Leading into our collaboration on the Oresteia, I also felt that Peter Hall was looking in his own way for an equivalent theatricality to fill the Olivier, and very early in the history of that auditorium he made discoveries in it that, though they have to go on being rediscovered, made him ripe for our Oresteia. His production of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in 1976 was the first in the Olivier space to show its exciting potential. Harley Granville Barker had likened the relation of actor to character in Tamburlaine to that of the blackclad handler to his puppet in Japanese Bunraku. ‘Marlowe’, he wrote in one of his marvellous Prefaces to Shakespeare, here to Hamlet, ‘had made the character something rather to be exhibited than acted.’ Peter Hall was evidently of a similar opinion, and one of the ways he found of reaching this was by playing on the NT terraces to anyone who happened to be passing. He notes in his Diaries:
An actor cannot speak thirty lines of blank verse to another actor’s eyeballs. It must be shared with the audience – told like a story-teller.
Full daylight, the conditions in which most of the great verse dramas were played and where the actor can see the audience as clearly as they see him, is a great way to discover the nature of this kind of theatre, and clearly the cast of Tamburlaine learned to fill the Olivier by being in the open-air makeshift spaces of the NT terraces. On the Easter Saturday the following year, we also played The Passion, which I had adapted from the northern mystery cycles, outside on the NT terraces, and the experience similarly helped to unlock the public style of the drama, which was then fed into the Cottesloe performances indoors. In another note in his Diaries, Peter Hall observes of Albert Finney, who was to be a wonderful Tamburlaine, that he was ‘in terrific form: one feels all those years of his youth in Manchester studying stand-up comics’ (9 July 1976). In a similar way, I felt that chorus of old comics cheering me on to the serious business of Greek tragedy. I believe that when we started the sadly aborted first rehearsals in 1979, both Peter Hall and I agreed on the points he records in his Diaries for that day, 27 February:
I started the Oresteia … Three main factors – the use of masks, the use of percussion, and the whole text being spoken by the actors to the audience, not to each other – were understood from the start.
We never got to play or rehearse on the terraces a drama that was created for the light of day. Granville Barker also wrote of Greek drama, and indeed of open-air full daylight theatre in general, that it suffered in the transition ‘from sunlight to limelight. The mere transference from outdoors in will prove deadening.’ All through our workshops and rehearsals we kept the original conditions in mind – large open-air theatre, masks, all-male company – not in the spirit of pedantic archaeology but in order to discover a theatricality the Olivier space cried out for and, sadly, even now, rarely gets. We weren’t to know then that we would eventually take the Oresteia to Epidaurus, though, alas, and perhaps tragically ironic after what I have said about the theatre of daylight, the Greeks hold their festival performances at night, in lighting conditions more suitable for the football pitch than to the dark tragedy, originally flooded with spring sunshine illuminating equally actors and some 15,000 in the audience.
Looking at the theatre of Epidaurus we were to play in seven years later, Peter Hall wrote in his diary for 19 May 1975:
I long to do a play here: with nothing, and with daylight, with the hillside pouring into the auditorium. But, say the Greeks, it is too hot. Well too hot in July and August, when they have the festival, but originally Greek theatres were built to operate in the spring, in March and April.
II
I brooded over my much-annotated Greek text, with its alliterative clusters underlined in red, for years, though in the period I also worked on other theatrical projects for the National Theatre, like Phaedra Britannica ‘after Racine’ in 1976; and Bow Down, a music-theatre piece with Harrison Birtwistle, who was to contribute the music to our Oresteia; and The Passion, from the alliterative medieval northern cycle of mystery plays, both in 1977 – all of which fed into what became the obsessive quest for the right form of English for Aeschylus.
The style I eventually came up with for the National Theatre’s Oresteia (1981), after a great deal of experimentation in workshops with masks and music, was characterised by alliterative metrics and compound words which I invented for reasons I will explain below. Two of my Anglo-Saxon-style neologising inventions – or what I’d thought of as my own inventions – namely ‘yokestrap’ and ‘hackblock’, I recalled suddenly, at a later stage, I had lifted from Robert Browning’s much maligned Agamemnon of 1877, though I never felt tempted to lift the more archaising, chivalric ‘troth-plight’, which, unlike the former examples, sounded too ‘poetic’ for me to want to plagiarise. I think it might be true to say that the seeds of my principal choices were lurking there in Browning from the beginning without my fully realising it.
