The Odyssey: “In the hushed hall it smote the suitors and all their faces changed”

Odysseus and Polyphemus, a Cyclops (painting by Arnold Böcklin) 

1/ It is not hard to understand the enduring power and popularity of the Odyssey—even before we talk about themes and technique, it is first of all an exciting story. The poem has a great structure: the first half is about Odysseus’s journey home after 10 years in the Trojan War and another 10 years in the sea; the second half is about Odysseus in Ithake (or Ithaca) figuring out what’s going on in his household in his absence, and taking revenge on the presumptuous and disrespectful suitors of his wife Penelope.

The first half is Odysseus (with some help from Athena) against nymphs and monsters and the wrath of Poseidon. The second half is Odysseus (with some help from Athena) against the suitors who have been courting Penelope, taking advantage of their culture of hospitality, eating away his property, and even plotting the murder of his son Telemakhos (also known as Telemachus or Telemachos). 

The entire poem is about homecoming, but in some sense, the first half is an adventure story; the second half is a revenge story. And in the centre is ingenious, sharp-witted Odysseus. 

2/ In the previous blog post, I wrote that “I can’t help feeling uneasy—perhaps even slightly cheated—that the protagonist doesn’t come up with everything himself…” Well, I have changed my view—or rather, it was great to see Odysseus and Telemakhos do the planning and fighting themselves. The scene about the test of the bow is especially satisfying! 

The quote in the headline comes from Book 21, translated by Robert Fitzgerald. 

I have been switching between the translations by Peter Green (my own copy) and Robert Fitzgerald (from the library); picking the latter for the last 8 books. Green provides better notes and he is clearer—more accurate, according to some classicists I know—but Fitzgerald sounds better. 

3/ I haven’t written about the writing—style, metaphor, imagery—of the Odyssey, have I? There are some striking passages. 

“At this,

Pallas Athena touched off in the suitors

a fit of laughter, uncontrollable.

She drove them into nightmare, till they wheezed

and neighed as though with jaws no longer theirs,

while blood defiled their meat, and blurring tears

flooded their eyes, heart-sore with woe to come.

Then said the visionary, Theoklymenos:

“O lost sad men, what terror is this you suffer?

Night shrouds you to the knees, your heads, your faces;

dry retch of death runs round like fire in sticks;

your cheeks are streaming; these fair walls and pedestals

are dripping crimson blood. And thick with shades

is the entry way, the courtyard thick with shades

passing athirst toward Erebos, into the dark,

the sun is quenched in heaven, foul mist hems us in …”” 

(Book 20) 

Look at this vivid, striking image, after Odysseus has killed the suitors: 

“Think of a catch that fishermen haul in to a halfmoon bay

in a fine-meshed net from the white-caps of the sea:

how all are poured out on the sand, in throes for the salt sea,

twitching their cold lives away in Hêlios’ fiery air:

so lay the suitors heaped on one another.

[…] Telémakhos

led her forward. In the shadowy hall

full of dead men she found his father

spattered and caked with blood like a mountain lion

when he has gorged upon an ox, his kill—

with hot blood glistening over his whole chest,

smeared on his jaws, baleful and terrifying—

even so encrimsoned was Odysseus

up to his thighs and armpits…” 

(Book 22) 

Too violent? Here’s a tender moment, when Penelope listens to Odysseus—in disguise as a beggar—speaking about her husband: 

“… she wept as she sat listening. The skin

of her pale face grew moist the way pure snow

softens and glistens on the mountains, thawed

by Southwind after powdering from the West,

and, as the snow melts, mountain streams run full:

so her white cheeks were wetted by these tears

shed for her lord…” 

(Book 21) 

The Odyssey is full of such interesting images and similes. 

At some point, I should perhaps write about the characters.

Đi & khám phá: Video du lịch York

Lâu lâu viết tiếng Việt trên blog, mặc dù mỳnh chắc có khoảng 2 độc giả người Việt (đặc biệt nhé!). 

Mời bà con xem video mỳnh edit về York, một trong những thành phố trung cổ đẹp nhất ở Vương quốc Anh. Video nói về lịch sử, văn hóa, nét đặc trưng của York, một số điểm nên đến khi ghé thăm York, và một số chỗ ăn uống. Hồi xưa mỳnh ở Leeds, đi York vài lần nhưng không biết, sau này đọc cuốn Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent mới nhận ra bà Judi Dench là dân York, sinh ở Heworth (không phải Haworth), rồi tới khi làm video này mới biết ở York có con đường tên là Dame Judi Dench Walk. 

