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Greek Drama in the First Six Decades of the Twentieth Century: Tradition, Identity, Migration

Authors

Amanda Wrigley

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, please see the full text of the introduction to this special issue:

This collection of essays from new and established scholars explores the translation, performance, and reception of ancient Greek drama in the period between and around the two world wars—so, broadly speaking, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1950s. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that the first six decades of the twentieth century present a significant and fascinating period for the study of modern engagements with Greek drama, one that, although hitherto somewhat overlooked, repays close study.

The essays have a particular focus on how acts of translation, performance, and reception of Greek drama represent and encourage reflections on international dialogues in this period. As will be seen, the authors have interpreted international dialogues in a variety of ways, including commentary on war and global politics, the creative exchange of ideas and promotion of ideologies, trends in performance, and internationally touring theater productions. Common themes arising from these discussions include the often interlinked concepts of tradition, identity, and migration.

The idea of tradition manifests itself in the following essays in various ways, from the trend of staging Greek plays outdoors, in daytime, and before massive audiences, following ancient performance conventions, to the conviction that Greek plays constitute a fundamental part of specifically the Western cultural canon. Engaging with Greek plays from this latter perspective is often inextricably bound up with issues of identity: the agents involved in establishing or calling upon a tradition are often perceived to be not only identifying with something for a particular purpose but also, through this act of identification, clearly distinguishing themselves against some others. International theater festivals are, in this regard, observed as a potent opportunity for the performance of national identity. The assertion of identity—whether of the individual, the community, or the nation—in engagements with canonical works often makes purposeful and powerful use of language via translation and adaptation, and Greek comedy in particular offers opportunities for exploring current debates on identity and nationalism through the use of dialect and language.

In the following discussions, Greek plays are also seen to migrate to new literary cultures and sociocultural arenas through not only linguistic translation or adaptation but also the reinterpretation of ancient Greek social behaviors and religious values to suit contemporary audiences. Migration of plots to modern-day settings also serves as urgent political commentary following international military crises. Touring productions may be perceived as acts of migration—of performance trends and of theater itself to hitherto excluded socioeconomic demographics. Indeed, so can the translation of Greek texts by classical scholars and translators, in the sense that this is the first act that makes these works accessible to readers who do not read Greek.

Some plays have resonated particularly strongly with modern theater practitioners and audiences: Euripides' Trojan Women, for example, served as an archetypal antiwar play for the twentieth century, with productions inviting identification with the victims of war and a recognition of common humanity over and above national or other demarcations. Yet political identities, too, are easily grafted onto ideas from Greek plays: for example, the same Greek tragedy, in this volume, is seen to offer useful material to both antifascists and anticommunists; and theater groups are observed to have turned to Greek plays to express their political ideologies and social concerns.

The contributions to this special issue emphasize the fluidity of culture, the political potency of cultural works, and the vital importance of language both as a tool of communication and as a means of reinforcing a sense of identity in order to achieve political and cultural presence. They also underscore the ceaseless back-and-forth conversation between tradition and renewal that can be perceived in modern engagements with Greek drama, which may also be interpreted as the cultural dialogues that communities continually have with the past in order to make some sense of the present moment and to attempt to shape the future.

In the first essay, Eleftheria Ioannidou considers the powerful cultural politics at play in the twentieth-century performance of Greek drama in ancient theater spaces. She argues that they have functioned as Foucauldian heterotopia, idealized spaces where the narrative of continuity from ancient to modern Greece is enacted. The performance of ancient Greek drama in ancient theater spaces on Greek soil by Greek companies became a demonstration of what was felt to be a specifically Greek cultural inheritance. Ioannidou interprets the assertion of a sense of cultural preeminence and the claim of exclusive authority over ancient Greek cultural works in terms of the nineteenth-century emergence of the modern Greek state and the need to establish a sense of national identity. She usefully reminds us of the late nineteenth-century European trend of staging Greek drama in ancient theater spaces beyond Greece—for example, Jean Mounet-Sully's performances in Œdipe roi at the Roman theater in Orange, France—and also the emergence in Greece of drama festivals in ancient theaters, such as that held annually since 1955 at Epidaurus. In the context of Epidaurus, she argues, dominant cultural discourses and exclusive policies promoting a traditional approach to the performance of Greek texts come face-to-face with modern theater practices, audiences composed of audibly responsive Greeks as well as tourists, and—in recent decades—productions of Greek drama by non-Greek theater companies. The ancient theater space thus becomes a site of enactment not only for the relationship of modern Greece with antiquity but also its response to non-Greek engagements with antiquity.

