- Greek Drama V: Studies in the Theatre of the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BCE ed. by Hallie Marshall and C.W. Marshall
Over the last forty years or so, the Drama Conference has established itself as the largest conference on ancient drama. Its first meeting took place in Sydney in 1982, and Australia or New Zealand hosted the following ones, but in 2017 the Drama Conference landed in Vancouver with C.W. Marshall and H. Marshall as its convenors and eventual editors of its proceedings. The fifth Drama Conference hosted 64 papers, 16 of which made their way into this volume. The editors selected them by focusing on two main themes: fragmentary works and the reception of Athenian drama in Greece and beyond. As they note, these principles "unite" over half of the essays presented (xiii). Although included in the volume's title, fourth-century bc drama unfortunately gets little attention. This volume, however, does convey some of the variety that must have characterized the conference: its 16 essays differ in methodology, scope, and importance.
Csapo and Wilson open the volume with a chapter on the history of Greek theatre (1–22). They consider the spread of Greek theatre in its political dimension by assessing both its reception among democratic, oligarchic, and autocratic communities, and its appeal as an "Athenian" product. The discussion is geographically and chronologically wide-ranging, spanning from Athenian cleruchies and colonies, which quickly established their own Dionysia with dramatic performances, to the Macedonian court. The other contributions fall into five sections, each comprising three papers, starting [End Page 306] with Sophocles' extant tragedies in Section 1. Murnaghan (23–36) explores how the characters of Sophocles' Ajax define themselves in relation to their epic past by creating multiple narratives on the beginning of Ajax's downfall. We move from epic to elegy with Mattison's work on Philoctetes (37–46), which the author reads against the "New Archilochus" fragment (P.Oxy. LXIX 4708), Tyrtaeus 9, and Solon 3, and argues that Sophocles cast Philoctetes and Odysseus as different types of elegiac poets. Papazoglou (47–60) tackles another tragedy, Women of Trachis, from yet another prospective. Drawing upon anthropological and psychoanalytical readings of Greek tragedy, she explores the nature of tragic characters and examines Deianira's psychological profile and its emergence ("the dramaturgy of the self").
Sections 2 and 3 treat Euripides' extant and fragmentary tragedies respectively. Gibert (61–71) borrows from E. Wilson the notion of "overliving" as living through horrors worse than death—the negative, tragic equivalent of survival—and applies it to Euripides' Hecuba.1 The result is a fascinating paper that stresses how staging, and specifically the (mis)treatment of corpses, contributes to this theme. Dunn (72–85) turns to one of Euripides' intrigue tragedies, Electra, to explore "affective suspense," which is defined as uncertainty not about events but about tragic characters who need to establish an affective bond to execute their plans after living apart for a long time. Having examined how this type of suspense pervades the tragedy, Dunn offers a fresh reading of the closing scene as the play's emotional climax: only when separated again, do Orestes and Electra establish an affective bond. While both Gibert and Dunn deal with tragic characters, Lionetti (86–99) tells us about the chorus of Euripides' Trojan Woman by focusing primarily on the first stasimon (ll. 512–567), which describes the fall of Troy with images and situations arguably reflecting the Athenian Panathenaia. On this reading, Euripides projects Athens onto Troy and the Trojan women become integrated in the Athenian civic body. Andújar's interesting paper on Euripides' Phaethon (100–113) has more to say about tragic choruses, specifically secondary ones. After a general overview of secondary choruses in tragedy, Andújar analyses the scene likely involving two choruses in Euripides' Phaethon and emphasizes its peculiarity: the secondary chorus celebrates an impossible reality, Phaethon's wedding (Eur. Phaethon TrGF F 781, Phaethon...