicán and his wife Fresia, the boastful Tucapel, the cacique Galvarino, mutilated as a dissuasive punishment but who instead stirs up his compatriots

⁴ Lerzundi (1978), 42.

⁵ Dixon (1993).

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to ongoing rebellion, even the ghost of Lautaro—but they are demeaned shadows of their previous incarnations. While the poem, in common with Renaissance epic in general, is still one of many voices, its unquestioned hero, unsurprisingly, is García himself. A mozo viejo, old head on young shoulders, he becomes the paragon of military strategy, political prudence, Christian piety, and moral restraint conspicuously lacking in La Araucana. Arauco domado, too, had a substantial contemporary reception, although in this case its dissemination is likely to have owed more to the Hurtado de Mendozas’s own efforts than to its intrinsic commercial value. Both La Araucana and Arauco domado found their way on to the Spanish stage in a series of plays set against the backdrop of the wars in Chile: Lope de Vega’s Arauco domado por el excelentísimo señor don García Hurtado de Mendoza (Arauco Tamed by the Most Excellent Don García Hurtado de Mendoza), published in 1622 but likely to date to 1598–1603;⁶ Ricardo de Turia’s La bellígera española (The Spanish Woman Warrior) published in Valencia in 1616; Algunas hazañas de las muchas de don García Hurtado de Mendoza, marqués de Cañete (Some of the Many Deeds of Don García Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete), composed collaboratively by no less than ‘nueve ingenios’ (‘nine wits’) and performed and published in Madrid in 1622–3;⁷ Gaspar de Ávila’s El gobernador prudente (The Prudent Governor), published in 1663 and dating probably to 1624–5; and Francisco González de Bustos’s Los españoles en Chile (The Spaniards in Chile) (1665). This chapter examines the first three of these, the earliest of the series and those most closely indebted to the two Araucanian epics. As their titles suggest, Lope’s Arauco domado and Algunas hazañas were commissioned by García Hurtado de Mendoza and his son Juan Andrés respectively, and draw extensively on Oña as well as on other works of history and genealogy promoted by the family. La bellígera española appears not to be the result of patronage, and finds its direct inspiration in La Araucana, with no evidence for Turia having read Arauco domado at all. The plays do not, however, divide as neatly into a conformist and critical stance towards the early Spanish conquest in Chile as this background information would imply. All are experimental works, composed and performed in a period in which the Spanish popular theatre had yet to attain its definitive form. Their attempt to represent the grandiosity of epic within the narrow confines of the open-air corral, the commercial theatre, posed practical and dramatic problems which later playwrights would largely strive to circumvent. While their principal inspiration is in the cycle of epics on the wars of Arauco (to the poems of Ercilla and Oña we might add Diego de Santisteban’s 1597 Quarta y quinta parte de La Araucana (fourth and fifth parts of La Araucana), which attempts ⁶ Dixon (1993), 86.

⁷ Mata Induraín (2013), 210 11.

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to capitalize on the celebrity of the original with less success), these are used eclectically. The dramatists improvise freely and loosely on their given material, selecting appealing and iconic episodes from both poems and other plays as well as the ballads they had inspired with little regard for their historicity, such as it was. While they absorb elements of allusion and imagery from the contemporary poems, they put them to their own use, at times allowing the classical original to be discerned beneath the layers of imitation. The very fact of acting particular scenes on stage (and omitting others) multiplies their potential reception, generating several layers of signification—visual, auditory, and verbal—which at times appear designed to generate contradictory reactions within the audience. While both the epics and the plays have received increased scholarly attention in recent years, they are rarely discussed comparatively in any substantive way. This chapter highlights the potential fruitfulness of such a comparison. As we shall see, translating the epics into drama produces a novel, peculiar kind of drama, bringing about innovations in structure and staging. In turn, the diverse directions taken by the plays in transforming their raw material shed some light on how epic poems were consumed and understood by their immediate readers.

LOPE DE VEGA’S ARAUCO DOMADO: THE TRAGICOMEDY OF WAR Arauco domado dates to Lope’s formative years as a dramatist, in which a number of formulas for structuring and staging a drama are tested out before they coalesce into what would become the hugely successful comedia nueva, a distinctively ‘modern’ art form which dominated the commercial theatres from 1600. Like many of these earlier works, the play, which Lope terms a tragicomedia, does not shy away from representing battles and scenes of violence.⁸ It is also highly self-conscious about doing so. In the prologue to the printed edition, the playwright stresses the complexity of representing a ‘verdadera historia’ (‘true history’), which has already been recounted in so many different versions, and finds a pictorial analogy most apposite for the process of dramatic creation: como en esta representación sucinta, y en este mapa breve, haciendo el mismo efeto en los oídos que la pintura en los ojos, grandes las primeras figuras, y las demás en lejos; porque sin reducirlas a perspectivas era imposible pintarlas.

⁸ Oleza (1981), 157 65, 199 220.

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(as in this succinct representation, and in this compact map, having the same effect on the ears as a painting does on the eyes, with the figures in the foregound large, and the rest in the distance; because without reducing them to perspective it would be impossible to paint them.)⁹

Like a painting, then, and—it might be added—in contrast to the spaciousness of epic, a play is a form of great expressive density. It succeeds in making sense of the vast panorama of historical events only by adopting a particular perspective, a viewing point from which some characters loom larger than others. Lope is frank, without being apologetic, about the inevitable process of selection and distortion this entails. Interesting, too, is the fact that the oral quality of the drama is here said to be paramount, for this play and its successors are also highly choreographed visual spectacles. They attempt to recapture what Tasso had termed the intrinsic meraviglia of epic, its capacity to inspire awe, wonder, and admiration, by instead pushing the special effects of the Golden Age stage to their limits.¹⁰ The dramatists specify in detail how their costumed Indians should look, how the various levels of the stage and sound effects should be utilized to give the impression of a devastating battle with only a handful of players. In comparison to the vertiginous velocity with which the intrigues of the plot proliferate and are resolved in the more conventional romantic comedies or comedias de capa y espada (cloak-and-sword plays), the comedias indianas (plays set in the Indies) proceed through a series of iconic vignettes, pausing every now and again to marvel at a tableau vivant, often revealed behind the backstage curtain before being veiled again: García prostrating himself before the Blessed Sacrament; the Virgin Mary descending to scatter the Araucanian invaders; the death throes of the impaled Caupolicán. Much as Thomas Greene described in his classic study of the epic, ‘the real movement of the poem is from one arch-image to another, and its vital force depends greatly upon their richness and flow’.¹¹ In his preface to the much more lavishly staged Algunas hazañas, the coordinator of the ‘nueve ingenios’, Luis de Belmonte Bermúdez, describes their joint efforts as ‘rasgos humildes’ (‘humble sketches’) and ‘pinceles . . . sutiles’ (‘subtle brushstrokes’),¹² attempting to delineate the majestic image of their hero. For Lope, however, the verbal dimension of his creation remains foremost. Within the play itself, this reflexivity manifests itself most obviously in the musings of the play’s protagonist, who often imagines himself performing his exploits before the absent image of the king: ‘el cielo | verá mi honesto celo, el Rey de España | esta imposible hazaña’ (‘the heavens will see my earnest zeal,

⁹ Ruiz Ramón (1993), 75 6. ¹⁰ Cf. Macintosh, Ch. 32 in this volume, for le merveilleux in French epic drama. ¹¹ Greene (1963), 12. ¹² Ruiz de Alarcón (1957), 535.

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the King of Spain this impossible feat’).¹³ Members of the royal household would on occasion have attended the corral, and plays were often performed at court, so the gesture points to how the re-enactment of García’s deeds ritualistically makes them present again to the potential spectator they were intended to serve. The first half of the play closely follows the movement of Oña’s poem, and consists in large part of García demonstrating, or other characters praising, his talents and virtues, as he puts an end to civil dissent in Chile, alleviates abuse of the indios de paz (peaceful tributary Indians), restores devotional practices, founds cities, and out-manoeuvres the Araucanians in military strategy. A series of heroic analogies are coined for him, the most prominent of which is that of Julius Caesar, ‘heroico César cristiano’ (‘heroic Christian Caesar’).¹⁴ The representation of the Amerindians also follows Oña’s at the outset, which results in a certain ambivalence in their portrayal already present in the epic. In tune with what Edward Said termed a ‘dialectic of reinforcement’,¹⁵ they are equipped with the generic attributes popularly associated with Amerindians in general: in reality, a jumble of stereotyped characteristics of the native peoples of the Caribbean with the odd Mexica or Inca trait— canoes, hammocks, bows and arrows, sun-worship, even some comic scenes of would-be cannibalism. Lope also strives, however, to emulate Oña’s ‘local colour’,¹⁶ introducing Mapuche and Quechua terms that Oña and Ercilla had first incorporated into the epic. The first glimpse we have of the Araucanians is in a provocative scene of Caupolicán and his wife Fresia preparing to bathe together in a spring. Unusually erotic for the comedia, the interlude allows the pair to voice, in the eloquent verse form of silvas, their intense and sensuous love, expressing a longing for the timeless leisure of Arcadia in what appears to be a species of American Golden Age: ya en tejidas hamacas de tronco en tronco asidas destos árboles altos, de inquieta guerra faltos, dormiremos en paz, y nuestras vidas llegarán prolongadas a aquel dichoso fin que las pasadas (now in woven hammocks, fastened from trunk to trunk of these high trees, free of troublesome war,

¹³ Ruiz Ramón (1993), 89. ¹⁴ Ruiz Ramón (1993), 121. ¹⁵ Said (2003), 94. ¹⁶ Dixon (1993), 89.

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we will sleep in peace, and our long lives will reach the same fortunate end as those of our ancestors).¹⁷

Yet this lyric beauty only makes all the more jarring the violence and hubris of the language also woven into their dialogue: ‘yo soy el dios de Arauco, no soy hombre’ (‘I am the god of Arauco, I am not a man’) declares Caupolicán, as he promises to tile over the sea with the scalps of Spaniards. Yet just before this scene, we have seen the urbanized, Hispanized Araucanian yanacona Tipalco conversing with the Spanish soldier Rebolledo, his ‘guest’ (alluding probably to the commonplace European practice of billeting) on terms of apparent friendly equity. The ambivalence intensifies as the conflict between the two sides progresses. While Lope largely avoids showing on stage the stylized but horrific battle deaths for which Ercilla was famed, the sudden eruption of individual acts of violence in the third act is especially shocking against the gentle humour and exalted panegyric of what has preceded it. We see Galvarino staggering on to the stage with severed hands to exhort the Araucanians never to surrender; the fair Fresia of the first act hurling her infant child to its death in rejection of her husband allowing himself to be taken prisoner, and finally Caupolicán impaled on the stake. At this point, the links between the levels of signification of the comedia to which I referred at the opening—verbal, visual, figurative— become less transparent than at the outset, or, as Teresa Kirschner puts it, the ‘weight of the physical presence on [sic] the Indian characters’ acts as a counterweight to ‘the exposition of the hegemonic discourse’.¹⁸ Rhetorically, everything points towards a satisfying conclusion to the panegyric of García and his complete control over the action. In contrast to Ercilla’s La Araucana (we have moved now beyond the early phase of the campaign reworked in Oña’s Arauco domado) the Spanish general’s authority over the final phase of the war is absolute; he orders the mutilation of Galvarino and the execution of Caupolicán himself, rather than leaving this to his subordinates. Somewhat implausibly—and again in contrast to La Araucana, in which the castigated Amerindians affirm the futility of their punishment and its detriment to the cause of peace—the victims willingly assent to their fate. Galvarino admits that ‘Tú has hallado justos modos | de castigar y vencer’ (‘you have found just ways of punishing and conquering’),¹⁹ while, even more fulsomely, the sentenced Caupolicán affirms that Agradecido te quedo, generoso capitán; ni te aconsejo me des ¹⁷ Ruiz Ramón (1993), 83 4. ¹⁹ Ruiz Ramón (1993), 122.

¹⁸ Kirschner (1998), 34.

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Shortly afterwards, Caupolicán’s conversion to Christianity, too, is brought about directly by García’s instigation and influence, rather than being, as in Ercilla, an unexpected but independent character development. This accomplished, the play ends, as it had opened, with a ritualistic display of loyalty to Church and King, as García offers his conquests to the image of the newly crowned Philip II. On the other hand, on a figurative and symbolic level, the emotional impact of the just punishment of the two barbarians is arguably complicated by their Christological connotations. In a rather grotesque and Americanized appropriation of the Gospel injunction that ‘unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds’ (John 12:24), Galvarino predicts that his hands, sown on the ground, will reap many hands to enchain and mutilate the Spaniards: ‘Quítase el grano a la espiga | para que el maíz se aumente’ (‘The grain is plucked from the ear, so that the maize increases’).²¹ Likewise, the mere hints in La Araucana of the Christlike nature of Caupolicán’s sufferings are here rendered very explicit. Like Mary Magdalene after the Crucifixion, Fresia, now lamenting her spurned husband, seeks for him among the Spanish soldiers—‘¿Vístele, por dicha?’ (‘Have you seen him, by chance?’)—to receive the answer Vile en triste y lloroso alarde. A la plaza le han llevado, donde en palo verás su cuerpo fuerte clavado. (I saw him in sad and tearful guise. They have taken him to the plaza, where to a stake you will see his strong body nailed.)²²

²⁰ Ruiz Ramón (1993), 135. ²² Ruiz Ramón (1993), 138.

²¹ Ruiz Ramón (1993), 122.

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In his final, prodigious appearance, unveiled in the same ‘discovery space’ within which the Blessed Sacrament appeared at the opening, and in which it, and the statue of Philip II, will shortly be revealed at the play’s closure, the victim’s penitential prayer traces a parallel again: ‘sin pies a vuestros pies clavado vengo’ (‘without feet I come, nailed, to your feet’).²³ The imagery is all the more disturbing for the fact that the resurrection and redemption entailed in these sufferings are not altogether aligned to the teleological Christian ‘discoveries’ to which they act as a visual parallel. As at the Crucifixion, the suffering Caupolicán is surrounded, in his final hours, by weeping women, invited by García to witness the spectacle he intends to decisively quell the rebellion. Yet these internal spectators do not react on cue to the ‘tamed’, subdued hero: the Fresia whose sorrow here is in uncomfortable juxtaposition with the previous scene of filicide hopes for vengeance through her other, older son, Engol. This latter character, present in neither Ercilla nor Oña (although possibly finding some inspiration in Caupolicán’s son in the Quarta y quinta parte de la Araucana), like the character of a popular Carolingian ballad avenging the treacherous killing of his nephew,²⁴ swears de no me llamar tu hijo, de no dormir en tu tambo, de no vestirme las armas que a españoles has quitado, de no mirar a mujer y de no salir al campo hasta que vengue tu muerte. (not to call myself your son, not to sleep in your tambo, not to don the arms which you have taken from Spaniards, not to look on a woman, and not to go out to battle, until I avenge your death.)²⁵

As Lope well knew, despite García’s personal victory, the wars in Chile did, indeed, continue, from generation to generation. His images of resurrection and renewal throughout the play are paradoxical; they suggest the perverse naturalness and cyclicality of violence. Fundamentally open-ended, like the epics by which it was inspired, the drama is at its closure, and true to its title, a disconcerting hybrid of comedia and tragedia.

²³ Ruiz Ramón (1993), 139. ²⁵ Ruiz Ramón (1993), 139.

²⁴ Dixon (1993), 88.

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ALGUNAS HA ZAÑ AS AND THE BEAUTY OF BATTLE The extent to which Algunas hazañas can be considered a single cohesive work is an open question. No doubt, coordinating no less than nueve ingenios, most likely under considerable time pressure, was a tricky business. The structure is, as the work’s title suggests, a loose one, with each writer composing a few hundred lines of the total, roughly encompassing the same historical period as Lope’s, from the arrival of García to the execution of Caupolicán, but with many more subplots and digressions. What the play lacks in dramatic intensity and consistency of character it makes up for in performative spectacle: the play was performed with two companies of actors to give the crowd scenes added impact,²⁶ and, like Lope’s, uses special effects to simulate magic, prodigies, and miracles. Broadly consistent in the play’s reworking of Lope is the attempt to mitigate Lope’s often harrowing depiction of the extremity of war, with its violence, cruelty, and suffering. One of its innovations is the introduction of two graciosos (fools), the Spanish Chilindrón and Araucanian Coquín, who vie with each other to offset the earnestness of their comrades-in-arms. Their own comic encounters in scenes of combat, imprisonment, and torture encourage the audience not to become too absorbed in the more conventionally epic scenes of action going on around them. This is especially so since the two, opting out of a fight whenever feasible, often step outside to act as the commentators and mediators through which the audience see and hear the conflict, from which perspective the violence is, if not a comic, at least an aesthetically gratifying spectacle. As Chilindrón observes: Gustosa cosa es mirallos [ejércitos], y ver al viento ligeras tantas plumas y banderas, tantas armas y caballos. Hermosa sobre sosiego es la guerra, enamorara si en sangre no se bañara y se aumentara en su fuego. (A pleasurable thing it is to watch the armies, and see fluttering in the wind so many feathers and flags, so many arms and horses. War is a beautiful thing to one at rest, it would enamour if it were not bathed in blood and fed on fire.)²⁷

²⁶ Mata Induraín (2013), 211.

²⁷ Sánchez García (2014), 88.

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Reflection on the pleasure, even laughter, of reading or listening to scenes of violence at a comfortable remove is also self-consciously present in the Spanish epics at times. In the first part of his poem, Ercilla repeatedly refers to war as a ‘juego’ (‘game’) or ‘fiesta’ (‘party’), mocks those who end up losing out, and appeals in his prologue to the ‘aficionados’ (‘fans’) of the ‘cosas de la guerra’ (‘business of war’), in the hardened tone of a veteran, before the mood darkens in his later years.²⁸ From a rather different angle, Oña, too, often narrates battle deaths and wounds with a comic touch, moving away from the horror and pathos of his predecessor. When not descending into farcical fist-fights, the conflict of Algunas hazañas is largely a war of courtesy. The two sides are broadly on a par, both in numbers and in the structure of the play, and both García and Caupolicán are paragons of clemency and civility. Each voluntarily releases the spies and prisoners of the other, meaning that the audience in fact witnesses very little bloodshed, and while the play still concludes with (here) Gualeva’s infanticide and the iconic execution of the Araucanian general, García himself strives to revoke the sentence. In this light, the almost total reconciliation of the two sides at the conclusion is unsurprising; broadly speaking, their martial and chivalric values are already shown to be shared. Another development in this drama is in that of the female characters. Both Oña and Ercilla introduce Amerindian heroines. In Ercilla, their stories of courtship, loss, and fidelity (fe) are mostly in a familiar European mould, and serve as a synecdoche both for the civilian community devastated by war and the Araucanian capacity for resistance even amid this devastation. While Oña also admires the sincerity of his Araucanian couples, there is nonetheless a hint of misogyny, stressing the fickleness and mutability of women; we see Lautaro’s consort Guacolda, for instance, wed to a Spaniard and berated by her fallen beloved’s ghost.²⁹ As we have seen, Lope’s main interest is in the character of Fresia, despairing but defiant. There is a brief flirtation between García’s brother Felipe and Tucapel’s wife Gualeva, but only to demonstrate firmly the restraint of the former in the face of temptation. Algunas hazañas amalgamates these various approaches. As in Oña, Guacolda sets aside her initial hatred of the Spaniards and shows herself well disposed to the Spanish soldier who pursues her; as in Lope, however, there is no consummation between the two, and at the end of the play Guacolda accepts the hand of the Araucanian Rengo as both submit themselves to the yoke of the Spaniards. Pervasive in all these works is the symbolic equation between the female Amerindians and the desired land, as Benito Quintana (2010) points out. The fact that no Spanish–Araucanian union is consummated is, however, not so much an ‘unrequited conquest’, in Roland Greene’s suggestive coinage (1999),

²⁸ Ercilla (1998), 69.

²⁹ Oña (2014), 306.

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as an idealized colonial situation, one in which miscegenation remained a sensitive subject and in which the Indian Republic, as it was termed in Spanish legal jargon, remains a nominally independent entity while also one reformed and in submission to Church and Crown. To carry the figurative language further, its situation is more akin to that of an adolescent in tutelage than to a wife or concubine. If there is one element at odds with this comedic resolution, it is in the repeated allusions to Lucan’s Pharsalia, a leitmotif in many of the literary works dedicated to the wars of Arauco. In La Araucana, Caupolicán had taken on an increasing resemblance to Lucan’s Pompey as the poem progressed, which in turn reflected the problematic definition of the Araucanians as a republican community. Oña repeatedly compares García to the Caesar of the Gallic Wars when in Chile, but to the republican Pompey when governing the Spanish community in Peru. Lope alludes more obviously to the Caesar of the Civil Wars when he refers to García’s audacious crossing of the River Biobío like a new Rubicon or a stormy Adriatic, which leaves Caupolicán still in the guise of a republican hero. In Algunas hazañas, García is, again, ‘hecho en todo el César mismo’ (‘made completely into Caesar himself ’)³⁰ on crossing the river, while the climactic battle is preceded by a darkened sun, burning lightning, thunder, and earthquakes which bring to mind the Lucanian vision of the chaos of a failing world.³¹ This, together with Caupolicán’s agonized lament on the death of his infant child and the Christological overtones of his ‘martirio’ (‘martyrdom’),³² are uncomfortably tragic notes in an otherwise largely complacent vision of satisfactory conquest. Perhaps unintentionally, the multiple authorship of the work brings about a proliferation of voices and potential responses to its overarching theme.

‘LOS S UCESOS . . . DE LA GUERRA’ ( ‘THE I NCIDENTS O F W A R ’) I N RICARDO DE TURIA ’S L A B E L L Í G ER A ES P A Ñ O L A Despite its eye-catching title, most of the action of La bellígera española, freely adapted from the Primera parte of Ercilla’s epic, does not centre on the title figure, the mujer varonil (man-like woman) Doña Mencía de los Nidos.³³ Greatly expanded from her cameo appearance in Ercilla, Turia’s Doña Mencía, a Spanish resident of Chile, proudly asserts her independence, belligerence, and desire to dominate, and rallies the Spanish citizens of Concepción to ³⁰ Sánchez García (2014), 71. ³² Sánchez García (2014), 98.

³¹ Sánchez García (2014), 74. ³³ Mata Induraín (2015).

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defend their city and defeat the Araucanian commander Lautaro. While Doña Mencía has captured most of the critical attention, the Amerindian protagonists Lautaro, Guacolda, and Rengo are more developed. Guacolda’s betrothal to Lautaro is, in this version, thwarted by the intervention of Rengo, who attempts to kidnap her for himself. Both are fooled by a letter purportedly written by Guacolda in which she professes her love for Rengo. Tormented by jealousy, Lautaro abandons his country to join the Spaniards as an auxiliary, but then switches sides, killing the conquistador Valdivia and going on to lead the Araucanian forces. Rengo subsequently switches sides to the Spanish and leads them to Lautaro’s fort, where the latter is killed on his first night with Guacolda, who is then promised by Mencía to Rengo. Part of the literary circles of Valencia, rather than Madrid, and without the pressure exerted by the Hurtado de Mendoza family, Turia represents a rather different response to Ercilla’s epic, which follows the contemporary ballads in its fascination with the star-struck lovers Lautaro and Guacolda, and its singular lack of interest in Don García. As in Ercilla, the greed and injustice of the first conquistadors is roundly criticized, while Arauco is a proudly independent martial republic, if ultimately doomed to strive against the heavens. In this schema, Lautaro assumes the stature of a hero of tragic, and epic, proportions. Valiant but flawed and hubristic, the subject of repeated curses and ill omens, he repeatedly laments the ‘malina estrella’ (‘fateful star’) which dogs him. Along with other characters, he is associated throughout with images of darkness and blindness, from the opening night scene in which, furious and bewildered, he laments that he has fire without light,³⁴ to his night-time death scene, in which he attributes the unseen arrow that struck him to Death itself. The tragic love triangle overlaid on to the epic plot line of La bellígera española renders much more fluid the issues of loyalty, treachery, and conquest it addresses. Lautaro, Rengo, and Guacolda each don Spanish dress and depart to serve the Spaniards at different points, but all for personal reasons utterly unconnected with true and voluntary submission to the Christians. A particular point of contention is Lautaro’s killing of Valdivia, which, in contrast to the epics, he carries out with his own hands. On the one hand, the action is repeatedly decried as a personal treachery, which will eventually bring about his downfall. On the other, it is a laudable act of patriotism against an unquestionably unjust ruler. While the now-penitent Valdivia laments ‘¿Hay pecho más inhumano?’ (‘Could there be a crueller breast?’), his killer responds, ‘Mas dí ¿qué Cesar Romano | vio hazaña tan famosa?’ (‘But tell me, did any Roman Caesar see so famous a deed?’).³⁵ Although the immediate correlation would appear to be between Lautaro

³⁴ Turia (1996), 6 7.

³⁵ Turia (1996), 38, my emphasis.

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and Caesar, the ironic suggestion of a Brutus addressing his victim is perhaps more powerful in the setting. Equally ambivalent is the ending of the play. If the union of Guacolda and Rengo, and of Mencía and don Pedro de Villagrán, superficially brings about a comedic resolution, the scene of Lautaro’s death and Guacolda’s attempted suicide immediately before makes for a hybrid with tragedy. Particularly disturbing is the treatment of Guacolda. If the Amerindian heroines of Lope and Algunas hazañas represent the promised land of the Americas drawn by affinity to Spain, but nobly relinquished to its original owners, here we have a broken woman, violated and vengeful. Weeping over the body of Lautaro, she is fought over by two lustful Spanish soldiers, purchased by Villagrán, and then finally given as a prize to Rengo. While the latter gloats ‘¿Quién tal despojo ha ganado | de su ya muerto enemigo?’ (‘Has anyone gained such spoils from his now dead enemy?’),³⁶ she swears to take his hand only to kill him later. The submission of the couple to each other and to Spain is, at best, a less than consensual union of convenience. There is little attempt to reconcile the heroine to her fate on moral or ethical grounds; ‘que éstos los sucesos son | de la guerra has de saber’ (‘you should know that these are the incidents of war’)³⁷ is the best that Mencía can offer to console her new ward. War, it seems, is as blind as love.

CONCLUSIO N The comedias de Arauco must have struck the theatre-going public as rather unusual productions for the Spanish stage. Their various attempts to grapple with the questions of violence and conquest, of alternative political communities and distant colonial encounters, within the confines of dramatic convention result in plays which are, like the epics which inspired them, hybrid and open-ended creations. The self-conscious, internal spectators of the works challenge the audience to select their own approach to the conflicts represented: do we laugh and admire, like the graciosos of Algunas hazañas? Weep and threaten, like the Araucanian onlookers of Lope? Smooth over resignedly, like Mencía tying up the loose ends of her victory? To judge by the limited afterlife and mixed reception of the plays, the challenge has not been one that either contemporary spectators or later readers were keen to embrace. For the uncertain ending of these dramas, somewhere between tragic death and comedic marriage, closure and continuum, ultimately leaves the spectator in a position in which participation cannot, entirely, be avoided.

³⁶ Turia (1996), 117.

³⁷ Turia (1996), 115.

24 Epic on Stage in the Dutch Republic Frederick Naerebout

My seven-word title begs a lot of questions: What is understood by ‘epic’ in the early modern world and in the Dutch Republic in particular? What does the staging of epic imply at this time? What kind of theatre, in what kind of society, are we talking about during this period? Since there is very little research into the theatre of the Dutch Golden Age, this chapter is of necessity a first step in what could clearly become a major research project. In seeking to define ‘epic’ drama and to identify the various forms it takes on the early modern Dutch stage, I hope to provide some tentative answers to these questions.

EPIC This is the hardest nut to crack and crucial for my argument here. There is no commonly accepted modern definition of what epic is and no agreement on which works from European contexts (and also non-European, which introduces new complications) would count as epic(s). Of course we can pick any working definition of epic and apply it to the literary output of the Dutch Golden Age and to the sources that fed into that output. If we decide that Homer is an example of epic, any translation, adaptation, or imitation of Homer is ‘epic’ as well; and if any of these are dramatized in part or as a whole, they would be examples of epic on stage. Of course, the exact reception of Homer at a particular time and place, and the possible reasons for that reception, is a valid and valuable thing to research. But in order to answer the questions asked at the start of this chapter, I think we need to follow a different path. We need to find out what the contemporary understanding of epic was. Early modern poetics adhere, by and large, to traditional generic designations, and epic poetry (heldendicht in the Dutch of the period: ‘verse on heroes’) was identified as one of these. But, as nowadays, there was no

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agreement on the extent of the genre: whether a particular piece of poetry qualified as heldendicht was open to debate. For example, Lucan’s Pharsalia was not an epic according to Gerardus Vossius, but it was according to Julius Caesar Scaliger.¹ So should we follow Scaliger’s more inclusive view on epic or the more restrictive opinion of Vossius? As both were quite influential, I suppose we should adopt a broad view, just as from a contemporary perspective we have poems that are generally accepted as epic poetry and poems that can be categorized as epic poetry or not, depending on what criteria one is willing to adopt. I take my bearings from the extremely thorough study of epic poetry by Pierre Smit, who considers epic in the Netherlands from 1550 to 1780.² Smit, who tried to approach epic poetry historically, taking the poetics of the period as his framework, in fact neglected Scaliger and relied on Vossius. This resulted in some poetry, such as translations and imitations of Lucan, being branded as pseudo-epics. But despite his Vossian outlook, Smit did include Scaligerian epics in his overview, which accordingly gives us as complete a conspectus of Dutch epic poetry as one could wish. From that conspectus it immediately becomes clear that epic poetry certainly caught the fancy of authors writing in the vernacular, and it must have enjoyed considerable popularity with audiences in the Dutch Republic. Between 1550 and 1700 some eighteen translations into Dutch of extant Graeco-Roman and post-classical epics were produced, while eight or nine new epics were composed.³ The translations were of Homer, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ariosto, and Tasso; and the newly composed epics dealt with either recent history (the Eighty Years War, the English Restoration, William III), a legendary past (Baeto, the Batavian king and founding father of Holland), or biblical subject matter. Between 1700 and 1780, there were eleven translations published, while the output of newly composed epics rose to thirty-three. Homer and Virgil were now granted new translations, but otherwise we see the works of a completely different set of authors being translated: Camões, Milton, Fénelon, Voltaire, and Gessner (Gessner via the French). Amongst the newly composed poems, there are again some with historical or legendary subjects, but the majority of them have biblical subjects.⁴ ¹ Scaliger (1561) (a 2nd edn. came out in 1581, a 3rd in 1586, plus many reprints in the decades that followed). Vossius (1647). An extensive analysis of the differences between these poetics can be found in the review article that Spies (1977 8) dedicated to the work of W. A. P. Smit. ² Smit (1975 83), two volumes, an anticipated third volume has never been completed. However, this groundbreaking study did not include the possible dramatization of epic poetry. ³ These numbers are based on Smit (1975 83). Counting these epic poems is not always easy, because editions often appear under different titles and there are advance publications of fragments. ⁴ I cannot discuss neo Latin epics at any length here. See Dewallef (1966). Inter alia, we have an epic about William of Orange; see Wijdeveld (1984) and de Schepper (1984). For an epic by Franciscus Plante about Johan Maurits of Orange, the Mauritias of 1647, see Smit (1975 83), 1.238 41.

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‘EPIC DRAMA ’ I N C O N T E X T ‘Epic drama’ was not an existing generic category in the Republic, where drama was categorized as tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy, or the Dutch equivalents treurspel, blij-einde-spel, and treur-blij-einde-spel.⁵ To these genres we should add the klucht, or farce.⁶ ‘Epic drama’ is not a category in modern studies of the Dutch stage either.⁷ So what precisely do we mean by ‘epic drama’? This coinage also implies that from this point onwards we are in a no man’s land between the idea of dramatized epic and the fact that drama and epic are seen as different genres. If we simply define epic drama as ‘theatrical plays that have epic subject matter’, this merely shifts the problem to the question what counts as epic subject matter. Back to square one: again we come up against the lack of a clear demarcation of epic. Whatever we include in or exclude from ‘epic subject matter’ will always remain arbitrary, unless we go back to the contemporary views on epic as outlined above. Even though something like ‘epic drama’ was not distinguished at the time, there were plays written and performed that dealt with the same subject matter as the seventy or so epic poems, translations, and new compositions that date from this period. Because it is, of course, impossible to ascertain whether a playwright used a Dutch translation of, say, Virgil, or went back to the Latin original, or used, for that matter, a version in whatever language, we have to add to our seventy poems all the sources that the translations were based upon. Some of these sources were recognized as epics in their own right, and then there is no problem: we have the epic source, we have the epic poem translating the source, and we have what we can with some justification call an ‘epic’ drama based on either or both. But other sources were not seen as epic: the Bible especially (most of it prose) was not seen as epic (defined as epic poetry). Whether the Bible should be considered as epic is a discussion that has continued to this day. But even when we do not consider (large parts of ) the Old or New Testament as epic,

⁵ Rens and van Eemeren (1977); van Eemeren and Meeus (1988) have produced a detailed categorization of plays based on an extensive set of criteria. This categorization is not an emic, but an etic, one. Because of its etic nature, it can and sometimes does speak of some subgenre of plays which are of an epic character, but the exact nature of this subgenre and which plays might belong to it never become completely clear. As far as I can see, the present chapter is the first attempt to chart this specific aspect of the literary landscape. A major study of Dutch Renaissance drama, Smits Veldt (1991), has hardly any mention of epic (and considers epic and tragedy as two competing genres). ⁶ A performance at the Schouwburg would always conclude with a farce or a ballet. Although we have parodies of epic in poetry (either translations of ancient parodies or the rare examples of newly composed parodies in imitation of the ancients), I am not aware of any farce/burlesque based on or imitating such poetic parodies. ⁷ Hummelen (1958) distinguishes a category of epic dramatic plays (plays that dramatize epic subject matter). In later publications, Hummelen rescinded the label.

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we can still accept that there existed epic poems that dealt with biblical subject matter (such as Paradise Lost) and that if these poems were to be transformed into stage plays, such plays could be labelled ‘epic drama’. But what if a play is directly based on biblical texts that never gave rise to an epic poem? Or when a playwright turned to Apollonius Rhodius, Valerius Flaccus, Nonnus, or Ovid—sources that nowadays are considered by many as epic, but were not judged to be epic according to contemporary taste, or at least not generally so? Or when a historical subject was put on stage that had never been treated in an epic poem? In instances such as these—when we want to follow contemporary ideas about epic—the subject matter of such plays is not epic. And what if a play is a complete inventio, not based on any existing source, epic or otherwise?⁸ Then the subject matter would definitely not be epic. So, it is only if a piece of poetry is deemed to be epic and is subsequently dramatized that the resulting play could be called epic. And if any other material gets dramatized, it is not epic. Or could it be, if only it were treated in a comparable manner? Could non-epic subject matter be treated in an epic manner, turning that play into an example of epic drama after all? Might we add to dramatized epic also drama that is made ‘epical’? This chapter suggests that it is essential to do precisely this. Before examining some of these plays, epic in subject and/or epic in manner, it is important to take a wider view of the theatre at this time. The performing arts should be seen in their historical context—as should, of course, any art. The context often determines, or at the very least hugely ⁸ At this stage of the argument, it might be useful to include a little excursus to draw attention to the divergent opinions in this period concerning the value of original compositions. Lodewijk Meijer wrote in the introduction to one of his plays (Ghulde vlies: treurspel met konst en vlieghwerken, vertoondt op de Amsterdamsche schouwburgh (Amsterdam, 1667)): ‘Wy leeven in een andere lucht en eeuwe, als de Ghrieken, en Romeinen. ’t Gheen hun behaaght heeft, zal onzen tijdtghenooten en landtslieden mooghelijk mishaaghen’ (‘We live in a different century and atmosphere from the Greeks and Romans and what pleased them may well displease our contemporaries and fellow citizens’). Others, motivated by religious considerations, launched rather more aggressive attacks on pagan literature. On the other end of the spectrum we find Andries Pels, who in his Ars Poetica of 1705 came out in favour of translations and extensions of, and variations on, the ancients: Doch ’t heeft zijn werk in een toneelstuk op te stellen Van eigen’ stoffe, en daar geen Ouden van vertellen. Gy doet veel beter, dat gy uit Homeers Ulis, Of Ilias, of uit de Metamorphosis Van Naso, uit Virgiels Aeneis, of uit boeken, De waereld overlang bekend, de stof gaat zoeken. (But it is quite a task into some play to mould Your own story that none of the ancients ever told. Your subject matter you should better get From Homer’s Odyssey or Iliad, or yet From Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Virgil’s epic Or from other books well known and classic.)

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influences, what is put on stage, and even whether there is any theatre at all. This is not to imply that there was, either in the plays themselves or in their staging, a specifically Dutch tradition: the research of the past few decades has shown ever more clearly how theatre at this time was an international, panEuropean art form.⁹ So it is imperative to take into account the bigger picture. In 1568 the Netherlands revolted against their Habsburg overlord: the Spanish king. This turned into a war of independence that lasted eighty years, ending with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 (although actual independence had already been gained by the northern Netherlands more than half a century before). From 1618 the Dutch struggle for independence was only a sideshow in a pan-European war that is generally known as the Thirty Years War; but even before that it was an international war: the English under Elizabeth I were deeply involved. One of the reasons for this involvement was that this was also one of the wars of religion. The northern Netherlands—the Seven United Provinces—won independence from the Habsburg Empire in 1588 as one of only two republics in Europe (the other was Venice). This specific political constellation may go some way towards explaining how this small country became Europe’s leading economic power, with the largest merchant fleet in the world, a huge overseas trading empire, and enough spending power even to be a military might of some consequence. It was also a centre of Reformed religion, a magnet for all Protestants fleeing from repressive Catholic monarchies and the CounterReformation, as well as a refuge for Jews and freethinkers who got into trouble with censorship or the Inquisition at home. This all came together to foster a most remarkable cultural ascendancy: the Dutch Republic led the way in most arts and most scholarly endeavours, acquired universities that rose to fame because they attracted the best intellects, and outpaced all European competition in book publishing. The Republic was ‘the intellectual entrepôt of Europe’.¹⁰ Holland, with its many towns along the western seaboard, was the most important of the provinces, and within Holland the city of Amsterdam outshone all others, with 25,000 inhabitants in 1567, 50,000 in 1610, 100,000 in 1620, and 200,000 in 1660. It was in Amsterdam that most publishers, most booksellers, most painters, the best shipbuilders, the best poets, the most and best of everything were found. It was also in Amsterdam that most plays were put on. The Dutch Golden Age did not last. After winning two Anglo-Dutch wars, in 1672 the Republic was at war with France and England at the same time—a

⁹ See Henke and Nicholson (2008) and (2014). Two recent examples of research into the international character of the Amsterdam stage, focusing on the translation and adaptation of Spanish plays, are Jautze, Francés, and Blom (2016) and Pérez (2016). Of course, influences also emanated from Amsterdam. ¹⁰ Gibbs (1971). Israel (1998) is still the best English language general account.

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severe economic crisis resulted. Louis XIV was a persistent enemy, but in 1688 the tide seemed to turn, when William III, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic like the Princes of Orange before him (ever since they had taken the lead in the fight against Spain), became king of England. In fact, it was the beginning of the end. The death of William III in 1702 ushered in an eighteenth century in which England came to the fore and in all aspects eclipsed the Republic. The decline was long and slow, compounded by natural disasters and political unrest. The Republic was still very rich, but its wealth was monopolized by a small elite and the majority of people descended into poverty: in 1764 James Boswell wrote in his diary: ‘most of their towns are sadly decayed and instead of finding every mortal employed you meet with multitudes of poor creatures who are starving in idleness’.¹¹ Culture was impoverished as well, but the artistic and intellectual life had been so vigorous that, although diminished, it may still be said to have flourished throughout the eighteenth century. A fourth Anglo-Dutch war from 1780 to 1784 proved fatal. In 1795 the weakened Republic was overrun by the Revolutionary French armies—and not long after ceased to exist. The theatre definitely made its contribution to the Dutch Golden and Silver Ages. However, this is a rather neglected area of study: compared to painting, hardly any attention has been paid to the theatre at all, and almost everything published about it is in Dutch and thus not readily accessible to the nonspecialist.¹² The main reason for this lack of interest must be the absence of a performance tradition: with extremely few exceptions, the plays of the period have not been seen onstage for over two centuries and they are not likely to be put onstage in the future. They are not generally read either: the rapid development of the Dutch language makes them very difficult to understand for the ordinary reader. The large majority of texts have never been published in modern editions, let alone translated into contemporary Dutch. Unknown and unloved they may be, but we neglect the theatre at our peril. It should be accorded its legitimate position as an important part of the Republic’s vibrant cultural life, otherwise our understanding of that life must remain incomplete. A surprisingly large number of plays were printed, from the mediocre to the works of the literary giant Joost van den Vondel. The Leiden University Library holdings for the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries are 6,000 plays, which is supposedly about half of the total number published.¹³ In fact, this ¹¹ Boswell (1952), 281. ¹² The best general history of the Dutch theatre is Erenstein (1996). But this covers all theatre from the Middle Ages to the present there is no recent study dealing with the sixteenth eighteenth centuries (the fifteenth century and before have been better served). Still important are several older studies by Ben Albach. Recent contributions by Anna de Haas flesh out several aspects of theatrical life in the sixteenth eighteenth centuries. ¹³ The main source for plays is CENETON = Census Nederland Toneel (, accessed 14 May 2017). CENETON now lists about 12,000

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rich theatrical record is somewhat surprising, considering the opposition towards the theatre from the Established Church. The Dutch Republic was officially a Calvinist country, and also home to a strong Reformist movement, known as the Second or Further Dutch Reformation, comparable to Continental Pietism and British Puritanism.¹⁴ This would have put an end to the theatre altogether, but the Church’s influence depended on local city magistrates, who usually tended to be non-interventionist. In some cities, for some stretches of time, the Church managed to impose their rulings, though enforcement was always difficult. But closing a theatre is easier than keeping people from making music or dancing in their own homes. In Amsterdam the Church was never very successful at imposing its behavioural standards—not even for Church members (who were a minority). But at times of crisis, explained by the Church as God’s displeasure at the nation’s ungodliness, magistrates yielded to the pressure exerted by the Church to close at least the theatres (in 1664 they were closed because of the plague, in 1665 and 1666 because of war with England, between 1672 and 1677 because of war with France, and so on).¹⁵ Altogether this does not seem to make for a very propitious situation; nevertheless, not only did playwrights produce an impressive number of plays but also many of these were staged. We can consider this as another indication of the cultural effervescence of the Dutch Republic, blooming against all odds. In order to stage a play properly in an urban setting you need a theatre. In the medieval and early modern period, theatres in the Netherlands had been temporary constructions, where Chambers of Rhetoric, pupils of Latin schools, and strolling players performed. In 1617 the first professional company, de Bataviersche Comedianten (the Batavian Comedians), was formed, after English examples, and in the same year the first purpose-built theatre, Samuel Coster’s Nederduytsche Academie, opened in Amsterdam. In 1637 this was replaced by a municipal theatre, de Schouwburg—which was renovated in 1665 as an up-to-date proscenium theatre, and stood until a fatal fire destroyed it in 1772.¹⁶ Other towns followed suit, and we find theatres in The Hague, Delft, Rotterdam, and Leiden. The Hague also got a French theatre,

plays published between the mid sixteenth century and 1803, in the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands. A very rough calculation tells us that in the Republic about twenty five new plays per annum were published. Neo Latin plays are not taken into account in the CENETON list their importance should not be underestimated, but as a rule they were not staged. See Bloemendal and Korsten (2011), Bloemendal and Norland (2013), IJsewijn (1981). ¹⁴ Groenendijk (1989). ¹⁵ An important study of Church censure is Roodenburg (1990). More specifically on the censorship of plays, see Leeuwe (1968), van der Haven (2004). See also Naerebout (1990). ¹⁶ Hummelen (1967). Note that the new theatre is dated to both 1637 and 1638: it was to have been opened on 26 December 1637, but because of protests from the Church the opening was delayed to 3 January 1638. For the 1665 refurbishment, see Elenbaas (2004).

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catering for the Stadtholder’s court, the States General of the Seven Provinces, and the international diplomatic community.¹⁷ The Bohemian court of the ousted Elector Palatine Frederick V and his wife Elizabeth Stuart also brought theatrical activity to The Hague for a large part of the seventeenth century. Travelling players could be seen in the rest of the country. The repertory of the Amsterdam theatre is known in great detail because the net profit of the performances went to two Amsterdam charities: the Orphanage and the Old Men’s House. In addition to the surviving printed texts of plays, and the very rare playbills and other such ephemera, we have the ledgers that give us the title of each play with the daily receipts. These allow us to establish the number of tickets sold and the number of repeat performances.¹⁸ Usually a play had its premiere, and one to three repeat performances, after which it was dropped indefinitely or put on again at irregular intervals—but not for more than a single performance, with very few exceptions. In 1647, to take a fairly typical year, thirty-four different plays were staged, for 105 performances in all (not counting the farces which were put on in double bills with the other plays). Most popular were plays that made use of stage machinery (konst- en vliegwerken, ‘tricks and flying systems’), especially gory ‘revenge tragedies’, classical tragedies, and comedies and farces.

VIRGIL ON THE S TAGE IN THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE In order to shed some light on the questions raised above, we will take one example of dramatization of an epic source (whether based on the original or a translation), Virgil and his Aeneid, because there are here interesting ramifications that might illuminate the ‘epic’ mode on stage.¹⁹ Only a few of these Virgilian plays were in the Amsterdam repertoire, but some of those were ¹⁷ Fransen (1925). ¹⁸ Oey de Vita and Geesink (1983), de Haas (2001). The online database ONSTAGE () brings together all evidence for repertory and revenues for Amsterdam’s public theatre during the period 1637 1772. Another online database () adds the repertory of the Schouwburg and the French and German theatres (the last two operating from just outside Amsterdam) between 1750 and 1800. ¹⁹ Plays based on Virgilian subject matter in this period are Cornelis van Ghistele, Van Eneas en Dido, Antwerp, 1551 (republished Rotterdam, 1621); Jacob de Mol, Aeneas en Dido, c.1599; Jacob Duym, Den Spieghel des Hoochmoets, wesende Troiados, 1600 (based on Virgil and Homer); Johan Baptista Houwaert and Jacob de Mol, Spelen van Zinnen van Aeneas ende Dido, 1621; Johan Bodecher Benning, Dido, oft’Heylloose Minnetocht, 1634; Joris Berckmans, Dido en Hyarba, 1636; Jacobus van der Does, Tragedie, ofte Ongeluckige liefde van de Koninginne Dido, 1661; Jacob van der Does, Het houwelyck tusschen Aeneas en Lavinia, 1663; Jan Neuye, Eneas of Vader des Vaderlants, 1667; Andries Pels, Didoos Doot, 1668; Anonymous, Troyens ondergang, en Dido, en Eneas, 1669; Lucas Rotgans, Eneas en Turnus, 1705; Jan van Hoogstraten,

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quite popular with the Amsterdam audiences: for example, Didoos Doot by Andries Pels, premiered in 1668 and was regularly revived during the next ninety or so years.²⁰ Eneas en Turnus, also known as De dood van Turnus, by Lucas Rotgans, premiered in 1705 and similarly enjoyed numerous revivals in this period.²¹ If we combine both plays, we see that for almost every year during the first half of the eighteenth century and for quite some years in the second half it was possible to see a Virgilian drama on the Amsterdam stage. And these are in addition to the many other plays based on epic sources. It is important to note that these Virgilian epic-inspired dramas persist despite, or even because of, the relative decline of the Dutch Golden Age at this time. There was, however, another, very different, example of Virgilian drama at the Amsterdam Schouwburg: Joost van den Vondel’s best-known play, written for the inauguration of the Schouwburg in January 1638, Gysbreght van Aemstel. This play is about the early history of Amsterdam, and, as we shall see, is completely dependent on Virgil’s Aeneid. It was extremely popular, and between 1638 and 1665 it was performed 110 times. The plot of the Gysbrecht is as follows: during the day and night of Christmas Eve 1300, a group of knights, who wish to avenge the murder of their lord, Count Floris V of Holland, first besiege and then take the city of Amsterdam. Gysbreght van Aemstel is falsely thought to have been involved in the murder. Because the siege of the city turns out to be unsuccessful, the enemy sets a trap. The enemy soldiers are seen to retreat, and only a ship with a cargo of wood is left behind before the walls. A traitor convinces Gysbreght to have the ship towed into the city because there is dire need of firewood. When everybody is in church (since it is Christmas Eve), some of the enemy soldiers, who have been hiding under the wood, leave the ship and open the city gates. The attackers torch Amsterdam, and amid the general bloodshed, members of the noble family of Aemstel are hunted down and slaughtered. Gysbreght wants to fight to the bitter end, despite his wife Badeloch pleading with him to escape from the city. It is only when God sends the angel Raphael, commanding that Gysbreght should save himself, that he agrees to go into exile with his family and other inhabitants of Amsterdam. Raphael predicts that Amsterdam will rise again as a great commercial power. The parallel with the story of the fall of Troy and Aeneas’ escape (securing the ultimate rise of Rome) is immediately obvious. The subject matter of the play, an incident in the medieval history of Amsterdam, is lifted on to an epic

Éneas of de Ondergang van Troje, 1710; Cornelis Boon, Dido, 1730; Philip Fredrik Lynslager, De vlugt van Eneas, of de dood van Dido, 1785. ²⁰ In 1701, 1702, 1703, 1704, 1707, 1708, 1711, 1714, 1715, 1718, 1719, 1720, 1722, 1723, 1725, 1727, 1728, 1729, 1730, 1733, 1735, 1737, 1738, 1740, 1745, and 1760. ²¹ In 1706, 1708, 1709, 1712, 1715, 1725, 1727, 1728, 1731, 1733, 1734, 1736, 1741, 1742, 1744, 1750, 1752, 1753, 1762, 1765, and 1768.

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plane by being turned into a mirror image of the Aeneid. The timing is significant, of course—like Augustan Rome, Amsterdam is seeking its own foundation myth precisely at the moment when the Netherlands is creating its own empire by establishing its hegemonic role in the Indian Ocean and Far East. Less than twenty years before Vondel wrote his Gysbreght, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, the Dutch East India Company) had changed from a privateering enterprise into a regular trading company: soon to be the largest commercial venture in the world. But Gysbreght van Aemstel is not merely imitatio of Virgil; it is also aemulatio, with the introduction of Christian elements, starting with the Christmas setting—and the invitation to the audience to envision biblical parallels as well, such as the Murder of the Innocents. But what precisely does this elevation to an ‘epic plane’ involve? There is no epic subject matter here; no epic poem that Vondel dramatized. It is rather the manner of the play, the obvious parallel with Virgil that makes it possible to categorize the Gysbreght as ‘epic’ drama. By manner, we should not understand the structural aspects of the play (five acts, unity of place and time, choral parts, and so on): those are based on Senecan tragedy and Aristotelian rules. Such formal aspects make this a classical, but not necessarily an ‘epic’ drama. But to pour new subject matter into a narrative mould that is completely Virgilian is something else: that is a conscious attempt to produce a play that shares in an epic ethos. Vondel’s Gysbreght is not pre-existing epic poetry dramatized, it is a newly composed drama that is made epical. There is a core corpus of ‘epic drama’—in other words, plays based on epic poetry ancient or modern—such as the Virgilian-themed tragedies listed above. Their analysis as such is still to be undertaken, but we can agree they are there. As far as the grey zone of plays not based on epic poems is concerned, every individual play that seems relevant should be looked at in detail in order to decide whether it counts as an example of epic drama or not. Has it been composed and performed in conscious contiguity with plays which are based on epic poetry? Thus we would be able to establish a corpus of ‘epic drama’ that includes historic plays such as Vondel’s, the many biblical plays and other miscellaneous plays not based on epic sources but presented in an epic manner. This task is way beyond the scope of this chapter, the purpose of which has been to begin an examination of the epic mode in Dutch theatrical history and to provide some caveats regarding the potential pitfalls involved in such an undertaking. The work is just at the start: it is only once we have created this corpus of epic drama (and I say ‘created’ since we need to bear in mind that this is not a category recognized in this period) that we can begin to analyse what the epic matter and manner contributed to the theatrical life, and thus to cultural life in general, of the Dutch Golden Age.

25 ‘Marpesia cautes’ Voicing Amazons, England and Ireland, 1640 Deana Rankin

INTRODUCTION: HARD WORDS When Aeneas encounters Dido in the Underworld, she famously meets his plea for understanding with silence: ‘quam si dura silex aut stet Marpesia cautes’ (‘as if set in hard flint or Marpesian Rock’; Aeneid 6.471).¹ The stoniness of her silence is most often conveyed in English translation by way of ‘Parian marble’, evoking the fabled material of the best and most lifelike statues of the gods.² But there is also a further, geographically and ideologically charged resonance to this collocation. In standing silent like the Rock of Marpesia, Dido conjures up, through her resistance to her one-time lover’s charms and claims, the flinty, inaccessible, cliff-top fortress in the Caucasus Mountains founded by the legendary Amazon queen, Marpesia. It is from this fortress in the mountains on the frontier of Scythian Asia Minor that Marpesia and her sister and co-ruler Lampedo set out to expand Amazon rule into Western Europe.³ Dido, in the line that follows the one quoted above, flees Aeneas ‘inimica’: still hostile, far from triumphant, and, many have argued, broken. Yet for the moment of Virgil’s simile, her flinty silence places her, as we shall see in what follows, in a long line of defiant warrior-queens. From early antiquity to the present day, it is at points of difficult passage and indeed as rocky impasses that Amazons make themselves known. In this, as in their resonant, flinty ‘hardness’, they are remarkably persistent. Since the ¹ Fairclough (1999). ² ‘Parian marble’, as quarried from Mount Marpessa in Paros, is favoured by, for example, Heaney (2016), 26. See also Muecke (1984). ³ The sisters appear in the earliest collection of exemplary female biographies, Boccaccio (2003). The chapter appears in a partial English manuscript translation c.1534 47, Parker (1943), 39 42.

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eighth century BCE when legends of female fighters first permeated the Scythian borders of the Greek Empire, through the later accounts of Herodotus and other Greek historians, to the intersecting poetic epics recounting the fall of Troy, Amazons have continually made their presence felt by way of transitional encounters in tales of love, empire, and war. Yet the degree to which Amazons were actual as opposed to fictional, like the true significance of their name, has long been contested: Amazon. A woman of the Country Amazonica. Amazones were warlike women of Scythia, which kept a Countrey to themselues without men, yet to have children companied with the bordering people. Their Sonnes they eyther des troyed or sent home to the father, but their daughters they kept, bringing them up in hunting, ryding, shooting and feates of armes. They burned the right breast of their children, lest it should hinder their archerie, wherefore they had the name Amazons, which (in Greeke) signifieth women wanting a breast.⁴

The definition here given is that of one I.B. Doctor of Phisicke, whose An English expositor teaching the interpretation of the hardest words used in our language was first published in London in 1616. But the claims made here endure, structuring, for instance the chapter headings in Adrienne Mayor’s excellent recent evidence-based study, which resonate powerfully (and playfully) with distinctive, commonly conceived Amazon features: ‘Bones’, ‘Breasts’, ‘Sex and Love’, ‘Drugs Dance and Music’.⁵ For some scholars, the search for ‘hard’ evidence concerning the existence of Amazons is a waste of time: they belong not to history but to myth, and so occupy an endlessly liminal position in the classical imagination. Indeed, located at the margins of empire, Amazons are, from a certain feminist perspective, figured only ever as the barbarous ‘Other’ by which the Greek masculine ‘Self ’ is defined. As such, they are always already doomed to eradication, the better to live on as myth. Exemplifying this logic, when the Amazon Penthesilea challenges Achilles to single combat in the non-Homeric accounts of the Trojan War, her death fulfils a mythic function which makes Achilles fight, fall in love, then fight on. Penthesilea first resuscitates, then resituates him as a fully-fledged Greek hero ready—finally—for the next instalment of the Greek destruction of Troy. Mary Beard recently (and polemically) puts the argument in the following resonant terms: An enormous amount of modern feminist energy has been wasted on trying to prove that these Amazons did once exist. [ . . . ] Dream on. The hard truth is

⁴ I.B. (1641), C1v. It was republished thirteen times between 1616 and 1700. ⁵ Mayor (2014). This obsession with evidence dominates popular interest in Amazons. See e.g. BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time (11 April 2013).

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that the Amazons were a Greek male myth. The basic message was that the only good Amazon was a dead one.⁶

Yet the sheer persistence of the Amazon, from the eighth century BCE to the present day, suggests that a more flexibly articulated response is called for. For the Amazon, viewed from the perspective of cultural evolution, has a remarkable ability to adapt, survive, and thrive: to give potent shape to the concerns— cultural, political, and familial—of her particular moment and place. In legend, which is to say when they move around in story, liberated from a retrospective archaeological history, Amazons convert, marry, have children, settle down. They also, crucially, often come in pairs: they have not only male counterparts, but also sisters—Penthesilea and Hippolyta; Marpesia and Lampedo—that is to say, other close female selves, who follow very different paths, and so blur and test rather than define the boundaries of what it is, or means, to be an Amazon woman. Far from being forever liminal, caught in the aspic of the binary dilemmas of ‘Male’ and ‘Female’, ‘Self ’ and ‘Other’, ‘Civilized’ and ‘Barbarian’, the figure of the Amazon might more productively be read as a figure in transition; somewhere ‘in the middest’ between genders, places, and genres; between life and death, epics and dramatic sequels, silence and voice. This chapter explores a particular moment in the history of this always already transitional figure: the year 1640, on the verge of the outbreak of civil war across the Three Kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, and the point at which Amazons appear on stage in both London and Dublin at the same time. This is not the first appearance of these figures on the Englishspeaking stage, but it represents a significant moment of transition in the representation of the Amazon in several key respects. Sir William Davenant’s masque Salmacida Spolia (‘The Spoils of Salmacis’), staged in January 1640 for a private court audience at Whitehall, invests inherited images of royal power with new life in the onstage role of ‘Amazonian’ given to the Queen, Henrietta Maria. This being a masque, the Queen, like Dido, remains majestically silent. Henry Burnell’s Landgartha: A Tragie-comedy staged publicly in the Werburgh Street Theatre, Dublin just under two months later on 17 March, St Patrick’s Day, makes a different kind of sense of Amazon tradition. The first extant play by an Irish playwright to be staged at the first purpose-built Irish theatre, Landgartha looks not to the non-Homeric epics for its inspiration, but rather, to romance, and to the North.⁷ Burnell chooses for his subject a Norwegian shield-maiden with Amazon connections at once Scythian and Italian, drawing her story from Saxo Grammaticus’ History of the Danes

⁶ Beard (2017).

⁷ Burnell (2013), 36 51.

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by way of François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques but also (silently) invoking both Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Ireland’s Viking past.⁸ These coinciding performances can, then, be located in the context of two evolving and competing early modern English-language literary embodiments of the figure of the Amazon. On the one hand, the Amazon of Graeco-Roman epic, already depicted on stage in (for instance) Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens: a figure identified with the patronage and politics of the Stuart Catholic queen-consorts, Anne of Denmark and Henrietta Maria. On the other hand, the Amazon warrior of Renaissance romance, inspired, as noted above, by Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, exemplified in Britomart, heroine of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and amplified by the women’s history-writing of Thomas Heywood: a figure more closely identified with the Protestant legacy of Elizabeth I. Burnell’s Landgartha brings these twinned Amazon traditions into play on the Dublin stage, but also marks a significant break with both. For his several Dublin Amazons—Landgartha, Scania, Elsinora, Fatima, Marfisa—not only fight, they also speak and dance; and even as they mark their difference from the classically unmoved and unmoving Dido, they also lay claim to the distinctive voice of hard, flinty, and above all active, political resistance.

SILENT AMAZONS: ENGLAND ’ S ‘F O R E I G N’ QUEENS On 21 January 1640, at the climax of Salmacida Spolia—a new masque by the Poet Laureate Sir William Davenant, presented at Whitehall—the heavily pregnant Queen Henrietta Maria descended to the stage from fantastically coloured clouds: The Queenes Majesty and her Ladies were in Amazonian habits of carnation, embroidered with silver, with plumed Helmes, Bandricks with Antique swords hanging by their sides, all as rich as might be, but the strangeness of the habits was most admired.⁹

The scene finally embodies on stage the undercurrent of female influence that animates the masque. From the outset, the title Salmacida Spolia invokes that city’s historical connections with two powerful Amazonian queens: on the one hand, Artemisia of Caria whose bravery in fighting for the Persians against ⁸ Just one other early modern English play shares this source lineage of Grammaticus via Belleforest: Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Shakespeare’s (few) Amazons are Greek: see Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and ‘Cupid with a mask of Ladies as Amazons’ in Timon of Athens. ⁹ Davenant (1640), D2r. For the immediate political context, see Healey and Sawday (1990), 59 74 and more generally Butler (1984).

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the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis (480 BCE) was noted by Herodotus (8.87–8, 101–3); on the other, Artemisia of Halicarnassus (c.350 BCE), whose Mausoleum for her husband was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The masque further includes a song of blessing dedicated to one of the most powerful female rulers of early modern France and the guest of honour at Whitehall that evening: Henrietta Maria’s mother, Marie de Médicis.¹⁰ Finally, the image of the heaven-sent Amazons both references and reinforces that which graced the recently completed ceiling at the opulent Queen’s House in Greenwich: Orazio Gentileschi’s An Allegory of Peace and the Arts.¹¹ In her ‘Amazonian habit’, with all its ‘strangeness’, Henrietta Maria claims her place next to the King. Sent from Pallas Athene to Philogenes (lover of the people) played by Charles I, she is ‘a Reward of his Prudence, for reducing the threatning storme into the following calme’.¹² In the confines of the masque, the ‘threatning storme’ in question is a violent group of robbers with intentions to damage the Halicarnarssus. In line with the Greek myth, chaos is averted when they drink of the famed local fountain of Salmacis, traditionally believed to have calming (some argue, emasculating) properties.¹³ The antimasque, however, also introduces storms brewing much closer to home. After eleven years of personal rule, Charles I had recently recalled Parliament for later that year. Acting on the advice of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford— the King’s viceroy in Ireland and one of his most trusted advisers—Charles planned to raise funds and garner support for the so-called Bishops’ Wars against Scotland. At the time of performance, hopes ran high that Charles’s Parliament could first silence resistance, then reunite and strengthen the Three Kingdoms. In the antimasque, this contextual drama is played out as various patients line up to visit the quack doctor, Wolfgangus Vandergoose: 5. Entry. An ancient Irishman, presented by M. Iay 6. Entry. An ancient Scotishman, presented by M. Atkins. 7. Entry. An old fashioned Englishman, and his mistrisse presented by M. Arpe. M. Will. Murry.¹⁴

¹⁰ Davenant (1640), C4v. See also Britland (2006), 176 94; Ng (2007), 34 6. On the associ ation of Artemisia of Halicarnassus with Catherine de’ Medici, and on her cousin Marie’s awkward exile in England, see Jansen (2002), 212 13, 220 1. ¹¹ Christiansen and Walker (2001), 224. This panel was moved to Marlborough House (the Commonwealth Secretariat), in the early eighteenth century. ¹² Davenant (1640), Av. ¹³ On the differing accounts of the effects of Salmacis’ fountain and the related legend of her marriage to Hermaphroditus, see Romano (2009). ¹⁴ Davenant (1640), C2v.

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When Vandergoose’s potions inevitably fail, Philogenes/Charles steps in to restore both the masque and the nation to order. If, however, this spectacular drama, with its Amazon gift from the goddess, conjured forth the possibility of peace,—of a royal couple bringing harmony to their discordant, divided territories—it did not ring true. For Charles’s so-called Short Parliament would last only three weeks; the bitter resistance to the King’s absolutist tendencies which it unleashed would shortly lead to the outbreak of war across the Three Kingdoms. That would lead, in turn, to the establishment of the English Commonwealth and, in 1649, the trial and execution of the King. Salmacida Spolia was the last masque to be staged at court for quite some time. Consider, for a moment, this staging of Amazons on the knife-edge between war and peace. Although English women were not permitted to act on the public stage until after the Restoration in 1660, there was, in fact, a longstanding elite performance tradition of occasional, festive masques in which aristocratic women silently portrayed Amazons and goddesses.¹⁵ In the seventeenth century, the Stuart queen-consorts—first Anne of Denmark, then Henrietta Maria of France—imported the masque traditions of their respective courts. Under their direction, and with their participation, the Amazon masque grew in popularity. With the able assistance of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, Anne of Denmark made her debut performance as the goddess Pallas Athene in Samuel Daniel’s The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (London, 1604). A few years later, she took her own place in the Amazon pantheon: in Jonson’s The Masque of Queens (London, 1609), eleven of the twelve queens are legendary Amazon figures from history; the twelfth is ‘Bel-anna’ herself.¹⁶ Some thirty years later, when Henrietta Maria descended from the clouds in her ‘Amazonian habit’ (exquisitely designed by the now rather elderly Inigo Jones), she thus invoked the theatrical legacy of the late queen mother.¹⁷ But she was also playing to her own particular performance history, for by 1640, Henrietta Maria had established her own fraught theatrical reputation. In 1626, shortly after her arrival in England, the Queen caused controversy when she took a French spoken part in a private performance of Honorat de Racan’s Artenice. From 1628 onwards, Henrietta Maria and the King regularly performed masques for each other, for example on Twelfth Night and Shrovetide, in which she appeared ¹⁵ A number of anonymous Amazon masques (now lost) were played in the sixteenth century. Harbage (1989), 32, 51. ¹⁶ Jonson (1609), D3r. For broader contextual readings of Jonson’s masques for Anne of Denmark, see Orgel (1990), 119 39; McManus (2002), 97 135. On the early modern staging of Amazons more generally, see Shepherd (1981) and Schwarz (2000), 109 33. ¹⁷ The sketch for the queen’s costume is reproduced and discussed in Tomlinson (2005), 115 16. On other possible Amazon entertainments of Henrietta Maria, see Britland (2006), 64 5, 26, 165.

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and danced; then in January 1633, she again took a central speaking part—not in French this time, but in English.¹⁸ Her controversial appearance in Walter Montagu’s The Shepherd’s Paradise coincided with the publication of William Prynne’s Historiomastix: The Players Scourge, or Actors Tragedie (1633), a concerted Puritan attack on theatre and immorality which compared actresses—and thus, the Star Chamber court ruled, the Queen herself—to whores. If Anne of Denmark had largely escaped Puritan censure by private practice of her faith, Henrietta Maria’s Catholicism—legally protected in a very public series of prenuptial agreements—was, by contrast, widely known and the subject of deep suspicion.¹⁹ The fact that Henrietta Maria’s favoured playwrights— Walter Montagu, James Shirley, and William Davenant—were all rumoured to be Catholics served only to reinforce Puritan opinion that her theatrical exhibitionism was an integral part of the Marian cult, which the Queen and her attendants openly practised at court.²⁰ Her 1640 appearance as an Amazonian queen, a defender not just of the monarchy but also of Catholicism, played to Protestant England’s worst fears. Outside Whitehall, rumours spread: Henrietta Maria was involved in ‘popish plots’; she was lobbying in Rome for funds for a Catholic army—one which would include Irish recruits, Old English Catholics, that is, like Henry Burnell. Just three years later, Henrietta Maria would indeed strike another dramatic Amazonian pose, this time in public, at the head of the Earl of Newcastle’s highly controversial Catholic regiment, raised in defence of Charles I. In private letters to her exiled husband describing the event, she signed herself off as ‘her she-majesty generalissima’.²¹ The silent Amazon had stepped from private stage on to public battlefield: she had taken up her sword.

THE A MAZON S PEAKS: L A N D G A R T H A Salmacida Spolia was performed in Whitehall in January, and again on Shrovetide, February 1640; on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, the same year, Henry Burnell’s Landgartha was performed in the Werburgh Street Theatre, Dublin.²² If Davenant’s play was the last court masque in England, Burnell’s ¹⁸ On women’s voices in the English masque, see McManus (2002), 179 201 and Gough (2003). ¹⁹ Anne of Denmark converted to Catholicism c.1593, a matter that became public when she refused to take communion at her London coronation in 1603. See Loomie (1971). On Henrietta Maria’s Catholicism, public and private, see Griffey (2008), 13 38. ²⁰ For a broader sense of links between the Queen’s court entertainment and her Catholicism, see Butler (1984), 25 54; Bailey (2009), 49 88, 175 216; and Griffey (2008), 73 88. ²¹ Green (1857), 222. See also Bailey (2009), 195 and White (2006). ²² Contextual background to Landgartha is drawn from the introduction to Burnell (2013), 11 66. Line references to the play are in parentheses in the text.

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was the last production to be staged in the Dublin theatre before the so-called ‘Irish Rebellion’ and the outbreak of war across the Three Kingdoms. It is tempting to speculate that it was the news of Davenant’s Amazonian spectacle that prompted Burnell to take up his pen; it would make neat sense of Burnell’s apology that ‘This Tragie-Comedy with the expence | Of lesse then two Months time he pen’d’ (Epilogue, 11–12). Even if he was not inspired by this particular example, Burnell was very much aware of the Stuart queenconsorts’ interests in the staging of Amazons, for Ben Jonson was his theatrical inspiration and James Shirley his local theatrical rival. The carefully orchestrated choice of St Patrick’s Day for the premiere, however, was significant for other reasons: the Irish Parliament was to convene the following day with two important items of business. First, the King’s viceroy, Thomas Wentworth, was determined to raise funds for an Irish army to support Charles I in the wars against Scotland; second, he aimed to reform the Irish Bigamy Laws—the latest stage of a long English assault on Irish Brehon law. Both acts were close to Burnell’s heart: the Catholic Old English, increasingly excluded from power in the government of Ireland by the Protestant New English, were ready and willing to fund Charles’s army in exchange for a return to full participation in civic life. In Burnell’s allegory of contemporary tensions, the play’s competing Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden map on to Ireland, England, and Scotland. The English attack on Brehon Law was, clearly, not welcome: for this ancient Irish system ran contrary to English legal practice in a number of ways which protected Old English Catholic interests: in particular it both allowed inheritance through the female line and recognized unofficial—that is to say, not state–Church sanctioned— marriages in property disputes. It was, therefore, a moment for the staging of Amazons; Burnell grasps it. Certainly Landgartha is an appreciative nod to Jonson, Shirley, and the courtly Stuart tableaux: the wedding masque in Act 3 features Pallas Athene, favourite of Anne of Denmark; the play as a whole applauds Henrietta Maria’s Marian poetics of female fortitude and leadership. But if the court masque tradition, in making a spectacle of the Amazon, relied on the silence of the female performer, then Burnell not only translocates the Amazon from England to Ireland, from the public to the private stage; he also—crucially—gives her voice: Landgartha speaks. There is, of course, a price to pay for this new Amazon voice: the legal restrictions preventing women from appearing in the public theatre held sway in Ireland as in England, so Landgartha and her Amazons would have been played by men. But if we accept that gender ventriloquism is the price ticket, what profit is to be gained? Notably, this new speaking Amazon has, from the outset, a very different physicality: as she delivers the ‘armed Prologue’ Landgartha’s sister Scania rejects Davenant’s ceremonial ‘Antique

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swords hanging by their sides’, brandishing instead ‘a battle-axe in her hand’ (Prologue). Scania’s choice of weapon immediately identifies her twinned Viking–Irish identity; it further signals, in ways which amplify many early modern English commentators on Ireland such as Edmund Spenser, her Scythian origins.²³ The Irish Amazon Marfisa, to whom we shall return below, is always dressed for action, whether that be fighting, horse-riding, or dancing. Nor is Landgartha herself given to the spectacular, architectural poses struck by other, previous Amazonian queens. Landgartha is a woman of action and her action, in turn, produces eloquence. As further exploration of two very different moments from the play will demonstrate, she does not merely ‘speak’. Landgartha exercises the rhetorical skill, political clarity, and moral conviction expected of the exemplary early modern ruler. She does so first on the verge of battle (1.121–59) and second during a rare moment of stillness, when she sits, purely because ordered to do so, and advises the King (2.406–37). In the first act—perhaps the most recognizably ‘epic’ of the five— Landgartha faces the crucial test of the model general: she delivers a battle speech to her troops. It is the first of three battle speeches by three different generals; it is by far the most compelling. Landgartha urges her women into battle with fluent, forceful command both of the laws of war and of classical Greek and Roman exempla. Their aim is clear, they fight for victory and divine glory: Not to be rank’d among the starre made harlots: But stated in the high’st Empyreall heaven, To side the gods, where Pallas and chast Phoebe (Arm’d chiefely with the weapons of their vertues) Keepe all the Masculin deities in awe. (1.124 8)

If she seeks the blessings of the gods, Landgartha is also acutely aware of the historical heroines in whose steps they follow: These cutting weapons, being (too) to fight authoriz’d, By the examples of the noblest women, Semiramis, Zenobia, faire Cinana Sister unto great Macedon, stout Alvilda, Camilla, and the Amazonian Queenes, Great Mithridates Queene, and severall others, Are patterns now for us to imitate; (1.143 9)

²³ Mayor (2014), 219 22. See Irenius on the Scythian origins of the Irish in Spenser (1997); also Hadfield (1993) and Lennon (2004), 5 57.

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Landgartha’s sisterhood, in its cosmic and legendary aspiration, has little place for men: while the male gods watch ‘in awe’, they wage an entirely necessary and just war against the usurper Frollo, ‘A cruell, vicious, revengefull Tyrant’ (l.133). As for their Danish collaborator, King Reyner, his efforts appear largely incidental to Landgartha’s quest for revenge: Let then the King of Denmarke fight where he list: We will pursue no other than our worst And strongest adversary in’s owne squadron; Where I, as first, will loose my life, or give A suddaine end to his blacke purposes, That sought a conquest on our chastities. (1.154 9)

If Reyner does not hear this speech, he does soon witness the full Amazon force embodied in her words. Reyner silently watches, as Landgartha kills Frollo in an onstage scene of single combat, and thereby gains for him the crown of Norway (1.324–60). Like Achilles, Reyner is bound to fall in love; unlike Penthesilea, however, Landgartha lives on. New accommodation must be reached. If in the first act Landgartha’s speech is that of the soldier, the second act demands that she change register; that she further demonstrate her skill in early modern humanist decorum by speaking in a manner appropriate to the politics—at once personal and public—of peace. Landgartha and her Amazons are summoned to court, and there—entirely unexpectedly—the by now ailing lovesick Reyner proposes marriage. Landgartha is reluctant; indeed she foresees that Reyner will quickly lose interest. In any other English tragicomedy of the period we might expect, at this point, an anguished soliloquy. Here, however, Landgartha’s private anxiety is voiced by way of an extended—and increasingly public—conversation (2.361–511). Her first response to Reyner’s unexpected proposal is to move aside to consult with her Amazons; it is a dangerous situation, they are all very aware of what Reyner might do to them if she gives the wrong answer, they promise to go down fighting (2.361). Landgartha hedges her bets, and asks for time, but Reyner wants to know, now: Pray you sit and speake; Or I must rise, if weaknesse will permit. She sits, and the rest stand. (2.404 5)

His command, disguised as a plea, leaves Landgartha surrounded. And from this vulnerable position, she speaks. What she offers is a carefully fashioned, highly political discourse on the rights and responsibilities, not only of the good subject, but also of the good king (2.406–37). She does accept Reyner’s proposal of marriage, but her terms are not those of passion, but of the ‘dutie’ of a loyal subject:

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I cannot (nor will my heart permit it) but In way of gratefulness, reciprocally Requite with love againe, as dutie binds; Nay more then so. (2.418 21)

It is very far from Austin’s notion of the performative ‘I do’.²⁴ This assent, furthermore, is buried right at the heart of a thirty-line speech: in the previous lines, she reminds the king that she is not acting from ambition, that she could have been queen before; in the lines which follow, she offers both parties to the agreement a get-out clause. She begs Reyner to decline a while The vehemencie of your fleete desires; And take full time to thinke on what you doe. (2.424 6)

Landgartha’s counsel of caution as voiced in that monosyllabic line, breaks open the tradition of the silent, masquing Amazon. Landgartha here plays a role which none of the men of Reyner’s court is prepared to play: she voices the good political adviser, mindful not only of the king’s desires, but also of his future reputation: For know sir, the honour You now affoord me, compar’d to th’infamie That would redound to both of us, and to others (By whom you are to be advis’d) if ought Sho’d chance amisse, when things were consummate Is nothing: would but heighten your disgrace. (2.428 33)

This new-found power of speech, then, lends to Burnell’s Amazon an extraordinary freedom: it enables Landgartha to voice the wisdom of both soldier and politician. However, if Landgartha’s speech resonates with the audience, onstage, for her, it produces only profound frustration. The lovesick Reyner does not listen: he hears none of her fears or warnings; he gazes on her as she sits, hears only that she will marry him, and is miraculously cured. As others enter the bustling drama of this new comic development, Landgartha is left to wonder at her own transition. The last lines of the act give voice to the fear that all her warnings will prove prophetic; that her transformation from self-governing Amazon to subject-wife may have dire consequences. When Valdemar asks her—as a kind of ‘father’ of the bride—for her sister Scania’s hand in marriage, Landgartha playfully puts him right about the nature of the ²⁴ Austin (1975).

