Shows how contemporary adaptations, on the stage and on the page, can breathe new life into Greek tragedy.

Surviving Greek Tragedy is a history of the physical survival to the present day of the thirty-two extant tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Beginning with the first revival of the plays in the fourth century BC, it charts the course of their transmission down the centuries as they passed through the hands of actors, readers, scholars, schoolteachers, monks, publishers, translators and theatre directors. Over the course of this 2,400-year period, the plays were at different times performed, copied, quoted, emended, excerpted, analysed, taught, translated, censored, adapted, or merely left to moulder in a library, as each successive culture charged with their safe-keeping saw fit. In the last thirty years Greek tragedy has become the medium through which most people encounter the classical heritage, and in the book Garland gives extensive coverage to modern stagings of the plays all over the world, taking this fascinating story right up to the present. Fully illustrated with images from all the periods under discussion--from Greek vase paintings to Deborah Warner's production of Medea at the Queen's Theatre, London.

African American adaptations of Greek tragedy on the continuum of these two models are then discussed, and plays by Peter Sellars, Adrienne Kennedy, Lee Breuer, Rita Dove, Jim Magnuson, Ernest Ferlita, Steve Carter, Silas Jones, Rhodessa Jones and Derek Walcott are analyzed."--BOOK JACKET.