The Reception and Performance of Euripides' Herakles: Reasoning Madness (Oxford Classical Monographs)

OXF O R D C L A S S I C A L M O N O G R A P H S Published under the supervision of a Committee of the Faculty of Classics in the University of Oxford

The aim of the Oxford Classical Monograph series (which replaces the Oxford Classical and Philosophical Monographs) is to publish books based on the best theses on Greek and Latin literature, ancient history, and ancient philosophy examined by the Faculty Board of Classics.

The Reception and Performance of Euripides’ Herakles Reasoning Madness

KAT H L E E N R I L EY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Kathleen Riley 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Riley, Kathleen, 1974– The reception and performance of Euripides Herakles : reasoning madness / Kathleen Riley. p. cm. –– (Oxford classical monographs) ‘‘This book began life as an Oxford D.Phil. thesis’’––Pref. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–953448–7 1. Euripides. Heracles. 2. Heracles (Greek mythology) in literature. 3. Heracles (Greek mythology)—Drama. 4. Mental illness in literature. I. Title. PA3985.R55 2008 882’.01—dc22 2008006540 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–953448–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Parentibus amicisque carissimis Jean and Frank Riley

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Preface This book began life as an Oxford D.Phil. thesis, and I would like to thank the University of Sydney for awarding me the Cooper and E. S. Wood Travelling Scholarships, which, supplemented by an ORS (Overseas Research Students) Award from the British government, substantially funded my three years in residence at Oxford. I am greatly indebted to Fiona Macintosh for her clear-sighted, meticulous, and stimulating supervision of my thesis, and, above all, her friendship and support. Oliver Taplin and Lorna Hardwick examined the thesis and made many valuable suggestions about revising it for publication. I have also valued the comments made on individual chapters by Edith Hall. For their advice and encouragement, my thanks to Stephen Harrison, Alastair Blanshard, Paula and Brian Alprin, and Daniel Algie. From the numerous libraries and collections I have consulted, special thanks must go to the staV of the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford for their courteous assistance, and Penelope Bulloch, Librarian at Balliol College, for making available to me Robert Browning’s manuscript of Aristophanes’ Apology. My thanks to Gerry Foley for his lucid interpretation, and practical demonstration, of key passages from Richard Strauss’s Elektra. I am extremely grateful to Cathy Ludwig and David CoVey for their generous help in rendering into clear English quotations from German texts. Most of all, I wish to thank my parents, Jean and Frank, for their wise counsel and unfailing support during the writing of the thesis and its subsequent revision, and for a lifetime’s love and inspiration. K. R. Extracts from Shirley Barlow’s translation of Euripides’ Herakles reproduced by permission of Aris & Phillips from Euripides: Heracles, edited with an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary by Shirley A. Barlow (Aris & Phillips, 1996).

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Extracts from John Fitch’s translation of Seneca’s Hercules Furens reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from Seneca: Tragedies I, Loeb Classical Library, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), Copyright ß 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Loeb Classical Library 1 is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Translations of passages from other Greek and Latin texts are the author’s own.

Contents List of illustrations Introduction: reasoning madness and redeWning the hero 1. ‘No longer himself ’: the tragic fall of Euripides’ Herakles 2. ‘Let the monster be mine’: Seneca and the internalization of imperial furor 3. A peculiar compound: Hercules as Renaissance man 4. ‘Even the earth is not room enough’: Herculean selfhood on the Elizabethan stage 5. Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist: the nineteenth-century damnatio of Euripides 6. The Browning version: Aristophanes’ Apology and ‘the perfect piece’ 7. The psychological hero: Herakles’ lost self and the creation of Nervenkunst 8. Herakles’ apotheosis: the tragedy of Superman 9. The Herakles complex: a Senecan diagnosis of the ‘Family Annihilator’ 10. Creating a Herakles for our times: a montage of modern madness Appendix 1. Heraklean madness on the modern stage: a chronology Appendix 2. The Reading school play Bibliography Index

x 1 14 51 92 117 150 182 207 252 279 338 358 366 368 389

List of illustrations Fig. 1. Asteas, The Madness of Herakles, Paestan rf. calyx-krater (350–325 bc). Museo del Prado.

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Fig. 2. Alessandro Turchi, The Madness of Hercules (c.1620). Bayerische Staatsgema¨ldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

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Fig. 3. Theatre programme for Herakles, Vienna, 1902.

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Fig. 4. Herakles, Archibald MacLeish, Alexandria, VA, 2005. Deborah Rinn Critzer (Mrs Hoadley) and Bruce Alan Rauscher (Hoadley). Photo: Stan Barouh. 306 Fig. 5. Mister Heracles, Simon Armitage, Leeds 2001. Clare McCarron (Megara) and Adrian Bower (Heracles). Photo: Keith Pattison.

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Fig. 6. Home Front, Daniel Algie, New York City 2006. Joseph Jamrog (Arthur), H. Clark (Ted), and Fletcher McTaggart (Harrison). Photo: Jonathan SlaV.

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O matter and impertinency mixed, Reason in madness. (King Lear, iv. vi. 170–1) And this madness that links and divides time, that twists the world into the ring of a single night, this madness so foreign to the experience of its contemporaries, does it not transmit to those able to receive it . . . those barely audible voices of classical unreason, in which it is always a question of nothingness and night, but amplifying them now to shrieks and frenzy? (Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason)

Introduction Reasoning madness and redeWning the hero Tales of madness are unsettling. They have a strange and enduring power to fascinate, amuse, and appal beyond the limits of their own historical moment. They seem to be tragicomedy itself: familiar, yet at the same time uncannily removed from everyday experience; entertaining but profoundly disturbing.1

One of the most unsettling tales of madness in Western literature is Euripides’ Herakles, or Herakles Mainomenos (The Madness of Herakles), Wrst produced shortly before 415 bc,2 in which, at the moment of his greatest triumph, Greece’s most celebrated hero is struck down by a supernaturally imposed madness and forced to murder his wife and children. Antiquity recorded a tradition that Euripides was prosecuted by the Athenian politician Cleon for staging at the Dionysia the unseemly spectacle of Herakles descending into madness, and for thus profaning the sacred civic festivities.3 The story is probably apocryphal, but it does reveal an ancient discomfort with this bloody and bewildering drama, a discomfort, moreover, that has endured throughout the centuries. For Herakles remains one of the least-familiar and least-performed plays in the Greek tragic canon. It 1 Salkeld (1993), 8. 2 Herakles Mainomenos, the title given in some MSS, was possibly meant to distinguish this play from the Herakleidae (The Children of Herakles). No traditional date for the Herakles has come down to us from the ancient scholars and external evidence is problematic. The most reliable indicator is internal metrical evidence, which suggests a production a little earlier than Troades of 415 bc (see Cropp and Fick (1985), 5). See also Collard (1981), 2. 3 The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, no. 2400 (vol. 24, 107–9), ll. 10–14.

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Introduction

is only now, for the Wrst time, experiencing something of a universal renaissance, having been adapted for the stage more times (and in a wide variety of forms) in the last decade than in the whole of its previous history (see Appendix 1). And even now it has almost the status of a last taboo. But why should this be so? The play’s subject matter is unquestionably shocking—madness, uxoricide, Wlicide— but this alone cannot account for its relative neglect, its untouchability. Blinding madness, involving impious crimes against philoi (loved ones), is hardly an uncommon theme in Greek tragedy. Euripides’ other plays on the subject include Medea and Bacchae, both profoundly disturbing. However, these plays do not seem to have unsettled audiences (or prospective adapters) in quite the same way as Herakles, and they have certainly been performed with far greater frequency, making more conspicuous incursions into the popular consciousness. Why, then, is the demented, Wlicidal Herakles an especially unsettling theatrical prospect? The answer lies in the singularity of tragic Herakles. Herakles is a hero whose ontological ambivalence makes him a discomWting tragic anomaly. Euripides’ Herakles and Sophocles’ Trachiniae are the only extant Attic tragedies on the theme of suVering Herakles. Yet in Attic comedy and satyr-drama and in burlesque Herakles featured regularly and prominently, a grotesque character of phenomenal physical strength, prodigious appetites, and oaWsh demeanour. In Euripides’ tragicomic Alcestis he appears as the saviour rather than the suVerer, and his more familiar comic persona as bibulous bungler is still much in evidence. The notable imbalance between comic and tragic representations of Herakles has been partially explained by Victor Ehrenberg and more satisfactorily by Michael Silk. Ehrenberg identiWes Herakles’ divinity as the chief obstacle to the hero’s tragic portrayal: ‘The Heracles of comedy is conWrmation of the fact that the hero’s fate was not tragic, unless it became involved in human frailties and human crimes. Heracles, whether hero or glutton, was always superhuman and therefore essentially untragic.’4 Silk, however, believes the problem is not the hero’s divinity, but his unique interstitial condition as theios ane¯r (divine man) and Monoikos (lone dweller), which makes him the 4 Ehrenberg (1946), 146.

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ultimate outsider and gives him a potentially dangerous complexity as a subject for tragedy: The reason why the tragedians avoid Heracles as suVering hero is that a serious treatment of his suVerings means coming to terms with anomalous status, with crossing the limits, with disturbing contradictions. If (to speak in formulae) tragic-suVering man is man’s image of his own essential condition, and if god is his projection of what he would, but dare not, aspire to, and is, instead, a helpless prey to, then the enactment of tragic-suVering god-man threatens to involve its audience in an existential inquisition of an uncommonly powerful and painful kind. The pure god, pure hero, pure buVoon, are safe subjects. The suVering Heracles, as a project for tragedy, is exceptionally sensitive material, almost too disturbing, almost taboo. And when tragedy does, eventually, dare to focus on this anomaly, disturbance is conspicuous.5

Of the two surviving tragic portraits of Herakles, the Euripidean portrait is the more complex and, therefore, the more ‘dangerous’. Sophoclean Herakles suVers mightily, but he embodies an oversimpliWed and intractable heroism that is not far removed from his untragic personae. In his behaviour and heroic temperament, he is more godlike than human and, as a consequence, unreachable and unappealing. By contrast, Euripidean Herakles has a speciWcally human complexity and, by today’s standards, accessibility. He displays from the beginning an enlightened and atypical heroism, and, before the arrival of Lyssa (Frenzy or Madness), is shown to be mentally and morally sound. To watch the Herakles is, therefore, to confront an impossible conundrum: how do we reconcile this image of human greatness and innocence with the Xagrant injustice of the gods and the inhuman nature of the hero’s mad crimes? In June 2004, reXecting on ‘the current rash of Greek drama . . . directly attributable to the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East’,6 Michael Billington, drama critic for the Guardian, posed the rhetorical question: ‘Where does our theatre instinctively turn in times of 5 Silk (1985), 1–22, at 7. 6 Michael Billington, ‘Terror of Modern Times Sets the Stage for Greek Tragedy’, Guardian, 19 June 2004. The ‘current rash of Greek drama’ included productions of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis at the National Theatre, Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender (an adaptation of Sophocles’ Trachiniae) at the Young Vic, Euripides’ Ion at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester, and Euripides Hecuba at the Donmar Warehouse.

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crisis? Not to Shakespeare or Shaw but to the Greeks.’7 Despite the overall sparseness of its performance history, the Herakles is no exception to this rule. Since the Wfth century bc interest in the play has been intermittent, but has always surfaced in historically charged circumstances (e.g. late Julio-Claudian Rome, Tudor England, Wnde-sie`cle Vienna, Cold War and post-9/11 America). Astonishingly, given its infrequent staging, the Herakles has had an undeniable impact on the history of ideas, proving an ideal text for people wanting, or needing, to redeWne the concepts of ‘madness’ and ‘hero’. As an examination of heroism in crisis, a tragedy about the greatest of heroes facing an abyss of despair but ultimately Wnding redemption, it resonates powerfully with individuals and communities at historical and ethical crossroads. However, the impact of the play has not always been a question of direct inspiration or obvious appropriation. Very often it has penetrated the prevailing culture by circuitous or subterranean means, although no less profoundly. The list of writers who have adapted, or in other ways championed, Euripides’ Herakles through the ages is a distinguished and sometimes surprising one. In keeping with its dangerous complexity and strange beauty, the play has consistently attracted rebels and visionaries to its cause. Duncan Salkeld has commented that to read tales of madness ‘is to confront a variety of questions. Can the madness of the past be interpreted in present-day categories of insanity? Should the concepts of real and literary madness be distinguished? Does madness make sense, and if so, what does it mean?’8 The primary interest of this book lies in changing ideas of Heraklean madness, of its causes, its consequences, and its therapy. Writers subsequent to Euripides have tried to ‘reason’ or make sense of the madness, often in accordance with contemporary thinking on mental illness. Diagnoses of Herakles’ condition have included melancholy, epilepsy, hysteria, manic depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and have been informed by a range of theories from humoral pathology

7 Michael Billington, ‘Terror of Modern Times Sets the Stage for Greek Tragedy’, Guardian, 19 June 2004. 8 Salkeld (1993), 8.

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to psychoanalysis and beyond. But Euripides’ play is not only a psychologically compelling dramatization of the irrational; it is also a thought-provoking enquiry into the heroic. In addition to the questions identiWed by Salkeld, interpreters of Herakles have had to confront a further question: how are we to understand Herakles’ arete¯ (moral and heroic excellence) in the light of his insane behaviour? Attempts to reason the madness necessarily entail redeWning Herakles’ heroism accordingly. This process of heroic redeWnition is the second focus of my investigation. Euripides himself emphasized a total absence of reason for the madness. The structural Wssion, unparalleled central epiphany, and highly unusual characterization of Herakles and Lyssa establish psychological and ethical discontinuity between Herakles sane and Herakles insane. The madness is senseless and intrusive, an unpardonable mischief conceived by malevolent gods. Against divine unreason, the rehabilitated Herakles emerges as a mature and humanistic hero whose salvation is achieved through human philia (love, friendship) and his own progressive spiritual resolve. Euripides’ play is, of course, itself an adaptation of traditional myth. As an adaptation it contains several innovations, not least of which is to feature the madness and Wlicide as the climax of Herakles’ twelve labours (rather than the labours as atonement for the Wlicide). The eVect of this is to emphasize further Herakles’ innocence and the injustice of the gods, and to concentrate meaning and dramatic tension in Herakles’ recovery from a disaster beyond reason. In adaptations of Euripides’ text, however, the implications of his chronological inversion of the Wlicide and labours have been very diVerently perceived. Later writers generally see a causal link between the violence of the labours and the domestic violence that immediately follows their completion. As a result, the rehabilitation of Herakles, which is the most radical part of Euripides’ play, is made secondary to the question of psychological causation in relation to his explosive madness. The Wrst writer to draw such a link between the labours and the Wlicide, and so begin the process of reasoning Herakles’ madness, was the Roman philosopher and tragedian Seneca. In his Hercules Furens two levels of motivation are apparent, the divine/mythological and

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the human/psychological, with the emphasis on the latter. Seneca internalizes Hercules’ furor, dispensing with the interventionist mischief-makers Iris and Lyssa, and thereby obscuring the boundary between sanity and insanity. He portrays Hercules throughout as a megalomaniac and menacingly autarkic overreacher, whose madness triggers a latent psychosis, and whose hallucinations merely extrapolate his ‘rational’ aspirations. He thus restores the traditional theodicy, which Euripides dismantled, and introduces to this particular tale of madness both psychological and ethical coherence. Hercules, as an idea or type, was an important and ubiquitous presence in the art, literature, and philosophy of the Renaissance. Although he was always primarily deWned as a warrior hero, a performer of civilizing feats, Renaissance Hercules was, in fact, a synthesis and distillation of various classical traditions. His most popular and pervasive incarnation was as Hercules in bivio (Hercules at the Crossroads), the triumphant hero of a Manichean struggle between Virtue and Vice. As such he became omnia omnibus, happily appropriated into civil humanism and Christian metaphysics alike. The Renaissance conception of mad Hercules was very diVerent from this paragon of virtus, reason, and restraint, but an equally composite and adaptable creation. What is known as the ‘Hercules furens tradition’ is neither exclusively Senecan nor essentially tragic. It is a wholesale description applied to a group of overlapping traditions—philosophical, medical, literary, and histrionic—whose ancient sources include Hippocrates, Aristotle, Macrobius, Ovid, and, of course, Seneca. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries translations of Seneca’s Hercules Furens appeared in England and on the Continent, helping to establish the Herculean hero as a deWning presence in Renaissance drama. Seneca’s psychologically and ethically challenging Hercules is an especially discernible and inXuential presence in Elizabethan tragedy. Political and cultural similarities between imperial Rome and Tudor England ensured the responsiveness of Elizabethan playwrights to the Senecan overreacher’s magnetism as well as his menace. Madness and tyranny in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are frequently construed in terms of Herculean furor, which, in turn, is rendered synonymous with an apocalyptic sense of selfhood. Following the Renaissance, mad Herakles eVectively disappeared from the stage and the cultural consciousness, re-emerging only very

Introduction

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gradually after an interval of nearly 200 years. For much of the nineteenth century Euripidean tragedy was either ignored or else roundly condemned, and the fate of Herakles was to become the preserve of a small but inXuential group of nonconformists. In 1818 Richard Valpy, the charismatic headmaster of Reading School, staged, in ancient Greek, the only documented production of Herakles in the nineteenth century. Later in the century the outspoken classical historian J. P. MahaVy initiated an anti-Aristophanic defence of Euripides, citing Herakles as ‘among the best of the poet’s works’;9 and his pupil, Oscar Wilde, expressed a special familiarity and aYnity with the play, as well as a desire to edit it. The revolutionary German philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-MoellendorV began work on a seminal edition of the text in the 1870s as part of his historicist crusade; and Robert Browning made his translation of Herakles in 1875 the pie`ce de re´sistance in a remarkable Euripidean defence (Aristophanes’ Apology). Browning’s version makes no attempt to reason Herakles’ madness. It is instead an extremely sympathetic ampliWcation of Euripides’ own voice, reaYrming, as opposed to redeWning, the play’s hero as redeemer and redeemed. The Modernist reception of mad Herakles has two currents, one psychological, the other philosophical. The Wrst represents the combined theories of Wilamowitz, the critic Herman Bahr, and the playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In his 1889 edition of the Herakles, Wilamowitz proposed his ‘seeds of madness’ theory, portraying Euripides’ hero as a blood-crazed megalomaniac. In 1902 his translation of the play was produced in Vienna and was the Wrst modern revival of Euripides on the European stage. This production, and in particular Bahr’s reaction to it, had a direct impact on the creation of Nervenkunst (neurotic art). Bahr, focusing on line 931 (›
 PŒŁ Æe q, ‘he was no longer himself ’), believed the mad Herakles to be a hero straight from the pages of Breuer and Freud, symbolizing the terrifying potential in all human beings to lose themselves, to become something ‘other’ than themselves. His reading of line 931 formed the basis of the Wrst explicitly psychoanalytic interpretation of Greek tragedy ever staged, Hofmannsthal’s electrifying Elektra of 1903. Meanwhile, other Modernist writers, namely 9 MahaVy (1879), 81.

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George Cabot Lodge, W. B. Yeats, and Frank Wedekind, conceived of Herakles as the archetypal Nietzschean Superman, reasoning the madness and murders as an inescapable precondition of self-divinity. In the late twentieth century, Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation and post-Vietnam awareness of combat trauma led to the identiWcation in the heroic male psyche of what might be termed a ‘Herakles complex’. Consequently, the adaptations of Euripides’ Herakles by Archibald MacLeish (pub. 1967) and Simon Armitage (pub. 2000) focused speciWcally on the Wlicide and its cultural implications, and applied a Senecan and psychoanalytic reading to the madness and to the Euripidean sequence of labours–Wlicide. MacLeish draws a frightening analogy between Herakles Kallinikos (Glorious Victor) and a Strangelovean scientist bent on dystopian perfection. Armitage portrays a maverick military man, an intuitive berserker lost in the maze of peacetime complexity. In each case the restless, overachieving hero Wts the psychological proWle of what American criminologists categorize as the ‘family annihilator’. MacLeish and Armitage were the Wrst modern playwrights to dramatize the Herakles complex. They were also instigators of the current phase in the reception of Euripides’ Herakles, that of the ‘neo-Senecan Herakles’. Out of the escalating horrors of our post9/11 world, and in direct response to the Iraq War, several new stage adaptations of Herakles have emerged. Apart from their record number, what is fascinating about these productions is that, although they are consciously inspired by Euripides, they have been unconsciously Senecanized, Wltered through a sense of despair that is supremely Senecan and at the same time utterly contemporary. Perhaps more so than at any other stage in his reception, the tragic Herakles of the early twenty-Wrst century is symbolic of acute moral crisis. His loss of self has become a metaphor for an entire civilization that has lost its way. Like Seneca’s portrait of the irredeemably autarkic Hercules, it is a metaphor tempered by little in the way of optimism. At the time of writing, mad Herakles’ latest manifestation is as a deeply traumatized war veteran in Daniel Algie’s powerful play Home Front. The unexpected death of this hero at the hands of the Theseus character, which is portrayed as a type of mercy killing and a Wnal act of friendship, exceeds Seneca in its cancellation of the redemptive might of Euripidean philia.

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The present study has been undertaken at a time when reception studies are becoming an increasingly valuable and respectable component of mainstream classical scholarship. The need to validate the place of reception within the discipline of classics has become less critical than the need for rigorous discussion about reception theory and methodology. One of the latest attempts to answer that need is Classics and the Uses of Reception (2006), edited by Charles Martindale and Richard Thomas. The diversity of contributions to this volume illustrates the current eclecticism of approach and lack of orthodoxy characteristic of classical reception studies. However, among pioneering deWnitions of classical reception and its purpose, which have appeared in the last ten to Wfteen years, some areas of reasonable consensus are apparent, most notably the idea that reception involves a dialogic or mutually illuminating discourse between ancient and modern. Martindale’s original reception manifesto, which appeared in 1993, held that ‘Meaning . . . is always realized at the point of reception’,10 that ‘numerous unexplored insights into ancient literature are locked up in imitations, translations, and so forth’.11 Thirteen years later he restated this thesis in terms of a twoway transmission of meaning: ‘reception involves the acknowledgement that the past and present are always implicated in each other.’12 In 2003 Lorna Hardwick showed how reception studies ‘focus critical attention back towards the ancient source and sometimes frame new questions or retrieve aspects of the source which have been marginalized or forgotten. . . . Reception studies therefore participate in the continuous dialogue between past and present.’13 The following year Edith Hall, formulating a theory of performance reception, advocated as ‘eminently sensible’ the notion ‘that our appreciation of the original texts can be reWned by excavating their afterlife, what they have ‘‘meant’’ in other cultures and epochs than those which originally produced them’.14 My approach to the reception of Euripides’ Herakles has been enlightened by much of this emergent theory, which has then been reinforced at a very practical level in my research. 10 Martindale (1993), 3. 11 Ibid. 7. 13 Hardwick (2003), 4.

12 Martindale (2006), 1–13, at 12. 14 Hall (2004a), 51–89, at 54.

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In an essay on the complexities of Shakespeare’s relationship to, and exploitation of, the classics, Colin Burrow raises an important issue: ‘Misremembering and mishearing the classical tongues can be as much a response to ‘‘the classics’’ as careful imitations and artful echoes.’15 Martindale makes a similar point: ‘One value of reception is to bring to consciousness the factors that may have contributed to our responses to the texts of the past, factors of which we may well be ‘‘ignorant’’ but are not therefore ‘‘innocent’’.’16 The present study, therefore, examines not only instances of explicit adaptation or appropriation, but also, and sometimes more revealingly, instances of implicit, mediated, or subterranean reception (such as the Euripidean and Heraklean essence of Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Elektra), and even of what we might cautiously describe as misappropriation (observable in the Wlicidal Herakles’ signiWcant role in Lodge’s doctrine of self-divinity). My methodology then is directed towards the discovery of both the intended and unintended consequences of reception. Examples of the latter could be said to include the recent phenomenon of neo-Senecanism in stage adaptations of Euripides’ text. As my title indicates, this study is also a performance history of Euripides’ Herakles and is, therefore, concerned with how the play has left its mark at crucial junctures of theatrical as well as cultural history. ‘It is the dynamic relationship’, Hall explains, ‘between ancient text, performer, and his or her audience that above all distinguishes Performance Reception from the study of the ways in which ancient texts have been received elsewhere.’17 With regard to a distinguishable methodology for the investigation of this branch of reception, Fiona Macintosh states that ideally performance history ‘works extensively and intensively at the intersection between theatre history, histories of classical scholarship and the history of ideas. . . . For the performance historian, the need to be aware of the importance of all these perspectives is imperative.’18 She also stresses the need for performance history ‘to combine diachronic awareness with synchronic depth together with formalist analysis of the texts in

15 Burrow (2004), 9–27, at 15. 17 Hall (2004a), 51–89, at 52.

16 Martindale (2006), 1–13, at 5. 18 Macintosh (2007), chap. 19.

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question’.19 With these principles in mind, my own practice has involved close textual analysis within a framework of broad historical contextualization. ‘Bigger-picture’ questions relating to social and political developments, theatrical and literary movements, and the education and professional lives of theatre practitioners have proved as pertinent to my investigation of the impact of a performance as questions surrounding the linguistic subtleties of a play and the aesthetics of translation. In Hall’s estimation, the performance historian is essentially a time-traveller with access to a unique conduit of human history, generated by an art form whose consequences belie its supposed ephemerality and exclusivity: Watched in physical company with many other spectators, performance oVers privileged access to mass ideology and collective taste and prejudice, and it is as a source for such phenomena that it tends to be used by social historians. But it simultaneously permits access to the private imaginative worlds of the individual members of previous generations. Theatre happens, and leaves its psychological records, precisely at the intersection of the collective and the individual, the ‘ideological’ and the ‘subjective.’ Theatre critics have, moreover, long been aware that there is something distinctive about the immanent presence of live performance in the human memory. Far from being an ephemeral art, which happens, comes to an end, and vanishes without a trace, a compelling theatrical experience can leave a much deeper impression on the memory even than the printed word or painted image.20

‘Performance issues’, Hall reveals, ‘may often need to be addressed in the negative—why was a play’s performance banned at a particular time . . . or why were there no attempts to stage Aeschylus in the seventeenth century, or Trojan Women in the nineteenth’.21 In the case of Herakles, in addition to the larger issue of the play’s relatively erratic stage history and untouchability, there is a need to address the speciWc impediments to its performance and the lacunae in its reception. For example, there is the question of tragic Herakles’ disappearance from the stage in the post-Renaissance period. There is also the prevalent damnatio of Euripides in the nineteenth century, which contributes both to the neglect and to the eventual rehabilitation of his tragedies. 19 Ibid.

20 Hall (2004a), 51–89, at 68.

21 Ibid. 56.

12

Introduction

As Macintosh makes clear, there are ‘inherent problems with the tools and the sources of performance reception—especially with the review’, so that the ‘need for a wide range of contextual evidence is paramount.’22 My approach to these problems, where possible, has been to examine the performance aspects of a production in close conjunction with the playscript (whether published or unpublished). Occasionally my analysis has been informed by my Wrst-hand knowledge of a performance. More frequently I have utilized a variety of primary sources, including posters, programmes, and visual or printed evidence about translation and production values, performance space, set design, costume, and styles of acting. These primary sources have been augmented by the use of reviews and interviews (conducted by myself or in the media) with a producer, playwright, or director. In examining instances of reception beyond the stage, my research has encompassed a similarly wide range of primary sources. I have, for example, been able to consult the original manuscript of Browning’s Aristophanes’ Apology at Balliol College, Oxford, and make extensive use of Hermann Bahr’s diaries and correspondence. The whole notion of adaptation, which the reception specialist or performance historian must address, is often pejoratively conceived. As Linda Hutcheon points out: ‘an adaptation is likely to be greeted as minor and subsidiary and certainly never as good as the ‘‘original’’.’23 This negativity becomes inevitable when the criterion of judgement is how ‘faithful’ an adaptation is to the original: ‘The morally loaded discourse of Wdelity is based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text. Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication. And there are manifestly many diVerent possible intentions behind the act of adaptation.’24 Scholars of the ‘classical tradition’, the theoretical forerunner to classical reception studies, tended in their investigations to use terms such as ‘inXuence’ and ‘legacy’, which in turn tended to preserve the ancient text as a yardstick of value or a kind of Urtext edition. Within these parameters the notion of adaptation is in danger of being reduced to a matter of either imitation or degeneration. 22 Macintosh (2007). On the diYculty in using the theatrical review critically, see Hardwick (2003), 53–4. 23 Hutcheon (2006), p. xii. 24 Hutcheon (2006), 7.

Introduction

13

By contrast, as Hardwick notes: ‘The vocabulary of reception studies has moved on from notions of ‘‘legacy’’ to include also the values and practices of the present and future creativity of classical culture. The key evaluative question both for the relationship with the past and for the present, may well be ‘‘what diVerence was made?’’ ’ In my study of the major receptions of Euripides’ Herakles up to the end of 2006, I have been eager to demonstrate what I believe constitutes the play’s Euripidean essence and how, at key moments in history, that essence has been transformed, even to the point of occasional cancellation. However, I do not see this transformative process as one of corruption and decline, but rather as a culturally revealing evolution that conWrms Euripides’ play as a ‘culturally active presence’.25 The Herakles has inspired, and continues to inspire, widely diVering adaptations of the hero and his madness, and as Shirley Barlow insists: ‘That is as it should be with any great work of art. . . . The motivation for Heracles’ madness will continue to be more complex than appears on the surface. And that is hardly surprising when the causes of madness in real life are so often puzzling and paradoxical. That theories so diVerent . . . should arise in regard to the Heracles is not a slur on Euripides, but rather a tribute to his depth.’26 25 Hardwick (2003), 112.

26 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 126.

1 ‘No longer himself ’: the tragic fall of Euripides’ Herakles ‘Madness’, according to Ruth Padel, ‘is the perfect image of tragic fall’,1 because of its daemonic power to eVect a sudden, comprehensive reversal of fortune and identity, and because it operates outside human control. In the light of this deWnition, there is no more perfect image of tragic fall in dramatic literature than Euripides’ Herakles, the glorious civilizer and saviour who, in a Wt of divinely inspired madness, murders his wife and children. At line 931 of Herakles the Messenger announces the moment of the hero’s insane metamorphosis with the words ›
 PŒŁ Æe q (‘he was no longer himself ’). His terse declaration encapsulates the essence of Herakles’ tragic fall, which is not only a sudden and comprehensive reversal, but an external, arbitrary imposition of ‘otherness’. Lyssa works from within Herakles, merging with his being in a very literal and physical sense, but she is not an extension or manifestation of his psychology. Instead, it is Herakles who manifests Lyssa’s irresistible force and Hera’s implacable will. Herakles becomes something alien; he is no longer himself. An English translation of 931 cannot adequately reproduce its extraordinary impact. With the Greek verse Euripides pithily initiates a series of revolutionary assaults on conventional dramaturgy, morally orthodox thinking, and audience expectations. As an immediate consequence of Herakles’ loss of self, the anticipated Wnale to an Odyssean nostos drama is brutally sabotaged; the chorus’s lyric invocation of Herakles Alexikakos (averter of evil), in all his Pindaric splendour, is 1 Padel (1995), 241.

‘No longer himself ’

15

horrifyingly travestied; and the traditional theodicy, with its attendant consolations, is smashed. But these violations of structural and moral unity are not simply acts of wanton theatrical destruction or ‘an extreme example of Euripidean shock tactics’.2 They constitute a meaningful prelude to the most innovative aspect of Euripides’ treatment of the Herakles myth, namely his hero’s assertion of a radical and enlightened humanism.

A N E S S E N T IA L D I S U N I T Y: T H E P RO B L E M O F T H E P L AY ’ S S T RU C TU R E The most obvious and critically rehearsed feature of the Herakles is its singular structure, in particular ‘the brisk counterpoint of peripeties on which the tragedy turns, wheeling over and over as one action pivots to its opposite, or, juxtaposed, against a sudden illumination, is as suddenly shattered and annulled’.3 At the beginning of the play, while Herakles is in the underworld completing his Wnal labour, his father Amphitryon, wife Megara, and three sons are sentenced to death by the usurping tyrant Lycus. Herakles arrives in time to save his family, but is at that moment struck by madness and forced to murder his wife and children. Thus, the play’s action is violently broken into two apparently discrete dramatic entities or movements: the Wrst is a familiar suppliant action, a rescue story culminating in belated but convincing conWrmation of Providence; the second is inaugurated by a sinister central epiphany and cancels the moral order which the Wrst movement restored. Since the early nineteenth century critics have complained about the lack of organic or causal unity between these two movements,4

2 Michelini (1987), 233. 3 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 45. 4 The leader of the 19th-century damnatio of Euripides, A. W. Schlegel (1846), 137 put the case against the Herakles plainly: ‘We have another example of two distinct and separate actions in the same tragedy, the Mad Heracles. . . . The one action follows, but by no means arises out of the other.’ For the Schlegelian Euripidesbild, see below, Chap. 5.

16

‘No longer himself ’

branding the eVect ‘episodic’, ‘diptychal’, and even ‘triptychal’.5 ‘[A] shapeless and soulless abortion’,6 ‘broken-backed’,7 and ‘ramshackle’8 are among the more colourful and damning descriptions of the play’s confronting structural violence. Such complaints issue from an Aristotelian standard of tragic construction and focus on Euripides’ undeniably un-Aristotelian use of peripeteia. In the Poetics, Aristotle maintains that a successful plot relies on a logical sequence of cause and eVect, wherein each incident is the result of what has gone before. In a ‘simple’ (i.e. single or continuous) plot an incident can, and ideally should, be unexpected, but never accidental. Everything that happens must be directed by necessity or probability: H
b ± ºH  Łø ŒÆd æ ø ƃ K Ø
Ø
Ø Nd æØÆØ: ºªø
 K Ø
Ø
 FŁ K fiz a K Ø
ØÆ  ¼ºººÆ h NŒe h I ªŒ r ÆØ: ØÆFÆØ
b ØFÆØ  e b H Æ ºø ØH
Ø ÆP ;  e
b H IªÆŁH
Øa f  ŒæØ · IªøÆÆ ªaæ ØF ŒÆd Ææa c
ÆØ

ÆæÆ e FŁ ºº ŒØ
ØÆæØ IƪŒ ÆØ e KB: K d
b P  ºÆ Kd æ ø  Ø Iººa ŒÆd æH ŒÆd KºØH; ÆFÆ
b ªÆØ ŒÆd  ºØÆ ½ŒÆd Aºº
‹Æ ªÆØ Ææa c
Æ
Ø ¼ºººÆ· e ªaæ ŁÆıÆe oø Ø Aºº j N I e F ÆP ı ŒÆd B  ; K d ŒÆd H I e   ÆFÆ ŁÆıÆØÆÆ
ŒE ‹Æ u æ K 
 ÆÆØ ªªÆØ. (1451b–1452a) Of simple plots and actions the worst are those which are episodic. I call a plot ‘episodic’ in which the episodes come after one another neither probably nor of necessity. Such pieces are composed by bad poets on their own account, and by good poets for the sake of the actors; for, as they write for competition and stretch a plot beyond its capacity, they are often compelled to break the continuity. But this is bad work, since tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action but also of incidents inspiring fear and pity, and this happens most of all when the incidents occur contrary to expectation and yet follow as cause and eVect; for in this way the incidents will cause more amazement than if they happened of themselves or by chance, since even the most amazing coincidences are those which seem to have happened as if on purpose. 5 Kitto (1961), 235 declared that the Herakles ‘falls into three distinct parts. . . . But a play has no business to be a triptych’. 6 Swinburne (1889), 179. 7 Murray (1946), 112. 8 Norwood (1954), 46.

‘No longer himself ’

17

The same rule applies to a ‘complex’ plot in which a change of fortune ( ÆØ) coincides with a discovery (IƪæØØ) or reversal ( æØ ØÆ) or both: ÆFÆ
b
E ªŁÆØ K ÆPB B ı ø F  Łı; u KŒ H

檪ø ıÆØ j K I ªŒ j ŒÆa e NŒe ªªŁÆØ ÆFÆ·
ØÆæØ ªaæ ºf e ªªŁÆØ 

Øa 
 j a 
. (1452a) These things ought to arise from the actual structure of the plot, so that from what has occurred earlier it follows that these things happen either by necessity or according to probability; for what happens on account of these things is very diVerent from what happens after these things.

Measured against this Aristotelian formula, the plot of the Herakles is unsatisfactory because the central change which occurs—the madness—is not a necessary or probable outcome; it is not, for instance, the corrective result of any visible ±ÆæÆ (failure or error) or the revelation of any latent psychological disturbance. In fact, the whole concept of change in the play ‘is seen not as rhythmical and orderly but as violent and capricious’.9 But not everyone has reacted to the Herakles with a sense of ‘outraged Aristotelianism’.10 Many commentators have approached the alleged problem of the play’s structure by advancing positive ‘solutions’. These solutions can be divided into three main types. The Wrst is an attempt to minimize the obvious dislocation of events and unconnected juxtapositions by establishing a coherent and continuous thematic pattern reinforced by linguistic repetitions. Sheppard, for example, believes the key to the play’s overarching unity is the recurrent motifs of friendship, strength, and wealth, explicitly stated in the closing lines (1425–6) and variously embodied throughout.11 The Herakles thus becomes a logical comparative exposition of these values. Following on from Sheppard, Chalk argues for demonstrable organic unity on the basis of ‘a further general concept— Iæ’ and, more particularly, the architectonic question—‘What is the place of human Iæ in the universe?’12 This question, he says, ‘is more than a theme. It is the play: the inexplicable overthrow by

9 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 124. 11 Sheppard (1916), 72–9.

10 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 45. 12 Chalk (1962), 7–18, at 8.

18

‘No longer himself ’

Hera of the conventional Iæ of Herakles followed by his recovery of a further Iæ prompt and (tragically) answer precisely this question.’13 Kamerbeek also advocates a unity of form which depends on the recurrence of a number of themes and phrases in the play’s two movements, such as the rare KºŒ
 simile used in Herakles’ two exit scenes (631 and 1424).14 The second type of solution, whose chief proponent was Ulrich von Wilamowitz-MoellendorV,15 restores to the plot the Aristotelian principles of necessity and probability, but removes the Aristotelian ideal of unexpectedness. It achieves causal unity by locating in the Wrst movement symptoms of mental imbalance, which preWgure the fullblown madness of the second movement.16 To this end, Herakles’ early speeches and behaviour have been scrutinized for signs of megalomania and intuitive bloodlust, or else the madness itself has been diagnosed as epilepsy.17 But, as Kevin Lee argues, these theses of psychological coherence ‘do violence to the text and/or turn the tragedy into a complicated form of case-history’.18 A variation on this solution is Burnett’s notion that the madness is morally, rather than psychologically, preWgured in the Wrst movement. To establish causal unity, she propounds a theory of hamartia, which includes Megara’s unnatural and untenable suppliancy and ‘arrogant agnosticism’,19 Amphitryon’s acquiescence in his daughterin-law’s ‘active unfaith’,20 and Herakles’ hubristic, albeit mostly passive, condition of grandeur: When the opening scenes of the Heracles are compared to their natural foils in other suppliant drama, aberrations and distortions appear that are easily a match for those of the second half of the play. In fact, the two halves of the play, equally deWant of the conventional forms, prove to have positive ethical links that establish something very like a causal sequence between them. Megara’s suppliant drama is an action purposely malformed so that it can lead directly into the grotesque scenes that destroy her.21

13 15 16 17 18 19

Chalk (1962), 7–18, at 9. 14 Kamerbeek (1966), 1–16. On Wilamowitz’s ‘seeds of madness’ theory and its inXuence, see below, Chap. 7. For a more recent solution along these lines, see Ruck (1976), 53–75. On Herakles as epileptic, see Blaiklock (1945), 48–63. Lee (1980), 34–45, at 34. Burnett (1971), 163. 20 Ibid. 162. 21 Ibid. 158–9.

‘No longer himself ’

19

Burnett contends that the ‘true radicalism’ of this suppliant action has been hitherto obscured,22 but the radicalism she deWnes pertains to Megara’s scepticism and not to Euripides’ treatment of the heresy expounded by Megara and personiWed by Herakles. For she later says, in relation to the deaths of Megara and the children, that ‘the poet has unobtrusively insisted that this fate was not only necessary to heaven but freely chosen by those who have suVered it’.23 Thus her own reading of the play, according to which Euripides is clearly endorsing the traditional theodicy, undercuts her claim of radicalism. The claim of radicalism can only be upheld when we recognize that Euripides is on the side of the heretics. The third, and most persuasive, type of solution is to see reXected in the uniquely bifurcated plot Herakles’ unique duality as ŁE Iæ (divine man). Justina Gregory defends the play’s structural and thematic unity by pointing to the motif of Herakles’ shared paternity, which spans every episode, and to the accompanying ‘spiritual contradiction involved in being simultaneously the son of Zeus and Amphitryon’.24 Owing to the emphasis placed on this contradiction, the madness assumes the function of an inevitable crisis, at the end of which the hero has rejected Zeus and his divine inheritance and embraced Amphitryon and his humanity. This function is further explained by Silk, who insists that what appears arbitrary or contradictory in the play is inherent in the myth itself, whereas Euripides’ plot develops in a way consistent with the demands of necessity: ‘[The] explosion—the madness—is presented as an arbitrary explosion such as gods create, but also as a necessary explosion, necessary in metaphysical terms as well as necessary on the level of character. The combination of god and man is unstable and must be blown apart to permit a new, simpler and comprehensible stability, whereby Heracles becomes a suVering man in whom we can believe and to whom we can relate.’25 According to this reading, the two separate actions of the Herakles actually represent one continuous movement towards humanity. 22 Ibid. 158. 23 Ibid. 172. 24 Gregory (1977), 259–75, at 272. On Herakles’ double parentage, see also Furley (1986), 102–13, at 106–7. 25 Silk (1985), 1–22, at 18.

20

‘No longer himself ’

These solutions are ingenious, and sometimes cogent, but they are all fundamentally thematic solutions to what has been invariably diagnosed as a formal problem.26 In the pursuit of thematic unity, the issue of actual formal disunity has been, perhaps too conveniently, circumvented. Moreover, the general failure to engage directly with this formal disunity has meant that the impact of the play in performance has largely been ignored. Thematic, linguistic, ethical, and psychological unity do not necessarily add up to structural unity or to powerful theatre. In terms of the ideas it presents, the Herakles is undoubtedly a coherent piece of drama, but this does not mitigate the jarring juxtaposition of events and wrenching transitions built into the plot, which are, I believe, central to the play’s meaning. On the page, and in performance, Euripides emphasizes contrast, change, and reversal. Linguistically and visually he reinforces the structural irrationalism.27 At 735 the chorus begin their celebration of the joyful metabasis that is Herakles’ return and Lycus’ destruction by exclaiming, ƺa ŒÆŒH (‘Disaster is reversed!’). Their very diVerent reaction to the second major turning-point in the play, the arrival of Iris and Lyssa, is similarly phrased, Æf e PıB ƺ
Æø (‘In a moment a god has destroyed the [hero’s] happiness’, 884). The repetition highlights the swiftness with which fate has subverted one set of circumstances and emotions and replaced them with another. At 1015 the Messenger, concluding his account of Herakles’ demented rampage, says of the hero, PŒ r
Æ ŁH ‹Ø IŁºØæ (‘I do not know of any man more miserable’). As Galinsky notes, the word IŁºØæ derives from pŁºÆ (labours),28 so that Herakles’ tragic fall is reXected in the changed nature of his most famous feats. Likewise, at 1279 Herakles refers to the murder of his children as his Wnal labour (e ºŁØ ) and, at 1411, as his most diYcult (– Æ Kº ø ŒEÆ H
 º 26 Cf. Barlow (1982), 115–25, at 115: ‘There have been attempts to gloss the awkward structure by searches for over-arching thematic or linguistic unity which have somehow still obviated the need to take into account too strongly the violent wrenches of fortune which the plot reveals.’ 27 On the meaning and aural impact of Euripides’ linguistic madness, see Kraus (1998), 137–56. 28 Galinsky (1972), 62.

‘No longer himself ’

21

ŒÆŒ , ‘All those labours I endured were less than this’). These allusions to Herakles’ heroic past, within the context of his present abasement, stress ‘the violence of change and its adverse eVects’.29 Euripides also emphasizes the violence of change by setting up contrasting images in structurally parallel positions. As Amphitryon enters the palace at 732–3, he tells the chorus how gladly he anticipates the retribution that now awaits his enemy Lycus: Ø ªaæ 
a ŁfiŒø Icæ KŁæe ø  H

æÆø
Œ. It has a certain pleasure to see an enemy being killed and paying the penalty for his actions.

The very next image the audience has of Amphitryon is at 1039–41, where he emerges from the palace after witnessing not only the just execution of his KŁæ, but also the senseless slaughter of his grandchildren: ›
 u Ø ZæØ ¼ æ ŒÆÆø T
EÆ Œø æı æfiø 
d

ØŒæa
ØŒø XºıØ

æŁ ‹
. Here the old man comes, treading a sad path with lagging steps, mourning like a bird mourning the unXedged birth-pang of its young.

In the same way, at 636, Herakles enters the palace as unequivocally the Kallinikos (Glorious Victor). At 1029, however, the ekkuklema presents an image of Herakles in abject defeat—bound, weaponless, and amechanos (helpless), his tragic fall complete. Gregory claims that the unifying theme of dual fatherhood ‘helps to soften the unexpectedness of the episode of madness’,30 and Bond, singling out the question-and-answer contrast at 814–15,31 speaks of the play as having ‘an essential unity’.32 Yet surely the dramatic point being made is an essential ‘disunity’, a point which can be appreciated only when we acknowledge, as Arrowsmith has done, that the structural 29 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 124. 30 Gregory (1977), 259–75, at 261. 31 The question posed at 814 is whether justice still Wnds favour with the gods (N e
ŒÆØ j ŁE  IæŒØ). It is answered at 815 by the sudden, chilling arrival of Hera’s envoys. 32 Bond (1981), p. xx.

22

‘No longer himself ’

Wssion is deliberate and dominant, and ought not to have superimposed on it a ‘softening’ rationale or cohesiveness: Beyond question the play falls starkly into two discrete but continuous actions, and between these two actions there is neither causal unity nor even probability: the second action follows but by no means arises out of the Wrst. . . . Against theodicy is put the hideous proof of divine injustice; against the greatness and piety and arete of Heracles in the Wrst action is placed the terrible reward of heroism in the second; against the asserted peace and calm and domestic tenderness which closes the Wrst action is set the utter annihilation of all moral order in the second. The result is a structure in which two apparently autonomous actions are jammed savagely against each other in almost total contradiction, with no attempt to minimize or even modulate the profound formal rift. That rift is, of course, deliberate; nothing, in fact, has been omitted which might support the eVect of total shock in this reversal. Moreover, even a cursory review of the material which Euripides used for his tragedy shows how carefully that material has been ordered to eVect, rather than obviate, this dislocation of structure.33

As the three-pronged defence of structural unity outlined above suggests, surprisingly few critics have happily accepted the fact ‘that it is not possible to make the tragedy please Aristotle’,34 let alone arrived at Arrowsmith’s or Lee’s conclusion that it is precisely ‘the breaking of the rules which Euripides wants to dramatize. Any tidy cause and eVect connection would be incompatible with the unique form of disorder which underpins this play.’35 And, of those who share this view, a good percentage have adopted a theory that, dramatically speaking, is unsound. In an attempt to reconcile what many consider the conventionality and feebleness of the play’s opening scenes with the horriWc vigour of its later scenes, W. G. Arnott declares the entire Wrst movement to be ‘Euripides’ mightiest red herring’. In his estimation, the playwright has committed an act of calculated theatrical incompetence in order to ‘turn the next 350 lines into a caustic series of savage shocks’.36 Michelini, who states plainly that, far from possessing organic unity, the Herakles is actually ‘designed to be unintelligible’,37 subscribes to Arnott’s ‘red-herring’ 33 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 46. 34 Lee (1980), 34–45, at 34. 35 Ibid. 35. 36 Arnott (1978), 1–24, at 11. 37 Michelini (1987), 232.

‘No longer himself ’

23

theory. She deems the opening scenes ‘a decoy that betrays the audience’s understanding of what they are to expect from a play, even a play by Euripides’.38 ‘We are misled’, she continues, ‘by an elaborate false front or dummy play, from which the real dramatic action emerges startlingly, like a jack from its box.’39 Martin Cropp similarly treats the Wrst part of Herakles as a dummy play. For him the dummy is an Odyssean nostos play which prepares a false climax and, accordingly, magniWes the ‘real’ climax: ‘Heracles . . . is centred, with architectural precision and balance, on the process of ruin, and thus gives equal weight to false expectation and emergent reality. . . . The play’s discrete structure adds impact to the emergence of the ‘‘real truth’’—though it may be felt that it does so at the cost of some banality in the deployment of plot and ethos before the crisis.’40 These ‘red-herring’ theorists are right to search for meaning in the play’s structural dislocation, but they rely too heavily on the unconvincing proposition that Euripides, a skilled dramatist, sacriWced one half of the tragedy in order to heighten the impact of the other half. Euripides often set up ‘false trails’ in his plays, exploiting received myth and familiar dramatic conventions, and luring his audience into precipitate forecasts and erroneous assumptions.41 However, for Euripides to have contrived a counterfeit or throw-away plot of more than 800 lines seems too prolonged and prodigal a theatrical tease, a blase´ and somewhat self-defeating sophistic stunt. His exploitation of the unexpected in Herakles is far more purposeful than playful, and nowhere in his structural design is there an element of the sacriWcial. What, then, is the meaning of the play’s strategic disunity? It is not that the Wrst action is ‘disposable’,42 merely an elaborate deception or an existing false reality by which to intensify an emergent true reality. Rather, as Arrowsmith asserts: ‘The play pivots on two seemingly incompatible realities, and if it insists on the greater reality of what has been created over what has been received, it does so, not by denying reality to receive reality, but by subtly displacing it in the 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 232–3. 40 Cropp (1986), 187–99, at 188–9. 41 On Euripides’ clever exploitation of the unexpected, see Arnott (1973), 49–64. See also Raeburn (2000), 149–68. 42 Michelini (1987), 242.

24

‘No longer himself ’

transWguration of its terms.’43 Euripides’ anomalous use of peripeteia is symbolic of Herakles’ loss and subsequent transWguration of self. The structural violence mirrors the fracturing of reason and myth by madness, and underscores the irrationality and injustice of Hera’s revenge. In short, a strategy of disunity is essential to Euripides’ ground-breaking externalization of Herakles’ madness and to his even more ground-breaking humanization of Herakles’ heroism.

EXTERNALIZATION AND HUMANIZATION: THE F I R S T M OV E M E N T ( 1 4 0 – 6 3 6 ) The most conclusive argument against the red-herring theory, and the disposability of the opening scenes, is ‘the fact that an ample portion of this red herring was not caught in the sea of myth, but was of Euripides’ own concoction’.44 The version of the Herakles myth which is presented in the Wrst movement of the play contains two startling and pivotal innovations—the introduction of the usurper Lycus and the placing of the labours before the murder of the children.45 These innovations are proof that the opening scenes have a positive purpose, that they are, in fact, our best guide to interpreting the madness which follows. That purpose is to create a sustained portrait of the hero’s sanity and innocence, and to determine that his tragic fall is the result of an isolated episode of madness, which is, furthermore, externally initiated on an inadequate pretext. For the Wrst 522 lines of the play Herakles ‘is omnipresent as a topic of discussion if not actually in person’.46 By the time he enters, the audience has been able to form a deWnite impression of the hero from Amphitryon’s reply to Lycus’ slanders, from the Wrst stasimon on the twelve labours, and, indeed, from the extreme set of circumstances dominating the play in Herakles’ absence. As Barlow states: 43 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 50. 44 Lee (1980), 34–45, at 36. 45 On Euripides’ innovative handling of the Herakles myth, see Bond (1981), pp. xxviii–xxx. 46 Hall (2003), pp. vii–xli, at xxiii.

‘No longer himself ’

25

‘The absence of Heracles is not merely the absence of an ordinary man but of an almost superhuman hero of whom miracles in the past have been expected. When he does not appear the despair is therefore that much greater as is the joy when he does.’47 The dependence of oikos and polis on Herakles as a strong, sound, and humane ruler is the keynote of the Wrst movement. In the prologue Amphitryon sets the scene of an imperilled royal household reduced to the indignity of supplication, and a city diseased with civil war ( Ø FÆ, 34). He laments the want, revealed by his son’s prolonged absence, of loyal and able-bodied philoi (55–6), a lament echoed by Megara (84–5) and the chorus (252–74). At 217–26 he scornfully rebukes Thebes and all of Greece for their ingratitude towards their benefactor in failing to help the Heraclidae. The chorus, at 272–4, deplore the sickness of the polis, which has led to the despotic seizure of power by the vicious interloper Lycus: P ªaæ s æE ºØ  Ø FÆ ŒÆd ŒÆŒE ıº ÆØ· P ª æ  i b
  Kή. The city is insane, corrupt with civil war and bad counsels. For unless it were insane, it would never have had you as its ruler.

The phrase  Ø FÆ repeats Amphitryon’s charge at 34, but the chorus bring an additional and graver charge of insanity against Thebes (P ªaæ s æE).48 At 339 V. Amphitryon turns his bitter reproaches on cuckolding Zeus, declaring: f
 K b Pa Œæ Ø M ø ºE, IººæØÆ ºŒæÆ
 P
e ºÆ, fiØ
b f f PŒ K ÆÆØ ºı. IÆŁ Ø r Ł; j
ŒÆØ PŒ ı. (344–7) You knew how to come secretly into my bed and take someone else’s wife without being invited. Yet you do not know how to save those you love. You are either an ignorant sort of god or else your nature is plain unjust. 47 Barlow (1982), 115–25, at 117. 48 On the interrelated structures of the polis and the psyche, cf. Plato’s Republic 4. 435b.

26

‘No longer himself ’

The cumulative eVect of these despairing complaints is to establish Herakles as the sole potential saviour of oikos and polis,49 the one source of Thebes’ moral and political health, and the only worthy object of faithful supplication in a world of human inconstancy and divine indiVerence. As the agon between Lycus and Amphitryon proves, this image of Herakles is not uncontested. The focus of the agon is Lycus’ allegation that Herakles’ use of the bow is a cowardly alternative to the spear and to the hoplite practice of close-quarter combat (158–64). Like Juno’s prologue to Seneca’s Hercules Furens,50 Lycus’ case against Herakles is, to some extent, automatically undermined by the speaker’s obvious prejudice and bad character, but it cannot be discounted. As Barlow indicates, ‘in its terseness and trenchancy it is a powerful attack on the very heart of the Herakles myth’.51 The charges brought by Lycus are indicative of certain challenges in the Wfth century to traditional heroic values and of the deeply rooted ambivalence of the Herakles myth.52 It is signiWcant, therefore, that Euripides not only raises these diYcult issues, but deals directly with them in Amphitryon’s counter-attack, which is a well-reasoned defence of Herakles’ pragmatic courage: Icæ › º
Fº KØ H ‹ ºø ŁæÆ Æ  ºª PŒ Ø fiH ÆØ Ł Æ IFÆØ; Æ ø IºŒc · ŒÆd EØ ıÆŁEØ sØ c IªÆŁE ÆPe ŁŒ
غfiÆ fiB H ºÆ: ‹Ø
b Ø Eæ ıØ h; £ b e ºfiH; ıæı Nf Id ¼ººØ e HÆ Þ ÆØ c ŒÆŁÆE; Œa
 Ig ºı I ÆØ 49 For the idea of the rightful king as the long-awaited saviour of oikos and polis, cf. the Wgures of Odysseus in the Odyssey and Orestes in Aeschylus’ Choephoroe (esp. ll. 115–16 and 138–9) and in Sophocles’ Electra (esp. ll. 160–4, 303–4, and 455–8). On the important relationship between the aristocratic oikos and the polis, and particularly the idea that a man’s competence as a leader in the public sphere should be a reXection of his role as a good father and a responsible head of an oikos, see Hall (1997), 93–126, at 104–5. 50 See below, Chap. 2. 51 Barlow (1996), 131. 52 On the ambivalence of Herakles in literature, see Silk (1985), 1–22, and in cult, see Burkert (1985), 210.

‘No longer himself ’

27

ıºE ›æHÆ P Æ  ÆØ e H  P

øØ E KÆØ; K Pıº Œfiø
 K· F
 K  fi e  ºØÆ;
æHÆ ºı ŒÆŒH fiØ e HÆ; c  Œ   ‰æØ. (190–203) A spearsman is the slave of his weapons and once his spear, his only defence, is shattered he is not able to keep death from his body, and if those in the ranks are not brave, then he himself dies by the cowardice of those near him. They whose hand can aim the bow well have the one supreme advantage: if he shoots a thousand arrows he still has others to rescue himself from death. Standing at a distance he defends himself by striking at the enemy with arrows unseen to their vision and he does not expose his body to his opponents but is secure. This is the most sensible tactic in battle, to preserve yourself and hurt your enemy without being dependent on chance.

Michelini, undermining somewhat her ‘red-herring’ position, maintains that this passage ‘has been treated as an egregious example of Euripidean inconsequence, but is in fact an important part of the portrait of Herakles as a modern and revisionist hero’.53 This is true in that Herakles is here atypically portrayed as a thinking hero, reliant more on expedient tactics than superior force. But what seems more to the point is that Herakles the bowman is a mortal hero, whose resourcefulness in battle is a demonstration of his ordinary human vulnerability.54 A second reply to Lycus’ invective is the lengthy Wrst stasimon (348–441) which, although it has the appearance of a romantic ecphrasis, is just as radical, in its treatment of the Heraklean labours, as Amphitryon’s vindication of Herakles as bowman. The ode is a threnos (dirge) for the supposedly dead hero, but the tone is eulogistic rather than mournful. Stylistically, and in its celebration of Herakles as monster-slayer and civilizer, it owes much to Pindar.55 Euripides’ chronological innovation of placing the labours before the madness and murders dismantles the image of labouring Herakles as 53 Michelini (1987), 244. 54 Cf. Iliad 18. 117–19: P
b ªaæ P
b   „æÆŒºB  ª ŒBæÆ; j ‹ æ ºÆ Œ ˜Ød ˚æøØ ¼ÆŒØ· j Iºº  Eæ K
Æ ŒÆd IæªÆº º  „æ. 55 On the ode’s metrical and linguistic borrowings from Pindar, see Bond (1981), 146 V. and Barlow (1996), 139 and 142–3.

28

‘No longer himself ’

penitent and gloriWed drudge, and replaces it with an image of him as righteous and altruistic champion. In the whole of the ode there is no suggestion that Herakles performs the labours under duress and, as Lee observes, ‘no sense of indulgence in violence for its own sake, no aggrandizement of self in a context divorced from the good of one’s family and friends’.56 Splendid physical feats though they may be, the labours are commemorated here as supreme aYrmations of moral excellence (ªÆø
 IæÆd ø, ‘the virtues of noble actions’, 357). The focus of the ode is threefold: the savagery of the vanquished (364–5, 372–4, 377, 382–6, 391–3, 398, 416–17, 420), Herakles’ piety towards the gods (359–60, 378–9), and his selXess service to humanity (391–3, 400–2, 416–17). Its purpose within the play is to demonstrate that there is no moral connection between the violence of the labours and the domestic violence which follows. As Gregory notes: ‘The scene of Heracles’ return oVers the audience its only glimpse of the hero before he is stricken by madness, its only chance to test the reports of him against the actuality of his presence.’57 Throughout this important scene the emphasis is again on the lack of moral connection between Herakles’ heroic past and his imminent collapse, as well as on the lack of psychological continuity. From the moment he arrives on stage, Herakles appears rational and circumspect. His speech and behaviour betray no sign of mental imbalance. In this respect he stands apart from two other notable Euripidean madmen, the matricide Orestes and the doomed voyeur Pentheus. Orestes’ hallucinatory visions of the Erinyes occur early in the play and are clearly the manifestation of his tormented sunesis or conscience (Orestes 396). Pentheus’ confusion is progressive and his hallucinations intermittent (Bacchae 618 V., 624 V., 918– 20), and, although they are directed by Dionysus, ‘it is no less than the suppressed traits of the subconscious which are laid bare as the god takes possession’.58 Dionysus is simply able to exploit the young king’s perceptible prurience and hypocrisy. In the case of both Orestes and Dionysus the emphasis is on the internal causation and inevitability of the madness. 56 Lee (1986), 23–8, at 26. 58 Barlow (1996), 12.

57 Gregory (1977), 259–75, at 264.

‘No longer himself ’

29

Euripides’ pointed humanization of Herakles in this homecoming scene Xatly contradicts that part of Burnett’s hamartia theory which suggests the hero has pretensions ‘to autonomy, knowledge and grandeur that is exclusive of the gods’.59 Herakles does not assume Olympian airs or boast of his conquest of Hades. All his concern is centred on his family and, far from having any hubristic pretension to autonomy, he stresses the importance of cooperative human values (633–6) and accepts the sound advice of his father (606). Herakles’ exclamation, ÆØæø Ø (‘Goodbye to my labours!’, 575) reveals that he puts the welfare of his family before personal kudos. Even the alleged bloodthirstiness of his vengeful threats against Lycus and the treacherous Thebans (566–73) is a measure of his love for his family and, therefore, not disproportionate to the present situation. The Wnal image we have of Herakles before his Wlicidal madness is of a gentle and loving father. It is an image in stark contrast to the hero of Sophocles’ Trachiniae, who is a superman of profound personal failings. As a radical domestic portrait of an awesome hero, it stands beside the brief, tender homecoming of Hektor in Iliad 6 (466–74): Ł æ Y ŒÆd  Æ Zø Œ KÆ,   , t ª ÆØ Ø,  ººª łıB ºÆb æı  ÆFÆØ, ŒÆd ŁŁ KH  ºø· P ªaæ æøe P
b ıø ºı. p, ¥
 PŒ IØA , Iºº I ÆØ  ºø fiH
 Aºº· z
  K d ıæF; ¼ø ºÆ ª  
 KºŒ
Æ æE, ÆF
 S Kºø· ŒÆd ªaæ PŒ IÆÆØ Łæ ıÆ Œø. (624–33) Take courage and don’t cry any more. And you, my wife, take hold of yourself, stop trembling and [children] let go of my clothes. I have no wings and won’t try to escape from those I love. Why, look, they do not let go but clutch my clothes all the more. Were you so much on a knife-edge?

59 Burnett (1971), 179.

30

‘No longer himself ’

I shall take these children by the hand and draw them after me like a ship with its little boats in tow. I don’t refuse to tend my children.

THE C EN TRAL EPIPHANY (815–73) The most compelling textual and dramaturgical reasons for interpreting Herakles’ madness as a wholly external phenomenon are the unusual central epiphany, which functions as a second prologue, and the even more unusual characterization of Lyssa as a rational and reluctant avenger. Bond notes that ‘Euripides seldom presents a divine epiphany except in his prologues and epilogues, where the gods are used to expound the past and the future in the manner commended by Aristotle’60 (see Poetics 1454b2). What makes the epiphany of Iris and Lyssa so remarkable is its unexpected occurrence midway through the play.61 Moreover, these divinities are not merely detached expositors of past and future events; they actively intervene to invalidate the denouement of the Wrst movement and to drive the action in an entirely new direction. The rare and explosive centrality of their entrance62 is, in formal terms, proof positive that Herakles is not mad at the outset. Critics who adopt the Wilamowitzian ‘seeds of madness’ line miss an obvious and crucial dramatic point: if Euripides had wanted to portray a megalomaniac or epileptic Herakles, he would either have placed the divine epiphany in the prologue to the Wrst half of the play or dispensed with these interventionist Wgures altogether, thereby internalizing the madness and presenting it as the logical culmination of a consistent moral and psychological progres60 Bond (1981), 279. 61 Cf. the midway appearances of Dionysus at Bacchae 604 (after he is heard oVstage at 576) and Athena at Rhesus 595. Neither entry has the explosive force of the Iris–Lyssa epiphany. Dionysus may be a sinister Wgure, but he has been an established central character from the play’s opening, and his reappearance at this point is not greatly shocking, while Athena’s appearance to Odysseus and Diomedes is both benign and undramatic. See Bond (1981), 279 and Barlow (1996), 160. For other instances of deities appearing mid-action, see Barrett ap. Carden (1974), 184 f. 62 Iris and Lyssa appear suddenly on high above the ske¯ne¯ (   bæ
ø ›æH, ‘I see such an apparition above the palace’, 817). On the dramatic staging of this epiphany, see Taplin (1977), 445.

‘No longer himself ’

31

sion. By not preparing us for the midway arrival of Iris and Lyssa, Euripides leaves us in no doubt about the illogicality and externality of Herakles’ madness. Furthermore, while he may well have drawn on clinical accounts of epilepsy and other maladies in his description of Herakles’ mad symptoms,63 Euripides himself was a dramatist and, therefore, ultimately concerned with the creation of powerful theatre and not with psychological realism. What follows the physical shock of this unique supernatural intrusion is an exchange that is unparalleled in Greek tragedy. In the Wrst place, neither Iris nor Lyssa appears anywhere else in the extant tragic canon.64 More importantly, these divine delegates, charged by Hera with the task of visiting madness upon Herakles, quarrel heatedly about the justice of their commission.65 As Lee points out, it is signiWcant that Hera herself does not appear and that Euripides presents in her stead two deities of equal rank but Wercely conXicting attitudes.66 Iris, traditionally the messenger of the gods, has here the particularized function of Hera’s faithful and unquestioning agent. She Wrmly identiWes herself with the interests and motives of her mistress (ªfiH b e  „æÆ x K ÆPfiH º; j  Łfi
b e K, ‘he may recognize the nature of Hera’s anger, and 63 On the similarities between Herakles 932–4 and Hippocrates’ De Morbo Sacro 7, see below, Chap. 3. 64 Iris makes a brief appearance in Aristophanes’ Birds (1199 V.), in conversation with Peisthetaerus. The personiWed Lyssa appeared in Aeschylus’ lost play Xantriae (fr. 169; see Lloyd-Jones (1957), ii. 435 V.), driving mad the maenads who destroy Pentheus, and possibly in Toxotides (on the death of Actaeon). An Attic red-Wgured vase of around 440 bc, depicting Aeschylus’ Toxotides, shows Lyssa with a dog’s head protruding from the top of her own head, as she urges Actaeon’s hounds to kill their master: see Trendall and Webster (1971), 62. There are no known vase depictions of Lyssa and Herakles. For a discussion of the iconographic evidence for Lyssa, see Kossatz-Deismann’s article in LIMC (1992), 6.1, 322–9. On the treatment of Lyssa in tragedy, see Duchemin (1967), 130–9 and Padel (1992), 162–3. In Homer’s Iliad º Æ is used of martial rage (e.g. 9. 39), and its cognate epithet ºı
 of the frantic activity of the hero in battle (13. 53). In tragedy º Æ generally describes a frenzy brought by the gods. It is used, for example, to describe Orestes’ madness in Aeschylus’ Choephoroe (287). 65 Lee (1982), 44–53, at 44 remarks: ‘The only even remote parallel is the discussion between Kratos and Hephaistos in Prometheus where the deities speak and act on ground-level and are found not at a crucial turning-point in the middle of the play, but at its beginning, when the disagreement of the speakers is a curtain-raiser to the more signiWcant discord which pervades the drama.’ 66 Ibid. 46–7.

32

‘No longer himself ’

learn mine’, 840–1), and her part in the proceedings against Herakles is to state Hera’s case and supervise the misbegotten hero’s punishment: e
 K  I
æe
ÆÆ æÆ , ‹ ÆØ r ÆØ ˘e  `ºŒ  ¼ . (825–6) Our advance is on the household of one man who men say is Alcmene’s son by Zeus. j Łd b P
ÆF, a Ła
 ÆØ ª ºÆ; c

Œ. (841–2) Otherwise the gods are worth nothing and men shall prevail, if Herakles does not pay the penalty.

Lyssa, on the other hand, has a will of her own and, given her nocturnal lineage, lupine etymology,67 and her very nature as the personiWcation of frenzy, she exhibits an astounding capacity for reason and compassion. She expresses unreservedly her loathing for her assignment and, paradoxically, provides the play’s most stalwart defence of Herakles’ innocence: ±cæ ‹
 PŒ ¼ h K d Łd h K ŁEØ; y   K  Ø
ı· ¼Æ
b æÆ ŒÆd Ł ºÆÆ IªæÆ KæÆ ŁH I  Øa Ø Æ Iø I
æH o . u P ÆæÆØH ª ºÆ ıºFÆØ ŒÆŒÆ. (849–54) This man whose house you send me to, is not obscure on earth and among the gods. He tames inaccessible land and the wild sea, he alone restored the honours of the gods when they were threatening to fall at the hands of wicked men. So I do not encourage you to plot any great wickedness.

Hera’s reasons for attacking her stepson, as conveyed by Iris, are Herakles’ bastardy and the alleged threat to the gods’ supremacy which his greatness poses. Bond, believing ‘Modern scholars are perhaps over-inXuenced by the liberal attitudes to adultery, bastardy, 67 For º Æ as ‘wolWsh rage’, see Lincoln (1991), 131–7.

‘No longer himself ’

33

and revenge fashionable during the present century’,68 maintains that ‘Hera’s conduct to [Herakles] cannot be termed capricious or irrational’.69 Yet, in the context of the Iris–Lyssa debate, her grounds for attack cannot but seem inadequate and illogical. Iris succeeds only in exposing the nature of Hera’s º (840) as purely vindictive. By contrast, Lyssa’s arguments in support of Herakles are both reasonable and irrefutable, and they are given added authority by the fact that Lyssa is so unexpected an advocate of caution and clemency. It is with almost comic irony that Iris castigates Lyssa for her unnaturally moderate stance and sage counsel: "æ. ¸ı. "æ.

c f ıŁØ  Ł  „æÆ ŒIa ÆÆÆ. K e ºfiH KØ ø  Y Id F ŒÆŒF. Pd øæE ª  ł
Fæ   ˜Øe
Ææ. (855–7)

iris. Don’t give advice about Hera’s schemes and mine. lyssa. I want to guide your step towards good, not bad. iris. Zeus’ wife did not send you down here to show moderation.

In the end Hera’s will prevails, and Lyssa sets about her repugnant task vigorously and methodically: r ª · h  oø Œ ÆØ ø º æ h ªB Øe ŒæÆıF  r æ T
EÆ ø x  Kªg 
ØÆ
æÆFÆØ æ N  ˙æÆŒºı· ŒÆd ŒÆÆææø ºÆŁæÆ ŒÆd
ı K ƺH, Œ I ŒÆÆ æH. (861–5) Then I shall run races into Herakles’ heart more forcefully than the ocean groaning with breakers or than earthquake, or than the painful impact of the thunderbolt. I shall shatter his house and bring it down upon him. But Wrst I shall have made him kill his children.

The sharp contrast between Lyssa’s rational plea and frenzied invasion, and between her initial deep reluctance and eventual businesslike destructiveness, makes the ensuing scene all the more disturbing and ethically challenging, as it pinpoints chillingly the injustice of the 68 Bond (1981), p. xxv, n. 28.

69 Ibid., p. xxv.

34

‘No longer himself ’

attack and the external causation of Herakles’ madness. Lyssa begins the transformation of her victim while she is still visible on stage. At 867–70 she anticipates the Messenger’s account of Herakles’ physical symptoms at 932 V., and the immediacy of her words conWrms that the Messenger’s statement at 931, ›
 PŒŁ Æe q, is to be taken absolutely literally: Herakles will experience ‘a terrible intrusion of the alien’.70

THE MADNESS (889–1015) While Euripides purposely does not ‘reason’ or rationalize Herakles’ madness in psychological terms, he does provide a brilliantly inventive and psychologically enthralling exposition of ‘reason in madness’,71 that is, ‘the mad logic of a mad person’.72 The madness of Herakles, which is the playwright’s most concentrated study of the condition, is dramatized, paradoxically, in an extremely wellreasoned and orderly manner. Violence and chaos are choreographed by Lyssa with expert precision; the senseless murders of Megara and the children are recounted within the coherent structure of the Messenger’s speech; and Herakles’ hallucinatory exploits, which appear to the bystanders as crazed and haphazard, are, in his mind, one continuous and logical sequence of events. At 836–7 Iris instructs Lyssa, 
H ŒØæÆÆ j ºÆı ŒØ (‘set his feet leaping, stir him up’), and at 871 Lyssa, resigned to her task, cries out,  Æ  Kªg Aºº æ ø ŒÆd ŒÆÆıºø fiø (‘I shall soon make you dance more wildly and I shall play upon you a pipe of terror’). Herakles’ madness is thus to take the form of an ecstatic Dionysian dance, arranged by Lyssa to the accompaniment of the aulos.73 The verbs æ ø and ŒÆÆıºø have a violent transitive 70 Wilson (2000), 427–49, at 438. 71 King Lear, iv. vi. 171. 72 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 121. 73 On Euripides’ deployment in the mad scenes of ‘imagery’ of destructive Dionysian music, see Wilson (2000), 427–49, at 434 V. For the more general Dionysian terms of reference at the onset of Herakles’ madness, see Schlesier (1993), 89–114, at 98; Zeitlin (1993), 147–82, at 150–1; Seaford (1994), 353–5; and Kraus (1998), 137–56, at 151–6.

‘No longer himself ’

35

force,74 which is diYcult to replicate in English.75 The sinister musical metaphor is reinforced by the deliberate echo at 879, æıŁ KÆ ºØ, following the emphatic juxtaposition of ÆØ Ø º ÆØ at 878. As Lyssa leads Herakles in his wild dance inside the palace, a short lyric dialogue between Amphitryon and the chorus conjures up for the audience the murderous progress of the dance and the hideously discordant strains of Lyssa’s maddening pipe: $.

ŒÆ æÆØ æıÆ ¼æ ı

ø P æı ŒÆæØÆ Ł æfiø. `. Ng
Ø. $.

æe Æ¥ Æ ; Pd A ˜ØıØ
 æ ø K d  ÆØ ºØA. < `:> ıªfiB; Œ ; KæA: <$:>
Ø 

Ø º K ÆıºEÆØ. ŒıƪE Œø
Øøª· h  ¼ŒæÆÆ
ØØ ¸ Æ ÆŒ Ø.76 `. ÆNÆE ŒÆŒH. (889–98) chorus. The dance begins but a dance without the accompaniment of drums and one which is not given to the joy of Bromios’ thyrsus. amphitryon [within]. Alas for my home! chorus. A dance for blood and not with the pouring of libations of the grape in honour of Dionysus. [within]. Escape children, be gone! . The tune being played on the pipe is truly murderous. He is hunting his children down. Not without eVect will Madness run Bacchic riot through the house. amphitryon [within]. Oh, what suVerings!

This passage is rich in Bacchic ritual imagery, but the emphasis is on the perversion of normally peaceful ceremonies: Herakles’ maenadic ecstasis is ominously without the accompaniment of the typana; the celebrant is transported not by the frenzied joy of Dionysus, but 74 Bond (1981), 294 notes that æ ø and ŒÆÆıºø are normally words of good omen, which occur in pleasant contexts. 75 Robert Browning’s translation of 871, which retains this transitive force, is, I believe, the most eVective. See below, Chap. 6. 76 ´ÆŒ ø is literally ‘to keep the feast of Bacchus’. It also has a causal meaning, ‘to inspire with frenzy’, and thus recalls 871 and 879. Cf. the transitive verb K Œı at 966.

36

‘No longer himself ’

by the lethal energy of Lyssa racing into his heart; in place of the usual Dionysian libations (ºØA), he performs a human sphagiasmos (sacriWce); and the festive aulos is played as an instrument of death. The role of the chorus in this oV-stage Bacchic revelry is, as Wilson observes, one of acoustic mimesis: ‘For the killings inside the house have taken place in the space ‘‘Wlled’’ by their choral song—one bacchic khoreia overlaying another, the metaphoric and the performative interlacing and merging.’77 Of the essential paradox of carefully choreographed chaos operative in this scene and, more broadly, in the tragic representation of madness, Padel says: ‘Dance images of madness express a central paradox, of unseen disorderly inner movement, articulated and ordered within a composed, choreographed performance. Madness is a non-dancelike ek [sic]: expressed through a genre that is itself a very highly wrought, rehearsed dance.’78 A similar paradox is operative in the Messenger’s speech (922– 1015),79 which is a model of lucid and systematic reportage. Every stage of the madness, from its Wrst physical symptoms through to its violent climax and abrupt ending, is plotted retrospectively and by an impartial witness, yet at the same time vividly and compellingly. In this long description of Herakles’ loss of self and its tragic consequences, no detail of action or reaction has been omitted. The Messenger graphically re-creates the atmosphere in the palace at the moment of Herakles’ deranged descent. At 950–2 the servants’ uneasy, ambivalent response to their master’s aberrant behaviour is captured imaginatively and with acute psychological insight:
Ø ºF
 O Æ
E q ªºø  Ł ›F, ŒÆ Ø 
 r ; ¼ºº N ¼ºº
æÆŒ· —ÆØ æe A
  j ÆÆØ; AVected with a double emotion the servants began to laugh and tremble both at once. They looked at one another and one of them said, ‘Is our master playing a joke on us or is he mad?’

The inclusion of reported speech, especially the urgent, uncomprehending pleas of Herakles’ family (965–7, 975–6, 988–9), contributes 77 Wilson (2000), 427–49, at 437. 78 Padel (1995), 139. 79 This is the third-longest messenger speech in the Euripidean corpus.

‘No longer himself ’

37

to the immediacy of the narration, while the snatches of Herakles’ delusional conversations (936–46, 982–3) are indicative of his insane logic. The speech as a whole is a psychological and theatrical tour de force, requiring an actor of exceptional versatility and control. Another psychological tour de force, detailing reason in madness, is Herakles’ hallucination, which is a sustained sequence of characteristic Heraklean feats grimly contextualized. Burnett states that Euripides ‘has been careful to give the hallucination a ghastly kinship with reality, and so the will of the sane Heracles seems always present, even as he commits his insane crime’.80 She believes the imagined Mycenean murders are able to distract and dazzle Herakles ‘because they are attractive to him’.81 Certainly the illusions of journeying, feasting, and wrestling, and the very real killings, serve to parody Herakles’ heroic career (cf. the ironic use of Herakles’ traditional epithet, ŒÆººØŒ, at 961). But, contrary to Burnett, I believe the poet has been careful to distinguish the will of the sane Herakles from his insane crimes. This distinction has been recognized by Hartigan, who says: ‘His madness is beyond his control, yet it acts through his virtue—his strength—to achieve his ruin.’82 In other words, the madness is ‘externally caused but internally activated’.83 Herakles does not act independently of Lyssa; she exploits his heroic identity and legitimate bia (force), forcing him to conduct an I º

º (‘a war that was no war’, 1133)84 against ‘wholly irrelevant and innocent victims’.85 There is nothing in Euripides’ portrait of the sane hero to suggest that killing is attractive to him or that his normal use of violence is excessive, which is why I dispute Barlow’s suggestion that Euripides is ‘asking whether there is not a very Wne line between murdering one’s enemies and murdering one’s own friends’.86 This question has been foregrounded in recent adaptations 80 Burnett (1971), 171. 81 Ibid. 170. 82 Hartigan (1987), 126–35, at 128. 83 Ibid. 129. 84 Herakles fought a non-war against children and philoi. On this oxymoron, see Bond (1981), 354. 85 Furley (1986), 102–13, at 102. 86 Barlow (1982), 115–25, at 123. Cf. Chalk (1962), 7–18, at 16–17: ‘The essential diVerence between Lykos and Herakles—their motives for action—the killing of the children does not cancel; but it does reveal what actions good and bad alike have in common—violence. . . . With Herakles himself Euripides is careful not to compromise our impression of his goodness by saying deWnitely that he would kill his children when sane; but he hints through the minor characters and through the veil of

38

‘No longer himself ’

of the play, but there is little in the original text to substantiate a negative reading of Herakles’ sane violence or, indeed, the discovery of a causal link between his past and present murders.87 Like the Bacchic dance and the Messenger’s speech, the hallucination involves a paradox: Herakles’ actions are, in themselves, reasonable, but they have been arbitrarily misplaced in an insane context.

T H E AWA K E N I N G A N D R E H A BI L I TAT I O N OF HERAKLES (1089–428) The Wnal episode of Herakles has two focal points: the hero’s anagno¯risis and his rehabilitation. At 1002–6 the Messenger reports that Herakles’ murderous rampage was halted by Athena’s sudden intervention: Iºº qºŁ NŒ; ‰ ›æA KÆ —ƺºa; ŒæÆ
Æı ª y K d ºø ŒÆæ y, Œ¼ææØł æ æ N  ˙æÆŒºı, ‹ Ø ı ÆæªH ; ŒI o 88 ŒÆŁBŒ. madness disturbingly enough to evoke an awareness that all Æ partakes of the irrational element here embodied in the extreme form of madness.’ 87 At 966–7 Amphitryon asks his son, h  ı   K Œı ŒæH j R ¼æØ ŒÆØ; (‘Surely the blood of those you have just been killing has not made you mad?’). Wilamowitz seized on these lines as proof of Herakles’ intuitive bloodlust and as a means of rationalizing his insane murders (see below, Chap. 7). However, these are the only lines in the play which draw a connection between the murder of Lycus and the murder of Herakles’ children, and the possibility of such a connection has already been unambiguously cancelled by the remarkable central epiphany. Fitzgerald (1991), 85–95, at 91–2, speaks absurdly of the ‘apparent’ resort to an outside agency to eVect Herakles’ catastrophe and of a direct link between the slaughter of Lycus and the slaughter of Herakles’ children: ‘if Heracles’ values had been other than they have been he may not have found himself in this situation. Certainly if his ‘‘morality’’ had not been one that recommended the blind vengeance, that so deWnes his ‘‘heroic’’ identity, he may, or would, not have been able to do what he did. . . . The ‘‘madness scene’’ expresses what is innate in [his] former self.’ This view completely ignores Herakles’ consistent portrayal as IºŒÆŒ (averter of evil) and thus his dissociation from the ‘amoral vindictiveness’ of Lycus. 88 On Euripides’ ironic use of the familiar idea of ‘sleep after toil’, and Herakles’ o  PŒ P
ÆÆ (‘unhappy sleep’, 1013), see Willink (1988), 86–97.

‘No longer himself ’

39

But there appeared a phantom, or so it seemed to our eyes, Pallas, brandishing her spear. y y . She hurled a stone at Herakles’ breast which checked his murderous rage and reduced him to sleep.

From his enforced palliative sleep Herakles awakes a bound and broken Wgure, remembering nothing of his mad deeds, but aware that his mind has been aVected in some terrible way: ‰ <
 >  μ
øØ ŒÆd æH Ææ ªÆØ

 øŒÆ
ØfiH. (1091–2) I was swamped somehow by a terrible confusion of mind.

Finding ropes around his chest and arms, his weapons scattered on the ground, and corpses beside him, Herakles experiences an acute and unfamiliar IÆÆ (helplessness, 1105) and
ªØÆ (perplexity, 1107). He is conscious of the incongruity between the normal living landscape of sky, earth, and sun (1090) and the ghastly vision of death before him, but he can identify no trace of the infamous inhabitants of Hades (1103–4) to conWrm his return to the infernal regions. He is now in a solitary terrestrial hell. It is Amphitryon who gradually and compassionately guides Herakles out of his dusgnoia and towards his anguished anagno¯risis. The powerful stichomythia between father and son at 1112–45 is the prototype of the corresponding stichomythia at Bacchae 1264–1301 between Cadmus and Agave. In the later scene the father slowly forces his daughter to cast oV her maenadic fury and to recognize that the fresh quarry she is triumphantly brandishing is the head of her son Pentheus. Devereux has termed the exchange between Cadmus and Agave a ‘psychotherapy scene’, which is ‘the natural consequence of the basic outlook of a poet who had already dramatised a clinically Xawless ‘‘supportive therapy’’ scene (Eur. HF 1089 V.)’.89 He compares Cadmus as psychotherapist, and the ‘tactfully gradual manner in which he leads Agave, step by step, back to a painful but inescapable reality’,90 to Amphitryon, whose psychotherapeutic method, at 1119–21, is to ascertain the stability of Herakles’ mind before compelling him towards the grievous knowledge of his crimes. 89 Devereux (1970), 35–48, at 37.

90 Ibid. 41.

40

‘No longer himself ’

DeWning Agave’s progression towards such knowledge, Devereux says, ‘the doer, having recovered her sense of identity, must be made to recognise also her deed’.91 In Herakles’ case, the doer, having recognized the deed (1132), must be made to recognize also his identity as its unwitting perpetrator. For Amphitryon, in the role of psychotherapist, the most painful duty is to redirect his son’s horror and vengeful anger away from a presumed enemy and onto Herakles himself (1133–9). Much has been written on the question of whether, in these postmadness scenes, Herakles’ old heroism is rehabilitated or whether he progresses to a fundamentally new type of heroism. Where one stands on this question depends on how one interprets Herakles’ rejection of suicide, his decision to retain the weapons with which he killed his loved ones, and his acceptance of Theseus’ philia. Chalk, who discerns an intimate connection between philia and arete¯, believes Herakles recovers a new, complex arete¯ of which friendly dependence and submission to fate are positive and active ingredients. Another ingredient, he contends, is Herakles’ old bia (symbolized by his bow and arrows), which is now tempered by his new ‘understanding, induced by suVering, of the hateful implications of action’.92 Directly refuting Chalk’s thesis, which he insists is based on anachronistic ethical standards, Adkins can detect no new arete¯ in the play’s Wnal scenes and, indeed, no arete¯ at all. Philia, he declares, is, according to Wfth-century thinking, incompatible with arete¯; the only desirable condition for the agathos is one of autarkeia: There is nothing whatever in the use of غÆ; º, غE, and Iæ to suggest for a moment that Iæ, whose basic usage is in commending those very qualities in a man which ensure his independence, self-suYciency, and ability to protect his dependants, can be manifested by receiving beneWts from a º. If we look at this play in terms of our values, we may see these transactions [between Herakles and Theseus] in a quite diVerent light; but we are concerned with the values of Euripides and his audience, and in this case with those of the Greeks between Homer and Aristotle generally. . . . Had Euripides wished to redeWne Iæ so radically as to render the IªÆŁ one who received (deserved) beneWts rather than conferring them, he would have had to do so explicitly and at length in order to make comprehensible 91 Devereux (1970), 35–48, at 43.

92 Chalk (1962), 7–18, at 14.

‘No longer himself ’

41

to the audience a view unparalleled in Greek literature up to and including Aristotle. Since he does not do so, we may conclude that, in portraying Hercules as receiving beneWts from Theseus, he was not portraying Hercules as manifesting any Iæ, traditional or new.93

But the incompatibility of philia and arete¯ is here maintained too arbitrarily, and Euripides’ radical agenda too summarily dismissed. The fact is that, already in the play’s Wrst and supposedly traditional half, the poet has redeWned arete¯ in such a way as to stress its relationship to philia, redeWning in the process the true agathos as a true philos. In his pre-madness scenes, when he has unquestionably the status of agathos and is possessed of unassailable arete¯, Herakles is never shown to be entirely self-suYcient or to advocate self-suYciency as a virtue. On the contrary, he espouses the importance of cooperative values and is seen to prize philia more highly than the glory of his labours. Moreover, the philia that is intrinsic to his arete¯ is not about conferring or receiving beneWts but is, rather, the spontaneous expression of unconditional love. The same may be said of Herakles’ expression of philia in his post-madness scenes, particularly at 1265 ( ÆæÆ ªaæ Id ˘e ªFÆØ  Kª, ‘I consider you as my father, not Zeus’) and 1401 ( Æ
ø æŁd ÆE
 ‹ ø ø  K, ‘Now that I have lost my sons, I count you as my son’). ‘Both these sentiments’, Barlow suggests, are ‘concerned with spontaneous attitudes and not necessarily deeds.’94 Lee Wnds that Herakles’ crucial decision to endure life (KªŒÆæø , 1351) is not made for positive reasons, that the beneWts of Theseus’ friendship ‘are largely material and do not impinge on the substance of Heracles’ fate’.95 Like Adkins, he overlooks the radicalism of Euripidean philia. Theseus oVers Herakles a home in Athens, puriWcation, wealth, and posthumous honours (1322–33), but the philia he represents cannot be reduced to a matter of material beneWts and reciprocity. What deWnes Theseus as philos is his genuine and unqualiWed love for Herakles, encapsulated in his moving and repeated dismissal of the notion of infectious pollution: 93 Adkins (1966), 193–219, at 216–17. 94 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 119. The verbs ªFÆØ and ø imply a mental state or attitude. 95 Lee (1980), 34–45, at 42.

42

‘No longer himself ’  Ø æø EæÆ ÆØ ; ‰ c    H  ºfi æŁª ø; P
b ºØ Ø   ª d æ Ø ŒÆŒH: (1218–20)

Why move your hand to warn me that you have a fear? Are you afraid that your greetings might pollute me? I don’t care if I share your suVering. ¨. ÆFÆØ·

ı
b Eæ  æfi ºfiø: ˙æ: Iºº ÆxÆ c E KæøÆØ  ºØ: ¨: ŒÆ; 
ı 
· PŒ IÆÆØ: (1398–1400) Theseus. Enough. Give your hand to a friend who wants to help you. Herakles. Be careful that the blood of my pollution does not wipe oV on your clothes. Theseus. Wipe away! As much as you like! I do not reject it.

Theseus’ love and loyalty make him a surrogate son to Herakles and thus impinge signiWcantly on the substance of Herakles’ fate. Lee also denies that Herakles progresses to a new type of heroism. He takes particular issue with Arrowsmith’s ‘conversion of reality’ theory,96 stating that, by keeping his weapons, ‘the hero, far from rejecting the old world of his labours, very deliberately clings to it’.97 Yet, Herakles’ decision to retain his weapons is not a reversion to an old arete¯, but a transWguration or deepening of what has already been established as an atypical arete¯. The bow and arrows may be symbolic of the Heraklean labours, but, as Amphitryon’s defence of the bow at 190–203 demonstrated, they are also the symbols of a modern and very human hero. Herakles’ decision at 1377–83 to keep his weapons is the key passage in his rehabilitative process: ºıªæÆd
b H
 ‹ ºø ŒØøÆØ: IÆH ªaæ æ ø 
 j ŁH, L ºıæa Ia æ  KæE 
·  ˙E Œ x º ŒÆd
ÆæŁ · A Ø 96 See Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 50. 97 Lee (1980), 34–45, at 43. Cf. Fitzgerald (1991), 85–95, at 94: ‘The eventual resumption of his armour suggests the possibility of the resumption eventually of his former ‘‘self ’’.’ This inference is based on Fitzgerald’s glaring misconstruction of Herakles’ ‘old’ morality as deWcient and blameworthy.

‘No longer himself ’

43

ÆØ
Œı  : r  Kªg 
 TºÆØ Yø;   Œø; Iººa ªıøŁd ‹ ºø f x  a Œ ººØ K æÆ K  ¯ºº
Ø KŁæE KÆıe  ƺg ÆNæH Ł ø; P ºØ  
 ; IŁºø
b ø. How painfully sweet it is to kiss them and how painful it is too to think of the companionship of my weapons. I do not know whether to keep them or to let them go. They will say as they brush against my side ‘It was with our help you murdered your wife and children. In wearing us you wear the killers of your sons.’ Am I to carry them about? What am I to say? Yet strip me of the very weapons with which I did the most glorious exploits in Greece and shall I not then die in submission at my enemies’ hands? I cannot leave them behind, I must keep them, painful though it is.

The bow and arrows no longer symbolize the hero’s past labours; apart from serving the practical purpose of self-defence, they will symbolize a mature and complex arete¯ based on suVering and moral strength.98 Their companionship will be a constant reminder to Herakles of a deed which has rendered his previous life almost meaningless. Far from clinging to the old world of his labours, Herakles is confronting a brave new world of inWnitely greater labours. Critics who have argued for and against Herakles’ advancement to a new type of heroism have generally had one thing in common—a slightly simplistic reading of the nature of Herakles’ arete¯ in the play’s Wrst half. Arrowsmith sees in the play ‘a conversion of heroism whose model is Heracles, and the heart of that conversion lies in the hero’s passage in suVering from the outworn courage of outward physical strength to a new internal courage, without exemption now but with the addition of love and perseverance against an intolerable necessity’.99 Herakles’ ‘old’ heroism was certainly less complex, and by the end of the play his arete¯ has acquired a greater internal dimension. 98 Dunn (1996), 123 believes Herakles keeps his weapons ‘for a purely negative purpose, for self-defense’, which he insists ‘does little to deWne a hero and does not deWne in a positive or constructive manner either old-fashioned, heroic virtues or new, humanistic ones’. He therefore ignores both the context in which ll. 1382–4 are spoken, especially the idea of ºıªæÆd ŒØøÆØ (1377), and the positive symbolic signiWcance surrounding the weapons’ future practical employment. 99 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 53.

