A Cultural History of Tragedy in Antiquity by Emily Wilson

Author:Emily Wilson [Wilson, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350154889
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

THE POLITICS OF REPERFORMANCE: TRAGEDY IN THE LATE REPUBLIC

The great period of Republican tragedy ended with the death of Accius around the start of the first century BCE, but the great plays continued to be reperformed. Several late Republican performances show a particularly radical reshaping of political meaning in reperformance.48

The first and probably most radical reshaping by reperformance was the manipulation, by actors and by audience, of individual lines, largely deracinated from their wider context within the play, to yield a specific, topical significance. Cicero writes to his friend Atticus of an incident in 59 BCE when the actor Diphilus used an existing line of tragedy to attack Pompey the Great: “To our misfortune you are Great (nostra miseria tu es magnus/Magnus),” punning on Pompey’s cognomen Magnus “The Great,” an attack which led to multiple encores.49 We do not know what play the line came from and whether any of the force of the attack derived from a constructed parallelism between Pompey and a character onstage, as opposed to resting solely on the wordplay, but in either case the tragedy, or at least one line from it, was given a new political meaning generated entirely by the context of its reperformance. Indeed, Cicero’s remark that “these lines might seem to have been written for the occasion by an enemy of Pompey” underlines the way in which reperformance mimics the effect of composition, producing a meaning which is as new as if it had just been written. A similar but even more complex effect was produced, if we can trust Cicero’s own understandably partial account, when the actor Aesopus used lines from a reperformance of Accius’ Eurysaces, with further lines interpolated from Ennius’ Andromacha, to lament Cicero’s exile and support his recall, to (allegedly) great acclaim by the audience.50 Here the manipulation of the original script is more overt, since lines from another play are introduced, but there is also a clearer sense that the cumulative effect of numerous lines and perhaps even of a scene or the play as a whole was made into a political allegory. Such manipulations are significant for what they tell us about the political meaning which could be generated by the reperformances themselves, but also because they show that audiences were already predisposed to interpret tragedy as having a political meaning.

An intriguing test case for this is the opening of Pompey’s theater in 55 BCE and the tragedies staged, alongside other entertainments, to mark the occasion.51 This was the first permanent theater in Rome, a significant moment in itself for the political history of tragedy, but its main interest for our purposes lies in Pompey’s attempt to harness tragic spectacle for political self-glorification. Again, our evidence is from Cicero, whose emphasis is on the vulgarity of the spectacle and its lack of cultural merit, rhetorically asking his friend Marcus Marius “What pleasure is there in getting a Clytemnestra with six hundred mules or a Trojan Horse with three thousand mixing bowls?”52 Through the cultural snobbery

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