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Crossing the Stages:
The Production, Performance and Reception of Ancient Theater
David Gowen
The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford
Cross-Referencing the Stages: The Collection, Research and Database
of The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford
Ancient Drama is currently being performed on both the commercial and the
amateur stage with greater frequency than at any time since classical
antiquity — yet our appreciation of its rich modern production history is
often constrained by the fact that documentation in the theatre arts often remains
sporadic and disorganised. In response to the absence of a coordinated
research effort devoted to the international production and reception of
Greek and Roman plays since the Renaissance, The Archive
of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama
was founded in 1995 by Oliver Taplin and Edith Hall, its co-directors, to
serve both as a repository of artefacts pertaining to the stage history
of the classics in performance and as a comprehensive source of stored
information, recording the details of all productions known to have been
staged in the last five hundred years. The holdings of the Archive
available for consultation include playbills, programmes, reviews, illustrations,
photographs,
scripts, video recordings and audio recordings.
Our Database is
defined by its length — the past five hundred years; by its breadth — which includes all
manner
of revival, translation, adaptation and re-working; and by its depth — the
powerful relational component of our electronic database, which
facilitates efficient, cross-referenced searching across a variety of
fields, including playwright, play,
language, translator, director, company and theatre; and across less
traditional points of entry, such as detailed production credits, popular
reception, critical reception and sponsorship. As new connections are
discovered between hitherto dissociated productions spanning the past
half-millennium, the benefits of such cross-referencing potential prove
invaluable; and our cumulative knowledge, as interdisciplinary scholars
— classicists, theatre historians, social historians and comparative literature
specialists — inevitably benefits from the collaboration.
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Last Modified: Monday, 08-May-2006 16:10:34 CST
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