27 H. Bosworth Smith … ‘the forbidden precincts’: in his Life of Lord Lawrence (London: Smith, Elder, 1883), vol. 1, pp. 450–1.
28 ‘Is there not’: Agnes and Egerton Castle, Rose of the World (London: Smith, Elder, 1905), p. 103.
29 ‘news that stays news’: Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 29.
30 translation of poet/dramatist Thomas Otway: ‘Phaedra to Hippolitus, translated out of Ovid’, in The Works of Mr. Thomas Otway (London: J. Tonson, 1712), vol. 2, pp. 380–5; Titus and Berenice: A Tragedy in Verse (London: R. Tonson, 1677).
31 Alexander Radcliffe … ‘a Farm-House in Putney in Surrey’: in Radcliffe’s Ovid Travestie, a Burlesque upon Ovid’s Epistles (London: Jacob Tonson, 1681).
32 Stevie Smith’s poem ‘Phèdre’: first published in The New Statesman and The Week-End Review for 25 December 1964, p. 1001; reproduced in All the Poems of Stevie Smith, Ed. Will May (New York: New Directions, 2016), p. 495.
33 Benjamin Whichcote, ‘should be the Monarchy’: Benjamin Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms (Norwich, 1702), no. 479.
34 ‘unreasonable things’: Dryden’s Prologue to Nahum Tate’s The Loyal General (1680), lines 14–15.
35 ‘Our Frailties help …’: John Dryden, ‘Creator Spirit, by whose aid’, first published in his Examen Poeticum (1693).
36 ‘there are only’ … ‘reason has to’: Turnell, Jean Racine, p. 7.
37 Philip Vellacott … ‘no more than’: ‘Introduction’, in Philip Vellacott, Euripides: Three Plays. Hippolytus – Iphigenia in Tauris – Alcestis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953).
38 ‘projections of basic’: Turnell, Jean Racine, p. 239.
39 ‘One has to experience’: Barbara Wingfield Stratford, India and the English (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922), p. 17.
40 ‘un de ces orages’: Jean-Louis Barrault in Mise en scène de Phèdre de Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1946).
41 Mrs B. M. Croker … ‘cruel vindictive animal’: Babes in the Wood: A Romance of the Jungle (London: Methuen, 1910), p. 277.
42 ‘And finally there is the close’: Barbara Wingfield Stratford, India and the English, p. 21.
43 ‘terribly limited’: George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 8.
44 Bennet Christian Huntingdon Calcraft Kennedy … ‘We are here’: in ‘Carthill’ (pseudonym), The Lost Dominion (Edinburgh & London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1924).
45 David Gebhard … ‘a favourite political’: transcribed quotation in the Tony Harrison collection at the Brotherton Library in Leeds. David Gebhard is a much-published American historian of architecture.
46 ‘not simply impersonal’: Turnell, Jean Racine, pp. 9, 12.
47 ‘Le coeur, qui egrène’: Jean-Louis Barrault, Le phénomène théâtral (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 19.
48 ‘the throbbing tom-toms’: Harrison’s primary source here remains unidentified, but the phrase ‘throbbing tom-toms’ was a commonplace in British writing about India. See e.g. Herbert Russell, Prince in the East (London: Methuen, 1922), p. 112.
FACING UP TO THE MUSES
President’s address to the Classical Association, delivered on Tuesday 12 April 1988, at the University of Bristol. Tony Harrison was president of the Classical Association between 1987 and 1988. The address was first published in Proceedings of the Classical Association, 85 (1988).
1 ‘This Parnassus and Helicon’: The Pilgrimage to Parnassus with the two parts of the return from Parnassus. Three comedies performed in St. John’s College, Cambridge, AD 1597–1601. Ed. from mss. by the Rev. W. D. Macray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), p. 7.
2 ‘one of the most unalloyed’: E. R. Dodds, Missing Persons: An Autobiography (Oxford: OUP, 1977), p. 191.
3 won a tripod for his poetry: in The Contest of Homer and Hesiod, for the text of which see Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer, edited and translated by Martin L. West (Cambridge, MA: Loeb, 2003).
4 ‘burned is Apollo’s laurel-bough’: Christopher Marlowe, in the Epilogue to Dr Faustus (first published 1604).
