Tom Roper's Weblog

Actum, sodales, ob tempus praeteritum tempus

I shall probably not be awake at midnight, so let me wish everyone a happy new year now. Since one of my abiding memories of 2015 is singing Auld Lang Syne, stone cold sober, in the early afternoon in an Edinburgh University lecture theatre at the EAHIL workshop, I offer below Auld Lang Syne in Latin, by a Canadian Latinist, Harry C Maynard.  

Num amicorum veterum
decet oblivisci?
Annorum heu fugacium
et temporis acti?

CHORUS
Actum, sodales, ob tempus
praeteritum tempus,
priusquam discesserimus,
manus iungamus.

Flores olim decerpsimus
ludentes in pratis,
sed aspera peragravimus
diebus ex illis.
CHORUS

Et agebamus vacuos
dies ad rivulum;
sed dividit iam diu nos
aequor undosum.
CHORUS

I discovered this at http://gaudium-mundo.blogspot.co.uk/2006/12/auld-lang-syne.html and the original translation, with others, may be found at  http://www.poslarchive.com/math/misc/latin-carols.html

Out, vile jelly! Hecuba: the 2012 King's College London Greek play

Euripides' Hecuba is not often performed. I'm not sure why. Euripides also dealt with the aftermath of the sack of Troy in Andromache, and in the Trojan Women, which seem to appeal most to modern taste. The Archices of Performance of Greek and Roman Drama (whose database is being rebuilt) lists no British productions in the original since 1827. So it was bold of King's College London, and the director, Roseanne Long, to put the play on as their 2012 production, and equally courageous of the young cast, not all of them classicists, to act in a difficult and in some cases unfamiliar language.

It is a revenge play. At the end. the body count consists of Hecuba's daughter Polyxena, sacrificed to appease the ghost of Achilles and to secure a wind to blow the Greek ships off the Thracian coast, and her son Polydorus, whose ghost introduces the action, murdered by Polymestor for the Trojan gold he has brought with him. Hecuba seeks no revenge for Polyxena, but, with the Trojan women, lures Polymestor and his children into her tent, killing them and blinding their father with their brooch-pins. His eyes streaming with blood, Polymestor prophesies that Agamemmnon and Cassandra, Hecuba's other surviving child, will be murdered on their arrival in Greece and that Hecuba will be changed into a dog and thrown herself from the top mast of their ship.

The director said that she had deliberately chosen a traditional production, with a masked chorus singing the odes. Hecuba, played by Georgia Pearce, was queenly, impressively so for such a young actress, and was one of the non-classicists in the cast. Polymestor was agreeably hypocritical and avaricious.  Agaememnon and Odysseus, played by native Greek speakers, had admirable military presence. Other parts, Polydorus's ghost, Polyxena, the herald Talthybilis and the Maid were played confidently. If I had a quibble, it was that the chorus were a little unassertive.

I am sure there is a thesis to be written, if it hasn't been already, on blinding in the theatre. Polymestor's deserved fate, for transgressing the duty to a stranger-guest, reminded of Oedipus, of course, but also of Gloucester's blinding in King Lear. I remember the shock the first time I saw the play at the Arts in Cambridge;  I knew the text well enough, but that did not prepare me for this Cornwall (who was the actor?) who not only gouged out eyes, but stamped on them on the floor as he uttered the lines, 'out, vile jelly'.

The experience of seeing a play in a language one understands imperfectly is interesting. I remember a trip, as a sixth-former to a cramming fortnight in Paris for A level French. English boys and girls from all over the country were billeted in a French lycée over the Easter holiday, and subjected to intensive tuition. There was an optional trip to the Comédie-Française, to see a Molière play, I forget which. Only I and one other student put our names down and so Phillipa, as I remember her name, and I were dispatched across Paris to see a play neither of us knew. She was a far better scholar than me, and I was lost from the first few lines. She also had the misfortune to be escorted around Paris by a maladroit teenage boy; I am sure I could have made the experience more agreeable for her. I apologise now, if not too late.

I have also seen plays in German, and many in Greek. Learning from my mistakes, these days I learn the text in advance, and try my best to ignore the sur-titles, though they can be very seductive. I have nothing but admiration for the actors, who need not only to understand, but to deliver the text in a dramatically exciting way.

 

 

 

 

The Oxford Greek play 2011: Clytemnestra

 

I am becoming a Greek play tourist; having become a regular attender at the Cambridge play, and the King's College London one, I decided to strike out for Oxford. While Oxford's tradition of performance of a play has not been as regular as Cambridge's. Amanda Wrigley, formerly of the Archives of Performance of Greek and Roman Drama, describes its history in her new book, Performing Greek Drama in Oxford†.

