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? 

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

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

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

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

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

The main arguments for the possible influence are: 

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

These are interesting points, no? 

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

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

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

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

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

Dewar-Watson argues: 

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

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

Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a voiceless messenger but true and certain! 

The soil <of my land>, 

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

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

mountain torrent!”

(translated by Alan Sommerstein) 

If only I could read ancient Greek! 

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

O Lady Hera! 

The sockets of their heavy-laden axles are squealing! 

Beloved Artemis! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

killed by one another, and the dust of earth

drinks up their dark red, clotted blood, 

who can provide purification, 

who can release them? O 

new troubles for the house 

mingling with its old woes!” 

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

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

Heracles by Euripides

1/ Another blasphemous play from Euripides. 

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

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

Like the sad chant of an aged swan;

A ghost of a man, voice with no substance.

Like a figure seen in a dream…” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott) 

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

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

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

Dying is fearful. Yet I count it foolishness

To struggle with the inevitable. Since we must die,

Let us not die shrivelled in fire, a mockery

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

We owe a debt of honour to our royal house.

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

To struggle out is folly more than bravery.

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

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

There are lots of good passages in this play: 

“MEGARA […] You weep,

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

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

And shed it for you…” 

It is moving. 

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

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

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

In one day Fortune has snatched from me everything,

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

Wealth, reputation – who holds them with certainty?” 

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

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

Toppling to earth, pedestal and all, the foremost man

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

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

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

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

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

My marriage, shared my fatherhood of Heracles.

All this meant nothing; for you proved less powerful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Euripides goes further:

“HERACLES Divinity’s impervious

To human feeling. I defy divinity.” 

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

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

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

Addendum: My friend Himadri added: 

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

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. 

The Birds by Aristophanes

1/ The premise is simple: two Athenian men Peisetairus and Euelpides, fed up with the world in which they live, go to the land of the birds and set up a utopia in the sky called Cloudcuckooland. 

The Birds, performed in 414 BC, is the longest Aristophanes play that survives. 

2/ This is an interesting speech from the birds, addressing humans: 

“LEADER Listen, you mortals, you half-alive pests, 

you bundle of leaves, you clay, 

Race of shadows, wingless and weak 

suffering things of a day. 

You shades of a dream, poor mortals attend us, 

us the truly immortal. 

Us everlasting, ageless and always, 

us the only eternal…” 

That comes from the translation by Paul Roche. Here are the same lines as translated by Ian Johnston: 

“CHORUS LEADER Come now, you men out there, who live such dark, sad lives—

you’re frail, just like a race of leaves—you’re shaped from clay,

you tribes of insubstantial shadows without wings,

you creatures of a day, unhappy mortal men,

you figures from a dream, now turn your minds to us,

the eternal, deathless, air-borne, ageless birds,

whose wisdom never dies, so you may hear from us…” 

3/ Peisetairus doesn’t just reject the world of humans; he rejects gods. 

“PEISETAIRUS It follows then 

that if the birds were born before 

Mother Earth 

and before the gods, they are 

heirs of royalty.” 

(translated by Paul Roche) 

He becomes a bird. 

“PEISETAIRUS But if they accept you as their god, as their Zeus, 

as their Mother Earth, their Poseidon, their Cronus, 

then let every blessing be theirs.” 

Peisetairus persuades the birds to take control of the sky and wage war against the gods: 

“PEISETAIRUS […] And just as we have to ask for visas from the Boeotians

when we want to visit Delphi, so will humans 

when they sacrifice to the gods have to get visas 

from you for the savory smell of fried bacon 

to reach heaven.” 

He rejects the gods and at the end becomes a god himself. That is quite blasphemous—no? I wonder what the audience thought. 

Wikipedia tells me The Birds has been much analysed. What is its meaning? Is it a satire? An allegory? Or escapist entertainment? I don’t know. But the main thing is that the play is funny, and full of funny lines. 

“SERVANT Not that. It’s simply that when my master 

turned into a hoopoe, he prayed 

that I should turn bird, too, 

so’s he’d still have a valet and a butler.” 

Or: 

“LEADER [to the audience] 

For sheer enjoyment nothing can beat 

putting on wings. 

If for instance one of you had 

a pair of the things 

And became hungry and terribly bored 

with a tragic play, 

He could simply up it from here 

and fly away…” 

On a side note, I wish we had some plays of the fourth and fifth greatest Greek tragedians, just to see the gap between Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and them (the same way we can’t fully appreciate how extraordinary Shakespeare was till we read his contemporaries). 

If you look on Wikipedia, you can see that the play is filled with references to places and writers and politicians and historical figures and mythical figures and other people. However, The Birds is not about a “current issue” in the way that The Clouds is. Some of the characters are recognisable types: fraud, father beater, inspector, informer, and so on. 

“METON I’ve come to survey the air for you 

and partition it into lots.” 

I do love it though when I get the reference:  

“PROMETHEUS […] That’s the reason I hurried here, to put you in the know. 

I always was a friend to man.

PEISETAIRUS Indeed, you are. Without you, we couldn’t even 

barbecue.” 

The play is funny from beginning to end—from Peisetairus and Euelpides’s conversation with the birds, to Peisetairus’s responses to the frauds and other annoying types trying to enter the kingdom, to his negotiations with the gods Poseidon, Heracles, and Triballus. He wants not only Zeus’s sceptre but also the princess (“who takes care of Zeus’s thunderbolts/ and other paraphernalia such as/ foreign affairs, law and order, harbor dues, the shipping plan,/ paymasters, jury fees, and vituperating dolts”): 

“HERACLES […] Are we going to go to war over a single woman?”  

That line must have tickled Aristophanes’s audience. 

The Birds has a light touch and joyful ending that I didn’t see in The Clouds. It’s fun. 

The Clouds by Aristophanes

1/ Strepsiades is an old farmer who runs into debt because of his son Pheidippides’s love of horses. Hearing about the Thinkery and the new thinkers, Strepsiades decides to send his son there to be trained to argue his way out of paying the money back. 

The head of the Thinkery is Socrates, a stand-in for the Sophists. My friend Tom (Wuthering Expectations) however told me “The Clouds has very little to do with the actual Socrates. Or anyway with Plato’s recurring character Socrates. The Aristophanes Socrates is more of, well, an influencer. A self-help influencer. We have those today!” 

For this play, I switched back and forth between the translations by Alan H. Sommerstein and Paul Roche. 

2/ There are some very funny bits at the beginning of the play. 

“FIRST PUPIL And see, here is a map of the entire world—look, there’s Athens. 

[…]

STREPSIADES […] But where is Sparta? 

FIRST PUPIL Oh… er?... Right here. 

STREPSIADES Far too close! Think again! Get it away from us!” 

(translated by Paul Roche) 

That’s how I feel about France. 

“SOCRATES […] Do you have a good memory? 

STREPSIADES Yes and no. Very good if somebody owes me something—very bad if I owe it to someone else.” 

(translated by Alan H. Sommerstein) 

Relatable. 

I also like it when someone from the Chorus speaks as Aristophanes: 

“LEADER [addressing the audience] 

[…] I thought that you an audience intelligent would be 

And also thought I’d never written a play so witty 

As this—and that is why I first produced it in this city. 

A lot of toil went into it—and yet my play retreated 

By vulgar works of vulgar men unworthily defeated.

For your sake I took all these pains, and this was all your gratitude!...” 

(translated by Sommerstein)

That reminds me of John Webster’s preface to The White Devil. 

The Clouds was a flop when first performed; the text we have is the revised version that was never produced. 

