Faber (2022) p/b vii + 14pp £8.99 (ISBN 9780571378739)
‘I sing of marriage and a marriage bed, and the endurance of love’ is the declared objective of our eponymous heroine, the shade of Penelope as she looks back over her eventful life. This ‘prose-poem’ was written to be performed with music provided by the late André Previn, whose collaboration with S. goes right back to Every Good Boy Deserves Favour in 1977. Penelope was performed in full at Tanglewood, the summer festival of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in July 2019 and received its first UK (spoken) performance in a wonderful evening arranged by Classics for All in November 2021 where the script was performed by Hattie Morahan. This performance can (and should) be viewed online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjGGu5lEots), not least for the illuminating discussion of the text between the author, the broadcaster Martha Kearney, and the academic Dr Emma Greensmith which precedes the performance of the monologue.
Penelope looks back from ‘the dark plains of Asphodel’ over her family history, going over her early life and subsequent marriage to Odysseus. She has some sharp words for Helen (‘round-heeled runaway Helen of the bee-sting lips and who-me? eyes, not known for her weaving…’) and a wonderful range of avian metaphors for the impregnation of Leda, mother of Helen who was ‘conceived in a wing-beat’ when Zeus ‘swanned past Leda’s defences and begat the slut’. The bulk of the monologue retells Penelope’s experiences after her husband went to Troy, as she awaited his return with a mixture of longing and wrath, being bombarded with lying tales ‘woven from moonbeams by roaming minstrels’ and besieged by the ‘brutes and boors of Ithaca forcing their suits for my hand in marriage’. She tells us about Eumaeus the swineherd and Argus the dog, about Eurycleia, the contest of the bow and their final joyous reunion. The adventures narrated in Odyssey 9-12 are brilliantly presented as far-fetched travellers’ tales of such beings as ‘one-eyed giants who snacked on sailors’—tales which Penelope takes with more than a pinch of salt but with discernible anxiety where they treat of ‘an island where a magic fruit made men forget their home and family’. Penelope tells us nothing which she did not experience for herself, and so the slaughter of the suitors is only inferred from its aftermath (‘the suitors were all dead, along with twelve serving-girls who had made love to them, hanged in a row by my son’) and the agency of the gods is wrongly surmised (‘one of [the immortal gods] has killed the suitors, and my husband is lost for ever’) as she still did not recognise her husband. The fashioning of the marital bed is described twice (pp. 3 and 12, with suitably Homeric repetition of phrases), reflecting its centrality in the tale and the life of its heroine. The monologue ends (as Aristarchus of Alexandria thought The Odyssey itself should end) with the couple going to sleep towards the end of the penultimate book of the original poem.
There are a few Stoppardian anachronisms in the text (Helen is ‘Miss World’ and later a ‘trophy wife’, whom Aphrodite ‘pimped’ for Paris) but generally the register of the language is close to Homer himself, with some similes drawn from the original—Odysseus’ plucking of the fatal bow-string ‘like a homing swallow’ is derived from Odyssey 21.411, and Penelope’s ‘heart of iron’ is taken from 23.172. Other Homeric epithets are given an interesting twist, so that Dawn is pleasantly ‘rosy-fingered’ after the battle is safely over (p.13, echoing e.g. Odyssey 2.1 ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς) but is ‘fetid and bloody-fingered’ after the suitors explode in rage at Penelope’s deception of them, focalising the scene with more emotion than Homer did (Odyssey 19.155).
S. has managed something which may look easy but which is in fact almost impossible to achieve: he has recreated the inner emotions of Homer’s Penelope in such a way as to be credible both in ancient and in modern terms, using language which manages to avoid the Scylla of archaism and the Charybdis of pastiche. He has resisted the temptation to go full Molly Bloom on his heroine, but she is still recognisably the work of the same man who gave us The Real Thing in 1982 and Arcadia in 1993. As with Homer’s original, this text is best appreciated in performance, and it is to be hoped that its publication in book form will encourage schools, colleges and theatres to present it to the widest possible audience.
John Godwin