In recent scholarship, characters in Attic tragedies are often described as victims. Modern audiences may be familiar with the word ‘victim’, but victimological studies have shown that the notion of ...victimhood, the recognition of a person as a victim, is culturally and historically contingent. As a step towards a cultural victimology of Attic tragedy, this article posits that epithets of misery are markers of the undeserved and unjust suffering which often serves as a foundation for the development of victimhood. In order to illustrate how an analysis of epithets of misery can contribute to a victimological reading of an ancient text, the article discusses the use of these epithets in Euripides’ Hecuba, the extant Attic tragedy with the highest number of occurrences of such epithets.
This essay explores the character of Cerulia in Frances Burney’s dramatic play,
Hubert de Vere
, composed and revised in the 1790s, yet never published or staged in Burney’s lifetime.
Cerulia seems ...to eschew any easy dramatic categorization, as she cannot be identified with the heroine of the play. Undeniably, she is a victim, but of whom/what, we may wonder? Does attempting to define the nature of the
hamartia
of which Cerulia remains victim lead the “ideal” reader/viewer toward either fate/the gods or, rather, social apparatuses? And, finally, what about the eponymous protagonist Hubert de Vere? Is it correct to identify de Vere as the actant “hero”, or perhaps as per the sub-category “villain hero” so popular in late eighteenth-century dramas?
Burney’s adroit exploitation of tropology and literary allusion in
Hubert de Vere
will be at the centre of this essay. In particular, I will examine the last act of the play, where the themes of confinement, imprisonment, and escape take on tragic hues. Though unpublished until 1995, these scenes are among the most vivid and, indeed, the most shocking Burney ever wrote. It is my contention that a long overdue appraisal of female characterisation in
Hubert de Vere
can shed novel light –at once both disturbing and liberating– on Frances Burney’s oeuvre at large.
La aphrosyne de Antígona Di Muro Pellegrino, María
Bajo palabra (Madrid, Spain),
12/2022
30
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Este artículo toma como punto de partida un cuestionamiento hecho a la postura tradicional en la que se señala a Antígona como una heroína y como defensora incondicional de las leyes eternas. ¿Podría ...decirse que lo es? Y, más aún, ¿podríamos afirmar que Antígona actúa de forma desinteresada? Estar orientada al amor, como nos revela en el verso 523, así como la constante proclamación del deseo de muerte y del reencuentro en el Hades con los suyos, especialmente con Polinices, nos lleva a poner bajo sospecha la aseveración heroica, dirigiendo nuestra argumentación, más bien, a un asunto al que no se le ha dado tanta relevancia al analizar sus acciones: su estado de aphrosyne.
It is often suggested that the Greek tragedians present clinically credible pictures of mental disturbance. For instance, some modern interpreters have compared the process by which Cadmus brings ...Agave back to sanity in Euripides’ Bacchae with modern psychotherapy. But a reading of medical writers’ views on the psychological dimension of medicine offers little evidence for believing that these scenes reflect the practices of late fifth-century Athenian doctors, for whom verbal cures are associated with older traditions of non-rational thought, and thus are scorned in favor of more “scientific cures” based on diet or medication. This paper will argue that Athenian tragedians, working from older traditions that advocated verbal cures for some mental ailments, do understand the potential psychological effects that their work can have on audiences, since tragedy requires psychological interaction with its audience in order to be effective. From a close reading of select scenes in Euripidean tragedy, this paper suggests that the experiences of the characters who experience suffering in Euripides’ Heracles and Bacchae are analogues of the experiences undergone by the spectators of tragedy at large. Parallels are made between the way that Agave and Heracles are both talked back to sanity by looking upon what has happened, and the way that tragedians make their audiences observe lamentations and meditations that follow the central tragic act, to help them return from the intense emotion provoked, perhaps, by the violence they have seen.
Abandoned by his community, doomed to a solitary existence with his voice as sole companion: can Sophocles’ Philoctetes still speak to us? What do his screams have to say? Dancing with Philoctetes: ...Reflections on Pain and Remembrance juxtaposes a new adaptation of Sophocles’ play with an essay describing the process of bringing it to life in a world on the brink of a pandemic. Akavia investigates Sophocles’ nuanced portrayal of the fragility of empathy in the face of suffering, and also shares the challenges of embodying and vocalizing Sophocles’ text onstage. She proposes that the pandemic and its aftermath offer a renewed perspective on Philoctetes’ thematization, not just of empathy and disease, but of the longing to return: to home, to health, to what memory holds. Akavia’s treatment of Philoctetes starts out from his body and voice and journeys on to loneliness, toxic masculinity, nostalgia, cancer, dreaming, parenthood, language, ballet lessons, siblings, music, and growing up. Here, scholarship and creative non-fiction combine to tell a story of reading, performing, thinking about, and living (through) tragedy.
Performances of Latin drama had become a widespread phenomenon in European schools by the middle of the sixteenth century. The potential for these dramas to have a significant impact on the students ...who performed or watched these plays was recognised at the time. Memories of participating in these performances would linger in the pupils’ minds, as Michel de Montaigne clearly shows in his own reminiscences of his leading roles undertaken at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux. The lessons learnt in performance were thought to be thoroughly complementary to the program of classroom Latin education across Europe. But learning in performance, this article contends, also yielded crucially different lessons as well, not least concerning the manipulation of sentiment through rhetoric and the often violently differing results in action. In this article I examine the 1543 production of George Buchanan's translation of Euripides' Medea from four angles: its `Greekness', the Latinity of the translation, the pedagogical context for the performance, and the medium of performance itself. Using these four angles to create a matrix of meaning, I argue that Latin translations such as Buchanan's warrant greater appreciation than has been awarded them so far, and demonstrate the potential that lies within these understudied texts.
Sadie Jones's The Snakes (2019) examines the overlap between secular capitalism and religious thought. Jones contemplates how Christianity and capitalism have shaped the moral economy, blending ...wealth and virtue to create a modern system of values. The essay first examines the responses of Jones's characters to this system: the protagonist, Bea, renounces her family's fortune to live the life of a saint, whereas her brother Alex sees himself as a sinner, attracted to the annihilation of self in Keats, Rumi, and Weil. The essay's second half focuses on how Jones disrupts this economy by strategically incorporating elements from ancient Greek culture. The Greek gods reject the transactional logic that underpins capitalism, so that not even Bea's virtue can prevent her brutal murder. No amount of credit, moral or financial, can move the amoral sovereignty of the world, as implacable as the rocks and trees Bea contemplates in her final moments.
In the context of intersectional gender economies, collaborative genealogies, and hierarchies of (in)visibility in theatre making, this inquiry turns to Christine Longford's little-known play-version ...The Furies (1933) to explore how gender exclusions, class privileges, and uneven dynamics of spousal joint authorship have historically been overlooked within modern Irish theatre history. By examining the trajectory of her partnership with the Dublin Gate Theatre's male artistic collaborators, i.e., her spouse Edward Longford as well as Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir (also known as The Boys), this study further attends to the ways Christine Longford created a space for herself within an androcentric/queer collective at the backdrop of the European avant-garde and the rise of fascism. Christine Longford's theatre work in 1930s post-independence Ireland countervails resonances about the political economy of intellectual agency in joint writing which make manifest a complex mosaic of uncharted women's spaces, labour, and biographies.
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