The present volume is composed of nine studies on Greek tragedy and one on Greek comedy. The chronological framework approached in this study includes not only the Attic dramatic production of the ...classical period, with regard to works preserved in their entirety, but also dares with the subsequent tragedy and with the always delicate study of fragmented production.
This paper provides a statistical survey of the incidence of elision at the penthemimeral caesura in the iambic trimeters of Greek tragedy. It updates and builds on the work of Descroix (1931) by ...considering the rates of elision of different types of words: lexicals, nonlexical polysyllables, and nonlexical monosyllables. While all tragedians elide less at the caesura than throughout the line, in Aeschylus the rate of this reduction is far greater for lexicals and polysyllabic nonlexicals than it is for monosyllabic nonlexicals. On this evidence, and the evidence of interlinear elision, it is tentatively suggested that lexicals and nonlexical polysyllables should together be considered as the more constrained elisions. When the rates of constrained elision are examined, the difference between Aeschylus and later Euripides is revealed to be twice that obtained when bulk figures are used. This difference is attributed to a combination of Euripides’ adoption of more fluent phrasing towards the end of his career and the tragedians’ different approaches to compositional constraints.
This paper aims to explore the ethical issues which arise with the employment of the performance or viewing of drama as a therapeutic process for ‘mental illness’. Looking into two case studies, this ...piece concentrates on the use of drama therapy along an axis of risk which balances patient safety and potential benefits. As this is a vast area of practice, this paper chooses to focus on the performance and viewing of Greek tragedy as a ‘complementary therapy’. In the public and academic psyche, Greek tragedy has held a prominent place in artistic explorations of ‘mental ill-health’ and thus it is unsurprising that it has been a point of origin for drama therapy. Reviewing the content of the plays, the settings of their modern performances, and the ‘ideology’ behind such performances will enable this paper to highlight some of the greater issues concerning the ethical implications of these examples of drama therapy. Citing performances from the 1950s to the present day, we will explore the competing risks to individuals that come with using ancient Greek drama as a potential means of therapy.
Medea is an Ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides and first played in 431 BC. It portrays a woman who goes beyond the traditional role of a woman in Ancient Greek society, so far as to kill her ...children and her husband’s new wife—to revenge his “betrayal.” Medea’s feeling of abandonment and her jealousy can be seen as the driving forces of her behaviour, and despite her guilt, Medea became a symbol of the oppressed woman—portraying the concerns of any woman of the epoch. We propose a reading for this Ancient Greek tragedy, which widely influenced world literature and the arts, within the lens of the medical humanities. The analysis of Medea’s mental state is augmented with quotations of the text in English translation (by Morwood J, 2008). Medea’s description by Euripides constitutes the representation of an individual’s psychology who is mentally disturbed and is a striking example of theatrical “madness.” Medical practitioners should read this Ancient Greek tragedy as they could benefit from the way the author depicts Medea’s mental state. The medical practitioner is exposed to the “theatricality of madness” and can examine the protagonist’s behaviour. The tragedy becomes an example of how the arts and humanities could be included in modern medicine as a means for medical practitioners to enhance their horizons and look beyond the results of a cold diagnosis.
Il volume che qui vede la luce costituisce il secondo capitolo del progetto METra (Mapping Epic in Tragedy – Epica e tragedia greca: una mappatura) e contiene i contributi presentati durante il ...Seminario Internazionale METra 2, tenutosi a Verona nel giugno 2022. Proseguendo sulle direttrici di ricerca i cui esiti sono ora disponibili in METra 1 (Lexis Supplementi 11, 2022), questa seconda raccolta indaga ulteriori aspetti dell’eredità omerica ed epica in tragedia. Come nel volume precedente, i saggi propongono approcci disciplinari diversificati: dallo studio metrico, linguistico e stilistico all’intertestualità, dalla ricerca dell’allusione alla riflessione sull’eventuale persistenza, tra Grecia arcaica e classica, di sistemi culturali ed etico-religiosi, senza trascurare il dialogo con la modernità.
The Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) is famous for his uniquely “bizarre” female characters. His contemporary critics as well as many of the researchers who touched upon his work ...have interpreted his female characters to be “obsessive,” “masochistic,” and in some cases even “sadistic.” Phædra is one of his characters who suffered the most because of this misconception. Rarely referenced at all, she has been regarded as a one-dimensional “masochist” who lacks psychological and emotional depth and whose only driving force is her desire for death. However, a close reading of Swinburne’s short poem reveals Phædra’s innermost anxieties and places her in the narrative of the Swinburnian femme damnée inspired by Les Fleurs du Mal of the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Swinburne’s “Phædra” is remarkable in that it also serves as an exceptional representation of Sappho (c. 630 - c. 570 BC) in Victorian England. This paper highlights Swinburne’s aversion towards the Victorian mock-morality, as well as some of his life-long influences. Furthermore, this paper defines Phædra in a new light by considering the classical originals, Sappho’s and Baudelaire’s works, and even a twentieth-century retelling by the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).
In this article we emphasize that Greek tragedy, surprisingly, can prove to be close to current psychoanalytic practice in exploring the paradoxical dimension of subjectivity. The interweaving of ...explicit/implicit communication and unconscious dimension in psychoanalytic work gives rise to emergent moments of meaning. Tragedy and psychoanalysis find their value in always striving for truth, at times grasping it, only to lose it and to have to co-construct it all over again. In the figure/background articulation of the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable, it is important to consider words not as labels fixed to define qualities and phenomena, but as living processes that go through exciting twists and turns. The words of therapy are spoken words and are part of a communicative flow that takes place in the interweaving of multiple implicit and explicit channels involving all the senses: voice quality, rhythm, sound, gaze, emotionally activated body. We have been interested in rhythm in the clinical exchange and we have delved into the study of imitation as the primary vehicle of implicit relational knowing and the transmission of pragmatic knowledge embodying ways of being in the world at very deep and procedural levels. A short vignette and a clinical case illustrate how the tool of mimesis proves useful in activating and improving our clinical sensitivity.
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