Seneca's Oedipus, adapted by Ted Hughes
Being on the road (in the service of Darth Real Life, not for fun) means among other things lots of train travel, which means more reading of recently aquired books. Back in London I found a copy of Ted Hughes’ adaption of Seneca’s Oedipus, which was first performed in 1968, directed by Peter Brook, starring John Guilgud and Irene Worth, and was out of print since. Since I love Hughes’ later adaptions/translations of Euripides, Aischylos and Racine, and since Irene Worth in her essay about Hughes talked about playing Hughes’ Iocasta (it would be Hughes’, not Seneca’s because the lines and monologues he wrote for her were not in the original), I was always very curious about it.
Hughes’ introduction, explaining why the National Theatre picked Seneca instead of Sophocles (when Seneca’s adaption of the Oedipus myth is usually rated as inferior to the Sophocles play which is one of the all time greats and picked by Aristoteles to illustrate what a tragedy should be) already hints at what’s to come: Sophocles’ play, he says, is “in spite of its blood-roots fully civilized”, and presents “a radiant moral world”. (I’d put it a bit differently - there is pity for the protagonist by the characters at the end of Sophocles’ play; I’m not sure that makes it more moral.) Whereas Seneca, writing in “Nero’s nightmare Rome, wide open to the depths”, presents via stoical epigrams and tremendous rethorical speeches figures that aren’t civilized at all: “They are a spider people, scuttling among hot stones”. You can see the draw for Hughes with his shamanic interests and for Peter Brook with his own interest in “raw” theatre, but what startled me was the connection to Seneca’s own liftetime he makes, because I hadn’t consciously considered that before. Oedipus, in the Greek myth (and both in Sophocles’ and Seneca’s version), has of course no Oedipus complex. The guy goes out of his way to avoid the trap fate has in store for him, leaving the parents he believes to be his so the prediction he would kill his father and marry his mother would not come true, and thus running straight into his actual parents without realising this for a decade. But Seneca, being asked by Agrippina the Younger to teach her son, watching this son become Nero, being a part of Nero’s regime for years until falling out with him, knew a mother and a son whom later historians (gossipy Sueton and insinuating Tacitus) accused of having been incestously involved with the full knowledge of their identities. He knew them very well indeed. And there are some echoes of Iocasta-as-Agrippina and Oedipus-as-Nero, of the Julian-Claudian dynasty in its last stage, in Hughes’ adaption, as when the ghost of dead Laius:
You insane family of Cadmus
you will never stop slaughtering each other
finish it now rip your children with your own
hands put an end to your blood now (…)
my counter rots but it isn’t the gods
it is this a son and a mother
knotted and twisted together a son and a mother
a couple of vipers bodies twisting together (…)
it is your king
blinded in the wrong that got him his throne blinded
to his own origins blind to the fixed gods
the loathed son of that same queen who now swells under him
While never a direct analogy - Oedipus is still unaware and the detective who is the murderer of his own investigation, and the plague afflicting his city drives his fatal need to find out the truth, which is hardly Neronic - it contributes to the most noticable change of this adaption, which is indeed the part of Iocasta. Iocasta in Sophocles didn’t have much to do but to protest at Oedipus trying to find out who killed Laius way back then and to kill herself off stage when she realises the truth. Not so here. Hughes gives her a very un-Greek-play but both Latin and modern feeling about her late first husband, who after all condemned her first born son to death as a baby because of a prophecy when she tells Oedipus not to investigate:
let it lie Oedipus it happened no man can
alter what has happened. I make no secret of it
to you that death was waiting for Laius fate
only adjusted the balance when he fell to the earth
he owed me a life I bore him a boy and before
my milk had entered its mouth he snatched it away
things I have never spoken a crime I shall not
dig up were tangled in those riens that dragged hi s
dead body away from the crossroads a man of
stones broken by stone
