This is an expanded version of a paper read to the Cambridge Philological Society in May 1978. An earlier version was read to an undergraduate seminar at Bristol. I am grateful for some helpful discussion on both occasions and in particular to my colleague Richard Buxton for valuable advice.

1. So, for example, Vickers, Brian at the outset of his often stimulating book Towards Greek tragedy (1973)Google Scholar: ‘I begin with some simple propositions. Greek tragedy is about people, and what they do to each other’ (3).

2. G & R 20 (1973) 3–19Google Scholar. See also her ‘Character in Sophocles’, ibid. 24 (1977) 121-9. I owe to Mrs. Easterling the stimulus to writing the present essay. The italics in the quotation are mine.

3. ‘Presentation of character in Aeschylus’ 7.

4. Garton, C., Personal aspects of the Roman theatre (1972) 17Google Scholar: compare 193ff. on Senecan personae. The whole of chap. 1, ‘Person, Persona, Personality’ is an important contribution to this discussion. See also his earlier article, ‘Characterisation in Greek tragedy’, JHS 77 (1957) 247–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Austin, J. L., How to do things with words ed. 2 (1975) 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Garton, , Personal aspects 15Google Scholar.

7. O'Neill, Eugene, A touch of the poet Paperbound, Yale ed. (1957) 33f.Google Scholar (stage directions to Act One).

8. Compare the following passage from Balzac's Gambara, quoted by Benveniste, E., Problèmes de linguistique générale (1966) 241Google Scholar: ‘After a turn in the arcades, the young man looked at the sky and then at his watch, made an impatient gesture, entered a tobacco shop, lit a cigar, placed himself before a mirror, and glanced at his clothes, somewhat more elaborate than the laws of taste in France permit. He adjusted his collar and his black velvet waistcoat, which was criss-crossed by one of those large golden chains made in Genoa; then, throwing his velvet-lined coat onto his left shoulder with a single movement and letting it hang there in elegant folds, he continued his walk, without allowing himself to be distracted by the leers of passers-by. When the lights in shops began to go on and the night seemed to him sufficiently dark, he made his way towards the square of the Palais Royal like a man who was afraid of being recognized, for he kept to the side of the square until the fountain so as to enter the rue Froidmanteau screened from the hackney cabs.’ The passage is discussed in the context of the novelist's ‘contract’ with the reader by Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist poetics (1973) 192–202Google Scholar: see also his discussion of character in the novel: ibid. 230-38. The topic of the novelist's presentation of character and what it owes to our everyday habits of thought is a long-standing one; see, for example, Lubbock, Percy, The craft of fiction (1921) 7Google Scholar; Booth, Wayne, The rhetoric of fiction (1961) passim, but esp. 40–64, 110–16, 144–7, 243–66Google Scholar.

There is, of course, an instructive counter-strategy in both the theatre and the novel which lies behind some varieties of the ‘theatre of the absurd’ and the nouveau roman, and which involves making audience or reader work harder in creating what we construe as the essential linkage between surface event and inner consciousness. Harold Pinter, writing of his own plays, makes use of a notion of ‘verification’: ‘the desire for verification is understandable but cannot always be satisfied… The assumption that to verify what has happened presents few problems I take to be inaccurate. A character on the stage who can present no convincing arguments or information as to his past experience, his present behaviour or his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives is as worthy of attention as one who, alarmingly, can do all these things’ (from a programme note quoted by Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the absurd [1961] 206Google Scholar). Esslin comments: ‘what Pinter, in his search for a higher degree of realism in the theatre, rejects in the “well-made play“ is precisely that it provides too much information about the background and motivation of each character … But there is more to this rejection of an overdefined motivation of characters in drama than the desire for realism. There is the problem of the possibility of ever knowing the real motivation behind the actions of human beings who are complex and whose psychological makeup is contradictory and unverifiable.’ Pinter's strategy is destructive of the notion of total accessibility which I have described as characteristic of dramatic personality, and to that extent contributes to our sense of the ‘absurdity’ of such theatre. But as a dramatic strategy it is unintelligible except in the light of our everyday response to personality.

