Even in the pre-revolutionary period, some Romantic elements in theatre productions emerged, foreshadowing the rise of the historical tragedy and the Romantic drama. Translations (resulting from encounters with German culture in Vienna, Jena, etc.) include Romeo and Juliet, Lessing’s Filotas, and Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris. Iōannīs Zambelios in his search for a metre to have been inspired by the heroic hexameters of Klopstock and Schiller.

After the Revolution of 1821, modern Hellenism expressed itself not only in a continuing preoccupation with classical tragedies and themes but also in an emerging, Romantically inflected “historical drama”. The Revolution itself provided an abundance of material for the dramatization of its heroic episodes: e.g. the fall of Missolonghi (Nikīratos by Evanthia Kaïrī); the death of Markos Botsarīs (treated repeatedly by playwrights such as Theodōros Alkaios, Iōannīs Zambelios, Alexandros Soutsos); Geōrgios Karaïskakīs (by Iōannīs Zambelios and by Panagiōtīs Soutsos). Around the mid-century, the need for reconciliation with the Byzantine period and the historical interpretations by Spyridōn Zambelios and Kōnstantinos Paparrīgopoulos affected play-writing as well.

Although Romanticism as such tended to be anti-classicist, the Greek Romantics never completely ceased to use antiquity as their source of inspiration, albeit often in a qualified register. The ensuing debates not only involved the use of classical themes, but also the use of ancient stage forms.

Additionally, Greek Romanticism was to a large extent inspired by religion – witness Messias ī Ta Pathī Iīsou Christou (“Messias or The Sufferings of Jesus Christ”) by Panagiōtīs Soutsos (Athens 1839): an attempt to write a religious mystery in the mode of the Byzantine Passion plays (Christos paschōn) recuperated from a nationalistic point of view. In 1827 Panagiōtīs Soutsos drafted Odoiporo (1831, “The Traveller”), a work with vividly Romantic and Byronic elements.

Generally, Romantic theatre in Greece can be said to reflect three strands of European influence, exemplified by the names of Byron, Schiller, and Hugo, and the posthumous influence and role-model of Shakespeare. These started to become known after 1840 through translations. In 1843 Kabale und Liebe was staged in Istanbul as Radiourgia kai Erōs. In 1850 Victor Hugo’s Angelo, tyran de Padoue was published as Angelo Turanno tīs Padouīs, and the prolific Iōannīs Isidōridīs Skylitsīs, the “king of katharevousa translators”, published Lucrèce Borgia as Loukrītia Borgia (Smyrna 1852). Schiller’s Die Räuber made its appearance in the same year in the guise of an adaptation of Verdi’s opera I masnadieri (Oi līstai). Goethe’s Clavigo appeared in 1857, Hamlet in 1858. Iōannīs M. Raptarchīs, a translator of the classics, published a 2-volume collection of six plays by Victor Hugo in Istanbul in 1860-61.

After 1860, these translation activities culminated in the heyday of Romantic drama, at a time when the Greek stage started to consolidate. During the later decades of the century the repertoires of the Greek theatre companies in Athens, as well as the major travelling companies serving the main urban centres with Greek communities (Istanbul, Varna, Odessa, Smyrna, Alexandria, Cairo, etc.), kept a number of popular plays in rotation. The company of Nikolaos Lekatsas, for example, had plenty of Shakespeare in its repertoire. This company and others (the celebrated “Menandros” of Dionysios Tavoularīs; the company of Dīmosthenīs Alexiadīs; of Pipina Bonasera) performed many theatrical adaptations of Alexandre Dumas (father and son), Eugène Sue, and other French authors.

Greek theatrical production over the decades was also influenced by Romantic and post-Romantic poetics: Hugo’s theory of drama, A.W. Schlegel’s Lectures on dramatic literature, Victor Cousin, Hippolyte Taine.

