Kathleen Riley, The Reception and Performance of Euripides' Herakles: Reasoning Madness. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, coll. "Oxford Classical Monographs", 2008. viii, 398 pages.
- ISBN: 9780199534487
- $130.00
Recension par Viviana Gastaldi (Universidad Nacional del Sur) dans Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.01.11.
Présentation de l'éditeur:
Description Euripides' Herakles, which tells the story of the hero's sudden descent into filicidalmadness, is one of the least familiar and least performed plays in theGreek tragic canon. Kathleen Riley explores its reception andperformance history from the fifth century BC to AD 2006. Her focus isupon changing ideas of Heraklean madness, its causes, its consequences,and its therapy. Writers subsequent to Euripides have tried to 'reason'or make sense of the madness, often in accordance with contemporarythinking on mental illness. She concurrently explores how theseattempts have, in the process, necessarily entailed redefiningHerakles' heroism.
Riley demonstrates that, in spite of its relatively infrequent staging, the Herakleshas always surfaced in historically charged circumstances - Nero'sRome, Shakespeare's England, Freud's Vienna, Cold-War and post-9/11America - and has had an undeniable impact on the history of ideas. Asan analysis of heroism in crisis, a tragedy about the greatest ofheroes facing an abyss of despair but ultimately finding redemptionthrough human love and friendship, the play resonates powerfully withindividuals and communities at historical and ethical crossroads.
Kathleen Riley is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford.