Viewing Agamemnon in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract Aeschylus, the Romantic; Sophocles the mid-Victorian; Euripides the modernist. So goes the general assessment of the reception of the Greek tragedians in nineteenth-century Britain.1 There is, of course, evidence in support of such a claim. The Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus, was the Wrst translation of Aeschylus to appear in English and it becomes in a very real sense the central Greek text for the British Romantic period: Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse drama Prometheus Unbound (1820) are but the Wrst in a long line of early nineteenth-century engagements with the Titanic.