The Strangeness of Tragedy (review)

{ 168 } BOOK REV IEwS present” (xv). Newstock and Thompson’s collection accomplishes this goal admirably , both through the quality of most of the essays and the overall breadth of the book. The many essays show that nontraditional casting of Macbeth is not just an occasional occurrence or an exception that proves the rule. As with more obviously racialized Shakespearean plays such as Othello or The Tem­ pest, Macbeth can clearly speak to minority audiences and performers. Weyward Macbeth is also a timely book; many essays use the rise of Obama as a parallel, but they remind the reader that the United States is certainly not“post-race.”As with the best works of historical scholarship, Newstock and Thompson’s collection merges detailed historiography with immediate relevancy, making this a valuable book indeed. —DAN VENNING CUNY graduate Center \ The Strangeness of Tragedy. By Paul Hammond. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2009. xi + 203 pp. $55.00 cloth. It is refreshing to find a scholar who has a more than passing acquaintance with foreign languages past and present, even more so when these strange tongues are deployed carefully in the service of tragic dramaturgy. Paul Hammond’s book-length essay,drawing on modern and postmodern theory alike,reinforces the essential strangeness and elusiveness of tragic language. This is a book that takes us well out of our linguistic comfort zones, but it is one that rewards even as it kicks away at the foundations of our understanding. With a facility in everything from ancient Greek and Latin to the French of Derrida and Freud’s German, Hammond’s survey of classic plays explores what he calls “the strangeness that tragedy fashions” (5). As his point of departure , Hammond uses an early essay by Freud, in which the words heimlich (familiar , homely) and unheimlich (uncanny, strange) are positioned not as opposites but as entwined terms that easily transform into each other.“We ourselves speak a language that is foreign,” as Freud once said, to which Hammond adds: “It is pre-eminently the tragic protagonist whose language becomes foreign, who speaks a parole which no longer quite meshes with the langue of those around him. Tragedy translates the protagonist into his own dimension, separated from the social world around him, and now inaccessible to others” (6). For two thousand years and from one tragic figure to the next, this estrange- { 169 } BOOK REV IEwS ment is expressed through seemingly normal words that—having multiple or even contradictory meanings—appear reduced to idiolects, sibyl-like rants and ramblings that through their incomprehensibility demonstrate the protagonist’s separation from place, time, self, and, in some cases, even his or her own body. The chaos that lies beneath the surface of the original language is often avoided by our translators, whose choices predetermine our somewhat simplistic reactions to the original. There is also a typographical/cheirographical dimension to Hammond’s work, for the tragic figure’s strangeness lies not just in the words themselves but in how those words were first expressed on the page. Hammond’s discussion of the nuances of the Greek word daimon (53–57) reminds us that the first tragic poets reveled in complexity, but the issue of the tragic protagonist’s agency becomes more complicated by the fact that (as Hammond points out) until the Middle Ages, literary Greek and Latin were written exclusively in capital letters (uncial), so it is impossible to tell whether the protagonists refer to personified, divine forces beyond their control or to personal emotions (113). The urgent question “Who acts?” becomes impossible to answer even as it is posed, again and again. Once Hammond establishes his theme, the choices of protagonists—Oedipus, Thyestes, Macbeth, Phedre, and so forth—become self-explanatory in a sense; there’s no need for him to argue their estrangement. It’s something we instantly recognize. What occurs in each chapter, then, is a detailed exploration of the roots and symptoms of tragic estrangement as evidenced through language, from the basic vocabulary right down to the syntax and grammar. And by demonstrating the awkwardness of contemporary translations (see, e.g., 47–49, on the Oresteia), Hammond directs us again and again to the beauty...