George Gilbert Aimé Murray (2 January 1866 – 20 May 1957) was an Australian-born BritishAustralian by birth, he returned to Australia in the 1890s for a visit. It has been lamented that "perhaps the most famous Australian of his time, [he] expressed no interest whatever in Australia"., also here at Adelaide Institute classical scholar and public intellectual, who served as Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford from 1908 to 1936. He was an outstanding scholar of the language and culture of Ancient Greece, perhaps the leading authority in the first half of the twentieth century. He is the basis for the character of Adolphus Cusins in his friend George Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara, and also appears as the chorus figure in Tony Harrison's play Fram.
He served as President of the Ethical Union (now Humanists UK) from 1929 to 1930 and was a delegate at the inaugural World Humanist Congress in 1952 which established Humanists International. He was a leader of the League of Nations Society and the League of Nations Union, which promoted the League of Nations in Britain.
Murray died in Oxford in 1957, aged 91. His ashes were interred in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey."Gilbert Murray", Westminster Abbey
Early life Murray was born in Sydney, Australia. He came from an Irish Catholic family and his ancestors fought at the Battle of the Boyne and in the 1798 Rebellion. His family all supported Irish Home Rule and were critical of the British government's actions elsewhere in the Empire. His father, Sir Terence Aubrey Murray, who died in 1873, had been a Member of the New South Wales Parliament; Gilbert's mother, Agnes Ann Murray (née Edwards), ran a girls' school in Sydney for a few years. Then, in 1877, Agnes emigrated with Gilbert to the UK, where she died in 1891.
Murray was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St John's College, Oxford, where he took his B.A. in 1886 in Greats with first-class honours with congratulations. He distinguished himself in writing both Greek and Latin, winning the Gaisford Prize for Greek Prose Composition, The Gaisford Prize for Greek Verse Composition, and the Chancellor’s Prize for Latin Composition.
Classicist
Academic career From 1889 to 1899, Murray was Professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow.The most famous of his students there was John Buchan, whom Murray helped to take a further degree at Oxford. Others were H. N. Brailsford and Janet Spens. He left Glasgow because his health broke down. There was a break in his academic career from 1899 to 1905, when he returned to Oxford; he interested himself in dramatic and political writing. After 1908 he was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford.He was a noted and popular lecturer. Amongst those on whom he had a particular influence was Gilbert Highet. In the same year he invited Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff to Oxford, where the Prussian philologist delivered two lectures: Greek Historical Writing and Apollo (later, he would replicate them in Cambridge).The correspondence between Murray and Wilamowitz is now published in The Prussian and the Poet. The Letters of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff to Gilbert Murray (1894–1930), ed. by A. Bierl, W. M. Calder III, R. L. Fowler (Hildesheim 1991).
From 1925 to 1926, he was the Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University.
Greek drama Murray is perhaps now best known for his verse translations of Greek drama, which were popular and prominent in their time. As a poet he was generally taken to be a follower of Swinburne and had little sympathy from the modernist poets of the rising generation.T. S. Eliot was rude: "As a poet, Mr. Murray is merely a very insignificant follower of the pre-Raphaelite movement." (from Euripides and Professor Murray, an essay in The Sacred Wood (1920)). Swinburne was in fact a youthful enthusiasm of Murray's, and Eliot's identification of it has stuck; but Murray probably preferred Tennyson for content among the Victorians (Mary Berenson reported this in 1903, and it still held good 50 years on . The staging of Athenian drama in English did have its own cultural impact.From the 1880s onwards, amateur performances in Greek had been popular, particularly for students dramaticals. See The Invention of Jane Harrison (2000) by Mary Beard. He had earlier experimented with his own prose dramas, without much success.
Over time he worked through almost the entire canon of Athenian dramas (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides in tragedy; Aristophanes in comedy). From Euripides, the Hippolytus and The Bacchae (together with The Frogs of Aristophanes; first edition, 1902);First published in: The Athenian Drama, vol. III: Euripides (Euripides: Hippolytus; The Bacchae. Aristophanes: The Frogs. Translated into English rhyming verse), 1902 (); many reprints (together, separate, repackaged). the Medea, Trojan Women, and Electra (1905–1907); Iphigenia in Tauris (1910); The Rhesus (1913) were presented at the Court Theatre, in London.See The Court theatre 1904–1907: a commentary and criticism by Desmond MacCarthy, 1966 reissue with Stanley Weintraub. In the United States Granville Barker and his wife Lillah McCarthy gave outdoor performances of The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris at various colleges (1915).
