The Politics of Greek Tragedy
D.M. Carter
Abstract
This book demonstrates how Greek tragedy can be called a political art form and why this is an exciting idea both for modern scholarship and to modern theatre producers and audiences. The central argument is that Greek tragedy made itself politically relevant to the members of the Greek city-state (polis) generally, rather than to Athenian democracy narrowly. The book begins by explaining the historical and theatrical context of first performance and then proceeds (in chapter 2) through a critical analysis of modern scholarly approaches to tragic politics. Chapter 3 gives a working definition ... More
This book demonstrates how Greek tragedy can be called a political art form and why this is an exciting idea both for modern scholarship and to modern theatre producers and audiences. The central argument is that Greek tragedy made itself politically relevant to the members of the Greek city-state (polis) generally, rather than to Athenian democracy narrowly. The book begins by explaining the historical and theatrical context of first performance and then proceeds (in chapter 2) through a critical analysis of modern scholarly approaches to tragic politics. Chapter 3 gives a working definition of ‘political’ as ‘a concern with human beings as part of the community of the polis’ and shows how these concerns are manifest in the very shape (staging, performance) of tragedy. Chapter 4 discusses four political plays and identifies political issues that would have mattered to their original audience. Chapter 5 considers two of these four plays in modern performance and draws conclusions from the different political readings thus yielded: modern political theatre has often been counter-cultural; ancient Greek tragedy, for all that it posed awkward questions relevant to the life of the polis, was part of the establishment.
Keywords:
politics,
tragedy,
city-state,
polis,
democracy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2008 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781904675501 |
| Published to Liverpool Scholarship Online: January 2014 |
DOI:10.5949/liverpool/9781904675501.001.0001 |
