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Opera was invented at the end of the sixteenth century in imitation of the supposed style of delivery of ancient Greek tragedy, and, since then, operas based on Greek drama have been among the most important in the repertoire. This book provides an exceptionally wide-ranging and detailed overview of the relationship between the two genres. Since tragedies have played a much larger part than comedies in this branch of operatic history, the volume mostly concentrates on the tragic repertoire, but a chapter on musical versions of Aristophanes' Lysistrata is included, as well as discussions of incidental music, a very important part of the musical reception of ancient drama, from Andrea Gabrieli in 1585 to Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This book examines cinematic representations of ancient Greek women from the realms of myth and history, including Helen, Medea, Penelope, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Iole, Dianeira, Io, Gorgo, Olympias, and Cleopatra. The chapters assembled here discuss how these female figures are resurrected on the big screen at different historical junctures, and are embedded in a narrative that serves different purposes (aesthetic, socio-moral, political) depending on the director of the film, the screenwriter, the studio, the country of its origin, and the time of its production. Using a diverse array of hermeneutic approaches (gender theory, feminist criticism, gaze theory, psychoanalysis, sociological theories of religion, film history, viewer-response theory, and personal voice criticism), the chapters aim to cast light on cinema's investments in the classical past and decode the mechanisms whereby the women under examination are extracted from their original context and are brought to life to serve as vehicles for the articulation of modern ideas, concerns, and cultural trends. Binding the chapters together is the common goal to explore the dialectic of continuity and rupture that characterizes the appropriation of the women of Greek myth and history in the cinema. To this end, the volume as a whole investigates not only how antiquity on the screen distorts, compresses, contests, and revises antiquity on the page but also, more crucially, why the medium uses such eclectic representational strategies vis-à-vis the classical world.

This book discusses the use of drama as an intertext in the work of the 2nd century Latin author Apuleius, who wrote the only complete extant Latin novel, the Metamorphoses, in which a young man is turned into a donkey by magic. Apuleius uses drama, especially comedy, as a basic underlying texture, and invites his readers to use their knowledge of contemporary drama in interpreting the fate of his protagonist and the often comic or tragic situations in which he finds himself. This book employs a close study of the Latin text and detailed comparison with the corpus of dramatic texts from antiquity, as well as discussion of stock features of ancient drama, especially of comedy, in order to explain some features of the novel which have so far baffled Apuleian scholarship, including the enigmatic ending. All Latin and Greek has been translated into English.

This book presents a radically new critical study of Aristophanes. Against the limited view of Aristophanes as Athenian theatrical satirist, the author identifies him as one of the world's great writers. Through an exploration of Aristophanes' comic poetry, informed by a wide range of theory from Kierkegaard to Adorno, a particular consideration of Aristophanes' own understanding of his medium, and challenging comparisons with modern literature, this book adds a new chapter to the long-standing debate about the nature and potentialities of comedy. Close analyses of Aristophanes' language and style, lyric poetry, presentation of character, organizational structures, and humorous modes, are conducted in this spirit. The enigma of ‘serious comedy’ and of Aristophanes' complex preoccupation with tragedy is at the centre of a new assessment of Aristophanic comedy as a whole. All Greek in the text is translated; the versions offered seek to convey the distinctive character of the original.

How does a theatrical tradition emerge in the fields of dramatic writing and artistic performance? Can a culture, in which theatre played no part in the past, create a theatrical tradition in real time—and how? What was the contribution of classical Greek drama to the evolution of Israeli theatre? How do political and social conditions affect the encounter between cultures—and what role do they play in creating a theatre with a distinctive identity? This book, the first of its kind, attempts to answer these and other questions, by examining the reception of classical Greek drama in the Israeli theatre over the last seventy years. It deals with dramatic and aesthetic issues while analysing translations, adaptations, new writing, mise-en-scène, and ‘post dramatic’ performances of classical Greek drama that were created and staged at key points of the development of Israeli culture amidst fateful political, social, and cultural events in the country’s history.

Astyanax is thrown off the walls of Troy, Medeia kills her children to take revenge on her husband, and Aias reflects sadly on his son’s inheritance, yet he kills himself and leaves Eurysakes vulnerable to his enemies. The pathos created by threats to children is a notable feature of Greek tragedy, but does not explain the range of situations where the playwrights chose to employ them. Although they are largely silent, passive figures, children exert a dramatic force that goes beyond their limited onstage presence. This book proposes a new paradigm to understand the roles of children in tragedy, emphasizing their dangerous potential as the future adults of myth. Their multiple projected lives create dramatic palimpsests which are paradoxically more significant than the immediate emotional effects. Children are never killed because of their immediate weakness, but because of their potential strength. Staging considerations underpin this re-evaluation, as the embodied identities of children are central to their roles. A new examination of the evidence for child actors concludes that the physical presence of children was a significant factor in their presentation. The socio-historical context of fifth-century Athens gives some pointers, but child roles can only be fully appreciated as theatrical phenomena, utilizing the inherent ambiguities of drama.

