The need for a book like this one became apparent shortly after I was appointed as the theatre historian in a university Department of Theatre. Qualified for the job only because I had written a book about the theatre in nineteenth-century London, I was expected to teach the history of theatre from Greeks to Grotowski. This was, and still is, the normal state of affairs wherever there are broad studies of classical or western literature and drama, history of the theatre, ancient or western art. Few instructors in any of these disciplines command the leisure to master the current state of knowledge in a succession of fields of study which are no more than contiguous with their own. Three or four weeks are allocated to the Greeks; then one must get on to the Romans, Middle Ages, Renaissance. Teaching theatre history, my students and I needed a book which would summarize the state of contemporary research on the performance practice of Greek theatre, arranged systematically by topic. Since nothing of the sort was available, I was obliged to turn to the relevant chapters of Bieber's obsolete History of the Greek and Roman Theatre, first published in 1939. For many instructors and students, it remains the last resort.

That was why I conceived the notion of writing a book that would supersede Bieber. I am an historian of the theatre, not a classicist. It may be asked, where I found the temerity to write about Greeks. I approach the subject pragmatically, as a working theatre not unlike others. I examine it as a composite art, in which the text is only one component. For costume, masks, music, theatre buildings and equipment, acting style, I turn to the visual sources provided by archaeology. And to interpret what I see, I refer to a lifetime of experience in the living theatre and a working knowledge of how things are done, and made.