Trifles By Susan Glaspell Essay

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Tragedy is an imitation of an action of high importance, complete and of some amplitude; in language enhanced by distinct and varying beauties; acted not narrated; by means of pity and fear effecting its purgation of these emotions.

“Trifles”
By
Susan Glaspell

Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was born in Davenport, Iowa to a grain dealer. She went to school in Des Moines at Drake University. While there she worked as a reporter. She later settled in New York’s Greenwich Village. She founded the Province Town Players with her husband, George Cram Cook, in 1915. This would be the first influential noncommercial theater troupe in America. In the summers of 1915 and 1916, the Players staged the plays of Eugene O’Neill and works by John Reed, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Glaspell herself. Moving their company to New York, they changed the company’s name to “Playwrights’ Theater. Glaspell has written several …show more content…

His first victory was won in the Athenian spring drama in 408 B.C. He has written more than 120 plays and only seven survived- “Ajas,” “Antigone,” “Oedipus the King,” “Electra,” “Philoctetes,” “The Trachinian Woman,” and “Oedipus at Colonus.” There are only a thousand fragments of the lost plays that still remain. His last play “Oedipus at Colonus” set twenty years after “Oedipus the King,” which showed the king blind and with old age, cast out by his sons, but his daughter Antigone by his side. Sophocles was nearly ninety when he wrote it.
Oedipus, the main character, is the King of Thebes. He has killed his father and slept with his mother unknowingly. This play focuses on him and his mission to find out who killed King Laius. The setting is at the palace of Thebes in the city of Thebes, Ancient Greece. The narrator moves from character to character and is in third person, omniscient. The narrator tells the thoughts and experiences of all the characters in the