L.'s commentary, as he states on the first page of the preface, is the first English-language commentary on the Rhesus in nearly a century. He writes, ‘In order to establish whether Rhesus can or cannot be Euripidean, and (more importantly) in order to lay the groundwork for a proper appreciation of this idiosyncratic play, nothing less than a full-scale commentary is required’ (p. v). L. succeeds admirably in the first task, but in the second he fails utterly, unless the ‘appreciation’ he had in mind was a complete awareness of the scope of the playwright's incompetence. His copious and thorough work should make further study of this much-neglected tragedy a far easier endeavour for Anglophone scholars by opening the difficult and obscure passages of an important text. However, his persistent and pervasive negativity about the quality of the play has instead the opposite effect. ‘Idiosyncratic’ is one of the most complimentary words used to describe the play. Elsewhere, his tone is far more critical; scarcely a page goes by without a reference to the author's complete ineptitude. Instead of wanting to use L.'s commentary as a starting point to study the Rhesus in more depth, readers are likely to feel that it does not merit their continued attention.

The book has many strong points. L.'s introduction contains sections on the mythological background of the play, dramaturgy, characterisation, stylistics, metrics and, most important of all for this play, authenticity. L. is particularly helpful on dramaturgy, language and metre, not only in the introduction but also throughout the commentary. His firm grasp of the play's ‘internal geography’ (introduced at pp. xxxvi–viii, but extensively referred to throughout) – represented onstage primarily by which of the two eisodoi actors would have used for their entrances and exits – helps the reader visualise how the play would have worked in performance. L. is extremely informative about word usage, frequently giving the reader valuable statistics on how many times a given word appears in various corpora. This evidence bolsters his argument that the play was not written by Euripides, an underlying theme throughout. L. is also very comprehensive in pointing out both earlier works that might have influenced Rhesus as well as later works that might have been influenced by it. These allusions come from a wide variety of genres: not only the expected tragedy and epic, but also iambos and comedy. On the lyric passages, L.'s metrical analyses are thorough and convincing. Military historians might also find much of value here, as L. is very informative about military equipment and strategy. And while some readers might find it irksome, others will be pleased that L. includes nearly an entire interlinear translation in the commentary on each line. Fortunately, L. never uses translation as a crutch to remove the need for analysis of the Greek; it complements his commentary rather than replacing it. L.'s text is based on Diggle's OCT edition, and all changes are carefully and thoroughly argued.

The only major fault is that L. too often criticises the playwright for having the characters ask questions about information that he feels they should already have known; in just once instance, he writes that Hector should have known which route the Thracian army would take without having to ask (p. 141). This approach feels overly pedantic and inappropriate to the study of Greek tragedy. Had L. been writing a commentary on the Oedipus Tyrannus, one senses that he might have commented repeatedly on the implausibility of Oedipus' lack of understanding as a sign of poor dramatic craftsmanship on the part of Sophocles.

Aside from this occasional pedantry, L.'s obvious erudition would make this book a pleasure to read, were it not for his relentless negativity about the quality of the tragedy itself. He repeatedly refers to ‘the play's generally derivative character’ (p. lxxi), ‘botched characterization’ (p. xlvi) and ‘incompetent dramaturgy’ (p. 104), and calls the author incompetent (too many times to count), inept (p. 24), careless (p. 131) and negligent (p. 118). These examples represent only a small sampling of the ways in which L. expresses his contempt for his subject matter. Most would agree that L. is the foremost expert on the Rhesus in the Anglophone world, and I found myself wondering why he kept working on a play that he so obviously considers to be second-rate craftsmanship, the work of a slavish imitator cherry-picking whatever phrases and lines he fancied from more skilled poets and fitting them haphazardly into a plot with gaping inconsistencies and no likeable or admirable characters.

The easy answer to this question is that L. wanted to prove that the Rhesus is not genuinely Euripidean, pace Ritchie and Burnett (the latter of whom he is particularly harsh towards, referring to her ‘elementary errors’ [p. xlvi n. 137] and ‘ignorance of Greek idiom’ [p. 116]), and he felt that writing a complete commentary would be the best way to set this debate finally to rest. In this argument, he is both thorough and convincing. He shows how the play's vocabulary choices, particularly its use of extensive hapaces (pp. liii–lv), and its metrics (pp. lxiv–lvii) defy easy grouping with either Euripides' early or late works. He also argues convincingly that a fourth actor would have been used to play Alexander. Less successful are his arguments that the Rhesus was written by an actor, perhaps even the famed Neoptolemus, and that the play was written for performance outside of Athens, probably in Macedonia.

But the repeated references to the play's poor quality – aside from being in and of themselves rather wearing to the reader – also seem to me to have the potential to mask some rather intellectually lazy scholarship. Too many times, L. attributes flaws of plot and characterisation to the author's lack of skill rather than making any attempt to understand them as artistic choices. Not so very long ago, scholars were treating the works of Euripides in the same fashion, dismissing him as a second-rate playwright and carping on the poor quality of the tragedies rather than trying to understand them in their own right. Might not the author of the Rhesus – who L. has indeed convinced me was not Euripides – deserve the same consideration?