This short monograph has its roots, as the preface declares, in the author’s bachelor and master’s dissertations, which were respectively about Euripides’ and Sophocles’ Electra plays and later developed into a doctoral thesis. With the addition of Aeschylus’ Choephori, it offers a comprehensive discussion of characterisation through language in the three tragedians’ Electra plays. (The exclusion of Euripides’ Orestes is understandable for the sake of coherence, but could have enriched the book by allowing at least an occasional look at a play that is less intensely oriented towards its Aeschylean predecessor.) C. defines idiolect as an individual character’s ‘typische Art und Weise zu sprechen’ (p. 13); this concept forms the unifying thread for the book’s analysis, although often the discussion develops in a more traditional direction through the lens of intertextuality.
The book consists of three chapters. The introduction defines and exemplifies ‘idiolect’ outside the Electra plays. A chapter on secondary characters moves from the nurse in Choephori, via the tutor in Sophocles’ Electra, to two figures in Euripides, the noble farmer and the old man who facilitates the pivotal recognition and planning scene; the final section is dedicated to Aegisthus in all three plays (C. does not take a position on the relative chronology of Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra plays). The final, longer chapter is dedicated to the main characters, tracing the development of Orestes, Electra and Clytemnestra across the three plays. The conclusion is minimal, occupying just over a page.
C. introduces the concept of idiolect through a combination of ancient and modern examples. The latter, taken from Astrid Holleeder’s autobiographical writing and the short stories of J.D. Salinger, are designed to make the framework of idiolect analysis more accessible, but this reader found that more space was dedicated to them than felt productive; Salinger’s use of linguistic elements for characterisation, in particular, is clearly an authorial choice, but this does not prove that Greek tragedians were invested in characterisation through idiolect to anywhere close to a similar degree. This cannot be argued a priori, and the rest of the book constructs a much better case for the idea that the analysis of individual characters’ manner of speaking can enrich our understanding of tragedy, both in its composition (interesting points are made about how authors may have chosen certain modes of phrasing over others, although the reliance on artificially created alternatives is methodologically dissatisfying) and in its reception. The rest of the introduction makes for occasionally frustrating reading: the list of techniques for the characterisation of characters in tragedy (pp. 29–31) is built mainly on the basis of examples from Salinger and is not referred to again in the rest of the work; the summary of existing research is cursory.
The chapter on secondary characters reveals some further unevenness, perhaps due to the process of turning a kernel of work about Sophocles and Euripides into a complete analysis of the three Electra plays. The discussion of the nurse in Choephori at the same time is overly detailed (a three-page synoptic comparison of critical editions for ll. 734–65 is provided for the sake of ultimately few variants) and does not add much to existing scholarship. C.’s main original suggestion, that the nurse’s request that the chorus clarify the ambiguous question they pose in l. 766 reveals that she is not a native speaker of Greek, strikes me as a misunderstanding of the interaction: through their reply and the following stichomythia, the chorus draws the nurse into a conspiracy to help Orestes, and the nurse’s request for them to clarify what they want from her is the first step towards contributing to this developing plot. On the other hand, C.’s analysis of minor characters in Sophocles and Euripides provides some of the best examples of how close attention to character speech and style can help readers unlock layers of meaning even in apparently simple/minor characters: he convincingly argues that the tutor’s language in Sophocles reveals his morally ambiguous position as a perverted father figure, and that the old man who plays such a central role in the extended recognition and planning scenes in Euripides’ Electra (487–698) is a parodic homage to Aeschylus. The extensive discussion of Aegisthus’ characterisation in the three plays, and how Sophocles in particular uses the Aeschylean model to introduce moral and emotional instability, is another example of how C.’s method can enrich our reading; the most interesting insights seem to come from his attention to intertextual resonances rather than idiolect or language in general. This is a recurring problem throughout the book, and it is my most significant gripe with the methodological framing: the analysis of Castor’s speech in Euripides’ Electra (pp. 35–40), which offers the first example of C.’s method, primarily relies on intertextual parallels with Homer and Aeschylus, as do the analysis of the Old Man and much of the discussion of the main characters in the last chapter. It is unclear what the linguistic details add to a solid literary analysis, and C.’s attempts at introducing quantitative remarks about the frequency of mostly extremely rare word forms appear thin. Another shortcoming of the Aegisthus section is the author’s approach to gender, and particularly the question of how far Aeschylus’ Aegisthus is presented as feminine: C. uncritically adopts P.C. Boutens and P. Groeneboom’s description of Aegisthus as ‘vrouwkeerl’ (p. 64), a term that betrays a concerning lack of attention for the nuances of gender nonconformity in both ancient and modern discourse, and thereby undermines the strength of his analysis of how language is used to express a character’s gender positioning.
The chapter on the main characters again alternates between examples of a convincing and innovative analysis, using linguistic features to support bold literary interpretation (especially on Electra: her use of particles in Aeschylus reveals that she is not at all vulnerable or inexperienced; the idea that she is similar to her mother is not at all a Sophoclean or Euripidean innovation, but is already unsettlingly present in Choephori), and some significant limitations: the section on Orestes does not consider Eumenides and again mainly raises points about intertextuality rather than linguistic characterisation; the section on Clytemnestra also largely explores parallels between the later Electra plays and Aeschylus. I was surprised not to find any mention of the curse of the Atreidae or of hereditary guilt in a chapter (and a book) that ultimately argues that Clytemnestra’s children are fated to become like her.
As a non-native speaker, I found C.’s German pleasantly readable. Translations from Greek occasionally create sociolinguistic resonances that felt inappropriate to me and to native speakers I consulted (on p. 70, the proposed translation of Eteocles’ address in Seven against Thebes 202 is in a dialectal, lower-class coded variant that does not suit the original context). The book assumes a multilingual reader, as it includes quotes in multiple European languages (translations for Dutch are provided, although not on p. 119; Catalan, Portuguese and Italian are left untranslated). References are occasionally missing (e.g. to Brown and Levinson on p. 75, where their politeness theory approach is mentioned without further details). Overall, the book is clearly aimed at scholars, who should be willing to appreciate it for its strengths as well as its limitations; without needing to be convinced by all of C.’s conclusions, readers will find that it stimulates further thinking about characterisation and intertextuality, if occasionally by inviting disagreement.
