by admin

Plautus Amphitryon

(Redirected from Amphitruo)
cover of Amphitryon theater play.

Amphitryon (/æmˈfɪtriən/; Ancient Greek: Ἀμφιτρύων, gen.: Ἀμφιτρύωνος; usually interpreted as 'harassing either side', Latin: Amphitruo), in Greek mythology, was a son of Alcaeus, king of Tiryns in Argolis. His mother was named either Astydameia, the daughter of Pelops and Hippodamia, or Laonome, daughter of Guneus, or else Hipponome, daughter of Menoeceus. Amphitryon was the brother of Anaxo, wife of Electryon and Perimede, wife of Licymnius.[1][2]

Mythology[edit]

Amphitryon was a Theban general, who was originally from Tiryns in the eastern part of the Peloponnese. He was friends with Panopeus.

Having accidentally killed his father-in-law Electryon, king of Mycenae, Amphitryon was driven out by Electryon's brother, Sthenelus. He fled with Alcmene, Electryon's daughter, to Thebes, where he was cleansed from the guilt of blood by Creon, king of Thebes.

Alcmene, who was pregnant and had been betrothed to Amphitryon by her father, refused to marry him until he had avenged the death of her brothers, all but one of whom had fallen in battle against the Taphians. It was on his return from this expedition that Electryon had been killed. Amphitryon accordingly took the field against the Taphians, accompanied by Creon, who had agreed to assist him on condition that he slew the Teumessian fox which had been sent by Dionysus to ravage the country.

The Taphians, however, remained invincible until Comaetho, the king's daughter, out of love for Amphitryon cut off her father's golden hair, the possession of which rendered him immortal. Having defeated the enemy, Amphitryon put Comaetho to death and handed over the kingdom of the Taphians to Cephalus. On his return to Thebes, he married Alcmene, who gave birth to twin sons, Iphicles and Heracles. Only the former was the son of Amphitryon because Heracles was the son of Zeus, who had visited Alcmene during Amphitryon's absence. He and Alcmene also had a daughter named Laonome. Meri pyari bindu abhi na.

He fell in battle against the Minyans, against whom he had undertaken an expedition, accompanied by the youthful Heracles, to deliver Thebes from a disgraceful tribute. In the play Heracles by Euripides, Amphitryon survives to witness the murders of Heracles' children and wife.

Dramatic treatments[edit]

  • Amphitryon was the title of a lost tragedy of Sophocles, but most others who have used this story have rendered comic treatments instead. Plautus, the Roman comedian, used this tale to present Amphitryon, a burlesque play. The dramatic treatment by Plautus has enjoyed a sustaining presence on the stage since its premiere. It was the only play by Plautus that was still performed during the Middle Ages, albeit in a modified form. It was staged regularly during the Renaissance, and was the second ancient comedy to be translated into the English language.
  • Plautus' play inspired several other theatrical works during the 16th century, including three Spanish language plays, two Italian plays, and a comedy in Portuguese by Luís de Camões. In 1636 Jean Rotrou translated Plautus' work into a successful French language production, Les Deux Sosies. This work inspired Molière's highly successful Amphitryon (1668). From Molière's line 'Le véritable Amphitryon est l'Amphitryon où l'on dîne,' the name Amphitryon has come to be used in the sense of a generous entertainer, a good host; the Spanish word for 'host' is in fact 'anfitrión' and its Portuguese 'anfitrião'. Several other continental versions inspired by Plautus followed Molière, including a Christianized version by Johannes Burmeister.
  • The first English language work that was loosely based on Plautus was an interlude in Jacke Juggler (ca. 1550). John Marston's What You Will (1607) was also partly based on Plautus. The first large scale work where Plautus was the chief source was Thomas Heywood's The Silver Age (1613). John Dryden's 1690 Amphitryon is based on Molière's 1668 version as well as on Plautus. Notable innovations from Dryden's adaptation include music by Henry Purcell and the character of Phaedra, who flirts with Sosia but is eventually won over by Mercury's promises of wealth. A modern comic adaptation was made by George Maxim Ross in the 1950s under the title Too Much Amphitryon.
  • In Germany, Heinrich von Kleist's Amphitryon (1807), which began as a translation of Molière's Amphitryon (1668) but developed into an original adaptation of the myth in its own right, remains the most frequently performed version of the myth, with Kleist using Alkmene's inability to distinguish between Jupiter and her husband to explore metaphysical issues; Giselher Klebe wrote in 1961 his opera Alkmene based on this play. Other German dramatic treatments include Georg Kaiser's posthumously published Double Amphitryon (Zweimal Amphitryon, 1943) and Peter Hacks's Amphitryon (1968).
  • In France, Molière's Amphitryon (1668) is the most famous and seminal treatment of the myth. It was also the subject of a play by Jean Giraudoux, Amphitryon 38 (1929), the number in the title being Giraudoux's whimsical approximation of how many times the story had been told onstage previously. It was adapted into English by S. N. Behrman and enjoyed a successful run on Broadway in 1938. Plautus' version was the basis of Cole Porter's 1950 musical Out of This World.[3] In 1991 it was the basis for the Jean-Luc Godard film Hélas pour moi.
  • The classic 1935 Nazi-era but anti-Nazi film version, Amphitryon, was based on Kleist.
  • Irish author John Banville's play God's Gift (Gallery Books, 2000) is a version of Kleist's Amphitryon.

