Chapter 10 - Genre and Transgression

Summary

I have tried particularly in the previous chapter to show how the connection between the sophists and tragedy is not to be seen as a matter of the regrettable influence on poetry of a rhetoric of tricks or an improper intellectualism, but rather as an important indication of the radical tensions that draw together sophistic and tragic questions about man’s place in the order of things. In this chapter, I am going to consider a further major area of innovativeness in tragic theatre that has proved instrumental in the evaluation and appreciation particularly of Euripides’ œuvre, namely, the poet’s self-conscious marking and manipulation of the conventions of the genre of tragedy. For Euripides’ innovativeness is developed not merely in the new material of his plots, the experimental use of lyric, or his ‘deglamorization’ of myth, but also in his tragedies’ self-reflexive sense of theatre as theatre.