3/ My problem with The Clouds is that I didn’t find it particularly funny—in fact, it was quite tough to read. Part of it is probably that one should be more familiar with the Sophists, the same way Women at Thesmophoria Festival wouldn’t be very funny if one never read Euripides. But it’s not just that. The Clouds is thick with references to Greek mythology, contemporary figures, local incidents, trendy ideas, and so on—my translators kindly explain all the puns, all the parodies and references, but jokes are not particularly funny when you hear them explained, are they? 

This is the difference between The Alchemist (perhaps Ben Jonson’s comedies in general) and Shakespeare’s comedies: The Alchemist is thick with local and contemporary references that now mean nothing to us, Shakespeare’s plays are not. Shakespeare’s comedies still suffer to some extent, because of slang (now obsolete) and puns (if read in translation), but much of the comedy is in characters, situations, and witty dialogue rather than parody, satire, or references to contemporary issues. 

Compared to Lysistrata and Women at Thesmophoria Festival, The Clouds didn’t make me laugh all that much. It’s too sour, I think. 

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. 

Lysistrata by Aristophanes, a play about war and sex

Now that I have read the greatest plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, it’s natural to get to the comedian and fourth great playwright of ancient Greece: Aristophanes. According to my copy, Lysistrata was performed in 411 BC. 

1/ The premise is simple: there is a war dragging on between the Spartans and the Athenians, a war that doesn’t seem to stop, so Lysistrata decides to do something about it and holds a meeting with women from both sides. 

“LYSISTRATA All right, 

what we’re going to have to forgo is—penis.

ALL Oh no!”

Hahaha. A sex strike. 

The translation I read is by Paul Roche. The same lines in Alan H. Sommerstein’s prose translation are: 

“LYSISTRATA Very well then. We must renounce—sex. [Strong murmurs of approval, gestures of dissent, etc. Several of the company seem on the point of leaving.]…” 

Roche’s choice is funnier.  

2/ I first picked up The Acharnians, Aristophanes’s third play and the earliest among the ones that survive. It didn’t seem to go very well, so I switched to Lysistrata, one of his best plays. Compared to the tragedies, his plays are much harder to read, full of parody and references. 

In this play, Aristophanes mentions the whole trio. 

“LAMPITO What sort of oath are we going to swear?

LYSISTRATA What sort? One like Aeschylus’s, 

with the victim slaughtered over a shield.”

And: 

“LYSISTRATA Oh, what a low-down randy lot we are! 

No wonder we’re the subject of tragedies, 

like Poseidon and the Tub of Sophocles:

have fun with a god, then dump the brats.”

(That play doesn’t survive). 

“MEN’S LEADER Yes, I was fierce and that’s the way I dealt with this fellow. We camped before the gates in ranks of seventeen. And now will I simply stand and watch these brazen women, Enemies of Euripides and of heaven? Oh, I might as well wipe out the glories of Marathon.”

Now these references I enjoy, as I know the playwrights, but there are lots of references and jokes I don’t understand. 

“MEN’S LEADER Euripides got it right. “No beast’s so bloody as a woman,” he said.” 

Euripides appears as a character in 3 of Aristophanes’s 11 surviving plays, and is mentioned in some others—Aristophanes seems… obsessed? I have to read a few to see how weird it is. 

3/ Lysistrata is very funny. 

“LYSISTRATA I know, but some things are more pressing.

CALONICE Like what you’ve summoned us to hear? 

Well, I hope what’s pressing is something really big, 

Lysistrata dear.

LYSISTRATA It’s huge.

CALONICE And weighty?

LYSISTRATA God, it’s huge, and God, it’s weighty.

CALONICE Then why aren’t they all here?

LYSISTRATA Oh, it’s not that; if it were 

there’d be a stampede. No, 

it’s something that sticks in my mind hard as a shaft

and keeps me from sleeping, though I tease it and tease it 

night after night.

CALONICE By now the poor thing must be floppy.” 

Aristophanes is not above a cheap laugh, which is something he shares with Shakespeare.

