| dc.description.abstract | Abstract
This thesis focuses on Ted Hughes’s first full-length verse drama for the stage, The House of Taurus, completed in October 1959. Begun in autumn 1957, Taurus is also part of the story of Hughes’s sojourn in the United States and his determination to use those thirty months to develop as a dramatist.
Hughes’s work as a dramatist before 1972 has not drawn the attention of scholars commensurate with the scope of the work represented by Hughes’s eighteen known and produced plays, and at least six unproduced plays, from that period. For almost fifty years, information on Taurus has depended on a few sentences from a 1959 letter written by Sylvia Plath and first published in Letters Home in 1975. The purpose of this thesis is to trace the genesis, development, and completion of Taurus, and, in so doing, offer scholars a new story of the play and playwright.
My research depends on the close reading of Hughes’s published and unpublished letters written from October 1, 1956, to January 1, 1960, and the rigorous analysis of the five extant pages of Taurus acquired from the Rose Library at Emory University. I read these fragments in the context of Hughes’s hitherto unknown early experience of the theatre and in relation to the work of key mentors, influences, and peers on both side of the Atlantic. Together, the study of the letters and play reveal that Taurus, based on Euripides’ Bacchae, was the beginning of a throughline of Greek originals that would characterize Hughes’s work for the theatre for the whole of his career. My thesis brings previously unseen documents and incidents to light, and offers an entirely new insight into Hughes's focus, influences, and aspirations at this crucial early stage of his career and thus a new way of understanding his larger oeuvre. | en_GB |
