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Good afternoon, and welcome to the second of this year's Humanities Forum events
here at the Gleacher Center.
The Humanities Forum is brought to you by the Franke Institute for the Humanities
and the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
And it's designed to showcase the work of our faculty for a wider public.
There will be a wine reception at the end of the lecture and the Q&A.
You're all invited to that.
I also want to acknowledge, as I seldom do, too seldom do, Mai Vukcevich,
Who is responsible for much of the work that goes into the production of the Humanities Forum every quarter.
Thank you Mai for all that you do.
[ Applause]
Also want to announce the next event, which will take place on Wednesday, May 4th:
in this very room: we'll have Christine Mehring, who is the Chair of the Art History Department
at the University
and a specialist in contemporary art.
She's involved in a major project now,
that has to do with the Fluxus movement of the 1980s in Process Art
and the production of 1982, in which a 1957 Cadillac was covered in concrete
as a kind of performance art.
Raising the question of what happens to the object
afterward, how is it curated, where is it stored, and so on
and it just hung around for ages and ages, nobody knew what to do with it.
Christine went to President Zimmer, and President Zimmer said
"We're not going to spend a penny on this"
And she stayed after it, and stayed after it
and now it's been restored, and that itself is a story.
And the Museum of Contemporary Art is involved in this,
and there's going to be a kind of procession this spring that leads the new
renovated concrete covered 1957 Cadillac from the Museum of Contemporary Art
down to what will be its permanent place of storage
in our parking garage at 57th and Ellis.
There's a little mock-up of a concrete car already in one of the stalls there,
they're going to have video events and conferences
about Fluxus, and films about Fluxus, so
Christine is going to be here to talk on the subject material matters in post-war art,
really about the question of how, what art is made of
has come to be such an important question
since the late 20th Century.
But this wonderful crowd is assembled here today for other purposes.
And to introduce the speaker you have come to hear, I give you my dear colleague
David Bevington, the Phyllis Faye Horton Professor Emeritus
in the departments of English and Comparative Literature.
David, will you do the honors?
[applause]
Thank you Jim, and thank you all for being here.
Well Nick Rudall grew up in the 1940s and 50s in Wales
where his talent for acting was quickly recognized.
In school he took roles like that of Goneril, in King Lear
and then when his voice changed, went on to other parts.
He continued his study in drama at Cambridge University
where he also pursued the ancient classics, especially Greek
and then studied classical studies at Cornell University
whereafter he came in the late 60s to the University of Chicago
with a joint position in Classics and Theater.
He worked with students in University theater, and with Court Theatre in a new theater space that he created
out of what had been the South Lounge
in the Hutch Commons.
There he directed a series of really brilliant productions
Soon, with the help of the University, he planned and raised money for the new theater building
that is now the Court Theatre.
There, beginning in the early 70s he directed and acted brilliantly
in a number of shows until his retirement from there in 1994.
He continues to publish an impressive series of theatrically oriented translations
of many plays, including Sophocles, Antigone, and Oedipus the King and Electra
Euripides, Medea, the Trojan Women, Ibsen's A Dollhouse
Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, Master Builder
Right at present, Court Theatre is in the process of producing 3 Greek tragedies in new translations
commissioned by Nick.
Last year, at the 2014-15 season, we saw Euripides and Iphigenia at Aulis.
Then this current season, Agamemnon by Aeschylus
and coming up in the next season, Sophocles' Electra.
Nick has gained a huge international and national reputation
He's acted and directed and published just about everywhere.
This fall we'll see the 21st published translation by him, this is the Aeschylus Agamemnon
that was featured at Court Theater.
Recent productions that he's been directing include The Trojan Women on the mainstage
at Stratford Canada,
the Bacchae in Central Park in New York, with original music, if you believe, by Philip Glass
who's here currently at the University
and Sophocles' Theban plays: Oedipus, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.
This, perhaps, is the most classiest occasion
as the opening theatrical event of the Olympic games on the acropolis at Athens.
You can imagine having a show of the Greek plays there, directed by Nick, and so on.
It's wonderful.
I want to add to this my own personal tribute in terms of my own career in teaching the history
of Western drama.
I joined the board at Court Theatre in the very beginning, and remained on it
until this last year.
