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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/9/2018, SPi
Edited by
FIONA MACINTOSH,
JUSTINE MCCONNELL,
STEPHEN HARRISON, AND
C L A I RE K E N W A RD
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/9/2018, SPi
3
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Acknowledgements
During the first few years of the new millennium, the Graeco-Roman epics
regularly featured in staged, musical, dance, operatic, and film performances.
Yet there was no systematic study of the long history of epic-inspired per-
formances in various media across previous millennia. The three-year APGRD
Leverhulme-funded ‘Performing Epic’ project, based at the Archive of Per-
formances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD), University of Oxford,
sought to address this largely untold history.¹
The project has grown along the way, just like the epics that inspired it, and
with this development have come numerous debts. As ever, we are truly
grateful to the marvellous team at OUP: to Charlotte Loveridge and Georgie
Leighton; and to Tom Perridge, who initially oversaw the commissioning
process. We are also indebted to our scrupulous copy-editor Rowena Anketell,
to our proof reader Brian North, to our Production Manager Saranya Jayakumar,
and to our outstanding indexer Cheryl Hunston, whose patience and skills
have considerably enhanced this APGRD volume.
We wish to thank the following in particular for their help and support in
various ways: Tania Demetriou for kindly giving us advance copy of her
forthcoming major study of Homer in the early modern period after other
commitments prevented her from contributing to the volume; to Helen Slaney
and to Susanne Wofford too for their very stimulating papers at the first of our
workshops. Rachael White has performed a brilliant task on the Bibliography
and done so with characteristic precision and good humour. Huge thanks to
Hannah Silverblank, Lily Aaronovitch, Peter Swallow, and Zoe Jenkins for
their help in cataloguing the epic material. We are also enormously grateful to
the Performing Epic Advisory Board members: Edith Hall, Oliver Taplin,
Stephe Harrop, Rachel Bryant Davies, Henry Stead, and Marchella Ward.
Last but by no means least, we remain indebted to all APGRD colleagues for
their ongoing support, and encouragement, not least Peter Brown, Felix
Budelmann, Constanze Güthenke, Naomi Setchell, and Tom Wrobel.
¹ <http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/about-us/research/performing-epic>.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/9/2018, SPi
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Contents
List of Illustrations xi
List of Contributors xv
Note on Nomenclature, Spelling, and Texts xxi
I. DEFINING TERMS
1. ‘Epic’ Performances: From Brecht to Homer and Back 3
Fiona Macintosh
2. Performing Epic and Reading Homer: An Aristotelian
Perspective 16
Barbara Graziosi
3. Shakespeare and Epic 31
Colin Burrow
4. Theatre on an Epic Scale 46
Tim Supple
viii Contents
Contents ix
x Contents
Bibliography 573
Index 619
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/9/2018, SPi
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
xx List of Contributors
For ancient texts and authors, we have adopted the standard spellings and
abbreviations in The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edn.) and the citations
from ancient authors are taken from the Oxford Classical Texts editions,
unless otherwise indicated. Translations are the author’s own, unless stated.
Spelling throughout is UK, unless referring to a US particular place/
institution.
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I
Defining Terms
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/9/2018, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/9/2018, SPi
‘Epic’ Performances
From Brecht to Homer and Back
Fiona Macintosh
4 Fiona Macintosh
an oversight is for studies of tragedy and the tragic,³ Brecht is often only
acknowledged by classical scholars as a rewriter of Hölderlin’s boldly eccentric
translation of Sophocles’ Antigone. When ‘Epic Theatre’ is considered by
classicists, it is narrowly construed as simply ‘narrative’ theatre with very little,
if anything, to do with the Greek and Roman epic poems.
Cast by Brecht in contradistinction to what he termed bourgeois, illusionist,
‘Aristotelian’ theatre, Epic Theatre advocates the deployment of Verfremdung-
seffekte (very loosely ‘distancing’ techniques⁴), which are designed to disrupt
the flow of the action, rupture the fourth wall, and thereby render a critical
stance on the part of the spectators in order to effect radical change within
society at large. The employment of film projections in Epic Theatre, designed
to usher in real-life experiences, both extends and segments the theatrical
space by turns; and, perhaps most importantly, these stage technologies effect
temporal disjunctions within the dramatic action, resulting in multilayered/
multi-perspectival performances.
It is important to concede that the epic performances discussed in this
volume are very often interventionist, as Brecht advocated; and they routinely
extend theatrical space (albeit vertically to the realm of the divine and hori-
zontally across continents) in their handling of the ‘big themes’, which Brecht
maintained provided the requisite subject matter of Epic. They also focus
intently on the here and now: as the theatre director Tim Supple suggests in
this volume, epic theatre must be both big and small—handling the general-
ities and the specificities of life. Temporally too the epic performances dis-
cussed in this volume are very often disjunctive in Brechtian terms as their
action leaps back and forth across time.
However, what the epic performances discussed here do not adopt in any
systematic fashion is Verfremdung—the concept generally considered to be
central to Brechtian theatre.⁵ They may well include deliberate features that set
these performances at some remove from reality, as with Homeric epic’s
stylized dactylic hexameter, which clearly effected in practice a degree of
Verfremdung;⁶ or, say, through the use of a choric/narrator figure who mediates
the action for the spectators.⁷ It could be argued that many epic performances
under discussion here, and not just those in opera and dance, depend absolutely
on the very spellbinding qualities that Brecht demonizes and associates with
the intoxication of bourgeois/‘Aristotelian’ theatre.
