The common position shared by Eliot and another great critics is that there is no writer, no matter how great and accomplished, who has not been influenced in one way or the other by other writers. Writers all catch light and heat from one another's thoughts. This is what Ogunbiyi implies when he makes the following remark on the first generation of Nigerian playwrights:

They are all very conscious of international dramatic models. The Gods (sic) for instance, is an adaptation of a classical tragic drama,King Oedipus: J.P. Clark's tragic trilogy - Song of a Goat, The Raftand The Masquerade - also follows uncritically classical specifications on tragedy. Wole Soyinka's protagonists are cast in the world of Ogun, his patron god, whom he syncretizes with classical deities and god-figure; Dionysus and Prometheus respectively (56).

These writers either studied the literatures of the Western writers while in school or became fascinated with them in their formative years as writers. It is therefore very common these days to hear of Camara Laye's indebtedness to Franz Kafka, Moliere's influence on the Ivorian Bernard Binlin Dadie and Flaubert's influence on the Cameroonian Mongo Beti, to mention but a few. These relatively young African writers show their fascination for their Western counterparts in a number of ways which include adaptations, as we find in Ola Rotimi's The Gods are not to Blame, which is an adaptation of Sophocles King Oedipus and Efua Sutherland's Edufawhich is an adaptation of the Alcestis myth; the borrowing of themes and styles as we find in Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King, believed to be an imitation of Franz Kafka, and Femi Osofisan's Kolera kolej, considered as an imitation of the absurd theatre.

        However, in this paper, we shall consider the possible links between the works of Wole Soyinka, a foremost African playwright, and Jean Giraudoux's La Guerre de Troie riaura pas lieuin his A Dance of the Forests. We shall strive to support the argument of possible influence with the striking parallels, in La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu and in the play-within-play scene inA Dance of the Forests.