Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition. By SIMON GOLDHILL and EDITH HALL, eds. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi + 336. Cloth, $99.00. ISBN 978–0–521–88785–4. Order this text for $99.00 from Amazon.com using this link and benefit CAMWS and the Classical Journal: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/classjourn-20 Previously published CJ Online reviews are at http://classicaljournal.org/reviews.php CJ Online 2010.06.04 This Festschrift is a tribute to Pat Easterling’s contributions to the study of Greek tragedy and the history of its performance. The essays are divided into three parts. The first explores the relationship of actor and audience, and how this relationship reflects the political preoccupations (broadly conceived) of the Athenian polis. The second centers on the figure of Oedipus, while the third examines the development of the tragic genre in both ancient and modern contexts. The editors optimistically suggest some coherence to the offerings, especially in the dust jacket blurb. But the variety of topics is in fact a strength of the volume, not least because it is a fitting tribute to the range of Easterling’s interests. In the first chapter (Sophocles: the state of play, pp. 1–24), Goldhill and Hall introduce the volume as a whole by assessing how scholarly interests have developed over the last century or so. Jebb and his 1900 edition of Antigone serve as a watershed for contrasting what went before (Victorian idealism and obsession with the beauty of tragedy) with what followed (already in 1903 Hofmannsthal’s dark and violent interpretation of Electra). What makes this overview particularly valuable is the attempt to place individual oeuvres in their wider cultural and intellectual context – by tracing for example, the influences of anthropology, psychology, and new theories about dance and ritual on Hofmannsthal, and noting the challenge these interpretations presented to the privileged position of Greek culture as the intellectual ancestor of Western civilization. The chapter offers a provocative discussion of the intellectual pedigree and contributions of scholars such as Reinhardt, Kitto, Bowra, Knox, Winnington-Ingram, Vernant, Vidal-Naquet, Segal, Zeitlin and Loraux, and briefly acknowledges the recent explosion in performance of Greek tragedy. It also makes broader observations about continuity and change in scholarly trends – the degree, for example, to whichcritics write against the backdrop of the previous generation’s work. The chapter then lays out four areas in which Sophoclean scholarship is currently engrossed (i) the political sphere (how political/how Athenian is tragedy?); (ii) performance studies, which have now moved from purely practical/dramaturgical considerations to cultural dimensions of performance, including other sites of “performance” in the city; (iii) the language of tragedy (especially its ambiguity); and (iv) the performance history of plays both in ancient and modern times. These four areas are the primary focus of the volume. Part One: Between Audience and Actor Goldhill (The audience on stage: rhetoric, emotion, and judgement in Sophoclean theatre, pp. 27–47) makes an ambitious attempt to develop a theory of the audience that can account for democracy’s belief in the collective deliberative ability of citizens . He examines how Sophocles dramatizes the process of being (in) an audience through the device of creating an on-stage audience [beyond the chorus, which serves continuously in this capacity, thus offering a helpful alternative model to the “chorus as sounding-board for the audience”]. For Goldhill, characters function as an on-stage audience when they serve as critical observers and respondents to what is occurring on stage, offering a model for the audience in the theatre, who are developing their own responses. The metadrama that other commentators see as an end in itself carries for Goldhill a political function: it encourages the audience to engage the critical faculties vital to deliberation. It is not always clear from Goldhill’s analysis what sets a particular character apart as an on-stage audience beyond his or her silence or function as focalizer, and his approach could be extended virtually ad infinitum given tragedy’s tendency to eschew sustained three-way conversation. Goldhill chooses instances that build suspense about how the character is responding to the situation and that highlight the multiplicity of possible responses to a scene. He provides a salutary reminder that the multiplicity of responses by the internal audience argues an equally wide range of response on the part of the external audience. The most fully developed case-study is Goldhill’s discussion of Electra, the most overtly theatrical of Sophocles’ plays, though he oddly omits the most prominent instance of an on-stage audience, Electra’s role as witness and mediator of the killing of Clytemnestra. Ismene Lada-Richard (‘The players will tell all’: the dramatist, the actors and the art of acting in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, pp. 