ABSTRACT
The triple imperative to ‘Cease’ seems self-directed, as though the Chorus were commanding itself to stop its imaginings, its lyric voicings. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the stanza suggests, should ‘cease’, and so, too, should Hellas. It is as though the work as a whole were conscious that, unless it ends and ends quickly, it will have to go on confronting the inescapable fact that ‘hate and death’ will ‘return’. The end of Hellas encompasses a more nuanced perspective than is allowed for by the play’s reputation as a piece of philhellenic propaganda. Certainly, what is comparatively rare is recognition of the artistic subtlety with which Hellas shapes an outlook that is shiftingly, fluidly ambivalent and complex. Wreckage of hope is the conjectured ground for hope’s unremitting creativity. In Hellas, hope is at once under strain and capable of a desperate resilience.
