Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914

Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh

Covers a broad chronological range, from the Restoration to the early twentieth century
Lavishly illustrated throughout, with many unique pictures recording historical performances
Accessible to theatregoers, students of drama, and readers of literature generally, as all Greek has been translated
Through its unique focus on performance, completely rewrites the social and political history of Greek tragedy in Britain

Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914

Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh

Description

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.

Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914

Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh

1:Regicide, Restoration, and the English Oedipus
2:Iphigenia and the Glorious Revolution
3:Greek Tragedy as She-Tragedy
4:James Thomson's Tragedies of Opposition
5:Euripides' Ion, Coram's Foundlings, and Hardwicke's Marriage Act
6:Eighteenth-Century Electra
7:Caractacus at Colonus
8:Revolutionary Oedipuses
9:Greek Tragedy in Late Georgian Reading
10:Ruins and Rebels
11:Talfourd's Ancient Greeks in the Theatre of Reform
12:Antigone with Consequences
13:The Ideology of Classical Burlesque
14:Medea and Mid-Victorian Marriage Legislation
15:Page versus Stage: Greek Tragedy, the Academy, and the Popular Theatre
16:London's Greek Plays in the 1880s: George Warr and Uocial Philistinism
17:The Shavian Euripides and the Euripidean Shaw: Greek Tragedy and the New Drama
18:Greek Tragedy and the Cosmopolitan Ideal

Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914

Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh

Author Information

Edith Hall, Leverhulme Professor of Greek Cultural History at the University of Durham, and Fiona Macintosh, Senior Research Fellow at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford

Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914

Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh

Reviews and Awards

Shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize 2005

"...comprehensively and formidably thorough study...a triumph...[Hall and Macintosh] succeed brilliantly...Here is a rich and informing overview of the drama and its various connections to social legislation, educational reform and religious preference...[it] links the history of classical transmission to that of the theatre in ways never previously attempted." - J. Michael Walton, Journal of Hellenic Studies 126, Reviews of Books 223-4

"...delightfully given to the reader in style, humour and wit, in a narrative that combines formal documentation with illustration from relevant anecdotal and visual material." - The Anglo-Hellenic Review

"This is a work of consummate scholarship. It is meticulously researched, perfectly documented and beautifully presented...The presentation and the reception of Greek tragedy in Britain is an important subject, and the authors address it very seriously indeed, but they go so much further than, to put it colloquially, 'what they say on the tin'. They make new connections, bringing to the reader, not just new facts, but new ideas...This is, in the precise sense of the word, an exciting book." - Professor Jan McDonald, formerly Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow (retired)

"...impressively detailed and wide-ranging... This is a massive scholarly project. Few contemporary academics would dare to take on such a long period of time, or to cross the disciplinary boundaries between Classics, theatre history and English literature ... Hall and Macintosh are to be congratulated for their courage and industriousness in crossing this chasm." - Emily Wilson, TLS

"...[a] rigorous and readable history...combines valuable new research with a set of cogent and persuasive arguments about the social and political history of Greek plays, always with a view to connecting these to more conventional English literary histories. Perhaps most engagingly, this new contribution by Hall and Macintosh provides the exhilarating sense of an emergent field, one that draws on the resources of classics, cultural history, literary and performance studies and whose possibilities have only begun to be tapped." - Keri Walsh, The Review of English Studies