Greek and Roman Actors -

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Résumé :
This collection of twenty essays examines the art, the profession and the idea of the actor in Greek and Roman antiquity, and has been commissioned and arranged to cast as much interdisciplinary and transhistorical light as possible on these elusive but fascinating ancient professionals. It covers a chronological span from the sixth century BC to Byzantium (and even beyond to the way that ancient actors have influenced the arts from the Renaissance to the twentieth century) and stresses the enormous geographical range of ancient actors. Some essays focus on particular themes, such as the evidence for women actors or the impact of acting on the presentation of suicide in literature . others offer completely fresh evidence, such as graffiti relating to actors in Asia Minor . others ask novel questions, such as what subjective experience can be reconstructed for the ancient actor. There are numerous illustrations and all Greek and Latin passages are translated.

Biographie:
Pat Easterling is an Honorary Fellow of Newnham College and a Fellow of the British Academy. She was Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge from 1994 to 2001, and Professor of Greek at University College London from 1987 to 1994. She has been a General Editor of Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics since its foundation over thirty years ago, and has published an edition within this series of Sophocles' Trachiniae (1982), co-edited, with B. M. W. Knox, Volume 1 of the Cambridge History of Classical Literature (1985) and edited The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997). She is currently writing a commentary on Sophocles' Oedipus at Colones. Edith Hall is Leverhulme Professor of Greek Cultural History at the University of Durham and has previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Reading and Oxford, where she was Fellow of Somerville College from 1995 to 2001. She is Co-Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford and author of Inventing the Barbarian (1989), editor of Aeschylus' Persians (1996) and co-editor of Medea in Pe formante (2000). She is currently working, with Fiona Macintosh, on a history of Greek tragedy on the British Stage for Oxford University Press.