Performing Gods in Classical Antiquity and the Age of Shakespeare

Dustin W. Dixon and John S. Garrison, Performing Gods in Classical Antiquity and the Age of Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). 9781350098145.

Reviewed by Amy K. Vandervelde, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, amykv2@illinois.edu.

Dixon and Garrison posit that gods onstage can open doors to new ways of thinking about plays, focusing on cases from the classical world to the early modern era. The authors explain that the inclusion of gods within plays enhances metatheatricality, pointing towards the artificial elements of the plays. They focus on the audience’s suspension of disbelief, writing that “an authentic portrayal of an immortal, nearly omnipotent figure is impossible…but we know that audiences in antiquity and in the early modern period were invested in these performances. Some did believe, at least momentarily, that supernatural beings shared their space” (pp. 12–13).

The introduction thoughtfully outlines how the book feeds into studies that examine classical reception as well as those that explore the divine in theatrical settings. Performing Gods stands out because it focuses on the deities as metatheatrical: Dixon and Garrison are showcasing “what the appearances of gods onstage have to say about theatrical performance itself” (p. 20). 

Chapter One lists eight contentions explored throughout the book, although they are not routinely reiterated in subsequent chapters. The whole of Chapter One is dedicated to the explication of these contentions. These central ideas are developed further in subsequent chapters, but from the reader’s standpoint, some direct nods to the numbered contentions of Chapter One would have been beneficial. Each chapter builds upon these eight key points in various ways, and the authors do make clear that not all of the eight points will be given equal weight in the following discussion (p. 20).

Chapter Two turns to a figure that is not explicitly a god, but the infamous Helen’s inclusion in ancient and early modern drama is extensive and proves fruitful for the book’s purpose. The chapter notes the potential objections to Helen’s place within the project’s scope, to which the authors respond that “what our dramatists seem to find so wonderfully useful about her persona is precisely her intersecting supernatural characteristics (her immaculate beauty from her divine lineage) and mortal identity” (p. 48). Both case studies—Euripides’ Helen and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus—exhibit several details that support Helen’s metatheatrical nature as a divine figure. This highly attentive chapter explains plot devices and staging nuances that reflect how Helen would appear onstage. The authors present an expanse of evidence in a digestible way, breaking the chapter up into subsections, and they continue this practice in the remaining chapters.

The third chapter turns to the theme of apparent changes in status: “We, the audience members, choose to believe in who or what the narratives tell us these characters are” (p. 67). Just as seeing mythological Helen onstage requires some suspension of disbelief from the audience, so too does the entire act of seeing divine figures onstage or seeing actors in numerous roles. This chapter looks at how the audience perceives the embodiment of the divine onstage by the mortal actors who play them, particularly given the entanglement of social statuses. Dixon and Garrison look at how the actors become the characters (p. 69); regardless of their social status outside of the theater, these actors can be a god onstage. Plautus’s Amphitruo offers a particularly interesting case study, with actors portraying gods who in turn portray mortals (Zeus is acting as Amphitruo and Mercury as his slave Sosia). These layers require the audience’s acceptance of the actors as gods, and those very gods acting themselves as mortals, in order for the play’s story to pan out. Social status becomes a blank slate in the theater, being rebuilt by the actors onstage as they become their characters.

Chapter Four provides a new view on a set of plays that are often associated with each other: Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The central aim of this chapter is to showcase the limited reach of the gods in drama, and the authors purposefully chose only two case studies to carefully track the gods’ impact within the plays. These particular case studies entertain a twofold outcome: do the mortals follow the gods’ commands or do they ignore them. In the Oresteia, Orestes is continually guided along a winding path of decisions by the gods; but in Hamlet, Hamlet himself becomes so blinded by his own over-thinking that he fails to complete his spectral father’s commands. The ghost of Hamlet’s father is, for the purposes of this chapter, considered a divine figure because of how Hamlet “reveres his father as such” (p. 104). The authors “suggest that the different degrees to which the gods reassert themselves as divine authors—or find that role usurped by humans—point to differences in the periods’ attitudes toward the divine nature of authors” (p. 94). Within the Oresteia, Dixon and Garrison explore how the gods and their influence start at a distance and then grow closer through the course of the three plays. In contrast, Hamlet’s father’s ghost appears most actively in the beginning of the play, leaving Hamlet then to his own devices. The protagonists’ friends also uphold these diverging pathways. The authors show how Pylades “turns the protagonist’s [Orestes’] attention back to the gods to direct the narrative” (p. 113); however, Horatio accepts his role as the new author of Hamlet’s tale, removing the influence of any otherworldly will. This chapter offers a fresh take on two comparable plays in analyzing the gods’ effects on the human characters, and it was the favorite of the reviewer.

