Afterword

All the contributions to this special issue offer particular insights into the often slippery and contentious relationship between ancient and modern drama. More than this, collectively they provide an insight into key questions that researchers are currently grappling with as they seek to maximize the cross-disciplinary impact of their work. These questions cover two main areas. The first is concerned with the investigative methods needed for researching the intersections between modern performance and ancient drama. These have to be methods that recognize the unique qualities of performance and relate it to its associated histories in theater and culture, to the professional profiles of those who create the production, and to the imaginative and experiential profiles of those who make up the audiences.

The second set of questions is much broader but arises from the first. How best can case studies of particular performances be used, individually and in groups and categories, to contribute to the study of larger questions, whether these relate to the performance history of a particular play or genre such as "tragedy," the career of a particular writer or practitioner, or the potential of drama for reflecting and shaping wider elements of cultural conflict and change?

Some of these scholarly and interpretative demands are present in most kinds of comparative study of drama. However, some of them present themselves particularly acutely in respect of the relationship between drama in antiquity and that on the modern stage. Two challenges are particularly important. Firstly, there are problems about the availability of evidence, including the basics of preservation, collection, and communication as well as critical evaluation. This difficulty applies both to evidence from antiquity and to that from the modern stage. For example, it is not just that the play texts that survive from Greece and Rome are only a small fraction of those that were performed, nor that their survival is predicated on a combination of selection according to the values of later scholars and the accidents of preservation of manuscripts. There is also the even more intractable problem that evidence about the approaches and careers of theater practitioners is sparse and that evidence concerning spectators is even more difficult to identify and interpret. (There are of course invaluable collections and studies, such as Eric Csapo and William J. Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985] and Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, eds., Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], but there inevitably remain many frustrating gaps.)

So far as evidence from the modern stage is concerned, much of it is ephemeral and what can be documented and made available too often by necessity concentrates attention on major established theater companies, "celebrity" actors and directors, and reviews by theater critics that are more attuned to communicating a particular viewpoint that capturing the interrelatedness of the different strands in a production. Even the welcome preservation of visual evidence about modern productions (video, film, still images) lacks counterparts in the ancient world and therefore has limited value for the comparative analysis of the total theater experience. Furthermore, the difficulty in locating and preserving evidence about ad hoc companies and about student and community drama shuts off an importance line of investigation into the individually and socially transformative impact of participation in performance and its associated activities (vital in ancient Athens but underresearched in terms of modern comparisons).

The second set of problems is closely related to this. Much of the scholarship on ancient plays is primarily literary. Quite simply, the texts are what we have, and it is noteworthy that even the influential and illuminating contemporary wave of sensitivity to ancient performance issues was originally grounded in analysis of the texts (for example, Oliver Taplin's pioneering work, starting with The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977]). This approach has subsequently developed to include performative analysis and study of the body, sound, dance, and movement as integral aspects of performance. Nevertheless, literary analysis of drama texts remains a significant driver of research and now includes examination of the lexical...