Description:

Already in his own lifetime, Euripides was known for pushing the boundaries of what a tragedy could be. While recent scholarship has tended to focus on discrete areas of experimentation, especially Euripides’ play with music and genre, this paper proposes the model of proliferation as a more holistic way of approaching his most innovative work. Setting two, ostensibly very different tragedies side by side, his Orestes and the fragmentary Ino (including the new papyrus fragment), I show how Euripides was exploring the potentiality of repetition and excess, on the level of plot, characters, and language and also in terms of intertheatricality—the overlaying of multiple stagings, across different genres, within the one performance. That we can see such experimentation already in the Ino, which is likely from the 430s or early 420s, complicates our usual understanding of “late Euripides” and indeed the development of Greek tragedy through the fifth century.