Iphigénie en Aulide: Greek Tragedy in the French style

The Brussels opera house (La Monnaie) is presenting Gluck’s two Iphigénies in tandem. On some days you can see both of them in one go, an evening of Wagnerian length; the two operas performed without intervals and a long break between. Or you can see them separately and I opted for the first of the two. The inspiration is more Racine than Euripides with a lengthy treatment of the love between Iphigeneia and Achilles which allows for the themes of obedience, duty, guilt and love in different forms to be developed. Achilles loves Iphigeneia and is prepared to defy the orders of Agamemenon for her sacrifice, but his duty compels him to obey his commander; Clytemnestra is conflicted between her love for daughter and her duty towards her husband; Iphigeneia herself loves her father even though he gives the order to sacrifice her under threat from the gods. Gluck’s through-composed music is serious and always pushes the momentum forward. It suits the tragic atmosphere well and is a highly suitable style for Greek tragedy with its combination of recitative, short arias and choruses. It has few great moments and is ultimately unmemorable but for the expression of dramatic scenes it is highly successful, especially when shaped and made urgent by the conductor Christophe Rousset, whose musical triumphs continue at the Monnaie after Semele. A strong cast, headed by Véronique Gens in the title role, conveyed the tension and conflict within their tragic characters. After Katie Mitchell’s staging of Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis at the National Theatre in London recently this seemed restrained and cool, but the Racinean pacing of the events in this treatment develops into real tragic tension. Only the rather soppy happy ending detracts from the full horror of what we are capable of when put into impossible situations.

The main problem of this production lies in the staging and the director’s lack of appreciation for the audience in the theatre. Obviously the producer did not climb up to the balcony where I found my seat to check the sight-lines. I could only see half of the action and only part of the surtitles. Pierre Audi brought the stage over the orchestra pit, put the orchestra on the stage and placed the chorus behind them as a sort of reflection of the audience. (We are all spectators in this postmodern world; there are no hidden actions; all is there in front of us, we get the point). What he forgot is that the Monnaie is a traditional house where you can’t do this sort of thing without depriving the audience of most of what you want to show them. The seats which have poor enough lines of sight for conventional productions are designed to look at the stage not the pit. So we had a good view of the orchestra who we wanted to hear, and half a glimpse of the singers who we wanted to see. The staging would go well in a school hall or a gym or other improvised venue, but not in a traditional opera house which did after all commission the piece. It had “touring production” written all over it and will no doubt be sold all round Europe. But it shows contempt for its original audience. In addition I think the health and safety authorities should be called in to look at the tilt of the stairs which his singers had to negotiate their way down. I feared for the sopranos in their long dresses each time.

Vitruvius on architecture

Does anyone read Vitruvius today? Do architecture students have some familiarity with the basic text on architecture from the ancient world. Judging from the splendid new Penguin Classics (http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141441689,00.html?strSrchSql=vitruvius*/On_Architecture_Vitruvius) translation of the ten books de architectura, perhaps they do. But does anyone read him in Latin? Our European Baccalaureate last year decided on Latin scientific writers as the set texts for the final examination, and so we have become familiar with this text, in fact for the first time. It is a much more entertaining read than may be imagined at first, and is far more than a dry technical analysis of building techniques. (Though in its own way that would still be pretty interesting.) He spends quite a long time telling stories about the origin of architectural features, and about the famous figures of science and technology. His is the story about Archimedes in his bath, and about Ctesibius and his mirror in his father’s barber shop (the origin of hydraulic pumps). He is also fascinating on the origin of the Caryatid figure on temple buildings, and on the origin of the Corinthian capital. A young girl died from disease and her nurse collected up her things and placed them by her tomb in a basket with a tile on top. By chance she put this basket over the root of an acanthus plant which sprouted in the spring shooting its foliage up around and through the basket. A passing artist, Callimachus, observed the pleasing shape of the different elements and decided it would look well as a new type of capital on top of a column.

Sometimes you have to read him with the illustrations to hand to see exactly what he means, but the modern editions are full of diagrams and sketches to make the text clear. Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian man sketch seems just such an attempt: the meaning of the text becomes apparent when you see it rather than just read it.

