https://journals.ui.edu.ng/index.php/ijota/issue/feed 2025-08-20T13:01:25+00:00 Open Journal Systems <p><strong><em>Ibadan Journal of Theatre Arts (IJOTA) </em></strong>is a biennial publication of the Department of Theatre Arts, University of Ibadan, the premier university in Nigeria. The Department, which was founded in 1962, is also the oldest Department of Theatre Arts in Africa. The journal aims at promoting scholarship in all areas of Theatre Arts – drama, dance, music, fine and visual arts, children’s theatre, community theatre, as well as the media arts of film, radio, television and the video, plus the social media and all the new developments of the Information Age being driven by cutting edge technology. Original, well-researched, and well-written articles on these and cognate issues, concerning the arts of the stage, screen, radio, and the Internet, are welcome from all parts of the world. Such an article should not have been published elsewhere. Each article is normally subjected to a blind peer review process to determine publishability or otherwise. Papers that demonstrate the authors’ adequate awareness of current research output, as well as relevant literature on the subject of study, stand a greater chance of being accepted.</p> https://journals.ui.edu.ng/index.php/ijota/article/view/1787 2025-08-20T12:41:46+00:00 ‘Goke Akinboye akinboye@gmail.com Jonathan Asante Otchere jonathanasante@gmail.com

<p>In assessing Euripides and his tragedies, Aristotle, in his Poetics, as well as his modern apologists, generally portrays Euripides as <br>irrational, anachronistic, iconoclastic and anti-traditional. Euripides’s use of deus ex machina as a tragic device is particularly condemned on the ground that it serves as a feeble means to resolve complicated plot, thereby rendering the internal economy of his tragedies defective and dramatically disunified. This paper frowns at such condemnation by arguing that Aristotle and his corroborators have been critically unfair to Euripides. To defend Euripides, the paper, through a qualitative content analysis of three Euripidean tragedies: Medea, Hippolytus and Ion, establishes that his deus ex machina was not a contrivance that <br>only resolves complicated and knotty plot; rather, the device was part and parcel of a rational, organic and internal whole plot. <br>From the plots and analyses of the three plays, the paper points out that Euripides intends, among others, that his deus ex machina would always serve as an ironic and satiric device in resolving matters concerning mortals and immortals, especially where no witnesses could arbitrate or testify between them.</p>

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