aristotle, actors, and tragic endings: a counter-response to johanna

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Arethusa 46 (2013) 133–155 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

ARISTOTLE, ACTORS, AND TRAGIC ENDINGS: A COUNTER-RESPONSE TO JOHANNA HANINK

JENNIFER WISE

There’d probably be tears.Which wouldn’t be auspicious.

Orestes1

In Arethusa 41, I suggest that Aristotle’s sad-ending theory of tragedy tells us more about the habits of fourth-century actors than about the tenor of fi fth-century tragedy (Wise 2008). On the basis of certain similarities between the didaskalic record of 341–39 and the (roughly contemporary) Poetics, I hypothesize that the philosopher may have been misled by the performance practices of his time into equating “true” tragedy with weepy endings. In Arethusa 44, Johanna Hanink takes up the challenge this idea poses for much received wisdom about ancient tragedy and subjects it to a most welcome scrutiny (Hanink 2011). In Hanink’s view, the hypoth-esis “marks a step forward for our understanding of how the realities of contemporary performance might have infl uenced Aristotle’s own view of tragedy” (312). I’m grateful to Hanink for the time she devoted to my argument, for the additional evidence she has adduced in its support,2 and, especially, for her keen grasp of what I was trying to do (324):

By drawing out the interplay of theatrical reality and Aris-totelian theory in her article, Wise prompts us to examine more carefully how the Poetics might be reconsidered

1 Orestes 789; trans. Arrowsmith 1992.239. 2 Hanink 2011.315, especially the wonderfully confirming calculations of Csapo

1999–2000.410–11.

ARE 46.1 1st proof text.indd 133ARE 46.1 1st proof text.indd 133 11/29/2012 5:29:31 PM11/29/2012 5:29:31 PM

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against the recent scholarship that has begun to investigate the fourth century B.C. as both an important “dramatic” era in its own right and a crucial site for the formation of the notion of classical tragedy and the canon of Greek plays that would survive.

Hanink clearly endorses this goal, concluding that “Wise suc-cessfully highlights the degree to which the Poetics has been read in the past without due consideration of contemporary theatrical practice” (324). Nevertheless, she disputes four “single points” that I make along the way (312). She also misstates my argument in one key place, but in a way that productively reframes the problem. After correcting this detail in her pré-cis and drawing out its implications, I will deal in turn (albeit out of order) with each of Hanink’s concerns and end with a brief discussion of why her explanation for the depoliticizing of tragedy in Aristotle’s hands is less credible than the one I offer.

Hanink’s summary of my argument is beautifully lucid and almost wholly accurate (2011.311–12). But after noting that my hypothesis “rests on a contention that fi fth-century tragedies, or at least tetralogies, had, as a general rule, concluded with ‘happy endings,’” Hanink misstates a crucial point. She continues: “These productions, the argument goes, tended to end on a propitious note for the citizens of whichever polis served as the play’s setting and thus, by extension, for the Athenian spectators” (312). This is not quite right. What I describe is the apparent fi fth-century expectation that tragic productions end propitiously for the spectators at the perfor-mance (not necessarily for the characters in the play). And the spectators need not be Athenian.3 I name the various groups for whom fi fth-century tragedies seem to have been expected to end well: the spectators at Aetna who viewed Aeschylus’s good-auguring Sicilian tragedy (2008.381), and “the Athenians, their friends, allies, or fi ctional stand-ins” (395; also 394, 385). But there are some political groups who don’t fi t into any of these categories. The people of Sousa, for example, the city in which Persians is set, would not have been seen by the Athenian spectators at the fi rst per-formance of this play as friends, allies, or fi ctional stand-ins, but rather as

3 Csapo 2010.98–99 thinks that Euripides’ Captive Melanippe might have been written for spectators at Metapontum or Herakleia and his Archelaos for audiences at Aegae; the audi-ences at Syracuse for a reperformance of Aeschylus’s Persians could also be added to the list: Nervegna 2007.16.


ARISTOTLE, ACTORS, AND TRAGIC ENDINGS 135

enemies, alter egos, or something of that nature.4 An inauspicious ending for Athens’ destroyers, which is what Aeschylus theatrically delivers to the people of Sousa in Persians, would, precisely because the misfortune was not their own but their enemies’, have augured well for the Athenians watch-ing it: the (sad) defeat of Persia portended the (happy) salvation of Athens.

This may just be a simple misstatement on Hanink’s part. But it highlights the basic theatrical fact on which my hypothesis is based: the emotional outcome for the people in a tragedy (the characters) may be dif-ferent from the emotional outcome delivered to the people watching it (the spectators). The fates of the characters, their happiness or sadness, is, of course, specifi ed in the text, but what this ending might portend (or por-tended) for the spectators at a given performance is simply not provided by the play. The text of Persians, for example, says that Xerxes and the chorus mourn and wail in grief and loss at the end. But how this dramatic outcome was received by particular spectators is something that can only be reconstructed or imagined on the basis of evidence from outside the text: our knowledge that the play was written and fi rst performed for Athe-nians, by Athenians (rather than for Persians, by Persians); the fact that these Athenian singers, dancers, and spectators had recently defeated the Persians in battle; that they had fi ned another playwright 1,000 drachmas for producing a depressing play about the Persians;5 and that they knew in advance that the performance would end not with the Persians’ tears but with the frat-house antics of their own joyous satyrs.

How a play’s ending affects the audience depends, in other words, on who that audience is, what they know, and how they feel—even before the play has begun. As Aristotle observes in Rhetoric, audiences respond very differently to the same stimulus depending on their pre-existing emo-tions, hopes, and expectations (1377b31–78a4):

When people are feeling friendly and placable, they think one sort of thing; when they are feeling angry or hostile, they think either something totally different or the same thing with a different intensity . . . If they are eager for,

4 The tragic city of Thebes, which Froma Zeitlin analyses as an “anti-Athens,” might be another setting where things were not expected to go well or resolve happily for the people; see Zeitlin 1990.130–67.

