Federica Boero

The article analyses two rewritings of Aeschylus’ Oresteia written by Irish authors – Seamus Heaney’s The Mycenae Lookout and Colm Tóibín’s House of Names – investigating the common needs that motivated their interest in the tragedy and their different approach to it. In 1996, Heaney published The Mycenae Lookout, a sequence of five poems, describing the tragic event from the point of view of the sentinel, who waits for the signal of the king’s return from Troy. The background of the rewriting is the civil war in Northern Ireland...