ملاحظات
المقدمة: القصة من البداية
(1)
Dares’ account is known only in a sixth-century Latin
translation based on a lost first-century Greek original; for Dictys’
fourth-century Latin text we have a first-century Greek fragment. For
the dates, texts, and identities of Dares and Dictys see Frazer 1966:
3–15.
(2)
The anonymous Siege of
Troy is the exception to this narrative pattern, moving
rapidly over the Argonaut material and the abduction of Helen to get to
the poem’s titular subject.
(3)
Zeus tormented Prometheus as a punishment for his
championing mankind and because of his refusal to reveal the prophecy
concerning Thetis. He chained Prometheus to a rock, where an eagle
gnawed his liver each day; because Prometheus was immortal, his liver
renewed itself each night.
(4)
An alternative genealogy has Aphrodite born from the foam
(aphros) of the sea. I give here
the Greek names of the goddesses. In Roman mythology Hera is known as
Juno, Pallas Athena is Minerva, and Aphrodite is
Venus.
(5)
In the presentation of the play at Shakespeare’s Globe in
2007 it was Paris’ melancholy looks that comically provided evidence of
his experience of love.
(6)
For accounts of the Judgment of Paris see Lucian Dialogues of the Gods 20, translated as
“The judgement of the goddesses” (1969: 384–409), and Lydgate’s
Troy Book 2.2369–92. Lydgate’s
Paris refuses to judge the goddesses unless they appear naked
(2.2747–54). Medieval literature, with its love of dream visions,
frequently presents the Judgment of Paris not as a real event but as a
vision dreamed by Paris (see e.g. Dares in Frazer 1966: 138-9). The
Judgment is also a dream in American TV’s Helen
of Troy (2003), where Paris retires to a cave to escape
the midday heat and falls asleep, and in Eric Shanower’s graphic novel
Age of Bronze: A Thousand Ships
(2005). The retrial in Peele’s Arraignment ends harmoniously when the goddesses catch
sight of Queen Elizabeth I (for whom the play was first written and
performed) and are content to acknowledge the monarch’s superior
beauty.
(7)
On being twin sister to a woman of Helen’s beauty see Eva
Salzman’s poem “Helen’s Sister” (2004).
(8)
Malcolm Bull reprints a Renaissance painting of Leda and the Swan in which “the eggs are
helpfully stamped with the names of their occupants” (2005: 169 and
plate VIIIb).
(9)
In the Cypria (in Hesiod
1977: 499) Helen is Nemesis’ third child after Castor and Pollux.
Helen’s birth is the result of Nemesis’ rape by her father, Zeus.
Isocrates also names Nemesis as Helen’s mother (1894, vol. 1, §59: 304).
A scholiast on Pindar notes that Hesiod “makes Helen the child neither
of Leda nor Nemesis, but of a daughter of Ocean and Zeus” (Catalogues of Women in Hesiod 1977:
191).
(10)
Both Hughes (2005) and Schmitz (1990), from whom Hughes
clearly takes her information, are incorrect in describing Helen as
eight years old in this poem; presumably they were misled by the
unexpected collocation “eight score moneths” (Trussell in Shaaber 1957:
425 [43]).
(11)
Pausanias attributes the story to Stesichorus (Pausanias
vol. 1, 2.22, in 1918: 365–7). If Helen gave birth to Iphigenia, this
gives us an indication of her age when Theseus raped her: old enough to
bear children. It is possible that this story is the slander on Helen
for which Stesichorus was punished with the loss of his eyesight (Adams
1988: 116).
(12)
We can read about the suitors’ oath in fragments from
Hesiod and Stesichorus, and in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (in Euripides 1972: 368-9); see
Spentzou 1996: 305 n12. The oath may have been Hesiod’s invention: he is
the first to relate it (Adams: 1988: 99-100).
(13)
Quintus of Smyrna tells this story in his Post Homerica (The
War at Troy).
(14)
The anonymous Gest
Hystoriale describes a sacrifice in Aulis but not of
Iphigenia (TLN 4655–61). Hesiod reports that Diana turned Iphigenia into
Hecate (Catalogues of Women in Hesiod
1977: 205). In Herodotus, book 4 (1965: 276) the Taurians identify
Hecate as Iphigenia; but in Euripides’ Iphigenia
among the Taurians she is “merely priestess of the
goddess” (editor’s note in Hesiod 1977: 205).
(15)
Peter Jackson’s recent study of the Indo-European roots of
the Trojan War myth cautions that it would be “naive to assume that
Stesichorus invented the phantom story ex
nihilo” (2006: 85).
(16)
The variant was well known to the Renaissance (see Roche
1964: 152–67).
(17)
George A. Kennedy (1987: 16) has a total of 17, of whom the
last (in a twentieth-century play by Eric Linklater) is
Voltaire!
(18)
This is also the name given to Paris’ son with Oenone, so
Dictys may be confused here.
(19)
Paris was also known as Alexander which means “defender.”
In Ovid’s Heroides he explains, “When
I/Was hardly grown to man’s stature I regained/Our herds by killing an
enemy./For that I received the name I proudly bear” (Ovid 1990:
160).
(20)
William Morris’s Helen imagines three possible methods of
death the Greeks might inflict on her: burning at the stake, slaughter
by a knife, or being thrown (in a sack) from the cliffs into the sea
(1915: 4).
(21)
She also commits suicide in Thomas Heywood’s 2 Iron Age (1632), but at a later stage and
for a different reason: old age has destroyed her beauty. In John Gould
Fletcher’s “On a Moral Triumph” (1925) she hangs herself when called a
“wrinkled harridan” by children, “first taking care to leave behind a
note, in which she laid all the blame on Menelaus and his fits of bad
temper” (1925: 97).
(22)
The “Envoy” to Maurice Hewlett’s “Helen Redeemed” (1913)
parallels Helen’s beauty with Achilles’ strength and sees their union as
“the marriage of true minds.”
الفصل الأول: سَرْد الأسطورة
(1)
This is a strong position in narrative terms, the final
elegy, although its strength seems partly undercut by its
sentiment—Hector was kind “even to
Helen” (Willcock 1976: 276, my italics) and by its change
of tone and subject from heroic paean to solipsistic concern: “I mourn
for you [Hector] in sorrow of heart and mourn myself also and my
ill-luck” (24.773-4). However, Helen’s self-pity is not unusual; Colin
Burrow notes that in Homer sympathy regularly “lead[s] to the
reaffirming of one’s own grounds for sorrow” (1993:
21).
(2)
The parallels between weaving and narrative are long
attested. See for example Clader 1976: 5–9, 33; Heilbrun 1990: 103-4,
111; Bergren 1980: passim; Ion in
Euripides 1973: 47. Homer twice gives Helen the opportunity to tell her
own story: in the Iliad (book 3) she
does so with weaving, in the Odyssey
(book 4) with words. On Achilles with his lyre and Helen with her
tapestry as two forms of the poet see Austin 1994: 38 and 38, n21.
Isocrates relates how Helen came to Homer at night and ordered him to
compose a Trojan epic. Helen is thus responsible for the Iliad: “partly owing to the genius of
Homer, but chiefly through her, his
charming poem of universal renown was composed” (1894: §65, my italics).
On Horace’s depiction of Helen as a poet see Putnam 2006: 92. Andrew
Lang’s “Palinode” (the octave of which is addressed to Helen, the sestet
to Homer) presents Helen as a poet (Lang 1923). In “Helen at the Loom”
George Lathrop depicts Helen’s relief at being in control of her
material (in both senses).
(3)
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is similarly concerned with
artistic afterlife in the dominant seventeenth-century genre of drama:
“Some squeaking Cleopatra” shall “boy my greatness” (Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.250). Whereas
Homer’s Helen is concerned about the effect of (mis)representation on
her reputation, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is concerned about the effect of
(mis)representation on her regality.
(4)
Nor does he think about regaining Helen when he does fight,
even though this is technically the reason for the
war.
(5)
For a good account of this absent material, and Homer’s
knowledge of it, see Lattimore 1961: 20–8. Some of the absent material
is probably purposeful omission of details familiar to Homer’s audience;
some, however, comprises post-Homeric additions.
(6)
Analyzing “abruptness,” “jolts,” and “partially undigested”
material in Homer, Burrow observes that “the Homeric poems are
generously capacious: they leave later writers space to invent motives”
(1993: 11-12).
(7)
The epic cycle additions are extant only in fragmentary
summaries; they are available in a Loeb parallel-text edition of Hesiod
(1977). For an analysis of the epic cycle see Burgess
(2001).
(8)
Quintus’ association with Smyrna, long considered doubtful,
has been reexamined and accepted by the poem’s most recent translator,
Alan James.
(9)
In the BBC film version of Troilus
and Cressida (1981) Helen is a silent presence in 2.2,
the scene in which the Trojan council debate whether to return her to
Greece. In the 2008 Cheek by Jowl production of the play in London, she
is on stage “throughout the battles, reminding us that she is the
ultimate provocation of war” (Billington 2008). Poetry too inserts
Helen—through metaphor. As Martin McKinsey points out, Eumaeus’
complaint that Helen “has been the death of many a good man” (Odyssey book 14, p. 209) reads literally
that Helen “cut the legs from under troops of men”; similarly, in
Yeats’s “No Second Troy,” Helen “is credited … with having burned Ilium
much as if she had wielded the torch herself” (McKinsey 2000: 187
n5).
(10)
This in fact is how all perception works. In hearing,
auditors do not receive every sound transmitted by the speaker but fill
in gaps according to logic (deafness is when the gaps outnumber the
received words, making the auditor incapable of completing the sense).
In night driving, the brain connects remarkably little visual data into
a road, a bend, a hill.
(11)
For an extended analysis of this aspect of Helen see
Gumpert 2001.
(12)
In Homer the aim is simply to regain her. Revenge is a
later addition, first implied in the epic cycle (in the Little Iliad; in Hesiod 1977: 519). There
is no evidence that female adulteresses were ever punished by death in
the fifth century BCE (see Patterson 1998; Cohen 1991: ch.
5).
(13)
On both occasions the Greek simply reads, “thus he
spoke.”
(14)
The same Sanskrit root leads to Latin gnavus/navus = “diligent,” “assiduous”;
i.e., working for knowledge.
(15)
Part of the word’s negative, fearful meaning comes from its
punning association with the River Styx (which means hateful, something
that makes you shudder), as Hesiod explains, “And there dwells a goddess
who makes the immortals shudder, awful Styx, eldest daughter of Oceanus”
(Theogony in Hesiod 1988:
26).
(16)
On the relation between these two texts see Maguire 2007:
91–109.
(17)
Henry Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang convey this more
overtly in their novel The World’s
Desire when Helen lifts her veil to the Sidonian. “When
he saw her loveliness he stopped suddenly as one who is transfixed by a
spear” (1894: 233). The simile is telling: an image of disaster, of
death. In the seventeenth century Daniele Bartoli notes Nicostratus’
reaction to Zeuxis’ painting of Helen: he was mesmerized “as though he
had seen not the head of Helen, but that of Medusa, he remained as
though of stone” (cited in Colantuono 1997: 161). For images of
petrification in the rhetoric of Renaissance art see Cropper 1991. Even
children’s literature adheres to this: climbing a wall to glimpse
Penelope through a window, Tony Robinson’s Odysseus “froze. He knew at
once who it was: she was thirteen or fourteen and she was incredibly
beautiful. It was Helen” (1987: 18).
(18)
I am indebted to Ben Morgan for this
reference.
(19)
The causes of the several destructions are varied: internal
conflict; fire; earthquake; external attack; fire again. The nine
numbered Troys (I–IX) subdivide into 47 phases of
construction/habitation (Wood 2005: 19; Latacz 2004: passim).
(20)
The parallels between Pandora and Helen are overt in
Hesiod’s Works and Days, where the
phrase used to describe Pandora—“fearfully like the immortal
goddesses”—is Homer’s description of Helen in Iliad 3.158. West’s translation (1988: 39) reads
dilutedly, “model upon the immortal goddesses’ aspect the fair lovely
form of a maiden.”
Ericthonius, son of Vulcan by Athena or by Earth, was hidden by Athena in a chest and given to Cecrops’ daughters to guard without opening. They disobeyed, were horrified by its contents (something serpentine) and leapt from the Acropolis to death.
The beautiful Feather Woman fell in love with the beautiful Morning Star and was taken from earth to live in the sky. She spent her days gardening but was told not to dig up the Great Turnip (which plugs the hole between sky and earth). Curious, she disobeyed and brought death and unhappiness into the world.
(21)
In seasonal myths the earth-mother divides into two
characters, a mother and a daughter (as in the Demeter-Persephone myth)
to “express the stages of summer-fullness and of spring rebirth after
the wintry death” (Lindsay 1974: 186). The story of Demeter-Persephone
has exact parallels in Sumerian myth in the story of Dunuzi and
Geshtines (see Armstrong 2005: 52).
(22)
At other times myth copies its model precisely. The stories
of Moses and Jesus offer what Plutarch would call “parallel lives.” Each
is threatened with death as a baby by tyrannical fiat. (Moses’ story
here parallels other birth stories from the ancient Near East. For
example, the mother of King Sargon of Akkod protected him by putting him
in a box of reeds which she set afloat on the Euphrates; Reinhartz 1998:
5). Each delivers the law of their respective religion (Moses in the Ten
Commandments, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount). For each a new
spiritual identity is heralded by water (the crossing of the Red Sea;
baptism in the River Jordan). Each spends a period of 40 days or years
in the wilderness. The story of Moses is itself modeled on creation
myths in which a god splits water to create the world. The narrative
innovation in the Moses myth is that “what is being born is not a cosmos
but a nation” (Armstrong 2005: 96).
(23)
As Mercea Eliade notes, “symbolism does not depend on being
understood” (1958: 450).
(24)
Throughout Greek myth, gods shine and dazzle. They wear
shining clothes, have gleaming hair, are associated with light. In
Luke’s Gospel, when two men in dazzling clothes appear inside Jesus’
empty tomb, we are meant to understand from this sartorial semiotics
that they are angels. When Jesus is transfigured, the four Gospels agree
in telling us that his face shone. On
the ways in which Christianity harnessed Homer see Coupe 1997:
106.
(25)
The story is told by Herodotus 1965:
381.
(26)
Herodotus describes a shrine of Helen at Therapnae (1965:
381), Pausanias a temple of Menelaus. Isocrates says both Menelaus and
Helen were worshiped there as gods, not as heroes (1894:
§63).
(27)
Other narrative innovations—such as hanging—are also likely
to be anthropomorphizing adaptations of a tree goddess religion.
Pausanias relates that Helen was hanged at Rhodes by a vengeful widow of
the Trojan War. The specific location, Rhodes, suggests that this is a
variant of the Helen dendritis
tradition. The parallel ends of the sisters Phaedra and Ariadne—both
hanged from a tree—suggest the origin of each as a tree-goddess (Clader
1976: 70). The power of the tree-goddess structures the opening of
Miranda Seymour’s novel The Goddess
(1979); Helen as matriarchal deity is the subject of Linda Cargill’s
To Follow the Goddess
(1991).
(28)
Most editors emend the folio’s “a fear” to “afeared,”
including the RSC Shakespeare, which is an edition of the Folio
text.
(29)
Penelope in the Odyssey
is similarly nostalgic, reminiscing about Odysseus’ leadership—“if ever
there was such a man” (book 19, p. 295).
(30)
In Homer Odysseus and Diomedes steal the Palladium from
Troy.
(31)
In Thucydides’ analysis Agamemnon was power-hungry (1972:
39-40).
(32)
On the importance of the Trojan War to subsequent literary
and political narratives see Waswo 1997.
(33)
Derek Walcott writes, “ten years’ war was … an epic’s
excuse” (Omeros, 56.3.11; p.
284).
(34)
In the London version this ending to act 1 was replaced by
a dialogue between Cassandra and Helen.
الفصل الثاني: الجمال
(1)
The Latin reads: “primo Helenam speciositate nimia
refulsisse” (delle Colonne Griffin 1936: 83).
(2)
John Pollard similarly refers to Helen as a woman “whose
only fault was that she was too
beautiful” (1965: 145, my italics). Cf. Ovid’s Paris in the Heroides who tells Helen “I find more now
than I was promised by the goddess and you exceed by far that promise”
(1990: 152-3).
(3)
The production was directed by Sam Mendes; Helen was played
by Sally Dexter.
(4)
The antistrophe can be found in Helen in Euripides 1973: 179, but the translation
smoothes over the textual difficulties. Austin (1994: 177–82) provides a
literal translation, indicates the lacunae, and chronicles the
difficulties in reconstructing and interpreting.
(5)
Helen, in John Erskine’s novel The
Private Life of Helen of Troy, defines the central
problem of beauty as insufficiency, not the insufficiency of an
individual but of beauty itself: “In the presence of great beauty all
men seem to be inexperienced. There isn’t enough of it, I suppose, to
get used to” (1926: 36).
(6)
In literature Helen regularly talks of her beauty as a
curse. In Ovid’s Heroides she
laments, “I wish beauty had passed me by” (1990: 172). In The Private Life of Helen of Troy, Helen
observes, “They always said I was beautiful, but the only effect I could
notice was that they treated me as if I weren’t a human being” (Erskine
1926: 140). Disguised as a commoner, Linda Cargill’s Helen enjoys the
“novel sensation” of guards “glancing at me indifferently” (1991: 23).
Mark Haddon’s Helen (2002) bonds with her newborn daughter because “it
was the first time I had ever been loved by someone who did not care
what I looked like” (this replays, in stronger form, her fascination
with her ataraxic suitor, Menelaus: “he looked through me. It was the
first time in my life I had ever felt invisible”). Sara Teasdale’s Helen
talks of her beauty as the gods’ “cruel gift” (1937: 9). Delmore
Schwartz’s Klymene pities one “chained to so beautiful a body” (1979:
115). Only the Chorus in Goethe’s 2
Faust does not see beauty as a bane: “For supreme good
fortune is yours alone/In the fame of beauty, excelling all” (8516-17).
In Sonnet 6 of John Erskine’s sequence about Paris, it is Paris who
feels the pressure of Helen’s beauty (1922: 137).
(7)
Shakespeare will later express the pivotal moment between
knowing you should conclude with Helen and being unable to do so in the
adversative conjunction “yet.” In Troilus and
Cressida Hector offers 27 lines of axiological argument
as to why Helen should be returned to the Greeks, but concludes in favor
of retaining her: “yet ne’ertheless/I propend to you/In resolution to
keep Helen still” (2.3.193–6). The contrasting conjunction “yet” is
unspoken in Aeschylus but the hinge is there. The Chorus cannot
articulate Helen’s beauty (because, as they realize, it cannot be
articulated: “beauty no thought can name”) and yet they cannot stop
themselves trying to do so. Their subsequent four lines are
chrestomathic clichés. Helen herself encounters this problem in Goethe’s
Faust when she meets the absolute
of ugliness: Mephistopheles/Phorycas. She tries to describe her/it
before conceding “Yet I waste breath; for ever vainly words attempt/To
recreate and recompose the forms we see” (2
Faust 8692).
(8)
Faced with a more prosaic extreme in Vanity Fair, that of the hangover of Joseph
Sedley from too much rag punch at Vauxhall Gardens, Thackeray also
employs the tactic of omission: “agonies which the pen refuses to
describe” (1977: 95).
(9)
A parallel episode of transferred representation occurs in
art history in Apelles’ (c. fourth century BCE) complaint about a
student artist who had lavished gold on his painting of Helen: “Because
you knew not how to paint her fair, you have made her rich.” The
incident, first reported by Clemens Alexandrinus, is narrated by
Franciscus Junius (librarian to the Earl of Arundel) in The Painting of the Ancients (1638, book 2,
ch. 6, §2, sig. Q4r; the Latin edition is 1637).
(10)
The frequency with which Butler sees landscapes “in terms
of painters he liked” perhaps recalls his own abandoned ambition to be a painter (Butler
1970: 264n).
(11)
My informal survey of editions of Tristram Shandy in libraries, second-hand bookstores,
and private collections has so far revealed only one reader (John
Scholar) who has accepted Sterne’s invitation.
(12)
I am grateful to David Summers for this reference. On the
absent or off-stage representations of God and the godlike see Taylor
2001 and Daileader 1998.
(13)
In 1576 Thomas Rogers took Zeuxis to task for his
presumption in painting Helen when “neither Homer by eloquence, nor any
man by imagination, should conceive the like” (sig.
U4r).
(14)
For Helen figures in the novel, see ch. 6. For Homeric
echoes and structures in both To the
Lighthouse and Mrs
Dalloway see Hoff (1999) and Wyatt
(1973).
(15)
In his Iconologia Cesare
Ripa uses a naked woman as the emblem of beauty (first Italian ed.
1593).
(16)
On the early modern equation of nakedness with “absence or
deficiency of language” see Neill 2000: 411-12.
(17)
Variants of this phrase occur in Ibycus, Sappho, Plutarch,
Pindar, Hesiod, and Homer. Later literary tradition consistently
portrays Helen as blonde. In the medieval Gest
Hystoriale we read, “[t]he here of hir hede, huyt as the
gold,/Bost out uppon brede bright on to loke” (TLN 3021). Shakespeare’s
Pandarus tells us that Cressida’s hair is “somewhat darker than Helen’s”
(Troilus and Cressida 1.1.41-2).
There is nothing unusual about this in terms of beauty. Paris is
traditionally blond, almost every medieval heroine is blonde, and in
Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage
blond is the Trojan norm: Aeneas’ description of the sack of Troy
includes “virgins half-dead dragg’d by their golden hair”
(2.1.195).
(18)
Heroines and gods in Greek drama such as Alcestis in
Euripides’ Alcestis (1974: 38) and
Dionysus in his Bacchae (Euripides
1973: 206) also have curls. Ciliary curls are attributed to both
Aphrodite and Medea in Hesiod’s Theogony.
(19)
See e.g. Fra Angelico, Jacques-Louis David, Evelyn de
Morgan, William Morris, Antonio Canova. Curls had a long reign as the
capillary desideratum for both men and women. Chaucer’s Pardoner’s blond
hair is deemed ugly partly because it refuses to curl (General Prologue
675–9). Cf. Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth
Night, whose hair “will not curl by nature”; 1.3.98-9
(Theobald’s emendation for F’s “coole my nature” is universally
accepted, including by the RSC Shakespeare editors whose copy text is
the Folio). Absalon has curly golden hair in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale.”
Curly hair is praised in Gest
Hystoriale TLN 3968, 3757 and in Lydgate’s Troy Book 2.4550. A French manuscript of
the fifteenth century (an illustration from the Works of Christine de Pisan) depicts Paris with blond
curls (BL Harley MS 4431, fol. 129).
(20)
It is this tradition that Shakespeare mocks in Sonnet 130:
“I never saw a goddess go,/My mistress when she walks, treads on the
ground.”
(21)
Since Achanes is a child, this may mean no more than that
Cupid imitated his childlike gait. But since Cupid is himself a child,
the inference holds: the divine paediatric gait is different from mortal
childlike movement.
(22)
In his essay “On Beauty” Francis Bacon considers
movement more important than features (1985:
189).
(23)
The fake female in Aristophanes’ The Poet and the Woman (Thesmophoriazusae) wears a yellow dress and perfume.
When later called upon to play Helen, he says that he is appropriately
dressed for the role. This may mean no more than that he is dressed as a
woman; but it may refer to the color of the dress he is wearing. In
Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) Helen
is characterized throughout by a controversial yellow dress. When
Verena, the Helen character in Jane Stanley’s novel A Daughter of the Gods (1886), attends a
ball, her dress is “a most artistic combination of bronze velvet and
pale yellow, embroidered in gold” (1886, vol. 2: 96). (For Walcott and
Stanley see chapter 6.)
(24)
Clothes, like their wearers, shine, as in Penelope’s
“shining veil” in Odyssey book 16, p.
252. See Hughes (2005: 106-7) on the saturation of clothes with olive
oil to create this luminous effect.
(25)
What is true of humans and gods is true of other sites of
beauty too: effect is more illustrative than description. Sidney’s
Arcadia tells us “we can better
consider the sun’s beauty by marking how he gilds these waters and
mountains” (1977: 63). This tradition is Platonic in origin: beauty is
the reflected splendor of the divine countenance (see Rogers 1988: 67,
citing Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium).
(26)
Later writers developed this reaction, not just comparing
the beautiful woman to a goddess but mistaking her for one. We see this
in the Gest Hystoriale (TLN 13808),
in Lydgate’s Troy Book 2.3653-4, and
in Shakespeare’s romances.
(27)
Laud Troy Book TLN
3067–76; Gest Hystoriale TLN 3538–64;
Lydgate’s Troy Book 2.4296; Siege of Troy TLN 664-5; Caxton’s Recuyell 1894, vol. 2:
538-9.
