January Conference 1999
THEATRE
: ANCIENT & MODERN
Return
to contents
Profound
Ambiguities in Sophocles' and Anouilh's Antigone
Dr
Jan Parker, Open University, U.K.
Introduction
One of the themes
running through the 'Performance' strand of this Theatre:
Ancient and Modern Conference has been how to categorise,
record, value different kinds of versions of classical plays.
Production data bases, such as at those at the Open University
and at Oxford, force the issue into the light - unless one gives
up all attempt to record 'faithfulness', there has to be some
way of classifying the relationship between a text and its translation
or modern re-performance. Yet how can one start to record faithfulness?
And in any case, faithfulness to what? To the original performance?
The original conditions of performance? To the literal text?
Translation Studies,
aware that translations have long been seen as the inferior
servant to the creating original, have variously and ingeniously
argued that a translation is a transformation of the original
text, a revivification, a re-imagining, a re-creation. The old
adage that in choosing a translation, as in choosing a wife,
the choice is between beauty and fidelity, is as unfashionable
as it is politically incorrect.
Those who have access
to the original text nevertheless owe a duty to those who do
not, by explaining in what sense the modern version represents
the original. Some schemes have been proposed - a scale of 1
to 10, with 1 being a performance in the original language,
2 one based on a literal translation and 10 being a modern play
loosely based on an ancient one. The play I want to talk about
was specifically mentioned as falling in category 10; I want
to put the cat among the pigeons by suggesting that in some
ways it is more 'faithful' than one that falls squarely into
category 2.
Profound Ambiguities
Margaret Williamson
has told an anecdote[1] about her
collaboration with Timberlake Wertenbaker on the translation
of Sophocles' Antigone for the Royal Shakespeare Company
(The Thebans: Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus at Colonnus and Antigone
by Sophocles translated and adapted by Timberlake Wertenbaker
(Faber and Faber: London and Boston, 1992). Explaining the complexities
of philia (friendship, love, alliance, family bond)[2]
and how Sophocles continually played along the spectrum of emotion
and kin-bond connoted by the term, she wanted Wertenbaker to
reproduce that complexity in their translation. Wertenbaker
refused, despite taking the linguistic point, because it would
'confuse the audience' - the simple rule being that complexity
makes bad theatre.
But the complexity
of philia in the original makes good theatre -
it is Antigone's intense focus on one part of the verbal spectrum
covered by philia and exclusion of the rest that complicates
the simply good action of burying her brother. It is her emotional
devotion to the bond of philia (=kin bond) when it applies
to her dead philos brother yet her lack of philia
(=warm emotion) towards her living kin, Ismene and to the philos-to-be
Haemon, that makes her a complex figure.
And likewise, while
no one could disagree with Creon giving primacy to philia
as the bond binding citizens together to oppose echthroi
(=enemies of the state), his lack of respect for philia
as a family bond, his harsh treatment of his living and dead
philoi - Ismene, Antigone, Haemon, Polyneices - complicates
his position.
This is a polarised
play, a play that leads to strongly-held judgements - a sure-fire
seminar success because one can always get students to express
their partiality. One of the mechanisms that draws the audience
into siding with or against Creon or Antigone is their various
appeals to partial definitions of philia - as in a law
court, the audience is drawn into judging the merits of their
case. The polarity lies in the verbal as well as the dramatic
fabric - philia for Antigone means, reasonably, family
bond but her interpretation makes her seem excessive if not
downright obsessive. Likewise Creon reasonably interprets philoi
as the state's allies: not for him, he says, to put family bonds
before state ones because the state, the polis, is that
which makes philia possible (Ant. 190). (At a
time when the old family clans had a mafia-like private network
with clan members in other states, that could and had undermined
the Athenian state, this line could have raised a democratic
cheer.) Yet his understanding of philia is, too, seen
as an appropriation - he takes any attempt to revalue Polyneices
as a philos, kin member, as a personal threat to his
authority to distinguish, for now and eternity, between philoi
and echthroi.
It is a polarised
play, but the polarities do not necessarily line up - the character
with the clearer argument does not necessarily have the better
case; the more sympathetic character is not necessarily right.
The polarisation complicates the issues rather than aligning
them neatly into black white, right wrong.
Wertenbaker refused
to try to convey the multiple valence of philia, the
appropriations, power play and partial uses of the same word
(e.g. by using 'kin/kind) instead using dear/loved ones/brother
as was easiest. I see a larger significance in this disagreement.
