Patrick Kragelund

Roman Historical Drama (eBook, PDF)

The Octavia In Antiquity and Beyond

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

The Octavia is the only surviving historical drama from ancient Rome. With a plot rich in sex, dynastic intrigue, riots, and murder, the play's characters include the philosopher Seneca, the emperor Nero, the ghost of his murdered mother, his wife Octavia, and his mistress and empress-to-be Poppaea. For centuries dismissed as a feeble, rhetorically overblown closet-drama written without consideration for the demands of plot or stage, the Octavia's dynamic changes of time and setting, its startling interplay of the verbal and visual, and its integration of issues pervading the politics of the period in which it was written, reflect scenic conventions and a notion of the dramatic that radically transforms and expands our knowledge of ancient theatre and the Roman stage. Roman Historical Drama is the first comprehensive interpretation of ancient historical drama in relation to this exciting play, revealing how the Octavia mirrors the genre's traditions by mixing formats and stock characters from traditional tragedy with elements drawn from new developments of the Hellenistic and Roman stage. The volume explores the role and impact of historical (and political) drama in Rome, offering a pioneering reading of the Octavia in relation to ancient performance practice, as well as to the politics of those who in AD 68 brought down the tyrant Nero. In its final section, the volume provides a panoramic survey of the revival and reinvention of classical tragedy in the Renaissance period, tracing the impact of the Octavia from Italy through France to Elizabethan England.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 528
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. Dezember 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780191028106
• Artikelnr.: 44390359

Autorenporträt

Patrick Kragelund holds doctorates in Classics and the reception of classics from the University of Copenhagen and has been Director of the Danish National Art Library since 1998. He has published widely on Roman history, literature, drama, and epigraphy, as well as on the reception of the classics in post-renaissance art.

Inhaltsangabe

List of Figures
List of Tables
Part I: The Tradition
1: Recovering a Lost Genre
2: Republican Flourishing and Imperial Decline?
3: Genre and Its Uses
4: Accius
5: Romans Fighting Romans
6: Stages Old and New
7: Imperial praetextae
Part II: The Octavia
8: A praetexta?
9: Time and Place
10: Plot and Historical Background
11: Octavia and the People
12: Seneca and Nero
13: The Ghost, the Divorce, and the Wedding
14: What Poppaea Saw
15: The Revolt, the Fire, and the Ship of Death
16: The Time of Writing
Part III: The Afterlife
17: Tragic Pasts
Bibliography
Index locorum
Index of Persons, Subjects, and Places