What is Dramatic Recitation?

This article examines the literary evidence for recitations of drama in first- and early second-century C.E.Rome. It begins by contextualizing the practice of recitatio, and thereafter focuses on the central question of how a solo speaker could recite a play so as to render it intelligible for his audience. Two solutions suggested by extant sources are voice and gesture; it is possible that the individuals reciting plays either altered their intonation or inserted specific movements to signify a change of character. Although both of these solutions are tentative, they indicate nonetheless that dramatic recitation involved elements of performance

Seneca's Characters: Fictional Identities and Implied Human Selves

Seneca's Characters addresses one of the most enduring and least theorised elements of literature: fictional character and its relationship to actual, human selfhood. Where does the boundary between character and person lie? While the characters we encounter in texts are obviously not 'real' people, they still possess person-like qualities that stimulate our attention and engagement. How is this relationship formulated in contexts of theatrical performance, where characters are set in motion by actual people, actual bodies and voices? This book addresses such questions by focusing on issues of coherence, imitation, appearance and autonomous action. It argues for the plays' sophisticated treatment of character, their acknowledgement of its purely fictional ontology alongside deep – and often dark – appreciation of its quasi-human qualities. Seneca's Characters offers a fresh perspective on the playwright's powerful tragic aesthetics that will stimulate scholars and students alike

Show or Tell? Seneca's and Sarah Kane's Phaedra Plays

This article analyzes the Senecan background to Sarah Kane's Phaedra's Love by focusing upon both playwrights' predilections for graphic violence and sexual content. Kane's version of the Phaedra story presents sex, death and mutilation as acts that often defy meaning – these phenomena have such a strong experiential impact that they are slow to move into the referential realm of sign and symbol. By placing these acts centre stage, Kane also implicates the audience. Of course, we cannot propose the same performance effects for Senecan tragedy, owing to lack of evidence. Nonetheless Seneca's work, like Kane's, plays upon dramaturgic techniques of showing and telling: Phaedra's passion is nefas, simultaneously immoral and something she physically cannot speak. Death is also meaningless in Seneca: the final scene shows Theseus trying and failing to make sense of his son's torn body. Both Seneca and Sarah Kane push the boundaries between theatrical illusion and visual reality and, in the process, comment on the nature of theatre itself