The Closet of Masks: Role-Playing and Myth-Making in the Orestes of Euripides

Abstract

Of what interest would an Oedipus be who fell victim to the fate of marrying, say, his aunt?Bert States, Irony and DramaThe Orestes is the most Euripidean of all Euripidean plays, reflecting his typical techniques, emphases, interests, and outlook. All the familiar signs are present and perceptible: for example, novelty of plot, rapidity and multiplicity of action, sensationalism and theatrical virtuosity, lyrical experimentation, increase in the cast of characters on stage, comic and melodramatic elements, the illusion-reality game, the ergon-logos paradox, the use of cliché and rhetoric, a focus on the phenomenon of alienation, on the psychopathology of characters, their natural victimage and their subsequent retaliatory reflex, the secularization of myth, the questioning of inherited values, and compensatory themes of philia and sōtēria, etc. etc.What marks the difference in this play is the extent to which these implications are carried out, the outer limits to which these techniques are pushed; it is a question of intensification, escalation, a question of a relentless drive towards the achievement of a theatrical ‘style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its possibilities and borders on its own caricature,’ to quote Borges' definition of his own baroque technique. Yet the aesthetic boldness of the play's excesses moves it out beyond any formal definitions and limitations, beyond parody, beyond outrage into another mode, one might say, to a new level of self-consciousness and authorial extravagance that does not seem to have existed before. And it is a play whose surface of seeming incoherence, instability and chaos is, in reality, under that kind of artistic control that brings about that fusion of form and content we call art, even as it always seems to be trying to escape from it.

The Hermeneutics and Poetics of Memory in Aeschylus's Persae

“…Much work has been done on metatheatre in shakespeare, see, e.g., egan 1975, Homan 1981, Hubbard 1991. on metatheatre in Greek tragedy, see, e.g., Zeitlin 1980, Batchelder 1995, ringer 1998, and Dobrov 2001, who uses the term mise en abyme. 40 Cf., for example, Dobrov 2001.15, who defines mise en abyme as a "metarepresentational strategy whereby a miniature theatrical situation is embedded within a larger, similarly…”

“…some of them, e.g., Oedipus Tyrannus or Medea, present transgressions of the conventions on which life in fifth-century athens was based. in other plays, Thebes appears as an anti-athens (Vidal-naquet 1988b, Zeitlin 1990). sometimes, the ideal athens within the tragedy reveals the faults of the real athens.…”

“…Due to her fear, atossa loses her speech, which is essential for the expression of memory. 30 Cf., e.g.,Zeitlin 1990; Croally 1994.40-43, with important qualifications about the relation between the self and other; rehm 2002.236-38, with a rather critical view. Parker 1997 points out that athens itself is untragic in tragedy.…”

Moral History from Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus

“…The question of what it is that tragedy teaches has played a large part in scholarly analyses of both individual tragedies and tragedy as a genre since the 1980s, but the fact that it is didactic is now more or less the communis opinio. It has more recently been succinctly restated by Griffith (2011: 2).39 For tragedy as fiction or make-believe see Zeitlin (1980) and Ruffell (forthcoming). 40 ἀλλὰ τούτῳ διαφέρει, τῷ τὸν μὲν τὰ γενόμενα λέγειν, τὸν δὲ οἷα ἂν γένοιτο.…”

Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse

“…Sommerstein, in his introduction to Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis (1993, 14), notes that only two of thirty participants chose to take the opportunity to compare the genres. Other works, such as Fletcher, 2012, Zeitlin, 1996, or McClure, 1999, include separate chapters on comedy and tragedy. Even in studies of Aristophanes' tragic parody the tendency has been to look at Aristophanes and not consider the tragedy in its own right.…”