[Chapters are listed below.]
Children mostly have only walk-on parts in classical and early modern drama—usually seen as passive victims, plot devices, or links in a genealogical chain—but they tend to bear a disproportionate representational burden, as foci of audience emotions like pathos, anxiety and grief, and as projections of a longed-for future. Critical approaches to the problem of children in tragedy track the history of literary criticism itself, in the modern era. L. C. Knight’s famous essay, “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” used its title as a parodic example of the absurdly character-focused approach to literature popular in the 19th and first half of the 20thcentury.[1] Characters, Knight asserted, were to be understood as “mere abstractions”, “imaginative constructions mediated through the poetry”—not real mothers with a specific, countable number of dead or living children. With high modernist hauteur, Knight didn’t even address the actual question in his title, except to dismiss it as one of those “familiar irrelevancies,” to be debunked by this bracing new approach. It didn’t take long, however, for the question of the children, and their relation to tragedy, to be forced back on the critical agenda: as Cleanth Brooks argued, the (dead? imagined?) child to whom Lady Macbeth claims to “have given suck,” becomes “perhaps the most powerful symbol in the tragedy,”[2] drawing together the play’s obsession with futures (“tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”) and its yearning for a “blessed” yesterday. Later critics and productions adopted more politicised readings, as childhood emerged though the lens of 20thcentury scholarship as an ‘invented’ category, historically constructed and culturally implicated in other relations of power such as gender, class, and ethnicity.
What about children in Greek tragedy? As Emma Griffiths discusses in her titular study of the subject, child figures in tragedies are static and often silent. They are not characters, in the Aristotelian sense of participating in the action, making choices and expressing those in speech. Yet just as every theatrical production of Macbeth has to think about the question of Lady Macbeth’s children, not least in how the actor chooses to interpret her lines such as “I have given suck,” so too does every interpretation of Medea, Andromache, Troades, or Alcestis, need to consider the function of the children in the play, both for the audience and for the onstage parents and adults who love, mourn or threaten them. Are these children symbols, vessels or “empty signs,” to be filled with Athenian society’s values, hopes, fears for the future and anxieties about the past? Were they written to be played by child or adult actors, by mute children ventriloquized by adults off stage, or even by dolls?
Griffiths’ book is a stimulating examination of the multiple functions of child figures in fifth-century tragedy, framed through the two terms of her title, pathos and potential. Scholars have generally read children in Attic tragedy as conduits of pathos, symbolising the vulnerability of the human body and the fragility of kinship and interdependence, core tragic themes. Yet Griffiths rightly argues that affect as an end in itself doesn’t explain their multiple roles on stage, and the stereotype of the child as pathetic victim needs to be probed and complicated. Instead, she argues that the child’s latent potential underpins their affective function in the plays—the possibility they will grow up to become fully fledged ‘characters’ in their own story. In an idiosyncratic fusion of quantum physics with literary criticism, she explains child characters’ potential in tragedy in terms of a particle’s “superposition,” whereby a particle can be said to be simultaneously in two positions at once, subject to a random subatomic event that either may or may not occur. Like Schrodinger’s cat, the familiar metaphor used to explain superposition, which is both dead and alive (dead/alive) until one or other possibility is realised, child figures in tragedy – which Griffiths defines as children who have not yet reached the age of maturity for marriage or military action (p. 14)—embody at the same time multiple, hypothetical future outcomes. Their inherent potentiality not only amplifies tragic pathos—laments for lost futures—but also accords them an aura of threat and danger, “as the strength of the future adult [who might enact vengeance] is retrojected onto the onstage weakness of the child” (p. 252).
Her introductory chapter sets out this interpretive framework, as well as the terminology and age categories involved in her analysis. She sets her work against the backdrop of recent scholarship on childhood as a historical construct as opposed to “universal or natural” entity. In passing, Griffiths touches bracingly on some of the unexamined assumptions behind even the most politically and theoretically aware work on Greek tragedy—that tragic children are to be viewed as pathetic stereotypes, arousing pity or compassion (although investigation of what these affective responses might consist of only occurs much later in the book in Chapter 4, where she explores the question as to whether pity for a child was the same for Athenians as it might be for us) and of their ethical and aesthetic implications in the context of Athenian drama.
Chapter 2, perhaps the most useful in the book, presents a new examination of the question of child actors on the stage. There is no solid evidence that child actors did perform these roles in the fifth century, but Griffiths sifts through historical evidence of child performers and detailed textual pointers of directorial control—e.g. the fact that child characters, when on stage, are always given clear verbal cues by adult characters (with the possible exception of Alcestis, discussed on pp. 79-83)—to make a plausible case that children did perform these roles. This leads her to some valuable insights into practical considerations of staging, given the limitations around what children could realistically be asked to perform. She explores the effect on the audience of the “peculiar quality of embodiment” a child brings to the stage, in which she suggests that boundaries of dramatic illusion are physically blurred to a greater extent than for adult actors and their characters. The child’s embodied presence, their “superposition” as both real Athenian child and also fictive character, is therefore potentially more troubling to the audience, feeding into the danger that children in tragedy pose as potential “wildcard[s] of the future” (p.67).