44

‘No longer himself ’

However, Arrowsmith overemphasizes the novelty of this dimension. He describes the Herakles of the Wrst action as ‘the familiar culturehero of Dorian and Boeotian tradition: strong, courageous, noble, self-suYcient’,100 but, as we have seen, even before his tragic fall Herakles is portrayed as an atypical and technologically sophisticated hero, who preaches the value of philia rather than self-suYciency.101 The conversion of heroism which occurs is not, therefore, a break with Herakles’ former self, but a development or maturation of that self.102 Barlow’s thesis is the nearest to this conclusion. ‘What changes’, she says, ‘is not [Herakles’] innate areteˆ but his perspective. . . . The play is partly about the transition from one order of experience to another.’103 The turning-point, which enables this transition, is Herakles’ rejection of suicide, his movement away from a physically heroic response towards a spiritually heroic response: KªŒÆæø  (1351). These words constitute, in Barlow’s estimation, ‘a calculated and positive decision’,104 and are demonstrative of an arete¯ that, because of its progressiveness, is being held in pointed contrast to the arete¯ of Sophocles’ suicidal Ajax.105 Herakles’ rehabilitation entails neither the annulment of an old arete¯ nor the acquisition of a completely new arete¯. It is the full, agonizing realization of an already enlightened form of heroic existence. The truly novel element in Herakles’ post-madness arete¯ is found in his deWnitive renunciation of the anthropomorphic gods 100 Arrowsmith (1956) 44–59, at 49. 101 Interestingly, Athenian male citizens swore their oaths of intra-household philia by Herakles. In fact, the male-only Herakles cult at Athens centred on philiarelationships in sub-military manifestations. 102 Foley (1985), 150 believes that at the end of the play the hero is ritually tamed for the new civic order of Athens. We realize, she says, that it is only Athens and Athenian tragedy which ‘can rescue Herakles from the ‘‘death’’ and anachronism with which he is threatened in the earlier scenes and create an untraditional spritualized hero equal to the mutability of life and valuable for the Athenian polis’. Foley makes the important point that the traditional Herakles is an ambivalent or liminal Wgure in need of some kind of recuperation for the modern democratic audience. However, Euripides begins this recuperative process earlier than Foley and others maintain, purging Herakles of much of his traditional ambivalence. 103 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 117. 104 Ibid. 112. 105 On Herakles’ rejection of suicide, see James (1969), 10–20, Yoshitake (1994), 135–53, and Romilly (2003), 285–94. Like Barlow, Romilly construes Herakles as an anti-Ajax and argues that Euripides is presenting a new doctrine on suicide.

‘No longer himself ’

45

(1341–6), and his own divinity (1265),106 and his substitution of a transcendent humanism. The hero is eVectively ‘demythologised’.107 He protests against divine amoral indiVerence and proclaims the irrelevancy of the gods to the life stretching before him, in which only human endurance and human philia matter. The true radicalism of Herakles’ demythologized arete¯ and his new humanist philosophy is best summed up by Ehrenberg: The disharmony of a world in which a blind fate destroys good and great men must be resolved into the harmony of human greatness and unselWsh love between human beings. Euripides denies the right of mere individualism,108 but he equally denies superhuman guidance and ordering. Man must rely on himself and his fellow-men to build his world, proudly and courageously defying the blows of fate. In a new sense Protagoras’ sentence becomes true: Man is the measure of all things. . . . The Euripidean man Wnally triumphs over the Wercest onslaught of fate. . . . It is a new generation and a new epoch in the history of the human mind, an epoch in which human reason outgrows and overcomes, for a time at least, the faith in superhuman forces and in the dark secrets of death and after-death. When Herakles rejects suicide, he acts as a true creation of Euripides and of the age of Enlightenment.109

Euripides’ Herakles is a play of strange beauty and brutality. As a piece of theatre, it is immensely powerful and disturbing. It remains, I believe, to this day the most radical and innovative treatment of the madness of Herakles. When Seneca took Euripides’ plot as the basis of his Hercules Furens in the mid-Wrst century ad, he began a process of reasoning the madness and psychologizing the hero which transformed the story’s Euripidean essence. Since then, with one or two notable exceptions, translations or adaptations of Euripides’ text have never quite matched its revolutionary externalization of the madness and humanization of the hero. But before the Hercules Furens is examined in detail, it is worth noting the reception of Herakles Mainomenos in antiquity outside of Euripides and Seneca. 106 See Silk (1985), 1–22, esp. 12 V. 107 Barlow (1996), 141. 108 Cf. Burnett’s notion (1971), 180 that Herakles’ humanist stance is based on autarkeia and not philia: ‘The play does . . . in the end work a kind of restoration for humanity, showing a form of self-salvation in which the chastened Heracles is suYcient unto himself.’ 109 Ehrenberg (1946), 163–5.

46

‘No longer himself ’

A number of sources from the Hellenistic period indicate the presence of mad Herakles in art, literature, and theatre. A poem of 125 lines, entitled ‘Megara’ and thought to belong to Theocritus (c.300–260 bc), gives a picture of Herakles’ wife and mother Alkmene at home in Tiryns while he is abroad undertaking his labours. Megara laments the mad murder of her children at their father’s hand, recalling vividly her frantic helplessness to save them: f b Kªg
 KE Y
 OŁÆºEØ ƺºı  e Ææ; e
 P
 ZÆæ XºıŁ ¼ººfiø: P
 Ø
ı  I
Øe ŒÆºıØ IæBÆØ æ ; K d Kªªf IŒ ŒÆŒe q. ‰
 ZæØ
æÆØ K d æØØ E OººıØ; o ÆNe ZØ Ø  Ø Æ Ł Ø K ıŒØEØ ŒÆŁØ· m
b ŒÆ ÆPf

øAÆØ Œº ıÆ  ºÆ ºØªf ØÆ æ, P
 ¼æ Ø ŒØØ K ÆæŒÆØ· q ª æ ƒ ÆPfiB p Y ªÆ  æ IغŒØ ºæı· S Kªg ÆNŒØÆ º ª ÆN ıÆ ÆØØØ 
Ø
 Œ Æ ººe Kø. (17–28) Wretched I saw with my own eyes my children felled by their father’s hand, and that no other has even dreamt of. And although they called out loudly, their mother was powerless to help them, since the evil was near and unconquerable. But just as a bird wails at her young ones perishing, whom a dread serpent devours as they play like children in the thick shrubs, and she, raving mother, Xies above them screeching piercingly, but then is unable to protect her children, for she is greatly afraid to go nearer the unsoothed monster; so I, unhappy mother, bewailing my beloved oVspring, many times roamed wildly throughout the house with frenzied feet.

Of the thirty-eight plays attributed to Rhinthon of Syracuse (c.323–285 bc), the inventor of hilarotragodia (burlesques of tragic subjects, later known as fabulae Rhintonicae), nine titles are known, but very meagre fragments (in Doric) survive. Almost all are burlesques of Euripidean tragedies and among them is Herakles. Euripides’ play itself was still being performed, as we know from the Tegea inscription (SIG3 1080), which records the victories of a Greek champion boxer (sometimes identiWed as Apollogenes) who

‘No longer himself ’

47

was also a tragic actor:110 ‘At the Great Dionysia at Athens in Euripides’ Orestes. At the Delphic Soteria in the Herakles of Euripides111 and the Antaios of Archestratos. At the Alexandrian Ptolemaia in men’s boxing. At the Heraia in Euripides’ Herakles, and Euripides’ Archelaos. At the Naia at Dodona in Euripides’ Archelaos and Chairemon’s Achilles.’112 The madness of Herakles is the subject of a red-Wgured calyxkrater from Paestum (350–325 bc), excavated in 1864 (Fig. 1). The vase, which is signed by the artist Asteas, depicts a scene of indoor mayhem: Herakles, the central Wgure, has broken up the furniture, from which he has constructed a bonWre, and is about to dash one of his children on the ground or hurl the child into the Xames, while a distracted Megara tries to Xee through a door to the right. Watching the scene from a loggia above are, from left to right, Mania (holding a whip), Herakles’ nephew Iolaos, and Alkmene.113 Only here is the instigator of Herakles’ madness identiWed as Mania rather than Lyssa, which, together with the presence of Iolaos and Alkmene, would strongly suggest that the vase represents not Euripides’ play but rather a play inXuenced by Euripides.114 The accounts of Herakles’ madness by three late Hellenistic writers also suggest a tradition independent of Euripides. Apollodorus of Athens (b. c.180 bc), Nicolaus of Damascus (b. c.64 bc), and Diodorus Siculus (who wrote c.60–30 bc) each place the madness before the labours.115 Apollodorus, in his Bibliotheca, a study of Greek heroic mythology, records that Herakles threw his own three sons and two children of Iphicles into a Wre: %a
b c æe %Ø Æ   ı ÆıfiH ŒÆa Bº  „æÆ ÆBÆØ; ŒÆd    N
ı ÆE
Æ; R KŒ %ª æÆ r ; N Fæ KƺE ŒÆd H

110 See Sifakis (1967), 84. 111 On this boxer’s physical suitability for the role of Herakles, see Falkner (2002), 342–61, at 360, n. 61. 112 Translated in Csapo and Slater (1995), 200. 113 Cf. the scene represented here to the description by Philostratus (c.ad 160–245) of what is purportedly a painting in a Neapolitan collection depicting Herakles’ mad murder and burning of his children (Imagines 2.23). 114 See Taplin (2007), no. 45. 115 Cf. the Euripidean chronology of the account given by Hyginus (Fabulae 31–2) around the 2nd century ad.

48

‘No longer himself ’

Fig. 1. Asteas, The Madness of Herakles, Paestan rf. calyx-krater (350–325 bc). Museo del Prado.  "ØŒºı
·
Øe ŒÆÆ
ØŒ Æ ÆıF ıªc ŒÆŁÆæÆØ b  e ¨ ı;

Ææƪ
b N ˜ºf ıŁ ÆØ F ŁF F ŒÆØŒØ. (2. 4. 12) And after the battle against the Minyans it came to pass that he was driven mad through the jealousy of Hera and threw his own children, whom he had by Megara, and two children of Iphicles into the Wre; wherefore, having passed sentence of banishment upon himself, he was puriWed by Thespius, and having come to Delphi, he enquired of the god inwhat part of the world he should dwell.

‘No longer himself ’

49

Both he and Nicolaus (F.Gr.Hist. 90 F 13) provide unembellished narratives which imply, rather than state, that the labours were atonement for the murders. Diodorus, however, includes a psychological explanation for the madness—Herakles’ depressed state of mind on learning from the Delphic oracle that he must perform the labours at Eurystheus’ command:  ø
b æÆŁø › b  ˙æÆŒºB K  N IŁıÆ P c ıFÆ·   ªaæ fiH Æ Øæfiø
ıº Ø P
ÆH ¼Ø ŒæØ B N
Æ IæB;   fiH ˜Ød ŒÆd Ææd c ŁŁÆØ ŒÆd I æ KÆ ŒÆd I
Æ: N

ººc s IÆÆ K   ÆPF;  „æÆ b  ł ÆPfiH º Æ· ›
b fiB łıfiB
ıæH N ÆÆ K . (Bibliotheca 4. 11. 1) At this turn of events Herakles fell into no ordinary despondency; for he judged that to be a slave to an inferior was in no way worthy of his own valour, and yet it seemed inexpedient and impossible not to obey Zeus, who was also his father. While he was thus greatly at a loss, Hera sent a frenzy upon him; and in his vexation of soul he fell into a madness.

Evidence for the madness of Herakles in Roman art and literature before Seneca is much scarcer. There does not seem to have been a Republican tragedy on the subject. Of the twenty known titles by Ennius (b. 239 bc), twelve are Euripidean, but the Herakles is not among them. Hercules did, however, feature in at least two, and possibly three, plays by Accius (b. 170 bc), who was acclaimed in Seneca’s day the greatest of all Roman tragedians. The single fragment of Accius’ Alcestis is from the Messenger’s account of Hercules’ rescue of Alcestis from Hades.116 Hercules has a speaking part in Phinidae, appearing probably to restore the blinded sons of Phineus to health and give them their father’s throne.117 Accius wrote a Philoctetes, but it is not known whether Hercules featured at the end of this version as a deus ex machina. There is also an unassigned Accian fragment which is possibly from a passage telling how Philoctetes witnessed the burning of Hercules on Mount Oeta.118 Hercules speaks the single fragment of Hesiona,119 one of the six known tragic titles attributed to Naevius, and is likely to be the eponymous hero of an anonymous tragedy which included the

116 See Warmington (1961), ii. 332. 118 Ibid. 569. 119 Ibid. 118.

117 Ibid. 520–2.

50

‘No longer himself ’

character of Poeas.120 Despite this fragmentary and inconclusive literary evidence, there is iconographic evidence to suggest that Hercules was considered at Rome the quintessential tragic hero. The tragic muse Melpomene was often portrayed at Rome with Herculean accoutrements, including unmistakably Hercules’ famous club. During the Empire mad Hercules (although probably not the Euripidean-Senecan hero) was a favourite role for both the amateur and professional thespian. A Wrst-century epigram dedicated to the tragic actor Apollophanes lists chief among his props Hercules’ club (Palatine Anthology 11. 169). Suetonius records Nero’s preference for performing publicly the part of mad Hercules (Nero 21. 3), a peculiarity he shared with other emperors.121 Like Nero, the pioneering pantomimus Pylades, who developed a high-Xown, passionate style of balletic interpretation of tragic drama, could carry his impersonation of mad Hercules to dangerous extremes (Macrobius, Saturnalia 2. 7. 16–17). In the dialogue Nigrinus, Lucian (b. c.ad 120) criticizes those actors who

ºº ŒØ j  `ªÆ j ˚æ j ŒÆd  ˙æÆŒºı ÆPF æø  Iغ, æı
Æ MØØ ŒÆd
Øe º  ŒÆd ªÆ Œ ØŒæe ŁªªÆØ ŒÆd Ne ŒÆd ªıÆØŒH
 ŒÆd B  ¯Œ  j —ºı

ºf Æ Øæ. (11) often when they have assumed the mask of Agamemnon or Creon or even Herakles himself, clothed in cloth of gold, looking Werce and gaping wide, speak in a voice that is small, thin, and eVeminate, and much too poor for Hecuba or Polyxena.

As can be seen, evidence for the ancient transmission of the Herakles Mainomenos story in antiquity, exclusive of Euripides and Seneca, is widely scattered and does not ultimately contribute to a coherent or conclusive understanding of how other ancients reasoned the madness or redeWned Herakles’ heroism in the light of his mad deeds. What it does indicate is that, in spite of the survival of alternate traditions, it is Euripides’ version of the story that has had the greatest impact on the future reception of Herakles Mainomenos, determining the essential themes which all subsequent adaptations have addressed. 120 See Warmington (1961), ii. 610.

121 See below, Chap. 2.

2 ‘Let the monster be mine’: Seneca and the internalization of imperial furor The only other extant ancient play to feature the madness of Herakles is that attributed to the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Younger (c.4 bc–ad 65), and entitled Hercules Furens. Seneca was attracted in his youth by ascetic philosophy, becoming a vegetarian and a disciple of Pythagorean teaching. However, his father’s counsel, allied to his own considerable literary and political ambition, guided him away from the enclosed life of an ethereal scholar and eventually towards the worldly situation of amicus Principis and senator consularis. Seneca’s dual career as the leading man of letters and most inXuential statesman of his day spanned almost the entire JulioClaudian dynasty, and positioned him fatally at the very heart of an implacable imperial machine. Although now he is probably better known for his moral and philosophical treatises, a group of ten tragedies has been assigned by tradition to Senecan authorship. Of the ten, one (Octavia) is certainly not by Seneca, and another (Hercules Oetaeus) is of dubious authenticity. The text of the tragedies is preserved in two principal groups of manuscripts. E (Codex Etruscus or Laurentianus), written in the late eleventh century and housed in the Laurentian Library in Florence, lacks Octavia and gives the other plays in the following order: Hercules (¼HF), Troades, Phoenissae, Medea, Phaedra, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, Hercules (¼HO). A, the ancestor of the vulgate tradition, gives the order and titles as: Hercules Furens, Thyestes, Thebais (¼Phoen.), Hippolytus, Oedipus, Troas, Medea,

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‘Let the monster be mine’

Agamemnon, Octavia, Hercules Oetaeus.1 Whatever their literary liabilities and assets, and quite apart from their phenomenal and extremely well-documented impact on Renaissance drama, Seneca’s plays have an inherent historical value: ‘They stand, with the exception of a few fragments, as the sole surviving representatives of an extensive Roman product in the tragic drama. They therefore serve as the only connecting link between ancient and modern tragedy.’2 Nor, as Edith Hall insists, does the eternal question of the plays’ ‘performability’, and the unlikelihood of full-blown theatrical productions, detract from their status in performance history: ‘Texts which are declaimed are also ‘‘performed’’; texts which are widely read inform subsequent adaptations of the story they relate. Whatever form of public exposure Senecan tragedy Wrst received, it was only the Wrst step in a process intended to lead to their consumption by a widely dispersed readership.’3 The importance of Seneca’s tragedies to subsequent reception lies not in their performability or otherwise but in their Romanization and politicization of familiar Greek antecedents. The values, sensibilities, and imagery which pervade Senecan drama, and the characters the playwright dissects, belong manifestly to imperial Rome. Moreover, Seneca’s tragic Weltanschauung, the moral and political frame of reference characteristic of his plays, extends far beyond the physically circumscribed world of the Greek polis to encompass the State and the Cosmos.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ABSOLUT E POWER Hercules Furens is a particularly instructive example of Seneca’s Romanization of Greek myth. Although certain stage directions, and the fact that the madness is enacted on stage, probably denote the inXuence of an intermediary Hercules-drama or dramas,4 the essentials of the story are derived ultimately from Euripides’ Herakles. The hero 1 For detailed studies of the MS tradition see esp. Zwierlein (1983), 7–181; Tarrant (1985), 23–87; Fitch (1987), 53–7; and Billerbeck (1999), 39–89. 2 Miller (1917), p. ix. 3 Hall (2005), 53–75, at 64. 4 See Fitch (1987), 45–7.

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returns from his twelfth labour, his triumph over the Underworld, to discover Thebes in the hands of the tyrannical Lycus and his family under sentence of death. He kills the usurper and is immediately driven mad by his malevolent stepmother Juno. In his madness he murders his wife and children, whom he has just rescued. On learning of his crime, once sanity is restored, he resolves to commit suicide, but is persuaded against this course of action and taken by Theseus to Athens where he will receive puriWcation. But while Seneca’s primary source is obvious, the play is, above all, a product of its time and of its author’s personal experience and agenda. Along with the rest of the Senecan tragic corpus, Hercules Furens is distinctly post-classical in structure and style, not least in its conspicuous rhetoricity. The declamatory speeches, lengthy ecphrases, and the dominant style of shock and hyperbole, which the modern reader might reasonably consider tedious fustian, were, in fact, characteristic of a generic tendency among Silver Latin poets and, more importantly, as Boyle asserts, part of the wider contemporary idiom: Seneca’s astonishing fusion of spectacle, bombast, paradox, epigram, brevity, plenitude, abstraction, grandeur, violence, disjunction, allusion, sensuousness is no arbitrarily chosen mode; it is product of a baroque, post-classical sensibility and grounded in the semiotic forms of contemporary Roman life. It is index of an age: the age of fourth-style Roman painting, the baroque in Roman architecture and sculpture, the ‘pointed’, declamatory style in poetry. It was a spectacular, histrionic age. It was a world of grandiose, almost strident aesthetics.5

Scattered throughout the text of Hercules Furens are also signiWcant echoes of the Augustan writers, and important aspects of the characterization of Juno and Hercules can be traced to the VirgilianOvidian tradition. Seneca’s most radical development of, or divergence from, his Attic model is his reasoning of the madness of Hercules, his introduction of the idea of psychological causation. Whereas Euripides’ meticulous staging of the madness emphasizes at every phase the externality and gratuitousness of the hero’s aZiction, Seneca internalizes the furor and 5 Boyle (1997), 18–19.

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consistently represents it as the inevitable outcome of an extreme modus vitae and an ingenium unbalanced by megalomania and obsession.6 This internalization has a historical and didactic basis, and is a creative consequence of what Braden identiWes as Seneca’s ‘interest in a certain kind of achievement psychology’,7 the psychology of real and unlimited power. In ways not dissimilar to Virgil’s Aeneid, Hercules Furens is a critique of the ambivalent achievement of Empire. Virgil’s ambivalence towards imperial achievement in general, and the ideological basis of the Augustan principate in particular, becomes most apparent in Book 12 of the Aeneid. Witness Aeneas’ pius furor8 throughout; the double simile, at 521–8, which links the murderous exploits of Aeneas and Turnus; and, above all, Aeneas’ ultimately vengeful killing of Turnus which reveals the unsettling disjunction between pietas and humanitas.9 Seneca likewise exposes the private or human cost of a public life dedicated to conquest and acquisition, as well as the hazardously Wne frontier separating greatness from excess. 6 The locus classicus for Roman internalization of madness, in contrast to Greek externalization, is Cicero’s rationalization in Pro Roscio Amerino (24. 66–7) of the Erinyes as the ı
Ø, the tormented conscience, of the matricide Orestes: ‘magnam vim, magnam necessitatem, magnam possidet religionem paternus maternusque sanguis; ex quo si qua macula concepta est, non modo elui non potest verum usque eo permanat ad animum ut summus furor atque amentia consequatur. Nolite enim putare, quem ad modum in fabulis saepenumero videtis, eos, qui aliquid impie scelerateque commiserunt, agitari et perterreri Furiarum taedis ardentibus. Sua quemque fraus et suus terror maxime vexat, suum quemque scelus agitat amentiaque adWcit, suae malae cogitationes conscientiaeque animi terrent; hae sunt impiis adsiduae domesticaeque Furiae quae dies noctesque parentium poenas a consceleratissimis Wliis repetant.’ (‘The blood of a father and mother has great power, great compulsion, great sanctity; if any stain has been received from this, not only can it not be washed away, but in fact it penetrates all the way to the heart, so that extreme frenzy and madness follow. For do not think, as you oftentimes see in plays, that those who have perpetrated some wicked and impious deed are disturbed and terriWed by the Wery torches of the Furies. His own crime and his own dread plagues each one above all else; his own wicked deed disquiets each one and madness attacks; his own evil imaginings and the remorse of his heart terrify him. For the wicked these are the unremitting and internal Furies, which, night and day, demand expiation for parents from most depraved sons.’) 7 Braden (1970), 5–41, at 13. 8 See Mackie (1982), 190. 9 On the controversial ending of the Aeneid, and its moral and political implications, see esp. Johnson (1965), 359–64; Burnell (1987), 186–200; Stahl (1990), 174–211; and Galinsky (1994), 191–201.

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He exploits the ambivalence of the mythical Hercules (ŁE Iæ; monster-slayer and Wlicide; altruistic civilizer and hubristic overreacher) in creating an imperial Roman tragic hero of enormous but divided potential. His Hercules is princeps and imperator, an exemplar of virtus and pietas, but also a victim of warring adfectus and ungovernable ira, an ira that culminates in murderous furor. As a product of the imperial system, and both a witness to and a participant in its intrigues, cruelties, and corruption, Seneca was well placed to examine closely the ambivalence and the underlying mania of imperial achievement. Indeed, in his own character and conduct he reXected the moral paradox of Empire. His extravagant sybaritic lifestyle gravely compromised the Stoic precepts he taught; the naked pragmatism of his dealings as a wealthy usurer10 and political sophisticate sat oddly with the idealized virtues fundamental to his philosophy. Seneca recognized these and more egregious contradictions in the individual rulers at whose command he proWted and suVered. He knew from Wrst-hand experience the menacing caprice to which men of absolute power, with a commensurate capacity for good or evil, were prone. Born in the second half of the Augustan principate, he reached maturity in the bloody reign of Tiberius, narrowly escaped execution after arousing the jealous suspicions of Caligula, and was exiled to Corsica by Claudius through the machinations of the empress Messalina. He was recalled to Rome in 49 at the behest of Agrippina, Claudius’ new consort, and entrusted with the education of her son Domitius (Nero). On Nero’s accession in 54 he exchanged the role of tutor for that of chief minister, and maintained a seemingly unassailable position of inXuence until his fall from grace in 62. In 65 he was compelled by his former prote´ge´ to commit suicide for his alleged complicity in the failed Pisonian conspiracy. His painfully protracted death, memorably recorded by Tacitus (Ann. 15. 63–4), was a prototype of Stoic courage and composure, redeeming in some measure a life of ignoble contradictions. Boyle has commented: ‘The declamatory themes of the schools—vengeance, rage, power-lust, incest, hideous death, fortune’s savagery—were the stuV of [Seneca’s] life. His literary response was twofold: the consolatory discourse of Stoic moral philosophy, reXected in his prose 10 See Tacitus, Annales 13. 42.

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works, and the tragedies, which articulate a world quite diVerent from that of the dialogues and epistles.’11 Where, then, in the chronology of Seneca’s turbulent career does Hercules Furens occur, and to what set of circumstances is it a response? Reliable evidence for the absolute dating of Seneca’s tragedies is scarce,12 but for the Hercules Furens we do at least have a terminus ante quem of late 54, established by the fact that the play is parodied in sections 7 and 12 of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudii (The GourdiWcation of the Divine Claudius),13 a ribald Menippean satire on the emperor’s apotheosis, which almost certainly belongs to November or December of 54.14 In this short work, Claudius arrives in heaven and Jupiter instructs his henchman, the deiWed Hercules, who has travelled the whole world over and encountered all possible monsters, to Wnd out the stranger’s nationality. The Hercules of the Apocolocyntosis is the familiar comic buVoon and braggart but, in order to make himself terrifying to Claudius, he temporarily assumes, in Menippean fashion, the exalted guise of a tragic actor (‘tragicus Wt’). Accordingly, he conducts his interrogation of Claudius in tragic iambics: exprome propere, sede qua genitus cluas, hoc ne peremptus stipite ad terram accidas; haec clava reges saepe mactavit feros. Quid nunc profatu vocis incerto sonas? Quae patria, quae gens mobile eduxit caput? Edissere. Equidem regna tergemini petens longinqua regis, unde ab Hesperio mari Inachiam ad urbem nobile advexi pecus, vidi duobus imminens Xuviis iugum, quod Phoebus ortu semper obverso videt, ubi Rhodanus ingens amne praerapido Xuit, Ararque dubitans, quo suos cursus agat, tacitus quietis adluit ripas vadis. Estne illa tellus spritus altrix tui? (Apoc. 7) 11 Boyle (1997), 32. 12 Fitch (1981), 289–307 has attempted to establish a relative order of composition from Seneca’s use of sense-pauses. 13 See Fitch (1987), 50–3. 14 See GriYn (1976), 129, n. 3.

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State quickly, what country hail’st thou from, lest slain by this bough thou fall’st to earth; this club hath often slaughtered savage kings. Why mumble now thy words in tones unclear? What land, what race bore that shaking head? Speak out. Verily, when seeking the far-oV realms of the triple king, whence I brought the noble herd from the Western sea to the city of Inachus, I beheld a mountain crest looking down upon two rivers, which the Sun regards right opposite each day he doth arise, where mighty Rhone with rapid torrent Xows, and the Saone, in doubt where it should run, noiselessly washes against the banks with silent shallows. Is this the land that nursed thy soul?

This bravura piece of mock-tragic verse recalls in subject matter and phraseology speciWc lines in Hercules Furens (e.g. 1296, 662 V., 762, 711–16, 680, 1108, 1127–30). Such reminiscences underline the contrast in Apocolocyntosis between the Xorid tragic register, which the mock-heroic Hercules employs, and the ludicrous situation in which he delivers his speech: Hercules is not confronting a fearsome monster but the doddery and inWrm Claudius. Seneca’s burlesque of his tragic Hercules (cf. mentis suae non est, ‘he is out of his mind’, Apoc. 7) suggests not only the priority of Hercules Furens over Apocolocyntosis, but also the chronological proximity of the two works. As Fitch observes: ‘The ease with which Seneca adapts phrases from Hercules Furens suggests that the tragedy was fresh in his mind and had either been written, or at any rate presented in a recitatio, within a year or two of 54.’15 The probability, therefore, is that the play was written at a period when the character and actions of Nero were ‘the obsessive center of [Seneca’s] life’.16 A further tenable inference is that Seneca conceived it partly as a seasonable and salutary warning to the adolescent imperial heir about the importance of moderate government and self-restraint. In form and subject the lesson was well suited to his pupil’s histrionic tastes. Nero’s fondness for performing in public is legendary, and Suetonius tells us that ‘Mad Hercules’17 was a favourite piece in the emperor’s tragic repertoire: 15 Fitch (1987), 53. 16 Stambler (1986), 35–8, at 38. 17 Fitch (1987), 49, n. 70 indicates: ‘One cannot tell whether the role of mad Hercules enacted by Nero came from a tragedy, nor whether it predated Sen. HF. Certainly it was not the role created by Seneca, as it required Hercules to be bound with chains.’

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Inter cetera cantavit Canacen parturientem, Oresten matricidam, Oedipodem excaecatum, Herculem insanum. In qua fabula fama est tirunculum militem positum ad custodiam aditus, cum eum ornari ac vinciri catenis, sicut argumentum postulabat, videret, accurrisse ferendae opis gratia. (Nero 21. 3)18 Among other parts he sang Canace in Labour, Orestes the Matricide, Oedipus Blinded, and Mad Hercules. In which drama [Mad Hercules] they say that a young recruit, posted to guard the entrance, when he saw him Wtted out and bound with chains, as the theme required, hastened forth to render assistance.

Nero’s identiWcation with Hercules did not end there. He had coins minted inscribed with the legend ‘Herculi Augusto’, and sought comparison with the hero’s superhuman strength by artfully staging battles in imitation of the labours: Destinaverat etiam, quia Apollinem cantu, Solem aurigando aequiperare existimaretur, imitari et Herculis facta; praeparatumque leonem aiunt, quem vel clava vel brachiorum nexibus in amphitheatri harena spectante populo nudus elideret. (ibid. 53) Because he was reckoned to rival Apollo in singing and the Sun in chariotdriving, he had likewise determined to emulate the achievements of Hercules; and they say that a lion had been prepared, which he could crush naked in the arena of the amphitheatre, with the people looking on, either with a club or by the clasping of his arms.

Herculean impersonation was an idiosyncrasy shared by other Roman emperors and featured by historians as a metaphor for megalomania and tyrannical excess.19 Dio reports that Caligula (ad 37–41) impersonated Hercules (and other deities) as a means of demanding that he be worshipped on earth as a god and of giving himself a pretext for his Olympian proXigacy: ŒÆd H b læøÆ H
b Łe ÆPe Iƌƺ ø,
ØH Kæ: Mı b ªaæ ŒÆd ææ  bæ ¼Łæø  ŁÆØ, ŒÆd fiB &ºfi ıªªªŁÆØ ŒÆd  e B ˝Œ ÆFŁÆØ ºª, ˘   r ÆØ 18 See also Dio 63. 9. 4. 19 Herculean impersonation is not peculiar to Rome’s imperial rulers. As Blanshard points out in his biography of Hercules (2005, p.xvii), throughout history ‘there has been no end of candidates willing to cast themselves as the ‘‘new Hercules’’ ’. Historical claimants to Hercules’ lion-skin include Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Cardinal Richelieu, Napoleon, and Mussolini.

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K º , ŒÆd ŒÆa F ŒÆd ªıÆØd ¼ººÆØ  ººÆE ŒÆd ÆE I
ºÆE  ºØÆ ıEÆØ æÆÆ, ŒÆd —Ø
H ÆsŁØ, ‹Ø F ŁÆº  æ ı,    ˙æÆŒºÆ   ˜Øı    ` ººø    ¼ººı, P ‹Ø f ¼ææÆ Iººa ŒÆd a ŁºÆ,  Œæ. (Roman History 59. 26. 5–6) And when some called him a demigod and others a god, he fairly lost his head. Indeed, even before this he had been demanding that he be regarded as more than a human being, and was wont to claim that he had intercourse with the Moon, that Victory put a crown upon him, and to pretend that he was Jupiter, and he made this a pretext for seducing numerous women, particularly his sisters; again, he would pose as Neptune, because he had bridged so great an expanse of sea; he also impersonated Hercules, Bacchus, Apollo, and all the other divinities, not merely males but also females.

The emperor would go to exceptional lengths to achieve accuracy in the various parts he assumed: b b ªaæ Łºı
æØ
 øæA ŒÆd ŒæÆBæÆ ŒÆd Ł æ r, b
b Iææø , ŒÆd Þ ƺ ŒÆd ºB j ŒÆd Œæ  I 
Æ  KæØ (‘Now he would be seen as a woman, holding a wine-bowl and thyrsus, and again he would appear as a man equipped with a club and lion’s skin or perhaps a helmet and shield’, ibid. 7). This image of Caligula alternating between bacchantic and Herculean personae, with appropriate paraphernalia, recalls the Euripidean Herakles whose madness Lyssa choreographs as a maenadic dance. The emperor Commodus (ad 180–92), son of Marcus Aurelius, regarded himself as the very incarnation of Hercules, adding the title of ‘Roman Hercules’ to his extraordinary nomenclature (the Emperor Caesar Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Pius Felix Sarmaticus Germanicus Maximus Britannicus, PaciWer of the Whole Earth, Invincible, the Roman Hercules, Pontifex Maximus, Holder of the Tribunician Authority for the eighteenth time, Imperator for the eighth time, Consul for the seventh time, Father of his Country), which Dio accounts an unmistakable symptom of superlative madness (73. 15. 4). Vast numbers of statues were erected representing Commodus in the garb of Hercules,20 and it was voted that his age 20 Mussolini’s attempts at Herculean self-representation likewise extended to statuary. Among his grandiose architectural plans for Rome was a great new forum to be dominated by a colossal bronze statue of Hercules, its features those of Mussolini himself and its hand raised in a fascist salute. However, according to Scobie

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should be designated the ‘Golden Age’ (Dio refers to the emperor derisively as y › æıF, y ›  ˙æÆŒºB, y › Ł, ‘this golden one, this Hercules, this god’, 73. 16. 1). Like Nero, Commodus is alleged to have re-enacted Herculean labours in the amphitheatre. According to Dio, the spurious contests he fought involved actual violence and were engineered expressly to indulge the emperor’s perverted brand of savagery: K Ø
c ºª
ØBºŁ ‹Ø FÆ ØÆ KŁºØ u æ ›  ˙æÆŒºB a &ıƺ
Æ: ŒÆd K Ø Ł ª y › ºª, K Ø
 

Æ f H


H K fiB ºØ  e ı j ŒÆd æÆ Øe ıæA Kæı IŁæÆ
æÆŒø  ØÆ ÆPE Y
 æd a ªÆÆ æØ º, ŒÆd  ªªı Id ºŁø  ººØ
f I ŒØ Æ Þ

ºfiø Æø ‰ ªªÆÆ. (73. 20. 2–3) A report spread abroad that he would want to shoot a few of the spectators in imitation of Hercules and the Stymphalian birds. And this story was believed, too, because he had once got together all the men in the city who had lost their feet as the result of disease or some accident, and then, after fastening about their knees some likenesses of serpents’ bodies, and giving them sponges to throw instead of stones, had killed them with blows of a club, pretending that they were giants.

These examples of Herculean impersonation and self-mythiWcation are illustrative of Braden’s deWnition of imperial derangement as ‘in great part the derangement of the classical competitive ethos with nowhere to go—having survived, in a sense, its own culmination. Furor is heroic anger diVused uncontrollably when the honoriWc borders it had once maintained become elusive and unreal. . . . Seneca depicts his hero’s madness precisely as a momentum of unstoppable competitiveness under the spell of his own name.’21 Two passages in particular support the theory that Hercules Furens is intended, on one level, to correct certain tendencies in the young Nero that Seneca knew might easily lead to manifold abuses of power and to the hubristic appropriation of godhead and divine (1990, 2): ‘When the bronze for a foot had been poured, the project for the statue was abandoned. Hercules was too expensive.’ Mussolini also commissioned sixty Herculean statues for his Stadio dei Marmi, an arena built outside Rome for the 1944 Olympic Games, postponed by World War II. Made of white marble, these 12-foot statues stood atop 6-foot pedestals surrounding the stadium. See Mott (2003). 21 Braden (1985), 14–15.

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prerogative. The Wrst is Juno’s criticism, at 39–40, that Hercules’ indomita virtus colitur et toto deus j narratur orbe (‘his indomitable valour is revered, and throughout the whole world he is storied as a god’). Although the verb colo may simply denote honour or reverence, Juno seems to imply that Hercules is not only fabled as a god but also worshipped as one. When Hercules appears, he gives substance to this implication by arrogating to himself a position equivalent to Jupiter’s as an object of prayerful devotion, as though he has already been deiWed. The second passage is contained in Theseus’ lengthy description of the Underworld (662–827),22 and concerns the post-mortem judgement of domini and duces: quod quisque fecit, patitur; auctorem scelus repetit, suoque premitur exemplo nocens. vidi cruentos carcere includi duces et impotentis terga plebeia manu scindi tyranni. quisquis est placide potens dominusque vitae servat innocuas manus et incruentum mitis imperium regit animaeque parcit, longa permensus diu vivacis aevi spatia vel caelum petit vel laeta felix nemoris Elysii loca, iudex futurus. sanguine humano abstine quicumque regnas: scelera taxantur modo maiore vestra. (735–47)23 22 T. S. Eliot (1951, 69) ridiculed this narrative as an absurdly long and untimely digression: ‘While Hercules is . . . engaged in a duel on the result of which everybody’s life depends, the family sit down calmly and listen to a long description by Theseus of the Tartarean regions.’ However, others have seen the infernal horrors recounted as a metaphor for the irrational. Galinsky (1972), 172 believes Theseus’ description is ‘the unparalleled centre piece of the tragedy’, its purpose ‘to reXect Herakles’ state of mind’. Similarly, Mueller (1980), 24–5 asserts: ‘This mythical world, described in the gloomiest colours of Senecan rhetoric, is plainly a metaphor for the destructive psychic reality that the spectator is about to witness.’ 23 Hercules himself brieXy echoes this message after the slaying of Lycus: ‘victima haud ulla amplior j potest magisque opima mactari Iovi, j quam rex iniquus’ (‘No victim more choice or bounteous could be slaughtered to Jove than an unrighteous king’, 922–4). John Milton translated HF 922–4 in his pamphlet The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, published in 1649 following the execution of King Charles, which Milton defended: ‘There can be slain j No sacriWce to God more acceptable j Than an unjust and wicked king.’ On Milton and regicide, see Boehrer (1992), 132–7.

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What each man did, he suVers: the crime recoils on its perpetrator, and the criminal is plagued by the precedent he set. I saw bloodstained leaders immured in prison, and a ruthless tyrant’s back Xayed by the hands of the plebs. But anyone who governs mildly, who keeps his hands guiltless as master of life and death, who conducts a gentle, bloodless reign and spares lives—he measures the long sweep of a life full of years, and then reaches either heaven or the happy setting of the blessed Elysian grove, to serve as judge. Avoid shedding human blood, all you who reign: your crimes are assessed with heavier penalties.

Seneca’s exclusive focus on sinful rulers is a remarkably un-Euripidean and un-Virgilian treatment of the traditional theme of infernal punishments, and, as Fitch asserts, ‘is clearly inXuenced by the political experience of his age’.24 Lines 739–45, which advocate bloodless and temperate sovereignty, anticipate Seneca’s advice to Nero in De Clementia, written in December 55/6 when the emperor could still be swayed by his old tutor and, as a consequence, Rome enjoyed a brief period of stability and sober administration.25 Boyle remarks of this passage: ‘It is as if the character has stepped out of the play and is haranguing the audience (or certain members in it). Seneca could not be less opaque.’26 ‘Hercules,’ declares Stambler, ‘of all Seneca’s great characters, shows the closest aYnities to Nero’s potential for good and for evil: cruelty moving into actual violent madness, and then succeeded by acts of gentle, sweet consideration. Is this Seneca’s portrait of Nero? Or his hope that Nero might be thus transformed?’27 Certainly, Hercules’ dual nature and divided potential have distinctly Neronian overtones. Nero perilously combined youth, vicious ancestry, instinctive depravity, singular energy, and consuming vanity, and his tutor was keenly aware of how the added circumstance of absolute power would augment and intensify the danger. Stambler’s questions, however, solicit too simplistic a response to Senecan Hercules. A determinedly allegorical reading of the character, which seeks speciWc correspondences with Nero, is both hazardous and unproWtable. Hercules Furens is not so much a portrait of Nero as a portrait of power, one that elicits its elements of design from the world of late 24 Fitch (1987), 311. 26 Boyle (1997), 109.

25 See esp. De Clementia 1. 7. 1–3 and 1. 11. 2–3. 27 Stambler (1986), 35–8, at 38.

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Julio-Claudian politics and morality. And, like so much of Senecan tragedy, it ‘follows a cultural given to its incredible and cataclysmic conclusion’.28

JUNO’S PROLOGUE (1–124) AND HERCULES’ ENTRANCE (592–639) Any reading of the madness of Seneca’s Hercules is largely and unavoidably contingent upon our interpretation of Juno’s prologue and Hercules’ behaviour on his Wrst entrance. Analysts of these vital preparatory scenes have tended towards diametrically opposed conclusions. On one side are the many who believe Hercules to be an impious and hubristic villain, the demented instrument of his own destruction. Their dissenters, inferior in number, discern in Seneca’s hero a Stoic sage, a godly human of exemplary pietas and virtus, and a sane mind persecuted by an insanely hostile goddess. Among the former group the most extreme position is that of Henry and Walker, who claim: ‘At no point in the play does Hercules reveal heroic or impressive qualities of character; he does not reveal even real strength.’29 Although they see Juno ‘in the same absurd light as her adversary’,30 Henry and Walker note that, in the prologue, ‘there is no intention on the part of the dramatist to arouse sympathy for Hercules. He is merely a doer, lacking all discrimination and earning merely contempt.’31 Bishop construes Juno’s prologue as an ‘adequate report’ of Hercules’ ‘punishable status’, of ‘an oVence committed and proved’,32 and he portrays Juno herself as a legitimate avenger of the violated ordo mundi: ‘In Act I Juno plainly tells us that Hercules’ type of life is tragically outrageous. . . . His physical capacity and accomplishments and his psychological readiness are dangerous. That is, the kind of man Hercules is, coupled with the kind of deeds he does produces a violence of action which Juno abhors because it is contrary to the ordo mundi, regardless of the results and intentions of the doer.’33 In her exposition of the prologue, Shelton goes so far as to 28 Braden (1970), 13. 29 Henry and Walker (1965), 11–22, at 18. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 17. 32 See Bishop (1966), 216–24, at 216–17. 33 Ibid. 221–22.

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remove altogether Juno’s agential function and to redesignate the goddess as ‘a vivid dramatization of the disorder in the human mind’.34 According to this construction, Juno’s words describe accurately, and in real time, Hercules’ self-activated descent into madness: ‘Rather than examining the problems of man in an irrational universe, as Euripides had done, Seneca examines the problems of the irrational man. Hercules, not the gods, is responsible for his own disaster, because emotional excess (ambitious pride) has gained dominance over the rational element in his soul.’35 Common to these negative interpretations of Hercules’ ‘sane’ behaviour is an understanding of Seneca’s internalization of the furor, which is communicated in terms of either a tragic Xaw (hamartia) or a pre-existing psychological disorder. However, this understanding is founded substantially on a readiness to accept at face value Juno’s denunciatory allegations. The Wrst critics to counter this lopsided reading of the prologue were Motto and Clark, who argued: ‘[Hercules] is, as usual, persecuted by Juno—and persecuted by her for what he is, not for what he does. It is the function of Juno’s prologue to the play to make their relationship patently obvious prior to the events of the play. Hence this deiWc and triumphant Herculean story in the Hercules Furens is nothing less (and nothing other) than the story of deliberately oppressed and maligned greatness.’36 They further insist that Hercules cannot be considered impious or hubristic since he is more than mortal and ‘one among a number of contending gods; he is not simply to be judged as a man’.37 Having dismissed the notion of hamartia, they attack the suggestion that Hercules is irrational from the play’s outset and spurred by megalomaniac aspirations: ‘At no time when he is sane does he suggest that he will invade the skies or scale the heavens to seize the reins of power. On the contrary, this is Juno’s furious premonition and delirious vision (64), which is later echoed by the maddened Hercules infected by Juno’s own disease (957–73).’38 Lawall continued and expanded on Motto and Clark’s thesis when he complained that the ‘ ‘‘naturalistic’’ interpretation of Hercules’ madness may appeal to twentieth-century psychological 34 Shelton (1978), 23. 35 Ibid. 13–14. 36 Motto and Clark (1981), 101–17, at 111. 37 Ibid. 110. 38 Ibid. 111.

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critics, but it fails to account for the literary tradition behind the Wgure of Juno in Seneca’s play’.39 As he correctly demonstrates, ‘Juno’s opening words place her Wrmly in the Vergilian-Ovidian tradition’.40 She appears as the vengeful wife unseated from her celestial throne by a succession of paelices, and as the relentless enemy of Jupiter’s illegitimate oVspring. Motto, Clark, and Lawall introduce a necessary caveat about Juno’s odium and ira, but their concomitant description of Hercules as the mentally sound and blameless victim of an Olympian vendetta is Xawed on two counts. First, and rather glaringly, it is actually a description of the Euripidean Herakles and ignores, therefore, Seneca’s very diVerent conception and staging of the madness. Secondly, it fails to consider the Augustan literary tradition behind the characterization of Hercules in the prologue and in the moments following his return. The polarity of critical opinion on Hercules’ temperament and normal state of mind belies both the real complexity of the character and the essential fact that in Seneca’s world there is no palpable distinction between good and evil, heroes and villains, for, as Braden perceives, ‘the mental mechanism is the same’: ‘The dramatic point is not that good people think this way and bad ones think that way, but that everyone in sight is thinking in much the same way, and there is this result. Hence Hercules can perform as both hero and villain without changing his personality.’41 More recently, Fitch and Boyle42 have recognized that what is stressed throughout the play, and particularly in the prologue and Hercules’ Wrst scene, is the hero’s ambivalence and the ease with which his celebrated strength may be unreasonably and criminally misdirected. Juno begins her prologue by identifying herself as ‘Soror Tonantis’ (‘Sister of the Thunder God’, 1), a bitter variation of the familiar formula ‘soror et coniunx’.43 She then scornfully lists the constellations which have shamelessly immortalized Jupiter’s various amorous intrigues (6–18). Her grievances are brought up to date with her allusion to Alcmena’s son (23), the target of her undying enmity: 39 Lawall (1983), 6–26, at 6. 40 Ibid. 41 Braden (1970), 5–41, at 14, n. 3. 42 See Fitch (1987), 15–24 and Boyle (1997), 106–7. 43 Cf. Virgil, Aen. 1. 46 f. (‘regina, Iovisque j et soror et coniunx’) and Ovid, Met. 3. 265 f. (‘si sum regina, Iovisque j et soror et coniunx, certe soror’).

66

‘Let the monster be mine’ non sic abibunt odia; vivaces aget violentus iras animus, et saevus dolor aeterna bella pace sublata geret. (27–9)

Even so, my hatred will not just evaporate. My mind will aggressively pursue undying anger, and my Werce resentment will abolish peace and wage eternal warfare.

Juno’s catalogue of constellations (cf. Ovid’s treatment of the Callisto story in Met. 2.409 V.) and her pledge of eternal warfare (cf. Virgil, Aen. 1.8–11, 25–8, and 46–8) form a clear index of the literary context in which the veracity and objectivity of her subsequent accusations against Hercules are to be measured.44 The VirgilianOvidian Juno, whom Seneca conjures up in these opening lines, is the humiliated spouse and rebel warrior whose cherished novercal odium and perseverance in anger are pathological. She is not motivated by righteous concern for the ordo mundi but by a fanatical sense of personal injury. The grandiosity of Senecan Juno’s arraignment of Hercules (30–88) conforms to her Virgilian-Ovidian persona. She addresses her stepson as ‘superbe’ (89), and represents his katabasis and abduction of Cerberus, which she ordered, as the aggressive and sacrilegious expression of overweening ambition: nec satis terrae patent:45 eVregit ecce limen inferni Iovis et opima victi regis ad superos refert. vidi ipsa, vidi nocte discussa inferum et Dite domito spolia iactantem patri fraterna. cur non vinctum et oppressum trahit ipsum catenis paria sortitum Iovi Ereboque capto potitur et retegit Styga? parum est reverti, foedus umbrarum perıˆt, patefacta ab imis manibus retro via est et sacra dirae Mortis in aperto iacent. (46–56) Even the earth is not room enough. See, he has broken through the gates of nether Jove, and brings spoils of triumph over that conquered king back to 44 See Lawall (1983), 6–26, at 6–8. 45 Ironically, Hercules echoes this phrase at 605–6: ‘non satis terrae patent j Iunonis odio’ (‘For Juno’s hatred the earth is not broad enough’).

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the upper world. With my own eyes I watched him, after he had shattered the gloom of the Underworld and subdued Dis, as he showed oV to his father spoils won from that father’s brother. Why not drag oV Dis himself, bound and loaded with chains—the god who drew a lot equal to Jove’s? Why not rule over captured Erebus, and unroof the Stygian world? It is not enough to return: the terms governing the shades have been breached, a way back to earth has been opened from the deep Underworld, and the sanctities of dread death lie in plain view.

Warming to her subject, she accuses Hercules of planning to commit a still more Xagrant oVence (‘magna meditantem’, 75)—an invasion of the heavens and seizure of his father’s sceptre: caelo timendum est, regna ne summa occupet qui vicit ima—sceptra praeripiet patri. nec in astra lenta veniet ut Bacchus via; iter ruina quaeret et vacuo volet regnare mundo. robore experto tumet, et posse caelum viribus vinci suis didicit ferendo; subdidit mundo caput nec Xexit umeros molis immensae labor meliusque collo sedit Herculeo polus. immota cervix sidera et caelum tulit et me prementem. quaerit ad superos viam. (64–74) It is heaven we must fear for—that after conquering the lowest realm he may seize the highest. He will usurp his father’s sceptre! And he will not reach the stars by a gradual approach, like Bacchus: he will forge a path by destruction, and he will want to rule in an empty sky. Swollen with conWdence in his welltested might, he has learnt through bearing the heavens that his strength can conquer them. When he bent his head to support the sky, the toil of that immense weight did not bow his shoulders; no, the Wrmament rested more securely on Hercules’ neck. Without budging, his back supported the stars and heavens—and my pressure. Yes, he is seeking a path to the gods.

Shelton contends that these lines chart ‘the progressive stages in the development of Hercules’ pride, ambition and madness’, and provide ‘an explanation of a psychological development’.46 This contention takes for granted Juno’s status as a prescient and objective observer. It 46 Shelton (1978), 21.

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also relies on an erroneous interpretation of the signiWcance of the shift in tense from ‘quaeret’ (67) to ‘quaerit’ (74): Juno describes a sequence of events and thoughts in Hercules’ mind, and, as she speaks, the point of time moves forward rapidly. First she fears that Hercules, Wlled with conWdence about his strength, may challenge Heaven (iter ruina quaeret, 67) and seize power from Jupiter (sceptra praeripiens patri, 65). Next she states that he is actually challenging Heaven (quaerit ad superos viam, 74). Juno’s words reXect the change in Hercules’ own attitude. The shift in tense from quaeret (future) to quaerit (present) . . . signiWes that dramatic time has advanced in this scene, from Hercules’ return from the Underworld to his insane attack on Heaven.47

‘Quaerit’ does not signify an actual development, either temporal or attitudinal. Rather, it is a generalizing present, and represents, at this stage at least, an unwarranted inference on the part of hostile Juno, based on Hercules’ deeds of prowess (‘robore experto’, 68). The sole progression, which the shift in tense does chart, is that taking place in Juno’s own mind: ‘What begins as a fear (timendum est) is no sooner voiced than it turns into an expectation (praeripiet, veniet, quaeret, volet); its likelihood is then backed up by arguments (68–74) which turn it into a certainty in the present (quaerit). . . . Juno seems determined to believe the worst of her stepson, and to Wnd any excuse to intensify her persecution of him.’48 It has been shown that Juno’s odium and ira in the prologue are Virgilian-Ovidian topoi, that her portrait of Hercules is an extremely prejudiced one, and that her fears, and the extravagance with which she voices them, are disproportionate to the existing or proven threat posed by Hercules. Nonetheless, when we strip away the conventional bombast we Wnd, like Galinsky, that Juno’s ‘objections to Herakles hybris do not lack an objective justiWcation’.49 Seneca’s Hercules is by no means a straightforward victim of persecution. He too is a product of Augustan literary tradition and, as such, an ambivalent hero with dangerous potential. Juno’s version of Hercules’ twelfth labour as a violent and vainglorious assault on Pluto’s throne has a basis in Aeneid 6, where pius Aeneas’ peaceful mission to the Underworld is contrasted with Hercules’ belligerence. At 392–6 a wary Charon declares: 47 Shelton (1978), 20. 49 Galinsky (1972), 169.

48 Fitch (1987), 141.

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nec vero Alciden me sum laetatus euntem accepisse lacu. . . . Tartareum ille manu custodem in vincla petivit ipsius a solio regis traxitque trementem. In truth I was not glad to have received Alcides as he passed over the lake. . . . He by his hand wrested the Tartarean guard in chains from the throne of the king himself, and dragged him away trembling.

In Horace, Odes 1. 3, Hercules is paired with Daedalus as a hubristic transgressor of the natural limitations imposed on humankind: expertus vacuum Daedalus aera pennis non homini datis: perrupit Acheronta Herculeus labor. nil mortalibus ardui est: caelum ipsum petimus stultitia neque per nostrum patimur scelus iracunda Iovem ponere fulmina. (34–40) Daedalus made trial of the empty air on wings not given to man: Herculean toil forced a way through Acheron. There is no such thing as diYculty for mortals: heaven itself we seek in our folly, and through our sin we suVer not Jupiter to set down the thunderbolts of his wrath.

Juno’s description of Hercules as an impetuous youth (‘violento iuveni’, 43–4), exultant in his physical strength and both unthinking and unrestrained in his fury, also has corroborative parallels in Augustan poetry. The story of Hercules’ defeat of the Wre-breathing demon Cacus in Aeneid 8 is an ultimately laudatory foundation myth, but at the same time an interestingly unsanitized account of the savagery of the venerated monster-slayer. Here Hercules’ anger, although vented on an abhorrent creature and not without justiWcation, is shown to be precipitate and excessive in nature, and thus a species of furor:50 50 In his long poem Contra iudices, Theodulf of Orle´ans (c.760–821), who was, next to Alcuin, the most distinguished and learned member of the Carolingian court, attributes the violent killing of Cacus directly to ‘furor Herculeus’, while downplaying the justiWcation for the killing. In doing so he has followed the interpretation of the Hercules–Cacus episode in Book 9 of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, in which Cacus is cast as a victimized outsider destroyed by Hercules’ bloodlust and megalomania. Theodulf may also have been aware of Lactantius’ attack on Hercules’ celebrated

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‘Let the monster be mine’ hic vero Alcidae furiis exarserat atro felle dolor: rapit arma manu nodisque gravatum robur, et ae¨rii cursu petit ardua montis. (219–21)

Hereupon with black bile the wrath of Alcides blazed out in madness: he seized in his hand his weapons and his heavily knotted club, and rushed with speed at the top of the lofty mountain. ecce furens animis aderat Tirynthius omnemque accessum lustrans huc ora ferebat et illuc, dentibus infrendens. (228–30) Behold! the Tirynthian drew near, frenzied with wrath, and, surveying every entrance, turned his face this way and that, gnashing his teeth. non tulit Alcides animis, seque ipse per ignem praecipiti iecit saltu, qua plurimus undam fumus agit nebulaque ingens specus aestuat atra. hic Cacum in tenebris incendia vana vomentem corripit in nodum complexus, et angit inhaerens elisos oculos et siccum sanguine guttur. (256–61) In his wrath Alcides did not put up with this, and with a headlong leap he hurled himself through the Wre, where the smoke pushes its wave forward in a great mass and the vast cave heaves with a black mist. Here he seized Cacus as he was vomiting forth vain Wres in the darkness, clasping him as in a knot, and, clinging, throttled him till the eyes squeezed out and the throat was drained of blood.)

In the tale of Hercules’ battle with the river Achelous for the hand of Deianira, in Metamorphoses 9, Ovid paints a similar image of a hero quick to anger and unmerciful. Invincible Hercules is boastful of his might and contemptuous of his rival’s eloquence: strength in De Divinis Institutionibus 1. 9: ‘Surely, he who subdues a lion is not to be considered stronger than he who subdues anger, the wild beast shut up within himself. . . . Excited by rage and madness, this same Wgure slew his wife together with his children—and men think him a god!’ (trans. McDonald (1964), 40–2). Nees (1991), 30 states: ‘Theodulf ’s Hercules is a hero whose virtue is ambiguous and tainted. . . . Theodulf has drastically condensed the Vergilian passage of nearly one hundred lines down to ten and condensed it in such a way that the brutality of Hercules’ retribution is dramatically highlighted.’

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accensae non fortiter imperat irae, verbaque tot reddit: ‘melior mihi dextra lingua. dummodo pugnando superem, tu vince loquendo’ congrediturque ferox. (28–31) Not manfully did he control his inXamed rage, and he replied in so many words: ‘My right hand is better than my tongue. You prevail by speaking, provided that I overcome by Wghting’, and he came at me Wercely.

‘Dextra’ (29) in this context provides an illuminating key to understanding the ambivalent nature and dual potential of Seneca’s Hercules. Boyle notes that the words manus and dextra ‘dominate the linguistic texture of this play [HF] as of no other, and pervade most especially Hercules’ own dialogue and the descriptions by others of Hercules’ power’.51 The mighty hand of Hercules has rid the world of monsters and brought peace and civilization to the ends of the earth (Pax est Herculea manu j Auroram inter et Hesperum, 882–3), but it ‘is also the instrument of anger, violent aggression and narcissistic, megalomaniacal ambition, an amalgam of passions or aVectus which move easily into madness and genocide’.52 This paradox is illustrated in Metamorphoses 12, where Nestor is made to recall Hercules’ slaughter of his brothers and his career of destruction in the Peloponnese. The old king is still full of grief and rage when he reveals to Hercules’ son, Tlepolemus, his father’s murderous deeds: quid me meminisse malorum cogis et obductos annis rescindere luctus inque tuum genitorem odium oVensasque fateri? ille quidem maiora Wde, di! gessit et orbem implevit meritis, quod mallem posse negare. . . . ille tuus genitor Messenia moenia quondam stravit et inmeritas urbes Elinque Pylonque diruit inque meos ferrum Xammamque penatis inpulit, utque alios taceam, quos ille peremit, bis sex Nelidae fuimus, conspecta iuventus, 51 Boyle (1997), 106.

52 Ibid. 107.

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‘Let the monster be mine’ bis sex Herculeis ceciderunt me minus uno viribus. (542–6, 549–55)53

Why do you force me to remember evil things and to tear open a grief that has been healed by the years, and to acknowledge my hatred and sense of outrage towards your father? He has of course accomplished things beyond belief, Heaven knows! and Wlled the earth with beneWts, which I wish I could deny. . . . [But] that father of yours once razed Messene’s walls and demolished the guiltless cities, Elis and Pylos, and wielded Wre and sword against my own home. To say nothing of the others whom he slew, there were twelve of us sons of Neleus, a striking band of youths, and all twelve, save me alone, fell by Herculean might.

In Book 6 of the Aeneid Caesar Augustus is proclaimed Hercules’ successor: nec vero Alcides tantum telluris obivit, Wxerit aeripedem cervam licet, aut Erymanthi pacarit nemora et Lernam tremefecerit arcu. (801–3) Nor, to be sure, did Alcides traverse so much of the earth, even if he pierced the deer with feet of bronze, or made peaceful the woods of Erymanthus, and with his bow made Lerna tremble.

This comparison underlines the ambivalence common to both Wgures in their superhuman achievements. Virgil does not denigrate or even directly question the greatness of these semi-divine heroes, but he does ensure that the dark side of such greatness, and its proximity to tyranny, madness, and other forms of excess, are never far from the reader’s consciousness. In the prologue of Hercules Furens Seneca similarly exposes the kinship between imperial greatness and excess, albeit through the transparently immoderate viewpoint of Juno. The goddess relates the spectacle of Hercules leading Cerberus through the cities of Greece in terms of a Roman triumph, with Hercules the conquering imperator and the dog his spolia opima: 53 Homeric Nestor’s reference to this same episode at Iliad 11. 690–3 is signiWcantly less emotional and less condemnatory of Hercules. The account given in Ovid is in the spirit of Lucretius’ ironical disparagement of the alleged beneWts conferred by Hercules on humankind (De Rerum Natura 5. 22 V.).

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at ille, rupto carcere umbrarum ferox, de me triumphat et superbiWca manu atrum per urbes ducit Argolicas canem. (57–9) But he, in his arrogance at having smashed the prison of the ghostly dead, is celebrating his triumph over me, and high-handedly parading the black hound through Argive cities.

The verbs ‘triumphat’ and ‘ducit’ are not in themselves pejorative, and, indeed, resonate with noble Roman values, but here they are juxtaposed with the adjectives ‘ferox’ and ‘superbiWca’.54 Allowing for Juno’s bias and overstatement, the juxtaposition of these morally loaded words urges us to consider the diVerence between triumph and triumphalism, and to evaluate the reasonableness of Hercules’ actions when he Wnally appears with Cerberus in tow. Among the many charges brought by Juno against Hercules, one in particular stands out as veriWable and revealing—her imputation that he derives perverse enjoyment from her constant animosity and the cruel tasks she prescribes (crescit malis j iraque nostra fruitur, ‘he grows greater through hardships, thrives on my anger’, 33–4; laetus imperia excipit, ‘he receives my orders cheerfully’, 42). This idea that there is something compulsive and unbalanced about the relish with which Hercules executes each command, and the impatience with which he awaits new challenges, is fundamental to Seneca’s innovative portrait of the hero. Almost immediately on his return to Thebes Hercules asks: quid restat aliud? vidi et ostendi inferos. da si quid ultra est, iam diu pateris manus cessare nostras, Iuno; quae vinci iubes? (613–15) What else remains? I have seen and revealed the Underworld. Assign any further task, Juno, you have left my hands idle too long: what do you bid me conquer?

These lines are, of course, laden with dramatic irony, as we know from Juno that the only thing left for Hercules to conquer is himself 54 The compound adjective superbiWcus is found only here. See Billerbeck (1999), 216.

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(nemo est nisi ipse; bella iam secum gerat, ‘There is none but himself. Now he must war with himself’, 85; se vincat, ‘let him conquer himself’, 116), that his most terrible labour is imminent. But as well as being ironic, Hercules’ demands substantiate Juno’s claims at 33–4 and 42, and reveal him to be a driven, restless, and obsessive personality. Hercules’ Wrst speech in the play also establishes that he is a character who is self-obsessed and autarkic, features which strongly distinguish him from Euripides’ Herakles. When Euripidean Herakles arrives home (523 V.), he Wrst greets his house and expresses his joy at having returned. He is then instantly alert to his family’s desperate plight and asks his wife what has happened in his absence. By contrast, Senecan Hercules is preoccupied with his recent and future conquests and apparently unaware of anyone else’s presence until line 616. He manifests, moreover, a disposition to megalomaniac fantasy: si placerent tertiae sortis loca, j regnare potui (‘if the regions of the third lot pleased me, I could have reigned there’, 609–10). Commentators have made much of Hercules’ alleged bloodthirstiness in spurring himself to action against Lycus: mactetur impar, hanc ferat virtus notam Watque summus hostis Alcidae Lycus. ad hauriendum sanguinem inimicum feror. (634–6) Though not my equal, he must be slaughtered; my valour must bear this stigma, and Alcides’ Wnal foe must be Lycus. I leave to drain his hateful blood.

Fitch, for example, speaks of ‘the relish which he takes in the task, reXected in language which verges on the brutal’.55 But, in fact, Hercules’ statement of revenge is far more succinct and restrained than the words employed by Euripides’ hero at this point:

æH b r Ø ŒÆd ŒÆÆŒ łø
ı ŒÆØH ıæ ø, ŒæAÆ
 IØ g Þłø ŒıH ºŒÆ· ˚Æ
ø
 ‹ı ŒÆŒf K æ s ÆŁÆ K KF fiH ŒÆººØŒfiø fiH
 ‹ ºfiø ØæÆØ, f
b æøE
ØÆæH  ÆØ 55 Fitch (1987), 274.

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ŒæH – Æ  "e K ºø ı, ˜æŒ  AÆ ºıŒe ƃÆŁÆØ: (566–73) First I shall go and raze to the ground the palace of this new king, I shall cut oV his unholy head and throw it for the dogs to tear at. Those of the Thebans whom I have found to be treacherous in spite of being well treated by me, these I shall overcome with my conquering club. Dispersing others with my winged arrows, I shall Wll the whole of the river Ismenus with bloody corpses and the clear stream of Dirce shall run red with gore.

What seems more pertinent is that Hercules’ brevity and comparative restraint are intrinsic to his restlessness and self-centredness, his lack of demonstrative aVection for his family: me bella poscunt: diVer amplexus, parens, coniunxque diVer. nuntiet Diti Lycus me iam redisse. (638–9) Battle calls me: postpone your embraces, father; wife, postpone them. Lycus must carry to Dis the news of my return.

He exhibits none of the tenderness towards his children that Herakles does at 622–36 of Euripides’ play; Hercules’ chief concern is his virtus (634), and he treats the killing of Lycus as a new labour, a fresh summons to ruthless action. Herakles, on the other hand, explains that his extreme bloodthirstiness stems from his love for his family and his overwhelming need to protect them, a duty which eclipses in signiWcance the feats of his labours: fiH ª æ  I Ø Aºº j
ÆæØ æc ŒÆd ÆØd ŒÆd ªæØ; ÆØæø Ø·   ªaæ ÆPf H
 Aºº XıÆ: ŒÆd
E   bæ H
 , Y æ ¥
  bæ Ææ, ŁfiŒØ I  · j   ŒÆºe o
æfi Æ b KºŁE K   º  ¯PæıŁø  ÆEØ, H
 KH Œø PŒ KŒ ø Ł Æ; PŒ ¼æ  ˙æÆŒºB › ŒÆººØŒ ‰

æØŁ ºÆØ: (574–82) For whom should I protect if not my wife and children and father? Goodbye to my labours! They are useless in comparison to these. If they, the children,

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were prepared to die for their father, I must die in defending them. Otherwise what shall we say is so glorious about doing battle with a hydra and a lion on Eurystheus’ orders, if I do not exert myself over the death of my children? I shall never then be called as I once was, ‘gloriously conquering Herakles’.

One Wnal observation to be made about Hercules’ ambivalence in his Wrst scene is that the hero’s own words highlight, with heavy tragic irony, his dual potential and prepare us for the catastrophic inversion of roles madness will occasion: Watque summus hostis Alcidae Lycus (‘and Alcides’ Wnal foe must be Lycus’, 635). The emphatic juxtaposition of ‘Alcidae Lycus’ reinforces Braden’s point that the mental mechanism is the same for Seneca’s heroes and villains. Bishop, however, misapprehends the signiWcance of the similarity when he says that Hercules and Lycus ‘are men of the same basic quality. Since this is tragedy, what happens to one is pattern, parallel, precedent for the other.’56 The real message is surely that Hercules, a greater man than Lycus—greater in strength, virtue, and achievement—has, in proportion to his greatness, a capacity for transgression and suVering far in excess of his enemy’s (cf. quicumque regnas: scelera taxantur modo j maiore vestra, ‘all you who reign: your crimes are assessed with heavier penalties’, 746–7).

THE MADNESS (926–1053) Hercules’ transition from hero to villain, his metamorphosis into his own ‘summus hostis’, is not the sudden, inexplicable event that it is in Euripides’ play. Euripides’ strikingly un-Aristotelian structure, with its wrenching use of peripeteia, focuses our attention on the discontinuity between Hercules’ sane and insane behaviour; the deliberate structural violence emphasizes the dislocation of existing reason and moral order by a hostile and irrational external force. The emphasis in Seneca’s structure, however, is on continuity and consistency, and reXects an original interest in the inward, psychological actuation of the madness. Critics, like Motto and Clark, who view Hercules in 56 Bishop (1966), 216–24, at 220.

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much the same light as his Euripidean counterpart, that is, in terms of ‘deliberately oppressed and maligned greatness’, completely fail to account for this crucial diVerence in structural emphasis between the Greek and Roman plays. The importance of Euripides’ startling central epiphany to the externalization of Herakles’ madness cannot be overstated. The audience is in no way prepared during the Wrst half of the play for the savage upheaval of the second half; the madness is unexpected and explosive. There is no omniscient deity to prologize and forewarn, and no indication in Herakles’ early behaviour of incipient madness or punishable hubris. Although Hera is mentioned in the prologue as the instigator of Herakles’ labours, Amphitryon concentrates not on the goddess’ jealous anger but rather on his son’s protracted absence and the present, increasingly hopeless situation in Thebes. Amphitryon’s prologue leads into a suspenseful rescue drama, the denouement of which is merely the prelude to an electrifying reversal initiated by the unannounced and highly dramatic midway appearance of Hera’s emissaries. Euripides’ personiWcation of a reluctant but chillingly methodical Lyssa makes immediate and unambiguous both the supernatural causation of Herakles’ temporary psychosis and the iniquity of the attack. Lyssa vividly activates the madness on stage, announcing at 867 V. the physical signs of her successful entry into Herakles’ heart: j N
 · ŒÆd
c Ø Ø ŒæAÆ ƺ
ø ¼  ŒÆd
ØÆæı ºØ EªÆ ªæªø f ŒæÆ, I a
 P øæØ, ÆFæ S K Kº,
Øa ıŒAÆØ
: Look at him! He is already shaking his head at the start of his race, rolling his distorted Xashing eyes without speaking. His breathing is uncontrolled like a bull ready to attack, and he bellows terribly.

Seneca could easily have made Furor a character in his tragedy, but he chose instead to conWne the level of divine motivation to the prologue, where Juno summons up from Hell Discordia, Scelus, Impietas, Error, and Furor. The omission of the interventionist Wgures of Iris and Lyssa from the scene of Hercules’ insane transformation obscures the boundary between reason and distraction,

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and lends psychological realism to the onset of madness which in Seneca’s version occurs on stage: —Sed quid hoc? medium diem cinxere tenebrae. Phoebus obscuro meat sine nube vultu. quis diem retro fugat agitque in ortus? unde nox atrum caput ignota profert? unde tot stellae polum implent diurnae? (939–44) But what is this? Midday is shrouded in darkness. Phoebus’ face is obscured, though not by clouds. Who chases the daylight back and drives it to its dawning? Why is this strange night rearing its black head? Why are so many stars Wlling the heavens in daytime?

The madness of Euripides’ Herakles ends, as it began, violently and as a result of sudden divine intervention. A phantasmic Pallas Athene hurls a stone at Herakles’ chest, causing him to collapse into a deep palliative sleep (1002–6). In Seneca the supernatural element is again omitted and replaced by a naturalistic loss of consciousness, as Hercules is tranquillized by exhaustion: vultus in somnum cadit et fessa cervix capite summisso labat; Xexo genu iam totus ad terram ruit, ut caesa silvis ornus aut portum mari datura moles. (1044–7) His eyes are closing in sleep, his head sinking, his weary neck drooping. Now his knees bend and his whole body collapses on the ground, as heavily as an ash tree felled in the woods, or a mass of masonry dropped in the sea to create a harbour.

In Euripides the moment at which madness overcomes Herakles is clearly signalled, Wrst by Lyssa herself when she exclaims j N
 , and later by the Messenger, who reports ›
 PŒŁ Æe q (931). Both announcements are followed by detailed accounts of Herakles’ demented physiognomy (867–70 and 932–5). In Seneca’s text this moment is less precisely and abruptly deWned, largely because the symptoms of Hercules’ madness are predominantly psychological

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rather than physical. Amphitryon asks Hercules at 952, Quod subitum hoc malum est? (‘What is this sudden trouble?’), but the onset of madness is, in fact, gradual and arguably precedes Hercules’ Wrst overt display of delirium, that is, his initial hallucination in which he envisions a solar eclipse and interstellar warfare. In 1994 Motto and Clark penned a note on lines 926–39 of Hercules Furens which was eVectively a revisionary addendum to the article they published thirteen years earlier. They acknowledge in this note that Hercules’ prayer for alta pax ‘smacks of hubris in the extreme’,57 that it evinces ‘a host of unusual traits’,58 chieXy supreme naivety and prodigious ego. In their attempt to rationalize what they regard as aberrant conduct, Motto and Clark propose that the fantastic aspirations expressed in the prayer suggest that the madness sent by Juno is already operative at this stage: ‘In short, lines 926–39 portray a Hercules who is steadily and incrementally becoming more and more rash, illusionary, and unstable.’59 They legitimately dispute the traditional conjecture that the madness commences at line 939, and their proposition of an earlier onset is well supported by the evidence of mental unbalance in the wording of Hercules’ prayer for a new Golden Age. However, contrary to Motto and Clark, I believe that the psychological traits exhibited in lines 926–39 are consistent with Hercules’ characterization earlier in the drama. The prayer for an impossible peace is, in essence, an ampliWcation of the obsessive (particularly self-obsessive) and megalomaniac tendencies manifest in Hercules’ Wrst speech at 592–615, which is also a prayer that evolves into a soliloquy. Hercules’ petition at 926 V. begins with a general plea for cosmic and terrestrial harmony, but the speciWcs of this petition, listed at 931–6, are exceedingly unrealistic and reveal an irrational desire to arrest the natural order, to eliminate seasonal and meteorological extremes: Ipse concipiam preces Iove meque dignas. stet suo caelum loco tellusque et aequor; astra inoVensos agant aeterna cursus, alta pax gentes alat; ferrum omne teneat ruris innocui labor 57 Motto and Clark (1994), 269–72, at 269. 59 Ibid. 271.

58 Ibid. 270.

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‘Let the monster be mine’ ensesque lateant. nulla tempestas fretum violenta turbet, nullus irato Iove exiliat ignis, nullus hiberna nive nutritus agros amnis eversos trahat. venena cessent, nulla nocituro gravis suco tumescat herba. non saevi ac truces regnent tryanni. si quod etiamnum est scelus latura tellus, properet, et si quod parat monstrum, meum sit.

I shall pronounce prayers, ones worthy of Jove and of myself. May heaven stand in its place, and earth and sea. May the eternal stars pursue their courses unhindered. May deep peace nurture the nations, may iron be used only in the harmless toil of the countryside, and may swords be hidden away. May no violent storm disturb the seas, may no Wre streak down from angry Jove, may no river fed with winter snows ravage the uptorn Welds. May poisons disappear, and may no deadly herb swell with harmful juices. May no Werce and cruel tyrants reign. If the earth is even now to produce some wickedness, let it come quickly; if she is furnishing some monster, let it be mine.

Hercules’ irrationalism is compounded by his hubristic assumption that he is the sole agent of peace and an invulnerable saviour Wgure equal to Jupiter (‘Iove meque dignas’,60 927). His assertion of a proprietary right over any remaining monster recalls lines 613–15 of his Wrst speech, and especially the command ‘da si quid ultra est’. In both instances Hercules’ words are tragically ironic, but at the same time symptomatic of his mental instability, his obsessiveness and manic restlessness. The ‘monstrum’ referred to at line 938 is, of course, Hercules. As Juno intended, Hercules is to do battle with himself, the one earthly opponent equal to his strength. Juno launches the battle and determines its course, but, in eVect, she does no more than exploit and exacerbate a pre-existing or semilatent mania, a fact best illustrated by the content of Hercules’ hallucinations at 939–1038. The madness of Euripides’ Herakles consists of a single coherent hallucination. He imagines himself travelling by chariot to Mycenae 60 Boyle (1997), 108 notes that the use of dignus with the ablative ‘may well have been a mannerism of Nero’s’, and he cites as evidence Suet. Nero 23. 1, in which the historian claims to quote an imperial rescript from ad 66/7: ‘ut Nerone dignus revertar.’ Cf. HF 957: ‘dignus Alcide labor.’

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in order to kill his great enemy Eurystheus. Along the way he prepares a banquet for himself and wrestles with an imaginary adversary. Finally, with his bow and club he murders his own wife and children under the illusion that he is wreaking revenge on the family of Eurystheus. These demented exploits have a logical sequence, and, in a diVerent context and directed at the right target, the violence, which culminates in serial slaughter, would not be considered anomalous or excessive. As Barlow states, ‘the illusions take place within the framework of normal and habitual acts’.61 By contrast, Seneca’s Hercules experiences a series of hallucinations with an ‘associative, rather than logical, connection between some of the visions’.62 ‘It is the relevance of the visions to Hercules’ individual psychology’, Fitch maintains, ‘that is of primary importance in the play.’63 His is not simply a case of misdirected normal aggression; the delusions themselves are megalomaniac and impious. In the same way as the preceding prayer for peace, the hallucinations reXect on a grand scale the preoccupations and abnormalities of the hero’s ‘sane’ mind. Juno may be orchestrating the madness as commander-inchief in Hercules’ war against himself, but the content of the hallucinations is psychologically consistent with the symptoms of mental disturbance previously displayed by Hercules. Just like Euripides, Seneca has conceived a madness ‘which is Wtted to this particular man’.64 The second of Hercules’ hallucinations, in which he plans an allout assault on heaven, converts his usual obsession with new challenges and punitive action, and his self-equation with Jupiter (cf. 907, 914, 922–4, 927), based on his promised deiWcation, into explicit Oedipal aggression towards his father: Perdomita tellus, tumida cesserunt freta, inferna nostros regna sensere impetus: immune caelum est, dignus Alcide labor in alta mundi spatia sublimis ferar, petatur aether: astra promittit pater. —quid, si negaret? non capit terra Herculem tandemque superis reddit. en ultro vocat 61 Barlow (1996), 165. 63 Ibid. 29.

62 Fitch (1987), 29. 64 Barlow (1996), 166.

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‘Let the monster be mine’ omnis deorum coetus et laxat fores, una vetante. recipis et reseras polum? an contumacis ianuam mundi traho? dubitatur etiam? vincla Saturno exuam, contraque patris impii regnum impotens avum resolvam. (955–67)

Earth is subdued, the swollen seas have yielded, the infernal realm has felt my onslaught: heaven is untouched, a labour worthy of Alcides. I must travel on high to the lofty expanses of the cosmos, and make for the sky: the stars are my father’s promise. What if he should now refuse? The earth cannot contain Hercules, and at last yields him to the world above. See, the whole company of the gods spontaneously summons me and opens the doors, with one goddess forbidding it. Will you receive me and unbar the Wrmament? Or must I tear down the door of the stubborn heaven? Do you still hesitate? I shall strip oV Saturn’s chains, and against my unnatural father’s unbridled rule I shall loose my grandfather.

This proposed attack is not indicative of Hercules’ habitual behaviour, but it is certainly an extension of his habitual psychology, especially his habitual megalomania. The phrase ‘dignus Alcide labor’ (957) recalls Hercules’ assumption of parity with Jupiter at 927 (‘Iove meque dignas’), while his pronouncement ‘non capit terra Herculem’ (960) recalls Juno’s claim at 46 (‘nec satis terrae patent’), a belief apparently shared by Hercules (cf. 609). Braden sees in lines 955 V., and in the momentum of Hercules’ mounting insanity, ‘a logical extrapolation of the pax Herculea’65 (929 V.): ‘The hallucinatory but lethal assault on the gods . . . reXects an ugly light back on the vision of the new golden age: as if that vision itself were merely imperial megalomania tilting on the edge.’66 At 976 V. Hercules envisages, in typically grandiose fashion, a rebellion by the Giants: Quid hoc? Gigantes arma pestiferi movent. profugit umbras Tityos, ac lacerum gerens et inane pectus quam prope a caelo stetit! labat Cithaeron, alta Pellene tremit

65 Braden (1993), 245–64, at 250.

66 Ibid.

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marcentque Tempe. rapuit hic Pindi iuga, hic rapuit Oeten, saevit horrendum Mimas. What is this? The pestilential Giants are in arms. Tityos has escaped the Underworld, and stands so close to heaven, his chest all torn and empty! Cithaeron lurches, high Pallene shakes, and Tempe’s beauty withers. One Giant has seized the peaks of Pindus, another has seized Oeta, and Mimas rages fearfully.

These images are an extreme manifestation of Hercules’ habitual obsession with order and chaos and with bringing to account the recalcitrant forces of cosmic anarchy. ‘Sed ecce’ at 987 marks a sudden shift in this feverish hallucinatory sequence67 to a less distant and expansive sphere of action, as Hercules catches sight of his children and believes they are those of Lycus. Each of the subsequent murders is apparently carried out oV-stage, while Amphitryon, with a view of events inside the palace, describes the killings as they occur. Hercules continues to be audible and intermittently visible throughout the scene. Having shot the Wrst boy through the neck with an arrow, he prepares to hunt down his remaining two sons: Ceteram prolem eruam omnesque latebras. quid moror? maius mihi bellum Mycenis restat, ut Cyclopia eversa manibus saxa nostris concidant. (995–8) I shall unearth the other oVspring and all their hiding-places. Why delay? A greater struggle awaits me at Mycenae, to overthrow the Cyclopean walls with my bare hands.

Hercules’ reference, in the middle of his Wlicidal rampage, to a future confrontation with Eurystheus is characteristic of the restlessness and overzealousness that delirium has aggravated. He seizes the second son and dashes him against the palace walls (1005–7). The third son dies of terror before his father can strike a blow (1023–4). Of considerable psychological signiWcance is the fact that Hercules confuses Megara with Juno (Teneo novercam, ‘I have caught my stepmother’, 1018), even though he is conscious of her relationship to the child being pursued 67 Cf. ‘Sed quid hoc?’ (939) and ‘Quid hoc?’ (976).

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(ante matrem parvulum hoc monstrum j occidat, ‘before the mother let this little monster be killed’, 1020). Just as the delusional plan to depose Jupiter brought to the surface a latent Oedipal aggression, so the killing of Megara is the climactic expression of Hercules’ intense resentment of Juno.68 Seneca introduces into the hallucinations a degree of culpability which is notably absent from Euripides’ text. Herakles’ mad deeds are criminal but he is innocent of criminal intent; the false reality he enacts does not in itself deviate markedly from the heroic norm. Hercules’ imagined reality, on the other hand, entails behaviour far outside the norm by which even a nonpareil, semi-divine hero is to be judged. His actions, regardless of context, and directed at the supposed target, would constitute gross impietas and nefas, and are, to some extent, a vindication of Juno’s fears. This Senecan theodicy contrasts strongly with Euripides’ insistence on an absolute lack of justiWcation for divine anger.

T H E AWA K E N I N G A N D R E H A BI L I TAT I O N OF HERCULES (1138–1344) Act Five of Hercules Furens corresponds to lines 1089 V. of Euripides’ play, in which Herakles regains consciousness, is gradually restored to sanity and cognizance, and forced to come to terms with his misdeeds. Seneca’s emphasis in these post-madness scenes is once again on the continuity of Hercules’ attitudes and behaviour with those of the previous acts. In place of Euripides’ physical portrait of the waking Herakles, which dwells on the hero’s awareness of his immediate natural surroundings, his hot unsteady breath, bodily constraint, and lack of weapons, Seneca presents a psychological portrait. Herakles, on waking, reasonably infers from the evidence of carnage nearby, and his unusual state of defencelessness, that he has

68 In the light of the Oedipal paradigm behind Hercules’ hallucinatory attack on Jupiter, it is also tempting to read his imagined killing of Juno as an oblique reference to, or an ironic warning of, Nero’s incestuous relationship with Agrippina and the matricide he eventually commits.

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returned to Hades. Hercules’ sense of dusgnoia (perplexity) and displacement is typically on a grander scale: Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? ubi sum? sub ortu solis, an sub cardine glacialis Ursae? numquid Hesperii maris extrema tellus hunc dat Oceano modum? quas trahimus auras? quod solum fesso subest? certe redimus. (1138–43) What place is this, what region, what tract of the earth? Where am I? Beneath the sun’s rising, or beneath the turning point of the icy Bear? Can this be the limit set to Ocean’s waters by the farthest land on the western sea? What air do I breathe? What ground lies under my weary body? Certainly I have returned.

The grandiosity of these cumulative interrogatives,69 through which Hercules expresses his disorientation, is perhaps not unreasonable in view of his accustomed expeditions to the ends of the earth, but it is also consistent with his equally accustomed self-aggrandizing modes of thinking and discourse. Interestingly, in his 1999 translation of the play Ranjit Bolt drastically reduces the extravagant tone of lines 1138–43 and, therefore, their psychological signiWcance: ‘Where am I? South or North or West or East? j What is this ground I’m lying on? At least j I know one thing: I’ve left the lower world.’70 ‘So too’, says Fitch, ‘with Hercules’ narcissistic concern with himself, or rather with an image of himself as invincible hero.’71 On discovering that his famous lion-skin and bow are missing, Hercules construes the loss as a loss of primacy and virtus: arma quis vivo mihi detrahere potuit? spolia quis tanta abstulit ipsumque quis non Herculis somnum horruit? libet meum videre victorem, libet— 69 Cumulative interrogatives are a peculiarly Roman rhetorical feature, known as percontatio (a persistent asking). Percontatio is a series of ‘wh-’ questions, as distinct from interrogatio, which is generally a ‘yes-or-no’ type of enquiry. Quintilian uses percontatio in the legal sense of interrogation or cross-examination (Insitutio Oratoria 5. 7. 27). 70 Bolt (1999), 62. 71 Fitch (1979), 240–8, at 243.

86

‘Let the monster be mine’ exsurge, virtus! quem novum caelo pater genuit relicto? cuius in fetu stetit nox longior quam nostra? (1153–8)

Who could strip my armour from me while I lived? Who stole such mighty spoils and had no dread of Hercules even in his sleep? I long to see my conqueror. Rouse yourself, my courage! What new son did my father leave heaven to sire? For whose begetting was night delayed longer than mine?

The emphatic placement of the personal pronoun, which forms part of the dative of disadvantage ‘vivo mihi’ (1153), and the pointed reference to ‘Herculis’ (1155) and ‘meum victorem’ (1156), show plainly Hercules’ egocentric perspective of the situation. Similarly, when Hercules recognizes his dead wife and children, his response to the murders is dominated by a sense of outrage at the violation of his virtus and heroic self-image: quis Lycus regnum obtinet,72 quis tanta Thebis scelera moliri ausus est Hercule reverso? quisquis Ismeni loca, Actaea quisquis arva, qui gemino mari pulsata Pelopis regna Dardanii colis, succurre, saevae cladis auctorem indica. ruat ira in omnes: hostis est quisquis mihi non monstrat hostem. victor Alcidae, lates? (1161–8) What Lycus holds the kingdom? Who dared encompass such crimes in Thebes once Hercules had returned? All you who dwell in the districts of Ismenos, the Welds of Attica, and the realms of Dardan Pelops, beaten by two seas: run to help, point out the source of this cruel carnage. My anger must pour out on all: my enemy is anyone who does not identify my enemy. Are you hiding, conqueror of Alcides?

The emphatically positioned ablative absolute ‘Hercule reverso’ (1163), which has a concessive force, and the phrase ‘victor Alcidae’ (1168) represent the most important aspect of the killings as far as Hercules is concerned. He measures the enormity of the ‘nefas’ (1159) committed by the perpetrator’s audacity (‘ausus est’, 1162). 72 This line and ‘victor Alcidae’ (1168) recall, with even greater tragic irony, Hercules’ command at 635: ‘Watque summus hostis Alcidae Lycus.’

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Hercules’ ensuing call to action is also ‘in character’. At 1175 he orders Amphitryon and Theseus to postpone their tears (diVerte Xetus), recalling closely his injunction to father and wife, at 638–9, ‘diVer amplexus’. In these parallel instances Hercules’ obsessive haste in administering retributive violence takes precedence over expressions of love or grief between himself and his family. Later, in a brief but moving moment of self-analysis, he curses his sacriWce of human tenderness to the heroic condition, and speciWcally his inability to weep as a father: Pectus o nimium ferum! quis vos per omnem, liberi, sparsos domum deXere digne poterit? hic durus malis lacrimare vultus nescit. (1226–9) O heart too Werce! Who can weep worthily for you children, scattered throughout the house? This face, hardened by suVerings, is incapable of weeping.

The stichomythia between Amphitryon and Hercules at 1186–91 is a contracted version of the corresponding exchange at 1111–45 of Euripides’ Herakles. It involves, moreover, a very diVerent dynamic. In the earlier text Amphitryon, acting the role of psychotherapist, slowly and gently leads his son out of his trance-like state and towards full recognition of his crimes. But in the Senecan stichomythia Amphitryon is merely the voice of caution and grief, and not the agent of anagno¯risis. Hercules has already discovered for himself the corpses’ identities, and it is the ghastly evidence of his own bloodied manus that dramatically betrays the identity of their killer: Miserere, genitor, supplices tendo manus. quid hoc? manus refugit: hic errat scelus. unde hic cruor? quid illa puerili madens harundo leto? tincta Lernaea est nece. iam tela video nostra. non quaero manum. quis potuit arcum Xectere aut quae dextera sinuare nervum vix recedentem mihi? ad vos revertor, genitor: hoc nostrum est scelus? tacuere: nostrum est. (1192–9)

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Have pity, father, I hold out my hands in supplication. What? He pulled back from my hands: the crime is lurking here. Why this blood? What of that shaft, soaked by a boy’s death? It is steeped in the Hydra’s fatal blood. Now I see my weapons. I need not ask about the hand. Who could have bent that bow, what hand Xexed the string that barely yields to me? I turn to both of you again, father: is this crime mine? They are silent: it is mine.

By not having Amphitryon as a central unifying presence, and by drastically reducing Theseus’ part in the rehabilitative process, Seneca has completely altered the structural emphasis and thematic basis of the Wnal scene. Euripides emphasized philia, human solidarity and unconditional love, as the keynote in Herakles’ rehabilitation; Seneca substitutes autarkeia, the hero’s aggressive self-assertion and prized sense of self-suYciency. Hercules is not saved from suicidal despair by Theseus’ constancy, wisdom, and willingness to share his friend’s pollution and suVering (cf. Eur. Her. 1400: ŒÆ, 
ı 
· PŒ IÆÆØ, ‘Wipe away! As much as you like! I do not reject it’). Rather, his determination to kill himself is checked by Amphitryon’s desperate counter-threat of suicide, in what Fitch classiWes as a species of the ‘Passion-versus-Restraint’73 scene: sic statue, quidquid statuis, ut causam tuam famamque in arto stare et ancipiti scias: aut vivis aut occidis. hanc animam levem fessamque senio nec minus fessam malis in ore primo teneo. tam tarde patri vitam dat aliquis? non feram ulterius moram, letale ferrum pectori impresso induam; hic, hic iacebit Herculis sani scelus. (1306–13) Whatever you decide, do so on the understanding that your glory and the verdict about you is in a tight and critical position. Either you live, or you kill. I am holding on my very lips this fragile life of mine, wearied with old age and no less wearied with troubles. Can anyone be so slow in granting his father life? I shall not endure further delay, I shall set my breast against the deadly blade and thrust it in. The crime lying here will belong to the sane Hercules.

73 See Fitch (1979), 240–8, at 245–6.

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Several critics have interpreted Hercules’ decision to go on living as a moral victory, an exemplum of Stoic endurance and Wlial piety.74 But this is another instance of mistaking Seneca’s hero for the Euripidean Herakles. Herakles’ moving resolution KªŒÆææø  (‘I shall have the courage to endure life’, 1351) is indeed a moral victory and a crucial moral progression, but Hercules’ exhortation to his virtus, ‘vivamus’ (1317), is, at best, an act of delayed and grudging pietas. Herakles’ decision to endure the painful companionship of his bow and club (Her. 1377–85) is symbolic of his advancement to a more mature and profound type of heroism, one exacting spiritual strength and courage. In Seneca, Hercules at Wrst determines to destroy his weapons to atone for his sons’ murders (1231–5), but he quickly changes tack: arma, arma, Theseu, Xagito propere mihi subtracta reddi. sana si mens est mihi, referte manibus tela; si remanet furor, pater, recede: mortis inveniam viam. (1242–5) My arms, my arms, Theseus, I demand that my stolen arms be quickly returned. If my mind is sane, give my hands back their weapons; if my madness remains, father, stand away; I shall Wnd a path to death.

His decision to retain his weapons for the purpose of self-immolation is symbolic not of his moral progress to heroic maturity, but of precipitate reversion to punitive action. It is also, as Miola points out, ‘an act of self-assertion, a validation of heroic identity. The language of Seneca’s play, particularly the insistent metaphors of exploration, suggests the implicit hubris. Hercules’ declaration, ‘‘mortis inveniam viam’’ (1245, ‘‘I shall Wnd a way to death’’), recalls his last great

74 Motto and Clark (1981), 101–17, at 105, for example, claim ‘the Senecan Hercules contests not with a Theseus on the grounds of ‘‘friendship’’ and philia, but with his father over the concepts of kinship, responsibility, honor, and duty. Seneca’s Hercules is not the old, aristocratic Ajax of Sophocles, who, ‘‘caught in new and anti-heroic circumstances which degrade him and make him ludicrous . . . consistently prefers suicide to a life of absurdity in an alien time.’’ Rather, his is ultimately the heroic commitment to survive, to protect, to endure.’

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labour, the Wnding of a way to Hades and back out. It also recalls his greatest aspiration, the Wnding of a path to the stars (958–61).’75 The Wnal image of Euripides’ Herakles is of a dependent Wgure who, through immense suVering, has deepened his understanding of the value of human love and friendship. Underlining this image is the epholkides (little boats in tow) simile, repeated at 1424, and Herakles’ epigrammatic last words: ‹Ø
b ºF j Ł Aºº ºø IªÆŁH  AŁÆØ  ºÆØ ŒÆŒH æE. (1425–6) Whoever wants to acquire wealth or power rather than good friends is a fool.

In stark contrast, the end of Seneca’s tragedy highlights Hercules’ isolation, his incapacity for loving dependence, and thus his failure to be fully or genuinely rehabilitated. The hero’s Wnal words are a prayer for obscurity and death: redde me infernis, precor, umbris reductum, meque subiectum tuis substitute vinclis; ille me abscondet locus— sed et ille novit. (1338–40) Return me, I pray you, to the shades of the Underworld, and reinstate me in your chains as your replacement. That place will hide me—but it too knows me.

Seneca’s dramatic portrait of the mad Hercules, which introduced the concepts of psychological causation and moral culpability, was eVectively a mirror of the excesses of the late Julio-Claudian age. In reasoning the madness as the furor of imperial overachievement and absolute power, Seneca also redeWned Hercules’ heroism in Roman and imperial terms, creating an imperialist Hercules of tragically divided potential, a Wgure increasingly isolated by megalomania and destroyed by a sense of selfhood that is unmitigated by selfknowledge or self-mastery. In Braden’s words: ‘A vision of furor conquered and enchained yields to a vision of furor beyond all limits and hope. For the very force that was to restrain the world’s violence 75 Miola (1992), 168.

