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Gilbert Murray's Euripides : The Trojan Women and other plays

Part of the Bristol Phoenix Press Classic Translations series
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In any account of the reception of Greek tragedy throughout the English-speaking world, Murray is a figure of immense importance.

It was he who unlocked the gates of commercial theatre to the performance of Greek on both sides of the Atlantic, bringing to the project his enormous personal prestige as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University and editor of the definitive Oxford Classical Text of the complete plays of Euripides.

By the 1920s over a quarter of a million copies of his translated plays had been sold, but he could never be written off as a mere populariser.

It was Murray who insisted, from the pulpit of the popular stage, on the political nature of Greek tragedy; on its historical resonances (Trojan Women and the Boer War); on its social urgency (Medea and the suffragette movement); on the religious and anthropological assumptions that permente it (his debt in Bacchae to Jane Harrison); and on the psychological truth in its delincation of character (as in Electra).

He had, too, a keen instinct for theatre and was deferred to by actors (Sibyl Thorndike), directors (Granville Barker) and playwrights (George Bernard Shaw). This volume contains five of Murray's translations from Euripides: Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, The Trojan Women and Bacchae.

His introductions and notes are also included, because it is in them that he sets out his distinctive view of each play.

James Morwood's new introduction to the volume sets the translations in their context.

An Appendix gives the hitherto unpublished parody of the plays written by Murray's former student and friend Sir Maurice Bowra.

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Product Details
Bristol Phoenix Press
1904675352 / 9781904675358
Paperback / softback
882.01
08/07/2005
United Kingdom
English
380 p.
22 cm
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Contents: Medea - Hippolytus - Electra - The trojan women - Bacchae.