And my mother had died and was not there to be proud of me. The two things that puzzled her – my love of Greek and my absolute commitment to the art of poetry – have come together in a way today, as it is those two obsessions of mine which I assume you are honouring me for today. And I know now that my mother will understand why I had to take that journey and can now be proud of me, and call me ‘doctor’. It makes me very proud that my one and only doctorate should come from Athens, the source of both our drama and our democracy.
Today and tomorrow and every day that I have spent or will spend in Athens I go for a few hours when the sun is shining and sit in the Theatre of Dionysus, and inspired by that sunlit orchestra I have dreamed up some of my projects: a language for masks in the Oresteia, which I did with Peter Hall for the National Theatre; and my play which incorporated the Ichneutae fragments of Sophocles, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, which had its world premiere in the ancient stadium of Delphi in 1988, and then played at the National Theatre in London, all over Europe, and is, as I speak, now on the stage of the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, the city of my birth. These and many other plays and also poems were sketched out in that ancient theatre, not far from here, which I use as an al fresco study whenever I am in Athens, much as Shelley, the poet who said ‘we are all Greeks’ made use of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome to compose his Prometheus Unbound. My route to the theatre usually goes via the, for me, very auspicious route, Odos Shelley and Odos Byronos. Shelley and Byron, who have been my guides in my love of Greece, its history, its culture and its freedom.
I have tried to understand how this habit has been so productive for me. I said that I started my acquaintance with ancient Greek three years after the end of the Second World War. The end of that war, what was called VE Day and VJ Day were respectively commemorated by bonfires in the back street. Even at the age of eight I connected our celebratory fire with the fires that had devastated Dresden and the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To this day, on the cobbles in that street there is a scorched black circle which became for me a kind of ‘orchestra’, a blackened theatrical space where art could not measure up to the barbarities of European history. Over that intimidating darkness was gradually superimposed another space, not a scorched orchestra but an illuminated one, and that was the space of ancient tragedy. I began very early to look for clues to how to express the tragedy of our century in the drama of ancient Athens.
But I mustn’t make myself seem so wholly serious. At the same time as I was studying, say, the Alcestis of Euripides and appearing as the Shelley Cyclops in the one known extant satyr play at school, I was going to the theatre and seeing more music-hall comedians and pantomimes than so-called serious theatre. The important thing about this kind of theatre is that it is all out front, it continually acknowledges the presence of the audience. In the pantomimes men played women and women played men. When I saw my first proscenium play in a drawing room I was horrified that no one on stage seemed aware of me and the rest of the audience. This early experience of popular theatre helped me, I think, to unlock Greek drama in my translations and productions. As I was working on the Oresteia, in the early days of the ten years I took to prepare the text, I had a dream. There was a queue of old men outside my house wanting to be in the chorus of the Agamemnon. I asked them to sign their names in a book. When I looked at the names, they were all the comedians I had seen as a child – Norman Evans, Nat Jackley, Albert Modley, Frank Randle, Robb Wilton, etc. I think they were urging me to bring all the experience I had had with them even into my confrontation of tragedy. And somewhere to bring about an end to that grating division in our culture between so-called ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art.
Prometheus: Fire and Poetry
* * *
1998
I
As a child I learned to dream awake before the coal fire in our living room. Staring into the fire, with its ever-changing flames, shifting coals, falling ash and what were called ‘strangers’ – skins of soot flapping on the grate – evoked in me my first poetry. My first meditations were induced by the domestic hearth. I have always associated staring into flames with the freedom of poetic meditation. It has been proposed by Gaston Bachelard that it is from brooding before flames that early man developed his interior life. It was also my job to light the fire, and to fetch the coal up from the cellar. With a bucket from the dark dank cellar that had been our shelter from German air raids and incendiary bombs, I brought the black coal that fuelled my dreaming. I later learned that the Latin for hearth is ‘focus’. And fire is what I focus on in Prometheus. And I remembered my Latin when, filming Prometheus on the roads of Romania, I saw on a forest-fire sign the word ‘foc’: ‘fire’.
II
The myth of Prometheus, who brought fire to mankind, keeps entering history at significant moments. One of the sources of my film is the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus (525–456 BC). Most Greek tragedy shifts its timescale from immediate suffering to some long-term redemption through memorial ritual or social amelioration, or simply through the very play being performed. The performed suffering was old, the redemption contemporary. The appeal to futurity is not simply that ‘time heals’ because it brings forgetfulness and oblivion, but because creative memory is at work, giving the suffering new form, a form to allow the suffering to be shared and made bearable across great gaps of time. And who continually cries out across millennia to present himself to ‘later mortals’ as a theama (something to be looked at), especially in his final words, more than Prometheus? Who calls from a remoter past than the bound Prometheus, and yet who still manifests himself when history moves in directions where defiance and unfreedom cry for help? It is a myth because of its timescale that encompasses many generations of mortals, which continually makes us reassess our history. It might give the disappointed utopian a refuge from despair. And maybe these days the socialist.
