Iphigenia in Tauris: A Drama in Verse (Angel Classics)

This drama in blank verse, the first important work of Goethe's Classical period, stands the Iphigenia-Orestes story as treated by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Racine on its head. In Goethe's drama Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces in the Trojan War, in exile as a priestess in the barbaric land of the Tauri (Crimea), breaks the Tantalid family curse. She saves the life of her brother Orestes who has murdered his mother because she murdered his father. The female identity of the central character is all-important. It is uniquely her voice that brings resolution - not by preaching values but by the visceral force of belief in the rightness of the language of the heart. Translated from the German by Roy Pascal.