Greek Drama Research Articles

The significance of Stage Directions in Aristophanes' Peace

Abstract
 This study is principally concerned with the staging of Aristophanes’ Peace. John Dee (1527-1609) was the first person to design a clever stage-effect for Greek drama, Aristophanes’ Peace, and made a giant beetle that could move from the air down to the stage. The nature and status of stage directions in this play will also be investigated, paying particular attention to the status of stage directions in printed text, and whether these stage directions were originally written by the playwright himself or were revised or supplied by editors, scriveners or members of the theatre companies. The paper will also evaluate how the technology of the Elizabethan playhouse facilitated the appearance of dung-beetle on stage.
 
 There was a great demand in the Elizabethan era for plays about spectacular tricks. People at that time were delighted in the dexterity of the supernatural mysteriousness of the magician and witches, and moreover there was a popular appetite for spectacles within such a play. One of the most widespread themes in legend and Elizabethan stage is the flying of supernatural entities. Dragons and dung-beetles are physically manifested differently on Elizabethan stage compared to Medieval and Jacobean stages. Flying of dragons and beetles had a remarkable fiery effect in theatre to create a new genre of spectacle in presenting princely power and martial values to the audience. The special effect of John Dee’s flying scarab for a Cambridge performance of Aristophanes’ Peace also prompted ‘great wondering and many vain reports spread abroad of the means how that was effected’ (Jefferies, 2011). In Aristophanes’ Peace, Trygaeus rides on the back of a giant dung beetle to the heaven in order to arrange peace for the Greeks. The flight scene offers an element of slapstick comedy to the play and makes a comical history out of the flight of the giant beetle. John Dee’s stage directions in Aristophanes’ Peace are very elaborate and clear which help the reader imagine how the play was staged (Hall & Wrigley, 2007). The findings of this study would be beneficial for the researchers, the students of English department and theatre companies.

An Essay on Narrative, Reality, and Imagination

ABSTRACTNarrative is a verbal account, a story of related events which can be factual, fictional or both. Life experience and imagination are as essential to narrative as narrative is to mankind. The phylogenic perspective of literature suggests an inborn capacity for empathy, intelligence and inventiveness, whereas the ontological example is variable. Western knowledge, politics and ethics have evolved from their narrative of Greek myth, epic and drama, the few medieval writers, singularly by the Elizabethan theater, importantly the Arthurian legend and romance stories, English and Russian novels, and uniquely the American short story. This heritage progressively demarcated such life themes as the hero, maiden and adversary; love, hate and indifference; loyalty, deception and betrayal; desire, achievement and loss. These characterizations of self and other remain relevant to the contemporary novel, cinema/TV, and theater, as well as the news, commentary, and real life. Conversely, postmodern assumptions challenge that individual subjectivity determines what is real, valid or authentic, consequently the relativism of traditional, institutional and historical precedents of the truth. Further, the computer, gaming, smart device, and artificial intelligence have changed the content and function of customary narrative. Nonetheless, narrative — real and imagined, ancient and new — retains the meaning of a story about connected events which variously transcends the boundaries of difference.

Sounds on Stage: Musical and Vocal Languages and Experiences

Abstract The twenty-four papers delivered at the graduate conference entitled “Sounds on Stage: Musical and Vocal Languages and Experiences” (L’Aquila, 14-16 November 2018) investigated the relationship between music and theatrical performances from a comparative perspective. The presentations dealt with the role of music in several theatrical genres from different cultures and times: ancient Greek drama, musical theater (especially opera), modern and contemporary theater and ancient ritual Sanskrit drama.

