Euripides' fragmentary plays

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

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1.The Evidence

Euripides composed around 90 plays in his fifty-year production career (455–405 bce). The corpus of texts transmitted from antiquity through the middle ages and into modern times includes seventeen tragedies, one satyr-play (Cyclops), and a further tragedy, Rhesus, which seems to have been confused with Euripides' own play of that name. Some evidence survives for another sixty plays, ranging from mere titles to quite substantial text-fragments and other information. Fifty of these are tragedies and only ten are satyr-plays, so the missing dozen may have included more satyr-plays than tragedies. The sixty plays (together with their production-dates, so far as these are known) are listed at the end of this article along with a further four plays of disputed authorship.

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Citation: Cropp, Martin. "Euripides' fragmentary plays". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 January 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=7212, accessed 22 November 2024.]

7212 Euripides' fragmentary plays 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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