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Euripides

Euripides (c. 480) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.

Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.

His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.

Life
Traditional accounts of the author's life are found in many commentaries, and include details such as these: He was born on Salamis Island around 480 BC, with parents Cleito (mother) and Mnesarchus (father), a retailer from the deme of Phlya. On receiving an oracle that his son was fated to win "crowns of victory", Mnesarchus insisted that the boy should train for a career in athletics. But the boy was destined for a career on the stage (where he was to win only five victories, one of these posthumously). He served for a short time as both dancer and torch-bearer at the rites of Apollo Zosterius. His education was not confined to athletics, studying also painting and philosophy under the masters Prodicus and Anaxagoras. He had two disastrous marriages, and both his wivesMelite and Choerine (the latter bearing him three sons)were unfaithful. He became a recluse, making a home for himself in a cave on Salamis (the Cave of Euripides, where a cult of the playwright developed after his death). "There he built an impressive library and pursued daily communion with the sea and sky". The details of his death are uncertain. It was traditionally held that he retired to the "rustic court" of King Archelaus in Macedonia, where he died in 406 BC, but modern scholarship is sceptical of these claims. It is possible that in reality he never visited Macedonia at all, or if he did, he might have been drawn there by King Archelaus with incentives that were also offered to other artists.

Such biographical details derive almost entirely from three unreliable sources:

 * folklore, employed by the ancients to lend colour to the lives of celebrated authors;
 * parody, employed by the comic poets to ridicule the tragic poets; and
 * 'autobiographical' clues gleaned from his extant plays (a mere fraction of his total output).

The next three sections expand on the claims of each of these sources, respectively.

A fabled life
Euripides was the youngest in a group of three great tragedians, who were almost contemporaries: his first play was staged thirteen years after Sophocles' debut, and three years after Aeschylus's Oresteia. The identity of the trio is neatly underscored by a patriotic account of their roles during Greece's great victory over Persia at the Battle of SalamisAeschylus fought there, Sophocles was just old enough to celebrate the victory in a boys' chorus, and Euripides was born on the very day of the battle. The apocryphal account, that he composed his works in a cave on Salamis island, was a late tradition, probably symbolizing the isolation of an intellectual ahead of his time. Much of his life, and his whole career, coincided with the struggle between Athens and Sparta for hegemony in Greece, but he did not live to see the final defeat of his city. It is said that he died in Macedonia after being attacked by the Molossian hounds of King Archelaus, and that his cenotaph near Piraeus was struck by lightningsigns of his unique powers, whether for good or ill (according to one modern scholar, his death might have been caused instead by the harsh Macedonian winter). In an account by Plutarch, the catastrophic failure of the Sicilian expedition led Athenians to trade renditions of Euripides' lyrics to their enemies in return for food and drink (Life of Nicias 29). Plutarch also provides the story that the victorious Spartan generals, having planned the demolition of Athens and the enslavement of its people, grew merciful after being entertained at a banquet by lyrics from Euripides' play Electra: "they felt that it would be a barbarous act to annihilate a city which produced such men" (Life of Lysander).

A comic life
Tragic poets were often mocked by comic poets during the dramatic festivals Dionysia and Lenaia, and Euripides was travestied more than most. Aristophanes scripted him as a character in at least three plays: The Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae and The Frogs. But Aristophanes also borrowed, rather than merely satirized, some of the tragedian's methods; he was himself ridiculed by Cratinus, another comic poet, as:

According to another comic poet, Teleclides, the plays of Euripides were co-authored by the philosopher Socrates:

Aristophanes alleged that the co-author was a celebrated actor, Cephisophon, who also shared the tragedian's house and his wife, while Socrates taught an entire school of quibblers like Euripides:

In The Frogs, written when Euripides and Aeschylus were dead, Aristophanes has the god Dionysus venturing down to Hades in search of a good poet to bring back to Athens. After a debate between the shades of Aeschylus and Euripides, the god brings Aeschylus back to life, as more useful to Athens, for his wisdom, rejecting Euripides as merely clever. Such comic 'evidence' suggests that Athenians admired Euripides even while they mistrusted his intellectualism, at least during the long war with Sparta. Aeschylus had written his own epitaph commemorating his life as a warrior fighting for Athens against Persia, without any mention of his success as a playwright; and Sophocles was celebrated by his contemporaries for his social gifts, and contributions to public life as a state official; but there are no records of Euripides' public life except as a dramatist—he could well have been "a brooding and bookish recluse". He is presented as such in The Acharnians, where Aristophanes shows him to be living morosely in a precarious house, surrounded by the tattered costumes of his disreputable characters (and yet Agathon, another tragic poet, is discovered in a later play, Thesmophoriazusae, to be living in circumstances almost as bizarre). Euripides' mother was a humble vendor of vegetables, according to the comic tradition, yet his plays indicate that he had a liberal education and hence a privileged background.

A tragedian's life
Euripides first competed in the City Dionysia, the famous Athenian dramatic festival, in 455 BC, one year after the death of Aeschylus; and did not win first prize until 441 BC. His final competition in Athens was in 408 BC. The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis were performed in 405 BC, and first prize was awarded posthumously. He won first prize only five times.

His plays, and those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, indicate a difference in outlook between the threea generation gap probably due to the Sophistic enlightenment in the middle decades of the 5th century: Aeschylus still looked back to the archaic period, Sophocles was in transition between periods, and Euripides was fully imbued with the new spirit of the classical age. When Euripides' plays are sequenced in time, they also reveal that his outlook might have changed, providing a "spiritual biography", along these lines: However, about 80% of his plays have been lost, and even the extant plays do not present a fully consistent picture of his 'spiritual' development (for example, Iphigenia in Aulis is dated with the 'despairing' Bacchae, yet it contains elements that became typical of New Comedy). In the Bacchae, he restores the chorus and messenger speech to their traditional role in the tragic plot, and the play appears to be the culmination of a regressive or archaizing tendency in his later works (for which see Chronology below). Believed to have been composed in the wilds of Macedonia, Bacchae also dramatizes a primitive side to Greek religion, and some modern scholars have interpreted this particular play biographically, therefore, as: One of his earliest extant plays, Medea, includes a speech that he seems to have written in defence of himself as an intellectual ahead of his time (spoken by Medea): "σκαιοῖσι μὲν γὰρ καινὰ προσφέρων σοφὰ δόξεις ἀχρεῖος κοὐ σοφὸς πεφυκέναι· τῶν δ᾿ αὖ δοκούντων εἰδέναι τι ποικίλον κρείσσων νομισθεὶς ἐν πόλει λυπρὸς φανῇ. ἐγὼ δὲ καὐτὴ τῆσδε κοινωνῶ τύχης [298–302]. If you bring novel wisdom to fools, you will be regarded as useless, not wise; and if the city regards you as greater than those with a reputation for cleverness, you will be thought vexatious. I myself am a sharer in this lot."
 * an early period of high tragedy (Medea, Hippolytus)
 * a patriotic period at the outset of the Peloponnesian War (Children of Heracles, The Suppliants)
 * a middle period of disillusionment at the senselessness of war (Hecuba, The Trojan Women)
 * an escapist period with a focus on romantic intrigue (Ion, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen)
 * a final period of tragic despair (Orestes, Phoenician Women, The Bacchae)
 * a kind of death-bed conversion or renunciation of atheism;
 * the poet's attempt to ward off the charge of impiety that was later to overtake his friend Socrates;
 * evidence of a new belief that religion cannot be analysed rationally.

Work
Athenian tragedy in performance during Euripides' lifetime was a public contest between playwrights. The state funded it and awarded prizes. The language was metrical, spoken and sung. The performance area included a circular floor (called orchestra) where the chorus could dance, a space for actors (three speaking actors in Euripides' time), a backdrop or skene, and some special effects: an ekkyklema (used to bring the skene's "indoors" outdoors) and a mechane (used to lift actors in the air, as in deus ex machina). With the introduction of the third actor (attributed to Aeschylus by Themistius; to Sophocles by Aristotle), acting also began to be regarded as a skill worth prizes, requiring a long apprenticeship in the chorus. Euripides and other playwrights accordingly composed more and more arias for accomplished actors to sing, and this tendency became more marked in his later plays: tragedy was a "living and ever-changing genre" (cf. previous section, and Chronology; a list of his plays is below).

