No book in English covering all the plays of Euripides has been published since 1967. In the meantime there has been something of a revolution in the way we view classical drama generally and Euripides in particular. "The Plays of Euripides" reflects that revolution and aims to show how Euripides was continually reinventing himself. A truly Protean figure, he seems to set out on a new journey in each of his surviving nineteen plays. Between general introduction and final summary, Morwood's chapters identify the themes that underlie the plays and concentrate, above all, on demonstrating the extraordinary diversity of this great dramatist.
James Henry Weldon Morwood was an English classicist and author. He taught at Harrow School, where he was Head of Classics, and at Oxford University, where he was a Fellow of Wadham College, and also Dean. He wrote almost thirty books, ranging from biography to translations and academic studies of Classical literature. His best-known work is The Oxford Latin Course (1987–92, with Maurice Balme, new ed, 2012), whose popularity in the USA led to the publication of a specifically American edition in 1996. Morwood is credited with helping to ensure the survival - even flourishing - of Classical education into the twenty-first century, both in the UK and the USA.