Epic performances from the middle ages into the twenty-first century

Abstract

Graeco-Roman epic poetry was the staple of the early operatic repertoire and it continues to provide a rich storehouse of themes for contemporary creative artists working in divergent traditions. Since Tim Supple and Simon Reade’s stage adaptation of Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid for the RSC (1999), versions of Greek and Roman epics have routinely provided raw material for the performance repertoire both within major cultural institutions and from emergent, experimental theatre companies. The chapters in this volume range widely across time (the Middle Ages to the present), place (Europe, Asia, and the Americas), and genres (lyric, film, dance, opera) in their searches for ‘epic’ content and form in diverse performance arenas. The anxieties about the ability to write epic in the early modern world in some way explain, together with the precedent of Greek tragedy’s reworking of epic material, this migration to the theatre. Yet equally, with this migration, epic encountered the barriers imposed by neoclassicists, who sought to restrict serious theatre to a narrowly defined reality that precluded epic’s broad sweeps across time and place. In many instances in recent years, the fact that the Homeric epics were composed orally makes reinvention not only legitimate but also deeply appropriate. With specialists from Classics, Music, English, Modern Languages, Dance, Theatre and Performance Studies, and from the creative industries, this volume is the first systematic attempt to chart the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions.