What is it about?
This article examines how an anonymous, seventeenth-century Greek play, "Zeno", stages ghosts, demons, live burial, and madness. In doing so, it demonstrates how early modern Greek theatre engaged with wider European debates about the functions of the imagination and the nature of reality.
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Why is it important?
The early modern Greek stage — often overshadowed by that of classical Greece — is brought into focus here. "Zeno" is effectively used as a case study to show the ways in which theatre was front and centre in European debates about the mind, perception, and definitions of "reality", and that Greek writers were active participants in said debates — debates which continue to inform modern anxieties regarding spectacle and the fragility of truth. "Zeno" also happens to be a Jesuit play, and is illustrative of the fact that Jesuit theatre was not simply moralistic spectacle, but an inventive, experimental art-form and a site of transcultural exchange between Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism, between Rome, Venice, and the Greek-speaking world.
Perspectives
This paper is included in one of the first edited volumes dedicated to early modern Greece, as opposed to to Byzantium or modern Greece. Early modern Greece remains underrepresented in European literary history, and this volume marks an important shift in the field which I am honoured to be part of, especially alongside other established and emerging scholars whose work I admire so much. I hope this article will not only generate more interest in early modern Greek theatre, but will, moreover, show readers how engaging with the past (even with obscure, anonymous works) allows us to effectively grapple with some of the most pressing questions of our time. The plays I examine are concerned with what we see, what we imagine, how we know things to be real or not, and how fear shapes belief. At a time when misinformation, spectacle, and anxiety over the uncanny capabilities of AI are at the forefront of our minds, returning to these early modern 'imaginative' experiments feels unexpectedly urgent.
Clio-Ragna Takas
Harvard University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Staging Phantasmata and the Early Modern Imagination: Zeno—an Anonymous Seventeenth-Century Greek Drama, January 2026, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004423312_012.
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