Chapter Five turns to the “immortalizing power of drama” (p. 118) for actors, playwrights, and characters. This chapter demonstrates how the artistry of theater can immortalize the real humans behind a performance, and is aptly entitled “To Die Is Human, To Act Is Divine.” The chapter shows that while humans—both on- and offstage—are indeed mortal, theater—through acting or writing—provides the godly attribute of immortality.

The afterword shifts to examine a modern-day staging of myths in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses. The authors turn their attention to the staged myth of Baucis and Philemon and conclude their work by restating their intended goal of illustrating the metatheatrical nature of onstage deities. They remark that “the realness of these gods manifests itself through the communal, co-constitutive experience of spectating, producing, and acting” (p. 147). The turn to Zimmerman’s play is an unexpected conclusion that shows the extension of Dixon’s and Garrison’s argument outside of their immediate temporal scope and provides an opening for further conversation on the topic of metatheatrical gods. Overall, errors are few in this book, but the reviewer noted a typo in the bibliography.¹

Table of Contents

Introduction (1–18)
1. Approaching Divinity (19–46)
2. Under the Actor’s Spell: Audiences in Euripides’ Helen and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (47–66)
3. An Actor Ascends: Status and Identity in Plautus’ Amphitruo and the Court Masque (67–92)
4. Authoring Gods in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (93–116)
5. To Die Is Human, To Act Is Divine (117–38)
Afterword: Entertaining Gods in Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses (139–48)

Notes

 1. The author for Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2014) is listed as Alison P. Hopgood, but the work should be accredited to Allison P. Hobgood.

Dialogue

1. Taking your framework of contention number five (“Gods Embody the Challenges of Dramatic Mimesis”) beyond your immediate scope, I wanted to ask if either of you might have thoughts about the inclusion of the gods in onscreen versions of the ancient epics. Do you find that including actors for the gods and goddesses in Troy: Fall of a City (2018) alters the audience’s perception of the plot compared to, say, Troy (2004), which excludes the deities’ presence?

These are great examples of onscreen adaptations that could fuel further discussions. For our book, we wanted to stay focused on gods performed within the two cultural contexts, and there’s much more to say on the topic of screen representations in our era. Indeed, depicting the gods onscreen presents evocative opportunities and challenges that differ from those of live performance. The gods in the Netflix series, though they seem to possess the powers of the makers of the series themselves, have lost their power to manifest the awesome magic of television (and of cinema), inasmuch as there is little effort to differentiate them from the mortal characters. In a striking contrast to Troy and Troy: Fall of a City, in the remake of Clash of the Titans (2010), the depiction of Zeus, played by Liam Neeson, as radiating light nods towards how even clearly artificial special effects can be used to make an actor more convincingly divine. Lisa Maurice’s Screening Divinity (2021) is one of a number of stimulating studies of the gods onscreen.

There are other ways beyond depicting Greek and Roman gods to capture the effects we describe in the book. As we discuss in the Afterword, we find that Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses cleverly uses a reflecting pool to manifest not only the power of ancient gods but also the power of the theater for modern audiences. When we have asked our students in class discussions to generate comparable examples to the divine in film, they have cited the use of animatronics to resurrect dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the use of CGI to bring Elvis and Rachael back to life in Blade Runner 2049. We think that these are wonderful examples that parallel the gods’ power, we argue, to embody the challenges of the theater for pre-modern audiences.

2. You detail the scope of your study in the Introduction, particularly your choice “to balance both canonical works and non-canonical works as case studies” (p. 14). Did either of you have any text that you immediately wanted to include? Did you have any texts that you had to cut for sake of this balance and the study’s scope?

Paring down to a manageable number of case studies is always a challenge with books like these, especially when they cover two distinct time periods. There are several plays that come to mind with which we would have liked to have spent more time (e.g., Shakespeare’s Cymbeline), but we found the best strategy was to select examples that best exemplified the argument. We also wanted to think about plays that tested the limits of our ideas, and this instinct led us immediately to Helen. Because she is a mortal who is sometimes treated as divine, she proved to be a useful figure to think with, particularly as we were concerned with how actors themselves can become divinities within theatrical productions. And so her appearances in Euripides’ Helen and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, two plays that both nod to her divinity through their sophisticated meta-theatricalities, became central case studies for the book.

Thank you very much for your answers to my questions! I appreciate your thoughtful explanation of the different portrayals of the gods in Troy: Fall of a City and those in Clash of the Titans (2010) and how the “clearly artificial special effects” help further an audience’s suspension of disbelief. Thank you for the recommendation of Maurice’s text as well. 

Your choice of Helen certainly stands out with how her complicated mortal-divine status lends itself to actors’ metamorphoses into their own form of divinity. I commend you both for narrowing down the case studies over these two time periods, where a plethora of options were available.