Classics 351
April 14, 2022

George Frederic Watts, The Minotaur, 1885

Phaedra (dir. Jules Dassin 1962) starring Melina Mercouri & Anthony Perkins: Trailer; Love Scene

Sarah Kane's Phaedra's Love (1996): text of play; Trailer for Arcola Theatre Performance (2011)

• Seneca's (early?) play: tragedy of a disconnected family controlled by powerful emotions (cf. Thyestes)
  
  
• stepmother/stepson taboo: myths, fears, prejudices (cf. Terence's Hecyra)
  
  Hades and Persephone, kylix from Vulci, ca. 430 BCE
  
  Seneca's Characters
  
  
• Phaedra's opening characterization of Theseus’s underworld quest
  
  Phaedra 91-97
  See, my husband has run away. He is gone.
  Theseus shows his bride his usual faithlessness.
  What a hero! Off he goes, through the misty lake from which
  there is no return. He goes as the soldier of a shameless suitor
  to steal from his throne the stolen wife of the king of Hell.
  He goes as the friend of mad desire. He was not restrained, not he,
  by fear or shame. His quest is for rape, and forbidden sex ...
  
  
• Phaedra's current infatuation
  
  Phaedra 119-122
  ... what I like is to rouse wild beasts, and chase them, and hunt them down,
  and to hurl stiff javelins from my soft white hand.
  Where are you going, my soul? Mad thing, why yearn for the forest?
  I recognize the fateful trouble of my poor mother.
  [cf. Act 2 conversation with Nurse & Chorus: "Let loose my hair ... Stern Hippolytus' mother looked exactly like this ", 394ff.]
  
  
• identification with Pasiphaë ("The women of Crete can never / enjoy an easy love. They always have monstrous affairs", 126-127); Venus's curse Sun/Helios > Vulcan (Venus & Mars); unnatural lust
  

  
  Panel of Phaedra-Hippolytus Sarcophagus, Italian/Roman, late 2nd century CE
  
  
• Phaedra's initial resolution to die (250ff.) gives way to acceptance of Nurse’s plan to seduce Hippolytus; reason vs. passion
  
  Phaedra 177-180 (Phaedra's response to the nurse's call for restraint)
  ... I know the things you say
  are true: but my lust forces me to follow
  the worse decision. My minds knows, but it wanders,
  yearning for wise advice, and tries in vain to return.
  
  
• Phaedra's tell-all onstage suicide before Theseus ("Cruel Theseus, when you come home, you always / bring disaster", 1163-1164), Act 5 (cf. offstage suicide & letter in Euripides's Hippolytus)
  
  **PERFORMANCE of 1159-1198: Julia**
  
  
  Alexandre Cabanel, Phaedra, 1880
  
  Phaedra 1177ff. (lovesick address to Hippolytus's fragmented corpse)
  I will avenge your death, I will stab my wicked heart,
  I will set Phaedra free of life and guilt together.
  And I will follow you blindly through the waves
  through the lakes of Tartarus, the Styx, and the fiery river.
  I want to do right by the dead …
  
  … You and I were not allowed to link our lives together;
  but we can join our deaths. Phaedra, if you are chaste,
  die for your husband. If unchaste, for your love ...
  
  ... This righteous sword will pierce my own bad heart.
  My blood is shed as an offering for this virtuous dead man.
  
  
• chameleon Nurse: initially urges resistance (129ff.); philosophically rejects mythic Cupid (195ff.) as cloak for "base lust"; "The desire to be well is part of what makes us well" (249); mastermind behind plan to approach Hippolytus (271ff.) & charge of rape (719ff.; "crime must be hidden by crime")
  
  
• Hippolytus: chaste devotee of Diana & pristine wild; opening call for hunt (1-84); misanthrope (cf. Euclio in The Pot of Gold); pseudo-Stoic (cf. Thyestes on his return to Mycenae)?
  