The classic sections are those on the different orders of architecture, the styles of painting in houses and theatres and town planning. He is also good on astrology and how to defend a city from sieges. There is much more to him than just architecture: in fact architectus is not confined to the narrow sense of the word in modern languages. As a stylist, Vitruvius is not a Cicero or an Ovid, but he doesn’t pretend to be. He is trying to write clear plain Latin for other architects and engineers as well as a general readership to explain things that may have become lost if he hadn’t written them down. He does not deserve to be patronised in the way the translator of an online version of his work looks down on his Latin style. As an intermediate author he has a lot to offer students of Latin who are beginning on their exploration of authentic texts but who may still find the subtleties and complexities of the classic works a bit daunting.

Do you CLIL?

Second half of term began with a pedagogical day. This is Eurospeak for in-service training, And I found myself in a lecture about CLIL, that is Content and Language Integrated Learning. This turns out to be teaching a subject to pupils through one of their foreign languages, History in English to native French speakers, for example. In French this educational phenomenon is referred to as EMILE (L’enseignement d’une matière intégré à une langue étrangère) with a nice reference to Rousseau. After a bit of this lively lecture (given by a guest lecturer: details here: http://www.vub.ac.be/FOST/fost_in_english/leden_pvdc_eng.htm) I began to realise I had been here before and I recalled some articles I had actually written on this subject in an earlier incarnation. It wasn’t called CLIL then but some other acronym, but basically it was the same: teaching through a second language towards a subject. I had been more interested in the sociological effects of this on the pupils: what German speakers made of being taught the history of the Second World War in English, by a British teacher in a mixed class with French, Italian and Dutch fellow-pupils, for example. I had seen this as having a Europeanizing effect on the youngsters, breaking down old prejudices and nationalisms in the search for objectivity and a touch of reconciliation. But it turns out that CLIL is not the answer to Europe’s old political problems but it is a way of increasing schoolchildren’s performance. Those who learn Mathematics using a CLIL methodology do better on their tests. (I suspect this means Belgians doing Maths in English in practice, but that’s another question.) And all this in the lecture, with added neuroscience. It was illustrated by those brightly-coloured brain scan pictures you often see in newspaper articles, which it is claimed show different areas of brain activity. I had a vision of schoolchildren being fed into an MRI machine and then being made to do Maths problems while they were lying flat inside a metal tube with electrodes fitted to their heads, but I’m sure it’s not like that really. It was all down to concept forming apparently. When the pupils are tackling these problems through a second language they form the concept more precisely, because they are having to think about what they are doing in a more objective manner than they would if they could do it more automatically through the medium of their first language. Then I began to think: isn’t this exactly what teachers in the past used to claim for Latin? The act of learning abstract language skills (nouns, verbs, accidence, syntax and so on) through the medium of the first language but applied to another separate language made the concepts more easily understood and consequently retained. So all that time spent on Latin grammar was not such a waste of time after all. But what did the old teachers of past centuries know? They were using what the lecturer called pre-scientific thinking about education; they didn’t have those nice pictures of bright blobs in the brain. Classics teachers would be regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned to claim such benefits for studying Latin today: we have to justify Classical studies on cultural and European grounds instead. CLIL on the other hand gets results. A criticism often aimed at Latin is that it is only for the better performing pupils. But what if it is the other way round: that those who do Latin perform better because of it, as a result of the CLIL effect? Will Latin then be at the forefront of modern educational thinking? With added neuroscience?

