Euripides and the Unexpected

Abstract

I should like to begin like a preacher in his pulpit, by citing two texts. In a lecture given at Harvard University in 1950 on the subject of ‘Poetry and Drama’ T. S. Eliot said: ‘I tried to keep in mind that in a play, from time to time, something should happen; that the audience should be kept in the constant expectation that something is going to happen; and that when it does happen, it should be different, but not too different, from what the audience had been led to expect.’ My second text comes from the paper that has most effectively influenced my own ideas on the subject of Euripides' clever exploitation of the unexpected in his plays: R. P. Winnington-Ingram's ‘Euripides: Poietes Sophos’, published in the second volume of Arethnsa. Winnington-Ingram ends his paper with these words: ‘It makes me wonder whether, in the words of Oscar Wilde, Euripides was not capable of resisting everything except temptation—the temptation to be clever.’