Edith Hall

Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy

Acknowldgements Preface Editions and abbreviations Setting the stage Inventing Persia The barbarian enters myth An Athenian rhetoric The polarity deconstructed Bibliography Index

Classical Mythology in the Victorian Popular Theatre

This article argues that our picture of the uses of Greek and Roman authors in nineteenth-century Britain will remain incomplete unless the popular and culturally subversive genre of classical burlesque, a staple of the mid-Victorian popular theatre, is taken seriously by scholars. Dozens of burlesques of ancient epic and tragedy were performed between James Robinson Planché’sOlympic Revels of 1831 and Gilbert and Sullivan’sThespis of 1871, offering the cross-class audiences access to a wide range of classical material. By examining a selection of important classical burlesques, some of which were never published, describing their authors and audiences, and situating them within their theatrical, historical, and ideological contexts, the article concludes that working-class and lower middle-class theatregoers of both sexes must have been much more familiar with classical mythology than they have been given credit for hitherto.

Talfourd's Ancient Greeks in the Theatre of Reform

This article discusses two romantic tragedies set in ancient Greece, which were performed on the professional stage in London in the 1830s. They are the works of Thomas Noon Talfourd, a radical member of Parliament.Ion (Covent Garden Theatre 1836) was based on Euripides’ tragedy of the same name;The Athenian Captive (Haymarket Theatre 1838) assumes many features from several Greek tragedies. The plays are contextualized within the social, political, and intellectual milieu of the decade of the Great Reform Act (1832), the abolition of slavery, and the accession of Queen Victoria. It is argued that they represent rare uses of ancient Greece for radical political purposes in the nineteenth-century British Theatre. Particularly significant are Talfourd’s choice of starring actor (the republican William Charles Macready) the impact of Talfourd’s own nonconformist Christianity on his presentation of struggles for liberty in ancient Greece, and the influences upon his work of Shelley and Bulwer.

Peaceful Conflict Resolution and Its Discontents in Aeschylus's Eumenides

The earliest ancient Greek text to narrate the resolution of a large-scale conflict by judicial means is Aeschylus’s tragedy Eumenides , first performed in Athens in 458 BC. After explaining the historical context in which the play was performed—a context of acute civic discord and the imminent danger of an escalation of reciprocal revenge killings by the lower-class faction in Athens—this article offers a new reading of the play and asks if it can help us think about the challenges inherent in conflict resolution today. The prosecutors are the Erinyes (Furies), the archaic supernatural agents of murder victims; their responsibility, in predemocratic Greece, before the invention of law courts, was to punish murderers. The defendant is Orestes, who has killed his mother but argues that, since she had killed his father, he was acting justly. The judges consist of eleven Athenian citizen jurors plus the presiding god, Athena, whose twelfth vote carries slightly more weight than any of the others. The article concludes that some aspects of the procedure are exemplary, especially Athena’s insistence on respecting each side’s right to be heard, her sensitivity toward the grievances felt by the defeated Erinyes, and the compensation they are offered. On the other hand, the tragedy clearly shows how difficult it is for a fair legal judgment to be made without a view to larger issues of national expedience, security, and inherent power structures, especially that of patriarchy.

INTRODUCTION: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy

Introduction: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy “Only connect . . .” — is there any single phrase that offers a more direct and humane method of conflict resolution? This sensible exhortation serves as the epigraph for E. M. Forster’s 1910 “condition of England” novel, Howards End, in which Forster humorously, then desperately, plots to get people, classes, and even places (rural England versus cosmopolitan London) utterly opposed in character and in values to “connect.” The moral good of human connection, the central theme of all of Forster’s fiction, is a primary article of his humanistic creed, as expounded with great urgency and yet a certain wistfulness in his 1938 essay “What I Believe.” “I realize,” he confesses,“Only connect . . .,” the epigraph of Forster’s Howards End , offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection — whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations — in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel’s conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conventional feeling as an act of moral heroism. This essay introduces the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means”: it explores and indeed extols the moral efficacy of connection in containing force and resolving conflicts, but it also contemplates the obstacles to connection, which Forster dramatizes with his characteristic honesty.

Peace by Other Means:: Symposium on the Role of Ethnography and the Humanities in the Understanding, Prevention, and Resolution of Enmity Part 3

Introduction: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy “Only connect . . .” — is there any single phrase that offers a more direct and humane method of conflict resolution? This sensible exhortation serves as the epigraph for E. M. Forster’s 1910 “condition of England” novel, Howards End, in which Forster humorously, then desperately, plots to get people, classes, and even places (rural England versus cosmopolitan London) utterly opposed in character and in values to “connect.” The moral good of human connection, the central theme of all of Forster’s fiction, is a primary article of his humanistic creed, as expounded with great urgency and yet a certain wistfulness in his 1938 essay “What I Believe.” “I realize,” he confesses,“Only connect . . .,” the epigraph of Forster’s Howards End , offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection — whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations — in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel’s conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conventional feeling as an act of moral heroism. This essay introduces the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means”: it explores and indeed extols the moral efficacy of connection in containing force and resolving conflicts, but it also contemplates the obstacles to connection, which Forster dramatizes with his characteristic honesty.

Peace by Other Means

Introduction: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy “Only connect . . .” — is there any single phrase that offers a more direct and humane method of conflict resolution? This sensible exhortation serves as the epigraph for E. M. Forster’s 1910 “condition of England” novel, Howards End, in which Forster humorously, then desperately, plots to get people, classes, and even places (rural England versus cosmopolitan London) utterly opposed in character and in values to “connect.” The moral good of human connection, the central theme of all of Forster’s fiction, is a primary article of his humanistic creed, as expounded with great urgency and yet a certain wistfulness in his 1938 essay “What I Believe.” “I realize,” he confesses,“Only connect . . .,” the epigraph of Forster’s Howards End , offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection — whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations — in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel’s conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conventional feeling as an act of moral heroism. This essay introduces the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means”: it explores and indeed extols the moral efficacy of connection in containing force and resolving conflicts, but it also contemplates the obstacles to connection, which Forster dramatizes with his characteristic honesty.

Ancient Greek Responses to Suffering: Thinking with Philoctetes

This chapter explores classical Mediterranean thought on suffering through a detailed examination of one Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, in which both moral philosophy and medicine also feature. Suffering in this play has no inherent metaphysical or ethical status, but it does raise the rather practical as well as ethical question of how other human beings can and should respond to the sufferer—examining in close detail how an individual’s acute suffering deforms his everyday life and his relationships with his or her community and showing how very differently individuals respond to the suffering of others. It even asks the proto-Utilitarian question of whether the suffering of a single individual should be allowed to outweigh the interests of the whole community. There is perhaps no other artwork that explores so intensely the problem which incurable suffering presents to the community to which the sufferer belongs.