In fact, the beginning tone of the Agamemnon, post-Trojan War, is infused with the same sense of post wartime England that Hughes experienced as a teenager and also evokes his father's military experience in WW1. These boundaries require a Hermes inspired and guided hero to navigate the limbo region much as Hughes had described it in his 1962 radio play 'The Wound' through his main character Ripley. Hughes's translation is filled with sharply startling contrasts and reveals his keen dramatic awareness the Aeschylus was writing a trilogy about limits, boundaries, seemingly irreconcilable warring viewpoints (How can Orestes be both guilty - according to the Furies, and innocent - according to Apollo?). Hughes's translation exposes the discordances, limits, boundaries, and oppositions that are a source of Aeschylus's unmistakable energy - that are the hallmarks of his unique, always dramatic, presentation. Hughes translation renders the rhetorical shifts of countervailing scenes, emotional moods, and concerns in forceful ways that emphasize (in what might be called typical 'trickster' fashion) the mutually undercutting and continuous tension in Aeschylus. In reality, there is considerable overlap between these three motifs or archetypes. What particularly interests me is the way the three plays in the trilogy incorporate successively, shamanic elements in the Agamemnon, trickster elements in the Choephori (or Libation Bearers), and scapegoat themes and images in the Eumenides.

Ted Hughes's posthumously published translation of Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy in 1999 continues his lifelong interest in the use of shaman, trickster, and scapegoat themes that I discussed in my book, Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes (1981). Stuart Hirschberg (Associate Professor of English at Rutgers, New Jersey) on Hughes's version of Aeschylus's trilogy of plays. Dramatic works by Ted Hughes The Oresteia (London: Faber and Faber, 1999)

Aeschylus the oresteia agamemnon