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power she holds over her community of fellow Amazons. Even as she does so, she intuits the loss of her own agency: She is not my warde; and may take whom she fancies I may my selfe repent, to be perswaded. (2.492 3)

Landgartha’s nostalgia for her self-determining Amazon past has started already. Over the next three acts, it will be tested to the limits as Reyner/ Charles I marries her, rejects her, leaves her pregnant with their son to go home and (bigamously) marry another. As the Irish Members of Parliament prepare for the following day’s negotations, Landgartha’s predicament is a warning: be careful with whom you do business.

THE DANCING AMAZON: MARFISA In Act 3, as the newly married Amazons Landgartha and Scania prepare to celebrate their wedding with a masque, Marfisa rides into town: Enter Hubba and Marfisa in an Irishe Gowne tuck’d up to mid legge, with a broad basket hilt Sword on, hanging in a great Belt, Broags on her feet, her hayre dishevell’d, and a payre of long neck’d big rowll’d Spurs on her heels. (3.97)

Her appearance is at once overspecified in its ‘Irish’ detail and tantalizingly vague: the ‘Irishe Gowne . . . Broags and hayre dishevell’d’ speak to a long tradition of early modern English commentary on the barbarity of Irish dress. But there is also much mystery: why the ‘big-rowll’d Spurs’ and from where has she ridden? Has she come to celebrate the wedding, or to disrupt it? Why the outlandish—distinctly non-Irish—name? At first it seems that Marfisa’s arrival is precisely timed so as to dilate still further the comic preamble to the ‘official’ masque. But Marfisa is no stage Irish antimasque clown; rather she exudes a seductive self-confidence, which instead makes a fool of her besotted suitor, Captain Hubba. Marfisa’s arrival not only delays the central masque, it also threatens to eclipse it: for she enters, raises audience expectations, and then promptly disappears for most of the act.²⁵ When Marfisa returns to the stage much later, the newly wed (and newly silent) Landgartha gives voice not only to her own desires, but also to those of the audience, when she cedes her bridal right to lead the dancing to Marfisa: ‘Let’s stand. I long to ²⁵ It is tantalizingly possible for the performer to double as Pallas Athene in the masque.

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see Marfisa dance.’ On which cue, Marfisa and Hubba ‘Dance the whip of Dunboyne merrily’ (3.340–1). So far, Marfisa seems to be playing to the role that critical readings of Landgartha have commonly foisted upon her: they comment on the ‘spectacular qualities’ of these scenes, that they inject ‘local colour’.²⁶ Marfisa is a crowd-pleaser; if Landgartha gives fierce voice to the Amazon, then Marfisa restores her to her habitual status as entertaining, seductive spectacle. If we take Marfisa’s Amazon pedigree seriously, however, then a very different reading begins to emerge. From the moment she enters—coincident with Landgartha’s reluctant decision to stop being an Amazon—Marfisa is a significant presence in the play, giving consistent voice to the epic Amazon values which Landgartha seems to have abandoned. On the one occasion when she appears without her Amazon group, alone with her would-be lover Hubba, the exchange focuses on Marfisa’s sexual chastity and her disdain for marriage: she is, quite simply, astonished that Landgartha’s husband can treat his wife so badly (4.178–232). Marfisa is, therefore, far from the stereotypical promiscuous (or bigamous) Irish Amazon. Her importance grows as the play progresses. By Act 5, when the bigamous Reyner, now in Sweden, asks for Landgartha’s help in battle, she consults with Marfisa on strategy: she sends her with Fatyma to recruit international Amazon reinforcements; quietly accepting Marfisa’s criticism of her acquiescence in Reyner’s infidelity (5.146). When Landgartha finally exits the play—having both won Reyner’s battle and reasserted her claim, as lawful wife and mother, to a new form of Amazon independence—she does so in the company, not of her husband, but of Marfisa (5.610). At once alter ego and stage ally to Landgartha, Marfisa serves to offer a running critical commentary on the play’s heroine. But, as her name implies, she enters the drama with a significant historical and literary pedigree of her own. By naming his ‘Irish’ Amazon ‘Marfisa’, Burnell is engaging in a series of further conversations—at once political and literary—that extend beyond the immediate context of the Dublin stage. If the character of Landgartha was fashioned both to resonate with and respond to the Amazons of the Marian court masque, then Marfisa demands to be read as a response to a second persistent tradition of early modern Amazon writing. Rooted in poetry and prose—that is to say in romance, travel writing, and historiography, rather than on the Jacobean stage—this particular Amazon figure is consistently identified not with ‘Britishness’ but with Englishness, and with the cult, not of Mary, nor yet of Catholic queen-consorts, but of the Protestant Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. Even as Henrietta Maria was being lowered from the clouds in January 1640, Thomas Heywood, the playwright turned women’s

²⁶ See Burnell (2013), 12 14.

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historian, had published his celebration of Elizabeth I in The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women in the World (London 1640): in it, she appears as the last and most glorious ‘Worthy’ of them all.²⁷ In the character of Marfisa, Burnell seems at once to invoke this Elizabethan tradition and to look beyond it. Apart from his teasing reference on the title page to ‘an Ancient story’, Burnell is altogether silent about his sources. But it is likely that in the first instance, he draws on the Scythian Amazon queen Marpesia with whom we started this chapter. In English, Marpesia first appears in the chapter on Amazons in the 1521 English translation of Christine de Pisan’s Cyte of Ladies.²⁸ She then enters Elizabethan prose by way of translations of the travel narratives of Thevet and Muenster and of their source, Justinus; she further survives into the Jacobean period by way of the compilation of earlier travel narratives that is Purchas, and through Heywood’s earlier history of women.²⁹ In Heywood’s celebration of the nine female worthies, this ‘Marthesia’ appears as an ancestor of the fifth Worthy, Penthesilea.³⁰ But if Heywood’s ‘Marthesia’ offers one possible analogue to Burnell’s Marfisa, she also lays claim to a second, in some respects more obvious, lineage: she is one of the woman warriors celebrated in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Burnell’s Marfisa shares many of the exotic qualities of her namesake in Ariosto. Saracen and twin sister to Prince Ruggiero, Marfisa also stands as counterpoint to the Christian woman warrior Bradamante who is in love with Ruggiero but will marry him only if he converts to Christianity. Bradamante gladly renounces her warrior status when she eventually marries Ruggiero and proceeds to found a dynasty of Christian rulers. Marfisa, on the other hand, has neither ambition nor desire to marry; she very happily remains an Amazon throughout. Eventually—after demonstrating considerable resourcefulness in battle across Ariosto’s romance—she converts to Christianity and devotes her considerable energy to ruling rather than fighting. But she does so—crucially—with her Amazon status still intact.³¹ Burnell most likely knew of Marfisa from the popular English verse translation by Sir John Harington first published in 1591, and most recently reprinted as Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (London, 1634). It is through Harington that we find the first tentative connection of Marfisa with

²⁷ Modelled on the tradition of the male Nine Worthies, Heywood’s list contains three Jews, three Gentiles, and three Christians: Deborah, Judith, Esther, Boudicca, Penthesilea, Artemisia, Elfleda, Queen Margaret (wife of Henry VI), and Elizabeth I. See also Turner Wright (1940). ²⁸ de Pisan (1521), 1.16. ²⁹ Purchas (1613), 334; Heywood (1624), 221. ³⁰ Heywood (1640), 101. ³¹ Marfisa herself delineates her eastern origins when she meets the Holy Roman Emperor and converts to Christianity: McNulty (1972), 437 8. Marfisa also appears in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1482). On Marfisa’s Amazon qualities, see Tomalin (1976) and Roche (1988).

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Ireland for, while serving in Ireland during the Essex campaign of 1599, Ariosto’s translator had visited the ‘rebel’ Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and presented his two sons with a copy of his book.³² This moment of cultural exchange points towards a further echo of Marfisa to be found in late sixteenth-century Ireland. For Orlando Furioso had proved to be both an inspiration for and a powerful influence on Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (London, 1596), the poem which might be said to have inaugurated the tradition of the woman warrior in Renaissance English literature, and, as noted earlier, one of those who sought to build on the alleged interrelations between the Scythians and the Irish. Marfisa does not appear in Spenser; but she has strong affinity with Britomart’s nemesis, the tyrant Amazon Radigund. Indeed their climactic contest is, as many critics have demonstrated, closely modelled on the battle between Bradamante and Marfisa in Ariosto.³³ It is intriguing to note, furthermore, that this particular contest of Amazons takes place in the fifth book of The Faerie Queene, the book which is most firmly inflected and infected by Spenser’s views on, and experience of, Ireland.³⁴ Ireland, it seems, is a place where [Scythian] Amazons spring to the epic as well as the dramatic imagination, a place where Amazons thrive.

CO NCLUSION Spenser in his infamous View of the Present State of Ireland, a late sixteenthcentury invective against Burnell’s tribe of Old English Catholics, anchored Irish dancing to Scythian origins. As such, Marfisa’s distinctly uncourtly dancing might initially appear to spring from Amazon ‘wildness’; a sign of her barbarity and alterity. Burnell, however, is very specific about what she dances—she dances not a wild native Irish round but the ‘whip of Dunboyne’, a dance imported from northern England in the twelfth century by Burnell’s Old English ancestors. It is a dance that her Danish/English suitor knows because he has danced it at home; a dance that, even as it reaffirms origins, simultaneously celebrates the playful possibilities of hybridity. Marfisa is a creature of epic, a fighter and a dancer; she has no time for watching plays. She is offstage for the masque—the high-classical oratory, the ³² McClure (1930), 78. ³³ McNulty (1972), 413 18; Spenser (1596), 5.7.26 34. Spenser’s Radigund is consistently referred to as an ‘Amazon’ but the term is derogatory (e.g. 5.5.1). The combat ends not with a happy recognition and restoration, but with the death of Radigund. On the Irish contexts, see Carroll (2001), 28 47. ³⁴ Some of the most influential recent studies to reshape our understanding of the relationship of Spenser and Ireland by way of The Faerie Queene include Murphy (1999), Palmer (2001), McCabe (2002), and Hadfield (2012).

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formal celebration of the Brutus myth, the careful archaeology of Ireland’s links to Denmark: the prophetic delineation of English–Irish relations—she remains oblivious to it all. We might take this reading of her absence further— for if we read marriage in this play as a figure for political accommodation, we might understand both Marfisa’s chastity and her absence from the masque as emblematic of a certain political defiance. It is striking how the masque silences Landgartha, transforming her from the fighting-talking-performing Amazon of the first two acts into a silent spectator. Burnell arranges his plot so as to ensure that Marfisa does not have to bear witness to this silencing. In her wilful absence, in her resolute chastity, she refuses to be like Landgartha: in her dancing, as in her constant movement, as in in her eventual reclaiming of Landgartha for a newly liberated life, Marfisa becomes an embodied manifesto for the defiant survival of the unaccommodated Amazon, between cultures and across time.

26 After the Aeneid Ascanius in Eighteenth-Century Opera Stephen Harrison

The famously abrupt (but surely authorial) ending of Virgil’s Aeneid at the very moment of the death of Turnus at the hands of Aeneas naturally encouraged its later supplementation.¹ We find this most notably in the ‘thirteenth book’ of the poem written in elegant neo-Latin hexameters by Maffeo Vegio (1407–58), a future canon of St Peter’s, as a student at the University of Pavia c.1428, and widely read both in the original and in vernacular translations which incorporated it.² As in the brief continuations found in the two twelfth-century romance versions of the story of Aeneas (the early French Le Roman d’Énéas and the early German Eneit or Eneasroman of Heinrich von Veldeke),³ this supplement tied up a key narrative strand left open in the original: Aeneas gets to meet his future bride, the local princess Lavinia in person, and their marriage is celebrated. Unlike in the medieval continuations, which focus on the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia as the romance climax of the plot (followed by a brief genealogical appendix listing the kings between Aeneas and Augustus and a self-referential authorial closure in the case of Heinrich),⁴ Ascanius/Iulus, Aeneas’ son and heir, has a cameo role in Vegio’s version:⁵ at 13.75–82, in an echo of Aeneid 12.435–440, he is the addressee of a didactic speech from his father; and at 13.501–8 he is the object ¹ See O’Hara (2010). ² For a modern edition, see Putnam (2004); for a modern study, Kallendorf (1989), 100 29. ³ For convenient partial translations into English and notes, see Ziolkowksi and Putnam (2008) 550 608; the original editions used here are Kartschoke (1986) and Petit (1997). ⁴ In Heinrich’s poem Aeneas hands over Alba Longa to Ascanius but is succeeded in his own dominion by Silvius Aeneas, his son by Lavinia (13310 20, 13344 58); the poem seems to be inconsistent about whether Ascanius or Silvius is the ancestor of the future Roman race (13359 63, 13381 6), an ambiguity already in the Aeneid (6.760 70, 1.267 77) and continued in Vegio (see Rogerson (2013)). ⁵ For a recent treatment, see Rogerson (2013).

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of admiration from the aged king Latinus, his father’s new father–in-law, recalling Dido’s interest in him at Aeneid 1.715–19. When Vegio’s poem finishes with his father’s apotheosis, it is only natural that readers might speculate about Ascanius’ future career. Something had been said of that in Livy, who presented Ascanius as succeeding very young to his father’s kingdom, founding Alba Longa and defending the new state against Mezentius and others (1.3–5); and in Livy’s Greek contemporary, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the same details are retailed (1.65–6), with the addition that Mezentius became a firm ally after making terms with Ascanius. Elsewhere in ancient sources, very little is transmitted and, again, this exiguous tradition was a challenge fully taken up in later adaptations.

A E N E I D SEQUELS I N EARLY OPERA The history and legends of ancient Rome were a central subject in early opera,⁶ and the romantic continuation of the Aeneid culminating in the wedding of Aeneas and Lavinia added a welcome element of happy ending,⁷ taken up in Monteverdi’s lost Le nozze d’Enea con Lavinia, produced in Venice in 1641,⁸ and several operas entitled Enea in Italia.⁹ The story of Ascanius was also much used: in addition to the three works discussed below, we find Giuseppe Antonio Bernabei’s L’Ascanio (Munich, 1686, libretto by Filippo Renato Sbarra), the lost Ascanio by Carlo Francese Pollarolo (Milan, 1686, libretto by Pietro D’Averara), and the very sadly lost Enea e Ascanio by Gluck (libretto by Marco Coltellini), performed at the coronation of the emperor Joseph II in Frankfurt in 1764. Early operas were usually composed for the elite of Church and/or state, and very often for a court context. The popularity of the story of Ascanius is not surprising here: as a character in the Aeneid and ancestor of Augustus, he represented a link with the authority both of Virgil and of the Roman Empire, and his role as the father of the main Roman dynasty could be exploited by ⁶ For orientation and some examples on historical themes, see Ketterer (2009). ⁷ See the material collected by Davidson Reid (1993), 1.62 6, under the heading ‘Aeneas in Latium’. ⁸ The libretto by Michelangelo Torcigliani survives: for a summary, see Rosand (2007), 143 9. The first four acts follow the Aeneid fairly closely, while the fifth act presents the marriage of the couple and a happy ending close to Vegio’s continuation, adding a coda on the future glories of Venice. This was the third of the classicizing operas written by Monteverdi in his last years (d. 1643), between Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640) and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642) for these operas as a group, see Rosand (2007), esp. 45 68. ⁹ By Jacopo Melani, libretto by Giovanni Andrea Moniglia, Pisa, 1670; Carlo Pallavicino, libretto by G. F. Bussani, Venice, 1675; and Antonio Draghi, libretto by Nicolò Minato, Wiener Neustadt, 1678.

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later European dynasties, who sometimes claimed a genealogical as well as ideological affinity with the early Caesars. In particular, the paucity of sources for Ascanius’ post-Aeneid activities noted above meant that his story could be freely adapted to the requirements of later contexts. Bernabei’s opera Ascanio of 1686 is worth consideration to see how it anticipates at the end of the seventeenth century the three eighteenth-century operas discussed below.¹⁰ First of all, like two of the three, it was associated with a Habsburg wedding, being dedicated to Maximilian II Emmanuel, elector of Bavaria, recently married to Maria Antonia, archduchess of Austria. Bernabei (c.1649–1732) would in the next year succeed his father as the elector’s Hofkapellmeister, while Francesco Sbarra, the librettist, was a Munich courtier. The plot revolves round the eventual union of the queen Silvia, daughter and successor of Turnus as ruler of the Rutuli, who like Dido is a widow under pressure from local suitors to marry, with Ascanio, son of Aeneas and king of Latium. The two royal lovers (paralleling the elector and electress) come together after various subplots involving rivals, disguise, and intrigue; apart from the Dido echoes, there are few links with the Virgilian text. In its freedom of innovation with Virgil’s plot, its dynastic context and consequent hymeneal theme, Sbarra’s libretto sets the tone for what is to follow. I will consider three eighteenth-century versions of the subsequent career of Ascanius as narrated in Italian opera libretti, set by three composers of note (Johann Joseph Fux, Antonio Lotti, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) and performed in the context of major European courts.

J O H A N N J O S E P H F U X: JULO ASCANIO, R E D’A L B A, K 3 0 4 (1708) By 1708 the Austrian Johann Joseph Fux (1660–1741)¹¹ had been a court composer for a decade to the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna (Joseph I since 1705), and since 1701 Kapellmeister at St Stephen’s Cathedral; in 1711 he was to become music director at the imperial court, and in 1725 he was to publish his Gradus ad Parnassum, a celebrated textbook on counterpoint used by Bach and many other composers. He was to compose some nineteen secular dramatic works overall, the best known of which was the opera Costanza e Fortezza, performed in Prague Castle in 1723 at the coronation of the emperor Charles VI as king of Bohemia.

¹⁰ For the full score, a useful plot summary, and some material on Bernabei, see Brown (1982), and for the full libretto, see Brown (1983). ¹¹ For recent orientation, see Hochradner and Janes (2008).

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In March 1708 his one-act opera Julo Ascanio, re d’Alba was written for the name day of Joseph I (19 March); it is clearly meant to reflect in its closing praises of Joseph and his family the ambitions of the young emperor, just 30 and only three years on the throne, whose armies under Eugene of Savoy were then with the English under Marlborough defeating the forces of Louis XIV in the War of the Spanish Succession (the major victory of Oudenarde was to come in July of the same year). The librettist was the court poet Pietro Andrea Bernardoni (1672–1714), born in Vignola near Modena and since 1701 imperially employed in Vienna; the text was one of a series of one-act poemetti dramatici composed for the court, which included the similarly Virgilian Enea negli Elisi (1702) with music by Carlo Agostino Badia, and another Roman collaboration with Fux in the same year, La clemenza d’Augusto.¹² Julo Ascanio’s theme of royal marriage and a future dynasty may also suggest the upcoming wedding of the Archduke Charles, the childless Joseph’s brother and the future emperor Charles VI, to Elisabeth Christine of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, which was to be celebrated in August of the same year (the couple had been formally engaged for four years).¹³ As we shall see, the Ascanius operas of Lotti and Mozart, and the earlier Ascanius opera of Bernabei, are also connected with royal marriages. A brief summary of the plot of the opera is revealing.¹⁴ King Evandro has been defeated in war in Italy by the neighbouring Latin king Ascanio, and has handed over himself and his sister Emilia to the victor’s mercy. Ascanio has already fallen in love with Emilia, and returns to Evandro his kingdom and freedom; Emilia has heavily divided feelings—hatred for her country’s conqueror but personal love for Ascanio. Encouraged by his confidant Teucro, Ascanio confronts Emilia and reveals his love, defending his actions in war; she resists. Evandro’s and Emilia’s mother, the prophetic nymph Carmenta, agrees with Evandro that Emilia and Ascanio should be united in marriage and brings it about; Carmenta prophesies the glorious future of the Caesars and of their modern equivalents and descendants the Habsburgs. The plot makes interesting adjustments to elements of the Aeneid. Its Evandro is young and an enemy of the new city of Trojan immigrants, rather than the old ally Evander of Virgil’s poem, though the prophetic nymph Carmenta is still his mother (cf. Aeneid 8.335–6); Emilia is an invented character, a version of the Roman name Aemilia but also the name of one of the female narrators in Boccaccio’s Decameron, while Ascanio’s confidant

¹² For further information on Bernadoni, see , last accessed 15 August 2018. ¹³ Though the marriage was marked by its own festive opera, Antonio Caldara’s Il più bel nome (libretto by Pietro Pariati); see further Sommer Mathis (1994), 11 30. ¹⁴ This is my summary of the relatively brief libretto, most conveniently edited by L. Ergens in Federhofer (1962), 183 5.

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Teucro has the name of one of Ascanius’ ancestors according to Virgil (cf. Aeneid 1.235). The final prophecies of the future descendants of Ascanio clearly adapt famous passages of the Aeneid, especially Carmenta’s last aria: Della stirpe di Iulo alta e famosa il primiero uscità che cinga il crine d’Imperiale Alloro, e in ver sarà ben degno di fondar sovra il Tebro un nuovo Regno. Ma dopo lunga età piu degno ancora di lui sara Giuseppe all’Istro in riva, che gli cinga le chiome il lauro avito. Egli di core ardito, prode di mano, e in consigliar maturo, Egli, clemente e giusto, d’ogni altro pria di lui famoso Augusto rendera col suo Nome il nome oscuro. (From the lofty and famous stock of Iulus there emerges the first to crown his hair with Imperial Bay, and in truth he will be well worthy of founding a new Kingdom on the Tiber. But after a long age, More worthy even than he Will be Joseph on the bank of the Danube, Who crowns his locks with the ancestral laurel. He of daring heart, Valiant of arm, And mature in counsel, He, merciful and just, Will render obscure with his Name The name of every famous Augustus before him.)¹⁵

This reworks elements from various prophetic passages in the Aeneid about the future destiny of the Romans and the coming of the first emperor, Augustus (cf. ‘famoso Augusto’), who matches Joseph as the contemporary monarch being praised via his ancestors: ‘Della stirpe di Iulo alta e famosa’ (cf. Aeneid 4.230 ‘genus alto a sanguine Teucri’; Aeneid 1.288 ‘a magno demissum nomen Iulo’; Aeneid 8.628–9 ‘genus omne futurum | stirpis ab Ascanio’); ‘Ma dopo lunga età’ (cf. Aeneid 1.283 ‘ueniet lustris labentibus aetas’); ‘un nuovo Regno’ (cf. Aeneid 1.206 ‘illic fas regna resurgere Troiae’).

¹⁵ My trans.

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The list of Joseph’s virtues towards the end also points to three of the four ascribed to Augustus on the shield presented to him by the Senate in 27 BCE (virtus, clementia, iustitia, and pietas—Res Gestae): courage (core ardito ~ virtus), mercy (clemente ~ clementia), and justice (giusto ~ iustitia). All this of course reflects the established Habsburg claim of descent from the Roman Caesars since the late medieval period,¹⁶ and the parallel between their imperial role in the Holy Roman Empire and that of Augustus as the first princeps of the original Roman Empire, an analogy exploited for example in the eighteenth century in the portraiture of Maria Theresa.¹⁷

ANTONIO L OTTI: ASCANIO, O VVERO GLI OD I DELUSI DAL S ANGUE ( 1 7 1 8) In 1716 the Venetian composer Antonio Lotti (1667–1740), still well known for his brief but intense eight-part motet Crucifixus and at that time first organist at San Marco in Venice, was engaged for a large salary by the crown prince of Saxony, Friedrich August, who was in Venice under instructions from his father King Augustus the Strong as part of a mission to bring back high-class musicians to his father’s Dresden court for his coming wedding to Maria Josepha, archduchess of Austria and daughter of the late Habsburg emperor, Leopold I. Successfully gaining leave of absence from his duties at San Marco, Lotti travelled to Dresden with the librettist Antonio Maria Lucchini and a collection of star musicians.¹⁸ In a two-year stay the pair produced three operas on classical/historical themes: Giove in Argo (1717), based on the Ovidian story of Jupiter and Callisto;¹⁹ and, for the crown prince’s lavish wedding celebrations in September 1719,²⁰ both Ascanio, ovvero Gli odi delusi dal sangue and Teofane (the latter with a plot loosely based on tenth-century history).²¹ The Venetian Lucchini (c.1690–1730) wrote some thirteen opera libretti overall, for Vivaldi, Caldara, and Albinoni as well as for Lotti.²² The libretto for Ascanio, ovvero Gli odi delusi dal sangue was used again (with some minor changes) under the same title by the

¹⁶ See Bérenger (1994), 9 10; Tanner (1993). ¹⁷ See Yonan (2011), 53. ¹⁸ Including the great castrato Senesino (Francesco Bernardi); see further n. 24. ¹⁹ Lucchini’s libretto was later reused for Handel’s London pasticcio opera Giove in Argo (1739), HWV A14. ²⁰ For further details, see Sommer Mathis (1994), 31 53. ²¹ Teofane formed the basis for Handel’s London opera Ottone, re di Germania (1723), HWV 15. For a detailed study of the three Dresden operas and their performance context, see Horn (2002). ²² See Talbot (1997) for a convenient outline of Lucchini’s career.

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composers Galuppi and Pescetti for a Venetian production in 1728 (the score is no longer extant). In events before the opera,²³ Ascanio, son of Aeneas, has succeeded as a young man to his father’s kingdom in Latium and driven his enemy King Mezenzio from the nearby realm of Agellia. Mezenzio has escaped on a ship with his two children, but is shipwrecked and driven on to the shores of Latium; his daughter Alba is saved with him, but he believes that his baby son Evandro has been drowned. Mezenzio wanders in the woods of Latium under the pseudonym Asterio; there he discovers a woman who has just given birth to a daughter, who reveals herself as Lavinia, stepmother to Ascanio, driven from his court for plotting to take supreme power for herself and her future child, the half-sister of Ascanio. Lavinia dies and Mezenzio/Asterio adopts her daughter as his own under the name of Silvia and brings her up as sister to his own daughter, Alba, without revealing her true origins. However, Mezenzio’s son was not drowned, but washed up safe on the coast of Latium elsewhere, discovered by a shepherd and brought to Oreste, former guardian and now minister to Ascanio; Oreste realizes from the baby’s valuable wrappings with Mezenzio’s name that the boy must be Mezenzio’s son, but presents the baby Evandro as his own son, hoping to prevent him from taking vengeance against Ascanio for the sufferings of his father. As Evandro grows up in proximity to Ascanio, the latter grows to love him. As the opera itself begins, we are twenty years on from the fall of Agellia. Mezenzio makes Silvia swear to take vengeance on Ascanio for her (supposed) father’s wrongs; this is hard for her as Ascanio loves and honours her. Meanwhile, her (supposed) sister Alba is preparing to marry (her actual brother) Evandro, who is about to be installed as co-ruler with Ascanio; Oreste reveals Evandro’s true identity, and the marriage is cancelled. In Act 2 Silvia is sent to assassinate Ascanio as he lies asleep in a garden but cannot carry out her task; Mezenzio tries to finish the job, but Ascanio awakes and sees a fleeing male. His advisers suggest that this is Evandro, but the latter is staunchly true to Ascanio. Mezenzio then reveals his identity to his true son Evandro, trying to encourage him to kill Ascanio, but curses him when he refuses; Alba makes Evandro continue to keep Mezenzio’s identity secret. Meanwhile Ascanio’s advisers have persuaded him to sentence Evandro to death for complicity in the supposed murder plot; Silvia decides to confess her own attempt in order to save her (supposed) brother. Ascanio is torn between fear and affection: under questioning, Evandro does not reveal the name of the culprit, since this would transgress his filial duty to Mezenzio. He is taken away. Silvia now reveals to Ascanio that she is sworn to hatred of him as ²³ I here translate and abbreviate with some adaptations the German summary which will appear in Professor Horn’s forthcoming edition of the opera (see n. 38). I am most grateful to him for kindly sending me an advance copy of this and of his draft edition of the full libretto.

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Mezenzio’s (supposed) daughter, and that she tried to kill him, but that her feelings for him did not permit her to go through with it; Ascanio, emotionally in turmoil, reluctantly confirms death sentences for Evandro and Silvia.²⁴ In the third act, as Evandro faces execution, he reaffirms his loyalty to Ascanio: his only guilt is the hostile blood of Mezenzio in his veins. Both he and Silvia prepare to die courageously. Mezenzio, still in disguise as Asterio and hoping to save his son, declares that now a child of Aeneas is about to die together with a child of Mezenzio; he claims to have arrived in Latium with two children of Mezenzio, then to have added Lavinia’s child (no gender given) to them, and to have lost Evandro, to be discovered by the shepherd. He refuses to reveal the particular parentage of Silvia and Evandro, hoping that Ascanio will be forced to mercy by the prospect of killing a relative; he reveals his own identity, threatening to kill Silvia and then himself. Ascanio, now inclined to spare the courageous pair Evandro and Silvia, determines to discover the truth by a stratagem: he has the pair taken away, apparently for execution, and a pair of covered bowls brought back, supposedly containing their two heads. Deceived, Mezenzio reveals the pair’s true identities. The pair are saved and Mezenzio is spared; Evandro and Silvia are married, and Ascanio offers his own hand to Alba. The convoluted plot has relatively little to do with the classical tradition of Ascanius. It follows the accounts of Livy and Dionysius in the two details of the young Ascanius succeeding to the throne and defeating and making a settlement with Mezentius (already dead by the end of the Aeneid); the dissension between Ascanius and his stepmother Lavinia is taken from the ancient commentary tradition on the Aeneid,²⁵ but its melodramatic series of events recalls Plautine comedy, Italian romance, and some of Shakespeare’s more complex plays, with stock elements of multiple disguised identities, tokens of recognition, shipwrecks, an oath of vengeance, a curse, an assassination attempted in a garden, and false deaths. The title ‘hatreds outwitted by blood’ points to the moralizing element in the plot and its happy ending. As in Bernadoni’s libretto for Fux, Evander is a young contemporary of Ascanius, not the Virgilian old man of his grandfather’s generation, and achieves a happy marriage at the end; it is ironic that he is made the son of Mezentius, his bitter enemy in the Aeneid. The heroine Silvia likewise draws her name from Bernadoni, while the minor character Oreste draws his from Greek tragedy, no doubt mediated by Orestes’ appearance in previous

²⁴ This is the context of the aria ‘Fosti caro’, originally sung by the great castrato Senesino, recorded by the modern countertenor Andreas Scholl (on the album Arias for Senesino, Decca, 2005). ²⁵ Servius on Aeneid 6.760 recounts that Lavinia and Ascanius quarrelled and that Lavinia, pregnant, fled and hid with the shepherd Tyrrhus (and also that Ascanius killed Mezentius). This is very likely to draw on lost versions of early Roman history.

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operatic plots.²⁶ The major role given to Mezentius as the villain of the piece is the chief innovation: his evil machinations forgiven at the end might reflect the characterization of Mezentius in the Aeneid (Book 10) as a vicious tyrant who is in some sense finally redeemed by his love for his son Lausus. In terms of contemporary allusion, the final double marriage clearly points to the occasion of performance at the wedding of Friedrich August and Maria Josepha, who like both the young couples in the opera unite two royal houses. Alba, the daughter of Mezenzio who marries Ascanio, will presumably in the future give her name to Ascanio’s future foundation of Alba Longa, a feature which matches Aeneas’ naming of his new city of Lavinium after his Italian wife Lavinia in Livy (1.11), but this is not emphasized in the libretto. No doubt the choice of Ascanius as subject on this occasion was connected with his status as ancestor of Augustus, whose name and authority were evoked in the names of the bridegroom and his father.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZA RT: A SCA N I O I N A L B A, K V 1 1 1 (1771) This two-act opera was written in some eight weeks by the 15-year-old Mozart in Milan to celebrate the marriage of Archduke Ferdinand, fourth son of the imperial consorts Maria Theresa and Francis I, and Maria Ricciarda Berenice D’Este, daughter of Duke Ercole III of Modena and Reggio, and first performed in Milan on 17 October 1771.²⁷ The marriage was politically important, as Ferdinand thereby became heir to the Duchy of Modena and was on his marriage appointed governor of the Duchy of Milan. The empress was offered two libretti by the Milan professor and poet Giuseppe Parini (1729–99) for the occasion, the other being the equally hymeneal Le nozze d’Atalanta, and chose the story of Ascanius, which Parini carefully crafted to fit the occasion.²⁸ Again a brief summary is helpful here.²⁹ In the first act, Venus shows Ascanio, the son she bore to Aeneas, the idyllic spot where the city of Alba Longa is due to rise and suggests that he become its king. She tells him to conceal his identity from Silvia, a nymph descended from Hercules, to whom

²⁶ Davidson Reid (1993), 2.764. ²⁷ For good rapid orientation on the opera, see Rushton (1997), and for further detail, see Salvetti (1995). For the context, see Sommer Mathis (1994), 199 230. ²⁸ For Parini’s career, see , last accessed 15 August 2018. ²⁹ Lightly adapted from the version given in the booklet accompanying the recording Mozart, the Early Operas: Ascanio in Alba (Brilliant Classics, 2002).

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he is already betrothed but has never seen,³⁰ and to present himself to her in disguise to test her virtue. Ascanio pretends to be a foreigner attracted by the beauties of the place. The priest Aceste tells the shepherds that their valley will be the site of a fine city and that they will have a sovereign, Ascanio, before the day is out. He also informs Silvia that she will be Ascanio’s bride, but she replies that she is in love with a young man she has seen in a dream. The priest reassures her, saying the young man in her dream can be none other than Ascanio. Venus then appears to Ascanio and asks him to test the girl a little longer before revealing his true identity. Between the acts, the city of Alba has magically arisen. In the second act, Ascanio spots Silvia among the shepherds and tries to talk to her. The girl immediately recognizes the young man from her dreams. Fauno intervenes and suggests to ‘the foreigner’ (Ascanio) that he should go off and announce the building of Alba in foreign parts, but also celebrates his attractiveness.³¹ Thus convinced that the foreigner is not Ascanio, Silvia is deeply saddened. She finally decides to accept her fate but declares she never will love anyone other than Ascanio. Aceste consoles Silvia, saying that her tribulations are about to come to an end. Venus is invoked by a magnificent chorus. Silvia and Ascanio add their voices to the chorus and the goddess descends on her chariot surrounded by clouds. Venus unites the two lovers and explains how she had intended her son to discover the virtue of his fiancée. Aceste pronounces an oath of fidelity and loyalty to Venus, who then retires. It only remains for Ascanio to perpetuate the race of Aeneas and guide the city of Alba to prosperity. Parini’s libretto shows clear signs of its hymeneal and political context in its adaptation of the Virgilian story, though it has no overt contemporary allusions as evident as those in Lotti’s opera. The union of Ascanio and Silvia, two young people of royal/divine descent, clearly reflects the wedding of Ferdinand and Maria Ricciarda; the unusual emphasis on the marriage of Ascanio and Silvia as an arranged one in which neither had seen the other before the wedding day mirrors the actual historical situation of the eighteenth-century couple. Likewise, the most striking innovation in the classical tradition of the story, by which Venus becomes the mother, not the grandmother, of Ascanius, and the partner, not the mother, of Aeneas, points to the role of Maria Theresa,³² the key guest at the wedding, as the mother of the groom and consort of Francis I. But the prominence granted to Venus as mother might also follow up indications in the Aeneid of motherly feelings felt by Venus towards Ascanius (e.g. 1.691–4; 10.45–53, 133). Likewise, the descent of Silvia from the line of Hercules, stressed in the libretto, looks to the bride Maria ³⁰ This is the context of the often anthologized aria ‘Cara, lontano’ (usually for countertenor). ³¹ This is the context of the often anthologized soprano aria ‘Dal tuo gentil sembiante’. ³² So Sommer Mathis (1994), 224.

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Ricciarda, the name of her father Duke Ercole III of Modena and Reggio, and the traditional claims of the D’Este to be descended from Hercules,³³ just as the Habsburg claim to descent from Augustus underlies the parallel of Maria Theresa and Augustus’ ancestor Venus.³⁴ The conjunction of the founding of Alba Longa and the marriage of Ascanio and Silvia clearly points to the political consequences of the 1771 marriage: the city of Alba Longa in the opera, the idyllic new realm of Ascanio, is surely a complimentary parallel for the Milan of its performance, the fresh dominion of Ferdinand as its new governor. Like Ascanio, a recently arrived Trojan exile, Ferdinand, from Vienna, can be seen as a welcome and divinely sponsored new ruler for a part of Italy from a foreign country: we can note the play of identity between ‘foreign’ and ‘non-foreign’ in the libretto. In literary terms, there is little direct reception of classical texts; the prophetic priest Acestes has the name of the Trojan founder of Segesta from the Aeneid (5.30), but the pastoral colour here comes from the vernacular Italian tradition. In particular, Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (1573), a play written for the Gonzaga court of Ferrara, provides both pastoral atmosphere (all its characters are nymphs and shepherds) and the name of Parini’s heroine, Silvia; it too is set in classical times, in the period of Alexander the Great. It was even more extensively used by Pietro Metastasio as the basis for the libretto used by Mozart a few years later in Il re pastore (1775).

CO NCLUSION This small sample of operas on the topic of Ascanius in the eighteenth century yields some interesting conclusions. First of all, the story of Ascanius has cultural cachet and authority because of its origin in the respected classical texts of Virgil and Livy: it provides elevated subject-matter appropriate for operas on great state occasions. Second, it is also conveniently flexible for subsequent adaptors because classical authors say so little about Ascanius, and provides a tempting topic for sequels which complete the biography of Aeneas’ son, most of whose life lies before him at the end of the Aeneid; librettists can choose how much of the classical sources (if any) to use. Third, the status of Ascanius as the ancestor of Augustus and of the Roman Empire has clear appeal to that empire’s modern successors, the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburgs, who had long claimed descent from Augustus and the Caesars in a ³³ Already established in the sixteenth century and spectacularly presented from 1550 in the iconography of the gardens at the Villa D’Este at Tivoli, a town of which Hercules was the traditional patron deity: see Coffin (1960), 78 85. ³⁴ See n. 17 above.

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form of translatio imperii. Finally, Ascanius’ key role as the conduit through which the blood of Aeneas passes to later rulers makes him a natural choice for pieces performed on occasions of royal marriages, stressing the crucial nature of genetic and dynastic continuity. This political appropriation of the story of Ascanius, an episode essentially supplementary to the plot of the Aeneid, matches the similar use of the Aeneid itself in this period in Habsburg propaganda:³⁵ neo-Latin epics of Virgilian colour were produced from Joachim Meister’s De Rodolpho Habspurgico (1576), an encomium of the dynasty’s founder,³⁶ to L. B. Neander’s supplement to Aeneid 8 of 1768, which takes the Show of Heroes down to the time of Maria Theresa; and even vernacular travesties of Virgil could make political points, as in Virgils Aeneis, travestirt, published in several parts between 1784 and 1788 by Aloys Blumauer in support of Joseph II’s aggressive policy towards the Catholic Church.³⁷ As ever, Virgilian cultural authority is expected to have power and impact for an elite readership and audience educated in the classics, the intended receivers of all these cultural artefacts.³⁸

³⁵ See Hardie (2014), 104 5, 119, and 187. ³⁶ See further Römer (2001). ³⁷ On these links, see further Tanner (1993). ³⁸ I am most grateful to Prof. Dr Wolfgang Horn, Lehrstuhl für Musikwissenschaft der Universität Regensburg, for kindly and rapidly supplying me with details of Lotti’s opera, the authoritative edition of which he is about to produce (for some sample pages see , last accessed 29 November 2016), and for reading and comment ing on a draft of this piece.

27 Epic Performance through Invenção de Orfeu and An Iliad Two Instantiations of Epic as Embodiment in the Americas Patrice Rankine

For classical epic, the body is a problem: an absence, a barrier to the modern audience’s full participation. That is, we know from our reading of ancient texts that epic performance was a communal, embodied affair. In addition to the examples of Phemius and Demodocus from the Odyssey, Odysseus and Achilles in the Iliad are storyteller and singer respectively too, embodiments of a long-standing cultural institution ubiquitous in the poems.¹ Performers in this context represent values of an immediate audience that is physically present. As the epic genre evolves, however, poets are aware that later audiences will inhabit the secondary space, whether in future performance, in Homer’s case, or as a text, in the case of Virgil.² The modern, reading audience is an eavesdropper on to the actual performance, to which the text, at first blush, can only approximate, as the reader is at least one remove from the space of performance. Bakhtinian literary criticism gives readers a template for comparing epic tradition to other phenomena.³ For example, for the novel as genre, by contrast to the epic, the absence—of the performer, of physicality—is helpful in its allowance for trust in the reader’s imagination. American novelist Ralph Ellison resisted any stage representation of his novel because he wanted readers to work through the paradox of race in their own minds, not through ¹ Thomas (1992). ² For the work of the ‘monumental poet’ whether Homer or not in his awareness of an oral tradition, see Thomas (1992). ³ Bakhtin (1981).

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the visceral physicality of performance.⁴ Absence of the body, however, is anathema to epic performance in its original setting. Given that epic is a performative genre, the contemporary reader faces this absence as a problem. Bakhtin linked the epic genre to a kind of nostalgia, wherein the craving for a long-gone, absent time cannot be recovered. Epic in performance thus runs counter to Bakhtinian sensibilities about the genre by bringing the past into the present. An earlier stage of classical scholarship, concerned with the orality of the epic text, led to studies of textual reception. This process included textual analysis, the translation of these texts into various languages, and theories of orality and literacy.⁵ In contrast to this, a turn among contemporary audiences is towards the challenge of enlivening the texts of epic poems, which moves epic as genre beyond the manuscript, beyond Bakhtinian absence to the range of performances discussed in this volume. I begin this particular inquiry into physical absences with Jorge de Lima’s Invenção de Orfeu (The Invention of Orpheus) (1952). Lima’s epic presents one extreme in how modern epic has addressed the absence of the physical body of the poet. In this first case, the poem itself becomes the absent body. Lima’s emphasis on the power of poetry to embody lack—lack of the body, indefiniteness of meaning itself—foregrounds the Bakhtinian problem of epic absence through a lack of physicality. Only the text remains, as itself a body, a physical, material phenomenon.⁶ Perhaps marking an earlier period in the reception of epic, Lima turns towards the text as a whole in itself. Distinct from the more contemporary An Iliad (2011)—which provides my second case study here—Lima’s Invention of Orpheus is more like its poetic successor, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, both in its recognition of physical presence or absence and in its ghosting of the physical body in the poem.⁷ The pay-off in the case of Lima, as it was for Walcott, is memorialization. The literary epic itself reifies lost and irredeemable bodies: those of the poet; of slaves, bodies lost in the Middle Passage to the New World; and of native people ghosted through the colonial enterprise. Following my discussion of Lima, I offer a reading of An Iliad, a stage adaptation, by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, based on Robert Fagles’s

⁴ Rankine (2016). ⁵ Thomas (1992), Ong (2002). Even earlier theories of the textuality or heightened literacy and its consequences of tragedy and Platonic philosophy rest on the orality, and thus the performativity, of Homeric epic. See e.g. Havelock (1988). ⁶ This is not the place to expand on the phenomenological significance of the argument. For more on this, see Brown (2014). ⁷ On the language of ‘haunting’ and ‘ghosting’ in performance, where a residue of previous performances and the bodies that inhabit them remains a presence, owing to such realities as the memories of playwrights and actors, see Carlson (2003), Hall and Harrop (2010), and Young (2010).

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translation of Homer’s Iliad. The play initially opened at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 2010 before being staged at Chicago’s Court Theatre from 10 November to 14 December 2011. As an embodied performance of epic poetry, the work is a stark contrast both to the modern epic that Lima emblematizes and to Lima’s celebration of the literary condensation of past epics as embodiment itself. An Iliad brings Homer himself to life, as it were, as ancient bard but also as war correspondent in such modern places as Iraq and Afghanistan.⁸ The performance shows the trauma of combat even for a war poet or correspondent, and thus as all good reception does, it restores something that was, so to speak, lost in translation: the actual physical and mental pain that must have been a reality not only for all the legendary figures in Homeric epic, but equally important and perhaps even more hidden, for the poet. The performance of An Iliad reintroduces physical presence, through the body, into the literary texts of Homeric epic. I bring Plato’s studies of epic performance, narrative, and mimesis, in Ion and in the Republic to bear on this project. Not only does Plato offer a framework for reading An Iliad as epic performance, but the question of the emotional role of the poet-performer that was central to the concerns raised in Plato’s dialogues is also precisely at the core of what the practice of enlivening classical, literary epic offers a contemporary audience. The restoration of the body to epic is a stark contrast to the legacy of epic poetry in Western traditions, such as with Lima’s poem, where the text is the thing. In either case, whether through the reified text in The Invention of Orpheus, or the performative turn of An Iliad, the attempt is to redress an absence, namely that of an absence of the body in relation to the genre of epic. The performative turn that An Iliad evidences allows the contemporary audience to imagine what the violence of war is like based on present-day parallels. For my reading of An Iliad, Plato’s discussion of epic performance becomes relevant: just as Plato said it would, embodying epic takes its toll on both actor and audience. But contrary to Plato’s formulation, the very toll, the seamlessness between performance and reality that such a toll evidences, is one of the greatest strengths of the epic performance, which we recognize, in part, through its mediating narrative aspects over pure enactment. That is, Plato’s concern regarding performance—namely, its potential to corrupt the performer and the performer’s audience—points to one of the benefits of performance, that of evoking pathos and of impacting on behaviour. In Lima’s alternative, no physical presence is required, other than that of the text itself. In the absence of the physical body, as Lima riffs, the Word becomes flesh— even as the lost body is memorialized through the text. Here epic embodiment is the poem itself as the incarnation of absence. ⁸ Robert Brough, in his 1858 burlesque Siege of Troy, also featured Homer as war corres pondent.

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THE I NVENTION OF ORPHEUS : M EMORIALIZATION AND THE EPIC TEXT AS THE PERFORMED BODY For me Body refers to the whole of the poem after the title. Embodiment is any language event that holds within it a form of being. Dumb example: ‘where is the North Star’ could embody the speaker’s disorientation. Seems to be a metaphor but is not the same or a metaphor could also ‘stand for’ and also embody being ness. But I use all terms as they apply to composing, not critiquing, explicating, etc. (Jack Ridl)⁹

Contemporary performance shifts our understanding of Bakhtin’s notion of nostalgia—a longing for great times and great characters in their relative absence—as underpinning the epic genre. Lima makes of epic a presence unrecognizable in Bakhtinian critique and one that works differently to performance—perhaps one that precedes a performative turn. Lima’s poem is emblematic of ‘the Word becom[ing] flesh’ (John 1:14). For Lima the poem is the body. There is nothing else, no longed-for absence, no reference to something else. The words themselves ‘embody being ness’. That is, ‘embodiment is any language event that holds within it a form of being’.¹⁰ Lima’s Invention of Orpheus becomes the physical monument of absent bodies that can never be restored. The slave bodies that were foundational to Brazilian national identity permeate the country’s literature and cultural iconography.¹¹ From the 1500s to the 1800s, many captives died in transit or as a result of the harsh conditions of enslavement. The native to the land known as Brazil is another absence, lost bodies resulting from genocide through the centuries that began in 1500. These absences become the stuff of Brazilian national identity.¹² Lima’s Invention of Orpheus is the realization of poetry as itself the lost physical body—of the slave, of the native, in sum, of Eurydice. That is, the myth of Orpheus’ loss of his beloved to Hades is not coincidentally linked to Brazilian identity.¹³ Orphic absence is a reality best conveyed through the Portuguese word saudade, which is a longing for an absence that can never be filled, not nostalgia, because it matters not whether the homecoming (nostos) for which one feels pain (algos) ever happened or not. For saudade, the absence is the reality, not a metaphor: a physical and emotional reality embodied in daily life.

⁹ The quote is from a personal exchange with Jack Ridl, who is a contemporary American poet. While his work has no direct association with Lima, an email conversation that I had with him regarding epic poetry, quoted here, is pertinent to this chapter. ¹⁰ Ridl, in an email to myself. ¹¹ Freyre (1956) is central to this construction. ¹² Haberly (2012). ¹³ Rankine (2011).

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Lima’s poem was written in 1952. Born in 1893, Lima’s presence in Salvador at 16 certainly deepened the African dimensions of his poems. Earl Fitz characterizes Lima as a poet who ‘makes use of traditional folk rhythms and ballads while also working pure Africanisms into his poetic diction’.¹⁴ Lima became a doctor in 1914 but then also pursued poetry and during his lifetime published five books of poetry. Modernism and surrealism inform his work. Fitz sees tradition and invention—European folk traditions mixed with the slave and native pasts—in such poems as ‘A Negra Fulô’ and Poemas Negros. The poem reworks the heroic narrative of epic, now in the context of New World traditions and figures. Lima reshapes a literary, poetic tradition. The Invention of Orpheus is structured in cantos, beginning with the fundacão (foundation), a word with whose Latinate resonance Lima plays. The allusiveness expected in the poetic epic tradition is present from Lima’s first lines. Homer sang of the man (‘andra moi’), Odysseus, the heroic explorer; Virgil of ‘arma virumque’, ‘arms and the man’; Lima incorporates the tradition, singing of a man ‘without arms’ (‘sem brasão’). Odysseus was famed for his cleverness and having travelled much (‘polytropos’), whereas the baron of Lima’s poem is not famed. He ‘fulfills only his fate’, a fate not precisely linked to any larger social project or national tradition—not ostensibly at least. Similar to Vasco da Gama, he navigates ‘day and night’. Lima’s hero, however, is more like Colombus than da Gama, in that the sought-after refuge is elusive. The hero’s island and the love he seeks are unattainable, but there is a sense that, in this case, unattainability is the existential condition not only of the journey to the New World, but also of human life: we everyday heroes ‘reinvent the sea with your Colombuses and call back doves over the waves’: ‘Reinventamos o mar com seus colombos, e columbas revoando sobre as ondas’ (1.3). The poem does not quite have a typical beginning, middle, and end. The depths or profundity of the sea constitute the poem’s thematic centre as the hero seeks an unattainable island. In the cantos that form the body of Lima’s poem, we encounter attempts to shape a reality no more tangible than the ondas or the waves of the sea, an island simultaneously shaped and eroded through the ondas. Within this context, the poetic and literary influences that one critic calls a montage,¹⁵ a wave of references, are also elusive but shape the poem. One cannot help but think of Derek Walcott’s much later Caribbean Sea, O-mer-os, the bone-white sea that is also the Nobel Laureate’s epic predecessor, Homer, or Omeros. For the Portuguese language, Camões’s Lusiads (1572) is the literary epic, treating the blacks (Moors) and Indians of the poem as antagonists. While Camões establishes his heroes in contrast to these subalterns (with ‘no trace of irony’¹⁶), Lima displaces the superiority of the Portuguese authority figures. ¹⁴ Fitz (1976). ¹⁵ Sá (2000). ¹⁶ Hart (1976), 45. Cf. Faia, Ch. 21 in this volume.

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The hero of The Invention of Orpheus already has what he seeks: ‘No one finds the island because we all know it. The same with the known geography in our eyes’ (1.2, ‘A ilha ninguém achou | porque todos a sabíamos. | Mesmo nos olhos havia | uma clara geografia’). The sought-after island is eternally renewed, similar to the life forms it sustains. It is no accident that part of Lima’s geography in Brazil is the vast Amazon that sustains and transforms vibrant life forms. The inventiveness of this space might include an orchid growing from a tree rather than in the ground. All living things respond to the inventiveness of Orphic song, which is best symbolized in Orpheus’ ability to draw lovers. But Orpheus himself is never present. He is and is not the hero of the poem, in the same way that the epic hero (Achilles, Aeneas) is and is not his antecedent. The unattainability of an end—love found, song accomplished, life complete—is a mark of abundance and simultaneously of frustration. Through the technique of montage, or palimpsest,¹⁷ Lima transforms the baron of his poem into a postmodern everyman: A baron distinguished Not by arms Not with limit/edge and fame Fulfills only his fate: To love, to celebrate his woman To sail day and night, By water and by sea, The island that he seeks and the love he loves. (1.1)

The metaphoric power of the poem is in every form. Every thing-in-the-world is a metaphor, and every metaphor is a thing-in-the world. In this context, Orpheus is the hero, but he is not present; the name stands in for loss and the emotion it produces, saudade. For Lima, the rivalry of influence, the rivalry that calls upon Camões as Portuguese progenitor is relaxed into waves (ondas) of the cantos flowing in and out. Lima’s intertexts include Camões, Fernando Pessoa (Mensagem), Afonso Arinos de Mello Franco’s The Brazilian Indian and the French Revolution, and Paulo Prato’s Voyage to Brazil.¹⁸ The range of intertexts in the body of the poem makes it an epic accomplishment in modern terms, and the particular intertexts allow for a distinctly Brazilian literary contribution, if we follow the declaration of omophagia, the consumption of bodies that marked Brazilian modernism following the Week of Modern Art in 1922.¹⁹ The unattainability of actual bodies also marks the poetic experience, since ‘Lima rejects, almost ¹⁷ Sá (2000). ¹⁸ Sá (2000). ¹⁹ i.e. similar to the way that Portuguese reported that the Tupi consumed their enemies to incorporate their strength, so the Brazilian poet would consume the literary and artistic dis courses of their European, Asian, African, and native surroundings to become whole.

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completely, the closed work, language as a mode of communication’ and the poem ‘rarely evokes the real world’.²⁰ Lima’s epic represents an attempt at creating a verbal new world and an actual new world better and more human, an ‘island’ that we never quite reach.²¹ One of The Invention of Orpheus’ central montages merges Orpheus and Christ.²² Orpheus, the figure of invention, is appropriate to a context wherein artists consume artistic forms only to reincorporate them into their own textual bodies. Orpheus’ dismemberment is one aspect of the classical story. But the word becoming flesh is a Christian motif, one in which Lima finds a certain narrative resolution. Orpheus is the hero of Lima’s poem because he best symbolizes both the inventiveness of life and the unattainability of sought-after love. During the fourth song Lima finds his way to the Trinity, leaving the ‘passing madness’ (‘loucura efemera’) for the ‘white calm’ to which he now returns: ‘Relighting this Lamp. And this one. And this one. You know which Three they are. Laudamus Te.’ (‘Reacendo esta Lampada. E Esta. E Esta. Sabeis quais sao as Tres. Laudamus Te.’) As Canto 6 begins the movement towards the end of the poem, the poet conveys the futility of an incorporation that moves ever into death: ‘Here is the end of the world, here is the end of the world where even the birds sing to engulf it in flames.’ (‘Aqui é o fim do mundo, aqui é o fim do mundo | em que até aves vêm cantar para encerrá-lo. | Em cada poço, dorme um cadáver, no fundo, | e nos vastos areais—ossadas de cavalo.’) The language becomes increasingly referential to Catholic symbolism: ‘O my Lord, de profundis clamavi ad te, Domine’ (6.1, 3). As texts form the body of Lima’s poem, so is the Word for him flesh. There is no separation between the world and The Invention of Orpheus; the world that the poet constructs is the reality of our existence. If we think of this in terms of saudade, we see it perhaps in terms of invention, the creative process that always makes anew yet undoes at the moment of creation. For the poet, the physical body is no more real than the elements out of which the invention is shaped; words are no more immaterial—no less performed—than the physical body onstage. Words are a product of incorporation and in truth never exist without the body. Ridl, to return to his notion of the body of the text, left us with a caveat: ‘I use all terms as they apply to composing, not critiquing, explicating, etc.’ If this is the case, then the poem is as much the process as it is the words on the page or the performance onstage.

²⁰ Costa Santos (2005), 722; my trans. ²² Cavalcanti (2010).

²¹ Cavalcanti (2010).

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AN ILIAD: PERFORMANCE IN PLATO AND THE PERFORMATIVE TURN IN CONTEMPORARY EPIC Absence might still be the link between epic performances such as An Iliad and the epic text, but embodying epic rhapsodically reifies contemporary resources in ways that Bakhtin could not have imagined. Even as the poet in Omeros encounters the ghost of Homer in London and confesses to his own missing knowledge of the poem, so contemporary poets revel in ruins, but those fallen edifices are not necessarily bound in past time. Timothy Edward Kane’s performance of Homer in An Iliad, his very embodiment of the poet, allows for the expression of empathy, not as a residue, but as a continuing emotion that contemporary audiences no doubt share with figures from the past, embodied in the present. The ‘great men’ of Bakhtinian epic are shown to be no further away than the seat next to you at the theatre. An Iliad has seen several restagings since its original 2010 production.²³ For the play’s Chicago premiere under the direction of Charles Newell, actor Timothy Edward Kane performed a one-man show that was recognizably the central story of Homer’s Iliad: Achilles’ rage and the devastation it causes to his own ranks, and to Hector and the city of Troy (Fig. 27.1). Returning to some essential propositions regarding epic performance from Plato, Kane at times narrated the story of Homer’s Iliad, in ways that recalled the basic distinctions between diegesis and mimesis outlined by Plato in Book 3 of the Republic: ‘If in no way does the poet himself pretend, the entire thing would be poetry and narrative in itself, without mimesis’ (393c11–d2). At crucial moments, as in the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon from Iliad 1, Kane took on the role of those characters, as if stepping into passages where the English translation of the Greek text might have quotation marks. Plato helps the contemporary audience to frame An Iliad as epic, rather than any other staged genre (tragedy, for example). As Plato points out in the Republic, even an epic poet, like Homer, is in fact performing, acting, whenever he embodies the role about which he is informing his audience. Kane, or the rhapsode he plays, to use Plato’s genres from Ion, is emotionally exhausted from simply telling the story for all these years. Socrates’ statement in Ion about the poet’s potential has an unexpected resonance for representations of war: the implication is that its devastation

²³ Stephen Spinella and Denis O’Hare each gave performances for the New York Theater Workshop, which ran from 6 March to 1 April 2012. See Isherwood (2012). The Lantern Theater Company staged the play’s Philadelphia premiere, which ran from 10 November to 11 December 2016; Peter DeLaurier played The Poet. See Bilderback (2016). Chicago’s Court Theatre itself restaged the play in 2013.

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Fig. 27.1 Timothy Edward Kane in the Court Theatre, Chicago production of An Iliad (2011). © Michael Brosilow.

is thereby understood and processed, to an extent, as a kind of therapy for the pain that lingers in its aftermath.²⁴ As a poet, Homer is proclaimed in antiquity as an expert ²⁴ Contemporary performers associated with at least two recent projects, namely Theater of War and Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives, bring a kind of therapy to troops suffering from combat trauma. For the mission and scope of Theater of War, see ; for Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives, see .

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[in] war and many other things, and how noble and ignoble men associate with one another, and craftspersons and laypersons, and how the gods associate with one another and with men, and astronomical phenomena, and subterranean phenomena, and the generations of gods and heroes. (531c4 9)

In the passage, Socrates questions the poet’s implicit claim to teach virtue, to be an instructor on the nature of divinity, to have understanding of cosmology, physics, and genealogy. Only a tad less broad-ranging, Kane’s bard/ rhapsode in An Iliad claims as soldier and as war correspondent to know war’s devastation, and he thus provides a contemporary instantiation of the Socratic problem of expertise. How could Kane know, as an actor, unless he himself has served on the battlefield? The claim of expertise—and exposure— is important because it speaks to a potential, personal toll on the performer. Socrates suggests that if Ion, as a performer of Homeric epic, was also master of this range of human disciplines, from war, to politics and commerce, theology, geography, and history, he would certainly be ‘akroasasthai deinos’ (‘remarkable to listen to’), worth the price of admission—and worthy of the reclusive Socrates’ attendance at the theatre. Even mastering just one of these crafts, outside acting itself, would be remarkable, and this is precisely the issue that Kane’s performance raises. The performer, potentially, possesses a skill or technē that we might call ‘enviable’. Descriptions of An Iliad echo the pay-off Plato imagines that rhapsodic performance could have, were the poet truly in full possession of his craft. As Mary Houlihan writes: ‘Kane portrays a storyteller whose eternal mission is to wander through time recounting this tale. He might be “as old as the story itself”, the actor says.’²⁵ Kane is the soldier wracked with trauma from combat; then the poet tired of telling and retelling the tale; and now the war correspondent, by explicit analogue, in Iraq or Afghanistan, equally exhausted. The Chicago Tribune reviewer describes the show as ‘jaw-dropping’: ‘Aside from Kane’s astonishing command of the script, he made clear to everyone in the theater that telling the story of human conflict was coming at enormous cost to the teller.’²⁶ The connection between Plato’s Ion and Kane in An Iliad situates the adaptation squarely within the realm of the performance of epic, particularly as it pertains to later, rhapsodic performances of Homeric epic. As we move from Ion to the Republic the concern for the impact of such a performance on the actor becomes central. Even enacting one role might deplete the person performing epic, not to mention the role of one who has encountered the horrors of war. For his body to convey the depletion of such a performance, Kane appears onstage—the set itself a ‘dilapidated sewer’—in a raggedy outfit

²⁵ Chicago Sun Times, 16 November 2011. ²⁶ Chicago Tribune, 26 December 2011.

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that bespeaks his tattered state.²⁷ This body is and is not Kane’s body. An Iliad offers seamlessness between performance and reality. Kane’s rags reveal the true emotional toll of acting, of performing various roles—of soldier, of athlete, of husband or wife—not only onstage, but also in life. The actor only amplifies everyday lived experience by portraying in heightened fashion what we all go through in real life. An Iliad is precisely interested in the question of acting’s impact on the moral self. Kane’s raggedly dressed body is wracked with weariness, an outward sign of an emotional—and moral—reality. Reviewer Chris Jones reveals the extent to which the performance is as much about acting as it is about the poem: Crucially, it just feels like Kane whose ravaged physical appearance is very different from his usual all American charm is spilling out the contents of his mind and heart, in service of some higher duty. Acting work at this level is often marked by a palpable unselfishness, a willingness to subjugate self to character and material, and that’s exactly how it feels here. It is a masterpiece of acting the clear high point of Kane’s career to date that should not be missed.²⁸

Role playing calls the actor to a ‘higher duty’. Jones sees the acting here as ‘palpable unselfishness’: Kane subjects his ‘self to character’, calling upon the epic poet as teacher of morality. True to Plato’s concerns, performance brings into the present the heroes of the past. The Bakhtinian description of the epic genre as one of past times no longer truly applies. Contemporary performance makes of these roles not the absent gods and heroes of the past, but transforms those heroes and gods into you and me. Kane likens the soldiers on the battlefield, Paris and Menelaus, to sports stars, our contemporary gods and heroes. Kane makes the emotional impact of these roles felt to his audience, citizens who are themselves athletes, soldiers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters.

MEMORY AND I NCANTATION ‘Someday it will help to have remembered’ (Virgil, Aeneid)

Kane’s rhapsode remembers anger. He says that he is reminding you of the anger you feel when you are ready to pay for your groceries, and the person behind you has cut you off without so much as a polite gesture. As Kane in the role of rhapsode in An Iliad narrates, your response might be, ‘I could kill’. ²⁷ Timeout Chicago, 21 November 2011.

²⁸ Chicago Tribune, 21 November 2011.

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Such is your bile, the mēnis you feel, a raw emotional trigger. ‘You press that anger down’, Kane says, using his hands to emphasize the weight of the emotion that you must fight back. The difference between you, as an average citizen, and Achilles, as warrior, is that you do not kill, whereas he does. The difference between you, as the audience member, and Kane, as rhapsode, is that you carry on with your day and try to forget about your seething rage, whereas he relives that emotion every time he tells the tale, whether as the 3,000-year-old spirit of Homer, the war veteran, or the actor. In other words, whereas you ‘let it go’, as Kane says you must, and as he says Achilles should have done, the soldier, the veteran, and even the actor, cannot. The war veteran’s combat trauma demands that he live in the psychotic break, that he repeat the moment of trauma over, and over, and over again.²⁹ Similarly, the actor must manufacture this rage nightly. The difference is that whereas the person suffering from combat trauma cannot help the repetition, for this is the very definition of trauma, the actor chooses to remember. The actor approximates that trauma, attempts to provide a mimesis of what it might be like to live in that psychosis. This is what makes acting a craft: the actor has control, whereas the person suffering from combat trauma does not. The actor manufactures and manages anger; Achilles and the person suffering from combat trauma cannot control it. In addition to performing an individual’s rage, the actor moves the realm of emotions from the individual to the community. Certain traumas to the individual seem all but forgotten in the main. The emotional impact of war on soldiers, for example, is not an issue of central importance to the community, if for no other reason than that the soldiers are quickly forgotten. The actor, as a kind of medium (a different analogy to that of therapist), performs the mimesis of trauma, as if he himself is reminding the audience of the soldier; the actor brings the traumatic dream alive, in front of our very eyes.³⁰ In other words, Kane stands in the psychotic break, from event to repetition to trauma, the actor replacing both the all-but-spiritual role of the poet and Plato’s philosopher. Kane remembers—the traumatic slaughter of Hector on the battlefield, the Second World War, murders on the mountainsides of Afghanistan—so that the average citizen can forget. As medium, however, the actor helps the audience to embody the trauma caused to the community, which is only just beneath the surface. ‘Medium’ is not far from the perception of theatre critic Jones, in his review of An Iliad: Kane’s Poet rattles off a bravura list of pretty much every major war in the world from Troy to Afghanistan (Crimean, Mexican War of Independence, et cetera, et

²⁹ For more on the relationship between the epics and how they manifest combat trauma, see Shay (1995). ³⁰ Schechner (2000).

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cetera, et cetera). In that moment by far the most remarkable of a consistently fascinating evening Kane’s lips start to move as if he were in the middle of an exorcism.³¹

Jones’s description aptly moves the conversation back to a Platonic observation about the rhapsode, who is an actor, as divinely inspired. The actor’s recitation becomes incantatory, resembling more inspiration or possession, as much as craft. Kane releases the audience through his own possession, the transference of trauma on to the actor. Performance theorist and director Richard Schechner, in his discussion of the significance of rehearsal, or preparation, to the actor’s transformation, uses similar language to that of Jones: Rehearsal is a way of making unknown material (the play to be performed) so familiar to the actors that the audience can successfully believe that what they see is a way of living. The professional actor is a person who is skilled in this kind of magic deception; or invocation of belief.³²

Rather than dismiss the actor based on similar observations to that made of Ion, Schechner explains how the craft of acting becomes a kind of possession. Repetition makes ‘unknown material . . . so familiar’ as to cause cognitive dissonance, perhaps for actor and audience alike. The role becomes ‘so familiar’ to the actor that it resembles ‘a way of living’ to the audience. Schechner likens actors to ‘masters of ecstasy’ and he continues: ‘exact preparations and exact performance assure that the link between past and present will not be broken’.³³ Kane becomes the 3,000-year-old poet from the past, able to tell of wars of today and yesteryear. The link between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the—shamanistic, ‘enthusiastic’—therapy of Homeric poetry lies in the fact that each form claims a place in the healing of the self. The show is as much about us, the audience, as it is about the actor: ‘Shamans are audience-oriented; their performances are designed to involve, please, scare, and affect audiences.’³⁴ In An Iliad, the actor proposes that the true burden of performance is on him, not on us. The therapist helps the patient; the exorcist frees the possessed from a spiritual burden. The actor would arrogate the roles to himself. He is ‘the man who knows and remembers’.³⁵ Kane remembers so that we, the everyday citizens, can forget. At the same time, the proposition that An Iliad explicitly raises about the role of the actor, the exaltation of actor to exorcist, is essentially the issue that troubled Plato both in Ion and in Republic. Whereas Plato questions what the poet does as technē in Ion, Schechner makes the work of the exorcism explicitly ³¹ Chicago Tribune, 21 November 2011. ³² Schechner (1994), 174 5. ³³ Schechner (1994), 178 9. ³⁴ Schechner (1994), 183. ³⁵ Cited in Schechner (1994), 182.

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that of technique. What is more, the actor in modern performance theory takes on the larger social responsibility that Plato would give to the philosopher: that of ‘the man who knows and remembers’. This transfer, to a degree, of social and ethical responsibility from audience to the actor, from the many to the one, makes the actor either a jaw-dropping Superman (and perhaps even a scapegoat) or a fraud. Plato dismissed the tradition of epic performance, perhaps in favour of a style of inquiry that was textual, dialogic, and ultimately philosophical. Nevertheless, Kane’s rhapsody demonstrates the pay-offs to embodying epic, which transforms words into flesh and blood. In the first place, An Iliad helps to locate the genre of epic, given a performative turn, in a different place from Bakhtin. Rather than a monumental genre of time past, epic becomes the everyday, although its quotidian existence depends upon its relationship to the past tradition. An Iliad returns us to historical questions about the impact of performance on audiences by calling attention, through epic, to the actor, in ways that other genres might obscure. Finally, An Iliad calls attention to the Platonic question of the toll that performance takes on the actor, not as the disinvested rhapsode of Ion, but rather as the narrative poet of Plato’s Republic, whose roles call into question the nature of character itself, that of the poet and also of the audience. The epic performer remembers so that the audience can forget.

THE PERFORMATIVE TURN The two instantiations of epic performance I have explored show two different—though not necessarily sequential—approaches to how to treat an absence. Lima’s 1952 epic is a classically literary epic. However, despite its textual approach to epic, the poem highlights an absence in its transformation of words into a meaningful whole, ‘the Word becom[ing] Flesh’. On the other hand, An Iliad evidences a different turn in the physical performance of contemporary epic. Writers, playwrights, and directors seem to be addressing an absence in classical epic, that of the body, through the potentialities inherent in theatre. These two approaches, that of Lima and that of Peterson and O’Hare, are not necessarily diachronic; the same culture might well produce both approaches to epic simultaneously, as is the case in contemporary American society, evidenced if we put An Iliad alongside such literary texts as Christopher Logue’s War Music (2015) (although, this too was, of course, originally written for radio performance³⁶). However, it may well be significant ³⁶ See Power, Ch. 17 in this volume.

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that the performative turn is occurring within an American culture, whether of Brazil or of the United States, that has collectively reached maturity in terms of its understanding of how classical epic worked, a result of over a century of Western ‘discovery’ about the ancient genre. The divergent approaches represented in The Invention of Orpheus and An Iliad, moreover, demonstrate the potential pay-offs of either within a given culture. For Brazil, the history of lost bodies—of black slaves and those native to the land—necessitates an embodiment through the text, if any commemoration of those lives is possible. One can imagine such an approach in the United States as well, but the remnants of native and African languages and practices surface in Brazilian culture in a way that makes Lima’s approach visceral. The cultural milieu of endless war, on the other hand, has resulted in various attempts to address the times with reference to ancient epic. These include Shay’s approach in Achilles in Vietnam, Theater of War, and Ancient Greeks/Modern lives, to name only a few practices that allow a viewing of the modern war hero in light of the ancient text. The performative turn of An Iliad, where memorizing is essential, is an instance of such embodiment.

28 Performing Walcott, Performing Homer Omeros on Stage and Screen Justine McConnell

Although Derek Walcott was a prolific playwright, it was as a poet that he received most acclaim. From ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ (1962) to ‘The Schooner Flight’ (1979), from the autobiographical epic Another Life (1973) to the Homeric Omeros (1990), it is Walcott’s poetry that is most well known the world over. Yet within the Caribbean at least, his reputation as a dramatist sits prominently alongside his identity as poet. He founded The Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and led it until 1976; his plays, numbering at least forty,¹ continue to be regularly performed in the Caribbean; and for Walcott, the distinction between drama and poetry was, and should be, a blurred one. Discussing ‘The Schooner Flight’, Walcott declared it to be ‘a dramatic poem. Whenever a persona arrives, the expression of dialect is, in a way, an expression of different personae.’² In this way, although Omeros is not usually thought of as a performance piece, strong grounds can be made for approaching it from this perspective. It is also worth bearing in mind, though it will not form the subject of this chapter, that the permeable border between poetry and performance is in evidence in Walcott’s decision to write a play based on the Odyssey just two years after the publication of his most Homeric of poems, Omeros.³ As I will explore, not only are the reasons for considering Omeros

¹ The exact number is uncertain, with previously unknown plays still being uncovered by the archivists at the University of the West Indies, Mona, where Walcott’s early papers are held. Bruce King (2000) lists over forty plays (both published and unpublished), while Campbell (2008) suggests that the number is closer to eighty, though the latter may well be an overestimate. ² Campbell (2008). ³ The very title of Walcott’s play, which was first performed in 1992, foregrounds its identity as a performance piece: The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993). On this play, see Burian (1999); Hardwick (1996); and McConnell (2013a), 134 53.

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as a performance piece intertwined with the poem’s prominent Homeric intertexts, but much of the appeal of classical epic, for Walcott, lies in its performance dimensions. Even more pertinent for this volume, though, is the fact that Omeros has been performed. It is on three such performances that this chapter focuses: one was never realized, but can be traced in the draft scripts that Walcott penned for a film of Omeros; a second was staged by the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, having been adapted and directed by Bill Buckhurst; and a third is found in the artist Isaac Julien’s filmic installation piece, Paradise Omeros. Each of these reworks Walcott’s poem for performance in ways that reflect on the multiple oral traditions from which his poem draws, as well as on the intervening appropriation of those spoken forms into literary texts.

PERFORMING EPIC Derek Walcott famously resisted the labelling of his long poem Omeros as an epic. The reasons behind this are manifold: the imperialist reverberations of the epic genre;⁴ Walcott’s resistance to a Eurocentric glass being placed before his Caribbean poem as if this is the most valuable lens through which to view it;⁵ and the connotations of imitatio and mimicry that accompany being fitted into such a predesignated category. Yet, if each of these is borne in mind, there are a number of ways in which Omeros is indeed an epic poem. Walcott acknowledged this in the qualifications he added to his denial of its epic status: I do not think of it as an epic. Certainly not in the sense of epic design. Where are the battles? There are a few, I suppose. But ‘epic’ makes people think of great wars and warriors. That isn’t the Homer I was thinking of; I was thinking of Homer the poet of the seven seas.⁶

Walcott’s correction (‘That isn’t the Homer I was thinking of ’) acknowledges not only the ancient Greek intertext woven throughout his poem, but also his poem’s fundamentally oral, mutable, and epic nature. He offered a different dimension to the category of epic, recasting it as the domain of survivors of the Middle Passage: ‘But they crossed, they survived. There is the epical splendour.’⁷ This is ⁴ See e.g. Quint (1993). ⁵ Walcott (1997), 232. ⁶ Quoted by Bruckner (1990), 13; repr. in Hamner (1997), 396. On ‘seven seas’ in Omeros, and Walcott’s stance on epic here, see McConnell (2013a), 110 12. ⁷ Walcott (1990), 28.1, p. 149. All quotations from Omeros are to chapter and section followed by page numbers from this 1990 edition. Future references will be given in the text.

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to turn the traditional imperialistic use of epic on its head, and to assert that the true aristeia was to survive the horrors of slavery. Performability is crucial to Omeros even while its carefully wrought structure and layout on the page emphasize its written nature (every edition has kept the same page numbering, even though the chapter segmentation would allow some flexibility without wreaking havoc on the referencing). The poem opens with a performance of sorts, as Philoctete addresses a crowd of tourists. In telling them how he made his canoe, he launches into a dramatic tale: the men armed with axes are ‘murderers’, who ‘advance’ (p. 3) like an army towards the trees, which shake with fear, forewarned of their impending doom by the prophetic wind. The Iliadic resonances are clear in the military approach ushered in by the breeze (reminiscent of the wind that finally comes to Aulis), and in the ‘wounding’ (p. 3) of the trees, not to mention in the presence of Philoctete, whose namesake was fated to secure a Greek victory at Troy. The anthropomorphization of the trees recalls not only classical epics such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses,⁸ but also myths and folklore from a myriad of places, which have been retold orally.⁹ Rather than a straightforward act of ‘reception’, Walcott inserted Omeros into a narrative tradition that has always been interwoven with performance, and which is not defined by chronology.¹⁰ The refusal of chronology, which entails a pre-emptive repudiation of traditional models of reception, mimicry, and influence, dismantles the colonial rhetoric of immature newness (which reverberates through the term ‘New World’); at the same time, it is in sympathy with oral traditions which—unlike their written counterparts—have never been interested in temporal primacy or authorship. The emphasis on performability continues throughout the poem. It is found in the figure of the griot, whom Achille meets during his hallucinatory journey back to Africa; in the narrator’s acknowledgement to Omeros, immediately after declaring that he has never read the Odyssey in its entirety, that ‘I have always heard | your voice in that sea, master’ (56.3, p. 283); and in the etymology given for the name, Omeros (‘and O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was | both mother and sea in our Antillean patois, | os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes | and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore’

⁸ Prominent transformations into, and anthropomorphizations of, trees in Metamorphoses include the stories of Daphne (1.452 567), the Heliades (2.340 66), Baucis and Philemon (8.618 724), Dryope (9.326 93), the trees who gather around Orpheus (10.86 105), Cyparissus (10.106 42), Myrrha (10.298 502), and the Thracian women (11.67 84). ⁹ e.g. Aesop’s fable ‘The Oak and the Reed’, the Zulu tale of ‘The Spirit in the Tree’, or the Taíno myth from Hispaniola of men who did not return home before sunrise being turned into trees. On the latter, see Saunders (2005), 289. ¹⁰ Cf. Walcott, ‘The Muse of History’ in What the Twilight Says (1998), 36 64 and Harris (1999), 187: ‘We arrive backwards even as we voyage forwards. This is the phenomenon of simultaneity in the imagination of times past and future.’

