Giovanna Di Martino

At the eve of the Great War, on the 16th of April of 1914 at sunset, a group of around a hundred people, from actors to musicians and dancers mounted the stage of the Greek theatre of Syracuse (Sicily), a two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old theatre, to enact a tragedy just equally old: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Not only did this production revisit the tragedy in a unique environment and represent one of its first rehashes in Italy; it also inaugurated a now more than a-hundred-year-old Festival, the longest running festival of ancient drama. In this paper, I am going to talk about the powers at play in the staging of Agamemnon: a strong nationalism was combined with a cosmopolitan attitude, a combination that grounded another project which became culturally and politically relevant so as to inform INDA’s beginnings, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Latin-Mediterranean theatre.

The panel deals with the reception of Ancient drama in scholarly works during Early Modernity. The first objective of the panel will be to examine the nature of these works and in what way they have grown to be at the heart of reflections on the way this theatre was understood or made to be understood by its readers. It will also try to grasp in what way these works either echo, define or set aside some of the debates on contemporary vernacular theater. The construction of a text, its translation (if required), analysis, explanation, criticism or indexing in plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, as well as Plautus, Terence and Seneca, can be seen as so many literary tasks embraced by scholars, each driven by a range of objectives.

The much-acclaimed and award-winning Griego (‘Greek’) trilogy of Chicanx and Latinx performance artist, playwright, writer and social activist Luis Alfaro is published for the very first time in an edition by Rosa Andujar (King’s College London) for the Methuen Drama series (Bloomsbury, 2020). Equipped with Andujar’s excellent introduction to Alfaro’s work generally and to each adaptation, plus a production history and interview with Alfaro, this book not only makes the scripts of three very successful plays available for the first time for everyone, but also presents a unique and fascinating way of engaging with the ancient Greek dramas of which Alfaro’s plays are adaptations, something that Andujar repeatedly highlights in the introductions. These adaptations, Andujar comments, are already beginning to “chart a new course for the three most popular Greek figures [Electra, Oedipus, Medea] onto the US stage” (6). Keywords: Luis Alfaro; Chicanx; Latinx Theatre; North American Urban T...

After centuries of neglect, Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes has gained increasing prominence worldwide and in the United States in particular, where a hip-hop production caught the public imagination in the new millennium. This study analyses three translations of Aeschylus’ tragedy (by Helen H. Bacon and Anthony Hecht, 1973; Stephen Sandy, 1999; and Carl R. Mueller, 2002) and two adaptations (by Will Power, 2001-2008; and Ellen Stewart, 2001-2004). Beginning in the late 1960s, the Seven Against Thebes has received multiple new readings: at stake are Eteocles’ and Polynices’ relationships with the (past and present) Labdacid dynasty; the brothers’ claims to the Theban polis and to their inheritance; and the metatheatrical implications of their relationship to Oedipus’ legacy. This previously forgotten play provides a timely response to the power dynamics at work in the contemporary US, where the fight for ethnic, cultural, economic, and linguistic recognition is a daily reality and ...

In 1783, Vittorio Alfieri, one of the most prominent cultural figures of 18th-century Italy, published his first tragedies, amongst which both Agamennone and Oreste. Standing between humanistic freedom when dealing with the ancients and his rationalistic world, Alfieri endeavors to expand and question the linguistic, theatrical and political limits of Italian theatre, challenging his contemporaries with a new notion of the tragic. Particularly interesting is his Agamemnon, which stands out as a new Italian classic: its contemporary strength originates from an emulation of Aeschylus’ homonymous play, which he reads through Brumoy’s Théâtre des Grecs, and of Seneca’s Agamemnon, which the critics have always been prone to recognize as Alfieri’s main source. However true this might be on a superficial (and linguistic) level, I will argue that Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, via Brumoy, plays as essential a role in the creation of Alfieri’s masterpiece as Seneca’s tragedy. The craggy Aeschylean representation of the gods and fixity of the characters are transposed on the figure of Clytemnestra, becoming tyrannical inner forces: in other words, Aeschylus’ play converts into a tragedy about the inner tyranny that our psyches exert on ourselves, an interpretation that will enjoy widespread appreciation throughout the centuries. In the history of the reception of ancient drama in Early Modern Europe, Alfieri stands at the end of the chain: a hybrid figure, anchored to the ancients, yet inevitably imbued with modern anxiety.

In 1737, a plagiarist named Giovanni Scarfò reprinted as his own a liber rarissimus containing some otherwise forgotten versions of Greek tragedies and comedies, translated into Latin by Coriolano Martirano and published by his nephew in 1556. Amongst these, there appears the first version of any Aeschylean play published in Italy; specifically, the tragedy that has been regularly revisited in Europe in varying forms over the centuries: the Prometheus Bound. In this chapter, I argue that Martirano's translation strongly informs Renaissance translation theory by its reference to the key factors that would influence translators and writers in subsequent centuries-patronage, religion and dramaturgical translatability. Through his translation, Martirano also presents a particular interpretation of Prometheus, represented as an icon of defiance in his struggle against a tyrannical Zeus, one that foreshadows some of the most evocative readings of the play belonging to the Romantic period.

At the eve of the Great War, on 16 April 1914 at sunset, a group of around a hundred people, from actors to musicians and dancers mounted the stage of the Greek theatre of Syracuse (Sicily), a two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old theatre, to enact a tragedy just equally old: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Not only did this production revisit the tragedy in a unique environment and represent one of its first rehashes in Italy; it also inaugurated a now more than a-hundred-year-old Festival, the longest running festival of ancient drama. In this paper, I am going to talk about the powers at play in the staging of Agamemnon: a strong nationalism was combined with a cosmopolitan attitude, a combination that grounded another project which became culturally and politically relevant so as to inform INDA’s beginnings, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Latin-Mediterranean theatre.

In 1783, Vittorio Alfieri, one of the most prominent cultural figures of 18th-century Italy, published his first tragedies, amongst which both Agamennone and Oreste. Standing between humanistic freedom when dealing with the ancients and his rationalistic world, Alfieri endeavors to expand and question the linguistic, theatrical and political limits of Italian theatre, challenging his contemporaries with a new notion of the tragic. Particularly interesting is his Agamemnon, which stands out as a new Italian classic: its contemporary strength originates from an emulation of Aeschylus’ homonymous play, which he reads through Brumoy’s Théâtre des Grecs, and of Seneca’s Agamemnon, which the critics have always been prone to recognize as Alfieri’s main source. However true this might be on a superficial (and linguistic) level, I will argue that Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, via Brumoy, plays as essential a role in the creation of Alfieri’s masterpiece as Seneca’s tragedy. The craggy Aeschylean representation of the gods and fixity of the characters are transposed on the figure of Clytemnestra, becoming tyrannical inner forces: in other words, Aeschylus’ play converts into a tragedy about the inner tyranny that our psyches exert on ourselves, an interpretation that will enjoy widespread appreciation throughout the centuries. In the history of the reception of ancient drama in Early Modern Europe, Alfieri stands at the end of the chain: a hybrid figure, anchored to the ancients, yet inevitably imbued with modern anxiety.