5 See my discussion of this story as evidence that tragedies in the fi fth century were expected to end auspiciously for the spectators: Wise 2008.392–93.


136 Jennifer Wise

and have good hopes of, a thing that will be pleasant if it happens, they think that it certainly will happen and be good for them (trans. Roberts 1941.1379–80).

Depending on what the spectators desire and expect, on who their friends and enemies are, how they feel about Persians in general, or even Oedipus in particular, they will react very differently to the same dramatic outcome.6 Theatre history shows unmistakably that features spe-cifi c to the real-life context in which a play is viewed—a recent death or assassination,7 a war or epidemic,8 the audience’s current opinions about the peoples, issues, or characters represented9—can shape the spectators’ experience as much as anything in the play itself. Audience response is shaped even by the type of event they think they’re attending: are they seeing the play within the context of a conquering king’s victory revels, as part of a beloved actor’s farewell tour, or as part of a prestigious annual celebration of their own free and democratic city?10 As Hans Robert Jauss shows (1982), aesthetic experience is partly shaped in advance by a pre-existing “horizon of expectations”—a set of beliefs and assumptions about what we’re about to see.11

An audience’s emotional experience of a play is also shaped by the intentions of the actors. Because audiences do not receive the play from the text but only through the actors’ interpretation of it, the intentions

6 At Frogs 1183–90, for example, Euripides and Aeschylus violently disagree about whether Oedipus was born lucky or was wretched from the start.

7 Consider the story about the audience bursting into tears at the proagon when Sophocles appeared in mourning for Euripides. The story was clearly intended to record something remarkable—revealing, if nothing else, that audiences did not normally burst into tears at the proagon. In this case, however, they did, because events surrounding a performance unavoidably shape its meaning: Lefkowitz 1981.88–104.

8 See Scott 1997.15–18 on the wholly different reception given by American and Canadian audiences to the very same shows during the early years of WW I when only the Canadi-ans were fi ghting.

9 During the French Revolution, Paris audiences interrupted and rioted during plays that represented kings and powerful noblemen in positive ways; see Root-Bernstein 1984.198ff. and Wise 2012.

10 See Ceccarelli 2010.101 for the shows staged by Philip and Alexander to celebrate their sacking of cities and, especially, for her observation that in the fourth century, “dra-matic festivals [sometimes] had no civic context at all, as when tragedy was performed on the initiative of kings.”

11 See Revermann 2006.159–75 for a superbly detailed discussion of these issues; also Bennett 1990 and Roselli 2011.3–5.



of performers replace those of the playwright when the play is staged.12 The locus classicus for the consequences of this ineluctable fact is Anton Chekhov’s comedy The Cherry Orchard, which was transformed into a lugubrious tearjerker by Stanislavski and company—even while the play-wright was still alive to object.13 Chekhov was a hard-working grandson of a serf and son of a grocer, a largely rural doctor who treated peasants for free.14 In The Cherry Orchard, he depicts an aristocratic family monopo-lizing 3,000 acres of land that they refuse on principle to cultivate, lease out, subdivide, or take any steps to conserve. Their intransigence results in bankruptcy, the loss of their estate, and the cutting down of their (unpro-ductive) cherry orchard. Chekhov makes his intentions clear by ending the play not with the sorrow of the aristocrats but with a speech by their old servant Firs, who realizes in the fi nal scene that his masters have forgot-ten all about him, locking him up in the house with the furniture as they blithely depart forever to start new lives elsewhere.

Constantine Stanislavski, however, who acted in and directed the play, was a privileged man-about-town and heir to one of the larg-est fortunes in Russia.15 He identifi ed with his character Gayev and with Gayev’s aristocratic relatives, mourned their fate, and made audiences do the same. Accordingly, Stanislavski’s production of The Cherry Orchard ended with a “heart-rending” bit of tearjerkery whereby Gayev slowly exited the stage with his shoulders wracked in a spasm of virtuosic sobbing that was described by one spectator as “almost more than an impressionable playgoer can bear” (quoted by Loehlin 2006.68). This grief-wracked exit does not exist in the text, is largely contradicted by Chekhov’s instruc-tions for Gayev in the scene (Loehlin 2006.68–69), and, in any case, is followed by the appallingly funny speech of the servant, Chekhov’s cho-sen ending. But Stanislavski’s display of soulful agony was so moving to

12 During the lifetimes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides when the poet acted his play himself or “taught” it to others, the intentions of actors would scarcely have existed as an independent determinant of the play’s meaning. Once posthumous revivals by professional actors come on the scene, however, the interpretations of actors will “count for more” than those of the poet, as Aristotle noticed (Rhet. 1403b33).

13 Chekhov’s letters of 1904 record his intense annoyance with the Art Theatre actors over their misinterpretation of his play: they “positively do not see in my play what I wrote.” He even offers to swear that some of them have never read the play through to the end “even once”: Yarmolinsky 1973.466.

14 Koteliansky and Tomlinson 1925.1–10, Friedland 1964.158–59.15 Stanislavsky 1925.21–32, Benedetti 1991.170–90.


138 Jennifer Wise

audiences that his character’s emotional suffering was experienced as the true outcome of the play.

Stanislavski’s choices not only glorifi ed the landed gentry’s suf-ferings beyond what Chekhov had intended, they also redirected the play’s satirical barbs. Lopakhin, for example, is a vital but guiltily successful busi-nessman (and grandson of a serf) who, Chekhov insisted, must be played as “a cross between a merchant and a professor of Medicine at Moscow University” (quoted by Loehlin 2006.48). Stanislavski’s production depicted him instead as a boorish lout who spits, picks his teeth, and lazes around on the divan, smoking; Lopakhin was also subjected to the ultimate theatrical indignity of being dressed in a deliberately absurd looking hat: a yokel’s knotted handkerchief (Loehlin 2006.48). The plot resolves, of course, with Lopakhin’s purchase at auction and clearing of the land (to build summer cottages). By portraying Lopakhin as a grossly materialistic boor, Stanislav-ski ensured that the fate of the aristocrats would seem lamentable indeed.

