Essays on Greek Tragedy

People can be blind to love, truth, or reality in general. The reason can be strong emotions or an intention to escape a traumatizing situation. At the same time, the outcomes of such blindness are usually tragic. Euripides was a master of creating dramatic plays that encapsulated the strongest emotions of a person by engaging them into the traumatizing actions and experiences. Particularly, the topic of blindness is particularly vividly represented in Euripides’s “Medea” (Euripides 17). She is overwhelmed with her frustration and anger on Jason’s betrayal and humiliation. In the swirl of a blind rage Medea ...

Antigone is a tragedy written by Greek playwright Sophocles in the year 442 BCE. The play carries on in a series of plays such as Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus as well as Seven Against Thebes, which tell the tale of social classes, family feuds, and civil law in ancient times. The play tells about the reversal of fortunes between people in the high social class who are forced to live very lowly lives and to suffer emotionally and physically due to the operation of the constitution. The play deals with the burial of Antigone’s brother ...

In chapter 2 Nietzsche makes a distinction regarding how people respond to drama and response to events in real life. The arguments present the distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian personalities. The distinction of these two personalities is crucial in gaining an insight as to how people behave in this world. The ultimate goal is to promote full awareness of oneself and the behavior of humanities. It is also vital in discovering how humanities can work for different people. In studying humanities, referring to these personalities is vital in understanding the distinction of personalities portrayed by a person According to Nietzsche’ ...

It is clear that a modern and ancient audiences use different concepts and words to express their emotional credentials with tragic characters. According to Aristotle concept of pity and fear in more detail, that indicates why ancient audience may not apply to the modern theater. Aristotle legendarily recognized characteristic emotions produced by tragedy as eleos and phobos which simply means pity and fear. The concept explanation provides a valuable idea as to how ancient audience replied to tragedy. However, to take advantage of his insight, we must clearly understand his concept of pity and fear. Words, after all, change their meanings ...

Gender is a social construct, not tied to sex in any neat, definitive manner and hence, amenable and open to (re)construction in order to challenge power relations. This paper explores gendered power relations in Euripedes’ Medea and Sophocles’ Antigone, in an endeavour to explicate upon how such relations manifest themselves in the text, and thereby, shape, influence and contribute to an understanding of the overwhelmingly misogynist and patriarchal social reality of ancient Greece. The paper also seeks to take issue with the use of language as mediating an elucidation and plurification of meaning/s in the text, and aiding in ...

The aim of this essay is to present you with a portrait of two dramas. The first one is ‘Antigone’ and it was written in the Ancient Greek Classical period in approximately 442 B.C., by Sophocles, one of the three poets of Ancient Greece, who along with Aeschylus and Euripides are considered to have established the tragedy as a poetic, theatrical kind of writing. The second play is ‘Another Antigone’, a modern theatrical play of nowadays which was written by A.R. Gurney and first produced in 1987. The portrait of both plays will be drawn in this essay so that both plays ...

Question at issue

Why a sense of narrative tradition is essential to democracy? Enthymeme For one to find out the basic cause of things they must involve tradition and democracy itself is considered a tradition. Tradition provides the base for reasoning. In the modern days people have lost a sense of narrative tradition contributing to their inability to form sensible dialogue which will lead to democracy. This is illustrated in the Chorus of Greek tragedy.

Quote

In his work Pozzi illustrates that; “takin the pre-Dorianmyths from the Homeric renaissance and presenting them to the Athenian Audience, the playwrigths objectified the cultural tardition of ...

Antigone is one of the most famous classical Greek tragedies even though Sophocles structured his play a bit differently than the typical structure of Greek tragedies. A definition of tragedy was outlined by Aristotle in his Poetics and for the most part, Sophocles’s Antigone follows all the elements of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy. Of course, Sophocles came from the same culture and period as Aristotle, and shared the same cultural values as him. So it is not surprising that Sophocles closely structured Antigone according to the definition outlined by Aristotle. This paper is a critical analysis of the structure ...

ORESTES A PLAY BY EURIPIDES

INTRODUCTION

The play was written by Euripides and it was first performed in 1408 BC in Ancient Athens. The play is about the young boy who with the help of his younger sister kills his mother Clymnestria in order to revenge for the murder of his father who was the king of Mycenae (Carson 2010,5). The play starts with the young boy condemned to death by the people of his father’s kingdom and tormented by guilt of killing his own mother (Aeschylus and Arthur 2004, 5).

PLOT OF THE PLAY

The play starts with Orestes sister Electrica telling us of her ...

Part 1: Annotated Bibliography

Chris Vervain "Performing Ancient Drama in Mask: the Case of Greek Tragedy." New Theatre Quarterly. 28.2 (2012): 163-181. Internet resource. The author of article has conducted through research into Greek plays and the use of masks in Greek Theater. This resource will be helpful with the paper mainly because it contains extensive information on Greek costumes that are used in plays. In addition, the article is current and up to date with the author being a very credible source. This is mainly because he is a renowned Greek theater mask maker.

Bain, David, and Peter D. Arnott. "The Greek Theatre." Classical Review. 40.2 (1990): 298-300. Print.

The authors of this article have critically examined ...