“Not falling in love hurts.
Yet falling in love hurts too.
But more painful than everything
Is to fail at loving completely.
Family means nothing to love.
Wisdom, manner are crushed.
Only money matters.
I wish the first person who loved money
Would have died.
Because of it, no brother matters
Because of it, no parents matter.
Wars, murders–because of money.
And this is worse. Those of us who love
Lose because of money.”
“I imagined I was running in a dream,,
But on my shoulders wearing wings.
Love dragged lead somehow
On his pretty feet,
As he was pursuing, almost catching me.
What does this dream want to mean?
I imagine that while I
Have been wrapped up in many
Loves and have slipped away from some
I am caught, stuck, in this one.”
“Stop speaking before you fill me with rage!
And you’re revealed as a fool as well as an old man.
You speak of unendurable things, claiming that the gods
Have some plan for this corpse.
Did they do it to honor him so greatly for his fine work,
Concealing him, the man who came here
To burn their temples and their statutes,
To ruin their land and their laws?
Do you see the gods honoring evil people?”
“It is noble for me to do this and then die.
I will lie with him because I belong to him, with him,
Once I have completed my sacred crimes. There’s more time
When I must please those below than those here,
Since I will lie there forever. You? Go head,
Dishonor what the gods honor if it seems right.”
“Stop speaking before you fill me with rage!
And you’re revealed as a fool as well as an old man.
You speak of unendurable things, claiming that the gods
Have some plan for this corpse.
Did they do it to honor him so greatly for his fine work,
Concealing him, the man who came here
To burn their temples and their statutes,
To ruin their land and their laws?
Do you see the gods honoring evil people?”
“It is noble for me to do this and then die.
I will lie with him because I belong to him, with him,
Once I have completed my sacred crimes. There’s more time
When I must please those below than those here,
Since I will lie there forever. You? Go head,
Dishonor what the gods honor if it seems right.”
Electra’s mother, and her mother’s lover, killed her father, Agamemnon. Her brother, Orestes, is in exile. She misses her father, and her relationship with her mother and stepfather isn’t good. As you’d imagine, Electra has the blues.
The question, though, is whether in Sophocles’ depiction of Electra’s grieving has tipped into pathology; whether melancholia has replaced mourning.
Based on Freud’s discussion of pathological grief in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Electra might well need therapy:
Freud:
“The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of self-regarding feelings”
Electra in soliloquy (103-106):
I will not put an end to this bleak lament and weeping
While I gaze on the stars’ radiant twinklings
Or on the day.
Electra to Chorus (821-22):
It would be a kindness if someone killed me
And a pain if I were to live.
I have no appetite for life.
Freud:
“The inhibition of the melancholic [a loss of interest in life] seems puzzling because we cannot see what it is that absorbs him [or her] so entirely.”
Chorus to Electra (121-123):
O child, child of a miserable mother–
Electra, what unrelenting lamentation
Destroys you unendingly?
Freud:
“They [melancholics] give a great deal of trouble, perpetually taking offense and behaving as if they had been treated with great injustice.”
Clytemnestra to Electra (519-522):
Now that Aegisthus is away, you show me no respect.
To top it off, time and again you’ve told lots of people
Things about me–that I’m brash, I rule unjustly,
I mistreat you and the things that are yours.
Freud:
“…like mourning, melancholia is the reaction to a real loss of a loved object. . . The loss of a love-object constitutes an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love-relationships to make itself felt and come to the fore.”
Electra to Chorus on the subject of Orestes (164-172):
I waited for him without fail, childless,
Forever suffering through life, unmarried,
Wet with tears and doomed to endless misfortunes.
But he forgets what he suffered and what he learnt.
Isn’t that why no message arrives without dashing my hopes?
He’s always longing,
Longing, but does not think to appear.
Laodameia is the name of Protesilaus’ wife, according to the Euripidean tradition. Other traditions have him married to Polydora, a child of Meleager. IN the non-Homeric tradition, Protesilaus was permitted to leave the underworld to meet his wife for a single day. The action of the play seems to have centered around this event, following Laodameia’s grief and the reactions of her near and dear.
Chas Libretto brings us a new interpretation of this story, rooted in the fragments that have survived and imagining the pieces we have lost. In a way, this is as true to the theme of the tale as humanly possible, arranging the remains of the lives we lead around the absence of the people we’ve lost.
Special Guests
Erika Weiberg
Performers and Scenes
Music performed by Bettina Joy de Guzman
Actors
Jessie Cannizarro
Tamieka Chavis
Damian Jermaine Thompson
Rene Thornton Jr.
Laodamia – Female, 20s
Iolaus/Protesilaos/Podarces, her husband and his brother – Male, 20s
Acastus, her father – Male, 50s – 60s
Chorus – Male/Female, 30s – 60s
Odysseus – Male, 30s
Euripides, Protesilaus fr. 650
“Illogical hopes deceive mortals”
πόλλ᾿ ἐλπίδες ψεύδουσιν ἅλογοι βροτούς.
Euripides, Protesilaus fr. 654
“When two are speaking and one is enraged
the one who resists fighting with words is the wiser.”
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Host and Faculty Consultant: Joel Christensen (Brandeis University) Executive Producer: Lanah Koelle (Center for Hellenic Studies) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies) Poster Illustration Artist: John Koelle
Euripides, Protesilaus fr. 655
“I won’t betray someone I love even when they’re dead.”
οὐκ ἂν προδοίην καίπερ ἄψυχον φίλον.
Future episodes
All start times are 3pm ET unless otherwise noted. Live stream available at chs.harvard.edu and on YouTube.
December 15An Ancient Cabaret
Euripides, Protesilaus fr. 657
“Anyone who lumps all women together in slander
Is unsubtle and unwise
For among the many women you will find one wicked
And another with a spirit as noble as this one”
“Stop speaking before you fill me with rage!
And you’re revealed as a fool as well as an old man.
You speak of unendurable things, claiming that the gods
Have some plan for this corpse.
Did they do it to honor him so greatly for his fine work,
Concealing him, the man who came here
To burn their temples and their statutes,
To ruin their land and their laws?
Do you see the gods honoring evil people?”
“It is noble for me to do this and then die.
I will lie with him because I belong to him, with him,
Once I have completed my sacred crimes. There’s more time
When I must please those below than those here,
Since I will lie there forever. You? Go head,
Dishonor what the gods honor if it seems right.”
“I had great wealth and I was ruling my home.
I would have had noble children some day
And she would only give birth to half-slave bastards for them.
But never and I say it over and over, never
Should anyone who has any sense at all and a wife
Allow other women to come to visit them!
These women are instructors of evils.
One ruins a marriage because she hopes to gain something,
While another who’s afflicted wants someone to be sick with.
Many more act because of native vice—and this is how
The homes of men grow diseased.”
“You’ve laid into your kindred with your tongue too much!
Such things are forgivable for you now, but still
Women must work to cover up women’s afflictions!”
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