The Hypochondriac or The Imaginary Invalid by Molière

Molière is a delight after the gory plays by Seneca! (Funnily enough, last time I read Molière was after the dark and repulsive revenge plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries).

I read the translation by Alan Drury, for the National Theatre in 1981, who devised the Prologue, Interludes, and Epilogues “in parallel to Molière’s rather than being a direct translation.” 

1/ The play is very funny. 

“ARGAN If a husband cannot leave anything to the wife he loves so tenderly, to the wife who has taken such great care of him, then precedent’s an ass. I’ll have to consult my lawyer to see what I can do. 

[…] 

ARGAN I shall have to make my will, my love, way Monsieur tells me to; but to be on the safe side, I’m going to give you twenty thousand francs in gold I have behind a secret panel next to my bed, and two bills payable to the bearer, one from Monsieur Damon and one from Monsieur Gérante. 

BELINE No, no, I’ll have none of it. How much did you say was behind the secret panel? 

ARGAN Twenty thousand francs, my love. 

BELINE Do not talk to me of riches, I pray you. How much are those two bills worth?” 

(Act 1) 

Some of his plays are different, such as Don Juan, but Molière’s plays—I mean the ones I know—tend to have the same format: the protagonist as the main object of satire; a hindered marriage; some charlatan/ trickster/ fraud (in this case, Beline the wife); a clever servant. 

“DIAFOIRUS SENIOR […] What’s irritating about the great is that when they are ill they absolutely insist their doctors cure them. 

TOINETTE How very presumptuous. You aren’t there for that. You’re there to issue prescriptions and to collect your fees. It’s up to them to get better if they can.” 

In this play, Molière lampoons hypochondriacs (like Argan) and quack doctors (like Diafoirus Senior, M. Purgon, M. Fleurant) and mercenaries (like Beline).

Between Act 2 and Act 3, Argan, his brother Beralde, and Argan’s servant Toinette go see a Molière play together—a play within a play I’ve seen many times but this is new—Molière’s characters go see a Molière play! 

“BERALDE […] That Molière play we’ve just seen; I would have thought that would have put you in the right track as well as given you something to laugh at. 

ARGAN Your Molière is an impertinent fellow with his so-called comedies. It’s a fine thing to make fun of honest men, like doctors.” 

(Act 3) 

The disturbing part however is that Molière collapsed onstage during his fourth performance and died soon after. Imagine being in the first audience watching the doctors curse Argan (played by Molière) and then seeing that Molière actually died! 

2/ Alan Drury is funny; another thing I like is that I can spot Shakespeare references in his translation. 

“ARGAN Listen, my girl, there’s no compromise. You have four days to make a choice. Either you marry Monsieur or get thee to a nunnery.” 

(Act 2) 

The same line in Charles Heron Wall’s translation is “Either you will marry this gentleman or you will go into a convent.” Drury’s choice is much funnier. 

“TOINETTE (crying out) Oh, my God, oh woe is me, what an untoward accident. 

BELINE What is it, Toinette? 

TOINETTE Ah, Madame. 

BELINE What is it? 

TOINETTE Your husband is dead. 

BELINE My husband is dead? 

TOINETTE Alas, yes. He’s shuffled off his mortal coil.” 

(Act 3) 

Again, Hamlet. 

I’m a simple girl—I get excited when spotting a Shakespeare reference. One of the pleasures of knowing Shakespeare is that you not only see his influence on playwrights, novelists, and short story writers, but also come across references by translators. E. D. A. Morshead’s translation of Prometheus Bound, for instance, has “More kin than kind” (evoking Hamlet’s “A little more than kin, and less than kind”) and “wild and whirling words” (again, Hamlet). Both are Morshead’s additions—at least that’s what I think when I compare this translation and the one by Theodore Alois Buckley.  

In these cases, it’s obvious, but sometimes it can be confusing—I saw “the dogs of war” and “’Tis I for whom the bell shall toll” in Philip Wayne’s translation of Faust, Part 1, but is it Goethe or the translator who references Shakespeare and Donne? 

3/ I love the light touch, the warmth and humour of Molière. A couple of months ago, I also read but didn’t blog about The School for Wives (translated by Richard Wilbur). 

Apart from Shakespeare, I would probably say my favourite writer of tragedies is Sophocles and favourite writer of comedies is Molière. 

Social media is no longer fun

There was a time when Facebook was fun. You and your friends posted things, you had conversations. Then slowly it became worse, became a place for showing off—you logged on and envied your friends travelling and exploring nice places and chilling on the beach and getting engaged and getting married and having babies, etc. But even that was better than now—I mostly use Facebook for work and for posting photos—now I only see posts from about 15 friends out of the 116 on my friend list—my feed is mostly filled with adverts for things (and beauty procedures) I don’t need and stupid memes I don’t find funny and AI-generated images I don’t find impressive and clickbait from media outlets I don’t read and TikTok-style videos from pages I don’t follow and Reddit stories I don’t know whether are true. The short-form content creators are the worst: occasionally you find something amusing, but most of the time you see people doing stupid couple videos or doing stupid pranks or asking passers-by stupid questions, and you can see when people steal ideas as the algorithm shows you different content creators creating the same content. 

What is the point of all this? 

Twitter also used to be better. I don’t mean it used to be a cosy, heartwarming little place like people often pretend it was before Musk—it has always been a divisive place, full of hate, amplifying stupid opinions and making mainstream issues that should only be on the fringe—you try to create your own circle and curate your own feed and can have interesting conversations with interesting people. But I think in some ways it has become worse: the clickbait and ragebait are worse; with monetisation, you see more sensational stuff and see Twitter threads broken up by bots and unrelated videos; with Grok and other AI, you see more fake stuff and also see people talking to Grok instead of each other. 

On the one hand, it may be hard to leave Twitter permanently—I’m currently taking a break—because that’s where I have friends with whom to discuss classic literature and cinema; that’s also where I can see news unreported and aspects unmentioned and perspectives unconsidered by the mainstream media. On the other hand, I would also see depressing news and hateful tweets and stupid opinions, and none of us are equipped to hear one stupid opinion after another, every day.

The Twitter copycats don’t sound better either—Bluesky for instance looks insufferable. 

I don’t even need to be on TikTok to know it’s much worse than other social media platforms.

The fun is mostly gone. Social media is now largely ragebait and brainrot and bots. The Dead Internet Theory appears increasingly true.  

Marjorie Garber on Titus Andronicus

Many of you probably already know that Titus Andronicus is the one I like the least among Shakespeare’s plays (I would, in fact, go as far as disregarding the opinions of anyone who calls it their favourite Shakespeare—I mean, really?). After Seneca, I should perhaps read the most Senecan of Shakespeare’s plays but don’t want to—could you blame me?—so I read Marjorie Garber’s essay about it in Shakespeare After All. 

As usual, she’s very good. 

“SATURNINUS Thanks, noble Titus, father of my life.