Standardization and certification save us from the frustrations of the Greek drama

Standardization and certification save us from the frustrations of the Greek drama

An epic journey in sharing: The story of a young researcher's journey to share her data and the information professionals who tried to help

Sharing data can be a journey with various characters, challenges along the way, and uncertain outcomes. These “epic journeys in sharing” teach information professionals about our patrons, our institutions, our community, and ourselves. In this paper, we tell a particularly dramatic data-sharing story, in effect a case study, in the form of a Greek Drama. It is the quest of – a young idealistic researcher collecting fascinating sensitive data and seeking to share it, encountering an institution doing its due diligence, helpful library folks, and an expert repository. Our story has moments of joy, such as when our researcher is solely motivated to share because she wants others to be able to reuse her unique data; dramatic plot twists involving IRBs; and a poignant ending. It explores major tropes and themes about how researchers’ motivations, data types, and data sensitivity can impact sharing; the importance of having clarity concerning institutional policies and procedures; and the role of professional communities and relationships. Just like the chorus in greek drama provides commentary on the action, a a chorus of data elders in our drama points out larger lessons that the case study has for research data management and data sharing. Where actors in the greek chorus were wearing masks, our chorus carries different items, symbolizing their message, on every entry. 
 [i] The narrative structure of this paper was inspired by the IASSIST 2018 conference theme of “Once Upon a Data Point: Sustaining Our Data Storytellers.”

SOSITHEUS AND HIS ‘NEW’ SATYR PLAY

Active in Alexandria during the second half of the third century, Dioscorides is the author of some forty epigrams preserved in theAnthologia Palatina. Five of these epigrams are concerned with Greek playwrights: three dramatists of the archaic and classical periods, Thespis, Aeschylus and Sophocles, and two contemporary ones, Sositheus and Machon. Dioscorides conceived four epigrams as two pairs (Thespis and Aeschylus, Sophocles and Sositheus) clearly marked by verbal connections, and celebrates each playwright for his original contribution to the history of Greek drama. Thespis boasts to have discovered tragedy; Aeschylus to have elevated it. The twin epigrams devoted to Sophocles and Sositheus present Sophocles as refining the satyrs and Sositheus as making them, once again, primitive. Finally, Machon is singled out for his comedies as ‘worthy remnants of ancient art (τέχνης … ἀρχαίης)’. Dioscorides’ miniature history of Greek drama, which is interesting both for its debts to the ancient tradition surrounding classical playwrights and for the light it sheds on contemporary drama, clearly smacks of archaizing sympathies. They drive Dioscorides’ selection of authors and his treatment of contemporary dramatists: both Sositheus and Machon are praised for consciously looking back to the masters of the past. My focus is on Sositheus and his ‘new’ satyr-play. After discussing the relationship that Dioscorides establishes between Sophocles’ and Sositheus’ satyrs, and reviewing scholarly interpretations of Sositheus’ innovations, I will argue that Dioscorides speaks the language of New Music. His epigram celebrates Sositheus as rejecting New Music and its trends, and as composing satyr plays that were musically old fashioned and therefore reactionary.

THE STRUCTURE OF PLAUTUS’ MENAECHMI

Widely different views have been held concerning the structure of Plautus’ Menaechmi. On the one hand, the sequence of misunderstandings arising from the presence in the same city of a pair of identical twins with the same name has been likened to clockwork and attributed in essentials to an unknown Greek dramatist. On the other hand, E. Stärk has stressed features of the play which are typical of improvised comedy and put forward the bold theory that it was constructed by Plautus himself, following traditions of pre-literary Italic drama but using stock motifs of Greek New Comedy. I wish to suggest that the truth lies between these extreme positions.

László Moholy-Nagy’s Theatre of Totality: a precursor to digital performance

ABSTRACTLászló Moholy-Nagy’s Theatre of Totality was an inheritor of the philosophical legacy of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, and was one of a number of early modernist proposals for spectacles which, I suggest, implicitly awaited the invention of the technological means to realise them fully. Developments in Digital Technology have since provided these. He proposed such a Totality which did not merely blend existing artistic genres and media, but embraced ‘life’ beyond art, synthesising vital impulses in a collective activity subsuming individual accomplishments. Unlike Wagner’s atavistic notions of reviving the social collectivity which produced Greek drama, this involved using the resources of industrial society, and though rejecting its profit-driven rationale, he believed that ‘the possibilities of the machine’ are endless. In his technical experimentation across media he aimed to encourage the development of a new receptivity to the ‘absolute elements’ of sensory stimuli. He sought a Total Theatre freed from ‘literary encumbrances’, to this end devising a variety of spectacular staging devices, culminating in his ‘mechanized eccentric’. Elements of this can be seen, I will argue, in the more contemporary multimedia works of Troika Ranch, Susan Kozel, Anne Imhof and Wayne McGregor.

