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7-07-2015, 03:22

Structure and Design

Euripides introduces new structures but also revives old ones. In 438, in an apparent innovation, he produced Alcestis instead of the satyr-play that would normally have come fourth. We do not know whether the omission of a satyr-play was a unique experiment, nor how the fourth-place position affected the audience’s response to the play. Nor is there any scholarly consensus on its genre: some scholars (e. g., Seiden-sticker, chapter 3 in this volume) describe the play as combining tragic and satyric elements, while others (e. g., Gregory 1979) regard its exploration of the place of death in human life as fundamentally serious. While Euripides’ preference was for free-standing tragedies, in 415 he seems to have produced a set of plays reminiscent of an Aeschylean connected trilogy: Alexander, Palamedes, and Trojan Women all concern the Trojan War, and are linked by recurring characters, themes, and imagery (Scodel 1980, 105).

Material is drawn from the entire range of myth (on the implications for tragic plots see Mastronarde 1999-2000, 28-29). Plot-lines are varied. Some tragedies (Medea, Hippolytus, Trojan Women, Ion, Bacchae) proceed in linear fashion from beginning to end in the continuous structure associated with the extant plays of Sophocles. Others involve an unforeseen development in the middle {Heracles, Andromache, Hecuba, Suppliants, Orestes), and still others feature an unexpected twist at the end (Alcestis, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Helen, Children of Heracles, Electra). In the case of Iphigenia at Aulis and Phoenician Women, extensive interpolation has obscured the original structure.

While Euripides’ tragedies vary considerably in design, some distinctive tendencies can be described. Typically they open with a lengthy monologue delivered by either a divinity or a human character who, speaking directly to the audience, sets forth essential background information in an orderly fashion and affords the spectators a partial glimpse of developments to follow. Sophocles, more naturalistically, arranges for background information to emerge through dialogue. The Euripidean monologue often includes genealogical information that Euripides, like the other tragedians, shapes to suit his artistic purposes {cf. Said, chapter 14 this volume, on the genealogy of Prometheus and of the Furies). Thus in Hecuba, a tragedy set in the Thracian Chersonese, he gives Hecuba a familial connection to the locale by making her the daughter of Cisseus, a Thracian king mentioned in the Iliad {Gregory 1995).

Both Euripides and Sophocles make regular use of the agon {debate) to structure their episodes. The Euripidean agon is generally more detached from the action {see Halleran, chapter 11 in this volume) and has been condemned as ‘‘self-indulgent digression for the sake of rhetorical display’’ {Collard 1975b, 59). The paired speeches are rhetorical in the sense that they are rigorously structured with beginning, ending, and internal transitions clearly marked {Lloyd 1992, 3-5) and also in the sense that they tend to clarify entrenched positions rather than resolve or alter the situation at hand {Lloyd 1992, 15). They are not, however, rhetorical in the sense of being frigid display pieces {see Collard 1975b for a defense of their relevance). In Medea, for example, the debate between Medea and Jason {465-575) makes a vital contribution to the play’s characterization and dominant themes. Medea’s capacity for rage and Jason’s unshakable complacency are both on view; Medea adverts to Jason’s broken pledges and Jason to Medea’s barbarian background; ominously, each parent uses the children as a means to berate the other.

Euripides deploys established dramatic techniques to bring a speech, an episode, or an entire play to a formal resolution, but does so without necessarily closing off the emotional, ethical, or political implications of what has come before. This technique can be interpreted either as an intellectually stimulating overrun, or as problematizing the very idea of an ending {so Roberts, chapter 9 in this volume). General reflections are endemic to tragedy, but Euripides is particularly apt to give them a summarizing function {Friis Johansen 1959, 151-60). Euripidean characters are known for their critical reproaches to the gods, which they tend to level ‘‘just before going off at a climax of the action’’ {Dale 1969, 182). Since eight of Euripides’ extant tragedies conclude with a deus ex machina, we tend to regard the device as distinctively Euripidean. Sophocles’ Philoctetes ends the same way, however, and by the fourth century {possibly, to be sure, through Euripides’ influence) it was viewed as tragedy’s general stock in trade: Antiphanes grumbles that a tragedian at his wits’ end can always bring on a deus ex machina, a recourse unavailable to comic playwrights {fr. 189.13-17 PCG).

Since tragedy unfolds in two time-frames {see Debnar and Sourvinou-Inwood, chapters 1 and 18 in this volume), the aetiology is early recognized as an effective means of bridging the temporal gap. Aeschylus uses aetiology for this purpose at the end of Eumenides, when Athena establishes the Areopagus council, familiar to his fifth-century audience as the Athenian homicide court; in Ajax Sophocles hints at the cultic honors received by the hero (Henrichs 1993b). Euripides appropriates the device, introducing his own aetiologies generally (though not invariably) at the close of tragedies. Thus at the end of Andromache Thetis gives directions for Neoptolemus to be buried at Delphi, in a tomb that would presumably be known to many in the audience (see, however, Dunn 1996, 45-57 and passim, Dunn 2000, and Scullion 1999-2000 for the possibility that Euripides may have invented at least some of his aetiologies).



 

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