Prometheus Bound attributed to Aeschylus (c. 430 bc? - new translation by Joel Agee 2014)

A New Translation by Joel Agee   -- Commisioned by The J. Paul Getty Museum

I did not have any plans to read an Ancient Greek drama this month, I read a number of them in the long ago, but when I was offered a review copy of a new translation of Prometheus Bound done by Joel Agee published by The New York Review of Books and commissioned by The J. Paul Getty Museum I felt the pedigree was just to high to pass up.

Aeschylus (525 to 456 BC) was the first Greek Dramatist, proceeding Sophocles and Euripides.  There is now, as detailed by Joel Agee in his very interesting and informative introduction, scholarly controversary existing over who really wrote Prometheus Bound, some put the first performance date as 430 BC but no one has been put forth as an alternative author.  I guess this matters most to scholars.

What has come down through history as Prometheus Bound is 11 fragments of a full drama.  The basic plot has passed into the common literary consciousness.  Prometheus stole fire from the Gods so Zeus had him bound to the side of a mountain.  The drama, as were all Greek Dramas, is simultaneously making religious and political statements.  Prometheus represents the liberation to humanity that knowledge of nature, of science, can bring to humanity.  Zeus wants humanity kept in total thrall to the capricious forces and whims of the Gods and this conflict drives the drama.

Reading the fragments was a deeply moving experience, like being at the very start of one of the great streams of western literature.  There are many themes in Prometheus Bound that would make for interesting class room discussion.

I would love to see this preformed one day.

Mel u

The Dybbuk by S Ansky (1914). A Drama in Four Acts - The Yale Yiddish Literature Project

A very important work in the canon of Yiddish literature. 

This project was made possible by a generous gift from The Yale University Press.

S. Ansky (1863 to 1920, Ukraine) is one of the most famous of Yiddish language dramatist.  

In Jewish mythology, a dybbuk (Yiddish: דיבוק, from Hebrew adhere or cling) is a malicious possessing spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of deceased person.  S. Ansky dramatized just such a possession in his famous play, The Dybbuk.  (The play is considered the immediate cultural source for movies like The Exorcist.)  Normally a dybbuk will enter the soul of a living person because it is dissatisfied with the course of events after its (their) death and are seeking to bend the will of the living as the price for releasing the possessed individual.   This is exactly what happens in the play.  The Dybbuk deals with deep matters of the teachings in writings of the tradition of the Kabbalah.  There are speeches by learned Rabbis that go into great details concerning spirit possession and its remedies.  

A young Talmudic scholar has fallen madly in love with the daughter of a wealthy man who has another son of a rich man picked out for his daughter. There wedding had been promised long ago.    The man in love dies from shock.  The woman goes to the cemetery to invite her deceased mother to the wedding ceremony, set for that morning.  She stops by the grave of the man who died from love for her and somehow she leaves "changed".  At the wedding ceremony she shouts out when she sees the man she is to marry, "you are not my bridegroom" and refuses to marry him.   She returns the cemetery, where she had stopped at the grave of a murdered couple the night before, and is followed by many from the wedding party.  In a male voice she announces that that her true love has returned to claim her as his bride. The Rabbi says she has been possessed by a dybbuk.  The rest of the play deals with the various attempts to exorcise this malicious spirit from the woman.   

The Dybbuk was to me of greatest value for its incorporation of Yiddish lore and customs into the play. 

It will only take you at most two hours to read it and I am defiantly glad I did.  I would enjoy seeing it preformed but there is not a big demand for Yiddish drama where I live so I guess I probably won't.

There was a Polish Yiddish language movie based on the play released in 1939.  

There is some background information on Ansky and Yiddish literature in my post on his short story "Go Talk to a Goy".  I will, I hope, post on additional short stories in the beautifully done Yale Collection  of his works. 

Mel u

The Shadow of a Gunman by Sean O'Casey (1923)

The Shadow of a Gunman  by Sean O'Casey (1880 to 1964, Dublin) seems to me one of the most important dramas of the modern Irish stage.  Declan Kiberd in Inventing Ireland:  The Literature of the Modern Nation devotes over fifty pages to this work and Juno and the Paycock. 

