Newly available in paperback in 2018, Simon Perris’ The Gentle, Jealous God. Reading Euripides’ Bacchae in English,Footnote ¹ sets out to ‘adumbrate a new cultural history for this classic play’ (20). While, as the author points out, the Bacchae has received attention in recent years from reception scholars interested in its performance history – including Erika Fischer-Lichte's 2014 Dionysus Resurrected Footnote ² – less has been written on translated versions or adaptations which are intended primarily for reading rather than performance. Perris’ work moves the conversation forward by examining in detail a series of case studies, while touching on many more examples in the course of his discussion.

The book's opening chapters provide valuable context for readers new to the play; after an introduction which sets out the author's methodology and an overview of recent scholarship on the Bacchae, Chapter 1 examines the figure of Dionysus and his representation in the play. Along the way, Perris highlights key points relating to technical aspects of the text and its performance, including structure, language, tone, and emotional effect. His comparison of a selection of English translations of the play's opening lines is particularly instructive here. There follows in Chapter 2 a far-reaching survey of adaptations of the play from antiquity to the present, covering literature, music, film, and theatre (this is supplemented by a useful appendix listing translations of the play published in English from 1781 to 2015). Individual chapters are then devoted to five case studies: Gilbert Murray's 1902 The Bacchae of Euripides; H. D.’s ‘Choros Translations from The Bacchae’ (1931); Derek Mahon's The Bacchae. After Euripides (1991); the 2002 Euripides. Bacchai by Colin Teevan; and David Grieg's 2007 Euripides. The Bacchae. An epilogue briefly considers the recent poetic Bacchae translations by Robin Robertson (2014) and Anne Carson (2015) before the book's short concluding chapter.

Throughout the book, the author plays close attention to the individual characteristics of each translation, as well as to the influences which can be traced in each work, in turn considering the ways in which his chosen texts have reshaped the future reception of the play. This is accompanied by careful examination of the contexts – artistic, historical, and political – within which each was produced. There is much in this book which will be of interest not only to scholars of classical reception but also to those whose focus is translation studies or comparative literature. Meanwhile, in producing a work which combines detailed analysis of individual texts with an overview of the play's translation history in English, the author has laid the groundwork for future scholarship on the reception of Euripides’ Bacchae.

Anna-Maria Hartmann's contribution to OUP's Classical Presences series also has at its heart a series of case studies of textual receptions of the ancient world; in this case, their shared feature is that of genre. English Mythography in Its European Context, 1500–1650 Footnote ³ focuses on the writings of mythographers in Renaissance England, with close examinations of five key works – the only original mythographies produced in England between 1500 and 1650 – which shed light on the reception of myth in the early modern period. In producing these detailed readings, Hartmann takes an approach which differs from other studies of Renaissance mythography, which – as she explains in her introduction – have tended to view the topic through the lens of either iconography, literary theory, allegory, or myth theory. Readers of Hartmann's work who are less familiar with the period under discussion will appreciate the care she takes to situate her work within this wider scholarly landscape, as well as the detailed overview in Chapter 1 of mythography in Europe within which the texts she examines should be contextualized. She demonstrates throughout the book how an understanding of these texts, which collected and explained ancient myths, can offer ways in to thinking about wider questions relating to culture, education, and religious belief, as well as the dissemination of classical stories and ideas, during the Renaissance. Works by Stephen Batman (1577), Abraham Fraunce (1592), Francis Bacon (1609), Henry Reynolds (1632), and Alexander Ross (1642 and 1647) form the core source material for Chapters 2 to 6. The author's painstaking study weaves together discussion of the content and structure of the mythographies with analyses of their relationship with ancient source material and the literary works of their contemporaries. She also considers in detail the ways in which their readings of myth – and in particular ancient divinities – are influenced by Christianity, and by the use of allegorical allusions as a way of thinking about the world. As well as examining recurring key themes, Hartmann devotes space to close analysis of particular passages or mythological episodes (for example, Henry Reynolds’ interpretation of the story of Narcissus, or Abraham Fraunce's version of Ovid's myth of Daphne in Amitas Dale). The resulting study is a valuable and thought-provoking contribution to scholarly understanding of this distinctive phase in the European reception of ancient mythology.

