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Concepts of (Un)dressing in Greek Drama 10.17863/CAM.45975 Reinke, Antonia Marie 0000000311635397 Hunter, Richard Laemmle, Rebecca Goldhill, Simon In recent years, dramatic props and costumes have become the focus of a renewed scholarly interest in the performance aspects of Greek drama. This has entailed, in particular, a shift away from enquiries into the ostensible realia of Greek staging to explorations of their complex constructions, semiotics and agencies in the plays and their cultural contexts more widely. My thesis situates itself within these developments but considers the hitherto underexplored phenomenon of (un)dressing in Greek tragedy and comedy. Often treated as a matter of physical costuming, it is a central contention of my work that (un)dress in theatrical representation functions, first and foremost, as an imaginary site where ideas of social identity, difference and transformation may be mapped and negotiated. Drawing on a broad range of relevant tragic and comic scenes, I argue that both dressing and undressing are persistently evoked in Greek drama as social and interactive performances, allowing characters to (re)position themselves and others in a grid of hierarchical relations, including differences of gender and station at their core. At the same time, the agency of (un)dressing is frequently reversed in the dramatic imagination: it is the performance of (un)dressing that determines a character’s social identity rather than vice versa. By exploring this dual capacity of dramatic (un)dressing, my thesis situates the theatrical concepts of (un)dressing within the plays’ socio-political context in the democratic city of Athens: these concepts highlight the precarious position of the democratic citizen male, caught between traditional ideas of essential being and a pervasive public performativity of self, as well as the different representational strategies used to address this uncertainty in tragedy and comedy respectively. University of Cambridge 2019-11-30 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) en Arts and Humanities Research Council DTP Studentship (2015-2018), Cambridge Trust European Scholarship (2015-2018), Stephan Körner Scholarship of Murray Edwards College (2015-2018) Kurt Hahn Trust Scholarship (2015-2016), Jahresstipendium für Doktorandinnen und Doktoranden, German Academic Exchange Service / DAAD (2015-2016), Graduate Studies Fund of the Cambridge Faculty of Classics (2018). https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/298918 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/d331c287-85b9-4182-93ad-238d974b4e3a/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/14bc81f1-faa5-4f57-a3e2-0ce6a5a1c459/download 53513885aa8d08f93fccd6ea8c5f75de https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/ Greek Tragedy Greek Comedy Dress Undress Disguise Social Hierarchy Identity Athenian Democracy Constructions of the Body Performance