While the concept of superposition is an interesting metaphor, the physics feels tacked on clunkily at times, since the heavy lifting is really done by the idea that children in tragedy embody multiple hypothetical futures held in a kind of suspended animation. In Chapter 3, on potential and temporality, Griffiths explores the identity of the tragic child as “double-counted,” freighted with both present and future significances. Her comparison to ghosts is illuminating: just as ghosts are visitors from the past, so the child figure onstage is accompanied by the shadowy spectre of the dangerous adult avenger/murderer/hero (140) they might become—they are, in a sense, ghosts from the future. The emotional force of these unstable, multi-layered temporalities concentrated in the body of the child is powerfully elucidated by Hekabe’s lament (Eur. Tro. 1178ff) over the dead Astyanax (probably played by a doll in this scene), which envisions a range of once-possible futures for him, not least as reincarnation of his dead father, even as she describes his mutilated body in the present. Griffiths argues that children in tragedy are killed not as children per se, but as future adults, always in strategic political decisions. This results in a powerful tension in the tragic representations of child death, well-elucidated by the example of Medea, who oscillates between seeing her children ‘as they are now’ and as potential adults, but whose ultimate decision to kill them “stems from her ability to shift focus from present to future” (p. 152)—putting her love and grief for them “on hold.” This chapter is full of interesting insights like this on children as “temporal nodes,” but its scattergun approach involves leaping from passage to passage rather than pursuing sustained interpretations of the child theme within the narrative of individual plays. This is not helped by its winding structure, which can be hard to follow. For example, the Medea would have repaid a far more substantial and detailed close reading, even a chunk of a chapter on its own, and this would have illuminated the core arguments more effectively, in my view.
If tragic children could be viewed through potential fear of the future adult, how does that interact with their supposed present vulnerability, Aristotle’s ‘pity’ factor? Chapter 4 re-examines the role of pathos in terms of possible biological and culturally determined responses, arguing that children on stage may not necessarily have evoked pity or affection from the male audience, since that relies on a more modern view of children as having a specific emotional appeal outside of normal adult concerns. Children in tragedy, she suggests, are not represented as innocent ‘blank slates’ external to tragedy’s complex moral accounting of reciprocity and guilt, but could also be viewed as tainted by hereditary crimes and thus targets for justifiable revenge (for example, the children of Polymestor are not used by Euripides in Hekabe to inspire pity for their father, p. 221). On the other hand, a child’s death could evoke pity at the loss of the future adult and the hopes the child embodied for parents and community. Pathos is but one of a range of possible affective and ethical dynamics at work in tragedies involving children, including questions of familial ties, gestures of supplication and legal parallels in Athenian society. Chapter 5 surveys child figures in the work of the three tragedians; alone of all the mostly long chapters, this one feels too brief, although it is a useful overview and suggests possible directions of enquiry, particularly for Euripides. Similarly, in her epilogue (Chapter 6), Griffiths points to future areas for consideration—adolescents, fragments and political aspects of representation.
The book bears traces of its origin as a doctoral thesis: footnotes are too plentiful, and often they bear only tangential relation to the main text, distracting from rather than usefully supplementing the argument. Similarly, the structure of several chapters could have been arranged more coherently, as the discussion veers very confusingly at times between the highly specific and the general without clear signposting. However, cumulatively, this a thought-provoking, substantial contribution to its topic. As Griffiths shows, simple pathos does not explain the multi-layered dramatic effect of child figures on the tragic stage. The inherently ‘unfinished’ nature of children means they embody multiple temporalities simultaneously, and this, she concludes, makes them “ideally positioned as focal points for tragedy’s negotiation of identity across time, linking the mythic past to the fifth-century present” (p. 250). Scholars these days are unlikely to view children as a “pseudo-critical” area of enquiry, as Knights once argued,[3] irrelevant to more serious literary concerns, and Griffiths’ timely study will hopefully open up future areas of study in the representation of children in classical literature.[4]
Chapter list
1. Contents
2. Staging Issues
3. Potential
4. Reframing Pathos
5. Plays and Playwrights
6. Conclusions and Future Directions.
Appendix: Being an Orphan
Notes
[1] L. C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”, subtitled “An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism” published in Explorations (London, 1946), pp. 1–39.
[2] Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (London, 1949), p. 31.
[3] Knights, “How Many Children,” p. 18, n. 1.
[4] A recent article by Fayah Haussker, “The Child’s Voice in Euripidean Tragedy: Socialization Through Challenge (Arethusa 52.3, 2019, pp. 203-229), suggests there is plenty more to be said on Euripides, while in Latin literature, Anne Rogerson’s Virgil’s Ascanius: Imagining the Future in the Aeneid (Cambridge 2017), explores similar themes very fruitfully.