I've seen all of Nick's productions many times, and have acted as dramaturge on some occasions
He and I then created a course, about 15 years ago, in the History and Theory of Drama,
which is still running from the ancient Greeks down to Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill
and Tony Kushner.
And this course owes its inspiration and its contents to Nick's pioneering work
of the classic schedule, repertory that he created for us at Court Theatre.
This has been my own personal education in the history
of Western drama, and it is a profound
debt that I can never repay.
That is why I am so honored to be able to present to you this evening,
Nick Rudall.
[applause]
David, could I have my script?
[laughter]
So, the title is, "What We Call Greek Tragedy"
And we owe that title to Jim, actually, because when he asked me
to do this talk 4 months ago
I said "I don't know what I'm going to talk about," so we came up with this title.
But in fact, it turned on something which began to fascinate me about a year ago
And it's this:
we call it Greek tragedy, but in fact it is not.
Of course it is, it's in Greek.
[laughter]
But of the 30 surviving plays that we have,
the tragedies that we have,
they were all written, performed, and sponsored
in, initially, the small town of Athens.
And subsequently, in the last 60 years of the 5th Century,
they were the magnificent centerpiece of a major festival
and became huge, and very important to the culture of that town,
which had grown from a parochial, small wooden-walled city
into the center of an intellectual and architectural empire.
So that observation is
in a sense obvious.
But we never think about it, and therefore, I think we lose
a couple of very important things.
The first is an extraordinarily difficult question:
Why are these tragedies the ones that touch us so much,
and then there's nothing for 2,000 years?
There's nothing til Shakespeare that we can properly call tragedies.
What are the ingredients that made these so powerful,
and allowed these 30 plays to survive?
Northrop Frye has a suggestion, which we'll touch on.
He says it's absolutely necessary to have the vision
the boldness
of an empire.
That is, those who are creating within that brief period of time
need grandeur as their background.
And in a sense that's obviously partially true,
just simply from the facts of the two empires.
But there are many other things, too.
And one of the points I want to try to make
is that the very parochialism of the beginning of this form
later transformed by the imperialism of Athens
creates a very peculiar kind of fusion of the two, so that we are able to
confront huge, huge problems
huge questions,
and yet see them through the small, parochial eyes
of a small family.
And we see them so particularly that way,
I was thinking the other day, when I was thinking about this,
it's sort of as though the kitchen sink drama of Britain after WWII
remained kitchen sink because it didn't have an empire, it only had the kitchen sink!
But Athens had both, in some sense.
So I will, I have to be brief.
So I will condense.
One of the questions is, why do we call it Greek tragedy
and not call it Athenian tragedy, and that's in a strange sense fairly important.
The first answer is because of Aristotle,
who was a ...
he had become a Macedonian when he was writing the Poetics,
and when he was writing other handbooks on how to be
an educated citizen.
And it's very, very strange that in the Poetics he never mentions that this is Athenian.
He never mentions that it's the polis.
He genericizes
and he allows the English department to thrive.
[laughter]
You've all been having reconsiderations of the past history of the department
and that formulaic notion of how to look at literature has been incredibly important.
But it did have this one effect,
which is, it genericized.
And so one of the things I want to do is to talk about the details of that.
The second thing that's strangely important
is that when Greek literature surfaced
in the late Renaissance, it surfaced earlier, but it was
absorbed by the Italian Humanists.
And the degree of lack of knowledge is occasionally
extraordinarily, wonderfully funny.
That is, for example, the orchestra, which you all know is the dance center
of the theater,
no one knows what it's for anymore.
And in fact you don't too, because you sit in the orchestra seats when you go,
you sit in the front.
But the notion of what the theaters were like physically
were just simply not known.
There's a wonderful drawing of the Swan Theatre in London
which has on the side, in one of the balconies, the word 'orchestra'
just sitting there, not knowing what it was.
But more importantly,
[coughs]
what you had was that --excuse me--
that these Italian Humanists tried to recreate what a Greek tragedy was like.
And indeed, that's why we have opera, as many of you must know,
that is, that the long speeches in tragedy were translated into song arias.
The term chorus, which meant dance, became the chorus of modern opera.
And the recitatives were just those little bits of dialogue that were in Greek tragedy.
So there's been this attempt to generalize what was Greek tragedy
for a very long time, in a sense.
Grene and Lattimore are to blame too,
they call them 'the complete Greek tragedies.'
