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An Oedipus for our Times? Yeatss Version of Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus
Fiona Macintosh

I N T RO D U C T I O N Between 2000 and 2003 numerous stories ran in The New York Times promising a rare theatrical gemAl Pacino as Oedipus. We learned that the acclaimed actress, Estelle Parsons, then working as director of the Actors Studio, was to direct a star-studded cast. Public readings took place in 2001 but there was in the end no full performance. This, however, was never interpreted as any kind of failure, nor indeed with much disappointment, because we always heard how it was the experience of working on the project that mattered more than any commercial realization: developing this Oedipus was valued for the fun of it, like working out in a gymnasium.1 This piece of luvviedom may seem like jetsam on the waves of theatre history. But it gathers in signicance when it emerges that the version chosen for this thespian work-out is one that began its life some hundred years previouslyYeatss Sophocles King Oedipus: A Version for the Modern Stage. Although not staged until 1926, and only rst published in 1928, the story of Yeatss version dates from the rst decade of the twentieth century and it continues to this day. The Yeats version has inspired at least one opera (Harry Partchs King Oedipusa Music-Dance Drama [premiered in 1952]);2 and it provided a potent vehicle for Laurence Oliviers celebrated tour de force, when he performed in an evening double-bill as Oedipus and Pu in
The New York Times, 3/2/2000. Partchs King Oedipus, using the Yeats version as libretto, was rst performed in 1952 at Mills College, Oakland. Partch had met Yeats in 1934 in Dublin, when he had already begun planning his opera. It was Yeatss writing on the union of words and music (e.g. Speaking to the Psaltery, E&I (1907), 1327 and more recently, the Preface to the 1928 published text of Yeatss King Oedipus) that impressed Partch. However, the Yeats estate did not grant Partch permission to release the recording of the 1952 premire, and so the 1954 recording used Parchs reworking of Jebbs translation instead. For details, see Grove (2001), s.v. Oedipus.
2 1

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Sheridans The Critic at the New Theatre in 1945. No less a theatrical triumph was the internationally renowned lm of Oedipus Rex (1956), directed by Tyrone Guthrie, which similarly used Yeatss version (indeed the Guthrie Theatre, Stratford, Ontario still treats Yeatss text as denitive, as a production there in 2005 demonstrates). When Michael Cacoyannis directed Oedipus Tyrannus in Dublin in 1973, it was again with the Yeats text, which provided him with his most intensive and productive training ground on which to develop his theories of Greek tragedy. And the Yeats version remains to this day the Oedipus of choice for most small-scale theatre companies who lack the resources to commission a new script.3 Whilst there has been serious work done on the manuscripts of the translation and some work on its inception,4 there has been no previous attempt to account for its extraordinarily wide-ranging production history nor its very considerable impact on twentieth-century tragic theory (especially via Francis Fergussons seminal Idea of a Theater [1949], which draws upon it extensively). Indeed, since translations for the stage are rarely considered to have a shelf life in excess of ten years, this chapter seeks to explain what is unique to the Yeats translation, over and beyond the obvious claim that Yeats still matters. And this is a point worth pondering because there has only been one other subsequent Irish version of Oedipus TyrannusDerek Mahons Oedipus (2005). Mahons Oedipus is not just a very loose adaptation of Sophocles tragedyit conates both the Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonusit belongs (like Mahons Bacchae) to what one might term the parodic line of Irish Greek adaptation (in which one would put, of course, Synges The Playboy of the Western World, Joyces reworkings of myth, and much of OCasey).5 The absence of new serious Irish Oedipuses is a notable one, when there have been so many Irish adaptations of ancient plays generallythere is already need to update the extensive 2002 listing in McDonald and Waltons collection of essays, Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, which with its titles debt to the Yeats version, itself forms part of the texts reception. In many ways this absence of other Irish Oedipuses is not unrelated to the broader question of what has happened to the gure of Oedipus post-Freud.
3 In the 1973 production Cacoyannis made a number of changes to Yeatss text, notably restoring many cuts to the choruses with the help of the poet, Richard Murphy. A notable, more recent, Irish production which used the Yeats text was Gary Hyness Druid Theatre Company staging in Galway in 1987, with Maria Mullen as Oedipus. For full details of the productions mentioned here, see the APGRD database, edited and maintained by A. Wrigley, at <http:// www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk>. 4 See especially, Clark and McGuire (1989), but also Grab (1972), Dorn (1984), Arkins (1990), Liebregts (1993), Macintosh (1994). 5 For a good analysis of the parodic elements in Mahons Bacchae, see Perris (2007).

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After some decades of unparalleled prominence on the stage in the rst part of the twentieth century, Oedipus has gone on to experience a new form of ostracism in the last forty or so years: the ignominy of being linked with imperialism, and the repressive and oppressive powers of the bourgeois state by his anti-Freudian adversaries in France (notably by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) ). If Oedipus continues to enjoy a place in the repertoire, it is often only secured by making him more East End than West End (as in Berkos Greek (1980) ); more representative of a minority than a majority voice (in, say, the post-colonial reworking of Ola Rotimi, The Gods are Not to Blame (1968), or the African-American version of Rita Dove, Darker Face of the Earth (1994) ). Other interesting changes have been the tendency to nd in Oedipus a more sentient than cerebral man (as in Pasolinis lm, Edipo Re (1967)); or perhaps even to make Oedipus into a woman (as with Gary Hyness 1997 Druid Theatre Companys production and the Cambridge Oedipus of 2004, directed by Annie Casteldine); or, as with Martha Grahams pioneering ballet, Night Journey (1945), it is by radically rewriting the Sophoclean text in order to allow the mother gure, Jocasta, to come centre stage.6 If Oedipus has largely taken to the wings in the second half of the twentieth century, it becomes all the more pertinent to ponder the survival of Yeatss text. By combining close textual evaluation of Yeatss version together with an account of its performance reception and its position within the history of ideas, we will perhaps begin to see how this quintessentially Modernist Oedipus, in deance of the odds, has managed to persist and to endure within a much more cynical postmodern world.

T H E G E N E S I S O F T H E T E XT ( 1 9 0 4 1 9 1 2 ) That the Irish national theatre movement from the end of the nineteenth century onwards should have had a history that involved Greek drama is not surprising: the performance history of Greek drama since the 1880s in Britain had been driven by Irish expertise and enthusiasm. Oscar Wilde claimed, perhaps with only a grain of truth, that he had been involved in the pioneering ancient Greek production of the Agamemnon in 1880 at Balliol College, Oxford.7 Yeats, with rather more veracity, looked back to the play, Helena in
For some of these new Oedipuses, see Macintosh (2004) and (2007). Ellmann (1987), 1012. This claim seems, however, unlikely (see Hall and Macintosh (2005), 4523).
7 6

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Troas by the Irish doctor/playwright, John Todhunter (performed at Henglers Circus in 1886 in the rst Greek-inspired theatre space in London) as a turning point in theatre history.8 When the Abbey Theatre opened, just a few months after the Barker-Vedrenne management took over at the Royal Court in London in early 1904, the repertoires of both theatres very often ran in tandem.9 These two theatres were leading the way in the New Drama in the English-speaking world, and the New Drama was very much allied to the Greeks. The repertoire of the Court included Euripides in Murrays translations; and very soon it was felt that the repertoire at the Abbey should include Greek plays, as Synge said, in order to throw light upon their own work.10 Whilst it was understood that in the Abbeys rst season, at least, Irish plays upon Irish themes should provide the subject matter, there was never any sense that the Greek corpus was alien. Yeats had written to Gilbert Murray in 1903 about his plans for the Theatre of Beauty, suggesting an Oedipus be played with Murrays Hippolytus.11 Since the comparative studies by Celtic scholars in the last part of the nineteenth century had suggested that the gures of Irish mythology had their Greek counterparts (Deirdre was the Irish Helen; Cuchulain, both a Heracles and an Achilles), close theatrical associations in the minds of playwrights and spectators were inevitable. Lady Gregory had a serious interest in comparative folklore, to which she introduced Yeats; and Synge had actually attended lectures by the leading authority on Celticism, Henri dArbois de Jubainville at the Collge de France in Paris, where the connections made between the Celts and the Greeks were systematic and thorough.12 But it wasnt just the content of Greek tragedies that was of interest; as with the 1880s revivals, it was their form that made them important models for the Abbey playwrights. Just as the Symbolists in Paris had turned to Greek tragedy, especially the plays of Aeschylus, in order to nd ways of conveying other layers of consciousness, so now Greek drama was to provide a way of exploring alternatives to theatrical naturalism. By the end of the rst year, there were political reasons too for staging Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus in particular. In 1904 Sir Herbert Beerbohm Treeinspired by Mounet-Sullys performance with the Comdie Franaisewas unsuccessful in his attempt to secure a licence from the Lord Chamberlain to stage the play in London. Trees informal inquiry led to a
8 Yeats (1989), 36. Yeats did not actually see the production, but he was correct about its importance. See Hall and Macintosh (2005), 458 f. 9 Indeed the Court has even been dubbed Londons outpost for the Abbey by Ben Levitas in a recent (unpublished) paper at a conference at the National Portrait Gallery in June 2005. 10 Synge to Lady Gregory, 13 December 1906 in Saddlemyer (1982), 178. 11 Letter to Murray, 17 March 1903 cited in Clark and McGuire (1989), 6. 12 Kiberd (1993), 323.

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number of attempts to stage the play. First and most signicantly, Yeats seized the opportunity to use the ban as a means of putting the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on the theatrical map of the English-speaking world when it opened at the end of the year. The Lord Chamberlains Oce had no jurisdiction in Dublin; Ireland now had a chance to expose English philistinism for what it was. When Yeats announced the establishment of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, he added:
Oedipus the King is forbidden in London. A censorship created in the eighteenth century by Walpole, because somebody has [sic] written against election bribery, has been distorted by a puritanism which is not the less an English invention for being a pretended hatred of vice and a real hatred of intellect. Nothing has suered so many persecutions as the intellect, though it is never persecuted under its own name.13

The banning of Sophocles tragedy in England now enabled the Irish to side with the Greeks as champion of the intellect against the English/Roman tyrant. In late 1904 and early 1905, Yeats seems to be attempting to commission both Gilbert Murray and Oliver St John Gogarty for a translation of Sophocles play. Murray was working on Euripides at the time and had been since the late 1890s; he found Sophocles conventional in comparison. He had deep misgivings, in particular, about Sophocles handling of the incest theme in the Oedipus Tyrannus. He wrote to Yeats, declining his invitation on the grounds that the play was English-French-German . . . all construction and no spirit with nothing Irish about it.14 Gogarty, however, seems to have begun a translation, although Yeats was privately concerned about the archaizing touchesthe thees and thous.15 Even though he had solicited Murray, whose translations used poeticizing archaisms in abundance, Yeats was looking for a contemporary, speakable text from the outset. In 1906, Yeats got his friend, William Magee, who wrote under the pseudonym John Eglinton and who was a classics graduate from Trinity, to produce a version. Again, Yeats was worried about the style this time it was too elaborate for him.16 Magees text, along with Robert Gregorys translation of Antigone, was being regularly reviewed at this time by the Abbey directorate, and both plays were intended for production early in 1907. In the event, however, it was only the Abbeys parodic Oedipus, Synges The Playboy of the Western World, that opened on 26 January 1907. Later that year on 29 October, Yeats joined other prominent opponents of
13 14 15

Yeats (1962), 1312. Murray to Yeats, 27 Jan. 1905 in Finneran, Harper, and Murphy (1977), i.145 f. 16 Clark and McGuire (1989), 10. Ibid. 11.

