Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun Review

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Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun ReviewGreek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun. By EDITH HALL Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. x +413. 40 illustrations. Cloth. $55.00/ £ 30.00 ISBN: 978-0-19-923251-2
This most elegantly produced book by Oxford University Press is as fine a book on the subject of Greek Tragedy as I have ever read. This volume, referred to as an introduction on the dust jacket blurb, is, however, not an introduction for the casual reader or the beginning student. It supposes of the reader a general familiarity with the subject and some knowledge of the 33 extant plays of the main corpus, but does not require knowledge of Greek; in fact, few (perhaps too few) Greek words associated with the subjects at hand are provided in transliteration. The author's style is quite formal, the illustrations pertinent and often quite amusing.
As an exploration of the `Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society' Hall's effort here to use the subtitle of another of [EH's]books) is an indispensable read for classicists who do not specialize in drama (and many who do will be given frequent pause by the novel connections the author forges), for teachers of general world literature or history of drama courses, and for undergraduate and graduate students of the classics who seek to master the subject in detail. The book seems to have an affinity to Simon Goldhill's 1992, Aeschylus: Oresteia, Landmarks of World Literature. What Goldhill does for the Aeschylean production--i.e., providing context for the plays within the 5th-century Athenian polis and then examining the plays thematically one by one and finally briefly discussing the reception of the trilogy--EH does for the complete corpus of extant 5th-century tragedies.
EH distils for the reader the erudition she and her colleagues have built over decades of studying and writing about ancient drama focusing on the plays not as mere texts, but as cultural artifacts. She is steeped in performance criticism (compare the work of Carlo Russo and Oliver Taplin), and also in the theory and history of the ancient theatre, including reception (compare the work of J. R. Green, E. W. Handley, David Wiles, P. Wilson, Eric Csapo and William J. Slater). She has also written works on ethnicity, reception and gender.
Hall's thesis about tragedy as performance art--the audience sharing the characters' suffering as they sit beneath the equinoctial sun in awe as the characters act out a very crucial day in their lives--is quite original, very interesting and worth the reading of the book (though not paying fifty dollars for).
The book is divided into chapters/sections, each of which has a separate bibliography at book's end, "Further Reading":Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun Overview

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