WHAT THE FIRST DRAMATISTS
HAVE TO SAY TO CONTEMPORARY
PLAYWRIGHTS
PLAYWRIGHTS CANADA PRESS
TORONTO · CANADA
The Greek Playwright:
What the First Dramatists Have to Say to Contemporary Playwrights
© Copyright 2009 Clem Martini
PLAYWRIGHTS CANADA PRESS
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Cover and type design design by Blake Sproule
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Martini, Clem, 1956-
The Greek playwright : what the first dramatists have to say to
contemporary playwrights / Clem Martini.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-88754-875-8
1. Greek drama--History and criticism. 2. Dramatists, Greek.
3. Playwriting. 4. Drama--Technique. I. Title.
PA3071.M37 2009 |
882'.0109 |
C2009-904748-9 |
First edition: September 2009
Printed and bound by Gauvin Press, Gatineau
Excerpts from Sophocles, 2 edited by David R. Slavitt and Palmer
Bovie reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Excerpts from Acharnians and Frogs, from The Complete Plays by
Aristophanes, translated by Paul Roche, copyright © 2004, 2005 by
Paul Roche. Used by permission of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin
Group (USA) Inc.
To Cher, Chandra & Miranda,
with appreciation and great love.
Don’t worry about it. If God is willing, all will be willing.
After all, the God of General Salvation is
Right here on this spot. Here. He. You.
—from Wealth by Aristophanes
Over the many years the oldest Greek playwrights have enjoyed and endured many different translations and adaptations of their works. These translations have varied greatly according to the attention paid, and the importance assigned, to diction, accuracy, idiom, metre, and rhyme.
As I have referenced the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes in this book, I have employed a selection of translations, some traditional, some more experimental and modern. Some translators, feeling perhaps that the poetry and metre were critical, have attempted to capture these elements in their translation. Others, thinking that comprehension and ease of delivery were of greater importance, discarded rhythm or rhyme and utilized standard prose. I tend to believe that there is some benefit to be had from experiencing this diversity and have employed an assortment of styles.
This does present a challenge, however, because as varied an approach to text as the translators have taken, they have also applied to the spelling of names. Thus, Hecuba and Hekabe are the same characters, only in different translations, as are Clytemnestra and Klytaimnestra, and Pesthetareus, Pithetaerus, and Pisthetairos.
Where I have quoted from different translations I have elected to adopt the spelling of the characters used by the translators, certain that the reader would simply demonstrate flexibility, as the original Greek authors have, and adapt.
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND
1. THE CAST αʹ
2. THE WAY IT WAS DONE βʹ
3. SYNERGY γʹ
Democracy
The Olympics
Literacy
Rhetoric
The Law
History
Philosophy
PROCESS
4. LEARNING FROM THE EVOLUTION δʹ
LEGACY
5. CHARACTER εʹ
6. ECONOMY ςʹ
7. CONTRAST ζʹ
8. AUTHORITY ηʹ
9. TRANSFORMATION θʹ
10. THE INFLUENCE OF ARISTOTLE ιʹ
FINAL THOUGHTS
11. CONCLUSIONS ιαʹ
APPENDIX—TIMELINE
BIBLIOGRAPHY/RECOMMENDED WORKS
If I was driving down a road and a directional sign along the way warned that the bridge ahead was broken—and it was written in Ancient Greek—I would plunge over the precipice. I’m afraid I’m a playwright, not a classics scholar or linguist.
My assumption is that most of the readers of this book will similarly not have read Aeschylus or Aristophanes in the original. If to appreciate these playwrights it’s necessary to first master the antique tongue they communicated in, we may as well sweep their books from the shelves now and collect them in a very select archive, because the number of people with the ability to understand and read Ancient Greek amounts to a minute fraction of the living population.
I am a passionate lover of playwriting, however, and I believe one can experience something rich and profound through viewing or reading the works of Sophocles or Euripides without having first immersed one’s self in the language of origin. And I also believe that the works that were written over two thousand years ago hold powerful lessons for playwrights today.
The most distinctive feature of the Greek tragedy is also the most vexing for any modern company: the chorus. Every ancient tragedy has its chorus, and every modern production has to face the acute problem of what to do with a group of people onstage through even the most intimate exchanges of husband and wife, a group which has long odes in dense lyric poetry to deliver between the scenes of actors acting and events happening…. There is nothing more tedious and depressing in theater than a group of actors in white sheets intoning pompous banalities with profound expressions.
