Aeschylus was born in Eleusis, a
Greek town near Athens, in 525 B.C. He was the first of the great Greek
tragedians, preceding both Sophocles and Euripides, and is credited by many as
having invented tragic drama. Prior to Aeschylus, plays were more rudimentary,
consisting of a single actor and a chorus offering commentary. In his works,
Aeschylus added a "second actor" (often more than one), creating a
new range of dramatic possibilities. He lived until 456 B.C., fighting in the
wars against Persia, and attaining great acclaim in the world of the Athenian
theater.
Aeschylus wrote nearly ninety
plays. However, only seven have survived to the modern era, including such
famous works as Prometheus Bound and The Seven Against Thebes. Agamemnon
is the first of a trilogy, the Oresteia, the other two parts of which
are The Libation-Bearers and The Eumenides. The trilogy--the only
such work to survive from Ancient Greece--is considered by many critics to be
the greatest Athenian tragedy ever written, because of its poetry and the
strength of its characters.
Agamemnon
depicts the assassination of the title character by his wife, Clytemnestra, and
her lover. The Libation-Bearers continues the story with the return of
Agamemnon's son, Orestes, who kills his mother and avenges his father. In The
Eumenides, Orestes is pursued by the Furies in punishment for his
matricide, and finally finds refuge in Athens, where the god Athena relieves
him of his persecution.
The events of Agamemnon
take place against a backdrop that would have been familiar to an Athenian
audience. Agamemnon is returning from his victory at Troy, which has been
besieged for ten years by Greek armies attempting to recover Helen, Agamemnon's
brother's wife, who was stolen by the treacherous Trojan Prince, Paris. (The
events of the Trojan War are recounted in Homer's Iliad.) The tragedies
of the play occur as a result of the crimes committed by Agamemnon's family.
His father, Atreus, boiled the children of his own brother, Thyestes, and
served them to him. Clytemnestra's lover, Aegisthus (Thyestes's only surviving
son), seeks revenge for that crime. Moreover, Agamemnon sacrifices his
daughter, Iphigenia, to gain a favorable wind to Troy, and Clytemnestra murders
him to avenge her death. The weight of history and heritage becomes a major
theme of the play, and indeed the entire trilogy, for the family it depicts
cannot escape the cursed cycle of bloodshed propagated by its past.
‘When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.’ It’s just
a silly joke that my father used to tell me, but it seems that it also sums up
something. This question and answer contain the essence of theatre – a play on
meaning, how one thing can become another in our minds… It is telling that for
us in the West our first theatre was tragedy. In the era when democracy was
born, tragic drama had its prime. It is equally telling that in times without
democracy, tragedy has given way to morality play: be it Everyman or Triumph of the
Will. Tragedy lives questions, morality plays answer them. That’s not to
say that tragedy is without morals; on the contrary, what constitutes a tragedy
depends entirely on one’s moral viewpoint. To use Geoffrey Brereton’s
real-world example – we would not think of the death of Hitler as tragic,
‘though for a Nazi sympathiser it must be supremely so’. Individual tragic
dramas may have specific moral points of view (or may have specific moral
points of view imposed upon them by modern directors and adaptors): Sophocles’s
Antigone as anti-totalitarian,
Euripides’s Trojan Women as antiwar;
however, tragedy is synonymous with struggle, and so the genre accommodates
multiple viewpoints, truths, and ‘right’s. Tragedy has two levels: the level of
power and the level of wanting power. Jason has the power to divorce Medea, and
Medea seeks power over Jason by killing his children; every way O’Neill’s Hairy
Ape turns, he is confronted with a world of power he cannot enter. The point
where power meets the want of power is the point of tragedy. The gods have the
power to launch Agamemnon’s ships, he wants them to exercise this power so
badly that he is prepared to kill his own daughter; Antigone’s wanting the
power to bury her brother clashes with Creon’s powers as ruler.
In tragic
drama, the clash of power and wanting power is also the point of violence.
Tragic drama depends on violence – whether it is the violence of war, the
violence of murder, or the quiet violence of Hamm’s controlling Clov in
Beckett’s Endgame. There are, as I
see it, three kinds of tragic violence: sacrifice, the violence of waste, and
revenge. The three can be linked, of course. Medea gets revenge on Jason by
sacrificing her children, and we are likely to view the children’s lives as
wasted. ‘Sacrifice’ and ‘revenge’ belong on either side of ‘the violence of
waste’ because both acts of sacrifice and acts of revenge can be viewed as acts
of waste. In the real world, ‘waste’ is probably the thing we most associate
with the tragic.
