Hippolytus

The subtractive test bites on rhetoric, not on structure. Remove the Nurse and the catastrophe has no agent: Phaedra has chosen silence and death, and only someone who loves her can break the silence for her. Remove the oath and Hippolytus has every reason to clear himself before Theseus, so the dispute of father and son has no lock. Remove the tablet and the dead woman cannot speak against the living man. The two halves are required as well: Aphrodite promises both deaths in the prologue, the woman’s and the young man’s, and the diptych is that promise kept. The servant’s prayer to Cypris in the first scene, asking her to forgive the young man’s pride, holds the whole play in a few lines. Held below the top by the length of Hippolytus’ tirade against women and of the dispute with his father, which say more than the action needs, and by a prologue that makes part of the first episode an exposition of what is already known.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The disclosures can be stated and they hold. First, against the view that to know the good is to do it, Phaedra: “ta chrēst’ epistamestha kai gignōskomen, / ouk ekponoumen d’”
“we know and understand what is good, but do not labour it through” (380 to 381). The scene shows it as well as says it: her reason stays lucid, and the end it reasons to is her death and his. Second, that the care for a good name, which she calls a two-edged thing, can kill as surely as desire: the lie on the tablet is that care turned to murder. Third, that speech once uttered cannot be recalled, and an oath that binds the tongue binds a life. Fourth, that the gods cannot do what human beings can: Artemis may not look on the dying, and the son forgives the father. What holds the axis where it stands is how the theology arrives: spoken from above, by one goddess at the opening and another at the close, rather than found in the action, and tried in the world of a single house.