The Suppliants, by Aeschylus, is a particularly boring tragedy whose only interesting factor lies in the culture one is able to glean from it.
There is a prevailing sense in our contemporary culture that what the ancient Greeks did, thought, or wrote may be irrelevant.
Plays written by the ancient Greeks are felt to be wordy, nerdy, and dense; the outlook of their grim authors, humourless and bleak. The form they employed, with its lengthy monologues, vexing choral recitations, and references to arcane ancient practices is held to be impossibly remote. In a postmodern age when forms are readily shattered, scattered, spliced, and cloned, the Greeks are perceived to be too tightly bound to an archaic narrative structure. In short, the feeling is that the Greek classics are old, boring, and, in every way, yesterday’s plays.
Part of this response may result from a failure of translation. Some early translators—overawed by the intricate construction, metre, and wordplay of the authors—rendered the text into a stiffly formalized, unnatural idiom. Consider the abstruse literary architecture and archaic, nearly incomprehensible phrasing of this still-employed translation of Euripides’s Hippolytus.
Great Zeus, why didst thou, to man’s sorrow, put woman, evil counterfeit, to dwell where shines the sun? If thou wert minded that the human race should multiply, it was not from women they should have drawn their stock, but in thy temples they should have paid gold or iron or ponderous bronze and bought a family, each man proportioned to his offering, and so in independence dwelt, from women free. But now as soon as ever we would bring this plague into our home we bring its fortune to the ground. ’Tis clear from this how great a curse a woman is; the very father, that begot and nurtured her, to rid him of the mischief, gives her a dower and packs her off; while the husband, who takes the noxious weed into his home, fondly decks his sorry idol in fine raiment and tricks her out in robes, squandering by degrees, unhappy wight! his house’s wealth.1
Part of our culture’s response may equally result from preconceived notions of the classics, which have come to be most easily recognized in the myriad marble statues that stand erect in museums, are framed on the cover of textbooks, and embedded in websites. The expressions on the faces of these statues are terribly reserved. Their sense of barely repressed anxiety is reinforced by their stiff postures, still striving to maintain a fragile sense of dignity thousands of years after their demise.
For contemporary playwrights—very much concerned with sustaining a vital, energized art form—there is the worry that this inflexible, anxious mode of expression is no longer useful; that history will weigh too heavily upon the requirements of creativity; that the dead will, in a sense, overwhelm the living.
And, when all is said and done, it has to be admitted that the ancient Greeks are the very epitome of Dead White Guys against whom contemporary culture has rebelled.
All these objections contain a kernel of truth. They also ignore a couple of critical points.
The plays of the ancient Greeks still possess the capacity to inform and move a contemporary audience. It’s not necessary to speculate on this matter—we know it’s true. The works of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes are produced on stages around the world every year. If you are a playwright that fact alone might make you sit up and take notice. A playwright knows better than anyone that getting a play remounted two years after its premiere can present a challenge, let alone two thousand.
As well, it’s always a valuable exercise for artists to examine “firsts.” By examining these initial moments of discovery one can sometimes detect the genuinely big ideas that lay the foundation for a discipline. And the ancient Greeks, as will be discussed later in this book, weren’t short on firsts; politically, philosophically, or aesthetically.
Nor is it only the historical roots of the craft that are exposed by the study of the Greeks. Nothing ever stops exerting influence. The impact of Greek writers continues to be felt pulsing through contemporary practice today. To fully understand those influences, it’s essential to return to the source.
More to the point, however, even if you are completely uninterested in the plays of the past, the evolution of theatre, from spectacle and ritual to a highly structured, complex dramatic form is of enormous importance. Not so much for how, but for why. Why did the Greeks, over a period of roughly two hundred and fifty years, develop a theatre that has for all intents and purposes become the template that Western societies have adopted ever since?
In this book, the emergent forces of early Greek culture will be examined for the precise influence they had upon theatre. In addition, the individuals most responsible for the creation of the craft of playwriting will be introduced and discussed, and their impact upon the nascent form calculated.
Sir Isaac Newton, in his letter to Robert Hooke, wrote, “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” As individuals interested in the craft of playwriting, it makes great sense to me to have a notion of who the giants were upon whose shoulders we are standing.