The drama of scholarship. Versioning and substitution in Euripides' 'Iphigenia at Aulis' and 'Alcestis'

Thesis

The topic of this thesis is two plays of Euripides, the Iphigenia at Aulis (IA) and the Alcestis, together with their modern scholarly histories. Interested in questions of contingency and arbitrariness, this thesis aims to offer a new approach that combines close readings of the plays themselves with a historical analysis of the problems and discourses which have emerged in response to them.

In studying plot and scholarship together, we find that issues of contingency in the plays, of versioning in the IA and of substitution in the Alcestis, are connected to the scholarly debates that dealt with the plays as objects of research. This argument is made across two parts, each one consisting of one chapter which offers an interpretation of a play and one which analyses historic and recent scholarship dealing with that play.

The contribution of this thesis is threefold. Two of its aims pertain directly to the sources of the study: the scholarly texts and the plays. On the one hand, I revisit important moments in the genealogy of two important issues for Euripidean criticism, textual and genre criticism, as these emerged and were developed over the course of the last 200 years. On the other hand, I offer new interpretations of both plays, which contribute to a Euripidean poetics of the arbitrary. Independently, I show that the plays were a repository of language and themes for the formation of the scholarly problems and discourses. The third aim, therefore, is to make the case for a new heuristic which combines plot and scholarship and from which the overall argument of the thesis is made: we should consider the historically contingent but tenacious problems of textual and genre criticism in Euripides as a continuation and mirroring of the themes and language which the plays themselves have provided.

Authors: Petin, H

• Alternative title: Drama of scholarship
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-mv4n5pjxw
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Iphigenia at Aulis; problem plays; Alcestis; tragedy; versioning; Euripides; history of classical scholarship; substitution; alphabetic plays
• Subjects: Euripides; Tragedy; History of Classical Scholarship