Roman historical drama : the Octavia in antiquity and beyond /
This book first examines the fragmentary evidence for Roman historical dramas (praetextae), from 200 BC down to 100 AD. Discussion centres on the genre's kinship with tragedy as well as on generic specifics: the use of historical topics and local formats, of an aetiological and teleological per...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Oxford, United Kingdom :
Oxford University Press,
2016.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | This book first examines the fragmentary evidence for Roman historical dramas (praetextae), from 200 BC down to 100 AD. Discussion centres on the genre's kinship with tragedy as well as on generic specifics: the use of historical topics and local formats, of an aetiological and teleological perspective, and of an episodic structure characterized by abrupt changes of time and settings. The fall of the Republic made deadly conflict between Romans (rather than with foreign enemies) a relevant topic for a plot. The sole surviving praetexta, the anonymous Octavia, offers a vivid re-creation of a crucial historical episode, the lethal strife with Seneca and the populous caused by Nero's murderous divorce from his empress Octavia and marriage to Poppaea in 62 AD. This drama reflects scenic conventions and notions of the dramatic that radically transform our knowledge of the Roman stage. Discussion focuses on its dynamic changes of time and setting, its startling interplay of the verbal and visual and its integration of issues pervading the politics of the period just after the fall of Nero, which, it is argued, was its time of writing. An unacknowledged favourite of the Renaissance dramatists, who reinvented classical-style tragedy, the impact of this drama is in the final section traced from Italy through France to Elizabethan England, before returning to Italy where the composer Claudio Monteverdi in Venice pioneered one of the earliest preserved operas with a plot ultimately based on the Octavia. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xiv, 475 pages) : illustrations |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 420-440) and indexes. |
| ISBN: | 9780191787614 0191787612 |