Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century

Greek and Roman epic poetry has always provided creative artists in the modern world with a rich storehouse of themes. Tim Supple and Simon Reade's 1999 stage adaptation of Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid for the RSC heralded a new lease of life for receptions of the genre, and it now routinely provides raw material for the performance repertoire of both major cultural institutions and emergent, experimental theatre companies. This volume represents the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions, with chapters covering not only a significant chronological span, but also ranging widely across both place and genre, analysing lyric, film, dance, and opera from Europe to Asia and the Americas. What emerges most clearly is how anxieties about the ability to write epic in the early modern world, together with the ancient precedent of Greek tragedy's reworking of epic material, explain its migration to the theatre. This move, though, was not without problems, as epic encountered the barriers imposed by neo-classicists, who sought to restrict serious theatre to a narrowly defined reality that precluded its broad sweeps across time and place. In many instances in recent years, the fact that the Homeric epics were composed orally has rendered reinvention not only legitimate, but also deeply appropriate, opening up a range of forms and traditions within which epic themes and structures may be explored. Drawing on the expertise of specialists from the fields of classical studies, English and comparative literature, modern languages, music, dance, and theatre and performance studies, as well as from practitioners within the creative industries, the volume is able to offer an unprecedented modern and dynamic study of 'epic' content and form across myriad diverse performance arenas.

Table of Contents:
Frontmatter List of Illustrations List of Contributors Note on Nomenclature, Spelling, and Texts I. DEFINING TERMS 1: Fiona Macintosh: 'Epic' Performances: From Brecht to Homer and Back 2: Barbara Graziosi: Performing Epic and Reading Homer: An Aristotelean Perspective 3: Colin Burrow: Shakespeare and Epic 4: Tim Supple: Theatre on an Epic Scale II. CROSSING GENRES 5: Tanya Pollard: Encountering Homer through Greek Plays in Sixteenth-Century Europe 6: David Wiles: Epic Acting in Shakespeare's Hamlet 7: Marchella Ward: 'I am that same wall; the truth is so': Performing a Tale from Ovid 8: Wes Williams: Monsters and the Question of Inheritance in Early Modern French Theatre 9: Pantelis Michelakis: The Future of Epic in Cinema: Tropes of Reproduction in Ridley Scott's Prometheus 10: Georgina Paul: From Epic to Lyric: Alice Oswald's and Barbara Köhler's Refigurings of Homeric Epic 11: Arabella Stanger: Choreographing Epic: The Ocean as Epic 'Timespace' in Homer, Joyce, and Cunningham 12: Marie-Louise Crawley: Epic Bodies: Filtering the Past and Embodying the Present A Performer's Perspective III. FORMAL REFRACTIONS 13: Margaret Kean: A Harmless Distemper: Accessing the Classical Underworld in Heywood's The Silver Age 14: Tom Sapsford: Epic Poetry into Contemporary Choreography: Two Twenty-First Century Dance Adaptations of the Odyssey 15: Robin Kirkpatrick: Voicing Virgil: Dante Performs the Latin Epic 16: Graeme Bird: Homer as Improviser? 17: Henry Power: 'Now hear this': Text and Performance in Christopher Logue's War Music (1959-2011) 18: Stephe Harrop: Unfixing Epic: Homeric Orality and Contemporary Performance 19: Emily Greenwood: Multimodal Twenty-First Century Bards: From Live Performance to Audiobook in the Homeric Adaptations of Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald 20: Emily Pillinger: Homer 'viewed from the corridor': Epic Refracted in Michael Tippett's King Priam IV. EMPIRE AND POLITICS 21: Tatiana Faia: Institutional Receptions: Camões, Saramago, and the Contemporary Politics of The Lusíads on Stage 22: Tiphaine Karsenti: Achilles in French Tragedy (1563-1680) 23: Imogen Choi: The Spectacle of Conquest: Epic Conflicts on the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Stage 24: Frederick Naerebout: Epic on Stage in the Dutch Republic 25: Deana Rankin: 'Marpesia cautes': Voicing Amazons, England and Ireland, 1640 26: Stephen Harrison: After the Aeneid: Ascanius in Eighteenth-Century Opera 27: Patrice Rankine: Epic Performance through Invencão de Orfeu and An Iliad: Two Instantiations of Epic as Embodiment in the Americas 28: Justine McConnell: Performing Walcott, Performing Homer: Omeros on Stage and Screen V. HIGH AND LOW 29: Claire Kenward: 'Of arms and the man': Thersites in Early Modern English Drama 30: Edith Hall: Classical Epic and the London Fairs, 1697-1734 31: Henry Stead: Classical Epic in Early Musical Theatre: The Case of Kane O'Hara's Midas 32: Fiona Macintosh: Epic Transposed: The Real and the Hyper-Real during the Revolutionary Period in France 33: Cécile Dudouyt: Sacrilegious Translation: The Epic Flop of François Ponsard's Ulysse (1852) 34: Laura Monrós-Gaspar: Epic Cassandras in Performance, 1795-1868 35: Margaret Reynolds: 'Of the rage, sing Goddess': Epic Opera 36: Rachel Bryant Davies: Fish, Firemen, and Prize Fighters: The Transformation of the Iliad and Aeneid on the London Burlesque Stage Lorna Hardwick: Epilogue. Voices, Bodies, Silences, and Media: Heightened Receptivity in Epic in Performance Endmatter Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Fiona Macintosh is Professor of Classical Reception, Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), and Fellow of St Hilda's College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (Cork University Press, 1994), Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, 1660-1914 (with Edith Hall; OUP, 2005), and Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus (CUP, 2009), and has also edited numerous APGRD volumes, including most recently The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance (OUP, 2010) and The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (with Kathryn Bosher, Justine McConnell, and Patrice Rankine; OUP, 2015). Justine McConnell is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London. She is the author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (OUP, 2013), and co-editor of three volumes: Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood (with Edith Hall and Richard Alson; OUP, 2011), The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (with Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh, and Patrice Rankine; OUP, 2015), and Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 (with Edith Hall; Bloomsbury, 2016). Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford, Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Adjunct Professor at the universities of Copenhagen and Trondheim. He has published extensively on Latin literature and its reception, including the following volumes: A Commentary on Vergil, Aeneid 10 (OUP, 1991), Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace (OUP, 2007), Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English (edited volume; OUP, 2009), Louis MacNeice: The Classical Radio Plays (co-edited with Amanda Wrigley; OUP, 2013), and Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn? (co-edited with Lorna Hardwick; OUP, 2013). Dr Claire Kenward is Archivist and Researcher at the University of Oxford's Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD). She has published on the reception of Greek drama and epic in early modern England, though her current research and forthcoming publications focus on the reception of Homer's Iliad in science fiction and speculative fantasy; she is also the co-author and curator of the APGRD's two multimedia, interactive eBooks: Medea - A Performance History (2016) and Agamemnon - A Performance History (2018).

Review :
In such essays the variety of epic performances outlined in Performing Epic or Telling Tales appears in a new light, with expert scrutiny by practitioners and scholars offering boundless insights into theatrical processes and intertextual inspirations, encouraging the reader to experience the wealth of epic performances in the present day. The volume is meant to be the first systematic account of epic reception on the modern stage and with its range of topics, both historically and geographically, and contributors from various disciplines it certainly meets this expectation. Additionally, it sets a milestone for future research on the reception of antiquity on the whole. An extensive bibliography, an index and a number of black-and-white illustrations (most of them showing actual epic performances on stage) round up the impressive amount of interesting contributions.