Alcestis by Euripides (trans. by Ted Hughes)

Genre: play, tragedy
First performed: 438 BCE
This version published: 2000
Pages: 96

Alcestis's husband Admetos is the ruler of Pherae and is widely lauded as a great hero who has brought peace and prosperity to the Greek city-state, "a savior of his people, an inspired prince."  Unfortunately, he is also doomed to die young.  The sympathetic god Apollo intervenes and informs Admetos of his fate, which can be avoided only if Admetos finds someone who is willing to die in his place.  The king begs both of his parents to die for him, but only his young wife Alcestis volunteers to perish in her husband's place.  

The play begins on the eve of Alcestis's death, as Apollo provides this backstory.  He is joined in the prologue by none other than Death, who has come to claim Alcestis's life.  Death's words made me shiver and re-read them, then shiver and re-read again.  

"...I am not a god.
I am the magnet of the cosmos.
What you call death

Is simply my natural power,

The pull of my gravity.  And life

Is a brief weightlessness--an aberration

From the status quo--which is me...

[Human] lives are the briefest concession,

My concession, a nod of permission.

As if I dozed off and dreamed a little.

I take a dream--and Admetos calls it his life.   

When I awake in the body of Admetos,

He dies." 

However, Apollo refuses to be cowed (probably because he is immortal and, you know, cannot die).  He acknowledges Death's power, but vows, "Somebody in this universe can pull the darkness over your eyes too.  And today you are going to meet him." 

Following this eerie, fascinating prologue, the play moves on to the human characters.  The whole household is in premature mourning for Alcestis, who is lying on her deathbed.  Her husband Admetos grieves and moans that he would do anything to save her.  He promises her the one thing she requests, that he will not remarry, and also promises to mourn her for the rest of his life.  Alcestis herself is not particularly talkative (admittedly, this is her death scene), but Admetos laments that nothing will ever be able to fill the void made by her approaching death.  Just before Alcestis dies, he dares to think of how he might rescue her from the underworld as Orpheus tried to rescue his dead wife: 

"Thinking about Orpheus--in the thick of all this.

Thinking of the impossible.

How he went down there,

Into the underworld, into the dead land,

With his guitar and his voice--

He rode the dark road

On the thumping of a guitar,

A horse of music.  

He wrapped himself in his voice,

Death-proof, a voice of asbestos,

He went

Down and down and down." 

What with phrases like "a voice of asbestos" and Orpheus having a guitar instead of a lyre, I was reminded that this version of the play was actually "adapted" as well as translated by Ted Hughes.  However, I really have no complaints with that, since the essence of the story is left intact and the modern turns of phrase are striking and lyrical rather than overly intrusive.  While I have not read Euripides' original and cannot truly compare it, I think Ted Hughes' "adaptation" is pretty remarkable in any case.

Scarcely has Alcestis died and Admetos lamented that he is not like the demi-god Orpheus, when a demi-god shows up on Admetos' doorstep!  This is none other than Heracles, who is in the middle of completing his twelve labors.  High on his recent triumphs over a slew of human-devouring monsters, Heracles is ready to dine with his old friend Admetos and have a few drinks.  He does not know that the house is in mourning, and Admetos conceals it from him so as not to be a poor host.  So, Heracles proceeds to get extremely drunk.  He recounts the stories of his labors, forcing the servants to act the parts of the monsters he wrangles (ouch!), and this in a palace where the queen has just died.  However, Heracles finds out what has happened and apologizes to Admetos, who still seems stunned and absolutely defeated by Alcestis' death.

I cannot not comment on the irony of Admetos' reaction, because it annoyed me.  While I understand that his wife volunteered to die in his place, he might as well have just asked her the way he asked his parents, and for all his vocal lamenting he never tried to stop Alcestis from sacrificing herself.  But it gets worse.  When Pheres, Admetos' father (his father is still alive, a "retired" king), comes to mourn Alcestis at her funeral.  He offers funeral gifts and some kind words to Admetos, who in turn absolutely lambastes his father.  He vows that he will throw his father's corpse and that of his mother to the dogs after they die, since they would not give their lives for his instead of Alcestis though they are old.  Admetos' father replies, "My life might not be much in your eyes.  For me it is all I have."  He points out that Admetos is like a cannibal, living thanks to the death of another.  Admetos is hypocritical towards his father and annoying as hell, eaten up with guilt and grief.  

