"Goodlie anticke apparrell"?: Sophocles' Ajax at early modern Oxford and Cambridge.

IN HIS DISCUSSION OF TRAGEDY in the Defence of Poesy (ca. 1580), Philip Sidney mentions Sophocles' fifth-century play [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Latinized as Ajax) to illustrate the impact that tragedy should make on its audience. (1) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] depicts the frenzy of the famous Greek warrior who became so frustrated after the dead Achilles' armor was given to Odysseus that he went mad:

   let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing or whipping
   sheep and oxen thinking them the army of Greeks with their
   chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus, and tell me if you have not a
   more familiar insight into anger than finding in the schoolmen his
   genus and difference. (2)

Sidney compares theatrical performance with study, evoking two responses to tragic action: psychological involvement with the protagonist's fall, and academic dissection of his type; he prefers the experience of watching "Ajax on a stage," and the personal "insight into anger" thereby gained to reading the commentaries of "the schoolmen" which dryly anatomize rather than vividly represent Ajax's rage. Sidney's discussion of these different responses to [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is part of the Defence's wider satire of pedantically misguided reactions to literature, but can also be read as a critique of his contemporaries' attitudes towards Greek tragedy. Sophocles was embedded within the curriculum at early modern Oxford and Cambridge, and as a Christ Church undergraduate during the late 1560s Sidney would have probably heard the Greek lectures, in which Sophocles was one of the authors taught. (3) Sidney interrogates an engagement with Sophocles only for his didactic usefulness, and suggests that the Greek dramatist should be more than just a worthy pillar of the curriculum, but should instead be watched "on a stage" to make an audience think and empathize.

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] may well have occurred to Sidney as a good example both because of Sophocles' place within the academic curriculum and because the play had recently been prepared for the university stage. Just before Sidney went up to Oxford in 1568, a Latin production of Sophocles' play under the expanded title Ajax Flagellifer (Ajax the Scourger) had been included in a high-profile royal progress visit to Cambridge. (4) On August 9, 1564, after various sermons, debates, and perambulations, the Queen pleaded fatigue, and so, in the stark words of one eyewitness, "This nyght sholde haue byn pleyed Aiax flagellifer in Latin and was not." (5) In 1605, nearly twenty years after Sidney's death, Ajax was again staged, this time at his alma mater, Christ Church, on an expensive, innovative Inigo Jones-designed stage, yet despite being overseen by powerful courtiers and the Office of the Works, accounts of its reception were mostly negative. The performance lasted from 9 p.m. until 1 a.m., (6) and an observer again noted bad-tempered royal fatigue: apparently James "was verye weary before he came thither, but much more wearied by that, and spake manye wordes of dislike." (7) Although another eyewitness enthused that "the King shewed himselfe verie well pleased, and content with it," we might be skeptical, since this comes from the official panegyric Oxfords Triumph (1605), authored by Anthony Nixon, "freelance Jacobean hack." (8) So both versions of Ajax were either canceled or apparently unsuccessful: could this failure have been predicted?

On the contrary--there were sound reasons for the play's selection. Like all progress visits, the university entertainments were primarily intended to impress the monarch, and with court advisors such as William Cecil (in 1564) and Thomas Howard, earl of Suffolk (in 1605), breathing down their necks, Cambridge and Oxford pitched their entertainments squarely at two monarchs who prided themselves on scholarship, both to pay a compliment to a learned prince and to imply that university and monarchy shared priorities. Siobhan Keenan and Linda Shenk have both recently demonstrated the extent to which Elizabeth's Privy Council sought to micromanage the 1564 visit, to ensure proof of institutional conformism. (9) This controlling zeal was seen in 1605, too, and best epitomized in Cecil's July 1564 letter to Edward Hawford, Master of Christ's, in which Cecil articulated his "desyer ... that twoe thynges may specyally appeare in that vniuersitie / Order/and lernyng: and for order I meane bothe for religionn and Civyll behavour." (10) The "hands-on" approach that the courtiers often took is further encapsulated in an account of Howard's involvement, along with the earls of Worcester and Northampton, and Lord Cary, in the 1605 Christ Church staging, and the resulting conflict:

   They (but especiallie Suffolk vtterlie disliked the stage att
   Christchurch ... this dislike of the Earle of Suffolk much troubled
   the Vicechancelor, and all the workmen, yet they stood in defence
   of the thinge done." (11)

The two productions of Sophocles' play tell us much about the adaptation of Greek drama for the progress visits: the monarch's presence, institutional practice, and contemporary notions of how such plays might be used combined to create a unique kind of dramatic performance.

