David Lane, the author of The Tragedy of Orpheus and the Maenads, a blank verse drama in a thoroughly Miltonesque style, must be a man of especial literary courage. After all, even though Mike Bartlett’s brilliant Shakespearean drama, King Charles III, received rave critical reviews on its premiere in 2014, it still only narrowly dodged accusations of being ‘fakespeare’ when Tim Pigott-Smith gave the performance of a lifetime in the 2017 BBC film adaptation. Even when confronted by such obvious excellence, there remains in the minds of too many critics a mistrust of anything that sounds remotely un-modern—of poetry or drama that exists in any register above the conversational.
The resigned, unquestioning acceptance of this state of affairs—especially by those who, through championing traditional form, should know better—continues to imprison this present age of creativity in a literary cul-de-sac. The advent of neo-formalism is, for this reason, a liberation of half-measures: given license to return to the traditional forms which had been cast off by the modernists, today’s poets are nevertheless constrained to adopt the modernists’ language and style, or else risk being told by their teachers and publishers that their verses are still dressed in pantaloons. To such a mentality, it is as if the centuries of development of a poetic register were just a dark and mystical superstition of the past, happily dispelled by the Wordsworthian move towards ordinary language in a way as salutary as the invention of the electric lightbulb and the advent of Pasteurisation.
But the development of a unique poetic register did not impede works of genius, even though it was brought about through a certain degree of historical and cultural happenstance. At its height, it provided the basis for a tremendous outpouring of some of the greatest works of English poesy, both in quantity and quality, and including most of the Romantics (Wordsworth, too!) despite the preference that some of them claimed to have for ordinary language. It was only when the literary revolution of the early 20th century—’the men of 1914’—gained a stranglehold upon English letters that the whole historical development of poetry thereunto was consigned to the dustbin as just so much useless and burdensome artifice.
This is not to suggest that Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and their literary descendants were without merit, or that they lacked a deep appreciation for the tradition of letters that they had received, or even that they encouraged others to ignore that tradition. Quite the contrary, their works are self-consciously steeped in what had gone before and they expected the reader to know it well (see, for instance, Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”). But their success has been used to forestall any sort of alternative poetical convention, particularly that which had been successful before the arrival of modernism and Imagism, and which had, in its favour, the immense weight of a thousand years of gradual literary development.
Natheless, there are practical reasons to encourage the use of and familiarity with the heightened poetic register. Its disuse has led to deleterious effects for general literacy. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, my students could not understand words as basic and obvious as o’er, although that particular example features twice in the first verse of The Star-Spangled Banner, their own national anthem: “O’er the ramparts we watched” and “O’er the land of the free.” Telling people that such language is ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘unsuitable’ for modern use is a good way to ensure that they never learn it, thereby rendering miserably unintelligible the great literary inheritance which is their right as speakers and readers of English. As such, recovering the traditional conventions of English poetry is not only an aesthetic enterprise but a civilisational one: David Lane’s version of Calliope is right when she declares, “The highest poesy / Must needs within the Polis ever sound / her music.”
All this is as much to say that Lane should be greatly praised for what he has undertaken in Orpheus and the Maenads—not only because of what he has done for the service of English letters, but because of how successfully he has done it. For the truth is that his Orpheus is a work of immense beauty shot through with strands of greatness. Even in encountering it upon the page, rather than seeing it performed upon the stage, the best lines echo long after. For as with Shakespeare and Milton, one cannot read it and come away unchanged for the better—with one’s mind richly furnished with new beauties, in forms both strange and wondrous.
In the Greek myths, Orpheus, the superlative master of harping and poetry, descends into Hell to rescue his dead lover, Eurydice. He nearly succeeds in the attempt, except for casting one prohibited look back at his beloved whilst they are on their way to the mortal world, by which means she is lost forever. Thereafter, Orpheus forswears civilisation, choosing instead to wander through the wilderness singing ever of his lost Eurydice. The frenzied Maenads—female followers of Dionysius—hear him and desire his attention, but Orpheus will not be distracted. Enraged by his rejection, they tear him to pieces. His lyre, carried by the Muses into heaven, becomes the constellation Lyra.
The plot of Lane’s play follows the same general outline, with one important change: his Maenads travel to Hades, where they successfully plead with Dis for the release of Eurydice. But the followers of Dionysius are not motivated by compassion: having been spurned, revenge is their plan, and they carry it out by giving Eurydice their intoxicating drink so that she, too, is swept up in their Bacchanalian frenzy. When they encounter Orpheus, who is stunned by the return of his lover, the women’s maddened eyes see not a man but a monster. Eurydice joins them herself in tearing him asunder. His head, cast into a river, floats away, still singing of his love; and, when Eurydice regains her senses, she hastens unto it, takes it under her arm, and disappears beneath the waves. Dionysius, for his part in the plot, is dashed down to Tartarus by a thunderbolt from Zeus, there to think upon his cruel misdeeds.
