Review by Choice Review
Dunn (Univ. of California at Santa Barbara) is concerned with the techniques Euripides used to bring his plays to an end and the tension that often exists between these indications of a play's conclusion and the absence of a sense of completion in the overall dramatic action. In part 1, the author provides a useful catalog of the various devices by which Euripides and other tragedians empty their stages at the end of a play. In parts 2 and 3 he examines the endings of Euripidean dramas that are especially provocative or revolutionary. His discussions generally reflect authoritative scholarship on the plays, but the focus on endings, without making deeper connections with essential principles of the Euripidean worldview, limits this book's value as a guide to Euripides' dramatic achievement. Anne Pippin Burnett's Catastrophe Survived (CH, Apr'72) and essays in Kurt von Fritz's Antike und moderne Tragodie (Berlin, 1962) remain two of the best guides to understanding a number of puzzling endings in Euripides. Ironically, this book lacks an ending of its own--a concluding chapter that would make definitive judgments about the potent connection between theme and ending in Euripides' work. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty. L. Golden Florida State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
