Tragic Rites. Narrative and Ritual in Sophoclean Drama by Adriana Brook (review)

Both narrative and ritual have attracted much attention in recent tragic scholarship. Adriana Brook's monograph brings them together in an impressive study which ranges across the seven surviving plays of Sophocles.

After some Acknowledgements, a Note on Translation and Sources, and an Introduction ("Ritual Poetics in the Plays of Sophocles"), five chapters follow: "Normative Rituals and Ritual Mistakes in the Antigone, Trachiniae, and Oedipus Tyrannus," "Ritual Conflation in the Ajax," "Ritual Repetition in the Electra," "Ritual Status in the Philoctetes," and "Supplication in the Oedipus at Colonus." There then comes a "Conclusion: Ritual and Closure," before the book itself closes with Notes (i.e., endnotes, regrettably, rather than footnotes), Bibliography, and an Index. The basic organization of the book, then, is not quite on the traditional model of one chapter for each of the seven surviving plays: rather, three of the plays are covered more briefly in an opening chapter, before a focus on the remaining four. Brook also points out (7) that Ajax has traditionally attracted the lion's share of attention when it comes to ritual in Sophocles; her book does indeed treat that play but confines it to a single chapter, allowing a broader focus which covers other dramas too. Brook rightly omits the fragmentary plays from her analysis, noting (182 n. 24) that she is interested in how ritual "evokes a predictable progression that has clear connections to the progression of the plot," and that such connections are difficult or impossible to recover in the case of plays which have not survived in full. All this is testament to a carefully organized work which readers will find easy to use.

The opening sentence of Brook's Introduction (3) states simply: "Rituals tell stories." This lapidary statement well exemplifies both the clarity of Brook's writing and the essence of her book. As she goes on to say (ibid.), "rituals and narratives advance in the same way toward the same ends. The rituals embedded in Sophoclean plays correspond to elements of plot development and characterization and so contributed to the ancient audience's experience and expectations as spectators of these dramas." The Introduction proceeds by exploring previous work by the classicists Froma Zeitlin, Eveline Krummen, and Albert Henrichs, as well as the ritual theorists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner; she then applies the work of these latter two scholars to the interpretation of Euripides' Hippolytus and Aeschylus' Suppliant Women, which she cites as plays which (in contrast to Sophocles' dramas), "follow the rules" (13) when it comes to ritual. The implication is that Sophocles' engagement with ritual is something distinctive and not shared with his contemporary dramatists; it might have been helpful to have a clearer overall statement of this, or perhaps even a more in-depth look at what distinguishes Sophocles from Aeschylus and Euripides and what the reason for such a distinction might have been. Brook then looks at an earlier theorist, Aristotle, and shows how his analysis of drama in the Poetics can be aligned with modern ideas about the place of ritual in drama. A concluding section on "Ritual Poetics" is followed by a brief account of the chapters that follow.

The first chapter begins with a summary of "Normative Ritual," under several headings: "Funerary Ritual," "Marriage," "Sacrifice," "Supplication," "Oaths and Other Verbal Rituals," "Purification," "Initiation and Mystery Cult," and "Prophecy." These sections handily give an account of the ritual practices which the plays distort or pervert in different ways. The second part of this chapter, entitled "Ritual Mistakes," has the following subsections: "Ritual Conflation" (in which rituals usually kept separate are merged together), which looks at Antigone and Trachiniae, "Ritual Repetition" (in which the repetition often inherent to ritual is pushed to extremes), which investigates Trachiniae, Antigone, and Oedipus the King, and "Ritual Status" (in which an otherwise valid ritual is invalidated because the person performing it lacks the necessary status to do so), on...