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Durham Research Online View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Durham Research Online Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 18 December 2019 Version of attached le: Published Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Crawforth, Hannah and Jackson, Lucy C. M .M. (2019) 'Greek tragedy on the university stage : Buchanan and Euripides.', in Gathering force : early modern British literature in transition, 15571623. , 340-355 . Further information on publisher's website: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/gathering-force-early-modern-british-literature-in-transition- 15571623/FCB00F37FCC85CC1314A08BFF7784DF2 Publisher's copyright statement: This material has been published in Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 15571623 edited by Kristen Poole and Lauren Shohet. This version is free to view and download for personal use only. 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Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 http://dro.dur.ac.uk chapter 19 Greek Tragedy on the University Stage: Buchanan and Euripides Hannah Crawforth and Lucy Jackson THIS, THIS, is HE: give place ye Roman Bards; 1 Ye Grecian Bards give place: THIS, THIS is HE. –Francis Peck Francis Peck’s jubilant proclamation of John Milton’s right to a place among the ancient Latin and Greek poets owes to a colossal mistake. Upon discovering a “small piece, published ... in 1642,” and determining “to peep a little into the book,” Peck excitedly “threw aside ... for the moment, a great heap of other old pamphlets which I had just then picked 2 up & sat me down.” Peck was thrilled by his discovery of what he took to be “the Sixth of Mr. John Milton’s Nine most celebrated poems, & one of 3 the hitherto unknown pieces of his.” But Peck’s enthusiasm was mis- placed. Instead of a new work by Milton, Peck had actually found an English translation by an unknown author from the Latin play Baptistes of George Buchanan (1506–82), a humanist who lived a hundred years before 4 Milton. If less famous than Milton today, this Scot of modest means had nonetheless, by the final quarter of the sixteenth century, gained a reputation as one of Europe’s foremost intellects, serving as tutor to Michel de Montaigne, Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI, and authoring 5 several key works of political theory. Buchanan also wrote significant works of drama at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, where he taught 1 Epigraph to New Memoirs of the Life and Poetical Works of Mr John Milton (London, 1740). 2 3 Ibid., 267–68. Ibid., 269. 4 Anon., Tyrannicall Government Anatomized &c. (London, 1642). 5 Buchanan had strong connections to the Sidney circle via the diplomat and historian Daniel Rogers; the group shared his interests in resistance theory. He also had a profound influence on Edmund Spenser; see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012), 63, 67, 108. See also Hadfield, “Spenser and Buchanan,” in George Buchanan: Political Thought in Early Modern Britain and Europe, ed. Caroline Erskine and Roger Mason (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 71–86 (p. 75). On Buchanan’s connections to European intellectuals such as Henricus Stephanus and Julius Caesar Scaliger (the foremost authority on Aristotle’s Poetics in the sixteenth century), see Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 135. 340 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Durham University Library, on 18 Dec 2019 at 16:29:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108303774.020 Greek Tragedy on the University Stage: Buchanan and Euripides 341 for several years in the 1540s. He authored four plays for performance by his Bordeaux students, all either translated from, or strongly influenced by, the tragedies of Euripides: Medea (1544), Jephthes (1554), Alcestis (1556), and 6 Baptistes (1577). Buchanan’s tragedies reveal the significance of plays performed both at and by schools and universities, an additional facet of 7 dramatic performance during the period treated in this volume. Roger Ascham commends Buchanan in his The Scholemaster (1570)as one of the “Few men, in writing of Tragedies in our dayes” who have successfully followed Greek tragic precedent, showing “the trew touch of 8 Aristotles precepts” and imitating “Euripides examples.” This chapter will show the profound depth of this important humanist’s engagement with Euripides, charting the particular rhetorical and political inheritance of the Greek tragedian and the tradition he embodied in early modern Europe, which Buchanan seeks to reanimate in his own plays. Taking as our starting point Peck’s eighteenth-century rediscovery of a mid-seventeenth- century drama (which turns out to be the work of a sixteenth-century author interpolating texts from the fifth century bce), we will argue for a strongly diachronic sense of what “local” reading – the concern of Part IV of this volume – can be. Since each of these local contexts transforms Buchanan’s plays, our interpretation of his dramatic work is not synchro- nically limited to the historical moment in which they were written. Instead, we show that fully historicizing specific contexts requires us to explore precisely how they invoke or imagine the past. This diachronic approach reaches back to the social and political circumstances that inform Euripides’s tragedies, as well as forward into the reception of his own texts. The strongly synchronic predisposition of recent historicism has limited the kinds of “context” usually considered relevant to Buchanan’s plays. By contrast, our chapter will argue that the classical political concerns that 9 shaped Euripides’s tragedies remain relevant in the early modern period. 6 With composition dates uncertain, we here give dates of publication. See George Buchanan: Tragedies, ed. Peter Sharratt and Peter G. Walsh (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), 2–4. 7 For complementary discussion of drama at the Inns of Court (the London law schools), its interplay with commercial practice, and remarks about theatrical experience in schools producing knowledge- able public audiences, see chapter 3 of this volume. 8 Quoted in Jonathan Walker, “Introduction: Learning to Play,” in Early Modern Academic Drama, ed. Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 1–18 (p. 1). 9 On Greek drama in early modern England, see for instance Tanya Pollard, “What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?,” Renaissance Quarterly 65.4 (2012): 1060–93, and Claire Kenward, “The Reception of Greek Drama in Early Modern England,” in A Handbook to the Reception of Greek Drama, ed. Betine van Zyl Smit (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 173–98. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Durham University Library, on 18 Dec 2019 at 16:29:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108303774.020 342 hannah crawforth and lucy jackson The text Peck had rediscovered was an English version of Euripides’s Baptistes, subtitled by Peck “A Sacred Dramatic Poem, in Defence of Liberty.” Peck’s subtitle casts the tragedy as a rhetorical work striving for political effect, revealing a point of connection between Milton and Buchanan, which subtends Peck’s misattribution. The two authors shared a commitment to the political potential of rhetoric, also evident in the 10 Euripidean tragedies that so powerfully shaped both writers. The skilled use of words – particularly their capability to soothe, flatter, and deceive – was of vital importance in early modern Europe, just as it had been in ancient Athens, a “society dominated institutionally by the assembly and the law- courts,” Simon Goldhill writes, in which “the discussion of the best way to use language (persuasion, argumentation, rhetoric) is an issue of considerable 11 social and political importance.” Goldhill’s description of Euripides’s Athens pertains equally to Buchanan’s own moment (and, eventually, to Milton’s). In the wake of the Reformation, and with the rise of print culture, the relationship between words and actions was once more a pressing social and political question in Europe. Recent critics have worked to show how this rhetorical aspect of Euripidean drama relates to what Goldhill identifies as a fifth-century bce “linguistic turn,” during which “the role of language in the production of meaning, in the development of thought, in the uncertainties of reference,” was debated “not only at the level of philosophical enquiry or literary self- consciousness but also in the more general awareness of the possibilities and 12 dangers of the tricks and powers of words.” Matthew Wright documents the influence on Euripides of ancient language philosophers including Parmenides, Leucippus, and Democritus: “thinkers [who] had also been 13 questioning the relationship between reality and language.” Wright also notes the importance of the ancient Greek rhetorician and Sophist Gorgias’s 10 Milton did in fact know Buchanan’s work and esteemed him as both one of the foremost political thinkers of an earlier generation and as an important poet whose efforts to fuse Christian theology with Greek tragedy offer a key precursor to his own Samson Agonistes.
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