9. Easterling, , ‘Presentation’ 3Google Scholar.

10. Ibid. 6.

11. de Mourgues, Odette, Racine or the triumph of relevance (1967) 34Google Scholar: the whole of Mme. de Mourgues' third chapter, ‘The stylization of passion’, is highly relevant to the problems discussed in this essay.

12. For a sensible discussion of these Euripidean scenes, see Bain, David, Actors and audience (1977) 57–61Google Scholar.

13. Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean tragedy, ed. 2 (1905) 287f.Google Scholar

14. Above all, of course, in his notorious Appendix on the line ‘He has no children’, on which Knights', L. C. famous essay ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ (reprinted in Explorations [1946] 13–50Google Scholar) is still the most penetrating comment.

15. Bradley, op. cit. 294f.

16. Traversi, D. A., An approach to Shakespeare ed. 2 (1956) 181Google Scholar.

17. Traversi, op. cit. 291.

18. Taplin, Oliver, ‘Did Greek dramatists write stage instructions?’, PCPS n.s. 23 (1977) 121–32Google Scholar.

19. Odette de Mourgues, op. cit. 40. For a brief but penetrating discussion of time in Greek tragedy, see Taplin, O., The stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977) 290–4Google Scholar.

20. On Aristotle and Greek tragedy (1962) esp. 43–6, 59–60, 232–5Google Scholar.

21. Except, perhaps, in some of the plays of Aeschylus, most obviously Persae (cf. ll. 140ff.), if Wilamowitz' plausible, though undemonstrable, suggestion is adopted: that is, that the skene building, with its implication of an ‘off-stage indoors’, is a development of Aeschylus' last years. The suggestion has been revived by Taplin, O. (HSCP 76 [1972] 66–9)Google Scholar and the case for an indoor setting of Persae 1ff., Myrmidons and Eum. 235ff. developed. He has argued the point once more, and related it to the ‘fluidity’ of place in Aeschylus, , in Stagecraft 103–7, 452–9Google Scholar. But such ‘indoor’ scenes are in no sense scenes of privacy.

22. Thus the ekkyklema is used to show us Klytaimestra standing inside over the bodies of the murdered Agamemnon and Kassandra (, 1. 1379: I remain convinced that the ekkyklema is used here, in spite of the arguments of Taplin, O., Stagecraft 325–7, 442–3Google Scholar), or to show Herakles in an exhausted coma surrounded by the bodies of his murdered children (Euripides, , Herakles 1028ff.Google Scholar).

23. One instance must suffice to illustrate this. The sharp distinction in social roles between male and female in the real life of fifth-century Athens in large part turns on the distinction between private and public spheres of action. It is certainly mistaken to think of Athenian women as universally submissive, silent and restrained from independent thought and utterance, but this is their role in the public world of the ‘outside’, which belongs to men - it is only in the privacy of the house that anything like equality of initiative lies with the woman. One of the most striking ways in which the poetic imagination of fifth-century Athenian tragedians has played upon and reshaped everyday reality in the theatre is in the transference of a private freedom to the public world, and the consequent ‘masculinisation’ of female characters. This too has its consequences for our understanding of dramatic personality. I have argued this point at greater length in an unpublished paper, ‘Law, custom and myth: aspects of the social position of women in classical Athens’.

24. SirPickard-Cambridge, Arthur, Dramatic festivals of Athens ed. 2 (1968) figs. 49, 60a-bGoogle Scholar.

25. For a somewhat fuller discussion, see Cambridge history of classical literature I (forthcoming).

26. Quoted by Mrs.Easterling, , ‘Presentation’ 4Google Scholar.

27. See especially the dissertations of A. Gross (1905) on stichomythia, of J. Fischl and E. Henning (both 1910) on messenger speeches, the books of Leo (1908) and Schadewaldt( 1926) on monologues, Ludwig, W.'s Sapheneia (1954)Google Scholar and the collection of essays Bauformen der griechischen Tragödie edited by Jens, W. (1971)Google Scholar; above all, perhaps, Kranz, W.Stasimon (1933)Google Scholar.

