[In the following review, Murray argues that Harrison's strength is in the public poetry of the theater and therefore better enjoyed in performance than in the solitary act of reading his Dramatic Verse 1973-1985.]

Every generation or so the rebirth of poetic drama is proclaimed; Tony Harrison （like myself） is just old enough to remember the excitement of the last renaissance, associated with the names of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry. The plays of that period are not much revived; even in the case of Eliot they remain a minor part of a major poet's work. They seem to belong to an alien culture, to be the last fling of an even earlier renaissance in the Edwardian age, when verse drama was a major industry, and the verse translations of Gilbert Murray packed the West End theatres.

It is difficult to explain the fascination of such a generation of quiet-voiced poets with the theatre. The oddest thing is that it was Eliot's main aim in preparing for the stage to reduce the poetic element in verse and diction, “to find a rhythm close to contemporary speech, in which the stresses could be made to come wherever we should naturally put them, in uttering the particular phrase on the particular occasion; “it was important that passages should not call “too much attention to themselves as poetry”. But within a few years other dramatists as different as Beckett, Osborne and Pinter, writing in prose, were exploring theatrical styles of rhetoric more obviously poetic than anything in Eliot. Now it looks more as if poetry had lost its way, and handed over to prose the task of exploring a form of discourse which would transcend the limits of ordinary language. For that is surely the reason why we should want poets to write for the theatre, whether they write in poetry or prose.

Tony Harrison is today our leading theatrical poet; and at first sight his work might seem to owe nothing to this earlier period of poetic activity. Yet there is I think a sense of continuity in conscious opposition: Eliot himself began his interest in the theatre with a violent attack on Gilbert Murray's style of translating （“Euripides and Professor Murray”, in 1920）; and Harrison shares Eliot's central preoccupations, with poetic diction, with the creation of atmosphere, and with the primacy of classical Greek models.

Much of Harrison's work is of course what we would conventionally call translation, though he himself prefers the term “adaptation”; the most interesting consequence of ＼Dramatic Verse 1973-1985,］ this publication of virtually all his dramatic verse apart from The Mysteries is the way that it shows how Harrison has used the creative potential of this process. In his hands the text takes on something of the flexibility of myth in the hands of the Greek tragedians; and even when the translation is as exact as one could wish, it achieves an independent life of its own which can scarcely be subsumed under the normal conception of translation. Here is that excellent poetic craftsman and disciple of Eliot, Louis MacNeice, rendering a chorus of Aeschylus' Agamemnon:

But the money-changer War, changer of bodies,
Holding his balance in the battle
Home from Troy refined by fire
Sends back to friends the dust
That is heavy with tears, stowing
A man's worth of ashes
In an easily handled jar.
And they wail speaking well of the men how that one
Was expert in battle, and one fell well in the carnage—
But for another man's wife.
Muffled and muttered words;
And resentful grief creeps up against the sons
Of Atreus and their cause.
               But others there by the wall
               Entombed in Trojan ground
               Lie, handsome of limb,
               Holding and hidden in enemy soil.

And here is Tony Harrison:

Geldshark Ares god of War
broker of men's bodies
usurer of living flesh
corpse-trafficker that god is—
give to WAR your men's fleshgold
and what are your returns?
kilos of cold clinker packed
in army-issue urns
wives mothers sisters each one scans
the dogtags on the amphorae
which grey ashes are my man's?
they sift the jumbled names and cry:
my husband sacrificed his life
my brother's a battle-martyr
aye, for someone else's wife—
Helen, whore of Sparta!
whisper, mutter belly-aching
the people's beef and bile: this war's
been Agamemnon's our clanchief's making,
the sons of Atreus and their “cause”.
Where's my father husband boy?
where do all our loved ones lie?
six feet under near the Troy
they died to occupy. …

Harrison's version is scarcely less accurate, but it is far more direct; more importantly it is poetry for performance, not for reading. It is hard to see the well-mannered version of MacNeice having the stage success that Harrison achieved in the National Theatre production. Harrison's strength is that he is genuinely a poet of the theatre, not a poet attempting to write for the theatre.

He also differs from the previous generation in his concern for the relation between theatre and music. Music is central to his idea of performance, and one feels more than the usual sense of frustration in attempting to evaluate the written word outside this intended context. Presumably tapes, even videotapes, exist in the archives of the National Theatre and the BBC; but when a writer offers for much of his work subtitles like “a music drama”, “a sex-war opera” or “a rhythmic libretto”, and when he works with composers like Harrison Birtwistle, Dominic Muldowney and Jacob Druckman, it seems a pity that the publication of his words cannot be combined with at least a selection of their performance on tape. For performance, not the written word, is the key to Harrison's art.

