Medea and Other Plays (Oxford World's Classics)

I like modern, readable translations and these are great. There are some very nice and helpful footnotes provided which were very much appreciated. I teach Ancient Philosophy, among other topics, and I was very happy with these translations of profound works of art. Medea, for instance, is a truly alarming and impressive creation.

Joining a class, with an excellent retired professor, guiding us, helped me get much more out of my readings.The books I purchased at Amazon, depict the wars, power struggles and human interactions that led to the fall of the circa 430 BC era Grecian civilization that are plaguing our world today. Wars and human suffering seem endless....Sherry Roberts...

exactly what i needed! great edition and quality

But I love it anyway. This is a hilarious play, and I wish that more focus would be put on classroom study of hilarious texts written long ago.

Medea and Other Plays is a collection of plays: Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, and Helen.It begins with Medea, whose husband has married the daughter of Creon, the king. Medea and her childrean are banished from the land, so Medea concocts a plot to kill the king, her husband, his new wife, and the children in revenge against her spouse.She then tricks the daughter of creon into wearing cursed robes so htat she is killed, and the king with her, and then she kills her children, much to her husband's dismay.Then the next book is Hippolytus. Hippolytus begins with the banished king of Athens and his illegitimate son Hippolytus, who is not favorable towards women, so he garners the hate of Aphrodite, who concocts a plot against him. A womam claims to love him, and in secret wants to see him, but he exclaims to the world the evils of women, and with her secret out, she hangs herself. Then the king of Athens returns and thinks his son is guilty and so allows him to be punished by Poseidon, but later finds this is not true, so Hippolytus is freed, and he forgives his father before he dies.The 3rd book is Electra, the daughter of Agamemmnon and Clymnestra, who marries a poor farmer by order. The son, Orestes, was also sent away but soon returns after he is grown, and ends up staying with the farmer. Orestes then embarks to revenge his fathers death, and kills Clymnestra and her lover Aegisthus.The 4th and final book is Helen, in which Helen fears that Menelaus didnt return safely from Troy, only to meet him in person at a later date. Then they must escape from Egypt where they are, which they do by tricking Theoclymenus into giving them a boat.These 4 greek plays are excellentlly written, Euripides,afterall, was one of the greatest greek playwriters of all time, and his plays are a wonderful collection of stories.James Morwood translates them very well, so that they are fluid and easy to understand.The book is slightly over 200 pages and is an easy and enjoyable read.It is a recommendable book to anyone looking to get a copy of these plays or any greek play.

Very fast shipping ! I didn't expect it to come so quickly with standard international shipping. Besides, the book is brand new as described on the site.I am very pleased, thanks.

Outstanding edition

Euripedes (~485 BCE - 406 BCE) stands with Sophocles and Aeschylus as the great playwrights of Greek tragedy. This volume collects four of the most famous plays by Euripedes to come down to us (he wrote more than eighty, of which less than twenty have been transmitted from antiquity). They are given modern and accessible translations by James Morwood, who also contributes detailed and generally informative notes (some of the notes, though, are so obvious as to constitute minor insults to the reader's intelligence). In addition, there is an excellent Introduction by Edith Hall. The two most striking aspects of the plays are their focus on the plights of being a woman and their message that the gods are as fickle and unreliable as mortals."Medea": "Medea" is not pleasant, but it is powerful theater. Medea is betrayed by her husband Jason (of Argonauts fame), who abandons her and their two sons for the bed of the daughter of the king of Corinth. In the words of William Congreve, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Medea eliminates all who mean anything to Jason. And she gets away with it, unlike in most Greek tragedies. She exits the play a demonic Fury, leaving a trail of blood and bodies. Even so, Euripedes has rendered her a nuanced woman, deserving of a measure of sympathy if not understanding. Plus, early in the play she delivers what James Morwood says is "the most famous feminist statement in ancient literature" (which begins, "Of everything that is alive and has a mind, we women are the most wretched creatures.")."Hippolytus": Hippolytus is a prig. He is manly, a hunter extraordinaire, but he is disgusted by the notion of sexual intercourse. (He is a virgin.) He also reveres the gods and believes in the sanctity of oaths -- two traits that will betray him. His step-mother, Phaedra, is overwhelmed by intense love and sexual desire for Hippolytus, but she keeps it to herself to the point of making herself physically ill. When she finally voices her passion, all hell breaks loose. The play is flawed, but it also is brilliant. It is as Freudian as "Oedipus the King", perhaps more so. It also explores the themes of the failure of words to convey the truth and the gap between appearance and reality."Electra": This play features the culminations of a series of murders, reminiscent of Biblical "begats". Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia; Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra took up with Aegisthus while Agamemnon was off to war in Troy and when he returned Clytemnestra and Aegisthus murdered him. It is at this point that "Electra" picks up the story, telling how Electra and Orestes, Agamemnon's daughter and son by Clytemnestra, avenge Agamemnon's death by murdering first Aegisthus and then Clytemnestra, their mother. The tale is, to my mind, the most sordid of all the Greek tales of interfamily murder. (The Chorus in "Electra" seems to agree when it says, "There is no house more wretched than that of Tantalus' descendants--and there never was.") "Electra" is not as tight as the other plays in this volume, and I preferred the story as presented in Aeschylus's "Agamemnon". Consistent with the other plays in the book, Euripedes portrays the women as stronger and cleverer than the men: Clytemnestra is much more forceful than Aegisthus (the saying in Argos is that "he's the woman's man--she's not the man's woman"), and Electra, not Orestes, is the driving force behind the murder of Clytemnestra."Helen": In conventional Greek legend, Helen was carried off to Troy by Paris, thus launching the Trojan War. Here, Euripedes develops an alternative version of the Helen story. Briefly, the woman that Paris took to Troy was a phantom look-alike, while the real Helen was spirited away by Hermes and sequestered in Egypt. The Egyptian pharaoh, Theoclymenus, yearned to marry the real Helen (after all, she was the most beautiful of all women), but she kept fending him off in the forlorn hope that eventually she would be reunited with her husband Menelaos, who, of course, was off fighting the Trojans. (For his part, Menelaos did not know that the woman he eventually rescued from Troy was a Helen-look-alike.) After seventeen years, a shipwrecked Menelaos washes up on the shores of Egypt and is indeed reunited with the actual Helen and after some confusion he even recognizes her for who she really is. Now the problem is, how to get away from Egypt and Theoclymenus. "Helen" is much different in tone than the other three plays. It is clever and funny. Nobody of any importance dies. There even seems to be a happily-ever-after ending. It is a tour de force, and it is the play that I enjoyed the most.Until now I had never read Euripedes. I was excited to discover how good he is. Perhaps Morwood's translation has something to do with it, but Euripedes is more accessible than either Aeschylus or Sophocles, his plays are more nuanced, and his characters more human. He might not reach the same depths of tragedy as his two rivals, but still he is a master. If you are looking for an introduction to him, or if you wish to immerse yourself in readily readable translations of masterpieces of Greek theater, I highly recommend this volume.