How proud I am of thee and of thy gifts

Rome shall record.—And when I do forget

The least of these unspeakable deserts,

Romans, forget your fealty to me.” 

(Act 1 scene 1) 

Garber makes an interesting point: 

“… at this point in the play, words like ‘headless’ and ‘unspeakable’ are metaphors, and metaphors only, parts of the ordinary language of imagery with which we ornament our daily conversation. Before long, when the play’s action turns to tragedy, these dead or sleeping metaphors will come to grisly life, with famous (or notorious) stage directions like ‘Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand’ (3.1.233).” 

Every word counts.  

She also refers to the traditional image of the body politic—the emperor is the head, the ministers and dependents are limbs, etc.—and says: 

“…. this apparently conventional metaphor will take off, will virtually explode into a nightmare of literalization, once the protagonist makes a bad choice. […] Titus’s refusal to be the ‘head’ leads, inexorably, to a set of stage directions in which two of his sons are beheaded, his daughter’s hands and tongue are brutally removed, and he himself is tricked into asking Aaron to help him chop off his own hand.” 

Later she says: 

“The ill-assorted body parts—decapitated heads in the two elder brothers’ hands, a hand in Lavinia’s mouth—are a speaking picture of the breakdown of the body politic.” 

She quotes Titus saying to Aaron the Moor “Lend me thy hand, and I will give thee mine”, saying: 

“Again the literalizing of language that is conventionally figurative (to lend a hand; to give one’s hand) adds to the Grand Guignol quality of the scene, but also to its powerful point: nothing is merely a figure, especially on the stage. Poetry and language are deadly earnest.” 

I don’t have anything to say, so I’m just going to quote Marjorie Garber: 

“Later Shakespearean tragedies, though they contain key moments of unspeakable bodily violation (the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear; the massacre of Macduff’s wife and children in Macbeth), often tend to translate and internalize such physical degradations as metaphors, rendering them metaphysical (‘filial ingratitude/ Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand/ For lifting food to’t?’ [Lear 3.4.14-16]). But Titus Andronicus is in a way the radical—the root—of Shakespearean tragedy, the dreamscape or nightmare world laid out for all to see, not disguised by a retreat into metaphor.” 

What do you think? 

“Seneca cannot be too heavy”: some thoughts on Seneca’s horror plays

Seneca (ca 4 BC – AD 65) was influenced by the ancient Greeks, and he himself influenced Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. For someone like me, he is unavoidable, so last month I read his Phaedra, and now read some more. 

The verdict? I love Shakespeare; I love the ancient Greeks; I don’t like Seneca. 

1/ Medea, adapted from Euripides’s play, is a closet drama, meaning that it’s meant to be read rather than seen onstage. And you can tell it wouldn’t work very well onstage, unless heavily edited: there are too many long speeches, some extremely long; much of the play doesn’t feel particularly dramatic. But I didn’t find it enjoyable to read either (though perhaps Emily Wilson is partly to blame). Compared to the Euripides play, it is more violent and sensationalist; Seneca’s Medea is more brutal, less conflicted, killing her own children in front of their father; Jason appears less despicable; the nurse and the chorus don’t seem to have much sympathy for Medea; the play as a whole is cruder. 

Elizabethan playwrights probably enjoyed the savagery and violence though. 

The interesting thing about reading Seneca is that I realise even though the Athenian playwrights deal with horrific, disturbing subjects, their plays are not just violent and sensational. They’re a lot subtler, more sophisticated and profound than Seneca and the revenge plays of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans—Hamlet, or Shakespeare in general, is obviously an exception, but Titus Andronicus is also a crude, ridiculous play, nothing like Shakespeare’s mature plays. 

I didn’t even like Euripides’s Medea, compared to his other plays, but it’s subtler and more nuanced than Seneca’s version. 

2/ Oedipus is adapted from Oedipus the King by Sophocles (also known as Oedipus Rex or Oedipus Tyrannus). Coleridge thinks the Sophocles play is one of the three best plots in the world (the others are Tom Jones by Fielding—I agree!—and The Alchemist by Ben Jonson). I doubt anyone would say that about the Seneca play.

The brilliance of the Sophocles play is in the way the plot unfolds, the way the characters gradually discover the horrible truth—Jocasta is to know before Oedipus—the tension arises because of something that has already happened, not something that is happening. The myth—a man kills his father and marries his mother—is sensational and disturbing, but Sophocles seems to be more interested in questions about fate and human agency. At the same time, he develops the character of Oedipus so that you can see why Oedipus is in the position he’s in: because he is imperious and even hot-tempered, he killed a man on the road, who turns out to be his father Laius; because he is intelligent and resourceful, he defeated the Sphinx and got awarded the queen of Thebes, who happened to be his mother. 

You don’t get any of that in the Seneca play. The plot is awkward; they summon back the spirit of the dead Laius and he names the killer (how stupid is this?); Seneca seems to delight in gory detail (do we need all that gory description of the sacrifice? why does he expand and exaggerate Oedipus’s blinding?); the chorus, for some reason, sings a few times about Bacchus and the horrific death of Pentheus, adding to the gruesome quality of the play; Seneca also changes Jocasta’s death, making it melodramatic and also reducing the nobility of her character as we see in the Sophocles play; I don’t mind that Jocasta dies onstage, but don’t like that she dies in front of Oedipus—no, worse than that, it is ambiguous and suggests that Oedipus might help kill Jocasta; the whole thing is just sordid. 

And that’s just the impression I’ve got from reading Seneca: it’s hard to explain, but his characters just don’t have the nobility we see in the Greek plays; even in the case of Phaedra, both Euripides’s Phaedra and Racine’s Phèdre have a nobility that Seneca’s character lacks. 

I read Oedipus in E. F. Watling’s translation, which felt more poetic than Emily Wilson’s translation of the same play and Medea. 

(On a side note: I wrote in my blog post about Shakespeare and the Greeks that Shakespeare didn’t depict tension that arises because of something that already happened, as we see in Oedipus the King. That is not entirely true, or rather, Shakespeare doesn’t write an entire play about that, but he does do it in the final scenes of Othello—tension arises as Emilia and then Othello realises what he has done, and what Iago has done). 

3/ Thyestes is another fabula crepidata, which is a Latin play with Greek subjects. There are however no extant Greek plays about the myth, so nothing to which to compare Seneca’s play. 

To be honest, there are interesting passages in the play. 

“MINISTER You do not fear your people’s disapproval?

ATREUS Of the advantages of monarchy

The greatest is that subjects are compelled

Not only to endure but to approve

Their master’s actions.

MINISTER                        Men compelled by fear

To praise, may be by fear compelled to hate.

He who desires to win sincere approval

Will seek it in the heart, not on the tongue.

ATREUS A moderate man may win sincere approval;

It takes a strong man to enforce feigned praise.

Men must be made to want what they dislike.

MINISTER Let the king want what’s right, who will oppose him?