The Shadow of a Gunman  is set in the tenements  of Dublin during the 1916 uprising against British rule.   People live crammed together in very close quarters in which people know the business of their neighbors.   It is a very dangerous time in which a mistaken impression of a person's political loyalty could get you shot, the shadow of the gunman is everywhere and all live in fear.   The language of this play has great lyrical beauty, even the stage directions are a pleasure to read.   One of the characters is a poet and I greatly enjoyed his verse.  We see the power of landlords and the constant fear of eviction.  A rumor begins to spread in the close quarters of the tenement that one of the residents is a gunman for the revolutionaries.  If government informers here this, it might mean that soldiers or local auxiliaries will bye sent in to find him which could produce violence that would be dangerous to all in the area.  

One of the central characters in the play, Minnie, is a prostitute.   Minnie has no fear of speaking her mind about Irish men, a topic she knows quite a lot about.  In a way, she is the bravest most noble person in the play.  I think most people seriously into Irish literature have already read this core drama.  

There is a lot of discussion about the nature of Irish society and what it means to be Irish in the play.  One line after another is just perfectly done.  This is a very important play, the language is a joy to read, the characters are very well done and the plot action brings some very dark and dangerous times to life for us.

I have also on my read soon list O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock  and The Plough and the Stars.  I hope to read them both year and I would love to see them preformed in Ireland.      

Please share your experiences with Sean O'Casey with us. 

Mel u

The Field by John B. Keane (1965)

Recently my brother and I were in Westport, Ireland when he spotted a poster advertising a performance of the play The Field by John B Keane, a highly regarded playwright and fiction writer. My brother recalled it was made into a very successful movie starring Richard Harris in the lead role of Bull. We decided to go and it was very well acted by the St Patrick's Westport Drama Society. There was not a false note in the performance. The play was staged in the meeting hall of a public school. The budget was of course low but the stage settings were great. The plot is well known. A widow decides to sell at a public auction some land that the hyper-manly Bull has been grazing his cattle on for years. The fair market value of the land s 800.00 Pounds. Bull and the auctioneer conspire to rig the bidding so he can buy it for 200.

The play fits very much into the themes of Irish Short Story Month Year III, recently over. All business dealings and conversations are completed in a pub over a whiskey. The auctioneer is a typical weak corrupt father. The loud thunderous Bull is your standard Stage Irish figure, given to lyrical rhetoric and violence. Bull lost his wife to a traveller. The auctioneer's wife is a dominating woman who has cheated on her husband. The play deals with the deep love of land and the role of the priest in Irish life. Seeing this play in Ireland was a great experience for my brother and I.

Mel u

The Tinker's Wedding by John Synge

The Tinker's Wedding by John Synge (1908)
"J. M. Synge-Remembering the Future" -Chapter Ten of Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd

The Irish Quarter

1871 to 1909

I have so far read The Aran Islands and The Playboy of the Western World by John Synge.   I am convinced by reading Kiberd's analyses of his work and Colm Toibin's remarks in Lady Gregory's Toothbrush that Synge is the third most important modern Irish author.   His use of language is just incredibly powerful.   His conversations and the patterns of speech in his plays are just wonderful.   It is how I imagine Irish was spoken and I love it!.   There is a beautiful cadence in his plays.  I hope to see one of his plays performed when I am in Ireland in May 2013.

I first became aware of the Irish Traveller culture (once called "Tinkers") when I discovered their predominance in the short stories of Desmond Hogan.  In the spirit of a famous line in Gravity's Rainbow, I think some secrets have been given to the Travellers to preserve against centrifugal history.   I recently acquired an ebook of the complete poems and plays of W. B. Yeats and a search found "Tinker" appears forty one times.   I think in the work of Synge and Yeats Travellers are romanticised and I think to some extent the treatment of Travellers by Hogan is a revolt against this romanticism and attempt to discover some darker truths than Yeats or Sygne were able to deal with.   Yeats and Sygne saw them as stock figures, symbols of freedom that did stand above the cant of Irish culture, where  Hogan helps us see the most oppressive cant was in the allegedly treatment of the Tinkers by figures of the Irish Renaissance in which they acted as though they were attacking the established culture.

