PROLEGOMENON TO THE STUDY OF

DRAMATIC AND THEATRICAL THEORY

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Centre for Study of Drama

in the University of Toronto.

Q Copyright by Jennifer Wise, 1995.

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Abstract of the

Doctoral Dissertation PROLEGOMENON TO THE STUDY OF DRAMATIC AND THEATRICAL THEORY

by Jennifer Wise

Graduate Centre for Study of Drama University of Toronto

1995

Modern dramatic theory has alternated between extremes in its

attempts to locate theatre within literature. Either theatre has been viewed

as a pre-literate, ritualistic phenomenon which writing can only compromise,

or it has been seen as essentially "textual," with even physical performance

subsumable under the aegis of textuality. At the heart of this dispute lies the

question of the relationship between writing and theatre, a relationship

which must be clarified as a prerequisite for any coherent theory of drama.

The solution proposed by this work is to return to the historical context

in which Western theatre emerged out of epic recitation. A comparison

between the performance style of oral epic and that of the newly emergent

art of the theatre will show the extent to which drama was influenced by the

literate technologies which were unknown to Homer yet well-attested for the

age of Aeschylus.

This dissertation proceeds through detailed analysis of such literate

practices as the use of the alphabet, the use of texts in education, the public

inscription of laws, the sending and receiving of letters, the use of coins, the

inscribing of ostraka, and the making of lists. Concurrently, the innovations

in performative storytelling represented by theatre are explored, and their

indebtedness to the technology of writing is evaluated.

It is found that writing enabled and encouraged the emergence of a

new kind of performance. Stories once only heard became visible; stories once

delivered monologically by a bard were atomised into discrete representing

units (actors); performers became non-specialists, and poets became

interrogators of myth rather than its divine repositories. However, although

writing helped to create dramatic form, textuality was never an end in itself,

but remained always in the service in an oral process of bodily performance

which can neither be described according to textual models nor completely

controlled by them.

Theatrical form is one of writing's great products, but also one of its

most effective critics.

Introduction: I .

The Theoretical Context

Concepts, just like individuals ... harbour a kind of homesickness for the place of their birth.

Kierkegaard

I f a newcomer to the theory of drama wished to be quickly acquainted

with the main outlines of twentieth century thought, he or she might accomphh

this with the acquisition of a certain two books. These two works of dramatic

theory were written by the same author, one seventeen years after the other.

They are not necessarily the most obvious choices, and will probably not be found

on every theorist's bookshelf; but placed side by side they make an accurate map

of the course dramatic theory has charted in our time.

I am thinking of David Cole's The Weatzical Event, of 1975, and his

Acting as Reading of 1992. As Cole himself is aware, these two works make

mutually exclusive claims about what theatre is. The first of them, written a t the

height of the anti-text fever that swept both theory and practice mid-way

through this century, locates theatre "within a pre-literate problematic of tribal

ritual," and focuses on shamanism and possession experience (1992:76). The

second, published two years ago, "presents acting not merely within the

framework of literacy and textuality but as, in its inmost essence, a mode of

engagement with texts" (76). Although Cole makes a halfhearted attempt to

explain away this about-face, his vague tropes about water, depths, oceans and

travels cannot hlde the fact that he has, in the space of seventeen years, reversed

his position on the relation of writing to theatre.

3

Cole's work does not really deserve to be made into a symptom of our

times. But there is no denying that his shift of allegiance from ritual to text is an

accurate reflection of larger theoretical trends. His bibliographies tell the story of

twentieth century dramatic theory a t a glance. In the seventies, readings on

comparative religion, comparative anthropology, and comparative psychology

encouraged theorists of drama to see theatre in comparative terms. Western

theatre was "like" shamanism, "like" Haitian voodoo, "like" Tibetan mysticism,

Ethiopian religion, Songhay magic; t heat r i d performance was hke religious

possession, like ritual healing, lrke psychopathology. By the nineteen-nineties,

however, Cole's readings in Derrida, Poulet, Iser, Barthes, Jameson, Dante and

Ong had apparently reglamorized the Western tradition as a source for

theatrical theory. The true essence of theatre no longer had to be sought in

''primitive" non-western practices, and the shaman was abandoned in favour of

the literary theorist. And so in Cole's more recent book, we find that the essence

of theatre is now t'readerly:" acting is reading, being an audience is being read to,

and the stage is a site of performance texts, inscriptions and reader-responses.

