Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English
from c.1970 to the Present  

Project Publications
(including Archived Conference papers)

A Democratic Turn

2009 Democratic Turn Eseminar

1998-2008 Archived topics

Open Seminar Series 2002

Classical Theatre in Modern Scotland - A Democratic Stage?

Lorna Hardwick,
The Open University, UK

Classical drama in Scotland today is noted for its diversity – in the variety of plays and adaptations staged; in the types of theatre and companies, and in the range of audiences attracted. In researching this paper an overview of productions from the last three years yielded a four-page print out! Material just from Greek sources ranged from versions of Oedipus, Medea, Electra and Antigone (including a multi-media dance rock opera) to Achilles (Elizabeth Cook’s poem), a puppet version of Theseus and the Minotaur, The Elektra Cabaret, a One-Man Odyssey and Dig Sappho. Companies included the RSC Fringe, the Craiova Theatre Company of Romania, the Debacle Theatre Company, Double Edge Drama, theatre babel and the State Academic Theatre of Georgia. Venues included the usual places to be found in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: the Royal Lyceum with the Garage, the Bongo Club and the Traverse in Edinburgh; the Old Fruitmarket, Tramway, and Citizens’ in Glasgow and Pittenweem Beach.[1]

Here, I want to focus on some of the main issues for Scottish theatre that are thrown into prominence by its engagement with classical drama and in particular to draw out elements relevant to debate about civic and humanistic values, cultural exchange and language and translation issues.

From my preliminary survey three main points emerged:

1) Greek drama permeates everywhere. It has played a pathfinding role in all tpes of theatre – experimental; student; festival and fringe; epic and classical; commercial. This means that it is closely intertwined with the politics of locale, space and geography, as well as of language and translation. It is noticeable that in contrast with the traditional association in Scotland between Latin and Humanism, on the modern stage it is Greek material (sometimes mediated via Latin, French and Spanish) that has become the basis for the exploration of what, to adapt Davie, I might call the ‘democratic stage’.[2]

2)Scotland has provided a stage for work filtered through the whole spectrum of world performance and translation traditions – French, German, Greek, Eastern European, Japanese. Sometimes these inter-relationships are multiple – for instance translations of modern French adaptations of Greek plays (Anouilh’s Antigone; Giraudoux’s La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu). There has been a stunning performance of Anouilh’s Antigone by the Marjanishvili State Academic Theatre of Georgia, a Noh-inspired version of Medea by Company East, and a series of versions of Antigone by the Tomée Theatre Company of Greece, the last dedicated to George Steiner. Olga Taxidou’s adaptation Medea : A World Apart (1998), which took in the Edinburgh Fringe and an international tour to Sarajevo, Moscow and Warsaw, situated Euripides’ exploration of the images of the outsider in relation to the discourse of the Cold War. In this way, Edinburgh was linked with other festivals, especially the Tbilisi International Festival of Theatre, a post-Soviet attempt to heal divisions after the bitter civil war in Georgia and Abkhazia in the 1990s. Nor, of course, does this stimulus come only from Edinburgh. The Ramshorn in Glasgow recently staged the world premiere of the Cuban version by Antón Arrufat of Seven Against Thebes, which, despite winning a South American Drama prize, had been suppressed since the late 1960s and is an important dramatic text for study of the role of Greek plays in interventionist and post-colonial theatre. [3]

Furthermore, Greek drama has also been the focus of a practical translation project which explores the potential of modern Scots and Welsh to accommodate dramatisations of Greek myth. In this project, which began in 1996, a version of Antigone has been created in Scots and a translation into Welsh is also being undertaken.[4]

3) Classical theatre in Scotland is at the centre of cultural and political debates nationally as well as internationally. For instance, TAG theatre company (Theatre About Glasgow, established 1967) has undertaken a four-year theatre and participatory drama project from 1999 – 2002. This seeks actively to engage young people in Scotland with the democratic process, coinciding with the re-convening of the Scottish Parliament. Unsurprisingly a new version of Antigone was central to the project.[5]

There is also the on-going debate about whether a National Theatre should be established in Scotland. Some say that it exists already (with a small ‘n’ and a small ‘t’); others hope that a National Theatre would involve endowment (better funding); that it could produce an august institution like the Comédie-Française; that it could be dedicated to staging a particularly important corpus of national drama (like the Japanese National Theatre) or that it could lead to the creation of such work (as the Abbey Theatre in Dublin did for Irish drama in the early twentieth century). A National Theatre can give status to a language or theatre tradition which identifies and unites people (like Poland in the eighteenth century). On the other hand, some fear that a National Theatre, in spite of its wish to balance new work and classical revivals, might be shaped by the tourist industry, thereby limiting radical work, and that a National Theatre might conflict with the civic emphasis in other groups.

