Abstract
In the early nineteenth century, Greece was an icon for people of all political persuasions. ‘Il n’y a personne qui ne désire l’émancipation des Grecs’, the conservative François René Chateaubriand announced in his Note sur la Grèce.1 ‘We are all Greeks’, the radical Shelley claimed at the beginning of his poem of liberation, Hellas. The model of Greece was the same and yet it could be appropriated by two very different political factions. As was illustrated in the last chapter, ancient Greece could be seen in two ways. It could be seen as the same, endorsing the British status quo by offering an uninterrupted historical line, imbibed by generations of schoolchildren. Or it could be perceived as different, challenging the understanding to comprehend a remote, old culture. The idea of Greece as the same was comforting to conservative writers, while the idea of it as different was attractive to liberal writers. With these two conflicting interpretations, Greece amounted to a particularly ambiguous metaphor for the political writer. In drawing upon the metaphor, the writer was faced with an underlying concern that the opposing association of Greece would be suggested to the reader, that the radical would be tamed, tinged with vestiges of conservatism, or vice versa.
I further propose that the Athenian theatre being resuscitated, the admission shall be free to all who can expound the Greek choruses.
Peacock: Crotchet Castle
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Notes
F.R. Chateaubriand, Note sur la Grèce (Paris, 1825), p. 9: ‘There is no one who does not wish for the liberation of the Greeks.’
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A. Briggs, The Age of Improvement (1959), p. 214. The Six Acts included: prohibition of drilling and military exercises; empowerment of magistrates to search for arms; further limitation of the right to hold public meetings and restriction of the freedom of the press.
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For a good account of the use of Sparta for political debate, see E. Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1969).
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W. Drummond, A Review of the Governments of Athens and Sparta (1794), pp. 186–7.
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See, for example, M. Heath, Political Comedy in Aristophanes (Gottingen, 1987)
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See F. Macintosh, ‘Under the Blue Pencil: Greek Tragedy and the British Censor’, Dialogos, 2 (1995), pp. 54–70.
A Defence of Poetry’, Reiman and Powers, 491. See T. Webb, ‘Shelley and the Ambivalence of Laughter’, in K. Everest (ed.), Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bicentenary Essays (English Association, Cambridge, 1992), pp. 43–62.
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E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), p. 117: ‘Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude’.
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© 1997 Jennifer Wallace
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Wallace, J. (1997). ‘The Common-hall of the Ancients’: Democracy, Dialogue and Drama. In: Shelley and Greece. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373952_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373952_3
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