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the British Censor including Granville Barker, Bernard Shaw, Synge, and Murray, as a co-signatory to a letter to The Times, in which they highlighted the absurdities of the system of theatre censorship. However, Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus was not just invoked in relation to the censorship debate at this time. It also became embroiled in a wider public debate concerning consanguineous sexual relations, which culminated in the passing of The Punishment of Incest Act (1908). Prior to 1908with the exception of the interregnum years, and in marked contrast to Scotland where incest had been a crime since 1567incest in England and Wales had been dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts, despite numerous attempts to make it a criminal oence. When a Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons was set up to investigate the state of theatre censorship in Britain, the anxieties concerning incest and the opposition to the Lord Chamberlains Oce came together in the discussions of Sophocles proscribed play.17 From 1907 to 1910, two actors were lined up for the lead role at the Abbeyrst in 1907, Ben Iden Payne (already associated with Greek plays in London and shortly in Manchester as well);18 and then late in 1909, Murray Carson was billed to appear as Oedipus in February 1910. Detailed discussion of the set took place at this time: rst, concerning the use of Gordon Craigs screens, which Craig himself vetoed on the grounds that more practice would be needed before they were used in production; and then plans were drawn up to remove the front rows of the stalls to accommodate the chorus.19 All of this activity at the Abbey was played out against a similarly frenetic series of attempts to stage the same play in London. Finally in November 1910 Murrays translation was granted a licence for performance in England. This, however, did not draw a halt to Yeatss plans for an Oedipus at the Abbey (indeed the prospect of a tour now made it in some ways more of an option, despite Yeatss concerns about the quality of the acting). In 1911, Yeats began working with Nugent Monck on the Oedipus; and in the summer, he began making cuts to Jebbs translation by himself. That it was Jebbs text he used was not surprising: it was Jebbs translation that had provided the parallel text for the Cambridge Greek Play production of Oedipus Tyrannus in 1887; and it was available in a convenient edition for the Abbey actors to work with. The quality and clarity of Jebbs commentary would also have been of genuine value to Yeats as he worked on the translation. Finally, Yeats no doubt felt some natural anity with Jebb, who was also a Dubliner; and a
17 18

For further discussion, see Hall and Macintosh (2005), 5348. Payne went on to join Annie Hornimans company at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, the rst repertory theatre in England, where he staged a number of Greek plays. 19 Clark and McGuire (1989), 167.

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close look at Yeatss translation shows that the anity manifests itself lexically too.20 When Max Reinhardts celebrated Oedipus Rex of 1910 was staged at Covent Garden in January 1912 in Murrays translation, Yeats continued with his own plans and his work on Jebbs text; and one of Moncks friends from Norwich, Dr Rex Rynd, who was over in Dublin, helped him with the Greek together with a young Greek scholar named Charles Power. Yeats saw the London production and thought it was wonderful.21 But this again did not deter him because his project was, after all, very dierent in conception: his text was to be sparse, whilst Murrays was languid and beautiful. Shortly after this, it seems, the Abbey project was abandoned. Clark and McGuire mention some rivalry over the lead role; but they dont identify any one particular reason for this change of heart. There is no mention of an Abbey Oedipus after 18 March 1912, when Yeats wrote to Monck of the possibility of rehearsals starting in May. It seems certain, however, that the May tour of Reinhardts Oedipus Rex to Dublins Royal Theatre scotched the Abbey project. Yeats, together with Lady Gregory and Mahay, was among the dignitaries on the rst night.22 Dublin had now had its Oedipus, albeit in Murrays Alma-Tadema-esque translation and in Reinhardts Nietzschean-inspired production; and 1912 was patently not the time to mount a speakable Oedipus in the narrow connes of the Abbey, where the Dionysiac collective would be well and truly marginalized in the orchestral pit, leaving the Apolline gures to tower over them on the tiny stage above.

T H E 1 9 2 0 s T E XT By 1912, then, Yeats had made changes to Jebbs text both in terms of its length and its style. He had done little with the odes, except having set them into rough, unrhymed verse; but they were by no means nished. In the early 30s he famously said it was his wife, George, who discovered his text and

20 Ibid. 18 contra Grab (1972). A second edition of the Cambridge Greek Play with Jebbs prose translation (with verse translations of the odes by Verrall set to music by Stanford) appeared in 1912. For a discussion of the pioneering nature of Jebbs translation and commentary, see Easterling (2005). 21 Yeats to Lady Gregory, postmark 31 Jan. 1912 cited in Clark and McGuire (1989), 33. For an account of the Reinhardt production, see Hall and Macintosh (2005), 52254. 22 Era, 18/5/12 in the Martin Harvey Papers, Theatre Museum, London.

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suggested he work on it again.23 In some ways, this is misleading because the mythological gure of Oedipus had become increasingly important to Yeats during the course of the 20s. As Bernard ODonoghue has pointed out, Yeatss theatrical activity was secondary in many ways to his prose in the 20sespecially to his work, A Vision which rst appeared in 1925 and later, much revised, in 1937.24 Oedipus enjoys a central role in the second edition of A Vision, acting as a kind of counterweight to the gure of Christ:
Oedipus lay upon the earth at the middle point between four sacred objects, was there washed as the dead are washed, and thereupon passed with Theseus to the woods heart until amidst the sound of thunder earth opened, riven by love, and he sank down soul and body into the earth. I would have him balance Christ who, crucied standing up, went into the abstract sky soul and body . . .25