Various phases of the movement for a Scottish National Theatre have been identified.[6] In 1909 Alfred Wareing’s Scottish Playgoers founded in Glasgow the first Citizens’ theatre in the English-speaking world, a concept which pre-dated the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The Saltire Society published a report in 1948. More recent efforts have centred on the Royal Lyceum in the 1970s, the Scottish Theatre Company in the 1980s and the National Theatre for Scotland Campaign in the 1990s (with a pamphlet ‘The Scottish Stage’ by Donald Smith in 1994). The Scottish Arts Council convened a Steering Group to meet in May 2002 to set a timescale for the launch in 2003/4 of the Scottish National Theatre (two years after the publication of the National Cultural Strategy). The Steering Group was to reconsider the proposed budget of £8 million (earlier in 2002 the Scottish Executive had announced funding of £3.5 million to improve the infrastructure of theatre in Scotland). However, at the time of writing (autumn 2002) the future of the project still looked unclear.

In the rest of this paper I want to look at two examples of recent work on the Scottish stage and to try to draw out ways in which these are emblematic of the features of cultural interaction and of civic and national identity that I outlined above. I shall argue that both, in different ways, are distinctively Scottish but never parochial or inward looking. In their interaction with classical drama they address very different aspects of Greek drama’s alien qualities and of its resonance for the present.

The production of Edwin Morgan’s Phaedra in April 2000 brought together a number of the issues which I have identified. In particular it exemplified the relationship between Scottish theatre and classical theatre in the broadest sense – including French as well as Greek and Roman. In addition, the use of the Scots language had as one of its aims the intention to demonstrate that Scots could take its place as a language of classical theatre. Phaedra was a translation into Scots by Edwin Morgan of the play by Jean Racine first performed in French at the Hotel de Bourgogne on January 1, 1677 under the title Phèdre et Hippolyte (Jacques Pradon’s  rival play with the same name was produced two days later, incorporating some apparent plagiarism). Racine’s Phèdre drew on Seneca’s Phaedra and Euripides’ Hippolytus. Morgan’s Phaedra was staged at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, directed by Kenny Ireland and designed by Isla Shaw. It fits into a tradition of translations of French classical plays into Scots together with Lochhead’s Tartuffe (first staged on 24^th January 1986 at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh), Le Misanthrope (first staged on 22^nd March 2002 at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh)[7] and Morgan’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1992), which blend demotic with literary or traditional Scots to create a dynamic form of theatrical Scots. These in turn draw on the 1920s revival of translation into Scots (fostered by the Scottish Renaissance movement led by C.M. Grieve – Hugh MacDiarmid) in which translation into Scots became an act of cultural politics.[8]

 The association between Scottish cultural politics and classical texts has been close. At the 100^th anniversary conference of the Classical Association of Scotland in Edinburgh in April 2002, Ronald Knox gave a paper on Douglas Young which emphasised the symbiotic relationship between Young’s classical scholarship, his work as a translator and historian and his political activities. This included discussion of Young’s translations of Aristophanes – The Puddocks – frae the auld Greek o Aristophanes [9]and The Burdies – a comedy in Scots verse from the Greek of Aristophanes.[10]Other notable translations into Scots include Bill Dunlop’s Klytemnestra’s Bairns, a version of Aeschylus’ Oresteia performed in Edinburgh in 1991 (Act 1) and in 1993 at the Old Observatory.[11]  Dunlop has discussed the potential and limitations of modern Scots – for example, its lack of vocabulary for discussion of intellectual concepts - in contrast to the benefits of its immediacy. He has also pointed to the potential of literary translation for working across varieties of modern Scots (almost translation within translation) and for widening linguistic experience.[12] Asserting that  ‘Any translation or adaptation into Scots is, perforce, a political act’, Dunlop, who was not working from the Greek text but mainly from the translations by Robert Lowell and Philip Vellacott, described how he ‘intended the use of possibly unfamiliar words when contextualised alongside more familiar words to be a means of mediating between a contemporary and a more literary Scots’. This is a good example of the role of translation in enriching the target language and is paralleled by Douglas Young’s creative use of Scots, which, he emphasised, looked more to Latin and Greek than to Anglicisms when it was necessary to bridge a gap in Scots vocabulary.[13] Dunlop also drew on variants of Scots to communicate what he saw as likely differences in speech among the ancient Greeks in the Oresteia – ‘Orestes, the exile since childhood, speaks differently from his parents and the rest of Argos. Brought up from an early age away from the place of his birth, it seemed natural that Orestes would adopt at least some of the speech patterns and language variant of his new home. Hence Orestes speaks in a form of Scots in which some elements of North-East Scots are present’.[14]

