We have seen that the two basic components of the cast of any Greek tragedy were the chorus and the actors. They never directly address the audience as they do at times in comedy, so that the ‘‘tone’’ of their contact with the audience is different (Easterling 1997d, 167). According to the testimony of Aristotle, there was originally only one speaking actor who was also the playwright. It was Aeschylus, Aristotle states (Poetics 1449a), who introduced a second actor, while Sophocles went one better and added a third. Three appears to have been the maximum number used, although Sophocles’ last play, Oedipus at Colonus, can only work with three actors if one of the roles is shared among all three to cover different scenes of the play. Apart from the speaking actors, there were also, as the texts make clear, a variable number of non-speaking supernumeraries, such actors taking the part of attendants, soldiers, and so on.
The limit on the number of speaking actors had implications for the way in which the text was composed. Thus characters sometimes exit to commit suicide, appropriate in itself for the tragic context, but also necessary in practical terms since the actor will be required to change mask and costume and return in another role. It is not certain why the number of speaking actors was limited in this way. Suggestions range from the question of expense to the idea that the limit would ensure that the three competing playwrights would be operating on the same terms. Perhaps the key rather lies in the nature of masked theater (Easterling 1997d, 153). Even with three actors available, it is interesting to see that Greek tragedy makes very little use of three-way interaction among the actors. The basis of most plays is confrontation or debate between two characters, and this may simply stem from the fact that it would have been difficult for an audience, the majority of whom were seated at a considerable distance from the acting area, to be sure which masked character was speaking at any given time if there had been verbal interaction among four or five characters.
All the performers were male. They were also all masked, as we have seen, with the natural exception of the aulos-player. The mask, in fact, is one of the most significant characterizing features of Greek tragedy, indeed Greek theater in general. The audience never saw the face of the performers, and so facial expression as an enhancement of performance was out of the question. The masks, which were apparently made of stiffened linen and which covered the whole head, created representative human beings rather than individuals with facial idiosyncrasies. In any case, given that many of the spectators were seated so far above the performance space, they could not have seen facial movements even if masks had not been worn.
The use of masks facilitated the convention already mentioned by which the speaking actors were often required to play a number of roles within the same play. An analysis of the texts to determine how the roles were divided reveals some interesting information. In Philoctetes, for example, the Odysseus actor must not only play the part of the pseudo-merchant who is the onstage agent of Odysseus’ behind-the-scenes machinations, but also, ironically, the part of the deified Heracles who resolves the impasse. Then again, in Women ofTrachis, it appears that the actor who played Deianira (the wife of Heracles) in the first part of the play would have played the dying Heracles in the second part. This raises the question of whether particular actors specialized in different types of roles. The Deianira/Heracles example would, at first sight, seem to suggest that there was no female or male role specialization. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that the dying Heracles describes himself as ‘‘crying like a girl’’ (1071-72), so there may in fact be a close connection between the roles. Unfortunately, we do not know if actors with voices of particular pitch played female roles, or if the ‘‘femaleness’’ was adequately conveyed by the mask alone. What we do know is that individual actors were increasingly turned into ‘‘stars’’ in the fourth century (Easterling 2002).
It seems likely that, on some occasions, there will have been a mask change for an actor even when he was not changing roles. An example of this would be in Oedipus the King, when a mask in some way indicating bloodied, sightless eyes will presumably have been put on by the Oedipus actor before he reemerges from the skene after the self-blinding. An especially effective, and gruesome, use of the mask may well have been made in Euripides’ Bacchae, for which it seems reasonable to suppose that the mask was used as the severed head of King Pentheus, brought on stage by his mother, who, in a maddened state, has killed him unwittingly (on this scene see Lada-Richards, chapter 29 in this volume).