(Sẵn nói cuốn Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, ai thích Shakespeare và bà Judi Dench nên đọc. Không chỉ kể chuyện sân khấu—cực hài—mà bà Judi Dench còn phân tích các vở và nhân vật của Shakespeare). 

Mà nếu không quan tâm vấn đề văn hóa thì bà con cũng xem video cho vui đi (mỳnh mất công edit, hê hê). 

The Odyssey: “won’t you ever […] abandon your deceptions and the lying tales you adore from the very ground up?”

A Grecian vase depicting Odysseus and the Sirens (why is Odysseus naked though?). 

1/ Here is something interesting Homer does in the Odyssey: we first see Odysseus with Kalypso and know he has been held captive there for 7 years; we see him try to survive in the sea till he gets to the island of Alkinoos (better known as Alcinous) and Nausicaa (Alkinoos’s daughter); Odysseus tells his own story of the journey home over the past 10 years (Books 9-12); after all the hospitalities, the king Alkinoos helps Odysseus go home; upon setting foot on his homeland Ithake (better known as Ithaca), which he doesn’t recognise after being away for 20 years, Odysseus sees a man, who he doesn’t realise is Athene, and makes up a story about himself, only for Athene to reveal herself and tease him. The quote in the headline comes from that scene (translated by Peter Green). 

Note that. Not only does Odysseus make up a story on the spot—who asks?—but it’s richly detailed. 

Does that not make you see the Odyssey in a different light? All the adventures are narrated by Odysseus himself: all the encounters with the Lotus-Eaters and the Kyclopes (Cyclops) and Kirke (Circe) and the spirits and the Sirens and Skylle (Scylla) and Charybdis and the sun god Helios. “Unreliable narrator” may be a modern concept but “liar” is not—perhaps Sophocles and Euripides thought that too as they didn’t seem to like Odysseus (though they also had other sources apart from Homer). I’m not saying that Odysseus makes up everything—this is a world in which gods and nymphs and monsters exist—but surely he embellishes his tales and makes himself look better.

(I should probably read the Iliad before saying much nonsense about Odysseus though). 

2/ Apart from being the greatest works of Western literature, what do the Odyssey, Don Quixote, and the plays of Shakespeare have in common? They all feature some kind of transformation: metamorphosis or disguise or acting. (Almost) every single Shakespeare play has some disguise, some acting or pretending, some version of “I am not what I am”: women dressing up as men, noblemen disguising as commoners, sane men acting mad, women pretending to die, and so on; and of course, some characters play a role without putting on any disguise, like Edmund or Iago. In Don Quixote, a hidalgo named Alonso Quixano decides to become an errant knight and transforms himself into Don Quixote; some other characters wear disguise and make up stories to trick him, or play pranks on him and Sancho. In the Odyssey, Athene assumes different shapes as she guides Odysseus and his son Telemachos on their journeys (I didn’t realise till now that the word “mentor” came from the Odyssey); Odysseus famously disguises himself as a beggar upon his return to Ithake, to figure out what’s going on in his household (which reminds me of Henry V), but before that he already pretends to be someone else a few times, such as in his trickery of the Kyclopes. 

Odysseus is an actor as well as a storyteller. 

It probably adds to the vitality and complexity of these characters that they transform themselves, reinvent themselves. 

3/ Speaking of storytelling, I have never understood readers who complain about things which don’t advance the plot or which don’t have anything to do with the main character. That complaint I have seen many times over the years about many of my favourite novels; now I see it in some reviews of the Odyssey. 

Why such a hurry? Take your time, enjoy the journey, get to know the people you meet on the way. 

Moby Dick is such an exhilarating masterpiece because of those digressions, because of those meditations on whales, because of Ishmael’s quest to understand the whale and understand life. War and Peace feels so rich and full of life because Tolstoy fleshes out all the characters, because he gets us to know even the most insignificant characters. The Odyssey feels so vast because all the characters that Odysseus or Telemachos comes across have their own adventures and their own stories. 