48–68) also examines metadrama. She argues that Sophocles’ innovation in creating the role of Neoptolemus allows the playwright to explore the relationship between Neoptolemus’ part in the plot to dupe Philoctetes and his identity as player. It would be worth noting that a similar interest in the theatrical implications of disguise and role-playing may have formed part of Euripides’ Philoctetes, in which Odysseus approaches Philoctetes with appearance and voice changed by Athene and playing the part of one of his own victims. But in Sophocles’ play, it is the son of Achilles who is co-opted to play the deceiver, and the disjuncture between player (“self”) and part (“character”) is complicates considerably the issue of whether Neoptolemus’ responses to Philoctetes are genuine or simulated. Lada-Richards makes a convincing case for reading an interest in acting into the play, and offers a useful study of ancient responses to coherence and incoherence between an actor and his part. She argues that a high degree of expertise is required of the actor in order to pull off the part of the faltering apprentice-player in the internal plot, just as Philoctetes’ unremitting pathos requires considerable self-mastery on the part of the actor. Unlike in real life, Lada-Richards argues, authenticity in performance is judged by the degree to which a performance is compelling. She situates Neoptolemus the actor’s derailment of the plot of Odysseus the stage-director/playwright within the context of contemporary performance culture, in which the playwright’s control over performance was diminishing and actors were enjoying increasing prominence. Some dimensions of the analysis (e.g. the political influence and diplomatic roles of star actors) run the risk of anachronism, as Lada-Richards seems to appreciate (“Sophocles’ play was only a hair’s breadth away from that new chapter...,” p. 65), though in the absence of sufficient contemporary evidence this remains an argument ex silentio. Edith Hall (Deianeira deliberates: precipitate decision-making and Trachiniae, pp. 69–96) considers the function of deliberation in Trachiniae, noting that the play conveys its importance by offering a series of examples of how not to deliberate. The essay ranges widely, drawing on a broad selection of sources to identify the key elements of good counsel (euboulia); this lays the groundwork for appreciating the degree to which deliberation in tragedies is usually presented as flawed or absent, and, in the case of Trachiniae, as compromised in virtually every conceivable way. Hall discusses the extent to which female tragic characters are capable of initiating and engaging in deliberation, concluding that in the case of Deianeira the evidence may say less about the deliberative capacities of women as a category than about the democratic polis; the precipitous decision-making and sudden mind-changing we see in the play are also characteristic of the Council and especially the Assembly. Hall’s suggestion that the hastiness of deliberation in tragedy may explain why the genre adopted the convention limiting its plot to the span of a single day must remain a conjecture. But tragedy certainly exploits the convention to highlight the dangers of hasty decision-making and, Hall argues, reflects the Athenian psyche’s essential optimism and self-sufficiency, since it raises the possibility that with better decision-making matters could have turned out differently. Part Two: Oedipus and the Play of Meaning Peter Burian (Inconclusive conclusion: the ending(s) of Oedipus Tyrannus, pp. 99–118) takes on the vexed question of the ending of Oedipus Tyrannus. Rejecting the arguments against authenticity, he seeks to make sense of the supposed inconsistencies, especially the fact that the expectation of Oedipus’ exile is suddenly overturned when Creon sends him into the palace in anticipation of further direction from Apollo. Indeed, the symmetry of ruler transformed into scapegoat is so compelling, Burian argues, that some scholars reject or even overlook the lack of exile at the play’s end. Oedipus’ departure into the palace brings the action full circle and forces him to return to the scene of his undoing. It thus bears a symmetry of its own, but this brings with it neither release nor the redemptive role of the pharmakos that we find in Oedipus at Colonus. Burian’s argument that the rejection of the pharmakos-ending is a rejection of polis-centered closure both fits and accounts for several of the more peculiar aspects of the play. The shift in focus from the polis to the fate and oikos of Oedipus, for example, is part and parcel of Oedipus’ fall from power: just as Oedipus the tyrant identified himself with the state he ruled, so now in his fall from power he can no longer serve any function within it. Burian provides a compelling characterization of the end of the play as providing formal rather than conceptual closure, and his analysis of the exchange between Oedipus and Creon points out its studied ambiguity. Thus the refusal of exile is a refusal of closure in which Sophocles masterfully