Hippolytus Temporizes - Hilda Doolittle

Advantages: Hippolytus' speech slagging off women is beautiful (I'm a woman, I'm allowed to say that)
Disadvantages: The characters just don't... feel right... somehow.

...Euripides’ Hippolytus is weird. I can’t really describe it better than that. Despite the title, it’s hard to work out whether the focus of the tragedy is Phaedra, wife of Theseus, Hippolytus, her step-son, or Theseus himself. The themes within the play are easy to see, but the play doesn’t really feel like a coherent whole, somehow. The story is about the family of Theseus, the man who famously killed the Minotaur. Theseus’ son, Hippolytus, is a chaste worshipper of Artemis, much to the annoyance of Aphrodite, the goddess of the more physical aspects of love. As a punishment for him, she makes Phaedra, his step-mother, fall in love with him, which has disastrous consequences for all concerned, causing the death of Phaedra and Hippolytus and great grief to Theseus. The plot, in its simplest form, makes sense, in a soap-opera kind... Read review

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Advantages: A great example of a greek tragedy
Disadvantages: Doom and gloom

...Hippolytus, the classic Greek tragedy, won first prize in the Great Feast of Dionysus in 428 B.C. Written by Euripides, this is a dark psychological play dealing with the powerful emotions of revenge, unrequited love and jealousy. The consequences are dire. There is a suicide, false accusations of rape, banishment, a violent death, loneliness and despair. The play is cantered on the main character, that of Hippolytus, the illegitimate son of King Theseus of Trozên and the Amazon Queen, Hippolyte. After the death of his wife, Theseus remarried and Hippolytus has a stepmother, Phaedra. The young prince, footloose and fancy-free, devotes himself to the sport of hunting and the worship of Artemis (the chaste goddess of the hunt) spurning love and marriage. The goddess Aphrodite is enraged at this and swears vengeance on him. She resolves... Read review

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Advantages: Interesting and enlightening in many ways
Disadvantages: -

...descendent, Maurice Kenny. Chapters six through nine look at the more modern Western culture, from Renaissance times (Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz) through to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the names become too numerous to mention, but are well known - names such as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Dag Hammarskjold, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). In his introduction, Harvey likens the gay person to the mystic in that they are both risk takers and adventurers of a sort. They eschew conventionality of some sorts, even as they might embrace conventionality and tradition of a different sort. Interestingly, one of the commonalities of many mystical traditions and paths is that for a true mystical deepening and enlightenment, the masculine and feminine aspects should... Read review

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