Kategoria BISAC: Drama >> Ancient & Classical

About the Series: For over 100 years...

Includes the plays Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, collectively known as the Theban plays. Starting with Oedipus the King and ending with the ultimate sacrifice of Antigone, his daughter the plays follow the trials of a family cursed by the edict of an oracle that "you will kill your father and marry with your mother." From the fourth century BC - when Aristotle took Oedipus the King as his model tragedy, the influence of Sophocles' great plays has been assured. These three great tragedies have a relevance and immediacy as metaphors for some of the most fundamentally...

A dramatist whose trademark was the unexpected, Euripides has constantly challenged and intrigued audiences, from Athens of the fifth century BC to the present. The three plays in this volume demonstrate Euripides' versatility. Hippolytos (which was turned into Phedre by Racine), deals with sexual passion, incest and abstinence; Suppliants (a version of the Antigone story) sets the play in Eleusis and dramatises the moment when the mothers of the dead sons of Oedipus beg Theseus to go to Thebes and demand their sons' bodies for burial. In Rhesos, all the confusion of sentry duty, the...

Always controversial, Euripides' plays are now celebrated for the subtlety of their characterisation and their unorthodox dramatic style. This volume contains three of his finest tragedies: Medea, the abandoned wife, who murders her own children; The Phoenician Women, a further twist in the story of Oedipus and Jocasta; and Bacchae, a macabre and complex play, about the power and irrationality of Dionysos. These translations are by David Thompson and J. Michael Walton.
With an introduction by J. Michael Walton

The most controversial of the Greek tragedians, Euripedes is also the most modern in his sympathies, a dramatist who handles the complex emotions of his characters with extraordinary depth and insight.

Euripedes's play is based on the myth of Jason and Medea, but gives it a decidedly feminist slant. Many critics have read the play as the first example of feminist theatre, seeing Medea as a feminist heroine. Others have argued that Euripedes is showing us how a woman shouldn't behave. All the action of the play takes place in Corinth, and Jason has left Medea in order to marry...

Antigone, defying her uncle Creon's decree that her brother should remain unburied, challenges the morality of man's law overruling the laws of the gods. The clash between her and Creon with its tragic consequences have inspired continual reinterpretation.

The plot revolves around King Creon who believes that a traitor in the kingdom does not warrant a proper burial, and Polyneices has died a traitor. However, the traitor's sister, Antigone, protests against Creon's refusal to bury her brother and, in light of her rebellion, is ordered by the king to be buried alive, despite being...

These three plays by the great comic playwright Aristophanes (c. 446-386 BCE), the well-known Lysistrata, and the less familiar Women at the Thesmophoria and Assemblywomen, are the earliest surviving portrayals of contemporary women in the European literary tradition. These plays provide a unique glimpse of women not only in their familiar domestic roles but also in relation to household and city, religion and government, war and peace, theater and festival, and, of course, to men.

This freshly revised edition presents, for the first time in a single volume, all three plays in faithful...