These parallels between the pagan and Christian worlds were being worked out by Yeats literally during the mid 20s during the composition of his Dionysiac/Christian play, The Resurrection, which he worked on at the same time as he revised Sophocles King Oedipus. If Oedipus is elevated by Yeats to the level of Christ in the second version of The Vision because of the manner of his deathhorizontal rather than vertical, in the ground rather than in the sky his privileging of Oedipus in general is also due to the manner of his leaving Thebes. In Yeatss version of the Oedipus Tyrannus we nd precisely what Yeats designates the heroic act:
. . . an act done because a man is himself, because, being himself, he can ask of other men but room among remembered tragedies; a sacrice of himself to himself almost . . . So lonely is that ancient act, so great the pathos of its joy.26

The imprint of Lewis Farnells Greek Hero Cults and Ideals of Immortality (1921) can be felt here in Yeatss claim that by being himself the hero can ask of other men but room among remembered tragediesin other words, gain room as a hero among heroes as he attains cult status.27 And when Yeats goes on to describe this elevation to heroic status as a sacrice of himself to himself almost, we detect the much longer-standing inuence of the Cambridge ritualists on his worknotably Jane Harrisons Themis (1912),

23 First broadcast on BBC Radio Belfast immediately before the play was broadcast on 8 September 1931, published in Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner, 12 Sept. 1931, cited in Clark and McGuire (1989), 4 f. 24 25 ODonoghue (2006), 110. Yeats (1937), 27. 26 Yeats (1966), 56970. See Dorn (1984), 6382 for connections between Oedipus the King and The Resurrection 27 Liebregts (1993), 367.

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and especially Murrays appended Excursus, in which the ancient rite of the Year Daemon is held to be the controlling tragic principle. Blindness was always a source of true wisdom for Yeatsthe blind poet, Anthony Raftery appears in his work from the 1890s. Now Oedipus blindness is a mark that he has acknowledged, in true wisdom, the limits of human knowledge:
Those men that in their writing are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupied hearts.28

And in A Vision (1937) Yeats writes of the importance of Oedipus mind:

[He] knew nothing but his mind, and yet because he spoke that mind fate possessed it and kingdoms changed according to his blessing and his cursing.29

As a truly cerebral gure ([he] knew nothing but his mind), and equally importantly one who speaks his mind and changes kingdoms in the process, Yeats cannot but admire and identify intensely with the Oedipus of the Colonus. Indeed in his rage against his sons, Oedipus becomes a powerful persona for Yeats during the turbulent 20s, when he too raged against developments in the public arena in the newly independent state. The ambiguity of Oedipusboth sinner and saint, swordsman and saint, hunter and huntedmake him the perfect exemplar of the Yeatsian antithesis of mask and anti-mask.30 If Yeats begins to dene his public self in the 20s with the assistance of the mask of Oedipus, he was aware of other exciting parallel attempts to do the same in Paris. Indeed, on 19 February 1928 he writes to his wife about Ezra Pounds assistance to Cocteau with the 1927 revival of his version of Antigone. He suggests that Cocteaus Antigone would be a perfect third play in a trilogy at the Abbey to accompany his two Oedipus versions.31 What is signicant about the Cocteau Antigone (1923) and the Cocteau Oedipus (not La Machine Infernale of 1934 but the libretto for Stravinskys Oedipus Rex (1927) which was subsequently performed as a play in 1937) is that they were both very condensed texts. It was Cocteaus pared down Antigone which attracted Stravinsky, and which led him to invite Cocteau to write the French version of the libretto for his opera (this was subsequently translated into Latin by Jean Danilou).32 This is not to say that Yeats was consciously
29 Yeats (1957), 370. Yeats (1937), 28. For the duality of Oedipus and its importance to Yeats, see Arkins (1990), 127. Liebregts (1993), 36971. 31 Clark and McGuire (1989), 14 n. 29. Yeatss OC dates from Dec. 1926; for the 1927 premire, see below pp. 5334. 32 For details of Stravinskys Oedipus Rex, see Walsh (1999). 30 28

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following Cocteaus exampleon the contrary, both he and Nugent Monck had been determined from the outset to make cuts to Jebbs translation; and Yeats (in direct imitation of Pater) had advocated condensation and contraction as early as 1899 in The Autumn of the Body.33 Instead, Yeatss high Modernist aesthetic at this time, as was the case for Cocteau in France, demands a highly concentrated and streamlined text: one in which the form is so rigid that nothing is allowed to escape its sharply dened, angular contours. As Yeats pointed out, a Greek play, unlike a Shakespearian play, is the exposition of one idea; in the case of King Oedipus, fate closing in upon one man.34 In 1926 the cuts he makes are even more marked, in line with this lean high Modernist aesthetic: I want to be less literal and more dramatic and modern . . . bare, hard and natural like a saga.35 When the King Oedipus opened in 1926, it played for one and a half hours, against a set by the director Lennox Robinson, with two Craig-inspired square pillars and curtains (see Figure 23.1). The chorus of ve men sang their odes to music by Dr J. F. Larchet from the orchestral pit, whilst the leader (played by J. Stevenson) appeared on stage with the actors. Like Shaw before him, Yeats claimed that he felt that he only understood a Greek chorus after he had attended a Salvation Army meeting in Dublin; and his chorus, unable to dance, sang like liturgical singers and enabled audiences to sit back, and relax . . . [their] strained attention . . . our attention is no longer concentrated upon a single spot, a single man.36 When we look at the 1928 published text in some detail, the eects of this division between chorus, leader, and Oedipus can be noted absolutely. But as Dorn and Grab have pointed out, the major eect of the staging was to enhance the Yeatsian conception of the hero as one embarked upon a tragic path, in which so lonely is that ancient act, so great the pathos of its joy.37

