Lady Jane Lumley’s Ground-breaking Translation and Adaptation of Greek Drama

On November 6, 2020, the School of Humanities at the University of Auckland presented a staged reading of Jane Lumley’s Iphigeneya, as part of the activities of a symposium on The Female Experience in Early Modern England, organized by Professors Tom Bishop and Erin Griffey, and sponsored by the Alice Griffin Fund.

The actors read from Tom Bishop’s modernized version of the play (available on this website), the original version of which is preserved in a manuscript written in Jane Lumley’s hand: British Library, MS Royal 15. a. ix. This was very likely the first performance of the play in the southern hemisphere; there have been two productions of the play performed in England, in 1997 and in 2014.

The actors were:

• Ella Paulson (Iphigeneya)
• Lisa Harrow (Clytemnestra)
• Tom Bishop (Agamemnon)
• Logan Brown (Menelaus)
• Trafford Anderson (Achilles)
• Murray Edmond (Senex)
• Madeleine Moloney (Chorus)
• Ophelia Wass (Messenger).

Lumley’s Iphigeneya is the very first translation of Greek tragedy into English, ever.

That it was accomplished by a teenaged girl is quite astonishing, as is the fact that it is the very first dramatic work written by a woman in English, that we know of so far. (The first dramatic works written by a woman in England may be the fourteenth-century Latin liturgical plays of Katherine of Sutton, Abbess of Barking).

I have been working with this play, a translation of Euripides’s Iphigenia, for a number of years, and have taught it regularly in my graduate course on Girlhood at York University. (I spell Lumley’s translation her way, Iphigeneya, and refer to Euripides’s play following the traditional transliteration from ancient Greek, Iphigenia.)

One of the unresolved questions about the play we discuss in my class is the question of its date. The manuscript was originally listed, in the 1609 catalogue of the Lumley Library, along with other as “exercises and translations out of Greek into Latin and otherwise” made by Jane and her younger siblings, Mary and Henry, “when they were young.” These translations date to circa 1550-1553: a time when the Lumley children were composing translations from Greek or Latin for their father as New Year’s gifts. It was common for humanist-educated children in Tudor England to show off their education to their parents in this way.

It seems quite plausible that Lumley made the translation around 1553 or 1554, since the play’s subject, the sacrifice of a daughter for political ends, resonates eerily with the story of Lady Jane Grey, who was Queen of England for 9 days in July, 1553, before Mary I claimed the throne. Lady Jane Grey, who was Lady Jane Lumley’s cousin, was beheaded for treason in early 1554.

Jane Lumley’s Iphigeneya has always read to me as a text that is intensely focused on its girl protagonist.

Lumley edits out a lot of historical and political details related to the Trojan War, as well as classical dramatic conventions, such as the elaborate Chorus. She does so in order to focus the spotlight on Iphigeneya as a character. Having the opportunity to see this play as a live staged reading taught me some new things about the play.

First, I got to see how one significant effect of Lumley’s editing is that it compresses the play into a series of staged arguments, in which different characters adopt various conflicting positions: such as that between Iphigeneya, who is committed to her own sacrifice, and Achilles, who hopes she will change her mind and marry him. Her editing process allows us also to chart the emotional evolution of a character such as Agamemnon, who we first see having just changed his mind about the sacrifice, calling the Senex to send back Clitemnestra, and then over the course of the play he comes to support it. In this respect, the play finds its place among the rhetorical exercises Tudor children composed, and translated, as part of their education.

I also saw how much Iphigeneya changes throughout the play, from a child very much immersed in her relationship with her parents, to an adult who makes choices about her future independently from them. It is fascinating to watch Iphigeneya thinking her way into this position. There is a very fruitful discussion among the actors and the conference participants about this metamorphosis out of girlhood at the end of the recording.

Another thing to look for as you watch the reading is Lisa Harrow’s reading of the part of Clitemnestra, which conveys the heart-rending emotional turmoil of a mother confronting the impending sacrifice of her daughter.