The long involvement of American and European dramatists with Greek tragedy throughout the first half of the twentieth century yielded many plays. The emphases varied, from myth to psychology to politics, as did their dramaturgy and dramatic language, but the plays on Greek themes by Anouilh, Cocteau, Eliot, Giraudoux, Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, Jeffers, and O’Neill have had at best only a mixed reception. In conjunction with other arts, especially music, a few of these responses to Greek tragedy have been more enduring.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hofmannsthal abandoned the lyrics and short verse plays that had made his reputation; in his short essay ‘‘Letter of Lord Chandos’’ (1902), the fictional author expresses a radical skepticism about the possibilities of language in order to explain his decision to cease his literary activity. Shortly afterwards, he began to write plays on classical themes (Electra, 1904; Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1906; and King Oedipus, 1907) in which myth, ritual, and gesture were to create a new language. Electra, the first and most famous of these, announced on its title page that it was ‘‘freely after Sophocles.’’ Hofmannsthal turned Sophocles’ play into a study of psychological extremity. The transformation was motivated by the example of Wilde’s Salome, a drama of decadent sexuality that Hofmannsthal saw in 1903; by reading Freud and Breuer on hysteria in women; and by a study of Rohde’s Psyche (1898), a work in which the Furies were interpreted psychologically as an extreme manifestation of a diseased mind (Goldhill 2002: 151). However, fame is attached not to the play but to the revised form it took when Strauss adopted it for his opera. The libretto is about two-thirds the length of the original, Strauss having made cuts to streamline the play and to simplify the psychologies explored by Hofmannsthal (Gilliam 1991: 36). The music with its contrasting moods (four confrontations with Electra constitute the largest part of the opera), expressive dissonance, thematic unity, and extensive network of motifs realizes Hofmannsthal’s ambitions more fully than his own words alone (Gilliam 1991: 1-17 and 67-106; Murray 1992). Even more drastically, 40 years later, the staging and language of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Atreides Tetralogy, his rewriting of the Oresteia in the context of the last years of Hitler’s Germany, were not equal to his dramatic ambitions, although the darkly fatalistic atmosphere of the tetralogy has been admired (Maurer 1982: 123-30).
French rewritings of Greek tragedy were often concerned with politics. In Girau-doux’s Electra (1937), Aegisthus is not only the accomplice to the murder of Agamemnon, but also a successful ruler who has brought prosperity to his city. He embodies and explidtiy defends the political expediency against which Electra’s revenge seems pointlessly destructive. The same conflict is heightened in Anouilh’s Antigone (1944), where Antigone’s defiance of Creon may be no more than an absurd rebellion against bourgeois values. Antigone is probably the best of the plays on mythological themes he wrote at this time (including Eurydice, 1941; Orestes, 1945; and Medea, 1946): its ‘‘stagecraft’’ and ‘‘argumentative cunning... far exceed what is a fundamentally tawdry, reductive treatment of the Antigone theme’’ (Steiner 1984: 193). Besides his rewriting of the story of Oedipus in The Infernal Machine (1934), Cocteau produced a colloquial French version of Antigone in 1922, with incidental music by Honegger and scenery designed by Picasso. A few years later he wrote the French text that was translated into Latin (by Jean Danielou) to serve as the libretto for Stravinsky’s ‘‘opera-oratorio’’ Oedipus Rex (1927-8). The Latin feels at once stately (‘‘Divum Jocastae caput mortuum!’’, Head of Jocasta, divine, dead) and liturgical, and the opera, designed to have a static and ‘‘neoclassical’’ monumentality, nonetheless recreates the movement of Oedipus’ fate, musically translated into the progress from ‘‘florid melisma into stony syllabic simplicity’’ (Taruskin 1992: 577; see also Walsh 1993).
Gide (Oedipus, 1931) and Sartre (The Flies, 1943) also based plays on ancient Greek tragedy, as did D’Annunzio (TheDead City, 1898). T. S. Eliot took the plots of The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949) from Aeschylus’ Eume-nides and Euripides’ Alcestis, respectively, and rewrote them in the language of the contemporary drama of social manners. Eugene O’Neill’s trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) transplants the Oresteia to a New England setting immediately after the Civil War. Robinson Jeffers adapted and imitated a number of Greek tragedies. The list of such adaptations in the first half of the twentieth century is long and dispiriting.
The Hellenism of Osip Mandelstam, in contrast, is one of the great achievements of modernist literature. Though he was not as erudite in classical philology as the Symbolist poets Innokenty Annensky (who translated Euripides), Vyacheslav Ivanov (translator of Sappho and Aeschylus), or Valery Bryusov, he absorbed and in some cases ‘‘corrected’’ (Mandelstam 1979: 477) their influence to become the greater poet. As a student at the Faculty of History and Philology at the University of St. Petersburg, he loved Greek in a personal, passionate, and idiosyncratic way (see the memoir by his Greek tutor quoted in Brown 1973: 47). His Hellenism is likewise personal. He contrasts Hellenization with an ‘‘inner’’ or ‘‘domestic’’ Hellenism:
An earthenware pot, oven tongs, a milk jug, kitchen utensils, dishes; it is anything which surrounds the body. Hellenism is the warmth of the hearth experienced as something sacred. . . the transformation of impersonal objects into domestic utensils, and the humanizing and the warming of the surrounding world with the most delicate teleological warmth. (Mandelstam 1979: 127-8)
This amalgam of ‘‘loftiness and distance with the familiar homeliness’’ (Brown 1973: 255) is not contrasted with Rome or Christianity but encompasses them within his commitment to the Mediterranean world and European high culture; it exists in an intimate relation to the ‘‘Judaic chaos’’ (Mandelstam 1986: 83-8) that drives him to embrace it.