Notes[edit]

  1. ^Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.4.5
  2. ^Pausanias, Graeciae Descriptio 8.14.2
  3. ^Michael H. Hutchins. 'Out of This World'. Archived from the original on 2009-10-25.

References[edit]

  • Christenson, David (Feb–Mar 2001). 'Grotesque Realism in Plautus' 'Amphitruo''. The Classical Journal. 96 (3): 243–260. JSTOR3298322.
  • Pausanias, Description of Greece with an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, M.A., in 4 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1918. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library
  • Pausanias, Graeciae Descriptio.3 vols. Leipzig, Teubner. 1903. Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
  • Plautus' Amphitruo, DM Christenson - 2000 - Cambridge University Press. Book reviews: [1][2]
  • Pseudo-Apollodorus, The Library with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.Greek text available from the same website.
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amphitryon&oldid=890253021'
19th Century‎ > ‎Kleist‎ > ‎

Amphitryon

[This page by Martin Swales]
Amphitryon. Ein Lustspiel nach Molière; Amphitryon. A Comedy after Molière (published 1807, first performed 1899)
Central to Amphitryon is the cardinal comic experience of confused identities. Jupiter and Merkur have taken on earthly form because Jupiter desires Alkmene, wife of the Theban general Amphitryon. The deception allows him to return home earlier than the real Amphitryon – and to make love to his devoted wife. Sosias, Amphitryon’s servant, finds himself in the first two scenes of the play confronted and overpowered by another version of himself (Merkur).The confusion and fury mounts throughout the play, until at the very end Jupiter reveals himself in his true shape. He and Merkur return to Olympus – but not before rewarding Alkmene and Amphitryon with the promise that they will have a son whose name will stand as the symbol of male power and greatness – Hercules. Kleist borrows the comic energies from his sources – Plautus and Molière, and time and again there are lines that draw the full humorous potential from the replicated and displaced identities that drive the play forward. In Act One, Scene 2 Sosias says to his double:
Nur habe die
Gefälligkeit für mich und sage mir,
Da ich Sosias nicht bin, wer bin ich?
Denn etwas, gibst du zu, muß ich doch sein.

Now please
Be so kind and tell me,
Since I am not Sosias, who am I?
You will admit that I must be something.

And, towards the end of the play (in Act Three, Scene 10) Sosias creates two new words in order to express the confusion that baffles both his master and himself:

Und kurz, ich bin entsosiatisiert,
Wie man euch entamphitryonisiert.