The incompatibility of these two versions of the essence of theatre is obvious. In

the first case, theatre is a pre-literary, religious ritual; in the second case, its

origins and essence are both indissolubly dependent on the existence of writing

and literacy.

Looking again a t Cole's bibliography for The Theatrical Event, we find,

tellingly, readings in Hegel and Jane Ellen Harrison, both of whom were

influential in shaping the anti-text sentiments of this century. In fact, Hegel was

4

one of the earliest aestheticians to take an explicit stand against writing in the

theatre. In his Aesthetics, Hegel argued that drama, being an embodiment of

action, comes into contradiction with itself when read.' Hegel saw the theatre's

only hope in a ban on reading: dramatic texts, to be true to themselves, should be

enacted, seen in action, and not read at all (except by actors, and, evidently, by

Hegelian philosophers). The irnpracticahty, to say nothing of the elitism, of

Hegel's solution can be let pass. However, Hegel's odd pronouncement on theatre

did succeed in bringing into awareness one of the fimdamental issues of

theatrical theory, an issue that had never before been formulated in so radical a

form. Aristotle, for example, seems to take for granted that plays are written,

and that they are intended for performance, but he doesn't explore the

theoretical implications of this bi-medial situation. Interested primarily in the

plot, Aristotle doesn't appear to see the medium as affecting the message in any

way. A plot heard is the same as a plot seen. If we know better today, and I think

we do, we might credit Hegel with making the theatre's textuality into the

'Drama is concerned to depict an action in all the reality of its actual presence' and 'would fall into contradiction with itself if it were forced to remain limited to the means which poetry, simply as such, is in a position to offer" (trans. T.M. Knon, 1971:30). Hegel continues: 'Nay, for myself , I go to the length of maintaining that no dramatic work ought to be printed' (35).

5

problem it has since remained? Regardless of how it has been solved, the

problem of writing and its relation to performance, once revealed, could no longer

be swept under the rug, and soon came to occupy the energies of theatre theorists

of all kinds, emerging in this century as perhaps the issue for theory and practice

alike.

What Aristotle skipped lightly over, and Hegel pointed out, semioticians

and phenomenologists have problematized even further. The closer we looked at

them in theory, the more dissimilar texts and performances appeared. In terms

of their sign systems, their phenomena, their temporal structures; in terms of the

perceptual apparatus they activate and the social contexts which ground them in

practice, texts and performances are incommensurable objects when it comes to

theoretical ana ly~is .~ And so, the question Hegel left us remains: what is the

relation between writing and the stage?

The history of theatrical theory is of course strongly marked by the debate about the relative merits of the performance over the reading of plays. Castelvetro was perhaps the first to contradict Aristotle explicitly and stress the primacy of performance. 'Aristotle is of the opinion that the delight to be obtained from reading a tragedy is as great as that to be obtained from a performance of it; this E aver to be false." (Poetica d'Aristotle vuIgarizzeta e sposta. Basel, 1576:297. Translated and cited by Marvin Carlson, 1984). Lessing has a special place in this history, thanks to his rigorous semiotic analysis of the limits of literary versus plastic media. For Lessing, the materiality of the theatrical sign puts limitations upon it from which literary representations are relatively free (see esp. 1984:88). And later Hazlitt, equally sensitive to the phenomenal differences between text and performance, argued for the supremacy of the text: 'The representing of the finest of [Shakespeare's plays] on the stage, even by the finest actors, is, we apprehend, an abuse of the genius of the poet, and even in those of a second-rate cIass, the quantity of sentiment and imagery greatly outweighs the immediate impression of the situation and s t o w (1930-34, Vo1.V. 221-22). But Hegel made textuality into an explicit theoretical problem in a way which most closely anticipates the anti-text trends of our time.

