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Simon Goldhill and Edith Hall (Eds.), Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 336.
The present volume is dedicated to Professor Pat Easterling as a token of honour for her life-long studies in Greek literature as also for her guidance to a generation of scholars over decades active at Cambridge in exploring new horizons in the Greek literary traditions. Pat's efforts in publishing the Cambridge History of Classical Literature and the Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy remain a source of encouragement and enlightenment for the generations of students, scholars and even common readers of the Greek literary history and criticism.
The thirteen essays collected in the present volume are distributed under four sections: an introduction followed by a section that looks at the relationship between the audience and the actors on stage, each of the three essays presupposing as also delineating Sophocles' understanding of the tragic genre as a democratic behaviour, i.e., Sophocles' idea that tragedy involves at once four factors such as acting, audience, deliberations and judgements all portraying the political character of the genre called "tragedy". The next section focuses upon a single, but the key Sophoclean figure, Oedipus. The fourth section is devoted to theoretical discourses that emerge from the tragic texts themselves constructing the tragic tradition through the three great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides who concentrated on the state of human life as conditioned by the interplay of divine authority and human inabilities, stretching this tradition also over a long time-scale - to Plutarch and Shakespeare.
In the introductory essay the editors offer an historical account of the Sophoclean scholarship starting with Richard Jebb's commentary on Antigone. During this phase of the early twentieth century literary appreciation in general and appreciation of the Greek tragedy in particular were heavily drawn upon the Hegelian model of the German critics who were in search for 'ideal beauty' and 'truth to human nature' the qualities suitable for the Victorian model of social ethics and human character. Anumber of Greek scholars such as Gilbert Murray, Von Wilamowitz, Karl Reinhardt, H.D.E Kitto, Pietro Pucci, C.M. Bowra and R.I.P. Winnington-Ingram are discussed with a view to highlighting the growth and construction of a tradition of tragic criticism (adopted by A.C. Bradley...