And it's fine. There's nothing wrong in calling them Greek tragedies,
but if we do not look at the very specific...
oh, I'm tempted to use the early parochial notion
[coughs]
of what was happening in Athens, we miss a lot of nuance.
So. Ok.
First of all, it's important to have, for all of us here,
a quick overview in terms of history.
So, because it's so difficult for all of us to count backwards,
and that 1,200 BC is the time of the Trojan War, but 400 years later
it's the invention of writing,
and for 400 years you've had the Iliad and the Odyssey sung as a part history
and part entertainment, but most importantly for us,
the Iliad, the Odyssey and the other epics, the Nostoi
were the fodder, as Aristotle himself says,
the fodder for tragedy.
That is, Aristotle mentions quite frequently, isn't it strange
he says, that we only write about a few families?
And indeed, they kept on writing about Iphigenia and Agamemnon and Electra
time and time and time again,
using that family story to examine much more complicated
and increasingly political ideas.
And this is where my point will go, I hope.
So.
Oh, there's one other important point in terms of the history:
it is that the Iliad in one sense did something else that was very important.
It pointed out the possibility of a unified Greece.
Pan-Hellenism.
And that stayed in the consciousness,
but what was happening, on the contrary, from the Trojan War down to 700 BC
was that the Mediterranean was being colonized from the East,
which was the coastline of Turkey
all the way to South Italy.
And it was being colonized, its dialects were becoming fragmented,
and most importantly,
it had independent states,
which had a variety of different forms of government.
They had inherited kingdoms-- Basileios,
they had tyrranies, they had oligarchies,
they had nobility.
One thing they didn't have
is democracy in any form.
And so the next important point for us, in terms of history
is the second conflict with the East, which is the Persian Wars.
Which started, of course, around 500 BC where the invasion of Greek lands
resulted in Persia being rejected on land,
and it also provided work for Brad Pitt.
[laughter]
Because Hollywood keeps on doing that section of history time and time again.
And then for 20 years, Persia decided that what it would do is to build a fleet.
But more importantly, Athens decided to build a fleet.
And over those 20 years, from 500 to 480, Athens built over 240 ships.
They were able to do it because they discovered a silver mine
and they built this fleet, and they defeated the Persians
at Salamis, around 480.
This is huge for what I'm talking about now.
Because what had been going on before in terms of festivals and drama
was just in a small wooden town.
But now it became an empire.
And I'd like to see if we can touch on that transition.
Let me just talk briefly, if I may,
about what we think the origins were,
and what it was like in the undocumented 6th Century.
I mean, the name that you all know is Thespian, of course.
And there was a shadowy figure called Thespus,
who clearly was an actor in the theater at Athens,
but what was that theater?
Probably where it is now, and where it was then, which was on the Acropolis.
Because they needed a flat space for dancing,
and a place for people to sit on the corner of the mountain.
But it was wooden.
But what happened after that was this:
there were 2 festivals, one in late January and one in early March,
like now.
Strange time to do outdoor theater.
But they were festivals dedicated to Dionysus.
It was the opening of the wine.
And they became 2 huge festivals.
The 2nd one, in March, was called the Dionysia, just a celebration of Dionysus.
The earlier one, called the Lenaia,
was less particular, but still about Dionysus.
Very quickly, that became very important to the very nature of what theater became
in the following sense:
Dionysus was, of course, the god of wine.
But he was also a god of fertility.
And one of the aspects of the primitive festivals
in the 6th Century, at the beginning, was indeed the carrying around of the phallus.
There's a wonderful passage in Aristophanes' first play
recounting what that festival would have been like,
the little servant girl would be carrying fruit in a basket,
and the young kids would be carrying phalluses behind her.
And he said 'don't do that! Don't touch her!'
His wife is watching from the roof.
But now, after Salamis, Athens became a power, because it demanded tribute.
And became incredibly rich, incredibly quickly.
And it was a benign empire, this is very important.
It didn't invade anywhere.
It just was the Mafia of the Mediterranean.
It provided protection money. And it had enormous wealth incredibly quickly.
And what did it do?
It built things.
First of all, of course the Parthenon.
It started using marble instead of wood.
It did the Parthenon, the Pnyx, which is the place where they kept the money,
and they built the Areopagus, which was the law courts, all on the Acropolis.
And the Odeon, which was where my plays were done.
And somehow it was there for the center of the city
but this festival, the Dionysia,
became incredibly important politically.
Because what they did was they turned this small, local festival
into an international festival.
They invited the people who had given the money to sit...
...to sit with Socrates.
To sit with the politician Cleon, to sit with Pericles.
To sit in this theater, and the theater was now enormous by our standards.
This is the first thing we have to do to disabuse ourselves
of what we think of as generic theater.
It could seat 20,000 people.
That's Plato's estimate.
20,000 people.
Now why would you do that?
Well, you would do it because you only put the plays on once.
It was an enormous event.
You wanted all the citizens there
to come and see what became hugely important
politically and artistically, because the other part of the empire
was the conservation of...
Herodotus, Thucydides, the beginning of history,
the cultivation of a new form: rhetoric.
That is the ability to argue in public.
Not done before.
And, indeed, tragedy. And, indeed, comedy.
All in this bizarrely short space of human time.
So [coughs]
What I...
All right, I've got to do this quickly.
What I wanted to do was to say
this overall thing first of all:
mainly that the internationalizing,
the politicizing,
and I use the word advisedly- it's the use of the polis to write about serious things-
was unique to Athens.
It was a chance to discuss things of enormous importance.
It was also a chance, in the plays,
to just occasionally say 'aren't we great?'
And they said it very often.
In fact, my very favorite one is in the Medea,
when Medea can do anything, and she's just decided she's going to kill the kids,
and then she's going to fly off in her chariot,
but fortunately, the King of Athens comes by, Aegis, and she said 'could I go there?'
He says sure.
And she's perfect now, she's got a place to go: Athens.
All the time you find these little references
in the plays to salvation being in this democratic state.
And one of the things I want to suggest
is that Athens saw itself as democratic
and at the height of its power
between 480 and the beginning of the Peloponnesian War some 30 years later,
or 40 years later,
it proselytized its own intelligence, and its own history
and its own artistry to an extraordinary extent.
But the period that we're talking about, from 460 BC down to 405 when Athens died
happens to cover glory and death.
The beginning of the empire, and the death of the empire.
And always telling the stories through individual members of family.
So let me quickly talk about the Oresteia, and how it's possible
to look at it afresh.
At the beginning of the Agamemnon, you have a myth
that we all know: the *** of Agamemnon.
But there is a chorus that we never look at.
Particularly. We don't question who they are.
But in fact they are an anachronism.
They are 12 citizens.
It could only happen in the theater of Athens.
They are there to say 'we can resist this!'
They have individual voices, even, which you never get anywhere else,
there's a section of 12 individual voices.
However, they fail in the first part.
But these 12 people, in the end, become the 12 jury members
that judge Orestes.
In the Areopagus, which had just been built, which was just behind the theater!
And so this audience is watching itself,
watching its own recent, immediate history,
and that's probably the most important part of what I'm saying.
It gradually became possible to touch on the immediate.
The things that were just happening, the critical, awful, terrible things,
and the glorious things, so the Oresteia is glorious beginning of the empire.
But Iphigenia in Aulis is the end.
The death.
But we see it through the death of a small child.
That's what I'm talking about.
It's about a family, so we can weep at her,
when in fact we are talking about the futility of death in a ridiculous war.
And it's that fusion of the parochial with the large that is so peculiarly Athenian.
Very quickly:
When you look at some of the plays wherein we ignore this question, like Oedipus,
and start thinking about what the audience was, when they were watching this play
in the early part of... I'm sorry, 428,
things begin to resonate.
Oedipus has caused a plague.
He is an intelligent, benign, ruler in many ways.
But he's a single ruler, he is a tyrant.
It was very convenient for the Athenian playwrights
that Thebes had more myths than anyone else.
Because they were all tyrants, and they could always compare themselves
to these creatures.
And it's, if you think, Pericles had just caused a plague
in Athens, by making sure that the citizens were within the walls.
Now that's not to say that Sophocles was saying 'this is Pericles,' the opposite!
It's just, the reverberations are peculiarly Athenian.
In fact, it was David who first, when we were teaching together,
started talking about this:
one of the central points of Thucydides in looking at why Athens was prone to fall
was a word that he partially coined, called Polypragmosyne,
which means you can't keep your *** hands off anything.
You're Athenian. You've got to do it.
And if there is any tragedy for us in human behavior
in Oedipus the King, it is that he can't stop.
