Six Greek Tragedies: Persians; Prometheus Bound; Women of Trachis; Philoctetes; Trojan Women; Bacchae

(Paperback)

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Description

The work of these three Athenian playwrights became the touchstone for drama for the next two and a half thousand years. This volume contains Aeschylus' "Persians", the earliest surviving Greek tragedy; his "Prometheus Bound", presenting an archtype of the human condition; Sophocles' "Women of Trachis", protraying Heracles death through his jealous wife's mistake; his "Philoctetes", which presents a moral debate and a young man's realization of the importance of loyalty to his own ideals; Euripides "Trojan Women", an anti-war play; and his "Bacchae", a play full of paradoxes which functions at many levels.

Author Bio

J. Michael Walton has published and edited seven books on classical theatre history and has nine translations of Euripides plays in print, many on the Methuen Drama list. He is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Hull where he taught from 1965 to 2002. While there he directed numerous plays and taught courses in Classical Theatre, Masks and Puppets, Russian Theatre, American Theatre, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Theatre, Directing and Acting. Frederic Raphael was born on August 14th 1931 in Chicago, and emigrated to England with his parents in 1938. He was educated at independent schools in Sussex and Surrey, before studying at St John's College, Cambridge. His career spans work as a screenwriter and a prolific novelist and journalist. In 1965 Raphael won an Oscar for the 1965 movie Darling, and two years later received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Two for the Road. He collaborated on the screenplay of Stanley Kubrick's last film Eyes Wide Shut, and wrote a controversial memoir of their time together, Eyes Wide Open in 1999. J. Michael Walton has published and edited seven books on classical theatre history and has nine translations of Euripides plays in print, many on the Methuen Drama list. He is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Hull where he taught from 1965 to 2002. While there he directed numerous plays and taught courses in Classical Theatre, Masks and Puppets, Russian Theatre, American Theatre, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Theatre, Directing and Acting. Kenneth McLeish studied Classics and Music at Worcester College, Oxford. Once a full-time translator, author and dramatist, he published extensively including The Good Reading Guide, Shakespeare's People, The Theatre of Aristophanes, Companion to the Arts in the Twentieth Century, Myth, The Listener's Guide to Classical Music and Crucial Classics (both with Valerie McLeish) and The Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought (as general editor). His original plays and his translations - from ancient Greek drama, as well as from Strindberg, Ibsen Moliere and Strindberg - have been widely performed, most notably by the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.