(28)
Hecuba anticipates Menelaus’ change of heart in Euripides’
The Women of Troy. She tries to
dissuade Menelaus from returning to Sparta in the same ship as Helen
because she knows his thoughts of vengeance will evaporate when he gazes
on Helen’s beauty.
(29)
The translator marks Lampito’s Spartan dialect with
Scottish forms. Dictys narrates another version of this. Achilles first
plans to kill Helen in public (Frazer 1966: 84). After the sack of Troy,
it is Ajax who proposes killing Helen. Menelaus’ love for Helen is such
that he petitions for her life (unmotivated by her appearance: neither
she nor her breasts are in sight). It is the intercession of Odysseus
with persuasive speech that saves Helen’s life.
(30)
Joseph’s source for this episode was the anonymous
Excidium
Troiae.
(31)
In Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621) Philargus suspects his wife of infidelity,
and repeatedly threatens her with death: by drowning, by burning, by
being dragged naked through thorn bushes. But when he catches sight of
her breast (“a most heavenly breast”), he stands stock-still in
admiration and offers his wife a two-day reprieve to confess (1995:
13).
(32)
For Stopford Brooke, “only one passage, that about the
breasts of Helen and the sword, seem to me awkward in conception” (1900,
vol. 1: 137). In Ben Jonson’s The Staple of
News it is Hermione who has beautiful breasts, and Helen
is praised “for a mouth!” (4.2.9). Jonson may have read Gest Hystoriale, which describes Helen’s
lovely lips (“lippus full luffly, as by lyn wroght”; TLN 3049). The
author of Gest Hystoriale takes his
description from Guido, with one silent editorial omission: that Helen’s
lips “ad oscula auidis affectibus inuitabant” (sig. d4r; Curry 1916: 66
n2).
(33)
The poem, as Stopford Brooke first realized, is Roman
rather than Greek in ambience. Lucretius’ devotion is to duty (stern,
rigid) rather than to beauty, and “the sense of the beautiful as a part
of life does not appear in the poem” (1900, vol. 1: 136). Consequently
Helen’s beauty is not presented holistically.
(34)
This tradition is recorded by Pliny (1968, vol. 33, §23:
63) among others. The tradition was later eroticized: Henri II of France
(1519–59) complimented his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, by modeling his
drinking goblet on the size of her breast (Yalom 1997:
68).
(35)
The noun in Greek, malon, is the word for apple or any other tree fruit
(pomegranate is another common translation) and is a common metaphor for
breasts. Here the sequence of lines means literally “don’t despise the
young girls, for softness resides in their tender thighs, and blossoms
in their apple/breast/pomegranate.”
(36)
Duffy here overlaps “beauty” and “sex symbol” but they are
not always complementary categories. In fact the latter is defined by a
focus on breasts rather than on facial beauty; breasts draw attention
away from the face. I am grateful to Elisabeth Dutton for this
observation. However, in Marlowe’s Dr
Faustus outstanding female beauty is compared to the
breasts of Aphrodite (1.1.161-2).
(37)
That Canova was perfectly capable of distinguishing male
from female is apparent from his sculpture of Napoleon (large, strong,
with rippled muscles) and his head of a female dancer (with flowers in
her hair), both in Astley House, London.
(38)
I am grateful to Kathryn Loveridge for this
reference.
(39)
This, at least, is the general meaning but it is a
difficult image, perhaps best glossed as “and you look pretty good in
drag too.”
(40)
The phrase was used in Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène (at the ENO in London’s Coliseum, 2006)
where it describes Paris, a young Toby Spence (in the ENO casting) to
Felicity Lott’s Helen (25 years Spence’s senior); but it is equally
applicable to the gender-fluid Helens of this section. Not in
Hesketh-Harvey’s original typescript, the pun was clearly added or ad
libbed in the course of rehearsal or performance.
(41)
A poem to Sir John Salusbury on the occasion of his
marriage compares him to Paris, to the latter’s disadvantage. Paris is
“beautiful,” “manlike,” “with face so feminate,” but Salusbury is even
more so; consequently “Helen revives to love sweet Salusbury” (XXI, 25,
27, 21, 30; 1914: 30, 29). I am grateful to Katherine Duncan-Jones for
this reference.
(42)
Lyly’s detail was clearly not an error; when he revised his
text, he kept this paragraph intact. Euphues first appeared in 1578; a revised edition
appeared in 1579.
(43)
A character called Dares appears in the Iliad (5.9ff).
(44)
For Hector’s lisp see Barbour’s Bruce (Curry 1916: 73). For
Hector’s stammer see Lydgate 2.4648.
(45)
Curry (1916: 48) identifies the first qualification of
Briseis’ monobrow as a defect in Tzetzes (1150), followed a decade later
by Benoît.
(46)
The verbal portraits are accompanied by illustrations,
although the scale is too small to represent details such as Helen’s
scar. Sylviane Messerli points out (personal communication) that Helen’s
portrait on folio 25r is separate from those of the women (which begin
on folio 28r). Helen’s portrait is followed by the men; Briseis effects
the transition from warriors to women.
(47)
This personal feature contrasts with the gap teeth of
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, which “becam [her] weel” (Chaucer 1987:
Wife of Bath’s Prologue, line
603). In Richard Brathwaite’s commentary on the Wife of Bath’s prologue
(1665: sig. I5v), Brathwaite links the Wife of Bath’s gap teeth with
Venus’ mole: the former “became her well, even as Venus’ mole made her
more lovely.” This is the same Richard Brathwaite who cited Helen’s scar
in a poem in 1621 (Nature’s Embassy);
he is clearly taken by the notion of a defect enhancing beauty (a topic
I shall explore in the next section).
(48)
In Shakespeare’s Troilus and
Cressida Thersites enters with the rhetorical question
“Agamemnon, how if he had boils, full, all over, generally?” (2.1.2).
Curry (1916: 76-7) suggests that in Lydgate’s case the King of Persia’s
warts are a misunderstanding and mistranslation of Guido’s faciem lentiginosam (sig. E2v) and
lentignosa facie (sig.
E2r).
(49)
If Lyly foregrounded the scar tradition, Thomas Heywood
foregrounded the dimple. Alone of all the later revisers John Masefield
picks up this issue and gives his Helen neither a scar nor a beauty spot
but a monobrow (1923: 35).
(50)
For extended discussion of this material I am indebted to
my colleague and former student, Ben Morgan. In particular, in the
second part of this section his assistance comes closer to
co-authorship.
(51)
Hence our habit of using gods’ names adjectivally—martial,
venereal—because they are the essence of the
category.
(52)
The same linguistic dilemma obtains in Antony and Cleopatra where Enobarbus cites
Cleopatra’s emotional exudations as inimical to metaphor: “we cannot
call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and
tempests than almanacs can report” (1.2.147–9). If Enobarbus sees
Cleopatra as an absolute of woman and therefore beyond language,
Cleopatra sees Antony as the absolute of men; in her attempts to
describe him, comparison becomes recursively redundant. He is a “man of
men” (1.5.72) and “lord of lords” (4.8.16). Consequently metaphor
“devolves upon itself to become mere tautology” (Bates 2002: 200). The
Laud Troy poet anticipates this
tautology when he introduces King Cilydis, the most beautiful man alive:
“His fairnes might no man discryve,/No man myght his fairnes say” (TLN
5260-1). The second line duplicates the first; faced with beauty it
cannot describe, language is reduced to repeating its
inability.
(53)
Almost all commentators on Chaucer’s Criseyde and
Shakespeare’s Cressida agree that Criseyde’s/Cressida’s situation is an
action replay of Helen’s, mutatis
mutandis.
(54)
Lord Bonavida’s speech reveals Heywood’s
medieval reading here in which Helen is only the most
beautiful woman in Greece; it is Polyxena who is the most beautiful woman
in Troy. Some medieval versions (the anonymous Siege of Troy, Caxton’s
Recuyell, the
Laud Troy Book)
offer the alternative tradition—the tradition which was
to become the dominant one—that Helen is the most
beautiful woman in the world.
(55)
This is true of all forms of beauty—poetry, for instance.
In Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a violent
intruder is stopped in his tracks by the poetic beauty of Arnold’s
“Dover Beach,” which his victim recites to him (2005:
217–24).
(56)
I am grateful to Jonathan Gil Harris for this
suggestion.
(57)
These examples occur in the dedicatory letter to Sir
William West prefaced to the 1597 edition of The
Anatomy of Wit. I am grateful to Leah Scragg for drawing
this to my attention.
(58)
This is the view of Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews (1742) when he describes
Fanny Price, the 19-year-old previously dismissed by Mrs Slipslop “on
account of her extraordinary beauty” (1977: 65). When Fielding later
details Fanny’s beauty, his details include innumerable flaws; e.g., two
smallpox scars, and teeth that, though white, “were not exactly even”
(1977: 155).
(59)
This work is a translation from Plutarch and
others, but this observation seems to be Grant’s addition. I am
grateful to Kirsty Milne for this point and for the reference to
Grant.
(60)
Pliny reports that Helen had a cosmetic to combat old age;
he identifies it as helenium. When mixed in wine, this same herb
banishes sorrow (1969, vol. 21, §91: 273-4). Homer’s Helen is seen to
possess such a herb in the Odyssey
book 4 (see also Edwin Muir’s poem “The Charm”). But it is poets not
cosmetics that defeat age, as Chiron observes in Goethe’s 2 Faust: “The poets freely choose her
changing face./She never need grow up, grow old,/Or lose her looks”
(7429–31).
(61)
Without naming her, Wilfred Owen invokes Helen in “The Kind
Ghosts” (1918), which contrasts the equanimity of the sleeping Helen
with the generosity of the permanently sleeping boys who died for
her.
(62)
The unfinished story was published in 1966, along with the
comments of Green and Fowler.
(63)
The transformation of Elfine in Cold Comfort Farm (1932) creates
the most frequent effect of beauty: love. Richard Hawk-Monitor
realizes “not that Elfine was beautiful, but that he loved
Elfine” (Gibbons 2006: 158).
(64)
The heavy mythological superstructure, cumbersome allegory,
and antiquated language are partly responsible for the novel’s failure.
For the National Observer’s
devastatingly bad review of the novel see Green 1946:
134.
(65)
John Ogle had anticipated them in 1594 when he described
Helen as “Beauty’s existence” (sig. D2v).
(66)
Katy Littlewood offered a version of this in 2004
when she directed a student production of Euripides’ Helen at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Three actresses were chosen to play the role of Helen. The
triple casting was partly a practical response to the size of
the role, partly an aesthetic response to the Diane Kruger
problem outlined above, and partly an embodiment of the
production’s keynote question blazoned on the poster campaign:
“The most beautiful woman in the world—who does she think she
is?” Delmore Schwartz approached the casting challenge in the
same way in his theatrical poem of 1941, “Paris and Helen: An
Entertainment.” In his projected cast of characters he
alternately cast four actresses as Venus: Greta Garbo, Myrna
Loy, Hedy Lamarr, and Dame May Whitty (Schwartz 1979: 105). To
him a convincing representation of Venus was obviously more
difficult than that of Helen, whose role is confidently assigned
to Madeleine Carroll. One quarter of his Venuses, Hedy Lamarr,
later played Helen in the film L’Amante
de Paride (1954). Coincidentally this Helen was
also a quartered role: Lamarr’s character has four
reincarnations of which Helen is one.
(67)
He has also commented on her stature in Memoirs 1972: 40.
(68)
Oliver Taplin explains how the Iliad “became a nationalist epic” from the fifth century
CE onward (1992: 110). Austin relates this to the nationalist plot of
Euripides’ Helen, designed “to remove
Helen’s body from all foreign beds once and forever” (1994:
143).
(69)
Similarly the Greeks in Quintus of Smyrna’s account, when
they see Helen/home, forget their previous reviling and see in her only
perfection.
(70)
The goddess Circe manipulates nostalgia in the opposite
way, encouraging Odysseus to forget his
fatherland.
(71)
Delmore Schwartz’s poem “Paris and Helen” is structured
round nostalgia. The Dioscuri, dead in their native land, contrast with
the exiled Helen who is fearful that Venus will take her “further from
home” (Schwartz 1979: 123) and with the “expatriate American,” never
mentioned by name (Ezra Pound), who “puts old Greek into modern English”
(115), “speaking Greek/Perception, and Greek passion” (116). “Nostalgia
is the easiest emotion,/Helen must suffer it, despite her beauty” (115).
Schwartz’s view of the past parallels Theodore Weiss’s view of Helen:
both renew themselves in poetry. “How the past/Once in a poem, has more
lives than a cat!” (Schwartz 1979: 116); “Helen, it seems, is more
herself the more she’s reproduced” (Weiss 1988: 953, lines
37-8).
(72)
Talking of nationalism, Schwyzer explains that the “project
of bringing a nation into being” has as “one of its prerequisites … the
absence of a fully realized
nation” (2004: 75).
(73)
For Schiller (1967: 5) beauty is a mystery and that is its
attraction. (Hence Paglia’s—or Western art’s—equation of beauty with the
mysterious smile.) George Santayana (1955: 19) and Northrop Frye (1970:
66) agree. The technical phrase for this mystery in seventeenth-century
continental philosophy is the je-ne-sais-quoi; see Bouhours (1960) and Scholar
(2006).
الفصل الثالث: اختطاف هيلين
(1)
Briseis lost her husband and three brothers on one day
(19.282–30) in the same campaign in which Andromache lost her father and
brothers, also slain by Achilles (6.414–24).
(2)
Medieval narrative combines or confuses the two rhyming
females, Briseis and Chryseis, with a new character, Criseyde, who
becomes the lover of the Trojan prince Troilus.
(3)
It is not the loss of Briseis that pains and angers him so
much as the personal insult to his valor and status. As he later
explains, he and Agamemnon are equals; to have his “prize of honor”
confiscated is to be treated like a “dishonored vagabond” (16.53, 54,
59).
(4)
Bia implies
unwillingness, but unwillingness need not imply force. In classical
thought, force (bia) is commonly
opposed to persuasion (peithō) and
trickery (dolos), which are the other
means of getting an unwilling person to do something. The contrasts or
parallel with Helen’s abduction—which was accompanied by persuasion (of
Helen) or trickery (of Menelaus) or force (of Helen) is an interesting
one. The respective value of each method is a matter of controversy
(explored by Gorgias; see chapter 4). I am grateful to Florence Yoon for
the points in this paragraph.
(5)
Phoenicia was a collection of city states, organized along
Greek lines, occupying the area known in the Bible as Canaan and today
as Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and the Palestinian
territories.
(6)
In Herodotus, value, and how value is determined, is a
practical rather than ethical activity. Long notes that the Phoenicians,
bargaining people, are “peculiarly accustomed to fixing values and
prices” (1987: 47).
(7)
For the ancient Greek belief that women experience greater
sexual pleasure than men and therefore can never be unwilling see Walcot
1978: 141.
(8)
The participial phrase (my italics) is designed to prevent
us viewing Helen’s information as special pleading. She is speaking to
Hecuba, Queen of Troy, who is surely in a position to contradict this
information were it false.
(9)
Chaucer himself suffered—or benefited—from the ambiguity of
the category raptus in the accusation
brought against him by Cecily Champaigne. A summary of this case might
read, she thought he raped her (in the modern sense of the word); he
thought she consented (Ackroyd 2004: 83–6; Chaucer 1987:
xxi-xxii).
(10)
I am indebted to Marion Turner for drawing my attention to
this passage and the passage on incest in book 3, and for invaluable
discussion on their implications.
(11)
This is the action that Shakespeare’s Cressida will later
present as submission to prevent rape: “upon my back to prevent my
belly” (Troilus and Cressida
1.2.260).
(12)
T. E., the author of The
Law’s Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632), could
be glossing this episode when he talks of rapists’ arguments
that “a careless liberty in [women’s] behaviour” was “an
infallible argument of sensuality,” and therefore an invitation
to violence (390). Although T. E. wishes he could persuade women
not to behave in such ways, his censure is directed at those who
misinterpret this behavior.
(13)
The atmosphere in the BBC film (directed by Jonathan
Miller) was threatening throughout, as the manipulative verbal treatment
threatened to become physical: Cressida was forced into a semisupine
position in her tent, with Diomedes pressing towards her, leaning over
her, physically restraining her. A similar atmosphere of constraint was
created by the set in the RSC production of 1990, directed by Sam
Mendes. Cressida’s tent was represented by steel ladders, and she looked
as if she were behind prison bars.
(14)
For extended discussion of this in Shakespeare see Maguire
2007: 78–119. For rape in Romeo and
Juliet see Watson and Dickey
(2005).
(15)
See Kahn and Hutson 2001, Sheen and Hutson 2005, Hutson
2007, and Thompson 2008.
