Classical Greek Tragedy Research Articles

The Book of Samuel and the Three-Actor Rule in Classical Greek Tragedy

ABSTRACT Following a two-part 2022 publication which argues that portions of biblical literature may be written in the style of Classical Greek theatre plays, this paper seeks to demonstrate that 1 and 2 Samuel consistently adhere to the distinctive three-actor rule of Greek tragedy. The number of countable speaking actors present in any given scene from 1 or 2 Samuel never appears to exceed three actors at a time, provided that (1) only speaking actors are included in the tally, (2) group speech is treated as that of a single actor, and (3) scenes are parsed into episodes following regular criteria.

Mythological heroes on Czech stages and politics: the case of Phaethon and Antigone

Abstract Czech culture and society have abundant experience of repressive regimes and political oppression, as well as censorship and bans on speaking publicly and critically about the political situation. This article focuses on two dramatizations of ancient Greek myth and demonstrates their connection with politics: Phaethon by Otakar Theer (1917) is an expression of rebellion against the bondage of the Czech nation in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, while The Whore from the City of Thebes by Milan Uhde (1967), a paraphrase of Sophocles’ Antigone, is a cynical analysis of the state of civil society in totalitarian communist Czechoslovakia. These plays tried to appeal to the audiences of the time allegorically, using ‘Aesopian language’ and parables. Both reinterpretations of Greek myth are analysed in their historical and cultural context and compared with contemporary adaptations of classical Greek tragedies.

“For I Am Nothing without You”: Fragmentariness and the Transformability of Archetypal Identity in David Rabe’s The Orphan

In the fi eld of literary refashioning and adaptation studies, ancient Greek drama has constituted an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artistic creation and production. When it comes to drama and theatrical performance, David Rabe’s The Orphan, the third play in his Vietnam-themed tetralogy, falls precisely in this category, as it is a revised and “extensive transposition” (Hutcheon 7) of two classical works: Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, the only surviving Greek trilogy, as well as Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. In adapting these tragedies, the playwright chooses to juxtapose them onstage in order to represent and record the events which mark the generational trauma and the familial war in Agamemnon’s House. Rabe’s turn to classical Greek tragedy and his vision to rely on it and inform it are two inescapably “political acts” (Sanders 97), spurred by personal experience. The playwright had attended a performance of Euripides’s tragedy and had seen in it a link between the Trojan and the Vietnam War—and by extension Iphigenia’s sacrifice and the My Lai massacre—before proceeding, subsequently, to write the play in question. His realization that “the Greeks saw that reason was the flip side or dark side of unreason” and that his novel ideas were actually rooted in the ancient past (Morphos and Rabe 81) is the drive which urges him to base his play essentially upon the parent texts while attaching it to a uniquely different trajectory.

Черты классической греческой трагедии в пьесе Э. Олби «Коза, или Кто такая Сильвия»

The article is devoted to studying the features of the classical ancient Greek tragedy in the play “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia” by Edward Albee, which received the prestigious Tony Award. Despite the outrageous plot and purely avant-garde stylistic devices, the play has a number of characteristics typical of a classic tragedy. The aim of the study is to find and characterize the features of the ancient Greek tragedy in the play “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia” by the American playwright E. Albee. The article focuses on the connection between the poetics of the dramaturg and the principles of Aristotle’s tragedy composition. Attention is also drawn to the development of the theme of loneliness and rejection by society, which is the leitmotif of playwright’s creative work. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the approach to the study of the play “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia” precisely from the point of view of its connection with classical ancient Greek dramaturgy; themes of sacrifice and kinship, which are fundamental in the ancient Greek tragedy. As a result, the play “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia” reveals the features that connect the play with the classical ancient Greek tragedy, the influence of Aristotle’s “Poetics” on the play by the representative of the American theatre of the absurd E. Albee; and shows how the themes of sacrifice and kinship develop in the play by the American playwright.

Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe's Age of Reason ed. by Blair Hoxby

Reviewed by: Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe's Age of Reason ed. by Blair Hoxby Jeffery Moser Blair Hoxby, editor. Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe's Age of Reason. Ohio State UP, 2022. 328 p. Stanford professor Blair Hoxby's newest editorial production is a multi-author volume that considers the theory and practice of tragedy produced during Europe's Age of Reason, that intellectual and philosophical period promulgated during the late-seventeenth century and early- to mid-eighteenth century. Hoxby has an impressive record of research and publishing about European literature and culture. This text continues his theoretical approach to refigure and reassess traditional views about tragedy's power, versification, and imparts from classical beginnings during the Enlightenment, between 1685 and 1815, and beyond. For any student of history and literature, it is worth remembering that plays written and performed in the late-seventeenth century and after were post-Shakespeare's lifetime, post-Civil War, and post-Interregnum for England. With the public staging of plays licensed to reopen in 1660 after eighteen years of closure, not only did English theatre undergo a restoration, but so did England and the whole British Isles on an expansive socio-political scale, leading up to the Act of Union, which went into effect in the spring of 1707. The act created the Kingdom of Great Britain. Right on these heels followed political restoration and reform afoot in Europe, too, resulting in changes and adjustments. With Napoleon Bonaparte's dethronement in 1814, most of Europe was challenged to determine a new path forward. Events like another French Revolution or Russian conquest occurring again suddenly seemed to be impossibilities. The boundaries of European countries were renegotiated and seemingly settled, and the United States was well on its way to dominating Western ideals about democracy and sovereignty, while Imperial England's colonial grasp around the globe began to wane and fade. So it was, in many ways, that literature and culture during the late seventeenth-century and early- to mid-eighteenth century found itself in the crosshairs of optimism and pessimism. This is a particular prong that Hoxby stresses about tragedy, arguing in the introduction [End Page 333] that tragedy found itself at a "crossroads of the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment" (1). In other words, tragedies of the time were caught between the expectations of doom and gloom of classical Greek and Roman tragedy traditions and the "optimism, reason, and a faith in human progress and productivity" still regarded today as the majority assessment that scholars associate with the Enlightenment. Hence, for Hoxby, and others who have contributed to this volume, the tragedy of this time must be seen to "teeter on the brink of paradox" (1). In this accord, the essays affirm that the scope of tragedy written and performed during this time was both expansive and transitional. It should not be easily categorized as stale or a noncontroversial accoutrement to the period, nor a genre that was subjugated to something less and not as entertaining, edgy, or discursive as its counterpart of comedy that rose in popularity among the masses during the Restoration. Instead, tragedy of this time must be newly seen and understood as "dynamic" and "paradoxical," experimenting and juggling classical, early modern, romantic, and emerging modern ideals and expectations about the genre. In addition to Hoxby, scholars contributing to this worthwhile academic collection include: Alex Eric Hernandez, Logan J. Connors, James Harriman-Smith, Russ Leo, Cecile Dudouyt, Adrian Daub, Stefan Tilg, Larry F. Norman, Joseph Harris, and Joshua Billings. Their essays are categorized into three relevant sections: Part 1-- Ancient Forms, Modern Affects; Part II – Philosophy, Religion, and the Institutions of Tragedy, and Part III – Ancients, Moderns, and the Historical Turn. Hoxby's own essay, "Joanna Baillie, the Gothic Bard, and Her Tragedies of Fear," concludes the first section. The Scottish poet and dramatist's books of verse and plays reveal her extensive study and critical appreciation of Shakespeare, especially the Bard's proficiency in the passions. Baillie's (1762-1851) tragedy of fear, Orra, is set "in the context of the critical reinvention of Shakespeare as a primitive genius whose mastery of the...

