Thursday, 29 November 2007

The Women of Troy









Andrew Field said...

You may find this book interesting.

I think that I agree with you entirely. And it's a shame you won't see Mitchell's show because it really does highlight the through line from Euripides to Brecht and Artaud. The more that changes the more that stays the same.

alexf said...

i was going to make the point about Aristotle over at andy's but didn't for fear of becoming his resident Brecht bore.

It's worth noting that Aristotle wasn't even a contemporary of the Greek dramatists whose work survives today (he was born 22 years after Euripides died). He wasn't a dramatist - in fact he was much more like an academic, and in his understanding of theatre he made many of the mistakes that modern (or relatively modern) academics (and pseudo-academic theatre critics) make. Further, (and hoisting modern terms that don't quite fit but will have to do) he outlined the theory of catharsis in response to the ultra-conservative attack on poets in Plato's Republic. Broadly, this is that the poets make people unhappy and so should be banished from the state (the political consequences of this unhappiness and of their banishment should be obvious). Aristotle defends the poets without really shifting the terms of the debate as his old teacher set them - he accepts the unhappiness but reframes it as a positive - a purging of negative emotion which might otherwise turn into negative action (negative towards whom we might ask, the person?, the state?) So art doesn't really cause any problems for Plato's Republic after all. phew!

As such it's not really surprising that Brecht rejects the Aristotelian premises. In fact, in his desire to agitate, to create in people a "critical attitude" which is turned towards society and which in turn results in action, he might be said to be pretty close to Plato in his conception of what artists do, but on the other side of the barricade in his sense of what he wants them to do.

I'm not sure how the Aristotelian understanding of theatre got passed on to early twentieth century germany, but if it's anything like the UK the influence of various mistranslations and misunderstandings of Aristotle's own misunderstandings of theatre started around the renaissance (i think) and smowballed into a sense of HOW THEATRE IS SUPPOSED TO BE that persists even now (i remember as a kid being taught about the unities of time, space and action which are at least as big a bastardisation of the original writings as, say, method acting is of Stanislavski's work.)

danbye said...


Although I do sometimes wonder if Plato was joking. Given his lionisation of Socrates' brave death at the hands of the dastardly authorities, I'm not sure how reliable are his conservative credentials. Maybe he was leaned on.

It's also worth pointing out (I sense we're all preaching to the choir, but perhaps there's a reader who's interested) that in creating the famous (and also much-ruined at A-level) table setting out distinctions between the Epic and Dramatic theatres, Brecht didn't intend to set himself up as in opposition to the Aristotelian conception (as he saw it). He was sufficiently irritated by this consistent misreading of his intention to add a footnote stressing that the table represents "mere differences of emphasis".

The plot of The Name of the Rose rides on the idea that Aristotle wrote some stuff about comedy too, but that it was lost in the Alexandria fire. It would be interesting to see what Brecht made of that.

sarah p said...

go on then, let's have a list of suggested comedies which Aristotle and Euripedes probably wrote, which got lost in the Alexandria library fire. My turn:

"Whoops, Cassandra!" by Euripides.

alexf said...

seriously dude - you're not that far off - the only surviving greek satyr play is the cyclops (i think that's what it's called) which is basically the same as a tragedy with pretty much the same subject matter, certainly the same sources, but with everyone running round getting drunk and all the performers wearing big fake cocks.

danbye said...

Yep. And it's by Euripides.

alexf said...

double whammy!

Andrew Haydon said...

Inevitable Classics Joke Dept: Euripides trousers; Eumenides trousers...