Greek tragedies on the university stage were not as common during Elizabeth's reign, nor half a century later under James, as they had been during the reigns of Edward and Mary, when in the wake of a new humanist interest in Greek rhetoric, college statutes at both universities had advocated the playing of Greek drama. (12) The painstaking efforts made earlier in the sixteenth century by scholars such as John Cheke, Thomas Smith, (13) and Roger Ascham--who, as her tutor, was to be so pedagogically influential on Elizabeth--to reconstruct "authentic" Greek in pronunciation and performance had given way by the 1560s to the translation of Greek texts into institutionally omnipresent Latin. (14) Dramaturgical priorities as well as linguistic register had changed by 1564, as we see from the account of Nicholas Robinson, Queens' Fellow and future bishop of Bangor: Robinson, who seems to have known of the preperformance arrangements of Ajax, suggests that this production was impressive not for its historical authenticity, but rather for its use of "Arma namque bellica vestes splendore illustres apparatumque omnem reliquum Londino alijs remotissimis locis" (arms of war, clothes shining in splendor, and all the rest of the gear from London and other very remote places). Continuing on the subject of lively visuals, Robinson also writes of "Aiax ille flagellifer, quem furentem cernere desiderabamus" (that scourging Ajax, whom we were longing to see raging in his madness). (15) Robinson's emphasis on glittering properties and costumes and on the burly "furentem" protagonist suggests a very different set of theatrical priorities in 1564 to those prized in the Greek plays orchestrated by Cheke and Smith earlier in the century. Authentic pronunciation and even the original linguistic medium were sidelined for spectacle, and so although Robinson refers to the play as a lucubratio (nocturnal study), appropriately for its academic context, his description, as Bruce R. Smith has recently discussed, suggests a "visually splendid and aurally exciting" production of Ajax rather than a bookish exercise in Greek to Latin translation." (16) Robinson also makes clear the extent to which Elizabeth was the cynosure of performance, which reminds us sharply of how different the original performance context of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], before an audience of about fifteen thousand at the City Dionysia, would have been to this production of a Latin version within the closed, hierarchical world of the university theater.

The accounts of the 1605 visit echo this impression of academic exclusivity and court control. The Orders for the Delegates of Convocation enjoined that scholars excluded from the plays were not "to make any outcryes or vndecent noyse about ye hall stayres or within ye Quadrange of christchurch as vsually they weare wont to doe": then as now, this is a very large area in which to demand silence. (17) So important was the royal presence that the original seating had to be dismantled because "the Kinge [had been] see placed that the Auditory could see but his Cheeke onlie." (18) The scenography was of the utmost importance: under the critical gaze of a king fond of the elaborate world of the court masque, Inigo Jones reconstructed classical stagecraft as filtered through Vitruvius and Serlio in Christ Church hall. John Orrell has argued that Jones was eager to "rise to the learning of the academy with a suitable classicism of his own," a kind of architectural humanism, and suggests that Jones chose Ajax because of Vitruvius's mention of the play's staging in the fifth book of the De Architectura. (19) Jones's classicism may have been even more impressive than Orrell records: in the Poetics, Aristotle notes that Sophocles was the first to introduce "scene-painting" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), and Jones may have picked up on this association when constructing the "artificiosus apparatus" of Ajax. (20) In any case, both painted scenery and the Vitruvian revolving backdrops (periaktoi) were adopted:

   a false wall fayre painted and adorned with statelie pillers which
   pillers would turne about, by reason whereof with the helpe of
   other painted clothes, their stage did varrie three tymes in the
   Actinge of one Tragedye. (21)

Orrell's discussion of Jones's classicizing experimentation is borne out by Isaac Wake's Rex Platonicus, a Latin panegyric account of the visit:

   Quae omnia, quam mirifica, & aures, & oculos varietate pascerent,
   facile non est dicere; eoque magis, quod pro materiae varietate,
   tota Scenae fabrica, & artificiosus peripetasmatum apparatus,
   iterum atque iterum, mirantibus omnibus, innouaretur.

   lit is not easy to say with how marvelous a variety all these
   things fed both the eyes and the ears, all the more so because, on
   account of the variety of the matter, the whole fabric of the stage
   and the artful apparatus of the embroidered hangings were renewed
   again and again to the amazement of all.] (22)

These accounts suggest that 1605's emphasis fell on inducing visual "amazement"--"mirantibus omnibus"--and certainly spectators seem to have marveled at the sight, even if they didn't like the production. Bruce R. Smith has persuasively argued that the 1564 production--judging by Nicholas Robinson's account, particularly--seems to have aimed at stimulating a sense of wonder: judging by the audience reactions, even the negative ones of those who "vtterlie disliked" it, such an assessment can be applied to the 1605 production too. (23)

