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?
One big difficulty here is separating the Greeks from Seneca and other Latin sources. All the Heracles stuff, for example, is easily from Hercules Furens, even from that play in English. No need for Latin, even, much like Shakespeare's use of Plutarch is all from the English version.
ReplyDeleteI guess another difficulty, for me, at least, is that I can easily believe that Shakespeare could have come up with essentially anything - plot, structure, language, anything - on his own. It is more surprising to me when I learn that some aspect of his plays was imitative.
Shakespeare has such strong affinities with the Greeks that I, too, find it hard to believe that he was never curious about those Latin versions of Euripides. He must have at least looked at some of them, right?
In my understanding Euripides is a Shakespearean figure. My Late Euripides is a highly Late Shakespearean figure. So in my interpretive world it is apparently Euripides who read Shakespeare.