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PARTISAN REVIEW
versions of "Greek" tragedy since Rome.... It is on the con–
trary, Oedipus and Electra, Antigone and the Eumenides, who
have been given incessant voice in twentieth-century high
theater and poetry.
And Steiner asks why this should be.
In fact, nothing of any great importance has been said by the
"incessant voice" retelling in this century any of the Greek myths.
The last great play which took up one of these myths was Goethe's
version of
Iphigenia in Tauris.
Steiner asks, "What significant
"Hamlets" after
Hamlet?"
and answers his question thus:
There are fitful brilliances of recall in Musset's
Lortrlzaccio.
Laforgue's Hamlet is an intriguing fragment, tangential to its
source. Hamlet, as a persona, as a complex of attitudes, is vividly
present in Russian poetry from Pushkin to Pasternak. But there
is little here to match the legacy of
imitatio
and variant, of
recapitulation and pastiche, which follows on Agamemnon, on
Helen of Sparta, on Laius and his breed.
Steiner adds that the only recapitulation of Shakespeare's
Lear
was
Edward Bond's unsatisfactory- my judgement of it- melodrama.
But these assertions, once questioned, do not hold. The theme of
Lear
was taken up again, and for George Moore to more perfect ef–
fect, in Balzac's
Pere Coriot.
As for Hamlet, there are certainly far
greater projections of his character than the protagonist of Musset's
tragedy. What about Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoyevsky's novel, and
Prince Andre, in Tolstoy's
War and Peace?
And what about the
tremendous recapitulation of Hamlet in real life by
S~ren
Kierke–
gaard, from whom Steiner took the very term "recapitulation"? I
could give many other examples of creative imitations and variations
of Shakespeare's characters, but I think the examples I have ad–
vanced are sufficient to show the
willed
nature of Steiner's judgement
of the poet. What I cannot let pass is a further criticism that Steiner
makes leaning on Wittgenstein, who apparently said that while
Shakespeare did indeed invent new forms of language, he was
"not
true to nature." I think it sufficient to note here that for Wittgen–
stein, truth to nature was a linguistic fact, not a fact of nature. We
know that the color "red" is rightly understood, he asserted, if the
sentence in which the term is used is grammatically correct. With all
due respect, I do not think that Wittgenstein should be permitted to