The writers cited above work with a range of modern Scots. Morgan’s work has been further energised by the radical 1960s development of Glaswegian Scots as a vehicle for poetry.[15] In his introduction to his Scots translation of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Morgan discussed the richness of urban Glaswegian for the theatre ‘It is widely spoken, can accommodate contemporary reference... and comes unburdened by the baggage of older Scots which used to be thought suitable for historical plays’.[16] Furthermore, Morgan argued that urban Glaswegian was ‘by no means incapable of the lyrical and the poetic’. This belief in the poetic qualities of the language informed Morgan’s approach to the translation of Phèdre, which in general followed Racine closely line by line. He emphasised the richness of the available vocabulary in Scots in comparison with Racine’s restricted use of words – ‘I wanted to bring out what was really there – a very passionate play … I think people in Britain tend to have a set perception of a French classics as being very cold with restrained style. I want to get away from this and make the characters as real and believable as possible’ (Source: Programme Notes). Morgan decided not to transpose the play into a Scottish context – ‘that is one way of doing it, and it works very well, but I thought I’d do it the other way: keep the characters as they are – that is ancient Greeks – and keep the place – ancient Greece’. The designer conceptualised the translator’s approach in visual terms. The performance space was shell-shaped, built on a level with the Grand Circle (with safety-net). The effect was therefore of theatre-in-the-round, linking the interior and exterior worlds. Isla Shaw commented that ‘as well as the Greek flavour I also wanted to create the feeling of an island or a castle and of the way Phaedra is imprisoned by her emotions, or her fate’ (Source: The Independent12/4/2000.

During the week of the première, a round-table discussion took place in which the translator, Morgan, and the Artistic Director, Ireland, were joined by Professor Peter France (Edinburgh) and Professor Alain Viala (Paris).[17] In discussing Morgan’s approach to the translation, they focused on the particular appeal of Phèdre, widely regarded as the greatest work of French classical tragedy but also a play which speaks directly to modern consciousness. As Morgan put it: ‘she’s a heroine with enormous faults but enormous passions, and the extremity of feeling has come across very strongly to audiences in the last half-century’. Perhaps this is because the play is not just concerned with declared passion but with its underlying energy, including the erotic. Ireland said that he and Gerda Stevenson, who played Phaedra, felt that the Jansenist concerns in Racine’s play had some very Scottish implications in the way that they drew on underlying feelings about what people should and should not do. Ireland commented on Jansenism – ‘If you’re Scottish, then the ‘Wee Free’ Presbyterian Church seems about the closest you can get – the same kind of severe fundamentalism’.[18]

These comparisons also challenge the conventional association between Scots as a theatrical language and its use in comedy. Morgan said that because of the Scots tradition of comic writing (MacDiarmid, Burns, Dunbar, Lindsay), some of the language used would be bound to have comic overtones for the audience.[19] He thought that this helped him to bring out the black humour of the play (for example, when Phaedra laments that she never got Hippolytus into bed). Language was also an issue because, as a largely demotic language, the Scots used by Morgan had working class rather than aristocratic roots. He said: ‘I didn’t know how or if it would work with characters who were very nearly gods, aristocratic characters with a weight of history and legend attaching to them. It gave me problems but I think maybe it was helped by the fact that the demotic Scots had sprinkled into it quite a few other things, bits of French, German, Shakespeare and Burns – and the Shakespeare and Burns quotations are uncannily close to the French text’. Morgan’s claim raises problematic questions about the cultural history and philology of the Scots language, including its relationship with English.[20]