John Keats, to whom the melody of vowels was the principal essence of verse music, spoke of the ancient Greek tongue as ‘vowelled Greek’; but Robert Browning, in his probably unplayable, unperformable and even, to many, unreadable but, to me, constantly fascinating version of the Agamemnon, corrects Keats in his Preface and uses the phrase ‘consonanted Greek’. Though clearly both modes of articulation are necessary to speech, immoderate affiliation to or affection for one or the other can polarise poetics. Dr Johnson called English a language ‘overstocked with consonants’. Henry Lawes, the composer who collaborated with Milton, envying the vowels of Italian for sung text said in 1651 that ‘our English seems a little over-clogg’d with consonants’. It is only ‘overstocked’ or ‘over-clogg’d’ if you have a distaste for them or want to use vowels and their capacity for sustained drone as a sort of operatic helium. The repeated consonants of medieval northern drama helped the words to carry directly over the unstructured hubbub and bustle of a Corpus Christi crowd in the York streets.
Aristotle thought vowels were of the spirit and consonants of the body. The poetic seeks first to inhabit flesh. ‘Consonants are secular,’ wrote Mandelstam, ‘vowels are monastic.’ My poetics are grounded in the flesh and the secular. Since I was a child I have loved the consonantal play at the heart of Yorkshire idiom and was delighted, when I worked in Prague and began to learn Czech, to come across a tongue-twister, ‘strč prst skrz krk’, which has not one vowel in it. So my affiliation, no doubt conditioned by my Yorkshire accent, was heavily consonantal, and my instinct was to go with the clogging but to search for a metrical current that had enough force to carry the consonantal crag-splinters with it. It is certainly Browning’s feel for the consonantal, potentially clogging energy of Aeschylus’ verse, his awareness of the oral physicality and what George Steiner calls the ‘aural density’ of the original language, that distinguishes Browning’s Agamemnon translation. It may clog but it never cloys like so much inferior Victorian poetry. Somewhere, though, almost more than in any other English-speaking poet who has tackled Aeschylus, I have always felt, even before I began to think of translating him myself, there were clues to the way Aeschylus might sound in English in the Browning version. Already using a kind of poetic compounding, and happily combining ‘grind’ or ‘grate’ and ‘strident’ in the Miltonic ‘griding’ (Paradise Lost, VI, 329), both resources he would use liberally to match Aeschylus almost forty years later, Browning talks of the Greek tragedian in Sordello (1840) thus:
The thunder-phrase of the Athenian, grown
Up out of memories of Marathon,
Would echo like his own sword’s griding screech
Braying a Persian shield –
I also took to the word ‘braying’, as I’d used ‘bray’ even as a toddler in Leeds to mean ‘give somebody a beating’, and to the subdued alliteration that enacts the striker and the struck in the voiced and voiceless counterparts of ‘b’ and ‘p’ in ‘Braying a Persian shield’. There is also a similar pairing of voiced and voiceless consonantal counterparts in the previous line’s ‘sword’s griding screech’. The
following are examples of Browning listening to that ‘griding screech’, that ‘bronze-throat eagle-bark’:
And – so upsoaring as to stride seas over,
The strong lamp-voyager, and all for joyance –
Did the gold-glorious splendour, any sun like,
Pass on – the pine tree – to Makistos’ watchplace.
Or:
The old men, from a throat that’s free no longer,
Shriekingly wail the death-doom of their dearest.
Or:
And when a messenger with gloomy visage
To a city bears a fall’n host’s woes – God ward off! –
One popular wound that happens to the city,
And many sacrificed from many households –
Men, scourged by that two-thonged whip Ares loves so,
Double spear-headed curse, bloody yoke couple –
Of woes like these, doubtless, who’er comes weighted,
Him does it suit to sing the Erinues’ paian.
Or:
But blood of man to earth once falling – deadly, black
In times ere these –
Who may, by singing spells, call back?
Or:
And blowing forth a brisk blood-spatter, strikes me
With a dark drop of slaughterous dew – rejoicing
No less than, at the god-given dewy-comfort,
The sown-stuff in its birth-throes from the calyx.
Or in Clytemnestra’s dominating response to the chorus after she has killed Agamemnon and Cassandra:
Now, indeed, thou adjudgest exile to me,
And citizens’ hate, and to have popular curses:
Nothing of this against the man here bringing,
Who, no more awe-checked than as ’twere a beast’s fate –
With sheep abundant in the well-fleeced graze-flocks –
Sacrificed his child – dearest fruit of travail
To me – as song-spell against Threkian blowings.
Not him did it behove thee hence to banish
Pollution’s penalty?
Browning’s devices, his dragging parentheses weighted between hyphens (no poet uses more hyphens than Browning!) that he uses in his own poetry but on a more colloquial base than in his Aeschylus, his crabbed word order, his compounds, all seeking to give weight to the line, once familiarity and fluency have mastered them, have an indisputable force and a power uncharacteristic of English outside its earliest forms, Milton or Browning’s contemporary, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Mostly, however, sequential meaning struggles with word order and coinage.
