ABSTRACT
In May 1964, Karolos Koun’s theater company participated in the London festivities for the celebration of Shakespeare’s 400th birthday with a performance of Aristophanes’s The Birds. Harold Hobson wrote in London’s Sunday Times about the performance:
I had expected to have to treat The Birds with respect. After all, they are Greek and originally spoke in the most supple and musical of languages, and they have endured for a very long time. Westminster Abbey is to them only a precocious junior and Shakespeare a writer in this month’s magazines. What I had not reckoned on is the spontaneous enjoyment, the exhilaration and the swift pleasure which this entertainment gives.
Hobson 1964 I am citing this quote here in order to introduce Koun from the outside, as it were, and to ask the logical question: if Koun could resurrect the Greek classics in such a way as to bring them alive after almost two and a half millennia, could he not do the same with Shakespeare, who lived only four hundred years back? How did he stage the admittedly few Shakespearean plays that he presented to the Greek public at various times? Before turning to these and related questions, I shall first give an overview of Shakespeare’s course in Greek theatrical history, for Koun’s work on Shakespeare is part of a cultural narrative.