Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages by Tanya Pollard (review)

By the end of the 16th century, classical tragedy had unevenly marked the English stage. In his Defense of Poesy Sir Philip Sidney famously mocked his contemporaries who did not observe classical rules of “honest civility” or “skillful poetry,” creating “mongrel” plays mixing kings and clowns. Indeed, with the exception of Ben Jonson, playwrights of popular theater mostly ignored such strictures of form and decorum. At the same time, their plays were deeply steeped in Greek and Latin literature, quite beholden to Ovid, Plutarch, Seneca, Terence, and many other authors who formed the core of grammar school and university curriculum. To this day, exactly how much any English playwright would have known of Greek tragedy itself has been a vexed matter. When writing about the classical roots of early modern tragedy, most critics have stuck carefully with Seneca, confining knowledge of Greek tragedy in its original form to an elite few.

In Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages Tanya Pollard aims to change our perception of Greek tragedy’s role in early modern English theatrical culture, arguing instead that “the similarities between early modern English dramatic genres and their Greek originals do not result from coincidence, affinity, or simply from Latin intermediaries. Rather, they have specific historical and material causes, which can be traced to the surge of interest in printing, translating, performing, and theorizing the newly accessible Greek plays in this period” (15–16). While she is not the only scholar to makes this case (others include Emrys Jones, Louise Schleiner, Laurie Maguire, Sara Dewar-Watson, Bruce Smith, Robert Miola, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and Diane Purkiss), Pollard’s monograph is certainly the best full-length treatment of the subject.

Pollard demands that we recognize the predominance of Euripides, rather than Sophocles or Aeschylus, as a model for adaptation in early modern European culture. She names as the most influential Greek plays those prominently featuring women: Iphigenia in Aulis, Hecuba, and Medea, among others. Working from there, rather than dwelling on formal strictures, Pollard foregrounds the tragic suffering of lamenting mothers and sacrificed virgins, figures designed to evoke the sympathetic emotion then seen as tragedy’s raison d’être. The book may begin by considering the more classically educated Thomas Kyd and end with Ben Jonson, but its core is her case for Greek tragedy’s influence on the work of William Shakespeare, the poet Ben Jonson notoriously teased for having “small Latin and less Greek.”

The first chapter of Greek Tragic Women outlines all the different ways in which English readers, audiences, and playwrights would access Greek plays, whether in the original or translation. It details Euripides’ popularity in early modern Europe, and in particular, the ubiquity of Hecuba’s story and image, the basis for Pollard’s argument that, for English playwrights, women, not men, exemplified classical tragic suffering. She offers readings of two early English translations of Greek tragedy: Lady Jane Lumley’s manuscript translation of Iphigenia in Aulis (c. 1557), and George Gascoigne’s and Frances Kinwelmershe’s Jocasta (1566), a version of Euripides’ Phoenissae. Chapter 2, “Imitating The Queen of Troy,” takes off from there to pair readings of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus. In those readings Pollard shifts our attention away from the male protagonists to the plays’ suffering mothers and daughters, who summon up their Greek “ghosts” (21). In Chapter 3, “What’s Hecuba to Him,” Pollard explores the implications of Hamlet’s reaction to Hecuba’s laments, where “Shakespeare self-consciously constructs his male tragic protagonist in negotiation with a female-centered Greek tradition, in which Hecuba represents the genre’s power to move audiences” (22). Drawing further on Euripides, Chapter 4, “Iphigenia in Illyria: Greek Tragic Women on Comic Stages,” follows the adaptation of female tragic models in Shakespeare’s comedies, including Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. Chapter 5, “Bringing Back the Dead: Shakespeare’s Alcestis,” then makes Alcestis a touchstone for Shakespeare’s women...