But once in a while, he sneaks in a serious point: 

“LYSISTRATA […] when we are in our prime and ought to be enjoying life, 

we sleep alone because of the war. 

And I’m not just talking about 

us married ones. . . . It pains me even more 

to think of the young girls 

growing into lonely spinsters in their rooms.

MAGISTRATE Men grow old, too, don’t you know!

LYSISTRATA Hell’s bells! It’s not the same. 

When a man comes home, 

even if he’s old and gray, he can find a girl to marry in no time, 

but a woman enjoys a very short-lived prime, 

and once that’s gone, she won’t be wed by anyone. 

She mopes at home 

full of thwarted dreams.” 

He clearly does have sympathy for women, in such a male-dominated society. 

4/ The thing I like about Lysistrata is that the whole thing is ridiculous. 

“[SECOND WIFE runs out from the Acropolis.]

SECOND WIFE Heavens above! I forgot to shuck my flax 

when I left the house.

LYSISTRATA So you’re off to shuck your flax? Get back inside.

SECOND WIFE By Our Lady of Light, I’ll return in a trice. 

All I want is a little f . . . I mean, shucking.” 

Both the women and the men are horny, and going nuts. 

“HERALD That there’s a Spartan cipher rod.

CINESIAS I’ve got a Spartan cipher rod as well.”

The whole thing is ridiculous and everyone is absurd—but aren’t we all? We shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. 

5/ One thing that particularly intrigues me is how this play was staged at the time. It seems more complicated than the tragedies, yes? There are more characters and the chorus is split in two, the men’s side and the women’s side. But I’m more curious about how they dealt with the female characters acting sexy in see-through dresses—consider that the actors were all male—and the men exposing their “Spartan cipher rods”—what did they do?

I guess we’ll never know.

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. 

The Greeks make me realise what Shakespeare doesn’t do

When I read Shakespeare’s contemporary playwrights in England, or Spanish Golden Age playwrights such as Lope de Vega, I think Shakespeare’s light years ahead of them all. But I don’t think that way when reading the ancient Greeks—I think they’re great in a different way.

Shakespeare’s works may feel richer as he has the advantage of having more actors and mixes the tragic and the comic—not to mention that he can do both tragedy and comedy, and other genres—but the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are not any inferior to Shakespeare’s tragedies in terms of depth and tragic power. This is especially staggering when we consider that there’s a gap of 2000 years between them. 

More interestingly, the Greeks make me realise what Shakespeare doesn’t do. In King Oedipus by Sophocles for instance, the tension in the entire drama arises not because of what’s happening, but because of what has already happened. This is something I later see in Ibsen, but not in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays also don’t question human agency. 

The Electra plays remind me again that Shakespeare doesn’t seem to take any interest in the mother-daughter relationship. He very often explores the father-daughter relationship (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, etc) and depicts some fascinating mother-son relationships (Hamlet and Coriolanus); the only mother-daughter relationship I can think of is Lady Capulet and Juliet, which is not particularly developed, and if we stretch it a bit, the Countess and Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, but they’re not actually mother and daughter. 

He also doesn’t take much interest in the subject of incest. In Pericles, it’s only a small part at the beginning of the story, not explored, and that’s a late play that Shakespeare co-wrote with another playwright. 

Now that I’ve read Hippolytus and other versions of the same myth, I’ve also realised that Shakespeare doesn’t write about women who make false rape allegations. We know he’s fascinated by jealousy and slander, and writes multiple times about women being falsely accused of cheating (Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale), but not about the other way around. 

Shakespeare also doesn’t adapt any of the classical plays. For his plays, he uses historical accounts, poems, Ovid, Chaucer, romances (such as Pandosto), and so on, but doesn’t rewrite or revisit any of the classical plays. Even if he didn’t know Greek, I believe there were Latin translations of the ancient Greek plays available. We don’t see him adapting the Roman plays either. 

This is fascinating stuff.