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has become, as Blake would say, what it beheld: the emperor is mad.’76 There is little optimism in this portrait, a symptom of the palpable inexorability of the times. Although Hercules Furens is unquestionably a product of the Senecan world and the Senecan experience, it has had an enormous inXuence on succeeding generations of playwrights, most notably in the Renaissance depiction of princely distraction and ambitious selfhood, and, fascinatingly, in late twentieth- and early twentyWrst-century adaptations of Euripides’ Herakles, beginning with a version by Archibald MacLeish. The modern theatre seems to have rediscovered in Seneca’s ambivalent and autarkic hero a powerful analogy for the mad excess and inexorable conceit of its own day. 76 Braden (1985), 8.

3 A peculiar compound: Hercules as Renaissance man In a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons, Roman Hercules seized upon the Renaissance imagination. His ability to excite wonder, to be assimilated into diVerent ideologies and artistic media, was extraordinary. Around him two main traditions evolved, one focusing on his heroic virtue, the other on his madness. In each case he was a distinguishable type, and it was explicitly as a type that the Renaissance received Hercules. The principal mode of reception was allegorical interpretation, its motivating concern what Hercules and his achievements signiWed morally. Outside the tragic stage, where Hercules retained a spiritual rather than physical presence, the hero was transformed from a character or being into an abstract idea.

VIRTUS HEROICA VERSUS FUROR Renaissance Hercules represents a synthesis of various classical traditions. As an exemplum of virtus heroica he is also a distillation of his complex classical self. For the most part he is recognized as a civilizing hero of superhuman endurance and valour, who rid the world of monsters and liberated it from chaos. But, unlike his ancient counterpart, he is a Wgure of startling propriety and intellectual consequence. Hercules the overreacher, the transgressor of boundaries, becomes a paradigm of moderation. And where his propensity for excess is apparent, it is justiWed as a manifestation of superior

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virtue. The newly decorous Hercules conforms to both courtly and Christian ideals. As the hero of the Wrst two books of Raoul Le Fe`vre’s Le Recueil des hystoires de Troyes (1464),1 he exhibits the moral and martial virtues of the true knight. What is more, Le Fe`vre interprets many of Hercules’ labours, such as supporting the heavens and slaying the hydra, as intellectual feats rather than merely physical exploits. Hercules is also celebrated for his strength of mind in Natale Conti’s Mythologiae libri decem (1551) and Vincentio Cartari’s Le Imagini con la Spositione de i Dei de gli Antichi (1556), where his victories over the monsters and tyrants are explained as triumphs of the mind over all sorts of vice. Similarly, in his Iconologia (1593) Cesare Ripa depicts Hercules as a perfect fusion of the three constituent parts of heroic virtue: the moderation of anger; the tempering of greed; and contempt for strife and pleasure. Hercules’ club accordingly symbolizes reason, while his lion’s skin represents generosity of mind and the conquest of concupiscence. In the late Middle Ages Hercules was viewed as a standard-bearer for the contemplative life. Guido da Pisa, in his Expositiones et Glose super Comediam Dantis, construed the hostile relations between Juno and her stepson as a clash between Juno as the active life and Hercules as the life devoted to contemplation and virtue. This interpretation contrasts markedly with Seneca’s portrait of a restless, overachieving Hercules who gives some substance to Juno’s worst fears. However, beginning with the poetess Christine de Pisan in the early Wfteenth century, Hercules was adopted as a symbol of the active life, and, as such, he attracted the attention of the Florentine humanists. His other appeal to the humanists was as an emblem of eloquence, a quality with which he was rarely associated in antiquity. Importantly, the Renaissance concept of eloquence implied not only verbal Xuency but also cultural aspiration. It could further imply moral goodness: the notion that to be eloquent one had to be vir bonus. The crusader Rinaldo in Torquato Tasso’s Allegory of Jerusalem Delivered (1575) is a Herculean hero who exempliWes active virtue. He is also, incidentally, an example of virtuous excess.

1 In 1475 William Caxton published a translation of Le Fe`vre’s work in England. Like the original, Caxton’s version enjoyed great popularity.

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The most popular allegorization of Hercules in the Renaissance was Hercules in bivio. In his quest for happiness at the crossroads of life, the hero chooses plain Virtue with her steep and rugged path on his right, and rejects the seductive path of ease and pleasure oVered by Vice on his left. This parable, which seems to have originated with the Wfth-century sophist Prodicus and Wrst appears in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, ‘intellectualizes the older concept of the hero as a redoubtable muscleman by making him an exemplar of reason and his moral choice a heroic act’.2 SigniWcantly, the story as derived from Prodicus is ultimately motivated by the pursuit of undying glory and not by any abstract notion of goodness. In the Renaissance Hercules’ choice was evoked in iconography,3 emblem books, mythographies, plays, pageants, and educational manuals. Among the artists who employed this motif were Du¨rer, Raphael, Rubens, Poussin, and most famously Annibale Carracci.4 Emblem 40 of GeVrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586) shows Hercules at the Forum Romanum courted by the opposing goddesses Minerva and Venus. In The Pilgrim’s Progress Bunyan has the pilgrim Christian confront such a choice, and in The Merchant of Venice Bassanio’s choice of the lead casket is just such a choice as Hercules had made before him. For obvious reasons, Hercules in bivio became associated with ‘the ontological condition of the Christian torn between the forces of good and evil’.5 He was, moreover, perceived as a model of Christian asceticism, his choice serving as a parable for the rejection of the body in favour of the spirit. Naturally enough, Hercules’ labours, his descent into hell, and his apotheosis were also Christianized during the Renaissance, and Hercules himself was often identiWed with Christ. In his Hymne de l’Hercule Chrestien, the French poet Pierre de Ronsard controversially proclaimed Hercules another Christ. Dante compared Hercules’ katabasis with that of Christ, while at the climax of Paradise Regained, Milton used the defeat of Antaeus by Hercules as a simile for Christ’s victory over the Tempter (4.562–71). 2 Zimmermann (2006), 356–78, at 364. 3 Reid (1993), 527–9 lists 30 such depictions between 1500 and 1650. Panofsky (1930) remains the most important study of the iconography of Hercules in bivio. 4 For an analysis of Carracci’s iconic painting of the Choice of Hercules for the Farnese ceiling, see Braider (2004), 111–43. 5 Zimmermann (2006), 356–78, at 364.

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Part of the Renaissance process of purifying and moralizing the Hercules myth was a rationalization of the hero’s madness in suitable allegorical terms. In keeping with his chivalric conception of Hercules, Le Fe`vre conceived Hercules’ furor as the stuV of romantic tragedy: the courtly lover is roused to anger by Linceus’ (Lycus’) false accusations of adultery, and kills both him and the innocent Megara. A more extreme attempt to justify the violence was made by the Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati. In De Laboribus Herculis (c.1406), which he began in response to a request from a friend to explain Seneca’s Hercules Furens, he reasoned Hercules’ madness as a kind of righteous excess beyond the understanding of lesser men, but intrinsic to his quest to overcome the terrestrial impedimenta to spiritual perfection: Inter hec [sic] autem furere Hercules videtur quia mundana abicientes eternorum amore in nostris oculis insanire videntur. Unde Pater Augustinus: ‘Necesse est ut ab impiis et dissimilibus patiantur opprobria et despiciantur tanquam stulti et insani qui presentia bona perdunt et invisibilia ac futura sibi promittunt.’6 Among these Hercules seems to rage because those who throw oV mundane things out of love for eternal things seem to be insane in our eyes. Whence Father Augustine: ‘It is necessary that they who lose present goods and dedicate themselves to invisible and future goods endure the scorn of the impious and those unlike them and be despised as foolish and insane.’

The slaying of Megara is, therefore, extolled as a victory of the soul over the Xesh, while Hercules’ three sons are murdered because they symbolize irascibility, sensuality, and concupiscence. However, more or less concurrent with the tradition of Hercules moralizatus was the so-called Hercules furens tradition, which, in contrast to the former, centred precisely on the inconsistencies and darkest recesses of the myth, on the hero as raving misWt and murderer. In his study of ‘The Madness of Hercules and the Elizabethans’, Rolf Soellner reveals that the Hercules furens tradition is an amalgamated tradition and by no means the preserve of tragedy: ‘The tradition of the mad Hercules as it evolved from the ancients to the Renaissance is a peculiar compound. While Seneca’s Hercules furens was its center, various theories and explanations arose, partly around 6 Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis, in Ullman (1951), ii. 596–7.

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it, partly independent of it, strangely blending literary, medical, philosophical, and popular ideas.’7 The hero of the Hercules furens tradition, in its popular and generic sense, is indeed a remarkably composite character, a character ‘importantly, but not exclusively, Senecan in shape’.8 There is, for example, the melancholic genius who gives rise to the proverbial morbus Herculanus; the histrionic Hercules, comically blustering exponent of English Seneca; and a Hercules Oetaeus maddened by the blood of Nessus. Layered on top of this composite tradition are a number of distinct motifs derived from Seneca’s Hercules Furens.

M OR BUS HE RCULANUS: T H E M E L A N C H O L I C H E RO In Renaissance popular imagination Hercules furens was identiWed with a particular medical condition which, in turn, was associated with madness. He was the archetypal melancholic hero. As with Renaissance Hercules in general, the pathological diagnosis of Herculean furor did not originate in the Renaissance but was actually a continuation and synthesis of ancient thinking. One of the central tenets of the Hippocratic Corpus9 is a theory based on the four humours: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile (respectively linked to the qualities of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness), and, although the Corpus contains no systematic discussion of melancholia, it does identify melancholia (along with haemorrhoids, dysentery, and skin eruptions) as a disease caused by an excess of black bile. In the treatise De Morbo Sacro, humoral theory is applied to epilepsy, which is pronounced a natural, not a ‘sacred’ disease. An epileptic Wt is said to occur when a surplus of cold phlegm from the brain Xows into the warm blood in the veins. The suVerer loses his speech and foams at the mouth, his hands are contracted, and the eyes contorted. In De Morbis Mulierum (1. 7) the term  ˙æ ŒºØ  appears as an 7 Soellner (1958), 309–24, at 314. 8 Miola (1992), 124. 9 The Hippocratic Corpus consists of some 60 medical treatises collected under Hippocrates’ name. The majority of these are dated to the later decades of the Wfth century bc or early decades of the fourth century.

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eponym of epilepsy, reXecting a common belief that Herakles suVered from the disease.10 Euripides contributed, in no small part, to the dissemination of this belief. For, while he avoids any medical rationalization of the madness and emphatically presents the hero’s aZiction as an external and temporary condition senselessly inXicted by vengeful gods, the physiognomy and symptoms, such as
ØÆæ (or rolling of eyes), which he gives the demented Herakles closely resemble a clinical description of an epileptic Wt: K æÆEØ O ø KŁÆæ ÞÆ  K ZØ ÆNÆH Æ KŒƺg Iæe ŒÆÆ hæØ ªØ
. (932–4) His face contorted, he rolled his eyes so that their bloodshot roots protruded and froth dripped down his Wne-bearded chin.

Barlow has noted the similarities between this account and the Hippocratic symptomatology of epilepsy in De Morbo Sacro (7).11 Von Staden, however, sees these correspondences as limited. He insists that they ‘could equally well be read as instances of Euripides’ deployment of tragic topoi used to describe pathological mental conditions’,12 and he cites examples from other Euripidean tragedies where one or more of these symptoms occur. Yet in the Herakles it is the presence of all these symptoms in the one character that is remarkable. In the Problemata Physica, which were ascribed to Aristotle and as such enjoyed considerable fame during the Renaissance, Herakles is held to be the epitome of melancholic genius, in support of the assumption that brilliance and achievement are always associated with black bile: ˜Øa 

 ‹Ø æØd ªªÆØ ¼
æ j ŒÆa غÆ j ºØØŒc j Ø j Æ ÆÆØ ºÆªºØŒd Z; ŒÆd ƒ b oø u ŒÆd

10  ˙æ ŒºØ  and Herculanus or Herculeus morbus are regularly listed in proverb anthologies. See Dicaearchus, quoted by Zenobius 4. 26; Diogenianus 5. 8; Apostolius 8. 64; Pseudo-Plutarch, Proverbia Alexandrinorum 36. 11 See Barlow (1996), 166, on 933–5. 12 Von Staden (1992), 131–50, at 139.

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ºÆ ŁÆØ E I e ºÆ ºB IææøÆØ; x  ºªÆØ H  æøœŒH a æd e  ˙æÆŒºÆ; ŒÆd ªaæ KŒE ØŒ ªŁÆØ Æ  B  ø;
Øe ŒÆd a IææøÆÆ H K غ ØŒH I  KŒı æªæı ƒ IæÆEØ ƒæa : ŒÆd  æd f ÆE
Æ ŒÆØ ŒÆd  æe B IÆø K ˇYfi  H ºŒH ŒıØ ª F
ºE· ŒÆd ªaæ F ªÆØ ººE I e ºÆ ºB. (30. 935a) Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the diseases arising from black bile, as the story of Herakles among the heroes tells? For Herakles seems to have been of this character, so that the ancients called the disease of epilepsy the ‘sacred disease’ after him. This is proved by his frenzy towards his children and the eruption of sores which occurred before his disappearance on Mount Oeta; for this is a common aVection among those who suVer from black bile.

This passage demonstrates how Hippocratic humoral theory shaped non-medical as well as medical views of melancholy. Herakles is here stated to have suVered from two speciWc melancholic diseases, epilepsy during the murder of his family, and dermatological eruptions while on Mount Oeta. The author of the Problemata is thus attributing the two explosions of Herculean furor, familiar from tragedy, to the same source, and, in line with Hippocratic thinking, reasoning the madness in physiological rather than supernatural terms.13 Humoral theory provided a general model for European conceptions of disease and illness, and indeed the diagnosis and prognosis of mental disorders, up to the seventeenth century.14 Certainly the Renaissance understanding of madness, including Herculean furor, was greatly inXuenced by the humoral and corporeal discourses on the subject found in Hippocratic, Galenic, and Aristotelian texts. In his notes to Act 4 of Hercules Furens, Thomas Farnaby, the Wrst English editor of Seneca’s tragedies, deWned the furor as wild delirium 13 IdentiWcation of certain states of melancholy with madness was common among the ancients. In Tusculanae Disputationes (3. 5. 11), Cicero, having seen ºÆªºÆ so often associated with temporary insanity, assumes that the Greek term is equivalent to the Latin furor: ‘Graeci autem manı´an unde appellent, non facile dixerim; eam tamen ipsam distinguimus nos melius quam illi. Hanc enim insaniam, quae iuncta stultitiae patet latius a furore disiungimus. Graeci volunt illi quidem, sed parum valent verbo: quem nos furorem, melagcolı´an illi vocant.’ 14 On Renaissance conceptions and deWnitions of madness, see Salkeld (1993), esp. 7–33, and Neely (2004), esp. 1–26.

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and melancholy. Hercules’ sensation of darkness at 939 V., he reasoned, was caused by excretions of black bile rising from the stomach to the brain: ‘Veluti caligant oculi a sublato de ventriculo vapore: ita ubi halitus turbidi ab atra bile sursum feruntur concipiunturque in cerebri venis, imaginatio laeditur unde falso iudicant sensationes: & insequitur ŁæØ
 ÆæÆæıc & ºÆªºÆ, quae tamen summis ingeniis plerunque accidit. sic Herculi coelum falsum.’15 Hercules must fall asleep, Farnaby continued, and exhale the black humour before his furor can subside: ‘Ita quamvis Herculis ºÆªºØŒe

Ł somno mulceatur ac sedetur non tamen plane atrum atque acrem humorem exspiravit.’ Like the eponymous  ˙æ ŒºØ  in the ancient world, morbus Herculanus (and its variants) became during the Renaissance a proverb for epilepsy or ‘the falling sickness’, and, as such, was lexicographically enshrined. Soellner notes that the term ‘was regularly listed in Renaissance Latin dictionaries and explained in standard reference works’.16 Erasmus accepted the term Herculanus morbus in his Adagia (2.4.27), adding an explanatory essay in which (like Seneca) he gave a human as well as divine reason for Hercules’ aZiction: the strain of the twelve labours added to the threats of Juno. Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1563) and Thomas Thomas’s Dictionarium (1596) both list ‘Herculanus morbus’ as ‘The Falling Sickness’. In Book 7, Chapter 10 (‘De epilencia vel de morbo caduco’) of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum, one of the great encyclopedias of the High Middle Ages, it is claimed that epilepsy is named ‘morbus Herculeus’ because the disease ‘is strong as Hercules was’. This encyclopedia of natural science helped to codify and formalize humoral theory, and it is worth noting that Batman’s 1582 English translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum has often been referred to as ‘Shakespeare’s Encyclopaedia’. The identiWcation of Hercules with epilepsy was not conWned to medical and encyclopedic texts. The furor displayed by at least two Herculean heroes in Elizabethan drama is diagnosed as the falling sickness. As Iago’s insinuations of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness take their toll, Shakespeare’s Othello suVers a complete physical and emotional collapse. He trembles and raves at the ‘ocular proof ’ of 15 Farnaby (1613), 39.

16 Soellner (1958), 309–24, at 314.

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Desdemona’s lost handkerchief, before falling into what the stage directions describe as a ‘trance’. When Cassio appears on the scene, Iago explains: My lord is fallen into an epilepsy; This is his second Wt, he had one yesterday. . . . The lethargy must have his quiet course, If not, he foams at mouth, and by and by Breaks out to savage madness. (iv. i. 50–1, 53–5)

John Marston’s melancholic hero Antonio appears to be an amalgam of Seneca’s Hercules furens and Hercules Oetaeus. He is given to extravagant outbursts of grief and rage, which are frequently pathological in nature: antonio [aside] O how impatience cramps my cracke`d veins, And curdles thick my blood with boiling rage! O eyes, why leap you not like thunderbolts Or cannon-bullets in my rival’s face? Ohime` infelice misero, o lamentevol fato! [He falls to the ground] alberto What means the lady fall upon the ground? rosaline Belike the falling sickness. (Antonio and Mellida, ii. i. 195–201)

In his passion he resembles Hercules with the shirt of Nessus upon him: A sudden horror doth invade my blood; My sinews tremble, and my panting heart Scuds round about my bosom to go out, Dreading the assailant, horrid passion. (iv. i. 278–81)

Antonio himself makes the Herculean comparison explicit: Behold a prostrate wretch laid on his tomb; His epitaph thus: Ne plus ultra.17 Ho! Let none out-woe me; mine’s Herculean woe. (Antonio’s Revenge, ii. ii. 132–4) 17 ‘Ne plus ultra’ is the motto purportedly inscribed on the Pillars of Hercules, the limits of the classical known world.

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‘Quite possibly’, Soellner surmises, ‘Marston used ‘‘Herculean woe’’ in the sense of ‘‘morbus Herculanus’’ and as equivalent to ‘‘falling sickness’’.’18

‘ERCLES’ VEIN’: THE HAM ACTOR In An Apology for Actors (1612), a spirited defence of the theatre against Puritan attacks, Thomas Heywood (1573–1641)19 records a strange, improbable story about the histrionic exploits of Julius Caesar. Towards the end of the second book, entitled ‘Of Actors and their ancient Dignitie’, he says: Iulius Caesar himselfe for his pleasure became an Actor, being in shape, state, voyce, iudgement, and all other occurrents, exterior, and interior excellent. Amongst many other parts acted by him in person, it is recorded of him, that with general applause in his owne Theater he played Hercules Furens, and amongst many other arguments for his compleatnesse, excellence, and extraordinary care in his action, it is thus reported of him. Being in the depth of a passion, one of his servants (as his part then fell out) presenting Lychas, who before had from Deianeira brought him the poysoned shirt, dipt in the bloud of the Centaure Nessus: he in the middest of his torture and fury, Wnding this Lychas hid in a remote corner (appointed him to creep into of purpose) although he was, as our tragedians use, but seemingly to kill him by some false imagined wound, yet was Caesar so extremely carryed away with the violence of his practised fury, and by the perfect shape of the madnesse of Hercules to which he had fashioned all his native spirits, that he slew him dead at his foot, and after swoong him terque quaterque (as the Poet sayes)20 about his head.21

The Hercules Furens which Julius Caesar is claimed to have performed is notably not the story dramatized by Euripides and Seneca, 18 Soellner (1958), 309–24, at 320. 19 A possible relation of Jasper Heywood’s (translator of Seneca’s Hercules Furens), but little is certain about his birth, family background, or formative years. Clark (1931) remains the authoritative source for information about Heywood’s life and canon. Other biographical and critical studies of the dramatist include Cromwell (1928), Boas (1950), Grivelet (1957), and Baines (1984). 20 The phrase ‘terque quaterque’ is taken from Ovid, Met. 9. 217. 21 Heywood (1612; repr. 1973), E3˘.

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but a version, after Ovid, of the madness of Hercules Oetaeus—a version which Heywood himself adapted for the stage (see below). But the real signiWcance of this curious anecdote lies not in what it reveals about alternative traditions of Hercules’ madness or about Julius Caesar, who is unlikely to have ever indulged in Herculean impersonation on stage in the fashion of the aesthetic Nero. Rather, it lies in the revelation of a particular theatrical tradition of Hercules furens in the Renaissance, a tradition synonymous with frenzied overacting. The Roman grammarian and philosopher Macrobius had recorded a similar tale, which was well known in the Renaissance, about the pantomime dancer Pylades of Cilicia being transported to risible extremes of simulated rage in his portrayal of Herakles mainomenos: Cum in Herculem furentem prodisset et non nullis incessum histrioni convenientem non servare videretur, deposita persona ridentes increpuit: øæ; ÆØ OæFÆØ. hac fabula et sagittas iecit in populum.22 (Saturnalia 2. 7. 16–17) When he had come on to dance The Madness of Hercules, some of the spectators thought that he was not keeping to action suited to the stage. Whereupon he took oV his mask and rebuked those laughing at him with the words: ‘Fools, my dancing is intended to represent a madman.’ It was in this play too that he shot arrows at the spectators.

Thus, in his reference to Caesar being ‘carryed away with the violence of his practised fury’, Heywood is continuing an ancient tradition about a furious stage Hercules. In his refutation of Heywood’s Apology, the critic I.G. (John Greene), far from disputing the veracity of the Caesarean anecdote, uses the probability of such a spectacle repeating itself as an indictment of actors’ ‘ancient and moderne indignity’ and of the theatre as a ‘heathenish and diabolicall institution’: ‘Next doth M. Actor recite a memorable example of Iulius Caesar, that slew his own servant whiles he acted Hercules furens on the Stage. Which example indeed greatly doth make against their Playes. For it’s not unlikely but a Player might doe the like now, as 22 Lucian (Salt. 83) tells a similar story of a pantomimus who overacted the part of ‘mad Ajax’: he tore the clothes of one of the scabillarii, snatched a Xute from an instrumentalist, and with it struck the actor playing Odysseus a near-fatal blow.

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often they have done. And then what a lamentable project would there be for the Spectators to behold.’23 The most egregious exponent of the Herculean acting tradition is Nick Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A brawny, conceited, and mock-heroic character, he is the incarnation of overconWdent, overzealous, and overblown theatrical amateurism.24 When he is allotted the part of Pyramus in the Mechanicals’ production of ‘The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby’ (a show of ‘exaggerated Senecanism’25), he announces to the director Peter Quince, ‘my chief humour is for a tyrant. I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split’ (i. ii. 25–6).26 He then proceeds to give an impromptu audition in ‘Ercles’ vein’ (i. ii. 37): The raging rocks, And shivering shocks, Shall break the locks Of prison-gates; And Phibbus’ car Shall shine from far And make and mar The foolish fates.

‘As the tyrant Ercles,’ Miola observes, ‘Bottom swaggers in a bombastic style, replete with pompous diction, alliterative thunderclap, animated naturalism, and cosmic magniloquence.’27 The satirical target of his ‘lofty’ Herculean improvisation has been supposed by 23 Greene (1615; repr. 1973), 28. 24 Actors throughout the years have enjoyed playing up Bottom’s self-conceit and theatrical amateurism. Among 20th-century interpreters of the role, comedian Frankie Howerd was praised for his ‘glorious representation of that universal type, the over-conWdent amateur whom friends and relations have encouraged to believe himself a Roscius’ (Daily Telegraph, 27 Jan. 1958), while Pete Postlethwaite’s performance captured the full ghastliness of ‘the amateur dramatic society bore’ (Jewish Chronicle, 25 July 1986). See GriYths (1996), 104–5. 25 Miola (1992), 186. Brooks (1979), pp. lxii–lxiii, believes Seneca is a major neglected source of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and supports his argument with a number of parallel passages. 26 I quote Shakespeare, including line numbers, from the Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (1998). 27 Miola (1992), 181.

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several scholars to be John Studley’s translation of Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus (1581), with speciWc reference to two separate passages:28 O Lorde of ghostes! whose fyrye Xashe That forth thy hande doth shake, Doth cause the trembling lodges twayne, Of Phœbus’ carre to shake. Raygne reachlesse nowe: in every place Thy peace procurde I have, AloVe where Nereus lookes up lande, Empalde in winding wave. The roring rocks have quaking sturd, And none thereat have pusht; Hell gloummy gates I have brast oape, Where grisly ghosts all husht Have stood.29

However, David P. Young and John Velz have separately raised the alternative possibility that Bottom’s alliterative rant is a travesty of certain lines of Seneca’s Hercules Furens in Jasper Heywood’s translation of 1561.30 Whatever the intended literary target, this specimen of ‘Ercles’ vein’ alludes to more than the worst faults of ‘English Seneca’. In his portrayal of Bottom, Shakespeare is invoking what is obviously a familiar dramatic type. The Herculean hero was well known to Elizabethan audiences from Christopher Marlowe’s enormously popular Tamburlaine, the Great,31 and they would have immediately identiWed in Bottom (a role probably created by the legendary clown William Kempe) a parody of the grandiose acting style of Edward Alleyn, Marlowe’s original Tamburlaine.32 In his Groatsworth of Wit (1592) Robert Greene ridiculed the trend of Herculean grandiloquence in contemporary theatre. His Player-Patron, supplying 28 The suggestion was Wrst put forward by Rolfe (1879), 133. See also Koeppel (1911), 190–1. 29 Quoted in Rolfe (1879), 133. 30 See Young (1966), 35 f. and Velz (1968), 376. 31 See below, Chap. 4. 32 The character of the cowardly braggart Pistol in 2 Henry IV also parodies Alleyn’s tragic style. For the connection between Alleyn and Shakespeare, and between the diVerent companies performing in the 1590s, see Southworth (2000).

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a resume´ of his stage experience, boasts to Roberto: ‘The Twelve Labours of Hercules have I terribly thundered on the stage.’33 Bottom is also a burlesque of recognizable Herculean characteristics, in particular the Herculean style of selfhood. This burlesque draws on a number of diVerent versions of the Hercules myth, including the Madness. In fact, throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream mad transformation and transforming madness are powerful motifs. Bottom himself undergoes a famous metamorphosis of self, an ‘assiWcation’,34 which is followed by a restorative sleep and confused awakening. He, therefore, perfectly illustrates the ‘peculiar compound’35 that is the Hercules furens tradition. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not the only play in the Shakespearean canon in which we Wnd Hercules furens invoked as a theatrical cliche´, a byword for ludicrous declamation and shameless ‘hamming’. In Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen mocks her Roman lover for playing admirably the role of his enraged ancestor, a role clearly reckoned to invite histrionic bluster: antony You’ll heat my blood. No more. cleopatra You can do better yet; but this is meetly. antony Now by my sword— cleopatra And target. Still he mends, But this is not the best. Look, prithee, Charmian, How this Herculean Roman does become The carriage of his chafe.36 (i. iii. 81–6)

‘Cleopatra’, Waith perceives, ‘both accentuates and modiWes what is Herculean in Antony. Like Caesar, she admires the man of valour and noble rage, but she also encourages his carousals.’37 Her taunting invocation here of a tragicomic Hercules reinforces the ambivalence and inconstancy38 of Antony’s Herculean role-playing. Antony the colossus, the ‘demi-Atlas of this earth’ (i. v. 24), emulates the semi-divine, 33 Carroll (1994), 69. 34 On Bottom’s ‘translation’, see Kott (1987), 73–85. 35 Soellner (1958), 309–24, at 314. 36 ‘The carriage of his chafe’ ¼ ‘the bearing or demeanour of his fury’. 37 Waith (1962), 120. 38 On Antony’s ambivalence and deliberate inconstancy, his refusal to tie ‘himself to a single consistent and predictable self ’, see Miles (1996), 175–85.

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world-conquering Hercules, but Antony the maverick warrior and debauchee ‘looks like a good example on the stage of life of the braggart sham-Herakles of comedy’.39

THE MADNESS OF HERCULES O E TA E U S Thomas Heywood was apparently the only writer of the English Renaissance to put Hercules furens on stage,40 but, as mentioned, the furor he dramatized was Hercules’ death agony on Mount Oeta. His furious Hercules is not the Euripidean or Senecan Wlicide but the slayer of Lichas, the messenger who brought Hercules the poisoned shirt of Nessus from Deianira. Hercules’ Wnal tribulation and death were familiar to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans more from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 9 than from Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus (considered as genuinely Senecan throughout the Renaissance). Ovid describes Hercules, with the fatal mantle upon him, as raging like a bull that bears a hunting-spear deep in its side. His blood bubbles and hisses, dark perspiration streams from every pore, his scorching sinews crackle, and his marrow melts. He roars at the mountain and brings great pines crashing down. As he catches sight of Lichas, his pain mounts up to madness: ‘utque dolor rabiem conlegerat omnem’ (9.212). This verse is the likely source of Thomas Heywood’s depiction of Hercules’ excruciating pain as a type of madness in The Brazen Age, containing The Labours and death of Hercules, the second of his four Ages which were successfully staged at the Red Bull during Shakespeare’s last few years in the London theatre (c.1611–13).41 As Ewbank comments: 39 Galinsky (1972), 141. On the importance of the comic Hercules to the ambivalent portrayal of Antony, see also Miola (1992), 130. 40 Listed under 1595 in the Annals of English Drama 975–1700 are two anonymous lost plays, I Hercules and II Hercules, under the auspices of the Admiral’s Men (see Harbage (1989, 3rd edn.), 64–5). Listed under 1561, together with Jasper Heywood’s translation of Hercules Furens, is Queen Elizabeth I’s fragmentary MS translation of Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus (ibid. 38–9). This is a free translation of the second chorus, although the Wrst 31 lines have no parallel in the Latin. Horace Walpole transcribed the piece in 1806, and identiWed it as Elizabeth’s work: see Share (1998), 69–72. 41 Heywood Wrst put the Lichas episode into verse in his Troia Britannica (1602?), a poetic tale based largely on William Caxton’s version of Raoul Le Fe`vre’s Recueil des hystoires de Troyes (pub. 1467).

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These Ages were an enterprise aiming even more ambitiously, and at greater length, than John Barton’s Tantalus, to put all Greek myth on stage, beginning in The Golden Age with ‘The Lives of Jupiter and Saturn’ and ending with the death of everyone except Ulysses at the end of The Iron Age—which Age had gone down so well as to prompt a Second Part (like a kind of Godfather Two). Not driven by a Shakespearian, or Bartonesque, urge to work out an idea or a theme, Heywood simply packs everything in to provide entertainment for a popular London audience.42

Perhaps because of this sweeping popular treatment, Heywood’s Hercules comes across as an uncouth strongman and inveterate braggart. The sound and fury of his ‘fustian heroism’43 led Galinsky to pronounce The Brazen Age ‘in all essentials the dramatization of a mythological comic strip’ and ‘the nadir of the Herakles tradition in literature’.44 Yet, while little case can be made for its literary merit, The Brazen Age is an important link in the Hercules furens tradition and in the Renaissance conception of the Herculean hero. Heywood’s version of Hercules’ Oetaean ravings represents an unusual intersection of Ovidian and Senecan threads. When Heywood’s Hercules puts on the poisoned shirt, his increasing physical anguish recalls the onset of the madness in Seneca’s Hercules Furens (939 V.). His whole countenance changes and his intense fury expresses itself in extravagant and impious threats of violence against Jupiter and the heavens: herc. Are all the furies with their tortures, Their whips and lashes crept into my skin? Hath any sightlesse and infernall Wre Laid hold upon my Xesh? when did Alcides Thus shake with anguish? thus change face, thus shrinke? . . . jason What alteration’s this? a thousand pangues I see even in his visage, in his silence He doth expresse even hell. priest Thou sacred Jove Behold us at thy Altar prostrate here 42 Ewbank (2005), 37–52, at 44. 44 Ibid. 232.

43 Galinsky (1972), 231.

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To beg attonement ’tweene our sins and thee, Lend us a gracious eare and eye. herc. Priest no more, I’le rend thy Typet, hurle Joves Altars downe, Havock his OVerings, all his Lamps extinguish, Raze his high Temples, and skale heaven it selfe Unlesse he stay my tortures. jason Warlike Theban, Whence comes this fury? is this madnes forc’t, That makes Alcides thus blaspheme the Gods. tell. Patient your selfe. herc. I will not Jason, cannot Tellamon, A stipticke poyson boyles within my veines, Hell is within me, for my marrow fries, A vulture worse then that Prometheus feeles, Fiers on my entrails, and my bulke in Xames. jason Yet be your selfe, renowned Hercules, Strive with your torture, with your rage contend Seek to ore-come this anguish. . . . omp. What strange fury Hath late possest him to be thus disturb’d?45

The reactions of the onlookers to Hercules’ rage are a further evocation of Seneca’s hero. Jason and Tellamon, recalling Seneca’s Amphitryon at 952 (‘Quod subitum hoc malum est?’), diagnose Hercules’ condition as a sudden loss or transformation of self (‘What alteration’s this?’, ‘Patient your selfe’, ‘Yet be your selfe’), while Omphale speaks of a kind of demonic possession. In Ovid, Lichas is the haplessly convenient victim of Hercules’ wrath, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Heywood’s tortured Hercules, however, does not merely catch sight of Lichas, he hunts the messenger down, and the murder is preceded by a particularly bloodthirsty Xow of rhetoric: Lychas, where’s he that brought this poyson’d shirt, That I may teare the villaine lim from lim, And shake his body small as Winters snow, His shattered Xesh shall play like parched leaves, And dance in th’ aire, tost by the sommer winds.46 45 Heywood (1874), iii. 249–50.

46 Ibid. 251.

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Returning to Ovid’s account, Heywood has Hercules swing Lichas about his head and hurl him into the Euboean Sea. The Argonauts again interpret his actions as madness, a frenzy surpassing physical trauma and confounding the physician’s skill: jason Princes, his torments are ’bove Physicke helpe, And they that wish him well, must wish his death, For that alone gives period to his anguish. tell. In vaine we follow and pursue his rage, There’s danger in his madnesse.47

Unlike Ovid, who immediately follows the slaying of Lichas with Hercules’ construction of his own funeral pyre, Heywood attributes a second murder to Hercules’ furor on Mount Oeta, that of the Lydian queen Omphale whom Hercules mistakes for Deianira. This case of mistaken identity leading to violent death places Heywood’s Hercules in the tradition of Euripides and Seneca’s deluded killer. The connection between the hero’s unbalanced state of mind and his homicidal behaviour is underlined by Hercules’ self-diagnosis. Before fatally striking Omphale with a rock, he cries: Art thou not Deyaneira come to mocke Alcides madnesse, and his pangues deride?48

This self-diagnosis of madness distinguishes Heywood’s Hercules from the hero of the Senecan Hercules Oetaeus, who expressly contradicts the opinion of the bystanders that he has again succumbed to madness: ‘Resistite’ inquit, ‘non furor mentem abstulit, furore gravius istud atque ira malum est: in me iuvat saevire.’ (823–5) ‘Wait!’ he said. ‘Madness has not stolen away my senses, this evil is deeper than madness or wrath: it delights to rage against me.’

Heywood was not the Wrst post-Ovidian writer to associate the events on Mount Oeta with Herculean furor. In the Carolingian poem Contra iudices, Theodulf of Orle´ans explicitly links the brutal and 47 Ibid. 252.

48 Ibid. 253.

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entirely unjust murder of the ‘unfortunate Lichas’ (miseri Lichae) to ‘furor Herculeus’, the hero’s inability to govern his animal instincts. Theodulf reproduces from Metamorphoses 9 Hercules’ disregard for Lichas’ suppliant pleas for mercy, but he omits the climactic apotheosis which follows. Of Theodulf ’s anti-Herculean, anti-pagan exploitation of his ‘irreverent’ Ovidian model, Nees has remarked: ‘Surely it ought to be clear from his transformation of his literary sources that Theodulf does not intend this passage to convey a paean to Hercules as a personiWcation of virtue, but rather a warning against the dangers even to an otherwise virtuous man of the vices of anger and lust.’49 Among Heywood’s contemporaries and near-contemporaries, the Oetaean strand of the Hercules furens tradition was reasonably uncommon but not unique. The Renaissance mythographer Natalis Comes sees furor depicted in both of Seneca’s Hercules plays, that is, in Hercules’ Juno-inspired Wlicidal frenzy and in his Nessusinduced rage on Oeta.50 In Antony and Cleopatra, which was probably staged about Wve years before The Brazen Age, the Wgure of Hercules Oetaeus is clearly part of Shakespeare’s grammar of furor.51 Enraged at what he believes is Cleopatra’s treachery, her capitulation to Caesar at Actium, Antony invokes and emulates the furor of his divine ancestor Hercules:52 Better ’twere Thou fell’st into my fury, for one death Might have prevented many. Eros, ho! The shirt of Nessus is upon me. Teach me Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage; Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o’th’ moon, And with those hands that grasped the heaviest club Subdue my worthiest self. The witch shall die. (iv. xii. 40–7)

49 Nees (1991), 31. 50 See Mythologiae (1567; repr. 1976), 203ˇ, 208. 51 The Hercules–Cacus episode in Aeneid 8. 193 V. (see above, Chap. 2) undoubtedly also forms part of the Shakespearean grammar of furor. 52 While Antony and Cleopatra as a whole is something other than the tragedy of a Herculean hero, it nevertheless contains a major treatment of the type. See Waith (1962), 113–21.

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Antony blames his downfall and imminent death on female perWdy, a ‘Triple-turned whore’ (iv. ii. 13), thus missing the irony of Deianira’s innocence.

THE SENECAN TRADITION A signiWcant component of the Hercules furens tradition in the Renaissance was, of course, a more direct engagement with Seneca’s Hercules Furens. This was evidenced by the appearance in England and on the Continent of translations of the text and by the undoubted impact of such translations on the more creative appropriation of the Senecan Hercules. The Wrst English translation of certain date and identity53 was by Jasper Heywood in 1561. Heywood was born in London in 1535, the son of the epigrammatist John Heywood (c.1497–1580). Related on his mother’s side to Thomas More, he was also the uncle of John Donne. A Catholic, he Xed England on the accession of Elizabeth, but returned in 1581 as head of the Jesuit mission. After arrest and imprisonment he was exiled, and died in Naples in 1598.54 Hercules Furens was Heywood’s third and Wnal translation of Seneca: his Troas was printed in 1559 and Thyestes in 1560.55 In 1581 all three translations were reprinted as the nucleus of Thomas Newton’s The Tenne Tragedies of Seneca. C. S. Lewis, cataloguing the manifold faults of ‘Drab Age Verse’, described this collection of English Seneca as ‘execrable: the metre a torment to the ear, the language at once artless and unnatural’.56 T. S. Eliot oVered a kinder assessment in his essay ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, which introduced the 1927 reissue of Newton’s edition: ‘If we look at the dates we cannot overlook the probability that these translations helped to direct the course of events. . . . It is not only as an embryonic 53 Harbage (1989), 209 includes in a supplementary list an extant anonymous translation of Hercules Furens, which probably dates from the late 17th century. 54 Herbermann et al. (1910), vii. 319. See also Reed (1926), 66–7 and 90; Southern (1950), 56; and Share (1998), 12. 55 Heywood’s Troas, Thyestes, and Hercules Furens were edited by Vocht (1913). See also Spearing (1912). For an analysis of the three translations, see O’Keefe (1974). 56 Lewis (1954), 256.

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form of Elizabethan tragedy that these translations have documentary interest. They represent the transformation of the older form of versiWcation into the new—consequently the transformation of language and sensibility as well.’57 Of the Wve translators who contributed to the collection, Heywood is generally acknowledged as the most proWcient. What is interesting about his Senecan translations as a group or series is that, like Robert Browning’s trio of major transcriptions from Greek tragedy (Euripides’ Alkestis and Herakles, and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon), published in the 1870s,58 each one employs a distinct translational technique, ranging from free and interpretative adaptation to determined literalism. Lewis styled this progression a movement ‘from a medieval to a humanistic conception of his task’ as translator.59 In the second act of Troas Heywood introduces the ghost of Achilles (‘the Wrst vengeful ghost of Tudor revenge tragedy’60), and substitutes for the geographically baZing third chorus another which is partly a translation of a chorus in Phaedra. For the Thyestes he invented a prologue in which he asks the Fury of Seneca’s Wrst scene for inspiration. Heywood’s Hercules Furens was his most literal translation and appeared side by side with the Latin, in what Lewis called ‘an eclectic text of his own manufacture’.61 As with his earlier translations, and all but one of the translations in Newton’s Tenne Tragedies, it was composed in ‘fourteeners’, the fourteen-syllable line of seven iambic feet. The title-page read: ‘The Wrst tragedie of Lucius Anneus Seneca, intituled Hercules furens, newly perused and of all faultes whereof it did before abound diligently corrected, and for the proWt of young schollers so faithfully translated into English metre, that ye may se verse for verse tourned as farre as the phrase of the english permitteth by Iasper Heywood studient in Oxford.’62 Heywood’s conWdent precursory deWnition of faithfulness, his objective of rendering the original text ‘verse for verse . . . as farre as the phrase of the english permitteth’, anticipates Browning’s defence of literalism in the preface to his Agamemnon in 1877: ‘If, because of the immense fame of the following Tragedy, I wished to acquaint myself with it, and could only do so by the help of a translator, I should require him to be 57 Eliot (1951), 98, 101. 59 Lewis (1954), 254. 61 Lewis (1954), 255.

58 See below, Chap. 6. 60 See Kerrigan (1996), 112–13. 62 Heywood (1561), sig. A.

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literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language. . . . I would be tolerant for once,—in the case of so immediately famous an original,—of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the very turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English will bear.’63 In practice, Heywood’s translation of Hercules Furens is generally free of tautology and embellishment. He preserves closely the original word-order, although sometimes too laboriously, a fault compounded by the occasional infelicitous choice of word. His rendering of lines 937–44 (the onset of Hercules’ madness) and 1138–42 (Hercules’ awakening) are illustrative of his technique: But yf to lyght some other mischiefe bryng The grownde yet shall, let it make haste: and any monstrous thyng If it prepare, let yt bee myne. but what means this? myd daye The darknes have encloasde abowt, lo Phoebus goethe his ways With face obscure without a clowde. who dryves the daye to Xyght, And turns to east? from whence doth now his dusky hed the nyght Unknown bryng forth? whence fyl the peaks so many rownde about Of datyme starres?64 What place is this? What region? or of the worlde what coaste? Where am I? under ryse of sanne? or bonde els uttermoste Of th’ycy bear? or els doothe here of sea of Hesperye The farthest grownde appoynte a bonde For th’ocean sea to lye? What ayre drawe me? to weery myght what grownde is undersette? Of truthe we are returnde from hell?65 63 Browning (1877), in Kenyon (1912), viii. 293–365, at 293. See further below, Chap. 6. 64 Heywood (1561), sigs I 6–7. 65 Ibid., sig. L 2.

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At its best, Heywood’s literalism is allied with a certain amount of poetic instinct and sensitivity. Eliot made special mention of the ‘singular beauty’ of Heywood’s translation of 1131 V., lines addressed by the chorus to Hercules’ slain children: Ite ad Stygios, umbrae, portus ite, innocuae, quas in primo limine vitae scelus oppressit patriusque furor; ite, iratos visite reges. To Stygian havens goe ye of shade and night, goe hurtles souls, whom mischief hath opprest Even in Wrst porche of lyfe but lately hadde, And fathers furye goe unhappy kynde O litle chyldren, by the way full sadde Of journeye knowne. Goe, see the angrye kyngs.66

‘Nothing can be said of such a translation,’ Eliot declared, ‘except that it is perfect. It is a last echo of the earlier tongue, the language of Chaucer, with an overtone of that Christian piety which disappears with Elizabethan verse.’67 The following century, the Dutch poet and dramatist Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679), who published translations of Seneca’s Troades (1626) and Hippolytus (1628), made a prose version of Hercules Furens as a private exercise. His published translations of ancient tragedy also included Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris (1666) and Sophocles’ Trachiniae (1668). Renaissance France, meanwhile, witnessed a profusion of translations and adaptations of Seneca’s Hercules Furens, including those by Roland Brisset (1589), Pierre Mainfray (1625), Benoist Baudyn (1629), Maurice de Chalvet (1638), Nicolas L’He´ritier (whose Hercule furieux (1639) is also known by the title of Amphitrion), and Pierre Linage (1650). Like Heywood’s translation in England, these French versions contributed to a more popular awareness of Seneca’s play as well as to the invocation by dramatists of mad Hercules as a type of stage hero, and to a proliferation of original works incorporating ‘Furens’ in their titles. 66 Heywood (1561), sig. L.

67 Eliot (1951), 104.

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Fig. 2. Alessandro Turchi, The Madness of Hercules (c.1620). Bayerische Staatsgema¨ldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

While Hercules in bivio was a far more popular subject for Renaissance artists, Senecan Hercules inspired at least one seventeenthcentury painting, Alessandro Turchi’s The Madness of Hercules of c.1620 (Fig. 2). In its general composition and treatment the picture denotes the inXuence of Michelangelo, although the colour-scheme is Venetian. In the centre of the painting Hercules is depicted holding one of his children aloft and on the verge of hurling its helpless form to the ground. Another child lies dead at his feet, and behind him Megara, her remaining sons, and women of the household kneel, recoil, or scatter in terror. Senecan Hercules also found his way into Italian opera. During the wedding celebrations for Cosimo III de Medici and Marguerite Louise d’Orlea`ns in 1661, the Florentine court prepared a theatre festival dominated by the production of Jacopo Melani’s Ercole in

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Tebe. As Blanshard wryly observes: ‘At Wrst sight, scenes of domestic violence make a strange choice for a wedding celebration, even if they are set to ballet music. Yet their use here provides a clear indication of the way in which these scenes were enjoyed for their dramatic potential far more than their content.’68 The title role was performed by the tenor Antonio Cesti, himself a celebrated composer of operas. The production inaugurated Florence’s beautifully restored Teatro della Pergola, and was especially notable for the emphasis it placed on the dance, including four end-of-act balli. During the Renaissance two distinct Herculean traditions arose concurrently. Both centred predominantly on the typological use of the hero. The more general and proliWc tradition established Hercules as the incarnation of active virtue, of reason, triumphant temperance, and eloquence. He became simultaneously an analogue of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection and an emblem of supreme humanist endeavour. However, the peculiarly composite Hercules furens tradition, and especially its morally challenging Senecan strain, held the greater literary potential and had arguably the greater creative impact. As Galinsky indicates, the appropriation of Seneca’s Hercules by Renaissance dramatists was not a case of ‘inventing modern adventures for [him] . . . and putting him into modern costume’. Writers ‘preferred to do without the physical appearance of Herakles and instead transfer some of his spiritual qualities to some other hero’.69 Thus, it is through characters such as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine or Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Coriolanus that Hercules furens Wnds a new and resonant theatrical voice. 68 Blanshard (2005), 59–60.

69 Galinsky (1972), 186.

4 ‘Even the earth is not room enough’: Herculean selfhood on the Elizabethan stage Immediately before his madness sets in, Seneca’s Hercules prays, si quod etiamnum est scelusjlatura tellus, properet, et si quod parat monstrum, meum sit (‘If the earth is even now to produce some wickedness, let it come quickly; if she is furnishing some monster, let it be mine’, 937–9). Later, with his reason restored, and having discovered for himself his identity as the murderer of his children, he says of his crime, laudanda feci iussus; hoc unum meum est (‘My praiseworthy deeds I did under orders; this alone is mine’, 1268). Both moments—one of hubristic triumph, the other suicidal despair—encapsulate the hero’s tragic autarkeia. For Hercules’ tragedy is that he remains to the very end a victim of his own unshakeable sense of selfhood and impenetrable isolation. The dramatization of these attributes is arguably Seneca’s greatest and darkest legacy to the Elizabethan theatre. While none of the major Elizabethan playwrights wrote a Hercules play based on the Euripidean-Senecan plot,1 Seneca’s tragic Hercules lies behind several of the most famous madmen and megalomaniacs of the Renaissance English stage, providing dramatists with ‘a rich and resonant grammar of furor, an essential and expressive code of thought and feeling’.2 The reasons for this have a great deal to do with the political and cultural aYnity between Julio-Claudian Rome and Tudor England, as Braden asserts: It is documentable that Renaissance tragedians were far more interested in their Roman than in their Athenian predecessors, and there are reasons for that beyond mere linguistic diYculties. An important part of what, at least 1 See Chap. 3, n. 40.

2 Miola (1992), 122.

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in its usual deWnition, distinguished the Renaissance as a period is the newly imperial cast of its politics and the individualistic cosmopolitanism of its culture—and the style of unappeasably ambitious selfhood that becomes the central subject of Renaissance tragedy has, in general, more authentic aYnities with the nihilistic villains of Seneca’s universe than with their more temperate and socialized Greek antecedents.3

As we have seen, Seneca’s Hercules Furens is a mirror of the excesses of the late Julio-Claudian age. Its hero is a Wgure of tragically divided potential and with a fatal, all-consuming sense of selfhood. The furor he embodies from the outset is the obsessive, restless ambition of the imperial overreacher; the monster he becomes represents the perversion, through absolute power, of the competitive ethos, natural boundaries, heroic anger, and the bonds of kinship. For the Elizabethan tragedians this psychological portrait of power held enormous dramatic appeal, as did Seneca’s Weltanschauung pertaining to State and Cosmos. The Tudor monarchs, like the Julio-Claudian emperors, were a highly dysfunctional dynasty that wielded an unprecedented authority. Until the 1534 Act of Supremacy no English sovereign had been head of Church and State. The Royal Supremacy was the apotheosis of monarchy, making Henry VIII the ‘one supreme head and king’ of a body politic in which spirituality and temporality were indivisible concepts. He was the vicar of God and, in his own words, the ‘soul of the whole kingdom’, with the divine mission to ‘animate, rule and save’ his people.4 This destiny, Henry believed, showed him to be the legitimate inheritor of the authority of Rome’s emperors. With the establishment of a national Church of England, ‘a powerful new national epic’ was born, ‘telling how for generations England had groaned under the tyranny of the bishops of Rome; [how the popes had] usurped the authority of those to whom all obedience is due, God’s vicars on earth—Roman emperors and their successors, the princes of Christendom—how the hour had come to throw oV this usurpation . . . and restore the pristine right order’.5 3 Braden (1993), 245–64, at 257. 4 Foxe, Acts and Monuments in Pratt (1874), v. 535; ‘Treatise on Royal Power’ in Public Record OYce, State Papers 1/238, fol. 245. 5 Scarisbrick (1997), 386–7.

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At the same time as this apotheosis occurred, a new idea of nationhood emerged which became inextricably interwoven with the Tudors’ extraordinary style of selfhood. As Guy indicates: ‘It is striking that, whereas in 1500 the word ‘‘state’’ had possessed no political meaning in English beyond the ‘‘state or condition’’ of the prince or the kingdom, by the second half of Elizabeth’s reign it was used to signify the ‘‘state’’ in the modern sense. In the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII politicians had spoken only of ‘‘country’’, ‘‘people’’, ‘‘kingdom’’, and ‘‘realm’’, but by the 1590s they began to conceptualize the ‘‘state’’.’6 The concept of the ‘state’, Guy continues, identiWed England as ‘a sovereign government which recognized no superior in political, ecclesiastical, and legal matters’.7 The implications of this identiWcation were ethnographic as much as political and religious. Henry’s anti-papal campaign and ‘imperial’ theory of kingship, and Elizabeth’s war with Spain sharpened the deWnition of ‘Englishness’. A vision of England as patria, and of her sovereign as an Augustan pater patriae, took shape. In the promotion as well as the analysis of this vision, the English language and the native literature were crucial. According to Braden, ‘Seneca presents us with a compelling version of classical man, exaggerated and simpliWed to reveal something of his essence. That in turn is what Renaissance writers see and respond to in Seneca.’8 In Seneca’s compelling version of the mad Hercules, Elizabethan dramatists saw and responded to the classical hero’s ambivalent essence, a greatness that is both magnetic and repellent. They saw reXected in this uncompromising Herculean heroism the danger facing their own society—that ‘such superhuman aspirations may tip over into amoral self-assertion’.9 Thus the archetypal Herculean hero of Renaissance English tragedy, Tamburlaine, is a celebration of the Herculean overreacher, but a celebration suVused with absolute awareness of the overreacher’s lethal menace. With Shakespeare the Herculean hero reaches an apex of psychological and moral complexity. His tragedies of madness and cataclysmic selfhood, which belong most securely to a Hercules furens tradition—Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and King Lear—are, to borrow 6 Guy (1988), 352. 8 Braden (1985), 2.

7 Ibid. 9 Miles (1996), 61.

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Braden’s phrase, the ultimate ‘magnifying lenses’10 for making sense of the Latin text and even, on occasion, the Greek text.

THE MAT TER OF SENECAN ‘INFLUENCE’ The inXuence of Seneca tragicus on the Elizabethan stage has become almost a scholarly commonplace; the critical quest to deWne its nature and extent has been an extremely proliWc endeavour.11 In 1893 John W. CunliVe produced a seminal thesis on the subject, in which he submitted as categorical proof of his assertion of inXuence a clinical itemization of verbal echoes and parallel passages. F. L. Lucas followed suit in 1922 with an equally categorical exposition of Senecan inXuence, which relied on an equally problematic investigative method. For many years after, Seneca’s impact, for better or worse, on the development of English tragedy remained undisputed, a ‘given’ of literary criticism. In addition to parallel passages, discussion of Senecan inXuence on Elizabethan playwrights centred on elements of formal imitation (the Wve-act structure, stichomythia, and stock characters); the borrowing of Senecan sententiae; and a shared fondness for the rhetorical, the melodramatic, the supernatural, and the gruesomely violent.12 The selection of these elements largely explains why even those critics who most ardently and conscientiously dissected Senecan inXuence rarely judged it a particularly positive thing. ‘Since the late eighteenth century,’ Braden records, ‘a belief in the manifest inferiority of Senecan drama has made that linkage [between Seneca and the Renaissance] seem an 10 Braden (1993), 245–64, at 257. 11 For an overview of the inXuence of Seneca on Renaissance English drama, see CunliVe (1893); Theobald (1909), 323–7; Charlton (1921), pp. cxxxviii–cc; Lucas (1922); Baker (1939); Wells (1944), 71–84; Johnson (1948), 33–53; Eliot (1951), 65–105 and 126–40; Hunter (1967), 17–26 and (1974), 166–204; Brower (1971), 141– 72; Kiefer (1978), 17–34 and (1985), 129–42; Muir (1978); Braden (1984), 277–92 and (1985); Miola (1992) and (2000), 116–25; Kerrigan (1996), 111–141; and Boyle (1997), 141–212. On the inXuence of Senecan prose on Shakespeare, see Miles (1996), 38–62. On Shakespeare’s classical reading, see Velz (1968); Martindale (1990); and Martindale and Taylor (2004). 12 Many of these elements were, in fact, borrowed indirectly, through the medium of 16th-century Italian tragedy. See Herrick (1965), esp. 115 and 292.

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unsatisfactory business: at best a puzzle, and often an embarrassment or worse.’13 It is also the principal reason why the common assumption of ‘inXuence’ was eventually challenged or at least qualiWed. Renewed critical scrutiny in the second half of last century prompted the counter-assertion that the putative Senecan legacy was, in reality, slender and elusive. In 1967 G. K. Hunter stressed the shortcomings of the ‘scientiWc’ approach typiWed by CunliVe, whereby the literary excavator would ransack a chosen Elizabethan text (‘B’) for detectable and quantiWable linguistic relics of Senecan tragedy (‘A’). Such an approach, he argued, oversimpliWed the search for inXuence by ignoring the syncretism and eclecticism of the Renaissance era, the fact that ‘B’ was part of a whole intellectual climate, and subject, therefore, to a complex of competing inXuences, both classical and Christian.14 ‘B’ texts, such as the last plays of Shakespeare, were, he said, ‘too rich, various and diYcult to place to be put under the inXuence. They refuse to stay etherized upon the table.’15 Hunter’s corrective remarks belonged to a necessary reaction against the earlier absolutist acceptance of Seneca’s inXuence and the reductionism of the ‘parallelpassage’ mode of enquiry. The exponents of this counter-movement, however, frequently indulged in their own form of reductive reasoning. Hunter, for instance, concluded that the Elizabethan debt to Seneca was, if not actually negligible, certainly vastly overestimated and, at any rate, impossible to isolate from the ‘stream of tendency raining down upon’16 English tragedy: ‘If Seneca’s tragedies had not survived, some details would have had to be changed—but the overall picture would not have been altered.’17

13 Braden (1985), 1. 14 Hunter (1967), 17–26, at 18–19. 15 Ibid. 18. Contained in Hunter’s obvious allusion here to line 3 of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is a further allusion to Eliot’s famous essays of 1927 on Seneca and the Elizabethans. Eliot was, in fact, one of the Wrst critics to move away from the traditional parallel-passage method and to suggest a less formalistic and quantitative approach to Senecan inXuence. At the end of his essay ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (repr. in Eliot (1951), 126–40), he wrote: ‘The inXuence of Seneca on Elizabethan drama has been exhaustively studied in its formal aspect, and in the borrowing and adaptation of phrases and situations; the penetration of Senecan sensibility would be much more diYcult to trace’ (140). 16 Hunter (1967), 17–26, at 18. 17 Ibid. 24.

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The Elizabethans’ dramatic sources were undeniably many and diVuse, a fact more recently acknowledged by Inga-Stina Ewbank: ‘Intertexts move promiscuously on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage; the eclectic richness of texts is part of the strength of its drama; and, when originals have been mediated through layers of classical and native texts, apparent likenesses can be deceptive.’18 However, an acceptance of Renaissance England’s discursive literary inheritance, its ‘eclectic richness’, should not automatically diminish or negate Seneca’s considerable sway. A far more illuminating approach to the problem of inXuence, than either the ‘QED’ technique of CunliVe and Lucas or the ‘eclecticism’ theory of Hunter, is that of Robert Miola, who undertakes to trace Seneca’s inXuence on Shakespeare. Miola’s interest is ‘in stylistic minutiae and in oblique, audacious eVects’,19 ‘not only individual echoes and elements, but also . . . larger patterns of concatenation and conWguration’.20 His proWle of Senecan Shakespeare, which he assembles through close textual analysis and a readiness to think laterally, embraces language and imagery, characterization and psychology, atmosphere and setting, tragic sensibility and tragic vision. Crucially, he views Seneca not as ‘a terminus a quo’, but rather ‘as an intermediary legatee, himself heir to the great and complex traditions of ancient tragedy’.21 The combined breadth and detail of Miola’s modus operandi provide a valuable model for investigating the impact of individual Senecan tragedies on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and especially the subterranean, and often subtle, inXuence of the Hercules Furens. In considering speciWcally the inXuence of Hercules Furens on Elizabethan tragedy, one point above all needs to be determined: what is it that makes Hercules Furens peculiarly Senecan? The basic dramatic sequence which Soellner designates ‘the Hercules furens tradition’, and which he ascribes to Seneca’s inXuence, involves a sudden and temporary Wt of insanity followed by a palliative sleep and an interrogative awakening. Other ‘traditional’ features include the sensation of darkness accompanying the onset of madness, and violence arising from mistaken identities. But, in truth, this scenario, which is fundamentally Euripidean, is not necessarily what gives the Hercules furens 18 Ewbank (2005), 37–52, at 38. 20 Ibid. 10.

19 Miola (1992), 9. 21 Ibid. 9.

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tradition, as a tragic tradition, its distinctive and demonstrable Senecan essence. To extract and analyse this essence, we need to do more than simply compile from the Elizabethan tragic corpus a checklist of plot components and physical symptoms. The arbitrariness of such a checklist is evident in Soellner’s pointed exclusion, from an otherwise informative survey, of two of the most signiWcant Herculean heroes in Elizabethan tragedy, Thomas Kyd’s Hieronimo and Shakespeare’s Lear.22 The real Senecan strain of the Hercules furens tradition is discovered in those aspects of the myth that were original to Seneca (and strikingly at odds with his major Attic source, Euripides’ Herakles), namely, his psychological conception of the madness and his characterization of Hercules as an autarkic hero at war with his own nature. Equally, in investigating possible aYnities between Shakespeare’s tragic heroes and Euripides’ Herakles, we need to focus on the Herakles’ peculiarly Euripidean features.

‘ B E L L A I A M S E C U M G E R AT ’: OT H E L LO In the prologue to Hercules Furens, Juno explicitly outlines the strategy she will employ in her campaign against Hercules: quaeris Alcidae parem? j nemo est nisi ipse; bella iam secum gerat (‘Do you need a match for Alcides? There is none but himself. Now he must war with himself ’, 84–5). Her masterly expedient is in se semper armatus Furor (‘mad Rage, always armed against itself ’, 98). Hercules, the peerless embodiment of heroic virtus, will be made to do battle with himself, and thus his greatest victory will be simultaneously his most comprehensive and ignominious defeat. Later, the hero’s own words foreshadow, with tragic irony, the genius and eYcacy of Juno’s nefarious plan: Watque summus hostis Alcidae Lycus (‘Alcides’ Wnal foe must be Lycus’, 635); si quod parat j monstrum, meum sit (‘if [the 22 Soellner (1958), 309–24, at 315: ‘Unless the writer refers directly to Hercules or uses several distinct features of the tradition, we cannot claim that the raging hero hovered in his imagination. On these grounds we must exclude from consideration some very famous examples of temporary madness on the Elizabethan stage, such as Kyd’s Hieronimo and Shakespeare’s Lear. Their resemblance to Hercules does not go much beyond the simple fact that they become temporarily insane.’

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earth] is furnishing some monster, let it be mine’, 938–9). The goddess determines the timing and outcome of Hercules’ madness, but, in complete contrast to Euripides’ Herakles, the hero himself, through his character and actions, suggests the nature of the attack and provides his stepmother with her most powerful weapon. Juno succeeds by exploiting and exacerbating a pre-existing or semi-latent mania, a personality already in conXict with itself. Juno’s strategy of activating a self-destructive furor is also, as Somerville indicates, the strategy devised by Shakespeare’s arch-manipulator Iago, whose function in Othello is agential rather than generative: ‘[Iago is] the agent in the play for bringing about the overthrow of a mind full of conXicting thoughts and emotions. The explosive charges were ready. He was the spark that set them oV. He was the Diabolus ex machina, the evil god brought in to complete a debacle in place of a beneWcent power introduced to save the situation.’23 At the end of Act i, Iago anticipates the ease with which he will execute his plan to make Othello suspect Desdemona of inWdelity: The Moor is of a free and open nature That thinks men honest that but seem to be so; And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose As asses are. (i. iii. 397–400)

However, it is not merely his master’s candour and credulity that Iago exploits; even more insidiously and unscrupulously he exploits Othello’s Herculean duality, the opposition between his nobility and the ‘bloody passion’ that ‘shakes [his] very frame’ (v. ii. 44). Othello, like Hercules, is a civilizing hero, a mighty warrior for order and justice, and a benefactor to the far-Xung regions of earth. The beginning of the play sees him confronting an external threat in the form of a Turkish invasion of Cyprus, just as Hercules, on his Wrst appearance in Seneca’s play, confronts the threat posed by the tyrant Lycus. In each case, once the external threat has been averted a more lethal internal threat must be faced. As Miola states: ‘The initial external struggle sets up the conXict that the main action deconstructs, as each hero confronts the loathed other within himself.’24 The prototype for 23 Somerville (1979), 76.

24 Miola (1992), 126.

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this deconstruction is Euripides’ Herakles, but there the action in each of the play’s contrasting halves is externally motivated. Seneca and Shakespeare introduce a double motivation: external design and orchestration plus internal conXict and susceptibility. In Hercules Furens the juxtapositions at 635 (‘Alcidae Lycus’) and 939 (‘monstrum meum’) highlight Hercules’ potential to become Lycus and his own monstrous prey. In the same way, Othello becomes the inWdel Turk, a raging barbarian who murders the gentle and faithful Desdemona. And, following the Herculean pattern, it is in a burst of righteous anger that Othello’s capacity for self-destructive furor is Wrst revealed. Roused by a drunken brawl between Cassio and Montano, which has been carefully contrived by Iago, he fears the ‘collying’ (darkening) of his senses as he threatens the combatants with death: Now, by heaven, My blood begins my safer guides to rule, And passion, having my best judgement collied, Assays to lead the way: if I once stir,— Or do but lift this arm, the best of you— Shall sink in my rebuke. (ii. iii. 196–201)

In the wake of his catastrophic madness, the decision of Euripides’ Herakles to retain the instruments of his family’s destruction, his famed bow and club, is emblematic of the transformation, or rather deepening, of his characteristic arete¯ into something greater and more spiritually exacting (1377–85). Seneca’s Hercules, surveying the bodies of his murdered wife and children, calls for his arms with the intention Wrst of destroying them (1231–5), then of destroying himself (1242–5), and thereby seeks to reassert his heroic identity. He is thwarted in his second purpose only by his father’s desperate counter-threat of suicide. His understanding and manifestation of virtus remains unchanged. Faced with the knowledge of his crime, Othello also seeks to reclaim his virtus and does so momentarily by fulWlling Hercules’ intention to kill himself. Yet, as Brower points out, Othello’s suicide has meaning beyond the heroic: With the recovery of a true vision of Desdemona and the attainment of true knowledge of his evil acts, Othello’s attitude is nearer the suVering Christian’s than the hero’s: This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven . . .

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For the ‘happiness’ of his death is more than a Wnal assertion of his heroic self; it is also an acceptance of the damnation that he knows is his due, and an act of self-sacriWce.25

But even in terms of the heroic standards prescribed by Greco-Roman or humanist tradition, Othello does not die unchanged. Whereas Seneca’s Hercules remarks bitterly on his inability to weep for his children as a father should (1228–9), Othello, like Euripides’ Herakles (1354–6), arrives at a deeper and agonizing recognition of his humanity, which declares itself in his unaccustomed facility in weeping: Then must you speak . . . Of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinal gum. (v. ii. 343, 348–51)

Othello is denied a Herculean apotheosis, but before his death he experiences, at least partially, a Heraklean transWguration of virtus.

‘NON CAPIT TERRA HERCULEM’: TAMBURLAINE AND HIERONIMO ‘With Tamburlaine,’ Braden declares, ‘Marlowe places at the head of Elizabethan drama perhaps the least compromising version of the Herculean hero on any Renaissance stage.’26 Part I of Tamburlaine chronicles the hero’s ascent from Scythian shepherd to King of Persia, his defeat of the Turkish emperor Bajazet, and his marriage to Zenocrate, daughter of the Sultan of Egypt. In Part II the hero’s pride, cruelty, and insatiable desire ‘to soar above the highest sort’ (ii. vii. 33) lead eventually to his ruin. On the question of whether Tamburlaine is presented with approval or disapproval, Waith believes Marlowe’s ‘concept of heroic character is suYciently complex to include what appear to be contradictory elements and that his attitude, going beyond simple approval or disapproval, remains constant’.27 25 Brower (1971), 27.

26 Braden (1985), 186.

27 Waith (1962), 63.

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And Braden contends: ‘The ambivalence that marks our response to Herculean Wgures is heightened in Tamburlaine to perhaps the breaking point.’28 Marlowe’s bipartite structure emphasizes the contradictory elements in Tamburlaine’s character and actions, his Herculean duality, as well as the Elizabethans’ ambivalent attitude towards the type of hero he exempliWes. The Wrst part can be read as a celebration of the glorious and charismatic Herculean overreacher, while the second part portrays the dangers and the mania inherent in a life deWned by overreaching. Like Hercules, Tamburlaine is a Wgure of inWnite aspiration, imagination, and restlessness: The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown, That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops To thrust his doting father from his chair, And place himself in the imperial heaven, Mov’d me to manage arms against thy state. What better precedent than mighty Jove? Nature, that fram’d us of four elements Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds: Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet’s course, Still climbing after knowledge inWnite, And always moving as the restless spheres, Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, That perfect bliss and sole felicity, The sweetness of an earthly crown. (Part I, ii. vii. 12–29)

Here he invokes the divine precedent of unWlial Jupiter, maps out the cosmic dimensions of his soul, and, in ‘a daring exaltation of worldliness’,29 envisions the fruition of his godlike pursuit in an earthly crown. Thus, in true Herculean fashion, Tamburlaine does not belong entirely either to heaven or to earth.30 He exists in an intermediate, or entirely 28 Braden (1985), 187. 29 Martin (1978), 248–64, at 254. 30 Cf. Silk’s description (1985), 1–22, at 6, of Herakles: ‘Heracles lies on the margins between human and divine; he occupies the no-man’s-land that is also nogod’s-land; he is a marginal, transitional or, better, interstitial Wgure.’

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separate, sphere in which his energy and ambition are without equal or consummation. As an intermediate or ‘interstitial’ Wgure, he is both vulnerable and dangerous.31 His isolation is the result of his greatness, but also his ‘colossal individuality’,32 self-absorption, obsessive concern for his virtus and the absolute primacy of his will (‘This is my mind and I will have it so’, Part I, iv. ii. 91), and his conviction that he is the sole executant of a divine purpose (‘I that am term’d the Scourge and Wrath of God’,33 Part I, iii. iii. 44). In Part II Tamburlaine’s most telling Herculean speech, and most violent assertion of autarkeia, reaches a climax in the sacriWcial-style murder of his cowardly son Calyphas (iv. i. 111–20): Here, Jove, receive his fainting soul again; A form not meet to give that subject essence Whose matter is the Xesh of Tamburlaine, Wherein an incorporeal spirit moves, Made of the mould whereof thyself consists, Which makes me valiant, proud, ambitious, Ready to levy power against thy throne, That I might move the turning spheres of heaven; For earth and all this airy region Cannot contain the state of Tamburlaine. [stabs Calyphas]

Following the pattern set by Seneca’s Hercules furens, Tamburlaine claims parity with Jupiter before issuing impious threats against Jupiter’s sovereignty. Lines 118–20 immediately recall Juno’s allegation against her stepson, nec satis terrae patent (‘Even the earth is not room enough’, 46), and Hercules’ deluded declaration of war on his father’s Olympian throne: in alta mundi spatia sublimis ferar, petatur aether: astra promittit pater. —quid, si negaret? non capit terra Herculem tandemque superis reddit. (958–61) 31 On the vulnerability and dangers of the interstitial Wgure, see Douglas (1969), 95–6 and 104. 32 Waith (1962), 77. 33 In Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus, the hero, addressing Jupiter, refers to himself in similar terms: ‘ille qui pro fulmine j tuisque facibus natus in terris eram’ (‘He who was born on earth in place of your Wery thunderbolt’, 1143–4).

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I must travel on high to the lofty expanses of the cosmos, and make for the sky: the stars are my father’s promise. What if he should now refuse? The earth cannot contain Hercules, and at last yields him to the world above.

Both heroes have outgrown the limits imposed by heaven and earth; they rage prodigiously and alone. A quite diVerent but equally compelling example of Herculean aspiration and autarkeia is the character of Hieronimo in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Braden argues: ‘Whatever the exact chronological relationship between Kyd’s play and Marlowe’s, The Spanish Tragedy provides the logical succession to Tamburlaine. . . . Kyd brings England’s unusually expansive version of Senecan selfhood into the crucial arena of revenge tragedy, where Renaissance drama forces that selfhood into its most intimate dealings with the lives around it.’34 Hieronimo, Knight Marshall of Spain, is driven mad with grief by the murder of his son Horatio, and, failing to secure justice, he plots to carry out his personal revenge. In common with Hercules, his mania, isolation, and restless punitive quest coalesce in titanic and tragic fashion; his solitude becomes pathological, unreachable. As he spurs himself to the task of vengeance in Act iii, he compares his uncompromising mission to Hercules’ destructive katabasis, employing language which simultaneously recalls Hercules’ hallucinatory assault on heaven: The upper billows, course of waves to keep, Whilst lesser waters labour in the deep, Then sham’st thou not, Hieronimo, to neglect The sweet revenge of thy Horatio? Though on this earth justice will not be found, I’ll down to hell, and in this passion Knock at the dismal gates of Pluto’s court, Getting by force, as once Alcides did, A troop of Furies and tormenting hags To torture Don Lorenzo and the rest. Yet lest the triple-headed porter should Deny my passage to the slimy strand, The Thracian poet thou shalt counterfeit: Come on, old father, be my Orpheus, And if thou canst no notes upon the harp, Then sound the burden of thy sore heart’s grief, 34 Braden (1985), 200.

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‘Even the earth is not room enough’ Till we do gain that Proserpine may grant Revenge on them that murdered my son. Then will I rend and tear them thus and thus, Shivering their limbs in pieces with my teeth. (iii. xiii. 106–23)

As with Herculean Tamburlaine, earth cannot contain the rage and the vengeful aspirations of Hieronimo. In enlisting a ‘troop of Furies and tormenting hags’ (114), Hieronimo is also likening himself to Seneca’s Juno, who marshals against Hercules the infernal army of Dis, Scelus, Impietas, Error, and Furor (95–9). Brower maintains that the most important feature of the Senecan hero and his style of speech (and the one which particularly distinguishes him from Homeric and Virgilian heroes) is ‘the immense sense of self, and the accompanying use of language to direct attention to the self ’.35 As we have observed in the speeches of Tamburlaine, this ‘immense sense of self ’ is also one of the main features of the Herculean hero. Characteristic of Senecan Hercules’ sane and insane discourse is his habit of referring to himself in the third person, or using his name as an aggressive assertion of self (631, 635, 957, 960, 990, 1152, 1155, 1163, 1168, 1218, 1295, 1316). This habit is an intrinsic part of Hieronimo’s autarkic rhetoric: Who calls Hieronimo? Speak, here I am. (ii. v. 4) Hieronimo, ’tis time for thee to trudge. Down by the dale that Xows with purple gore Standeth a Wery tower; there sits a judge Upon a seat of steel and molten brass, And ’twixt his teeth he holds a Wrebrand, That leads unto the lake where hell doth stand 35 Brower (1971), 169. T. S. Eliot found repugnant the Senecan hero’s self-assertiveness and self-absorption. Of Othello’s last great speech (v. ii. 338–56), in which the Moor refers to himself in the third person, he wrote (1951, 130–1): ‘What Othello seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about himself. Humility is the most diYcult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself. Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic Wgure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatizing himself against his environment. He takes in the spectator, but the human motive is primarily to take in himself.’

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Away, Hieronimo, to him be gone! He’ll do thee justice for Horatio’s death. . . . Justice, O justice to Hieronimo! (iii. xii. 6–13, 27) See, see, O see thy shame, Hieronimo. (iii. xiii. 95)

Similarly, in the Wnal act, Hieronimo’s triumphant exclamations before killing himself, ‘know I am Hieronimo’ (iv. iv. 83) and ‘now behold Hieronimo, j Author and actor in this tragedy’ (iv. iv. 146–7), are moments of autarkic epiphany which correspond strongly to Hercules’ declaration that he is the author of his family’s and his own destruction (‘hoc unum meum est’, 1268).

‘ H I C E R R AT S C E LUS ’ : M AC B E T H The most psychologically and morally complex incarnation of Herculean autarkeia in the Elizabethan tragic canon is Shakespeare’s Macbeth, whose Xight to exalted selfhood and the resulting crash to ordinary mortality are, as Miola notes, clearly ‘plotted along Senecan coordinates’.36 Like Seneca’s Hercules, Macbeth’s immoderate hopes (‘spes immanes’, 162) to scale ad astra ‘start him on a vertiginous descent to hell’.37 His ‘restless ecstasy’ (iii. ii. 22) is especially Herculean (cf. HF 613–14: ‘quid restat aliud? . . . da si quid ultra est’ and 996: ‘quid moror?’); he ‘is always in an emergency, desperate to overtake, to leap over, to outrun’.38 The tragic essence of both heroes is captured in Braden’s analysis of extreme autarkeia: To choose the way of self-conscious horror, a way systematically opposed to all other human desires and responsibilities, is to certify an absolute lack of ulterior motivation; no other part of the soul is being gratiWed or even courted. ‘What I was praised for doing, I did on orders,’ says Seneca’s Hercules, looking on the bodies of his murdered family, ‘only this is my own’ (Herc.f. 1268). Heroic evil is the ultimate autarceia [sic], enforcing and exploiting a radical split between the self’s needs and the claims of its context.39 36 Miola (1992), 111. On the Senecan resonances in Macbeth, see Peyre´ (2004), 141–55. 37 Miola (1992), 111. 38 Poole (1987), 42. 39 Braden (1985), 47.

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The terrifying results of this radical split are enacted in the heroes’ anagno¯riseis. Hercules’ anagno¯risis in Act v is consistent with, and potently symbolic of, his tragic selfhood. Boldly deviating from Euripides’ psychotherapeutic stichomythia between father and son, Seneca reveals to us the terrible workings of the autarkic conscience. Hercules is the self-proclaimed author of his crime; unaided in his recognition, his bloodstained hands betray his guilt: Miserere, genitor, supplices tendo manus. quid hoc? manus refugit: hic errat scelus. unde hic cruor? quid illa puerili madens harundo leto? tincta Lernaea est nece. iam tela video nostra. non quaero manum. quis potuit arcum Xectere aut quae dextera sinuare nervum vix recedentem mihi? ad vos revertor, genitor: hoc nostrum est scelus? tacuere: nostrum est. (1192–9) Have pity, father, I hold out my hands in supplication. What? He pulled back from my hands: the crime is lurking here. Why this blood? What of that shaft, soaked by a boy’s death? It is steeped in the Hydra’s fatal blood. Now I see my weapons. I need not ask about the hand. Who could have bent that bow, what hand Xexed the string that barely yields to me? I turn to both of you again, father: is this crime mine? They are silent: it is mine.

In the wake of his Wrst crime, the murder of Duncan, Macbeth, focusing on his ‘hangman’s hands’, undergoes a correspondingly autarkic anagno¯risis. The diVerence is that Macbeth’s anagno¯risis marks only the beginning of his madness and his hellish odyssey into the darkest reaches of his soul: macbeth One cried, ‘God bless us!’ and, ‘Amen,’ the other, As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands. List’ning their fear, I could not say, ‘Amen,’ When they did say, ‘God bless us!’ lady macbeth Consider it not so deeply. macbeth But wherefore could not I pronounce ‘Amen’? I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’ Stuck in my throat. lady macbeth These deeds must not be thought After these ways: so, it will make us mad.

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macbeth Methought, I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murther Sleep,’—the innocent Sleep; Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds,40 great Nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast;— lady macbeth What do you mean? macbeth Still it cried, ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house: ‘Glamis hath murther’d Sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more!’ lady macbeth Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy Thane, You do unbend your noble strength, to think So brainsickly of things. Go, get some water, And wash this Wlthy witness from your hand.— . . . macbeth Whence is that knocking?— How is’t with me, when every noise appals me? What hands are here? Ha! they pluck out mine eyes. (ii. ii. 26–46, 56–8)

This anagno¯risis takes the form of a virtual soliloquy in which the terror of Macbeth’s subconscious mind is projected onto the screen of his consciousness. He seems not to hear his wife, but to communicate in a state of solitary Wxation, responsive only to the importunate sounds and images conjured up from his raw conscience. The auditory hallucinations of Duncan’s disembodied voice and the knocking, and the visual hallucination of the hands that pluck out Macbeth’s eyes, are, as Somerville describes, ‘the expression in consciousness of the content of a mental conXict, and the acuteness of the fear is . . . directly proportional to the severity of the conXict’.41 Somerville interprets the hero’s incipient madness in this scene as a ‘distortion in his a-social personality’.42 In other words, Macbeth’s guilt intensiWes, to the point of mania, an already abnormal aloofness—the self-imposed isolation and inverted altruism of the Herculean overreacher. 40 Muir (1959), 56 believes it ‘probable that ‘‘balm of hurt minds’’ was suggested by the situation in Hercules Furens, where the Chorus invokes Sleep to cure the madness of the hero’. The relevant lines are HF 1065–7: ‘tuque, o domitor j Somne malorum, requies animi, j pars humanae melior vitae’ (‘And you, o Sleep, subduer of troubles, rest for the spirit, sweeter part of human life’). 41 Somerville (1979), 48. 42 Ibid. 42.

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The words manus and dextra dominate the linguistic texture of Hercules Furens, continually underlining the duality of the Herculean nature and modus vitae. Often they are used as metonyms for the hero’s celebrated strength and civilizing deeds. As the focus of Hercules’ anagno¯risis, they vividly symbolize the realization of the monster-slayer’s potential to turn monster. The stain attached literally to Hercules’ hands, and Wguratively to his soul, is commensurate with his greatness and his extravagant style of selfhood: quis Tanais aut quis Nilus aut quis Persica violentus unda Tigris aut Rhenus ferox Tagusve Hibera turbidus gaza Xuens abluere dextram poterit? Arctoum licet Maeotis in me gelida transfundat mare et tota Tethys per meas currat manus, haerebit altum facinus. (1323–9)43 What Tanais or what Nile or what Persian Tigris with its violent waters or Werce Rhine or Tagus, turbid with Spanish treasure, can wash my right hand clean? Though chill Maeotis should pour its northern seas over me and all the Ocean stream across my hands, the deed will stay deeply ingrained.

In his parallel anagno¯risis, Shakespeare uses Seneca’s hand motif to symbolize Macbeth’s Herculean scelus and indelible miasma: Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand?44 No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red. (ii. ii. 59–62)45 43 Cf. Seneca’s Phaedra 715–18, in which Hippolytus cries out after being polluted by his stepmother’s attempted seduction: ‘quis eluet me Tanais aut quae barbaris j Maeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari? j non ipse toto magnus Oceano pater j tantum expiarit sceleris’ (‘What Tanais will wash me or what Maeotis pressing barbarous Xoods into the Pontic sea? Not the mighty father himself with all his Ocean will expiate such a crime’). 44 C. B. Young (cited by Muir (1959), 58) points out that Shakespeare’s echo at ii. ii. 59–60 is closer to the original than Jasper Heywood’s translation of HF 1328 (‘And al the water therof shoulde now pas by my two handes’). 45 On the familiar possibility that Macbeth ii. ii. 59–62 is an amalgamation of Hercules Furens 1323–9 and Phaedra 715–18, see Muir (1959), 57–8. Miola (1992, 112–14) persuasively argues for Hercules Furens as a source. The hand motif is, of course, peculiar to the Hercules passage.

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In so doing, he exploits the autarkic intensity of the original lines, their revealing combination of horror, aspiration, and exhilaration. As Poole explains: ‘[Macbeth] is overwhelmed by the sheer excitement of possibility, of beginning. The great lines about the multitudinous seas acknowledge the vast magical forces that lie beyond his control, but they also express the absurd, magniWcent desire to tame and possess those powers for himself, to reduce multitudinousness to oneness.’46 The diVerence between the two passages is one of placement and of psychological and moral emphasis. The Senecan passage comes at the close of the play and is accompanied by a preWgurement, however bleak and brieXy sketched, of Hercules’ absolution. Seneca’s main interest in the Herculean psychology and morality is located in the scenes up to and including the madness. Unlike Euripides’ Herakles, the nature of Hercules’ heroism does not undergo signiWcant development or transformation as a result of his furor and scelus. Shakespeare’s main interest is diVerently located. As Miola discerns, the displacement of the anagno¯risis from the end of Hercules Furens to the second act of Macbeth ‘enables more searching exploration of the eVects of scelus, measured in terms personal, social, and universal’.47 Macbeth’s is almost a Herculean journey in reverse, a journey further and further away from absolution and redemption. What both heroes share, however, near the end of their respective journeys, is an acute sense of autarkic desolation: Cur animam in ista luce detineam amplius morerque nihil est; cuncta iam amisi bona, mentem arma famam coniugem natos manus, etiam furorem. (1258–61) There is no reason for me to keep lingering in this light any further. I have lost all of value: my mind, my weapons, glory, wife, sons, hands—even my madness. I have lived long enough. My way of life Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf, And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have. (Macbeth, v. iii. 22–6) 46 Poole (1987), 47.

47 Miola (1992), 112.

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Each is essentially aphilos, not merely friendless but beyond the reach of human philia, a condition plainly demonstrated by Hercules’ inability to weep for his murdered sons (‘lacrimare vultus nescit’, 1229) and by Macbeth’s impassive acceptance of the news of his wife’s death (v. v. 17–28).

‘HOC UNUM MEUM EST ’: CORIOLANUS Aspiration and corruptibility render Macbeth aphilos; for him, as for Tamburlaine and Hieronimo, isolation is a corollary of his restlessness. But for Shakespeare’s incorruptible Coriolanus the condition of aphilia, the ‘drive toward superior isolation’,48 is an end in itself. He hugs his solitariness to him; it is what sustains him, and the only means by which he believes he can claim authorship of himself. It is his persistence in this belief which brings him closest to the tragic core of Seneca’s Hercules. The main source of Coriolanus is Plutarch’s ‘Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’ in his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, which Shakespeare read in the English translation by Thomas North (1579). Shakespeare’s departures from Plutarch’s biography are what make his hero more Senecan. Most importantly, to the account of the battle in which Martius earns his cognomen he adds a single crucial word, ‘alone’.49 This becomes a recurring theme: Following the Xiers at the very heels, With them he enters; who, upon the sudden, Clapp’d to their gates; he is himself alone, To answer all the city. (i. iv. 49–52) Within these three hours, Tullus, Alone I fought in your Corioles walls, And made what work I pleas’d. (i. viii. 7–9) 48 McCanles (1967), 44–53, at 49. 49 Cf. Plutarch’s version in Brooke (1909, 149): ‘But he looking about him, and seeing he was entered the city with very few men to help him . . .’.

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Know, Rome, that all alone Martius did Wght Within Corioles gates. (ii. i. 162–3) Alone he enter’d The mortal gate of th’ city . . . (ii. ii. 110–11)

It is also, Waith stresses, ‘one of the touches which reveals most unequivocally [Shakespeare’s] heroic conception of the character. In Coriolanus the opposition of the individual might of the hero to the superior forces of nature and fate is pushed to the uttermost.’50 Coriolanus’ isolationism takes many forms. In the Wrst place he harbours a pathological distaste for the ordinary citizenry, making it his mission to be at perpetual variance with their cause: He seeks their hate with greater devotion than they can render it him, and leaves nothing undone that may fully discover him their opposite. (ii. ii. 18–21)

In contrast to his friend and father-Wgure Menenius, he refuses, even at the cost of the consulship, to aVect aVability and bestow blandishments, in short, to play the politician. He is ‘too absolute’ (iii. ii. 39), ‘too noble for the world’ (iii. i. 25). Nor is his lack of political mildness and ease compensated for by the revelation of a domestic self. At no point in the play do we see Coriolanus enjoying his home and family. His parting from his family at the opening of Act iv is perfunctory (‘Come, leave your tears. A brief farewell!’), and recalls precisely the instructions of Seneca’s Hercules to his loved ones (diVer amplexus, ‘postpone your embraces’, 638; diVerte Xetus, ‘postpone your tears’, 1175). Perhaps to an even greater degree than Hercules, Coriolanus is an interstitial hero. He is set apart by his superhuman martial prowess (‘And with a sudden reinforcement struck j Corioles like a planet’, ii. ii. 113–14), his colossal physical presence (‘He’ll shake your Rome about your ears. j As Hercules j Did shake down mellow fruit’, iv. vi. 99–101), and his godlike aura (‘the nobles bended j As to Jove’s statue’, ii. i. 265–6). Above 50 Waith (1962), 142.

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all, what separates himis his unwillingness to belong, to be part of awhole. He must be entire of himself. When he is banished from Rome, he declares deWantly, ‘There is a world elsewhere!’ (iii. iii. 135). Yet, so determined is he to be both aphilos and apolis that he has no real place in any world; he is neither Roman nor Volscian, but remains ‘a kind of nothing, titleless’ (v. i. 13). His otherworldliness is perceived by the Roman general Cominius, observing Coriolanus’ eVect on the Volscian forces: ‘He leads them like a thing j Made by some other deity than nature, jThat shapes man better’ (iv. vi. 91–3). On leaving Rome, Coriolanus tells his mother Volumnia: ‘I go alone, j Like to a lonely dragon that his fen j Makes fear’d and talk’d of more than seen’ (iv. i. 29–31). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this is the Wrst recorded use of the word ‘lonely’ in the English language.51 ‘It is’, says Poole, ‘as if Shakespeare were making Martius Wnd a new syllable, to ‘‘exceed the common’’. ’52 Immediately after Coriolanus’ banishment, Volumnia rouses herself by invoking the wrath of Hercules’ stepmother: ‘In anger, Juno-like. Come, come, come!’ (iv. ii. 53). The self-comparison is apt, for in the last act it is she who initiates Coriolanus’ decisive war against himself, the battle between his desire for superior isolation and the constraints of Wlial love. As ‘the honour’d mould j Wherein this trunk was fram’d’ (v. iii. 22–3), she is the source of his isolated being, his counsel in self-truth, and as such he must honour her. Coriolanus is thus ‘perfectly trapped by the Wssure in the nature created by his mother’s nurture’.53 Having aligned himself with his great enemy AuWdius in the pursuit of vengeance against Rome, he resolves to be merciless: ‘Wife, mother, child, I know not’ (v. ii. 81). At the approach of the familial embassy mustered under Volumnia, he summons his intransigent, unnatural solitariness: But out, aVection! All bond and privilege of nature break! Let it be virtuous to be obstinate. What is that curtsy worth? or those doves’ eyes, Which can make gods forsworn? I melt, and am not Of stronger earth than others. My mother bows, As if Olympus to a molehill should In supplication nod; and my young boy Hath an aspect of intercession which Great nature cries, ‘Deny not’. Let the Volsces 51 OED (2001), viii. 1122.

52 Poole (1988), 76.

53 Ibid., 105.

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Plough Rome and harrow Italy: I’ll never Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand As if a man were author of himself And knew no other kin. (v. iii. 24–37)

But his hope of authorship of himself is eventually vanquished by the ‘colder reasons’ (v. iii. 86) of his one true author, Volumnia, whose admonitions and entreaties recall those of Seneca’s Amphitryon (HF 1306–13): For myself, son, I purpose not to wait on fortune till These wars determine. If I cannot persuade thee Rather to show a noble grace to both parts, Than seek the end of one, thou shalt no sooner March to assault thy country than to tread— Trust to’t, thou shalt not—on thy mother’s womb That brought thee to this world. (v. iii. 118–25)

Coriolanus knows that his capitulation is a fatal act of treason against himself. He has allowed his mother to penetrate the solitariness that sustains him: O mother, mother! What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope, The gods look down, and this unnatural scene They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O! You have won a happy victory to Rome; But for your son, believe it, O believe it, Most dangerously you have with him prevail’d, If not most mortal to him. But let it come. (v. iii. 185–92)

Her victory is visible in her son’s alien tears: ‘it is no little thing to make j Mine eyes to sweat compassion’ (v. iii. 199–200). Yet, ultimately, it is not Coriolanus’ capitulation to the bonds of philia which destroys him, but rather his reassertion of his aphilos self. In the Wnal scene AuWdius taunts Coriolanus with the very emblems of the latter’s surrender of self-authorship: ‘thou boy of tears!’ (v. vi. 101). It is this accusation, far more than AuWdius’ cries

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of ‘traitor’, which cuts Coriolanus to the quick. He responds by inviting his own death in a chilling utterance of autarkic perfection: Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads, Stain all your edges on me. Boy! False hound! If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there, That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I Flutter’d your Volscians in Coriole. Alone I did it. Boy! (v. vi. 111–16)

The Herculean Coriolanus, who seeks self-authorship through extreme aphilia, is in many ways a preWgurement of the Nietzschean Herakles who emerges in the Modernist period in the work of Lodge, Yeats, and Wedekind.54 In both cases, the hero’s isolation is a dangerous creed of transcendence, which holds the self as divinity and universe. It is a creed as far removed from Euripidean philia as is possible to get.

‘QU I S H I C LOC U S? ’ : K I N G L E A R A ND PE R I C L E S Act v of Hercules Furens memorably opens with the hero’s disorientated and rhetorically grandiose awakening from the restorative sleep that has overtaken madness: Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? ubi sum? sub ortu solis, an sub cardine glacialis Ursae? numquid Hesperii maris extrema tellus hunc dat Oceano modum? quas trahimus auras? quod solum fesso subest? certe redimus. (1138–43) What place is this, what region, what tract of the earth? Where am I? Beneath the sun’s rising, or beneath the turning point of the icy Bear? Can this be the limit set to Ocean’s waters by the farthest land on the western sea? What air do I breathe? What ground lies under my weary body? Certainly I have returned.

This ‘interrogative awakening into painful self-consciousness was a topos variously employed on the Elizabethan stage’,55 and frequently 54 See below, Chap. 8.

55 Miola (1992), 166.

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by means of direct quotation or adaptation of the Senecan passage. In Part III (5.3) of Richardus Tertius (1580), Thomas Legge quotes lines 1138–9 of Hercules Furens to indicate the perplexity and fear of Henry Tudor alone and lost on the battleWeld: Quis hic locus? quae regio? quae regni plaga? ubi sum? ruit nox. hei ubi satellites? inimica cuncta. fraude quis vacat locus? quenquam rogabo? tuta sit Wdes vide. nativus artus reliquit internos calor rigore frigent membra vix loquor metu tremisco totus. (14–20) What place is this, what region, what quarter of the kingdom? Where am I? The night hastens on. Ah! where are my followers? All around is hostile. What place is free from deceit? Shall I ask anyone? Take care that his loyalty is assured! The natural warmth has left my inward joints; my limbs are frozen with stiVness. I can scarcely speak for fear. I tremble all over.

In Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600), John Marston uses the same two lines to signal the beginning of Pasquill’s furor, and in Alaham (1600), Fulke Greville presents his own version of Senecan percontatio and Herculean dusgnoia: But what is this? Wake I, or doe I dreame? If chang’d; with whom, or into whom am I? Doth Horror dazell sense, or multiply? What world is this? Where’s Alaham? Where my Sonne? (v. iii. 99–102)

Other contemporaneous examples of the Herculean sequence of temporary insanity, palliative sleep, and confused awakening include Bomelio in the anonymous The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (1582) and the hero of Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso (1591). Like Seneca’s Hercules, Bomelio’s madness begins with the sensation of darkness and has two levels of causation—internal and external; his melancholic disposition is worsened by the goddess Fortuna’s persecution of him. Greene’s Orlando twice imagines himself in his madness to be Hercules, and his furor causes him to mistake his servant for his enemy Medor and violently to attack Medor’s accomplice.

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With the latter’s detached leg in his hand, he swings it about as though it were Hercules’ club, and calls for a lion’s skin, declaring: ‘Thou seest I now am mightie Hercules j Look, wheres my massie club upon my necke’ (ii. i). Later he orders his servant to fetch from Apollo the shirt of Nessus (iv. ii). The Herculean ravings of Bomelio and Orlando are cured only by sleep. Two satirical treatments of this ‘awakening’ topos are found in the academic play Lingua (1607) and James Shirley’s Love Tricks (1625). In the earlier work the boisterous coward Tactus becomes raving mad, and ‘cannot be persuaded but he is Hercules furens’. He is eventually bound by Somnus and his delirium remedied by sleep. Although a satirical creation, Tactus owes something to Seneca’s characterization of Hercules as a tragic miles gloriosus, an impetuous braggart constrained by an unthinking, unfeeling brand of heroism. These stage representations of remedial sleep in the context of Herculean furor also reXect contemporary medical opinion and pharmaceutical practice. As Blanshard observes: ‘Seventeenth-century physicians even recommended a ‘‘sleep cure’’ for madness based on the period of unconsciousness experienced by Hercules before he regained his sanity. Such a period of oblivion they reasoned allowed the black bile that had ascended from the stomach to the brain to be breathed out.’56 Narcotics such as opium and tobacco were commonly prescribed for this purpose. The most famous Herculean awakening in Elizabethan drama occurs in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act iv, scene vii: Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight? I am mightily abused. I should ev’n die with pity To see another thus. I know not what to say. I will not swear these are my hands: let’s see— I feel this pinprick. Would I were assured Of my condition. . . . I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you and know this man, 56 Blanshard (2005), 60. For an overview of medical perspectives on sleep in this period, see Dannenfeldt (1986), 415–41. On Renaissance beliefs in both the remedial and harmful eVects of sleep, and in sleep as a near-relation to death, see Pollard (2005), 67–8.

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Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant What place this is and all the skill I have Remembers not these garments; nor I know not Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me, For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. (iv. vii. 52–6, 63–9)

Here we have the same ‘slow drift back into consciousness, the disordered sense of place, the fearful possibility that this waking is a waking into damnation’.57 But what is remarkable about this scene is its Euripidean rather than Senecan substance. As in the case of Euripides’ Herakles, Lear’s awakening marks the beginning of his rehabilitation which is achieved through philia, through the loyalty of Gloucester and Kent and, above all, the redemptive love of his daughter Cordelia who, in common with Euripides’ Amphitryon, plays the part of the gentle psychotherapist and agent of anagno¯risis: O my dear father, restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss Repair those violent harms that my two sisters Have in thy reverence made. (iv. vii. 26–9)

Lear’s interrogative awakening is more muted and less grandiose than Hercules’, more naturalistic and less rhetorical. In place of Hercules’ rage and self-assertion he exhibits humility, contrition, and a Heraklean sense of aidos. He also aYrms his humanity (‘as I am a man’).58 Unlike Herakles, of course, Lear wakes to the joyous realization that the child whom he wronged (not in his madness, but in full consciousness) is alive. Yet, it is this very diVerent realization that starts Lear on a Heraklean journey towards forgiveness and salvation. In contrast to Senecan Hercules’ autarkeia, Lear’s restoration and recognition are characterized by a new, childlike dependence and vulnerability (‘this child-changed father’, iv. vii. 17), which, paradoxically, enable the 57 Braden (1993), 245–64, at 259. 58 Cf. Euripidean Herakles’ bitter scepticism towards Zeus and his acknowledgement of mortal Amphitryon as his true father at 1263–65. As Barlow (1996, 178) notes: ‘Here Heracles is questioning his very identity.’

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rehabilitation of his majesty and fatherhood.59 The progress of this rehabilitative scene recalls Arrowsmith’s description of Euripides’ Herakles as ‘a play which imposes suVering upon men as their tragic condition, but . . . also discovers a courage equal to that necessity, a courage founded on love’.60 The scene ends with Cordelia leading her father oV ‘in a brief but indelible version of Herakles’ exit with Theseus’.61 ¨.

ı
æfi c Eæ ; ›
ªø
 Kª. (theseus. ‘Put your arm round my neck, and I shall lead you’, 1402) . . . ˙æ. E
 IƺÆ ÆN ÆØ
 j ¨E

ÆºØ łŁ KºŒ
. (herakles. ‘I who have desolated my house with shame and am utterly destroyed, shall follow Theseus like a small boat in tow’, 1423–4). cordelia Will’t please your highness walk? lear You must bear with me. Pray you now, forget and forgive; I am old and foolish. (iv. vii. 82–4)

‘Shakespeare’, Braden perceives, ‘in eVect restores to the Senecan scene an important part of what Seneca cuts out of Euripides; the proud man’s discovery of a dependence and comfort that in fact will restore his ruined standing (he is again ‘‘your Highnesse’’).’62 As we know, the happy ending promised by that discovery is prematurely annulled by the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. With this Wnal peripeteia Shakespeare takes us ‘from a consolation beyond Euripides’ to a despair beyond Seneca’s. . . . [His] recasting of the classical scene recapitulates its past and exceeds it’.63 But, for reasons which Brower articulates, the play does not end with Seneca’s nihilistic despair; it ends, like Euripides’ Herakles, with an image and an aYrmation of transcendent love in the midst of insupportable fortune: Lear’s demand for love, with which King Lear began, was an assertion of self, and the only answer to that demand is Cordelia’s. But ‘love suVreth long and is kind’, though the answer is ‘nothing’. Hence the overwhelming eVect of Lear’s last words, that in the face of ‘No, no, no life!’ he looks for life, and he loves. . . . Lear 59 As in Euripides, the roles of parent and child are reversed. Cf. King Lear, v. iii. 10–11, where, Brower (1971), 412 states: ‘As father kneels to child and asks forgiveness, a new and tender inversion of relations takes place.’ 60 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 53. 61 Braden (1993), 245–64, at 260. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 261.

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dies loving and looking for life—that is ‘the wonder’, a kind of greatness more remarkable than the power of endurance that Kent marvels at. To love and hope with full tragic knowledge of the injustice, cruelty, and confusion of life is to pass beyond god-like hero to something god-like indeed.64

In Act v, scene i of the tragicomic Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which has several points of similarity with Act iv, scene vii of King Lear, Shakespeare again recapitulates and transcends the Herculean anagno¯risis. To paraphrase Miola, Pericles is the antitype of a Senecan protagonist and endures a kind of anti-furor, which culminates not in a scelus of cosmic proportions but in a moving reunion scene between father and daughter:65 pericles This is the rarest dream that e’er dull sleep Did mock sad fools withal; this cannot be My daughter, buried. . . . How came you in these parts? where were you bred? marina The king my father did in Tarsus leave me; Till cruel Cleon, with his wicked wife, Did seek to murder me; and having woo’d A villain to attempt it, who having drawn to do’t, A crew of pirates came and rescu’d me; Brought me to Mytilene. But, good sir, Whither will you have me? Why do you weep? It may be You think me an impostor: no, good faith; I am the daughter to King Pericles, If good King Pericles be. (v. i. 162–4, 170–80)

T. S. Eliot discerned the Herculean subtext beneath the climactic moment of Pericles’ recovery and recognition, selecting the beginning of Hercules’ anagno¯risis (1138) as an epigraph to his poem ‘Marina’ (1930), which opens with a striking enjambement of Senecan percontatio: What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands What water lapping the bow And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog What images return O my daughter. (1–5) 64 Brower (1971), 415.

65 Miola (1992), 194.

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The Senecan epigraph implicitly contrasts Pericles’ joyful recognition of his daughter Marina, whom he believed was dead, with Hercules’ tragic recognition of his murdered children. In a postscript to his letter presenting the draft of ‘Marina’ to the Bodleian Library, Eliot wrote: ‘I intend a criss-cross between Pericles Wnding alive, and Hercules Wnding dead—the two extremes of the recognition scene—but I thought that if I labelled the quotation it might lead readers astray rather than direct them. It is only an accident that I know Seneca better than I know Euripides.’66 Eliot’s self-confessed greater familiarity with the Senecan version may account for his failure to discern the Euripidean subtext beneath Pericles’ recognition and Shakespeare’s subtle repudiation of Herculean autarkeia in favour of Heraklean philia. If Seneca is ‘the closest Shakespeare ever got to Greek tragedy’,67 the very fact of a discernible Euripidean subtext in his plays raises fascinating, if ultimately unanswerable, questions. The close aYnities in essence between the rehabilitative awakenings of Herakles, Lear, and Pericles also illustrate Burrow’s point about the imaginative complexity of Shakespeare’s mobilization of classical allusion: ‘A large part of the creativity of Shakespeare lies in his willingness to overlayer one shard of ‘‘the classics’’ with another, to misremember, and to reinvent what he has read.’68 Seneca’s charismatic and uncontainable Hercules, who is nourished and made desolate by the same ferocious sense of selfhood, assumed many roles on the Elizabethan stage. As character and concept he became a tragic archetype for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. However, his subsequent inXuence was never as profound or pervasive, and for a time the Herculean hero of Senecan tradition eVectively disappeared from the English stage. The causes of his disappearance are bound up with changes, which were initiated during the Restoration, in audience composition, theatrical tastes, and heroic ideals. The greatest achievement of the Restoration stage was the wit and social satire of its comedy of manners, which laid the foundations of 66 Quoted in Moody (1994), 158. 67 Martindale (1990), 44. See also Silk (2004), 241–57, at 241. 68 Burrow (2004), 9–27, at 24.

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a quintessentially English comic mode. By contrast, the Restoration heroic play was one of the more short-lived forms in the history of the theatre. Its most proliWc exponent was John Dryden (1631– 1700), who endeavoured unsuccessfully to acclimatize the trappings of French neoclassicism in English. With Dryden the heroic genre rose, Xourished, and fell. In his major plays, The Conquest of Granada (1670), Aureng-Zebe (1675), and All for Love (1677), we Wnd ‘legitimate descendants of the earlier Herculean heroes. However . . . these descendants speak and behave very diVerently from their forebears. One of the reasons why they do so is the acknowledged inXuence of the romance, and especially of the French romance.’69 Likewise, there are echoes of the Herculean hero in Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane (1702), but the distance between this play and the Senecan world of Marlowe is vast. Restoration heroic drama was not part of the problematizing tragic tradition. Its aim was to inspire admiration and wonder, and a happy ending, which witnessed poetic justice for the brave and noble, was de rigueur. Sober emphasis was placed on the virtues of valour, honesty, and love, and, above all, on decorum and propriety. Propriety required, for example, Nahum Tate in his version of King Lear (1681) to restore Lear to his throne and marry Cordelia to Edgar. In the same way, in his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth (published in 1682), Tate replaced the desolate spectacle of Martius’ Wercely autarkic death with ‘an impeccable funeral tableau; Martius dies with his wife under one arm and his son under the other, the perfect family man’.70 Towards the end of the Restoration, and at the beginning of the Georgian era, theatre audiences became more numerous and less sophisticated, and were now more likely to comprise members of 69 Waith (1962), 154. Nearer in essence to the earlier Herculean heroes is the hero of Dryden and Nathaniel Lee’s Oedipus (1678), whose deWant last words call to mind Seneca’s grandiloquent and bombastic overreacher. On Dryden and Lees’s debt, in this Wnal speech, to Seneca and to Milton’s Samson Agonistes, see Macintosh (2005a), 1–29, at 20. 70 Poole (1988), 120. The autarkic intensity of Shakespeare’s ending is also missing from James Thomson’s Coriolanus (Wrst performed posthumously in 1749), in which the hero, recalling his victory at Corioles, says nothing of being ‘alone’. As Waith remarks, the omission of this word ‘makes all the plainer the consequences of Shakespeare’s climactic emphasis on Coriolanus as an individual who can never be assimilated into a city, his own or another’ (1962, 143).

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the professional and merchant classes than the aristocracy. The change in audiences was accompanied by a shift in the type of plays presented: sentiment supplanted comedy, and pathos substituted for tragedy. Under these new conventions, the psychologically and morally complex Herculean hero lost his theatrical appeal. In the early to mid-eighteenth century the work of dramatists such as George Lillo (1693–1739), who is best remembered for his play The London Merchant; or, the History of George Barnwell (1731), inXuenced the development of bourgeois tragedy and domestic drama, the prototypes of Arthur Miller’s tragedy of the common man. The discovery and elevation of the ordinary entailed a suspension of dramatic interest in the extraordinary, and the semi-divine Hercules, greatest of all classical heroes, was an obvious casualty of this movement. Waith mentions a slightly later development, which had similar consequences for tragic Hercules—the rise of the novel: Admiration for the uncompromisingly individual warrior ceases for a time, to begin again in a somewhat diVerent form in the Romantic movement. HeathcliV and Captain Ahab, diVerent as they both are from Tamburlaine or Morat, are loved and feared for somewhat similar reasons. Their shocking infractions of the code of ordinary decency are similarly accepted as integral parts of their heroism. That the most obvious examples of the type occur in the novel rather than on the stage is one of many indications of the absorption by the novel of themes formerly sacred to epic and tragedy.71

The lengthy absence of the Herculean hero from English drama reXects a more universal neglect. Following his Renaissance revival, there is a hiatus of almost two centuries in the reception of mad Herakles, the hero of Euripidean-Senecan tradition. He Wrst reappears at the turn of the nineteenth century, not in literary or dramatic form but in the work of Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova, one of the few artists ever to have attempted to capture the moment of Herakles’ Wlicidal rampage.72 On the theme of ‘Hercules in his Madness Killing his Sons’, Canova executed a preliminary sketch, an oil painting, a wax bozzetto, and Wnally, in 1803–4, a plaster relief, which is housed in the Canova Museum in his home town of 71 Waith (1962), 201. 72 Canova’s better-known depiction of Hercules, and indeed one of his most celebrated works, is his marble sculpture Hercules and Lichas, completed in 1815.

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Possagno. This last conveys an extraordinary sense of space and momentum.73 Hercules, an immense form of grim unstoppability, leans far to the left, extending his bow to the full. At the extreme right is the half-Xeeing, half-turning Wgure of Megara, cradling a dead son in her left arm. Her other sons are scattered about the scene in various attitudes of terror and supplication. In the centre of the relief Amphitryon hurls himself before Hercules in a futile attempt to avert complete disaster. This central Wgure of frantic intercession reveals Canova’s chief source to be Euripides’ Herakles, a fact known to copyists who, in engravings of the relief, provided act and scene numbers. As Blanshard comments, ‘Canova doesn’t just want us to look, he wants us to read’.74 In terms of documented performance, the gap is even greater; Euripides’ Herakles does not reappear, in his own right, on a professional stage anywhere in the world until the beginning of the twentieth century.75 His rediscovery occurs gradually and mainly through the personal and progressive eVorts of a few individuals in the late nineteenth century and early Modernist period. It is intrepid philological enquiry allied with rare poetic vision which engineers Herakles’ eventual reinstatement and reinvention in theatres across Britain, Europe, and the United States. 73 For detailed descriptions of the scene depicted in the relief, see Licht (1983), 262 and Blanshard (2005), 41–6. 74 Blanshard (2005), 46. 75 Euripides’ Herakles does, however, appear in his own right in a production by Reading School in the late Georgian period. See Appendix 2. See also Hall (1997b), 59–81, at 68. Antonis Varveris apparently directed a performance of Herakles in Greece in 1879, but very few details of this production have been recorded.

5 Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist: the nineteenth-century damnatio of Euripides The nineteenth century represents a crucial transitional stage in the reception of Euripides’ Herakles. It was an era in which interest in ancient drama generally was rekindled, when substantial studies of the tragic genre were undertaken, and a time when beliefs in the comparative merits of its best-known authors were devoutly witnessed. For most of the century Euripides was dogmatically cast as the least of the poets who made up the Wfth-century tragic triumvirate; and the diYcult and disturbing Herakles was, like many of his plays, not so much singled out for scorn or condemnation, as ignored. Consistent, however, with the overall historical pattern of the Herakles’ reception, whereby each generation has produced few, but notable, advocates of the play’s worth, the nineteenth century fostered a small number of eminent, and sometimes surprising, champions whose heresy was both peculiar to its time and in advance of it. The staunchest and most radical of these champions was the poet Robert Browning, in his Aristophanes’ Apology of 1875. In order to appreciate the full signiWcance of this work, it is Wrst necessary to understand the critical and literary orthodoxy against which Browning’s radicalism asserted itself, as well as the emergent, but tentatively voiced, heterodoxy which he energized. What follows is essentially a survey of the nineteenth century’s reception of Euripides and, in particular, the Herakles. The survey is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to record the principal studies made of the playwright and to illustrate the views expressed by his chief detractors and disciples. It is conWned to Germany and Britain, where the century’s major scholarship on Greek tragedy

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and the text of Herakles, and certainly that which had the most direct impact on Browning and his contemporaries, was centred. It ends in 1880, before the most intensive phase of Euripides’ rehabilitation in the Modernist era. This rehabilitation was distinguished by the progressive works of three notable scholars: Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorV, who substituted historicism for classicism as a methodology for the investigation into Wfth-century tragedy; A. W. Verrall, who applied to Euripides’ plays an extreme brand of rationalism; and Gilbert Murray, who ‘viewed the plays primarily as pieces of theatre which were to be relished and criticized as such’.1 Finally, with regard to the scope of the present survey, it will encompass not only literary criticism and scholarly editing, but also translation and poetry.

T H E NATURE OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY HELLENISM Ironically, many twentieth-century critics have tended towards the sort of generalizations and conWdent assertions which, they contend, are characteristic of nineteenth-century Hellenism, in their own attempts to scrutinize the trends of Euripidean criticism in the nineteenth century. Gilbert Murray, writing in 1913 in Euripides and His Age, from a Modernist perspective and with almost immediate hindsight of the Victorian era, identiWed this tendency, and indeed equally embodied it, in his analysis: The Victorian Age had, amid enormous diVerences, a certain similarity with the Periclean in its lack of self-examination, its rush and chivalry and optimism, its unconscious hypocrisy, its failure to think out its problems to the bitter end. And in most of the current criticism on things Victorian, so far as it is not mere fashion or folly, one seems to feel the Victorian spirit itself speaking. It arraigns Victorian things by a Victorian standard.2

Murray identiWes two general aspects of the nineteenth century’s reception of Euripides. The Wrst, outlined in Euripides and His Age,

1 Barrett (1996), 39–50, at 47.

2 Murray (1913), 6.

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is the pronounced polarization of opinion and allegiances surrounding the philosophical and political import of the extant Euripidean corpus in the nineteenth century: ‘As a thinker he [Euripides] is even to this day treated as a personal enemy by scholars of orthodox and conformist minds; defended, idealized and sometimes transformed beyond recognition by various champions of rebellion and the free intellect.’3 The second aspect of the nineteenth century’s reception identiWed by Murray (slightly later, in 1915) is the pejorative stamp which the classicist reading of Attic drama had placed on Euripides: ‘Greek drama has always suVered from a school of critics who approach a play with a greater equipment of aesthetic theory than of dramatic perception. This is the characteristic defect of classicism. One mark of the school is to demand from dramatists heroes and heroines which shall satisfy its own ideals.’4 Murray’s last remark is echoed, much later in the century, in Richard Jenkyns’s assessment of the comparative levels of favour in which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were held during the Victorian age. ‘The Victorians’, he says, ‘tended to worship those artists who were most unlike themselves—Homer, Raphael, Bach— and perhaps the supposed modernity of Euripides did not help his reputation.’5 Ann Norris Michelini, in her outline of the history of Euripidean interpretation, makes the same point: The antimodernist or classicist stance that was associated with the educational mission of ancient or ‘classical’ studies made it diYcult to assimilate an artist who was perceived as similar to the moderns. In fact it was only in comparison with modern poetry like that of Racine that Euripidean art was likely to appear at all admirable. This negative view of Euripides was pervasive and powerful throughout almost all the nineteenth century.6

However true, in a broad sense, these generalizing remarks are, they fail to do justice to the complexity of nineteenth-century Hellenism. Jenkyns, for example, after taking to task Victorian critics’ convenient labelling of the three tragedians according to their supposedly deWnitive qualities, oVers his own, perhaps overly tidy, classiWcation: ‘Speaking crudely, one can say that Aeschylus was the most inXuential 3 Murray (1913), 1. 5 Jenkyns (1980), 107.

4 Murray (1915), p. vi. 6 Michelini (1987), 6.

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of the three in the romantic period, Sophocles in the middle of the Victorian age and Euripides towards the end of the century.’7 Jenkyns is clearly acknowledging the somewhat arbitrary nature of his demarcation, but what such a generalization does is occlude the role played by Euripides earlier in the century. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Hellas8 (1822) demonstrate that, in many respects, the Romantics did indeed ‘discover’ Aeschylus. At the same time, however, Sophocles and Euripides were also favourites of Shelley, as The Cenci9 (1820) and his surprising translation of The Cyclops10 (published posthumously in 1824) prove. More surprising still is the apparent interest of Shelley’s contemporary, Byron, in the Euripidean-Senecan Herakles. In Don Juan Byron makes two slightly enigmatic references to Hercules Furens, the Wrst in an aside, the second in a simile. In Canto 11. 52 (1823) he describes ‘That prodigy, Miss Araminta Smith j (Who at sixteen translated Hercules Furens j Into as furious English)’, and in Canto 17. 11 (1824), detailing his changes of temperament, he likens himself at times to ‘a sort of ‘‘Hercules furens’’ ’.11 Towards the midcentury, Mendelssohn’s Antigone, which was performed at Covent Garden in January 1845, led to wide interest in the play, and in Sophocles as the classical exemplar.12 In the same period, however,

7 Jenkyns (1980), 106. 8 Hellas was based on Aeschylus’ Persae. See Hall’s introduction to her edition of the Persians (1996), 1–33, and Wallace (1997), 196–205. 9 The Cenci was inXuenced by Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Wrst staged in 1886. For a study of Shelley’s Greek translations, see Webb (1976), chaps. 1–3, and of The Cenci, esp. 36–7 and 212–13. 10 The Cyclops was a translation of Euripides’ satyr play. See Webb (1976), 79–87 and Wallace (1997), 71–5. 11 Byron’s references to Hercules furens are unusual. The episode of Herakles’ madness scarcely features in the concordances to the major English poets of the 19th century. However, the choice, labours, and death of Herakles were comparatively fertile and popular themes for 19th-century writers and artists. See Reid (1993), 515–61, esp. 530, 545–6, and 551. 12 This production, which was overseen by Friedrich Wilhelm IV, employed Johann Jakob Christian Donner’s translation of Sophocles’ text as well as Mendelssohn’s orchestral introduction and choral settings. It premie`red in Potsdam in October 1841, and was performed in Paris in 1844 before transferring to London the following year. For the inXuence of the ‘Mendelssohn Antigone’ on the 19th century, see Macintosh (1997), 284–323, at 286–9.

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stage adaptations of Euripides’ Medea13 and Alcestis14 were inXuencing popular and parliamentary debate about the marital state generally, and divorce legislation speciWcally, which precipitated Britain’s Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857. And whilst at the end of the century Euripides was in many ways ‘rediscovered’, predominantly by the sympathetic scholarship of Wilamowitz, Murray, Verrall, and Norwood, it is also true that Aeschylus, and especially his Agamemnon, became hugely popular from the 1880s onwards.15 In the audience at Frank Benson’s presentation of the Agamemnon at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1880 were Browning, Tennyson, and Oscar Wilde. When the production transferred to London, among those who saw it were George Eliot, Henry Irving, and Ellen Terry. Sophocles also found favour in the last two decades of the century, as shown by the choice of Ajax as the inaugural Cambridge Greek play in 1882.

TH E SC H L E G E L I A N E U R IP I D E S B I L D The most inXuential and durable appraisal of Euripides in the period between 1800 and 1880 was by August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1843). This appraisal had a complex genesis that is frequently overlooked or misunderstood by modern commentators. Schlegel and his younger brother Friedrich (1772–1829) were largely responsible for popularizing and enshrining the Romanticist approach to the study of ancient Greek poetry, an approach fuelled by hostility towards French neoclassicism. They idealized for modern poets and critics the quality of completion (Volkommenheit) in ancient literature, and made the inseparableness of moral and aesthetic values, of personality and art, an article of faith. Friedrich Schlegel concentrated much of his eVorts on Greek epic poetry, while his brother is best known for his Vorlesungen

13 See Hall (1999), 42–77 and Macintosh (2000), 75–99, esp. 80: ‘The Wgure of Medea, the abandoned wife and mother, was adopted and adapted on the stage to illuminate the discussion about divorce legislation from, at least, the mid-1840s onwards.’ 14 See Macintosh (2001), 281–308, and particularly her discussion of Frank Talfourd’s burlesque production of Alcestis, Wrst staged at London’s Strand Theatre in 1850. 15 See Macintosh (2005b), 139–62.

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u¨ber dramatische Kunst und Literatur (Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature), which were delivered in Vienna in 1808, ten years before his appointment as Professor of Art and Literary History at Bonn University. Between them the Schlegels disseminated a theory, which prevailed virtually unchallenged for two-thirds of the nineteenth century, of Verfall, of literature’s progressive degeneration from the Greeks to the moderns.16 A. W. Schlegel exercised this theory to compelling eVect in his treatment of the Greek tragedians. Of his thirty lectures, nearly half are concerned with the ancient drama and, in these, it is Sophocles who is held up as the sublime exemplum of the classic standards of harmony, completion, and dignity, and Euripides who represents the antitheses of these qualities. What has seldom been made clear, however, is that in regard to Euripides the Schlegels were not of one mind. Ernst Behler, redressing the misconception, initiated by August Wilhelm, that Friedrich Schlegel’s views on Euripides were indistinguishable from his own, maintains: ‘August Wilhelm simpliWed his brother’s complex and ambiguous image of Euripides to an almost entirely negative one.’17 By appropriating and magnifying Friedrich’s concept of a sudden fall from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Euripides, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegel inaugurated a phenomenon that we may describe as the nineteenthcentury damnatio of Euripides’.18 Behler reconstructs Friedrich’s view of Euripides from a broad range of sources, including extant unpublished material for an uncompleted history of Attic tragedy, earlier articles on Greek literature, and later histories on ancient and modern literature. His close examination of these sources reveals an ambivalent and not unsympathetic attitude, which Behler terms Friedrich’s ‘dual evaluation of Euripides’.19 While Friedrich Schlegel found much to criticize and regret in Euripides’ dramaturgy, his essentially progressive literary and historical philosophy yielded a less monochromatic portrait of the poet than is commonly assumed. It was his brother’s

16 Such ‘evolutionary’ literary theories were not uncommon in the 18th and 19th centuries and were not conWned to tragedy. Epic poetry was frequently plotted and studied according to a scale which descended from the noble primitivism of Homer to the modern elegance of Virgil. See e.g. Jenkyns (1980), 8. 17 Behler (1986), 335–67, at 359. 18 Ibid. 335. 19 Ibid. 350. See also 351–4.

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critique of Euripides, however, that was the more sustained and publicized. In his eighth lecture, entitled ‘Euripides: His Merits and Defects— Decline of Tragic Poetry Through Him’, August Wilhelm Schlegel expounded a denunciatory catalogue of complaints which became, for most of the century, the received classicist view of Euripides as populist, libertine, atheist, misogynist, and subversive sophist. He prefaces this catalogue with an exposition of his urgent didactic purpose, namely to arrest the decadence plaguing contemporary dramaturgy: When we take him in his connexion with the history of art, when we look at each of his pieces as a whole, and again at the general scope of his labours, as revealed to us in the works which have come down to us, we are forced to censure him severely on many accounts. . . . He either wanted the lofty earnestness of purpose, or the severe artistic wisdom, which we reverence in Aeschylus and Sophocles, to regulate the luxuriance of his certainly splendid and amiable qualities. His constant aim is to please, he cares not by what means; hence is he so unequal: frequently he has passages of overpowering beauty, but at other times he sinks into downright mediocrity. We have, besides, a particular reason for censuring without reserve the errors of this poet; the fact, namely, that our own age is infected with the same faults with those which procured for Euripides so much favour, if not esteem, among his contemporaries. In our times we have been doomed to witness a number of plays which, though in matter and form they are far inferior to those of Euripides, bear yet in so far a resemblance to them, that while they seduce the feelings and corrupt the judgement, by means of weakly, and sometimes even tender, emotions, their general tendency is to produce a downright moral licentiousness.20

For a modern reader, Schlegel’s portrait of Euripides, and the ‘revolution’ he wrought, depicts a Wfth-century equivalent of the ‘angry young man’ or ‘kitchen-sink’ dramatist, a tormentor of respectable conservatism.21 Euripides used as his framework the dramatic conventions of his day in order to reinterpret the subjects, both divine and mortal, 20 Schlegel (1846, rev. English edn.), 111–12. 21 John Osborne worked within a traditional three-act structure when, in 1956, he gave a new dramatic voice to a classless and leaderless section of post-war British society in Look Back in Anger. See Kenneth Tynan’s review of the original Royal Court production (Observer, 13 May 1956). For alternative readings of the ‘revolutionary’ Angry Young Men, see Rebellato (1999) and Carpenter (2002).

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of the well-known myth cycles.22 Accordingly he had, in Schlegel’s estimation, domesticated, or even trivialized, the tragic register exempliWed by his predecessors and had infused familiar tales and sacred notions with an all-too-modern scepticism: [Euripides] endeavours to Wll up, or to build over the chasm that yawned between his contemporaries and that wondrous olden world, and to come upon the gods and heroes in their undress. . . . He introduces his spectators to a sort of familiar acquaintance with them; he does not draw the supernatural and fabulous into the circle of humanity, but within the limits of the imperfect individuality. . . . He takes delight in depicting the defects and moral failings of his characters.23

Schlegel does not name the Herakles in the course of his attack. With the exception of a comparative review of Aeschylus’ Choephoroe and the Sophoclean and Euripidean versions of Electra, his pronouncements on the tragedians are generally made without illustration from the plays themselves. He does mention the Herakles in his tenth lecture, where he comments brieXy on the lack of causal unity between the two halves of the play.24 Nevertheless, the general faults which Schlegel enumerates would seem to have particular application to the Herakles. The other main charge brought against Euripides by Schlegel was that of agnosticism, or indeed atheism, which was linked in the critic’s eyes to a sneering and morally destabilizing intellectualism: ‘He thinks it too vulgar a thing to believe in the gods after the simple manner of the people, and he therefore seizes every opportunity of interspersing something of the allegorical interpretation of them, and carefully gives his spectators to understand that the sincerity of his own belief was very problematical.’25 Implicit in this judgement is the notion, which Nietzsche later developed into the pivotal tenet of his 22 J. A. Symonds and Gilbert Murray each drew a distinction between the traditionalism of Euripides’ dramatic technique and the radicalism of his ideas: ‘All the cumbrous paraphernalia of the Aeschylean theatre environed the men and women of Euripides, who cut but a poor Wgure in the garb of demigods’, Symonds (1893), 21; ‘In speculation he is a critic and a free lance; in artistic form he is intensely traditional. He seems to have loved the very stiVness of the form in which he worked. He developed its inherent powers in ways undreamed of, but he never broke the mould or strayed away into shapelessness or mere realism’, Murray (1913), 7. 23 Schlegel (1846), 114–15. 24 Ibid. 137. 25 Ibid. 116.

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attack on Euripides, of the pernicious force of ‘Socratism’ operative in Euripides’ plays. Throughout the nineteenth century the issue of Euripides’ alleged agnosticism and irreverence was a regular, and often crucial, feature of the debate surrounding his poetic merit. Among the few to speak in Euripides’ defence on this point was John Keble (1792–1866), who, while Professor of Poetry at Oxford in the 1830s, argued that the poet’s depiction of the purest chastity (ŒÆŁÆæ) in his Hippolytus preWgured Christ’s promise that the pure in heart shall see God (Matthew 5: 8).26 Towards the end of the century a theory arose according to which the Bacchae was written as a palinode (recantation), and provides evidence of Euripides’ oldage conversion to religious orthodoxy. Walter Pater (1839–94) expounded this theory in an essay on the Bacchae which formed part of his Greek Studies of 1895: Writing in old age, he is in that subdued mood, a mood not necessarily sordid, in which (the shudder at the nearer approach of the unknown world coming over him more frequently than of old) accustomed ideas, comfortable to a sort of common sense regarding the unseen, oftentimes regain what they may have lost, in a man’s allegiance. It is a sort of madness, he begins to think, to diVer from the received opinions thereon. . . . Euripides has said, or seemed to say, many things concerning Greek religion, at variance with received opinion; and now, in the end of life, he desires to make his peace—what shall at any rate be peace with men. He is in the mood for acquiescence, or even for a palinode, and this takes the direction, partly of mere submission to, partly of a reWning upon, the authorised religious tradition. . . . It is this extravagant phase of religion, and the latest-born of the gods, which as an amende honorable to the once slighted traditions of Greek belief, he undertakes to interpret.27

The ‘merits’ which Schlegel ascribes to Euripides are few and seldom unequivocally conceded, but are usually precursory to an ever-more damning indictment of the playwright’s transgressions. In the concluding remarks of his eighth lecture, for example, he declares that Euripides:

26 See Jenkyns (1980), 92. For the notion of Euripides as a proto-Christian, cf. Browning’s The Ring and the Book, 10. 1717–25. 27 Pater (1895), 50, 55. On the ‘palinode’ theory and its prevalence in the 19th century, see Dodds (1960), pp. xl–xlii. Dodds remarks on the irony that ‘good Christian editors seem to have been gratiWed by this notion of their poet’s eleventh-hour conversion to pagan orthodoxy’ (p. xl).

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has a particular strength in portraying the aberrations of a soul diseased, misguided, and franticly abandoned to its passions. He is admirable where pathos and moral beauty are united. Few of his pieces are without passages of the most ravishing beauty. It is by no means my intention to deny him the possession of the most astonishing talents; I have only stated that these talents were not united with a mind in which the austerity of moral principles, and the sanctity of religious feelings, were held in the highest honour.28

Schlegel is not insensitive to Euripides’ Wner poetic qualities, but his sensitivity and occasional enthusiasms are much muted. Moreover, when he lists Euripides’ contemporary detractors, Schlegel singles out, with particular praise for his ‘inWnite cleverness and inexhaustible Xow of wit’,29 the comic poet Aristophanes who, he says, ‘seems almost ordained to be his [Euripides’] perpetual scourge, that none of his moral or poetical extravagances might go unpunished’.30 This reverential nod to the comic poet provides one of the most important keys to the Schlegelian Euripidesbild and, indeed, the nineteenthcentury damnatio of Euripides. Schlegel’s evaluation of Euripides is famously encapsulated in the line: ‘He has neither the dignity and energy of Aeschylus, nor the chaste sweetness of Sophocles.’31 The inXuence of his estimation of the Greek tragedians was profound and widespread. The fact that his comments had been embraced at both a popular and a scholarly level accounted for the longevity of the century’s classicist perspective of its literary ancestry. Schlegel’s antipathy towards Euripides, however, was not received entirely without dissent by his contemporaries. Most notable among those of his countrymen who opposed him was Goethe (1749–1832). In a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann, which Eckermann records as having taken place on Wednesday, 28 March 1827, Goethe condemned Schlegel’s biased and dubiously founded criticism of the drama. The conversation begins with a consideration of Hinrich’s book on the nature of antique tragedy, and progresses through Sophocles and Molie`re to Schlegel’s treatment of Molie`re and the Greek tragedians in his lectures. Goethe’s scathing response to the critic, and his own high opinion of Euripides, are clearly set forth: 28 Schlegel (1846), 121. 30 Ibid.

29 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 120.

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He [Schlegel] is . . . just to Aeschylus and Sophocles; but this does not seem to arise so much from a lively conviction of their extraordinary merit as from the tradition among philologists to place them both very high; for, in fact, Schlegel’s own little person is not suYcient to comprehend and appreciate such lofty natures. If this had been the case, he would have been just to Euripides too, and would have gone to work with him in a diVerent manner. But he knows that philologists do not estimate him very highly, and he feels no little delight that he is permitted, upon such high authority, to fall foul of this mighty ancient, and to schoolmaster him as much as he can. I do not deny that Euripides has his faults; but he was always a very respectable competitor with Sophocles and Aeschylus. If he did not possess the great earnestness and the severe artistic completeness of his two predecessors, and as a dramatic poet treated things a little more leniently and humanely, he probably knew his Athenians well enough to be aware that the chord which he struck was the right one for his contemporaries. A poet whom Socrates called his friend, whom Aristotle lauded, whom Menander admired, and for whom Sophocles and the city of Athens put on mourning on hearing of his death, must certainly have been something. If a modern man like Schlegel must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought only to do it upon his knees.32

Schlegel’s Vienna lectures gained enormous currency through their subsequent publication in four editions (1809, 1816, 1845, and 1846) and their translation into almost every European language. In 1815 the lectures were Wrst translated into English by John Black. A second English edition appeared in 1840, and was followed in 1846 by a ‘Revised Edition According to the Last German Edition’ by A. J. W. Morrison. By the middle of the century the impact of Schlegel on British classical scholarship was easily discernible.

MAT THEW AR NO LD’S SILENCE Schlegelian Romanticism, and German Hellenism in general, played a vital role in formulating the concept of Hellenism which informed the poetry and criticism of Matthew Arnold (1822–88), one of the Victorian age’s most proliWc and decided theorists on Greek culture.33 It is 32 Trans. Oxenford, in Eckermann (1850), 377–8. 33 For a detailed discussion of Matthew Arnold’s Hellenism, see Turner (1981), 17–36.

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useful, when considering his opinions on ancient tragedy, to bear in mind that, despite its ubiquity and inXuence, Arnold’s Hellenism is strangely unrepresentative of, or at least unresponsive to, the period of scholarship in which it was formulated. According to Turner: ‘The content of Arnold’s Hellenism was largely uninformed by recent classical scholarship. Arnold had read widely in Greek literature, but not deeply in contemporary classical studies. From his earliest prose works through the discussion in Culture and Anarchy Arnold’s concept of Hellenism and what the Greeks had been like combined the intellectual elements of English humanism and German aesthetic Hellenism.’34 The signiWcance of Arnold to Euripidean reception in the nineteenth century resides in his studied silence on the tragedian, and his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford35 in November 1857 (published in 1869) was programmatic in this regard. The lecture, entitled ‘The Modern Element in Literature’, opens with a broad statement of Arnold’s cultural belief and prepares the standard by which his judgement of literature is to be delivered: An intellectual deliverance is the peculiar demand of those ages which are called modern; and those nations are said to be imbued with the modern spirit most eminently in which the demand for such a deliverance has been made with most zeal, and satisWed with most completeness. Such a deliverance is emphatically, whether we will or no, the demand of the age in which we ourselves live. All intellectual pursuits our age judges according to their power of helping to satisfy this demand; of all studies it asks, above all, the question, how far they can contribute to this deliverance.36

Arnold Wnds ‘a mighty agent of intellectual deliverance’37 in the literature of ancient Greece, and he employs ‘the idea of the common modernity of Periclean Athens and Victorian Britain to assert the direct relevance of the literary achievement of Greece for British literary life’.38 He praises Aeschylus and especially Sophocles for their idealized representation of the heroic world and their ‘positive cultural function in their own modern age’.39 Aristophanes, whom, 34 Turner (1981), 22. 35 Arnold was the Wrst Professor of Poetry at Oxford whose lectures were delivered in English rather than Latin. 36 Arnold (1857a), in Super (1960), i. 18–37, at 19. 37 Ibid. 20. 38 Turner (1981), 28. 39 Ibid. 29.

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to a large extent over the next two decades, Arnold assimilated to his own critical and literary creed, is defended for his equally positive value to Wfth-century Athenian society in his ability to expose fundamental truths through comedy. Euripides is barely mentioned40 in the course of Arnold’s lecture, and is thus condemned by exclusion. Unlike Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, Euripides did not provide in his drama the requisite intellectual deliverance, which Arnold sought for his own age of confusion from the literature of the Greeks. In one respect Arnold’s silence on Euripides was less detrimental than his voluble praise of Sophocles; at least he had not made Euripides the prosaic emblem of a reactionary cause. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford, Arnold’s deWnition of Sophocles’ supreme attribute and greatest legacy comes as a thunderous anticlimax: ‘The peculiar characteristic of the highest literature—the poetry—of the Wfth century in Greece before the Christian era, is its adequacy; the peculiar characteristic of the poetry of Sophocles is its consummate, its unrivalled adequacy.’41 As Jenkyns wryly comments: ‘Arnold made Sophocles, the man who ‘‘saw life steadily, and saw it whole’’, the patron saint of his crusade against the Philistines, but he made him sound so dull. . . . Who would join a crusade that had ‘‘Adequacy’’. . . emblazoned upon its banners?’42 On the rare occasions when Arnold breaks his silence on Euripides, in order to compare him unfavourably with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he does not entirely do him a disservice. In the Preface to Merope (also written in 1857), for example, Arnold distances himself from those critics who condemn Euripides outright and, in the process of declaring the moral essence of Euripides’ work inferior to that of Aeschylus and Sophocles, he manages to make Euripides sound an intriguing and colourful, if ethically problematic, poet: ‘In none of the extant dramas of Aeschylus or Sophocles is there a character which is entirely bad. For such a character we must go to Euripides; we must go to an art—wonderful indeed, for I entirely dissent from the unreserved disparagers of this great poet—but an 40 Euripides is mentioned just once, and in passing, towards the end of the lecture, where he is grouped with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes as one of the chief dramatic poets of the 5th century whose work has survived. 41 Arnold (1857a), in Super (1960), i. 18–37, at 28. 42 Jenkyns (1980), 105.

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art of less moral signiWcance than the art of Sophocles and Aeschylus; we must go to tragedies like the Hecuba, for villains like Polymestor.’43 As Jenkyns implies,44 Arnold’s creation of a dull Sophocles and a shadowy Euripides may have unwittingly contributed to a general revival of interest in Euripides in late nineteenth-century Britain.

NIETZSCHE AND THE SOCRATIC MASK At the beginning of 1872 a new and extreme form of assault on Euripides was launched within Germany with the publication of Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) Die Geburt der Trago¨die aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music). The novelty of Nietzsche’s assault lay not in his treatment of Euripides, but in the nature of his overall reading of Greek tragedy, wherein, against the entrenched classicism of his day and its championship of Sophocles, he proclaimed a primitivism, or archaism, which had Aeschylus as its prototype. Its extremism, on the other hand, was in the thesis itself and, speciWcally, Nietzsche’s apportionment of blame for the demise of the tragic medium. Nietzsche had adopted, and taken to its utmost limit, Schlegel’s evolutionary scheme, his theory of degeneration in literature. Whereas Schlegel had seen Euripides as the agent through which tragedy’s decline was eVected, Nietzsche branded him its very murderer.45 Nietzsche had Wrst made this accusation publicly two years earlier, in the second of two lectures on ancient drama, ‘Sokrates und die Trago¨die’ (‘Socrates and Tragedy’), which was delivered on 1 February 1870. In this lecture he based his argument on what was commonly accepted as the Aristophanic interpretation of Athenian culture (as derived principally from The Frogs), and drew a direct link between Socratic rationalism in Euripidean drama and the death of the Aeschylean tragic form. He develops this thesis in chapters 43 Arnold (1857b), in Super (1960), i. 38–64, at 55. 44 Jenkyns (1980), 105–6. 45 As Henrichs (1986), 369–97, at 381 points out, Nietzsche added to the familiar Romantic cycle of birth, maturity and death, a ‘post-mortem phase, which he perceived as a new birth, or a modern renaissance’.

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11–14 of The Birth of Tragedy.46 In the opening chapters he sets out the antithesis, which will dominate his argument, between the Apolline and Dionysiac impulses in art, that is, according to Nietzsche, the only genuine impulses in art. In chapter 12 he declares: Dionysus had already been scared from the tragic stage, and in fact by a demonic power which spoke through Euripides. Even Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether new-born demon, called Socrates. This is the new antithesis: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the art-work of Greek tragedy was wrecked on it. . . . The most magniWcent temple lies in ruins. . . . And even that Euripides has been changed into a dragon as a punishment by the art-critics of all ages—who could be content with this wretched compensation.47

Henrichs demonstrates convincingly that the fundamentals of Nietzsche’s invective against Euripides are derived from Schlegel, and that Nietzsche oVers little that is original, insightful, or based on a close reading of the poet he maligns. Moreover, Henrichs rightly argues that the Euripidesbild in The Birth of Tragedy is Schlegelian theory unqualiWed and unmitigated, a direct consequence of the climate attending its embryonic form: Nietzsche was raised in an intellectual climate rife with harsh criticism of Euripides. When he entered the elite boarding school of Schulpforta in the fall of 1858, the modern depreciation of Euripides that began, in Germany, with Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and culminated in the Schlegels, had attained the status of absolute academic orthodoxy. Two generations of schoolmasters and university professors had managed to deprive August Wilhelm’s verdict of its Wner, more conciliatory touches and to reduce it to a crude catalogue of the poet’s worst sins against dramatic convention and good taste.48

Nietzsche’s condemnation of Euripides motivated two polemical pamphlets in response from a fellow alumnus of Schulpforta four years his junior, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-MoellendorV (1848–1931), who had been compelled by Rudolph Scho¨ll to review the book and was destined to become, in William M. Calder III’s phrase ‘sospitator 46 For an exposition of Nietzsche’s argument in these chapters, see Silk and Stern (1981), 73–77. 47 Nietzsche (1872), in Levy (1909), i. 95–6. 48 Henrichs (1986), 369–97, at 373.

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Euripidis’.49 On 30 May 1872 Wilamowitz published a thirty-two-page attack entitled Zukunftsphilologie! Eine erwidrung auf Friedrich Nietzsches ‘Die Geburt der Trago¨die’ (Future-Philology! A Rejoinder . . . ). Erwin Rohde (1845–98), for many years before his Wnal apostasy a staunch friend and defender of Nietzsche’s, counterattacked with his own pamphlet Afterphilologie (Pseudo- (or ‘Backside’) Philology), which prompted a twenty-four-page rejoinder from Wilamowitz, Zukunftsphilolgie! Zweites Stu¨ck, published on 21 February 1873.50 To an even greater extent than Schlegel,51 Nietzsche’s argument is constructed largely on generalizations, and his references to the actual plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are made in a very desultory fashion.52 The only Euripidean play on which he comments is the Bacchae in chapter 12, while the Alcestis is alluded to in chapter 8. As Henrichs maintains, the function of Euripides within the design of The Birth of Tragedy was essentially a negative one; but, ultimately and ironically, the portrait of Euripides that emerged from Nietzsche’s study had a positive impact on the playwright’s subsequent reception by re-igniting the debate on ancient tragedy in the last decades of the nineteenth century: ‘Nietzsche was not interested in Euripides per se, but he needed him as a reverse image of Aeschylus, the true tragedian, and as negative proof for his 49 ‘Sospitator Euripidis’ forms part of the title of a discussion by Calder (1986), 409–30, of Wilamowitz’s rehabilitative work on Euripides. He opens this discussion by citing some striking bibliographical statistics: ‘Athenian tragedy always remained a center of his [Wilamowitz’s] interest. Within this center he wrote least on Sophocles, more on Aeschylus, but most on Euripides. The Hiller/KlaVenbach bibliography lists 45 items on Euripides, against 19 on Aeschylus and 18 on Sophocles’ (409). 50 Wilamowitz’s pamphlets are reprinted in Gru¨nder (1969), 27–55 and 113–35. See also Calder (1983), 214–54, and Silk and Stern (1981) 95–107. Lloyd-Jones (1982), 178 has summarized the dispute between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz thus: ‘Wilamowitz asked, ‘‘What can we do for philology?’’; Nietzsche preferred to ask, ‘‘What can philology do for us?’’ To the classicists, with whom Nietzsche’s standpoint has so much in common, the ancients had supplied a pattern, an ideal standard of excellence; for the historicists with their relativistic outlook no such thing could exist.’ 51 Henrichs’s claim (1986), 369–97, at 381 that ‘Schlegel’s points are always speciWc and based on a close reading of Euripides’ cannot be supported by the relevant Lectures themselves. 52 According to Silk and Stern (1981), 62, crude generalizations are a consistent Xaw in Nietzsche’s argument: ‘Nietzsche frequently alludes, without explaining the allusions, to more or less well-known features of Greek tragedy or the Greek world; he gives virtually no dates for artists, thinkers, or events, ancient or modern; and he sometimes makes points that rest, clearly enough, on unstated presuppositions.’

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overall concept of tragedy. That concept, for better or worse, turned out to be an inWnitely greater source of inspiration for subsequent critics than anything Schlegel ever said on the subject of tragedy.’53 Silk and Stern arrive at a very similar conclusion, believing that, despite his gross unfairness to Euripides, Nietzsche’s treatment of the poet had the virtue of being ‘consistently right in raising the right issues’,54 and that, of the three tragedians, it is Euripides whom Nietzsche unwittingly succeeds in bringing to life: It is perhaps to the point that if Nietzsche shows no sympathy with Euripides, he nevertheless pays him the compliment of empathy. Where Aeschylus and Sophocles remain shadowy Wgures, Euripides is made real. He sits in the theatre and thinks (§11); he is a ‘passionate actor’ (§12); in the ‘evening of his life’ he recants (§12). Accurately or not, Nietzsche ‘goes into’ him, in fact he psychologizes him—and thereby, without any such intention, vindicates one of Euripides’ own supreme innovations.55

THE BEGINNING OF EURIPIDES’ REHABILITATION That The Birth of Tragedy made little immediate impression on English criticism is attested by the fact that in 1873 it is Schlegel’s attack on Euripides to which John Addington Symonds (1840–93) responds in the Wrst series of the Wrst edition of his Studies of the Greek Poets. What Symonds has in common with Nietzsche, however, is his deployment of Schlegel’s degeneration theory as a premise and point of departure for his own interpretation of tragedy’s evolution; the diVerence being that Symonds is now acting as an apologist for Euripides. Symonds begins his interpretation with the claim: ‘The law of inevitable progression in art, from the severe and animated embodiment of an idea to the conscious elaboration of merely aesthetic motives and brilliant episodes, has hitherto been neglected by the critics and historians of poetry.’56 Symonds refers, Wrst in broad terms, to three generations of artists and to the qualities that necessarily deWne each of these, concluding of the third generation: 53 Henrichs (1986), 369–97, at 385. 55 Ibid. 262.

54 Silk and Stern (1981), 258. 56 Symonds (1873), i. 207.

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They have either to reproduce their models—and this is stiXing to true genius; or they have to seek novelty at the risk of impairing the strength or the beauty which has become stereotyped. Less deeply interested in the great ideas by which they have been educated, and of which they are in no sense the creators, incapable of competing on the old ground with their elders, they are obliged to go aWeld for striking situations, to force sentiment and pathos, to subordinate the harmony of the whole to the melody of the parts, to sink the prophet in the poet, the hierophant in the charmer.57

He then applies this law of sequence to Greek sculpture, the three orders of Greek architecture, proto-Renaissance and Renaissance painting, and Wnally to the three tragedians. He draws a parallel between Correggio and Euripides, whose function in this schema is to illuminate their artistic genealogy and serve as archetypal specimens of that genealogy’s natural end: ‘Those who rightly understand them must, we imagine, be prepared to accept with gratitude the existence of Correggio and Euripides, both as complementing Giotto and Æschylus and also as accounting for the meridian splendour of Sophocles and Raphael. Without the cadence of Euripides the majestic aria of Sophocles would hardly be played out. . . . It is thus, as it were, that like projectiles, arts describe their parabolas and end.’58 Symonds’s strategy, therefore, is not to deny the majority of defects of which Schlegel accuses Euripides, but instead to demonstrate that these defects have an intrinsic historical and evolutionary value: ‘Cultivated in all innovations of morality and creed, Euripides belonged essentially to his own day. As far as a tragic dramatist can be the mouthpiece of his age, Euripides was the mouthpiece of Athenian decline. . . . Aeschylus was the Titanic product of a bygone period; Sophocles displayed the pure and perfect ideal; but Euripides was the artist who, without improving on the spirit of his age, gave it a true and adequate expression.’59 The achievement of Euripides, Symonds insists, must be gauged within the context of its own time. He voices his impatience with adherents to Schlegel’s school of thought, whom he brands a ‘malevolent generation of critics’.60 These critics, he argues, oVend against the law of sequence, which he applies to art, by making comparisons across the generations and neglecting the inherent 57 Ibid. 208. 59 Ibid. 201.

58 Ibid. 209. 60 Ibid. 211.

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worth of each of art’s evolutionary phases: ‘It is false criticism, surely, to do as Schlegel, Mu¨ller, and Bunsen have successively done to measure Euripides by the standard of the success of his predecessors, or to ransack his plays for illustrations of pet dramatic theories, and then because he will not bear these tests, to refuse to see his own distinguished merits.’61

THE I RISH REBELS: MAHAFFY AND WILDE In a footnote to his commendation of Browning’s Balaustion’s Adventure in the second volume of the third edition of his Studies in 1893, Symonds acknowledges: ‘Since this chapter was Wrst published, Mr. Browning has still further enforced his advocacy of Euripides by Aristophanes’ Apology, while the great tragic poet has found a staunch defender from the carping criticasters of the Schlegel school in Dr. MahaVy.’62 The Revd John Pentland MahaVy (1839–1919) was a Fellow, and later Provost, of Trinity College, Dublin, and Professor of Ancient History in the University of Dublin. Having converted from philosophy to the study of history early in his career, his best-known works are his Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (1874), Rambles and Studies in Greece (1876), a four-volume History of Classical Greek Literature (1880), and Greek Life and Thought from the Death of Alexander to the Roman Conquest (1887). MahaVy was a complex character, whose scholarship reXected an interesting paradox in his thinking. He believed resolutely that the value of scholarly enquiry into ancient civilizations was as a guide to the complexities of modern life and to understanding the universality of human nature. He attracted controversy, notoriety, and eventually allegations of heresy with his unromantic portrait of the Greeks and their seemingly modern failings, his candid discussion of the Greek practice of homosexuality, and his conviction that ‘sophisticated Christianity absorbed, to its advantage, much of the higher ethics of classical antiquity’.63 But, while his outspokenness on these issues earned him the reputation of a maverick, he betrayed, 61 Symonds (1873), 230.

62 Ibid. ii. 57.

63 Stanford (1984), 241.

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politically and temperamentally, little aYnity with the ideals of Periclean Athens. According to Stanford: ‘MahaVy’s favourite form of citizenship in the classical world was not that of a small freedomloving city-state like Athens or Sparta. He would have preferred to have been a citizen of one of the great Hellenistic monarchies (whose kings were generous patrons of scholarship) that arose after the death of Alexander the Great, and he saw their nearest modern equivalent in the British Empire.’64 Moreover, as a staunch Unionist he was deeply hostile to Irish culture and political nationalism in any form; it has been argued that ‘MahaVy did not merely embody reactionary Hellenism, he sought to justify British imperialism in Ireland through his work as a classical scholar as well’.65 In his pronouncements on Euripides, however, MahaVy is seen at his least reactionary and most provocative. Indeed, his partiality for the tragedian, which he demonstrated on several occasions throughout his career, became a facet of his notoriety. In 1867, at the theatre of the Royal College of Science in Dublin, he delivered a lecture entitled ‘Three Epochs in the Social Development of the Ancient Greeks’, in the course of which he judged Euripides to be superior to Sophocles. In 1879 he produced, as part of a ‘Classical Writers’ series, a primer on the playwright, outlining Euripides’ biographical details and the chief stylistic and dramatic qualities of his verse. As Stanford and McDowell indicate: ‘Though intended for beginners, it was by no means negligible for scholars, especially in a period when Euripides was still generally regarded as inferior to Sophocles.’66 Most unusually for a general study of Euripides in this era, MahaVy provides some discussion of the Herakles, and in a manner that is neither perfunctory nor depreciatory. He Wrst mentions the play in chapter 5, where it is lauded as being ‘among the best of the poet’s works’,67 and used as an anomalous example in an analysis of Euripides’ dramas of character and situation, because it ‘is so striking in its combination of two subjects that it almost deserves to be called a drama of plot’.68 In chapter 7, after summarizing the plot, and particularly the progression of Herakles’ rehabilitation in the 64 Ibid. 220. 65 Macintosh (1994), 5. 66 Stanford and McDowell (1971), 160. 67 MahaVy (1879), 81. 68 Ibid. 82.

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second half of the play, MahaVy aYrms that Herakles, in the aftermath of madness, is one of Euripides greatest and most complete tragic creations: ‘The dignity of a great nature asserts itself against the utmost which a spiteful Providence can do to break it down. . . . Here then we have a truly great and tragic Wgure, one worthy of a permanent place in the temple of Fame.’69 MahaVy sees Herakles as exceptional among Euripidean characters in having a stature and grandeur commensurable with the heroes found in Aeschylus and Sophocles. In chapter 8 he lists verse 1163 of Herakles as an example of Euripides’ ‘peculiarly eVective’ use of lyric metre: ‘Theseus enters as a digniWed stranger, and marvels at the confusion of the house and the bodies of the dead, the aged Amphitryon answers his iambic questioning in extraordinarily hurried and agitated metre (resolved dochmaics), which give a peculiarly dramatic eVect to a splendid scene.’70 Chapter 10 of MahaVy’s study is a synopsis of the history of Euripidean reception, beginning with Aristophanes: ‘We may say that no Greek poet ever received more constant and unsparing adverse criticism, and from the ablest possible critic [i.e. Aristophanes]. To have outlived, nay, to have conquered such attacks, is in my mind an astonishing proof of genius.’71 When he reaches his own century, MahaVy, like Symonds, takes particular issue with Schlegel: The weak points of Schlegel’s criticism were his dislike of the French and depreciation of Euripides. Perhaps on account of Racine’s, Voltaire’s, and AlWeri’s preference, and in opposition to it, every fault was found with Euripides and every merit denied. . . . The fashion at last set in against the poet, and the jibes of Aristophanes were exalted into the canons of criticism. The present century, while correcting the antipathies of Schlegel’s school, has nevertheless not reinstated Euripides completely into his former position. . . . Many recent editors and historians, and one of our greatest poets, Mr. Browning, have set themselves to assert for Euripides his true and independent position beside these rivals, who have failed to obscure or displace him. The Germans, still infected by Schlegel, talk of Euripides as the poet of ochlocracy, that debased democracy which they have invented at Athens after the suggestion of Thucydides.72 69 MahaVy (1879), 107. 71 Ibid. 129–30.

70 Ibid. 119. 72 Ibid., 142–3.

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MahaVy’s advocacy of Euripides’ genius, and his nonconformist regard for the Herakles, may well have had a profound inXuence on the most famous of his pupils, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). MahaVy, whom Wilde credited as ‘my Wrst and best teacher’ and ‘the scholar who showed me how to love Greek things’,73 was Wilde’s tutor from the commencement of his three years at Trinity College, Dublin (1871–4), during which time he was awarded both a Foundation Scholarship and the Berkeley gold medal for achievement in Greek. After Wilde went on a Demyship up to Magdalen College, Oxford, with MahaVy’s blessing, he maintained reasonably close contact with his former tutor, even assisting him in the revision and proof-reading of his Social Life in Greece and Rambles and Studies in Greece. In April 1877 Wilde accompanied MahaVy on a tour through Greece.74 Part of MahaVy’s purpose in inviting Wilde was to prevent the latter’s intended pilgrimage to Rome, prompted by his developing interest in Catholicism, and to sway him ‘from Popery to Paganism’.75 While at Oxford, Wilde kept a commonplace book76 in which the scope of his reference extended well beyond the prescribed texts of his course, and he routinely applied himself to questions of art and beauty and demonstrated a facility for interweaving classical and contemporary issues. The commonplace book contains ten references to Euripides, including citations of four speciWc plays (Bacchae, Ion, Cyclops, and Electra).77 The Wrst of these references is part of a brief discussion of the Aristophanic legacy in Euripidean reception: The Frogs of Aristophanes form an era both in the development of comedy, and the history of literary criticism. Euripides, who was criticised by the conservatives of his own day much as Swinburne is by the Philistines of ours, is there attacked for the laxity and extravagance of his metres as well as for the immorality of his teaching: and there are in the main the two channels into which the stream of Greek 73 In a letter probably written in 1893. See Ellman (1987), 27. A change in their relationship is signalled by Wilde’s anonymous and predominantly scathing review in the Pall Mall Gazette (1887) of MahaVy’s Greek Life and Thought. An irrevocable breach in their friendship occurred after Wilde’s arrest and disgrace. 74 See Stanford and McDowell (1971), 38 V. 75 MahaVy in a letter to his wife (dated 2 April 1877), quoted in Stanford and McDowell (1971), 41. 76 Repr. in Smith and Helfand (1989), 107–74, with notes at 175–201. 77 On Wilde’s treatment of Euripides in his commonplace book, see ibid. 26–7.

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literary criticism Xowed—poets were criticised on ethical grounds, and on the grounds of style.78

In a later entry, which appears opposite comments on the stage history of the Bacchae, Wilde continues the theme of Euripidean reception, noting some of the poet’s more recent disciples, among whom he counts himself: Cited by the orators as a patriot, by Aristotle as the most tragic of poets, he was to the age of Menander the model and the delight[;] more than this, Euripides witnessed to nature in the stilted rhetoric of the Roman stage, in the studied pomp of the French Court: He fed the youth of Racine and of Voltaire, fanned into a Xame the genius of AlWeri, and occupied [such] great poets as Shelley, Schiller, Browning with the task of translating him. And we who toil in the heated quarries of modern life may perhaps—or is it only a fancy—gain some freedom of soul from his genius who was the great humanist of Hellas, the cor cordium of antiquity[.]79

Wilde’s other mentor at Trinity was Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, who had been appointed Professor of Latin at the age of 25 and was the founder and editor of the magazine Kottabos, to which Wilde contributed a number of translations and original poems. Among Wilde’s contributions was a sonnet entitled ‘A Vision’, which was Wrst published in Kottabos 2, Hilary Term 1877.80 It was inspired in part by Dante’s Divine Comedy and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘A Vision of Poets’, and is a poetic statement of the nineteenth-century reception of the three tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides: Two crowne`d Kings, and One that stood alone With no green weight of laurels round his head, But with sad eyes as one uncomforted, And wearied with man’s never-ceasing moan For sins no bleating victim can atone, And sweet long lips with tears and kisses fed. Girt was he in a garment black and red, And at his feet I marked a broken stone Which sent up lilies, dove-like, to his knees. Now at their sight, my heart being lit with Xame

78 CB [23] and [25], repr. in ibid. 113. 79 CB [130], repr. in ibid. 132. 80 The sonnet was later published in Poems, 1881.

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I cried to Beatrice´, ‘Who are these?’ And she made answer, knowing well each name, ‘Æschylus Wrst, the second Sophokles, And last (wide stream of tears!) Euripides.’

Most remarkable of all, for the purposes of this survey, is a letter written by Wilde to George Macmillan, of the publishing Wrm, on 22 March 1879, Wve months after taking his degree and at a time when Wilde was seriously contemplating an academic career. Macmillan had been a member of MahaVy’s touring party in Greece in 1877, was a founder of the Hellenic Society,81 and, since January 1879, a full partner in his father’s Wrm, with special responsibility for publications on music, the classics, and natural history. In the letter, after expressing a desire to translate selections from Herodotus, Wilde writes: ‘I do not know how many Greek plays you intend publishing, but I have been working at Euripides a good deal lately and should of all things wish to edit either the Mad Hercules or the Phoenissae: plays with which I am well acquainted. I think I see what style of editing is required completely.’82 In his reply to this suggestion, two days later, Macmillan goes so far as to oVer Wilde a fee for the tendered work: half-proWts and an advance of £25 or £30 for Herodotus and halfproWts or £45 down for the plays. Unfortunately these negotiations never came to fruition, and Wilde’s ambitions as a scholarly editor seem to have been abandoned in the wake of his failure to secure a Fellowship at Magdalen.83 Nevertheless, the very fact that so celebrated and iconic a literary Wgure should, in the formative years of his career, have expressed a particular familiarity with, and wish to edit, what was at that time still a relatively obscure play, remains extraordinary.84 It is interesting to speculate that, had the proposed edition of Herakles been submitted and published within a reasonable 81 Founded in 1879. MahaVy was a co-founder of the Society, which counted Wilde and John Addington Symonds among its members. 82 Repr. in Holland and Hart-Davis (2000), 78. 83 See Guy and Small (2000), 67. 84 Calder (in correspondence with the author, 5 May 2002) believes the subconscious reason behind Wilde’s attraction to the Herakles is that ‘it is the dream play for a male homosexual: the super athlete/hero/big guy murders wife and children to run oV with boyfriend’. This psychoanalytic explanation seems unlikely, and there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Wilde’s interest in the play was based on a homoerotic reading of the relationship between Herakles and Theseus.

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period of time after Wilde’s correspondence with Macmillan, it would have been the Wrst separate nineteenth-century edition of the text published in Britain and would have preceded Wilamowitz’s seminal edition by several years.

SWINBURNE’S SCENIC SOPHIST Wilde’s pairing in his commonplace book of Euripides and the English poet and essayist Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) as objects of philistine scorn would have been regarded by Swinburne, at best, as a most unholy alliance and a comparison deeply degrading to himself. A younger contemporary of the Brownings, Swinburne nurtured a lifelong hatred, of fantastic and almost pathological proportions, towards Euripides—a hatred, moreover, in which he always asserted he was supported by Benjamin Jowett. In a letter to his friend Sir Edmund Gosse, dated 2 January 1876, he expressed, with scatological frenzy, violent indignation at the description, which had appeared in the previous day’s Athenaeum, of his Erectheus as ‘a translation from Euripides’: When a fourth form boy could see that as far as it can be said to be modelled after anybody, it is modelled throughout after the earliest style of Æschylus—the simple three-parts-epic style of the Suppliants, Persians, and Seven against Thebes: the most radically contrary style to that of the scenic sophist (with his ‘droppings,’ as Mrs. Browning aptly rather than delicately puts it) that could possibly be conceived. I should very much like to see the play of Euripides which contains 500 consecutive lines that could be set against as many of mine. I did introduce a good deal of the ‘long and noble fragment’ referred to, into Praxithea’s Wrst long speech—but the translated verses (I must say it) were so palpably and pitiably inferior both in thought and expression to the rest that the Wrst persons I read that part of the play to in MS . . . remarked the falling oV at once—the discrepancy, and blot on the face of my work—so I excised the sophist—wiped up and carted oV his ‘droppings’—only keeping a hint or two, and one or two of his best lines. If this sounds ‘outrecuidant’ or savouring of ‘surquedry,’ you may remember that I always have maintained it is far easier to overtop Euripides by the head and shoulders than to come up to the waist of Sophocles or the knee of Æschylus.

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‘Sympathetic touch which distinguishes the two—there are but two— tragic poets’! Have such critics neither eyes nor ears? Or is there really a human reader who does actually Wnd Phædra, Hecuba, Medea, Iphigenia, more pathetic than Antigone, or the Oresteia? . . . And then—the ‘prodigality of splendid imagery such as Wnds no place’ (heavens and earth!) ‘in Greek literature’!!! Well, it certainly doesn’t in Euripides, who was troubled with a dysentery of feeble imagination and a diarrhœa of rhetorical sophistry.85

Thirteen years later, in a discussion of Ben Jonson’s Discoveries, Swinburne referred to Euripides with alliterative venom as ‘that Xuent and facile dealer in Xaccid verse and sentimental sophistry’.86 Later in the same study, deploring Jonson’s egregious lapse of literary judgement in ascribing perfection to Euripides, he singles out the Herakles as proof of Euripides’ outrageous crimes: It is unlucky that . . . Ben Jonson should have committed himself to the assertion that Euripides, of all men, ‘is sometimes peccant, as he is most times perfect.’ The perfection of such shapeless and soulless abortions as the Phoennissae and the Hercules Furens [n.b. the two Euripidean works which Oscar Wilde particularly wished to edit] is about as demonstrable as the lack of art which Ben Jonson regretted and condemned in the author of Hamlet and Othello.87

PHILOLO GY A ND TRA NSL ATION Paradoxically, while Germany was the centre for the century’s most persistent and vociferous disparagement of Euripides, it also produced the most sustained and large-scale editorial work, which fostered a revival of interest in the poet and a movement towards his rehabilitation. Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century very few separate editions of the Herakles were published. The Wrst was that of Gottfried Hermann (1772–1848) in 1810. Hermann had been made Professor of Poetry at Leipzig in 1809, and the Herakles was the Wrst of thirteen Euripidean plays which he edited separately between 1810 and 1841. In his introduction to the text he remarks on

85 Repr. in Gosse and Wise (1927), viii. 221–2. 86 Swinburne (1889), 139. 87 Ibid. 179.

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the paucity of inexpensive and satisfactory critical editions of Euripides with which he himself had been confronted, and elucidates his reasons for choosing to work on the Herakles: Quum Euripidis aliquam fabulam in publicis meis scholis interpretari constituissem, neque invenirem editionem, quae et exiguo pretio parabilis esset, nec textum haberet a criticis aut nimis, aut minus, quam par videretur, mutatum: ipse animum adieci ad edemdam aliquam huius poetae tragoediam. Praetuli autem aliis Herculem furentem, tum quod haec fabula in melioribus est, tum quod non est ex his, quae in carminibus antistrophicis nihil proprium habent, tum denique quod diYcultates, quibus laborat, maximam partem vinci posse videbatur.88 When I had decided to expound on some play or other of Euripides in my public lectures, I could not Wnd an edition that was readily available at a small price, nor could I obtain a text that had not been altered by editors either too much, or less than seemed proper. I turned my mind to the task of publishing some tragedy of this poet myself. But I preferred Hercules Furens to the others, not only because this play is among the better ones, but also because it is not among those which have nothing individual in the antistrophic verses, and Wnally because it seemed that the problems with which the play is aZicted were, for the most part, surmountable.

Just before his premature death August Julius Edmund PXugk (1803– 39) edited seven plays of Euripides, including Herakles, for a series produced at Go¨ttingen in which Wunder’s edition of Sophocles also appeared. For the next Wfty years in Germany, prior to Wilamowitz’s ground-breaking edition in 1889, it was only in complete editions of Euripides’ extant dramas that the Herakles received attention. These editions include those of August Matthiae (1769–1835), published in nine volumes, along with the Fragments and Scholia, between 1813 and 1829; the brothers Karl Wilhelm (1802–83) and Ludwig Dindorf (1805–71)—the younger brother edited Euripides in 1825 and Wilhelm Dindorf edited all the Greek dramatists, with notes and Scholia, for the Clarendon Press between 1832 and 1863;89 August Nauck (1822–92) in 1854; and Adolf KirchhoV in 1855. In addition to these works, Johann Adam Hartung (1802–67), a fervent admirer of 88 Hermann (1810), III. 89 A text of the whole was Wrst published in a single volume in 1830 as the Poe¨tae Scenici Graeci.

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Euripides, analysed all the plays in his Euripides Restitutus, published between 1843 and 1845. During this period Wilamowitz produced his earliest work on Euripides, beginning in 1867 when he carefully scrutinized the entire preserved Euripidean corpus, including Rhesus, in composing his Valediktionsarbeit at Pforta. In this he cited verses 674–77 of the Herakles, a passage on lifelong service to the Muses, which supplied him with his motto: P Æ ÆØ a $ æØÆ ÆE % ÆØØ ıªŒÆÆت ; 
Æ ııªÆ. c fi  IıÆ, ÆNd
 K  ØØ Y. I will never stop blending [in song] the Graces with the Muses, that most charming conjunction of goddesses. I don’t want to live without the Muses’ gifts; may I ever be among the crowned.

The passage reappeared on the dedication page of his edition of the play (dedicated to Schulpforta) and in the Nachwort to the second volume of his Platon. Wilamowitz’s schoolboy estimation of Euripides’ artistry conformed unreservedly to the contemporary orthodoxy. In his valedictory address he declared the playwright ‘a middling poet and a poor tragedian’, but his thorough and historical approach to Euripides’ plays was something radical and refreshing.90 Throughout his undergraduate years Wilamowitz’s opinion of Euripides gradually improved, and, most importantly, he realized that Euripides was the ideal poet with whom to launch his revolutionary hermeneutics. In 1875, the year of Browning’s Aristophanes’ Apology, he published his Habilitationsschaft, Analecta Euripidea, a programmatic work in which he initiated certain lines of enquiry that were later developed in his Herakles commentary. Above all, he rejected the canonized Sophocles and nineteenth-century classicism, and in place of these he substituted the ‘unclassical’ Euripides and historicism, ‘the art of seeing the Greek world as the Greeks saw it’.91 He approached philological interpretation in the manner of a biographer; he was concerned with the historical context in which a play was produced, and he was anxious to stress the similarities rather 90 See Calder (1986), 409–30, at 412.

91 Fowler (1990), 489–522, at 493.

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than the diVerences between ancients and moderns. In the Analecta Euripidea Wilamowitz also demonstrated an early interest in the question of staging, the notion of the play as performance. The work includes an essay on the staging of Hippolytus. Although his maximum opus did not oYcially appear until 1889, Wilamowitz had formulated a plan to edit the Herakles as early as January 1877. At Greifswald on 10 September 1879 a manuscript version, comprising a text and translation,92 was presented as a gift to his father-in-law Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) on the occasion of his silver wedding anniversary. The appropriateness of the gift was, on the face of it, extremely dubious in view of the play’s uxoricide and infanticide, not to mention Mommsen’s intransigent hostility towards Euripides.93 The point of the presentation, however, was as a scholarly tribute to Mommsen as mentor and as one whom, at that stage in his career, Wilamowitz revered as the Herakles of Wissenschaft and as a ŁE Iæ.94 In England, before the middle of the century, a few critical commentaries were printed in English (as opposed to Latin) on single plays of Euripides, but no attempt was made to annotate a collected edition. The three-volume edition of Euripides, Wrst published for Bibliotheca Classica between 1857 and 1860, by Frederick Apthorp Paley (1816–88) was unique in scale and remained the automatic recourse of English-speaking Euripidean commentators until at least the 1880s. Paley’s general method of annotation is described by Collard: Theatrical moments are rarely remarked. . . . What he gives his reader is a mixture of text-critical, grammatical, lexical, interpretative and contextual comment, with succinctly pointed comparative illustration, in a direct and unpretentious way. Metrical comment is conWned to identiWcation of the rhythms, except in dialogue trimeters. . . . In all this, Paley holds true to the editorial principles of the Bibliotheca Classica, but in one important respect he goes further: he is discreetly suggestive to the sensibility or emotions.95 92 Wilamowitz (1879). 93 Mommsen had roundly denounced Euripides in his Ro¨mische Geschichte (1854–6). He held several of the Aristophanic and Schlegelian prejudices against the poet, including an abhorrence of Euripidean women, as well as two of his own. He believed Euripides, the prophet of the oikoumene¯, to be subversive and anti-nationalistic, criticisms which anticipated the anti-Semitism and anti-Cosmopolitanism expressed in the third volume of his Ro¨mische Geschichte. 94 See Calder (1985), 80–110, at 95–6 and (1986), 409–30, at 418–19. 95 Collard (1996), 67–80, at 74.

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The Herakles is the Wrst play in the third volume of Paley’s edition. Paley begins his account of its history by stating: ‘In several respects the Mad Hercules is a remarkable play. It diVers materially in the style and treatment from the other dramas of Euripides.’96 SigniWcantly, he Wnds in the play borrowings from the Aeschylean style of diction and Œ ºØ. He maintains that the Herakles ‘can hardly be said as yet to have obtained the editorial care that it deserves’,97 but he seems somewhat undecided as to its success. On the one hand, he says: ‘We shall be disposed, while we attach some value to it as a tragic experiment, not perhaps altogether congenial to the author’s mind, to doubt whether, for that very reason, the success was commensurate with the eVort,’98 while, on the other hand, he charges K. O. Mu¨ller with not having given the play’s merits a high enough estimate.99 In addressing the complaint of Mu¨ller and other German critics about the incongruity of the two main actions of the plot, Paley oVers a solution in the form of an aetiological connection between these two movements: The Wrst part of the play has . . . this direct relation to the last, that it represents the hero not only as a self-sacriWcing benefactor of mankind, but as the greatest deliverer of the Theban people, who, at the very moment of their joy and gratitude to the family of Hercules, are deprived of them by a crime which renders it legally impossible to retain Hercules in their city. Thus excluded from both Argos and Thebes, he has Athens only left as an asylum. The play therefore as a whole may be deWned to be ‘the history of the connexion of Hercules with the Athenian people’.100

The timing of Herakles’ madness and the signiWcance of the central epiphany and peripeteia are left unaccounted for by Paley. In 1875 J. T. Hutchinson and A. Gray of Cambridge University produced an edition of the Herakles ‘with introduction, notes, and analysis’, the text of which was based mainly on the editions of Paley and Nauck. In a prefatory note, dated December 1875, the editors acknowledge ‘the translation of the play contained in Browning’s Apology of Aristophanes [sic], which is especially remarkable for its Wdelity to the original’.101 What is also noteworthy is that Hutchinson and Gray anticipated the use of their edition in schools, 96 Paley (1860), iii. 3. 97 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 4. 100 Ibid. 6.

98 Ibid. 101 Hutchinson and Gray (1875), preface.

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by quoting at length passages by classical authors to which they have referred. Between 1800 and 1880 no separate translation of the Herakles was published in England with the exception of Robert Browning’s, which formed part of Aristophanes’ Apology. All nineteen extant plays of Euripides, however, were translated literally in two volumes by Theodore Alois Buckley of Christ Church, Oxford, and Wrst published in 1850. A later edition of this work was among the nine editions of Euripides’ dramas in Browning’s library on its dispersal in 1913, and would appear to have been a more immediate galvanizing force behind Browning’s defence of Euripides in Balaustion’s Adventure and Aristophanes’ Apology than the work of either Schlegel or Matthew Arnold. In his introduction Buckley denigrates Euripides with such vehemence that it is astonishing that he regarded the considerable task of translation deserving of his time and labour, and the plays themselves of a wider English readership. ‘The inferiority of our author to the great tragedians’, he professed, ‘prevents our feeling much desire to enter upon the respective merits and demerits of his several plays, especially as we are completely anticipated by Schlegel, with whose masterly analysis every reader ought to be acquainted.’102 Despite this initial protestation of reluctance, Buckley swiftly summons the will to reiterate the most condemnatory of Schlegel’s assertions, including Euripides’ responsibility for the decline of tragic poetry, and to endorse the classicist conception of a correlation between the artist’s character and his art: ‘So great is the prodigality of slaughter throughout his dramas, that we can but imagine morbid cruelty to have formed a considerable ingredient in the disposition of Euripides. Even his pathos is somewhat tinctured with his taste for painful images.’103 Having noted the shortcomings, in subject, morality, and technique, which he, after Schlegel, Wnds in the poet’s work, and having bypassed any degree of subtlety or ambivalence present in Schlegel’s critique, Buckley is conWdent that ‘there is no true tragedy in Euripides’.104 Browning scribbled his wrathful response to this particular damnatio in his own copy of Buckley’s edition, and, according to DeVane, he ‘expressed himself so violently in Greek that the matter is better 102 Buckley (1850), i. p. vi.

103 Ibid. x.

104 Ibid.

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not translated’.105 What Browning must have objected to most strongly in Buckley’s crude attack was the translator’s observation ‘that the study of Aristophanes is indissolubly connected with that of our author. If the reader discover the painful fact that the burlesque writer is greater than the tragedian, he will perhaps also recollect that such a literary relation is, unfortunately, by no means conWned to the days of Aristophanes.’106 In Buckley’s attempt to perpetuate the Aristophanic caricature of Euripides, we Wnd his wearisome regurgitation of the most negative aspects of the Schlegelian position; and with the pedestrian and pedagogic quality of his literal prose translation and his querulous notes on the clumsiness of Euripides’ phrasing, Browning found much to censure and correct. The nineteenth-century damnatio of Euripides was a robust and clamorous orthodoxy which few were daring or fervent enough to challenge. As a consequence, before 1875 attempts to rehabilitate Euripides were desultory and largely unproductive. Admiration for this emblem of decadence amounted almost to a guilty pleasure, and was often deemed a symptom of maverick tastes and unsteady scholarship. While the Herakles excited modest interest in some distinguished quarters, until Browning and Wilamowitz it did not inspire a major piece of rehabilitative criticism or composition. There was a failure by Euripidean critics and champions alike to engage in a precise or meaningful way with the plays themselves. The prevailing portrait of Euripides during this period was, in essence, the annexation by Schlegel and others of an Aristophanic burlesque. The success of any rehabilitative counter-movement would therefore depend on a readiness to dismantle Aristophanic tradition and delve deeply into Euripidean tragedy for its own sake. 105 DeVane (1955), 352.

106 Buckley (1850), i. p. xi.

6 The Browning version: Aristophanes’ Apology and ‘the perfect piece’ Gilbert Murray’s self-confessed generalization that, throughout the ages, Euripides has been ‘loved by poets and despised by critics’,1 can, with some justiWcation, be applied to the nineteenth century and especially its attitude towards the Herakles. The greatest artistic contribution to the rehabilitation of Euripides as tragedian, which began in the latter half of the century, and to the nascent awareness of the Herakles’ excellence in particular, was undoubtedly made by Robert Browning (1812–89). In Aristophanes’ Apology (1875) Browning applies himself valiantly, and at length, to the whole issue of Euripidean reception, both ancient and modern; and, as the coup de graˆce in his defence of the playwright, he translates Herakles in full. The play is deemed by Browning ‘the consummate Tragedy’ (AA 3526), ‘the perfect piece’ (3534) by which to ‘test true godship’ (3529).

THE BROWNINGS AND EURIPIDES THE HUMAN Robert Browning’s enthusiasm for Euripides was largely inspired by his wife, Elizabeth Barrett (1806–61). A mutual love of Greek tragedy had been at the centre of their courtship, throughout which Barrett reworked her translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, published in 1833, in close consultation with Browning. In their correspondence with each other, the two poets incorporated Promethean language and 1 Murray (1913), 1.

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imagery into the context of their burgeoning relationship in a way that reXected the constraints of their respective situations.2 Barrett’s favourite tragedian was Euripides, and in her poem ‘Wine of Cyprus’ (1844), written two years before her elopement with Browning, she conceived in praise of the ancient poet an epithet and accompanying image that would often be invoked, and occasionally parodied, by other writers: Our Euripides, the human With his droppings of warm tears, And his touches of things common Till they rose to touch the spheres. (89–92)

Browning reprinted these lines as the preface to Balaustion’s Adventure, and in the epilogue, which follows the dramatic recitation of Alcestis in that poem, Balaustion professes to know The poetess who graved in gold, Among her glories that shall never fade, This style and title for Euripides, The Human with his droppings of warm tears. (2668–71)

After his wife’s death in 1861 and his subsequent relocation from Florence to London, Browning engaged in an intensive study of Euripides, who, King says, ‘became his frequent companion. Both his personal loss and the tragic vision of the aged poet helped sharpen the sense of reality which informs The Ring and the Book.’3 The Ring and the Book, the longest, and universally recognized as one of the greatest, of Browning’s works, was published in instalments between 1868 and 1869, and was based on the proceedings of a trial in Rome at the beginning of 1698 in which Count Guido Franceschini was charged with the murder of his young wife, Pompilia. There are ten verse narratives in the poem, which all concern the same crime and are each written from a distinct perspective. Contained in Book 10 is a startling defence of Euripides against the common imputation of atheism. Browning resurrects Euripides 2 See Prins (1991), 435–51 and Hardwick (2000), 32. 3 King (1968), 129.

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and puts into his mouth a lengthy dissertation, addressed directly to Pope Innocent XII, in which the tragedian assumes the persona of a monotheistic prophet and proto-Christian whose particular form of paganism anticipated, by half-a-millennium, many aspects of Pauline teaching: Five hundred years ere Paul spoke, Felix heard,— How much of temperance and righteousness, Judgement to come, did I Wnd reason for, Corroborate with my strong style that spared No sin, nor swerved the more from branding brow Because the sinner was called Zeus and God? How nearly did I guess at what Paul knew? How closely came, in what I represent As duty, to his doctrine yet a blank? (1717–25)

Euripides is also made to assert, in marked contradiction of Schlegel and his disciples, that he ‘Adopted virtue as my rule of life’ (1710), and to claim for his work, far from a populist motive, a moral and didactic mission: And, what my heart taught me, I taught the world, And have been teaching now two thousand years. Witness my work,—plays that should please, forsooth! ‘They might please, they may displease, they shall teach, For truth’s sake,’ so I said, and did, and do. (1712–16)

In the preface to Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871), Browning quotes and supplies his own translation of lines 1275–80 of Herakles, in which the hero speaks bitterly of his frenzied murder of his family as his last crowning labour. But the poet’s most concentrated and large-scale defences of Euripides were Balaustion’s Adventure in 1871 and Aristophanes’ Apology in 1875, which included ‘transcriptions’ of Alkestis and Herakles respectively. Balaustion’s Adventure preceded the vindication of Euripides attempted by Symonds and MahaVy, and was written primarily in tribute to the memory of Elizabeth Barrett and her love of the tragedian. It deals with the theme of miraculous salvation, with Herakles emerging as a

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Christ-like saviour Wgure, a fully rounded spiritual hero who exercises transcendent powers over Death.4 In Aristophanes’ Apology, however, can be found Browning’s ultimate expression of his personal kinship with the ancient poet and his ultimate riposte to Euripides’ critics and his own.

AR IS TOPHANES’ APOLOGY: CONTEMPORARY AND SUBSEQUENT RECEPTION Aristophanes’ Apology was published on 15 April 1875. It comprised 5,705 lines of verse, making it the third-longest of Browning’s works after The Ring and the Book and Sordello, and four times the length of any extant Greek tragedy.5 The poem was revised for the collected edition of 1888–9 and Browning added six lines throughout the text. It has a complex narrative and temporal structure of multiple layers. The subsuming narrative mode is a dramatic monologue spoken by the heroine Balaustion as she and her husband Euthukles sail to Rhodes after the destruction of Athens’ long walls by the Spartans. Within the ‘present’ of this monologue is built a dialogue, an extended agon between Balaustion and the comic poet Aristophanes, recollected from one year previously when Euthukles brought Balaustion news of Euripides’ death. Part of this dialogue is a transcription from Euripides, an uninterrupted and unedited recital of the Herakles which occupies 1,549 lines of the complete text. 4 Poole (1987), 139 observes that in Balaustion’s interpolative narrative Herakles ‘loses nothing of his rollicking pagan pedigree, but he acquires the aura of a spiritual life-force, which in its turn reinterprets the Wgure of Christ’. On Herakles’ Christ-like attributes in Balaustion’s Adventure, see Roberts and Prins (forthcoming), general introduction, sec. 4. With more speciWc reference to Euripides’ Herakles, Elizabeth Hasell (1874), 545–67, at 567, contemplated ‘the full spiritual signiWcance of the legend. . . . There are hints, but no more than hints, in the ‘‘Frenzied Hercules’’ of the dim inexplicable feeling which we cannot doubt haunted the mind of antiquity, that if ever the bonds of Hades were burst and its gates thrown open, it could only be at the cost of unexampled anguish . . . that if ever human nature raised above the stars it could only be in the person of one whose sorrows as well as his deeds should alike transcend the measure of human doing and suVering.’ 5 The Ring and the Book was published in monthly instalments from November 1868 to February 1869. It comprises twelve books (21,204 lines). Sordello was published in March 1840 and comprises six books (5,981 lines).

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Contemporary critics,6 giving their attention mainly to the poem’s recondite style and the esoteric nature of its ostensible subject matter, typically treated the Apology as a scholarly curiosity. The reviewer for the Athenaeum of 17 April 1875 suggested, much to Browning’s annoyance, that the poem was conceived during a discussion of the conclusion of Plato’s Symposium between the poet and Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College (Browning was Jowett’s friend and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol).7 This suggestion is probably less than earnest, but, in making it, the reviewer has uncovered an important point, that the dramatic narrative surrounding the transcription is far more Platonic than Euripidean. The reaction of novelist and critic Margaret Oliphant, writing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July 1875), was indicative of the bewilderment and irritation that the Apology excited in many quarters: Three-fourths of the readers of English poetry are absolutely indiVerent to the question why Aristophanes attacked Euripides in his comedies, which is exactly one of those details which the dilettante critic delights in, but which convey neither information nor ediWcation to any one else. . . . The fact remains that Englishmen are not Greeks, and that no poem nor other work plentifully besprinkled with classic vocables, and made up of classic allusions, ever will or can be anything but caviare to the multitude, and never can or will be anything original or great.8

While there was consensus among the critics regarding the Apology’s demonstration of the poet’s erudition, there was a mixture of opinion on the quality of the verse. John Addington Symonds, whose review in the Academy (17 April 1875), although not unqualiWed in its praise, oVered the most favourable assessment of the poem’s merits, wrote: ‘Mr. Browning is unrivalled in the art of following thought through all its windings, tracing and retracing labyrinths of sophistry and prejudice, blending the specious and the true as he conceives them, the coarse and the reWned, spinning with words a closely-Wtting veil of gossamer for the spirit he imprisons in his verse.’9 By contrast, the

6 A representative selection of contemporary criticism on Aristophanes’ Apology is reproduced in Litzinger and Smalley (1970), 398–403. 7 For Browning’s reaction to this suggestion, see Hood (1933), 171. 8 Repr. in Litzinger and Smalley (1970), 401–2. 9 Ibid. 398.

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reviewer in the Spectator (3 July 1875) thought Browning’s mastery of the stylistic elements of the Apology very dubious: Mr. Browning permits the passion for analysing character so to dominate him, that he becomes careless of things essential to his art. Sweetness, brightness, grace, melody, eloquence are either absent, or present at but the rarest intervals. Here and there he condescends to give us a glimpse of them. Once in some twenty pages or so comes a beautiful line, even a beautiful passage, though seldom this latter without some harshness to blot it.10

Other reviewers considered the poetry of the Apology inferior to the lyricism of Balaustion’s Adventure, and that, as a sequel, the work was a disappointing failure. A common feature of these immediate responses to Aristophanes’ Apology is their silence on the transcription from Euripides. Mrs Oliphant did make reference to Browning’s earlier transcription of Euripides’ Alkestis, and conceded that his most recent eVort was ‘a good translation of a great poem’.11 However, she saw the translation as a separate concern, and in no way a mitigation of the oVence she believed Browning had committed by his intellectual posturing, the ‘prank’ he had played ‘for the gratiWcation of a small and select audience’.12 In other reviews the translation is altogether ignored. The translation did, however, attract the appreciative attention of two notable contemporaries of Browning’s, the Greek scholar MahaVy and the historian, critic, and essayist Thomas Carlyle. MahaVy clearly regarded Browning as a great poet and a superior translator. In his concise survey of Euripides’ life and works, published in 1879, he reproduced the poet’s translation of two choric stanzas of Hippolytus (beginning at line 525), which, as he proudly revealed, Browning had specially made for him on 18 December 1878, ‘so that the general reader may not miss the meaning and spirit of the ode’.13 In chapter 5 of this volume MahaVy described the translation of Herakles in Aristophanes’ Apology as ‘admirable’14 and an invaluable resource for the English reader, and in his conclusion 10 Ibid. 402. 11 Ibid. 401. 12 Ibid. 402. 13 MahaVy (1879), 115. MahaVy used the translation again in A Survey of Greek Civilization (1897), paying tribute to ‘this great poet’. 14 MahaVy (1879), 82.

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he included the Browning versions of Herakles and Alkestis in a list of ‘the best and most accessible helps to the study of the poet’.15 Soon after the publication of Aristophanes’ Apology, Carlyle wrote to Browning: ‘Ye won’t mind, though it’s the last advice I may give ye, but ye ought to translate the whole of the Greek tragedians—that’s your vocation.’16 This substantial endorsement of his skills as a translator persuaded Browning to undertake a translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, which was published two years later. In his preface to this later work, Browning in fact states that Carlyle commanded him to do the translation, a responsibility that Carlyle was quick to disavow when he saw the ‘unreadable’17 result of his earlier exhortation. Browning sent a copy of Aristophanes’ Apology to Matthew Arnold soon after its publication, a gesture to which Arnold responded gallantly and graciously.18 It is also probable that Oscar Wilde had read the poem, since in June 1881 he sent Browning the Wrst copy of his poems as ‘the only tribute I can oVer you in return for the delight and the wonder which the strength and splendour of your work has given me from my boyhood’.19 In the twentieth century, scholarship on the Apology focused largely on the question of Browning’s classical sources and how necessary a knowledge of these is to a proper appreciation of the poem. Critics also asked whether the apologiae of Balaustion and Aristophanes relate to Wfth-century Athenian dramaturgy or whether they actually represent a clash of literary e¯the¯ in Victorian Britain; and they explored the ways in which Browning’s advocacy of Euripides’ poetic principles can be related to his own aesthetics. Seldom in these discussions, however, was Browning’s translation of Herakles more than cursorily examined. 15 MahaVy (1879), 144. 16 Quoted in GriYn (1910), 256. 17 See Carlyle’s comments on Browning’s translation of the Agamemnon recorded in Litzinger and Smalley (1970), 432–3. 18 In a letter dated May 20 1875, and reprinted in Lang (2000), iv. 262, Arnold thanked Browning for the poem, ‘which I shall keep to read when my summer holiday comes and I can read a poem steadily. It is sure to leave me with the impression which your writings from the Wrst have given me and which the writings of so few other living people give me—that the author is what the French call a grand esprit.’ 19 Holland and Hart-Davis (2000), 111. Wilde was certainly aware of Browning’s translations of Euripides since he refers to them in his Oxford commonplace book ([130], repr. in Smith and Helfand (1989) 132).

