Sommerstein. Aeschylus, Suppliants

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...

Voegelin�s Account of Tragedy in the New World Disorder

Voegelin did not publish an extended volume on Greek tragedy. In his writings, there is a brief account of tragedy in The New Science of Politics, and a more extensive chapter on the subject in The World of the Polis.1 [1] In each case, the bulk of Voegelin�s analysis is concerned with Aeschylus, but in neither case is his analysis comprehensive. His comments in New Science amount to a few page...

Tragic Vision: Similarities and Departures in the Tragic Vision of O’Neill and Aeschylus

In this paper, I have explored the genesis of modern tragedy through a comparison between t Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. O’Neill has reworked the Oresteian Trilogy by placing his characters in the modern cultural context. Although there are similarities in both the tragic narratives yet I have focused on the points of departure to highlight the differences ...