5 ‘the famous haunt’: A journey into Greece by George Wheler, Esq., in company of Dr. Spon of Lyons (London: W. Cademan, 1682), p. 460.
6 ‘so foul that’: Paul W. Wallace, ‘Hesiod and the Valley of the Muses’, in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 15 (1974), pp. 5–24, and also his Strabo’s Description of Boiotia: A Commentary (Heidelberg: Bibliothek der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaften, 1979), p. 104.
7 ‘Is there anywhere’: W. Macneile Dixon, Hellas Revisited (London: E. Arnold & Co., 1929), pp. 105–8.
8 ‘must deal’: W. Macneile Dixon, Tragedy (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), p. 17.
9 ‘a retreat from the word’: George Steiner, Language and Silence (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
10 ‘sounded like fifteen Arthur Scargills’: quoted in ‘A Bleeding Poet’, an anonymous editorial in The Economist, issue 7795, 23 January 1993, p. 95.
11 I think it was Plautus: Harrison’s note here reads, ‘I have, since my address, received a letter from Dr Peter Jones of Newcastle University suggesting that the lines of Plautus might very well be “facite totae plateae plateant” (Aulularia, 407).’
12 ‘Words! Words!’: Nikos Kazantzakis, in Report to Greco, translated by P. A. Bien (Oxford: Cassirer, 1965).
13 the announcement of her death: Harrison’s note here reads, ‘Dr. Peter Jones’ letter also contained a xerox of the first page of a burlesque of Homer by Thomas Bridges (1797), which has the invocation: “Come, Mrs. Muse, but if a maid, / Then come, Miss Muse, and lend me aid!”’
14 ‘who deals with’: W. Macneile Dixon, Tragedy (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), p. 17.
15 ‘yet without being’: F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Francis Golffing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 102.
16 ‘theatre that can imagine: see Bonnie Marranca’s interview with Robert Jay Lifton, ‘Art and the Imagery of Extinction’, Performing Arts Journal, 6.3 (= 18) (1982), pp. 51–66; reprinted in Lifton’s The Future of Immortality (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
17 Harbage … ‘an obvious reciprocity’: Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audiences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 160.
18 fire breaks out: Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, translated from the German by Carol Stewart (New York: Viking, 1962), p. 26.
19 ‘Give us some light’: Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Lighting’, translated by John Willett, in Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, Eds John Willett and Ralph Manheim, with the co-operation of Erich Fried (revised edn, London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 426.
20 ‘a Shakespeare play’: W. B. Yeats, Memoirs (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 276.
21 a British TV documentary: Paxinou in Athens by Huw Weldon (1963).
22 histēmi: the first person singular of a crucial verb in the ancient Greek language, ‘I set up’, which is notoriously difficult to conjugate.
23 ‘first of all’: W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, p. 276.
24 ‘The mask challenges’: Susan Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p. 9.
25 ‘tragedy represents’: Adrian Poole, Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 11.
26 ‘the portrayal of’: Anthony Clare, ‘Living Death’, The Listener, 31 March 1988, issue 3,056, p. 10.
27 ‘There can be no poetry’: Theodor Adorno actually wrote in his Prismen in 1955, ‘nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch’ – ‘to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10a (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 30.
28 an appeal to a Roman general: D. L. Page, Select Papyri Vol. III: Poetry (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 360. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1941), pp. 598–9, lines 18–19.
29 ‘Theama’ is also: Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 1295; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 306.
30 ‘O
dread fate’: Oedipus Tyrannus, 1297–1305, translated by Richard Jebb (Cambridge: CUP, 1887), pp. 169–71.
31 ‘total nihilism’: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Trojan Women, English version by Ronald Duncan (London: H. Hamilton, 1967), p. xxi. Sartre’s Les Troyennes was first produced in 1965.
32 if the Partisan Review takes this attitude: Harrison’s note here reads, ‘I am glad to be able to report that since my address another less pusillanimous US magazine, Agni Review, has said it will be publishing my Lysistrata later in 1988.’
33 ‘an excellent selection’: Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The New Statesman, 6 October 1978, p. 442, reviewing K. J. Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (London: Duckworth, 1978).
34 Lady Falkender … ‘Before the Election’: this anecdote is also reported in a BBC interview with Sir Hugh Greene broadcast in 1982 and quoted in an article by Anita Singh in the Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2015, ‘Did BBC Help Win Labour the 1964 Election by Cancelling Steptoe and Son?’