Brereton describes a typical real-life tragedy – an experienced
climber being killed by an easy climb. ‘The predominant impression is one of
waste’, Brereton writes. This ‘waste’ has occurred without an act of revenge or
of sacrifice. But in theatre, for the purposes of drama, sacrifice and revenge
necessarily feed into tragedy more than in real life. Of these two impulses
toward violence, it seems to me that ‘revenge’ is the more problematic for
tragedy, for notions of the tragic. We speak of ‘revenge tragedy’ – but is this
term not an oxymoron, given that the pursuers of revenge almost invariably
equate it with justice? Justice, by definition, should not be tragic. This
essay investigates tragedy’s link with revenge by looking at plays from three
eras: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Seneca’s Thyestes, and Webster’s The White Devil. My discussion of the
plays will be informed in particular by the first two chapters of René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred.
Revenge doesn’t stop.
It is a baton passed endlessly from killer to future killer. Aeschylus knew
this. The Oresteia – Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The
Eumenides – is the only extant Greek tragic trilogy. This cycle of plays
dramatises the breaking of the cycle of revenge, through the creation of a
judicial system. It moves from a world where sacrifice is required to appease
the gods, to a world of trials – where ‘justice’ is performed with the approval
of the gods. It essentially dramatises the shift from ‘primitive’ society to
Western democracy. The catalyst for this shift is revenge. In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard
writes of sacrifice as an act of violence without risk of reprisal. The revenge
cycle of the Oresteia begins with a
sacrifice that breaks this rule – King Agamemnon’s killing of his daughter to
appease Artemis, so that the winds will change and his ships may sail to Troy:
…What can I say?
Disaster follows if I
disobey;
Yet surely worse disaster
if I yield
And slaughter my own child,
my home’s delight…
…
…But disband the fleet,
sail home, and earn
A deserter’s name?…
…No, the wind must turn,
There must be sacrifice,
the girl must bleed!
And
so Agamemnon kills his daughter, Iphigenia, and this sews thoughts of vengeance
into the mind of his wife, Iphigenia’s mother, Clytemnestra. Upon his return
from Troy, Agamemnon is murdered by Clytemnestra, and the Queen cites the death
of her daughter as her reason. She chastises the Chorus of Argive Elders:
Why, once before, did you
not dare oppose this man,
Who with no more
compunction than men butcher sheep,
When his own fields were
white with flocks, sacrificed
His child – my own
daughter, whom my pains brought forth?
He killed her for a charm
to stop the Thracian wind!
He was the one you should
have driven from Argos; he,
Marked with his daughter’s
blood, was ripe for punishment.
For
Clytemnestra, the ‘simple truth’ is that Agamemnon was ‘evil’. Her act of
revenge is an act of justice:
This is my husband,
Agamemnon, now stone dead;
His death the work of my
right hand, whose craftsmanship
Justice acknowledges.
As
Clytemnestra felt it her duty to avenge her daughter’s death, so it is the duty
of Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, to avenge his father’s murder, even if it means
killing his mother. As Orestes prepares to murder Clytemnestra, the Chorus of The Libation Bearers says:
Justice exacts her debt;
The voice of Justice cries:
Let word pay word, let
hatred get
Hatred in turn, let
murderous blow
Meet blow that murdered…
As
Girard writes, with revenge, the crime and the punishment are the same.
Both Clytemnestra and Orestes equate
the revenge-murders they commit with justice. For whom, then, is the Oresteia a tragedy? Agamemnon’s own
words, as he prepares to sacrifice his daughter, indicate that he knows what
the consequences of his action will be – he knows that ‘ruin’ lies ahead.
Actions undertaken of one’s own free will and with full knowledge of their
consequences are decidedly untragic. They possess neither of the points
important to tragedy which Brereton mentions in his attempt at a universal
definition – an ‘unforeseen or unrealised failure’ and an ‘ironical change of
fortune’. Sophocles’s Oedipus,
sometimes seen as the ‘perfect’ tragedy, demonstrates the validity of these
points. Oedipus’s tragedy is that he does not know who his real parents are;
because he doesn’t have this knowledge, he unwittingly commits patricide and
incest; in the end, his search for the source of pollution in Thebes ironically
leads him to himself. If the Oresteia
is not a tragedy for Agamemnon, then it can hardly be a tragedy for
Clytemnestra or Orestes either. Both mother and son achieve their goals of
getting justice. In fact, there are only two characters in the Oresteia who are ‘tragic’, in the sense
that they suffer from either a lack of free will or a lack of knowledge:
Iphigenia, and Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess turned slave of Agamemnon.
