Aeschylus | David Grene (essay date 1940)
David Grene (essay date 1940)
SOURCE: "Promethus Bound, " in Classical Philology, Vol. 35, No. 1, January, 1940, pp. 22-38.
[In the essay below, Grene delineates the "dramatic de-sign" of Prometheus Bound.]
In the eighteenth century the critics knew what they thought about the Prometheus of Aeschylus and knew why they thought it. It was a bad play because the structure was episodic, the characters extravagant and improbable, the diction uncouth and wild. Their handbook of criticism was the Poetics of Aristotle, either directly or indirectly drawn upon. And it is plain that the Aeschylean plan does not measure up to Aristotelian standards. Since the eighteenth-century critics believed that there was only one canon for drama rooted in the principles of Aristotle, they quite reasonably judged the Prometheus a bad play. During the nineteenth century, with the Romantic revival and the breakdown...
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