No play in the ancient repertoire works over a longer timescale than Prometheus Bound. Or deals with more unbroken suffering. Its span is not, as in the Oresteia, the ten fateful years of the Trojan War, but thirty millennia: thirty millennia of tyrannical torture, thirty millennia of defiance. And so it is not surprising that at times of the collapse of ideas that might have created liberty and equality the figure of the chained Titan, Prometheus, is remembered. Nor is it surprising that for those who dramatise history as dialectical struggle Prometheus has come to embody the tyrannically restrained champion of the downtrodden and oppressed. When men feel themselves in chains, the myth of the Titan re-enters history. Out of hopelessness comes a new need for the chained martyr’s undiminished hope, though every day Zeus’ eagle tears the liver from his body:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
So Shelley concludes his own Prometheus Unbound (1820), when the wreck that Hope had to contemplate was the failure of the French Revolution to deliver liberty, equality and fraternity. But hope is also created out of the contemplation of the wreck of tyrannies, earlier despotisms demolished over a long period of time, not overthrown by revolution, with Nature running riot over ruined imperial stones. It was precisely this spectacle that Shelley had all around him as he composed his Prometheus Unbound in Rome in 1819. Shelley found this everywhere in the ruins of the imperial city:
Rome has fallen, ye see it lying
Heaped in undistinguished ruin:
Nature is alone undying.
(‘Fragment: Rome and Nature’)
And specifically in the Baths of Caracalla, which he chose as his al fresco
study in which to write his play. These grandiose baths, built by the Emperor Caracalla (211–17) on the Aventine hill of Rome and enlarged by Elagabalus (218–22) and Alexander Severus (222–35), were in use until AD 537, when the Goths of Vitgis cut the aqueducts of Rome. The famous Farnese Hercules, the hero who finally killed the tormenting eagle of Zeus and freed Prometheus, stood in the colonnaded passage between the frigidarium and the tepidarium. The ruins of the ideals of the French Revolution turned Shelley to the myth, and the famous posthumous painting by Joseph Severn, now in the Keats–Shelley House in Rome, shows him working on his Prometheus Unbound in 1818/19 in the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. Such ruins revealed to Shelley the proof that even the greatest of powers come to an end, a suitable ambience in which to compose his Prometheus Unbound. And the Baths of Caracalla is still an appropriate place in which to contemplate the ruins of time and the collapse of empire, with their braced brick molars, thirds of arches, seagulls on the jagged rims fenced off with hazard tape, or with a red-and-white warning hurdle. The bricks abraded back to rock and dust. Signs which give you a clue to the vast ruins: ‘apodyterium’; ‘natatio’. The whole vast collection of fragmentary walls braced and netted, sometimes held together, by the roots of briar and blackberry, laurel, yew, fig. And fennel – perhaps the most appropriate plant to preside over this preface as it was in a stalk of fennel that Prometheus hid the fire he stole for mankind. This preface to my Prometheus film was sketched there, as Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound was a hundred and eighty years ago, in the Terme di Caracalla, Rome. The whole of Shelley’s great poem, which I had in my pocket, seems to end back in the Baths of Caracalla, when, as Richard Holmes writes, ‘the vision has dissolved and Shelley is sitting within the blossoming labyrinths of the Baths of Caracalla’. These ruins helped Shelley to give the struggle between Zeus and the chained Titan a millennial scale. Zeus or a Roman emperor, or a regime intended for all time, could also be like Ozymandias:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
(‘Ozymandias’, 1817)
It is the time that dealt, again in Shelley’s words, with Bonaparte:
A frail and bloody pomp which Time has swept In fragments towards Oblivion.
(‘Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte’, 1816)
Everything toppling into the ‘dust of creeds outworn’ (Prometheus Unbound, 1.697). The ‘vast and trunkless legs of stone’ of the ruin of Ozymandias could well refer in 1989 to the dismantled and toppled statues of Lenin and various eastern European communist leaders in bronze or stone all over the Eastern bloc. Ozymandias and the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla for Shelley, as the toppled Berlin Wall for us, were evidence of time overturning the tyrannies, an assurance that Prometheus would not suffer for ever.
Byron has similar reactions to Rome and the triumph of time:
Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.
What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see
The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
O’er steps of broken thrones and temples, Yea!