Look at the screen

I have had a projector in my classroom for the first time since the beginning of term. I hesitate to call it by its familiar name - beamer – as when I said I had a beamer my grown up children thought I had bought a BMW (beamer in London speak). So a data projector or device that throws a large image onto a screen, or a blank wall in my case. I do not have a Smartboard which is an interactive screen you tough instead of pointing a mouse. You quickly learn not to emphasise a point by tapping the board smartly; if you do you risk losing the whole page and then have to rummage around getting it back. What difference does this make to my teaching? In fact quite a lot. We have the Cambridge Latin Course DVDs for Books 1 and 2 on the school network (yearly licence fee paid up, of course) so I am able to use the readings, dramatisations, and civilisation videos regularly. Much better to show a short 3 or 4 minute film, than to devote a whole lesson to catching up on the ones available once a week, as I was doing before. Perhaps the most irritating part of it all though is how quickly the pupils get used to this and accept it as normal, although I still think it is an amazing piece of new technology. In other classes it is also extremely useful. With an internet connection you can very quickly and easily find an image to illustrate a piece. I was going over an unseen translation from Cicero, one of the Catilines where he tells how all the senators deserted the benches when Catiline entered the senate-house. I had not thought of it before the lesson, but I remembered the painting of just this scene and within seconds was able to find it by Googling Cicero and Catiline and switching to images.

Mythological references and illustrations are now all within easy reach, and each teacher can quickly build up their own data base. Also available are resource banks, like the Oxbox for upper school Latin from Oxford University Press. This full of exercises, unseen translations, texts for practice, presentations and other activities including the latest thing: translation into Latin. (More about this later.) So no more chalk, no more squeaky markers on the white board and now nothing but PowerPoint. Perhaps, however, we should stop going on about this new technology and like the kids in the class just take it for granted and get on with the job of teaching using what kit is available to us. The lesson is still the same, the class have to pay attention to the material in the same way and they still have to work at it. New technology doesn’t make it easier, but it does broaden the range of possible material for any particular class. So it may be the case that we are not “dumbing down” but making more demands of our students after all. So everyone, pay attention to the screen.

Not taking a school trip

For the last eight years or so I have taken a school trip (or voyage scolaire) to the Bay of Naples and Pompeii. This has been for Latinists aged 14 or so (our 4th year) in their second year of Latin. They are familiar with Pompeii through the Cambridge Latin Course Book 1 and are pleased to see some of the locations in which the stories about Caecilius and Quintus take place. A trip to this area can also take in Mount Vesuvius, Herculaneum, the Archaeological Museum in Naples, the Campi Flegrei, the Villa Oplontis and Paestum. Over the years the visits have evolved, both improving and declining. Visits to Herculaneum have improved a lot with a new car park for the bus, and no longer a need to walk a perilous distance to the site entrance. New excavations are also tantalisingly close: the Villa dei Papiri almost within sight of the traditional excavations. Pompeii is often as frustrating as ever with the House of the Vettii still closed after many years of restoration. Every year for the last four I have asked at the entrance “Is the House of the Vetti open?” Always the reply is “sempre chiusa.” Last year I was told the restaurant was also closed because of a dispute over the franchise. I didn’t dare ask any further about that. Who has the concession over coffee in Pompeii? Vesuvius is always a good excursion, although the weather can make this a bit uncertain as it will be closed if it is cloudy. Even the usually dependable Solfatara had changed last year. This live volcano near Pozzuoli is a winner with school pupils especially if they were taken around by Bruno. He must have been in his seventies, a retired teacher by my estimation who spoke good French and always amused and informed my pupils, showing them the volcanic phenomena of the region with a twinkle of enthusiasm. But last year I was told he was no longer available and school visits had to make special arrangements.

So this year I have said no. The demands of taking 30 14 year olds away have finally proved too much. I very much enjoy teaching lessons on the spot: talking about gladiators in the amphitheatre itself; giving a lecture on Vitruvius’ analysis of the Doric order in front of one the temples at Paestum; speculating on who lived in the Villa Oplontis in one of the bedrooms; showing the extent of the eruption by the wall of volcanic material rising up in front of the site at Herculaneum. But when we get back to the hotel at 18.30 or so the day has not finished and will continue through dinner (Are they all eating enough? Are they behaving at table?) and the evening (How to occupy them until bedtime?) and the night (Who is making that noise at 03.00? Are they all in their rooms?). The responsibilities of keeping them all safe, well, fed, healthy, getting enough sleep) are just too much, when parents are now so demanding over the safety aspects, the cost and their need to be constantly informed about the welfare of their offspring. (Can we have your mobile number? You will make sure it is switched on at all times?) I have begun to wonder if it is safe to let them go off for half an hour in Naples. Probably not, but they do have to learn to cope with different places. So for my pupils I shall have to leave to someone else the responsibility of giving them the experience of seeing the Bay of Naples with its ancient past and controversial present.

Partial to Martial 1

Euroclassicist has been amusing himself by making versions of some of Martial’s epigrams. Here are a few samples:

1.1

Hic est quem legis ille, quem requiris,
toto notus in orbe Martialis
argutis epigrammaton libellis:
cui, lector studiose, quod dedisti
viventi decus atque sentienti,
rari post cineres habent poetae.

Dear Readers, here’s the one to whom you’re partial,
Your favourite poet: M. Valerius Martial.
A crowd of you each day the bookshop crams
To buy his witty books of epigrams.
The praise you give him, gentlemen and ladies,
Is mostly given to poets down in Hades.
But he’s not ready for the depths of Hell:
In fact he’s here now, still alive and well.


1.4

Contigeris nostros, Caesar, si forte libellos,
terrarum dominum pone supercilium.
consuevere iocos vestri quoque ferre triumphi,
materiam dictis nec pudet esse ducem.
qua Thymelen spectas derisoremque Latinum,
illa fronte precor carmina nostras legas.
innocuos censura potest permittere lusus:
lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba.

If, o my lord, you condescend to look
At my small efforts in this little book,
Please do not let your brows in rage be furled
Although that fits the ruler of the world.
Triumphal jokes made in my lord’s procession
Are licensed by an emperor’s concession.
My jokes are like those of a cheeky comic;
Allow your frown, then, to be economic.
My poems must be rated as “18”,
But even if they’re filthy, I am clean.


1.10

Petit Gemellus nuptias Maronillae
et cupit et instat et precatur et donat.
adeone pulchra est? immo foedius nil est.
quid ergo in illa petitur et placet? tussit.

Jimmy wants to marry Jane.
He’s got gifts and flowers to give.
In fact she is a real pain,
But she’s got three weeks to live.


1.16

Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura
quae legis hic: aliter non fit, Avite, liber.

Some poems here are pretty good,
Some scarcely worth a look.
But in the end, you need them all
To make up one whole book.

1. 23

Invitas nullum nisi cum quo, Cotta, lavaris
et dant convivam balnea sola tibi.
mirabar quare numquam me, Cotta, vocasses:
iam scio me nudum displicuisse tibi.

Cotta asks you to join him for food
In the baths with your kit off – how rude!
But he never asks me.
Why is this? Well, you see:
I don’t look too good in the nude.


1.28

Hesterno fetere mero qui credit Acerram,
fallitur: in lucem semper Acerra bibit.

All day he has the kind of stink,
Which must be due to last night’s drink.
He drinks so late his drunken haze
Is not last night’s, but still today’s.

Going to University

Part of Euroclassicist’s job is dealing with young people from all over Europe who want to go on to study at university in the United Kingdom. This has to be done through UCAS (www.ucas.com) which is the central admissions point for all UK universities. The main difference between entry to UK universities and those of many other European countries is that entry through UCAS is competitive: applicants receive conditional offers or rejections on the way admissions tutors assess their applications. Their achievements at school and their marks are part of this, but so is the reference or report written by the school on their progress, character, suitability for the course and their predicted marks in their final examination. Some courses require additional entry tests as well. In addition the applicant must write a personal statement expressing their motivation for the course and institutions they are applying to, as well as their background and interests. They must demonstrate in this personal statement their commitment to their subject and give clear reasons why the tutors should choose them instead of their rivals. A large part of my day is taken up in reading many of these personal statements, and then returning them to their authors explaining what could be improved or better expressed (and correcting plain errors) while endeavouring to make sure that it remains a personal statement and not one that has been completely rewritten. The remainder of the day at the moment is taken up with arranging for the writing of the references, writing them myself, and then editing those written by my colleagues for space and consistency of style. Then I try to squeeze in some Latin teaching as well.