The kind of friction and overlap mentioned by Morgan was also evident in the design and costume of the production of his Phaedra. There was a rejection both of Louis XIV period setting and of outright modern. Instead, there were hints of classical Greek with some modern elements – for example, Theseus wore heavy boots with thick soles, Velcro fastenings and spurs which made him look like a cross between Hermes and a Biker. Both Hippolytus and Theseus were tattooed: Hippolytus had a barbed wire tattoo on his arm, Theseus a prominent tattoo depicting Poseidon and a sea-monster. Together with the leather thongs on his wrists, this added to the ‘macho’ image, reinforced by the physicality of David Rintoul’s performance. Phaedra wore a striking red dress (which in Scottish theatre in spring 2000 seemed to be de rigueur for passionate women; compare Medea’s costume in Liz Lochhead’s version).

The Director’s view was that, although there is a place in the theatre for recreating the style of the classical period, ‘a work of art should be more about the friction between that period and the contemporary … it’s the friction that creates something special. If you started trying to define Scottish culture, it’s something that is alive and changes from day to day’. In the discussion which followed the Round-table, one comment from the audience suggested that both translator and director had actually gone full circle back to Euripides and that many aspects of the production were more aligned with the Hippolytus than with Racine – e.g. the language not being too elevated; the staging more like Athenian theatre than the Comédie-Française; the friction between contemporary and mythical resonances, and the not-terribly-reverent view of the gods. In fact, neither Morgan nor Ireland had revisited Euripides, which raises interesting questions about how refiguration can reveal layers of source texts which have been suppressed or marginalised in intervening receptions. In particular, Morgan hoped that the shock of cultural friction would ‘bring the characters back alive’. He also aimed, since the translation was quite close, to ‘find out what there is in this most remarkable play that survives and transcends a jolt into an alien register’.[21]

My second key example of the vigour of theatre in Scotland is David Greig’s Oedipus. In 2000, a grant from the National Lottery enabled three of Scotland’s leading playwrights to be commissioned to create new versions for present-day Scotland of three Greek tragedies. The grant also funded theatre babel to assemble a large company to rehearse over an extended period. There had also been a preview in 1999 in the Stalls Studio of the Tramway by students of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. The three plays were Oedipus (David Greig), Electra (Tom McGrath) and Medea (Liz Lochhead). Lochhead’s Medea has subsequently become the best known, with tours and performances at the Edinburgh Festival.[22] The text of Medea has also been published.[23]  In the 2000 production, the plays were performed in nightly sequence and then, as a triple bill with the title Greeks, in the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, directed by Graham McLaren, who is the artistic director of theatre babel. He has described the project in these terms:

Of the three plays staged in April 2000 it is, in my view, Oedipus which best represents the nexus of qualities which make up a distinctive Scottish contribution to modern performances of Greek material. The play is short, as Oedipus goes, with a running time of approximately one hour and twenty minutes. Greig’s version is raw and uncluttered. In the opening sequence, Oedipus, framed by his children, the herald and the priest, addresses the audience directly, as his people. Everyone has gathered to come under his protection, as he himself is protected by god. This is the situation which the play deconstructs. Greig uses the initial encounter between Oedipus and Creon to summarise what has gone before. The Sophoclean ironies are brought out as Oedipus says that, although he has never met Laius, ‘I will pursue his murderer as if he were my own father’. Greig’s Oedipus is both proud and intemperate, determined to ‘purify this filthy city’, if necessary by killing at random.

The same basic set was used for each of the three plays. There was a mid-blue backcloth which the lighting design tinged with pink at the lower level, and incorporated with this was a plain entrance which had the appearance of an upright stele. For Oedipus there was a dead tree towards the rear of the acting space and in the centre a ritual circle used for taking auspices and, at the end, for enacting the verbal image of ashes with glowing embers and smoke. The tree emphasised aridity and drought as a man crawled in search of the dried-up river in a silent and stunning opening to the play. The Chorus (of seven, both genders, dressed in white, barefoot) asked god to give them the power to see such pain and yet feel no pity, a feeling fatal to humans:

He wants water.
There’s none. He’s licking at the dust…
He’s sniffing at the ground, he thinks he can smell a river…
A cruel river trick that: to leave its smell behind…
Give him a kick. See if he moves
(When the man slumps)
I think we should say a prayer…
We beg you god.
Kill the pity in us.
Make us like you.
Give us the power of your hate.
The power of a God to see pain and feel nothing.
Hear our prayer.
Plunge our hearts into divine fire.
Cauterize our souls against this fatal human feeling – pity.
He’s dead now.[24]

