Modern Irish Literature - Colin Teevan (essay date 1998)

Colin Teevan (essay date 1998)

SOURCE: “Northern Ireland: Our Troy? Recent Versions of Greek Tragedies by Irish Writers,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XLI, No. 1, Spring, 1998, pp. 77-6.

[In the following excerpt, Teevan focuses on Greek tragedy adaptations in the Irish theater and poetry.]

“Each nation … fashion[s] a classical Greece in its own image.”

—W.H. Auden1

It is, perhaps, only after one has written something that one begins to see not only one's own personal motivations for doing so, but also the broader social environment and forces that contributed to the making of the text. In 1994 I undertook a translation and, ultimately, an adaptation of Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.2 At the time I had a variety of personal reasons for choosing this particular text—not least my attraction to both Iphigenia's notorious change of...

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