ATREUS The king who binds himself to want what’s right Sits on a shaky throne.” 

(Act 2) 

(translated by E. F. Watling) 

Now that is Seneca the philosopher, Seneca the statesman, Seneca the emperor’s advisor. 

In terms of language and imagery, there are many striking passages: 

“FURY […] Nor shall the heavens

Be unaffected by your evil deeds:

What right have stars to twinkle in the sky?

Why need their lights still ornament the world?

Let night be black, let there be no more day.

Let havoc rule this house; call blood and strife

And death; let every corner of this place

Be filled with the revenge of Tantalus!...” 

(Act 1) 

Or: 

“ATREUS It is. My heart is shaken with a storm

Of passion that confounds it to its centre.

I am compelled, although I know not whither,

I am compelled by forces.… Hear! the earth

Groans from its depths; the sky is clear, but thunder

Rumbles, and from the house there came a crash

As if the roof were falling; and our gods,

Shaken, have turned their backs on us. So be it!

Let a black deed be done, which gods above

Will fear to see.” 

(Act 2) 

Reading these plays, especially Thyestes, I can see the influence of Seneca on Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights: the 5-act division, the use of (bombastic) rhetoric, the fascination with evil and taste for extreme violence. All the lurid, gruesome scenes I have seen in 16th-17th century English revenge plays—a character bites off his own tongue and spits it out, a villain kisses and gets killed by a poisoned skull, someone appears onstage with a bloody heart on a dagger, and so on—all seem to trace back to the spectacle of violence and gory detail in Seneca. The pie in Titus Andronicus is a direct reference to Thyestes and—look at all the horrible murders in that play—I can see why someone would say it looks like an attempt to out-Seneca Seneca.

However, as I wrote back then, there’s nothing to the revenge plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries—nothing but spectacle—and very often those plays leave a bad taste in my mouth afterwards because the characters are all monstrous and bestial, and the same could be said about Seneca’s plays. Out of the four I’ve read, Thyestes is the most horrific—Atreus takes revenge on his own brother Thyestes by roasting Thyestes’s children and feeding them to him—it is repulsive. 

I think I’ve got enough of Seneca. 

“As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle—”: on Antony and Cleopatra

1/ Reading Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All (an insightful book about all the plays), I realised how much I loved Antony and Cleopatra. It’s such a vast play, full of lyricism and eroticism and exuberance. 

When I first read the play in 2021, I was baffled. Antony and Cleopatra is so unlike Shakespeare’s other tragedies: it doesn’t have the angst, the terror, the heartrending quality of King Lear or Othello; the deaths of the protagonists don’t even feel tragic. Even A. C. Bradley found it an unsatisfying play, despite his love for the inexhaustible Cleopatra. But Antony and Cleopatra is a different kind of play: a play in which Shakespeare explores the stuff of myths and legends and transforms two flawed and in many ways ordinary people into quasi-mythological beings in the last two Acts; a play in which he seems reconciled with humanity, and finds the sublime in two deeply flawed human beings. Despite their irresponsibility and selfishness, despite their defeat in battle, one sides with them—with their love and passion and generosity and vitality—rather than the cold and orderly world of Caesar. And when they die, we don’t feel the pain, the sense of loss as from the death of Cordelia or Desdemona, because of their nobility in death, because they have defeated Caesar and will be reunited, because the world doesn’t feel enough for them.   

“CLEOPATRA […] Husband, I come!

Now to that name my courage prove my title.

I am fire and air; my other elements

I give to baser life...” 

(Act 5 scene 2) 

In death, Cleopatra mythologises herself and Antony. 

It is a wondrous play. I don’t know how Shakespeare does it, the same way I don’t know how he creates that sense of wonder in the statue scene in The Winter’s Tale. 

2/ I have now read 5 essays in Shakespeare After All: on Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and Antony and Cleopatra. It is a brilliant book: Marjorie Garber analyses all the plays, with lots of quotes; I like that sometimes she also mentions performances, and the reception of the plays or characters over time.  

For anyone who wants a book of literary criticism about all of Shakespeare’s plays, I would recommend Shakespeare After All and Tony Tanner’s Prefaces to Shakespeare (instead of a certain grandiloquent critic I’m not gonna name).  

G. Wilson Knight also has a few excellent essays about Antony and Cleopatra in The Imperial Theme. 

3/ I have never seen any production of Antony and Cleopatra. Who can play Cleopatra? Who can make me think “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/ Her infinite variety”? Who can make me think “The vilest things/ Become themselves in her”? But I have listened to Frances Barber on audio, and she is Cleopatra. She can be fierce, she can sound cruel, she can sound petty, she can be a drama queen, but there’s an allure about Frances Barber’s performance that one thinks, no wonder Antony says “Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch/ Of the ranged empire fall. Here is my space/ Kingdoms are clay.” 

4/ I wonder what it says about me that my top 5 Shakespeare plays are Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, and Antony and Cleopatra. Nothing controversial, I reckon—all were written after 1600—all are Shakespeare at his peak. 

No comedies though; the Shakespeare comedy I love best is Twelfth Night, which is melancholic; unless you follow the categories in the First Folio and count The Winter’s Tale and Measure for Measure as comedies. 

Ranking Shakespeare [updated]

On 6/4/2023, after reading all of Shakespeare’s plays, I created this blog post ranking the plays and characters. All the lists are now updated. 

My 5 favourite plays:

King Lear

Macbeth 

Othello

The Winter’s Tale 

Antony and Cleopatra 

My 15 favourite plays: 

Macbeth 

Othello

King Lear

Antony and Cleopatra

The Winter’s Tale 

Hamlet 

Measure for Measure 

Henry IV, Part 1 

Henry IV, Part 2 

Twelfth Night 

The Merchant of Venice 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 

Richard II

Julius Caesar 

Coriolanus 

5 greatest male characters:

Macbeth in Macbeth 

Hamlet in Hamlet

Iago in Othello

Falstaff in Henry IV plays (not The Merry Wives of Windsor) 

Shylock in The Merchant of Venice 

5 favourite male characters:

Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet 

Falstaff in Henry IV plays (not The Merry Wives of Windsor) 

Barnardine in Measure for Measure 

Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing 

The Fool in King Lear 

5 greatest female characters:

Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra 

Lady Macbeth in Macbeth 

Rosalind in As You Like It

Viola in Twelfth Night 

Isabella in Measure for Measure 

5 favourite female characters: 

Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing

Emilia in Othello 

Hermione in The Winter’s Tale

Rosalind in As You Like It  

Margaret in Henry VI Part 2, Henry VI Part 3, and Richard III (not Henry VI Part 1)

Favourite couple:

Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing

Favourite non-speaking character: 

Crab the dog in The Two Gentlemen of Verona 

5 most evil characters: 

Iago in Othello 

Goneril in King Lear 

Regan in King Lear

Leontes in The Winter’s Tale 

Richard III in Richard III 

10 favourite Shakespeare productions and films: 