35 ‘Kalo taxidi!’: ‘Have a nice trip!’
THE TRACKERS OF OXYRHYNCHUS
This introduction to the text of the play as it was performed in Delphi was first published in The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), and reprinted in Tony Harrison: Plays Five (London: Faber & Faber, 2004).
1 ‘I had a dream’: Byron, ‘Darkness’ (1816), lines 1–3.
2 ‘obvious reciprocity’: see note re. p. 178 above, p. 514.
3 ‘Give us some light’: Brecht, ‘The Lighting’, in Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, p. 426.
4 King Lear: W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, p. 276.
5 ‘evoked the open air’: William Poel, Shakespeare in the Theatre (London and Toronto: Sidgwick and Jackson, Ltd., 1913), p. 4.
6 ‘exemplary theatre’: Harley Granville Barker, The Exemplary Theatre (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922), p. 206; Dennis Kennedy, Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), p. 200.
7 terrible image tolerable: Voltaire, Letter 4 to M. de Genonville (1719), in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 2 (Theâtre, vol. 1) (Paris: Armand-Aubrée, 1829), pp. 33–9.
8 ‘suffers at’: Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 1295; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 306.
9 ‘total nihilism’: Sartre. Hecuba’s last word in Euripides’ Trojan Women is ‘life’ (1330); see note re. p. 189 above, p. 515.
10 ‘The problem’: Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 285.
11 ‘lust …’: D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (Florence: G. Orioli, 1931), p. 82.
12 ‘sublunary nature’: Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface’ to Samuel Johnson (Ed.), The Plays of Shakespeare (8 vols, London: J. and R. Tonson, 1765).
13 ‘Shakespeare should not’: Robert Bridges, Collected Essays (Oxford: OUP, 1927), p. 28.
14 ‘Mere coincidence’: Alfred Bennett Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 159. Emphasis added.
15 ‘farmers, craftsmen’: W. B. Stanford, Greek Tragedy and the Emotions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 17.
16 Charles I of 1819: the fragments of Charles I were first published in full in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: E. Moxon, 1870).
17 Dr Hunt … ‘The piece was’: Dr Hunt’s Address to the Annual General Meeting of the Egypt Exploration Society, 1911 (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1911).
18 Homeric Hymn to Hermes: first published in Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, Ed. Mary Shelley (London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824).
19 mentioned by Pausanias: Pausanias, Description of Greece, 9.29.6–9.30.2.
20 Herodotus says: Herodotus, Histories, 2.26.3.
21 Apollo was only reconciled: Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.7.9 and 2.22.2.
HECUBA TO US
Introduction to The Common Chorus (Parts 1 and II), first published by Faber & Faber (London, 1992) and reprinted in Tony Harrison: Plays Four (London: Faber & Faber, 2002).
1 ‘For deedes doe’: Edmund Spenser’s ‘The Ruins of Time’ was first published in his Complaints (London: William Ponsinby, 1591).
2 ‘Hippocrates, after’: Marcus Aurelius, translation by A. S. L. Farquharson, Ta eis heauton = The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944).
3 ‘probably gone’: J. G. Frazer, Pausanias’s Description of Greece (Cambridge: CUP, 1898), p. 395.
4 ‘This year everyone’: George Solti, interview with Marc Fisher, Washington Post, 5 August 1990.
5 Heinrich Heine was appalled: in the Preface to Lutèce: lettres sur la vie politique, artistique et sociale de la France (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1855).
6 ‘a dozen showers’: Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 592 (Friday 10 September 1714), p. 384.
7 ‘a common Horace’: Lord Chesterfield, Letters Written By The Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl Of Chesterfield, To His Son, Philip Stanhope (London: J. Dodsley, 1774), vol. 1, p. 298.
8 ‘The spectacle of’: George Santayana, Uncommon Sense (Boston, Basel and Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1984), p. 57.
9 ‘Transience is the backdrop’: ibid.
10 ‘symbolic immortality’: Robert Jay Lifton, ‘The Psychic Toll of the Nuclear Age’, New York Times Magazine, 26 September 1982.
11 ‘negative solidarity’: Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1970), p. 83.
12 spectacular photograph: the photo, taken in 1983 by Raissa Page, was reproduced in her Guardian obituary and can be viewed online at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/sep/21/raissa-page-obituary.
