Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- List of Figures and Table -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction: Embodying the Hero and His Story --   Emma Stafford -- Part 1: Labours -- 1 Sandow the Modern Hercules: or the Twelve Labours of the Class-Conscious Historian of British Classics --   Henry Stead -- 2 Hercules and the Tragicomic in the Epic Theatre of Dürrenmatt --   Deborah Chatr Aryamontri -- 3 ‘Breaking News: Hercules Is the Son of Zeus’: the Chorus in Helen Eastman’s Hercules --   Sofia Frade -- 4 ‘The Moral Madness of the Modern Herakles’: Collage and Fragments in Tony Harrison’s The Labourers of Herakles and the Harrison Archive --   Owen Hodkinson -- Part 2: Madness -- 5 The Madness of Hercules from Euripides to the Renaissance --   Neil W. Bernstein -- 6 Herakles, Medea and the Reality of Filicide --   Sue Hamstead -- 7 Herakles in Orbit: the Role of Space in Modern Versions of Euripides’ Herakles --   Samuel D. Gartland -- Part 3: Death and Apotheosis -- 8 The Death and Apotheosis of Hercules at the Comédie-Italienne: from Senecan Tragedy to Commedia dell’Arte --   Lucia Degiovanni -- 9 The Sweet Vitality of Dancing Bodies: Classical Embodiment, Modernist Poetics, and Fascist Visions in Sophocles’ Trachiniae at Syracuse in 1933 --   Eleftheria Ioannidou -- 10 Herakles, Sex, Death, and Spin: Sophocles’ Women of Trachis and Its Adaptations --   Eleanor OKell -- 11 Directing The Wife of Heracles (2010) for a Contemporary Audience: Footballers, Hairdressers and Dispensing the Poison --   George Rodosthenous -- Part 4: Setting Hercules to Music -- 12 Hercules and Opera at the Court of Louis XIV: Ercole amante --   Jon Solomon -- 13 Shattered Female Virtue: Dejanira as Depicted in Handel’s Hercules --   Robyn M. Rocklein -- 14 ‘I Shall Sing of Herakles’: Writing a Hercules Oratorio for the Twenty-First Century --   Emma Stafford and Tim Benjamin -- 15 Herakles in Twenty-First Century Music --   Adriana F. Nogueira -- Epilogue --   Emma Stafford -- Index.

Hercules Performed explores the reception of the ancient Greek hero Herakles – the Roman Hercules – on the western stage from the sixteenth century to the present day, focusing on live theatre, including tragedy, comedy and musical drama. Each chapter considers a particular work or theme in detail, exploring the interplay between classical models and a wide variety of modern performance contexts. The volume is one of four to be published in the Metaforms series examining the extraordinarily persistent figuring of Herakles-Hercules in western culture, drawing together scholars from a range of disciplines to offer a unique insight into the hero’s perennial appeal.

English

Description based on print version record.