SOURCE: Long, Chester Clayton. “Cocteau's Orphée: From Myth to Drama and Film.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 51, no. 3 (October 1965): 311-25.

In the following essay, Long contrasts the mythical, dramatic, and cinematic versions of Orphée, emphasizing Cocteau's versions of the Greek myth.

1.

No one should any longer question the “distortion” of myth in a poet's work, especially if the poet is writing for the theatre. The free adaptation of whichever of the many versions of a particular myth a poet happens to have at hand during composition is a long and venerable tradition. The Greeks, and specifically Aristotle, adjured the poet not to sacrifice dramatic excellence in the interest of slavish imitation of his model. And that makes perfectly good sense, for the structures of myth, drama, and film are not the same, nor are their functions.

A current style among some critics is to deal with these...