By contrast, Debra Caplan's essay emphasizes the very adaptability of the Greek tragedies themselves to particular—and, in this case, Jewish—literary expectations and sociocultural and religious values. This pioneering study examines the refiguration of Greek tragic characters and plots on the Yiddish stage of New York at the turn of the twentieth century, illustrating her argument with a discussion of how, in three plays, Greek polytheism was downplayed, a biblically derived morality was introduced, and the actions of challenging maternal characters were substantially revised. First, Jacob Gordin's influential Medea (1897), which sparked the trend for adapting Greek tragedy into Yiddish, is observed to depart significantly from its model—Franz Grillparzer's trilogy Das goldene Vließ—with the suicide of Medea who, in the Grillparzer version, exits triumphant after murdering her children.1 Soon the story of Gordin's popular Medea was relocated to the newly arrived immigrant community of New York in Z. Libin's domestic tragedy Henele, or, The Jewish Medea, which became a major play in the repertoires of Yiddish actors from its 1903 premiere. In 1935, Mendl Elkin's The Sorrows of Oedipus avoids the difficulty represented by Jocasta, whose incest with her son may well have posed a considerable challenge to the archetypal devoted Jewish mother, by introducing the literary double of the Madwoman whose toytn-tants (dance of death) makes absolutely clear her fate.

An individual who necessarily figures large in any history of Greek drama in translation and performance in this period—owing to the outstanding popularity of his English rhyming verse translations of Greek drama as both reading and acting editions, in Britain and overseas—is Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford from 1908 to 1936. He began to write translations as a practical way of illustrating his lectures at the University of Glasgow, and the first volume—comprising Euripides' Bacchae and Hippolytus and Aristophanes' Frogs—was published in 1902, with many more following on its heels. A recent conference held to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death resulted in a volume that highlights how many other strings this classicist had to his bow. As the volume's editor Christopher Stray puts it, he was a "Greek scholar, historian of literature and of religion, political activist and polemicist, internationalist, translator, man of the theatre, editor, psychic researcher."2

The next two essays in this volume, by Simon Perris and Niall W. Slater, provide new insights into the scholarship on Murray's contribution to the translation, performance, and reception of Greek tragedy in the first decades of the twentieth century.3 First, Perris carefully delineates how a variety of Murray's concerns—war, peace, internationalism—intersect with and illuminate one another in his translation of Trojan Women. Perris goes on to argue, in a close reading of both the translation and Murray's classical and political writings, that the Euripidean text in Murray's hands also becomes "an exercise in compassion" and "a metapoetic reading of tragic poetry" (429, 434). Published in 1905, the British Liberal reaction to the Second Boer War resonates through Murray's Trojan Women, and indeed it was this translation—an "autopsy of war" (424, 428), in Perris's words—that led to the subsequent identification of Euripides' Trojan Women as the archetypal antiwar play for the twentieth century.

In 1915, for example, a production of Murray's translation of the play sponsored by the Women's Peace Party was taken on a tour of the United States. This production, a revival of Maurice Browne's 1913 Chicago Little Theatre production, played at multiple venues across the West before tens of thousands of people. The first professional production of one of Murray's translations had taken place in London in 1904, when the Stage Society joined forces with the New Century Theatre of William Archer to produce Hippolytus at the Lyric Theatre under Harley Granville Barker's artistic direction. Granville Barker oversaw three more productions of Murray's Greek tragedy at the Court (Trojan Women in 1905 and Euripides' Electra and Hippolytus in 1906) and a 1907 production of Medea at the Savoy.4 The influence of the short-lived Court was pervasive in Britain: many of those involved in its productions would become important figures in the repertory movement that grew out of its example, and these actors took with them the most successful plays from the Court repertoire, including Murray's translations of Greek tragedy, to the new repertory companies being set up across the country.