Williamson was hoping for a modern version that would, in this
respect, remain true to the complexity of the original; Wertenbaker's
implicit reply was that the primary claim on the translator
is that of the needs of the contemporary audience, that the
priorities of reception are paramount. And the result of that,
I propose, is a falsifying simplification of the play.
The history of the
reception of the Antigone is full of such simplifying-outs.
Steiner's monumental study, Antigones,[3]
has demonstrated how often Antigone has been played and understood
as the heroic martyr, Christ-like figure, the archetypal representative
of the individual's stand against the claims of the state (a
burning issue in the nineteenth century).
I am suggesting
that the decision to simplify-out is a translating decision
that goes far beyond the verbal. That is to say that we can
find in the original Greek play a structural complexity analogous
to the linguistic play on the word philia to which Williamson
was referring; in both, to simplify is to falsify. The simple
dynamic with which the play opens - that Antigone must bury
her brother - is, from the start, set in counterpoint with other,
complicating explanations and valuations of her action. And,
as with the complexity of philia, a translation that
hides that complexity aligns itself with many previous examples
where the drama has been sold short in the name of clarity.
Antigone is seen
within the play as anything but a simply heroic figure. For
Ismene, she is trying to do the impossible because she is in
love with the impossible (Ant. 90) : she is unwomanly
and going against nature; she is being extreme (Ant.
68). For Creon she is hubristic, rebellious, hard-natured, over
full of thumos/passion. For the chorus she is, variously,
the inheritor of Oedipus' polluted nature and bound to death,
an example of that Greek conception of a perilous 'going too
far' that 'falls on the step of dikê' (right, justice.
Ant. 653), and - perhaps worst of all - a woman who fights
against and usurps the male role of Creon. She is given no simple
heroic platform from which to explain or defend her action;
going to her death, she seems to have accepted the chorus' hostile
account of her action as driven by something other than purity
of motive and the primacy of the claim that the dead must be
buried. See, for example, the interchanges at lines 853-75:
Chorus
You went to the furthest verge of daring, but there you found
the
high seat of dikê and fell.
Perhaps you are paying for you father's pain
Antigone
You have touched on my darkest thought, grief for my father
and for the entire destiny that adheres to us, the famous
House of Labdacus.
I am of them, one wretched nature. . .
Chorus
You showed reverence where you should but he who properly
has power may not be thwarted. You, self-willed, were brought
down by your temper.
In her first reference
to her act, Antigone had called it a holy wrongdoing (Ant.
74); her sense of the paradoxical, double-edged position that
she is in returns in her final speech before she is led away:
- pious, I am
convicted of impiety (Ant. 925)
In response, the
chorus say:
'The same storm
gusts of the soul control her' (Ant. 929-30).
By the time we get
here, it is, pace Wertenbaker, difficult to hold onto
the simple issue - that the dead must be buried and that it
is the basic right and duty of Antigone to perform it. Her act
is interpreted - received, if you will, within the play - in
a manner which is complicating and plural.
The primacy of the
simple claim has become lost in a tissue of psychological complication,
rationalisation and self-explanation. In addition to the single
issue of Polyneices' burial, has been added the tragedy of Antigone/anti-gone=anti-generation
- Oedipus' daughter, she who will 'not reproduce', who is against
generation, who must not marry Haemon but must die.
The history of critical
response to her act has frequently been an attempt to unify,
to clarify - if necessary by excising difficult sentiments.
One of the most written-about speeches in any Greek play is
her assertion in her last speech, above, that she would not
have performed this act for a husband or child:
'One husband gone,
I might find another or a child from a new man
in the first child's place, but with my parents hid away in
death,
no brother, ever, could spring up for me.' (Ant. 905-11)
Earlier editors
simply excised the speech as incongruous: that is, as offending
against certain contemporary ideals of womanhood. From where
we are sitting now, it is relatively easy to see how such excisions
offer more to reception studies than to the critical analysis
of Sophocles' play. But debate about that speech continues,[4]
at a more sophisticated level, drawing on models as diverse
as archaic Greek anthropology and twentieth-century feminist
epistemology, but still striving to make the speech congruent
with a simple interpretation of Antigone's action. It is cut
altogether from Wertenbaker's acting version, presumably on
the same criterion that it would 'confuse the audience': here
again, in a situation where there are competing claims between
fidelity to the complexities of Sophocles' original, and the
contemporary audience's need for clarification of the issues,
Wertenbaker goes decisively for the latter.