His dramatic career extends over the whole period of his activity as a poet; indeed, until the publication of his Selected Poems in Penguin in 1984, he was more widely known as a playwright. The earliest play here reprinted is his version of The Misanthrope for the National Theatre in 1973: it must have been the first successful use of rhyming couplets on the stage for well over a century; the pace and wit of the original are marvellously recreated through the way that the conventions of the rhyming couplet build up tensions and expectations. And the formality of the stylistic constraints in turn imposes a formality of representation, and recreates for us precisely that lifestyle of conventions which the hero Alceste so vigorously opposes.

In Phaedra Britannica （1975）, a close adaptation, in rhyming iambic couplets, of Racine's play, the action is reset in the British Raj before the Mutiny. By a simple device of change of situation Harrison revives all the tensions present in Racine. The formality of the couplet form offsets the passionate and uncontrollable emotions that are expressed through it, just as the controlled coolness of Racine's language heightened the violence of the original; but it also seems right for its new context, as characters struggle to express thoughts and feelings through the conventions of colonial English life. The new setting is also important for the religious meaning of the play; for it allows us to believe in the influence of the gods of India on the action, from the betrayal of the Memsahib's mother by lust to the final curse of the Governor, which brings forth Siva's monster to stampede his son's polo ponies and drag him to his death. When at the end the Governor and Lilamani are left alone, the weight of Indian religion and the dread of the mixing of races shine through his final words:

Your family, now mine, have borne the cost
of crossing certain bounds best left uncrossed.
Now try to ford, though times force us apart,
those frontiers of blood into my heart.

When it was first produced in 1981, I described The Oresteia as “surely the best acting translation of Aeschylus ever written. It gives the impression of catching every image and every nuance of meaning that is dramatically significant, while recreating Aeschylus' traditional grandeur and sonority” （TLS, December 11, 1981）. Rereading the text after the memory of that magnificent theatrical experience has faded a little, it is easy to see how closely Harrison's achievement is related to his technical skills as a writer of poetry. On this occasion he abandons rhyme （except in certain choruses） in order to appeal to a far older tradition of English verse. He uses a variety of strongly stressed and regular metres often based on the dactyl or anapaest, to create a poetry of pace and of menace. The chief characteristic of his line is a heavy caesura at its centre, which recalls the rhythm of Anglo-Saxon verse, or of the Psalms in the Authorized Version. This allusion to the origins of English poetry is reinforced by his very strong emphasis on alliteration and assonance, and by his use of a vocabulary rich in gutturals and labials:

Coerced into keening by Queen Clytemnestra
for King Agamemnon as if for our bloodkin
we carry these ghost-sops out to his gravemound.
Lashed out to lament the lost lord of Argos
we Trojans trench flesh ruts into our faces.
There's no need to coerce us, we cry anyway.

The language too points to our own remote past—of tomb-cairn, clanchief and bloodguilt. Instead of gods and goddesses we have “Hera, high she-god and Zeus, the high he-god”. Where rhyme is used, the effect is powerful, as in the passage quoted above, or:

LEMNOS! Its very name is vile
Clytemnestra should have been
of that murderous and manless isle
the killer queen
Queen of women who wield knives
or slaughtered husband's sword.
The Lemnos husband-killing wives.
LEMNOS—name to be abhorred.

There is in fact something almost Byronic in the speed, rhythmic vigour and fluency of Harrison's verse, and in his delight in it:

This is my mule, a poor long-suffering hack,
               with iambic front legs and trochaic back.
Backwards or forwards, he'll take you home
               both ways together like a palindrome.

（Palladas 34）

Without their music, others of Harrison's works are less easy to judge. For instance, a collaboration with Birtwistle produced Yan Tan Tethera for BBC Television, described as “a mechanical pastoral” with revolving hill and two choruses of black- and white-faced sheep: after various mishaps the opera is finally due for first performance this August on the South Bank and ITV. Seeing （and hearing） may induce believing, but on the printed page it doesn't sound as if it would have appealed to the author's father:

Sorry, dad, you won't get that quatrain
（I'd like to be the poet my father reads!）
It's all from you once saying on the train
how most of England's rhubarb came from Leeds.

