Iphigenia: The Fall of House Atreides

I’ve hinted at this topic a couple times already in the leadup to this show, so now that we are up and running I think it is probably time to address the elephant in the room: the Curse of the Atreides. This curse, the REAL, if hidden, reason that Iphigenia is doomed, is one of two significant bloodline curses in Greek mythology and particularly in Greek tragedy. Maybe someday in another eight years I’ll win another pitch meeting and we will stage Seven Against Thebes or Oedipus Tyrannos and I’ll tell you all about the Curse of Labdacus, remarkably an even more troubling curse than this one. But until then, I have some theories about Greek bloodlines that I am eager to share with you.

Agamemnon comes by the blood on his hands honestly. He is following in a rich familial tradition of kinslaughter dating back to his great-grandfather Tantalus, a king on the West coast of what is now Turkey. Tantalus, for reasons passing understanding, took it into his head to test the gods’ infallibility. When the Olympians attended a banquet hosted by Tantalus, he butchered his own son Pelops, cooked him, and fed him to the gods to see if they would notice. What he would get out of this, other than a dead son and, I suppose, the satisfaction of being right, is unclear. In any case, he was wrong. The gods DID notice that the kid they were eating was human and not goat as they were promised (with the exception of Demeter, who was still in mourning for her daughter Persephone and inadvertently ate some of Pelops’ shoulder) The gods were understandably aggrieved at Tantalus, both for attempting to force them into anthropophagy and for thinking he could trick them. He was sent to Tartarus, where he stands in a pool of water up to his neck with a bunch of grapes above his head. If he bends his neck down to take a drink the water recedes, and if he cranes his neck up to eat a grape the branch lifts out of his reach. His eternal torment is where the word “tantalizing” comes from.

The Torment of Tantalus, by Bernard Picart, 1731.

Pelops, in the meantime, was restored by the gods and fostered for a time on Mount Olympus, where Hephaestus even built him a new shoulder out of ivory to replace the portion that Demeter ate. He sought the hand of Hippodamia in marriage, but her father King Oenomaus of Elis, fearful of a prophecy that he would be killed by his son-in-law, challenged him to a chariot race for consent to wed her, with his life as the hazard. Oenomaus had been running this con for a while, having claimed nearly 20 past suitors’ heads after defeating them in chariot races. But the other suitors weren’t the favorites of Poseidon, god of the sea and of horses. Nor were they trapped in a polluted bloodline whose every generation would pass more atrocities on to their offspring, turning them more vile and depraved and pathetic with each passing year. Pelops was both. He conspired with Oenomaus’ chariot driver Myrtilus, offering him half of the kingdom and the first night in bed with Hippodamia, if he would betray his master. Myrtilus leapt at the opportunity and sabotaged the chariot before the race, killing Oenomaus (and fulfilling his prophecy). When he approached Pelops to demand his cut, Pelops accused him of trying to rape Hippodamia and threw him off a cliff. His, shall we say, eventful life gave us the name for the Peloponnesian Peninsula, the large southern landmass of Greece separated from the rest of Europe by the Isthmus of Corinth.

The regions of the Peloponnesian Peninsula

Pelops’ sons Atreus and Thyestes are where it starts to get really complicated. First of all, the two of them conspired to kill their half-brother and Pelops’ favored son Chrysippus [for reasons I don’t want to get into now but I swear I can talk about if we ever do that Oedipus stuff and the Curse of Labdacus like I threatened earlier -KH] and they were exiled. While in exile they were jointly named as the stewards of Mycenae (or Argos, depending on who you ask) while its king Eurystheus warred with the sons of Heracles; when he was killed in battle Atreus and Thyestes ascended to the throne. But two men may not sit on one throne, and soon Atreus and Thyestes were at one another’s throats. Atreus found a golden lamb in his flock while looking for a sacrifice for Artemis, and gave it to his wife Aerope to hide it from the goddess [insulting Artemis is a family failing, it would seem -KH]. Aerope promptly turned it over to her lover Thyestes, who proposed to Atreus that the crown of Mycenae should go to whoever had a golden lamb. His brother somehow didn’t sense the obvious trick here and agreed, at which point Thyestes produced the lamb and won their contest. Atreus got him back by wagering that the crown should go to whoever could make the sun rise in the West and set in the East, after Zeus told him that Helios had been offended by Thyestes’ duplicity and would drive the chariot of the sun across the sky backwards to help him win back the throne.

