SOURCE: Arrowsmith, William. Introduction to Alcestis, by Euripides, translated by William Arrowsmith, pp. 3-29. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

In the following excerpt, Arrowsmith provides a modal analysis of the Alcestis.

I

By general agreement the Alcestis is a spirited, puzzling, profound, and seriously light-hearted tragicomedy of human existence. But it is also, as I hope to show,¹ a peculiarly beautiful and coherent example of what, for want of a better word, I would call “modal” drama (as opposed to modern “psychological” drama or the drama of our own “theater of character”). Moreover, the beauty and the difficulty of the play—its mysterious elusiveness, its puzzling texture and unfamiliar form—can only be understood, I think, by grasping, in all its complicated richness, its peculiar thought and structure.

Among extant Greek plays, there is literally nothing like it.² For works of similar tone and structure, we must go...