12/10/2015

Tragedy Traditions: Between Shakespeare and the Greeks

Series Questions
How are words and actions of tragedy passed down?
Are there links or gaps in the tradition?
How do works make us think about how news is passed on? Whose
job is it to transmit messages?
How are the horrific issues of tragedy turned into artistic forms?

Spiegelman Maus (on handout)

-Challenge to tradition on how tradition passed down – why does

the son not heed the words of his father?
-Note erasure of orchestra in bottom left corner – son does not
concede authority to his father in writing history.
-Or is the orchestra left in, barely visible, almost by accident?

-Tragedy has often had a musical accompaniment – this graphic

novel joins and doesn’t join that tradition.

-Think about figure of journalist/storyteller in tragedy – the son in

Maus has to ‘draw out’ the story of the tragedy.

Section A
1)Agamemnon
-Focus on receiver of news
-Play opens with physical discomfort, not tragic concerns
-Watchman’s job is to wait for news – the beginning of something in
this case, rather than the end
-The news of victory will not be welcomed

2)Hamlet
-Scene of waiting for news has a tradition in tragedy
-Each line has a double meaning – ‘Long live the king!’ very
resonant in Hamlet
-Is there a shadow of Oresteia here?

What is it to say that there is a connection, something shared,

between Shakespeare and Greek tragedy?
How can we figure the relationships between earlier and later
texts?
We need a flexible, mobile way of thinking that can be adapted to
individual moments, rather than an overarching theory of influence.

The tragedy paper enables a way of studying texts that allows

parallel and unexpected relations, recurring things, between very
culturally and historically various texts.
3)Ben Johnson
-This comment about Shakespeare and the classics has weighed
heavily on literary tradition
-Shake. often compared to classics, and postulated to have read
them
-We need to be careful of tracing links between S. and Greeks that
are too direct, perhaps they need to be more metaphorical.

Influences can be thought of in genetic terms for transmission of

tragedy – See Baldwin on handout.
-Rather than thinking in terms of family trees, rather think of
unpredictable transmissions. Recessive characteristics?
Elusive/unmappable characteristics?

Genetic metaphor gives framework for thinking, offering a

complicated lineage of familial characteristics, with indirect routes.

4)Winter’s Tale
-Shadows Euripides’ Alcestis
-Alc. dies in place of her husband Admetus, but Heracles arrives
and fetches her back from death by wrestling with Death
-Agreement not to take a new wife agreement needed for it to
work.
-Paulina extracts a similar deal here from aunts – P racks up
pressure as Heracles does, and aunts comply as Admetis does
-Cleo suggest it’s a strange bargain to strike, but also that there is
something disruptive about it.
-This echo suggests more than random reappearance, but hard to
say that Sh. is invoking Alcestis directly.

5)Antony and Cleopatra

-Inspired by Plutarch - but actually Bacchus, not Hercules in
Plutarch. Soldier 2 misremembers it. Or is it Shakespeare that
misremembers? Or is it done intentionally to associate Antony with
Hercules rather than Bacchus?
-Gods and music appear recessively in this Shakespeare scene –
under the Earth, invisible, not walking the stage.

See indirect and direct influences section on handout for possible

reading.

Section B
-R. Lynne thinks S engaged with Greek tragedy through key
sources he read – Ovid and Seneca
-Artworks often work by looking at what the tradition has turned
away from over time, rather than following it. Perhaps Shakespeare
understood what Ovid and Seneca were turning away from in the
tragic tradition.
6)Metmorphosis
-Stories are tragic by nature –terrible events, and subjects of tragic
drama before Ovid
-Ovid gives the tragic figures a metamorphic ending
-Metamorphosis is an alternative to other kinds of fate – neither life
nor death.
-Titus Andronicus inspired by Philomel story – but there is no
transformation into a bird in Shakespeare. Ovid turns away from
the consequences of tragedy, but Shakespeare tries to turn back to
the horror of tragedy.
-Shakespeare won’t look away from older tragic tradition that Ovid
evades through metamorphosing endings.

7)Pyramus
Tone of Ovid falls/rises into comic, even when stories are grueling
and sad.
Blood squirting comes off as absurd. (See parody of this in 8)
-Ambivalence of tone in Greek tragedy courts the possibility of
comedy – Ovid follows through with that possibility.

Gods in Ovid are fallible/capricious. Shadows qualities of the Greek

tragedy gods, but in Greek they are still feared and revered. Ovid
makes this turn to the comic VISIBLY.

C – SENECA
-Shake may have read in Seneca what Seneca was turning away
from in tragic tradition
-Seneca very formal/declamatory, Shake saw that the formal
moments were testable/problematic in Greeks. Seneca allowed
Shakespeare to see something in the Greeks.
-Seneca turns away from theatricality – very written register,
rhetorical. Shakespeare tests this through the interactions of
bodies on a stage.

9)Inexorability of Senecan drama. Heavy framing of the weight of

the curse.
Shakespeare might have tested these, but in sympathy with what
Seneca was moving away from

10)Seneca brings philosophy to the fore – long speeches. Versions

in Shakespeare and Greeks, but often left hanging in these authors,
rather than worked through. The philosophizing is left open to
attack.

11)Chorus similar to end of Euripides plays, but this is at end of act

4 – this surprise at actions of gods is not the end, but rather a
prompt for finding further significance.
-Greeks and Shake can both end on surprise, awe, chaos,
something Seneca will not do.
-Is S turning back to the Greeks as much as away from Seneca?

We might see something of a more distant original in an absence in

a more recent source.

Future lectures will cover other ways to think about tragedy and
transmission