This is a volume that has been eagerly anticipated, and its 36 chapters offer a comprehensive and up-to-date study of Euripidean drama. The volume comprises seven parts: ‘Text, Author, and Tradition’, ‘Early Plays’, ‘Later Plays’, ‘Satyr, Spurious, and Fragmentary Plays’, ‘Form, Structure, and Performance’, ‘Topics and Approaches’ and ‘Reception’. As is evident from this list, the volume is ambitious in its scope, covering all Euripides’ extant plays and a broad range of topics. Each chapter has three purposes. Firstly, to give synopses of the plays, summarise scholarship and critical approaches, and give suggestions for further reading. Secondly, they are to encourage further examination by positing original and provocative readings. Lastly, they aim to contribute to the wider discussion about the place of Euripides in classical reception and in expressing and exploring contemporary issues.
Section 1, ‘Text, Author, and Tradition’, is an important introduction to the following sections. It is a necessary read, particularly for those new to Euripidean drama. D.J. Mastronarde's chapter explains the textual transmission concisely and highlights the benefit of an awareness of this and utilisation of the apparatus criticus when consulting and interpreting the texts. R. Scodel's chapter separates fact from fiction in the ancient biographies of Euripides, underlining the pitfalls of reconstructing Euripides and his attitudes. She discourages a complete dismissal of these sources, instead proposing a critical evaluation of them. This section concludes with J. Gibert's exploration of Euripides in relation to Aeschylus and Sophocles. He warns against approaches based on the biographical traditions of these dramatists, nicely complementing Scodel's chapter, and conclusions that are subjective, oversimplify and do not consider that only a small proportion of their plays are extant. However, he notes some features that seem typically Euripidean, such as the degree of engagement with philosophy and manipulation of mythology and generic expectations. These features are developed in more detail in the following chapters.
In the next two sections McClure divides the essays on Euripides’ extant tragedies into early plays (438–416 bce) and later plays (415–405 bce), aiming for a roughly chronological exploration of Euripides’ tragedies, presumably to track his development as a playwright. These chapters vary quite significantly in their aims, intended audience and material. For example, in Section 2, O.E. Goslin's chapter concentrates more on redeeming Children of Heracles from criticism and neglect, arguing for its dramatisation of the relationship between political idealism and power by the adaption of the Heraclidae legend. It briefly touches upon trends in scholarship and does not really give a clear synopsis of the play. M. Ebbott's chapter concisely summarises Hippolytus and its relation to other plays, along with the scholarly debate concerning this. She focuses on the emotions and how forgiveness is reached at the end of the play through sympathy, in contrast to Phaedra's destructiveness. Ebbott guides the reader through these different emotions in the Hippolytus, which are apparent on reading the play, offering a good summary for those new to the Hippolytus and Euripidean tragedy. Although the chapter does not give much recognition to scholarship on Phaedra's tablet, its metatheatricality or to scholarship on gender and feminist approaches, it is effective in showing the immediacy of emotions and Euripides’ psychological exploration of these characters. The topics covered in this section are broad, but despite the range of very different focuses, common features emerge, such as unsettling and unresolved endings and challenges to mythical tradition and gender and social roles.
E.M. Griffiths's chapter in Section 3 on Ion is a good example of one that mostly fulfils McClure's promise of being provocative and original, while summarising the play and relevant scholarship. She covers identity, psychological readings of the characters, and the relationship between men and gods, ending with an interesting exploration of the role of food in forming cohesive social bonds and in focusing on the matter at hand. She links this to tonal exploration in Ion, presenting it as the honeyed cup that takes the edge off a ‘severe examination of Athenian identity’ (p. 239). This is a plausible interpretation, but what is perhaps more interesting and worth further investigation is what she touches on in her conclusion but does not explore fully, that is, the relationship between food in Ion and the audience's sensory experience of the dramatic festival. Section 3, among other things, highlights self-consciousness as a feature of these later plays, along with a focus on religion. However, Euripides’ generic exploration in these plays is not given enough attention: tone is only briefly discussed in Ion, and parody in Orestes and potentially comic elements in Helen are passed over.
Section 4, as McClure notes, is ‘a kind of catch-all for plays that depart in some significant way from the extant corpus’ (p. 7). P. O'Sullivan provides a good introduction to satyr drama and looks at the characterisation of the satyr chorus in Cyclops. V. Liapis's chapter clearly sets out the argument for Rhesus not being a Euripidean play because of its contradictory mythology, problems in staging, and its metre and language. The section concludes with C. Collard's chapter on fragments, which is technical, but important. Read together with Mastronarde's earlier chapter, the reader gains a more complete view of how the manuscripts and fragments we have today are assembled, and the effect of new publications of fragments on our interpretation of the plays. This chapter has been updated with a supplementary note detailing new publications of fragments and scholarship.