This is a Iocasta who is not passive, and echoes Clytaimnestra as well as Agrippina. Her first, entirely Hughesian monologue is this, which is very Agrippina, as well as the only dramatic attempt to take Iocasta seriously as a mother that I recall reading, so I just have to quote it almost at full length:
when I carried my sons
I carried them for death I carried them for the
Throne
I carried them for final disaster when I carried my
First son
Did I know what was coming did I know
What ropes of blood were twisting together what
Bloody footprints
Were hurrying together in my body
Did I know what past and unfinished reckonings
Were getting flesh again inside me
Did I think that the debts of the past
Were settled before I conceived
I knew the thing in my womb was going to have to
Pay for the whole past
I knew the future was waiting for him like a greedy
God a maneater in a cave
Was going to ask for everything happiness stregth
And finally life
As if no other man existed I carried him for this
For pain and for fear
For hard sharp metal for the cruelty of other men
And his own cruelty
I carried him for disease
For rottenness and dropping to pieces
I carried him for death bones dust I knew
But I carrried him not only for this I carried him to be king of this
And my blood didn’t pause
Didn’t hesitate in my womb
Considering the futility
It didn’t falter reckoning the odds it poured on
Into him blood from my toes my finger ends
Blind blood blood from my gums and eyelids
Blood from the roots of my hair blood from before
Any time began
It flowed into the knot of his bowels, into the knot of
His muscles
The knot of his brain
My womb tied everything together every corner of the
Earth and the heavens
And every trickle of the dead past
Twisted it all into shape inside me
What was he what wasn’t he (…)
A bag of blood a bag of death
A screaming mouth
Was it asking a question
He was a king’s on he was a man’s shape
He was perfect (…)
His eyes were perfect feet perfect fingers perfect
He lay there in the huge darkness like a new bright
Weapon
He was the warrant of the gods
He was their latest attempt
To walk on the earth and to live
He only had to live
And what if at that moment after all that
A doubt had turned him back
Now Iocasta in Sophocles’ play clues into the truth sooner than Oedipus does, leaves, and when he after realizing everyhing hurries after her, he finds she has hanged herself, and blinds himself. The Seneca-Hughes play reverses the order of events. Iocasta still isn’t on stage when the full truth hits Oedipus, but he blinds himself before her death (and Seneca isn’t content with letting Oedipus use Iocasta’s hair pins as Sophocles was, no, he has to actually tear out his eyeballs), and then Iocasta returns to the stage. Which I think is Hughes not Seneca. He couldn’t let her die silent, and gives Iocasta and Oedipus a scene post discovery, which no one else did.
Chorus: Look Iocasta coming out of the palace demented
Look at Iocasta why has sh estopped look at her
She’s staring at her son she hardly knows what’s
Happening darkness is nearly swamping her
There he stands blasted his blind mask turned to
The sky she wants to speak she’s afraid of him
She comes closer her grief stronger than everything
She’s stepping towards him
Iocasta: what can I call you now what shall I call you
You’re my son shall I call you my son
Are you ashamed
You are my son I lost you
You’re alive I’ve found you
Speak to me
Show me your face
Turn your head towars me show me your face (…)
You were my husband you are my son you
Killed my husband I bore you sons nothing
Can be blamed everything that has happened is here
There is no road from it
Oedipus: no more words mother I beg you by all that in our
Names is right and wrong let there be no more words
Between us two
Iocasta: Nothing in me moves can I not feel I shared the
Wrong how do I share the punishment it’s me
I am at the root of it I am the root my blood is
The dark twisted root this womb darkness (…)
All I want is death find it you
Killed your father finish it the same hand
Your mother finish it is this the word that
Killed him is this that killed my husband and my
Husband’s father in a single stab where shall I
Have the second stab this point under my breast
Or this long edge across my throat don’t you know
The place it’s here this the place the gods
Hate where everyhting began the son the husband
Up here
Chorus: look her hand slackens from the hilt the whelm
Of blood squeezes the blade out