Macbeth (1979), dir. Trevor Nunn, with Ian McKellen as Macbeth and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth 

King Lear (2016), dir. Michael Buffong, with Don Warrington as Lear 

The Winter’s Tale (1999), dir. Gregory Doran, with Antony Sher as Leontes 

Hamlet (1990), dir. Kevin Kline, with Kevin Kline as Hamlet 

Coriolanus (2024), dir. Lyndsey Turner, with David Oyelowo as Coriolanus 

Henry IV Part 1 and Henry IV Part 2 (1979), dir. David Giles, with David Gwillim as Hal and Anthony Quayle as Falstaff 

Twelfth Night (1988), dir. Kenneth Branagh, with Frances Barber as Viola and Richard Briers as Malvolio 

Measure for Measure (1979), dir. Desmond Davis, with Kate Nelligan as Isabella 

Othello (2013), dir. Nicholas Hytner, with Adrian Lester as Othello and Rory Kinnear as Iago 

The Taming of the Shrew (1976), dir. William Ball and Kirk Browning, with Marc Singer as Petruchio 

Bonus: 

Ran (1985), dir. Akira Kurosawa 

+10 favourite books about Shakespeare: 

Prefaces to Shakespeare by Tony Tanner

Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth by A. C. Bradley

The Wheel of Fire by G. Wilson Knight 

The Crown of Life by G. Wilson Knight 

The Imperial Theme by G. Wilson Knight  

What Happens in Hamlet by John Dover Wilson 

Shakespeare After All by Marjorie Garber 

The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate

Soul of the Age by Jonathan Bate 

Shakespeare: The World As Stage by Bill Bryson 

Shakespeare by Anthony Burgess 

Now give me your lists. 

Rereading Othello, or How I’ve come to realise that Othello is not really about jealousy

It took me a while, but now I can see that the central theme of Othello is not jealousy, but the ensnaring and damnation of the human soul. 

“OTHELLO […] Perdition catch my soul 

But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, 

Chaos is come again.” 

(Act 3 scene 3) 

Othello has known chaos; in Desdemona, he sees a glimpse of heaven, a glimpse of salvation—“My life upon her faith.” 

Marjorie Garber doesn’t write at length about it in Shakespeare After All, but she also mentions “the struggle between two forces, a “good angel” and a “bad angel,” for a man’s soul. […] in Othello a very similar contest pits Iago on one side and Desdemona on the other, the two contending for the possession, in the sense of property or ownership and also that of magical or demonic enchantment, of Othello.” 

The word “soul” (or “souls”) appears 40 times in the play, and when Othello in the end realises what he has done, he asks: 

“OTHELLO […] Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil 

Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?” 

(Act 5 scene 2) 

Beauty, goodness, love, faith, salvation—Iago may not know what it is, but he knows he lacks something, and he must destroy it—“He hath a daily beauty in his life/ That makes me ugly.” And he succeeds. The saintly Desdemona forgives Othello seemingly from beyond death, but Othello knows his soul is damned and he cannot accept her forgiveness: 

“OTHELLO […] Where should Othello go? 

Now, how dost thou look now? O ill-starred wench! 

Pale as thy smock! When we shall meet at compt, 

This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, 

And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl?

Even like thy chastity; 

O cursèd, cursèd slave! Whip me, ye devils, 

From the possession of this heavenly sight! 

Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulfur! 

Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! 

O Desdemon! Dead Desdemon; dead. O! O!” 

(ibid.) 

The one thing Iago hasn’t predicted is the love and strength that his wife is capable of—she exposes him—“Let heaven and men and devils, let them all/ All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.” (ibid.) But if I in my previous reading only paid attention to the tragedy of Desdemona and of Emilia, I can now see the tragedy of Othello. Shakespeare’s play is not simply a play about manipulation and jealousy and an honour killing, it is so much more. It took me a couple of years, 4 performances, numerous essays, discussions, and a rereading, but now I see Othello in a different light. 

I’m going to quote Himadri (Argumentative Old Git): 

“If I am on the right track on this, the tragedy lies not in Othello’s fall from a great height, but in his failure to reach that height in the first place. That height may be but vaguely glimpsed, but Othello, unlike Iago, is capable of glimpsing it, however vaguely, and the entire play seems suffused with a terror of that chaos that lies just under the surface of our lives – a chaos that prevents us from attaining those vaguely glimpsed heights, and which instead hurls our very souls from heaven.” 

What a magnificent work of art. 

_____________________________________________

I’ve also picked up Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All and read the Othello essay. It is a long book as she wrote about all of Shakespeare’s plays—like Tony Tanner’s Prefaces to Shakespeare—so I’ll probably go through it slowly rather than read it all at once. The Othello essay is excellent though. 

My 20 favourite plays not by Shakespeare

There was a time when pretty much all I read was novels and short stories; the plays I knew were those assigned at school or university. Then a couple of years ago, my favourite plays were all by Shakespeare. 

But now I have got a better grasp of drama, especially classical drama, so here’s a list of favourites that aren’t by Shakespeare (listed chronologically by the dramatist’s birth year, and grouped by country): 

• The Oresteia by Aeschylus, which is actually three plays: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides 
• Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus 
• Oedipus the King 
• Antigone 
• Electra by Sophocles 
• Hippolytus 
• Hecabe 
• The Bacchae by Euripides 
• Lysistrata 
• The Frogs by Aristophanes 
• Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe 
• The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster 
• The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley 
• The Revenger’s Tragedy by Thomas Middleton or Cyril Tourneur 
• Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca 
• Tartuffe 
• Don Juan 
• The Misanthrope by Molière 
• Phèdre by Jean Racine 
• The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen 

______________________________________

What can we see here? My tastes are predominantly Greek (and Shakespearean): 10 out of 20 plays are by the Athenian playwrights (or 12 out of 22 if you don’t count the Oresteia as one). Molière is another favourite. 

Only one play from the 19th century. No Goethe. No Chekhov—is that a surprise?—I struggled with his plays, having read only two, and much prefer him as a short story writer. No Oscar Wilde, simply because I haven’t read him—if “allowed” to include plays I’ve seen onscreen, I would name The Importance of Being Earnest (though it’s hard to say which play I would remove to make place for it). 

No Tennessee Williams, whom I liked at university. No one contemporary, but then the only one I know is Tom Stoppard—one day I’m going to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which I would probably like. 

Now this list is a bit of a cheat—a list of favourite plays, by Shakespeare and other dramatists, would be much, much harder. 

Name your favourite plays. 

The Frogs by Aristophanes

1/ Could anyone love ancient Greek drama and not love The Frogs? 

The premise is this: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are all dead; the Athenian stage is now devoid of talent (“I defy you to find a genuine poet among the whole lot of them: one who can coin a memorable line,” Dionysus says to Heracles); so the god of drama, Dionysus, decides to go to the underworld to bring back one of the dramatists. 

