ABSTRACT
Many of the plays that have survived, including the Cyclops, incorporate and embellish characters and events from Homeric narratives, all of which helps to comprise a quasi-mythical Hellenic past that the dramatists brought into the present. Cyclops recapitulates an episode from The Odyssey in which Odysseus, on his return from the Trojan War is imprisoned by the Cyclops who feasts on some of his crew. The alternative to stoic acceptance is a focus on human activity, especially of the kind that violates moral and ethical norms, of which crime is a cardinal example. Thus, a combination of stoic acceptance, and an assertion of individuality alongside a willingness to accept things as they are was what some Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists found so appealing, and it addresses, modifies and adapts the question of motivation that in its various forms had come down from ancient Greek drama.
