Presents critical essays which discuss the birth of Greek drama and how the art evolved.

The use of the chorus in tragedy / Friedrich Schiller -- Introduction to ten Greek plays / Lane Cooper -- Poetics / Aristotle -- The criticism of Greek tragedy / William Arrowsmith -- Sophocles's electra : the Orestes myth rephrased / John Jones -- The birth of tragedy / Friedrich Nietzsche -- Tragedy and Greek archaic thought / R. P. Winnington-Ingram -- The antidote of comedy / C. M. Bowra -- From Aristophanes to Menander / W. Geoffrey Arnott -- Greece : the forms of Dionysus / E. T. Kirby -- I know you by your rags : costume and disguise in fifth-century drama / Frances Muecke -- Fear and suffering in Aeschylus and Euripides / Jacqueline de Romilly -- Aristophanes and his rivals / Malcolm Heath -- The tragedians and popular religion / Jon D. Mikalson -- Knowledge that is sad to have to know / Ruth Padel -- The fabrication of comic illusion / Niall W. Slater -- Myth into muthos : the shaping of tragic plot / Peter Burian.