Quick footnote of Roman history: when Agrippina died, she reportedly said to the assassins sent by her son "smite my womb". But even without this callback, it’s an incredibly powerful scene, and I’m still shaking from reading. I wish someone had recorded the production, or made a radio version later, with Worth and Gielgud speaking this, but I don’t think it happened…
Hughes’ introduction, explaining why the National Theatre picked Seneca instead of Sophocles (when Seneca’s adaption of the Oedipus myth is usually rated as inferior to the Sophocles play which is one of the all time greats and picked by Aristoteles to illustrate what a tragedy should be) already hints at what’s to come: Sophocles’ play, he says, is “in spite of its blood-roots fully civilized”, and presents “a radiant moral world”. (I’d put it a bit differently - there is pity for the protagonist by the characters at the end of Sophocles’ play; I’m not sure that makes it more moral.) Whereas Seneca, writing in “Nero’s nightmare Rome, wide open to the depths”, presents via stoical epigrams and tremendous rethorical speeches figures that aren’t civilized at all: “They are a spider people, scuttling among hot stones”. You can see the draw for Hughes with his shamanic interests and for Peter Brook with his own interest in “raw” theatre, but what startled me was the connection to Seneca’s own liftetime he makes, because I hadn’t consciously considered that before. Oedipus, in the Greek myth (and both in Sophocles’ and Seneca’s version), has of course no Oedipus complex. The guy goes out of his way to avoid the trap fate has in store for him, leaving the parents he believes to be his so the prediction he would kill his father and marry his mother would not come true, and thus running straight into his actual parents without realising this for a decade. But Seneca, being asked by Agrippina the Younger to teach her son, watching this son become Nero, being a part of Nero’s regime for years until falling out with him, knew a mother and a son whom later historians (gossipy Sueton and insinuating Tacitus) accused of having been incestously involved with the full knowledge of their identities. He knew them very well indeed. And there are some echoes of Iocasta-as-Agrippina and Oedipus-as-Nero, of the Julian-Claudian dynasty in its last stage, in Hughes’ adaption, as when the ghost of dead Laius:
You insane family of Cadmus
you will never stop slaughtering each other
finish it now rip your children with your own
hands put an end to your blood now (…)
my counter rots but it isn’t the gods
it is this a son and a mother
knotted and twisted together a son and a mother
a couple of vipers bodies twisting together (…)
it is your king
blinded in the wrong that got him his throne blinded
to his own origins blind to the fixed gods
the loathed son of that same queen who now swells under him
While never a direct analogy - Oedipus is still unaware and the detective who is the murderer of his own investigation, and the plague afflicting his city drives his fatal need to find out the truth, which is hardly Neronic - it contributes to the most noticable change of this adaption, which is indeed the part of Iocasta. Iocasta in Sophocles didn’t have much to do but to protest at Oedipus trying to find out who killed Laius way back then and to kill herself off stage when she realises the truth. Not so here. Hughes gives her a very un-Greek-play but both Latin and modern feeling about her late first husband, who after all condemned her first born son to death as a baby because of a prophecy when she tells Oedipus not to investigate:
let it lie Oedipus it happened no man can
alter what has happened. I make no secret of it
to you that death was waiting for Laius fate
only adjusted the balance when he fell to the earth
he owed me a life I bore him a boy and before
my milk had entered its mouth he snatched it away
things I have never spoken a crime I shall not
dig up were tangled in those riens that dragged hi s
dead body away from the crossroads a man of
stones broken by stone
This is a Iocasta who is not passive, and echoes Clytaimnestra as well as Agrippina. Her first, entirely Hughesian monologue is this, which is very Agrippina, as well as the only dramatic attempt to take Iocasta seriously as a mother that I recall reading, so I just have to quote it almost at full length:
when I carried my sons
I carried them for death I carried them for the
Throne