The first half of the play is the journey of Dionysus, in disguise as Heracles, to Hades. The second half is the battle between the traditional Aeschylus and the innovative Euripides. 

When Aristophanes wrote the play, Aeschylus had been dead for some time (456 or 455 BC), Euripides had recently died (ca 406 BC), but Sophocles was still alive; Sophocles died before the play was performed in 405 BC but Aristophanes didn’t have enough time to rewrite the whole play and incorporate him into it, so he only rewrote some lines to allude to Sophocles’s departure to the underworld. 

If you’re familiar with ancient Greek drama, The Frogs is invaluable because it offers insights into contemporary reception of these dramatists—the three tragedians who survive are indeed the three greatest—it’s also fascinating as one of the earliest pieces of literary criticism, long before Aristotle’s Poetics. As its own thing, it’s also a very funny play. Some of the jokes are over my head, naturally—there are local references, some of the plays mentioned don’t survive, and above all, I cannot read ancient Greek and missed all the jokes about metre and language—but I have read enough to see the contrast between Aeschylus and Euripides and it’s still a very funny play. 

Like Shakespeare, Aristophanes mixes the high and the low, the serious and the ridiculous. 

I read the translation by David Barrett, revised by Shomit Dutta. 

2/ Dionysus goes to Hades with his slave Xanthias. 

“CHARON I don’t take slaves. Not unless they fought in the sea-battle.

XANTHIAS I was exempted on medical grounds: eye trouble.” 

The relationship between the two is hilarious. 

“DIONYSUS I feel faint. Give me a sponge.

[XANTHIAS extracts a sponge from one of the bags.]

Press it on my heart, there’s a good chap.

XANTHIAS There you go.

DIONYSUS No, here. That’s it.

XANTHIAS The heart’s slipped a bit, hasn’t it?

DIONYSUS What? Oh, yes – the sudden shock. It’s taken refuge in my… lower intestine.” 

The introduction by Shomit Dutta also makes me think about the question of actors. As the playwrights were allowed first 2 actors, then increased to 3 by Sophocles, and the chorus, the actors had to do quite a lot of doubling. In The Frogs, the main actor would play Dionysus, who I think was onstage the entire time; the second actor would play Xanthias and Euripides or Aeschylus. 

3/ Why is the play called The Frogs? I have no idea. But there’s a chorus of frogs when Dionysus is on the way to see the dead playwrights. 

“FROGS

Brekekekex, koax, koax,

Brekekekex, koax, koax!

Oh we are the musical Frogs!

We live in the marshes and bogs!

Sweet, sweet is the hymn

We sing as we swim,

And our voices are known

For their beautiful tone…”

4/ Even though Aristophanes’s Aeschylus and Euripides are probably not much like the actual Aeschylus and Euripides, the same way Aristophanes’s Socrates is not much like the real Socrates, the duel between the two characters is amusing. 

“EURIPIDES But is a cock suitable material for a tragedy?

AESCHYLUS And you, you blasphemer, what did you put into your plays?”

Euripides is, as always, accused of bringing all sorts of characters into his plays. 

“AESCHYLUS […] No one can say I ever put a lustful woman into a play.

EURIPIDES How could you? You’ve never even met one.

AESCHYLUS And thank heaven for that…” 

5/ The Penguin edition of Alcestis and Other Plays (translated by John Davie) has an excellent introduction by Richard Rutherford, in which he compares the three Greek tragedians. 

“Whereas Aeschylus’ characters (the Prometheus apart) are above all members of a family or of a larger community, Sophocles tends to focus on individuals set apart from their society or at odds with those who care for them: Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Philoctetes, the aged Oedipus. With him, more than with the other two tragedians, it makes sense to speak of tragic heroes and heroines. […] The role of the chorus is somewhat reduced, though some of the odes which reflect on human achievement and its smallness in relation to the timeless power of the gods have a poetic splendour to match almost anything in Aeschylus. The characters have more depth and subtlety…” 

That is probably why Sophocles is my favourite, even though I love all three. They’re all different: Aeschylus is monumental, full of grandeur, but he’s more distant; Sophocles and Euripides focus more on individual characters, though Sophocles has a tragic hero or heroine at the centre for the entire play whereas Euripides tends to shift the focus from one character in half of the play to another in the latter half. 

“The plays of Euripides, although they still work within the traditional range of myths, do not generally dramatize heroic initiatives and triumphant achievements. His are tragedies of suffering rather than action (the Medea again is a special case, a partial exception).” 

Rutherford makes an important point though: 

“In some ways Euripides can be seen as a more self-consciously literary dramatist than his fellow tragedians. […] He seems regularly to modify the conventions of his genre and adapt the work of his predecessors, sometimes even drawing attention to the changes he has made. […] Aeschylus and Sophocles are also experienced in reshaping and adapting traditional motifs, but Euripides goes far beyond them in playing with conventions and exploiting the spectator’s awareness of the dramatic situation. While shocked and moved by the events on stage, we are nevertheless frequently reminded that this is ‘only’ a play.” 

I would probably have to think more about the last sentence, but that passage has a good point. If I have to choose between Euripides and Aeschylus, I would probably go for Euripides for the variety and inventiveness and the various interesting things he does in his plays, though the Oresteia is magnificent.

To go back to Aristophanes—after all this blog post is meant to be about him and The Frogs (which, by the way, Richard Rutherford does mention in his introduction)—he is also a great dramatist and very inventive. The five plays I’ve read so far are all different: Lysistrata is a farce about a sex strike; Women at Thesmophoria Festival includes Euripides as a character and parodies multiple of his plays; The Clouds is the most intellectual of the plays, satirising the Sophists; The Birds is a fantasy, about the utopia of Cloudcuckooland; and now The Frogs is something different altogether. 

It is fascinating that these great dramatists were alive and working in the same place around the same time. 

Prometheus Bound, which may or may not have been by Aeschylus

1/ Apart from the Oresteia, Prometheus Bound seems to be the most referenced and influential among the plays attributed to Aeschylus, though it may or may not have been by him. Doubts began to emerge in the 19th century because of the theme, vocabulary, linguistics, metre, and style, but what can I say, I can’t read it in the original. 

I read the verse translation by E. D. A. Morshead (which sounds better than the verse and prose translation by Alan Sommerstein that I’ve got). 

2/ The play is set on the mountaintop. Before the story begins, Prometheus has helped Zeus defeat the Titans to become the new king of the gods, but he is now punished by Zeus for loving and helping mankind. 

“PROMETHEUS

  […] Behold me, who must here sustain

  The marring agonies of pain,

  Wrestling with torture, doomed to bear

  Eternal ages, year on year!

  Such and so shameful is the chain

  Which Heaven’s new tyrant doth ordain

  To bind me helpless here.

  Woe! for the ruthless present doom!

  Woe! for the Future’s teeming womb!

  On what far dawn, in what dim skies,

  Shall star of my deliverance rise?” 

