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APPROACHES TO ANCIENT
DRAMA
IMPORTANT NOTES
2. This booklet does not repeat information that has been given in the Department of
Classics Postgraduate Handbook (available online at
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/classics/postgraduate/handbooks/pgthbk05.pdf).
Everything in the Handbook, so far as it is relevant to this module, should be deemed to
form part of this booklet, unless explicitly superseded below.
CONTENTS
II. OBJECTIVES
On successful completion of this module you should have developed knowledge and skills
in the following ways:
Intellectual Skills:
Ability to identify and evaluate key problems in the study and use of ancient drama within
an intellectual framework informed by current scholarship and to engage with
theoretical approaches
Ability to locate, select and evaluate critically at an advanced level a variety of ancient
texts and modern literature relevant to specific issues and problems
Ability to show initiative in approach to topics, with evidence of advanced critical and
original thinking
Ability to devise a research topic and select appropriate methodologies
Ability to reflect critically upon the discipline and develop an awareness of it as an
evolving entity
IV. TIMETABLE
All classes will take place from 14.00 to 16.00 on Thursdays in room C11, Archaeology &
Classics Building, except that the class scheduled for Thursday 13 October (when the
convener will be unavailable) will be rearranged for a different day and time (to be
decided, in the light of students’other commitments, at the class on 6 October).
The essay subject will be chosen by each student in consultation with the convener, not
later than 3 November (no essay topic of your own choice will be valid for
assessment purposes without the convener's prior approval). It must relate to one
of the eleven unbracketed topics listed in the Teaching Schedule, and must make detailed
use of the evidence of one or more specific plays. Examples (they are only examples!) of
possible topics would be:
In the preparation of your essay you are encouraged to incorporate relevant material from
your seminar reports and (with due acknowledgement) from the presentations, or
contributions to discussion, of other students. It is quite acceptable to choose for your
essay subject a topic on which you reported in a seminar, or one growing out of it,
provided that it meets the requirements stated above.
You must provide a word-count for your essay, on the Departmental Cover Sheet. Your
word processor will have a tool for providing a word- count. The word- count should
include footnotes/endnotes, but exclude the title and bibliography.
Your essay should not be less than 5000 or more than 6000 words long. If shorter than
this, it is unlikely to cover the question adequately. If longer than 6000 words, however
good it is, it will have five marks deducted as a penalty for excessive length. If there
is no word- count on your cover- sheet, the marker will estimate the word- count of your
essay, and will penalise the essay if it appears to be overlength.
Guidance on the preparation of coursework will be found in sections 7.1 to 7.3 of the
Postgraduate Handbook and also in section 9.7 (on bibliographies, notes and referencing).
The criteria used for the marking of coursework are stated in section 8.1 of the
Handbook. If you have fulfilled the module objectives set out in section II above, you will
have written an essay or essays showing, at the least, most of the qualities described in
the Handbook as typical of an essay "near the middle of the MA pass range".
You will get feedback on your written coursework through a Coursework Report Form,
which will be placed in your pigeon- hole in the Student Seminar Room (B7). You should
take careful note of these comments, which are designed principally to help you to
improve further your writing, argumentative and presentational skills. Feedback will be
sent to you by Monday 23 January.
WARNING
Coursework must be wholly your own work. You must not quote or paraphrase the
words of published authors without acknowledgement. Failure to acknowledge
your sources may lead to your being suspected of plagiarism, that is, the
academic offence of seeking an unfair advantage by using other people's work as
though it were your own. Your coursework coversheet will include a declaration,
which you must sign, stating that the work is your own and that you have
acknowledged all material taken from other sources.
4
VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY
This reading list is extremely selective, and you should aim to expand it as your reading
itself leads you, via references, to fresh material. In general, books rather than articles
are listed; and there is no listing of editions or translations of, or commentaries on,
individual plays or collected works (except fragments).
1(a). General
In many respects the best place to start is still P.E. Easterling and B.M.W. Knox ed. The
Cambridge History of Classical Literature vol. 1 (1985), which has sections on the origins
of tragedy, on tragedy in performance, on the major and minor tragic dramatists, on
satyr- play, and on comedy, with bibliographies on each genre and each author (up to
about 1982). These sections have also been published as a separate paperback entitled
Greek Drama (1989).