The comic poet Aristophanes is the earliest known critic to characterize Euripides as a spokesman for destructive, new ideas associated with declining standards in both society and tragedy (see Reception for more). But fifth-century tragedy was a social gathering for "carrying out quite publicly the maintenance and development of mental infrastructure", and it offered spectators a "platform for an utterly unique form of institutionalized discussion". The dramatist's role was not only to entertain but also educate fellow citizenshe was expected to have a message. Traditional myth provided the subject matter, but the dramatist was meant to be innovative, which led to novel characterizations of heroic figures and use of the mythical past as a tool for discussing present issues. The difference between Euripides and his older colleagues was one of degree: his characters talked about the present more controversially and pointedly than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, sometimes even challenging the democratic order. Thus, for example, Odysseus is represented in Hecuba (lines 131–32) as "agile-minded, sweet-talking, demos-pleasing", i.e. similar to the war-time demagogues that were active in Athens during the Peloponnesian War. Speakers in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles sometimes distinguish between slaves who are servile by nature and those servile by circumstance, but Euripides' speakers go further, positing an individual's mental, rather than social or physical, state as a true indication of worth. For example, in Hippolytus, a love-sick queen rationalizes her position and, reflecting on adultery, arrives at this comment on intrinsic merit: "ἐκ δὲ γενναίων δόμων τόδ᾿ ἦρξε θηλείαισι γίγνεσθαι κακόν· ὅταν γὰρ αἰσχρὰ τοῖσιν ἐσθλοῖσιν δοκῇ, ἦ κάρτα δόξει τοῖς κακοῖς γ᾿ εἶναι καλά. [...] μόνον δὲ τοῦτό φασ᾿ ἁμιλλᾶσθαι βίῳ, γνώμην δικαίαν κἀγαθὴν ὅτῳ παρῇ [409–427]. This contagion began for the female sex with the nobility. For when those of noble station resolve on base acts, surely the base-born will regard such acts as good. [...] One thing only, they say, competes in value with life, the possession of a heart blameless and good." Euripides' characters resembled contemporary Athenians rather than heroic figures of myth. "For achieving his end Euripides' regular strategy is a very simple one: retaining the old stories and the great names, as his theatre required, he imagines his people as contemporaries subjected to contemporary kinds of pressures, and examines their motivations, conduct and fate in the light of contemporary problems, usages and ideals." As mouthpieces for contemporary issues, they "all seem to have had at least an elementary course in public speaking". The dialogue often contrasts so strongly with the mythical and heroic setting that it can seem like Euripides aimed at parody. For example, in The Trojan Women, the heroine's rationalized prayer elicits comment from Menelaus: "ΕΚΑΒΗ: [...] Ζεύς, εἴτ᾿ ἀνάγκη φύσεος εἴτε νοῦς βροτῶν, προσηυξάμην σε· πάντα γὰρ δι᾿ ἀψόφου βαίνων κελεύθου κατὰ δίκην τὰ θνήτ᾿ ἄγεις. ΜΕΝΕΛΑΟΣ: τί δ᾿ ἔστιν; εὐχὰς ὡς ἐκαίνισας θεῶν [886–889]. Hecuba: [...] Zeus, whether you are the necessity of nature or the mind of mortal men, I address you in prayer! For proceeding on a silent path you direct all mortal affairs toward justice! Menelaus: What does this mean? How strange your prayer to the gods is!" Athenian citizens were familiar with rhetoric in the assembly and law courts, and some scholars believe that Euripides was more interested in his characters as speakers with cases to argue than as characters with lifelike personalities. They are self-conscious about speaking formally, and their rhetoric is shown to be flawed, as if Euripides were exploring the problematical nature of language and communication: "For speech points in three different directions at once, to the speaker, to the person addressed, to the features in the world it describes, and each of these directions can be felt as skewed". For example, in the quotation above, Hecuba presents herself as a sophisticated intellectual describing a rationalized cosmos, but the speech is ill-suited to her audience, the unsophisticated listener Menelaus, and is found to not suit the cosmos either (her grandson is murdered by the Greeks). In Hippolytus, speeches appear verbose and ungainly, as if to underscore the limitations of language.

Like Euripides, both Aeschylus and Sophocles created comic effects, contrasting the heroic with the mundane, but they employed minor supporting characters for that purpose. Euripides was more insistent, using major characters as well. His comic touches can be thought to intensify the overall tragic effect, and his realism, which often threatens to make his heroes look ridiculous, marks a world of debased heroism: "The loss of intellectual and moral substance becomes a central tragic statement". Psychological reversals are common and sometimes happen so suddenly that inconsistency in characterization is an issue for many critics, such as Aristotle, who cited Iphigenia in Aulis as an example (Poetics 1454a32). For others, psychological inconsistency is not a stumbling block to good drama: "Euripides is in pursuit of a larger insight: he aims to set forth the two modes, emotional and rational, with which human beings confront their own mortality." Some think unpredictable behaviour realistic in tragedy: "everywhere in Euripides a preoccupation with individual psychology and its irrational aspects is evident....In his hands tragedy for the first time probed the inner recesses of the human soul and let passions spin the plot." The tension between reason and passion is symbolized by his characters' relationship with the gods: For example, Hecuba's prayer is answered not by Zeus, nor by the law of reason, but by Menelaus, as if speaking for the old gods. And the perhaps most famous example is in Bacchae where the god Dionysus savages his own converts. When the gods do appear (in eight of the extant plays), they appear "lifeless and mechanical". Sometimes condemned by critics as an unimaginative way to end a story, the spectacle of a "god" making a judgement or announcement from a theatrical crane might actually have been intended to provoke scepticism about the religious and heroic dimension of his plays. Similarly, his plays often begin in a banal manner that undermines theatrical illusion. Unlike Sophocles, who established the setting and background of his plays in the introductory dialogue, Euripides used a monologue in which a divinity or human character simply tells the audience all it needs to know to understand what follows.

Aeschylus and Sophocles were innovative, but Euripides had arrived at a position in the "ever-changing genre" where he could easily move between tragic, comic, romantic, and political effects. This versatility appears in individual plays and also over the course of his career. Potential for comedy lay in his use of 'contemporary' characters, in his sophisticated tone, his relatively informal Greek (see In Greek below), and in his ingenious use of plots centred on motifs that later became standard in Menander's New Comedy (for example the 'recognition scene'). Other tragedians also used recognition scenes, but they were heroic in emphasis, as in Aeschylus's The Libation Bearers, which Euripides parodied in Electra (Euripides was unique among the tragedians in incorporating theatrical criticism in his plays). Traditional myth with its exotic settings, heroic adventures, and epic battles offered potential for romantic melodrama as well as for political comments on a war theme, so that his plays are an extraordinary mix of elements. The Trojan Women, for example, is a powerfully disturbing play on the theme of war's horrors, apparently critical of Athenian imperialism (it was composed in the aftermath of the Melian massacre and during the preparations for the Sicilian Expedition), yet it features the comic exchange between Menelaus and Hecuba quoted above, and the chorus considers Athens, the "blessed land of Theus", to be a desirable refugesuch complexity and ambiguity are typical both of his "patriotic" and "anti-war" plays.

Tragic poets in the fifth century competed against one another at the City Dionysia, each with a tetralogy of three tragedies and a satyr play. The few extant fragments of satyr plays attributed to Aeschylus and Sophocles indicate that these were a loosely structured, simple, and jovial form of entertainment. But in Cyclops (the only complete satyr-play that survives), Euripides structured the entertainment more like a tragedy and introduced a note of critical irony typical of his other work. His genre-bending inventiveness is shown above all in Alcestis, a blend of tragic and satyric elements. This fourth play in his tetralogy for 438 BC (i.e., it occupied the position conventionally reserved for satyr plays) is a "tragedy", featuring Heracles as a satyric hero in conventional satyr-play scenes: an arrival, a banquet, a victory over an ogre (in this case, death), a happy ending, a feast, and a departure for new adventures. Most of the big innovations in tragedy were made by Aeschylus and Sophocles, but "Euripides made innovations on a smaller scale that have impressed some critics as cumulatively leading to a radical change of direction".

