The Agamemnon of Aeschylus - Louis Macneice

 I keep rediscovring Louis MacNeice.   He was of course pivotal to my thesis on radio drama, having revolutionised the form during World War II, and he is also central to the second series of monographs I am current researching.   The Agamemnon of Aeschylus was translated by MacNeice in 1936, long before he took to radio, but it was performed by the BBC after he scored a massive success with Christopher Columbus and The Dark Tower.   Originally MacNeice made his version for Rupert Doone's Group Theatre, again a central element of my current research.   They certainly hadn't performed it by August 1936 when MacNeice wrote the preface for the Faber first edition, which is what I have been reading.

I of course studied the Oresteia during my first degree at Hull, but that was in the first term (we did the history of drama chronologically) and is now getting on for fifty-three years ago.   I was not a great fan of the lecturer who did the Greeks, nor he of me.   I have tended to avoid them since though I still treasure my Penguin Classic edition.   MacNeice is only concerned with the first play of the trilogy, in which Agamemnon returns to Argos in triumph, having defeated and destroyed Troy.   Aeschylus, said to have been a warrior as a young man, is much more interested in the curse laid upon the House of Atreus.   

Atreus was the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus.   He invited his brother to a feast and served up the butchered remains of his nieces and nephews; only the newborn Aegisthus survived and was brought up in exile.   Agamemnon and Menelaus both became Argive kings and married sisters, Clytemnestra and Helen respectively.   Helen we know ran off with Paris, hence the Trojan war.   Clytemnestra was thought to be loyal to her husband but during his ten-year absence she has become the secret lover of Aegisthus.   She hates Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia to the gods to get a fair wind for Troy.   Now he is finally back, bringing with him one of the Trojan women alloted as slaves to the Greek leaders.   Agamemnon was given Princess Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, the prophetess no one believes.   Clytemnestra assumes Cassandra is Agamemnon's sex slave - so she murders them both.

This being Greek drama, the earliest surviving, all this happens in continuous time and the action is all offstage until the 'reveal' of the murder scene.   The audience gets everything reported by the chorus and heralds, the main characters make long set speeches which are then discussed and debated by the chorus.  This, however, all happens on the stage - the raised area at one end of the circular 'orchestra' with a single story building to represent houses, palaces, and general places within.   What scholars argue about is what use, if any, was made of the huge orchestra space.   They tend to agree that it was a dancing area but since we have no extant Greek choreography---

It has always seemed plain to me that the dancers interacted with the drama - registering shock, horror, amusement, concern etc.   It seems to me inevitable that reported action (like, for example, the story of Atreus) was enlivened by being acted out in dance or mime, and that the orchestra did indeed involve live music.

Aeschylus, who died in 456 BC, is the earliest Greek playwright we know of.   That doesn't mean he was necessarily the first, and I doubt very much that the Oresteia was his first play.   He is far too sophisticated for that.   Note, for example, how he breaks up the long speeches with some fast, snappy dialogue between Clytemnestra and the Chorus Leader.   Note also his stagecraft: rather than start with the Chorus, he begins with the watchman, alone on the palace roof, standing guard through the night, as he has done for the past year, and bored out of his skull.   He sees the beacon fire: hasn't a clue what it means.   He descends from the roof - and then the Chorus arrives, a chorus with an identity; they are all old men, the Elders of Argos - and they arrive already debating what the news might be.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Agamemnon as imagined by Louis MacNeice, who was definitely taking his first tentative steps in dramaturgy.   I am tempted to try a paper on how Aeschylus might have influenced MacNeice's next theatrical steps.

It's niche, I know.   But it's my niche.

The Women of Troy - Pat Barker

 I thought The Silence of the Girls was Barker's best work since the Regeneration Trilogy.  Good news - The Women of Troy maintains the standard.   This covers a period of the Trojan story I am more familiar with, having spent a lot of time and thought on Euripides' play of the same name.   Troy has fallen, its princes have been killed; the men have either been massacred or enslaved and sent back to Greece as farm labourers.   This, self-evidently, is about the surviving women who have been portioned out as prizes to the Greek leaders.

Briseis is Barker's principal character in both books.   She was claimed by both Agamemnon and Achilles and caused a feud between them.   Achilles won out and she is now pregnant with his child.   Achilles, of course, is dead.   On his deathbed he gave Briseis to his lieutenant Alcimus, who has given her the best status and security by marrying her.   Other women are not so fortunate.   Cassandra has been given to Agamemnon, Hecuba to Odysseus.   Andromache, widow of Hector, has been granted to Pyrrhus, the sixteen year-old son of Achilles, who hacked down Priam and murdered Andromache's son.   Brilliantly, Barker makes him, not Andromache, the other main character of her novel.   Pyrrhus is haunted by the memory of the father he never really knew.   He is as strong as his father but he has no wisdom, and knows it.   The Myrmidons adore him but Pyrrhus the boy-man only loves his horses, in particular Ebony, one half of his chariot team.

I devoured this book.   If anything I found it even more enjoyable than Silence of the Girls.   Next up, apparently, is The Voyage Home.   Definitely a must-read for me.