Penelope
A One-Act Poetic Drama
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
- PENELOPE Queen of Ithaca; wife of Ulysses and mother of Telemachus
- ULYSSES King of Ithaca; husband of Penelope and father of Telemachus
- TELEMACHUS their adult son and heir
- MENTOR elder of Ithaca, loyal to Ulysses
- TIMARETE wife of Mentor
- MEDON the elder attendant and herald
- IASOS the page
- LYKOS a nobleman in the hunting party
- PHAON an affected courtier
- MENEKRATES an older sea captain who has sailed under Ulysses.
- ELDERS
- ATTENDANTS
- GUESTS
- CITIZENS
- RECRUITS and MARINERS
SCENES
SETTING AND STAGING
The royal palace and harbour of Ithaca, late summer, twenty years after Ulysses’s homecoming.
Author’s Note
Penelope began with Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” to which the play owes its primary literary debt. Passages from Tennyson’s poem are quoted directly throughout.
The play also draws upon Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXVI.