̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - tragedy

Reinventing tragedy in the modern age

bjb42 — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:00:47 +0000

This year's Cambridge series at the Hay Festival will include a debate about how we make “good tragedy” today.

Taking part are Professor Adrian Poole, Professor Alison Sinclair and Jennifer Wallace. ̽��ֱ��debate is just one of five panel discussions organised by the ̽��ֱ�� for the Festival, which this year celebrates its 25th anniversary. ̽��ֱ��series also includes a number of stand-alone talks by Cambridge academics, including Professor Susan Golombok and Professor Lawrence Sherman.

It is the fourth year for the Cambridge series at Hay, which takes place from 31st May to 10th June, and the first time it has included panel discussions on a range of contemporary issues. Professor Poole, who has taught an undergraduate course on tragedy for many years and is author of Tragedy: a Very Short Introduction, says Aristotle set out to answer the question of what makes good tragedy when he composed his influential handbook, ̽��ֱ��Poetics. He says: “For Aristotle, 'tragedy' mainly meant a form of drama, though it also connoted a kind of story, of which Homer's Iliad was exemplary. ̽��ֱ��answers to this question are bound to look very different in 2012.

“We have many more ways of telling stories in words, sounds and visual images than were available to the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare and Racine, and of disseminating them to audiences around the world, now at the press of a button – all of which will have some impact on our ability to make - and respond to - 'good tragedy'.”

Jennifer Wallace, author of ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy, says that the media and the public still tend to respond to tragic events in ways that echo the age-old traditions which go back to Greek tragedy, for instance, turning horror into narrative and seeking an explanation for events by telling individuals' stories. However, she says Aristotle's notion of catharsis is much more problematic now and can be hard to justify.

She says: “Aristotle implies that through witnessing tragedy, we purge ourselves or gain relief. This suggests tragedy has some moral or therapeutic function in society. But is there such a phenomenon now as "compassion fatigue" or "tragedy porn"? Is it still possible to consider witnessing others' suffering morally improving or enriching?”

For Alison Sinclair, professor of modern Spanish literature and intellectual history, our continuing fascination with the tragedies of others and the popular media's obsession with offering up disaster for consumption opens up interesting questions about the fine line we often tread between thrill and horror. “I am intrigued by why we are moved to consume such stories. While they may not qualify as cathartic our consumption of them raises interesting issues about our experience, and our experience of our experience, that it might be difficult to confront.”

She says 20th century Spanish writers like Federico Garcia Lorca and Ramon del Valle- Inclán grappled with the need to reinvent tragedy for a modern audience. Lorca sought to meld elements of Greek tragedy with contemporary social realities in plays such as Blood Wedding, she says, but arguably either avoided catharsis or undercut it. By contrast, Valle-Inclán theorised in 1920 that a new form was needed to replace tragedy. “ ̽��ֱ��aim,” she says, “was to interrupt the processes of identification and/or catharsis, the point of this being to free the spectator, or indeed to force the spectator, not to feel, but to think, both about what is on the stage, but also about the implications for him or herself.”

Jennifer Wallace adds: "In an era of 24/7 news and constant potential exposure to tragedies around the globe through the internet, it may be paradoxically difficult to focus the kind of active, sympathetic attention on suffering which dramatists could do in the past. Does that matter? Is the capacity to make what might be termed a 'good tragedy' the hallmark of human civilisation, or an indication of a humane society?"

For more information on the Cambridge series at the Hay Festival and to find out about booking, click here.

Is tragedy the perfect dramatic form for our current predicament? Or has the classic idea of catharsis through viewing the suffering of others become much more problematic in an age of 24/7 news and the internet? An event at this year's Hay Festival will investigate.

Is there such a phenomenon now as "compassion fatigue" or "tragedy porn"? Is it still possible to consider witnessing others' suffering morally improving or enriching?

Jennifer Wallace

Jeff Rozwadowski, Creative Commons

Tragedy.