4/ One thing that makes me feel uncomfortable—if that’s the right word—about the Odyssey is how much the gods interfere with human affairs and how much is fated. I know it’s the ancient Greece. I know it’s their belief. But I can’t help feeling uneasy—perhaps even slightly cheated—that the protagonist doesn’t come up with everything himself: it’s Athene who tells Telemachos to set sail in search of his father; it’s Athene who guides him along the way; it’s Athene who later tells Telemachos to come back; it’s Athene who gets Zeus to help Odysseus leave Kalypso; it’s Athene who appears as a little girl and guides Odysseus on the island of Nausicaa; it’s Athene who gives advice and disguises Odysseus as he’s back in Ithake; and so on.

I don’t mind that Kirke advises Odysseus how to survive the Sirens, or how to escape the dangerous path between Skylle and Charybdis—how would Odysseus know otherwise?—and Odysseus and his men still have to do everything they can to fight the monsters and survive in the sea. But it makes me feel uneasy nevertheless about the belief and depiction of human beings as so insignificant, so helpless, unable to escape their fate and unable to fight against the caprices of the gods.  

5/ The poster doesn’t make me particularly hopeful about Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of the Odyssey. The tagline is “Defy the gods.” 

The Odyssey: “Tell us this tale, goddess, child of Zeus; start anywhere in it!”

1/ The Odyssey is one of the foundational works of Western literature, and yet I knew so little about it and still had my surprises. Of course, I knew about the Wooden Horse at Troy (who doesn’t?), about Kirke (better known as Circe) turning Odysseus’s men into pigs, about Kalypso and the promise of immortality, about Penelope and her weaving trick, etc. but I didn’t know about the structure of the Odyssey. It’s natural, is it not, to assume that an epic poem from around the 8th century BC would start at the beginning and tell the story chronologically to the end? So I naively thought. But no, the Odyssey begins in medias res—actually towards the end—and we don’t see Odysseus till Book 5 (out of 24). Odysseus’s adventures are told by different people—by Odysseus himself in Books 9–12. 

I switched back and forth between Peter Green and Robert Fitzgerald before deciding to stick to Green. 

Let’s compare. This is Fitzgerald: 

“When primal Dawn spread on the eastern sky

her fingers of pink light, Odysseus’ true son

stood up, drew on his tunic and his mantle,

slung on a sword-belt and a new-edged sword,

tied his smooth feet into good rawhide sandals,

and left his room, a god’s brilliance upon him.

He found the criers with clarion voices and told them

to muster the unshorn Akhaians in full assembly.

The call sang out, and the men came streaming in;

and when they filled the assembly ground, he entered,

spear in hand, with two quick hounds at heel;

Athena lavished on him a sunlit grace

that held the eye of the multitude. Old men

made way for him as he took his father’s chair.” 

(Book 2) 

The same passage, by Green: 

“When Dawn appeared, early risen and rosy-fingered, 

Odysseus’ dear son got up from the bed he’d slept in, 

put on his clothes, slung a sharp sword from one shoulder, 

tied on a pair of fine sandals under his sleek feet, 

and sallied forth from his chamber, in appearance like a god. 

At once he issued orders to the clear-voiced heralds 

to call to assembly the long-haired Achaians. They made 

the proclamations he ordered, and quickly the people gathered. 

When they were met together in a single body 

Telemachos now joined them, a bronze spear in one hand, 

not alone, but accompanied by a pair of hunting dogs, 

and wondrous the grace that Athene now shed on him, 

so that the whole crowd watched him as he approached: 

he sat in his father’s seat, and the elders made way for him.” 

Fitzgerald: 

“Under the opening fingers of the dawn

Alkínoös, the sacred prince, arose,

and then arose Odysseus, raider of cities.

As the king willed, they went down by the shipways

to the assembly ground of the Phaiákians.

Side by side the two men took their ease there

on smooth stone benches. Meanwhile Pallas Athena

roamed through the byways of the town, contriving

Odysseus’ voyage home…”  

(Book 8) 

Green: 

“When Dawn appeared, early risen and rosy-fingered, 

Alkinoos, princely in power, arose from his slumber, 

and Odysseus, the Zeus-born sacker of cities, rose too. 

Alkinoos, princely in power, now led the way to 

the Phaiakians’ assembly place, built for them near their ships: 

On arrival there they sat down on the polished stones

side by side, while Pallas Athene went through the city 

in the likeness of the herald of sagacious Alkinoos, 

working on the return of great-hearted Odysseus…” 

Fitzgerald sounds better, Green can sometimes be rather dry and stilted, but it seems to me that Green retains better the repetition of Homer’s style. For instance, the image of Dawn, “early risen and rosy-fingered”, is said over and over again throughout the story, not only by the narrator but by different characters. 