I impose on the reader’s patience with such a detailed recitation of the facts of this case because the point it is meant to illustrate is dif-fi cult to appreciate in the abstract: that even something as trivial as the choice of a character’s hat—a matter of greater concern to the costumer than the poet, as Aristotle might say—has a direct hand in determining the meaning of a play’s ending for the spectators. Although, as James Loehlin so tactfully puts it, “Stanislavski’s treatment” of Chekhov’s char-acters “seems to go against Chekhov’s text” (2006.68), it was Stanislav-ski’s production of The Cherry Orchard that toured the world and made the play famous, “moving audiences to tears” all over Russia, Europe, and the United States (Loehlin 2006.68, 79). Stanislavski later admitted that Chekhov “had written a happy comedy, and all of us had considered the play a tragedy and even wept over it,” but the play’s reputation had been made.16 Following Aristotle, we might consider extra-textual matters like the actor’s “delivery” to be “unworthy” of serious attention (Rheto-ric 3.1404a2). But as this case shows, it is the choices made by actors, as much as or more than those made by playwrights, that decide if, when, and for whom the spectators weep.

If a play like The Cherry Orchard could be transformed within months of its composition from a critique of the Russian aristocracy into

16 Years later, Stanislavski (wrongly) remembered “Chekhov’s anger” in connection with Three Sisters (1925.278), but Geoffrey Borny 2006.201 corrects his mistake. See also Senelick 1997.67–71.



an anguished lament for their martyrdom,17 how much more might the tenor of fi fth-century tragedies have changed over the course of a hundred years? During the fourth century, according to Edith Hall, the most “dura-ble marks” left on “[the spectators’] memories” “after the performance of a play” were those connected with “the affl ictions suffered by the leading characters” (2006.16). But as Eric Csapo crucially reminds us, this was evidently not the case for most of the fi fth century, when audiences were much more intently focused on the choral aspects of tragedy (2010.105; also 1999–2000.404). Representations of (and jokes about) the effects of trag-edy on audiences show that spectators’ reactions varied widely in the fi fth century, from effusions of patriotism and military zeal (Frogs 1020–44), through delirious love for the playwright’s braininess,18 to outrage over the play’s moral, religious, and political ideas.19 In addition to focusing on a tragedy’s civic “advice” (Frogs 1008–09, 1055), a “typical” fi fth-century Athenian spectator like Dionysus20 was most memorably impressed by things that were done and sung by the chorus (Frogs 1028–29).21 By the mid-fourth century, on the other hand, tragic audiences are depicted as mainly focused on “the suffering of individuals” (Roselli 2005.21);22 by the mid-third century, a tragedy could conceivably be performed in competi-tion without any chorus at all (unlike comedy: Nervegna 2007.21). In short, fi fth-century spectators reacted to the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and

17 In his reconstruction of Stanislavski’s production from photos and eyewitnesses, Loehlin describes (2006.68) the fi nal scene: Ranevskaya has “her hands crossed over her chest in an image of saint-like suffering.”

18 Frogs 52–60, 770–80; also many anecdotes about the audience’s love for the poet’s brains, philosophy, and poetic skill in Kovacs 1994.25, 33, 35, and 37.

19 From Lefkowitz 1981 and Kovacs 1994. Despite the unreliability of some or even many of these stories, a distinct picture of audience response to fi fth-century tragedy does nevertheless emerge, and it is one in which the spectators are simply not particularly focused on the “suffering” of the protagonists. Instead, the anecdotes speak of the audience being astounded and terrifi ed by the show’s noise, costumes, and special effects, and enlightened or infuriated by the playwright’s ideas (Lefkowitz 1981.70, 71, 95, 103, 158, and 159). In Kovacs 1994, tragedy is reported to have made audiences feel happy (43), to have physi-cally saved them (25), and morally, religiously, and politically provoked and angered them (7, 39, 53–55, 63, 87, and 105), sometimes to the point of physical and legal action (7, 53, and 61–63). See also Roselli 2011.26–49 for an excellent discussion of many of these anecdotes and testimonia.

20 Wright 2009.157 n. 63, also Slater 2002.21 See Ceccarelli 2010.138 and n. 130 for the predominantly choral meaning of trag-

edy in the fi fth century.22 Roselli 2005.20–21 quotes and analyses a fragment from Timocles’ comedy Women

at the Dionysia.


140 Jennifer Wise

Euripides in ways that were specifi c to their moment in historical time.23 A textually prescribed ending that delivered one set of emotions to audi-ences in this century, in the hands of one set of performers, may have had a very different effect on spectators a hundred years later.

Let me start, then, with Hanink’s third point, about the “the nature of fourth-century Euripidean revivals” (2011.312). She begins by accepting, and providing additional evidence for,24 my suggestion that the celebrity actors who mounted such revivals would have been likely to favour minimally choral and maximally protagonistic plays (315). But she disputes my corollary suggestion that these star actors, for similar reasons, would also have been likely to choose weepy over celebratory plays. As evidence for her skepticism, she cites Ion and Orestes, two protagonist-centred plays that may have survived thanks to their selection for celebrity revival (Hanink 2011.315):

And yet there does not seem to be any correlation between the percentage of a tragedy that consisted in actors’ song and the nature of the play’s resolution: of the four Eurip-idean plays that are more than ten percent actors’ song (Hecuba, Ion, Phoenissae, Orestes), two are tragedies that Wise numbers among those that have “happy end-ings”: both the Ion and Orestes are resolved by means of a deus ex machina.

