Tragic Plots: A New Reading from Aeschylus to Lorca

Tragic Plots A New Reading from Aeschylus to Lorca Felicity Rosslyn, University of Leicester Throughout the history of literature, tragic plots have been preoccupied with gender issues, individuation and divided loyalties-family, or city? Love, or duty? This new study show how these facets are interlinked, and why tragic drama is consistently written at periods of fundamental social and political change. Beginning with Aeschylus and Sophocles, the author considers the psychological implications of the gods and goddesses, and how the Athenian preoccupation with the city-state reflects a balancing act between blood and the law on which the modern state still depends. Turning to the Renaissance, Rosslyn notes the recurrence of the same theme in Shakespeare's tragedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Coriolanus. She follows the thread through the work of Ibsen and Strindberg in the nineteenth century. The final chapter presents an exploration of the same themes in the work of twentieth-century dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca, and the book concludes with a brief consideration of what makes the "historical moment" propitious to tragedy, in the light of the work of Chekhov, Yeats, Eliot, O'Neill and Miller.