Audiobooks online: genre "Tragedy", page 6

Racine's version of the time-honored story of Iphigenia was acted for the first time in 1674. The model upon which it is shaped is the "Iphigenia in Aulis" of his favorite Euripides, but the French poet has heightened the romantic interest and complicated the plot by the importan...

Iphigenia in Aulis (Ancient Greek: Ἰφιγένεια ἐν Αὐλίδι) is the last extant work of the playwright Euripides. Written between 408, after the Oresteia, and 406 BC, the year of Euripides' death, the play was first produced the following year in a trilogy with The Bacchae and Alcmaeo...

Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607. It was first printed in the First Folio of 1623. The plot is based on Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Marcus Antonius and follows the relations...

Macbeth is a play written by William Shakespeare. It is considered one of his darkest and most powerful tragedies. Set in Scotland, the play dramatizes the corroding psychological and political effects produced when its protagonist, the Scottish lord Macbeth, chooses evil as the ...

Ajax is a Greek tragedy written in the 5th century BC. The date of Ajax's first performance is unknown and may never be found, but most scholars regard it as an early work, c. 450 - 430 BC. It chronicles the fate of the warrior Ajax after the events of the Iliad, but before the e...

John Webster's bloody Jacobean tragedy exposes the decadence of the Italian court. The virtuous Duchess of Malfi, a young widow, secretly marries her steward Antonio, and is subsequently persecuted by her brothers: the sexually obsessed and eventually mad Ferdinand, and the corru...

The Tragedy of King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Lei...

Sophocles' play recounts an episode from the Trojan War, in which the wily Odysseus and Achilles' son Neoptolemus travel to a remote island to persuade Philoctetes to come with them to Troy. A prophet has foreseen that the Greeks will need Philoctetes and his bow (given to him by...

Based on Aphra Behn's 1688 novel (which is one of the earliest novels in the English language), Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko is seen by scholars today as the driving force that kept Behn's work from fading into obscurity. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it w...

Considered by her contemporaries a playwright “second only to Shakespeare,” Joanna Baillie was one of the most critically acclaimed writers of the Romantic Era. The Plays on the Passions, first published in 1798, stands as her undeniable magnum opus: a multivolume series of trage...

King Leir is an anonymous Elizabethan play about the life of the ancient Celtic king Leir of Britain. It was published in 1605 but was entered into the Stationers' Register on 15 May 1594. The play has attracted critical attention principally for its relationship with King Lear, ...

"The time to which this tragedy relates is much later than that of any other of Racine's historical plays. The capture of Babylon (or rather Bagdad) from the Persians by Sultan Amurath IV, on which the catastrophe of the plot depends, occurred only a year before the poet's birth,...