Does the new century need a new introduction to Greek theatre? There are good books on the market. Several are written by directors of Greek plays, who are particularly well equipped to show you how to read plays in accordance with their sole original purpose: to make sense in performance. There has not been any avalanche of new discoveries, new hard information. The ancient world has not changed … How could it? Yet we have changed. Our assumptions are different, and our questions are different. Here are some of my own assumptions that led me to embark on this book.

1. A new readership has emerged from the new academic discipline of theatre studies. I have written supposing that the reader of this book knows nothing about ancient Greece, but has some sophistication in the analysis of performance. I hope that readers coming from classical studies will nevertheless find themselves interested by questions that emerge from a different academic agenda. I regard this book as an interdisciplinary study.

2. As soon as theatre studies emerged as a discipline, it became clear that no one within the discipline actually knew what ‘theatre’ was. Performance reaches into all areas of life and it is an arbitrary convention which dubs one activity ‘theatre’, another circus, a wrestling match, a job interview. There is a danger of circularity.

3. […]