Periodization

In the twenty-five centuries that have passed since the death of the three tragic playwrights, their performance reception has been marked by thematic, temporal and spatial continuities but also by periods of silence, false or tentative starts, violent or incomprehensible ruptures, and multiple deaths. The plays of the Greek tragedians may have been performed not even once in the fifteen centuries that separate the Renaissance from the Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca. In more recent centuries, their revival has often been incidental and precarious. The year 1585 is often considered to be a landmark date for the revival of Greco-Roman drama on the modern stage, with an impressive Italian production of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King inaugurating the neo-classical theatre Olimpico of the Venetian Vicenza (Wiles 2000: 178-83). Yet, for all the interest that the production generated in its own time and still generates among theatre historians and classicists, it was a one-off event. Moreover, it was not the first performance of Greek tragedy in Europe, as several plays such as Euripides’ Hecuba and Medea and Sophocles’ Electra had been performed in colleges from the beginning of the sixteenth century (Boas [1914] 1966; Tanner 1934). The revival of Greco-Roman drama on the modern stage began not in 1585 but a full century earlier, and not with a Greek tragedy but with the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence and the tragedies of Seneca which both linguistically and aesthetically appeared more familiar and attractive (Reinhardstoettner 1886; Sanesi 1911; Duckworth 1952). When exactly one decides that the performance history of Greco-Roman drama begins is inextricably linked with one’s investment in different aspects of the subject. The preoccupation of much of recent scholarship (the present chapter is no exception) with Greek drama rather than Roman and with tragedy rather than comedy helps explain why 1585 is often used as a decisive date for the beginning of a process which may have actually started much earlier and which did not quite establish itself as a continuous theatrical tradition until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Scholarly debates around theatrical origins and beginnings can find themselves immersed in wider cultural and political conflicts. Should the origins of Greek tragedy on the modern Greek stage be sought at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the first systematic attempts were made to create theatrical traditions for the revival of Greek tragedy in ancient Greek or in close translation (Georgousopoulos 1993)? Should they be sought in the 1810s, at the eve of the Greek War of Independence, when free adaptations of tragedies were performed by the Greek diaspora, for instance the Philoctetes of Sophocles and of the French neo-classical playwright La Harpe, which was performed by Nikolaos Pikkolos in Odessa (Spathis 1986)? Or back in 1571, some fifteen years before the landmark production of Oedipus the King in Vicenza, when Aeschylus’ Persians was staged in an Italian adaptation on the Venetian-occupied Greek island of Zante (Mavromoustakos 1999a)? The relative significance of continuities and ruptures, of free adaptations and close translations, and of amateur and professional productions raises issues of periodization which take us beyond a series of historical moments and show how historiographical problems can be grounded in larger debates around the politics of language, cultural heritage and national identity.

Scholarship on the performance reception of Greco-Roman theatre deploys a wide range of classificatory and typological systems for the division of the field into periods, movements, ages and styles. Period labels come from chronological dates (Hall et al. 2004), general concepts of periods (e. g. Renaissance), historical events (‘Post-war Presences’ Flashar 1991: 181), rulers (‘Medea and Mid-Victorian Marriage Legislation’ Hall and Macintosh 2005: 391), cultural influences (‘Electra after Freud’: Scott 2005), artistic movements (e. g. modernist sets), artists or intellectuals (‘Gilbert Murray and the popularisation of Euripides’: Garland 2004: 161), and genres (e. g. nineteenth-century burlesque). Periodization encourages a closer look at the plurality of micro-narratives of which larger historical sequences are constituted. As such it is an ‘enabling instrument of history’, ‘marking decisive moments of difference, the ‘rise’ or ‘emergence’ or ‘crisis’ or ‘waning’ of the forms of social life’ (Fulbrook 2002: 5). Yet, despite the fact that period labels are functionally necessary, and can be positively deployed, divisions into historical or cultural periods, movements and styles have repeatedly come under attack, and not without good reason (Besserman 1996: 4). They favour the assumption that change occurs between periods, in the margin of history, rather than in its midst. They obscure not only continuities or affiliations between periods but also changes within periods. Even annalistic labels such as ‘the 1960s’ or the ‘millennial’ can convey a false sense of singularity, homogeneity and coherence (e. g. ‘the 1960s’ standing for cultural counter-revolution, the ‘millennial’ for excitement or anxiety), thus failing to do justice to the variety of complex and disparate historical processes and structures each of them encompasses.

