INTRODUCTION

The bludgeoning Hollywood franchise that arose out of Frank Miller's (1998) graphic novel 300 is not alone in its fictitious use of the ancient world. The films 300 (2007) and 300: Rise of an Empire (2014) are both contributors to a longstanding tradition of Western myth-making, which gained traction in the nineteenth century. The mythology insisted that the battles between Greek citystates and the Persian empire, the so-called “Persian Wars,” were a showdown over the fate of Western civilization itself. Pre-eminent historians of the time believed that the defeat of Xerxes’ forces helped preserve the lofty Greek attributes of freedom of thought and democracy. The victory over Persia was a brilliant moment in the triumph of reason in the face of dark Eastern backwardness and sinister mysticism. This is a dubious view that some die-hard conservative scholars in the West continue to propagate to this day and such intransigent readings have, in fact, helped give voice to, for instance, the far-right, anti-immigrant Golden Dawn party in Greece, which holds ceremonies at Thermopylae, as Time reported in 2012, chanting “Greece belongs to Greeks” in front of a bronze statue of their slain hero, the Spartan king Leonidas.

There can be little doubt that 300 and its sequel's vision of muscle-bound warriors chimes with the contemporary popular taste for both a particular type of gym-bodied heroism and an ever-mounting tide of intolerance of the “others” inside and outside of our communities. In the films, the Spartans and, latterly, the Athenians fight bare-chested without armor in the “heroic nude” mode so beloved in the ideology of ancient Greece, but they are so gym-pumped with bulging muscles that they easily betray their roots in the American comic-book tradition of superheroes. Like superheroes, the burly Greeks are on a mission to save the world. In contrast, and as in antiquity, in the films the Persians are represented with covered bodies, clothed in trousers, tunics, and turbans; their bodies (when seen) are pale, weak, even deformed. They too have a mission: to follow their master, Xerxes, end freedom, and bring about his reign of terror.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter explores how the lead actor performance of Russell Crowe in Darren Aronofsky's unconventional biblical epic Noah (2014) takes up Ridley Scott's blockbuster film Gladiator (2000) as a specific screen intertext by using what I call “maximal projections.” By coining the phrase “maximal projections,” I mean that Crowe plays the role of the Old Testament patriarch Noah using a series of deliberately referential gestures to his character of Maximus, the general turned gladiator, in the earlier film. Further, I maintain that Crowe makes this intentional artistic choice to invite the audience of Noah to recognize Maximus in his performance in the biblical epic in order to captivate and appeal to them. As film historian Jim Cullen observes:

RUSSELL CROWE'S STAR TEXT

The casting of Crowe, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role of Maximus in Gladiator, as the title patriarch in Noah raises the theoretical question of his celebrity “star text” that is being interpreted or “read” by the audience as they watch him on screen (Figures 6.1 and 6.2). As originally framed by Richard Dyer in his influential book Stars, an actor's distinct star image can both affect the production of meaning in a film and manipulate the arousal of emotions and expectations in viewers. That is, when a famous actor takes on a role, they bring one or more previous roles to the new performance; thus their star text powerfully influences how an audience engages with their previous roles within the new performance.

INTRODUCTION

The late 1990s television series Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001) chronicled the adventurous of a mythical ancient Greek warrior woman, Xena. She was unusual among sword-and-sandal heroes not only for her gender but also for her lack of any long-term heterosexual relationship and for her sexually active lifestyle. Xena's characterization in turn helped pave the way for more complex and proactive female characters in the modern “golden age” of televisual and cinematic historical and fantasy dramas.

The small subfield of “Xena studies” has extensively analyzed Xena's depiction as mother, as action heroine, and as half of a possible implicit same-sex relationship with her companion, Gabrielle. However, no scholarship has yet considered the precedent Xena set as a trendsetting archetype of a sexually active, polyamorous woman whose romantic decisions do not mark her as immoral or deviant. Other characters within the series, such as Xena's look-alikes Meg, Diana, and Leah, each represent different sexual lifestyle and relationship choices, all of which are eventually respected by the other characters. Despite their campy origins and convoluted plot twists, these stories of Xena have helped reshape the notion of what women might do and with whom in the ancient world. They offered new and complicated models of heroism and morality that more closely paralleled those of traditional male protagonists in films and television about the ancient world.