Athenian Law and Classical Greek Tragedy: The Case of Oedipus the King

This paper is a comparative study of two different but interrelated discourses: fifth-century Athenian law and the classical Greek tragedy Oedipus the King, and its tertium comparationis is the rhetoric or language shared by these discourses. In order to discuss what is involved in this comparison this paper revolves around three axes of attention. First, it tries to show how most of the language of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, if contextualized, is invested with legal terms and can be interpreted in terms of Athenian law. Second, it argues that, aside from the philosophical and educational aspects of Oedipus the King, the Athenian audience must have experienced one of the most important aspects of their public life: participating in the Athenian popular courts (dikasteria: δικαστήρια) as juries. If it is so, then Sophocles the playwright can be viewed as a logographos, a speech-writer, and his play can be understood as a legal case study in an Athenian popular court. Third, the paper puts forward the proposal that the case of Oedipus the King and its legal rhetoric used as the plot unfolds can be a paradeigma (either a paradigm or an example), in addition to orations by Aeschines, Antiphon, Demosthenes and other Athenian rhetoricians, and can shed light on how the Athenian legal system worked when this tragedy was performed in fifth-century Athens.

‘Cinema: Today’s Theatre’ – Images from the 1914 Cologne Rose Monday Parade

ABSTRACT A carnival float in the 1914 Cologne Rose Monday parade was designed under the slogan ‘Theatre Then and Now’. The float depicted a cinema under the headline ‘The Theatre of Today’, pointing out that the film industry was encroaching on actors, authors and topics of the classical legitimate theatre. While the cinema sector was booming in the city, the Cologne Schauspielhaus (Cologne Theatre) was suffering a severe decline in audience attendance. The painted draft of the carnival float illustrates in detail the discrepancy between cinema and legitimate theatre and what they offered its audiences: long feature films for high entrance fees versus free car rides and free buffet to lure audiences into classical Greek tragedies. The Cologne carnival float commented in a caricaturing way on how the cinema attained sold-out houses with its propositions, while the legitimate theatre remained empty.

Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas

Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views of His Writings and Ideas

An Origin for Political Culture’: Laws 3 as Political Thought and Intellectual History

Abstract Plato’s survey in Laws book 3 of the development of human society from its earliest stages to the complex institutions of democratic Athens and monarchical Persia operates both as a conjectural history of human life and as a critical engagement with Greek political thought. The examples Plato uses to illustrate the stages of his stadial account, such as the society of the Cyclops and the myths of Spartan prehistory, are those used by other political theorists and philosophers, in some cases also drawing on the presence of the same stories in classical Greek epic and tragedy. By incorporating his critique into a timeline Plato is able to suggest that some approaches are limited in scope to specific social conditions, whereas his Athenian Stranger presents his analysis from an external and superior viewpoint, looking down on human society from above.

“For I Am Nothing without You”: Fragmentariness and the Transformability of Archetypal Identity in David Rabe’s The Orphan

In the fi eld of literary refashioning and adaptation studies, ancient Greek drama has constituted an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artistic creation and production. When it comes to drama and theatrical performance, David Rabe’s The Orphan, the third play in his Vietnam-themed tetralogy, falls precisely in this category, as it is a revised and “extensive transposition” (Hutcheon 7) of two classical works: Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, the only surviving Greek trilogy, as well as Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. In adapting these tragedies, the playwright chooses to juxtapose them onstage in order to represent and record the events which mark the generational trauma and the familial war in Agamemnon’s House. Rabe’s turn to classical Greek tragedy and his vision to rely on it and inform it are two inescapably “political acts” (Sanders 97), spurred by personal experience. The playwright had attended a performance of Euripides’s tragedy and had seen in it a link between the Trojan and the Vietnam War—and by extension Iphigenia’s sacrifice and the My Lai massacre—before proceeding, subsequently, to write the play in question. His realization that “the Greeks saw that reason was the flip side or dark side of unreason” and that his novel ideas were actually rooted in the ancient past (Morphos and Rabe 81) is the drive which urges him to base his play essentially upon the parent texts while attaching it to a uniquely different trajectory.

Power Struggles in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: ESP, Law and Literature and Greek Tragedy

After a brief overview of the Law and Literature movement, this article suggests possible convergences with ESP teaching and the use of classical Greek tragedy. It takes as a “case study” the Oresteia (458 BC), a trilogy by Aeschylus which features the first courtroom drama in Western literature. The first part of the article illustrates how tensions between a private and a civic form of justice lead to a series of power struggles, particularly between men and women. The following part shows how true power is predicated on mastery of language and signs. The conclusion suggests ways in which classical drama can be used by ESP instructors, given that the issues raised are as relevant today as they were in the 5th century BC.

