Title: Greek tragedy and the British theatre, 1660-1914 /
Authors: Hall, Edith, 1959-; Macintosh, Fiona, 1959-
Publisher: Oxford University Press,
Year: 2005
Subjects: Greek drama (Tragedy) History and criticism.; Greek drama Modern presentation; Theater Great Britain History.
Abstract: This lavishly illustrated book offers the first full, interdisciplinary investigation of the historical evidence for the presence of ancient Greek tragedy in the post-Restoration British theatre, where it reached a much wider audience--including women--than had access to the original texts. Archival research has excavated substantial amounts of new material, both visual and literary, which is presented in chronological order. But the fundamental aim is to explain why Greek tragedy, which played an elite role in the curricula of largely conservative schools and universities, was magnetically attractive to political radicals, progressive theatre professionals, and to the aesthetic avant-garde. All Greek has been translated, and the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Greek tragedy, the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, theatre history, British social history, English studies, or comparative literature.
Contents: Regicide, Restoration, and the English Oedipus -- Iphigenia and the Glorious Revolution -- Greek Tragedy as She-Tragedy -- James Thomson's Tragedies of Opposition -- Euripides' Ion, Coram's Foundlings, and Hardwicke's Marriage Act -- Eighteenth-Century Electra -- Caractacus at Colonus -- Revolutionary Oedipuses -- Greek Tragedy in Late Georgian Reading -- Ruins and Rebels -- Talfourd's Ancient Greeks in the Theatre of Reform -- Antigone with Consequences -- The Ideology of Classical Burlesque -- Medea and Mid-Victorian Marriage Legislation -- Page versus Stage: Greek Tragedy, the Academy, and the Popular Theatre -- London's Greek Plays in the 1880s: George Warr and Uocial Philistinism -- The Shavian Euripides and the Euripidean Shaw: Greek Tragedy and the New Drama -- Greek Tragedy and the Cosmopolitan Ideal