Elektra: Methue student edition (Student Editions)

Euripides was born near Athens between 485 and 480 BC. His first play was presented in 455 BC and he wrote some hundred altogether of which nineteen survive – a greater number than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined – and which include Alkestis, Medea, Bacchae, Hippolytos, Ion and Iphigenia at Aulis. He died in 406 BC.

Kenneth McLeish studied Classics and Music at Worcester College, Oxford. Once a full-time translator, author and dramatist, he published extensively including The Good Reading Guide, Shakespeare's People, The Theatre of Aristophanes, Companion to the Arts in the Twentieth Century, Myth, The Listener's Guide to Classical Music and Crucial Classics (both with Valerie McLeish) and The Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought (as general editor). His original plays and his translations - from ancient Greek drama, as well as from Strindberg, Ibsen Moliere and Strindberg - have been widely performed, most notably by the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

J. Michael Walton has published and edited seven books on classical theatre history and has nine translations of Euripides plays in print, many on the Methuen Drama list. He is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Hull where he taught from 1965 to 2002. While there he directed numerous plays and taught courses in Classical Theatre, Masks and Puppets, Russian Theatre, American Theatre, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Theatre, Directing and Acting.

MARIANNE MCDONALD is Professor of Theatre and Classics at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. She was a Fulbright professor in 1999 and in addition to her post at UCSD, is adjunct professor at Trinity College Dublin and a fellow at the National University of Ireland. With over 140 publications, she is the author of Terms for Happiness in Euripides, Euripides in Cinema, Ancient Sun/Modern Light, and Star Myths.