Geopolitical shifts and economic shocks, from the Early Modern period to the 21st century, are frequently represented in terms of classical antecedents. In this book, an international team of contributors - working across the disciplines of Classics, History, Politics, and English - addresses a range of revolutionary transformations, in England, America, France, Haiti, Greece, Italy, Russia, Germany, and a recently globalised world, all of which were accorded the classical treatment.

Set at the end of the Trojan war, "Euripides' Trojan Women" depicts the women of Troy as they wait to be taken into slavery. While choral songs recall the death-throes of the great city, the scenes between the old queen, Hekabe, and the women of her family explore the consequences of the defeat, from the rape of Cassandra, through the triumphant self-exculpation of Helen, to the pitiful death of the child Astyanax, who is thrown from the walls of his ravaged city. Barbara Goff sets the pla...

Crossroads in the Black Aegean is a compendious, timely, and fascinating study of African rewritings of Greek tragedy. It consists of detailed readings of six dramas and one epic poem, from different locations across the African diaspora. Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson ask why the plays of Sophocles' Theban Cycle figure so prominently among the tragedies adapted by dramatists of African descent, and how plays that dilate on the power of the past, in the inexorable curse of Oedip...

Euripides' Medea comes alive in this new translation that will be useful for both academic study and stage production. Diane J. Rayor's accurate yet accessible translation reflects the play's inherent theatricality and vibrant poetry. The book includes an analytical introduction and comprehensive notes, and an essay on directing Medea by stage director Karen Libman. The play begins after Medea, a princess in her own land, has sacrificed everything for Jason: she helped him in his quest for...

Humour, pathos and suffering, and the culminating drama of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, give these plays a wonderful immediacy. Their action was conceived on a cosmic scale and all the enthusiasm and vitality of their writing is retained to this day. The energies of whole communities, notably at Chester, York and Wakefield, were devoted to their production and they were to influence later dramatists significantly. The grand design of the mystery plays was to celebrate the Christian st...

Oedipus, king of Thebes, is one of the giant figures of ancient mythology. Through the centuries, his story has inspired works of epic poetry, lyric poetry, tragedy, opera, a gospel musical and more. The myth has been famously deployed in psychology by Sigmund Freud. It may not be too bold to claim that Oedipus is the name from Greco-Roman mythology best known beyond the academy at the present time, thanks to Freud's famous phrase 'the Oedipus complex'. The most famous version of the Oedip...

A contemporary of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe was one of the most influential early modern dramatists, whose life and mysterious death have long been the subject of critical and popular speculation. This collection sets Marlowe's plays and poems in their historical context, exploring his world and his wider cultural influence. Chapters by leading international scholars discuss both his major and lesser-known works. Divided into three sections, 'Marlowe's works',...

The "Eumenides", the concluding drama in Aeschylus' sole surviving trilogy, the "Oresteia", is not only one of the most admired Greek tragedies, but also one of the most controversial and contested, both to specialist scholars and public intellectuals. It stands at the crux of the controversies over the relationship between the fledgling democracy of Athens and the dramas it produced during the City Dionysia, and over the representation of women in the theatre and their implied status in A...

Aristotle's 'Poetics' is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory.

Blighted and accursed families are an inescapable feature of Greek tragedy, and many scholars have treated questions of inherited guilt, curses, and divine causation. N.J. Sewell-Rutter gives these familiar issues a fresh appraisal, arguing that tragedy is a medium that fuses the conceptual with the provoking and exciting of emotion, neither of which can be ignored if the texts are to be fully understood. He pays particular attention to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes and the ...

Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames takes as its subject adaptation of Greek tragedy in the last decades, arguing that rewritings of Greek tragic texts in this period can be used as a tool to uncover a significant dialogue with postmodernism. Despite the large number of staged and written adaptations of Greek tragic texts in recent years, the idea still persists that tragedy is incompatible with postmodernism, with the long-standing debate over the demise of the genre in the mode...

In Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the women of Athens, fed up with the war against Sparta, go on a sex strike and barricade themselves into the acropolis to persuade their husbands to vote against the war. It is the most often performed of all Aristophanes' comedies. It is also, perhaps, the most misunderstood. This collection of essays by eight leading academics - written for sixth-form students and the general public alike - sets the play firmly in its historical and social context, ...