A lot of the fun of The Tinker's Wedding is in the language.   Kiberd says the theme of the story is the conflicts between the culture of the Tinkers and the Anglo-Irish as represented by the wish of the Tinker woman to have a bishop perform her marriage ceremony.   I really enjoyed the conversations.  

I plan to read and post on all of Synge's plays.


Please share your experiences with John Synge with us.

John Bull's Other Island by George Bernard Shaw

John Bull's Other Island by George Bernard Shaw (1904)
"John Bull's Other Islander" -chapter three of Inventing Ireland:  The Literature of the Modern Nation by Declan Kiberd (1995)

Inventing Ireland

An Irish Quarter Event

"Ireland is the only spot on earth which still produces the ideal Englishman of Irish history"-George Bernard Shaw

As soon as I began to read Inventing Ireland:  The Literature of the Modern Nation by Declan Kiberd I knew it was the volume I needed to begin my real education in the literature of Ireland.  I  am very interested in the post colonial approach to literature and have posted on many Asian works from that perspective.   Like everyone, my basic guide in this is Edward Said and as soon as I saw Kiberd was looking at Irish literature in the same way I at once bought an Ebook. I previously posted on his chapter of Edith Somerville and Ross Martin (Violet Martin) and it did change my understanding of their work.   I will soon read also their The Real Charlotte as it is the primary work Kiberd writes on and will reread his chapter also.   I have decided I will try to read all of the  works (or at least all I can download for free) Kiberd makes reference to in Inventing Ireland and post on them in the light of what I learned from him.   Kiberd's book is beautifully written and deeply learned.  He sets things in the historical and cultural context.  This will be an on going Irish Quarter event.  

John Bull's Other Island is George Bernard Shaw's (1856 to 1950, Dublin, Ireland-there is some background information on Shaw in my prior posts on him) only play that takes place at all in Ireland.   One of the things I have learned of since I began the Irish Quarter:  A Celebration of The Irish Short Story on March 11 was that the English constructed their own vision of the Irishman, the stage Irishman as it is often called.   Like any colonizer there is a need to see the people in the country you rule as in need of your care and protection. The English cast the Irishman as comic figures given to wild emotions, not inclined to work very hard, unable to stick to a project without falling into drink, given to trickery and full of superstition.   They treated Catholicism as one step above a pagan form of religion.  The Irish were basically cast as children in need of  the steady hand of the English.

I would love to have been in the audience in London and then in Dublin when this play opened so I could have seen the differing reactions to Shaw's actually quite funny characterization of the  Irish.   The play brings on stage in the opening act an Irishman who offers to go along as guide for an Englishman who is going to Ireland.    The man is the very epitome of the stage Irish Paddy figure, a complete liar, a fluid talker who speaks half in riddles in a sing song kind of way, loves whiskey and a complete suck up to the English.  Kibard tells us that because Ireland has lost so many of the most enterprising people of the country to emigration a new class of landowner has risen in Ireland.   These Irish landowners are not at all concerned with bettering the country.   There is also a cultural movement in Ireland at this time, called now The Irish Renaissance, which Kiberd says in part plays into the hands of the English as it was more concerned with mummifying Irish culture than reviving it.  The Irish in this movement basically played up to the liberal university educated Englishman's romantic view of Ireland.  "John Bull's Other Island" was per Kiberd Shaw's warning that Ireland was in danger of being turned into "a tourist's landscape of colourful, non-threatening characters, who mark off their "interesting" cultural differences from the London visitor, even as they become more tractable to his economic design".     The play shows us how both the English and the Irish were often playing out roles that they thought the other expected of them... The Irish acted the fool and the sycophant in order to deal with the English who in turned played at nobility.   Many of the English in Ireland in fact had problems of various sorts that were easier for them to deal with in a colony.  Just like in India, the locals long ago learned that an Englishman in a colony is there seeking something he cannot find at home and that he often has things wrong with him.     One of the things any colonizer wants is women.  In the character of Nora we see an idealized, in the minds of the English visitors, version of the Irish woman, a woman forced to become strong by a race of weak good for nothing more than versifying and drinking men.   The Englishman fancies himself in love with her and sees her as better than the women at home.   

