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BURNETT, A.P., Catastrophe Survived. Euripides' Plays of Mixed Reversal. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971. VIII,234p. Cloth wrps. Gilt titled spine. A few pen annotations in index. Name and date on free endpaper. 'This stimulating book discusses seven plays of Euripides from a point of view which is carefully stated at the beginning and consistently maintained throughout. Professor Burnett explains that she is not here concerned with the 'verbal modes' of tragedy; nor with the 'physical modes' of the Attic theatre (...). She bases her interpretation of the plays on a study of Euripides' handling of conventions of a different kind - the 'limited set of matrix-plots' into which traditional story was broken up for the purposes of the tragic genre. (...) She sees the tragic poets as building their dramas out of suppliant plots, vengenance plots, willing-sacrifice plots, and the like, each with its characteristic scenes, tableaux, and characters. (...) but both Sophocles and Euripides 'showed a major preoccupation with devices that could introduce a covert multiplicity' into this artificial unity, and in so doing brought their plays closer to the complexities of real life. It was Euripides who carried this furthest, in works which are not to be regarded as mere 'happy ending plays', or 'tyche plays' or melodrama, but as 'dramas whose multiple plots revolve in both directions at once, mixing actions of catastrophe with others of favourable fortune'. In these plays of catastrophe survived, with rescue as their common symbolic action, human exertion is repeatedly shown to be 'blind and ineffective at best, sordid sometimes, and occasionally contemptible and cruel', in contrast with 'a devine pity and purpose that can, when it is ready, turn disaster into bliss.' This is the thesis of Mrs. Burnett's preface and first chapter. In the remaining chapters she applies it, with varying success, to the seven plays which she places in the category of 'mixed reversal'. (...) Most of this makes good and occasionally scintillating reading, full of insights which provoke fresh thought even where they do not command belief. (...) Nevertheless, this book is one of the most adventurous and interesting studies of Greek tragedy that have appeared in recent years.' (H.C. BALDRY in The Classical Review (New Series), 1974, pp.23-25). From the library of the late Prof. W. Geoffrey Arnott. € 25.00 (Antiquarian) ISBN: 9780198141860