Classical Greek Drama Research Articles

The sacred groves of ancient Greece

The sacred groves of ancient Greece

New Directors/New Films, New York

March 26-April 6, 2008 New Directors/New Films (ND/NF) the single most important film survey in North America. It programmed by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center together to showcase emerging and demanding cinema that sounds the clarion call for the Future of Film. Not bound by a conventional definition of emerging, curators rather choose films of merit that otherwise would rarely have a chance to be seen. Danielle Arbid's A Lost Man (LN/FR, 2007) ND/NF's most challenging film. Challenging because it humanizes Arab men and women in a way rarely seen in Western cinema. The gaze secular, female, and Arab. Despite Arbid's declaration that she is not interested in either politics or gender, the film itself speaks the language of political domination, fundamentalist policing of gender and sexual activity, politics of objectification, and the cause and effects of emotional and economical plunder. Arbid seems schooled in the sensuality of Henry Miller rather than in the rejection of sentimentality of Anais Nin. She bravely breaks taboo by showing Arab female prostitutes enjoying their sexual work. They reject any notion of victimization. She also navigates the conflicting feelings these women have for both the Western man (here a French photographer who, vampire-like-a postmodern colonial gestalt-seeks to steal the soul of the Arab women with whom he having sex by photographing them naked during intercourse) and the Arab man, with whom he travels, who feels himself an outsider even in his own community. Azazel Jacobs's Momma's Man (US, 2008) the worst-titled indie film of the year, but it captures the yearning to go home (literally) that a whole generation of twenty- to thirtysomethings are experiencing. Except home here an artist's loft owned by the director's real artist parents (who play the parents) in this dramatic fiction that seamlessly crosses reality and fantasy. The film shows how dysfunction not always easily understood and that adulthood not simply chronologically defined. It offers a new look at the American family dynamic that centers on a very male fear of responsibility and the adolescent nostalgia for being taken care of while rebelling against authority. Thanos Anastopoulos's Correction (GR, 2007) an Athens-based, color-drained, contemporary story of identity, belonging, vengeance, and forgiveness, that echoes classical Greek drama. With minimal dialogue, Anastopoulos creates a canvas of humanity, through light and shadowing reflective of early-twentieth- century Italian cinema, and slowly reveals a tale of national identity and fear of immigrants. He captures, in faces, both soul passion and dark emotion. Ostensibly a story of amends about a recently released prisoner, the film challenges the viewer to unravel the mystery of what happened and where fault lies. This stunning filmmaking that transcends specifics of location and resonates as a contemporary nomadic journey through the meaning of ethnic identity in a world made smaller by globalization. Lucia Puenzo's XXY (AR/SP/FR, 2007) from Argentina, the first narrative film to address intersex. This word has replaced hermaphrodite as the politically correct term for a person born with both male and female genitals. Usually one more dominant than the other. Puenzo one-ups Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Peirce, US, 1999) with a failed attempt to tell a very serious story of an intersex child whose parents have brought him-her up with little psycho logical or medical intervention. The child allowed to become a teenager with awakening sexual desire and a serious sex identity problem. Like Boys Don't Cry, Puenzo sensationalizes the subject so an audience can distance itself from the frank reality of a body out of place in the world around it. Puenzo actually uses all the emotional tools of the faux serious, middle-class tele-novella to present a creepy voyeuristic view of a potential suicide situation. …

Digital performance: a history of new media in theater, dance, performance art, and installation

The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period of experimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution of these practices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this form of new media art. Dixon finds precursors to today's digital performances in past forms of theatrical technology that range from the deus ex machina of classical Greek drama to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the total artwork), and draws parallels between contemporary work and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the twentieth century. For a theoretical perspective on digital performance, Dixon draws on the work of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others. To document and analyze contemporary digital performance practice, Dixon considers changes in the representation of the body, space, and time. He considers virtual bodies, avatars, and digital doubles, as well as performances by artists including Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast Theory, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel approaches to creating theatrical spectacle, including virtual reality and robot performance work, telematic performances in which remote locations are linked in real time, Webcams, and online drama communities, and considers the extratemporal illusion created by some technological theater works. Finally, he defines categories of interactivity, from navigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon challenges dominant theoretical approaches to digital performance -- including what he calls postmodernism's denial of the new -- and offers a series of boldly original arguments in their place.

Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Battle: A History of Combat and Culture Gunther E. Rothenberg Battle: A History of Combat and Culture. By John A. Lynn. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8133-3371-7. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Index. Pp. xxv, 399. $27.50. Some seven years ago in this journal, John Lynn, a prominent specialist on French military affairs from the Age of Louis XIV to Napoleon, expressed his fears that an "embattled academic military history" was becoming increasingly isolated and in danger of becoming extinct. He recommended employing the "new" cultural history approach to explore connections between the evolution of society and war. Of course, fears about the demise of military history were somewhat premature and except for purely operational history, a field hardly ever taught in the academy, most course work in military history already included substantial social-political and cultural components. Since then John Keegan in his A History of Warfare (1993) and Victor Davis Hanson's recent Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (2001) have tried to establish the evolution of a specific culturally determined western way of war. Originating from the Greek hoplite battle, the western way, they maintain, has remained basically different from non-western approaches to fighting. Lynn's Battle does not agree with either of these two authors. As described in a special appendix, its methodology is based on the interaction between an idealized conduct of war and the realities of combat, influenced and limited by political and social circumstances and dominant intellectual patterns. Lynn rejects the common belief that warfare responds only to the universal demands of tactics and technology. Instead, he asserts that the ideas and ideals of different cultures influenced the way they have fought. He borrows, he claims, from the methodology of cultural history "without being guilty of its excesses" (p. xix). Indeed, Battle is rarely burdened by theory or jargon, but this raises the question why the introduction of cultural history terminology was necessary at all in an intelligent, broad, well-informed, challenging, and frequently provocative study. [End Page 943] Spanning three continents and with a time frame from Ancient Greece to the present, the book is organized into eight self-sustaining case studies. The first, "Written in Blood: The Classical Greek Drama of Battle and the Western Way of War," expounds differences with Hanson and to a lesser degree with Keegan. Lynn denies Hanson's basic thesis that a continuous and superior Western Way of War, "civic militarism" as he calls it, based on discipline and law, has provided the foundations enabling western armies to overcome larger and sophisticated non-western forces. Pointing to major gaps and deviations from this theory, Lynn refutes the idea of an innate cultural western superiority. His second chapter, "Subtleties of Violence" dismisses the concept of a specific "Oriental Way of War." His discussion of the ancient military writings of China and India notes that though mass armies were not unknown, these cultures rejected the bloody slogging of western armies in favor of a more sophisticated indirect approach, attrition and stratagems. In addition, in these two, as well as the following chapters, Lynn clearly wants to make the case that the "universal soldier" shaped by war and combat, a staple concept for many writers, never existed. Lynn argues that the values and assumptions of soldiers from different cultures differed and continue to differ from each other in fundamental ways, an assumption not shared by the reviewer. Chapter 3, "Chivalry and Chevauchée," is an exposition of the contrast between the ideals of chivalry and the brutal reality of medieval war, especially the merciless raids devastating the countryside. The next chapter, "Linear Warfare: Images and Ideas of Combat in the Age of the Enlightenment," the era of the author's recognized expertise, suggests that the parameters of limited war were, at least in western Europe, conceptual rather than imposed by resource limitation. Again, keeping in mind central and Eastern Europe, the reviewer dissents. But he liked Chapter 5, dealing with the influence of European military practices in India, successfully amalgamating concepts of class and caste with the regimental system to form effective fighting forces. Chapter 6...

Plata Quemada

There is a moment, about a half-hour into Marcelo Piñeyro's Plata Quemada (2000), of really quite pure tragic dimensions. I use the word "tragic" advisedly, not in its overused sense of "pathetic" or "unfortunate," nor to capture the inevitable violence and death that stalks all human existence. Rather, I use it in the sense of classical Greek drama to capture that instance in which the individual defies, if not the unforgiving gods, the inflexible rules that govern the harsh realities of social life.

