August 11, 2012
First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage...
Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword
And won thy love doing thee injuries.
But I will wed thee in another key,
With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling.
(Theseus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, I.i)
I assistant directed on Carey Perloff's production of Racine's Phèdre at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and the American Conservatory Theater a couple of years back, and wrote a blog (not unlike this one) collecting random thoughts and research discoveries along the way.
My favourite post was "Farouche: Phedre and the Half-Blood Prince". It was a tangent inspired by the coincidence that A Midsummer Night's Dream was also playing that summer, alongside a dozen other shows in Stratford's impressive repertory system.
In the opening scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, is about to get hitched to Theseus, "Duke" of Athens, despite the violent backstory briefly mentioned in the above quote. I got curious. Sure, Shakespeare was writing a comedy, so it wasn't surprising he glossed over the more disturbing bits of the myth. And the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta is only the first of four story threads, setting up the love-and-marriage theme that culminates in Oberon's final benediction: "To the best bride-bed will we, / Which by us shall blessed be; / And the issue there create / ever shall be fortunate." (Ironically, he's talking about the baby Hippolytus, of whom more in a moment.) All very lovey-dovey, no? But I couldn't help rewinding to the whole "wooed thee with my sword" thing. What was up with that?
Phèdre tells the story of Phaedra (English spelling), wife to King Theseus, who falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus. Not technically incest, but not technically a good idea, either. Hippolytus' mother Hippolyta doesn't appear in either the French tragedy or its source, Hippolytus by Euripides (which coincidentally got a Theatre@York production just last year). It's as if, her reproductive function fulfilled, "the horse-loving Amazon" held no more interest for the myth-makers, the playwrights, or even, perhaps, Theseus himself. Sure, the whole point of this story is the relationship (or lack thereof) between a young man and his stepmother, so a biological mom would be a narrative nuisance. But where did Hippolyta go? An Amazon queen is a rather large item to misplace.
Check out "Farouche: Phedre and the Half-Blood Prince" for some slightly meandering answers, with a bit of French-Canadian history thrown in for good measure.
I've also assembled a Pinterest board of images of Amazons from ancient Greek art on up. In the vase paintings they always seem to wear these odd striped leggings, that somehow remind me of the patterns on striated muscle -- hence the other images on the board.