TREATMENT OF FATE IN SHAKESPEAREAN AND CLASSICAL GREEK TRAGEDIES: A COMPARISON

Fate is regarded as a central component in tragedy. The significant role of fate is recognized when, despite a character's heroic acts and good intentions, they face death simply because they are doomed to die. But studies confirm that fate does not play a similarly critical role in the tragic denouement of each play. This paper attempts a critical comparison on the role and nature of fate in the downfall of protagonists in the classical Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. By reviewing research-based articles and books, and by reading through selected texts in reader-response approach, this paper attempts to identify the entirely different natures of fate that came into play for the tragic heroes’ downfall as portrayed in these two different ages. The findings manifest that the force behind the collapse of the heroes in the classical Greek tragedies was predominantly fate where the hero had little to do but to become a pawn in the hands of external forces beyond his control, while the force behind the tragic events is not external in the Shakespearean tragedies. Rather, the heroes themselves were, on the whole, responsible for their tragic downfalls due to their internal triggers.

The Tragedy of Ukraine: Hard Lessons to Learn from the Classics

As the war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, it remains mired in debt, corruption, and strife. The country seems to be caught up, again, in a vicious cycle that has been repeating itself for decades, if not centuries. Classical Greek tragedy gives us a deeper look at the reasons behind Ukraine’s persistent failure to achieve social stability, and to suggest remedies. The tragic cycle can be broken through a compromise in which individual, social and divine aspirations for justice are reconciled. As long as Ukrainian leaders seek to achieve justice without compromise, the nation’s self-destructive cycle is likely to persist.

La tragedia griega en el teatro contemporáneo: un análisis de <i>Incendios</i> de Wajdi Mouawad

The present study focuses on the analysis of contemporary literature which has a textual formality that is forged, both structurally and, in a sense, thematically, by the fundamental aspects of classical Greek tragedy. In order to do this, we would take the example of Incendies, the work of the Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad, where autobiographical hints are interspersed with sources of classical Greek tragedy, the most evident of which is the one of Oedipus Rex; that is to say the relation between the mother and the son and the discovery of the Truth, which already appears in Aristotle’s Poetics. We also find the case of Cadmo and the search for a kidnapped family member and the importance of learning the language so as to understand the events that take place.

As duplicidades do Édipo Rei de Sófocles

<span lang="PT-BR">Os principais estudiosos da peça de Sófocles, <em>Édipo Rei </em>(S. <em>OT</em>), na qual Édipo figura como governante supremo de Tebas, sugerem que a característica determinante dessa personagem seria uma espécie de ambivalência ou duplicidade fundamentais. Nesse sentido, Édipo seria na verdade não apenas um, mas dois. Assumindo essa caracterização como típica do discurso trágico (tal como sugere Jean-Pierre Vernant), demonstraremos que um agravamento de algo dessa ordem compromete a unicidade desse <em>mŷthos</em>, bem como suas personagens e suas falas, já que até mesmo seu protagonista é cindido em duas figuras diferentes e, de certa maneira, antagônicas. O objetivo do presente artigo é atentar para a complexidade da construção de seu enredo – em seus diferentes estratagemas para proporcionar deslocamentos espaço-temporais, situações tensas, expressões de conteúdo dúbio e de valor indecidível – com que se configura o <em>crescendo</em>na significação trágica do drama até sua dissolução na cena em que uma verdade mais profunda é revelada num cegante e violento esplendor. O conflito entre a duplicidade da realidade humana e a univocidade do discurso divino atinge um paroxismo que já era reconhecido na própria Antiguidade e que é responsável por fazer com que essa peça seja considerada por muitos a obra-prima de Sófocles, quiçá de todo o repertório trágico da Atenas clássica.</span>

Irony, Conflict, and Tragedy in Cultural Analysis: Hip-Hop between Bourdieu and Nietzsche

