Hercules Performed

The Hero on Stage from the Enlightenment to the Early Twenty-First Century
Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-90-04-69575-7
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 25, 390 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 771 g

Reihe: Metaforms

Hercules Performed explores the reception of the ancient Greek hero Herakles – the Roman Hercules – on the western stage from the sixteenth century to the present day, focusing on live theatre, including tragedy, comedy and musical drama. Each chapter considers a particular work or theme in detail, exploring the interplay between classical models and a wide variety of modern performance contexts. The volume is one of four to be published in the Metaforms series examining the extraordinarily persistent figuring of Herakles-Hercules in western culture, drawing together scholars from a range of disciplines to offer a unique insight into the hero’s perennial appeal.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Stafford, Emma

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Figures and Table

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Embodying the Hero and His Story

Emma Stafford

Part 1: Labours

1 Sandow the Modern Hercules: or the Twelve Labours of the Class-Conscious Historian of British Classics

Henry Stead

2 Hercules and the Tragicomic in the Epic Theatre of Dürrenmatt

Deborah Chatr Aryamontri

3 ‘Breaking News: Hercules Is the Son of Zeus’: the Chorus in Helen Eastman’s Hercules

Sofia Frade

4 ‘The Moral Madness of the Modern Herakles’: Collage and Fragments in Tony Harrison’s The Labourers of Herakles and the Harrison Archive

Owen Hodkinson

Part 2: Madness

5 The Madness of Hercules from Euripides to the Renaissance

Neil W. Bernstein

6 Herakles, Medea and the Reality of Filicide

Sue Hamstead

7 Herakles in Orbit: the Role of Space in Modern Versions of Euripides’ Herakles

Samuel D. Gartland

Part 3: Death and Apotheosis

8 The Death and Apotheosis of Hercules at the Comédie-Italienne: from Senecan Tragedy to Commedia dell’Arte

Lucia Degiovanni

9 The Sweet Vitality of Dancing Bodies: Classical Embodiment, Modernist Poetics, and Fascist Visions in Sophocles’ Trachiniae at Syracuse in 1933

Eleftheria Ioannidou

10 Herakles, Sex, Death, and Spin: Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and Its Adaptations

Eleanor OKell

11 Directing The Wife of Heracles (2010) for a Contemporary Audience: Footballers, Hairdressers and Dispensing the Poison

George Rodosthenous

Part 4: Setting Hercules to Music

12 Hercules and Opera at the Court of Louis XIV: Ercole amante

Jon Solomon

13 Shattered Female Virtue: Dejanira as Depicted in Handel’s Hercules

Robyn M. Rocklein

14 ‘I Shall Sing of Herakles’: Writing a Hercules Oratorio for the Twenty-First Century

Emma Stafford and Tim Benjamin

15 Herakles in Twenty-First Century Music

Adriana F. Nogueira

Epilogue

Emma Stafford

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Emma Stafford is Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Leeds and author of numerous works on Greek myth and religion, including Herakles (Routledge 2012). She is co-editor of three other Hercules volumes in Brill's Metaforms series (2020).

Contributors are: Tim Benjamin, Neil W. Bernstein, Deborah Chatr Aryamontri, Lucia Degiovanni, Sofia Frade, Samuel D. Gartland, Sue Hamstead,
Owen Hodkinson, Eleftheria Ioannidou, Adriana F. Nogueira, Eleanor OKell, Robyn M. Rocklein, George Rodosthenous, Henry Stead.