Greek tragedy has enjoyed a vigorous afterlife on the modern stage both in the original Greek and in translation. Yet whilst the production history of, say, Shakespeare has long been the subject of academic inquiry, it is only very recently that classical scholars have appreciated both the value and the importance of charting the fortunes of Greek drama in the modern period. It is not simply that classicists need to be aware of the extent to which their own area of study has shaped major dramatic trends in Europe from at least the 1880s onwards. It is not even that a general lack of interest in such matters has meant that classical scholars have remained unaware of the (by no means insignificant) fact that Sophocles' Oedipus the King was banned from the professional stage in Britain until 1910. What a survey of modern productions of Greek plays does, above all, is provide us with a salutary reminder that contemporary investigations into Greek drama are no less time-bound than those of previous periods. Indeed, every encounter with artworks of the past is really an exploration of current concerns and needs; and nowhere is this better illustrated than through a study of the performance histories of Greek tragedies.

Yet the tendency of classical scholarship to ignore the fortunes of Greek tragedy on the modern stage is somewhat surprising. For the production histories of these plays reveal that close ties have, in fact, existed between the professional theatre and the world of scholarship since at least the nineteenth century. The row that followed Nietzsche's capitulation to Wagner and Bayreuth at the end of the nineteenth century may well be notorious (cf. Ch. 12, pp. 324-5), but it is the exceptional nature of the episode that has guaranteed its notoriety.