A wide range of translated ancient texts bearing on all aspects of drama is collected by
E.G. Csapo and W.J. Slater in The Context of Ancient Drama (1994).
The standard bibliographical guides to publications on the ancient world have traditionally
been the annual L'Année Philologique (APh) and the quarterly "Bibliographische Beilage"
appended to certain issues of the periodical Gnomon. In recent years, the print version
of APh has been getting increasingly slow in appearing, and for material since 1959 it is
generally best to consult the online version (which, as of September 2005, was complete
to the end of 2003). From the University's eLibrary Gateway, click on the “Find
Database” tab (if not already foregrounded), choose Classics from the Arts & Humanities
menu, and when the Classics page comes up, choose "Annee Philologique" from the
alphabetical list of resources. A special username and password are required; you will find
them by clicking the "i" button to the left of the resource name. Once in APh you can
search under a wide range of criteria, the most important being "Modern author", "Ancient
author", "Subjects and Disciplines" (choose Literature/Genres/Drama), and (from the
"Other criteria" menu) "Word(s) in the title". Listings of books are accompanied by
references to published reviews of the book; listings of journal articles (and of chapters in
multi- author volumes) include brief abstracts of the article (in English, French, German,
Spanish or Italian according to the country in which the journal or volume was published).
For very recent material the best source is Gnomon, which however gives only author,
title and publication details, not abstracts or reviews1. It is most efficiently searched
online; use the link on the "Quick Links" menu on the Department's home page, then click
on "English Version".
On Euripides, special mention should be made of the excellent bibliographies found in each
volume of the Aris & Phillips series of editions; with each new volume the bibliography is
updated, and the latest will be found in W. Allan's edition of The Children of Heracles
(2001). I have tried to supply an introductory bibliography for Aristophanes in my Aris &
Phillips editions, most recently in Wealth (2001).
Almost all general works in the field of Greek drama deal with tragedy or comedy
separately; two which cover both, at an introductory level, is A.H. Sommerstein, Greek
Drama and Dramatists (2002), and (with a rather fuller treatment) I.C. Storey and A.
Allan, A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama (2004).
1
Most significant books in the Classics field are reviewed (sometimes more than once!), soon
after they appear, in the electronic publication Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR), which also
has a Quick Link from the Department's home page; to find a review (if there is one), click
"Archives" on the BMCR home page, then "Index by Author of Work", then look for the author
and title.
5
On tragedy the most comprehensive book by a single author is A. Lesky, Greek Tragic
Poetry (Eng.tr. 1983); the smaller introductory text by B. Zimmermann, Greek Tragedy
(Eng. tr. 1991), has useful bibliographies (though even in the English edition they lean
heavily towards works in German). P.E. Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to
Greek Tragedy (1997) is now probably the best introduction to serious study of the
subject; it is particularly valuable on tragedy's connections with society, myth and
religion, and on the "reception" of Greek tragedy in later antiquity and in the modern
world. Two valuable collective volumes published more recently are R. Bushnell ed. A
Companion to Tragedy and J. Gregory ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy (both 2005);
the latter is particularly rich and comprehensive. M.S. Silk ed. Tragedy and the Tragic
(1996) offers a wide variety of approaches to the problem of defining the concept of the
tragic, and in the process sheds light on many aspects of the genre.
On comedy, except for E.W. Handley in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
(see above) and the relatively elementary book by F.H. Sandbach, The Comic Theatre of
Greece and Rome (1977), few writers have even tried to bridge the gap that yawns in our
surviving material between the "old" comedy of ca.486- 385 BC and the "new" comedy of
ca.325 onwards; the useful introduction by B. Zimmermann, Die griechische Komödie
(1998), has not yet been translated. The best general book in English1 on old comedy is
probably still K.J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (1972), though M.S. Silk, Aristophanes and
the Definition of Comedy (2000) is more sophisticated; F.D. Harvey and J. Wilkins ed. The
Rivals of Aristophanes (2000), despite its title, deals extensively with all of old comedy,
Aristophanes not excepted. On new comedy, see notably R.L. Hunter, The New Comedy
of Greece and Rome (1985). On the intervening period we now have, at a rather more
advanced level, H.G. Nesselrath, Die attische Mittlere Komödie (1990), and
(concentrating on the early fourth century) G.W. Dobrov ed. Beyond Aristophanes:
Transition and Diversity in Greek Comedy (1995); also worth consulting is E.G. Csapo,
“From Aristophanes to Menander? Genre transformation in Greek comedy”, in M. Depew
and D. Obbink ed. Matrices of Genre (2000).