Iphigenia isn’t even a ‘character’, as such – her story is simply told by the
Chorus, during one of their odes. And Cassandra, though she dies alongside
Agamemnon, is barely even a ‘bonus prize’ for Clytemnestra – the Queen merely
mentions in passing the prophetess’s murder, though she gloats at length about
the death of her husband. The play does not foreground Cassandra’s death, it
foregrounds Clytemnestra’s revenge. Therefore, it is not tragedy that is
foregrounded, but the Queen’s justice.
The only problem with this justice
is that it doesn’t end – the responsibility for it just passes from one person
to another. Ultimately, it moves out of the oikos
and begins to affect the polis. As
Girard puts it, with vengeance, the ‘multiplication of reprisals… puts the very
existence of a society in jeopardy…’ And so the polis must find its own solution. Enter: trials and the judicial
system, as seen in The Eumenides. In
the final chapter of the Oresteia,
Orestes is hounded by the Furies – the creatures who take revenge on behalf of
those murdered by blood relatives, if there are no next of kin left to do it
themselves. Agamemnon’s son goes to Athens, where he faces a trial presided
over by Athene. Apollo leads Orestes’s defence; the Furies are the
‘prosecution’. After the arguments have been heard, twelve Athenian citizens
vote on the defendant’s guilt. Then, Orestes is allowed to go free – not
because he didn’t kill his mother, but because it’s the only way the cycle of
revenge can cease. A tale that began with an act of sacrifice (the killing of
Iphigenia), now ends with one – the Furies must give up their hold on Orestes;
they must sacrifice no less than themselves, as they are transformed into the
Eumenides, the ‘Kindly Ones’. In Girardian terms, this act of sacrifice does
stem the flow of violence. A permanent cycle of acts of justice – revenge – has
been replaced by a single act of justice aiming at a permanent solution – the
trial. The trial may provide ‘better’ justice from the community’s point of
view, in that it stops the threat to the polis.
But this does not take away from the fact that, for Clytemnestra, as her
daughter’s mother, and for Orestes, as his father’s son, their justice was
found in the deaths they caused.
The saga of the violence committed
by Agamemnon’s family against itself, however, while it may end with the trial
of Orestes, did not begin with the killing of Iphigenia. Her sacrifice prompted
Clytemnestra’s revenge, and in that sense was the beginning of the Oresteia. But members of Agamemnon’s
family had been murdering other family members since long before. An
‘unofficial prequel’ to the Oresteia
is the tale of Thyestes, as related
by Seneca. Agamemnon was the son of Atreus, who had a brother, Thyestes. Atreus
and Thyestes could never reach agreement over sharing their kingdom, and they
vied with one another constantly. Eventually, Atreus became king and Thyestes
went into exile. But Atreus plots to end the feud once and for all under the
pretence of reconciliation… In the second chapter of Violence and the Sacred, Girard describes how tragedy results from
an inability to assert differences: ‘The sheer impossibility of asserting their
differences fuels the rage of [brothers] Eteocles and Polyneices.’ The same could
be said of Atreus and Thyestes. Their lack of difference as brothers results in
rivalry, in efforts to claim their individuality, which results in conflict.
The only way they can declare their distinctness is by committing increasingly
despicable acts against one another, each trying to outdo his brother: Thyestes
sleeps with Atreus’s wife, so Atreus murders Thyestes’s children and serves
their flesh to him for dinner. This latter crime is the subject of Seneca’s
play. As Act Two of Thyestes opens,
Atreus is wondering how he can get his revenge, or, as he sees it, justice:
Am I a coward, sluggard,
impotent,
And – what I count the
worst of weaknesses
In a successful king –
still unavenged?
After so many crimes, so
many sleights
Committed on me by that miscreant
brother
In violation of all sacred
law,
Is there no more to do but
make vain protests?
