The posthumous image of him has been entangled with the real individual, and no one has really fully tried to disentangle them. But achieving that would provide us with a unique window into both the life of the court and fundamental conceptions of humour, humanity, and deviance in the Reneissance. … Fool: In Search of Henry […]
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Dante: Inferno to Paradise is a two-part, four-hour documentary film chronicling the life, work and legacy of the great 14th century Florentine poet, Dante Alighieri, and his epic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, one of the greatest achievements in the history of Western Literature. The ambition of the film, which combines powerful dramatic reenactments, colorful interviews with […]
Readers to this book are likely aware, more or less, of the basic facts of the genocide of European Jews in the Second World War. Yet the mass killings of non-Jewish Belarusians during the same period have only recently been dragged out of the shadows, thanks to US historian Timothy Snyder’s tour de force of […]
Well, that was a long silence, wasn’t it? I have moved my site over from Blogger. I took the first steps a couple of years ago but didn’t follow up on the maintenance/correction issues necessary until now. I am on the last page reviews of correcting or updating posts. I plan on posting on books […]
I just noticed where NYRB Classics has released a new translation of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs. My brief notes on New Directions’ 1947 translation by Stuart Hood can be found here. I highly recommend it without having read the new translation yet. It is one of the weirdest books I have ever read. […]
Jamie Lyons, co-founder of The Collected Works and so much more (see his bio), has some stunning photos and text from site specific performances he has been involved in. Many of these performances involve surviving fragments of ancient Greek plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Definitely worth checking out. Related posts I’ve made to the […]
I’ll try and stay current and catch up later on any plays I miss in Amateur Reader’s AncientGreek-a-Thon at Wuthering Expctations. Up this week is Ajax, Sophocles’ earliest (probably) surviving play, first performed in the 440s BCE. Ajax has long been a character that intrigued me. In The Iliad he performs great feats, yet is […]
Trying to get caught up on everything I mean to post, and feeling frustrated and tired about running into old problems about posting comments on other blogs… A semi-quick comment on Aeschylus’ use of actual events (instead of mythic stories) in The Persians. You usually see a comment about the poet/playwright Phrynichus when there is […]
The Authenticity of ‘Prometheus Bound’ by Mark Griffith 1977: Cambridge University Press When Mark Griffith began researching this topic for his doctoral thesis he believed in the authenticity of Prometheus Bound as a work by Aeschylus, but came to the the conclusion “that the evidence which I was assembling showed Prom. consistently behaving quite differently […]
A great resource for the reading of ancient Greek plays can be found in the posts tagged at Sententiae Antiquae as Reading Greek Tragedy Online. The Reading Greek Tragedy Online discussion and reading of the play for The Persians can be found here. A reading and discussion of Aeschylus’ The Persians (translated by Ian Johnston). […]