University Greek Plays, in America

A couple of weeks ago the Secret Victorianist attended a production of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, staged by the students of Barnard College here in New York City. It was my second ‘Greek Play’, as I was also at Oxford’s most recent Greek Play in 2014—a production of Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers. And, during my Masters, I had also spent time investigating the homosocial and publishing culture around the 1900 Cambridge Greek Play—Aeschylus’s Agamemnon—(a subject I’ve blogged about before).

The Harvard Greek Play in 1906

My night at Barnard however made me wonder about the history of the Greek Play in America. Were American universities slower to join in the nineteenth-century renaissance of performances in Ancient Greek than their British counterparts? The programme told me Barnard’s Greek Play was an annual event, but only one dating back to 1977. I wanted to do some more digging to find out.

What I found was a fascinating journal article from the Classical Journal, published October 1910. D.D. Hains’s ‘Greek Plays in America’ is a topline summary of American institutions’ performances of classical plays in ancient languages, and translation, and shows the speed with which these universities took to the tradition being established in Britain.

Oxford’s first Greek Play was an Agamemnon given in 1880, which was later repeated in Eton, Harrow and London. Cambridge’s inaugural Greek Play, Ajax, came two years later in 1882.

But Harvard University in fact nearly pipped Oxbridge to the post. A production of Antigone was originally planned to celebrate the opening of the Sanders’ Theatre in 1876, but was ultimately abandoned. And so Harvard’s first Greek play, Oedipus Tyrannus, was actually performed in May 1881. The venture was an immediate success. The five performances drew audiences totaling 6,000 and a professional company took the production, in translation, to New York and Boston for an additional two weeks.

The University of Toronto's Antigone (1882)

I was also surprised to find that the second university Greek Play on the American continent was Canadian. Toronto University staged Antigone in 1882 and, again, in 1894.

The University of Pennsylvania can lay claim to the first Greek comedy, the Acharnians, in 1886, while Smith College was the first with a female cast, producing Sophocles’ Electra in 1889.

Haines estimates 101 performances based on Ancient Greek drama at 47 American institutions between 1881 and 1910, with around half as many in Latin from a slightly reduced pool of universities. His conclusion that ‘the increasing number of such performances augurs happily for the future of the classics in our schools and colleges’ might have been slightly optimistic, but the tradition does live on at schools like Barnard, even as the popularity of a classical education has waned.

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A Victorian Alphabet: S is for Swinburne, Sappho and Sadomasochism

Matthew Arnold criticised Algernon Charles Swinburne for his ‘fatal habit of using one hundred words when one would suffice’. So it is perhaps strange that Swinburne, a poet notable for his diffusiveness, should be so heavily indebted to that most fragmentary of poets, known for her enigmatic brevity – Sappho.

Sappho’s slight oeuvre is of course the result 2,600 years of imperfect transmission but the broken nature of her poetry has become one of the most identifiable reasons of its appeal. Swinburne loved and admired Sappho from his schooldays at Eton, but feminist critics have criticised nineteenth-century male poets such as Swinburne and Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier for exploiting the gaps in Sappho, inserting themselves in the silence and populating the elisions with expressions of their own sexual and poetic desires.

Swinburne certainly found Sappho spoke to him in very personal ways, encompassing, but also going beyond, questions of sexual preferences – the appeal of sadomasochism, the experience and expression of what we might label ‘bisexual’ love. Sappho is perhaps most directly prominent in Swinburne’s ‘Anactoria’ (published as part of Poems and Ballands in 1866).

In the Days of Sappho, John William Godward

Anactoria is a female lover of Sappho’s, mentioned by name in Fragment 16, but it is Fragment 31, traditionally referred to as the ‘Ode to Anactoria’ despite the lack of addressee, which informs Swinburne’s poem more directly. In Sappho’s poem it is the physical effects of love and particularly sexual jealousy on the poet herself which is the focus:

For whenever I glance at you, it seems that I can say nothing at all but my tongue is broken in silence, and that instant a light fire rushes beneath my skin. I can no longer see anything in my eyes and my ears are thundering, and cold sweat pours down me, and shuddering grasps me all over, and I am greener than grass, and I seem to myself to be little short of death.

And Swinburne’s poem, written in a voice which is later confirmed to be Sappho’s, starts in the same vein:

My life is bitter with thy love, thine eyes

Blind me, thy tresses burn me, thy sharp sighs

Divide my flesh and spirit with soft sound,

And my blood strengthens, and my veins abound.

But in Swinburne’s poem, the violence soon shifts to be directed towards Anactoria, not just caused by her: 

I would my love could kill thee; I am satiated

With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead.

….

I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,

Intense device, and superflux of pain;

Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake

Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache

This violence isn’t only the result of jealousy – rather, it is a source of pleasure in itself and the natural result of a love which is imagined as being equally painful to both parties:

I feel thy blood against thy blood: my pain

Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein.

For both Swinburne and Sappho, sex and pain are inexorably linked and in both poems the natural result of love is death, but Sappho’s importance to the later poet isn’t only a question of a shared interest in sadomasochism. In a 1914 article in The Saturday Review on Sappho, Swinburne wrote:

Judging even from the mutilated fragments fallen even within our reach from the broken altar of her sacrifice of a song, I for one have always agreed with all Grecian tradition in thinking Sappho to be beyond all question and comparison the very greatest poet that ever lived.

In ‘Anactoria’ the equal pain which Swinburne imagines, is not mirrored in an equal death – Sappho will survive, while her lovers will not, because of the uniqueness of her song:

Yea, they shall say, earth’s womb has borne in vain

New things, and never this best thing again;

Borne days and men, borne fruits and wars and wine,

Seasons and songs, but no song more like mine [emphasis mine]

In his 1914 article, Swinburne continues:

Aeschylus is the greatest poet who ever was also a prophet; Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist who ever was also a poet; but Sappho is simply nothing less – as she is certainly nothing more – than the greatest poet who ever was at all.

It is this ‘faith’ of Swinburne’s in the perfection of Sappho’s poetry, rather than her sexual subjects, which cements her worth.

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