"John Bull's Other Island" was really a lot of fun to read.  I would love to see it acted on the stage one day but somehow I know I never will.




Mel u

The Rising of the Moon by Lady Augusta Gergory

The Rise of the Moon by Lady Augusta Gregory (1907, a play in one act)

What school in the Philippines is teaching this story?  Please leave a comment.  I live in The Capital Region

I think most people's image of Lady Augusta Gregory (1852 to 1932-County Galway, Ireland) is that of a very rich lady who used her money to buy her way into the inner circles of the Irish Theater and of William Butler Yeats.   This is not entirely fair but it is not real far from the mark.

I have for sometime wanted to read one of her plays and I was very glad to find a rather short one (under twenty pages) in For the Love of Ireland:  A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers by Susan Cahill.  Gregory wrote a lot of plays, all of which were preformed at the Abbey Theater in Dublin (which was largely run on donations from Gregory).    I am glad I read this play and would like to read some of her short stories based on her research into Irish folktales.

"The Rising of the Moon", first preformed in 1907 at the Abbey Theater, is a very simple work with only two real important characters.  One is a police sergeant, with some of his men, who are on the look out for a leading member of an organization seeking Ireland's freedom from English rule.  The other is the man they are seeking.   As the play opens the sergeant and his men are looking for good places to put up wanted posters.  There is a hundred pound reward for the capture of the man, a lot of money to most people then.   One of the policemen says that anybody on the force who captures him is sure to get promoted.   The sergeant explains to his men that they are doing very important work in keeping the public order.

The sergeant sends his men on their way to put up wanted posters all over town.  A man dressed in old clothes comes along and the sergeant demands to know who he is and what he is doing walking about.  The man explains that he is Jimmy Walsh, a ballad singer.  It is interesting that the sergeant speaks the king's English but the ballad singer speaks in  Irish dialogue, or at least Irish dialect as Lady Gregory from a very Anglo/Irish patrician background, saw it.   It comes across now as a little patronizing.  The man begins to sing a ballad and the sergeant says "stop that noise".   As I know not to many people are ever going to read this play (and even less this post!) I will tell the ending.  The sergeant figures out that the man is the wanted  person and he lets him go.

I am glad I read this play and will in time read more of her work and perhaps I will read Colm Toibin's book on her.  I have read his short story based on her, "Silence" and will post on it soon.

You can download a lot of her work, including her dramas, from Manybooks.

Mel u

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (1904, translated by Julian West)


My Prior Posts on Chekhov

The Cherry Orchard is  the last of Anton Chekhov's  (1860 to 1904-Russia) plays and in fact one of his very last works.     Many regard it as among his best work.   I first  heard of it many years ago when I read as a teenager The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman.     I have posted a number of times on Chekhov so I will be quite brief in my comments on The Cherry Orchard.   

The play is set on the estate of an aristocratic woman.   The pride of her estate and the whole region is the beautiful cherry orchard on the property.   The owner of the estate, a widow, has been living in France for the last five years, ever since her young son drowned.    News reaches her daughter that her mother has tried to kill herself so she and her governess go to bring her back to the estate.

When the widow arrives back on her estate she finds a very bad situation.   It is about to be sold at public auction for unpaid debts.   A former serf on the estate, now a successful merchant devises a plan, and it sounded like a very good one to me.    Sell of parcels of the estate for the construction of houses or summer cottages.   This will allow all the debts to be paid and the family to stay on the estate.   The only problem is the cherry orchard must be cut down.   The widow will not allow this.

