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

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).

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