After this their prank war took a turn. Atreus found out about the affair between his wife and Thyestes, and to get revenge he took a page from his grandfather’s cookbook, killing his nephews Aglaus, Orchomenus, and Calaeus and cooking them into a pie, Titus Andronicus-style, that he fed to their father. Thyestes’ inadvertent cannibalism left him polluted, unfit for human company, and he was exiled. While in exile an oracle informed him that, if he had a son by his daughter, that son/grandson would kill Atreus. Seeming to believe that if he was polluted anyway there was no harm in incurring more, he did so, raping his daughter Pelopia and fathering Aegisthus. When Aegisthus came of age he, true to prophecy, seized the throne, killed his uncle Atreus, and banished Atreus’ two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, who found refuge in the court of King Tyndareus of Sparta.

L-R: Matthew Rhys as Demetrius, Laura Fraser as Lavinia, Anthony Hopkins as Titus Andronicus, Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Chiron. From Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus, produced by Fox Searchlight.

While in Sparta Agamemnon and Menelaus married Tyndareus’ daughters, the clever Clytemnestra and the beautiful Helen, and with the support of the Spartans Agamemnon took his throne back from Aegisthus. When Tyndareus abdicated Menelaus became king of Sparta, and the scene was set for the beginning of the Trojan War, which I do not have time to explain here. While awaiting the muster of Greece to sail for Troy, Agamemnon continued the cycle of violence by killing his daughter Iphigenia as a sacrifice to Artemis as repayment for his boast of being a better hunter. Clytemnestra took her revenge during his long absence fighting the Trojan War by taking his father’s killer, the exiled Aegisthus, as her lover. When Agamemnon returned to Mycenae with his captive seer Cassandra in tow, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus caught them both in a net while they bathed and killed them, and Aegisthus, like Grover Cleveland, took power once again. Agamemnon’s son Orestes, having been away in Athens, returned some years later in secret on orders from Apollo and met his long-lost sister Electra. The two of them killed Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, as well as their son and Electra and Orestes’ half-brother/uncle/cousin Aletes. For the crime of matricide Orestes was tormented by the Furies and fled back to Athens, where Athena and Apollo interceded and the citizens gave him a trial. They found in his favor and the curse of House Atreus is finally broken.

What I find particularly interesting in the Atreides bloodline curse is the cannibalism. The kinslaughter is bad, certainly, but it is relatively common in these sorts of stories. But cannibalism is an entirely different kettle of…fish. Very uncommon in Greek mythology otherwise, it makes a surprising TWO appearances in the five generations of this curse. Even more interesting is that, in both cases, the victims of the cannibalism are the offspring of the perpetrator. I am aware of only a handful of other examples of fathers eating their sons in the canon of Greek myth: Tereus tricked into eating his son Itys by his wife Procne after he raped her sister Philomela and pulled her tongue out and the whole sorry trio being turned into birds by Apollo out of pity, Lycaon eating his son Nyctimus at another banquet for the gods and being turned into a wolf by Zeus out of disgust, giving us the name Lycanthrope for werewolves and apocryphally originating a werewolf cult on Mount Lykaion, and Kronos King of the Titans eating each of his children as they were born, out of fear of the one who would eventually usurp him. Cannibalism, as I have addressed before, is heavily associated with abandoning your humanity and identifying with another class of being, so I am not surprised to see animal transformations featured in these other stories. But why does it not feature in the Atreides myth?

Greater Werewolf, 5th Edition, Magic: The Gathering. Art by Dennis Detwiller. Never thought I’d get to use this picture again.

I believe the answer lies on Mount Lykaion and Mount Olympus. King Pelasgus, the father of Lycaon, was the namer and progenitor of the Pelasgians, the legendary inhabitants of prehistoric Greece from whom the “modern” Athenians and Thebans and Telamonians and Argives, etc. of Agamemnon’s time were descended. Agamemnon’s own ancestor Pelops, a victim of cannibalism, was similarly revered as the father of the Peloponnese, the people of the Peloponnesian Peninsula, in the times of Homer and Euripides. Kronos ate all of his children but for Zeus, who overthrew Kronos and became King of the Gods. And Zeus himself was always on guard for the next hero to usurp and replace HIM; Achilles, notably, was sometimes considered a threat to the throne of the Great Thunderer. It is my contention that cannibalism, particularly when you keep it in the family, was strongly associated in Ancient Greece with founding new tribes and dynasties. I think that Orestes had the opportunity to be either the progenitor of a new tribe, perhaps unifying all of Greece as his father did, but permanently, or the king of a new generation of gods, overthrowing the capricious Olympians and ushering in a wave of justice and rationality, as befits the first man ever acquitted by a jury. What happened in my little pet theory to turn him off the Golden Path is unclear, but from where I’m sitting he had as good a shot at the throne as anybody.

This theory has major implications for Frank and Brian Herbert’s Dune series as well.
Timothee Chalamet as Duke Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides, in Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 DUNE, produced by Legendary Entertainment.

Iphigenia is, unfortunately, little more than a footnote in this broader view of her family tree. For the Ancient Greeks her main job was to die, first to loose the winds for Troy and second to seal Agamemnon’s doom as a filicide. That may have been fine for them, but here at We Happy Few we like our female characters with a little more to do. Come see what agency we found for her! Tickets are still available here!

Pericles, Prince of Tyre: The Play(wright)’s the Thing

Finally! At last, at long last, I will talk about my mysterious name-drop of George Wilkins in my first blog and my continual hinting that something about it was coming. I wanted to save something special to share with you on opening night, so I’m very excited to finally talk about this with the half-dozen of you who didn’t either already know about it or just googled “George Wilkins Pericles” to find out what I was talking about. [Just kidding. My audience is barely a half-dozen people on a good day, and I know none of you would betray me like that -KH] By the way, if you hear something vaguely sinister while you’re reading this blog post, pay it no mind. It’s just me, putting on war paint and sharpening my knives for a …different discussion we’ll be having later on. But first Wilkins and the question of collaboration.

George Wilkins co-wrote Pericles with Shakespeare. This by itself is, while noteworthy, neither shocking nor scandalous. As I’ve discussed here before, theatre is a team sport. Even the smallest of shows rely on the actors working with the director working with the designers working with the producer…a whole roomful of artists working together to make the best show they can. This process is further compounded when the playwright is in the room, adding another vision and voice to the collaborative process. Shakespeare did not exist in a vacuum, handing down masterpieces from high in his ivory tower. He was an actor and company member in the Lord Chamberlain’s (later the King’s) Men, writing plays for specific people, his friends and colleagues. Early texts of his work occasionally replace character names with the names of the actors who would play them, most notably Will Kemp, the company’s clown. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility to assume that people like Kemp or Richard Burbage or Henry Condell or John Heminges, company members and artists in their own right, would have some feedback on the roles that they would be portraying. There is evidence that Kemp would improvise many of his lines, that Shakespeare would write into his final version. Moreover, Shakespeare was known to collaborate with other writers on both his writing and theirs: Two Noble Kinsmen has both Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s names attached to it, and textual analysis connects Shakespeare with Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Kyd, and George Peele at the least. It is not unusual that Pericles would be co-written.

What IS unusual, however, is his choice of collaborators in this circumstance, and the nature of their cooperation. Shakespeare’s other known co-writers were all working writers and poets in their own right. Wilkins was a minor, poorly regarded pamphleteer and middling-successful tavernkeeper and pimp, whose greatest (indeed only) claim to fame was this very collaboration. The circumstances under which Shakespeare came to work with such a man, near the end of his career no less, are unclear. This confusion is amplified by a lack of clarity of HOW the collaboration worked. It is widely accepted that Wilkins wrote the first two acts, and Shakespeare the final three, but whether they wrote as a team, or one edited or re-wrote the other, is also uncertain. Wilkins wrote a novel version of the story, “The Painful Adventures of Pericles”, in 1608, which suggests to me that he also wrote the initial play and Shakespeare reworked it. The style of the writing shows a marked shift at this point, dropping many elements of the Fantastic Adventure I told you about last week and taking on the nascent characteristics of the Shakespearean Romance genre, particularly the separation and reunion of fathers and daughters. These distinctions can be clearly seen within the text itself; what cannot be seen is why or how they happened.

While this mystery of Pericles’ authorship is certainly interesting, and well worth considering while watching the play, it is not really what I wanted to talk to you about. It was just a convenient and obliquely-related entrepot into the REAL discussion I wanted to have with you: authorship conspiracies. There are…theories regarding the veracity of Shakespeare’s claim to be the author of his own work. People question the ability of a countryside glover’s son to create the most compelling literature in the English language, and they have invented progressively outlandish explanations for how someone, ANYONE, who meets their rigorous criteria of “not being William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon” was actually the writer. As you might imagine, I have Things to Say about that.

From The Warriors, 1979.

 

First of all, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. End of discussion. Theories to the contrary are based largely on outdated classist assumptions about early modern education and culture. But it wouldn’t be a very informative or entertaining blog post if I just told you that and walked away, so I will dig into some of the prevailing theories a little bit and heap scorn upon them. They are designed (in the manner of conspiracy theories everywhere) to make their adherents feel superior and important, that they have discovered some tremendous mystery that has been kept a secret for hundreds of years. Generally conspiracy theories like this would also advance the interests of their own claimant, but every other name that is suggested was already famous in their own right and none of these theories started until the mid-19th century, two hundred years after everyone involved was dead. It’s worth noting, by the way, that no one denies the EXISTENCE of William Shakespeare the actor and landowner; there is too much extant evidence. Which means all of these theories feature Shakespeare as a willing co-conspirator, publishing someone else’s plays under his own name. These really read more like a smear campaign on Shakespeare than a revelation of hidden knowledge.

