0 dainty ducke
Martin SEYMOUR-SMITH
Seneca's Oedipus adapted for the theatre by Ted Hughes (Faber 6s) Prometheus Bound derived from Aeschylus by Robert Lowell (Faber 20s) Seneca's ten tragedies (or nine if Octavia is not his) were almost certainly neither written for dramatic performance nor in fact per- formed in Rome. Doubtless they 'were recited. Their disproportionate but under- standable and vital influence on Elizabethan drama is what makes Seneca important to us now. Or is it? Peter Brook wanted, says Ted Hughes, 'a text that would release what- ever inner power this story, in its plainest, bluntest form, still has, and unearth . . . the ritual possibilities within it' Sophocles was not suitable because 'the Greek world saturates' him 'too thoroughly ... the evolu- tion of his play seems ... fully civilised. The figures in Seneca's Oedipus are Greek only by convention : by nature they are more 'primitive than aboriginals. They are a spider people, scuttling among hot stones'. That last is a brilliant sentence, fully illustrating the queer, disturbing—but so often wilfully self-indulgent and uncontrolled —power of Ted Hughes's mind. And, of course, any intelligent experiment is wel- come. Nevertheless, there is much that is questionable in what he says. First and fore- most, I doubt if Seneca's play provides the necessary text. It is a Euripidean treatment, by a stylistically gifted Roman hypocrite who was not a poet, of the essential Sophoclean theme. Furthermore, as E. F. Watling says in his excellent Penguin translation, his tech- nique is 'anti-realistic', aiming 'at the creation of dramatic tension by words with the mini- mum of visual aid' (actually, I believe—I did not see it—that the successful performance at the National Theatre 'unearthed' some of 'the ritual possibilities' precisely by means of visual aid); and it 'by compression weakens the suspense and impact of the king's dis- covery of his past'.
That weakness certainly does not help to release 'whatever inner power' the story has. Nor is Seneca's treatment, for all its blood- thirstiness, plain or blunt. Furthermore, in terms of our own time, Sophocles somehow transcends and assimilates both Freud and the laudable aims of the National Theatre; Seneca does neither. It would have been better to take this story and ask Ted Hughes for his own treatment: by being tied to Seneca—and for a modern adapter he stays remarkably close to the Latin—he is forced to employ some very prosaic or inadequate language ('the blood came spewing out over his face and beard/in a moment he was drenched': but the crude sensationalism is present in the Latin), which never succeeds in living up to its explosive theme. Perhaps the direction and acting of the performance obscured this deficiency—all credit to it— but it is still there.
However, Ted Hughes has done the job he was set to do admirably. I do not think it could be improved. Of course he has avoided the fourteeners of his 1563 predeces- sor Neville (also a Cambridge man, though his translation of Oedipus was executed at the age of sixteen). Much later Shakespeare mocked this sort of thing thus: 'But stay:
0 spighte! But marke, poore Knighte, what dreadful dole is heere? /Eyes, do you see? How can it be? 0 dainty Ducke, 0 Deare!' But Neville is really rather better than that, as when Jocasta says 'Fayne would I speake, I am afraide. For what should I thee call/ My Son? doubt not. Thou art my Son. My Son thou art for all/These mischiefs great: alas, alas I shame my Son to see.'
Hughes's instinct, correct so far as his text is concerned, has been to strip this of the poetic pathos that Neville was able to put into it: he is much more terse: 'what can I call you now what shall I call you/ you're my son, shall I call you my son'. The whole enterprise suggests that Hughes has the capacity to adapt the real poetry of drama- tists such as Sophocles or Aeschylus.
It is impossible to tell if Robert Lowell has worked from the Greek, from a crib, or merely from what he calls 'one of the dullest' translations he could find. Most of his prose translation bears no serious rela:nn to the text at all, or indeed to its specific contexts. This is a well-constructed personal treatment of a basic myth. It is extraordinary; but not in its relation to Aeschylus, whose text has merely given Lowell the opportunity, perhaps the excuse to make his own play. That Aeschylus can be genuinely and poetically adapted into the English language we know at least from MacNeice's Agamemnon; but that is not in any sense to criticise Lowell for his 'derivation'. However, discussion of it must be confined to the context of his own work—not Aeschylus's, or I think, even its significance for us today.
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