Search Results

This chapter argues that Murray is best seen as a man who articulated contemporary concerns with supreme skill in a period of transition. It cites two main phases, or two modes to Gilbert Murray's career as a Greek scholar. The first (‘mode A’) was that of an upwardly-mobile professional classicist of the conventional kind, self-consciously engaged in close philological analysis and on-going debate with rival scholars. The second (‘mode B’) was aimed instead at a wider audience, including many non-classicists, and largely eschewed the apparatus of professional scholarship.

Some analysis privileges the practices of sacrifice, marriage, and agriculture, and the homologies among women show how the proper performance of Greek culture guarantees a healthy community and the maintenance of productive relationships among gods, mortals, and animals. The study of the representation of women in Greek drama, like the representation of ritual, has expanded exponentially in the last two or more decades. In the earlier part of this century, Athenian plays were simply quarried for what they could be made to say about a generalized “status” or “position” of women. Several explanations might be adduced for why Greek drama displays so many memorable females. One possible answer would be that drama in fifth-century Athens is a radical genre that challenges social norms and exposes the constructed nature of gender identity, and, in particular, of female inferiority, by mobilizing female characters who actively resist the identifications offered by their culture.

This chapter presents an outline of Epicharmean grammar and assigns to Epicharmus an important place in the linguistic history of Greek literature. It argues that Epicharmus' fragments open up a fascinating world not often studied in depth by students of Greek literature: that of a powerful colonial city whose traditions and institutions were profoundly different from those prevailing at Athens, and whose dialect, very different from the Attic, was remarkably influenced by indigenous languages. Epicharmus also provides a useful corrective to the ‘Athenocentric’ view of Greek drama.

This chapter considers the different aspects of Murray's engagement with Greek texts. It examines Murray's textual editing, an area of his work which is conventionally dismissed, and even ignored. These include his editing of Euripides and the Aeschylus.

This chapter pushes against the notion that Eva Palmer Sikelianos's work in Greece was disconnected from her non-Greek past and indifferent to “archaeological problems.” Digging deep into her papers and other sources dating between 1903 and 1940, the chapter pieces together Eva's dialogue with artists from Isadora Duncan to H. D. to George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell to Angelos Sikelianos, who were all familiar with archaeological problems but standing at an oblique angle to them as they thought about how to stage the ancient Greek chorus. This transatlantic genealogy allows reflection on how creative work happening near ruins, yet outside the formal discipline of archaeology, responds to the place, takes on the feel of archaeological discoveries, and generates further rounds of imaginative reworking. The same genealogy brings into view how Eva's efforts to revive the tragic chorus, having transformed Isadora's experiments, traveled across the Atlantic to inform the work of Ted Shawn.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to prove the very simple proposition that in Euripidean tragedy, dramatic form is a kind of political content. The project is motivated by two separate but intersecting problems. The first is the problem of Euripidean tragedy. There are eighteen extant tragedies confidently attributed to Euripides and many of them are, for lack of a better word, odd. With their disjointed, action-packed plots, comic touches, and frequent happy endings, they seem to stretch the generic boundaries of tragedy as we usually think of it. The second problem is the relation between the play and its contemporary world, the political world of democratic Athens. Tragic dramas were, almost without exception, set in the mythic past, not in the fifth-century polis, and almost never allude overtly to their contemporary moment. The remainder of the chapter discusses the meaning of politics of form by way of a brief illustration.

In the first decades of the last century, while the holy cause of ancient tragedy’s ‘revival’ was becoming established in Greece, there were some, among them Grigorios Xenopoulos, who claimed that the ancient plays could not be theatrically interesting to a contemporary audience unless they were submitted to textual and performative adaptation. Their challenge to tragedy’s ‘revival’ originated from different modern perspectives, mapping out diverse and even conflicting versions of modern Greek theatrical modernity. Despite their differences, they all emphasized the importance of contemporary theatre as opposed to ancient drama, and pointed out theatrical and cultural gaps between the ancient past and the modern present at a time when most Greek intellectuals and artists were zealously confirming continuities. However, their agenda has been totally overlooked thereafter in the practice of performing tragedy in Greece. This chapter presents and discusses the various texts and contexts of this neglected modern Greek battle between Moderns and Ancients.

