The Audience

We should not overlook the importance, as one of the key components of any performance of a Greek tragedy, of the audience, whose experience must have been richly aural as well as visual (Hall 2002, 4). The Theater of Dionysus perhaps held up to 15,000 spectators, so that the atmosphere at a play would have been very different from what prevails in most modern theatrical situations. The tragedies presented must have posed a significant intellectual and emotional challenge to an audience, and there must have been some discomfort involved in sitting in fairly cramped conditions for lengthy periods. Even though the audience did not directly judge the competition, their reaction to the plays they watched must surely have influenced the appointed panel of judges. We lack clear evidence, however, about the audience’s precise responses. One story, found in Plutarch’s Cimon (8.7-9) about an incident that happened near the end of Aeschylus’ career and the beginning of Sophocles’, suggests that factionalism may have played a role, with different sections of the audience backing a different playwright. Plutarch’s story (admittedly written down more than 500 years after the event) tells how the archon on this occasion refused to choose the judges by lot, as was the usual practice, but obliged the ten strategoi (generals) to act instead, on account ofthe increased prestige which these men would bring to the judging, in a situation of divided audience partisanship.

The exact composition of the audience is unknown, the debate focusing on whether women were allowed to attend, or whether tragedy was basically an occasion for citizens (freeborn male adults). The evidence is inconclusive, although it appears unlikely that women, who were surely participants in the Festival of Dionysus in general, would have been excluded from the theatrical part as such. Stories dating from a later period, however, like the one in the anonymous Life of Aeschylus telling how the chorus of Furies in Eumenides were so terrifying that they caused children to faint and women to have miscarriages, cannot be used as reliable evidence on this question.

In a theater without much in the way of scenery, smaller stage props would have been used with telling effect. We can assume that significant items - the tapestries Clytemnestra lays out as the deceptive and seductive welcome mat for Agamemnon, Ajax’s whip, shield, and sword, Philoctetes’ bow, the urn supposedly containing Orestes’ ashes in Sophocles’ Electra, even chariots on occasion - would have been represented by real objects in the theatrical performance. This, however, raises an interesting question of interpretation. It is sometimes difficult to decide whether some given object or phenomenon is referred to or described in the text because it was visible to the audience, or for the very reason that it was not, and that the playwright is therefore inviting his audience to imagine it.

To illustrate the point, we can mention cases where the audience must simply have been invited to use their imagination. When one character refers to another as having tears running down his or her face or looking triumphant, it is clear that the audience

Members were the ones to supply, as it were, the visualized emotion, since the mask of an actor was unable to display it (the actor could, however, express the required emotion through voice, stance, and gesture). The same applies, ofcourse, to contexts where characters verbally set the scene of the locale to be imagined for the fictional world of a given play. When, for example, at the beginning of Philoctetes, Odysseus announces, ‘‘This is the shore of the island of Lemnos surrounded by sea,’’ the audience obviously saw no waves. Interestingly, though, when characters point out landmarks such as buildings, the audience could see equivalent buildings around them from their seats in the theater, even though they could not see the buildings of the fictional world of the play. Similarly, references to the sky and the sun become instantly transferable to the natural environment of the audience.

There are, however, many problematic contexts. For example, when the chorus of Euripides’ Ion arrive in Delphi, they slip into the role of tourists, describing the sculptural decorations of the temple of Apollo. It is not easy to be sure whether the skene was decorated with at least some figures, even if not precisely those described, or whether the audience is being invited to imagine them. In that play too, the playwright could not have guaranteed that birds would be flying overhead at the precise moment that the hero shoos them away, even if he was holding in his hand the bow with which he was threatening to shoot them. There is a teasing point in Orestes when the hero asks for a bow with which to ward off the Furies assailing him. Given that he is temporarily mad and his Furies only imaginary, it has to be asked whether Electra hands him an actual bow (on this scene see Gregory, chapter 16 in this volume). The locus classicus for this issue, however, is seen in Bacchae, where the chorus describes an earthquake that shakes Pentheus’ palace. Controversy rages as to whether anything concrete took place in the theater or whether the earthquake was simply conveyed by the reaction of the chorus. Given that this is a play much concerned with illusion, the latter seems more likely, especially since characters entering subsequently make no reference to any damage.