Green also provides better notes (especially for an ignoramus like me). 

2/ I have enjoyed the Odyssey from the beginning, but my mistake at the start was comparing it to the Athenian tragedians and Shakespeare, wanting more poetry, finding some parts of the narration mundane and some passages prosaic. Then I realised it’s better to compare it to Don Quixote—to see the Odyssey as gradually leading to Don Quixote (and other novels). In many ways, the Odyssey is a precursor to the picaresque novel: a character travels from place to place and has adventures and meets different groups of people; he may tell strangers his own story or they may tell theirs, creating stories within the story. In this sense, Homer feels closer to Cervantes than to Shakespeare, or even Sophocles.

3/ I’m going backwards, reading the Odyssey after the tragedies of the 5th century BC. It turns out to be a good idea, as Homer tells the myths in snatches and only gives those mythological characters cameos—after all, Homer’s first audience was acquainted with them—but luckily I have seen them in close-up in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (not to mention Seneca). Odysseus’s encounter with Aias (also known as Ajax) in the Underworld and the latter’s cold reaction would have been lost on me if I hadn’t read Sophocles’s play, but I have, and it’s a great scene.

Especially interesting is when I see the tragedies depart from Homer: Homer’s story about Oedipus for instance has quite a different ending from that of Sophocles’s play (I myself prefer Sophocles’s version). 

(On a side note, before getting into ancient Greek literature, I somehow always imagined Homer and the playwrights being around the same time, or not very far apart. The gap between Homer’s epics and Greek tragedy is about the same as between Gulliver’s Travels or Robison Crusoe and now). 

Let’s hope I have some more interesting things to say later on. 

Why read/ watch plays? (P.3): Plays vs films

Before we begin, I’m going to say that I’m talking about plays in the broad sense: not only live performances but also texts and filmed plays and audio recordings (“Let’s hear a play”); I however exclude musicals.

If we compare cinema and theatre (in the sense of live performance), we can all name the advantages of theatre: the nearness of the audience to the actors, the interaction and immediacy, the fact that no two performances are the same. But if we compare cinema and drama (in the broad sense), I’m afraid most people would only talk about the advantages of cinematic language: the language of image, large scenes, visual effects, and above all, editing and the close-up. It is derogatory when a film or TV series is described as “stagey”; what’s the equivalent for the other way around? 

I myself have loved literature and cinema all my life—my interest in drama is relatively new—but I love Shakespeare. That’s why I want to examine these questions: are films actually superior to plays, or is cinematic language superior to the language of drama, as the derogatory use of “stagey” seems to suggest? What do plays do better than films?

Now you may argue that the word “stagey” only suggests that a film should use cinematic language, but let’s look at the word when it’s used for TV. In the past, TV series, especially TV adaptations of classic novels, were modelled after theatre; now they’re modelled after films, meaning that they’re now meant and expected to be cinematic. Look at the 1972 War and Peace or 1977 Anna Karenina for example. Some people disparage them as stagey, and in some ways these TV series are closer to plays—lots of dialogue and minimal camerawork—but this also means that the screenwriters and directors pay more attention to dialogue and let the scenes unfold. Both series are excellent adaptations that take Tolstoy’s novels seriously and convey the complexity of the characters. Now if you look at the 2013 TV adaptation of Anna Karenina, you can see that it’s modelled after cinema and dialogue is devalued. And I can’t help asking, why do they keep moving the camera? Why do they cut every 4 seconds? (I counted) Why do they not let the scene unfold? I couldn’t even watch beyond 5-10 minutes of the 2018 King Lear for the same reasons, despite my admiration for Anthony Hopkins and Florence Pugh as actors. 

I’m not saying that screen adaptations of classic novels should be closer to plays, nor that they shouldn’t employ cinematic language. I’m also not saying that I’m mainly interested in drama driven by dialogue, driven by words (as my friend Himadri would probably say, who loves plays more than films). But dialogue is increasingly devalued in our mainly visual world—the word “stagey” reflects that—and that I find very sad. 

Films and plays do different things and have different strengths—I love both. In a film, the story and conflict are driven by many things, including dialogue (which some filmmakers unfortunately seem to forget). In a play, drama is driven by dialogue: what we say and what we don’t say and how we say it and how we hide or deceive with words. 

Persona or Cries and Whispers for instance has to be a film—it would not work as a novel or a play or an audio performance. Conversely, Rosmersholm has to be a play—you could of course turn it into a film, but its ambiguity and intricacies cannot be communicated by image or cinematic language. 

And when I watch Shakespeare, which I can’t watch live all the time (I’m just a poor girl, from a poor family), the choice would more often be a recording of a live performance, or a filmed play (like the BBC Television Shakespeare from the 1970s-80s), than a film adaptation. Sometimes a Shakespeare film respects the text, such as the 1993 and 2012 Much Ado About Nothing. Very often, Shakespeare’s words are heavily cut. Chimes at Midnight on its own is probably a passable film, but Orson Welles condenses into two hours the two Henry IV plays, with some bits from Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The result is a Falstaff—Welles—film with lots of supporting characters: all the others are underdeveloped, but even Falstaff is sentimentalised and simplified. 

Some Shakespeare films also indicate something like a fear of words. The 2015 Macbeth—perhaps I’m being unfair as I didn’t watch all of it—breaks into pieces the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech, mixing in flashbacks and battle scenes and special effects and drowning music. The main actors, Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, also don’t know how to speak the words. 

Even when we look at Kurosawa’s adaptations of Shakespeare, Ran is a masterpiece, a work of art on its own separate from King Lear, but Throne of Blood is shallow compared to Macbeth: stripped of much dialogue, it is an exciting film, but doesn’t have the complexity of Macbeth; the main characters are reduced to a weak man urged on by an evil wife. Now you might say Throne of Blood uses cinematic language and I should judge it as a film, so I would say that it is not a profound, thought-provoking film. 

Now I have seen many film adaptations of plays, it would be interesting to watch play adaptations of films. 

Why read plays? (P.2): Plays vs novels

I know, I wrote that the last blog post was my response once and for all to the mantra “Plays are meant to be seen, not read.” But I want to write about a different aspect: Why read plays? What do plays offer that novels do not? 

(Ibsen staring into your soul). 

Considering the popularity of novels, I think we can all name the advantages of novels. Some might argue that novels dig deeper into characters’ minds and have more psychological depth, but I don’t agree—look at Shakespeare—Hamlet and Macbeth and Brutus and many other characters question themselves, struggle with themselves, and people have analysed them for 400 years. But scope is one advantage: a play cannot have hundreds of characters and a wide range of experiences like War and Peace. Length and span are another: The Winter’s Tale might be an exception in making a jump of 16 years, but it doesn’t cover 16 years; War and Peace spans from 1805 to 1813, then jumps to 1820.

However, plays have their own strengths—I’m not even talking about plays as performance, but as text. Plays show a clash of perspectives. I won’t talk again about the range of views in Shakespeare—I think I’ve been annoying enough about this subject—you all know what I would say. Instead, look at Ibsen. In The Wild Duck, he shows the contrast between a character who thinks human beings need delusion and can’t cope with much of the truth, and a character who tears down a marriage to set it on a new foundation of truth and destroys everything. In An Enemy of the People, he depicts a man of integrity, a man of courage standing up for the truth, but at the same time also lets us see the concerns of the townspeople, and makes us feel uneasy about the heroic man. In Rosmersholm, he depicts three different people—or four if you count Mrs Helseth—grappling with a suicide and questioning, blaming themselves. What actually happened? Who is to blame? 

Occasionally you find a novel with the same quality. Tolstoy for instance enters different characters’ minds and depicts their different—clashing—perspectives. William Faulkner has multiple characters narrating the story, in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. But even when a novelist switches between different perspectives, there is narration—there is someone shaping how you see characters and events—you are always aware of the authorial presence. The closest a novel gets to a play in this aspect is the epistolary form: in Dangerous Liaisons, the finest epistolary novel I’ve read, you see the different perspectives, you see the manipulators set out their plan and see them at work, you read between the lines and imagine the effect on the receiver of each letter. 