The Towneley and Chester Plays of the Shepherds: The Dynamic Interweaving of Power, Conflict, and Destiny

The Towneley and Chester Plays of the Shepherds:The Dynamic Interweaving of Power, Conflict, and Destiny Norma Kroll The two Wakefield Shepherds' plays in the Towneley cycle and the Shepherds' play in the Chester cycle offer far more complex and subtle representations of human nature, power, and destiny than scholars of medieval drama have yet recognized.1 These versions of the rustics' exploits differ notably from each other, but, like the brief York and N-Town equivalents, they all end in scenes of the shepherds' adoration of the infant Jesus. Scholars tend to regard these encounters between the divine and the human as the point of the actions and to treat the characters' antics as typological prefigurations of Christ's birth.2 [End Page 315] While this critical approach highlights the ways that the plays' parodic elements parallel Jesus's incarnation, it locates the Godhead at the center of power and marginalizes the human characters' potency.3 Yet the playwrights expand the brief Gospel accounts into works of drama, not just dramatized spectacles, by giving the shepherds enough power to struggle against each other and against the limiting forces in their worlds. These cycle plays do not simply repeat or reinforce theological points of view based on Scripture, scriptural interpretations, or the liturgy; rather, they subordinate such perspectives' emphasis on divine might in the universe to human potency on earth by representing the rustics' deeds as vital contributions to God's plan. To this end, the Wakefield and Chester dramatists transform an episode from Christian history into drama by interposing patterns of destiny between the human and the divine. In general, destiny refers to fated events or inevitable outcomes, whether providential or not; in drama, it signifies the sets of forces operating (however ambiguously) within the characters' natures as well as in their larger social and political contexts. In the cycle plays, as in dramas of other eras, these earthly [End Page 316] forces and the characters who embody and struggle with them have a substantial impact on the course of events. The overlay of patterns of destiny on those of divine Providence became possible in the cycle plays because of earlier shifts in philosophical views of free will, in poetic uses of Christian material, and in the status of the peasant and middle classes. As John Coldeway argues, the "prosperity in countryside and town usually translated into a redistribution of power and wealth from the relatively few to the relatively many."4 This power is reflected in the Towneley and Chester portrayals of shepherds who have enough freedom to make their own imaginative, emotional, or physical choices as well as to struggle with each other and with the forces of destiny shaping their existence.5 The rustics' conflicts also accommodate or advance humans' relationships with God as well as the plays' intersections of earthly and cosmic events.6 Thus the three Towneley and Chester versions of destiny function as the organizing principles of the works, reflected not only in consistent patterns of characterization and action but also in coherent systems of language and imagery. I. The Generic Necessity of Human Power in Drama Before considering the medieval context of the three Shepherds' plays, we might usefully look at the interdependence of destiny and genre in classical Greek drama.7 In the tragedies, destiny is fate, with the [End Page 317] action an inevitable design either imposed on or emerging from particular human natures and satisfying larger social and cosmic purposes. The comedies are shaped by fortune, a series of events occurring by chance and comprising a character's earthly luck. In Greek drama, as in the English cycles, the power or presence of the gods or of other extrahuman forces resonates in the background and intervenes in the actions, and, in some plays, the gods themselves become the main actors. Yet, as in the Iliad where the gods' wishes give way to the scales of destiny, the Greek plays give the operations of fate and fortune power over the major and minor gods as well as over the human characters.8 In Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, for example, the Titan has the power to foreknow what is destined and...

CoMEDIA electrONica: Performing Intermediality in Contemporary Theatre

Although the concept of ‘intermediality’ recently has gained prominence within the discourse of Theatre Studies, still various contradictory definitions of that term circulate, none of which applies insight from the field of Media Theory to theatre. Rather than clinging to the banal formula ‘theatre + media = intermedial theatre’ and thus perpetuating the idea of medial specificity, an approach to intermediality informed by Media Theory stresses underlying strategies of processing all kinds of information, including the aesthetic, within a certain period. Consequently, theatre's genuine ‘mediality’ already implies its ‘intermediality’, which in fact can be traced back all the way to classical Greek drama. Within the present transformation from McLuhan's ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ into an ‘electrONic culture’, theatre now trains its spectators in cognitive strategies of that emerging cultural paradigm. The performance Circulation Module by the Japanese group NEST reflects these significant repercussions of electrONic culture on theatrical performance at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The Appeal of Modern Greek Drama and Its Future in the English-speaking World

The Appeal of Modern Greek Drama and Its Future in the English-Speaking World Stratos E. Constantinidis “. . . Greek culture has lost the appeal it enjoyed after the Second World War and even during the Junta years. Although a pervasive trend, the diminished interest is most keenly noticeable in literature. Greek writing beyond Elytis hardly makes an imprint outside of Greece. While translations of East European, “Third World,” post-colonial, and in general non-Western authors receive wide attention and critical acclaim, the works of Greek postmodern novelists, poets, women writers, or memoirists remain virtually unknown. To be sure, those wishing to translate Greek fiction and poetry find few willing publishers. Even when available in translation, these works find a small audience. Undeniably the position of Greece in the contemporary cultural universe has shifted. While thirty years ago Greece was a compelling subject of critical interest, now it has been superseded by other cultures.” —Gregory Jusdanis, Vassilis Lambropoulos, and Artemis Leontis, Whither the Neohellenic? A Conference-Workshop. The conveners of the “Whither the Neohellenic?” workshop submitted the following premise to the participants: Interest in Greek culture—from the classical to the modern period—peaked in the English-speaking world in the mid-1970s, but it has been waning ever since. The conveners founded this premise on their observation of three symptoms: (1) the number of published translations of Greek books and their [End Page 175] volume of sales have declined; (2) the number of published books about Greek culture and their marketability have decreased; (3) the overall attention to Greek affairs by the mass media has dropped. On the assumption that the above observations are correct, we were invited to investigate two difficult questions: (1) Why has international attention and investment in Greek cultural affairs plummeted? (2) What can be done to reinvigorate international attention and investment in Greek cultural affairs? We can diagnose the problem if we identify those factors that have caused the decline of public interest, scholarly research, and monetary investment in Greek cultural affairs. We can prescribe a cure that might reinvigorate interest, research, and investment in Greek cultural affairs if we identify those factors that might have an international appeal. Of course, not all aspects of Greek culture are controlled by the same kind or number of factors. I have therefore limited my focus to one aspect of Greek culture, Greek drama; to one period, the modern period; and to one international language, English. For this reason, my contribution to this investigation will be restricted in the sense that my observations and conclusions about modern Greek drama may not be applicable to classical Greek drama, to other aspects of Greek culture, and/or to countries that are not part of the English-speaking world. Let me begin by placing the first question in a theatrical context. Why has attention to and investment in Greek drama plummeted in the English-speaking world? In order to answer this question, I formed two hypotheses: (1) the number of published translations of modern Greek plays has declined, (2) the amount of published research about modern Greek drama has also declined. I then proceeded to collect data that would support or invalidate those two hypotheses. I am happy to report that both hypotheses were invalidated. The number of published translations of modern Greek plays has increased since 1900. A total of 60 modern Greek plays were translated into English and were published during these 97 years of the twentieth century. Translation activity in the twentieth century was overwhelmingly greater than translation activity in the nineteenth century. I found only one modern Greek play (Nikolaos Piccolos’s The Death of Demosthenes) that was translated into English during the nineteenth century. It was rendered by Grigorios Paleologos and was published in Cambridge, England, in 1824. In the twentieth century, the distribution of these translations shows an interesting pattern. Prior to 1950 only four English translations of modern Greek plays were published: Kostis Palamas’s Royal Blossom or Trisevgeni translated by Aristides Phoutrides and published in New Haven by the Yale University Press in 1923, and three Cretan plays—The [End Page 176] Sacrifice of Abraham, Erophile, Gyparis translated by F. H. Marshall—published...

Greek Theater: An Annotated Bibliography of Plays Translated and Essays Written from 1824 to 1994