In many places the
Williamson-Wertenbaker translation is all that could be wished
for - well crafted English catching the poetry and nuance of
the Greek - and certainly scores a 2 in terms of closeness of
language. But in terms of closeness of conception, of translation
of dramatic shape and dynamics, its score, I propose, should
be less favourable. It is possible to be literal while not being
faithful.
As with many Greek
plays, the complexity of the original conception, of dramatic
portrayal of myth, has in modern productions been replaced by
a simplified version of the myth. This simplification is often
pointed up by design aspects underlining the univocal message
of the production: Antigone dressed in white, for example and
the location of the production in a historical period of tyranny.'
This is not Sophocles' Antigone but 'Saint Antigone' - an iconic
figure who stands in production after production as the heroic
woman defying the male militaristic state.[5]
The memorable BBC
production, for example, with Juliet Stevenson as Antigone and
John Shrapnel as Creon (not to mention John Gielgud as Teiresias),
dressed Creon in jackboots and had Antigone brought into a headquarters
marked out by the swastika.[6]
The association of the imagery of the Third Reich with the Antigone
story seems the ultimate simplifying out - Antigone in diaphanous
white vs the Fascist dictator.
However, I now want
to turn to Anouilh's Antigone, which was produced at
a time when the Third Reich was an actuality, not a theatrical
metaphor, and when the claims and costs of heroic resistance
were a similarly pressing reality. The choice of Antigone, by-now
the archetypal resistance figure, for a production in Vicky
France would seem to invite a simplifying of Sophocles' version
of the myth in order to make a political and ethical point.
It is true that the classic status of Sophocles' play was instrumental
in getting Anouilh's 'version' a performance licence; it is
also true that the contemporaneity of the language and production
and the dressing of the guards in the raincoats associated with
the State Secret Police created an uproar in the theatre and
turned Antigone into a Resistance heroine. Yet, the depth and
complexity of Anouilh's interpretation of Sophocles' play and
the ambiguity of his version - politically, ethically and theatrically
- seem to me to make this play a pre-eminent example of a fidelity
beyond literalness.
Anouilh's version
of the story was produced with the permission of the classically
educated authorities of the Vichy government, in occupied France
in February 1944; in L'Humanité of 12 October
1944 Créon was assimilated to the pro-Vichy party and
at the same time Pol Gaillard published a left-wing attack
on the play. However the play ran long after the Liberation
to packed houses, hailed as the Resistance play. Audiences
in the theatre sympathised with Antigone (played, affectingly,
by Anouilh's wife of the time, Monelle Valentin); Antigone's
'Non' was famous as a cry of resistance, in all senses. Despite
Anouilh's claims that he was an artisan, not a thinker, and
that 'Je n'ai pas de pensées politiques. Mes refus restent
des refus de concierge.'(Paris-Match, 21 Oct. 1972),
the play generated immense controversy.[7]
The play was taken by some as an act of collaboration, but by
others as an act of resistance - an unclarity that marks out
his version from previous ones and from, for example, the BBC
production mentioned above. It therefore makes a curious text
from the point of view of reception studies, because it represents
an ambiguous and elusive witness as to how the Antigone story
was appropriated at this cultural and historical moment - unlike,
for example, Brecht's well documented 1948 version.[8]
Or the many re-workings of Antigone at this time of historical
and cultural conflict.[9] For the
theatre historian John Harvey, the play's tumultuous reception
obscured its true status by reducing its subject to a political
conflict between 'gauleiter Créon [and] the foolishly
idealistic heroine. Ambiguity, which in more normal times may
enrich a work of art, now undermined a writer's position'[10]
: Harvey thus identifies its reception as the mechanism of falsifying
oversimplification.
Taken as pro-Vichy
by those who read the play and saw Créon as dominant
(the classical scholars who were advising the Vichy government)
and by the Communist-controlled newspaper Les Lettres Françaises
(Sept. 1944) and L'Humanité (12 Oct. 1944) yet
taken in the theatre as pro-Resistance, the play's philosophic
as well as political stance is disputed. It was taken as an
existential statement by J-P Sartre:
Anouilh's Antigone
is not a character at all. . .She represents a naked
will, a pure, free choice; in her there is no distinguishing
between
passion and action. . .[For] the young playwrights of France.
