La mort d'Achille

This play was difficult for a number of reasons, the first being that it lacks the presence of a chorus to transition between acts and explain to the audience their implications. Previously I had thought that the chorus was unnecessarily repetitive, but for the majority of the time I found myself thinking that a chorus would help me understand and pull me out of the confusing dialogue. The other complicating factor in understanding this play is that it does not follow the canonical death  of Achilles that we know of, but it follows another version where Achilles falls in love with Priam's daughter and is subsequently killed by Paris. This was a different experience than many of the other Renaissance tragedies that I have read where I knew exactly what the action would be. Here, I had an understanding that Achilles would die, but I did not know how or under what circumstances. The struggle to understand the implications of the text, rather than its poetry which is the real meat of Renaissance tragedies, meant that I was missing out on the point of the play. This may just be a personal experience, but I found the play confusing and difficult to follow the action, or lack thereof. It made me long for the simplicity of neoclassical drama, with its clarity, repetition, and straightforward plot, but also it is clear why those principles grew out of the messy plots of the Renaissance.