There are chapters on Aeschylus (S. Saïd), Sophocles (R.S. Scodel) and Euripides (J.
Gregory) in Gregory ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy.
On Sophocles, in contrast, there is a very wide selection, among which may be noted R.P.
Winnington- Ingram, Sophocles: An Interpretation (1980); C.P. Segal, Tragedy and
Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (1981) and Sophocles' Tragic World (1995);
and the difficult but rewarding work of K. Reinhardt, Sophocles (Eng.tr. 1979).
Euripides is less well supplied, perhaps because he has so many more plays extant. D.J.
Conacher, Euripidean Drama (1967), is good to begin with; more recent criticism is
represented by e.g. P. Burian ed. Directions in Euripidean Criticism (1985), A.N. Michelini,
Euripides and the Tragic Tradition (1987), and especially M.J. Cropp et al. ed. Euripides
and Tragic Drama in the Late Fifth Century (= Illinois Classical Studies 24/25 [1999-
2000]).
1
Now there is one in German of about equal quality: P. von Möllendorff, Aristophanes (2002).
6
For Aristophanes, Dover's Aristophanic Comedy (see above) remains a classic, but D.M.
MacDowell, Aristophanes and Athens (1995) is more comprehensive even if also more
pedestrian. Five other books deserving special notice are K.J. Reckford, Aristophanes'
Old-and-New Comedy I (1987), which concentrates on elements of fantasy; A.M. Bowie,
Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy (1993) which concentrates on elements related
to myth and religion; M.S. Silk, Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy (see above);
N.W. Slater, Spectator Politics: Metatheater and Performance in Aristophanes (2002);
and the conference volume edited by P. Thiercy and M. Menu, Aristophane: la langue, la
scène, la cité (1997). A short treatment of remarkable breadth and judgement is N.J.
Lowe, "Greek stagecraft and Aristophanes", in J. Redmond ed. Themes in Drama 10:
Farce (1988) 33- 52.
On Menander see N. Zagagi, The Comedy of Menander (1995); S.M. Goldberg, The Making
of Menander's Comedy (1980); and D. Wiles, The Masks of Menander (1991) which
concentrates on masking and its implications for performance and characterization.
The series of Entretiens sur l'antiquité classique published by the Fondation Hardt bring
together, in each volume, contributions on a topic from seven or eight leading specialists.
There have been volumes on Ménandre (vol. 16 [1970]), Sophocle (vol. 29 [1983]) and
Aristophane (vol. 38 [1993]).
Three key elements in the structure of old comedy are discussed by T. Gelzer, Der
epirrhematische Agon bei Aristophanes (1960), by G.M. Sifakis, Parabasis and Animal
Choruses (1971) (see also T.K. Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and the
Intertextual Parabasis (1991)), and by B. Zimmermann, "The parodoi of the Aristophanic
comedies", most easily found in E. Segal ed. Oxford Readings in Aristophanes (1996) 182-
193; see now also, on all of these, A.F.H. Bierl, Der Chor in der Alten Komödie (2000).
The formal structure of Greek new comedy, as revealed by papyrus discoveries, proved to
be so simple that it has attracted little recent scholarly attention.