. . man is
to be defined as a free being, entirely indeterminate, who
must choose
his own being when confronted with certain necessities.[11]
Yet it was declared
by Anouilh to be a piece of entertainment rather than a statement
of principle or work of philosophic exposition. [12]
This is a richly
ambiguous play. But, precisely because of its political, philosophic
and dramatic openness, because of the shifting ethical structures
adumbrated in Anouilh's play, I want to argue that it encompasses
a complexity concerning the nature of Antigone's action which
is directly comparable to that which I found in the Sophocles.
And in engaging with the dynamics of Sophocles' Antigone,
it is in that sense a vital and faithful translation of Sophocles'
play if not of Sophocles' words.
This is not at all
to deny that Anouilh's play is, from first to last, a distinctively
modern play, thoroughly of its time. We are given a wealth of
extraneous, contemporary sounding information about the characters
and their past.
Antigone is a thin
dark girl whose family didn't take her seriously. Haemon was
first attached to Ismene:
Everything combined
to attract him to Ismene - his love of dancing and sport,
of happiness and success. His senses, too, for Ismene is much
prettier than Antigone [sic]. . .and then he went and sought
out Antigone and asked her to be his wife. She looked up at
him with those sober eyes of hers, unsurprised, smiled a sad
little smile. . .and said 'yes'. (Five Plays, p.80)[13]
Créon is
'wrinkled, tired':
Before, in the
reign of Oedipus, when Créon was only the most influential
man at court, he loved music and fine buildings, would spend
hours prowling round Thebes' little antique shops. But Oedipus
and his sons are dead. And Créon, forsaking his books
and his collector's pieces, has rolled up his sleeves and
taken their place. Sometimes, when he's worn out, he wonders
whether it's not pointless, being a leader of men.. . ..Then
next morning, he's faced with particular problems to be solved
he just gets up, like a labourer starting a day's work. (Five
Plays, p.80)
Antigone, the night
before she did the deed, dressed up in grown up clothes, wore
Ismene's makeup and perfume, and tried to get Haemon to sleep
with her. This is very much of its time and of its culture!
Antigone is given
a rounded, realist characterisation and personal history: we
learn how she was always the alienated, aspiring, sensitive,
thin child (unlike the pretty Ismene), who is worried about
the future of her pet dog, who wept because 'there were so many
insects and plants in the fields that it was impossible to collect
them all'. She is whimsical and annoyingly childish. This kind
of characterisation clearly has the tradition of the realist
novel behind it; it also draws on the perhaps peculiarly French
type of the ingénue or naïf.
It is formally very
different from Sophocles: instead of the continuously present
Greek chorus, we have a chorus who makes one pronouncement about
the nature of tragedy, and a meta-theatrical narrator who speaks
a prologue in which he introduces to the audience the actors
who are about to become the characters in the play:
She's thinking
she's going to die. . .But there's nothing to be done. Her
name is Antigone, and she's going to have to play her part
right through to the end. (Five Plays, p.79)
The narrator foretells
the outcome, not through any prophetic power, but because he
knows the script the characters must follow.
There is also a
thoroughly un-Sophoclean scepticism as to the status of ethical
values. This is strikingly expressed in the characterisation
of Créon as a pragmatist, not an ideologue, who refuses
to condemn Antigone, who tries hard to save her from the consequences
of her action, and who perfectly understands that the distinction
between the good and the bad brother, the patriot hero and the
traitor to his country, is entirely arbitrary. This Créon
is the servant not the master of the state.
There is no equivalent
to what in Sophocles comes after Antigone's troubled and troubling
exit to death: the revelation by Teiresias that the issue was
after all that simple, that Polyneices must be buried and that
the gods are angy and polluted. Indeed, Anouilh's Créon
would rather bury the body - he does not like the smell, and
does not think either brother worth attention. But Realpolitik
dictates that one should be honoured, one castigated - Thebes
needs the smell of putrefaction to bring them to realities.
The catastrophe
comes, simply, with Haemon's suicide, with Antigone's determinaton
to die: i.e. there is no metaphysical pronouncement on the ethics
of the burial, no access to a realm of absolute value.
