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This book examines the performance of Greek tragedy in the classical Athenian theatre. David Wiles explores the performance of tragedy as a spatial practice specific to Athenian culture, at once religious and political. After reviewing controversies and archaeological data regarding the fifth-century performance space, Wiles turns to the chorus and shows how dance mapped out the space for the purposes of any given play. The book shows how performance as a whole was organised and, through informative diagrams and accessible analyses, Wiles brings the theatre of Greek tragedy to life.
Why did ancient autocrats patronise theatre? How could ancient theatre – rightly supposed to be an artform that developed and flourished under democracy – serve their needs? Plato claimed that poets of tragic drama "drag states into tyranny and democracy". The word order is very deliberate: he goes on to say that tragic poets are honoured "especially by the tyrants, and secondly by the democracies" (Republic 568c). For more than forty years scholars have explored the political, ideological, structural and economic links between democracy and theatre in ancient Greece. By contrast, the links between autocracy and theatre are virtually ignored, despite the fact that for the first 200 years...
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Many dogmas regarding Greek theatre were established by researchers who lacked experience in the mounting of theatrical productions. In his wide-ranging and provocative study, Clifford Ashby, a theatre historian trained in the practical processes of play production as well as the methods of historical research, takes advantage of his understanding of technical elements to approach his ancient subject from a new perspective. In doing so he challenges many long-held views. Archaeological and written sources relating to Greek classical theatre are diverse, scattered, and disconnected. Ashby's own (and memorable) fieldwork led him to more than one hundred theatre sites in Greece, southern Italy,...
This collection of eleven essays provides the reader with some valuable insights into the richness of sources dealing with music and musical performance scattered over 3000 years and covering a wide range of geographies, from Syria to Iberia, through Greece and Rome. The volume, then, offers a series of examinations of literary data and materials from different areas of the Classical World and the Near East in ancient times and in late Antiquity, examined both synchronically and diachronically, in some cases in dialogue with one another. This broad treatment makes this collection of interest to historians, archaeologists, philologists and musicians, providing them with a multi-faceted volume which guides them towards a fuller understanding of ancient societies and which heightens the awareness of the importance of music as a transversal phenomenon.
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Explores the origins and development of ancient drama, especially comedy, on Sicily and its relationship to the political situation.