Dramatic Apparitions and Theatrical Ghosts

Ghosts haunt the stages of world theatre, appearing in classical Greek drama through to the plays of 21st-century dramatists.Tracing the phenomenon across time and in different cultures, the chapters collected here examine their representation, dramatic function, and what they may tell us about the belief systems of their original audiences and the conditions of theatrical production.As illusions of illusions, they foreground many dramatic themes common to a wide variety of periods and cultures. Arranged chronologically, this collection examines how ghosts represent political change in Athenian culture in three plays by Aeschylus; their function in traditional Japanese drama; the staging of the supernatural in the dramatic liturgy of the early Middle Ages; ghosts within the dramatic works of Middleton, George Peele, and Christopher Marlowe, and the technologies employed in the 18th and 19th centuries to represent the supernatural on stage. Coverage of the dramatic representation of gho