Epic Cassandras in Performance, 1795–1868

Victorian refigurations of the Cassandra myth ferment throughout the long eighteenth century, when new theatrical modes put into practice prevailing aesthetic theories that gave prominence to the visual over the verbal. This chapter examines the range of prophetic Cassandras, from the Shakespearean raving prophetess to the palm-reading Gypsies of the 1860s. Such variations can only be given full expression on the stage, where a set of gestures, costumes, and sociocultural referents develop new cultural, inter-theatrical, and semiotic systems. Performing as the epic Cassandra also triggered the career of a number of actresses and dancers who found in Cassandra the perfect means to prove their performing skills to the audience. At a time when women’s access to knowledge was being disputed, the Cassandra myth provided fertile soil wherein to test and contest the role of women in society.

Epic Transposed

The vexed problem of epic, equally detectable in the British and French theatrical traditions from the eighteenth century onwards, explains why epic had no place on the ‘tragic’ stage of the Comédie-Française during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Epic, it seems, could either be ‘low’ (so confined to the Théâtre Italien) or transported to the hyperreality of the operatic/ballet stages. This chapter examines one danced version, Gardel’s revolutionary ballet pantomime Télémaque dans l’île de Calypso (1790) in order to probe the fate of epic on the eighteenth-century stage. In the wake of the institutional divisions of the theatrical arts at the end of the seventeenth century, serious ‘spoken’ drama was restricted to a narrowly conceived ‘reality’ that precluded the ‘hyperreality’ of epic; and yet, paradoxically and chillingly, it was this ‘hyperreality’ that was increasingly providing a better reflection of the revolutionary actualities that were unfolding outside the theatre.

‘Marpesia cautes’

Amazons have long made their presence felt in epics of love, empire, and war; and from early antiquity to the present day, it is both at generically rocky impasses and geographically distinct interstices that they make themselves known. This chapter explores these ideas with respect to the performance of the Amazon on the English and Irish stage across the first half of the seventeenth century. It focuses on a particular moment in early 1640, on the verge of the outbreak of civil war across the Three Kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, when, in London, Sir William Davenant’s Salamanca Spolia is performed at court and, in Dublin, Henry Burnell’s play Landgartha is performed at the public theatre in Werburgh Street. It locates these coinciding performances in the context of two evolving and competing English literary embodiments of the figure of the Amazon.

‘Now hear this’

In 1958 Christopher Logue produced his first ‘account’ of the Iliad, ‘Achilles Fights the River’, following encouragement from two BBC producers, Donald Carne-Ross and Xanthe Wakefield. Over the next four decades, Logue produced several more accounts, now known collectively as War Music. Despite being the product of Logue’s idiosyncratic range of interests and affinities, the poem was also shaped through collaboration with two people who had a particular interest in the poem’s performance. Logue continued to correspond into the early 1980s with Carne-Ross, whose constant attention to the sound of the poem was crucial to its development. From 1981, Logue’s collaboration with the actor Alan Howard, who recorded sections of the poem for broadcast on the BBC also helped to shape War Music. This chapter, drawing on archival material, considers the ways in which the poem’s performance history affected its form and its development.

Epic Poetry into Contemporary Choreography

This chapter considers two recent dance adaptations of the Odyssey: New Movement Collective’s 2013 work Nest and Cathy Marston’s ‘Choreographing the Katabasis’, a project undertaken in 2015 at the APGRD, Oxford. The chapter analyses how both these works engage with the epic poem in ways that have historically been of interest to classical scholars. As a site-specific and multi-authored work, Nest emphasized the sense of multiplicity that has been noted both of the Odyssey’s mode of creation and its narration process. In developing her adaption from the Homeric text with the expertise of Oxford scholars, Cathy Marston produced a dance version of Odysseus’ encounter with the shade of his mother, Anticlea, which closely engaged with the formulaic aspects of the hexameter text in order to explore the interplay of rhythm and representation in both verbal and non-verbal languages.