In the final act, the former surf is jubilantly announcing that he has bought the estate on which is father, grandfather and himself were once serfs, little more than slaves.    The family has no real idea what they will do other than perhaps live with relatives.

The Cherry Orchard  is about a society in transition.   The old order is crumbling and in clinging to the past which  allow it to be destroyed.  

Historically, serfs were freed in 1861.   Serfs were allowed to become merchants and a new class began to arise.   Once many estate owners lost their free labor of the serfs, they could no longer run run them at a profit.

The Cherry Orchard  is very well worth reading.   It is a canon status work for sure.    You can easily find it online.

I hope to read Three Sisters soon.



Mel u

The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol

The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol (1842)

A Very Funny Play

Prior Posts on Nikolai Gogol

The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol (1809 to 1852-Russia-author of Dead Souls) is a  funny drama.   It was a very enjoyable read, easy to follow with sharp  characterizations.  (The version of the play I read -on Dailylit.com-was translated by Thomas Seltzer.   Seltzer -1875 to 1943-was  an American born in Russia who  immigrated along with his parents while he was a young child.    He was a highly regarded translator and founded a publishing company that is credited with introducing the work of D. H. Lawrence to the USA for which he was attacked by puritanical groups.)


The plot is pretty simple.   The mayor and other officials in a small Russian town are thrown into a state of panic when they get an anonymous tip that an inspector general has been sent to do a secret investigation of how the town and the surrounding area are governed.   


The find out that two weeks ago a stranger from St. Petersburg has checked into a local hotel.   They at once assume he is the dreaded Czarist inspector general.   A bad word from him could mean Siberia!    We quickly learn the stranger at the inn is not the inspector general.  He  is just a civil servant with a wild imagination.   All of the officials, especially the mayor and the governor, begin making up to the alleged inspector.   At first the man, Khlestatov,  is so conceited that he thinks it is all because he is just such a quality person.   The mayor and the governor both explain they are very honest men, just taking the minimum bribes so as not to offend anyone.   Khlestatov moves into the house of the mayor.    He begins to request large loans from the mayor and other officials.   He even begins a romance with the mayor's daughter after he moves into his house.   The false inspector decides on the advise of his valet, that he needs to leave town.   The mayor chases after him convinced once his daughter marries the inspector general he will be untouchable.   


I will leave the rest of the plot untold.  


There was a 1949 movie starring Danny Kaye based on this play.   It has been a while since I have seen it but I recall it as funny but overacted.   I would like to see it again now.   


In October I will be posting on two earlier short works of fiction by Gogol for The Classics Circuit.  


I enjoyed this a lot.   This is not a "heavy" thinking type of drama where people launch into 30 sentence long speeches about the nature of God or such.   It is fun and whatever else you get  from it is your bonus.   


Mel u

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett-Japanese Literature and Beckett

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1949, a play in two acts)

Most Important Drama  of the 20th Century
Japanese Literature and Beckett

Irish Literature on The Reading Life




"There is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement. Here we do accept a disparity between intention and result. I am speaking, obviously, of a style of personal existence as well as of a style in art; but the examples had best come from art. Think of Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka, Artaud, think of most of the important works of art of the 20th century, that is, art whose goal is not that of creating harmonies but of overstraining the medium and introducing more and more violent, and unresolvable, subject-matter. This sensibility also insists on the principle that an oeuvre in the old sense (again, in art, but also in life) is not possible. Only "fragments" are possible. "-Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag


I think this is perfectly applicable to Waiting for Godot.

During Irish Literature Week I  I did a post on two very strange short stories by Samuel Beckett (1906 to 1989-Ireland-Nobel Prize 1969).   I really enjoyed the experience of reading the stories and left them with the feeling they were expressing something quite profound.   Unfortunately I had no idea what that was.   My post on these short stories was the least viewed of my 19 posts for the week.   


Waiting for Godot has, as far as my limited research tells me, has no rivals for the title of most important dramatic work of the 20th century.   (I am glad I read Ubo Roi by Alfred Jarry before reading this.)    I was pondering how to post on the work.   I could, of course, rattle on about the themes of the work-absurd universe, European values in disarray, etc.   Instead I will just make a few observations.