T H E 1 9 2 8 P U B L I S H E D T E XT Following the premire in 1926, there were further revisions, all working towards cutting away any remaining slack in the text. By the time of the 1927 revival (when it appeared with Oedipus at Colonus), Lady Gregory had
34 Watson (2006), 48. Yeats (1987), 197. Yeats to Olivia Shakespear, 7/12/1926 in Foster (2003), 338. 36 Yeats (1987), 197. Cf. Yeatss comments in the Preface to the play (1928), repr. Clark and McGuire (1989), p. 104: The main purpose of the chorus is to preserve the mood while it rests the mind by change and attention. For Shaw, see Preface to Major Barbara. 37 Grab (1972), Dorn (1984), Yeats (1966), 570. 35 33

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Fig. 23.1. Set for the 1926 Abbey Theatre production of Yeatss King Oedipus, from Theatre Arts Monthly, March 1927, 216.

worked with Yeats (with the aid of Paul Masquerays 1922 French translation) to give more direct speech and better sound.38 As Yeats commented, happily acknowledging Augusta Gregorys role, with your help I have made the Edipus a masterpiece of English prose.39 When we turn to the published text, we nd (in the words of Guthrie and Moiseiwitsch, who worked on it for a number of years for their production in Stratford, Ontario in the 50s): a very aristocratic, but austere and uncompromising document, it treads barefoot over steep sharp rocks.40 However, for all its lapidary quality, Yeatss version is also lithe and supple like a well-tuned athlete; capable of exibility as well as taut muscular contraction. The sense of movement comes about in large measure because of the brevity of the sentences (where Jebb will use a subordinating clause, Yeats will favour a new sentence). Consider this example, which contains that wellknown phrase amid our troubles. It occurs in the scene with Creon, when Oedipus asks why nothing was done to nd Laius killers immediately. Creon replies in the Yeats version:
Such things were indeed guessed at, but Laius once dead no avenger arose. We were amid our troubles.
38 39 40

Lady Gregorys journal entry for 2 Feb. 1927 in Clark and McGuire (1989), 37. Reported in Lady Gregorys journal, 11 Feb. 1927 in Clark and McGuire (1989), 38. Guthrie and Moiseiwitsch (1955), 120.

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[Cf. Jebb: Such things were surmised; but Laius once slain, amid our troubles, no avenger rose.]41

We see here one important way in which Yeats works. By shortening sentences, and avoiding hypotaxis, he alters the pace and direction of the exchange: the trajectory of Jebbs sentence (and the long breath that it would require of an actor) is broken by Yeats into smaller units, as he translates Jebbs line into what is roughly a trimeter, a tetrameter, and a concluding trimeter. As Vendler points out, Yeatss adoption of the half-epic hexameter line in his poetry became one of his most powerful poetic symbols of a natural Irish aristocracy; and with the trimeters comes pace.42 Even in Yeatss prose, it seems, the line is working in rhythmically analogous ways to his poetry; and it is undoubtedly this regular loose trimeter substructure that makes this prose translation feel so poetic. But the major change eected by Yeats in this sentence is, of course, the change in emphasis, which shifts Jebbs subordinating clause to the end of the speech. Without this simple alteration, the phrase amid our troublesnow in a sentence on its own and resonant not only because of its topicality but also because of its new positioning would never have gained prominence. Another reason why Yeatss text feels lean, t, and active in comparison with Jebbs is because it is verb-based. Often Yeats takes a noun clause from Jebb and turns it into a verb clause. A simple but eective verb-based sentence appears in the scene between Creon and Oedipus:
King Laius was our king before you came to pilot us [Cf. Jebbs: Laius, king (onax), was lord (hegemon) of our land before thou wast pilot (apeuthynein).]43

By removing the honoric title from Creons address to Oedipus, and by making the noun clause into a verb clause (you came to pilot us), Yeats has managed to confer upon his Oedipus an increased sense of purpose and dynamism. Sometimes the latent performability of the text comes about from Yeatss use of a single arresting verb, as when the Priest announces that:
. . . the city stumbles towards death, hardly able to raise up its head.

Yeats (1952), 478; Jebb (2004), 29; OCT 1267 (my emphases). Vendler (2006), 79. The Athenaeum, 26/4/1884, 5312 considered Jebbs translation clear, racy, idiomatic. For comment on how Jebb would have reacted to this extraordinary claim, see Easterling (2005), 31. 43 Yeats (1952), 477; Jebb (2004), 25; OCT 1034 (my emphases).
42

41

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[Cf. Jebbs: For the city, as thou thyself seest, is now too sorely vexed (saleuei), and can no more lift her head from beneath the angry waves of death].44

Yeats has contracted a complex nexus of images in Sophocles, which combine emotional and physical turmoil and drowning in the sea, into a single landbased image which achieves speakability and cries out for performance: the suppliants are almost urged to embody the drooping, dying city as they enact its faltering gait. A similarly eective condensation and reordering of Jebbs text appears in the Priests appeal to Oedipus for his assistance:
. . . whether you nd it by your power as a man, or because, being near the gods, a God has whispered you. [Cf. Jebb: . . . whether by the whisper of a god thou knowest it, or haply as in the power of man.]45

What Yeats has done here is to convert the whisper of a god into the more active a God has whispered you (note too the perfect elision of the preposition to, which allows the sibilance of the line to echo to the end uninterrupted). As with the previous example, the important part of Yeatss sentence is reserved for the end, for emphasis. Although these examples come from the rst part of the play, the sense of movement and action persists throughout Yeatss text and is very often a result of his putting the verbs to the test. Another very important feature of Yeatss style, and one that has undoubtedly contributed to its durability, is the combination of a lack of specicity in general, together with an occasional specicity at particular points in the text, which serves to make the text very concrete and immediate. As Guthrie and Moiseiwitch so readily relished and exploited, Yeatss version is set in neither Thebes nor Dublin; we are nowhere in particular, and this enabled them to transport Oedipus into a mythopoeic sphere absolutely. But alongside this sense of being everywhere and nowhere in particular is the kind of detail that Guthrie and Moiseiwitch imply in their description of a text that treads barefoot over steep sharp rocks. One such specicity is almost Homeric in its eect: when Jocasta tells Oedipus of Laius binding of their childs feet, she says he had it thrown by sure hands upon a trackless mountain. The sure hands calls to mind the fossilized Homeric epithet and replaces Jebbs literal translation of Sophocles text by others hands (allon chersin).46 The Homeric echo is, perhaps, not
Yeats (1952), 475; Jebb (2004), 15; OCT 2223 (my emphasis). Yeats (1952), 476; Jebb (2004), 17; OCT 423 (my emphasis). 46 Yeats (1952), 495; Jebb (2004), 101; OCT 719. On specicity in Homeric simile, see Silk (2004), 619.
45 44