The Future of Epic in Cinema

This chapter explores the ways in which the generic label of ‘epic’ might be deemed relevant for Ridley Scott’s film Prometheus (2012), and more broadly for the ways in which a discussion about the meanings of epic in early twenty-first-century cinema might be undertaken outside the genre of ‘historical epic’. It argues for the need to explore how ‘epic science fiction’ operates in Scott’s Prometheus in ways that both relate and transcend common definitions of the term ‘epic’ in contemporary popular culture. It also focuses on the unorthodox models of biological evolution of the film’s narrative, suggesting ways in which they can help with genre criticism. When it comes to cinematic intertextuality, a discussion about generic taxonomies and transformations cannot be conducted at the beginning of the twenty-first century without reflecting on the tropes that cinema animates and the fears it enacts at the heart of our genetic imaginary.

Encountering Homer through Greek Plays in Sixteenth-Century Europe

Originally received as oral performances, Homer’s epics circulated in sixteenth-century Europe not only as printed literary texts, but also through performances of a different sort. This chapter argues that fifth-century Greek plays on Homeric material played a crucial role in shaping the epics’ early modern reception. In a phrase widely circulated in the sixteenth century, Aeschylus reportedly claimed that all of his tragedies were ‘slices from the great banquets of Homer’. Although Virgil and Ovid were more familiar vehicles for Homeric material, Greek plays made distinctive contributions to perceptions of Troy and its aftermath through their links with performance, and their status as models for dramatic genres. It is proposed that the versions of Homer transmitted through Greek plays had an important role in shaping not only early modern understandings of Homer, but also the development of the early modern popular stage.

‘Of arms and the man’

In c.1537 Thersites made his entrance on the English stage, and declared himself as belonging to Homer at the start of a comic interlude that has typically been considered (like Thersites himself) as travestying high epic into low, scurrilous entertainment. This chapter examines the intersection between staged versions of the character Thersites and the early modern period’s ongoing reception of Homer’s Iliad. Considering the Thersites interlude as representative of a broader cultural conception of Thersites, the chapter argues that a peculiarly English, and explicitly metatheatrical, Thersites emerges from a series of receptions-within-receptions, as Homer’s character was approached via refractions across a number of later classical texts. Moreover, when resurrected on the public stage in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (c.1602) and Thomas Heywood’s two-part drama The Iron Age (c.1611), this alternative, composite Thersites offers a significant commentary on the offstage reception of Homer’s epic text.

After the Aeneid

This chapter looks at three eighteenth-century operas on the topic of Ascanius: Fux’s Julo Ascanio, re d’Alba (1708), Lotti’s Ascanio, ovvero Gli odi delusi dal sangue (1718), and Mozart’s Ascanio in Alba (1772). It shows that the story of Ascanius has cultural cachet and authority because of its origin in the respected classical texts of Virgil and Livy, and that it provides elevated subject matter appropriate for operas on great state occasions; this classical episode is conveniently flexible and tempting for subsequent adaptors because classical authors say so little about Ascanius, especially about his future career after the Aeneid, which is what these operas treat. The status of Ascanius as the ancestor of Augustus and of the Roman Empire has clear appeal to that empire’s self-conceived modern successors, the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburgs; and Ascanius’ key role as the conduit through which the blood of Aeneas passes to later rulers makes him a natural choice for pieces performed on occasions of royal marriages, stressing the crucial nature of genetic and dynastic continuity.

Institutional Receptions

This chapter examines the reception of Luís de Camões’s The Lusíads in José Saramago’s play What Shall I Make of This Book? Discussing the narrator’s speeches in The Lusíads, Saramago’s play, and a set of statements by intellectuals contemporary to Saramago, it surveys the extent to which Saramago draws on Camões’s allusions to the political instability in King Sebastião’s court in order to comment on the epic’s reception in the twentieth century. The conclusion explores the extent to which Saramago’s views in the play are representative of a wider thread not only in the literary reception of the poem, but also in Camões’s studies. The implications of this idea for the act of reading Camões’s epic today are central to this chapter.