There are two fl aws in Hanink’s reasoning here. The fi rst is that, as the case of The Cherry Orchard shows, the texts of Ion and Orestes tell us little about how these plays were performed by fourth-century actors.25 Indeed, about plays like these where the “happiness” of the ending depends wholly on the eleventh-hour reversal of a deus ex machina, we must remain completely in the dark, for we do not even know whether Old Tragedies in revival were performed right to the end (see Nervegna 2007). (In later

23 Roselli 2005 analyses “the prejudices and expectations” of this audience in detail; n. 26 provides a bibliography of current scholarship on its composition in the fi fth century. Also Revermann 2006.159–75.

24 Especially Csapo’s statistics (1999–2000.410–11) that suggest to Hanink (2011.315): “That nearly seventy percent of the sung lines in Orestes would have been sung by actors (and not the chorus).”

25 For the things they do tell us, such as actors’ textual interpolations, see Page 1987 and Hall 2007.



periods, we see star actors ending the play midway through, with their most heart-breaking or clap-trapping speech.26) The fact that Aristotle associates Euripidean plays in general with miserable endings (1453a25), despite the fact that many of them end happily in the texts, tends to support my view that fourth-century actors, even when staging an “all-time favourite” play like Orestes (Nervegna 2007.19), performed it in such a way as to impress the spectators most strongly with the suffering of the protagonist (see Hall 2006.16). The other weakness in Hanink’s counterargument on this point is that the sample size is too small. Two ostensibly happy-ending plays out of four sounds like a lot, but out of all the Old Tragedies chosen for revival in the fourth century, these two may have been exceptional choices in a period overwhelmingly dominated by sad-ending plays.

In connection with this, her third objection, Hanink also cites the fact that new tragedies continued to be written and staged as trilogies (320). This she takes as evidence that Aristotle would not have been as likely as I suggest to have mistaken the true nature of fi fth-century tragedy. How-ever, these new trilogies were presented without a concluding satyr play. That is, neither the excerpted revivals nor the three-part premières of the fourth century concluded with the kind of raucous celebration with which all tragedies had ended at the City Dionysia in the fi fth century.27 How could Aristotle have known what effect a concluding satyr play would have had on the audience’s experience of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in the previous century? His discussion of satyr performance in Poetics shows clearly that the question hadn’t even occurred to him.28

26 When on tour, for example, Stanislavski’s actors performed individual acts of Chekhov’s plays. The actors and “the public” enjoyed these excerpts, says Stanislavski 1925.286, “for they allowed the actors to “focus the spectators’ attention on the emotions of the characters.”

27 Hall 2006.168, Harrison 2005, Griffith 2002.202–03, Sommerstein 2002.22ff.; also Seaford 1984.1–59, who analyses the “obscenity, hilarity, and joyful endings” of satyr drama (5). Gilbert 2002.85–87 compares the dominant theories of the satyr play in our time. While they differ in their view of its anthropological function, all agree that the satyr play ended with joy and success. For evidence of how the disappearance of the satyr play from tragedy proper affected people’s view of tragedy, see Hall 2007.284: whereas “in 430 Tragoidia had still been conceived as a cheerful maenad, the companion of bois-terous satyrs,” a fourth-century monument equates tragedy “with a famous actor and a melancholy role.”

28 At 1449a20–23, he associates satyr performance with dancing, trochaic tetrameters, and a “ludicrous” and undignifi ed effect—but also with the distant past of tragedy’s develop-ment, long since left behind and irrelevant to both the fi fth- and fourth-century tragedies that he discusses.


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Conceivably lacking the counsel of any fi fth-century playwrights or audi-ences, Aristotle would have had no reason to conclude that all the actors of his time were doing tragedy “wrong.” On the contrary, as he tells us himself, he concluded, on the basis of what he saw “on the stage, and in the tragic competitions,” that when actors did tragedy well, they were doing it “right” (Poetics 1453a26–28).

Turning to Hanink’s fi rst point, we proceed to the matter of my alleged exaggeration of Euripides’s unpopularity in the fi fth century. Hanink writes: “One of the key premises underlying Wise’s argument is that fourth-century audiences received Euripidean tragedy far more warmly than had Euripides’ contemporaries” (2011.313). In fact, my discussion of Euripides is concerned solely with his record of victories in the tragic contests and with the (universally accepted) fact that, judged by his num-ber of fi rst-place prizes, he was the least successful of the fi fth-century tragedians whose work is known to us today.29 That this was my intent is stated plainly: “Compared with the sensational success of Aeschylus, who won fi rst prize thirteen times of the nineteen he competed, and Sophocles, who won at least twenty victories (and never placed third), Euripides won a paltry four times in his life” (2008.383).30 My purpose in mentioning this fact was to invite readers to compare it with Aristotle’s discussion of Euripides in Poetics; my purpose was not, as Hanink suggests, to pres-ent Euripides as unpopular with fi fth-century audiences in any absolute sense. I noted Euripides’ poor fi fth-century record of victories relative to Aeschylus and Sophocles for the sole purpose of teasing out the oddness of Aristotle’s decision to defend Euripides’ sad-ending strategy on the basis of its success in competition (Poetics 1453a23–28).31

As I tried to show, Aristotle uses an argumentative sleight-of-hand to equate “the tragic” with sad endings (even while acknowledging that some of the best tragedies actually end well).32 It occurs in his statement

29 As Roselli notes (2005.1), Euripides was both the least winningest of the three great fi fth-century tragic poets and “wildly popular.” Wright 2009.149–50 discusses the existence of an “anti-prize” mentality and emphasizes the disjunction between the number of prizes a poet won and how warmly his work was received.

30 Again at the end of the paragraph (2008.383), I specify that I am “judging” the suc-cess of Euripides’ plays in competition only “by the number of times they were awarded first prize.”

