Criticism
Critics have debated how to categorise the play's genre. It employs both tragic and comic elements and was performed in the usual place reserved for satyr plays when it was first produced. Conacher explores how Euripides expanded the myth of Admetus and Alcestis and added comic and folk tale elements. Beye also discusses legendary and fairy tale aspects of the play.
Alcestis is also a popular text for women's studies. Critics have indicated that the play's central focus is Admetus rather than Alcestis. Segal, for example, has written of the play's patriarchal aspects. The nature of sacrifice, especially in ancient times, has been variously analysed by Rabinowitz, Vellacott, and Burnett, who explain that ancient Greek morality differed considerably from that of the present day. Modern interpretations of the play have been extremely varied, so much so that critics (such as Michelini and Gounaridou) have noted their failure to agree on much of anything. Gounaridou argues that Euripides meant for the play to be understood in many different ways. The psychologies and motivations of Admetus and Alcestis are especially disputed, with the question of Admetus's selfishness strongly contested.
Read more about this topic: Alcestis (play)
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)