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The chapter begins with an accounting of the three versions of Prometheus’ story from Hesiod, Aeschylus, and finally, Shelley. Shelley’s play, “Prometheus Unbound” is contrasted with Aeschylus own drama, “Prometheus Bound.” The two plays differ in the resolution of the conflict. In the former, Shelley does not allow reconciliation between Prometheus and Zeus, unlike Aeschylus’ version, with its recurring themes of female subjugation and male aggression and seduction. The chapter covers the first act of “Prometheus Unbound” and analyzes the significance of the major and minor characters and their actions, in light of Shelley’s unique philosophy in life. In Shelley’s play, the feminine aspect—represented by Earth and Prometheus’ own mother—plays a major role in the denouement, and parallels are seen with Shelley’s own home life. In Shelley’s mind, goals of self-knowledge and self-respect could only be achieved through “mirroring,” and this is illustrated in his play.

Chapter 3 features what is clearly a more national but also an increasingly international dialogue and exchange of ideas on tragic heroes like Prometheus, despite the remoteness of the prison islands. Chapter 3 focuses on the productions—or attempts at productions—of the female exiles of Trikeri and also on their alternative educational and cultural expressions, which tended to bring gender into the equation. The women's theater on Trikeri contained both licensed and illicit stage activity. It presents an Antigone that was distinctly different from the one staged—and privileged—on Makronisos: it traced liberal and democratic ideals back to antiquity. This chapter also makes tangible, through the Prometheus myth and play, how the Right handled the tool of the notorious “declaration of repentance,” which it tried to wrest from the Left.

This chapter examines how women's claim to classical literacy was related to the problem of translating “literally” by focusing on different versions of Prometheus Bound. In particular, it considers the ways that various practices of “literal” translation seemed to bind women to Aeschylus's tragedy. The discussion begins with a reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (E.B.B.), the first woman to translate Prometheus Bound into English (in 1833 and again in 1850) and an important prototype for other “lady-translators” in England and America. The chapter argues that the translator's bondage is dramatized not only through the suffering of the immobilized Prometheus, but also through the cries of the painfully mobile IΩ‎. It also traces how IΩ‎ traveled from England to America and back to Greece to highlight the different modes of translation employed by these women translators to perform their identification with Greek letters.

The first chapter of this book introduces the practical or organizational framework of classical tragedy staged on the prison islands of the Civil War (Makronisos, Trikeri, Aï Stratis). It also points to changes in the conditions of imprisonment in the various locales and over time and to differences in the treatment of men and women. This chapter also builds links forward and backward in time, which is essential for many reasons: the internees' classicizing performances of Sophocles' Antigone and Philoctetes and of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and Persians complemented other choices of works, such as the patriotic Greek martyr‐dramas, well‐regarded foreign classics, and many native plays, comedies, and skits.

The exile stage confronted actors, artists, and audiences with the modernist challenge to rethink the very means and methods of drama. The theater of the prison islands was intensely political for reasons of the real‐life ideological perspectives of its practitioners. Performance as a platform for political involvement reached its apogee for becoming performance of and for political beings again. Emphasizing political and material result more than performance style was a way for the inmate cast to present itself as a disciplined group that was still engaged in dissidence. The performers' choices, styles, and techniques helped them to maintain a sense of cultural belonging, professionalism, and integrity. Alexandrou's play delivers the darker side of the radical resistance that inspired most of the cultural activities described in the preceding chapters. This darker side is, however, a necessary complement to Chapters 1‐4 of this book, and it helps this study to strike a more objective balance.

This chapter discusses the depiction and narrative function of female characters in Tony Harrison's film/poem Prometheus, which uses the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound as its primary literary model. The socio-historical framework of the 1984 strike by the National Union of Mineworkers is outlined, alongside the pervasive issues of social decay experienced within mining communities impacted by industrial contraction. The chapter places the female characters within this context, exploring the ways in which their depiction is representative of the traditional role of women in working class communities, and how Harrison uses them, even as largely silent characters, to depict the destruction of community and familial structures. It is argued that while the miners' strike has been an almost exclusively discussed in the public realm in terms of its male participants, Harrison insists on also depicting the private female suffering caused by the mine closures.

Eva Palmer Sikelianos, along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos, founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the ancient Greek rites that had taken place on that spot more than twenty-five hundred years before. This chapter explores Palmer Sikelianos’s choreography, rituals, music, and dramaturgy for her reconstructed Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus in light of her research on ancient Greek culture, conducted in both Paris and modern Greece. Based on silent film records of Palmer Sikelianos’s 1930 festival, her autobiography, her collaborations with Natalie Clifford Barney on Greek-themed theatricals in the early 1900s, and comparisons to the movement vocabulary and other contemporary stagings of ancient Greek festivals and sport, the chapter demonstrates how Palmer Sikelianos navigated between the needs and methods of the archaeologist and those of the performer. She blended the oldest sources on ancient Greek ritual music and dance that she could find with what she saw as an authentic “spirit” of Greek culture that she observed in modern Greek society. Her performances drew from archival/archaeological courses (ancient treatises, dance iconography) and lived practices (folk song, modern dance, Byzantine chant traditions). Like the Ballets Russes’s re-enactment of ancient Greece in Daphnis et Cholé and L’Après-midi d’un Fauné and pagan Rus’s in Le Sacre du printemps [The Rite of Spring], Palmer Sikelianos’s project to re-enact “authentic” Greek theater and choreography illustrates that theories of theatrical historical reconstruction in the early twentieth century were heavily influence by contemporary theatrical, political, and social events.

Chapter 2 discusses the history, policies, and practices of the Greek military regime’s censorship (via the book index and preventive and hortatory censorship), but also addresses the reactions of authors and theater practitioners. The chapter covers the “Authors’ Silence” or the silence boycott by authors and playwrights, self-censorship, and the dissident contestation of state censorship. It also focuses on the role of ancient drama and especially on Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, identifying the defiant, intellectual tragic hero as a voice of modern resistance. The chapter further discusses the activist contributions of Anna Synodinou and George Seferis, to then turn to transgressive plays representative of the New Greek Theater and of the Greek Performative Turn (associated with the work of stage director Giorgos Michaelides). The chapter also presents a case study of The Trombone, a thought-provoking play written by Marios Pontikas. The final section outlines the role played by the Greek revue

Chapter 3 looks at productions and new versions of Greek tragedy that began to defy the American reluctance to politicize the plays in response to controversial contemporary social and political issues and to question American optimism. Most productions in this category began in the late 1960s and 1970s and have been increasingly common in the last thirty years. Aside from Sophocles's Antigone, which did generate an important production in the late nineteenth century, this chapter focuses on productions and new versions of less well-known tragedies, such as Aeschylus's Persians and Prometheus Bound, Sophocles's Ajax, and Euripides's Children of Heracles, by artists including Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre and Peter Sellars and Robert Auletta.

In Homeric epic, describing a map of the world, like epic song itself, is a privilege granted by the divine Muses and figured in Hephaestus’ shield-making. In two examples from Aeschylean tragedy, a defiant hero appropriates the map-making prerogative of the gods established in Homeric epic. In each case, in a bid to restructure the existing order, the hero lays claim to the divine ability to map the space of the world without invoking the Muses. In Prometheus Bound, Prometheus’ gift of a map to mortal Io is not just an altruistic favour. It is also a part of his strategy for controlling and directing the future in a way that will ultimately lead to his own liberation. In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra uses Hephaestus’ fire to map space instantaneously. Her control of the god’s technology is aligned with her scandalous power over every other aspect of the action of the play.