Ted Hughes: Euripides ‘Alcestis’

Note The world premiere performance rights were gifted to Northern Broadsides by the late Ted Hughes. The programme notes, by Fiona Macintosh, situated the production in the tradition of 19th century burlesque (version by Francis Talfourd) as well as relating it to versions by James Thomson, Robert Browning and T.S. Eliot. Macintosh also discusses the relationship of the play to representations of women to Greek drama, to the impact of the death of a wife on the reform of the husband in Shakespeare's 'A Winters Tale' and to the poetic and structural links between the Hughes version and the death of his wife Sylvia Plath.

Details of the Northern Broadsides production can be found on the Classical Receptions in Late Twentieth Century Drama and Poetry in English online Database, (ed.) L. Hardwick, [www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays/], Production ID 2533.

Further Reading

L. Hardwick, ‘Can (modern) poets do classical drama? The case of Ted Hughes’, in R Rees, ed., Ted Hughes and the Classics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, 39-61.

M.J. Walton, Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006.