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2013.
The Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy.
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717.
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On the Pressure of Circumstance in Greek Tragedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Extract
It is an unfortunate weakness of most of the standard textbooks on Greek tragedy that they fail to communicate the immediacy of pressure that is of its essence. This particular inadequacy has hardly been corrected by the recent spate of books on either staging or the visual presentation of plays, which suggest themselves now as the standard adjustment to existing handbooks for students with or without the language.
One of the few certainties we have, in beginning the argument, is that tragedy is, if anything, about decisions and their consequences. This much is implied in Aristotle's intuition about hamartia, which if it means ‘mistake’ can be taken to direct attention to the circumstances which dictate a decision. Indeed, decisions are far more prominent in Attic tragedy than mistakes as such: to take two examples from the Oresteia, which as an Aeschylean trilogy should not seem so exceptional as people are inclined to make it, both Agamemnon and Orestes take decisions of terrifying consequence that can hardly be classed as ‘mistakes’ (namely to kill a daughter and to kill a mother, Iphigenia and Clytemnestra in Agamemnon and Libation Bearers respectively). In this respect, Aristotle might be taken as considering more closely the sentimental drama that flourished in his day, and in this, if we judge by his perceptions, it may well be that Oedipus the King of Sophocles in fact marks a turning-point—in the desperate futility of Oedipus' errors—which is more readily, and perhaps with less justice, ascribed to Euripides.
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References
1. The paucity of clear yet detailed introductions to the meaning of the plays as text or performance is often forgotten by those who fail to realise that even specialist language students, at undergraduate level, do require manuals of this sort. The current accent on performance in recent studies is certainly to be welcomed, but there must be some doubt about the validity of a concept of ‘stagecraft’, or of stage ‘vision’, which resolutely fails to tackle the central problem of the proper acting-area for fifth-century performance: for a critique of recent studies, and a counter-proposal for a more committed and convincing construction of the presentation of Greek tragedy, see the joint article by Ewans, Michael and Ley, Graham, ‘The Orchestra as Acting-area in Greek Tragedy’, Ramus 14 (1985), 75–84Google Scholar, with the works cited there. One particular point of adjustment, which draws attention to the society that produced the plays (as, for example, in ‘Elizabethan’ or ‘Jacobean’ tragedy), is to favour ‘Attic’ or ‘Athenian’ in place of the more usual ‘Greek’ tragedy, and this will be adopted here.
2. Poetics 1453a 7ff.
3. The emphasis in the Poetics on Oedipus the King, and on the contrivances towards tragic effect in (later) Euripides, with a corresponding lack of attention to Aeschylus, might easily be taken to indicate a bias of this kind. It is to be expected, surely, that Aristotle would seek in the classics for corroboration of the more salient and potentially vigorous characteristics of the failing tragedy of his day; the attempt to make him answer for what was for him a totally dead form of lyric tragedy seems to me confounded by the weakness and limitations of his comments on the chorus (1456a 25ff.) as indeed of those on spectacle (1450b 16ff. and 1453b 7ff.).
4. One thinks here of the plays by Galsworthy, John (Strife, 1909Google Scholar; Justice, 1910), Harley Granville-Barker (Waste, 1907), following on the contentious Plays Unpleasant (in particular Widowers’ Houses, 1892, and Mrs. Warren's Profession, written 1894 and first performed 1902) by George Bernard Shaw. Pre-censorship of texts for performance was finally abolished in Britain in 1968, after scandals involving plays by both Osborne, John (A Patriot for Me, 1965Google Scholar) and Edward|Bond (Saved, 1965Google ScholarPubMed, and Early Morning, 1968). Pre-censorship of the stage was effectively introduced (= defined by statute) in 1737 by Robert Walpole. For the events immediately preceding its abolition see, for example, Browne, T., Playwrights’ Theatre: The English Stage Company at the Royal Court (London 1975), 56–71Google Scholar.
5. On this, the discussion by Podlecki, A., The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (Ann Arbor 1966), 63–100Google Scholar, remains extremely useful.
6. Summaries of the plots of these two lost plays can be found in Webster, T.B.L., The Tragedies of Euripides (London 1967Google Scholar), though that for the Alexander should be adjusted, where necessary, in the light of Coles, R.A., A New Oxyrhynchus Papyrus: The Hypothesis of Euripides’ Alexandras, BICS Supp. 32 (London 1974Google Scholar).
7. Antigone, repeatedly, sees death as a desired end: 71–75, 460–66, 555, and 559f.
8. Readers may be surprised, as I was, to find this judgement of Albin Lesky, one of the most distinguished of modern German scholars, on the Antigone in Greek Tragedy, tr. Frankfort, H.A. (London 1967), 108Google Scholar: ‘What Antigone really fights for are the unwritten laws of the gods; the laws with which, as she puts it, the polis ought never to be in conflict. But Creon does not act as the representative of the polis, which is unanimously in favour of Antigone (733); his decision is arrogant and evil.’ This remarkably one-sided view seems to suggest that, on this occasion, Lesky allowed moral indignation to override his grasp of the period. Some twenty years on we may be less inclined to believe that the ability of women to speak or act for themselves needs to be encouraged by the warmth of male approval, patronising or otherwise, as here.
9. It is a useful control on our understanding of Aristotle to note that the period which Nietzsche sees as marking the degeneration of tragedy, namely the later (or ‘Socratic’ in Nietzsche’s terms) fifth-century, is also that about which Aristotle clearly feels most confident, certainly in terms of identifying, as he sees it, the mechanisms of tragic effect. The attack on ‘aesthetic Socratism’ and on Euripidean drama by Nietzsche comes in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), chapters 11–15.
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