It is interesting that the play is about Zeus as much as it’s about Prometheus, perhaps even more, but Zeus never appears. 

“CHORUS

  What God can wear such ruthless heart

  As to delight in ill?

  Who in thy sorrow bears not part?

  Zeus, Zeus alone! for he, with wrathful will,

  Clenched and inflexible,

  Bears down Heaven’s race—nor end shall be, till hate

  His soul shall satiate,

  Or till, by some device, some other hand

  Shall wrest from him his sternly-clasped command!” 

The various plays I’ve read from ancient Greece have depicted the gods as lustful, capricious, cruel, and petty, but Prometheus Bound goes even further—the playwright goes for Zeus, depicting him as a treacherous tyrant. Prometheus Bound must have influenced Paradise Lost. Kenneth McLeish tells me that in 19th century’s Europe in particular, “the grandeur of its poetry and the suffering colossus at its centre were so much in tune with the intellectual mood that it was ranked with Hamlet and the Book of Job, and its creator with Dante, Michelangelo and other such artist-supermen.” 

The play is very quotable, I think, full of great passages. 

“CHORUS

[…] Strange is thy sorrow! one only I know who has suffered thy pain—

Atlas the Titan, the god, in a ruthless, invincible chain!

He beareth for ever and ever the burden and poise of the sky,

The vault of the rolling heaven, and earth re-echoes his cry.

The depths of the sea are troubled; they mourn from their caverns

profound,

And the darkest and innermost hell moans deep with a sorrowful sound;

And the rivers of waters, that flow from the fountains that spring

without stain,

Are as one in the great lamentation, and moan for thy piteous pain.” 

I especially love the passages when Prometheus talks about what he has taught mankind. 

“PROMETHEUS 

  […] But listen now

  Unto the rede of mortals and their woes,

  And how their childish and unreasoning state

  Was changed by me to consciousness and thought.

  Yet not in blame of mortals will I speak,

  But as in proof of service wrought to them.

  For, in the outset, eyes they had and saw not;

  And ears they had but heard not; age on age,

  Like unsubstantial shapes in vision seen,

  They groped at random in the world of sense…” 

Prometheus has taught humanity carpentry and architecture and astronomy and mathematics and writing and medicine and so on—that’s why he’s now bound to a rock. 

“PROMETHEUS

  Yet more I gave them, even the boon of fire.

CHORUS

  What? radiant fire, to things ephemeral?” 

3/ I have noted before the clear contrast between ancient Greek plays and the plays of Shakespeare’s time: Elizabethan and Jacobean plays are full of people doing things, flirting, kissing, eating, fighting, killing, etc; ancient Greek plays mostly depict people talking about things or reacting to things, as murder and other horrific things are kept off-stage or hidden from view. 

Prometheus Bound is even more extreme in the sense that the protagonist cannot move around—he’s bound to the rock for the entire play (if it’s ever staged)—it’s a drama of the mind. In terms of plot, it’s even more static than Seven Against Thebes—nothing happens, Prometheus first talks to the chorus of nymphs about his sin of helping humanity and Zeus’s punishment, then he talks to Io (now a cow) about their fate, then he sees Hermes and challenges Zeus to dash his bolt on him. But in terms of conflict and tension, I think there is more in Prometheus Bound than in Seven Against Thebes—different characters warn Prometheus of Zeus’s power and fear his punishment, but Prometheus becomes more and more defiant as the play progresses—there is an increasing sense of tension and threat even though Zeus never appears, and that culminates in the final moment of the play. In Seven Against Thebes, even though the characters are in a war and threatened on seven sides, it’s written in such a way that I didn’t feel any tension till Eteocles was told that his brother Polyneices was at the seventh gate. 

4/ Another thing I find strange about Prometheus Bound is that Zeus is not only a tyrant (in his behaviour towards Io as well as Prometheus), but he also has limits. 

Zeus is not omniscient—he didn’t know Prometheus was going to steal fire from the gods and give it to mankind. 

Zeus is not omnipotent—he cannot escape his own fate. 

“CHORUS.

  But what hand rules the helm of destiny?

PROMETHEUS.

  The triform Fates, and Furies unforgiving.

CHORUS.

  Then is the power of Zeus more weak than theirs?

PROMETHEUS.

  He may not shun the fate ordained for him.”

He doesn’t even know what’s going to happen. 

“HERMES.

  […] Attend—the Sire supreme doth bid thee tell

  What is the wedlock which thou vauntest now,

  Whereby he falleth from supremacy?” 

Is this not strange? That the king of the gods is not all-powerful? 

This is a fascinating play. 

Surely Shakespeare must have known the Greeks [updated]

All the writings I have so far come across tell me that Shakespeare probably didn’t read ancient Greek plays: there were no English translations available at the time, writers from ancient Rome were more important, there’s no evidence that Shakespeare knew Greek or read the Greeks. But Latin translations were available, and I can’t help finding it unlikely that Shakespeare wasn’t curious about Greek tragedy: Roman writers, who influenced Shakespeare, were themselves heavily influenced or inspired by the Greeks; Francis Meres, the first to canonise Shakespeare, in 1598 (!) knew the Greeks (“As the Greek tongue is made famous and eloquent by Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Phocylides and Aristophanes; and the Latin tongue by Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Silius Italicus, Lucanus, Lucretius, Ausonius and Claudianus: so the English tongue is mightily enriched and gorgeously invested in true ornaments and resplendent abiliments by Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Warner, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Chapman”); Ben Jonson knew the Greeks (mentioning Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in his poem about Shakespeare); and so on. 

There is no way that Shakespeare was in such a circle and never read the Greeks. 

In the Oresteia by Aeschylus, Agamemnon begins with a watchman, like Hamlet; the scene of Orestes confronting his mother Klytaimestra (or Clytemnestra) in Libation Bearers reminds me of Hamlet and Gertrude. There are also similarities between Hamlet and Sophocles’s Electra: both are revenge plays that focus more on the mind of the protagonist than on the revenge itself; Electra is consumed with hate, and concentrates all her hate on her mother Clytemnestra even though Aegisthus also took part in the killing; Hamlet seems to hate his mother even more than he hates Claudius; Electra thinks about her mother sleeping with the murderer of her father, so does Hamlet. 

Sometimes the similarities don’t necessarily suggest influence—perhaps it’s simply that Shakespeare and these playwrights were writing about human nature and human nature doesn’t really change: for instance, Oedipus’s anger and bitterness at being abandoned by his children makes me think of King Lear. But I do wonder if the Oresteia and Sophocles’s Electra influenced Hamlet. 