In the same year that the Women's Peace Party production of Trojan Women was touring the western United States—1915—Granville Barker toured universities on the East Coast with a British double bill of Murray's translations of Trojan Women and Iphigenia among the Taurians, both starring Lillah McCarthy. In his essay on this production of Iphigenia among the Taurians, Niall W. Slater discusses how Granville Barker is said to have been inspired to stage massive productions of Greek tragedy by seeing both the ancient theater at Syracuse in Sicily and the Yale Bowl, which, as an outdoor entertainment venue seating seventy thousand, seemed effectively to mimic the performance conditions of ancient Greece. Slater notes several points of interest in his discussion of the performance and reception of Iphigenia among the Taurians in 1915. The play had long been a popular choice for performance on American college campuses,5 and there was already an established tradition of staging Greek drama in such venues (for example, in 1903, the University of California at Berkeley inaugurated its eighty-five-hundred-seat Hearst Greek Theatre with a production of Aristophanes' Birds), but Slater notes how this professional British production shocked audiences with its geometric designs in Norman Wilkinson's bold color palette. Slater illustrates his discussion of the strong visual impact of this production with reproductions of photographs from a limited edition reprint of Murray's translation of the play published in association with the production.

Just over twenty years later, also in America, Greek drama caused a very different kind of stir when it became the focus of governmental investigations into "un-American activities." Hallie Flanagan, the director of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP)—a publicly funded national theater organization that was part of Roosevelt's New Deal—was called on to defend the group's work against charges of distributing Communist propaganda via its performances. In his essay "Is Mr. Euripides a Communist?" Robert Davis considers the political ramifications of the FTP's 1938 production of Trojan Incident. By now, Euripides' Trojan Women had been established as an important text in the antiwar movement, and this 1938 adaptation of the play was determinedly antiwar in both text and stagecraft. Furthermore, as Davis argues, the FTP gestured toward issues of social justice both in its practical mission to reach a large popular audience and in production choices such as the political use of experimental modern dance by choreographer Helen Tamiris, who also—in the role of Cassandra—challenged the audience to strive for harmony between nations. Trojan Incident was firmly anchored in the tensions of the present, with Hecuba demanding of the audience at the end of the play, "Are you ready?" In his analysis of the reception of the production, Davis demonstrates that Trojan Incident disappointed those critics who wanted their Greek tragedy presented with more grandeur and less overt contemporary application, angered nearby professional theaters with its accessibly low ticket prices, and drew the attention of those politicians who suspected the FTP of functioning as a channel of Communist propaganda. Such negative receptions seem implicitly to gesture toward the political and social weight of both the FTP and its refiguration of Euripides in an America struggling with economic depression, doubting the allegiance of its citizens, and facing a world teetering on the precipice of large-scale war.

In the same year, 1938, a major Afrikaans production of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus was staged in Pretoria before the prime minister of South Africa and several members of his cabinet. In her essay on the role of translations and productions of the Sophoclean tragedy in the enhancement of the status of the Afrikaans language, Betine Van Zyl Smit develops the theme of the use of theater in the construction and development of national and community identities. As Van Zyl Smit argues, the endeavor to translate canonical works of literature into Afrikaans also involved a cultural rivalry with former British colonial rulers that was complex in its desire for equivalence on the one hand and distinctiveness on the other. Afrikaner cultural organizations such as the Nasionale Teater Organisasie (NTO), established in 1947, were also conceived of as being clearly distinct from the majority indigenous population and as such are inextricably linked with the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, which led to nearly half a century of apartheid government. Van Zyl Smit's essay concludes with an evaluation of Athol Fugard's 2004 Exits and Entrances, a play that, taking its narrative cue from Fugard's very first stage appearance in a 1956 Cape Town production of Oedipus Tyrannus, casts a critical eye on the aspirations of Afrikaner theater of the late 1950s and hints toward the more democratic and culturally inclusive South Africa of the late twentieth century.

In the next essay, Gonda Van Steen examines two very different political uses to which the battle-cry "Now the struggle is for all"—from Aeschylus's Persians—was put in the context of 1940s Greece. Both instances may be described as propagandistic, but in the first case Fascists and in the second Communists are cast as the Persian "enemy," thus demonstrating the ease with which a powerful half-line from an ancient Greek tragedy may be reincarnated to serve very different political agendas. The first use occurs in a radio feature program, The Glory That Is Greece, written by the Belfast-born poet, writer, and classicist Louis MacNeice for broadcast by the BBC on 28 October 1941, the first anniversary of Greece's dictator Ioannis Metaxas's bold "No!" to the Fascist Italian invaders. As Van Steen demonstrates, MacNeice knew, at the time of writing, that this "No!" had led Greece to war and occupation, but his purpose was to hark back to the glorious military victories of ancient Greece against the Persians at Marathon and Salamis in order to boost morale at a time when Britain was giving military aid to beleaguered Greece. "The struggle … for all" in this case represented the Allied antifascist war effort on behalf of the occupied nations of Europe. Just five years later, however, the Aeschylean slogan was subject to a very different interpretation by the Greek political Right, for whom a 1946 Ethniko Theatro (National Theater) production of Persians functioned as an effective anticommunist vehicle. Now "Persian" stood for Communism at home and abroad. Van Steen notes the irony, to say the least, in the fact that that the postwar Greek state's battle against Communism often targeted the very people who had, just a few years earlier, fought so hard to resist Fascism.

In the last essay in the collection, Michael Simpson argues that T. S. Eliot's play The Elder Statesman, which draws on Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus as well as Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone, reacts to revolutionary forms of theater represented by playwrights such as John Osborne and Samuel Beckett by promoting the traditional canon of European drama through an accommodation of some of its significant features. As such, the play continues the cultural project set forth in Eliot's 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which sought to affirm the integrity of the Western cultural tradition following the division and devastation of Europe during the First World War. In the second half of the 1950s, it was, Simpson proposes, the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary that underpinned the culturally ideological thrust of The Elder Statesman. In this reading, Simpson concludes, Eliot "shifts the faultline that … emerged in the Atlantic, between Europe and America, back to the Suez Canal, between the West and the East," a move that also served as an effective "cultural underwriting of the NATO alliance" in response to Soviet imperialism (523, 525).

These eight essays are followed by four research notes that productively extend the range of the volume and point to areas that it is hoped will receive full treatments elsewhere. First, Michele Valerie Ronnick details how William Sanders Scarborough, a former slave and the first professional African-American classicist, was in the audience for a film version of Aeschylus's Oresteia shown at the Classical Association meeting at the University of Cambridge in 1921. This Gaumont film was based on the Cambridge Greek Play production of the trilogy in ancient Greek, part of the longstanding tradition of performing Greek plays in ancient Greek on academic stages that dates back to the 1880s (and still continues, in some academic centers, to the present day). Interestingly, the same film version was also shown to schoolchildren from Chiswick, Greater London, immediately before a performance of an abridged English-language version of the Oresteia by the Cambridge students. This bumper entertainment package was part of a scheme set up by the local education authority to introduce schoolchildren to great plays; in the years following the First World War, many such activities arose in towns, villages, and in universities—a phenomenon that seems to demonstrate a similar, almost "missionary" enthusiasm to take especially Shakespeare and Greek drama to a wide audience.

The remaining three research notes comment on engagements with Greek drama in the years following the Second World War. Giulia Torello offers a succinct study of how Alberto Savinio's Alcesti di Samuele (1949) makes use of Euripides' Alcestis to reflect on the responsibility of individuals to resist future threats of totalitarianism. The play, set in Munich during the Second World War, tells the story of a Jewish woman who commits suicide in order to protect her Christian husband. The Heracles figure who brings this modern-day Alcestis back from death is the former American president Franklin D. Roosevelt. This Heracles stands for democracy and individual liberty; yet Alcestis finds that her return to life is unsatisfactory in comparison with the freedom she was able to exert in choosing the time of her own death—a power over one's own life taken away from so many millions in the Holocaust. Savinio's play is in itself a testament to postwar freedom of speech: the mere mention of Judaism by writers had been impossible under Fascism.