What amazes me most about these applications is the number that come from young people of all European nationalities who want to go to study in English in the UK. Many have English as their first or second language and have achieved an excellent level of language skills. Some, however, take English as their third language and have studied it formally for only six years. Yet they are willing to commit themselves to a three year undergraduate course in what is neither their first language (or mother tongue) nor their second language as studied at school. The adaptability and ambition of these young people is admirable, and experience shows that they go on to make a success of their chosen courses. As a whole for all applicants, Geography is up this year and Economics, though still popular, is down a bit. Not many of them, although they are skilled and accomplished linguists, go on to study languages at university. Quite a few, however, go to study Law with a language or International Business or Management where they use their languages as an integral part of their course. We send a good number to do scientific and engineering courses each year. Imperial College London which is a specialist science and technology institution is very popular with my students. I even get an occasional student to apply for Classics, which flourishes at Oxford, Cambridge, London (University College and King’s College) and many others.
Many of these applicants wish to go to Oxford or Cambridge (or Oxbridge, as we call it/them). These world-class universities are very competitive and few in the end are chosen. The capacity to show that you are completely committed to your academic subject, to have all-round ability in every subject and to be a reasonably well-rounded human being as well is not granted to many and I always have some disappointed faces to deal with in January when the decisions have been made. For talented and ambitious young people, the first rejection in their lives is hard to take. But they bounce back after a bit and realise that Bristol, Warwick, Edinburgh and Imperial College are every bit as good, and are perhaps even better for them personally. These applications have to be completed by October 15th and the lucky ones will be interviewed in Oxford or Cambridge in the first week of December.

Chinese Semele

I told my Baccalaureate Latin class, as we were reading Ovid’s Diana and Actaeon, that the evening before I had been to see an opera in Brussels performed by Chinese and international singers, directed by a Chinese artist, conducted by a Frenchman, of an opera in English by a German composer based in England, based on a version in Latin by Ovid of a Greek myth. This extraordinary production has been taking place at La Monnaie/De Munt, the Brussels opera house throughout the month of September. The contemporary artist Zhang Huan has been the overall inspiration for the show, making his directorial debut in opera. He is best known as a performance and installation artist and has an exhibition on in London at the same time featuring a pig (don’t ask for more details). The root of this production of Handel’s Semele is a Buddhist temple taken down and reconstructed by Zhang Huan, first in his Shanghai studio, and then transported to Brussels for the performances (above middle). Behind this temple there is a long and tragic story, which is shown to the audience in a video during the overture, concerning the couple who were living in this abandoned temple for a time before Zhang Huan came to ask to remove it. It is a tale of love, jealousy, murder, arrest and violent death when the husband is convicted of killing one of his wife’s lovers and executed. Though not exact, the parallels to the story of Semele appear to be what attracted Zhang Huan to the project of directing his first opera. He fills the show with many elements of his art: the temple itself used as a set; sumptuous costumes (above middle) from both Chinese and European cultures; a group of musicians from Mongolia playing and singing traditional music; his trademark ash paintings (above top); and finally the wife of the temple couple herself bringing the drama to its conclusion. This whole creation was intrinsic to the performance and Zhang’s interventions in the opera (including cutting the last scene) cannot be separated from the whole experience. One of his sculptures has been placed outside the opera house (above bottom) and the audience have to walk through it, smelling the incense (which provides the ash for the paintings) as they enter. Then in the interval Aruhan and her Mongolian musicians perform their version of Semele outside under the legs of this sculpture. The opera critics in the newspapers I have seen seem to have been baffled by all this, and have concentrated on the things they feel comfortable with: the singing and the superb orchestral playing of Les Talens Lyriques under Christophe Rousset. However, what they have failed to indicate is that this is one of the most thought-provoking current opera productions, combining visual, musical, cinematic and dramatic effects in such way as to achieve a total artistic experience; and it does this without the predictable “shocking” tactics too often employed by European opera directors. At the very end, one of the ash paintings of a woman (Semele or the temple wife?) is shown on a screen in front of the stage. We see water trickle down over it, as slowly the image is washed away and Semele is dead and the show is over.