31 The oddness of his argument is especially glaring since, as Hanink notes (2011.319–20), Aristotle was surely aware of Euripides’ record of victories in the fi fth century.

32 At 1453b27–54a10, he lists all the possible types of tragic plots: the murder is either com-mitted or averted, in knowledge or in ignorance. Of the (less good, less tragic) type of



that though critics disagree with him and say that tragedies should not end sadly (as they often do, for example, in Euripides), sad-ending tragedies are actually the “right” or “correct” kind of tragedy to write, the “most truly tragic” kind of tragedies. Why? Because, says Aristotle, these plays prove their superior tragic-ness “on the stage, and in the tragic competitions” (1453a23–28). As a way of unpacking this rationale, I chose in my article to focus on its second half, “in the tragic competitions,” because victories in tragic competition are objectively quantifi able. Since we know for a fact that Euripides rarely did succeed “in the tragic competitions” with his sad-ending strategy in the fi fth century, then it simply does not follow, as Aristotle says, that the strategy’s effectiveness is proved in competition—unless, of course, as I propose, he was really thinking of the fourth-century contests, during which, if the didaskalic record of 341–39 is any indica-tion, Euripides’ record was impressive indeed. Over a three-year period, his plays beat out those of his Old Tragedy rivals for selection by starring actors three years in a row, a success rate of 100 percent.33

But even leaving Euripides’ success rate out of it and concentrat-ing instead on the fi rst half of the rationale, we arrive at the same result: Aristotle is basing his preference for sad endings not on the play texts, nor on what the critics say is appropriate for tragedy, but on how effective the plays are “on the stage.” The “right” tragic, Aristotle says, is what is “seen to be the most truly tragic” “on the stage.” Tautologies like this—true trag-edy is what is most truly tragic—are errors in reasoning. But the rationale is no less revelatory for its fallacious logic. It shows that when justifying his bias toward sad-ending plays, the philosopher is thinking of his own experience as a spectator of tragedy as “seen” “on the stage.” Euripides’ improved fortunes in fourth-century contests, therefore, demonstrable as it is, is not “one of the key premises” of my argument (Hanink 2011.313). A look at Euripides’ comparatively few victories in the fi fth century was just a convenient way of showing how surprisingly stage-centric Aristo-tle’s preference for sad endings really is.

This brings us to Hanink’s fourth point. Given Aristotle’s access to perhaps the entire corpus of fi fth-century tragedies, Hanink doubts that

plot in which the murder is averted, he praises Cresphontes, Iphigenia, and Helle as “the best” of this (not “truly tragic”) kind.

33 Snell 1971.13–14. James Butrica interprets the record as saying that these Euripid-ean plays “won” against others (2001.197); Revermann thinks it can’t be known whether they competed or were just exhibited (2006.21). Euripides’ improved success rate in the contests of the fourth century is attested either way, however: either he won three years in a row or was chosen for exhibition three years in a row.


144 Jennifer Wise

he could have been misled by the way in which fourth-century actors per-formed them. After surveying some of the evidence that Aristotle would have had to hand, Hanink concludes that (321)

It is thus hardly the case that it was merely “on the basis of watching single acts of fi fth-century tragedies out of con-text” that Aristotle produced the Poetics (Wise 2008.42). Rather, the Poetics would have been composed upon the fi rm foundations of Aristotle’s own access to the tragic texts and exposure to new performances and reperfor-mances at both the Great Dionysia and elsewhere.

I do not in fact say or imply anywhere that it was “merely” on the basis of fourth-century performances that Aristotle wrote the Poetics. The point I make is rather that these performances evidently played a very signifi cant role in shaping Aristotle’s ideas about tragedy, since, by his own admission, stage effectiveness was the touchstone whereby he judged what was “most truly tragic.” Though he acknowledges the existence, excellence, and even the critically approved normalcy of happy-ending tragedies, he nevertheless departs from the norm and equates “true” tragedy with sad-ending plays. That he adduces their effectiveness “on the stage” as “the best proof” of their superior tragic-ness should be enough to persuade us of the need to give due weight to his experience of tragedy as performed “on the stage.” For where else does a man get his ideas of stage effective-ness if not from the stage? No matter how “fi rm” his knowledge of or exhaustive his access to the body of fi fth-century tragic texts, Aristotle all but tells us outright that he did not derive his sad-ending theory of trag-edy from texts of any kind. When explaining why sad endings are more “truly tragic” than happy endings, he refers us to the impression that actors make with these plays “on the stage.” As he says, plays with miserable endings reveal themselves to be “the right” kind of tragedy when they’re performed well: “on the stage, and in the tragic competitions, such plays, properly worked out, are seen to be the most truly tragic” (1453a23–28). His bias toward sad-ending tragedies is thus based not on poetic texts but on theatrical performances.

Furthermore, as we learn from the reception of Chekhov’s plays over the course of a century, stage performances, especially highly effec-tive and moving ones, come to inform people’s subsequent reading expe-rience. For decades after Stanislavski’s histrionic tour de force, even



readers of Chekhov experienced The Cherry Orchard as a weeper.34 This is because the “horizon of expectations” of which I spoke above affects readers no less powerfully than theatre goers (Jauss’s insights were fi rst developed in connection with readers’ responses to literary texts). Hav-ing spent his entire theatre-going life seeing fi fth-century plays on stage only in the non-satyric, apoliticized, and protagonist-centred versions pre-sented by famous actors, Aristotle is very likely to have had his “horizon of expectations” shaped by these performances and by his fellow specta-tors’ reactions to them. In fact, it’s almost inconceivable that the best and most deeply affecting performances of tragedy that he’d witnessed in the theatre would not have shaped, even if unconsciously, his basic ideas of what tragedy is supposed to be.

As Hanink acknowledges, Aristotle’s theatre history researches were characteristic of his own time, not the fi fth century (2011.320–21). The relative novelty of this kind of “retrospective” scholarship could well mean that he inherited a theatrical record consisting of little more than lists of names and dates of victories.35 Crucial questions about perfor-mance practices are obviously left unanswered by such lists.36 Indeed, what Aristotle says about the paucity of evidence for early comedy applies to the issue of audience reception generally: for most of theatre history, it wasn’t taken seriously enough as a scholarly subject for anyone to write about.37 Thus even the most defi ning facts about the reception of tragedy in the fi fth century, such as whether the audience expected to be carried away by joy or by sadness at the end, could well have been unknown to Aristotle in the fourth.

As the annals of theatre history prove, a century can open an unbridgeable chasm between performance traditions. Less than a century

34 Even by experts, the play continued to be read as a tragedy for about eighty years, for example Hornby 1986.60. See Senelick 1997 for a complete history of the play’s recep-tion, esp. 67–71.

35 See Scullion 2002 for the issues connected with fi fth-century victors’ lists and Wright 2009.138–77 for the inordinate obsession in all periods with prizes and number of victories.

36 As Revermann 2006.167 and Hughes 2012.206 remind us, even highly detailed historical records are surprisingly mute about the things we most want to know, such as performance practices and audience reception.

37 For gaps in the history of comedy, Poetics 1449a37; for the boom, over the last fi fteen years, in interest in issues of “reception,” see Gildenhard and Revermann 2010.1 and Rev-ermann 2006.9ff. Roselli 2011 goes a long way toward rectifying the traditional scholarly neglect of the subject of audience response.


146 Jennifer Wise

separates Shakespeare from the Restoration, for example, but when his plays were revived after 1660, they were staged in a way that would have been unrecognizable to Shakespeare’s own audiences, with female actors in the women’s parts, French neo-classical “improvements” to the verse, and Italian-style opera choruses.38 About a century separates the life-times of Goethe and Elvis Presley, but we’d be making a big mistake if we assumed that the performance practices and audience expectations of Goethe’s time were known to contemporaries of Elvis Presley—even to those contemporaries who were experts in theatre, such as Orson Welles, Neil Simon, or Bertolt Brecht. Hanink thinks that Aristotle’s access to fi fth-century texts and knowledge of the fourth-century theatre would have prevented him from making any fundamental errors, but there are some fundamental things about which Aristotle conceivably had no reliable information at all: 1) how the poets and amateur actors of the fi fth century had originally interpreted the roles that he was used to seeing in the hands of famous, full-time professionals; 2) the effect that the concluding satyr play had on everyone’s experience of tragedy during the fi fth century—performers and spectators alike; 3) all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which the immediate political context for tragic performance in the fi fth century differed from the context in which he viewed it in the fourth; and 4) the specifi c ways in which the nature of the Old Tragedy event as an actor’s (rather than a poet’s) art had changed people’s horizon of expecta-tions when approaching, viewing, and judging tragic performances—and responding to their endings.

Hanink’s remaining point concerns her reluctance to accept the consequences of the fact that in the fi fth century, unlike in the fourth, trag-edies at the City Dionysia appear always to have been funded, rehearsed, performed, and judged as four-part affairs. In challenging my conclusion that this can only mean that all fi fth-century (City Dionysia) tragedies were tetralogies, she cites various pieces of evidence that could be taken to sug-gest, on the contrary, that even in the fi fth century, the individual acts of tragic tetralogies were viewed as separate, stand-alone works (2011.318–19). As quickly becomes apparent, however, Hanink’s arguments all hinge on her particular understanding and use of the word “viewed.” Whereas she uses the word metaphorically to mean “considered, talked of, notated,

38 See, for example, William Davenant’s Macbeth (1674) and other standard acting versions of Shakespeare during the Restoration: Spencer 1965.



mentally conceived,” I use it literally to mean “actually seen by people sitting in a theatre.” She writes

(319; my emphasis):Contrary to Wise’s arguments, it was not standard for any given three-plus-one slate of plays to be viewed as a tetralogy. When, moreover, it comes to the three great tragedians, it is only in the case of Aeschylus that we have evidence for the composition of true tetralogies, that is, of groups of plays connected not just by a general theme but by the sustained development of a more or less single plot.

One can see from Hanink’s criteria for “true” unity—i.e., thematic and narrative (rather than spatial and temporal) continuity—that on the sub-ject of tragic tetralogies, we are simply talking about different things: I’m talking about what spectators saw in the theatre, Hanink about how read-ers might write or talk about tragic texts. That a fi ctional Dionysus, sitting in a boat with a book entitled Andromeda, might use this title to describe what he’s reading is hardly surprising, but it does nothing to alter the fact that when Andromeda was fi rst performed in competition at the City Dio-nysia, spectators experienced it as but a piece of a much larger work, the four-part entry submitted by Euripides to the contest that year. Similarly, that on victors’ lists each of the four parts of a tragedy was inscribed with its own title does nothing to change the fact, so justly pointed out by Mark Griffi th (2002), that they took their places on the list in the fi rst instance not as winning plays in their own right but as a quarter of the tragic per-formance that won (or didn’t win) fi rst prize. Regardless, even, of whether the poets invented or, in rehearsal, used these subtitles themselves, when it came to performance in competition, the spectators judged and therefore “viewed” each contest entry as a tetralogy.

As for Hanink’s insistence that trilogies like the Oresteia were, in any case, the exception rather than the rule, the non-survival of any trilogy except the Oresteia makes it impossible to say much of anything about what was or was not typical of trilogies. More to the point, however, is that the way in which the four parts of a tragic composition related to one another narratively and thematically is actually a separate (literary) issue that does not really bear upon the theatrical fact that, during the fi fth cen-tury at the City Dionysia, tragedies were performed and therefore viewed by spectators as four-part affairs.


