ELEKTRA - Stratford Festival

sophokles. cast of a bust from the
farnese collection (now in naples) in
the pushkin museum.
Sophokles
Playwright
Sophokles (or
Sophocles), son
of Sophilus, was
born into a wealthy
family in Colonus
Hippius, near Athens,
in or around 496
BC. At the age of
sixteen, he was
chosen to lead a
choral celebration of
Greece’s victory over
the Persians at the
battle of Salamis. In
adult life, he was elected to several public offices,
including that of stratêgos or general.
He began his six-decade career as a playwright
in 470 BC, and in 468 he defeated Aeschylus, then
regarded as Greece’s greatest dramatist, in the
playwriting competition held in Athens as part of the
annual Dionysia festival. In all, he won twenty-four
such contests in the space of less than thirty years.
Of the more than 120 plays Sophokles is believed
to have written, most survive only as fragments.
Only seven of his tragedies have come down to
us intact: Ajax (450 BC), Antigone (442), Oedipus
Rex (429), Trachiniae, or The Women of Trachis
(425), Elektra (409), Philoctetes (409) and Oedipus
at Colonus (401). He also wrote lyrics, elegies and
epigrams.
Sophokles wrote his last play at the age of ninety
and died not long thereafter, some time in the
winter of 406–405 BC.
Anne
Carson
Translator
Anne Carson was
born in Toronto and
received her BA,
MA and PhD from
the University of
Toronto. She burst
onto the international
poetry scene in
1987 with her long
poem “Kinds of
Water” and has since published the volumes of
poetry Short Talks (1992), Glass, Irony and God
(1995), Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1996),
Autobiography of Red (1998), The Beauty of the
Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001)
and NOX (2010).
She is also a classics scholar; her translations
include If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002)
and An Oresteia (2009), and she is the author of
the scholarly work Eros the Bittersweet (1986). She
has been a finalist for the National Book Critics
Circle Award; was honoured with the 1996 Lannan
Award and the 1997 Pushcart Prize, both for poetry;
and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. In
2001 she received the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry (the
first woman to do so), the Griffin Poetry Prize and
the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She currently
teaches at the University of Michigan.
Background to the Story
In Greek mythology, Elektra, her brother Orestes, and her sisters Chrysothemis, Iphigenia and
Iphianassa were the children of Agamemnon, King of Argos, and his queen, Clytemestra. Many years
before this play begins, a fleet of Greek ships under Agamemnon’s command had assembled at Aulis,
from where they were to set sail for the Trojan War. Agamemnon, however, had offended the goddess
Artemis, who refused to allow his ships to depart until Agamemnon had made a sacrifice – of his
daughter Iphigenia.
During Agamemnon’s long absence at the siege of Troy, Clytemestra, unable to forgive him for killing
Iphigenia, took a lover, Aigisthos; when at last Agamemnon returned home, she and Aigisthos murdered
him. Elektra saved her young brother, Orestes, by smuggling him out of the palace and sending him
to Phocis, where King Strophius raised him alongside his own son, Pylades. Now Orestes, grown to
manhood, has returned incognito to Argos, where the incessantly mourning Elektra still waits for him to
avenge their father’s death.
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