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Shakespeare's medieval world

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A number of universities have chairs in early modern literature, a few in Middle English; Cambridge is unusual in combining the two, in the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English originally set up for C.S. Lewis. His example of working across the periods has been followed by many of its later occupants, even though most scholars are cautious about crossing the invisible boundary between them. As the current holder of the Chair, I was delighted to be commissioned to write a book on Shakespeare and the Medieval World. Although we think of Shakespeare as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, his world was still largely a medieval one.

Subtle glimpses of a changing time

Research is most often a process of discovering what’s there. That may be achieved by new technology, from Galileo’s telescope to the electron microscope, or simply by looking at things from a new angle or seeing them differently. Shakespeare’s medieval world is of the second kind.

We have, for instance, a number of early 17th-century engravings of London that are regularly reproduced in histories of the early modern city or books on Elizabethan drama. Apart from the newly-built theatres on the south bank, however, almost everything in the pictures is medieval: the great hulk of old St Paul’s towering over the city, the serrated skyline of the towers and spires of the parish churches, the bridge (completed in 1209) with its display of traitors’ heads, William the Conqueror’s Tower. They show, in fact, not so much ‘Shakespeare’s London’ as ‘Medieval London in the age of Shakespeare’.

Staging the world

̽��ֱ��same principles apply to drama. Many of the great cycles of Biblical mystery plays, which we think of as medieval, continued to be performed until half-way through Queen Elizabeth’s reign, a couple of them (both now lost) into the reign of King James I. Coventry, not far from Stratford, had one of the best known; it was last performed in 1579, when Shakespeare was 14 years old. His plays contain a number of allusions to the cycle plays – ‘out-Heroding Herod’ is the most famous of them – and most of them bear a particularly close relationship to what is known of the Coventry cycle. It can’t be proved that he saw it, but of the many unknowns in his life, that he did so is one of the safer conjectures.

̽��ֱ��cycle plays, furthermore, offered a model of theatre that was at the opposite extreme from the Classical Latin drama that was taught in the schools and imitated by humanist playwrights. It was insistently inclusive. ̽��ֱ��motto traditionally ascribed to the Globe, ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem’ (something between ‘all the world’s a stage’ and ‘everyone acts a part’), declared that the theatre was as large as the world: the maxim first appears in the 12th-century writer John of Salisbury, whose works were regularly reprinted in the Renaissance and were known, among others, to Ben Jonson.

̽��ֱ��theorists might insist that kings and clowns should never share a stage, but it was the very point of the Biblical plays that both kings and shepherds came to the newborn Christ. They did not separate out comedy and tragedy, both newly-imported terms: they offered an all-embracing play, in which black humour and deep grief could mix in the Passion sequences. They had no qualms about presenting a vast range of time and space on stage, from the Fall of the Angels to the Last Judgement, in ways that can make Shakespeare’s embrace of Rome and Egypt within a single play, or a time span that allows for babies to grow to adulthood, seem quite modest. And above all, they acted their action. Classical and humanist drama relied on messengers to report what was happening outside the single location it allowed itself, and especially any kind of violence. Medieval and Shakespearean drama performed it, blood and all.

Those ideas are so familiar now – so much part of what plays do – that it is easy to forget how much they needed to be asserted. Some, such as the mixing of tragedy and comedy, incited bitter hostility among Elizabethan theorists and have continued to cause unease for much longer (hence the notion of ‘comic relief’: it’s more complicated, and more profound, than that). ̽��ֱ��dramatists for the public theatres, like their medieval forebears, assumed that the stage had the same freedom of representation that we now accord to the cinema screen. No one expects the screen to obey the Aristotelean principles for the stage rediscovered around 1500 – that it should show only one place, or that the action shown on it should approximate to real time; both are possible, but exceptional. Medieval principles of theatre gave Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights the freedom that the neo-Classicists wanted to forbid.

What Shakespeare read

‘Medieval Shakespeare’ extends not just to his theatre, but to his reading, and to what he wrote about. Not only his plays on English history, but Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear draw on history or legendary history as it was carried forward from the Middle Ages.