Modern Greek Drama and Theatre in the Crisis Period: Mnemonic Flashback of the past as a Defense Mechanism in the Present

:At the beginning of the 21st Century, Modern Greek Dramaturgy had already entered the Postmodernism phase, closely adhering to the trends of international theatre. The economic and cultural crisis that set in after the first decade brought an end to almost every innovative attempt. Obsolete types and forms, subjects and stories/plots, are recycled and updated. The Past reappears in exactly the same way it used to be depicted in 20th or even 19th century literary texts and successful comedies of the Greek cinema of the 50’s-60’s are almost completely prevailing. It is not, however, the first time this phenomenon is observed in the Modern Greek Theatre. A similar one appears in the Interwar period (1922-1940), when, for political, social and economic reasons reality becomes very negative for Greek playwrights. The recent and distant Past appears to have a redemptive effect, thus offering an alibi and a way-out deprived by the Present.This is the subject of our announcement, based on the notions and the function of theatrical memory and the multiple roles by which History is joining Theatre.

How to Instill Cultural Values in the New Generation through Cultural Promenades and Ancient Drama: A Field Research

The present study investigates whether experiential learning through cultural promenades and ancient Greek drama can constitute an effective method of instilling cultural values in the new generation. For this reason, field research was conducted in the broader area of Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Qualitative research through in-depth interviews followed, in order to record 42 student teachers’ perceptions after their own experiential contact with the method of cultural promenades. This research method with teacher candidates during their vocational training as future teachers is of great importance, as it will indicate whether the method of instilling cultural values through cultural promenades and ancient Greek drama is effective enough to be adopted in later teacher candidates’ teaching in schools. The choice of the sample is strategic, since the teaching specialty of the majority is economics and management, and thus teachers get acquainted with an innovative experiential methodology on teaching economic and cultural sustainability, which—according to literature—are interconnected. The findings reported valuable insights on the effectiveness of the said teaching methodology. The present research is the first that focuses on the descriptive interrelations among cultural promenades, experiential learning, cultural values, and sustainability, and thus it provides policy makers and teachers with invaluable insights.

Shelley’s Oppositional Songs

ABSTRACTAnalyzing the function of song as a genre can clarify debates over how Shelley’s more visionary mode of poetry might intervene in politics and whether his overtly political popular songs betray the philosophical claim to a revolution in subjectivity made by those visionary works. Because the genre of song originates in communal, oral performance, yet is also a subgenre of the larger category of lyric, its intrinsic oppositions or tensions mediate between political action and lyric subjectivity. Tracing two streams of song, the “urbane” and the “marginal,” that offer models for Shelley’s experiments in song, the essay then conducts a census of songs in the volumes that Shelley published or intended to publish. Applying a description of oral song performances as representing a “bodily economy,” it examines Shelley’s three revisionary Greek dramas, especially the two published in 1820, to interpret the drafts of songs intended for his “little volume of popular songs, wholly political.”

THE MOTIVE OF MADNESS IN WORLD LITERATURE

The paper is based on the hypothesis that the motive of madness is very common in literary works starting from the literature of the old age to modern and postmodern literary production. Many famous world writers have worked on this motive in various literary epochs, genera and species. In antique comedy, man's insanity was portrayed in a witty, playful and humorous way, and the same poetic, approach to the treatment of this motive is also of later comedical works. In tragedy, madness is often the cause of starvation, but also the ability to get to know essential knowledge, truth and ideas. Sometimes madness is considered obsessive, sick, or just punishment. In Renaissance literature, this state of the human spirit is seen through the theory of human wonders, attributing melancholy to educated young men, and hysteria to young women. It was caused by disappointment, suffering, unrequited love or sin. In the focus of our research were found some of the world's renowned literary creators, moral psychologists, who along with each psychological portrait also offer ethical values that characterize character. The theme of this paper is the motive of madness in some literary works. This paper is an attempt to address the complex issues of insanity in world literature through literary research supported by psychology. The aim of the paper is to examine the presence of the motif of madness, its understanding and interpretation from the ancient Greek drama, through the literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, to modern and postmodern literary traditions. The image of madness is given through various manifestations of character behavior, that it is authentic or irradiated, and through the comments of other heroes, eyewitnesses and interpreters.

