Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century

by Macintosh, Fiona; McConnell, Justine; Harrison, Stephen; Kenward, Claire

• ISBN13: 9780198804215
• ISBN10: 0198804210
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-12-25
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Greek and Roman epic poetry has always provided creative artists in the modern world with a rich storehouse of themes. Tim Supple and Simon Reade's 1999 stage adaptation of Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid for the RSC heralded a new lease of life for receptions of the genre, and it now routinely provides raw material for the performance repertoire of both major cultural institutions and emergent, experimental theatre companies.

This volume represents the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions, with chapters covering not only a significant chronological span, but also ranging widely across both place and genre, analysing lyric, film, dance, and opera from Europe to Asia and the Americas. What emerges most clearly is how anxieties about the ability to write epic in the early modern world, together with the ancient precedent of Greek tragedy's reworking of epic material, explain its migration to the theatre. This move, though, was not without problems, as epic encountered the barriers imposed by neo-classicists, who sought to restrict serious theatre to a narrowly defined reality that precluded its broad sweeps across time and place. In many instances in recent years, the fact that the Homeric epics were composed orally has rendered reinvention not only legitimate, but also deeply appropriate, opening up a range of forms and traditions within which epic themes and structures may be explored. Drawing on the expertise of specialists from the fields of classical studies, English and comparative literature, modern languages, music, dance, and theatre and performance studies, as well as from practitioners within the creative industries, the volume is able to offer an unprecedented modern and dynamic study of 'epic' content and form across myriad diverse performance arenas.

Author Biography

Fiona Macintosh, Professor of Classical Reception, Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), and Fellow of St Hilda's College, University of Oxford,Justine McConnell, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, King's College London,Stephen Harrison, Professor of Latin Literature and Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford,Claire Kenward, Archivist and Researcher, Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), University of Oxford

Fiona Macintosh is Professor of Classical Reception, Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), and Fellow of St Hilda's College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (Cork University Press, 1994), Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, 1660-1914 (with Edith Hall; OUP, 2005), and Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus (CUP, 2009), and has also edited numerous APGRD volumes, including most recently The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance (OUP, 2010) and The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (with Kathryn Bosher, Justine McConnell, and Patrice Rankine; OUP, 2015).

Justine McConnell is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London. She is the author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (OUP, 2013), and co-editor of three volumes: Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood (with Edith Hall and Richard Alson; OUP, 2011), The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (with Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh, and Patrice Rankine; OUP, 2015), and Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 (with Edith Hall; Bloomsbury, 2016).

Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford, Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Adjunct Professor at the universities of Copenhagen and Trondheim. He has published extensively on Latin literature and its reception, including the following volumes: A Commentary on Vergil, Aeneid 10 (OUP, 1991), Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace (OUP, 2007), Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English (edited volume; OUP, 2009), Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays (co-edited with Amanda Wrigley; OUP, 2013), and Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn? (co-edited with Lorna Hardwick; OUP, 2013).

Dr Claire Kenward is Archivist and Researcher at the University of Oxford's Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD). She has published on the reception of Greek drama and epic in early modern England, though her current research and forthcoming publications focus on the reception of Homer's Iliad in science fiction and speculative fantasy; she is also the co-author and curator of the APGRD's two multimedia, interactive eBooks: Medea - A Performance History (2016) and Agamemnon - A Performance History (2018).

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Note on Nomenclature, Spelling, and Texts
I. DEFINING TERMS
1. 'Epic' Performances: From Brecht to Homer and Back, Fiona Macintosh
2. Performing Epic and Reading Homer: An Aristotelean Perspective, Barbara Graziosi
3. Shakespeare and Epic, Colin Burrow
4. Theatre on an Epic Scale, Tim Supple
II. CROSSING GENRES
5. Encountering Homer through Greek Plays in Sixteenth-Century Europe, Tanya Pollard
6. Epic Acting in Shakespeare's Hamlet, David Wiles
7. 'I am that same wall; the truth is so': Performing a Tale from Ovid, Marchella Ward
8. Monsters and the Question of Inheritance in Early Modern French Theatre, Wes Williams
9. The Future of Epic in Cinema: Tropes of Reproduction in Ridley Scott's Prometheus, Pantelis Michelakis
10. From Epic to Lyric: Alice Oswald's and Barbara Kohler's Refigurings of Homeric Epic, Georgina Paul
11. Choreographing Epic: The Ocean as Epic 'Timespace' in Homer, Joyce, and Cunningham, Arabella Stanger
12. Epic Bodies: Filtering the Past and Embodying the Present A Performer's Perspective, Marie-Louise Crawley
III. FORMAL REFRACTIONS
13. A Harmless Distemper: Accessing the Classical Underworld in Heywood's The Silver Age, Margaret Kean
14. Epic Poetry into Contemporary Choreography: Two Twenty-First Century Dance Adaptations of the Odyssey, Tom Sapsford
15. Voicing Virgil: Dante Performs the Latin Epic, Robin Kirkpatrick
16. Homer as Improviser?, Graeme Bird
17. 'Now hear this': Text and Performance in Christopher Logue's War Music (1959-2011), Henry Power
18. Unfixing Epic: Homeric Orality and Contemporary Performance, Stephe Harrop
19. Multimodal Twenty-First Century Bards: From Live Performance to Audiobook in the Homeric Adaptations of Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald, Emily Greenwood
20. Homer 'viewed from the corridor': Epic Refracted in Michael Tippett's King Priam, Emily Pillinger
IV. EMPIRE AND POLITICS
21. Institutional Receptions: Camoes, Saramago, and the Contemporary Politics of The Lusiads on Stage, Tatiana Faia
22. Achilles in French Tragedy (1563-1680), Tiphaine Karsenti
23. The Spectacle of Conquest: Epic Conflicts on the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Stage, Imogen Choi
24. Epic on Stage in the Dutch Republic, Frederick Naerebout
25. 'Marpesia cautes': Voicing Amazons, England and Ireland, 1640, Deana Rankin
26. After the Aeneid: Ascanius in Eighteenth-Century Opera, Stephen Harrison
27. Epic Performance through Invencao de Orfeu and An Iliad: Two Instantiations of Epic as Embodiment in the Americas, Patrice Rankine
28. Performing Walcott, Performing Homer: Omeros on Stage and Screen, Justine McConnell
V. HIGH AND LOW
29. 'Of arms and the man': Thersites in Early Modern English Drama, Claire Kenward
30. Classical Epic and the London Fairs, 1697-1734, Edith Hall
31. Classical Epic in Early Musical Theatre: The Case of Kane O'Hara's Midas, Henry Stead
32. Epic Transposed: The Real and the Hyper-Real during the Revolutionary Period in France, Fiona Macintosh
33. Sacrilegious Translation: The Epic Flop of François Ponsard's Ulysse (1852), Cecile Dudouyt
34. Epic Cassandras in Performance, 1795-1868, Laura Monros-Gaspar
35. 'Of the rage, sing Goddess': Epic Opera, Margaret Reynolds
36. Fish, Firemen, and Prize Fighters: The Transformation of the Iliad and Aeneid on the London Burlesque Stage, Rachel Bryant Davies
Epilogue. Voices, Bodies, Silences, and Media: Heightened Receptivity in Epic in Performance, Lorna Hardwick
Endmatter
Bibliography
Index