Because Ajax was not actually performed in 1564, we have to base our reconstruction of its staging chiefly on Robinson's account. We have more evidence for 1605, particularly in Wake's account, which goes into detail about the plot and characterization. Wake suggests that Sophocles' play was significantly altered for the 1605 performance, that "titulo ex Sophocle mutuato, sed re, tam diversa, quam idiomate" (although the title was borrowed from Sophocles, still [the play] was as different in matter as in expression). (24) Two of these alterations are particularly important. The chorus of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] consists of sailors from Salamis, where Ajax was king, but the 1605 adapters transformed this collective choric voice into the recognizably Senecan device of a ghost who comments on the play's action. We see this character in Seneca's Agamemnon, for example, where--in the Cambridge student John Studley's 1566 translation--the ghost of Thyestes speaks of being "sent out again / from Tartar dungeon depe" to watch his dysfunctional household and comment on the action. (25) Similarly, in 1605 "Vmbra Hectoris ... Chori praebebat vicem" (the shade of Hector ... provided the function of the Chorus), "Aiaci insensissima" (completely undetectable to Ajax), and Hector's ghost "exultat" (rejoices) at his death. This choric substitution sets the 1605 adaptation more squarely within Senecan tragic tradition, recalibrating the more dialectical function that the chorus performs in [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (26) Another fashionable supernatural element was also added as a second radical change to the dramatis personae; Wake tells us that one of Inigo Jones's three periaktoi depicted the "furiarum domicilia" (dwellings of the Furies), a physical setting that we never see in Sophocles' play. In Sophocles' play, Ajax invokes the Furies as he is about to commit suicide, but this is a prayer flung into the ether: he does not physically visit their dwellings. (27) A scene was probably added in 1605 enacted in front of these "domicilia': Wake cites the moment when Ajax "Furias euocat" (calls upon the Furies), and this was probably the moment at which the periaktoi revolved and the actors stood before the "horrenda antra" (fearful caves) of the Furies. (28) In Sophocles, the Furies are bodiless symbols of revenge, invoked rather than seen, while in 1605 the dread goddesses seem to have been embodied, and presented, perhaps, as an onstage manifestation of Ajax's madness., (29) These two changes described by Wake strongly imply that this play "so different" from Sophocles' original was turned into a more visual, literalized dramatic performance, redolent of the more fashionable Senecan form. The presence of Hector's ghost watching and laughing at Ajax's dementia, particularly, reminds us of the ghost of Don Andrea in Kyd's Spanish Tragedie, who declares--as the 1605 audience unfortunately did not--that "these were spectacles to please my soule." (30) So we get a sense of Sophocles' Ajax transformed into two productions that echo contemporary dramatic trends. Nixon describes the "goodlie anticke apparrell" of the 1605 production, (31) but far from prioritizing a historically accurate reconstruction of Attic drama, these Elizabethan and Jacobean adapters of Ajax for the progress visits seem to have updated the play to satisfy the tastes of its contemporary audience, particularly the monarch.

Regina Literata, Rex Platonicus

   Illic laeta parat pubes spectacula, Scenae
   Materiam veteris, multiplicesque iocos,
   Et Tragicam ferri rabiem, querelosque Cothurnos,
   Moesta quibus tristi funera clade sonant.
   Quis Maiestati nugas praebere canoras
   Ausus, quis mimos apposnisse leues?

   [In that place, the young men prepare happy spectacles,
   The subject of the ancient stage and many jests;
   Also the tragic rage of iron, the complaining tragic actors,
   Mournful funerals in which they sound in sad misfortune.
   Who (would) dare to offer (her) Majesty melodious trifles,
   To have placed before her petty pantomimists?]

Abraham Hartwell, Regina Literata (1565) (32)

Ajax's antiquarian cachet, and the contemporary perception of tragedy as an elevated genre--"high and excellent," in Sidney's terms (33)--also rendered it suitable for staging before the monarch. Oxford and Cambridge were uniquely placed to showcase humanistic learning through their progress entertainments, alongside the standard progresses provision of hospitality and compliment, and so during these visits the universities sought to appeal directly to the monarch's sense of erudition, an institutional agenda exemplified by the titles of progress narratives such as Abraham Hartwell's Regina Literata (London, 1565) and Isaac Wake's Rex Platonicus (Oxford, 1607). The University Orders for Elizabeth's 1564 visit specify that Cambridge was "to provide Hercules furens, Troas, or some Princely Tragedy" (my emphasis): Alan H. Nelson has pointed out that we don't know whether the Order refers to Euripides' plays or Seneca's, but what is clear is that the organizers wanted to offer a story that involved ancient Greek heroes. (34) A clue to their motivation might be the word "Princely," which does double duty here, referring both to the typical dramatis personae of Greek tragedy (heroes, gods, royalty--Aristotle's "those who are in high station or good fortune" (35)) and to the queen in the audience. (36) By asking whether "trifles" (nugas) and "petty pantomimists" (mimos ... leues) could entertain someone as intellectually serious-minded as the Queen, Hartwell's poem echoes the more explicit compliment paid in the University Order which described the queen as "adorned with all kinde of good literature, which is rare & mervelous in a woman." (37) Hartwell's rhetorical question represents a marked effort on the part of the university to perform its own learning, and the plays were squarely a part of that humanistic performance. (38)