̽��ֱ��story of Hamlet was first written down around 1200, and was in oral tradition before that. Lear was invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain(c. 1136), and Holinshed’s great Chronicles, the Elizabethans’ encylopaedic history of their real and supposed past, took the story from there. Lear’s Tom o’ Bedlam quotes from a folktale, and from one of the medieval verse romances that in cheap print provided the 16th century with much of its pulp fiction. ̽��ֱ��Trojan Troilus and Cressida draws on Chaucer and Caxton much more than on Homer; Chaucer is the sole source for ̽��ֱ��Two Noble Kinsmen, a collaboration with John Fletcher, and is the major inspiration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower, whose tomb faces the grave of Shakespeare’s brother in what was once the parish church for the Globe and is now Southwark Cathedral, is both the source for the story of Pericles and appears on stage as its presenter. Around half of Shakespeare’s plays have direct or indirect medieval sources, and they are a minor presence in many more.

None of this means that Shakespeare was a medieval writer: he changed everything he touched, whether inherited or new. But it is only possible to measure what he achieved, or even to see it clearly, when we recognise how much the Middle Ages gave the world’s greatest playwright to work on.

For more information, contact Professor Helen Cooper (ehc31@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of English or Magdalene College.

Medieval culture pervaded Shakespeare's life and work. Professor Helen Cooper examines its influence on the work of the world's greatest playwright.

Although we think of Shakespeare as quintessentially belonging to the English Renaissance, his world was still largely a medieval one.

Professor Helen Cooper

ell brown from Flickr

Statue of William Shakespeare at the centre of Leicester Square Gardens, London

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Greek tragedy: setting the stage today

tdk25 — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Every three years since 1882, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge students have brought ancient Greek tragedies to life again through their performances in the Cambridge Greek Play, a showcase of theatrical and academic expertise that is spoken entirely in the original language.

̽��ֱ��first play – Sophocles’ Ajax – was, as the publicity of 1882 boasted, the first full performance of a Greek tragedy in ancient Greek in the modern world, and the show roused extraordinary interest. It was reviewed in all the national newspapers, and special trains had to be put on from London to bring the fashionistas up to Cambridge to see the event of the season. England was still in the grip of an intense ‘philhellenic’ love of all things Greek; classics took up 80% of the curriculum at the best schools and universities; the neo-classical paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton drew crowds of thousands; Greek love was the ‘dirty secret’ of the fin-de-siècle decadents. For Victorian England, the Cambridge Greek Play represented a rare chance to see an art form that featured vividly in the cultural imagination.

Archaeological accuracy really mattered to the Victorian audience – the play had to embody the best scholarship, the most recent research. In 1882, this was ensured by the involvement of the world-famous Greek scholar Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Regius Professor of Greek. This connection with research continues today, with a thriving academic interest that both feeds into and benefits from the performances. What can the surviving plays tell us of ancient Athenian society? How can we know how to pronounce a long-dead language? How can the ancient world inform our understanding of the modern world? What is at stake when Greek tragedy is staged in the theatre today, and how are its most difficult problems to be faced? It is this final question that has been of particular interest to me – how audiences might see ancient Greek theatre accurately realised on stage again, 2500 years after it was born in Athens.

Resurging interest

That first astounding show in 1882 heralded one of the most surprising developments in modern western theatre. Since the turn of the 20th century, ancient Greek plays have become part of the repertoire of all modern theatres and, since the 1970s, there has been the most remarkable explosion of performances of Greek tragedy across the world – not just in Europe and the USA, but also in Japan and Africa and Russia. In London, Paris and New York, almost no year goes by without a revival of one of these classics. In 2001 alone, there were 17 productions of Aeschylus’ great trilogy the Oresteia in the USA, which is more than there were in the whole world in the first 65 years of the 19th century. In London, three separate productions of Sophocles’ Electra were staged over a few months. When theatre director Peter Sellars wanted to stage his anguish at the Gulf War in the early 1990s, he turned to Aeschylus’ Persians – in California, Edinburgh and Austria. There is no sign of this growth slowing, on campus or in the professional theatre. Greek tragedy seems once again to speak urgently and authoritatively to a modern audience.

