The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Aeschylus
Aeschylus
(
525
–
456
BC
), the earliest of the three great Athenian tragic poets. He has some claim to be regarded as an inventor of the genre, since, where there had previously been the chorus and only one actor, he introduced a second actor and subordinated choral song to the dialogue. He is noted for the scope and grandeur of his conceptions and style, but only seven of his many plays have survived, three of which form the famous trilogy the
Oresteia
(Agamemnon, Choephoroe, Eumenides), which describes the murder of Agamemnon by his wife and his son's subsequent vengeance.
Aeschylus
was hardly known in England before
T.
Stanley
's edition of the plays in
1663
.
Milton
gave some Aeschylean traits to
Samson Agonistes
(
1671
) and in the next century the primitivists
John
Brown
(
1725
) and
William
Duff
(
1770
) praised Aeschylus's ‘irregular greatness, wildness and enthusiasm’; but...
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