And so it's a very Athenian play.
And very briefly, one other:
the last play, which David Greene wrote beautifully about,
the last play of Sophocles,
Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles decides that in fact, probably, he's given Oedipus too much pain.
In all the plays he's written about him.
I mean, that's David's take.
And what he does instead is give him a kind of apotheosis at Colonus.
What we always forget is, Colonus was Bridgeport.
[laughs]
It was a tiny little suburb of Athens.
And that's where Oedipus is going to finally have his rest.
Very briefly with...
Euripides.
Two things.
One is, very early on, in a play called the Alcestis,
a man is condemned to death, and what he does is,
he tries to argue for members of his family to die in his stead.
And in one extraordinary interchange with his father,
he asks his father to die in his stead.
And the argument revolves around that which was a current philosophical argument,
which is, what is natural law? Physis.
And what is human law, created by human beings, nomos?
And the father at one point said 'tell me where it's natural
for a father to die for his son."
I mean, it's neither natural, nor will you find it entrenched in human nomos.
Why is that imporant? Well,
if you look at The Clouds,
it's what Socrates is arguing about. It's about a new...
onslaught to traditional Athenian values.
That is, it is time to replace the old with the young.
Terrified, and it's as bad as sort of kicking 40 year old men out of a coffee shop,
in contemporary Athens, they were all sitting around, they just simply hated
the idea that the sons could have a say.
And this play started to talk about that in huge philosophical terms.
Aristophanes in The Clouds writes a whole play about it.
And Plato in the early dialogues indeed tackles the subject
of loyalty to the father, as did Xenophon in his pieces about Socrates.
One last one for Euripides.
The great play, The Trojan Women
is in fact the most terrifyingly immediate
indictment of the Athenian people
because 2 years before the play, Athens had
invaded the island of Milos, which was a place that was meant
to keep on giving money to Athens.
As part of their empire. They refused to give,
and Athens -- this is the long Melian debate in Thucydides--
Athens did this: it killed all the men,
and it murdered most of the young boys.
And it sold the women into slavery after ***.
[?]
But this is Athens!
This is Athens, and Athens has to confront that.
And what Euripides does again is to tell a terrifying story
vaguely taken from myth.
I mean, Hecuba and Andromache and... there's no other source except Euripides writing for this.
But he can tell this devastating political indictment
through the stories from the Trojan War
and yet at the beginning of the play he does this:
the chorus of women who know they're going to be slaves are singing
about how terrible it's going to be
but in one verse, one of them says
'I hope I'm going to be a slave in Athens.'
[laughter]
And at first, that used to nauseate me,
but I really think that Euripides' extraordinary level of irony
is what's happening.
So those kind of...
you know, I've touched on 4 plays.
It permeates these plays.
And I will end, I must end.
I will end by talking about two things.
One is that Aristophanes, in the Frogs, the play he wrote when Athens was dying
he decides that he has to choose,
that in fact Dionysus the god has to choose
between the 3 playwrights who are now dead.
And at first Dionysus chooses Euripides, they have a competition, etc. etc.
And at the end of the play, Dionysus chooses Aeschylus
because, he said, he fought at Marathon.
And not Euripides, because he spends too much time with Socrates.
And what he says, in fact, is that we need
these playwrights to come back and save our city.
This is extraordinary.
What we finally have to recognize
is that over those 60 years, the playwrights were the philosophers,
the political thinkers,
and they were revered as the major spokespersons
of what it meant to be Athenian, and indeed, how difficult it was
to be human.
I should end with that sentence, because it was ok.
[laughter]
But, two days ago, I looked at the most recent copy of Classical Philology
And there was a review of a book that just came out
from a woman at Cambridge.
And she was writing about 100 years later,
the time of Lycurgus, when the orators themselves
were trying very hard to restore democracy
in the face of the Macedonian threat, which was about to happen.
The Macedonian threat, where, indeed, Aristotle was writing his generic stuff.
Not mentioning the polis at all.
But Lycurgus, it seems, noticed that everyone was forgetting that tragedy was Athenian.
And even 100 years later, was aware that this was dying.
So what did he do?
In the entrance for the chorus to come in,
in the Paradus, he built 3 huge statues.
Aeschylus,
Sophocles,
and Euripides, in an attempt to make it Athenian again.
Good, thank you.
[applause]