148 Jennifer Wise

The fi nal part of Hanink’s article is devoted to proposing a dif-ferent explanation than the one I offer for Aristotle’s most striking omis-sions in Poetics: the absence from his account of tragedy of its Athenian, civic, Dionysian, and celebratory aspects. I attribute the gloomy, depoliti-cized image of tragedy that we fi nd in Aristotle to the appearance of a new member of the “theatrical cast of Athens,”39 the full-time professional actor (2008.398). Hanink thinks that Aristotle’s universalizing of tragedy is more likely to have been shaped by, and in turn refl ects, tragedy’s “status, already in this period, as the city’s most successful cultural export” (2011.322).

While it is true that tragedy was a successful cultural export of the Athenians in Aristotle’s time, the problem with Hanink’s proposal is that tragedy always was a successful cultural export of the Athenians. Far from being a development that was specifi c or new to “this period,” the fourth century, as Hanink’s hypothesis would require, the export of Athenian tragedy was, on the contrary, one of its defi ning characteristics from the start. As Oliver Taplin points out, evidence for the export of Athenian tragedy predates even our earliest surviving play (1993.2). Eric Csapo makes the same point with great quantities of evidence (2010.83–107), counting four “certain” venues for staging plays outside Athens by about 420 and another four that are “probable” (2010.102). Athenian trag-edy was exported to Sicily with Aeschylus in the fi rst quarter of the fi fth century, to other locales in Italy through the middle of the century, and to Macedon with Euripides and Agathon toward the end (Taplin 1993.2–3). Taplin considers the very early date by which Athenian tragedy acquired its status as a successful cultural export to be but the logical consequence of its performance at Athens for tourists and foreigners (3–5). For these visitors to Athens, as for the patrons who invited Athenian playwrights back to their foreign courts—to say nothing of the Athenians themselves, who throughout the fi fth century performed in tragedies with concluding satyr plays and watched their friends and relatives do the same—tragedy’s intimate connection with the Athenian polis and its Dionysian celebrations would have been obvious.

Indeed, if patterns in early modern theatre history are any guide, tragedy’s cultural prestige abroad existed because of its specifi cally Athe-nian character, not despite or in opposition to it. For example, the fi rst international exports of commedia dell’arte occurred within a year of the founding of Il Gelosi—that is, “from [the] very inception” of the genre

39 The title of Edith Hall’s 2006 book.



itself (Henke 2008.19). The Gelosi troupe, the Aeschylus of commedia dell’arte, was the fi rst great exponent of a type of theatrical performance that was still relatively new.40 The troupe was founded and fi rst performed in Italy in 1568. Within the year, it had played in cities as far fl ung as Linz and Prague; by 1576, eight years later, Il Gelosi had successfully exported commedia dell’arte to Paris, Vienna, Munich, Spain, and Antwerp (Henke 2008.26–27). Yet despite its almost instantaneous transformation into an export commodity, commedia dell’arte lost none of its local and wholly Italian characteristics: regardless of where or for whom they played, com-media actors performed in Italian, staged the same Italian plots and charac-ters as they did at home, and used precisely the same Neapolitan, Venetian, and Bergamese dialects, masks, and costumes that had made this form of theatre so famous and beloved in the fi rst place.41

Athenian tragedy seems likewise to have been exported to foreign courts and cities without any diminution of its local characteristics. Judging from the politically allusive, chorally elaborate, satyr-infl ected way in which tragedy was written and performed in Athens throughout the fi fth century, the genre’s concurrent status as a successful cultural export seems not to have had any de-politicizing or de-Atticizing effect.42 The reason for this may lie in the very nature of cultural exports: the more famous Athenian drama became in cities far and wide, the prouder its practitioners would have been of the specifi cally Athenian qualities that had given their prod-ucts such cachet. Likewise from the point of view of the cultural import-ers: when twentieth-century Parisians, Muscovites, and Berliners wanted American jazz, jeans, Coke, movies, and rock-and-roll, they wanted “the real thing,” with all of its political meanings and authentic materials, not some de-Americanized, universalized knock-off.43

40 According to Henke 2008.19–20, the fi rst written evidence of commedia dell’arte dates to the 1540s.

41 Other examples abound. In nearly all pre-industrial periods during which perform-ers were limited to the transportation technologies of the Athenians (foot, horse, cart, and sailing ship), new forms of theatre, including Italian opera, English sentimental comedy, German Sturm und Drang, and Parisian melodrama, became international sensations within as little as one year. For the last of these, see Wise 2012.

42 The same appears to have been the case with Old Comedy: despite its export far beyond its point of origin, even the latest example of the genre, Frogs, is still as politi-cally allusive, locally topical, and, essentially, as Athenian as ever; see Taplin 1993.3–5, 48, Slater 2002, and Revermann 2006.

43 As Quebecois playwright Michel Tremblay noted in 2000, it is precisely their accuracy to specifi c locales that gives plays their truth value: http://www.iti-worldwide.org/theatredaymessage_list.html (accessed December 14, 2011).