I also like to think that Shakespeare got inspiration from Euripides for The Winter’s Tale: he adapted the play from Robert Greene’s Pandosto but wanted to change the ending—he clearly didn’t care for all the incestuous stuff—so perhaps he got some ideas from Alcestis and Heracles. As my friend Himadri pointed out, Leontes, like Heracles, destroys his own family in a fit of madness; Leontes, like Heracles, has to live not only with the loss, but also with the guilt. I didn’t see strong parallels between Alcestis and The Winter’s Tale when I first read the play, but now that I’ve thought more about it, there are: however you interpret Hermione’s restoration to Leontes, the scene is a vision of resurrection; and as in Alcestis, the happiness in the ending of The Winter’s Tale is subdued, Leontes cannot undo what he has done to Hermione (and their son), the same way Admetus has to face the fact that he has let Alcestis die in his place. 

Surely Shakespeare must have known these plays. 

Thoughts? 

_________________________________

Update on 14/8/2025: Currently not on Twitter, I have more time to read literary essays on JSTOR and found, among others, two interesting essays about the subject of Shakespeare and the Greeks.  

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2870800

In this essay, Louise Schleiner argues that Hamlet was influenced by Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Euripides’s Orestes. 

“Whatever Shakespeare’s competence with Greek and Latin may have been (respect for his learning is fashionable again), I am convinced that at least some passages of Euripides’ Orestes and Aeschylus’ Oresteia (in the latter namely the graveyard and matricide scenes of the Libation Bearers) by some means influenced Hamlet. The concrete theatrical similarities between the Shakespearean and Aeschylean graveyard scenes and between the roles of Horatio and Pylades (in both Aeschylus and Euripides) are in my view too close to be coincidental. Furthermore, the churchyard scene of Hamlet does not occur in any of the play’s known sources or analogues: if it was not a sheer invention—and Shakespeare very seldom sheerly invented anything in the way of plot—it has some source not yet identified.” 

She also argues that Shakespeare could easily borrow books from Ben Jonson’s large library, as they were fellow playwrights (and friends). 

The main arguments for the possible influence are: 

• Hamlet has “Orestean urge to kill his mother” (he may not say it but he’s “at considerable risk of killing her”); 
• There are parallels between the graveyard scene in Libation Bearers and the one in Hamlet, which isn’t in Roman and medieval sources; 
• Horatio seems to mirror Pylades, which may explain the inconsistency in the characterisation of Horatio (“Shakespeare had superimposed upon the domestic Horatio of the Ur-Hamlet the concept of Pylades, dear foreigner-companion of Orestes from his youth abroad, touchstone of justice and male friendship, soul mate and supporter of the Orestean hero with his dreadful commission to cleanse away his own mother’s evil and the usurping step-father whom that evil has enabled to take power”); 
• Orestes is haunted by the Furies after taking revenge, the Furies seem to be let loose on Hamlet before he takes revenge. 

These are interesting points, no? 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40210320

In this essay, Sarah Dewar-Watson argues that The Winter’s Tale may have been influenced by George Buchanan’s Latin translation of Alcestis. 

Alcestis and Hermione are both restored to their husbands; in both plays, they are first veiled in the recognition scene; in both plays, a third party brings about the reunion of husband and wife; in both plays, the wife says nothing to the husband at the end. 

After Alcestis’s departure to Hades, Admetus thinks about creating a sculpture (or something similar) of Alcestis: 

“I will have an image of you, the work of a skilled craftsman’s hand, and lay it in my bed. I will kneel before it, clasping it in my arms, and call your name, and it will seem as though I hold my dear wife, although I do not. An empty pleasure, I know, but it will lighten my heavy heart. Or perhaps you will visit me in my dreams, and console me. We welcome a glimpse of our loved ones in our sleep, however long it lasts.” 

Dewar-Watson argues: 

“Buchanan interpolates the word statura at a crucial moment in the recognition scene: “O femina, / quaecumque tandem es, es profecto Alcestidi / modo et statura corporis simillima” (Lady, whoever you are, you are just like Alcestis, the very image of her form) (ll. 1137-39). This is a rendering of Euripides, lines 1061-63: “σύδ’, ώγύναι, / ήτις ποτ’ εί σύ, ταϋτ’ έχουσ’ Άλκήστιδι / μορφής μέτρ’ ίσθι καί προσήιξαι δέμας” (You, lady, whoever you are, have the exact form of Alcestis and your body is just like hers). Buchanan’s interpolation of the statue motif, therefore, provides a clear model for the device in the equivalent scene in Shakespeare. Buchanan’s variation on the source text is-like his interpolation of umbra-striking, since the rest of his translation is generally a very close rendering.

The link between Buchanan’s Alcestis and The Winter’s Tale is underscored by another verbal echo. In Euripides, Admetus exclaims to Heracles, “uń u’ έλης ήρημένον” (You destroy me, I who am already destroyed) (1. 1065), which Buchanan closely follows (“neve perdas perditum”) (1. 1141). The line is especially memorable because of the reduplicative effect provided by the cognate accusative, and it thus provides a likely source for Perdita’s name. Although the cognate accusative is an effect that English cannot readily accommodate, Shakespeare substitutes a bilingual pun (“Our Perdita is found” [5.3.121]), which playfully inverts the original grammatical structure. Where the cognates in Latin and Greek heavily reinforce a sense of loss and destruction, Shakespeare’s reconstruction of the syntax creates a new play on words in which the very idea of loss is countered and dispelled.” 

Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus

1/ This was tough to read. The Oresteia, Aeschylus’s masterpiece, was first performed in 458 BC. Seven Against Thebes was produced in 467 BC, as the third part and the only one that survives of a four-part sequence, preceded by Laius and Oedipus (forming a tragic trilogy) and followed by a satyr play, The Sphinx. Seven Against Thebes is about the fight between Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polyneices, which was not covered by Sophocles’s Theban plays. 

When Sophocles wrote about the same family, Antigone was from around 442–440 BBC, its prequel King Oedipus was around 429–427 BC, and Oedipus at Colonus (ca 407 BC) was written shortly before his death ca 406 BC. 

As my main frame of reference is Shakespeare, when I first got into Greek tragedy, I had to adjust to the plays of Sophocles and Euripides as they’re different, but in the plays before the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s concept of drama is even further away from ours that I don’t quite understand it. The play is static. Part of the play, when the chorus is wailing and lamenting, feels like an opera. Part of the play, when the messenger tells Eteocles about the enemies at the seven gates and paints a picture of each one, feels like an epic poem being performed to the audience. It is very odd. 

2/ I’m just going to poke at the play. 

“CHORUS […] The army has been let loose, it has left its camp! 

This great host of horses is pouring forward at the gallop! 

The dust I see in the air shows me it is so, 

a voiceless messenger but true and certain! 

The soil <of my land>, 

struck by hooves, sends the noise right to my ears! 

It’s flying, it’s roaring like an irresistible 

mountain torrent!”

(translated by Alan Sommerstein) 

If only I could read ancient Greek! 

“CHORUS […] I hear the rattle of chariots round the city! 

O Lady Hera! 

The sockets of their heavy-laden axles are squealing! 

Beloved Artemis! 

The air is going mad with the brandishing of spears!” 

