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19 results

  • SHIFTING SISTERHOOD: ELECTRA AND CHRYSOTHEMIS IN SOPHOCLES’ ELECTRA

  • Lyndsay Coo
  • Journal: Ramus / Volume 50 / Issue 1-2 / December 2021
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2021, pp. 89-108
  • Print publication: December 2021

  • When Sophocles wrote Electra's story, he gave her a sister, Chrysothemis. In their two scenes together, the sisters warn, entreat, cajole, insult, spar with, and proclaim affection for each other. While Electra maintains her public mourning for their father Agamemnon, Chrysothemis chooses not to openly defy his murderers, Aegisthus and their mother Clytemnestra, believing that resistance that accomplishes nothing is futile. Time has not been kind to this more pragmatic sister. In English-language criticism, she has acquired her own epithet, ‘timid’; her femininity has been dismissed as vacuous and her morality as driven by material self-interest. For many critics, she is a shallow and conventional figure whose main purpose is to act as a foil to the exceptional Electra. Since the pairing of a ‘stronger’ and a ‘weaker’ sister recurs in the depiction of Antigone and Ismene in Sophocles’ Antigone, this portrait of two contrasting sisters has been recognised since antiquity as distinctively Sophoclean, and the corresponding reduction of the sister–sister bond to a template has frequently precluded deeper examination of this relationship in both plays.

  • 3 - Greek Tragedy and the Theatre of Sisterhood

  • from Part I - Themes
  • Edited by P. J. Finglass, University of Bristol, Lyndsay Coo, University of Bristol
  • Book: Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy
  • Published online: 11 June 2020
  • Print publication: 02 July 2020, pp 40-61

  • Summary

    This chapter draws attention to a familial relationship that has been treated as all but invisible: that between sisters. Although we find examples of this bond in our surviving tragedies, it has long been overshadowed by a focus on male/female relations. This discussion, prompted by the recent productive debate between the fields of classics and political theory over the sisterhood of Antigone, employs close readings of Sophocles’ Tereus and Euripides’ Erechtheus to bring out a feminist interpretation of these texts that places sisterhood front and centre. The chapter shows not only that sisterhood was a more prevalent theme in Greek tragedy than is visible from the extant plays alone, but also that the fragments can be a rich source for scholars working in the area of feminist political theory.

Female Characters in Fragmentary Greek Tragedy
  • Edited by P. J. Finglass, Lyndsay Coo
  • Published online: 11 June 2020
  • Print publication: 02 July 2020
  • How were women represented in Greek tragedy? This question lies at the heart of much modern scholarship on ancient drama, yet it has typically been approached using evidence drawn only from the thirty-two tragedies that survive complete - neglecting tragic fragments, especially those recently discovered and often very substantial fragmentary papyri from plays that had been thought lost. Drawing on the latest research on both gender in tragedy and on tragic fragments, the essays in this volume examine this question from a fresh perspective, shedding light on important mythological characters such as Pasiphae, Hypsipyle, and Europa, on themes such as violence, sisterhood, vengeance, and sex, and on the methodology of a discipline which needs to take fragmentary evidence to heart in order to gain a fuller understanding of ancient tragedy. All Greek is translated to ensure wide accessibility.

  • Four Off-Stage Characters in Euripides' Hecuba

  • Lyndsay Coo
  • Journal: Ramus / Volume 35 / Issue 2 / 2006
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014, pp. 103-128
  • Print publication: 2006

  • But off-stage characters can have value, a great deal of value, if selectively handled.… Pick them with care, imagine them well, and they can do more for you than they could had they been brought on.

    J. van Druten, Playwright at Work (London 1953), 117f.

    The study of off-stage characters—by which I mean human characters with a physical presence within the world and setting of the play, but who never actually appear on-stage—is a critical angle seldom applied to Greek tragedy. I hope to show that Euripides' Hecuba particularly repays this unorthodox approach. Its on-stage characters are complemented by crucially important offstage figures, and I shall focus on the four who are of greatest importance for Hecuba: Achilles, Neoptolemus, Cassandra and Helen. My investigation will be structured around the following questions:

    • • What traditions were associated with these characters before Hecuba, and what resulting preconceptions might Euripides' audience have held about them?

    • • How are these characters represented by the on-stage characters, and with what effect?

    • • What is the symbolic effect of the absence of these characters?

    Taken together, the answers to these questions will provide a new reading of Hecuba, revealing how Euripides' choices over which characters to feature offstage and how to represent them contribute to the overall themes of the tragedy. My exploration will lead to me engage with many issues of interpretation, both literary and textual. I hope to show that Euripides' decision to keep a character off-stage is as deliberate and strategic as the decision to feature one prominently on-stage.