The Opsis of Helen: Performative Intertextuality in Euripides (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Structure and Performance of Euripides' Helen
Using Euripides' Helen as the main point of reference, C. W. Marshall's detailed study expands our understanding of Athenian tragedy and provides new interpretations of how Euripides created meaning in performance. Marshall focuses on dramatic structure to show how assumptions held by the ancient audience shaped meaning in Helen and to demonstrate how Euripides' play draws extensively on the satyr play Proteus, which was part of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Structure is presented not as a theoretical abstraction, but as a crucial component of the experience of performance, working with music, the chorus, and the other plays in the tetralogy. Euripides' Andromeda in particular is shown to have resonances with Helen not previously described. Arguing that the role of the director is key, Marshall shows that the choices a director can make about role doubling, gestures, blocking, humour, and masks play a crucial part in forming the meaning of Helen.
"Escaping" Tragedy: Metadramatic ὄψεις of Euripides' Helen and Iphigenia in Tauris
2019
- claims that "allusions to the chorus and actors as inhabiting the world of the theater, or to the audience as spectators of a play, are now acknowledged to have a place in tragedy as well as comedy." Greek tragic poets being self-conscious and realizing the artistic status of their work would explicitly or implicitly comment on the theatrical context of their plays, their mythopoiesis, and conventions of the theatrical experience. Poetic self-awareness
Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris: The vertical theme in classical tragedy
2021
This paper is a preliminary exploration of the vertical theme, of age-old spatial archetypes and the anthropocentrism of classical architecture, the divine-human interface, plus the role of gender in the dramaturgical corpus of Euripides. Research will continue with the comparative exploration of similar themes in Aeschylus and Sophocles. More particularly, the main contributions of this paper are the following: First, it argues that certain kinds of verticality in Euripides, like columns, statues and temples, are a symbol of power, sacredness and gender, paradoxically both male and female. Second, it pursues the hypothesis that, in Euripides, the Athenian tragedy portrays a fascinating architectonic and artistic diachrony, linking as it does Minoan, Mycenaean, archaic and classical times, especially in regard to the palace, temple and colonnade theme. Euripides appears to have been cognizant of this reverent tradition. Third, it suggests that the spirituality-materiality pairs in this tragedy are only seemingly polarized, and are replicated in architecture and sculpture.
Theatre Journal, 1980
When this book was first published, its burden-that Greek tragedies make more sense when they are treated as plays for performance-was fairly novel, or at least it was preached more than it was practised. In the few years since then, it has become an orthodoxy, and stagecraft is now given due attention in nearly all new books. While happy about that, I am not happy that my name is cited as a 'ringleader' of those who maintain that we should concentrate on performance rather than words. I do not endorse that: the power of the Greek theatre rests on its extraordinary combination of word and embodiment. To neglect one is to impoverish the other. I trust that this book does not encourage anyone to set the performative dimension in competition with the verbal. I hope it does not seem fickle to say that there are things here which I would not write in the same way today. The revised bibliography gives some idea of how fast the water is flowing under the bridges of scholarship. I would also acknowledge more openly in chapter 1 the selectivity of any account of the 'author's meaning'. And in the last chapter I would stress more that it is the place of books like this to suggest and to prompt rather than to dictate to the professional theatre. The use made of my work by the National Theatre Oresteia in London in 1981-2 shows that such a relationship can work. This book is, in fact, about ancient Greek culture and about the theatre, and it is meant for the 'general reader' who is interested in either or both. I hope professional Hellenists will read it, but it was not written primarily for them. While I have had students in mind above all, students of drama or English literature or Classical civilization, any student who encounters Greek tragedy, anyone who is fascinated by the Greeks, who loves the theatre, anyone who is prepared to be enriched by the great literature of the past may find these pages worth while. But there is a condition. The core of the book (chapters 3-9) demands and assumes that the reader already knows all, or at least some, of the nine tragedies it concentrates on (they are listed on p. 22). Furthermore, it is probably best read with a translation (or text) open to hand, preferably a translation which has the line numbers in the margin (there are recommendations on pp. 197-8). This book is in no way a substitute for reading the plays themselves-and, if possible, seeing them. Indeed, I should like to think that the book has encouraged and will encourage theatres to stage these great dramas, and might help to find them audiences. I quote from the tragedies liberally. All quotations are translated and all the translations are my own. I am only too aware how stilted and imperfect they are; but I thought it essential to translate high poetry into something which suggests its lofty and arresting style. The language of Greek tragedy was not that of everyday speech, and I had rather turn it into bad verse than into pedestrian prose. In the earlier Preface I stressed how much this book owed to the inspiration and to the help of Colin Macleod. Since his death in December 1981, at the age of 38, everything that preserves his insight, however diluted, has become that much more concentrated. If this study succeeds at all in getting beneath the surface, that is owed to him. Magdalen College, Oxford March 1985 Oliver Taplin viii 1 The visual dimension of tragedy Behind the dialogue of Greek drama we are always conscious of a concrete visual actuality, and behind that of a specific emotional actuality. Behind the drama of words is the drama of action, the timbre of voice and voice, the uplifted hand or tense muscle, and the particular emotion. The spoken play, the words which we read, are symbols, a shorthand, and often, as in the best of Shakespeare, a very abbreviated shorthand indeed, for the actual and felt play, which is always the real thing. The phrase, beautiful as it may be, stands for a greater beauty still. This is merely a particular case of the amazing unity of Greek, the unity of concrete and abstract in philosophy, the unity of thought and feeling, action and speculation in life.
