Metatheatre in Aeschylus’ Oresteia

Metatheatre in Aeschylus’ Oresteia

Lionel Abel coined the word ‘metatheatre’ in his 1963 book, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, claiming he had discovered a new type of theatre, and cited Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the first metatheatrical play. Over the intervening decades, various scholars have pushed the incidence of the earliest metatheatrical play back beyond Hamlet. Richard Hornby, in his 1986 book, Drama, Metadrama,...

Legal Action: The Trial As Theater in Aeschylus' Oresteia

Aeschylus' Oresteia is a key text for analyzing the relationship between law and drama both because it includes the earliest surviving instance of a trial scene in western drama and because it is explicitly concerned with the nature of trials, telling a story of repeated conflict that can only be resolved by the invention of the trial as a new form of action. First produced in Athens in 458 B.C...

Sophrosyne in Aeschylus

The ORESTEIA Attentional Agent

We present the overall operation of an ORESTEIA Attenional Agent. We show how the three main components, i.e. the Attention subsystem, the State Evaluation subsystem and the Computational Model are integrated into a coherent design. The agent is an efficient design that handles a number of the DC core conceptual problems.

political temperance and rational contrivance in the oresteia trilogy by aeschylus: reflecting on the problem of areopagus

the council of areopagus as a judicial establishment monitored the proper implementation of rule of law in the polis (city-state) of athens. while, the main responsibility and duty of areopagus was to adjudicate the cases of the most serious crimes, it intervened in the political affairs as well. eventually, after long-lasting political conflicts between athenian oligarchy and democracy, this e...