Actors of Dionysus

Actors of Dionysus (aod) is a charity and theatre company with 26 years of experience of creating radical adaptations of Ancient Greek drama and new writing productions inspired by myth. Since 1993 we have toured over 50 productions nationally and internationally, performed to over 750,000 people and become the UK's leading interpreters in this field.

Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain: Seven Essays on the Definition of a Genre by Henry W. Sullivan

Reviewed by: Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain: Seven Essays on the Definition of a Genre by Henry W. Sullivan Jane W. Albrecht Henry W. Sullivan. Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain: Seven Essays on the Definition of a Genre. sullivan's splendid study is presented in seven interwoven essays that cover a lot of ground in great depth. They move nimbly from consideration of early modern literary treatises to German Romantic and idealist philosophy to Greek mythology and drama, Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology, and more; from analysis of plays by Luis Velez de Guevara and Lope de Vega to those by Antonio Mira de Amescua, Tirso de Molina, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and others. Those familiar with Sullivan's decades of scholarship will see its stamp on several of the new essays, along with his characteristic luminous prose and affable style. The thread that Sullivan keenly advances throughout the chapters of Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain is that, contrary to what was claimed for centuries, there was "a lucid and tangible 'idea of tragedy'" in the Golden Age made manifest in a uniquely Spanish style (35). That style is founded on the "embrace of Aristotle as to key affective features such as the Oedipal conflict, uxoricide, hamartia, Fate, catharsis of pity and fear, anagnorisis, and poesis" (33). Golden Age Spanish tragedy has found its champion in Henry Sullivan. Chapter 1, necessarily the longest, reviews the history of scholarly interest in the theory and practice of Spanish Golden Age tragedy, including the genre's rejection by eighteenth-century classicists in Spain and France. Sullivan singles out three moments of heightened critical attention to tragedy. The 1630s in Spain produced two notable works, González de Salas's "A New Idea of Ancient Tragedy," a lengthy exegesis of Aristotle's Poetics, and Lope de Vega's prologue to El castigo sin venganza, a brief commentary on Spanish-style tragedy (32). Second, the German Romantic movement of the nineteenth century yielded the insights of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel on the opposition of freedom versus necessity as the axis of Spanish drama (103). Finally, the British Calderón school of criticism of the twentieth century bore fruit in the achievements of, among others, A. A. Parker on the domination of action over character and subordination of theme to poetic justice in the comedia and the concept of "diffused responsibility" in [End Page 337] Calderonian tragedy; Bruce Wardropper on Spanish admiración as "the new catharsis"; Peter Dunn on the Christian background of Calderonian tragedy; and A. Irvine Watson on the neo-Aristotelianism of Golden Age tragedy (98–100). Sullivan, a son of the British school, takes up these topics in later chapters, drawing on some of those scholars' insights, repudiating others, and mostly relying on his own ideas and convictions. Chapter 2 illustrates a Spanish-style tragedy in extended analysis of Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza. An extraordinarily practical review of the uses of meter is followed by examination of the play's base images and poetic images. Sullivan shows that, similar to Shakespeare, Lope obeyed a formal design that reached back to the "affective substance and human interest of Ancient Greek theater described by Aristotle" (164). Chapter 3, to my mind the highlight of the volume, treats family tragedy in dramas of parricide and incest. Sullivan highlights two points where Spanish tragedy diverges from Western tradition, which have gone unremarked by scholars. First, in a reversal of Greek myth, sons are immolated by their fathers and never the other way around (205). Second, the status of the wife and wife murder are idiosyncratic (205): "Spanish drama inverts the mythic Kronos tradition of the wife winning out over an injurious husband by showing a jealous husband winning out over his [innocent] wife" (211). The lessons of this chapter will resonate in theater studies for years to come. Chapter 4 treats hamartia. First, Sullivan establishes that Spanish dramatists rejected fate as pagan destiny (in the manner of ancient Greek dramatists) as well as fate as character (in the style of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English playwrights). Instead, fate...

