Electra
Electra (Elektra) Author: Euripides
First Performance: c.422–416 BC, Athens
First English Translation: 1782
Genre: Greek trag. in verse
Setting: Before a peasant's cottage near Mycenae, some years after the Trojan War
Cast: 7m, 2f, chorus (f)
In a prologue the Peasant reveals that Agamemnon's daughter Electra has been forced into marriage with him but that he respects her and has never come to her bed. Accompanied by Pylades, Orestes arrives at his birthplace, from which he was taken as a child after his mother's brutal murder of Agamemnon, his father. The reluctant Orestes has a duty to avenge the death of his father by killing his mother Clytemnestra. Orestes speaks to Electra without revealing that he is her brother and is dismayed at the way she is treated. The kind Peasant invites the strangers...
[The entire page is 406 words long]
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