This production is of Aeschylus's Libation Bearers, or , the middle play of the Oresteia, but retitled for this production so as to bear the name of Orestes' mother, whom he murders at the end in revenge for her murder of his father Agamemnon at the end of the first play in the trilogy. At the end of Helen Eastman's superb Cambridge production of the Agamemnon, the last sight we saw was the silent figure of Orestes.

Since I am neither a proper classicist, nor a skilled drama critic, take everything I say cum grano salo. It was a good, and in places very powerful production, particularly in the second half, when Orestes arrives in disguise at the palace where his father was murdered and Clytemnestra lives with her lover, the usurper Aegisthus, to kill them both. Among some strong performances, I particularly liked Jack Noutch's Orestes, and Lucy Jackson as Clytemnestra.

The surtitles were in a new translation, by Arabella Currie; Tom Paulin was also credited with a role. I try not to read these too often but when I did, they seemed clear and in fittingly forceful language for the Greek and the action on stage. However a Japanese setting didn't help, as far as I was concerned. I prefer my Greek drama to look Greek, which is very backward of me. This led to moments, as when Electra and the chorus fanned themselves, when the youthful matinée audience broke into giggles.

The character of Pylades, Orestes' foster-brother and travelling companion, has been excised from this version. True, he only speaks once, when Clytemnestra is pleading for mercy,  but the production left in Orestes' references to him, which made it seem as if Orestes had an imaginary friend. To compensate, two non-speaking concubines are added to the cast. While as a general rule I agree one cannot have too many concubines, it was hard to see what they added to the play. They flanked Clytemnestra as she received the disguised Orestes, perhaps to emphasis the corrupt nature of the usurper's court.

There are two performances left, tomorrow afternoon and evening. I would certainly urge anyone in the Oxford area to go.

Some other reviews:

Cherwell: http://www.cherwell.org/culture/stage/2011/11/16/first-night-review-clytemnestra

http://www.theatreworldinternetmagazine.com/theatreworld/southrev.htm#OxfordPlayhouse

http://www.thepublicreviews.com/clytemnestra_oxford_playhouse/

http://redandgoldfever.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/clytemnestra/

† Wrigley, Amanda
Performing Greek Drama in Oxford and on Tour with the Balliol Players
Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011

Euripides' Helen: the King's College London Greek play 2011

I'm no drama critic. I lack both the necessary theoretical background and, an infrequent theatre-goer, the practical experience, to do a decent job. However, as far as I can see no one else has tackled the recent King's College London Greek Play, so I shall have a go.

I saw the first night, preceded by a talk by Bettany Hughes, author of Helen Of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore, which, as I find as I read it, is an exhaustive and fascinating account of Helen both in antiquity and how she has been seen since.

It's an odd play. Instead of the Homeric version of the Trojan war, it seems that the Helen snatched away by Paris from Menelaus's court to Troy was not the real Helen, but an eidolon. The real Helen, blameless, was brought by Hermes to Egypt where she has lived ever since. So, after the sack of Troy, Menelaus travels home and is shipwrecked on the coast. The play has an unusual happy ending too: Helen and Menelaus, reunited, conspire with the Egyptian king Theoclymenus' prophetess sister Theonoe, to outwit the king, faking a sea-burial for Menelaus, who they claim is dead, and then seizing the ship and sailing for Sparta.

Georgia Crick Collins, as Helen, was splendid in a demanding role; Menelaus was equally good, though he did play a few too many lines for laughs. Andreas Andreou, a modern Greek speaker, as Theoclymenus, had the difficult task of speaking in the classical language. The other parts were handled well, and the chorus, delivered their lines convincingly, though they sometimes lacked the cohesion necessary to convince the audience that they are watching a single unit. I have been spoilt for choruses, though, by seeing last year's Cambridge Greek Play, Agamemnon.

I was impressed by the audience too. With so many school students in the audience, the foyer crammed and echoing to teachers' despairing cries of, "St Custard's, do stick together', before we were let in, I feared that the production might be disrupted by inappropriate levity, but, though the odd double-entendre in the surtitles did raise a titter, everyone was very well behaved.

32nd Annual Conference on Book Trade History: The Book Trade and the Classical World

I am disgustingly late in writing up my notes from the 32nd Annual Conference on Book Trade History: The Book Trade and the Classical World, which took place nearly a month ago. I plead pressure of work, and the difficulty of understanding my notes after such a time-lapse.

This page may demonstrate some of the difficulties the notes pose for a paleographer:

Nevertheless, since the official proceedings may take some time to prepare and publish, I shall offer some of what I can remember and decipher.