Xena's creators, Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert, and John Schulian, as well as the actress Lucy Lawless herself, explicitly represented her as a polyamorous and desirous woman throughout the series. She was initially depicted as a “bad girl” and exhibits many of the traits of the wicked woman in classical cinema – promiscuity, greed, and lack of maternal instinct. Through Xena's encounters with her comrades Hercules and Gabrielle, she ultimately finds redemption and remakes herself as a heroine. However, she notably never embraces celibacy or settles down with any one particular romantic partner. Xena thus offers a new model of mythical heroine that rejects both the wicked seductresses and the virginal damsels or widows of earlier cinematic incarnations.

INTRODUCTION

The short-lived BBC television series Atlantis presents us with a range of characters who go on their own heroic journeys. The rather bland but brave and honorable protagonist Jason (Jack Donnelly) must confront his dark side; the unheroic, greedy, drunken Hercules (Mark Addy) becomes a tragic hero; and the clumsy but likable Pythagoras (Robert Emms) uses his brains to help his friends. By the end of the second and final series female characters Ariadne (Aiyisha Hart), Medea (Amy Manson), and Medusa (Jemima Rooper) also display different aspects of heroism, moving respectively from princess to warrior, assassin to helper maiden, and victim to monster to self-sacrificing heroine. For modern readers and viewers, characters from Greek mythology can seem uninteresting and irrelevant today. Particularly Perseus, Jason, Theseus, and Bellerophon can all become interchangeable as young men who slay monsters and go on quests, with few people remembering (or caring) who did what, and there are almost no heroic women characters for female viewers to relate to (Atalanta is the notable exception). By creating male characters with their own specific peculiarities and flaws, and female characters with heroic potential, the producers of Atlantis present us with heroes that we can relate to, even though they are grounded in the ancient world. Modern viewers are also versed in the tradition of the bildungsroman, and are familiar with television story arcs where protagonists change and grow as individuals. By presenting us with characters who change over time and learn from their heroic journeys the Atlantis writers aim to sustain the interest of viewers, so that they continue to watch to the end of the series.

Atlantis was a family-oriented fantasy adventure series set in ancient Greece, which aired on BBC1 from 2013 to 2015 on Saturday evenings in the family drama viewing slot initially established by the return of Doctor Who in 2005, previously filled by Robin Hood (2006–9) and Merlin (2008–12). Atlantis was conceived by writing team Julian Murphy and Johnny Capps, to follow their previous popular series Merlin, which had concluded after five seasons.

The Heroides is a collection of verse letters, written in elegiac couplets, supposedly sent by mythological heroines (or heroes) to their lovers, who are absent for various reasons. It is the work of the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC – AD 17), and it comprises two parts: the first part contains fourteen letters – the so-called ‘single letters’ – written by women, while the second part comprises the correspondence of Paris and Helen (16–17), Leander and Hero (18–19), Acontius and Cydippe (20–1).

The fifth letter of Ovid's Heroides is the letter supposedly sent by the Phrygian nymph Oenone to Paris, the son of king Priam. Here is an outline of the story: Oenone, daughter of the river-god Cebren and skilled in the art of medicine, was Paris’ first love, while he was still a shepherd on Mount Ida, unaware that he was the Prince of Troy. Paris later left her for Helen, whom he received as a gift from Venus for granting her first prize in the beauty contest against Juno and Minerva. During the ensuing Trojan War Paris was wounded by Philoctetes’ arrows. He returned to Oenone and begged her to heal him, but she refused. After Paris died, Oenone killed herself, filled with remorse. Oenone's Ovidian letter is written after Paris’ return to Troy with Helen and before the outbreak of the Trojan War.

Before I discuss this letter, let me first underline three important points about the Heroides:

• 1. The letters of the Heroides have double senders and double receivers: the senders are Ovid and the heroines, and the receivers are the lovers of the heroines and us, the external readers (as ‘super-readers’).

• 2. The general situation of each heroine in the single letters, mutatis mutandis, is similar to that of an elegiac lover: she has been betrayed by a faithless man, who has broken his promises and has abandoned her. The heroine tries to persuade the recipient to act in accordance with her desires, accusing him of cruelty and lamenting her miserable fate. In this way the Heroides are perfectly in line with elegy's original function as a genre of lamentation.

