A Companion to Euripides

Laura K. McClure, Laura K. McClure

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119257523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A COMPANION TO EURIPIDES

A COMPANION TO EURIPIDES

Euripides has enjoyed a resurgence of interest as a result of many recent important publications, attesting to the poet's enduring relevance to the modern world. A Companion to Euripides is the product of this contemporary work, with many essays drawing on the latest texts, commentaries, and scholarship on the man and his oeuvre.

Divided into seven sections, the companion begins with a general discussion of Euripidean drama. The following sections contain essays on Euripidean biography and the manuscript tradition, and individual essays on each play, organized in chronological order. Chapters offer summaries of important scholarship and methodologies, synopses of individual plays and the myths from which they borrow their plots, and conclude with suggestions for additional reading. The final two sections deal with topics central to Euripidean scholarship, such as religion, myth, and gender, and the reception of Euripides from the 4th century BCE to the modern world.

A Companion to Euripides brings together a variety of leading Euripides scholars from a wide range of perspectives. As a result, specific issues and themes emerge across the chapters as central to our understanding of the poet and his meaning for our time. Contributions are original and provocative interpretations of Euripides' plays, which forge important paths of inquiry for future scholarship.

PART I
Text, Author, and Tradition

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

Laura K. McClure

Euripides has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in recent years, thanks to important publications on multiple fronts. The long‐awaited fifth volume of Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Kannicht (2004)) makes available an updated and expanded version of the complete fragments of the poet, replacing an outmoded nineteenth‐century edition. The Loeb Classical Library recently added an eighth volume to its Euripides’ series, rendering for the first time an extensive collection of the fragments into English translation. A spate of commentaries on the plays and fragments have also appeared in the last two decades, introducing the poet’s work to a new generation of students of ancient Greek, including Medea (Mastronarde (2002)), Phoenissae (Mastronarde (2004)), Phaethon (Diggle (2004)), Alcestis (Parker (2007)), Helen (Allan (2010)) and Rhesus (Liapis (2012)). The recent publication of The Art of Euripides (Mastronarde (2010)), the first scholarly treatment of Euripides’ oeuvre to appear in almost three decades, offers a commendable overview of critical approaches to the poet and nuanced analyses of critical issues such as genre, dramatic structure, the Chorus, religion, rhetoric, gender, and reception across all of the extant plays. Collections of essays, such as Oxford Readings in Euripides (Mossman (2003)), have contributed contemporary perspectives on the poet’s work to the ongoing critical dialogue. And vibrant new translations of the plays continue to appear in rapid succession. Experimental translations such as Grief Lessons (Carson (2008)), which consists of evocative renderings of Heracles, Hecuba, Hippolytus, and Alcestis, convey the excitement of Euripides’ poetry while translations specifically geared for performance, such as Medea (Rayor (2013)), have helped to bring his plays to modern audiences. The Complete Euripides (Burian and Shapiro (2010–2011)) offers the general public contemporary critical introductions and notes to earlier translations of the plays. Even Grene and Lattimore’s iconic Complete Greek Tragedies series, without a doubt the most widely circulated twentieth‐century translations of the plays in English, has been recently revamped for today’s classroom (Griffith and Most (2013)). This flurry of scholarly and creative activity attests to the poet’s enduring relevance to the modern world.

This volume is the product of much of this recent work. Many of the essays draw on the texts, commentaries, and scholarship addressed above, as well as the vibrant scholarly dialogue on the poet engendered by conference papers and journal articles over the last two decades. Like the other companions in the Blackwell series, this one is intended for several audiences, from general readers, students and teachers, to the academic specialist. The companion as a genre has the advantage of bringing together a large number and variety of scholars at various stages of their careers all working on a single subject from a wide variety of perspectives. As a result, specific issues and themes begin to emerge across the chapters as central to our understanding of the poet and his meaning for our time. The individual chapters also operate on multiple levels. First, they offer summaries of important scholarship and methodologies, synopses of individual plays and the myths from which they borrow their plots, and conclude with suggestions for additional reading. Second, they do more than simply look backwards. Instead, they aim to develop original and provocative interpretations of the plays that in turn promise to open up future paths of inquiry. Finally, the individual chapters taken together contribute to a much larger conversation about the place of Euripides in our reception of the classical past and his value in articulating pressing contemporary concerns.

