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Search - The Plays of Euripides in English - Volume I

The Plays of Euripides in English - Volume I
Author: Euripides

I906 - CONTENTS - PAGE xi INTRODUCTION - THE most poetical translation of Euripides intcj any tongue, Shelleys radiant version of the Cyclops, which opens the present volume, stands easily at the head of all our English plays from the Greek. Shellcy probably made it about 1818-19. Writing to Leigh Hunt, November 1819, he spoke of the Greek plays... more » tempting him to throw over their perfect and glowing forms the grey veil of my own words. In his Essays a d Studies Mr Swinbume, after pointing out some of the gaps and errors in Shelleys rendering, due in part to the imperfect text the translator had used, says While revising the version of the Cycles I have felt again, and more keenly, the old delight of wonder at its matchless grace of unapproachable beauty, its strength, ease, delicate simplicity and sufficiency. Mr Swinbume has not by any means spared the good fame of Euripides himself, regarded as a dramatist and Mr Swinbumes pronouncement is of a temper which, until very recently, might be held typical of the modern critical attitude. But now, thanks to Dr. Verrall, Professor Gilbert Murray and other writers, a very marked reaction has set in. We might quote opinion, indeed from many brilliant scholars who have helped to reverse the Euripidean current. The old fashion, says Mr Way, of disparaging his genius in which Schlegel led the way, giving all the weight of his authority to a sentence which others were too uncritical or too timorous to revise is now utterly discredited. We hstve Essays and Shdies Notes on the Text of Shelley, p. 21 I. xi Introduction ceased to regard the generations of Greeks and Romans, who loved and reverenced him, as degenerate fools and blind, and are at last making some humble eforts to understand them and to recover their joint of view. The argument is continued by Dr. Verrall, to whose remarkable book, Bur ides the Rationalist, we owe the following passages -I The right view of Euripides, the capacity of understanding him, is a thing which we moderns have yet to recover and our only way is to begin with recognising that somewhere in our notions about the poet there must be something fundamentally wrong. It should not be possible, as it was not long ago for an English poet bound to the poets of Greece by mutual obligations, to pronounce Euripides no peer of his peers, a dramatist not to be ranked as the equal of those with whom he was actually ranked by the judgment of Athens and all the ancient world, without perceiving that he condemns, not the object of his criticism, but simply his own comprehension. Turning to Mr Swinburne Euripides, he has told us, was a botcher. Deserved or not by the poet, the phrase is apt enough to indicate the nature of modern objections. It appropriately describes the sort of dissatisfaction which we feel after reading, with the modern expositions, some of Euripides best known and best appreciated works. There is plenty of excellent material single scenes, or it may be all the scenes, are wrought with undeniable and astonishing power. The murmurs begin when we conteaplate the work as a whole and then the botcher can no longer be kept out of our minds. After all, it would seem, the thing is a patch-work. The excellences of the parts do not seem to subserve any common design, nay, even are mutually repugnant. The author is doubtless a master of his tools, but still, to speak familiarly, he does not know what he is driving at. In considering the art of Euripides, and the change in Introduction xiii our feeling for the suggestive, almost interrogative, presentment of his tragic and troubled fables of death and human existence, we have to realise that our own current philosophy, and our own dramatic art, European and English, are changing or have already changed...

ISBN-13: 9781408633496
ISBN-10: 1408633493
Publication Date: 11/16/2007
Pages: 392
Rating:

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Publisher: Gayley Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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