The Ghost of Clytemnestra is the first afterlife figure in extant Greek literature to call for vengeance instead of ritual burial. Speaking for the sake of her own soul (psychē), the Ghost cites the ethical wrongs done to her as a mother killed by her own son and as a queen dishonored in the afterlife. The Ghost’s claims, however, have never been seriously considered by scholars. By contrast, the Erinyes do take up her cause, chasing down Orestes and arguing a universal version of Clytemnestra’s case in the trial. This chapter delves into the specifics of the Ghost’s rhetoric, her metatheatrical self-awareness, and her first-person depiction of the afterlife. The living Clytemnestra has already proven manipulative, politically usurping, and murderous; she continues these behaviors after death. Further, the Ghost’s lack of substance (as image, soul, or dream of the Erinyes) distances her from the living world. How can a character so far outside of societal norms demand serious ethical consideration?

Chapter 1 examines two interrelated concepts – “metatheater” and “theatricality” – that undergird Catullus’ and other Romans’ understanding of their society and the roles that they play in it. Romans of the first century BCE imagined themselves living in a world that could often seem interchangeable with that of their literary and popular dramas, especially Roman comedy, whose boundary between fiction and reality is thin at the best of times. This chapter explores the attitudes that make possible not merely theater that is self-conscious of its status as theater, but the underlying ideas that allow self-conscious theater to be legible. In particular, this chapter considers metaphors of life as theater and points of contact between notions of self and of performance – persona in the sense of “unique individual” and in the sense of “mask that superimposes its identity on the wearer,” both of which definitions were operant in the late Republic. Romans often represented themselves playing a series of shifting roles and improvising their lives as they lived them.

The period from the inaugural production of the Ring (1876) to the bicentenary of Wagner’s death (2013) encompasses a variety of dramaturgical approaches. The tradition of naturalistic, illusionist theatre, to which Wagner was heir, was exposed within twenty-five years to the innovations of Alfred Roller and Adolphe Appia, then in turn to the austere iconoclasm of Wieland Wagner, the ideological revolutions of Bertolt Brecht and metatheater, and more recently to the radical theories of deconstruction and post-dramatic theater, all of which have come to constitute what is known as Regietheater. Wagner’s richly multivalent cycle also provided fertile territory for political, environmental and feminist interpretations, but this focus on ideological aspects of the work has developed alongside an emphasis on the theatrical dimension (including mime, dance, avant-garde design, video, and new technology). Indeed, it could be argued that the primacy accorded mime, gesture, and choreographed movement in recent decades represents a fidelity, in some respects, to the composer’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and that the apotheosis of the latter has been achieved only in the age of Regietheater.