During the progress visits, Elizabeth and James played up to a picture of themselves as the ideal consumers of such "Princely Tragedye." Elizabeth delivered speeches in Latin, "rendred thankes in greeke" for a Greek oration at Christ's, and, despite her "foeminilis pudor" (womanly modesty), delivered an oration in Latin at St Mary's Church. (39) Despite multiple references in the Orders and accounts to the king's short attention span--the stipulation of "very briefe and short oration" recurs (40)--James gamely responded to the university's fashioning of him as a Rex Platonicus, reportedly declaring during a visit to the new Bodleian Library that "if I were not a King, I would be an University man." (41) While the universities complimented royal learning, the monarch reciprocally performed erudition, to reassure the institutions that their values and teaching were prized, and thereby to invite loyalty. One reason why the organizers included a classical play like Ajax in the entertainment program was to offer the Regina Literata or Rex Platonicus the gift of the university's erudition, and thereby to pay the monarch the compliment of acknowledging his or hers.

Both Elizabeth and James had been taught by influential humanist tutors who were ardent advocates of Greek tragedy, and awareness of the monarch's own intellectual formation, particularly at Cambridge in 1564, may also have prompted the universities to stage Ajax. Elizabeth's tutor Roger Ascham had been involved in the Greek reforms initiated by Cheke and Smith in the 1540s; more specifically, he had translated Sophocles' Philoctetes in 1543, (42) and he articulated throughout his writing a particular fondness for Sophocles. In Toxophilus (1545) too, Ascham's bow-lover quotes one of Teucer's speeches from Ajax, which Ascham translated into English. (43) In The Scholemaster (published 1570), Ascham recommends Sophocles among a select few other Greek and Latin authors as a model of "what is fitte and decorum in euerie one, to the trew vse of perfite Imitation" (sig. 57r). At the start of her reign, Elizabeth and Ascham still read Greek and Latin together after dinner, and he was indirectly involved in the 1564 visit, writing to the Earl of Leicester that he should learn from the plays he saw at Cambridge: "I truste you beinge at Cambrige and hearinge Comedies, Tragedies and Disputacions there will moue you ... to thincke as I doe." (44) All in all, her former tutor's predilection for Sophocles may well have prompted the staging of Ajax before Elizabeth in 1564.

The association between monarch, tutor, Greek tragedy, and university context is less strong in James's case, but his tutor George Buchanan's involvement in the king's education, and influence on the king's classicism, (45) was as well-known in 1605 as Elizabeth's relationship with Roger Ascham had been fifty years beforehand. Buchanan had worked extensively on Greek tragedy, translating Euripides' Medea and Alcestis at the College de Guyenne in Bordeaux during the 1540s, and Ascham had singled out Buchanan's Latin biblical play Iephthe as one of the few contemporary tragedies "able to abyde the trew touch of Aristotles preceptes, and Euripides examples" (Scholemaster, sig. 57r). Buchanan died in 1582, but his association with James only strengthened the new monarch's claims to erudition as "University man" and Rex Platonicus. Echoing Buchanan's influence, one of James's earliest published works, 1584's The essayes of a prentise, in the diuine art of poesie, is full of classical mythological allusions and meditations on the workings of literary genre, and the poem "The Vranie, or heavenly Mvse" makes clear the fascination of Homeric and Greek tragic stories: here, the speaker talks of the pleasure of using Greek to give "a lusty glaise / For to descryue the Trojan Kings of olde, / And them that Thebes and Mycens crowns did holde." (46) The stories of ancient Troy, Thebes and Mycenae, particularly their depiction of kingship, all held considerable fascination for the poem's speaker: knowledge at the universities of the king's well-attested classical scholarship, often remarked upon in orations and debates during the 1605 visit, as well as Jones's impulse to reconstruct Vitruvian stagecraft and the "high and excellent" status of tragedy, must all have suggested themselves to the Oxford organizers as compelling reasons for staging a Greek tragedy before the king.

"Goodliest Argument and vse"

We have already seen how the progress visits were meant to reassure the monarch of the universities' good faith, how the entertainments were to reflect "Order and lernyng," and how the elevation of tragedy as a genre rendered it appropriate--in theory, if not in practice--for staging before the monarch, so that Ajax at the universities, as "Princely Tragedye," became an institutionally acceptable form of intellectual compliment. In a discussion of receptions of Euripides' Iphigenia, Pantelis Michelakis has discussed how theater, particularly Greek tragedy, can be used both "as a conservative force, a force of closure thought to pose a threat to the disruptive potential of radical art," and "as a metaphor for division and difference." (47) This dichotomy is helpful for thinking about two of the main ways in which Greek tragedy was viewed by theorists and adapters of the form. At the early modern universities during the progress visits, no "disruptive potential" featured within the plays chosen, but instead, rather than aiming to make the spectator feel personally "struck so to the soul," in Hamlet's words, and experience individualized "insight into anger," in Sidney's, the two performances of Ajax at the universities aimed at collective conformism--that "conservative force"--rather than individual emotional response, guaranteed to disrupt and provoke. The interventions of university authorities, Privy Council, and leading courtiers ensured that the play would have to be received in an orderly manner, and this reception rested on how theater during the royal progresses was meant to function: first, the monarch had to be visibly impressed, and then the whole of the courtly and academic hierarchy fanning out below the monarch should be entertained. Within the performances of Ajax, at least, there was no room for disruption.