The translation of Œdipus Rex was a commission from W. B. Yeats.R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life I p. 334; early 1905. Foster also notes that Yeats and Murray corresponded about the Stage Society. Yeats was being provocative: Oedipus Rex could not be publicly presented on the British stage , because the incest was unacceptable to the censors. Foster (II p. 338) notes that it was two decades later that the play was actually performed, but by then Yeats had adapted the Murray text, and R. C. Jebb's, and made cuts, for a rather different result. Until 1912 this could not have been staged for a British audience, due to its depiction of incest. Murray was drawn into the public debate on censorship that came to a head in 1907 and was pushed by William Archer, whom he knew well from Glasgow, George Bernard Shaw,Shaw was a friend, from Murray's time around 1902 looking into Fabianism—Shaw had used Murray's marriage to Lady Mary Howard in 1905 as the basis for that of Barbara and Adolphus in Major Barbara; see for example Michael Holroyd's biography of Shaw, for Murray providing ideas for Act III; also "In More Ways than One": Major Barbara's Debt to Gilbert Murray, Sidney P. Albert, Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May 1968), pp. 123–140 and others such as John Galsworthy, J. M. Barrie and Edward Garnett. A petition was taken to Herbert Gladstone, then Home Secretary, early in 1908.
The Ritualists He was one of the scholars associated with Jane Harrison in the myth-ritual school of mythography.Noel Annan (The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses, 1999, p. 243) wrote "Gilbert Murray's remark that no one can write about Greek religion without being influenced by Jane Harrison seems truer now than when he made it." They met first in 1900. says 1902 in Cambridge; but says 1900 in Switzerland. In both cases it was through A. W. Verrall. Both books say they met at Bernard Berenson's Florence home in 1903, as Harrison was finishing Prolegomena, and discussed it. He wrote an appendix on the Orphic tablets for her 1903 book Prolegomena; he later contributed to her Themis (1912).Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy; reprinted in . The editorial introduction writes (p. 95) "Murray views tragedy as the legacy of the ritualistic enactment of the myth of the life and death of Dionysius".
Francis Fergusson wrote
Ostracism Murray's openly expressed pro-Home Rule and anti-imperialist views, combined with his failure to support the cause of retaining compulsory Greek, antagonised his colleagues at Oxford University, who were mostly Conservative and Unionist. In 1910, he recalled, only New College, Balliol College and Jesus College continued to send pupils to his lectures; the absence of undergraduates from Christ Church, to which his chair was attached, was particularly noticeable.
In public life
Liberal Party politics He was a lifelong supporter of the Liberal Party, lining up on the Irish Home Rule: Murray founded an Oxford Home Rule League in 1886 and non-imperialist sides of the splits in the party of the late nineteenth century. He supported temperance, and married into a prominent Liberal, aristocratic and temperance family, the Carlisles. He made a number of moves that might have taken him into parliamentary politics, initially by tentative thoughts about standing in elections during the 1890s. In 1901-2 he was in close contact with the Independent Labour Party. But the overall effect of the Second Boer War was to drive him back into the academic career he had put on hold in 1898, resigning his Glasgow chair (effective from April 1899).
He stood five times unsuccessfully for the University of Oxford constituency between 1919 and 1929. He continued support for the Asquith faction of Liberals, after the party was split again by Lloyd George. for details and his academic elections against Lloyd George and Bonar Law, which were equally unsuccessful.In 1921 Murray was trying a scheme on Asquith to promote a new progressive grouping under Edward Grey ; but this proved impractical king making.Noel Annan, in Our Age: The Generation that made Post-War Britain (1990) provides (p. 236) a list of Liberal Party intellectuals of the 1920s capable of attracting the younger generation; Murray is listed there with Maynard Keynes, Hubert Henderson, Walter Layton, Ramsay Muir, Ernest Simon, Roy Harrod. Another list including Murray (p. 32) is with J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, J. L. Hammond and his wife Barbara Hammond (both close friends of Murray), Graham Wallas, H. W. Nevinson and H. W. Massingham, as 'the newly educated classes of the left' and 'reformers'. During the 1930s the Liberals as a party were crushed electorally, but Liberal thinkers continued to write; Murray was one of the signatory Next Five Years Group formed around Clifford Allen."... after Lloyd George had become the Independent Liberal in 1931, many remaining Liberals participated in the Next Five Years group, who proposed an aggressive industrial policy and management of banking and finance similar to the Yellow Book. It is true that the group called themselves non-partisan, and in fact one of the core members was Harold Macmillan. However, as Freeden indicates, the Liberal tendency of the group was obvious as a whole. Geoffrey Crowther and Salter, both Liberals, were responsible for the first section of the book dealing with domestic affairs. The signatories included Layton, Rowntree, Cadbury, Isaac Foot, H. A. L. Fisher, Gilbert Murray, J. L. Hammond, and Hobson, other than several Liberal MPs." From paper by Tomoari Matsunaga, PDF .
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