Ostensibly a translation of Sophocles' Antigone, Anne Carson's Antigonick (2012) is in fact a genre-bending, hybrid construct which defies boundaries. It is a crossbreed between translation, adaptation, and rewriting, as well as between text and image. It incorporates a great variety of discourse types and literary or paraliterary genres, and amalgamates hand-inked blocks of text with original colour drawings (by Bianca Stone). This 'transtextual palimpsest' engages in a fascinating dialogue not only with Sophocles' Antigone but also with its translators and commentators, as well as with authors as disparate as Hegel, Beckett, Brecht, Butler, and Irigaray. At times provocative, stirring, funny, and often all of the above, Carson's Antigonick asks us to push the boundaries of genre, textuality, and visuality towards a new synthesis, which may capture something of the unity of speech, visuality, music, and movement that Greek drama managed to achieve.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, and at the beginning of the twenty-first, adaptation has come to the forefront of theoretical debates about the limits (or lack thereof) of our engagement with the classical past. At the same time, the adaptive process takes on an increasingly performative character, moving away from the text-centred approaches that had dominated earlier eras and towards new idioms that privilege visuality at least as much as textuality, or enhance the text through its scenic realisations and refractions. Theorists are now careful not to ‘treat performance as merely a derivative citation of the text’;1 text and performance are viewed as being in a state of constant interaction, complementarity, and mutual redefinition, in which performance may actuate in numerous ways the performative potential of the dramatic text, while the text may be conceptualised afresh as a result of being performed. In particular, to study the adaptation of Greek tragedy in both textual and performance media is not only to explore intertextual or ‘intervisual’ relations but also to map out the various avenues through which plays once considered sacrosanct, qua indisputedly part of the Western cultural paradigm, are increasingly being appropriated into different performance and cultural contexts, value systems, and conceptual frames, and are as a result often challenged, questioned, contested.

This Prelude, which may be read as a supplement to the Introduction, aims at situating adaptations of Greek tragedy in their historical context. This volume’s contributions programmatically focus on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century adaptations of Greek tragedy, but this must not be taken to imply that adapting Greek tragedy for the page or for the stage is a recent development. It is to be hoped that the following historical overview will help avoid or dispel presentist fallacies by demonstrating both that Greek tragedy was an act of adaptation since its inception and that the reception of Greek tragedy has proceeded, to a considerable extent, in concert with its adaptation in theatre and dramatic literature.