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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Oedipus is a man who was told he had killed his father and married his mother.He has to account for a past which is his own past, though it falls on him like somebody else's. Antigone, in order to throw a handful of earth on her brother's body, has to break the laws of the city state. She chooses a gesture which by law is punished by death. Orestes, to avenge his father, has to kill his murderers: his own mother and stepfather.
Note 1 in page 303 A great deal has been written about Hamlet's connections with ancient tragedy. It is significant that the subject has been treated least by Shakespearean scholars. Shakespeare did not know Greek tragedy and for this reason the subject did not exist, as far as philological research was concerned. Two books which discuss the possibility of Shakespeare knowing directly the works of the Greek tragedians, particularly Euripides, are worth noting: Janet Spens, An Essay on Shakespeare's Relation to Tradition (Oxford, 1916), and F. M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (London, 1914). Janet Spens even mentions Marston, who consciously imitated the Greeks and could have exerted some influence on Shakespeare. It is quite certain that Shakespeare could not have read the Greeks, but he could have heard about them from bis learned friends.
The first Greek scholar to be interested in Hamlet's likeness to Orestes was Tadeusz Zieliski in his Sofokles i jego Iwórc-zo tragicma [Sophocles and his Tragic Works]. The Russian edition was published in 1914–15, the Polish edition, Kraków 1928. Zieliski was interested mainly in the development and transformations of the concept of vengeance and its Christian rendering in Shakespeare.
The “Oedipus complex” in Hamlet and Orestes has been analyzed copiously in modern scientific literature. These analyses have been inspired either by Freud, or, more recently, by Jung and his theory of archetypes. Of particular interest are: Ernest Jones, A Psycho-analytic Study of “Hamlet,” Essays in Applied Psycho-analysis (London, Vienna, 1923); republished as Hamlet and Oedipus (New York, 1949), and Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (London, 1934); especially the chapter: “Examination of the Oedipus Complex as a Pattern Determining our Imaginative Experience of Hamlet.”
Basic on the parallel between Shakespeare and Sophocles is Prosser Hall Frye's work, “Shakespeare and Sophocles,” in the volume Romance and Tragedy (Boston, 1922), recently republished (Lincoln, Neb., 1961). Frye is mainly interested in the differences between the Weltanschauung and artistic method of the two great tragic writers. A detailed analysis of Hamlet as primarily religious drama, and its comparison with Greek tragedy, has been made by H. D. F. Kitto in his Form and Meaning in Drama: A Study of Six Greek Plays and of “Hamlet” (London, 1956).
The most important and most detailed treatment of this theme has been Gilbert Murray's excellent study “Hamlet and Orestes” in his book The Classical Tradition in Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1927). Murray has dealt not only with the Oresteia and the two Electras, but has also included in his study Andromache, Iphigenia in Tauris, and Orestes by Euripides. He was also the first to introduce to the study of the history of the Orestes myth, the Historia Danica: Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus and the Icelandic Ambales Saga. He, too, as far as I know, was the first to compare the part of Ophelia with Electra, and Horatio with Pylades. His final conclusions are concerned with the universality and regeneration of myths.
Compared with the ample literature I have just mentioned, my essay differs in that it is an attempt at a structural analysis of the transformations of the same model. I am much indebted also to The Idea of a Theatre, by Francis Fergusson (Princeton, 1949), and to Jean Duvignaud's reflections on Greek tragedy in his Sociologie du théâtre (Paris, 1965), which breaks new ground, and to a small but valuable and stimulating book by Jacques Lacarrière, Sophocle, published in the series Les Grands Dramaturges (Paris, 1960). In the interpretation of Hamlet, and particularly the thesis of “the end of the era of terror,” I have taken some ideas from Jean Paris' suggestive study, Hamlet ou les personnages du fils (Paris, 1953).
Note 2 in page 307 Aeschylus, The Choephoroe, ll. 117–123, trans. Lewis Campbell, in Aeschylus—The Seven Plays in English Verse (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949).
Note 3 in page 308 Sophocles, Electra, trans. Sir George Young, in Sophocles' Dramas, Everyman's Library (London: Dent, 1953), pp. 90–91. Hereafter references will be cited in the text.
Note 4 in page 313 Euripides, Orestes, trans. Arthur S. Way (London: Heinemann, 1929), p. 157.