Often it seems to be said that the lead characters are tramps.   Beckett said he had no such idea in mind.   There is one reference to one of the characters asking the other where they slept last night suggesting he had no home.   Maybe this is part of where the idea comes from.   I think Waiting for Godot is a very Irish literary work.


  Part of the Irish tradition involves characters in stories and plays swapping exaggerated barbed insults at each other.    In  many of the fables and short stories of Ireland we encounter strangers having deep conversations with each other.   The famines and the times of troubles created many wanderers.    A wanderer along an Irish highway might be a sage, a fairy in disguise, or an evil spirit of some kind.    People do not quite carry on conversations but have linked monologues.    Post WWII Europe produced millions of wanderers, lost souls out on the highway.    Those still in their comfortable homes (perhaps kept at the compromise of their values) liked to see the wanderer as but a tramp.   It is very hard to admit he may know important truths you do not.


In my post on Kenzaburo Oe's incredible When He Himself Shall Wipe Away my tears (I am seeing more and more the French roots of the Japanese novel) I said


"There is a long established literary tradition of using the insane to say what cannot be accepted by those in fully sunlit worlds.    The narrator of  The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears has very deep roots in western culture.    His ancestors were in the plays of Euripides, his great grandfather was Dostoevsky's  underground man,   he speaks through Crazy Jane.   Oe has stated that he has come to understand the meaning of his own works through reading the poetry of William Butler Yeats."


Waiting for Godot is firmly in this tradition.


I think the best way to first read Waiting for Godot is just to enjoy the wonderful and crazy conversations, try to get inside the personalities of Vladimir and Estragon, read the long passages slowly,   wonder who Godot is and why they are waiting for him but really just enjoy it.    


You can read it online here


Readers of Japanese literature should read this work for sure.   I see strong echos now of Beckett in the plays of Yukio Mishima.   I think Beckett probably owes his own debt in turn to classic Japanese theater. 


Please let is know of your experience with Beckett 


Mel u

Androcles and the Lion by George Bernard Shaw

Androcles and the Lion by George Bernard Shaw (1912)

An Aesop's Fable Brought to the Stage

George Bernard Shaw (1856 to 1950-Ireland) is most known now as the author of the play, Pygmalion, on which the movie My Fair Lady was based.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1925 and an Oscar in 1938, the only person to have done both.   He was a tremendously productive writer with more than 60 dramas and countless articles and essays.   He was also very active in social causes.    

The story line of Androcles and the Lion is considered to have been one of Aesop's fables.    I think almost everyone knows the basic plot.   There has been a movie based on it and I have seen it in cartoons.   Androcles, a Christian, comes upon a lion in the wilderness and pulls a thorn out of his foot.   Androcles is sent by the Romans to the Colosseum to be killed by a lion, etc.  

Shaw does a great job filling out details in the story.   We meet his wife and we kind of like her but she is a real person for sure.   We see the attitudes of the Romans toward the Christians.   There are some very good conversations about religion between the Roman guards and the condemned Christians.   All a Christian has to do to escape the lions is to swear he believes in the Roman gods.   A Roman officer tries to explain to Androcles and his wife that even he does not belief in the gods, it is just a formality so why not swear.   

The play is interesting and an enjoyable read.   I liked the stage descriptions a really lot.   The play is pushing Shaw's social agenda but it is entertainment first.    

I read this at Dailylit.com.   As a drama I think it could be preformed in well under two hours.   It is not a heavy read or at all abrasive.    

I think most people will enjoy this play and be glad they read it.   It is not one of Shaw's major works and did not change the history of drama or anything like that but it is very well written with some great conversations and the characters seem real to me.

The next drama I will read will be Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett probably to be followed by The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov.

Mel u

Miss Julie by August Strindberg

Miss Julie by August Strindberg (1888, translated  by Edwin Bjoerkman)

An Intense Drama of Character

August Strindberg (1849 to 1912-Sweden) was a very prolific and influential playwright.     Miss Julie is  the first of his works I have read.