Score: 9.0 / 10

It rises often and in several registers. Hippolytus’ prayer with the garland from “akēraton leimōna”
“the untouched meadow” (about 73 to 74), where only the reverent may cut; Phaedra’s delirium, longing for the mountain, the hunt and the meadow; the ode to Eros, with Semele and Iole as the god’s victims; the escape ode, wishing for the wings of a bird to the Adriatic, the Eridanus and the garden of the Hesperides, then turning back to the Cretan ship that brought Phaedra; the messenger’s bull rising from a wave that hides the Isthmus, and the horses’ panic. The height is the last scene, where the goddess must leave the dying man, “emoi gar ou themis phthitous horan”
“it is not lawful for me to look on the dead” (about 1437), and the son releases the father from blood-guilt: tender, cold and exact. Held below the top by the long level stretches in the middle of the play, the Nurse’s counsel, the tirade and the forensic dispute of father and son, where the argument keeps to the ground.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Myth built, and the build bears weight at every joint. The two goddesses stand as images on either side of the door, the poles between which the action is drawn, and they frame it: Aphrodite opens the play, “Pollē men en brotoisi kouk anōnymos / thea keklēmai Kypris”
“mighty among mortals and not without a name, I am called the goddess Cypris” (1 to 2), and Artemis closes it. The name is the death: the horseman is killed by his own team, panicked by a bull that Poseidon sends from the sea at a father’s word, and the bull from the sea answers the bull of Crete. The meadow untouched by the scythe is the unmated life that cannot last. The end is a founding: the girls of Troezen will cut their hair for him before marriage, so that the youth who refused marriage enters every marriage, and the myth closes into the city’s rite. The particular stays particular: Phaedra names her mother Pasiphae and her sister Ariadne as a family fate. Held below the highest figures because the gods are present as persons, which makes the pattern clear at some cost to depth beneath the surface, and because the chaste youth and the slandering wife are old stock, cousin to Joseph and Potiphar’s wife.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The swerve is real and its cost is on record. Euripides had written the story before, in the lost Hippolytus Kalyptomenos, whose Phaedra, by ancient report, declared her love herself and offended the audience. The second play wagers on the same story before the same public, and moves the offence into the act of speech: Phaedra fights the desire, will not name it, is betrayed into it by the Nurse, and kills for her name. The intermediary, the scene heard through a door, the silencing oath, the letter that speaks for the dead, and two goddesses at the frame who are neither reconciled nor just make a new tragedy of speech and silence; by the ancient hypothesis it took the first prize. What holds the axis a little above the bar is where the turn is made: inside the inherited form, with the divine prologue, the epiphany and the messenger’s speech used straight, and in part as a correction of the poet’s own earlier risk toward decorum rather than a departure from the tradition.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The play is about what speech does and what silence costs, and its form is made of speech acts and their failures. The Nurse says the name, so that Phaedra can answer “sou tad’, ouk emou kleueis”
“you hear this from yourself, not from me” (352). Phaedra and Hippolytus never speak to each other: she hears his rage through a door, the oath shuts the one mouth that could save him, and the tablet speaks for the dead woman and is believed against the living man. The diptych is the instrument: the first half is the woman destroyed by the power she resists, the second the man destroyed by the power he refuses, and the two goddesses at the frame make the halves two faces of one law. The goddess who closes the play is the form’s last word on itself: she can tell the truth, and she cannot stay for the death. Held off the top by the joint at the tablet, where a lie and an oath, devices rather than one growing action, carry the play across its midpoint.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Evidence rather than promise. W. S. Barrett’s commentary of 1964 is one of the monuments of Greek scholarship; Bernard Knox’s essay of 1952 read the play as a tragedy of choice between speech and silence; Phaedra’s speech has been set against the Socratic claim that to know the good is to do it; Charles Segal, Froma Zeitlin and others have read its enclosures, the meadow, the hunt, the sea and the house. The questions stay open: whether Hippolytus is guilty of anything but devotion, a saint, a prig or both; what Phaedra means by her two kinds of shame, a passage still disputed; whether the Nurse acts for her mistress or against her wish; whether the gods are forces of nature or persons with spite; whether the son’s forgiveness redeems or only consoles. Held below the top because the return has been more scholarly than general: its open questions are fewer and less publicly contested than those of the tragedies on which theories of the form were built, and no such theory was built on this one.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The field is Attic tragedy of the fifth century, and Greek and European drama after it. The intrinsic force is real: the divided will made the action of a tragedy, a woman’s struggle with desire rendered from inside her reasoning, and a whole action bound to the mechanics of speech, the intermediary and the written word. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force, and it is specific: Aristophanes turned the oath line against Euripides in Frogs, within a generation; Ovid wrote Phaedra’s letter in the Heroides; Seneca rewrote the play as Phaedra; Racine built Phèdre (1677) on it and named Euripides as his source, and through Racine the story runs to Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), D’Annunzio, Jeffers and Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love (1996). What holds it in the high eights is the channel: most of that reach passes through Seneca and Racine rather than from the play itself, and the larger reorganisations of Attic tragedy were made elsewhere.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Some twenty-four centuries, the text whole and read without a break. Hippolytus is among the ten plays of the select edition transmitted with scholia through Byzantium, so it was read and taught continuously, never lost and recovered. The form is fully legible; the losses are of the music and the dance, as for all Greek drama, and a few lines are suspected, as for every tragedy, none of them charged. Its presence is wide and kept twice: printed and taught, translated into every major European language, staged through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and present a second time in Racine’s version. It takes the foot of the range a text so whole and so continuously read commands, because its presence, wide as it is, is narrower than that of the most famous Greek tragedies, and outside the teaching of Greek it is read more in the academy than in common reading.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Judged on Euripides’ Greek, the music neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact. The irony is timed: the servant prays to Aphrodite just after she has announced the deaths, and the garland for Artemis is offered as they begin. The exchange of single lines draws out the secret by naming Phaedra’s mother and sister, the two women of her house ruined by love, until the Nurse says the son’s name. The Nurse’s second thoughts turn on a line that sounds like wisdom and is ruin, “hai deuterai pōs phrontides sophōterai”
“second thoughts are somehow wiser” (436). Phaedra’s long speech is grave and reasoned, the messenger’s narrative is one of the great set pieces of the theatre, and the last scene keeps the god’s voice cool and the man’s voice broken. The oath, the door, the tablet and the epiphany are machines fitted exactly. The charges are the exposition, where the prologue speaks to the audience and tells the plot, and the length of the tirade and of the dispute of father and son.

Score: 9.2 / 10

One law governs the whole: the powers of the world, desire and purity, sea and meadow, are not to be refused, and whoever refuses one of them, or tries to master it by speech, is destroyed by it; the gods who are these powers do not love the human beings they move. Take the two most distant elements: the untouched meadow of the first scene and the bull out of the sea; or Aphrodite’s cold opening speech of vengeance and the last exchange, where Hippolytus frees Theseus from blood-guilt. They obey the same law. The meadow is Artemis’ and refused to Cypris; the sea is Poseidon’s and brings the refusal back; and inside that law the only grace is the one human beings give each other. The chorus’s doubt that the gods govern justly is inside the law, not against it, and the range is wide for one play. What holds the axis where it stands is the dispute of father and son, whose forensic and sophistic register argues the law more than it lets it be felt.

Score: 9.0 / 10

A single play of about 1,466 lines, not marked down for its length and weighed on what it holds. The orders are several and integrated through one house: the inner life, at the pitch of Phaedra’s reasoning about shame, knowledge and will; the family, in a father, a son born of an Amazon, a stepmother and her nurse, and a Cretan house with its inherited curse; the city, in Theseus as king and the law of oaths and evidence; the sacred at its fullest, two goddesses, Poseidon, oath and curse, purity and pollution, and a cult founded at the end; the natural order of meadow, hunt, horses and sea. What holds it lowest of the twelve is what the form leaves out: one house in one day at the margin of a city, with labour, a people, the economy and history absent, and the state present only as a king’s word and a son’s exile.

Score: 8.0 / 10