To craft a "Princely Tragedye" appropriate for the progresses, adapters of Ajax had to subdue in their new versions the more disquieting elements that contemporary theorists like Sidney and many later commentators have seen as central to the play. (48) If we look at Sidney's definition of a politicized tragedy, its intended impact on royalty and its unsettling aftermath from the spectator's perspective, we see how far Ajax on the progresses deviated from this view:

   [Tragedy] that openeth the greatest woundes, and ... maketh kings
   fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours,
   that with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration,
   teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak
   foundations gilden roofs are builded. (49)

Rather than teaching uncertainty and "stirring the affects," the university progresses sought to perform unity, order, loyalty. While university dramatists during a progress visit would never have emphasized these more troubling elements of tragedy, of course, Sidney's words make us reflect on what he and other literary contemporaries thought tragedy could, even should be, and how toothless a subgenre the academic tragedies performed during the progresses must have seemed to them. Bruce R. Smith has argued that early modern academic drama flattens out Greek tragedy and its "awkward" ethics, and substitutes a simplified "Christianized" morality, (50) and to modern readers and spectators perhaps more familiar with politicized adaptations of Sophocles, as recently discussed by Edith Hall and Lorna Hardwick, (51) the fact that Greek tragedy was not perceived as radical, not as politicized at the early modern English universities might seem odd, particularly when contemporaries like Sidney were starting to argue for a more ethically engaged form of theater. Yet we have to acknowledge that all readings of classical texts are "mediated, situated, contingent," (52) and it was the situation of these two performances of Ajax that rendered "disruptive potential" impossible. The very arguments that Sidney posits for a more explosive kind of tragic performance--ambivalent ethics; emotive characterization; empathy with anger--disqualify such tragedy from ever being staged during the progresses. Avoidance of these more complicated elements might suggest why the adapters foregrounded other elements such as staging, properties, and larger-than-life Senecanism over Sophocles' drama of a once admired warrior deteriorating into a suicidal madman, a narrative which certainly "teacheth the uncertainty of this world." If we acknowledge the sharply "situated" nature of the progress tragic adaptations, rather than dwell on what these two versions of Ajax were not, it makes more sense to consider the ideological reasons behind their staging, besides their status as "Princely Tragedy," or their function as an opportunity for Inigo Jones to show off his reading of Vitruvius.

For humanists such as Roger Ascham, Greek tragedy was to be taken to heart, to enrich the learner's intellect and improve his (or her, in Elizabeth's case) rhetorical skill. For Ascham, Greek tragedy offered a language of wonderful richness and polish, certainly, but it also offered lessons for use, more than epic and lyric poetry, as much as philosophy and history:

   In Tragedies, (the goodliest Argument of all, and for the vse,
   either of a learned preacher, or a Ciuill Ientleman, more
   profitable than Homer, Pindar, Virgill, and Horace: yea comparable
   in myne opinion, with the doctrine of Aristotle, Plato, and
   Xenophon,) the Grecians, Sophocles and Euripides far ouer match our
   Seneca in Latin. (53)

Compare Ascham with Sidney: rather than a genre that "teacheth the uncertainty of this world," tragedy becomes "profitable" for the "learned preacher, or a Ciuill Ientleman." Modern scholars have rightly viewed as more complicated the relationship between Attic tragedy and Athenian polis, (54) but for Ascham, Athens was unequivocally an ideal:

   The remembrance of soch a common welthe, vsing soch discipline and
   order for yougthe, and thereby bringing forth to their praise, and
   leaning to vs for our example, such Capitaines for warre, soch
   Councelors for peace, and matcheles masters, for all kinde of
   learninge, is pleasant for me to recite. (sig. 17v)

Ascham offers an ideal of Greek culture, manifest in the "goodliest Argument ... and vse" of its tragedies, and this became a strong reason for staging such plays before the monarch. His idea of weaving the rhetorical fabric of tragedy into religious and secular (vernacular) discourse hearkens back to an earlier humanistic idealism, found in the revival of Greek tragedy at St. John's College, Cambridge, in the 1530s, and in his hope for what tragedy should do, as Jonathan Walker has recently argued. (55) Ascham's terms ("discipline and order"; "all kinde of learninge") echo Cecil's program for the 1564 visit, and Ascham clearly views Greek tragedy as the ideal product of an ideal state, the Athenian "common welthe." His case for the genre's "profitable ... vse" seems to ignore much of the actual content of Greek tragedy--all of the incest, cannibalism, awful, often innocent deaths, horrendous families, vendettas, and ruthless gods--to construct an idealized version of the rhetorical and literary elements such plays offer, that are, to Ascham, handily ripe for extraction by the shrewd Elizabethan humanist, whether "learned preacher" or "Ciuill Ientleman."

