Monody and Dramatic Form in Late Euripides Claire Catenaccio Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Claire Catenaccio All rights reserved ABSTRACT Monody and Dramatic Form in Late Euripides Claire Catenaccio This study sets out to reveal the groundbreaking use of monody in the late plays of Euripides: in his hands, it is shaped into a potent and flexible instrument for representing emotion and establishing new narrative and thematic structures. Engaging with the current scholarly debate on music, affect, and characterization in Greek tragedy, I examine the role that monody plays in the musical design of four plays of Euripides, all produced in the last decade of his career: Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Phoenician Women, and Orestes. These plays are marked by the increased presence of actors’ song in proportion to choral song. The lyric voice of the individual takes on an unprecedented prominence with far-reaching implications for the structure and impact of each play. The monodies of Euripides are a true dramatic innovation: in addition to creating an effect of heightened emotion, monody is used to develop character and shape plot. In Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Phoenician Women, and Orestes, Euripides uncouples monody’s traditional and exclusive connection with lament. In contrast to the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, where actors’ song is always connected with grief and pain, in these four plays monody conveys varied moods and states of mind. Monody expresses joy, hope, anxiety, bewilderment, accusation, and deliberation. Often, and simultaneously, it moves forward narrative exposition. The scope and dramatic function of monody grows and changes: passages of actors’ lyric become longer, more metrically complex, more detached from the other characters onstage, and more intensely focused on the internal experience of the singer. In the four plays under discussion we see a steadily increasing refinement and expansion of the form, a development that rests upon the changes in the style and function of contemporary music in the late fifth century. By 415 B.C., many formal features of tragedy had become highly conventionalized, and determined a set of expectations in the contemporary audience. Reacting against this tradition, Euripides successively redefines monody: each song takes over a traditional Bauform of tragedy, and builds upon it. The playwright uses the paired monodies of Ion to pose a conflict of ideas that might otherwise be conveyed through an agon. In Iphigenia in Tauris the heroine’s crisis and its resolution are presented in lyrics, rather than as a deliberative rhesis. In Phoenician Women, Antigone, Jocasta, and Oedipus replace the Chorus in lamenting the fall of the royal house. Finally, the Phrygian slave in Orestes sings a monody explicitly marked as a messenger speech that inverts the conventions of the form to raise questions about objectivity and truth in a disordered world. In examining these four plays, I hope to show some of the various potentials of this new Euripidean music as a major structural element in tragic drama, insofar as it can heighten emphasis, allow for the development of emotional states both subtle and extreme, reveal and deepen character, and mirror thematic movements. Euripides establishes monody as a dramatic form of considerable versatility and power. The poetry is charged with increased affect and expressivity; at the same time it articulates a new self-consciousness about the reciprocal capacities of form and content to shape one another. Here we may discern the shift of sensibility in Euripides’ late work, which proceeds pari passu with an apparent loosening of structural demands, or what one with equal justice might recognize as an increase in degrees of freedom. As the playwright repeatedly reconfigures the relationship between form and content, the range of what can happen onstage, of what can be said and sung, expands. Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Prologue 1 Ion: Monody as Agon 24 Iphigenia in Tauris: Memory and Movement 82 Phoenician Women: The Lyric Voice of a Shattered House 113 Orestes: Monody as Messenger Speech 175 Exodos 211 Bibliography 214 i Acknowledgments My utmost gratitude is due to Helene Foley for her thoughtful and generous guidance as my Doktormutter. I thank also the members of my committee: Elizabeth Scharfenberger, for her kindness and support; and Nancy Worman, who challenged me to think critically. Bridget Murnaghan and Timothy Power read my work attentively and gave suggestions for its improvement. Gareth Williams, Katharina Volk, Elizabeth Irwin, and Julie Crawford encouraged me to become a better reader, writer, and teacher during my years as a graduate student. My friend Garett Albert read most of Euripides’ oeuvre with me over five years of weekly meetings. Charley McNamara, Kate Meng Brassel, Zachary Roberts, and Daniel Flanigan rejoiced and despaired with me at every stage of the writing process. My sister Eva made the figures, which I think came out nicely. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, who first taught me to love stories. Finally, I would like to thank Euripides, for his plays. ii for my parents iii Prologue She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. - Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West” In Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” two men stand by the sea and listen to a woman sing. Through her song the woman becomes the maker of her own world. She binds the disparate elements of emotion and sensation together in a formal composition. This anonymous singer enlarges, shapes, orders, and even creates experience not only for herself, but also for the men who hear her. Why does the individual voice raised in song move us so powerfully? To explain why song functions as it does is necessarily somewhat speculative. For the purposes of this project, the question may be considered from two perspectives, linguistic and aesthetic. As an adaptive strategy for communication, song is a concentration of those elements universal to human speech that are routinely heightened when emotion itself is high: strong variations in pitch and volume, rhythmical emphasis, and the repetition of sounds and syntactical units. From the standpoint of aesthetics, song draws upon a set of conventions and variations played off against these conventions. Every song is a work of art within a particular tradition, heard by every audience in a specific way based on its prior encounters and expectations. This is particularly true of Greek tragedy, a stylized genre built up of a set of recognizable conventions, performed before an audience highly attuned to these conventions. 1 This project sets out to reveal Euripides’ groundbreaking use of monody, or solo actors’ song, in his late plays: in his hands, it is shaped into a potent and flexible instrument for representing emotion and establishing new narrative and thematic structures. Engaging with the current scholarly debate on music, affect, and characterization in Greek tragedy, I examine the role that monody plays in the musical design of four plays of Euripides, all produced in the last decade of his career: Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Phoenician Women, and Orestes. These plays are marked by the increased presence of solo actors’ song in proportion to choral song. The lyric voice of the individual takes on an unprecedented prominence with far-reaching implications for the structure and impact of each play. The monodies of Euripides are a versatile dramatic innovation: they are used to shape plot, to display states of heightened emotion, and to develop character. How do these actors become the “artificers,” to borrow the word of Wallace Stevens, of the world in which they sing? In Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Phoenician Women, and Orestes, Euripides uncouples monody’s traditional and exclusive connection with lament. In contrast to the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, where actors’ song is always connected with grief and pain, in these four plays monody conveys varied moods and states of mind. Monody expresses joy, hope, anxiety, bewilderment, accusation, and deliberation. Often, and simultaneously, it moves forward narrative exposition. In the four plays under discussion we see a steadily increasing refinement and expansion of monody as a form, a development that rests upon the changes in the style and function of contemporary music in the late fifth century. The scope and dramatic function of actors’ lyric grows and changes: passages of actors’ lyric become longer, more metrically complex, more 2 detached from the other figures onstage, and more intensely focused on the internal experience of the singer. My argument stands at the crossroads of two paths of inquiry: the study of dramatic form, on the one hand, and, on the other, the synthesis of affect, emotion, and character. These terms require some clarification. By form I mean the structure of the drama as created by the playwright, the way that a play develops over the course of an individual performance. Greek tragedy comprises a set of conventional and clearly recognized building blocks, or Bauformen, including the agon, the iambic rhesis, the choral ode, and the messenger speech. By 415 B.C., these formal features of tragedy had become highly conventionalized, and determined a set of expectations in the contemporary audience. As I hope to show, monody in the late plays of Euripides is always placed in self-conscious relation to these familiar elements of Attic tragedy. Turning to the second cluster of terms, I have taken care to avoid the word “character” to indicate one of the dramatis personae, or πρόσωπα, in a given play.