This was a highly politicised version of the play. Costume suggested an Indian setting. Oedipus and Creon wore white-buttoned coats and trousers. Tiresias wore a head-dress like that of an Indian holy man. The Indian dress and religious ritual distanced political change from modern time and place, yet there was a contemporary impact in the theme of the handover of power and the associated exposure of corruption and civic disease. This was brought out in the rivalry between Oedipus and Creon and in the language of the play. The design suggested that the sun was setting over a colonised city. Yet this never became a ‘closed’ reading; both usurper and liberator spoke in Scots accent and idiom, and the identification of Creon and Oedipus with the roles of usurper and liberator fluctuated throughout the play. Greig emphasised in the Programme Notes the tension he felt in ‘being true to the foreign-ness of the original work and trying to ‘translate’ it into dramatic and linguistic idioms which might speak more comfortably to your own audience’. He rewrote substantial parts of the play, shortened it and translated ‘freely’. He said: ‘It is not Sophocles’ work but nor is it entirely mine. It belongs neither to Greek culture nor to Scots. It is neither truly old nor truly new. It is a hybrid, a mongrel creation. But mongrelisation is, of course, the secret of survival in a species’.

Thus the production resisted any temptation towards crude or reductionist contemporary allusion. The setting and focus reminded anyone who was so tempted in that direction that Scots, too, were leaders in the expansion and organisation of the British Empire and thus the play resisted facile labelling of post-devolution Scotland emerging from colonial rule. Yet both histories, of the Raj, and of devolution, and of the associated crises of identity, were there. As the director put it: ‘Politically Scotland is changing and with the millennium the world is changing. Now is the time to be defining what it is to be, not just a Scot in Scotland but what it is to be human in the world … Oedipus is as close to a universal text as you’ll get. It starts off with the simple mystery of who killed Laius but finishes up by asking absolute questions about what it is to be human’ (Source: Interview with Steve Cramer, Programme Notes).

Look at him.
This is Oedipus. Dam builder.
Road maker.
Visionary.
He has been consumed by the fire of his own life…
Look at him closely.
What do you see.
Nothing beyond.
Only
Ashes.
And the memory of the fire.  

This was a theatrical experience of great intensity. Sadly, Greig’s poetic text is, as yet, unpublished. It is also worth pondering why neither of the productions I have discussed has had a tour or residency outside Scotland (especially when you consider that the RNT’s full title is The National Theatre of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps London is just too parochial). It is also worth considering whether the positive exploitation of hybridity which has characterised classical theatre in Scotland also has some implication for the broader classical tradition.[25]

Endnotes

[1] All the examples discussed in this paper are documented in the database of modern productions of Greek drama published by the research project on The Reception of the Texts and Images of Ancient Greece in modern drama and poetry, http://www2.open.ac.uk/ ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays.

[2] G Davie, 1961, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

[3] For further discussion of this play, see Lorna Hardwick,  Greek Drama and anti-colonialism: ‘Decolonising Classics’ in (edd) E Hall, F Macintosh and A Wrigley, Dionysus since ’69, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.

[4] See Ian Brown, John Ramage and Ceri Sherlock, 2000, ‘Scots and Welsh Theatrical Translation and Theatrical Languages’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre, vol. 1 no. 2, December, (http://arts.qmuc.ac.uk/ijost) and  Ian Brown and Ceri Sherlock, 1998, ‘Antigone: A Scots/Welsh Experience of Mythical and Theatrical Translation’ in (edd) L. Bowker, M. Cronin, D. Kenny and J. Pearson, Unity in Diversity? Current Trends in Translation Studies, Manchester, St Jerome, 25-37.

[5] This has been analysed by Alison Burke, 2001, ‘Totalitarianism, Martyrdom and Social Resistance: Sarah Woods’ Antigone’, IJoST, vol. 1 no. 3, September (http://arts.qmuc.ac.uk/ijost). For discussion of the role of the Antigone as a focus for political education and awareness of cultural and civic issues, see also Lorna Hardwick, New Surveys in the Classics: Reception Studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003 (in press), chapter 6, Hardwick ‘Greek Drama and anti-colonialism, note 3 above, and Betine van Zyl ‘Antigone in South Africa’ to be published in a forthcoming BICS supplementary volume, edited by John Davidson and Frances Mieke and comprising the selected proceedings of Greek Drama III, an international conference in memory of Kevin Lee, Sydney, Australia, July 2000.