Music, Ritual, and Self-Referentiality in the Second Stasimon of Euripides’ Helen
Greek and Roman Musical Studies, 2018
The imagery of Dionysiac performance is characteristic of Euripides’ later choral odes and returns particularly in the Helen’s second stasimon, which foregrounds its own connections with the mimetic program of the New Music and its emphasis on the emancipation of feelings. This paper aims to show that Euripides’ deep interest in contemporary musical innovations is connected to his interest in the irrational, which made him the most tragic of the poets. Focusing on the musical aspect of the Helen’s second stasimon, the paper will examine how Euripides conveys a sense of the irrational through a new type of song, which liberates music’s power to excite and disorient through its colors, ornament and dizzying wildness. Just as the New Musicians present themselves as the preservers of cultic tradition, Euripides, far from suppressing Dionysus as Nietzsche claimed, deserves to rank as the most Dionysiac and the most religious of the three tragedians.
15 Sacrificial Feasts and Euripides’ Cyclops: Between Comedy and Tragedy?
De Gruyter, 2021
Although the cannibalistic feast in Euripides' Cyclops belongs to the material that the playwright inherits from Book 9 of the Odyssey, the specific treatment of the theme in the play opens up a vista that allows us to examine the satyric genre in comparison to tragedy and comedy, as satyr drama seeks a generic niche between its two dominant siblings. What would immediately strike a spectator of Cyclops is the sacrificial dimension, totally absent from the Homeric account of murder and omophagy, and possibly new with Euripides.1 For all the recent surge of scholarship that has elucidated many aspects of satyr drama, the theme of sacrifice has yet to be adduced as a generic marker of the genre. This paper is therefore, in keeping with the playfully innovative nature of satyr drama, an experimental investigation, with Euripides' Cyclops as the starting point and almost exclusive focus, from which we can perhaps extrapolate on the special, unique 'vision of life' expressed in satyr drama. As the theme of sacrifice appears in both tragedy and comedy, it enables the satyric genre to define itself not only in opposition to tragedy, but also as a 'middle genre between tragedy and comedy' with its own particular voice.2 First, it would be necessary to offer a brief outline of the tragic and the comic take on sacrifice, which is to be understood as a sequence of ritual gestures comprising slaughter but culminating with eating and drinking.3 The two dramatic genres treat this sacrificial sequence in distinct but complementary ways that make up the total range of its symbolic associations, as these are embedded in different moments of the sequence. Tragedy uses sacrifice as a metaphor for the suffering of its characters; comedy, on the other hand, turns its attention to the pleasures of the feast and the subsequent drinking and revelry (κῶμος). By presenting the fate of its
A Competition of choregoi in Euripides' Trojan Women. Dramatic Structure and Intertextuality
I wish to focus on the structure of the Trojan Women's parodos and first episode in order to argue that it is strongly influenced by Euripides' response to the Agamemnon . I will demonstrate that this response consists in turning Aeschylus' use of myth and lyrics into spectacular drama and in undermining the religious and cosmic pattern of the Agamemnon. I will start by examining the complex dramatic structure of this first part of the Trojan Women, especially the striking changes in tone occurring while Cassandra is on stage. I will then reflect upon the conflict of authority thus created between Cassandra's inspired voice and that of the suffering Hecuba. This conflict, I believe, is Euripides' way of dramatizing the mortals' inability to grasp the meaning of their actions and woes.