Iphigenia in Tauris

A Play in Five Acts

 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (translated by Charles E. Passage)

 

In English translation.   A play that has, generation after generation, won fervent admirers among thoughtful readers! Five good people enact this drama. There are no villains. Gaudy passions and horrendous crimes are acknowledged as parts of life, but relegated to areas beyond our view. The five good people are engaged in a poignant discussion of what constitutes right conduct in the midst of a situation made difficult as a result of such passions and crimes. They consult both the rational mind and the intuitive heart, and they arrive at a decision that is mixed of sadness and joy, yet that which is right and inevitable. A great deal happens in this play, and what happens is both profoundly significant for all of us and deeply moving as well. Iphigenia in Tauris, which Thomas Mann termed supreme among the works of German literature, is a subtle psychological document by a poet whose language and nationality were German but whose mentality was at the very least European. Even that term suggests a false limitation, for in actuality, Goethe’s mind was concerned with the universally human. This dramatic poem is likewise universally human. Its “Greekness” is a mere veil wherewith to signify that it is of no one era and of no one nation, but rather true in any time and in any place.

Götz von Berlichingen

Hauptmann, Three Plays Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen Plenzdorf, The New Sufferings of Young W. Weiss, Marat/Sade