The Chorus of Drama in the Fourth Century BCE seeks to upend conventional thinking about the development of drama from the fifth to the fourth centuries. Set in the context of a theatre industry extending far beyond the confines of the City Dionysia and the city of Athens, the identity of choral performers and the significance of their contribution to the shape and meaning of drama in the later Classical period (c.400–323) as a whole is an intriguing and under-explored area of enquiry. Drawing together the fourth-century historical, material, dramatic, literary, and philosophical sources that attest to the activity and quality of dramatic choruses, the book provides a new way of talking and thinking about the choruses of drama after the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles. Having considered the positive evidence for dramatic choral activity, the book provides a radical rethinking of two oft-cited yet ill-understood phenomena that have traditionally supported the idea that the chorus of drama ‘declined’ in the fourth century: the inscription of χοροῦ μέλος‎ in papyri and manuscripts in place of fully written-out choral odes, and Aristotle’s invocation of embolima (Poetics 1456a25–32). The book goes on to explore how influential fourth-century authors such as Plato, Demosthenes, and Xenophon, as well as artistic representations of choruses on fourth-century monuments, have had an important role in shaping later scholars’ understanding of the dramatic chorus throughout the Classical period. The book’s conclusions, too, have implications for the broader story we wish to tell about Attic drama, and its most enigmatic and fundamental element, the chorus.

This book looks at Roman comedy in the light of history and Roman history in the light of comedy. Plautus and Terence base their dramas on the New Comedy of 4th- and 3rd-century BC Greece. Yet many of the themes with which they engage are peculiarly alive in the Rome of the Hannibalic war, and the conquest of Macedon. This study takes issues as diverse as the legal status of the prisoner of war, the ethics of ambush, fatherhood and command, and the clash of maritime and agrarian economies, and examines responses to them both on the comic stage and in the world at large. This is a substantially new departure in ways of thinking about Roman comedy and one that opens it up to a far wider public than has previously been the case.

Demonstrating that ancient drama can be a powerful tool in seeking justice, this book investigates a cross section of live theatrical productions on the US stage that have reimagined Greek tragedy to address political and social concerns. To address this subject, it engages with some of the latest research in the field of performance studies to interpret not dramatic texts in isolation from their performance context, but instead the dynamic experience of live theatre. The book’s focus is on the ability of engaged performances to pose critical challenges to long-standing stereotypes that have contributed to the misrepresentation and marginalization of under-represented communities. Yet, in the process, it also uncovers the ways in which performances can inadvertently reinforce the very stereotypes they aim to challenge. This book thus offers a study of the live performance of Greek drama and its role in creating and reflecting social, cultural, and historical identity in contemporary America.

Graeco-Roman epic poetry was the staple of the early operatic repertoire and it continues to provide a rich storehouse of themes for contemporary creative artists working in divergent traditions. Since Tim Supple and Simon Reade’s stage adaptation of Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid for the RSC (1999), versions of Greek and Roman epics have routinely provided raw material for the performance repertoire both within major cultural institutions and from emergent, experimental theatre companies. The chapters in this volume range widely across time (the Middle Ages to the present), place (Europe, Asia, and the Americas), and genres (lyric, film, dance, opera) in their searches for ‘epic’ content and form in diverse performance arenas. The anxieties about the ability to write epic in the early modern world in some way explain, together with the precedent of Greek tragedy’s reworking of epic material, this migration to the theatre. Yet equally, with this migration, epic encountered the barriers imposed by neoclassicists, who sought to restrict serious theatre to a narrowly defined reality that precluded epic’s broad sweeps across time and place. In many instances in recent years, the fact that the Homeric epics were composed orally makes reinvention not only legitimate but also deeply appropriate. With specialists from Classics, Music, English, Modern Languages, Dance, Theatre and Performance Studies, and from the creative industries, this volume is the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions.

This book is a critical study of three late plays of Euripides. It offers a reading of the plays, which has important implications for the way in which we read Euripidean tragedy and tragedy in general. It re-evaluates the escape-tragedies (Helen, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and the fragmentary Andromeda) and argues that they are to be taken seriously as a major dramatic and intellectual achievement. The book also argues that the escape-tragedies were produced as a thematically connected trilogy in 412 BC. The book assesses the ways in which genre affects our understanding of the plays. It also examines the plays' treatment of central themes such as myth, geography, cultural identity, philosophy, and religion. These are not separate topics but are seen as being joined together to form an intricate nexus of ideas. The escape-tragedies emerge as being serious, dark, pessimistic plays which raise some disturbing questions about the human condition.