A period which foregrounds the problems of the period as a fixed, singular or homogeneous entity is that of the ‘present’ or the ‘contemporary’ (e. g. Kruger 2003). In the last few decades there have been more stage productions of Greek tragedy than in any other similar period of time since the invention of the genre in the late sixth century bc. Recent research (e. g. Hall et al. 2004) show how theatre and cultural historians have sought to collect, classify and interpret a vast body of empirical data amounting to hundreds of productions and thousands of sources from around the world by demarcating the whole phenomenon as ‘contemporary’. ‘Contemporary’ productions of Greek tragedy raise an issue of periodization whose methodological and theoretical implications call for closer consideration. The ‘contemporary’ is not an empirically discrete period but a way of thinking about and organizing time and history at large. It may be constructive to assume that the ‘present’ of the performance reception of tragedy in avant-garde theatre begins with productions such as Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, but does the same hold true for the reception of Greek tragedy on the commercial stage or in schools and universities? How about countries with important theatrical traditions such as Spain and Greece, which were in the middle of a dictatorship well into the 1970s, or East Germany on the other side of the iron curtain? Or other geographical and conceptual peripheries existing away from the limelight of western metropoles? Can the revolutionary or counter-cultural ‘present’ of the performance reception of Greek tragedy during four decades of avant-garde theatre be the same as the fin-de-siecle or post-millennial ‘present’ of valorization or institutionalization of this reception in scholarship, in the classroom, or on stage? To focus on the artistically and socially progressive tendencies of experimental theatre is to set Greek tragedy at the forefront of artistic innovation and creativity. However, this is also to obscure other, competing aspects of this ‘present’ such as the marginalization and fragmentation of theatrical experimentation, anxieties about the death of tragedy and the contested role of Greco-Roman antiquity in the modern world, the (real or perceived) crisis in humanities scholarship, and the regressive or highly regulated nature of many of the socio-political contexts within which Greek tragedy is ‘currently’ being performed and debated. Periodization does not account for the different positions available within each period, nor for the different endpoints from which one looks at the past.

Periodization does not overcome the problems of totalization usually associated with diachronic historical narratives. Even when we move away from larger historical sequences and concentrate instead on ‘more specific, historically grounded, propositions about the interrelation among particular elements in any given historical constellation’ (Fulbrook 2002: 62), we cannot easily separate the defining features of micro-narratives from the singularity and totality of grander narratives. Like larger narratives, periods are not so much chronologically distinct stages in a continuous historical time, but discursive tropes or modes of experience, providing different structures for organizing historical meaning and significance. Concepts such as avant-garde, modern and postmodern, or civil war, democracy and dictatorship are shorthands, labels or categories for ‘imposing order on disparate and complex historical events, patterns of development, political structures.’ (Fulbrook 2002: 86-7). Consider, for instance, the case of Aristophanes’ Frogs, with which I began my discussion of canonization processes above. The play dramatizes not only contrasting value judgements on the theatre of Aeschylus and Euripides but also competing views of the history of tragedy itself, bringing historical and cultural change into the centre of interpretation. The Frogs does not contrast different ‘moments’ in the history of tragedy but different modes of understanding the development of tragedy. On the one hand it dramatizes evolutionary and teleological narratives of progress introduced by the character of Euripides. On the other hand it features narratives of decline and fall and schemes of birth-maturation-death supported by the character of Aeschylus. Aristophanes’ Frogs rehearses some of the more powerful strategies of emplotment of historical processes available to scholars for the history of performance of Greek tragedy. On the one hand, there is the narrative of progress and triumph the popularity of which increases as scholars focus their attention on the twentieth century. Through such a narrative one can explain why in the last few decades Greek tragedy has been more widely performed than at any other similar period after the fifth century bc. One the other hand the performance reception of Greek tragedy can also be interpreted as a story of decadence or of nostalgia for what has been lost for ever: a story that begins with the death of the great dramatists and continues with the gradual loss of much of their work and the neglect, misunderstanding, or abuse of their surviving work by fourth-century actors, Roman tragedians, Byzantine scribes, modern intellectuals, postmodern directors and so on. The performance history of Greek tragedy on the ancient stage has often been cast in such terms, with the help of its ancient admirers such as Aristophanes and Aristotle (see, further, Easterling 1993). Inevitably, any attempt to tell the performance history of fifth-century tragedy is based on a certain vision of history, be it evolutionary, pessimist, cyclical or whatever. This holds true not only for narratives of continuity and revival but also for those focusing on rupture and fragmentation.