This research examines the theme of disorderliness and its relationship to the desire for social order sanctioned by law as treated in Aeschylus's Eumenides, the third play of the Orestia, and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The research will review the action of each play and explore how order gives way to justice (or to idiosyncratic ideas of justice) in the action of each, as well as the functional role that prevailing (and presumably settled) law plays in bringing the dramatic conflict to a close. It will be argued that closure of conflict is not necessarily the same thing as conflict resolution and that the impact of each play derives power from the fact that the end of action poses an interrogation of the claims to legitimacy that the reassertion of more orderly experience may have.
The resolution of the Oresteia that takes place with the Eumenides cannot be understood without fairly detailed reference to the curse of the house of Atreus of Argos, which is bound up with the legend of the Trojan war and which is rife with complex causal relationships and actions that long predate the trial of Orestes before Athena in the Eumenides. The curse began when Atreus killed sons of his brother Thyestes, who had seduced Atreus's wife. After a banquet in which Atreus fed Thyestes's children to him, Thyestes laid a curse on Atreus's descendants. Atreus's two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, married two sisters, Clytemnestra and Helen, respectively, and when Helen either eloped with or was abducted by Paris to Troy, Agamemnon, like Menelaus, assembled an army of Greeks and prepared to sail for Troy. But that was made possible only after Agamemnon succumbed to a demand by the goddess Artemis that he offer his daughter Iphigenia as a propitiating sacrifice (Olson 171ff; Graves 50ff passim). According to Hegel's view of the Oresia, Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia sets up the entire scheme of manifest action in the Oresteia:
[Agamemnon's sa...