Helen

One of my goals this year is to read through some of the Greek and Roman works I have in my Great Books set that I haven't read it. I seem to have gotten stuck in the plays. My plan was just to read a couple and then move on to non-fiction, but I marked all of the plays I haven't read yet with sticky tabs and now they are taunting me, so it looks like I'm my new goal is to finish reading the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes! Fortunately, this still works for Jean's Greek Classics Challenge. I do hope to still read a few other Greek works as well.

Oddly enough, Helen really could count toward Magical March as well, although I'm not sure plays count. Like a lot of Greek plays, there are gods involved and they do work a bit of magic. The premise of this story is that the Helen of the Trojan War didn't really run off with Paris. Hera kidnapped the real Helen and locked her away, and created a fake Helen that went with Paris. So the whole massive, brutal Trojan War was fought over a fake woman. That was both frustrating and chuckle inducing. I wonder what they people at the time thought of this take on the story? It's kind of funny, and shows how pointless the war was, but I wonder how well that went over.

Anyway, in the story, the real Helen has been trapped for 17 years!!! Hera doesn't sound like the most pleasant god, does she? Helen is in the same situation Penelope is in - she's having to fend off suitors as her husband Menelaus is presumed dead and even if he's not, he's off chasing the fake Helen so the real Helen should be free to marry. The primary suitor is Theoclymenus, who decides he's going to force Helen to marry him, and he has the power to pull this off. At the same time, Menelaus shows up and finds the real Helen, but can't be seen by Theo. Does he believe real Helen's tale? Will he be able to rescue her? What will Theo do? Is Theo's sister Theonoe - who knows everything that goes on and whose help is necessary if Menelaus and Helen want to escape - a friend or foe? Check out Helen by Euripides to find out! :)

This play is easier to understand and follow than some of the Greek plays, maybe because I'm fairly familiar with the Trojan War so most of the characters were familiar and I wasn't having to work to keep them straight. It's a fun twist on an old story, even if it's almost as old itself!

In other news, I'm working my way through 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (which isn't terrible, but isn't enthralling me either) and I jumped right in to Dragonfly in Amber, which is definitely enthralling! I feel bad for my mixed review of Outlander - I don't think I gave it enough credit for telling a great story. I'm also trying very hard to finish out CB's TBR Challenge - I had to go to the library today because I had a reserve come in. I went ahead and checked out a few more books to save a trip, but I CANNOT touch them until Sunday. Actually, I've told myself I can't finish them until the stack of books I'm already in the middle of are cleared off my table, so I have quite a bit of reading to do! I am going to try to catch up on some blog reading and commenting tonight though. I've been so busy with work lately that I haven't wanted to spend much time with the computer in the evenings and I'm way behind on making the rounds and miss the interaction.

The Suppliants

I planned to read Herodutus' Histories this month as part of Jean's Greek Classics Challenge. That didn't happen! I do hope to read it this year still, but instead I've kept trying to work my way through Eurpides' plays.

The Suppliants is about a group of grieving mothers who lost their sons in the battle of seven against Thebes, which is the topic of Aeschylus' aptly named play Seven Against Thebes. I think it helped that I had read that play before and at least had a vague idea of what happened and some of the major plays even though I didn't remember most of the details. This play kind of assumes you already have that knowledge, which you would have if you were a Greek playgoer back then.

The mothers go to Theseus for his help in getting their sons' bodies back, which he does.  He even goes as far as to prepare the bodies for burial himself, which was a great honor. It was extremely important to the Greeks to have a proper burial as they believed that affected the afterlife.

One of the things that stuck out to me the most from this play is the idea that we should look to the gods for the answers and not try to take over their roles, yet the play had much less influence and presence of the gods than many other Greek tragedies. For example, Theseus says "Are we not then too proud, when heaven hath made such preparation for our life, not to be content therewith? But our presumption seeks to lord it over heaven, and in the pride of our hearts we think we are wiser than the gods."

I found this striking, because it seemed to me that while Theseus says this, he then relies on his own wisdom and the people of Athens to make a decision, without calling on the gods. (Unless I overlooked that, which is entirely possible.) Only at the very end of the play does Athena make an appearance, and it's not to interfere. I know Euripides as a whole uses the gods much less in his plays than Aeschylus or Sophocles, so I wonder if this was a way of ironically saying we are wiser than the gods? After all, the Greek gods weren't exactly the infalliable, moral paragon God of the Judeo-Christian world, so who is to say that the gods were smarter than the humans? Or maybe it's just an example of "do what I say, not what I do," but even if I don't quite know for sure what he was trying to say, it gave me something to think about about and I enjoyed his play as a whole.

Comedy of Errors/Some Sixteenth-Century Lit.

I haven't updated in a while, but I have been reading. Here's a quick overview of a few things.

I read/watched the Comedy of Errors. I watched a BBC version with Roger Daltry from the Who, which I thought was interesting. You don't think of rockers doing Shakespeare. And he played a funny character. Well most of the characters are funny, but his is the funniest. This is one of the plays that is definately better to watch than read. It gets irritating when you're watching it, but not nearly as much as when you just read it. At least when you're watching it you see the two sets of twins and so the confusion makes more sense (you know there are two sets of twins when reading too, but it's just not the same). But it bugs me that they don't realize what's going on considering that tho of the characters are looking for their long-lost twin brothers and you'd think they'd realize they'd found them when everyone started treating them like someone else. This is why most of the comedies bug me.