(16)
For an excellent account of consent in T. E. and in
Shakespeare see Sale (2003).
(17)
For an explanation of the contexts of statute change (“each
had its own story and a reason for being told”) in Elizabeth’s
parliaments see Dean 1996: xiii and passim. The abduction debate is part
of Parliament’s concern “with ordering the household” and “punishing
those who challenged the stability of the household”
(16).
(18)
Sir Simonds D’Ewes records the readings in his journals
(D’Ewes 1682: 551, 552, 555).
(19)
The will (National Archives PROB 11/89) was written on Jan.
3 and proved on Feb. 3 and proved again (? or entered in the PCC?) on
Mar. 14. Stoite describes himself as being “aged and weak of body yet of
perfect mind and memory” in January; a month later he was
dead.
(20)
Alice’s abductor, Donnington, was tried and acquitted in
London; what happened to him at the assizes in Dorset I have not yet
discovered. Alice was returned to her family in Dorset and whom she
subsequently married is unknown (the Dorset records do not begin until
1651).
(21)
Cf. Measure for Measure
in which Angelo asks Isabella to agree to her own
violation.
(22)
In Homer et al. the name is often used both for the country
and for the city.
(23)
I am grateful to Robert Parker for this
reference.
(24)
One of his variants, “Helen ye pearle of Greece,” may have
caught Shakespeare’s eye for use in Troilus and
Cressida (2.2.81).
(25)
A later Thomas Watson (d.1686) has a “Helen Graeco” in a
Latin marginalium about beauty in Heaven Taken
by Storm (1670).
(26)
Without using the specific collocation, Faustus too
associates Helen with Greece rather than Troy, promising the students
that they will see “that peerless dame of
Greece.”
(27)
Given Menelaus’ injunctions to Helen not to struggle in
Morris’s Scenes from the Fall of
Troy, this poetic drama may also end with
rape.
الفصل الرابع: اللوم
(1)
Ovid’s Heroides, by
contrast, presents Helen’s ambivalence as a flirtatious
technique.
(2)
Pollard notes that Eve, Pandora, and Helen are judged by
the “repercussions on others,” not “by their degree of personal guilt”
(1965: 161-2).
(3)
The earliest MS is ninth century CE but the original was
probably written sometime between the fourth and sixth centuries CE
(Atwood and Whitaker 1944: xv).
(4)
The Latin dialogue is of such banal simplicity that one can
only imagine it being used as a textbook for language tuition
(Anon/Atwood and Whitaker 1944: xviii).
(5)
In 1909 Alfred Williams’s Helen suggests that the Greeks
are more to blame “who for one feeble woman, drew/With one consent a
world to strife” (111).
(6)
In English, “faultless” can be a reference to Helen’s
flawless beauty or her faultless actions. In Greek the word is amōmētos (a variant of the more usual
amymōn) whose primary meaning is
blameless, although in Quintus, who uses the word three times, it always
refers to physical beauty (see Parry 1973: 83). I am grateful to
Florence Yoon for talking me through the Greek complications
here.
(7)
Different versions of Helen’s story present her attendant
as the mother of Theseus or as a totally separate character who just
happens to share a name with Theseus’ mother. Homer’s designation of
Aethra as “Pittheus’ daughter” leaves no room for doubt
(3.144).
(8)
Maionia is an old name for Lydia, in the centre of Asia
Minor.
(9)
This is an instance where narrative logic (not a high
priority in epic) is sacrificed to emotional need: the father was killed
in book 5 (Willcock 1976: 152). He is here resurrected when his son is
slain so that we can share his anguish.
(10)
For a discussion of doubled episodes in the Odyssey (which unfortunately, does not
include this one) see Fenik 1974.
(11)
“Guilt” is clearly a term with Christian connotations; the
Greek reads, “Helen … is the cause of many evils for
Greece.”
(12)
Despite the gap of five hundred years Pollard’s point is
essentially the same as Caxton’s in his Recuyell; Helen’s problem, Caxton states, is a general
female problem: curiosity. Having heard of Paris’ great beauty, Helen
“after the custom of women … had
great desire to know by experience if it were truth that she heard speak
of” (Caxton 1894: 530, my italics).
(13)
This is a Latin translation of Benoît’s Roman de Troie, although Guido says it
comes from Dares and Dictys.
(14)
The phantom myth is believed to originate with Stesichorus’
“Palinode,” a poem we know only from Plato’s quotation of it in
Phaedrus §243a-b. For a
reinvestigation of the relationship between Plato’s quotation and its
alleged origin in Stesichorus, see Wright 2005: 83–90, 99–105, who
argues that Plato’s argument is full of spurious references. We might
note here that Stesichorus’ (alleged) palinode, in which he recants his
slander of Helen (for which he had been struck blind) and in which he
rehabilitates Helen’s reputation through the eidōlon story, is a double exculpation: he rescues
himself from blindness and Helen from blame.
(15)
“Defense,” like “encomium,” is a technical generic term:
the latter is a eulogy, the former an argument of vindication. Despite
its title, Gorgias’ work is a defense, not an encomium (although its
playful nature perhaps makes it a mock encomium).
(16)
He makes this point again later when he lists the
“blessings” of the Trojan War, of which the greatest is Greek national
independence.
(17)
When Chaucer refers to his source in Dares, he means Joseph
of Exeter (Joseph/Roberts 1970: ix).
(18)
Bate (Joseph/Bate 1986: 168) suggests an analogue in Dido’s
banquet for Aeneas
(19)
Bate interprets this phrase as premature ejaculation.
Kennedy (1987: 9) views it as a euphemism for
fellatio.
(20)
When Helen is reunited with Menelaus, the poet replays the
line of her meeting with Paris: “Ether kyssid oder and were acord” (TLN
1902).
(21)
This is a version of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis
Troia.
(22)
This complaint recurs in most medieval Troy books. It is
reinforced in the weavers’ song in Thomas Deloney’s later prose
narrative Jack of Newbury (1626)
where the weavers, naturally, approve of Penelope’s spinning, and
conclude that disaster would have been averted “had Helen then sat
carding wool” (sig. F2r).
(23)
The book was sold in the Houghton sale at Christie’s of
London on June 11 and 12, 1980, lot 362, for
£14,000.
(24)
Bullen edited the poem in the nineteenth century; he
collated both the 1589 and 1604 texts. I quote from Bullen’s text
because it has the convenience of line numbers. Where variants between
the two printed versions are an issue, I quote the two versions
separately, relying on Bullen’s representation of the 1604 text.
However, as will be evident below, Bullen’s edition is not reliable in
all details.
(25)
1589: “will be no better rulde”; 1604: “will not be
oreruled.”
(26)
I retain the edition’s italic and modernize
spelling.
(27)
The apparent paradox is rooted in the difference between
blame and responsibility. Those texts (e.g., the Iliad) that point the finger of responsibility at the
gods view them as agents of action, not as figures of blame. To say the
gods are responsible is a fact, not an accusation. In Greek mythology
gods behave badly, not immorally.
(28)
In a self-defeating circularity typical of early modern
revenge tragedy he says (four times) that he now must take revenge for
Hector’s death.
(29)
Contrast the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
(30)
As McKinsey notes (2002: 182), this unfulfilled form
reflects the unfulfillment of the poet.
(31)
It is notable that at the time Shakespeare was revising
women’s roles in myth—a project he pursues in the problem plays with
Isabella replaying Lucrece’s predicament (but refusing to become a
martyr, a role for which her position as novice nun admirably equips
her) and with Helen and Cressida’s reputations being recuperated in
All’s Well That Ends Well and
Troilus and Cressida—he was
simultaneously exploring how one might escape “being.” Troilus and
Cressida are aware of their roles as historical lovers, destined to
betray and be betrayed. Yeats’s question “What could she have done,
being what she is?” applies to Cressida.
(32)
Agnes Latham betrays an anachronistically twentieth-century
sensibility when she glosses “Helen’s face, but not her heart” in
As You Like It as follows: “few
if any of Shakespeare’s audience would pick up the reference and know
that he was saying Rosalind was as beautiful as Helen but more chaste”
(3.2.140).
(33)
The respective texts are Greene, Ciceronis Amor; Lodge, An Alarm
Against Usurers; Fenne, Fenne’s
Fruits; Parry, Moderatus.
(34)
Little St Helen’s, now called St Helen’s Place, is one
street north of Great St Helen’s, the street in which John Crosby in
Heywood’s 1 Edward 4 desires his last
resting place: “In Little St Helen’s will I be buried” (sig.
