Mae Smethurst is professor of classics and East Asian literature at the University of Pittsburgh. She has authored two books: The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami: A Comparative Study of Greek Tragedy and Noh (Princeton University Press 1989)and Dramatic Representations of Filial Piety (Cornell East Asia 1998). The first book won the Hitomi Arisawa Prize for an outstanding book published by an American university press in 1989-1990, and the second won the United States-Japan Friendship Commission’s prize through the Donald Keene Center at Columbia for an outstanding translation from pre-modern Japanese to English in 2002. She also edited with the help of co-editor Christina Laffin a volume on noh: Ominameshi: A Flower Viewed from Many Directions.

• Introduction: Toward a Comparative Study of the Action in Greek Tragedy and NohChapter 1: Aristotle on Tragedy: A Reading of “Iphigenia in Tauris” and “Oedipus the King”Chapter 2: The Tragic Action of Realistic Noh: Reading Noh with and beyond AristotleChapter 3: Climactic Moments: The Third Person in Realistic NohChapter 4: Climactic Moments: The Third Actor in Greek TragedyCoda: Plot, Performance, and Creative DistancesAppendix: Passages from Realistic NohBibliographyIndex

Historically, Greek tragedy and Japanese Noh have nothing to do with each other, having developed in different eras and geographical regions. Yet both theatrical traditions tell stories of human joy and suffering through characters and action, and they evoke emotional response in audiences past and present. Noh plays are most familiar as mugen or "spirit noh," in which a wandering soul recounts an event in his or her life that is the cause of longing or torment. There are also genzai or "realistic noh," which deal with living people and present action. Some of the best-loved plays in the repertoire are Genzai Noh, Funa Benkei, Sumidagawa, and Ataka. Smethurst, author of The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami uses Aristotle's views on tragedy to analyze the plot structure in a group of lesser-known genzai noh texts, comparing them to examples of tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides. She examines the writers' use of action in these noh plays and their incorporation of third-person speech at the plot climax, features that correspond to Aristotle's principle that a tragedy can have only three actors. Smethurst's study of noh texts is uniquely illuminating for scholars of tragedy. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty.