Menander (c. 341-291 BC) was the foremost innovator of Greek New Comedy, a dramatic style that moved away from the fantastical to focus upon the problems of ordinary Athenians. This collection contains the full text of 'Old Cantankerous' (Dyskolos), the only surviving complete example of New Comedy, as well as fragments from works including 'The Girl from Samos' and 'The Rape of the Locks', all of which are concerned with domestic catastrophes, the hazards of love and the trials of family life. Written in a poetic style regarded by the ancients as second only to Homer, these polished works - profoundly influential upon both Roman playwrights such as Plautus and Terence, and the wider Western tradition - may be regarded as the first true comedies of manners.

Menander was the founding father of European comedy. From Ralph Roister Doister to What the Butler Saw, from Henry Fielding to P. G. Wodehouse, the stock motifs and characters can be traced back to him. The greatest writer of Greek New Comedy, Menander (c.341-290 BC) wrote over one hundred plays but until the twentieth century he was known to us only by short quotations in ancient authors. Since 1907 papyri found in the sand of Egypt have brought to light more and more fragments, many substantial, and in 1958 the papyrus text of a complete play was published, The Bad-Tempered Man (Dyskolos) . His romantic comedies deal with the lives of ordinary Athenian families, and they are the direct ancestors not only of Roman comedy but also of English comedy from the Renaissance to the present day. This new verse translation is accurate and highly readable, providing a consecutive text with supplements based on the dramatic situation and surviving words in the damaged papyri. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

An exploration of what lies at the heart of contemporary theatre. Written by the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, it investigates the process of devising performance, theatre's interdisciplinary role, and the city's influence.

This volume is arguably one of the most important studies of Euripides to appear in the last decade. Not only does it offer incisive examinations of many of Euripides' extant plays and their influence, it also includes seminal examinations of a number of Euripides fragmentary plays. This approach represents a novel and exciting development in Euripidean studies, since it is only very recently that the fragmentary plays have begun to appear in reliable and readily accessible editions. The book s thirty-two contributors constitute an international "who s who" of Euripidean studies and Athenian drama, and their contributions will certainly feature in the forefront of scholarly discourse on Euripides and Greek drama for years to come.

Lost works by ancient Greece's third great tragedian. Eighteen of the ninety or so plays composed by Euripides between 455 and 406 BC survive in a complete form and are included in the preceding six volumes of the Loeb Euripides. A further fifty-two tragedies and eleven satyr plays, including a few of disputed authorship, are known from ancient quotations and references and from numerous papyri discovered since 1880. No more than one-fifth of any play is represented, but many can be reconstructed with some accuracy in outline, and many of the fragments are striking in themselves. The extant plays and the fragments together make Euripides by far the best known of the classic Greek tragedians. This edition, in a projected two volumes, offers the first complete English translation of the fragments together with a selection of testimonia bearing on the content of the plays. The texts are based on the recent comprehensive edition of R. Kannicht. A general Introduction discusses the evidence for the lost plays. Each play is prefaced by a select bibliography and an introductory discussion of its mythical background, plot, and location of the fragments, general character, chronology, and impact on subsequent literary and artistic traditions.

This volume examines whether dramatic fragments should be approached as parts of a greater whole or as self-contained entities. It comprises contributions by a broad spectrum of international scholars: by young researchers working on fragmentary drama as well as by well-known experts in this field. The volume explores another kind of fragmentation that seems already to have been embraced by the ancient dramatists: quotations extracted from their context and immersed in a new whole, in which they work both as cohesive unities and detachable entities. Sections of poetic works circulated in antiquity not only as parts of a whole, but also independently, i.e. as component fractions, rather like quotations on facebook today. Fragmentation can thus be seen operating on the level of dissociation, but also on the level of cohesion. The volume investigates interpretive possibilities, quotation contexts, production and reception stages of fragmentary texts, looking into the ways dramatic fragments can either increase the depth of fragmentation or strengthen the intensity of cohesion.