In recent decades, the performance reception of Greco-Roman drama has emerged as a subfield of classical reception at the intersection between classics and theatre studies. Despite its complex relationship of affiliation and influence with literary and dramatic criticism and its openness to semiotics, translation studies, postcolonialism, and hermeneutics, performance reception has established itself as a field indebted above all to history in all its different forms and guises. The nature of the theatrical event may be transient and contingent and the traces it leaves behind fragmentary, but the appeal to performance reception of the empirical methodology of sources and of the ‘impartiality’ of the research practices of historiography remains strong. This is not least because of the vast amount of new knowledge and information into which the performance reception of Greco-Roman drama has tapped. New knowledge has contributed to a reconceptualization of the afterlife of Greco-Roman drama but at the same time it has also resulted in an easing off of the pressure from adjacent critical fields. However, the most interesting work in performance reception is taking place not at the level of the discovery and accumulation of empirically accurate knowledge, but at the level of identification, evaluation, synthesis, and analysis of this knowledge and of the purposes of its investigation. Factual statements have undeniable usefulness, but it is the methodologies involved in their making and uses and the narratives of their interpretations which make performance reception a field of critical inquiry.
The purpose of this chapter is to revisit two of the most commonly used practices in theatre history and historiography, and to explore the methodological basis on which they have been or might me constituted. Periodization and canonization are both central to the ways in which knowledge of the theatrical past is organized, classified, categorized, and made available in performance criticism. Periodization shapes perceptions of change, providing ways of compartmentalizing and controlling the passage of time, whereas canonization provides selection criteria and value judgements for dramatic texts and their authors as well as for stage performances and their directors or stars that remain, or should remain, unaffected by the passing of time. Both canons and periods are commonly used as empirical tools because they facilitate performance analysis and interpretation. But, far from descriptive and unproblematic, they are inevitably implicated in the questions of historicism raised above. One of the disciplinary contexts in which the two practices have come under a lot of critical scrutiny is that of literary studies, and theatre research could certainly benefit from a more productive engagement with it. The aim of this chapter is to rethink some of the assumptions we make in the process of canonization and periodization of stage performances of Greco-Roman drama, and to examine the implications of such practices both for what we are looking for and for what we find in our encounter with the theatrical past. Canonization and periodization condition not only the way we look at the past, but also the kind of past we look at.
World History