This is really a Classics blog and I haven’t gone into detail about Ovid yet, but the main thing to take away from this seems to be that Greek myth is so deeply ingrained in European culture that we take it for granted. Of course, a story about overwhelming passion that ends in violent death has to be Greek, and the sensational narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are the means by which we have absorbed such tales into our archetypal consciousness. But how can this be the case for Chinese culture? When this production transfers to Shanghai will the cultural commentators there be asking: who is this writer Ovid? What does he have to offer us? Will there be translations of the Metamorphoses in bookshops in Beijing and Shanghai? How can European classicists respond to that? Zhang Huan has shown how such a cross-over between cultures can work and enrich both of them.

The Myth Painter

The Myth Painter 31st July 2009
J.W. Waterhouse The Royal Academy London


Classicists may well know John William (or Nino) Waterhouse (1849-1917) for his paintings of Greek Myths. The images are probably well-known as illustrations of texts of Ovid or Homer. Calendars using his paintings often sell well. Yet this is his first major exhibition in London for many years and shows the largest ever retrospective collection of his paintings. Many are in Tate Britain (though not always on display), others are in English provincial galleries, and some have come from as far as Australia for this show.

He has been out of fashion as a Victorian painter, often regarded as sentimental and conservative in style, and recently the young women who feature in nearly all of his works have been looked at with disapproval and a suspicion of an unhealthy fascination. His reputation ought to be enhanced by this exhibition for, whatever comparisons can be made with other more modern work being done at the same time, he is clearly a terrific painter.

Look at Circe Invidiosa, for example (above middle).

Reproductions cannot convey the quality of the green he has found to give this image its attractive yet troubling atmosphere. The story is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 14 and shows Circe jealously poisoning the sea after Glaucus, who loves Scylla, has rejected her so that Scylla will be turned into a monster. Waterhouse’s women are almost always highly attractive yet slightly dangerous creatures. His paintings feature Circe, Ariadne, Proserpina, Penelope, Echo, the Sirens and the nymphs who tempt Hylas in perhaps his best known picture (above top).
Other paintings are based on figures from English literature: the Lady of Shalott and Miranda from the Tempest. While classics teachers may often use these images to illustrate the stories of Greek mythology and particularly the way they are told by Ovid, it is worth paying some attention to the context in which Waterhouse was working. The Pre-Raphaelite painters (Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt) were clearly a great influence, but Waterhouse was still painting in what appears to be a similar style long after the Victorian period and also long after Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. This exhibition enables us to look at Waterhouse not just as an illustrator of stories but as an individual stylist and original painter. Is it the use of Greek mythology which makes him appear old-fashioned? Or is his use of unusual and troubling stories from Ovid a precursor of the kind of criticism now current for Ovid, which sees him not as an amusing but slight poet but as a subversive and ironic writer reworking and recreating the old stories in a new way? Perhaps we should not be saying, “Look at this charming portrayal of the Echo and Narcissus story” but “How does Waterhouse create a disturbing image of the young woman in this story?” There are also hints in the notes to the exhibition of Waterhouse’s possible interest in the occult particularly in the figure of Proserpina who seems to appear in many of his pictures although she is not named as such. Claudian’s poem the Rape of Proserpina seems to have been important to him. Questions can also be raised over possible misogyny in his portrayal of women as femmes fatales, always tempting the men in the pictures to danger, and over his fascination with young women, girls even, in sexually ambiguous poses. It may be thought however that here we are retrospectively attributing the unease of our own period back onto the late nineteenth century when a portrayal of childhood may have had very different connotations. This show seems to have been popular with the public who have been brought face to face with a demanding series of images based on Latin and Greek authors. Without a basic knowledge of the foundation texts that classicists seek to keep before the gaze of young people in Europe, the subject mater of these paintings would be baffling to many viewers. Should we really just read them as examples of significant form, of just a collection of shapes and colours, or should we know or have to work out what story the painter is trying to tell?