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(2.3, p. 14)). Each of these prioritizes the oral over the written: sounds heard take precedence over words read. Revealingly, in an earlier draft of Omeros and continuing right into the proofs stage, the surf ’s ‘sibilant collar’ was spread not over a ‘lace’ shore but over a ‘printless’ one.¹¹ In Walcott’s mind, evidently, the resounding waves and their hissing surf encompass an island unoppressed by either the written word or the imprint of Man’s footsteps. Yet just a few pages earlier, in the published version of the text, the shoreline is indeed a ‘printed beach’. In that episode, Philoctete waves his fellow fisherman off from the beach at sunrise, unable to join them on account of his suppurating wound; the ‘printed’ shore he stands on then is surely not only riven with the footsteps of tourists, but is also the text of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. The St Lucian Philoctete embodies his ancient forebear, similarly unable to set out to sea and to work on account of his injury (Sophocles, Philoctetes 254–84). By contrast, when Walcott redefined the etymology of the name Omeros for its St Lucian context, he dislocated it from its canonical literary context and re-envisioned it for a contemporary Caribbean one, complete with its Antillean patois. Walcott brings together elements from Africa, ancient Greece, and the Caribbean in an act of syncretism characteristic of the Caribbean.¹² This syncretism resonates throughout the narrative of the poem (embodied in the very name and being of Achille, for example, or in the cure for Philoctete’s wound), and is likewise apparent in the poem’s exploration of orality and performance.¹³ Thus, the West African griot encountered by Achille, Omeros’ voice heard in the sea, and the islands’ indigenous nature evoked by the lace or printless shore, combine to form the Caribbean performance poetics which Omeros celebrates. This was a fundamental facet of the appeal of ancient epic for Walcott. His Nobel lecture, ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’,¹⁴ began by discussing a Trinidadian performance of Ramleela, the dramatization of the Hindu epic the Ramayana, indicating that for Walcott the performance of epic was crucial to its continued life in the Caribbean. Notwithstanding his

¹¹ Manuscript Collection 136, Box 10, Folder 2 Derek Walcott Papers held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. The line originally read ‘and spreads its sibilant lace on a printless shore’. ¹² See Benítez Rojo (2001), 11 16 on this syncretism of the Caribbean and its fundamental connection with performance, as well as the correspondences between the Greek and Yoruba pantheons. ¹³ Throughout the poem, St Lucian identity is posited as a syncretization of its African, European, and indigenous Caribbean roots. The cure that Ma Kilman finds for Philoctete’s wound exemplifies this syncretization: on her way back from the Catholic Mass, she is moved by an ancestral memory of healing plants; she successfully searches for the seed among the St Lucian woods a seed that was brought over by the sea swift from Africa, and which will heal Philoctete’s sore (47 9, pp. 235 50). ¹⁴ Walcott (1998), 65 84.

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own creation of a literary masterpiece in Omeros, both the poem itself and the film script of it that he subsequently wrote are frequently troubled by the written word. For Walcott, it is not so much that the orality of the Homeric epics permits experimentation in a way that other texts may not; rather, it is what orality signifies in the Caribbean that is important. When the priest smiles at Achille’s ‘misspelling’ of the name of his canoe, In God We Troust, the fisherman retorts ‘Leave it! Is God’ spelling and mine’ (1.2, p. 8). Achille denies the superiority of the written word, which is inflexibly and exclusively expected to take the form of the colonially imported language in which it arrived in the Caribbean, never incorporating the influences of its new surroundings. Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that ‘the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery’, an idea which is brought to the fore in Omeros at certain moments:¹⁵ the rage of Achille at being misunderstood by a camera for the spelling on his canoe was the same process by which men are simplified as if they were horses . . . ¹⁶ (59.3, p. 298)

Walcott’s Achille, unlike Homer’s, is not predominantly associated with anger. That Walcott transposed Achilles’ μῆνις (anger) to his own Achille at this moment signals the centrality of the legacy of slavery and colonial oppression to Omeros. Symbolized most prominently in Philoctete’s wound,¹⁷ Achille’s anger at the patronizing tourist gaze is another indicator of the ongoing impact of that legacy. The oral roots of epic can rid it of some of the historical, oppressive apparatus that is an integral part of so much of the Western literary canon. This is particularly true when the performance dimension is foregrounded; it is striking that even while Walcott wrote his poem, he aligned himself with performance poets. Evoking the ancient performers of Homeric epic, the rhapsodes, via the etymology of that term (ὁ ῥαψῳδός—‘one who stitches songs together’), Walcott declared that he ‘stitched’ qualities into his characters (5.2, p. 28) and ‘sang’ the tale of the St Lucian Achille (54.1, p. 320).

¹⁵ Lévi Strauss (2011), 299. Although Walcott and Lévi Strauss seem to be in agreement on this point, it is worth noting Walcott’s criticism of Lévi Strauss’s attitude to the Caribbean, made in his Nobel lecture, ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’ (Walcott (1998), 76 7). ¹⁶ The evocation of that other ‘tamer of horses’, Hector, who incited the rage of another Achille(s) is surely not coincidental here. ¹⁷ Wounds and scars are prominent within the poem (Plunkett, for example, also has a wound that troubles him); as Walcott declares, ‘affliction is one theme | of this work’ (Omeros 5.2, p. 28). See Ramazani (1997).

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Given this recurrent deliberation on the nature of the written and spoken word, it is unsurprising to discover that a performance of Omeros had been in Walcott’s mind since at least 1994. Two years earlier Walcott had been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company to write his play, The Odyssey: A Stage Version, which opened at The Other Place in Stratfordupon-Avon on 2 July 1992. Now it was to Omeros that his thoughts again returned: his papers held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto contain multiple drafts of a screenplay of Omeros that he began writing in 1994, which was due to be produced by PBS but never came to fruition.

O M E R O S ON FILM Among the many versions of Walcott’s film script, one opens with an explicit statement of intent to engage creatively and freely with the book version of Omeros; to appropriate and adapt it rather than to closely translate it into the medium of film. The opening scene sees the narrator and Plunkett chatting on the latter’s verandah, two books on a table nearby: Omeros itself and the historical account that Plunkett worked on throughout Omeros, now published as The Battle for Another Helen.¹⁸ The film’s opening lines are spoken by the narrator: Now that I’ve read your book, and you’ve read mine, Major Plunkett I’ve come to this frightening conclusion, sir. We were both wrong.

Signalling his intention to set the record straight—or at any rate to offer a new, alternative version—the film script proceeds to diverge significantly from the poem. Multiple versions of this draft script are held in the archives at Toronto, at various stages of completion, but unfortunately the film has never been made. Nevertheless, this opening scene is particularly fascinating both for its metacommentary on Walcott’s own process and for its suggestion that part of the fault in the books of the narrator and Plunkett may lie in their fixed, written form. Although film enables the permanent record of a performance, the medium itself straddles the unrepeatability of performance and the perpetual reiteration offered by film and recording technology.¹⁹ If the narrator, who we are encouraged to identify with Walcott himself, believes that he and Plunkett ‘were both wrong’, it is tempting to see Walcott’s ¹⁸ Manuscript Collection 136, Box 13, Folder 29 Derek Walcott Papers held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. ¹⁹ On comparisons of film and theatre, see e.g. Allardyce Nicoll (1936); André Bazin (1967), 76 124; Susan Sontag (1966).

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film script and the storyboards that he created to go alongside it as a correction of that earlier error.²⁰ The film gives Walcott a chance to tell the story of Omeros from a different angle, to alter its emphasis, to retell it both in a new mode and from an altered perspective. To treat his own published poem, in other words, much as one would treat an oral text, which has no singular instantiation of a tale. One of the most conspicuous facets of an oral tradition is the lack of one identifiable author. In a way far less true of written texts (unless the editorial hand is particularly strident and simultaneously acknowledged), performance texts are works of communal composition. Walcott’s film scripts are the work of his hand alone, but if the film had been made, he would have been compelled to relinquish sole authorship and entrust his work to the moulding hands of the director and its embodiment by the actors, not to mention the input of so many others who would also have worked on and shaped the film. Furthermore, unlike play-scripts, film scripts are seldom published: the film itself takes the place of the script, which, as that opening scene alerts us, is a different work of art altogether. When he adapted Omeros for the screen, then, Walcott relinquished a part of the sole authorship that his poetry (but not his dramatic work) enabled him to maintain. As the script stands, the nature of the error made by both the narrator and Plunkett is left undefined. The published poetic text of Omeros, however, identifies one mistake made by both of them: their inability to see St Lucia ‘with no Homeric shadow’ (54.2, p. 271). Throughout the poem, both the narrator and Plunkett keep seeing the people of St Lucia, and Helen in particular, as figures from Homeric epic. They both feel that by doing so, they are granting a kind of elevation to the men and women all around them; only towards the end do they see how misguided this is. As the poem’s narrator ponders the matter, he is faced with a brutal realization: ‘Hadn’t I made their poverty my paradise?’ (45.2, p. 228). This, no doubt, is one component of the error to which the film’s narrator alludes, but the presence of the books on the table and the form of the film script itself suggest that their other error is to have removed their narratives from the performance realm. The film, then, would right that wrong. Of course, Walcott’s Omeros itself is not entirely distanced from the realm of performance. In addition to the prioritization of the oral over the written that comes to the fore in the episodes of the griot in the Congo, the narrator and Omeros on the steps of St Martin’s in London, as well as in the etymology of ‘Omeros’, there is the metre of the poem. Although its form may discourage identification as a performance text at first glance, its metre belies such a strictly literary interpretation. Walcott described it as being composed in ²⁰ Walcott’s storyboards for the film of Omeros are also held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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‘rough-textured terza rima’,²¹ while Paul Breslin has observed that the way Walcott plays around with this metrical form is in keeping with the inclination of creole traditions to incorporate elements from a range of sources, just as Walcott here evokes Byron’s mock-heroic Don Juan as well as Dante’s Commedia.²² Indeed, Walcott’s ‘rough-textured terza rima’ is combined with metrical and melodic cadences derived from Caribbean calypso,²³ while Omeros within the poem speaks in a ‘Greek calypso’ (57.1, p. 286). These two forms both have their roots in oral traditions: Dante is thought to have developed terza rima from the troubadour’s sirventes song, deploying it alongside his radical use of vernacular Italian, while calypso took form on the slave plantations of Trinidad as a mode of subversive oral communication. The Toronto papers are crying out for a film-maker to bring Walcott’s cinematic vision to life. One striking example is the moment envisioned in the poem at 6.3. The storyboards render this with a shot of the St Lucian Helen picking her way between the sprawled bodies of sunbathing tourists; juxtaposed with the modern scene is an ancient one of the Greek Helen walking among the dead Trojans on the battlefield. A voice-over of Maud and Plunkett in conversation accompanies both scenes, with Maud lamenting Helen’s ingratitude, while Plunkett remarks that tourism is ‘a wound, like slavery. Beyond healing’.²⁴ Although the exploitative side of tourism is present in the poem (manifested in the tourists who ‘try taking [Philoctete’s] soul with their cameras’ (p. 3), or those who snap their fingers at Helen to call her over to take their order (p. 322)), in the film this has become even more prominent. The roles of Maud and Plunkett are likewise enlarged in the film version; perhaps because Walcott had grown even fonder of his fictional creations in the intervening years, or perhaps because he already had in mind his ideal actors for the roles and wanted the parts to be substantial enough to appeal to them.²⁵

OMEROS O N T H E LOND ON S TAGE The adaption of Omeros, staged at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2014 and 2015, was a far less radical dramatization of the published poem than that

²¹ Sampietro (n.d.). ²² Breslin (2001), 245. ²³ See Abani (2006). ²⁴ Manuscript Collection 136, Box 13, Folder 2 Derek Walcott Papers held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. ²⁵ In a scrawled out note in the margins, among other instructions for the rehearsal draft, Walcott has penned two names in capital letters, FINNEY and MIRREN: presumably his ideal casting of Plunkett and Maud would have been Albert Finney and Helen Mirren. Manuscript Collection 136, Box 13, Folder 3 Derek Walcott Papers held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

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envisioned by Walcott for the medium of film. Where Walcott imagined a large cast and multiple locations, Bill Buckhurst’s stage adaptation pared the poem right back to a cast of only two actors, who assumed the roles of all the characters within the poem. In this way, Buckhurst evoked the figure of the storyteller which is so prominent in the shape-shifting figure of Omeros/ the griot within the poem and melded together a storytelling tradition with a theatrical one, as the two actors assumed roles, embodying each of the different characters rather than just narrating their stories. The effect was reminiscent of what the Martiniquan writer Patrick Chamoiseau has termed ‘théâtre conté’, a ‘piece of theatre in story form’, which encapsulates the sense of European theatrical traditions blending with Caribbean oral storytelling traditions.²⁶ The Sam Wanamaker, lit as it is primarily by candlelight (the Playhouse is a recreation of an archetypal Jacobean indoor theatre), with steeply raked seating that has much of the audience leaning forward from three sides of the stage, contributed to the sense of traditional storytelling, as did the prominence of the music and the lack of stage effects or set changes (Fig. 28.1).

Fig. 28.1 Photo of Joseph Marcell in Omeros, by Derek Walcott, directed by Bill Buckhurst, in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe (2015). Photograph by Pete Le May. © Shakespeare’s Globe.

²⁶ Chamoiseau (1982).

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First staged in 2014, starring Joseph Marcell and Jade Anouka, with music by Tayo Akinbode, the production was reprised in 2015, this time with Joan Iyiola taking Anouka’s role. On both occasions it was well received though not widely reviewed, with critics remarking both on the impressive way that the two actors embodied so many characters and the effectiveness of the simplicity of the production.²⁷ That a poem could be adapted for the stage with so few changes being made to it is further evidence of the performance foundations that underpin Walcott’s epic poem.

ISAAC JULIEN’ S PARADISE OMEROS Isaac Julien’s 2002 installation piece, Paradise Omeros, describes itself as being ‘loosely based on’ Derek Walcott’s epic poem, Omeros, and Walcott himself collaborated on the project. Projected on to three separate screens curved round in a semicircle (recalling an ancient Greek theatre), at times each screen shows a different shot, at times the triptych combines to form a single image; the viewer shares a similar dislocation to that which the protagonist of the film is experiencing. The short film, twenty minutes in length, flits between St Lucia and London depicting episodes from the life of a young man in search of a sense of home and identity.²⁸ The film opens with Walcott reciting some of his own lines: because this is the Atlantic now, this great design of the triangular trade. Achille saw the ghost of his father’s face shoot up at the end of the line. (24.2, p. 130)

This is the cue for a close-up of Walcott’s own face, inserting Walcott into Julien’s film as a kind of Bloomian Oedipal father in an echo of the way Omeros, the wandering bard, features as a character in Walcott’s poem.²⁹ Later Walcott’s voice again intertwines moments of Omeros in an unfamiliar order, and supplements them with previously unpublished lines which were contributed by the poet after he had watched an early draft of the film.³⁰ In a richly evocative scene, the protagonist (played by Hansil Jules)— ²⁷ See the online reviews by Maryam Philpott, The Reviews Hub (2 June 2014), Eleanor Turney, A Younger Theatre (11 June 2014), and Lucy Brooks, CultureWhisper (15 August 2015). ²⁸ On the film and its rhizomatic engagement with Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’, see Pirker (2011). See also Erickson (2014). ²⁹ It is worth noting that Bloom’s ‘transumptive scheme’ or metalepsis, posited in A Map of Misreading (1975), resonates with Walcott’s own (milder) assertion that ‘if you think of art as a simultaneity that is inevitable in terms of certain people, then Joyce is a contemporary of Homer’ (Walcott (1997), 241). ³⁰ Walcott’s poem, written for the film, has been published as the preface to the Dublin exhibition catalogue, Isaac Julien (2005); see Erickson (2014), 20.

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still dressed in the black-tie uniform that he has worn as a waiter on the beach—walks slowly into the sea. The scene cuts to the seabed, and Walcott’s voice-over returns, splicing together passages from the start and end of the poem, both of which name the figure of Omeros and connect it inextricably with the Caribbean sea (56.1, p. 280; 2.3, p. 14). Pulled back to Walcott’s poem thus, the seabed recalls the hallucinatory journey that Achille made to Africa and the shipmate’s laughing suggestion that he might have walked along the seabed to get there (30.1, p. 157). Julien’s installation is far from being a filmed version of Walcott’s poem, however condensed. As Walcott has reimagined Homer for his own time and place (twentieth-century St Lucia), so in turn, Julien reimagines Walcott for his own time and place (the dawn of the twenty-first century in a transnational space of the Caribbean diaspora). Julien’s film does not feature the same cast of characters: there is no Achille, Hector, or Philoctete; no Ma Kilman, Plunkett, Maud, or Helen. And yet, just as Omeros engages with the Homeric epics, Paradise Omeros engages with Walcott’s poem, and with Milton and the epic tradition more broadly. As well as the title of Julien’s work indicating that Paradise Lost is an important intertext, the allusion to Milton’s epic is underlined by the film’s emphasis on the battle between good and evil which is embodied in the double retelling of the tussle between love and hate, which I will discuss in a moment. Walcott and Julien both trumpet their engagement with their literary predecessors in their titles and then proceed, partially at least, to fracture the connection by refusing to create their works in the shadow of their predecessor. As Julien describes it, the film ‘is using [Walcott’s] text as a springboard, using it as a meditation and then doing your own thing’.³¹ This fracturing of the connection between an older text and the newer one it helped inspire, is not to break completely with that source. Like a piece of glass riven with cracks yet still precariously holding its form, what we see displayed within their works are the scars. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Walcott expounded on the value of these very scars: Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. [ . . . ] This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vo cabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.³²

³¹ Julien, quoted in Steiner (2003).

³² Walcott (1998), 69.

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Walcott’s analysis here encapsulates the mode of reception in which both he and Julien engage. If Walcott’s Omeros is a response to the Homeric epics (as well as taking inspiration from other European canonical authors such as Virgil, Dante, and James Joyce), the ‘restoration’ that it enacts is specifically Caribbean. From the influence of the Martiniquan literary giant, Aimé Césaire³³ to the smatterings of Creole (‘our shards of vocabulary’) within the poem, which are integral even when brief and frequently translated; from the island’s ‘shattered histories’ that are the focus of Plunkett’s research to the tales of the African griot, and the performance rituals of the Boxing Day rite (55, pp. 272–7)—all of these contribute to rendering Walcott’s poem much more than a reworking of Homer set in a ‘second-rate Aegean’.³⁴ The denial of chronology, mentioned earlier, is a part of this: Walcott can take inspiration from his literary predecessors and yet refuse a position of temporal belatedness or derivative mimicry. Walcott’s poem reassembles disparate parts which were violently united and separated from each other by the history of slavery and colonialism; Julien takes the story forward one more step, to the St Lucian diaspora and those who have migrated (as Julien’s parents did) from St Lucia to London. At times the film’s three screens juxtapose startling images of the Caribbean sea, British race riots,³⁵ London council estates, and the silver football that functions in Julien’s film much like the sea-swift does in Walcott’s poem.³⁶ Just as the seaswift unites Walcott’s poem as it weaves in and out, so the silver football in Julien’s film traverses the multiple landscapes. Appearing in both St Lucia and London, and leading the film’s protagonist into the sea and towards the London scenes, the ball takes the place of the sea-swift that guides Walcott’s Achille towards Africa (24.3, pp. 130–1; also cf. 63.3, p. 319). Walcott and Julien both retain ‘icons and sacred vessels’ from their predecessors’ works, most notably in the figure of the storyteller, as if to emphasize that the oral storyteller is most worthy of being salvaged from the shattered ruins. Just as Walcott includes Omeros as a character within his poem, and has him refer to the Odyssey when he tells the narrator, ‘a drifter | is the hero of my book’ (p. 283), so too Julien enacts an equivalent manoeuvre by incorporating Walcott into his film. The two modern artists have transplanted the storyteller from one context to another, and in Walcott’s case, this action recurs repeatedly throughout the poem, as we see Seven Seas, Omeros, St-Omere, and the griot, all as related instantiations of each other.

³³ On the influence of Césaire and négritude on the wound imagery of Omeros, see Ramazani (2001), 59 61. ³⁴ Walcott (1997), 232. ³⁵ The images are highly reminiscent of, and may be taken from, the Bradford race riots that took place the previous year, in 2001. ³⁶ On the sea swift in Omeros, see Clayton (2004), 118 22; Davis (2008), 408 11.

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For Julien, another storyteller also features in his film. He reworks the famous ‘Love and Hate’ scene from Charles Laughton’s film, The Night of the Hunter (1955), in which Robert Mitchum tells the children the ‘story of life’, with the right hand (‘Love’) and the left hand (‘Hate’) doing battle, and the right emerging victorious in the end. In keeping with the visibility of the ‘chain of receptions’ that both Walcott and Julien deploy, the Night of the Hunter scene is appropriated via its reprise in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), with the gold rings spellings ‘LOVE’ and ‘HATE’.³⁷ Mitchum’s story is retold twice in Paradise Omeros, both times to the protagonist while he is working as a waiter. The first retelling is by a man on the beach (played by St Lucian poet, Kendel Hippolyte), speaking in Antillean Creole and brandishing the rings on his fingers; later, the tourist on the sun-lounger will retell it in English, once again flourishing the rings and again addressing the protagonist. It is as if the two men, retelling the same story, also stand for Walcott and Julien, likewise retelling the same (Homeric) story in different ways. Another striking transplantation from Walcott’s text to Julien’s is embodied by the protagonist’s fulfilment of a short passage of poetry that comes at the end of Omeros. Walcott, aligning himself with the ancient bards, writes that, I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son who never ascended in an elevator, who had no passport since the horizon needs none never begged nor borrowed, was nobody’s waiter. (64.1, p. 320)³⁸

The protagonist, who began the film as a waiter on the beach in St Lucia, ends it on a housing estate in London. We see him step into a descending lift, and watch as he and a young white man catch each other’s eye; it is unclear for a time whether the white man intends him harm, or whether the frisson between the two is romantic. But their final near-encounter (the film ends as they are on the cusp of meeting) follows the second retelling of the ‘Love and Hate’ tale, and seems to confirm that in this case too, love will win out in the end. Substantiating Julien’s allusion to this passage is the fact that Paradise Omeros’ protagonist, who steps out of the lift at the end of the film, began the film uniformed in black tie and serving drinks to a sunbather on the beach. He is somebody’s waiter, for sure, and as the film angle uncomfortably implies, he is our waiter: we watch him approach and loom over us with a tray and bottle of water, from an angle that could only mean that we are reclining on the sun-lounger too, just like the customer who we have not yet seen.

³⁷ Smith (2003). ³⁸ On this passage, see Farrell (1999), 281 3; McConnell (2013a), 114 15.

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The closeness of the two scenarios, the poetic and the filmic one, helps to underline the protagonist as Achille. Simultaneously, it brings to mind the homoerotic dimension of Achilles and Patroclus’ friendship, which is an element absent from Walcott’s text, but present in the Homeric epic and Julien’s film. Much of Julien’s work, most notably his 1989 award-winning film, Looking for Langston, has explored homoeroticism and homophobia. At the same time, what Julien does here again echoes what Walcott earlier did: Walcott created a new Achilles-figure in Omeros, one not too closely tied to his Homeric namesake, and so too Julien takes Walcott’s Achille and refigures him once again, now as a homosexual man who will descend in an elevator, will have a passport and travel, and will be a waiter. This freedom to adapt and rework source material into a new shape is, of course, at the heart of a storyteller’s role. Derek Walcott’s Omeros may not have been performed as often as one might have hoped, and the fact that his film script has not (yet . . . ) been produced is a pity. Yet the existence of such a rich script, alongside the stage adaptation by Bill Buckhurst and the filmic reception that is Paradise Omeros, all testify to the poem’s potential as a performance piece. That potential does not just spring from a vibrant story that can support the narrative medium of a range of genres (as any good tale can). It is rooted in the poem’s own roots, which are found in the orally composed Homeric epics, in the Caribbean traditions of oral storytelling, in Walcott’s extensive experience of drama and theatre, and in the way these have evolved and been deployed over time. In Walcott’s Omeros, performance is so central to the poem that its dramatization was almost inevitable. Like the ring-composition of classical epic, the creation of Omeros grew out of performance, and in Julien and Buckhurst’s works, returns to performance once more.³⁹

³⁹ I am very grateful to Jennifer Toews at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library for her expertise and generosity in accommodating my research.

V High and Low

29 ‘Of arms and the man’ Thersites in Early Modern English Drama Claire Kenward

Abacke, geve me roume! in my way do ye not stand, For if ye do I wyll soone laye you lowe. In Homere of my actes ye have red I trow: Neyther Agamemnon nor Ulysses I spared to checke They coulde not bringe me to be at theyr becke. (3 7)

With these lines, the character of Thersites announces his arrival on the English stage, c.1537, in a performance of the anonymous comic interlude Thersites—commonly attributed to Eton master, Nicholas Udall. Published in 1562 as A New Enterlude Called Thersytes, the comedy is an elaborate expansion of an earlier Latin dialogue by the influential French humanist, Ravisius Textor.¹ Also entitled Thersites (and printed posthumously in Paris, 1530), Textor’s 267-line dialogue is increased to over 900 lines plus stage directions.² The comprehensive additions and elaborations in the English version include Thersites’ opening soliloquy: while Textor’s dialogue begins with Thersites demanding armour from Vulcan (Mulciber in Udall), the vernacular Thersites addresses his audience, introducing not only himself but also a pervasive

¹ Quotations from the English Thersites and Textor’s Thersites (in a translation by Axton) cite line numbers from Axton (1982), 35 63, 139 55 respectively and are given in the text. Axton discusses the debate surrounding authorship at 1 8; I follow the standard attribution and refer throughout to ‘Udall’s interlude’. ² Udall replicates Textor’s plot whereby Thersites convinces Vulcan to equip him with armour worthy of Greek heroes, then boasts of his martial prowess; Thersites is terrified by a snail but defeats it in battle. A soldier challenges Thersites, who tries to hide behind his Mother (Mater) but he is chased offstage leaving his weapons behind. Udall’s most extensive addition is the inclusion of a second plot with an overtly anti papal edge in which Mater uses witchcraft to cure Telemachus of worms.

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metatheatricality, and explicit intertextuality, that is scarce in the neo-Latin source. The traditional dramatic formulation—‘Abacke, geve me roume’—by which performers from early mummings onwards made their way through an audience to a playing space,³ is here combined with bombastic threats against the spectators and twenty-one lines of exposition before Thersites reaches Mulciber’s onstage blacksmith’s ‘shop’ (21). Presumably menacing spectators with the ‘clubbe uppon his necke’, this mock-Hercules locates his identity—‘[c]alled Thersites’, ‘of late from the sege of Troye’ (2, 8)—in the audience’s memory of reading about his exploits ‘[i]n Homere’ (5). Emerging from among the spectators, the first Thersites on an English stage also emerges, or so he claims, straight out of Homer’s epic. Despite the educationally elite audiences implied by the interlude’s original performance at Court and/or at Oxford,⁴ Thersites’ blithe assumption that his spectators have read about him in Homer should not, of course, be taken as proof of their familiarity with Homer’s text. It does, however, evidence the original audience’s assumed familiarity with the idea of Homer and his Iliad. Ingrained, typically ironic, allusions to Homer run throughout the interlude (discussed below), and while they do not rely on precise textual details from the Iliad, the English Thersites’ additional, explicit reference to reading Homer’s work at the opening of the play is a direct engagement with classical epic. Thersites draws the spectators’ attention to an ancient offstage book, prompting them to understand him comparatively, in relation to their expectations of whatever it is that ‘Homer’—and Homer’s Thersites—means to them. Thersites’ classical namedrop authenticates his identity; it is the first of his unrelenting boasts, one by which he locates his provenance in a text that, although obscure in 1530s England, had long since gained canonical status.⁵ This chapter examines the intersection between staged versions of the character Thersites and the period’s ongoing reception of Homer’s Iliad. Forty years or so after the Thersites interlude was performed, the Iliad would become increasingly accessible in England in scholarly Greek, Latin, and parallel editions, as well as an increasing number of European vernacular translations. In 1581 Arthur Hall published the first, partial, English-language version Ten Books of Homers Iliades translated out of French. George Chapman’s decisive English translation (using Jean de Sponde’s influential 1583 Greek-Latin edition) appeared in intermittent stages, with Thersites present (as he is in Hall’s translation) in each edition: seven books in 1598 ³ See Chambers (1903), 1.205; Wickham (1959 81), 1.191 ff. ⁴ See Axton (1982), 12 13; Wiggins and Richardson (2012), 46 7. ⁵ The misleading suggestion that Homer’s text was at hand was a rhetorical trope with an extensive history: Chaucer, for example, instructs readers of Troilus and Criseyde, c.1380s, that if they wish to read about Troy’s destruction they can easily do so: ‘In Omer, or in Dares or in [Dictys]’ (1.146).

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(Books 1–2 and 7–11) as well as Achilles Shield (an extract from Book 18); the first twelve books in 1609, and all twenty-four, with revisions to the earlier versions, in 1611. Around 1602, in the midst of Chapman’s translation project, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida notoriously returned Homer’s Thersites to the English stage. Whether we believe the first Quarto’s claim that Shakespeare’s play was ‘[a]cted by the King’s Majesty’s Servants at the Globe’ (title page), or the second Quarto’s claim that it was ‘never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar’ (Epistle), or whether the intended audience was restricted to the educated members of the Inns of Court,⁶ around 1611 Thomas Heywood would introduce a similar Thersites, in his two-part Iron Age, to the diverse audiences of ‘three severall Theaters’ across London, including the Red Bull (Fig. 29.1).⁷ Traditional scholarship has judged these Thersites plays as tainting their Homeric subject matter, travestying high epic into low, scurrilous entertainment for schoolboys or the playhouse’s uneducated groundlings. In Thersites, recurring fart-jokes, Telemachus’ worm infection, and Thersites’ battle with a snail are clearly designed to amuse students at end-of-term frivolities, rather than dramatize classical epic. For Shakespeare and Heywood, reliance on Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye as a major source led the Cambridge-educated Heywood to be seen as an ‘avowed classicist’, ‘compelled by poverty to pander to the vulgar’.⁸ In 1915 John Tatlock urged his peers to qualify their condemnation of Shakespeare’s Troilus by arguing that it was not a wilful crime against Homer’s epic, but rather a cultural inevitability. Using Heywood’s Iron Age as proof, Tatlock asserts that lack of Homeric dignity is unavoidable when, unaware of Homer’s authority over the subject, the story of Troy is approached (by Shakespeare, Heywood, and their spectators) with ‘a mind mostly full of Caxton’.⁹ Caxton’s Recuyell, which enjoyed at least thirteen reprints between 1473 and 1702, is representative of the cultural inheritance of the medieval romance epics that continued to dominate the telling of Troy long after Homer’s text became accessible. The ultimate source material for this so-called antiHomeric tradition is the spurious eyewitness account of Dares (and to a lesser extent Dictys),¹⁰ via the romance narratives of continental Europe (such as Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (c.1160), Guido delle Colonne’s Latin Historia destructionis Troiae (1287), and the third book of Lefèvre’s French Recueil des histoires de Troie (added after 1464)), which were reimagined in English versions by Chaucer, Lydgate, and Caxton. This alternative tradition has no Thersites; consequently, Thersites’ presence is something of an intertextual token for Homer’s Iliad. Thus, since Samuel Johnson onwards, Shakespeare’s Thersites has been seen as evidence of Shakespeare’s familiarity ⁶ See Elton (2000). ⁹ Tatlock (1915), 761.

⁷ Heywood (1632), 1.A4v. ⁸ Clark (1922), 221. ¹⁰ On Dares and Dictys, see Frazer (1966).

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Fig. 29.1 Title page to Thomas Heywood’s The Second Part of the Iron Age (1632).

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with the Iliad via Chapman’s translation.¹¹ Numerous studies examine the relationship between Shakespeare’s Troilus and Chapman’s Iliad; and, more recently, the textual relationship between Chapman and Heywood’s Iron Age has begun to receive similar attention, challenging the traditional judgement that his play is little more than a Shakespearean borrowing.¹² However, this focus on the textual relation of the two plays to Chapman’s Iliad leaves little room to consider the wider cultural conception of Thersites.¹³ Shakespeare apparently amplifies a handful of Chapman’s lines into arguably the most significant character in his Trojan War: ‘[Shakespeare] turns Thersites into the play’s ethical prism, the fulcrum at which its conflicting perspectives intersect’.¹⁴ Heywood expands Thersites’ role further still: we see him both before and after the war, and he forms a comic doubleact with (Virgil’s) Synon. Looking beyond Chapman’s Homer, this chapter examines the additional roots of the early modern conception of Thersites, of which I consider Udall’s interlude to be representative. What was the early modern understanding of Thersites before Homer’s Iliad was easily accessible? What, if not the Iliad, forms the ‘horizon of expectations’ by which Shakespeare’s and Heywood’s spectators comparatively read the onstage Thersites?¹⁵ And finally, what does it mean for the reception of Homer’s epic when this peculiarly English Thersites is ‘returned’ to the Trojan War on Shakespeare’s and Heywood’s stages?

PLAYING S AUCY JACK: OVID, LUCIAN, AND JUV ENAL The Iliad was regularly summarized, and deferred to, in rhetorical handbooks, educational manuals, dictionaries, and commentaries across the early modern period. Erasmus’ On the Method of Study positioned Homer as ‘the father of all myth’—a sentiment echoed, for example, in Thomas Elyot’s The Governor, which describes ‘noble Homer: from whom, as from a fountayne, proceeded al eloquence and lerning’.¹⁶ Among such references the notion of Homer’s ¹¹ Johnson (1810), 217 18. ¹² See Tatlock (1915), Schanzer (1960), Palmer (1982), Nuttall (2004), Demetriou (2008), Wolfe (2008 and 2015a), Bevington (2015), Coffin (2017), and Kenward (2017). While Heywood’s Iron Age is undoubtedly a response to Shakespeare’s Troilus, Shakespeare’s play is almost certainly the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s dramatic answer to the wave of around seven (lost) Trojan and Greek themed dramas by the Admiral’s Men at the Rose towards the end of the 1590s; see Teramura (2014). ¹³ Tatlock (1915), 740 n. 36 set the precedent, declaring Thersites ‘little changed from Il. ii.212 277. His abjectness, cowardice, and scurrility in Homer are simply extended, regularized, and accounted for in Shakespeare by his position as the Fool.’ ¹⁴ Wolfe (2015a), 302. ¹⁵ Jauss (1970), passim. ¹⁶ Erasmus (1978), 673; Elyot (1537), 29.

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Thersites was also transmitted, from brief entries in Elyot’s Dictionary (1538) and Rainolde’s Foundacion of rhetorike (1563), for example, to extensive descriptions in Cox’s The arte or crafte of rhethoryke (1524), and Erasmus’ highly influential Apophthegmes (1531): ‘Homerus in his secounde volume of his [ . . . ] Ilias’, ‘describeth [ . . . ] Thersites, a pratleer bee ye sure [ . . . ]. All the Grekes did hym, deride and mocke, And had hym, as their commen laughing stocke.’¹⁷ This English translation, by the interlude’s potential author, Udall, concentrates on Thersites’ physical deformities: ‘Squyn-yied’, ‘Lame of one leg’, ‘croump shouldered’, ‘shrunken’, with a head ‘like a tankarde or sugarlofe’ and ‘three heares on [it], like a drowned ratte’.¹⁸ For Kimbrough, Erasmus’/Udall’s description and the interlude, in both performance and later publication, are significant examples of the numerous references by which Thersites ‘had a means of continuous currency [while] the Iliad was forgotten [ . . . ] and he descended to the Elizabethans with no necessary dependence on Homer’.¹⁹ However, as the examples above attest, in the majority of references to Thersites, Homer, if not always his Iliad, is named. Thersites, even adrift from the Iliad, is consistently linked to ‘Homer’. Indicative that second- or third-hand knowledge of the Iliad is not necessarily corrupt or imprecise, the allusions to Homer’s epic in the Thersites interlude typically generate humour by knowingly subverting expectations. Thus Thersites’ initial boast relies on the audience’s awareness that he is misrepresenting the dynamic between himself, Agamemnon, and Odysseus; by specifying disputes with them, Thersites accurately recalls the Iliad but ironically omits Odysseus’ violent silencing of his ineffective verbal ‘checkes’ (6; Iliad 2.212–69). The fact that Thersites arrives onstage with only a club: ‘retourned [from Troy] where all my harness I lost’ (8–9), subtly recalls Odysseus’ final threat to strip him bare and beat him from the camp (Iliad 2.261–5). Beyond the opening soliloquy, Udall again gestures to this episode in his main addition to Textor’s plot: Odysseus’ son Telemachus delivers a letter from his father incongruously asking for forgiveness for his treatment of Thersites at Troy: I am very sorye When I cast in memory The great unkyndnes . . . .

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With whiche I dyd you moleste And gave you sorye reast; The cause thereof truly: Nothing but verye envye. (539 56) ¹⁷ Erasmus (1542), 180r. Cf. Melanchthon reproduced Thersites’ speech from the Iliad, plus Latin translations and a commentary, in Grammatica Graeca (1527). ¹⁸ fo. 180r v. ¹⁹ Kimbrough (1964), 174.

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Again the Iliad is cast as an intertextual memory, recalled by characters who reframe the memory to their own advantage. Here, it is Ulysses’ letter that works against the audience’s understanding of the epic: to flatter Thersites, Ulysses outrageously claims that his violence was motivated only by ‘envye’ (556). In another intertextual memory, the English Thersites specifically fears, when threatened by the soldier, that he will suffer like Hector: ‘if they [ . . . ] here me fynde | To their horses tayles they wyll me bynde’ (491–2), a contrast to Textor’s Thersites who simply fears that he will be ‘destroyed’ (233). If Udall accentuates Thersites’ link to the Iliad over Textor’s more general evocation of his past, both interludes offer an ironic dramatization of what was widely understood to be one of the staple ‘epic conventions’—the arming of the hero.²⁰ Virgil (Aeneid 8.370–453) helped to establish the convention by following Homer (Iliad 18.368–616) and introducing a descriptive passage devoted to the arming of the hero in divinely wrought armour, made by the god Hephaestus (aligned with Vulcan/Mulciber). Textor ironically converts the trope into the drama’s essential plot as Vulcan equips the unworthy Thersites with javelin, pike, sword, greaves, corselet, and helmet, each of which is compared to a catalogue of mythological precedents such as Jupiter’s lightning bolts (13–14) and the ‘Amazonian axe’ (42). Udall follows Textor, although the armour and the comparisons are translated into a uniquely English idiom: the helmet becomes a ‘sallet’, enabling an extended series of puns in which Mulciber thinks he is being asked for a ‘salad’ (35–41, 48, 52–3); the heroic greaves are ‘briggen yrons’ (169), and the corselet that can withstand the weight of ‘rocky Olympus’ (Textor, 48) is now a ‘habergyn’ that withstands the ‘Malverne hylles’ (114). The ‘Libyan lion’ (18), ‘bulls’, ‘wild boars’ (65), and ‘dragons’ (69) that in Textor evoke beasts faced by classical heroes, are bathetically undercut in Udall by the far less fearsome ‘Lyons on Cotsolde’ (124): colloquial slang for Cotswold sheep. In ironically dramatizing the arming of the hero, both Textor’s and Udall’s Thersites act as implicit commentaries on classical epic and its heroes. In Homer (and Virgil), the magnificent armour signals the hero’s inherent worth. Decked in the same divinely wrought armour, Udall’s Thersites claims to aspire to epic feats: ‘I wyll seeke adventures, yea, and that I wyll not cease’ (235), ‘I wyll not rest | Tyll I have fought with some man or wylde beast’ (282–3). Wearing Mulciber’s indestructible helmet, Thersites declares that ‘Hercules in comparison to me was but a boye’ (88); believing the armour to

²⁰ Brumble (1998), 106 14. For a fuller discussion on the early modern understanding of ‘epic conventions’, see Donker and Muldrow (1982), 108 18.

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be an accurate signifier of her son’s worth, Thersites’ mother begs him not to endanger himself: ‘Wyll ye committe to battayles daungerous | Youre lyfe that is to me so precious?’ (268–9). But arms do not make the man, as Thersites, again casting the audience as his confidant, reveals: Felowes, kepe my counsel: by the masse, I doo but cracke [boast] . . . . . . . . . . But yet I wyll make her believe that I am a man. Thincke you that I wyll fight? No, no . . . (371 4)

Despite his matchless armour, Thersites intends to do battle only if he finds his foe ‘aslepe’ or if ‘his armes and his fete be [ . . . ] fast bounde’ (376, 378); the ignoble opportunist is happy only to look the part of the epic warrior. The interludes subtly construct Thersites as an anti-Achilles, through various details: Vulcan’s armour, Mater’s desire to protect her son from war and hiding him behind her skirts, and Thersites’ dropping of his weapons to escape the Soldier. Collectively, these offer a reversal of the moment on Skyros in which Achilles, disguised as a girl by his mother to protect him from the Trojan War, reveals his true identity when he picks up the weapons deliberately dropped by Odysseus (Statius, Achilleid Book 1). In their comic inversions, both interludes not only prove, as Miles puts it in his epilogue, ‘that the best men in the hoost | Be not suche that use to bragge moste’ (892–3), but also implicitly question the notion of what constitutes hero and whether conventional signifiers can be trusted. The interludes’ concern for what makes a hero also points to alternative classical precedents for Thersites beyond the second- and third-hand references to the Iliad, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Juvenal’s Satires, and Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, Menippius, and A True Story. Ovid and to a lesser extent Lucian occupied a key position in the grammar schools’ humanist curricula, while Juvenal was often quoted, and despite the numerous references to Homer’s Thersites, it would have been in these texts that Thersites was first and most frequently encountered.²¹ Although Textor’s dialogue is an original composition, passing references to Thersites in both the Satires and Metamorphoses (13.232–3) establish an association between Thersites and Achilles’ divine armour. In Satires (8.269–71), here loosely translated by Thomas Twyne in his The schoolemaster (1576), parentage and illegitimacy are presented as less important than a man’s deeds (on the battlefield) in determining his worth: ²¹ See Mack (2002) and (2006) and Baldwin (1944) for details of the early modern curricula; for the dominance of Ovid, see Enterline (2000); for the influence of Lucian, see Rhodes (2015); for Juvenal, see Green (2016).

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I rather had Thersites son thou were, so that thou might Like Pyrrhus beare Vulcanus Armes in midst of Martial fight. Then if Achill[e]s should beget one like Thersites foule . . . (2.4)

The son of Thersites who acts as bravely as the bastard Pyrrhus would be worthier, and so rightly wear Vulcan’s armour, than a legitimate son of Achilles who behaves like the coward Thersites. Twyne adds an additional final line to Juvenal, ensuring that his English readers fully appreciate Thersites’ character as a ‘dastard wretch, that could do naught, but prattle, scould & skoule’ (2.4). Similarly, Thersites only appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses within an anecdote recited as evidence in the dispute between Ajax and Ulysses over who is more deserving of Achilles’ armour. For Ovid’s Ulysses, silencing Thersites evidences his own heroism, making him worthy of inheriting Achilles’ mantle: Then Agamemnon call’d Toogither all the capteines who with feare were yit appall’d. But Ajax durst not then once creake. Yit durst Thersites bee So bold as rayle uppon the kings, and he was payd by mee For playing so the sawcye Jacke.²²

In Ovid, as in Udall’s interlude, Thersites’ verbal attack on Agamemnon and Odysseus’ response is an intertextual memory of Homer’s Iliad by a Homeric character in a post-war setting. Udall’s Thersites manipulates that memory to boast of his own prowess, his Ulysses redefines it to flatter his foe; similarly, Ovid’s Ulysses recites and reframes the moment as evidence of his own valour, offering a commentary on the incident ‘enacted’ in the Iliad, placing almost as much attention on Ajax’s silence as Thersites’ railing. Arthur Golding’s prominent translation of the Metamorphoses, first printed in 1567, five years after the English Thersites was published, expands on Ovid with the inclusion of an anachronistic theatrical metaphor: ‘he was payd by mee | For playing so the sawcye Jacke’ (161). For Golding’s Ulysses, Thersites performs the role of Saucy Jack—a stock character that developed as a variant of the medieval morality plays’ Vice figure: a commoner (Jack), insolent towards superiors (saucy), a clowning rogue who lives off his wits, whose performance is designed to provoke laughter as he bends or disregards conventional ethics for monetary gain or to save his skin.²³ It is perhaps worth noting that, although early textual evidence for mummers’ plays is scarce, at some point in the evolution of provincial folk plays, Saucy Jack’s depiction coincidentally collides with that of Homer’s Thersites: ‘Saucy Jack, who has a hump, is dressed in rough working clothes, and his uncouthness ²² Trans. Golding (1567), 161. ²³ Smith (2000) examines Shakespeare’s clowns as versions of the Saucy Jack trope.

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must be emphasized according to local tradition.’²⁴ Golding’s metaphor, although anachronistic, captures more of the ‘original’ Homeric moment by recalling the Iliad’s description of Thersites as saying ‘whatever he thought would raise a laugh among the Argives’ (Iliad 2.215–16). This synthesis of Thersites with a stock character from the medieval folk-play traditions of Northern Europe, while a useful metaphor in Golding’s translation, had already been achieved onstage, as we have seen, in Textor’s and Udall’s interludes, particularly so in the English version. Udall’s metatheatrical additions replicate conventions that grew up around Vice figures: from Thersites’ stock opening phrase, his repeated asides to the audience, comic weeping as he begs his mother to save him (490), persistent wordplay, punning, and fast-paced nonsense rhymes (‘the tryflinge tabborer, trowbler of tunys, | Wyll pyke Peter Pybaker a penyworth of prunes’ (661–2)), to his bawdy or scatological humour (‘She gyrded oute a farte | That made me to starte | I thyncke hyr buttockes dyd smarte’ (844–6)), and confusion of identities (‘Where is Robin John and Little Hode?’ (318)).²⁵ The addition of bathetic, anachronistic colloquial details, such as the description of Ulysses’ ‘minstrelsy | That shall pype “Hankyn Boby”’ (573–4) and the naming of Oxford localities (‘Cumnor’, ‘Sydnam’, and ‘Hinksey’ (660, 659, 745)), again fuse the Homeric character with provincial English folk plays. Moreover, the climactic centrepiece of both interludes, Thersites’ combat with the snail, enacts a medieval proverb for cowardice (an armed knight battling a snail) common to France and England, which not only had a long-established iconographic history in manuscript marginalia, but also, as Axton argues, a number of humorous literary depictions that may well have been intended for rudimentary performance.²⁶ However, the cowardly knight is now clad in armour worthy of Achilles, and Thersites reacts to the snail as if it is a mythical beast: ‘the monster cometh toward me styll; | Excepte I fyghte manfully, it wyll me surely kyll’ (443–4). The ensuing battle offers a symbolic mirroring: despite its size (performed by a boy-player), its impressive armour and ‘armed browe’ (389; its shell and horns), Thersites’ opponent is still only a snail, just as the armed Thersites is still only a coward. In contrast to the passing references to Thersites in Ovid and Juvenal, Lucian provides a model for dramatizing Homer’s hunchback. Thersites appears in the underworld in Dialogues of the Dead, disputing with Nireus over which of them is more handsome—a quarrel that they ask the visiting Menippus to settle (30/25).²⁷ Nireus, quoting the Iliad, declares himself to be ²⁴ Kennedy (1930), 32; cf. Brown (1952), 33. ²⁵ Happé (1964) examines the evolution of Vice in folk plays. ²⁶ Axton (1982), 8 9. Just as the literary descriptions can be read as scripts with implicit stage directions, accompanying woodcuts (in which the snail is atop a plinth) are suggestive of a means of concealing a performer to operate the snail. ²⁷ Erasmus’ Latin translation was printed in London in 1528 and 1531.

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‘son of Charops and Aglaea, “handsomest man of all who came to Troy”’ and urges Menippus to ‘ask Homer what I was like’ (30/25; cf. Iliad 2.672–3). Thersites, however, declares that even if ‘Homer the blind’ described him as having ‘a sugarloaf head, and thin hair’, he is now just as handsome as Nireus, and has been judged as such by Minos. Menippus agrees, stating that ‘your bones are no different here’, in ‘Hades all are equal’ (30/25). As Kim observes, the ‘impression one gets from the dialogue is not only that Nireus and Thersites are Homeric characters, defined and embodied by Homer’s verses, but also that they are fully conscious of that fact’.²⁸ Lucian’s explicit, playful intertextual references to the Iliad repeatedly place Homer on the same diegetic level as his characters. Thus, in an earlier Dialogue, when Menippus is shown the corpses of Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus, he addresses Homer directly: ‘Dear me, Homer, how the central figures of your epics have been cast to the ground and lie unrecognizable and ugly, all so much dust and rubbish’ (6/20). In Lucian’s Menippus (15–16), this notion, that death strips away the epic certainty surrounding identity, is again associated with an inability to distinguish Homeric heroes from Thersites: for I, seeing so many withered carkases lying in a place together, and all of one likenes, looking fearefully and gastly with their bare teeth [ . . . ] made a question to my selfe, how I should know Thersites from the beautifull Nireus, [ . . . ]. Which when I beheld, I thought I might compare the life of man to nothing so well, as to a long shew or pageant, in which fortune was the setter out.²⁹

Lucian’s imagery reverberates across the early modern period—although the more obscure Homeric character of Nireus is frequently replaced with that of England’s heroic ancestor Hector, or the Greek champion Ajax. For example, in describing the vicissitudes of Fortune, Lydgate’s version of Boccaccio’s The Fall of Princes, states that she is ‘Nowe a cowarde durst nat come in prees | Nowe sumwhile hardy as a lyon | Nowe lyke Ector nowe dredefull Thersites’.³⁰ In 1571, Thomas Hill harnesses the horror of being unable ‘to find out and know Thersites from the mighty Hector’ in real life, as a justification for his book on physiognomy: ‘If ever this were in any age a necessary science, then no doubt in this our time, being moste perverse and wicked [ . . . ] For who doth not see in our dayes, how the impudent Thersites [and] the subtill Ulysses [ . . . ] do rage.’³¹ That Shakespeare, too, is aware of this post-Homeric classical aphorism is evident from Cymbeline (c.1610), in which Guiderius states: ‘Thersites’ body is as good as Ajax’, | When neither are alive’ (4.2.252–3). Thus, by the time the Iliad began circulating in England, an ²⁸ Kim (2010), 160. Cf. Lucian’s True Story which describes a court case brought against Homer by Thersites regarding his depiction in the Iliad; Homer, with Ulysses acting as his advocate, is acquitted (2.20). ²⁹ Trans. Hickes and Hickes (1634), 38. ³⁰ Lydgate (1494), 6.C2v. ³¹ Hill (1571), Epistle.

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expanded notion of Thersites had been established, accentuating his physical deformation and vitriolic railing. This early modern Thersites can be seen as an intertextual conglomerate, formed via Ovid’s, Juvenal’s, and Lucian’s receptions of Homer. Via Juvenal and Ovid an association is made with Achilles’ armour, and via Lucian the context of questioning heroic worth becomes repeatedly attached to Thersites’ body. Udall’s Thersites merges these concerns with folk-play conventions, depicting its eponymous antihero as a quintessential commoner clown—an opportune resemblance that is echoed in Golding’s Metamorphoses. In each of these receptions Thersites is located, or remembered, post-Troy but looks back to his representation in the Iliad. However, when this early modern Thersites returns to the English stage, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Heywood’s Iron Age, he is effectively ‘returned’ to this Homeric past.

‘ I N T R O Y T H E R E L I E S T H E SC E N E ’ The armed prologue to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida has long been considered a reflection, satirical or otherwise, of a high epic style, which introduces not only an epic vocabulary but also an epic structure to the play.³² Yet after this epic narrator has left the stage, the play starts with its hero, Troilus, calling for his armour to be removed (1.1.1): the antithesis of epic’s arming of the hero and an immediate denial of the action anticipated by the armed prologue. The anonymous suit of armour reappears in the play’s final act—‘Enter one in (sumptuous) armour’ (5.6.26)—where Hector catches sight of it: Stand, stand, thou Greek! Thou art a goodly mark. No? Wilt thou not? I like thy armour well. I’ll frush it and unlock the rivets all, But I’ll be master of it. [ . . . ] Why then, fly on; I’ll hunt thee for thy hide. (5.6.27 31)

This incident comes from Caxton and the medieval tradition, in which Hector’s death is typically precipitated by a moment of greed in which he fails to uphold the standards of chivalry, leaving himself exposed to Achilles’ fatal attack.³³ In Shakespeare, there are two rapid, intervening scenes before ³² See Burrow, Ch. 3 in this volume. ³³ See Caxton (1473), D.I.307; Lydgate (1513), R6r; and also the fourteenth century Seege or Batayle of Troye (anon.), which Troyer (2004) convincingly argues was a burlesque minstrel performance and in which Achilles ‘smites’ Hector ‘yn at the fondement’ as he stoops to pick up a pretty helmet (l.1500, quoted in Troyer 2004).

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Hector returns to the stage ‘dragging the one in sumptuous armour’ (5.9): first, Achilles instructs his Myrmidons to focus solely on collectively finding and killing Hector, and second a bastard son of Priam attempts to fight with Thersites who runs away, making his final exit of the play, exclaiming: ‘I love bastards. I am bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour’ (5.8.8–10). Juvenal’s consideration of parentage and valour on the battlefield is thus played out ad absurdum by Thersites’ encounter with Priam’s valiant bastard; and, between the appearance of the ‘goodly armour’ (5.9.2) on the battlefield and the murder of its owner, an act which debases Hector, there are two scenes of cowardice in which Thersites and Achilles become moral equivalents. When Hector returns and strips the sumptuous armour, he declares the body within to be a ‘[m]ost putrifièd core’ (5.9.1). The Myrmidons now murder Hector, adding his unarmed corpse to the stripped ‘putrifièd’ body of the Prologue. As the play’s epic signifier collides with the medieval tradition, epic aspiration is exposed as a superficial fiction. As soon as Hector is murdered, Achilles commands the Myrmidons to spread the story of his own personal victory: ‘On, Myrmidons, cry you all amain, | “Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain!” ’ (5.9.13–14). We are, it seems, already in Lucian’s underworld. Homer’s living characters become morally indistinguishable, while the incongruously rotting corpse beneath the sumptuous armour recalls Thersites’ ‘rank’ body (1.3.72). Once the armour is stripped away, be they a Hector or a ‘bastard in valour’, the ‘putrifièd core’ is all that remains. The anxiety and chaos caused by an inability to distinguish high from low is, of course, the theme of Ulysses’ degree speech (1.3.74–137), and his key metaphors of dangerous concealment are those of the ‘vizard’ and the ‘masque’ (1.3.82–3). Indeed, identity is persistently at stake in Troilus and repeatedly centres on Thersites: from Aeneas’ inability (or disrespectful refusal) to recognize Agamemnon (1.3.215–56), and Ajax’s inability to distinguish Thersites from Agamemnon (3.3.252–3), recurring scenes of ‘imitation’ in which Patroclus and Thersites ‘pageant’ the Greek kings and ‘put on [their] presence’ ‘like strutting players’ (1.3.150 and 151, 3.3.260, and 1.3.153; cf. 3.3.260–86) to Thersites’ catechism in which he grammatically declines: ‘What’s Agamemnon’, ‘what’s Achilles’, ‘what’s Thersites’, and ‘what art thou?’ (2.3.37, 39, 41), only to reveal that their identities are always located outside the self, sliding into that of the next, unknowable character (cf. 3.3.94–7 and 110–15). As Wolfe states: ‘Thersites is a “knower” (II.3.46) in that whatever self-knowledge the play’s other characters possess is refracted through the deforming glass of Thersites.’³⁴

³⁴ Wolfe (2015a), 302.

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The play’s other often-discussed obsession is that of bodily disease, which is again entwined with notions of heroic identity and, again, frequently linked to that ‘crusty botch of nature’ Thersites (5.1.5) (but also to Pandarus in the Trojan camp). In an extended aside, Thersites muses on Agamemnon’s body: ‘how if he had boils, full, all over generally?’, ‘And those boils did run? Say so, did not the General run then? Were not that a botchy core?’ (2.1.2–3, 5–6). Regardless of rank, Agamemnon is reduced to the ‘botchy core’ that defines him as a coward, and links him associatively to the ‘putrifièd core’ in sumptuous armour that runs from Hector. When the heroes of Homer’s epic are encountered first via Lucian’s descriptions of the underworld, Troilus’ twin obsessions with unstable identity and putrefaction, and the fact that Thersites acts as a touchstone for both, are more readily understandable.³⁵ Juvenal, Ovid, and Udall’s interlude provide the links between Thersites’ deconstruction, or inversion, of heroic worth and epic’s concomitant signifier of matchless armour. Although far from the interlude’s comparatively charismatic Thersites, Shakespeare’s ‘fool’ (2.1.64) reflects the general development of the morality plays’ Vice characters in professional theatre as they evolved into fully incorporated dramatic characters. Earlier clowns, who amused with a variety of physical comedy, jigs, and songs (such as the Shakespearean fools played by William Kempe), were superseded by cynical, verbal, often vitriolic wits like Touchstone, King Lear’s Fool, and Thersites (each performed by Robert Armin). Shakespeare’s Thersites, like all conventional fools, and the interlude Thersites before him, is defined by his metatheatricality and close association with the audience; but as the drama moves from the university and Court to the playhouse, this closeness is not only via physical proximity and direct address, but also, as with the original Saucy Jacks, in terms of social rank. In tracing the relationship between Chapman’s translations of the Iliad and Shakespeare’s Troilus, Charlotte Coffin hypothesizes that, while Shakespeare ‘probably used Chapman’s 1598 version’ as inspiration for his Thersites, the revision Chapman makes in 1611—an additional line in which the epic narrator associates Thersites with ‘[j]esters parts’ (21)—implies that Chapman ‘was perhaps influenced by Shakespeare’s treatment of Thersites in-between his own publications’, and that Heywood then ‘used both Shakespeare’s play and Chapman’s second translation’.³⁶ However, as we have seen, Chapman’s interpolation also follows the precedent, set by Udall’s interlude and Golding’s Metamorphoses, of seeing Homer’s character through the lens of early modern clowns: be they fools, jesters, or Saucy Jacks. Thersites is not simply Homeric in this period. Heywood, Shakespeare, and Chapman not only respond to one ³⁵ See Milowicki and Rawdon Wilson (2002) for the influence of the ‘Menippean discourse’ genre on Shakespeare. ³⁶ Coffin (2017), 64.

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another, their representations also encompass a much wider cultural understanding of who Thersites was. In Heywood’s verse version of Caxton’s Recuyell, Troia Britannica (printed 1609), Thersites does not appear as a character. Instead, Heywood inserts Thersites into a dramatic apostrophe to Homer that begins: ‘Oh! Homer, t’was [ . . . ] Thy pen, not Greece, the Troyans ouerthrew’ (171). Apostrophically declaiming Homer as a Greek propagandist is common in the anti-Homeric tradition,³⁷ yet Heywood employs Homeric details to intensify the irony of his address, going so far as to claim that ‘Thersites was well featured’ until Homer made him ‘stigmaticke and lame’ (171). Reminiscent of Lucian’s imagined libel case brought by Thersites against Homer (A True Story, 2.20), Heywood’s ironic attack inverts Homeric sureties: ‘Penelop had beene wanton, Hellen chast’ (171). In 1637 Heywood would go on to publish Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas, selected out of Lucian, Erasmus, Textor, Ovid &c, which includes his translation of Lucian’s dialogue between Nireus and Thersites. Not only indebted to Shakespeare, then, Heywood’s Thersites can also be seen against Heywood’s own reception of Lucian’s satirical interactions with Homer. As in Shakespeare, Heywood’s Thersites acts as a choric figure, commentating throughout the two-part Iron Age that Heywood claims was ‘[a]cted by two Companies, uppon one Stage at once [in] three severall Theaters’.³⁸ Heywood’s Iron Age is vast in many ways: in terms of subject matter, cast size, and staging requirements. Unlike Troilus, which follows a loosely epic structure by starting in the tenth year of the war and ending with the death of Hector, Heywood’s Iron Age is the culmination of an encyclopedic cycle of three earlier Ages (Golden, Silver, and Brazen) which, following the structure of Caxton’s Recuyell (and Heywood’s Troia Britannica), dramatize swathes of classical mythology, from the deification of the gods to Orestes’ murder of Clytemnestra. While Shakespeare’s armed ‘epic’ prologue informs the audience that Troilus will be ‘[b]eginning in the middle, starting thence away | To what may be digested in a play’ (28–9), Heywood’s epilogue to The Brazen Age, spoken by Homer himself, stands in defiance of any proto-neoclassical structure, declaring: ‘He that expects five short Acts can containe | Each circumstance of these things we present, | Me thinkes should shew more barrennesse then braine.’³⁹ ‘Homer’ is Chorus to all three of Heywood’s earlier Ages, delivering prologues and epilogues to each, narrating dumbshows, and stage-managing the plays’ vast leaps across time and place.⁴⁰ In The Iron Age, however, Homer’s choric role is taken over by Thersites, who is not only present at Troy but also

³⁷ Lydgate, for example, includes an extensive apostrophe attack that begins: ‘O Thou Omer | for shame be now rede’ (1513), U5r. ³⁸ Heywood (1632), 1.A4v. ³⁹ Heywood (1613b), L3v. ⁴⁰ See Kenward (2017).

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acts as a (very vocal) witness from Helen’s infidelity at Sparta to Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon at Mycenae. First present at Menelaus’ court, Heywood’s Thersites is fully aligned with the role of court jester, one who is asked for his humorous opinion: ‘What saith Thersites?’ (1.Cr); and so when Diomed calls him ‘a rayler’, he replies ‘I am a Counsellor’ (1.Cr). However, like Heywood’s choric Homer before him, The Iron Age’s Thersites not only commentates on the onstage action, he often seems to be stage-managing the performance: Enter Thersites with Souldiers, bringing in a table, with chayres and stooles [ . . . ] THERSITES: Come, come, spread, spread, up with the pulpets straight, Seates for the Judges . . . (1.Kv)

Thersites is dramatically included within the action yet stands outside it. Far more so than Shakespeare’s Thersites, then, and closer to Udall’s (and Lucian’s), Heywood’s Thersites is aware of both the dramatic artifice of the stage and his own literary construction. Spectators who followed Heywood’s cycle of five Ages would see Thersites occupying the same dramatic space and function as Homer before him; Thersites stands on Heywood’s stage for Homer, just as Shakespeare’s Thersites has been seen to signify Homer’s Iliad. Heywood’s Thersites repeatedly wonders how history may have been different if Helen had his face (1.F2r), or if he ‘had Hectors face’ (1.G3r), or if he were to disguise his deformities: ‘fanne my face | With a dyde Ostrich plume, plaster my wrinkles | With some old Ladies Trowell, I might passe | Perhaps for some maide-marrian’ (1.F2v). Recalling Udall’s anti-hero, Heywood’s Thersites is steeped in anachronisms that bring him closer to the spectators than to the classical characters. Again, Heywood’s Thersites continues to be at the centre of discussions about identity, but in The Iron Age identity is less precarious than in Troilus; Thersites only talks about his face, his impersonations are gone, and emphasis is placed on the inflexibility of the physical form. Recalling Richard III (1.1.14–31), Thersites states that his ‘hutch-backe’ defines his character: Still suiting my conditions with my shape, And doe, and will, and can, when all else fayle: Though neither sooth nor speak wel: bravely rayle, And that’s Thersites humour. (1.F2v)

The only case of mistaken identity in The Iron Age occurs as a demonstration of Ajax’s descent into madness, after Ulysses is awarded Achilles’ armour. Recalling the precedent set by Sophocles’ Ajax, and echoed in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead (23/29) in which Ajax mistakes cattle for the Greek kings, Heywood’s Ajax mistakes the unarmed Thersites for the armed Ulysses (1.Lr).

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On realizing his mistake, Ajax asks Thersites to rail on the Greeks, which leads to a replay of the Shakespearean catechism, in which Ajax asks: ‘What’s Agamemnon’, ‘what’s Menelaus’, ‘What’s Diomed’, ‘what’s Thersites’, and ‘what’s Ulysses’ (1.Lv–L2r). However, in contrast to Shakespeare, Heywood’s Thersites fixes each character’s identity in his one-line answers: no longer dependent on their relations to anyone else, Menelaus is ‘A King and a Cuckold’, Thersites ‘a rayling Rouge, a Curr, a barking Dog’, and Ulysses a ‘dam’d Politican’ (1.L2r). Heywood’s characterizations of these characters endorse Thersites’ view; responding to the manner in which Shakespeare presented the epic characters (and not how they discuss themselves), Heywood’s dramatization moves each character closer to a debased caricature of their Homeric counterpart. This is the Trojan War as seen from Thersites’ perspective, that of the common man caught up in decisions made by his social, but not moral, superiors. On the night of Troy’s destruction, Heywood significantly includes an innovative scene in which a Trojan citizen and his wife are awoken by the sound of the approaching Greeks and slaughtered by Pyrrhus and his soldiers. Pyrrhus wears Achilles’ armour, which was ritualistically bestowed on him in the opening scene of the Iron Age Part 2. The dramatization of the arming of the hero sees Pyrrhus, armed piece by piece, rising as ‘a Phoenix’ from his father’s ‘cold-ashes’, swearing to be worthy of his father’s name and his armour (2.Br– B2v). Echoing Shakespeare’s ironic battlefield commentary on Juvenal, the fully armed Pyrrhus/Achilles here slaughters a man and wife dressed only in their anachronistic nightgowns. Heywood thereby offers his playhouse audience an image of themselves: anonymous, unarmed citizens sacrificed to the pursuit of heroic fame.⁴¹ This, then, far more so than in Shakespeare’s regulated ‘epic’ structure, is the chaos of the Trojan War as experienced from ‘below’. When Heywood’s Thersites is seen on the battlefield he is, like Shakespeare’s fool, not there to fight but ‘to laugh at mad-men’ (2.Iv), by which he means Homer’s heroes. In discussing the manner in which early modern readers approached Homer’s Iliad via the expectations and perspectives laid down in numerous Latin texts, Demetriou celebrates the pervasive ‘contemporary culture of reading Homer intertextually’.⁴² It is clear that Thersites had currency in England as a Homeric character long before the ‘arrival’ of Homer’s text. This Thersites, standing for Homer’s text yet defined by the classical receptions of Homer in Ovid, Juvenal, and Lucian, as well as third-hand extracts of and references to the Iliad, is an overtly intertextual figure. As in his stage debut in the anonymous interlude, this conglomerate Thersites continually deconstructs ⁴¹ Heywood here foreshadows the common Trojans in Elkannah Settle’s 1701 play, The Virgin Prophetess, or The Fate of Troy; see Hall, Ch. 30 in this volume. ⁴² Demetriou (2008), 44.

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the notion of what makes a hero. Despite multiple sources, the quintessential characteristics that passed down to early modern authors were that of the outsider, the lower-class anti-hero who plays the fool for his peers, the physical coward who vocally defies authority. Such qualities aligned Thersites with stock characters of early folk drama and morality plays, allowing him to be understood as the metatheatrical fool closely allied with his spectators. In the tradition of the fool, then, but infused with the bitter hindsight of Lucian’s underworld Thersites, this quintessentially Homeric character, when ‘returned’ to Troy, inevitably interrogates his epic origins. In Chapman’s translation of the Iliad—dedicated to the Earl of Essex as the ‘now living instance of the Achilleian vertues’ (1598: A3r)—Achilles’ armour is, as in Homer’s Iliad (and Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Juvenal’s Satires), an indisputable symbol of the hero’s worth. On Shakespeare’s and Heywood’s stage, the magnificent armour is, at best, an empty, misleading signifier of epic grandeur, which can only temporarily disguise the rotten corpse that everyone, coward and hero alike, will become; at worst, it signifies the system of primogeniture that accords status unfairly and may, as in Heywood, entail the indiscriminate slaughter of defenceless citizens in the pursuit of epic fame. In a parallel movement, then, to the history plays’ investigations into monarchy, in which it becomes clear that the crown does not make the king, the ‘English’ Thersites’ interventions into Shakespeare’s and Heywood’s Trojan dramas make it abundantly clear that the armour does not make the hero.

30 Classical Epic and the London Fairs, 1697–1734 Edith Hall

ELKANAH S ETTLE, CITY POET ‘The Siege of Troy is here’, reads the painted board at the centre of Hogarth’s famous Southwark Fair (painted in 1733 and engraved in 1734 or 1735; Fig. 30.1). Hogarth had always been interested in the way that classical culture could be commodified. He opens his memoirs with the sad picture of his father, a classical scholar of repute, plunging his family into poverty after the failure of his project for a Latin dictionary.¹ Fairground theatre was a better business prospect. The show Hogarth portrays, performed amidst other colourful entertainments, was Elkanah Settle’s ‘droll’, The Siege of Troy;² the woman just left of centre ‘drumming up’ business is either Mrs Mynn, the entrepreneurial show-woman who produced it, or her daughter Mrs Lee. The droll was a favourite at the London fairs from its premiere at Bartholomew Fair, probably in 1698, until at least 1734, when it was performed by two different companies— one of them using puppets—at Southwark Fair. In the droll, the Trojans, led by a plebeian cobbler named Bristle, survive the siege of Troy and hold a carousal. Although The Siege of Troy was popular and influential, it has been bypassed in scholarship. This chapter excavates the evidence for the nature of the production, which includes (most unusually, for a fairground droll) several printed editions; it also argues that Settle’s entertainment deserves to be acknowledged as a crucial piece in the jigsaw puzzle of early eighteenth-century classicism.

¹ Hogarth (1833), 2. ² See Hogarth (1833), 179 and 323, where the performers in the picture and their acts are identified. Hogarth himself called his picture simply The Fair, without specifying which one.

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Fig. 30.1 William Hogarth’s Southwark Fair engraving (1734). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.

Settle’s parents owned a tavern in Dunstable, where he was born, during the Civil War, on 1 February 1648.³ He must have received some education, because by 1663 he was elected a King’s Scholar at Westminster. He left school in 1666 and entered Trinity College, Oxford.⁴ Along with a fellow student called William Butler Fyfe he wrote his first play, on a Herodotean theme, Cambyses. It was accepted in 1666 for performance by Davenant’s company, then playing at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was ‘the first new Play that was acted’ by this company after the Great Fire of London, and proved a success,⁵ running to four editions before the century’s close. Settle gained the favour of influential courtiers, especially Anne, Duchess of Buccleugh and Monmouth. He penned The Empress of Morocco, staged in 1669–70, ‘perhaps the greatest blockbuster theatre event of the period’,⁶ with rich spectacle and embedded dance performances. Yet Settle’s works have been deplored by scholars of English literature. In 1929 Dobrée explained in his canonical Restoration Tragedy why he was not going to discuss Settle any more than other Restoration playwrights who turned classical themes into successful dramas. They include John Banks ³ Brown (1910), 6 7. ⁴ Brown (1910), 8. ⁵ Downes (1708), 36. Dennis (1717), ‘Preface’ said that the piece ‘was Acted for Three Weeks together’. For a detailed reading of Settle’s Cambyses in historical context, see Hall (2019). ⁶ Bulman (2012), 309.

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(who wrote plays about Troy, Cyrus the Great, and Alexander the Great) and John Crowne (who wrote a Darius King of Persia, a Caligula, and a play about the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian): it must be pleaded that there is a level below which it is waste of time for the mere lover of literature, as opposed to the scholar or thesis writer, to go; and indeed, grubbing in the mud in the hopes of making mud look like crystal, or finding some isolated, and even then doubtful, gem in the slime, is much to be deplored.⁷

As we shall see, the contempt of English Literary studies for Settle was partly inherited from Settle’s Augustan coevals. The commercial success of Settle’s early theatre entertainments incurred the envy of other authors. His two chief critics were the very men who between them put classical epic at the heart of Augustan literature and society, John Dryden and Alexander Pope. The runaway success of Settle’s early plays incurred Dryden’s hatred, expressed in his vitriolic insertions to Nahum Tate’s The Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel in 1682. The satire allegorically reads recent events, from the Popish Plot to the Monmouth Rebellion, through the biblical tale of Absalom’s revolt against King David (2 Samuel 14–18). Settle, known for stirring up anti-Catholic opinions, is identified with Doeg the Edomite, the brutal herdsman of Saul who carries out the executions of a large number of priests (412–20): Doeg, though without knowing how or why, Made still a blund’ring kind of Melody; Spurd boldly on, and Dash’d through Thick and Thin, Through Sense and Non sense, never out nor in; Free from all meaning, whether good or bad, And in one word, Heroically mad: He was too warm on Picking work to dwell, But Faggotted his Notions as they fell, And if they Rhim’d and Rattl’d all was well. Spightfull he is not, though he wrote a Satyr, For still there goes some thinking to ill Nature: He needs no more than Birds and Beasts to think, All his occasions are to eat and drink. (412 24)

Settle’s verse is a blundering melody, utterly mindless, ‘heroically mad’; he is incapable even of writing satire, having no more capacity for thought than a member of the animal world. Besides being a rabid anti-papist, Settle was an advocate of James II and a supporter of the Tory party. He was quarrelsome and opinionated. He had little regard for diplomacy or his public image. He consequently fell out of ⁷ Dobrée (1929), 12.

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favour amongst the nobility and the theatre-going public on the accession of William and Mary. It must have been shortage of funds which drove a man with ambitions to be a playwright of national importance to accept the post of London ‘City Poet’, responsible for producing the pageants of the Lord Mayor’s Show. With this appointment there came payments from the company to which the Lord Mayor belonged. They do not seem to have been generous: Poets as stupid are as other men; They dully will the Muse’s chariot draw, As, for example, brother Elkanah, Who has long time from rules of reason swerv’d And underneath his glorious pageants starved.⁸

But Settle embraced the role, even advertising himself as ‘City Poet’ in his published works.⁹ The significance of the office dwindled and it disappeared in 1722; Settle seems to have been its final incumbent. His pageants included The Triumphs of London for the Grocers’ Company in 1692 and for the Merchant Taylors’ Company in 1693. Failure met his repeated attempts to return to the established theatres with serious plays, and he did not make a sufficient living from his other literary enterprises such as eulogistic poems. But he scored hits with notable Lord Mayor’s pageants in 1698, 1699, and 1700, and probably with more over the next few years. City pageants and fairground theatricals had much in common, besides their outdoor setting. The Lord Mayor’s Show was traditionally held on 29 October. Contemporary sources speak of cartoonish images of faces stuck on windows, candlelit balconies, and waves of soldiers, clowns, and company men in livery—vintners, brewers, butchers, and apothecaries—jostling to take precedence in the procession, carrying symbols of their crafts.¹⁰ Mumming and colourful costumes abounded: preparations for one of Settle’s shows are described thus in 1705: City Poet instructing his Gods and Goddesses all the Morning, how to behave themselves in a Pageant, and welcome my Lord Mayor. Cooks busie in raising Pye crust Fortifications, which the Heroes of Cheap side will storm most manfully next Day.¹¹

Dead cats and joints of meat were hurled. Caged lions were displayed at the Tower and mad people at Bedlam. The mob could become riotous.¹² The atmosphere was similar to that of Bartholomew Fair—in the early 1700s still the largest fair. Its ancient function—to serve as a textile market—had largely

⁸ Verses quoted in Fairholt (1844), 121 2 with n. ¹⁰ Brown (1705), 117 18. ¹¹ Brown (1705), 117.