We learn from Claire Warden's research note that in 1938, the British company Theatre Union responded to the Spanish Civil War with a production of Aristophanes' Lysistrata. Following the Second World War, the group (now Theatre Workshop) returned to the play: the left-wing playwright Ewan MacColl substantially revised and renamed his adaptation Operation Olive Branch and Joan Littlewood, his wife and cofounder of the group, produced the play as part of their touring repertoire. This 1947 adaptation and production of what is popularly perceived as an antiwar comedy attempted to understand the social impact of the Second World War in light of the particular concerns that resonated most strongly with the political ideology of the group. The husband-and-wife team MacColl and Littlewood were Communists who are said to have worked under the watchful eye of the authorities (like Hallie Flanagan of the Federal Theatre Project in America, as discussed in Davis's essay). Warden succinctly discusses how MacColl reworked the Greek comedy in a tragic vein—emphasizing, for example, the plight of the soldiers whose fate lies in the hands of the unscrupulous political heavyweights—and also commented on current tensions and historical conflicts close to home through the use of English, Irish, and Scottish accents and dialects.

A decade later, the Scots language was employed for two literal translations of Aristophanic plays by the classicist, politician, and man of letters Douglas Young. C. W. Marshall highlights the political force of Young's The Puddocks (Frogs) and The Burdies (Birds) as an assertion of Scottish national identity in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in light of their performances at Edinburgh's international summer theater festivals. The Puddocks and The Burdies were performed at the Fringe Festival in 1958 and 1959, respectively, and in 1966 The Burdies was chosen to be the first production staged by the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company at the Edinburgh International Festival. Marshall concludes that Young's translations thus made a significant contribution to discussions about the place of the Scots language in the cultural life of the nation and closely related issues of identity and nationalism in Scotland.

Lorna Hardwick's thoughtful "Afterword" situates the present collection within the flourishing body of scholarship on modern translations, performances, and receptions of Greek drama, underlining the points where it rises to the challenges posed by this interdisciplinary area of research and indicating fruitful avenues and approaches for future work. She discusses particular issues facing the researcher investigating the relationship between ancient Greek and modern drama: these include the unavailability of much crucial evidence and the traditional logocentric approach in classical scholarship. Hardwick also presents the particular question that studying the modern performance reception of Greek drama raises for classicists: how to develop rigorous and stimulating methodologies that interrogate the aesthetic and social value of modern engagements with the plays while avoiding a simplistic study of the "fidelity" of a modern work to or performative engagement with the ancient model.

This collection finds a place in an established field of work on modern engagements with the extant literature, history, and thought of the ancient Mediterranean world; there is space here only to mention a few book-length studies to give a sense of the work that has been done. There are many stimulating diachronic studies of a single play or playwright in translation and performance, for example, the edited collections Medea in Performance, 1500–2000 (2000), Agamemnon in Performance, 458 bc to ad 2004 (2005), and Aristophanes in Performance, 421 bcad 2007: Peace, Birds, and Frogs (2007). Single-authored works include E. Teresa Choate's Electra USA: American Stagings of Sophocles' Tragedy (2009), Fiona Macintosh's production history of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus (2009), and Simon Perris's doctoral thesis "Literary Reception of Euripides' Bacchae in English, 1866–2008."6 Translations of Greek drama are the subject of J. Michael Walton's Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English (2009), and the general debates receive discussion in Lorna Hardwick's earlier Translating Words, Translating Cultures (2000).7 Many studies have focused on interpreting the bounty of productions staged within living memory: for example, Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (2004), Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today (2005), and Staging of Classical Drama around 2000 (2007).8 Others have focused on place: for example, E. Teresa Choate's volume on Sophocles' Electra in the USA (mentioned above), Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh's Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, 1660–1914 (2005), and Amanda Wrigley's Performing Greek Drama in Oxford (2011).9 There has been significant consolidation of approach and methodology in these areas, and the recent appearance of the edited volume Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice (2010) usefully takes up some of the important debates that received a solid foundation in Lorna Hardwick's Reception Studies (2003) while also—importantly—bringing the voice of the practitioner into the conversation.10

