It is not so very long ago that Greek tragedies, at least in the context of Western classical scholarship, were primarily regarded as literary texts for translation and philological analysis. Over the course of the last three decades in particular, however, many new and exciting approaches to the plays have opened up, one of which relates to the question of how they might have been originally produced and performed at Athens. The production side of things had not, of course, been entirely neglected, but it had often been regarded as a side-issue, confined to cursory notes in editions and literary monographs, with ad hoc bursts of interest occasioned by the actual staging of a play, especially one using the original Greek language, in a modern theater.
A more active interest in the production and performance aspect of Greek tragedy had naturally been an ongoing feature of the work of theater practitioners, but their focus was more on modern realizations of the text than on any reconstruction of the terms of the original performance. Indeed, there was quite a significant gulf between the approaches taken to Greek tragedy by classical scholars and theater practitioners. This situation has been radically changed with the development of performance and theater studies as an academic discipline and its cross-fertilization with more traditional classical scholarship. The result has been an intellectual environment in which a study such as The Play of Space (Rehm 2002) fits comfortably, the author being a trained classicist but also a member of a university theater studies department and theater practitioner, and accordingly able to extend the parameters of discussion beyond the relatively uncomplicated notion of ‘‘staging’’ to include more sophisticated dimensions such as modern theories of space.
In the context of classical scholarship in the English-speaking world itself, a turning point is often seen in the publication of The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Taplin 1977), which followed soon after the German monograph Das Theater der Tragodie (Mel-chinger 1974). This chronology is slightly misleading, because important studies by classical scholars had already been appearing, even if at irregular intervals, one such example being Greek Theatre Production (Webster 1970a), first published in 1956. It was Taplin’s book, however, that had the greatest impact on a greater number of
Scholars working in the classical field, coming as it did at a time when a wider interest in theater studies in general was developing. Since the 1970s, indeed, there has been a sensational increase in the amount of published academic material on the subject.
World History