Isaac Wake, like Ascham, glosses over the more unsavory aspects of Greek tragic plot. Wake, as the only chronicler to offer an interpretation of why Ajax was chosen, argues that its plot renders it particularly suitable for an academic, courtly audience:

   The choice of its argument was made not only because it provided,
   with a splendid and stately variety of representations, abundant
   delight for such great spectators, but because the matter also
   seemed to be very appropriate for both courtly and academic ears
   and minds. (56)

Wake states that the play was thoroughly suitable--"perquam accomodata"--in its 1605 context because Odysseus gets Achilles' armor for his eloquence:

   Ajax claimed those arms as a reward for military prowess, but
   Ulysses obtained [them] as the deserts of [his] wisdom and learned
   eloquence.

Like Ascham's championing of Greek tragedy through presenting it as an exemplary ideal for both rhetoric and the state, Wake's interpretation seems curiously one-sided when compared with how Odysseus' eloquence is actually represented in [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. However different the 1605 adaptation was "in matter as in expression," the adapters must have worked hard to excise the other characters' ambivalence toward Odysseus's smooth tongue. The chorus in the Greek original speaks of his "whispered words," for instance, against Ajax, implying, if not making explicit, that he engages in insidious, destructive gossip; (57) to Ajax, Odysseus is a [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], a "cunning fox," for his scheming and his silver tongue. Ajax, of course, is Odysseus' enemy in the play, and due to his anger his judgments are extreme, but Sophocles posits the idea that eloquence--Wake's "literata facundia"--can be manipulative and pernicious, not unequivocally praiseworthy. Wake's interpretation of Ajax is so doggedly straightforward that it at first seems like a willful misreading, but then we have to remember that he's commenting on the altered Latin adaptation rather than [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], and that his reading of the play was based on what was performed in front of him in Christ Church hall.

Nonetheless, we are left with a sense that the progress adaptations offered only simplified versions of the original. G. Zanker has argued that [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] takes its questioning of heroic values from Homer's Iliad, and that "the problems inherent in heroism that lie at the very heart of the Iliad were ones which were perceived by Greek society in Sophocles' day not as any mere poetic construct, but as live issues." (58) As evidence of the "mediated, situated, contingent" nature of the progress performances of Ajax and their distance from the original play, those "live issues" that Zanker identifies in Homer and Sophocles do not seem to have been particularly compelling to the play's Elizabethan and Jacobean adapters, nor does Sidney's case for the play's potential behavioral lessons, the "insight into anger" Ajax's plight could provide, seem to have been a factor. For Wake, rather than the "live issues" of what constitutes heroism and proper heroic behavior, it is Odysseus's "prudentia" and "literata facundia" which fit the play for an academic audience, his wisdom and his learned eloquence which unquestionably qualify him for the prize of Achilles' armor above the flagellifer Ajax's "militaris virtus" (soldierly strength, courage). Just as the 1564 performance seems to have relied on its properties and "furentem" protagonist to impress, so the 1605 production rested on its stagecraft and the reassuring, orderly message that spectators like Wake appear to have derived from it: eloquence always triumphs, and force must always be subordinated to superior intelligence. In Ascham's terms, and implicitly in Wake's, Greek tragedy teaches skills as necessary to statecraft as to university life: rhetorical facility, persuasive words. The play's interests in verbal register and eloquence's power would clearly appeal to audiences at the institutions bent on teaching rhetorical polish and linguistic self-awareness, but to convey this message, Sophocles' representation of words' potentially destructive power had to be flattened out, as did the play's potential for "teaching of the uncertainty of this world." Stripped of its ambivalence toward rhetorical facility, and its potential for "stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration," then, Ajax seems to have been rendered "profitable"--in Ascham's terms--both as visual extravaganza and as unequivocal praise of the arts of rhetoric. Nixon, as we have seen, described the play as clothed in "goodlie anticke apparrell": this apparel, though visually impressive and "goodlie," profoundly altered [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] through the act of context-specific adaptation.

Notes

(1.) For ease of reference, I will refer to Sophocles' play as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and the two university adaptations as Ajax.

(2.) Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004), 17.

(3.) James McConica, "The Rise of the Undergraduate College," in The History of the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 3:1-68 (22); see also G. D. Duncan, "Public Lectures and Professorial Chairs,'" ibid., 335-61 (340-41).

(4.) See Frederick S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1914; repr. New York: Benjamin Biota, 1971), 97.

(5.) See Alan H. Nelson, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989) (hereafter REED: Cambridge), 1:231.