Helen at Shakespeare’s Globe

Complementing Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is a new production of Euripides’ Helen in a version by Frank McGuiness. This is the first time the theatre, which reproduces the building of Shakespeare’s time, has put on a Greek drama http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/theatre/annualtheatreseason/helen/. One of Euripides’ lightest tragedies, it was played largely for laughs but the rapid production managed to slip from the comedy to the more serious almost seamlessly. Penny Downie was a sexy, lively Helen reaching up to the top of galleries with her appeals to the gods to rescue her from her fate of being abandoned in Egypt among barbarians.
For this is of course the real Helen: the one who went to Troy was merely an idolon. Menelaus (a strong and sympathetic Paul McGann) is shipwrecked on her shore on his return from the war and is surprised to find his real wife already there. These two fill the stage and the whole theatrical space, and take us through their disbelief, wariness and ultimate joy in their mutual recognition. This plot device of course enables Euripides to play with the idea of the war being fought for nothing, for an illusion: a thought that is always relevant to whichever war is being fought. It also enables him to include some clever wordplay over misidentification and misunderstanding. We can see the origin of all those future comedies of separation and reunification, of loss and restoration in Menander and Plautus and then the whole of European comedy, here in a so-called tragedy of Euripides. McGuiness’s version is in what is called “muscular” free verse, that is a kind of heightened poetic prose which suits the style of Greek drama well. It is the same solution adopted by Ted Hughes in his version of Racine’s version of Euripides (see the post above on Phèdre). Deborah Bruce as director has solved the problem of what to do with the chorus in the current fashion: a collection of individuals half recite their lines, half sing them to simple tunes (though the professional singer brought in to strengthen the music should have been left in the box with the musicians or incorporated properly into the chorus, not dressed in a dinner jacket and allowed to wander over the stage). I know the deus ex machina is difficult to deal with too, but the knockabout act of Castor and Pollux was unfunny and spoiled the hard work of the two principals.

A curious incident before the play started. One of the great things about the Globe is that you can often go along at the last minute and get a standing ticket for five pounds (six Euros), as was possible for Shakespeare’s public. (They paid one penny.) However to our surprise we were greeted with House Full posters and asked to wait for returns. While we were waiting a well dressed and well spoken woman came to the head of the queue offering two standing tickets. Someone in front of us took one and as we wanted two we passed her back to the person behind us who took the second ticket for five pounds. We continued to wait while a couple came up having a huge public row about whether to go the show or not (something about the last train, but not wanting to waste 40 pounds). Then the man who had just bought the standing ticket came back out of the theatre, furious. He had been sold a ticket for last night’s Romeo and Juliet, but in the transaction had not looked closely at the ticket. I immediately began to have suspicions abut the piece of street theatre we had just witnessed. Was this a scam too? Then a member of the box office team came up with two standing tickets and we got in just in time. Who would have thought that a) a Greek Tragedy would be sold out and b) that a rogue would pull a stunt like that outside the Globe? It was full of pickpockets, rascals and coney-catchers in Shakespeare’s time too apparently.

pronuntiatio restituta

Pronuntiatio restituta 4th August 2009

How we should pronounce Latin today? From day to day when Latin is used or referred to, we hear many varieties of pronunciation in the broadcast media. The restored pronunciation, which most professional classicists use, has not settled the matter, nor has it solved the problem. I am put in mind of this because of a TV programme about Roman food. The BBC has made a series called The Supersizers Eat in which two presenters eat the food of a particular era for a week to see how they get on.