As Pavis describes the inmrnmensurability of text and performance, 'linguistic arbitrariness and stage iconicity cannot be reconcded or mutualIy cancelled out by a common systemn (1982: 143).

6

If theorists such as Artaud (1958) and the early Cole reached the same

conclusion as Hegel did-that texts are alien to theatrical performance-it is not

because they were necessarily following hLs example. Between Hegel and the

anti-text enthusiasts of this century, intellectual developments elsewhere in the

Humanities had the effect of providing theatre theorists with a ready-made

solution to the problem of the dramatic text. This solution was the "ritualist

hypothesis," and its emergence, whilst tied to a number of thinkers, is most

intimately connected with the career of Jane Ellen Harrison.

Harrison was student of religion; but her ideas about myth and ritual

were adopted wholesale into theatre studies, where they have remained in some

quarters to this day. For Harrison, as for her precursors Frazer and Freud and F.

Max Miiller, the stories we tell each other are not what they appear to be.

Beneath the visible surface of myth lies a truer, more primal and deeply human

reality. For Hamson, all our mythological "sayings" are really "doings" in

disguise. Myths are "really" attempts to explain religious rituals no longer

recognized as such. Extending her views about religion into a n area about which

she knew very little, Harrison put forward the view that the myths of the ancient

theatre, too, were rituals in disguise. Harrison wrote that "for Greece at least,

only in orgiastic religion did drama take its rise" (199 1:568 [orig. pub. 19031).

Like that of Nietuche, which it resembles in some ways, Harrison's theory

of drama only pretended to be an historical account of the emergence of the

genre. As Brian Vickers (1973), M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern (1981), Keith May

(1990), Robert Ackerman (199 I), Robert Fowler (199 1)

(199 1) have shown, Harrison and Nietzsche were equally

7

and Renate Schlesier

gdty of distortions of

the historical evidence. Nietzsche, for his part, came eventually out from under

Wagner's influence and abandoned his Dionysian polemics, finally admitting the

"heresy" that "the Athenians went to the theatre in order to bear b e a u t .

speeded' (cited by Ober and Strauss, 1990:259). Harrison, however, never did

test her hypothesis against the historical evidence for drama's emergence. But

thanks to her own intellectual dynamism, the ritual hypothesis was taken up

with gusto by her acolytes Cornford and Murray, by whom it was spread far and

wide.

By classicists who have since examined the evidence, however, the ritual

hypothesis was found to be "crude and unworkable" and ultimately simply "false"

(Kuk, 19'74-85248 and 223. See also Kirk, 1970)."ut as Ackerman noted as

recently as 1991, the "news" of the discrediting of the ritualists has somehow

failed to reach the ears of their followers (189). Indeed, some theorists of drama

today are still repeating the idea that theatre arose from ritual as d it were self-

evident.

4 Brian Vickers (1973) devotes a useful chapter to the 'picturesque and attractive theory' built by the ritualists 'on no historical basis' (38). Surveying the 'modem scholarship ...[ which has] demotished the flimsy and inconsistent evidence" presented by Harrison et al. (33ff), Vickers concludes that 'this whole complex of false ideas, so widely disseminated, must finally be abandoned ... because there is no actual evidence for any of its assumptionsw (42).

8

Harrison was, by her own admission, interested neither in art nor in

theatre (Peacock, 199 1: 173). She was similarly unapologetic about what she

called her "dishke for history" (Schlesier, 201). Her intellectual motives were

simply to reveal the superficiality of rationalist accounts of religion, and in this

she succeeded. By refocussing attention away from the Olympian heights and

onto the orgiastic rites practiced in the valleys below, she put the study of

ancient religion in her debt (see Fowler, 1991:79). Scholars have come

increasingly to see how right she was about ancient religion: that it was not a

matter of doctrine or rational moral codes, but mainly the observance of concrete

rites and symbolic actions based on "fear and deprecation1' (Harrison, 1991:7).