[6] See Denis Agnew, 2001, ‘The Scottish National Theatre Dream’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre, vol.. 1 no. 3, September (http://arts.qmuc.ac.uk/ijost); Roger Savage, 1996, ‘A Scottish National Theatre?’ in (edd) Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace, Scottish Theatre since the Seventies, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 23-33.

[7] Published text, Liz Lochhead, Miseryguts and Tartuffe, London, Nick Hern Books, 2002

[8] See J. Derrick McLure, Language, Poetry and Nationhood: Scots as a poetic language from 1878 to the present, East Lothian, Tuckwell Press, 2000, ch. 7 ‘The MacDiarmid Revolution’.

[9] D. Young, The Puddocks – frae the auld Greek o Aristophanes. Tayport, Young , first edition1957, second edition 1958.

[10] D.Young, The burdies : a comedy in Scots verse, Tayport, Young, first edition1959, second edition 1966. 

[11] Full published text, Bill Dunlop, Klytemnestra’s Bairns, Edinburgh, Diehard Press, 1993.

[12] B. Dunlop, ‘Klytemnestra’s Bairns: Adapting Aeschylus into Scots’, IJoST, vol. 1 no. 1, June, 2000 electronically published at http://arts.qmuc.ac.uk/ijost.

[13] Discussed by John Corbett, ‘Writtin in the Langage of Scottis Natioun: Literary Translation into Scots’ in (ed) S. Bassnett, Translating Literature, Cambridge, Essays and Studies, D.S. Brewer, 1997, 95-117, especially 106-7.

[14] Dunlop, 2000, op cit. On varieties of Scots, see J. Corbett, 1997, Language and Scottish Literature, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, chapter 1.

[15] See further  J. Derrick McClure, 2000, Language, Poetry and Nationhood: Scots as a poetic language from 1878 to the present, East Lothian, Tuckwell Press, chapter 1 and in (ed ) Peter France, 2000, The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, John McRae and Bill Findlay ‘Translations into Scots’, 36-8. The debate continued at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 15^th August, 2002, when Mike Watson, Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport, was criticised by members of the audience (after he gave the inaugural Donald Dewar Lecture), for the lack of funding for the Scots language in contrast to that available for Gaelic and for the Scots language and culture in the North of Ireland. The question of the status of the Scots language in relation to the modern Scottish novel was also a keen issue (see Magnus Linklater, ‘Literary spat symbolises the state of a nation’, The Times, 23^rd August, 2002, p.14).

[16] E Morgan,1992, Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Manchester, Carcanet Press, xi.

[17] Published as ‘Translating Phèdre: A Round – table’, 2000, Translation and Literature, vol. 9 pt 2, 200-212.

[18] Racine was at Port-Royal with Jansenist teachers – whose watchword was piety before scholarship – from 1649-59, with a break of two years.

[19] See also the comments by John Taylor in this volume on the stereotypical use of Scots in translation of Aristophanic comedy.

[20] See further McLure, 2000, chapter. 2, and in relation to specific texts the debate about the linguistic affiliations of Gavin Douglas’ translation of Virgil’s Aeneid discussed by M Tudeau-Clayton, 1999 (published 2000), ‘Richard Carew, William Shakespeare, and the Politics of Translating Virgil in Early Modern England and Scotland, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol.. 5 no. 4, spring, 507-527. On the question of Douglas’ nationalist agenda, Tudeau-Clayton argues against AE Christa Canitz, 1996, ‘In our awyn language: The Nationalist Agenda of Gavin Douglas’ Eneados’, Vergilius 42, 25-37.

[21] Edwin Morgan, 2000, Jean Racine: Phaedra, Manchester, Carcanet, introduction,8.

[22] Alison Burke’s article in this volume discusses its importance for modern treatments of the Chorus.

[23] Liz Lochhead, 2000, theatre babel’s Medea: after Euripides, London, Nick Hern Books.

[24] Quotations are from the unpublished play text. I am very grateful to David Greig for generously allowing me to consult this.

[25] Earlier versions of this paper were given in panels at the joint Classical Association/Classical Association of Scotland Conference in Edinburgh, April 2002 and at Glasgow University at the Centre for Study of the Greek and Roman World, May 2002. I have benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions of the participants on both occasions.