#alcestisblogging

I actually recently read Euripides' Alcestis in Greek and I have to say: it's funny. I get how it was slotted as a satyr play. Admetus is a buffoon. He's constantly lamenting about how he can't live without his wife, begging her not to leave him, saying he'll die along with her, talking about how the grief is worse than death, like dude. We all know she's dying on your behalf. You could just agree to die like you were supposed to and she'd live. And then it feels so comic with tons of stuff happening in the house and the slaves stepping out into the street to describe it to the chorus. Even before Heracles shows up with his genre-bending powers, the only way I can take this play is as a parody of tragedy.

I've mostly postponed thinking about Alcestis until later this year when I will eventually have to tackle the issue of Alcestis' three-day silence, but I did just read a really cool chapter about it (Chiara Blanco, “Touching Death in Euripides’ Alcestis” in Sensing Greek Drama) that suggests that the final scene would have been understood as Heracles tricking Admetus into dying with Alcestis and joining her in death/the underworld... the chapter rests on the idea that the stage image of the 'recognition,' with Heracles forcing Admetus to take the hand of the silent and immobile veiled woman, possibly represented on stage by a statue rather than an actual actor, recreates the motif of hand-clasping commonly found in funerary art and joins him to her statue-like and corpse-like state. so the tableau on the stage is that of a reunion between the spouses in the afterlife, with the hand-clasping echoing the marriage ritual of taking the bride by the hand as well as funerary art. and Admetus' avoidance of death (spelled out in the prologue) is revealed as just a temporary postponement. idk how I feel about the argument as a whole but it's a fascinating take that does make Admetus' characterization throughout make a lot of sense, not to mention the genre categorization of Alcestis as satyr drama.