One aspect of the style of Aeschylus that Browning tried to reproduce was his compound words and coinages. In Clouds (line 1,367) Aristophanes mocks Aeschylus as στόμφαξ, ‘one who speaks mouthfilling words’, and κρημνοποιός, which could be translated as ‘precipice-spouting’ or ‘crag-composing’, and it is an aspect of his style that has always drawn me to his poetry. W. B. Stanford likens the stylistic device of compounding in Aeschylus to ‘kenning’, a word derived from medieval Icelandic treatises on poetics to denote those periphrastic, circumlocutory expressions characteristic of Old English and early Teutonic poetry, Old Norse and Icelandic, with typical examples like oar-steed for ‘ship’ and sword-storm for ‘battle’, or more adventurous and far-fetched ones like wound-leek for ‘sword’.
That great compendium of ‘The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue’, the Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883) of Vigfússon and Powell, singles out Egil Skalla-Grimsson, the tenth-century Icelandic poet, who lived also in Norway and England, as a great creator of ‘kennings’. Egil wrote one of his best-known poems, ‘Hofud-Lausn’ (‘The Head Ransom’), an end-rhymed drapa of twenty staves, composed overnight, with kennings like ‘wound-mews’ lips’ for arrow barbs and ‘woundbees’ for arrows, to save himself from execution by King Eric Bloodaxe in York in about 948. Speaking of Egil’s kennings, Vigfússon and Powell say:
In Egil’s vigorous and concise figures we have the noblest examples of this kind [of kenning], often as deeply thought out and as ruggedly true and bold as the tropes of Aeschylus himself.
Perhaps my Yorkshire Aeschylus is a descendant of Egil, a skald-kin at least! Egil’s style helped the eagle to bark in modern English. And York was also the city where the drama I had in mind and was influenced by was created. The spirit of Egil led me back to Aeschylus, and the ‘kennings’ of Aeschylus back to the saga skald.
The Greek language permitted great freedom in coining words. Aeschylus made the most of this. Neologisms are used by him with great frequency.
Stanford quotes compounds such as ἀταύρωτος (Agamemnon, 245, ‘unbulled’), used of Iphigenia, and the marvellous Ἀρειθύσανος (‘tassel of Ares’, epithet of a warrior, Aeschylus fragment 51), and comments that they sound ‘so grotesque in a literal English version that they are usually mitigated in translation’. Browning looked for the opposite of such linguistic mitigation in his version, and I also took to compounding with great relish, happy to associate the ‘eagle-bark’ of Aeschylus with Egil the Icelander coining his kennings under the threat of King Eric’s axe.
One of my favourite Aeschylean neologisms is from Prometheus Bound:
ναρθηκοπλήρωτον … πυρὸς πηγὴν (109–10)
fennel-filling fountain of fire
Old English has a facility for compounding which is characteristic of its poetic style, and I tried to use it not necessarily to match an Aeschylean compound exactly, but wherever I could as a means of also dramatising the tensions and antagonisms of the drama. There was no intention of chauvinistic Saxonising in my echoes, and echoes only, of our ‘heroic’ world. I wasn’t intending to be like Sir John Cheke, the first Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, who in Milton’s time ‘taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek’ but whose version of the gospels goes for Anglo-Saxon neologising like hundreder, for ‘centurion’. Nor was it going as far as William Barnes, who influenced Hopkins with his An Outline of English Speechcraft (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1878), which comes up with Saxonising beauties like push-wainling for the Latinate ‘perambulator’, matter-might for ‘mechanics’, while ‘laxative’ becomes loosensome, ‘horizon’ sky-sill, ‘embrasure’ gun-gap, ‘emporium’ warestore, ‘forceps’ tonglings, ‘genealogy’ kin-fore, ‘meteor’ welkin-fire, ‘telegram’ wirespell. But there is something basic to English and its poetics in such ‘kennings’.
