The turn toward affect which over the past few decades has dominated in the humanities has been fruitful in the field of ancient Greek performance and especially in treatments of Attic tragedy.[1] It is within this discourse that Duncan’s book positions itself as it explores the role played on the tragic stage by ugliness—a state of being that presupposes not just a cognitive but also a physical and emotional intersubjective response from the viewer. In doing so, Duncan seeks to challenge two long-standing philosophical traditions: (1) the Platonic-Aristotelian treatment of drama as first and foremost poetic text as opposed to embodied performance and (2) the Enlightenment-Romantic enthroning of beauty as the positive definition of aesthetics.[2]
Duncan examines two categories of the material presence of ugliness on the tragic stage: costume that clothes the human body and the human body itself. “Ugly” costume is frequent in tragedy in the form of rags clothing royalty—i.e., characters who, by their status, are expected to dress beautifully. By “ugly” bodies Duncan understands primarily corpses, though he examines instances of mutilated and dying bodies as well. In both cases, Duncan is interested in the foundational dramatic ambiguity of the relationship between reality and representation (mimesis)—an ambiguity inherent to the word of prosōpon as both the mask concealing an actor’s face and the human face which the mask represents. Thus, Duncan shows that tragedy often blurs the lines between body and costume, with the latter standing to the former in the same relationship in which a mask stands to the face. Similarly, Duncan’s survey of ancient Greek literary descriptions of mortuary practices suggests that, at least in literature, beautified corpses could function as mimetic images of the deceased in life—a conflation of body (sōma) and its funerary representation (sēma).
In his analysis of both rags and corpses, Duncan puts tragedy in lively dialogue with vase painting, comedy, philosophy, and historiography, and demonstrates convincingly that his findings are relevant across the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Part I is devoted to tragic costume. Part II discusses how tragedy’s penchant for rags is adopted mockingly by Aristophanes and what we can learn from comedy’s humorous mimesis of the mimesis of tragedy. Whereas earlier treatments of Aristophanes’ view of tragedy have focused on the comedian’s verbal criticism of the genre, Duncan shifts attention to Aristophanes’ scenic production as key to understanding Old Comedy’s view of tragic aesthetics. In Part III, Duncan applies Judith Butler’s concept of frames of war to his analysis of corpse as spectacle in Thucydides, Herodotus, and across Greek tragedy. Finally, in the epilogue, Duncan examines the origins of fourth century’s “textualization” of fifth-century tragic performances by tracing the chronological development of Plato’s theory of aesthetics from the early Hippias Major to the mature Republic and late Laws. Erudite and nuanced, Duncan’s discussion makes a significant contribution to scholarship’s ongoing efforts to reconstruct various performance dimensions of Greek tragedy, reminding us that the plays were not just scripts but embodied sensory experiences. If earlier works have attuned us to the importance of such non-verbal elements as onstage entrances and exits and props, Duncan draws our attention to (tattered) costumes and (dead or dying) bodies as those material dimensions of the tragic characters’ onstage presence which both do and do not coincide with the characters themselves.
Notwithstanding these indisputable merits of Duncan’s analysis, I remain doubtful that ugliness is indeed a helpful lens for analyzing material presences on the tragic stage. After examining the lexical history of the English term “ugly,” Duncan acknowledges that ancient Greek lacks an exact equivalent and defends his choice of this term on the grounds that “there is no single word, probably in any language, that corresponds to the generative interaction of form and feeling resulting in negative aesthetic response” (p. 24). In pursuing this line of thinking, Duncan hopes to avoid the shortcomings of earlier works such as Karl Rosenkrantz’s Aesthetik des Häßlichen (1853), which made the concept of ugliness too broad (“if everything is ugly,” observes Duncan a propos Rosenkrantz’s book, “then nothing is”). Yet Duncan himself ends up in a similar bind, inasmuch as the list of phenomena that he classifies as ugly seems endlessly extendable. Is ugliness indeed the common denominator of such diverse onstage appearances as the Furies; Ajax’s corpse; blind Oedipus; Electra’s ragged costume; and the body of little Astyanax who has been thrown from the walls of Troy? One really feels that Duncan has stretched the argument too far when, analyzing Medea’s lament over her (still alive) sons, he suggests that, inasmuch as she “itemizes” the children’s bodies, lingering separately on eyes, mouths, and limbs, Medea is proleptically imagining them as already in a state of disintegration and that therefore this is an example of the dramatization of ugliness.[3]
Furthermore, in imposing the definition of ugliness on widely varied onstage phenomena, Duncan risks obscuring some key tragic themes and patterns. For example, he does not recognize that bedraggled royalty is a recurrent presence on the tragic stage because rags serve as a handy visual symbol of a favorite tragic theme—reversal in a character’s fortunes (e.g., Aesch. Pers.; Soph. Electra, Philoctetes, OC; Eur. Electra; Helen). By contrast, the thematic significance of tragic corpses varies widely and is not, pace Duncan, necessarily dependent on whether or not a given corpse is materially present onstage. Oedipus’ corpse in Sophocles’ Coloneus remains an anticipated futurity throughout the play, yet is closely analogous to the materially present, discovered-covered-uncovered-covered corpse of Sophocles’ Ajax, in that both Oedipus and Ajax are outcasts from their respective communities, yet ones whose dead bodies are endowed with a talismanic power (a theme that Duncan does not discuss, which is all the more surprising given his interest in tragic corpses blurring the distinction between subject and object, p.112). The same, however, cannot be said of Astyanax’s body (Eur. Troj. 1168-1205), which Duncan categorizes as yet another example of material ugliness but which actually plays a role similar to the peripeteia-symbolizing rags that clothe royalty: Hecuba wails that the boy was thrown from those very walls which Apollo built for his forefathers; that that very head which was so caressed is now split open; that those very hands which looked so much like his father Hector’s are now lying all disjointed, etc. By applying the lens of ugliness to costumes and bodies on the tragic stage, Duncan opens our eyes to hitherto unconsidered dimensions of Greek tragedy, but perhaps at the cost of erasing awareness of broader characteristics of the genre.