⁹ Brown (1910), 28 9. ¹² See Ashton (1882), 1.246 9.

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been replaced by ‘rioting and unlimited licence’.¹³ An eyewitness describes ‘the rumbling of Drums, mix’d with the intolerable Squalling of the Cat Calls and Penny Trumpets . . . the Singeing of Pigs, and burnt Crackling of over Roasted Pork’.¹⁴ From the upper floor of alehouses visitors enjoyed a view of the booths, and the actors ‘strutting around their Balconies in their Tinsey Robes, and Golden Leather Buskins’; typical entertainments were rope-acrobats, sworddancers, horse-vaulters, ‘monstrous’ freaks of nature (three-breasted women, three-legged cockerels), and performing dwarves.¹⁵ Fairground theatricals were a particular attraction, especially since the two licensed theatres were closed during the fairs. As in Hogarth’s picture, the booths offered a variety of entertainments. Mrs Mynn (or Mynns/Minns) ran a troupe of strolling players who certainly performed at the Cock-Pit in Epsom in 1708 and claimed to have performed ‘at Windsor for the Entertainment of the Nobility’.¹⁶ It is unknown when they first worked with Settle, but Theophilus Cibber states that he was the best contriver of machinery in England and for many years of the latter part of his life received an annual salary from Mrs Minns and her daughter Mrs Leigh, for writing Drolls for Bartholomew and Southwark Fairs, with proper decor ations, which were generally so well contrived, that they exceeded those of their opponents in the same profession.¹⁷

One of the best documented drolls produced by Mrs Mynn, almost certainly with Settle’s involvement, was her Whittingdon, Lord Mayor of London, in which the parallel traditions of the City pageants and the fairground droll merged. A description of the scenic effects shows that they concluded with a miniature version of the procession which Londoners enjoyed at the inauguration of new mayors: A View of several stately and surprising Scenes; as a Rowling Sea, beating a large Ship under Sayl, with a Neptune, Mermaids, Dolphins &c. Also a Prospect of a Moorish Country, so swarming with Rats and Mice, that they over run the King and Queens’ Table at Dinner; Likewise a large diverting Scene of Tapestry, fill’d with all living Figures; and lastly, concluding with a Lord Mayor’s Triumph, in which are presented nine several Pageants, being Six Elephants and Castles, a Magnificent Temple, and two Triumphal Chariots.¹⁸

Settle’s involvement is suggested by that series of nine spectacles from the Lord Mayor’s Triumph. As we shall see, the elephants, castles, temple, and chariots may well have been used in other years as well, when Mynn produced The Siege of Troy.

¹³ Ashton (1882), 1.250. ¹⁴ Quoted in Robins (1898), pt. 1, ch. 2. ¹⁵ Ashton (1882), 1.251 3. ¹⁶ See Rosenfeld (1960), 19. ¹⁷ Cibber (1753), 3.352. ¹⁸ Quoted in Ashton (1882), 1.256.

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Settle’s flair at producing street pageants went hand in hand with his talent for fairground drolls. It is uncertain when he first took to the fairs, but in the 1690s they became an important source of income for him.¹⁹ His career beyond droll-writing never recovered; in his last years he was said to have ‘acted a dragon, enclosed in a case of green leather of his own invention’,²⁰ in a droll presented at Bartholomew Fair by Mrs Mynn entitled St George for England. He died in poverty in the Charterhouse in 1724.

T H E S I E G E O F TR O Y The poet Dryden had died many years before, on 12 May 1700. But he had lived to endure seeing Settle exploit the success of his own masterful translation of the Aeneid (1697), the publication of which had been nothing short of ‘a national event’.²¹ The depiction of the Trojan Horse in Settle’s scenery was modelled on that in one of the engravings in Dryden’s book (Fig. 30.2), thus drawing an explicit connection between the august translation and the fairground droll, which premiered in 1698 or 1699. There are two versions of the first printed edition of 1707. They claim respectively that its text represents the version of this ‘Dramatick Performance’, presented in Mrs Mynn’s Great Booth, ‘over against the Hospital-Gate in the Rounds in Smithfield, during the Time of the Present Bartholomew-Fair’ (i.e. in late August 1707) and ‘in the Queens-Arms-Yard, near Marshallsea-Gate in Southwark, during the Time of the Fair’ (i.e. in early September, Fig. 30.3). But both texts have an identical preface ‘To the Reader’ informing us that The Siege of Troy ‘made its first entry now Nine Years Since in Bartholomew Fair’. The current production is the third, and has had so much money and labour spent upon it that it is not inferior to any of the ‘operas’ performed in the Royal Theatres.²² The Siege of Troy has been called the ‘most remarkable of the BartholomewFair dramas which found their way into print’.²³ Its spectacular effects were agreed to have exceeded those of any other spectacle; Benjamin Victor said that it was the best droll he had ever witnessed.²⁴ The effects—including the elephants, castles, temple, and chariots—are carefully reconstructed from original sources in Sybil Rosenfeld’s path-breaking study The Theatre of the

¹⁹ Brown (1910), 35. ²⁰ Baker (1782), vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 640, quoted in Brown (1910), 35. See also Dr Young’s Epistle to Mr Pope, quoted in Cruikshank (1827), 137: ‘Poor Elkanah, all other changes past, | For bread in Smithfield dragons hiss’d at last, | Spit streams of fire to make the butchers gape, | And found his manners suited to his shape.’ ²¹ Walker (2003), xiv. ²² Settle (1707a) and (1707b). ²³ Chambers (1862 4), 2.265. ²⁴ Victor (1761), 2.74.

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Fig. 30.2 Engraving of the Trojan Horse in Troy, reproduced from the 3rd edn. of The Works of Virgil, Containing his Pastorals, Georgics and Aeneis, translated into English by Mr Dryden (London: J. Tonson 1699). Reproduced by permission of Paul Hartle. The engravings were reproduced from those in John Ogilby’s translation (1654).

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Fig. 30.3 Title page of the Southwark Fair edition of The Siege of Troy droll (1707). Reproduced by permission of King’s College Library.

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London Fairs in the 18th Century.²⁵ The script is fascinating in its subversive treatment of heroic epic and classical mythology. It enacts the Troy story as related in the Aeneid from the arrival at Troy of the wooden horse and the self-mutilated Sinon to the burning of the city and the Greeks’ departure. The aristocratic and divine characters speak rhyming iambic couplets as they do in Dryden’s translation. Those from the Greek camp are Menelaus, Ulysses, and Sinon; in Troy there are Paris, Helen, Cassandra, and Venus. But a sense of how packed Mrs Mynn’s booth platforms must have become, as indicated in Hogarth’s depiction, is conveyed by the other fifty-three cast members listed under ‘Actors’ Names’: A numerous Train of Trojan Mob, Spectators of the Wooden Horse and Actors through the Play . . . Three Persons drest in Gold for Statues in Diana’s Temple. Nine Priests and Priestesses of Diana. Ten Persons richly drest, and Retinue of Paris and Helen. Twenty two Officers, Guards and Trumpets, the Attendants of Menelaus. In the whole Fifty three Persons drest, besides the Actors and Diana in the play.

The crucial element from the perspective of the droll’s sociopolitical impact is that ‘numerous Train of Trojan Mob’, whose identity as ‘Spectators of the Wooden Horse’ is shared with the external audience of the droll. Some of that Mob have sizeable speaking parts, and these characters, although nominally Trojan, come over as working-class city dwellers indistinguishable from Settle’s own public. In 1614, Ben Jonson had laughed at the taste for introducing such a contemporary frame to classical mythical stories in the puppet show in the final act of Bartholomew Fair, ‘The ancient moderne history of Hero, and Leander, otherwise called The Touchstone of true Loue, with as true a tryall of friendship, betweene Damon, and Pythias, two faithfull friends o’ the Bankside’ (Act 5, Scene 3). Rosenfeld concludes that the ‘populace could not be trusted to stand too much of the classical legend even though it was accompanied by scenic marvels; the comedians had to be brought on to amuse them with the rough and tumble life they knew’.²⁶ But another way of looking at the fusion of past and present in the world created by the droll is as a complex metatheatrical response to the elite connotations of the classical material in a cross-class context. The boundary between the collectives responding to upper-class antique heroics from within the play and as its paying spectators is jeopardized. In the second scene we are transported to ‘Bristle, a cobler, and his wife’. These lower-class Trojans speak raucous prose. Mrs Bristle wants to go and see the wooden horse, but her husband Tom Bristle objects to her leaving the house: W.

Well, I am resolv’d I will go abroad, and see this sight, though the Devil stay at home and piss out the Fire. ²⁵ Rosenfeld (1960), 161 6.

²⁶ Rosenfeld (1960), 141.

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BR.

Will you so! Then I’m resolv’d I’ll give your Whores Hide such a lick of Styrup Leather, till I make your own Devilship spit it out. (Settle (1707a), 6)

Fortunately for Mrs Bristle, the Trojan Mob enters and she escapes. A magnificent spectacle is now revealed in which Paris and Helen appear riding in a ‘Triumphant Chariot’, drawn by elephants painted on the flats. Ten more painted elephants support ten castles filled with richly dressed attendants, with a vista of Troy beyond. Paris and Helen admire each other in rhyming couplets. A crazed Cassandra enters to condemn the adulterous pair, before Venus descends in a swan-drawn chariot and the attendants sing a celestial chorus. In Act 2, Ulysses and Sinon persuade the Trojan mob, now led by Bristle who has appointed himself their captain, to breach the Trojan Walls and drag in the horse. Cassandra is distraught, and performs miracles designed to ‘preach bright Reason’ to Paris. The next spectacular scene ‘discovers the Temple of Diana’ at Troy, complete with eleven statues of the Olympian gods, including Diana, all dressed in gold, and a heavenly vista. When Paris and Helen arrive, Cassandra waves her wand, and the statues’ costumes miraculously turn black as the vista ‘is changed to a scene of Hell’. But it transpires that only the audience and Cassandra can discern the truth of this transformation: Paris and the Priest see nothing altered, and agree that she is insane. The vertiginous alternation between heroic and demotic is underlined by the next scene change, to a street in Troy. The Greek army, streaming out of the Trojan horse, disperses to begin its work of destruction; Captain Bristle and the Mob, unaware of the danger, enter for a night of revelry and fantasies of social levelling: Enter Mob drunk. Well, Captain, we have a tory rory Night on’t. CAP. Ay Neighbour, the Noble Prince Paris has made all the Conduits in the Town piss Claret, and given such Feasting and Toping, and fidling and Roaring, till we are all Princes as great as himself. ALL. Ay, ay, all Princes, all Princes. (Settle (1707a), 17) MOB.

As they carouse, the siege ensues, the Grecians setting fire to houses and abducting maidens. Menelaus slays Paris; Helen commits suicide by hurling herself into the flames. But the members of the Trojan Mob led by Captain Tom Bristle survive. Menelaus pardons them: you’ve severely felt The Arm of vengeance, for your Princes Guilt; And do deserve our Pity. Here I have finisht my Revenge. Enjoy Your Lives and Liberties, go and rebuild yout Troy. MOB. Huzzah.

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CAPT. OF THE MOB.

Hark ye, Friend, (Speaking to a Grecian) pray tell your King from me, he’s a very civil Gentleman, and since he’s so humbly Gracious, to bid us build our Town again, strike up Fiddles, we’ll give him a Song and a Dance at parting. The droll ends here amidst revelry. Ulysses draws the moral that ladies who commit adultery endanger whole countries, a theme which has been reinforced by the extramarital flirtations of Mrs Bristle. The Siege of Troy is thus subversive on several levels. The blame for the Greek expedition against Troy is exclusively laid on the shoulders of the Trojan aristocracy and the aristocratic Helen of Sparta. The royal culprits Helen and Paris both expire. The action ends with a Trojan working-class leader about to rebuild the city; this is radical enough in itself, but also repudiates the tradition of Troy’s annihilation asserted by the canonical classical authorities Virgil and Homer. The rhyming couplets and elevated diction of the aristocrats is deflated by juxtaposition with the indelicate dialogue of the Trojan commoners, who are given all the laughs. There is a further level of insouciance. Royal propaganda had sought to associate William III with Aeneas, and his arrival on the sands of Torbay in 1688 with Aeneas’ arrival in Latium; this association had been emphasized, for example, when Dryden’s publisher Jacob Tonson insisted on superimposing William’s features on those of Aeneas when he reproduced in Dryden’s Aeneid the engravings from John Ogilby’s 1654 translation.²⁷ Settle omits Aeneas from his Trojan droll, thus avoiding offence to either Catholics or Anglicans amongst Mrs Mynn’s customers. But in 1698, by refusing to use Troy to pay homage to the king, he threw into further relief his rejection of Aeneas as hero of the tale and preference for the plebeian cobbler. Moreover, the invention of the identifiably London/Trojan hybrid Bristle gives a makeover to the familiar story of Brutus the Trojan who had founded London as the ‘New Troy’; the political message of a working class with a continuous identity and recreational culture (note ‘The Siege of Troy is here!’ in the present tense on Hogarth’s billboard) needs to be understood in the context of seven decades of serial changes in constitution and kings. Settle’s success with the droll emboldened him to attempt a longer version of a similar (and in places identical) entertainment in the established theatre. The published text (Fig. 30.4), with its detailed description of the visual effects, shows that it retained all the spectacular stunts familiar from the droll, but deleted Bristle and his Mob. In 1700 a London newspaper, The Post Boy, contained this notice: Great preparations have been [in the] making for some Months past, for a New Opera to be Acted next Term at the Theatre Royal which, for Grandeur, Decor ations, Movement of Scenes, &c., will be infinately superior to [Henry Purcell’s] Dioclesian, which hitherto has been the greatest performance that the English ²⁷ Dryden (1697), Ogilby (1654).

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Fig. 30.4 Title page of Settle’s Troy Opera (1702), variously entitled Cassandra: The Virgin Prophetess and The Virgin Prophetess; or The Fate of Troy. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

Stage has produced, that probably ’twill equall the greatest Performance of that kind, in any of the foreign theatres. The Musick is compos’d by the Ingenious Mr. Finger.²⁸

²⁸ Quoted from Lowerre (2014), 41. Henry Purcell’s The Prophetess: or, The History of Dioclesian, with libretto by Thomas Betterton (based on the play The Prophetess by John Fletcher

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For his siege-of-Troy ‘Opera’, performed in the Theatre Royal in 1701, Settle further upgraded the role of Cassandra and chose a new title, The Virgin Prophetess, or The Fate of Troy. The title was determined by the public’s penchant for scenes involving delirious pagan prophetesses. The star of Purcell’s Dioclesian (1690) had been the prophetess Delphia, who not only delivers flamboyant predictions, but also prevents Dioclesian’s marriage to the wrong woman by using magic to raise a storm and a monster. The Virgin Prophetess did not rescue his career as a serious writer, but Settle’s rivals must have been aggravated by his ability to make money from offering the same material and even stage properties to different audiences. His generic versatility also challenged customary distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ arts, especially when he had the temerity to publish, in addition to the text of the opera, an attractive souvenir volume containing the script of the droll, adorned with a woodcut depicting Captain Bristle. But worse was to come. The Siege of Troy was turned into an even ‘lower’ medium than a fairground droll—an itinerant puppet show.

MARTIN P OWELL’S PUPPET PRODUCTION Dryden’s attack on Settle in The Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel had been scathing: In Fire works give him leave to vent his spight, Those are the only Serpents he can write; The height of his ambition is we know But to be Master of a Puppet show; On that one Stage his works may yet appear, And a months Harvest keeps him all the Year. (451 6)

Dryden sneeringly alleges that Settle aspires to own a puppet show, which will allow him to make money during the London summer fair season. Whether Settle ever publicly discussed such an ambition, which would have met with bemusement within elite literary circles, is not clear. But Dryden’s disparagement proved prescient. In 1712 the Dublin puppeteer Martin Powell, the rage of London since his arrival with his equally talented son in 1710, staged Settle’s droll—perhaps without paying Settle anything for the privilege—under the title The False Triumph. He blended his performance media in a conscious bid

and Philip Massinger) had its premiere at Dorset Garden in 1690. Gottfried Finger was a Moravian composer and expert viola da gamba player.

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to attract more select audiences. The text was augmented with extra scenes including an epiphany of Jupiter, sung by Signior Punchanella, a famous castrato currently starring in the Italian Opera House.²⁹ The appearance of an opera singer in a fairground droll based on Virgil but performed by puppets is symptomatic of the chaotic struggle between entertainment media in London during the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first three of the eighteenth. Opera competed with spoken drama, and both increasingly featured the balletic interludes which were about to develop into a separate medium of musical theatre altogether. But certain hierarchies remained, if shakily, between types of entertainment. Despite their voguishness in the first half of the eighteenth century, even amongst the more prosperous classes, puppet-show personnel were deprecated as ‘Rogues and Vagrants’ and suffered from a precarious financial and social status.³⁰ ‘Serious’ actors only resorted to working with puppet shows in lieu of the better professional opportunities afforded by live acting, even in the venue of the fairs.³¹ In this period, for example in another Hogarth engraving, A Just View of the British Stage (1724), ‘the puppet could serve as a visual emblem not just for the process of performance itself, but also for a broad spectrum of paratheatrical entertainment seen as invading and polluting a theater that had finally achieved a legitimacy to which Jonson had so painfully aspired over a century earlier’.³² The scorn which puppet shows incurred from the educated elite is never more pointedly expressed than in Joseph Addison’s ‘Machinae Gesticulantes, anglicè A Puppet Show’ (1698), a poem in epic Latin hexameters (the translated phrases here provided are not by Addison).³³ It is thus a highbrow and hyper-literate description of a performance medium which it not only explicitly describes as ‘low’ but also implies is infantile in the technical sense—the puppets lack language altogther. The poem engages in complex literary allusion to Virgil, especially the Georgics, but in the year after Dryden’s translation there are also explicit references to the Aeneid in the reference to the ‘bella, horrida bella’ (‘bristling’ battles, 51; see Aeneid 8.86). Addison lambasts the vulgarity both of the medium of ‘Gesticulating Machines’ and their audiences. Nothing could more loudly proclaim the gulf dividing cultural circles of refinement (defined by knowledge of canonical classical authors in the original languages) from the boorish masses. Addison is unlikely to have known that by the third century BCE there were puppet shows enacting stories connected

²⁹ Speaight (1952), 42. ³⁰ Shershow (1995), 115 16. ³¹ Bentley (1941 68), 2.413 and 480. ³² Shershow (1995), 121. ³³ The Latin poem was published in Addison (1719). The English translation used here is the excellent Anon. (1813). There is a sophisticated analysis of the literary strategies deployed in the poem in Haan (2005), 71 87.

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with the Trojan War.³⁴ His humour derives from negotiating the absurd discrepancy whereby the coarse puppet-show audience—the ‘gaping throngs’ from ‘the grinning street’—are described with mock-solemnity suited to Horace’s Ars Poetica or serious Roman epic, punctured in turn by the bathos of the idea that cash puts bottoms on seats differing in quality according to the amount paid: ‘Nor reigns disorder; but precedence fit | Marshals the crowd, and as they pay they sit’ (‘Nec confusus honos; nummo subsellia cedunt | Diverso, et varii ad pretium stat copia scamni’, 9–10). Yet the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been described as the golden age of puppetry in London and in English provincial towns, performed in both fairgrounds and taverns,³⁵ and Powell was a key figure in making the medium somewhat more acceptable to the upper classes during Queen Anne’s reign. He used jointed wooden marionettes moved by wires and standing about three feet tall. With these he presented ‘witty plays, elegantly dressed and spectacularly staged’; his theatre began to attract the gentry and nobility of both sexes,³⁶ and he was at pains to exclude prostitutes and keep his audience ‘respectable’. His puppet shows offered more sophisticated performance techniques than those of his rivals, using footlights and backcloths.³⁷ Their dialogue could be intricate and their plots fairly complicated. Their effects could be terrifying; the actor Tate Wilkinson was taken by his father to see one at Bartholomew Fair when he was small: ‘I there saw a sea-fight, and a most terrible battle, which determined me never to see one again.’³⁸ Powell and son toured regionally, to Bath, Bristol, and Oxford. Their first documented performance was The Creation of the World, involving Noah, his ark, and Mr Punch, during the summer season in Bath.³⁹ In London they established a puppet theatre on the Piazza in Covent Garden, south of Russell Street. There Powell staged King Bladud the Founder of Bath, The City Rake, and The History of Sir Richard Whittington, as well as a biblical melodrama set at the court of Nebuchadnezzar.⁴⁰ His subsequent choice of the Trojan story is remarkable because classical themes were rarely adopted by the puppeteers. Their repertoire largely depended on biblical episodes and stories connected with Harlequin or Punchinello. ³⁴ See the five act Nauplius mentioned by Heron of Alexandria in his technical treatise On Automata ch. 22.3 6 para. 264 in the Teubner edition of Wilhelm Schmidt (1899 1914) and Hall (2006), 65 n. 38 with further bibliography. ³⁵ On post Restoration puppet show history I have learned most from Malcolmson (1973), Burke (1985), and Shershow (1995). ³⁶ Speaight (1952), 41. ³⁷ Novelty in the spectacle department was a key attraction of the most successful puppet shows: Richard Steele, deriding the new custom of sending youths off to the Continent to visit classical sites, claims that such lads spend their time ‘as Children do at Puppet Shows, and with much the same Advantage, in staring and gaping at an amazing Variety of strange things’ (The Spectator 364, for 28 April 1712). ³⁸ Wilkinson (1790), 1.19. ³⁹ Speaight (1952), 38. ⁴⁰ Speaight (1952), 39.

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The False Triumph remained in the Powell family’s repertoire for years. Powell Junior staged it in 1726 as a marionette ‘operatic burlesque’. Another, more obscure puppet master named Mr Terwin staged The Siege of Troy under its original name in Mermaid Court in 1734. But he had gone head to head with a revival the same year of the droll, featuring actors rather than puppets, produced by Mrs Mynn’s daughter Mrs Lee in collaboration with one Mr Harper. They set up a booth on a new Southwark site at Axe and Bottle Yard and printed an advertisement boasting a famous cast and lavish visual attractions: ‘in its decorations, machiner, and paintings [it] far exceeds anything of the like that ever was seen in the fairs before, the scenes and clothing being entirely new’. Lee and Harper, perhaps with an eye to Terwin’s puppets, staked their prior rights to the famous entertainment, ‘the only celebrated droll of that kind . . . first brought to perfection by the late famous Mrs Mynns’, which ‘can only be performed by her daughter Mrs Lee’.⁴¹ A fascinating text reveals the annoyance caused to some educated men by the claim made by entrepeneurial showpeople like Mynn, Lee, Settle, and Powell to ‘ownership’ of classical antiquity. Thirteen years after Addison wrote that Latin hexameter satire on puppet shows, he described a preposterous project for a new London entertainment incorporating all the fashionable spectacles available across the city.⁴² He claims that in a coffee shop he heard an aspiring impresario (clearly informed by his perceptions of men like Settle and Powell) propose a new scheme ‘of an opera, Entitled, The Expedition of Alexander the Great’. This would include a ladder-dance, a posture-man, ‘a moving picture’, an erotic waxwork model of Statira, bear-baiting, and dancing monkeys. The passion for stage prophetesses would be satisifed by opening the opera with Alexander consulting the priestess at the Delphic oracle. The comedian and booth manager William Penkethman ‘is to personate King Porus upon an Elephant, and is to be encountered by Powell, representing Alexander the Great upon a Dromedary, which nevertheless Mr. Powell is desired to call by the Name of Bucephalus’. The two kings celebrate the ratification of peace thus: Upon the Close of this great decisive Battel, when the two Kings are thoroughly reconciled, to shew the mutual Friendship and good Correspondence that reigns between them, they both of them go together to a Puppet Show, in which the ingenious Mr. Powell junior, may have an Opportunity of displaying his whole Art of Machinery.

Alexander the Great’s favourite book was known to have been the Iliad. Addison presumably wanted his readership here to imagine the operatic Porus and Alexander being entertained specifically by Settle’s Siege of Troy,

⁴¹ Advertisement in BL (1731 1831).

⁴² The Spectator 31, for 4 April 1711.

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especially since the Powell family was at precisely this chronological point planning to transfer it to the puppet theatre. Addison’s showman further proposes that Alexander could be entertained by Penkethman’s ‘Heathen Gods’, an automaton show (housed in the same building as Powell’s puppets) about which we know from advertisements in Spectator 46 and subsequent issues: Mr. Penkethman’s Wonderful Invention call’d the Pantheon: or, the Temple of the Heathen Gods. The Work of several Years, and great Expense, is now perfected; being a most surprising and magnificent Machine, consisting of 5 several curious Pictures, the Painting and contrivance whereof is beyond Expression Admirable. The Figures, which are above 100, and move their Heads, Legs, Arms, and Fingers, so exactly to what they perform, and setting one Foot before another, like living Creatures, that it justly deserves to be esteem’d the greatest Wonder of the Age. To be seen from 10 in the Morning till 10 at Night, in the Little Piazza, Covent Garden, in the same House where Punch’s Opera is.

But Addison’s climax is his allegation that this showman proposed to make the actors of The Expedition of Alexander the Great deliver their lines in ancient Greek: for that Alexander being a Greek, it was his Intention that the whole Opera should be acted in that Language, which was a Tongue he was sure would wonderfully please the Ladies, especially when it was a little raised and rounded by the Ionick Dialect, and could not but be wonderfully acceptable to the whole Audience, because there are fewer of them who understand Greek than Italian.

The unintelligibility of ancient Greek would guarantee its success, just as the desire to listen to exotic sung Italian had fed the craze for opera. And the ladies, who of course knew no Greek, would like its melliflous sound. The Oxford-educated Addison, an outstanding classical scholar, was perfectly aware that the Macedonian dialect was not Ionic but Doric, and sounded uncouth to other Greeks: he is asking his reader to collude in condemning the equally uncouth showman’s error. He revels in the absurdity of ordinary Londoners who frequent puppet shows having any contact whatsoever with the ancient Greek tongue. The problem that no theatre performers knew the language was to be solved either by persuading ‘some Gentlemen of the Universities to learn to sing, in order to qualify themselves for the Stage’, or by bringing boatloads of Greeks from Smyrna (again, Addison invites his reader to spot the error in the idea that spoken Greek had not changed since classical antiquity); alternatively, it would only take ‘a Fortnight’s time’ for opera stars to learn Greek. None of Addison’s humour would work unless his readership was convinced that knowledge of that arcane tongue was only acquired through extensive study and was thus entirely beyond the reach of most mere mortal men.

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T H E T R O Y DR O L L I N THE DUNCIAD The prestige and mystery surrounding ancient Greek helped feed the public appetite for Alexander Pope’s Iliad, published between 1715 and 1720, during the same period as a repeated series of republications of The Siege of Troy in 1716, 1717, and 1718. Despite the snobbery of men like Joseph Addison, the hunger for Troy poems, whether Pope’s lofty translation of the original Greek epic or Settle’s evergreen droll and Powell’s puppet version, seem to have mutually reinforced the public desire and market for all three. Yet, while Settle’s own career took a nosedive, and he died in poverty, Pope made a fortune out of the subscribers to his translation of the Iliad, conceived as a commercial idea before 1710, at around the time that The Siege of Troy became famous. I would even argue that the interest in ancient epic which Pope was able to monetize was partly a result of the popularity of Settle’s droll. The Siege of Troy continued to enjoy posthumous popularity after Settle’s death in 1724, twenty years before Pope’s demise. This success may explain the harsh contempt which Pope articulated for his now deceased rival in The Dunciad, the first edition of which was published in 1728. In the later revised editions, Settle’s role was somewhat diminished, but only four years after his death, he still loomed large in Pope’s mind: only the parts played by King Dunce himself and Queen Dulness are of greater magnitude.⁴³ In Book 3, which parodies Aeneid 6, Anchises/Settle welcomes Aeneas in the underworld. Father and son then see a vision in which Dulness spreads over the entire planet. This centrepiece of the poem, which contains well over three hundred lines, is narrated by Anchises/Settle himself. When Pope’s friend William Kent provided the designs for the headpiece illustration of The Dunciad 3, illustrating the low theatrical forms attacked in the book, he chose two winged dragons, one with the ears of an ass, devouring a harlequin sorcerer, and the other excreting a harlequin head first.⁴⁴ As Settle is made to say to Pope’s other target Lewis Theobald, Yet lo! in me what authors have to brag on! Reduc’d at last to hiss in my own dragon. Avert it, heav’n! that thou or Cibber e’er Should wag two serpent tails in Smithfield fair. (287 90)

Pope gives Settle profound symbolic importance in the poem’s vision ‘of an England on the verge of a cultural breakdown’, his satirical expression of the

⁴³ Rogers (1975), 447. ⁴⁴ Kent’s designs were executed by the engraver Peter Fourdrinier and appeared in the edition of the Dunciad included in the collected works of Pope published in 1735. See further Mengel (1973 4), 170 4.

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sense Pope shared with other Augustans of an ongoing ‘threat to traditional and highly esteemed values’.⁴⁵ Amongst these values the Renaissance reverence for classical antiquity was central. As Aubrey Williams wrote in his pioneering interpretation of The Dunciad as a parodic version of the Aeneid, The threat to time honoured values was most clearly mirrored for many Augustans in the contemporary assault on classical standards and traditions in literature. The classical models and resources appeared to be perverted and debased by a variety of abuses inappropriate borrowings and applications, mean imitations, vulgar para phrases. At the same time, however, the classical resources remained, in their original splendour, a perpetual reproach to those in the present who were guilty of such abuse. The very introduction of classical materials into the work of a bad writer automatically supplied a standard by which such work could be measured and found wanting.⁴⁶

The overall plot of The Dunciad, according to Pope himself, enacts the transfer of the imperial seat of Dulness from the coarse City of London to the polite world of Westminster: the introduction of the lowest diversions of the rabble in Smithfield to be the entertainment of the court and town; or in other words, the Action of The Dunciad is the Removal of the imperial seat of Dulness from the City to the polite world; as that of the Aeneid is the Removal of the empire of Troy to Latium.⁴⁷

In the Dunciad the City of London, the Kingdom of the reprehensible low culture of Dulness, is therefore represented by the mythical Troy, and the royal court, to its west, is represented by Virgil’s Latium and Rome. As Williams points out, there was still a real, physical division in the time of Settle and Pope between these two parts of London (popularly known as Troy-novant), marked by portions of the old city wall still standing.⁴⁸ In Book 2 of the Dunciad, the dunces traverse the streets of London, tracing a tangible real-world itinerary from the City to the polite world of Westminster.⁴⁹ This route links them unmistakably to the figure of Elkanah Settle, City Poet, since it follows that taken by each new Lord Mayor of London on his first day in office. Pope also associates this pageant with the distinction between the values which dominated each area. When the vulgar revelry which represents the commercial values of the City annexes the territory previously occupied by the dignified standards associated with the royal court and noblemen, the result is disastrous: Classical and humane letters, so long fostered by the aristocracy and bound up with humanistic ethics and ideals, appear to be threatened in the Dunciad by the combined onslaughts of trading class attitudes and a debased literary practice.⁵⁰

⁴⁵ Williams (1955), 40; Malcolmson (1973), 20 1; Shershow (1995), 108 82. ⁴⁶ Williams (1955), 11. ⁴⁷ Pope (1729), 56. ⁴⁸ Williams (1955), 11 19. ⁴⁹ Williams (1955), 29 30. ⁵⁰ Williams (1955), 31.

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The annexation appeared the more violent because the City was still sharply separated in the minds of Settle and Pope’s contemporaries from the building developments of the new West End. In the later seventeenth century, the plague and the Great Fire had persuaded most of the aristocracy to leave the City forever. The spacious squares of Covent Garden, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, St James, and Soho were designed for the rich and ennobled. They were keen to put a physical distance between themselves and the commercial heartland. The City also began to look grimier and its air to be more polluted, since the dominant west winds blew the dust from the increasing number of coal fires away from the aristocratic settlements back to the winding alleys inhabited by the Smithfield Muses.⁵¹ The success of Mr Powell’s puppet theatre in the heart of Covent Garden must have felt to Pope like a continuous affront. The fall of Pope’s ‘Troy’ is precipitated by the death of Elkanah Settle, the last of the City Poets. This, Pope tells us, throws the Kingdom of Dulness into a crisis. Dulness announces that she will therefore transfer her imperial seat from Smithfield to the rest of London. Lewis Theobald, the translator, editor, and writer of plays and pantomimes,⁵² now appears to figure as the duncely ‘Aeneas’. He laments to Dulness (who shares features with Virgil’s Venus, Aeneas’ mother) the collapse of his Troy: But see great Settle to the dust descend, And all thy cause and empire at an end! Cou’d Troy be sav’d by any single hand, His gray goose weapon must have made her stand.⁵³

That is, if anyone could have saved the old Troy it would have been Elkanah Settle. Pope is demanding here that his reader remember that in The Siege of Troy the city is indeed saved. For a brief moment in the Dunciad, Settle becomes indistinguishable from his own coarse Trojan hero, Bristle. But henceforward literary Duncery will take possession of the whole of London, led by the avatar of Dulness, Theobald, ‘the first who brings | The Smithfield Muses to the Ear of Kings’.⁵⁴

CONCLUSIONS If we reject the time-honoured tradition of aesthetically condemning Settle’s droll as trivial and ephemeral, we can see it, rather, as a notably successful bid ⁵¹ See Brett James (1935), 25, 313, 366; Trevelyan (1930), 80. ⁵² On Theobald’s classical translations and use of myth and literature in the playhouse, see Hall and Macintosh (2005), 41 2, 54 6, 58 9, 61 2, 75, 111 n. 26, 154 8, 179 80, 218. ⁵³ Pope (1728), 14. ⁵⁴ Line 2 of the Dunciad in Pope (1728), 7. The first scholar to appreciate the importance of The Siege of Troy to the Dunciad was Rogers (1975), although his interpretation of the relationship between the two texts differs considerably from mine.

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to turn fairground booth theatre on classical epic themes into something artistically complex, ingenious, and capable of appealing to a wide public. The Siege of Troy matters for political historians because its message of a transhistorical Trojan/British working class with a continuous identity and recreational culture can be read as self-affirming response to the serial changes of constitution and ruling class over the previous seven decades. Settle’s droll is interesting to Classicists not only on account of its intriguing relationship with ancient ‘siege theatre’ such as Seven against Thebes, but also as an example of the burlesque staging of epic myth, invented in the fifth century BCE by Cratinus.⁵⁵ It matters for English Literary studies not only because it was the literary burlesque of classical epic—and there were many such in the first half of the eighteenth century⁵⁶—with the deepest cultural penetration, and because it makes sense of the Dunciad, but also because it shows how even canonical ‘classics’ such as Dryden’s Virgil and Pope’s Homer need to be situated in a dialogue with performance history to be fully appreciated. It deserves an honoured place in the ‘chain’ of performed receptions of the Troy story. It drew on pre-existing ‘Troy’ performances including of course Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. But it also continued to exert an influence on ‘Troy’ dramas for more than a century and a half after it was the highlight of the London fairs. This was partly because it continued to be reprinted, both on its own and as part of a popular primer of ancient mythology which was published in both Britain and North America, until at least 1794 (Fig. 30.5).⁵⁷ Its influence on Charles Dibdin’s Melodrame mad!: or, The siege of Troy: A new comic pathetic, historic, anachronasmatic, ethic, epic melange (first performed at the Surrey Theatre in 1819) is profound. Dibdin’s ‘melange’ in turn informed Robert Brough’s magnificent 1858–9 burlesque at the Lyceum, The Siege of Troy.⁵⁸ This genealogy shows that we we must probe further back than ballad opera to understand the indigenous British branch in the ancestral stemma of Victorian classical burlesque. Ultimately Settle’s droll is of most interest of all to Classical Reception, broadly defined. It reveals how ‘classic’ Augustan writers struggled to stake their claim to cultural possession of Greek and Roman antiquity and to the financial profits and kudos to be derived from it. It provides unchallengeable evidence that the story of the siege of Troy was available to audience members ⁵⁵ Hall (2008), 39 and n. 27. ⁵⁶ See Bond (1932), 74. ⁵⁷ The droll itself was republished in Berwick in 1794 and Dublin in 1788. It was also often reissued as part of The New history of the Trojan wars, and Troy’s destruction: In three books. Containing, I. The renowned and valiant deeds of the most famous Hector of Troy. II. The rape of fair Helen of Greece, together with the last destruction of Troy by the stratagem of the wooden horse. III. The arrival of Brute in Britain, and how he conquered Albion and his giants, and built Troynovant, now London (Philadelphia: Carey, 1794). Similar or identical volumes had been published in 1728, 1735, 1750, 1751, and 1791. ⁵⁸ On which see Hall (1999a); Hall and Macintosh (2005), 352 with fig. 31.1.

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Fig. 30.5 Frontispiece and title page to The New History of the Trojan Wars and Troy’s Destruction (1750 edn., London: J. Hodges). In the author’s private collection.

across the class spectrum in early eighteenth-century London. Indeed, it was at the fairground, and perhaps especially at the puppet shows, that the wars over the ownership of classical stories were fought with the greatest intensity, and The Siege of Troy is a rare and precious piece of evidence illustrating the perspective of the less privileged and less educated segment of the population. Like the occasional enlightened thinker of the same period advocating the widespread teaching of ancient authors in English translation rather than the ‘classical curriculum’ which entailed grooming in grammar via the French ‘Delphin Classics’ by then dominating privileged youths’ curriculum, the droll provides a valuable counterweight to the more plentiful extant material expressing the viewpoint of the classically trained elite.⁵⁹ In its own way it has certainly turned out to be what Dobrée would describe as a ‘gem in the slime’. ⁵⁹ See Hall (2009) and (2015); Hall and Stead (forthcoming), chs. 1 2.

31 Classical Epic in Early Musical Theatre The Case of Kane O’Hara’s Midas Henry Stead

In the wake of his shiny yet sinister affliction, the formerly greedy King Midas was understandably ‘perosus opes’ (‘disgusted by wealth’), but he was sadly not—it is told—a bit less ‘fat-minded’ (‘pingue ingenium’). A life of rural seclusion and religious observance could not protect him from his own stupidity, and—as Ovid tells us in Book 11 of his Metamorphoses (146–7)—Midas dared to speak out against the judgement of Old Tmolus, who had awarded Apollo the victory over rustic Pan in a musical contest. As punishment for this slight, or—as Apollo would have it—his uncultivated hearing, the god of music stretched Midas’ ears long, filled them with white hairs, and made them floppy and movable at the base. Nowadays the most widely disseminated part of the Ovidian myth of Midas is undoubtedly the first, in which Bacchus grants the greedy King Midas the famous golden touch in return for treating Silenus well and for bringing him safely home. As we all know, this ends badly. Yet, luckily for Midas, Bacchus reverses his gift by having the king immerse himself in the sacred waters of the River Pactolus. However, the eighteenth-century Irish dramatist and musician Kane O’Hara, whose Midas provides the focus of this chapter, does not deal with Midas’ golden touch but with his ill-fated judgement of the competition between Apollo and Pan. But the story—from its original’s thirty-four lines of Latin hexameter—is lavishly expanded in O’Hara’s Midas. This chapter recovers this forgotten blockbuster of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century stages, whose roots lie in Ovid’s perpetuum carmen and also in British and Irish comic opera and puppet theatre traditions.

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O’ HARA’ S M ID A S O’Hara’s version, which received its first performance in Dublin in the early 1760s, begins with a chorus of the ‘Heathen Deities, seated amidst the clouds, in full council’.¹ Apollo is struck down from heaven by Jupiter for spying on him, by which he means illuminating the earth while Juno was searching for him on one of his covert amorous adventures. The thunderbolt that casts down Apollo to earth scares away some shepherds, who handily discard a coat, a hat, and a guitar. The god lands in this idyllic landscape, described as ‘Champaign country’, and quickly adopts the dress of a shepherd, changes his name to Pol, and picks up the abandoned guitar. He is both hungry and penniless, so when he is discovered by Sileno, he gladly takes the job he is offered of entertaining Sileno’s wife, Mysa, and daughters Nysa and Daphne. Sileno’s daughters are as keen on the dashing ‘Pol’ as their mother, Mysa, is distrusting of him. Squire Midas, though already married, courts the young Nysa, and his herald Damaetas is sweet on Daphne, so when they discover that both sisters are hopelessly infatuated with this new guitarist shepherd they dream up a cunning plan. That plan is to summon Pan, ‘the old soaker’, who has characteristically taken up in an alehouse and surrounded himself with tobacco pipes, bagpipes, and booze. They set up a rigged musical contest between Pan and Pol, the winner of which will continue entertaining the court whilst the other will be banished, or ‘transported like a thief ’. Pan goes first, singing his fast-paced, wordy, and bounding drinking song, ‘A tol de roll lol’, to which Pol answers with a more measured verse form with content of an altogether higher register. In performance the role of Pan was designed for an Irish singer and the most famous Pan was Robert Owenson (1744–1812), the most sought-after Irish male lead in London at the time. Judge Midas falls asleep even before Apollo begins his song; and on waking he declares Pan the winner. Apollo then reveals his true self and turns Squire Midas’ ears into those of an ass. The performance ends with an address to the critics, threatening them with the same fate as Midas if they judge the burletta too harshly. It will be clear from this brief summary that there are considerable differences between the Ovidian source and O’Hara’s version. All that remains of the source is the musical competition between Apollo and Pan, and the punishment of Midas for his judgement against Apollo. Much else has been added. Even though the competition was rigged and the corrupt judge paid for his crimes, in the theatre the judgement of Midas stood for a victory of the bawdy over the refined, the ‘lowbrow’ over the ‘highbrow’, but most importantly the long-suppressed Irish folk tradition over a style associated with the

¹ O’Hara (1766), 1.

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imperial overlords. At one level such a Saturnalian turning of the tables would have entertained audiences across Britain and Ireland, warming to the boozy underdogs of Pan and Midas and their pyrrhic victory over the flashy foreign fop, Pol. But embedded in both the form and the set-up of the singing contest is a deeply dissident, countercultural message. O’Hara’s second burletta The Golden Pippin (1773)—the ‘burla’ of which was the Judgement of Paris—was at first denied a licence by the Lord Chamberlain because of its satirical thrusts at the royal family. The politics in his earlier Midas may well be more opaque, but with the era of the Regency approaching, when the dissolute George, Prince of Wales stood in for his father the king during the latter’s mental decline, the depiction of mad and bad rulers such as Jupiter and Midas was perilously close to the mark. The choice of the classical myth of Midas, told in its most popular form in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,² had the dual effect of providing a plot immediately familiar to its intended audience and of imbuing the thrilling and popular performance with a cultural legitimacy it would not otherwise have had. In a similar way to how Victorian pornographers, say, attempted to legitimize their erotic portrayal of the human form through reference to classical sculpture, or Edwardian strongmen attempted to give their freakish feats an air of distinction by wearing Roman sandals and calling themselves ‘The Modern Hercules’, the popular and comic operatic form of the burletta earned a sheen of respectability by its ‘epic’ burla. No doubt too, the use of a well-known classical source afforded the author greater freedom to tackle the big issues of the day. As ‘Machine’ (the composer) in the opening of Henry Fielding’s Tumble-down Dick: or Phaethon in the Suds (1736) says: ‘Sir, the Scene lies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and so, pray, Sir, don’t ask any more Questions, for things of this Nature are above Criticism.’³ While Midas certainly gained an air of prestige from its classical origin, it is also from the stark contrast between the supposedly lofty classical content and the supposedly lowly musical theatrical form that much of the humour is derived. The crude binaries of stereotype quickly crumble under the interplay of writer and audience. The classical, for example, is only lofty until it is brought low, and Fielding’s Ovidian source is only ‘above criticism’ when it is not subjected to criticism. The truth of the matter is that neither Fielding’s nor O’Hara’s works has much to do with their Ovidian ‘original’ at all, and the humour lies partially in the phoniness of the conceit through which the audience is gladly dragged. The introduction of an Olympian superhuman character, here in the form of the disguised Apollo, shines a revealing light on familiar inter-mortal relationships and divisions within contemporary society. O’Kane’s Midas is, above all, about corruption at all levels.

² Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.146 79.

³ Fielding (1736), 5.

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MID AS A ND THE MUSICAL STAGE The burlesquing of classical deities and heroes was, of course, nothing new. The treatment of gods and heroes as low-life types is often thought to have its roots in the French literary burlesque tradition, most notably in Paul Scarron’s Virgile Travesti (1648–53), which inspired Charles Cotton’s Scarronides, or Virgil Travestie (1648), which in turn in England spawned a whole host of imitators. But from the early 1600s, a puppet show responding to Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598) called The ancient modern history of Hero and Leander shows that the classical burlesque tradition is already in rude health in England at the turn of the seventeenth century.⁴ The English travesties, or burlesques of epic, were especially debasing of its elevated subjects. This is not only a reaction against the drudgery of rote learning inflicted on the privileged pupils of the classics; it is also because epic provided an especially sharp instrument for social criticism. The stratified epic population of imperfect gods and dutiful heroes presented creative practitioners with both a familiar and a sufficiently distant context in which to expose the foibles and infelicities of society. Classical myth was especially useful because everyone knew, at least in broad terms, the backstory for each character. This meant the lean narrative of the English burletta/afterpiece form that O’Hara pioneered need not waste time or space on character development. It was just as easy to draw on the myths, as they come down in, say, Ovid, making the occasional knowing nod to their former incarnations for comic effect. In the English burletta much humour was derived from the comparison between the original words of popular melodies and the actors’ often highly inappropriate new lyrics. It

⁴ The puppet Hero and Leander was performed by a man known only as ‘Leatherhead’ and is the only surviving text of a puppet show from the era. It is recorded in Ben Jonson’s comedy Bartholomew Fair (1614). In it Leander is cast as the son of a ‘dyer at Puddle wharf ’ and the action takes place in the decidedly working class environs of the London waterways. This fortuitously preserved show reminds us of the ephemerality of such performance pieces, and the many unfound treasures that lie beyond the gaze of the high literary spotlight, which we have long been accustomed to beam back at our past. Traces of other long lost classical burlesques played by puppets in imitation of Italian opera are to be found in the theatre of the legendary puppeteer Martin Powell, located in the Little Piazza in Covent Garden: Heroic Love, or The Death of Hero and Leander (1711); Orpheus and Euridice (1712); The False Triumph, or The Destruction of Troy (1712), which was revived in 1726 by his son; Venus and Adonis (1713). In the False Triumph, Lawrence explains: ‘the Greeks and Trojans were exactly dressed in the ancient manner, and “at Paris’s triumph the stage is to be beautified with trophies, the side scenes representing elephants with castles, in which are Syrians holding forth splendid banners, with Indians on horseback, bearing curious trophies.” And then Signior Punchinella appeared in the role of Jupiter, descending from the clouds in a chariot drawn by eagles, and sang an aria to Paris. The piece concluded with a prospect of Troy in flames. None of these plays had ever been acted in the human theatre, and only one of them was ever printed.’ There is plainly much work to be done in the puppet reception of the classics.

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was a similar kind of interplay between the mythological character’s backstory and the often irreverent action played out on the stage that both empowered audiences and made them laugh. As at the French Comédie-Italienne and in the fair theatres at SaintGermain and Saint-Laurent, the stage potential of the epic burlesque was readily exploited by English theatre makers.⁵ One of the most important of these early stage productions of burlesqued epic in England was Elkanah Settle’s The Siege of Troy.⁶ Other important forerunners for O’Hara’s Midas come in the ballad opera tradition, notably John Motley’s Penelope (1728), John Breval’s Rape of Helen (1733), John Gay’s Achilles (1733), and Henry Fielding’s Tumble-Down Dick, or Phaethon in Suds (1736). These all have epic sources, with varying degrees of textual dependence and intervening mediation (by, for example, the ubiquitous Pope’s Homer (1719)). The English (more serious) comic opera tradition was not immune to classical epic burlesque. There was, for example, Richard Leveridge’s Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe in 1716. The main difference between English comic opera and ballad opera is that comic opera was written for musicians and singers who could act whereas ballad opera was written for actors who could also sing. The ballad operas were therefore musically simpler but dramatically more complex. Where the ballad operas were made up of popular ballads, rarely written as concerted music— that is, for two parts or more together—the comic opera was largely concerted music written specifically for the production, with relatively little energy put into its visual aspect.⁷ The English burletta, of which form Midas was one of the earliest and certainly the most successful example, defied the traditional boundaries between the operatic forms, introducing via its strange theatrical and musical blend different audiences to different genres.⁸ The burletta was literally all-singing, all-dancing, with close attention paid to the visual element, including detailed and perspectival scene painting, elaborate costume design, and high-tech stage effects. Much the same could be said of the contemporary puppet theatre, in which O’Hara’s Midas also played a key role. A burletta is a short operatic performance piece that has a simple plot tightly woven around a single and central comic event, hence the burla (joke) from which the diminutive burletta derives. They tended to use pared-down and familiar plots, easily recognizable type characters, and highly exaggerated acting. The burletta borrowed from Italian opera seria the operatic combination

⁵ In French theatre: Furetière’s Les Ampurs d’Énée et de Didon (1649), Perrault’s L’Enfer burlesque (1649), Richer’s L’Ovide buffon (1649), and Picon’s L’Odyssée d’Homère (1650). On the French Stage: Le Decent de Messetin aux enfers (1689), Ulisse et Circe (1691), Arlequin Phaeton (1692), and La Baguette de Vulcan (1693). See further Dudouyt, Ch. 33 in this volume. ⁶ See Hall, Ch. 30 in this volume. ⁷ Lawrence (1922), 397 9. ⁸ Lawrence (1922), 407.

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of the emotive aria and the plot-moving recitativo, but the music accompanying the singing, unlike opera seria, were popular songs which would have already been well known to the audience via other musical theatre or popular ballads. The ‘English burletta’ is, then, a hybrid form, adapted from an Italian form, distinguished from the ballad opera by its lack of spoken dialogue.⁹ Italian performers had been a relatively common presence on the English stage since the Restoration, performing both comic and serious opera, but when the mid-eighteenth-century operatic phenomenon of the ‘burletta’ arrived, the majority of mid-eighteenth-century British audiences had little idea what to make of it. That is, before the Giordani family arrived with a performance of Cocchi’s Gli amanti gelosi at Covent Garden in December 1753. The Giordani staged a handful of Italian burlettas in the 1753/4 season and their success was largely gained by the talents of their starlet daughter, Nicolina Giordani—whose popularity was attributed by the contemporary Irish playwright and critic, Arthur Murphy, to her ‘quick expression of humour in countenance, such a vivacity of action, joined to such variety’.¹⁰ In spite of the popularity of the Giordanis there were still significant problems in attracting and entertaining a broad audience base at an Italian burletta. Many found the Italian burletta tiresome because they simply could not understand what the characters were saying. This linguistic problem was solved in 1758 by the performance of the burlettas in English versions written by the Naples-born double-bass player, Stefano Storace. These were performed at John Trusler’s Marylebone Pleasure Gardens from 1758 to 1760. Outside the main hall, where a modicum of decency was at least feigned, the gardens were also the venue for bull-baiting, boxing, gambling, cockfighting, prostitution, and the like. Storace’s translations were extremely popular, and it was by way of these Englished Italian burlettas that favourable conditions for the return of the Italian burletta in Italian ensued. On 19 December 1761 the D’Amici family put on a production of the Italian burletta, Scolari’s La Cascina at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin.¹¹ The production was a success. Consequently the rival Dublin theatre on Crow Street was as empty as Smock Alley was full. Partly out of loyalty to the Crow Street Theatre and partly on a patriotic whim, according to which he reacted strongly against the idea of local Irish theatre losing out to a company of touring Italians, Garret Colley Wellesley, Viscount of Dangan and first Earl of Mornington, a Dublin aristocrat and talented musical amateur (father of Arthur Wellesley, more commonly known as the Duke of Wellington, of

⁹ Dircks (1987) and (1999), 93 4; Rubsamen (1950), 552 3; Lawrence (1922), esp. 406 7; and Talbot (2014), 10 11. ¹⁰ Murphy in Gray’s Inn Journal, no. 67, repr. (1786), 6.141, cited in Dircks (1999), 31. ¹¹ Flood (n.d.).

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Waterloo fame), asked his old friend Kane O’Hara to adapt and enlarge his short comic opera about King Midas, for Crow Street.

M ID A S ON THE S TAGE O’Hara’s Midas went on to enjoy an extraordinarily rich performance history but its origins are mired by conflicting accounts. There is, however, general consensus that sometime at the beginning of the 1760s, the musical was composed for private performance in the home of its author and/or that of his friend William Brownlow, who lived near Lurgan.¹² There is also strong evidence to suggest that these private shows were puppet performances. As we shall see later it was in puppet form that Midas would achieve perhaps its greatest success and highest critical acclaim. Kane O’Hara was born in 1711 or 1712 (Fig. 31.1). He was so tall that he was nicknamed ‘St. Patrick’s Steeple’.¹³ He was a much-loved and well-respected figure in eighteenth-century Dublin. In 1757 he founded the Dublin Musical Academy with Wellesley. O’Hara was therefore a central player in the Dublin music scene. He is reported to have been ‘a first-rate wit’ by a contemporary,¹⁴ but was also rumoured to have seldom left his house;¹⁵ and (perhaps not unconnected) in 1778, when his sight failed, he required the assistance of an amanuensis. He was an aristocrat, ‘from old Sligo stock’,¹⁶ with an apparently strong social conscience. He regularly hosted fundraising events for charitable causes, including a relief fund for those incarcerated in the various Marshalseas in Dublin. His Musical Academy annually raised funds for the Charitable Loan Society, which gave small loans to ‘poor industrious Trade Folk’.¹⁷ His father, Kean Og O’Hara, high sheriff of Sligo, was a patron of the impoverished blind harper Turlough O’Carolan (1670–1738), whose memory and art would become a powerful symbol of republicanism for the United Irishmen who rebelled against British rule in Ireland in the 1790s. O’Hara was a graduate of Trinity College Dublin where—as well as at school—he would have been exposed to a great deal of Latin and Greek literature. Given the lack of textual correspondence between source and O’Hara’s libretto, it is immaterial whether or not the Ovidian original was engaged with directly or not. It is with the plot, the situation, the story that O’Hara engages, not Ovid’s poetic text. There were two important dramatic forerunners to Midas, of which O’Hara may have had some acquaintance: John Lyly’s Midas (written in 1588–9), which told both the ‘golden touch’ and ¹² Flood (1906), 299. ¹³ Kelly (1975), 272n. ¹⁴ O’Keeffe (1826). ¹⁵ See e.g. the short biographical feature entitled ‘Kane O’Hara Esq.’ in Cawthorn (1806). ¹⁶ Fitzpatrick (1895), 63. ¹⁷ Dublin Journal, 11 February 1758.

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Fig. 31.1 Kane O’Hara by Edmund Dorrell. Etching, published 1 November 1802. NPG D5391. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

‘ass’s ears’ episodes; and Christopher Smart’s The Judgment of Midas: A Masque, a slight work focusing like O’Hara simply on the second tale, which was written in 1748 and first printed in his 1752 Poems on Several Occasions. O’Hara’s Midas makes few specific demands on the audience in terms of classical education. The idea that Jupiter is a rake, who preys on mortal women, is funny in itself because his demeanour replicates that of the ruling gentleman. He is pilloried in the opening song thus:

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Cock of the school, He bears despotic rule; His word, Though absurd, Must be law.¹⁸

The more subtle allusions are still far from subtle; for example, Juno sings: Think not, lewd Jove, Thus to wrong my chaste love; For, spite of your rakehelly godhead, By day and by night, Nor be, of dues nuptial, defrauded. I’ll ferret the haunts of your female gallants; In vain you in darkness enclose them; Your favourite jades, I’ll plunge to the shades, Or into cows metamorphose them.¹⁹

Aside from the broad reference to Jupiter’s rapacious exploits in general, O’Hara alludes here to the story of Io found in Book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is a casual allusion that connects with its source in a flash. Little if anything lasting of the original context is imported. It is simply a gratification of some learning to complement an already clever polysyllabic rhyme. The burletta is full of such verbal dexterity but this is really as close textually as O’Hara gets to his source. Lord Midas and Mysa (the bossy housewife) use Latin in two places, but this is more legal Latin that has crept into the public realm than classical Latin. The Dublin staging of the opera at Crow Street Theatre was a success and it was picked up in 1764 for a run at London’s Covent Garden. Although when it first arrived in Covent Garden as a three-act musical it only lasted nine nights, when it returned, following an overhaul converting it into a two-act afterpiece, it stormed through the major and minor theatres and pleasure gardens of London, and was still in common cultural currency well into the 1830s. It was performed 226 times before 1800 in London’s patent theatres alone. Travelling companies brought it to the provinces and it toured widely into the early nineteenth century, reaching audiences all over Britain and Ireland, some in the United States. It even reached as far afield as Jamaica and St Petersburg.²⁰ While the central plot of Midas sketched above remained consistent, the libretto and score adapted to its new surroundings. There was, for example, a good deal of smoothing down to be done before the Irish play was ready for a London audience. The changes made were for the most part small. O’Hara ¹⁸ O’Hara (1820), 5.

¹⁹ O’Hara (1820), 6.

²⁰ Dircks (1987), 7.

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stripped the play of its ‘local’ jokes, especially allusions specifically to Dublin life. Although the play is still an education in imaginative curses, a comparison of the Dublin and London texts shows an effort to dilute language of the jokes that rely on coarse references to urination and prostitution. In spite of such smoothing, O’Hara was still criticized for not distinguishing between the low/vulgar register (proper to comedy) and the profane. Different versions of the burletta were recorded in select publications dating from 1762 to 1766, not including reprints—which continue well into the nineteenth century. These come in the form of the entire libretto (‘as it was performed in Crow Street’ (1762) and ‘as it was performed in Covent Garden’ (1764 and 1766)). Another important resource is a collection of the Songs in the New Burletta of Midas (1762), which has recently been identified as the earliest source of Midas, and from which it is possible to develop a strong sense of the never-recorded score.²¹ Four manuscripts remain: three in the National Library of Ireland, and then the single undated manuscript in the Larpent Collection—submitted for licensing purposes.²² Talbot’s comparison of these resources has shown that many of the changes were made for reasons of musical and dramatic efficacy.²³ In the slimlining from three-act opera to two-act afterpiece, what is found on the cutting-room floor is suggestive: there is a turning away from Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), famous for its subversive politics of reform. While in the 1762 version there were six airs borrowed from Gay’s ballad opera, only one remained in the afterpiece.²⁴ This reduction goes hand in hand with the excision of scenes with clear political references. Other reductions are more practical: references to O’Hara’s largely unknown (in London) earlier works and jibes made towards the Italian comic opera at the Smock Alley Theatre are understandably cut. Pan’s part is also reduced. The identification of the rustic Pan with the outlawed traditional Gaelic bardic singer pitched in contest against the English Apollonian oppressor would inevitably go down less well in England. In the 1760s the penal laws were still in effect, and singing traditional Irish songs was outlawed. The very act of singing, let alone staging a contest between traditional Irish and high cultural/elite art forms, gained a heightened political charge. When it was performed in 1764 in Covent Garden, Mr Shuter, who was playing the titular role, delivered a prologue in the form of a letter to the town: Many Headed Sir, YOU, to whom Authors ever must be civil, As Indians worship out of fear the devil. To you who have admir’d Mia Spiletta, A stranger Poet offers a Burletta;

²¹ Talbot (2014), 76 9. ²³ Talbot (2014), 76 98.

²² Huntington Library, San Marino, California. ²⁴ Talbot (2014), 97.

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And hopes to please (he owns it, for tis true) With English musick, English humour too. Full glad he heard that Artaxerxes’ strains, And village love, chaunted by rural swains, Have shar’d, with Italy, your kind applause; To make one effort more, his pen he draws His piece receiv’d, and into favour grown, The whole Italian Drama is your own. Then judge not, critics, by rules too severe, Scenes where wild whim and frolick should appear. Ev’n polish’d Paris dedicates a stage Where strong Burlesque each night diverts the age But all in French; and shall a British pit, Like Boniface, to jargon listening sit, And what they understand not take for wit? For you, the bard thinks English most expedient; And so, good Mr TOWN, your most obedient.²⁵

O’Hara is consciously weaving together multiple strands of existing performance traditions from Britain, Ireland, France, and Italy; and his greatest innovation in Midas is perhaps its bold reassembly of foreign yet deeply familiar parts in a distinctly modern and high-quality form. Where other comic operatic forms, including the Italian burletta, were concentrating on a species of farcical realism, depicting the lives of real contemporary people in disarray, O’Hara used mythological characters. This was, as we have heard, certainly no innovation. This much was well known by the anonymous editor of O’Hara’s Midas (1770), who wrote that Burlesque in all times from the stage of Athens down to The Dragon of Wantley [1737], has been esteemed one of the provinces of the Drama. Its humour princi pally consists in making dignified personages raise in our minds trite and ordinary ideas, or else in giving to trivial objects a serious air of gravity and importance.²⁶

In the prologue O’Hara sets himself up as the ‘stranger’ Englisher of the Italian burletta. He does this by explicitly aligning his efforts with those of Thomas Arne, who in 1762 adapted Metastasio’s Artaxerxes (1729), creating what is considered the first English opera seria. He aligns himself too with Isaac Bickerstaffe, who in the same year wrote Love in a Village, widely considered the first English opera buffa, or comic opera. His own new work, Midas, is presented here as an English-language attempt at the Italian operatic form of the burletta, to which he refers by allusion to the well-loved character from the hugely popular Italian burletta Gli amanti gelosi, ‘Mia Spiletta’. The performance of Nicolina Giordani, who from that moment on became ²⁵ O’Hara, Midas, Larpent Collection, 235; emphasis changed from bold to italic. ²⁶ O’Hara (1770), 3: front matter editorial address ‘To the Reader’.

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affectionately known as ‘La Spiletta’, generally sent critics into paroxysms of adulation.²⁷ In spite of its generic hybridity, high levels of allusivity, and hence essentially derivative nature, Kane O’Hara’s Midas quickly became a ‘classic’; and the story it told entered almost immediately into the mainstream media and discourse of contemporary culture and politics. The image of the foolish, corrupt, and long-eared man of influence became a prism through which people—both creative practitioners and the audiences (who saw or read it)— could make sense of the world around them. One example is the hand-coloured etching The Blind Enthusiast, dating to 14 May 1792, printed by Richard Newton and published by William Holland (Fig. 31.2). Midas’ ass’s ears are used by the cartoonist—alongside the dunce’s hat and blindfold—to indicate the foolhardiness of William Wilberforce who was at the time considered to be

Fig. 31.2 The Blind Enthusiast. Cartoon, British Museum, image no. AN361549001. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

²⁷ One such, Thomas Wilkes, was given cause to question ‘whether the antient [sic] mimes excelled them [the Giordani family] in attitudes, postures, agility, and grimace: they have a surprising power of distorting the countenance, and perhaps nothing was ever more entertaining than the various faces made by La Spiletta and her father, crying, in one of these pieces’: Wilkes (1759), 53.

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stirring up slave revolts in the West Indies. The other blindfolded figure, symbolizing Justice, casts her judgement in favour of the vested interests of the transatlantic slave trade, the sailors and plantation owners (to whom she points with her sword). Their verdict of ‘Not Guilty’ is contrasted with the reckless, foolish, fire-breathing Wilberforce, who is labelled an ‘enthusiast’ (a common derogatory term of the time for a deluded, ‘ranting’—usually religious—fanatic) for the ostensibly futile cause of abolition.²⁸ Other potentially mediating influences—for example, Shakespeare’s Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Apuleius’ Lucius in his Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass—are to be regarded with caution, for Ovid stipulates that aside from his floppy ears Midas maintained in all other aspects his human form. Apuleius’ Lucius, on the other hand, is transformed wholly into an ass, and Shakespeare’s mischievous Puck bestows upon Bottom the complete head of an ass. Additionally, neither of their transformations is brought about as a punishment for perceived foolishness, which is clearly what the ears here represent.

MIDAS IN PUPPET THEATRE O’Hara pioneered a bold new form of entertainment with his English burletta form and inspired many writers to follow suit. Among Midas’ progeny, we can include Thomas Chatterton’s fragment of a burletta, Amphytrion (written c.1768), which he wrote after seeing Midas tour Bristol; Charles Dibdin’s Poor Vulcan (1778)—another hugely popular burletta; and André Ernest Grétry’s Le Jugement de Midas (1778). Even though the actor and playwright Robert Hitchcock was confident that Midas would ever ‘hold a distinguished place amongst the entertainments of the stage’,²⁹ this important play—which touched thousands, if not millions, of lives—has nevertheless slipped into almost complete obscurity. This neglect may well have something to do with its most important afterlife on the puppet stage. The Irish tenor Michael Kelly (1762–1826) states plainly that ‘Kane O’Hara . . . had a puppet show for the amusement of his friends . . . It was quite the rage with all the people of fashion, who crowded nightly to see the gratuitous performance.’³⁰ The private puppet theatre that played at O’Hara’s house ‘was worked by a young man of the name Nick Marsh, who sang for Midas and Pan’.³¹ Molloy reports that Marsh ‘made the little people he controlled play such pranks and utter such witticisms as convulsed all who ²⁸ For discussion of the loaded term ‘enthusiasm’, see Stead (2015), 257 8 and Mee (2003), passim. On abolition and the Greek and Roman classics, see Hall, Alston, and McConnell (2011). ²⁹ Hitchcock (1788), 1.93. ³⁰ Kelly (1826), 5.1.5. ³¹ Kelly (1826), 5.1.5.

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heard and saw’.³² Kelly recalls: ‘In the performance of this fantoccini I sang the part of Daphne, and was instructed by the author himself; the others were by other amateurs.’³³ What Kelly does not tell us is that this puppet show did not remain a private affair. O’Hara established in 1774 what he called the Patagonian Puppet Theatre, in which enterprise he was joined by the landscape artist and scene-painter John Ellis (1776–1812). The son of a cabinetmaker, Ellis controlled the puppet theatre with the help of some friends. It is unknown exactly how much involvement O’Hara had with the puppets, beyond writing for them.³⁴ But in 1776, after winning the honour of a silver palette from the Dublin Society for his ornamental and perspective painting, Ellis took the puppets to London and set up his elaborate stage in a 200-seater space called the Grand Room, the upper level of the Exeter ’Change, in the Strand. In this venture he was joined by, among others, Michael Stoppelaer and Charles Dibdin. The Patagonian Theatre opened on 26 October 1776 with O’Hara’s Midas. On the same bill that night was The Enchanter, a pantomime, and in conclusion was a ‘magnificent piece of PERSPECTIVE ARCHITECTURE’. The Patagonian Theatre’s classical inauguration tapped into the metropolitan ‘Graecomania’ that would run wild through the Regency period. Midas was the first and the longest running of the company’s classical entertainments; it was not their last. The theatre continued in the same format of a double bill with a display of scenery to finish for the next five years. The scenes of perspectival painting and architecture were not infrequently based on views from the ancient world, for example, the Temple of the Sun ‘As formerly in the famous CITY of PALMIRA’.³⁵ The scenery design was an important attraction. Ellis would recreate distant events or foreign places, providing a kind of virtual tourism for the majority of Londoners who could never afford to travel. For just a shilling you could sit in the gallery and experience, for example, Ellis’s recreation of the 1779 eruption of Mount Vesuvius or see close up the Niagara Falls. The puppet show defied and redefined people’s expectations of that genre of entertainment. A man from Oxford Coffee-house, who signed off as ‘MICRO-MEGAS’, wrote into the Morning Chronicle after the opening night, describing what he saw as ‘appearing to be rather a continued series of witchery, than any thing related to that despicable thing called

³² Molloy (1897), 5.2.152. ³³ Kelly (1826), 5.1.5. ³⁴ O’Hara’s Tom Thumb the Great was first played by the puppets of ‘The New Patagonian Puppet Theatre’ in Abbey Street in 1779. ³⁵ With thanks to the archivists at the Victoria and Albert Museum, who hold the Enthoven Collection. There are numerous newspaper cuttings related to the Exeter ’Change, from where the above details have been gleaned. NB the next exhibition in the Grand Room after the Patagonian was the Eidophusikon of Philip James de Loutherbourg. When that moved out, the menagerie moved in.

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a Puppet Shew’. The classical trimmings and extraordinary technological innovation conspired to elevate the ‘despicably’ base art form of the puppet show. The burletta of Midas and especially in his puppet fora, just as other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century burlesques, provided access to classical culture for those who were by formal education excluded from it. In this way, Midas supplemented as well as fed on the classical experience of a newly diverse culture-consuming public, including now middle- and lower-class citizens and upper-class women. Midas was definitely not written for any pedagogical purpose; its primary business was to entertain. But the fact that it did just this and reached a far wider audience than originally intended shows that there was a public appetite for things classical, which both rewarded a small amount of classical knowledge and derided the pomposity with which the acquirement of such knowledge was tainted. Midas simultaneously illuminates and blurs the borders between underexplored genres in our cultural history. Due to the looseness of its connection with its classical source, in textual terms, it tells us next to nothing about the Latin texts to which it is distantly related. However, what a focus on the dramatic receptions of literary products such as Midas can show is that people of all classes in Dublin, London, and elsewhere, were eagerly responsive to classical culture. Midas can also reveal the wider web of classical connections between readers, audiences, creators of art, and the culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

32 Epic Transposed The Real and the Hyperreal during the Revolutionary Period in France Fiona Macintosh

On 12 December 1738, the Comédie-Italienne staged a short allegorical parody entitled Les Muses by Pierre de Morand. In the Prologue, Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, fulminates in the presence of two actors from the Comédie-Française against the epic muse, Calliope, for having invaded tragedy’s traditional space in the theatre.¹ Tragedy, Melpomene avers, which had formerly provided the education of kings, has now been subsumed by epic’s inflated language, its pompous verbiage, and grandiose and excessive embellishments. Indeed, Melpomene continues, Racine would be considered prosaic if he were writing today, when ‘Tragedy is really no more than an epic monster’ (‘La Tragédie enfin n’est plus qu’un monstre épique’).² And as if Melpomene didn’t have enough trouble contending with these ‘epic’ (principally stylistic) incursions, she complains that she is now forced to witness the additional destruction wreaked by Thalia, the comic muse, who is busily exploiting the debris left in Calliope’s wake. Such is the deplorable state of tragedy, according to Melpomene, in the first part of the eighteenth century, despite over a hundred years of strict codification in the French theatre. Attendant upon the generic confusion of Corneille’s controversial Le Cid (1636), Cardinal Richelieu had commissioned Jean Chapelain’s report, Les Sentiments (1638) with the express intention of making Melpomene’s complaints redundant: the strict ‘rules’ of tragic drama— especially the unities of time and place—would exclude the full sweep of epic

¹ Desboulmiere (1769), 368 9. For the attribution to Morand, see Mercure de France (December 1738), 2675 6; and for comment, Russell (1946), 125. ² Desboulmiere (1769), 369.

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content from the tragic realm; and décor simultané, which enabled tragicomedy to move from one continent to another with a few steps, was now shunned. Duped by neoclassical theorists, Melpomene remains blissfully unaware that cross-contamination of Greek tragedy by Homeric epic—notably in the messenger speech but most obviously in terms of its subject matter—is tragedy’s hallmark. Indeed, what is striking here is just how enduring, despite the neoclassical strictures, the traditionally close relationship between tragedy and epic had proved to be. Since antiquity epic had enjoyed primary status amongst the arts; and tragedy, the early humanists argued, needed to take its cues from epic poetry.³ However, epic’s high status also fuelled considerable anxiety, especially amongst the ‘moderns’ in France in the last part of the seventeenth century after at least forty unsuccessful attempts to produce a ‘French’ epic.⁴ Whilst the ‘moderns’ maintained that the ancients could generally be improved upon, there was now considerable doubt about the possibility of producing a modern epic poem at all—in marked contrast to all other ancient genres. This view was articulated most authoritatively by Charles Perrault in his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1692), but persists well into the eighteenth century. Voltaire, adopting Nicolas de Malézieux’s terms in particular, claimed that the French (unlike the English with Milton’s example as evidence) simply did not ‘do’ epic (they did not have ‘la tête épique’).⁵ This vexed problem of epic, on account of its relative status, its style, and its content, explains in part why epic was deemed to have no place on the ‘tragic’ stage at the Comédie-Française during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Melpomene, in Morand’s interlude, thus anticipates a schism that becomes increasingly evident during the course of the eighteenth century, when ‘epic’ elements on stage are finally excluded from serious spoken drama and are coralled, in turn, within opera and dance, or confined to the unofficial stages of the fairs, where they had been flourishing since the seventeenth century.⁶ Epic, it seems, could either be ‘low’ (in other words, burlesqued as it had been since antiquity and so confined to the fairs or to the Comédie-Italienne) or transported to the realms of hyperreality on the operatic/ballet stages. This chapter examines one danced version, Pierre Gardel’s revolutionary ballet d’action, Télémaque dans l’île de Calypso (1790), based on Fénelon’s extraordinarily popular, didactic epic novel based on the Odyssey, Les Aventures de Telémaque, fils d’Ulysse (1699), in order to probe the fate of epic on the eighteenth-century stage.⁷ In the wake of the institutional divisions within the theatrical arts at the end of the seventeenth century, serious ‘spoken’ drama in ³ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷

Bizer (2011) provides a helpful survey. ⁴ Russell (1946), 1. Voltaire (1996) (1727 in English; 1735 in French). See Usher (2014), 209 10. Brockett (1965). Chapman (1987). It is sometimes called a ballet pantomine or a ballet heroïque.

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both France and England was increasingly restricted to a narrowly conceived ‘reality’ that precluded the ‘hyperreality’ of epic; and yet, paradoxically and chillingly, it was this ‘hyperreality’ that increasingly provided a better reflection of the revolutionary actualities that were unfolding outside the theatre.

TRAGEDY VERSUS EPIC In the seventeenth century, epic and tragedy were understood to be very close kin; and since antiquity had accorded epic pre-eminence among the literary genres, all modern poetic genres strove to emulate its traditional social and pedagogical functions and its elevated style. Aristotle in the Poetics was invoked as principal authority for those who maintained that tragedy was essentially an epic poem in dramatic form: like epic, it employed elevated style to convey a serious, moral lesson; and tragedy’s only difference from epic was its use of representation rather than narration to tell its story. In 1667 René Rapin in his La Comparaison d’Homère et de Virgile (1669, trans. John Davies 1672) asserted: The Epopoea, saith Aristotle, is an imitation or a draught or portraiture of an illustrious action. It has that in common with Tragedy; yet with this difference, that the latter imitates by representation, and the former by narration. So that its matter is Heroick actions; its form, Fable; its end, the instruction of Princes and grandees.⁸

In 1730 we find a broadly similar view advanced by Pierre Brumoy in his highly influential Théâtre des Grecs—a three-volume work designed to introduce his contemporaries to the Greek dramatic texts in translation (albeit in abridged form in the case of Aeschylus), as had already been the case for the Homeric epic following the recent translations into French by Anne Dacier and into English by Alexander Pope.⁹ Brumoy similarly proclaims the affinities between tragedy and epic but focuses less on their different modes of representation; instead, and following André Dacier’s attention to the temporal differences between tragedy and epic, it is epic scale that he emphasizes: tragedy is in effect ‘an abbreviated epic poem’ (‘le poème épique en raccourci’).¹⁰ Why then, given these proclaimed affinities, did tragedy and epic end up from the late seventeenth century onwards on opposing sides in the querelle des anciens et des modernes? First, the ‘ancients’ maintained that modern French tragedy needed moral improvement and epic was to be the guide. ⁸ Rapin (1672), 7. ⁹ See further Hall, Ch. 30 in this volume. Additional translations of Homer include Hobbes’s Iliad (1676) and Odyssey (1675), which appeared in a combined edition in 1677. ¹⁰ Brumoy (1730), 1.80.

