Rebecca P-H > Recent Status Updates

can't believe she hasn't written on Sophocles' Tereus actually, with all this about the (mostly metaphorical) reduction from human to animal manifesting as the loss of linguistic sense and the transformation of speech into either silence or sheer sound

huh Aristophanes' implicit theories of sound/speech and of the evolution of tragedy in Frogs make an interesting and weirdly nostalgic counterpoint to Aristotle's teleological narrative of the origins and development of tragedy as a genre

Aeschylean drama as "crammed full of voices that demand to be received as material emissions of bodies and as markers of presence in the world, even as they were once received by audiences in the theater" ok yeah I probably should have read this two years ago and been citing it all along ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

you can't tell me that "but I'd like to know, my friends: where in the world IS Athens?" wasn't a hilarious line when performed in Athens to an audience of mostly Athenians

huh you know I am buying Philoctetes as an Orpheus figure. should also give some thought to how he reconfigures the relentlessly male play into a landscape full of nymphs. I guess it undermines the power of that act of poetic conjuring if you make the nymphs present all along like Heaney does.

"the terminally silent Pylades" oh man the pattern in contemporary Oresteia adaptations with the character of Pylades being collapsed into Electra (no Pylades in Icke or Farber or McLaughlin) already at work in Sophocles. he loses a voice with which to invoke Apollo because she's taken it over.

I'm making this Electra chapter fight (and defeat) the Batchelder book The Seal of Orestes

something very specific about apostrophe within the theater I think. addressing someone/something that's not present to answer in a context whose basis is messing around with what 'present to answer' means. for a hero to cry out means to see that there is a bigger picture which is to anticipate AN audience if not this theatrical audience.

this on Ajax's lyrical/poetic/metrical isolation from the others on stage pairs very nicely with Afroditi Angelopoulou on how the unusual chorus of military-age men highlights Ajax's corporeal/choreographic isolation from them, the group with whom he ought to be in sync. has me thinking about Harry Beaton in Brigadoon actually, dancing in counterpoint to the male ensemble and often cut off from their singing

this on Ajax's lyrical/poetic/metrical isolation from the others on stage pairs very nicely with Afroditi Angelopoulou on how the unusual chorus of military-age men highlights Ajax's corporeal/choreographic isolation from them, the group with whom he ought to be in sync. has me thinking about Harry Beaton in Brigadoon actually, dancing in counterpoint to the male ensemble and often cut off from their singing

'τόδ᾽ στέγος ἀρχαῖον' come on that's the skene

Hadestown Sophoclean authorship confirmed

I definitely need to talk to Sarah about the possibility of Sophocles himself playing the title role in his Thamyras like the Vita claims. and the even more speculative possibility that he played Philomela in his Tereus, a role that would've been the polar opposite of Thamyras but would've ALSO been poet-analogous, working with a different idea of the 'poet' more based in the written word than earlier decades...

calling the army περσέπτολις, "city-sacking" but also simultaneously "Persepolis"/"Persian city"!

I do wish I had a physical copy of this book so I could put it on a shelf with all its friends

every time I read something about Ajax or Philoctetes I can feel myself become less and less interested in using the concept of 'moral injury' to talk about tragedy in terms of the Greek heroes wronged by their army communities, communities which exist to destroy. I can't quite shake the leopards-eating-faces vibe.

yeah Persians should probably be my next Greek read. what with way the mutual interchanges of garments and bodies echo and lead up to the Oresteia.

absolutely convinced that the repeated εὐφαμεῖτε/ὀλολύξατε are calls to the audience to sing along

once again thinking of the time I saw the whole Oresteia at Epidaurus last year and when Athena established the court of the Areopagus the whole audience clapped ❤️

I have to believe that at least some of the Erinyes' songs ended up as the pop music sensations of 450s Athens

ultimately overcorrecting in its understanding of Aeschylus vis a vis gender and women, but an excellent example of how to read the trilogy back to front and why it's critical to keep the hung jury of the Eumenides in mind throughout the entire Oresteia

my kingdom for a reference to the implications if Orestes is or is not played by the same actor as Agamemnon!!!

I do love the rhetorical move of just going "there is more to say about x," which shows up as a transitional sentence in just about every subsection. wonder if I could get away with that in my own writing.

it took seeing a production of Brigadoon for me to go “oh THAT’s why there are so many choral search/chase scenes in Greek tragedy.” would love to see this one choreographed decently someday

oh the Furies are absolutely doing that thing dogs do when they twitch their legs while asleep and you know they're dreaming of chasing squirrels

I think I agree with the overall main claim of this book but don't buy any of the actual arguments it's making to support that claim. which is an interesting reading experience.

ποῖ δῆτα κρανεῖ, ποῖ καταλήξει μετακοιμισθὲν μένος ἄτης; well, Athens.

ok so the text of the Perseus strophe is definitely WAY too uncertain to ever base an argument on it. noted. Γοργοῦς isn't even in any of the manuscripts!!!

Zeitlin (rightly) makes much of the strophe about the Lemnian women but I feel like we're overlooking not just the Althaea strophe with the threat posed by a mother to her son but also the Scylla strophe about daughters as a potential threat to their fathers if allowed to grow up into women with ties outside their natal families... that's why Electra falls silent and exits the stage and never returns

when you're reading a book whose entire premise is the death of a child and you get to the part where the child dies 😢