Finally, some minor quibbles.
- Several passages (e.g., pages 65; 198-199; 201-204; 208; 212; 214) suffer from clusters of typos with entire clauses printed in unwarranted italics; syntax issues; and missing words.
- Duncan describes Tecmessa as “Ajax’s bride” (p. 143) and subsequently refers to Ajax as Tecmessa’s “husband” (p. 153)—two surprisingly euphemistic ways to describe the relationship of a bronze-age warrior and his concubine.
- In the Epilogue, there is a mistaken interpretation of a passage in Hippias Major 298a1-5: Duncan understands “beautiful people” as Socrates’ ironic reference to himself and his interlocutor, but it is syntactically more natural to understand “beautiful people” as the first item in a list of beautiful things that Socrates is contemplating.
Neither these minor issues nor the broader challenges outlined above detract from the merits of Duncan’s reconstruction of the materiality of Greek performance and of the manifold connections he draws between this materiality and contemporary philosophic, comic, and historiographic discourse. Ugly Productions will be important reading for students and teachers of ancient drama and of the history of Western theatre.
Bibliography
Curtis, L. and Weiss, N. (eds.) 2021. Music and memory in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Cambridge.
Emrich, W. 1964. Die Symbolik von Faust II: Sinn und Formen. Frankfurt am Main.
Foster, M., Kurke, L., and Weiss, N. (eds.) 2019. Genre in archaic and classical Greek poetry: theories and models. Studies in archaic and classical Greek song, 4. Leiden: Brill.
Mueller, M. 2016. Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy. Chicago.
Neumann, M. 1985. Das Ewig Weibliche in Goethes Faust. Heidelberg.
Nooter, S. 2017. The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge.
Porter, J. 2010. The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience. Cambridge.
Riedel, V. 1999. “Goethe und seine Zeit im Spannungsfeld zwischen Antike und Moderne,” Mitteilungen der Winckelmann-Gesellschaft 62.
Telò, M. and Mueller, M. (eds.) 2018. The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Object and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. London.
Notes
[1] For the application of affect theory to archaic and classical Greek poetry, see Foster, Kurke, and Weiss 2019. To ancient Greek music: Curtis and Weiss 2021. To Attic tragedy: Porter 2010; Mueller 2016; Nooter 2017; Telò and Mueller 2018. Besides these monographs and edited collections which systematically analyze ancient Greek performance through the lens of affect, numerous other scholarly works in the field have over the past 10-15 years drawn inspiration from affect theory and from related approaches that can be described with the umbrella term of New Materialism.
[2] Duncan tends to oversimplify the Classical-Romantic outlook. For examples of Classical-era interest in the presence of ugliness in classical Antiquity, see discussions of Goethe’s Klassische Walpurgisnacht, a crucial episode in Faust II wherein “dominieren die niederen Gottheiten, die archaischen und dionysischen Züge” (Riedel 1999:12) and where the word grau appears countless times in a variety of forms, compounds, allusions, and homonyms (Neumann 1985:227). For a more general discussion of the poetic horror that Goethe felt for Antiquity, see Emrich 1964: 221-222. Similarly, the fascination of the Romantic era with ugliness is well known and much discussed.
[3] Duncan’s brief references to ugliness in other theatrical traditions likewise suggest an excessively broad view of the concept that can lead to apples-and-oranges kinds of comparison. Thus, for example, he considers Hamlet’s “macabre contemplation of Yorick’s skull” to be as much a manifestation of ugliness as the character of Caliban in the Tempest.