The top three conspiracy candidates for authorship are Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and Christopher Marlowe. The first two, Bacon and de Vere, would have been forced to hide their playwriting hobby from their peers, either to avoid humiliation for associating with low-class actors or (it is alleged) to shield themselves from blame for the treasonous and revolutionary content of the plays they were seemingly compelled to write (I’ll cover Marlowe’s reasoning in a second). The fact that two of them, de Vere and Marlowe, were dead for much of Shakespeare’s career is less of a deterrent than you might think. De Vere is handwaved with the excuse that the plays written after his death in 1604 had been completed earlier, and were released intermittently by other members of this ever-growing conspiracy, for reasons passing understanding. For Marlowe, who was stabbed in the head in a bar fight in 1593, it is alleged that…he wasn’t. That instead he killed his assailant that night and fled to Italy where he lived in exile, writing plays which he then sent to England to be published under the name of an actor he once knew there. [this is only one of several conspiracy theories associated with Kit Marlowe, and I unfortunately don’t have the time to get into all of them. Suffice it to say that he would have done this to escape assassins either because his cover as a spy was blown, or his Catholic OR homosexual leanings were discovered -KH] Astonishingly, of these three Bacon, the only one who was alive for the entirety of Shakespeare’s career, is the one whose cause is presently least championed.

 

Charlie Day as Charlie Kelly. From It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, season 4, episode 10, “Sweet Dee Has a Heart Attack”, 2008.

 

A major qualifying factor of all three of these candidates for anti-Shakespeareans is that they were university educated, while Shakespeare was not, having completed his formal education at the King’s New School in Stratford at around 14 years old. The education that he would have received at a grammar school certainly could not have prepared him to write so well, the argument goes. This argument underestimates the curriculum of an early modern English grammar school. Far from the middle school education it suggests to modern minds, this level of schooling would be heavy on memorization of the classics and include a grounding in Latin and Greek. Combined with working in the field and, you know, the ability to learn things outside of a formal university setting, there is no reason (aside from mistaken classist assumptions) to disqualify Shakespeare on the grounds of his education. [This also ignores the fact that other contemporary playwrights, including Ben Jonson, were ALSO not educated in a university, but no one casts any aspersions on their existence, making this conspiracy seem more and more like a hatchet job on Shakespeare -KH]

An argument that is not as outrageously inaccurate as the idea that they were written by either a dead man or a philosopher with zero indication of any poetic aspirations, but still staggeringly impossible, is that Shakespeare’s plays were written by a whole coterie of writers. This alleged rogue’s gallery of playwrights includes de Vere, Bacon, Jonson, Cervantes, and Queen Elizabeth I. On the one hand, there is solid and ever-growing evidence that Shakespeare was happy to collaborate. Deep textual analysis and orthographics offer proof that multiple people worked on any number of Shakespeare plays, as I said above, so it is not outside the realm of possibility that multiple people could cooperate to write. On the other hand, every single person that you add to a conspiracy makes the conspiracy that much harder to conceal. As Ben Franklin said, three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. In order for ANY of these conspiracies to work the mystery author would have to swear to secrecy Shakespeare himself, all of his known collaborators such as Middleton and Fletcher, the members of his company, the publisher, their couriers, and who knows who else. To add an entire secret network of other writers, including a Spaniard and THE QUEEN…the complexity beggars the imagination. That secret would be out in a week. And for what?

I unfortunately do not have the time to go through every single theory that has been posited, including those that mandate an author must experience personally everything that he would write about, that rely on cryptograms, ciphers, and Kabbalah-like word counting, or that suggest secret incest-children of Queen Elizabeth. Occam’s razor by itself should put paid to any theory more complicated than “the name on the manuscript is the name of the author”, but if that test is insufficient, ask yourself how anyone would benefit from the conspiracy, and how they could have kept it a secret for so long, especially if they included hints to prove to the sufficiently motivated that it was them.

 

If you’d like more information I would recommend this book, which as you can see I flagged so thoroughly while writing this blog post that the flags quickly became completely useless.

 

In case you forgot why I wrote this, like I did halfway through, it’s because we are opening our production of Pericles tonight! We are sold out for tonight’s show but tickets are still available for the rest of our run, so come check it out! And be sure to stay tuned next week, when my contract requires that I write something about the actual play that we are staging.