It’s been quite a week in the District as we’ve been met with a wave of snowfall unlike we’ve seen in … well… ever! Besides closing most of the area for a week, the snow also caused us to cancel a few of our opening week performances of ORESTES in the Theatre, which resumed performances Thursday night.
Theatre certainly has come a long way since its origins in Ancient Greece, but its influence lives on. ORESTES is one of many Greek tragedies that survives the centuries through translation and performance and sometimes translative adaptation. Anne Washburn’s take on the tragedy about the surviving children of Agamemmnon and Clytemnaestra shows us that a centuries-old play still entertains and educates audiences today.
Shakespeare’s plays, too, have a certain je ne sais quoi which allows them to stay present in the public eye, and even Shakespeare may have been influenced by Greek Tragedy. Take, for example, HAMLET and ORESTES: They both involve the murder of a king by a relative. The protagonists find themselves denied their fathers’thrones by newly wedded couples. Both Orestes and Hamlet experience periods of madness, and their revenge takes the lives of both the mother and her new husband. Also, both stories place great emphasis on the importance of faithful friendship (in Plyades and Horatio) vs. seeming friendship (in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Menelaus). The primary difference is the end. Orestes follows the convention of the day using adeus ex machina to conjure a happy ending, while Hamletends tragically with almost everyone dying in the final scene.
You can find more information like this in our Study Guide for ORESTES, playing at the Folger until March 7. Do any other plays stick out to you as influenced or similar to a Greek play?
[…] on the story. Other sources do confirm that Shakespeare was also influenced by the Greek tragedies (https://folgereducation.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/the-greeks-and-shakespeare/). Influence on the works of great playwrights, make their genius within human reach, is a feeling I […]
Shakespeare doen’st know greek tragedies, just Seneca and perphaps Plautus. Until Ressaincent the greeks was unknow for west.
[…] Showerman speaks on Folger edu-blog Shakespeare Fellowship President Earl Showerman posted a comment about Greek influences in Hamlet to the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Making a Scene: Shakespeare in the Classroom educational blog on February 14, 2010. Showerman’s commentary supported a February 12, 2010 post by Folger Education Programs Administrative Assistant Caitlin Smith titled, “The Greeks and Shakespeare”. […]
[…] February 18, 2010 Shakespeare Fellowship President Earl Showerman posted a comment about Greek influences in Hamlet to the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Making a Scene: Shakespeare in the Classroom educational blog on February 14, 2010. Showerman’s commentary supported a February 12, 2010 post by Folger Education Programs Administrative Assistant Caitlin Smith titled, “The Greeks and Shakespeare”. […]
Thank you to Caitlin Smith for presenting this all important topic of the relationship between Shakespeare’s work and the plays of the classic Greek theater. Her question about other plays “influenced or similar to a Greek play” has a worthy answer.
Other Greek tragedies have been identified as Shakespeare sources by scholars, from J. Churton Collins in 1904, who found Sophocles’ Ajax as a source for Troilus and Cressida, to Emrys Jones in 1977, Euripides’ Hecuba for Titus Andronicus, and more recently to A.D. Nutall in1989, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus for Timon of Athens).
Those interested in current scholarship on Shakespeare and Greek sources can find Dr. Showerman’s “Shakespeare’s Many Much Ado’s: Alcestis, Hercules, and Love’s Labour’s Wonne” at Brief Chronicles, Vol. 1 (2009). The article may be found by using the following link:
http://www.briefchronicles.com/ojs/index.php/bc/article/view/9
R. Thomas Hunter, Ph.D.
Another book worth consulting on this subject is ‘Shakespeare and the Greek Example’ by A. Poole (e.g. http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2143857)
Caitlin Smith has succinctly summarized the major plot and character similarities between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Euripides’ Orestes and Electra. Orestes was the most prominent character in all of Greek tragedy, appearing as a major character in the dramas of Aeschylus (Choephori and Eumenides), Sophocles (Electra) and Euripides (Orestes, Electra, Iphigenia of Tauris and Andromache). Scholars have for over a century recognized the many parallels between these Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s greatest drama. Classical scholars Gilbert Murray (1914) and H.D.F. Kitto (1956) have written extensively on the subject, each suggesting a possible direct influence, despite the fact that these dramas were mostly untranslated from the original Greek, or published as Latin translations in continental editions. More recent scholars, including Louise Schleiner (SQ 1990) and Theodore Lidz (1975) have elaborated in even greater detail the debt Shakespeare owed to the Greek tragedians for Hamlet. In ‘Hamlet’s Enemy: Madness and Myth in Hamlet’, Lidz writes: “If the similarities between Hamlet and Euripides’ Electra and Orestes are fortuitous, the coincidences are rather amazing for plays with such closely related themes. If, however, they indicate that Shakespeare was familiar with Euripides’ plays, we have reason to believe that Shakespeare purposefully altered the Amleth saga into a play that weighed what would have happened to Orestes if his father had bidden him to spare his mother, and thereby created one of the most subtle and tortured of all tragic heroes.” That contemporary playwrights recognized Shakespeare’s debt to Euripides is attested by Thomas Heywood’s Second Part of the Iron Age which included a closet scene between Clytemnestra and Orestes with elements taken from Hamlet. Paul Stampfer (1880) and Margaret Arnold (1984) have suggested a direct influence of Euripides’ Phoenissae on Troilus and Cressida and more modern Shakespeare scholars Jonathan Bate, Claire McEachern and Sarah Dewar-Watson (SQ 2009) have all argued for a direct influence of Euripides’ Alcestis on both Much Ado about Nothing and The Winter’s Tale. Is it not time that Jonson’s misleading claim of Shakespeare’s “lesse Greek” as regards Euripides’ influence on the playwright be broadly challenged by the academy?