1 Euripides

Euripides' first play, Daughters of Pelias, a story from the Medea myth, was produced in 455 BCE at the annual theatrical festival of the City Dionysia just three years after Aeschylus’ acclaimed Oresteia, and thirteen years after Sophocles' first play in 468 BCE. Euripides was to compete against the latter poet for almost a half century. His last play, Bacchae, was produced just after his death in 407/6. Thus by the beginning of his career, the tragic genre had already reached a mature form and a stable foundation from which to experiment. His death, in turn, marked the end of this amazing period of literary history. Little is known of his life and much of the biographical information is unreliable as is so often the case with ancient authors (Scodel, chapter 3). Ancient scholars attributed 92 tragedies of which only 17 are extant (excluding the satyr play, Cyclops, and the play probably erroneously attributed to him, Rhesus). Fully 70 plays never reached the medieval manuscript tradition. But that is far more than for any other tragedian, thanks to the “happy accident” of the alphabetic plays (Mastronarde, chapter 2). (For comparison, only six authentic tragedies of Aeschylus and seven of Sophocles survive.) Despite 24 productions at the dramatic festivals, Euripides won only four first prizes, far fewer than his tragic colleagues.

More than any other ancient author, Euripides has suffered from distortions of literary criticism, biography, and anecdote. Indeed, a full account of his reception would more than fill one book (for good introductions, see Mastronarde (2010) 1–28; Michelini (1987) 3–51). Since antiquity, Euripidean tragedy has occasioned controversy. The comic poet Aristophanes, in plays such as Acharnians (425), Women of the Thesmophoria (411), and Frogs (405), portrays the poet as debasing the tragic genre and corrupting the morals of his spectators through his innovative lyrics, clever rhetoric, and penchant for sensationalist myth. Aristotle in his Poetics takes this criticism a step further, enumerating his dramaturgical defects, such as faulty characterization, irrelevant Choruses, piecemeal plots, and contrived endings, while at the same time upholding Sophocles as the tragic model. The Hellenistic scholars largely reiterated these flaws in their scholia on the plays and so it passed on.

Despite his negative critical reception, Euripides’ popularity rapidly eclipsed that of the other two tragedians after his death. His plays were regularly staged both at Athens and abroad as Greek drama rapidly expanded its audience throughout the Mediterranean in the fourth century. In addition, there were virtuoso performances of excerpts from the plays accompanied by new musical forms and dance. Fragments from both fourth‐century tragedy and Middle Comedy show the imprint of Euripides’ language and style, while the plot devices of New Comedy, such as recognition, rape, and exposure, and structural elements such as the prologue, clearly attest to the poet’s profound influence on later drama. By the Roman period, familiarity with Euripides served as the mark of the educated class. Roman rhetorical models, such as those of Quintilian, found Euripides more useful than Sophocles for students of oratory while incidents and speeches from his plays provided material for rhetorical exercises.

Ancient sources such as Aristotle, Quintilian, and the scholia influenced modern reception of Euripides, beginning in the sixteenth century. German romanticism propagated a form of classicism that sought aesthetic perfection in both literature and art. According to the Schlegel brothers, tragedy evolved from a primitive stage in Aeschylus and reached its ideal in Sophocles, only to decline in the hands of Euripides. This view followed Aristotle’s original criticisms and subsequently found an even more vitriolic outlet in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872), which identified the poet with a dying and decadent art form. Early twentieth century critical appraisals tended to follow suit, somewhat understandably, since the anomalies of Euripides’ technique—his lack of dramatic unity, fondness for rhetoric, political allusions, genre experimentation, mythic innovation, and problematic characters, namely, unmanly heroes and insubordinate women—set him apart from the other tragedians. Early stylistic and formal studies of Euripides represented a turning point in his reception. By elucidating aspects of language, dialogue, and dramatic structure, they moved the focus away from dramaturgical defects to an appreciation of his form and mastery of the complexities of tragic conventions.

2 New Approaches

In the last fifty years, there has been an important critical shift in scholarship on Euripides. Stylistic and formalist studies yielded to explorations of symbolic meanings and systems within the plays, informed by structuralist and semiotic theories. A second popular approach has broadly evolved from historicizing methods and concerns influenced by Marxist, feminist, cultural, and religious studies. These approaches have allowed new and enhanced attention to questions of politics, gender, and sexuality, and the construction of personal and social identity (Mastronarde (2010) 14–15). Deconstructionist readings have also helped to show how Euripides’ plays continually resist interpretation, exhibiting an openness of form, structure, and meaning that invites, indeed compels, ancient spectators and modern readers alike to determine their own perspectives on the play’s characters and actions. As ...