A voice in modern times

Why does Greek tragedy speak to us today? As with the 5th century BC, our age is an era of great confidence in the progress of science and knowledge: Greek tragedy ruthlessly exposes the pretensions in human claims to control and certainty. As with the 5th century BC, our age is obsessed with the tension between the brutal realities of war and the rhetoric of politicians: Greek tragedy anatomises this tension with painful insight. Moreover, Greek tragedy is obsessed with conflict between the genders, between public and private duty, between self-control and a sense of helplessness in the face of the world’s violence: all this too finds a powerful echo with modern audiences.

Staging Greek tragedies

It is far from clear how these great masterpieces of theatre should be translated from the page into the theatre. When the genre first flourished between 500 and 300 BC, the convention was for actors to wear specially crafted masks. All the actors were male, with a limit on how many could appear on stage at one time, and the chorus had to be composed of Athenian citizens.

How can the old conventions of the chorus work without looking like a Hollywood musical? Can masks evoke anything but bad clowns for today’s theatre? Is Greek tragedy destined to be crushed by its own formality, and end up as no more than men in black yelling portentous clichés at each other?

̽��ֱ��book How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today stems first from my research into ancient theatre and the history of theatre performance: I have been engaged for many years with exploring the political and social impact of theatre in ancient Athens, as well as with how these old plays became so important in the cultural life of Europe, especially around the turn of the

20th century. But my concerns in this book also come from a more direct set of experiences. I have been deeply moved by some great performances in the theatre; I have also been annoyed, bored, outraged by others. I wanted to explore why so many productions failed, and why the truly great productions were great.

I also had the hands-on experience of producing the Cambridge Greek Play over 12 years, with two outstanding directors – Dr Jane Montgomery, who was the Leventis Visiting Fellow in Greek Drama, and Annie Castledine, from the Complicite Theatre Company and who has also directed at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Seeing how professional theatre is made at the ‘down-and-dirty’ level is not something most academics are privileged to do, and anyone who writes about theatre can learn a lot from such an experience. But the immediate stimulus to write my book was when I was asked to provide some suggestions for Vanessa Redgrave to read about tragedy – she was rehearsing a production of Hecuba at the time. I found to my chagrin (and to the detriment of my dignity as a Cambridge professor) that there was nothing I could really recommend to an intelligent modern actor or director to help them when daunted by the task of performing Greek tragedy. So I sat down and wrote what I hope will answer that need.

I examine the six most pressing questions any company faces with the task of staging a Greek tragedy: the theatre space, the chorus, the actor’s role, the relationship between tragedy and politics, the translation, and the representation of the gods and heroes.

I look at what we can learn from the ancient world about these issues, how the most successful modern productions have dealt with them, and how a company can negotiate a way through some of the most difficult problems these texts provide.

My hope is that actors and directors embarking on the journey of staging a Greek play might have some guidance. I hope too that, for the reader wishing to know more about these truly remarkable plays and their extraordinary re-emergence on modern stages, this might inspire them to consider what makes Greek tragedy so exciting and so relevant a genre today.

‘Simon Goldhill’s new book is enthralling. A ‘can’t put down’ and a ‘forever re-read’. His detailed analyses of so many past productions are rare and exciting. His unfolding of the Greek texts and the many different translations is both instructive and exhilarating.’

Vanessa Redgrave CBE, actress

For more information, please contact the author Professor Simon Goldhill (sdg1001@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Classics. How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today is published by ̽��ֱ�� of Chicago Press.

With the curtains just closed on the 40th Cambridge Greek Play since the 1880s, Greek classicist Simon Goldhill reflects on how this creative genre still speaks to a modern audience.

His detailed analyses of so many past productions are rare and exciting. His unfolding of the Greek texts and the many different translations is both instructive and exhilarating.

Vanessa Redgrave CBE,actress

Cambridge Greek Play Committee

Olga Tribulato as Tiresias and Marta Zlatic as Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, 2004

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Yes