The Greeks or Shakespeare?
By ‘the Greeks’ I mean the ancient tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. By ‘Shakespeare’ I mainly mean Shakespeare, but some of what I have to say applies to other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights too. What follows is a personal take. I’m not asking which plays are better or more important. In fact I’m not sure such a question makes good sense. Instead I’m reflecting on why I always preferred directing Greek tragedies. Directing, not acting. The reason I’m doing this is that I’ve just finished writing a novel about the art world, called The Painting (out soon), and I’m wondering whether to begin work on a book about Greek tragedy, more specifically about why and how it works in the theatre today. The advantage of making this my next project is that much of the groundwork has already been done, over many years of practical work and reflection on it. (Click here to see the results of some of that reflection.) But that’s also the disadvantage, in a way, because I wouldn’t be discovering much that’s new . . . and I've got other projects. Still, at least here I might clarify and even possibly answer my question, ‘The Greeks or Shakespeare?’ – a question which, until now, I never stopped to ask myself.
Productions of Ancient Greek tragedies nearly always use a translation. In my own practice I've often consulted the original to check, question or revise something in the translation, but I would never want to stage such a play in Ancient Greek, even if I were somehow guaranteed an audience fluent in the language. Conversely, I would never be interested in staging Shakespeare except in his original Early Modern English. Why this difference? Very broadly, I think the heart or soul of a Greek tragedy lies in its ‘dramatic architecture,’ whereas the heart or soul of a Shakespeare play lies in the ‘pressure behind its language’.
At this point, I’m in danger of being misunderstood in two ways, so I stress the following. Firstly, I’m well aware that the original language of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides is often densely and powerfully expressive (only some of which can be caught in translation). Secondly, by ‘dramatic architecture’ I’m not referring to Aristotle’s (later) idea of ‘unity of action,’ still less to the (much later) supposed ‘three unities’ of time, place and action (all of which are often enough violated in Greek tragedies in any case); there is something dramatically condensed in many Greek tragedies, but to understand it we need to look for a different, deeper kind of unity than these.
There’s a significant corollary of my preference for directing Greek tragedies, which is my preference for working on specific speeches from Shakespeare as audition pieces or in acting classes. To push this to a kind of limit, I might say that I get stuck with such speeches, because there’s so much to discover or unlock in them. Shakespeare, for me, has a way of drawing you ever deeper into moments of the drama. I’m very much of the John Barton school in believing that Shakespeare’s language is full of cues or ‘implicit stage directions’ that show you how to speak it (though not in a singular sense), but I’d go further; Shakespeare’s language, at its best, is living thought in action. Its wellspring is the heart or soul or entrails, or even (in odd cases) the ‘mind,’ of the character, as that character is caught up in some complexly dramatic situation. The words themselves are a kind of ‘happening’. Put differently, the key to a lot of Shakespeare is the spontaneity of utterance.
This is not (or barely) true of early Shakespeare; it tends to become truer as his work develops and matures, and it's indexed by the increasing irregularity of his versification. In The Winter’s Tale, a late play, such ‘pressure of spontaneity’ pushes the verse to near breaking point. This is Leontes tormented by jealousy:
Go, play, boy, play: thy mother plays, and I Play too, but so disgraced a part, whose issue Will hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamour Will be my knell. Go, play, boy, play. There have been, Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now; And many a man there is, even at this present, Now while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm, That little thinks she has been sluiced in's absence And his pond fish'd by his next neighbour, by Sir Smile, his neighbour: nay, there's comfort in't Whiles other men have gates and those gates open'd, As mine, against their will. Should all despair That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind Would hang themselves. Physic for't there is none; It is a bawdy planet, that will strike Where 'tis predominant; and 'tis powerful, think it, From east, west, north and south: be it concluded, No barricado for a belly; know't; It will let in and out the enemy With bag and baggage: many thousand on's Have the disease, and feel't not. How now, boy!
But at the very same time what this reveals is how much the verse still matters, for it remains the source of the energy of the speech. Try writing it out as prose and you’ll immediately see that something crucial is lost.
At some point in his career, then, Shakespeare discovered, or began a long process of discovering, that dramatic verse could go beyond rhetoric. By ‘rhetoric’ I don’t necessarily mean carefully contrived or excessively flowery language. I mean language which is conceived as being intrinsically public – even where this might be in a conversation among a small group of friends. In taking language beyond rhetoric, he unlocked its potential to express interiority. I would argue, in fact, that Shakespeare was one of the major players (along with figures like Descartes) in the discovery – or perhaps it should be called the invention – of interiority. But in Shakespeare this is not yet the interiority of, say, Molly’s monologue in Joyce’s Ulysses. What matters in Shakespeare is really the tense or fraught interface between interiority and the public domain.
Which brings me back to the Greeks. Yes, the language of Aeschylus or Sophocles or Euripides is rich and evocative, but it never expresses interiority. That’s because for the Greeks there is no such thing, and that is what interests me in their work – just as what interests me in Shakespeare is the way that interiority starts making itself so urgently felt. To get a better sense of this difference, look at the great speech of the shamed hero, Ajax, just before he falls on his sword in Sophocles’ play, Ajax (ll. 815-865). This is the nearest thing in (surviving) Greek tragedy to a soliloquy. But it is not a soliloquy. It doesn’t come from ‘within’. Instead it is born in the space between the speaker and the metaphysical and physical realms that he invokes and addresses, as he calls on Zeus, on Hermes, the Furies, the Sun, Death, then daylight and lastly, most touchingly, the rivers and streams of the Trojan plain. In some sense Ajax’s words are ‘already public,’ even though he is alone.
