Module code: CX267/367

Module value: 30 CATS

Module teacher: Dr Emmanuela Bakola (term 1); Leo Kershaw (term 2); Dr Emmanuela Bakola (term 3)

Timetable in 2024-5: One two-hour lecture a week, with seminars in weeks 5 and 9.

Students taking the Greek text component: One one-hour text-reading class every week, in addition to lectures and seminars above.

Time and place of lectures: Fridays 2-4pm, A023; Time and place of Seminars: Fridays weeks 5 and 9, 11-12 OC1.02 and 13-14.00 FAB3.26. Greek text class: Fridays 10-11am; FAB2.01

Description

Theatre creates meaning in performance. This module offers an integrated study of Greek tragedy, comedy and satyr drama through close readings of the plays (in translation; the module is available with a Greek text element for students of advanced Greek) and an exploration of how the plays created - and continue to create today - meaning on the stage.

Performance and theatricality is a continuous angle through which we will study the plays; the module uses this angle to explore the political, social, cultural and literary dimensions of Greek plays, their economic, religious, social and political context, issues of translation, as well as their ancient and modern reception.

The set plays include Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Suppliant Women; Sophocles’ Oedipus King and Women of Trachis; Euripides’ Medea, Bacchae, Orestes; Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Women at the Thesmophoria and Frogs, as well as satyr dramas, tragedies and comedies which have only survived in fragmentary form.

Assessment:

50% Assessed coursework (Terms 1 and 2), 50% exam (summer term)

Course Outline 2024-2025

Term 1

Week 1: Introduction to the module, to Greek theatre and its context; the dramatic festivals of Athens and their social, political and financial context; the spread of the theatre in the Greek world; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and the 98% that has been lost; the sub-genres tragedy, satyr drama and comedy; the political, social and intellectual context of fifth-century tragedy; ways of ‘reading’ Greek theatre: Greek theatre and critical theory, especially performance criticism, theatre semiotics, new materialisms, phenomenology, reception.

Week 2: Aeschylus’ Oresteia as one play in three parts. The Agamemnon and the focus on the house (oikos) and other interiors. Theatrical space and polysemy. The complex concept of wealth in Aeschylus and its materialities: the crimson textiles and the ‘tapestry scene’. Multiple layers of meaning: from the individual, to the house, to the polis, to the cosmos.

Week 3: Libation Bearers and Eumenides: homecomings as metaphor and structural pattern. Clytemenstra, Cassandra. the Erinyes and the feminine. Characters and choruses in mirror scenes. The Erinyes and the ending of the trilogy.

Week 4: Sophocles’ Women of Trachis; Sophocles’ perception in antiquity; myth, tragedy and structuralism; the house (oikos), other interiors and the wilderness: a structural opposition? Sophocles and the shadow of the Oresteia; Heracles, Deianeira, masculinities and femininities; Sophoclean endings

Week 5: The Dionysiac and Greek tragedy: Euripides’ Bacchae and the Dionysiac; thinking about the Dionysiac through space: the house (oikos) and the mountain/wilderness; costume and disguise in the Bacchae; engaging with mystic cult in performance; religion, ritual and Greek theatre; madness and 'psychotherapy' on stage;

+ Seminar on the Bacchae

Week 6: Reading week – no meetings

Week 7: Euripides’ Medea: gender ideology and marriage as overarching theme; heroic ideology and the oikos; children in Greek theatre and in Medea; ethnicity and otherness; making sense of the ending

Week 8: Introduction to comedy; Aristophanes' Frogs: comedy, and tragedy, parody and literary criticism; Frogs and poetic journeys; comedy and ritual (the death and regeneration motif of mystic initiation); comedy and the Dionysiac; tragic poets as metaphors of poetic styles

Week 9: Aristophanes’ Lysistrata: the female in Greek comedy; sex and gender on stage; feminist or patriarchal poetics?; the oikos in the Lysistrata; domestic and public space; the body and the polis

+ Seminar on comedy

Week 10: Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus in performance: opening scene and finale; the oikos and the mountain; Oedipus and the topography of memory; myth and psychoanalysis.

Term 2

Week 11: Reception of Euripides' Medea in modern film and performance

Week 12: Sophocles' Antigone: feminine and masculine; polis and oikos; the winds of the house of Oedipus.

Week 13: Lost dramas in Classical Athens: the missing 98%, part I - Satyr Drama; Satyr drama and the Dionysiac: Fragment 314 from Sophocles’ Searchers, and Tony Harrison's The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus ; Satyr drama in modern reception

Week 14: Lost dramas in Classical Athens: the missing 98%, part II - Tragedy I: Aeschylus' Achilles trilogy

Week 15: Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousae; comedy, competitiveness, innovation, experimentation; Aristophanes' fascination and rivalry with tragedy; comedy, parody and literary criticism;

Week 16: Reading Week, no meetings

Week 17: Euripides' Orestes and the development of the tragic genre; the perception of Euripides in ancient and modern imagination; Orestes in the shadow of the Oresteia; re-defining the tragic?

Week 18: Aeschylus' Suppliant Women as part of a lost trilogy; the myth of the Danaids, masculine and feminine; the theme of migration; ethnicity in performance; female choruses in modern imagination

Week 19: [Aeschylus’] Prometheus’ Bound and the question of authorship; Prometheus Bound in modern performance

Week 20: Seminar: Lost dramas in Classical Athens: the missing 98%, part III - Comedy. Rivalry between Aristophanes, Cratinus and Eupolis

Term 3

Week 21: Aeschylus and Sophocles Revision

Week 22: Euripides, Comedy, Satyr drama and Fragments Revision

Week 23: Exam practice

 

PRINCIPAL MODULE AIMS AND OUTCOMES OF THE MODULE

Principal Module Aims

1. For students to understand the special nature of Greek tragedy, comedy and satyr play as performative genres through selected readings, screenings, class discussions, and practical workshops.
2. For students to gain a thorough knowledge of the spectrum of theatre practice in the fifth century BC and its engagement with earlier and contemporaneous literary and cultural production.
3. For students to understand the links between aesthetic events with their political, social and cultural contexts.
4. For students to understand the continuing significance of Greek theatre in the modern world.

Principal Learning Outcomes

By the end of the module students should:
1. Have a thorough knowledge of the spectrum of Greek theatre in its performative, social, political and cultural contexts
2. Have enhanced their research, writing and communication skills.
3. Have gained an understanding of the availability, uses and limits of primary source material, both literary and archaeological.
4. Have experience of working alone and as part of a team to achieve individual objectives, facilitating transition from university to an independent professional environment.
5. Be able to deploy electronic technologies in their learning.

Additionally, final-year students will :

• develop the ability to set their findings into a wider comparative context, drawing in other aspects of the study of the ancient world;
• engage creatively with a wider range of secondary literature that includes discussion of classical literature within broader comparative, including critical-theoretical, frames.