Culture has increasingly been analyzed ironically in relation to social conflict, emphasizing themes of ideology, co-optation, and complicity in reproducing inequalities. Arguably the most sophisticated ironic cultural critique is provided by Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s critique is often criticized for reductionism, but without pursuing what is neglected by ironic reductionism. Nietzsche provides a remarkable counterpoint, offering both seminal resources for modern social criticism, and profound reflections on culture’s potential to affirm life with integrity and authenticity. Nietzsche’s analysis of classical Greek tragedy suggests how culture can collectively affirm life through art without illusions. The relative emphases and insights of these two critics are contrasted here in relation to the cultural phenomenon of hip-hop, addressing latent ideological baggage but also its social activism and tragic-realist aesthetic. Grounded in this discussion of hip-hop as predictably compromised, but also incisively defiant and painfully honest, a challenge is posed for cultural analysis to be critical without being dismissive of existential and aesthetic questions, or blind to the potentials of popular culture. Culture is neither as derivative as much social criticism would suggest, nor as autonomous as many artists and art critics would suggest. Cultural studies therefore must find a middle way, navigating between cynicism and naiveté.

‘We who cannot speak lived there first’: A new claim to land in My plaas se naam is Vergenoeg by George Weideman

My plaas se naam is Vergenoeg (“My farm’s name is Vergenoeg [‘Far Enough’]”, 2005), a published play by George Weideman, is meaningful within the context of postcolonial discourse on land ownership and ecocritical views on the use of land. The play adds viewpoints to current postcolonial claims to land through several animal characters laying claim to being the first inhabitants, further commenting critically on man’s greed and destructiveness with regard to the earth. This article undertakes an analysis of the play, firstly investigating the messages of these non-human voices, rarely remembered or heard in the historical constructions of South Africa’s past. It focuses on Weideman’s blending of aspects of different genres and periods, the animal epic and classical Greek tragedy, resulting in a powerful downplay of man’s claim to sole ownership of the land. The study, secondly, considers the notion of landscape as defined by animals’ ways of inhabiting and interaction, in addition to the notion of landscape as a cultural construct that is traditionally defined by man’s ways of inhabiting and interaction.

Myth Or Truth: The Apollonian And Dionysian In The Death Of Ivan Ilyich

In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche uses Classical Greek tragedies to break down the human experience into two dichotomic cultures: the Apollinian and the Dionysian. The Apollinian culture represents humanity’s tendency toward order, pattern, and rationalism, while the Dionysian culture represents humanity’s simultaneous urge toward chaos and emotional intuition. Whereas Classical Greece allowed for both to coexist and augment one another through Greek Tragedies, Western thinking and culture allows for no such fruition; instead, Western society heavily emphasizes the Apollinian over the necessity or acknowledgement of the Dionysian. In The Death of Ivan Illyich, Leo Tolstoy takes this cultural practice a step further, giving readers a glimpse into a society that denies the Dionysian entirely. Through the demoralizing decline and eventual death of Ivan Illyich, Tolstoy suggests that rejecting the Dionysian not only obstructs society’s true understanding of human nature, but makes it wholly unprepared to handle humanity’s most essential truth: its mortality.

Arthur W. Pinero and Cavafy the Dramatist: The Parallel Quest for the Quality Play