28. Dale, A. M., Euripides, ‘Alcestis’ (1954) n. on 280ff.Google Scholar See also McCaughey, J., Ramus 1 (1972) 26–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Alcestis enters to die at line 244, her entry heralded and an intensification of emotion prepared for by the chorus. In the epirrhematic scene that follows, in which Alcestis sings, Admetus speaks antiphonally in pairs of trimeters, Alcestis' song is of her vision of death approaching, expressed in the familiar images of Greek folk tradition. She sees a boat, a lake, a boatman hand upon the oar - Charon; Charon speaks to her in her vision, urging speed impatiently; Alcestis in her song replies, and in a gathering crescendo (οὐχ ὁρᾷς) cries out that ‘someone’ (Death, perhaps, one-winged and dark-eyed) carries her away; as the urgency of her song increases, darkness closes on her eyes, and, we would say, she dies, with a last farewell to her children (): this section of the scene ends with a brief anapaestic recitative from Admetus, between speech and song, begging her not to abandon him. A sharp break, a new sequence in spoken trimeters, and Alcestis speaks - rationally, collectedly - and with that passionate objectivity so characteristic of Euripidean theatre expounds her reasons for dying: she speaks of herself as if she were another. A brief revival of emotion as she expresses her sense of the cowardice of Admetus' parents in deserting him and of her own heroic strength, and immediately she returns to the coolest rationality in presenting her last wishes to Admetus, backed by logical, even rhetorical argument. Admetus replies in the same rhetorical mode, in a rhesis of almost exactly the same length; a brief stichomythia covers the symbolic act of handing her children into Admetus' charge. At the end of it, Alcestis ‘dies’ again: darkness, fainting, farewell, ‘I am no more’ () - all recur.

30. PCPS n.s. 9 (1963) 62 n. 1Google Scholar.

31. Some fifty examples in Sophocles, as against six in Euripides, as well as eighteen of an article plus particle tied to a noun in the following line: see Denniston, , CQ 30 (1936) 76f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Note also nine cases of elision at trimeter end. For Aeschylus (particularly P. V.) see Yorke, CQ 30 (1936) 153–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herington, C. J., The author of the ‘Prometheus Bound’ (1970) 46–9Google Scholar; Griffith, M., The authenticity of ‘Prometheus Bound’ (1977) 88, 96–100, 192Google Scholar.

32. Kranz, , Stasimon 175ff.Google Scholar, esp. 178.

33. There is an analogy here with the analysis of structure in the visual arts put forward by Adrian Stokes in his writings on art. Sophoclean ‘over-running’ of formally distinct parts in the dramatic composition and our consequent involvement in action and character as process has its counterpart in what Stokes calls the ‘invitation in art, the invitation to identify emphatically’ where internal stresses override the parts of a composition: see The image in form: selected writings of Adrian Stokes, edited by Wollheim, Richard (1972) 101–12Google Scholar.

34. For example O.T. 634-96, where the formal symmetries of the scene constitute an elaborate stylization of the interchange between Oedipus, Kreon, Iokasta and the chorus, and this at a moment of great emotional intensity, brought out by the lyric iambics and dochmiacs and by the use of antilabe in the trimeters.

35. Compare Aeschylus, , P.V. 88ff.Google Scholar, on which see Griffith, , Authenticity 108–10Google Scholar.

36. See especially Taplin, O., GRBS 12 (1971) 25–44Google Scholar.

37. William Arrowsmith, writing of Herakles, using the term ‘dislocation’ in making a similar point; see his introduction to the Chicago translation (The complete Greek tragedies: Euripides II [1956] 44–57Google Scholar). Zürcher, W., Die Darstellung des Menschen im Drama des Euripides (1947)Google Scholar is still illuminating on this aspect of Euripidean dramatic personality.

