Greek & Roman

The Tempest (Folger Shakespeare Library)

Twelfth Night (Folger Shakespeare Library)

The Three Theban Plays (Penguin Classics)

Aristotle called "Oedipus The King," the second-written of the three Theban plays written by Sophocles, the masterpiece of the whole of Greek theater. Today, nearly 2,500 years after Sophocles wrote, scholars and audiences still consider it one of the most powerful dramatic works ever made. Freud sure did. The three plays--"Antigone," "Oedipus the King," and "Oedipus at Colonus"--are not strictly a trilogy, but all are based on the Theban myths that were old even in Sophocles' time. This particular edition was rendered by Robert Fagles, perhaps the best translator of the Greek classics into English.

The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Eumenides (Penguin Classics)

Sophocles I: Oedipus The King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone (The Complete Greek Tragedies)

Aeschylus I: Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides (The Complete Greek Tragedies)

Euripides I: Alcestis, The Medea, The Heracleidae, Hippolytus (The Complete Greek Tragedies)

Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

Antigone

To make this quintessential Greek drama more accessible to the modern reader, this Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Edition™ includes a glossary of difficult terms, a list of vocabulary words, and convenient sidebar notes. By providing these, it is our intention that readers will more fully enjoy the beauty, wisdom, and intent of the play. The curse placed on Oedipus lingers and haunts a younger generation in this new and brilliant translation of Sophocles’ classic drama. The daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, Antigone is an unconventional heroine who pits her beliefs against the King of Thebes in a bloody test of wills that leaves few unharmed. Emotions fly as she challenges the king for the right to bury her own brother. Determined but doomed, Antigone shows her inner strength throughout the play. Antigone raises issues of law and morality that are just as relevant today as they were more than two thousand years ago. Whether this is your first reading or your twentieth, Antigone will move you as few pieces of literature can.

Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women (The New Classical Canon)

Aristophanes' comic plays, Lysistrata, Women at the Thesmophoria and Assemblywomen contain the earliest portrayals of actual women in the European literary tradition, and are the only such portrayals that survive from classical Athens. These plays provide a unique glimpse of women not only in their familiar domestic roles but also in relation to household and city religion and government, war and peace, theater and festival, and, of course, to men. In all three plays we find a fantastic but provocatively plausible inversion of the actual world, where women and men have changed places. Aristophanes' comic gynecocracies put male fantasies of feminism--often intersecting with those of myth, tragedy and Platonic idealism--into sharp and memorable focus, and so help us to redefine our understanding of the troubling realities to which these comic fantasies were a response.

In Staging Women the eminent Aristophanic scholar Jeffrey Henderson presents, for the first time in a single volume, all three plays in new translations. Unlike earlier versions, which typically censor, translate around, or otherwise misrepresent these texts, Henderson preserves intact all of Aristophanes' blunt and often obscene language, rough satire, social and political protest and provocative fantasy. In addition, each play is supplied with an introduction and explanatory notes. The volume includes introductory material about Aristophanes, his comic theater and the women in Aristophanic comedy. An appendix contains translations of fragments bearing on the portrayal of women in Aristophanes'lost plays.