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Penelope, review: Tom Stoppard’s 21st-century Odyssey sells its heroine short

  • Why are writers as diverse as Margaret Atwood, Wole Soyinka, Kamila Shamsie, Stephen Fry, Anne Carson and now, Tom Stoppard (who has reworked the Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope, Odysseus’s wife) compelled to return again and again to Greek myths for fresh inspiration? Despite their lexicon of fantastical monsters, capricious deities and super-humans, these myths seem to endure because the emphases of their meanings are constantly changing over the passage of time, making them inhabit