Explores Euripides' use of monody, or solo actor's song, to express emotion and develop character in his late tragedies.

This work challenges recent critical assessments that emphasize the allegedly subversive elements in Euripides' play. The Orestes is found to present a curious mélange of early and late Euripidean features, resulting in a drama where the tragic potential of Orestes' predicament becomes lost amid the moral, political and situational chaos that dominates the late Euripidean stage. Throughout, emphasis is placed on reading the Orestes in light of Greek stage conventions and the poet's own practice. Of particular interest are: an original examination, in light of Greek rhetorical practice, of Orestes' agon with Tyndareus; an analysis of the Phrygian's monody as a cunning hybrid of Timothean nome and traditional messenger speech; and a re-evaluation of the play's troubling deus ex machina.

In Greek tragedy, women constantly struggle to control language. This book shows how aspects of womena (TM)s communicationa "song, silence and secret-keeping as female verbal genres, and the challenges of speaking out of placea "constitute a decisive factor in Euripidesa (TM) portrayal of gender.

The Music of Tragedy offers a new approach to the study of classical Greek theater by examining the use of musical language, imagery, and performance in the late work of Euripides. Naomi Weiss demonstrates that Euripides’ allusions to music-making are not just metatheatrical flourishes or gestures towards musical and religious practices external to the drama but closely interwoven with the dramatic plot. Situating Euripides’ experimentation with the dramaturgical effects of mousike within a broader cultural context, she shows how much of his novelty lies in his reinvention of traditional lyric styles and motifs for the tragic stage. If we wish to understand better the trajectories of this most important ancient art form, The Music of Tragedy argues, we must pay closer attention to the role played by both music and text.