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Sir F. G. Kenyon, editor of the 1912 centenary edition of The Works of Robert Browning, makes several pronouncements which are typical of the critical attitude that has persisted in relation to the transcription. In his introduction to Aristophanes’ Apology, Kenyon says: ‘Whereas in the earlier work [Balaustion’s Adventure] the main object was the translation, with which the comparatively slight setting was inextricably interwoven, in Aristophanes’ Apology, the main interest is in the setting and the translation might be detached, or ‘‘taken as read,’’ without aVecting the main theme.’20 He further maintains that the ‘discussion is complete in itself; the translation of the Hercules is only introduced by way of illustration of Balaustion’s triumphant advocacy of her beloved poet. It is a Wne translation of a Wne— though by no means perfect—play; but its interest is eclipsed by Browning’s own poem.’21 Kenyon’s comments are instructive because they demonstrate, Wrst, the misconception that the literalness of Browning’s translation, and the absence of authorial comment on the play, make the interest of the transcription to the reading of the poem minimal, and secondly, the opinion, long current, that the Herakles was a Xawed component of the Euripidean corpus. Similarly, William DeVane22 and R. A. King,23 in their evaluations of the Apology, believe the translation to be subordinate to the rest of the poem. DeVane seems to judge the comparative signiWcance of the translation and the surrounding debate in terms of length. ‘It is obvious’, he states, ‘that the Herakles holds no such central place in Aristophanes’ Apology as the Alcestis holds in Balaustion’s Adventure. The arguments of Balaustion and Aristophanes, in point of space, overwhelm the play by Euripides.’24 Donald Smalley25 and Jane McCusker26 have each made an interesting study of how the Apology aVords the reader insights into the conXicting ideals of poetry and the role of the poet espoused by Browning and his contemporaries. But they have failed to consider how, and to what extent, the translation of the Herakles is made relevant to an oblique commentary on the literary landscape of Victorian Britain, and how it is used to attest the truth of Browning’s 20 22 24 26

Kenyon (1912), viii. pp. v–vi. See DeVane (1955), 350 V. DeVane (1955), 376. See McCusker (1984), 783–96.

21 Ibid., p. vi. 23 See King (1968), 203 V. 25 See Smalley (1940), 823–38.

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poetic creed. Towards the end of her essay, ‘Browning’s Aristophanes’ Apology and Matthew Arnold’, McCusker emphasizes that ‘the reader’s understanding of the poetic situation and of the poetic debates is created by the eVect of the whole poem, including Browning’s translation of the Herakles’.27 Yet, while she oVers a very thorough and cogent exposition of the way speciWc lines in the poem relate to details in the debate between Browning and Matthew Arnold, she never addresses the question of exactly what the choice of text for transcription contributes to ‘one of Browning’s fullest examinations of poetic theory’.28 More recently, Adam Roberts29 and Daniel Karlin,30 recognizing that the Apology has been a greatly neglected and misunderstood work, have presented fresh perspectives on the issue of Browning’s deployment of sources. Karlin explores the complex framework of dualities and oppositions in the poem and its central antithesis between love and hate, while Roberts treats the poem as ‘one of Browning’s most complex statements on the nature of Art and humanity’.31 Neither of these revisionist theses, however, deals with the translation of the Herakles. This brief synopsis of the major critical discourse on Aristophanes’ Apology since its publication should give some indication of how Browning’s Herakles has been the casualty of serious scholarly neglect. Two critics, however, while by no means providing a comprehensive dissection of the translation, have at least acknowledged its importance within the context of the poem. Frederick Monroe Tisdel sees Balaustion’s reply to Aristophanes as ‘Browning’s real contribution to the criticism of his time on the merits of Greek drama. It is his answer to the estimate of Schlegel, his eVort to do justice to the enduring worth of Euripides.’32 Although he erroneously states that the discussion between Balaustion and Aristophanes ‘closes’33 with the reading of the Herakles, Tisdel is conscious that, in determining how the translation aids a defence of Euripides’ genius, ‘the important consideration . . . is the way in which the play illustrates the 27 29 31 33

See McCusker (1984), 796. 28 Ibid. 795. See Roberts (1990–1), 32–45. 30 See Karlin (1993), chap. 7. Roberts (1990–1), 32–45, at 32. 32 Tisdel (1927), 1–46, at 11. Ibid. 5. In fact 626 lines (5,085–711) follow the transcription.

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argument’.34 He thus lists, with appropriate examples, four ways in which the characterization, action, and language of the Herakles plainly answer the strictures of Aristophanes, and by extension Schlegel, upon Euripides.35 This list comprises Euripides’ humanization of Herakles; his humanization of the gods; his moralization on the subject of fate; and his use of maxims. If Browning’s intention in the transcription of Herakles is to answer Schlegel’s criticisms, his choice of text is a bold one. By selecting the Herakles, in which humanization of the heroic status and scepticism about the gods and accepted myths are critical elements, his purpose seems not categorically to refute Schlegel’s charges by proving their opposite, but rather to confront them directly by means of a literal translation through which the power and beauty of the original might be discovered and appreciated anew. Deviating in certain aspects from Tisdel’s thesis, Clyde De L. Ryals oVers a more complete understanding of the signiWcance of Browning’s very literal translation of Herakles to the structural and philosophical design of the poem.36 He attributes the eVectiveness of Browning’s defence of the tragedian not to the words spoken by Balaustion, but rather to the translation, which, he says, the poet ‘wished to be as neutral and objective in style as possible’.37 Within the framework of the Apology, Browning intended the Herakles to serve as the ‘pure statement, distinct from the biased utterances of Aristophanes and Balaustion’.38 The unembellished transcription, therefore, is made separate from the rather myopic arguments employed by Balaustion and Aristophanes, who each make concessions to the other’s viewpoint only for those concessions to be swiftly withdrawn and the pair’s original polar positions to be resumed. Ryals further maintains: ‘Browning must have reasoned that one way to circumvent the subjectivity of his monologist was to provide within the monologue a full-Xedged drama, the most objective of literary forms, unedited and without commentary.’39 He contends that Balaustion and Aristophanes each represent one pole of a dialectic—transcendental versus descendental, or soul versus 34 Tisdel (1927), 18. 35 See ibid. 18–22. 36 See Ryals (1975), chap. 5 and (1993), 196–9. 38 Ibid. 105. 39 Ibid. 104.

37 Ibid. 104–5.

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body—and that the translation demonstrates that Euripides, by contrast, ‘speaking to both soul and sense, creates the kind of drama reXective of a true understanding of human nature’.40

T H E EV ID E N C E OF T H E B A L L I O L M A N U S C R I P T Ryals makes two elementary, but frequently overlooked, points which together suggest a radical approach to the study of the poem. He recalls the fact that the translation of Herakles preceded the composition of the surrounding poem by fourteen months,41 and insists that ‘the translation is not a mere Xexion of Browning’s classical muscles but an organic part of the work whose full title is Aristophanes’ Apology; Including a Transcript from Euripides: Being the Last Adventure of Balaustion’.42 Far from dismissing the transcription as a subordinate or detachable element in the work, Ryals in fact proposes that the Herakles is a logical point of entry into an analysis of the poem. Moreover, this approach to the poem accords with the order and method of construction which Browning himself followed and which can be deduced from the manuscript of Aristophanes Apology housed in Balliol College Library.43 In the manuscript the transcription and the beginning and conclusion of the poem are written on paper that is clearly margined and of superior quality to that on which the bulk of the work is composed.44 These sections were probably composed in London. The transcription itself is dated at the end ‘June 17 ’73.’ Some half-sheets of the same quality as the transcription have been pasted into the sections immediately preceding and following the Herakles, signalling the probability that while Browning was making the translation he was already giving thought to a context in which to place it. On the Wnal page of the manuscript Browning has written: ‘Begun about August 11—ended Saturday, Nov. 7 ’74, Mers Picardy.’ The 40 See Ryals (1975), chap. 5 and (1993), 112. 41 Ibid. 101–2. 42 Ibid. 104. 43 Balliol MS 389. 44 DeVane (1955), 376 has remarked on the diVering quality of the paper used in the ms to show that the composition of the poem had at least two distinct stages. He does not, however, draw any conclusions about the signiWcance of the order in which these stages occurred.

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transcription has been numbered twice, Wrst, as folios 1–32 in the same black pen as the transcription itself and, secondly, in a brown pen as folios 112–70. Throughout the rest of the manuscript the pages have been numbered three and even four times, indicating the various stages of composition and reorganization. The chronological development of Aristophanes’ Apology suggests the following conclusion: that Browning wrote his translation of the Herakles as a complete work, an intellectual exercise in its own right and for its own sake, but that, at the same time, he envisaged the translation as a central part of a whole, the focal point of a comprehensive treatise on the reception of ancient drama and Euripides’ place in the tragic canon, and by extension a profession of poetic faith and a labour of love. I believe, therefore, that by observing the poet’s known modus operandi, and examining in detail his transcription of Herakles and the theory of translation by which it has been fashioned, the true substance of Browning’s consummate defence of Euripides is to be found.

B ROW N I N G’ S G R E E K A N D T H E NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRANSLATION DEBATE The principle of translation which Browning applies in the Herakles is key to understanding its intended signiWcance within Aristophanes’ Apology, especially when this principle is examined in terms of a comparison with the poet’s two other major transcriptions from Greek tragedy, namely Euripides’ Alkestis (1871) and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (1877). In each of the three translations a distinct theory and methodology are discernible, and a diVerent experience of Greek tragic drama made available to the reader. The composition of these works coincided with an intense scholarly debate on the method which those attempting translations of Greek and Latin texts should employ. As Lorna Hardwick indicates: ‘The variety of approaches to translation and the broadening spectrum of authorship in the nineteenth century oVer evidence of Werce debate, not only about the nature and purposes of translation and its cultural and political implications, but also about the role of translation

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in the lives and work of writers and in the perceptions of both the classically educated and the broader readership.’45 Crucial to this dispute, and not unfamiliar to our own era, was the question of ‘faithfulness’ to the original: how to deWne this abstraction in a way that was neither nebulous nor arbitrary, but that would provide translators with practical guidelines for their task. In order to arrive at any sort of deWnition, the theorist had to contend with several interrelated issues: the virtue, or otherwise, of literalism as a translational system; the beneWt to be gained from, and the sheer linguistic attainability of, lexical, syntactical, and conceptual accuracy; and the more philosophical and ethical dilemma of whether translation should entail a process of alienation or acculturation, that is, whether the translation should communicate to the reader a sense of the remoteness, in time, culture, and language, of the original text, or render Xuent and accessible what may be fractured and distancing. Two of the chief combatants in this controversy were Francis William Newman (1805–97) and Matthew Arnold. Newman’s translation of the Iliad (1856) into unrhymed English metre was made according to his theory that what was diYcult or strange in the original should be replicated in the translation by deliberate archaisms, in his case by the use of alliterative verse and words of Anglo-Saxon origin. Arnold heavily criticized this technique in his lectures ‘On Translating Homer’ (1860–1), which were intended to give practical advice to would-be translators of Homeric epic, accusing Newman of substituting his own eminent ignobility for Homer’s eminent nobility.46 Co-opting and paraphrasing Coleridge, Arnold proposes a contrasting theory: ‘It may be said of that union of the translator with his original, which alone can produce a good translation, that it takes place when the mist which stands between them—the mist of alien modes of thinking, speaking and feeling on the translator’s part—‘‘defecates to a pure transparency,’’ and disappears.’47 The conXict in approach between Newman and Arnold led to a surge in the publication of translations and essays on the practice of translation. It was against this background that Browning published 45 Hardwick (2000), 24. See also Daniel Weissbort’s general synopsis of 19th-century verse-translation theories in France (2000), 89–96, esp. 91–2, and the discussion by A. D. P. Briggs of how these theories were applied to the Greek tragedians, ibid. 356–67. 46 Arnold (1861), in Super (1960), i. 97–216, at 103. See contra, Newman (1861). 47 Arnold (1860–61), in Super (1960), i. 97–216, at 103.

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his three complete transcriptions from Greek tragedy within the space of six years. His contribution to the debate, therefore, was one of practical demonstration; and the hallmark of his experimentation in the Weld of translation was versatility. It is Browning’s ability with these three translations to traverse the expanse between Newman and Arnold that is most noteworthy. Each translation serves a unique purpose and engages a technique appropriate to, and elucidative of, that purpose. Browning’s transcription of the Alkestis in Balaustion’s Adventure is essentially an adaptation of the Euripidean original, and has a number of features in common with a working playscript. In reciting, interpreting, and revising the text before a small audience of friends, the heroine Balaustion performs the role of a dramaturge presenting a read-through of the play. Similar to the structure of Aristophanes’ Apology, the recitation is, in fact, part of the adventure narrative in which Balaustion recalls how, making for Athens after the Sicilian disaster, she rescued herself and fellow Rhodians from attack by the Syracusans when she recited solo Euripides’ Alkestis. Her vivid reading of the drama is interspersed with lively descriptions of the action and characters, stage directions in verse, and explanatory digressions. Balaustion also outlines for her audience a new moral direction for the play, whereby Admetus’ character is purged of much of its weakness and ignobility. Ryals construes this method as ‘not a criticism but a ‘‘higher criticism’’ of the text. . . . Just as a modern hermeneuticist may look behind the literal accounts of the gospels to grasp the essence of the Christian message, Balaustion looks beyond the actual text to seize upon Euripides’ essential meaning.’48 Browning’s Alkestis is a recasting of Euripides, a creative appropriation that endows the ancient poet with an anachronistic historical consciousness. It demonstrates, therefore, a theory of translation which is almost the reverse of that operative in his two later transcriptions. The Agamemnon is Browning’s most literal translation, but its literalism is of a very diVerent order from that of his Herakles, and one for which the poet was greatly castigated at the time and has rarely been commended since. It is the only one of the three translations to which Browning appended a preface. In this he protests: 48 Ryals (1993), 177–8.

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If, because of the immense fame of the following Tragedy, I wished to acquaint myself with it, and could only do so by the help of a translator, I should require him to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language. . . . I would be tolerant for once,—in the case of so immediately famous an original,—of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the very turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English will bear. . . . Further, if I obtained a mere strict bald version of thing by thing, or at least word pregnant with thing, I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek. . . . I should expect the result to prove very hard reading indeed if it were meant to resemble Aeschylus. . . . All I can say for the present performance is, that I have done as I would be done by, if need were.49

Despite this anticipatory defence, Browning’s approach was most unwelcome. The extremely demanding, and often baZing, nature of his English was met with frustration and oVence. Even Browning’s usual admirers expressed perplexity and mild chagrin. Kenyon labelled the translation ‘a perverse tour de force’,50 and saw in it an oblique attempt by Browning to show his beloved Euripides in a favourable light by contrast. William Cranston Lawton believed Browning failed in the Agamemnon because he had misguidedly applied to Aeschylus the same literalist method which he had applied to the ‘easier’ verse of Euripides: ‘When Browning attempts to render these most diYcult Aeschylean choral songs in English verse, and rhymed verse, and at the same time to be niggardly, solemnly, absolutely literal, the result is too often but the disjecta membra of articulate speech.’51 In more recent times Yopie Prins has discerned a method to Browning’s madness and a purpose to his alleged perversity. She argues: The translation presents English as a foreign language that must be translated back into Greek in order to be understood. Ultimately, Browning’s Agamemnon undoes the opposition between the two languages altogether, as it moves into an interlingual realm that John Addington Symonds criticized for being ‘neither English nor Greek.’ However, rather than criticizing this

49 Browning (1877), in Kenyon (1912), viii. 293–365, at 293–4. The wording of Browning’s apologia closely recalls Jasper Heywood’s literalist cause as stated in the title-page of his translation of Seneca’s Hercules Furens. See above, Chap. 3. Undoubtedly, Browning was aware of Heywood’s translation. 50 Kenyon (1912), viii., p. xi. 51 Lawton (1897), 363–87, at 384.

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radical linguistic estrangement, we might ponder how Browning’s translation serves as metaphor for the act of reading itself.52

Prins’s suggestion is that ‘Browning is interested in translation as a process of alienation that is also exacted in the process of reading’.53 She believes that ‘Aeschylus’ obscurity poses certain challenges to the reader, who must interact with the text in order to reenact both its meaning and its resistance to meaning. On this model of reading, the obscure is a necessary condition for the sublime.’54 This idea of purposeful obscurity appears much earlier in MahaVy’s assessment of Aeschylus’ ‘pregnant obscurity, as contrasted with the redundant obscurity of some modern poets or the artiWcial obscurity of the Attic epoch’.55 W. B. Stanford, writing half-a-century after MahaVy, qualiWes this by saying: ‘The poets of the 1930s and 1940s are nearer Aeschylus in their obscurities and ambiguities than were the ‘‘modern’’ poets of MahaVy’s day, though among them Browning and Hardy show Aeschylus’ direct inXuence.’56 Prins maintains that in the diYculty and obscurity of Aeschylean verse, Browning found ‘a precursor for his style, which is often described in terms of a catachrestic or ‘‘grotesque’’ literalism’.57 Stanford uses the word ‘catachresis’ to categorize instances where Aeschylus deliberately alters the meanings of words to suit his needs.58 Discussing Aeschylus’ neologisms, which are, for the most part, compound words, he states, ‘Aeschylus is straining language almost to the breaking point. One is reminded of the strained, distorted, almost grotesque, Wgures of a painting by El Greco.’59 Browning re-creates a similar tension in his translation of the Agamemnon, and, in so doing, resembles Gerard Manley Hopkins (1849–89), who broke with the conventional poetic diction of his time in reviving archaisms, appropriating dialect words, and employing coinages of his own to communicate hitherto unexpressed concepts, and produced in his verse an overall eVect of strangeness or, as he called it himself, ‘queerness’.60 52 Prins (1989), 151–70, at 152. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 156. 55 MahaVy (1880), i. 275. 56 Stanford (1942), 128. 57 Prins (1989), 151–70, at 157. 58 Stanford (1942), 64. 59 Ibid. 65–6. 60 According to Gardner (1948), i. 112: ‘Taken altogether, his [Hopkins’s] lexical and syntactical neologisms, like his innovations in rhythm, produce an air of strangeness more marked than in any other English poet. . . . The aim of poetry being to move, to excite, the ‘‘foreign air’’ or strongly idiosyncratic Xavour of his verse is a powerful emotive factor.’

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The diYcult style of Browning’s Agamemnon has also been accounted useful and eVective by British poet Tony Harrison (b. 1937) who, surprisingly, claims that the translation had a direct inXuence on his own version of the Oresteia, which opened at the National Theatre in November 1981: It is certainly Browning’s feel for the consonantal, potentially clogging, energy of Aeschylus’ verse, his awareness of the oral physicality and what George Steiner calls the ‘aural density’ of the original language, that distinguishes Browning’s Agamemnon translation. It may clog but it never cloys like so much inferior Victorian poetry. Somewhere though, almost more than in any other English-speaking poet who has tackled Aeschylus, I have always felt, even before I began to think of translating him myself, there were clues to the way Aeschylus might sound in English in the Browning version.61

While he is alert to the Xaws in Browning’s translation, Harrison believes it is neither unreadable nor, it seems, lacking in dramatic potential. He says in reply to Kenyon’s charge of perversity, ‘somewhere, I think, those very perversities point the way to a means of making the text massive and megalithic, doing honour to the daunting Dunkelheit of Aeschylus but without renouncing the intelligibility at the heart of all theatrical communication’.62 Harrison’s reference to George Steiner invokes a comparison between Browning’s Agamemnon and the literalist techniques adopted by Friedrich Ho¨lderlin (1770–1843) in his translations of Sophocles. Ho¨lderlin saw a need to re-primitivize Sophocles’ text for his German audience through a process of estrangement from ‘natural’ German. According to Steiner, by this practice Ho¨lderlin was ‘polemicizing, obliquely, against Schiller’s idealization of the harmonic universality of Greek art and against F. W. Schlegel’s insistence on the never-to-be-rivalled perfection of the classical’.63 His technique was extremely unpopular in his own lifetime, but was rediscovered and treated in a positive light in the early and mid-twentieth century, an experience analogous to that of Browning with his Agamemnon. The publication in 1804, and subsequent editions in 1808 and 1846, of Ho¨lderlin’s Oedipus der Tyrann and Antigona were regarded as ‘the tragic indices of mental crisis and 61 Harrison (2002), 9.

62 Ibid. 12.

63 Steiner (1984), 67.

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decay’,64 a view which persisted until the rehabilitative judgements of Norbert von Hellingrath in 1911 and Karl Reinhardt in 1951. Between the digressive style of Browning’s Alkestis, with its ‘interpretative paraphrase’,65 and the extreme literalism of the Agamemnon stands the Herakles, the most successful, and yet the least familiar and least studied, of Browning’s three translational experiments. It is successful because, of the three, it comes closest to achieving the impossible, namely the transmission of much of the linguistic power of the original text simultaneous with the creation of a highly readable work of English poetry which is seldom strained or inelegant. The transcription has a Xuency and a simplicity that are often wanting in Browning’s own surrounding verse. Two judgements, read before the Boston Browning Society at the close of the nineteenth century, endorse Browning’s Herakles as an exemplary essay in the art of translation. Philip StaVord Moxom declared: ‘As a translation it leaves almost nothing to be desired in faithfulness to the original. In this respect it serves as a model for the ablest workers in the Weld of translation from the Greek classics.’66 William Cranston Lawton, meanwhile, predicted: ‘The Heracles may long remain the best single version in English of a masterly Greek drama.’67

HE RAKLES TRANSCRIBED The transcription of Herakles, like the rest of Aristophanes’ Apology, is composed mainly in blank verse. Apart from the choral odes, which are in rhyme, Browning’s use of rhyme in the translation is sporadic but striking in its re-creation of the original dramatic impact of a scene. For example, in translating the lyric dialogue between Amphitryon and the chorus at verses 1042–88 of Euripides’ text, Browning has employed a varied and highly eVective rhyme-scheme which captures the suspense and nervous movement of the original passage as well as the extraordinary tension, palpable in the characters’ language, between the emotional 64 Ibid. 66. 65 Moxom (1897), 411–37, at 413. 66 Ibid. Moxom Wrst made his address, ‘Balaustion’s Opinion of Euripides’, on 25 February 1896. 67 Lawton (1897), 363–87, at 386. Lawton Wrst made his address, ‘The Classical Element in Browning’s Poetry’, on 31 December 1895.

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and practical necessities imposed by the situation. Browning’s version of the scene, at lines 4659–721, begins and ends in blank verse, but the greater part of the exchange alternates between rhyme at the end of every line and rhyme at the end of every second line. This alternation reproduces the shifts between fearful urgency and calm resolution controlled by Euripides’ use of agitated dochmaics interspersed with iambics. As well as retaining Euripides’ combination of short, sharp imperatives and enjambement, Browning rhymes the last line of the Wrst speaker with the Wrst line of the second speaker, creating the eVect of a fraught dialogue in which the interlocutors talk across one another: choros Old man, the fate of thy son! amphitruon Hush, hush! Have done! He is turning about! He is breaking out! Away! I steal And my body conceal, Before he arouse, In the depths of the house. choros Courage! The Night Maintains her right On the lids of thy son there, sealed from sight! amphitruon See, see! To leave the light And, wretch that I am, bear one last ill, I do not avoid; but if he kill Me his own father. (4685–99)

Another striking example of Browning’s manipulation of rhyme to recreate the force of the original is his rendering of verses 861–6 of Lyssa’s speech in which she makes her chilling disclosure of the destruction she will visit on Herakles. Barlow remarks of the original lines, ‘there is an extraordinary energy from the pent-up movement, sight and sound, impressions concentrated within a short space to parallel the explosive force with which Heracles’ madness is created’.68 It is this momentum and density of images that Browning has impressively reproduced: 68 Barlow (1996), 162.

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Go I will! and neither the sea, as it groans with its waves so furiously, Nor earthquake, no, nor the bolt of thunder gasping out heaven’s labor-throe, Shall cover the ground as I, at a bound, rush into the bosom of Herakles! And home I scatter, and house I batter, Having Wrst of all made the children fall,— And he who felled them is never to know He gave birth to each child that received the blow, Till the Madness, I am, have let him go! (4447–54)

At line 4449 the blank verse sharply breaks oV, just as the imagery, which Lyssa employs, changes from the metaphorical and universal to the literal and particular. A short, concentrated passage of rhyme follows, within which Browning shifts briskly between internal rhyme in lines 4450 and 4451 and rhyme at the end of the next three lines. The overall movement of the passage is at once frenetic and unrelenting. The system of spelling Greek proper nouns, which Browning employs in the Herakles, is one he adopted in ‘Artemis Prologuizes’ (Dramatic Lyrics, 1842) and adhered to in all his subsequent transcriptions from classical Greek. In deWance of the more conventional Latinizations or Anglicizations, whereby y is substituted for ı, c for Œ, and ae for ÆØ, Browning provides very precise transliterations of Greek names. In the preface to his translation of the Agamemnon Browning protests the soundness and increasing currency of this practice in anticipation of its detractors: Just a word more on the subject of my spelling—in a transcript from the Greek and there exclusively—Greek names and places precisely as does the Greek author. I began this practice, with great innocency of intention, some six-and-thirty years ago. . . . I supposed I was doing a simple thing enough. But there has been till lately much astonishment at os and us, ai and oi, representing the same letters in Greek. Of a sudden, however, whether in translation or out of it, everybody seems committing the oVence, although the adoption of u for ı still presents such diYculty that it is a wonder how we have hitherto escaped ‘Eyripides.’69 69 Browning (1877), in Kenyon (1912), viii. 293–365, at 295–6.

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This system, however, relies on a Xawed premise, as Kenyon indicates with reference to the Agamemnon: ‘If Greek and English vowel sounds were identical, transliteration would no doubt be the correct procedure, but since they are not, transliteration is often as far from the truth as the more common Latinisation.’70 In the Herakles, while Browning has transliterated most names and their adjectival forms according to this system (e.g. Amphitruon, Alkaios, Eurustheus, Thebai, Lukos, Kadmeian, Euboia, Minuai, Hudra, Mukenaian, Kuklopian, Olumpos), there are a few names for which he has simply given an English equivalent, for example ‘Madness’ for ¸ Æ, ‘Night’ for ˝ , and ‘Heaven’ for ˇPæÆ. This is a surprising inconsistency in view of the fact that the poet’s insistence on ‘accuracy’ extended to ordinary nouns and even exclamations of grief. At 4485 he translates the cry Ng
Ø (891),71 which refers to Amphitryon’s NŒ, as ‘O ye domes!’, and at 4831 he gives ‘peploi’ for  ºØØ (1198). The chorus’ lament OE (875) is reproduced at 4463 as ‘Otototoi.’ A remarkable feature of Browning’s literal rendering of the text is the way it often achieves simultaneously Wdelity to the Greek phraseology and an arresting quality in the English verse. This achievement is demonstrated in his translation of Iris’ instructions to Madness (834–42): Up then, collecting the unsoftened heart, Unwedded virgin of black Night! Drive, drag Frenzy upon the man here—whirls of brain Big with child-murder, while his feet leap gay! Let go the bloody cable its whole length! So that,—when o’er the Acherousian ford He has sent Xoating, by self-homicide, His beautiful boy-garland,—he may know First, Here’s anger, what it is to him, And then learn mine. The gods are vile indeed And mortal matters vast, if he ’scape free! (AA 4418–28)

Here Browning has retained much of Euripides’ asyndetic structure and concentration of imperatives. His literal transcriptions of the 70 Kenyon (1912), viii. p. xii. 71 This and all subsequent numbers in parentheses (unless marked AA) refer to the line-numbers in Euripides’ text.

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participial phrase ÆØ
Œı j æH Ææƪf (835–6)72 and the clause ‰ i æ Æ . . . j e ŒÆºº ÆØ
Æ Æ ÆPŁfi fiø (838–9) are appropriately graphic and successfully emulate Euripides’ grotesque juxtapositions of the imagery of Dionysiac ritual with the stark vision of infanticide and of innocence with evil. Similarly, Browning has translated the future verbs in Lyssa’s announcement at verse 871,  Æ  Kªg Aºº æ ø ŒÆd ŒÆÆıºø fiø, as powerful and portentous transitive verbs that communicate the direct and violent operation of Madness through Herakles: Ay, and I soon will dance thee madder, and pipe thee quite out of thy mind with fear!73 (AA 4459)

Browning remains equally faithful to Euripidean imagery in passages where his style becomes less literal and more allusive and condensed. For example, in the stichomythia between Amphitryon and Herakles, in which the father acts as psychotherapist to the son, Browning has replaced Euripides’ direct Bacchic metaphor in lines 1119 and 1122 with the idea of the literal and Wgurative intoxication associated with the worshippers of Bacchus: amphitruon If thou no more art Haides-drunk,—I tell! herakles I bring to mind no drunkenness of soul. (AA 4755–6)

One very notable aberration from his own methodology, however, is the poet’s handling of the repeated simile of the ‘little boats in tow.’ At lines 628–32 Euripides uses the rare word KºŒ
 to describe the manner in which Herakles’ children trail after their father upon their reprieve and re-entry into the house: p, ¥
 PŒ IØA ; Iºº I ÆØ  ºø fiH
 Aºº· z
   d ıæF; 72 Cf. Barlow’s translation (1996, 79) of the adjective ÆØ
Œı as a Wnal clause (‘so that he kills his children’), which tends to weaken its dramatic impact. 73 Cf. Barlow’s translation (ibid. 83) of verse 871, which invests æ ø with a causal rather than a transitive force: ‘I shall soon make you dance more wildly and I shall play upon you a pipe of terror.’

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The Browning version ¼ø ºÆ ª  
 KºŒ
Æ æE, ÆF
 S Kºø.

Browning translates these lines accurately: Ah,— No letting go for these, who all the more Hang to my garments! Did you foot indeed The razor’s edge? Why, then I’ll carry them— Take with my hands these small craft up, and tow Just as a ship would. (AA 4226–231)

Echoing this passage, Euripides uses KºŒ
 at the end of the play, but this time the word applies to Herakles and his newly formed dependence on his friend Theseus: E
 IƺÆ ÆN ÆØ
 ¨E ÆºØ łŁ KºŒ
. (1423–4)

The repetition is pronounced. In her translation of verses 1423–4, Barlow’s choice of words preserves the parallel with the earlier simile in order to highlight the tragic irony of the Wnal scene and the important role reversal experienced by the hero: I who have destroyed my house with shame and am utterly destroyed, shall follow Theseus like a small boat in tow.74

By contrast, Browning’s translation of the same verses diverges from the original in both linguistic and thematic terms: Myself,—who with these shames Have cast away my house,—a ruined hulk, I follow—trailed by Theseus—on my way. (AA 5076–8)

What Browning has given us in these lines is a portrait of grand and noble wreckage (‘a ruined hulk’), a tragic fall certainly, but signiWcantly 74 Barlow (1996), 121.

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not, as Euripides intended, to the vulnerable condition of a ‘childchanged father’.75 Herakles is still the ship, while Theseus is the boat in tow. Two further general features of Browning’s method of transcription, which are characteristic of his attempt to retrieve for the English reader something of the experience of reading ancient Greek poetry, are his respect for the original word order and its dependent emphases and his imitation of certain Greek idioms. Browning has not slavishly reproduced the word order of the Greek text at the expense of good sense and sound verse, but, within the constraints of an uninXected and less economical language, he has as far as possible adhered to it. A clue to Browning’s thinking on the subject of word order is found in his manuscript, where his translation of lines 631–2 appears thus: 3 2 1 Take / up / these small craft / with my hands / and tow Just as a ship would.

In the Wrst version he made of these lines, Browning maintained almost exactly the Greek word order. In the second version, which is indicated by his numbering, he worked out an order that produced a more poetic verse in English. By his careful positioning of words Browning has also ensured that his translation, where it cannot or does not reXect the original word order, at least retains the emphasis intended by Euripides. This is best illustrated by his translation of the important verse 931, ›
 PŒŁ Æe q, which powerfully signals the immediate and very physical invasion of Herakles by Madness. Browning translates this literally (‘But he was himself j no longer’) and, in order to achieve in English an eVect comparable to the Greek, he places the most important words emphatically at the end and beginning of the lines. In his essay to the Boston Browning Society two decades after the publication of Aristophanes’ Apology, William Cranston Lawton remarked of the transcription: ‘The little detail he has added is rarely modern or in any way un-Hellenic. Indeed, the minute faithfulness and self-suppression of this task must have been most irksome to a nature so alert and self-moved.’76 An example of the Hellenic detail 75 King Lear, iv. vii. 17.

76 Lawton (1897), 363–87, at 382.

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The Browning version

evident in Browning’s style is the way he imitates the rhetorical doubling between verb and object favoured in Greek. Thus, in his rendering of line 1093, a Łæa ø, as ‘breathings hot I breathe’, he keeps the original word order and doubling. He employs this idiom even where it does not occur in Euripides’ text, translating Herakles’ exhortation at line 1390 to the people of Thebes, ı ŁÆ , as ‘lament one wide lament’. The value of the translation of Herakles to Browning’s defence of Euripides is intimately connected to the method of translation Browning employs. In contrast to his Alkestis, the poet avoids interposing comment, either explicatory or reinterpretative. In contrast to his Agamemnon, his literalism here is regulated and not a deliberate cause of estrangement. In most respects, by allowing Euripides’ own voice to be heard, Browning’s translation restored to the Herakles its dramatic and moral essence, something which had been altered, or removed altogether, by the majority of translators of the text since Seneca, and which has been largely absent from modern versions in which the writers’ personal agenda are given precedence. Without denying or diminishing the individual character of his translation, it could be argued that Browning’s agenda in his version of the Herakles was, in a sense, precisely to eschew any ideological intrusion of an overtly private or contemporary nature, and was, therefore, a reaYrmation of Euripidean thinking. Galinsky, assessing the importance of the translation to the nineteenth century, concludes: At Wrst sight, it may seem paradoxical that in the Herakles Browning’s contribution to the tradition is precisely that he refrained from adapting and, thus, tampering with Euripides’ portrait of the hero. At a time when Matthew Arnold used classical themes for escapism, when Swinburne dismissed Euripides as a ‘botcher’ and a ‘scenic sophist’, and when Wilamowitz pronounced Herakles’ madness to be the result of his megalomania, Browning sounded the true and authentic Euripidean note by helping the poet speak for himself.77

Truth and authenticity in this context are thorny notions, and their application perilous. But if we understand the process involved in the translation of classical literature as a dialogue between the ancient writer and his modern interpreter, the Browning version of Herakles reads as a remarkably empathetic and immediate exchange with the tragic poet. 77 Galinsky (1972), 263–4.

7 The psychological hero: Herakles’ lost self and the creation of Nervenkunst If Browning’s main contribution to the reception of Herakles was his boldly sympathetic transcription of its unreasoned madness, the next decade marked the beginning of a process of appropriation which assumed the speciWc form of psychologizing the hero and internalizing his madness, and discovered in the text an electrifying prototype of Modernist neuroses. Two charismatic individuals, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-MoellendorV and Hermann Bahr, were pre-eminently responsible for ensuring that the Modernist era can be regarded conWdently as the most decisive in the history of the play’s reception. The Wrst, Wilamowitz (1848–1931), was the great German classical scholar, whose monumental two-volume edition of Herakles, published in 1889, is widely regarded as ‘the foundation of modern classical scholarship, the Wrst modern commentary on a Greek tragedy, the one book every classical scholar must know’.1 Hermann Bahr (1863–1934) was Austria’s self-appointed architect and diagnostician of ‘Die Moderne’. Their separate life missions—one philological, the other cultural—coincided in fortuitous combination to facilitate the interest of the later twentieth century’s directors and 1 Fowler (1990), 489–522, at 498. August Nauk (1822–92), the best Hellenist of his day, was the Wrst to review the edition. In a letter he wrote to Wilamowitz on 2 October 1889, Nauck described the Bearbeitung as ‘unvergleichliche’: ‘Dies Werk, das ich wa¨hrend der letzten Tage kaum aus den Ha¨nden gelegt habe, macht einen u¨berwa¨ltigenden Eindruck. Es gibt wohl kaum ein Gebiet des philologischen Wissens, wo Sie nicht sichtend und lichtend die Wunderkraft Ihrer Genialita¨t beta¨tigen’ (‘This work, which I have hardly put down over the last days, leaves an overwhelming impression. There seems no area of philological knowledge unilluminated by the wonder of your penetrating genius’). See Calder (1977), 375–85.

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dramatists in the mad Herakles, and the ongoing theatrical appropriation of Euripides’ hero as a means of exploring private and historical crises. Euripides’ Herakles had a profound eVect on both men, when each was in his fortieth year (his akme¯, in the ancient sense), and, although they pursued distinct objectives, their work intersected at an important intellectual watershed. On 6 January 1902 the Wrst and only performance of Wilamowitz’s translation of the Herakles was staged at Vienna’s Theater in der Josefstadt, and was reviewed by Hermann Bahr in a lengthy feuilleton. This production, and its powerful impact on Bahr, occurred simultaneously with the emergence in Wn-de-sie`cle Vienna of revolutionary movements in literature, art, theatre, and music, and with the focal shift, identiWed by Carl E. Schorske, within these convergent spheres, from rational man to psychological man.2 Viennese Modernism became synonymous with irrationalism, subjectivity, individual instinct, dreams, and above all, nerves and nervous complaints. Herakles played a key part in one of the ‘big bangs’ of European thought, which led (amongst other things) to the psychoanalytic rediscovery of Attic tragedy, a phenomenon demonstrative of the predominant inward-turning of Wn-de-sie`cle Vienna, and of which Sigmund Freud’s ‘Oedipus complex’ is the best-known example. Pioneering psychoanalysts like Freud (1856–1939) extracted from the archaic Greek myths, as reinterpreted by the Wfth-century tragedians, paradigmatic diagnoses of repression and hysteria.3 At the same time, classical scholars began to make use of the new science of psychology in their work and to consider the tragic representation of madness in terms of clinical accuracy. A creative corollary of this reciprocal interest in the psychic life of the ancients was the development of what Bahr deWned as the Nervenkunst (neurotic art) of Modernism. The initial cause ce´le`bre, and the enduring ideal, of Nervenkunst was Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s free and (as contemporary critics believed) ‘ungriechisch’ adaptation of Sophocles’ Elektra, which premie`red in Berlin 2 See Schorske (1979), esp. chaps. 1 and 4. 3 For a comprehensive discussion of how antiquity is implicated in psychoanalytic theory, and how Freud appropriated Wgures and themes from classical mythology, see Armstrong (2005).

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in 1903, revealing modern hysteria in classical guise.4 It is my belief, however, that Hofmannsthal’s engagement with the ‘pathological’ in Greek tragedy and the Nachtseite of human psychology was inXuenced, at a very deep level, by Euripides’ Herakles, through the agency of Hermann Bahr in his capacity as cultural mediator to the Jung-Wien generation. Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), like others among his literary circle, was both fascinated and disturbed by Bahr’s theory of the lost self or ‘die Unsicherheit des Ich’,5 which Bahr derived directly from verse 931 of Herakles (›
 PŒŁ Æe q) and held to be the essence of Euripidean tragedy. Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, which broke violently with his earlier lyrical dramas,6 was an almost immediate response to Bahr’s implicit challenge, towards the end of his review of Herakles, to the writers of his day to ‘lose’ themselves in the eternal insecurity of the self and to depict, in contemporary terms, the terrifying potential within all human beings suddenly to be borne away from themselves. My purpose in this chapter, therefore, is to uncover the wider signiWcance of the 1902 Viennese Herakles, which, in the century since its performance, has been completely overlooked, and to propose that it was indeed this production that, through the intermediate dynamism of Hermann Bahr, inspired Hofmannsthal’s psychologically explicit Elektra of the following year. The timing of the Viennese Herakles and its place in the reception history of Euripides are extremely noteworthy. Wilamowitz, Bahr, and Hofmannsthal were, in their varying ways, initiators of the change in Hellenism that occurred at the close of the nineteenth century, a change speciWcally concerned with attitudes towards Euripides and which led to the dethroning of Schlegelian and Arnoldian classicism. Despised for most of the 1800s for his ‘modernity’, his Xagrant disharmony and decadence, Euripides became the tragedian best suited to the age of unreason, a poet and prophet of the mental and spiritual disquietude that ushered in the nervous new century.

4 Gustav Zieler, in a review of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (Kreuz-Zeitung, 31 Oct. 1903), proclaimed the characters ‘moderne Hysteriker, die sich in ein antikes Gewand gehu¨llt haben’ (‘modern hysterics who have wrapped themselves in the cloak of antiquity’). 5 Bahr (1904), 93. 6 See e.g. McMullen (1985), 637–51, at 639.

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Not only was Euripides now appreciated for his modern attributes, but through him critics and writers also arrived at a new understanding of the nature of Sophocles. Hofmannsthal’s Hellenism was grounded largely in a desire ‘to make Euripides anew’ and to invest the ancient poet with the Dionysian element that Nietzsche had accused Euripides of removing from tragedy. Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, in both its dramatic and operatic forms, presented audiences with an alien and unromantic perspective of Sophocles, a Sophocles stripped of his classicist habiliments; it signiWed the making anew of Sophocles through the medium of Euripides.

WILAMOW ITZ AND THE SEEDS OF MADNESS In response to the passage in the Aristotelian Problemata Physica (30.953a), in which Herakles is categorized, along with Empedocles, Plato, and Socrates, as a ‘melancholic man’ or unstable genius, Wilamowitz says that Herakles has been placed ‘in die Reihe der Heroen des Geistes’ (‘in the order of the heroes of the mind’).7 A major part of Wilamowitz’s contribution to the reception of Euripides’ Herakles was his internalization and rationalization of the madness as the climax of a pre-existing disorder: ‘die Tat aber ist eine Folge der Herakleischen eignen Natur geworden’ (‘however, the deed has become the consequence of the Heraklean nature itself’).8 He concludes that what makes Herakles a great hero is also what drives him over the edge into psychopathy and, therefore, the seeds of madness are in him before the arrival of Hera’s emissaries. With this interpretation Wilamowitz sought to resolve the persistent problem of the play’s disjunctive structure, the apparent irreconcilability of its two halves. Like Seneca before him, he problematizes Herakles’ physis through the revelation of the hero’s pathogenic mentality of revenge and slaughter, in short, his megalomania. His argument, which is founded exclusively on verses 562–82 and 966–7, is that Herakles’ mind has been unbalanced by years of killing and, on his return to Thebes from the Labours, his normal heroic bloodlust has reached the point of insane excess. 7 Wilamowitz (1959), ii. 93.

8 Wilamowitz (1895), i. 128.

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Herakles’ speech at 562–82, in which he sets out the revenge he will take upon the usurper Lycus and the disloyal citizens of Thebes, is construed by Wilamowitz as evidence of incipient madness. The critical lines are 566–73:

æH b rØ ŒÆd ŒÆÆŒ łø
ı ŒÆØH ıæ ø, ŒæAÆ
 IØ g Þłø ŒıH ºŒÆ· ˚Æ
ø
 ‹ı ŒÆŒf K æ s ÆŁÆ K KF fiH ŒÆººØŒfiø fiH
 ‹ ºfiø ØæÆØ, f
b æøE
ØÆæH  ÆØ ŒæH – Æ  "e K ºø ı, ˜æŒ  AÆ ºıŒe ƃÆŁÆØ. First I shall go and raze to the ground the palace of this new king, I shall cut oV his unholy head and throw it for the dogs to tear at. Those of the Thebans whom I have found to be treacherous in spite of being well treated by me, these I shall overcome with my conquering club. Dispersing others with my winged arrows, I shall Wll the whole of the river Ismenus with bloody corpses and the clear stream of Dirce shall run red with gore.

Wilamowitz believes this passage to be a display, not of heroic anger, but of manic intemperance: Ob Lykos ein Haus hat, ob seine Demolirung Zweck hat, davon weiss Her. nichts. Beides ist auch gar nicht der Fall. Es lodert eben der Ja¨hzorn in ihm ¨ bertreibung und bringt ihn schon hier zu to¨richten Pla¨nen, die er in wilder U prahlend ausruft: auch nachher, wenn der verderbliche Wahnsinn ihn beherrscht, ist die Zertru¨mmerung des Schlosses seines Feindes sein Haupt¨ berfu¨lle von Kraft sucht sich eine mo¨glichst gewaltige Aufgabe.9 wunsch: die U Herakles does not know if Lykus has a house or if there is a purpose to his demolition. Neither is the case. Rather his violent temper blazes up and already at this point leads him to foolish plans, which he proclaims boastfully in wild exaggeration; even afterwards, when he is ruled by pernicious insanity, his main wish is the total destruction of his enemy’s palace: the superabundance of strength seeks out the most violent task.

Herakles’ graphically violent language shows him relishing the grisly duty ahead of him, a sure sign, according to Wilamomitz’s reading of
ØÆæH at 571, of the conquering hero’s mental imbalance: 9 Ibid. ii. 131, on v. 566.

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ØÆæE zerreißen, zerXeischen, ist eigentlich fu¨r den Erfolg der Pfeilschu¨sse ein zu grausames Wort, das eher dem Schlage der Keule zukommt. Die Phantasie des Her. labt sich am grassesten und blutigsten: die Inconcinnita¨t ist also wohlberechtigt.10
ØÆæE to rip up, to tear apart, is actually too awful a word for the results of arrow shots. It would apply more to the blows of the club. Herakles’ fantasy feeds on the superlatives of crassness and bloodiness: his roundabout use of the word here is therefore justiWed.

Amphytrion’s question to his son, h  ı   K Œı ŒæH j R ¼æØ ŒÆØ; (‘Surely the blood of those you have just been killing has not made you mad?’, 966–7), suggests to Wilamowitz a rational explanation for Herakles’ homicidal rampage, that the madness is a psychological reaction to the murders he has just performed in defence of his family, and the inevitable consummation of a bloodlust of such enormous proportions as that manifest in verses 566–73. This explanation better applies to Seneca’s Hercules Furens, in which the epiphany of Iris and Lyssa does not occur, and Hercules, in his madness, imagines that his victims are the children of Lycus (HF 987–8) rather than those of Eurystheus. Wilamowitz’s psychological interpretation of Herakles’ madness was adopted by several leading Euripidean scholars well into the next century. The Wrst to acknowledge his debt to Wilamowitz was A. W. Verrall (1851–1912), who took the rationalization of the madness to an extreme and outlandish conclusion. Verrall, the Wrst holder of a chair of English Literature at Cambridge, contributed greatly to the late nineteenth-century rehabilitation of Euripides and to the undermining of the Schlegelian position. His championship of the ancient poet relied on an exciting and original, but sometimes dangerous and self-defeating, hypothesis. In 1895, the year Wilamowitz’s revised edition of Herakles appeared, Verrall published Euripides the Rationalist, in which he claimed that Euripides’ genius could not be appreciated until one had accepted that beneath the surface of his plays lay a satiric or ironic viewpoint. He insisted that, while the plays outwardly conformed to popular and traditional thinking, their real meaning and hidden scepticism were only intelligible to the educated among the original audience. Verrall’s obituarist in the Classical Review admitted 10 Wilamowitz (1895), 131–2, on v. 571.

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that this position could lead him astray, although it was nonetheless valuable for that reason: ‘It would be foolish for even his most ardent admirer to deny that this very IªØÆ at times betrayed him into error. . . . But in Verrall’s case these occasional aberrations were hardly to be regretted, for his advocacy of an untenable position was as likely as not to be more suggestive and stimulating than many a note unimpeachably correct.’11 Recent critics, such as Michelini, have taken a more exacting view of Verrall’s approach: ‘His methods amount almost to parodies of traditional scholarship. . . . Instead of athetizing or emending diYcult passages, he introduced fanciful interpretations that were intended to eliminate the diYculties and preserve the text.’12 Perhaps most fanciful of all was his essay on Herakles, ‘A Soul’s Tragedy’, published in 1905. Taking his cue from Herakles’ protestation at verse 1346, IØ
H ¥

Ø ºªØ (‘These are the miserable tales of poets’), Verrall asserts: The legend of Heracles, as commonly told, is not supposed as part of the story, but replaced by some totally diVerent conception of Heracles, and of his mental and physical history. . . . In these circumstances it would seem imperative, as the next step, at least to attempt the interpretation of the play upon the hypothesis that the hero is not a superhuman personage, nor his story supernatural, but he a man, however great, like other men, and the scene of his action, however remote in time and diVerent in circumstances from the age of Euripides or from our own, nevertheless no other in its physical laws than that same world which the Athenians knew and we know. Not only is this the truth, but upon the perception of it depends all the coherence of the play, all its meaning to the intelligence, and the better part of its appeal to the emotions.13

He concurs with Wilamowitz that Herakles is mad from his Wrst entrance, but his attempt to rationalize the events of the story becomes an extraordinary exercise in reductionism. Among his claims are that the divine epiphany at 815 V. is merely an apparition dreamt up by a member of the chorus;14 Cerberus is an ordinary dog;15 and Herakles’ descent into Hades was nothing more than a mine disaster.16

11 BayWeld (1912), 172–3, at 172. 13 Verrall (1905), 136–7. 15 Ibid. 193–4.

12 Michelini (1987), 15. 14 Ibid. 171. 16 Ibid. 185–6.

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Verrall’s theory on the Herakles was reproduced Wfteen years later by Gilbert Norwood: ‘Herakles suVers from a growing tendency to madness; in his moods he knows that all his story is human, all the nobler for its humanity, but in his dark hours he accepts the vulgar splendours which rumour throws round his adventures, at such times lending nascent myth the support of his own false witness. The tragedy of his life has been this mental distemper, which has Wnally caused him to destroy his wife and children.’17 The inXuence of Wilamowitz is also clear in Norwood’s argument that, although the appearance of Iris and Lyssa seems to overthrow the idea of Herakles’ madness as internally motivated, ‘the past scene [562– 82], before ever Frenzy arrives, has shown the hero not mad, yet not in full possession of his senses’.18 One of Wilamowitz’s staunchest disciples was Gilbert Murray (1866–1957), whose rehabilitative work on Euripides owed a great deal to the German scholar’s ‘historical insight and singular gift of imaginative sympathy with ancient Greece’.19 Murray had been overwhelmed by Wilamowitz’s edition of the Herakles, although he remained ambivalent in his opinion of the play itself: ‘It is brokenbacked; it has too much conventional rhetoric; but for sheer loftiness of tragic tone the last act, after Heracles awakes from the trance in which he has murdered his children, will stand beside anything in ancient drama.’20 His pronouncement on the nature of Herakles’ madness conforms faithfully to the position of Wilamowitz: When a writer of Wction wishes to make a character go mad or change his nature he has obviously a choice before him, a choice between contrast and preparation. Suppose, as here, it is a case of violent homicidal rage, produced by some external accident, he can get an eVect by making the victim in his normal state a particularly gentle and reasonable person who is utterly transformed. . . . Or he can equally get an eVect by showing certain slight tendencies in the normal man which blaze out into excess in the new conditions. It is clear that Euripides in his treatement of Heracles follows the second method and not the Wrst. Heracles is a warm-hearted and passionate Wghter who goes mad passionately and pugnaciously.21

17 Norwood (1920), 232. 20 Murray (1946), 112.

18 Ibid. 233. 21 Ibid.

19 Murray (1897), preface.

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E. R. Dodds (1893–1979), in an essay on ‘Euripides the Irrationalist’ published in 1929, described the ‘scientiWc care’22 and ‘fascinated precision’23 with which Euripides explored the dark, irrational side of human nature, giving as an example Herakles, ‘whose insanity is clearly marked as belonging to the manic-depressive type’.24 Dodds concludes his article with the observation that the present threat to the supremacy of rationalism posed by Dr Jung and Dr Freud, among others, is one reason why Euripides ‘is for our generation one of the most sympathetic Wgures in the whole of ancient literature’,25 and this is why his Herakles is the Wn-de-sie`cle text. G. M. A. Grube’s thesis on Herakles in 1941 aimed to redress the extravagances of Verrall’s interpretation and subsequent readings of the internalization of Herakles’ madness, which paid too little heed to Euripides’ dramatic intention by discrediting the play’s supernatural agents. He found the theories of Wilamowitz and Verrall on the seeds of madness illuminating but not conclusive: [Heracles] promises vengeance on Lycus; his words become more and more violent; he speaks like one intoxicated with his own strength and greatness until he seems to pass from greatness to megalomania. . . . The reckless wildness of the promised vengeance argues a dangerous exaltation, and the grandiloquent words in which he boasts of his own might—great though that be—stand out uncomfortably. . . . The cause of Heracles’ madness, however, seems to lie entirely outside himself, which is no doubt why it is represented externally, by this sudden divine appearance. . . . We Wnd little of the psychological motivation at which Euripides is such a past master. We have Madness and Iris instead.26

The inXuence of Wilamowitz’s psychological explanation of Herakles’ madness continued right up to the close of the twentieth century, as critics and dramatists located the seeds of madness in the play’s Wrst part in order to make sense of the violence of the second part. In 1945 E. M. Blaiklock, taking his cue from ancient and Renaissance humoral theory, proposed that the madness was an epileptic furor.27 Two decades later J. C. Kamerbeek rationalized the

22 Dodds (1929), 97–104, at 99. 23 Ibid. 100. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 104. 26 Grube (1941), 252–6. 27 Blaiklock (1945), 48–63. Repr. in Blaiklock (1952), 122–40.

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murders as ‘the violent reaction to the overstrain of a burdensome life’,28 a kind of ‘executive stress’. In the Herakles of American poet Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982), staged in 1965, the delusion, which causes the hero to slaughter his sons, is linked directly to his megalomaniac progress towards deiWcation. British poet Simon Armitage (b. 1963), in his millennial version of the tragedy, Mister Heracles, portrayed the hero’s condition as psychosis induced by combat trauma and desensitization to the act of killing.29

T H E P H I LO LO G I S T A S ACTO R Wilamowitz’s role in the rehabilitation of the Herakles and its author, and the breadth of his inXuence, were not conWned to the world of scholarship and exegetic discourse. He was also responsible for the Wrst performance of the Herakles of the twentieth century and, indeed, the Wrst professional revival of a Euripidean tragedy30 on the European stage prior to the productions of Gilbert Murray’s translations which Harley Granville-Barker (1877–1946) presented in London.31 Wilamowitz’s translations of Greek tragedy for the stage were part of a lifelong obsession with theatre and tragic drama. From the obituary he wrote for himself in about 1912, it is clear that he ‘thought of himself Wrst as a soldier, second as an actor, third as a teacher, fourth as a scholar’.32 As an 18-year-old schoolboy at Pforta he had played Goethe’s tragic hero Egmont, a revelatory and liberating experience which, at the time, he described in ecstatic or epiphanic terms as though it were a kind of religious conversion.33 The lasting potency of his hour upon the stage and his close identiWcation 28 Kamerbeek (1966), 1–16, at 14. 29 On MacLeish and Armitage’s versions of Herakles, see below, Chap. 9. 30 Adolf Wilbrandt had directed his own translation of Euripides’ satyr play Cyclops at Vienna’s Burgtheater in 1882, as an afterpiece to Sophocles’ Elektra. 31 The Wrst of these was Hippolytus for the Stage Society at the Court Theatre in 1904. See Hall and Macintosh (2005), 492 V. 32 Calder (1994a), 355–8, at 358. 33 See Wilamowitz’s letter to his mother, probably written two days after the performance on 7 March 1867, and signed ‘Ulrich, Graf von Gaure’. Published for the Wrst time in Calder (1994b) 371–6, at 372–4.

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with the isolated Wgure of the aristocratic, idealistic, and uncompromising Egmont had, as Calder points out, ‘great implications for the history of tragic exegesis’.34 The passion of the young Thespian remained with the mature scholar and informed his whole approach to the critical interpretation of ancient texts. At the end of the ‘Einleitung’ of his Herakles, Wilamowitz explicitly rejected the Nietzschean ideal of the philologist as prophet. Instead he asserted that the philologist’s assignment should be comparable to that of the actor, but he was careful to distinguish between bravura acting and vain histrionics, and to stress the ability of the true artist to submerge his own personality and to inhabit and animate a diVerent character: Wie wir unser Gescha¨ft nur dann recht besorgen, wenn wir in jedes alte Buch, das wir unter den Ha¨nden haben, nicht unsern Geist hineintragen sondern das herauslesen, was darin steht, so liegt u¨berhaupt die speziWsch philologische Aufgabe in dem Erfassen einer fremden Individualita¨t. Es gilt sich in eine fremde Seele zu versenken, sei es die eines einzelnen, sei es die eines Volkes. In der Aufopferung unserer eigenen Individualita¨t liegt unsere Sta¨rke. Wir Philologen als solche haben nichts vom Dichter noch vom Propheten, was beides bis zu einem gewissen Grade der Historiker sein muß. Dagegen mu¨ssen wir etwas vom Schauspieler in uns tragen, nicht vom Virtuosen, der seiner Rolle eigene Lichter aufsetzt, sondern vom echten Ku¨nstler, der dem toten Worte durch das eigene Herzblut Leben gibt.35 Just as we only do our work properly when, in every ancient book that comes into our hands, we read out of it what is there rather than put our own spirit into it, so it is the speciWc task of the philologist to comprehend an alien individuality. The task is to immerse ourselves in an alien soul, be it of an individual or of a people. Our strength lies in our giving up our own individuality. We philologists as such do not have much of the poet or prophet in us, both of which a historian must have to a certain extent. No, we must have something of the actor in us— not the virtuoso who interprets his role in his own way but rather the true artist who through his heart’s blood gives life to the dead word.

The equivalence of Wilamowitz’s own hermeneutic methods to the craft of the ‘Schauspieler’ or ‘echten Ku¨nstler’ was nowhere more discernible than in his peculiar empathy with the character of Herakles,36 while the 34 Ibid. 372. 35 Wilamowitz (1959), i. 257. 36 On Wilamowitz’s ‘profound personal aYnity’ with the Wgure of Herakles and his perception of himself as a   ˙æÆŒºB, see Calder (1985), 80–110, at 91–101.

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image he fervently evoked of giving life to dead words was practically expounded in his eVorts to revive Greek tragedy on the modern German stage in actable translations. The return of Greek tragedy to the German stage had been initiated in the late nineteenth century by the poet, novelist, and dramatist Adolf Wilbrandt (1837–1911), who was director of the Burgtheater in Vienna between 1881 and 1887. While he was an eminently practical man of theatre, Wilbrandt had a respectable academic background, including a doctorate. The son of a professor at the University of Rostock, he had brieXy studied law there before making the transition to philology and history and continuing his studies at Berlin and Munich. During his literary career he had the rare distinction of being twice awarded the prestigious Grillparzer Prize, Wrst in 1875 for his tragedy Gracchus der Volkstribun and again in 1890 for his dramatic poem Der Meister von Palmyra. In the mid1860s Wilbrandt published translations of Sophocles with the express design of making the plays stageworthy in a modern sense. To this end he simpliWed the tragedies’ mythological references, substituted German iambic pentameter for the Greek trimeters, and reduced the choral passages to speaking parts. His translations were performed in the next two decades in Meiningen, Darmstadt, Berlin, and Munich, but he exercised little directorial control over these productions. It was not until his tenure at the Burgtheater that Wilbrandt achieved recognition as a director of Sophoclean tragedy, beginning in 1882 with his Elektra, the inaugural production of his newly instituted repertory. His greatest triumph was his staging of Oedipus Tyrannus, which opened on 29 December 1886 and starred the Hungarian actor Emerich Robert, whom Wilbrandt recalled in his memoirs ‘in griechischer Wohlgestalt und Beredsamkeit, aber mit der Freiheit, dem Feuer, den Seelento¨nen unserer Tage’ (‘in Greek comeliness and eloquence, but with the freedom, the Wre, the soul tones of our day’).37 In his review of the premie`re, Ludwig Speidel, the critic for the liberal Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, conWdently announced: ‘Wien ist fu¨r die große Trago¨die, von der es sich fru¨her mehr oder minder wehleidig zu verschließen pXegte, mu¨ndig geworden’ (‘Vienna used to close its mind to great tragedy, more or less in a 37 Wilbrandt (1905), 44.

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self-pitying way, but has now come of age’).38 It is very possible that Freud saw Wilbrandt’s Oedipus, either in its Wrst presentation a few months after his return to Vienna from Paris (where he had seen and been deeply impressed by the great Jean Mounet-Sully’s deWnitive Oedipus at the Come´die Franc¸aise39), or in one of its thirty revivals at the Burgtheater prior to 1900. One whose receptiveness to Wilbrandt’s Elektra and Oedipus can, with more certainty, be conWrmed is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He had attended the Burgtheater productions as a teenager, and his own ground-breaking Sophoclean adaptations were partly a progression of Wilbrandt’s work. It is as a precursor and a facilitator that, in Hellmut Flashar’s estimation, Wilbrandt ranks highly in the German reception of Greek tragedy, having prepared both the stage and public sentiment for the radicalism of his theatrical heirs: Diese Inszenierungen sind Marksteine auf dem Wege der Einbu¨rgerung des antiken Dramas auf der Bu¨hne der eigenen Zeit. Die zuvor gea¨ußerte Skepsis, ob die griechische Trago¨die u¨berhaupt auf dem modernen Theater ein Existenzrecht habe, ist ein fu¨r alle Male beseitigt, jedenfalls was Sopho¨ bersetzungen Wilbrandts werden nun auf den Bu¨hnen kles betriVt. Die U mehrerer Sta¨dte (Berlin, Mu¨nchen, Nu¨rnberg, Mannheim, Stuttgart) gespielt. Ohne sie sind die dann weitergehenden Schritte von Wilamowitz und Max Reinhardt nicht denkbar.40 These productions are milestones on the road to establishing ancient drama on the contemporary stage. The former scepticism, which doubted if Greek tragedy even had the right to exist in modern theatre, has been removed once and for all, at least with regards to Sophocles. Wilbrandt’s translations are played on the stages of several cities (Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg, Mannheim, Stuttgart). The work of Wilamowitz and Max Reinhardt builds upon these translations and goes one step further and is therefore unthinkable without them. 38 Cited in Smekal (1916), 216. 39 Between 30 October 1885 and 28 February 1886 Freud studied with the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpeˆtrie`re in Paris. It was during this period that he saw Mounet-Sully (1841–1916) perform the title role in L’Oedipe roi (a version by Jules Lacroix). According to Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones (1953, 194), the interpretation ‘made a deep impression on him’. On the inXuence of Mounet-Sully’s Oedipus, see Macintosh (1997), 284–323, at 289–90 and her forthcoming Oedipus Tyrannos: A Production History. On Freud’s fascination with Oedipus and his development of the Oedipus complex, see Armstrong (2005), 47–62. 40 Flashar (1991), 103.

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At the turn of the new century Wilamowitz emerged as Wilbrandt’s Wrst and improbable successor in the task of revitalizing Greek tragedy for the contemporary theatre—improbable because, unlike Wilbrandt, he was not a poet or practitioner, but occupied the venerable position of philology’s high priest. He did, however, alter the course of this revitalization process, in a way consistent with his most sustained philological project, by placing Euripides at its forefront. Wilamowitz made popular and non-literal translations of eight Euripidean plays into German verse (Alkestis, Bacchae, Herakles, Supplices, Hippolytus, Medea, Troades, and Cyclops), Wve of which (Herakles, Hippolytus, Medea, Alkestis, and Cyclops) were given theatrical performances. The staging of his Wrst Euripidean translation, the Herakles, was preceded by productions of his only non-Euripidean translations, Sophocles’ Ko¨nig Oedipus and the Orestie of Aeschylus, which both premie`red in Berlin in 1900, under the direction of Hans Oberla¨nder.41 Flashar has documented the performance history of Wilamowitz’s translations between 1900 and 1981.42 According to his chronology, the thirty-Wve professional (as opposed to academic) productions mounted during this time constitute Wfteen presentations of the Orestie, seven of Ko¨nig Oedipus, and thirteen from Euripides. Of the Euripidean translations, Hippolytus proved the most popular, with four separate stagings in Wilamowitz’s lifetime, while Herakles and Alkestis each received just one performance. Although he was not a professional man of the theatre, Wilamowitz was no less mindful than Wilbrandt of the importance of producing translations that were viable on the modern stage. His collaboration with Hans Oberla¨nder on the Orestie, which Wilamowitz details in his Erinnerungen, was probably typical of the nature and extent of his involvement in the dramaturgy of his translations: An dem Einstudieren habe ich keinen Anteil gehabt, aber er verhandelte mit mir, ich nahm Streichungen an dem Texte vor und besprach vielerlei, die AuVassung der Charaktere, die Bu¨hnenbilder, die Cho¨re, die er zumeist so einzustudieren verstand, daß sa¨mtliche Choreuten zusammen sprachen

41 Ko¨nig Oedipus was Wrst performed on 28 February at the Berliner Theater. Orestie followed on 24 November at the Theater des Westens Berlin. 42 See Flashar (1985), 306–57, at 352–3.

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und doch die Worte verstanden wurden. Diese letzte Forderung hatte ich erhoben. . . . Ich lernte mancherlei, freute mich an vielem.43 I did not play any part in the actual rehearsals, but he consulted with me; I agreed to text being deleted and discussed many things: the interpretation of the characters, the scenery, the chorus, which he directed in such a way that all members of the chorus could speak at the same time and yet be understood. I had demanded the latter. . . . I learnt this and that and enjoyed much.

He also mentions taking part in similar performances of Ko¨nig Oedipus, Hippolytus, and Medea (although there is no suggestion that he assisted the production side of Herakles or that he even attended the performance), and that his occupation with the theatre was substantial enough to cause him to be nominated to the committee awarding the Schiller Prize, a post he held until World War I.44 As Philip Ward has noted, the stageworthiness of Wilamowitz’s translations necessitated, to some degree, a reconciliation between the scholar’s sturdy historicist principles and the exigencies and changing expectations of Modernist theatre: This ambiguity is reXected in the diction of his translations, which combine archaism and Modernism into a curious mish-mash of Schiller, Geibel, Protestant hymn, late Goethe rhythms, Hebbelesque dialogue and strange lapses into colloquialisms. The stated aim was comprehensibility. . . . Inevitably this could only be achieved by accommodating his translations to prevailing theatrical taste, which in the 1890s meant the Naturalism of Otto Brahm’s Freie Bu¨hne.45

THE VIENNESE HE RAKL ES Herakles was the second of Wilamowitz’s translations to be performed in Vienna. His Orestie (which premie`red in Berlin) had been staged at the Burgtheater in December 1900. By contrast, the venue for the Wrst modern European production of a Euripidean tragedy was not in the heart of the city, but rather in Josefstadt, a district just outside the walled centre and within walking distance of the Ringstrasse. Here it formed part of a vigorously avant-garde 43 Wilamowitz (1928), 253.

44 Ibid. 254.

45 Ward (2002), 52.

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repertoire of thirteen plays by eight authors produced by the Wiener Akademischen Verein fu¨r Kunst und Literatur between November 1901 and April 1903. The other authors whose works were featured included Goethe, Ibsen, Hauptman, and Maeterlinck, and the most notable premie`re of the season, apart from Herakles, was the Wrst German performance of Peer Gynt. Herakles was only the second production of the Viennese Akademischen Verein, established in 1901 along similar lines to the Berlin association of the same name which was dedicated to the revival of Greek drama on the modern stage.46 The Theater in der Josefstadt was the smallest of the outer city’s permanent commercial playhouses,47 but, owing to the energy and foresight of Joseph Jarno, its director from 1899, it had become a forum for the Modernist cause. As Yates explains, the theatre’s middlebrow entertainment provided a Wnancial safety-net for its highbrow experimentation: ‘Jarno’s strategy was to make money with light comedies, which allowed him also to put on an adventurous programme of ‘‘literary evenings’’, featuring dramatists such as Strindberg, Wedekind, Shaw, and Maeterlinck: here far more than in the Burgtheater or the Deutsches Volkstheater, the theatre-going public of Vienna were brought into touch with the leading trends in contemporary international drama.’48 The director chosen for Herakles was Albert Heine, a future director of the Burgtheater, whose acting credits included the roles of Oedipus and Kreon in Berlin. Six of the eight cast members were recruited from the Burgtheater, an ensemble of German and Austrian actors, while the Chorus consisted mainly of student members of the Akademischen Verein. Erich Schmidt performed the title role and Heine took the part of Amphitryon. Intriguingly, top billing was given to the actress Frieda Wagen in the part of Iris, clearly, from the programme, a leading light in the Josefstadt’s company (see Fig. 3). The performance took place on the Feast of the Epiphany (an oYcial holiday in predominantly Catholic Vienna) in a 2.30 Monday matine´e. It would have had an audience of less than 800 people (the capacity of the Josefstadt at that time was 798). Yet, in spite of its 46 See Flashar (1991), 123 and Ward (2002), 54. 47 The largest was the Theater an der Wien and the oldest the Theater in der Leopoldstadt. 48 Yates (1996), 186.

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Fig. 3. Theatre programme for Herakles, Vienna, 1902.

relatively low-key circumstances, the signiWcance of this once-only event did not pass unrecorded. The next day reviews of Herakles appeared in a number of Vienna’s major newspapers, unanimously aYrming the play’s enthralling beauty and brutality. Herakles, in its dark presentation of the irrational, confronted its audience with an entirely new and profoundly unsettling experience of Greek tragedy

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that obviously found intense resonances in ‘nervous’ Vienna. It also underlined the claim made by the poet and dramatist Friederich Hebbel (1813–63), that ‘Dies Oesterreich ist eine kleine Welt, j In der die grosse ihre Probe ha¨lt’ (‘Austria is a little world in which the big world has its dress rehearsal’).49 The Neue Freie Presse hailed the performance as a milestone in Viennese theatre history and in the reception of Euripides: Er war wiederum, zumal der Stimmung des Publikums nach, ein kleines literarisches Fest, sagen wir getrost, ein großes, denn zum erstenmal erschien auf einem Wiener Theaterzettel der Name Euripides. Zum erstenmale wenigstens wurde eine Trago¨die des hellenischen Dichters aufgefu¨hrt. Die Wahl war auf ‘Herakles’ gefallen, und der Erfolg bewies, daß sie nicht besser ¨ berhaupt ließ die Trago¨die einen tiefen Eindruck zuru¨ck sein ko¨nnte! . . . U und fand echten Beifall, der wa¨hrend des Actes athemlos an sich ha¨lt, um sich am Schluße in einem Sturm Luft zu machen.50 Going by the mood of the public it was a little literary celebration—let’s feel free to say a big celebration—because for the Wrst time the name Euripides appeared on a Viennese playbill. At least, one of this Hellenic poet’s tragedies was performed for the Wrst time. Herakles was chosen, and the resulting success proved that the choice couldn’t have been better! . . . The performance made a lasting impression and was met with true approval, which held itself in breathlessly during the performance and released itself in a storm of applause at the end.

The critic for the Wiener Abendpost, a supplement of the Wiener Zeitung, was greatly moved by Euripides’ virtuosity in dramatizing universal human themes: Wa¨hrend Chorstudenten auf der Bu¨hne die großen Fragen der Menschheit: Jugend und Alter, Leben und Sterben ero¨rterten, saßen Philologen und Antiquare zu ihren Fu¨ßen und ho¨rten das ma¨chtige Rauschen der schwingenden Verse des Euripides. Es erklang wie eine große Orgel, wenn Meisterhand alle Register beherrscht.51 While on the stage the students of the chorus debated all the big questions of humanity—youth and age, life and death, philologists and antiquaries sat at their feet and listened to the mighty roar of Euripides’ vibrant verses. It sounded like a huge pipe organ played by a maestro in command of all the stops. 49 Quoted in Benedikt (1954), 14. 51 Wiener Abendpost, 7 Jan. 1902, p. 7.

50 Neue Freie Presse, 7 Jan. 1902, p. 6.

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Wilamowitz himself testiWed to the performance’s tremendous reception when, in a letter to his friend Gilbert Murray dated 5 December 1902, he reported, ‘Voriges Jahr hat Herakles in Wien einen grossen Erfolg gehabt’ (‘Last year in Vienna Herakles enjoyed a great success’).52 Hermann Bahr, writing in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt,53 concluded his review of Herakles with a brief and disapproving critique of the company’s declamatory, rather fustian, acting styles,54 but he insisted that any Xaws in interpretation did not detract from the tragedy’s powerful appeal to its audience: Den Herakles gab Herr Erich Schmidt doch gar zu sehr als fahrenden Athleten. Ich kann mir schon denken, was er herausbringen wollte: die volkstu¨mliche Gestalt der Sagen und der Schwa¨nke. Aber er geriet dabei manchmal fast in einen Hans Sachs-Stil. Der Horatio-Natur des Theseus kam Herr Gregori mit seinem singenden Predigerton nicht bei. Herr Heine, als Amphitryon, in einigen Momenten, besonders in seiner Wut gegen die Untreue des Zeus, von starker Wirkung und auch interessant durch das deutliche Bestreben, den Eindruck des Reliefs zu erreichen, u¨berschrie sich spa¨ter so, daß er damit das richtige Verha¨ltnis der Gestalten ganz zersto¨rte. Ich fand die Vorstellung u¨berhaupt zu gewaltsam, zu la¨rmend, zu—um das bo¨se Wort auszusprechen: zu deklamierend. Trotzdem oder auch vielleicht gerade deswegen wirkte sie auf das Publikum sehr.55 Mr Erich Schmidt portrayed Herakles too much like a travelling athlete. I can imagine what he wanted to emphasize: the popular character of the legends and farces. But in doing so he sometimes fell almost into the style of Hans Sachs. Mr Gregori did not grasp the Horatio-nature of Theseus with his singing-preacher tone. In his role as Amphitryon Mr Heine had a few moments of strong impact, particularly in his rage against Zeus’ betrayal, and was also interesting in his clear attempt to achieve the impression of 52 Reproduced in Bierl, Calder, and Fowler (1991), 54. 53 Bahr reproduced his feuilleton on Herakles in his third volume of drama criticism, Rezensionem: Wiener Theater 1901–1903, (1903), 112–20. 54 The actor’s craft was a subject of particular concern to Bahr the theoretician and one integral to his programme of modernity. In an essay entitled ‘Der neue Stil’, which appeared in his Studien zur Kritik der Moderne (1894), he interviewed fourteen leading performers about the new naturalistic style of acting. All of the actors spurned Naturalism and, like Bahr, advocated a modern, Xexible technique. Bahr emphasized the need for real human beings (‘wirkliche Menschen’) and the personal view of the individual artist to be portrayed on stage. Among the actors whose personal, nonderivative styles he most admired were Eleanora Duse, Mounet-Sully, Sarah Bernhardt, and Adele Sandrock. 55 Bahr (1903), 120.

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relief; however, later in the piece he overdid the shouting so much that he quite destroyed the proper proportion of the characters. Overall I found the performance too violent, too loud, too—to utter the evil word—bombastic. Despite this, or perhaps even because of this, the performance had a powerful impact on the audience.

HERMANN BAHR’S RESPONSE The paragraph above is Bahr’s only comment on the production itself. For the most part his review, of between 1,500 and 2,000 words, consists of two strands: an analysis of Euripides’ virtuosity, and an extremely personal reaction to the ‘vile surge of chaos’56 at the play’s centre. Throughout his discussion he demonstrates a close reading of both the original text and Wilamowitz’s ‘Einleitung’. He begins by comparing Herakles, internally and technically, to the black dramas of the ageing Shakespeare, especially Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens, likening the two playwrights to master chess-players, worn out with bitter loathing for the too easy, too routine execution of their expert stratagems. Their disenchantment manifests itself in hasty exposition, as they go through the motions of preparation and distribution, of build-up and tension, climax and resolution. Then suddenly, Bahr contends, the tired masters rouse themselves from their weariness with the banalities of the dramatic form, in order to amaze their audience with the creation of a forceful and transcendent work of art: Haben sie sich so noch einmal aufgeraVt, den Mut und die Kraft ihrer Kunst zu zeigen, so kommt ein wilder Zorn u¨ber sie, sie stoßen das eben erst mu¨hsam aufgebaute Werk mit den Fu¨ßen weg, zerschlagen es und erschrecken uns durch ihr eigenes Antlitz, das plo¨tzlich hinter den zerrissenen Figuren, still gebietend, traurig spottend, gramvoll gefaßt erscheint. . . . Man hat in solchen Momenten das Gefu¨hl, als trete der Dichter selbst ungeduldig vor, winke den Schauspielern ab und wolle uns bedeuten, daß es doch zu to¨richt sei, das o¨de Spiel fortzusetzen, er wolle lieber endlich einmal ernst u¨ber Ernstes mit uns reden.57 As soon as they have built themselves up again to show the courage and power of their art, then a wild fury overcomes them, they kick over the work 56 Bahr (1903), 119.

57 Ibid. 113–14.

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they have just carefully constructed, destroy it, and shock us by their own face—silently commanding, sadly ridiculing, sorrowfully composed—which suddenly appears from behind the Wgures who are now in tatters. . . . In such moments one has the feeling that the poet himself takes the stage, waves the actors away, and tries to convince us that it is pointless to continue the performance: he would rather discuss something very serious with us at last.

This account contains Hermann Bahr’s original solution to the problem of the apparent lack of unity between the two halves of Herakles, the play which he deems the Wnest example of the sort of internal transformation he has just outlined. The Wrst half, he says, is an exposition in the style of a dispatch, a melodramatic tale of danger and rescue, executed with impatience. It is proof of the master craftsman’s ennui. The second half, however, is an expression of the artist’s renewed leonine fury, and is launched by Euripides’ ‘trumpcard’, the terrible epiphany of Lyssa, played with the deftness of the virtuoso magician: Halten wir hier an, um das fabelhafte Kunststu¨ck zu verstehen, das dem Dichter mit dieser Exposition gelungen ist: er hat seine Ungeduld, jenen Verdruß des gelangweilten Routiniers, der es nicht mehr ertra¨gt, ewig wieder dasselbe zu machen, fu¨r die dramatische Stimmung ausgenu¨tzt und in dramatische Haft umgesetzt. Was im Grunde nur der Ekel, bei der Vorbereitung zu verweilen, und das Bedu¨rfnis, schneller zur Sache zu kommen, ist, la¨ßt er uns als die atemlose Not einer u¨berwa¨ltigten Stadt, als die Todesangst der Mutter um die verfolgten Kinder empWnden. Und nun richtet er sich plo¨tzlich wie ein Lo¨we auf. Nun hat er gespu¨rt, was er, selbst unwillig, immer noch kann. Nun regt sich die la¨ngst entwo¨hnte Lust des großen Zauberers an der Gewalt des Metiers noch einmal in ihm. Man vernimmt fast, wie hinter der Erscheinung der bleichen Lyssa der verdrossene alte Dichter boshaft lacht: ‘Ja, jetzt kommt mein Trumpf, den doch keiner ahnt!’ Lyssa bringt, von Hera geschickt, den Wahnsinn u¨ber Herakles. Sie schlu¨pft in das Haus, der Chor stimmt die Klage an, und wir ru¨cken erregt zusammen: nun wird der rasende Herakles erscheinen, die große Szene ist da!58 Let us take pause here to understand the amazing feat the poet has achieved with this exposition: he has taken his impatience, that chagrin of the bored old hand who can no longer bear to do the same old thing, and exploited it for the dramatic mood, transforming it into dramatic arrest. What was actually just his distaste for taking too long for preparation and for the need to get to the 58 Ibid. 115–16.

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crux of the matter more quickly, he now lets us feel as the breathless distress of an overpowered city, as the mother’s fear for the lives of her persecuted children. And now he suddenly stands up like a lion. Now he has felt what he can still do, even if he doesn’t want to do it. The passion of the great enchanter in the power of verse, a joy given up long ago, now stirs in him again. Behind the appearance of the pale Lyssa one can almost perceive the querulous old poet laughing wickedly: ‘Yes, now comes my trump-card and nobody expects it!’ Lyssa, sent by Hera, brings madness upon Herakles. She steals into the house, the Chorus intones its lament, we move together excitedly: now the raging Herakles will appear, the big scene is on!

According to this reading of the play, the disunity is not a technical weakness; it is purposeful and necessary. Next in his piece Bahr outlines the ‘colossal eVect’ of the oV-stage explosion of madness which is rehearsed three times in the audience’s imagination: Da tritt Herakles nicht auf, sondern durch die Schreie des Vaters, die aus dem Hause gellen, wird der Chor, vom Anblick jener bleichen Dienerin schon auf Furcht gestimmt, plo¨tzlich von einer Vision des Schrecklichen erfaßt, die unser Gemu¨t, das ja die ganze Zeit schon daran gearbeitet hat, die unabwendbare Szene bei sich zu entwerfen, sogleich mit solchem Schauer erfu¨llt, daß wir eigentlich die Schilderung des nun nachstu¨rzenden Boten gar nicht mehr brauchen wu¨rden, aber indem wir ihn jetzt die unselige Tat auch noch erza¨hlen ho¨ren, alle Greuel zum zweiten Male zu erleben glauben. Auch das ist eigentlich nur ein technischer KniV, es ist, wenn man so sagen darf, schließlich nur Sardou. Der Dichter hat den Einfall, weil es ihm zu schwer ist, die Raserei des Herakles so stark zu zeigen, als sie unsere Phantasie erwartet, sie lieber gar nicht zu zeigen, sondern uns von eben unserer dreimal erregten Phantasie vorspielen zu lassen—dreimal: durch die Schreie, dann durch das Entsetzen des Chors, endlich durch den genauen Bericht. Die Wirkung ist eine ungeheure. . . . Man fu¨hlt sich hier, auch wie manchmal bei Shakespeare, an der Grenze der Dichtung, wo das Wort vor dem Unsagbaren zu verstummen und der Musik zu weichen ha¨tte.59 Herakles does not actually come on stage. Rather the Chorus, already made anxious by the look of the pale servant, is suddenly gripped by a vision of horror when it hears the father’s screams ringing from the house. This Wlls our mind, which has already been working the whole time to create the 59 Bahr (1903), 116–17. Bahr refers to Victorien Sardou (1831–1908), popular French author of ‘well-made’ but superWcial plays.

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unavoidable scene, with such dread that we really do not need the report of the Messenger who dashes in afterwards, but now as we listen to him tell the disastrous deed, it is as if we live through the horror a second time. This is actually only a technical trick; it is, if one may say so, ultimately only Sardou. Because it is too diYcult for the poet to show Herakles’ madness as strongly as our imagination expects, the poet had the idea of not showing it at all, but rather letting it play in our own heads by exciting our imagination three times: Wrst through the screams, then the horror of the Chorus, and Wnally the precise report. The eVect is colossal. . . . One feels here, as sometimes with Shakespeare, that one is on the boundary of poetry, where the word is silenced by by the unspeakable and must yield to music.

His last statement about being on the ‘boundary’ of poetry anticipates the cry of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, ‘Wer glu¨cklich ist wie wir, dem ziemt nur eins: j schweigen und tanzen!’ (‘For those as happy as we, only one thing is Wtting: to be silent and dance!’),60 during her manically triumphant dance towards death. Bahr makes a further comparison between Euripides in the Herakles and the attitudes of the older Shakespeare; he discerns in Euripides’ relationship to the ideal of Greek virtue and in Shakespeare’s perspective of the Homeric world in Troilus and Cressida the same discomWting scepticism towards the concepts of dike¯ and autarkeia. He cites, with page references, part of Wilamowitz’s discussion of the signiWcance of Herakles to the pure Greek mind, his embodiment of the Dorian ideal of man, before illustrating how completely the poet subverts this ideal: Es ist der reinste Ausdruck des alten Glaubens an die Autarkeia: daß der Mann auf der Welt nichts braucht als die eigene Kraft, um sich selbst und allen Menschen und den Go¨ttern zu genu¨gen, wenn er sie nur gerecht, treu und tapfer u¨bt. Und gerade in diesen tiefsten Grund der dem Hellenen u¨berlieferten Weisheit bohrt Euripides seinen Zweifel ein. Wer kann denn sagen, daß er sich selbst genu¨gt, da doch keiner auch nur sicher ist, derselbe zu bleiben? Die Go¨tter hauchen ihn an und er wird ein anderer. Hera schickt den Wahn auf Herakles herab, und Herakles ho¨rt auf, Herakles zu sein, ›
 PŒŁ Æe q.61 This is the purest expression of the old belief in autarkeia: that in this world man needs only his own strength to satisfy himself, all people, and the gods, if he is only just, faithful, and brave. And it is exactly into this deepest 60 Hofmannsthal (1920), 94.

61 Bahr (1903), 118–19.

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ground of wisdom handed down to the Greeks that Euripides bores his doubt. Who can say that he is suYcient unto himself, since no one can be sure that he will stay the same? The gods breathe on him and he becomes someone else. Hera sends down madness upon Herakles and Herakles ceases to be Herakles, he is no longer himself.

At this point it is important to note that Hermann Bahr practised a species of theatre criticism very diVerent from that of our own era. In his reviews he could adopt a highly impressionistic and subjective approach, but this was always underpinned by the extraordinary breadth of his reading, the depth of his technical knowledge, and the scope of his experience of European drama. As Daviau contends, Bahr was interested in interpreting theater works as expressions of ideas useful to his own age and to the development of the new humanity. . . . His reviews are not ephemeral opinions intended merely to inform the public about whether a given play was worth its time and money but valid and important theoretical documents that partly reXect the tendencies of the time and, more importantly, chart the course of the theater in Vienna during the critical transition period at the turn of the century.62

Bahr himself maintained that the purpose of his criticism was to extract the ‘demands of his time’,63 and it is with this objective in mind that the full consequence of his response to Euripides’ Herakles must be considered. Bahr had certainly read the play before he saw it performed, a fact unusual in itself, and his feuilleton is the result of considerable reXection upon its themes. The one verse that he quotes from the original text is 931, ›
 PŒŁ Æe q, a concept which seems to have shaken him to the core (‘das ist das schauerliche Wort der Dichtung’, ‘this is the spine-chilling poetic phrase’), the idea of the loss of self, the unforeseen stealing away of one’s reason and identity, the potentiality and randomness of which conspire to cancel equally the possibility of self-determination and faith in Providence. What Bahr had chanced upon in the Messenger’s stark communique´ was a deWnition of Wn-de-sie`cle angst, and, over the next two years, he endeavoured to elevate these words to the status of a Modernist mantra: Er war es nicht mehr, war verwandelt, war ein anderer, kannte sich nicht mehr, hatte sich selbst nicht mehr. Wenn dies geschehen darf, daß ein Mann 62 Daviau (1985), 71.

63 See Bahr (1923), 285.

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sein eigenes Selbst verlieren kann, und keiner weiß, was, wenn die Go¨tter zu¨rnen, morgen aus ihm geworden sein wird, was soll dann die Lehre der Va¨ter, daß nur jeder seiner Kraft vertrauen, seinem Sinn gehorchen mo¨ge? Da doch eben der eigene Sinn stets ungewiß, die eigene Kraft durch jeden Hauch des Schicksals vera¨nderlich ist! Wer kann sich behaupten, wenn ihm, ‘einer wu¨sten Wirrsal Brandung den Sinn ergreift?’ Wer wagt noch zu leben, wenn er so zu jeder Zeit sich selbst entru¨ckt werden kann?64 It was no longer he, he was transformed, he was someone else, he did not know himself anymore, he did not possess himself anymore. If this can happen, if a man can lose his own self, and no one knows what may become of him tomorrow if the gods are angry, what is one to make of the teaching of the fathers that each man is to trust in his own strength, to obey his own mind? After all, it is precisely one’s own mind that is always uncertain and one’s own strength can be changed by any breath of fate. Who can assert himself if ‘a wild surge of confusion seizes his mind?’ Who dares go on living if at any time he can thus be borne away from himself?

In grappling with the inescapable questions brought to light by Euripides’ penetration of the Nachtseite of the Herakles myth, Bahr asks: ‘Welcher Dichter du¨rfte es heute wagen, sich so ins ‘‘Pathologische’’ zu ‘‘verirren’’ und darzustellen, daß kein Mensch jemals davor sicher ist, nicht durch unbekannte Ma¨chte plo¨tzlich sich selbst entwendet zu werden?’ (‘What poet today would dare to ‘‘lose’’ himself in this way in the ‘‘pathological’’ and to depict the fact that no human being is ever safe from suddenly being stolen from himself by unknown powers?’)65 This is eVectively an urgent summons issued in the hope of discovering Euripides’ modern Viennese counterpart, a poet of the psyche and of Nerven, and a dramatic voice for decadent culture’s crisis of identity. The Wrst to answer the summons, to discern in line 931 of Herakles exactly what Bahr discerned and to make it contemporary, was Hugo von Hofmannsthal in his Elektra.

MODERNISM’S CULTURAL MEDIATOR Simon Goldhill, in an essay on the historical impact of Richard Strauss’s operatic adaptation of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, makes a 64 Bahr (1903), 119.

65 Ibid. 119–20.

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point that must already be apparent to the reception scholar: ‘If theatrical performance is to be studied as an event, or performance history to be written, it is necessary, I think, to try to uncover the multiple frames that make an occasion a cultural moment: the full grammar of contemporary performances, the range of competing intellectual and social understandings, the varied media and genres of commentary and opinion formation.’66 The multiple frames of cultural reference surrounding the 1902 Viennese production of Herakles converge in the single Wgure of Hermann Bahr. In addition to being Austria’s dominant theatre critic, Bahr was a proliWc dramatist, essayist, and feuilletonist with an exceptionally wide remit, a catalyst of Modernism and avant-garde ideas without parallel. He has often been credited with coining the term ‘Die Moderne’, an error he happily encouraged. The genuine originator of this usage was Eugen WolV in 1886, but, as Barker argues, to Bahr ‘must go the distinction of having brought the term into everyday literary currency, above all after the appearance of his collection Zur Kritik der Moderne in 1890’.67 ‘Die Moderne’ was Bahr’s credo and manifesto, the banner under which he fought his many and diVuse campaigns. His arc of aesthetic jurisdiction in Wn-de-sie`cle Vienna swept across every Weld within the arts and secured him a place in the vanguard of the ‘collective Oedipal revolt’68 which characterized the relationship of Vienna’s Jungen to their political and cultural past. Bahr was the nucleus of the Cafe´ Griensteidel gatherings, the city’s interchange for literary Modernism, and as such he became a mentor to several leading members of Jung-Wien, including Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), a generation of writers preoccupied with the nature of modernity and the life of the psyche.69 Bahr was likewise instrumental in both formulating and advocating the regenerative aims of the Secession, an artistic movement formally established by Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) on 3 April 1897 as a new Roman secessio plebis, an assault on nineteenth-century historicism and certainty and their concealment of modern man’s true face. In Bahr the seceding artists acquired a passionate spokesman. Along with the Burgtheater’s director Max Burckhard, he was literary 66 Goldhill (2002), 175. 68 Schorske (1979), p. xxvi.

67 Barker (1983), 617–30, at 622. 69 See Schorske (1981), 415–31, at 420.

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adviser to the movement’s oYcial journal Ver Sacrum, and through this and his own paper Die Zeit he championed the Secessionists’ frequently shocking exploration of instinctual life and psychological experience. Bahr’s presence was also strongly felt in the theatre world over many years. His four volumes of theatre criticism, published between 1898 and 1906, served his overall cultural programme as a criticism of encouragement and ideology, or what Yates has called a ‘strategy of eclectic receptiveness’.70 At the turn of the century he was employed by the Deutsches Volkstheater as a consultant. From 1906 to 1907 he directed plays for Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) in Berlin, and in 1918 he was appointed director of the Burgtheater. In attempting to summarize the protean nature of Bahr’s participation in Viennese Modernism, Daviau pronounced him a cultural mediator rather than a cultural innovator.71 Bahr followed trends as much as he led them; he was a commentator no less than a forecaster: ‘He was not a poet in the German sense of Dichter but a highly gifted journalist and cultural man of letters, who was also a visionary, an educator, and the conscience of his age. He had a gift for reading the ‘‘demands of his time’’ and the willingness to respond to them. It was this sensitivity to nuances of change and shifts of attitude that enabled him to remain in the forefront of developments.’72 In and alongside Bahr’s reaction to the 1902 Herakles exists a fascinating insight into, and a speciWc instance of, his cultural mediation.

‘ER WAR NICHT MEHR DERSELBE’ The Herakles presented a particular and united focus for Bahr’s two current obsessions, ancient Greek culture and contemporary psychology. Periclean Athens had supplied Bahr with a blueprint, which he drew up in Bildung in 1900, for a renascent Austrian culture and a comprehensive educational programme integral to this vision. In 1901 he travelled to Greece, where the sight of the Parthenon made a deep impression, and he subsequently immersed himself in Wfth-century Greek literature. Bahr’s interest in the human psyche 70 Yates (1992), 3. 71 Daviau (1984), 30–68, at 33. 72 Daviau (1985), 142.