In a letter to Robert Bridges, Gerard Manley Hopkins called Barnes’s work ‘a brave attempt to restore English to a sort of modern Anglo-Saxon, a vastly superior thing to what we have now’. Both Cheke and Barnes, and, of course, Hopkins, were in the back of my mind when I was looking for new compounds, not only to evoke the ghosts of Anglo-Saxon epic and saga, but to help lay bare tensions at the heart of the drama. And those tensions are those of the ‘sex-war’. As two eminent scholars have remarked of the Oresteia, there is ‘continual emphasis … on the sexual antithesis’ (R. P. Winnington Ingram), and ‘the clash between man and woman’ forms one of the trilogy’s pervading themes (Hugh Lloyd-Jones). Into that clash entered my coined compounds ready to engage.
IV
In April 1979, we had mask workshops and improvisations, and as I had done in the music-theatre piece Bow Down, another collaboration with Harrison Birtwistle, I made little poems out of the attitudes of the actor to his part of the story, giving to the actor’s sometimes strong emotional outbursts a similar rhythmical energy, with my own improvisatory coinings groping towards the style they were helping me to find. As these early workshops included women, the sexual polarisation of the trilogy’s matter was made brutally clear. Out of the actor/singer Michael Heath’s Apollo, dramatically interrupted by a lightning flash that ran down a pipe into the rehearsal room, and the Clytemnestra of Yvonne Bryceland, Tony Robinson’s Cassandra, Jack Shepherd’s Orestes, came the frank brutality behind the sex war of the Oresteia. I called them ‘gloss songs’. They were my way of putting myself into the same vulnerable improvisatory situation as was expected of the even more intrepid actors. These are five examples of gloss songs that survive in my notebooks, though there were many on scraps of paper that I binned as readily as the actors were ready to trash earlier improvisations for something better. I kept a few to register the vehemence and often crude responses the material of the myth seemed to elicit from the actors.
1. ZEUS
Godchamp thought himself so strong
he challenged come-who-may
Godchamp wasn’t godchamp long
the son who threw him soon got thrown
Chronos Ouranos the same way
godchamps first and then unknown
so it went on: father/son
father/son again
till zeus himself’s the champion
zeus the stayer sing his praise
zeus champion for evermore
Godchamp zeus the one who stays
raise the paean zeus will reign
with laws for mortals like the law:
awareness comes from pain.
2. FURIES
Son of Earth-she-god GAIA
and sky-he-god OURANOS, he,
CHRONOS castrated his own sire
and flung his sperm-bag in the sea.
From Sky-he-god’s sack of sperm
oozing blood into the brine
came the FURIES whose locks squirm
venomous and serpentine.
Out of Sky’s kin-mangled gender
a god now neither she nor he
sprang to hound the gore-offender
punish bloodguilt ruthlessly.
Crone-kinder never knowing childhood
she-things with one task to do
snouts pressed to the spoor of shed blood
till the killer gets killed too.
3. APOLLO
Only seven months in the womb!
Couldn’t get out fast enough!
Got fattened up on nectar and am-
brosia not papmilk stuff!
Loathed that warm blood-padded cell
that grounded blimp of blood
that gorge of pulsing pinkish gel
that slime of motherhood.
Look at this lot at my feet
all tits and purple clitoris
old vulva-face, foul bitch on heat
not even scorpions would kiss.
That cunt Cassandra got the gift
of APOLLO’s prophecy
but when I yanked up her silken shift
she crossed her legs on me!
The gang
bang god of muscled air
I rape my crazy Trojan screw
and when she screams out: Look he’s there!
no one believes it’s true.
4. CLYT’S TITS
My suckled he-child made me sore.
He needed just more tits than two
always mewing more more more
and more he got but still not through!
I fed him first with bursting tit
my milk was warm and sweet
ORESTES grew too fond of it
tugged four years at the teat.
I gave him my own breast a queen,
my breasts were ripe and wet
I gave him to a nurse to wean
or he’d be suckling yet!
He stands before me mouth agape
as though he’d suck me if he could,
each breast throbs no no escape
both nipples ooze their motherblood.