This book is a study of Euripides' so-called ‘political plays’ (Children of Herakles and Suppliant Women). Still disdained as the anomalously patriotic or propagandistic works of a playwright elsewhere famous for his subversive, ironic, artistic ethos, the two works in question — notorious for their uncomfortable juxtaposition of political speeches and scenes of extreme feminine emotion — continue to be dismissed by scholars of tragedy as artistic failures unworthy of the author of Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae. This study makes use of recent insights into classical Greek conceptions of gender (in real life and on stage) and Athenian notions of civic identity to demonstrate that the political plays are, in fact, intellectually subtle and structurally coherent exercises in political theorizing — works that use complex interactions between female and male characters to explore the advantages, and costs, of being a member of the polis.

This book discusses creative and public engagements with ancient Greek literature, history, and thought via BBC Radio from the birth of domestic broadcasting in the 1920s up to the 1960s. The astonishing range of programmes broadcast includes some of the most interesting, imaginative, and political engagements with ideas from and about ancient Greece, from creative re-imaginings of ancient historical texts written and broadcast as Second World War propaganda, scores of performances of Greek tragedy and comedy, talks for schoolchildren and the general public, and re-writings of Homeric poetry especially for radio performance. These radio engagements with Greek literature, history, and thought made ideas from and about ancient Greece both practically and imaginatively accessible to far larger and more diverse audiences than has previously been taken into account in writings on classical receptions. Radio audiences were counted in tens or hundreds of thousands, and—not infrequently—millions. The book makes use of the rich range of archival evidence that exists not only for production processes, which illuminates the creatively symbiotic relationship between radio and the spheres of education, publishing, and the stage, but also the experience of individual listeners, which adds a rich and important dimension to current debates in classical reception studies. This book establishes the radio medium as a cultural sphere of great significance for a full understanding of ancient Greece in the public imagination in twentieth-century Britain.

The book maps out the dialogue between Greek tragedy and major investigations of postmodern theory, focusing on adaptations produced between 1970 and 2005. Despite the large number of stage and script adaptations of the Greek tragic texts in this period, tragedy has been deemed to be incompatible with postmodernism. The long-standing debate over the demise of tragedy in the modern world has recently resurged in the claim that postmodernism precludes tragedy as both an aesthetic form and a way of perceiving the world. However, rewritings of Greek tragedy can be used to uncover a significant relationship between tragedy and postmodernism. The plays under discussion are characterized by an extended intertextual engagement with their prototype texts; instead of simply adapting the Greek myth, they rewrite the classical text in ways akin to the renegotiation of authorship and textuality proffered by poststructuralist thought. Far from being an intertextual interplay, the strategies adopted in these rewritings are integral to the wider problematics of interrogating the authority of the classical canon and the power structures embedded in its reception. The book employs a cultural materialist methodology that resists fixed definitions of tragedy and focuses instead on the selected plays in order to analyse the peculiar tragic modes and tropes developed at the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

This work is one of the first full studies of the dissemination of Greek tragedy in the archaic and classical periods. Drawing on recent research in network theory, it seeks to reinterpret classical tragedy as a Panhellenic art form. It thereby offers a radically new perspective on the interpretation of the extant tragic texts, which have often been seen as the product of the fifth-century Athenian democracy. Tragedy grew out of, and became part of, a common Greek (or Panhellenic) culture, which was itself sustained by frequent travel and exchange. This book shows how Athens was a major Panhellenic centre within a wider and, by the fifth century, well-established network of festivals and patrons. The part played by non-Athenians in the festival culture of Attica is fully reassessed and it is estimated that as much as a quarter of all tragic poets who produced plays in Athens during the classical period were non-citizens. In addition, the book re-examines the evidence for tragedies that were probably or certainly performed outside Athens and shows how and why they were calculated to appeal to a broad Panhellenic audience. The stories they contained were themselves tales of travel. Together the works of the tragedians told and reworked the history of the Greek peoples and showed how they were connected through the wanderings of their ancestors. Tragedy, like the poets and their creations, was meant to travel and this is the first full study of tragedy on the move in the archaic and classical periods.