exploits the openness of the mythical tradition. Chris Carey (The third stasimon of Oedipus at Colonus, pp. 119-33) offers a study of the third stasimon of Oedipus at Colonus. His opening remarks proposing that OC functions as a cornerstone for the “Theban cycle”, which he characterizes as the nearest thing to a Sophoclean trilogy, set off alarm bells, given the many years and plays separating Antigone from OC. But Carey’s analysis does not, for the most part, insist on direct verbal echoes. Rather, it offers a thoughtful exploration of this ode and its reflections on old age and mortality, teasing out the resonances of its words and motifs, especially the points of intersection with the lives of Oedipus and his family: time is focalized through the long-standing sufferer Oedipus; death described as anumenaios suggests his own unclean marriage; the description of old age as akratesintersects provocatively with his situation as at once powerless and strangely powerful. Carey’s greatest insight may come at the end, where he links the chorus’ comparison of Oedipus to a headland to the interest in topography that permeates the play. Oedipus’ connection to the landscape goes far beyond the apostrophizing seen in other plays, Carey argues: Oedipus not only resembles but becomes the rugged landscape into which he will be absorbed. Michael Silk’s contribution (The logic of the unexpected: semantic diversion in Sophocles, Yeats (and Virgil), pp. 134–57) examines a specific feature of Sophoclean use of language: what Silk calls a “semantic diversion”, usually found at the end of a syntactic unit, which substitutes a different word for what the listener expects . Silk claims that this practice is unique to Sophocles among Greek tragedians [I am not so sure] and draws on instances from Yeats and Virgil to elucidate it; he compares it to the para prosdokian of comedy, though it lacks the tendency towards climax of the latter. Indeed, Silk is insistent on avoiding thinking of semantic diversions as a device at all, perhaps because this suggests a degree of standardization; the claim that these diversions have nothing to do with defamiliarization needs more argument. Silk exposes the facile tendency of commentators to explain these word uses as metonym or to posit alternate meanings and points out the challenge they represent to textual critics used to operating according to probability. Sophocles’ “magisterial elusiveness” causes a wide range of associations to spill out, including the residual presence of the expected but supplanted reference, and may reflect the playwright’s Weltanschauung in constituting completeness and open-endedness at once. Fiona Macintosh (The French Oedipus of the inter-war period, pp. 158–76) considers reworkings of Oedipus Tyrannus in France during the 1920s and 1930s. Her analysis sets the approaches taken by Mounet-Sully, Bouhélier, Stravinsky, Cocteau and others in the context of cultural and intellectual history. Rejection of the classical heritage as presented by Parnassiens such as Leconte de Lisle resulted in the Modernist predilection for dissonance and incongruity. When Modernism became associated with German cultural imperialism, a classicism emerged that sought the wellsprings of French culture in a democratic classicism, and reworkings of the Oedipus myth presented new popularist tendencies and preferred a sequential, diachronic plot order. Macintosh considers inter alia educational policy, aesthetic currents, staging choices and biographical information to explain the peculiar dynamics of the resurgent classical performance tradition in France two decades after the country seemed to have turned its back on classicism as a vestige of the ancien régime. Part Three: Constructing Tragic Traditions In a dense and often elusive piece (Theoretical views of Athenian tragedy in the fifth century BC, pp. 179–207), Kostas Valakas attempts to recreate fifth-century theories of tragedy on the basis of evidence from the tragedies themselves. He draws attention to affinities with Presocratic ideas and rhetorical theory, noting for example a growing interest in a theatrical “reality” seen as distinct from both what it represents and the world of the audience, and observing that this parallels a shift in the conception of the relation between artefact and reality in statuary inscriptions: whereas early inscriptions assume that statue and model are one and the same, Athenian inscriptions of the fifth century acknowledge that the statue is a representation rather than the thing itself. Valakas’ suggestion that the terminology of representation in Plato and Aristotle (eikōn, mimēsis etc.) was likely already used by fifth-century intellectuals to discuss the dynamics and interests of tragedy, especially tragedy’s interest in the capacity and limits of human knowledge and its treatment of themes of appearance and reality, deception and discovery, seems reasonable. Whether this interest amounts to an espousal of Protagorean relativism, as Valakas suggests, and whether one can separate tragedy’s “moral education” from its “political role” is