Euripides' Herakles, which tells the story of the hero's sudden descent into filicidal madness, is one of the least familiar and least performed plays in the Greek tragic canon. Kathleen Riley explores its reception and performance history from the fifth century BC to AD 2006. Her focus is upon changing ideas of Heraklean madness, its causes, its consequences, and its therapy. Writers subsequent to Euripides have tried to 'reason' or make sense of the madness, often in accordance with contemporary thinking on mental illness. She concurrently explores how these attempts have, in the process, necessarily entailed redefining Herakles' heroism.Riley demonstrates that, in spite of its relatively infrequent staging, the Herakles has always surfaced in historically charged circumstances - Nero's Rome, Shakespeare's England, Freud's Vienna, Cold-War and post-9/11 America - and has had an undeniable impact on the history of ideas. As an analysis of heroism in crisis, a tragedy about the greatest of heroes facing an abyss of despair but ultimately finding redemption through human love and friendship, the play resonates powerfully with individuals and communities at historical and ethical crossroads.
Author(s): Kathleen Riley
Series: Oxford Classical Monographs
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 411
Contents......Page 10
List of illustrations......Page 11
Introduction: reasoning madness and redefining the hero......Page 14
1. ‘No longer himself’: the tragic fall of Euripides’ Herakles......Page 27
2. ‘Let the monster be mine’: Seneca and the internalization of imperial furor......Page 64
3. A peculiar compound: Hercules as Renaissance man......Page 105
4. ‘Even the earth is not room enough’: Herculean selfhood on the Elizabethan stage......Page 130
5. Sophist, sceptic, sentimentalist: the nineteenth-century damnatio of Euripides......Page 163
6. The Browning version: Aristophanes’ Apology and ‘the perfect piece’......Page 195
7. The psychological hero: Herakles’ lost self and the creation of Nervenkunst......Page 220
8. Herakles’ apotheosis: the tragedy of Superman......Page 265
9. The Herakles complex: a Senecan diagnosis of the ‘Family Annihilator’......Page 292
10. Creating a Herakles for our times: a montage of modern madness......Page 351
Appendix 1. Heraklean madness on the modern stage: a chronology......Page 371
Appendix 2. The Reading school play......Page 379
Bibliography......Page 381
B......Page 402
C......Page 403
F......Page 404
H......Page 405
L......Page 406
M......Page 407
P......Page 408
S......Page 409
W......Page 410
Z......Page 411