13 ‘of several words’: Jeffrey Henderson, The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (New York: OUP, 1991), p. 137.
14 Carry Greenham Home: directed by Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson (1983).
15 ‘I am so tired’: Caroline Blackwood, On the Perimeter: Caroline Blackwood at Greenham Common (London: Flamingo, 1984), p. 14.
16 ‘smelted’ into performance: Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, translated by Kitty Hunter Blair (London: Bodley Head, 1986), p. 134.
HONORARY DOCTORATE, ATHENS
Acceptance speech on receiving an honorary doctorate from the Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, December 1998.
1 ‘we are all Greeks’: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Hellas (1821).
2 the Shelley Cyclops: Shelley’s translation of Euripides’ satyr play Cyclops was first published in his Posthumous Poems, Ed. Mary Shelley (London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824).
PROMETHEUS: FIRE AND POETRY
The Introduction to Prometheus, first published by Faber & Faber (London, 1998) and reprinted in Tony Harrison: Collected Film Poetry (London: Faber & Faber, 2007).
1 proposed by Gaston Bachelard: in La psychanalyse du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).
2 ‘the vision has dissolved’: Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), p. 505.
3 ‘an English attempt’: George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite (London: G. Richards, 1898), pp. 218–19.
4 ‘Prometheus Unbound in particular’: Timothy Webb is a Shelley and Romantic literature specialist who has published widely. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to identify the source of this quotation.
5 ‘… Prometheus Unbound, a drama’: Isabel Quigley (Ed.), Shelley: A Selection (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), p. 20.
6 ‘It is easy to conceive’: H. H. Anniah Gowda, Dramatic Poetry from Medieval to Modern Times (Madras: Macmillian India, 1971), p. 192.
7 ‘My book is poetry’: Henrik Ibsen, letter to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, written in Rome on 9 December 1867, in Henrik Ibsens Samlede Verker, Eds Francis Bull, Halvdan Koht and Didrik Arup Seip (Oslo: Gyldendal 1949), vol. 18, p. 198.
8 ‘for Shelley was’: Karl Marx, quoted in Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, translated by Edward Fitzgerald (London: Jo
hn Lane, 1936), Chapter 15.
9 Chartist movement: Paul Foot, Red Shelley (London: Bookmarks Publications, 1984), p. 228.
10 ‘He defied’: Heinrich Heine, letter to Rudolf Christiani, 27 May 1824, in Heines Sämtliche Werke, vol. 20, Ed. Fritz H. Eisner (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1970), p. 163.
11 ‘had cursed’: Adam Mickiewicz, Preface to his Polish translation of Byron’s The Giaour, Poezye lorda Byrona tłumaczone, Giaur przez Adama Mickiewicza (Paris: Alexander Jełowicki, 1835).
12 ‘never did the’: Giuseppe Mazzini, ‘Byron and Goethe’, which first appeared in English translation in the Monthly Chronicle, September 1839.
13 ‘Amid this land’: the poem is reproduced in The Poems of Thomas Kibble Hervey, Ed. Mrs T. K. Hervey (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866).
14 ‘Thanks to fire’: Paul Ginestier, The Poet and the Machine, translated by Martin B. Friedman (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), p. 21.
15 ‘The Iron Kingdom’: Guy de Maupassant, in the fragment ‘Le Creusot’, published in Au Soleil (Paris: V. Havard, 1884) and Oeuvres complètes, vol. 9 (Paris: Librairie de France, 1935), p. 328.
16 ‘primordial figure’: Timothy Richard Wutrich, Prometheus and Faust: The Promethean Revolt in Drama from Classical Antiquity to Goethe (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), p. 8.
17 ‘the patron saint’: George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941), p. 297.
18 Karl Marx … pleading for freedom: see Marx’s 1841 Preface to his doctoral dissertation ‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’; the cartoon is reproduced in Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of his Life, translated by Edward Fitzgerald (London: John Lane, 1936) and Edith Hall, ‘The Problem with Prometheus’, in E. Hall, R. Alston and J. McConnell (Eds) Ancient Slavery and Abolition from Hobbes to Hollywood (Oxford: OUP, 2011).
19 John Lehmann … in Sukhum: Prometheus and the Bolsheviks (London: Cresset Press, 1937), pp. ii, 254–5.
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