Recusatio from Both Directions

Tony Harrison has been widely regarded as an interventionist poet and playwright in the sense that his work holds up a critical lens to modernity, brutally revealing the injustices and oppressions perpetrated by rulers, imperialists, and warmongers. The use of Greek and Roman material as means of exposing and challenging dominant political and cultural practices has been a central aspect of his project. This key feature of Harrison’s work also draws attention to the ironies in Harrison’s own situation. It was the privileged education he received, including being one of the last generation of writers to be schooled in the languages and histories of antiquity, plus his subsequent assimilation into the intelligentsia of creative practitioners, which put him in a position to become such an effective gadfly and to adapt a whole range of literary and theatrical forms and traditions for the purposes of political and social consciousness-raising. This chapter uses Harrison’s recusatio of modern politics and culture as a launching pad for examination of the reverse side of the coin. In using Greek and Roman texts, mythological narratives and figures, and poetic and theatrical forms and conventions in radical contexts, Harrison is involved in creative code-switching, that is, he recasts ideas and narratives in linguistic registers, idioms, and situations that enable modern readers and spectators to become part of the windows he opens on both ancient and modern.