Q. Discuss the character of Clytemnestra in the play Agamemnon.
Answer: Agamemnon is the first play in a trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus entitled the Oresteia. Even though Agamemnon gets a shout-out in the play’s title, Clytemnestra may well be its most interesting character. By interesting, we don’t mean likable – after all, technically speaking, she is a liar, a two-timer, and a murderer. But maybe that’s just part of her charm. We’d better explain. The first thing we learn about Clytemnestra is from the Watchman ……Read More.
Q. How does Aeschylus build intense dramatic suspense around Agamemnon’s home coming in the play Agamemnon?
Answer: Agamemnon is treated as the masterpiece of Aeschylus. In it the action takes place before the palace of Agamemnon in Argos at the time of his victorious return from the Trojan War. Besides, the grand theme of the play based on sin, murder, punishment and a fatalistic conception of human life’, the intense dramatic suspense >>> Read More.
Q. How far does Clytemnestra draw the readers’ sympathy in Agamemnon?
Answer: Agamemnon is treated as the masterpiece of Aeschylus. Agamemnon, the first play of the ‘Oresteian Trilogy’ is considered the best of all Greek dramas. Aeschylus was the first successful tragedian and his ‘Oresteia’ was the only surviving trilogy of the ancient world of which the first play ‘Agamemnon’ is considered the greatest of all Greek dramas. The primary theme of the ‘Oresteia’ is the continual destruction, inherited from generation to generation but as an individual play the subject of ‘Agamemnon’ is the vengeance which Clytemnestra takes upon Agamemnon because, he sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, at Aulis ten years previously. Clytemnestra is often given the bloody attributes for this murder…..Read More.
Q. Analyse the theme of hereditary guilt in the play Agamemnon.
Answer: The Agamemnon, Choephori, and Eumenides were the last tragedies composed by Aeschylus, and were produced in 458 [B.C.], two years before his death, along with the satiric drama Proteus. The tetralogy as a whole was called the Oresteia, a name which, whether due to Aeschylus or not, appears to have been in use at any rate as early as the time of Aristophanes. The contents of the Proteus are unknown, and its connection with the preceding tragedies obscure; but it probably dealt with the fortunes of Menelaus, the brother of Agamemnon, and related the story of his detention on the coast of Egypt, and his rescue by the help of Proteus, the sea-god….Read More.
Q. Justify Agamemnon as a tragedy of Sin, Punishment and Redemption.
Answer: Every sin is punished but in the punishment innocents are hurt. “While Zeus abides enthroned… the wrongdoer suffers,” but often so does the wrongdoer’s children or wife or concubine. This “curse of the gods” is not unique to Aeschylus plays; it is the condition of our fallen world. Protestants in Northern Ireland cannot identify the IRA members who kill their police so they murder innocent Catholic children, at Versailles the Allies punished the German people in general because they could not punish war-criminals in particular…..Read More.
