Euripides post-modern: “The Alcestis”
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Pietro Pucci
Abstract
The outline of my metatheatrical reading is grounded on the emotional contact that Euripides' poetics assumes between the character who offers herself to death and the spectators' pain for this offering. As they view the actual death of Alcestis, fully performed on the stage, the spectators undergo the experience of what means to die, and in their imagination are ready to enter into Hades with Alcestis. Through this experience they prepare themselves for their own death, and they offer themselves to its inevitability. This pain and preparation will make them wiser and produce also a purgation, or what we would call an aesthetic pleasure, symbolized by the late return of Alcestis to light. Since Admetus is not prepared, and is not wise, he tries non philosophical and non poetic ways of facing Alcestis' death, until, in despair, he falls into a sort of suicidal mood. The richness of this masterpiece explodes through the metatheatrical reading.
© Walter de Gruyter 2011
Articles in the same Issue
- Homer and His Peers: Neoanalysis, Oral Theory, and the Status of Homer
- Towards an Oral, Intertextual Neoanalysis
- Sappho 27 V., Alcaeus 308 Lib., and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes
- Ironic Genre Demarcation: Bacchylides 17 and the Epic Tradition
- Euripides post-modern: “The Alcestis”
- The tradition of the Delian problem and its origins in the Platonic corpus
- Show or Tell? Seneca's and Sarah Kane's Phaedra Plays
- List of Contributors
Articles in the same Issue
- Homer and His Peers: Neoanalysis, Oral Theory, and the Status of Homer
- Towards an Oral, Intertextual Neoanalysis
- Sappho 27 V., Alcaeus 308 Lib., and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes
- Ironic Genre Demarcation: Bacchylides 17 and the Epic Tradition
- Euripides post-modern: “The Alcestis”
- The tradition of the Delian problem and its origins in the Platonic corpus
- Show or Tell? Seneca's and Sarah Kane's Phaedra Plays
- List of Contributors
