This stimulating volume comprises an introduction plus thirteen essays by a stellar line-up of experienced scholars with significant publication records who specialise in Greek tragedy or a related field. This is the first study to address the reception of Aeschylus holistically, and although the plays of the Oresteia trilogy are understandably explored in most detail, it is good to see all the extant plays discussed as well as a number of fragments. The thematic focus is on the processes of ‘editing, analyzing, translating, adapting, and remaking the plays of Aeschylus' both ‘for the page and the stage’ (p. ix, italics original), emphasising a ‘systemic model’ (p. 3) that sees the connections between these processes. Helpful theoretical guidance is given regarding the terminology of ‘translation’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘remake’ (pp. 6–7), and the volume's ‘dual perspective’ (p. 22) on audience and readership is stressed as C. guides us deftly through the interconnections between the chapters in his exemplary introduction.
In Chapter 1, ‘Editing Aeschylus for a Modern Readership: Textual Criticism and Other Concerns’, A. Garvie provides an overview of the challenges facing a modern textual critic in producing an edition of Aeschylus. He gives valuable advice on how to strike a balance between analysis of text and contexts by, for example, giving measured consideration both to possible authorial intention and to potential audience responses, ancient and modern. The discussion draws on his own experience in producing authoritative and indispensable editions of Aeschylus, most recently Persae (2009), and is informed by an impressive range of scholarship.
Chapter 2, by J. Hannink and A. Uhlig, ‘Aeschylus and His Afterlife in the Classical Period: “My Poetry Did Not Die With Me”’, focuses our attention on the ancient contexts and reception of Aeschylus' plays whose importance Garvie had noted. Starting from Aristophanes' Frogs, Hannink and Uhlig argue carefully and persuasively, based on frustratingly limited evidence coming mainly from tragedy, comedy, the Life of Aeschylus and the fact that Aeschylus' popularity declined in the fourth century bce, that Aeschylus' plays were actively reperformed within his own lifetime.
In Chapter 3, ‘Prometheus Bound in Translation: “the True Promethean Fire”’, J.M. Walton discusses English-language translations of one of the three most popular Greek tragedies in translation (coming third after Agamemnon and Antigone). Beginning with Charlotte Lennox's 1759 translation into English of Brumoy's 1730 Le théâtre des grecs, which included a description of Prometheus in Chains, Walton takes us on a fascinating and learned tour, quoting from a wide variety of translations from across the centuries and highlighting links to their cultural contexts. One concluding observation underlines the relatively high number of female translators of this play, creating a natural link to Chapter 4, ‘Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes: Women, War and the Hecht/Bacon Translation’, by D. Roberts, where the collaborative translation of Helen Bacon is analysed, as is the earlier translation of Anna Swanwick among otherwise male translators. Roberts powerfully demonstrates the significance of social and historical context on the process of translation, showing how the Vietnam War, with associated reports of rape, as well as the influence of Freudian theory in the academy, loom large over the linguistic choices made by Hecht and Bacon.
Chapter 5, ‘Aeschylus in the Balance: Weighing Corpses and the Problem of Translation’, by R. Rehm, brings us back to the caricature of Aeschylus in Aristophanes' Frogs and to the broader issue of translating Aeschylean language. Focusing on the Aeschylean metaphor of ‘weighing in the balance’, used throughout his works in relation to death, Rehm puts forward a thought-provoking argument on the impossibility of any contemporary translation to do justice to the metaphor. This is the case not only because the experience of weighing with scales and counterweights is foreign in a digital world, but also, and more importantly, because Western culture is, for the most part, entirely divorced from the physicality of death. Rehm's concluding suggestion that a directorial choice might most readily convey that physicality, through the possibilities afforded by theatrical production, exemplifies the bridging of approaches to the reception of Aeschylus that this volume promotes.
From a single Aeschylean metaphor we turn to a cognitive analysis by P. Meineck, discussing how individual words and images may have functioned in the original performance of the Oresteia in Chapter 6, ‘Cognitive Theory and Aeschylus: Translating beyond the Lexicon’. Examining primarily the text of Agamemnon, Meineck opens by making arresting observations on the multisensory experiences of the original audience. For example, the smell of butchered and roasted sacrificial meat from the sanctuary next to the theatre must have influenced audience responses to Ag. 1309–10. The main part of the paper applies theories of spatial processing and cognitive surrogacy to the Aeschylean text in an analysis also informed by deep knowledge of Classical Athenian landscape and culture. Meineck offers exciting new ways of understanding Aeschylus as live theatre.
Where Meineck acknowledges the significance of auditory experiences in the ancient theatre and, sadly, the loss of ancient music, the authors of Chapters 7, 8 and 9 focus on extant musical adaptations of Aeschylus. S.B. Ferrario, ‘Aeschylus and Western Opera’ (Chapter 7), seeks to answer why Aeschylus was an unpopular choice for operatic treatment until his rising popularity in this art form over the course of the late twentieth century. In her impressively broad-ranging discussion she shows how the plot structure and content of Aeschylus' plays accounted for their limited use in opera from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and also how these same aesthetic challenges, along with the thematic concerns of his tragedies, sparked a renewed interest in his works from the 1960s onwards. Early operatic engagements with Aeschylus, such as Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848) and Taneyev's Oresteia (1895), Ferrario argues, were deeply personal pieces for their composers. Twentieth-century operas based wholly or in part on Aeschylean tragedy have an experimental dimension (Carl Orff's 1968 Prometheus, Andrew Earl Simpson's 2006 The Furies) or a political one (Mikis Theodorakis's 1999 Antigone).