Greek Theater: An Annotated Bibliography of Plays Translated and Essays Written from 1824 to 1994 Stratos E. Constantinidis Preface Modern Greek drama has been performed and discussed in several European languages. This bibliography lists translated plays and original essays that appeared only in English. Therefore, the 182 entries that follow represent only a small sample of artistry and scholarship. I compiled this bibliography in order to guide beginning students of Greek theater who are not fluent in modern Greek. Modern Greek theater has been victimized by brief, sweeping generalizations in introductory surveys that beginning students find in encyclopedias and in general histories of Greek literature. These surveys, which discourage the further study of modern Greek theater by underrating its significance, inadvertently expose the limitations of their authors. For example, Myron Matlaw boldly—and, to a certain extent, unjustly—claims that “Greek drama in modern times hardly reflects the glories of its golden age” (Modern World Drama: An Encyclopedia 1972:318). Likewise, but more tactfully, Rae Dalven concludes that modern Greek theater is making an enormous contribution to world drama through the many revivals of classical Greek drama in translation, the production of countless foreign plays in translation, and the production of an “abundance” of original [modern] Greek plays (The Readers’ Encyclopedia of World Drama 1969:400). This cajoling “abundance” of original modern Greek plays, however, misconstrues the production record of modern Greek drama in the 1960s and earlier. A deprecating attitude toward modern Greek drama and scholarship is also shared by widely used texts such as Constantine Dimaras’s A History of Modern Greek Literature (1972), Linos Politis’s A History of Modern Greek Literature (1973), and Roderick Beaton’s An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature (1994). The above popular histories share, in addition, a [End Page 123] literary bias: they neglect the performance side of theater and give dramatic literature and scholarship only a cursory mention. However, a fair amount of modern Greek dramatic literature, performances, and scholarship is not second rate. Of course, modern Greek drama and theater have not yet benefited, internationally, from as systematic, extensive, or detailed an analysis as that accorded classical Greek drama and theater. I offer my brief comments below with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I know how presumptuous it is to attempt to describe or evaluate in ten-line annotations plays such as Kostis Palamas’s controversial Trisévyeni or the books of prolific scholars, such as Linda Myrsiades, whose work has not yet been fully discussed. On the other hand, I am aware of how indispensable a bibliographical guide can be for a more analytical and, one hopes, revisionist study of modern Greek theater. Dramatic literature Akritas, Loukis. “Hostages,” translated by Mary Gianos. In Introduction to Modern Greek Literature: An Anthology of Fiction, Drama, and Poetry, edited by Mary Gianos, 418–417. New York: Twayne, 1969. This three-act tragedy dramatizes the suffering of Greeks in a rural town near the border during the German/Italian occupation (1940–1944). Many young Greeks (such as Lambrinos) have taken to the mountains and become freedom fighters, killing enemy soldiers. In retaliation, the invaders would take Greek women, children, and elderly men as hostages. Then, they would torture, imprison, or kill them, especially if they were connected to Greek guerrillas (Arete and Photene), or if they assisted the freedom fighters in any way (Liakos). When the allied forces invade Italy and Germany, the Germans and Italians evacuate the Greek town. They feel that Greece, which at first seemed small and easy to conquer, now appears to be a gigantic, indomitable country. They attempt to break through the lines of the freedom fighters by using Lambrinos as a bargaining chip. Lambrinos is shot and they are apprehended. Anagnostaki, Loula. “The City,” translated by George Valamvanos and Kenneth MacKinnon. The Charioteer 26 (1984):55–72. This one-act play describes the “game” of a thirty-year-old couple, Elizabeth and Kimon. Elizabeth invites single, middle-class, lonely gentlemen to dinner in her apartment, makes them fall in love with her, expose themselves, and then throws them out with Kimon’s help. Tonight’s guest, a photographer, made a career with customers who wanted their...

Des disciplines scolaires à la culture scolaire

Education not only transmits culture, it modifies culture as well. Our present day knowledge of classical Greek drama e.g., has been largely produced by educational selection and use during the Middle Ages.This article concentrates on the drastic reform of spelling education in French schools in 1833 and its effects on French culture. Until that time, only one third of French school teachers were able to spell correctly. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, however, orthography was among the basic subjects taught in primary and secondary education, hampering later attempts at educational modernization.Three major cultural effects of this educational reform are discussed. First, the orthography of the French language, constantly changing until that time, has remained very static ever since. Second, orthography, which until then only concerned printers and scribes, has become a hallmark of the well-educated person. Third, the problem of teaching students to spell correctly inspired French teachers t...

Social function, polysemy and narrative‐dramatic form: A case study ofdo the right thing

Spike Lee's film, Do the Right Thing, has been interpreted in radically different, even inconsistent ways. This essay argues that Lee used a form similar to classical Greek drama in order to embed inconsistent themes into the film. This analysis in turn suggests implications in relation to the functions served by narrative rhetoric and a polysemic critical practice.

Classical Greek and Roman Drama: An Annotated Bibliography

Classical Greek and Roman Drama: An Annotated Bibliography

Classical Greek and Roman drama: an annotated bibliography

Classical Greek and Roman drama: an annotated bibliography

Searching for a Satyr Play: the Significance of the ‘Parodos’

The parodos is the first appearance of the Chorus in a classical Greek drama, an occurrence common to tragedy, comedy – and that curious hybrid form, of which very few examples are extant, the satyr play. One of the two complete surviving, texts is the Ichneutai or Searching Satyrs of Sophocles: and in the following exercise in literary detection. Paola Polesso bases her investigation of the play not only on linguistic evidence but on clues which emerge from seeing the play in performance, to suggest the chronological context with in which the play may now be more precisely placed. Dr. Polesso, who presently teaches drama in the University of Bologna, has acted as assistant director to Luca Ronconi, and has been a contributor to numerous Italian theatre journals.

