The chorus is often marginal to the action of the play, and to the community of the heroes who act on stage. This remoteness affects the relationship of chorus and actors and is registered in the structure of their lyric dialogues. The tragic chorus’s margin-ality is also central to some theories about its status and function.
The tragic chorus was extremely important to nineteenth-century Romantic theories of Greek theater. Schiller argued that the chorus creates a distance from the tragic action, contributing to the general object of art, which is to make the spectator ‘‘free’’ and removed from the material ‘‘by means of ideas.’’ A. W. Schlegel maintained that the chorus is ‘‘the ideal spectator’’ (‘‘ideal’’ in Schiller’s sense), because ‘‘it mitigates the impression of a heart-rending or moving story while it conveys to the actual spectator a lyrical and musical expression of his own emotions, and elevates him to the region of contemplation’’ (trans. Carlson 1993, 179). Coleridge argued that choruses are created ‘‘as ideal representatives of the real audience, and of the poet himself in his own character, assuming the supposed impressions made by the drama, in order to direct and rule them’’ (quoted in Booth 1961, 99).
Schlegel’s approach proved especially influential, but it is in some ways misleading: in fact the chorus members do guide the audience, even when they express wrong judgments on the tragic action. We can accept a modified version of Schlegel, however, if in place of the Romantic concept of the ‘‘ideal’’ spectator we substitute modern theories of the reader/spectator. Literary theory distinguishes an ‘‘implied’’ reader (the reader the text itself envisages), a ‘‘model’’ reader (an abstract entity, a reader ‘‘supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them,’’ according to Umberto Eco [1979, 7]), and an ‘‘empirical reader,’’ that is, each reader (or spectator) who approaches a text. (For an overview, with references, see Rabinowitz 1995; also Carlson 1993, 520.)
The members of the chorus offer a response to part of the text that is itself part of the text. Thus they are ‘‘empirical readers/spectators’’ located within the text. Several views of the play are possible; the men or women who comprise the chorus offer one plausible reaction, in accordance with their social status, national characterization, and sex. The tragic chorus may split into two half-choruses, especially on the occasion of their entrance on stage, and each semichorus may have different information or different views on the action (see, for example, Euripides’ Suppliants 598-633), but they are always homogeneous with respect to social status and sex. (Comedy follows a different convention, as evidenced by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata 254-349, where a half-chorus of old men opposes a half-chorus of old women.)
The chorus members ‘‘read’’ the action, but they offer an empirical, not an ideal, reaction to it. In fact their reaction is both less correct and more profound than that of an ideal spectator. Choruses often make crucial mistakes of judgment: for instance, in Ajax they do not see through the deceptive speech delivered by the protagonist before his suicide, as the audience is meant to do; in Oedipus the King they fail to understand the identity of Oedipus. In this way they offer the audience the chance to see the action from a radically different point of view; the audience feels both more perceptive and more involved in the action than the chorus. On the other hand, choral passages offer some of the more complex and elusive general reflections in tragedy. In some cases, the social pressure put on the chorus members pushes them to eschew direct statements and speak in abstract, quasi-philosophical terms. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon the old men of the chorus deliver complex meditations on social structure and the mechanisms of guilt (40-257, 355-487, 681-781), even as they avoid any harsh confrontation with Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. The chorus of Antigone meditates on the fate of humankind (332-75, 582-625), but their reflections may imply criticism of the king (see also 509). The chorus often leaves indeterminate the relationship of such passages to the details of the action, thus forcing ancient and modern audiences to explore radically different interpretations of the events presented on stage.
Tragic choruses present a plausible reaction to the events. They do not act in bad faith and do not lie, except to dangerous tyrants (Euripides, Iphigenia among the Taurians 1056-77 and 1293-1310). On the other hand, the marginality of the chorus members frees them from the dignified stance that is expected of male citizens, and allows them to react in a way that would be considered too wild and ‘‘feminine’’ in everyday life. (On the problematic moral stance of acting see Plato’s critique at Republic 395d-e and Lada-Richards, chapter 29 in this volume.)
The marginality of the chorus is what allowed choral passages to be taken as ‘‘the voice of the poet’’ (scholion to Euripides, Medea 823; Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1959, 2: 132-33; 3: 149). This was especially the case for general reflections voiced by the chorus. Since the chorus is for the most part not directly involved in the action, their reflections are not swayed by self-interest; the poet is not imitating a character. Earlier critics therefore assumed that general reflections voiced by the chorus reproduced the author’s ‘‘view’’ of the play. This approach has now been abandoned, but it is worth noting that the authority of the chorus is textualized in its namelessness. The scholarly consensus that chose ‘‘chorus’’ as a manuscript siglum, rather than assigning specific names appropriate to each tragedy (‘‘slave women,’’ ‘‘women of Corinth,’’ ‘‘old men of Argos,’’ and so forth), encourages readers to apprehend the choral pronouncements as possessing a collective character, voiced by an impersonal entity free from social conditioning.
A more radical and less personalized version of the ‘‘voice of the poet’’ approach is the theory that considers the chorus ‘‘the mouthpiece of the city’’ (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, 311). On this reading, the marginality of the chorus is a source of authority; by not being involved in the tragic action, the chorus is less swayed by the immediate circumstances and can give a reliable interpretation of the play. In opposition to Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, John Gould has recently stressed the fact that ‘‘the tragic chorus is characteristically composed of old men, women, slaves, and foreigners (the last often non-Greek as well as non-Athenians),’’ arguing that these groups are ‘‘marginal or simply excluded from the controlling voice of‘the people’ ’’ (2001, 383). This perspective would limit the importance of the chorus in guiding audience response to the tragic events, and stand in the way of an interpretation of the chorus as ‘‘the citizen body.’’
The typology of tragic choruses is more varied than Gould allows. Gould curiously excludes old men from the ‘‘citizen body,’’ by assimilating them to the very broad category of the Other. Old men are certainly viewed as weak and frail in tragedy, but there is a significant strand in Greek culture that regarded old men as particularly wise and authoritative in matters of politics (the starting point is Iliad 9.60). The old men of the chorus are often called ‘‘citizens’’ (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 855; Sophocles, Antigone 806, Oedipus the King 512, Oedipus at Colonus 1579). Indeed, ‘‘it is tempting to describe them as super-citizens, since they were privileged in the assembly (where it was their right to speak first) and in the council’’ (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, 312). In two plays by Sophocles, Ajax and Philoctetes, the chorus is composed of adult citizens (soldiers). Sophocles apparently shows a preference for male choruses (twenty-four against fifteen), when we can be certain about their identity. The opposite tendency is evident in Aeschylus (fourteen male, twenty female) and Euripides (fifteen male, twenty-six female: Mastronarde 1998, 62-63; see also Foley 2003, 13 and 25-27). A similar trend can be observed in the choice of singing characters, to which I now turn.
World History