I've also been going through the trusty old Norton anthology and reading (skimming) some poetry. I never grew to like poetry much. Unless it's Shel Silverstein or Dr. Suess. Otherwise just give me prose. Even Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis was hard to get through and I like Shakespeare, even some of the sonnets. I did read the whole thing in that case though because I'm determined to read all of Shakespeare's works since I'm so close from having taken two Shakespeare courses.

I did enjoy reading Sir Thomas More's Utopia though. I didn't read the whole thing, just the excerpts in the Norton. It sparked a long conversation with my husband about if it's okay to support a utopian state if it's entered into willingly by all citizens and if it could ever work. I found it interesting that More does a make a point of saying all the citizens would have to believe in God or leave, because if you don't believe in God you have no incentive to be a good person or look out for others, so he did address that aspect. While we agreed with that, it seems odd to assume that just because someone believes in God that he will automatically want to serve the good of the community instead of himself. People are inherently sinful, and we just can't see such as society working period. More worked around people who definately believed in God, but sure didn't look out for the good of the people all the time (hello Henry VIII!) so I find it hard to imagine he really thought such a society would work. I understand his desire for a society like this though, especially considering his society at the time. There was a massive amount of difference between the pheasants and the royalty, and More was familiar with both worlds. Living in such a state and being so close to both worlds would make you want to imagine a better way, I just don't think socialism is the way to go. It was nice that it sparked such a great conversation with Ryan though!

Richard III

I finally finished Parts 2 and 3 of Shakespeare's Henry VI and watched Richard III. I watched the Lawrence Olivier version and for extra nerdiness I followed along in my Riverside Shakespeare, causing my husband to stand in awe of me when he got home that night and caught me. Well, he stood in amazement that I had hit a new nerdy low anyway. Or what he thought was a new nerdy low. I did this mulitple times for my undergrad Shakespeare course. Dr. Youmans was big on emphasizing that they are plays and should be watched, not just read, so we were required to watch 10 Shakespeare movies in addition to our reading assignments. It was great because you could check out the BBC versions of almost all of the plays from the library and they were word for word, so it made the reading a lot easier. We read 16 plays and all of the sonnets that semester, so that help was greatly appreciated. I used a few other versions for part of my 10, but the BBC ones were wonderful.

Because I agree with Dr. Youmans on the importance of watching Shakespeare, not just reading him, I decided to watch Richard III. It followed along with the text pretty closely, and most of the changes were just combining scenes so that sometimes things were slightly out of order. For example, if scenes one and three had the same people, they might run together and then you'd go to scene two. And some of Richard's lines were combined and the lines in between were deleted. Olivier was incredible. It was interestingly staged as well. It seemed more like watching a play most of the time, although it wasn't a film of a play the way the BBC versions are. The ending scene and the "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" line was powerful.

Once again, I was left wishing that things were taught differently in school. Dr. Youmans in the only teacher I ever had who insisted on the importance of watching Shakespeare, except for maybe a drama teacher. All other teachers talk about how reading them is important, and often even analyize things that are strictly part of the writing. That doesn't diminish the fact that he's a great writer, but I just think that should be emphasized more. Explain that he's like a screenwriter today. Compare him to J.J. Abrams and maybe kids would be more interested.

Henry VI Part I

I finally started in on Shakespeare on Saturday and read Henry VI Part 1. I've decided to read in the order in which Shakespeare wrote them, which is why I'm starting with the Henry VI tetralogy even though it's later historically. It also works out nice because I'm not technically to Shakespeare yet in my history reading, but I am almost finished reading The Wars of the Roses which is about the time frame of the Henry VI plays. Of course, we don't actually know for sure the order of the plays, and there's debate from the start over whether Henry VI Part 1 was actually written first or if it was written after Henry VI Parts 2 and 3. There's also uncertainty about if Shakespeare really wrote this play or if he just revised it or wrote parts of it. That's uncertainty on top of the general uncertainty if Shakespeare actually wrote any of the plays or if someone else did. Anyway, I'm reading from the Riverside Shakespeare and am using their timeline as my guide for reading order.

Back to the actual play. You can definitely tell it's either one of his earliest works or was written at least partly by someone else. It lacks the poetry and beauty of most of his other plays. For example, it's primarily written in rhyming couplets instead of blank verse so it doesn't sound as natural for a history, and he also doesn't break lines between different speakers. The intro of the Riverside points that out and notes that he rarely breaks lines in his early works and does so frequently in his later works. When I read that in the intro I didn't really think that would make much of a difference, but it definitely makes things sound stilted and not conversational. He's also not as good at character building as in the later works. The characters all sound the same, which makes it harder to realize what's going on. It's very different from the second tetralogy featuring Henry IV/V where all of the characters are very distinctive. It's especially interesting to see Falstaff in both series and how undeveloped he is in the Henry VI plays when he's larger than life in the Henry IV plays. I am glad I'm reading The Wars of the Roses also or I think it would be a lot harder to follow along. That's also helping to make Richard III more understandable, so it will be interesting when I get to that play to see how my perception of it has changed over time. I still enjoyed Richard III when I read the first time, I just think I will view it differently this time and have an even greater appreciation for it now.