In Britain, Elizabeth I shrewdly instituted a tradition that plays in Latin (whether recently rediscovered Plautus and Terence, or newly-composed) be performed for royal visits to Oxford and Cambridge (Shenk, 2003, 2008). (After her death this continued briefly without enthusiasm: James 1st tried to leave a Latin play in 1605 but was prevented by his attendants and fell asleep; Charles and the Elector Frederick both slept through a six-hour ‘comedy’ at Cambridge in 1613 (Carpenter, 1985:7)) She also ordered an annual Christmas Latin play at Westminster School, with a fine of ten shillings if the duty was shirked. This tradition has continued unbroken from 1564 to today, even escaping the Puritan ban on theatre. Except for brief competitive responses to the Westminster Play in the form of experiments with Greek tragedy in Greek at Stanmore School (two Sophocles plays in 1770) and Reading School for Boys (a triennial tradition of Greek plays in Greek from 1806-21, on which see Hall (1997) and Hall and Macintosh (2005: Chs. 8 and 9)) there was then what Glynne Wickham calls a ‘dark age’ for two centuries until the 1880s (Wickham, 1977:115). Then, an explosion of international interest in performing the authentic texts of ancient drama began in schools and universities, which is alleged to have launched (among other things) the present British academic tradition of performing Greek plays in Greek. 

But the performance of a Greek or Roman play in an educational context is especially interesting because it has a particularly vivid ‘double’ existential status as both a theatrical experience, and a dramatisation of values or ideas beyond the occasion itself. This is clear from the fact that the sudden rage or craze for Greek plays in the 1880s stirred the passionate interest of the artistic, literary and political celebrities of the day (e.g. the late Edward Burne-Jones, Frederick Leighton and Oscar Wilde were all alleged to have contributed in some way towards the 1880 Oxford Agamemnon; the 1881 Harvard Oedipus Tyrannus was graced by ‘men of letters’ such as Longfellow and Emerson). Prime Ministers and princes were often seated in the front row at Oxford and Cambridge Greek plays, and the 1882 Cambridge Ajax was hailed as a national event, with special trains laid on from Kings Cross. The interests of women, liberals, and progressives were central to these earliest 'revivals'. In fact one could claim the ‘first’ British Greek play in Greek was the all-female 1877 Newnham Electra, for which lines were learned, costumes made, and an audience invited to attend the production at the fledgling college. But the Principal, Anne Clough, anxious about propriety, cancelled at the last minute. Ancient Greek, as Chris Stray and Yopie Prins have shown, was then such a powerful symbol of the (exclusively male) educational elite that the girls of Newnham, and later Girton, Somerville and various womens’ colleges in the United States seized on Greek plays to ‘perform’ their own inclusion. It was the fusion, or tension, between these two different ‘ways of being’ – a theatrical experience that was also 'symbolic' on a wider stage - which gave these late nineteenth-century Greek plays their particular frisson.