Political concerns, broadly understood, have been the driving force of several important works; furthermore, modern engagements with nondramatic Greek texts are becoming important in shaping the nature of the debates within classical reception studies. The reception of ancient drama and poetry in colonial and postcolonial contexts has, for example, been the subject of several recent volumes, including Classics and Colonialism (2005) and Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (2007); Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson's Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora (2007) builds on earlier works such as Kevin J. Wetmore's The Athenian Sun in an African Sky (2002) and Black Dionysus (2003).11 Particularly pertinent to the issues raised by several essays in this special issue is the important recent collection Classics and National Cultures (2010); furthermore, current work on the modern reception of ancient Greek historians (for example, the forthcoming collection Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the Renaissance to the Present) promises to offer new thinking on such themes as citizenship, democracy, war, and peace.12

It has been incredibly satisfying to work on a collection focused on such a rich topic and period, and it is my hope that this special issue of Comparative Drama will encourage further work on the translation, performance, and reception of Greek drama in the first six decades of the twentieth century. Many important strands remain to be woven into the issues and topics presented here, and I look forward to future "international (intellectual) dialogues."

The contributors to this special issue have been a pleasure to work with, and I have very much valued their good cheer and patience, as well as their scholarship. I am especially grateful to Robert Davis for numerous acts of intellectual assistance and to J. Michael Walton for initial encouragement. I would also like to thank the many anonymous reviewers who offered excellent advice. I remain most grateful to Anthony Ellis, Eve Salisbury, and other colleagues at Comparative Drama for their invaluable support and consummate professionalism in the publication of this collection.

Amanda Wrigley
University of Westminster

Notes

1. On the resonances of Grillparzer's Medea story, first performed in Vienna in 1821, with the Austrian anti-Semitic riots three years earlier, see Fiona Macintosh, "Introduction: The Performer in Performance," in Medea in Performance, 1500–2000, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 1–31 (13).

2. Christopher Stray, introduction to Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics, ed. Christopher Stray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–15 (2).

3. See James Morwood, "Gilbert Murray's Translations of Greek Tragedy," in Gilbert Murray Reassessed, 133–44, and Fiona Macintosh, "From the Court to the National: The Theatrical Legacy of Gilbert Murray's Bacchae," in Gilbert Murray Reassessed, 145–65.

4. Hippolytus was revived with a new cast in 1906; Medea was originally to have been put on at the Royal Court. Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, 1660–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), state that "it was largely on account of Granville Barker's productions of Murray's translations … that the Greek example became widely known in Britain" (492).

5. For an account of the history of Greek plays on the American academic stage, see Domis Edward Pluggé, History of Greek Play Production in American Colleges and Universities from 1881 to 1936 (New York: Columbia University Bureau of Publications, 1938).

6. Medea in Performance, 1500–2000; Agamemnon in Performance, 458 bc to ad 2004, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Legenda, 2000); Aristophanes in Performance, 421 bc–ad 2007: Peace, Birds, and Frogs, ed. Edith Hall and Amanda Wrigley (Oxford: Legenda, 2007); E. Teresa Choate, Electra USA: American Stagings of Sophocles' Tragedy (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009); Fiona Macintosh, Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Simon Perris, "Literary Reception of Euripides' Bacchae in English, 1866–2008," doctoral diss., University of Oxford, 2008.

7. J. Michael Walton, Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Lorna Hardwick, Translating Words, Translating Cultures (London: Duckworth, 2000).

8. Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Amanda Wrigley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, ed. John Dillon and S. E. Wilmer (London: Methuen, 2005), and Staging of Classical Drama around 2000, ed. Pavlína N. Sípová and Alena Sarkissian (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007).

9. Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, 1660–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Amanda Wrigley, Performing Greek Drama in Oxford and on Tour with the Balliol Players (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011).

10. Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, ed. Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop (London: Duckworth, 2010); Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies, Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics 33 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also the essays in A Companion to Classical Receptions, ed. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), and Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

11. Classics and Colonialism, ed. Barbara Goff (London: Duckworth, 2005); Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds, ed. Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson, Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Kevin J. Wetmore, The Athenian Sun in an African Sky: Modern African Adaptations of Classical Greek Tragedy (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002) and Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003).

12. Classics and National Cultures, ed. Susan A. Stephens and Phiroze Vasunia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Katherine Harloe and Neville Morley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, 2012).

Comparative Drama is carried by JSTOR and Project MUSE.

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