Euripides is also known for his use of irony. Many Greek tragedians make use of dramatic irony to bring out the emotion and realism of their characters or plays, but Euripides uses irony to foreshadow events and occasionally amuse his audience. For example, in his play Heracles, Heracles comments that all men love their children and wish to see them grow. The irony here is that Heracles will be driven into madness by Hera and will kill his children. Similarly, in Helen, Theoclymenus remarks how happy he is that his sister has the gift of prophecy and will warn him of any plots or tricks against him (the audience already knows that she has betrayed him). In this instance, Euripides uses irony not only for foreshadowing but also for comic effect—which few tragedians did. Likewise, in the Bacchae, Pentheus's first threat to the god Dionysus is that if Pentheus catches him in his city, he will 'chop off his head', whereas it is Pentheus who is beheaded at the end of the play.

In Greek

The spoken language of the Euripidean plays is not fundamentally different in style from that of Aeschylus or Sophoclesit employs poetic meters, a rarefied vocabulary, fullness of expression, complex syntax, and ornamental figures, all aimed at representing an elevated style. But its rhythms are somewhat freer, and more natural, than that of his predecessors, and the vocabulary has been expanded to allow for intellectual and psychological subtleties. Euripides has been hailed as a great lyric poet. In Medea, for example, he composed for his city, Athens, "the noblest of her songs of praise". His lyrical skills are not just confined to individual poems: "A play of Euripides is a musical whole...one song echoes motifs from the preceding song, while introducing new ones." For some critics, the lyrics often seem dislocated from the action, but the extent and significance of this is "a matter of scholarly debate". See Chronology for details about his style.

Reception
Euripides has aroused, and continues to arouse, strong opinions for and against his work:

"He was a problem to his contemporaries and he is one still; over the course of centuries since his plays were first produced he has been hailed or indicted under a bewildering variety of labels. He has been described as 'the poet of the Greek enlightenment' and also as 'Euripides the irrationalist'; as a religious sceptic if not an atheist, but on the other hand, as a believer in divine providence and the ultimate justice of divine dispensation. He has been seen as a profound explorer of human psychology and also a rhetorical poet who subordinated consistency of character to verbal effect; as a misogynist and a feminist; as a realist who brought tragic action down to the level of everyday life and as a romantic poet who chose unusual myths and exotic settings. He wrote plays which have been widely understood as patriotic pieces supporting Athens' war against Sparta and others which many have taken as the work of the anti-war dramatist par excellence, even as attacks on Athenian imperialism. He has been recognized as the precursor of New Comedy and also what Aristotle called him: 'the most tragic of poets' (Poetics 1453a30). And not one of these descriptions is entirely false. Bernard Knox"

Aeschylus gained thirteen victories as a dramatist; Sophocles at least twenty; Euripides only four in his lifetime; and this has often been taken as indication of the latter's unpopularity. But a first place might not have been the main criterion for success (the system of selecting judges appears to have been flawed), and merely being chosen to compete was a mark of distinction. Moreover, to have been singled out by Aristophanes for so much comic attention is proof of popular interest in his work. Sophocles was appreciative enough of the younger poet to be influenced by him, as is evident in his later plays Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. According to Plutarch, Euripides had been very well received in Sicily, to the extent that after the failure of the Sicilian Expedition, many Athenian captives were released, simply for being able to teach their captors whatever fragments they could remember of his work. Less than a hundred years later, Aristotle developed an almost "biological' theory of the development of tragedy in Athens: the art form grew under the influence of Aeschylus, matured in the hands of Sophocles, then began its precipitous decline with Euripides. However, "his plays continued to be applauded even after those of Aeschylus and Sophocles had come to seem remote and irrelevant"; they became school classics in the Hellenistic period (as mentioned in the introduction) and, due to Seneca's adaptation of his work for Roman audiences, "it was Euripides, not Aeschylus or Sophocles, whose tragic muse presided over the rebirth of tragedy in Renaissance Europe."

In the seventeenth century, Racine expressed admiration for Sophocles, but was more influenced by Euripides (Iphigenia in Aulis and Hippolytus were the models for his plays Iphigénie and Phèdre). Euripides' reputation was to take a beating in the early 19th century, when Friedrich Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel championed Aristotle's 'biological' model of theatre history, identifying Euripides with the moral, political, and artistic degeneration of Athens. August Wilhelm's Vienna lectures on dramatic art and literature went through four editions between 1809 and 1846; and, in them, he opined that Euripides "not only destroyed the external order of tragedy but missed its entire meaning". This view influenced Friedrich Nietzsche, who seems, however, not to have known the Euripidean plays well. But literary figures, such as the poet Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, could study and admire the Schlegels, while still appreciating Euripides as "our Euripides the human" (Wine of Cyprus stanza 12). Classicists such as Arthur Verrall and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff reacted against the views of the Schlegels and Nietzsche, constructing arguments sympathetic to Euripides, which involved Wilamowitz in this restatement of Greek tragedy as a genre: "A [Greek] tragedy does not have to end 'tragically' or be 'tragic'. The only requirement is a serious treatment." In the English-speaking world, the pacifist Gilbert Murray played an important role in popularizing Euripides, influenced perhaps by his anti-war plays. Today, as in the time of Euripides, traditional assumptions are constantly under challenge, and audiences therefore have a natural affinity with the Euripidean outlook, which seems nearer to ours, for example, than the Elizabethan. As stated above, however, opinions continue to diverge, so that modern readers might actually "seem to feel a special affinity with Sophocles"; one recent critic might dismiss the debates in Euripides' plays as "self-indulgent digression for the sake of rhetorical display"; and one spring to the defence: "His plays are remarkable for their range of tones and the gleeful inventiveness, which morose critics call cynical artificiality, of their construction."

Unique among writers of ancient Athens, Euripides demonstrated sympathy towards the underrepresented members of society. His male contemporaries were frequently shocked by the heresies he put into the mouths of characters, such as these words of his heroine Medea: "[...] ὡς τρὶς ἂν παρ᾿ ἀσπίδα στῆναι θέλοιμ᾿ ἂν μᾶλλον ἢ τεκεῖν ἅπαξ [250–251]. I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once."

Transmission
The textual transmission of the plays, from the 5th century BC, when they were first written, until the era of the printing press, was a largely haphazard process. Much of Euripides' work was lost or corrupted; but the period also included triumphs by scholars and copyists, thanks to whom much was recovered and preserved. Summaries of the transmission are often found in modern editions of the plays, three of which are used as sources for this summary.

The plays of Euripides, like those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, circulated in written form. But literary conventions that we take for granted today had not been inventedthere was no spacing between words; no consistency in punctuation, nor elisions; no marks for breathings and accents (guides to pronunciation, and word recognition); no convention to denote change of speaker; no stage directions; and verse was written straight across the page, like prose. Possibly, those who bought texts supplied their own interpretative markings. Papyri discoveries have indicated, for example, that a change in speakers was loosely denoted with a variety of signs, such as equivalents of the modern dash, colon, and full-stop. The absence of modern literary conventions (which aid comprehension), was an early and persistent source of errors, affecting transmission. Errors were also introduced when Athens replaced its old Attic alphabet with the Ionian alphabet, a change sanctioned by law in 403–402 BC, adding a new complication to the task of copying. Many more errors came from the tendency of actors to interpolate words and sentences, producing so many corruptions and variations that a law was proposed by Lycurgus of Athens in 330 BC "that the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should be written down and preserved in a public office; and that the town clerk should read the text over with the actors; and that all performances which did not comply with this regulation should be illegal." The law was soon disregarded, and actors continued to make changes until about 200 BC, after which the habit ceased. It was about then that Aristophanes of Byzantium compiled an edition of all the extant plays of Euripides, collated from pre-Alexandrian texts, furnished with introductions and accompanied by a commentary that was "published" separately. This became the "standard edition" for the future, and it featured some of the literary conventions that modern readers expect: there was still no spacing between words; little or no punctuation; and no stage directions; but abbreviated names denoted changes of speaker; lyrics were broken into "cola" and "strophai", or lines and stanzas; and a system of accentuation was introduced.

After this creation of a standard edition, the text was fairly safe from errors, besides slight and gradual corruption introduced with tedious copying. Many of these trivial errors occurred in the Byzantine period, following a change in script (from uncial to minuscule), and many were "homophonic" errorsequivalent, in English, to substituting "right" for "write"; except that there were more opportunities for Byzantine scribes to make these errors, because η, ι, οι and ει, were pronounced similarly in the Byzantine period.

Around 200 AD, ten of the plays of Euripides began to be circulated in a select edition, possibly for use in schools, with some commentaries or scholia recorded in the margins. Similar editions had appeared for Aeschylus and Sophoclesthe only plays of theirs that survive today. Euripides, however, was more fortunate than the other tragedians, with a second edition of his work surviving, compiled in alphabetical order as if from a set of his collect works; but without scholia attached. This "Alphabetical" edition was combined with the "Select" edition by some unknown Byzantine scholar, bringing together all the nineteen plays that survive today. The "Select" plays are found in many medieval manuscripts, but only two manuscripts preserve the "Alphabetical" playsoften denoted L and P, after the Laurentian Library at Florence, and the Bibliotheca Palatina in the Vatican, where they are stored. It is believed that P derived its Alphabet plays and some Select plays from copies of an ancestor of L, but the remainder is derived from elsewhere. P contains all the extant plays of Euripides, L is missing The Trojan Women and latter part of The Bacchae.

In addition to L, P, and many other medieval manuscripts, there are fragments of plays on papyrus. These papyrus fragments are often recovered only with modern technology. In June 2005, for example, classicists at the University of Oxford worked on a joint project with Brigham Young University, using multi-spectral imaging technology to retrieve previously illegible writing (see References). Some of this work employed infrared technology—previously used for satellite imaging—to detect previously unknown material by Euripides, in fragments of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, a collection of ancient manuscripts held by the university.

It is from such materials that modern scholars try to piece together copies of the original plays. Sometimes the picture is almost lost. Thus, for example, two extant plays, The Phoenician Women and Iphigenia in Aulis, are significantly corrupted by interpolations (the latter possibly being completed post mortem by the poet's son); and the very authorship of Rhesus is a matter of dispute. In fact, the very existence of the Alphabet plays, or rather the absence of an equivalent edition for Sophocles and Aeschylus, could distort our notions of distinctive Euripidean qualitiesmost of his least "tragic" plays are in the Alphabet edition; and, possibly, the other two tragedians would appear just as genre-bending as this "restless experimenter", if we possessed more than their "select" editions.

See Extant plays below for listing of "Select" and "Alphabetical" plays.

Chronology
Original production dates for some of Euripides' plays are known from ancient records, such as lists of prize-winners at the Dionysia; and approximations are obtained for the remainder by various means. Both the playwright and his work were travestied by comic poets such as Aristophanes, the known dates of whose own plays can serve as a terminus ad quem for those of Euripides (though the gap can be considerable: twenty-seven years separate Telephus, known to have been produced in 438 BC, from its parody in Thesmophoriazusae in 411 BC.). References in Euripides' plays to contemporary events provide a terminus a quo, though sometimes the references might even precede a datable event (e.g. lines 1074–89 in Ion describe a procession to Eleusis, which was probably written before the Spartans occupied it during the Peloponnesian War). Other indications of dating are obtained by stylometry.

Greek tragedy comprised lyric and dialogue, the latter mostly in iambic trimeter (three pairs of iambic feet per line). Euripides sometimes 'resolved' the two syllables of the iamb (˘¯) into three syllables (˘˘˘), and this tendency increased so steadily over time that the number of resolved feet in a play can indicate an approximate date of composition (see Extant plays below for one scholar's list of resolutions per hundred trimeters). Associated with this increase in resolutions was an increasing vocabulary, often involving prefixes to refine meanings, allowing the language to assume a more natural rhythm, while also becoming ever more capable of psychological and philosophical subtlety.

The trochaic tetrameter catalecticfour pairs of trochees per line, with the final syllable omittedwas identified by Aristotle as the original meter of tragic dialogue (Poetics 1449a21). Euripides employs it here and there in his later plays, but seems not to have used it in his early plays at all, with The Trojan Women being the earliest appearance of it in an extant play—it is symptomatic of an archaizing tendency in his later works.

The later plays also feature extensive use of stichomythia (i.e. a series of one-liners). The longest such scene comprises one hundred and five lines in Ion (lines 264–369). In contrast, Aeschylus never exceeded twenty lines of stichomythia; Sophocles' longest such scene was fifty lines, and that is interrupted several times by αντιλαβή (Electra, lines 1176–1226).

Euripides' use of lyrics in sung parts shows the influence of Timotheus of Miletus in the later playsthe individual singer gained prominence, and was given additional scope to demonstrate his virtuosity in lyrical duets, as well as replacing some of the chorus's functions with monodies. At the same time, choral odes began to take on something of the form of dithyrambs reminiscent of the poetry of Bacchylides, featuring elaborate treatment of myths. Sometimes these later choral odes seem to have only a tenuous connection with the plot, linked to the action only in their mood. The Bacchae, however, shows a reversion to old forms, possibly as a deliberate archaic effect, or because there were no virtuoso choristers in Macedonia (where it is said to have been written).

Extant plays
Key:
 * Date indicates date of first production.
 * Prize indicates a place known to have been awarded in festival competition.
 * Lineage: S denotes plays surviving from a 'Select' or 'School' edition, A plays surviving from an 'Alphabetical' edition see Transmission above for details.
 * Resolutions: Number of resolved feet per 100 trimeters, Ceadel's list see Chronology above for details.
 * Genre: Generic orientation (see 'Transmission' section) with additional notes in brackets.

Lost and fragmentary plays
The following plays have come down to us in fragmentary form, if at all. They are known through quotations in other works (sometimes as little as a single line); pieces of papyrus; partial copies in manuscript; part of a collection of hypotheses (or summaries); and through being parodied in the works of Aristophanes. Some of the fragments, such as those of Hypsipyle, are extensive enough to allow tentative reconstructions to be proposed.

A two-volume selection from the fragments, with facing-page translation, introductions, and notes, was published by Collard, Cropp, Lee, and Gibert; as were two Loeb Classical Library volumes derived from them;  and there are critical studies in T. B. L. Webster's older The Tragedies of Euripides, based on what were then believed to be the most likely reconstructions of the plays.

The following lost and fragmentary plays can be dated, and are arranged in roughly chronological order:

 * Peliades (455 BC)
 * Telephus (438 BC with Alcestis)
 * Alcmaeon in Psophis (438 BC with Alcestis)
 * Cretan Women (438 with Alcestis)
 * Cretans (c. 435 BC)
 * Philoctetes (431 BC with Medea)
 * Dictys (431 BC with Medea)
 * Theristai (Reapers, satyr play, 431 BC with Medea)
 * Stheneboea (before 429 BC)
 * Bellerophon (c. 430 BC)
 * Cresphontes (c. 425 BC)
 * Erechtheus (422 BC)
 * Phaethon (c. 420 BC)
 * Wise Melanippe (c. 420 BC)
 * Alexandros (415 BC with Trojan Women)
 * Palamedes (415 BC with Trojan Women)
 * Sisyphus (satyr play, 415 BC with Trojan Women)
 * Captive Melanippe (c. 412 BC)
 * Andromeda (412 BC with Helen)
 * Antiope (c. 410 BC)
 * Archelaus (c. 410 BC)
 * Hypsipyle (c. 410 BC)
 * Alcmaeon in Corinth (c. 405 BC) Won first prize as part of a trilogy with The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis

The following lost and fragmentary plays are of uncertain date, and are arranged in English alphabetical order.