This chapter examines the ways in which Louis MacNeice employed and, at times, manipulated historical narratives of ancient Greece in radio feature programmes to provide encouraging parallels for the resilience, courage and determination required to survive fascist occupation in World War II and ultimately to overcome it. The primary aim of these programmes was to maintain awareness of and sympathy for an important ally on the Home Front through radio. MacNeice uses the artifice of viewing the present predicament of Greece through the prism of its ancient past. We may term his programmes propaganda in that their effects are intentionally rhetorical, though these broadcast features were not such as would require embarrassed explanations after the war.

At the time of the outbreak of war in 1939, BBC Radio was more established, more developed and much more widely available than its nascent television service, which had been available within a short radius of London's Alexandra Palace since 1936. With the latter shut down for the duration, radio was in any case the primary medium for the broadcasting of information and entertainment. Radio could reach the majority of the population: ‘by 1939, 73 per cent of households nationwide owned a radio licence, suggesting a potential audience of perhaps 35 million out of a total population of 48 million’. Transmissions reached a corner of most living rooms and, as Connelly has written, the war forced a change in domestic listening habits, with radio becoming more convenient than the newspapers: ‘With people working longer hours in complex shift patterns, the ability to read a newspaper from cover to cover diminished, thus making the radio the crucial source of information.’ Given this ubiquity, radio was also an effective means of propagandising the allied war effort, particularly through the evolving features genre.

It was the adaptable format of features programmes that was in the main used for BBC Radio wartime propaganda. Wrigley writes, ‘Strictly speaking, features may be described as radio documentaries or information programmes which utilise innovative combinations of dramatization, poetry, music and sound for their effect.’

In The Tragedy of that Famous Roman Oratour Marcus Tullius Cicero (1651) Antony's wife Fulvia longs to publish her revenge on Cicero who accused her of corruption against Rome: ‘Had I his damned tongue within my clutches, / This bodkin should in bloody characters / Write my revenge.’ Writing in ‘bloody characters’ with a ‘bodkin’, a particularly female weapon, is a means for Fulvia to mark her revenge as part of a long tradition in which revenge is feminised. From the Erinyes, or Furies of Greek mythology, to the terrifying figure of Medea, and to Tamora's impersonation ‘I am Revenge, sent from the infernal kingdom’ in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (5.1.30), the sphere of vindictive action is defined as a passionate, feminine alternative to the masculine law. Vengeance is ‘a kind of wild justice’ as Bacon called it. This chapter will extend the central argument I put forward previously about revenge being a feminine genre which overturns conventional appearances, gender identities and forms of behaviour and taps into fundamental fears about maternal power and female agency. I situate these arguments within the early modern practice of re-marking revenge tradition, and the affective power of performance. Employing techniques from corpus linguistics to survey the rewriting of revenge from 1580 to 1700, I ask whether revenge tragedy is primarily an Elizabethan genre or whether it endures over time. I consider how revenge is self-consciously re-marked (rehearsed, repeated, rewritten) in performances across the seventeenth century that look back to the feminised figures of the Erinyes and Medea. I draw on neuroscience to explore how the affective power of performance engages with our own cognitive hardwiring, arguing that revenge involves a complex engagement of both human intellect and emotions. I then speculate on how its enactment in staged representations carries a heightened affective resonance for spectators, thus opening up questions about its ongoing appeal.

REVENGE INSCRIPTIONS

Over fifty years before Fulvia vowed to ‘write my revenge’, Bel-Imperia in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1582–92) had sent Hieronimo a ‘bloody writ’, an injunction to ‘revenge Horatio's death’ penned in her own blood. Hieronimo exacts revenge through a performance of his own dramatic writing, ‘Soliman and Perseda’, and concludes by biting out his own tongue.

At the end of the 1950s both the eminent archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler (1890–1976) and author and secret service veteran Sir Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972) presented film documentary series about ancient Greece for BBC Television. Although aspects of the classical world had been considered in earlier television programmes, Wheeler's Armchair Voyage: Hellenic Cruise (BBC, 1958) and The Glory that was Greece (BBC, 1959) with Mackenzie were the small screen's earliest sustained engagements with the subject. The television critic of The Manchester Guardian described the first episode in Wheeler's series as ‘an instance of television really opening a window upon the world and genuinely giving people a foretaste of something tremendously satisfying that they can go and do for themselves’. For The Listener, K. W. Gransden welcomed Mackenzie's initial offering as ‘a most impressive and enjoyable film, both for classicists like myself and, I should guess, for those to whom it was all new’. Sequences filmed at significant classical sites in Greece feature in both series, although the documentary languages that each develops and their approaches to representing place and space are distinct. Seen almost sixty years on they also reveal contrasting concerns, as Wheeler addresses archaeological questions within a broadly humanist framework while Mackenzie develops a more explicitly political discourse with an embrace of contemporary parallels.

