The Text
The text of the play is very poor, and scholars have detected several interpolations in the text. Over the centuries large and small interpolations have been inserted into this tragedy. Some scholars even believe that the whole play is post-Euripidean, written in the style of the late Euripides. For more about interpolations in the text, see Donald J. Mastronarde, Phoenissae.
Read more about this topic: The Phoenician Women
Famous quotes containing the words the text and/or text:
“Upon looking back from the end of the last chapter and surveying the texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page and the five following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, to keep up that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly, without which a book would not hold together a single year.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“I am so glad you have been able to preserve the text in all of its impurity.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)