(6.) Anthony Nixon, Oxfords Triumph, quoted in REED: Oxford (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press/British Library, 2004) ed. John R. Elliott, Jr., and Alan H. Nelson (University); Alexandra F. Johnston and Diana Wyatt (City), 1:303.

(7.) See the anonymously written manuscript "The preparacion at Oxford in August 1605" (REED: Oxford, 1:299).

(8.) See Anthony Nixon's published account Oxfords Triumph (London, 1605) (REED: Oxford, 1:303); see also Anthony Parr, "Nixon, Anthony (ft. 1592-1616)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/arti cle/20206 (accessed September 1, 2008).

(9.) Siobhan Keenan, "Spectator and Spectacle: Royal Entertainments at the Universities in the 1560s," in The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth L ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 86-103 (87-90); Linda Shenk, "Gown before Crown: Scholarly Abjection and Academic Entertainment under Queen Elizabeth I," in Early Modern Academic Drama, ed. Jonathan Walker and Paul Streufert (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 19-44 (22-26); see also Penry Williams, "State, Church and University 1558-1603," in The History of The University of Oxford, 3:397-440 (397-401); Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967; repr., London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), 67-83; C. M. Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 47-73; H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958).

(10.) See the section entitled "Queen Elizabeth I at the University of Cambridge, 5-10 August 1564," in John Nichols's The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, ed. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Clarke, and Elizabeth Goldring. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). I would like to thank the editors of the Cambridge material, Elisabeth Leedham-Green, Jayne Elisabeth Archer, and Faith Eales, for their permission to cite from this material prior to publication.

(11.) REED: Oxford, 1:295.

(12.) See, for example, the 1554-55 decree by the "Dean and Chapiter" at Christ Church that discusses four plays at Christmas, which had to include "a comedy in greke" and "a tragedy in greke" (REED: Oxford, 1:96); at Cambridge, see, for instance, the stipulation in the Queens' College statutes for 1544-55 for the playing of Greek (REED: Cambridge, 1:205).

(13.) For evidence of Greek plays performed at Cambridge, particularly during the 1530s, see REED: Cambridge, vol. 2, app. 8; for details of Cheke and Smith's involvement in Greek language performances, especially at Queens and St. John's, see REED: Cambridge, 2:766 and 769. See also Streufert, "Christopherson at Cambridge: Greco-Catholic Ethics in the Protestant University," in Early Modern Academic Drama, 45-64.

(14.) The 1564 Latin version of Ajaxmay well have been based on the Dutchman Georg Rotaller's 1550 translation: Rotaller, following the 1502 Aldine edition of Sophoclis tragaediae septem cum commentariis, translates the play's Greek title into Aiax Flagellifer, and this combination of title plus epithet was used in both progress performances. For a facsimile edition of Rotaller's translation, see the digitized version on the Bibliotheque Nationale de France Web site: http://gallica2.bnf.if/ark:/12148/bpt6k74932g.image.f2.langEN. odeAffichageimage.

(15.) REED: Cambridge, 1:238 (trans. Abigail Ann Young 2:1138).

(16.) REED: Cambridge, 1:238; Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 216.

(17.) REED: Oxford, 1:286.

(18.) Ibid., 1:295.

(19.) John Orrell, The Theatres of Inigo Jones and John Webb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 30.

(20.) Aristotle, Poetics, 1449a 16, trans. W. Hamilton Frye (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946).

(21.) REED: Oxford, 1:296.

(22.) REED: Oxford, 1:308, and 2:1022 (trans. Patrick Gregory).

(23.) Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience, 216.

(24.) REED: Oxford, 1:307, trans. Patrick Gregory 2:1023.

(25.) John Studley, The eyght tragedie of Seneca. Entituled Agamemnon. Translated out of Latin in to English, by Iohn Studley, student in Trinitie Col]edge in Cambridge (London: Thomas Colwell, 1566), sig. Bir.

(26.) REED: Oxford, 1:308; 2:1023.

(27.) See Sophocles, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Ajax), ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) 108-9.

(28.) REED: Oxford, 1:308 and 2:1023.

(29.) Later in the seventeenth century, the Furies are among the cast in plays such as James Shirley's The Traytor (1635) and Thomas Nabbes's Microcosmus (1637).

(30.) Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie (published 1592), ed. Emma Smith (London: Penguin Books, 1998), Act 4. Scene 5 (91).

(31.) REED: Oxford, 1:299.

(32.) REED: Cambridge, 1:238 and 2:1138 (trans. Abigail Ann Young).

(33.) Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 27.

(34.) REED: Cambridge, 1:229; 2:1216.

(35.) Aristotle, Poetics, 1453a 5.

(36.) The adjective "princely" is often used in progress narratives, as we might expect: in Christ Church in 1566, one eyewitness, the Corpus Christi student Miles Windsor refers to the Hall's "Princelie lightes of wax" (see Corpus Christi College MS 257 fols. 104-23 (107r). Windsor adds in the margin that "Lights provyded for 5 nightes woulde serve but one nighte," implying that the lights' princeliness clearly came at a cost beyond the projected lighting budget. For my edition of Windsor's account, see the section "Queen Elizabeth's Visit to the University of Oxford, 31 August-6 September 1566" in the new edition of John Nichols' Progresses (see n.10).

