"Throughout the book, Rowland shows remarkable erudition. Not only does he navigate an ocean of primary sources from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century, but he provides abundant documentation on each source and period, engaging with critical traditions, combining methodologies and offering many new readings."

- Charlotte Coffin, Universite Paris-Est Creteil - Cahiers Elisabethains 'Rowland is one of the very few scholars with detailed knowledge of both ancient theatre and the medieval and early modern performance traditions. Killing Hercules therefore makes a very significant contribution to classical reception scholarship and to the medieval and early modern receptions of Sophocles' Women of Trachis, in particular. But it does much more than that: Rowland copiously tracks the trails of destruction left by Hercules, the serial adulterer and aggressive sexual predator, across media (in opera as well as theatre and the iconographic tradition) and across time and place, right down to Martin Crimp's twenty-first century Hercules in Cruel and Tender, who has just returned from spearheading the 'war on terror'.' Fiona Macintosh, Professor of Classical Reception, University of Oxford, and Director of the Archive for Performances of Greek and Roman Drama

'Large-scale treatments of European themes have all too often leapt from the classics to the early modern, but Richard Rowland here shows with remarkable breadth and grasp why medieval wrestlings with Hercules in all their audacity, freedom and confident re-direction, must not be left out of the transformations of the classical story-world so continuingly vital in Western culture. He offers a rich series of changing receptions from the church fathers to Boethius to Petrarch and Boccaccio; new perspectives on Hercules as a figure of sexual violence for Jean de Meun and Christine de Pisan; fresh accounts of Hercules and Deianira in the energetic and varied late medieval explorations of marriage by Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, as well as examining Deianira's continuing career in early modern print.' Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thomas F. X. & Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature, Fordham University, New York

'With this book Richard Rowland sets new standards for understanding and appreciating English music theatre works. Music historians will be stimulated by the breadth and detail with which he tracks the handling of Hercules from classical antiquity to the present. Historians of literature should take encouragement from Rowland's accessible and provocative analyses to follow his example and include musical works in their surveys. This is an exceptionally fresh, thoroughly worked out approach to the artistic interpretation of a universal theme.' Dr Ruth Smith, author of Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought