Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides

1/ Ah, the beginning of it all! Menelaus and Agamemnon are on the way to Troy to retrieve Helen and sack Troy, but their ships are stuck, due to lack of winds. A prophet says Agamemnon has to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis (which to me doesn’t make sense, because Helen is Menelaus’s wife and they have a daughter, hello?). The whole play is about the characters struggling with themselves and arguing with each other, and in the end, Iphigenia willingly goes to the altar, doing it for Greece. 

I wish I could claim to have come up with it myself, but I’m stealing the idea from Tom (Wuthering Expectations) that this is the trolley problem: save Iphigenia, or kill her and save many? The irony of course is that Iphigenia is sacrificed, Agamemnon is later killed by his wife Clytemnestra, who is then killed in revenge by Orestes (and in Euripides’s play, Electra); perhaps we can also argue that the sacrifice of Iphigenia allows the Akhaians to travel to Troy and leads to all the deaths in the 10-year war.

But this is why I have a problem with the ending. In the Introduction of my copy, Philip Vellacott says that Euripides died before finishing the play and the ending was written by someone else. I know Euripides himself had written a play called Iphigenia in Tauris, but the irony is that Iphigenia chooses to sacrifice herself to help Greece only for her death to lead to so much suffering and deaths—where is the tragedy, and the irony, if she is replaced with a deer and just whisked off to Tauris? On a personal level, I don’t want young and innocent Iphigenia to die; but for the purpose of the drama—with the way things have been built up—she has to die, so the rescue at the end just feels farcical.    

2/ As I wrote in the previous blog post, I may complain about the beginnings and/ or the endings in the plays of Euripides—this man is odd—but his middles are generally brilliant. The struggle in Agamemnon, the argument between him and Menelaus, the scene between Clytemnestra and Achilles (Akhilleus), Clytemnestra’s confrontation of her husband, the resolution of Iphigenia, etc—all these conflicts make for great drama—we just have one brilliant scene after another (until that farcical ending). 

(I usually write Akhilleus, but I’m using the spellings in Philip Vellacott’s translation). 

“MENELAUS […] Besides, compassion moves me for the unhappy girl, 

Remembering she is of one blood with me, and faces 

Death at an altar for the sake of my false wife. 

What, after all, is Helen to her?” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott) 

The whole thing of course is ridiculous, just like the war(s) going on as Euripides was writing the play. I suppose Euripides is simply fascinated by all the reasoning—and sophistry—that leads to the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the Trojan War. 

“CHORUS […] Where now can the clear face of goodness, 

Where can virtue itself live by its own strength?—

When ruthless disregard holds power, 

When men, forgetting they are mortal, 

Tread down goodness and ignore it, 

When lawlessness overrules law, 

When the terror of God no longer draws men together 

Trembling at the reward of wickedness?” 

Euripides is clearly in a dark, bitter mood. 

This is funny though: 

“ACHILLES […] I’ve said all this, not out of eagerness to marry 

Your daughter—thousands of girls pursue me all the time; 

But King Agamemnon has insulted me.” 

Duh.

3/ Let’s look at the moment Iphigenia decides to accept her face and sacrifice herself. 

“IPHIGENIA […] The power of all Hellas now looks to me; 

All lies in my hand—the sailing of the fleet, capture of Troy, 

And the future safety of Greek wives from barbarous attacks; 

No more forcible abductions from our happy homes, when once 

Paris has been made to pay the price of death for Helen’s rape. 

All this great deliverance I shall win by dying, and my name 

Will be blessed and celebrated as one who set Hellas free…” 

How selfless and noble for a young girl to sacrifice herself for Greece.

“IPHIGENIA […] And if Artemis has laid a claim 

On my body, who am I, a mortal, to oppose a god? 

This I cannot do. To Hellas, then, I dedicate myself. 

Sacrifice me; take and plunder Troy. For me, your victory 

Shall be children, marriage—for all time my glorious monument. 

Greeks were born to rule barbarians, mother, not barbarians 

To rule Greeks. They are slaves by nature; we have freedom in our blood.” 

This is quite disturbing, yes? I don’t think this is me looking at it with modern eyes—Euripides has depicted the perspective, the suffering of the Trojans—he would find this problematic. 

Having now read 13 of his plays, I still find Euripides strange and hard to grasp—I prefer Sophocles—but Euripides is always fascinating and thought-provoking, and often makes me feel uneasy. 

Orestes by Euripides

1/ It would have been quite interesting, I suppose, to read Orestes immediately after the Oresteia and the two Electra plays—I just couldn’t get hold of a copy at the time. Oh well. 

One thing I’ve noticed is that Euripides may create plays about the same people, but the plays are not necessarily related. His Electra and Orestes are fairly consistent, though in Orestes there’s no reference to the fact that Electra has got married (per Aegisthus’s order), but Euripides has a play called Helen in which Helen never goes to Troy—it’s just a phantom. The Helen and Menelaus in Orestes, and the Helen and Menelaus in Helen are completely different characters. 

2/ Euripides’s Orestes is very different from Eumenides, the last part of the Oresteia. At the risk of being reductive, I think we can say the central idea of Aeschylus’s trilogy is that violence begets violence and at some point the cycle of violence has to get cut—the plot of Eumenides is about whether Orestes can be forgiven or forever haunted by the Furies, and the debate boils down to whether a son owes more to the father or to the mother, whether the duty and desire to avenge his father can outweigh the crime of killing his mother. I’m not entirely sure what the central idea of Euripides’s play is—perhaps there isn’t one—what we have is a rather bitter, nihilist, and messy play in which violence piles upon violence, the characters turn increasingly monstrous, and then Apollo appears to provide a resolution that doesn’t resolve anything. I often feel Euripides is best in the middle: his beginnings often have some long and awkward exposition and his endings often have some awkward deus ex machina, but the middles are (usually) brilliant. 

What is wrong with Pylades? And Electra?  

And what kind of sick joke is it that Apollo makes Orestes marry Hermione? 

3/ There are many great passages in the play: 

“CHORUS […] O Zeus, listen! 

What mercy is there? 

Pitiful son, what is this agony, 

This blood-hunt, this persecution? 

There is a fiend of vengeance 

That drowns your life in tears, 

Sinks your house in your mother’s blood, 

Destroys your mind with madness. 

I mourn, I groan, I grieve. 

The greatest happiness is not permanent

In the world of men; 

But the storms of God rise against it, 

Like a light sailing-ship they shatter it, 

Terrors and disasters roll around it, 

Till crashing waves close over death…” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott)

4/ I can see why people say Euripides is more realistic and modern than the other ancient Greeks. 

“MENELAUS Ye gods! What am I looking at? Some ghost from hell? 

ORESTES You are right; terror and pain make me a living corpse.

MENELAUS This savage look, this mattered hair—I’m sorry for you. 

ORESTES What you describe is outward; my torments are real.

MENELAUS Your eyes are glazed with horror; your look frightens me. 

ORESTES I no longer exist; only my name is left.” 

Unlike Eumenides, in Orestes, we don’t see the Furies onstage—we only see Orestes’s madness. 

Euripides depicts Orestes committing the worst of sins—matricide—but gets us to understand him. He writes the scene of Orestes and Menelaus and gets us to empathise with Orestes’s anger and sense of betrayal, but at the same time we also understand why, after 10 years of war, Menelaus doesn’t want more conflict and bloodshed. 

Compared to the Oresteia, the plays of Euripides are less mythic: the human beings are more active, the gods are less involved. 

In Electra, it’s almost as though there’s no oracle from Apollo: we see Orestes and Electra talk about killing Clytemnestra; we see Electra urge her brother to carry on with the plan when he hesitates, like Lady Macbeth taunts and urges Macbeth; Electra also takes part in the killing, unlike the Electra of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

In Orestes, the gods don’t appear till the very end; the whole play is driven by humans; Orestes and Electra first turn to others, asking for help or intervention, as they’re facing punishment; then Pylades comes up with the idea of killing Helen and becoming heroes, celebrated for killing the woman everyone hates, rather than just known as the murderers of Clytemnestra; and Electra comes up with the plan to hold Hermione hostage as a way of bargaining with Orestes; there doesn’t seem to be any hint of the existence of the gods till the very last scene. 

And when Apollo does appear, Euripides makes one think why the gods haven’t intervened earlier and prevented all the bloodshed.

Metamorphoses: “He dropped like an ox/ Slaughtered in sacrifice”

1/ I don’t know if classical literature is more violent—graphic—than modern literature, but Metamorphoses is full of violent images. 

“… And, in his madness hunting her, tracked down

His wife and snatched Learchus from her arms, 

His little laughing son with hands outstretched, 

And wildly smashed the baby’s head against 

A granite block…” 

(Book 4)

(translated by A. D. Melville) 

Jeez. That’s from the myth of Athamas and Ino.

The myth of Perseus, who kills a monster and rescues Andromeda from the rocks and has to fight a bunch of men who want Andromeda and the kingdom, is reminiscent of the killings in the Iliad or the Odyssey. Full of vivid, horrible details. 

“Even so the weapon found a mark and struck 

Rhoetus full on the forehead. Down he fell 

And, as the iron was dragged out of his skull, 

His heels drummed on the ground and his red blood

Spattered the banquet board…” 

(Book 5) 

More graphic: 

“… this time, as he bent

The spring crescent, Perseus seized a brand

That smoked upon the altar there, and struck 

The lad and smashed his face to shattered bones.” 

(ibid.) 

The quote in the headline comes from the same scene. 

However, Ovid is not Seneca. Ovid may depict extreme violence, like Homer and Sophocles do, but Seneca seems to have a perverse delight in gore. When Ovid tells the myth of Niobe, who mocks the gods and has to see all her 7 sons and 7 daughters killed, he describes the killings quickly—some of the sons die from a single arrow, the deaths of the sisters are more or less grouped together—one can guess that Seneca would expand and add more horrific details. For instance, when Seneca retells the myth of Oedipus (creating a play much inferior to Sophocles’s version), he adds a scene of a ritual sacrifice, with gory visions:  

“MANTO Father, what is this?

Instead of gently quivering as they should,

They make my whole hand shake; there is fresh blood

Proceeding from the veins. The heart is shrunken,

Withered, and hardly to be seen; the veins

Are livid; part of the lungs is missing,

The liver putrid, oozing with black gall.

And here – always an omen boding ill

For monarchy – two heads of swollen flesh

In equal masses rise, each mass cut off

And covered with a fine transparent membrane,

As if refusing to conceal its secret.

On the ill-omened side the flesh is thick

And firm, with seven veins, whose backward course

Is stopped by an obstruction in their way.

The natural order of the parts is changed,

The organs all awry and out of place.

On the right side there is no breathing lung

Alive with blood, no heart upon the left;

I find no folds of fat gently enclosing

The inner organs; womb and genitals

Are twisted and deformed. And what is this –

This hard protuberance in the belly? Monstrous!

A foetus in a virgin heifer’s womb,

And out of place – a swelling in the body

Where none should be. It moves its limbs and whimpers

Twitching convulsively its feeble frame.

The flesh is blackened with the livid gore.…

And now the grossly mutilated beasts

Are trying to move; a gaping trunk rears up

As if to attack the servers with its horns.…

The entrails seem to run out of my hands.

That sound you hear is not the bellowing

Of cattle, not the cry of frightened beasts;

It is the fire that roars upon the altars,

The hearth itself that quakes.” 

(translated by E. F. Watling) 

I’m giving you the whole speech so you can see how gross it is, but the sacrifice scene is longer. 

The main difference between Ovid and Seneca is vision: despite the violence, despite the rapes, despite the brutal acts, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses I find a lightness of touch and a kind of transcendence that I don’t see in Seneca’s plays. 

2/ However, Ovid’s version of the myth of Bacchus and Pentheus, because much shorter, is not as nightmarish and disturbing as The Bacchae by Euripides. I can’t claim to understand The Bacchae, having read it once, but it is a discomforting, haunting play and I can see why it’s said to be Euripides’s greatest play. 

3/ Now that I’m reading Ovid, I’m starting to think there’s something to the theory—is it Jonathan Bate’s?—that Shakespeare swaps the locations in The Winter’s Tale, erroneously giving Bohemia a coast, in order to reinforce the association of Perdita with Proserpina, who is taken by force from Sicily. 

“… Here Proserpine  

Was playing in a glade and picking flowers, 

Pansies and lilies, with a child’s delight, 

Filling her basket and her lap to gather

More than the other girls, when, in a trice, 

Dis saw her, loved her, carried her away…” 

(Book 5)

The scene of Perdita with the flowers evokes the image of Prosperina—she even directly names her. And her happy scene, as in Ovid, is interrupted by the violence of a man. 

The rape of Proserpina, painting by Nicolas Mignard. 

Now look at these lines in Metamorphoses: 

“Behold, the daughter I have sought so long 

Is found…” 

(ibid.) 

Do they not make you think of The Winter’s Tale? 

4/ Metamorphoses is a vast, colourful poem, but there are a few recurring themes: the lust of the male gods (especially Jove, the Roman equivalent of Zeus), the jealousy of Juno (Hera), the hubris of human beings, and the capriciousness of the gods. 

The myth of Arachne is one of my favourites in Ovid. 

PS: I’m currently in the US, on a work trip. 

The Odyssey and The Tale of Genji: on human nature, customs, and literary tradition

In an earlier blog post, I wrote “I actually had more trouble trying to understand the characters in The Tale of Genji (about 1,000 years old) than the ones in the Odyssey (about 2,700 years old).” My friend Susan asked why that was, so perhaps I’ll write a bit about the subject.

The Odyssey is—if we have to boil it down to one word—about homecoming. The only thing strange about is the concept of xenia—hospitality and guest-friendship—because why does Odysseus’s household have to keep feeding the suitors and allowing them to eat up the estate in his absence? Athena’s involvement is perhaps also a bit strange, but not that strange if you think of her as a character—the gods are like human beings, just with power—and if you’re used to the depiction of the gods’ interferences in Greek tragedy. Everything else is familiar: Odysseus’s urge to go home and his companions’ unthinking recklessness and Poseidon’s anger and Telemakhos’s hatred of the suitors and Odysseus’s caution upon his return and Penelope’s suffering and so on are all familiar.

The Tale of Genji is closer to us in time, but more alien. It requires us to adjust to that world, but many things remain baffling and incomprehensible, if not downright reprehensible: on the one hand, men and women at the Heian court who aren’t married to each other can’t even have a conversation except through servants, and upon further acquaintance, behind screens; but on the other hand, someone like Genji has sex with everyone and nothing seems out of bounds, as he has sex with (or even forces himself on) his first cousin and his best friend’s lover and his own stepmother and other relatives, and he even abducts an eight-year-old and raises her to be his perfect wife.  

Not only so, the characters don’t have names! As the narrator is a lady-in-waiting, like Murasaki Shikibu, she has to refer to them by titles or nicknames or some other ways—we have to keep track of hundreds of characters without names (unless you take the easy way and read another translation instead of Royall Tyler’s). 

That doesn’t mean that The Tale of Genji can’t be appreciated, or even loved, by readers used to Western culture and tradition. It is among my Top 10 novels (or at least was, when I last made the list over a year ago). Once you (manage to) get past the weird stuff in The Tale of Genji, many experiences and feelings are—to use a word lots of readers seem to like—relatable: love and jealousy and heartbreak and suffocation and disappointment and envy and loneliness and fear and grief, etc. Murasaki is especially good at writing about death, grief, women’s suffering, and the impermanence of everything. Her novel simply requires more efforts from the reader. 

But it’s not just that 11th century novel, I also had a hard time when I was exploring 20th century Japanese novels. It’s a different tradition, with different styles and expectations. The only Japanese writer I wholeheartedly embrace is Akutagawa (at least the 18 short stories I’ve read). With all others, there are barriers and the novels often seem blurry to me, as someone interested in characters, details, and metaphors: the characters often seem blurry, without the vividness and complexity of characters in Western novels (except for the main characters in Kokoro and Botchan); descriptions tend to be impressionistic; metaphors are generally rare (Mishima and Abe Kobo excepted); but above all, I’m baffled by the (lack of) sense of pacing and tension, either because it has an odd structure and ends so abruptly (such as Kokoro), or because of its evenness of tone and lack of emphasis (like some novels of Kawabata and Tanizaki). I love Japanese cinema, which I know the best after American and British cinema, but Japanese literature remains for me a challenge. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out I have more difficulty with Japanese plays than with the ancient Greek plays.

It is perhaps for the same reasons—different tradition, different styles and expectations—that I took quite a while to get into Hong lou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber) from 18th century China, even though I’m familiar with Chinese culture, whereas I took to the 17th century Don Quixote immediately. Descriptions in Don Quixote may be crude—to use Nabokov’s word—but descriptions in Hong lou meng are all catalogues, awkwardly listing qualities or different aspects of someone or something like items. More importantly, Cao Xueqin often doesn’t go very far in depicting characters’ thoughts: sometimes he writes down some thoughts and one expects him to go further, but he doesn’t. Reading Hong lou meng, I had to make an effort and readjust my expectations. 

Where am I going with all this? My point is that it’s important to think of works of literature as part of a tradition. This is why I didn’t randomly pick up a single play from ancient Greece and stop, I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes. This is why, with my interest in Western literature, I’m now going back to its foundation. This is why I advocate for teaching Shakespeare and the Western canon in school. This is why, when I explore literature outside the West (especially before the 20th century), I keep in mind that it’s a different tradition and try to explore multiple works and multiple writers. 

All that said, isn’t it amazing that the Odyssey is so relatable—to use again a word I don’t particularly like—after something like 2,700 years? 

PS: I recently read Cyclops by Euripides but didn’t blog about it, as I had nothing to say. 

“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. 

My 20 favourite plays not by Shakespeare [updated]

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 I got into Shakespeare and my favourite plays a couple of years ago 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. 

Update on 19/3/2026:

I would probably replace The Revenger’s Tragedy or The Changeling with Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. Now this is a great, psychologically complex, haunting play. 

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. 

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.” 

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.” 

Hecabe (or Hecuba) by Euripides

1/ Written ca 424 BC, it’s set around the same time as The Trojan Women, which was performed in 415 BC. Is it not interesting that Euripides, after about 10 years, returned to the character of Hecabe (also known as Hecuba)? 

Anyway, now that I know the story, that scene in Hamlet is going to carry more meaning (even if the Hecuba Shakespeare knew was not Euripides’s):  

“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,    

That he should weep for her?” 

2/ The play begins with the ghost of Polydorus. 

“HECABE […] O dazzling light of day, O murk of night,

Why am I roused and raptured

With haunting fears and phantoms?

O holy Earth, mother of dark-winged dreams,

Take back this frightful vision I have seen!” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott) 

The ghost of the son appears before the mother and tells her about his murder—what does that make you think of?—I think of the ghost of the father telling the son about his murder and calling for revenge—Hamlet! 

3/ At first sight, it seems to be a messy play. Roughly, the first half is Hecabe learning the fate awaiting her daughter Polyxena and trying to save her, in vain; the second half is her discovering the death of her son Polydorus and taking revenge on the murderer, King Polymestor of Thrace. However, it is as though Hecabe takes out on Polymestor all her despair, all her hatred, all her anger at the Greeks. 

“HECABE I saved you, did I not? – and sent you back from Troy.

ODYSSEUS You did indeed; and here I am alive today.

HECABE Yet now you scheme these cowardly plots against me – you

Who by your own confession owe me your own life –

Repaying good with the worst evil in your power!

You are a low and loathsome breed, all you who grasp

At popular honours! who without a thought betray

Your friends, for one phrase that will gratify a mob!

Let me not know you!”

Owing his life to Hecabe, Odysseus now has her daughter sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles. He betrays her. It’s not that different from what Polymestor does to her: 

“HECABE […] help me take revenge

On this most false and perjured friend, who without fear

Of powers below or powers above, has done a deed

Of blackest treachery! Many times he was my guest,

Sat at my table, was among my closest friends,

Was treated with all honour. Then he lays a plot,

And murders. Then, on top of murder, he denies

Even a grave, and throws my son into the sea!” 

That is also treachery. That is also betrayal. But Hecabe is powerless to do anything against Odysseus, to take revenge on the Greeks, so she destroys Polymestor in a brutal, horrific way. At least that’s how I read it. 

4/ Look at this line: 

“POLYMESTOR […] No monster like a woman breeds in land or sea;

And those who have most to do with women know it best.” 

That must be the bit Aristophanes references a few times in different plays. However, it would be absurd to call Euripides a misogynist when we can see his sympathy for women in plays such as Hecabe or The Trojan Women. He also gives Hecabe many great passages.  

“HECABE […] The strong ought not to use their strength

To do what is not right; when they are fortunate

They should not think Fortune will always favour them.

I once was fortunate, and now I am so no more;

One day has taken happiness, wealth, everything.

Then be my friend. Let awe, and pity, move your heart.” 

Reminds me of Measure for Measure. 

“HECABE […] How strange, that bad soil, if the gods send rain and sun,

Bears a rich crop, while good soil, starved of what it needs,

Is barren; but man’s nature is ingrained – the bad

Is never anything but bad, and the good man

Is good: misfortune cannot warp his character,

His goodness will endure.

Where lies the difference?

In heredity, or upbringing?” 

Hecabe is not simply a suffering woman, a woman to be pitied. Euripides gives her interesting lines, thought-provoking lines. 

“HECABE A free man? – There is no such thing! All men are slaves;

Some, slaves of money; some, of chance; others are forced,

Either by mass opinion, or the threatening law,

To act against their nature.” 

5/ I also like this: 

“CHORUS Strange how in human life opposites coincide;

How love and hate change with the laws men recognize,

Which can turn bitter foes to friends, old friends to foes.”

Perhaps I’m now more familiar with Euripides, but I would say I like Hecabe more than The Trojan Women. 

Women at Thesmophoria Festival by Aristophanes

Also known as Thesmophoriazusae, this play was first performed in 411 BC, the same year as Lysistrata, another play about the battle of the sexes. 

I read the translation by Paul Roche. 

1/ Euripides is one of the main characters in the play: 

“EURIPIDES The women plan to do away with me today 

at the Thesmophoria. 

I speak ill of them, they say.

AGATHON How can we help you, then?

EURIPIDES In every possible way. 

If only you’d infiltrate among the women as a woman 

and speak up for me, you’d save my life 

because only you can represent me well.” 

That’s the premise. The play later has a scene in which the women complain about Euripides’s depiction of women in his plays—do they not notice the way he depicts men?—so the female-only festival of Thesmophoria is where they decide what to do with him.

We no longer have Agathon’s plays but it doesn’t matter, as Agathon refuses to help, so Euripides gets his relative Mnesilochus to dress up as a woman and infiltrate the women’s meeting. The poor man however is exposed, so Euripides rescues him by reenacting scenes from his own plays Helen and Andromeda—Andromeda and some other plays Aristophanes parodies don’t survive but Helen does—it’s a great pleasure to catch the references to not only Helen but also Hippolytus, Ion, and Alcestis. 

2/ Aristophanes is crude:  

“SERVANT For Agathon, our peerless poet, prepareth to—

MNESILOCHUS Get himself buggered.

SERVANT —to lay the keel of a vessel for drama. 

He bendeth the beams, and planeth the planks, 

Riveteth verse with phrase and symbol…” 

Imagine these lines in the tragedies of Aeschylus! Or Euripides! Reading other playwrights, especially the Greeks, makes me fully appreciate how unusual it is that Shakespeare mixes the tragic and the comic, the high and the low. 

Aristophanes also makes me realise how “clean” the plays of Molière are—this is not a complaint—Aristophanes is very funny and Women at Thesmophoria Festival is a light-hearted farce. 

3/ Like the Elizabethans, the ancient Greeks only had male actors playing all the roles, so Mnesilochus pretending to be a woman or even reenacting Helen reuniting with Menelaus is, when we think about it, not that different from what the Greeks were doing with the female roles in the tragedies. 

There is also another layer of comedy: when Cleisthenes appears and says there’s a spy at the meeting, the women all look at each other and try to find out which one is the man, but to Aristophanes’s audience, they were all men. 

4/ This makes me curious: 

“WREATH SELLER […] My husband died in Cyprus, leaving me with five small children whom I struggled to maintain by weaving wreaths of myrtle for the market and have kept them all alive—at least half and half. But now this fellow in his tragedies has made people believe that the gods don’t exist and my sales in consequence have halved…” 

Euripides tends to depict the gods as capricious and cruel; in some cases, such as Electra, he removes the gods except as deus ex machina at the end, Electra and Orestes themselves choose to kill Clytemnestra without an order or oracle from Apollo; so I’m quite curious about the Greeks’ reception of that. 

Another thing is that in The Bacchae, Dionysus persuades Pentheus to dress up as a woman to spy on the women, only for him to be brutally killed and torn limb from limb by the women in frenzy, including his own mother. I can’t help thinking if Euripides simply borrows the idea because “all this female frippery reveals/ to passersby the depths of your depravity”, or there is some deeper meaning that I have missed, considering that Women at Thesmophoria Festival has an appearance of Euripides as a character and Dionysus in his play is the god of drama. 

The Bacchae by Euripides

The first thing I’m going to say is that The Bacchae is said to be Euripides’s greatest play. The second thing is that it’s a play that requires multiple readings and I haven’t got an adequate grasp of the play. 

But I’m going to write a blog post about it anyway. 

1/ This is a gruesome play. Ancient Greek tragedies are often bleak: son kills father and marries mother, wife kills husband then gets killed by their children, mother kills children, stepmother fancies stepson and falsely accuses him of rape and causes his death, husband lets wife die instead of him, etc. All disturbing stuff (what’s wrong with the Greeks?). And yet The Bacchae is still more horrible and horrifying.

Part of it is the plot itself: the god Dionysus, son of Zeus and Semele, goes to Thebes to prove his power and punish the city, including his own aunts and his cousin Pentheus, for denying his divinity. All the women of the city run around in a frenzy caused by Dionysus, destroying all and ripping animals to shreds. 

“MESSENGER […] Great uddered kine then hadst thou seen 

Bellowing in sword-like hands that cleave and tear, 

A live steer riven asunder, and the air 

Tossed with rent ribs or limbs of cloven tread. 

And flesh upon the branches, and a red

Rain from the deep green pines. Yea, bulls of pride, 

Horns swift to rage, were fronted and aside 

Flung stumbling, by those multitudinous hands

Dragged pitilessly…” 

(translated by Gilbert Murray) 

Together with other crazed women, Agave tears apart the limbs of her own son Pentheus and holds his head as a trophy.

“CADMUS Thou bearest in thine arms an head—what head?

AGAVE (beginning to tremble, and not looking at what she carries) 

A lion’s—so they all said in the chase. 

CADMUS Turn to it now—’tis no longer toil—and gaze.

AGAVE Ah! What is this? What am I carrying here? 

CADMUS Look upon it full, till all be clear! 

AGAVE I see… most deadly pain! Oh, woe is me!” 

It is an unbearable scene. 

But The Bacchae is particularly gruesome and horrible because it makes us ask: what’s the point of all this? What are we to make of all this cruelty and violence? 

Kenneth McLeish for example says in A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama: 

“How do mortals come to terms with the presence of God in their lives—particularly when God is, or seems to them to be, capricious, dangerous and uncompromising? In this play Dionysos demands submission in exchange for unimaginable ecstasy. But his cult, at least in human terms, is blood-crazed and outlandish.”

It is especially bizarre and disturbing when we consider that all these Greek plays were performed at the Dionysian Festival. 

2/ In a way, the play is about the war between two tyrants, but what can a mortal do against the power of a god? 

3/ Himadri pointed out: 

“Dionysus goes further, and persuades Pentheus – who had, at his first appearance, been so full of macho swagger – to dress as a woman, so he could blend in with the other members of the Dionysian cult. The reference here is clearly to Aristophanes’ play Women of Thesmophoria (a play in which Euripides himself appears as a character), in which a man dresses as a woman in order to infiltrate an all-female society; but where the effect there had been comic, here, it is grotesque. It is quite common for comedies to appropriate elements of tragic drama, and then to parody the tragic by depicting these borrowed elements in an absurd manner; but here, Euripides reverses the process: he borrows from a comedy to add to his tragedy an extra layer of horror. Pentheus, dressed absurdly as a woman, follows his own prurient inclinations towards his own grisly death. Dionysus merely helped facilitate the process.”

I didn’t know this, obviously, as I haven’t read Aristophanes. 

Both Tom (Wuthering Expectations blog) and Himadri (Argumentative Old Git blog) wrote about the meta-theatre aspect of the play. I can’t help noticing the parallels and contrasts between The Tempest, believed to be the last play Shakespeare wrote alone, and The Bacchae, Euripides’s last play and performed shortly after his death: Prospero and Dionysus start with a long speech explaining the past and their intentions; they are both akin to a playwright/ theatre director, moving things around, orchestrating the plot; but The Tempest is about reconciliation and seen as a farewell to the stage whereas The Bacchae is about the god of drama causing gruesome violence, in a cool, sociopathic way. 

“DIONYSUS Yet cravest thou such 

A sight as would much grieve thee?”

The same line, in John Davie’s translation, is “Would you really like to see what gives you pain?”. 

That’s an interesting question, is it not? Why do we watch awful things onstage (or onscreen)? 

I can’t say I understand Euripides’s play, but it’s gripping, powerful, and disturbing.