The Mahābhāṣya by Patañjali incorporates the earliest reference to what could have been the seeds of Sanskrit drama. This treatise on grammar from 140 BCE provides a possible date for the beginnings of theatre in India. Most Athenian tragedies dramatise occasions from Greek mythology, although The Persians—which phases the Persian response to news of their military defeat on the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE—is the notable exception in the surviving drama. When Aeschylus won first prize for it at the City Dionysia in 472 BCE, he had been writing tragedies for greater than 25 years, yet its tragic therapy of current history is the earliest example of drama to outlive. More than 130 years later, the philosopher Aristotle analysed 5th-century Athenian tragedy in the oldest surviving work of dramatic theory—his Poetics (c. 335 BCE).
Our upcoming slate of basic and modern works will present forever-relevant themes and shared human …