--- A. P. Burnett's blurb writer, quoted by Richard Rutherford in his General Introduction to Medea and Other Plays: Medea/ Alcestis/The Children of Heracles/ Hippolytus (2003), Penguin Classics.
Here's Rutherford (text at Erenow.com)
The Iphigenia at Aulis is a fast-moving and constantly attention-grabbing play, but one in which the high seriousness of the Aeschylean ode is dissipated, and the tragic sacrifice becomes wasteful self- deception. As A. P. Burnett put it: ‘In these plays the poet shows men scaled for comedy trying to live in a world still ruled by the gods of tragedy.’
The source is given in the accompanying footnote as, "From the jacket blurb of Catastrophe Survived (Oxford 1977)." The text from Google Books, for the 1985 edition, is:
Examining the seven Euripidean tragicomedies, this book contends that the plays' plots--compounded as they are of the opposite elements of good fortune and catastrophe--result from experimentation with a new form intended to express a characteristically Euripidean view of reality. The plays involve people scaled for comedy trying to live in a world ruled by the gods of tragedy, making efforts sometimes noble, sometimes sordid, but in the end, essentially futile. Burnett shows how Euripides manipulates traditional scenes, diverting and frustrating the expectations aroused in his audience and transforming their simple pity and terror into a response that is conscious, complex, and inescapably disturbing.
