Reperforming Greek Tragedy : Theater, Politics, and Cultural Mobility in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC

An inexplicably understudied field of classical scholarship, tragic reperformance, has been surveyed in its true dimension only in the very recent years. Building on the latest discussions on tragic restagings, this book provides a thorough survey of reperformance of Greek tragedy in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, also addressing its theatrical, political, and cultural context. In the fifth and fourth centuries, tragic restagings were strongly tied to cultural mobility and exchange. Poets, actors, texts, vases, and vase-painters were traveling, bridging the boundaries between mainland Greece and Magna Graecia, boosting the spread of theater, facilitating theatrical literacy, and setting a new theatrical status quo, according to which popular tragic plays were restaged, by mobile actors, in numerous dramatic festivals, in and out of Attica, with or without the supervision of their composers. This book offers a holistic examination of ancient reperformances of tragedy, enhancing our perception of them as a vital theatrical practice that played a major part in the development of the tragic genre in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. This book offers a comprehensive study of reperformances of Greek drama in the 5th and 4th centuries BC in the context of cultural mobility and theatrical traveling. These phenomena are examined along with other contemporaneous developments, such as the spread of drama beyond the Athenian borders, cultural politics, the rise of the acting profession, and the cultural export of images of performances as tragic snapshots depicted on vase-painting