From bear-keeper’s daughter to empress, Theodora is the real deal. Duffy captures Theodora’s indomitable spirit and through her viscerally connects readers to timeless human responses and reactions to pain, happiness, faith, and enlightenment. The interstices of Theodora’s experiences flow into a continuum of shared experiences familiar to any woman living in any age and culture controlled by men. Duffy weaves a plausible tapestry-like narrative, illuminating the smallest details of daily life in the sixth century as well as each pinnacle and nadir of Theodora’s tumultuous life. Her father was a bear trainer at the Hippodrome, the vast sports stadium that was the social center of Constantinople and the site of Theodora’s early career as an acrobat and actress, which, back in the day, also denoted prostitute. Scholars believe she was born between 497 and 510 AD. Duffy presents a main character that is brilliant, flawed, and utterly mesmerizing.

Stella Duffy’s historical novel about the most progressive empress of Byzantium and wife of the late-Roman emperor Justinian I, affords the attention and respect the historical Theodora deserves.

Theodora (Penguin Press) as history is fascinating. Sardou serves as a useful reminder that, ultimately, we all create our own vision of Byzantium and we all get the Theodora we deserve.‘Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore’ by Stella Duffy Rather than scorn Sardou's play for its warped vision of Byzantium, Byzantinists should embrace it as a didactic example for probing how we, too, frame, claim, and re-frame Byzantium based on our own fashions, scholarly preoccupations, and shifting paradigms. Sardou, Sarah Bernhardt, and their sumptuous Byzantine spectacle created a long-lasting impression upon the popular and academic imagination. Was it Greek or Roman, familiar or hybrid, barbaric or civilized, Oriental or another Other? The image of Theodora perpetuated by Sardou would become firmly ensconced in the popular imagination, despite the best efforts of his critics.

Acclaimed as the greatest spectacle of the nineteenth century, the play also became a major bane for scholars of Byzantine studies, for it actively participated in positioning Byzantium within an established system of knowledge. In the process of selling scandal, murder, intrigue, grand spectacle, opulent costumes, and dangerous liaisons, the seductive performance of Byzantine decadence actively shaped indexical, iconic, and ontological frameworks for the Byzantine empire within Euro-American visual and cultural discourse. This play was the most successful collaboration between Victorien Sardou and the tremendously celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt. Victorien Sardou's Theodora (first staged in 1884) introduced mass audiences to Byzantium and literally created Byzantine realities for its spectators.

Theodora by Stella Duffy