Collecting decades of work, Patrick Kragelund has constructed a one-stop tome that attempts to unite the history of the sparsely documented Roman praetexta with an exploration of the one full extant example — the post-Senecan Octavia, and reception of Octavia in Renaissance tragedy. While each part has its strengths, the monograph as a whole lacks coherency, varies greatly in degree of focus and inconsistently achieves its aim of being accessible to non-Classicist audiences (8).

In Part I, K. surveys the primary sources available for the praetexta, starting with an attempt to find a basic definition that distinguishes this genre. Although sources are at times confusing and/or contradictory, K. seems content to proceed with the (limiting, in this reader's opinion) assumption that praetextae encompass stage drama featuring Roman ‘historical’ characters in ‘Roman dress and Rome-related settings’ (43) and showing ‘propitious consequences for Rome’ (18; cf. ‘patriotic’, 23, 28 passim). The limitations of these assumptions — that praetextae have little room to critique the state or show ‘tragic’ consequences for Rome, and that all drama mentioning Roman historical figures and/or the toga praetexta(ta) must necessarily be counted as part of this genre — prevent K. from subsequently approaching the fragments as potential tragoediae or as potentially redefining the genre's relationship with the state.

The aim of the argument in Part I is that absence of evidence should not be considered evidence of absence, that it is just as likely that praetextae were well established and performed throughout the Republic and early Empire. This is all well and good, and this reader is happy to expand the range of plausible reconstructions, but K.’s imagination often stretches only in the directions that confirm his hypotheses (one example would be the Claudia and the unnamed praetexta discussed by Varro, where K. assumes that their being labelled as praetextae necessitates the presence of male characters who must have worn the nominal toga (25–31)). Additional problems with Part I include occasional redundancies (for example, Laberius at 62, 77), inconsistency of focus (sometimes very concerned with minutiae of scholarly disagreements that are poorly introduced as such, for example, concerning the identity and punishment of Maternus (103–26)) and a complex, obfuscating prose style.

K. is most successful when discussing the Octavia itself and dramatic performance culture from the reign of Nero onwards (beginning at ch. 6.4). The careful analysis of Pliny, Quintilian and Seneca concerning the question of dramatic recitation vs. large-scale performance is especially refreshing (83–99), as is K.’s insistence that ‘the reader of drama … is … engaged in imagining the visual equivalents to what the script suggests’ (150). These sections provide a much needed addition to recent discussions of Senecan performativity in, for example, G. W. M. Harrison and V. Liapis (eds), Performance in Greek and Roman Theatre (2013) and T. Kohn, The Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedy (2013).

In Part II, the scene-by-scene analysis of the Octavia goes beyond recent commentaries (for example, Boyle (2008); Ferri (2003)), incorporating the ‘implied dimension’ of visual performance (149–50) into a close inspection of the text. This section is highly readable and insightful with regard to textual interpretation, but it contributes to the fragmentary feel of the book by failing to connect the nuances of the Octavia to the history of the praetexta presented in Part I. This reader, at any rate, wanted to know how K. sees the Octavia confirming, subverting and/or manipulating the generic norms.

The final chapter in Part II, on dating the Octavia, is similarly disappointing for its lack of imagination concerning the author's potential resources and aims. K. builds an argument that the Octavia was most likely written during the reign of Galba, in part because of the audience's assumed familiarity with the characters and plot and in part because of the supposed unlikelihood of a dramatist writing an anti-Neronian script under a pro-Neronian emperor. Given the liberties taken against arguments ex silentio in the rest of the monograph, this section seems particularly circumscribed. Again, the Galba argument would have been better served if K. could address the political concerns of the Octavia as a praetexta in terms of the content in Part I.

Part III is a rather succinct history of the manuscript revival of the Senecan tragic corpus and its various translations and proliferation as compared to the tragedies of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus. K. argues that, despite their assertions to the contrary, playwrights of the early Renaissance were deeply influenced by the Octavia in writing tragic drama. K. focuses on the imitation of a few elements he sees as distinctive (narration of dreams, the appearance of ghosts and exchanges similar to that between Seneca and Nero) and shows that these elements are quite popular especially in the Italian dramas of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While his discussion rarely approaches in-depth analysis of the receptions and, again, does nothing to theorize how praetextae as such were received or thought of as having separate generic aims, exposing the reader to the breadth of Italian tragedies that seem to have made liberal use of the Octavia is useful.

Footnotes to primary sources are extensive, though sometimes they fail to address sweeping claims made in the text. Secondary source citations generally point to major publications. In terms of accessibility, there are many instances where Classical figures are discussed without sufficient introduction; readers unfamiliar with Roman history will want to have a prosopographic resource handy.