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FRANKLIN LIBRARY LEATHER Sophocles Plays NEW *SEALED*
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FRANKLIN LIBRARY LEATHER Sophocles Plays NEW *SEALED*
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FRANKLIN LIBRARY The Tragedies of SOPHOCLES Illustrated by Alan E. Cober Beautiful Topgrain Leather Limited Edition FROM "THE 100 GREATEST BOOKS OF ALL TIME" COLLECTION The contrast between what we know of the life of Sophocles and the suffering of the characters in plays is striking. T is good reason to believe that the dramatist himself was a happy man, of good family, handsome, wealthy, strong; that he enjoyed the high esteem of the fellow citizens who appointed him to various high offices, that he won more dramatic prizes than Aeschylus and Euripides combined; and that he had a son who was also a successful playwright. Yet his dramas depict hard fortunes faced by the most heroic tempers, for whom life is at best terrible. This contrast between life and art suggests that the Greeks knew well how bitter life can be, how dangerous it is to suppose that happiness, if it arrives, is ever permanent. Each of the Sophoclean plays deals with someone or several persons on whom both fate and fortune had seemed to smile, so that confrontation with calamity brings recognition along with reversal, insight after disillusion, understanding as well as anguish. The stories or myths with which the tragedies deal – and which were well known to the audience, much as biblical stories would be familiar to audiences of our own day – were all of the same type. A good person conceives a plan or purpose that becomes all-important to carry out. In his efforts to do so, the protagonist becomes entangled in circumstances that lead to a step both difficult and ominous, but it is a step he feels he must take if he is to be true to himself and to his mission. The step contains a contradiction, destructive to himself, which he only partly apprehends. He hesitates to take it but believes t is nothing else he can do. The step proves fatal to his purpose, to his character, often to himself. But in the calamity that ensues, he loses the blindness of his resolved action and sees himself and the world in a new light. Good tragedy, Aristotle claimed and Sophocles demonstrated, has as its hero a person who is neither the best nor the worst in character; the tragic hero is more good than bad, yet has some flaw. The flaw is not a moral one; it is a flaw in knowledge, an inability to see, perhaps partly induced by a hot temper. In any case, it is an indication of fallibility. If it were not so, Aristotle argued, we could not feel pity and terror in what befalls the tragic hero, for the destruction of a perfectly good person would be monstrous, and that of a bad one no more than poetic justice. This Franklin Library volume contains Sophocles’ extant plays, seven of them in all, out of more than a hundred he is reported to have written. Among Sophocles’ plays, Oedipus the King and Antigone are as well known as any dramas in the world, with the possible exception of Shakespeare’s. Although less well known today, Ajax and Electra have been highly regarded for many centuries, and Oedipus at Colonnus is thought by some to be Sophocles’ best play . Philoctetes is likely to appeal with special force to modern readers, and The Women of Trachis offers us Deianira, a fascinating character. Part of Sophocles’ enduring popularity is attributable to the fact that his plays sustain their form and vision through some of the most terrible subject matter the human imagination has ever undertaken to confront. A volume of Sophocles was found in Shelley’s pocket when he was drowned. To Matthew Arnold, Sophocles was one “who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.” Yeats even made his own translation of Oedipus the King, feeling that the play’s passions had been obscured by scholarship. Sophocles’ plays are so well made that they justify the claim that they are the absolute model of their kind.This beautiful book features: Top Grade Full Tooled Leather Hunter Green Binding Hubbed Tooled Leather Spine Lovely Emerald Green Satin bookmark,...
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