Page "Euripides" Paragraph 51

In the seventeenth century, Racine expressed admiration for Sophocles but was more influenced by Euripides ( e. g. Iphigenia at Aulis and Hippolytus were the models for his plays Iphigénie and Phèdre ).

Euripides's reputation was to take a beating early in the nineteenth century when Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel championed Aristotle's ' biological ' model of theatre history, identifying Euripides with the moral, political and artistic degeneration of Athens.

August Wilhelm's Vienna lectures on dramatic art and literature went through four editions between 1809 and 1846 and, in them, he opined that Euripides " not only destroyed the external order of tragedy but missed its entire meaning ," a view that came to influence Friedrich Nietzsche, who however seems not to have known the Euripidean plays at all well.

However literary figures such as the poet Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning could study and admire the Schlegels while still appreciating Euripides as " our Euripides the human " ( Wine of Cyprus stanza 12 ).

Classicists such as Arthur Verrall and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff reacted against the views of the Schlegels and Nietzsche, constructing arguments sympathetic to Euripides, which involved Wilamowitz in this restatement of Greek tragedy as a genre: " A tragedy does not have to end ' tragically ' or be ' tragic '.

The only requirement is a serious treatment.

" In the English-speaking world, the pacifist Gilbert Murray played an important role in popularizing Euripides, influenced perhaps by his anti-war plays.

Today, as in the time of Euripides, traditional assumptions are constantly under challenge and audiences therefore have a natural affinity with the Euripidean outlook which seems nearer to ours for example than the Elizabethan.

As stated above, however, opinions continue to diverge, so that one recent critic might dismiss the debates in Euripides's plays as " self-indulgent digression for the sake of rhetorical display " and another springs to the poet's defence in terms such as: " His plays are remarkable for their range of tones and the gleeful inventiveness, which morose critics call cynical artificiality, of their construction.