 * Aegeus
 * Aeolus
 * Alcmene
 * Alope, or Cercyon
 * Antigone
 * Auge
 * Autolycus
 * Busiris
 * Cadmus
 * Chrysippus
 * Danae
 * Epeius
 * Eurystheus
 * Hippolytus Veiled
 * Ino
 * Ixion
 * Lamia
 * Licymnius
 * Meleager
 * Mysians
 * Oedipus
 * Oeneus
 * Oenomaus
 * Peirithous
 * Peleus
 * Phoenix
 * Phrixus
 * Pleisthenes
 * Polyidus
 * Protesilaus
 * Rhadamanthys
 * Sciron
 * Scyrians
 * Syleus
 * Temenidae
 * Temenos
 * Tennes
 * Theseus
 * Thyestes

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Euripides


text:
Emily Brontë

Emily Jane Brontë (, commonly ; 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. She also published a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell with her own poems finding regard as poetic genius. Emily was the second-youngest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She published under the pen name Ellis Bell.

Early life

Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 to Maria Branwell and an Irish father, Patrick Brontë. The family was living on Market Street, in a house now known as the Brontë Birthplace in the village of Thornton on the outskirts of Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Emily was the second youngest of six siblings, preceded by Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Branwell. In 1820, Emily's younger sister Anne, the last Brontë child, was born. Shortly thereafter, the family moved eight miles away to Haworth, where Patrick was employed as perpetual curate. In Haworth, the children would have opportunities to develop their literary talents.

When Emily was only three, and all six children under the age of eight, she and her siblings lost their mother, Maria, to cancer on 15 September 1821. The younger children were to be cared for by Elizabeth Branwell, their aunt and Maria's sister.

Emily's three elder sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge. At the age of six, on 25 November 1824, Emily joined her sisters at school for a brief period. At school, however, the children suffered abuse and privations, and when a typhoid epidemic swept the school, Maria and Elizabeth became ill. Maria, who may actually have had tuberculosis, was sent home, where she died. Elizabeth died shortly after.

The four youngest Brontë children, all under ten years of age, had suffered the loss of the three eldest women in their immediate family.

Charlotte maintained that the school's poor conditions permanently affected her health and physical development and that it had hastened the deaths of Maria (born 1814) and Elizabeth (born 1815), who both died in 1825. After the deaths of his older daughters, Patrick removed Charlotte and Emily from the school. Charlotte would use her experiences and knowledge of the school as the basis for Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

The three remaining sisters and their brother Branwell were thereafter educated at home by their father and aunt Elizabeth Branwell. A shy girl, Emily was very close to her siblings and was known as a great animal lover, especially for befriending stray dogs she found wandering around the countryside. Despite the lack of formal education, Emily and her siblings had access to a wide range of published material; favourites included Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Blackwood's Magazine.

Inspired by a box of toy soldiers Branwell had received as a gift, the children began to write stories, which they set in a number of invented imaginary worlds populated by their soldiers as well as their heroes, the Duke of Wellington and his sons, Charles and Arthur Wellesley. Little of Emily's work from this period survives, except for poems spoken by characters. Initially, all four children shared in creating stories about a world called Angria.

However, when Emily was 13, she and Anne withdrew from participation in the Angria story and began a new one about Gondal, a fictional island whose myths and legends were to preoccupy the two sisters throughout their lives. With the exception of their Gondal poems and Anne's lists of Gondal's characters and placenames, Emily and Anne's Gondal writings were largely not preserved. Among those that did survive are some "diary papers", written by Emily in her twenties, which describe current events in Gondal. The heroes of Gondal tended to resemble the popular image of the Scottish Highlander, a sort of British version of the "noble savage": romantic outlaws capable of more nobility, passion, and bravery than the denizens of "civilization". Similar themes of romanticism and noble savagery are apparent across the Brontës' juvenilia, notably in Branwell's The Life of Alexander Percy, which tells the story of an all-consuming, death-defying, and ultimately self-destructive love and is generally considered an inspiration for Wuthering Heights.

At 17, Emily began to attend the Roe Head Girls' School, where Charlotte was a teacher, but suffered from extreme homesickness, according to Charlotte, and left after only a few months. Charlotte wrote later that "Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils; without it, she perished. The change from her own home to a school and from her own very noiseless, very secluded but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices), was what she failed in enduring... I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall." Emily returned home and Anne took her place. At this time, the girls' objective was to obtain sufficient education to open a small school of their own.

Adulthood

Emily became a teacher at Law Hill School in Halifax beginning in September 1838, when she was twenty. Her health soon broke under the stress of the 17-hour workday, and she returned home in April 1839. Thereafter she remained at home, helping the family's servant with the cooking, ironing, and cleaning at Haworth. She taught herself German from books and also practised the piano. Emily was an accomplished pianist.

In 1842, Emily accompanied Charlotte to the Héger Pensionnat in Brussels, Belgium, where they attended the girls' academy run by Constantin Héger in the hope of perfecting their French and German before opening their own school. Unlike Charlotte, Emily was uncomfortable in Brussels and refused to adopt Belgian fashions, saying "I wish to be as God made me", which rendered her something of an outcast. Nine of Emily's French essays survive from this period. Héger seems to have been impressed with the strength of Emily's character, writing that: She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have given way but with life. She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman... impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned. The two sisters were committed to their studies and by the end of the term had become so competent in French that Madame Héger proposed that they both stay another half-year, even, according to Charlotte, offering to dismiss the English master so that she could take his place. Emily had, by this time, become a competent pianist and teacher, and it was suggested that she might stay on to teach music. However, the illness and death of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, neccessitated their return to Haworth. In 1844, the sisters attempted to open a school in their house, but their plans were stymied by an inability to attract students to the remote area.

In 1844, Emily began going through all the poems she had written, recopying them neatly into two notebooks. One was labelled "Gondal Poems"; the other was unlabelled. Scholars such as Fannie Ratchford and Derek Roper have attempted to piece together a Gondal storyline and chronology from these poems. In the autumn of 1845, Charlotte discovered the notebooks and insisted that the poems be published. Emily, understandably furious at the invasion of her privacy, at first refused but, according to Charlotte, relented when Anne brought out her manuscripts and revealed to Charlotte that she had been writing poems in secret as well. Around this time Emily wrote one of her most famous poems, "No coward soul is mine". Some literary critics have speculated that it is a poem about Anne Brontë, while others see it as an answer to the violation of her privacy and her own transformation into a published writer. Despite Charlotte's later claim that it was Emily's final poem, this is factually inaccurate.

In 1846, the sisters' poems were published in one volume as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Charlotte later stated that the Brontë sisters had adopted pseudonyms for publication, preserving their initials: Charlotte was "Currer Bell", Emily was "Ellis Bell" and Anne was "Acton Bell". Charlotte wrote in the 'Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell' that their "ambiguous choice" was "dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because... we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice". Charlotte contributed 19 poems, and Emily and Anne each contributed 21. Although the sisters were told several months after publication that only two copies had sold, they were not discouraged (of their two readers, one was impressed enough to request their autographs). The Athenaeum reviewer praised Ellis Bell's work for its music and power, singling out those poems as the best in the book: "Ellis possesses a fine, quaint spirit and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted", and The Critic reviewer recognised "the presence of more genius than it was supposed this utilitarian age had devoted to the loftier exercises of the intellect."

Personality and character
Emily Brontë's solitary nature has made her a mysterious figure and a challenge for biographers to assess. Except for Ellen Nussey and Louise de Bassompierre, Emily's fellow student in Brussels, she does not seem to have made any friends outside her family. Her closest friend was her sister Anne. Together they shared their own fantasy world, Gondal, and, according to Ellen Nussey, in childhood they were "like twins", "inseparable companions" and "in the very closest sympathy which never had any interruption". In 1845 Anne took Emily to visit some of the places she had come to know and love in the five years she spent as governess. A plan to visit Scarborough fell through and instead the sisters went to York where Anne showed Emily York Minster. During the trip the sisters acted out some of their Gondal characters.

