Classical Review’s latest Profile, Greek Tragedy and Performance by Rosa Andújar (King’s College London) has just been published and is free to read. This is the third in our new series of open-access essays that provide lively, engaging surveys of important topics – highlighting recent developments and ongoing initiatives. Rosa’s Profile follows earlier surveys by Christopher Schliephake on Ecocriticism and by Colin Elliott on Roman Economic and Monetary History.

Greek tragedy is easily one of the most dynamic fields in Classics, with multiple key subareas and topics. Rosa’s Profile focuses on scholarly and creative work produced in the last ten years that illuminates Athenian fifth-century BCE performance practices. Her essay begins with a brief overview of the growth of performance as a significant subfield, and how it was initially concerned with examining the traces of what Aristotle termed opsis (spectacle). The Profile then turns to a detailed examination of recent scholarship on the performance of Greek tragedy, which has not only included attention to the tragic stage and its realities but also expanded into other key areas such as materiality, affect, and audience perception. She likewise examines the emerging interest in tragedy’s wider sound- and dancescapes, which stems from the rise of key scholarship on ancient music and dance. Rosa pairs these discussions with a survey of creative digital engagements with Greek tragedy that have profited from such performance-centred scholarship.

To celebrate this latest Profile we have gathered together reviews of some of the books mentioned by Rosa and made them free to read. You can also access them individually below.

E. Csapo, Actors and Icons of the Ancient Theater

By Paul Monaghan 62.2

C. Chaston, Tragic Props and Cognitive Function: Aspects of the Function of Images in Thinking

By Chiara Thumiger 61.2

R. Rehm, The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy

By Lowell Edmunds 53.2

M. Mueller, M. Telò in The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

By Aara Suksi 69.2

M. Wright, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, Vol. 1: Neglected Authors (2016); M. Wright, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, Vol. 2: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

By Daniel Anderson 69.2

J. Billings, F. Budelmann and F. Macintosh, Choruses, Ancient and Modern

By Peter Meineck 65.1

N. Weiss, The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater

By Matthew Shipton 69.1

Image Credits : Image courtesy of: Radek Kucharski from Warsaw, Poland, CC BY 2.0 – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 via Wikimedia Commons