ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL AND ENDURING OF GREEK TRAGEDIES
Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens and one of the few whose plays have survived, Some ancient scholars attributed 95 plays to him but according to the Suda it was 92 at most. Of these, 18 or 19 have survived more or less complete. He is credited with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. He was also considered "the most tragic of poets¿, focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unheard of. He was "the creator of...that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg," in which "...imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". However, he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