Nevertheless, her efforts to unearth smilarly irrational roots for theatrical

practice were misplaced. L a d g any concrete historical evidence, her followers

have been accused of fabricating proto-theatrical r i t d s which didn't exist (see

Taplin, 1978: 16 1, 19 1, n.3; Pickard-Cambridge, 1927: 16).

Despite its fictionality, the idea that drama was originally the worship of

a polyonymous "Year-Spirit" caught on. Certainly it was a much more exciting

theory than could be produced by such plodding philologists as Taplin and

Pickard-Cambridge. According to Ackerman (1991), the social connections of

Gilbert Murray had something to do with the theory's immunity to sound

historical scholarship: because he knew the editor personally, Murray was able to

get the ritual hypothesis into the Encydopaedia En%-M before it could be

subjected to any unbiased scrutiny (170). As a result, reliable demonstrations

that "drama developed out of the choral lyric" (Kirk, 1974-85:103), and not out of

9

any ritual, took a long time to penetrate the fog of public prejudice and have

even today failed to reach the non-specialist.

Murray's motives for championing the ritual theory have also been called

into question. According to Ackerman, the ancient dramatic stories smacked of

"an incredible immorality" which Murray was too squeamish to accept (171).

Rather than credit such immorality to the Greeks, he may have found it easier to

see the characters of mythology as disguised ritual embodiments. For h1.m and

for such followers as Francis Fergusson (1949), Oedipus, Orestes, Hamlet and so

on could not possibly be realistic psychological portraits, but must have

functioned rather as superficial masks for a single seasonal god of an ancient

fertility rite.

If theatre is "really" an ancient religious ritual disguised, then not only

are mythological characters just decadent later additions, but the whole

dramatic text is obscurantist, too. As Imes (1981) has shown, a similar belief in

some primal disguised origin of theatre is at work throughout the century's

avant garde, anti-textual theories and theatrical experiments. As Innes explains,

Artaud (1958), Grotowsky (1968), the Living Theatre, Barba (1990), C h a b n

(1972) and Schechner (1971, 1973, 1976, 1977) all latched on in one way or

another to the ritual hypothesis, and all concluded, in their disparate ways, that

because theatre is an essentially irrational, pre-literate phenomenon, writing can

only pervert theatre's true calling. If theatre was originally a religious rite, a

10

holy communion shared by initiates, then texts can only get in the way (Innes,

passim and esp. 257-58).

No evidence for the actual existence of such a religious ur-drama has ever

been found (Pickard-Cambridge, 1927: 189; Else, 19657; Vickers, l973:33ff). But

the hypothesis was welcomed as a panacea for all the theoretical uncertainties of

the text-performance relation. The most tangible consequences of the theatre's

enchantment with ritual were the many theatrical experiments, referred to

above and discussed by Innes, in which practitioners ended up throwing the baby

of theatre out with the bath-water of text (see also Kirby, 1969; Benamou, 1977;

Schechner, 1971, 1973, 1976, 1977; Artaud, 1958). But even among theorists who

did not take the ritual hypothesis as a licence to do away with the problem of the

text, we still see implicit obeisance to a discredited idea. Bert 0. States

introduced a 1985 study of the phenomenology of theatre with bald statements of

theatre's "probable" ritual origins (1-2), and a popular College textbook, the HBJ

Anthology of Literature (Stott, et al., 1993), introduces the drama section with a

description of Greek theatre's "pre-literate," religious, ritualistic roots (682).

With standards of scholarship so high in so many fields, it is almost beyond

comprehension that theatre studies should be so careless with its own.