So he wrote in his poetic epistle on translating Smetana's Bartered Bride for the New York Met （also included in this volume）. But this is just an extreme example of a tension which runs through all of Harrison's work, and marks him out as belonging to a particular generation. Aggressive pride in his working-class origins is combined with a delight in exploring even the most obscure byways of European culture: how many people have heard of Palladas, the Alexandrian schoolteacher in the late Roman empire, whose epigrams Harrison so brilliantly translated?

The most entertaining expression of this conflict is Harrison's homage to his old school, Leeds Grammar School. The Big H, with music by Dominic Muldowney, was first shown on BBC Television on Boxing Day, 1984; three schoolteachers act the part of a modern Herod instilling in their classes the duty of massacring innocents, and the importance of not dropping aitches; as each hero returns from his task, the teacher intones:

The title I hereby award to thee
is Grand Child Eliminator G. C. E.

The dog Latin and the schoolboy jokes come thick and fast, and the puns are truly awful:

In these days of freedom the flogger and flesh-render
can also be a Herod of the feminine gender.
If you think mass-murder is monopolised by men
watch how this King Herod does it, then think again.
HIStory is HERstory, girls, now mark this well
you too might be recruited into Herod's PREL.

（The PREL is Herod's hit squad, named acronymically from the school motto, pro rege et lege.） It must all have been great fun for the schoolkids involved. I find it also an intensely nostalgic piece; for it looks back to the only period when it might be said that England had a shared culture and a shared education; though they still teach Latin at Leeds Grammar School, it no longer takes little Tony Harrisons who drop their aitches, for it is a private school.

Harrison's most ambitious work to date is Medea: a sex-war opera with music by Jacob Druckman; commissioned by the New York Met and finished last year, it does not seem to have been performed yet. But it involves a major step forward in his art. It is a formal opera; there is, for instance, what is clearly a chorus sung by the Argonauts; and there is a （poetically） haunting aria for Butes, reluctant voyager:

O moon, whose bees are stars
send out your swarms tonight
and on this sea that scarcely stirs
ooze your honied light.

The plot derives from the myth, conceived as all its versions; it is framed in Greek and Latin passages from Euripides to Hosidius Geta （second century AD） and the Scottish Renaissance Latinist, Buchanan. The story begins with the Argonauts on Lemnos, and moves to Colchis for the winning of the golden fleece, and the meeting of Jason and Medea. Their wedding at the end of the act is repeated for Jason and Creusa at the start of the next act, which provokes the dreadful revenge of Medea on her rival. The final section explains why this is a sex-war opera. Harrison has already protested at the attitude of opera to women:

Tosca, Carmen, Butterfly
it seems all women do is die
in music drama.
A woman is what men desert;
in opera （as in life!） men hurt
and harm her.

Now he takes up a theme he had explored earlier in the Oresteia, the conflict between the male and female principles:

As the sex-war's still being fought
which sex does a myth support
you should be asking.
What male propaganda lurks
behind most operatic works
that music's masking?

Medea did not kill her children; they were stoned by the men of Corinth. And the opera ends with a father, Hercules, murdering his children.

The libretto is totally professional, and no longer rests on translation or even adaptation: the basis of the act of recreation is no longer the text, but the myth. All the various techniques that he has learned over the last twelve years in the theatre are brought into play. One hopes and expects that the music will live up to this superb libretto.

Harrison's poetry has always been public poetry, immediately accessible and directed at an audience rather than at the solitary reader. His chief weakness as a poet, that he lacks the ability to speak in a private voice, is in the theatre his greatest strength: unlike Eliot, his natural habitat is the public arena. That is also why he understands so well the classical tradition in the theatre: it is not just an accident of his education. For the Greeks, poetry was a public act, and therefore belonged in the theatre, where the spoken word fused with religious ritual, dance and music to extend the boundaries of action and speech towards the unknown. In the Oresteia, Tony Harrison and Peter Hall showed their understanding of the place of ritual in the theatre; and Harrison has always seemed close to the ancient tragedians in his acceptance that poetry is part of this ritual context. Like them he belongs to a verbal not a written culture: the word is the spoken word. That is why he finds his natural home in the theatre, and that is why this book is no more than the verbal notation for past and future performances. At the start of his Oresteia he places an author's note: “This text is written to be performed, a rhythmic libretto for masks, music, and an all-male company.” That is no mere antiquarian homage to Aeschylus, but a statement of poetic principle.