Tucker's Choephori of Aeschylus - Tucker's Choephori of 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...

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 ...

the rule of law versus tragic action in aeschylus tragedies

in his poetics, aristotle, from a structural perspective, assumes tragedy to be a tragic story based on hamartia. in this theory, the interrelation of the content of tragedy and its era has been delineated. since the origin of tragedy is not merely ritual but also political and affected by social and structural developments in athens, the content of tragedy needs to be examined from a political...