Friday, March 25, 2022

Alcestis by Euripides - that’s why we all gotta think human thoughts

Alcestis (438 BCE), this is more like it, this is an introduction to Euripides.

HERAKLES:  I mean, we all gotta die.  Right?

Well, that’s why we all gotta think human thoughts,

and live while we can.

Eat, drink, and be merry.

Take it from me,

the way those gloomy, bellyachin’ tragedians gripe,

life isn’t life at all, it’s just a goddam

funeral.  (tr. William Arrowsmith, pp. 74-5)

That’s from an extremely drunk Herakles, to be specific, with a number of Euripidean ideas crammed into one passage.


I have been puzzled by the satyr plays, the hundreds of lost satyr plays.  The strange fact is that every set of profound, moving, powerful tragedies was immediately followed by something quite different, perhaps thematically linked to the earlier plays, perhaps not, but typically, I am told, featuring a chorus of drunken, dancing, singing satyrs.  Perhaps it was meant as a palate cleanser, or a return to the Dionysian part of the Dionysian Festival, or a reminder, as Herakles say, not to take everything so seriously. 

Imagine the Oresteia followed by dancing drunk satyrs.  Imagine Aeschylus, pious Sophocles, each writing fifty or sixty of these things, a new one every year.  With the competitors, three new satyr plays every year.  Scholars disagree completely over whether the Cyclops of Euripides, the only real satyr play that by chance survived, is early or late in his career.  I put it late in our schedule, but I was tempted to put it early just to take a look at it, to remind myself that every tragedy we read was accompanied by something similar.

Unless they were not, because Alcestis was performed in the spot of the satyr play, and aside from Herakles getting drunk in place of the satyr chorus it is clearly some other kind of thing.  William Arrowsmith, in his 1974 translation, points to The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest as kindred plays.  Alcestis is a fairy tale play, a tragicomedy, dependent for its effect on radical changes in tone and rhetorical mode, the mix of high and low as we say with Jacobean tragicomedy.  By the end the effect is sublime, I find.

Young Alcestis has agreed to die in place of her callow husband Admetos – fairy tale stuff, Greek-myth version.  Admetos, scene by scene, humanizes, grows even, until by the end he is perhaps worthy, or at least ordinarily unworthy, of the gift of his wife.  Drunk Herakles, engaged in a hospitality competition, replaces the fairy godmother or talking bird as the demi-deus ex machina who retrieves Alcestis from Death.  There they are up above, in a late 18th / early 19th century print by John Flaxman owned by the British Museum.

Some scenes are melodramatic, full of pathos, like the maid reporting on the perfect behavior of dying Alcestis.  Some are comic, as with Herakles quoted above, or sharply ironic (Apollo arguing with Death).  Alcestis has a visionary moment:

He is pulling, pulling – don’t you see? – pulling me away

To the place where the dead gather.

I see his blue eyebrows, black wings beating – Death!

Let me go, Admetos, what are you doing?  Let go.

The dark road opens before me.  (tr. Anne Carson, 264, from Grief Lessons)

Then she snaps out of it, in a radical shift of tone, and gives clear instructions to her husband about her children and remarriage.

These shifts in register and mood do, much like in Shakespeare, remarkable things.

We do not have any other Euripides plays like Alcestis, but some will get close.  We have several more young people offered as human sacrifices but miraculously rescued (or not).  We have two more plays featuring Herakles. 

There will be some gloomy bellyaching, too, although I do not think that describes the extraordinary horrors of our next play, Medea (431 BCE).  Don’t miss this one.

9 comments:

  1. I wouldn't say that Admetos grows or even has any particular insight as the play progresses. He seems to just switch the reason for his breast beating, but never really mourns Alcestis for her own loss; it's sort of "Oh, look what I've done to myself." Other people will call him a murderer, and he's not sure he can bear up under that. What a dope. As are Apollo, Death, and Herakles. Euripides had no respect for the big manly men or the big manly gods. I think this play is laugh-out-loud funny. This was my first reading of it. Thanks again for embarking on this mad project. I hope some other people comment along.

    ReplyDelete
  2. And yeah, Medea. That play is immense, explosive. We saw a riveting production in 2019 (I think). No dragon-pulled chariot, but otherwise crackling with all kinds of energy.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Medea is a good "if you read just one" candidate. I keep plugging these things on Twitter, but I doubt I am getting any new readers. People, people, the next one is Medea!

    William Arrowsmith argues strongly for the growth of Admetos, although he cautions that the psychology is not novelistic. He calls it "modal psychology," and he means that the change from the beginning to end is that Admetos moves from a false to a true mode, and his true mode is essentially human. The blessed, perfect Admetos weakens, becomes more human, thus his final moment is him at his weakest (most human), tempted by the beautiful unknown woman to break his oath to Alcestis.

    So I'm just calling this growth. But it is really a shift, from one role to another, much like Apollo formally shifts roles. This is a tightly constructed play.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I really like the bit of Arrowsmith's translation that you quoted. "Think human thoughts"

    ReplyDelete
  5. Arrowsmith was a great scholar-translator. When we get to the major Aristophanes plays, I will urge people to seek out Arrowsmith. But his Euripides is also special. He was a champion of Euripides, against scholars who neglected him as too much of an oddball.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I enjoyed this, even though it felt maybe a bit slight. There's not really much plot, and the final happy ending doesn't feel especially earned (it reminds me of Gluck's opera Orefo Ed Euridice, which absurdly decides that the right way to end that story is for Cupid to decide "aw, why not just bring her back to life anyway"? I don't really know what to make of the fact that Alcestis, so eloquent earlier in the play, is unable to speak when she's brought back to life. Anyway, I think the most interesting part of the play is the conversation between Ademtos and his father, which has some real barbs on both sides.

    (I missed Antigone and Rhesus because I was on vacation - I'll probably try to circle back to the former, even though I've already read it, but I suspect I will never get to the latter - you didn't really sell me on it!)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Euripides is the master of the unearned happy ending. It is part of his metaphysics. There are some doozies coming up.

    Yes, save Rhesus for last. The least of the tragedies. Maybe I will change my mind by the end, but I doubt it.

    ReplyDelete
  8. There's a 1940's/50's Italian rewrite of Alcestis by Alberto Savinio, set in Nazi Germany, that unfortunately gets carried away by Freudianism and is therefore less interesting to me, but the modern Alcestis of that play, when rescued from her first death, cannot live again and instead convinces her husband (a much more sympathetic character than Admetus) to die with her. It would be a fascinating premise if not for all the Freudian interjections.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I can see how Alcestis lends itself to Freud. The revised ending sounds good.

    ReplyDelete