Miss Julie has only three characters, and one of them is only on stage for a very brief time.   It takes place on the estate of a count, though he never appears.   The entire action of the play is in a series of intense conversations between the count's daughter Julia and Jean who is her father's footman.  (A footman normally was the senior servant in a large household, second to the butler.   He often personally attends the  master of the household.)   Jean is quite well read and has seen more of the world than one would expect for his position.   Julia is the spoiled apple of her widowed father's eye.   She was raised to thing of herself as the equal of men, a daring concept at the time.

Julia is sexually attracted to Jean.   He knows this is something he should not pursue as it could cost him his job.   Strindberg is pretty open for the time in letting us know that Julia and Jean have slept together.    The real issue is that neither can forget the dynamics of power in their situation.   Each one struggles to both love the other without reservations and to achieve domination in the relationship.

Miss Julia is also very much about social classes in 19th century Sweden.   I think it would take a quite good actor and actress to preform this drama.   The finance of Jean, a cook in the household has a very brief part.   It is basically one long conversation of Jean and Miss Julia concerning their relationship.

Imagine a Jerry Seinfeld episode featuring Elaine having a very intense conversation with her on and off again mechanic boyfriend and now imagine this directed by the great Swedish movie direct Ingmar Bergman in a setting where the mechanic cannot escape Elaine and you get the idea.

I read this via Dailylit.com.   You can easily find it online.   I am glad I read this work and will in time read, I hope, more of his plays.  

The next drama I post on will be George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion.
After that I will read and post on Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot,  then The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov and I will try my luck with Gogol's The Inspector General.   I am really enjoying reading these late 19th century-early 20th century European dramas and am open to suggestions as to what to read next.
Mel u

The Playboy of the Western World by John Synge

The Playboy of the Western World (1907)
Riders to the Sea (1904)

Two Dramas by one of Ireland's Premier Playwrights

"And that enquiring man John Synge comes next"-W. B. Yeats

John Synge (Dublin, Ireland, 1871 to 1909) is most famous for his drama The Playboy of the Western World.     The title of the play has become an international cliche.    (There is good article on his life, work and influence here).    He was a co-founder of the famous Abbey Theater and an associate of many of the literary greats of the period.

In his day his plays were considered quite daring in their content.

I am very glad I decided to read both of these works.  The Playboy of the Western World would probably take at the tops two hours to preform on the stage and Riders to the Sea  under thirty minutes.

The Playboy of the Western World is set in County Mayo on the western coast of Ireland.   This is what "western world" means.   The action takes place in a pub.,   The central character, the playboy, tells the patrons of the pub that he is on the run because he has killed his father.   The atmosphere of the bar is beautifully done down to the wild looking publicans daughter who is quite taken with the young playboy.   It turns out that he is only pretending to have killed his father to give himself status.   

I loved the dialect and the vocabulary  used in this work.   I think done well it would be beautiful to hear.    It also brings home how important having a good story to tell was in Ireland and the role of the pub in Irish life at the time.   

Riders to the Sea is a brief one act drama.   It is set in the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland.   These rugged islands became the last refuge for many Catholics during the invasion by Cromwell.   A great many of the residents make their living from the sea.   The most important character is an older woman, Maurya, who has lost her husband, her father in law, and five sons to fishing accidents.   They went to the sea and never returned.  This is a profoundly sad work.   

You can easily find these works online.   I read them both via dailylit.com.   They are very much worth the time it takes to read them.   I think you need to read both to get an accurate understanding of the work of Synge.

The next drama I post on will be Miss Julia by August Strindberg, followed by The Countess Cathleen by W. B. Yeats.   

Mel u

The Seagull by Anton Chekhov

The Seagull  by Anton Chekhov  (1896, translated by Constant Garnett)

Chekhov's First Major Drama

My prior posts on Chekhov

In addition to being the consensus world's greatest short story writer, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904-Russian-there is some background information on him in my prior posts) had a major influence on the development of the modern theater.   He wrote four major plays.   Last week I posted on his Uncle Vanya, which I greatly enjoyed.   I am going to keep this post very short as a lot of what I said about Uncle Vanya applies well to The Seagull (and also I am getting backed up in my reviews!)