D3r).
(35)
This reference occurs in a scene that textual critics
attribute to Shakespeare’s collaborator (possibly George Peele). John
Stow invokes “Helen, mother to Constantine” in his Chronicles of 1589, as does Lodowick Lloyd
in 1590 (The Consent of Time),
Antoine de la Faye in 1599 (A Brief
Treatise), Henry Timberlake in 1603 (The Travails of Two English Pilgrims), and
John Wilson in 1608 (English
Martyrology). In 1612 Michael Drayton repeats the formula
three times in Polyolbion.
(36)
We recall the “rolling eye” of Helen in ch. 45 of the
English Faust book.
الفصل الخامس: هيلين وتراث فاوست
(1)
The English translator is known only by his initials, “P. F”;
John Jones (1994: 26–34) makes a convincing case for identifying him as Paul
Fairfax, an Englishman who had traveled in Germany.
(2)
Goethe changes Faust’s pact with the devil to a wager
between God and Mephistopheles. Although in scene 7 Faust enters into a
contract with Mephistopheles, its terms are vague (“sometime later/Wages
in the same kind will then fall due”; 1658-9). David Luke comments that
this bargain “seems to be an artistically necessary concession by Goethe
to the old Faust tradition” and “its importance is immediately played
down” (Goethe/Luke 1987: 555 n33).
(3)
The earliest extant English edition is dated 1592, but an
Oxford inventory of late 1589 contains what is almost certainly an
English edition of the Faust book (Fehrenbach
2001).
(4)
All references are to John Jones’s 1994 edition and are by
through-line numbers. For convenience, I also provide chapter
numbers.
(5)
This quotation is P. F.’s addition to his
original.
(6)
This detail is P. F.’s addition to his German
original.
(7)
There is tautology here in the English. The EFB reads
“suddenly the globe opened and sprang up in height of a man: so burning
a time, in the end it converted to the shape of a fiery man” (115–17,
ch. 2). Since the grammatical subject is consistently the globe, the
sentence must mean (awkwardly): the globe became a burning man then a
fiery man. In German the man-height stream of fire extinguishes itself
and then reforms as a fiery man (Anon. 1988: 17).
(8)
These encouragements are P. F.’s
additions.
(9)
This chapter is considerably expanded by P. F. from the
German. He adds animal details (e.g., the specificity of hog, worm, and
dragon), extends the list of animal forms in which the devils appear,
adds new dialogue between Faust and Lucifer about shape and
transformation, and describes the emotional and physical effects on
Faust of the therioform devils.
(10)
The terror and the two-hour time scheme are P. F.’s
addition.
(11)
The A-text reads “Enter
[MEPHISTOPHELES] with a Devil
dressed like a woman, with
fireworks” (2.1.151SD, my italics). The B-text reads
“He fetches in a woman Devil”
(2.1.146SD, my italics). The A-text thus explains how the B-text effect
is achieved.
(12)
This pedagogical promise is P. F.’s
addition.
(13)
P. F. omits a phrase from the German, which reads “fair
and rosy-cheeked like milk and
blood mixed” (omission in italics).
(14)
As in Marlowe, Faustus seems not to know what to ask for.
Marlowe’s Mephistopheles appropriately promises Faustus “more than thou
hast wit to ask” (A-text and B-text, 2.1.47).
(15)
P. F.’s endearing explanatory literalism occasions one of
his additions here: the pregnant Helen is only pregnant “to his
[Faustus’] seeming” (2668, ch. 55, my
italics). As devils are incapable of creation, pregnancy is a technical
impossibility. The pregnant Helen is doubly an
illusion.
(16)
On function: the German Faust Book informs us that Faustus
prefers to walk rather than ride (on horseback or in a carriage). The
EFB adds an explanation for Faustus’ preference: on foot “he could ease
himself when he list” (2392-3, ch. 46). “Ease himself” can mean either
urinate or defecate (Jones glosses it as the latter). Either way it is a
supererogatory insertion in narrative terms but consistent with P. F.’s
interest in the body.
(17)
The Duchess of Anholt is the only “real” female character.
The wife in act 1 and Helen in acts 2 and 5 are devils; the alewife is a
stock caricature.
(18)
Even Goethe’s Faust indulges a momentary libidinous impulse
when he first sees Helen.
(19)
Damnation, then, as defined by Mephistopheles, would seem
to have attractions: “Hell hath no limits” (2.1.124). Hell in short is a
metaphysicians’ (or at least a Faustian)
paradise.
(20)
By the end of the play, however, in an unsurprising
theophobic volte-face, Faustus will be begging for the
reimposition of limits: “Oh God,/…/Impose some end to my
incessant pain./Let Faustus live in Hell a thousand years,/A
hundred thousand, and at last be saved./No end is limited to
damned souls” (5.2.98, 101–4).
(21)
Productions rarely attempt a realistic Helen, opting
instead for devils in drag or property objects. In the 1974 RSC
production, directed by John Barton, Helen was a puppet with a blonde
wig, manipulated by Mephistopheles; in the 1970 RSC production, directed
by Gareth Morgan, a straw wig on a mop represented Helen. Often the
devil who represents the wife in 2.1 represents Helen of Troy at the
end.
(22)
See Riggs 2004: 318-19 for a discussion of the Dutch Church
libel in which controversial views, posted on the wall of the Dutch
churchyard in London, were signed “Tamburlaine.”
(23)
On the autobiographical relevance of both Faust and
Homunculus to Goethe see Goethe/Luke 1994:
xxxiv–xxxvii.
(24)
To avoid confusion, I refer to Goethe’s texts as 1 and 2
Faust; I call Clifford’s Part
One and Part Two.
References to Goethe are by through-line number; references to Clifford
are by page number. For an interesting joint exploration of Marlowe and
Goethe see Keefer 2004.
(25)
A version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, corresponding in many respects to the text of Q1
(1600), survives in a German edition of 1781.
(26)
Lyric, epic, opera, operetta, masque, procession, allegory,
choral ode, folk tale, and comedy are just some of the many forms
incorporated in Faust.
(27)
Cf. Hatfield 1987: 77: “a remarkably irrelevant
scene.”
(28)
In conversation with Johann Eckerman, Goethe’s secretary
and live-in companion during his last decade, Goethe said that poetry
should be both frag-mentary and difficult (Goethe/Luke 2 Faust 1994: xvii; 1 Faust 1987: xlvi). Eckerman published his Conversations after Goethe’s
death.
(29)
The philosopher James Kirwan offers an explanation of the
relationship between time and ecstasy, which is transferable to
Faust: “Paradise is never here
and now, for one cannot be conscious of being entirely happy; the moment
I become absolute, in ecstasy, the ‘I’ disappears; such a moment is
timeless, but the ‘I’ that wanted ecstasy no longer exists. Thus time,
as finitude, separates us from paradise now, yet time causes paradise to
come into being—then” (Kirwan 1999: 68). This explains why Goethe’s
devil loses the wager.
(30)
“Das Heidenvolk geht mich nichts an”—literally, “Heathen
folk don’t do it for me” (Goethe 1949: TLN 6209).
(31)
The Astrologer voices two of the topics of ch. 2:
Helen is not beautiful, but is beauty itself; and her beauty is
associated with excess.
(32)
One of Goethe’s early subtitles for the Helen fragment
written in 1800 was “Helena in the Middle Ages” (Goethe/Luke 1994: xli).
In becoming a medieval knight Goethe’s Faust fulfils the ambition of
Marlowe’s Faustus (“I will … wear thy colours on my plumèd crest”;
5.1.98–101).
(33)
In German the nouns are “Sage,” “Märchen”: tale,
fairytale.
(34)
Goethe critics agree that the references to Helen and Paris
as Luna and Endymion refer to an engraving by Le
Sueur.
(35)
There is similar acoustic self-consciousness when Heywood’s
Helen moves between rhyme and blank verse in 1
Iron Age (1632).
(36)
In Omeros (1990) Derek
Walcott describes rhyme as “language’s desire to enclose the loved world
in its arms” (13.3.14-15).
(37)
Euphorion is an allegory of Byron, revealed Goethe,
although this identification was an afterthought. His name is the Greek
form of the Latin “Faustus.”
(38)
http://clem.mscd.edu/~holtzee/odyssey/helen.html
accessed June 7, 2008.
