SOURCE: Swales, Martin. “‘Die neue sitte’ and Metaphors of Secular Existence: Reflections on Goethe's Iphigenie.” Modern Language Review 89, no. 4 (October 1994): 902-15.

In the following essay, Swales surveys the major thematic concerns in Iphigenie auf Tauris.

Whatever kind of work Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris may be held to be, it is not usually described as a ‘problem play’. On the contrary: in its (to invoke a famous phrase) ‘avoidance of tragedy’, in its conciliatory glory, it is frequently (and particularly by present-day students, in my experience) felt to be problematic only in virtue of its non-problematic condition: that is, in its serene transcendence of the darkness which its original material (that of the Greek legend) enshrines. Iphigenie lightens every darkness, psychological, political, and theological. In a gesture of thoroughly benign intertextuality, Goethe's play invokes the older (Euripidean) model, but only, it would seem, in order to banish it resolutely...