Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides’ Black Sea Tragedy by Edith Hall (review)
- Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides’ Black Sea Tragedy by Edith Hall
Hall’s fascinating reception history of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris illustrates how, over many centuries, warring nations and cultures have fought to appropriate and transform the stories as well as the lands of the Black Sea and Greece. This popular drama of Iphigenia’s escape with her brother Orestes and his faithful friend Pylades from barbaric Black Sea “Tauris” is embedded in the long, bloody history of this region, poised between Greece and Christianity in the West and Russia in the East. That the city the Greeks knew as “Tauric Chersonesos” was located in what is now Crimea makes Hall’s story only that much more timely and thus compelling.
Rebecca Bushnell, Board of Overseers Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles’s Theban Plays, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance, and A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice.