Charlotte Brontë remains the primary source of information about Emily, although as an elder sister, writing publicly about her only shortly after her death, she is considered by certain scholars not to be a neutral witness. Stevie Davies believes that there is what might be called "Charlotte's smoke-screen", and argues that Emily evidently shocked her, to the point that she may even have doubted her sister's sanity. After Emily's death, Charlotte rewrote her character, history and even poems on a model more acceptable to her and the bourgeois reading public. Biographer Claire O'Callaghan suggests that the trajectory of Brontë's legacy was altered significantly by Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte, concerning not only because Gaskell did not visit Haworth until after Emily's death, but also because Gaskell admits to disliking what she did know of Emily in her biography of Charlotte. As O'Callaghan and others have noted, Charlotte was Gaskell's primary source of information on Emily's life and may have exaggerated or fabricated Emily's frailty and shyness to cast herself in the role of maternal saviour.

Charlotte presented Emily as someone whose "natural" love of the beauties of nature had become somewhat exaggerated owing to her shy nature, portraying her as too fond of the Yorkshire moors, and homesick whenever she was away. According to Lucasta Miller, in her analysis of Brontë biographies, "Charlotte took on the role of Emily's first mythographer." In the Preface to the Second Edition of Wuthering Heights, in 1850, Charlotte wrote: My sister's disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced. And yet she knew them: knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but WITH them, she rarely exchanged a word.

Emily's unsociability and extremely shy nature have subsequently been reported many times. According to Norma Crandall, her "warm, human aspect" was "usually revealed only in her love of nature and of animals". In a similar description, Literary news (1883) states: "[Emily] loved the solemn moors, she loved all wild, free creatures and things", and critics attest that her love of the moors is manifest in Wuthering Heights. Over the years, Emily's love of nature has been the subject of many anecdotes. A newspaper dated 31 December 1899, gives the folksy account that "with bird and beast [Emily] had the most intimate relations, and from her walks she often came with fledgling or young rabbit in hand, talking softly to it, quite sure, too, that it understood".

Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte, told the story of Emily's punishing her pet dog Keeper for lying "on the delicate white counterpane" that covered one of the beds in the Parsonage. According to Gaskell, she struck him with her fists until he was "half-blind" with his eyes "swelled up". This story has been called into question by many biographers and scholars, including Janet Gezari, Lucasta Miller and Claire O'Callaghan. It also contradicts the following account of Emily's and Keeper's relationship: Poor old Keeper, Emily's faithful friend and worshipper, seemed to understand her like a human being. One evening, when the four friends were sitting closely round the fire in the sitting-room, Keeper forced himself in between Charlotte and Emily and mounted himself on Emily's lap; finding the space too limited for his comfort he pressed himself forward on to the guest's knees, making himself quite comfortable. Emily's heart was won by the unresisting endurance of the visitor, little guessing that she herself, being in close contact, was the inspiring cause of submission to Keeper's preference. Sometimes Emily would delight in showing off Keeper—make him frantic in action, and roar with the voice of a lion. It was a terrifying exhibition within the walls of an ordinary sitting-room. Keeper was a solemn mourner at Emily's funeral and never recovered his cheerfulness.

In Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era (1886), Eva Hope summarises Emily's character as "a peculiar mixture of timidity and Spartan-like courage", and goes on to say, "She was painfully shy, but physically she was brave to a surprising degree. She loved few persons, but those few with a passion of self-sacrificing tenderness and devotion. To other people's failings she was understanding and forgiving, but over herself she kept a continual and most austere watch, never allowing herself to deviate for one instant from what she considered her duty."

Emily Brontë has often been characterised as a devout if somewhat unorthodox Christian, a heretic and a visionary "mystic of the moors".

Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was first published in London in 1847 by Thomas Cautley Newby, appearing as the first two volumes of a three-volume set that included Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey. The authors were printed as being Ellis and Acton Bell; Emily's real name did not appear until 1850, when it was printed on the title page of an edited commercial edition. The novel's innovative structure somewhat puzzled critics.

Wuthering Heights's violence and passion led the Victorian public and many early reviewers to think that it had been written by a man. According to Juliet Gardiner, "the vivid sexual passion and power of its language and imagery impressed, bewildered and appalled reviewers." Literary critic Thomas Joudrey further contextualizes this reaction: "Expecting in the wake of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre to be swept up in an earnest Bildungsroman, they were instead shocked and confounded by a tale of unchecked primal passions, replete with savage cruelty and outright barbarism." Even though the novel received mixed reviews when it first came out, and was often condemned for its portrayal of amoral passion, the book subsequently became an English literary classic. Emily Brontë never knew the extent of fame she achieved with her only novel, as she died a year after its publication, aged 30.

Although a letter from her publisher indicates that Emily had begun to write a second novel, the manuscript has never been found. Perhaps Emily or a member of her family eventually destroyed the manuscript, if it existed, when she was prevented by illness from completing it. It has also been suggested that, though less likely, the letter could have been intended for Anne Brontë, who was already writing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, her second novel.

Death
Emily's health was probably weakened by the harsh local climate and by unsanitary conditions at home, where water was contaminated by run off from the church's graveyard. Branwell died suddenly, on Sunday, 24 September 1848. At his funeral service, a week later, Emily caught a severe cold that quickly developed into inflammation of the lungs and led to tuberculosis. Though her condition worsened steadily, she rejected medical help and all offered remedies, saying that she would have "no poisoning doctor" near her. On the morning of 19 December 1848, Charlotte, fearing for her sister, wrote: She grows daily weaker. The physician's opinion was expressed too obscurely to be of use – he sent some medicine which she would not take. Moments so dark as these I have never known – I pray for God's support to us all. At noon, Emily was worse; she could only whisper in gasps. With her last audible words, she said to Charlotte, "If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now", but it was too late. She died that same day at about two in the afternoon. According to Mary Robinson, an early biographer of Emily, it happened while she was sitting on the sofa. However, Charlotte's letter to William Smith Williams, in which she mentions Emily's dog, Keeper, lying at the side of her dying-bed, makes this statement seem unlikely.

It was less than three months after Branwell's death, which led Martha Brown, a housemaid, to declare that "Miss Emily died of a broken heart for love of her brother". Emily had grown so thin that her coffin measured only 16 inches (40 centimeters) wide. The carpenter said he had never made a narrower one for an adult. Her remains were interred in the family vault in St Michael and All Angels' Church, Haworth.

Legacy
The English folk group The Unthanks released Lines, three short albums, which include settings of Brontë's poems to music. Recording took place at the Brontës' home, using their own Regency era piano played by Adrian McNally.

In the 2019 film How to Build a Girl, Emily and Charlotte Brontë are among the historical figures in Johanna's wall collage.

In May 2021, the contents of the Honresfield library, a collection of rare books and manuscripts assembled by Rochdale mill owners Alfred and William Law, was re-discovered after nearly a century. In the collection were handwritten poems by Emily Brontë, as well as the Brontë family edition of Bewick's 'History of British Birds.' The collection was to be auctioned off at Sotheby's and was estimated to sell for £1 million.

The 1946 film Devotion was a highly fictionalized account of the lives of the Brontë sisters.

In the 2022 film Emily, written and directed by Frances O'Connor, Emma Mackey plays Emily before the publication of Wuthering Heights. The film mixes known biographical details with imagined situations and relationships.

Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo set select Emily Brontë poems to music with SATB chorus, string orchestra, and piano, a work commissioned and premiered by the San Francisco Choral Society in a series of concerts in Oakland and San Francisco.

title: Emily Brontë


text:
Talk:Electromagnetism

Animation of lightning at top of page
Is having a distracting animation of lightning at the top of this page appropriate for electromagnetism? that animation would be better on the lighting article and certainly not at the top of any page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.176.51.109 (talk) 07:06, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Agreed. I've cut the two images entirely; I don't think the reader really benefits in their understanding of electromagnetism by being shown what a magnet and some lightning look like. --McGeddon (talk) 17:58, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

---

This article, being a gateway, should have some illustrations. I agree that the lightning bolt animation is very distracting, and a image of a bar magnet doing notiong is of no value whatever. I kind of liked the idea of a static lightning bolt, but I'm not sure what its point is relative to electromagnetism. Given that, are there illustrations that would be useful, e.g. a photo of "lines of force" around both a bar magnet and an electromagnet made with iron filings (the point being that electric current makes "magnetism", and this is the same "stuff" as a bar-magnet's "magnetism"), and an equivalent electrostatics photo-image? (Good luck creating that one!) An electromagnet hanging by thin wires in a gravitational field (like a pendulum) and being pulled sideways by another electromagnet? (Easy to do). Ditto for a tinfoil-covered styrofoam ball being repelled by a charged plate? (Not so easy; this one I found as a problem in a physics text in a chapter on the electric field -- to calculate the angle from vertical; cf Sears and Zemanski 1964:564 problem 25-11, also p. 538 problem 24-4). As a kid I learned about "magnetism" from iron-filing making lines of force, and the experience that two magnets either repel or attract. Electrostatics I learned from charged balloons repelling or attracting, and scuffing my feet to make sparks (and to light up a neon light). That they are equivalent "stuff" in different forms is not a trivial factoid -- what you'd need to illustrate the idea is a triboelectrically-charged leaf-electroscope hooked to a Leyden jar that, when discharged through a coil of wire, moves a compass-needle. Thoughts? BillWvbailey (talk) 15:39, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

0 / 10
Intro fails to clearly describe what the relationship between electricity and magnetism is.

Article fails to clearly describe how much magnetic force is generated from a known quantity of electricity. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.181.91.233 (talk) 11:39, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Inventors
I was wondering since people like Tesla and troy reed made electro-magnetic vehicles, and I did recently to add a small section on its historical accuracy. TBh, there are a few dozen inventers. Electro-magnetic car inventors are actually in yildiz, troy reed, wasif kahloon, tesla are a few of them. They work with plasma or a highly advanced form of hho (a battery system) with electromagnetic induction motors even. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.255.25.193 (talk) 20:55, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Unraveling a design problem
One of the design's problems has been antennas in the circuits. However, a team of researchers in university of Cambridge have invented a new way and is to integrate the antenna on the chip. last frontier of semiconductor design would be a massive leap forward for wireless communications.

Read more here:

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-electromagnetism-enable-antennas-chip.html

MansourJE (talk) 12:40, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

about zero
Is zero negative or positive? Sandeepsiddu01 (talk) 06:06, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Your question is not relevant to electromagnetism. Try asking at Talk:Zero. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 07:00, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Better still, since this question is not about improving an article, you could try Reference_desk/Mathematics. RockMagnetist(talk) 15:57, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Chaotic and emergent phenomena
This section seems to be fringe or speculative science. Should it be part of the article?

 * Thanks @Constant314 :-) if you had to single out specific points about the section, what aspects in particular do you find to be too speculative or fringe? Previous edits claimed that QED could explain all aspects of electromagnetic phenomena, which I would be concerned about. How do we show readers that there are many electromagnetic phenomena which cannot be explained by (even by the quantum) linear electromagnetic equations i.e. Aharonov–Bohm effect, Beltrami plasma vortices, phase changes associated with superconductivity etc.Sparkyscience (talk) 21:30, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

 * I don’t know, so I am flagging the section for others to examine. But my concerns are two.  In any article there is always the tension between not enough information and too much.  An article about electromagnetism, reasonably could go into the QED under-pinning.  A “something is wrong with QED” section is two steps removed from the subject of the article.  It rightly goes into an article on QED.  That’s my opinion.  Secondly, a “QED doesn’t work” statement is extraordinary.  I would want to see solid secondary references such as main line university physics text books.  Let’s examine the statement that Aharonov–Bohm effect cannot be explained by QED.  Scientific theories never explain anything; they make predictions. From my admittedly dated readings about the Aharonov–Bohm effect was that it was predicted by QED and that is what led to the experiment.  Are you suggesting that AB is not predictable from QED?  Constant314 (talk) 22:06, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

 * Hi Constant314, thanks for going through your valid points and sorry its been a while to get back to you. I completely understand the concerns raised. I suppose the real point that I'm trying to get across is not that "QED is wrong" or a point which is two steps removed from electromagnetism. I agree such things would be too far down the rabbit hole for this article; if this is how the current revision appears to the reader then current version must be changed. What i'm trying to do (...rather badly?) is emphasise an aspect about electromagnetism that is orthogonal to both classical and quantum electrodynamics, the aspect of nonlinearity.

 * The thing that is of note about the AB effect is not that it it is a quantum phenomena... but that it is non-local. i.e. the effects occur when there is a nontrivial field potential leading to forces which are not local in nature and therefore we sometimes require non-Abelian commutation relations, where potentials can be used to create local-to-global effects, to make accurate predictions. Beltrami plasma vortices can be understood on purely on classical terms (i.e not a two steps removed quantum phenomena), but again cannot be understood through your typical linear equations, same thing with superconductivity phase transitions and the Tesla circuit example... There's more to electromagnetism then Maxwell's equations (or quantized versions) would have you believe, and these effects should be highlighted, because they make electromagnetism interesting!

 * As an aside, I did not make a "QED is wrong" statement, but i can see why you might have interpreted the above remark as such, QED works great if you can apply perturbation theory, i.e. nonlinearity converges to a simplified linear problem, but this isn't always the case. In my edit on the page, I corrected the article from "All electromagnetic phenomena can be explained in terms of quantum mechanics, specifically by quantum electrodynamics" to "[QED gives] extremely accurate predictions of quantities like the Lamb shift and measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron...[and] is one of the most accurate theories known to physics in situations where perturbation theory can be applied.

 * I would recommend skimming over Barret & Grimes (1995) to get a clearer picture of what I'm trying to get across with respect to nonlinearity. The forward by Roger Penrose seems prescient to our current conversation:

 * ''"There can be little doubt that Maxwell's equations constitute one of the great landmarks in physical theory. Their basic accuracy has been confirmed innumerable times, in many different types of experiment. Their invariance properties led Einstein to his special theory of relativity. Moreover, their gauge-theoretic interpretations led to non-Abelian generalizations, fundamental to modern particle physics. Their elegant mathematical form has provided several important influences on the development of mathematics itself.

 * These facts should not, however, deter theoretical or experimental physicists from seeking alternative descriptions, unconventional formulations, surprising electromagnetic effects, or radical generalizations. The various articles in this book provide the reader with a great variety of different kinds of approach to developments of this nature. We have historically motivated accounts, suggestions for new experiments, unconventional viewpoints and attempts at generalizations. We also see novel and ingenious formulations of electromagnetic theory of various different kinds.

 * I am sure that this book will make it clear that electromagnetism is a subject that is in no way closed to simulating new developments. It is very much alive as a source of fruitful new ideas."

 * Perhaps some rewording to this effect would be useful in highlighting to the reader that what we know about electromagnetism has had a huge impact but that it is not a closed subject? I'm not sure I've done that by any means. As for what i've already written, I certainly don't mind re-edits if not complete revision. The electromagnetism article does need a lot of work. I would be wary of wholesale deletion of the section. So long as we make it clear in the article what is well established within electromagnetism (which of course should be the majority of the article) and what is not well established i feel this subject matter which you have termed "fringe" or "speculative" (...I can't see any overtly dodgy references?) is in fact the "cutting edge" and does have a place on the article. Science, after all, is not a set of facts in textbooks but a method and process of discovery. Sparkyscience (talk) 11:42, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

 * I'm not suggesting that theoretical or experimental physicists should be deterred from seeking alternative descriptions, unconventional formulations but that rather that alternative descriptions don't belong in this article until they become main stream.

 * But lets look at Aharonov–Bohm effect. What about this is not local?Constant314 (talk) 18:12, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

 * Aharonov et al. (2016) "We have shown that the Aharonov-Bohm effect has two distinct aspects, one continuous and one instantaneous. The latter is manifestly nonlocal; it underlines the necessity of describing quantum systems via gauge-dependent quantities rather than local forces, which cannot account for abrupt changes in modular velocity."