As Chekhov has only four major dramas  it makes sense to read them in order of  first performance.   Also The Seagull seems somewhat autobiographical as one of the characters is a short story writer.   

There are four main characters in The Seagull.   The play is about their relationships and their conversations about the nature of acting and writing.   One of the character is a young woman trying to become an actress.   Another is a still attractive but past her glory days actress and her adult son, an artistically self conscious playwright.    The most interesting character was a famous short story writer who does not feel his work represents the kind of art he can produce.   There are some very interesting long conversations about the nature of acting and writing that almost seem like Chekhov talking to us directly.

I read The Seagull at Dailylit.com.   You can easily find it online lots of places.  

I hope to read his Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard soon.



Mel u

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen (1881)

Most Important Dramatist Since Shakespeare?

Cold versus Warm Weather Writers

Henrik Ibsen (1828 to 1906-Norway-there a good background article on him here) is widely considered, based on my quick post read research, the most important dramatist since Shakespeare.   His dramas are kin to the novels of Emile Zola in that they attempt to strip away the mask of  conventional morality to uncover the hidden motives of greed, envy and lust below the surface of life.   In his times, his plots were a scandal.   Ghosts was the first of his dramas I have read though I have seen movies based on them.  Ibsen is a hugely influential writer and I will be reading more of his work.

I have been thinking for sometime on how the weather in which the writer of or the presumed audience for a literary work shapes it.   I first mentioned this in my post on  Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner when I said it was a "cold climate book".    I do not see someone raised in a tropical environment without long  harsh winters during which  everything turns brown or grey and  where going outside is a great chore relating to this closed in world.   I think Ibsen is very much a cold climate writer.   He comes from and writes for a world  in which it is normal to spend months inside in oppressively heated small spaces and where just going outside can be a threat to your survival.    

Ghosts is a drama about a widow, Helen Alving, her adult son Oscar (a painter), a pastor, a carpenter and his daughter.   The daughter works as a maid for Mrs Alving.   The maid thinks the carpenter is her father but in reality the father was the late husband of Mrs Alving, Captain Alving (a sea captain).  As the play opens  Mrs Alving is talking to her long term advisor  the Pastor  and tells him she wants to start and orphanage so she can spend all the money her husband left her so there will be none left to pass on to the son.   The husband was very promiscuous and the maid is in fact his daughter.    Captain Alving had an affair with another maid many years ago and she is probably the mother of the maid (these once shocking plots do not really scandalize us to much more now as we can hear much worse in the TV news every day about celebrities and politicians.).    Captain Alving continued is his behavior all his life but Mrs Alving could not leave him for fear of scandal.   To make it all worse, she finds out that her son Oscar has inherited syphilis from this father and is in love with the maid without knowing she is his half-sister.   There is an impending mercy killing or assisted suicide at the close of the drama.  

In its day, the mere mention of a venereal disease was considered the most horrible bad taste.   I think the play is still read and preformed for what it tells us about how lies and misdeeds in family lives can be like ghosts that haunt us and future generations.

Anyone seriously into modern drama or who even took a class in it in college has probably already read an Ibsen play.    Literary autodidacts should certainly at some point read his work.    I will be reading more of his work.        
If you enjoy an occasional Ingmar Bergman movie, then you will like Ghosts. 


I read this via Dailylit.com.    No translator credit was given.   You can easily find it online. 

It is part of Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan.

There is a very good post on the play at Things Mean a Lot where you can see how the past permeates the future in this work.   Rebecca Reid has an excellent post on this and The Doll's House in which she describes in some detail how the icy weather of Norway plays a big part in  Ghosts.

The next dramatic work I read will be The Seagull by Anton Chekhov.

Do you have a favorite 18th or 19th century drama?

Do you think growing up in harshly cold environment inclines a writer toward a tragic dark view of life?  

Mel u
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