The Oresteia - Hardcover

Aeschylus; E. D. A. Morshead [translator]

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Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1111887403 ISBN 13: 9781111887407

Publisher: HERITAGE PRESS, 1961

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Our version of the Oresteia is basically the translation of E. D. A. Morshead, sometime fellow of New College, Oxford, and later assistant master at Winchester; he died in 1912 at the age of sixty-three. With the advice of Moses Hadas, Jay Professor of Greek at Columbia University, we have corrected Morshead's errors and revised numerous verses whose wording would strike the wrong note in the ear of the present-day reader and perhaps move him to guffaws instead of pity and terror. ... For the Oresteia of Aeschylus, Michael Ayrton has created eleven paintings which are striking in composition and execution and monumental in size. He has studiously avoided trying to make the characters... look like Greek actors of the fifth century B.C. ... The artist has limited his palette almost entirely to brooding warm grays, charcoal blacks, and dramatic plum-like shades. ... For the type, Adrian Wilson has chosen a special cutting of 18-point Janson... For running-titles and small display lines Adrian Wilson happily hit on a Greek-looking type named American Uncial, and the larger display lines and the initial letters have been hand-drawn in Adrian Wilson's studio and under his supervision. The mise-en-page he has worked out for the Oresteia is as striking as the paintings, involving an extraordinary balance between running titles carefully placed at the head of left-hand pages and at the foot of righthand pages. The text has been printed in New York under the direction of Robert Baderson and his skilled crew, and the paper has been specially made for this book by the Chillicothe Paper Company, of Chillicothe, Ohio, on the Scioto River. The binding is a three-piece production: The shelfback is a strip of plum-colored linen stamped in pure gold leaf; the Ayrton paintings reproduced as gravures on the front and back covers depict respectively the procession of the Athenians to the Cave of the Eumenides, and Electra mourning the death of Agamemnon.

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