Unsurprisingly one episode was set in Rome, where the two supersizers ate Roman food cooked according to Apicius and others with a fairly convincing recreation of the whole pig roasted at Trimalchio’s dinner party in Petronius. More perhaps about the food later, but first language. I shan’t repeat the gossip I heard from a former pupil of mine who was acting as researcher on this programme, but I should like to take issue with the pronunciation of Latin by Giles Coren. There was a brief passage of Latin conversation between him and the other presenter Sue Perkins (with subtitles) which as far as I could tell was not too bad, apart from the use of a soft ‘c’ throughout. The Roman dinner cena was referred to thereafter as “saynah”. My former pupil apparently did her best to persuade Giles that it should be cena “kayna” but without success. This was what he had been taught and he (as many do) insisted that this was correct. I come across this regularly, usually from parents, who are convinced that the pronunciation we use in class is eccentric if not plain wrong, but who of course cannot agree on what should be a suitable way of speaking Latin. What can we as professionals do about this? I suppose we must go on doing what we already do and try to be as consistent as possible, even between ourselves in our different countries and traditions and perhaps in a century or two there may be some sort of consensus. For the moment, however, it seems that the old pronunciation of Latin in English, which was supposedly reformed out of the classroom at the beginning of the twentieth century, is still hanging around in the dusty corners of some English private schools. We shall never be able to change Julius Caesar (“Jeewlius Seizer”) nor would it be right to, and a Caesar salad will keep its soft ‘c’. (As this dish, invented in Las Vegas at Caesars Palace (no apostrophe) is usually spelt Ceasar salad, I suggest we should keep this spelling for the salad to indicate its pronunciation and origins.) However, it would be best for Latin in an ancient context to be spoken in an authentic way. So please, television presenters everywhere, repeat after me one hundred times: cena with a ‘k’ sound.

Phèdre 2nd July 2009


Euroclassicist went to the London National Theatre last week – in Brussels. Thanks to the technology of NT Live, a performance of Racine’s Phèdre was broadcast direct to cinemas all around the UK and to other countries too. The leader in this technology has been the New York Metropolitan Opera which after being broadcast for many years on live radio across the USA and then to other countries has moved recently to the live relay of opera performance to cinemas. We saw Lucia di Lamermoor (Donizetti) recently in Brussels and it was almost like seeing a live performance. Would live theatre work as well?

Phèdre is Racine’s take on Euripides’ Hippolytus: serious French tragedy in strict alexandrines often thought to be encased in a rigid style of French classical acting. Was this the wisest choice to begin this season of live relays? The advantages are the presence of Helen Mirren in the cast as Phèdre. Dame Helen is a popular actor, well-known to the British public for her role as The Queen and in many film and television appearances (Prime Suspect, Calendar Girls). I first saw her play Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra when she was still a drama student. Her intensity, concentration and commitment to the role were ideally suited to the unrelenting pace of Racine’s drama. This was the second advantage to the choice of Phèdre. The two hours traffic of the drama (without a break) kept the audience pinned to the back of their seats as the tragedy unfolded. The rapport of the actors with audience was evident on the expression of their faces, which we could see in all the detail of HD vision in close up. This is something you cannot duplicate in the theatre: in the front row you see the actors close up but not the whole stage, further back you have a view of everything but not the close expressions.

The set was also well suited to the live transmission: a brilliant Greek blue sky, the suggestion of a Greek coast line or island. The cameras could occasionally catch the actors isolated against this blue background, which we knew was just a cyclorama at the back of the stage but which became for us a real outdoor sky with the Greek sunlight burning down on the characters intensifying the emotions they were feeling. The costumes were indeterminate, not the clichés of ancient Greek tragedy, not identifiably modern. This tragedy was neither French nor English, ancient nor modern, and though clearly Greek it served for a lot more.

The actors were well-served by crystal clear sound which made understanding easy, though without subtitles for the non-native speaker audience. Subtitles in English (like the surtitles at the opera) may be a possibility worth considering in the future. The English version was by Ted Hughes who is well-known as an English poet and who was in fact Poet Laureate until his death in 1998. Described as muscular free verse his version does not attempt to reproduce Racine’s alexandrines but concentrates on projecting the raw emotions of the characters in direct but heightened language. We have tickets for a live performance of the play later and will be able then to make a direct comparison between the two experiences. I shall try revisit Racine in French and Euripides in Greek before then to make a valid comparison.

Classicists in Europe may not have too many similar chances to see a play like this on a Greek theme, but when such things do occur it is well worth making an effort to go along and to encourage students to experience live acting and productions of this quality in an entirely new way. The relays of the New York Metropolitan Opera may well have productions of classically themed operas in the coming seasons.