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Crossing the Stages:
The Production, Performance and Reception of Ancient Theater
Ronald Vince
The School of Art, Drama and Music
McMaster University
Feminist Scholarship and Athenian Drama
The Aristotelian theatrical paradigm, with its emphasis on dramatic
text, on the applicability of Aristotelian precepts to Western drama in
general, and especially on the universal validity of the theatrical
experience provided by Greek plays, is breaking down. Feminist
scholarship in particular has been highly critical of Athenian culture as
well as of the male-dominated scholarship that elevated its worth and
drew inspiration from it. Some theatre historians have argued that
theatre in its origins (assumed to be Greek) is male gender specific,
anti-female, patriarchal, hurtful to women. In this paper I explore this
issue, arguing that fifth-century drama was in fact deeply imbued with a
sense of female power, but that its specific performative context
imposed a particular ideological interpretation. I argue that an
erroneous assumption underlies both the traditional and the feminist
view of Athenian drama; that is, that a dramatic text carries its
performative ideology with it, that 5th-century Athenian ideology is
validated by 20th-century performance. We can learn to experience, to
understand and to take pleasure from the remnants of earlier and other
cultures, but in order to do so we must accommodate those remnants in
terms of our own ideological and cultural matrix. The messages of
Athenian drama are a complex amalgam of ancient materials and
modern perceptions.
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