…
Whatever might be sin
Against a brother, can only
be justice
In this man’s case…
…
He took my wife…
Even
an act as vile as the murder of children and the feeding of their bodies to
their father, is seen as justice, when set in the context of revenge. Do
Atreus’s actions compose a tragedy? They are criminal; horrific; distressing to
the extreme, certainly. But tragic? Atreus’s plan is meticulously carried out.
He kills the children knowing full well what he is doing – preparing them like
a sacrifice. But this sacrifice is not to appease any deity, only Atreus’s
thirst for vengeance:
Incense was used, and
consecrated wine,
The salt and meal dropped
from the butcher’s knife
Upon the victims’ heads,
all solemn rites
Fulfilled…
Girard
writes that, ‘In many rituals the sacrificial act assumes two
opposing aspects, appearing at times as a sacred obligation to be neglected at
grave peril, at other times as a sort of criminal activity entailing perils of
equal gravity.’ Atreus’s sacrifice of the children does result in peril, but
not for Atreus – for Thyestes. Indeed, as Atreus makes the sacrifice to
himself, to his own revenge-lust, he is elevated to god-like status – securing
at once his revenge, his kingdom, and the last defeat of his brother. He is
able to look on gleefully, as Thyestes is bent to his will:
I
walk among the stars! Above the world
My
proud head reaches up to heaven’s height!
…
I
have attained the summit of my wishes.
In
the Oresteia we saw how, to modify
terms from Girard, private justice (revenge) gave way to public justice (the
judicial system). In Thyestes we saw
how even the most extreme acts of violence can be called justice. In each case
we were considering paradigms of the tragic genre – Aeschylus is one of the
three great Greek tragedians, the man who laid the foundations for Sophocles
and Euripides (to either build upon or rip up – as they saw fit!), and Seneca
is synonymous with Roman tragedy. Similarly, John Webster is ‘the typical Jacobean dramatist…’ What we
see when we turn to The White Devil,
however, is a confusing of the issue this essay is based on: that acts of
revenge are not tragic because pursuers of revenge are interested in justice.
Like the Oresteia, Webster’s play
presents us with cycles of revenge, where deaths are caused and then must be
avenged by relatives of the deceased. But, unlike in the Oresteia, public justice does not swoop down to stop the excesses
of private justice. At the end of The
White Devil, there is no establishment of a judicial system, the latest
killers are simply taken off to be tortured: there is no democratic hope, no
sense that the wheel of revenge will stop turning. Indeed, during the course of
the play, the very idea of revenge as justice is destabilised, when one
character declares that the fact that the revenge-murders he is about to commit
will become famous is enough to justify them:
Tush
for justice.
…
…the
fame
Shall
crown the enterprise and quit the shame.
Where
does this leave us in terms of our view of tragedy? The first time I read The White Devil, I did not think it was
tragic. It was a tale of court corruption, involving the deaths of various
undesirable characters. None of the people commanded ‘respect or sympathy’, and
so their deaths did not particularly inspire sorrow in me. Roland Wymer, in his
book Webster and Ford, suggests that The White Devil investigates the idea of
the moment of death as the moment of greatest life. And indeed, it is only as
they are about to die that several of the characters show their most admirable
sides. Flamineo is brave and defiant. Vittoria gains a conscience:
O
my greatest sin lay in my blood.
Now
my blood pays for’t.
Yet, there are also characters who die pathetically,
ironically, ridiculously, or for seemingly pointless reasons. Isabella, spurned
by her husband when she asked for a kiss, then dies as she kisses a poisoned
portrait of him. Camillo is murdered in a bizarre scenario where he is drunk
and about to jump off a vaulting horse. Marcello is stabbed in the back while
looking at the cross around his mother’s neck. So, while some characters have
their finest moments as they prepare to die, for others, death surprises them,
and they are killed without realising anything about the world or themselves,
without ‘tragic recognition’, in Aristotelian terms. The conflicting
presentations of death in The White Devil
match the destabilisation of revenge-as-justice, and both feed into the wider
sense of ‘ambivalence’ in the play. The Oresteia
gave us hope. Thyestes gave us
immense evil. And even though that evil was allowed to take place, the
play-world was still a moral one – the Chorus deplored and condemned the
actions of Atreus, describing them as an ‘Inhuman outrage’. If there’s evil,
and we can see that evil, then we have something.
The overriding impression one gets from The
White Devil is of ‘uselessness’. Corruption pervades the world like a
permanent cancer. People cannot recognise themselves until they are about to
die, and even then they may not.