But is Brecht’s Epic Theatre really so far from the epic performances under
discussion in this volume? Were we Oxford-based classicists, then, initially
‘Epic’ Performances 5
too quick to emphasize the differences between epic performances and the
towering twentieth-century, Epic Theatre model? We slowly realized that we
needed to take heed. For even if Brecht’s ‘approach to acting, playmaking,
scenography, and music has not been accepted outside Germany’, his ‘approach
to staging, storytelling, technology, and ensemble acting has triumphed’.⁸ More-
over, whilst Brecht in the late 1920s and early 1930s followed Schiller and
Goethe in his apparent misapprehension that, according to Aristotle, epic and
drama were opposites,⁹ by 1935 both his position and his understanding of
any Aristotelian polarity had evolved. In his ‘Thoughts for Pleasure or Theatre
for Instruction’, there is more nuance and greater room for overlap between
the two genres:
The term ‘epic theatre’ seemed self-contradictory to many because, following
Aristotle, the epic and the dramatic forms of presenting the plot are held to be
distinct . . . [But] Aristotle himself distinguished between the dramatic and epic
forms as a difference in their construction . . . [and] there was the ‘dramatic
element’ in epic works and the ‘epic element’ in dramatic works.¹⁰
Now, it seems, ‘epic drama’ and ‘dramatic epic’ are both possibilities according
to his schema.
During the course of the APGRD’s ‘Performing Epic’ project and in the
commissioning and editing process for this volume, it has become apparent
that formal questions—Brecht’s modes of ‘construction’—are central to an
understanding of epic performances in the modern world. And Brecht has
turned out not to be the outlier: his multilayered, multifaceted action, seg-
mentation, and discontinuity all reappear in the epic plots in evidence in this
volume. Brecht, as Silk has demonstrated, has borrowed much from Aristotle
on epic (not least the notion of epic segmentation, which comes from Poetics
chapter 26, where he speaks of epic as less unified than tragedy); and Brecht
very often provides coherence to Aristotle’s theory where there is none.¹¹ And
just as Brecht’s Epic Theatre demystifies the theatrical conventions associated
with the neoclassical unities and the deus ex machina,¹² so epic performances
from the late seventeenth century were deemed to be in breach of those
‘unities’ and were consequently confined to performance spaces where the
‘rules’ were not applicable—in the fairs, in the opera house.
Brecht, then, despite our initial conviction to the contrary, has turned out to
be a very helpful guide in analysing the epic performances under discussion
here. Just as Brecht can illuminate tragedy,¹³ so his theory is by no means
unhelpful when it comes to analysing epic on stage. And as so often with
⁸ Supple, Ch. 4 in this volume, p. 56. ⁹ Silk (2001), 186. ¹⁰ Brecht (2015), 109.
¹¹ Silk (2001). See too Graziosi, Ch. 2 in this volume, for Aristotle on epic.
¹² Giles, in Brecht (2015), 17. ¹³ Revermann (2016).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/9/2018, SPi
6 Fiona Macintosh
interdisciplinary dialogue, the initially slow process of discovery has afforded
exciting new perspectives that a classical lens, tout court, occluded.
EPIC CONTENT
When it was explained that the principal research focus for the APGRD’s
Leverhulme project was the content of the Graeco-Roman epics in perform-
ance, it is true to say that there was a degree of bemusement on the part of the
members of HAR, the Paris-Nanterre theatre research group. The subtext of the
dialogue was something on the lines of: ‘How could ancient “epic” content
constitute a “research” focus?’ And ‘How could source-spotting provide serious
research findings?’ It took some explaining to make it clear that ‘Performing
Epic’ entailed rather more than source-spotting and data collection (however
important that was for the APGRD database).¹⁴ The project was designed, inter
alia, not only to trace systematically the afterlife of the ancient epics in per-
formance; it was seeking also, and most importantly, to examine the multiple
reasons behind the continuous attraction of ancient epic material to theatre and
film directors, to playwrights, composers, and choreographers down to this day.
Indeed, it was developments in theatre into the twenty-first century, when ‘epic
performances’ have enjoyed considerable prominence in theatrical repertoires
around the globe, that prompted the research project in the first place.
For some contemporary theatre makers, such as Peter Brook, epic material
has provided a staple and a reference point throughout a long career. Late in
2015 at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris and then early in 2016 at the Young Vic
Theatre in London, Brook returned to the subject of his epic-scale, nine-hour
Mahabharata (1985, made into a six-hour film in 1989 after four years’
touring internationally) with a short episode entitled Battlefield from Vyasa’s
Sanskrit epic.¹⁵ This internecine struggle between the Bharata family members
is set against the backdrop of the Kurukshetra War; and as Aeschylus was said
to have done with Homer, Battlefield takes a ‘slice’ from Vyasa’s epic ‘banquet’
in order to make some sense of the tragedies of families torn apart by the
horrors of war.
Brook’s engagement with epic had initially been fed by his interest in living
oral indigenous epic performances in India and in traditional societies around
the world. In recent years, verse narratives of quest, adventure, and destiny—
the Greek and Roman Iliad, Odyssey, Argonautica, Aeneid, Metamorphoses
alongside Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, the Inuit Atanarjuat, and the West
African Sundiata—have been inspiring new theatrical, danced and sung
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