This chapter outlines the precursors of and influences on Wheeler's and Mackenzie's series, exploring within a broad cultural frame the legacies of early modern travellers and of the Grand Tour, the development of sightseeing and popular tourism from the eighteenth century onwards, representations of Greece in literature, painting and photography, technologies for virtual voyages, illustrated lectures and film travelogues as well as the mediation of travel by radio and early television. I argue that elements of each of these antecedents contributed to the formation of the two series, along with the public service understandings of the BBC's mission, the social and educational aspirations of a post-war, middle-class audience and the personal interests of the two presenters. Yet while both series can be seen as pioneering certain techniques that would quickly become established for presenter-led documentary series, the visual language of neither is entirely successful.

Standing on the deck of a cruise ship destined for Greece, Sir John Wolfenden, a prominent educationalist and guest speaker on the tour, is asked by the well-known archaeologist and presenter of Armchair Voyage: Hellenic Cruise (BBC, 1958; henceforth Hellenic Cruise), Sir Mortimer Wheeler, to explain the ‘extraordinary pull’ of Greece today. After considering the natural landscape and the buildings and statues the ancient Greeks left behind, Wolfenden turns to the political and cultural inheritance. These, he asserts, are the basis of modern civilisation in the West. Wheeler appears unconvinced, and yet, as the ship travels on to Olympia and footage of the ruined sanctuary appears on screen, he observes, ‘the newcomer most readily finds contact with that sense of beauty and humanity that are the basic contributions of Greece to the modern world’. Wolfenden's proposition is sustained. Hellenic Cruise, the first British television documentary to engage with ancient Greece at the time of broadcast, establishes the relationship between the Hellenic past and Western present as one of inheritance. In this, the programme was far from unique. For example, in 1821 the English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote passionately that ‘We are all Greeks – our laws, our literature, our religion and our art have their root in Greece’, when attempting to encourage his British compatriots to support the Greek struggle for independence from Turkish rule.

‘My tables! Meet it is I set it down’, exclaims the most famous revenger of the early modern theatre, as he employs the study methods he has acquired at university to record a ghost's lesson of murder and retribution. While initially promising that ‘thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain’ (1.5.102–3), Hamlet will later rely on his prior learning to test the truth of his uncle's guilt, composing ‘a speech of some dozen lines’ that, inserted into The Murder of Gonzago, enables him to try the king and ‘tent him to the quick’ (2.2.477, 532). This association between words and violent action, the humanist education system and the pursuit of revenge, became even more emphatic in Jacobean drama, when the figure of the malcontent – often depicted as a socially ambitious scholar whose prospects for advancement have been blocked by entrenched aristocratic privilege – gained in popularity. From De Flores in The Changeling and Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, to Vindice in The Revenger's Tragedy and the eponymous protagonist of Antonio's Revenge, Jacobean revengers invite audiences to reflect on the relationship between humanist learning, with its emphasis on proper governance and moral education, and the violent retribution that they enact upon corrupt rulers and unjust societies. Hinting at early modern doubts about whether humanism would be able to live up to its ideals in practice, such characters are credited with the ability to ‘manipulate a fluid and contingent world with a dramatist's inventiveness and authority’; as John Kerrigan has shown, the early modern revenger becomes a ‘surrogate artist’, ‘transmuting creative ambition into narrative and stage action’. The educational heritage that these fictional characters share with their creators is especially significant. Early modern playwrights and their metatheatrical protagonists both drew inspiration from classical models: the Roman author Seneca's influence on Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge drama has long been recognised by critics, while Tanya Pollard's chapter in this collection demonstrates how early modern authors responded to and reworked the legacy of ancient Greek tragedy. Yet the significance of the associations between humanist education and revenge action for the female avengers of sixteenthand seventeenth-century drama have not yet been fully addressed.