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Updated: May 27, 2025
The situations, in Hamlet and the Choephorae and Electra, are so close that resemblances in some passages must and do occur, and Mr. Collins does not comment specially upon the closest resemblance of all: the English case is here the murder of Duncan, the Greek is the murder of Agamemnon.
In the Choephorae, Orestes, upon the execution of the deed of retribution, finds that all peace is gone: the furies of his mother begin to persecute him, and he announces his resolution of taking refuge in Delphi.
It is by no means my intention to deny him the possession of the most astonishing talents; I have only stated that these talents were not united with a mind in which the austerity of moral principles, and the sanctity of religious feelings, were held in the highest honour. Comparison between the Choephorae of Aeschylus, the Electra of Sophocles and that of Euripides.
The deed committed in the Choephorae is partly enjoined by Apollo as the appointment of fate, and partly originates in natural motives: Orestes' desire of avenging his father, and his brotherly love for the oppressed Electra.
AEschylus in his 'Choephorae' and his 'Prometheus'; Sophocles in his 'OEdipus Tyrannus'; Euripides when he wrote 'The Trojan Women, 'Medea, and 'Hippolytus'; Shakespeare in his 'Leer'; Goethe in his 'Faust'; Ibsen in his 'Ghosts' and his 'Peer Gynt'; Tolstoy in 'The Powers of Darkness'; all all in those great works, must have satisfied their most comfortable and normal selves; all all must have given to the average human being, to the Public, what it wants; for to do that, we know, was the reason of their existence, and who shall say those noble artists were not true to it?
I pass over the subsequent piece of the Choephorae for the present; I shall speak of it when I come to institute a comparison between the manner in which the three poets have handled the same subject.
AEschylus in his 'Choephorae' and his 'Prometheus'; Sophocles in his 'OEdipus Tyrannus'; Euripides when he wrote 'The Trojan Women, 'Medea, and 'Hippolytus'; Shakespeare in his 'Leer'; Goethe in his 'Faust'; Ibsen in his 'Ghosts' and his 'Peer Gynt'; Tolstoy in 'The Powers of Darkness'; all all in those great works, must have satisfied their most comfortable and normal selves; all all must have given to the average human being, to the Public, what it wants; for to do that, we know, was the reason of their existence, and who shall say those noble artists were not true to it?
The relation in which Euripides stood to his two great predecessors, may be set in the clearest light by a comparison between their three pieces which we fortunately still possess, on the same subject, namely, the avenging murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes. The scene of the Choephorae of Aeschylus is laid in front of the royal palace; the tomb of Agamemnon appears on the stage.
The subjects of the three tragedies might be separated by a wide interval of time, or follow close upon one another. The three pieces which form the trilogy of Aeschylus, are the Agamemnon, the Choephorae or, we should call it, Electra, and the Eumenides or Furies. The subject of the first is the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra, on his return from Troy.
It is worthy of remark that Antigone's determination to inter her brother, notwithstanding the prohibition with which Sophocles opens his own piece, which he names after her, is interwoven with the conclusion of this play, a circumstance which, as in the case of the Choephorae, immediately connects it with a new and further development of the tragic story.
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