Overview: Phaedra and the Nurse

This chapter offers an overview of the book’s concerns, which are centred on the relationship between the tragic protagonist and the listener or onlooker who stands as witness. In Euripides, Phaedra’s anguished disclosure of her feelings to the Nurse, and the Nurse’s troubling reaction to what she hears, veering between extreme horror and too-familiarising rationalisation, are the starting-point for thinking about the difficulty of communicating tragic experience, which by its nature verges on the unspeakable, and so of finding good witness. The concept of good witness is extended to other terms: finding someone to tell one’s story; hospitality to the alien or stranger; and the ‘holding’ of another’s experience epitomised in the mother’s relation to the child, as in object relations theory (esp. Donald Winnicott). The dual obligation both to enter into the extraordinariness of the protagonist’s experience and to ground it in a world shared in common is discussed in relation to the theatrical representation of madness, particularly in Shakespeare, and to the distinctive resources which theatre can bring. Such witness is expressed as a particular kind of grieving, whose relation to adequate representation is glossed with reference to Gillian Rose’s concept of ‘inaugurated mourning’.