Following this instructive survey comes D. Munteanu's ‘Aeschylus’ Cassandra in the Operas of Taneyev and Gnecchi’ (Chapter 8), which highlights the structural and musical similarities between Sergei Taneyev's 1895 Oresteia and Vittorio Gnecchi's 1905 Cassandra, as well as their comparable reception histories (successful initial productions, followed by obscurity and then revival in the twenty-first century). Munteanu explores how both operas engage with the Aeschylean original, and demonstrates how these neglected works were pioneering and influential in re-establishing Cassandra as a potential operatic heroine.
The next chapter, ‘Pop Music Adaptations of Aeschylus’ Plays: What Kind of Rock Was Prometheus Fastened To?’ (Chapter 9), by K. Wetmore, focuses on four productions from twenty-first-century America that translate the Greek tragic experience for their audiences. Two have a serious political agenda. Will Power's hip-hop The Seven (2001–2008), ‘samples’ and ‘mashes up’ Aeschylus in representing legacies of violence and disempowerment in ways that can be related to the black community, while The American Repertory Theatre's Prometheus (2011), supported by Amnesty International, made Prometheus into a prisoner of conscience with a musical score written by rock composer and political activist Serj Tankian. By contrast, entertainment seems to be the main concern of Dizzy Miss Lizzie's The Oresteia (2008–2009) and The Troubadour Theatre Company's ABBA-inspired Abbamemnon (2014), neither of which bear the weight of the original tragedies.
Chapters 10, 11 and 12 underline different types of traumatic engagement with Aeschylus. In Chapter 10, ‘Aeschylus as Postdramatic Analogue: “a Thing Both Cool and Fiery”’, P. Monaghan discusses the potential of Aeschylean tragedy for postdramatic theatre. Surveying some of the more experimental theatrical engagements with Aeschylus, Monaghan posits, in a thought-provoking and broad-ranging discussion, that the ‘discordant and incommensurable elements’ in Aeschylean tragedy observed by Nietzsche may be given new life through Lehmann's concept of the ‘aesthetics of undecidability’ in postdramatic theatre (p. 251). Postdramatic responses to Aeschylus, Monaghan proposes, tend to be either ‘cooling’ and Apollonian by, for example, making language more accessible, or ‘fiery’ and Dionysian by, for example, increasing the physicality of performance. Moving from traumatic transformation of the text we turn to images of trauma generated by the text in Chapter 11, ‘Voices of Trauma: Remaking Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in the Twentieth Century’, by L. Hardwick. Focusing on three communications of traumatic experience from Agamemnon – the Watchman's speech, the Herald episode and Cassandra's monody – Hardwick examines how the adaptations of two Irish poets, Louis MacNeice and Seamus Heaney, function both within and beyond personal and contemporary experiences of trauma. Hardwick persuasively demonstrates how such responses to Aeschylus may enhance ‘the aesthetic and political agency of trauma’ (p. 281). Chapter 12, ‘The Oresteia in Kannada: the Indian Context’, by V. Guttal, confronts us with further complexities regarding the trauma of adapting Greek tragedy for an Indian audience. Acknowledging both the imperial origins and the anti-colonial politics of Classical literature in India, Guttal gives an overview of Greek tragedies that have been translated and adapted into Kannada (spoken in the state of Karnataka in south western India). Of Aeschylus' plays, Agamemnon has been the most popular, with four versions, the Oresteia as a whole has been translated twice, and there is one Persians and one Prometheus Bound. The successful staged version of the Oresteia (Orestis Purana) in 2015, directed by Venkataramana Aital, invoked Indian myths and practices in representing and communicating the Aeschylean text.
The final chapter, ‘Two Centuries, Two Oresteias, Two Remakes', by H. Moritz, highlights the effects of contemporary theatrical conventions on two major adaptations of the Oresteia – Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) and Katharine Noon's Home Siege Home (2009). Realist theatrical concerns and Freudian psychology permeate O'Neill's work in his representation of family dynamics. Noon's play, on the other hand, is characterised by postmodernism and metatheatricality in its evocation of contemporary politics. Beginning, as it does, with a brief review of the reception of the Oresteia in antiquity, and spanning the main period of Aeschylean reception history in its central discussion, Moritz's chapter makes a singularly appropriate closing piece for the volume.
Overall, this is an exceptionally coherent and well-conceived collection, edited by an expert hand. The chapters speak both to the central concerns of the volume and to each other, with authors clearly engaged with and cross-referencing each other's work. This book will be indispensable for anyone interested in the reception history of Aeschylus, and has much of value to say, more generally, about the politics of translation and adaptation in the remaking of Greek tragedy.