(37.) REED: Cambridge, 1:227.

(38.) Ajax was staged alongside one Roman comedy (Plautus' Aulularia) and two tragedies, Edward Halliwell's Dido, based on book 4 of Virgil's Aeneid, and Nicholas Udall's Ezechias, derived from 2 Kings 18-19. The emphasis shifted during James's visit from tragedy to comedy and pastoral. In 1605, Ajax sat alongside Robert Burton's Latin "pastorall ... Comedie" Alba, Matthew Gwynne's Latin "Comoedia faceta" (witty Comedy) Vertumnus, and Samuel Daniel's "english playe ... drawn out of fydus pastor"; this was first entitled Arcadia Reform'd, tellingly renamed The Queen's Arcadia, which was "presented to her Maiestie and her ladies." See REED: Oxford, 1:298-99 (anonymous commentator on Alba); 1:307 (Isaac Wake on Vertumnus); 1:299 (anon. on The Queen's Arcadia).

(39.) See the Cambridge 1564 section of the new edition of John Nichols's Progresses (n.10).

(40.) See, for instance, REED: Oxford, 2:283 (Orders of the Delegates of Convocation): "att ye topp of Quatervois ye greeke professor shall make a very breife and short oration in greeke not exceedinge twentie lynes to his maiestie."

(41.) See Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, commentary J. B. Bamborough and Martin Dodsworth, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989-2000), 2:88, and 6:434.

(42.) See Paul Streufert, "Christopherson at Cambridge: Greco-Catholic Ethics in the Protestant University," Early Modern Academic Drama, 46-47.

(43.) Roger Ascham, Toxophilus (London: Edward Whytchurch, 1545): "And therfore it is true that Teucer sayeth in Sophocles. Seldome at all good thinges be knowen how good to be / Before a man suche thinges do misse out of his handes" (sig. 11r).

(44.) See REED: Cambridge, 1:229 (letter from Ascham to Robert Dudley, August 5, 1564).

(45.) See Rebecca W. Bushnell, "George Buchanan, James VI, and Neo-Classicism," in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 91-111; see also Roger Mason, "George Buchanan, James VI and the Presbyterians," in Kingship and the Commonwealth: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1998), 187-214.

(46.) James VI and I, The essayes of a prentise, in the diuine art of poesie (Edinburgh: Thomas Vautrollier), sig. Dir.

(47.) Pantelis Michelakis, "Reception, Performance, and the Sacrifice of Iphigenia," in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Charles Martindale and Richard Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 216-26 (217).

(48.) For studies of Ajax that discuss these elements, see, for instance, P. E. Easterling, "Character in Sophocles," Greece & Rome, 2nd ser., 24, no. 2 (Oct. 1977): 121-29; Bernard M.W. Knox, "The Ajax of Sophocles," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 65 (1961): 1-37; Jean-Pierre Vernant and Page duBois, "Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex," in New Literary History, 9, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 475-501.

(49.) Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 27-28.

(50.) Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience, 201.

(51.) See Edith Hall, "Sophocles' Electra in Britain," in Sophocles Revisited: Essays Presented to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ed. Jasper Griffin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 261-306; Lorna Hardwick, "Remodelling Receptions: Greek Drama as Diaspora in Performance," in Classics and the Uses of Reception, 204-15.

(52.) Charles Martindale, "Thinking through reception," in Classics and the Uses of Reception, 3.

(53.) Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London: Iohn Daye, [1570]), sig. 52v.

(54.) For a critical overview of such recent ideological interpretations of Attic tragedy, see Jasper Griffin, "The Social Function of Attic Tragedy," Classical Quarterly, n.s., 48, no. 1 (1998): 39-61.

(55.) Jonathan Walker, "Learning to Play," in Early Modern Academic Drama, 2.

(56.) See REED: Oxford, 2:1022, translated from Wake's Latin by Patrick Gregory. Wake's original description is as follows, as in REED: Oxford, 1:307-8: "Cujus argumenti factus est delectus, non tantum quod splendida pomposaque representationum varietate, tantis spectatoribus delectationem affluentem ministraret; sed quod materia etiam videretur Aulicis, Academicisque auribus, animisque perquam accomodata. Celebris enim representatur ilia de Achillis defuncti armis con tentio, quae sibi pro militaris virtutis praemio vendicauit Aiax sed obtinuit Vlysses, prudentiae merito, & literatae facundiae."

(57.) Sophocles, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 46-47.

(58.) G. Zanker, "Sophocles' Ajax and the Heroic Values of the Iliad," Classical Quarterly, n.s., 42, no. 1 (1992): 20-25. (20, 21).