Note 1 — Chapter VII · POETIC IN ANCIENT DRAMA AND NARRATIVE

All the larger histories of Greek literature appraise Greek tragedy, trace its history, and cite monographs for special study. The study of Greek tragedy as drama should begin with the plays themselves. These should be read—and with happily increasing frequency they may even be seen—before reading further about them; for they are now available not only in many editions, but also in many translations. Translation, though it must fall short or go wide of the original diction, conveys the larger dramatic movement, the characteristic dramaturgy; and Sir Gilbert Murray’s translation of Aristotle’s main example, Œdipus Rex, seeks especially the dramatic values. Very instructive comparisons may be made by reading all eight tragedies presenting the story of Orestes and his house, the “Oresteia”: the Agamemnon, Choephoræ, and Eumenides of Æschylus, the only extant trilogy; the Electra of Sophocles; and the Orestes, Electra, Iphigenia in Aulis, and Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides. Beside the Œdipus Rex of Sophocles most critics would place his Antigone; and beside the Medea, the most popular play of Euripides, his Alcestis and his Trojan Women. But it is no great task to read all extant Greek tragedies.

The general character of Greek dramaturgy and its historical place are outlined at once concisely and suggestively by Brander Matthews in his Development of the Drama (New York, 1903), chapter ii, to which may be added chapters iii, v, viii, ix, and xiii of his Study of the Drama (New York, 1910). T. D. Goodell’s Athenian Tragedy (New Haven, 1920) is admirable. Gilbert Murray’s Euripides and His Age (London and New York, 1913) discusses Greek dramaturgy generally in chapters iii, viii, and ix. More inclusive works for English readers are A. E. Haigh’s The Attic Theatre, 3d edition revised by A. W. Pickard-Cambridge (Oxford, 1907), and R. C. Flickinger’s The Greek Theatre and Its Drama (Chicago, 1918).

These few books are selected as specifically informing and suggestive for dramaturgy. A longer selective list will be found in L. VanHook’s Greek Life and Thought (New York, 1923), pages 310-312. A comprehensive bibliography, so many are the historical significances of Greek tragedy, would fill a volume.