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surprising given Yeatss deep admiration for Lady Gregorys Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), with its own evident, though probably unconscious, debt to Lang, Leaf, and Myerss translation of the Iliad.47 As with the Homeric epithet, Yeatss adjective conveys seemingly redundant detail. Yet those sure hands by their very specicity draw attention to themselves and invite multiple meanings: rst the sense of parents, and especially a mothers, shocking indierence to the act of abandoning their child; but also, because of the dramatic irony here, the realization that these hands are both sure (because they convey the baby to another pair of hands rather than abandon it) and not sure because that other pair of hands will lead the child ultimately to his downfall. Jebbs frequent adoption of the term mouth in this middle part of the play is readily borrowed by Yeats;48 and is taken further by him when Jocasta is on her way to leave oerings on Apollos altar she tells us that Oedipus
is at the mercy of every mouth that speaks terror. [Cf. Jebbs: . . . is at the will of the speaker, if he speaks terrors].49

As Jebbs literal translation is replaced by Yeatss surprising, but very powerful, metonymical substitution of the source of the sound for its subject, we have another example of how Yeats makes his text vivid, even graphic here, almost conjuring to the minds eye and into the Theban context the subject of Edvard Munchs Scream (1893). It would seem that a prominent feature of Jebbs style in general has led to this sharply delineated image of an o-stage haunted Oedipus at this precise point in Yeatss text. The power and resonance in Yeatss version come frequently, as in his poetry, from eective use of repetition and echo, and very often repetition of the verbs; and this undoubtedly brings a sense of formal patterning, almost incantatory in eect on occasions, to his prose as well as to his verse. The famous alliterative Yeatsian interpolation in the parodos is representative in this respect: For death is all the Fashion now, till even Death be dead.50 But the ritual potential in Yeatss play is not conned to his odes alone. Listen too to the nal words of Oedipus tirade against Tiresias:
Were you not an old man, you had already learnt how bold you are and learnt it to your cost!51

Oedipus hauteur is caught here in the aristocratic six-syllable units with

47 49 50 51 48 Lang, Leaf, and Myers (1889). Cf. Jebb (2004), 89, 113, 129. Yeats (1952), 500; Jebb (2004), 125; OCT 917. Yeats (1952), 480. On repetition in the poetry generally, see P. McDonald (2002), 3550. Ibid. 486.

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their echoing verb (Were you not an old man, you had already learnt . . . and learnt it to your cost) which frame the third implied trimeter with its silent third foot (how bold you are) that is hammered home in his vehemence. But Oedipus ire is no match for Tiresias rhetorical skill; he too knows how to make verbal repetition work; and as the ending of his counterblast so amply demonstrates, he does so with a sleight of hand that Oedipus cant match:
. . . for no one of living men shall be crushed as you will be crushed.52

The major change eected by Yeats to Sophocles and in turn to Jebbs text, as Dorn and Grab have pointed out,53 is to isolate Oedipus from his Theban context altogether. This was dictated in part by the connes of the Abbey stage, which meant that the chorus of ve were down in the pit and only the Leader remained on stage. However, the fact that this limit worked in accordance with Yeatss conception of Oedipus is more than evident from the text itself. This is an Oedipus who commands the stage through self-referential languagea language that is deictic, gestural, and highly performative. Yeatss Oedipus uses the rst person where Sophocles generalizes: You are minded to betray me and Thebes? (cf. Jebb . . . art minded to betray us (hemas) and to destroy the state).54 Like Yeatss Cuchulain, Oedipus pronounces himself hero of men from the outset:
How can I being the man I am, being King Oedipus, do other than all I know?55

This is pure Yeats not least with its strict framing six-syllable units (How can I being the man . . . do other than all I know?) and its centrally important and metrically irregular octosyllabic unit (I am, being King Oedipus). But it is also more literally pure Yeats as interpolation, with its insistance upon the heros accession to heroic status in his rst speech in the play. When Yeatss Priest goes on to describe Oedipus as being near the gods (another decidedly non-Sophoclean interpolation) the heros special status is being amplied yet again. Whilst Yeatss choral odes are generally detached from the previous episodescuts are made to any reference (often in the Sophoclean epode) to events in the previous scene56 when the chorus do refer to Oedipus, and they do so indirectly in the third and fourth stasima, their comments serve to
53 Ibid. 486 (my emphases). Grab (1972), Dorn (1984). Yeats (1952), 483; Jebb (2004), 55; OCT 331. For third-person address in tragedy and Irish tragedy generally, see Macintosh (1994), 10525. 55 Yeats (1952), 475. 56 e.g. in the rst stasimon, the reference to Oedipus is omitted; and at the end of the third, the reference to Laius is similarly absent, 54 52

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enhance his heroic status. Yeats introduces an ambitious man into Sophocles generalizing comments about civic life:
Yet an ambitious man may lift up a whole State And in his death be blessed, in his life fortunate.57

And in his fourth, very truncated stasimon, he interpolates:

A famous man, deep-thoughted, and his body strong, Be honoured in dance and song.58

