Surviving Greek Tragedy

"Surviving Greek Tragedy" is a history of the physical survival to the present day of the thirty-two extant tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Beginning with the first revival of the plays in the fourth century BC, it charts the course of their transmission down the centuries as they passed through the hands of actors, readers, scholars, schoolteachers, monks, publishers, translators, theatre directors, and so on.

Over the course of this 2,400-year period, the plays were at different times performed, copied, quoted, emended, excerpted, analysed, taught, translated, censored, adapted, or merely left to moulder in a library, as each successive culture charged with their safe-keeping saw fit.

In the last thirty years Greek tragedy has become the medium through which most people encounter the classical heritage, and in the book Garland gives extensive coverage to modern stagings of the plays all over the world, taking this story right up to the present.