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and nervous complaints Wrst materialized in an essay from 1890 on ‘Die Herkunft der Weltanschauungen’. By the following year, with the ¨ berwindung publication of a collection of essays under the title Die U der Naturalismus, Nerven had become Bahr’s deWnitive programmatic utterance. He used the book’s opening essay, ‘Die Moderne’, to advance his vision of a new art, and indeed a new religion, based on nervous sensitivity: Wir wollen alle Sinne und Nerven auftun, gierig und lauschen und lauschen. . . . Ja, nur den Sinnen wollen wir uns vertrauen, was sie verku¨ndigen und befehlen. . . . Wir haben kein anderes Gesetz als die Wahrheit, wie jeder sie empWndet. Der dienen wir. Wir ko¨nnen nichts dafu¨r, wenn sie rauh und gewaltta¨tig ist und oft ho¨hnisch und grausam. Wir sind ihr nur gehorsam, was sie verlange. Manchmal verwundert es uns selbst und erschreckt uns, wir ko¨nnen uns aber nicht helfen. Dieses wird die neue Kunst sein, welches wir so schaVen. Und es wird die neue Religion sein. Denn Kunst, Wissenschaft und Religion sind dasselbe. Es ist immer nur die Zeit, jedesmal in einen andern Teig geknetet.73 We want to open all our senses and nerves, greedily, and listen, listen. . . . Yes, we only want to trust in our senses, in what they proclaim and command. . . . We have no other law than the truth as each person perceives it. We serve the truth. We cannot help it if the truth is rough and violent and often derisive and brutal. We obey only the truth, which is what truth demands. Sometimes we are surprised and shocked ourselves by this but we cannot help ourselves. This will be the new art which we create. And it will be the new religion. For art, science, and religion are the same thing. It is always just the spirit of the age, kneaded each time into another dough.

¨ berwindung des Naturalismus’ in the same volume, In the essay ‘Die U Bahr emphatically asserted the centrality of nervous sensitivity to Decadence: ‘Der Inhalt des neuen Idealismus is Nerven, Nerven, Nerven’ (‘The essence of the new idealism is nerves, nerves, nerves’).74 Bahr’s pronouncements on Nerven were made on the threshold of an explosion of creative and scientiWc interest in the hidden recesses of mental life, and seem almost prophetic. The advent of the new century was signalled by a proliferation of book and play titles concerned with dreams,75 culminating in Freud’s Die Traumdeutung, 73 Bahr (1891), 3 and 6. 74 Ibid. 157. 75 On the dominance of dream narratives in the Wn de sie`cle, see Cohn (1982), 58–71.

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which Wrst appeared in late 1899, although its publication date is normally given as 1900 to ensure its lasting renown as a ‘happening’. Simultaneously, as Die Traumdeutung proved, Greek mythology became the object of intense psychoanalytic investigation, a development that led to a cross-fertilization of ideas between literature and psychological scholarship: ‘Interest in mythology was awakened by a process of reciprocity. On the one hand the psychoanalytic penetration of myth bore fruit in poetry; on the other hand literature itself was a source of important corroboration, as well as illustrative material, for the psychoanalysts.’76 Hermann Bahr’s Dialog vom Tragischen, completed in 1903 and published a year later, represents a synthesis of his personal mission and these wider intellectual currents. In this work, which he dedicated to Gustav Klimt, Bahr applies the terminology of Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s Studien u¨ber Hysterie of 1895, and in particular the theory of psychical catharsis by means of psychoanalysis, to the workings of Greek tragedy.77 The Wrst section of the book takes the form of a dialogue in which the character of the host insists that the purpose of tragedy is no diVerent from the work of ‘jene beiden ¨ rzte’ (‘those two doctors’), the authors of Studien u¨ber Hysterie. As A Ward states, what Bahr is suggesting here is ‘a meeting point for Ancient and Modern: they meet in the person of the hysteric’.78 Die ganze Kultur der Griechen war denn auch rings von Hysterie beschlichen und umstellt. Wir sehen sie u¨berall lauern, wir ho¨ren sie u¨berall ro¨cheln, die Mythen sind von ihr voll, wir spu¨ren sie aus der traumhaft hellen Sprache durch, ja der ganze BegriV der Polis, in welchem sich der Bu¨rger fu¨r den Genuß einer erhabenen Stunde oder fu¨r den Wahn des unter den Nachkommen fortschallenden Ruhms mit Lust zersto¨rt, ist hysterisch. Aber da hatte die Nation noch die Kraft, eine Anstalt zu erWnden, die ihr half, ihre Hysterie auf die gro¨ßte Art ‘abzureagieren’.79 Hysteria crept up on and surrounded the entire Greek culture. We see it lying in wait everywhere, we hear it groaning everywhere, the myths are full of it, we feel it come through the bright dreamlike language, the whole concept of the polis is hysterical, in which the citizens wilfully destroy for the 76 Schmidt-Dengler (1982), 32–45, at 42. 77 See Worbs (1983), 139–43 on ‘Hermann Bahrs Entdeckung der Studien u¨ber Hysterie’. 78 Ward (2002), 143. 79 Bahr (1904), 23.

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sake of enjoyment of a sublime hour or for the delusion of fame resounding forth through successive generations. But at that time the nation still had the power to invent an institution to help them abreact this hysteria.

The second part of the Dialog is entitled ‘Das Unrettbare Ich’ (‘The Irredeemable Self ’). In the course of Bahr’s elucidation of this concept, he divulges its provenance as Herakles: Manchmal hat man wirklich die EmpWndung, als wu¨rde man, ohne es zu wissen, geheimnisvoll gefu¨hrt, und mir ist, als wa¨re ich die ganzen letzen drei Jahre her durch eine unbekannte Macht nur immer auf einen Gedanken gestimmt worden, dem ich nun also endlich wehrlos erliegen mußte. Das begann mit einer Stelle im Herakles des Euripides, die mich erschu¨tterte. Herakles fa¨llt im Wahnsinn seine Kinder an. Der Bote, der schildert, wie sich der Rasende betrug, sagt: Er war nicht mehr derselbe! Dies traf mich furchtbar. Ich hielt im Lesen ein und hatte das Gefu¨hl: u¨ber der bloßen Vorstellung, daß es einem geschehen ko¨nnte, nicht mehr derselbe, sondern plo¨tzlich ein anderer Mensch zu sein, mu¨sse man eigentlich schon wahnsinnig werden. Ich fand es in der Pha¨dra wieder und allma¨hlich schien es mir der eigentliche Gedanke des Euripides, die Unsicherheit des Ich darzustellen. Nun las ich ein entsetzliches Buch, Ribots ‘les maladies de la personnalite´’;80 hier werden Menschen gezeigt, welche plo¨tzlich ihr Ich verlieren und als neue Wesen eine andere Existenz beginnen, aus der sie manchmal, ebenso plo¨tzlich und ra¨tselhaft, wieder in die erste zuru¨ckgestoßen werden.81 Sometimes one really has the feeling that, without knowing it, one is being guided secretly, and it seems to me that, over the whole of the last three years, I have been destined by an unknown power to think only one thought, to which I Wnally had to succumb. It began at a spot in Euripides’ Herakles, which shook me up. In his madness Herakles attacks his children. The Messenger, who describes how the madman behaved, says: he was no longer the same person! This shook me up terribly. I stopped reading and had the feeling: that the mere idea that it could happen to a person that he was no longer the same, but suddenly another human being, could make one really go mad. I rediscovered it in Phaedra, and gradually it seemed to me that it was Euripides’ actual intention to show the insecurity of the self. Then I read a terrifying book, Ribot’s Les Maladies de la personnalite´; it shows people 80 Theodule Armand Ribot (1839–1916) was Professor of Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne and later at the Colle`ge de France. Les Maladies de la personnalite´ was Wrst published in 1885. 81 Bahr (1904), 92–3. By Phaedra Bahr is presumably referring to a version of Euripides’ Hippolytus.

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who suddenly lose their self and begin a new existence as diVerent beings, an existence out of which they are sometimes just as suddenly and mysteriously pushed back into the Wrst one.

In this passage Bahr has returned to the Euripidean verse, ›
 PŒŁ Æe q, that horriWes him (‘die mich erschu¨tterte’; ‘dies traf mich furchtbar’), and which he translates precisely as ‘er war nicht mehr derselbe’.82 This powerfully austere report of the moment of Herakles’ insane metamorphosis has allowed Bahr Wnally to articulate a long-felt sense of vulnerability and apprehension. He believes Herakles 931 encapsulates Euripides’ pivotal tragic idea, ‘die Unsicherheit des Ich’ (‘the insecurity of the self ’). The original Greek words have so penetrated his psyche that, in a moment of acute introspection, Bahr seems to feel that he himself is no longer the same, and that he is literally ‘beside himself ’. The experience he relates to the reader is parallel to Herakles’ øØ at 965, where the word carries the singular meaning of an ‘aberration’83 or, as Barlow suggests, ‘an ‘‘alienation’’ from his former self ’.84 Bahr’s conception of the loss of self as somehow pre-determined, or at least as an ever-present possibility, also accords with Wilamowitz’s explanation of Herakles’ temporary psychosis as the violent activation of a semi-latent state of mind. However, while Wilamowitz linked the loss of self expressly to a megalomaniac bloodlust on the part of Herakles, Bahr determines that it is an ineluctable fact of the human condition. Just as Bahr Wnished writing the Dialog vom Tragischen in the spring of 1903, Hugo von Hofmannsthal commenced his period of intensive work on Elektra. Throughout the late summer of that year the two men were in close contact. Bahr visited Hofmannsthal in Rodaun almost daily and discussed with him the argument of the Dialog, which, as we know from a letter Bahr wrote to Hofmannsthal on 19 July 1903 thanking him for his comments, Hofmannsthal had already read and rated highly. This discourse proved the catalyst for Hofmannsthal’s active engagement in psychopathology.85 Bahr’s 82 Cf. Wilamowitz’s slightly less literal translation of 931: ‘doch er war wie verwandelt’, in Wilamowitz (1895), i. 233. 83 See Bond’s note (1981), 315, on ø. 84 Barlow (1996), 167. 85 On the interaction between Bahr and Hofmannsthal during the construction of Elektra, see Martens (1987), 38–51, at 38–40.

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contention that the techniques of modern science, and in particular psychoanalysis, could be used to illuminate ancient myth, opened up for Hofmannsthal the possibility of using ancient myth to illuminate modern issues, and of thus closing the breach that he declared existed in Wn-de-sie`cle Vienna between ‘old furniture and young neurosis’. Two books which Hofmannsthal later revealed he had consulted during the composition of his tragedy were Erwin Rohde’s Psyche and Breuer and Freud’s Studien u¨ber Hysterie. A Wrst edition of the latter work was in Hofmannsthal’s personal library, although it seems that initially he borrowed a copy from Bahr. In an undated letter, believed to have been written in the summer of 1903, Hofmannsthal asked Bahr: ‘Ko¨nnen Sie mir eventuell nur fu¨r einige Tage das Buch von Freud und Breuer u¨ber Heilung der Hysterie durch Freimachen einer unterdru¨ckten Erinnerung leihen (schicken?)’ (‘Would you be able to lend me just for a few days Freud and Breuer’s book on ‘‘Healing hysteria through release of a suppressed memory’’?’).86 In common with Studien u¨ber Hysterie and Dialog vom Tragischen, Hofmannsthal’s Elektra employed the theory that hysteria was caused by the repression of a traumatic memory and could be cured by abreaction.87 When Hofmannsthal read Bahr his completed manuscript, Bahr instantly recognized in the tragedy ‘his’ hysterical Greeks. On 13 September 1903 he recorded in his diary: ‘Zum Hugo nach Rodaun. Elektra fertig. Liest daraus vor. Der wilde Tanz am Ende herrlich. Auch durchaus meine Griechen, hysterisch, abgehetzt, ins Ruhelose getrieben’ (‘Travelled to Rodaun to Hugo. Elektra is Wnished. He read bits aloud to me. The wild dance at the end is fantastic. Just like my Greeks: prone to hysteria, always rushing around, driven into restlessness’).88 Studien u¨ber Hysterie was not the only book about the psychological dark side in which the two writers shared an interest, as a letter Hofmannsthal wrote to Bahr in August 1904 indicates: Ich mo¨chte Sie aber um ein anderes bitten: um jene ‘Maladies de la personnalite´’. Es handelt sich in dem StoV, der mich jetzt am meisten lockt, in dem 86 Hofmannsthal (1937), 142. The editors of this volume of correspondence place the letter in the period Nov. 1903–May 1904. 87 On Hofmannsthal’s use in Elektra of the theme of repressed memory, see Martens (1987), 38–51. 88 Reproduced in Farkas (1987), 149.

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‘Leben ein Traum’, ja darum, in die tiefsten Tiefen des zweifelhaften Ho¨hlenko¨nigreichs ‘Ich’ hinabzusteigen und dort das Nicht-mehr-ich oder die Welt zu Wnden.89 I would like to ask you about something else: about that Maladies de la personnalite´. It deals with the subject which at present most attracts me in Leben ein Traum, about descending into the deepest depths of the uncertain cavernous kingdom of the self and Wnding there the self that no longer exists or the world.

The date of the letter and the mention of Theodule Ribot’s Les Maladies de la personnalite´ help to contextualize Hofmannsthal’s increasing curiosity about das Selbst and der Ander. What he designates the ‘uncertain cavernous kingdom of the self ’ has an immediate point of reference in Bahr’s contemplation of ‘die Unsicherheit des Ich’ in the Dialog vom Tragischen. More striking still is Hofmannsthal’s invention of the hyphenated phrase ‘das Nicht-mehrich’ to classify the abstraction of the lost self, which, he discloses, is his present most absorbing occupation. The phrase exactly, and irrefutably, recalls Euripides’ ›
 PŒŁ Æe q and amalgamates, linguistically and conceptually, Bahr’s ‘er war nicht mehr derselbe’ and ‘die Unsicherheit des Ich’. Hofmannsthal’s appropriation, through Bahr, of Herakles 931 also signiWes the evolution of his own sense of ‘das Gleitende’ (‘sliding’ or ‘slipping away’), a concept he introduced in his most famous essay, Ein Brief, written in 1902. In this Wctional letter from Lord Chandos, the younger son of the Earl of Bath, to Francis Bacon, Chandos confesses a crisis of language (‘Sprachkrise’), manifest in an inability to express himself coherently.90 Hofmannsthal represents Chandos’s diYculty as symptomatic of a pervasive feeling of impermanence, the belief that the social and cultural institutions taken for granted by previous generations now rested on ‘das Gleitende’. For the individual, ‘das Gleitende’ means the impermanence of notions of Self, of one’s own identity, and mental soundness. The loss of self, therefore, is the extreme outcome of this crisis.

89 Hofmannsthal (1937), 155. 90 An English translation of the ‘Chandos Letter’ appears in Hofmannsthal (1952), 129–41.

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Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, commissioned and directed by Max Reinhardt, premie`red at the Kleines Theater in Berlin on 30 October 1903, with Gertrud Eysoldt (1870–1955) in the title role. With its morbid irrationalism, animalistic savagery, and disturbed sexuality, the play was an immediate sensation and a provocative reconceptualization of Greekness as something demonic and ecstatic. When it was produced in Vienna in 1905 one reviewer deWned Hofmannsthal’s achievement as ‘eine ‘‘Elektra’’ im Spiegelbild unseres psycho-ku¨nstlerischen Zeitideals’ (‘an Elektra as reXected in the psycho-artistic ideal of our time’).91 In November 1903 the composer Richard Strauss (1864–1949) saw the Elektra in Berlin and conceived the notion of a full operatic setting for the text. Earlier in the same year he had been similarly inspired by Reinhardt’s staging of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, which also starred Gertrud Eysoldt. However, it was not until 1906, by which time the opera of Salome had been launched, that Strauss approached Hofmannsthal for permission to adapt his Elektra, and their celebrated collaboration began.92 The score was completed on 22 September 1908, and the Hofmannsthal–Strauss Elektra received its Wrst performance on 25 January 1909 at the Ko¨nigliches Opernhaus in Dresden, under the conductor Ernst von Schuch and the director Willi Wirk. Annie Krull and Ernestine Schumann-Heink created the roles of Elektra and Klyta¨mnestra. (Interestingly, a famous later Klyta¨mnestra was the soprano Anna von Mildenburg (1872–1947), the wife of Hermann Bahr.) Strauss’s score, which required a huge orchestra, exempliWed a new extreme in Nervenkunst. It has been described as psychoanalysis in music, and is said to be fraught with ‘its period’s mod cons of psychology and decadence’.93 Michael Ewans has called Strauss’s Elektra ‘one of the most extreme works of expressionist art, an opera of unrelenting emotional intensity which in performance imposes an almost unbear91 Wiener Mittags-Zeitung, 15 May 1905. 92 On the genesis and composition of the opera, see the correspondence between Strauss and Hofmannsthal (Mar. 1906–Aug. 1908), trans. Hammelmann and Osers (1961), 2–22. 93 R. Holloway in PuVett (1989), 145.

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able strain on everyone involved’,94 and ‘a music which is poised on the almost indeWnable borderline between decadence and extreme expressionism’.95 Modernism had rudely and conclusively usurped the place of classicism.96 Critics and audiences reacted to the opera with shock and violent distaste, many Wnding it rebarbative, brutal, and iconoclastic. But the production excited an equally fervent attraction, with its aurally and visually confronting juxtaposition of modern neuroticism and familiar ancient myth.97 Performances soon followed in other major cities around the world, with the new and degenerate Hellenism never failing to fascinate and scandalize. Although in England the Lord Chamberlain had refused Strauss’s Salome a licence until certain modiWcations were introduced, on 19 February 1910 Sir Thomas Beecham (1879–1961) conducted the Wrst British performance of Strauss’s Elektra at Covent Garden in the presence of King Edward VII. The London production was the centre of massive publicity and caused a heated exchange of open letters between Ernest Newman and George Bernard Shaw in The Nation. Beecham later declared that the ‘journalistic fever’ inspired by the premie`re was eclipsed only by the death of the king later that year.98 The opera was initially banned at the New York Metropolitan and had to be performed at an alternative Manhattan venue—in French. In the original text and in the subsequent libretto there is compelling semantic evidence that Euripides’ Herakles played an important part in the conception and construction of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra. Hofmannsthal’s Modernist reworking of Sophocles’ play is, at basis, a Euripidean study of the loss of self; it owes as much to Euripides as it does to Breuer and Freud. The theme of the lost self is emphatically announced, in a verse identical to Bahr’s translation of 94 Ewans (1984), 135–54, at 135–6. 95 Ibid. 137. 96 According to Ewans (ibid. 136): ‘A contemporary cartoon shows Sophokles as a helpless old man, with the victor’s crown fallen from his brow and his chiton half stripped from him as he is violently assaulted by two suave young men in the evening dress of the twentieth century. Von Hofmannsthal, his eyes gleaming with manic intensity, holds Sophokles by the beard while gouging out his eyes; on the other side of the picture, Strauss genially puts his boot into Sophokles while striking blows at him with drumstick and cymbals.’ 97 On the critical reception of the original performances, see Gilliam (1991), 9–17. On the British reception, see Goldhill (2002), 131–9. 98 Beecham (1944), 146.

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Herakles 931, at the very start of the play’s centrepiece, the confrontation between mother and daughter. Elektra cautions the Lady Macbeth-like Wgure of Klyta¨mnestra, ‘Du bist nicht mehr du selber’ (‘You are no longer yourself ’).99 The verse calls attention to the alteration in the queen’s appearance as well as her mental aberration or disease. Within Strauss’s arrangement of the scene the unexpected shifts in tonality retain the emphasis on these words. Musically the key phrase is highlighted in several ways: (1) the harmony, based on B dominant seventh, is a sudden bright change from the gloomy, rather ambivalent and portentous, G# dominant seventh/augmented Wfth; (2) the change in time-signature from 3/2 to 6/4 provides a more marked rhythm, almost suggesting waltz time; (3) the counterpoint running with the melody is based on thirds, and is sweet and lilting; (4) the key phrase stands out with its crescendo, dropping back to pianissimo at the end, when the tonality arrives at E minor and the darker tone returns. Shortly after this point in the play, although not in the opera, the neurotic somnambulist Klyta¨mnestra gives a graphic account of the symptoms of her loss of self: Ich Wnde nichts! . . . dann schwindelt’s mich, ich weiß auf einmal nicht mehr, wer ich bin, und das ist das Grauen, das heißt mit lebendigem Leib ins Chaos sinken.100 I cannot Wnd anything! . . . Then I get dizzy, suddenly I no longer know who I am, and that is the horror, it means being buried alive in chaos.

What she describes here is something akin to Herakles’ second katabasis, an infernal descent into the chaos that supplants reason and eradicates all sense of self. Elektra too analyses her own condition as a loss of self and a sinking into nothingness. She tells Orest that her obsession with avenging their father’s murder has resulted not only in her physical degradation but also in the sacriWce of her whole identity: ‘Sieh, ich bin j gar nichts. Ich habe alles, was ich war, j hingeben mu¨ssen’ (‘Look, I am nothing at all. I had to give up everything that I was’).101 99 Hofmannsthal (1920), 27. 100 Ibid. 33. 101 Ibid. 80.

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In his retrospective expositions of the play’s meaning, Hofmannsthal consistently maintained that his Elektra was about the fragility of the self and the dissolution of the concept of individuality. In 1911, in a letter to Richard Strauss concerning the recently Wnished manuscript of Ariadne auf Naxos,102 Hofmannsthal explained to his collaborator that the underlying idea of the new work was the same as that of Elektra—the complexity of the preservation of the self: What it is about is one of the straightforward and stupendous problems of life: Wdelity; whether to hold fast to that which is lost, to cling to it even unto death—or to live, to live on, to get over it, to transform oneself, to sacriWce the integrity of the soul and yet in this transmutation to preserve one’s essence, to remain a human being and not to sink to the level of the beast, which is without recollection. It is the fundamental theme of Elektra.103

Hofmannsthal’s most unequivocal aYrmation of the Elektra as a study of the lost self occurs in his Aufzeichnungen for 1922–9, where he recalls: Meine antiken Stu¨cke haben es alle drei mit der AuXo¨sung des IndividualbegriVes zu tun. In der ‘Elektra’ wird das Individuum in der empirischen Weise aufgelo¨st, indem eben der Inhalt seines Lebens es von innen her zersprengt, wie das sich zu Eis umbildende Wasser einen irdenen Krug. Elektra is nicht mehr Elektra, weil sie eben ganz und gar Elektra zu sein sich weihte. Das Individuum kann nur schemenhaft dort bestehen bleiben, wo ein Kompromiß zwischen dem Gemeinen und dem Individuellen geschlossen wird.104 My three ancient plays all deal with the disintegration of the idea of the individual. In Elektra the individual disintegrates empirically when the substance of the individual’s life is blasted from within, just as water freezing in an earthen jug cracks the jug apart. Elektra is no longer Elektra, precisely because she has utterly devoted herself to being Elektra. The individual can only continue to exist, and this in a shadowy form, where a compromise is met between commonality and individuality.

Like Euripides at 932–5 of the Herakles, Hofmannsthal has written a detailed physiognomy of the lost self. Klyta¨mnestra’s unusually large 102 Aridane auf Naxos, an opera in one act, was Wrst performed in Stuttgart on 25 October 1912. A revised version premie`red in Vienna on 4 October 1916. 103 The letter from mid-July 1911 is translated by Hammelmann and Osers (1961), 94. 104 Hofmannsthal (1959), 201.

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and heavy eyelids, her sallow and bloated countenance are, according to his stage directions, lit in lurid colour, and her speech is punctuated with laboured breathing. Haunted by dreams in which she is persecuted by demons for her sins, she appeals to Elektra to advise her by what new human sacriWce her soul may be released from torment and her former self restored: ‘Aber diese Tra¨ume mu¨ssen j ein Ende haben. Wer sie immer schickt: j ein jeder Da¨mon la¨ßt von uns, sobald j das rechte Blut geXossen ist’ (‘But these dreams must come to an end. Any demon, no matter who sends it, lets us be as soon as the right blood has Xown’).105 ‘Das rechte Blut’ refers to the necessary expiatory sacriWce, but it also supposes, in this context and by antithesis, a pathology of the loss of self. In his characterization of Klyta¨mnestra Hofmannsthal has combined the ancient concept of pollution with twentieth-century pathology.106 Klyta¨mnestra’s appearance and behaviour suggest a chemical imbalance and the absence of ‘das rechte Blut’ in her own veins. This ‘alienation’ from the self is a consequence of pollution, of repressed guilt, the reverse of Herakles’ øØ. Elektra slowly, and with chilling calmness building to feral excitement, reawakens her mother’s repressed memory of her crime and, as Butler observes, the relationship between the two characters acquires a very contemporary dynamic: ‘The interview which . . . takes place between the guilty mother and the vengeful daughter is a poetical version, highly charged with tragic irony, of the analysis of a neurotic patient by a psychician [sic] of the Viennese school.’107 This reading of the confrontation is supported by the text itself, in which Klyta¨mnestra, in an aside to her companion, remarks of Elektra’s tone, ‘Sie redet wie ein Arzt’ (‘She talks like a doctor’).108 Hofmannsthal’s startling incorporation of modern pathology and psychoanalytic discourse was reXected in the clinical terminology of the critics, who applied to the characters of Elektra words such as haematomania and neurasthenia.109 Throughout Euripides’ Herakles the hero’s madness is repeatedly deWned as a ghastly form of Bacchic ekstasis: ÆŒ Ø (897); K Œı (966); ´ Œ (1119); ´ÆŒ Æ æÆ (1122). The 105 Hofmannsthal (1920), 35. 107 Butler (1939), 164–75, at 169. 108 Hofmannsthal (1920), 27.

106 See Martens (1987), 38–51, at 41. 109 See Goldhill (2002), 137–8.

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hysterical symptoms displayed by Hofmannsthal’s principal characters also correspond to the symptoms of Bacchic intoxication. After warning her mother that she is no longer herself, Elektra declares, ‘so gehst du hin im Taumel, immer j bist du als wie im Traum’ (‘And so you go along in giddiness, you always act like you are in a dream’).110 The word ‘Taumel’ (giddiness or reeling, or, more Wguratively, a transporting frenzy) suggests the literal and metaphorical drunkenness of a bacchante. Lyssa’s announcement, æ ø (I shall make you dance), at 871 of the Herakles, and the cries of the Chorus at 878– 89 and 889–97, characterize Herakles’ madness as a maenadic dance and a macabre inversion of Dionysiac revelry. In his stage directions Hofmannsthal represents Elektra’s Wnal exultant frenzy upon the murders of Klyta¨mnestra and Aegisth in precisely similar terms: ‘Sie hat den Kopf zuru¨ckgeworfen wie eine Ma¨nade. Sie wirft die Kniee, sie reckt die Arme aus, es ist ein namenloser Tanz, in welchem sie nach vorwa¨rts schreitet’ (‘She has her head thrown back like a Maenad. She throws up her knees and stretches her arms out in a nameless dance with which she strides forward’).111 Herakles’ mad dance concludes with his supernaturally enforced collapse into unwholesome sleep, while the maenadic Elektra falls to earth as the result of an apparently fatal stroke. The new ending Hofmannsthal has given Sophocles’ tragedy seems to answer the Chorus at 1025–6 of Herakles: ÆNÆE; Æ ƪe j j ª j ŁØH fiT
a j  )Ø- j
Æ æe Iø; (‘Alas, what lament or dirge shall I sing? What dance to Death?’). According to Yates, ‘Hofmannsthal’s modernization of the myth [of Elektra] transforms Sophocles’ heroine into a character whose mind is fashioned out of the insights of Freudian psychology and the imagery of the Secessionists’.112 As we have seen, the characters of the 1903 Elektra have also been fashioned out of Euripidean psychology, and speciWcally Euripides’ conceptualization of the lost self. Why then, in view of his debt to the Herakles, did Hofmannsthal elect to adapt Sophocles’ rather than Euripides’ more psychologically weighted version of the myth? One answer is that, by avoiding the obvious starting-point and superimposing both the psychoanalytic portrait 110 Hofmannsthal (1920), 27. 111 Ibid. 93. 112 Yates (1992), 148.

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of hysteria and the Euripidean idea of ‘das Nicht-mehr-Ich’ onto the sublimely ‘harmonious’ Sophocles, Hofmannsthal was challenging the tragic demarcations Wxed by nineteenth-century classicism and reintroducing Sophocles as a less remote and idealized poet.113 He was also continuing, in spectacular fashion, the reaction, begun by Wagner and Nietzsche, against German neoclassicism as embodied in Goethe’s ‘devilishly humane’114 reworking of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris.

‘NACH RODAUN, MIT H UGO’ This persuasive internal evidence of the relationship between Hofmannsthal’s Elektra and Euripides’ Herakles prompts the other obvious question of whether Hofmannsthal had himself seen the performance of Wilamowitz’s translation. The resemblances outlined above indicate that Hofmannsthal’s knowledge of the Herakles did not rest solely on Hermann Bahr’s reading of 931; it seems likely that he had read the play in full or even seen it performed. Crucially, on the day that he attended the performance of Herakles in Josefstadt, Bahr went to Rodaun (in those days a tram-ride out of town) and accompanied Hofmannsthal and his wife on a walk. Afterwards he visited the writer Richard Beer-Hofmann (1866–1945), as his diary entry for 6 January 1902 establishes: Nach Rodaun, mit Hugo und Gerty spaziert, dann bei Beer-Hofmann. Herein, bei Mama Schlesinger gegessen, Hans da. Herakles. Mit Burckhard besprochen, wie Schnitzler Grillparzer Preis verschaVen.115 Travelled to Rodaun, went for a walk with Hugo and Gerty, then dropped in on Beer-Hofmann. Dined at Mama Schlesinger’s; Hans was there. Herakles. Discussed with Burckhard how to procure Schnitzler the Grillparzer Prize. 113 See also the argument of Ewans (1984), who believes that: (a) with the Elektra ‘the legend of Sophokles’ detachment and nobility is hardest to sustain’ (141); and (b) ‘every major theme of the operatic treatment is already either explicit or implicit in Sophokles’ original play’ (142). 114 Goethe’s description of ‘this Hellenizing work of art’ as ‘devilishly humane’ is cited by Hofmannsthal (1959), 131. 115 Bahr (1997), iii. 165.

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The entry is, in fact, a microcosm of Bahr’s extraordinary sphere of inXuence within literary and theatrical Vienna at that time, as well as an indication of the regular social intercourse between the members of Jung-Wien which must inevitably have entailed a proWtable exchange of creative ideas. In a collection of Bahr’s Tagebu¨cher for 1888–1904, edited by Reinhard Farkas in 1987, the entry has been reduced by half and documents only Bahr’s morning visits, not his afternoon at the theatre.116 The omission is an example of how both the production and Bahr’s mediation between the play and his contemporaries have been ignored. Bahr’s account of his movements on 6 January is tersely factual rather than conveniently elaborative. Nevertheless, the bare details he provides oVer tantalizing possibilities, and indeed probabilities, of who else among Vienna’s cultural establishment saw that historic performance of the Herakles. That the theatre director Max Burckhard was present at the Josefstadt that afternoon, and this was the venue for Bahr’s conversation with him about Schnitzler and the Grillparzer Prize, is a reasonable inference. Moreover, it is entirely conceivable that either Hofmannsthal or Beer-Hofmann, or perhaps both, accompanied Bahr to the theatre after lunch. In default of any extant journal or epistolary evidence on the part of Hofmannsthal or Beer-Hofmann, it is impossible to prove categorically that this happened, but the likelihood of such a proceeding can be attested on the basis of a veriWable shared interest in the idea of the lost self. It is almost certain that Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hofmann were, at the very least, aware of the Herakles production, that they read Bahr’s feuilleton of 7 January, and that Bahr discussed the play when he met them on the Monday of the performance or soon afterwards. Beyond dispute is the fact that the two friends whom Bahr called upon in Rodaun that day later read the Dialog vom Tragischen well in advance of its publication. The fact in itself appears merely coincidental, but when duly considered in the light of Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hofmann’s written responses to Bahr concerning the Dialog, it assumes great signiWcance. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Bahr in the late summer of 1904, in which he speaks of ‘das Nicht-mehr-ich’, has already been

116 See Farkas (1987), 111.

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cited. Equally revealing is a note Beer-Hofmann sent to Bahr on 3 November 1903, in which he wrote: Ich habe ihn in der ‘Rundschau’ nur Xu¨chtig lesen ko¨nnen, und erst jetzt habe ich mich mit Ruhe daran gefreut. Von den andern Aufsa¨tzen war mir nur ‘Der bo¨se Goethe’ bekannt. Selbstversta¨ndlich—das heißt selbstversta¨ndlich fu¨r Jemanden der mich kennt—musste mich ‘das unrettbare Ich’, und was sie darin von Euripides und seiner Art die Unsicherheit des ‘Ich’ zu betonen, sagen, am tiefsten beru¨hren.117 I was only able to read it hastily in the Rundschau, and only now have I had the chance to read it in peace. Of the other essays, I knew only ‘The Evil Goethe’. Naturally—that is, naturally for anyone who knows me—‘The Irredeemable Self ’, and what it says therein about Euripides and his way of emphasizing the insecurity of the ‘self ’, touched me very deeply.

Both writers have singled out from the entire Dialog the passage in ‘Das Unrettbare Ich’ on Herakles 931, by which they have been profoundly aVected. This remarkable set of circumstances again demonstrates Bahr’s gift for keeping his Wnger on the Viennese pulse and for diagnosing precisely the collective anxieties of his day. It could be, however, that Bahr’s argument about ‘die Unsicherheit des Ich’ consolidated Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hofmann’s Wrst-hand knowledge of the Herakles performance in Josefstadt. In either event, under Bahr’s counsel the two men came to a deeper understanding of the play’s meaning and of the aYnity between Euripides’ art and their own literary preoccupations and aspirations.

HOFMANNSTHAL’ S GREEKS The case for Hofmannsthal’s presence at the 1902 Herakles is strengthened by his well-documented involvement at the turn of the century in tragic drama, the reshaping of ancient mythology, and above all the renewal of Euripides. The year 1900 marked a shift in the young Hofmannsthal’s creative orientation from poetry to drama. This shift occurred concurrently with his most concentrated 117 Beer-Hofmann (1999), 14.

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enquiry into the Greeks and the literary representation of Greekness. Like Schnitzler and Beer-Hofmann, Hofmannsthal had been a pupil at Vienna’s Akademisches Gymnasium, where he received a solid grounding, and attained Xuency, in the Greek and Latin languages.118 Now, in his mid-twenties, he began a process of ‘rediscovering’ the classics, which reached its height in 1901–2. During this period he experimented with the dramatic form, while educating himself in the works of the Greek tragedians. He usefully combined these pursuits by writing prologues to the classical productions of the Berlin Akademischen Verein, beginning in January 1900 with his prologue to Wilamowitz’s translation of Oedipus.119 Between 1899 and 1904 Elektra was the only play Hofmannsthal completed. He had, however, made several previous attempts at adapting tragic subjects for the stage. In a postscript to a letter he sent Richard Beer-Hofmann on 12 July 1901, Hofmannsthal reported, ‘ich beginne na¨chstens das große Stu¨ck nach Browning’ (‘soon I will begin the big play from Browning’). The ambitious undertaking referred to here was a Wve-act tragedy, ‘Die Gra¨Wn Pompilia’, based on Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. Although the play was never Wnished, it is intriguing that, at the start of his career as a serious dramatist, Hofmannsthal was drawn to the work of the English poet who championed Euripides’ Herakles and to the poem that, in its tenth book, contains a long and extraordinary vindication of Euripidean thinking. Hofmannsthal’s interest in Euripides pre-dated the composition of Elektra by a decade. As early as 1893 he wrote in a manuscript note to himself: ‘Bacchen des Euripides zu erneuern.’120 Ward has shown that this project to adapt or rewrite the Bacchae, although never fully realized, occupied Hofmannshal’s eVorts in three distinct phases over twenty-Wve years (1892–3, 1904, and 1905–18).121 The fragmentary notes Hofmannsthal made on the play reveal plans for a two-act drama, ‘radically diVerent from previously published versions’.122 They also reveal that the proposed renewal of the Bacchae enabled Hofmannsthal ‘to rehearse 118 On the classical curriculum during Hofmannsthal’s time at the Akademisches Gymnasium, see Schmidt-Dengler (1982), 32–45, at 33. 119 See Ward (2002), 70. 120 Hofmannsthal (1980), 365. 121 See Ward (2000), 165–94. 122 Ibid. 165.

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many of his fundamental concerns’.123 Notes written in 1904, for example, depict the palace of Pentheus, full of trapdoors and secret shafts, as a metaphor for ‘des zweifelhaften Ho¨hlenko¨nigreichs ‘‘Ich’’ ’ (‘the uncertain cavernous kingdom of the ‘‘self’’ ’). In the same year that he began his Bacchae project, Hofmannsthal was working on an adaptation of Euripides’ Alkestis which was not performed until 1916. Both these attempts to renew Euripides for the modern stage were made in reply to Nietzsche’s argument in Der Geburt der Trago¨die about the Dionysian element in tragedy and its elimination by the Socratic Euripides.124 Hofmannsthal’s programme of renewal involved rewriting the Dionysian element into Euripides. In his Alkestis, Death is equated with Dionysiac intoxication, as Herakles is made to proclaim: ‘Go¨ttliche Art der Trunkenheit vielleicht j ist, was wir Totsein heißen!’ (‘A divine kind of drunkenness perhaps is what we call death!’).125 The character of Herakles has been drastically modiWed from the original; in place of Euripides’ blundering, good-natured drunk, Hofmannsthal introduces a mystical sage. In view of his own diligent endeavours in the last years of the nineteenth century to renew Euripides, his rehabilitation of Herakles in the Alkestis, and his increasing fascination with the irrational in tragedy, it becomes highly probable that on 6 January 1902 Hofmannsthal did attend the historic revival of Euripides’ Herakles in Josefstadt. From the evidence collated above, both textual and circumstantial, as well as that provided by supporting documents such as private correspondence, journals, and published works, it is possible to construct a revised reading of the beginnings of Nervenkunst and to establish a demonstrable link between Euripides’ Herakles and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra. That link is verse 931 of Herakles, which Hofmannsthal appropriated through his association with Hermann Bahr and used as the conceptual basis of his reworking of Sophocles’ Elektra. Bahr’s interpretation in Dialog vom Tragischen 123 See Ward (2000), 191. 124 Between 1892 and 1893 Hofmannsthal attended lectures by Alfred von Berger, Professor of Aesthetics at Vienna, on ‘Scho¨nheit in der Kunst’ and ‘Dramaturgie der antiken Tragiker’, which discussed Nietzsche and inspired Hofmannsthal’s rereading of Die Geburt der Trago¨die. 125 Hofmannsthal (1953), iii. 37.

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of the Euripidean idea of the lost self consolidated Hofmannsthal’s twin preoccupations of Greek myth and psychopathology, and, very likely, his Wrst-hand impressions of the 1902 performance of Herakles. The Josefstadt production of Herakles, although not itself steeped in the theories of psychoanalysis, was the progenitor of the Wrst overtly psychoanalytic treatment of a Greek tragedy on stage. Not only did the play have a tremendous impact on the most inXuential critic of the day, Hermann Bahr, but its violent unmasking of the instability of the self also resonated in the high-strung intellectual and creative climate of Wn-de-sie`cle Vienna. Moreover, the play’s translator, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, had put forward the Wrst psychological explanation of the madness of Herakles in the modern era, and was equally instrumental in the revival of Greek tragedy on the German stage. Hofmannsthal’s achievement with Elektra must, therefore, be measured against his obvious (but scarcely acknowledged) indebtedness to the philological and theatrical accomplishments of Wilamowitz.

8 Herakles’ apotheosis: the tragedy of Superman The Wrst two decades of the twentieth century witnessed an important detour in the Modernist reception of Euripides’ Herakles. The process of psychological appropriation, begun by Wilamowitz and Bahr, was temporarily interrupted by a less coordinated process of allegorical and philosophical appropriation. Dramatic interest in the tragic Herakles shifted from his latent psychosis to his latent divinity, his uniquely ambivalent status as theios a¯ner. As a consequence, the madness and Wlicide gathered signiWcance not as manifestations of the Heraklean psychology, but because they anticipated and aYrmed a superhuman destiny. Michael Silk views Euripides’ Herakles as a play that is primarily concerned with the demigod Herakles’ interstitial predicament: H.F. dramatizes a conXict between the god and the man in Heracles, and ends by clearly destroying one element, the god, and isolating the other, the man. The whole shape of the play is calculated to throw the god–man opposition into relief. . . . Lucid humanity is isolated, however painfully, at the end, rejecting a divine potentiality, rejecting a capacity for madness, rejecting both as intolerably arbitrary manifestations of a cosmos which, in desperation, it invests with pious hopes. The logic of Euripides’ drama is dependent on his inversion of events in the myth. Inter alia, by abandoning the sequence of madness followed by labours, he avoids any suggestion that Heracles can be redeemed by a saviour-god’s exercise of his superhuman powers. Only the human values of friendship can provide that redemption.1 1 Silk (1985), 1–22, at 18.

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Euripides’ radical resolution of the great Heraklean paradox is a kind of ‘anthroposis’, an apotheosis in reverse; it necessitates the hero’s full integration into the human community, the consummation of his human potential. By repudiating the accepted theology (1340–6), Herakles is repudiating his divine self and asserting the superiority of cooperative human values to the amoral, self-seeking ways of the gods. George Cabot Lodge’s Herakles, an allegorical verse play published in 1908, explores the same contradiction between the interstitial hero’s human and divine properties. In this case, however, the contradiction is overcome by the hero’s alienation and apotheosis, a progression or transition that is the opposite of Euripides’ integration and humanization. Lodge’s Herakles repudiates the accepted theology in order to assert his own divinity. This unperformed play is the major work of an indisputably minor poet, and the product of a militantly esoteric philosophy. Yet it does warrant critical examination, for it is also the most extensive and least compromising example of a wider current in the Modernist reception of mad Herakles. This becomes clear when we compare Lodge’s Herakles with two other allegorical plays which draw on the Herakles myth, both by major Modernist writers: W. B. Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand (Wrst staged in 1904 and revised in 1906) and Frank Wedekind’s Herakles (written in 1917 and Wrst performed in 1919). The connection between these three works is that their Heraklean heroes are tragic variations of Nietzsche’s Superman (U¨ bermensch), embodiments of unyielding, transcendental autarkeia, who pay a terrible price for self-aYrmation and deiWc independence.

HERAKLES AS CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN A NA RC H I ST The life and work of American poet George Cabot Lodge (1873–1909) are so inextricably linked that Herakles, his magnum opus completed less than a year before his premature death, makes sense only in a biographical context, as the culmination of an intensely personal and deeply held philosophy.

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Although he was himself a minor poet whose achievement, uneven at best, has been neglected in recent decades, George Cabot ‘Bay’ Lodge was part of a prominent literary circle which included Brooks and Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. The son of Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924), he carried with him ‘impeccable educational and social credentials’,2 not least an enviable New England pedigree. At Harvard he undertook the traditional classical curriculum and developed particular interests in French literature and German philosophy. He also began to write poetry. After graduation he continued his education in Paris, making a thorough study of the Romance languages, and later in Berlin where he learnt German. His friend Edith Wharton described him as ‘an admirable linguist, a good ‘‘Grecian’’, a sensitive lover of the arts, and possessed, on the whole, of the fullest general ‘‘culture’’ I have ever known in a youth of his age’.3 Recoiling from the materialism of his ‘Proper Bostonian’4 ancestry, Lodge chose to pursue the decadent Brahmin life, to which he was temperamentally better suited, becoming what Martin Green has called a Boston aesthete, one who ‘renounced responsibility for social and political reality—resigned it to the philistines’;5 and, as an alternative, placed a premium on intellectuality and aestheticism for their own sakes. His choice was not inevitable. Apart from his father, the formative inXuences on his life were his father’s closest friends, William Sturgis Bigelow and Theodore Roosevelt. The careers of these two men presented to young Lodge widely diverging examples to follow, something, in fact, of a Heraklean dilemma. A convert to Buddhism, the eVete and eccentric Bigelow represented the Brahmin life in its purest, if most decadent, form—the life of withdrawal. In complete contrast, Roosevelt was an exponent of, and evangelist for, the life of immersion, the life of manly action and strenuous toil in the open country. Despite his sympathy with Roosevelt’s rugged idealism, and his own robust appearance, Lodge ultimately aspired to the intellectual triumphs of the sequestered 2 Galinsky (1972), 218. 3 Wharton (1910), 236–9, at 236. 4 Crowley (1976), 17 deWnes ‘Proper Bostonians’ as ‘families whose social position resulted not so much from their MayXower ancestry or their intellectual distinction as from their commercial success’. 5 Green (1966), 151.

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man of thought rather than the vigorous triumphs of the public man of action. Withdrawal and alienation became for him both an ideal and an obsession, his way of doing battle with the plutocracy and philistinism he associated with Boston society and with modern civilization generally. ‘The world cannot be fought with its own weapons’, he wrote to his mother in August 1896. ‘David fought Goliath with a sling, and the only way to kill the world is to Wght it with one’s own toy sword or sling, and deny strenuously contact with, or participation in, the power it cherishes.’6 While in Paris, during the spring of 1896, Lodge and his close friend and fellow ‘Harvard Poet’ Trumbull Stickney founded the Conservative Christian Anarchist Party, more ‘as a playful intellectual pose than a rigorous philosophy’.7 For Stickney and his party replacement Henry Adams, Conservative Christian Anarchism remained an essentially whimsical doctrine, an illusory attempt to impose philosophical order on a chaotic world, but, according to Crowley, Lodge redeWned it as a serious programme of ethical rebellion: Although Adams came to see man as a dwarfed and impotent manikin whose destiny was blindly ordained by forces beyond his control and perhaps his understanding, Lodge asserted the power of the individual will (or soul) to shape its own destiny and to reclaim man’s divine inheritance. Using Conservative Christian Anarchism as both a rationale and a rationalization for his estrangement from society, Lodge transformed Adams’s passive construct into a plan of action.8

Central to Lodge’s plan of action, and informing all his subsequent work, was the Nietzschean concept of ‘overcoming’ and a belief in the principle of self-divinity. Lodge Wrst expounded his revised theory of Conservative Christian Anarchism in the novel Mediocracy (1901), where he argued that human individuality and divine potentiality had been consumed in a process of ‘artiWcial selection’ whereby the ‘Wttest’ were determined by economic rather than natural criteria. This process had given rise to a ‘Mediocracy’, a classless society driven by mediocrity and commercialism, and represented by the ‘Social or Conservative Man’ who, under the guise of Christianity, practised a morality of aZuence. The antithesis of the 6 Quoted in Crowley (1976), 33–4.

7 Ibid. 50.

8 Ibid. 51–2.

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‘Social or Conservative Man’ was the ‘Eccentric or Anarchist’, one who rebelled against the current unnatural order by alienating himself from it and asserting his full humanity and, therefore, his innate divinity. Lodge’s anarchism was both elitist and anti-political; its ultimate goal was not mass revolution but the evolution of ‘True’ values among an intellectual and cultural elite. He cast himself in the role of the alienated ‘poet anarchist’, ‘a prophet-seer who chanted the ‘‘Truth’’ to an indiVerent or hostile society’.9 From this point, the persistent theme of Lodge’s poetry was transcendence. As Henry Adams observed, ‘the thought was ever the same: the soul of Man was the soul of God’.10 The thought is summarized in ‘The Song of Man’ (1902),11 which contains a hymn in praise of the human deity and absolute, transcendental self-suYciency: For my God is the friend that I cherish, and my God is the woman I love, My God is the Spring on the hillsides, the Sea and the marvel thereof, My God is the justice of sunlight unhindered by power or pelf, And vast beyond all and inclusive of all things, my God is Myself! (i. 227)12

In 1906 Lodge took advantage of two quite diVerent public occasions to declaim his superhuman philosophy. Having been invited to deliver a poem before the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, he produced ‘The Soul’s Inheritance’, in which he envisioned the awakening and emancipation of the divine self: We know not when, from carnal lethargies And trivial pastimes and derisive dreams 9 Quoted in Crowley (1976), 60. 10 Adams (1911), 156. 11 Cf. Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself ’ from Leaves of Grass (1855), esp. ‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself . . . Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am j touched from, j The scent of these armpits aroma Wner than prayer, j This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds. j If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my j own body, or any part of it, j Translucent mold of me it shall be you! . . . I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, j I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.’ Lodge held Leaves of Grass to be almost a sacred text. He cast Whitman (1819–92) as the model of the alienated poet and dedicated his Poems (1899–1902) to him. According to Crowley (1976), 49: ‘Ignoring Whitman’s hopes for a democratic American poetry, Lodge interpreted him as a prophet of Conservative Christian Anarchism.’ 12 This and all subsequent references to Lodge’s poems and dramas are to the volume and page numbers in Lodge (1911).

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Of ineVectual felicities, Irresolutions and timidities And temperate ambitions, we shall wake To Wnd our safe exclusions overborne, The pale of our defence invaded, all Our precincts of secure retreat destroyed; To feel the dark enchantments yield; to hear Thy trumpets blowing in our citadels. (ii. 89)

A few months later he was invited to deliver a poem about the Pilgrims at the annual meeting of the New England Society in New York. He used the literal journey of the Pilgrims as an analogy for the soul’s mystical pilgrimage towards the Wnal vision of the truth: May we with haughtier strength and hardihood Send forth the vagrant and victorious soul From dreams and desolate insanities And gross deceptions of the solid world, Into the shining light, on to the Road! (ii. 100)

As these verses indicate, the soul’s awakening into transcendental glory is not a gentle awakening. For Lodge, as Conservative Christian Anarchist, the realization of the divine self and the attainment of true freedom and self-suYciency are predicated on struggle and sacriWce. Transcendence requires alienation and severance from all that the world has to oVer, including the best it has to oVer—the tenderness and comfort of home and family. The creation of the divine self is only possible through the annihilation of the domestic and dependent self. In his verse plays Cain (1904) and Herakles (1908), Lodge transformed the Conservative Christian Anarchist idea of sacriWcial severance into myth. He reinterpreted Cain’s crime of fratricide and Herakles’ crime of Wlicide as redemptive acts, necessary to free humanity from ignorance and slavish faith. Lodge’s freethinking and rebellious Cain, recognizing his indwelling divinity, urges his brother Abel to relinquish his submissive trust in God and to seek instead ‘the soul’s inheritance’, ‘thy crown’, ‘thy liberty’. When Abel refuses, Cain murders him to prevent the enslavement of future generations:

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Herakles’ apotheosis How shall I suVer that such a traitor live When by his life the future world is doomed To stumble in the shadow of ignorance Stung by the lash of self-inXicted fears? Shall I not rather with violence even and death Safeguard the treasure in jeopardy and keep Flawless the sacred seed? (i. 317)

Exiled by Adam and by God, Cain accepts his solitary mission and is consoled by Eve’s understanding and blessing: ‘Go forth, go forth, lonely and godlike man!’ The resolute inhumanity of the transcendent superhuman is presented nowhere more explicitly or agonizingly than in Lodge’s Herakles, in which the Greek hero emerges, through reasoned violence and purgative madness, as the archetypal Conservative Christian Anarchist. At 272 pages almost equal in length to all the rest of his writings together, Herakles was Lodge’s most ambitious composition and, over three years of intensive work, it became his raison d’eˆtre. Although he claimed indiVerence to the poem’s popular success, and anticipated only half-a-dozen readers, in writing the Herakles Lodge was driven by an acute need for personal fulWlment, focusing all his aspirations on its completion. From late 1907, having developed a serious heart condition, he was also driven by the spectre of his own mortality. At that time he conWded in a letter to his friend Langdon Mitchell: ‘I’ve been a little fussed about my heart taken in connection with the fact that my ‘‘Heracles’’—which signiWes such endless things to me—is only just three quarters done.’13 This endless personal signiWcance was attested to by the Florentine critic Pavolini, who saw concentrated in Lodge’s Herakles ‘all the force of his thought, his conception of the world of man, all the mystic ardor of his soul, all the force and grace and splendor of his poetry’.14 From Lodge’s own words it is clear that he perceived himself as a Herakles Wgure, struggling towards autarkic divinity, and that his magnum opus was both a reXection and a resolution of the conXict in his life between contented domesticity and the restless expectancy of the poet anarchist. He wrote to Mitchell, lamenting his lack of time and solitariness in trying to Wnish Herakles: 13 Quoted in Crowley (1976), 95.

14 Pavolini (1913), 400–8, at 402.

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‘I feel terribly hampered & thwarted by the many little things of daily life & social life. The anchorites & the Solitaries had in them much wisdom & the time is near when I shall crudely sacriWce everything including my family to preserve that retirement, that spaciousness & even Xow of Time which must be had if the voice of God within me is to be heard.’15 Bypassing completely Euripides’ treatment of the myth, Lodge based his Herakles on the account provided by Diodorus Siculus (4.10–11 and 15), in which the madness and Wlicide precede the labours. An extract from this account prefaces the main action of the drama, which is divided into twelve scenes. To the mythical dramatis personae (Herakles, Megara, Creon, Alcmena, Iolaus, Teiresias, the Pythia, and Prometheus) are added the symbolic characters of the Poet and the Woman, with whom the drama opens. Their function is akin to that of the Greek tragic chorus. They also serve as a sub-plot or an epitome of the central Heraklean quest. The Poet has travelled to Thebes from his native Athens, forsaking carnal love and meretricious beauty, in search of the light of spiritual perfection. The Woman initially ridicules his solemn stance, but is soon converted to his quest. Pavolini likens this Wrst scene to ‘an overture in which is presented the leading motive of the opera; the spirit which is seeking for the inner light’.16 In the second scene King Creon has assembled his people to witness his abdication in favour of his son-in-law, Herakles. Creon is the archetypal ‘Social or Conservative Man’, a being of supreme worldliness, and, as such, he is entirely rebuVed by Herakles who will not be forestalled, in his search for the soul’s inheritance, by the unsolicited burden of temporal responsibility: I will be Lord of none, And thus unto myself be Lord and Law! I, with the soul’s immortal thirst to slake, How shall I down into the shallow stream Where beasts and many men have drunk together And left foul waters strangled in their course? (ii. 208–9)

The hero is roused to deWant anger by the same force that inspires Cain to rebel, by what Henry Adams describes as an ‘unshaped, mystical 15 Quoted in Crowley (1976), 90.

16 Pavolini (1913), 400–8, at 403.

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consciousness of a destiny to become the Savior, not the Servant,—the creator, not the economist,—the source itself, not the conduit for ‘‘these safe human mediocrities’’ ’.17 In renouncing Creon, Herakles is also dissociating himself from common humanity: The Xorid animal Which laughs and longs, is pleasured and distressed, The heart that feels and feigns, that faints and dreams, That sorrows and is glad—the facile brain That schemes and lies and is alert to seize Success and is ambitious of no more Than serviceable ingenuity Can aptly compass—that supremely serves To methodize the waste of the world’s work To proWtable order and endow Life’s labor with a seeming worth and end— These are not I. (ii. 209)

As Adams notes, the climax of Herakles’ quest is built ‘from the ground,—that is to say, from the family, which is always the Wrst sacriWce in these mystical ideals of the Savior’.18 The sacriWce is foreshadowed in the fourth scene by a tableau of gentle domesticity. Herakles listens as Megara sings to their three sleeping children: My children sleep, whose lives fulWl The soul’s tranquillity and trust; While clothed in life’s immortal dust The patient earth lies dark and still. . . . For yesterday is all we are, Tomorrow all we yet shall be; The end is where no eye can see . . . We only know the way is far! We only know men grow and grieve And die . . . And death is strange and sore! O sleep, my darlings, sleep!—before The time returns to wake—to live! (ii. 228) 17 Adams (1911), 168.

18 Ibid. 169.

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Megara’s lullaby signiWes resignation to the great mystery that lies beyond the limits of human understanding, to the familiar cycle of birth and death. For Herakles, resignation is a forfeiture of the soul’s inheritance, a failure to fulWl spiritual potential. He does not seek the ‘soul’s tranquillity and trust’, but the perfection of the enfranchised soul. His journey begins with a katabasis. In search of some sign of his true identity and destiny, he enters the city’s nocturnal underworld, a tavern frequented by thieves and prostitutes. There, in a scene redolent of Mary Magdalene’s recognition of the resurrected Jesus,19 he is recognized by the Woman as the Light and the Redeemer. The Woman begs to follow him, but Herakles declares: ‘There are no followers j Nor captains on the soul’s eternal quest!’ He thus determines to lead a life of alienation and withdrawal. Herakles’ planned withdrawal is foiled, however, by the arrival of Eurystheus’ messenger, bringing the order to submit to the King of Argos and the gods, and to perform the imposed labours. For Herakles, as an embryonic superhuman, the labours are an intolerable impediment to his personal transcendental quest, as they demand from him both servitude and altruism. He is the antithesis of Euripides’ hero who, Barlow says, is motivated by ‘no narrow personal vision but a beneWcent mission to mankind as a whole’.20 Here we can see Nietzsche’s inXuence on Lodge. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra), the Persian sage cautions the Higher Men not to sacriWce their self-seeking creative mission for the selXess, cooperative values of lesser men: Do not let yourselves be imposed upon or put upon! Who then is your neighbour? Even if ye act ‘for your neighbour’—ye still do not create for him! Unlearn, I pray you, this ‘for,’ ye creating ones: your very virtue wisheth you to have naught to do with ‘for’ and ‘on account of ’ and ‘because.’ Against these false little words shall ye stop your ears. 19 Lodge, in fact, viewed Jesus Christ as a Messiah for Conservative Christian Anarchism, who, forsaken by God on the cross, trusted in the divine power he found within himself. The dedication of Cain read: ‘To the deathless memory of jesus of nazareth seer and sayer of truth who was believed only by the poor and outcast, who was recognized by all reputable and respectable people as the avowed enemy of law, order and religion, and who was at last brought to his death by the priesthood of the orthodox church through the operation of the established courts of social justice, this poem is inscribed with measureless love’ (i. 231). 20 Barlow (1981), 112–28, at 17.

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‘For one’s neighbour,’ is the virtue only of the petty people: there it is said ‘like and like,’ and ‘hand washeth hand’:—they have neither the right nor the power for your self-seeking! In your self-seeking, ye creating ones, there is the foresight and foreseeing of the pregnant! What no one’s eye hath yet seen, namely, the fruit—this, sheltereth and saveth and nourisheth your entire love. Where your entire love is, namely, with your child, there is also your entire virtue! Your work, your will is your ‘neighbour’: let no false values impose upon you! (4. 73. 11)21

The other impediment to Herakles’ self-seeking quest has not yet become apparent to him. He is, at this point, still bound to domestic life, believing his family will share in his ultimate achievement: This is the loveliest and most beautiful Of all good fortune of man’s mortal life: Surely it shall not for the truth’s sake pass Out of the sum of real prosperities! Rather my loved ones and my love shall share, Always with me and to whatever end, The days and ways of the enfranchised soul. (ii. 274–5)

He does not understand the true cost of his soul’s transcendent destiny, even when it is prophesied by Teiresias: For all his life is lost to save his life; And all he loved is sacriWced and slain To make love pure and perfect in his heart! (ii. 333)

The ninth scene takes place before and within the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where Herakles, full of anger and doubt, has gone to discover from the oracle his true identity. There he drags the Pythoness from her Tripod and tears asunder the veil that covers the image of God, to Wnd the sanctuary empty. It is a moment of self-epiphany; Herakles Wnally recognizes that the God is within him, that he is the only God. He also comprehends the full meaning of Teiresias’ prophecy, that the cost of self-divinity is violent severance of his cherished earthly attachments. The Pythia explains to Herakles the ordeal awaiting him: 21 Nietzsche (1885), in Levy (1909), xi. 356–7.

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Life’s perfected metamorphosis From man to God shall hardly come to pass Save in exceeding travail and grief and pain. Only in anguish man is born again, Other and more and mightier than he was! . . . Only with strange and tragic ecstasies Of body and being, mind and heart, Life’s human chrysalis Is torn asunder, and ruined, and rent apart, To loose man’s winged divinity Into the light of truth, the skies of liberty! (ii. 359–60)

Before Herakles resolves to fulWl his spiritual destiny, the God and the man within him engage in one last struggle. Like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, he contemplates in anguished solitude the bitterness of his cup, his impending sacriWce: Life is a bitter thing to lose, and love And home and wife and child and happiness And rest and the contentment of mild joys And small achievements and brief brilliant glories:— These all are welcome and pleasurable things, And bitter things to lose! . . . And know you well It is a bitter thing to go adrift, Companionless and without pause or end, Into the vast dark spaces of the soul;— To dwell, sense-stripped and naked to the core, In the chill heights of man’s divinity! (ii. 359)

The struggle ends with Herakles overcoming his human self and asserting his remorseless, unstoppable divinity in an explosion of autarkic ecstasy: I am resolved to death, to tears and blood, To desolation and intolerable Bereavement,—to the worst that needs must be! And to the best, to new nativities, I am resolved! And I will stand apart, Naked and perfect in my solitude,

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Herakles’ apotheosis Aloft in the clear light perpetually,— Having aVorded to the uttermost The blood-stained, tear-drenched ransom of the soul! (ii. 363–4)

Filled with the power of that assertion, Herakles returns home and, in scene 10, proceeds to act out ‘the logical insanity of the Conservative Christian Anarchist: murder for the sake of life’,22 and, as Adams remarks, ‘the insanity of Herakles surpassed all other insanities, as the CruciWxion of Christ surpassed all other cruciWxions’.23 Ignoring the tender remonstrations of his wife and mother, Herakles kills his children one by one as they scream for mercy, thereby completing ‘One violent and intolerable deed j Of sacriWce’ in the name of his newly discovered Godhead. He collapses before he can strike Megara with his sword. When he reappears in scene 11, he intones a psalm of rebirth, recalling Jesus’ assurance to Martha before raising Lazarus from the dead (John 11: 21–7): I am the madman; and the murderer I am; and I am Herakles; and I, I am the Resurrection and the Life, I am the Soul, whose inmost virtue is Thus to outlive destruction and return, Valid with Truth’s perennial victory! (ii. 407)

The allegorical interpretation of Herakles’ frenzied slaughter of his sons as a sacriWcial deed, essential to spiritual perfection and incomprehensible to ordinary humanity, was not original to Lodge. It appears 500 years earlier in Coluccio Salutati’s De Laboribus Herculis, where the Wlicide is justiWed as the soul’s victory over earthly preoccupation and sin.24 In sacriWcing his children, Lodge’s Herakles is also accomplishing the superlative evil peculiar to the Nietzschean Superman. ‘Man must become better and eviler’, counsels Zarathustra. ‘The evilest is necessary for the Superman’s best’ (4. 73. 5).25 ‘Only the soul survives’ the sacriWcial carnage. Reborn and invulnerable, Herakles ordains himself ‘the future and the hope of man’, and 22 Crowley (1976), 102. 23 Adams (1911), 175. 24 See above, Chap. 3. 25 Nietzsche (1885), in Levy (1909), xi. 353. Cf. Lodge’s Herakles: ‘I am resolved . . . to the worst that needs must be! j And to the best.’

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now willingly undertakes the labours in order to free his people from their slavery to false gods, to raise humanity to the level of divinity: Therefore the Labours!—for the soul must strive, The God must serve, until His virtue is, In man’s degraded being and abject heart, In man’s deformed, incurious, haunted mind, In man’s gross greed and dull brutalities, Illustrious and exempliWed!—till truth, Loved and proclaimed, at last is lived and known! (ii. 420)

The twelfth scene, which Adams designates the ‘Prometheus Unbound’,26 represents Herakles’ Wnal labour as the liberation of Prometheus from his Caucasian torment. Herakles frees Prometheus by dispelling the myth of God, which was fashioned from human fear and immaturity, and proclaiming the new theology: Now we have looked abroad and looked within, Straining the symbol, and we learn to know, Quietly and at last, its secret sense, Shadowed and insuYciently set forth, Is, in the meaning and the truth, ourselves!— We are the Gods! (ii. 443)

In his enlightened state, Prometheus realizes that his chains, like the God whom he deWed, were insubstantial, and he gains ‘the freedom to become Free.’ Prometheus Unbound represents the logical conclusion of Lodge’s philosophy, the dramatic climax of his faith,27 but, as readers, we are left with the stark image of the Man-God’s desolate achievement. In an essay on the uses made of the Promethean legend by three young American poets of the turn of the twentieth century (Trumball Stickney, William Vaughn Moody, and George Cabot Lodge), Thomas Riggs comments on the immense void confronting Lodge’s apotheosized Cain and Herakles: ‘At the points at which the heroes 26 Adams (1911), 178. 27 Silk and Stern (1981), 296, note: ‘The suVering hero of Greek tragedy, Oedipus or Prometheus, is the original model for Nietzsche’s U¨ bermensch, the superman.’

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are depicted as having achieved their release, their perfect selfdiscoveries and self-realizations, the poems are empty. The envisaged goal is without content. The moment of apotheosis which Cain and Herakles approach through disciplines of destruction turns out to be little after all: their souls are inWnite, God is dead. In the slaughter of deity they are left alone and bleak against stark scenery.’28 Herakles as Conservative Christian Anarchist is a celebration of Nietzschean overcoming, but this celebration is ultimately as bleak as Seneca’s despairing portrait of Herculean overreaching. The proximity of Lodge’s hero to Seneca’s overreacher is discernible in GeoVrey Miles’s critique of Senecan Hercules’ superhuman quest for self-perfection: ‘Hercules embodies in extreme form the aspirations of Senecan Stoicism: immovability, self-consistency, superiority to fortune, godlike self-perfection. He shows what happens when these aspirations are taken to their logical conclusion. In the process constancy becomes detached from normal Stoic moral values, and ‘‘authenticity of self ’’ becomes an end in itself.’29

‘ T H E WAV E S H AV E M A S T E R E D H I M ’ Lodge claimed, probably defensively, that he wrote Herakles for his ‘inside ring’, a select circle of literary friends whom he felt ‘would understand its secrets and liberties’.30 To his sorrow, this privileged audience received the poem with muted enthusiasm and some perplexity. A Wrst edition of more than 200 copies was made available to the public and a few reviews appeared nationally, but, with the exception of scene 10 (the Wlicide), Herakles was generally criticized as lifeless and repetitive. Ironically, this most private of poems became the Wrst of Lodge’s works to enter a second edition, although its appeal was mainly conWned to what Lodge warily regarded as a crank element in American poetry’s small readership. Lodge resigned himself, as alienated prophet-seer, to ‘singing in a vacuum’. However, in spite of his sense of failure and isolation, he was not alone among 28 Riggs (1951), 399–423, at 421–2. 30 Crowley (1976), 105.

29 Miles (1996), 61.

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Modernist writers in his allegorical treatment of the madness of Herakles, in portraying the madness as a precondition of Nietzschean overcoming. A brief analysis of two roughly contemporary plays, which, unlike Lodge’s Herakles, were written for the stage, will reveal a more widely evolving interest in the tragic Herakles and his relationship to Nietzsche’s Superman. On 27 December 1904 the Abbey Theatre in Dublin opened as the permanent home of the Irish National Theatre Society. The occasion was marked by the premie`re of W.B. Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand, the Wrst (and most frequently revived) of a cycle of Wve plays featuring the mythical Celtic warrior Cuchulain.31 Yeats (1865–1939) conceived Cuchulain as the central Irish myth, and, as Maeve Good points out, since the poet’s preoccupation with Cuchulain ‘spans almost his entire career, Yeats’s attitude and presentation of the hero necessarily alters and develops’.32 Fiona Macintosh has described the Cuchulain of On Baile’s Strand as ‘the Nietzschean tragic hero, whose deWance we rejoice at, and yet, whose annihilation vindicates a higher necessity’, concluding that he is ‘a problematic and dangerous hero for modern Ireland to inherit’.33 We also have here Cuchulain in his role as the ‘Irish Herakles’.34 On Baile’s Strand is Yeats’s most Nietzschean play35 and his most Heraklean. It is a potently compressed exposition of the sort of Heraklean quest dramatized by Lodge, a quest that culminates in sacriWcial Wlicide and madness. Yeats had originally treated the subject of Cuchulain’s killing of his son and subsequent madness in a narrative poem, ‘Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea’ (Wrst printed in 1892), but the more immediate inspiration for On Baile’s Strand was the story ‘The Only Son of Aoife’ 31 The rest of the cycle included The Green Helmet (1910, revised from The Golden Helmet of 1908), At the Hawk’s Well (1917), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939). The plays were not written or produced in chronological order in terms of the myth. 32 Good (1987), 11. 33 Macintosh (1994), 18. 34 Celtic scholars have regularly compared the myth of Cuchulain to the myth of Herakles, focusing particularly on aspects such as the descent into hell, and the imposition and successful accomplishment of impossible tasks. In 1888 John Rhys identiWed Cuchulain with Herakles by making them both sun-gods. See Macintosh (1994), 11. 35 On the inXuence of Nietzsche on Yeats, see Good (1987), 75–80 and Donoghue (1989), 38–48.

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from Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), Lady Gregory’s translation of the old Gaelic saga-epic Ta´in Bo´ Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). In ‘The Only Son of Aoife’, Cuchulain is aware that he has fathered a child with Aoife. That child, Connla, has been raised by Aoife for the purpose of carrying out her revenge on Cuchulain for his marriage to Emer. Connla lands at Baile’s Strand under strict command not to divulge his identity on any account. But when he is challenged by Cuchulain, and lies dying from his wounds, he reveals himself to his father, who is overcome by grief. Conchubar, the high king, a negligible presence in the story until this point, sees the Wlicidal Cuchulain as a threat to the kingdom, and, out of fear, bids Cathbad, the Druid, to put an enchantment on the hero, binding him ‘to go down to Baile’s Strand, and give three days Wghting against the waves of the sea, rather than kill us all.’ Where Lady Gregory emphasized the tragic consequences of Aoife’s consuming hatred, Yeats explores a tragic code of heroism. He introduces a sub-plot involving the Blind Man and the Fool, who function as grotesque shadows of Conchubar and Cuchulain. He makes Cuchulain unaware that he has left Aoife with child, and removes the scene in which Connla reveals his identity, leaving Cuchulain to discover the truth from the Blind Man. His explanation for Cuchulain’s desperate battle against the waves is madness and not a druidical spell. By 1906 Yeats had completely rewritten the Wrst half of On Baile’s Strand, up to the entrance of the Young Man. The revisions he made brought to light the story’s Heraklean echoes, namely Cuchulain’s Heraklean anagno¯risis and loss of self, his conXicts, both internal and external, as an interstitial hero, and Wnally his Heraklean collapse. In the 1906 version, ‘Yeats centres the play’s entire thematic structure squarely on the conXict between the values of Cuchulain and the values of Conchubar’.36 These two opposing Wgures represent the same heroic dichotomy as Lodge’s Herakles and Creon. Cuchulain is an embryonic Superman, self-suYcient and recalcitrant. He has killed ‘Kings and the sons of kings, j Dragons out of the water, j And witches out of the air, j Banachas and Bonachas and people of the woods’ (54).37 His philosophy is to ‘dance or hunt, or quarrel or 36 Skene (1974), 41. 37 This and all subsequent references to On Baile’s Strand are to the page numbers of the 1906 version printed in Yeats (1997), 49–72.

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make love, j Wherever and whenever I’ve a mind to’ (54). His unsanctioned killings, wanton largesse, and supposed childlessness combine to make him a dangerous maverick force. For he has, as Zarathustra instructs the Higher Men, surpassed ‘the petty virtues, the petty policy, the sand-grain considerateness, the ant-hill trumpery, the pitiable comfortableness, the ‘‘happiness of the greatest number’’—!’38 Cuchulain reXects Yeats’s interest, at that time, in the principle of self-divinity exempliWed by the Nietzschean Superman: Yeats in 1903 found Nietzsche’s projection of such a man exhilarating. . . . It was clearly a relief to Yeats to Wnd a structure of ideas which accommodated the tragic hero, the Renaissance prince, the personage. Yeats’s answer to the secularization enforced by positivist science and economics was not to assert the sacredness of life as such, the form in which a divine will is expressed, but to locate images of sacredness in the individual personage, the hero; a Nietzschean alternative to the Christian saint.39

Possessive of his godlike independence, Cuchulain battles a world of lesser men hostile to his heroic temperament. He also Wghts an internal battle to remain constant to his self-seeking quest. Like Lodge’s Herakles, he refuses to be responsible and altruistic, but is thwarted by the demands of the lesser world in the shape of Conchubar, High King of Uladh, who requires him to take an oath of submission to safeguard family values and the interests of Conchubar’s heirs: conchubar I would leave A strong and settled country to my children. cuchulain And I must be obedient in all things; Give up my will to yours; go where you please; Come when you call; sit at the council-board Among the unshapely bodies of old men; I whose mere name has kept this country safe, I that in early days have driven out Maeve of Cruachan and the northern pirates, The hundred kings of Sorcha, and the kings Out of the Garden in the East of the World.

38 Nietzsche (1885), in Levy (1909), xi. 352. 39 Donoghue (1989), 38–48, at 41.

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Must I, that held you on the throne when all Had pulled you from it, swear obedience As if I were some cattle-raising king? Are my shins speckled with the heat of the Wre, Or have my hands no skill but to make Wgures Upon the ashes with a stick? Am I So slack and idle that I need a whip Before I serve? conchubar No, no whip, Cuchulain, But every day my children come and say: ‘This man is growing harder to endure. How can we be at safety with this man That nobody can buy or bid or bind? We shall be at his mercy when you are gone; He burns the earth as if he were a Wre, And time can never touch him.’ (54–5)

Like Lodge’s Creon, Conchubar is a wily politician, tied to matters temporal, and concerned, above all, with material security and the greater good. Cuchulain resists his power because, as Yeats later declared in A Vision (1925; revised version 1937), the heroic nature ‘is conscious of the most extreme degree of deception, and is wrought to a frenzy of desire for truth of self ’. The masked characters of the Fool and the Blind Man40 are in some sense equivalent to Lodge’s Eternal Woman and Eternal Poet; their initial dialogue foreshadows symbolically the crucial argument between Cuchulain and Conchubar, whose relationship they mimic. The Blind Man, resting on Conchubar’s throne, symbolizes the King’s wiliness and worldliness, while the Fool is his labouring, risk-taking dupe. In a letter outlining his heroic image of Cuchulain, Yeats makes explicit the parallel between the Cuchulain–Conchubar opposition and the Fool–Blind Man opposition: ‘The touch of something hard, repellent yet alluring, self-assertive yet self-immolating, is not all but it must be there. He is the fool—wandering passive, houseless and almost loveless. Conchubar is reason that is 40 The Fool and Blind Man were originally given the names Barach and Fintain respectively; these were omitted in the 1906 version, presumably to stress the characters’ symbolic importance.

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blind because it can only reason because it is cold. Are they not the hot sun and the cold moon?’41 Cuchulain eventually agrees to take the oath, betraying his heroic code and his ‘desire for truth of self ’. But his submission entails more than a betrayal of self; it precipitates the destruction of self. As a token of obedience, Conchubar insists that he meet the challenge of the young stranger out of Aoife’s country. Cuchulain takes the Young Man for a worthy ally and surrogate son: Boy, I would meet them all in arms If I’d a son like you. He would avenge me When I have withstood for the last time the men Whose fathers, brothers, sons, and friends I have killed Upholding Conchubar, when the four provinces Have gathered with the ravens over them. But I’d need no avenger. You and I Would scatter them like water from a dish. (65–6)

He violently refuses to do the King’s bidding, but cries of ‘witchcraft’ from the assembled court compel him to draw his sword and unwittingly kill his only child. Recalling the anagno¯risis of Euripides’ Herakles, Cuchulain discovers the identity of his victim gradually and painfully: blind man He was a queen’s son. cuchulain What queen? what queen? [Seizes Blind Man, who is now sitting upon the bench.] Was it Scathach? There were many queens. All the rulers there were queens. blind man No, not Scathach. cuchulain It was Uathach, then? Speak! speak! blind man I cannot speak; you are clutching me too tightly. [Cuchulain lets him go.] I cannot remember who it was. I am not certain. It was some queen. fool He said a while ago that the young man was Aoife’s son. cuchulain She? No, no! She had no son when I was there. fool That Blind Man there said that she owned him for her son. cuchulain I had rather he had been some other woman’s son. What father had he? A soldier out of Alba? She was an amorous woman—a proud, pale, amorous woman. 41 Repr. in Wade (1954), 425.

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blind man None knew whose son he was. cuchulain None knew! Did you know, old listener at doors? blind man No, no; I knew nothing. fool He said a while ago that he heard Aoife boast that she’d never but the one lover, and he the only man that had overcome her in battle. [Pause.] blind man Somebody is trembling, Fool! The bench is shaking. Why are you trembling? Is Cuchulain going to hurt us? It was not I who told you, Cuchulain. fool It is Cuchulain who is trembling. It is Cuchulain who is shaking the bench. blind man It is his own son he has slain. (70)

With this discovery, Cuchulain is seized by madness. He rushes down to the sea and strikes at the waves with his sword, imagining Conchubar’s crown on each foaming crest. His frenzied battle with the waves has strong overtones of Herakles’ hallucinatory rampage. As the Fool sounds his death-knell, he is Wnally subsumed by the power of the sea: There, he is down! He is up again. He is going out in the deep water. There is a big wave. It has gone over him. I cannot see him now. He has killed kings and giants, but the waves have mastered him, the waves have mastered him! (71)

The waves’ mastery signiWes Cuchulain’s physical defeat, but an apotheosis and spiritual rebirth are implied.42 The hero achieves the elemental, inoculative fury out of which the Nietzschean Superman is born: Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which ye should be inoculated? Lo, I teach you the Superman: he is that lightning, he is that frenzy!— . . . I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud—man.43 42 SigniWcantly, in his critique of Lodge’s Herakles Pavolini (1913, 400–8, at 408) recalls a verse from Lodge’s Wrst poem: ‘This is the song of the wave, that j died in the fullness of life.’ He then concludes, ‘Has not Cankara, the greatest theologian of India, already said in a strophe worthy of a poet: ‘‘There is no diversity of essence between thee and me, O Lord; I am thine but thou art not mine; because the wave is of the sea but the sea is not of the wave.’’ ’ 43 Nietzsche (1883), in Levy (1909), xi. 9, 16.

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H ERAK LES AS SUPER HUMAN MISFIT In common with Euripides and Lodge, Frank Wedekind’s interest in Herakles is centred on the internal conXict of the theios ane¯r. Euripides’ resolves this conXict by destroying the god and elevating the man. In an exact reversal of Euripides, Lodge dramatizes a Nietzschean apotheosis, Herakles’ realization of self-divinity. For Wedekind (1864–1918), a deWnitive resolution is unattainable. His Herakles is aware from the outset of his divine inheritance, and engages in a desperate struggle to ascertain his human identity and to achieve domestic happiness and earthly fulWlment. He is the ultimate outsider, an interstitial hero or ‘superhuman misWt’44 who Wnds communion and solace only in death. Although divided into three acts, Wedekind’s Herakles is actually a series of twelve individual scenes or ‘Stationem’, resembling in structure the mystery plays which dealt with the stations of Christ’s Passion and the Resurrection. According to Galinsky, Wedekind ‘deliberately chose this form to underline its inverted content’.45 Herakles is unwilling to fulWl a Christlike destiny, to assume the role of Saviour. The stations of his passion are essentially diVerent. As Ward B. Lewis states, the prologue, delivered by the god Hermes in his role as psychopompos (conductor of souls to the nether world), prepares us for ‘the dramatic representation of a human fate; it is that of Hercules, a bastard between men and gods, a mortal with divine gifts who struggles for human happiness but fails to gain the love of mankind’.46 Hermes makes clear to his audience that what he is about to present is not a celebration of the superhuman Herakles, but rather the universal tragedy of a ‘driven soul’, whose godly deeds are the measure of his human failure and ultimately devoid of meaning: Der Go¨tterbote, der die Seelen leitet, Heißt eure Seelen, wenn sie’s sind, willkommen. Er kommt, euch eine Seele vorzufu¨hren, Die des Geschickes weitste Spur durchmaß. Was er an Taten tat, der Gottbegabte, Der Hohnbeladene, bleibt abgetan.

44 Galinsky (1972), 237.

45 Ibid. 236–7.

46 Lewis (1997), 131.

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Herakles’ apotheosis Der Lo¨we von Nemea und der Ebe Vom Erymanthos und der Artemis Behende Hirschkuh und die Rinderherden Des Augias und die Stymphalidenvo¨gel Und Ko¨nig Diomedes Rosse und Der Stier von Kreta und der Drache Ladon Und selbst der Ho¨llenhund—seid ohne Furcht, Kein Tier beleidigt euren klugen Sinn. Befu¨rchtet ihr, daß toller Mummenschanz Den Sinn mit Zimbelklang und Paukenschla¨gen Beta¨ubt und langweilt?—Stiege Hermes nieder, Bedenkt es selbst, solch Schauspiel zu verku¨nden? Was lichtscheu sich in Busch, Ruinen, Ho¨hlen Auf Erden birgt, gelobt sich meinem Schutz. Auch wer die Schranken mit Gewalt durchbrach, Die zwischen Mensch und Mensch gezogen, mir Vertraut er sich. Aus Stoßgebeten kenn ich Das wilde Flackern der gehetzten Seelen. Oh, fu¨rchtet nimmer, daß mit solcher Kenntnis Vom Ungeheuerlichen schauderndes Erstaunen ich in euch erwecke, mit Dem Schlangenstab auf den Gewaltigen deutend. Nur was vor abertausend Jahren war, Nur was in abertausend Jahren sein wird, Nur was entsteht, was lebt, was sich erneut, Nur das fu¨hr ich euch vor: Ein Menschenschicksal. (Act i, scene i)47

The messenger of the gods, he who guides the souls, welcomes your souls, if that’s what they are. He comes to show you a soul, one that measured the furthest trail of fate. What deeds he performed, this divinely endowed one, the one heaped with scorn, are shrugged oV still. The lion of Nemea and the boar of Erymanthos and Artemis’ nimble hind and the cattle of Augias and the Stymphalian birds and King Diomedes’ mares and the bull of Crete and the dragon Ladon and even the hound of hell—be not afraid, no beast will insult your good sense. Do you fear that mad masquerade will numb and bore you with the crash of cymbal and beating of drum?—Would Hermes descend, think you, to herald such a spectacle? That which hides in bushes, ruins, and caves, shy of light, claims my protection. And also he who would 47 Wedekind (1964), ii. 601.

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violently break through the barriers erected between one human and another, entrusts himself to me. From their fervent prayers I know the wild Xickering of driven souls. Oh, never fear that with such knowledge of the monstrous I will awaken in you shuddering amazement, pointing my serpent rod at the violent one. Only that which has been for thousands of years, only that which shall be in thousands of years to come, only that which is created, lives, and renews itself, only this will I show you: a human fate.

Unlike Lodge’s Herakles, who does not fully understand his true identity until his visit to Delphi in scene ix, and who must learn to think and act like a Superman—to reject all values and concerns external to himself—Wedekind’s hero behaves from the start as a consummate Superman, displaying every attribute of the self-made god, including absolute moral autonomy and lethal implacability. In true Nietzschean fashion, he regards nothing as forbidden unless it is weakness under the form of ‘virtue’ or ‘vice’. ‘Though mightier than [Wedekind’s] Samson,’ remarks Izenberg, ‘he is even less controlled, lustful, easily enraged.’48 When King Eurytos is defeated by Herakles in an archery contest and reneges on his promise to give the victor his daughter Iole, Herakles exacts revenge by murdering Eurytos’ son Iphitos. Later, furious at Iole’s loyalty to her father, he storms the Oechalian palace, killing the King and his three remaining sons. In another episode, Herakles cruelly rejects his faithful wife Dejaneira because he blames her for his murder of a Xirtatious young man who aroused his jealousy. The tragedy of Wedekind’s Herakles lies in his very perfection and self-suYciency as a Superman, and in his awareness, implicit in his exchange with Apollo, of his constant failures to attain the human worthiness and domesticity he genuinely desires: apollo Ist’s keine Go¨ttergnade, Mensch zu sein? herakles Das will gekonnt sein. Mir gelingt es nicht. (Act i, scene iii)49 apollo Isn’t it a god-given grace to be human? herakles One has to be capable of being that. I’m not successful at it.

Herakles has overcome his domestic self too decisively, alienated himself from the human community too irrevocably. He cannot 48 Izenberg (2000), 94.

49 Wedekind (1964), ii. 611.

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contain his restless, superhuman fury, the Nietzschean insanity which caused him to slaughter his wife and children: eurytos Du konntst zu Haus bei deinen Lieben dich Erholen. Mordend u¨berWelst du sie! herakles Die Wut, durch stets gewalt’gere Ungeheuer In Herakles entfesselt, raste fort. (Act i, scene ii)50 eurytos You could have recovered at home with your loved ones. Instead you attacked them murderously. herakles The fury, unleashed in Herakles by always more violent monsters, kept on raging.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Man is deWned as something that is to be surpassed: Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going. (1: Zarathustra’s Prologue, 4)51

For Wedekind’s superhuman Herakles, the opposite is true: the goal, which he strives to achieve, is his perfection as Man, but he is constrained by his unsurpassable perfection as Superman. As in Lodge’s Herakles, the Superman’s desolate perfection is highlighted in the play’s ‘Prometheus Unbound’ segment (Act ii, scene viii). Prometheus is the anti-Superman who, paradoxically, achieves autonomy by virtue of his selXessness. In contrast to Herakles, whose labours were self-assertive demonstrations of merely physical superiority, Prometheus’ art and altruism have invested his suVering with real meaning. Before he departs to free Prometheus, an act Wedekind characterizes as entirely self-serving, Herakles weighs this test of physical strength against the greater test of moral strength confronting the Superman in his bid for simple human dignity and freedom: 50 Wedekind (1964), ii. 605.

51 Nietzsche (1883), in Levy (1909), xi. 9.

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Mein SchiV!—So freud- und ruhmlos ist kein Kampf Wie der um schlichte Menschenwu¨rde. Kra¨fte Verschlingt der Kampf, sie reichten aus, Prometheus Vom Kaukasus zu reißen! (Act ii, scene vii)52 My ship!—No struggle is as joyless and infamous as the one for simple human dignity. The struggle consumes my powers, but they suYce to drag Prometheus from the Caucasus.

In the Wnal two scenes Herakles achieves a type of freedom in his autarkic death, and domesticity of a sensual Olympian variety in his marriage to Hebe. But the purpose of the play’s ending is not to rejoice at Herakles’ transcendence; it is to reinforce, in Herakles’ own words, his failure to become Man and his ‘awesome solitude’53 as Superman: Wahrlich, es Wel nicht leicht, Go¨ttliche Gaben zu ba¨ndigen. Nie fand ein Sterblicher sich Schwerer ins irdische Joch. . . . Stets wieder tobte das Chaos, Stets wieder wankte die Erde. Leichter war alles errungen Als der ha¨usliche Herd. (Act iii, scene xii)54 Truly, it was not easy to keep my godlike gifts in check. Never did a mortal Wnd himself more ensnared in the earthly yoke. . . . Again and again chaos raged, again and again the earth shook. Everything was easier to gain than the domestic hearth.

The profound pessimism of Herakles, Wedekind’s last play (performed posthumously in Munich in September 1919), is at least partly explained by the historical context in which it was written—Germany’s impending defeat and disintegration in the closing stages of World War I. What Wedekind seems to be advocating is the urgent need, in a dehumanized post-war world, for ordinary human beings and not superheroes. Galinsky terms Wedekind’s Herakles a turning-point, ‘a return to the Euripidean concept of the hero’.55 The play certainly marks a 52 Wedekind (1964), ii. 636. 54 Wedekind (1964), ii. 660–1.

53 Galinsky (1972), 238. 55 Galinsky (1972), 236.

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turning-point in the reception of mad Herakles, but it is actually a turning away from Euripides towards a neo-Senecan Herakles. It also signiWes a resumption of interest in the dark and dangerous Heraklean psychology, an initial step towards the discovery of a ‘Herakles complex’. The Nietzschean Herakles and Seneca’s Hercules share a Werce autarkeia and self-proclaimed divinity, which make them a grave threat to the sanctity and survival of all civilized, cooperative institutions, including the family. Neo-Senecan Herakles, who emerges in the second half of the twentieth century, challenges, more unequivocally than any previous theatrical incarnation of mad Herakles, the desirability and validity of this uncompromising brand of superhuman heroism.

9 The Herakles complex: a Senecan diagnosis of the ‘Family Annihilator’ Euripides’ tragic Wgure of Herakles, the father who murders his own family, did not resonate powerfully in the mid-twentieth century, although other aspects of the Herakles myths (especially the labours) did appeal to the German-speaking world. Werner Herzog’s Wrst ‘short’ Wlm, Herakles (1962),1 ironically juxtaposed the mythical hero with a contemporary body-builder. Neither the Swiss playwright Friedrich Du¨rrenmatt’s Herkules und der Stall des Augias (Wrst broadcast on Radio Bern in 1954 and staged in 1963) nor Heiner Mu¨ller’s anti-tragedy Herakles 5 (written in 1966, although not performed until 1974) had much to do with Euripides.2 Even Hartmut Lange’s Brechtian treatment of the myth in Herakles, a study of Stalin performed in West Berlin (1968), which deals with the hero’s guilt in general terms, did not centre on infanticide.3 Yet directors have now begun to appreciate the importance of Euripides’ decision to place at the centre of a tragedy the darkest episode of Herakles’ myth, the murder of his wife and children. The concept 1 This was a 12-minute black-and-white Wlm which alternated between footage of a body-builder, Mr Germany, and a crash at Le Mans. 2 On Herakles 5, see Gruber (1989), 58–62 and Preusser (2000), 259–66. For general critical studies of Mu¨ller’s dramas, see Keller (1992), Schmitt (1999), and Ostheimer (2002). 3 Du¨rrenmatt’s play was revived several times both in the 1960s and subsequently; the text is available in Du¨rrenmatt (1998), vol. viii. Hartmut Lange, who was the Chief Dramaturg of the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin between 1961 and 1964, moved to West Berlin in 1965. In 1968 two of his plays were staged there together as a diptych, Der Hundprozess and Herakles, under the direction of H. Heyme. The Wrst play considered the negative side of Stalin, the second the positive. They are published in Lange (1988).

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of the warrior, the trained killer who misdirects his aggression against his own household, has found powerful resonances in our own society, where marital violence and the male child-killer are pressing social concerns, not least aZicting our own ‘warriors’ in the military forces. The apparent topicality of the issues raised by this hero has been a crucial factor in putting him back on the public stage. The last decade has been the most proliWc in the play’s entire performance history. In 1998 alone four professional productions of new translations were staged, two in Amsterdam, one at London’s Gate Theatre,4 and one in Vicenza. The following year Euripides’ tragedy was incorporated in Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Heracles Trilogy, staged in Istanbul, Japan, and Barcelona. In March 2001 a new German translation of Herakles was performed at Theater am Kirchplatz in Liechtenstein, and in August 2002 the National Theatre of Northern Greece staged Mary Yiosi’s modern Greek translation at the Ancient Theatre of Epidauros. In Zagreb in October 2004 the Croatian National Theatre produced in tandem translations of Euripides’ Herakles and Alcestis by Neven Jovanovic. These productions were reprised a year later in Germany for the Festspiele Ludwigshafen. The madness of Herakles has also made an impression on New York’s fringe theatre scene. In November 2000 a multi-media and sitespeciWc production, colliding the text of Euripides’ Herakles with Mu¨ller’s Herakles 5, was mounted by Chashama Theatre in Times Square. Between April 2004 and November 2006 La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club on the Lower East Side presented no fewer than three world premie`res featuring striking modern incarnations of Heraklean madness. These were Hercules in High Suburbia: A Musical Tragedy!, the Wrst-ever rock-and-roll adaptation of Euripides’ Herakles; Herakles via Phaedra, an all-singing, all-dancing Herakles biography with a Prohibition backdrop; and Home Front, a drama inspired by Euripides’ Herakles and set in America’s Midwest in 1972. Amongst other productions staged in the latter part of the twentieth century, Herakles has attracted the attention of two major English-language poets with high public proWles, each writing in a 4 For reviews of Nick Philippou’s Gate production, see Alastair Macauley, Financial Times, 14 July 1998; Lyn Gardner, Guardian, 15 July 1998; Robert Hanks, Independent, 16 July 1998; Helen Morales, Times Literary Supplement, 17 July 1998; and Andrew Aldridge, Stage, 6 Aug. 1998.

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historical period of momentous change and uncertainty, who, in common with Seneca, have deployed Herakles’ ambivalent heroism as a symbol of the fragile and paradoxical condition of civilization in their own era. The verse play Herakles by the American poet Archibald MacLeish, conceived and produced at the height of the Cold War, and British poet Simon Armitage’s Mister Heracles, a version of Euripides’ tragedy commissioned in the dawn of the new millennium, scrutinize the problematic place of the returned warrior within a domestic and broader cultural context. While few Euripidean scholars would now endorse Wilamowitz’s ‘seeds of madness’ or ‘megalomaniac’ theory, MacLeish and Armitage demonstrate that contemporary dramaturgical interest in the madness of Herakles lies resolutely in the question of psychological causation, in diagnosing the potential of the patriarch and protector to turn ‘family annihilator’. Indeed, the theatrical reception of Euripides’ Herakles in the late twentieth and early twenty-Wrst centuries is distinguished by the identiWcation, either consciously or subconsciously, of a ‘Herakles complex’ as part of the heroic male psyche: the hero’s habitual aggression, the excesses of his modus vitae, and the particular cultural imperatives to which he is subject cause him to be at war with himself, his dependants, and his society. An analysis of MacLeish’s Herakles and Armitage’s Mister Heracles reveals that the dramatization of the ‘Herakles complex’ necessarily involves applying a Senecan or Wilamowitzian reading to Euripides’ text, and especially to Euripides’ innovative sequencing of events in the myth.

