Kategoria BISAC: Drama >> Ancient & Classical

Sophocles and the Politics of Tragedy　is an inquiry into a fundamental political problem made visible through the tragic poetry of Sophocles.　In part I　Badger offers a detailed exegesis of three plays: 　Ajax,　Antigone, and　Philoctetes. These plays share a common theme, illuminating a persistent feature of political life, namely the antagonism between the heroic commitment to the beautiful and the transcendent on the one　hand, and the community's need for bodily safety and material security on the other....

Age-old scholarly dogma holds that the death of serious theatre went hand-in-hand with the 'death' of the city-state and that the fourth century BC ushered in an era of theatrical mediocrity offering shallow entertainment to a depoliticised citizenry. The traditional view of fourth-century culture is encouraged and sustained by the absence of dramatic texts in anything more than fragments. Until recently, little attention was paid to an enormous array of non-literary evidence attesting, not only the sustained vibrancy of theatrical culture, but a huge expansion of theatre throughout (and...

Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is one of the best-known and most influential ancient tragedies. As the plot develops, Oedipus, King of Thebes, comes to the realization that he has unknowingly murdered his father and married his mother, and thereupon blinds himself. The drama is presented in this edition as a critically revised Greek text with a new German translation, and includes a comprehensive introduction and continuous commentary, for which no knowledge of Ancient Greek is assumed. Additional information is provided for readers who are conversant with Greek.

Was there more to medieval and Renaissance comedy than Chaucer and Shakespeare? "Bien sur." For a real taste of saucy early European humor, one must cross the Channel to France. There, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the sophisticated met the scatological in popular performances presented by roving troupes in public squares that skewered sex, politics, and religion. For centuries, the scripts for these outrageous, anonymously written shows were available only in French editions gathered from scattered print and manuscript sources. Now prize-winning theater historian Jody...