THEME AND STRUCTURE IN THREE PLAYS OF EURIPIDES

This dissertation seeks to show that the intellectualism of Euripides\u27 plays provides the key to understanding them. The intellectual phrases and speeches are analyzed in a new way which shows them to be the substance of the dramatic text, using three plays, Heracles, Iphigeneia in Tauris and Iphigeneia at Aulis as examples. If one analyzes such passages along with the story, one finds a system of ideas unique to each play which conflict with each other and in that conflict explain the plot structure and vagaries of characterization. These ideas remain in a permanent contradictory state and the critic should not attempt to make one uppermost or say one is a foil to the other. This state of conflict explains that peculiarly unsettling quality which Rivier calls dissonance. The systems of ideas contained in the plays I call idea-themes. Each play has several such components which recur like literary themes but are discussed as if the characters were philosophers. However, I believe that these themes can be analyzed showing logical relation to each other, to the structure, and to the characterization. The identification of idea-themes leads one to redefine all of Euripidean drama as a unique type where the intellectualization undermines the moral straightforwardness of tragedy. This creates a cosmos in which there are unsettling answers or even no answers at all to moral questions, in which there is no tragic vision in the classic sense, but a new sort of drama. In the final chapter, the works of Euripides are surveyed briefly to show that the idea-theme method may be applied to the entire corpus and when one does so, a chronological pattern involving attitudes toward tyche develops. In an Appendix, the Bacchae and Medea are discussed briefly according to the same method