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As Mme Dacier pointed out in her excoriation of Racine, neoclassical French tragedy was preoccupied with galanterie (love interests) and it was now necessary to raise tragedy to the dignity of epic once again.¹¹ This new kind of tragedy, pioneered in England by Dryden and then emulated in France by Voltaire, was in many ways ‘epic tragedy’, but came to be known more commonly in England as ‘heroic tragedy’.¹² Just as the term ‘heroic’ meant ‘epic’ in the Renaissance,¹³ from at least the mid-seventeenth century the terms heroic/epic are not just conjoined, they are regularly used interchangeably. Thomas Hobbes proclaims in response to William Davenant’s Preface to his heroic poem Gondibert (1650): ‘For the Heroique Poem narrative, such as yours, is called an Epic Poem. The Heroique Poem Dramatique is Tragedy.’¹⁴ Dryden, slightly later, in his ‘Of Heroique Plays: An Essay’ (1672) publicly acknowledges his debt to Davenant’s dramatic practice and defines the heroic play as ‘an imitation, in little of an Heroick Poem’.¹⁵ According to Dryden: an Heroik Poet is not ty’d to a bare representation of what is true, or exceeding probable: but . . . he may let himself loose to visionary objects, and to the repre sentation of such things, as depending not on sence [sic], and there not to be comprehended by knowledge, may give him a freer scope for imagination.¹⁶

This new, post-Racinean, heroic tragedy had to encompass virtuous and dignified (epic) subjects in a world beyond history—a world of visionary objects that may or may not include gods and spirits; and it had, above all, to express this world in elevated (epic) style. However, this elevated style, as in the Renaissance, eventually became a problem.¹⁷ By 1738, as we have seen, Morand’s Melpomene strongly resents this stylistic overspill from epic into tragedy; and in 1758, baron von Grimm, Diderot’s close colleague on the Encyclopédie, echoes Melpomene as he dismisses Charles-Pierre Colardeau’s play, Astarbé, based on an episode from Fénelon’s epic novel, Télémaque, on the ground that beautiful verse (‘les beaux vers’) and drama (‘un œuvre dramatique’) are incompatible: ‘These are sentences, maxims, sentiments, full of emphasis and far from the real’ (‘Ce sonts des sentences, des maxims, des sentiments aussi pleins d’emphase que vides de naturel’).¹⁸ Epic and tragedy are no longer allies; instead they are polarized in a theatrical marketplace where the ‘natural’, rather than the elevated, is now prized in stylistic terms.

¹¹ Dacier (1699). ¹² Russell (1946), Deane (1931). ¹³ See Burrow, Ch. 3 in this volume. ¹⁴ D’Avenant (1650). Hobbes’s response was appended to this first edition. ¹⁵ Dryden (1978), 10. The essay is prefixed to his play, The Conquest of Granada. ¹⁶ Dryden (1978), 12. ¹⁷ For the ‘tumid’ of epic style, see Burrow, Ch. 3 in this volume. ¹⁸ Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique (Paris 1812), 3.483, cited in Russell (1946), 126.

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Hostility to epic in the eighteenth century, for those seeking to reforge tragedy in the neoclassical mould, is clearly bound up with the rise of theatrical naturalism and its ally, philosophical rationalism. Voltaire followed Dryden for most of his dramatic career in striving to reinvigorate the French stage with ‘epic’ stylistic infusions. Yet, even he, in his Essai sur la poésie épique, first written in English in 1727, against the backdrop of Pope’s commercial successes and only later in 1735 in French, maintained that for all Homer’s sublimity of style, he merely provided ‘fastidious’ heroes and ‘ridiculous’ gods.¹⁹ And from the 1760s onwards, Voltaire realized that stylistic imitation of epic alone was not going to yield the requisite tragic revival he sought: instead, he turned increasingly away from the ‘irrational’ elements of epic towards what he discerned as the ‘noble simplicity’ of Racine in his endeavours. In addition to the philosophes’ objection to the ‘ridiculous’ in the Homeric pantheon, the ‘indecorous’ in Homer led the ‘moderns’ in the querelle to demand the banishment of epic from tragedy. As Hopkins has pointed out, the allegorical readings of Homer from the seventeenth century onwards were often deployed by the ‘ancients’ to deflect from the poems’ problematic content.²⁰ According to such readings, Achilles’ insubordination to Agamemnon in Book 1 of the Iliad needs to be read allegorically as a demonstration of the perils of misunderstandings between princes.²¹ But however irreverent is Achilles’ behaviour towards the monarch, worse (according to the modernes) is Homer’s presentation of him in Book 9 preparing food for Odysseus—roast pork and goats’ meat, bread, and wine. In 1620 Alessandro Tassoni had been perturbed by the absence of Achilles’ servants, a view that is considered sufficiently damaging by Anne Dacier some years later in the Preface to her translation of the Iliad to require a lengthy refutation, in which she details the profound religious significance of the rituals surrounding the preparation, serving, and consumption of food in ancient Greece.²² However, the anxieties about eating in Homer were not quelled: they were central to English Scriblerian satire in the early eighteenth century and were commonplace in mid-nineteenth-century France.²³

T R A N S P O S I N G E P I C AN D T H E MERVEILLEUX This mismatch between the Homeric epics’ elevated form and their frequently mundane content inevitably led to mock epic, which, in marked contrast to ¹⁹ ²¹ ²² ²³

Voltaire (1996) (1727 in English; 1735 in French). ²⁰ Hopkins (2012), 165 7. See Bizer (2011) for sixteenth century allegorical readings of Iliad Book 2. Tassoni (1620); Dacier (1699), xix; and for comment, see Power (2015). Power (2015); and Dudouyt, Ch. 33 in this volume, for nineteenth century France.

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mock heroic that uses epic to take the ‘low’ to task, provides a serious critique of the epic genre itself.²⁴ Neoclassical theorists had granted ‘rules’ to epic, as had been the case with tragedy, in order to fill in the blanks left by Aristotle’s sketchy account in the Poetics: so, for example, Le Bossu’s much-cited Le Traité du poème épique (1675) massively reduced epic’s requisite time span from the Homeric ten years to six months in order to avoid breach of the so-called ‘unity’ of time. As Robertson has argued, it was precisely these restrictive rules that strangled epic’s imaginative potential and paradoxically secured its insecurities in the long run.²⁵ Furthermore, the proscriptions against the essential ingredients of epic on the grounds that they breached verisimilitude—its leaps across time and place into hyperreal worlds; and, as Dryden had advocated, leaps beyond history into worlds that may or may not include gods and spirits—guaranteed their migration to other genres. Neoclassical theory simply did not allow for the capaciousness of epic: Le Bossu’s treatise is so bound by rules that only the Aeneid of the ancient epics obeys his prescriptions.²⁶ The fact that even within the Homeric corpus there are at least two distinct models—the ‘Iliadic’ and the ‘Odyssean’—seems to get lost in neoclassical debate. The ‘Iliadic’ model becomes more and more identified with pure ‘epic’ with its martial content, whereas the Odyssey with its love interests, its recognition and suspense, and its (qualified) ‘happy ending’ is deemed to have much in common with ‘romance’. But in the early modern period, the distinction is one of degree rather than kind: just as ‘heroic’ and epic are often conjoined, so too are epic and ‘romance’.²⁷ Scaliger had accepted Heliodorus’ prose novel, Aethiopica as ‘epic’ and romance, in time, came to be designated ‘prose epic’.²⁸ Dryden’s ‘heroic’ tragedy very often depended on romance plots drawn from ancient novels, prompting one critic to delineate Dryden’s tragedies ‘as heroic romance material raised to epic dignity by grandeur of style’.²⁹ The source of this ‘heroic romance material’ was both the Greek novel and the very rich seam of vernacular medieval romance. For Boileau and others, however, Heliodorus’ novel with its romantic (love) plot was very definitely not epic; and for Chapelain, for whom the merveilleux (Aristotle’s to thaumaston) had to be held in check by the probable or else, as in Le Cid, it became ‘monstrous’, the plots of both the Aethiopica and the Odyssey were unsuitable for tragedy because they are contrived/implausible ²⁴ Robertson (2008). ²⁵ Robertson (2008), 16 34. ²⁶ Davis (2012), 133. These restrictions are mocked by Pope in his ‘Receit to make an Epic Poem’ (1695). ²⁷ Burrow, Ch. 3 in this volume; and Burrow (1993). ²⁸ Scaliger for Heliodorus’ reception, see further Williams, Ch. 8 in this volume. On epic and romance in the early modern period, and the influence above all of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, see Burrow (1993). ²⁹ Russell (1946), 9.

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(invraisemblable).³⁰ According to Chapelain, the gods alone can render the invraisemblable acceptable because they can usher in the miraculous. Chapelain’s view is echoed by Rapin, for whom le merveilleux is everything that is contrary to the ordinary course of nature (‘contre le cours ordinaire de la nature’). However, when Niobe is turned into a rock, this is rendered plausible because a god is involved.³¹ Whilst Chapelain and Rapin might feel that the gods can make the marvellous vraisemblable, by the mid-eighteenth century, in an age of growing religious scepticism, le merveilleux and the supernatural were increasingly considered anachronisms. ‘Le merveilleux’, argued one prominent Enlightenment critic, only fell within the provenance of the epic poet, ‘who paints in black and white, not for our eyes but our imagination’ (‘qui peint sans couleur, non pas par nos yeux, mais pour notre imagination’).³² And when Voltaire set about the revisions for his tragedy, Sémiramis (1748)—following the controversy caused by its ghost scene in Act 3, Scene 6, in which King Ninus rises from his tomb very much as Darius in Aeschylus’ Persians—the playwright explained: I am giving more tragic and less epic elements; I am substituting, as much as I can, the real for the marvellous. I am, however, keeping my ghost. Je donne plus au tragique et moins à l’épique, je substitue, autant que je peux, le vrai au merveilleux. Je conserve pourtant toujours mon ombre.³³

Voltaire’s desire to move more towards ‘the real’ and away from le merveilleux, towards tragedy and away from epic, captures the mood of the moment. Now Lillo’s proto-bourgeois tragedy, The London Merchant (1731) is the preferred model for the new tragedy and not Dryden’s ‘heroic’ be-helmeted and be-plumed tragedies. No doubt Voltaire’s Semiramis lurks somewhere behind Fielding’s tonguein-cheek observation in his novel Tom Jones (1749): ‘The only supernatural agents, which can in any manner be allowed to us moderns are ghosts; but of these I would advise an author be extremely sparing.’³⁴ By 1781, the literary critic and philosopher, James Harris can praise both Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1737) on the grounds that they avoid ‘using Machines, Deities, Prodigies, Spectres, or anything else incomprehensible, or incredible’.³⁵ Indeed it is le merveilleux, above all, that makes epic increasingly inappropriate as dramatic model during the course of a century that narrowly restricts the ‘real’ in the theatre to the domestic house (oikos) and the village/town/city (polis). ³⁰ ³¹ ³³ ³⁴

Boileau (1674); Chapelain (1638); for comment, Stone (1974), 87 8. Rapin (1675). ³² Grimm (1754), cited in Russell (1946), 89. Letter to Formont, cited in Russell (1946), 89 but wrongly dated to 1732. Fielding (1966), Book 8, ch. 1, 362. ³⁵ Harris (1801), 368.

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But where does le merveilleux go? As Robertson has pointed out, it is mock epic that releases the imagination of writers and readers once serious epic becomes a target; and epic features migrate to other genres, notably the novel and, in performance terms, into the burlesques and into serious musical and danced performances.³⁶ As Rameau’s librettist, Louis de Cahusac argues in Lettres sur la danse ancienne et moderne (1754), le merveilleux is the distinct function of the tragédie lyrique, which transports the mind by visual and auditory enchantment in awe-inspiring performances.³⁷ Dance, in Cahusac’s terms, is fundamental to defining this different level of reality because it does so with bodily force. In this sense, le merveilleux is not incompatible with vraisemblable; there are, as Charles Batteux argues in Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe (1746), two kinds of tragedy with different levels of reality—one heroic, called ‘tragedy’ pure and simple without the marvellous because it is human-focused; the other, merveilleuse on account of the gods, called ‘Spectacle Lyrique’ or opera. In short, according to Batteux, opera is the representation of marvellous action, or more precisely, the result of the divine element of epic transposed to the stage (‘le divin de L’Épopée mis en spectacle’).³⁸

F É N E LO N’S TÉLÉMAQUE AS EPIC PARADIGM Fénelon’s prose epic, Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse (written around 1693–4, first published without the author’s permission in 1699 and then posthumously in 1715), imagines Telemachus’ adventures between Books 4 and 15 of the Odyssey. It was the most popular novel throughout eighteenthcentury Europe and it managed, with its heroic romance material raised to epic dignity by grandeur of style and deeply serious intent, to resist objection from strict neoclassical theorists and from Enlightenment sceptics alike. And in many ways, it provided the model not just for the novel but also for the visual and performance arts throughout the eighteenth century. Following publication of the unauthorized edition of the novel, Richard Steele in The Tatler writes of Fénelon’s prose epic that it is ‘altogether in the spirit of Homer, and will fire [sic] an unlearned reader a Notion of that great

³⁶ Robertson (2008); and see Power (2015) for epic and the English novel. For burlesque and the fairs, see Hall, Stead, and Bryant Davies, Chs. 30, 31, and 36 in this volume; and further Brockett (1965) for invaluable background to the Parisian fairs. ³⁷ For the links between le merveilleux and the sublime, see Cronk (2002); for Cahusac, Bussels and Van Oostveldt (2012), 157 8. ³⁸ Batteux (1746), 218 20.

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poet’s manner of writing, more than any Translation of him can possibly do’.³⁹ Pope rose to the challenge, set here by Steele and also by Andrew Michael Ramsay in the preface to the first authorized edition of the novel, by announcing his own plans to translate the Iliad some three years later. Pope wrote in his preface that Fénelon’s Télémaque provides ‘the truest idea of the spirit and turn of Homer’.⁴⁰ As Ramsay had argued, and Voltaire was to echo some years later, Fénelon’s Télémaque surpassed all other epics because its moral—the happiness of the human race—was superior.⁴¹ Modern scholars have readily written Fénelon’s novel off as a ‘pious’ and rather tedious didactic tale.⁴² Yet the political philosopher Patrick Riley identifies Télémaque (together with Bossuet’s Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture Sainte (1704)) as the most important piece of political theory at the turn of the eighteenth century, which provides (contra Bossuet’s defence of divine right monarchy) an attempt to combine republican virtues with monarchism.⁴³ It advocates world peace and religious and ethnic tolerance; and above all, what Fénelon terms ‘disinterested love of God’. Fénelon was ordained as a priest in 1675 and made a spiritual guide for the ‘new Catholics’ (those who had been Huguenots) in northern France.⁴⁴ In 1689 he became tutor to Louis XIV’s grandson, duc de Bourgogne, for whom he wrote Télémaque (c.1693–4) in the long-standing tradition of miroirs des princes in order to instruct the young prince in the principles of government. It may well have been Perrault’s claim in Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1692) that the moderns had surpassed the ancients in all genres except epic that prompted Fénelon’s attempt to write a prose epic for his time. On the side of the ancients, Fénelon praised the noble simplicity of the Greeks in his Lettre sur les occupations de l’Académie Francaise: ‘I love a hundred times better the poor Ithaca of Odysseus, than a city [Imperial Rome] shining through so odious a magnificence.’⁴⁵ And this simplicity is enacted in various locations in the novel. Crete is one such place, as Telemachus’ adviser Mentor (Minerva in disguise) points out: The great goods of the Cretans consist chiefly in health, strength, courage, the peace and union of families, the liberty of all the citizens, the plenty of all necessary things, a contempt of superfluities, a habit of industry, and abhorrence of idleness: an emulation in virtue, submission to the laws, and reverence towards the just gods.⁴⁶

³⁹ Steele, Tatler papers no. 156, 8 April 1710. ⁴⁰ Pope, Poems, 7.23. ⁴¹ Russell (1946), 121. ⁴² Notably Stanford (1977), 215 dismisses Telemachus as a lay figure for moralization. ⁴³ Riley (1994). ⁴⁴ For excellent contextual analysis, see Riley (1994). ⁴⁵ Fénelon, cited in Riley (1994), xvii. ⁴⁶ Fénelon (1994), 60. All subsequent references are placed in brackets in the text after the citation.

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But it is in the mythical places of Bétique and Salente that the Greek ideal is best exemplified. In Book 10, the misrule of Idomeneo in Salente (former king of Crete, whose rash vow had forced him to commit filicide and, in turn, led to his exile) is clearly a cautionary tale for the French King and all European monarchs. As Mentor/Minerva gently upbraids Idomeneo: If you have been abused hitherto, it is because you wanted to be deceived; and were afraid to meet with too much sincerity in your counselors . . . You have exhausted your treasure . . . By aiming at appearing great and powerful, you have almost destroyed your real power and greatness. Lose no time then in repairing your faults; discontinue all your magnificent structures; renounce that affectation of pomp and grandeur which would ruin your city; permit your people to enjoy the benefits of peace . . . (152)

And at the end of Book 17, when Salente is run by the now reformed philosopher-king, Idomeneo, there is no longer a need for the state to impose its views on its neighbours. Instead Salente takes its place, in what Mentor designates ‘the universal republic’: Do you not think the gods must regard the whole world, which is the universal republic, with equal horror, should each nation, that is, each family of the great commonwealth, think it had the undoubted right to make good its claims upon the neighbouring nations by violence. (307)

Some years later in a letter to Father LeTellier (1710), Fénelon wrote: ‘In these adventures I have put all the truths necessary to govern, and all the faults that one can find in sovereign power.’⁴⁷ Perhaps not surprisingly, by 1699 Fénelon found his works proscribed and one month later a copy of his novel was printed without his permission. Immediately the King saw it as an attack on himself, his warmongering, and his extravagance; Fénelon’s pension and tutorship were removed and he was sent into exile in the provinces. But with the death of the young duc in 1712, any hope of a different state vanished; and three years later, in 1715, Fénelon himself died.

FÉNELON’ S TÉLÉMAQUE ON STAGE The message of republican virtues, world peace, and religious and ethnic tolerance made Fénelon’s novel highly pertinent during the course of the following century. Moreover, Fénelon’s political views, heretical during the ancien régime, increasingly afforded him a new degree of popularity during ⁴⁷ Cited in Riley (1994), xviii.

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the revolutionary period, when his novel was widely available in cheap reprints and translations (often in parallel text editions), and read for pleasure as well as in educational contexts. From the 1780s onwards, Télémaque was the source of numerous operas, notably Mozart’s/Varesco’s Italian opera seria of sacrifice, Idomeneo (1781), taken indirectly from Book 5.⁴⁸ But it is, above all, Telemachus’ stay on Calypso’s island, from Book 6, which features regularly in the visual and performance arts in the last part of the century.⁴⁹ One of the most successful ballets d’action of the pre-Romantic period was Télémaque dans l’île de Calypso (1790) by the maître de ballet at the Paris Opéra, Pierre Gardel, with music by Ernest Miller. It garnered plaudits during the Revolution, the Napoleonic period, and under the Bourbon Restoration, remaining prominent within the repertoire until 1826 with over 413 performances since its premiere.⁵⁰ Drawing directly on the events of Book 6, it inspired in the next couple of years at least two other ballets, with the same title, based on the same episode—by Jean Dauberval (1791) and by Vicenzo Galeotti (1792) respectively. Gardel choreographed the dances for a number of the Festivals of the Revolution, alongside Jacques-Louis David, which turned to ancient Greece as a model not in order to reclaim antiquity but (as Fénelon had advocated) to replicate its perceived communality, simplicity, and unaffected beauty.⁵¹ However, Gardel’s significance is not simply because he succeeded in translating Fénelon’s epic to the stage during the early years of the Revolution; but that his ballet d’action, like Fénelon’s novel, spoke equally to subsequent generations because it foreshadowed themes that were to preoccupy the ballet in the next generation, for whom ballet came to ‘represent a new matriarchy’, where the male dancers were subservient to the prima ballerinas.⁵² Gardel’s programme for his ballet d’action opens with a graphic description of the vast backdrop at Paris Opéra.⁵³ As Nye explains, the importance of the ballet programme at this time reflects the contemporaneous shift in the meaning of the word choréographie, which no longer refers to the dance steps but to the dramatic structure of what is now a danced drama.⁵⁴ In the programme, Gardel etches a detailed set that affords the spectator a breathtaking ⁴⁸ Other operas based on Télémaque from the 1780s include Jean François Le Sueur’s Télé maque dans l’île de Calypso ou Le Triomphe de la sagesse (1796); Simone Mayr’s Telemacho nell’isola di Calipso (1796); Fernando Sor’s Telemaco nell’isola di Calipso (1797). ⁴⁹ Visual arts, notably the paintings by Angelica Kauffman, Benjamin West, and William Hamilton. Other ballets on the theme before Gardel’s 1790 version, include Antione Pitrot, Télémaque (1759); Gasparo Angiolini, Télémaque (1770); Charles Le Picq, Télémaque dans l’île de Calypso (1777). ⁵⁰ Guest (1996). NB it is often referred to significantly as a ballet heroïque. ⁵¹ These include L’Offrande à la liberté (1792); Fête héroique pour les honneurs du Panthéon à discerner aux jeunes Barr et Viala (1793); Fête pour l’inauguration des bustes de Marat et le Peletier (1793). For comment, see Macintosh (2013). ⁵² Clark (2001), 243. But see Macintosh (2013) on the illusory nature of this matriarchy. ⁵³ Gardel (1790). ⁵⁴ Nye (2008).

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panoramic sweep across a section of Calypso’s isle and gestures to further worlds beyond: from the sea in the far distance, bristling with rocks and an inaccessible shoreline; to the mountains extending yonder, furnished with trees—one higher than all the rest, to the left; and finally in the foreground, to the right, the interlacing cradle of vines, underlaid by a carpet of grass and roses.⁵⁵ The vines and the carpet are taken directly from Fénelon, where Calypso’s grotto ‘was lined with a young vine which extended its pliant branches equally on every side . . . A thousand springing flowers enameled the green carpet with which the grotto was surrounded’ (5). As Gardel’s audience, tutored in the Les Aventures de Télémaque from a young age, would recognize, this is ‘epic on stage’, in its scale, its specificities, and in its intimation of other worlds. Fénelon’s prose epic has aptly been dubbed ‘operatic’;⁵⁶ and when Gardel’s scenario for his first scene, also drawn from Book 1 of Fénelon’s novel, instructs the orchestra that ‘the overture should paint the whistling of the high winds, the roaring of the enraged sea, the most terrible storm, and then by degrees the most voluptuous calm’,⁵⁷ the visual and the auditory fuse in pregnant expectation. The programme notes then zoom in on two survivors of the shipwreck in the distance, Mentor and Telemachus, and the tutor is revealed atop a rock heaving his charge from the jaws of the omnivorous waves. Gardel, with Fénelon’s guidance, provides a model here in this opening sequence for the tempestuous operatic overtures of nineteenth-century grand opera, not least Verdi’s Otello. In the ballet, it is not the duplicitous and vengeful lover of Telemachus’ father, Calypso (a mime role), who comes centre stage. Instead, it is the nymph, Eucharis (a dancing role taken by Marie Miller, soon to become Mrs Gardel), with whom Telemachus (the only male danced role taken by Gardel himself—Fig. 32.1) falls madly in love following her intoxicating dance to the violin in Act 1, Scene 7.⁵⁸ The principal locus of this cautionary tale of the perils of seductive pleasure is Eucharis’ grotto, which (as was indicated by Gardel’s description of the set) is heavily dependent on the ekphrastic power of Fénelon’s account of Calypso’s grotto in Book 1 of his epic novel. For Calypso’s grotto, Fénelon himself clearly drew on both Ovid’s description of Diana’s grotto in Metamorphoses Book 3 (157–60) and Titian’s Gothic representation of it in his celebrated Diana and Actaeon (1556–9). But he also drew on the rich seventeenth-century tradition of onstage operatic grottos, notably Giacomo Torelli’s designs in Venice for Sacrati and Nolfi’s Bellerofonte (1642), which both Ovid’s account and Titian’s painting no doubt

⁵⁵ Gardel (1790), 5. ⁵⁶ Forment (2014). ⁵⁷ Gardel (1790), Act 1, Sc. 1, 5. ⁵⁸ Guest (1996), 307 reports that the violin solo, from Giornovichi’s First Violin Concerto, was performed at the premiere by the virtuoso, Rodolphe Kreutzer, to whom Beethoven dedicated his famous sonata.

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Fig. 32.1 Pierre Gardel as Télémaque. Painting by Sébastien Cœuré in the collection of Jean Louis Tamvaco, Paris.

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inspired.⁵⁹ Fénelon’s grotto, in turn, provided the model for the Margravine of Bayreuth, Wilhelmina’s own grotto in her rock garden, Sanspareil, at Bayreuth around 1745. The grotto contained an open-air theatre, where tableaux vivants based on Télémaque were performed.⁶⁰ The grotto scene in Act 2 of Gardel’s ballet d’action is able to build additionally on the well-established iconographic tradition for Calypso’s grotto generally, as well as on representations of Fénelon’s epic specifically, such as the recent painting by Angelica Kauffman (1782, Fig. 32.2) and the near contemporaneous scene by William Hamilton (1791, Fig. 32.3). For this reason, no doubt, Gardel’s description of the grotto in Act 2 of his scenario is suitably schematic;⁶¹ but where Fénelon’s text distances the first encounter between Telemachus and Eucharis through the filter of Mentor’s generalizing caveats, Gardel’s ballet takes the spectator right inside the scene into the grotto. As the lush enclosed setting of the grotto indicates, Telemachus’

Fig. 32.2 Angelica Kauffman, Telemachus and the Nymphs of Calypso (1782). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.

⁵⁹ Forment (2014), 368. ⁶⁰ Forment (2014), 365 on the imprint of Fénelon’s grotto on Wagner’s grotto in Tannhaüser (1845). ⁶¹ Gardel (1790), 11: ‘Le Théâtre répresente le jardin le plus agréable, de petites collines, des fleurs, des fontaines, des cascades les rendent pittoresques. Un grouppe [sic] d’arbres détaché des autres est sur un des côtés, et sur l’autre, l’ouverture d’une grotte, où l’on voit Télémaque endormi.’

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Fig. 32.3 William Hamilton, Calypso Receiving Telemachus and Mentor in the Grotto (1782). Private collection. Public domain.

awakening from slumber in Act 2 is in reality a sexual awakening as he opens his eyes to behold the beautiful Eucharis. Gardel’s text choreographs both the emotional and bodily movements of the dancers’ duet in Scene 2 as it syntactically enacts Telemachus’ attempts to declare his love to the timorous and coquettish nymph: ‘He becomes pressing, she wants to flee, he takes the garland and entwines her with it; she breaks it, saves herself, he follows in pursuit’ (‘il devient pressant, elle veut fuir, il prend la guirlande et l’enlace avec; elle la romp, se sauve, il la suit’, p. 12).

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With the descent of Venus from the clouds ex machina to unleash libidinous chaos in the form of Cupid, the chorus of thirty nymphs acquire vehement sexual agency. Their lithe and beguiling movements enhance the island’s all-pervasive atmosphere of sensuality and natural beauty, which Telemachus has found impossible to resist. Smitten by Cupid’s darts, the nymphs now exhort him to join them in a voluptuously seductive dance that acts as prelude to the intimate duet between Telemachus and Eucharis that marks the climax of Act 2. In the final act, time and place on stage become truly ‘epic’: the nymphs perform their moral and social transgressions bodily as they course frenetically to and fro through the forest and across the mountain tops in pursuit of their human quarry. The chorus acquires, under the influence of Cupid, a new, terrifying power as they seek to foil Mentor’s plot to make Telemachus flee Calypso’s isle and resume his search for his father. Armed with torches, hair dishevelled, and now dressed, and twisting and turning, like bacchantes (‘Elles dansent en bondissant, et en tournant en rond, ainsi que ces filles dansoient aux fêtes de Bacchus’, Act 3, Scene 12), they proceed to the coastline and set fire to the ship that Mentor has built for their escape, immolating Eucharis in the process. Only the intervention of Cupid can quell the tumult and save Eucharis by transporting her into the clouds above. But the Bacchic frenzy continues now the chorus are denied their prey; and Mentor seizes the moment of Eucharis’ transposition to push Telemachus into the sea before plunging head first himself into the depths below. At a time when interrogatory Greek choruses had been increasingly reinstated in versions of ancient tragedy for decidedly republican reasons, Gardel’s female chorus of nymphs parallels, and perhaps even mirrors, the role played by women during the Revolution: beautiful, dignified, and simple in the dances round the liberty tree in the Greek-inspired festivals; but equally powerful and vengeful in the carmagnoles that are danced round the guillotine.⁶² Although Gardel clearly does not represent the full fervour and frenzied potential of the carmagnole, the Furies at the end of Télémaque serve as a reminder of the power of dance both to unite and to unleash demonic energy. This is very far from Gardel’s source, where Telemachus finally rejects Eucharis (who remains a bacchante) once Mentor has reinstilled in him a sense of duty. It is also different from Dauberval’s ballet the following year (and its numerous revivals), where the final scene shows Eucharis in the arms of a duplicitous Calypso, who thoroughly relishes her rival’s despair.⁶³ * * *

⁶² Macintosh (2013).

* *

⁶³ Dauberval (1805), 24.

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Of one revival of Gardel’s ballet in Paris in 1813, the critic, Geoffroy reports: Calypso’s nymphs dance so beautifully and with movements so graceful that the audience envies Telemachus his lot and finds Mentor’s action excessive in exposing his charge to a watery grave to remove him from such delightful company.⁶⁴

Despite the obvious journalistic licence here, which permits Geoffroy to collapse the events of Acts 2 and 3 into one movement eliding the Bacchic frenzy that is prelude to the final plunge into the watery depths, his reductionary comments are in many ways symptomatic of a marked change in taste towards classical themes in ballet in the nineteenth century. Increasingly Graeco-Roman myth and its themes are shunned as artificial, ornamental, and incapable of conveying any contemporary resonance. The narrowly ‘real’ that defined the parameters of eighteenth-century spoken drama, within which bourgeois tragedy flourished, is now extended to danced drama as well. Whilst significant classical models undoubtedly lie behind the new subjects of Romantic ballet—not least Gardel’s bacchantes behind the corps de ballet of La Sylphide (1832) and, especially, behind the Wilis of Giselle (1841)⁶⁵—it is clear, at least on the surface, that by the early nineteenth century ancient epic and Romantic ballet are as alien to each other as Morand had proclaimed in 1738 that epic was to tragedy.

⁶⁴ Journal de l’Empire, 12 January 1813, cited in Guest (1996), 310. ⁶⁵ Macintosh (2013).

33 Sacrilegious Translation The Epic Flop of François Ponsard’s Ulysse (1852) Cécile Dudouyt

François Ponsard’s fifth play Ulysse, a tragedy in verse based on Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, premiered on 18 June 1852 at the Comédie-Française. This is how contemporary theatre critic, Louis Jourdan described the performance in the Revue de Paris: The Théâtre Français is to be praised wholeheartedly for its splendid staging of this work . . . At the rise of the curtain, we thought for a moment that we had been transported to the enchantment of the Grand Opéra, when we saw the rocky shores of Ithaca . . . All the stage decoration in the following acts had been executed, if not always with scrupulous erudition, at least with exquisite art and taste.¹

Besides the lavish new sets painted expressly for the play, the reviewer praised both the performance of the tragedian Édmond Geoffroy as Ulysse and the quality of Ponsard’s poetry. The parallel with opera was made even stronger by the fact that this three-act dramatized rendering of the Odyssey Books 13 to 23, comprised sung choruses composed by Charles-François Gounod, who was then at the beginning of his career, shortly before his ‘St Cecilia’ Mass (1855) and Ave Maria (1859) made him famous.² For the Comédie-Française, which had anticipated a great success, the play proved a serious financial setback. The initial 1852 production, with twenty-six performances, had a reasonably good run compared to other new plays staged the same year,³ but ticket sales were insufficient to cover production ¹ Jourdan (1852), 139. All translations are my own, unless otherwise stated. ² Ulysse was his second composition for the stage, after Sapho (1851). He went on to write widely acclaimed operas such as Faust (1859) and Mireille (1864). ³ Only three of the twelve plays created that year ran longer: Augier’s Diane (thirty one), Murger’s Le Bonhomme jadis (thirty eight), and Sandeau’s very popular comedy Melle de la

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costs. Eugène de Mircourt, prominent journalist, theatre critic, and biographer of the day, reported that the company lost as much as 36,000 francs in the process.⁴ In both 1852 and in 1854, the tragedy was egayée (‘enlivened’) by audiences laughing out loud, lampooned in parodies and castigated in theatrical reviews. Mirecourt harshly concluded in 1855: ‘The play Ulysse would not have been performed twice had it not been for the music of the choruses.’⁵ Later in 1852, Ponsard published a book entitled Études antiques containing a preface, Ulysse, and Homère, a five-canto poem written as a fictional frame for a verse translation of Odyssey Book 6, ‘Ulysse et Nausicaa’. In the preface, he explains that his intention both in the tragedy and the poem was to ‘show Homer’ to his contemporaries: ‘If I have undertaken this task, it is because I have—rightly or not—understood and tried to recreate Homer’s manner of writing, differently from the way it has been understood and recreated by my predecessors.’⁶ When discussing the play more specifically, he adds: ‘I have not chosen the action of the Odyssey for its dramatic qualities, but as a way of showing Homer to spectators.’⁷ His justification for writing the preface at all is that ‘partly [as] a translator . . . I feel bound to explain in what light the poet I translate has appeared to me’.⁸ Ponsard relied both on performance and on translation to share his Homeric epiphany with his contemporaries. His play is thus a multidimensional act of ‘translation’, not so much from ancient Greek to French, since he relied heavily on existing (mostly prose) translations of the Odyssey, but from prose to verse, from epic to tragedy, and from the page to the stage. The attempt was generally considered a failure at the time and it is now an all-but-forgotten footnote in nineteenth-century French theatre. Accordingly, this chapter is something of a forensic examination, an attempt to determine whether the play’s demise is due to natural internal causes or to unfortunate circumstances. Beyond the fate of the play itself, this case study throws some light on midnineteenth-century conceptions of Homer and epic poetry in general. Ultimately, Ponsard’s Ulysse illustrates the difficult choices inherent in every act of translation for the stage: above all, to what extent should the translator conform to or challenge the audience’s expectations?

Seiglière (sixty six). The average run for the eighty seven plays performed at the Théâtre Français that year was around eight performances. Joannidès (1970), 364. ⁴ Mirecourt (1855), 85. ⁵ Mirecourt (1855), 80. ⁶ Ponsard (1852), 12. ⁷ Ponsard (1852), 27; my emphasis. ⁸ Ponsard (1865), 3; my emphasis. This quote comes from a much shortened preface to the Études antiques when they were published in vol. 2 of the Œuvres complètes in 1865.

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PONSARD’S U L Y S S E I N C O N T E X T It is tempting to ascribe the lack of success of an obscure play written by a long forgotten playwright to simple lack of talent on the writer’s part; but the Théâtre-Français had in fact every reason to expect Ulysse to be successful. In 1843, Ponsard’s very first tragedy, Lucrèce, had been a veritable literary triumph at the Odéon. With two moderately popular tragedies performed in 1846 (Agnès de Méranie, set in medieval times) and 1850 (Charlotte Corday, on the aftermath of the 1789 Revolution), as well as a comic interlude performed the same year (Horace et Lydie inspired from Horace 3.9 ‘Donec gratus eram tibi’), François Ponsard was a prominent literary figure. Getting this well-known poet and playwright to turn once more to the classics for inspiration made both artistic and financial sense. Ponsard’s relative lack of success with Agnès de Méranie and Charlotte Corday was attributed by critics to bad luck rather than to any fault in the plays themselves, and it earned him the nickname ‘Ponsard pas de chance’ (‘Ponsard, the unlucky’).⁹ Ulysse’s failure to convince Parisian spectators, by contrast, was attributed entirely to the play itself and to the fact that Ponsard had attempted to adapt Homer for the stage. One of his critics asked in a parody of Géronte from Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin (Scapin the Schemer): ‘What the devil was Ponsard doing in Eumaeus’ shack or at Nausicaa’s laundering?’¹⁰ Indeed, in order to understand Ponsard’s decision to dramatize Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, it is necessary to consider the wider context of Parisian literary quarrels between the ‘Classiques’, the advocates of tragedy written according to the unities, and the ‘Romantiques’, proponents of the drame, a new theatrical form liberated from any neoclassical prescriptions. The most striking landmark in this literary quarrel was the controversy that raged when Hernani, Victor Hugo’s first performed drama, premiered on 25 February 1830. That night, and during the play’s run at the ThéâtreFrançais, the stalls became a literary battlefield where supporters of the unities, who upheld Racine as the highest tragic model, clashed with a younger generation of writers, who revered Shakespeare and believed in freeing the stage from all neoclassical fetters. According to the Romantiques, there should be no limits to the number of characters, to the length and scope of the dramatic action, and playwrights should be able to write in verse, in prose, or indeed in a mix of the two. This theatrical uprising took place mere months before the political revolution of July 1830, which led to Louis-Philippe’s reign and France’s only experiment in constitutional monarchy. From a twenty-first-century perspective, the Romantic aesthetics not only caught the mood of the period; they also dominated the whole century. It is

⁹ Mirecourt (1855), 88.

¹⁰ Blanc (1870), 60.

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therefore easy to forget that in March 1843, when another Romantic drama by Victor Hugo, Les Burgraves, spectacularly failed to enthuse spectators, this was interpreted as a sign that the Romantic movement was on the wane, leading some even to celebrate what they saw as the end of the Romantic craze. It was Ponsard’s dubious luck to triumph later the same year with his very first play, Lucrèce (the title role played to great acclaim by Marie Dorval). For better or for worse, Ponsard’s name became the rallying cry of a new, anti-Romantic faction calling themselves ‘école du bon sens’ (‘school of common sense’), which, whilst leaning towards ancient and neoclassical models (with verse, close-knit action, and a limited cast), did not adhere strictly to the unities of place and time. Lucrèce was hailed as the perfect example of this new tragedy, a synthesis between Classiques and Romantiques.¹¹ Ponsard, ‘l’auteur de Lucrèce’, remained an important literary landmark until the early twentieth century. With Ulysse, Ponsard again turned to ancient sources after two plays drawn from French medieval and contemporary history. In the second, Charlotte Corday, written under the short-lived Second Republic (1848–52), he experimented most with Romantic licence. This play made critics wonder how much of a Classique Ponsard actually was: ‘Ponsard is a Romantic bird whose wings are clipped. He sings, but cannot soar.’¹² In 1852, with the restoration of the Empire after Louis-Napoleon’s political coup and the change in theatrical and political tastes, Charlotte Corday was banned from the repertory ‘as a dangerous play for social peace’.¹³ The political propaganda of the Second Empire encouraged an implicit Roman parallelism and the foundation of a new order, both within the borders and with neighbouring countries. Actors and playwrights had their role to play in the celebration of the new regime, especially the heavily subsidized Théâtre-Français.¹⁴ Ponsard cleverly adapted his compositional style to the new context, with a comic interlude entitled Horace et Lydie, in which he wrote a pastiche Horatian ode within the dramatic frame provided by Ode 3.9 (a lovers’ spat between Horace and Lydia). Writing this interlude specifically for the neoclassical actress Rachel, Ponsard implicitly presented himself as a Horace to the new Augustus. It was in this context that the Comédie-Française asked Ponsard for a new Lucrèce, a new balancing act between the conservative and the progressive tendencies of the times. According to one of Ponsard’s unpublished letters, the play literally wrote itself: ‘Ulysse, that the ThéâtreFrançais is expecting to perform this summer [ . . . ] I made quick work of it this time; I took from Homer the outline and most of the ideas.’¹⁵ However, the attention the Théâtre-Français brought to the staging delayed the performance until 1852. ¹¹ Jeanroy Felix (1889), 351. ¹⁴ See e.g. Heylli (1879), 1 2.

¹² Mirecourt (1855), 96. ¹³ Blanc (1870), 54. ¹⁵ Quoted in Latreille (1899), 221.

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The theme of Ulysse lends itself well to ‘restorations’, so much so that an earlier Ulysse written early in the 1810s by the Bonapartist Pierre Lebrun was, much to its author’s dismay, immediately understood as a celebration of Louis XVIII’s return when it premiered in 1815. Ponsard’s choice of topic made sense not only from a political but also from an artistic point of view.¹⁶ Ulysse promised a measure of novelty that combined the deepest reverence for the adapted material (the play follows Books 13–23 of the Odyssey very closely) and a choice of ancient Greek source that a Romantique would not have disavowed, since Homer was celebrated as the source of all poetry, ‘the lark of the world’s dawn’.¹⁷ The choral odes Ponsard wrote for the tragedy are reminiscent both of ancient drama and of Racine’s last two biblical plays Athalie and Esther, but Ponsard’s claim to show Homer’s epic in all its primitive power in the episodes smacks of Romanticism. However, the attempt backfired: the Romantiques mocked what they saw as a lifeless servile copy, while the Classiques simply refused to recognize Ponsard’s rustic Homer as their own: the author has reduced the plot to such a stark and rudimentary idea that its model could only be found in Aeschylus. This refusal to add complications to the dramatic situations as in Romantic plays shows a lack of moderation. Why avoid an excess only to fall into the opposite Charybdis?¹⁸

The critical crossfire between Classiques and Romantiques in which the play was caught had much to do with Ponsard’s compositional method. Ironically, the image one critic used to convey his poor opinion of the play’s structure recalls the etymology of the word ‘rhapsode’, and the technique of poetic patchwork: There is no scene in this new tragedy that shows the slightest invention. A pair of scissors was all that was needed to cut out all the passages in the Odyssey to do with Odysseus’ recognition by Eumaeus, Telemachus, Euryclea and at last by Penelope; a needle was enough to patch them together [ . . . ], to speak plainly, there is neither workmanship nor compositional skill in evidence here.¹⁹

Or as another critic put it, a succession of poetic motifs does not make a play because there is an essential difference between epic and dramatic composition: Let us now examine [ . . . ] whether the poem was suited to this transformation. In my opinion, it is hardly suited at all, and all the great poets either of ancient theatre or ours have opined in the same way, since none of them, if I am not mistaken, has tried his hand at an Odysseus or a Penelope. And even if they had, I doubt they would have undertaken to follow Homer step by step like

¹⁶ See Latreille (1899), 220. ¹⁹ Planche (1852), 189.

¹⁷ Hugo (1864), 58.

¹⁸ Jeanroy Félix (1889), 351.

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M. Ponsard, and to translate literally whole scenes and sentences, only taking pains to cut them so that they do not take too much space.²⁰

A reader of the Revue de Paris or the Athenaeum français could be forgiven for thinking that Odysseus’ return had hardly ever been staged before in France, and that Ponsard had simply cut slices from the Odyssey to offer them raw to the public. But both statements need qualification. As many as three moderately important tragedies and two operas had been written in French on the subject since the seventeenth century; and even if Ponsard’s play is strikingly different from previous treatments, it would be mistaken to say that there was no attempt in Ulysse to translate epic into drama.

DRAMATIZING ODYSSEUS ’ RETURN While the topic was never an overwhelmingly popular one in the French repertoire, Ponsard was not the first to write a tragedy based on Odysseus’ revenge.²¹ It is likely that Ponsard was aware of Piccini’s opera, Penelope, with libretto by Marmontel, and that it was a potential source of inspiration for his chorus of nymphs in the first act. But Ponsard’s tragedy borrows more than just choruses from the operatic genre. Like opera, he stays close to the supernatural aspects of epic: the goddess Minerva interacts with Ulysses; disguises and transformations happen in front of the spectators; and there are frequent changes of sets, sometimes within the same act. These are characteristics of operas rather than tragedies, which were held to stricter standards of realism.²² Whilst it is most likely that Marmontel’s lyrical tragedy and Lebrun’s tragedy of 1815 were the only versions available to Ponsard, all previous versions present the action from the point of view of Penelope. In all versions, she is the main character in the first act, focusing all the spectators’ expectations and sympathies around her hopes and fears for her son, her husband, and her own fate, whereas shipwrecked Odysseus never appears before the second act. Despite being written in different centuries, belonging to different genres, and bearing different titles, all previous versions also have parallels with Racine’s Andromaque (1667). Penelope, like Andromache, has to resist ²⁰ Dufaï (1852b), 18 19. ²¹ Charles Claude Genest (commonly called l’Abbé Genest) wrote a Pénélope (1684); the composer Niccolo Piccini’s Penelope, a three act lyrical tragedy, with a libretto by Jean François Marmontel, was performed at court in 1785; Ulysse by Pierre Antoine Lebrun premiered at the Théâtre Français in 1815. The opera Ulysse (1703) composed by Jean Féry Rebel, with a libretto by Guichard, is only loosely based on the Odyssey, since the main plot involves Circe’s wiles to prevent the happy reunion of Odysseus and Penelope. ²² See Macintosh, Ch. 32 in this volume.

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an oppressive courtship that tears her away from her devotion to her husband’s memory, while her son’s life is threatened. Penelope is in a way a lucky Andromache whose long-lost husband returns in time to save her and their son. In all previous versions, the final struggle between Odysseus and the suitors is anxiously anticipated by Penelope, who remains alone on stage with her serving women awaiting the outcome. In all these plays, the tone is elevated and Eumaeus’ Homeric occupation is never mentioned. Marmontel’s Pénélope and Lebrun’s Ulysse add parallels with Sophocles’ Electra: the recognition between Penelope and Odysseus happens before the massacre of the suitors, just after the disguised Odysseus has announced the news of his own death. He cannot bear his faithful wife’s agonizing grief and reveals his identity. It is Ponsard’s compositional novelty, therefore, to follow Homer in the Odyssey and to focus on Odysseus himself, not on Penelope. This radically changes the structure of the play, forcing it to re-enact the same grudging recognition scene with a different cast of characters: his dog (Act 1, Scene 2), his son (Act 1, Scene 5), his nurse (Act 2, Scene 6), the suitors (Act 3, Scene 4), his swineherd (Epilogue, Scene 1), and lastly, his wife (Epilogue, Scene 2). This brief outline of the plot reveals that Ponsard did not simply cut and paste passages from Homer; he made a number of compositional choices. Argos’ death, when he recognizes his master, is placed at the beginning of Act 1, so that instead of being attacked by hounds, Odysseus is placed in a situation illustrative of his return. This choice entails a change of both chronology and topography, since the dog is the first living being who recognizes him, and that very first recognition happens in Eumaeus’ hut, not inside Odysseus’ household. Similarly, postponing Eumaeus’ recognition to the Epilogue has an impact on how the interaction between master and servant is depicted; the swineherd here is trusted less and so does not contribute as much to Odysseus’ revenge. Earlier versions streamlined the crowd of suitors to one or two characters and have at least a scene parallel to Andromaque, Act 1, Scene 4, in which the suitor has a Pyrrhus part, impatient of delays, self-righteous in what he presents as his passion and either directly threatening a very young Telemachus or threatening to withdraw his protection against the plots of the other suitors.²³ The dramatic tension is created by the fact that the spectators know of Ulysses’ return, and see Penelope brought to the brink of despair and suicide (another Racinian echo) because she does not know of her ²³ In Genest’s tragedy Pénélope, Eurymachus, King of Samos, professes his love for Penelope, and threatens to withdraw his protection against Antinous’ plans to kill Telemachus and steal his throne. In Marmontel’s opera Pénélope, only Nessus, King of Delos, has a speaking part the rest of the suitors are bundled together in ‘chœurs des poursuivants et de leur suite’. In Lebrun’s tragedy Ulysse, both Antinous and Eurynome are mentioned and the relationship between the two is not clear Eurynome seems to be a follower rather than a fellow suitor.

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husband’s return. Ponsard’s focus on Ulysses throughout, by contrast, robs his play of this source of dramatic tension. Instead, audiences fear that Odysseus might be recognized too soon. But this tension is relegated to a purely metatheatrical dimension. In the epic material Odysseus—and through him Athena—is very much in control of his final deception, so that the only dramatic effect left to Ponsard is for his main character to express emotion through a few rather anticlimactic dumb shows and asides. For example, in Act 1, Scene 2, when Eumaeus and the other swineherds are centre stage inside Eumaeus’ hut, they watch and describe Ulysses’ interaction with his dog. Ulysses then comes on stage from the wings and walks up to the open door of the hut and says, still looking at the dog: He’s dead! He died of joy when he recognized me. Ah! Minerva knew how to change me in the eyes of men, but not to my old dog, who is better than us. Poor Argos! I have not been able to this is like a pang of remorse to stroke you before you died.²⁴

He sheds a tear and adds: ‘Poor Argos.’²⁵ In Act 2, Scene 4, we get another emotionally diluted sideshow, when Ulysses, half hidden with Telemachus and looking at Penelope from afar, expresses his only explicit emotion on seeing his wife: ‘I cannot contain myself . . . emotion is welling inside me.’²⁶ In Act 2, Scene 6, when Euryclea recognizes Ulysses between two sung choruses while Penelope is busy lamenting her husband’s absence centre stage,²⁷ the resulting scene is dramatically indistinct and the protagonist emerges as cold and stilted from these brief asides.²⁸

TRANSLATING HOMER TO THE STAGE Ulysse may well have failed to draw crowds at the Comédie-Française, but it was actively parodied and commented upon, sparking lively debates on how, if at all, Homer’s Odyssey, and epic poetry more generally, should and could be performed. Much of the controversy centred on the idea that performance showed the epic material in too crude a light: that Eumaeus the swineherd, and regular references to his swine, could not possibly be accommodated on the stage of the Comédie-Française. A commentator reports that two parodies performed during the months following the premiere focused on the clash ²⁴ Ponsard (1852), 159. ²⁵ Ponsard (1852), 159. ²⁶ Ponsard (1852), 190. ²⁷ Ponsard (1852), 208 9. ²⁸ Cf. Latreille (1899), 225: ‘A tragic hero who constantly has to restrain himself, and who goes through the play without letting a word slip or making a movement or gesture allowing us to fathom his heart, is an irritating enigma for the spectator, who would like to catch a glimpse of the secret harboured in this inexorably sealed soul.’

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between the demotic material and the high-cultural venue in order to ridicule Ulysse.²⁹ The title of the first burlesque, Ulysse ou Les Porcs vengés by Louis Huart, makes this explicit. The second burlesque made its parody visually with its set as an inn bearing the arms of the Le Porc épique. This could be translated as ‘the epic hog’, a clear reference to Ponsard’s claim that if pigs are ‘epic’ enough for Homer then there is no reason not to mention them in a performance of the Odyssey. But it is also a pun, since porc-épic is the French word for porcupine, a small, prickly animal, hinting that Ponsard’s attempt to follow the Odyssey produced a commonplace and repellent piece of work. By 1903, the porc-épic lampoon had come to symbolize Ponsard’s failure.³⁰ In the second parody, as described in Heylli’s Journal intime de la ComédieFrançaise, Ulysse’s lack of success is ascribed, in a metatheatrical joke, to its being a boring translation: A character seated among the audience explained that the most ineffable pleasure was to be got from the performance of this ancient tragedy [ . . . ] if one knew ancient Greek, brought the Odyssey along and followed M. Ponsard’s dramatized translation with an eye on the original text.³¹

Bellanger concludes: ‘Ponsard has erred only in that he forgot the difference between performance and reading. His Ulysse was received coldly by the regulars of the Théâtre-Français, but it was vindicated by the good opinion of scholars.’³² Some critics went one step further and claimed that the very fact of performing a translation of Homer’s epic poetry was not only a boring misstep, it was downright dangerous. This position was developed by Jourdan in the Revue de Paris: The Odyssey has been put in the stocks for the public to jeer at. Nothing can prevent the fact that Homer has been misrepresented as a tragic playwright. The duty incumbent upon us all is to redress this wrong as much as possible, to shout in every key and at the top of our voices that this is not Homer, that this is not the Odyssey; that beyond the swine, the swineherds, and the myriad of domestic details, the bed, the knapsack, the new dresses and the old, all piled up in such a small space, there is something else, there are streams of scintillating poetry, of sublime thoughts that have been left in the shadows. It is our duty to protest against a conscientiously written play, no doubt, but one which, unbeknownst to its author, could be used to support dangerous conceptions, and make the ignorant audience think that, after all, antiquity is not worth studying.³³

This reviewer was not the only one to claim that the play exposed Homer to ridicule and risked robbing ancient epic of all prestige. Paulin Blanc, journalist and biographer of the time, laments the fact that Ponsard has turned Odysseus’ return into a ‘vulgar incident of legendary times’. He highlights ²⁹ Heylli (1879), 49. ³² Bellanger (1903), 113.

³⁰ Bellanger (1903), 112. ³¹ Heylli (1879), 49. ³³ Jourdan (1852), 140 1.

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the fact that, with the exception of the choral odes, the play avoids the lyrical dimension to the point of sounding, at times, almost like prose.³⁴ Under the limelight, the great Odysseus’ revenge becomes nothing more than a settling of scores between a small landowner and his swineherd and their parasitic neighbours because of their overfondness for pork. Another critic opposes the stage and the page: ‘The most ingenuous and authentic details, that enchant us in narrative form, too often seem foolish when they are shown on stage’; and he concludes: ‘If Homer is the most divine of poets, Ponsard’s so-called tragedy is simply blasphemy.’³⁵ Yet, on the issue of words and register, Ponsard also found staunch defenders: ‘The Greeks called a spade a spade. They could mention without distaste an ox, a cow, a sheep, a barn, and even swine.’³⁶ The Goncourt brothers drew a parallel between the reception of Homer’s Odyssey and that of Shakespeare’s Othello: We are not going to blame M. Ponsard for using this epic word. Who can blame him, when one has read in the preface to the More de Venise about all the difficulties that the word mouchoir [handkerchief] had in order to make its entry at the Théâtre Français. It is a fact that it took that word ninety seven years from 1732 to 1829 to be spoken in a tragedy. M. Ponsard, with successful and forceful audacity, has been deliberately daring in his choice of words [ . . . ] to the satisfaction of the audience, who, in the main, is used to calling a hog a hog.³⁷

Be it misguided or blasphemous, Ponsard’s Ulysse was indeed very deliberately composed in order to create a contrast between the epic simplicity of the episodes, in which he strove to ‘bring the verse of the drama to the most extreme simplicity’ and show Homer in all his native authenticity, and the lyricism of the sung choruses ‘where I was speaking in my name and not in Homer’s’.³⁸ However, the acknowledged beauty of the choral odes and of Gounod’s music failed to give audiences the sense of awe that Homer commanded, largely thanks to the long-standing status enjoyed by Fénelon’s initiation novel Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) within the French education system: The Odyssey, the Télémaque, from which the first impressions of our literary life are inseparable, imprint on our souls inalienable rights: . . . Eumaeus’ hut, the dog ³⁴ Blanc (1870), 60. ³⁵ Planche (1852), 189, 191. ³⁶ Michiels (1863), 518 19. ³⁷ Goncourt and Goncourt (1853), 258. NB There are three words for pig in French: cochon is the most familiar and usually refers to the living animal, like pig in English; porc is a more elegant term, referring either to the meat, like pork in English, or, unlike pork, to the animal itself; the last, pourceau belongs to a higher register, like swine, and can only mean the animal. The word cochon is never used either by Ponsard or by his commentators, and pourceau is often used by critics who reproach Ponsard for referring to such animals in the first place. The word Ponsard and his defenders often use is porc, which I have consistently translated as hog in this chapter to signal that neither cochon/pig nor pourceau/swine is being used. ³⁸ Ponsard (1852), 28.

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who dies when he is reunited with his master, the nurse who recognizes his scar, Penelope’s weaving [ . . . ] they are suffused with such prestige!³⁹

Homeric prestige is indeed at the heart of the matter; and Ponsard’s claim that he saw Homer differently from previous translators was not entirely unfounded. He had tried to redefine Homer’s poetic value at length in his 1852 preface: the style of the Odyssey is, he argues, ‘very simple, very familiar, very artless, and at the same time it shows objects as in a picture; one fancies everything he describes is in front of one’s eyes’; ‘Homer belongs to the family of artless and spontaneous geniuses, like Corneille and Shakespeare’; and his hallmarks are ‘primitive customs, artless expression, a love for details’.⁴⁰ Ponsard insists primarily on Homeric immediacy; the focus is on the concrete and the visual. This simple Homeric style is given by Ponsard as an antidote to what he presents as decadent French poetry that relies too heavily on elegant words and periphrases: He gave things their name, like the Bible, like all ancient poems, calling without qualms a hog a hog, a spit a spit. It is in France only that poetry has undertaken to revise and correct creation, and dispense with animals, who do not ‘deserve’ to exist in verse.⁴¹

Ponsard’s aim with Ulysse, and in his poem Homère, was to incite audiences to review their familiar conceptions, lead them to a country that has become new by dint of its antiquity, where customs and manners resemble those of our countryside, where people speak a language that was long ago repudiated by polished lessons and forbidden by treatises of rhetoric. If some thing of Homer’s spirit makes this imitation come to life here and there, it would be beneficial for the art of poetry to go beyond the French, English or German horizons and to look to Greece, its native land.⁴²

Ponsard’s proficiency in ancient Greek, however, was not such that he could himself provide a new translation. What he did was compare previous translations with an eye on the original. In his preface he praises Anne Dacier’s prose translation (1716) and proclaims verse as his only difference from hers.⁴³ For Ponsard, it seems, Homer’s meaning is what matters; and if a prose translation can fully revive its spirit, then the poetic dimension is all but a mere accessory. Ponsard found in poet André Chénier both a source and a rival. Ponsard’s Homère (1852) is a clear response to Chénier’s L’Aveugle (1819), since both poems tell an imaginary episode in Homer’s life. In his preface, Ponsard reproached Chénier for having misrepresented Homer: he ‘recoils from Homeric brutality [ . . . ] lacks simplicity [ . . . ] all of Homer’s ³⁹ Wisniewski (1861), 119. See further Macintosh, Ch. 32 in this volume. ⁴⁰ Ponsard (1852), 8 9, 11, 13. ⁴¹ Ponsard (1852), 38. ⁴² Ponsard (1852), 38 9. ⁴³ Ponsard (1852), 7.

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ruggedness has disappeared. Some will say it is all for the best, that he is better suited to the French taste.’⁴⁴ To prove him wrong, Ponsard included a translated passage from the Odyssey in his poem in an attempt to demonstrate that his own interpretation of the Homeric style was the right one. According to him, translators and poets should above all refrain from adorning their models with borrowed graces. He developed his conception of translation at greater length in his acceptance speech at the Académie française: We request almost literal faithfulness, one that renders concision with concision, copiousness with copiousness, and does not shy away from a bold turn of phrase, vulgarity, or even faults in the original. Every work of art has its unique fragrance [ . . . ] emanating from all of its passages the coarsest and the most delicate, if you substitute the witty for the rough hewn, or even elegance in the place of bare simplicity, you have not translated the author, you have disfigured him.⁴⁵

Ponsard’s claim that true Homer was to be found in a supposedly indigenous prosaic truth rather than in poetic beauty did not go unnoticed: ‘M. Ponsard’s little translation takes on new proportions in the context of what surrounds it. So we ask ourselves, is this a new model being proposed? Or at least a new model for translation? We are bound to evaluate the work very attentively [ . . . ] we are dealing with a kind of doctrine.’⁴⁶ Ponsard’s theory of translation focuses on the signified rather than the signifier, the notion rather than the harmony, the visual rather than the music. Chénier, on the contrary, as a poet, focuses on prosody and attempted to translate not Homeric sentences, but Homer’s musicality. Chasle describes the process as follows: To reproduce something of ancient verse, of the measured beat, of the fall of the mighty hexameter, this is translating indeed, translating the secret charm of the ancients, the seduction of Homer’s muse. [ . . . ] Harmony is one of the great prestiges of ancient poetry, the translator who succeeds in reproducing something of it is more exact than the most exacting hellenist.⁴⁷

Ponsard was not unaware of that lost dimension, but ascribes it to the unavoidable fact that the syllabic poetry of the French language cannot hold a candle to the harmony created by the long and short vowels of ancient poetry: I am no doubt but a barbarous Gaul translating the melodious Greek [ . . . ] the pigment of poetry crumbles to dust on the clumsy translator’s fingers. How does one compete against that musical and imitative language? [ . . . ] where is the music in the twelve syllables, half long or half short, of which our alexandrine is arithmetically composed?⁴⁸

⁴⁴ Ponsard (1852), 21. ⁴⁶ Chasle (1852a), 357.

⁴⁵ Cited in Bellanger (1903), 114. ⁴⁷ Chasle (1852b), 382. ⁴⁸ Ponsard (1852), 26 7.

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Ponsard’s lament here is generic, however, concerning the difference between French and ancient Greek prosody, something that is beyond his or anyone else’s ability to mend; and just as he bemoans the fact, he also puts it into perspective. The colour may be faded but the shape—that is to say, the meaning of Homer—remains for him to draw out. Chénier’s approach to Homer is ahistorical, focusing on the aesthetic and supposedly universalizing, musical experience of epic poetry. In Chasle’s words, he ‘has not translated from translations; he drew from the living spring, let himself be swayed by the sound of ancient melody, and with his ear still full of this cherished rhythm, he made us hear an echo of old Homer’.⁴⁹ Ponsard, on the other hand, retrieves from Dacier’s translation a historical perspective on Homer. He compares the Iliad and Odyssey to the twelfth-century CE Chanson de Roland and finds in the Homeric poems less civilized times that he presents as having ‘similar primitive customs, similar artless expressions [ . . . ] history then was only transmitted through oral tradition; events were told and retold, becoming increasingly more poetic and grand and fantastical; it is a treasure trove from which the singer only has to draw’.⁵⁰ This historicist view of Homer adopted by Ponsard struck a chord despite the play’s lack of success; yet for one commentator at least, it remained ‘a work of art more useful that enjoyable’.⁵¹ In terms of translation theory, fifty years after Ulysse, Ponsard was seen as a landmark and a turning point: ‘The case is closed, and the literal has won the day, even in the tribunal of the Académie française. From now on, it will be the rallying cry of all translators, be they poets.’⁵² But even advocates of Ponsard’s school of translation bemoan the lack of heat and energy and the fact that this otherwise highly competent poet willingly sabotaged his own poetic style in Homer’s name: ‘One wonders that M. Ponsard should have dedicated all the strength of his talent—and this is saying a lot—to make Homer simple [ . . . ] because he feared to make him lyrical he has made him prosaic.’⁵³ It is easy in French to write impeccable alexandrines which sound exactly like prose, and this is what Ponsard did. When Minerva informs Ulysses that Eumaeus ‘Prend soin que les pourceaux’ (‘takes good care that the swine’—six syllables, followed by a caesura) ‘ne manquent pas de glands’ (‘do not run out of feed’),⁵⁴ the message is so trivial and the line so flat that it rings almost as self-pastiche.

⁴⁹ Chasle (1852b), 379. ⁵⁰ Ponsard (1852), 11 12. Ponsard may have found his comparison between Homer and thirteenth century French epic in Émile Littré’s Histoire de la langue française in which Littré discusses affinities between old French and ancient Greek epic poetry and actually translates Book 1 of the Iliad in reconstituted old French. Littré (1863), 312 18. ⁵¹ Wisniewski (1861), 121 2. ⁵² Bellanger (1903), 114. ⁵³ Chasle (1852a), 357. ⁵⁴ Ponsard (1852), 152.

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CONCLUSIO N Beyond the failure of Ponsard’s play, and beyond the critical debate about translation theory that this failure revived, the controversy shows how inseparable Homeric epic was from the aura of prestige attached to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Using contemporary translation theory, one could say that Chénier’s Homeric imitations belonged to a tradition of domesticating Homer, ‘bringing the author back home’; whereas Ponsard had set out to foreignize the Homeric epic, by ‘sending the reader abroad’.⁵⁵ As Ponsard says: ‘Here are some Greeks who are not French; why should we refuse them our hospitality? Should I have made them civilized and dressed them according to our fashion?’⁵⁶ But as always with foreignization, the otherness the translation strives to preserve is a construct, as Matthew Arnold made clear in On Translating Homer, less than ten years after Ulysse’s premiere.⁵⁷ Ultimately, what Ponsard’s Études antiques shows (in the preface, the poem Homère, and the tragedy Ulysse) is that conceptions of translation and perceptions of Homer’s epic are both evolving at the time and being redefined in relation to each other. Homer’s epic was not the only ancient Greek material involved in this shift, and Ponsard was not alone in trying to come to terms with it. Two words come back repeatedly in reviews: ‘antiquarian’ and ‘archeological’. Ponsard is accused of being an antiquarian, and his Ulysse of being archaeological poetry: ‘theatre and archaeology are not compatible. He wanted to translate Homer in his own way, and we would have applauded this fancy of his, if M. Ponsard had not like a spoiled child demanded a stage and an audience for his work.’⁵⁸ But how truly incompatible is archaeology with theatre? What Ponsard tried to do with the Odyssey was beginning to be possible for Greek tragedy.⁵⁹ Ulysse was performed almost ten years after the Paris premiere of 1844 of Vacquerie and Meurice’s translation of the Mendelssohn Antigone described by the literary critic Sainte-Beuve as follows: The poetry is not very convincing; [ . . . ] but what can one say? . . . This experi ment is a useful, illuminating, thought provoking one; it gives our education a finish and sharpens our judgement in many ways: after Shakespeare, here comes

⁵⁵ For the terminology, see Venuti (1995), 20. ⁵⁶ Ponsard (1852), 39 40. ⁵⁷ Arnold (1905), 34 42. Arnold opposed what he saw as Newman’s arbitrary historicizing of Homer, and strove to set universal guidelines for the translation of Homer. Ponsard, by contrast, opposed what he saw as Chénier’s French appropriation of Homer, and used a historicizing rationale in favour of literal translation, heralding the end of neoclassical belles infidèles and the dawn of philological translation. ⁵⁸ Jourdan (1852), 142. ⁵⁹ For antiquarianism and theatre and archaeology in Britain at this time, see Hall and Macintosh (2005).

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Sophocles . . . Oh! If only a true dramatic poet would rise, he would find oppor tunity and eager audiences!⁶⁰

If Ponsard failed to be the new dramatic genius who was to usher Greece to contemporary Paris convincingly—and credit for that may well fall to Jules Lacroix with his Œdipe Roi of 1858⁶¹—it may well have been, paradoxically, because he was not ‘archaeological’ enough. Dufaï compared Ulysse to the 1844 Antigone, concluding that, as translations, they were both too literal for literary comfort but he adds an important caveat: It is true that the theatre [for the 1844 Antigone] was for this once set out à l’antique, one could see many old men with beautiful white beards and laurel boughs, and the said old men were singing Sophocles’ choral odes to a new tune; but with all due respect to that great poet, I am convinced that without the overall novelty, without the beards and the music, his tragedy would have verified Rousseau’s quip: ‘no doubt that Sophocles’ most beautiful tragedy, faithfully translated, would be a complete flop in our theatres’.⁶²

Leconte de Lisle later in the century compounded this foreignizing ‘overall novelty’ in the staging of ancient plays with text-level novelty. In his translations, he jolted readers and spectators out of their sense of familiarity with transcriptions of epic and tragic words and names: Akhilleus, Elektra, knémide, paian, daimôn—these forbidding Greek chunks strongly resisting any attempts to assimilate or appropriate Homer or Aeschylus.⁶³ Ponsard, by contrast, had followed traditional usage, according to which Ulysses (and not Odysseus) is mentored by Minerva (and not Athena). Ponsard, the conciliator, limited his ambitions to showing a new conception of the Homeric tone, all the while keeping the text and the performance conservatively neoclassical. It seems that in so doing he stripped Homeric epic of its familiar prestige, and failed to wrap it in the new exotic glamour that would become the norm in the 1870s, with the rise of archaeological reconstitutions of ancient staging and the rediscovery of ancient open-air venues.

⁶⁰ Sainte Beuve (1876), 224 6. For the significance of this Antigone, see Macintosh (2009). ⁶¹ Macintosh (2009), 83 91. ⁶² Dufaï (1852b), 17. ⁶³ For a discussion of Leconte de Lisle’s translations, see Humbert Mougin (2003), 31 45.

34 Epic Cassandras in Performance, 1795–1868 Laura Monrós-Gaspar

A critic of The Globe acknowledged in 1878 that ‘No century, no decade, and we may almost say no year, is allowed to pass without some set of opinions, more or less paradoxical, being stated on the subject of Homer and his poems.’¹ Indeed, the Homeric question was at the centre of the intellectual coteries throughout the nineteenth century, so much so that it even formed part of the debates on another relevant issue in the sociocultural history of the period: the diffusion of knowledge and women’s access to it. Before the 1880s, when Greek tragedy and Aeschylus’ Oresteia becomes the tragedy of choice, it is epic Cassandra that is routinely at the centre of that debate.² At a time when women’s access to knowledge was being disputed, the Cassandra myth provided fertile soil to test and contest the role of women in society. Throughout the long eighteenth century, when new prominence was accorded in the theatre to the visual over the verbal,³ epic Cassandra makes a regular appearance on the stage. During this period, there was a ‘public penchant for scenes involving delirious pagan prophetesses’,⁴ which in turn launched the careers of a number of actresses and dancers who found in Cassandra the perfect vehicle to demonstrate their skills. This chapter examines a number of nineteenth-century versions of epic Cassandra for the stage: a monodrama by Elizabeth Cobbold (1821); Domenico Rossi’s ballet Le Siège de Troye (1807); and various equestrian refigurations of The Siege of Troy in Britain which add a further orientalized perspective where Cassandra is both

¹ ‘The Siege of Troy Again’, The Globe, Tuesday 21 January 1879, 1. ² Macintosh (2005). ³ This is linked to a revival of ancient pantomime which influences the performing arts in France and England all the way down to the nineteenth century and includes Lady Hamilton’s ‘Attitudes’ and Ducrow’s hippodramas. See Lada Richards (2003) and (2010). ⁴ See Hall, Ch. 30 in this volume.

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the feared sorceress and the mysterious, clairvoyant, and exotic Gypsy. All these case studies demonstrate how epic Cassandra demands gestural performance and entails costume and sociocultural referents that develop new cultural, inter-theatrical, and semiotic systems that problematize and intervene directly in the urgent question of women’s knowledge.

‘MADDENING WITH PROPHETIC RAGE’ Select audiences gathered at the European Saloon for a short season to see Elizabeth Macauley’s solo ‘serious and comic dramatic performances’ in 1821.⁵ Among the collection of ‘Attitudes’,⁶ musical recitations, and accent imitations included in the bill, Part III announced Cassandra, a monodrama by Elizabeth Cobbold⁷ written expressly for the actress ‘and never before performed in London’.⁸ A multitalented performer, playwright, and theatre theorist, Elizabeth Macauley was also a Cassandra of her time. From the very first years of her career as an actress, Macauley had suffered the abuses of a managerial system in control of the professional circuit in London, which caused her to fall into oblivion.⁹ A recurring idea in her pamphlets was her vulnerability as a female performer at the hands of the leading actor-managers who conducted the business: ‘I am an oppressed and defenceless woman, seeking for justice’,¹⁰ she claimed, in search of ‘emancipation from slavery to independence’.¹¹ Macauley participated in a new feminist historiography that sought a vehicle for social transformation on the stage.¹² Her social theatre was cast in contradistinction to the pomposity of the performances of the great Shakespearean actor-managers of her time. Consequently, and as the result of an acrimonious dispute with Edmund Kean during her ⁵ ‘European Saloon’, Morning Post, Thursday 15 March 1821, 1. The performances started on Saturday 17 March 1821. Cassandra shared the bill with ‘Which is the Maid?, or The Way to Win Him’ and ‘Le Petite Suppere’. See also The Lady’s Monthly Museum, or, Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction (London, 1821), vol. 13, 8/1, 227. ⁶ On ‘Attitudes’, see Holmström (1967), McCullogh (1983), and Lada Richards (2003). ⁷ Even though the works by society hostess Elizabeth Cobbold (née Elizabeth Knipe) were mostly published privately, she is included in various contemporary anthologies of Romantic women poets (see Feldman 1997). Cobbold’s engagement with professional theatre as a playwright had been limited so her Cassandra provided her with a visibility beyond her poetry. ⁸ See ‘European Saloon’, Morning Post, Thursday 15 March 1821, 1. ⁹ Bratton (1996). ¹⁰ Macauley (1824), 8 9. See also Macauley (1810), 3 4. ¹¹ Macauley (1819), 8. ¹² Crochunis (2004). Note that she contributed to the dissemination of Shakespeare and other playwrights in her Tales of the Drama (1822). She claimed that uniting History as a ‘national study’ and Drama as a ‘national amusement’ should nurture the youthful minds in the audience. Macauley (1823), vi.

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short engagement at Drury Lane, she suffered an unfair banishment from the main London venues that would mark her career forever.¹³ Her exclusion from the dominant theatrical elite forced Macauley to channel her efforts elsewhere. This she did by appearing in a set of solo performances in concert rooms and small venues, which readily attained the approval of audiences. The reviews of Macauley’s one-woman shows provide evidence of her intellectual approach to character at a time when conventions in acting were being questioned by the male architects of culture.¹⁴ Macauley’s pamphlets on theatre and acting became another easy target for her male detractors who condemned her for her boldness, resolution, and—they claimed—lack of talent. When her Cassandra was first put on, barely three years had passed since her dispute with Kean and only two since the publication of her prophetic pamphlet Theatrical Revolution; or Plain Truth Addressed to Common Sense, which foresaw the debates on the managerial system that pervaded the nineteenth century. Such a context inevitably provided a fruitful subtext for her performance of the role of scorned and unheeded prophetess. Macauley was not the only woman to gain visibility through the performance of this monodrama. This 1821 Cassandra was sponsored by four aristocratic women, led by the notorious Caroline Lamb, whose stage adaptation of her novel Glenarvon (1816) was about to be performed in London.¹⁵ Lady Caroline Lamb had been ostracized from London society for her extravagant life, failed marriage with William Lamb—the future prime minister Lord Melbourne—and a torrid affair with Lord Byron.¹⁶ Lamb was accorded social visibility at a time when the Whig aristocracy had turned its back on her. Yet more important for this chapter is the character of Elinor, a secondary character in Lamb’s Glenarvon, who is placed centre stage in John H. Amherst’s adaptation in 1821. Miss Watson performed Elinor ‘as the wild, impulsive

¹³ Macauley (1824). ¹⁴ e.g. ‘New Theatre’, Morning Post, 9 April 1821, 2; Burwick (2003), 129 70; and Taylor (1989), 144 61. ¹⁵ The other patronesses were the Duchess of St Albans, the Countess of Bessborough (Caroline Lamb’s mother), and Lady Barbara Ponsonby (married to William, Caroline’s brother). See ‘European Saloon’, Morning Post, Friday 16 March 1821, 1. In 1835 Cassandra reappeared once again in the life of Lord Melbourne when Benjamin Robert Haydon exhibited his painting Cassandra Predicting the Murder of Agamemnon on His Arrival after Ten Years’ Absence at Mycenae at the Society of British Artists in 1835. The model for the painting was Caroline Norton, whose reputation was damaged when Lord Melbourne was sued by the Honourable George Norton for ‘criminal conversation’ with his wife in 1836. See Macintosh (2005), 145 6. ¹⁶ Glenarvon was staged at the Royal Coburg Theatre in 1819 and 1821, where Lamb was the patroness of the last night of the winter 1819 20 season; see Rowell (1993); Nicoll (1955), 4.467; see also Burwick (2011a). The 1821 version was adapted by John H. Amherst, who also revived The Siege of Troy at Astley’s in 1833. Nicoll regards the 1819 and 1821 staging as the same version with a different title.

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maniac’, pre-empting Cassandra in Amherst’s 1833 Siege of Troy at Astley’s in 1833 (see below). The Macauley Cassandra similarly raved and rent her hair and clothes in Cobbold’s monodrama. Anticipating Berlioz’s Cassandra in Les Troyens (1856–8), where an eminently visual and narrative Cassandra is brought to the foreground, Cobbold revisits Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid and gives prominence to the prophetess’s views of the siege of Troy, which she relates interspersed with her visions of the imminent preordained future. The humdrum pentameters of Cobbold’s text add little to the nineteenth-century British reappraisals of epic in poetry.¹⁷ In fact, this could have been one of the various works that inspired the Dickensian caricature of Cobbold as a literary aficionado in the character of Mrs Leo Hunter dressed as a histrionic Minerva in Pickwick Papers (1836–7). Yet Cobbold’s text is evidence of the widespread appropriations of epic and the importance of the epic figure of Cassandra in theatre history at this time. Cobbold’s monodrama promoted the acting style of the talented but as yet unrecognized actress, Macauley.¹⁸ At a time when women as a collective were beginning to attain a social voice of their own, the essential dramatic nature of Cassandra’s role in ancient epic and tragedy offered female performers a useful tool to fashion alternative performance styles. Two well-known models for Cobbold’s monodrama were Lady Hamilton and Henriette Hendel-Schütz, who featured Priam’s daughter among their corresponding repertoire of ‘Attitudes’, which privileged tableau over coup de théâtre.¹⁹ Emma Hart (later Lady Hamilton) sat for George Romney’s celebrated painting Cassandra. Since her first appearance in 1787, Lady Hamilton had captivated the European aristocracy with private performances of her so-called ‘Attitudes’, where she posed as well-known female figures from famous paintings, the Bible, and classical mythology. Even though records of the performances of Lady Hamilton only refer to Cassandra indirectly,²⁰ Hendel-Schütz’s performance as a raving Cassandra predicting the fall of Troy topped her bill. Visual evidence of Hendel-Schütz’s performances is provided in J. N. Peroux’s catalogue of illustrations,²¹ where Cassandra is seen bending over a pedestal, with one knee on the floor, her dishevelled hair covered with a shawl. Peroux’s rendering of Hendel-Schütz’s Cassandra bears much resemblance to George Romney’s painting for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, which drew on both Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (2.2) and

¹⁷ See Harrison (2007b) and Tucker (2008). ¹⁸ Cobbold (1825), 16. As early as 1738, Susannah Cibber’s performance of the tragic Cassandra in James Thomson’s Agamemnon also called on the theatricality of the myth and demonstrated the particular acting style she had learnt from Colley Cibber and Aaron Hill. ¹⁹ See Slaney (2016), 189 218. ²⁰ Monrós Gaspar (2011b), 102. ²¹ Holmström (1967), 195.

