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Chapter 5 offers a new reading of the urn in Sophocles’ Electra, an object that casts Electra unexpectedly into the role of a mourning mother on the model of Niobe. Even before it materializes on stage, the urn stands for the already canonical tradition of “Electra plays,” inviting spectators to reflect on how Sophocles’ tragedy signals its reception and reshaping of earlier tragic material through props. Receptacles and their everyday function in preserving goods prove highly adaptable to the needs of tragic stagecraft and performance. Equipping both the dramatist and characters with a powerful tool for interrupting the linear flow of time, the urn exemplifies the malleability of the performance medium; its association with an actor named Polus, who reportedly substituted the ashes of his son for the empty stage urn in a 4^th century BCE performance of Electra, is emblematic of the close collaboration between tragic props and reception history.

This chapter explores how Greek tragedy evokes epinician poetry. The chapter begins with a discussion of epinician as a genre, drawing on both Pindar and Bacchylides. In particular, it explores how epinician was regarded in fifth‐century Athens: a society whose democratic values are frequently believed to be at odds with the aristocratic and individualistic values of epinician. The second part of the chapter explores how tragedy makes use of epinician motifs, using two case‐studies: Euripides' Heracles, and Electra. It is argued that in both these plays the clustering of epinician language is used to explore problematic values associated with epinician poetry: in particular, questions about what constitutes aretē (excellence), and the relationship between individual and community.

This chapter explores how Greek tragedy evokes Thrēnos and other forms of ritual funerary song. The chapter begins with a discussion of the Greek ritual lament, and seeks continuities between the various forms such as women's lament, Thrēnos, funerary epigram. It also discusses the role that funerary legislation played in changing the nature of funeral song, and the effect that this would have had on a fifth‐century audience's understanding of ritual lament. The chapter discusses three plays which place particular emphasis on the conventions of lament: Aeschylus' Persians, Sophocles' Electra, and Euripides' Alcestis. Each of these plays uses lament to represent ethical ideas to do with moderation and social convention, highlighting the politicized role that lamentation had accrued by this period.

This chapter discusses a number of short passages in order to offer a better synthesis for the argument of the whole of this book, and to show how to apply the findings based on various highly restricted sets of data to the ‘random’ selection of a passage, any passage, of tragic trimeters. Among these is Electra 516-27, offered as a pendant to Schein's explication de métrique of these same lines.

This chapter draws attention to two misconceptions about Aeschylus' Choephoroi. It points out, firstly, that Electra is recommended to pray (110–21), and then does pray (130–44), for the return of Orestes and the coming of someone who will avenge Agamemnon's murder, as if these were two entirely separate things; not till she and we hear of Apollo's oracle (269–96) does she learn that Orestes himself must be the avenger. Secondly, Apollo's oracle as at first reported contains no promise of protection, only commands and threats; the first mention of a promise comes only at lines 1032–3, and until then the audience cannot be sure that Apollo will not let the endless cycle of revenge continue indefinitely.

This chapter examines how Sophocles in Electra plants false clues about how the play's action will go. At first Electra seems to assume, as in Aeschylus, that an outsider will avenge Agamemnon's death (115–17; corrected at 303–4), while the chorus wish only for the death of Aegisthus, not Clytaemestra (126–7; this is not finally contradicted until Electra and Clytaemestra confront each other). Another false clue appears when Electra apparently wishes (603–5) that she could take revenge on her mother herself; she will decide to do so when she believes Orestes dead, and even when she enters the palace at 1383 we may well suppose she is going to participate in the murder (in fact she comes out again — but still participates in the murder, by remote control). The implications of these false clues, and of the process by which they are refuted, for our understanding of the play are discussed.

This chapter discusses Murray's work as a translator of Greek tragedy, examining the linguistic and dramatic aspects of his translations, and emphasizing the scale of his achievement in bringing tragedy to an greater audience. The chapter mentions his translations of Euripides' Hippolytus, Electra, and the The Trojan Women.

This chapter focuses on Euripides' Electra. It argues that the play offers us a vision of egalitarianism premised on the claim that a man's virtue cannot be judged by his wealth or birth but only by his own ēthos (character). It associates that democratic vision with “reality.” But as the play unfolds that vision is prevented from realization and indeed is de-realized, as we are led to abandon this reality—our own democratic reality—for an illusion explicitly recognized as such. This process of de-realization proceeds alongside the play's demythologization. The myth is shown to be implausible, an empty form. And yet we are asked to accept this mythic form in place of “reality” and its ethical and political content.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. It argues that Euripides' imperfect alignment of form and meaning forces form itself onto center stage. It makes us aware of a play's form, granting it density and texture. Even at its emptiest, form is always full, replete with meaning. We have seen Euripides exploring that meaning, thinking in form about tragic form and its fullness and emptiness. The plays have shown us form as generative and enabling, producing, for example, an aspiration to justice (in Hecuba and Trojan Women), or a renewed attachment to the polis (in Ion), or even history itself (in Suppliants and Orestes. We have also seen the constraints and oppressions of form, both dramatic and social. In Electra, empty forms encrusted with outdated content constrained human behavior and foreclosed radical social possibilities. Form functioned as a deadweight upon the play's own imagination.

Chapter 2 reads the tapestry scene in Aeschylus’ Agamemnonwith special attention to the textile’s qualities as a physical artifact and how it gets repurposed in the Choephoroiand in the later Electraplays of Sophocles and Euripides. While it has often been assumed that Clytemnestra herself has woven the tapestry, this chapter argues that the garment’s agency is not readily traceable to a single hand. The textile embodies the complex economy of the entire House of Atreus; it does not merely symbolize Clytemnestra’s guileful entrapment. The more immediate causes of Agamemnon’s capitulation are to be found in the object’s overpowering visual and sensory output, qualities it possesses by virtue of its elaborate pattern-weave and distinctive purple dye. The retrospectively framed interpretation of the tapestry scene seeks to capture something of the enduringly prescriptive qualities of the mesmerizing object at its center.