On the first day, the first speaker was David Butterfield of Christ's College Cambridge, on Verses to Order: the prominence of Latin and Greek verse composition in British publications of the 19th century. Dr Butterfield took us through the history of the practice of composing verse in classical languages, based mostly in schools and universities. Though Milton and Vaughan had both composed verse in Latin, by the 18th and 19th centuries original composition took second place to translation of existing pieces of English into Greek or Latin, most often in the manner of the Attic tragedians or the Augustan poets.

The development of prizes for verse writing gave an impetus to verse composition and booksellers and publishers saw a new market for texts in public and grammar schools.

Dr Butterfield divided the published output into manuals for boys to help them with this task, and collections of compositions such as Musae Etoniensis. These collections included attempts to render classically influenced poems such as Gray's Elegy (and Gray himself was a classicist) and Tennyson, or Jabberwocky, done as Mors Iabrochii. Latin was favoured over Greek. I came across an Oxford example in a second-hand bookshop in Lewes quite recently. It occurred to me, though it would be a huge task to assemble them, that school magazines of the nineteenth century must contain many examples.

Then Freya Cox-Jensen of Christ Church, Oxford spoke on The Distribution and Circulation of Classical Texts in England, France, Scandinavia and the Low Countries in the 16th and early 17th centuries. She based her work on Peter Burke's paper of 1966, A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians† , but has been able to take advantage of the greater availability and searchability of bibliographic tools, particularly the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC), due to go online next year, to conduct a bibliometric exercise covering the first two centuries of printing . She emphasised that printed texts did not supplant manuscript immediately, that reading was not synonymous with reading a printed book for some considerable time, and that the book trade was international, so that texts, and their printers, migrated from country to country.

After lunch, the Librarian of the Warburg, Jill Kraye, talked about the history of the library, from its beginnings as Aby Warburg's personal collection in Hamburg to its move to England, and the Deed of Trust with the University of London, supposed to guarantee its future, though this, like so much in British cultural life, is now called into question. They are building digital collections of their rare books, and an iconographic database. Jill's''s talk was followed by a tour of the library.

Then Ceri Davies spoke on Some Latin Writers from Wales, their printers and publishers. I had no idea there were so many humanist scholars in Tudor Wales. Jos van Heel finished the first day by telling us about Images of Ancient Texts: Eighteenth-century facsimiles of Greek and Latin text manuscripts, before an evening reception at Dr Williams Library.

On the second day Dirk Imhof spoke on From School Books to Luxurious Editions of Classical Authors: the Antwerp publisher Jan Moretus I, based on his analysis of the printers' archives. Moretus inherited Plantin's business, not without controversy. for Plantin's family felt it was rightfully theirs. Then Nichols Poole-Wilson, Managing Director of Bernard Quaritch spoke on Classics and Fashion among English Book Collectors, a fascinating insight into books as objects of luxury, fashion, vanity and status, taking us into byways of bibliomania such as leather fetishism (the 18th century craze for morocco bindings), and the vogue for bleaching and washing texts to make the pages whiter, annihilating marginalia in the process. He ended with the tantalising speculation that collectors in the future might wish to track down manga versions of classical authors,.

The final speak was Christopher Stray, whose life of W H D Rouse I read some years ago, on OUP’s Classical Publishing in the second half of the nineteenth century, the results of some extraordinary detailed work in the Press's archives, including accounts of the development of Liddel and Scott's Greek lexicon in its various incarnations of the Big Liddell (aka the Great Scott), the Middle Liddle and the Little Liddle, as well as Lewis and Short's Latin dictionary.

†A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450-1700

Peter Burke

History and Theory
Vol. 5, No. 2 (1966), pp. 135-152

Available from JSTOR, if you're one of the chosen few

The Observer can't count

This blog is starting to become formulaic. The pattern seems to be something like this:

Step 1: your author reads something in the paper that annoys him
Step 2: your author rushes to the keyboard and, frothing at the mouth, pens words of savagery that they make Jonathan Swift and Martial look like Godfrey Winn
Step 3: your author collapses  unconscious over the keyboard in a puddle of sweat and spittle; passers-by revive him, which they know can be done by forcing drops of armagnac through his clenched teeth

Today, because I'm a little behind in my newspaper reading, I looked at an Observer article on the 2,500th anniversary of the battle of Marathon. Interesting enough, and the line that Pandareou, described as 'avidly fit', will only run about nine miles raised a smile. But it is not the 2500th anniversary this year, but next, as the Marathon2500 project recognises.