Arthur W. Pinero and Cavafy the Dramatist:The Parallel Quest for the Quality Play Gonda Van Steen (bio) Introduction: Cavafy the Dramatist, in Search of the Well-Made Poem Άλκηστις και Κλυταιμνήστρα,την ζωήν μας διηγούνται την δεινήν και την κενήν —Constantine Cavafy, «Η αρχαία τραγωδία», Ποιήματα 1882–1932 6–7 Alcestis and Clytemnestratell the story of our life, eventful or empty. —Constantine Cavafy, “Ancient Tragedy”1897, repudiated poem; translation mine1 It is not a new idea to read Constantine Cavafy’s poems from the perspective of theater, performance, stage directing, and role-playing, but these productive connections may gain new meaning and relevance from a detailed analysis of Cavafy’s fascination with Arthur W. Pinero. The prolific Pinero was a London-born playwright, actor, and stage director and a slightly earlier contemporary of Cavafy. Pinero was of Portuguese and Sephardic Jewish descent. Despite his initial status as an outsider, he managed to integrate himself fully into the London theater world, but only with unrelenting dedication to his profession and with a life-long awareness of audience expectations and of social control in general. Pinero gained tremendous popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and was knighted in 1909 (Griffin 129). Even though most of his plays are now long forgotten, many were among the holdings of Cavafy’s personal library.2 George P. Savidis expresses an interest in Cavafy’s theatrical perspective and speaks of the poet’s “semi-dramatic technique” (“Cavafy” 369). His ideas, however, did not morph into a systematic publication, except [End Page 73] perhaps for his 1985 essay “Cavafy versus Aeschylus,” in which the above characterization occurs: this older essay treats but also diminishes Cavafy’s reception of classical Greek tragedy. Emphasizing Aeschylus (but referring also to Menander’s New Comedy), Savidis qualifies Cavafy’s creative competition with Aeschylus, hence the “versus” of his essay’s title (361, 362, 363, 373). A creative competition of Cavafy versus Pinero may not be too farfetched. A few more succinct mentions of Cavafy and the theater appear in Savidis’s Mikra Kavaphika A and B and in his commentary on Cavafy’s unfinished poem “Tigranocerta” of 1929 (“‘Tigranocerta’”).3 Other scholars and translators note the theatricality and the mise-en-scène potential of many poems of Cavafy, who himself was an avid theater-goer.4 Even though Cavafy’s life was closely linked to theater and stage practitioners, according to theater aficionado Kostas Nitsos, the poet believed that he himself would never be able to write drama.5 Paradoxically, Cavafy then went on to infuse his poems with a profound sense of the stage, rendering him writer, actor, director, set designer, and prompter all at once (Nitsos 29). Moreover, Cavafy’s feeling for action and gesture, his calibrating of plot twists and reversals, and his elliptic, laconic treatment of some subjects are, once again, truly theatrical. So, too, are the poet’s imaginative use of direct speech and collective monologues (imitating choral speech), his penchant for subversive irony, and his tendency to tell, retell, dramatize, and effectively re-perform parts of the actions or contents of his poems, as in, for instance, “Young Men of Sidon (A. D. 400),” «Νέοι της Σιδώνος (400 μ.Χ.)»; this last poem in the Cavafy canon pivots on the epitaph ascribed to Aeschylus and presents itself as an encounter (even a battle of wills) of reiteration and reinterpretation between an actor and a group of young male literati. Vassilis Lambropoulos concurs that this poem renders Aeschylus’s epitaph multiple times, and he characterizes it as an “interminable series of interpretations and reinterpretations, some of which acquire enough validity to form temporary constitutions of its knowledge” (“Classics” 207; “Violent Power” 204).6 Recently, the performative dimension of Cavafy’s cross-cultural communication has been the topic of newspaper articles, blogs, conference papers, and so on.7 Cavafy eagerly read, recognized, and conversed with masters in the realm of theater. He himself never formally published his poems, but he did keep ledgers of the select people who, he thought, might appreciate receiving his work in the mail. Among the recipients on those lists feature many actors, actresses, and other stage practitioners, including the big names of the Greek theater world of the first...

Tragedijos pėdsakai Moscho kūryboje

The article deals with the role of Classical Greek tragedies in the Hellenistic period and their influence on the poetry of that period. The importance of Hellenistic drama was much less than that of Classical drama. Old tragedies were performed, studied and edited during all the Hellenistic period. The poets of that period are known as poetae docti, they had got a good knowledge of the poetry of the past centuries. One of the Hellenistic poets Moschus lived and wrote during the second century B. C. He was grammarian, a pupil of Alexandrian philologist Aristarchus. Like many others Hellenistic poets, Moschus wrote bucolic poetry, short epic poems and epigrams. His language is very closely Homeric. The analysis of the poets’ short epic poems Megara and especially his masterpiece Europe reveals that Moschus was derivative author and used many litterary sources, not only Homer and Hellenistic poetry (Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius), but an Attic tragedy as well. The traces of influence of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides on Moschus’ poetry are analysed (Aesch. Pers. 181–187; Soph. frg. 881; Eur. frg. 820 etc.).