Aeschylus: The Earlier Plays and Related Studies by D. J. Conacher (review)

126 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS in cultural or historical data. believes that historical meaning is "recoverable" (Wiles' word on 219). The divide between the structuralist method and that of the postmodernist could not be more extreme. Wiles oscillates. I think. between the two theory-driven methods. Chapters I to 3 (see 66. but also 86) are severely postmodern. chapters such as "Left and right. east and west" or "Inside/outside" are resolutely structuralist. The certainties of this structuralist universalism (Levi-Strauss believed that we all think and construct our institutions in polarities) easily spill over into historicist and potentially reductive certainties such as the Hippoiytus reading of 216-219 (linking the setting of the play in Troezen with contemporary Athenian politics). At any rate. is not structuralist universalism a first cousin of Taplin's' New Critical universalism? Having said all of this, however. I must hasten to correct the impression that this is a bad or a false or a "wrong" book. Quite the contrary . It is a very stimulating and eye-opening contribution to the performance criticism of ancient theatre. That one does not always share Wiles' theoretical perspective makes it all the more irnportant that we read and absorb his intelligent and invigorating book. PETER TOOHEY UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND ARMIDALE. NEW SOUTH WALES 235 I D.J. CONACHER. Aeschylus: The Earlier Plays and Re1ated Studies. Toronto/Buffalo/London: Vniversity of Toronto Press, 1996. Pp. xv + 184. Cloth. $50.00. ISBN: 0-8020-0796-1. Paper. $17.95. ISBN: 0-8020-7155-4. With this we1come book. following his earlier studies of PV (of whose Aeschylean authorship he is now less certain) and the Oresteia. Conacher completes his literary commentaries on the surviving plays of Aeschylus. After a preface in which he explains his aims and methods Conacher devotes three separate chapters to Persae. Septem. and Suppiices . and then. for good measure. gives us two further chapters on Imagery and the Chorus in all seven plays. The book displays all the virtues of its predecessors. and represents the fruit of many years of engagement with Aeschylean tragedy. As he takes the student through each play scene by scene. if not quite line by line. Conacher provides c1ear and helpful guidance on dramatic interpretation and structure. themes. style. imagery. dramatic irony. metrical patterns. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 127 the structure of choral odes. etc.. and he writes sensibly on most of the familiar problems of the plays. rightly preferring interpretations which are couched in terms of the dramatic requirements of a play over. for example. political explanations. He is always sane and cautious in his judgement. and scrupulously honest in drawing the reader's attention to theories and interpretations with which he disagrees . Indeed he carries this almost to a fault. So. on 1 II. it is surprising to read that "the view which we have tended to deprecate in this 'postscript' has a reasonable possibility of being right." while on 100 a chorus of handmaids at the end of Supplices is the "most acceptable" view. whereas at 176 it "seems quite possible" that the chorus of Danaids is itself divided into two. Fuller discussion of major problems. such as Atossa's exit lines and the end of Septem. is reserved for five useful Appendices, while brief camments on text and details of interpretation are confined to the footnotes. As Conacher explains in the preface, there is little on staging, and the modern approaches of structuralists and decanstructionists and others, though he is familiar with them, are c1early not to his taste. As with any book on Aeschylus some disagreement is inevitable. My only serious doubts cancern Conacher's interpretation of Persae. He writes (8). "the theme of the Persae. then, is simply the demonstration of divine nemesis answering the overreaching ambition of human greed and puffed-up confidence in power and wealth, the old sequence of koros-hybris-atf~familiar to the Athenian audience since Solon's day," and (7) that "the theme of the Persae can be quickly understood or at least mentally pigeon-holed by any schoolboy who can read a handbook": it is, for Conacher, not so much what Aeschylus says as the way in...