Stone (1913), Mandelstam’s first book of verse, includes several poems on classical themes; two poems (Nos. 62 and 78) invoke Homer in a mood of languid, golden slowness. Tristia (1922) is more haunted by death. The figure of Persephone appears throughout the book, knit to the darkened fate of St. Petersburg and of the living, fleshly word after the Revolution. In this book and in his subsequent poetry, classical references are deployed indirectly and suggestively, with complex effect (Bryusov even complained about the inaccuracies of the mythology; see Brown 1973: 266). The title poem ‘‘Tristia’’ invokes Ovid,6 other ancient writers, and Pushkin in its study of leavetaking. Although lament and nostalgia are dominant moods in the book, they are counterpointed by moments of quiet contentment and of the joyful recognition of one’s condition in time that is made possible by high literacy. Poems (1928) collects the previous books and adds a few new poems, including the great anguished ode ‘‘The Horseshoe Finder,’’ which Mandelstam offers as the defeated end of the tradition of the ode inaugurated by Pindar (on this theme, see Cavanaugh 1995: 163-8). In the final poems of the Voronezh Notebooks, references to the classical Mediterranean world are placed under the extreme pressure of Stalin’s terror; Rome is depicted in a sinister light.
Constantine Cavafy wrote a few early poems on Homeric themes, avoided almost totally the Greece of the fifth century, and set the majority of his classically inspired poems in the Hellenistic empire or later. Marguerite Yourcenar, who translated a selection of his poetry into French prose, divided the latter into cycles:
The Ptolemys-Seleucids cycle, which we might also call the Fall of the Hellenistic Mon-archies-Triumph of Rome, the largest, since it includes at least two dozen poems and the ones most charged with pathos and irony; the four etudes de moeurs in the Hellenized Jews cycle; seven poems in the fine Alexandrian Caesar-Caesarion-Antony cycle; ten poems in the Sophists-Poets-Ancient Universities cycle, which constitutes the equivalent of Cavafy’s ars poetica; two poems on Nero...; some twenty poems in the Pagan-Christians cycle...; two poems about Apollonius of Tyana; seven poems on, or rather against, Julian the Apostate; seven in the Orthodoxy-Byzantine Chronicles cycle. (Yourcenar 1985: 166-7)
Classical Greek poetry plays only a small part in his own verse; he draws on the lesser-known Greek prose writers and evidently on works like E. R. Bevan’s House of Seleucus (1902; see Yourcenar 1985: 163) in creating his new myth of Alexandria. This city - historical, erotic, mythical - and the dispersed and disempowered inhabitants of its empire yield the characters and events over which his skeptical intelligence ranges with oblique ironies and sympathies (see further Keeley 1976).
Because of ‘‘Sailing to Byzantium’’ (1928) and ‘‘Byzantium’’ (1933), Yeats is the modernist most closely associated with Byzantium. In the nineteenth century, something like a ‘‘Byzantine revival’’ had occurred in the wake of the Gothic revival, with a particular appeal to the international Arts and Crafts movement (see Bullen 2003). Yeats read W. G. Holmes’s The Age of Justinian and Theodora (1905) and a few other works on the topic (Gordon 1962: 81-9), but the symbol he made of Byzantium depends largely on the nineteenth century’s aesthetic and organic view of the city. In A Vision (1925), he wrote that perhaps in early Byzantium alone ‘‘religious, aesthetic and practical life were one.’’ He was conscious of historical parallels and connections between Ireland and Byzantium and perhaps saw Ireland’s break from England as an echo of Byzantium’s break from Rome (Foster 2003: 326).
Modernist poets did not translate extensively from Greek. Yeats adapted Jebb’s translation of Oedipus Rex in 1912, and two decades later, after consulting ‘‘half a dozen translations,’’ he produced a version for the Abbey in December 1926; he continued to revise, closely studying Paul Masqueray’s French translation, and in 1928 he published Sophocles’ King Oedipus (Clark and McGuire 1989: 3-40). In his Collected Plays of 1934 he added Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. He included a chorus from Oedipus at Colonus in The Tower (1928), and one ‘‘From the Antigone" in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). Other translators include not only Annensky and Ivanov but also H. D., whose imagistic translations include choruses from Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis in 1916 and from Hippolytus in 1919 (she translated Euripides’ Ion in 1937), and Salvatore Quasimodo, who translated a selection of ancient Greek lyric in 1940 and subsequently turned to Homer and the tragedians (he also translated Latin verse).
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