Electra

The Electra of Euripides has the distinction of being perhaps the best abused and one might add not the best understood of ancient tragedies. A singular monument of poetical or rather unpoetical perversity; the very worst of all his pieces; are for instance the phrases applied to it by Schlegel. Considering that he judged it by the standards of conventional classicism he could scarcely have arrived at any different conclusion. For it is essentially and perhaps consciously a protest against those standards. So indeed is the tragedy of The Trojan Women; but on very different lines. The Electra has none of the imaginative splendour the vastness the intense poetry of that wonderful work. It is a close-knit powerful well-constructed play as realistic as the tragic conventions will allow intellectual and rebellious. Its psychology reminds one of Browning or even of Ibsen. So begins the introduction to the Electra as translated and introduced by Gilbert Murray.