(39)
In her afterword George reverts to the mode of the critics
cited above when she talks of Helen’s story as “culminating” in
Marlowe’s “famous” line, the “ultimate description of Helen” (2006:
608).
(40)
“A thousand” is used as a round figure for a large number
in Virgil’s Aeneid, as in book 2’s
description of “death in a thousand forms” (1981:
62).
(41)
Cf. the use of “a thousand” in Dido 2.1.175, 185; 5.1.39.
(42)
In 1909 Arthur Symons, questioning whether prose could
compare with poetry as being “the best words in the best order” (1927),
used Marlowe’s lines as a test case for comparison (challenging the
conclusion of W. J. Courthorpe, Oxford professor of poetry, who had used
the same lines for the same purpose).
(43)
In this paragraph I take my lead from Flax’s explanation of
romantic parody in McMillan 1987: 43-4. The Schlegel quotation is cited
by Flax.
(44)
I have modernized Schlegel’s
spelling.
(45)
The generically fluid nature of modern fiction means that
parody has left the novel for other more traditional genres. Journalism
is probably our last stable genre; hence the British satirical newspaper
Private Eye can flourish,
piggybacking as it does on journalistic staples from the tabloid press
to the parish magazine.
(46)
He acknowledges wryly that “from a professional point of
view I should rejoice in this./Machismo is such a useful tool./The
destructiveness it causes is beyond belief” (49).
(47)
The conversation is replayed on p. 68 before the appearance
of Gretchen, the innocent young girl with whom Faust falls in
love.
(48)
Paris’ effeminacy is often ridiculed by male characters in
twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, while being an attraction for
Helen (see Drew 1912: 11; Drew 1924: 24SD; Haddon
2002).
(49)
Although this geographic boundary occurs in Goethe, it is
not made relevant to the thematically liminal as it is in
Clifford.
(50)
Helen is used as a sexual noun in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, where it functions as an
insult to Mary—she is “a Helen.” As we shall see, this is exactly the
synecdoche that Clifford’s Helen seeks to
overturn.
(51)
This rejection of gender stereotypes applies even in the
Witch scenes, where Faust is surprised that the witches’ spells do not
sound like those in Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s Macbeth. “You mustn’t believe all the stuff
you see on the commercials, dearie./It doesn’t rhyme,” a witch explains
(Clifford 2006: 67). The Hollywood film The
Truth about Cats and Dogs (1996) had similarly used
Helen’s name as a shorthand for the damage caused by overvaluing female
beauty in male-female relations. Dr Abby Barnes (Janeane Garofalo), a
vet with a call-in radio show, falls in love with one of her callers,
Brian, yet convinces herself he would not be attracted to her were he to
see her. When Brian suggests a meeting, she arranges for her tall blonde
neighbor (Uma Thurman) to stand in for her. Asked for the truth at the
height of the confusion, Abby expostulates: “The truth is Helen of Troy!
Helen of Troy!” The 15-year-old protagonist of Mark Schultz’s play
A Brief History of Helen of Troy
(2005) feels similarly burdened by the beauty of her dead mother. In Tom
Stoppard’s The Invention of Love
(1998) the recently deceased textual critic A. E. Housman feels no such
pressure. Arriving in the underworld, he expresses interest in meeting
Benjamin Hall Kennedy, the classical scholar after whom Housman’s
academic Chair was named. Charon remarks that this is not usually the
first request of the newly dead. “Who is?” inquires Housman naively. The
response: “Helen of Troy” (1998: 2-3).
(52)
Diary, Aug. 2, 2007. Marjorie Garber analyzes the
segregated lavatory as the key site of gender difference in Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural
Anxiety (1992).
الفصل السادس: مُحاكاة هيلين
(1)
Since my discussion concerns only book 3, I omit the
preliminary 3 from all canto references.
(2)
Hamilton (9.42.9n) notes that this comment about
Aeneas’ regret of his marriage is added by Paridell to his Virgilian
source.
(3)
Marlowe’s Dr Faustus
later halves the number of Cupids: “Enter HELEN again … passing
over between two Cupids.” (This stage direction
exists only in the B-text, 5.2.93.)
(4)
When performed by boys, as in the original Elizabethan
production, this effect might have been more (or less)
obvious.
(5)
In his poem La Belle
Hélène (1878), about attending a performance of the
opera, Edgar Fawcett resigns himself to Offenbach’s opera as the
lesser of two evils: better to parody the classics than to forget
them.
(6)
The production was directed by Laurent Pelly; Kit
Hesketh-Harvey provided the English
translation/adaptation.
(7)
The director, Laurent Pelly, also designed the
costumes.
(8)
Coincidentally Offenbach had originally planned a
musical parody of Wagner’s Tannhäuser but was overruled by his librettists
(Traubner 2006). For a lucid account of the development of the opera
see Traubner 2003: 45–50.
(9)
I have not found any copies of this film in American
libraries, although the Library of Congress owns a two-page
synopsis. According to the synopsis, the missing material includes
the Judgment of Paris (the goddesses are listed as Aphrodite, Hera,
and Thetis, although the attached cast list correctly offers Athena
instead of Thetis); Helen’s disillusion with Paris who snores just
like Menelaus; Paris’ irritation at Helen’s sartorial extravagance;
Helen’s attempts to end the war (thwarted by the Trojans); and the
wooden horse. Two stills, available on the Web and copyrighted to
Getty Images, show episodes not in the BFI
fragments.
(10)
The film won an Oscar for its intertitles in the first
year of the Academy Awards.
(11)
Elisabeth Dutton, personal
communication.
(12)
See Wilfrid S. Jackson’s Helen of
Troy, New York (1904) and Mrs Burton Harrison’s The Story of Helen Troy (1881), for
examples. Jackson’s novel was made into a musical comedy by Bert Kalmar
in 1923, titled Looking for the Happy
Ending (but sometimes also known by the title of
Jackson’s novel).
(13)
Kate Payn teases the heroine Verena about her aversion
to being photographed, revising Scott’s lines from “Lady of the
Lake” for the purpose (vol. 1: 235). In vol. 2: 213 Kate reassures
her mother, who is losing her in marriage, that she has another
daughter; Tennyson’s lines from “The May Queen,” pressed into
service here, do not include Kate’s comments about curling tongs and
female hairstyles. The novel is in two volumes; all references are
to volume and page number.
(14)
This review is quoted in an advertisement for the book
in The Daily News of May 26,
1886.
(15)
Hurst and Blackett specialized in popular novels,
publishing the work of Mary Braddon (author of Lady Audley’s Secret), Mrs Oliphant,
and “John Halifax, Gentleman,” for example. Stanley’s novels were
also published and widely publicized in the
USA.
(16)
For the parallels between Clarissa’s parties as an
“offering” and Septimus Warren Smith’s suicide as a Girardian
sacrifice, see Wyatt 1973. On the Homeric world of the novel
generally, see Hoff 1999.
(17)
I am grateful to John Scholar for observations on Woolf
and Joyce in this paragraph and throughout this
section.
(18)
References to Omeros are
in the form: chapter/section/line.
(19)
John van Sickle sees in the name of Achille’s ancestor,
Afolabe, a Greek etymology: apo =
from, away, and labé = take (1999:
23). Afolabe’s name means “taken away,” even before he is captured as a
slave.
(20)
Although this is typical of Helen narratives, it is unusual
in Omeros, where everyone’s
interiority is examined at length. The poem’s events are primarily
emotional.
(21)
Boswell’s Past Ruined
Ilion provides wide coverage of Helen poems, but the list
has expanded considerably since 1982. In addition to the novels cited in
endnotes throughout this book, see Nye (1980), McLaren (1996), Franklin
(1998), Pollard (2004), and Elyot (2005); in 1956 Warner Brothers
released a book of the film: Helen of Troy—The
World’s Greatest Love Story. For a screenplay (adapted
from his stageplay) see Miller (2003). Political and religious uses of
Helen are at their height in the early modern period: see Rainold 1563:
Gir-v; Buchanan 2004: 79; and Fuller 1799: 153-4 (a
late-eighteenthcentury transcript of a seventeenth-century speech
delivered by Charles I). I am grateful to Thomas Roebuck for these three
references. For religious uses see Pikeryng’s Horestes, lines 538–601 (where the satire is conveyed by
using the tune of a popular song about Mary Queen of Scots to words
about Clytemnestra and Helen; Axton 1982: 158) and Bridges (1587) where
Helen is compared to the Roman Catholic mass. For philosophy and
politics see Camus (2000).