Normally, a novel focuses on a single point of view, or has an omniscient or objective point of view. In the former case—when the story is narrated by the protagonist (such as Jane Eyre) or an observer/ another character (such as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby), or it has a third-person narrator but mainly focuses on a single perspective (such as Jane Austen’s novels)—we see everything through that one perspective. With the third-person narrator who focuses on one character’s point of view, we can see the author: Jane Austen’s use of free indirect discourse for instance creates a double perspective, a dual voice—the narrator’s voice blending in with the character’s voice. But even when a novel has a first-person narrator, you can see the author somewhere between the lines: even though Lolita is seen through the eyes of Humbert Humbert, we can see—even without the framing device—that Nabokov is not Humbert Humbert. 

In the latter case, when the story has an omniscient or objective point of view, there is a narrator guiding the reader, which you don’t get in plays. Take Rosmersholm, for instance. What goes on in Rebecca’s mind when she cries out in joy and then rejects Rosmer’s proposal? And because there is no narrator and we are restricted to what the characters say, Ibsen gets us to see the situation in a certain way in the first two acts then turns everything upside down in Act 3. Even then, we only have fragments and there are things we would never know. What actually happened? What’s the truth about the relationship between Rosmer and Beata? What was on Beata’s mind when she decided to kill herself? 

Himadri (Argumentative Old Git) says: 

“I think Ibsen makes use of the fact that there *is* no narrator - no-one to interpret things, even by implication.

[…] This communicates a sense of mystery - not in the sense that the narrator isn’t giving us answers, but in the sense that there is no answer to give that may be articulated.

I don’t know to what extent this is possible in a novel.

A sense of the mystery of our human lives, of its inscrutability, is difficult to convey in a novel, where you’re aware of the authorial presence, even if the authors do their best to keep themselves in the background.”

Even in An Enemy of the People, a play that seems more straightforward than other Ibsen plays, there is a sense of mystery: what happens in Dr Stockman’s mind between Act 3 and Act 4 that he, when he has the chance to speak to people in town, decides not to speak about his findings about the baths but, instead, to have a rant about “the common man”? And more importantly, as Himadri has put it, why is the truth about the endangerment to public health so important to Dr Stockman, considering his contempt for the public? 

That sense of mystery is one of the fascinating things about Shakespeare. Why does Hamlet not act? What goes on in his mind when he tells Ophelia “Get thee to a nunnery”? Why does Iago hate Othello so much that he sets out to destroy him? Does he actually suspect Othello of having slept with his wife? What does Viola see in Orsino? Where does Leontes’s jealousy come from? 

Let’s have a discussion. 

Why read plays?

It is an unwritten rule on the internet that whenever you speak about reading Shakespeare, someone is to appear and (angrily) say “Plays are meant to be seen, not read.” 

This blog post is me responding to that once and for all. 

Why read plays, especially Shakespeare? 

1. The Preface to the First Folio says “Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe.” 
2. Shakespeare is a dramatic poet—poetry is better savoured when read.
3. It’s also better to think about the meaning of a phrase, a line, a speech when you read the play (especially for a non-native speaker like me). 
4. A play, especially a Shakespeare play, is different from a screenplay. You may not read the screenplay of Citizen Kane (though you can, it’s published) because the greatness and influence of Citizen Kane also lie in mise-en-scène and cinematography and sound and editing and acting and so on; the greatness of Shakespeare lies in his words. 
5. A performance is an interpretation: Ian McKellen’s Iago is different from Bob Hoskins’s Iago is different from Rory Kinnear’s Iago. We form our own interpretation from the text. 
6. Which actor on the stage or the screen can possibly convey the richness and complexity of Hamlet, Cleopatra, or Falstaff on the page?  
7. Whether or not Shakespeare intended his plays to be read, people have read—and loved reading—his plays for centuries. 
8. If you only watch plays, you would never know many major works of Western literature, you would never know all the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Molière, Racine, Calderón, Ibsen, etc. 
9. Even with Shakespeare, the most performed playwright in the world, some of his plays are rarely performed. 
10. Or you may go to the theatre thinking you’re watching a Chekhov play or an Ibsen play, but it’s “a new version” by someone else. 
11. If you want to know Greek tragedy but only want to see it performed, you not only have no choice in which play is performed, you also have no choice in which translation is being used. You might even end up with a hip hop version (like The Bacchae at the National Theatre in London).   
12.  A great performance may be an exhilarating experience and deepen your understanding of the play, but a bad performance, well… 

“Plays are meant to be seen, not read”? Just admit you’re not used to reading plays. 

Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen

1/ In Rosmersholm, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, and—if I remember correctly—The Doll’s House, Ibsen seems closer to the ancient Greeks than to Shakespeare, in the sense that the drama lies not in what the characters are now doing, but in the discovery of, and reaction to, what they did in the past. There are two important differences though: the Greeks wrote about mythical characters, Ibsen wrote about ordinary people; the Greek plays are based on myths known to the audience, Ibsen’s plays have an element of surprise. You may, for example, read Oedipus the King and watch the way Oedipus slowly discovers the painful truth about his sins, which you already know; you may read Electra and watch her reaction to the news of Orestes’s death, which you already know is a trap; but reading Rosmersholm, you must piece together the picture at the same time as some of the characters. It’s captivating, but it’s also disturbing—you think you know someone, but you don’t—your perception of the characters changes, then changes again, then changes again as things unfold. And Ibsen is one of those writers who are utterly terrifying—there’s something harsh and uncompromising and ruthless about him. 

(I read the translation by James MacFarlane). 

2/ Rosmersholm is about Johannes Rosmer (former clergyman and owner of Rosmersholm) and his companion Rebecca West, one year after the suicide of Rosmer’s wife Beata. Like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Beata casts a long shadow after her death, seeming to never go away. The interesting part, I would argue, is that the play is not really a depiction of two people haunted by the past. When the play begins, one year after the suicide, Rosmer may avoid the bridge but he and Rebecca West both seem to live peacefully. The trouble only begins when Kroll, Beata’s brother, visits them again after a long time and, after an argument about Rosmer’s new ideas and apostasy, sows some seeds of doubt and guilt in his mind, breaking Rosmer’s peace of mind and the peace at Rosmersholm. Rosmer and Kroll also force Rebecca to confront the past and confess the truth—you think you know someone, but you don’t—it changes her and Rosmer’s perception of her and their relationship.

The play, I think, is more about the chaos that lies underneath the surface of our lives. A bit of disturbance and everything collapses. 

    

3/ Spoiler alert: those of you who have not read or seen the play are warned that for the rest of the blog post, I may discuss significant plot points. 

Rosmersholm is a complex, multi-layered play. There are lots of things to say. One can focus on the clash of ideas in the play; or the fanaticism and cruelty of the conservative Kroll; or the hypocrisy of the radical Peder Mortensgaard; or the impossibility of knowing the truth and understanding Beata; or the truth about Rosmer’s marriage with Beata (and their sex life); or Rosmer’s dependence and his need for a role model; or the joylessness at Rosmersholm and its influence on Rebecca; or the character of Mrs Helseth, the housekeeper; or the image of White Horses; or the ending; and so on. 

However, a couple of things particularly fascinate me. One is the theme of truth. For some reason, I generally only see people talk about social issues, feminism, etc. when talking about Ibsen, which is a very superficial reading of Ibsen’s plays. As my friend Himadri—the Ibsen expert—has pointed out, Ibsen is obsessed with the truth and its different aspects: the consequence of hiding the truth, the cost of exposing the truth, the importance of truth, the impossibility of knowing the truth… In this play, there are lots of questions. What’s the truth about the marriage at Rosmersholm? Was Beata oversexed or was Rosmer undersexed? Did she hold him back, constrain, limit him? Who actually drove her to suicide? Why did she, before death, reach out to Mortensgaard? What does Rebecca mean about her past? 

Rosmersholm is, I think, about the chaos that lies underneath the surface of daily life—there is peace when Rosmer doesn’t know and Rebecca doesn’t confront the truth—and when she does, everything collapses, his faith in her is destroyed, life is impossible. 

Another fascinating thing is that in Act 3, Ibsen places together two terrifying characters, confronting each other: one is Kroll, ready to do anything for his ideas, regardless of personal relationships; the other is Rebecca, ready to do anything for power over another person, regardless of life and death. In a way, Rebecca West has something of Hedda Gabler, one of the most terrifying female characters in literature (why is Ibsen like this, though?). 

The play also shows the difficulty—if not impossibility—of really knowing another person: you may live in the same house with someone, you may fall in love with them, but they may turn out to be completely different from what you thought. It’s a dreadful thought. 

This is a masterpiece, but I need some time to recover.

An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen

I picked up the play thinking it’s about a good man standing up for the truth—standing alone—and getting ostracised and punished for pointing out that the public baths were polluted. That isn’t wrong, but Ibsen’s play is a lot more complex and discomforting than that.

