It’s the sexy frontier field of Classics and it’s boom business for theatre producers, novelists and Netflix execs. But what exactly is it? How should we conceptualise it? What’s the difference between legacy, tradition and reception? Should you say acculturation or assimilation- or perhaps appropriation?
Getting a handle on all this is important because the field of Classical Reception has exploded in the last twenty years and it is much more than a fad. The work of ‘receptionists’ – academics and artists – could be a critical lifeline for Classics moving forward.
A mission statement: Classical Reception enriches the study of our own world as well as the ancients’ and it exemplifies the importance of ancient culture as a lens for evaluating the human experience.
I use a metaphor, ‘lens’, not by accident. Metaphors have been vital to the task of conceptualising Classical Reception, a field which can seem to the uninitiated either impossibly esoteric or just plain woolly.
For Classics, the discipline of Reception Studies was born around 1980, building on the reader-response theories which proliferated in English departments from the late 1960s. Reception Studies set itself apart from studies of ‘The Classical Tradition’ (or ‘Legacy’) which had been produced sporadically by high-profile scholars like Gilbert Murray. His volume The Classical Tradition in Poetry (1927) is worth dipping into if you can find a copy. Twenty years later another, more flamboyant Gilbert, Highet, wrote an 800-page survey The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949): a slightly indulgent work but one written with panache and an astonishing command of the canon.
One metaphor often used to conceptualise the Gilbert sort of Reception is that of a geologist chipping through rock strata. This figures Greece and Rome as two interlocked Mediterranean cultures buried, static, beneath many solid layers of cultural accretion built up over the centuries. To access the spirit of Homer or Horace was an exercise in excavation. Their meaning was sitting there, residual and timeless; the scholar’s duty was to keep tracing back through Tennyson, Pope, Shakespeare, Augustine, Apuleius, Virgil, Callimachus etc. until Homer himself was exposed, blinking and biddable, to the light of the contemporary age.
I’ve mocked up this metaphor below, on the left:
On the right is the latest metaphor, not for Classical Tradition Studies (now passé ) but for Reception Studies (the omission of the words Classical or Classics is another post, pending). We receive texts from the moving, unstable position of a ship deck. The text is a shipwreck submerged beneath moving, unstable waters which represent the refracting influence of past receivers and our individual experience and expectations. Note the following:
- A receiver attuned to themselves and their reception context – the sailor
- An unreliable prism of previous receptions – the sea
- A text in a state of ongoing, irreversible alteration – the wreck
- A text which new texts want to engage with – the yacht sailing to the wreck
I like the metaphor, myself. Those four strands could help structure discussion with your pupils.
At this point, though, you might ask ‘Hang on, how much difference is there in practice between Classical Tradition Studies and Reception Studies?’
Surely an article on e.g. Shakespeare’s use of Plutarch could verge on both quite acceptably?
Yes: the difference is one of methodological caution.
Receptionists working now are steeped in all the advances made by literary theory since its first flourishing back in the 1960s. They work with theoretical tools unavailable in the world of Gilbert Murray – a time when Oxford and Cambridge had only just begrudgingly introduced English literature as a degree course.
When, for example, someone writes about Derek Walcott’s Omeros, they must also engage inevitably with the work of postcolonial theorists – however implicit or unconscious that engagement might be. We all filter, we all carry biases, we all stand on a moving vessel glimpsing down through the murk of other responses. Modern Reception Studies acknowledges this and indeed exploits its analytical potential.
Another question you might have: do we need to distinguish between academic Reception and artistic Reception?
Isn’t Kate Tempest, say, or Madeline Miller doing something rather different to someone like Jonathan Bate?
Not really: they are all engaging with the complex dynamic and durability of ancient texts in the modern world.
But still, there is a difference: academics are evaluating how artists have evaluated. It is second-tier reception and their evaluation is more explicit. They are also subject to the constraints of professional scholarship.
The artist and the academic are different species, then, probably – except in the case of people like Seamus Heaney who are prepared to ‘show their working’ and describe the nature of their reception. For school pupils, the introductions to well-known translations of major Classical authors are usually a good place for this sort of discussion. Emily Wilson’s Odyssey comes to mind. Robert Browning’s Agamemnon is famously idiosyncratic. John Dryden’s preface to his 1680 translation of Ovid’s Epistles is short and stimulating if you can stomach the antiquated English.
There is a third category of receptionist, too: the theorist. People like Charles Martindale (considered the godfather of British Classical Reception – first at Bristol, now York) have engaged explicitly with the question of how we should go about conducting research in Classical Reception. Key works are Redeeming the Text (1993) and the slightly more accessible Classics and the Uses of Reception (2006). He addresses issues such as what sort of text or cultural artefact should warrant the attention of formal Reception Studies. How seriously should we take Gladiator as a reception of Imperial Rome? On the same pegging as I, Claudius? The novel or the TV series? Essentially, ‘how low can we go’? The introduction to Uses of Reception I recommend as a good introduction. Another one to get on your Kindle is Backing into the Future (1994) by Bernard Knox, a Harvard professor whose collection of essays is a rallying cry for Classics and its impact as explored through various receptions of ancient texts.
Common to all these approaches is a sense that every reading of a Classical text is situated – the reader’s response is mediated through an unstable prism of other readings.
If I told you that Nelson Mandela on Robben Island in the late 60s had played the part of Creusa in the prison’s production of Antigone, would your perception of Apartheid affect your next reading of the play?
After reading Pat Parker’s Silence of the Girls or Emily’s Hauser’s For the Most Beautiful would you view differently life in the Greek camp at Troy, or the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus? What about Christopher Logue’s War Music? Would you think differently about the quality of light playing on the ‘neon edge of the sea’?
There was a time in the 1990s which saw more plays by Euripides on the London stage than any other playwright. If you told your pupils this, would they read Medea through a slightly different filter?
They’re interesting questions and at a time like this we could easily weave this idea into project work around Greek mythology or Homer or anything else.
What would your pupils make of Carol Ann Duffy’s Mrs. Sisyphus? Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad?
Reading Cavafy’s Ithake alongside Tennyson’s Ulysses (and also Lotos-Eaters) is a short-ish assignment for those who’ve read some of the Odyssey in translation, and all those texts are available online.
For more advanced pupils and/ or those thinking of university applications, they should read Ovid’s very funny Tristia 2 (578 lines) which interrogates the notion of a reader’s ‘situatedness’ by way of absurdly reductive interpretation of the Greek and Roman canons. It’s also a great stimulus for discussion around the relationship between art and politics.
Before C-Ovid-19, there were a number of exciting dramatic receptions planned in London: Kate Tempest’s adaptation of Philoctetes, Paradise, as well as a meditation on the fragmentary nature of identity, Fragments.
Classical Reception of all stripes is surging, and I think that we Classics teachers can harness what’s out there to bolster pupils’ understanding of what the Classical comprises.
Will it enter the Class Civ curriculum in the near future, perhaps?
Is it worth it, to the detriment of reading more Classical texts ‘in abstract’?
At the academic level, why should public money subsidise research in Reception?
How exactly is Reception helping to shape what Classics will look like moving forward?
Perhaps the answers to these are obvious. I’ll be setting out my argument in another post coming soon: Why does Classical Reception matter?
I’d love to your thoughts in the meantime. The comment box below, as ever, beckons!