This is a very different
play from Sophocles', not in any sense a translation with the
literalness of Wertenbaker's. Where Anouilh's version does,
however, map precisely onto Sophocles' is in its treatment of
the nature of Antigone's act. This is not allowed a significance
which can operate as the central dynamic of the play. The problematising
qualities in Sophocles, which I discussed earlier, are strongly
replicated in the long scene between Créon and Antigone,
in which Créon persuades Antigone of the ethical baselessness
of her action: not only are the brothers indistinguishable in
death (they have been trampled to pulp and one was pulled out
as 'the hero Eteocles', the other left), but in life each was
as vile as the other. Moreover, the ritual of burial is agreed
to be an empty form.
This amplifies the
effect in Sophocles of the burial having to be done twice over,
repeated in daylight when it is sure to be interrupted. In Anouilh,
as in Sophocles, it is not the act itself which is central,
or which settles anything; instead its meaning is evaluated
and re-evaluated at almost inordinate length - it takes about
twenty five intense minutes to act the Créon-Antigone
scene. In Anouilh, Antigone, exposed to a full consciousness
of this ethical uncertainty, is at one point persuaded by Créon,
extraordinarily, to turn aside from her purpose - to go up to
her room, marry Haemon. In her final scene, even, she is capable
of saying: 'I don't know any more what I'm dying for' (Five
Plays p.133).
And yet she dies,
she plays out the role of Antigone to the end, as the narrator
puts it. Why then does Antigone have to die? Because her name
is Antigone, as the narrator says? Because she is bound into
what the chorus describes as tragic necessity, the working out
of the great mechanical trap which brings rest and completion
because it is so free from uncertainty or struggle?
Nice and neat,
tragedy. Restful, too, because you know there's no lousy hope
left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat in
a trap, with all heaven against you. And the only thing left
to do is shout. . .And to no purpose. In drama you struggle,
because you hope you're going to survive. But tragedy's gratuitous.
Pointless, irremediable. Fit for a king. (Five Plays p.102)
The elegance of
this tragic vision is bought at the price of disembodiment,
such as we also hear in Sophocles when the chorus reminds Antigone
that her death is like Niobe's: 'Yet even in death you will
have your fame, to have gone like a god to your death, living
then dying'; and she replies, 'Why are you mocking me?' (Ant.836-9)
In both plays the chorus offers explanations which are partial,
and which are felt to be partial - a simple tragic vision which
the play goes beyond. In Anouilh, when Antigone rejects Créon's
pragmatist ethic of 'saying yes' to the realities of circumstance
and to such forms of happiness as life can, in practice, afford,
she may be asserting an existentialist freedom ('I needn't if
I don't want to', 'I don't have to do what I don't want to'),
but she may equally be the immature adolescent in flight from
the real. In neither play is there a mediating chorus explaining
the meaning of Antigone's death. Antigone's story is that she
must die; productions from Sophocles onwards have to decide
whether the ambiguity over why, exactly, she must die should
be resolved in the production and performance, or passed to
the audience. Anouilh has chosen to keep faith with Sophocles,
unlike Timberlake Wertenbaker, in passing the ambiguity, and
therefore the disturbing uncertainty, to the audience.
Both plays impel
readers and audiences to resolve the issue; both plays have
generated critical literature offering to settle the matter.
In Anouilh's case, his own writings have been adduced as testimony
to his 'real' intention: e.g. whether it was really right-wing,
whether he was 'really' pro-Vichy. (He wrote pieces for two
unpleasantly anti-semitic, right wing papers: La Gerbe
(14 nov. 1940) and Je suis partout ( 28 feb. 1942) and
biographers cite his 1945 campaign on behalf of his friend Robert
Brasillach, who was executed for collaboration with Germany.)
Such intentionalist debate is an additional means of oversimplification
- the complexity of Anouilh's play's interpretation of Sophocles'
is independent of intention. What is interesting is that at
such a time a play could have opened up such issues, could have
created such controversy. The reason for this is, I think suggested
by Anouilh himself, writing about Brasillach and the political
climate. In his introduction to Brasillach's Collected Plays
Anouilh wrote that Brasillach was executed as an example by
'Créon':
Life would have
doubtless killed him as it killed others. The man
who signed his death warrant preserved him at the very moment
he
thought he was condemning him to disappear. With whatever
words he may intoxicate himself, Créon always loses
in the end.
