Teaching Delivery: This module is taught in 10 weekly lectures. 

Content: How should we analyse, write about, and study productions of Greek drama - both in the past, and present? This course introduces key questions of approach about the reception history of Greek drama. It also offers - in ten weeks - a historical survey of changing ideas of theatre and performance, charting the interdependent relationship between theatre history and ideas of ancient Greece. Together, both have articulated key issues in European intellectual history - about, for example, civic society, nationhood, cosmopolitanism, authenticity, translation, textuality, gender, and class. The course asks what else is being performed when we re-perform a recognizable artwork: values such as community, continuity, commemoration, participation, and status. It asks - when translation or adaptation is declared - exactly what, and where, is the implied original. Do modern titles such as ‘the Oresteia’ refer to a text, a myth, or a tradition? What is a tradition? Who or what starts, continues, and defines one? As an artist, how is working within a tradition distinct from making new work? The course includes attending one current production as a class. It offers a historical context within which to understand this activity. 

Skills: 

By the end of this module student should be able to:

1. historically situate different ideas of theatre, and be aware of the historical background to current ideas of theatre, drama, and the play,  transformations in which Greek drama has played a key role

2. analyse any reception of Greek drama - whether a performance, a literary text, a philosophical, anthropological, or psychoanalytical idea - anywhere, and at any time, with fully examined assumptions and a critical attitude to sources and archives

3. be knowledgeable about the reasons why ideas of Greek drama differ from era to era and place to place

4. understand the interdependence of Western ideas of theatre and Greek drama, as both fundamentally engaged with questions of public, nation, literature, art, authenticity et al.

Module text: tbc