A RC H I B A L D MACL E I S H ’ S H E R A K L E S

The public poet Archibald MacLeish was a poet whose considerable literary achievements ran parallel to a distinguished career of public service and high oYce. An alumnus of Yale, where from 1911 to 1915 he became well versed in English and classical literature, and Harvard Law School, and a veteran of World War I, his education and early life experiences instilled in him the seeds of liberal humanism, as well as an acute

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social and political conscience. At Yale MacLeish studied under Clarence Whittlesey Mendell (1883–1963), Professor of Latin and Greek, who recalled on the thirty-Wfth anniversary of the class of 1915: ‘Yours was the last class with whom I read Petronius and Euripides and Horace with a sense of permanence and security that made possible for us a leisurely sympathy with them, ignoring the storms and wreckage of the centuries and the continent that lay between.’5 This sympathy and proximity in consciousness with the ancients, which MacLeish gained in his young manhood, informed much of his subsequent work, especially his plays, in which he drew on classical mythology to attest the universality and endurance of ethical truths and their direct relationship to the modern American experience. For Wve years from 1923 MacLeish was part of the expatriate literary community in Paris, which also included E. E. Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. As Dan JaVe points out, in common with these contemporaries MacLeish sought from his self-imposed exile a deWnition of his native land and to replace a nostalgia for Europe ‘by mapping out a tradition’.6 It was a tradition that, at critical moments in America’s history, he retraced to the heroic world of Greek epic and tragedy. MacLeish’s ideal of the poet’s function, and the attitudes and events that determined the development of that ideal, provide a setting in which to understand his aspirations for his Herakles and the vigorous philosophy at the play’s source. Many of his early poems owe much to the inXuence of pioneering Modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound,7 and the often-quoted Wnal couplet of his Ars Poetica (1926), ‘A poem should not mean j But be’, was simplistically adopted as a kind of mantra of extreme Modernism.8 However, while he betrayed certain Modernist mannerisms in his verse, MacLeish eschewed the Modernist preoccupation with the private individual’s experience and the poet’s alienation from society. He was the antithesis of George Cabot Lodge’s ideal of the withdrawn, self-seeking ‘poet anarchist’ whose verse was essentially a private language intelligible only to his 5 Quoted in Somer (1988), 115–121, at 117. 6 JaVe (1976), 141–8, at 146. 7 e.g. The Pot of Earth (1925), Nobodaddy (1926), Einstein (1926), and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928). 8 See Jerome’s analysis of MacLeish’s peculiar Modernism in Drabeck, Ellis, and Rudin (1988), 9–15.

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fellow Brahmins. JaVe maintains: ‘During the 30s MacLeish set out to do as man and poet what no other twentieth century American poet had dared. Stirred by devastating eVects of the economic breakdown at home and startled by the hints of a dangerous anti-humanistic and anti-intellectual revolution abroad, he set out to make the entire social scene his domain. He was to try to do Shelley one better, to make the poet the acknowledged legislator of his time.’9 Towards the end of the 1930s MacLeish evolved, in a series of essays, a notion of poetry as ‘public speech’. In ‘Public Speech and Private Speech in Poetry’ (1938) he contrasts what he deems the ridiculous romanticism of the British nineteenth-century poet, that is, the private speaker, with the ground-breaking poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, in which he discerns both a ‘transition towards a poetry capable of accepting a political and revolutionary era upon its own terms’10 and ‘hope of a new and shaping inXuence in a world which needs, of all things, shape and meaning most’.11 Perhaps most revealing of his personal literary mission is his assessment of Yeats’s later poetry as ‘an act upon the world’.12 Among the poets, throughout history, whose work MacLeish designates as public speech are those of ancient Greece and Rome.13 The following year in ‘Poetry and the Public World’, MacLeish proclaimed: ‘Art is a method of dealing with our experience of this world, which makes that experience, as experience, recognizable to the spirit’,14 and he decried ‘the failure of contemporary poetry to bring to poetic recognition the experience of our time’.15 His essay entitled ‘The Irresponsibles’ (1940) was an attack on intellectual apathy in the face of impending international crisis: ‘Nothing is more characteristic of the intellectuals of our generation than their failure to understand what it is that is happening to their world. And nothing explains that failure so precisely as their unwillingness to see what they have seen and to know what they do truly know.’16 L. G. Salingar, deWning T. S. Eliot’s unparalleled importance in restoring the intellectual dignity of English poetry, wrote: ‘At a time when few people would take it seriously, he formed a means of expression in poetry for the surface and depths of a representative modern mind, intensely aware 9 11 13 15

JaVe (1976), 141–8, at 145. Ibid. 540. Ibid. 542. Ibid. 828.

10 12 14 16

MacLeish (1938), 536–47, at 546. Ibid. 544. MacLeish (1939), 823–30, at 825. MacLeish (1940), 618–23, at 619.

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of his surroundings, their place in history, and his intimate reaction to them.’17 This deWnition closely accords with MacLeish’s idea of the ‘responsible’ writer and thinker. Through his essays and poetry MacLeish was advocating what Somer perceives as ‘his personal commitment to his art, to turn it outward upon the living world’.18 In a critique of MacLeish’s Herakles, Gianakaris declares that the poet, ‘in his every act mirrored an altruistic zeal for improving the well-being of the country’s people. All the while, from the artistic standpoint his poetry scarcely ranged outside the subtly but clearly didactic spectrum.’19 MacLeish’s role as a public poet was not conWned to the promotion of humanist values in his creative work. He also had a long and active involvement in his country’s public life. An admirer of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he became a chief adviser to the president as well as an occasional scriptwriter of Roosevelt’s speeches and the famous ‘Fireside Chats’. Among the numerous appointments he held during World War II and the immediate post-war period were Librarian of Congress (1939–44), assistant director of the OYce of War Information (1942–3), Assistant Secretary of State (1944–5), and assistant head of the US delegation to UNESCO (1946). MacLeish was appointed Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard in 1949, and during the next decade devoted himself to teaching and writing, and was awarded two of his three Pulitzer Prizes. His public voice throughout this time was raised against the unwholesome climate of anti-communist hysteria, notably in his radio play The Trojan Horse, broadcast and published in 1952. Having been under investigation by J. Edgar Hoover since the early 1940s for his liberal values and left-wing sympathies, and in particular his involvement with the League of American Writers and other anti-fascist groups, he gained the distinction of having an FBI Wle that eventually ran to 600 pages, longer than that of any other writer in the United States. In October 1953 Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that MacLeish had belonged to more communist front organizations than any man he had investigated. That same year, in his capacity as the newly elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, MacLeish had tried unsuccessfully to involve the 17 Salingar (1983), 443–61, at 443. 19 Gianakaris (1971), 445–63, at 445.

18 Somer (1988), 115–21, at 121.

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Academy in challenging the irrationality, scaremongering, and strong-arm tactics of McCarthyism. Despite the intense scrutiny he faced, MacLeish emerged relatively unscathed from this grubby and shaming episode of his nation’s history. He loyally defended friends and colleagues whom McCarthy threatened, and managed never to compromise his principles and integrity.

Herakles, the great modern myth of science In early 1959, soon after his verse play J. B., a twentieth-century retelling of the story of Job which earned him his third Pulitzer, had been successfully produced on Broadway, MacLeish began work on Herakles. The task which the poet had assigned himself, of recasting the myth of Herakles and the murder of his sons as a ‘dramatic parable’20 for the atomic age, a contemplation of its wonders and evils, took six years to realize. These six years constituted undoubtedly the most destabilizing chapter of the Cold War, in which the world witnessed intensive nuclear armament, experimentation, and brinkmanship culminating, in October 1962, in the thirteen days of the Cuban missile crisis; the Bay of Pigs invasion; the start of the space race between the United States and the USSR; the construction of the Berlin Wall; the detonation of the Soviets’ ‘Tsar Bomba’, the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed; America’s oYcial and bitterly divisive entry into the Vietnam conXict; and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Inevitably, writers and Wlm-makers were quick to respond to the growing and ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation that characterized this era, and to the widespread fear, ideological belligerence, and above all, the awesome helplessness the new vision of Armageddon induced. In 1958 Peter George’s novel Red Alert was published. Five years later it became the basis of Stanley Kubrick’s darkly comic science-Wction movie Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, in which military paranoia and scientiWc genius diabolically conspire to launch an unprovoked and irrevocable nuclear attack on Russia. In a similarly grotesque comic vein was Du¨rrenmatt’s 20 Donaldson (1992), 482.

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1962 play Die Physiker (staged in London in 1963 and in New York the following year). The comedy is set in a lunatic asylum in which a nuclear physicist, Johann Wilhelm Mo¨bius, has taken refuge after destroying his papers to prevent his research on nuclear Wssion being put to evil use. Two other inmates, also posing as lunatics, are physicist agents who have been sent by their respective governments to kidnap Mo¨bius. Eventually all three men decide to stay safely in the asylum, but the female doctor in charge has copied Mo¨bius’s notes and plans to seize control of the world. Dr Strangelove and Die Physiker satirize science’s fatal and irreversible progress in an increasingly insane and unscrupulous world. Stanley Kramer’s Wlm On the Beach, adapted from a novel by Nevil Shute and released worldwide in December 1959, dealt tragically with the same theme, depicting the desolate aftermath of global nuclear conXict as the last human survivors in Melbourne await the radioactive fallout and certain extinction. When asked by a young naval oYcer (Anthony Perkins) who he thinks started the war, atomic scientist and ‘blind mechanic of disaster’ Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire) replies, ‘Albert Einstein’: The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn’t possibly use without committing suicide. Everybody had an atomic bomb and counter bombs and counter-counter bombs; the devices outgrew us, we couldn’t control them. I know—I helped build them, God help me. Somewhere some poor bloke probably looked at a radar screen, thought he saw something, knew that if he hesitated one thousandth of a second his whole country would be wiped oV the map. So he pushed the button, and the world went crazy.

In comparison with these better-known works of Cold War Wction, MacLeish’s Herakles is an esoteric and more ambitious attempt to expose the political and scientiWc hubris that had made humanity too easily expendable a commodity. The vision and conviction that fuelled its creation were unapologetically grand. Whereas other writers examined the morality and the terrors of the nuclear age from a futuristic perspective, MacLeish chose to locate the origins of the present madness Wrmly in Greek mythology. In a letter to Gerald Murphy, written just over twelve months before the world premie`re of Herakles, he explained his attraction to the myth of Herakles and his sudden realization of the tragic aYnity between his own age and

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the heroic age. The letter reads like a stream of poetic consciousness, a gradual and revelatory reasoning out of the play’s thematic premise. Scattered throughout are lines and phrases that made their way into the Wnal play: It occurred to me this morning that this age in which we have lived, you and I, is actually, if one looks through the trash, plastic containers, paper cups, half-used words and soiled hypocrisies which Xoat on its surface like the steamer-leavings on the precipitous deep blue of Lake Como—is actually a heroic age and that that is its tragedy. The heroic ages in the myths—those only true rememberers—were the ages in which men, some men, perhaps only one, dared to believe that it might be possible—that it was possible— with nothing but human head and hands to slaughter the great beasts, to overcome the monsters, to go down into the dark, into death itself, and drag the dog up howling and so, as Herakles was assured by the oracle, to live thereafter like gods. I have known for a long time that that myth was our myth. That is why I have been struggling for Wve years with a play about Herakles. But not until this morning did I see what I must have known all along—that it is because our age like his life is heroic in that highest and most daring sense that we take our meaning from him. For our age is tragic as his life was and as all the heroic ages must be. The deeds are performed, the miracles accomplished, the wonders visited—and there is still the world as it was—the dog as it was . . . except that the dog is now tied up in the cook’s slops in Eurystheus’ kitchen. Le prince d’Acquitaine a` la tour abolie. It is true tragedy—tragedy to wring the heart: all these tremendous intelligences daring to take space and time and matter apart and to dig deep down under into the eternal dark and returning in triumph to what? Night as usual. Dust as usual. Someone sprinkling water on the dust as usual—the old sad smell. But then one reminds one’s self that in the myth Herakles does become a god at the end. So that the oracle comes true in the myth. So what should we think of ourselves—of our destiny? The myths are always right—but right in another language. Are we also gods, we victims of ourselves—but in some sense we do not understand?21

MacLeish retained Euripides’ distinctive ordering of events in the Herakles myth. Contrary to what was probably the traditional chronology, in which Herakles performed the labours as a penance for the murder of his family, Euripides placed the murders after the twelfth 21 16 Sept. 1964. Repr. in Winnick (1983), 420.

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labour had been successfully accomplished. This bleak sequence necessitates a reassessment of the labours and raises the question of whether they have been nulliWed or made futile. MacLeish summarized in a programme note the unsettling moral conundrum produced by the labours–madness chronology: ‘If the labors come Wrst as they do in Euripides, how do the murders follow? If it is not the murderer of the sons who masters the beasts by way of penance, but the master of the beasts who murders the sons, why are they murdered?’ As Gianakaris asserts: ‘It is evident that MacLeish considers these distinctions between event sequences as comprising the crux of the Heraclean dilemma.’22 Crucially, MacLeish added a deWnite Senecan dimension to this dilemma by replacing the interventionist Wgure of Lyssa with a blinding Wt of megalomaniac violence and obscuring (or indeed removing) the contradistinction between Herakles sane and Herakles insane. He thus introduced into his Euripidean framework the concept of inevitability and a changed notion of culpability, and he formulated these in a way that underlines the ambiguity of what he saw as the ‘Herakles’ of the late twentieth century—our notion of Science: I felt very strongly then that the myth of Herakles was the great modern myth . . . because the labors of Herakles were all of them labors of delivering the world from its fears, from its monsters, delivering it from evil, creating a world in which people would live simply and humanly, which is very much what the modern myth of science has been. Science Wghts against cancer. It cures infantile paralysis. It puts an end to yellow fever. It accomplishes miracles in regard to the decency of living. The myth of Herakles ends with his return from the labors and the discovery that in his wars against the monsters he has destroyed his own sons. This is also the myth of science for us. Science has produced the bombs; science has produced the destruction of the young.23

The stage production (1965) MacLeish’s Herakles opened on 27 October 1965 in Ann Arbor, where it ran for fourteen performances, and was produced by the University of Michigan’s Professional Theater Program with the APA (Association of 22 Gianakaris (1971), 445–63, at 454. 23 MacLeish, in Drabeck and Ellis (1986), 213–14.

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Producing Artists) Repertory Company in the University’s Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre. With the establishment of the Professional Theatre Program in 1962, the University of Michigan became the Wrst university in the United States to engage a resident repertory ensemble for a longterm contract. Its honorary sponsors included playwrights Arthur Miller and Thornton Wilder and actresses Judith Anderson and Helen Hayes. The purpose of the Program was to oVer a broad selection of high-quality contemporary theatre and to produce a new play each year. It had previously presented the American premie`res of Behan’s The Hostage and Shaw’s Man and Superman. The world premie`re of Herakles was part of the Program’s fourth Fall Festival, along with three other plays—Hart and Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It With You, Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, and Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. The production was directed by Alan Schneider, who had previously directed MacLeish’s television play The Secret of Freedom (1960). Throughout his career as one of America’s foremost theatre directors, Schneider alternated between academic and commercial assignments. While serving as an assistant professor at the Catholic University of America, he directed productions of Sophocles’ Electra (1943) and Oedipus the King (1950). He enjoyed a close association with Samuel Beckett, staging all the American premie`res of Beckett’s plays, beginning with Waiting for Godot. He also directed the original productions of all the major plays of Edward Albee and several works by Harold Pinter and Bertolt Brecht. In the cast of Herakles were APA members Rosemary Harris as Megara and Sydney Walker as Herakles. It is clear from a letter MacLeish wrote to Richard Burton on 7 August 1965 that casting and initial rehearsals took place at the Phoenix Theatre in New York, with which the APA had an alliance. The play comprised only one act, and had a running time of an hour and Wfteen minutes. It opened in the present at the site of the Delphic oracle’s ruined temple, where three American tourists (Mrs Hoadley, her daughter Little Hodd, and a governess Miss ParWt) had come to investigate the ancient myth of Herakles with the aid of a Greek guide. With this contemporary scene MacLeish juxtaposed the tragic denouement of the myth, so that the modern Americans shared the stage with Megara, Herakles, and the Pythian priestess, Xenoclea. The tourists, literally drawn into the myth, watched as Herakles returned in triumph from his labours and demanded

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from Apollo oracular approbation of his exploits and the deiWcation he had been promised. The main movements of the play were towards and beyond Herakles’ realization that the monstrous ‘enemies’ he boasted of killing upon re-entering the Theban gate were, in fact, his seven sons come to greet him. In these movements MacLeish appropriated elements of Euripides’ anagno¯risis, waking, and rehabilitation scenes, and transformed the role of Megara into an amalgamation of the Euripidean characters Amphitryon and Theseus. The high proWles of MacLeish and Schneider ensured that the production was reviewed in national newspapers and magazines such as Variety, Life, the New York Times Book Review, and the Christian Science Monitor. A common critical reaction was disappointment. There was unanimously high praise for Rosemary Harris’s performance, but many critics felt that MacLeish’s subject was abstruse and his treatment of it dramatically static. The review in Variety claimed that the play was ‘better to read than see on the stage’, and that MacLeish’s message was ‘lost in a plethora of spoken words too complex in their poetic structure for dramatic impact. The great ideas suVocate in verbiage.’24 Several reviewers stated their preference for the suspense and tragedy of the original text. This is surprising, in view of how rarely Euripides’ play had been performed in America or elsewhere.25 In fact, the only vaguely commercial production of Herakles contemporary with MacLeish’s play was a ‘partially staged’ reading of William Arrowsmith’s 1956 translation26 on 20 February 24 Variety, 10 Nov. 1965. 25 See Hartigan (1995), 142–3. 26 Arrowsmith (1924–92) was one of the 20th century’s most inXuential theorists and exponents of translation (not only of the classics). Apart from the translations he produced himself, he coedited, with Roger Shattuck, The Craft and Context of Translation (1961) and was the instigator and general editor of the Oxford University Press series The Greek Tragedy in New Translations. The former initiative was ‘based on the conviction that poets like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides can only be properly rendered by translators who are themselves poets’. See Arrowsmith’s selfinterview on this topic (1981, 56–67). His translation of Herakles for The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by Grene and Lattimore, has proved over the years a relatively popular version of the play, particularly it seems as a script for school and university productions. The prevalence and accessibility of the translation are largely attributable to its clarity and to Arrowsmith’s sensitive introductory appreciation of the play, which includes a radical defence of its un-Aristotelian structure. Conacher’s review (1957, 85–7, at 85) of Arrowsmith’s translation provides a good summary of its merits and shortcomings: ‘This version (which is preceded by a brilliant analysis of

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1959, performed by Qwirk Productions in the Great Hall of New York’s Cooper Union and directed by Geraldine Lust.27 One of the more sympathetic reviews MacLeish’s play received was that in the Christian Science Monitor by Richard Cattani, who, while acknowledging the diYculties that Herakles posed as a piece of theatre (for example, its brevity and lack of action), came nearest to penetrating the play’s philosophical core and identifying the precise correlation between the ancient myth and modern reality. Cattani understood that, like Euripides and, to a greater extent, Seneca, MacLeish ‘was more concerned with the moral implications of the twelve labors of the protagonist than with their spectacle’. He was also aware of the importance of the hero’s climactic recognition of his crimes to interpreting the meaning of the labours, and of the conXict between heroic and domestic values, which MacLeish had inferred from Euripides’ text: This revealed Wlicide points to the true assessment of Herakles’ labors: grandiose, selWsh, tragically delusive. Though he had silenced the dogs at the gates of hell and seized on the golden apples—symbolical of his having overcome the world and become a god—he had failed to overcome the horror of his own heart. . . . Herakles presses us to consider the values of decency and family life in an aZuent and atomic age wherein labors of Herculean magnitude can so easily entice us to feats of mock-godly grandeur.28

Although the play’s subdued critical reception indicated a cultural climate inhospitable to Greek tragedy, even in modern adaptation, audience attendance in Ann Arbor was encouragingly large, leading to a strong expectation that the production would transfer to Broadway. However, the managing director of the Phoenix Theatre, T. Edward Hambleton, and Alfred ‘Delly’ de Liagre, the producer of J. B., were both convinced (almost certainly correctly) that the play

the play’s unusual structure) has at least all the minor virtues of the best modern translations: it is clear, quiet in tone, completely lacking in bombast and, for the most part, faithful to the original—particularly in the important quality of never trying to improve on it. In a few of the more dramatic speeches, the tone strikes one as a little too tranquil, even sleepy, but the easy rhythms of the translator’s blank verse are particularly eVective in the moving speeches of Heracles toward the end of the play.’ 27 The reading was reviewed by Michael Smith in Village Voice, 25 Feb. 1959, p. 8. 28 Christian Science Monitor, 13 Nov. 1965.

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was commercially unviable. Their grounds were that it was written in verse, it presupposed too much classical knowledge, and its grim, implacable judgement on the civilized world was ill-suited to the tastes of the average Broadway theatregoer.29 Yet MacLeish’s programme note shows that he believed absolutely in the modernity and relevance of his play’s mythical hero: In our generation the myth of Herakles is closer to the human mind, to the imagination of the race, than it has been for thousands of years. The impossible labors are no longer impossible because we have accomplished more than all of them together. The hero is no longer too strong to be a man because we are stronger. The murders are no longer madness because we know ourselves to be capable of more dreadful murders, with the consequence that the fable of that wandering, laborious man is no longer merely fable. Indeed, the mocking question of our time, the question which later generations may think most characteristic of our time, is precisely the question of the labors of Herakles.

The published version (1967) This conviction led MacLeish to add a Wrst act to the existing drama and to publish the expanded version in 1967. The most important change is the addition of Professor Hoadley, a Nobel laureate physicist, who, conWned to a wheelchair, seems remarkably like Peter Sellers’s German nuclear scientist Dr Strangelove. Hoadley, accompanied by his family, has arrived in Athens ‘fresh from his beneWcent discoveries’ (1)30 and the prize ceremony in Stockholm, prior to returning home to America. He has come to Greece, ‘the fatherland of his heroic soul’ (5), seeking, like Herakles, oracular guidance at the conclusion of his labours. The physical analogy between Hoadley and Herakles is unequivocally drawn in the stage directions, where the Professor is described as ‘a huge bulk of a man, strong hands straining at the Xanges of the wheels’ (2). The two characters are further related in terms of temperament and their dichotomous potential as Wghters against the monsters that threaten the world. Both men are 29 See MacLeish, in Drabeck and Ellis (1986), 214. 30 This and all subsequent references to MacLeish’s Herakles are to the page numbers in MacLeish (1967).

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bullies and share a madness or megalomania with other Wctional Cold War characters, such as the psychotic Brigadier-General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and the gung-ho Joint Chief-of-StaV General ‘Buck’ Turgidson (George C. Scott) in Dr Strangelove, and the asylum director Dr Mathilde von Zahnd in Die Physiker. Herakles and Hoadley also suVer from a malaise of the soul, a restless discontent that they can only partially deWne. Hoadley’s sojourn in Greece is born of a desire to revisit the myth of Herakles, which he believes will make meaningful his own labours, in the only setting commensurate to his heroic vision and heroic longing: This is heroic ground where to be born was beautiful, where breathing mattered, where to dare and think and do were . . . Oh . . . wonders! (16)

MacLeish appended to the published text a succinct author’s note which is our best guide to appreciating the play’s construction and to unravelling its meaning: ‘As the generation of Euripides knew the myth, it was after the Labors had been accomplished and the dog dragged from the gate of death that Herakles, unknowing, killed his sons.’ Here MacLeish is explicitly acknowledging his debt to Euripides’ version of the myth, but his reference to Cerberus being dragged from Hades is a subtle, or perhaps entirely unconscious, acknowledgement of a greater debt to Seneca. In Euripides, Cerberus does not appear on stage, and the playwright pointedly has Herakles explain that he has left the dog at Hermion in Demeter’s grove (615). But in Seneca, although the stage directions are less than clear on this point, Hercules apparently enters leading Cerberus as spolia opima in his triumph over Pluto (in lucem extuli j arcana mundi, ‘I brought earth’s hidden things into the light’, 596–7; hoc nefas cernant duo, j qui advexit et quae iussit, ‘Only two should behold this enormity: he who fetched it, she who ordered it’, 603–4). In the prologue Juno describes this action as the latest example of Hercules’ gross impiety and megalomania: at ille, rupto carcere umbrarum ferox, de me triumphat et superbiWca manu

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But he, in his arrogance at having smashed the prison of the ghostly dead, is celebrating his triumph over me, and highhandedly parading the black hound through Argive cities. I saw the daylight faltering at the sight of Cerberus, and the Sun afraid.

Although Juno’s viewpoint is an obviously prejudiced one, Seneca at least implies that it is not wholly unsubstantiated. For MacLeish, Herakles’ treatment of Cerberus is an unambiguous indicator of megalomania, of extraordinary might transmuted into an extraordinary display of hubris. His hero boasts aggressively of how he gagged the dog and ‘tied him up in the cook’s slops in Eurystheus’ kitchen’ (64). The Euripidean labours–madness chronology is essential to MacLeish’s purpose, but his use of it is at variance with Euripides’ exculpatory externalization of Herakles’ madness. In Euripides, the fact that the madness and murders immediately follow the completion of the labours underlines the gratuitousness and magnitude of Herakles’ tragic fall and the terrible injustice of the gods. In Seneca, however, and even more so in MacLeish, there is a psychological and causal link between the labours (and all that they represent) and the subsequent explosion of madness. Porter has observed that MacLeish’s printed text is structurally quite close to Euripides’ Herakles: The bipartite structure of MacLeish’s Herakles, in which Act One and Two are related to each other as contrasting panels, Act One poising the hero at the peak of his career, Act Two plunging him into the depths, owes much to the structure of Euripides’ play. Most Euripidean of all, perhaps, is the freedom with which MacLeish handles his classical sources, transposing, conXating, redirecting them with a daring worthy of the creator of the Orestes, the Medea, or the Herakles itself.31

What Porter does not consider, however, is the very diVerent nature of MacLeish’s peripeteiac design. In Euripides’ play the main peripeteia, which is announced by the unusual central epiphany, is not 31 Porter (1985), 145–50, at 147.

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the inevitable consequence of the hero’s hamartia or of a madness that has hitherto lain dormant. Herakles’ psychosis is a temporary condition senselessly inXicted by vengeful gods. The action of the second half of the play cannot, therefore, be rationalized by the action of the Wrst. By contrast, MacLeish has ordered his text so that the events of Act Two directly answer the moral questions posed in Act One. The two acts function as a dialogue in which, paradoxically, the present foreshadows the mythical past. Act One concludes with Mrs Hoadley asking how the myth of Herakles ends. Hoadley insists that the myth ends with Herakles giving the oracle himself, having mastered everything on earth, his destiny, and even God. But his wife is not satisWed by this answer: There must be something else beyond the doing. After the world is mastered he comes home . . . he must come home. They meet him . . . his . . . his sons. He has sons, hasn’t he? They meet him running. Oh, they run to meet him. (20–1)

The peripeteia of the second act, which Mrs Hoadley anticipates, is not, as in Euripides’ Herakles, an explosive event, but is gradually revealed, through the agency of Xenoclea, as ‘the last unconquerable horror’ (82), in a scene comparable to the psychotherapy scene between Amphitryon and Herakles at verses 1111–45 of Euripides’ text: xenoclea There is blood on your hands, Herakles. herakles My enemies’. xenoclea What enemies? . . . The blood . . . It is your blood, Herakles. herakles Mine! I haven’t a scratch. They never touched me. xenoclea No, they never touched you, Herakles . . . How many children have you, Herakles? megara No! No! No! No!

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herakles Seven sons. xenoclea Whose blood have they, Herakles? . . . Think of them, Herakles. Try to think of them. herakles When I forget my seven sons! . . . xenoclea Try to remember them–each one . . . It all comes true when you remember. Silence. Let your mind remember, Herakles: it’s trying to remember. Let it! Don’t be afraid. herakles There’s not a creature dead or living I’m afraid of. xenoclea So! Go back to them, Herakles. herakles Back where? xenoclea You’ll know. herakles Beside the gate there . . . xenoclea Look at them, Herakles! herakles They’ve fallen: how can I face them when they’ve fallen? xenoclea Lift their heads! Lift their heads! Lift their bloody heads! herakles No! xenoclea You are remembering, Herakles. Look at them! herakles Take them away! (84–7)

As outlined in a letter MacLeish wrote to Alan Schneider during the play’s rehearsal period in New York, the Wgure of Xenoclea was partly inspired by Michelangelo’s Delphic Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The poet’s conception of this character is critical to the dialogue between past and present around which the play revolves: Like M. A.’s Sybil she is full of the knowledge of event—of enormous events which have shaken and will shake the world of men. She knows what we do not know—the future. She knows too that dimension of the future which is the past. . . . One thing does concern her—the truth. As the truth concerns the Sibyl. She must bring mankind to the truth—to see the truth—to Wnd it for themselves.

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She is the agency of catharsis—the agency through which Herakles is brought to see what he has done—what he is—where he is.32

Another key to interpreting the relationship between past and present in the published version of MacLeish’s Herakles is one that, as Colakis indicates, ‘remains curiously neglected’.33 The dedication to the twentieth-century Greek poet George Seferis serves obliquely as a programmatic statement of the sort of easy interchange between the mythical and contemporary worlds which MacLeish sought to devise in dramatic form. Like MacLeish, Seferis (1900–72) was an eminent writer-statesman.34 He occupied various top governmental and diplomatic posts, and was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. As a public poet Seferis shared with MacLeish ‘a capacity to transform a personal experience or insight into a metaphor that deWnes the character of our times’,35 and to this process of transformation myth was fundamental. The value of myth for Seferis was not as a private, nostalgic study, but rather as a vital exegesis of modern existence. In his verse, ‘the past is always there to shape and illuminate an image of the present’.36 The mythical characters in whom Seferis was interested, particularly the Wgure of the wanderer, have illuminating parallels with MacLeish’s Herakles: Men of inconstancy, of wanderings and of wars, though they diVer and may change in terms of greatness and value . . . always move among the same monsters and the same longings. So we keep the symbols and the names that the myth has brought down to us, realizing as we do so that the typical characters have changed in keeping with the passing of time and the diVerent conditions of our world—which are none other than the conditions of everyone who seeks expression.37

32 Letter from the Alan Schneider Papers, by permission of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego. 33 Colakis (1993), 34. 34 In Drabeck and Ellis (1986), 213, MacLeish expresses his admiration for Seferis as a poet ‘whose relation with the aVairs of his generation was . . . in the public sphere and the private one’. 35 Keeley and Sherrard (1973), pp. xi–xii. 36 Ibid., p. ix. See also the study of Seferis’s relationship to Homer in Ricks (1989), 119–71. 37 From Seferis’s ‘* EÆ ªæ Æ ªØa c ð˚º)’ (‘A Letter on ‘‘Thrush’’ ’, 1950), quoted in Keeley & Sherrard (1973), p. ix.

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Furthermore, the technique Seferis employed to create an eloquent and credible poetic dialogue between the present and the mythical past is one to which MacLeish consciously aspired in his Herakles: His [Seferis’s] secret (in addition to his advantage) is that he always oVers an appropriate setting—a poetically realistic setting—before he allows any legendary Wgures to appear on his stage; before he attempts to carry the reader to the level of myth, he earns his sympathy and belief by convincingly representing the present reality sustaining his myth. . . . In this way the myth comes to life fully, the ancient and modern worlds meet in a metaphor without strain or contrivance as we Wnd the legendary Wgures moving anachronistically onto the contemporary stage that the poet has set before our eyes.38

A humane antidote to a brave new world The augmented version of MacLeish’s Herakles reXects the date of its genesis in the mid-1960s in its connection between the domestic circumstances of the writer’s mythical and contemporary heroes. The dysfunctional marriage and constant acrimony of the Wrst act lend it Albee-esque strains. It resembles scenes from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and A Delicate Balance (1966), in which the drawing-room becomes an arena for competing familial cruelties. Yet the dynamics of this particular sex war also suggest the inXuence of Strindberg’s The Father (1887), which was largely inspired by the nineteenth-century theory that Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and especially the trial scene in Eumenides, ‘described a real historical shift from matriarchy to patriarchy which, like all hard-won achievements, could easily be reversed’.39 Strindberg’s father is both a soldier and a scientist, but his wife Laura ‘undoes the entire construction of the Captain’s masculinity. She undoes him as a scientist, and as a father.’40 Although with less design or eYcacy, Mrs Hoadley similarly attempts to undo her husband’s male and heroic identity by demeaning and even infantalizing him (‘So that’s it!—why we came. You wanted j Herakles to play with!’ (18)). She is an embittered, waspish, and possibly alcoholic woman, both afraid and disdainful of her husband’s 38 Keeley & Sherrard (1973), p. viii. 39 Rosslyn (1998), 183–96, at 190.

40 Ibid. 190.

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unforgiving master plan. Although certainly not the creation of a misogynistic writer, her character plainly pre-dates feminist revisionism in the theatre. Within this Strindbergian struggle, however, MacLeish problematizes the male–female opposition. Unlike Laura, Mrs Hoadley is undoubtedly a victim and ultimately powerless. By reproof and mockery she may challenge the notion of male heroism, but does not succeed in subverting it. Moreover, MacLeish does not present maleness as a straightforward construction, but creates instead images of compromised masculinity: in the words of the crippled professor’s Stockholm oration lurks the spectre of the Hoadleys’ estranged homosexual son, who represents the sons of Herakles slaughtered in a frenzy of overachievement, and who has no place in his father’s heroic schema, a schema which gloriWes boundless daring, unknown deeds never before attempted, arduous undertakings in a room alone, impossible discoveries, dreadful weapons capable of holocaust, of extermination, Wre as hot as God’s. (17)

MacLeish sets up meaningful contrasts between his male and female protagonists which provide the reader with conXicting perspectives on the heroic paradigm at the play’s centre. The voices of human despair, reason, and enlightenment in the drama are all female. Hoadley’s ambition for a world controlled by science, and his intolerance of weakness and imperfection, is perceived by Mrs Hoadley as Orwellian lunacy. As a humane antidote to her husband’s brave new world, she pleads the importance of human fallibility and pain: To want the world without the suVering is madness! What would we be or know or bear or love without the suVering to love for? (21)

But Hoadley responds that the only thing left to man, and his ‘ultimate pride’, is, through science, to make the world free from suVering (22).41 Without politicizing the point, MacLeish makes 41 Cf. General Ripper’s obsession with ‘the purity of essence’ and his belief in a communist Xuoridation plot, or Dr Strangelove’s sinister Darwinian vision of a

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clear throughout the play that it is the two wives, Mrs Hoadley and Megara, and the oV-stage eVeminate youth, who suVer from this ‘ultimate pride’, this masculine conception of the heroic. Hoadley’s grand design to eliminate suVering is comparable to the prayer of Seneca’s Hercules for a new Golden Age: alta pax gentes alat; ferrum omne teneat ruris innocui labor ensesque lateant; nulla tempestas fretum violenta turbet, nullus irato Iove exiliat ignis, nullus hiberna nive nutritus agros amnis eversos trahat. venena cessent, nulla nocituro gravis suco tumescat herba. (929–36) May deep peace nurture the nations, may iron be used only in the harmless toil of the countryside, and may swords be hidden away. May no violent storm disturb the seas, may no Wre streak down from angry Jove, may no river fed with winter snows ravage the uptorn Welds. May poisons disappear, and may no deadly herb swell with harmful juices.

This prayer immediately precedes Hercules’ homicidal hallucination and can, in fact, be read as the Wrst sign of madness. Fitch has indicated ‘the sheer impossibility of what he prays for—an end to sea storms, lightning, winter Xoods, poisonous herbs; these things belong to the very fabric of nature, and the wish to eliminate them reXects an unbalanced obsession with stamping out all possible sources of disorder. In addition, the prayer is tainted by the atmosphere of hubris and ambition in which it is spoken.’42 Hoadley is last seen at the close of Act i roughly handling his wife as he sermonizes on ‘human perfection’ and the ‘triumphant mind’. Resentful of her undisguised loathing of his scientiWc dystopia, he laughs at her pain as he tightens his grip on her wrist. The denouement, which is played out in Act ii, is revealed only to the women in the party, whose prescience is post-fallout world in which a nucleus of survivors will go forth in ‘a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead’. A humane antidote to this brave new world is only ironically suggested by the incongruous music accompanying the Wlm’s opening credits (an instrumental version of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’) and the closing scenes of nuclear apocalypse (Vera Lynn singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’). 42 Fitch (1987), 27.

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contrasted with Herakles’ short-sightedness. As Herakles violently tries to force an answer from the oracle, Megara oVers him an alternative to his laborious, heroic existence, but it is not one he can comprehend: megara Oh leave the oracle to the oracle. We have our life: there’s enough of it, isn’t there, taking it year by year as it comes . . . ? taking a day at a time as it comes to us . . . ? night at a time . . . ? There’s enough in a man’s life to live by . . . bitterly woman’s either! herakles A life is inconceivable without the silence answering somehow! megara No! Come with me! Come with me! Oh, come away! We need the edge of ignorance to live by, the little, ignorant unknown of time beyond us in the dark that could be anything. (76–7)

After Herakles has been made to realize his identity as the murderer of his sons, Megara pleads with him to help her bury their children and to seek puriWcation, but the play ends with Herakles conforming to the heroic pattern set for him, reverting to blind violence, still determined to give the oracle himself. By the end of Euripides’ play Herakles has emerged as a new type of hero, one who has acquired spiritual courage and true understanding, and who has learnt the importance of human suVering. This is conWrmed by the emphatic placement of the words ºø and æE in the last two verses spoken by him (1425–6). MacLeish’s Herakles, however, ultimately symbolizes an unreXective and unrepentant heroism, unchecked by evidence of its cataclysmic capacity. This type of heroism is preWgured early in Act i by the myth of Theseus which Hoadley invokes. Like Herakles, Theseus the returning warrior was inadvertently responsible for the death of a loved one. Hoadley and his wife represent opposing perspectives of the myth. Mrs Hoadley focuses on ‘the black forgetful sail’ which caused Aegeus, out of needless

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grief, to commit suicide, and she tells her daughter, ‘Heroes are like that, darling; they forget j the little things . . . like sails’ (7). Hoadley, however, typically cannot see beyond the daring and magniWcence of Theseus’ exploits, believing that the achievement itself outweighs other consequences and absolves the hero from guilt: Theseus! Theseus from the labyrinth retrieved . . . the room beyond the room beyond the last impossible room where no man till that night had ventured . . . why should Theseus have remembered the black sail? He had the minotaur to think of: that terrible victory beyond the reach of men or of men’s minds with only one thin, ravelling thread to lead him. (8–9)

The most urgent message contained in MacLeish’s Herakles concerns the perilous ease with which the selXess monster-killer arrogates to himself godlike powers and prerogatives. In a letter to Karl Galinsky, MacLeish wrote: ‘The great modern myth is not Jesus but Herakles—not God become man but man become God . . . it is still true that man-become-God is the great contemporary tragedy—dead sons and ruined faith.’43 His play portrays a situation in which the modern ‘Herculean feats’ of science and technology are motivated not by altruism, but by an endless need to prove divine capability. This pessimistic view of progress and power in the late twentieth century mirrors Seneca’s judgement, as expressed by Braden, of the dangerous reality of Julio-Claudian rule: ‘It was not until the possibility of eVectively unlimited power became totally real that the psychology of ruling became dangerously problematic. Technology by its very nature presents opportunities without instructions; and any technology developed beyond its possessors’ ability to handle it tends to eliminate checks on human behavior and to encourage apocalypses.’44 43 The letter, which is dated 18 Mar. 1970, is quoted in Galinsky (1972), 244. 44 Braden (1970), 5–41, at 9.

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In Act i of MacLeish’s Herakles, Hoadley, extolling the achievements of his own age, declares, ‘We should be gods to know what we know’ (13), and talks of atomic weapons, the new instruments of apocalypse, as having a ‘Wre as hot as God’s’ (17). It is Megara, at the close of Act ii, who responds to her husband’s assertion that ‘A man is made for anger’ by suggesting that aspiring to godhead entails imitating the senseless destruction practised by divinity: Nothing, neither love nor trust nor happiness matters to the will of god: it can and down the city tumbles . . . down the children in the bloody dust. Nothing is terrible as the will of god that can and can and can. (88–9)

Implicit in this impassioned protest is the opposition between male and female, heroic and civilized values. The writer opposes domesticity, compassion, and female suVering to the indiVerence of the male demigod.

Forty years on MacLeish was the Wrst modern playwright to dramatize the Herakles complex, and, following Seneca, to establish ‘the continuity between the sane and insane mind’,45 the relationship of the monster-slayer to the child-slayer. In doing so, his failure to arrest popular imagination must be qualiWed. The 1965 stage production of Herakles was the imperfect realization of an unfashionably tragic vision of the world. Part of the problem was the play’s unabashed didacticism, its conceptual strength, which has been seen as a dramaturgical weakness.46 The two-act version, published in 1967, resolved some of the ambiguities of the original script, but sadly was never performed in MacLeish’s lifetime. However, forty years after the one-act Herakles 45 Fitch (1987), 30. 46 JaVe (1976), 141–8, at 147, remarks: ‘As a poet of social consciousness he satirizes more eVectively than he dramatizes. . . . Too often he is over-insistent, a shouter and convincer rather than a seducer.’

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premie`red in Ann Arbor, MacLeish’s second attempt was Wnally staged by a small, newly established professional theatre company of some daring and imagination. In August 2005 Natural Theatricals, artists in residence at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, presented Rip Claassen’s production of MacLeish’s two-act Herakles in the classical ambience of the Memorial’s indoor amphitheatre. The production was the centrepiece of a summer season that also featured a translation of Euripides’ Ion and a new play inspired by classical Greek myth, Alexa’s Necklace. According to its mission statement, Natural Theatricals is dedicated mainly to presenting plays with classical themes derived from the ancient Greek theatrical tradition, which may include English translations of ancient works, adaptations by modern masters, or new works built upon or inspired by classical themes. The company’s Wrst two seasons demonstrated a particular fascination with the tragic Herakles. In 2004 it proudly staged the Wrst professional production of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis in North America since 1960. Although unaware of the fact at the time, in rescuing MacLeish’s Herakles from theatrical oblivion, Natural Theatricals accomplished an even more remarkable feat. The company’s artistic director, Paula Alprin, had discovered a copy of the 1967 text on the bottom shelf of a used bookstore, where ‘it was practically a doorstop’.47 Because of its strong classical inXuence and apparent neglect, ‘this Wne and fascinating play’48 accorded ideally with the company’s artistic mission. But, as Brian Alprin, the producing director, explained: ‘We were certainly unaware of the pervasive neglect of Herakles since 1965. We knew it was underproduced—we specialize in underproduced and neglected works as well as new works—but not the extent of the neglect.’49 The Alprins did not know that the 1965 play had not been professionally revived in the intervening decades; that there were, in fact, two versions of the play; or that the published version had never been performed. Thus Natural Theatricals was unwittingly responsible for staging the world premie`re of MacLeish’s two-act Herakles.

47 Brian Alprin, in correspondence with the author, 27 Feb. 2006. 48 Ibid. 49 Brian Alprin, in correspondence with the author, 2 Mar. 2006.

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Such a milestone was worthy of more than local recognition. It is unfortunate, therefore, that unlike the Schneider production forty years earlier, Natural Theatricals’ eVorts were reviewed only by critics in Greater Washington, DC.50 The reviews, in one respect, echoed the consensus of the national critics in 1965, that as a stageable entity the play was strangely lifeless. Technical diYculties and ineVectual airconditioning conspired on the press opening to reinforce this conviction. Nevertheless, it is likely that even a Xawless production would expose persistent dramatic deWciencies in MacLeish’s revised script. The fact remains that the play’s lyricism and fervour somehow defy easy translation to the stage. What distinguished the critical reaction to the play in 2005 from that in 1965 was a complete failure (despite the inclusion of MacLeish’s author’s note in the programme) to understand the importance of the Euripidean chronology to the story, and especially to MacLeish’s reading of the Wlicide. It is not clear what ancient source one critic had in mind when he wrote: ‘Mr Macleish’s Herakles timeline may not be exactly as the ancient Greeks wrote it.’51 Not one review mentioned MacLeish’s conscious debt to Euripides’ Herakles or how the revelation that Herakles has killed his own sons exempliWes the play’s central concerns. These omissions, I suspect, indicate a lack of directorial focus as much as inattention and classical illiteracy on the part of the critics. Rip Claassen’s programme note is a rather equivocal excursus on the play’s periphery; it fails to engage with the implications of either the Wlicide or the Euripidean chronology: ‘This wonderful work that Mr. MacLeish left us has our heroes seeking truths. To me, anyone who is brave enough to explore truth and destiny is a hero, for to face questions and answers (or no answer) is brave, to accept and never question is folly. Do the gods, or does God, make our destiny? Or do our choices, whatever they are, give us our due?’ 50 For reviews of the Natural Theatricals production, see ‘Greek Mythology Viewed from the 1960s’, Potomac Stages, 5 Aug. 2005 (http://www.potomacstages. com/NaturalArchive.htm#herakles); Brad Hathaway, ‘Herakles On Stage But OV to Rough Start’, Alexandria Gazette Packet, 11 Aug. 2005; ‘Herakles at the Temple’, Del Ray Sun, 20 Aug. 2005; Walter RuV, ‘An Evening with Herakles’, DC Theatre Reviews (http://dctheatrereviews.com/review/2006/02/24/25). 51 Rich See, ‘A Summer of Greek Theatre’, Curtain Up, 5 Aug. 2005 (http:// www.curtainup.com/greeksummerdc.html).

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Fig. 4. Herakles, Archibald MacLeish, Alexandria VA, 2005. Deborah Rinn Critzer (Mrs Hoadley) and Bruce Alan Rauscher (Hoadley). Photo: Stan Barouh.

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Where Claassen demonstrated a more incisive appreciation of the play was in his staging of its sex-war dynamics. It is signiWcant that MacLeish’s reading of the Wlicide, as a paradigm of the dangerous potential of scientiWc militarism, is devoid of any subtext relating to sexual politics. However, the text now demands reappraisal in the light of the feminist revision of gender roles, and recent thinking on male violence, especially domestic violence. A modern staging needs to make explicit the relationship between child-murder and problematic masculinity, a relationship only implicit in MacLeish’s investigation of the Herakles complex. Claassen went some way towards this by drawing a parallel between the instinctive and misogynistic violence practised by the two heroes, between Hoadley’s manhandling of his wife and Herakles’ violation of the Pythian sanctuary. According to Brian Alprin: ‘We ratcheted up the physicality between the Hoadleys—instead of catching her wrist he circled behind the couch and caught her by the hair, viciously twisting her neck to direct her towards the window. It corresponded well to Herakles grabbing Xenoclea’s hair to cast her on to the court beneath the stairs leading to the door.’52 This parallel could have been made more explicit by doubling the roles of Hoadley and Herakles. Instead, actor Bruce Alan Rauscher (Hoadley) doubled as the Greek guide. But the production clearly established the Hoadleys’ absent alienated son as one of the keys to the play: ‘We tried to make sure that his role in the dynamics of the family was understood by our audience in preparation for Act II.’53 The two attempts, forty years apart, to bring MacLeish’s Heraklean vision to theatrical fruition have been partly thwarted by the play’s inherent dramaturgical shortcomings. Yet the vision itself retains its power and urgency. Certainly the play is ripe for revaluation by a twenty-Wrst-century audience; the relevance of its warning about ‘man become God’ has been renewed by the ethical debates on biotechnology (especially cloning and stem-cell harvesting), by intensiWed fears of chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare in the wake of 9/11, by the descent of ‘liberated’ Iraq into slaughterous chaos, and by the constant spectre of global terrorism. 52 Brian Alprin, in correspondence with the author, 4 Mar. 2006. 53 Ibid.

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Problematizing traditional male heroism MacLeish’s Herakles is unmistakably a product of its time, located in a period of transition between diVerent cultural and theatrical languages. It was written and staged on the eve of the social changes initiated by the women’s movement, a corollary of which was a new curiosity on the part of theatre and Wlm practitioners about the male psyche. Just weeks after MacLeish’s Herakles opened, the English Stage Company gave the premie`re at London’s Royal Court, of Edward Bond’s Saved, a powerful and acutely observed study of the violence endemic to a South London council estate and its aimless young men. The play, which contains an on-stage infanticide, helped to precipitate the abolition in 1968 of the Lord Chamberlain’s power to censor plays. It has been frequently restaged since its premie`re, a mark of the interest shown by directors of the feminist and postfeminist eras in the problematization of received notions of maleness and in the relationship between these notions and the social evils of domestic violence and child abuse. More recently, mainstream cinema has displayed a similar interest in representations of masculinity. In 1993 Susan JeVords was already observing that ‘externality and spectacle have begun to give way to a presumably more internalized masculine dimension. . . . More Wlm time is devoted to explorations of [men’s] ethical dilemmas, emotional traumas, and psychological goals.’54 The central question posed by Hollywood depictions of male heroism since the 1980s has been ‘whether, and how, masculinity can be reproduced successfully in a post-Vietnam, post-Civil Rights, post-women’s movement era’.55 Within this cultural climate, Euripides’ Herakles, which details the shift from external to internal heroism, becomes an ideal text for the modern enquiry into the problematic male hero, and consequently a powerful piece of social drama. In the last decade editors and translators of Herakles have tried to show how ‘Euripides’ original play probes the nature of heroism, violence, and masculinity’.56 In the introduction to her 1996 edition of the text, Shirley Barlow stated that Herakles’ externally caused 54 JeVords (1993), 245–62, at 245. 56 Hall (2003), pp. vii–xli, at xii.

55 Ibid. 247.

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madness parodies and perverts the hero’s habitual violent behaviour. She deduces from Euripides’ careful staging of the madness, his tragically methodical inversion of Herakles’ normal heroic qualities, that the playwright views the normalization or legitimization of heroic violence as morally problematic: Heracles’ precision in dispatching in sequence his children and his wife with the same deadly weapons and the same eYciency with which he has accomplished other violent actions shows both the continuity with and also now the negative side of physical strength. The line between legitimate violence and taboo violence is a very Wne one, as Euripides’ use of the hallucination underlines, for it is the beguiling delusion which makes Heracles’ actual deeds seem natural to him when in fact they are unnatural to an extreme degree.57

Kenneth McLeish saw Euripides’ Herakles as ‘an early example of that favourite character in myth and legend, the Xawed and suVering hero. . . . He has two natures, and they are at war.’58 His comparison of Herakles with the infamous female Wlicide Medea is instructive: ‘While Medea’s murder of her sons imposes no guilt on her, setting both her and them free from the trappings of mortality, the murder of Herakles’ sons intensiWes his human feelings, forcing him to Wnd ways to cope not only with the guilt he feels for their deaths, but with the Xawed and mortal part of himself of which those deaths are a consequence.’59 SigniWcantly, in July 1998 McLeish’s translation of Herakles was performed, under Nick Philippou’s direction, at The Gate in London as the second of two plays in the theatre’s ‘No More Heroes’ season. According to a programme note, the season presented ‘the parallel stories of two men coming home. They should be treated as heroes. But they Wnd themselves in a world they don’t recognise as their own.’ The other work was Outside on the Street, a new translation by Tom Fisher of Wolfgang Borchert’s autobiographical and only play Draußen vor der Tu¨r.60 Its central character is a German soldier who returns from a prisoner-of-war camp on the Russian front and is unable to adapt himself to civilian life. In 2001 Christian WolV, introducing an original translation of Herakles by poet Tom Sleigh, wrote: 57 Barlow (1996), 10. 59 Ibid., p. xxxii.

58 McLeish (1997), pp. xxiv–xxxiv, at xxxi. 60 First performed on 21 Nov. 1947.

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Herakles’ heroic identity requires deeds of force and violence, carried out usually far from home. When he comes home to save his family and be with them, looking forward to passing on his fame, his heroic example, to his sons, the heroic identity, with its divine baggage, will not adapt; it selfdestructs. One might suppose that Herakles brings home the craziness that makes great warriors and that his madness, a caricature of his heroic behavior, is psychologically plausible.61

While WolV acknowledges that Euripides himself does not encourage this sort of rationalization, he does assert that the tragedy is subversive, that it calls into question presumed norms of order, including heroic values.62 Introducing Robin WaterWeld’s translation of Herakles in 2003, Edith Hall commented on Euripides’ persistent interest in male violence and on the easy appropriation of this ancient poet by modern interpreters who have a ‘paciWst feminist’ agenda.63 She also made an explicit connection between the madness of Herakles and that aVecting the warrior or trained killer: ‘Heracles is the only Greek tragedy in which Madness herself appears. Here she takes the form the Greeks called Lyssa, a personiWcation of the peculiarly male form of mental disorientation to which trained killers are vulnerable, the madness characteristic of soldiers who have gone berserk on the battleWeld.’64 In a preface to her translation of Herakles in 2006, Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson deWned Herakles’ madness speciWcally as ‘berserker furor’65 and Herakles himself as a ‘brutalized and brutalizing hero’.66 Her analysis of the play’s violent self-splintering evoked the lethal duality of Seneca’s Hercules at war with himself: ‘Herakles is a two-part man. Euripides wrote for him a two-part play. It breaks down in the middle and starts over again as does he. Wrecks and recharges its own form as he wrecks and recharges his own legend.’67 In developing this theme Carson combined a species of Arnott’s ‘red-herring’ theory with a more extreme form of Arrowsmith’s ‘conversion of reality’ theory: The Wrst eight hundred lines of the play will bore you, they’re supposed to. Euripides assembles every stereotype of Desperate Domestic Situation and a Timely Hero’s Return in order to place you at the very heart of Herakles’ dilemma, which is also Euripides’ dilemma: Herakles has reached the 61 WolV (2001), 3–23, at 13. 63 See Hall (2003), pp. vii–vli, at x and xiii. 65 Carson (2006), 14. 66 Ibid. 15.

62 Ibid. 17. 64 Ibid., p. xxii. 67 Ibid. 13.

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boundary of his own myth, he has come to the end of his interestingness. . . . For this practical dilemma Euripides’ solution is simple. From inside the cliche´ he lets Herakles wreck not only his house, his family, his perfection, his natural past, his supernatural future, but also the tragedy itself. Into the Wrst half of the play he packs an entire dramatic praxis, complete with reversals, recognitions, laments, revenge, rejoicing, suspense and death. This melodrama ends at 814. The actors leave the stage. You may think it’s over and head for the door. But if you stay you will see Herakles pull the whole house of this play down around himself, tragic conventions and all. Then from inside his berserker furor he has to build something absolutely new. New self, new name for the father, new deWnition of God. The old ones have stopped. It is as if the world broke oV. Why did it break oV? Because the myth ended.68

Presented here is an image of Herakles as a damaged war veteran needing to break literally with a dangerously obsolescent self and an equally incongruous world-view. Probably taking its cue from this prefatory image, Hilton Als’s review of Carson’s translation, which appeared in the New Yorker, reads almost like an appreciation of Seneca’s Hercules Furens and very much like an arraignment of Iraq War hawks: We have a kind of primer on the intrinsic dangers of blind devotion to ideology. . . . Carson oVers us a familiar portrait: Herakles is a man whose hubris, political and otherwise, brings his nobility to a crashing close. Carson focuses on Herakles’ ‘berserker furor’, oVering an apt description of an imperialist, ancient or modern, who fails to provide for his people’s safety or who sends young soldiers to Wght wars that rob them and their country of the promise inherent in tomorrow.

Strangely, there is very little in Carson’s translation itself to justify a Senecan reading. There is no suggestion of hubris (although the publisher’s blurb refers to Herakles swaggering home) or of internalized furor. In fact, Carson’s rendering of Lyssa’s on-stage activation of the madness is consummately Euripidean in its emphasis on the physical immediacy and externality of her manoeuvres: Wilder than the wild cracking sea, than earth split open, than the lightning bolt that breathes pain, 68 Ibid. 14.

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The Herakles complex is the race I shall run into the breast of Herakles! I’ll smash his halls, pull down the house, kill the children. And the killer will not know who it is he kills until my madness ends. Watch! . . . I call upon the dooms of death to howl in like dogs to the hunt. Soon I will set you dancing, my man, yes I will turn you into a Xute of fear! (820–8; 833–6 ¼ Eur. Her. 861–7; 869–71)69

Her translation of Œ I ŒÆÆ (865) as ‘I’ll kill the children’, and ŒÆÆıºø fiø (871) as ‘I will turn you into a Xute of fear’, conveys more explicitly than Barlow’s version (‘I shall have made him kill his children’; ‘I shall play upon you a pipe of terror’) Lyssa’s active part in the Wlicide and her transformative power.

SIMON ARMITAGE’S MISTER HE RAC LE S

The trained killer: a case study These trends in theatre, Wlm, and scholarly criticism have precipitated the current reversal of fortune in the performance reception of Euripides’ Herakles detailed at the opening of this chapter. An excellent example of how recent social and cultural developments have inXuenced, consciously and subconsciously, the modern reading of this ancient play and the ongoing diagnosis of the Herakles complex is Simon Armitage’s Mister Heracles. Born in West Yorkshire two years before MacLeish’s Herakles was staged, Simon Armitage was Britain’s oYcial Millennium Poet and is a prescribed author in the GSCE syllabus. Mister Heracles, his Wrst major project undertaken for the stage, was commissioned by the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds where, under the co-direction of Natasha Betteridge and Simon Godwin, it received its world premie`re on 16 February 2001. The adaptation of a Greek tragedy was an uncharacteristic assignment for Armitage, 69 Carson (2006), 54–5.

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and a departure from his familiar idiom and the more localized sphere in which he writes. He maintains that this was not a conscious change of direction, but rather a product of his maturity as a writer: ‘In writing my poems and some of the prose I’ve done in the past, I’ve always been drawn to characters who exist on the margin. But Mister Heracles is about the big things, and maybe I just thought I’d arrived at a time in my life when I got a kind of writing conWdence and I could tackle that.’70 Explaining his approach to interpreting the original text, Armitage says he ‘didn’t simply want to contemporise’ the ancient drama or update it to a speciWc point in history: ‘In Mister Heracles, it is as if the whole of human history has occurred within the lifespan of one family. Atomic weapons and spears are spoken of in the same sentence, quantum physics and spinning wheels considered in the same thought. . . . No cultural or historical co-ordinates were beyond possibility using this full-spectrum approach.’71 The play, therefore, incorporates a vast transhistorical compass, into which are built many deliberate anachronisms. These anachronisms were reXected in the stage design and costuming. What gives cohesion to this chronologically ‘full-spectrum approach’ is not the play’s temporal context, but rather its thematic focus. In his penultimate speech, the hero of Mister Heracles demonstrates to Theseus that his lineage and life’s work constituted a progression towards catastrophe. He declares himself ‘a case study, j a living, breathing, one-man case-history’ (51). Armitage has said that the play is about what he sees as the ‘very strong contemporary theme’ of heroism.72 Central to his reworking of Euripides’ drama is the notion, which seems to have been original to Seneca and which was developed by Wilamowitz, that the potential for violence is within Herakles from the outset of the play. In the Senecan version the madness is externally instigated by Juno, but the characters of Iris and Lyssa are excised, and what actually precipitates Hercules’ downfall is his own divided nature. Armitage is even more explicit than Seneca in internalizing the germ of violence. At the same time, he perceives a meaning in the violence that extends far beyond the Wgure 70 In an interview for BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Feb. 2001. 71 Armitage (2000), pp. ix–x. All subsequent page numbers in the main text of this chapter refer to this edition. 72 Front Row, Feb. 2001.

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of Heracles: he sees the madness and infanticide as the inevitable, if extreme, products of the terrifying capabilities bred by such modern phenomena as virtual reality, relentless acceleration in the speed of technological advances, and systematic desensitization to all forms of violence. More particularly, Armitage’s study of the Herakles complex has at its core the cultural psychology of militarism and masculinity, and the problem, above all, of trained killers adapting to civilized and civilian society. In contrast to MacLeish, for Simon Armitage, writing in the post-feminist era, the Herakles who is a paradigm of militarism is also necessarily a comment on the way society construes masculinity and the cultural and political authorization of male violence. From the beginning of the production an overt, although highly eclectic militarism was established through images borrowed and condensed from history and popular culture, and reXecting the fragmented focus of the military in the post-Cold War era. The play opened in outer space, where Mister Heracles, an astronaut, gradually Xoated into view as the title of the play Xashed above the stage like the opening credits of a Wlm. At the beginning of Euripides’ play the explanation for Herakles’ absence is that he is undertaking his twelfth labour, an attempt to abduct Cerberus from the Underworld. In Armitage’s version the twenty-Wrst-century equivalent of this katabasis is interplanetary exploration, with Heracles the Wrst man to travel at the speed of light. Dispossessed and anxiously awaiting his return, Megara, Amphitryon, and the three sons of Heracles had the appearance of refugees or prisoners of war, whose images are familiar from World War II newsreels. The setting also gave the impression of a post-atomic apocalypse, an impression supported by the presence of the chorus, who, in modern dress and grimy blue work-coats, had the task of cleaning up after the fallout. In the second choral ode, the original strophe and antistrophe were adapted in the choreography of twelve songs, performed alternately by the four members of the chorus in a style akin to modern rap music. These songs depicted the labours of Heracles as the exploits of a comic-strip hero or a character from the Boys’ Own annuals. In preparation for their execution, and at Megara’s request, the family are permitted by Lycus to enter their house and exchange their ragged clothes for party outWts. In the production, the boys emerged

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Fig 5. Mister Heracles, Simon Armitage, Leeds, 2001. Clare McCarron (Megara) and Adrian Bower (Heracles). Photo: Keith Pattison.

dressed in kilts, Megara in a party dress and tartan sash, and Amphitryon in tails and campaign medals. They appeared as the proud stock of the army establishment. Heracles, on his return, reinforced this image, assuming again his role as head of a traditional nuclear family within a rigidly hierarchical military community. His costume was a cross between the uniforms of an English soldier and a US airforce pilot. King Eurystheus of Argos, who in Euripides’ tragedy ordered the labours, has been replaced in this version by a state military organization from which, by his own admission, Heracles is absent without leave. Consistent with his unspeciWc uniform, this military entity is unnamed and could as easily be NASA as a military battalion. It is clear, at any rate, that unlike Euripides’ Herakles, who is an individual and solitary alexikakos (averter of evil), Armitage’s hero operates within an oYcial and organized military culture.73 73 As Hall (2004b), 1–46, at 16, states: ‘The idea of Heracles as military hero was brought home in the Euripidean section of Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Heracles Trilogy, which premiered in Istanbul in 1999, and was performed by both Greek and Turkish actors.’

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In drawing a contrast between Heracles’ initial bluster, bravado, and slightly imperious manner (qualities which liken him to a miles gloriosus from New Comedy), and the tenderness of his reunion with his family, Armitage has reproduced the breach Euripides also highlighted between heroic and domestic values. He has beautifully rendered into modern verse the moving simile in which Herakles compares his children to epholkides, little boats towed after a ship: All climb into me, life will not give out, will not splinter me. Sail in my slipstream, my candle aXoat and my paper boats. (25)

Heracles’ simple assertion to his family, ‘Today is put back’ (22), provides both a powerful closure to the traditional nostos tale dramatized in the play’s Wrst half and an eVective prelude to the climactic peripeteia with which the second half begins. Armitage is signiWcantly juxtaposing Heracles’ behaviour as an aVectionate father and unfailing protector with his celebrated public image as a relentless killing machine. The sudden appearance of Iris and Lyssa midway through Euripides’ play, which interrupts the joyous choral ode celebrating Herakles’ rescue of his family (763–814), marks a chilling reversal for which the audience has in no way been prepared. Armitage’s robust, almost ribald, interpretation of the ode prepares the audience, in some measure, for the tone and import of the supernatural dialogue, especially when the chorus remark: Goodness has come with years of nurture, but willpower and killer instinct too are in his nature. (31)

These lines adumbrate the disaster in that Heracles’ ‘killer instinct’ is the very instinct that Armitage’s Madness is able to activate and turn against Heracles. The chorus oVer a further, ominous reminder that Heracles’ skills as a killer, the skills he will now employ to save his family, have been honed and perfected in his unquestioning service to duty:

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Now, with kith and kin to be protected, the true Heracles steps forward. Now he must kill for himself, not just to order. (31–2)

In a radical departure from its Euripidean model, the epiphany of Iris and Madness, as staged by Betteridge and Godwin, seemed to parody the James Bond world of glamour and gadgetry and owe something as well to the Cold War landscape of a John Le Carre´ spy novel. The two characters, as Armitage has drawn them, represent the state military organization which Heracles, by exerting his independence, has snubbed. Although their entrance, which ‘smacks of oYcial disaster’ (32), strikes terror in the chorus, the eVect turns to bathos with Iris’ opening words of reassurance: People, please, don’t stand up—we’re not stopping. It’s a Xying visit—we were just passing. Anyway, it isn’t you we’re interested in, obviously, but you-know-who, everyone’s favourite dreamboat, who I see from the way you’re carrying on is back in the neighbourhood, making himself at home. (32)

Madness, who on stage was represented by a male actor, is a middleclass under-achiever dissatisWed with his dirty work and, in contrast to the sobriety and prudence of Euripides’ Lyssa, a querulous and self-obsessed creature: I come from a good family, went to private school, I could have been something big in the city or the church, but it didn’t work out. I seem to have fallen between schools. . . . It’s the very thanklessness of the task gets a person in the end; there’s no gratitude from upstairs, and obviously no slap on the back from those on the receiving end. (33)

The comic interplay between Iris and Madness creates a surreal prelude to the climactic explosion of homicidal madness. Godwin and Betteridge’s staging of this important scene was very similar in

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style and purpose to Nick Philippou’s epiphany in the 1998 Gate production. In a review of this earlier production for the Times Literary Supplement, Helen Morales noted: ‘Emily Python’s Madness is portrayed as a petulant teenager in a short dress and black boots, with hair in scrunched knots. This conception . . . lessens her dramatic impact. Euripides conjures Madness with ‘‘eyes white, veins throbbing and beard spit-drooled’’, but Python merely Xicks through magazines while Herakles writhes in anguish.’74 The eVorts of these modern directors to diminish the dramatic impact of Euripides’ striking central epiphany betray a Senecan conception of the madness. As Fitch explains, in Hercules Furens, ‘as often in classical literature, we Wnd two levels of motivation: one divine and the other human, or one mythological and the other psychological’.75 Seneca’s real interest lay in the human/psychological level. But rather than dispense with the divine/mythological level altogether, and thereby defy centuries of dramaturgical convention, he conWned it to the prologue. He therefore, as Fitch says, ‘distanced the divine action as far as possible from the actual madness, and showed the planning stage, involving Juno herself, rather than her agents as in Euripides’.76 Similarly, modern directors prefer to minimize or even make light of the gods’ intervention and to concentrate on the psychological causation of the madness. Unlike Euripides’ Lyssa, who runs races into Herakles’ heart (Kªg 
ØÆ
æÆFÆØ æ N  ˙æÆŒºı, ‘I shall run races into Herakles’ heart’, 863), Armitage’s Madness uses an electronic device that locks onto Heracles’ frequency, activating a violence that is intuitive. SigniWcantly omitted from this scene is any mention of Hera, her vengeful purpose, or her initiation of the madness. Nor does Madness admonish Iris and Hera, as in Euripides’ text (848–54), for proceeding against an undeserving object of Olympian wrath. Armitage’s Iris explicitly conWrms what the chorus had earlier unwittingly predicted, that the eYcacy of the method by which Heracles will become mad is entirely contingent upon his predisposition to 74 Times Literary Supplement, 17 July 1998, p. 20. Lyn Gardner, in her review of the same production, described Madness as ‘a Hello!-reading hairdresser waiting for her client’s hair to dry’ (Guardian, 15 July 1998, p. 13). 75 Fitch (1987), 32. 76 Ibid.

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violence. The ‘injection’ of madness to be administered to Heracles will multiply ‘his sense of being human’, which Iris says: is Wne if he’s as meek as a lamb and so on, but poor Heracles—a born killer through and through— there’s no telling what a man like that might do. (33–4)

Iris’ depiction of Heracles as ‘a born killer’ establishes for the contemporary audience an immediate association with Oliver Stone’s 1994 Wlm Natural Born Killers. The Wlm, based on a story by Quentin Tarantino, is an analysis of the mass media’s gloriWcation of the culture of violence, and charts the career of two psychopathic serial murderers who achieve the status of legendary folk-heroes. Like Stone, Armitage is dissecting the celebrity attached to the perpetrator of violence and the impact on the individual of a cultural psychology according to which violence is the norm. The symptoms of Mister Heracles’ madness reveal Armitage’s internalization of his hero’s psychosis and explanation of his loss of self as symptomatic of the imperative of violence that has deWned his previous existence. In Euripides’ text, Lyssa describes how she will carry out her commission predominantly in the Wrst person (861 V.), thus stressing her very physical operation through Herakles, whose mind and body will be consumed by her force. Moreover, Herakles’ madness begins to take eVect while Lyssa is still on stage, drawing attention to what she is doing to him: j N
 (‘Look at him!’, 867). By contrast, Armitage’s Madness, whose concise diagnosis is given in the third person, exhibits a clinical detachment in the execution of his work. The process of triggering Heracles’ madness is not one of violent upheaval (as charted by the Euripidean Lyssa’s catalogue of graphic images at 861–71), but involves what Iris describes as an ‘electronic adrenalin shot’ (32). Madness elaborates on this process: The subject feels a Xash of blinding light, leading to temporary memory loss and sometimes a funny turn or possible blackout before sense returns. (33)

This electronic charge will sever instinct from reason and Heracles will act ‘as if spell-bound, radio-controlled, or on strings’ (34).

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Madness does not specify the consequences of Heracles’ hallucinatory behaviour. Euripides’ Lyssa states, Œ I ŒÆÆ æH (‘First I shall have made him kill his children’, 865). Armitage’s Madness is less precise, although the psychosis will involve a kind of ‘cinematic replay’ of the twelve labours: ‘All the past comes spooling through the mind’ (34). The chorus also interpret the madness as serial Xashbacks to the routine slaughter imposed by the labours: Some whirlwind of the mind whips up a version of his life which he acts out on his own kind. (35)

Thus, as in Euripides, the hallucination is a parody of the labours and an inversion of Heracles’ heroic self. Where Armitage diverges from Euripides and assumes a Senecan standpoint is in his suggestion, developed in his reworking of the rehabilitation of Heracles, that the madness and murders are the culmination of a natural progression towards an unnatural act. In the Messenger’s account of the onset of Heracles’ madness in Mister Heracles there is signiWcantly no English equivalent of the powerful Euripidean phrase ›
 PŒŁ Æe q (931) to signal the abrupt transition from sanity to insanity. Similarly, as Euripides’ Messenger recounts the physical symptoms of the madness at 932–5, the emphasis is on the metamorphosis and distortion of the normal self—the contorted features, the foaming mouth, and the maniacal laugh—but Armitage’s Messenger describes a system in overload, the intensiWcation of symptoms already present, and the easy awakening of a latent psychosis: A nerve pumped in the wall of his neck, just here, as if the man couldn’t swallow, and his eyes swelled in their sockets. His veins were hot, overloaded. (37)

Heracles’ mad speech, as reported by Armitage’s Messenger, is also symptomatic of the heightening of a mentality practised in violence and enslaved to a manic speed of activity: Father, this isn’t the time to clean the house, I have breakthroughs to make, barriers to crash,

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more dirty work to do before I stop. No rest for the wicked indeed. No peace. (37)

The snatches of speech, which in Armitage’s text precede the murders of the Wrst two sons, generalize the targets of his rage: ‘Here’s one I’m killing for the mother state’; ‘here’s a killing for the greater good’ (38). These statements indicate that the madness has not necessarily been triggered by the most recent events in Heracles’ life, but is the inevitable consequence of a culture steeped in violence in which, as MacLeish’s play also pleaded, the achievements that advance civilization can also be responsible for its dehumanization and destruction. In the Leeds production the same actor played the roles of Madness and the Messenger. He was, therefore, the last character to enter the house before the madness erupted and the Wrst to re-emerge in its aftermath. Armitage’s adaptation of the Messenger’s speech is one of the Wnest monologues in the play, and Nick Bagnall’s interpretation of it was a compelling piece of naturalistic acting through which the impact of the tragedy was conveyed. What Armitage has successfully translated from the original speech is the sense of the ordinary and domestic that is fractured by the onset of madness. His Messenger begins his account by saying: It was just happenchance I was present, the way that a person walking the beach or harbour might be asked to photograph a sweet family grouping with their camera. (36)

From this quiet opening he reconstructs, in steady rhythm, each murder and the mounting sense of his own powerlessness. Armitage adds an even more sinister element to the original by indicating the pent-up violence beneath the surface of this ideal image of the nuclear family.

Profile of the ‘family annihilator’ At the end of the Messenger’s speech the fac¸ade of the house was slowly lowered onto the stage to reveal, within a blood-red cavity, the

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tableau scene of a family living-room in which Heracles was asleep and bound amid the carnage he had wrought.77 This image of ‘ordinary suburban horror’, identiWed by Lyn Gardner in her review of the play,78 found almost simultaneous analogies in two widely publicized real-life incidents of domestic homicide, both occurring in quiet middle-class English suburbia. In Surrey, one week before the opening of Mister Heracles, a former sergeant-major in the Coldstream Guards, described by family and neighbours as a devoted husband and father who had enjoyed a glittering military career, suddenly, and seemingly inexplicably, shot dead his wife and two small children. Unlike Euripides’ Herakles, he then succeeded in killing himself. Gardner mentioned the case in her review of Mister Heracles, while another newspaper reviewer asked: ‘Does the violence of warfare incite soldiers to other sorts of violence?’79 Six months later PC Karl Bluestone of Gravesend, also remembered as a respected oYcer and an adoring father, used a hammer to bludgeon to death his wife and two of his four children before hanging himself. In an article which appeared in the Daily Telegraph in the wake of this second tragedy, the writers attempted to explain the psychology behind such increasingly common instances of Wlicide, declaring: ‘The ordinariness and decency of the situation are an aVront to the imagination.’80 These men were only two amongst nine British fathers who murdered their children in the space of two years. What makes Smith and Bluestone oVer particularly close analogies to Euripides’ Herakles is their role as heroes of modern civilization: Smith had been a member of the queen’s ceremonial guard at Buckingham Palace and had served with his regiment in Northern Ireland, while Bluestone had been part of a tactical unit in North Kent, whose 77 This highly eVective piece of staging successfully re-created the function of the ekkyklema (a wheeled platform). At 1029–30 of Euripides’ text the chorus cries out: Y
Ł,
Ø 
ØÆ ŒºfiBŁæÆ j ŒºÆØ łØ ºø
ø (‘Ah, ah—look! The double doors of the high-gated palace are being moved’). At this point the ske¯ne¯ doors would be opened and the tableau of the sleeping Herakles lashed to a pillar amidst the corpses of his family would be wheeled out on the ekkyklema. On the use of this machine, see Bond’s note (1981), 329 on 1028 V. 78 Guardian, 24 Feb. 2001. 79 Susannah Clapp, Observer, 25 Feb. 2001. 80 Elizabeth Grice and Nicole Martin, ‘What Drives a Father to Kill his Family?’, Daily Telegraph, 31 Aug. 2001, p. 21.

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purpose was to combat speciWc antisocial crimes such as vandalism. The disturbing phenomenon of ‘civilization heroes’ as the perpetrators of domestic violence has also surfaced in America’s ‘War on Terror’. Between 11 June and 19 July 2002, four military wives were murdered, allegedly by their husbands who were based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the headquarters of America’s e´lite Special Forces unit. Three of the men were Special Operations soldiers, who had recently returned from service in Afghanistan; and, of these, two committed suicide after their wives were killed. Military authorities denied that there was a connection between the killings and the men’s service in Afghanistan, but the much-publicized wife-murders prompted an investigation into the military’s provision of ‘reuniWcation training’ for soldiers returning from combat deployment, family assistance centres and support groups, and post-deployment counselling. Today on the website of the National Center for PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), established by America’s Veteran AVairs in 1989, soldiers and their families can download guidelines on ‘Returning from the War Zone’. Such cases as the Fort Bragg murders certainly lend powerful and truly tragic force to Mister Heracles. When Georg Rootering directed Wolfgang Heyder’s version of Herakles at Liechtenstein’s Theater am Kirchplatz in March 2001, he argued that the reason it was so important in today’s society to stage this once rarely performed piece was the topicality of the crime of Wlicide and its never-lessening power to horrify us: ‘Mit seinem Werk bezieht Euripides Stellung zu Themen, die uns heute noch bescha¨ftigen. Ein Held erschla¨gt in Blutrausch seine Familie—gewiss, das ist auch im Jahr 2001 nicht allta¨glich’ (‘In his work Euripides takes a stand on themes that still occupy us today. A hero slays his family in a murderous frenzy—well, admittedly this isn’t an everyday occurrence even in 2001’).81 The fact that fathers as child-killers have increasingly become the focus of both public interest and forensic psychology has helped to make Euripides’ shocking Herakles a more attractive and stageable proposition than in previous decades. Herakles conforms in several respects to what American criminologists 81 ‘. . . schon beim ersten Lesen habe ich die Stimmen geho¨rt’ (‘. . . even upon the Wrst reading [of it] I heard the voices’), Georg Rootering in conversation with Wolfgang Heyder, Herakles programme, 5.

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now deWne as a new sub-category of killer, the ‘family annihilator’. According to his psychological proWle, the family annihilator is a devoted husband and father, a responsible provider, and a model citizen. He is also, like Seneca’s Hercules, an overly controlling and autarkic personality. Professor Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Centre on ConXict and Violence at Northeastern University in Boston, says family annihilators share one key characteristic: ‘They are loners. These killers don’t share responsibility. They have the mental attitude that they are ‘‘commander-in-chief ’’, and that it’s lonely at the top. They cannot share their problems with the foot soldiers.’82 It is this attitude, combined with deep psychological disturbance and personal catastrophe, that persuades the family annihilator that the killings he is methodically carrying out are altruistic in nature (cf. Armitage’s Heracles: ‘here’s a killing for the greater good’ (38)). In his large-scale survey of infanticide, Hardness of Heart, Hardness of Life (2000), Larry S. Milner draws on forensic case-studies, international statistics, and literary representations in categorizing psychologically the perpetrators of this crime. The myths of Medea and Herakles are both analysed, but under separate categories. The term ‘Medea syndrome’ or ‘Medea complex’, Milner says, designates the murder of a child in revenge against a spouse.83 It is used almost exclusively of female infanticides, despite the signiWcant number of men who kill their children in order to punish their wives. Herakles, together with Athamas,84 is listed by Milner as a prime example of the Wlicidal parent who kills out of insanity or extreme psychosis, and whose condition has traditionally been ascribed to the workings of a malevolent god.85 Recent stagings of Euripides’ Herakles provide evidence of the ways in which, as Milner observes, modern medical thought has replaced mythological interpretations based on divine causation with speciWc psychiatric diagnoses.86 They are also evidence of an important shift in social and theatrical priorities from 82 ‘Family Man’, Guardian Weekend, 13 July 2002, p. 24. 83 See Milner (2000), 380–2. 84 Like Herakles, Athamas was a victim of Hera’s jealous anger: he and his wife Ino had raised Dionysus, the illegitimate child of Zeus and Semele. Hera drove Athamas insane, causing him to kill Ino and his young sons Learchus and Melicertes after mistaking them for a lioness and her cubs. See Ovid, Met. 4. 416–530. 85 See Milner (2000), 417–19. 86 Ibid. 419.

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the Medea complex to the Herakles complex. The Wlicide in Euripides’ Medea has been of primary interest to directors throughout the play’s performance history. By contrast, the issue of Wlicide in Herakles has been largely subordinate to the broader issue of heroism. This discrepancy was memorably pointed up by Tony Harrison in a reference to Herakles as Medea’s male counterpart in Medea: A SexWar Opera (1985). The comparison underlines the unfairly diVerent treatment, in both ancient myth and modern media, meted out to male and female Wlicides: He killed his children. So where Is Hercules’s electric chair? A children slayer? Or is Medea The one child-murderer you fear.87

Harrison’s drama ends by initiating a change in media focus from the female Wlicide to the male Wlicide. Newspaper headlines and frontpage reports of mothers murdering their children are projected on a screen, but the Wnal projection, ‘which freezes the music and the chorus’, quotes a real tabloid newspaper headline, ‘a father cuts his 4 kids’ throats’, with ‘father’ crudely underlined in red.88

Rehabilitating the ‘connoisseur of death’ In The Veteran Comes Back (1944) Willard Waller described the unrehabilitated war veteran as ‘America’s gravest social problem’ and ‘a threat to society’.89 The threat, as Waller perceived it, existed in the fact that the veteran is a trained killer who has become a stranger to the civilian world, a ‘connoisseur of death but an illiterate of peace’.90 He has to renaturalize himself into the ‘estranged world of peacetime complexity’, to modify his ‘sadistic-aggressive tendencies’, and to restore ‘his dominion over himself ’.91 But the veteran ‘can never quite recapture his former self ’; there remains in his soul ‘a core

87 Cf. Kenneth McLeish’s comparison, cited earlier, of Herakles and Medea as child-killers. 88 Harrison (1986), 370, 437, 448. The quotation was from the Sun, 19 Oct. 1983. 89 Waller (1944), 13. 90 Ibid. 247. 91 Ibid. 35, 44, 296.

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of anger’ that is potentially explosive.92 Waller’s book, published in the closing months of World War II, was an urgent plea to government and society to prepare for the impending inXux of veteran GIs by creating an ‘art of rehabilitation’ and a ‘science of Vetranology’.93 Two years later the Academy Award-winning Wlm The Best Years of Our Lives, directed by William Wyler, explored many of the issues which Waller had raised, about the plight of readjusting veterans and the need for rehabilitative programmes. Like its Vietnam successor, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), it sensitively and unromantically interwove the stories of three ex-servicemen struggling to resume their pre-war lives in small-town America. Armitage, at the beginning of the twenty-Wrst century, has used Euripides’ Herakles to address the same problem of the returned warrior and his estrangement from ordinary domestic and civilized life. His reworking of the post-madness scenes shows the aftermath of the type of explosion Waller forecast. The rehabilitation of Mister Heracles is quite explicitly the slow and partial rehabilitation of a war veteran and a ‘connoisseur of death’. Following Euripides, the rehabilitation of Armitage’s hero comprises three main stages: Heracles’ waking and the psychotherapy scene in which Amphitryon guides his son towards recognition of his deeds; Theseus’ arguments; and Heracles’ Wnal progress from the contemplation of suicide to the shouldering of his fate. In Euripides’ play Herakles wakes from his madness uncertain whether he has returned to Hades. The disorientation experienced by Armitage’s Heracles, however, is expressed in a military context.94 He asks, ‘Am I captured? Were we overtaken j in battle?’ (42), and wonders whether he has been the victim of some form of chemical warfare. On seeing his father nearby, Heracles begs to be freed ‘before the enemy returns’ (43). When Euripides’ Herakles Wnally recognizes the corpses as those of his wife and children, and asks the identity of their murderer, Amphitryon gives the answer, f ŒÆd a Æ ŒÆd ŁH n ÆYØ (‘You with your bow and whichever god was responsible’, 1135), thereby pronouncing the gods’ guilt and Herakles’ role 92 Waller (1944), 31, 109, 167. 93 Ibid. 305, 308. 94 Cf. the military frame of reference used by Seneca’s Hercules in the waking and recognition scene: spolia (1154), victorem (1156), hostis (1167), praeda (1185).

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as the blameless instrument of divine will. In contrast, reXecting the relative absence of the gods from Mister Heracles, Armitage has Amphitryon answer pointedly, ‘Heracles, you killed them, nobody else’ (44). When Heracles then asks his father whether he killed his family ‘By force of hand or something inside me?’, Amphitryon replies, ‘Like a man possessed, by his own dark thoughts’ (45). This stands in revealing contrast to Amphitryon’s straightforward announcement in Euripides, Æ (‘You were mad’, 1137). Armitage is redeWning Heracles’ temporary loss of reason and control as possession by an internal force generated by the hero’s very mode of existence. Consistent with this reading of the madness is Heracles’ admission, ‘It came from inside. I was . . . capable’ (49).95 The role of Theseus in Armitage’s play highlights the playwright’s perception of the complexities inherent in any attempt to apportion blame for the murders. He is the one character who tries to externalize Heracles’ madness and who, at least at Wrst, alludes to workings on a supernatural level (‘This reeks of intervention at a high level’ (47); ‘you were disturbed from outside’ (49)). Yet even he soon argues that the madness was inevitable in view of Heracles’ lifelong obedience to the destiny which his own heroic attributes had shaped for him: All your life you have fallen into step. Born musclebound you’ve thrown your weight around, born bright you’ve cracked the most cryptic of codes, born of such birth you’ve held your head high, followed the script exactly as planned. So this fall was the most obvious thing in the world—it was certain to happen. (52)

Theseus thus represents for the audience the problem of determining the cause of the violence that has erupted and indicates the necessity of treating the individual psychology as merely part of a complex social whole. Herakles’ two major speeches in Euripides (at 1255–310 and 1340– 93), in which he makes his moral and spiritual journey from an old to a new (or from an emergent to a mature) type of heroism, have been 95 Cf. Megara’s lines in MacLeish’s Herakles (1967), 89: ‘Nothing is terrible as the will of god j that can and can and can.’

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substantially altered and truncated by Armitage in accordance with his own objectives. In the original version of these speeches Herakles protests against the immorality of the gods and their indiVerence to human suVering. He acknowledges Amphitryon as his ‘true’ father and renounces Zeus who, he says, begot him to be the enemy of Hera (1262–3). In Armitage’s play it is not the enmity of his stepmother but the expectations created by his divinity that have contributed to Heracles’ tragedy: Well, father, I have tried to be your son, tried hard to be a son of a true man, not someone god-like or legendary, but it cuts deep. Living up to his name keeps driving me on, towards the extreme, all part of a bigger push to be seen. (51)

Whereas Euripides’ Herakles, by renouncing Zeus, asserts his humanity, Armitage, like MacLeish before him, goes further in declaring the death of Zeus and dramatizes the dangers of man becoming God in God’s absence. In the Wrst of these Wnal speeches Heracles concludes: I see my life for what it is—a list of things accomplished, acceptance speeches, records broken, puzzles solved, clocks beaten, all in the end without wider meaning. (52)

Like MacLeish’s Herakles, and his Cold War counterpart Professor Hoadley, Armitage’s hero has sought and failed to discover the ultimate meaning of his labours. In his second speech, however, he does try to re-evaluate his past achievements in the aftermath of their tragic culmination. Armitage has ampliWed verses 1281 (lŒø
 I ªŒ K 
 , ‘The pitch of necessity to which I have come is this’) and 1294 (K F
 lØ ıæA rÆ , ‘This is the pitch of disaster I think I shall reach’) of Euripides’ text to give a very diVerent exposition of Heracles’ tragic fall and his relationship to Anagke¯ (Necessity). In the play’s most sustained analysis of the causes of the madness, Heracles recalls, in Theseus’ presence, the process of his gradual desensitization to the act of killing; the anaesthetizing frequency of the deed; the shift from what was a trained action to the

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point where ‘instinct and reaction take over’ (53); and the sort of impassivity that can only end in mania: Remember the Wrst time you killed a man, cousin? As if a threshold had been crossed or some Wnal obstacle overcome? But then what, after the second, third kill? Did you keep count into double Wgures? Did you round it up to a square number, or round it down, back into proportion? Soon instinct and reaction take over. I’ve loaded magazines without thinking, lined up the cross-hairs, beaded a target as if I were just pointing a Wnger, then beckoned death by pulling the trigger. Along lines of sight, I’ve followed the trace of gunWre passing through armour and Xesh, seen daylight Xashing on the other side, seen death blink its eye, and not broken sweat. At Wrst it caused a dryness in the throat; these days it doesn’t even raise the pulse. I’ve killed without giving a single thought to the speed of a bullet: one mile per second, and spinning for good measure. (53–4)

Armitage even ascribes to Heracles, during the madness, a degree of consciousness—consciousness of excitement, something that Euripides’ hero never experiences: They dreamed up a plan that couldn’t be more sweet: madness to strike from inside, turning me loose on myself, the gorgon’s head in a hall of mirrors. During my crimson rage, here in my house, when the red mist came down into my eyes, even though I was cut oV from my soul I remember one thing—feeling alive. That’s how far I’ve come: only butchery of those I love most provokes life in me. . . . Oh, my children and my wife, that your death were in me all the time, waiting to hatch. (54)

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These extraordinarily acute insights, which Armitage’s Heracles articulates, into his own psychological condition have strong resonance for a society that is becoming better educated about the role of posttraumatic stress disorder in the experience of combat veterans.96 Benedict Nightingale astutely began his review of Mister Heracles in The Times by noting the connection made in the play between the Vietnam experience and the madness of Heracles: ‘We have all heard of Vietnam vets who, years after the war, have gone on the rampage, sometimes killing their nearest and dearest. For the poet Simon Armitage, Euripides’ Heracles is an example of much the same syndrome.’97 The resurgence of interest in performing Euripides’ Herakles coincides with the public impact of Jonathan Shay’s highly original study Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (Wrst published 1994). In this work Shay, a psychiatrist in the Department of Veteran AVairs Outpatient Clinic in Boston, investigates the symptoms of combat trauma through a comparative analysis of the mutually illuminating Wrst-hand narratives of Vietnam veterans and Homer’s descriptions in the Iliad of behavioural phenomena displayed by combatants, especially Achilles. One behavioural phenomenon particularly pertinent to Armitage’s reading of Heracles’ madness is ‘the berserk state’, a term used by Shay to designate the warrior’s blind and concentrated frenzy: ‘A soldier who routs the enemy single-handedly is often in the grip of a special state of mind, body, and social disconnection at the time of his memorable deeds.’98 In the light of vivid reports by his patients, who are Vietnam combat veterans with severe, chronic PTSD, Shay re-examines aspects of the Wve aristeiai (heroic killing sprees) on which Achaean warriors embark in the Iliad, and their transgression of ‘the ambiguous borderline between heroism and a blood-crazed, berserk state, in which abuse after abuse is committed’.99 During this 96 See the following recent surveys of post-combat syndromes: Hyams, Wignall, and Roswell (1996), 398–405; Jones et al. (2002), 1–7; Ellard (2003), 246–54. On World War II, see Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); on Vietnam, see Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978); Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978); Ted KotcheV’s First Blood (1982); and Steve Tesich’s stage play, The Speed of Darkness (1989). 97 ‘All the World’s a Rage’, The Times, 23 Feb. 2001. 98 Shay (1995), 77. 99 Ibid.

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state the ‘berserker’ exhibits attributes that are simultaneously godlike and bestial, the factor common to both conditions being a lack of all restraint: ‘Restraint is always in part the cognitive attention to multiple possibilities in a situation; when all restraint is lost, the cognitive universe is simpliWed to a single focus. The berserker is Wguratively—and sometimes literally—blind to everything but his destructive aim. He cannot see the distinction between civilian and combatant or even the distinction between comrade and enemy.’100 The inability to distinguish between philoi and polemioi, along with the other cognitive inversions of what would ‘normally’ be described as deeds of courage, inversions symptomatic of the berserk state, are what Ruck is referring to when he describes Euripides’ maddened Herakles as ‘the ironic antithesis of his own dominant heroism.’101 The madness of Mister Heracles has notably precise similarities to the martial rage of certain heroes of the Iliad, in which º Æ and its cognate epithet ºı
 are used to denote the soldier’s possession by blind fury and bloodlust. Moreover, Shay’s deWnition of the berserk state, which is apposite to Heracles loss of self, also corresponds to the Homeric meaning of º Æ, for example in the description of Hektor at Iliad 9.237–9: * ¯Œøæ
b ªÆ Łœ ºÆø ÆÆØ KŒ

ªºø; ı ˜Ø; P
 Ø Ø IæÆ P
b Ł : ŒæÆæc
  º Æ

ıŒ. And Hektor exulting greatly in his strength rages fearfully, trusting in Zeus, and regards not men nor gods; and a mighty madness has possessed him.

As Shay demonstrates (and Armitage’s hero acknowledges), the potential of the berserk state to recur episodically in civilian life is everpresent and can destroy the victim’s ability to function as a responsible citizen in a normal domestic or co-operative environment: ‘Unhealed combat trauma . . . destroys the unnoticed substructure of democracy, the cognitive and social capacities that enable a group of people to freely construct a cohesive narrative of their own future.’102 The explosive potential, which Armitage’s Madness actuates in Heracles, has a close equivalent in recent history and in the personal experience related by one of Shay’s patients, a veteran of three Vietnam combat tours in 100 Ibid. 86–7.

101 Ruck (1976), 53–75, at 60.

102 Shay (1995), 181.

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tanks: ‘Every three days I would totally explode, lose it for no reason at all. I’d be sitting there calm as could be, and this monster would come out of me with a fury that most people didn’t want to be around. So it wasn’t just over there. I brought it back here with me.’103 Mister Heracles’ Wnal speech reads as a dissection of the causes and eVects of the berserk state. It is away from the excess of sensation, hyper-alertness, and disconnection (‘I was cut oV from my soul’), which are characteristic of this state, that Heracles realizes he must be rehabilitated: I need to go back to the beginning get into a calm life, depressurise, have a normal heart for half a minute, tone it down, tune it to a Wner scale of living. (54)

His last words in the play are a prayer that he might ‘come down to earth, back to personal space’ (57). The need for rehabilitation is eventually acknowledged, but the process of rehabilitation only partly and awkwardly begun. In 2002 Shay published a sequel to his Homeric-based investigation, entitled Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, in which he argued that the Odyssey oVers explicit portrayals of behaviour common among returning soldiers in our own culture. Just as Homer’s most famous berserker, Achilles, ‘speaks’ to the psychology of the modern combat soldier, the character and experience of Homer’s most famous returning veteran, Odysseus, Shay maintains, are full of insights for modern veterans, their families, and their commanders. Shay not only documents the problems faced by veterans in reintegrating themselves into civilian society,104 but, like Waller a generation earlier, he also issues an impassioned plea to America’s military institutions and policymakers to reform the cultural and systemic conditions that engender moral and psychological injury among veterans, and to apply themselves more earnestly to preventative and rehabilitative solutions.105 103 Shay (1995), 33. 105 Ibid. 205 V.

