What do we mean by 'tragedy' in present-day usage? When we turn on the news, does a report of the latest atrocity have any connection with the masterpieces of Sophocles, Shakespeare and Racine? What has tragedy been made to mean by dramatists, story-tellers, critics, philosophers, politicians and
journalists over the last two and a half millennia? Why do we still read, re-write, and stage these old plays?
This book argues for the continuities between 'then' and 'now'. Addressing questions about belief, blame, mourning, revenge, pain, witnessing, timing and ending, Adrian Poole
demonstrates the age-old significance of our attempts to make sense of terrible suffering.
1. Who needs it?
2. Once upon a time
3. The living dead
4. Who's to blame?
5. Big ideas
6. No laughing matter
7. Words, words, words
8. Good timing
9. Pain and gain
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Adrian Poole is Professor of English Literature, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has written and lectured on Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, on literary translation and on nineteenth-century English literature. His publications include Gissing in Context
(1975), Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example (1987), Shakespeare and the Victorians (2003), The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation (1995, co-edited with Jeremy Maule), and editions of novels by Dickens, James and R. L. Stevenson. He is working on a project about witnessing tragedy
developed out of his 1999 British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, 'Macbeth and the Third Person'.