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Greek and Roman tragedy.²² Moreover, the key to the success of Romney’s Cassandra lay not so much in his multiple sources or in the artist’s status as in his model, Emma Hart. Whereas the few occasions on which Cassandra appears in ancient art usually depict the episode of the rape during the sack of Troy, modern artists foreground her tragic role as an unheeded fortuneteller.²³ Stagings of the epic Cassandra perpetuate these iconographic representations; and Cobbold’s Cassandra gathers all the visual commonplaces associated with the siege and storming of Troy—the ramparts, the temple, the horse—and juxtaposes them with Cassandra ‘maddening with prophetic rage’, following in the line of Hart and Hendel-Schütz.²⁴ Domenico Rossi, a disciple of the celebrated eighteenth-century choreographer, Jean-Georges Noverre and translator into Italian of Noverre’s Lettres sur la danse, had earlier in 1807 choreographed his own ballet d’action, Le Siège de Troye, for the King’s Theatre company in London.²⁵ Rossi had previously been the company director of the Teatro de los Caños del Peral in Madrid in 1787–90 and 1791–9. One of his successful ballets at los Caños was El incendio de Troya (The Fire at Troy), based on the Aeneid (Book 2) and first performed in Madrid in 1798.²⁶ After the Madrid years and a short period in Portugal, Rossi arrived in London around 1805 and became ballet master at the King’s Theatre. On 14 April 1807, and ‘with unbounded applause’,²⁷ Rossi staged the heroic ballet Le Siège de Troye, probably an adapted version of the Madrid performance. With music by Federigo Fiorillo and choreography by Rossi himself, the ballet ran for seventeen nights;²⁸ it enjoyed such success that a selection of the most popular airs was published and sold in 1807 at Kelly’s Opera Saloon in London.²⁹ Evidence of Rossi’s Siège is scant, yet a copy of the playbill preserved in the Dramatic Annals collected by John Nixon indicates that the piece featured the celebrated ballet dancer Madame Deshayes—born Élisabeth Duchemin—as Cassandra.³⁰ Her husband, the famous André Jean Jacques Deshayes, interpreted the character of Pyrrhus (Fig. 34.1). ²² Monrós Gaspar (2011b), 104; Sillars (2006), 138. Troilus and Cressida was not a favourite on the eighteenth century stage, therefore critics concur in finding the source for Romney’s Cassandra in classical tragedy rather than in Shakespeare. Romney had also made some chalk drawings in response to Robert Potter’s 1777 English language translation of Aeschylus in the 1780s. ²³ Elvira Barba (2008), 179. In the nineteenth century, for example, besides the sculpture Cassandra Dragged from the Altar of Minerva (1829) by James Legrew, only Solomon Joseph Solomon’s Ajax and Cassandra (1886) excels in pictorial refigurations of the homonymous episode in contrast to the numerous visual representations of Cassandra the dramatic prophetess (see e.g. D. G. Rossetti in 1870, Frederick Sandys in 1895, and Evelyn de Morgan in 1895). ²⁴ Scott (1823), 117. ²⁵ Celi and Toschi (1996), 7. ²⁶ Rossi was not alone in staging the Troy episode in Spain: for example, a popular adaptation of the siege of Troy became a hit in Badajoz for the 1867 season. See Suárez Muñoz and Suárez Ramírez (2001), 778. ²⁷ Levy and Ward (2006), 243. ²⁸ Smith (1955), 87. ²⁹ Levy and Ward (2006), 243. ³⁰ Nixon (1807 45), fo. 30.

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Fig. 34.1 Siege of Troy Playbill. © Senate House Library, University of London.

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André Deshayes, son of the celebrated ballet master Jacques-François Deshayes, had been the principal dancer at los Caños del Peral in 1798, when Rossi’s El incendio de Troya was first staged. Whether due to their previous collaboration, the shared influence of Noverre on their dancing styles, or Rossi’s prior knowledge of the classical episode (he had put on his own Agamennone in Florence in 1779—possibly Noverre’s Agamemnon vengé),³¹ Troy was once again in Rossi’s repertoire when he arrived in London. And so was Cassandra. A review of the ballet in the Monthly Mirror outlines the plot,³² which like the Madrid ballet was based on Book 2 of the Aeneid, except in London the cast was considerably smaller.³³ Elizabeth Deshayes was the principal dancer of the company at the King’s and the role of Cassandra, we can infer from accounts of the Madrid ballet, was extremely challenging as it drew on the choreography of Noverre’s Agamemnon vengé: ‘con el cabello descompuesto [ . . . ] ruega y conjura’,³⁴ ‘llena de furor profético’,³⁵ ‘huye de un lado a otro pidiendo clemencia’.³⁶ Deshayes’s dancing was greeted rapturously,³⁷ and clearly accentuated the physical dimension to Cassandra’s story that drew on popular images of prophets and popular fortune-tellers of the time. Her name and contribution to the myth have, nonetheless, been erased from the books of dance history.

ON HORSE A ND ON FOOT Spectacular dramatizations of the siege of Troy had been at the centre of elite entertainment for centuries. Yet from the late eighteenth century on, London’s popular theatre was especially well acquainted with the epic heroes from the siege of Troy. It was Elkanah Settle’s droll The Siege of Troy, above all, put on for Mrs Mynn’s booth at Bartholomew and Southwark fairs, that made this episode so widely known in Britain.³⁸ In 1795, The Siege of Troy by John O’Keeffe—a free pantomimic adaptation of Settle’s spectacle—was put on at the New Amphitheatre of Arts in Westminster under the direction of Philip Astley. O’Keeffe’s Siege was the last piece of an evening entertainment where equestrian exercises and races were ³¹ Celi and Toschi (1996), 16. ³² Monthly Mirror (1807), 289. I have not yet found a copy of the London libretto so far in my research. ³³ Note that in 1789, Il ritorno di Agamennone, choreographed by Francesco Clerico, opened at San Benedetto Theatre, Venice, with Rosa Clerico Panzieri dancing with great success as Cassan dra. In 1801 the ballet was revived in La Scala as Agamennone. APRGD database il ritorno di Agamennone (1789), . ³⁴ Incendio (1798), 10. ³⁵ Incendio (1798), 11. ³⁶ Incendio (1798), 13. ³⁷ ‘Kings Theatre’, Morning Chronicle, Wednesday 15 April 1807, 7. ³⁸ See Hall, Ch. 30 in this volume.

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intermingled with short ballet pieces and pantomimes. The coexistence of O’Keeffe’s pantomime, which reproduced the most spectacular scenes in Settle, with Astley’s equestrian exhibition, paved the way for the staging of the siege of Troy as a military and classical hippodrama in the nineteenth century. Indeed, following this 1795 production, almost every manager who took on the running of Astley’s Amphitheatre left his own imprint on its stage and circus with a revival of The Siege of Troy. In 1833 Andrew Ducrow put on the most spectacular adaptation in The Giant Horse; or The Siege of Troy, and in 1854 John Robert O’Neil, known as Hugo Vamp, put on The Siege of Troy; or The Misjudgement of Paris under William Cooke’s management.³⁹ Penned by J. H. Amherst, Ducrow’s production remodelled the stage and circus arena by filling it with water and laying on, as promised in the playbill, ‘two hundred and twenty artists’ and ‘forty-five trained horses’.⁴⁰ O’Neil’s Siege caused such a sensation that when he tried his luck at the Marionette Theatre in Cremorne Gardens, his own The Golden Pippin; or, The Judgement of Paris and the Siege of Troy (1858) was received to great acclaim.⁴¹ Rather than conscious reworkings of Homer and Virgil, the equestrian spectacles based on classical epic at Astley’s aimed at promoting a flourishing new form of entertainment. Consequently, the repertoire of the circus was developed with an eye on the box office and not on fidelity to the classics. As a critic of the New Monthly Magazine and Humorist puts it: ‘What do the unwashed frequenters of Astley’s know about the gods of the Greek mythology, or the demigods of the heroic ages? And yet see the enthusiastic sympathy with which they hailed their effigies, as offered to them by the genius of Ducrow!’⁴² Even if dramatic licence prevailed over accuracy, the classical interactions that emerged in the process of turning epic into equestrian burlesque paradoxically brought the classical heroes closer to nineteenthcentury audiences.⁴³ These plots juxtaposed images from the classical epic with the nineteenth-century social imaginary in a hybrid semiotic system that linked past and present.⁴⁴ There were also private theatricals, ballets, puppet shows, and classical non-equestrian burlesques, whose scripts have not been preserved, based on the siege of Troy.⁴⁵ So in vogue was the episode that even ³⁹ Equestrian burlesques based on epic also abound on the French stage with the works by M. Augustin Hapdé. See Stott (1958), 2.203 4. ⁴⁰ Playbills: Royal Amphitheatre 1791 1843; ASTLEY’S AMPHITHEATRE PLAYBILLS 170 1791 1843, PB Mic C13137170/409, Thursday 18 April 1833. ⁴¹ See ‘Royal Cremorne Gardens’, West London Observer, Saturday 29 May 1858, 4. ⁴² ‘The late Andrew’ (1842), 44. ⁴³ See e.g. Richardson (2013), 104 12 for the relation between contemporary war heroes and the Trojan episode. See also Assael (2005). ⁴⁴ See Bryant Davies, Ch. 36 in this volume. ⁴⁵ See e.g. ‘the new Fantocini The Siege of Troy’ at the Little Theatre, Drury Lane, which coincided with Rossi’s ballet at the King’s (‘Amphitheatre Royal’ Saunders News Letter, Tuesday 10 November 1807, 2.)

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private theatricals at Woburn Abbey in 1847 are known to have included a charade derived from the siege of Troy by Stafford O’Brien.⁴⁶ The recurrence of these images, steering a course between variation and tradition, reflected the ritualization of the siege of Troy as a national entertainment and built up an archive of expectations that prompted the mythologization of the theatrical event.⁴⁷ Whether at King’s Theatre, Cremorne Gardens, or at Astley’s; whether as a ballet, a marionette show, or an equestrian performance, attending a dramatization of the events at Troy in the nineteenth century meant participating in a cultural event that became, after Settle, nearly as quintessentially British as the Christmas pantomime is at present. The reverberation of parallel images in the various venues meant, in Ricœur’s terms, ‘realizing anew’; ‘recalling, replying to, retorting, even [ . . . ] revoking heritages’ both from the classical and the national pasts. The new, ludicrous form of epic which was dominating the arena at Astley’s, therefore, became a cultural site wherein to test and contest images of national mythologies and archetypes. If we consider Astley’s arena as a site where social female archetypes were either legitimized or disputed—with strong-minded masculine women coexisting with female acrobats—the choice of female characters in nineteenth-century dramatizations of The Siege of Troy was primarily motivated by a single main concern: the exhibition of a cultural semiotic system with female models easily recognizable and appealing to the audiences. Not surprisingly, therefore, the inconstant Helen and the feared Cassandra—who easily melded with current debates on marriage and women’s access to knowledge respectively—are two recurring pillars in the spectacles considered in this section.⁴⁸ The figure of Cassandra the prophetess is revived in every restaging of The Siege of Troy at Astley’s:⁴⁹ and from Astley’s 1795 The Siege of Troy to O’Neil’s 1854 The Judgement of Paris, the equestrian appropriation of the Trojan princess perpetuates the fusion of the epic and tragic Cassandra, combined with other dramatic popular figures such as orientalized seers and chiromantic clairvoyants. O’Keeffe’s 1795 Siege follows the eighteenth-century theatrical premise that the action must speak to the eye and is therefore in line with the pantomimic attitudes of Hamilton and Hendel-Schütz. O’Keeffe claimed to display ‘the most lively and interesting picture of the various passions that agitated the human breast, which it is possible to convey through the medium ⁴⁶ See ‘Multum in Parvo’, Newcastle Courant, Friday 1 January 1847, 3. ⁴⁷ Ricœur’s formulation of the notion of repetition for historiographical enterprise serves here as a key point of reference to understanding the process. Ricœur (1993), 380. ⁴⁸ Subsidiary female characters only include Hecuba, Minerva, Juno, and Venus, with ro mantic subplots which serve the purpose of the burlesque. ⁴⁹ This comprises research done at the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Collection at the British Library; the Larpent Collection at Houghton Library; the Pettingel Collection at the University of Kent; and modern repertories such as Allardyce Nicoll’s (1955 9).

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of scenic effect’.⁵⁰ Therefore, even though no lines are given to Cassandra in the pantomime, the epithets that define her as a ‘lunatic’ with a ‘deranged mind’ point to a performance style that once again highlights the inherent theatricality of the myth. The emphatically gestural portrayal of Cassandra here would be carried forward in subsequent stagings at Astley’s. Andrew Ducrow had taken on the management of the theatre in 1824 and in 1833 he staged John Amherst’s The Giant Horse; or The Siege of Troy, which was eulogized by the press for its spectacular staging.⁵¹ The playbill advertising the performance provides substantial evidence of the magnificence of the spectacle with an illustration of the colossal horse flanked by a full description of the procession of ‘45 highly trained steeds of different nations’, a ‘stud of wild zebras’, and a ‘troop of fairy ponies’. Such grandiose staging was not only possible because of the venue but also due to the conventions set by Philip Astley’s popularization of the Troy episode through his revisitings of Elkanah Settle’s text. Reviews of Ducrow’s show point to the audience’s intimate acquaintance with the subject—particularly amongst the younger members in the Amphitheatre: the reviewer of the Dublin Evening Packet and Correspondent, for example, argued how ‘The plot is familiar to every school-boy, and the story, in this reading age, to the great majority of children of a riper age’.⁵² Indeed, Greek epic was part of the curricula of the elite schools in England;⁵³ but The Giant Horse had also been adapted for the Juvenile Drama in Orlando Hodgson’s celebrated series.⁵⁴ With a colourful set and plates, the reproduction of the hippodrama in miniature by Hodgson testifies to the success of the show, which was eventually transferred to Drury Lane with new scenes and numbers.⁵⁵ The posters show Miss Enscoe, who was an actress in Astley’s stock company between the 1820s and the 1830s, billed as Cassandra.⁵⁶ Miss Enscoe had made a name for herself playing exotic, enigmatic parts in burlettas and pantomimes.⁵⁷ She was, therefore, ideally cast for Amherst’s Cassandra, if we

⁵⁰ O’Keeffe (1795), 9. ⁵¹ ‘Theatricals’, Dublin Evening Packet and Correspondent, Saturday 13 April 1833, 4. See also ‘Theatres’, Morning Advertiser, Friday 5 April 1833, 2. ⁵² ‘Theatricals’, Dublin Evening Packet and Correspondent, Saturday 13 April 1833, 4. ⁵³ See Stray (1998). ⁵⁴ See Speaight (1946) and Bryant Davies (2018a). ⁵⁵ ‘The Drama’, Bell’s New Weekly Messenger, Sunday 29 December 1833, 17. Alfred Bunn, who was manager of Drury Lane at the time, also had an arrangement with Ducrow to use some of his horses at the theatre. Grant, Great Metropolis (1837), Act 5, Scene 1, 57. ⁵⁶ The posters are held in the British Library collection of Astley’s Amphitheare Playbills: 170/ 409, Thursday 18 April 1833; 170/410, 22 April 1833; 170/411, 3 July 1833; 170/412, 7 July 1833. I have, until now, found no surviving copy of Amherst’s text. ⁵⁷ In 1820, for example, she had been involved in a performance of Jane Scott’s celebrated gothic pantomime of The Necromancer; or, Harlequin and the Golden Key. The Adelphi Calen dar, .

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take Hodgson’s juvenile adaptation as a close aesthetic version of the production at Astley’s. In Hodgson’s toy adaptation of The Giant Horse, there is neither a speaking Cassandra nor a single allusion to the character. Still, a frenzied Cassandra is portrayed facing the giant horse ‘wild’ and ‘impulsive’ with a torch in her hand in the backdrop for Act 2, Scenes 6 and 7 (Fig. 34.2). Hodgson’s illustration reinforces the epic Cassandra’s aesthetic function in the amphitheatre, namely to prepare the spectator both for ekplēxis (astonishment) at the spectacular entrance of the Giant horse and for an increase in the pathos of the scene. Moreover, the illustrations of the characters in the play collected in Hodgson’s Characters (1833) include a subsidiary female figure, who adds further semiotic inter-theatricalities to Hodgson’s approach to the Trojan prophetess. The playbill for Astley’s production describes a stylized procession in the arena with a ‘sorcerer’, ‘maidens’, ‘vestals’, a ‘chariot of oxen (slaves)’, and Egyptian mummies that display the whole gamut of theatrical resources. In Hodgson’s Characters, the ‘sorcerer’ is drawn as a frenzied woman with a prophetic tablet in her hands and Kabbalistic signs trimmed on her costume with an

Fig. 34.2 ‘Hodgson’s Characters in the Giant Horse: Descent of the Greek spies from the giant horse’. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Fig. 34.3 ‘Hodgson’s Characters in the Giant Horse’. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

embroidered inscription purposely misspelling Greek characters (Fig. 34.3). The visual prominence of the sorceress here, in contrast with other silent characters in the procession, serves to highlight the visual dimension of clairvoyance both at Astley’s and in Hodgson’s. This is comparable to the ‘warriors on horses’ and ‘the trophy of arms’, which emphasize the military spirit of the performance through the same procession.⁵⁸ Considering together both Cassandra and the sorceress, new semiotic connections come into play that associate the epic figure with onstage Gypsies and popular refigurations of Cassandra elsewhere in the nineteenth century.⁵⁹ In this instance, the constellation of meanings transmitted through costume and props—the torch, the tablet, and the elaborate outfit—provides specific information on the role, which relates the two characters to enigmatic clairvoyance.⁶⁰ These paratextual elements allow us to read the ‘image’ of Cassandra as a Kabbalistic Gypsified sorceress: for example, the elaborate petticoats ‘worked at the bottom with black cabalistic signs’ (a marker for clairvoyant Gypsies as acknowledged by a critic in the Penny Illustrated Paper,

⁵⁸ Siege (1833), 14. See Dentith (2006) for an analysis of epic and empire. ⁵⁹ A further link is provided by the numerous nineteenth century Gypsy performers and mediums who are portrayed, for example, with tarot signs on their costume in cabinet cards and illustrations of the period. See Monrós Gaspar (2016a). ⁶⁰ See Monrós Gaspar (2012) for an analysis of Cassandra and costume.

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and later in the century, by Édmond de Goncourt in his acclaimed portraiture of circus life).⁶¹ The last recorded equestrian burlesque of the siege of Troy staged at Astley’s is John Robert O’Neil’s The Siege of Troy; or, The Misjudgement of Paris. O’Neil’s Siege was first performed in August 1854, just before the allied forces (France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia), which fought against the Russian Empire, landed in Sebastopol during the Crimean War. References to the conflict abound in the play; many of them are interspersed as satiric puns in Cassandra’s visions of the Trojan War. Cassandra as a political commentator was commonplace in Victorian England with Florence Nightingale’s essay Cassandra (1852) and William Rathbone Greg’s Rocks Ahead; or The Warnings of Cassandra (1874) as two of the most flagrant examples.⁶² Besides demonstrating her engagement in politics, O’Neil’s Cassandra extends the tradition of a ‘theatrical’ Cassandra in two highly visual scenes, which became hallmarks of Cooke’s management. First, she provides the action to the ecstatic series of tableaux which represent the Judgement of Paris in Act 1, Scene 1, when she interrupts the freeze-frames, entering and ‘running . . . like winkin [sic]’, ‘waving her torch’,⁶³ and as a ‘mad prophetess [ . . . .] mesmerized’ by Apollo.⁶⁴ Then, she comes on stage ‘wildly’ with unheeded prophecies in Act 2, anticipating the audience’s ekplēxis when the horse is dragged across the stage. Among the various popular clichés on which O’Neil draws here is mesmerism, which was widespread and extensively practised in England from the 1830s until the end of the century by people from different backgrounds and with different interests.⁶⁵ Itinerant lecturers talked about the medical powers of such pseudoscience and dramatized its effects, following a predictable pattern that paralleled Cassandra’s enthousiasmós. It is no coincidence, therefore, that in 1843 a certain Madame Doce performed the part of clairvoyant somnambulist in L’Extase by Lockroy and Arnould ‘like another Cassandra’ in London;⁶⁶ and that in her mesmeric shows in Baker Street, Madame Tecmen was billed in 1844 as ‘the sleeping Cassandra’.⁶⁷ The general scheme was that a male Apollonian mastermind exerted his mesmeric powers over one or several women. The alleged effects on the mesmerized lady or ladies in question

⁶¹ ‘Gipsy Experiences by a Roumany Rei’, Penny Illustated Paper, 10 October 1861, 25. The bohemian Romani was clad with ‘some cabalistic signs printed’ on her costume. De Goncourt (1957), 39. ⁶² See Monrós Gaspar (2008) and (2011a). ⁶³ O’Neil (1854), fo. 4. ⁶⁴ O’Neil (1854), fo. 4. ⁶⁵ Winter (1998). ⁶⁶ ‘Theatricals’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, Sunday 9 April 1843, 5. The play was first performed at the Vaudeville in Paris on 23 January 1843. ⁶⁷ ‘Clairvoyance’, Hereford Journal, 28 August 1844, 1. See Lehman (2009) for mesmerism on stage.

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were new mental and sensory powers, including second sight and the physical ecstasies that O’Neil seeks to recreate in his show. Astley’s equestrian Cassandra, then, presented a set of prescriptive images by means of which the epic prophetess was aligned with contemporary seers. By the mid-nineteenth century, the comic siege of Troy had essentially become a product of Astley’s. However, neither the episode nor the association between Cassandra and peripheral social characters such as mesmerizers, clairvoyants, and Gypsies was exclusive to Astley’s hippodrama. Students of Westminster School, well known for its yearly productions of celebratory English and Latin plays,⁶⁸ put on their version of the siege by a said ‘John Burneybusby’ in 1818.⁶⁹ A year later, Thomas John Dibdin’s Melodrama Mad! or The Siege of Troy was first performed at the Surrey Theatre in 1819 where Cassandra is described as a ‘melodramatic mad prophetess’,⁷⁰ and associated with clichéd literary madwomen and Gypsies such as Ophelia, Meg Merrilies, Mad Bess, and Crazy Jane.⁷¹ In 1868,⁷² when the London-born journalist William Mower Akhurst moved to Australia, he did not hesitate to take the London craze for Troy to the Antipodes,⁷³ which also enjoyed their own Astley’s.⁷⁴ His Paris the Prince and Helen the Fair; or, The Giant Horse and the Siege of Troy became a celebrated hit of the Melbourne season in 1868. The scene painter John Hennings devised the instructive ‘Panorama of Duke of Edinburgh’s outward voyage’ for the play, which ⁶⁸ McConaughy (1913), 19 22; Forshall (1884); Gwyer (1898), 247 60; Sargeaunt (1898). ⁶⁹ For an announcement of the play, see ‘The Siege of Troy’, Morning Chronicle, Monday 21 December 1818, 2. See also ‘The Siege of Troy’, Morning Post, Saturday 26 December 1818, 2. The author is referred to as John Burnaby in the latter. Note that when John O’Keeffe’s son was a student at Westminster, ‘a row was held’ by the boys in an inhabited house on Mill Bank where they re enacted the siege of Troy. O’Keeffe (1826), 2.151. ⁷⁰ Dibdin (1819), A. ⁷¹ See Kromm (1994), Monrós Gaspar (2016a), and Wechsler (2002). The Shakespearean echoes are also present when Cassandra speaks to Paris, who adapts Hamlet’s deranged words to Ophelia in 3.1.148 62. Robert Reece’s Agamemnon and Cassandra; or The Prophet and Loss of Troy (Liverpool, Prince of Wales’s Theatre, 1868) follows in the line of the Hamlet Cassandra link. Together with Akhurst’s Paris the Prince (see below), it is the only non equestrian burlesque play in English which refigures the myth of Cassandra for the comic stage in the 1860s. Note that Nolan’s burlesque Agamemnon at Home did not have Cassandra in its cast list (Monrós Gaspar (2011b), 149, 180 6). See also Macintosh (2005), 74 n. 62, 150 n. 34. ⁷² Other comic Cassandras predating the English are the opera buffa, Attanagamenone (1731) by Bartolomeo Cordans; Agamenon e Clitemnestra (1772) by Juan Crisóstomo Faría Cordero; François Georges Fouges’s (Desfontaines) Cassandre Agamemnon et Colombine Cassandre (1803), and Hervé’s Agamemnon; ou, Le Chameau à deux bosses (1856). Monrós Gaspar (2011b), 128 37. ⁷³ He also put on Ixion: The Man on the Wheel at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne on 22 September 1866, adapted from F. C. Burnand’s 1863 homonymous burlesque and a good number of British oriented texts which served as comic lessons for their audiences. See and Lynch (2011). ⁷⁴ Colligan (1999).

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eventually became its central attraction.⁷⁵ The panorama was interpreted for the audience by Cassandra and Cupid with satirical puns on current affairs, including the contemporary theatrical scene, local and international politics,⁷⁶ and xenophobic accounts of the life in the various destinations in South America, Africa, and even Aboriginal Australia.⁷⁷ Following in the line of his British predecessors, Akhurst relies heavily on the visual dimension of the Cassandra myth for the success of his show. Many more of his stage directions are for Cassandra, calling for violent gesture and movement, than are given to almost any other character. This is reinforced in the final tableau in Scene 2, where Cassandra appears ‘in a state of prophetic ecstacy’⁷⁸ under the contemptuous gaze of the other characters on stage. The staging of prophecies, mesmerism, and seances, which was much to the taste of Victorian London audiences, had also been imported to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century. From the 1860s onwards, a mesmeric mania flooded both Britain and Australia and ‘the prophetess’ became a theatrical cliché that would have been readily recognizable to Akhurst’s audiences. Reviews of the Melbourne 1868 staging highlight Henry R. Harwood’s make-up in the role of Cassandra as a successful ‘complete travestie of the sybilline daughter of Priam’.⁷⁹ There is no visual evidence of Harwood’s costume for this production, but the final musical number of Scene 4 provides enough textual support for a direct link from Hodgson’s to Akhurst. When Helen prepares for her love encounter with Thersites, she is ‘togged out like old Cassandra’;⁸⁰ but, she insists, she ‘didn’t stoop to practice chiromancy, | In Bourke-street, Troy, like her’.⁸¹ The Theatre Royal, the venue for the premiere of Paris the Prince, was certainly located in Bourke Street, the hub of entertainment in the 1860s. In the vicinity of the theatre, another ‘Chiromancy and Astrology’ business was successfully run by Madame Siecle, late Madame Eckardt, who was ‘visited by persons of the highest standing

⁷⁵ Hennings’s panorama was based on the world tour that Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh undertook in 1867. This was the first royal visit to Australia and inspired Paris and Helen’s journey in the galley to Ilion. Colligan (2002), 104. See also Williams (1983), 63. ⁷⁶ See ‘News and Notes’, Ballarat Star, Friday 29 May 1868, 2 for the reception of Harwood’s allusion to the defeat of Mr Gillies at Ballarat by Mr Jones, for example. ⁷⁷ The roles of Cassandra and Cupid were taken by husband and bride to be, Henry R. Harwood and Docy Steward two luminaries of the Australian theatre at the time. Harwood’s performance as Cassandra earned him the respect of the profession: ‘Cassandra [ . . . ] is his greatest achievement’, ‘Mr. R. H. Harwood’, The Argus, 28 January 1869, 5. He inspired the performance of J. R. Greville as Hilda as ‘a salt water edition of Cassandra’ who ‘appears [ . . . ] and discourses mysteriously after the manner of the burlesque tragedians’ in The Battle of Hastings; or, The Duke, the Earl and the Witch; ‘Theatre Royal’, The Age, 30 March 1869, 3. ⁷⁸ Akhurst (c.1868), 17. ⁷⁹ ‘The Siege of Troy at the Royal’, The Age, Melbourne, Monday 13 April 1868, 5. ⁸⁰ Akhurst (c.1868), 23. ⁸¹ Akhurst (c.1868), 26.

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to whom she . . . revealed their past lives and future’.⁸² No doubt Helen’s obvious disguise as a chiromantic prophetess would have had close connections with the ‘sorceress’s’ costume in Hodgson’s toy theatre.⁸³ What is relevant here is that such links are all firmly established through an aesthetic rather than any textual semiosis.

CONCLUSIONS There are no burlesque refigurations of the siege of Troy featuring the epic Cassandra beyond the 1860s: Troy Again by E. A. Bowles (1888) focuses on the Helen and Paris affair, and J. Wilton Jones’s Helen of Troy up-to-date; or The Statue Shop (1893) only refers indirectly to a modernized version of the character of beautiful Helen. This may well be due to the shift from epic to tragedy, and to Aeschylus’ Agamemnon especially, towards the end of the century. Earlier in the century, the epic seer was enmeshed in contemporary representations of deranged female sages, strong-minded women, and bluestockings. When Florence Nightingale called herself Cassandra in her 1852 homonymous essay, or the press of the late nineteenth century reviewed Arnold White’s The English Democracy as written by ‘Cassandra the third’,⁸⁴ they were appealing not only to the disregarded political voices of the nineteenth century but also to a more complex dynamic where the epic Cassandra is embedded in contemporary cultural discourse about women’s knowledge. The theatricality of the seer, nonetheless, provided a fruitful ground for performers to create their own aesthetic niche. The rich amalgam of sources which inform the epic Cassandra includes Shakespeare as well as Greek and Roman tragedies. Yet the various nineteenthcentury epic Cassandras are united by a common semiosis of theatrical patterns that give prominence to the visual over the verbal.⁸⁵ Rossi’s ballet, Cobbold’s monodrama, and the various comic refigurations of the Cassandra myth down to the 1860s all respond to a rich iconographic tradition as well as a performance culture that privileges spectacle over the word: the ‘seer’ over the speaker.

⁸² ‘Astrology and Chiromancy’, The Age (Melbourne), Monday 30 March 1868, 1. ⁸³ Also consider the links with the costume of the celebrated Medea interpreted by Madame Ristori and burlesqued by Frederick Robson. ⁸⁴ ‘The English Democracy’, London Daily News, Wednesday 27 June 1894, 6. ⁸⁵ See Heinrich, Newey, and Richards (2009) for a prominence of the visual over the verbal on the Victorian stage.

35 ‘Of the rage, sing Goddess’ Epic Opera Margaret Reynolds

MĒN I S To begin with the beginning of the Iliad, which, we are told, is the beginning of everything. This is Robert Fagles’s translation of the first three lines (1–3): Rage Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles; murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,¹

Let’s compare a number of other renderings: a) George Chapman—in his early modern translation (1616): ‘Achilles’ baneful wrath resound’;² b) Alexander Pope’s 1715–20 translation: ‘Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring | Of woes unnumber’d’;³ c) Richmond Lattimore’s long-time standard version: ‘Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus’;⁴ d) The poet Robert Graves: ‘Sing, MOUNTAIN GODDESS, sing through me | That anger which most ruinously | Inflamed Achilles’;⁵ e) Michael Reck’s more recent transcription: ‘Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ maniac rage’;⁶ f) Stanley Lombardo’s 1997 version: ‘Rage: | Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage, Black and murderous’;⁷ g) And finally, Caroline Alexander in a translation from 2015: ‘Wrath— sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath of Peleus’s son Achilles’.⁸ ¹ Fagles (1990), 77. ⁴ Lattimore (1951). ⁷ Lombardo (1997).

² Chapman (1888 98). ³ Pope (1715). ⁵ Graves (1959). ⁶ Reck (1990). ⁸ Alexander (2015), 1.

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‘Rage’, ‘murderous’, ‘doomed’, ‘baneful wrath’, ‘wrath’, ‘anger’, ‘devastation’, ‘ruinously inflamed’, ‘maniac rage’, ‘ruinous’, ‘rage, black and murderous’, ‘anger’: all of these translators are trying to portray the enormity of the subject contained in this first word, mēnis, of the Iliad. And here it is: ‘anger’—or more correctly ‘of the anger’. Within the conventions of ancient Greek oral poetry the first word of a poem was designed to be the ‘topic’ or ‘theme’ word, which sets the tone for the whole of the performance to follow. Then there comes an adjective or ornamental word, an ‘epithet’ which expands on the ‘topic’. And then—within these strict epic conventions—comes a relative clause, which is linked to the ‘topic’ word and its ‘epithet’. This first word of the first Homeric poem is important in terms of formal literary structure, and in terms of meaning and significance. ‘Anger’ does not really come up to the mark—which is why all these translators have tried to add in more power, more huge ghastliness to indicate the enormity of the ‘anger’ and its far-reaching and terrible consequences. Muellner explains that this is not an ordinary human ‘anger’: mēnis is a radical condemnation associated with the gods, and invoked when someone breaks the rules of community or of the proper order of things. It is ‘a cosmic sanction . . . a social form whose activation brings drastic consequences on the whole community’ and it is incurred ‘by the breaking of basic religious or social taboos’.⁹ One of these might be where ‘the value of a person and the continuity of the world is at stake because the hierarchy of persons based on the themistes of exchange is being breached’.¹⁰ Which is, of course, what has happened at the beginning of the Iliad. Agamemnon flouts the rules of ransom by refusing to return Chryses to her father, he insults the god Apollo in the process, and he then belittles the rank of Achilles by taking Briseis. Achilles may be ‘angry’ but the whole right order of things is challenged where the rules of ransom, supplication, respect, and exchange are broken.¹¹

O PE R A The earliest operas often took stories from Greek (and Roman) mythology for their subjects. But the early composers also drew on epic—most obviously the

⁹ Muellner (1996), 8. ¹⁰ Muellner (1996), 51. For a comprehensive summary of the scholarship on the study of ‘mēnis’, see Lynn George (1997). ¹¹ Aristotle makes this point in Rhetoric 2.2, where he quotes the example of Achilles’ anger: ‘One sort of insolence is to rob people of the honour due to them; you certainly slight them thus; for it is the unimportant, for good or evil, that has no honour paid to it . . . ’ trans. W. Rhys Roberts, The Internet Classics Archive, .

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Iliad and the Odyssey, but also the Aeneid and the Achilleid. Conventional histories of opera point to the debt to Greek theatre but recent criticism foregrounds the influence of Roman sources. In the case of operas based on epic there is a major point to be made as texts in Latin—especially the Achilleid and the Aeneid—spawned many operas, the first in the early history of opera, the second in the later periods.¹² These operas that more or less revisit ancient epic do not just draw on the ‘story’ part of epic; there are also many formal constituents, borrowed from ancient epic and tragedy, not least the rendering of emotion.

MAKING EMOTION AND ANGRY OPERA As Claudio Monteverdi went back to the Greek for stories, so too he looked there for themes and patterns to be realized in music. One of these was the idea of ‘the lament’; this is the only piece of music still extant from his lost opera Arianna (1607–8). The ‘lament’ is a staple of the operatic form from the earliest key works like Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1688) to operas being composed today. And for Monteverdi and his contemporaries and successors, it became the convention to give the ‘lament’ a particular musical form of descending tetrachords, a set of four notes, in a minor key.¹³ Similarly, the theme of ‘love triumphant’ will often use descending tetrachords but in the major key.¹⁴ But Monteverdi also thought about the presentation of anger on the opera stage. His Eighth Book of Madrigals was entitled Madrigals of War and Love: With Some Pieces in the Theatrical Style (1638). Here he introduces the stile concitato to represent anger, which, for the most part, is simply rapid repeated notes and extended trills, which do indeed feel ‘excited’ or agitated. Tomlinson argues that ‘the stile concitato is almost invariably not a depiction of simple anger, the ira Monteverdi discussed in his preface of 1638, but a portrayal of the hostilities of war’.¹⁵ But the stile concitato—loud repeated notes particularly in the strings or the brass—is used by other composers to represent everything warlike, from actual battle to the jealous frustration of the lover, and also to represent anger. But why? What is anger anyway? And, given that it is bad enough in real life, why would we want to represent it in the arts? Except that it is there from the beginning as the first word of the Iliad. For the operatic composer, there are attractions. To begin with, we might consider the spectacle. The extremes of ¹² See Ketterer (2003). Statius’ Achilleid went on being enormously influential not only in opera but also in literature and erotic texts for a considerable time: see Micozzi (2008). ¹³ Rosand (1991), 377 ff. ¹⁴ Fenlon and Miller (1992); Carter (1997), 173 204. ¹⁵ Tomlinson (1984), 202. See also Palisca, Baker, and Hanning (1992).

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emotion—despair, ecstasy, anger—are the staples of the operatic stage. But anger is especially important because it almost always involves the voice. And that is an actual representation of human experience. If people are sad or deserted or mourning they are, in real life, more likely to be silent than to express themselves in a lament. If someone is ecstatically happy, they are more likely to be silent—or, if they are saying anything at all, to be uttering inarticulate little noises—than they are to be breaking out in a full-blown love duet. But anger is different from either of these. Anger is about the voice and about the show, about shouting, rude words, and gestures, about a violence which is extreme, frightening to witness, and likely to evoke in the bystander, just as much as in the person at whom the anger is directed, extremes of anxiety and distress. By about the middle of the eighteenth century the ‘rage aria’ had become one of the conventions of opera seria, very often set in the key of D minor.¹⁶ In addition, anger does two things: first, it isolates the ‘angry being’; and secondly, the facts of who is getting angry and with whom, can challenge ordinary sensibilities and values. Hirsch makes a point about the dramatic effects of anger: ‘To be angry . . . is to create a space of separation, to isolate oneself temporarily’.¹⁷ And who gets angry? We might think it is people who are right to be angry. But apparently this is not the case. In the abstract for a paper published by a group of scientists working at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, the researchers write: The new model the recalibrational theory of anger proposes that anger . . . was designed by natural selection to nonconsciously orchestrate the individual’s responses to interpersonal conflicts of interest so that the individual bargains effectively. [ . . . ] The functional product of the anger (if successful) is the recali bration upwards of the other person’s tendency to place weight on the angry person’s welfare. The two bargaining tools humans have is the ability to confer or withhold benefits, and the ability to inflict costs . . . The theory predicts, and these studies find, that stronger men and more attractive women are more anger prone, feel more entitled to better treatment, and prevail more in conflicts of interest.¹⁸

The ancient Greeks had it right all along. Achilles the beautiful, Achilles the powerful, is the one who gets angry—and why? Not just to gain what he wants, ¹⁶ This convention of using D minor for a ‘rage aria’ continued for some time. Wheelock (2003), 187 suggests that it was often associated with some kind of supernatural vengeance so that Mozart’s Don Giovanni is dominated by D minor. ¹⁷ See Hirsch (1989), 170. Slatkin (1991) also speaks about mothers specifically in relation to the Thetis Achilles relationship. ¹⁸ Sell, Tooby, and Cosmides (2009). A report by John Harlow in the Sunday Times reinter preted the findings of this paper to announce ‘Blonde women born to be warrior princesses’, suggesting that they were more likely to get angry. Sell attempted to correct this reading in a letter to the Sunday Times (January 2010), but the newspaper did not publish his letter.

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but because he has been insulted. This is the point Aristotle makes when he quotes the example of Achilles’ anger in the Rhetoric (2.2). Achilles’ anger is necessary to reinstate the whole themistes of order, to recalibrate the out-ofkilter structure of the worlds of gods and men. Barthes reminds us that Speech is irreversible: a word cannot be retracted, except precisely by saying that one retracts it. To cross out is here to add: if I want to erase what I have just said, I cannot do it without showing the eraser itself (I must say: ‘or rather . . . ’ ‘I expressed myself badly . . . ’); paradoxically, it is ephemeral speech which is indelible, not monumental writing.¹⁹

Barthes is speaking here about the inevitability of qualification and multiple meanings in speech. But think too of the consequences of anger, of the spoken word that is cruel or derogatory. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones,’ we are told as children, ‘but words can never hurt me.’ Except that it is not true. The unkind word remains forever. Barthes goes on to make another point. This is about teachers and how they speak—how they deliver—but it applies to opera too: We can only make ourselves understood (well or poorly) if we maintain a certain speed of delivery . . . Silence and vacillation are equally forbidden . . . The spoken word is ‘clear’; the banishment of polysemy . . . serves the Law all speech is on the side of the Law.²⁰

‘[A]ll speech is on the side of the Law.’ Which it is in the case of the Iliad. Achilles’ anger is on the side of the law of reciprocity and hierarchy. This is what opera does too. There is no such thing as anarchic opera any more than there is anarchic epic. In opera, as in epic, we know what will happen at the end before we start at the beginning.

ACHILLES IN EARLY OPERA Horace, in his Ars Poetica, speaks about the characteristics due to Achilles— clearly derived from a reading of Homer. Achilles, he says, should always appear ‘impiger iracundus inexorabilis acer’. In Rushton Fairclough’s Loeb translation (1926) the passage is rendered in this way: Either follow tradition or invent what is selfconsistent. If haply, when you write, you bring back to the stage the honouring of Achilles, let him be impatient, passionate, ruthless, fierce.

¹⁹ Barthes (1977), 190 1.

²⁰ Barthes (1977), 191.

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In ‘Achilles’ operas the hero is very often angry. It is not always serious, but given that there are so many other things about Achilles—his prowess in battle, his beauty, his swift-footedness, his singing—that are available to portray, it is intriguing that his key word ‘anger’ so often appears. But it appears differently construed in different historical periods. Not that the earliest ‘Achilles’ operas have much to do with Homer. Instead, they are based on the myths of Achilles’ early life and, in particular, on the stories drawn from Statius’ Achilleid, which had an immense influence on many of the earliest operatic works performed across Europe.²¹ Three of the earliest ‘Achilles’ operas are not named after the hero but his lover or his mother (Sacrati/Strozzi’s La finta pazza, 1641; Handel’s Deidamia; and Domenico Scarlatti/Capece’s Tetide in Sciro, 1712). The first of these early ‘Achilles’ operas is La finta pazza (The Feigned Madwoman), first performed in 1641 with a libretto by Giulio Strozzi and music by Francesco Sacrati. Following Statius, Thetis—aware of the prophecy that Achilles will die at the walls of Troy—hides her son, dressed as a girl, at the court of Lycomedes on the island of Scyros. Here Achilles becomes the lover of Lycomedes’ daughter Deidamia. When Ulysses arrives to conscript Achilles, Deidamia feigns madness to persuade him to stay, hence the title. La finta pazza was the opera that opened the Teatro Novissimo in Venice. Rosand lists the elements that created the opera as a ‘reflection’ of its audience: the use of disguise, cross-dressing, puns on gondolas and traghetti and other familiar Venetian terms, the device of a play-within-a-play, singing contests, jokes about opera, madness, misunderstandings, and hidden things. The part of Deidamia was played by the well-known soprano Anna Renzi, the part of Achilles by a castrato. But within the cast there was a second castrato part at the court of Lycomedes—a Eunuch who is also a professional singer.²² The transformative elements of the opera are joyfully embraced and made the centre of the action. Achilles is played with vigour as was often the case with the role in the eighteenth century: The flame of my warrior spirit is not growing dim; my strength is great and my thoughts are lofty. The keenness of true valor cannot be blunted; in any kind of clothing Achilles is Achilles.

And yet this Venetian Achilles is happy to play the part of a woman without any loss of identity or destiny: It’s a lovely change of nature to transform oneself from a woman, to change from being a man into a woman . . . I am no longer beautiful Phyllis; I have returned today to being Achilles.²³

²¹ Heslin (2005).

²² Rosand (1991), 120.

²³ Cited in Heslin (2005), 5.

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But this whole theatrical world is one of flux and illusion. At one point Diomede remarks on the indeterminate character of the island of Scyros: ‘Everything on the island of Scyros seems to me to have changed its nature. Even the large and solid rocks float, while the finest dust sinks.’²⁴ Part of the slippery landscape of La finta pazza is the extended play with emotional states where the characters, including Achilles, grow angry or jealous over slights, real or imaginary. In Achille in Sciro, with music by Giovanni Legrenzi and a libretto attributed to Ippolito Bentivoglio and first performed at Ferrara in 1663, Deidamia has apparently sworn a vow of chastity to Diana, where in reality she is in league with the disguised Achilles, known as ‘Pyrrha’. Polycastes is betrothed to Deidamia’s sister Cyrene, but he falls for ‘Pyrrha’. Deidamia and Achilles/ ‘Pyrrha’ quarrel over his supposed interest in Cyrene. In many complex plot twists Achilles pretends to be an unknown sailor, ‘Pyrrha’s brother’, and ‘Pyrrha’ disguised as Achilles. While the complications of this cross-cross-cross-dressing may eventually be resolved in the plot, the anarchic ramifications in terms of gender and sexuality remain with the audience. ‘This theme of latent same-sex attraction’, says Heslin, ‘was Bentivoglio’s most important innovation.’²⁵ In Scarlatti/Capece’s Tetide in Sciro (1712) Achilles, a soprano, is dressed as ‘Arminda’ and pursuing Deidamia. But Deidamia is in love with ‘Filarte’ who she believes to be a man, but who, in fact, is a woman, Antiope, once Lycomedes’ mistress. And Antiope/Filarte is attracted to Achilles/Arminda. The gender roles and the casting might appear confusing to modern audiences—Achilles, Antiope, Tethys, and Ulysses are all sopranos while Deidamia and Lycomedes are altos—but the role distribution was often determined by the dictates of the contemporary context.²⁶ Lycomedes’ selfish character drives the plot. In Act 2, Scene 2, Antiope complains about Lycomedes’ treatment of her, naming him ‘ingrato, spergiuro, traditore’, and plans her revenge. As with John Gay’s later version, Achilles (1731), Lycomedes spends much of the opera hopelessly pursuing ‘Arminda’. Heslin suggests the probability that Gay may have had some knowledge of this earlier opera.²⁷ In Gay’s version, which has music by J. Pepusch and A. Corelli, the crossdressing in the story is paralleled by the way in which Gay criss-crosses genres.²⁸ Achilles is part burlesque, part travesty, part serious opera, and all ²⁴ Cited in Heslin (2005), 6. ²⁵ Heslin (2005), 10. ²⁶ Ulysses would generally be sung by a castrato, while Achilles (given the cross gendering involved) would be sung by a woman. But, in theory, all the parts in this opera could be played by a woman and in these early operas it was very common to find entirely ‘gender blind’ casting. See Reynolds (1995). ²⁷ Heslin (2005), 119. ²⁸ The music is a mix from various sources: see Winton (1993), 160 1.

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of it supported by a firm knowledge of the ancient Greek sources. It is hardly surprising that Gay, like his contemporaries who were engaged with rewriting/ translating epic for the modern age, should be such a serious refashioner of Homeric epic.²⁹ Lewis makes the case for the work as an inventive precursor to modern methods.³⁰ Gay’s burlesque style dictates the tone of the Prologue: His scene now shows the Heroes of old Greece; But how? ’tis monstrous! In a Comic Piece. To Buskins, Plumes and Helmets what Pretence, If might chiefs must speak by common Sense? (Prologue, 15 18)³¹

But Gay also understands that strict epic tradition means that Achilles the hero should be appearing with his key characteristic ‘rage’. Shall no bold Diction, no Poetic Rage, Fome at our Mouths and thunder on the Stage? No ’tis Achilles, as he came from Chiron, Just taught to sing as well as wield cold Iron. (Prologue, 19 24)

Gay’s hero was played by Thomas Salway, but sex and sexuality are still in the foreground. In this version—as in Scarlatti’s Tetide in Sciro—Lycomedes takes a shine to ‘Pyrrha’ and attempts to seduce her, absolutely certain of himself: LYCOMEDES :

Why such Affectation? Why this Provocation? LYCOMEDES : Must I bear Resistance still! ACHILLES : Check your Inclination. LYCOMEDES : Dare you then deny me? ACHILLES : You too far may try me. LYCOMEDES : Must I then against your Will! ACHILLES : Force shall never ply me. (2.4.80–8) ACHILLES :

When his advances are met with resistance, Lycomedes resorts to force. And this is when Achilles gets angry: What heart hath not Courage, by Force assailed To brave the most desperate fight? Tis Justice and Virtue that hath prevailed And Power must yield to Right.

²⁹ See further Hall and Macintosh, Chs. 30 and 32 in this volume. ³⁰ Lewis (1988), 123. See also Dugaw (2001). ³¹ For the text of Achilles, see Fuller (1983), 221 75 and 389 92.

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It is a funny scene, clearly played for laughs, because Achilles is in a skirt yet the audience can see that Lycomedes is no match for those muscles. But it is tragic too, because it represents a scene often portrayed on the stage and in the texts of the eighteenth century—the scene where the woman is raped, betrayed, and deserted. Lewis sees evidence of what he calls ‘anti-feminist’ sentiment in this burlesque; but if we read Achilles’ anger here as being Right, then this scene could indeed suggest that his defiance is a righteous anger against the status quo in eighteenth-century sexual politics.³² At least one contemporary complained that Gay’s Achilles was insufficiently angry. A reviewer writing in the Daily Courant referred to Horace to ask: Where is the Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer, the Life, the Vivacity of an amorous young Warrior? All lost in the whining, virtuous, yet debauch’d Modern.³³

Another reviewer replied in the Grub Street Journal: There is no Necessity to draw him [Achilles] impetuous, wrathful, inexorable, and severe, unless he be plac’d in such a Situation, as where he demands Reparation to his Honour, for the Injuries and Affronts heaped upon him by AGAMEMNON; then Honoratum si forte reponis Achillem, he should be Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer.³⁴

As Heslin remarks: ‘This rebuttal does not quite hit the mark, since Gay’s Achilles, the victim of an attempted rape, is in fact placed in a far more injurious situation than Homer’s Achilles.’³⁵ Heslin’s comment is the product of a latter-day sensibility but it is nonetheless astonishing that Gay’s text is so clear on the question of rape. In fact, all these early operas based on the stories of Achilles in Scyros worry about sexual inequality and exploitation. Part of this comes from Statius’ Achilleid where Deidamia is raped by Achilles, when his disguise allows him to accompany her to a women-only night-time festival. But all these allusions to the routine violence meted out to women might also remind us that this is the key premise of the Iliad itself both in the initial stealing away of Helen and in its opening scene, where the vehicles of Achilles’ anger against Agamemnon are Chryses and then Briseis—both of whom suffer, in objective fact, abduction and rape.

³² Noble (1988), 207 agrees with this point: ‘not that Gay is a feminist per se, but that the predicament of women represents one mode of the wider condition of dependency, the dynamics and abuses of which Gay knew all too well about in his own life, and which he probes in terms of many kinds of social relationships in his writings’. ³³ Anonymous reviewer writing in the Daily Courant, cited in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 3 (February 1733), 78. Cited in Heslin (2005), 122. ³⁴ 22 February 1733, as quoted in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 3 (February 1733), 84 5. Cited in Heslin (2005), 122. ³⁵ Heslin (2005), 122.

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ENLIGHTENED ANG ER A few years later Pietro Metastasio wrote a new libretto for Achille in Sciro, published in Vienna in 1736 and then performed with music by Antonio Caldara.³⁶ Although Metastasio’s text follows the familiar plot of Achilles’ feminine disguise, the placement of his ‘anger’ is differently situated here. Heller argues that this is a text about the cult of masculinity and operatic heroism. She acknowledges the fact that the story still involves cross-dressing, but in her account Metastasio’s focus is the rational and physical display of heroic manliness as the embodiment of Enlightenment values.³⁷ The pivotal scene in Metastasio takes place in Act 2. Ulysses, arrived at the court of Lycomedes, suspects that ‘Pyrrha’ is Achilles himself. He presents a trunk of feminine adornments to the women. But among the jewels, the perfumes, and the silks are a sword and a shield and Achilles is drawn to these. When an alarum is sounded, Achilles throws down the lyre, emblem of courtly entertainment, and seizes the sword: And this lyre, Is this the weapon for Achilles? Ah! no fate Offers another, more worthy. To earth, to earth [Throws down the lyre and goes towards the arms carried in with the gifts of Ulysses] Vile instrument. To the honoured charge Of the heavy shield. [He puts on the shield] My arms regain strength. In this hand The sword flashes. I begin now [He seizes the sword] To recognize myself. Ah, if only there were before me A squadron of thousands upon thousands.³⁸

Achilles’ anger is here directed against himself as he castigates his ‘feminine disguise’ and invokes his duty to the kings of Greece. In a wide-ranging article on the body of the castrato, Freitas refines Heller’s argument about this key moment to show how Achilles is torn between Ulysses’ call to arms and Deidamia’s claim to honour and fidelity: ‘Although Metastasio’s Achilles forswears all things feminine—including music—in favor of war (Act 2, Scene 8), he almost immediately launches into another aria (Scene 9), in which he admits “at the sight of her beautiful eyes alone does my heart melt”’.³⁹ As the part of Achilles in the many Metastasio musical versions that followed was sometimes sung by a woman and sometimes sung by a castrato, the complications surrounding Achilles’ relative ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ loyalties remained confused. Nonetheless, in her eighteenth-century

³⁶ This libretto was to be set to music by many other composers. On Metastasio’s popularity with opera composers, see Burden (2010), 177 92. ³⁷ Heller (1998). ³⁸ Cited in Heller (1998), 567. ³⁹ Freitas (2003), 240 1.

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fantasy The Valley of Decision (1902), Edith Wharton would describe a performance of Caldara and Metastasio’s Achille in Sciro. In this case, the hero, Odo Valsecca, hears Count Vittorio Alfieri rail against the state of Italian politics in relation to the hierarchy of gender: ‘Fools! Simpletons!’ he cried, ‘not to see that in applauding the Achilles of Metastasio they are smiling at the allegory of their own abasement! What are the Italians of today but men tricked out in women’s finery, when they should be waiting full armed to rally at the first signal of revolt?’⁴⁰

Metastasio’s text was set to new music by Domenico Sarro in a piece commissioned to mark the opening of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples on 4 November 1737, when the role of Achilles was sung by Vittoria Tesi.⁴¹ Another version of Metastasio’s libretto with music by Pietro Chiarini was performed at the Teatro Sant’Angelo in Venice during the Carnival season of 1739, when Achilles was sung by Francesca Poli.⁴² When Metastasio’s text was again set to new music by Niccolo Jommelli in Vienna in 1749, the part of Achilles was sung by a castrato. Rather in tune with Heller’s argument on the Enlightenment need to emphasize Achilles’ masculinity, Elisabeth Krimmer suggests that this was a casting against the dominant grain at the time: Interestingly, the performance of femininity onstage by castrati was widely accepted: it was their portrayal of masculinity that provoked disapproval. Their playing such masculine parts as Achilles in Jommelli’s Acille in Sciro (1749) was scandalous, for it suggested that one could be a hero without the physique of a man.⁴³

Nonetheless, according to McClymonds, in the music of Jommelli’s 1749 version—and even more so in his later attempt at the same libretto, commissioned for performance in Rome—Achilles’ resurgent masculinity, and his warlike anger, were further emphasized in the music for the revelation scene: a tremolo increases the intensity of the recitative as Achille, who is hiding in female attire, expresses the overwhelming desire to take up arms. The tremolos of 1749 become even more dramatic in 1771 with the addition of oboe, trumpet, horn and viola.⁴⁴

Handel’s Deidamia, to a libretto by Paolo Antonio Rolli, is again set during Achilles’ sojourn on Scyros. At the first performance in London in January 1741 Deidamia was sung by soprano Elisabeth Duparc (‘La Francesina’), her

⁴⁰ Wharton (1902), 108. ⁴¹ Sarro’s opera was revived at the Festival della Valle d’Itria in 2007 with Gabriella Martel lacci in the title role; it was recorded live and released on CD by Dynamic Records in 2008. It was also performed at the Teatro San Carlo in November 2016 with Sonia Prina singing Achilles. ⁴² Selfridge Field (2007), 461. ⁴³ Krimmer (2005), 1543 59. ⁴⁴ McClymonds (1980), 333.

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friend Nerea by soprano Maria Monza, Achilles by soprano Miss Edwards, and Ulysses by the mezzo-soprano castrato Giovanni Battista Andreoni. Modern productions often give all the main roles to women, with only Lycomedes and Fenice being sung by men.⁴⁵ Here the princess Deidamia knows that her lover Achilles is a man, but when Ulysses arrives seeking him, she tries to continue his concealment because she is aware of the prophecy of his death at Troy. In Act 2 Ulysses flirts with Deidamia. She replies politely. Achilles, concealed behind a bush, is at first much taken by Ulysses’ manly appearance. But as Ulysses’ wily wooing seems to be making headway, Achilles takes Deidamia furiously to task—‘I feel resentment raging in my heart’—and he launches into the aria ‘Lasciami’, which is accompanied by violent agitation in the strings and the harpsichord continuo typical of the stile concitato. It is also intriguing for Handel’s use of pacing, as the voice is used in jabbing breaths punctuated with rests as each outburst succeeds another. Deidamia responds: Did I not think the anger of my dear the sting of love, more than a real rage, a heavy grief would overwhelm my soul.⁴⁶

This example of Achilles’ rage is not so much a joke as a pretext for violent expression in music. In a recent revival at the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam in March 2012 with Sally Matthews as Deidamia and Olga Pasichnyk singing Achilles, the production—by David Alden—made much of Achilles’ anger.⁴⁷ In many ways this insistence on Achilles’ masculine honour is concomitant with Heller’s argument about Metastasio’s Enlightenment hero. But this raises questions about the staging possibilities. Achilles is a man berating his lover for faithlessness. But his character is, at this point, likely to be wearing a dress. Add to that the fact that Achilles was played originally—and still is in revivals—by a woman. Achilles’ anger is not justified, but the scene may elicit an angry reaction in the audience.

⁴⁵ In the 2003 recording by EMI Ltd/Virgin Classics, Deidamia is Simone Kermes; Nerea, Dominique Labelle; Achilles, Anna Maria Panzarella; and Ulysses, Anna Bonitatibus. Fenice is sung by Furio Zanasi and Lycomedes by Antonio Abete. With Il Complesso Barocco conducted by Alan Curtis. ⁴⁶ Handel and Rolli (2003), 23, 27 8. The Italian text of Rolli’s 1741 libretto is from the edition prepared by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giuseppina La Face. The English translation is taken from the word book probably prepared for the performances at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1741. ⁴⁷ Loomis (2012): ‘While singing a rage aria, Achille grabbed [the extra’s] cello bow and broke it’.

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THE S HADE OF ACHILLES While Metastasio’s libretto continued to be set to music by a great number of composers until 1825, new versions of the Achilles story disappeared from the operatic repertoire. Berlioz’s Les Troyens (1856) was conceived as a poème lyrique and the composer wrote his own libretto based on Virgil’s Aeneid.⁴⁸ The opera does not, strictly, deal with Achilles because it begins at the moment when the Greeks have lifted their siege of Troy and departed. But Achilles and his anger are still there; in fact, essentially, they open the opera. Without an overture, the curtain rises outside the walls of Troy where there are two objects: the giant wooden horse and the tomb of Achilles. Three shepherds are seen standing on the tomb and playing ‘antique double flutes’ in swift insistent notes, represented in the orchestra by oboes. The Chorus opens as the people of Troy celebrate the departure of the Greeks (‘Après dix ans’). But though their words and music are cheerful, there is something sinister in the jabbing notes on the oboes. The people jeer at the departed Greeks (‘Quels poltrons que ces Grecs!’), but a soldier reminds them of the recent past, and that Achilles’ tent was exactly where they are now. As Act 1 goes on, Cassandra predicts the fall of Troy. The Trojans may imagine that Paris has delivered them from the fury of the Greek hero, but Achilles’ angry intervention is still at hand as the Trojans bring the treacherous wooden horse into the city. At the beginning of Act 2 Aeneas lies dreaming, when he has a vision of Hector—but Hector as Achilles’ vengeance has made him.⁴⁹ Offenbach’s operetta, La Belle Hèlène to a text by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, parodies all the myths and stories of the Trojan War. But— like all the many ‘Achilles on Skyros’ operas—it is a work about ‘disguise and revelation’.⁵⁰ Achilles appears in the ‘entry of the kings’ in Act 2 with these immortal lines: ‘Je suis le bouillant Achille, bouillant Achille, bouillant Achille’.⁵¹ Of course this is a joke, but it is nonetheless intriguing that the epithet of the first line—‘fuming’ (literally ‘boiling’) Achilles—of the Iliad is Achilles’ key attribute here, even in this most irreverent version of the epic. If Berlioz’s shade of Achilles is the angered ghost that hovers balefully over the new destiny to be sought by Aeneas and the Trojans, Offenbach’s Achilles is an absurd chimera of his originating epic self. As Gumpert sees it: ‘Calchas is a con man, Achilles a dunce, Agamemnon a lout, Menelaus a fool. (At the ⁴⁸ While Berlioz completed the opera in 1858, the Paris Opéra hesitated over its production and the composer eventually agreed to the second half of the opera only and with many cuts being performed at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1863. The opera was not performed in its entirety until 1890. ⁴⁹ Premier Tableau: Nº 12 Scène et Récitatif. Libretto and translation by Luiz Gazzola (Almaviva), (2012): . ⁵⁰ Gumpert (2001), 226. ⁵¹ Offenbach, Meilhac, and Halévy (1868), 12.

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same time, all of these characterizations represent a faithful rendering of Homeric epic.)’⁵²

A NGE R AND S UP P L ICA TI ON Finally to a work where Achilles—and his anger—are portrayed seriously and with tremendous impact. This is Michael Tippett’s King Priam from 1962.⁵³ Tippett created the libretto for this piece and he—more than any other composer in the list of ‘Achilles’ operas—owes a great deal to Homer.⁵⁴ In Act 2, Scene 2, Hermes takes to us to Achilles’ tent where the hero sings of his homeland. This is a still moment, accompanied by solo guitar, in an act dominated by war, represented in music by brass, percussion, and piano. Patroclus weeps, and Achilles chides him—‘Do not provoke me, Patroclus’—and now we are back at the beginning of the Iliad, back at the origins of the anger of Achilles: PATROCLUS : Hard-hearted Achilles, from your insensate pride the Greeks will soon go down into defeat. ACHILLES : Aha! So they now see what it means to misuse me. When we fought against Thebe, I was the first to enter the town. I killed Andromache’s father and all his sons. I was given a girl as my prize. Till Agamemnon stole her (no other word) and the craven Greeks applauded. Is that fair dealings to Achilles? PATROCLUS : You live for your quarrel.⁵⁵ Patroclus suggests that he be permitted to go to the battlefront in Achilles’ place. But in Act 2, Scene 3, Patroclus is slain by Hector and stripped of Achilles’ armour. When Hector, Priam, and Paris sing a prayer of thanksgiving, Tippett offers explicit stage directions: At the height of the ensemble, with Priam, Hector and Paris facing the audience at the footlights, Achilles appears before the tent to deliver his war cry; a blood curdling melisma that echoes round the stage. Hector stands as though transfixed. OLD MAN: In between the tent and the walls, gloating over the naked body of Patroclus on the ground Achilles’ war cry! Achilles delivers the cry a second time. PRIAM: Oh Hector! OLD MAN: Oh Troy! Achilles delivers the cry a third time.⁵⁶

⁵² Gumpert (2001), 226. ⁵³ See further Pillinger, Ch. 20 in this volume. ⁵⁴ Tippett (1962), 24: ‘Yet we could tell the story too, the pathetic story of our masters, Viewed from the corridor.’ Act 3, Interlude 1. ⁵⁵ Tippett (1962), 18. ⁵⁶ Tippett (1962), 20 1.

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The terrible sound of Achilles’ war cry is wordless, pure voice. And it is more than voice, because Tippett writes it as an ululating cry and it is amplified. Achilles’ anger is louder than loud. Achilles and his anger begin the Iliad, and continue throughout to be the essential topic of the Iliad. The earliest inventors of opera took their models from ancient Greek epic and tragedy, and turned to stories drawn from both. Opera composers also invested in the emotional registers found in the epic— love, lamentation, conflict, anger—discovering new ways to render emotions in musical form, in the ‘lament’, in the stile concitato, in the ‘rage aria’. But in almost all the ‘Achilles’ operas, the view on the Iliad is sidelong. The earliest operas are based on a Latin epic, Statius’ Achilleid, which tells the story of events before the Iliad. Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène (insofar as it takes any part of the story seriously) also precedes the Iliad. Berlioz’s Les Troyens is based primarily on Virgil’s Latin Aeneid and the story here starts after the end of the Iliad. Tippett’s King Priam does both: his story begins before the Iliad and ends after the end of Homer’s epic to show the death of Priam. But for all this, some reflection of epic convention and ‘the anger of Achilles’ remains in these operas: translated into theatrical display, into questioning of social expectations around gender difference and sexual exploitation, into a challenge to the cruelty and the pity of war. In the Iliad Achilles is angry because he has been insulted, because the right order of respect is violated, because Briseis (strictly speaking, a chattel) has been taken away from him. Tippett is, in the central part of his opera, true to the epic form, as he tells the sections of the story to do with Patroclus and Achilles, with the death of Hector, with Priam and the ransoming of Hector’s body. But Tippett’s real subjects here are true to his pacifist beliefs. And these are the subjects that arouse his anger: the wicked waste of love and the futility of war. Which is why the most important scene in King Priam is that between Achilles and Priam to a text that closely follows Homer’s Book 24. In Act 3 Priam comes to beg for the return of Hector’s body. Here too, at first, Achilles is angry. But the instrumental scoring in this section is elaborate and designed. There is percussion for Achilles, xylophone, cymbals, drums, all beating out his anger, while a plangent guitar is used to evoke the heartstrings. Against these two strands, Priam is given a ceremonial, almost baroque, contrapuntal weaving up and down the scale which sounds like a tribute to Monteverdi’s form for the lament. Tippett was attentive to the social, religious, and communal functions of both epic and opera. In many ways this scene—in the Iliad itself, but especially in Tippett’s opera—takes us back to the first word and premise of the Iliad. The anger is there, but so is the reparation. Achilles was angered, the world order was disrupted, when Agamemnon refused to acknowledge the ritual of supplication and return Chryses to her father, when Agamemnon, forced to capitulate, took away Briseis from Achilles, doing more wrong.

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Here Priam similarly makes his supplication. In Homer, Priam reminds Achilles to ‘respect the gods’ or to ‘fear the wrath of heaven’. Tippett’s libretto follows closely: Remember the gods. Be merciful before the dawn. For I have done what no father did before. Kissed the hands of him who killed my son. Achilles takes Priam’s hands off his knees, and lifts Priam’s head.⁵⁷

Priam’s supplication is successful. And supplication is the opposite of anger. The angry man does not listen. But when you hear the suppliant, when you accede to their plea, then, you are listening, really listening to the voice, and that is the whole effort of opera. Achilles listens. He hears. His anger is assuaged.

⁵⁷ Tippett (1962), 29.

36 Fish, Firemen, and Prize Fighters The Transformation of the Iliad and Aeneid on the London Burlesque Stage Rachel Bryant Davies

Throughout the nineteenth century, actors, dancers, marionette puppeteers, and acrobats on horseback comically reimagined Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid at theatres, circuses, and open-air venues across London. This fastgrowing metropolis was metamorphosing into the world’s most densely populated city: it is striking that these ‘disposable’ entertainments with a range of ticket prices,¹ which constantly competed for this newly expanding leisure market, exploited classical epic. Such performances, often described as burlesques or burlettas, were the predominant genre in which the Trojan War myths were playfully, popularly encountered in Regency and Victorian Britain. Not only could they draw audiences comprising a wider social range than the classically educated elites, but these comic stage transformations also exhibit the usability and adaptability of the Iliad and Aeneid. This chapter turns the spotlight on some distinctly non-epic moments within productions clearly signalled as burlesquing the Trojan War myths: productive junctures when epic performances were tested by modernization, commercial metamorphosis, and audience perceptions. Their burlesque playfulness enacts clashes between academic and vernacular connotations of epic to reveal how integral Graeco-Roman antiquity was across the nineteenth-century cultural landscape. One of the most extraordinarily successful epic performances, a circus version of The Siege of Troy at Astley’s Amphitheatre in 1854, was memorably described as ‘ultra-Classical, Extra-Mythological, Super-Homeric, Horatian and Virgilian’. To substantiate this claim, one playbill (Fig. 36.1) quoted Aeneas’ summary of Troy’s destruction: ‘Trojanas ut opes, et lamentabile Regnum, ¹ Schoch (2003), 16.

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Fig. 36.1 Astley’s Playbill, Siege of Troy. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

eruerint Danaii’. So far, so epic . . . However, not only was the ‘plain English’ underneath an amusingly over-translated jingle,² this advert also squeezed in a further playful pedigree: ‘perfectly Thucididian, Aristidian, Damocletian, Sophoclean, Pericleian, Ovidian, Livinian, Ciceronic, Euphonic, Mnemonic, Anti-Teutonic, Lyric, somewhat Comic, and quite Erratic’. This comically capacious (and rather mendacious) roll-call epitomizes this mid-century moment when ‘minor’ theatres challenged the censorship which restricted spoken drama to only two royal theatres (Covent Garden and Drury Lane). Yet the enforced inclusion of song, dance, and stage business compelled burlesque’s flourishing creativity. This chapter will show that the multiple sources incorporated to satisfy the censors, and mocked in this playbill, not only defined burlesque but also encapsulated the very obstacles and opportunities inherent in transforming canonical epic poems into theatrical entertainments. This is the story of that transformation: what happened when epic and non-epic, ancient and modern, elite and popular sources were all jumbled together? Even while trading on their supposedly classical credentials, these successful entertainments insatiably combined literary, political, and popular cultures in dizzyingly kaleidoscopic parodic references and puns. Such topical allusions could, along with comic innovations, completely divert epic plotlines. They were ² ‘What a riot the Greeks have all made in our town, Destroying our fun and our joy: The folks are knocked up and the houses knocked down, And extinguished’s the GLORY of TROY!’ (Virgil, Aeneid 2.4 5: ‘how the Greeks ruined the Trojan wealth and tear wrenching kingdom’).

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an eagerly anticipated feature of the burlesque genre and parodic tradition of updating classical literature; but not universally approved by critics of classical burlesques, who often painted themselves as jealous guardians of the elite knowledge supposedly necessary to ‘appreciate the delicate humour’ of these epic performances.³ Their fears reveal the tensions inherent in the rich variety of burlesque transformations of Homer’s and Virgil’s Trojan War narratives into staged comedies. As entertainments first and foremost, these burlesques did not aim to translate the whole Iliad or Aeneid directly onto the stage as, for example, George Winter Warr would in his textually faithful and archaeologically accurate recreation in aid of ‘the King’s College lectures to ladies’: The Tale of Troy: Scenes and Tableaux from the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer (Cromwell House, 1883). Burlesques are increasingly recognized as vital evidence for classical afterlives: recent productive analyses have focused on their negotiation of class and gender, particularly through their anachronistic absorption of modernity.⁴ Shakespearean burlesques offer a productive comparison;⁵ however, these rework existing scripts, often parodying particular performances of the original plays, just as the burlesques of Greek tragedies often did.⁶ Classical studies have, likewise, prioritized burlesques of Greek tragedy: a larger leap is required to transform ancient epic into modern comedy. Such metamorphoses, in burlesques inspired by the Trojan War myths, are especially significant in light of the long-running, exceptionally heated, debates over translation⁷ and the existence of Troy and the Homeric Question (of the poet’s identity and oral composition of the poems), which in turn heightened controversies over ‘Ossian’s’ Gaelic epic cycle in the first half of the century and, later, the Deluge tablets.⁸ Against this backdrop, the tensions enacted between these composite sources are inextricably linked with the question of who engaged, and in what ways, with classical epic performances in nineteenth-century Britain. Theatre historians have emphasized the importance of ‘inter-theatricality’—the

³ Universal Review, March 1859. ⁴ For focus on modernity, see Hall (1999a), 358, 366; Richardson (2003), 57 63, 74 9; Richards (2014b), 112 25; Richardson (2015), esp. 81 2, 87 8. For focus on gender, see Monrós Gaspar (2016b), esp. 141 204; for Medea, Macintosh (2000), esp. 77, 79 86, 98; Hall and Macintosh (2005), 391 425. For burlesque negotiation of epic and other sources, see Bryant Davies (2018a) and (2018b). ⁵ Moody (2000), 118 47; Schoch (2002), passim; Hackett (2009), 46 94. ⁶ Planché’s Medea burlesqued the 1845 Mendelssohn Antigone; whilst Brough’s Medea sent up Adelaide Ristori’s performances in London at the same time: see Macintosh (2000), 81, 86 8, 93. Cf. Burnand’s Ulysses (1865), 1.2.103, 140: Bryant Davies (2018b), 238 41. ⁷ See Hall, Ch. 30 in this volume. ⁸ On the cultural significance of the Homeric controversies, see Gange and Bryant Davies (2013), 39 70; for their influence on burlesques, see Bryant Davies (2011) and (forthcoming). See Tucker (2008), 39 43 and Gange (2013), 136 for Ossian and Deluge tablets respectively.

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relationships between different performances and audiences—and continue to illuminate the social composition of burlesque audiences, while classicists have begun to explore sociopolitical topicalities, including the conflation of the Crimean and Trojan wars.⁹ My snapshots extend both approaches by revealing these centonic burlesques as, simultaneously, new entertainments in their own right and complex games of identifying—or overlooking—their varied references.¹⁰ Exploring the mechanisms of this comic balancing-act enables us to assess the impact of these epic performances: in reworking the Iliad and Aeneid as staged entertainment for a wider range of spectators than those who traditionally encountered ancient literature and mythology at school, did they obfuscate the epics, or render them more accessible? Did critics—mediating both performances and sources for their readers—judge the epics enhanced, or supplanted, by their transformation into patchwork comedies? It is impossible wholly to reconstruct the significance of each burlesque innovation for individual playwrights, spectators, or critics; or for readers of reviews when measuring their own likely performance in the recognition game against that described by critics. However, reviews pivot on the epic credentials of these entertainments: were they seen to distil, or dilute, classical epic? Such reactions, as well as the telling gaps between scripts and reviews, are essential in understanding how the apparently incidental patchwork of combinations and innovations constructed, or even directed, these burlesqued epics. Here, I focus on four particularly conspicuous examples of epic repackaged for the London stage through anachronistic juxtapositions: Thomas Dibdin’s Melodrama Mad! or, The Siege of Troy (1819, Surrey Theatre), Charles Selby’s Judgment of Paris; or, The Pas de Pippins (1856, Adelphi), Francis Cowley Burnand’s Dido (1860, St James’) and Paris, or Vive Lemprière! (1866, Strand).¹¹ As their titles indicate, burlesques usually highlighted specific epic episodes and characters in their exuberant revamps. Here, they also signal their intention to lampoon contemporary events: like the playbill description in Figure 36.1, Dibdin’s spoofs modern performance culture; Selby’s parodies prior stage appearances of the Golden Apple; Burnand added a subtitle, The Celebrated Widow for the 1865 revival, after Queen Victoria, whose government ⁹ Bratton’s term: (2003), 36 8. For audience composition, see also Davis and Emeljanow (2001); Booth (1991), 1 11; Schoch (2002), 107 50. Richardson (2013), 75 6, 80 112 on the Crimea War; for Brough’s Siege of Troy, which includes Homer as a War Reporter, see McConnell (2015), 260 9; Bryant Davies (2018a). ¹⁰ Compare Virgilian centos, which juxtapose quotations to create new narratives, including Hosidius Geta’s tragedy, Medea: see McGill (2005), esp. 1 52. ¹¹ For more detailed discussion of these alongside other titles, see Bryant Davies (2018a). I omit any discussion of Odyssean burlesques here as they primarily burlesque Fénelon’s retelling: see Bryant Davies (2018b) for text of Planché’s Telemachus and Dibdin’s Melodrama Mad!.

