In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Art of Euripides: Dramatic Technique and Social Context
  • David Sansone
Donald J. Mastronarde . The Art of Euripides: Dramatic Technique and Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xiii, 361. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-521-76839-9.

According to Richard Buxton (Persuasion in Greek Tragedy [Cambridge 1982] 147), "Euripides is a dramatist of bewildering variety and puzzling contradictoriness. Far more than Aischylos or Sophokles, he defies reduction to a simple formula." Mastronarde's splendid new book shows that its author is not only fully aware of this perceived difference between Euripides and his fellow tragic poets, but is sensitive to the reasons for the perception. Comparative assessments of the fifth-century tragedians are to be found in the influential works of early critics like Aristophanes and Aristotle, whose judgments inevitably affected the winnowing that took place in late antiquity and that resulted in the "selection" of a small number of plays by each dramatist. In the case of Euripides, however, we have been granted a bonus, in the form of the random survival of the eight alphabetic tragedies and one satyr play. As a result, the output of Euripides appears bewilderingly variegated, but, as Mastronarde recognizes, we cannot be certain that a random sample of the lost plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles would not present a comparably broad range. For this reason, The Art of Euripides is an important contribution not only to Euripidean scholarship but to the understanding of fifth-century Attic tragedy in general.

Mastronarde's title is chosen in tribute to Thomas Rosenmeyer's 1982 book on Aeschylus (vii). Accordingly, we are given a series of chapters devoted to various features of Euripides' "art," such as his use of the chorus, his treatment of women characters, experiments with dramatic structure, and the way in which the dramatist deploys rhetoric to shine a spotlight on both characters and issues. We are spared a discussion of Euripides the man, about whom, after all, we know nothing reliable. Instead, the opening chapter is taken up with an overview of the reception of Euripides' plays, beginning with his contemporary Aristophanes and culminating with an excellent and well-balanced outline of trends in Euripidean criticism since the mid-twentieth century (14-25), as well as a brief statement of the book's "approaches and scope" (25-28). Mastronarde's approach is "eclectic, flexible, and wary of totalizing interpretations" (25); like the work of Euripides himself, Mastronarde's book is "exploratory and aporetic" (viii). Portions of the book have appeared in various publications, ranging in date from 1986 to 2005 (ix-x), but the parts are well integrated into a coherent and consistent whole.

Typical of Mastronarde's undogmatic method are chapters 2 and 3, which examine matters of genre and structure. Given the hybrid nature of the tragic genre, whose DNA is almost indistinguishable from that of satyr play and whose ancestors include Homeric and cyclic epic, choral lyric and iambic narrative (54), it is understandable that the genre can accommodate the variety of tones and outcomes exhibited by plays like Bacchae and Medea on the one hand and Helen and Alcestis on the other. In response to criticisms such as Swinburne's notorious condemnation of "such shapeless and soulless abortions as the Phoenissae and the Hercules Furens" (A Study of Ben Jonson [London 1889] 179), Mastronarde patiently guides the reader along a "continuum of possibilities" (64) that stretches from the tightly constructed Hippolytus to the more "open" Orestes. And yet both plays employ their differing structures with equal effectiveness to explore similar issues of vengeance, coercion, and alienation. The same approach is adhered to through the remaining chapters, of which the last, on male characters, is perhaps the most illuminating. In it, the extraordinary range of Euripidean men is shown to illustrate the capacity of [End Page 274] the tragic genre to provide "an arena of fantasy or alternative experience that invites the audience to identify temporarily with figures of many statuses" (282).

In an effort to make The Art of Euripides accessible to less experienced readers Mastronarde includes a brief guide to Euripides' plays (28-43), which contains clear and accurate summaries of the action of...

pdf

Share