150 Jennifer Wise

And yet, after nearly a century of successful export without any apparent change to its basic performance practices, Athenian tragedy underwent a seismic shift in 386.44 First at the City Dionysia and later elsewhere45 excerpts from Old Tragedy classics began to be performed in a non-satyric, minimally choral, and purely histrionic way—“purely his-trionic” in the sense that these excerpts, chosen and staged by actors, were now removed from their original literary and political contexts. Hanink’s cultural export theory does not fi t well enough with the known chronol-ogy to explain this shift, but as Paola Ceccarelli puts it, the “considerable changes in [the] production” of tragedy after the fi fth century do line up with “the rise of professional actors” (2010.105).46

Aristotle himself saw the advent of experts in tragic acting as a signifi cant feature of his time. In the fi rst chapter of Book 3 of Rhetoric, he mentions two ways in which tragedy was “now” different than before. One was its shift from a “poetical” to a colloquial diction: “The language of tragedy,” he says, used to be “decorated” by “poetical” words, but it has “dropped” that style altogether and “given up all words not used in ordinary talk” (1404a29–33). The other change was the emergence of tragic acting as a distinct and requisite component of tragic production. Whereas skill in acting scarcely counted in the past, and poets used to win tragic com-petitions without even thinking about it, expertise in “matters of delivery” had become an absolute requirement (1403b32–34): “It is those who do bear them in mind who usually win prizes in the dramatic contests . . . in drama, the actors now count for more than the poets.” About the expertise of such specialists in delivery, Aristotle says that “it was a long time before it found its way into the arts of tragic drama” at all (1403b22–23). This is because, in the past, “the poets acted their tragedies themselves” (1403b23–24). In other words, so long as the poets were performing their own plays, acting as a distinct art form hardly existed; now it was what won awards.

Aristotle’s sense that the rise of acting specialists was a feature specifi c to his time (“now”) is also suggested by Plato’s Ion.47 When Plato

44 See Ceccarelli 2010.113, esp. n. 43, for a discussion, with bibliography, of the evidence for the reperformance of Old Tragedy from 386; also Easterling 1993.562 and 1997c.

45 Ceccarelli 2010, Nervegna 2007, Easterling 1997a, and Hall 2007.46 Ceccarelli 2010.105 writes that these changes were “linked, not least, to the rise

of professional actors,” reminding us that there were surely other causes as well, among them, presumably, the same political changes at Athens after the loss of the Peloponnesian War that caused the shift from Old to New Comedy.

47 Woodruff 1983.5 puts the dialogue’s probable composition date before 390 and its dramatic date before 412, which would make it a picture of the performing professions



depicts Socrates interrogating an expert in matters of delivery about the nature of the performer’s art, it is still to the older member of the theatri-cal cast of Athens, the rhapsode, that he turns. That is, even at the end of the fi fth century, a rhapsode like Ion was still seen as the “working profes-sional,” the specialist in matters of performance and delivery, the one for whom dramatic performance was a “trade.”48 This was probably because during most of the fi fth century, as Csapo notes, actors still came from a handful of “well-to-do families” (2010.88); they were not yet professional performers. In the fi fth century, in Niall Slater’s words, acting “was not yet a way of making a living: there simply were not enough performance opportunities” for actors to sustain full-time careers (2002.29). By the mid-fourth century, all this had changed.49 Aristotle writes about an actor like Theodoros exactly as Plato had previously written about a rhapsode like Ion: as a full-time professional, a specialist in his own distinct art form, competing and winning prizes against other like-minded profes-sionals, and pursuing a (potentially) remunerative career.50 In the days of histrionic amateurism,51 the tragedian’s job was a civic one, “to delight” the city with a propitious “gift”;52 the job of the fourth-century actor was to make the spectators cry.

With the advent of full-time performance specialists such as The-odoros and Polos, tragedy would inevitably have changed to some degree from a good civic augury into the kind of protagonistic monology of indi-vidual suffering that we see refl ected in Poetics and in the didaskalic record of 341–39. And whether we look to Aulus Gellius’s story about Polos’s urn in Electra, or to Stanislavski’s sobbing exit in The Cherry Orchard, we see that the actor’s special skill, his professional technique, is precisely what Aristotle recommends to the tragic poet in Poetics: to sympathetically feel,

during the generation prior to Aristotle’s.48 See Woodruff 1983.5ff. for the signifi cance of Plato’s repeated use of technê to

talk about Ion’s job. 49 Duncan 2005.63 dates the rise of the full-time professional actor to the fourth cen-

tury, Csapo 2010.83–116 and Hall 2006.30, 298 to the end of the fi fth.50 Rhetoric 3.2 and Politics 7.17, 1336b13–14; Ion 530b–d, 535e, 537e, 538b, 539e,

541c.51 Fifth-century actors and poets were paid (Csapo 2010.88–89). By amateurism I

mean that their participation in drama was unrelated to their livelihood and could therefore be part-time or seasonal.

52 See Hanink on the economy of charis and timê with which all three tragedians were associated both vis-à-vis Athens and other places. She quotes the hypothesis for Oedipus at Colonus that conceives of the play as a “favour” given by Sophocles to the Athenians, a gift intended “to delight” the city: 2010.60.


152 Jennifer Wise

oneself, the painful emotions of the leading characters (1455a29–b). Polos sympathized with the grief of a mourning princess; Stanislavski emotion-ally identifi ed with the sorrows of a bankrupt nobleman. Underlying this job of sympathetic identifi cation—of feeling what others feel—is an ethi-cal assumption about the universal equivalence and interchangeability of all human feeling, and Aristotle’s theory of tragedy is based on the same assumption: we pity the character and fear for ourselves. Inspired, perhaps, by the feats of sympathetic identifi cation carried out by the virtuoso actors of the fourth century, Aristotle concluded that all human beings will react identically to Oedipus’s fate and that this emotional reaction will be iden-tical to Oedipus’s own: as he suffers, so suffer we—all of us, regardless of whether we ourselves are aristocrats or servants, Athenians or Persians. In my earlier paper, I argue that the rise of the fourth-century actor was a “catastrophe for our understanding of fi fth-century tragedy” (2008.384), and I maintain that this is true (with allowances for some degree of strate-gic hyperbole), but it’s worth adding that it was a very good thing for the theatre—and our humanity. The actors of Aristotle’s time may have given us a distorted picture of Old Tragedy, but they also developed a technê that has been teaching the rest of us ever since how to sympathize with the suffering and mourn the destruction of others—including our enemies.

University of Victoria

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aristotle, actors, and tragic endings: a counter-response to johanna

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