Dennis Pryor

Aeschylus, they say, was killed when an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a smooth, shell-cracking rock, dropped a tortoise on him. Ever since then translators have been dropping translations on the head of his plays with comparably fatal results. Rush Rehm’s version of The Oresteia (Hawthorn Press, $4.95 pb, 144 pp) brought to the Pram Factory a rarely attempted piece of theatre – the ... (read more)

Ian Donaldson’s The Rapes of Lucretia is a book so rich in ideas that a review can only be unfairly perfunctory. It starts from ancient accounts of the rape of Lucretia and tracks the transformations of the myth through two millennia. This is no wearisome catalogue, no tedious grinding of PhD mills. Donaldson is, as he puts it, ‘especially interested in the close relationship that may exist be ... (read more)