With the wonderfully Yeatsian (almost Hopkinsian) compound deepthoughted, combined with the body strong, (note again the hexameter and the trimeter), the chorus bring absolutely into their midst a physically forceful, theatrically real, and intensely cerebral hero. This is Oedipus as mind and body; saint and swordsman. We have therefore a magnication of Knoxs Sophoclean herointransigent, yes; monomaniacal and elevated beyond mere mortal status from the outset. This is not an Oedipus who regrets his life: no Yeatsian hero could, and so the Chorus, instead of Oedipus, are given the line in the kommos: It had indeed been better if that herdsman had never taken your feet out of the spancel or brought you back to life.59

A F T E R L I F E I N T H E T H E AT R E But how did this version work in theatres beyond the Abbey, theatres where there was no need for the chorus to be reduced to ve members and to be conned to the orchestra pit? We have seen how its deictic, gestural language and its muscular syntax cry out for performance. Additionally, it is important to stress how the very bareness of the text has enabled actors to work upon it: as the metaphor of the text as a workout from The New York Times, with which I began the chapter, implies. One very good example of this potentiality inherent in the pared-down script is the cry of recognition in Yeatss version. Yeats takes his cue from Jebb and translates the Greek as O! O!; but Jebb had included the exclamatory spelling of oh! with the h (compare the Watling translation, Oh God).60 Simple as this dierence between Yeats and Jebb is, in practice it makes a very big dierence. By omitting the h, Yeats is implying pure sound: an open, hollow, primal scream rather than a desperate
57 60

Yeats (1952), 499. Ibid. 510.

58

Ibid. 506.

59

Ibid. 514, Knox (1964).

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cri de coeur of any potentially self-pitying kind. Yeats makes very extensive cuts to the kommos at the end of the play because his Oedipus must not show self-pity or be pitied on any account. This magnicent potentiality of the Yeatsian O, O! was precisely what Laurence Olivier appreciated when he took the part in 1945 at the New Theatre, under the direction of Michel Saint-Denis. Olivier gave a consummate performance as the lonely hero pushed beyond the bounds of normal human endurance. When Oliviers Oedipus discovered the truth about himself, he emitted his (now famous) primal scream (in direct imitation, we are told, of the wailing of ermine entrapped by the barbarous practices of huntsmen). He says:
After going though all the vowel sounds, I hit upon Er. This felt more agonised and the originality of it made the audience a ready partner in this feeling.61

This cry has gone down in the annals of British theatre history and it is no doubt the sparseness, and very openness, of Yeatss text that made that possible. For the critic Kenneth Tynan, Oliviers Oedipus cried a new born babys wail;62 and in many ways Olivier was oering audiences Freuds Oedipus, now in 1945 being crudely wrenched anew from his mothers womb. Olivier, like Tyrone Guthrie, had regularly consulted Ernest Jones on matters of psychology in relation to Hamlet and Othello.63 Now it seemed his Oedipus was being subjected to Freudian insights. That it was this moment from the production in particular that entered the annals of British theatre history, is perhaps not surprising. For Oliviers wail not only anticipates the Beckettian scream; it also recalls Kleinian psychoanalytical theory, in which the rst and crucial trauma occurs on the departure from the birth canal. Yeatss text permitted this psychoanalytical reading in part because of its unerring focus upon Oedipus and its marginalization of the chorus which allows Oedipus in Oliviers interpretation to become Everyman. But it was also suciently exible, and as we have seen suciently patterned, to become an archetypally ritualistic drama under Guthries direction as well. In this sense the Yeats text was subjected equally eectively to the two most inuential theoretical approaches in the twentieth-century readings of Sophocles play: the Freudian and ritual readings respectively. Oliviers performance marks both the climax and the end of the Freudian tradition in many ways. Since Francis Fergusson used the Olivier production as the starting point for his The Idea of a Theater (1949), the 1945 production may be said to have
61 62 63

Olivier (1982), 154.

Shellard (1999), 35.

Forsyth (1976), 165.

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guaranteed the popularization in the English-speaking world of the ritual reading of tragedy as well. In many ways, Fergussons theory of the tragic hero as ritual scapegoat extended Murrays ritual readings of Euripides plays to Sophocles; and, as his preface makes clear, his theory came out of watching Olivier play Oedipus using Yeatss text.64 If Fergusson popularized the ritual theory of tragedy (and provided an agonistic partner against which Raymond Williams was later to spar),65 when Guthries production of Yeatss text appeared in Stratford, Ontario, in 1954, audiences saw the main tenets of the Cambridge ritualists fully realized on the stage. Indeed, it would seem that Guthrie was more than aware of Fergusson on tragedy (or should we say, Fergusson on Yeatss version of Sophocles tragedy). He writes:
The theater is the direct descendant of fertility rites, war dances and all the corporate ritual expressions by means of which our primitive ancestors, often wiser than we, sought to relate themselves to God, or the gods, the great abstract forces which cannot be apprehended by reason, but in whose existence reason compels us to have faith.66

Guthrie refers to Oedipus in particular as the sacred drama of Oedipus Rex . . . [in which the actor] impersonates a symbol of sacrice.67 Both Guthrie and Moiseiwitch had been to see the Old Vic Companys Oedipus Rex in 1945Guthrie himself would have directed had he not objected to Oliviers suggestion to play Pu in The Critic the same night in the double bill. On seeing Olivier in the nal scene with realistic blood pouring down his face (see Figure 23.2), Guthrie was determined to direct the scene himself and to do it dierently. According to Guthrie and Moiseiwitsch, the audience must be prepared to enter into a world of symbols exactly analogous to the experience of dreaming.68 The lm version of the production of 1956 begins with a narrator explaining how the play the audience is about to witness re-enacts the sacrice of a king, just as the priest re-enacts in symbolic mode Christs Last Supper during the eucharist. In an overtly metatheatrical gesture, the actor picks up his mask and invites the audience to imagine the studio lights as the sun, the camera as eyes, and he conjures before their eyes a smoke-enshrouded set from which the moaning suppliants emerge. In Guthries stridently anti-realistic production, the masked Oedipus
64 Fergusson (1949), 10: They must have been moved by the perennial vitality of the great role itself, which Olivier discovered . . . If the chorus, the other characters, and the rhythms of the play as a whole had been equally well understood, we might have enjoyed a direct perception of Sophocles play: i.e. the performable rhythm of life and action which may still touch us though originally realized in the customs, beliefs, and ritual forms of antiquity. (Fergussons emphasis) 65 66 67 Williams (1966). Guthrie (1960), 314. Ibid. 313. 68 Guthrie and Moiseiwitsch (1955), 154.

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Fig. 23.2. Laurence Olivier as Oedipus in the Old Vic Company production at the New Theatre, 1945.

doesnt change his mask in the nal scene but merely wears a gauze veil over it; and when the daughters come, they wrap themselves round him in a ritual dance, symbolically washing in his blood, [in . . . ] a purication of ritual.69 Yeatss blinded Oedipus has only just emerged from the palace proudly announcing to the chorus that it
. . . was my own hand alone, wretched that I am, that quenched these eyes.70

With Yeatss inspired choice of the verb quenchwith its multiple connotations of extinguishing something on re and cooling with liquid and thus soothing and satisfyingwe see how Guthries image of Oedipus daughters bathing in their fathers blood is also suggested on the lexical level as well. For Yeats, as for Guthrie (and we could add Fergusson and all those for whom tragedy is a ritual enactment of the Year Daemon), death in tragedy is really
69

Davies (1955), 35.

70

Yeats (1952), 513.

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Fig. 23.3. Douglas Campbell as Oedipus with chorus in the lm of the Stratford (Ontario) Festival production, dir. Tyrone Guthrie, 1957.

no death at all: it is a sacrice of the individual which brings about renewal for all. When Guthries mythopoeic production, with its striking, vast masks and kothornoi, and occasionally measured and deliberate pace, was put on lm in 1957, it guaranteed that Yeatss Oedipus became international property (see Figure 23.3). Guthries Oedipus, in marked contrast to Oliviers piercing scream, gives out a low moan (interestingly also nding sucient freedom in Yeatss O, O! to emit Aieee) before withdrawing in the fading light. The nal scene is played out in half-light as the audience participate and share in Oedipus new, deeper insight into reality. Departing from both the Sophocles and Yeats texts, Creon orders Oedipus to Go!. There is no room here for mere pity: the chorus retreat into the shadows, leaving Oedipus to fumble his way down the steps towards the camera, heavily obscured, almost blotted out as if in silhouette, by the half-light, before disappearing out of sight entirely. This is a far cry from the 1928 text, where Oedipus (as with Sophocles) is sent back into the palace, followed by Creon and the children. Guthrie is oering the audience not only a greater magnication of the Yeatsian isolated

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Modernist hero; he has also translated Sophocles/Yeatss tragic character into the (Senecan) ritual scapegoat absolutely.

C O N C LU S I O N Yeatss text would seem to have endured even when the gure of Oedipus has become marginalized on the modern stage. There is a real sense in which the gure of Oedipus, especially in the post-Freudian world, has proved problematic in just the way that Modernism and Yeats himself have often proved problematic in the postmodern world: all are identied in varying ways with dubious politics and dangerous ideas of heroism.71 The dictat in Stravinskys Poetics of Music that the Dionysiac must nally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it, explains the composers obsession with form in his neoclassical period.72 In many ways, Yeatss text made the Dionysiac of his earlier work submit to Apolline law here; and Guthries production exploits the Apolline dominance absolutely in designs that are strikingly evocative of those by both Theodore Stravinsky and later Cocteau for Stravinskys Oedipus Rex.73 But Yeatss Oedipus has clearly endured in part because he is not Apolline enough; the poets own identication with the gure of Oedipus meant that high Modernist formal distancing was ultimately impossible to achieve in this case, even if it had ever been entirely desirable. The speakability of the text is certain; so too is its inherent theatricality. It has also endured because of its minimalist nature: its denial of a Theban context has allowed it to lend itself most readily to universalizing interpretations of tragedy, such as Guthries in Stratford, Ontario; and its marginalized chorus has also enabled Freudian readings of the hero to be projected upon the text, as was the case with the Olivier/Michel Saint-Denis production. Pared down, gaunt even on occasions, Yeatss text has turned out to be prescient rather than problematic, gesturing in the direction of Beckett, of Pinter even, but without resorting to their demotic counterpoints. For this reason, it can remain the Oedipus of choice even at a time when heroes have no place; it is modern, yet distanced, amid our time rather than of our time. Indeed, this chapter could have borrowed for its title the preposition and the
McCormack (2005). Stravinsky (1947), 801. It is generally held that this work was in fact ghostwritten and not by Stravinsky himself. 73 Walsh (1999), 35 f. The 1960 Santa Fe Production, conducted by Stavinsky, with Paul Franke as Oedipus and Mary MacKenzie as Jocasta, appears to have copied Moiseiwitschs designs absolutely (see the photo in Stravinsky (1947), 35).
72 71

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possessive pronoun (amid our) from that resonant phrase, with its uncharacteristically specic application to the 20s troubles in Ireland. As a text that is amid rather than of our time, it remains out of timean adopted anachronism; a kind of virtual otherworld, where heroes are permissible because aspirational and conceptual, but resolutely not of the here and now.*
* Earlier versions of this paper were given as papers at UCD and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 2007. I am most grateful for comments from members of the audience on both occasions. Especial thanks to both Bill McCormack and Michael Silk for their support and criticisms.

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