Women on the Edge

This volume of brand new translations of Euripides' tragic plays offers a distinctive, fresh, and dynamic approach to the ancient classical texts. The editors, leading feminist critics in fields of classics, comparative literature, and theatre arts, have selected four important plays in which female characters occupy a crucial role in the dramas. The shared project is to confront the very limits and margins of how "woman" was played out on the classical Athenian stage. In an extensive and informative introduction to the volume and in meticulous essays that precede the translation of each play, the editors boldly undertake the challenge of answering the invariable question: why are female figures so prominent in and so central to the tragic drama of Euripides? The collection achieves exceptional success in tackling this complex problem of interpretation because the editors judiciously regard the plays "not as a set of stable documents but as the intersection of such factors as the material conditions of production, the historical, social, and political contexts, and the audience's responses, as well as individual playwrights' visions" (xi). The translations offer an unparalleled awareness of the context of the original performances. The instructive introductions and editorial commentaries skillfully illuminate how the cultural environment of late fifth-century Athens, as it was explicitly and implicitly gendered, influenced the onstage representation of women as characters in the tragic dramas

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