Crucially, it is not that there is something missing in Greek tragedy.
When teaching Greek tragedy in an academic context I would often begin by asking students what they associated with it. Nine times out of ten ‘fate’ would be among the answers. This is a seriously misleading idea, at least if we understand ‘fate’ in the usual sense. But there is one sense in which it is appropriate. In Shakespeare the ‘pressure of spontaneity’ in the language is the way the new interiority makes itself felt. In Greek tragedy, by contrast, it is as though the words spoken are always already written, such that the character must, as it were, 'plug into' them. (I stress already written – not spoken.) This is not ‘fate’ in any literal sense, for it is a metaphor – but a key one. Unfortunately the way the words spoken are always ‘already written’ often leads to some bad acting!
It should be easy enough to see the problem here, even if you’re not yet sure what exactly I mean by that metaphorical ‘already written’. After all, all play scripts are already written in the literal sense and the basic problem for any actor is how to speak one’s words in performance as if this is the very first time they’re being uttered. But you can’t put some 'missing' pressure of spontaneity back into the words of a Greek tragedy, because it’s not (somewhat paradoxically) already there in the words (as it is in Shakespeare) and you won’t find it in anything like authentic form anywhere else. Apart from that, it’s the ‘already written’ quality which matters, which needs to be understood and somehow brought out. But some actors try to make up for what they instinctively feel is a deficit by endowing the words with a noble or heroic or dignified or (in the worst case) ‘tragic’ quality. This is to add rhetoric (in its crudest sense) to rhetoric (in its most subtle sense – the sense of language as intrinsically public).
Put differently, Greek tragedy is not a form of ‘psychological theatre’.
Still, I didn’t expect to take quite so long to get back to what I earlier said mattered most (to me) in Greek tragedy, that is, its dramatic architecture. And I’m aware that what I’ve said up till now reduces to this: I prefer directing Greek tragedy because Shakespeare is so good at taking you ‘inside’ his characters! To give that a more positive slant, then, what matters to me in a Greek tragedy is a dimension I’ll call the between-characters. Of course there’s a between-characters in Shakespeare too, as there is in most drama. But the between-characters of Greek tragedy is different.
The key to this is the chorus. If Greek tragedy didn’t have a chorus, I wouldn’t be interested in directing it. Now, Greek tragedy is strictly impossible to imagine without a chorus, so although what I’ve just said makes a kind of sense on one superficial level, it makes no sense at all on another deeper one.
Here I need to go off at a tangent, or what might initially seem a tangent. Like many people involved in theatre, especially of a more experimental kind, I love its collective, group-oriented nature. So many exercises aim to develop and build on that group orientation, including exercises that reduce or remove the need for leaders. For people like me, theatre is a choric practice, in fact, though we might use other words to describe that fact such as complicity or the ensemble. But almost no plays since Ancient Greece include a chorus which (and this for me is the formula that defines Greek tragedy) is theatrically central while dramatically marginal. It is very hard indeed to imagine how such a chorus could be incorporated into a modern play. This is the contemporary ‘paradox of the chorus,’ the fact that choric practice is alive and well in preparatory theatre work today, but not in plays.
I’ve said that there’s no interiority in Greek tragedy. It's important nonetheless that there is individuation – of a kind. Oedipus’s most powerful line, after he discovers the awful truth, is “Now I am Oedipus”. But at the same time his fate is shared. It is shared by the chorus, though only up to a point (the chorus cannot grasp why he blinds himself), and it is shared by the messenger who reports Oedipus’s act of self-blinding. (Messengers, in fact, are an important source of the between-characters in Greek tragedy, but I'll have to deal with that in another post.) Note then that the chorus never speaks in the person of a main character, whereas the chorus in a Japanese Noh play does sometimes speak the words of the shite. The corollary of this, however, is that the Noh chorus does not occupy the dramatic playing space, but the Greek tragic chorus does. It is the way that the Greek tragic chorus occupies – and in a theatrical (but not a dramatic) sense owns – the playing space that matters above all, as that chorus becomes involved in but simultaneously displaced by the tragedy that unfolds.
What I mean by the dramatic architecture of a Greek tragedy is the way the involved-displaced presence of the chorus is woven into it, both in the alternation of episodes and stasima (danced and sung reactions to the preceding action) and in the differences made by the presence of the chorus in the episodes themselves The deeper unity of such a play lies precisely in the realization of both the theatrical centrality and the dramatic marginality of the chorus.
Performances of tragedies in ancient Greece were called choroi, or choruses. Even today, to direct a Greek tragedy is (or, I believe, should be) to focus on the 'journey of the chorus' through the play – not in pursuit of some supposed 'authenticity,' but because that's where the modern relevance of the play lies.
What’s at stake here for a modern audience, I believe, is something that takes us beyond empathy. Empathy is one of the modern world's highest and most central values. But if we stop to think about it, we’ll see that empathy as we understand it is really the other side of the coin of the stress and value we put on the idea of the self-contained and autonomous individual. In directing a Greek tragedy, you have to start to deconstruct that conceptual nexus. A different, richer sense of the division and the relation between the individual and the collective, the private and the public, can be the result. In a sense, what Greek tragedy does is take us back before that extraordinary discovery – or invention – by Shakespeare, as he stood on the cusp of modernity, which I've called interiority, and which, in a way, became a kind of Siren voice, enriching our sense of self but also leading us astray from potential other truths about what it is to be human.