An exciting series that provides students with direct access to the ancient world by offering new translations of extracts from its key texts. This book offers a valuable guide to Greek theatre. It presents a broad selection of key ancient sources, both visual and literary, about all aspects of performance - including actors, masks, stage props and choral dancing - as well as scenes from the plays themselves that offer insights into their staging, plots, and reception. The dramatic brilliance of playwrights such as Sophocles, Aristophanes and Menander is brought to the fore by helpful commentary that provides a framework for the interpretation of Greek drama, fleshes out its cultural contexts, and invites students to consider a range of provocative questions.

Peter Arnott discusses Greek drama not as an antiquarian study but as a living art form. He removes the plays from the library and places them firmly in the theatre that gave them being. Invoking the practical realities of stagecraft, he illuminates the literary patterns of the plays, the performance disciplines, and the audience responses. Each component of the productions - audience, chorus, actors, costume, speech - is examined in the context of its own society and of theatre practice in general, with examples from other cultures. Professor Arnott places great emphasis on the practical staging of Greek plays, and how the buildings themselves imposed particular constraints on actors and writers alike. Above all, he sets out to make practical sense of the construction of Greek plays, and their organic relationship to their original setting.

In this fascinating and accessible book, David Wiles introduces ancient Greek theatre to students and enthusiasts interested in knowing how the plays were performed. Theatre was a ceremony bound up with fundamental activities in ancient Athenian life and Wiles explores those elements which created the theatre of the time. Actors rather than writers are the book's main concern and Wiles examines how the actor used the resources of story-telling, dance, mask, song and visual action to create a large-scale event that would shape the life of the citizen community. The book assumes no prior knowledge of the ancient world, and is written to answer the questions of those who want to know how the plays were performed, what they meant in their original social context, what they might mean in a modern performance and what can be learned from and achieved by performances of Greek plays today.

A collection of essays, by leading international scholars, on the history of the Greek theatre, and on the wider context of festival culture in which theatrical activity took place in the Greek world. The emphasis is on the documentary material - inscriptions, archaeological remains and monuments - which provides so much of our 'hard' evidence for the activities of the theatre. Much of the important material discussed here is unknown except to specialists, and these studies offer access to its interpretation to a wider audience. They cover a wide range of time and place, from the earliest days of the Greek theatre to the Roman period, with special emphasis on the neglected Hellenistic period, which is especially rich in documentary evidence.

The latest volume in the Classical World series, this book offers a much-needed up-to-date introduction to Greek tragedy, and covers the most important thematic topics studied at school or university level. After a brief analysis of the genre and main figures, it focuses on the broader questions of what defines tragedy, what its particular preoccupations are, and what makes these texts so widely studied and performed more than 2,000 years after they were written. As such, the book will be of interest to students taking broad courses on Greek tragedy, while also being suitable for the general reader who wants an overview of the subject. All passages of tragedy discussed are translated by the author and supplementary information includes a chronology of all the surviving tragedies, a glossary, and guidance on further reading.

Constitutes the first analysis of the modern performance of ancient Greek drama from a theoretical perspective.