As far as costume in general is concerned, vase-paintings appear to give some idea of what the performers wore - formal robes befitting royal contexts, at least for the central characters in many of the plays. Euripides, however, poses something of a problem here. Aristophanes makes fun of him for lowering the dignity of tragedy by introducing a series of heroes in rags. Many of the plays referred to in this connection in the comedy Acharnians (lines 410-34) are now lost. However, we can see the phenomenon at work in a play like Helen, where Menelaus, who repeatedly emphasizes his status as the conqueror of Troy, is introduced as the ragged and disheveled survivor of a shipwreck. Then again, the Electra of Euripides’ play of that name is made to draw attention to the wretched state of her own dress. Exactly how the actors were costumed in such plays is not known. It has, in fact, sometimes been supposed that there would have been a relatively constant ‘‘dress standard’’ for all tragedies, irrespective of a particular setting or the situation of individual characters, and that such things as ‘‘rags for robes’’ would have simply been left up to the audience to imagine. It does seem unlikely, however, that the cave-dweller Philoctetes, for example, would have been dressed much the same as the king Oedipus, or that soldiers in the field, as we find in Ajax, would have looked like their counterparts in a civic context. When one considers the chorus too, the differences between old men, sailors, and young girls would seem to demand corresponding and marked differences in costume. As far as torn clothing goes, the earliest surviving tragedy, Aeschylus’ Persians, features the climactic entrance of King Xerxes in garments that he says he has rent in despair after the destruction of his army and fleet. Again, it seems reasonable to suppose that this situation will have been visually reflected. Caution is needed, however. Our expectations, based as they are on experience of different kinds of theatrical conventions, may not be so readily transferable to ancient Greek dramatic practice.
In general, it is assumed, with good reason, that the style of performance in Greek tragedy must in no sense have been naturalistic. The universal use of masks, for a start, throws increased emphasis on both gesture and verbal enunciation. One imagines expressions of grief and jubilation to have been accompanied by appropriate gestures on a grand scale. The language of Greek tragedy, moreover, does not use everyday speech but the ‘‘high’’ register of poetry, even if, as Aristotle notes (Poetics 1449a), the iambic trimeter, which came to be the normal meter for dialogue, emerged as most appropriate for the very reason that, of the available poetic meters, it was the one closest to the rhythm of natural speech.
The most common pattern for a Greek tragedy features scenes of spoken dialogue involving the actors, interspersed with songs sung and danced by the chorus. It is impossible to recapture anything like the full effect of the chorus’s contribution, since our knowledge of their words as transmitted in the texts is not matched by knowledge of the accompanying music and dance. The complicated meters of the choral songs do, however, show responsion. That is to say, a stanza is normally complemented by another stanza in exactly the same meter. The names ‘‘strophe’’ and ‘‘antistrophe’’ applied to this phenomenon suggest that the repeated meter will at least sometimes have been accompanied by complementarity of music and dance movement. Vase-paintings showing choral performers may well give some idea of particular choral steps caught, as it were, in freeze-frame. Indeed, it has been argued that identity of choreography between strophe and antistrophe must have been an absolute rule (Wiles 1997, 97-113). Almost nothing is known for certain about the accompanying music, although the texts have been closely studied in an attempt to demonstrate what general musicality the metrical patterns reveal (Scott 1984 and 1996). Sometimes references are made to music in the fictional world of the play that will have directly corresponded with the sounds made by the aulos-player, for example during Io’s initial frenzied monody in Prometheus Bound (Griffith 1983, 196). Although the notes, so to speak, are largely lost to us, there is considerable evidence about musical development during the course of the fifth century, especially the so-called New Music by which Euripides seems to have been influenced (Csapo 1999-2000).
Euripides’ plays, in fact, show increased emphasis on sung monodies or ‘‘arias,’’ whose virtuoso flavor became an obvious target for Aristophanes’ comic criticism. At some point in the fifth century an actors’ competition was introduced at the City Dionysia, running parallel with the existing competition among the three playwrights. It was restricted, however, to the three protagonists or leading actors, who clearly needed to be high-class singers as well as actors as such (Hall 2002). Indeed, the significant musical content of Greek tragedy, which included laments shared between the chorus and an actor, must have brought the plays close to the form of modern opera or musical theater.
Apart from speech and song, there appears to have been a mode of delivery in between, somewhat similar to recitative. This could be employed by both actors and chorus, especially as an introduction to a choral song. An example of this is the parodos or entrance-song of the chorus in Sophocles’ Ajax, where the lyrics are preceded by a preamble of thirty-eight lines in the anapestic meter that is often associated with entrances. It is not known whether such anapestic passages were delivered by the whole chorus or by the chorus leader alone. In addition to these various modes of delivery, one also has to take account of expressions of grief and pain that often stand in the text. Famous instances of pain occur in Women of Trachis, when Heracles is brought in dying, wracked with agony, and in Philoctetes, when the hero has an attack associated with his wounded foot.
