This book's editors and contributors include some of the pioneers in the study of performance aspects of Greek drama. Therefore, in addition to new insights provided by each chapter, it is reasonable to expect the volume to serve as a kind of recapitulation, status report or roadmap for the next phases in the development of the field. Happily, the book for the most part lives up to this expectation.
A wide scope and diversity of subjects can often be a disadvantage for books based on conference papers, since they tend to lose any sense of consistency. For this book, however, the opposite is true. This volume provides a set of chapters that showcase different perspectives and approaches that can be applied to studying performance aspects of Greek drama. Each chapter exemplifies methods applicable for a much wider range of problems and inquiries than those dealt with in the book itself.
The two first chapters, by E. Medda and Taplin, discuss how text and stage action structure and bind together space on stage and what happens offstage. Both chapters are excellent examples of analyses for which consideration of staging is indispensable for a deeper understanding of dramatic meaning. Medda demonstrates that the boundary between life and death, which he argues is the fundamental theme of Sophocles’ Antigone, is constituted spatially by the two side entrances. Taplin explores how deictic pronouns may be used to construe spatial, thematic and personal relations between the here and now on stage as well as people and things happening offstage, using Sophocles’ Trachinian Women as an example.
The next two chapters by M. Revermann and E. Csapo focus on what studying the performance of Greek drama can tell us about religious experiences connected to the dramatic festivals. Revermann argues that the presence of divinities on stage is not just a representation but constitutes an opportunity for experiencing specific aspects of the gods being present, both directly and through the fictional meetings between deity and human taking place in front of the audience. Csapo connects some of the celebrations in the endings of Aristophanes’ comedies with rituals celebrating choral victories. The chapter describes some of these rituals and provides detailed discussions of the epigraphic evidence for them.
Olson, G. Mastromarco and Totaro delve into more concrete approaches for reconstructing staging. Olson has picked as his antagonist the commentary in K.J. Dover's edition of Clouds (1968). He convincingly attacks some of Dover's suggestions for the staging of Clouds and provides ingenious ideas for some of the more difficult problems of staging and costuming. The chapter is, however, unusually sparing with references. This feels like a missed opportunity specifically in the argument against Dover's suggestion that four proper speaking actors were used. The ‘Three Actors Plus’ rule, limiting the number of proper actors to three, with the possibility of giving a few lines to an extra, is not as universally accepted as Olson implies (p. 86). See, for example, Revermann, Comic Business (2006), pp. 214–15, D.M. MacDowell, ‘The Number of Speaking Actors in Old Comedy’, CQ 44 (1994), 327 and J. Henderson, Aristophanes: Essays in Interpretation (1980), p. 161, all promoting the view that comic productions were free to use all four actors as they wished, if four speaking actors were indeed allowed. It would have been helpful to have Olson's differences with these scholars illuminated further.
Mastromarco reconsiders various scenes in comedy with mute female characters assumed to have been nude on stage by previous scholarship. Just as Olson does in his chapter, Mastromarco convincingly shows how misconceptions about staging have occurred because of modern preconceptions and sensitivities. Totaro looks at staging at the beginning of Aristophanes’ Acharnians and offers a novel and interesting way of determining staging by looking at the poetry alluded to by the comic text. An additional value of all three chapters of Olson, Mastromarco and Totaro, within the context of the book, is that they clearly exemplify Revermann's methodological assumptions put forward in his Comic Business (pp, 63–4), which are proclaimed, in Taplin's introduction, to be the book's ‘underlying foundation’ for reconstructing staging from the dramatic text.
B. Zimmermann's chapter is a short reflection on how we can learn more about props, including costumes, in tragedy from paratragic passages in comedy, taking as an example the Euripides scene in Aristophanes’ Acharnians 393–498. C. Orth, by looking at several comic fragments, discusses the special challenges connected with interpreting them, offering many useful strategies for this task. He argues that a thorough examination of the performative content that can be gleaned from each fragment is a way to avoid misleading presumptions.
The two last chapters by F. Montana and A.H. Sommerstein look at two different types of sources of performance in manuscripts of Greek drama. Montana provides close readings of several comments concerning staging in the scholia to Aristophanes’ Frogs. Through this he makes reasonable judgements about the forms of knowledge on which these ancient observations are based. Sommerstein discusses stage directions found in manuscripts of Greek drama and argues convincingly that some indications of non-linguistic vocalisations in the manuscripts of Aeschylus’ tragedies may have been made by the author. The argument builds on the fact that the indicated vocalisations cannot be deduced from the text. This is a good reason to believe that they originate from someone who had close knowledge of either the first or a later performance, but, in my view, not necessarily the author himself.
Although concern for performance has become a natural part of much research on Greek drama, there is still need for studies that focus on performance and the relationship between text and staging. This volume is an excellent example of such scholarship and is therefore a most welcome contribution. The work, however, is just beginning, as all the chapters raise new and interesting questions. It is therefore my hope that the book, as is hinted in the acknowledgements by Totaro, may be followed by further volumes on similar topics.
