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Curated playlist

Plays set in ancient Greece

  • Troilus and Cressida8 minTroilus and Cressida, written by William Shakespeare probably in 1602, arrives with a strange and unsettling preface. One printing of the 1609 quarto announces it as a play recently performed on stage. The other printing declares it a new…
  • Medea (play)8 minMedea, the ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, opens in the immediate aftermath of a betrayal. A woman who gave up her homeland, her family, and her royal identity for a man now learns that man is marrying someone else. Her nurse…
  • The Birds (play)7 minThe Birds by Aristophanes opened at the City Dionysia in Athens in 414 BC, and two middle-aged men were stumbling across a hillside wilderness with a pet crow and a pet jackdaw as their only guides. They were fed up with Athens, fed up…
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream15 minA Midsummer Night's Dream opens in Athens, four days before a wedding, with a father dragging his daughter before a duke and invoking a law that would see her put to death for refusing to marry the man he chose. That is the trigger. What…
  • The Persians11 minThe Persians, written by Aeschylus, holds a distinction that no other surviving text can claim: it is the oldest piece of ancient Greek drama still in existence. It premiered in 472 BC at Athens' City Dionysia festival, won first prize,…
  • The Frogs13 minThe Frogs opens with Dionysus cutting off his own slave's joke before it even lands. Xanthias is hauling his master's baggage and reaches for crude toilet humor about the heavy load, the kind of joke he assumes the audience wants. But the…
  • The Two Noble Kinsmen10 minWilliam Shakespeare wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1613 or 1614, his final play before he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he died in 1616. He did not write it alone. Another dramatist's name sits beside his on every surviving copy,…
  • Oedipus Rex8 minOedipus Rex opens with a city dying. Thebes is consumed by plague, and its king stands before his people vowing to hunt down the murderer responsible. The catch: he is the killer. Sophocles wrote this Athenian tragedy at a moment when the…
  • Antigone (Anouilh play)4 minJean Anouilh's Antigone opened at the Théâtre de l'Atelier in Paris on the 6th of February, 1944, while German soldiers patrolled the streets outside. The audience watching that night faced an unusual problem: they could not agree on what…
  • Pericles, Prince of Tyre11 minPericles, Prince of Tyre arrived in print in 1609 as a quarto edition and was reprinted five times before 1635, making it one of the most popular plays of Shakespeare's era. Yet it was left out of the First Folio in 1623, the great…
  • The Bacchae9 minThe Bacchae ends with a mother cradling what she believes is the head of a mountain lion, only to realize it belongs to her own son. That image, delivered by Euripides in the final years of his life, has haunted audiences for more than two…
  • Prometheus Bound11 minPrometheus Bound opens with four characters on stage at once, a staging so unusual that no other surviving ancient Greek tragedy matches it. Kratos and Bia, embodiments of brute power and callous violence, are fastening a silent figure to…
  • The Comedy of Errors10 minThe Comedy of Errors is one of William Shakespeare's earliest plays, and it gave the English language something most plays never do: a common idiom. To call a chaotic string of blunders a "comedy of errors" is now perfectly ordinary…

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