The next section is entitled ‘Form, Structure, and Performance’. Formal structures, such as deus ex machina scenes, and narrative patterns, like anagnorisis, and additionally the interplay between these, are examined by M. Dubischar. D. Roselli focuses on an exploration of the social and ideological context of performance, while S. Murnaghan explores trends in Euripidean choruses, suggesting the reasons for his more frequent use of female choruses as relating to his treatment of female characters in general and the relationship between femininity and emotional abandonment with the emergence of new music. However, after reading Gibert's chapter, it is worth questioning whether the prevalence of female choruses is purely coincidental. The introduction of new music here is complemented by A. D'Angour's introduction to music in Attic drama and the Orestes musical papyrus. This section is meant to cover the performance of Euripidean drama, but it is noticeably lacking in an exploration of the staging of Euripides’ plays, props and costumes. In fact, none of the previous chapters, except those by I.C. Storey, A.A. Lamari and Liapis, offer any substantial discussion of these. The omission of this is significant, and readers could gain a more complete picture of Euripides and Euripidean drama by consulting works such as R. Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (1994).
Section 6 builds on some aspects that arise from the earlier discussions, such as Euripides’ engagement with religion, manipulation of mythology and presentation of gender. F.M. Dunn's chapter is a good example of the benefit of reading this section in conjunction with the earlier chapters. Dunn presents Euripides as ‘a contributor on several fronts to the intellectual ferment of late fifth-century Athens’, rather than ‘a creature of his times’ (p. 448). This illuminating chapter covers literacy, special skills, relativism and humanism, anthropology and progress, and agency and responsibility, while at the same time supplementing some of the plays covered previously. He shows how the critical attention to human experience present in the late fifth century is found in Helen and used to explore dramatic and comic implications of intellectual concerns. Regarding Cyclops, he applies an anthropological reading to Polyphemus, showing him as both civilised and uncivilised, arguing for Euripides’ examination and challenge of anthropological models. Thus, this discussion clearly demonstrates how contemporary issues are reflected in Euripides’ plays and how knowledge of these concerns influences our reading and understanding.
The final section is a whistle-stop tour of Euripidean reception. Three of these chapters focus on Euripides’ ancient reception, while the fourth covers the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A. Duncan's brief exploration of fourth-century tragedy, Middle Comedy, vase painting and New Comedy highlights Euripides’ influence and popularity. However, in her New Comedy section, she states that Euripides’ influence is not revealed through direct reference at all (p. 543), but there is a quotation from Euripides’ Oedipus in Menander's Samia. She does not include the Samia in her examples, and this is one of Menander's more complete plays with much scholarship on suggested Euripidean parallels, such as Hippolytus and Phoenix. Despite this, her tracking of similar scenes, like recognition scenes, is effective in showing Euripides’ influence on Menander. C. Star's chapter on Seneca is another important read, as it highlights the impact of Euripides on Senecan tragedy, but notably shows that readings that compare Seneca too closely to Euripides neglect Seneca's innovation and interaction with Roman poets. B. Goff notes that how Euripides is viewed in contemporary society is vital to our exploration of issues and understanding of modernity. She shows how translations of Euripides made his plays accessible to a wider audience, causing a boom in performances, while also noting that perceived ‘problems’ in Euripidean tragedy were redeemed and reinterpreted, suggesting shifting ideology as responsible for this. She references many performances and points to the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama as a useful resource. In Goff's introduction, she quotes Mastronarde (The Art of Euripides [2010]): ‘a thorough treatment of the reception of Euripides would require a whole volume to itself’. Readers can now be directed to Brill's Companion to the Reception of Euripides (2015).
In conclusion, a very thorough study of Euripides is achieved in this volume. It is remarkable for its coverage of such a variety of topics, and from these chapters we gain a fuller understanding of Euripidean drama. However, if the volume included more on staging and performance, the reader would obtain a more complete picture of Euripides. The task of writing a chapter accessible to general readers, students, teachers and academic specialists that summarises scholarly trends and approaches, while also being original and ‘provocative’, is a tricky task indeed. Some essays are clearly aimed at those relatively new to Euripidean drama, while others are more complex and require specialist knowledge. This often correlates with the degree of originality and provocativeness in the chapters. Nevertheless, McClure is correct that, when taken together, the chapters reveal specific issues, themes and features that are essential to our understanding of Euripides. However, one of the focuses of McClure's introduction is Euripides’ relevance in contemporary culture, and one of her aims is to contribute to the ongoing discussion about ‘the place of Euripides in our reception of the classical past and his value in articulating pressing contemporary concerns’ (p. 2), but this only really comes out as a conclusion of Goff's chapter.