V
‘Patriarchy means all that is depersonalised, alienated, it means multinational industry, nuclear war, urban isolation, capitalism, as well as rape, the stifling of women’s creativity and sexuality. It is a very bad word indeed,’ wrote Liz Forgan in Women’s Guardian (20 March 1979), in an article entitled ‘Beware the Bloodthirsty Matriarchs’, an account of a Matriarchy Study Group. I was intrigued, and as there were often days when Peter Hall was forced to abandon rehearsals for industrial diplomacy, I invited these ‘bloodthirsty matriarchs’ to come into a workshop day to talk and debate sexual politics with the company, and especially what they considered to be the defeat of the Furies at the end of the trilogy. The debate was very polarised.
The Oresteia is a sexual battleground. In 1886, just before he started work on The Father, Strindberg, whose dramas of the sex war are almost unbearably raw, had come across an article by Paul Lafargue, the son-in-law of Karl Marx, in La Nouvelle Revue (1886), entitled ‘Le Matriarcat: étude sur les origines de la famille’. This view of the trilogy sees Orestes as an almost revolutionary initiator of the patriarchal era: ‘Oreste est le personnage symbolique qui doit fouler aux pieds toutes les coutumes de la famille maternelle.’ Not only did Orestes kill his mother, destroying the mystique of motherhood, but later married Hermione, the daughter of Helen, sister of Clytemnestra. This would have been incest in early societies. After Hermione he married Erigone, the daughter of his own mother, Clytemnestra, and Aegisthus.
Lafargue was, of course, echoing Bachofen. The rediscovery of Bachofen’s Mutterrecht by US academic feminists in the 1960s and 1970s had spawned a great deal of pseudo-scholarship about the existence of matriarchal societies before their forceful appropriation by patriarchy. Perverse as much of this was, and unproven as was the historical basis, it had long roots, and most certainly gave a mythological focus to the heated discussions that we also engaged in.
Engels had written in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that the defeat of Mother-Right, which he derived from the Mutterrecht of Bachofen, which he found dramatised in the Oresteia, represented ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex’. Freud also found ‘still audible in the Oresteia’ the idea of the matriarchal social order being succeeded by the patriarchal one, but he found the transition
an advance in civilisation, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premise. Taking sides in this way with a thought process in preference to a sense perception has proved to be a momentous step.
For Hegel, the distinction between what I was to call bedbond and bloodbond in the Oresteia was the basis of the creation of the State:
The notion, in short, and the knowledge of the substantiality of marital life is something later and more profound than the more purely natural connection between mother and son, and constitutes the beginning of the State as the realisation of the free and rational will.
But the beginning of the State initiated patriarchy and all its repressions. The ‘bloodthirsty matriarchs’ – who were, in fact, mild but militant feminists whom I had invited into rehearsals to make the polarisations of the play palpably clear – reversed the dictum of Apollo, which I gave its stark brutality:
the womb of the woman’s a convenient transit.
This blunt judgement, though it made women in the audience at the National audibly gasp at the affront, has the support of contemporary Athenian science. Aristotle’s work links biology and politics:
the female provides the material, the male provides that which fashions the material into shape … Thus the physical part, the body, comes from the female and the soul from the male since the soul is the essence of a particular body.
And in the Politics we find:
… by nature the male is superior, the female inferior, the one rules, the other is ruled.
The women who came to condemn patriarchy reversed the dictum of Apollo with quotations from Elizabeth Gould Davis, who wrote: ‘In nature’s plan the male is but a glorified gonad.’ Athena, who gives the casting vote to the male, was regarded by radical feminists as a masculine fifth columnist, a status confirmed by her birth (or rebirth) out of the head of her father, Zeus. She is called by Mary Daly, in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethic of Radical Feminism (1978), ‘a puppet of Papa’, ‘a fembot’.