Browning called his version a ‘transcription’ rather than a translation. This is not only aptly applicable to the deliberately non-Latinate transliteration of Greek names like Klutaimnestra, Kalchas, Skamandros, Kokutos or Threkian, etc. – a habit Browning bequeathed to Ezra Pound, along with much else – but also to the way he tries to reproduce word order and grammar. ‘He picks you out the English for the Greek word by word, and now and again sticks two or three words together with hyphens …’ wrote Carlyle, who came to regret that he had personally encouraged Browning to translate Greek tragedy, once he was faced with the virtually unintelligible text of the Agamemnon. The kindest contemporary judgement was that of Sir Frederic Kenyon, who called the work a ‘perverse tour de force’. But somewhere, I think, those very perversities point the way to a means of making the text massive and megalithic, doing honour to the daunting Dunkelheit of Aeschylus but without renouncing the intelligibility at the heart of all theatrical communication. The sense of the weighted net of Aeschylean verse is in the Browning version sporadically, but the movement of the metric and the narrative clarity become clogged, not so much by the compounds (which are a characteristic of his original), but because of Browning’s commitment to a Greek, or at least a highly Hellenised and un-English, grammatical word order. In his Preface he says he is translating ‘in as Greek a fashion as the English will bear’. John Aldington Symonds, in his diary for 1 November 1888, noted:
Browning’s theory of translation. Ought to be absolutely literal, with exact rendering of words, and words placed in the order of the original.
He comes up, he concludes, with something ‘neither English nor Greek’. ‘Browning’s translation is the nightmarish product of the nineteenth-century dream of reproducing the past “as it actually was”,’ agreed the more contemporary translation theorist Reuben A. Brower.
Browning’s Sordello (1840), another of his notoriously ‘obscure’ productions, and long regarded as the least comprehensible poem in English, was understood by so few readers that the poet offered to publish a more reader-friendly edition in which, though he would change nothing, he would write in ‘the unwritten every-other-line which I stupidly left as an amusement for the reader to do’. In Browning’s Agamemnon, there is a written ‘every-other-line’ which can only be the original Greek of Aeschylus. You feel you are reading one of those interlinear texts of the Bible I used to use in school chapel services so that the act of worship I always thought ridiculous would not go to waste, and I would use the occasion to learn some Greek or Latin, or sometimes Lutheran German. A contemporary reviewer of Browning’s Agamemnon claimed that the poet, who had always ‘tortured’ the English language, ‘now tortures it even more fiercely’. Browning’s rare apologists, like his contemporary Dr Edward Berdoe, thought that it was the very ruggedness of Browning’s verse that was required ‘to interpret correctly the ruggedness of Aeschylus’. Browning certainly constructs a hurdle course, daunting at first sight, but once the reader learns to clear these apparent obstacles to smooth forward progress, the motion is by no means sporadic, lamed, hobbled, hamstrung or encumbered, but each leap increases the forward, even at times stylish, momentum. Browning’s ‘semantic stutter’ can reach a weighty eloquence. What G. K. Chesterton called Browning’s ‘staccato music’, except when it is laboured and deliberately self-retarding or struggling vainly to ignite its dragging ‘lumberingness’, can rise to Aeschylean marmoreal grandeur. The ‘lumberingness’ of Browning undermines the dramatic need for momentum. Metrical verse serves as the guarantor of momentum. ‘Metre’, said Coleridge, is ‘a stimulant to the attention’.
The momentum should appear unstoppable and keep the spectator spellbound and therefore never able to interrupt or intervene to relieve the sufferer or prevent an enacted consequence. In this respect the audience shares something of the condition of the Greek chorus, which is drawn into performance but never intervention through action. This sets up a kind of halfway house that ensures the basic decorum of theatricality. The speech of Clytemnestra as Agamemnon walks up the blood-coloured carpet strewn for him prevents the audience, by its spellbinding rhetoric, from behaving like kids at the panto and yelling, ‘Don’t go inside!’
Actors need to be encouraged not to provide chinks in the momentum when the play runs down and the dramatic propellant leaks through the overlong ‘psychological’ pause, or the naturalistic prosifying of rhythmical verse used, in most cases, for its very quality of unstoppability and relentless, inexorable, though not boring, momentum. Yeats was probably feeling the same when he wrote:
But actors lacking music
Do most excite my spleen,
They say it is more human
To shuffle, grunt and groan …
‘The Old Stone Cross’ (1938)
In the aborted Oresteia workshops of 1979, I listened to actors reading Browning’s version aloud with some difficulty. We also read a dozen others. As Peter Hall wrote in his Diaries for 5 March 1979: ‘All were totally unspeakable and undramatic.’ I have always thought that one of the ways to make it both speakable and dramatic was to find an English verse which would have maximum weight, of the kind that Browning recognised in the Greek of Aeschylus and was aiming for in his English, but with a maximum momentum.
The weight, the ruggedness of Aeschylus consists partly of craggy alliteration and compounding. A few random samples suffice:
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 27