Lane’s changing of the action makes Eurydice into an active part of the destruction of Orpheus—the one whom she most loves—unlike in the earlier version of the mythos in which she is but a passive object on whom Orpheus continually dwells. This small change greatly heightens the tragic effect of the tale, so that Orpheus is undone not by a party wholly exterior to his mournful obsession, but by the very object of his love. In the very moment which sees his impossible hopes somehow realised—the return of Eurydice to the mortal world—his doom is at hand. Mirroring this inversion of fate, the emotional register is likewise reversed, with a moment of frantic, unknowing hatred turned inward against the object of long years of devoted love.
But Lane does not suggest the triumph of a moment’s madness; not only is Dionysius divinely punished, but the three Maenads themselves seem to regret their part in the wicked plot and are receptively chastised by Apollo. At the end of the play, they declare their intention to travel forth and tell the tale of Orpheus’ death to those they meet, as a means of expiating their guilt for their part in the murder. Moreover, Eurydice is reunited with Orpheus, albeit not in the mortal world. The reader does not know to what extent they may participate in the afterlife together, but Orpheus’ enduring love—even after death—and Eurydice’s hastening unto him show that, whatever may have transpired, the truth of their devotion endures beyond the terrible events of the wine-drunk frenzy.
Completely absorbed by his emotional state, Orpheus seems to be irrational; yet the events of the plot do not necessarily condemn him, even in the tragedy of his end. His death, in Act V scene 4, comes about proximately through his stunned surprise—it is the suspension of his performative sorrow that makes his murder possible, not the continuation of it, as the stage directions show:
[Loud echoing cries are heard. Enter in mad ecstasy Eurypyle, Theope, Agave, and Eurydice, who, seeing Orpheus, stand in astonishment. Orpheus recognises Eurydice and, being himself astonished, obliviously drops his lyre.]
Had Orpheus continued to sing plaintively of the lost Eurydice—or had he even turned his song to one which celebrated her restoration—the insanity of the Maenads might have been thwarted. For so moving was Orpheus in full song that even projectiles hurled at him refused, in the final instant, to land their blows upon him, instead falling harmlessly to the earth. But his emotional investment in certain sorrow cannot survive the return of his love object; for a brief moment, the performative emotional state is halted whilst the subject renegotiates the changed landscape of reality; and, in that moment, Orpheus is lost.
During the seven lines that follow, as Orpheus tries to process what he is seeing into a new emotional nature, and thus a new performative self formed in response to events, the Maenads are preparing to strike. When Eurydice herself urges in response, “Let us four attack as one and pull / The beast apart,” the stage direction instructs that “Orpheus stands horrified and speechless.” The situation is changing too rapidly for him to adapt; he has literally forgotten himself—and, more importantly, his lyre is on the ground. This time, there is no music to soothe the savage beast: an idiom which here is ironically inverted. For the savage beast is, in fact, the whirling death of Eurydice and the Maenads, not the horrified man who, Eurydice says, “A monster stands / Athwart our careless way, a bristling bulk / That asks an instant action.”
Beyond the narrative action of the play, a theoretical underpinning connects the events of the play to a commentary on the development of English poetry in the 20th century, as discussed in the first part of this review. It is to the play’s great credit that this theoretical concern is not obtrusive in any sense, although it has been carefully worked as an important and theoretically consistent layer present, for example, in Orpheus’ grisly death: the tearing apart of his body symbolising the disjointedness of Imagism, and summoning to mind (appropriately) the “heap of broken images” in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where those images are themselves the memories and traditions that exist in the mind from the Bible on down.
Commenting on this, in an explanatory note sent to this reviewer, Lane notes also that the character of Orpheus also offers a perspective on the dynamics of revolutions, with Orpheus behaving like the Girondists, those moderates of the French Revolution who themselves were sentenced to the guillotine for being insufficiently radical. Here, too, the play opens itself to new and provocative readings along political lines, especially given the inclusion of Agave as one of the trio of Maenads, and the early reference to the death of King Pentheus. Euripides’ play, The Bacchae, recounts the story of Orpheus’ death at the hands of the Maenads; but it also describes how the Maenads, including Agave, kill King Pentheus—Agave’s son—and how Agave tears off the head of Pentheus, thinking it to be the body of a raging lion. The reflection of this Euripidean moment in Lane’s version of Orpheus’ death, at the hands of Eurydice, seems to this reviewer to be deeply significant and ripe for further consideration along political lines, as especially is Calliope’s portentous musing upon the nature of the One, in which she concludes:
The One shall be the soul unseen of all
That animates this various world and vast.
David Lane’s The Tragedy of Orpheus and the Maenads recommends itself by irresistibly inspiring readers to continue thinking about the play and what it signifies, even after the text has been reluctantly set aside. It is a work which invites one to return to it, to ponder its meaning and the beauty of its language, and to marvel at its mastery of a poetic diction that is too often dismissed today in pursuit of a slovenly ‘approachability.’ If there are to be works of art that are considered truly conservative, in the sense of preserving and recovering not only the rough form but the intentions and approaches of the best that have gone before, then Lane’s Orpheus must surely be counted amongst the finest examples of this, our Orphic age.