Not all the new feminists were as mildly reproving as those we debated with. There are works which revisit the violence of the world of Aeschylus and relish in a way that does deserve the epithet ‘bloodthirsty’ the fate of Agamemnon at the hands of Clytemnestra. In Nancy Bogen’s novel, for example:
This is what: take his phallus and put the knife to it, and then as I watch the pain spread across his face when he realises what is going to be, say – ‘This is what you made the child with, this is what you hurt me with again and again, and it is because of this that the people all follow and serve you right and wrong.’ And with this draw the blade over it and – ‘Now look at it’ – fling it in his face.
Reading this we have to remember that Aeschylus uses the word ‘ἐμασχαλίσθη’ (Choephori, 439) for what Clytemnestra does to Agamemnon and I translate as ‘hacked off his cock’.
Interestingly, the actor who became angriest at the feminist revisions of history was eventually cast as Apollo, who is described by Philip Slater in his The Glory of Hera as ‘the personification of anti-matriarchy’.
One of the results of these discussions and my research and the developing process of rehearsal was that I used the facility for compounding I had allowed myself as a way of linking the clan world of Aeschylus with the Anglo-Saxon, a compounding that helped me clarify these sexual polarities, and underscoring what the aspect of Greek gender can do and English cannot. The choice of a muscular narrative energy of the alliterative line haunted by Anglo-Saxon was then able to carry on it such compounds as bloodbond for the claim of kinship, and bedbond for the claims of the marriage tie, which sound in this formation like equally matched contestants, and in the court of Athena the final choice of importance has to be made between two other words of equal weight: bloodright and bondright. So my choices began to throw up words which carried the whole tension of the trilogy. In the same way, it enabled me to underline the sexual polarities of, for example, θεός (‘god’) and θεά (‘goddess’), which the Greek gender denotations allow to sound of equal status, whereas the ‘-ess’ suffix of English makes the female form sound diminutive. In the same way, I used pairs like he-child and she-child.
Once I had established the principle, in the course of the trilogy I came up with compounds and coinages like the following:
bloodkin bloodclan blood-due bloodright bloodbond preybirds nest-theft childloss clanchief star-clans thronestones godstones chief-stave he-god she-god hechild she-child lust-lode man-hive sky-curse guestright godgrudge mangrudge manlord life-lot god-sop god-plea god-seer yokestrap (after Browning) godkin godstone bondright bloodright bond-true bond-proof bride-snatch love-gall spearclash shieldclang wavegrave stormflash waveforc
e galesqualls blood-price spoil-spouse gut-truth warcar blood-dew gore-lust grudgehound blood-quag hackblock (after Browning) dirgeclothes ghostsop godsop blood-glut grave-cups gift-glut gore-shots shrinestool ooze-clots grave-garb brute-clan netmesh blood-smog spearspoil croprot griefstrings.
Though I was overruled by the management, I had the feeling that though we shouldn’t make the trilogy ‘holy’, we could, by segregating the audience into male and female (like a Greek Orthodox church), electrify the auditorium, and make those sex-war stichomythia go from the male or female mask to the divided banks of sexual supporters.
Ironically, the copies of my Oresteia text rushed from the printers for sale at the premiere came wrapped in old sheets of a textbook called Placental Physiology. On one page there was the sentence: ‘The existence of the mammalian ovum was not proved until 1812.’ And on another: ‘The placenta is the fetal exchange station.’
VI
As there are three auditoria on the South Bank, it means that there are actors from three plays meeting and mingling. There was some resentment expressed by actresses about men taking over what seem like brilliant female roles in Greek drama. I half promised that I would construct a satyr play to follow the Oresteia and let the women play the half-men/half-goats and wear the phalluses as a mode of comment and redress. It was another enterprise that floundered because of the industrial disputes at the NT. But I never lost my determination to write about satyrs, as we cannot understand the whole experience of Greek tragedy without them, though they have perished as the divisions between high and low art hardened. I eventually created The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, first in the ancient stadium of Delphi in July 1988, then in a revised version for the Olivier in March 1990. But I didn’t get to see women wearing the piano-wire-stiffened foam rubber cocks until girls at the University of Durham did a production some years after.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 29