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MACINTOSH, Fiona, Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama. Cork University Press, Cork, 1994. XX,212p. Cloth wrps. Upper edge a bit stained. With author's dedication to Professor Arnott on free endpaper. 'Greek tragedy and the plays of the Irish Literary Revival have a number of common features: Ireland saw itself as having a special relationship with the Greeks as far back as the Middle Ages, and the classical tradition, with ready (if sometimes spurious) parallels to be drawn between the Greek and Gaelic myths and bardic traditions (…). W.B. Yeats came to see Greece as 'a storehouse of cultural traditions that industrialized Europe had sacrifices in the name of progress': as Fiona Macintosh demonstrates, Seán O'Casey was no less aware of classical precedent when he fashioned his tragic scenes. Macintosh sets her study of the representation of death and dying in Greek and Irish drama against this background, and offers some novel and interesting comparative insights within a general field where one might have thought there was not much new left to be said. She argues that death in Greek and Irish society is given a different kind of representation from that found in many other traditions (…). Death is not a single catastrophic event, but a process joining forces with the tragic working of time. It is prepared for [(…) it is marked conventionally by a big speech (…)]; and it is rounded off by the lamentation of those who were close to the hero in life. One interesting argument put forward is that the much discussed avoidance of death on the stage in Greek tragedy is perhaps not so important after all, since the dramatist is concentrating on the process of preparation for death (…). Without overstating her case she traces many illuminating parallels between the Greek tragedians and her three Irish dramatists, Yeats, Synge and O'Casey, concluding that the absence of tragedy from much of the modern stage may be related to 'the decline in ritual practices surrounding death' in the Western world. (…) This study touches upon so many cultural and aesthetic issues that, despite its sombre topic, it deserves to be widely read.' (MICHAEL ANDERSON in Theatre Research International, 1995, p.292). From the library of the late Prof. W. Geoffrey Arnott. € 37.50 (Antiquarian) ISBN: 9781859180150