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apparently ran Carthage, had been widowed by Prince Albert’s death in December 1861; Lemprière was a well-known reference author for classical mythology. All four exploited contemporary performance culture in transforming the epic narratives into successful burlesques at major venues. Their innovations to the Aeneid, Iliad, and more diffuse Trojan War myths are significant. The starring role played by Dibdin’s firemen, who preserve Troy from ruin, adds a new perspective to existing studies of the satirical effect of everyday modernity in classical burlesque. At the same time, all four burlesques incorporate allusions to very recent performances into the purportedly epic narratives: Dibdin recycled Shakespearean characters recently played at Drury Lane by rising star Edmund Kean, and Selby recycled the latest choreography from Covent Garden, while Burnand incorporated a cameo from a burlesqued novel, dressed his gods as prize fighters, and relocated a performing ‘fish’ to Dido’s Carthage. Together, these ‘inter-theatrical’ examples crucially extend studies of burlesqued canonical literature into the classical arena:¹² when spectators of purportedly epic plots are expected to recognize references to recent performance culture, these non-classical, non-epic—and, often, non-elite—sources take on as much importance as the canonical Trojan War myths. Examining different critics’ reports of these entertainments and audience reactions in light of the published scripts will show that knowledge of these modern sources—whether at ‘major’ or ‘minor’ theatres, or an infamous scientific hoax—became just as, if not more important than, knowledge of the original epics. While Dibdin’s burlesque was performed three decades earlier than Selby and Burnand’s three, which span just one decade, it offers the clearest discussion of packaging the Trojan War for audiences beyond London’s West End and formed the backdrop for subsequent reviews of Iliadic burlesques. The prominence given to ostensibly epic provenances, as advertised on the Astley’s playbill (Fig. 36.1), alongside modern elements in these four titles, clearly signals the importance of these competing allusions. These stakes, both in the mechanics of the burlesque game and its political and social significance, are especially high for the Iliad and Aeneid: these epics formed the backbone of elite classical education; moreover, Virgil’s narrative was seen to spell out the importance of the ruined cities of Troy and Carthage as physical evidence for a westward-moving translatio imperii which underwrote Britain’s imperial ambitions—and its concerns. These ingenious burlesque amalgamations of anachronistic competing sources do not, then, only shed new light on the afterlife of the Trojan War myths; crucially, this story of peculiarly un-epic scenes also lifts the curtain on the complementary starring roles that both ¹² For Shakespeare burlesques, see Wells (1977 8), Schoch (2002), Davis (2012), Bradley (2016).

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classical antiquity and modern performance culture mutually negotiated, evaded, and reinforced on the burlesque stage.

‘EXACTLY SIMILAR TO THE OLD HOMERIC LEGEND’? Burlesques often provided excuses to flaunt classical knowledge: several stage sets and character lists were decorated with Greek script, and some ancient texts were incorporated in extraordinary detail.¹³ These transliterative jokes encapsulate the challenges of deciphering burlesques whose purportedly epic plots rely on contemporary performance culture. Such references could prove pitfalls to critics, such as when the Sporting Times blithely ignored the subtitle of Burnand’s Paris; or, Vive Lemprière to describe its anachronistic plot devices as ‘exactly similar to the old Homeric legend’.¹⁴ Dibdin’s Melodrama Mad! is peppered with Shakespearean lines transferred to Homeric characters: significantly, this—almost centonic—construction includes whole passages from Macbeth and Richard III, recently performed at Drury Lane with Edmund Kean in the title roles.¹⁵ Moreover, the burlesque ends with some imaginative ‘product-placement’ through the dramatic rescue of Troy by the insurance company firemen, to whom I shall return in the concluding section. Descriptions of such innovations ranged from the surprising verdict, ‘too classical’, of this plot, or ‘exactly similar to the old Homeric legend’ (confusingly, of Burnand’s burlesque about Paris and Oenone, which drew on Ovid’s Heroides), to complaints of ‘facetious misrepresentation’ (of Burnand’s Dido).¹⁶ Closer examination of the innovations which gave rise to these descriptions reveals the reasons for such complex, contradictory, reactions to these epic performances. These non-epic, contemporary elements often underpinned the new comic plots. Since the burlesques depended as much on popular entertainments as on the original epic narratives, they could also have serious implications for deciphering the significance of the epic subject-matter. One of the most extreme examples of an ostensibly epic entertainment which actually featured little ancient content, was a mid-century parody of a ballet about the Judgement of Paris to a soundtrack ‘of songs and duets from fashionable operas’ (Fig. 36.2).¹⁷ The unanimous critical approval awarded ¹³ See e.g. Hall (1999a), 345; Richardson (2015). ¹⁴ Sporting Times, 14 April 1866. ¹⁵ Marshall (2012), 373. See further Bryant Davies (2018b). Cf. Macintosh (2009) on Shake speare in Dryden and Lee’s Oedipus (1678). ¹⁶ Literary Chronicle, 8 April 1820; Sporting Times, 14 April 1886; Morning Post, 13 February 1860. ¹⁷ Daily News, 18 August 1846.

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Fig. 36.2 ‘The Pas de Déesses at Her Majesty’s Theatre’, Illustrated London News, 1 August 1846.

this cross-dressed ‘travestie’ shows that burlesque’s voracious consumption of other theatrical entertainments was usually recognized and appreciated.¹⁸ Selby’s Pas de Pippins spoofed the celebrated Pas de Déesses, which represented the three goddesses, danced by a trio of famous ballerinas, trying to catch Paris’ Golden Apple by ‘flying’ on point (Fig. 36.2). Selby, who began the fashion ‘of dramatising the popular ballets of her Majesty’s theatre’, did create a framework for his choreographic ‘profanation’, but this mythical backstory was ‘wisely curtail[ed]’ after the premiere.¹⁹ This ‘uproariously received’ show proved much less controversial than other epic burlesques, probably because it was a familiar burlesque target, Covent Garden, which bore the brunt of the jokes. It is striking that so many reviewers described ‘thunders of applause’ and ‘one of the most enthusiastic encores we ever remember’.²⁰ Its success in ‘tak[ing] advantage’ of ‘the sensation produced within and beyond the fashionable world by the new ballet at the opera’ emphasizes burlesque’s immediacy.²¹ The Era, which made much of reviewing both shows together, judged that ‘each danseuse was imitated superbly’ while the Daily News agreed that the ‘imitation of Taglioni’s famous ¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹

Bell’s Life, 23 August 1846. Lloyd’s Weekly, 23 August 1846; The Era, 23 August 1846. Daily News, 18 August 1846; Illustrated London News, 1 August 1846. Bell’s Life, 23 August 1846.

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step [ . . . ] could not have been mistaken for a moment’.²² As the Illustrated London News explained, ‘a pièce de circonstance of this kind [ . . . ] must of necessity be planned, written, and brought out with high-pressure haste, whilst the prototype is before the public, or fresh in their minds’.²³ In contrast, only four years later a similarly topical parody backfired. The Talking Fish from Burnand’s Dido does not rework an elite performance from a ‘legitimate’ theatre; rather, this ‘Virgilian burlesque’, inspired by the playwright’s tutoring job, offers the clearest example of the unease which surrounded the intrusion of contemporary performance culture into epic narratives.²⁴ Shipwrecked on the Carthaginian shore, Aeneas ‘is on the point of hanging himself in despair, when the Talking Fish (Mr Davey) suddenly enters’ and ‘suggests the advisability of his visiting Dido’s court’.²⁵ This ‘finished gentleman’ therefore engineers the Virgilian plot back on track— ready for a subsequent dramatic derailment—when threatened with a premature ending. This new addition to the Aeneid is not Burnand’s own invention; rather, he both parodies and pays homage to a performing seal marketed all over Britain (Fig. 36.3). Allegedly capable of speaking words such as ‘Mama!’, ‘Jenny’ had recently taken the country by storm. Burlesque writers immediately exploited this popular scientific show while further publicity accompanied her demise only a few weeks before Burnand’s premiere: as Radcliffe suggests, Aeneas’ reference to the Fish’s death was ‘a pathetic, topical irony that must have been understood by the audience’.²⁶ Indeed, only the next month, ‘the dramatic tax levied on [her] popularity’ was compared in The Era, ‘the recognised organ of the theatrical profession’, to that enjoyed by renowned soprano and tenor, ‘Madam Jenny Lind, [and] Mr. Sims Reeves’.²⁷ Complaints, in the very same paper, of difficulties in interpreting this character are therefore especially strange. When he crossly asked, ‘What the talking fish has to do with the legend, or why he should be introduced’, this reviewer was in fact missing the point that, even if he did not recognize the allusion to Jenny, The Talking Fish assumes the goddess Venus’ role in this episode of the Aeneid.²⁸ This anonymous reviewer was almost certainly classically educated but, in denying the continuum of scientific and artistic cultures, as well as popular and elite entertainments, he was unable to decipher Burnand’s burlesque.²⁹

²² Daily News, 18 August 1846. ²³ Illustrated London News, 22 August 1846. ²⁴ Burnand (1904), 343. ²⁵ The Era, 19 February 1860; Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 19 February 1860. ²⁶ See Radcliffe (2012), 151. ²⁷ The Era, 25 March 1860. ²⁸ The Era, 19 February 1860. ²⁹ For continuum of elite scientific and artistic cultures, see e.g. Buckland (2013), Brown (2015).

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Fig. 36.3 ‘The “Talking Fish”’, Illustrated London News of the World, 14 May 1859, p. 292.

Although underwhelmed by Burnand’s puns, he does praise the extremely topical ‘allusions to Mr. Gladstone’s Budget’, which had only been announced the previous week and were appreciated by many reviewers: it is all the more telling that they cannot, or do not want to, admit to popular knowledge of the Fish.³⁰ Such topicalities, which ‘disperse meaning by implicating the play in an extensive network of references and cross-references’ while apparently familiarizing the epic action, further complicate understanding of classical burlesque.³¹ These reviewers’ appreciation of ‘the most impertinently pertinent references to the events of the present moment’, such as the tenpenny tax, can be seen here as staking a claim for the burlesque’s elite political content. However, it sits oddly alongside their silence regarding the Fish: the fact that he is not even made an example of jokes ‘appropriated from other writers’ suggests deep unease over the Fish’s simultaneous disguise and preservation of the epic narrative.³²

³⁰ Morning Post, 13 February 1860. ³² Daily News, 13 February 1860.

³¹ Schoch (2002), 40 1; (2003), xviii.

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The process of modernizing epic as drama was clearly the key to such responses. The Morning Post, London’s leading daily newspaper, imagined this procedure scientifically when it celebrated burlesque’s ‘power of transmutation’ through the ‘crucible’ of ‘comic imagination’. Burnand’s Dido is particularly important as the first English burlesque of Virgil’s Aeneid. Episodes from Aeneas’ account of the fall of Troy had previously been mined, but were always attached to Homer’s Iliad.³³ For this reason, the paper could dramatically announce that ‘The fate from which neither Euripides nor Sophocles, neither Shakspere nor Byron, have been exempted in this mirthful age has at last overtaken the bard of Mantua, and the “Aeneid” has been submitted to the same process of facetious misrepresentation.’ The same review even compared Burnand to Augustus, and Dido to Rome, in describing how ‘Mr. Burnand found Virgil’s poem an epic; but [ . . . ] it has come out a farce!’³⁴ Others also emphasized that ‘the author has taken full advantage of the license allowed to burlesque writers’ to create ‘a laughterprovoking absurdity’.³⁵ Of course, not everyone approved: Edmund Yates’s complaints about Burnand’s ‘execrable writing’ and seats ‘filled with the author’s friends’ must have left Daily News readers in no doubt that its bland description, ‘the author has departed considerably from the received version of the story of the Tyrian Queen’, concealed a heinous crime.³⁶ Even more bitterly, Baily’s Monthly lamented ‘the melancholy degradation to which the writer has subjected the “Aeneid”’ and damned it as ‘creditable neither to a gentleman nor a scholar’.³⁷ It seems that the issue was not scantily clad gods and old jests, since these were ‘greeted with uproarious laughter’: rather, it was that Virgil’s epic was the target of transformation. Whereas controversies over oral epic and the reality of the Trojan War seem to have made the Iliad easier to remould, Virgil was a historically verified poet and the remains of both (Roman) Carthage and Rome were clearly visible. Burnand did admit that, in writing Dido, ‘perhaps I was taking revenge on the classics’; his unhappy experience of classical education at Eton, where he relied on crib translations, may have inspired his second Trojan War burlesque.³⁸ This demonstrates the latitude that could be extended to similarly transformed narratives when they were perceived as Homeric or based on ‘mythological lore’.³⁹ Paris shares many of Selby’s immortal dramatis personae but the real target is clearly advertised in the subtitle: Vive Lemprière! This, as critics instantly recognized, celebrated burlesque’s debt to a modern source:

³³ ³⁵ ³⁶ ³⁷ ³⁹

See Hall, Ch. 30 in this volume. ³⁴ Morning Post, 13 February 1860. The Standard, 13 February1860. Daily News, 13 February 1860. See also Burnand (1904), 375. Baily’s Monthly, 1 March 1860. ³⁸ Burnand (1904), 366, 156, 252 3. Morning Post, 3 April 1866.

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John Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, first published in 1788 and a ‘renowned’ Victorian reference book.⁴⁰ Lemprière’s role in inspiring classical burlesques, and enabling spectators to recognize classical plots, was well accepted, but unusually, Burnand makes continual allusions to the encyclopedia throughout his burlesque. From the first entrance of the gods, which the circus-master Mars introduces as ‘a show | out of Lemprière, whom we all know’, to Oenone’s final address, the audience were encouraged to read up on ‘this old subject’ in ‘our old classic friend’.⁴¹ It is clear that, despite a telegram sent by Oenone to Paris—which almost exactly represents Ovid’s epistolary poem between the same characters⁴²—the sources were seen as modern. Several critics, whose reviews were reprinted around the country, emphasized instead ‘several laughable parodies of scenes’, in which the dynamic between Paris and Oenone recalled ‘the bickerings between Rip van Winkle and his wife Gretchen’.⁴³ Boucicault’s stage version of Washington Irving’s short story was a very recent hit at the Adelphi (where Selby’s Pas de Pippins had been performed twenty years earlier).⁴⁴ In addition, reviewers appreciated how the ‘burlesque version of Castor and Pollux, in which they are mirthfully represented as pugilists’ was heightened by their costume, which combined the equipment of ‘modern prize fighters’ with ‘that recognised costume belonging to classic ages’.⁴⁵ It seems that these immortal twins, ‘placed in so many grotesque situations’, rather stole the limelight: despite the Morning Post confirming that ‘they have little or nothing to do with the main purpose of the story’, the lively slapstick and acrobatics of the actors were described as ‘the most conspicuous features in the entertainment’. Paris was extensively celebrated as ‘the best burlesque which Mr. Burnand has ever written’ and Reynold’s Newspaper specifically applauded the ‘audacious’ yet ‘agreeably handled’ transformation of its ‘classical subject’.⁴⁶ It is therefore surprising that the Sporting Times claimed, ‘The plot is exactly similar to the old Homeric legend from which the work takes its name.’ This reviewer complained: many of the witty allusions are naturally clothed in classical garb; and as a very large portion of the audience have either never learned or almost entirely forgotten the language of the Romans many of Mr. Burnand’s best aimed shafts fail to hit the mark.⁴⁷

It is possible that ‘the language of the Romans’ alludes to Ovid’s Heroides; yet in conflating this with ‘the old Homeric legend’, and thereby overstating the ⁴⁰ ⁴³ ⁴⁴ ⁴⁵ ⁴⁶ ⁴⁷

Morning Post, 3 April 1866. ⁴¹ Burnand (1866), 10, 51. ⁴² Ovid, Heroides 5. Birmingham Daily Post, 9 April 1866; Liverpool Mercury, 22 May 1866. McArthur (2007), 213 40 discusses the performance of Rip van Winkle. Birmingham Daily Post, 9 April 1866; Morning Post, 3 April 1866. Ladies’ Monthly, 1 July 1866; Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, 8 April 1866. Sporting Times, 12 April 1866.

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epic credentials of the piece, the Sporting Times’ reviewer failed the burlesque recognition-game: his comments reveal his ignorance of the Iliad and Aeneid, which allude to but do not narrate Paris’ Judgement as well as his oversight of Burnand’s anachronistic incorporations.⁴⁸ Importantly, this complaint is not about the suitability of epic for burlesque: along with the Morning Post’s list of the Aeneid’s fellow burlesque targets, the Sporting Times by no means assumed that the cultural significance of classical epic granted it immunity from parodic rejuvenation. What this comment instead embodies, however unwittingly, is a wider concern regarding such epic entertainments. These burlesques were not just about subverting canonical ancient works, although this could be a major factor. Rather, as commercial enterprises, their main objective was to entertain the audience—by challenging spectators to identify their assorted sources. As these examples of failed or rejected recognition of both ancient and modern sources show, this game became problematic when spectators did not, or could not, participate in the burlesque enterprise. Turning from critical assessments of the burlesque innovations themselves to discussion of their perceived effects on spectators, shows that such confusion and mistaken identifications were seen as especially common among epic burlesques. As we shall see, critics were concerned that epic burlesques—even those including innovations such as examined here—could be ‘too classical’ for their audiences. Since, as these snapshots demonstrated, epic burlesques conformed more to the burlesque genre than they staged the epic poems, such criticisms suggest perhaps, not fears that epic was subverted or reversed in these burlesques but rather, that audience confusion regarding the classical sources actually displaced and subsumed the epic narratives into modern performance culture.

‘ NOT QUITE UP I N THEIR I L IAD’ ? Burlesques not only enabled classical epic to reach new audiences, but also reached traditional audiences in new ways. At the same time, since these epic burlesques were marketable entertainments like their Shakespearean counterparts, their alterations ‘assume the competency of their spectators’.⁴⁹ The fact that un-epic, popular innovations such as The Talking Fish were not always recognized suggests that their introduction may not so much have levelled the playing field as tilted it to the confusion of classically educated reviewers and ⁴⁸ The Judgement of Paris, explicitly mentioned at Iliad 24.25 30 and Aeneid 1.35 42, is not narrated in either epic. See Davies (2001), 35 7 for its presence in the wider epic cycle. ⁴⁹ Schoch (2003), xix.

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spectators. However, the accounts of bewildered spectators, ‘not quite up in their Iliad’, suggest a more complex picture.⁵⁰ There is inherent tension here between accessibility and innovation which, as closer examination of responses to these four case studies will show, is put under additional pressure when the ostensible subject-matter is classical epic. Burlesque innovations were calculated to win applause and a long, profitable run. Judging by the majority of reviews, to a great extent they succeeded. However, comments that spectators of Burnand’s Paris had ‘either never learned or almost entirely forgotten’ the classical epics imply wide differences in spectators’ prior classical encounters. Critical opinions—which circulated around the country in papers of widely differing prices—were first formed by, and measured against, perceived reactions. Critics’ assumptions, as we have already seen, could be esoteric, and descriptions of which classical allusions those who could afford to buy tickets recognized (or not) do not always reflect fairly compared to other evidence. However, published reviews are important nonetheless, because the burlesque game of recognizing juxtaposed sources depended on spectators’ knowledge, expectations, and prejudices. These epic performances worked both with and against other means by which classical knowledge circulated. Not only might they reinforce knowledge acquired through, for example, penny papers; their sweeping transformations of the ancient narratives challenged the familiarity of every spectator; perhaps especially those most familiar with classical epic through traditional schooling. Although my four examples took particular liberties in staging the epics, their comic approach was not unexpected: sixteenth-century poet George Chapman had translated into English the mock-epic Batrachomyomachia, an account of a battle between frogs and mice attributed to Homer, while Thomas Bridges’s 1762 Burlesque Translation of Homer updated this tradition. Many nineteenth-century critics viewed epic burlesques against this parodic backdrop and as part of an ongoing tradition of dramatizations of epic. This could lead some to gloss over the very innovations that so incensed other critics. One, reviewing Burnand’s Paris in a major London daily paper, even described the subject matter of ‘The Golden Pippin and the Choice of Paris’ as ‘no stage novelties’ but rather as ‘convenient media’ for jokes ‘of almost coeval antiquity’ with the epics themselves.⁵¹ This critic must have been expecting his readers to be aware of the episode’s popularity onstage since the 1760s. Most remarkable was the Irish burlesque-writer Kane O’Hara’s 1773 Golden Pippin at Covent Garden.⁵² Rejected by the theatrical censor until ‘after a radical declawing’,⁵³ it nonetheless attracted positive contemporary reviews. Given the intended readership of Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, ⁵⁰ Morning Chronicle, 28 December 1858. ⁵¹ Morning Post, 18 August 1846, 5. ⁵² See Stead, Ch. 31 in this volume. ⁵³ Hume (2005), 331.

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it is unsurprising that ‘the well known judgment of Paris’ was not detailed; rather, the critic praised ‘the freedom of the burlesque’ which enabled the inclusion of ‘incidental turns and inflections which he [the playwright] judged necessary to heighten his ridicule or his humour’. Most tellingly, the reviewer emphasizes that ‘We are not angry at this humorous bard for the great latitude of his ideas’ and concludes that the show ‘is replete with humour and character’.⁵⁴ This long view of epic performances was also evident in reviews that examined burlesque adaptations of the Iliad. Reviewers of Robert Brough’s Iliad; or, The Siege of Troy (Lyceum, 1858) would recall that ‘Tom Dibdin years ago [1819] at the Surrey Theatre ventured to travestie the same theme’. This reviewer in The Era, a paper which ‘far surpasse[d] every other weekly journal’ in ‘the amount and accuracy of its theatrical intelligence’, further noted that ‘every rhyming schoolboy has probably made it the first specimen of his burlesque dramas for home production’, but pronounced Brough’s version as the first ‘complete and appropriate dramatic illustration’.⁵⁵ These perceptions of continuity are all the more powerful given that in both cases, at separate venues and almost forty years apart, reviewers reported ‘bewildered’ spectators: while Brough reportedly confused ‘the uninitiated in Homeric translation’, Dibdin’s burlesque was described as ‘too classical for the Surry [sic] side of the water’.⁵⁶ Yet both achieved long runs: Brough’s featured in the centre of the Illustrated London News’ special on Christmas pantomimes and Dibdin’s was immediately revived the following year:⁵⁷ this epic performance, like the others considered here, was clearly both admired and profitable. Such repeated criticisms of confusion therefore suggest that the real issue was the perception that the burlesques were in fact too epic for their audiences. The advertisement of missed popular references combined with condemnation of others’ classical confusion can of course be seen as reinforcing the social snobbery that surrounded classical knowledge. Yet both classical and modern sources were overlooked or caused confusion, while reviewers generally agreed that the incorporation of different elements was part of the burlesque fun and, as such, needed to be acknowledged. At the same time, however, bewilderment, and not getting every reference, was also an intrinsic part of the burlesque experience. Dibdin’s reviewer in Theatre claimed that some scenes would ‘read much better than they act’; in the same way, as theatre historian Schoch explains, the ‘audience’s awareness of its own inability to “take in” the whole play was always part of the burlesque experience’.⁵⁸ It is therefore probable that any ⁵⁴ London Magazine, 1 (1773), 59. ⁵⁵ The Era, 26 December 1858. ⁵⁶ Morning Chronicle, 28 December 1858; Literary Chronicle, 8 March 1820, 8 January 1859. ⁵⁷ Illustrated London News, 8 January 1859. ⁵⁸ Schoch (2003), xxvii; (2002), 38 41.

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spectator would often have failed to recognize some topicalities, references, or wordplay: their pervasiveness would have made it difficult for even the most ideal of spectators to digest at the pace of live performance. Clearly the social make-up and assumed classical knowledge of both spectators and readers of reviews was key in these judgements. All of the venues for these burlesques were featured in guidebooks as ‘principal places of amusement during the London season’, but audiences ranged between an ‘eager throng of holiday sight-seers’ and the members of Cambridge’s Amateur Dramatic Club who travelled in to see Burnand’s Dido at St James’s Theatre.⁵⁹ This was located just off Pall Mall; nearby were the Adelphi and Strand theatres, which, like Brough’s Lyceum, were West End venues on the Strand. In contrast, Dibdin’s Surrey Theatre was, like Astley’s Amphitheatre, south of the River Thames. Contemporary guidebooks reassured potential spectators that its melodramas ‘differe[ed] but little from those of the major’ theatres and describe a typical audience as consisting of ‘nobility and gentry, tradespeople, [and] mechanics’: in addition, recent research shows that working-class spectators sat ‘four women to one man in the pit, the husbands and brothers being in the gallery to save expense’.⁶⁰ The Surrey’s prices reflected this inclusive clientele: at the time of Melodrama Mad! box seats were four shillings, the pit two, and the gallery one shilling, all half price for latecomers. These 1819 prices are similar to the range for Astley’s Amphitheatre—the most famously inclusive venue—which the 1854 playbill (Fig. 36.1) advertised between sixpence and five shillings. It is important to note, however, that although midcentury box seats at the Lyceum and Royal St James cost two or three pounds, their cheaper seats started at one shilling or sixpence respectively. This range implies that, although a greater number of spectators could afford pricier seats and so were more likely to have prior knowledge of the Iliad and Aeneid, a social range of spectators persisted, especially at holiday entertainments. Conflicting opinions, both contemporary and scholarly, demonstrate that burlesque audiences comprised a wide social spectrum: Schoch notes that contemporary journalists struggled to define Adelphi audiences. Despite the fact that ‘Little scholarship exists on nineteenth-century burlesque audiences’, this diversity is echoed in scholars’ suggestions, ranging from Schoch’s ‘Bohemian’ and ‘fast’ young men, to Hall’s ‘lower-middle-class male who enjoyed the topical satire in Punch’.⁶¹ As theatre historians have concluded, ‘London theatre audiences in the mid-nineteenth century were so diverse that generic definitions are clearly inappropriate.’⁶²

⁵⁹ Cunningham (1850), 11; The Era, 2 January 1859; Burnand (1904), 375; Brady (1838), 116; Davis and Emeljanow (2004), 97. ⁶⁰ Brady (1838), 116. ⁶¹ Schoch (2002), 107, 135; Hall (1999a), 339. ⁶² Davis and Emeljanow (2001), 228 and (2004), 93; Hall (1999a), 358; Schoch (2002), 152.

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Critical accounts of failures to recognize both epic and modern components of these burlesques, then, do not so much provide us with concrete evidence of specific audiences’ prior encounters with classical epic—although the critics’ prejudice does, importantly, suggest a range of spectators not usually associated with classical education—as reveal attitudes towards the comedic transformation of epic. Despite their un-epic innovations, these epic performances were seen as ‘too classical’ for their audiences. This description arose from the increased accessibility to the epic narratives perceived in Dibdin’s Melodrama Mad! However, two particularly dizzying examples of anachronism from this burlesque and Burnand’s Paris suggest that the real problem was an altogether different sort of excessive classicism.

‘ TOO CLASSICAL’ ? The anachronisms and intertheatrical references within these burlesques embedded classical epic firmly, even if controversially, within modern performance culture. They enabled the comic transformation of the epics into burlesque games of recognition, which could appeal to wider audiences: the reviewer who considered Dibdin’s Melodrama Mad! ‘too classical’ for the Surrey Theatre, for example, was thoroughly outvoted by the show’s resounding success.⁶³ Hall’s analysis of the ‘historical self-consciousness’ of classical burlesque, along with the ‘productive gap’ Schoch identifies ‘between representation and the real’, are helpful springboards.⁶⁴ Two uncomfortable examples of this ‘complex dialectical process by which analogy became awareness of difference’ show how, in the case of the Trojan War myths, conflating ancient epic and modern life, or destroyed city and contemporary metropolis, was particularly troublesome. Burnand’s knowing jokes about modern encyclopedic sources throughout Paris enable the hero to inform Oenone that ‘I’m a character in history’. Even more vertiginously, after Oenone observes to Paris that ‘Helen your fast friend left you’, Venus replies that this is ‘true historically, | In Lemprière, but not true allegorically’. Her comment here conflates Homeric epic and Lemprière’s retellings with historical accuracy while also supporting the competing claims of the burlesque’s alternative account of ‘this old legend told anew’. Similarly, Hecuba and Cassandra’s attempt to dissuade Hector from fighting Achilles using the cautionary paradigm of the Ides of March becomes one of Dibdin’s most unsettling anachronisms when Hector replies that ‘Caesar’s not born yet’. It is especially odd given that Troy, which Hector describes as ⁶³ Literary Chronicle, 8 April 1820.

⁶⁴ Hall (1999a), 358; Schoch (2002), 152.

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‘burnt’ will soon, here, be saved by firemen. Nonetheless, retorting that ‘I’m sure I read it when I went to school’, Cassandra maintains the truth of her historical narrative, which contradicts the burlesque’s own ending. Her extraordinary claim to have had an elite classical education at a girls’ school in 1819, followed by her decision that ‘I dream’d myself ’, further underline the glaring anachronisms.⁶⁵ Despite being voiced by a character who is famously always correct, the fact that the epic account of Troy’s fall as well as recorded Roman history has become an imagined alternative doomed never to be believed, emphasizes the burlesque’s un-classical conclusion. In light of Hector and Cassandra’s discussion, ‘too classical’ seems all the more absurd a criticism of Dibdin’s burlesque: yet in light of the Trojan War myths shared by this group of burlesques, this description takes on extra significance, enabled by precisely the un-epic popular culture references examined here. Having established a firm, typically burlesque, correlation between contemporary London and the location of the action through anachronisms such as Bow Street Runners, postmen, and velocipedes (early bicycles), Dibdin is faced with a problem when Jupiter flourishes his thunderbolt to destroy Troy. At this point, stage directions order ‘Firemen [to] enter with engines, which change to pedestals, with Genii of each Fire-office on them’. This enabled an advertisement for contents and buildings insurance, since ‘Phoenix! Norwich! Sun! and Hand-in-Hand’ were competing fire companies. The ‘Trojan firemen’, listed as ‘Messrs. Bucket, Hose, Badge, Pipes, Pump, Engine, &c.’ save Troy during the ‘Ballet Hornpipe of Firemen’.⁶⁶ This dramatic rescue is an extreme example of Schoch’s suggestion that, by ‘resurrecting dead characters in the finale’, the burlesque ‘teases its audience’.⁶⁷ The implications of such ‘glimpses’ were drawn out by one reviewer with a knowing reference to multiple ancient sources: this emphasized that Burnand’s Paris negated the entire Trojan War since ‘Paris and Oenone are reunited [ . . . ] not in death, but in life’ and rather off-handedly dismissed ‘whatever may be the most trustworthy authority on the subject’ against ‘Mr Burnand’s own genius’. The burlesque resurrection of Hector, Achilles, Dido, and Oenone from their epic fates was, therefore, not unexpected. However, their narrow escapes not only brought the Trojan War to an early end, but also prevented the future destruction of Carthage. This consequence was spelt out in the periodical Musical World. Appointing himself spokesman for ‘Classical scholars’, the reviewer claimed to feel ‘a creeping sensation’ on seeing ‘Dido join the hands of the fickle Aeneas and the treacherous Anna, thus wantonly cheating the Fates, who had decreed the foundation of imperial Rome’.⁶⁸ Unfortunately the review stops short of the logical conclusion: since medieval tradition held that ⁶⁵ Dibdin (1819), 30. ⁶⁷ Schoch (2002), 104.

⁶⁶ Holloway (1992), 27; Dibdin (1819), 41. ⁶⁸ Musical World, 18 February 1860.

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London was founded by Trojan refugees, the modern city and empire—as well as its Roman model—would have been only ‘dream’d’. The sociopolitical impact of such anachronisms and innovations was heightened by the conflation of classical epic and contemporary performances examined here. These un-epic interpolations demonstrate that, within the burlesque game of identifying patchwork allusions, modern and intertheatrical references were just as important as classical sources. This reciprocity within consumer culture both obfuscates and elucidates epic: the playful fusion of classical epic and recent entertainments enabled comic, topical incongruities which could bring the comedy within reach for more spectators, but this modernizing apparently frustrated those who expected to understand epic performances effortlessly. Competent spectators needed both modern and classical knowledge: the transformation of classical epic into a playful game of recognition emphasizes how fully classical antiquity was embedded within wider cultural and social landscape, as both object of fun and historical exemplar. Schoch’s Shakespearean findings hold here: burlesques cannot displace their originals because the humour relies on their existence; in addition, the paradox that supposedly accessible topicalities puzzled spectators prompts his conclusion that ‘Incomprehension is a built-in feature’. Classical epic, however, was not accessible through the repertory system of frequently changing plays which ensured that ‘Most Victorians acquired their knowledge of Shakespeare [ . . . ] at the theatre.’⁶⁹ Without this prior exposure, ‘not at school’, these burlesques’ fusion of modern and ancient, elite and popular, underlines the ambiguous role of classical epic, emphasized by many reviewers, as both cultural glue and elite marker of cultural ownership. Moreover, nineteenth-century London abounded in apocalyptic imagined futures, which exploited the eighteenth century’s vocabulary of picturesque ruins: Henry de la Beche, a geologist and childhood friend of the fossilist Mary Anning, drew in 1830 a cartoon, ‘Awful changes’, which showed dinosaurs learning about human fossils, while in 1840 the politician Thomas Macaulay described a New Zealander sketching the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (pictured 1872 by Doré).⁷⁰ In this context, burlesque juxtapositions highlighted the painful relevance of epic: Troy’s excavated ruins, unsaved by Dibdin’s firefighters, would come to be described as ‘a beacon and a warning’ for Britain’s cities; earlier in the century, these epic burlesques already fulfilled that function.⁷¹

⁶⁹ Schoch (2003), 12, 39, 41. ⁷⁰ For these images, see Bryant Davies (2018b), 342, 333, respectively. ⁷¹ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (February 1836), 39. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to reuse material from Bryant Davies (2018b).

Epilogue Voices, Bodies, Silences, and Media Heightened Receptivity in Epic in Performance Lorna Hardwick

P RO E M This discussion examines some of the implications of the diverse modes and contexts for epic in modern performance, with specific focus on recent performance of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. It is widely recognized that the reception of Homer is a touchstone for classical reception more broadly; and Homer scholarship has increasingly brought to prominence the implications of the oral tradition for poetry in performance.¹ A key aspect of performance analysis is to uncover audience experience and the assumptions made about the role of audiences (spectators and listeners) as part of performance and co-creators of meaning. This includes the effect on audiences and performers of their physical co-presence, widely theorized as a major aspect of the transformative experiences that may be triggered by performance.² One of the effects of that contingency is the bringing of diversity, especially in the accommodation of differing sensibilities and levels of spectating and listening skills. This is a strand of reception analysis generated by performance scholarship and increasingly recognized by scholars as part of the relationship between ‘surface’ and ‘depth’ that is beginning to be theorized.³ In terms of epic in performance, this in turn prompts an interest in what I call ‘heightened receptivity’ or performative ‘hot spots’ that are unique to a particular performance, which bring together the dynamics of the performance as text and as generator of sparking lateral relationships with the wider cultural environment. ¹ Butler (2016), 17, 21 48 deploys ‘Homer’s Deep’ as the springboard for examining the ‘shifting deep sea’ between classics and other modes of enquiry; on Homer scholarship, see Fowler (2004b). ² Fischer Lichte (2010). ³ See e.g. Purves (2016), which explores this in terms of touch and emotion.

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It is often remarked that because performance is ephemeral it is difficult to analyse in ways that contribute to wider issues in scholarship.⁴ I take the risk of focusing on the performances themselves, aiming to compare the genesis and effects of different performance modes and the ways in which they overlap.⁵ Stephe Harrop has suggested that scholars may be overconcerned with a literary approach to dramatic texts and thus imply that even in performance they can be regarded as single, stable, and therefore repeatable entities.⁶ I have argued elsewhere that ‘repetition with a difference’ is a characteristic not just of Homeric epic poetic technique but also of reception and performance.⁷ In this chapter I tighten the lens to reflect on how text, performance, and medium relate to one another in ways that not only conjoin the ‘fixed’ and the ‘flowing’ models identified by Harrop, but also have implications for the simulated orality, underwritten by performers’ awareness of the canonical text and the printed word, discussed by Greenwood in this volume.⁸ I begin by considering the impact of radio as a performance medium that braids together orality and aurality and communicates to audiences made up of individuals who are at a distance from the performer in the studio. I then discuss different approaches by solo performers in other performance contexts, especially those that involve the co-presence of performer and audience: the rhapsode, the dramatic monologue, and the staged solo. This leads me to look at other kinds of staged performance, from vocalizations through to minimalist and total theatre. Threads through the discussion consider how different performance dynamics shape the imaginative responses of listeners and spectators; the effects of performance on perceptions of Homeric similes; the relationship between focalization and multivocalism in Homer; and the extent to which the proven capacity of Homeric epic to accommodate change is reflected and fostered in the performance modes through which it is mediated. I focus here on examples which, while some may be little known, raise acute questions about where the ‘hot spots’ in performance of Homer might be, how they have been tackled by practitioners, and how they may change according to performance medium and wider sociopolitical contexts.⁹

⁴ Hence the tendency to privilege performance history over the dynamics of the performance itself. ⁵ There are also indirect implications for Homer scholarship in that performance frees up the texts from the canonization that they have been subject to ‘on the page’, enabling fresh perspectives, but that will not be my concern here. ⁶ Ch. 18 in this volume. ⁷ Hardwick (2016a). ⁸ Greenwood’s discussion in Ch. 19 is also particularly important for its attention to the different ways in which both listening to a radio performance and reading from the page are aural. ⁹ Hall (2010) provides a helpful framework for analysis, developed in respect of drama. I suggest in the Conclusion to this chapter that epic poetry in performance raises some additional points.

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RA DIO: A L ABORATORY F OR GROWING EXPERIMEN TS WITH EPIC I N PERFORMANCE The history of broadcasting has only relatively recently been established as a significant strand for the documentation and analysis of classical receptions.¹⁰ Within the broad remit of broadcasting, the medium of radio has given a platform to Homeric epic, as well as to drama and talks of general interest in classical subjects.¹¹ Analysis of radio broadcasts of epic poetry, and especially of the Iliad and the Odyssey, reveals a range of excerpts, rewritings, and new work affiliated to Homer. In 2017, BBC Radio aired The Odyssey Project: My Name is Nobody, which broadcast fresh imaginings of the Odyssey by ten poets from different backgrounds and traditions and gave a voice to modern migrants’ search for security.¹² This particular project attests to the recognition that the narratives and the poetics of Homeric epic reach out over time and place as well as language.¹³ It reflects awareness that there is a kind of ‘memoryism’, in which the existence of epic narratives and figures is known and associations made, even if the texts that have helped carried these into the public imagination have not been read.¹⁴ It also indicates that radio is a medium that is prepared to take risks (sometimes for reasons of prudence as well as imagination and technology)—as James Runcie has put it: ‘You can be much more nimble on radio, partly because it is cheaper.’¹⁵ There are significant formal and structural reasons for the attractiveness of Homeric epic to radio. Beaty Rubens, the radio producer, has commented incisively that ‘if mime is the least suited to radio of all art forms, then oral poetry must be the best. So Homer’s Odyssey makes an ideal basis for creative radio.’¹⁶ Primarily this is because Homeric epic used direct speech rather than extended narrative.¹⁷ Much of the direct speech is interactive between characters, either as conversation or as debate, including conflict. Furthermore, both the modern and the ancient performer of epic must grasp and hold the imagination of the listener in what is commonly held to be ‘the telling of an event or story which is not itself physically enacted or visually ¹⁰ Wrigley (2015a), with extensive bibliography. ¹¹ These are by no means confined to BBC Radio 3 (formerly the Third Programme) which was central to the traditional BBC remit to ‘inform’ and ‘educate as well as to entertain’. At the time of writing in 2017, the Radio 4 series In Our Time, hosted by Melvyn Bragg, has for several years regularly included topics from Greek and Roman history, visual and material culture, and literature and ideas, in its weekly Thursday morning discussions between academics. ¹² Cf. David Farr’s 2005 theatre dramatization, discussed below. ¹³ There are comparisons to be made with BBC initiatives from the late 1950s; see Wrigley (2015a), 179 ff. ¹⁴ See Prince (2008) and Greenwood, Ch. 19 in this volume. ¹⁵ The Observer, 19 March 2017, news section, 7. ¹⁶ Rubens (1989), 25, cited in Wrigley (2015a), 173. ¹⁷ Griffin (2004), 156 refers to c.45% of the Iliad and 67% of the Odyssey as direct speech.

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illustrated’.¹⁸ However, part of my purpose in this chapter is to challenge notions that radio is necessarily rigidly constrained in these ways. For example, radio soundscape is often extended to include non-verbal sounds, especially music or natural world sounds (e.g. birdsong, waves). Furthermore, the specific modes and formal traditions of performance epic carry through into the modern medium the presumption that the bodily energy of the performer carries the sound and meaning over to the listeners. The most active part of the body is the breath system. This includes not only the larynx, teeth, tongue, and palate but also other areas and organs—the ribcage, diaphragm, and muscles of the abdomen.¹⁹ The ancient rhapsode, of course, had further techniques available to him because the audience was physically present and this is still the case when epic brings together performer and audience in one shared physical space (see the discussion of Verse Theater Manhattan, below). One of the most important aspects of recent radio performances of versions and adaptations of epic poetry is their relationship to the physicality of ‘live’ performances with an audience, performances in which the ‘script’ may be further adapted and display a suppleness that enables it to travel across media and performance contexts. There are three main types of radio adaptation conventionally used to categorize performance epic: the single voice, based on the performance agency of the rhapsode who voices all the different character’s speeches; the adaptation that includes multiple voices, usually with a cast of actors who play different characters; the dramatization, usually of selected episodes with a range of characters, sound effects, and voices.²⁰ A good example of the last of these is Simon Armitage’s The Last Days of Troy (2014), which has been versatile in its transposition between stage and radio.²¹ I take the view that the overlaps that these categories have with each other and with live performance in contexts where the audience is co-present are especially useful for the insights they provide into the dynamics of performance generated both by Homer and by the new performance contexts.

¹⁸ Wrigley (2015a), 173 4. ¹⁹ For detailed discussion and citation of scholarship, see Harrop (2010), 233 4. ²⁰ Wrigley (2015a), 175 ff. argues that radio drama is a form of writing and performance distinct from any other genre and makes dramatization of Homeric epic central to her case. This is a valuable insight. However, my discussion seeks to explore the other side to that coin the propensity of radio vocalizations and dramatizations to be in their turn adapted for the live stage. ²¹ This was commissioned by the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester and staged there and at Shakespeare’s Globe in London in 2014 (see Graziosi, Ch. 2 in this volume). It was subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in two episodes in July 2016. The Last Days of Troy differs from the examples discussed in this chapter in that it selected and reworked material from Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid to continue the narrative from the end of the Iliad to the eventual victory of the Greeks and the destruction of Troy (Armitage (2014a), vii). In that sense, it provided a prequel to Armitage’s 2004 radio adaptation of the Odyssey.

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There is a further cluster of trends that needs to be mentioned: the ways in which performance scripts are adapted in the light of audience and participant response before they are published and how they develop through multiple performances. They become examples of ‘stage to page’, rather than the reverse (which used to be the standard assumption). A good example of this ‘work in progress’ is William Zappa’s version of Homer’s Iliad.²² This work was originally commissioned as an adaptation for a play to be broadcast on Radio National Drama in Australia, but the project ran into budget difficulties. However, the author retained the guiding idea of a script to be read aloud or performed. He is trialling this in schools, with students taking on the various roles so that they ‘can experience this great story as a group’.²³ The aim to capture the imaginations and engage group responses from people who may not previously have been familiar with the Iliad continued to drive the work: ‘I’ve been writing in Iambic Hexameter. I hope you find it as clear and driving as I intend. I chose this over Pentameter because I felt it offered a greater scope and would also be less predictable and therefore more engaging in performance.’²⁴ As an actor, Zappa seeks a poetic rhythm that actors understand and that they will find both ‘performable’ and ‘listenable’.²⁵ Book 1 is called Fury and the opening words set the tone and reflect the author’s aims to capture immediately the imaginations of the listeners: A VOICE:

Fury, so much fury. Tell us, Muse of Achilles The son of Peleus, insane and cursed, who’s fury cost The Achaeans dear, hurling to the darkest death their souls, Those brave souls, their bodies left to rot For skulking dogs and carrion birds to feast away.

Zappa’s script is divided between different voices/characters. This proem is followed by speeches from the Muse (who also has a narrative role), from Chryses, and from Agamemnon. In Book 2 the episode with Thersites and Odysseus is presented in a dialogue form designed to engage listeners and participants in debate. As Zappa’s project develops further it is likely to yield

²² At the time of writing, March 2017, this is a work in progress, excerpts of which have been read in Australia (2015 17) and Oxford (2016). I am grateful to the author for information about his project and for allowing me to read and quote from his text in advance of publication. ²³ Personal communication (1 June 2015). Zappa’s project is evidence of an increasing determination to explore diverse methods of bringing epic poetry and drama to new readers, listeners, and viewers. Hardwick (forthcoming) discusses the generation and impact of the new series of short films of excerpts from Greek drama created by Helen Eastman’s BareFacedGreek company for the ‘YouTube generation’. ²⁴ Personal communication (1 June 2015). ²⁵ The use of iambic may be considered to be a distinctive form for bringing together English spoken forms and the traditions of Greek oral poetry.

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additional information about audience engagement and the poetic and performance strategies that inform it. Commissioning for radio is a significant strand in performance epic and was vital in the genesis and development of Christopher Logue’s War Music.²⁶ Logue’s commission was based on the selection of a short episode and was for radio listeners, whose main response would be through their auditory imaginations.²⁷ This prompted a visualized poetic that resembled filmic excerpts, something that Emily Greenwood has described as Logue’s ‘cinematic narrative techniques and poetic sound effects’.²⁸ The iteration of the piece from script to broadcast studio to publication in a literary journal, with the printed page appearing to mark the end stage, but then looping back into further rewritings, is deeply significant and provides an important model for other refigurings under discussion here.²⁹

FROM RADIO S TUDIO TO THE THEATRE: THE MODERN RHAPSODE AS PERFORMER The ‘thickness’ of the depth and breadth of Logue’s writing has been reflected in the varied approaches brought to the performance styles of solo performers of his ‘Account’ of Homer’s Iliad. These performances reflect the selection of material, the occasion and contingencies of audience expectation, and the performer’s technical range and desire to explore different dimensions of the work. For instance, Peter Florence’s solo vocalization of Kings at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in 1999 was presented in the Programme Notes as ‘Stand-up Tragedy’. Kings is based on Books 1 and 2 of the Iliad and the venue was the somewhat minimalist setting of St Katherine’s Hall, a historic stone and

²⁶ See further Power, Ch. 17 in this volume. Logue (2015b) includes the whole work. I use War Music as the general title to include War Music (1981, rev. 1988, 2001), as well as the subsequent Kings (1991), The Husbands (1994), All Day Permanent Red (2003), and Cold Calls (2005). See Greenwood (2007), 175 6 on publication histories. The projected final book ‘Big Men Falling a Long Way’ (extensively based on Books 10 24) was incomplete at the time of Logue’s death in 2011. Fragments from it have been assembled by Christopher Reid and published in Logue (2015a), 295 335 with comments from the editor on Logue’s working methods and on his extensive revisions and multiple versions of all the phases of his project. ²⁷ Power, Ch. 17 in this volume, describes this as ‘making his listeners see for themselves’. ²⁸ Greenwood (2007), 145. Logue has also written screenplays and the layout on the page of sections of his Homer makes a direct appeal to visual imagination. Greenwood (2007), 158 9 points to the interrelation between all aspects of Logue’s sensory poetic. Minchin (2001), 132 60 discusses visual memory in Homer. ²⁹ I am not concerned here with detailed questions concerning the translational relationship of Logue’s ‘Account’ to Homer’s poems. See Greenwood (2007), 146 51 for discussion of this and especially Logue’s rejection of ‘fidelity criticism’.

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timber building.³⁰ The stage was a simple raised oblong with a white background, which before the performer’s entry was lit through blue, white, and red filters with a standing microphone positioned to create a silhouette. As the casually dressed performer entered from the rear of the hall, the lighting changed to dim white. This had an intense effect, concentrating all the attention on the performer. The poem was performed with an interval, which proved to be a bad idea as it took some time for Florence to recreate the atmosphere after the break.³¹ In contrast to the austere performance aesthetic of 1999, Florence’s 2003 performance of War Music in the same town, Ledbury, was at the prosceniumarch Market Theatre and extended to ninety minutes, plus interval. There were some added stage effects and use of multimedia, not all of which were well received by the audience. The performance was preceded by a multicoloured screening of names and phrases from the poem, accompanied by extra-loud heavy-metal music, which was presumably intended to convey something of the oral/aural blend and the menacing violence in Logue’s text. There were shouts of ‘thank goodness’ when the music stopped and the performance began, although the audience (predominantly middle-aged people from Ledbury and the surrounding villages and country towns of Herefordshire and Worcestershire) was later won over and applauded enthusiastically at the end.³² The lighting was kept up throughout, with the aim of including the audience in the atmosphere created by the static performer at the microphone. Although Florence remained in one place, body movement was important, especially in the encounter between Ajax and Hector, in the depiction of wounds, and in the representation of Hera’s passion for her favourite heroes. A different and somewhat more diverse audience was evident at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2003 for Alan Spence’s and Christopher Logue’s reading of All Day Permanent Red.³³ According to a review in The Scotsman, this reading was characterized by Alarms and excursions . . . the elan, the jump, dart, lift and sheer music. This is language that soars and sweeps over the battlefield like a vulture and over the centuries too . . . Logue’s work almost defies its poetic structure, taking all the

³⁰ For documentation of the performance, see , DB no. 1110. ³¹ The need for an interval was less because of the length of the performance than because of the summer heat and poor ventilation. ³² Documentation and review by Lorna Hardwick at , DB no. 2674. ³³ Logue also read from The Husbands at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 1994 in a session organized for schoolchildren and at the Hay on Wye Literary Festival in 1998 for a general audience (documentation at , DB no. 147).

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power of the shorter form and expanding it into the epic without any dilution of its impact. Breathtaking stuff.³⁴

The performative energy required to communicate Logue’s word pictures is intensified when his work is more ambitiously staged. Audience response can be unpredictable, making epic in performance an even more daring and risky enterprise. Some critics grew to expect more than just minimalist production values; the Evening Standard commented on Alan Howard’s 1997 solo performance at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn: ‘one actor, one poet, one barstool . . . what on earth did they pay designer Douglas Heap for?’³⁵ Howard was the leading and perhaps pioneering solo performer of Logue’s Homer, starting with a radio broadcast of Kings in 1991, which he then took to the Edinburgh Festival in 1991 and the National Theatre in 1992.³⁶

P L A Y I N G HO M E R I N T H E T H E A T R E 1 : THE MINIMALIST APPROACH Bold performance features came to the fore in Verse Theater Manhattan’s 2003 tour of Christopher Logue’s ‘Account’ of the Iliad, War Music, presented by an all-female cast in a minimalist set, with no stage properties, bounded only by a black curtain. Side lighting projected shadows for the narrative and fighting, with a red filter at the moment of violent climax. There was a soundscape of light percussion. The company’s production had a performance history that resonated with current international trauma. In 2001 its New York performances were interrupted by the events of 9/11 when the neighbourhood was closed to traffic. They later performed in aid of the Red Cross and undertook a Midwest tour. This phase of the company’s work highlights the synergies between performance, audiences, and current events; interest in performing Logue intensified at the time of the Second Gulf War in 2003. I was able to interview the company after their performance at the Wickham Theatre, Bristol University in March 2003.³⁷ The material offered by the ³⁴ D. Robinson, The Scotsman, festival suppl., 21 August 2003, 15. Performance documented at , DB no. 2703. The critic’s words un consciously reflect the relationship between the verbal and the physical embedded in epic in performance. ³⁵ Michael Comber, Evening Standard, 4 April 1997. ³⁶ Howard’s performances are documented at , DB no. 148. ³⁷ The UK campus orientated tour also visited Oxford, Cambridge, King’s College London, the University of East Anglia, and Exeter. Documentation at , DB no. 2670.

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company in the interview and in the audience ‘talkback’ that preceded it added valuable evidence about the importance of physical theatre and movement in performance poetry. One actor commented on Logue’s text that ‘it’s a very muscular text . . . there’s not a huge thought process between feeling and action. So, I know for myself that the more I could invest in it physically, the better . . . to understand and really wrap myself around these characters.’ She added that ‘we had worked with very heavy shields and swords during the fights, so that we learned the weight of these weapons, so that when we didn’t have them we had the physical memory of what it was like to move with that’ (my emphasis). This placed great demands on the audience, because in the actual performance weapons were not used: ‘during rehearsal we just had to keep trusting, they’re going to see what we’re going for, without us holding the actual spear’. Practising with actual weapons helped the cast to develop authentic movement. However, because there were no stage properties in performances, not even weapons, nothing came between the words/movements and the audience.³⁸ Having an all-female cast possibly brought an ironic undertone to Logue’s visceral communication of violence.³⁹ Company members took the view that audiences have to work harder in minimalist performance. Logue’s text actually promoted that engagement by including instructions to be voiced to the audience, such as ‘Imagine wolves’.⁴⁰ In the post-show discussion that followed the performance, audience members asked both about the process of turning a text that was designed to be read (on the page) into a performance piece and about its relationship to Homer. As will be evident from my preceding discussion, the first assumption is not borne out by the performance history of Logue’s ‘Account’, which was written to be heard; and the second focus of interest was not one that Logue welcomed or intended as a discussion point. In response, the director, Jim Melton, emphasized that the company were not approaching War Music as a Greek play but as a poem created in English. What happens when two aspects of Homeric reception—rewriting and recombination of Homeric forms and public performance—are brought together? Stephe Harrop has written about Oswald’s performances of Memorial demonstrating how the poet-performer becomes an actor, dissolving barriers between the predominantly verbal (associated with poetry) and the physicality associated with drama on the stage.⁴¹ Drawing on the approach of Robert

³⁸ It could be said that the physical movements, made without the heavy staves, actually made the spectators ‘hear for themselves’, whereas Logue’s radio technique made listeners ‘see for themselves’. ³⁹ One critic of the 1997 Tricycle Theatre performance by Alan Howard wrote that ‘Logue’s barbaric approach to Homer feels authentic in a way that more informed classically trained versions don’t’ (Robert Hanks, The Independent, 8 April 1997). ⁴⁰ Logue (2015a), 230. ⁴¹ Harrop (2010).

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Pinsky, Harrop accepts that as a vocal art poetry is also a bodily art.⁴² In her introductory remarks to the Edinburgh Festival rehearsed readings from her work Achilles (Edinburgh Book Festival 2003, 12 August), Elizabeth Cook paid tribute to the actor Greg Hicks because of his experience of performing Greekinspired material.⁴³ Cook said that what made Homer a ‘poet for the present’ was not just the material shared between antiquity and modernity (fish/spears/ shields) but rather the physiology and chemistry of the body, which enabled communication of emotions that allowed moderns to have a rapport with the ancients.⁴⁴ Equally, in the examples discussed in this chapter, there is the additional aspect of the ‘silent’ being given a voice. In antiquity, poetry could be seen as a way of making the material audible—in James Porter’s words: ‘Epic, then, is mute materiality made audible but not immaterial.’⁴⁵ Such a comment is readily applicable to Alice Oswald’s poetic and vocalization techniques in Memorial.

P L A Y I N G HO M E R I N T H E T H E A T R E 2 : FROM MINIMALISM TO MONSTERISM There have also been large-scale transpositions of epic to the stage.⁴⁶ These emphasize performative narratives which are also shaped by the theatre practitioners’ sense of the possibilities of theatre and its audiences. A thought-provoking example is The Odyssey, described by the West Yorkshire Playhouse in the UK as ‘a new retelling by David Farr after Homer’ and, more exotically, by the Lyric, Hammersmith as ‘a trip based on Homer’s epic’.⁴⁷ The writer David Farr identified Homer’s Odyssey as a ‘big story’ that helped people to understand global issues. In an interview excerpted in the theatre programme (2005), he commented that ‘after a rather dull period in the 1990s, global politics has ignited again’. The connection between Troy, ⁴² Harrop (2010), 234, quoting and discussing Pinsky (1998). ⁴³ , DB no. 2658. ⁴⁴ Hardwick (2016b) discusses another example of Hick’s virtuoso solo performances on material based on Greek drama and/or poetry, in Colin Teevan’s Missing Persons (2006). This was a series of five dramatic monologues, which included the RoyKeaniad, an elision of the footballer’s withdrawal from the Irish football team in the 2002 FIFA World Cup and Achilles’ retreat from battle. Interestingly, the Programme Notes for that performance explained who Keane was, but not Achilles. Documentation at , DB no. 2788. ⁴⁵ Porter (2010), 478. ⁴⁶ For other examples, see Hardwick (2004). ⁴⁷ The play was a joint production by the West Yorkshire Playhouse and Bristol Old Vic; it also played at the Lyric, Hammersmith, where Farr was artistic director. Design was by Angela Davies. The performance discussed was staged at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, UK, 9 April 2005, documented at , DB no. 2773.

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Odysseus’ nostos, and contemporary global issues was spelled out in the programme. This contained a summary of the story of the Greek expedition to Troy, the fall of Troy and Odysseus’ attempts to return home to Ithaca, together with photographs of images of figures and scenes from the Epic Cycle and the Odyssey, such as Odysseus’ escape from the Cyclops Polyphemus by clinging to the belly of the ram. There was also discussion of Homeric musical instruments and reproductions of ancient evidence. This represented a substantial attempt to ensure that audiences, who were assumed not to be familiar in detail with the scholarly context to Homer, were informed both about the ancient story and about historical sources. Alongside this material, the programme also reproduced extracts from documents detailing UK procedures for dealing with asylum seekers, together with an analysis of the main features. This juxtaposition of epic source and modern global politics encapsulated the production concept for the play and served to alert the spectators, who read the programme (either before the performance or subsequently), to its resonances for contemporary events. It provided an example of how performed epic can communicate large and public issues in a (relatively) small and intimate theatre space.⁴⁸ The play was staged in the round (thus positioning the audience as a community) and performed on a raised rectangular platform representing a ship’s deck, with mast and rigging. The deck was scattered with milk crates, open-ended oil drums (which concealed the fleeces of sheep), upturned chairs, and lids and covers that masked chutes to the understage. The Trojan horse appeared later as a skeletal framework on two drums with the ship’s mast used for its neck. Its mane was patterned with the jackets of printed books. As the play opened, Odysseus lay face down at the centre of the stage (wearing navy blue shorts and pale blue T-shirt). He was then dragged off to be questioned by immigration officers and held in a detention centre for asylum seekers. The almost Kafkaesque central irony was that the officials did not believe Odysseus’ claim that he wished to leave, not remain, and that he had a home to which he wished to return. The officials sang music-hall patter songs, using words from the official regulations on the treatment of asylum seekers. This was interspersed with their use of the vernacular in their abuse of Odysseus and the other refugees. Episodes from the Odyssey (Lotus Eaters, Bag of Winds, Oxen of the Sun, Circe, Cyclops) were presented as Odysseus’ narrative to the officials who interrogated him. Although the introduction of the officials and the detention centre was anachronistic, the dramatic techniques followed Homeric formal patterns, especially in the use of foreshadowing and the nesting of episodes within a structure of narrative and song. The Programme Notes emphasized ⁴⁸ The space used at the West Yorkshire Playhouse seats 350 people neither studio nor ‘arena’ nor street square space of Epic theatre referred to by Supple, Ch. 4 in this volume.

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the link between Odysseus’ frustrated need for a safe haven en route to home and the abuse of refugees and the destitute. Metatheatrical comment was woven into the stage action through the rhapsode figure of the official Harold, who framed the sequence by telling the stories to his son. Live music, song, movement, and the use of masks in the visit to the underworld stretched the audience’s senses and emotions. The wax in the rowers’ ears in the Sirens’ episode was replicated in the auditory experience of the audience by a dull buzz in the soundscape.⁴⁹ The sequence in the underworld included scenes that foreshadowed Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, his abuse by the suitors, the stringing of the bow, and the slaughter of the suitors. This was in contrast to the more chronologically orientated narrative approach in the verse adaptation by Peter Oswald, Odysseus, staged in the UK in 1999, directed by Martin Wylde.⁵⁰ In that version, Odysseus’ nostos was presented as a process of recovery from psychological trauma and the killing of the suitors was a culmination rather than a symptom. The slaughter was represented only by the sounds of percussion contrasting with a darkened stage and auditorium, while the killing of the maids and the fumigation of the polluted house were totally omitted, with the result that the audience was not challenged to reflect on the clashes and overlaps between ancient and modern value systems.⁵¹ In Farr’s 2005 version the introduction of the asylum seekers and the detention centre trope meant the audience was constantly challenged to confront contemporary resonances rather than have them repressed. Conversely, there was less leeway for the audience’s imaginations to range across possibilities of interpretation. The urgency of the relationship between ancient and modern was intensified when spectators realized that Odysseus’ fellow detainees were refugees from Troy. There was an agonizing moment of anagnorisis and redemption for Odysseus when the Trojans acted out for him the story of the wooden horse and provided the boat for him to escape from detention. Because of the use of foreshadowing of the events that took place after Odysseus’ return the play actually ended with him struggling ashore on Ithaca. His response to Eumaeus’ question ‘Who are you?’ was ‘Nobody’.⁵² Critical reaction to the production was occasionally mixed, but most appreciated its energy and the virtuosity and physicality of the ensemble playing, the imaginative set, and the haunting score of the live music. Even more than most ‘translations to the stage’, this put a premium on the non-verbal elements of sound and movement as an integral part of the narrative and a prime mover

⁴⁹ At the West Yorkshire Playhouse on 9 April 2005, the response of the audience was ecstatic. ⁵⁰ Published text is Oswald (1999). ⁵¹ For discussion see Hardwick (2004), 349 50 and documentation at , DB no. 1090. ⁵² Farr (2005), 75. In the published script, Eumaeus’ question remains unanswered.

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in the generation of emotions. Some critics used the play to pose questions like ‘What would happen to Odysseus today if he were to find himself washed up on yet another alien shore? Would he be greeted by Nausicaa and her beautiful attendants and feasted by the king? Or would he find himself caught up in a brutal bureaucratic nightmare with immigration authorities?’⁵³ From my viewpoint in 2017, the play and the awareness it created seems astonishingly prescient, although in 2017 many newspaper theatre critics might have reacted differently, in the light of intervening experiences and perceived public fatigue concerning the fate of refugees. Other critics who reviewed performances in 2005 and 2006 commented on the performance styles: ‘an eclectic array, ranging from slapstick comedy to a devastating and haunting mask sequence in the underworld . . . serendipitous spirit of the Odyssey [with] a contemporary narrative backbone . . . this is the classics even for those who don’t know their catharsis from their elbow’.⁵⁴ A few identified Homer with a culture of Everyman: ‘his epic tale interpreted and accessible at the broadest level’.⁵⁵ Many commented on the impact of the Cyclops, represented first by an anonymous figure in an overcoat and then by a spotlight on a pole, the light turning agonizingly red after Odysseus blinded it. The way in which the image of the Cyclops was used offers an intriguing comparison with the approach taken in Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1992, directed by Gregory Doran and designed by Michael Pavelka.⁵⁶ In Walcott’s Stage Version the image of the Cyclops (‘the Eye’) was used to create resonances with the totalitarian threat represented by the all-seeing Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel 1984, and by extension with the secret police of the repressive regimes in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and especially with the Romania of President Ceaușescu. In Farr’s version, the Cyclops episode marked a major turning point in the narrative and in Odysseus’ self-awareness, as in Homer.⁵⁷ When seen from the perspective of later events, especially the movement of people in search of asylum in times of war, it marked one of the ‘defining moments of myth, legend, and history’ that Supple identifies as the core of epic theatre.⁵⁸

⁵³ Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 2 March 2005, 20. ⁵⁴ Rachel Haliburton, Time Out, 8 March 2006, 128. ⁵⁵ Charlotte Smith, Financial Times Weekend Magazine, 25 February 2006, 36. ⁵⁶ Published text, Walcott (1993). The production is discussed in Hardwick (2004), 350 5, including production photographs, and is documented at , DB no. 845. ⁵⁷ In Odyssey 9.105 566, the received folk tale is reworked from a self consciously Hellenic perspective that constructs polarities between the lifestyles and societies of the Cyclopes and the Greeks. ⁵⁸ Ch. 4 in this volume.

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CO NCLUSION From this exploration I can draw out some more general points that might repay further investigation. The versatility of epic in performance in moving from radio to vocalizations with live audiences and to staging in the theatre (and sometimes back again) suggests two things. First, that radio is not so separated from other performance media as is sometimes assumed and that in particular it can cross the ‘transformative bridge’ that is normally considered to require a live audience. Radio can do this not only in the liberty it gives to the interplay of aural and visual imaginations but also in a more physical sense by communicating the bodily properties of the voice. Speech is an intensely physical act that ‘results from a complex set of physical actions and reflexes . . . [such that] it is impossible even to think of a word without moving’.⁵⁹ Hearing, thinking, and moving are part of a unified process of engagement and understanding. Epic poetry is especially able to generate that kind of crossover. That helps explain how radio has become such a fertile seedbed and host for different kinds of performance. Secondly, the capacity to accommodate and sustain change without losing its own identity is an attribute of epic poetry and finds its counterpart in the diverse capacities of the performance modes to which it is adapted and which it, in its turn, shapes. This capacity, sometimes theorized as ‘self-difference’,⁶⁰ underlies much of the creative practice that is crucial to classical receptions in the literary, filmic, and performing arts.⁶¹ I suspect it may also be an under-researched strand in the history of classical scholarship. A better understanding of creative practice will push scholarship in this field to devote as much attention to the moves from performance to page as it does to the reverse.⁶² Analysis of the interface between vocality and physicality in epic in performance also highlights the significance of silence, whether total or punctuated by breathing and other non-verbal sounds. ‘Silence’ also has a metaphorical dimension, signalling that episodes, ideas, and emotions are omitted or pushed aside.⁶³ Silence is both an instrument and a characteristic of transformation, both cognitive and affective. It is just one of the possible markers of the moments of heightened receptivity that have threaded through the examples discussed in this chapter. The elements that coalesce to heighten receptivity are not only internal to the epic itself but are also contingent—on the performance mode, on the immediate performance environment, on the nature of the audience, on the

⁵⁹ Harrop (2010), 233. ⁶⁰ For instance, as conceptualized in translation studies by Maurice Blanchot. Greenwood (2007), 146 discusses the implications for the interface between translation and literature. ⁶¹ See e.g. the case studies that feature in the Open Access e journal Practitioners Voices in Classical Reception Studies (PVCRS) at . ⁶² See Harrop on Tempest, Ch. 18 in this volume. ⁶³ See Hardwick (2018).

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wider sociopolitical context, and on the climactic events that shape sensibilities at any particular time. Epic poetry’s capacity to absorb and energize such changes and redeployments, while still providing a sustainable basis for comparisons, makes it a key resource for capturing and explaining the reliefs in aesthetic and cultural maps.⁶⁴ ⁶⁴ This discussion has been confined to recent examples of performances in Britain and so offers only one part of the jigsaw. Global and cross cultural examples figure in other parts of this volume and provide material for further comparative work, which will in its turn be enhanced by analysis and theorization of the impact of modern media (see Michelakis, forthcoming).

