Notes on Aeschylus

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,...

Sophrosyne in Aeschylus

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...

Notes on Lactuca saligna in Iran

In the identification process of weed materials available in "IRAN" herbarium, a specimen belonging to the genus Lactuca (Asteraceae) had the following characteristics: Plant annual, many stemmed from base; stem erect-slightly procumbent, slender, glabrous, whitish and leafy. Basal leaves dried; stem leaves ca. 7 × 0.5 cm, glabrous, linear-lanceolate, entire at margin, sessile, auriculate, auri...

Notes on "Notes on conditional previsions"

These notes comment on Williams’ fundamental essay Notes on Conditional Previsions, written as a research report in 1975 and published in the present issue. Basic aspects of that work are discussed, including historical background and relevance to the foundations of probability; examples are supplied to help understanding.