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The Reception and Performance of Euripides' Herakles: Reasoning Madness

Online ISBN:
9780191715945
Print ISBN:
9780199534487
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Reception and Performance of Euripides' Herakles: Reasoning Madness

Kathleen Riley
Kathleen Riley
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
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Published online:
1 September 2008
Published in print:
24 April 2008
Online ISBN:
9780191715945
Print ISBN:
9780199534487
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book is the first to examine the reception and performance history of Euripides' Herakles from the fifth century BC to AD 2006. Its primary interest lies in changing ideas of Heraklean madness, of 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. Diagnoses of Herakles' condition have included melancholy, epilepsy, hysteria, manic depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, and have been informed by a range of theories from humoral pathology to psychoanalysis and beyond. The study's concurrent focus is how these attempts to reason the madness have, in the process, necessarily entailed redefining Herakles' heroism. The book also demonstrates that, in spite, of its relatively infrequent staging, the Herakles has always surfaced in historically charged circumstance – 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.

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