Euripides: 'Helen'
Euripides: 'Helen'

Author: Euripides

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-02-21

Total Pages: 19

ISBN-13: 0521836905

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Detailed commentary, suitable for students, on one of the most skilful and original Greek tragedies.

The Structure and Performance of Euripides' Helen
The Structure and Performance of Euripides' Helen

Author: C. W. Marshall

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-12-04

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1316195279

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Using Euripides' play Helen as the main point of reference, C. W. Marshall's detailed study expands our understanding of Athenian tragedy and provides new interpretations of how Euripides created meaning in performance. Marshall focuses on dramatic structure to show how assumptions held by the ancient audience shaped meaning in Helen and to demonstrate how Euripides' play draws extensively on the satyr play Proteus, which was part of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Structure is presented not as a theoretical abstraction, but as a crucial component of the experience of performance, working with music, the chorus and the other plays in the tetralogy. Euripides' Andromeda in particular is shown to have resonances with Helen not previously described. Arguing that the role of the director is key, Marshall shows that the choices that a director can make about role doubling, gestures, blocking, humour, and masks play a crucial part in forming the meaning of Helen.

Euripides: 'Helen'
Euripides: 'Helen'

Author: Euripides

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-02-11

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 9780521545419

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This up-to-date edition offers a detailed literary and cultural analysis of Euripides' Helen, a work which arguably embodies the variety and dynamism of fifth-century Athenian tragedy more than any other surviving play. The story of an exemplary wife (not an adulteress) who went to Egypt (not to Troy), Euripides' 'new Helen' skilfully transforms and supplants earlier currents of literature and myth. The Introduction elucidates Euripides' treatment of Helen and sets the play in its wider intellectual context. It also discusses questions of genre and reception, rejecting such descriptions as 'tragicomedy' or 'romantic tragedy', and showing how later artists have responded to Euripides' unorthodox heroine and her phantom double. The Commentary's notes on language and style are intended to make Helen fully accessible to readers of Greek at all levels, while the edition as a whole is designed for use by anyone with an interest in Greek tragedy.

Helen
Helen

Author: Euripides

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 0195077105

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Transcending the literal bounds of genre, Euripides' Helen has been characterized as both a comedy and a tragedy. In this evocative translation by James Michie and Colin Leach, Euripides' delicate balance--in all its subtlety of texture and tone--is beautifully captured. Finding its source in a myth ascribed to the Sicilian poet Stesichorus, this drama centers on the myth of two Helens--a god-wrought phantom that was carried of by Paris to Troy, and the real, flesh-and-blood Helen who was mysteriously sent to Egypt. The reader encounters myriad reversals, worlds--real/ideal, tragic/comic--surprisingly juxtaposed and, as in any story of Helen, the pathos of the impossible, all allowing Euripides to comment of the futility of war and the difficult distinction between appearance and reality.