Text written to be performed — Greek tragedy through Shakespeare to the absurd, where the page is only half the work.
10 topics · 19 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Medea
Euripides · 431 BCE
A foreign sorceress abandoned by her Greek husband for a more advantageous marriage takes a calculated revenge that includes killing their own…
+5 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Agamemnon
Aeschylus · 458 BCE
A king returning triumphant from Troy is murdered in his own bath by his wife and her lover, opening a trilogy that argues a family's cycle of…
+10 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Shakespearean Tragedy
A. C. Bradley · 1904
Reads Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth as studies of character in which the tragic outcome follows necessarily from a flaw in an otherwise…
+1 more at this level
12 of 19 works
Euripides
A foreign sorceress abandoned by her Greek husband for a more advantageous marriage takes a calculated revenge that includes killing their own children, staged to argue that a city's contempt for an outsider produces exactly the monstrousness it claims to fear.
about 85 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Sophocles
A king's relentless investigation into a murder turns out to be an investigation into himself, arguing that self-knowledge can arrive only through a fall no foresight could have prevented.
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Aristophanes
Stages a sex strike organised across warring Greek city-states to argue, through farce, that the women shut out of politics have both the standing and the leverage to end a war the men cannot stop themselves fighting.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Aristophanes
The god Dionysus descends to the underworld to bring a great tragedian back from the dead to save Athens, and stages a formal contest between Aeschylus and Euripides to argue that tragedy's civic duty is to make citizens better, not merely to be clever.
about 55 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Molière
A pious fraud who talks his way into a household's trust and near-destruction, staged to argue that hypocrisy dressed as devotion is more dangerous than open vice — a case so pointed the play was banned for five years.
about 75 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Anton Chekhov
A family too sentimental and self-absorbed to save its estate loses it to the son of a former serf, staged as comedy rather than tragedy to argue that historical change replaces people who cannot act, whatever their feelings.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Aeschylus
A king returning triumphant from Troy is murdered in his own bath by his wife and her lover, opening a trilogy that argues a family's cycle of blood-vengeance cannot be closed by more private killing, only by the public court that ends the whole Oresteia.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William Shakespeare
A prince who has every reason and every means to avenge his father delays past all sense, arguing that thought and self-consciousness, not lack of courage, are what stand between intention and action.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Christopher Marlowe
A scholar who trades his soul for twenty-four years of magical power spends them on tricks and spectacle rather than the knowledge he claimed to want, arguing that the ambition to transcend human limits collapses into pettiness once it actually succeeds.
about 80 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Ben Jonson
A wealthy Venetian fakes a fatal illness to draw a parade of legacy-hunters into ever more degrading acts of flattery and bribery, a satire arguing that greed corrupts faster and more completely than any of the vices it pretends to despise.
about 3.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026John Webster
A widowed duchess who secretly marries beneath her rank is hunted to madness and death by her own brothers, staged to argue that the aristocracy's obsession with blood and status is a more dangerous derangement than any single villain's malice.
about 2 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Jean Racine
A queen consumed by an incestuous passion for her stepson destroys herself and him once forced to name it aloud, compressed into strict classical unity of time and place to argue that reason is powerless against a passion the gods themselves have decreed.
about 55 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026