Didaskalia consists of two parts: an electronic journal devoted to information about modern performances of Greek and Roman drama, music, and dance, as well as a selection of web sites concerned with Greek and Roman theater in general. The electronic journal appears in quarterly issues with supplemental issues consisting of conference proceedings, new translations, and monographs appearing as needed. Contributors to the electronic journals range from students to scholars in the fields of theater and opera. The first three volumes of Didaskalia centered around themes such as “Beyond Spoken Drama,” “Fusions of Greek and Asian Drama,” and “Education and Outreach.” Many articles include hyperlinks to charts or illustrations, but endnotes are not hyperlinked.
In addition to articles, each issue includes listings of performances, conferences, and events, as well as announcements pertinent to the journal topic. Updates to listings made after the appearance of a quarterly issue are linked separately to the Didaskalia page. The coverage of the these listings and the make‐up of the contributors, mirrors the composition of the editorial board, which draws on scholars in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
The web site associated with the journal provides additional resources. Several brief, unsigned essays begin this section of Didaskalia; and this resource continues to grow. The essays provide a brief overview; but, more importantly, they link to a growing collection of slides and re‐constructions of ancient theaters. This section also features a collection of links to other resources arranged by topic, including “Classics Resources,” “Theatre Resources,” “Texts and Translations,” “Ancient Theater in the Classroom,” and “Publishers of Books about Ancient Theater.”
These links tend to be brief lists of major resources. However, they can be thorough; as well the collection of course related web sites includes many resources not found in more standard resources such as WebED, the World Lecture Hall, or Suzanne Bonefas’s Classics Course Links. An online bookstore for books on ancient theater allows users to browse recommended books arranged by topic, then click on the title of the book to view ordering information in Amazon.com and/or the Internet Book Store. Finally, the section is rounded out by an online survey being made by the American Philological Association to determine interest in activities related to staging ancient dramas.
Didaskalia succeeds in stimulating, disseminating, and collecting information about ancient theater from diverse disciplinary perspectives. The awards it boasts come as no surprise. However, the web site could benefit from some improvements. Most significant is a thorough checking of links. Broken graphics and links can be found scattered throughout the web site. Hopefully, these are the result of Didaskalia’s recent migration from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom to the University of California at Berkeley. Of greater concern is the condition of the links pages. Overall, 44% of the links on these pages either dead‐ended, malfunctioned, or led to re‐directs. Also, brief annotations to the links might be desirable in at least some cases, especially when the links point to resources in a language other than English, the language in which Didaskalia is written.
The Electronic Journal portion of the site is free of such trouble and offers a set of features comparable to many online publications. As the journal grows, it would be enhanced by a search engine. In the meantime, PDF counterparts to the HTML versions of the article would be welcome both because they make printing and citing the article easier and because it would be possible to display Greek texts quoted by the authors, rather than the transliterations currently used in the HTML version.
Despite some reservations, Didasklalia does tie together existing resources about the modern performance of ancient theater. The electronic journal housed here succeeds in presenting essays by writers with a variety of disciplinary perspectives, life experiences, and national origins. The web site materials, which have been added since the establishment of the electronic journal show promise of providing a set of background materials. At the present, this section consists of several groups of distantly related, although useful, material and collections of links. With time for further growth and a thorough review of links, this part of Didasklia promises to be as stimulating and helpful as the electronic journal.
