Electra

The subtractive test finds very little. The prologue must stand: Orestes’ plan of a false report of his own death is the engine of everything after. Chrysothemis comes twice and both visits are required: first as the sister who submits, carrying Clytemnestra’s offerings after the dream of the sceptre; then with the true news of the lock on the tomb, which Electra, already holding the false news, refuses, and which drives her to resolve on the killing alone. The agon with Clytemnestra must come before the false report so that the mother’s relief can be seen. The long speech of the chariot race at Delphi is the one place a reader asks whether so much is needed, and it is: its length makes a lie into a death. Held below 9 by that speech’s ornament and the second Chrysothemis scene’s length.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a wrong left unpunished does not only injure, it forms the one who resists it, so that the avenger is made by the crime and in its likeness. Electra knows it herself. She tells the chorus that among such evils there is great necessity to practise evil (308 to 309), and tells her mother that shameful deeds are taught by shameful ones (621). Clytemnestra’s defence, Iphigenia, is given its weight and is not refuted, only countered. The play shows grief as a way of keeping faith that turns, under the false news, into the will to kill, and it shows a mother’s relief at her son’s death as the most terrible thing she says. Held off the top because the play declines to state what the deed costs afterwards: it discloses the formation, not the aftermath.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Height is reached often, and highest in three places. The urn speech: “ō philtatou mnēmeion anthrōpōn emoi”
“O memorial of the dearest of men to me” (1126), Electra holding what she believes are her brother’s ashes, a lament among the summits of Greek grief, for a man standing beside her; and the recognition duet rises from it. The dreadful height is the exodos: Clytemnestra’s cry within, “ōmoi peplēgmai”
“Ah, I am struck” (1415), Electra’s answer, and then Aegisthus lifting the shroud to find not Orestes but his wife. The opening monody and the lyric entry of the chorus, with Electra as the nightingale mourning Itys and as Niobe weeping in stone, make a third. Held a step from the top by the stretches of argument in the first episode.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The play’s central device is an archetype made into plot: the living are mourned as dead, the dead father is the only certain ally, and the urn that should hold the brother holds nothing. Clytemnestra’s dream of Agamemnon’s sceptre planted at the hearth and growing to shade the land is the house’s future seen in a figure. Electra herself, the daughter who will not stop mourning, the nightingale and Niobe of her own songs, became the type of the unappeasable mourner; this is the Electra Hofmannsthal took, and the name passed into psychology. She stays particular: the sister who mocks Chrysothemis’s comfort, kept like a servant, unmarried. Held below 9 because the myth is inherited from Aeschylus and the epic, and the curse on the house is evoked more than built.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The inheritance is Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, which sets the same events, and Sophocles turns them. The centre moves from the avenger to the sister who waits. The recognition, which Aeschylus places early, is withheld until four fifths of the play are spent. A false report, a stratagem in Aeschylus, becomes the play’s heart. The mother is killed before Aegisthus, so the play ends not on the matricide but on the tyrant driven in to die; and there are no Furies, no pursuit, no trial. The stake is real: to stage the matricide without the moral reckoning the Oresteia had made the form’s own, and leave the audience to supply or refuse it. Held below the gate because it is a revision within a set story and a proven path, and because Euripides’ Electra swerved further from the same model.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The play is built so that the audience knows from the prologue what Electra does not: that Orestes lives. Every scene after is watched across that gap, and the form is the knowledge, since only a form that holds the truth back from its heroine and gives it to its audience can show what grief, hope and hatred do to a mind working on a false report. Electra is kept before the audience for nearly the whole play, so that her endurance is the play’s duration. The late recognition sets her resolve to kill alone before she knows she has a brother, so that her will is shown as hers, not Orestes’. Held a little off the top by the messenger speech, the form’s most container-like stretch.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence rather than promise. The ending has been argued for a century without settlement: whether it is a plain triumph of justice, or deeply ironic, the absence of the Furies a silence that condemns, as Winnington-Ingram and others read it. Electra herself is read as heroic and as deformed by her suffering, and both readings find their lines. The commentaries continue, from Jebb’s to Kells’s and after. The play’s question of word and deed, logos and ergon, set in the prologue and returned in the false death, the true lock and the empty urn, keeps yielding formal readings. Held below the top because its open questions are fewer than those of the tragedies most often reread, and they gather at the end.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is Athenian tragedy of the later fifth century, the form at its height and the story already told by Aeschylus. The play made the long endurance of a single suffering figure, held in view, the substance of a tragedy, and made the false report and the delayed recognition a full dramatic structure; Aristotle’s interest in recognition belongs to the same field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the play is the source most later Electras worked from, through Crébillon (1708) and Voltaire’s Oreste (1750) to Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (1903) and Strauss’s opera on it (1909), Giraudoux’s Électre (1937) and Yourcenar’s (1954), with O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) drawing on the whole story; and Aulus Gellius records the actor Polus carrying his own son’s ashes in the urn scene. Held at the gate because its force refines the form more than it reorganises it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Survival over some twenty-four centuries, and the text survives whole. The play is complete, with no loss of parts, and its corruptions are those any Greek tragedy carries. Its presence is demonstrated: chosen for the Byzantine triad with Ajax and Oedipus Tyrannus, it was among the three plays of Sophocles most copied and taught, and so was read without break from late antiquity through the Byzantine schools into the Renaissance. It has been translated into the European languages again and again since, is staged in the modern repertory, and has passed into opera and into the vocabulary of psychology. Set at the foot of the band for a text whole and read without break over millennia, because its presence, though continuous, is narrower than that of the most read Greek tragedies, and its modern fame runs partly through Strauss.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Judged on the Greek; its metre and sound are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact: the false report placed to fall after the agon, so that Clytemnestra’s relief is exposed; the news of the lock set against it; the recognition delayed and then given in a lyric duet; the killings timed so that the mother dies within while Electra keeps watch at the door, and Aegisthus dies by the device he rejoiced in. The messenger speech is a set piece of narrative energy, the crash at Delphi told to the last detail of a death that never happened. The single-line exchange of the recognition, the paired speeches of the agon and the lines split between speakers at the blows show command of every instrument the form had. Charged a little: the first episode’s argument is slower than the rest.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the lyric lament of the chorus’s entry, Electra as nightingale and Niobe, and the cold irony of the exodos, where Aegisthus is invited to lift the veil and finds his wife. One law governs both: word and deed part, and the play turns on what is said and what is so. The false word kills Orestes for Electra and for Clytemnestra; the true sign, the lock, is disbelieved; the urn of the dead holds nothing; the shroud over the dead Orestes covers the queen; and Electra’s mourning, a word kept against the deed, ends in the deed. The range is wide for a single play, from lament to argument to the race to the killing, and it holds. Charged only for the ending’s tone, which some read as a fracture rather than a design.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged at a single play’s scale. Consciousness is held fully, in Electra’s long endurance. The family: a mother, two sisters, a dead father, an absent brother, and a murdered daughter, Iphigenia, argued over in the agon. The state: Aegisthus’ rule as usurpation, the house as the city. The sacred: Apollo’s oracle, which sends Orestes and is prayed to by mother and daughter both; the dead below; the rites at the tomb. The body and labour, in Electra’s servitude; games and spectacle, in the Pythian race. All of it is held, not listed, through one house and one day. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that form: history and the natural order are absent, and the city as an agent barely appears.

Score: 7.5 / 10