104 Shay (2002), 11 V. and 149 V.

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Shay and Armitage provide good examples of how, in the last decade in particular, writers with very diVerent commissions have used the mythology and literature of the ancient Greeks as a tool in their analyses of the problems inherent in the roles designed for men in modern society and especially the military. Armitage’s portrayal of Heracles as a victim of post-combat syndrome and the berserk state has speciWc parallels not only with Vietnam veterans, but also with veterans of the most recent conXicts in the Persian Gulf. Anthony SwoVord’s Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War, published in 2003 and made into a Hollywood Wlm in 2005 under the direction of Sam Mendes,106 provides a profoundly disturbing insight into the army’s culture of brutalization and the psychology of the trained killer in war and peace. SwoVord, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, believes, like Mister Heracles, that ‘because of my unalterable genetic stain, I was linked to the warrior line’.107 His father had served in Vietnam, his grandfather in the army air force during World War II, and he claims that his initial impulse to enlist in the Marine Corps ‘had nothing to do with a desire for combat, for killing, or for a heroic death, but rather was based on my intense need for acceptance into the family clan of manhood’.108 SwoVord witnessed his father’s maladjustment to civilian and domestic life, which expressed itself physically in the strange locking of his hands into Wsts: ‘My father was thirty-nine years old and the world seemed a dead, cold place, void of promise. The problems of his psyche had become manifest in his hands. With his Wsts he beat at the thick chest of the world, but the world ignored him. Of course the world ignored him.’109 Years later the son recognized in himself the same feelings of emptiness and anger as well as a Heraklean volatility and self-destruction: ‘I remember about myself a loneliness and poverty of spirit; mental collapse; brief jovial moments after weeks of exhaustion; discomWting bodily pain; constant ringing in my ears; sleeplessness and drunkenness and desperation; Wts of rage and despondency; mutiny of the self.’110 106 Reviewing the Wlm in the Village Voice (‘Weathering the Storm’, 1 Nov. 2005), J. Hoberman described it as ‘a referendum on the second Gulf war’. 107 SwoVord (2003), 128. 108 Ibid. 203. 109 Ibid. 41. 110 Ibid. 3.

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Mister Heracles admits to ‘feeling alive’ while carrying out the murders of his wife and sons. In his exposition of the veteran psyche, Waller declared that ‘often only a narrow margin separates the horrible from the pleasurable’.111 SwoVord illustrates this very point in his vivid description of the ex-soldier’s deeply ambivalent relationship to his weapon: ‘The man Wres a riXe for many years, and he goes to war, and afterwards he turns the riXe in at the armory and he believes he’s Wnished with the riXe. But no matter what else he might do with his hands—love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper—his hands remember the riXe and the power the riXe proVered. The cold weight, the buttstock in the shoulder, the sexy slope and fall of the trigger guard.’112 The contrast SwoVord draws in describing the veteran’s hands as instruments of carnage and of peaceful domesticity reinforces the point made by Seneca and Armitage about the warrior’s divided potential, and the endless contest between his creative and destructive instincts. Only one comprehensive study has examined the mental-health impact of the current war in Iraq.113 The results of this study indicate that the estimated risk of PTSD from service in Iraq is 18 per cent. Apart from the intensity of combat operations in Iraq, soldiers are exposed to a set of unique ‘stressors’ arising from the fact that much of the conXict, particularly since the end of formal operations, has involved guerrilla warfare and terrorist actions from ambiguous or unknown civilian threats. In this context there is no safe place and no safe role. An unprecedented degree of vigilance needs to be maintained, and there is great concern that soldiers will mistake for combatants civilians who mean them no harm. Such statistics and fears are conWrmed by the increasing familiarity of news reports featuring the fatal maladjustment of Iraq veterans to their domestic environment. On 5 October 2006, in the nearly deserted French Quarter of New Orleans, Zachary Bowen strangled his girlfriend, Addie Hall, whom he had met the night Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005. He dismembered her body and cooked some of her body parts on his stove. Eleven days later he jumped to his death 111 Waller (1944), 52. 112 SwoVord (2003), 123. Interestingly, in view of Shay’s comparative study, SwoVord mentions that during his service in the desert he read the Iliad (54). 113 Hope et al. (2004), 13–22.

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from a hotel roof. What shocked investigators and the public even more than the grisliness of the murder was the fact that Bowen was a decorated war hero. He had served in Kosovo and Iraq as a military policeman, earning several medals, including the NATO medal and the Presidential Unit Citation. However, his re-entry into civilian life, aided by drugs and alcohol, was much less distinguished. He found part-time work bartending and delivering groceries. After the murder-suicide a fellow bartender claimed Bowen would grow depressed when talking about his military service, and that there had been an incident in Iraq involving a child that haunted him. Apparently Bowen’s suicide note also left several clues as to his failure to leave behind in Iraq his war experiences. In contrast to many such tragic real-life counterparts, at the end of Euripides’ Herakles the hero discovers a capacity to endure the life that confronts him. As he states, KªŒÆæø  (‘I shall have the courage to endure life’, 1351). Barlow maintains that ‘this is the most important line in the play, for it represents the turning point in the hero’s rehabilitation. With these positive and assertive words Heracles shows he has overcome his destructive despair and has once more taken control of his life.’114 Of greater symbolic importance is Herakles’ decision to retain his weapons (1377–85), the traditional tokens of a less complicated heroism, now grievously laden with new meaning and demanding superior courage and resolve from their bearer. Herakles is able to make this progression through the redemptive power of philia oVered him by Theseus, who conveys him to a new life in Athens. Curiously, in view of the emphasis on militarism throughout Mister Heracles, Armitage attaches no symbolic signiWcance to Heracles’ weapons at the end of the play. This oversight is not unique. Modern adapters generally have failed to exploit (or even apparently to perceive) what is the play’s crucial moment of spiritual transWguration—Herakles taking up again the instruments of his family’s annihilation. It seems a great theatrical opportunity missed. Yet this failure is certainly consistent with the trend of neo-Senecanism in the recent reception of Euripides’ Herakles. For it is in Seneca’s Hercules Furens that the retained weapons lose their meaning of moral progress and heroic maturity, and 114 Barlow (1996), 182.

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become instead symbols of moral stagnancy and heroic obsolescence. One exception to this trend is Robin WaterWeld’s 2003 translation of lines 1377 V. of Herakles. This includes a stage direction which, following Euripides, juxtaposes Herakles’ tender handling of the corpses of his wife and children with his contemplative and ambivalent handling of his weapons: ‘I am parting company from my wife and children. O, the sweet pain of kissing them! (He kisses the bodies one by one, and then handles his fallen weapons) O, the painful partnership of these weapons! I don’t know whether I should keep them or discard them, because as they cling to my side they will say: ‘‘You used us to slay your children and your wife. You still have us, the killers of your children.’’ ’115 Just as he makes nothing of Herakles’ heartbreaking determination about his weapons, Armitage does not stress the importance to this determination of the notion of philia. In fact, his Heracles exhibits a Senecan autarkeia in the course of his rehabilitation. This is clear from Armitage’s explanation that, ‘when the gods die, they leave man in control of his own moral identity, and after experiencing his greatest tragedy, Heracles must confront his greatest challenge. We observe the agonising creation of the new kind of superman: one who takes responsibility for his actions.’116 Consequently, the reworked ending does not achieve the impact of the original. Armitage’s ‘despressurisation’ is in no way comparable to Euripides’ impressive KªŒÆæø , or to his hero’s moving refusal to repudiate the painful companionship (ºıªæÆd ŒØøÆØ) of his club and bow. In removing the emphasis on philia, Mister Heracles seems to have gained only half a new understanding. He knows that he ‘was born to a way of life j that went into receivership’ (51), but has not yet found a substitute. It appears, in true Senecan style, a deliberately disquieting ending, lacking the muted optimism of humanistic resolve with which Euripides had invested his own reworking of the Herakles myth. Archibald MacLeish’s Herakles and Simon Armitage’s Mister Heracles are a continuation of the process, begun by Euripides in the Wfth century, of deconstructing and tragically redeWning the heroic Herakles and identifying, in contemporary terms, the implications of his madness and his suVering. Both writers discovered in Euripides’ play a powerful 115 WaterWeld (2003), 71.

116 Armitage (2000), p. x.

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symbol for the uncertainties of their own age as well as a means of formulating, and responding to, questions about the nature and validity of traditional male heroism and about the cultural legitimization of violence. Their discovery underlines Michael Billington’s observation, quoted in the Introduction to this book: ‘Where does our theatre instinctively turn in times of crisis? Not to Shakespeare or Shaw but to the Greeks.’117 At the same time, however, MacLeish and Armitage establish that, where the Herakles is concerned, this instinctive modern leaning towards Greek myth has assumed an intriguing un-Hellenic aspect. From the theatrical rehabilitation of Euripides’ mad hero in the last half century a neo-Senecan Herakles has emerged, an ambivalent, hubristic, restless, and autarkic hero. Like Seneca before them, MacLeish and Armitage have located the psychological causation of Herakles’ madness in an obsessive and excessive modus vitae and in the labours, which they have reinterpreted as scientiWc and military exploits. They have substantially reconWgured the madness itself, internalizing and rationalizing it as the inevitable culmination of a deep-seated individual and cultural complex. This Senecan and psychoanalytical reading of Herakles’ madness has profoundly aVected, and certainly focused, our understanding of the Wlicide. No doubt MacLeish and Armitage represent only the beginning of the creative exploration of the Herakles complex. 117 ‘Terror of Modern Times Sets the Stage for Greek Tragedy’, Guardian, 19 June 2004.

10 Creating a Herakles for our times: a montage of modern madness At the close of the twentieth century, and now in the Wrst decade of the new century and new millennium, the Wgure of mad Herakles is not simply to be found in speciWc adaptations of Euripides’ text. He has inWltrated contemporary culture, and our continuing fascination with both the heroic and the irrational, in all kinds of mediated ways. The waking scene in King Lear provides a fascinating link between Euripides’ Herakles and Alan Bennett’s stage play The Madness of George III, which premie`red at the National Theatre in 1991 and starred Nigel Hawthorne. In and out of madness, King George identiWed strongly with Shakespeare’s confused and beleaguered patriarch, King Lear. During the last ten years of his life, having been pronounced insane and conWned to Windsor Castle, he assumed the appearance of Lear, with his wild hair and long white beard, and his dying words were reputed to be ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold’ (King Lear, iii. iv. 143). Borrowing appropriately from historical fact,1 Bennett transported Act iv, scene vii of King Lear to the point in his play where George III is steadily emerging from his madness: thurlow ‘Will’t please your Highness walk?’ (The king stands, Wrst as Lear, then as himself.) king There. willis So is that the end? 1 As part of George III’s rehabilitation, Willis, the king’s physician, read King Lear with him.

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king No, no . . . Cordelia—that’s Thurlow—dies. Hanged. And the shock of it kills the King. So they all die. It’s a tragedy. thurlow (Blowing his nose) Very aVecting. king It’s the way I play it. Willis murders it. thurlow Your Majesty seems more yourself. king Do I? Yes, I do. I have always been myself even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself. That’s the important thing. I have remembered how to seem. What, what?2

While Bennett’s immediate and conscious point of reference in this scene is King Lear, the comments of director Nicholas Hytner reveal that the scene is also Wrmly located within a classical tradition, indeed the Hercules furens tradition: There has to be mythic resonance to a story about a king dying and coming back to life. The king dies and comes back to life and the nation rejoices. And that’s what happened in the theatre. That’s why it works. I didn’t realise this until well after the play opened, but if you presented it as a myth . . . that form of theatre is interesting, eVective and sometimes impressive, but it was the truthfulness and the humanity of the performance that, I think, enabled the huge audience that it got to tune into that cycle of death and rebirth. That’s one of the dramatic archetypes.3

Hytner conceives George III’s madness and restoration in terms of a Heraklean katabasis and anagno¯risis. Moreover, in his dramatization of George III’s loss and recovery of reason, Bennett has unconsciously drawn a visual parallel with Herakles: the King, bound and helplessly enthroned in a restraining chair, recalls the tableau scene of Herakles’ amechania at 1094–7: the broken hero roped to a pillar. He has also drawn a linguistic parallel. In Euripides’ Herakles, the phrase ›
 PŒŁ Æe q (931) designates the hero’s violent transformation of self as well as Lyssa’s immediate and very physical operation through him. In The Madness of George III the phrase ‘not himself’ is used three times in reference to the King’s deranged state.4 Its force is weaker than its Greek equivalent, but it deWnes a similarly inexplicable overturning of the King’s normal public and private selves. Correspondingly, 2 Bennett (1992), 80–2. 3 Quoted in Riley (2004), 264–5. 4 In the Wlm version, The Madness of King George (1994), the distracted king, trying to reassure his daughter Amelia, says tearfully: ‘Papa’s not mad, my darling. No, no. He has just lost himself, that’s all.’ See Bennett (1995), 33.

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George III’s recovery is judged a restoration of self. Towards the end of the play Thurlow declares the King to be ‘his old self’,5 while George’s Wnal words on stage boast of his regained, though not unaltered, self: ‘The King is himself again. God save the King.’6 A decade after he had pointed out Herakles the child-murderer as Medea’s male (and less maligned) counterpart in A Sex-War Opera, Tony Harrison wrote and directed a graphic, idiosyncratic scene of Wlicidal madness in The Labourers of Herakles. The play, a co-production between the European Cultural Centre of Delphi and the Royal National Theatre Studio in London, was commissioned in 1995 for the Eighth International Meeting on Ancient Greek Drama, whose participants also included Theodoros Terzopoulos, Tadashi Suzuki, and Heiner Mu¨ller. In the same year Harrison was commissioned by the Guardian to write poems based on Wrst-hand experience of the civil war in Bosnia, the most brutal chapter in the break-up of Yugoslavia. He left for Bosnia immediately after the premie`re of The Labourers of Herakles on 23 August, and his anticipation of his front-line assignment, as well as his heightened awareness of the Delphic gathering’s proximity to the atrocities in the Balkans, undoubtedly inXuenced the play’s conception and execution. From his programme notes we learn that Harrison speciWcally formulated Herakles’ furor as ‘racist rage’, the Wlicide as part and parcel of genocide. In the play the children are butchered in a round of orgiastic ethnic cleansing. Also in the programme notes we discover Harrison’s Senecan diagnosis of the madness: ‘the most destructive forces Herakles must wrestle with are himself and his own destructive impulses which led him to the unspeakable murder of his own children.’ The other productions presented in Delphi that summer were mostly costly spectacles staged in the vast ancient stadium above the sanctuary. Harrison’s Labourers drew attention for its modest scale, muscular language, and rhythmic thrust, all of which contributed to its immediacy. It was performed on an excavated site intended for the New Theatre of the European Cultural Centre of Delphi. The set comprised a ring of nine cement-mixers and a thirty-Wve-foot cement silo, bearing the company logo of Herakles General Cement (the black proWle of Herakles crowned with the lion 5 Bennett (1992), 83.

6 Ibid. 93.

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skin). Littered about the ‘stage’ were wheelbarrows, planks, assorted scaVolding, and the usual detritus of a half-Wnished building site. There was also a large pile of cement sacks, all stamped with the Herakles logo. The cast consisted of Wve Labourers in hard hats. For the Wrst twenty minutes of the hour-long piece they enacted a percussive pantomime, banging the drums of the cement mixers and the bodies of the wheelbarrows in hypnotic harmony and rising to a crescendo, which stopped suddenly. Each Labourer was then lured inside the ring by the voice of his ancient self emanating from the silo and singing the sole surviving fragment of the Herakles tetralogy of Phrynichos, referring to Herakles’ wrestling match with Death (‘øÆ
 IŁÆ ªıØ
 j ØæØ’). Suddenly a barrier collapsed to reveal an ancient statue of Herakles. According to Harrison’s stage directions: ‘It is as if the statue has come up through the silo from the underworld, where Herakles has been wrestling with death for the body of Alkestis.’7 This image of Herakles as saviour and deus ex machina was abruptly subverted by an image of Herakles as madman and agent of indiscriminate destruction. Labourer 4 became possessed by the madness of Herakles, which manifested itself in ‘a manic percussion solo’.8 This began a contagion of madness. Labourer 1 demolished the statue with savage blows from his shovel, his possession (apparently hallucinatory in form) culminating in a bravura demonstration of rhythmically propelled violence9 and ending, like Herakles’ madness, in restorative catalepsy: With the increase of sound from the manic cement mixers, Labourer 1 turns his murderous attentions to the sacks of Herakles cement, which he batters, throws, slashes and deguts in his frenzy, hauling out of the ripped open 7 Harrison (1996), 122. 8 Ibid. 122. 9 Carol Chillington Rutter believes this tour de force of male violence reveals an inconsistency between Harrison’s theatrical practice and his oYcial pro-feminism. In her review of the Delphi performance (1997, 133–43, at 140) she argues that the ‘enormous theatrical pleasure in the sheer feat of physical and technical virtuosity’ undermined the scene’s disturbing content. ‘It turned out to celebrate, not to critique male violence. The audience did not ‘‘just sit and stare’’. They gave the rage of Herakles a round of applause.’ Rutter’s charge of inconsistency may have some legitimacy, but I suspect her unease at the audience’s complicit enjoyment of the spectacular violence was part of Harrison’s dramatic point.

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stomachs yards of red and white barrier tape, like guts. He seems to have slain all the cement sacks. He searches. Nothing. Then he notices two small sacks (representing children). He impales their little bodies on the end of a pick. Red silk guts protrude from their gaping wounds. Exhausted by the eVort of killing, Labourer 1 adopts the pose of the statue of Herakles in the catatonic aftermath of slaughter and devastation.10

What followed was a scene of tragic anagno¯risis. Labourers 4 and 5 hurled the sacks of cement into an open trench ‘as if for mass burial’,11 while Labourers 2 and 3 sorted the fragments of the dismembered statue. Then Labourers 3 and 4 searched the rubble of the gutted city, ‘like mothers who search for their missing children’,12 until they came upon the tiny cement sacks: ‘With a tragic shriek of recognition, Labourers 2 and 3 fall to their knees, and embrace and huddle to the cement sacks (their dead children) in their grief. They each pull from the gaping wounds of their babies a length of red silk, which becomes their robe and a classical female mask. They become the two Women of Miletos.’13 As the mourning mothers of devastated Miletos they sang another fragment of Phrynichos. Thus male violence brieXy yielded to female grief. At the end of their song of mourning, Labourers 2 and 3 picked up the small cement sacks and, turning towards two cement-mixers, threw the sacks, together with their women’s masks, into the revolving drums before resuming their male labours. In 1997 Walt Disney Pictures released its version of the Herakles myth, a blockbuster animated feature, set in Thebes (‘The Big Olive’), but bearing the Romanized title Hercules. Notwithstanding the many liberties it takes with the classical tradition, the Wlm may be regarded as part of the reception history of mad Herakles, if only because of the centrality to the screenplay of Megara, the wife best known to us from the Euripidean-Senecan tradition of Herakles’ madness. Disney’s is a predictably family-oriented and, therefore, sanitized reconstruction and conXation of mythical threads, devoid of anthropomorphous adultery, novercal vindictiveness, Wlicide, and uxoricide. In this retelling Hercules is the product of Zeus and Hera’s loving and monogamous marriage, an adored prince royal. Abducted from his Olympian idyll by Hades’ henchmen, preparatory to a coup 10 Harrison (1996), 122–3. 12 Ibid.

11 Ibid. 123. 13 Ibid.

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d’e´tat, the infant Hercules is stripped of his divinity (although not his godlike strength), deposited on earth, and soon found by an elderly bucolic couple, Amphitryon and Alcmene, who raise him as their own son. The rest of the Wlm charts Hercules’ passage to heroic maturity (and indeed commodiWed superstardom) and his discovery of both his celestial birthright and his earthly destiny. The prologue, intoned by Charlton Heston, asks ‘What is the measure of a true hero?’, a reXection interrupted by a chorus of gospel-singing muses who complain, ‘He’s makin’ this story sound like some Greek tragedy.’ But, despite its feel-good orthodoxy and staunchly tongue-in-cheek treatment of classical antiquity, Disney’s Hercules is liberally peppered with references (unmistakable to the trained ear and eye) to the darker aspects of the Heraklean condition. Although the Wlm reverses the familiar Heraklean trajectory from mortality to immortality, it does invoke the familiar Wgure of Herakles Monoikos, portraying its hero as a confused interstitial dweller, a Messianic misWt. With echoes of George Cabot Lodge’s restless pilgrim roused to consciousness of self-divinity, the adolescent Hercules conWdes to his adoptive father, ‘I try to Wt in . . . I just can’t. Sometimes I feel like . . . like I really don’t belong here . . . like I’m supposed to be someplace else.’ Tragic Herakles is comically alluded to when, after attending a performance of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, the adult Hercules remarks, ‘Man! I thought I had problems.’ The character of Megara (‘Meg’), Hercules’ love interest, is an intriguing hybrid of tragic wives. Hercules’ Wrst encounter with her is borrowed from the story of the attempted rape of Deianeira by the Centaur Nessus. Towards the end of the Wlm, in a scene strongly reminiscent of Herakles wrestling with Death for the life of Alcestis, Hercules descends into Hades, oVers himself in Meg’s place, and snatches her soul from its Stygian grave. Most signiWcantly, and ironically, for viewers familiar with Euripides’ Herakles is Hercules’ assurance to Meg, ‘I would never ever hurt you.’ Meg herself, in trying to convince the villainous Hades of Hercules’ singularity and innate decency, repeats this assurance: ‘He would never do anything to hurt me.’ At the end of 2000, in direct opposition to Disney’s ‘hot, blonde, rippling image of heroic deeds’, director Jay Scheib merged Euripides’ Herakles with Heiner Mu¨ller’s Herakles 5 and used this amalgamation, which he supplemented with material from Pindar and from Ha¨ndel’s

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one-act dramatic cantata The Choice of Hercules (1751), as the substance of a dark and persistent enquiry into the dual nature of Herakles’ heroism. Just as the text was concocted from a variety of sources, so too the production, presented by the alternative theatre group Chasama14 in the basement of its Times Square venue, was a composite palette of video loops, physical images, puppets, and digitally sampled and manipulated sounds. Through the collision of Euripides and Mu¨ller’s Heraklean portraits Scheib’s Herakles set at jarring right angles the civilizing labours and the ecological catastrophe they engendered; the hero as monster-slayer and the hero as monster; an altruistic, socially integrated Herakles and a Herakles who does not want to take part any more and who wants out of his own myth. Earlier in 2000 an exhibition, entitled A Measured Quietude:15 Contemporary Irish Drawings, was held at the David Winton Bell Gallery in the List Arts Center at Brown University. It featured the work of nine artists from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, including John Kindness from Belfast, who re-created a large-scale wall drawing, Scenes from the Life of Herakles #2, produced Wrst at The Drawing Center’s Project Room in New York’s SoHo. In this drawing Kindness has transposed the Attic vase style of classical Greece into a black-and-white horizontal fresco of continuing sequential images that recount the labours of Herakles in the context of contemporary Irish experience. Herakles himself is reimagined as ‘a Belfast youth meeting the challenges of the street with fearless, slightly robotic aplomb’.16 One panel depicts a young, dishevelled Herakles, possibly the inmate of a psychiatric hospital, being brought before a white-jacketed doctor in search of healing.17 14 Chasama (Farsi for ‘to have vision’) was founded by Anita Durst in 1995 as a non-proWt arts organization in New York City. 15 ‘A measured quietude’ is taken from W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’. 16 Roberta Smith, ‘The Irish Struggle for a Visual Poetry to Call Their Own’, New York Times, 25 June 1999. 17 Kindness is not the Wrst Irishman to draw on the madness of Herakles in examining his national history. In Tom Murphy’s Famine (1968), the explosion of desperate violence by village leader John Connor, whom the playwright calls ‘a physical force man, one of the ‘‘mad and vicious Connors’’ ’ (Murphy 1992, p. xv), is a heartbreaking echo of the madness of Euripides’ hero. For earlier links between mad Herakles and the Celtic hero Cuchulain, see above, Chap. 8.

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In May 2004 the Young Vic, Wiener Festwochen, and Chichester Festival Theatre, in collaboration with the The´aˆtre des BouVes du Nord and Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Wrst presented Cruel and Tender,18 Martin Crimp’s original version of Sophocles’ Trachiniae.19 Directed by Luc Bondy, the production was a direct response to global terrorism and the latest war in Iraq. Crimp’s Herakles, the General, is a megalomaniac, a neocon holy warrior crazed by combat and conquest, who mutters his famous epithet, Kallinikos, by way of self-validation. He also recalls the ethnic cleanser of Harrison’s The Labourers of Herakles, who wears ‘the shirt of modern Europe’s agony’20 and is cremated in ‘Europe’s conscience’.21 The family he has left behind sees plainly the irrationality, and gradually the illegality, of his attempts to eradicate a hydra-headed Terror. His wife Amelia (Deianeira) describes him as a hurt man whose mind is blank and who does not understand ‘that the more he Wghts terror j the more he creates terror— j and even invites terror—who has no eyelids—into his own bed’.22 The General’s son, James (Hyllus), a half-jaded, half-appalled specimen of Generation Y, condemns his father’s impassive, workaday attitude to the collateral damage he inXicts: ‘You have wiped people oV this earth like a teacher j rubbing out equations. You’ve stacked up bodies like j bags of cement.’23 At the end of the play the General stands convicted of crimes against humanity. Yet he remains unrepentant, ‘a deluded Wgure who goes to his death believing in the sanctity of his anti-terrorist mission’.24 In reply to James’s unWlial candour, he delivers a chilling speech reminiscent of 18 Reviews of the Young Vic production include: Michael Billington, Guardian, 14 May 2004; Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard, 14 May 2004; Jeremy Kingston, The Times, 14 May 2004; Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 15 May 2004; Susannah Clapp, Observer, 16 May 2004; Victoria Segal, Sunday Times, 16 May 2004; Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times, 17 May 2004; Paul Taylor, Independent, 24 May 2004; and Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail, 13 Aug. 2004. 19 For a list of echoes, allusions, and reworkings of the text of Trachiniae in Cruel and Tender, see Pat Easterling’s ‘Critical Review’ compiled in January 2004 for the project ‘The Reception of the Texts and Images of Ancient Greece in Late-TwentiethCentury Drama and Poetry in English’ (http://www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/ GreekPlays). 20 Harrison (1996), 146. 21 Ibid. 148. 22 Crimp (2004), 2. 23 Ibid. 57. 24 Michael Billington, review of Cruel and Tender, Guardian, 14 May 2004.

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Senecan Hercules’ obsessive prayer for a new Golden Age, a homily mounting to paranoiac and autarkic frenzy: I have puriWed the world for you. I have burnt terror out of the world for people like you, I have followed it through the shopping malls And the school playgrounds Tracked it by starlight across the desert Smashed down the door of its luxury apartment Learned its language Intercepted its phone calls Smoked it out of its cave Thrown acid into its eyes and burned it to carbon. While you’ve been logged on to internet chat-rooms I’ve seen my friends burst open like fruit. While you were hiding your face in that girl’s hair— yes?—yes?— I have been breathing in uranium. Every streak of vapour in a cold sky is a threat every child with no shoes wandering up to a checkpoint every green tree-line every quiet evening spent reading is a threat and even the lamp on the bedside table even the coiled Wlament inside the lamp is a threat. So don’t you talk to me about crimes because for every head I have ever severed two have grown in their place25 and I have had to cut and to cut and to cut to burn and to cut to purify the world— understand me? 25 The appropriation of Herakles’ second labour (the Lernean Hydra) as a piece of wartime political propaganda has an interesting historical antecedent. An early American Civil War cartoon, ‘The Hercules of the Union, Slaying the Great Dragon of Secession’ (1861), depicts General WinWeld Scott, commander of the Union Forces, as Hercules about to strike the many-headed hydra that is the secession of the Confederate States. Scott wields a Herculean club marked ‘Liberty and Union’. The hydra has seven heads, each representing a prominent Southern leader. The neck of each Southerner is labelled with a vice or crime associated with him.

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(softly) I killed the Nemean lion oh yes— with these hands—with these hands— and the dog the dog with the three heads I collected it from hell in front of the cameras I have visited the dead in front of the cameras— Remember? (Points to himself proudly.) Kallinikos. Kallinikos.26

The General’s kinship with Seneca’s imperial overreacher and his Renaissance counterpart, MacLeish’s Strangelovean scientist, and Armitage’s celebrity superhero and berserker is striking. But, like Mister Heracles, the evil he embodies is, in fact, symptomatic of something larger, something mainstream, a crusade combining amoral calculation and casual cruelty. As his Wnal words reveal, the General’s tragedy is to have been this crusade’s avenging instrument as well as its sacriWcial victim: I will explain into the microphones that my labours are at an end that what I have done is what I was instructed to do and what I was instructed to do was to extract terror like a tooth from its own stinking gums. I will explain from my own carefully prepared notes and meticulous diaries oh yes oh yes that I am not the criminal but the sacriWce.27

David Lan, who commissioned Cruel and Tender for the Young Vic, echoes Michael Billington’s remark about the ubiquity and enduring appeal of Greek tragedy: Luc Bondy came across Sophocles’ play while researching Handel’s opera, Heracles, and found in it something that resonated with a world seeking to 26 Crimp (2004), 57–8.

27 Ibid. 67–8.

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A Herakles for our times

justify the invasion of Iraq. And, if we constantly go back to the Greeks, it is because of the immediacy of their engagement with the world. Sophocles used a myth the audience all knew to comment on his own time. In a similar way we are using Sophocles’ play as a way of illuminating ours.28

But whatever Bondy and others may think, it is actually the Romanized Greek hero, the morally and psychologically problematic Senecan Herakles that appears to have caught the cultural imagination of the early twenty-Wrst century, and to have become a potent emblem of the new nihilism and humanity’s age-old capacity for self-destruction. Critic Charles Spencer declared of Cruel and Tender, ‘Nothing I have seen in the theatre to date so resonantly and provocatively captures our bewildering post-9/11 world’, and he proclaimed Joe Dixon’s General ‘a deranged Hercules of our time. His roaring insistence that he has ‘‘burnt terror out of the world’’ and that he has only done ‘‘what I was instructed to do’’ seems to bring us close to the heart of contemporary darkness.’29 One of the most recent full-scale adaptations in English of Euripides’ text was a raucous rock-and-roll musical, Hercules in High Suburbia, produced in April 2004 by Watson Arts, a resident company of the renowned La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City, and re-produced as part of the Ninth New York International Fringe Festival. Like its predecessors since the 1960s, it too is essentially a neo-Senecan creation, portraying Hercules as a pretentious suburbanite and realityTV producer whose absence from the gated community of Thebes by the Sea is explained by the fact that he is shooting the two-hour season Wnale of his latest show in the Underworld. Writer and director Mary Fulham follows Seneca in ascribing to the madness two levels of motivation: this Hercules is destroyed as much by his hubris and unimaginative recourse to brute force as by Hera’s jealousy. She also, like Seneca, places the Wlicidal Hercules in the context of a complicit prevailing culture, in this case an American culture of excess and voyeurism, of celebrity murder trials a` la O. J. Simpson, of SUV sovereignty and rampant individualism compounded by collective irresponsibility. The original rockabilly-blues score, which won composer Paul Foglino a Fringe NYC Overall 28 Quoted in Michael Billington’s article ‘Terror of Modern Times Sets the Stage for Greek Tragedy’, Guardian, 19 June 2004. 29 Daily Telegraph, 15 May 2004.

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Excellence Award, included new cultural anthems such as ‘I’ve Got a McMansion on the Hill’ (sung by the parvenu Lycus) and ‘Because I’m God’. Hercules’ rampage as the familiar Family Annihilator is captured on a surveillance video, which an opportunistic security guard hopes to sell to ‘Greeks Gone Wild’. Meanwhile a nonchalantly bloodthirsty reporter cruises the scene in search of sensational copy. A review of the production, which appeared in the New York Times, was headed ‘Demigod Gone Wild in Land of Soccer Moms’.30 This headline is itself a succinct critique (or possibly an indictment) of the sub-editorial crassness that deWnes the show’s targeted culture. The Annex at La MaMa was the venue in May 2006 for another exuberant musical make-over of the Herakles myth. Herakles via Phaedra31 interwove the stories of Herakles and his friend Theseus, combining elements of Sophocles’ Trachiniae and Euripides’ Hippolytus but presenting a fundamentally un-Euripidean mad Herakles. Herakles’ Hera-induced insanity occurred early in the Wrst act as the show followed the alternative Heraklean chronology whereby the Wlicide precedes the imposition of penitential labours. Further departures from Euripidean tradition were the reduction of the number of murdered sons to two and the exclusion of Amphitryon. The piece was conceived, directed, choreographed, and co-composed by Ellen Stewart, La MaMa’s founder and artistic director and one of OV-Broadway’s great pioneers, and performed by her Great Jones Repertory Company.32 Billed as a Dance Theatre Epic, the production was almost entirely sung and danced to the accompaniment of live music throughout. Its theme and musical setting were ostensibly the Jazz Age of Xappers, gangsters, and speakeasies, but actually the show was marked (and to some extent marred) by an extreme eclecticism. The many fast-paced scenes amounted to a bizarre terpsichorean farrago merging Charleston, Can-Can, chorus line, Flamenco, and ballet. The musical styles ranged from operatic recitative to blues and salsa, while 30 Rob Kendt, New York Times, 15 Aug. 2005. 31 For reviews of the production, see Miriam Horn, ‘At La MaMa, Greek Myths Retold Acrobatically in Herakles via Phaedra’, New York Times, 24 May 2006 and New Yorker, 5 June 2006. 32 Herakles via Phaedra was essentially a re-creation of Another Phaedra via Hercules, which the Great Jones Repertory Company premie`red at La MaMa on 3 March 1988. La MaMa’s tradition of doing Greek plays with the Great Jones Repertory Company began in 1972.

350

A Herakles for our times

the instrumentation included a synthesizer, gongs, woodblocks, and a bamboo Xute. If the co-ordinated sum of these disparate parts was, in the end, unilluminating in narrative terms, it was at least entertaining and often arresting. The most interesting example of the contemporary theatre’s Senecan recreation of Euripides’ hero is La MaMa’s third and most serious Heraklean oVering, E. Randahl Hoey’s production of Daniel Algie’s Home Front, a play consciously inspired by Euripides’ Herakles, yet which, in its despairing nulliWcation of Euripides’ radical rehabilitative message, is startlingly original. A former Jesuit, who as an emerging playwright in the 1960s was sponsored by Arthur Miller, Algie wrote Home Front over a period of ten years. In it he reimagines Herakles’ return to Thebes from Hades as the disorienting homecoming of a Vietnam MIA (‘missing in action’). But, although it is set against the moral morass of an earlier conXict, a programme note reminded audiences of the play’s timeliness: ‘Today, we look forward to welcoming home a legion of returning veterans. Euripidean themes may have important lessons for us as we assimilate these wounded souls back into our communities.’ What is more, the world premie`re of Home Front on 9 November 2006 occurred two days after a mid-term election in which the Iraq War acted as a lightning-rod for sweeping change. It also came just weeks after the much-publicized murder-suicide committed by Iraq War veteran Zachary Bowen.33 The convergence of these events did not escape the notice of the New York critics, many of whom gave utterance to a nation’s shame and sorrow. Steven Snyder, for instance, ended his review in The Villager with this reXection: ‘In a culture that doesn’t look at the caskets returning home from war, or discuss the spirits of the men who have now been forced to serve two or three tours of duty, this is the face we haven’t seen. As debates about timetables, ‘‘victory’’ and insurgents have Wlled the headlines, what we’ve lost sight of are the individual stories of our men and women, struggling against increasingly overwhelming odds.’34 The play takes place on the porch and in the front yard of a midwestern farmhouse during a summer’s weekend in 1972. Meg, her two 33 See above, Chap. 9. 34 Stephen Snyder, ‘Disquiet on the Home Front’, The Villager, 76: 26 (Nov. 2006), 15–21.

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sons, Bobby and Jason, and her father-in-law, Arthur (Amphitryon), await the unlikely return of Harrison (Herakles), an honourable army corporal missing in action for seven years and declared dead by the military. There is no external threat to this family group in the shape of an equivalent Lycus character. Instead we see a dysfunctional family on the verge of implosion, much like the Hoadleys in MacLeish’s Herakles. Meg, ‘who hangs around in a bathrobe like a bedraggled Tennessee Williams heroine’,35 refuses to accept oYcial notiWcation of her husband’s death, an attitude that has led her to a nervous breakdown and periodic hospitalization. This evening she claims to have received a phone-call from Harrison, who merely sobbed on the other end of the line and hung up. Reckoning this to be another of her delusions, Arthur castigates Meg for her neuroticism and neglect of her children. He then indulges in his own brand of denial, distancing himself from his missing son by revealing to Meg Harrison’s true paternity. Harrison, he tells her, is the son of a barnstorming pilot named Everett (Zeus). He also reveals, without remorse, how his hatred of his adulterous wife, Alice (Alcmene), and his refusal to forgive her even when she was dying of cancer, provoked her suicide. Sickened by these revelations, Meg resolves to give up hope of her husband’s return and to take the boys away from their grandfather whom she likens to ‘a toxic dump’.36 Early the next morning, with Meg alone outside and her resolve intact, Harrison appears suddenly in the front yard. Even as the two embrace, the audience is left uncertain about the reality of Harrison’s appearance, for in an earlier scene Meg’s solitude and fragile hopefulness had imagined her lost husband momentarily into being. At the opening of Act ii we learn that Harrison has indeed returned and is AWOL from a stateside repatriation hospital. He is deeply disturbed by his years of imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Vietcong, in a place ruled by a sadistic colonel given the appellation of ‘Hell’s Dog’, and by his personal moral surrender in the name of survival. Meg tries desperately to push away her own depression, believing she can rehabilitate her husband. Harrison, however, believes his faith and his pre-war self to be lost forever: Pain like that? I know you’re trying to comfort me, but the day I was captured, in the space of an hour, I’d smothered one of my own men and 35 Anita Gates, ‘Dysfunctional, To Put It Mildly’, New York Times, 14 Nov. 2006. 36 Algie (2006), 34.

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saved an enemy, dug him out of his tomb. Everything I ever believed I’d do had turned upside down. (his voice takes on a Xat tone) I went to war young and strong, but only came back in pieces—feet moving under me, a thumb asking for a ride, eyes that ached to see my wife and children, a whisper begging to reach something clean and good just once more before there was nothing left of me.37

He struggles to reintegrate himself into his family; he is a stranger to his sons who respond to him with fear and reluctance. But, like Euripides’ hero, he shows great tenderness towards his children, and his Wnal words before madness strikes echo Herakles’ statement of universal parental love: ‘Oh, they put strength in me. (lifts both) My two boys, Meg. A son on either side of my heart. (his eyes welling) Despite the diVerences between people everywhere, they love their children.’ Although Harrison is a gentle and loving father, he never appears to his sons as an invincible saviour. He is already at his homecoming a broken and dependent Wgure, needing to be supported by Meg as he re-enters the house. His physical and emotional dependence at this point contrasts markedly with his refusal at the end of the play to be helped to his feet by his friend Ted (Theseus). Harrison’s post-madness declaration of independence from a God who he decides is either callous or non-existent does not translate itself into a new humanistic faith or a capacity for dependence. He cannot accept goodness and, instead, submerges himself in a deWant and masochistic autarkeia. As in Euripides’ Herakles, Harrison’s Wlicidal madness erupts oVstage. A great shriek from inside the house, a child’s voice, reaches Arthur who is alone on the porch. This is followed by Meg’s pleading howls, the screams of a second child, a clamour of things falling, and lastly Meg’s groans as fearful blows are struck. Harrison rushes out of the house with a riXe raised in his Wsts, ‘the wood, red-stained end wielded like a club’.38 He lunges toward Arthur, who Xees down the porch steps, stumbles, and crawls away. Harrison overtakes him and is about to bring the riXe-butt down when the screen door bangs shut. At that sound Harrison, stunned, drops the weapon and collapses into unconsciousness. There is no orderly messenger report of what happened inside the house and details of the critical pre-madness moments 37 Algie (2006), 59.

38 Ibid. 66.

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353

are less than precise. What is clear, however, is that the madness explodes from within Harrison. Like Seneca, Algie has dispensed with the interventionist Wgures of Iris and Lyssa and removed any discernible threshold between his hero’s sanity and insanity. The madness is reasoned as the terrible climax of severe PTSD and guilt. The presence in the farmhouse of an empty shotgun has triggered in Harrison memories of a past battle context. He seems to have mistaken his family for the Vietcong, although the exact nature of his hallucination is problematic because he has also been haunted by the memory of a wounded American lad he smothered to death in a failed attempt to protect himself and his men from capture. As a species of the neoSenecan Herakles, Harrison suVers from a madness that is internal and, at the same time, reXective of larger forces. Like Armitage’s Heracles, he is a trained killer estranged from the civilian world and domestic normalcy, and cut oV from his former self: arthur You were made into a killer! harrison (abstracted) They train you to be . . . arthur (unable to contain himself) You think you’ve changed? harrison It doesn’t happen in a day, I guess. When you come back, you’re supposed to get rid of all that, as easily as you’d unclip a round of ammo. Turn in your weapon, soldier. War’s over. Dismissed. And I’m only one of the walking wounded.39

While Algie’s rationalization of the madness is (unconsciously) quite Senecan,40 his treatment of the post-madness scenes goes well beyond the autarkic desolation of Seneca’s version and could almost be classiWed as anti-Euripidean. In particular, he drastically alters the key role of Amphitryon and Theseus in these scenes. Arthur at least partially performs a psychotherapeutic function during Harrison’s bewildered awakening. He removes the gun, questions his son in stages, and Wnally forces him to look upon the carnage inside the house. When Harrison is made to recognize his guilt, he wishes not 39 Ibid. 71. 40 Algie states that he read Seneca’s Hercules Furens ‘some thirty-Wve years ago, but hadn’t looked at it since, so its inXuence could only have welled from my unconscious. One reason I deliberately avoided re-reading it was that I had trouble enough Wnding the right distance from Euripides’ play to shape one which would incorporate the central myth, yet hold the stage on its own.’ In correspondence with the author, 26 Jan. 2007.

354

A Herakles for our times

Fig 6. Home Front, Daniel Algie, New York City, 2006. Joseph Jamrog (Arthur), H. Clark (Ted), and Fletcher McTaggart (Harrison). Photo: Jonathan SlaV.

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for death but for a long life of pain and punishment: ‘I’ll get the riXe. Put shells in it. Do it myself. I deserve to die. (suddenly crawling on all fours) No! Not enough! Not enough pain! Never enough of it for me! (scrambling toward the door of the porch) They won’t execute the mad! Thank God. Pray I have a long life. With every breath, more agony. Even in sleep, the nightmares. Everywhere for me, nothing but punishment. I should never see the light again!’41 He pulls the back of his shirt up over his head, an action symbolic not only of his shame but also his negation of self (cf. Herakles, who, at 1159–60 of Euripides’ text, veils his head with a cloak). Arthur calls to the farm Harrison’s lifelong friend and war buddy, Ted, who returned from Vietnam Wve years earlier and is now a deputy sheriV. Ted is horriWed by the murders. He handcuVs Harrison and is about to haul him to the sheriV’s oYce, but Arthur persuades him to delay the arrest, invoking the young men’s friendship and Harrison’s childhood rescue of Ted. Ted relents, urging Harrison to uncover his head and treating him with gentleness and compassion. In Euripides’ play Theseus, at the risk of pollution to himself, lovingly undertakes to share Herakles’ suVering and oVers his suicidal friend real hope of redemption. In Home Front Ted oVers Harrison such hope to secure his cooperation, but it is an oVer apparently without substance or conviction: ted Sorry, pal, but I’ll have to lock you in the back seat then. harrison And from that cage, I’ll go into another. Forever. I know where I belong, what I’m heading to now, all alone. But I’ll bear that, too. Even the mad can be brave. ted With treatment, a doctor might be able to bring you back. harrison To what? Accepting what I did? Any peace about that?

As a result of this exchange and Harrison’s ‘wordless, unwilling cry of soul agony’,42 Ted determines a solution focused on release rather than redemption. In what is portrayed as an act of both cynicism and mercy, he kills Harrison, Wring a single shot into his back as Harrison says goodbye to his father. Arthur agrees to tell the sheriV and coroner that Ted shot Harrison when, on his arrival at the house, he found Harrison attacking Arthur. Thus the philia shown by 41 Algie (2006), 77.

42 Ibid. 85.

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Amphitryon and Theseus, which is crucial to Herakles’ rehabilitation, is here converted into a dark conspiracy born of sheer hopelessness. A synopsis of Home Front on the play’s oYcial website states that, like Euripides, Algie has composed a ‘disquisition on the suVering of war, the role of heroism and the healing power of friendship and community’.43 It is a strange assertion; for, as it is written and performed, Home Front leaves us with the impression that in some cases philia is an insuYcient healer and rehabilitation simply not achievable. The play’s compelling Wnal image is an imperfect pieta`, Arthur mourning the body of his ‘only son’44 in an agony of strangulated love: His palms quickly draw away from Harrison’s head, are held out both in terror and compassion. Trembling, they approach his son again, do not quite touch him, cannot bring any comfort. As he keeps repeating this heartrending gesture, always edging nearer, yet withdrawing, and his mouth stretches wide in unspeakable anguish, darkness rushes down.45

For Algie, this ending with its shocking cancellation of Euripidean possibility and salvation is appropriate and unavoidable in the modern context: ‘I built a reversal of expectation into every aspect of my drama, using that to express the constant overturning of belief, a tragic vision which is absolutely necessary and all but unbearable.’46 Home Front is a fearless and impressive rereading of Herakles and, if it ultimately transforms or cancels out the play’s Euripidean essence, it does retain something of Euripides’ conception of ‘a random nemesis descending at times even upon the innocent; a force to be reckoned with, certainly, yet one without our ability to wrest from it a satisfying meaning—the paradox, if you will, of a capricious necessity’.47 At the opening of her discussion of the transmission (or transmigration) of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon to the English Renaissance stage, Ewbank quotes Hamlet’s Pyrrhus speech (Hamlet, ii. ii. 452 V.), centring on the line recited by the First Player: ‘Anon he Wnds him j Striking too short at Greeks.’ The impotence of aged King Priam, ‘striking too 43 http://www.homefrontplay.org. 44 Algie (2006), 86. 46 Daniel Algie, in correspondence with the author, 8 Dec. 2006. 47 Id., in correspondence with the author, 26 Jan. 2007.

45 Ibid. 87.

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short at Greeks’, she says, ‘seems to image a long-held axiom of English Renaissance scholarship that, when the playwrights wielded their antique sword, it struck too short at Greeks and lay where it fell, that is on Roman Seneca’.48 As Ewbank points out, this axiom is no longer unquestioned, at least in respect of Shakespeare. However, the phrase ‘striking too short at Greeks’ serves as a very apt designation for the current phase in the theatrical reception of Euripides’ Herakles. In our attempts to create a Herakles for our times, Seneca has clearly provided us with a powerful medium through which to anatomize ‘the heart of contemporary darkness’. The neo-Senecan Herakles that has emerged is the embodiment of Foucault’s statement that ‘Madness has become man’s possibility of abolishing both man and the world. . . . It is the last recourse: the end and the beginning of everything. Not because it is a promise . . . but because it is the ambiguity of chaos and apocalypse.’49 On the other hand, Euripides’ text, with its unreasoned madness and unconditional philia, enables us to conceive a positive alternative. For, to quote again the description by Arrowsmith of the play’s deepest motive: ‘the Herakles is a play which imposes suVering upon men as their tragic condition, but it also discovers a courage equal to that necessity, a courage founded on love.’50 Each new manifestation of mad Herakles is revealing in its own right, and perhaps more so because of its departures from Euripides. Nevertheless, my own hope is that in the next phase of its theatrical reception we might witness a direct engagement with the radical second half of Euripides’ play, leading to a persuasive modern rendering of the transcendent human nobility and fellowship at its heart. A neo-Euripidean Herakles could well prove an attractive antidote to the terrifying irrationalism and inhumanity of a neo-Senecan world. 48 Ewbank (2005), 37–52, at 37. 50 Arrowsmith (1956), 44–59, at 53.

49 Foucault (1988), 281.

APPENDIX 1

Heraklean madness on the modern stage: a chronology The following chronology includes theatrical performances of translations, adaptations, and versions of Euripides’ Herakles post 1800. Year Title

Director

Company/venue

Place

Date

Translator/adapter (Language) 1818 1879

Herakles (Ancient Greek) Herakles

1902

Herakles Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellondorff (German)

1919

Herakles Frank Wedekind (German) He´rakle`s Choreographer: Janine Charrat Composer: Maurice Thiriet Librettist: Andre´ Boll

1953

1958

1959

Heracles Marijan Matkovic (Croatian) Heracles William Arrowsmith (English) Hercules Furens (Ancient Greek)

Richard Valpy Antonis Varveris Albert Heine

Reading School, Reading, Reading Town Hall England Greece

Oct.

Wiener Akademischen Verein fu¨r Kunst und Literatur, Theater in der Josefstadt

Vienna

6 Jan.

Prinzregenten Theater

Munich

1 Sept.

Ballet de France, The´atre de Champs Elyse´es

Paris

20 Apr.

Vlado Habunec

Croatian National Theatre

Zagreb, Croatia

1 Feb.

Geraldine Lust

Qwirk Productions, New York The Great Hall, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art King’s College, London London

17 Aug.

20 Feb.

Appendix 1 Year Title

Director

Company/venue

359 Place

Date

Takis Ethniko Theatro Mouzenidis (National Theatre of Greece), Epidauros Festival, Ancient Theatre of Epidauros Athens Festival, Ancient Odeion of Herodes Atticus Living Theatre Company

Epidauros, Greece

26 June–9 July

Athens

31 July–15 Sept.

New York

8 Sept. 30 June

Translator/adapter (Language) 1960

Iraklis Panagis Lekatsas (Modern Greek)

Heracles 1962

Iraklis Panagis Lekatsas (Modern Greek)

Takis Ethniko Theatro Mouzenidis (National Theatre of Greece), Epidauros Festival, Ancient Theatre of Epidauros

Epidauros, Greece

1964

Eracle Salvatore Quasimodo Composer: Bruno Nicolai (Italian) Hercules Furens

Giuseppe Di Martino

Syracuse

1965

Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico, 18th Syracuse Festival, Teatro Greco di Siracusa Tetuo University of Tamura Tokyo (Greek Tragedy Study Club), Hibiya Amphitheatre Iraklis Takis Ethniko Theatro Panagis Lekatsas Mouzenidis (National Theatre (Modern Greek) of Greece), Ancient Theatre of Epidauros Dodonaia Festival, Ancient Theatre of Dodona Herakles Alan University of Archibald MacLeish Schneider Michigan’s (English) Professional Theatre Program, 4th Fall Festival, APA Repertory Company, Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre

Tokyo

Epidauros, Greece

Dodona, Greece

Aug.

Ann Arbor, USA

27 Oct.–7 Nov.

360

Appendix 1

Year Title

Director

Company/venue

Place

Date

Translator/adapter (Language) Hansgu¨nther Heyme

1968 Herakles Harmut Lange (German) 1974 Herakles 5 Heiner Mu¨ller (German) 1983 Heracles

Heracles: A new verse drama in ancient Greek and modern English by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, with arrangement of English material and songs by Michael Silk

Munich

Jem Bolland

Dyll Davies (artistic director) / Michael Silk (tour director)

1987 Herakles 1988 Herakles William Arrowsmith (English)

Herakles

King’s College, London, Dept. of Classics, New Theatre, King’s College King’s College, London, Dept. of Classics, New Theatre, King’s College Players Theatre, McGill University Horace Mann Theater, Columbia University Wheeler School Auditorium Second Storey Theater

London

16 Mar.

London

15 Sept.

Montreal, Canada New York

30 Sept.

Providence, RI Newport, RI

11 Oct.

6 Oct.

12 Oct.

Qwirk Productions New York Joanne Klein

1992 Herakles 5 Heiner Mu¨ller (German) 1997 Herakles Heiner Mu¨ller

West Berlin

Dept. of Drama & Colorado 18 Feb. Dance, Colorado Springs, USA College, Armstrong Theatre Theater Zuidpool

Theodoros Attis Theatre Terzopoulos

Melinda Powers

Antwerp

Athens

Thessaloniki, Greece Attis Theatre Athens Barnard-Columbia New York Ancient Drama Group, Minor Latham Playhouse

26 Feb.– 2 Mar. 11–14 Mar. 18–31 Mar. 28 Mar.

Appendix 1 Year Title

Director

Company/venue

361 Place

Date

Translator/adapter (Language) The Madness of American Heracles (Two Repertory Theban Plays, with Theatre (ART) The Phoenician Women) Philip Vellacott (English) Herakles Theodoros Heiner Mu¨ller Terzopoulos Attis Theatre 1998 Herakles Heiner Mu¨ller Herkules: Hero of the People Oscar van Woensel Herakles Gerrit Komrij

Herakles Heiner Mu¨ller Herakles Kenneth McLeish (English) Herakles Heiner Mu¨ller Eracle Dario Del Corno

USA

Argos, Greece 29 June Athens

Theodoros Attis Theatre Athens Terzopoulos Hein van Transformatorhuis Amsterdam der Heijden Toneelgroep, Amsterdam Titus Muizelaar

Stadsschouwburg

Amsterdam

Toured Alkmaar, Apeldoorn, Arnhem, Den Bosch, Breda, Eindhoven, Gouda, Groningen, Leeuwarden, Maastricht, Nijmegen, Roosendaal, Rotterdam, Tilburg, Ijmuiden, Zoetermeer (Netherlands) and Leuven (Belgium). Last performed 29 May 1998 Theodoros Festival Bogota, Terzopoulos Iberoamericano Columbia de Teatro de Bogota, Teatro National Nick The Gate Theatre, London Philippou Notting Hill Theodoros Internationale Terzopoulos Sommerakademie, Mousonturm Theatre Andre´e Ruth Teatro Olimpico Shammah di Vicenza

26 Nov.– 31 Dec. 1–8 Jan. 3–24 Jan.

22–4 Jan.

4–7 Apr.

9 July– 1 Aug.

Frankfurt

13–15 Aug.

Vicenza

4–7 Sept.

362

Appendix 1

Year Title

Director

Company/venue

Place

Date

Ravenna

30–1 Oct.

Istanbul

26 May

Istanbul

27 May

Istanbul

28 May

Translator/adapter (Language) Herakles Heiner Mu¨ller

Theodoros L’Invenzione del Terzopoulos Silenzio, Teatro Ravenna

Theodoros 11th International Terzopoulos Istanbul Theatre Festival, Istanbul Municipal Theatre: Mushin Ertugrul Stage Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 11th International Herakles Mainomenos Terzopoulos Istanbul Theatre Festival, Based on Euripides’ Istanbul Herakles, Sophocles’ Municipal Theatre: Trachiniae, and Mushin Heiner Mu¨ller’s Ertugrul Stage Herakles 5 Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 11th International Herakles Kathodos Terzopoulos Istanbul Theatre Festival, Istanbul Based on Euripides’ Municipal Theatre: Herakles and Mushin Ertugrul Sophocles’ Stage Trachiniae Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 2nd Theatre Herakles Terzopoulos Olympics, Based on Shizuoka Arts Heiner Mu¨ller’s Theatre Herakles 2 and 13 Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 2nd Theatre Herakles Mainomenos Terzopoulos Olympics, Based on Euripides’ Shizuoka Arts Herakles, Sophocles’ Theatre Trachiniae, and Heiner Mu¨ller’s Herakles 5 Herakles Trilogy: Theodoros 2nd Theatre Herakles Kathodos Terzopoulos Olympics, Based on Euripides’ Shizuoka Arts Herakles and Theatre Sophocles’ Trachiniae Iraklis Mainomenos Theodoros Attis Thiasos Tasos Roussos Terzopoulos Composer: Ioannis Christou (Modern Greek)

1999 Herakles Trilogy: Herakles Based on Heiner Mu¨ller’s Herakles 2 and 13

Shizuoka, 4 June Japan

Shizuoka, 5 June Japan

Shizuoka, 6 June Japan

Moscow

20–1 June

Appendix 1 Year Title

Director

Company/venue

363 Place

Date

Translator/adapter (Language) 2000 Herakles Trilogy: Herakles Kathodos Based on Euripides’ Herakles and Sophocles’ Trachiniae Herakles Trilogy: Herakles Mainomenos Based on Euripides’ Herakles, Sophocles’ Trachiniae, and Heiner Mu¨ller’s Herakles 5

Herakles After texts by Euripides, Mu¨ller, Sophocles, Pindar, and Handel (English) 2001 Mister Heracles Simon Armitage (English) Herakles Wolfgang Heyder (German) 2002

Heracles Mary Yiosi (Modern Greek)

Theodoros 10th International Delphi, Terzopoulos Meeting on Ancient Greece Greek Drama, Ancient Stadium of Delphi

2 July

Theodoros Festival de Terzopoulos Teatro Clasico, Amphiteatro Romano

Merida, Spain

30–1 July

Festival of Epidauros, Ancient Theatre at Epidauros Chashama (basement), Times Square

Epidauros, Greece

25–6 Aug.

New York

30 Nov.– 16 Dec.

West Yorkshire Playhouse

Leeds, England

16 Feb.– 17 Mar.

Theater am Kirchplatz

Schaan, 16–31 Liechtenstein Mar.

Jay Scheib

Natasha Betteridge and Simon Godwin Georg Rootering

Theater am Kirchplatz Haus der Kultur, ‘Walther von der Vogelweide’ Meraner Stadttheater Andrei National Serban / Theatre of Thymios Northern Greece, Karakatsanis Forest Theatre Ancient Theatre at Filippi Amphitheatre of Siviri

Schaan, 15–16 Liechtenstein Mar. Bozen 19 Mar. Meran

21 Mar.

Thessaloniki, Greece Filippi, Greece Siviri, Greece

17–19 July 27 July 7 Aug.

364

Appendix 1

Year Title

Director

Company/venue

Place

Date

Festival of Epidauros, Ancient Theatre at Epidauros Ancient Theatre of Dion Ancient Theatre of Olympia Roman Amphitheatre of Patra Theatre Alexis Minotis, Egaleo Theatre Vrachon, Melina Merkouri, Ymitos Katrakio Theatre, Nikea Forest Theatre

Epidauros, Greece

16–17 Aug.

Translator/adapter (Language)

Dion, Greece 24 Aug. Olympia, 28 Aug. Greece Patra, Greece 31 Aug.–1 Sept. Athens

4 Sept.

Athens

7 Sept.

Athens

10 Sept.

Thessaloniki, 13–15 Greece Sept.

2004 Hercules in High Suburbia: A Musical Tragedy! Mary Fulham Original songs by Paul Foglino (English) Heracles (English)

Mary Fulham

A Watson Arts New York Project, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (First Floor Theatre)

Linda Castro

Herakles Fragments of Euripides Neven Jovanovic (Croatian) 2005 Hercules Furens (English)

Ozren Prohic

Grass Roots Greeks, 6th @ Penn Theatre Hrvatsko Narodno Kazaliste (Croatian National Theatre)

Herakles Fragments of Euripides Neven Jovanovic (Croatian) Herakles Archibald MacLeish (English)

15 Apr.– 2 May

San Diego, USA

26 Apr.

Zagreb, Croatia

15 Oct.

Elias Brasenose Arts Oxford Mitropoulos Festival, Brasenose College Chapel Ozren Hrvatsko Zagreb, Prohic Narodno Kazaliste Croatia (Croatian National Theatre)

10–13 May

Rip Claassen

5–28 Aug.

Natural Theatricals, Alexandria, George USA Washington Masonic National Memorial (amphitheatre)

11 Apr.

Appendix 1 Year Title

365

Director

Company/venue

Place

Date

Mary Fulham

A Watson Arts New York Project, The Ninth New York International Fringe Festival, Mazer Theatre

Ozren Prohic

Hrvatsko Narodno Ludwigshafen, 10–11 Nov. Kazaliste u Zagrebu Germany (Croatian National Theatre, Zagreb), Festspiele Ludwigshafen Theater im Pfalzbau

Ellen Stewart

The Great Jones Repertory Company, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, The Annex at La MaMa La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (First Floor Theatre)

New York

18 May–11 June

New York

9–26 Nov.

Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico, Teatro Greco di Siracusa

Syracuse

11 May–24 June

Translator/adapter (Language) Hercules in High Suburbia: A Musical Tragedy! Mary Fulham Original songs by Paul Foglino (English) Herakles Fragments of Euripides Neven Jovanovic (Croatian)

2006 Herakles via Phaedra: A Dance Theatre Epic Ellen Stewart Music by Genji Ito Additional music by Ellen Stewart et al. (English) Home Front Daniel Algie (English)

2007 Eracle Salvatore Quasimodo (Italian)

E. Randahl Hoey

13–25 Aug.

APPENDIX 2

The Reading school play The entire performance history of the Herakles is relatively sparse, and the nineteenth century is no exception. The only recorded performance of the play between 1800 and 1880 appears to be that produced by Dr Richard Valpy, headmaster of Reading School between 1781 and 1830. Valpy was something of a charismatic figure, liberal in temperament, but with a reputation for harshly administering corporal punishment. Between 1809 and 1816 he produced several classical school textbooks. He had also been stagestruck since his youth, and in 1806 inaugurated at the school a triennial Greek play. Of the six full-scale productions of Greek tragedies he mounted in Reading Town Hall over the next twenty-one years, five were by Euripides, including two productions of Alcestis (1809 and 1824); Orestes (1821); Hecuba (1827); and, most extraordinarily of all, Herakles (1818). As Edith Hall points out: ‘The performances were surprising in the context of theatre history, because in the first two decades of the nineteenth century tragedy had retreated from the public stages of Britain almost altogether. By the 1820s, partly as a result of the Greek War of Independence, Greek themes began to appear occasionally on the commercial stage. . . . But the Valpeian plays had anticipated this revival of Hellenic theatricals by fifteen years.’1 Moreover, Frank Benson’s staging of the Agamemnon at Balliol College and the institution of the Cambridge Greek Play were still several decades in the future.2 One likely reason for Valpy’s choice of the Herakles is the fact that in 1794 Gilbert Wakefield (1756–1801), Unitarian minister, controversialist, and sometime fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, published a popular new selection of tragedies with notes specifically for the use of schools. The first volume of his Tragoediarum delectus contained Hercules Furens, Alcestis, and Trachiniae.3 Wakefield’s laudable intention was to introduce the lesserknown plays to school reading.

1 Hall (1997b) 59–81, at 76. 2 The Agamemnon was performed on 3 June 1880 in the Hall of Balliol. The first Cambridge Greek Play was produced in 1882, and the first Cambridge production of Euripides was Ion in 1890. 3 See Clarke (1945), 17.

Appendix 2

367

In the context of Euripidean reception in the second decade of the nineteenth century and the general critical and performance history of the Herakles, Valpy’s production in 1818 was singularly ambitious and, indeed, heroic. The production was reviewed in the Reading Mercury of Monday, 18 October 1818, by Mary Russell Mitford, a friend of Valpy’s and, later, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s. Mitford informs her readers that the plot ‘contains much striking situation, much of the fitness of representation, which distinguishes Euripides from his great rival [Sophocles], and much of the tender pathos, for which he is so justly celebrated’.4 Special mention is also made of the interpretation of the waking scene by a Mr Harington, who performed the title role. 4 Reading Mercury, 18 Oct. 1818, p. 3.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Accius 49 actors 101–6 Gertrude Eysoldt 240 in MacLeish’s Herakles 289, 290 Nero 50, 57–8 Wilamowitz as 216–18 in Wilamowitz’s Herakles 218–19, 222, 225–6 Adams, Henry 254, 255, 256, 259–60, 264, 265 adaptation 12–13 Adkins, A.W.H. 40–1 Aeneid (Virgil) 54, 68–9, 72 Agamemnon (Browning) 195–8 agnosticism 18, 157–8 see also atheism; Christianity Algie, Daniel 8, 350–7 Alkestis (Browning) 187, 193, 195, 199, 206 Alleyn, Edward 104 Alprin, Brian 304, 307 Alprin, Paula 304 Amphitryon: Algie’s 351, 353, 355 Armitage’s 314, 327 Canova’s 148–9 Euripides’ 18–19, 21, 24–7, 35, 38–42, 39, 143 n. 58 Seneca’s 77, 83, 87, 88 Walt Disney Pictures’ 343 anagno¯risis: Algie’s Home Front 353–4 Armitage’s Mister Heracles 326 Bennett’s The Madness of George III 339 Euripides’ Herakles 38–40 Harrison’s Labourers of Herakles 342 MacLeish’s Herakles 290 Seneca’s Hercules Furens 84–8, 122, 134, 140 Shakespeare’s King Lear 142–5 Shakespeare’s Macbeth 132–5 Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand 268–71 anger 55, 69–70, 73, 84 see also madness

Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 110–11 Apocolocyntosis (Seneca) 56–7 Apollodorus of Athens 48–9 Apollophanes 50 Apology for Actors, An (Heywood) 101 apotheosis: as conservative Christian anarchist 253–66 Wedekind’s Herakles 273–8 Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand 267–72 see also divinity arete¯ 5, 17–18, 40–1, 44 Aristophanes 171–2 Aristophanes’ Apology (Browning) 150, 182, 185–92 Aristotle 16, 97 Armitage, Simon 8, 216, 312–21, 315 Armstrong, Richard H. 208 n. 3, 219 n. 39 Arnold, Matthew 160–3, 188, 194–5 Arnott, W.G. 22, 23 n. 41, 310 arrows: Euripides’ Herakles 27, 40, 42, 43 and Julius Caesar 102 Seneca’s Hercules Furens 83 Wilamowitz’s Herakles 211, 212 Arrowsmith, William 23–4, 42, 43–4, 144, 290–1 Asteas 47–8, 47 atheism 157, 183–4 see also agnosticism; Christianity Athena 30 n. 61, 38–9, 78 autarkeia 45 n. 108, 88, 128–9, 134–5, 229 Bacchae (Hofmannsthal) 249–50 Bacchic ritual 35–6, 35 n. 76 Bahr, Hermann 7 Dialog vom Tragischen 235–7 and Hofmannsthal 237–9, 246–8, 250–1 and Modernism 207–9, 232 and psychology 233–7 and the Viennese Herakles 225–31

390

Index

Baines, Barbara J. 101 n. 19 Baker, Howard 120 n. 11 Balaustion’s Adventure (Browning) 168, 180, 183 Balliol manuscript 192–3 Barker, Andrew W. 232 Barlow, Shirley A. 24–5 arete¯ 44 on Browning 203 n. 72, 73 Herakles complex 308–9 identity 143 n. 58 on madness 13, 97 murder 37 philia 41 on Pindar 27 n. 55 structural unity 20 n. 26 Barrett, Elizabeth 182–3 bastardy 32–3 Beecham, Sir Thomas 241 Beer-Hoffmann, Richard 246–8 Behler, Ernst 155–6 Bennett, Alan 338–9 bia 37, 38 n. 86, 40 Billerbeck, Margarethe 52 n. 1, 73 n. 54 Billington, Michael 3–4, 337, 345 n. 18, 347–8 Bishop, J. David 63, 76 black bile 96, 98, 99, 142 Blaiklock, E.M. 18 n. 17, 215 Blanshard, Alastair 58 n. 19, 116, 142, 149, 149 n. 73 Boas, Frederick S. 101 n. 19 boats 30, 90, 144, 203–5, 316 Boehrer, Bruce Thomas 61 n. 23 Bolt, Ranjit 85 Bomelio 141, 142 Bond, Godfrey W.: Euripides’ Herakles 21, 27 n. 55, 30, 32–3, 35 n. 74, 37 Heraklean myth 24 n. 45 wheeled platform 322 Bottom, Nick 103–5 bows 26–7, 40, 42–3, 81, 85, 125 Boyle, A.J. 53, 60 n. 60, 65, 71, 120 n. 11 Braden, Gordon: on good and evil 65 science and technology 302 on the Senecan influence of Elizabethans 117–20

on Seneca’s Hercules 54, 60, 82, 90–1, 302 on Shakespeare’s King Lear 144 and Tamburlaine the Great (Marlowe) 126, 127 on The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd) 129–30 Braider, Christopher 94 n. 4 Brazen Age Containing The Labours and death of Hercules, The (Heywood) 106–9 Breuer, Josef 235, 238, 241 Brooke, C.F. 136 n. 49 Brooks, Harold F. 103 n. 25 Brower, Rueben A. 120 n. 11, 125–6, 130, 144 Browning, Robert: Alkestis 187, 193, 195, 199, 206 Aristophanes’ Apology 150, 182, 185–92 Bailliol manuscript 192–3 Balaustion’s Adventure 168, 180, 183 and Euripides 182–5 Herakles 180–1, 192–206 and influence on Hofmannsthal 249 Buckley, Theodore Alois 180–1 Burkert, Walter 26 n. 52 Burnell, Peter 54 n. 9 Burnett, Anne Pippin 18–19, 29, 37, 45 n. 108 Burrow, Colin 10, 146 Butler, E.M. 244 Caesar, Julius 101–2 Cain (Lodge) 257–8 Calder, William M. III: on Oscar Wilde 173 n. 84 on Wilamowitz 164–5, 207 n., 216 n. 33, 217 Caligula 59 calyx-krater 47, 48 Canova, Antonio 148–9 Carden, Richard 30 n. 61 Carlyle, Thomas 187–8 Carpenter, Humphrey 156 n. 21 Carson, Anne 310–12 celebrity 348 censoring of plays 308 Cerberus 72–3 Chalk, H.H.O. 17, 37 n. 86, 40 Charlton, H.B. 120 n. 11

Index Christianity 94, 116, 158, 253–66 see also agnosticism; atheism chronology of performances 358–65 Clark, Arthur Melville 101 n. 19 Clark, John R. 64–5, 76–7, 79, 89 n. Claassen, Rip 304, 305, 307 clubs (weapons) 50, 81, 125, 142, 352 Cohn, Dorrit 234 n. 75 coins 58 Colakis, Marianthe 297 Cold War 285–7 Collard, Christopher 178–9 Comes, Natalis 110 Commodus, Lucius Aurelius 59–60 Conservative Christian Anarchist Party 255–66 Contra iudices (Theodulf of Orle´ans) 109–10 ‘conversion of reality’ theory 42 Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 136–40 Crimp, Martin 345–8 Cromwell, Otelia 101 n. 19 Cropp, Martin 23 Crowley, John W. 254 n. 4, 255, 256 n. 11 Cruel and Tender (Crimp) 345–8 Cuchulain 267–72, 344 Culture and Anarchy (Arnold) 161 Cunliffe, John W. 120, 120 n. 11 cures for madness 142 dance 35–6, 245 Dannenfeldt, Karl H. 142 n. Daviau, Donald G. 230, 233 De Morbo Sacro (Hippocrates) 31 n. 63, 97 dehumanization 277, 321 see also humanization DeVane, William Clyde 180–1, 189, 192 n. 44 Devereux, George 39–40 dextra 71, 134 Dialog vom Tragischen (Bahr) 235–7, 250–1 Diodorus Siculus 48–9 Dionysian terms of reference 34 n. 73 Dionysus 30 n. 61 disunity 5, 15–24, 288 divinity 3, 19, 45, 140, 302 see also apotheosis

391

divorce legislation 154 Dodds, E.R. 158 n. 27, 215 domestic violence 5, 28, 116, 307, 308, 322–3 see also murder Donoghue, Denis 267 n. 35 Douglas, Mary 128 n. 31 Drabeck, Bernard A. 297 n. 34 drawings 344 dreams 208, 234, 244 Duchemin, J. 31 n. 64 Dunn, Francis M. 43 n. 98 Du¨rrenmatt, Friedrich 279, 285–6 Easterling, Pat 345 n. 19 Eckermann, Johann Peter 159–60 Ehrenberg, Victor 2, 45 Elektra (Hofmannsthal) 208–10, 237–8, 240–6, 250–1 Eliot, T.S. 283–4 on Heywood 114 ‘Marina’ (poem) 145–6 and Senecan influences 61 n., 111–12, 120 n. 11, 121 n. 15 on Shakespeare’s Othello 130 n. Elizabethan period 99–100, 117–49, 120–3 Ellard, John 330 n. 96 Ellis, Helen E. 297 n. 34 Ellman, Richard 171 n. 73 Empire, Roman 54–5 English translations 179–81 epilepsy 18, 30, 31, 96–7, 98 epiphany 30–4 Erasmus 99 Euripides 1–2, 5 see also Herakles (Mainomenos) Euripides and his age (Murray) 151–2 evil and good 65 Ewans, Michael 240–1, 246 n. 113 Ewbank, Inga-Stina 106–7, 122, 356–7 external madness 30–1, 37, 45, 308–9 Eysoldt, Gertrude 240 Falkner, Thomas 47 n. 111 ‘falling sickness’ 99, 100–1 Farkas, Reinhardt 247 Farnaby, Thomas 98–9 feminism 307, 308

392

Index

filicide see murder film 279, 286, 342–3 Fitch, John G. 52 n. 1, 56 n. 12, 57 n. 17, 62, 65, 74, 85, 88, 318 Fitzgerald, G.J. 38 n. 87, 42 n. 97 Flashar, Hellmut 219, 220 Foley, Helene 44 n. 102 Foucault, Michel 357 Freud, Sigmund 208, 219, 234–5, 238 friendship see philia Fulham, Mary 348–9 Furley, David J. 19 n. 24 furor see madness Galinsky, G. Karl 20, 54 n. 9, 61 n. 22, 107, 302 Gardner, Lyn 318 n. 74, 319 n. 74, 322 Gardner, W.H. 197 n. 60 Georgian era 147–8 Gianakaris, C.J. 284, 288 Gilliam, Bryan Randolph 241 n. 97 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 159–60, 246 Goldhill, Simon 231–2, 241 n. 97 good and evil 65 Good, Maeve 267 Gosse, Sir Edmund 174–5 Granville-Barker, Harley 216 Gray, A. 179–80 Green, Martin 254 Greene, John 102–3 Greene, Robert 104–5, 141–2 Gregory, Justina 19, 28 Grene, David 290 n. 25 Griffiths, Trevor R. 103 n. 24 Grivelet, Michael 101 n. 19 Groatsworth of Wit (Greene) 104–5 Grube, G.M.A. 215 Gru¨nder, Karlfried 165 n. 50 Guy, John 119 Hall, Edith 9, 10–11, 52, 310, 315 n. 73 hallucinations: Armitage’s Mister Heracles 320 Euripides’ Herakles 34, 37, 38 Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy 129–30 MacLeish’s Herakles 300 Seneca’s Hercules 80–3 Shakespeare’s Macbeth 133

hamartia 18, 29, 64, 295 Hammelmann, Hanns 240 n. 92 Harbage, Alfred 106 n. 40, 111 n. 53 Hardwick, Lorna 12 n. 22, 193–4 Harrison, Tony 198, 340–2 Hart-Davis, Rupert 188 n. 19 Hartigan, Karelisa V. 37 Hasell, Elizabeth 185 n. 4 Helfand, Michael 188 n. 19 Hellenism 151–4, 160–3 Hellenistic period 46, 48 Henrichs, Albert 163–6 Henry, Denis 63 Hera 24, 31–3, 324 n. 84 see also Juno Herakles (Carson) 310–12 ‘Herakles complex’ 8 see also Herakles (MacLeish); Mister Heracles (Armitage) Herakles (Lodge) 258–67, 272 n. 42 Herakles (MacLeish) 281, 306 madness 291, 295–7, 307, 309 the published version 292–8 and science 285–8 stage productions 288–92, 304–7 Herakles (Mainomenos) (Euripides) 1 appearance of Herakles 24–30 awakening 38–40 Bahr on 236–7 epiphany 30–4 history of performances 3–4, 279–81, 358–67 madness 5, 14, 17, 24–5, 30–8, 77, 78, 80–1 rehabilitation 40–5 and Seneca’s Hercules 89 and Shakespeare’s King Lear 143–4 and Shakespeare’s Othello 125–6 structure of the play 15–24 see also Browning; individual characters Herakles (Rhinthon of Syracuse) 46–7 Herakles (Scheib) 343–4 Herakles via Phaedra (Stewart) 349–50 Herakles (Waterfield) 310 Herakles (Wedekind) 273–8 Herakles (Wilamowitz) 7, 207, 208 madness 18, 30, 210–16 Viennese Herakles 221–6, 223

Index Hercules Furens (Heywood) 111–14 Hercules Furens (not Seneca’s) 101–2 Hercules Furens (Seneca) 5–6 anagno¯risis 84–8, 122, 134, 140 compared to Tamburlaine 127–8 and Heywood’s The Brazen Age 107–8 history of the play 51–2 Juno’s prologue 63–76 madness in 5–6, 52–5, 76–84, 122 and melancholia 98–9 rehabilitation 88–91 and Roman emperors 55–61 and Shakespeare’s Macbeth 131–6 and Shakespeare’s Othello 123–6 see also individual characters Hercules in High Suburbia (Fulham) 348–9 Hercules Oetaeus (Seneca) 51–2 Hercules Oetaeus (Studley) 104, 106–11 Hercules (Walt Disney Pictures) 342–3 heresy 18–19, 168 Hermann, Gottfried 175–6 heroism 40, 43–4, 308–12 Herrick, M.T. 120 n. 12 Herzog, Werner 279 Heywood, Jasper 104, 111–14 Heywood, Thomas 101–2, 106–9 Hieronimo 129–31 Hippocrates 31 n. 63, 97 Hippocratic Corpus 31 n. 63, 96–8 Hippocratic humoral theory 96, 98, 99, 215 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 7, 219 Bacchae 249–50 and Bahr 237–9, 246–8, 250–1 and Browning’s influence 249 Elektra 208–10, 237–8, 240–8, 250–1 Ho¨lderlin, Friedrich 198–9 Home Front (Algie) 8, 350–7, 354 Hood, Thurman L. 186 n. 7 Horace 69 humanization 24, 29, 45, 191, 253 see also dehumanization humoral theory 96, 98, 99, 215 Hunter, G.K. 120 n. 11, 121–2 Hutcheon, Linda 12 Hutchinson, J.T. 179–80 Hyams, Kenneth 330 n. 96 hydra 345–6

393

impersonation of Hercules 58–60 in bivio 94, 115 infectious pollution 41–2 injustice 3, 5, 21 n. 31, 22, 33 Iraq 334 Iris 31, 316 Armitage’s 317–19 Browning’s 202 Euripides’ 20, 30 n. 62, 31–5 isolationism 137, 139–40 Izenberg, Gerald N. 275 Jaffe, Dan 303 n. 46 James, C. 44 n. 105 Jeffords, Susan 308 Jenkyns, Richard 152–3, 155 n. 16, 163 Johnson, Francis R. 120 n. 11 Johnson, W.R. 54 n. 9 Jones, Edgar 330 n. 96 Jones, Ernest 219 n. 39, 220 n. 29 Juno 63–76, 123–4, 130, 294 see also Hera Jupiter 128–9 see also Zeus justice 3, 5, 21 n. 31, 22, 33 Kallinikos 8, 21 Kamerbeek, J.C. 18, 215–16 Karlin, Daniel 190 Keble, John 158 Keeley, Edmund 297 n. 37 Kenyon, F.G. 189, 196, 198, 202 Kerrigan, John 120 n. 11 Kiefer, Frederick 120 n. 11 Kindness, John 344 King Lear (Shakespeare) 142–5, 147, 338–9 King, Roma A. 183, 189 Kitto, H.D.F. 16 n. 5 Kossatz-Deissmann, Anneliese 31 n. 64 Kraus, Christina 20 n. 27, 34 n. 73 Kyd, Thomas 129–30 Labourers of Herakles, The (Harrison) 340–2 labours: Euripides’s Herakles 20–1, 24, 27–8, 42 MacLeish’s Herakles 287–8, 291 and madness 49 Seneca’s Hercules Furens 75–6, 89–90 Wedekind’s Herakles 274–5

394

Index

Lange, Hartmut 188 n. 18, 279 Latttimore, Richmond 290 n. 25 Lawall, Gilbert 64–5 Lawton, William Cranston 196, 205 Lee, Kevin 18, 28, 31, 41–2 Lewis, C.S. 111, 112 Lewis, Ward B. 273 Lichas 108–10, 148 n. 72 Licht, Fred 149 n. 73 Lincoln, Bruce 32 n. linguistics 20 n. 27, 27 n. 55, 35 n. 74, 37 lion’s skins 85, 142, 340–1 Litzinger, Boyd 186 n. 6 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh 31 n. 64, 165 n. 50 Lodge, George Cabot 7–8, 253–66, 272 n. 42 loss of self 8 Armitage’s Mister Heracles 319 Bahr on 209, 230–1, 236–7 Bennett’s The Madness of George III 339–40 Euripides’ Herakles 14 Hofmannsthal on 239–46 Lucas, F.L. 120, 120 n. 11 Lycus: Armitage’s 314 Euripides’ 15, 20, 21, 26, 38 n. 87 in the Renaissance 95 Seneca’s 61 n. 23, 74–6, 83, 86 Lyssa 3 Armitage’s 316–20 Bahr on 227–8 Browning’s 200–3 on calyx-krater 48 Carson’s 310–12 Euripides’ 14, 20, 30–7, 77–8, 316 Seneca’s 6 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 131–6 McCusker, Jane A. 189 McDonald, Mary Francis 70 n. McDowell, R.B. 169 Macintosh, Fiona 10–11, 12, 147 n. 69, 153 n. 12, 154 n. 14, 216 n. 31, 219 n. 39, 267 n. 34 MacLeish, Archibald 8, 216, 281–5, 293 see also Herakles (MacLeish) McLeish, Kenneth 309 Madness see Lyssa

madness: Algie’s Home Front 352–3 Armitage’s Mister Hercules 316–21, 329–30 Bennett’s Madness of George III 338–40 Browning’s Herakles 205 cures for 142 Euripides’ Herakles 5, 14, 17, 24–5, 30–8, 77, 78, 80–1 external 30–1, 37, 45, 308–9 Foucault on 357 Harrison’s The Labourers of Herakles 340, 341–2 Heywood’s Hercules Furens 113 internalized 53–5, 64, 327, 340, 353 Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy 129–30 and labours 49–50 linguistic 20 n. 27 Lodge’s Herakles 266–7 MacLeish’s Herakles 295, 300 Madness of Herakles (calyx-krater) 47, 48 Madness of Hercules (Turchi) 115 Ovid’s Metamorphoses 106 ‘seeds of madness’ theory 30, 210–16, 281 Seneca’s Hercules Furens 52–5, 64, 76–84 Studley’s Hercules Oetaeus 106–11, 109 today’s definition of 4–5, 64–5 and virtue 92–6 Wilamowitz’s Herakles 18, 210–16, 228–30 Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand 267–8, 272 see also loss of self; Lyssa; murder Madness of George III, The (Bennett) 338–40 Madness of Herakles (calyx-krater) 47, 48 Madness of Hercules (Turchi) 115 Mahaffy, John Pentland 7, 168–71, 184, 187–8 Mania 48 see also Lyssa manus 134 Marlowe, Christopher 104, 127–8 Marston, John 100–1, 141 Martens, Lorna 237 n. 85, 238 n. 87 Martindale, Charles 9–10, 120 n. 11 ‘Medea syndrome/complex’ 324–5

Index Megara: Algie’s 351, 352 Armitage’s 314 on calyx-krater 48 Walt Disney Productions’ 342, 343 Euripides’ 18–19, 315, 315 poem by Theocritus 46 in sculpture 149 as seen in the Renaissance 95 ‘Megara’ (Theocritus) 46 melancholia 96–101 mental illness see madness messengers: Armitage’s 320–1 Euripides’ 34, 36 Studley’s 106 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 70–2, 101 n. 20, 106, 108–9, 324 n. 84 Michelini, Ann Norris 22–3, 27, 152, 213 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) 103–5 Miles, Geoffrey 105 n. 38, 120 n. 11, 266 militarism 307, 314, 315, 321–6, 325–37 Milner, Larry S. 324 Miola, Robert S.: on Senecan influence 120 n. 11, 122, 134 n. 45, 145 on Shakespeare 103 on weapons 89 mistaken identities 109, 122, 141, 334, 352 Mister Heracles (Armitage) 216, 312–21, 315, 327–8, 334 Modernism 151, 208–9, 231–3, 241, 282 Mott, George 60 n. 20 Motto, Anna Lydia 64–5, 76–7, 79, 89 n. Moxom, Philip Stafford 199 Mueller, Martin 61 n. 22 Muir, Kenneth 120 n. 11, 133 n. 40, 134 n. 45 murder: Algie’s Home Front 355–6 Armitage’s Mister Heracles 314, 319, 328, 334 Euripides’ Herakles 20, 34–8 and the Herakles complex 279–80 Lycus’ 38 n. 87, 74–6 Macleish’s Herakles 291, 295–7, 307, 309

395

Megara (Theocritus) 46 modern profile of 321–5, 334–5 Seneca’s Hercules Furens 5–6, 74–6, 83–4 Yeat’s On Bailes’s Stand 267–8 Murphy, Tom 344 n. 17, 345 n. 17 Murray, Gilbert 151–2, 157 n. 22, 182, 214, 225 Naevius 49–50 Natural Theatricals 304–5 Neely, Carol Thomas 99 n. 14 Nees, Lawrence 110 Nero Claudius Caesar 50, 55, 57–8, 62, 80 n., 84 n. Nervenkunst 7, 208, 234–5, 240, 250 Newman, Francis William 194–5 Nicolaus of Damascus 48–9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 163–6, 265 n. 27 Norwood, Gilbert 214 Odes (Horace) 69 oikos 25, 26 n. 49 O’Keefe, John J. 111 n. 55 Oliphant, Margaret 186, 187 On Baile’s Strand (Yeats) 267–72 opera 115–16, 240–1 Orlando Furioso (Greene) 141–2 Osers, Ewald 240 n. 92 Othello (Shakespeare) 123–6, 130 n. Ovid 70–2, 101 n. 20, 106, 108–9, 324 n. 84 Padel, Ruth 14, 31 n. 64, 36 painting 115 Paley, Frederick Apthorp 178–9 palinode theory 158 Pallas Athene 30 n. 61, 38, 78 Panofsky, E. 94 ‘Passion-versus-Restraint’ 88 Pater, Walter 158 paternity 19, 21 Pavolini, P.C. 258, 259, 272 n. 42 peace, prayers for an impossible 79–80, 81 performance reception 9–13 performances of Herakles 3–4, 6–7, 10–11, 208, 221–6, 279–81, 358–67

396

Index

Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Shakespeare) 145–6 Peyre´, Yves 131 n. 36 philia 44 n. 101 Algie’s Home Front 355–6 Armitage’s Mister Heracles 335, 336 Euripides’ Herakles 5, 8, 17, 40–1, 90, 140, 335 Shakespeare’s Coriolanus 139–40 Shakespeare’s King Lear 143 Shakespeare’s Macbeth 136 Pindar 27 polis 25, 26 n. 49 political influences 60–3, 90, 118–19 Pollard, Tanya 142 n. Poole, Adrian 135, 185 n. 4 Porter, David H. 294–5 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 323, 330, 334–5, 353 prayers 79–80, 81, 117, 300, 332, 346 Prins, Yopie 185 n. 4, 196–7 prologue of Juno 63–76 Raeburn, David 23 n. 41 Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (Anonymous) 141–2 Reading school play 366–7 Rebellato, Dan 156 n. 21 reception see performance reception red herring theory 22–3, 27 rehabilitation 40–5, 88–91, 325–37 Reid, Jane Davidson 94 n. 3, 153 n. 11 Renaissance 6, 92–116, 120 n. 11 Restoration period 146–7 revenge 74–5, 81 Rhinthon of Syracuse 46 Riggs, Thomas, Jr. 265–6 Ring and the Book, The (Browning) 183 Roberts, Adam 185 n. 4, 190 Rolfe, William J. 104 n. 28 Roman period 49–50, 55–60, 62, 101–2 Romantics 153, 154 Romilly, Jacqueline de 44 n. 105 Roswell, Robert 330 n. 96 Ruck, Carl A.P. 18 n. 16, 331 Rutter, Carol Chillington 341 n. 9 Ryals, Clyde de L. 191–2, 195

Salingar, L.G. 283–4 Salkeld, Duncan 4–5, 98 n. 14 Scheib, Jay 343–4 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 15 n. 4, 154–60, 170 Schlesier, Renate 34 n. 73 Schmidt-Dengler, Wendelin 249 n. 118 Schneider, Alan 296–7 Schorske, Carl E. 208 science 285–8, 299, 302–3 Scobie, Ruth 59 n. 20 sculpture 148, 167 Seaford, Richard 34 n. 73 ‘seeds of madness’ theory 30, 210–16, 281 Seferis, George 297–8 self 130 Algie’s Home Front 355 divine 140, 255–7 Elizabethan period 117–49 Heywood’s The Brazen Age 108 image 86 Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy 130 loss of 8, 209, 230–1 Armitage’s Mister Heracles 319 Bahr on 236–7 Bennett’s The Madness of George III 339–40 Herakles (Euripides) 14 Hofmannsthal on 239–46 Seneca’s Hercules Furens 86 Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream 105 Shakespeare’s King Lear 144–5 Shakespeare’s Macbeth 131–3 self-divinity 255 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 5–6, 51–2, 111–16, 120–3, 120 n. 11 see also Hercules Furens Shakespeare, William 119–20 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 103–5 Coriolanus 136–40 King Lear 142–5, 147, 338–9 Macbeth 131–6 madness 105–6 Othello 123–6, 130 n. Seneca’s influence on 122 Share, Don 106 n. 40 Shay, Jonathan 330–3

Index Shelton, Jo Ann 63–4, 67–8 Sheppard, J.T. 17 Sherrard, Philip 297 n. 37 Silk, Michael: on the divine man 2–3, 127 n. 30, 252 on madness 19 on Nietzsche 165 n. 52, 265 n. 27 sleep 38–9, 78, 99, 122, 141, 142 Sleigh, Tom 309–10 Smalley, Donald 186 n. 6, 189–90 Smith, Philip E. 188 n. 19 Soellner, Rolf 95, 99, 122–3 Somer, Richard F. 284 Somerville, H. 124, 133 Sophocles 153, 155, 162, 198–9 Southworth, John 104 n. 32 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd) 129–30 Spearing, E.M. 111 n. 55 spears 26–7, 39, 313 Stahl, Hans-Peter 54 n. 9 Stambler, Bernard 62 Stanford, W.B. 169, 197 Steiner, George 198 Stern, J.P. 164 n. 46, 165 n. 52, 265 n. 27 Stewart, Ellen 349–50 stichomythia 39, 87, 120, 203 Strauss, Richard 240–2 structural unity of Euripides’ Herakles 5, 15–24, 228 Studien u¨ber Hysterie (Freud) 238 Studley, John 104 Suetonius 50, 57–8 suicide 44, 45, 53, 88, 125, 131 Superman 273–8 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 174–5 Symonds, John Addington 157 n. 22, 166–8, 186 Tamburlaine the Great (Marlowe) 104, 119, 126–9, 127–8 Taplin, Oliver 30 n. 62 Tarrant, R.J. 52 n. 1 Taylor, A.B. 120 n. 11 theios ane¯r 2, 252 Theobald, William 120 n. 11 Theocritus 46 Theodulf of Orle´ans 69 n. 50, 109–10 Theseus: Algie’s 352, 353, 354, 355

397

Armitage’s 327, 335 Browning’s 204–5 Euripides’ 40–2 MacLeish’s 290, 301–2 Mahaffy on 170 Oscar Wilde on 173 n. 84 Seneca’s 53, 61–2, 87, 88–9 Stewart’s 349 Thomas, Richard 9 Tisdel, Frederick Monroe 190–1 Trendall, A.D. 31 n. 64 triumphs, Roman 72–3 Turchi, Alessandro 115 Turner, Frank M. 160 n. 33, 161 twentieth-century performances 279–81 unity 5, 15–24, 228 Valpy, Richard 7, 366 Velz, John W. 104, 120 n. 11 Verrall, A.W. 212–13 veterans 325–37, 350 Victorian period 151–4 Viennese Herakles (Wilamowitz) 221–31, 223 Virgil 54, 72 virtue 92–6 Vocht, H. de 111 n. 55 Von Staden, Heinrich 97 Waith, Eugene M. 110 n. 52, 126, 137, 147 n. 70 Walker, B. 63 Wallace, Jennifer 153 n. 8 Waller, Willard 325–6 Walt Disney Pictures 342–3 Ward, Philip 249 Waterfield, Robin 310 weapons: Algie’s Home Front 353 Armitage’s Mister Heracles 335 Euripides’ Herakles 39, 42–3, 125 Home Front (Algie) 355 Seneca’s Hercules 89, 125, 335–6 Webb, Timothy 153 n. 10, 11 Webster, T.B.L. 31 n. 64 Wedekind, Frank 8, 273–8 Wells, Henry W. 120 n. 11 Weltanschauung (Seneca) 52

398

Index

Wharton, Edith 254 wheeled platform 322 n. 77 Wignall, Stephen 330 n. 96 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von 163–6, 177, 218–21 Herakles 18, 30, 207, 208, 221–6, 223, 281 influence on Hofmannsthal 246–8 on the madness of Herakles 210–16 Wilbrandt, Adolf 216 n. 30, 218–19 Wilde, Oscar 7, 171–4, 188 Willink, C.W. 38 n. 88 Wilson, Peter 34 n. 73, 36 Wolfe, Christian 310

Xenoclea 295–7, 307 Yates, W.E. 245 Yeats, W.B., On Baile’s Strand 267–72 Yoshitake, Sumio 44 n. 105 Young, David P. 104 Zeitlin, Froma I. 34 n. 73 Zeus: Algie’s 351 Euripides’ 19, 25, 41, 143 n. 58, 328 Walt Disney Productions’ 342 see also Jupiter Zwierlen, Otto 52 n. 1