Greek Theatre between Antiquity and Independence: A History of Reinvention from the Third Century BC to 1830

by Walter Puchner, Andrew White (Assistant)

This first general history of Greek theatre from Hellenistic times to the foundation of the Modern Greek state in 1830 marks a radical departure from traditional methods of historiography. We like to think of history unfolding continuously, in an evolutionary form, but the story of Greek theatre is rather different. After traditional theatre ended in the sixth and seventh centuries, no traditional drama was written or performed on stage throughout the Greek-speaking world for centuries due to the Orthodox Church's hostile attitude toward spectacles. With the reinvention of theatre in Renaissance Italy, however, Greek theatre was revived in Crete under Venetian rule in the late sixteenth century. The following centuries saw the restoration of Greek theatre at various locations, albeit characterized by numerous ruptures and discontinuities in terms of geography, stylistics, thematic approaches and ideologies. These diverse developments were only 'normalized' with the establishment of the Greek nation state.

372 pages, Hardcover

Published July 21, 2017

About the author

Walter Puchner (Greek: Βάλτερ Πούχνερ) is an Austrian writer, critic and university professor on theatre studies. He has made significant work on the theatrology of Greece, the greater area of the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and Byzantium, on folkloristics but also on a variety of other subjects concerning the culture of the area with more than 80 books and numerous studies and critiques.

Reviews

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing here is dry, and Puchner assumes that his readers have the history and geography of the Greek diaspora in their minds (I repeatedly had to look up information about the Ottoman vassal states, the Ionian islands, and British and Venetian colonialism in Greece), but the information here is excellent. This book fills in the gap(s) between ancient Greece and modern Greece, and Puchner makes a convincing argument about rupture and discontinuity as historiographic models. The book is already very long, so I do understand why the political histories were left out, but this makes Puchner's book more of an old-school, Brockett-style list of names and texts – in short, it is more of a resource than a history book.