The evolutoin of tragedy as a dramatic mode - from Aeschylus to today

As noted in earlier posts, classic Greek tragedy (Aeschylus) was not focused on "character" but rather on "action," so A's Oresteia (sp?) trilogy presents (off-stage) several highly dramatic actions - two sets of regicides, including a wife murdering her husband and a son murdering his mother - but the people who generate these actions are really just sketched in, they have no distinct characteristics other than their drive to avenge a perceived wrong. In the 3rd drama in this trilogy, the Eumenides, Orestes, having killed his mother to avenge her murder of his father, is pursued by an eponymous Chorus - Eumenides is sometimes translated as The Furies - that literally hound him (that is, pursue him as if he is an animal on the run) about his actions. This pursuit and the turmoil the Furies create in his mind are, I think, the first hint of the possibilities for developing a character in Greek tragedy: The Furies set Orestes apart from other characters by generating his tormented mind. These Furies are the beginning of the dramatic use of psychology in establishing character, they represent guilt and struggle, even as O believes and recognizes that his matricide was necessary and inevitable. Over the course of centuries, these external psychological forces would be integrated into the consciousness of tragic heroes, who will express their torment directly - through soliloquy, as does Hamlet and, to a degree, Othello and the Scottish king, to cite obvious examples, and through action and behavior (Lear is a good example). Later Greek tragedians, and even A in his later works, also built on the framework of the Eumenides, giving some of the characters the rudiments various psychological conditions - guilt, shame, remorse, suffering (see Philotetes and the Oedipus trilogy, for ex.). Tragic drama as a literary form has evolved and developed, up to the present day (is the Godfather trilogy a tragic drama?, the Sopranos?), probably more than any other dramatic mode.