At the other extreme, Greek tragedy makes good use of dramatic silences. This is a technique of Aeschylus’, which is touched on in the underworld debate between Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes’ Frogs. This comedy was produced at the end of the fifth century, shortly after the death of Euripides, Aeschylus by this time being long dead and clearly regarded as the ‘‘classic’’ tragic playwright. Aeschylus’ play Niobe, now lost, evidently contained a long sequence in which the heroine, grieving for her slain children, maintained silence. Of course, we do not know how the audience of Niobe reacted to this ploy. We can, however, see it exploited brilliantly in Agamemnon, when Cassandra’s long silence constitutes a significant victory over Clytemnestra, who endeavors unsuccessfully to elicit some spoken response from her (on this scene see Mossman, chapter 22 in this volume).
Yet another effective use of silence, through the very breaking of it, seems to have been employed by Aeschylus in Libation Bearers. When Orestes balks at the imminent prospect of killing his mother, Pylades, played by an otherwise mute actor or supernumerary, unexpectedly interjects to remind him of Apollo’s command. The very fact of the three-speaking-actor convention, of course, leads directly to situations that appear tailor-made for dramatic silences. In Women of Trachis, for example, the woman Heracles has captured as his concubine is sent on ahead with a group of fellow captives, in a scenario that in some respects recalls the Cassandra episode in Agamemnon. The structure of Women of Trachis does not allow for Iole to have a speaking part. Her very silence, however, as Heracles’ wife asks about her before she enters the house in an ominously symbolic action, greatly enhances the dramatic effect of the scene. The silent presence of children, as in Euripides’ Medea, must also have been exploited with telling dramatic effect.
The exploitation of one further dramatic convention is especially interesting. Having once entered the orchestra, the chorus did not then normally leave it until the end of the play. Interesting consequences of this can be seen in Agamemnon. The king’s death cries are heard from inside the skene, whereupon the chorus engages in a lengthy discussion as to whether or not they should go in and help. If, as suggested above, this play was performed if not at the very beginning, then at least near the beginning of the period when the skeenee was added to the performance space, there could as yet be no convention by which the chorus qua chorus was unable to leave the orchestra and enter the building. However, it might have been assumed to be out of keeping with the tragic genre to make the chorus scramble inside. Moreover, the effect of the subsequent action, when the door opens and Clytemnestra emerges with the bodies, would have been entirely lost. Thus purely practical considerations might have been behind the non-intervention of the chorus. Something similar occurs in Euripides’ Medea, staged more than twenty years later, by which time conventions concerning the skene and the chorus’s relationship with it may well have developed. Again, however, intrusion of the chorus into the skene, clumsy in itself, would have spoiled Euripides’ later strategy, so again the chorus is made to debate whether or not to go in and help the children whose death cries are heard from within.
The debate in both cases means at least that the chorus is not left to stand around unresponsive to what is supposedly going on inside the skeenee. This raises another question. What was the chorus doing during the extended scenes involving the actors alone? Some have imagined that the chorus will have responded mimetically when they are not given words. Others have felt that this would be too distracting and have thought in terms of a seated chorus, at least for some of the long passages in which they were not involved. Certainty is impossible. The constant presence of fifteen old men or young women must undoubtedly have been imprinted on a playwright’s mind as he was creating his text. Thus on a number of occasions we find attention being drawn to their presence, for example in situations where a plan is being concocted, and one of the characters needs to be reassured that the group of people hovering round are friends who will not give the game away.
This question of the chorus’s presence and the spatial limits within which they are allowed to operate has other manifestations too, especially in Euripides. For example, in Hippolytus Phaedra is listening at the door of the skene to a conversation supposedly taking place inside, and she asks the chorus to join her. They, however, decline the invitation, pointing out that it is her role to relay news from the house, a response ‘‘in character’’ that at the same time appears to show Euripides drawing attention to a convention by which the chorus would not normally approach the skeenee door too closely. In Helen, however, we actually find Euripides making the chorus enter the skeenee. This is an unusual case that allows the entrance of Menelaus into an empty performance space where he delivers what is in effect a second prologue. If there was a convention about choral non-entry into the skene from the orchestra, Euripides is certainly breaking it here. In two other surviving plays the chorus is made to leave the orcheestra during the course of the action, to return later, but both of these instances require departure down an eisodos, not into the skene. The plays in question are Euripides’ Alcestis, in which the stage needs to be cleared for the entrance of the drunken Heracles, and Sophocles’ Ajax, where the hero will need to be alone for his suicide scene.
World History