  Phaedra 515-521 (Hippolytus's extravagant praise of rustic life)
  All he [the innocent man] needs to eat is fruit shaken from the trees,
  while berries picked from the shrubs can easily supply
  his simple meals. His whole desire is to be far away
  from regal pomp. Drinking from golden cups, the proud
  consume anxiety; what joy to taste fresh water
  from naked hands! A deeper, surer sleep
  holds the man who stretches out on a hard mattress—in safety.
  
  
• Act 2 misanthropic jeremaid in response to Nurse's plea to "follow nature as your guide to life. / Get out to the city more often, join in with the crowds" (481-482); traditionalist Roman anthropology (525ff.), from "Golden Age" (no war, greed or lust for power) to current decline of human beings
  
  Phaedra 556-568 (climax to Hippolytus's moral history of humankind)
  ... the husband lies dead, killed by his own wife's sword,
  and wicked mothers slaughtered their own young;
  I will not talk of stepmothers—beasts are more kind.
  But Woman is the root of all evil. Full of her wicked schemes,
  she lays seige to men's minds. How many cities have burned
  because of her adulteries! How many wars have been caused,
  how many kingdoms overturned, how many enslaved!
  Forget the rest, remember only Aegeus' wife,
  Medea—proof enough that women are the devil.
  Nurse
  Why should you blame all women for the crimes of a few?
  Hippolytus
  I hate them all, I curse them, I shun them, I reject them.
  Be it reason, nature, or passion which inspires me,
  my pleasure is to hate them.
  

• Hippolytus's reaction to Phaedra’s direct advance ("Have mercy on me. I love you", 671); cf. Euripides's Hippolytus use of Nurse: “... This stepmother is a worse evil, by far, than the Colchian” (697); sword?
  
  
• chorus: identity, role, attitude toward Phaedra & Hippolytus?
  
  Act 1 (destructive, degrading, irrational) power of love/sex song, "Love conquers / even the fiercest of creatures: stepmothers", 356-357
  Act 2 (after Phaedra rejected) song on Hippolytus's superhuman looks, "Seldom has beauty come to men unpunished", 820
  Act 3 (after Theseus curses Hippolytus) generic reflection on Nature's indifference to human affairs ("Fortune rules chaotically over human life", 979)
  Act 4 (after Messenger tells Theseus of Hippolytus's destruction) more reflections on Fortune, esp. Theseus's ("[Jupiter's] thunder strikes at kings", 1140)
  
  
• Theseus: pale, filthy, tired old hero (835ff.) rescued by Hercules & returned to upperworld; rash wish to torture nurse (882ff.) & assumption of Hippolytus’s guilt = sword ("Can he have come from Greece? Or a barbarian land / Scythia or Colchis?", 906-907)
  
  Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Death of Hippolytus, 1860
  
  
• Theseus curses Hippolytus (Neptune): spectacular chariot wreck (cf. Euripides's Hippolytus 1173ff.), Hippolytus's mutilated body
  
  
  Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, The Death of Hippolytus, 1715
  Phaedra 1093-1104 (messenger's speech)
  Hippolytus bloodies the countryside: his shattered skull
  bounced down the rocks, and thorns tore off his hair;
  his beautiful face was ruined by the hard, stone ground.
  His unlucky loveliness was lost in all these wounds.
  The chariot wheels rolled over his still-twitching limbs.
  At last a charred branch from a tree-trunk pierced him
  right in the middle of his groin, and held him fast.
  The horses pause a little way from their gored master,
  attached to his wounded body; then all at once they break,
  making an end of their owner and delay. The thickets cut
  the half-dead corpse, and thorns with their sharp brambles;
  parts of the body were stuck to every tree.
  
  
• Theseus regrets rash action; final image of Hippolytus’s body parts being reassembled ("go out and seek the missing parts of the body / scattered in the country," 1278-1279) for cremation, curses Phaedra (inversion of Roman "may the earth lie gently upon you"), to be buried; destruction of a dysfunctional family (family of rash actors) = fragmentation