In the first two Acts, Ibsen introduces the characters and the conflict: Dr Thomas Stockman discovers that the public baths—the pride and a source of income for the town—are contaminated and have been making people ill; he has to expose the truth, and the two journalists, Hovstad and Billing, agree to publish his exposé in their paper, the Herald; the Mayor, Peter Stockman, who is also Thomas’s brother, opposes such a disclosure as it would ruin the town and damage his reputation. Dr Stockman doesn’t care about damage; he has the truth with him, he has the press, he has the Ratepayers Association (Aslaksen, the printer of the Herald, is also the chairman of the association). 

Tension rises in Act 3 as the Mayor walks around doing what politicians do—once people realise how much it would cost to replace the pipes and that would be paid for by taxpayers and that the public baths would be closed for at least two years, Hovstad and Billing and Aslaksen all switch to the Mayor’s side—the truth cannot come out, the article cannot be published. Even Katherine Stockman thinks her husband is foolish for not thinking about their family, not prioritising their children. Angry, betrayed, Dr Stockman now stands alone (though his wife, when she realises the hypocrisy and cowardice of others, decides to support him). If the article cannot be published, he would hold a public meeting himself. He would not be silenced. He would tell everyone the truth! 

As the Herald publishes the lies by the Mayor, reassuring the public that there’s nothing at all wrong with the public baths, one expects that at the public meeting in Act 4, Dr Stockman would tell his side of the story, that he would explain his investigation and discovery, that he would persuade the public to close down those baths of poison. But no. Instead, he says that “all our spiritual sources are polluted” and “our whole civic community is built over a cesspool of lies” (translated by James MacFarlane). 

Before Dr Stockman even speaks, the public are against him, but he already knows that most people are ignoramuses and fools—distinguished men such as himself are the minority. He goes on a rant against the mass, against the common man: 

“DR STOCKMAN […] Look at the difference between pedigree and cross-bred animals. […] Or I might mention dogs, which are so like humans in many ways. Think first of an ordinary mongrel—I mean one of those filthy, shaggy rough dogs that do nothing but run about the streets and cock their legs against all the walls. Compare a mongrel like that with a poodle whose pedigree goes back many generations, who has been properly fed and has grown up among quiet voices and soft music. Don’t you think the poodle’s brain will have developed quite differently from the mongrel’s? You bet it will!...” 

I’m not saying that I see Shakespeare everywhere I go, but that makes me think of a passage in Macbeth: 

“FIRST MURDERER We are men, my liege.

MACBETH Ay, in the catalogue you go for men,

As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,

Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept

All by the name of dogs. The valued file

Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,

The housekeeper, the hunter, every one

According to the gift which bounteous nature

Hath in him closed; whereby he does receive

Particular addition, from the bill

That writes them all alike. And so of men…” 

(Act 3 scene 1) 

To go back to Ibsen’s play, it is a disturbing scene. Dr Stockman goes from being a man of integrity, a man of courage to speaking like a fascist. That passage is pure eugenics. 

“DR STOCKMAN [with rising temper] When a place has become riddled with lies, who cares if it’s destroyed? I say it should simply be razed to the ground! And all the people living by these lies should be wiped out, like vermin!...” 

He speaks of love for the town, but he’s full of contempt for people. He must be denounced as an enemy of the people. He must be banished. 

What does that sound like? 

“BRUTUS There’s no more to be said, but he is banished

As enemy to the people and his country.

It shall be so.

ALL PLEBEIANS It shall be so, it shall be so!

CORIOLANUS You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate

As reek o’ th’ rotten fens, whose loves I prize

As the dead carcasses of unburied men

That do corrupt my air, I banish you!...” 

(Coriolanus, Act 3 scene 3)  

Dr Stockman shares with Coriolanus the pride and the inflexibility and the contempt for the mass.   

An Enemy of the People is a disquieting play. It’s a play that makes you feel uncomfortable: all the men who close their eyes and take part in the cover-up are despicable and Dr Stockman is in the right about the baths, but he’s so uncompromising, so contemptuous, so unwilling to understand the concerns of people in the town. Even the character Aslaksen makes moderate people uncomfortable: he continually speaks of moderation, but what moderation can there be when the choice is between, on the one hand, an exposé of an endangerment to public health and, on the other hand, its cover-up? 

Thought-provoking play. 

PS: The original title is En folkefiende, which I think sounds better than An Enemy of the People. 

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.