In
his article ‘Tragedy, Pure and Simple’, George Steiner attempts a definition of
tragic drama in its ‘absolute mode’:
“Tragedy” is a dramatic representation, enactment, or
generation of a highly specific world-view. This world-view is summarized in
the adage… “It is best not to be born, next best to die young.” This dictum is
transparent shorthand for a larger conception. It entails the view that human
life per se, both ontologically and
existentially, is an affliction.
The problem, of course, as Steiner acknowledges, is
that, if life is this bad, why would you write about it? If tragedy urges an
end to life, then the very fact that one has written a tragedy is a defiance of
tragedy. Hence, there are ‘very few “absolute” tragedies’. Of one of our great
writers of ‘tragedies’, Steiner says:
The Shakespearean sense of reality, of man’s works and
days, is conceptually and pragmatically tragicomic. Shakespeare knows, in every fibre of his compendious
being, that a child is being born next door, a birthday celebrated below
stairs, in the very instant of the murder of Agamemnon or the blinding of
Oedipus. He knows, overwhelmingly,
that the facts of the world are hybrid, that desolation and joy, destruction
and generation, are simultaneous.
Steiner describes the world’s simultaneously joyful
and sorrowful nature as ‘tragicomic’. But, for me, the fact that the world is
at once full of joy and full of sorrow is
tragedy. A baby’s being born in the same moment that someone is murdered is not
separate from the tragedy, it is part of it. In short, tragedy is not a
worldview which denies life; it is life. Life is the tragic condition. Hence,
there is no such thing as ‘absolute’ tragedy. Life is many things and so is
tragedy.
How
does all this affect the thesis that revenge is not tragic? By a deus ex machina, my thesis seems to
implode! In a way, however, this leaves us back where my essay began: with the
idea that the tragic genre accommodates multiple viewpoints and truths. The
notion that the point of tragedy is the point where ‘the want of power’ meets
‘power’, applies as equally to day-to-day life as it does to avengers and their
targets; we are all looking for the power to realise our wishes in a world
where others have the power to grant them. As mentioned already, when I first
read The White Devil, I did not
consider it tragedy. But I also did not consider Thyestes to be tragic – until, that is, I heard Thyestes speak,
after he realises what he has unwittingly done to himself:
Gods!
This
was the sight you could not bear to see!
This
was the sin that drove the daylight back
To
where it came from. O what words can tell,
What
grieving can assuage my agony?
There
are not words enough to speak of it.
Here
are their severed heads, I see, their hands
Chopped
off, the feet left from their broken legs,
The
leavings of their father’s gluttony.
…
I
press my sons to death – they press their father.
Atreus’s revenge was not tragic for him because he
equated it with justice, but the fruits of that revenge were very much tragedy
for Thyestes. We may want to think of ‘justice’ as a pure concept, divorced
from tragedy, but it is not. It depends as much upon perspective as anything
else. Solutions, even if they are for the good of the ‘whole’, tend to be at
somebody’s expense. Some have power and some are left seeking it. Tragedy.
The
last ‘act’ of the Oresteia provides
hope. But The Eumenides is not that
much more than an elaborated version of the conclusions to many other Greek
tragedies, which also posit the possibility that the future will be better. One
thinks of Antigone – by the end,
Creon has learned from the pain he caused himself through his actions, and
there is a sense that he will govern more wisely from now on. Even the end of Oedipus gives hope – though the cost has
been colossal, the city has been purged of its pollution, and there is a chance
to begin anew. Oedipus himself manages a certain apotheosis through his
suffering, as we see in Sophocles’s Oedipus
at Colonus. The world of The White
Devil may be permanently corrupt, but the fact that some people can become
alive as they die still offers us something: a lesson to live well before it’s
too late, or to fall down well when the time to fall arrives – so that maybe we
can leave a mark of ourselves on those we leave behind. Tragedy is the state of
the world, of humanity: it sees all the horrors painfully clearly, but it sees
the good as well, and it offers the possibility that through the horrors or
beyond the horrors we may be better people. And it is here that we return once
again to sacrifice. Tragedy demands sacrifices of its characters because life
demands sacrifices of everyone. And, to draw on Girard, the more critical the
situation, the more difficult the sacrifice will be. Tragedy does away with
illusion. It never promises things will be easy. But neither does hope. The
door is ajar.