Chapter 3 tackles the use (and abuse) of material tokens in tragic scenes of recognition, focusing primarily on Euripides’ Ionand Electra. The tokens reuniting Ion with his mother are replicas (mimêmata) that evoke the birth of Ericthonius, a mythical ancestor to the Athenian audience. It is argued that these tokens give a mythico-political cast to what might otherwise be characterized as a private reunion between a mother and her son. The recognition scene of Euripides’ Electra, usually read as a parody of the similar scene in the Choephoroi, more overtly politicizes the recognition of Orestes. Rejecting the familial tokens that had secured Orestes’ identity in the Choephoroi, Euripides’ re-staging has this scene instead hinge on the recognition of a bodily scar. The authentication, or recognition, of Orestes is thus made into a proto-exemplar for the audience of their own practice of scrutinizing citizens, known as the dokimasia.

Sophocles' Electra is shadowed by the past of the house of Atreus. In particular, in a departure from the emphasis in the Oresteia, the tragic milieu is the mind of Electra. Though memory plays its part, more than memory is at work here, for the very way that the characters exist in time is determined by the death of Agamemnon, which remains present throughout in its own dimension, and is restaged at the end of the play when Orestes kills Aegisthus on the same spot where Aegisthus had killed Agamemnon. The central character, Electra, lives in a version of the past, not only never forgetting the murder of her father, but having her whole life and way of thinking, from moment to moment, compelled by it. She seems to exist tangentially to the time and space shared by other characters. Here we have both tragic and non-tragic forms of displacement, some destructive, some recuperative. This is the estranged territory of tragedy, and here in Electra we have a tragedy within a tragedy.

This chapter explores how the nineteenth century developed a remarkably uniform view of Electra in Sophocles as a pious heroine. It then analyzes how this critical view fragmented and changed. It compares and contrasts Victorian and modern readings of the play to explore the historicity of critical readings of tragedy.

This chapter looks at moral conflict in Sophocles' Antigone and Electra. It contends that while both heroines approach the dilemma that confronts them monistically, the larger disagreement that animates each tragedy is a pluralist one. Antigone and Electra are both faced with a dire choice, but they choose a course of action single‐mindedly and with little to no regret. The blinkeredness of their vision is highlighted in each case by the girl's sister (Ismene and Chrysothemis respectively). The chapter then focuses on the grave clash with a competing ethical perspective (Creon, Clytemnestra) that both women enter into as a result of their monism. The tragedy, it is argued, turns on the dramatization of this feud and it is ultimately presented as incommensurable. In this way, both plays close with no unambiguous sense of who is right and who is wrong.

This chapter suggests that the revised Clouds (419–417 BCE) extends the narrative of the failure of the first version in 423 by deploying against the rival Eupolis the same delegitimating strategies used in Wasps against Cratinus. The chapter starts by considering how Aristophanes appropriates Electra’s defense of paternal authority to transform the conflict of comic modes in Wasps into opposing types of filial relationship: the child committed to avenging a wronged father versus the spoiled son who brings only ruin. The chapter also draws out affinities between Eupolis and Socrates, the anti-paternal teacher.The revised Clouds seems to depict an audience that the bad son Eupolis has deprived of Aristophanes’ protective cloak—just as Socrates steals the cloak of the comic father Strepsiades. Read through the intratextuality of parabasis and plot, Strepsiades’ destruction of Socrates’ school suggests the audience’s revenge for this loss, a turning of the implied violence of vulgar comedy against its practitioners in an incendiary moment of redemptive recognition that anticipates Aristophanes’ eventual supremacy in the comic canon.

Eugene O'Neill's early attraction to Shaw's work is evidenced in his memoir-comedy Ah, Wilderness! (1933), in which young Richard Miller, like O'Neill, treasures Candida and identifies himself with the young poet in the play, Eugene Marchbanks. Many early works by O'Neill have Shavian resonances, as do some later plays, such as Mourning Becomes Electra, in which Captain Brant appears to parallel Shaw's Brassbound in Captain Brassbound's Conversion. The most memorable connection, however, seems to be the chronicle comedy Marco Millions, in which lines and scenes strikingly echo Caesar and Cleopatra. Somewhat intimidated by Shaw's reputation, O'Neill, when in England, never attempted to meet Shaw, who admired the younger playwright's work. Yet when Yeats and Shaw planned an Irish Academy of Letters in the early 1930s, which would include associate members of Irish ancestry, Shaw recommended O'Neill.

This chapter examines two plays of myth re-vision, from Britain and Iceland, written at the cusp of the millennium: Sarah Kane's Phaedra's Love (1996) and Hrafnhildur Hagalín's Easy Now, Electra (2000). As the titles suggest, each has as its centre a myth in which a maternal figure is effectively placed on trial. The chapter discusses two ways – contrasting, yet not wholly unrelated – in which myths have continued to fuel work by younger writers, first considering the extent to which classical myth serves Kane's particular brand of British ‘in-yer-face theatre’. It then situates Hagalín's practice of myth re-vision within the context of contemporary ‘post-dramatic’ performance. Post-dramatic theatre foregrounds the material situation of performance, the problems inherent in representation and the artificiality of composition, to the point where dramatic action, understood in conventional terms, is radically undermined if never quite eradicated.