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Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Aalto Ballet, Essen 195 Achilles, anger of 400, 408 see also Achilles in opera Achilles, armour of 438 Achilles, shield of 139 40 Achilles in French tragedy 322 35 end of heroism 326 30 nostalgia for heroism 330 5 polymorphous Achilles 323 6 Achilles in opera 524 39 19th c. opera 536 7 early opera 528 32 enlightenment opera 533 5 mēnis 524 8 Tippett, King Priam 537 9 Actaeon 316 acting and actors 396 402 acting in Shakespeare’s Hamlet 76 89 attitudes to acting 76 80 Hamlet and acting 80 5 ‘The Mousetrap’ 85 7 actresses 367 see also female performers; women on stage Adams, Douglas, The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul 28 Addison, Joseph 454 5 ‘Machinae Gesticulantes, anglicè A Puppet Show’ 452 3 Spectator 455 Adelphi Theatre, London 543, 550, 554 Ad Herennium (Rhetoric for Herennius) 38, 43, 77 Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment 140 Aeneas, William III and 449 Aeschylus 63 Agamemnon 70 Oresteia 59 Persians 70 affective impact of poetry 64 6 Africa 393 Akhurst, William Mower, Paris the Prince and Helen the Fair; or, The Giant Horse and the Siege of Troy 521 Akinbode, Tayo 413 Alden, David 535 aleatoric composition 157

Alexander, Caroline 524 Alexander of Pherae 84 Alexander the Great 454 Alexandria, library of 243 Algunas hazañas (Some Deeds) 339, 341, 346 8 alienation 55, 87, 291, 297, 303 see also Verfremdungseffekte (distancing techniques) allegorical readings 480 Almeida Theatre, London 8, 59 Altman, Rick 126 Alves, Hélio 320 Amazons on stage in England and Ireland 361 76 Burnell, Landgartha 363 4, 367 75 Davenant, Salmacida Spolia 363, 364 7 Amboise, Michel d’ 325 Amerindians 342, 347 8, 350 Amherst, John H. 510 The Giant Horse; or The Siege of Troy 515, 517 20 Amsterdam, early modern theatre repertory 358 Amsterdam, Nederduytsche Academie 357 Amsterdam, Netherlands Opera 535 Amyot, Jacques Aethiopica 105 6, 107 anachronisms 544, 555 6 ancient Greek language 455 Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives 397 n.24, 403 ancient modern history of Hero and Leander, The (puppet show) 464 ancients and moderns, quarrel of 477, 478 80, 484; see also ‘Classiques’ and ‘Romantiques’, quarrel of the Andreoni, Giovanni Battista 535 anger 399 400, 526 8 see also Achilles, anger of Anne, Duchess of Buccleugh and Monmouth 440 Anne of Denmark, Queen of England 192, 193, 364, 366, 367 Anon., Ad Herennium 38, 43, 77 Anon., Batrachomyomachia 552 Anouka, Jade 413 anti Homeric tradition 423 antiquarianism 506

620

Index

APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama) 3, 6, 69, 195, 282 Apollonius Rhodius 308 Apuleius, Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass 473 Araucanian plays see conquest on the 17th c. Spanish stage Araucanians 337, 342 archaeology and theatre 506 Architectural Association, Interprofessional Studio 196 archival/ephemeral binary 171 2, 174 Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) 3, 6, 69, 195, 282 Areal 136 7, 137, 140, 144, 147 Arinos de Mello Franco, Afonso, The Brazilian Indian and the French Revolution 394 Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso 364, 374 Aristarchus 243 aristocratic ethic 327, 330 Aristophanes 296 Aristotelian perspective on literature 16 30 Armitage’s Last Days of Troy and The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead 25 30 epic scale and improbability of gods 17 22 Homer between literary criticism and performing arts 22 5 Aristotle Brecht and 4, 5, 291 2 on epic plot 14 influence on later criticism 22 4 and structure of tragic action 325 Tippett and 291 2, 303 and tragicomedy 73 Aristotle, Generation of Animals 115 Aristotle, Poetics on aim of poetry 21 and epic scale 16, 17 19, 23 French drama and 478 and genre 16, 17 22, 64, 65, 67, 73, 138 9 and length 154 and metre 19 and portrayal of gods 16, 19 23 and recognition scenes 117 and simultaneous action 18 19, 154 and the unities 23 Aristotle, Politics 35 Aristotle, Rhetoric 528 arming of hero episodes 427, 432, 437 Armin, Robert 434 Armitage, Simon as bard 275 7, 283, 287 The Last Days of Troy 16, 25 6, 27 9, 561 The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead 16, 27 8, 29 30

Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey 275 7, 284, 285 armour of Achilles 438; see also arming of hero episodes Arne, Thomas 471 Arnold, Matthew, On Translating Homer 506 Arnould, Auguste, and J. P. Lockroy, L’Extase 520 Arrell, Douglas 184 Artemisia of Caria 364 5 Artemisia of Halicarnassus 365 artistic freedom 318 Ascanius in 18th c. opera 377 88 Fux, Julo Ascanio 379 82 Lotti, Ascanio, ovvero Gli odi delusi dal sangue 382 5 Mozart, Ascanio in Alba 385 7 Ascham, Roger 68 The Scholemaster 33 4 Asian epic theatre 49 50, 55, 167 Astley, Philip 514 Astley’s Amphitheatre, London 514 21, 540, 541, 554 asylum seekers 167 9, 568 9 Atreus, house of, plays about 74 5 ‘Attitudes’ 509, 511 Atwood, Margaret, The Penelopiad: A Play 264 5 audience at ancient Greek theatres 51 at burlesques 551 5, 557 expected ability of 27 and improviser 248, 265 6, 267 8, 270 1 in India 53 participation of 196 8 performance analysis and 558 and pleasure of emotion 64 6, 72 at poetry performances 270 1, 564 5, 566 recognition of allusions by 88, 422, 426, 551 5, 557, 568 reflected on stage 437, 447 of schoolboys 75 at stadiums 48 9 see also listening audio text 283 audiobooks 282, 283 5 Auerbach, Erich, ‘Camilla and the Re birth of the Sublime’ 210, 211, 213 Augustine 88 Augustus, Roman emperor 381 2, 385, 387 Augustus the Strong, King of Saxony 382 Aukin, Lianne 261 Austin, Gilbert 77 Austin, J. L. 371 Australia, Radio National Drama 562 authorship, multiple 198, 348

Index authorship and oral tradition 410 authorship of Homeric epics 198 Avid for Ovid 165, 173 Ávila, Gaspar de, El gobernador prudente (The Prudent Governor) 339 Axe and Bottle Yard, London 454 Axton, Marie 430 Bacchylides 202 3 Badia, Carlo Agostino, Enea negli Elisi 380 Baebius Italicus, Ilias latina 324 5 Bagnall, Nick 16 Baily’s Monthly (magazine) 549 Bakhtin, Mikhail 152, 155, 389, 390, 396 ballad opera tradition 465 ballet d’action 477, 486 92, 488, 512 14 Banks, John 440 1 Bantam Books, Choose Your Own Adventure series 196 bard/narrator figure 10, 207, 289 see also multimodal bards of 21st c. Barthes, Roland 528 Bartholomew Fair 439, 442 3, 444, 453 Bataviersche Comedianten, de (the Batavian Comedians) 357 8 Bate, Jonathan 95, 96, 186, 193 Batrachomyomachia 552 Battersea Arts Centre, London 268 Batteux, Charles, Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe 483 Battle of Salamis 365 Bausch, Pina 195 Bayreuth, Sanspareil rock garden 489 BBC Radio, The Odyssey Project: My Name is Nobody 560 BBC Radio 4 16, 282 BBC Third Programme 250 Beard, Mary 362 3 Beche, Henry de la, ‘Awful changes’ 557 Beckett, Samuel 149 50, 159, 160, 162 Beheshti, Shaghayegh 168 Bellanger, J. 501 Belleforest, François de, Histoires Tragiques 364 Belmonte Bermúdez, Luis de 341 Bénichou, Paul 330 Benioff, David 22 3 Benserade, Isaac de 323, 328 9, 330 Bentivoglio, Ippolito, Achille in Sciro (libretto) 530 Bérard, Victor 149, 151 Berlioz, Hector, Les Troyens 511, 536, 538 Bernabei, Giuseppe Antonio, L’Ascanio 378, 379 Bernadoni, Pietro Andrea Enea negli Elisi (libretto) 380

621

Julo Ascanio, Re d’Alba (libretto) 380, 384 La clemenza d’Augusto (libretto) 380 Bern Ballet 202 Betterton, Thomas 82 Bian Lian (face changing) 54 Bible, the 353 4 Bickerstaffe, Isaac, Love in a Village 471 Billard de Courgenay, Claude, Polyxène 323, 332 3 biology 125 32 Blanc, Paulin 501 Blanco, Mercedes 336 Blind Enthusiast, The (cartoon) 472, 472 Blumauer, Aloys, Virgils Aenis, travestirt 388 Boas, Frederick 68 bodies see embodiment, epic as bodies and rhythm 227 bodies in epic 164 77 masked presences 172 7 Théâtre du Soleil 165 72 bodily energy 561, 567, 571 body language 87 Boileau Despréaux, Nicolas 335, 481 Borée, Vincent 323, 329 30 borrowings, in composition 252 3 Boshier, Derek, and C. Logue, Manifesto 254, 260 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture Sainte 484 Boswell, James 356 Boucicault, Dion, Rip van Winkle 550 Bouffes du Nord, Paris 6 Bourgogne, duc de 484 Bourne, Matthew 198 Bowles, E. A., Troy Again 523 Boydell Shakespeare Gallery 511 Brandstetter, Gabriele 176 7 Brazil, culture 392, 403 Brazil, Week of Modern Art 394 Brecht, Bertolt on acting 54 5, 78 and alienation 55, 289, 291, 297 and Aristotle 4, 5, 291 2 on audience experience 54, 55 Cunningham and 153 on dramatic vs epic theatre 55 6 Epic Theatre of 3 6, 54 6 and free indirect style 13 The Mother 78 and performance traditions 9 on theatrical forms 55 ‘Thoughts for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction’ 5 Tippett and 291 2, 297, 302 Brechtian epic montage 293 Brehon Law 368

622

Index

Breslin, Paul 411 Breval, John, Rape of Helen 465 Bridges, Thomas, Burlesque Translation of Homer 552 Bristol University, Wickham Theatre 565 6 British contemporary theatre 46 7 British Museum 8 Britten, Benjamin, War Requiem 290 broadcasting see radio broadcasts Brook, Peter 6 Battlefield 6, 57 Mahabharata 6, 57 Marat/Sade 57 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 57 Oedipus 57 Brough, Robert, Iliad; or, The Siege of Troy 459, 553 Brown, S. A. 95 Brownlow, William 467 Bruce, Mark 195 Brumoy, Pierre, Le Théâtre des Grecs 478 Brussels, Cirque Royal 149 Brutus 350 Brutus the Trojan 449 Buckhurst, Bill 405, 412, 417 Budelmann, Felix 202 3 Budgen, Frank 155 Burgoyne, R. 123 burlesque 14, 464, 540, 542 burlesque on London stage 540 57, 541, 546, 548 audience knowledge 552 5 contemporary cultural allusions 545 51 London and Troy 555 7 burlettas, English 464 5, 465 6, 540 Burnand, Francis Cowley Dido 543, 547 9, 554 Paris, or Vive Lemprière 543, 545, 549 51, 552, 555, 556 Burnell, Henry, Landgartha: A Tragie comedy 363 4, 367 75 Burneybusby, John 521 Burrow, Colin 90, 93, 95 Byron, Lord, Don Juan 411 Caedmon (audiobook company) 283 Cage, John 149 Cahusac, Louis de, Lettres sur la danse ancienne et moderne 483 Caldara, Antonio, Achille in Sciro 533 4 Callimachus 92, 308 calypso 411 Cambridge, St John’s College 33, 34, 36, 45 Camões, Luís de, The Lusíads 393 see also institutional receptions: The Lusíads Campbell, Joseph 150

Campbell, Joseph, and Henry Morton Robinson, Skeletal Key to Finnegans Wake 151, 156 Capece, Carlo, Tetide in Sciro (libretto) 530 Caravero, Adriana 279 Caribbean performance poetics 407 carmagnoles 491 Carne Ross, Donald 250, 251, 255, 257, 259, 261 Carr, Marina, Hecuba 11 13, 12 Carroll, Tim 263, 267 Casaubon, Isaac, De Satyrica Graecorum poesi 73 Cassandras in performance, 1795 1868 508 23, 513, 518, 519 Cobbold, Cassandra 509 12 equestrian spectacles 514 23 Rossi, Le Siège de Troye 512 14 Castelvetro, Lodovico 65, 72 La poetica di Aristotele volgarizzata 23 Castor and Pollux 550 castrati 533, 534 catalogue form 155 6 ‘Catalogue of Ships’ (Iliad) 18, 28, 265 6 Caussin, Nicolas, La Cour Sainte 330 Caxton, William, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye 184, 423, 435 censorship 316 17, 318 Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara 527 Césaire, Aimé 415 ‘chain of receptions’ 91, 416 Chamoiseau, Patrick 412 chance driven composition 157 Chanson de Roland 505 Chapelain, Jean 481 2 Les Sentiments 476 Chaplin, Charlie 54 5 Chapman, George 77 Achilles Shield 423 Batrachomyomachia 552 Iliad 184, 422 3, 425, 434, 438, 524 character and genera dicendi 44 ‘characters of style’ 34 Chariclea see Heliodorus, Aethiopica in early modern French theatre Charitable Loan Society 467 Charles I, King of England 365 6, 367 Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor 379, 380 Chasle, Émile 504, 505 Chatterton, Thomas, Amphytrion 473 Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Knight’s Tale 193 Cheke, John 33 Chénier, André 503 4, 505, 506 Chiarini, Pietro, Achille in Sciro 534

Index Chicago, Court Theatre 391, 397 Chicago Tribune 398 China, ‘Opera’ form 53 4 choréographie 486 choreography see bodies in epic; Cunningham, Merce, Ocean; dance adaptations of the Odyssey; real and hyperreal in Revolutionary France choruses 170, 297 8, 491 Chrestien, Florent 73 Christ, comparisons with 216, 344, 395 Christian/classical mix 185, 186, 190, 216, 217 18 in Dante 211, 214, 215 16, 225 Christian morality and secular ethics 330 Christian motifs in Algunas hazañas 348 in Lima’s Invention of Orpheus 395 in Lope de Vega, Auraco domado 344 5 in R. Scott’s Prometheus 122 3 in Vondel, Gysbreght van Aemstel 360 chronotopes 152, 153 6 Chwast, Seymour 197 Cibber, Theophilus 443 Cicero 38, 80, 81, 83, 88, 308 De Oratore 41, 44, 79 cinema see Scott, Ridley, Prometheus Cinthio (Giraldi) 65, 71, 72 circling motif 201 Cirque Royal, Brussels 149 ‘City Poet’, London 442, 457 Cixous, Hélène 166, 169 70 L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge 167 L’Indiade ou L’Inde de leurs rêves 167 Tambours sur la digue 169 clairvoyance 519, 521, 523 Clarke, Nick 165 ‘Classiques’ and ‘Romantiques’, quarrel of the 495 8 see also quarrel of the ancients and moderns class, social, and fairground shows 449, 452 3, 454 5, 457 8, 459 60 class, social, and theatre 270, 475 Claudel, Paul 292 Claudian 90 Clayton, Frederick, The Hole in the Wall 90, 94 Clod Ensemble 164 clowns 434 Cobbold, Elizabeth, Cassandra 509, 510 12 Cocchi, Gioacchino, Gli amanti gelosi 466, 471 2 Cock Pit, Epsom 443 Cœuré, Sébastien, Pierre Gardel as Télémaque 488

623

Coffin, Charlotte 434 Colardeau, Charles Pierre, Astarbé 479 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 125 collective memory 27 colonialism 14, 390, 415 see also imperialism Coltellini, Marco, Enea e Ascanio (libretto) 378 comedia nueva 340 Comédie Française (Théâtre Français) 477, 493, 495, 496, 500, 502 Comédie Italienne 465, 476, 477 comedy 95 comic opera 465, 471 commoner as hero 56 see also everyday epic composition techniques 251 3, 259 61 see also Homer as improviser; orality and contemporary performance conquest on the 17th c. Spanish stage 336 50 Algunas hazañas 346 8 Lope de Vega, Arauco domado 340 5 Turia, Ricardo de, La bellígera española 348 50 contemporary performance culture 544 5, 545 51, 555, 557 contraction and expansion 152, 156 9, 246 8, 247 Conway, James 295 Cook, Elizabeth, Achilles 567 Cooke, William 515 Copeland, Roger 153 Coras, Jacques de 323 Corelli, A., and J. Pepusch, Achilles 530 2 Corneille, Pierre Andromède 116 Le Cid 476, 481 Corneille, Thomas 323, 333 4 Coster, Samuel 357 costume 509, 518 19, 523 Cotton, Charles, Scarronides 464 Court Theatre, Chicago 391, 397 Covent Garden, London 453, 466, 469, 541, 546, 552 Coventry Cathedral 290 Cox, Leonard, The arte or crafte of rhethoryke 426 Cratinus 459 Crawley, Marie Louise, Myrrha 173, 173 6 Creole language 415, 416 creole traditions 411 Crésolles, Louis de 87 Crick Crack Club 264 cross dressing 529, 530 Crow Street Theatre, Dublin 466, 469 Crowne, John 441 Cubitt, James 196 Cullingford, Sonya 202, 203, 204, 205, 206

624

Index

cultural evolution 129 30 Culver, Andrew 149, 150 Cunha, Carlos 318 Cunningham, Merce, Ocean 149 63 expansion and contraction 156 62 Homeric and Joycean chronotopes 153 6 and Joyce 150 3 cyclicality 162 Cyclops on stage 570 Dacier, André 478 Dacier, Anne 478, 479, 480, 503, 505 Daeniken, Erich von 124 D’Aguiar, Fred The Longest Memory 100 Pyramus and Thisbe poems 99 100 Daily Courant (newspaper) 532 Daily News 546, 549 Dalva, Nancy 150, 151 D’Amici family 466 dance see bodies in epic; Cunningham, Merce, Ocean; dance adaptations of the Odyssey; real and hyperreal in Revolutionary France dance, ancient 165, 174 5, 203 dance, Irish 375 dance adaptations of the Odyssey 194 208 Marston, ‘Choreographing the Katabasis’ 201 7 New Movement Collective, Nest 196 201 Dance Scholarship Oxford (DANSOX) 195 D’Angour, Armand 202, 203 Daniel, Samuel, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses 366 DANSOX (Dance Scholarship Oxford) 195 Dante, Commedia 411 Dante, Convivio 221 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia 218 20, 226 7 Dante, Inferno 196, 210 14 Dante, Paradiso 221 2, 226 Dante, Purgatorio 160, 209, 214 18, 222 6 Dante and Latin epic 209 27 Convivio 221 De Vulgari Eloquentia 218 20, 226 7 Inferno 210 14 Paradiso 221 2, 226 Purgatorio 209, 214 18, 222 6 Dares Phrygius 325, 422 Darwin, Charles 129 Dauberval, Jean 486 Davenant, William 367, 440 Gondibert 479 Salmacida Spolia 363, 364 7 D’Averara, Pietro, Ascanio (libretto) 378 Davey, Mr (Talking Fish) 547, 548 David, A. P. 202, 203

David, Jacques Louis 486 Davies, John 478 Davies, Siobhan 198 Dawkins, Richard 125 declamation 79 Dekker, Thomas If It Be Not Good, the Devil is in it 182 3 Newes from Hell; Brought by the Divells Carrier 183 Delcroix, Patrick, Die Odyssee 195 Deleuze, Gilles 119 Demetriou, Tania 7, 63, 437 descent (inheritance) 114 16, 117 Deshayes, André 512 14 Deshayes, Jacques François 514 Deshayes, Madame (Élisabeth Duchemin) 512, 514 De Tragoedia et Comoedia 67 devil plays 182 ‘dialectic of reinforcement’ 342 Dibdin, Charles 474 Poor Vulcan 473 Dibdin, Thomas, Melodrama Mad! or, The Siege of Troy 459, 521, 543, 545, 553, 555 Dickens, Charles, Pickwick Papers 511 Dickenson, John, Arisbas, Euphues amidst his slumbers 34 5 Dictys Cretensis 325, 423 Dido 40, 77, 80, 108, 195, 225, 361, 364, 379, 556 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 378, 384 disease 434 distancing techniques (Verfremdungseffekte) 4, 153, 291, 302 distributed voice 280 DiTommaso, Lorenzo 119 Döblin, Alfred 14 Dobrée, Bonamy, Restoration Tragedy 440 1 Doce, Madame (actress) 520 Donatus 71, 83 Donne, John 200 Doran, Gregory 570 Doré, Gustave 557 Dorrell, Edmund, Kane O’Hara 468 Dorval, Marie 496 ‘double motivation’ 20, 27 doubling 293 6 Drayton, Michael, The Barons’ Wars 35 dreamthinkspeak, Don’t Look Back 8 drolls see London fairs and classical epic 1697 1734 Drury Lane theatre, London 510, 517, 541, 545 Dryden, John 194 5, 207 8, 441, 451, 479, 481 Aeneid 444, 445, 449 ‘Of Heroique Plays: An Essay’ 479

Index Dublin, Crow Street Theatre 466, 469 Dublin, Smock Alley Theatre 466, 470 Dublin, Werburgh Street Theatre 363, 367 Dublin Evening Packet and Correspondent 517 Dublin Musical Academy 467 Dublin Society 474 Duchemin, Élisabeth (Madame Deshayes) 512, 514 Ducrow, Andrew, The Giant Horse; or The Siege of Troy 515, 517 20 Dufaï, Alexandre 507 dumbshows 86 Duparc, Elisabeth (‘La Francesina’) 534 Dutch East India Company (VOC) 360 Dutch Republic, epic poetry in 351 2 Dutch Republic, epic theatre in 351 60 epic drama 353 4 epic poetry 351 2 historical context 354 8 Virgilian plays 358 60 Dzierzon, Małgorzata 196, 200 Eckardt, Madame (Madame Siecle) (clairvoyant) 522 3 ‘école du bon sens’ (‘school of common sense’) 496 Edinburgh Book Festival 564 5 Edinburgh Festival 565, 567 Edwards, Miss (soprano) 535 elegy 92 3, 99 Eliot, T. S. 303 Elisabeth Christine of Braunschweig Wolfenbüttel 380 Elizabethan theatre, epic moment 53 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 373 4 Elizabeth Stuart, Electress Palatine 358 Ellis, John 474 Ellison, Ralph 389 90 Elyot, Thomas Dictionary 426 The Governor 425 embodiment, epic as 389 403 Lima, Invention of Orpheus 392 5 the performative turn 402 3 Peterson and O’Hare, An Iliad 396 402 Emig, Rainer 155, 156 emotion 64 6, 78 81, 84 5, 89, 526 8 enargeia 141 Encounter (magazine) 250 endings 159 62 Enea in Italia operas 378 English theatre, epic moment 53 English Touring Opera 295 Enlightenment opera 533 5

625

Ennius 34, 41 Annales 35 Enscoe, Miss (actress) 517 ephemeral/archival binary 171 2, 174 epic, definition 351 2 ‘epic’, history of term 32 7 epic acting see acting in Shakespeare’s Hamlet epic acting (Brechtian) 78, 87 Epic Cycle 17 epic from ‘below’ 437 see also everyday epic epic performances, overview 3 15 back to Brecht? 13 15 Brecht’s Epic Theatre 3 6 epic content 6 9 epic form 9 13 ‘epic tragedy’ 479 ‘epic turn’, recent 9 épica culta (learned epic) 336 épica de la pólvora (gunpowder epic) 336 epigrams 36 Epsom, Cock Pit 443 Epstein, Joseph 281 equestrian spectacles 514 23 Erasmus 68, 69, 74, 88, 332 Apophthegmes 426 On the Method of Study 425 Era, The (newspaper) 546, 547, 553 Ercilla, Alonso de, La Araucana (The Arauncaniad) 337 8, 342, 343 4, 347, 348, 349 Ercole III, Duke of Modena and Reggio 385 Erdman, Jean 150 Essen, Aalto Ballet 195 Essex, Earl of 438 Estado Novo, Portugal 318, 319 ethical influence of epic 36, 37 Eucharist 221 Euripides 19 Andromache 69 Cyclops 66, 69, 72, 73 Electra 69 Hecuba 11 13, 68 9, 70, 71 2, 74 Iphigenia in Aulis 69, 70, 74, 323 Medea 20, 70 Orestes 69, 70, 75 Trojan Women 69, 70, 84 European Festival of Latin and Greek, Odyssée 24 8 everyday epic 171 2, 269, 393, 399, 402 Everyman Theatre, Liverpool 16 evolutionary biology 126, 129 30 Exeter ’Change, London 474 exorcists, actors as 401 2 expansion and contraction 152, 156 9, 246 8, 247

626

Index

face changing (Bian Lian) 54 Factory, The, The Odyssey 263, 266 8 Fagles, Robert 390 1, 524 Fairclough, Henry Rushton 528 fair theatres, France 465 fairground theatricals see London fairs and classical epic 1697 1734 fan fiction 286 Faria e Sousa, Manuel de 316 Farr, David, The Odyssey 567 9, 569 70 female characters in Algunas Hazañas 347 8 female performers 364 7, 368 see also Cassandras in performance, 1795 1868; individual performers female role models 516, 523 female voices 207, 278, 368 72 female warriors see Amazons on stage in England and Ireland feminism in Gay’s Achilles 532 feminist historiography 509 Fénelon, François 484 5 Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse 477, 479, 483 5, 502 3 Lettre sur les occupations de l’Académie Française 484 Télémaque on stage 485 92 Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria Este 385, 386, 387 Fergusson, Francis, The Idea of a Theater 209 Ferreira, Bartolomeu 316 17 Festival of Epidaurus 8 Festivals of the Revolution 486 Fielding, Henry Tom Jones 482 Tumble down Dick: or Phaethon in the Suds 463, 465 Filleul, Nicolas, Achille 322, 323, 326 7, 331 film see Scott, Ridley, Prometheus; Walcott, Derek, Omeros on stage and screen film projections 4 Finger, Gottfied 450 Fiorillo, Federigo 512 firemen 545, 556 Fitz, Earl 393 fixed and unfixed performances 263 8 Fletcher, John, The Faithful Shepherdess 73 Fletcher, John, and W. Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen 193 Florence, Peter 563 4 Foley, John Miles 268, 270, 272, 273 food in Homer 480 fools 434, 438 formulas in composition 232 6, 234, 235, 236 42, 237, 238, 240, 241, 267 Foucault, Michel 174 found phrases 251 3

foundation myths 360 Fowler, Don 91, 92 fragmentation in M. Cunningham, Ocean 156 9 in J. Joyce, Ulysses 154 6 in Odyssey 154 in performance 177 in Tippett, King Priam 292 3, 300, 301, 304 ‘Francesina, La’ (Elisabeth Duparc) 534 Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor 385 Frederick V, Elector Palatine 358 free indirect style 13 freedom, artistic 318 Freitas, Roger 533 Friedrich August, prince of Saxony 382, 385 Frye, Northrop 125 Fux, Johann Joseph Constanza e Fortezza 379 Gradus ad Parnassum 379 Julo Ascanio, Re D’Alba 379 82 La clemenza d’Augusto 380 Fyfe, William Butler 440 Galeotti, Vicenzo 486 Galuppi, Baldassare, and G. B. Pescetti, Ascanio, ovvero Gli odi delusi dal sangue 383 Gardel, Pierre, Télémaque dans l’île de Calypso 477, 486 92, 488 Garden of Eden 218 Gardner, Lyn 271 Gascoigne, G. and F. Kinwelmershe, Jocasta 86 Gay, John Achilles 465, 530 2 The Beggar’s Opera 470 Gellius, Aulus 44 gender and genre 64, 74, 92 and lyric 133 in NMC, Nest 199 201 in Odyssey 145 7, 199 201 in opera 533 5 see also cross dressing genera dicendi 33, 34, 38, 43 4 generational conflict 334 generic self consciousness 114 Genetay, Octave de, L’Éthiopique 103 4, 106, 111 16 ‘genetic imaginary’ 126 genetics and genre 125 32 Genette, Gérard 31 genre in 16th c. England 34, 37 8, 68 in 18th c. France 476 80

Index Aristotle and 16, 17 22, 64, 65, 67, 73, 138 9 and chronotopes 152 comedy 95 in Dutch Republic 353 and gender 64, 74, 92 genera dicendi 33, 34, 38, 43 4 and genetics 125 32 grand style 83 4 and Greek plays 67 ‘heroic’/‘high’ style 33, 35, 36, 37, 38 41, 43 ‘heroic romance’ 481 ‘heroic tragedy’ 479 hierarchy 138 Homer and 17 18, 64, 72 hybrid 70 5 Ovid and 91 3 Shakespeare and 37, 95 7 transformation of 126 treatises on 67 8 see also Pyramus and Thisbe tale, reception of; tragedy; tragicomedy Gentileschi, Orazio, An Allegory of Peace and the Arts 365 Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 552 3 ‘genus’, term 44 Geoffroy, Édmond 493 Geoffroy, Julien Louis 492 George, Prince of Wales 463 German theatre, epic moment 54 gesticulatio 86 gestural performance 509, 517 gesture 87 see also dumbshows Gielgud, John 57 Gildon, Charles 82 3, 86 Giordani, Nicolina 466, 471 2 Giordani family 466 Giraldi, G. B. (Cinthio) 65, 71, 72 Giselle (ballet) 492 Globe, The (newspaper) 508 Globe Theatre, London 16, 405 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, Enea e Ascanio 378 Godard, Jean Luc 124 gods, portrayal of Aristotle on 16, 19 23 in Armitage’s plays 28 9 in burlesques 464 in Tippett, King Priam 300 1 Voltaire and 480 Golden Age 218, 342 Golding, Arthur 91, 184, 185 Metamorphoses 429 30, 432, 434 Goncourt, Edmond de 502, 520 Goncourt, Jules de 502 González de Bustos, Francisco, Los españoles en Chile (The Spaniards in Chile) 339

627

Gounod, Charles François 493, 502 Graça Moura, Vasco, ‘Camões: A Few Challenges’ 310, 320 ‘Graecomania’ 474 Graham, Martha 150, 151, 195 grammar schools 428 grand style 83 4 grandeur of epic 14 Graves, Robert 524 Graziosi, Barbara 66, 273 Greek theatre tradition 51 2 Greek vocabulary, use of 68 Greene, Robert, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 183 Greene, Roland 347 Greene, Thomas 341 Greenwich Palace, London 192 Greenwood, Emily 559, 563 Greg, William Rathbone, Rocks Ahead; or The Warnings of Cassandra 520 Grétry, André Ernest, Le Jugement de Midas 473 Griffith, Eva 183 Grimm, F. M. 479 griot 406, 407, 412 see also storyteller figure Grocers’ Company 442 grottos 487 9 groundlings 84 Grub Street Journal 532 Guarini, Giambattista 72 3 Pastor Fido 73 Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troie 423 Gumpert, Matthew 536 7 gunpowder epic (épica de la pólvora) 336 gypsies 519, 521 Habsburg dynasty 379 80, 382, 387 8 Haggarty, Ben, Pandvani 108 264 Halévy, Ludovic, and H. Meilhac, La Belle Hélène (libretto) 536 7 Hall, Arthur, Ten Books of Homers Iliades translated out of French 422 Hall, Donald 281 Hall, Edith 153, 554, 555 Hall, Peter 82, 85 Hamilton, Lady (Emma Hart) 511, 512 Hamilton, William 489 Calypso Receiving Telemachus and Mentor in the Grotto 490 Hammersmith, Lyric Theatre 269, 271, 567 Handel, G. F., Deidamia 534 5 Hardy, Alexandre La Mort d’Achille 323, 327 8, 331 Les Chastes et Loyalles Amours de Théagène et Cariclée 106 11

628

Index

Hardyng, John 33, 43 Harington, John, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse 374 5 Harper, Mr (show man) 454 Harris, James 482 Harrop, Stephe 278, 282, 559, 566 7 Harrowing of Hell 190 Hart, Emma (later Lady Hamilton) 511, 512 HAR (Histoires des arts et des représentations), Université de Paris, Nanterre 3, 6 Harwood, Henry R. 522 Haughton, William, Grim the Collier of Croyden 182, 191 Hazell, Edward 241, 245 6 Heap, Douglas 565 Hector in English tradition 431, 432 3 Hecuba and hybrid genre 74 heightened receptivity in performance 558 72 the modern rhapsode 563 5 proem 558 60 radio 560 3 theatre 565 70 Heinrich von Veldeke, Eneit (Eneasroman) 377 heldendicht (verse on heroes) 351 Heliodorus, Aethiopica, as tragedy 481 2 Heliodorus, Aethiopica in early modern French theatre 103 18, 107 J. Amyot’s version 105 6 epilogue 116 18 O. de Genetay’s L’Éthiopique 103 4, 106, 111 16 A. Hardy’s version 106 11 prologue 103 5 Heller, W. 533, 535 Hendel Schütz, Henriette 511 Hennings, John, ‘Panorama of Duke of Edinburgh’s outward voyage’ 521 2 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England 363, 364 5, 366 7 Henri IV, King of France 105 Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales 192, 193 Hercules 187, 189 92, 193, 386 7 Her Majesty’s Theatre, London 546 Hermes 289, 302 Herodotus 365 heroic couplets 77, 85, 447, 448, 449 ‘heroic’/‘high’ style 33, 35, 36, 37, 38 41, 43 ‘heroic romance’ 481 ‘heroic tragedy’ 479 heroism in burlesques 464 heroic identity 428 9, 431, 432, 434, 436, 437 8

in opera 533 5 see also Achilles in French tragedy Heslin, Peter 532 hexameter rhythm 203, 206 Heylli, Georges d’, Journal intime de la Comédie Française 501 Heywood, Thomas The Brazen Age 183 The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine of the Most Worthy Women in the World 373 4 and genre 68 The Golden Age 183 The Iron Age 423, 424, 425, 434, 435 7 Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas 435 The Rape of Lucrece 192 Troia Britannica 435 and women’s history 364 Heywood, Thomas, The Silver Age 183 93 Hercules 187, 189 92 Pluto and Proserpine 184 8 Hicks, Greg 567 ‘high’/‘heroic’ style 33, 35, 36, 37, 38 41, 43 Hill, John 77 Hill, Thomas 431 hippodrama 515 Hippolyte, Kendel 416 Hirsch, M. 527 Histoires des arts et des représentations (HAR), Université de Paris, Nanterre 3, 6 historical epic in cinema 123 histos (mast/loom) 200 Hitchcock, Robert 473 Hobbes, Thomas 479 Hodgson, Orlando The Giant Horse 523 Hodgson’s Characters 518, 518, 519 Hodgson, Orlando, The Giant Horse 517, 518 Hofmann, Michael, and James Lasdun, After Ovid 99 100 Hogarth, William A Just View of the British Stage 452 Southwark Fair 439, 440 Hölderlin, Friedrich 4 Holdridge, Barbara 283 Holland, William 472 Homer and double motivation 20 and emotion 64 and genre 64 influence on literary criticism and performing arts 22 5 noise in 254 5 and oral composition 24 5 as origin of literature 65

Index and performance 64 6 prestige of 503, 506, 507 simplicity of 502 3 and tragedy 17 18 and tragicomedy 72 Homer, Iliad Achilles in French tragedy 322 35 Achilles in opera 537, 538 allegorical readings of 480 arming scenes 246 8, 247, 427 Armitage, Last Days of Troy 25 30 Armitage, The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead 25 30 as benchmark of excellence 139 biographies in 142 burlesques of 553 composition theories 232 6, 234, 235, 246 8, 247 and double motivation 20 editions 244 ‘Iliadic’ epic model 481 Livathinos, Iliad and 8 Logue, War Music and 250, 252, 255, 256 7, 257 8 Lucian, Menippus and 431 Oswald, Memorial and 133, 141 4, 278 9 Peterson and O’Hare, An Iliad and 265 6, 396 Pound and 259 readings from 8 references to, in early modern manuals 425 6 and rhetoric 88 sexual violence in 532 shield of Achilles 139 40, 140 1 similes in 142 4 Tempest and 269 Thersites and 423 Tippett, King Priam and 289, 537 and tragedy 17 18 Udall, Thersites and 426 7 variants in 243 4 Walcott, Omeros and 406 Zappa, Iliad and 562 3 Homer, Odyssey Armitage and 276 7, 282 Atwood, The Penelopiad and 265 BBC, The Odyssey Project and 560 as benchmark of excellence 139 Cunningham, Ocean and 150 and cyclicality 151 ending of 26 7 The Factory, The Odyssey and 266 8 Farr and 567 9 Fénelon, Les Aventures de Télémaque and 477, 483

629

French theatre adaptations 498 500 and gender 145 7, 199 201 Köhler, Niemands Frau and 133, 145 7 Lima, Invention of Orpheus and 393 Marston, Katabasis and 202 7 NMC, Nest and 195, 196 8, 198 201 ‘Odyssean’ epic model 481 Odysseus and hybrid genre 74 Odysseus as Enlightenment subject 140 Odysseus as performer 10 Peter Oswald and 569 Ponsard, Ulysse and 493, 494, 499, 502 5 radio and 560 readings from 8 Tempest and 269 and time space 153 4 and tragedy 18 Homer as improviser 228 49 expansion and contraction 246 8, 247 formulas in Homer 232 6, 234, 235 formulas in Jazz 236 42, 237, 238, 240, 241 improvisation 230 2 variants 242 6 Homer Multitext Project 244 Homeric Hymns 286 Homeric orality and contemporary performance 262 74 fixed and unfixed performances 263 8 fixed/unfixed fusion 268 73 Homeric plays in 16th c. Europe 63 75 Homer and performance 64 6 hybrid genres 70 5 staging of Homeric stories 66 70 Homeridae 261 homosexuality 294 5, 417 Hopkins, David 480 Horace 220, 308, 495, 496 Ars Poetica 92, 528 Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment 140 Houlihan, Mary 398 Howard, Alan 260 1, 565 Huart, Louis, Ulysse ou Les Porcs vengés 501 Hue, S. M. 317 Hughes, Ted ‘Lovesong’ 98 Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being 91 Tales from Ovid 91, 97 9, 100 1 Hugo, Victor Hernani 495 Les Burgraves 496 Hurtado de Mendoza, García 338, 339 Hurtado de Mendoza, Juan Andrés 339

630

Index

I. B., An English expositor 362 iconography 523 ideal, epic as 330 ‘Iliadic’ epic model 481 Illustrated London News 546, 547, 548, 553 imitation, literary 32 immigration 560 see also asylum seekers imperialism 13 14, 405, 406 improbable actions 19 23, 481 2 improvisation 230 2 see also Homer as improviser; orality and contemporary performance incantation and memory 399 402 Indian theatre 47 8, 50, 52 3 inflated style 43 influence, literary 32, 394, 414 15 inheritance 114 16, 117 in performance composition 262 instability of text 260 institutional appropriation 318 21 institutional receptions: The Lusíads 307 21 The Lusíads on stage 310 12 poet and nation 307 10 translating Camões 312 17 versions of Camões 318 21 intermedial poetry 280 1 intertextuality of Thersites character 437 8 inter theatricality 544, 555, 557 intimate/epic theatre 47, 48, 50 Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, Oxford 195, 206 Iran, theatre 49 50 Irish folk tradition 462 3 Irving, Washington, ‘Rip van Winkle’ 550 Iyiola, Joan 413 Javitch, Daniel 67 jazz improvisation 236 42, 237, 238, 240, 241, 245 6, 248 Jenny (performing seal) 547 Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, London 270 John, Saint, Gospel of 392 Johnson, Rebecca May 145 Johnson, Samuel 139 Jommelli, Niccolo, Achille in Sciro 534 Jones, Chris 399, 400 1 Jones, Inigo 366 Jones, J. Wilton, Helen of Troy up to date; or The Statue Shop 523 Jonson, Ben Bartholomew Fair 447 Burnell and 368 The Devil is an Ass 182 Discoveries 36 Epigrams 35 6 Every Man Out Of His Humour 83

The Masque of Queens 364, 366 Oberon 73 The Poetaster 77 and Shakespeare 45, 90 ‘A Weak Gamester in Poetry’ 35 6 Jönsson, Claus 134 Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor 379, 381 2 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor 378, 388 Jourdan, Louis 493, 501 Joyce, James Finnegans Wake 150, 151, 159, 160, 161 Ulysses 150, 151, 154 6, 160, 163 Jubb, David 270 Jules, Hansil 413 Julien, Isaac Looking for Langston 417 Paradise Omeros 405, 413 17 Julius Caesar Civil Wars 348 Gallic Wars 348 in Spanish theatre 342, 350 Jung, Carl 296 Jungian archetypes 292, 301 Juvenal 90, 433 Satires 94, 428 9 Kane, Timothy Edward 396 402, 397 katabasis 181, 203 see also Marston, Cathy, ‘Choreographing the Katabasis’ Kauffman, Angelica, Telemachus and the Nymphs of Calypso 489, 489 Kean, Edmund 509, 544, 545 Kelly, Michael 473, 474 Kelly’s Opera Saloon, London 512 Kempe, Will 45, 434 Kent, William 456 Kerala, India 48, 52 Kilburn, Tricycle Theatre 565 Kim, Lawrence 431 Kimbrough, Robert 426 kingship 315 16 King’s Majesty’s Servants, theatre company 423 King’s Men theatre company 192 King’s Theatre, London 512, 514 Kinwelmershe, F., and G. Gascoigne, Jocasta 86 Kirk, Geoffrey Stephen 141 Kirschner, Teresa 343 Köhler, Barbara Niemands Frau (Nobody’s Wife) 133, 138, 145 7, 148 ‘THE MOST BEAUTIFUL’ 133 7, 136, 137 Krimmer, Elisabeth 534 Kubrick, Stanley 124 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy 182

Index la Fontaine, Jean de 324 Lacroix, Jules, Œdipe Roi 507 Lamb, Caroline, Glenarvon 510 Lamb, Charles 18 lamentation, female 206, 278 laments, musical 526, 538 Lampedo, Amazon warrior 361 Landgartha see Amazons on stage in England and Ireland Lang, Fritz 124 Larpent Collection 470 Lasdun, James, and Michael Hofmann, After Ovid 99 100 Latin, Dante’s view of 219, 221 Lattimore, Richmond 143, 203, 206, 524 Laughton, Charles, The Night of the Hunter 416 Lawrence, Karen 155 layout of text 254 Le Bossu, René, Le Traité du poème épique 481 Le Clerc, Michel 323 Leal de Matos, M. V. 316 learned epic (épica culta) 336 Lebrun, Pierre, Ulysse 497, 498, 499 Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie René 507 Lecoq, Jacques 175 Ledbury, Market Theatre 564 Ledbury, Saint Katherine’s Hall 563 4 Ledbury Poetry Festival 563 4 Lee (Leigh), Mrs (show woman) 439, 443, 454 Lee, Spike, Do the Right Thing 416 Lefèvre, Raoul 184 Recueil des histoires de Troie 423 Legrenzi, Giovanni, Achille in Sciro 530 Leiden University Library 356 Lemprière, John, Classical Dictionary 550 Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor 382 LeTellier, Father 485 Leverhulme Trust, The 3, 6 Leveridge, Richard, Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe 465 Levi, Peter 259 Lévi Strauss, Claude 408 Lewis, Peter 531, 532 libraries 284, 284 5 Lillo, George Fatal Curiosity 482 The London Merchant 482 Lima, Jorge de ‘A Negra Fulô’ 393 Invenção de Orfeu (The Invention of Orpheus) 390, 392 5, 402 3 Poemas Negros 393 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London 440

631

listening 255 7 listing 157, 158 see also catalogue form LISU (Loughborough University Research and Information Centre) 284 literary criticism and performance studies 22 5 Littlewood, Joan, Oh, What A Lovely War! 57 Livathinos, Stathis, Iliad 8 live poetry performance and Cook, Achilles 567 and Köhler, Niemands Frau 138, 148 and Logue, War Music 563 6 and Oswald, Memorial 137, 277 81, 282, 283 5, 284, 286, 566 7 and Tempest, Brand New Ancients 268 73 see also Homeric orality and contemporary performance Liverpool, Everyman Theatre 16 Livy 378, 384, 385 Lockroy, Joseph Philippe, and Auguste Arnold, L’Extase 520 Lodge, Thomas 68 Logue, Christopher All Day Permanent Red 252, 256 7, 564 5 Cold Calls 252 Kings 255 6, 261, 563 4, 565 Patrocleia 257, 261 Pax 259 60 Prince Charming 250, 251, 257 War Music 250 61, 563, 565 6 Logue, Christopher, and Derek Boshier, Manifesto 254, 260 Logue, Christopher, War Music, text and performance 250 61 audience immersion 255 7 composition techniques 251 3 creation through performance 259 61 text and orality 253 5, 257 9 Lombardo, Stanley 524 London, Adelphi Theatre 543, 550, 554 London, Almeida Theatre 8, 59 London, Astley’s Amphitheatre 514 21, 540, 541, 554 London, Axe and Bottle Yard 454 London, Battersea Arts Centre 268 London, ‘City Poet’ 442, 457 London, Covent Garden 453, 466, 469, 541, 546, 552 London, Drury Lane Theatre 510, 517, 541, 545 London, Exeter ’Change 474 London, Greenwich Palace 192 London, Her Majesty’s Theatre 546 London, Jerwood Theatre Downstairs 270 London, Kelly’s Opera Saloon 512 London, King’s Theatre 512, 514

632

Index

London, Lincoln’s Inn Fields 440 London, Lyceum Theatre 459, 553, 554 London, Marylebone Pleasure Gardens 466 London, Mermaid Court 454 London, National Theatre 565 London, Nursery Theatre 267 London, Old Vic Theatre 57 London, Red Bull playhouse 182 3, 191, 423 London, St James’ Theatre 543, 554 London, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse 405, 411, 412, 412 London, Shakespeare’s Globe 16, 405 London, Strand Theatre 543, 554 London, Surrey Theatre 459, 521, 543, 553, 554 London, Theatre Royal 449, 451 London, Welsh Chapel 196 London, Whitehall Palace 363, 364 London, Wilton’s Music Hall 195 London and Troy 449, 457, 514, 516, 557 London fairs and classical epic 1697 1734 439 60, 440, 445, 446, 450, 460 The Dunciad 456 8 Elkanah Settle 439 44 Powell’s puppets 451 5 The Siege of Troy 444 51 pseudo Longinus 335 loom/mast (histos) 200 Lope de Vega, Arauco domado (Arauco Tamed) 339, 340 5, 347, 348 Lord, Albert 24, 229, 230 The Singer of Tales 232 6, 233 6, 234, 245, 249, 262 Lord Mayor’s Show 442, 457 Lotti, Antonio Ascanio, ovvero Gli odi delusi dal sangue 382 5 Crucifixus 382 Giove in Argo 382 Teofane 382 Loughborough University Research and Information Centre (LISU) 284 Louis XIII, King of France 330 Louis XIV, King of France 335, 356, 380 Louis XVIII, King of France 497 Louis Napoleon 496 Louis Philippe, King of France 495 Lourenço, Eduardo 309 Lowe, Nick 9 Lucan, Pharsalia 337, 348, 352 Lucas, George, Star Wars 124 Lucchini, Antonio Maria Ascanio, ovvero Gli odi delusi dal sangue (libretto) 382 3 Giove in Argo (libretto) 382 Teofane (libretto) 382

Lucian 433, 434 Dialogues of the Dead 428, 430 1, 436 Menippus 428, 431 A True Story 428, 435 Lumley, Jane 74 Lupton, Hugh 264 Lydgate, John, The Fall of Princes 431 Lyly, John Euphues 34, 35 Midas 467 8 lyric 133 41, 136, 137, 140 1, 142 lyric poetry from Homeric epic 133 48 epic and lyric 133 41 Köhler, Niemands Frau 138, 145 7 Oswald, Memorial 137, 141 5 performances 137 8, 148 Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith 269, 271, 567 Macaulay, Alastair 150, 162 Macaulay, Thomas 557 Macauley, Elizabeth 509 10, 511 Theatrical Revolution; or Plain Truth Addressed to Common Sense 510 McClymonds, Marita P. 534 McConnell, Justine 272 McGregor, Wayne 198 Machiavelli, Niccolò 332 Madrid, Teatro de los Caños del Peral 512, 514 Mahabharata 6, 47, 53 Make Poverty History 49 Malézieux, Nicolas de 477 Manchester, Royal Exchange Theatre 16 Mantell, Marianne 283 Mapuche people 337 Marcell, Joseph 412, 413 Maria Antonia, archduchess of Austria 379 Maria Josepha, archduchess of Austria 382, 385 Maria Ricciarda Berenice D’Este 385, 386 Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress 382, 385, 386, 387 Marie de Médicis 365 Marionette Theatre, Cremorne Gardens 515 Marionitis, Dimitris 8 Market Theatre, Ledbury 564 Marlowe, Christopher Dido Queen of Carthage 40, 81 Hero and Leander 464 Tamburlaine 39 Marmontel, Jean François, Penelope (libretto) 498, 499 Marpesia, Amazon queen 361, 374 marriage celebrations 379, 380, 382, 385, 386 7, 388 Marsh, Nick 473

Index Marston, Cathy, ‘Choreographing the Katabasis’ 195, 201 7, 205 Marston, John 77 Martial 91, 94 Martindale, Charles 93, 95 Martínez, Miguel 336 Marxism 292 Marylebone Pleasure Gardens, London 466 Mary Magdalene 344 masculinity in opera 533 5 masks 175 6 Mason, Harold Andrew 253 masques 364 7 see also individual masques mast/loom (histos) 200 maternal impression theory 106, 109 10, 113, 115, 117 maternal metaphors 217, 219 Matthews, Sally 535 Maximilian II Emmanuel, Elector of Bavaria 379 Mayor, Adrienne 362 Mazzoni, Jacopo 65 medicine and theatre 115 Médicis, Marie de 330 medieval folk play traditions 429 30, 438 mediums, actors as 400 Medjedović, Avdo 24 Mehl, Dieter 86 Meilhac, Henri, and L. Halévy, La Belle Hélène (libretto) 536 7 Meister, Joachim, De Rodolpho Habspurgico 388 Melanchthon, Philip 41, 79 80, 84 Melbancke, Brian, Philotimus 34 Melbourne, Theatre Royal 522 Méliès, Georges 124 Melton, Jim 566 memorialization 390, 392 5 memory 278, 280, 286, 399 402 Menander Rhetor 37 Mendelssohn, Felix, Antigone 506, 507 Men in Motion 195 mēnis (wrath) 524 5 meraviglia 341 Merce Cunningham Dance Company 149 Merchant Taylors’ Company 442 Mermaid Court, London 454 merveilleux, the, epic and 480 3 mesmerism 520, 521, 522 Metastasio, Pietro Achille in Sciro (libretto) 533 4 Artaxerxes (libretto) 471 Il re pastore (libretto) 387 metatheatricality 422, 430, 438, 447 see also inter theatricality metre 19, 203, 206, 410 11, 504, 562

633

Meurice, Paul 506 ‘MICRO MEGAS’ (newspaper correspondent) 474 5 Midas see O’Hara, Kane, Midas Middle Passage 390, 405 Middleton, Peter 286 Milhaud, Darius 292 Miller, Ernest 486 Miller, Marie 487 Milton, John Comus 77 Johnson on 139 Paradise Lost 77, 123, 414 Minchin, Elizabeth 278 Mirecourt, Eugène de 494 miroirs des princes 484 mirror, metaphor of 83 Mitchum, Robert 416 Mnouchkine, Ariane 58, 164, 166, 168 mock epic 480 1 modernist epic 150 Molière 117 18 Les Fourberies de Scapin (Scapin the Schemer) 495 Molloy, Joseph Fitzgerald 473 4 monstrous births 104, 106, 110, 114 16 montage technique 393, 394 Montagu, Walter, The Shepherd’s Paradise 367 Monteverdi, Claudio Arianna 526 Le nozze d’Enea con Lavinia 378 Madrigals of War and Love 526 Monthly Mirror (periodical) 514 Montiglio, Silvia 276 Monza, Maria 535 moon, the 186 7 morality plays 429 30, 434, 438 Morand, Pierre de, Les Muses 476, 477, 479, 492 Morden, Daniel 264, 269 Morning Chronicle (newspaper) 474 5 Morning Post (newspaper) 549, 550 Morris, Mark 195 Motley, John, Penelope 465 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Ascanio in Alba 385 7 Idomeneo 486 Il re pastore 387 Muellner, Leonard 525 Muenster, Sebastian 374 multimodal bards of 21st c. 275 88 bard figures 275 81 presence/absence 281 7 multimodal poetry 280 1 multiple authorship 198, 348 multiple perspectives 11, 154, 198

634

Index

multi textuality 242 4, 246 multivocal theatrical epic 44 Murphy, Arthur 466 Murphy, Clare 264 museum performances 174, 176 7 musical theatre see O’Hara, Kane, Midas Musical World (periodical) 556 Mynn, Mrs (show woman) 439, 443, 444 St George for England 444 Whittingdon, Lord Mayor of London 443 Myth Off, competition 264 Nanterre, Université de Paris 3, 6 Naples, Teatro San Carlo 534 narrative, as characteristic of epic 36, 135 40, 140 1, 146, 147 narrator 310 narrator/bard figure 10, 207 see also multimodal bards of 21st c. national epic, Portugal 307 9 National Gallery/Royal Opera House, Metamorphosis: Titian 2012 8 National Library of Ireland 470 National Theatre, London 565 National Theatre of Wales 50 native peoples 390, 392, 403 naturalism, theatrical 479 80, 492 Neander, L. B. 388 Nederduytsche Academie theatre, Amsterdam 357 neoclassical theory 481 Nestle, Walter 335 Netherlands see Dutch Republic, epic theatre in Netherlands Opera, Amsterdam 535 Newcastle, Earl of 367 Newell, Charles 396 New History of the Trojan Wars and Troy’s Destruction, The 460 ‘new memoryism’ 286 New Monthly Magazine and Humorist 515 New Movement Collective (NMC), Nest 195, 196 201, 199, 201 New York Review of Books 120 New Yorker (magazine) 252 Newton, Richard 472 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy 11 Nightingale, Florence 523 Cassandra 520 ‘nine wits’ (‘nueve ingenios’), Algunas hazañas (Some Deeds) 339, 341, 346 8 Nixon, John, Dramatic Annals 512 noises in Homer 254 5 Nolfi, Vincenzo, and F. Sacrati, Bellerofonte 487 North, Thomas 84

Norton, T., and T. Sackville, Gorboduc 71, 86 nostalgia 124, 330, 390, 392 Novak, Julia 281 novels 23, 389, 483 Noverre, Jean Georges, Agamemnon vengé 514 ‘nueve ingenios’ (‘nine wits’), Algunas hazañas (Some Deeds) 339, 341, 346 8 Nursery Theatre, London 267 Nye, Edward 486 O’Brien, Geoffrey 120 O’Brien, Stafford 516 O’Carolan, Turlough 467 ‘Odyssean’ epic model 481 Odyssée 24 (worldwide reading) 8 Odyssey Project: My Name is Nobody (BBC Radio) 560 Offenbach, Jacques, La Belle Hélène 536 7, 538 Ogilby, John 449 O’Hara, Kane 467, 468, 474 O’Hara, Kane, Midas 461 75 Midas in puppet theatre 473 5 Midas on stage 467 73 the musical stage 464 7 O’Hara, Kane, The Golden Pippin 463, 552 O’Hara, Kean Og 467 O’Hare, Denis, and Lisa Peterson, An Iliad 265 6, 390 1, 396 402, 397, 402 3 O’Keeffe, John, The Siege of Troy 514 15, 516 17 Old Vic Theatre, London 57 Olivier, Laurence 57 Olympic opening ceremony, London 48 9 omophagia 394 Oña, Pedro de, Arauco domado (Arauco Tamed) 338 9, 342, 347 8 O’Neil, John Robert (Hugo Vamp) The Golden Pippin; or, The Judgement of Paris and the Siege of Troy 515 The Siege of Troy; or, The Misjudgement of Paris 515, 520 1 O’Neill, Hugh, Earl of Tyrone 375 Ong, Walter 279 opera epic sources of 525 6, 538 opera buffa 471 opera seria 471, 527 ‘Spectacle Lyrique’ 483 see also Achilles in opera; Ascanius in 18th c. opera; Tippett, Michael, King Priam, epic refracted in oral composition and Homer 24 5, 228 49 formulas 232 6, 234, 235 improvisation 228 32, 249

Index length 246 8, 247 variation 242 4 orality and contemporary performance 262 74 fixed and unfixed performances 263 8 fixed/unfixed fusion 268 73 oral performance and Armitage, Odyssey 282 3, 284 and Cook, Achilles 567 and Dante 210 and Köhler, Niemands Frau 138, 148 and Logue, War Music 563 6 and Marston, Katabasis 207 and Oswald, Memorial 137, 277 81, 282, 283 5, 284, 286, 566 7 and Tempest, Brand New Ancients 268 73 and text 10 11, 253 5, 257 9, 279 81, 406 9 see also orality and contemporary performance oral poets of Yugoslavia 229 oral tradition and authorship 410 oral tradition and metre 411 oratory 79, 83, 87, 88 Orestes, popularity in England 74, 75 ornamental epithets 233 Orpheus and Eurydice tale 8, 392, 394 Orwell, George, 1984 570 Oswald, Alice, ‘Hymn to Iris’ 286 Oswald, Alice, Memorial lyric and gender in 133, 141 5 and oral performance 137, 277 81, 282, 283 6, 284, 566 7 Oswald, Peter, Odysseus 569 Other Place, The, Stratford upon Avon 409 ottava rima 35 Ovid Camões and 308 Heroides 93, 194, 325, 545, 550 self reception of 93 Tristia 92, 93, 94 Ovid, Metamorphoses 164 Crawley, Myrrha and 173 Fénelon, Télémaque and 487 Heywood, Silver Age and 184, 185, 186, 188 Marston and 202 O’Hara, Midas and 461, 463, 469, 473 Thersites interludes and 428, 429 Walcott, Omeros and 406 see also Pyramus and Thisbe tale, reception of Oxford, St Hilda’s College 195 pacifism 538 Packard, Edward 196 Pacuvius 34, 41

635

pageants 442 palimpsest technique 394 Panathenaea 76 pantomime, ancient (tragoedia saltata) 86, 165, 174 5, 203 Paper Cinema, Odyssey 8 Parini, Giuseppe Ascanio in Alba (libretto) 385 Le nozze d’Atalanta (libretto) 385 Paris, Bouffes du Nord 6 Parker, Patricia 43 Parry, Milman 10 11, 24, 229, 234, 236, 259, 262 Pas de Déesses 546 ‘Pas de Déesses at Her Majesty’s Theatre’ 546 Pasichnyk, Olga 535 Passion Plays 49, 50 Patagonian Puppet Theatre 474 Paul, Saint 222 Pavelka, Michael de 570 pedagogical function of epic 9 Peele, George 74 Pels, Andries, Didoos Doot 359 Penkethman, William 454 ‘Heathen Gods’ 455 Penny Illustrated Paper 519 20 Penthesilea 362, 363, 370, 374 Pepusch, J., and A. Corelli, Achilles 530 2 performance, Plato and 64 5, 64 6, 76, 78 9, 396 402 performance and composition 259 61 see also orality and contemporary performance performance culture, 19th c. 544 5, 545 51, 555, 557 performance poetry see orality and contemporary performance performance poets, Walcott and 408 9 performance practices see orality and contemporary performance performance reception 69 70 performance scholarship 558 performance statistics, 16th c. 74 5 performance storytelling 264 performance studies and literary criticism 22 5 performance traditions, Brecht and 9 performative dimension of epic 10 performative turn, the 391, 396 402, 402 3 performer, mistrust of 88 Performing Epic project (APGRD) 3 Peroux, Joseph Nicolaus 511 Perrault, Charles, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes 477, 484 Perris, Simon 9 Perrucci, Andrea 86

636

Index

Pescetti, Giovanni Battista, and B. Galuppi, Ascanio, ovvero Gli odi delusi dal sangue 383 Pessoa, Fernando, Mensagem 394 Peterson, Lisa, and Denis O’Hare, An Iliad 265 6, 390 1, 396 402, 397, 402 3 Phelan, Peggy 166 Philip II, King of Spain 337, 344, 345 Philomel tale 95 philosophical rationalism 480 physicality in performance poetry 561, 566, 571 Piccini, N., Penelope 498 Pickering, John, Horestes 75 Pindar 308 Pinsky, Robert 567 pipe simile 93 Pisan, Christine de, Cyte of Ladies 374 Plato Ion 10, 64 5, 76, 78 9, 396 8, 401 2 and performance 64 6, 76, 78 9, 396 402 Republic 64, 65, 396, 398, 402 Symposium 296 Plautus, Amphitryo 72, 73, 184 Plutarch 84 pseudo Plutarch, De Homero 64, 65 Pluto on stage 185 6, 187 8 poetry see Dante and Latin epic; embodiment, epic as; heightened receptivity in performance; Homer as improviser; institutional receptions: The Lusíads; Logue, Christopher, War Music, text and performance; lyric poetry from Homeric epic; multimodal bards of 21st c.; orality and contemporary performance; individual poets poetry readings 8, 281 Poli, Francesca 534 political contexts 105 of Achilles in French tragedy 323, 325, 326, 327, 330, 335 of Amazon plays 363, 365 6, 366 7, 368, 372, 375 of Ascanius operas 380, 382, 385, 386 7, 387 8 of Burnand, Dido 548 of Camões, Lusíads 312 17 of Dutch Drama 354 8, 360 of fairground shows 449 of Farr, The Odyssey 567 8, 570 of Fénelon, Télémaque 485 6 of O’Hara, Midas 463, 470, 472 3 of O’Neil, The Siege of Troy 520 of Ponsard, Ulysse 495, 496, 497 of Saramago, What Shall I Make of This Book? 318 21

of Spanish epics 337 of Verse Theater Manhattan, War Music 565 politics 13 14 Pollarolo, Carlo Francese, Ascanio 378 Polyxena 325 6, 332 3, 334 Pompey 348 Ponsard, François Agnès de Méranie 495 Charlotte Corday 495, 496 Études antiques 494, 506 Homère 494, 503 4 Horace et Lydie 495, 496 Lucrèce 495, 496 Ponsard, François, Ulysse 493 507 context 495 8 Odysseus’ return 498 500 translating Homer 500 5 Pope, Alexander The Dunciad 456 8 on Fénelon’s Télémaque 484 Iliad 456 8, 524 Logue and 252 3 popular culture see burlesque on London stage; Cassandras in performance, 1795 1868; London fairs and classical epic 1697 1734; O’Hara, Kane, Midas Porter, Cole, ‘Night and Day’ 237 41, 237, 238, 240, 241 Porter, James 288, 567 Porter, Lewis 241, 245 6 Port Talbot Passion Play 50 Portugal, national epic 307 9 Post Boy, The (newspaper) 449 50 postcolonialism 320 1 poster poetry 253, 254 post Soviet playwrights 58 9 Pound, Ezra Cantos 258 9 ‘Early Translators of Homer’ 259 Pountney, Rosemary 206 7 Powell, Martin 458 The City Rake 453 The Creation of the World 453 The False Triumph 451 2, 454 The History of Sir Richard Whittington 453 King Bladud the Founder of Bath 453 Prague Castle 379 Prato, Paulo, Voyage to Brazil 394 prayer 214 16 presentness 166 7, 170, 171 Priam of Homeric plays in 16th c. 68 9 of plays in Dutch Republic 356 see also Tippett, Michael, King Priam, anger in; Tippett, Michael, King Priam, epic refracted in

Index Private Eye (magazine) 251 2 ‘procedural authorship’ 267 8, 274 proliferation of parts 154 6 Prometheus see Scott, Ridley, Prometheus Propp, Vladimir 125 Proserpina myth 184 8 Prynne, William, Historiomastix: The Players Scourge, or Actors Tragedie 367 psychosomatic responses 209, 226 Ptolemaic Papyri 242 4, 246 Punchanella, Signior (opera singer) 452 puppet shows 451 5, 460, 465, 467, 473 5 Purcell, Henry, Dioclesian 449, 451 Purchas, Samuel 374 Putrov, Ivan, Ithaca 195 Puttenham, George, Arte of English Poesie 33, 37, 67 Pyramus and Thisbe tale, reception of 90 102 in D’Aguiar 99 100 in Hughes 97 9, 100 1 in Ovid 91 4 in Shakespeare 94 7 in Supple and Read 100 1 pyrotechnics 182 see also special effects quantum theory 147 quarrel of the ancients and moderns 477, 478 80, 484 quarrel of the ‘Classiques’ and ‘Romantiques’ 495 8 Queen’s Servants theatre company 182, 183, 192 Quin, James 77 Quint, David 13 Quintana, Benito 347 Quintilian 79, 80, 81, 83 4, 86, 88 Racan, Honorat de, Artenice 366 Rachel (actress) 496 Racine, Jean 117 18, 292, 480 Andromaque 498, 499 Athalie 497 Esther 497 Iphigenia in Aulis 323 Radcliffe, C. 547 radio broadcasts 250, 255 7, 260 1, 282, 560 3, 571 Radio National Drama, Australia 562 ‘rage arias’ 527, 538 Rainbow Quarry, Minnesota 150 Rainolde, Richard, Foundacion of rhetorike 426 Ramayana 47, 53, 165, 172, 407 Ramleela 407 Ramsay, Andrew Michael 484 rap 272

637

Rapin, René 482 La Comparaison d’Homère et de Virgile 478 reader as collaborator 209, 211, 221 Reade, Simon, and Tim Supple, Tales from Ovid 91, 100 1 reading aloud 210 readings, poetry 8, 281 real and hyperreal in Revolutionary France 476 92, 488, 489, 490 epic and the merveilleux 480 3 Télémaque as ballet 485 92 Télémaque as epic paradigm 483 5 tragedy vs epic 478 80 reception and colonialism 406, 415 reception, institutional see institutional receptions: The Lusíads ‘receptions, chain of ’ 416 receptivity see heightened receptivity in performance Reck, Michael 524 recognition scenes 104, 114, 117, 209, 222 Red Bull playhouse, London 182, 183, 191, 423 refugees 167 9, 568 9 Reid, Christopher 259 religious theatre 49 53 Renzi, Anna 529 repetition 278 republicanism 337, 348 Return to Parnassus, The 45 revenge drama 75 Revermann, Martin 3 4 Revue de Paris 493 Reynolds, Matthew 256 Reynold’s Newspaper 550 rhapsodes 10, 281, 408, 497, 563 5 see also bard/narrator figure rhetoric see oratory Rhetoric for Herennius (Ad Herennium) 38, 43, 77 rhetorical styles 77 rhythm in Dante 209, 223, 225, 226, 227 Richelieu, Cardinal 330, 476 Ricœur, Paul 516 Ridl, Jack 392, 395 Riley, Patrick 484 ring composition 201 rivalry, poetic 35 6, 40, 42 Robertson, Ritchie 481, 483 Robinson, Henry Morton, and Joseph Campbell, Skeletal Key to Finnegans Wake 151, 156 role models, female 516, 523 Rolli, Paolo Antonio, Deidamia (libretto) 534 5 Roman d’Énéas, Le 377

638

Index

Roman Empire 212, 378 9, 382, 387 8 romance 104 romance epics 423 romantic motifs in tragedy 326 Romanticism 309, 310, 495 6 ‘Romantiques’ and ‘Classiques’, quarrel of the 495 8 see also quarrel of the ancients and moderns Romney, George, Cassandra 511 12 Rosand, Ellen 529 Rosenfeld, Sybil 444, 447 Rossi, Domenico Agamennone 514 El incendio de Troya (The Fire at Troy) 512, 514 Le Siège de Troye 512 14, 513 Rotgans, Lucas, Eneas en Turnus (De dood van Turnus) 359 Rotrou, Jean de 323 Routh, Francis 296 Royal Court Theatre, London 269 Royal Opera House/National Gallery, Metamorphosis: Titian 2012 8 Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford upon Avon 570 Rubens, Beaty 560 Rubery, Matthew 283 Runcie, James 560 Russia, playwrights 58 9 Sackville, T., and T. Norton, Gorboduc 71, 86 Sacrati, Francesco, and V. Nolfi, Bellerofonte 487 Sacrati, Francesco, La finta pazza (The Feigned Madwoman) 529 Said, Edward 342 St Hilda’s College, Oxford 195 St James’ Theatre, London 543, 554 St John’s College, Cambridge 33, 34, 36, 45 St Katherine’s Hall, Ledbury 563 4 St Paul’s Boys, theatre company 74, 77 Sainte Beuve, Charles Augustin 506 7 Sainte Maure, Benoît de, Roman de Troie 325, 423 Salway, Thomas 531 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London 405, 411, 412, 412 Sanspareil rock garden, Bayreuth 489 Santa Barbara, University of California Center for Evolutionary Psychology 527 Santisteban, Diego de, Quarta y quinta parte de La Araucana (fourth and fifth parts of La Araucana) 339 40, 345 Sappho (frag. 16) 134 6, 136, 137 Saramago, José, What Shall I Make of This Book? 309 10, 310 14, 317, 318, 320 1

Sarro, Domenico, Achille in Sciro 534 Saucy Jack, character 429 30, 434 saudade 392, 394, 395 Savoie, Thomas de 329 Saxo Grammaticus, History of the Danes 363 Sbarra, Filippo Renato, L’Ascanio (libretto) 378, 379 scale in contemporary theatre 46 59 after Brecht 56 8 Brecht 54 6 epic theatres of world 49 54 loss of epic 58 9 stadiums 48 9 scale of action Aristotle on 16, 17 19, 23 5 in Armitage’s plays 27 8 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 71, 352, 481 Poetics 37 8 Scarlatti, Domenico, Tetide in Sciro 530 Scarron, Paul, Virgile Travesti 464 scenery 474, 521 2 scepticism 482 Schechner, Richard 401 Scheuer, Hans Jürgen 133, 135, 136 Schneider, Rebecca 174 Schoch, R. W. 553, 554, 555, 556, 557 scholia 243 ‘school of common sense’ (‘école du bon sens’) 496 school programmes, Portugal 318, 319 Schouwburg theatre, Amsterdam 357, 359 science fiction 120 5 Scodel, Ruth 287 8 Scolari, Giuseppe, La Cascina 466 Sconin, Adrien 323 Scotsman, The (newspaper) 564 5 Scott, Ridley, Gladiator 123 Scott, Ridley, Prometheus 119 32, 122 and biology 125 32 as epic 120 5 Scott, William, The Model of Poesy 36, 38, 39, 42, 44, 68 Scriblerian satire 480 Scythia 369, 375 seal, performing (Jenny) 547 Sebastião, King of Portugal 313 Sébillet, Thomas 322 secondary orality 279 secular ethics and Christian morality 330 Selby, Charles, Judgment of Paris; or, The Pas de Pippins 543, 546 ‘self difference’ 571 Sena, Jorge de ‘Camões Addresses His Contemporaries’ 319 Camões and the National Identity 310, 319 ‘Super Flumina Babylonis’ 319

Index Seneca 85, 308 Controversiae 93 sententiae 85 6 Serbo Croatian oral tradition 236, 245 Settle, Elkanah 439 44, 451, 457, 458 Cambyses 440 The Empress of Morocco 440 The Siege of Troy 439, 444 51, 446, 454, 456, 459 60, 465 The Triumphs of London 442 The Virgin Prophetess; or The Fate of Troy 450, 451 sexual politics 531 2 Sh’ia Ta’zieh, theatre tradition 49 50 Shakespeare and epic 31 45 2 Henry IV 39 Hamlet 37, 40 1 history of term 32 7 Lucrece 38 9 Othello 40 Troilus and Cressida 41 4, 45 Shakespeare’s Globe, London 16, 405 Shakespeare, William 2 Henry IV 39 and acting 82 Armitage and 277, 283, 287 burlesques of 542, 557 Comedy of Errors 39 40 Cymbeline 431 Hamlet 37, 40 1, 71, 80 8, 89 Henry V 82 3, 251 King Lear 59 Love’s Labour’s Lost 257 Lucrece 38 9 Macbeth 545 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 57, 90, 94 7, 101, 473 Othello 40, 502 and Ovid 90, 94 7 Pericles 186 Richard III 436, 545 The Tempest 186, 193 ‘The Mousetrap’ 85 7 Titus Andronicus 94, 95 Troilus and Cressida 41 4, 45, 423, 425, 432 5, 511 Venus and Adonis 38 and Virgil 39 40, 41 The Winter’s Tale 91 Shakespeare, William, and John Fletcher The Two Noble Kinsmen 193 shamans, actors as 401 Shay, Jonathan, Achilles in Vietnam 403 Sheen, Michael 50 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 124 shield of Achilles 139 40

639

Shirley, James 367, 368 Shuter, Mr (actor) 470 Sichuan Opera 54 Sidney, Philip 84 Defence of Poesie 36, 37 Sidney, Robert 35 Siecle, Madame (Madame Eckardt) (clairvoyant) 522 3 ‘siege theatre’ 459 Signior Punchanella, opera singer 452 silence 571 silencing of female characters 376 Silk, Michael S. 5, 15, 90, 228 similes, epic 277 8 simulated orality 279, 559 simultaneous action 18 19, 154 Skinner, Marsha 151 2 Slaney, Helen 203 slavery 406, 408, 415, 473 slaves 299, 390, 392, 403, 411 Smart, Christopher, The Judgment of Midas: A Masque 468 Smit, Pierre 352 Smith, Gregory E. 229 Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin 466, 470 snail proverb 430 Snyder, Zack 123 4 social criticism, burlesques and 464 Socrates 64, 65, 78, 396 8 Songs in the New Burletta of Midas 470 Sophocles Ajax 69, 70, 436 Antigone 4, 70 Electra 69, 70, 499 and improbable actions 19 Oedipus Rex/Oedipus Tyrannus 57, 70, 482 Philoctetes 70, 324, 407 sound in performance 561, 569 sound in poetry 254 5 South Slavic epic singers 24, 229, 262 Southbank Centre, London 282 Southwark Fair 439, 440, 443, 444, 446 Spain, epic poetry 336 Spanish theatre, epic moment 53 Spartoi 117 special effects in burlettas 465 in English theatre 182, 183, 184, 188, 190 1 in fairground shows 444 5, 448 in Spanish theatre 341, 346 spectacle 49, 54, 341, 346, 523 ‘Spectacle Lyrique’ (opera) 483 spectacles, equestrian 514 23 spectators see audience speculum regi 315 16 Spence, Alan 564 5

640 Spencer, Charles 101 Spenser, Edmund 369 The Faerie Queene 364, 375 View of the Present State of Ireland 375 Sponde, Jean de 422 Sporting Times 545, 550 1 Stacey, Jackie 126 stadium theatres 48 stage machinery 358 see also special effects staging of Araucanian plays 341 of Cunningham, Ocean 157 8, 159, 160 of Farr, The Odyssey 568 9 of Heywood, Silver Age 184, 186, 188, 189 90, 192 of NMC, Nest 197 8, 199, 199 200, 201 of solo performances 564 of Théâtre du Soleil, Le Dernier Caravansérail 170 of Théâtre du Soleil, Les Éphémères 171 of Verse Theater Manhattan, War Music 565 6 Stanislavski, Konstantin 88 Statius 216 18 Achilleid 325, 428, 529, 532, 538 Thebaid 188 9, 193 Steele, Richard, Tatler 483 4 Stewart, Garrett 279 Stiblinus, Gasparus 66, 71, 75 stile concitato 526, 535, 538 Stone Nest, arts organization 196 Stoppelaer, Michael 474 Storace, Stefano 466 storyteller figure 415 16 storytelling 264, 267, 412, 417 Strand Theatre, London 543, 554 Stratford upon Avon, The Other Place 409, 570 Strozzi, Giulio, La finta pazza (The Feigned Madwoman) (libretto) 529 Supple, Tim 4, 8, 15, 570 Supple, Tim, and Simon Reade, Tales from Ovid 91, 100 1 Surrey Theatre, London 459, 521, 543, 553, 554 suspense 104, 114 Sveaas, Clemmie 199, 199 Sylphide, La (ballet) 492 syncretism, Caribbean 407 syrtos 203 Szondi, Peter 9 Talbot, Rachel 470 Talking Fish (Mr Davey) 547, 548 Tamil Nadu, India 53 Tamvaco, Jean Louis 488

Index Taplin, Oliver 140 1, 154, 200 Tarantino, Quentin 121 Tasso, Torquato 341 Aminta 387 Tassoni, Alessandro 480 Tate, Nahum, The Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel 441, 451 Tatlock, John 423 Taylor, Diana 174 Teatro de Almada, Portugal 318 Teatro de los Caños del Peral, Madrid 512, 514 Teatro Novissimo, Venice 529 Teatro San Carlo, Naples 534 Teatro Sant’ Angelo, Venice 534 technologies in theatre 4, 54 see also special effects Tecmen, Madame (mesmerist) 520 Tempest, Kate, Brand New Ancients 268 73 Terence, Eunuch 94 Terukkuttu theatre form 53 Terwin, Mr (puppet master) 454 Tesi, Vittoria 534 Textor, Ravisius, Thersites 421, 427 8 textual criticism 244 textual variants 242 4, 246 Theater of War 397 n.24, 403 Theatre (periodical) 553 theatre, Australia 521 3 theatre, contemporary see Aristotelian perspective on literature; embodiment, epic as; heightened receptivity in performance; orality and contemporary performance; Pyramus and Thisbe tale, reception of; scale in contemporary theatre; Walcott, Derek, Omeros on stage and screen theatre, Dutch Republic see Dutch Republic, epic theatre in theatre, England, 19th c. see burlesque on London stage; Cassandras in performance, 1795 1868 theatre, England, early modern see acting in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Amazons on stage in England and Ireland; Pyramus and Thisbe tale, reception of; Shakespeare and epic; Thersites in early modern drama; underworld in Heywood’s The Silver Age theatre, Europe, early modern see Homeric plays in 16th c. Europe theatre, France, 19th c. see Ponsard, François, Ulysse theatre, France, early modern see Achilles in French tragedy; Heliodorus, Aethiopica in early modern French theatre

Index theatre, France, Revolutionary period see real and hyperreal in Revolutionary France theatre, Ireland, early modern see Amazons on stage in England and Ireland theatre, Portugal, 20th c. see institutional receptions: The Lusíads theatre, Spain, early modern see conquest on the 17th c. Spanish stage théâtre conté 412 Théâtre du Soleil 58, 165 72 Le Dernier Caravansérail 164, 165 6, 167 71 Les Éphémères 164, 167, 171 2 Théâtre Français see Comédie Française (Théâtre Français) Theatre Royal, London 449, 451 Theatre Royal, Melbourne 522 theatres in Dutch Republic 357 8 Thebes, House of 117, 188 9, 193 ‘theme’ words 525 Theobald, Lewis 456, 458 Thersites in early modern drama 421 38 in Heywood, Iron Age 435 7 in interludes 425 32 in Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 432 5 Thevet, André 374 Thomas, Dylan 281 Thomas, Taffy 264 Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto 409 Tillyard, E. M. W. 154 time space 152, 153 6, 163 Tippett, Michael, A Child of Our Time 290, 297 Tippett, Michael, King Priam, anger in 537 9 Tippett, Michael, King Priam, epic refracted in 289 304 communities and groupings 296 301 engagement and alienation 290 3 reflections and doubles 293 6 responses and emotions 301 4 Titian, Diana and Actaeon 487 Todorov, Tzvetan 125 Tomlinson, Gary 526 Tonson, Jacob 449 ‘topic’ words 525 Torelli, Giacomo 487 Toronto University, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library 409 ‘towering’ epic 14 tragedy Aristotle on 17 18 and emotion 64 6 and epic, France 476 80 in Hughes, Tales from Ovid 98, 99 in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 95 in Pyramus and Thisbe tale 93, 95

641

tragicomedy in French theatre 106, 108, 111, 112, 114 origins of 72 5 in Spanish theatre 340 5, 350 tragoedia saltata (ancient pantomime) 86, 165, 174 5, 203 training of improvisers 267 8 transcriptions of Greek words 507 translatio imperii 544 translation 194 5, 208, 260, 494, 500 6, 524 5 see also individual translators translation as collage 253 translation theory 505 6 trapdoors 9, 182, 183, 184, 188, 192 travesties 464 Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn 565 Trinidad Theatre Workshop 404 Trojan Horse, depiction 444, 445 Troy in early modern theatre 7, 63 4, 69, 326, 359 60 and London 449, 457, 514, 516, 557 in Tippett, King Priam 289, 290 see also burlesque on London stage; London fairs and classical epic 1697 1734 Troy (movie) 22 3 Trusler, John 466 Tsagalis, Christos C. 142, 144, 145, 248 Tudor, David 151 tumid style 43 Turia, Ricardo de, La bellígera española (The Spanish Woman Warrior) 339, 348 50 Twyne, Thomas, The schoolemaster 428 9 typography 253, 254, 259 Udall, Nicholas, Thersites 421 2, 426 8, 429, 430, 432, 434 Ullman, Michael 241, 245 6 underworld in Heywood’s The Silver Age 181 93 Hercules 189 92 Pluto and Proserpine 184 9 unities 23 unnamed characters 297 300 Vacquerie, Auguste 506 Vamp, Hugo (John Robert O’Neil) The Golden Pippin; or, The Judgement of Paris and the Siege of Troy 515 The Siege of Troy; or, The Misjudgement of Paris 515, 520 1 variants 242 6 Vegio, Maffeo 377 8 Venice, Teatro Novissimo 529 Venice, Teatro Sant’ Angelo 534 Venn, Edward 294

642

Index

Venus 386, 387 Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) 360 Verfremdungseffekte (distancing techniques) 4, 87, 153, 291, 302 vernacular language 219 20, 220 2, 226 7 Vernant, Jean Pierre 302 verse on heroes (heldendicht) 351 Verse Theater Manhattan, War Music 565 6 Vickers, Aaron 202, 203, 204, 205 Vickers, Brian 90 Victor, Benjamin 444 Victorian theatre, epic moment 54 violence 340, 343 5, 346 7 Virgil Camões and 307, 308 and genre hierarchy 139 in Hamlet 80 Virgil, Aeneid Addison and 452 arming of hero in 427 Armitage, Last Days of Troy and 26 Berlioz, Les Troyens and 536, 538 Burnand, Dido and 549 Cobbold, Cassandra and 511 Dante and 213, 214 16, 217, 220, 222, 225, 226 Dutch theatre and 358 60 in fairground shows 447 Fux, Julo Ascanio and 380 1 Habsburg propaganda and 388 in Jonson’s Poetaster 77 Lima, Invention of Orpheus and 393 Lotti, Ascanio and 384, 385 and memory 399 Mozart, Ascanio in Alba and 386, 387 and oratory 79 80, 83, 84, 88 9 and Ovid 93 Pope, Dunciad and 456 7 Rossi and 512, 514 Shakespeare’s allusions to 39 40 Talking Fish and 547 William III and 449 see also Ascanius in 18th c. opera Virgil, Fourth Eclogue 217 18 Virgil, Georgics 452 visual similes 253 4 visual vs verbal, in performance 508, 523 VOC (Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie, Dutch East India Company) 360 voice 279, 280, 281, 288, 571 see also female voices ‘voiced text’ 272 Voltaire 477, 479 Essai sur la poésie épique 480 Sémiramis 482

Vondel, Joost van den, Gysbreght van Aemstel 359 60 Vossius, Gerardus 352 Vyasa, Mahabharata 6, 47, 53 Walcott, Derek The Odyssey: A Stage Version 409, 570 Omeros 390, 393, 396 ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’ (Nobel lecture) 407, 414 ‘The Schooner Flight’ 404 Walcott, Derek, Omeros on stage and screen 404 17 Julien, Paradise Omeros 413 17 Omeros film script 409 11 Shakespeare’s Globe’s Omeros 411 13, 412 Walk the Plank, Spellbound (Rama and Sita) 165, 172 3 Waltz, Sasha 195 wandering bards 275 7 war futility of 538 as spectacle 346 7 trauma of 391, 396 9, 400 Warr, George Winter, The Tale of Troy: Scenes and Tableaux from the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer 542 Watson, Miss (actress) 510 Watts, Ann Chalmers, The Lyre and the Harp 259 Webbe, William 67 Wedding of Smilagic Meho, The 24 Week of Modern Art, Brazil 394 Weigel, Helene 78 Weil, Simone 141, 142 Wellesley, Garret Colley, Viscount Dangan 466 7 Welsh Chapel, London 196 Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Strafford 365, 368 Werburgh Street Theatre, Dublin 363, 367 West, Martin 204 5, 244 West Yorkshire Playhouse 567 Westminster School 521 Wharton, Edith, The Valley of Decision 534 Whitbread Prize for Poetry, winners of 286 White, Arnold, The English Democracy 523 White, Gareth, Audience Participation in Theatre 267 8 Whitehall Palace, London 363, 364 Whitley, Alexander 196 Wickham Theatre, Bristol University 565 6 Wilberforce, William 472 3 Wilhelmina, Margravine of Bayreuth 489

Index Wilkinson, Tate 453 William III, King of England 356, 449 Williams, Aubrey 457 Willson, Suzy 164, 172, 174 Wilson, Michael, Storytelling and Theatre 263 4 Wilton’s Music Hall, London 195 Winterbottom, Michael, Code 46 131 Wiseman, Peter 90 Wiser, Renaud 200 Woburn Abbey 516 Wolfe, Jessica 433 women, role of 508 women and knowledge 508, 509, 516, 523 women in French Revolution 491

643

women on stage 364 7, 368 see also Cassandras in performance, 1795 1868; individual performers Wylde, Martin 569 Xenophanes 20 Yale University 282 Yates, Edmund 549 Yeats, William Butler, ‘The Statues’ 303 4 Young Vic Theatre, London 6 Yugoslavia, oral epics of 24, 229, 262 Zappa, William, Iliad 562 3 Zeitlin, Froma 72