테렌스 래티건의 『브라우닝 버전』에 나타난 아가멤논 신화의 전유

Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version: Appropriation of the Agamemnon Myth

This paper examines the critical dimensions of artistic appropriation in Terence Rattigan's 1948 stage play, The Browning Version. While focusing on the play's dramatic/literary use of the myth of Agamemnon's murder dramatized earlier in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, this study shall expose to critical scrutiny the ambivalence inherent to such an act of multi-layered re-contextualization, adopted and adapted on the one hand to portray the pragmatic post-war English society and the English psyche oppressed in the age of austerity, and yet on the other hand to suggest the possibility of a different future. The paper will look at the strategies of duplicity, transformation and reversal which have allowed the playwright to negotiate the meaning of the mythic narrative in a different socio-cultural framework to offer a humanistic analysis of the conflicts and uncertainties of life. It is argued that Rattigan's once overshadowed and overlooked work be revaluated through these critical paradigms, along with its thin beam of light carrying both timely and timeless resonances.