7
3. Satyr-drama
The only modern book in English on the subject is D.F. Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play
(1980); but in many ways the most valuable treatment is the introduction to R. Seaford's
edition of Euripides' Cyclops (1984). See also P.E. Easterling in Easterling ed. The
Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy 37- 44; M. Griffith, "Slaves of Dionysos: satyrs,
audience, and the ends of the Oresteia", Classical Antiquity 21 (2002) 195- 258 (with very
rich bibliography); B. Seidensticker, “The chorus of Greek satyrplay”, in E.G. Csapo and
M.C. Miller ed. Poetry, Theory, Praxis (2003) 100- 121; and B. Seidensticker, “Dithyramb,
comedy, and satyr- play”, in Gregory ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy. Those who can
read German should consult what is now the standard work on the subject, R. Krumeich et
al. Das griechische Satyrspiel (1999). A valuable article, particularly for its final sections
on the nature and function(s) of satyr- drama, is M. Kaimio et al., "Metatheatricality in
the Greek satyr- play", Arctos 35 (2001) 35- 78 (copy available from me).
The standard editions of the dramatic fragments are Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta,
now complete (Aeschylus ed. S.L. Radt, 1985; Sophocles ed. S.L. Radt, 1977; Euripides
ed. R. Kannicht, 2004; Minor Tragedians ed. B. Snell, 1971; Adespota ed. R. Kannicht & B.
Snell, 1981) and Poetae Comici Graeci ed. R. Kassel and C. Austin (1983- ), now
complete1 (Epicharmus and other Doric comedy and mime in vol. 1; Attic dramatists, in
1
The original plan of the series included a critical text of the eleven extant comedies of
Aristophanes; it is not clear whether this is still envisaged.
8
alphabetical order, in vols. 2- 7; anonymous fragments in vol. 8) except for the nineteen
plays of Menander included in W.G. Arnott’ s Loeb edition (1979- 2000)1. Both editions are
valuably annotated, but neither has, or professes to have, discursive introductions or
commentaries. For these one must turn to the excellent Budé edition of the Euripidean
fragments by F. Jouan and H. van Looy (1998- 2003) and to the many editions of
individual fragmentary plays, or groups of plays, by Sophocles, Euripides and Menander,
notably C. Collard et al., Euripides: Selected Fragmentary Plays i (1995) and ii (2004).
See also T.B.L. Webster, The Tragedies of Euripides (1967) and An Introduction to
Menander (1974); the discussions of lost plays in my Aeschylean Tragedy (chapters 5.5,
6.2, 8.4, 9 and 10) and in my article "The prologue of Aeschylus' Palamedes", Rheinisches
Museum 143 (2000) 118- 127; the highly persuasive reconstruction of Sophocles' Tereus
by D.G. Fitzpatrick, CQ 51 (2001) 90- 101; the contributions by Dover, Arnott, Rosen,
Harvey and Storey to F.D. Harvey and J. Wilkins ed. The Rivals of Aristophanes (2000);
and the contributions by Clark, March, Hahnemann, Sommerstein and Rosen (among
others) to A.H. Sommerstein ed. Shards from Kolonos: Studies in Sophoclean Fragments
(2003). I can also make available the introductions, texts with translation, and
commentaries on eight Sophoclean plays in the forthcoming edition of Sophocles: Selected
Fragmentary Plays which I am preparing together with A.C. Clark, D.G. Fitzpatrick and
T.H. Talboy.
There are useful brief surveys of the performance aspects of Greek tragedy by M.R.
Halleran in Bushnell ed. A Companion to Tragedy (2005) 198- 214 and by J. Davidson in
Gregory ed. A Companion to Greek Tragedy (2005).
1
One play included in Arnott’ s first volume, Epitrepontes, has been augmented since then (and
even since Sandbach’ s revised Oxford text of 1990) by several important new papyri. Arnott
re-edits lines 655-835 to take account of this material in D.L. Cairns and R.A. Knox ed. Law,
Rhetoric and Comedy in Classical Athens (2004) 269-292, at 282-8; on pp.279-281 he gives a
guide to new papyri from other parts of the play (his item (c) is now POxy 4641).
2
The old Oxford edition of Aristophanes, by F.W. Hall and W.M. Geldart, is an excellent example
of what a critical edition of a text should not be like.