The most interesting images are probably when the messenger describes the enemies. 

“SCOUT […] Tydeus is already growling near the Proetid […]. Teydeus, lusting madly for battle, is screaming like a snake hissing at midday…” 

He describes, he paints a picture of each enemy. What do the audience see? Do they see anything? 

“SCOUT […] I shuddered, I won’t deny it, to see [Hippomedon] brandish his great round threshing-floor of a shield. And it can’t have been a cheap artist who gave him that device on the shield, Typhon emitting dark smoke, the many-coloured sister of flame, from his fire-breathing lips; the round circle of the hollow-bellied shield is floored with coiling snakes. The man himself raised a great war cry; he is possessed by Ares, and he rages for a fight like a maenad, with a fearsome look in his eye…” 

I like the imagery, but all this stuff feels like an epic poem—there’s no drama as we know it, no conflict and tension—till Eteocles hears that his brother Polyneices is at the seventh gate and decides to fight him himself, and the chorus tells him not to do so. 

Aeschylus does raise something interesting, however. When Eteocles hears that Polyneices is at the seventh gate, he says: 

“Ah me, my father’s curse is now truly fulfilled!” 

The curse, presumably about the brothers killing each other for their cruel treatment of their father, would have been in Oedipus, which didn’t survive. But Eteocles’s remark is obviously nonsense—it’s nothing like the preordained fate from which Oedipus couldn’t escape—Eteocles is told that his brother is at the seventh gate—he makes the choice.   

“CHORUS […] And when they die in kindred slaughter, 

killed by one another, and the dust of earth

drinks up their dark red, clotted blood, 

who can provide purification, 

who can release them? O 

new troubles for the house 

mingling with its old woes!” 

4/ The play ends oddly, almost going in a new direction with the herald announcing that Polyneices is not to be buried, and Antigone defying him (which is more or less the plot of Sophocles’s play). However, Kenneth McLeish writes in A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama: 

“Scholars say that Aeschylus wrote only the first four fifths of Seven Against Thebes as we have it. His contribution ends not with the resolution and catharsis, but with a brief report of the princes’ deaths, a reminder that ‘God’s knife is whetted still,’ and a chorus of desolation balancing the chorus of distress at the beginning. Later hands added the Antigone/ Ismene material we now possess – and they unfocused the meaning of the action, introducing a completely new strand (Antigone’s defiance of the council), without integrating it, and –because the quality of the verse is poor—reducing the impact of Aeschylus’ chorus […] How Aeschylus resolved the issues raised by the play and its predecessors in the sequence is now unguessable.” 

Heracles by Euripides

1/ Another blasphemous play from Euripides. 

This is how the play starts: amidst the chaos in Thebes, Lycus attacks the town, kills King Creon, and seizes the crown; as Creon’s daughter Megara is married to Heracles but Heracles has gone to the underworld for the final labour, perhaps to never return, Lycus decides to kill them all—Megara, their 3 sons, and Heracles’s father Amphitryon. 

“CHORUS […] My voice full of grief and mourning,

Like the sad chant of an aged swan;

A ghost of a man, voice with no substance.

Like a figure seen in a dream…” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott) 

About half of the play is Amphitryon, Megara, and the Theban elders (the chorus) lamenting their fate and praying for rescue from Heracles or the gods. Amphitryon begs Lycus to spare them, but Megara doesn’t do so. 

“MEGARA […] I love my children – naturally;

I gave them birth, and care from childhood; and to me

Dying is fearful. Yet I count it foolishness

To struggle with the inevitable. Since we must die,

Let us not die shrivelled in fire, a mockery

To our enemies, which to me is a worse thing than death.

We owe a debt of honour to our royal house.

[…] When the gods spread misfortune like a net, to try

To struggle out is folly more than bravery.

For what will be will be; no one can alter it.” 

She accepts it with poise and dignity. Reminds me of Shakespeare’s Hermione. 

There are lots of good passages in this play: 

“MEGARA […] You weep,

My pretty flowers! Then, like a brown-winged honey-bee,

From all your weeping I’ll distil one precious tear,

And shed it for you…” 

It is moving. 

“AMPHITRYON […] Time as he flies has no care to preserve our hopes;

He’s bent on his own business. Look at me: I once

Was great in action, drew all eyes upon me; now

In one day Fortune has snatched from me everything,

As the wind blows a feather to the sky; all lost.

Wealth, reputation – who holds them with certainty?” 

Euripides gets us to care about Megara and the children, and builds it up so that we all hope for Heracles to return in time and thwart Lycus’s plan to kill the family. And Heracles does return in time! He then kills Lycus. But no, the story takes a different turn as Isis, under the command of Hera, gives him a fit of madness and makes him kill his own wife and children in a frenzy, only because Hera is Zeus’s wife and has always hated Heracles for being Zeus’s son. It is horrific. The play reminds me of Aias (also known as Ajax) by Sophocles (which I think is a more perfect play), but what Hera does to Heracles is so much worse than what Athena does to Aias: Heracles kills his own wife and children! 

“HERACLES […] She has achieved her heart’s desire,

Toppling to earth, pedestal and all, the foremost man

Of Hellas. Who could pray to such a god? For spite

Towards Zeus, for jealousy of a woman’s bed, she hurls

To ruin his country’s saviour, innocent of wrong!” 

What kinds of gods are these? But it’s not only Hera—Euripides doesn’t seem particularly fond of Zeus either. 

“AMPHITRYON Zeus! I once thought you were my powerful friend. You shared

My marriage, shared my fatherhood of Heracles.

All this meant nothing; for you proved less powerful

Than you had seemed; and I, a man, put you, a god,

To shame. I’ve not betrayed the sons of Heracles.

You knew the way to steal into my bed, where none

Invited you, and lie with someone else’s wife;

But those bound to you by every tie you cannot save.

This is strange ignorance in a god; or else, maybe,

Your very nature lacks a sense of right and wrong.” 

Zeus never appears. Never intervenes. He’s even worse than Apollo in Ion. 

Amphitryon and Heracles are not the only ones chastising the gods either: 

“MEGARA […] How dark and devious are the ways of gods to men!”

Euripides goes further:

“HERACLES Divinity’s impervious

To human feeling. I defy divinity.” 

2/ The good thing about living in London is that when I’m fascinated by a period, such as ancient Greece at the moment, I can just go to the British Museum and look at the artworks and artefacts from that period. 

This is me with a vase depicting characters from the Oresteia: 

This is part of the collection about the Labours of Heracles: 

Addendum: My friend Himadri added: 

“You mention Hermione, but I think the parallel with The Winter’s Tale goes further. Heracles destroys his family in a fit of madness: the madness comes from the gods, but no reason is given. Similarly, there is no reason given for the madness of Leontes, who also destroys his family. And both Leontes and Heracles must live not only with the loss, but also with the guilt.
Shakespeare knew Heracles. He must have done.”