The Plays of Sophocles

The emphasis throughout this book, aimed at late school and early university students, is on Sophocles' tragic thinking, on the concept of the 'Sophoclean hero', and on the dramatic structure of the plays. A brief concluding chapter draws together what has been said in the seven studies of the individual plays. The aim of the book is to help readers to understand why Sophocles is still worth reading, or going to see in the theatre, in the twenty-first century, and to show how far Sophoclean scholarship has moved in recent decades from the once prevalent view that he was a pious religious conformist who had nothing very profound or original to say, but who said it very beautifully.