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    Electra
    Electra
    Electra
    Ebook101 pages1 hour

    Electra

    By Sophocles

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Masterpiece of drama concerns the revenge Electra takes on her mother for the murder of her father. One of the best-known heroines of all drama and a towering figure of Greek tragedy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMay 24, 2012
    ISBN9780486157962
    Author

    Sophocles

    Sophocles is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than or contemporary with those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides.

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    Reviews for Electra

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Zeer duidelijke dramatische structuur, psychologisch voldragen, zeer dynamisch verhaal; in tegenstelling tot Aischylos hier voldragen, zelfstandige persoonlijkheden
    • 3/5
      Zeer duidelijke dramatische structuur, psychologisch voldragen, zeer dynamisch verhaal; in tegenstelling tot Aischylos hier voldragen, zelfstandige persoonlijkheden
    • 3/5
      While I loved the dialogue, the pacing of this Hamlet and Antigone caper was a bit rushed. The chorus was particularly effective, the atmosphere resonates with revenge. Electra pines but does not waste. Her timid sister cringes in comparison to this inferno of vengeance. Then suddenly she has a cohort and the circumstances of his arrival afford their nemesis interlopers opportunity to even further impugn their deeds—or do they?

      Aegisthus, what were you thinking? There is a nobility in the Divine. There’s also Icarian agency. Think Cobain, “Come back as Fire/Burn all the liars/Leave a blanket of ash on the ground. The plot was the only one pursued by three of the Greek masters (Euripides and Aeschylus being the other two) which invites comparisons, though apparently the chronology is regrettably unclear.
    • 4/5
      50. Electra by Sophocles, translated by Anne Carson- introduction and notes by Michael Shaw- editors’ forward by Peter Burian and Alan Shapirofirst performed: c. 405 bcetranslation 2001 (Anne's introduction comes from a 1993 lecture)format: 130 page Oxford University Press paperbackacquired: borrowed from my library read: Aug 11-15rating: 4 starsJust another Greek Tragedy, but this was different in presentation. Anne Carson's translation was excellent and brought alive the tension in Electra's language in the first key first parts of this play. And the two introductions, one by Shaw and the other by Carson, pick apart the play and it's structure, revealing a lot more of what is there. The play itself is a tragedy with a "happy" ending. Electra is trapped, living with her mother and her mother's lover, she is in serious danger, and cannot marry and bear any children. She can only cooperate. But, her brother Orestes will rescue her by killing their own mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, with the help of some clever word play. (in front of a covered corpse, that Aegisthus does not know is Clytemnestra.)Orestes: This isn't my corpse—it's yours.Yours to look at, yours to eulogize.Aegisthus:Yes good point. I have to agree.You there—Clytemnestra must be about in the house—call her for me.Orestes:She is right before you. No need to look elsewhere.Clearly a happy play. Electra, despite her trap, becomes a presence. She maintains pitiful public devotion to her father, living miserably in mourning, and, in doing so, skillfully wields some power and influence. At the heart of this play is Electra's language and how she works over the other characters. She becomes the fury who harasses the murderers. "By dread things I am compelled. I know that.I see the trap closing.I know what I am. "

    Book preview

    Electra - Sophocles

    e9780486157962_cover.jpge9780486157962_i0001.jpg

    DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

    GENERAL EDITOR: STANLEY APPELBAUM

    EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: THOMAS CROFTS

    This Dover Thrift Edition may be used in its entirety, in adaptation or in any other way for theatrical productions and performances, professional and amateur, without fee, permission or acknowledgment.

    Bibliographical Note

    This Dover edition, first published in 1995, is an unabridged republication of the play Electra from the volume The Dramas of Sophocles Rendered in English Verse Dramatic & Lyric by Sir George Young, as published by J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., London, in 1906. (The Dent edition was the second, the first having been published by George Bell & Sons, London, in 1888.) See the new Note, specially written for the Dover edition, for further details.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Sophocles.

    [Electra. English]

    Electra / Sóphocles ; translated by Sir George Young.

    p. cm—(Dover thrift editions)

    9780486157962

    1. Electra (Greek mythology)—Drama. I. Young, George, Sir, 1837–1930. II. Title. III. Series.

    RA4414.E5Y68 1995

    882’.01—dc20

    94-44867

    CIP

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

    Table of Contents

    Title Page

    Copyright Page

    Note

    Persons Represented

    ELECTRA - Scene, before the Palace at Mycenæ.

    Note

    SOPHOCLES (born ca. 496 B.C., died after 413) was one of the three masters of tragic theater flourishing in 5th-century Athens. He wrote 123 plays, only seven of which survive. Electra was written and first performed in the late 440s.

    Unlike most of the violence we experience in dramatic form these days, the bloodshed of Sophocles’ stage is always the issue of intense emotional agony, and signifies nothing less, than the psychological rebirth of the hero. In perhaps the most well-known of Sophocles’ plays, Oedipus Rex, the young hero enters his destiny only after killing his father, and fulfills it by blinding himself. His destiny is of course an unhappy one, but happiness is not the goal of a Sophoclean protagonist. The goal is a cataclysmic overthrow of circumstance. Oedipus was’ drawn by the irresistible forces of his own nature, the justice of his deeds being beside the point (as they were inadvertent.) In Sophocles’ universe, nature is stacked, long before the participant is aware of it, in such a way that a character’s personality must be pushed almost to the point of dementia before his decisive act becomes clear. While this understanding might also be extended to the antagonists of the plays, for they too do bloody deeds, the hero always lacks the outright criminality of the antagonist, whose acts put the tragic mechanism into motion. In these respects, poor Hamlet of Elsinore is a hero very much in the Sophoclean vein.

    In Electra, the trouble brewing is in Argos, in the house of Agamemnon Atréides, who, returning victorious from the Trojan War, was (before the present action begins) murdered by his wife Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus, her lover. Aegisthus, then, fearing that Agamemnon’s young son Orestes would one day avenge his father’s murder, made plans to have the boy killed too. This would have been accomplished had not the boy’s older sister Electra taken care to send him away, to friends outside of Argos, so that he might safely grow to maturity. Meanwhile, Electra and her sister Chrysothemis remained under their mother and new father’s roof, in full knowledge of their crime, for several years until the time of this play’s beginning. Now, as Electra has hoped that he would, Orestes returns. Electra has kept her grief fresh over the years, and laments her father’s murder as inconsolably as ever. Her refusal to accept the situation as it is, her fiery demeanor, symbolize the necessity of Orestes’ mission, as, accompanied by his old guardian and his good friend Pylades, he comes home to reckon with his family’s bloody circumstances.

    The translation by Sir George Young (1837–1930) is not only very accurate; it also preserves the feeling of

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