  However, Heracles also feels guilty for having made a drunken scene while Alcestis lies newly dead.  He approaches Admetos in the company of a veiled woman, who he says he won as a prize in an athletic competition(!), and begs Admetos to look after this woman for him.  Admetos refuses, saying he will not dishonor Alcestis by having this woman in his house.  Finally, Heracles tells Admetos to look at the woman's face behind her veil--and it is Alcestis!  It turns out that, to atone for his rudeness, Heracles surprised Death while he bent over Alcestis' body and so saved her from the underworld.  Alcestis must be silent for three days (no big loss, I guess, since Euripides didn't give her much interesting to say in her one scene earlier in the play!), but after that she is free to live out the rest of her natural life.  So Apollo's prophecy has come true!  Someone, Heracles, was able to pull the darkness over Death's eyes.  

I really enjoyed this play.  I began it thinking that it might extol the virtues of Alcestis in supposedly being a good wife and dying for her husband, but to the contrary we see the utter selfishness and cowardliness of Admetos far more than we actually see Alcestis herself.  While the subject matter of the play is dark and it is primarily a meditation on death, it is also a timeless meditation on life and what makes life worth living in spite of the presence of death.    

Although I never thought of Heracles as a characteristically wise figure, I loved the words he used to console Admetos: 

"But any one of us can be killed tomorrow.

We don't ruin today with worrying about it.

Death can come in a twinkling, any second.

Up to that second, every second is precious,

Precious, precious life.

Death has to be ignored.

Then when it comes--mourn.  Acknowledge it.

But not before it comes." 

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

Genre: play, comedy
Published: 411 BCE
Translated by Douglass Parker

The Peloponnesian War has raged between Athens and Sparta for many years.  Lysistrata, an Athenian woman, becomes fed up with the devastating war and her husband's refusal to even speak with her about the possibility of peace:

Lysistrata: "...When the War began, like the prudent, dutiful wives that we are, we tolerated you men, and endured your actions in silence.  (Small wonder--you wouldn't even let us say boo.) 

Too many times, as we sat in the house, we'd hear that you'd done it again--manhandled another affair of state with your usual staggering incompetence.  Then, masking our worry with a nervous laugh, we'd ask you, brightly, "How was the Assembly today, dear?  Anything in the minutes about Peace?"  And my husband would give his stock reply. 
"What's that to you?  Shut up!"  And I did." 

So Lysistrata comes up with a simple yet ingenious plan.  She summons the war-weary women of Athens and some from Sparta as well and announces that they are going to force their husbands and lovers to end the war by refusing to have sex with them until they call an armistice.  In the meantime, they will dress and perfume themselves as seductively as possible, wearing thin gowns and such, and the older women of Athens will seize and occupy the Acropolis.

I had somewhat high expectations for this play, having known it by reputation for a long time.  When I was younger, I imagined it must be a sort of Grecian "battle between the sexes," which in a way, it kind of is.  As I grew older and became more self-consciously a feminist, I assumed Lysistrata must be a feminist play, since it features women mobilizing together and wielding what power they have over men in a patriarchal society to bring about peace. 

However, Lysistrata is first and foremost a comedy.  It is not at all a feminist (or more accurately, proto-feminist) work.  Although women are the agents of conflict and change in the play, none of Aristophanes' characters are what one might call proto-feminist.  In fact, even the women in the play decry their own gender at times; Lysistrata laments that her comrades in the strike are so weak and useless.  That said, she also does have a few stirring lines which assert her dignity and the dignity of her cause.  "What did you expect?" she asks an Athenian commissioner who comes to try to persuade her and the other women to leave the Acropolis,

"We're not slaves; we're freeborn Women, and when we're scorned, we're full of fury.  Never underestimate the Power of a Woman."

Other than this disappointment, which I perhaps should have been better prepared for (Ancient Greek playwrights are not known for having had a high regard for women), I did somewhat enjoy Lysistrata.  Some scenes were funny, as when Myrrhine teases her husband by pretending to get everything ready for them to sleep together (bed, pillows, blankets, perfume, a better perfume, etc) and then running away.  I also have to commend the translator (Douglass Parker, in the edition I read) for translating all of these sometimes obscure Greek sexual puns and double entendres into English, which cannot have been an easy task.  That said, I avoid sex comedy films like the plague and found some of the humor here to be crude.     

While the play is not itself feminist, I do think it is one that feminists and those who are interested in gender studies, gender and power, etc, should check out.  Lysistrata and the other women are adamant that war affects everyone, not just warriors and not just males but also women and children and communities.  While the story is a myth, the play demonstrates that anyone can change the course of history by promoting peace, even if one works to do so by means of apparently simple or, er, unorthodox methods.  Also, phallic jokes are apparently timeless.