All journalists should be made to write this out 2500 times:
'There was no year 0 BC/AD. the year 1 BC was followed directly by the year 1 AD'

Agamemnon

The 2010 Cambridge Greek play was Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and was a triumph. Since I am neither an accomplished Greek scholar, nor skilled in drama criticism, I'll refer you to the Guardian review by Padraig Belton and the one in Varsity by Xavier Buxton. I suggest you don't bother with this one, which complains about it being performed in Greek. As was pointed out at the academic symposium the next day, the intention behind the tradition is not archaeological, but to create a piece of modern theatre.

I set off on the train, catching one from King's Cross that might have been named the Agamemnon Special, packed as it was to the gunwales with school classics students bound for Cambridge. School parties make up a considerable part of the audience and In the symposium the director, Helen Eastman, on Twitter as HelenEastman, said that she had had them in mind when developing the play; it had to hold their attention, and she was gratified to find two fifteen year-olds close to blows over Cassandra outside after one performance.

All the performances were splendid, but the chorus, on stage throughout, were the finest, and one only has to hear them to understand the point of presenting the play in its original language, and remarkably, they were by no means all classicists. The watchman, who later joined the chorus, gripped us as he described how he scanned for the beacon lights, the women, Katherine Jack as a beautiful Clytemnestra and Phoebe Haines as an eerie operatic Cassandra, which leads me to the adventurous music, by Alex Silverman, which matched the rhythms of the verse perfectly. The design was simple but subtle; the lights wielded by the chorus as the news of the fall of Troy spread gave a sense of speed and distance, while a shrine for Clytemnestra's sacrificed daughter had as its centrepiece Iphigenia's yellow dress, the chorus knelt in front of boxes holding lights, knives, water and earth and brought onto stage jars containing the ashes of the dead.

In spite of preparation with the Loeb translation, the old 1926 edition whose archaisms kept me amused, I had to have recourse to the surtitles which used a forthcoming translation by Edith Hall.

The following day was the symposium and, though I have many pages of notes, I shan't inflict them all on readers. In the first session, on the text, chaired by Paul Cartledge whom I recently heard lecture on the battle of Marathon and expound oracles to Melvyn Bragg (link opens BBC iPlayer),  Simon Goldhill, who I'd heard introduce the Kings College London production of the Persians earlier this year, exhorted us to ignore Aristotle and German idealist philosophers, Emmanuela Bakola talked about the language of wealth and earth in the play and Renaud Gagné talked about past and future.

After lunch, in a session on the reception of Agamemnon, Edith Hall, also fresh from explaining oracles on Radio 4 talked about Clytemnestra's afterlives, she being, for Professor Hall, the most extraordinary heroine of tragedy, womb-driven par excellence, but traduced by later versions, Seneca's, and those who followed him. The play is a revenge tragedy, revenge for Iphigenia. She didn't have much time for Eugene O'Neill. Fiona Macintosh discussed European performances and Lorna Hardwick, using the watchman's phrase A great ox stands upon my tongue discussed Seamus Heaney's poem Mycenae Lookout together with a South African version, Yael Farber's Molora, which sets it before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Finally, in a panel on the performance itself, Helen Eastman, Barrie Rutter, who had been in the chorus of Peter Hall's 1981 production, Struan Leslie, Movement Director for the RSC, Alex Silverman, the composer and Thalia Valeta, an actress who uses Greek tragedy in therapeutic work, discussed the performance. I remember chiefly Barrie's description of wearing masks, and how it affects the way the chorus works, Thalia's mention of Engels' interest in the play as marking the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy (which I must confess I had forgotten), Struan's description of the chorus working like a flock of birds that decides collectively where to go, Alex's description of studying classics as involving, 'a green book, a big dictionary and a headache'.

 

 

The Persians: Kings College London Greek Play 2010

Νῦν ὑπὲρ πάντων ἀγών: now you fight for everything. These words, from the messenger's description of the battle of Salamis, spoken by the Greeks as their ships are about to engage the Persians are, according to Simon Goldhill's pre-play lecture at the KIngs College London Greek Play, the motive and reason for the Greek victory.

I attended the play, and the lectures beforehand by Professor Goldhill, who holds the chair in Greek Languages and Culture at Cambridge, and Dr Lindsay Allen, Lecturer in Greek and Near Eastern History at Kings College London. Professor Goldhill said the play was the foundation text of western attitudes to the east and discussed it from a Greek perspective, while Dr Allen took the Persian point of view, illustrating her talk with images of Persian antiquities, including Darius's tomb at Persepolis, not Susa where Aeschylus set the action of the Persians.