Also new to the Classical Presences series is a distinctive and impressive contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the translation of classical texts. For Newly Recovered English Classical Translations 1600–1800,Footnote ⁴ Stuart Gillespie scoured libraries and archives in order to gather a sizeable collection of hitherto unprinted translations of classical literature (some 319 translations drawn from 159 different manuscripts). With meticulous editing and commentary, the English translations are presented here in nine chapters: Greek and Latin epigram; other Greek authors (though no Homer, for whom no significant unprinted works of this era were found); Horace; Juvenal; elegy and love poetry; other Latin authors; Ovid; Seneca the Younger; and Virgil. After a useful and accessible introduction, which explains the scope of the book and the presentation of the texts, each chapter offers short introductions to ancient authors, texts, their translation history, and the modern translator. The texts themselves represent a fascinating insight into translation practices of the period, including a Scots imitation of Horatian odes (‘Sir, gin your Honour would vouchsafe to take / Your kale with me the night, and coarse oatcake…’ begins Allan Ramsay's early eighteenth-century version of Epistle 1.5, Si potes Archiacis conuiua recumbere lectis…). Most of the translators are not ‘professional’ writers, but encompass a range of backgrounds, from scholars to clergymen, and also including women (though only two) and self-educated men, such as Henry Price, the son of a Poole innkeeper who attended Oxford and whose translation of Heroides 13 is included here.

With this variety of subjects, Newly Recovered English Classical Translations plays a part in the recent strand of scholarship that seeks to bring the marginalized and non-elite readers of classical texts to our attention, such as Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall's 2016 Classical Presences edited collection on Women Classical Scholars, and Henry Stead and Edith Hall's forthcoming volume on Classics and Class. Gillespie also makes some use of the opportunities of digital publishing, by publishing ‘overspill’ texts in an online PDF ‘Annexe’, intended to be searchable and updatable – though one can't help but think that more creative and innovative approaches to the presentation of digital texts might render this treasure trove of texts still more accessible and open to interrogation. Still, Gillespie's achievement in recovering these translations, and presenting them with such clarity and attention to detail, is certainly to be commended, and the weighty tome is sure to be of interest to scholars of classical literature and English literature alike.

Also located at the intersection between classical reception and English literature is a collection of essays entitled Frankenstein and Its Classics. The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction.Footnote ⁵ Marking the bicentennial of Mary Shelley's novel, the twelve chapters set out to place Frankenstein in a range of literary, philosophical, mythological, and cultural traditions, but with an emphasis squarely on what is to be gained by doing so from a solid classical receptions foundation. Arguing that Shelley and her circle shared a relationship with antiquity that was close, purposeful, and shaped by strong personal feelings, the volume's editors make a strong case for the need to take a detail and well-informed view of Shelley's work and its classical engagements. This involves assessing not only how the novel itself draws on classical precedents but also how its own rich progeny – the texts and films that themselves engage with and reshape the Frankenstein legacy, especially in science fiction – continue to contribute to and be implicated in an ongoing narrative of the reception of classical material. In so doing (as the editors themselves point out), the volume is itself a kind of Frankensteinian assemblage of temporally distant parts, stitching the forward-looking drive of the novel's commentary on science and technology to its rich appreciation of and engagement with the ancient – from its subtitle, ‘The Modern Prometheus’, onwards. This rich variety of approaches is sustained across essays that take in such diverse texts and topics as Ovid's Metamorphoses and Kant, climate catastrophe and Timothy Leary, Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Aristotle.

Finally, a recent addition to Edinburgh University Press's rapidly growing Screening Antiquity list brings us a selection of enlightening and rewarding essays on Ancient Greece on British Television, edited by Fiona Hobden and Amanda Wrigley.Footnote ⁶ With scholarship on cinematic receptions of classical antiquity proliferating over the past couple of decades, it is important that due attention is also paid to the small screen, which has been no less preoccupied with the ancient world at different times in its history, and in different genres. Work which is properly engaged with the specificity of televisual receptions – a feature that Hobden and Wrigley rightly highlight in their introduction – is especially welcome, and the essays on display here are for the most part carefully contextualized accounts of receptions that not only occupy a distinctive space in the landscape of popular media, but are also located within a particular national context, ranging from 1950s documentaries hosted by the eminent archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, to the twenty-first-century digital wizardry of programmes on Atlantis.

In fact, although TV adaptations of Greek tragedy are considered in a number of chapters, alongside studies of the use of Greek myth in Doctor Who and a sci-fi version of the Oresteia, it is not the fictionalized or mythologized ancient Greece that stands out as most worthy of consideration here, so much as the rich seam of documentary programming that has populated British TV schedules for decades. So, for example, Fiona Hobden's survey of a range of documentaries, including Channel 4's Greek Fire (1990) and more recent BBC productions such as The Greatest Show on Earth (2013), is interesting not only for its account of the different historiographical practices and priorities in evidence but also because of its insightful illumination of how such productions connect with much broader questions about classical reception and the nature of our perceived relationship with antiquity. Exploring the question ‘Are We the Greeks?’, Hobden shows how many documentaries are predicated on an assumption of ideological ‘connectivity’ between ancient and modern, while only some (such as Greek Fire) are inclined to emphasize that the Greek ‘legacy is not fixed and direct, but contingent and invented’ (32). Usefully supplemented by a lengthy interview with the academic and TV documentary-maker Michael Scott, and his director and producer, David Wilson, this collection incorporates the best assessment yet of the important role that TV documentaries play in configuring modern understandings of the classical past.