Central to Tanya Pollard's thesis in Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages is the supposed collaboration between George Peele and Shakespeare on Titus Andronicus, and what Shakespeare learned, as a result, about particular features of Euripidean tragedy from Peele. Hecuba and Iphigenia emerge as “synecdoches for the tragic theater” and “especially for the sympathetic transmission of emotion between bodies with which it was linked” (2). In addition, a third, Alcestis, is claimed as the authority to whom the origins of tragicomic form can be traced (188). Throughout her six chapters, six appendixes, and a meticulous collection of footnotes (sometimes unnecessarily repetitive), Pollard adduces a surprising amount of evidence in support of her claim that despite the infrequency of translations directly into English of Euripides from the Greek, his texts were transmitted via Latin, and that references to Hecuba, Iphigenia, Alcestis, and Medea, and to theatrical situations resembling some of their predicaments (as passionate victim or as active heroine), can be traced through Shakespeare's tragedies (chapter 3), comedies (chapter 4), tragicomedies (chapter 5), and, surprisingly, in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (chapter 6).

One of Pollard's objectives is to revitalize source studies, but she is periodically aware of the difficulties of doing so. She dismisses Bloom's Oedipal account of the anxiety of male influence (14), though Bloom himself had already ruled out Shakespeare and the early modern period from his Freudian thesis. Instead, she invokes Longinus's account of the identification of “literary influence and creativity with a Euripidean model of the female body's potent receptivity,” and she concludes that Euripides “conceived his plays through absorbing the inspiration of Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles before him” (18). Thus ancient Greek models were, for early modern readers, “simultaneously original models and secondary copies—sources and variants, first and second generations—not unlike the mother-daughter dyads who came both to represent his canon and to pass it on to later periods” (18–19). Phrases such as “not unlike” and “implicitly” reveal a speculative strand that occasionally destabilizes what is otherwise a consistent, if somewhat partisan, scholarly argument. Through early modern accounts of translation, Pollard argues, “Greek playwrights, especially Euripides, became members of a diachronic collaborative community that facilitated new literary modes” (19). What she calls “Euripides’ fertile female protagonists” become models for types of authorship that engaged “collaboratively with the past, rather than along adversarially Oedipal lines” (20).

That Pollard seeks to intervene “in a larger conversation about intertextuality” (20) is laudable, but her concept of a “diachronic collaborative community,” and the acknowledgment of a synchronic pressure that can be brought to bear on the process of textual transmission, appears to mean little more than a conversation between texts whose linear connections are unproblematic, if complex. That said, Pollard's resurrection of Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh's Jocasta (1556), and Jane Lumley's English translation of Iphigenia (1557), is welcome, as indeed is the larger context she provides for them in chapter 1 involving Erasmus, Buchanan, and Peele. She charts meticulously the ways in which Lumley's translation models “a shift in authority from classical literary sources to their modern descendants” (45). This recovery of a female authorial voice is convincing, although the social and cultural reasons for it are less clear; moreover, while the identification of Iphigenia as a “Christ figure” (49) is perfectly plausible, little is said about how classical and biblical models intertwine, and with what semantic effect. Although they do not entirely damage the trajectory of Pollard's argument, there are some casual impressionistic observations, such as the claim in chapter 2 that the Ghost of Revenge in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy is “typically staged as a male” (91), which overlooks its specific gendering in Kyd's text, which might lead to a more fruitful association with Tamora's parodying of Revenge in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Pollard regards Lavinia and Tamora as “mirror images of each other” (104), but she underplays the mediation of Seneca's Chorus in Newton's translation of Troas, which avails itself of a familiar popular critical strategy with the statement that Hecuba “A mirrour is to teach you what you are” (Newton, Troas [1927], 15).

There is much to admire in the detail of Pollard's book, although at times her vision is blinkered, and, surprisingly, Webster and Middleton are relegated to a few minimal references and footnotes. There are also some problematic observations, such as that Shakespeare's Aaron is traced to Greek thought (107), whereas reference to the New Testament book of Revelation might have been more helpful. Moreover, despite arguing ardently throughout for direct Euripidean influence, Pollard is finally, and to her great credit, forced to admit that Shakespeare got his Euripides “through Ovid, Virgil, and Homer” (122). On the one hand, “classical models” are confidently identified, but they are then aligned “with increasingly complex layers of contaminatio” (160). The problem here is with the familiar discourse of source study, and although it is not one that Pollard resolves satisfactorily, her substantial contribution to the debate does much to open out some of the principal issues involved.