Not much happens on stage in the play: the Persians, represented by the Queen Mother Atossa and a chorus of regents, and referring to themselves as barbarians, learn of the catastrophic defeats of Xerxes' armies in Greece from a messenger. Atossa invokes the ghost of her dead husband and father of Xerxes, the dead king Darius who appears to bemoan the defeats and prophesy further ones. At the end, the ragged Xerxes himself returns, amid much crying of 'οἱοιοῖ’, woe. It was, as Professor Goldhill pointed out, brave of Aeschylus to show this, for it turns the audience's pride in a Greek triumph to ‘pity and fear’. For 1500 years, he said, the play was not shown. Yet in the past five years, there have been at least twenty productions, including that of Peter Sellars.

The theatre was full, and not only with sixth-formers studying the play for A level. The production leaned towards the traditional but was effective and we applauded the cast generously at the end. Darius in particular, had considerable stage presence and, if I read the biographies in the programme, not all the cast are reading Greek itself, so their sensitive and accurate recitation of the lines was a considerable achievement. The Greenwood Theatre is not the most well-appointed in London, but I found a seat next to a broken one, which gave me plenty of leg room.

Χορός

ἰὼ ἰώ, Περσὶς αἶα δύσβατος.

Ξέρξης

ἰὴ ἰὴ τρισκάλμοισιν,

ἰὴ ἰή, βάρισιν ὀλόμενοι.

Χορός

πέμψω τοί σε δυσθρόοις γόοις.

Deep-girdl'd dames

'The Loeb Library, with its Greek or Latin on one side of the page and its English on the other, came as a gift of freedom...The existence of the amateur was recognised by the publication of this Library, and to a great extent made respectable...The difficulty of Greek is not sufficiently dwelt upon, chiefly perhaps because the sirens who lure us to these perilous waters are generally scholars [who] have forgotten...what those difficulties are. But for the ordinary amateur they are very real and very great; and we shall do well to recognise the fact and to make up our minds that we shall never be independent of our Loeb.”

Virginia Woolf in the Times Literary Supplement, quoted on the Loeb Library home page, though without a precise citation, which I shall look up tomorrow, when I have access to the TLS Archive.

I feel less guilty, now I have Woolfian authority, about reading the Loeb translation of Aeschylus' The Persians, by Herbert Weir Smyth, to support my faltering Greek in preparation for next week’s visit to the Kings College London Greek play. Annoyingly, I learnt that in Cambridge, at the end of the month, Emmanuel are staging an abbreviated production of Oedipus at Colonus in the original, with a discussion. If I were free, and still had a house in Cambridge, I’d be up there like a shot. The dates of this autumn's Cambridge Greek play still aren’t announced: I scoured the Arts Theatre website.

In using the Loeb, I find myself wondering at some of the archaisms Smyth use. Some examples:

'Trusty of the Trusties', 'venerable partner of my bed', 'nay, methinks thou shalt learn anon the whole account in very truth'.

Why should Smyth use this language,which must have sounded old-fashioned in the extreme in 1928 when he prepared this translation?

I quickly rejected one theory, that he might choose antiquated vocabulary to fit the metre, for the translation is rarely in verse, expect for some of the choruses.  Neither could it be that the choice of words is made to make a suitable translation for dramatic performance. These translations are designed to help the reader, not for performance on the stage, and in some cases, even to the ears of an audience eighty years ago, the translation would have been near-unintelligible. Is it that he wanted the translation to mirror the Greek word order? This would be helpful to readers like me, yet it is clearly not always the way Smyth translated. Sometimes the archaisms do preserve some of the effects in the Greek, such as assonance and alliteration, but not all the time.

I fall back on the theory that he felt that, as this is one of the oldest plays we have, it should be made to sound old. Unfortunately, even to my ear, and as my family often complain, I am not free from guilt of deliberate archaism and circumlocution, they grate.

An old library book

I'm going to see Aeschylus' The Persians, the Kings College London Greek Play, part of the University of London Festival of Greek Drama next month. I thought I'd better bone up on the text and, while I have the very fine Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis edition, by Denys Page, my faltering Greek needs a parallel text, so I ordered the Loeb edition from East Sussex. The copy is kept in store and, their inter-library transport being delayed by the snow, it took a little while to reach Seaford, but I have it now.

The binding is damaged, and the spine has fallen off, but it will serve very well. It is an old copy and I was fascinated by the date label, which tells me it was first borrowed in 1939, and by the book plate. How many libraries, of any type, use book plates these days?

And here is the Browne issue card

It's a good year for Aeschylus. Agamemnon is to be the Cambridge Greek Play.