A01=Patrick Kragelund
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Patrick Kragelund
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AN
Category=ATD
Category=DSBB
Category=DSG
Category=HBLA1
Category=NHC
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Format=BB
Format_Hardback
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€100 and above
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780198718291
- Format: Hardback
- Weight: 926g
- Dimensions: 162 x 241mm
- Publication Date: 03 Dec 2015
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The Octavia is the only surviving historical drama from ancient Rome. With a plot rich in sex, dynastic intrigue, riots, and murder, the play's characters include the philosopher Seneca, the emperor Nero, the ghost of his murdered mother, his wife Octavia, and his mistress and empress-to-be Poppaea. For centuries dismissed as a feeble, rhetorically overblown closet-drama written without consideration for the demands of plot or stage, the Octavia's 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 in which it was written, reflect scenic conventions and a notion of the dramatic that radically transforms and expands our knowledge of ancient theatre and the Roman stage.
Roman Historical Drama is the first comprehensive interpretation of ancient historical drama in relation to this exciting play, revealing how the Octavia mirrors the genre's traditions by mixing formats and stock characters from traditional tragedy with elements drawn from new developments of the Hellenistic and Roman stage. The volume explores the role and impact of historical (and political) drama in Rome, offering a pioneering reading of the Octavia in relation to ancient performance practice, as well as to the politics of those who in AD 68 brought down the tyrant Nero. In its final section, the volume provides a panoramic survey of the revival and reinvention of classical tragedy in the Renaissance period, tracing the impact of the Octavia from Italy through France to Elizabethan England.
Patrick Kragelund holds doctorates in Classics and the reception of classics from the University of Copenhagen and has been Director of the Danish National Art Library since 1998. He has published widely on Roman history, literature, drama, and epigraphy, as well as on the reception of the classics in post-renaissance art.
