‘Rituals tell stories’ (p. 3). Such a simple beginning belies the complexity of B.’s topic, but its confidence stands firmly on her systematic reading of ritual in Sophocles’ seven extant tragedies. Those who favour the theorists she uses will most appreciate the insights B. has to offer, but anyone interested in the role of ritual and ritualised actions in tragedy will want to reference her book. A. van Gennep's tripartite vision of rituals as rites of passage along with V. Turner's more generic and binary view of individuals moving between communitas (or liminality) and structure provide B. with the theoretical terminology to understand ritual activity; the narrative assumptions of the dramatic genre, particularly the idea of progressive and purposeful plot structures, are explicitly Aristotelian. Using a methodology of ‘ritual poetics’ that combines the rules of ritual and literary theory, B. approaches rituals as a poetic device that, being analogous to narrative in their structure, can communicate meaning. Rituals that deviate from the norm thus can point to deviations in character and plot, which would have generated predictable responses and expectations from a fifth-century Athenian audience familiar with ritual practice.
Chapter 1 reconstructs the ritual knowledge of such an audience beginning with a summary of the normative version of religious rituals, the terms that Sophocles uses to reference them and the categorisation of ritual ‘mistakes’ with examples from Antigone, Trachiniae and Oedipus Tyrannus. Indeed, one of the most valuable innovations of her work is this categorisation into three general problems: ritual conflation, ritual repetition and ritual status. Ritual conflation occurs when distinct rituals seem to permeate one another, influencing how the two are perceived and interpreted. This can reflect rituals ‘entangled’ within a scene, or it can refer to the performance of a ritual later in a play that recalls versions in earlier scenes. Ritual repetition, on the other hand, assumes a causal relationship between rites, describing the reappearance of the same ritual because the previous iteration was corrupt, mistaken or incomplete. Ritual status refers to the problem of an inappropriate status of the individual(s) involved in a certain ritual. All of these problems prevent members of the rituals from returning or entering into a community unambiguously and portend future narrative issues as the subsequent four chapters illustrate.
Chapter 2 looks particularly at ritual conflation in the Ajax, a play B. divides into three parts based on the conflated rituals in each, both real and metaphorical – the killing of the herd, Ajax’ suicide and his burial. In the first part, the slaughter of the herd features sacrificial language, compelling an audience to think of sacrifice rituals, yet the aftermath resembles elements of funeral rites, portraying Ajax as both officiant and victim in a conflated ritual. Ajax’ suicide again conflates sacrificial and burial imagery during a supposed purification rite, highlighting his ambiguous, even paradoxical, role in the referenced rituals, evident symbolically in the changing use of the sword. The third part, though possessing dramatic closure, is complicated by Teucer's desperate ritual activities and his demands for Ajax’ burial, a ritual that has previously failed in the play. This throws into question whether Ajax’ burial can be successful at all. Important to this chapter is B.’s claim that the van Gennep phases of ritual correspond to each part but progress in reverse order to that of the narrative, weakening the resolution at the end of the play. While she demonstrates the liminal and pre-liminal connections in the second and third parts well, it is harder to accept that the first part of the play represents a post-liminal phase, given that the conflated, pre-liminal funeral rites dominate her reading of this part.
In Chapter 3 B. argues that the repetition of corrupt (and conflated) funeral rites in Electra not only provides the structure of the plot but is the plot: ‘while ritual drives the characters of this play to the completion of a sequence of obligatory funeral rites, the corruption of ritual prevents them from ever reaching the end of that sequence’ (p. 76). Turner's vision of ritual informs her argument here. B. considers how each member of the Atreus family is responsible for this unending cycle of corrupt rituals and argues that the family is in a constant state of communitas due to Electra's persistent and contagious lamentations. As a result, the end of the play cannot be deemed optimistic when Orestes and Electra are implicated in the cycle of corrupt rituals that will continue perpetually without some type of intervention. Most interestingly, she concludes that the ambiguity at the end of the play is reflected in the absence of Apollo, who has been usurped by a pattern of ritual repetition that the audience would consider the closest thing to a divine prophecy in the exodos.
In Chapter 4 ritual status is regarded as an issue in the Philoctetes for Neoptolemus and Philoctetes, who perform oaths and supplications, but do not have the authority to do so according to the societal norms of the last quarter of fifth-century Athens. The isolation of Lemnos, however, would suggest to an audience the possibility of a ‘ritually permissive environment’ (p. 128), B. asserts, particularly when the integrity of the mythical narrative is at stake. While the chapter seems unevenly focused on Neoptolemus’ status, her reading is insightful. B. argues that Neoptolemus could be analogous to a pre-ephebic Athenian youth delegitimising his ritual authority while Philoctetes, though not technically an exile, resonates as one because of his connection with the bestial and divine spheres. Thus, for example, Neoptolemus would not be expected to have experience of how oaths must work, explaining his willingness to abide by his oath with Philoctetes on different terms. Philoctetes meanwhile releases the same wild, inauspicious cries during the oath that left him marooned. While the audience might expect something to come of the oath, they would anticipate a narrative issue as well due to the problematic status of each character (as occurs, forcing the entrance of Heracles). However, B. reads another scene in an opposite way: we might think Neoptolemus will abandon Philoctetes when he leaves to fit out the ships but ‘no audience is likely to interpret the speech in this way. The audience has witnessed Neoptolemus and Philoctetes withdraw into ritual communitas and emerge into structure having established a new relationship of obligation between them. Even though Neoptolemus lacks adult ritual status, his apparently genuine commitment to Philoctetes as a supplicandus has dramatic if not ritual legitimacy’ (p. 129). Yet would not Odysseus, of legitimate status and a representative of Greek society, possibly influence Neoptolemus in Philoctetes’ absence, feeding doubts about a successful resolution and heightening the dramatic tension?
In Chapter 5 B. argues that all three ritual problems exist within the Oedipus at Colonus, ‘united by the overarching motif of supplication’ (p. 141). The repeated rituals of supplication, the conflation of sacrificial and burial rituals at Oedipus’ death and the ambiguity of Oedipus’ ritual status throughout the play anticipate the end-goal: the acceptance of Oedipus by Athens and the Eumenides. Of particular note is her reading of Oedipus’ death: while there is ritual closure for Oedipus, who began the play with a supplication of the Eumenides, ‘he does not achieve closure through ritual whose purpose is to facilitate community; rather, he achieves it by breaking free of human community and a human role in ritual’ (p. 168). Indeed, B. most succeeds in demonstrating that our understanding of Sophocles’ tragic endings must take his engagement with ritual throughout the play into consideration: ‘ritual cues, by evoking the play's earlier rituals, encourage the audience to see these endings as disquieting, ambiguous, and with the possible exception of the Philoctetes, tragic in an affective way … ritual offers not an end but a way to anticipate, understand and negotiate what the future inevitably holds’ (pp. 177–8).