So it could perhaps
be said that for Anouilh, Créon is an archetype - he
'always' exists - a figure generated in all societies by political
expediency. He is, archetypally, the figure bound within his
time and political system. (Anouilh's prologue sketches out
Créon's future - he will be dispensed with in his turn,
by the system.) 'Creon always loses' because he is finally a
historically contingent figure. On the other hand Antigone,
in his play, refuses to be bound by contingency - she has her
archetype, Sophocles', to tell her that there is a timeless
heroic stance, an infinite heroic status to achieve. On this
reading, the source of the ambiguity is the incommensurability
of the figure bound by contingency and the figure wishing at
all costs to be free of contingency. Antigone longs for the
timeless, for the infinite. She is pushed into her action when
Créon describes life as a series of commonplace pleasures
-
a book you enjoy,
a child playing round your feet,
a tool that fits into your hand, a bench outside your house
to rest on in the evening. (Five Plays p.121)[14]
Antigone's cry 'je
refuse!' comes as she rejects the 'happiness' that Créon
offers, because 'Moi, je veux tout - I want everything'. (p.123).
Anouilh's Antigone, like Sophocles', comes to die by a mixture
of will, obstinacy, chance and because of the exigencies of
the system. In both plays the dynamics that bring about Antigone's
end are finally inexplicable, excessive; they are more than
the consequences of Creon, character or fate. They are, finally,
tragically, 'gratuit'.
Return
to contents page
Endnotes
[1]
Williamson in a seminar talk for the Intercultural Translation
module of the Centre for British and Comparative Cutural Studies
(University of Warwick, 1998).
[2]
philos (pl. philoi, abstract noun philia,
vb. philein) a close friend, loved one, ally, family
member echthros (pl. echthroi, abstract noun echthra, vb. echthairein)
an enemy A Greek man seems to have looked at his society as
divided into 'us'- his philoi - and 'them'- his echthroi. The
division is fundamental, philoi=kith and kin, personal
and political allies, who are to be philein (cherished, benefitted)
vs echthroi=personal and political enemies, who are to
be echthairein (fought against, hated).
[3]
Steiner, George Antigones (Oxford University Press, 1984)
[4]
Blundell, M.W., Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: a Study
in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge University Press,
1989) 134
[5]
I received today the marketing material for Declan Donnellan's
new production of Antigone at the Old Vic: 'Creon. . . encounters
the defiant Antigone. Alone she stands against authority, precipitating
a mighty clash in her battle for individual freedom against
the state. . .' (For a review of this production and details
of cast see The Reception of the Texts and Images of Ancient
Greece in Late Twentieth-Century Drama and Poetry in English
Project Database : http://www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays)
[6]
Details of this production may be accessed using the database
referenced in n.5 above.
[7]
Exhaustively documented by M. Flügge in Refus ou Ordre
Nouveau. Politik, Ideologie und Literatur im Frankreich der
Besatzungszeit 1940-4 am Beispeil der 'Antigone' von Jean Anouilh
(Rheinfelden 1982).
[8]
Bertolt Brecht, Die Antigone des Sophokles. Materialien zur
'Antigone'. and production details in K Völker Brecht:
A Biography, trans. by J. Nowell (New York, 1978) pp323ff.
(see also H. Flashar, Inszenierung der Antike: das griechische
Drama auf der Bühne der Neuzeit 1585-1990 (Munich:Beck,
1991) especially pp. 186ff and M. A. F. Witt, 'Fascist ideology
and theatre under the Occupation : the case of Jean Anouilh',
Journal of European Studies 23, pp. 49-69.
[9]
E.g Robert Garnier's 1580 Antigone, staged for the only
known time in Paris in 1944 and 1945, Marguerite Yourcenar's
1936 'Antigone' and Maurice Druon's 1944 story of Ismene's lover,
Mégarée, sacrificed by and for a rotten society.
[10]
J. Harvey Anouilh: A Study in Theatrics (Yale University
Press 1964) viii.
[11]
From a lecture J-P Sartre 'Forgers des mythes', (tr) Rosamond
Gilder Theatre Arts vol.20 no. 6 (June 1946).
[12]
'Certains me disent démodé en dehors du coup.
On voudrait que je fasse des piéces-à-these, que
j'expose de grands principes. Or, je n'arrive pas à me
prendre assez au serieux.' (Jean Anouilh, Tribune de Genève
12 Dec. 1966).
[13]
All translations from Anouilh Five Plays (Methuen, 1987)
translator Barbara Bray.
[14]
Preface to Complete Works of Robert Brasillach (Club de l'honnête
homme,1964).
Return
to contents
|
Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English