This chapter provides a broad overview of the music written for productions of ancient drama from the late sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, highlighting the extent to which composers in vastly different times and places made efforts to recover elements of Greek tragedy through the music they created. In no case did any of these musicians, including Gabrieli, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Wilhelm Taubert, and Franz Lachner, make an obvious attempt to imitate ancient music, about which very little was known for certain. Yet each of them was concerned enough with re-creating the past to employ compositional strategies designed to evoke certain presumed characteristics of Greek drama, often in ways that departed from stylistic conventions of the day.

This chapter examines Wilde’s championship of serious theatre and the authentic performance text by analysing his reviews of the first so-called ‘archaeological’ productions of Greek plays and Shakespeare. It offers a wider context in which to understand the rapidity of his disaffection with Greek plays, as practised among the social elite; and it suggests some ways in which his early enthusiasm for authentic Greek drama and Shakespeare is related to his own later classically informed playwriting, which combines old ideas of theatre as about and for its audiences with new ideas of drama as the appreciation of a literary object. Wilde’s own work as a dramatist straddled that change, prefigured by a comment he made in 1885: ‘An audience looks at a tragedian, but a comedian looks at his audience.’ He combines both these directions of gaze in his 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest.

In modern productions, translators and directors, aided by our own imaginations, edit the gods away in order to concentrate on human action. Because modern readers do not try to comprehend the theology of an ancient and foreign civilization, they fail to see that in Euripides’ plays (as in dramas by other poets), it is the gods who control what happens in human life, even when the human characters in the dramas are unable to imagine the full extent of the gods’ power. The chapter discusses the modern tendency to omit divine action in Euripides’ Trojan Women, and inability to recognize its presence in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, even though Aristotle understood that the contrast between human ignorance and divine omniscience was a central feature of Athenian drama. It also explains why this book discusses the roles played by individual gods, as well as the function of divine epiphanies in general.

In 1998, four years after the first free elections in South Africa, the Cape Town producer (and actor) Mark Fleishman and his team put a new adaptation of the Electra myth on the stage of the Hiddingh Hall theatre on the Orange Street Campus of the University of Cape Town, under the title In the City of Paradise. The play is set against the backdrop of the immediately post-apartheid era in South Africa. This transitional period from a former repressive political system to democracy was a crucial one in South African history. The impact of Greek drama as protest under the apartheid regime has been well documented, but this chapter considers its continuing impact in the new South Africa in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The chapter examines the continuing importance of workshop theatre as a means of individual and community transformation. It addresses the continuing fluidity of myth in modern contexts and argues that free versions of Greek plays have potential to critique easy assumptions about the relationship between truth and reconciliation.

The Introduction begins by providing a brief overview of the reception of Greek drama by under-represented communities in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. After situating the book’s topic within this historical timeline, it proceeds to explain the development of the project, the focus on live theatre, the choice of productions, and the reasons for them. It defines terms, provides disclaimers, explains the methodology used, clarifies the topic, situates it within its historical moment, summarizes each of the chapters, describes the development of the ‘democratic turn’ in Greek drama, and finally speculates on the reasons for the appeal of Greek drama to artists working with under-represented communities.

At the end of dramas the gods may not have solved all problems, that does not mean that Euripides sought to have his original audiences cease to honor them. On the contrary, it reminds us that the gods exist to please themselves, not in order to make humans happy. The codas to five dramas (even though they were probably not written by Euripides) state explicitly and without any hedging that the gods do what they choose to do and that humans only understand what has happened after the fact, by which time it is too late to prevent further suffering and loss. This outlook is shared by the other dramatists. Theatrical performance gives the audience a fleeting opportunity to look down upon human life with all its limitations from a distance, as a god might see it, without the usual mist of partial understanding that clouds mortal eyes.