Kategoria BISAC: Drama >> Ancient & Classical

In his play Bacchae, Euripides chooses as his central figure the god who crosses the boundaries among god, man, and beast, between reality and imagination, and between art and madness. In so doing, he explores what in tragedy is able to reach beyond the social, ritual, and historical context from which tragedy itself rises. Charles Segal's reading of Euripides' Bacchae builds gradually from concrete details of cult, setting, and imagery to the work's implications for the nature of myth, language, and theater. This volume presents the argument that the Dionysiac poetics of the...

In this book J. Peter Euben argues that Greek tragedy was the context for classical political theory and that such theory read in terms of tragedy provides a ground for contemporary theorizing alert to the concerns of post-modernism, such as normalization, the dominance of humanism, and the status of theory. Euben shows how ancient Greek theater offered a place and occasion for reflection on the democratic culture it helped constitute, in part by confronting the audience with the otherwise unacknowledged principles of social exclusion that sustained its community.

Euben makes...

Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era.

Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic...

What pleasures did Plautus' heroic tricksters provide their original audience? How should we understand the compelling mix of rebellion and social conservatism that Plautus offers? Through a close reading of four plays representing the full range of his work (Menaechmi, Casina, Persa, and Captivi), Kathleen McCarthy develops an innovative model of Plautine comedy and its social effects. She concentrates on how the plays are shaped by the interaction of two comic modes: the socially conservative mode of naturalism and the potentially subversive mode of farce. It is precisely this...

Why should Greek tragedy matter now? This book opens a dialogue between the tragic theatre in ancient Athens and the multiple performances of the modern world. In five interconnected chapters, Rush Rehm engages tragedy on its own terms, using our oldest theatre as inspiration for how we might shape the theatre of the future.

Part analysis, part polemic, this book engages the aesthetic, political and ethical challenges of Greek tragedy as a means of confronting what tomorrow's theatre can do.

Hippolytus is generally acknowledged to be one of Euripides' finest tragedies, for the construction of its plot, its use of language and its memorable characterisations of Phaedra and Hippolytus. Furthermore, it asks serious and disturbing questions about the influence of divinity on human lives. Sophie Mills considers these and many other themes in detail, setting the play in its mythological, cultural and historical contexts. She also includes discussions of major trends in interpretations of the play and of subsequent adaptations of the Hippolytus story, from Seneca to Mary...

Surviving Greek Tragedy is a history of the physical survival to the present day of the thirty-two extant tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Beginning with the first revival of the plays in the fourth century BC, it charts the course of their transmission down the centuries as they passed through the hands of actors, readers, scholars, schoolteachers, monks, publishers, translators and theatre directors.

Over the course of this 2,400-year period, the plays were at different times performed, copied, quoted, emended, excerpted, analysed, taught, translated,...

Phaedra is one of Seneca's most successful tragedies. It was the first ancient drama to be performed in the Renaissance, marking an epoch in European theatre. The myth, as reworked by Seneca on the basis of dramas by Euripides, was endowed with fresh power, and his characterisation of Phaedra, especially in her frank avowal of love to her stepson, Hippolytus, fired the imagination of later tragic poets, especially Racine. Roland Mayer introduces the reader to the complex dramatic and literary inheritance which Seneca appropriated and in his turn bequeathed, and he sets out some of the main...

Euripides' "Medea" is one of the greatest and most influential Greek tragedies. This book outlines the development of the Medea myth before Euripides and explores his uniquely powerful version from various angles. There are chapters on the play's relationship to the gender politics of fifth-century Athens, Medea's status as a barbarian, and the complex moral and emotional impact of her revenge. Particular attention is paid to the tragic effect of Medea's great monologue and the significance of her role as a divine avenger. The book ends by considering the varied and fascinating reception...

Accessible introductions to ancient tragedies discuss the main themes of a play and the central developments in modern criticism, while also addressing the play's historical context and the history of its performance and adaptation. References to Dionysus in popular culture focus on the god as the incarnation of wild and decadent behaviour, by which humans are intrigued and appalled. The god as he is portrayed in "Euripides' Bacchae" is, however, more complex, paradoxically transcending straightforward notions of the Dionysiac. "Euripides' Dionysus" blurs the dividing line between many of...