In most versions of the Hippolytos myth, Phaidra is depicted as an utterly debauched character, a woman reduced to shamelessness by the power of Aphrodite. In Euripides' Hippolytos, however--informed by the playwright's moral and religious fascination--we find a Phaidra resisting the goddess of love with all her strength, though in the end unsuccessfully. Phaidra becomes a tragic foil for Hippolytos, making his superhuman virtue at once believable and understandable.

Robert Bagg's profound translation of this Euripidean masterpiece is idiomatic, natural, and intensely lyrical, designed not only to be read but performed. Unlike most versions, Bagg's Hippolytos sustains the dramatic tome and dynamics to the very end--even after Phaidra's death--and the moving scenes between Hippolytos and Theseus, and later Hippolytos' death-scene with Artemis, receive here unprecedented plausibility and power.

THE TANDEM RIDE is a book that follows the poet, teacher and translator Robert Bagg on various outdoor, deskbound, and romantic adventures, from boyhood through adolescence and maturity into old age. The poems are often composed in narrative blank verse or traditional forms, including Spenserian stanzas and sonnet sequences. Bagg's comfort zone has remained since his college days within the heady precincts of Greek myth, while writing about contemporary subjects in colloquial American speech.

Patronage studies are an important part of modern Italian Rnaissance art history. This book looks at how and why the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinit was made. What induced the patron to have it decorated, why did he choose the particular church and why as his chosen painter did he choose Domenico Ghirlandaio. The patrons interest in promoting his image both on earth and in heaven are important factors in any Renaissance patronage study none more so given the bitter rivalry for the favour of Lorenzo de Medici between Francesco Sassetti and his banking rival Giovanni Tornabuoni. These two conducted and extensive campaign for the right to have decorated the main chapel in Santa Maria Novella. Sassetti having failed in his bid, not least as he wanted his chapel dedicated to his name saint then had Ghirlandaio create one of the great Florentine fresco cycles.

Robert Bagg's translations are Prized for making ancient Greek dramas immediate and gripping. His earlier translations of the plays of Sophocles and Euripides have been performed over seventy times, across a wide array of stages. This edition includes accessible new translations of four plays by Euripides -- the tragedies Medea, Bakkhai, and Hippolytos, and the satyr play Cyclops -- all rendered in iambic pentameter, a meter well suited for the stage. They sustain the strengths that Bagg is known for: taut and vivid Language and faithfulness to the Greek. Students new to the world of classical drama will find rich and informative introductions to each work, explanatory notes, and stage directions that evoke the plays' original fifth century BCE Athenian Settings.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Wilbur (b. 1921) is part of a notable literary cohort, American poets who came to prominence in the mid-twentieth century. Wilbur's verse is esteemed for its fluency, wit, and optimism; his ingeniously rhymed translations of French drama by Moliere, Racine, and Corneille remain the most often staged in the English-speaking world; his essays possess a scope and acumen equal to the era's best criticism. This biography examines the philosophical and visionary depth of his world-renowned poetry and traces achievements spanning seventy years, from political editorials about World War II to war poems written during his service to his theatrical career, including a contentious collaboration with Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman.Wilbur's life has been mistakenly seen as blessed, lacking the drama of his troubled contemporaries. Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur corrects that view and explores how Wilbur's perceived ""normality"" both enhanced and limited his achievement. The authors augment the life story with details gleaned from access to his unpublished journals, family archives, candid interviews they conducted with Wilbur and his wife, Charlee, and his correspondence with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, John Malcolm Brinnin, James Merrill, and others.

Vivid translations of three masterworks of Western literature; With this volume, poet Robert Bagg completes his translation of the three plays in which Sophocles dra matized the agony and destruction inflicted on Oedipus and his family, the royal house of Thebes. To the newly revised Oedipus the King, first published in 1982, Bagg adds Antigone and Oedipus at Kolonos. Composed decades apart in the fifth century bce, these tragedies hold a central place in Western literature - not only because of the formal beauty and dramatic power of their poetry, but because of the shocking ironies that convey Sophocles' understanding of divine malice and human vulnerability. Bagg's goal has been to make accurate but idiomatic renderings of the Greek originals that are suitable for reading, teaching, or performing. What makes his versions ""leaner, tauter, more luminous and Sophoclean than other transitions,"" writes classicist Richard P. Martin, is Bagg's ""decision to follow the American poetic tradition of Stevens, Pound, and Frost rather than the English tradition"" of most other contemporary translators. Readers and actors alike will find these translations loyal to Sophocles' characteristic directness and concision, his pervasive irony, his unsparing descriptions of physical violence, and the music of his choral songs. Each character speaks with a distinctive voice; each play possesses a tone expressive of the issues that preoccupied Sophocles during the stages of his long engagement with the fate of Oedipus, his wife/mother Jocasta, and their children. In the introductions, Bagg and his wife Mary discuss factors in ancient Greek social and cultural life that are likely to be unfamiliar to the general reader but are central to interpreting Sophocles' meaning. They have also annotated each play to clarify mythological references and points of interpretation and translation. In their general introduction they explore the origins of Greek theater, the nature of the Athenian festival of Dionysos at which Sophocles' plays were first performed, and the characteristic ingredients of Greek drama in performance. They conclude with a discussion of the known facts and surviving anecdotes of the playwright's life.