Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Whittington, Leah

Titel

Shakespeare and the Greeks: theatricality and performance from Plutarch’s Lives to Coriolanus

Ist Teil von

• Classical receptions journal, 2017-01, Vol.9 (1), p.120-143

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Oxford Journals 2020 Humanities

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The search for points of contact between Shakespeare and Greek tragedy has intensified in the last fifteen years, as several scholars (Mossman, Pelling, Burrow) have argued with increasing confidence for Plutarchs Lives as a mediating conduit between classical Athenian tragedy and early modern English theatre. Plutarchs prominence in Shakespeares library has never been doubted, and his Lives reflect deep engagement with the Greek tragic corpus. This article advances this line of inquiry to consider Plutarchs oeuvre as a repository of ancient thinking about dramatic gesture and the movement of the body in performance, focusing on performance conventions of Plutarchs own era in the second century BCE. Drawing on examples from both the Lives and the Moralia, I show that Plutarchs investment in drama goes beyond visualized scenes and tragic structure to include non-verbal aspects of physical performance that came to be of significance for Shakespeare. The second part of the essay reconsiders the relationship of Shakespeares Coriolanus to its Plutarchan model, suggesting a transhistorical collaborative effort between Plutarch and Shakespeare in creating the climactic encounter between Coriolanus and Volumnia in Act 5 Scene 2, which emphasizes the affective impact of bodily gesture. OA