Were it particularly bold to assert that tragic playwrights craft both their plots and the psychologies of their dramatis personae with past trauma and crisis in mind, an exhaustive study (nearly 600 pages, with nary a word about Euripides or Prometheus Bound, and only brief reference to Antigone) might at least go some way toward systematically defining playwrights' uses (and abuses) of the past. The contrast with more ambitious and sophisticated studies on related issues – F. Dunn, Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece (2007) and, especially, J. Grethlein, The Greeks and Their Past (2010) – is stark: K.'s study is far from the last word on this topic.

There are a great many pasts potentially at issue for the analysis of tragedy. Within individual plays, characters tell tales, some of which may comprise personal experience (e.g. Deianira's histories in Trachiniae); some the mythological (e.g. the Antigone's fourth stasimon); and some outright fabrications (e.g. the death of the Sophoclean Orestes). Of course, the distinctions between fact, fiction and myth are not always particularly transparent: think of the use(s) of Io (Supplices) or the ravings of Cassandra (Agamemnon). Kleos takes many forms, and the past reverberates in a variety of ways. Nor are the only possible pasts at stake those invoked by the dramatis personae. A particular recollection may deviate from other poetic accounts (outside the drama) or from the tradition(s) otherwise known to the plays' diverse audiences. Just as characters' perspectives are unique and idiosyncratic, no audience is uniform, realities which tragedians exploit by manipulating expectations – obscuring, emphasising or innovating in their dramatic representations.

K.'s study is not particularly interested in such nuances. After declining to discuss the poetic (i.e. intertextual) past (pp. 1–2; cf. the analysis on pp. 387–95), it treats the past more or less monolithically, that is, inasmuch as this theme impacts on characters' decisions, motivations and perspectives. The monograph is essentially a commentary of a very traditional sort: twelve plays are treated in self-contained chapters, which are themselves divided into further sections that fixate on resolving specific interpretative conundrums, primarily through attention to particular characters. K. clearly knows both the plays and the pertinent scholarship very well, but such a design runs counter to (and actually suppresses) the possibility of a more sophisticated argument. The abundance of interpretative tangents and scholarly polemic becomes aimless and distracting: a full half of the chapter on Supplices, for example, involves the question of whether the dramatic action responds to an oracle outside the plot (not as relevant a digression as it might appear – especially when K.'s answer is, in a word, ‘no’); the discussion of Philoctetes' chorus (pp. 299–314), meanwhile, serves mainly to discredit other interpretations and approaches.

These are not isolated complaints: the issues singled out for detailed and meandering analysis are too often of questionable import (pertinent ones are suffocated before their discussion can flourish). The findings, as a result, frequently fall flat. Few will be surprised to learn that the eponymous Persians of Aeschylus fail to assess the past (i.e. Marathon) properly; that Philoctetes' world-view is shaped by others' past behaviour; that the Aeschylean Clytemnestra (or her Sophoclean daughter) is fixated on a specific act of bloodshed; that Deianira desires to preserve her status as Heracles' prize. The conclusions regarding Ajax (p. 240) show promise, but the learning (ironically) comes too late and the discussion is cut off before it takes flight. What is at stake is only ever dimly glimpsed: a ten-page conclusion valiantly attempts to sum up, but even it is immediately dwarfed by a further twenty-five pages of irrelevant and tangential appendices.

To this critic's mind, the book suffers for its heft, but more so from a problematic polarity at its heart. On one side, there is K.'s acknowledgement of the ambiguity surrounding events in plays' prehistories, loose ends which are deliberate on the playwrights' part (p. 508). Thus, in contrast to Aeschylus, whose characters are more profoundly impacted by the past (but more loosely connected to it), in Sophoclean tragedy a gap repeatedly emerges. While Sophoclean characters cling vividly to particular ideas about the past, the plays themselves obfuscate that prehistory: Sophocles declines to detail what exactly happened in the matter of Achilles' arms (the consequences of which reverberate in Ajax and Philoctetes); says little about the Atreid saga beyond the pivotal murder of Agamemnon (Electra; cf. the Aeschylean Agamemnon); only gradually exposes history (O.T.); and largely glosses over the details of what prompted the exile and impending war in O.C. But instead of constructing the study as a whole upon such a fruitful matrix, K.'s procedure instead takes aim at ambiguity. The study repeatedly diagnoses and resolves, rather than investigates, what it perceives as dramatic and thematic aberrations.

The results, as I say, are learned but unremarkable readings, and the absence of a sophisticated theoretical framework and larger argument leaves the discussion somewhat rudderless. Only if one supposes that Agamemnon's murder can (and, indeed, must) be traced to a single cause, for example, would one engage in the kind of scholarly gymnastics that complains that the seers Calchas and Cassandra provide ‘puzzling pronouncements’ or ‘do not seem to agree with each other on the causal association of Agamemnon's murder with the earlier crimes in the family’ (p. 104). Are we now to fault Aeschylus' masterpiece for its complexity? Other assertions are downright shocking. Noting that Sophocles grants Philoctetes the opportunity to praise the integrity of Achilles, Ajax, Nestor, Patroclus and Antilochus (Ph. 410–34), K. points out that this runs contrary to his all-consuming grudge against the Atreids and Odysseus, and raises the question of how such comrades could have been complicit in his exposure (pp. 274–5). After a few pages of discussion in which it is concluded that the curiosity is deliberate, the boom is decisively lowered: ‘If one is willing to believe that Sophocles included a virtual digression of more than forty lines for such trivial purposes, and that he did not detect or care about, the problem it created, one has to saddle him with dramatic negligence, incompetence, and lack of imagination’ (p. 277).

The preponderance of such insensitivity reveals a misplaced critical focus. One might have hoped that, rather than going to great lengths to accuse the most successful tragedian of his age of incompetence, the study might consider what such a curious gap in Philoctetes' memory reveals about his world-view and morality, or about Sophocles' tendency to obscure past trauma. Much more remains to be said about how tragic playwrights handle the theme of the past.