9
On the physical conditions of production see A.W. Pickard- Cambridge, The Theatre of
Dionysus in Athens (1946), a good guide to what was known and conjectured up to that
time; N.G.L. Hammond, "The conditions of dramatic production to the death of Aeschylus",
GRBS 13 (1972) 387- 450; S. Melchinger, Das Theater der Tragödie (1974); E. Simon, The
Ancient Theatre (Eng.tr. 1982); H.J. Newiger, "Drama und Theater", in G.A. Seeck ed. Das
griechische Drama (1979) 434- 503. E. Pöhlmann, "Die Proedrie des Dionysostheaters im
5. Jahrhundert und das Bühnenspiel der Klassik", Museum Helveticum 38 (1981) 129- 146,
formulated the now widely- accepted hypothesis that until the mid fourth century the
orchestra in the Theatre of Dionysos was not circular but rectangular or trapezoidal (see
also now, in English, J.C. Moretti, “The theater of the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus
in late fifth- century Athens”, in M.J. Cropp et al. ed. Euripides and Tragic Theater [2001]
377- 398); there is strong evidence in favour of this hypothesis, but there is also evidence
telling against it (e.g. no one has explained how circular dithyrambic choruses of 50 could
perform in an area of the postulated shape and dimensions – and they all tend to be coy
about specifying the dimensions), and the jury is still out (see, on the other side, S.
Scullion, Three Studies in Athenian Dramaturgy [1994]). The evidence of the dramatic
texts is put to good use by O.P. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977), R. Rehm,
Greek Tragic Theater (1992) and The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek
Tragedy (2002), and D. Wiles, Tragedy in Athens (1997); C.W. Dearden, The Stage of
Aristophanes (1976) is considerably less reliable, but C.F. Russo, Aristophanes: An Author
for the Stage (3rd ed. 1994) while often wrong- headed is always thoughtful and thought-
provoking. The relationship between words and stage action in tragedy is studied in
almost simultaneous articles by W.J. Slater, "Split- vision: secondary action in Greek
tragedy", GRBS 43 (2002/3) 341- 372, and J.P. Poe, "Word and deed: on 'stage- directions'
in Greek tragedy", Mnemosyne 54 (2003) 420- 448, both of whom, to different degrees,
reject the Taplin dogma that all significant stage action is signalled in the text.
On the festival competitions, see A.W. Pickard- Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of
Athens (3rd ed. 1988, rev. J. Gould and D.M. Lewis) and P.J. Wilson, The Athenian
Institution of the Khoregia (2000). For the evidence of art, see A.D. Trendall and T.B.L.
Webster, Illustrations of Greek Drama (1971); O.P. Taplin, Comic Angels and other
approaches to Greek drama through vase-paintings (1993), and especially J.R. Green and
E.W. Handley, Images of the Greek Theatre (1994); also the catalogues in T.B.L.
Webster, Monuments Illustrating Tragedy and Satyr-Play (2nd ed. 1967); T.B.L. Webster,
Monuments Illustrating Old and Middle Comedy (3rd ed. 1978, rev. J.R. Green); T.B.L.
Webster, Monuments Illustrating New Comedy 3rd ed. 1995, rev. J.R. Green and A.
Seeberg).
There is no good modern study of tragic costuming. For comedy, see L.M. Stone,
Costume in Aristophanic Comedy (1981) and D. Wiles, The Masks of Menander (1991);
the use made by Wiles (and by Webster and many others) of the mask- catalogue
preserved by the lexicographer Pollux is criticized by J.P. Poe, "The supposed conventional
meanings of dramatic masks: a re- examination of Pollux 4.133- 54", Philologus 140 (1996)
306- 328, who argues that Pollux's catalogue is probably not a list of "standard" types but
is based on the actual mask inventory of a specific acting company, and that the primary
function of New Comic masks was not to code for personality traits but, prosaically and
practically, to make sure that every character in a play looked different from every other.
On dramatists' theatrical techniques, see O.P. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977)
and Greek Tragedy in Action (1978); D. Seale, Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles (1982);
N.C. Hourmouziades, Production and Imagination in Euripides (1965); and K. McLeish, The
Theatre of Aristophanes (1980). Of unique value are the new Everyman translations of
Aeschylus (2 vols., 1995- 6) and Sophocles (2 vols., 1999- 2000) by Michael Ewans, which
are accompanied by a detailed study of the staging of the plays, with particular reference
to movements ("blocking"), based on production experience and taking full account of the
findings of more traditional scholarship.