I carried them for final disaster when I carried my
First son
Did I know what was coming did I know
What ropes of blood were twisting together what
Bloody footprints
Were hurrying together in my body
Did I know what past and unfinished reckonings
Were getting flesh again inside me
Did I think that the debts of the past
Were settled before I conceived
I knew the thing in my womb was going to have to
Pay for the whole past
I knew the future was waiting for him like a greedy
God a maneater in a cave
Was going to ask for everything happiness stregth
And finally life
As if no other man existed I carried him for this
For pain and for fear
For hard sharp metal for the cruelty of other men
And his own cruelty
I carried him for disease
For rottenness and dropping to pieces
I carried him for death bones dust I knew
But I carrried him not only for this I carried him to be king of this
And my blood didn’t pause
Didn’t hesitate in my womb
Considering the futility
It didn’t falter reckoning the odds it poured on
Into him blood from my toes my finger ends
Blind blood blood from my gums and eyelids
Blood from the roots of my hair blood from before
Any time began
It flowed into the knot of his bowels, into the knot of
His muscles
The knot of his brain
My womb tied everything together every corner of the
Earth and the heavens
And every trickle of the dead past
Twisted it all into shape inside me
What was he what wasn’t he (…)
A bag of blood a bag of death
A screaming mouth
Was it asking a question
He was a king’s on he was a man’s shape
He was perfect (…)
His eyes were perfect feet perfect fingers perfect
He lay there in the huge darkness like a new bright
Weapon
He was the warrant of the gods
He was their latest attempt
To walk on the earth and to live
He only had to live
And what if at that moment after all that
A doubt had turned him back
Now Iocasta in Sophocles’ play clues into the truth sooner than Oedipus does, leaves, and when he after realizing everyhing hurries after her, he finds she has hanged herself, and blinds himself. The Seneca-Hughes play reverses the order of events. Iocasta still isn’t on stage when the full truth hits Oedipus, but he blinds himself before her death (and Seneca isn’t content with letting Oedipus use Iocasta’s hair pins as Sophocles was, no, he has to actually tear out his eyeballs), and then Iocasta returns to the stage. Which I think is Hughes not Seneca. He couldn’t let her die silent, and gives Iocasta and Oedipus a scene post discovery, which no one else did.
Chorus: Look Iocasta coming out of the palace demented
Look at Iocasta why has sh estopped look at her
She’s staring at her son she hardly knows what’s
Happening darkness is nearly swamping her
There he stands blasted his blind mask turned to
The sky she wants to speak she’s afraid of him
She comes closer her grief stronger than everything
She’s stepping towards him
Iocasta: what can I call you now what shall I call you
You’re my son shall I call you my son
Are you ashamed
You are my son I lost you
You’re alive I’ve found you
Speak to me
Show me your face
Turn your head towars me show me your face (…)
You were my husband you are my son you
Killed my husband I bore you sons nothing
Can be blamed everything that has happened is here
There is no road from it
Oedipus: no more words mother I beg you by all that in our
Names is right and wrong let there be no more words
Between us two
Iocasta: Nothing in me moves can I not feel I shared the
Wrong how do I share the punishment it’s me
I am at the root of it I am the root my blood is
The dark twisted root this womb darkness (…)
All I want is death find it you
Killed your father finish it the same hand
Your mother finish it is this the word that
Killed him is this that killed my husband and my
Husband’s father in a single stab where shall I
Have the second stab this point under my breast
Or this long edge across my throat don’t you know
The place it’s here this the place the gods
Hate where everyhting began the son the husband
Up here
Chorus: look her hand slackens from the hilt the whelm
Of blood squeezes the blade out
Quick footnote of Roman history: when Agrippina died, she reportedly said to the assassins sent by her son "smite my womb". But even without this callback, it’s an incredibly powerful scene, and I’m still shaking from reading. I wish someone had recorded the production, or made a radio version later, with Worth and Gielgud speaking this, but I don’t think it happened…