Children of Oedipus, and Other Essays on the Imitation of Greek Tragedy, 1550–1800

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The essays in this volume deal with the uses of Greek tragedy by European playwrights between the Renaissance and the Romantic period. While the individual essays include discussions of plays by Neo-Latin, Italian, French, and German playwrights, they aim at isolating the strategies of adaptation and patterns of transformation shared by the different writers as heirs to a common dramatic tradition. The first essay traces the crucial impulses that European tragedy received from the humanist imitation of ancient drama and concludes with a detailed analysis of Garnier's Antigone. This is followed by a study of Racine's Phedre as both an embodiment of and an exception to the characteristic strategies of adaptation used by seventeenth-century playwrights. A turning point in the understanding of Greek tragedy is illustrated by a comparison of Goethe's Iphigenia auf Tauris and Kleist's Penthesilea. A fourth essay, analysing two characteristic strategies in coping with the problem of knowledge in Oedipus Rex, examines that approaches taken by Voltaire, Kleist, Corneille, and Schifler and discusses Ibsen's Ghosts as the prototype of modern analytical tragedy. The next essay turns to scriptural tragedy, discussing Buchanan's Jephtha as the prototype of a genre of Christian tragedy, which applied strict imitation of Greek tragic form to theologically intractable subjects from the Old Testament. The essay concludes with a study of Athalie and Samson Agonistes as the two belated masterpieces of this sub-genre of humanist drama. Finally, the volume addresses the interaction of epic and dramatic traditions in two essays showing Milton's use of the conventions of the tragedy of knowledge in Paradise Lost and Racine's use of the Dido tragedy as the model for Berenice. This encompassing survey of an enduring dramatic tradition offers useful background for the study of drama and all those interested in the continuing life of the classical tradition