Description:

This interactive workshop, “Theatre, Comparatism, and the ‘Classic’: Interactions between Shakespeare and the Greeks,” invites participants to ponder, along with Professor Fiona Macintosh (Fellow in Classics, St Hilda's College, Oxford; Professor of Classical Reception, Faculty of Classics) what it means to “think with Shakespeare” and “make theatre with the classics.” These two propositions are intertwined in the fields of English literary studies and theatre scholarship, but only after the performative acts of reinvention by the nineteenth-century commercial stage, and subsequent recovery and redefinition under Modernism. What has the “performative turn” meant for the reception history of Shakespeare and Greek drama, both behind the lectern and on the stage?

Two readings will be circulated in advance of this event. Please contact Amy Swanson at AmySwanson2018@u.northwestern.edu to receive them.

This event is co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama, the Department of Classics, and the Early Modern Colloquium.

Photo credit: The Frogs, a Stephen Sondheim musical based on the play by Aristophanes. Dionysus (Larry Blyden, right) and George Bernard Shaw (Anthony Holland, left) are retrieved from Hades for a competition. Photo: William Baker/Yale Repertory Theatre