Do 'agón' poético ao 'agón' platônico

O presente artigo tem o objetivo de mostrar em que sentido o texto platônico está vinculado a uma espécie de evolução das formas agonísticas do drama grego, assumindo a forma particular de um agón dramático. Conhecendo as técnicas do agón no gênero dramático, Platão teria reformulado suas convenções, de acordo com as finalidades a que se propunha. Trata-se, portanto, de uma investigação sobre a apropriação platônica de uma estrutura estilística pertencente a uma tradição de discursos em que o universo agonal é expresso na forma dialogada. Para desenvolver as possíveis relações de continuidade e descontinuidade entre o agòn lógon da tragédia e a estrutura dialogada dos diálogos platônicos, propomos uma análise comparativa com base em uma cena escolhida de As Fenícias de Eurípides (v. 446-635).

Great Panathenaia in Greek drama

The works of the Greek playwrights of the classical period are an interesting source on the history of the panatheniac festival. The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes contain information about both the sacred part of the Great Panathenaia and agones the Panathenaic games. Of the elements of the sacral part of the Panathenaic festival were most often mentioned holiday peplos for Athena, the participants of the Panathenaic procession, the night procession, sacrifi ce. Part of the Panathenaic games were both in agony, which is characteristic for the Panhellenic games available for the citizens of Greece and local competitions, participation in which was limited only to the citizens of Athens. The mention of agones inherent in the Panhellenic games can be found in many works of Greek playwrights, but nowhere is there a clarifi cation that we are talking about the Panathenaic games. But it is interesting to note that more mentioned in the tragedies, and especially in the comedies of Aristophanes local competitions, which were sacred.

Ancient Drama and Reception of Antiquity in the Theatre and Drama of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)

Theatre in the German Democratic Republic was an essential part of the state propaganda machine and was strictly controlled by the cultural bureaucracy and by the party. Until the early sixties, ancient plays were rarely staged. In the sixties, classical Greek drama became officially recognised as part of cultural heritage. Directors free to stage the great classical playwrights selected ancient plays, on one hand, to escape the grim socialist reality, on the other to criticise it using various forms of Aesopian language. Two important dramatists and three examples of plays are presented and discussed: an adaptation of an Aristophanic comedy (Peter Hack’s adaptation of Aristophanes’ Peace at the Deutsche Theater in Berlin in 1962), a play based on a Sophoclean tragedy (Heiner Müller’s Philoktet, published in 1965, staged only in 1977), and a short didactic play (Lehrstück) based on Roman history (Heiner Müller’s Der Horatier, written in 1968, staged in 1973 in Hamburg in West Germany, and in the GDR only in 1988). At the end there is a brief look at a production of Aeschylus Seven against Thebes at the BE in 1969.

Some notes on a quantitative study of negation in Greek drama

Some notes on a quantitative study of negation in Greek drama

The Study of Revenge Tragedies and Their Roots

Tragedy has its roots in man’s life. Tragedies appeared all around the world in the stories of all nations. In western drama, it is written that tragedy first appeared in the literature of ancient Greek drama and later in Roman drama. This literary genre later moved into the sixteenth century and Elizabethan period that was called the golden age of drama. In this period, we can clearly see that this literary genre is divided into different kinds. This genre is later moved into seventeenth century. The writer of the article has benefited from a historical approach to study tragedy, tragedy writers and its different kinds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. The author has also presented the chief features and characteristics of tragedies. The novelty of the article is the study of Spanish tragedy and its influences on revenge tragedies written by Shakespeare and other tragedy writers. Throughout the article, the author has also included some of the most important dramatists and tragedy writers of these periods including Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, John Marston, George Chapman, Tourneur and John Webster.

Moral Conscience through the Ages

Moral Conscience through the Ages