Advanced Search Request a Book

ORDERS

Readings Orders 0

DEMANDS

Readings Demands 0

Grief Lessons: Four Plays By Euripides
[Paperback - 2008]
euripides
Out of Stock
Availability in 4-6 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: $16.95
Our Price: Rs.3845 Rs.3460
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.385
Category: Literature
Sub-category: Drama
Publisher: New York Review Books | ISBN: 9781590172537 | Pages: 312
Shipping Weight: | Dimensions:
Notify

Description

Now in paperback. Euripides, the last of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens, reached the height of his renown during the disastrous Peloponnesian War, when democratic Athens was brought down by its own outsized ambitions. “Euripides,” the classicist Bernard Knox has written, “was born never to live in peace with himself and to prevent the rest of mankind from doing so.” His plays were shockers: he unmasked heroes, revealing them as foolish and savage, and he wrote about the powerless–women and children, slaves and barbarians–for whom tragedy was not so much exceptional as unending. Euripides’ plays rarely won first prize in the great democratic competitions of ancient Athens, but their combustible mixture of realism and extremism fascinated audiences throughout the Greek world. In the last days of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian prisoners held captive in far-off Sicily were said to have won their freedom by reciting snatches of Euripides’ latest tragedies. Four of those tragedies are presented here in new translations by the contemporary poet and classicist Anne Carson. They are Herakles, in which the hero swaggers home to destroy his own family; Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, in which Hektor’s widow takes vengeance on her Greek captors; Hippolytos, about love and the horror of love; and the strange tragic-comedy fable Alkestis, which tells of a husband who arranges for his wife to die in his place. The volume also contains brief introductions by Carson to each of the plays along with two remarkable framing essays: “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form” and “Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra.”

About the Author

Euripides (Greek:Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along withAeschylusandSophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along withHomer,Demosthenes, andMenander.Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre ofWilliam Shakespeare's Othello,Jean Racine's Phèdre, ofHenrik IbsenandAugust Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander andGeorge Bernard Shaw.His contemporaries associated him withSocratesas a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such asAristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.

Also by the Same Author

View All
Ten Plays (Translation)
[Paperback - 2006]
euripides
Out of Stock
Availability in 4-6 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: $7.95
Our Price: Rs.1545 Rs.1390
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.155
Medea And Other Plays
[Paperback - 1963]
euripides
On Demand
Availability in 4-6 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: $11
Our Price: Rs.2095 Rs.1781
Standard Discount: 15%
You Save: Rs.314
Electra And Other Plays (Translation)
[Paperback - 2004]
euripides
On Demand
Availability in 4-6 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: $14
Our Price: Rs.2645 Rs.2248
Standard Discount: 15%
You Save: Rs.397
The Bacchae And Other Plays (Translation)
[Paperback - 1973]
euripides
On Demand
Availability in 4-6 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: $13
Our Price: Rs.2495 Rs.2121
Standard Discount: 15%
You Save: Rs.374
Euripides:Ten Plays
[Paperback - 1998]
euripides
On Demand
Availability in 4-6 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: $7.95
Our Price: Rs.1695 Rs.1441
Standard Discount: 15%
You Save: Rs.254

Bestsellers in Literature

View All
Milk And Honey
[Paperback - 2015]
rupi kaur
In Stock
List Price: £14.99
Our Price: Rs.3345 Rs.3010
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.335
Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass
[Hardback - 2020]
lana del rey
In Stock
List Price: £16.99
Our Price: Rs.4245 Rs.3820
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.425
Only Dull People Are Brilliant At Breakfast: Little Black Classics 119
[Paperback - 2016]
oscar wilde
Out of Stock
Availability in 2-4 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: £3
Our Price: Rs.645 Rs.580
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.65
Conversations On Love
[Paperback - 2022]
natasha lunn
Out of Stock
Availability in 2-4 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: £10.99
Our Price: Rs.2395 Rs.2155
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.240
Healing Through Words
[Hardback - 2022]
rupi kaur
In Stock
List Price: £16.99
Our Price: Rs.5045 Rs.4540
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.505
The Night Is Darkening Round Me: Little Black Classics 63
[Paperback - 2015]
emily bronte
Out of Stock
Availability in 2-4 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: £3
Our Price: Rs.545 Rs.490
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.55