Conclusion

Performance research provides a revised and corrective genealogy of the reception of Greco-Roman drama in antiquity and in the modern world, allowing an expansion of knowledge and understanding beyond the spatio-temporal and conceptual boundaries of other fields such as poetry or education. On the one hand the numerous and diverse stage enactments of dramatic texts provide a large new empirical field that awaits exploration. On the other hand the nature of these enactments, best understood as events leaving only scattered traces behind rather than facts, poses a challenge to the dichotomy between contingency and timelessness which discussions of periodization and the canon often rely on. To be sure, periodization and canonization are necessary to discussion and central to the ways in which theatre histories are constructed and transmitted. But this is not to say that they are neutral, objective or simple. Their empirical use can be based on arbitrary or unexamined assumptions which obscure the same reception processes they set out to illuminate. To do without such concepts means to give up tools which not only make the construction of historical narratives possible but also differentiate them from the random collection and exposition of factual knowledge. But to use them as anything other than discursive strategies is to reduce their effectiveness and to miss some of the intricacies and complexities of the interaction between practice and theory that make reception performance a suitable ground for old paradigms to be put to new tests.

NOTE

I am very grateful to Lorna Hardwick, Miriam Leonard, Fiona Macintosh and Vanda Zajko for their generous and insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

FURTHER READING

On the need to interrogate the research practices of theatre studies and more specifically the processes and effects of theatre history and historiography, see the essays in Zarrilli, McConachie, Williams and Sorgenfrei 2006, Worthen and Holland 2003, Reinelt and Roach 1992, and Postlewait and McConachie 1989. On the concepts of the canon and canon formation and the debates in literary criticism between enabling and authoritarian - or aesthetic and cultural - readings of the canon, see Gorak 2001, Guillory 1995, and the essays in Alter 2004 and Gorak 1991. For an overview of ancient and modern paradigms of periodization and their critique from Friedrich Nietzsche to Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson, see the collection of essays in Besserman 1996, especially the introduction. On the concept of the ‘classic’, see the influential studies by Kermode 1983 and 1988, and the collection of essays in Porter 2006a, especially the introduction.

PART V

Performing Arts

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Iphigenie en Tauride and Elektra: ‘Apolline’ and ‘Dionysiac’ Receptions of Greek Tragedy into Opera