38. Compare such openings as Kleon's (Thuc. 3.37.1) or the anonymous author of P. Hibeh 13.

39. Especially 525-7, 534-5 and the rhetorical questions that follow, 558-60, 577.

40. Lattimore, R., Story patterns in Greek tragedy (1964) 64f.Google Scholar

41. See JHS 93 (1973) 74–103, esp. 85-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Barrett, W.S., Euripides, ‘Hippolytus’ (1964) 229, n. on 377-81Google Scholar.

43. Among recent discussions, Mrs. Easterling's treatment of this scene (‘Presentation’ 10-19) is lucid, sensitive and helpful, as is Taplin's, Oliver in Stagecraft 308–16Google Scholar, but neither of them, I think, quite takes the significance of the pace and brevity of the scene.

44. Barrett, op. cit. 348, n. on 986-7.

45. Dale, A. M., Euripides, ‘Alcestis’ xxii–ixGoogle Scholar: see also her Collected papers (1969) 139–55Google Scholar.

46. Cretans 4-41 in Page, D. L., Greek literary papyri I (1941)Google Scholar = fr. 82.4-41 Austin. See Rivier, A., Etudes de litérature grecque (1975) 46–60Google Scholar.

47. The association between ‘purple’ and ‘blood’ is cogently demonstrated by Goheen, R. F., AJP 76 (1955) 115–26Google Scholar: see also Taplin, , Stagecraft 315Google Scholar; Lebeck, Anne, The Oresteia: a study in language and structure (1971) 85–6Google Scholar.

48. On the poetic imagery of the Oresteia, see above all Anne Lebeck, The Oresteia; Peradotto, J. J., AJP 85 (1964) 388–93Google Scholar and the article of Goheen cited in n. 47.

49. See Professor Lloyd-Jones' note on 1. 1446 on p. 95 of his translation in the Prentice-Hall series (1970), with which I entirely agree.

50. See Neustadt, E., Hermes 64 (1929) 262–3Google Scholar; Winnington-Ingram, , JHS 68 (1948) 132–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taplin, , Stagecraft 312f.Google Scholar

51. I do not think it would be helpful to call this ‘ironical’ - as though Klytaimestra consciously chooses to play with her personality.

52. JHS 68 (1948) 130–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar: the quotation is from p. 132.

53. I exclude ll. 489-502, which I do not believe are spoken by Klytaimestra: see Taplin, , Stagecraft 294–7Google Scholar.

54. See Taplin, , Stagecraft 299ff.Google Scholar, 306-8.

55. The concrete vividness of Kassandra's visions is strongly marked by the repeated use of deictic τόδε (1095, 1096, 1101, 1102, 1108, 1110, 1114, 1217) and by the definite articles of 1125-6.

56. An instructive comparison in point of both language and structure can be made with the Japanese Noh play. There, a single grammatical sentence may be divided between actor and chorus, handed, as it were, without pause or division from one to the other; the chorus may use the first person ‘I’ in presenting the experience and feelings of one of the dramatic persons; and a character who has appeared in the first part of the play in human guise (often as a woman abandoned by her lover) may re-appear in the structurally separate second half remasked and recostumed as a horned demon, transformed by the stress of experience into a being of another order. The model of ‘human intelligibility’ is thus still further removed from the audience's everyday perceptions. And yet Zeami, the greatest master and theorist of the Noh, could describe its essential function as that of ‘imitating things’, and a later theorist could gloss that remark as ‘imitating truly and realistically the behaviour of young and old, male and female, aristocrat and poor, priest and layman’. As to structure, Zeami's principles are notably musical in their descriptive import. His plays are based on an ordered sequence of introduction, exposition and conclusion (jo, ha and kyu); the introduction is to be composed so that it may be performed in a ceremonial mood and at a leisurely tempo; the exposition, the principal part, at a variety of tempos and pitches, building up towards more and more detail; and the conclusion at a rapid tempo, leading to a magnificent finale. The masked drama of the Noh represents, perhaps, the other pole in the presentation of human experience and personality from the plays of O'Neill.

57. Wimsatt, W. K., Hateful contraries (1966) 39f.Google Scholar

58. Easterling, , ‘Presentation’ 10Google Scholar.

59. Ibid. 14.