Hello. It’s Woody here again, so put on your most scholarly hats and get ready as we enjoy another installment of this series on historic uses of myth.
I’ll be honest with you, I’m a little bit nervous about this post. I have quelled some of these nerves with a stiff gin, but I fear that has simply led to a different set of problems. Therefore I would like to ask for your forgiveness if I seem less than the semi-divine incarnation of blog-based scholarship you’ve all come to know, respect, and quietly lust after. “But Woody,” I hear you cry. Don’t cry, it’s just a post on a theatre company’s blog. Everything’s going to be alright. “But Woody, why are you nervous?” It’s because I’m a Classicist – I like Ancient Greeks and Romans – but today I shall stepping over a millennium out of my comfort-zone. My one consolation in this is that a mutual friend recently quoted By Jove’s Artistic Co-Director Mr. David Bullen as saying “Anything written AD is pop-culture.” Pick a boss who shares your prejudices, children; it makes things so much easier. Right, enough delaying. Today’s post will be about Shakespeare.
One might think that Shakespeare is a bit of an odd choice for this series, but you’d be wrong. Considering his reputation it’s a choice liable to make me tread carefully, but it’s not odd. I shall proceed to defend this claim because, although he never wrote a Medea or an Oedipus the King, Old Wagglepike (waggle = shake, pike =spear) was a man who knew how to “misuse” him some myth.
Shakespeare famously had “little Latin and less Greek”, but in the hands of a genius that can quite easily be enough. Although he did not, as mentioned, re-write any of the big stories we can see him making use of the same practices as his Ancient forebears in the high and noble art of nicking one’s ideas off of other people. The methodology is so similar to Aeschylus et al that I feel comfortable commenting upon his techniques without taking off my Classicist hat. (If you’re curious a Classicist hat is like a cross between a laurel wreath and a hip-flask. Mine’s a tasteful blue).
I think we’ve defined our terms well enough for the business at hand so let’s get a little more specific. I shall start with Romeo & Juliet both because it is one of the more well-known works and because it lets me start my illustration with a bit on methodology, which I always find useful. Romeo & Juliet is an Aristotelian tragedy; that is the fall of one or more persons of noble birth due to factors or combinations thereof which are out of their control and typically arise from the natures of the people involved. Romeo & Juliet is contains anagnorisis (moment of recognition), peripetea (downfall), hamartia (fatal flaw) and all the other lovely building blocks of tragedy we know from the Poetics. In the Poetics Aristotle tells us his favourite tragedy is Sophocles’ Oedipus the King because it has the peripetea and anagnorisis happen simultaneously. Romeo & Juliet manages this as well: the downfall of the prideful families is brought about by the realisation of what fate their attitudes have visited upon their children. The man from Stratford must have been wearing the clever-trousers the days he wrote the ending, because in fact he goes one step further than Sophocles and makes it so the parents’ downfall is brought about that of their children which in turn is due to an anagnorisis which later proves false.
The plot of these ‘star crossed lovers’ is also borrowed and reworked. The plot is two young people become infatuated contrive to elope but a lost message scuppers the plan and they both kill themselves out of grief. This is the exact same plot as Pyramus and Thisbe which can be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Editor’s note: as well as being the mock play performed by The Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
In his comedies, too, we can see that Shakespeare had his feet in the Classical world. I shall take as my example A Comedy of Errors. Identical twins raised miles apart with no knowledge of each other find themselves in the same place. No one there knows about the twins either. Mistaken identities and hilarity ensue. I just described for you the plot of The Brothers Mnischemi, a comedy by Plautus who lived in Rome around 200BCE. Plautus himself based his play on an earlier Greek play (or possibly two) which has not survived. The Englishman’s version does make the innovation of having a pair of twins, so give him credit for that. The language and cultural references change, but in the important terms of how the gags work Shakespeare’s comedies are Plautine farces: clever slaves, disguises, word-play, innuendo, some unabashed filth, and a happy ending.
So to conclude, nearly everything from this giant of English Literature has its roots in Ancient Greece and Rome. If this is news to you and you find it galling, don’t worry: Political Scientists get even more irritated when Classicists point out the same thing about their discipline.
I admit that I enjoy putting on my toga and being condescending, but I do not like being intentionally wrong or misleading about the facts of matter or my intellectual position on them. Every Ancient writer over whom I have enthused in the previous instalments of this mini-series has done the same sort of idea-borrowing I point out in the works of Old Wagglepike. I think these observations are just that. They cannot be accusations for that implies a crime, and why would I label as a crime a literary skill which I love? It does not affect how good a play it is that Romeo & Juliet is a story from Roman literature written in a Greek form; it’s not the ingredients but how one combines and seasons them that ultimately make a good meal. If you still think I was being too snarky in the body of the post for this to sound genuine, just know one thing. I chose which writers to discuss in this series and I would not waste my time with something I did not think was genius.
One hopes you’re well,
Yrs,
ADWoodward
