ABSTRACT
"The Greek Tragedy is a dark problem", announces Thomas De Quincey at the beginning of his essay, "Theory of Greek Tragedy". For De Quincey, Greek Tragedy "stands in the very same circumstances" as the play within the play of Hamlet, a derealized "life within a life which the painter sometimes exhibits to the eye, and which the Hamlet of William Shakespeare exhibits to the mind". The influence of Greek tragedy on De Quincey's writings had not received much attention before Nigel Leask's article appeared. Leask offers a developmental reading of De Quincey's aesthetics of murder, moving from the "Knocking" essay of 1823 and the first two "Murder" essays of 1827 and 1839 through the period of De Quincey's writings on Greek tragedy to the final "Postscript" to the "Murder" essays, published in 1854. De Quincey's understanding of the "sub-liminal" or sublime power of hidden violence depends on patriarchal cultural assumptions endemic to classical Greece.
