Clytemnestra is not like Gertrude, but a much grander and more tragical figure.  Shakespeare leaves you in no doubt as to his queen’s relation to Claudius; he enlarges on their guilty passion ad lib. Aeschylus never mentions love at all in any of his extant plays; only barely hints at it here.  It may be supposed to exist; it is an accessory motive; it lends irony to Clytemnestra’s welcome to Agamemnon—­in which only the audience and the Chorus are aware that the lady does protest too much.  But she stands forth in her own eyes as an agent of Karma-Nemesis; there is something very terrible and unhuman about her.  Early in the play she reminds the Chorus how Agamemnon, is setting out for Troy, sacrificed his and her daughter Iphigenia to get a fair wind:  a deed of blood whose consequences must be feared—­something to add to the Chorus’s misgivings, as they chant their doubtful hope that the king may safely return.  In reality Artemis had saved Igphigenia; and though Clytemnestra did not know this, in assuming the position of her daughter’s avenger she put herself under the karmic ban.  And Agamemnon did not know it:  he had intended the sacrifice:  and was therefore, and for his supposed ruthlessness at Troy, under the same ban himself.  Hence the fate that awaited him on his return; and hence because of Clytemnestra’s useless crime—­when she and Aegisthos come out from murdering him, and announce what they have done, the Chorus’s dark foretellings—­to come true presently —­of the Karma that is to follow upon it.

And here we must guard ourselves against the error—­as I think it is that Aeschylus set himself to create the perfect and final art-form as such.  I think he was just intent on announcing Karma to the Athenians in the most effective way possible:  bent all his energies to making that—­and that the natural result of that high issue clear and unescapable; purpose was this marvelous art-form—­which Sophocles took up later, and in some external ways perhaps perfected.  Then came Aristotle after a hundred years, and defining the results achieved, tried to make Shakespeare impossible.  The truth is that when you put yourself to do the Soul’s work, and have the great forces of the Soul to back you therein, you create an art-form; and it only remains for the Aristotelian critic to define it.  Then back comes the Soul after a thousand years, makes a new one, and laughs at the Aristotles.  The grand business is done by following the Soul—­not by conforming to rules or imitating models.  But it must be the Soul; rules and models are much better than personal whims; they are a discipline good to be followed as long as one can.—­ You will note how Aeschylus stood above the possibilities of actualism with which we so much concern ourselves; in the course of some sixteen hundred lines, and without interval or change of act or scene, he introduces the watchman on the house-top who first sees the beacons that announce the fall of Troy, on the very night that Troy fell,—­and the return of Agamemnon in his chariot to Argos.