Classical Greek Drama in Modern Greece: Mission and Money

Classical Greek Drama in Modern Greece: Mission and Money Stratos E. Constantinidis Introduction Lines 1164-1165 in the éxodos of Aristophanes' Ecclesiazousae are generally assigned to Praxagora's drunk maid. She tells Vlepyros "And you too, move your feet in the Cretan manner." Textual evidence suggests that she urges him to perform a "high stepping" dance: the little girls (meirakes) who accompany the chorus, are told to mark the rhythm "with the whole leg" (1167), and the chorus members urge each other to "Get it up" (1179) as they make their exit. High step, straight back, head held high are features of Minoan Cretan dancers (Lawler 1964: 94-95). The drunk maid bequeathed modern directors a quandary: should they use a modern Cretan dance, or concoct—lacking archeological records—an allegedly "archaic" one? Alexis Solomos, the first director to revive Aristophanes' comedies at the Epidaurus theatre , gave his productions a flavor of the 1950s rather than stage shaky inferences about how the ancient Greeks supposedly performed in their amphitheatres. "My purpose," Solomos said, "was not so much to present an artificial revival as to prove a natural survival " (Solomos 1974: 11). The maid's lines circumscribe a wider problem in the revival of classical drama on modern Greek stages: should a theatre company "translate" the verbal and visual aspects of the ancient plays to suit the understanding and tastes of modern audiences or preserve the verbal, paraverbal, and non-verbal elements? Historically, this problem has proven to be a tough one for the modern Greek theatre, having caused great conflict between the advocates of rival production styles. There is no exact equivalent in the English theatrical tradition for this kind of conflict. The present study aims at describing the issues and tensions that have resulted from reviving classical Greek plays in modern Greece. Their history, in brief, consists of the century-long amateur 15 16 Stratos E. Constantinidis productions (1830-1930) followed by half-a-century of professional (subsidized) productions (1931-81). The focus here is on the first period . From the Neoclassics to the Classics Modern Greek theatre was born outside Greece in the large Greek communities of Bucharest (Romania), Alexandria (Egypt), Odessa (U.S.S.R.), Vienna (Austria), Venice (Italy), and Constantinople (Sideris 1970: 151). High school based community theatres produced Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes in translation for ideological purposes. The productions, say, of Hecuba (Bucharest 1817)—a collation of passages from Homer's Iliad rather than Euripides' tragedy (Zoras 1967: 509)—and Sophocles' Philoctetes (Odessa 1818), served as tools for instructing the subjugated Greeks against the Turkish domination. Rigas Pheraios' Map of Greece (1797), for example, which portrayed an ideal Greece stretching from Crete to the Danube, bears a drawing of an ancient Greek amphitheatre in the upper left-hand corner, thus affirming the importance of theatre as a cultural expression of Greek unity (Kambanis 1948: 129-130; Dimaras 1964: 162-163). Between 1791 and 1821 the Greek Enlightment turned out some 65 plays in translation such as Pietro Metastasio's Orpheus and Euridice (l797), Goethe's Iphigenia Among the Taurians (1818), and Vittorio Alfieri's Orestes (1820) (Sideris 1976: 18). Published and produced translations of the Greek classics such as Sophocles' Ajax (1817) divided the plays into acts and scenes and incorporated the original choral lines into the dialogue. This spirit of adapting the classics to current esthetics was an initial approach to reviving ancient Greek drama (Sideris 1976: 17). During the 1835-36 season, several actors and intellectuals went to Athens, the capital of new Greece, to assist in the rebirth of drama (Veis 1940: 19). Costas Aristias, for example, came from Bucharest and became artistic director of the amateur Friends of Drama Company. This company set a double goal for itself: to teach a generation of young actors to perform ancient Greek plays in Athens and other major towns and to re-educate the modern Greek audiences to the cultural treasures of their own past apart from Italian and French melodramas (Paraskinia 1938: 269-273). Ironically, the company produced Vincenzo Monti's Aristodemus (1840) and then disbanded. Aristias returned to Romania while melodramas and operettas dominated the theatre of Athens from 1840 to...