And simply, I have been de-Sosiasized,
Just as you have been de-Amphitryonized.
Yet the comic confusion – and here Kleist’s need to subvert the genre comes into play – constantly touches on profound, and profoundly hurtful, matters. After their night of love, Jupiter asks Alkmene whether the body in her arms was that of the husband or of the lover. She refuses to accept the distinction:

Recreate ost file outlook 2013. Nicht, daß es mir entschlüpft
In dieser heitern Nacht, wie, vor dem Gatten,
Oft der Geliebte aus sich zeichnen kann;
Doch da die Götter eines und das andre
In dir mir einigten, verzeih ich diesem
Von Herzen gern, was der vielleicht verbrach.

Not that it escaped me
In this happy night, how, from the husband
Often the lover can distinguish himself;
But since the gods united the one and the other
In you for me, I forgive this one with pleasure,
For what the other one perhaps committed.
Behind this moment of disturbance and conciliation vibrates the whole question of sexuality in marriage, of licit and illicit desire, of whether the notion of conjugal rights diminishes the act of love into a duty rather than freely given emotional surrender. Moreover, the perception that sex has both a physical and a metaphysical dimension vibrates throughout the play – and comes to a head in Act Two, Scene 5. Alkmene says to Jupiter that, in order to pray to the divinity, she needs to invest him with human features:

Soll ich zur weissen Wand des Marmors beten?
Ich brauch Züge nun, um ihn zu denken.

Should I pray to a white marble wall?
I need features now, to think of him.
Yet to her the love of an earthly man in marriage is the very foundation of her being. Jupiter, embracing her, asks her to choose between himself and Amphitryon. She acknowledges the profound bliss that she felt the night before and desperately hopes that that divine feeling was for her husband:

Wenn du, der Gott, mich hier umschlungen hieltest,
Und jetzo sich Amphitryon mir zeigte,
Ja – denn so traurig würd’ ich sein, und wünschen,
Daß er der Gott mir wäre, und daß du
Amphitryon mir bliebst, wie du es bist.

If you, the god, held me here in your arms,
And then Amphitryon appeared to me,
Yes – then I would be so sad, and wish,
That he were the God to me, and that you
Remained Amphitryon to me, just as you are.
The desperate confusion of feeling, the complexity of different kinds of knowing (or are they the same kinds of knowing?) is at the heart of the play and gives it a powerful tragic undertow. Of course, at the end all is explained, everybody is forgiven and reconciled. No hard feelings, we might say. But there are hard feelings, the dark undertow will not go away – and it vibrates in the final utterance of the play, one of the shortest and most famous curtain lines in all German drama. In the midst of the general rejoicing, as the male world celebrates the promise of the birth of Hercules, the product of the night of love between Alkmene and Jupiter, she, the mother who will bear the child, says simply ‘ach’. However the line is played in the theatre – as a croak of despair or a scream of outrage – its force vibrates long after the play’s close.
Further Reading
Robert J. Andreach, ‘Overmyer’s Amphitryon: Adapting Kleist for a Contemporary Audience’, Papers on Language and Literature 36 (2000), 158-76
Susan E. Gustafson, ‘“Die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden”: The Linguistic Question in Kleist's Amphitryon’, Seminar 25:2 (1989), 104-26
Jeffrey L. Sammons, ‘Jupiterists and Alkmenists: Amphitryon as an Example of How Kleist’s Texts Read Interpreters’, in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist, ed. by Bernd Fischer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), pp. 21-42
John Walker, ‘“Und was, wenn Offenbarung uns nicht wird”: Kleist’s Kantkrise and Theatrical Revelation in Amphitryon’, Oxford German Studies 22 (1993), 84-110
Andrew J. Webber, The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), Chapter 4: ‘Cases of Double Trouble in Kleist’, pp. 195-231