10
On all matters connected with actors and acting, see now P.E. Easterling and E.M. Hall
ed. Greek and Roman Actors (2002). On acting styles see further J.R. Green, "Comic
cuts: snippets of action on the Greek comic stage", BICS 45 (2001) 37- 64 (exploiting
artistic evidence), who also argues that the four- step stage of early 4th- c. Italian vases
was raised to 6- 8 steps (about 1.6 metres) in or about the 360s – which, Goette has
argued, is the likeliest date for what used to be called the "Lycurgan" reconstruction of
the Athenian theatre. On the ancient image of the actor (which has given us the words
“hypocritical” and “histrionic”), see A. Duncan, Performance and Identity in the Classical
World (forthcoming 2005).
On an important and little- studied aspect of performance, see A.L. Boegehold, When a
Gesture was Expected (1999); his specific suggestions are often implausible, but it is
certainly true, especially in comedy, that a script often becomes much more intelligible
when it is remembered that the characters could speak with their hands as well as their
mouths.
An important paper bucking most of these trends is J. Griffin, "The social function of Attic
tragedy", CQ 48 (1998) 39- 61 (cf. also P.J. Rhodes, "Nothing to do with democracy:
Athenian drama and the polis", JHS 123 [2003] 104- 119; D.M. Carter, “Was Attic tragedy
democratic?”, Polis 21 [2004] 1- 25 [copy available from module convener]; and D.M.
Carter, The Politics of Greek Tragedy [2005]); one of Griffin's main targets, Seaford, has
responded in CQ 50 (2000) 30- 44, and the other, Goldhill, in JHS 120 (2000) 34- 56. A
valuable, balanced contribution to the debate is offered by J. Gregory, "Euripides as social
critic", G&R 49 (2002) 145- 162.
11
C. Meier, The Political Art of Greek Tragedy (1993), is particularly valuable on Aeschylus,
on whom see also A.J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (1967),
C.W. Macleod, "Politics in the Oresteia", JHS 102 (1982) 122- 144, and A.H. Sommerstein,
Aeschylean Tragedy (1996) 288- 295, 392- 421; on Euripides, J. Gregory, Euripides and the
Instruction of the Athenians (1991).
The claim that tragedy was "written by citizens … performed by citizens, and watched
almost exclusively by citizens" (Goldhill in the Cambridge Companion, p.344) is
comprehensively exploded by M. Kaimio, "The citizenship of the theatre- makers in
Athens", Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft 23 (1999) 43- 61 (copy
available from me): by "theatre- makers" she means those responsible for creating
theatrical performances (poets, actors, chorus members, choregoi).
Discussions of the relationship between old comedy and Athenian culture, society and
politics are innumerable. In addition to those offered by various contributors to the
Winkler- Zeitlin and Sommerstein et al. volumes (see above), see M. Heath, "Aristophanes
and the discourse of politics", in Dobrov ed. The City as Comedy, and S. Halliwell, "Comic
satire and freedom of speech in classical Athens", JHS 111 (1991) 48- 70, who both take
the view that comedy neither affected nor was expected to affect the public life of the
state. Against this, A.T. Edwards in the Scodel volume (see above) shows, with the help
of Bakhtin's theory of carnival masquerade, how what was originally a downmarket popular
entertainment may have been hijacked by an élite and used as an anti- democratic
weapon (so too, rather more crudely, D. Rosenbloom, "From ponêros to pharmakos:
theater, social drama, and revolution in Athens, 428- 404 BCE", Classical Antiquity 21
[2002] 283- 346), and J.J. Henderson, "Attic Old Comedy, frank speech, and democracy",
in Boedeker & Raaflaub (above) 255- 273, argues (not necessarily contradicting Edwards!)
that comedy's chosen voice was that of the ordinary man who felt, even in a democracy,
that in practice he was controlled by an élite; see also his chapter “Demos, demagogue,
tyrant in Old Comedy”, in K.A. Morgan ed. Popular Tyranny (2003). A thoughtfully argued
intermediate view will be found in C. Carey, "Comic ridicule and democracy", in R.G.
Osborne and S. Hornblower ed. Ritual, Finance, Politics (Oxford, 1994).