King Lear: The Grammar of Tragedy

Owe& >>, j INCE the eighteenth century, there has developed a large body of critical opinion which has held that the drama of Shakespeare is so conceived that it is more appropriately read as literature than seen as theater. Although the most virulent attack against Shakespeare's dramatic method has come from a playwright unsympathetic to the Elizabethan tradition, similar suggestions have been offered by English critics. Many of Voltaire's objections to Shakespeare's of are reflected in the work of neoclassicists such as Pope, of romanticists such as Lamb, and more recently in that of humanists such as Bradley. Indeed, the consensus of English critical opinion has been that the tragic form of Shakespeare-unlike that of classical Greek drama or that of neoclassical French drama-derives from a poetic vision of such brilliance that no grammar can suffice to translate it into concrete form. The suggestion that the tragedies of Shakespeare cannot be performed is a disturbing one. Certainly, to confine Shakespeare to the purely literary is to engage in the process of aesthetic reduction; it is to deprive his complex drama of its plastic form, as well as to diminish many of its essential contents. The problem in Shakespearian stage history seems to impinge upon the fact that this dramatic form is particularly dependent for its articulation upon a secondary language. Its grammar for tragedy is plastic; in essence, a complex of idea, sound, gesture, costume, setting, and highly inferential suggestion. Unlike the theater of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere, which had its presentational mode codified by the French Academy at the point of creation, the English drama has been subjected to interpretation in a wide variety of theatrical languages. Now the absence of a standard mode of communication-a Shakespearian theatrical convention-has had certain practical advantages. Continued experimentation has provided Shakespearian drama with a strong vitality; but it has also proved to be the root of a'major difficulty. For the absence of a formal linguistic convention-a theatrical language-has made the exposition of certain of the tragedies extremely difficult, if not virtually impossible. One of the plays profoundly affected by the problem of grammar is Shakespeare's Titanic tragedy: King Lear. Like Hamlet, Lear has, since the seventeenth century, been the subject of a continuing critical controversy. Lamb declared that it could not be projected on the stage. A. C. Bradley described Lear as Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but not his best play. Harley GranvilleBarker, while judging the drama to be eminently playworthy, was forced to ad-

The Mayor of Casterbridge and the Old Testament's First Book of Samuel: A Study of Some Literary Relationships

From one standpoint, the major theme of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is not “character is fate” or “man against himself,” but rather it is the conflict between generations. This is a very ancient subject matter, one of the archetypal themes noted by the Jungian literary psychologist Maud Bodkin, who traces it in classical Greek drama and in Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear? In Hardy's novel the conflicting generations are represented by Michael Henchard, the middle-aged corn factor and mayor, and Donald Farfrae, the energetic young Scotchman whose two-fold abilities, “the commercial and the romantic” (p. 162), while exercised with the best of intentions, prove deadly to his patron. Because of the ineluctability of this theme, it is necessary that the affection between the two men should turn to hate and that Henchard, as the older, should go under. The special bitterness of Henchard's inevitable failure is perhaps Hardy's characteristically pessimistic contribution. But we might also relate this quality of bitterness to the lack—increasingly in Hardy's time and almost totally in ours—of a generally accepted religious outlook which could transform Henchard's sufferings into a mitigating ritual and his death into a sacrificial symbol. Whereas Lear dies in the bosom of his family, as it were, surrounded by both his living and dead relatives, in full view of an awed and edified audience, Henchard's death is hidden from the eyes of all men except the faithful “fool” Whittle, whose report is necessarily limited to a few concrete particulars. Under the circumstances, Elizabeth–Jane's “what bitterness lies there!” (p. 337) is, at least on one level of the narrative, a final comment which every reader must echo.

The So-Called Rule of Three Actors in the Classical Greek Drama. Kelley Rees

<i>The So-Called Rule of Three Actors in the Classical Greek Drama</i>. Kelley Rees

The Three Actors (Kelley Rees) - The Rule of Three Actors in the Classical Greek Drama; a Dissertation … for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. By Kelley Rees. University of Chicago Press, 1908. Small Quarto, pp. 86. Price, $79.

The Three Actors (Kelley Rees) - The Rule of Three Actors in the Classical Greek Drama; a Dissertation … for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. By Kelley Rees. University of Chicago Press, 1908. Small Quarto, pp. 86. Price, $79. - Volume 23 Issue 6