Prometheus Bound as 'Epic' Tragedy and Its Narratology of Emotion, in: Mathieu P. de Bakker, Baukje van den Berg, and Jacqueline Klooster (eds.), Emotions and Narrative in Ancient Literature and Beyond. Studies in Honour of Irene de Jong (Mnemosyne, Supplements 451), Leiden 2022, 287-306 (original) (raw)

short SAMPLE This contribution shows how the theatrical process is continually displayed in a highly self-reflexive and metatheatrical manner. The play highlights the dimension of vision and the pathos, the suffering, pity, and lament, and inscribes them in its own language and performance. This ‘total theatre’ through metatheatre has, however, a limited range of potency. Showing must be complemented by telling. It is well known that tragedy cannot do without long, embedded speeches, especially by messengers, in order to include events that cannot be shown on stage, as they happen elsewhere, or in the past or in the future, or are too violent. Yet, in Prometheus Bound narration acquires a new significance. It is almost as if the author intends to combine epic and tragedy in order to create a super-tragedy. Extended storytelling allows for complexity and creates an emotional effect, an art in which Homer has proven mastery in Greek culture. The incorporation of sophisticated storytelling techniques for the emotional effect implies a narratology of emotions in the best way, both in a mise en abyme and in the entire play. But it is not only the Homeric art that lies behind Prometheus Bound. The epic aspect, the broad disclosure of the future as well as the past conveyed by means of the mantic word and variegated narration provide the drama with the underlying themes of Hesiodic epic, the famous literary source of the myth of Prometheus, and with motifs of Presocratic didactic poetry, and mirror them in a self-referential manner. In this way, the drama reveals the political, socio-cultural, and anthropological possibilities of reflection that affect all citizens who watch it in the theatre.