Hercules Performed

Emma Stafford is Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Leeds and author of numerous works on Greek myth and religion, including Herakles (Routledge 2012). She is co-editor of three other Hercules volumes in Brill's Metaforms series (2020). Contributors are: Tim Benjamin, Neil W. Bernstein, Deborah Chatr Aryamontri, Lucia Degiovanni, Sofia Frade, Samuel D. Gartland, Sue Hamstead, Owen Hodkinson, Eleftheria Ioannidou, Adriana F. Nogueira, Eleanor OKell, Robyn M. Rocklein, George Rodosthenous, Henry Stead.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Figures and Table

Notes on Contributors



Introduction: Embodying the Hero and His Story

 Emma Stafford



Part 1: Labours

1 Sandow the Modern Hercules: or the Twelve Labours of the Class-Conscious Historian of British Classics

 Henry Stead



2 Hercules and the Tragicomic in the Epic Theatre of Dürrenmatt

 Deborah Chatr Aryamontri



3 ‘Breaking News: Hercules Is the Son of Zeus’: the Chorus in Helen Eastman’s Hercules

 Sofia Frade



4 ‘The Moral Madness of the Modern Herakles’: Collage and Fragments in Tony Harrison’s The Labourers of Herakles and the Harrison Archive

 Owen Hodkinson



Part 2: Madness

5 The Madness of Hercules from Euripides to the Renaissance

 Neil W. Bernstein



6 Herakles, Medea and the Reality of Filicide

 Sue Hamstead



7 Herakles in Orbit: the Role of Space in Modern Versions of Euripides’ Herakles

 Samuel D. Gartland



Part 3: Death and Apotheosis

8 The Death and Apotheosis of Hercules at the Comédie-Italienne: from Senecan Tragedy to Commedia dell’Arte

 Lucia Degiovanni



9 The Sweet Vitality of Dancing Bodies: Classical Embodiment, Modernist Poetics, and Fascist Visions in Sophocles’ Trachiniae at Syracuse in 1933

 Eleftheria Ioannidou



10 Herakles, Sex, Death, and Spin: Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and Its Adaptations

 Eleanor OKell



11 Directing The Wife of Heracles (2010) for a Contemporary Audience: Footballers, Hairdressers and Dispensing the Poison

 George Rodosthenous



Part 4: Setting Hercules to Music

12 Hercules and Opera at the Court of Louis XIV: Ercole amante

 Jon Solomon



13 Shattered Female Virtue: Dejanira as Depicted in Handel’s Hercules

 Robyn M. Rocklein



14 ‘I Shall Sing of Herakles’: Writing a Hercules Oratorio for the Twenty-First Century

 Emma Stafford and Tim Benjamin



15 Herakles in Twenty-First Century Music

 Adriana F. Nogueira



Epilogue

 Emma Stafford



Index