less certain. Angus Bowie (Athens and Delphi in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, pp. 208–31) explores the function of prophecy in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, arguing that it is an early indication of a shift toward a greater sense of human agency in understanding causation and interpreting events. Much of the piece is devoted to close analysis of passages in the Oresteia, elucidating the degree to which prophecy, and Delphic prophecy in particular, looms as an interest in the plays. Bowie argues that other forms of sign-interpretation (e.g. the beacon) are described in oracular terms, and that Cassandra is described in language reminiscent of the Delphic Pythia. Bowie even suggests that the description of Agamemnon’s robe as a net alludes to the Delphic omphalos and its knotted covering. Be that as it may, he successfully demonstrates that in the Oresteia prophecies are repeatedly problematized as ambiguous, open-ended, and associated with violent revenge, and that the plot privileges Athens over Delphi as the locus for resolving legal and political problems. In an intriguing side-note, Bowie suggests that psephomancy (divination through the use of pebbles) may have been the usual form of divination at Delphi, and argues that this might offer an additional dimension to the contrast between divination’s failure at Delphi and the successful use of (voting) pebbles in the Areopagus court at Athens. Richard Buxton (Feminized males in Bacchae: the importance of discrimination, pp. 232–50) offers a welcome cautionary rejoinder to the tendency to see gender-crossing everywhere in the Bacchae. Analyzing characterizations singulatim, he argues that the play creates as much meaning by setting up distinctions as by collapsing them. Tiresias and Cadmus, for example, take up the paraphernalia of bacchants but do not participate in transvestism, in contrast to Pentheus. In their case, what matters is whether their behavior is age-appropriate rather than gender-appropriate. Buxton also cautions that Dionysus’ femininity is not as ubiquitous a motif as some suppose, since it belongs to the early stages of the play; later on, his wildness is at issue. So too Pentheus’ feminization is a concern early in the play, whereas later his identification by Agaue as a wild beast dominates. Zeus is presented as parent, and specifically as mother; he is feminized in function but not in appearance. Oliver Taplin (Hector’s helmet glinting in a fourth-century tragedy, pp. 251–63) sets out to shine the spotlight on fourth century tragedy. He convincingly identifies an Apulian vase in the Antikenmuseum in Berlin as representing scenes from Astydamas’ Hector, though he probably overstates his case in reading the inclusion of an attendant to receive Hector’s helmet as an example of a bold aemulatio of Homer, given the ubiquity of supernumerary characters in both tragedy and vase-painting. Taplin closes with a thought-provoking analysis of a fragmentary passage (adesp. tr. fr. 649) in which Cassandra is allotted (by Astydamas, Taplin argues) a highly unusual televisionary “messenger speech” in which she describes Hector’s death from afar. Christopher Pelling (Seeing a Roman tragedy through Greek eyes: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, pp. 26–88) closes the volume with a delightful look at Shakespeare’s use of ancient source material. After briefly discussing evidence for the direct influence of Greek tragedy, he settles into an extended treatment of the ways Shakespeare engaged with Plutarch. Although his access to Plutarch’s Lives was at two removes (through North’s 1579 translation of Amyot’s 1559 French translation), close examination reveals that Shakespeare was often truer in spirit and in sense to Plutarch than either Amyot or North. Plot devices such as mirror scenes, motifs including the language of sacrifice to describe Caesar’s murder, reintroduction of “pagan” elements such as the daimon linking Brutus and Caesar all show a close affinity to Plutarch’s sensibilities and especially his vision of the tragic. This volume was written by scholars for scholars. Much of the Greek is left untranslated, and footnotes generally do not attempt to provide the overview of the scholarly terrain an undergraduate would need. Although there is little here that is radically pioneering, this volume gathers a collection of well conceived and written essays that will likely spawn further discussion and frequent citation, and the reader comes away with an appreciation for the wide variety of approaches to the study of Greek tragedy that exists in the early twenty-first century. Eric Dugdale Gustavus Adolphus College [log in to unmask] If you have been forwarded this review, you may subscribe to the listserv by sending an email to: [log in to unmask] Leave the subject line blank, and in the first line of the message write: SUBSCRIBE CJ-Online You may remove yourself from the CJ-Online listserv by sending an email to: [log in to unmask] Leave the subject line blank, and in the first line of the message write: UNSUBSCRIBE CJ-Online