As we have seen, at any given time there could be only three actors with speaking parts on stage. More often than not scenes in Greek tragedy did not use all three actors, as the playwrights preferred to work with one or two in most scenes. It is instructive to consider Aeschylus’ Persians, our earliest extant drama (produced in 472), in this regard. Not only are there no scenes with three actors with speaking parts but there are only two scenes featuring two actors, and even here one senses a degree of stiffness in the flow of dialogue.3 Later plays of Aeschylus and those of Sophocles and Euripides show smoother handling of the interactions between and among the actors, but three-actor scenes remain less common, and even in such scenes the dialogue tends to unfold between pairs in sequential combination.
Nevertheless, all three tragedians exploited the possibilities of scenes with three actors. It is not until halfway through Agamemnon that Aeschylus takes advantage of three actors, and he does so in a surprising way. After ten years away fighting at Troy - and after more than eight hundred verses filled with foreboding about his homecoming and Clytemnestra’s usurpation of his power - Agamemnon arrives on stage in a chariot (810), a seemingly triumphant victor. In a masterful stroke of dramaturgy, Aeschylus has Clytemnestra persuade her husband to enter the palace by walking on the house’s delicate tapestries. With misgivings, the king does so, and the two enter the house. Everything in the play thus far leads the audience to expect death-cries from within. But after the following choral song (975-1034), Clytemnestra reappears and attempts to lead into the house Cassandra, the young captive who accompanied Agamemnon back from Troy. Although silent in the previous scene, Cassandra was visible to the audience, who could readily infer her identity. But it is not until after Clytemnestra’s unsuccessful attempt to lure her indoors that Cassandra speaks. Her impassioned, initially incomprehensible cries (1072, 1076) come as a surprise. Aeschylus does not have all three actors engage each other in the same scene, but it is only the use of the third actor that makes this sequence possible.
Aeschylus uses a third actor as a surprise in the second play of the Oresteia trilogy, Libation Bearers. Pylades, Orestes’ dear friend who has accompanied him on his return home from exile, has been silent throughout the play. But at the critical moment when Orestes, intent on avenging his mother’s murder of his father, is faced with his mother’s plea for mercy, he wavers. Turning to Pylades, he asks what he should do, and his companion does speak, urging action (‘‘Make all mankind your enemy rather than the gods,’’ 902). The impasse between husband-murdering mother and soon-to-be mother-murdering son is broken by the surprising utterance of this hitherto silent character.
In two consecutive episodes of Oedipus the King, Sophocles makes shrewd theatrical use of three-actor scenes. This play’s impressively tight structure initially revolves around one question - who is the murderer of the former king Laius, the murderer whose exile will free Thebes from its present blight? All of the play’s energy until this moment has been focused on this search, with the disturbing possibility that Oedipus, the current king, might be Laius’ murderer. It is the unexpected arrival of a character from outside of Thebes that moves the play in a different direction. A messenger from Corinth (924) reports that King Polybus is dead and that Oedipus, his (putative) son, will now become king. Jocasta was on stage at the start of the episode when the messenger arrived and Oedipus soon joins them - it takes all three characters to drive the play to its first conclusion. First, the messenger speaks with Jocasta; then Jocasta, having sent for Oedipus, speaks with her husband, who then engages with the messenger. Oedipus addresses to Jocasta his fear that he might still fulfill the second half of the prophecy by marrying his mother. At this point, the messenger intervenes with the information that Oedipus is not in fact the son of Polybus and Merope but a foster child. In dialogue (primarily stichomythia), Oedipus questions the messenger about how he came to Corinth. When the messenger explains that he himself took a foundling Oedipus from a shepherd from Laius’ house, Oedipus turns to Jocasta, silent for the preceding sixty or so lines, and questions her. Jocasta, who has come to realize that Oedipus is both her son and husband, tries to dissuade him from his pursuit of his identity but, failing in this, she leaves the scene with ominous words (1071-72).
At this point, Jocasta (and the audience) knows the full truth, but Oedipus does not. In the following scene another forceful manipulation of all three actors brings the full and painful truth home to Oedipus. The shepherd from Laius’ household, having been summoned in the previous episode, arrives (1123) and is questioned by Oedipus. When he seems to be making no progress in his questions, the messenger intervenes to confront the shepherd about their encounter years before. This shepherd is now addressed by Oedipus, and in a fierce stichomythic exchange Oedipus learns that he is the son of Laius, the murderer of his father the king, and the most wretched man alive. A taut sequence of two-way exchanges among the three parties has allowed the truth to come forth.
In the three examples just discussed, the third actor was on stage from the beginning of the scene. Helen shows how the arrival of a third actor can radically move the course of the drama. Menelaus, returning from ten years of fighting at Troy to reclaim his wife, is startled to find her in Egypt, where his storm-driven ship has landed. He cannot believe that this woman with Helen’s features and physique can possibly be his wife, whom he has left behind on his ship, and he starts to return to the shore, only to be thwarted by the arrival (597) of a third actor, a messenger from the ships who explains that the Helen Menelaus left on his ship was only a phantom. That phantom has now escaped into the sky, revealing that the real Helen never went to Troy at all but lived in Egypt. At this point, the reunion between faithful wife and warrior husband, almost achieved in the previous scene, unfolds in lyric delight (625-97).
World History