Whose agonies are evils of a day –
A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto iv, lxxviii)
Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grown
Matted and mass’d together, hillocks heap’d
On what were chambers, arch crush’d, column strown
In fragments, choked up vaults, and frescos steep’d
In subterranean damps, where the owl peep’d,
Deeming it midnight: – Temples, baths or halls?
Pronounce who can; for all that Learning reap’d
From her research hath been, that these are walls –
Behold the Imperial Mount! ’tis thus the mighty falls.
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto iv, cvii)
Byron’s statue by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1831) in the garden of the Villa Borghese has a thoughtful poet seated on a fallen fragment of column and beside it a human skull, imperial might and fragile clay made one in time’s momentum. The momentum that crushed hope, and Prometheus who kept it burning like a torch of liberty. The Titan has been described as ‘a primordial figure in the history of hope’. In Shelley and Byron’s time the ‘history of hope’ had met its obstacles, and if Prometheus was, as he was for Shelley, ‘the saviour and the strength of suffering man’ (Prometheus Unbound, i.817) and the patron saint of the overthrow of tyrannical power, then he too was tormented by that shrivelling of hope in man. One of the things that Prometheus is tortured by, apart from the eagle eating his liver, is the vision sent to him of what is in fact Shelley’s own anguish, the failure of the French Revolution:
Names are there, Nature’s sacred watchwords, they
Were borne aloft in bright emblazonry;
The nations thronged around, and cried aloud,
As with one voice, Truth, liberty, and love!
Suddenly fierce confusion fell from heaven
Among them: there was strife, deceit, and fear:
Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil.
This was the shadow of the truth I saw.
(Prometheus Unbound, i.648–55)
Byron also writes with Shelley’s bitterness about the effect of the failed French Revolution on Europe’s struggle for freedom:
But France got drunk with blood to vomit crime,
And fatal have her Saturnalia been
To Freedom’s cause, in every age and clime;
Because the deadly days which we have seen,
And vile Ambition, that built up between
Man and his hopes an adamantine wall,
And the base pageant last upon the scene,
Are grown the pretext for the eternal thrall
Which nips life’s tree, and dooms man’s worst – his second fall.
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto iv, xcvii)
Both Byron and Shelley call on Prometheus and his commitment to man’s future to help them weather what Shelley calls in his Preface to The Revolt of Islam (1818) ‘the age of despair’ that, for intellectuals like him, followed on from what he had to call, in the lines above, the ‘strife, deceit and fear’ of the French Revolution. What is needed for the creation of a just, independent society after this setback, writes Shelley, is ‘resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope, and long-suffering and long-believing courage’. Such perseverance and indefatigable hope are symbolically pre-eminent in the apparently hopelessly chained Prometheus. Shelley writes:
The revulsion occasioned by the atrocities of the demagogues, and the re-establishment of successive tyrannies in France, was terrible, and felt in the remotest corner of the civilised world … This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics, and inquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those of Mr Malthus, calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph.
The ‘oppressors of Mankind’ are gathered together as ‘the Oppressor of Mankind’, as Shelley called Zeus/Jove when, in the same spirit as The Revolt of Islam, he wrote Prometheus Unbound in the following year.
III
Shelley considered Prometheus Unbound his finest piece of work. It sold less than a score of copies, and is still never given a theatrical presentation or even thought of as a play. H. S. Mitford’s is a typical attitude. He edited The Oxford Book of English Romantic Verse 1798–1837 (Oxford: OUP, 1935), and like so many editors of dreary antholo
gies, excluded the poetry from dramatic works, giving a very narrowed view of the range of verse. Songs from plays were admitted as they fitted the lyrical cliché. And he also made an exception of a passage from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, on the grounds that ‘no one would call that a play’. Shelley’s play (and indeed most of the dramatic efforts of the Romantic poets) is considered untheatrical and unplayable, and judged by the theatrical clichés of today it may seem irredeemable as a dramatic text. But George Bernard Shaw had the musical and Wagnerian insight to see in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound ‘an English attempt at a Ring’, and Wagner’s ideas were deeply inspired by Aeschylus. Later critics, like Timothy Webb, have also sought to justify and incorporate Shelley’s attempts into the theatrical canon by stressing operatic models: ‘Prometheus Unbound in particular seems to owe a considerable debt to operatic models as well as to masque and, more obviously, to its Aeschylean prototype. Its exploration of musical analogies and its use of strategies and structures from opera and ballet extend the boundaries of dramatic form.’ Isabel Quigly makes similar operatic parallels in her introduction to Shelley’s selected poetry in the Penguin Poetry Library:
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 20