Almost as an afterthought, a good half of these dramatic poems remain plays still worth staging it has been the classicist poets who have most vigorously written for actors and not readers, as with Louis MacNeice’s Agamemnon (1936) or Tony Harrison’s Oresteia (1982). These two views meet when the plays are invoked as touchstones of wisdom, as in Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1948), where a weak, indecisive husband with an ungovernable, unhappy wife is evidently Agamemnon to her Clytemnestra, and where it is Robert Browning’s translation (1877) which alone offers a bleak consolation of certainty. They are also administered as social medicine, for instance by the Belfast voices of Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (Sophocles’s Philoctetes), in the forlorn hope that they retain some of their mimetic power for civil disturbance or persuasion in turbulent times. The tiny pool of molten gold in the crucible of Athens, or bitter herbs crushed in its mortar and pestle? The thirty-one surviving tragedies of fifth-century Greece are exalted cultural glories – the best books in the Alexandrian library, the first link in a chain through the New Comedy, to Plautus and Seneca, to Shakespeare, to Robert Bolt or David Hare.
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