I was excited to see that one of my favorite fin-de-siècle artists Aubrey Beardsley actually created some striking illustrations for this play, but decided not to include any of them in this review because most of them are bordering on pornographic.  I do not really know the age range of this blog's vast audience (haha), but back in the day I did have many younger readers.  Anyway, though, I digress...

I am going to try reading another Aristophanes comedy, possibly The Frogs, which I have heard good things about.

This play is

bawdy         raunchy (yes, I realize that is a synonym for "bawdy," but it bears repeating)    

This play was on my Classics Club list! 

Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw

Genre: play
Pages: 160
Published: 1923


I really enjoyed this play, the first I have ever read by George Bernard Shaw.  Set in fifteenth century France during the Hundred Years War, it is Bernard Shaw's interpretation of the story of Joan of Arc, revered as both a French heroine and a saint (but only since 1920, nearly 500 years after she was burnt at the stake as a heretic!)  I will make a very strange comparison and say that the play reminded me a bit of a particularly brilliant episode of Game of Thrones.  It is a series of fascinating, sometimes philosophical and sometimes funny and always confrontational conversations.  Bernard Shaw foregoes writing any bloody battle scenes and instead concentrates on developing Joan's character and those of the people who condemned her as a heretic, as well as her supposed allies who essentially stood by and let her be condemned.

I liked that Bernard Shaw portrays Joan as a human being, complete with a very stubborn nature and a propensity for lightly making fun of her supposed social betters to their faces.  Honestly, desperate though he might have been, would the dauphin have listened to just any country girl who told him that he could only win back French territory and be crowned if he let her lead his army against the English?  No, divinely inspired or not, Joan of Arc must surely have been one tenacious, determined, and even slightly arrogant young woman.  She was certainly bold, even reckless enough to suddenly and a bit mysteriously recant her confession at her trial when she had might have been imprisoned for life rather than burned at the stake.  Bernard Shaw portrays her as all of these things, as very human.

First printing of Saint Joan

Joan was burnt not as a witch, as is sometimes thought, but as a heretic.  She was tried by a Church tribunal not only for political reasons, but because the Church officials perceived that she felt her direct divine connection to God meant that she must obey Church authority only if it did not go against what her "voices" told her was God's will.  Cauchon, the preceding bishop, is actually sympathetic to Joan in the play, not the kind of heartless Catholic monster that a less thoughtful Protestant playwright might have written him as.  He tries hard to convince Joan to submit to "the considered wisdom and experience of the Church," but she refuses to believe her spirits could be wrong.  So, Joan was maybe a bit of a Protestant.  Bernard Shaw actually uses the word "Protestantism" several times in the play, though it is an anachronism, to drive home this point.  Though his subject is medieval, the play is very much a product of the 1920s, especially as it reflects on Joan's recent canonization as a saint in 1920.

In the epilogue, a surreal scene in which Joan and those who condemned her reflect on her legacy as ghosts, King Charles VII (formerly the dauphin) says:

"...But I will tell you this about her.  If you could bring her back to life, they would burn her again within six months for all their present adoration of her."

In short, Bernard Shaw means that Joan is revered as a martyred saint, but was ridiculed and mistreated during her life.  People, whether religious or not, are happy to think of her as a misunderstood "woman ahead of her time," a martyr and a national heroine.  But people like Joan--a cross-dressing, sharp-tongued woman who rode into battle and claimed she regularly spoke to Saint Catherine and knew what was best for everyone better than they themselves did--are often better-loved after they are dead, and treated as outcasts or lunatics while they are alive.  This was a fascinating perspective on Joan that I had never considered before.

This play is also very funny at times.  Bernard Shaw's dialogue reminded me of that of Oscar Wilde, to whom he is sometimes compared, in that he is good at writing aphorisms and witty remarks.  Here are a couple of the quotes that I particularly appreciated:

Charles: "If we could only have a treaty, the English are sure to have the worst of it, because they are better at fighting than at thinking."

"Poulengey:  "...We want a few mad people now.  See where the sane ones have landed us!"

This play is:

poignant, engrossing, surprisingly funny


P.S. I have decided to phase out my old rating system, which basically uses the Goodreads system and substitutes unicorns for stars.  One of the benefits of writing reviews is that I can assess books in a more qualitative fashion, and I often cannot even explain to myself why I gave a book four stars instead of five or vice versa.  It seems to depend largely on my mood at the moment, so I am going to try using adjectives to sum up my feelings towards and perceptions of books instead.

...This review is part of my Classics Club project!