Alexandros Rizos Rangavīs published his play Frosynī in 1837 in 15-syllabic verse. Charged with incident and passion, the story is set at Ali Pasha’s court at Ioannīna, but is preceded by a preliminary dialogue debating and challenging Aristotelian precepts and proclaiming a new, Romantic approach in the mode of Hugo and Stendhal. Later in his long career, Rangavīs wrote three more plays, whose themes and settings testify to a broadening of historical and aesthetic vision. Paramonī (tīs Epanastaseōs), “The eve (of the Revolution)”, is an epic depiction of Hellenism; Douka (“The duke”) thematizes the capture of Constantinople by the Franks in 1204, with the author relying on Byzantine sources and historical studies; Oi triakonta (tyrannoi) (“The thirty (tyrants)”) has a classical setting: the end of the Peloponnesian War.

Ideas on “national Romantic theatre” crystallized in the writings of Dīmītrios Vernardakīs. His Maria Doxapatrī (Munich, 1858), the subject of which is taken from a medieval chronicle, opens with a “Prologue on national theatre, and particularly of the present time”, vindicating a recourse to Shakespeare (obviously in the spirit of German Romanticism and A.W. Schlegel). Vernardakīs later embraced classical examples as well, witness his translations of Euripides; and, while taking Romantic and/or national topics like Evfrosynī (1882, on the theme of the woman executed by Ali Pasha, also treated by Rangavīs), Nikīforos Fōkas (1896, on the Byzantine emperor), and Faust (1893), he strove to transcend the split between classicist and Romantic poetics.

Romanticism, complex as it is, often expressed itself in the historicist choice of topic, which could be classical in orientation even though the chosen form was Romantic and anti-classicist. Alexandros Zōīros, who was active in the Greek circles of Constantinople and an adept of the “Great Idea of a single national theatre”, wrote historical drama of a purely didactic character: Eis apogonos tou Timoleontos ītoi Patris, Mītīr, Erōs (1860, “A descendant of Timoleon, or Fatherland, Mother, Love”); Oi Triakosioi ītoi o Charaktīr tou archaiou Ellīnos (“The Threehundred or the Character of the ancient Greek”); Dīmosthenīs (“Demosthenes”); Borras kai Anatolī (“North and East”); Alexandros o Megas (“Alexander the Great”); Sōkratīs (“Socrates”). Again, Antōnios Antōniadīs in his Filippos o Makedon (1866, “Philip of Macedon”, a prize-winner at the Voutsinaio competition of 1865) stresses the national-educational advantages of historical drama; and Timoleōn Ambelas’s many plays ranged from the contemporary theme of Martyres tou Arkadiou (1867, “The martyrs of Arkadi”) to Roman history (Nerōn, “Nero”; Virginia ī Rōmaia, “Virginia the Roman Woman”, both 1871), which, in describing the sacrifices required for the protection of civic liberty, were presented as instructive exempla for later generations.

The recourse to history could become problematic in the light of modern developments. “National” values like Christianity and Hellenism were represented as irreconcilable in Kleōn Rizos Rangavīs’s Ioulianos o Paravatis (“Julian the Apostate”, 1865); its prologue boldly proclaims a positivistic faith in scientific progress and suspicion of Christian dogma. All the same, Kleōn Rangavīs gave a more empathetic treatment of Byzatinism in his Irakleios (1885) and Theodōra (1884).

Other Romantic ventures turned to a perceived continuity between classical antiquity and the demotic tradition, bypassing Byzantium. Spyridōn Vasileiadīs, whose Romantic play Oi Kallergai (1869) had been inspired by the  Istorikai skīnai (“Historical scenes”) of Spyridōn Zambelios, dismissed “Byzantine decay” and saw antiquity and the popular tradition as the twin sources of “national poetry”, something he exemplified in his collection Attikai nyktes (“Attic nights”, 1873), prefaced by a lengthy prologue on the unity of Greek poetry. His invocation of the nationality-defining parameters of climate, natural environment, history, and ethnic character, was derived from the race-milieu-moment theory of Hippolyte Taine.