Blighted and accursed families are an inescapable feature of Greek tragedy, and many scholars have treated the questions of inherited guilt, curses, and divine causation. This book gives these familiar issues a fresh appraisal, arguing that tragedy is a medium that fuses the conceptual with the provoking and exciting of emotion, neither of which can be ignored if the texts are to be fully understood. It pays particular attention to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes and the Phoenician Women of Euripides, both of which dramatize the sorrows of the later generations of the House of Oedipus, but in very different, and perhaps complementary, ways. All Greek quotations are translated.

This study of Euripides’ Electra approaches the play through the lens of modern linguistics. A variety of modern linguistics theories (conversation analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics (on gender and politeness), paroemiology, and discourse studies) are introduced and then applied to the text of the play, with the aim of enhancing literary interpretation. The book has a specific focus on issues of characterization and demonstrates how Euripides shaped his figures through their use of language. In addition, some of the play’s major textual issues are tackled using the same linguistic methodology. An introductory chapter treats each of the linguistic approaches used throughout the book and discusses some of the general issues surrounding the play’s interpretation. This is followed by chapters on the figures of the Peasant (chapter I), Electra herself (chapter II), and Orestes (chapter III)—in each case showing how these figures’ characterization is determined by their speaking style and their ‘linguistic behaviour’. The book argues for a balanced interpretation of the main characters, challenging dominant scholarly opinion on this play. Three further chapters focus on textual criticism in stichomythia (chapter IV), on the messenger speech (chapter V), and on the agōn (chapter VI). A conclusion evaluates the linguistic approach adopted and discusses possibilities for further research along these lines.

This book offers an overview of key themes in the interpretation of the plays of Plautus. It explores the connections between deception, desire, slavery, genre, and audience. It attempts to offer an account of the mechanisms of Plautus’ humour and the uncomfortable origins of laughter. These dramas do not just play to but also work on the audience. The whole corpus of Plautine plays is examined with longer accounts of selected dramas and choice scenes. An emphasis on methodological and theoretical questions is maintained throughout. Particular attention is paid to the psychic life of humour and its relationship to questions of social power.

This book examines the impact that Athenian Old Comedy had on Greek writers of the Imperial era. It is generally acknowledged that Imperial-era Greeks responded to Athenian Old Comedy in one of two ways: either as a treasure trove of Atticisms, or as a genre defined by and repudiated for its aggressive humor. Worthy of further consideration, however, is how both approaches, and particularly the latter one that relegated Old Comedy to the fringes of the literary canon, led authors to engage with the ironic and self-reflexive humor of Aristophanes, Eupolis, and Cratinus. Authors ranging from serious moralizers (Plutarch and Aelius Aristides) to comic writers in their own right (Lucian, Alciphron), to other figures not often associated with Old Comedy (Libanius) adopted aspects of the genre to negotiate power struggles, facilitate literary and sophistic rivalries, and provide a model for autobiographical writing. To varying degrees, these writers wove recognizable features of the genre (e.g., the parabasis, its agonistic language, the stage biographies of the individual poets) into their writings. The image of Old Comedy that emerges from this time is that of a genre in transition. It was, on the one hand, with the exception of Aristophanes’s extant plays, on the verge of being almost completely lost; on the other hand, its reputation and several of its most characteristic elements were being renegotiated and reinvented.

The Classics were core to the curriculum and ethos of the intensely homosocial Victorian and Edwardian public schools. Yet ancient homosexuality and erotic pedagogy were problematic to the educational establishment, which expurgated classical texts with sexual content. This volume analyses the intimate nexus between the Classics, sex, and education primarily through the figure of the schoolmaster Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890–1918), whose clandestine writings explore homoerotic desires and comment on classical education. It reprints Bainbrigge’s surviving works: Achilles in Scyros (a verse drama featuring a cross-dressing Achilles and a Chorus of lesbian schoolgirls) and a Latin dialogue between schoolboys (with a translation by Jennifer Ingleheart). Like other similarly educated men of his era, Bainbrigge used Latin as an intimate homoerotic language; after reading Bainbrigge’s dialogue, A. E. Housman went on to write a scholarly article in Latin about ancient sexuality, Praefanda. This volume, therefore, also examines the parallel of Housman’s Praefanda, its knowing Latin, and bold challenge to mainstream morality. Bainbrigge’s works show the queer potential of Classics. His underground writings owe more to a sexualized Rome than an idealized Greece, offering a provocation to the study of Classical Reception and the history of sexuality. Bainbrigge refuses to apologize for homoerotic desire, celebrates the pleasures of sex, and disrupts mainstream ideas about the Classics and the relationship between ancient and modern. As this volume demonstrates, Rome is central to Queer Classics: it provided a male elite with a liberating erotic language, and offers a variety of models for same-sex desire.