 * You seem to be offering very little in the way of references to back up your (currently subjective) opinion that this is fringe, speculative or not mainstream. If it is a peer reviewed journal, or it is a published article by a univeristy professor in a textbook, I think most would agree that you can not just dismiss the scientific points raised in the edit with the hand-waving you have thus far done; it needs to debated with countering peer reviewed argument of equal merit. To my mind gauge theories, non-abelian groups, nonlinearity are very well developed scientific concepts and have a place in electromagnetic theory and have many interesting and surprising results that a reader may be interested in... If you have any references to back up your opinion that they have no place in electromagnetic theory... that's great... but so far you've said you "don't know" what parts in particular you want to flag...I fear you are merely operating on a hunch...or because you are not familiar with this aspect of the subject matter that must mean it is somehow wrong...

 * I apologize if I sound like I'm cross examining you. I'm just asking you what the references say since I don't have access to them.Constant314 (talk) 17:10, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

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Nearly all physical and chemical things are explained by electromagnetism & gravity?
Wikipedia says: "The electromagnetic force is responsible for practically all phenomena one encounters in daily life above the nuclear scale, with the exception of gravity. The electromagnetic force is also involved in all forms of chemical phenomena".

If I sit in a phycics or chemistry class, and watch my teacher do some physics and chemistry demonstrations, are 100% of them explained by electomagnetic force & gravity? (At high school or university).

You can assume my teacher does not own a nuclear reactor or a particle accelerator.

If there are important exceptions, please tell.

--ee1518 (talk) 15:37, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

 * Feynman in his book QED says that the electromagnetic force is responsible for all everyday phenomena except gravity and radioactivity. Radioactivity is caused by nuclear forces, so the Wikipedia statement is correct, but I would have stated it as Feynman stated it.  If you have and old watch with radium coated numerals, the glowing in the dark would be due to radioactivity. Also, the sun is powered by radioactive processes.  Constant314 (talk) 15:55, 19 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Does your chemistry teacher have a set of radioactive Fiestaware? Mine did! XOR'easter (talk) 18:44, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Wrong link
Since I can edit: the text of the Pauli exclusion principle in the section on fundamental forces is linked to the article about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, not to the article about the Pauli exclusion principle. As I assume this is wrong maybe some of the priviledged editors can correct this link.2601:280:4B00:590D:49DD:4267:E71:58E6 (talk) 19:41, 26 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Not sure what you are asking, but if you want to suggest an edit to Pauli exclusion principle then you need to make the suggestion on the talk page of that article. If you want to suggest an edit on this article, then you need to be more explicit.  It is not helpful to just say that some part of the article needs to be edited.Constant314 (talk) 20:13, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

 * It's done. --Ritchie92 (talk) 22:08, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Merge with Classical electromagnetism?
I've noticed that we have two articles with very similar title and content: electromagnetism and classical electromagnetism. Neither is in a good state, even though they are rather important articles: electromagnetism has about 30k views per month! I wonder if merging the articles could help concentrating effort into improving them? I assume electromagnetism is supposed to cover more than just classical electromagnetism, but it doesn't do it. Quantum electrodynamics is not even mentioned! Tercer (talk) 14:49, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I'd merge classical electromagnetism into here (it's not long, and what is there could be condensed a bit in the process). Then I'd add a section here about QED with a "main article: Quantum electrodynamics" tag. XOR'easter (talk) 15:27, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

"Myth" put in page as fact
Sorry I'm new so I don't know how to format very well.

In the page it says: "While preparing for an evening lecture on 21 April 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted made a surprising observation. As he was setting up his materials, he noticed a compass needle deflected away from magnetic north when the electric current from the battery he was using was switched on and off. This deflection convinced him that magnetic fields radiate from all sides of a wire carrying an electric current, just as light and heat do, and that it confirmed a direct relationship between electricity and magnetism."

If you look at Hans Christian Ørsted, it says that this is a myth, and that Hans discovered it on purpose. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cal8205 (talk • contribs)
 * Thanks for calling attention to that. XOR'easter (talk) 16:41, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

edit request
At high energy the weak force and electromagnetic force are unified as a single electroweak force. to At high energy, the weak force and electromagnetic force are unified as a single electroweak force. (missing a comma)108.46.173.109 (talk) 18:54, 11 May 2021 (UTC)
 * done Constant314 (talk) 20:02, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Edit Request
An inline citation for At high energy the weak force and electromagnetic force are unified as a single electroweak force. Is this a sentence that needs an inline citation? If so, I am requesting an inline citation for this sentence. ScientistBuilder (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 17:39, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Electromagentism Template Message
I have added several sources with inline citations. I am working on removing the template message. ScientistBuilder (talk) 19:32, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Remove or Move MagnetoHydrodynamics and Nonlinear Phenomenon Section
I want to remove or merge and move the section on magnetohydrodynamics section. The section should be expanded or become a subsection in another section for better organization. ScientistBuilder (talk) 23:05, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Proposed merge of Electricity and Magnetism (College Level) into Electromagnetism
Electricity and Magnetism (College Level) pretty clearly duplicates the scope of Electromagnetism and should be selectively merged to the latter. signed,Rosguill talk 21:13, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Support multiple merges: the body of the article spans multiple existing articles: Electrostatics, Magnetic field, Electrical network, and this one. The sections are detailed to the level of formulas and equations, not high-level explanations, so should be selectively merged to their corresponding articles.  Schazjmd   (talk)  21:53, 29 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Support It seems reasonable to do a selective merge.   scope_creep Talk  11:01, 2 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Just so you know, I am working on a GA overhaul of this page, during which I am eventually going to add a "Theory" section that will include all the material on that page. After that, the page can be deleted. Mover of molehills move me 02:05, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

 * Please note I pushed this into the draft section as it was a recently created article that has not been NPP approved. There is also a college text called Electricity and Magnetism (book). AngusW🐶🐶F  ( bark  •  sniff ) 02:28, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Please note that Wikipedia is not a textbook. AngusW🐶🐶F  ( bark  •  sniff ) 02:29, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
 * see Draft:Electricity and Magnetism (College Level) if you need to use any of the content from that AngusW🐶🐶F  ( bark  •  sniff ) 07:20, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 27 January 2023
please change "exert accelerate other charged particles" to "exert acceleration on other charged particles" Abnormalful (talk) 01:48, 27 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Done, although not exactly. Constant314 (talk) 02:33, 27 January 2023 (UTC)

Clarification on confusion with the infinite range section-MINOR EDIT
I want to edit the part where electromagnetism is compared to the other four fundamental forces, as I fear that it is quite ambiguous in explaining that only the gravitational force is the other force operating at infinite range, and my edit will clarify this ambiguity.It is a minor edit adding only that one point.The text that will be added is- The only other fundamental force apart from electromagnetism which operates at an infinite range is the gravitational force. SriCHaM (talk) 11:31, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
 * ✅ Constant314 (talk) 14:08, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Clarification on topics
Of particles or particles streams? Streams of particles can also perform elecromagnetism, as well as electric fields. --195.24.52.66 (talk) 10:45, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 2 February 2024
In the first paragraph of the article, 5th sentence "Electromagnetic forces occur between any two charged particles, causing an attraction between particles with opposite charges and repulsion between particles with the same charge, while magnetism is an interaction that occurs exclusively between charged particles in relative motion.", the first word ("Electromagnetic") should not be instead "Electrostatic"? Andreimihai56 (talk) 15:14, 2 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. Shadow311 (talk) 15:59, 2 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I changed the sentence but not quite in the way suggested. Coulomb forces work on moving charges so we can't simply substitute "electrostatic" here. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:05, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

No source for the blurb about Thales in the history section
There is no source or citation for the section that talks about Thales researching electromagnetism in ancient times. Liiammtheehowrrd (talk) 12:28, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

 * Did you verify that the ref at the end of the paragraph does not discust Thales?
 * Meyer, Herbert (1972). A History of Electricity and Magnetism. pp. 3–4.
 * Johnjbarton (talk) 16:14, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Electromagnetism