On the presentation of non- Greeks in drama, especially tragedy, see E.M. Hall, Inventing
the Barbarian (1989), and P.A. Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others
(1993).
On the problems and principles of using drama (and other literary texts) as sources of
evidence about contemporary society, see C.B.R. Pelling, Literary Texts and the Greek
Historian (2000).
It was an old complaint (older than Aeschylus!) that tragedy had "nothing to do with
Dionysus", at whose festivals it was performed; recent scholarship has been much
concerned with proving, or trying to prove, that this complaint was misguided. See for
example the chapters by Winkler and Goldhill in Winkler & Zeitlin ed. Nothing to do with
Dionysos? (1990), and by Cartledge and Easterling in Easterling ed. The Cambridge
Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997); also, on drama and the Dionysiac, T.H. Carpenter
and C.A. Faraone ed. Masks of Dionysus (1993), especially the contributions by Seaford
and Zeitlin, A.F.H. Bierl, Dionysos und die griechische Tragödie (1991), and I. Lada-
Richards, Initiating Dionysus (1999); and on a wide variety of aspects of the relationship
between tragedy, ritual and society, R. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual (1994) – though
this is a highly controversial work. Seaford debates with Rainer Friedrich in M.S. Silk ed.
Tragedy and "The Tragic" (1996) 257- 294, and is one of the contributors to Bushnell ed.
A Companion to Tragedy (2005). The whole trend of the last generation's scholarship in
this area is vigorously opposed by S. Scullion in "'Nothing to do with Dionysus': tragedy
misconceived as ritual", CQ 52 (2002) 102- 137; see also his chapter in Gregory ed. A
Companion to Greek Tragedy.
13
(1) The application to Greek drama of the findings of, and of methods, theories and
ideologies developed in, disciplines not primarily concerned with the study of literary
texts, such as anthropology (e.g. structuralism), sociology (e.g. Marxism, feminism) and
psychology (e.g. psychoanalysis). Apart from the feminist approaches (for which see §8
above), the works in this area most likely to appeal to the uncommitted are those inspired
by Lévi- Straussian structuralism; outstanding examples are J.P. Vernant & P. Vidal-
Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (Eng. tr. 1990) and C.P. Segal, Tragedy and
Civilization (1981), Interpreting Greek Tragedy (1986) and Sophocles’ Tragic World
(1995). This approach, indeed, has been so influential that it has now, as Goldhill writes
(Cambridge Companion 343), “been very widely absorbed into the mainstream of criticism,
often without acknowledgement as such”.
(2) The application to Greek drama of explicitly formulated theories of literary criticism.
The approach that has attracted most attention in this regard is that associated with
the names of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, characterized by a focus on the text
rather than the author and on the problematization of language and communication; the
most notable articulator of this approach in English has been Simon Goldhill, especially in
The Oresteia: language, sexuality, narrative (1984) and the somewhat more accessible
Reading Greek Tragedy (1986) and The Poet’s Voice (1991) – the latter also has an
interesting discussion of Aristophanes. Since drama is itself (among other things) a form
of linguistic communication, considerable attention has come to be paid to the
presentation of drama (or of drama- like activities) within drama (often called
“metatheatre”); this is a leading concern, for example, of Mark Ringer’ s Electra and the
Empty Urn (1998), of Niall Slater’ s Aristophanic study Spectator Politics (2002), and of
much recent discussion of the most metatheatrical of all surviving ancient dramas,
Aristophanes’Thesmophoriazusae. Here too there has been a tendency to absorb once-
controversial approaches “into the mainstream” while smoothing away some of their most
controversial features (such as a tendency, in some hands, virtually to elide from critical
consideration the designing mind of the author and the historical context of a work).
General surveys of recent critical approaches to Greek drama have tended to concentrate
on (1) rather than (2); this applies even to the best of them, that by Goldhill in Easterling
ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997) 324- 347, and also to the
chapters on critical approaches in Bushnell ed. A Companion to Tragedy (2005), which
cover psychoanalysis (J.R. Lupton), Marxist and post- Marxist materialism (H. Grady), and
feminism (V. Wohl), but do not treat any literary- critical theory as a separate object of
discussion.