Tragic Depictions of Political Resignation: Ismene and Chrysothemis in Galician Dramatic Literature
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34624/fb.v0i21.41450Keywords:
Greek Tragedy, Secondary Characters, Ismene, Chrysothemis, Classical Tradition, Galician DramaAbstract
The reworking of the themes, characters and motifs from Greek-Latin mythology is a verified trend in contemporary Galician drama since the second half of the 20th century to the present day. Many of the playwrights who remake these myths for Galician drama know the original Greek or Latin texts and usually engage in a dialogue with their current situation through the canonical paradigm of the classic, being tragedy and the tragic sense of drama the preferred ways of all the authors who approach that dialogue. For this reason, there are many tragic characters who stand as a model and reference for a certain political reading of ancient texts, highlighting those figures of tragic heroism who do so in a positive sense. However, for this paper, we will try to offer a critical and analytical reading of the characterization of two of the most reviled secondary characters of the ancient tragic imaginary in the Galician theater that reworks them: Ismene (daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta and sister of Antigone) and Chrysothemis (daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and sister of Electra). Their recharacterization will be reviewed in the Galician plays in which these characters appear, paying attention to the reference of the Greek hypotexts and highlighting the main differences and concomitances found in the comparative reading of the texts, without neglecting the different reinterpretations in a political and social key that underlie the reworkings of the Galician authors.
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