This bizarre imperviousness of the ritual hypothesis to disproof has been

accounted for in many ways. Drama theorist Michael SidnelI recently suggested

that theories about the ritual origins of drama in Greece may have borrowed

credibility from "known" facts about theatre's religious origins in the Middle

Ages. However, theatre's

hypothesis. According to

11

emergence from religious rite in Europe is also a

theatre lore like the kind repeated in the HBJ

Anthology of Literatw-and by A. M. Nagler in his A Source Book in

TheatnRmI History (1952)-theatre first appeared in Europe in the Quem

Quaezitis trope of the Christian Church. The anthology calls this "a play" (683).

But it was not a play, as Michael Kobialka (1988) has shown. I t was a set of

instructions for how to perform the liturgy properly, and the monks who carried

out the ritual actions were not acting, but following the rules of their religious

order. Placed in its proper context in the Regulans Concordia, as Kobialka has

done, the Quem Quaerits tells the monks what to do in church, just as they

learn elsewhere in the same document how to shave, change their shoes, and go

to the bathroom. Theatrical form was certainly used by the Medieval Church to

popularize the contents of the holy books, but to use something is not necessady

to have invented it. Credit for invention goes to the Greeks; and if theatre

resurfaced within the context of Christian worship in Europe, the explanation for

thu may have more to do with the presence there cf literacy than of religion per

se. Literacy was also practiced in the schools of the time, and they did in fact

produce real plays. But given a choice between two madestations of drama in

the tenth century A.D.-plays written by the nun Hroswitha for performance by

her students, and a set of rules for monastic hygiene-popular theatre history

ignores our first real playwright in favour of a religious ritual with borderline

dramatic elements. I2 other words, there seems to be a general preference in the

discipline for the idea that theatre originates in religion. What is actually known

12

about ancient and Medieval drama alike is apparently unsatisfymg; the

twentieth century theorist wmts a primitive or irrational beginning for the art.

As Christopher Innes has noted, "this idealization of the primitive and the

elemental in theatre, together with the rediscovery and adapting of remote or

arch;uc models, is of course an extension of the medievahsm and orientalism of

nineteenth century romanticism" (3). But what appears to have given ritualist

notions their peculiar invulnerability in the twentieth century is that

comparative anthropology was added to the equation. Anthropologists have come

a long way since the days of Frazer and Harrison. But in the early decades of the

century, anthropologists thought nothmg of taking social practices out of their

contexts in particular societies, and accumulating catalogues full of items which

looked vaguely similar, but which in practice were completely unrelated (Kirk,

1970:4). As G. S. Kirk in his classic study of myth has shown, Harrison's and

Frazer's method was, "even by the indulgent view ... rather reprehensible-

although no one reached the point of successfully reprehending it1' (4). "The

whole idea of considering phenomena like myths and cult-practices in isolation

&om the social complex as a whole has [since] seemed, to anthropologists a t

least, time-wasting and repellent" (5). Kirk's language does not sound overly

harsh when we take a closer look at the kinds of comparative anthropology he

has in mind.

For example, anthropologists such as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz,

in analyzing cultural phenomena that are alien to them, are quick to compare

13

these practices directly to activities from their own society. Rather than

attempting to understand such phenomena from the inside, as it were, they

import criteria from their own milieux which are highly irrelevant to the society

under investigation. As David Bynum (1981) has argued, such downplaying of

cultural and historical differences has led anthropologists like Turner and Geertz

to "hail rituals as works of art" (142-63). Balinese cockfights are equated with

performances of Macbet4 Chiambu religious rituals are said to function just like

Moby Dica There is no basis for comparisons of this kind, and the cultural

arrogance implicit in them is odious. The effect of novels on literate Westerners

is an inappropriate hermeneutic device for comprehending the meaning and

effects of religion in an oral culture. The mimetic dances of the Bambuti pygmies

may have something to teach us about performance, but only if it is remembered

that social practices change meaning and function over time and especially

under the impact of l i t e ra~y .~ One cannot leap from the Mudmen to Macklin

without acknowledging what has transpired in between them. Although it is

certainly a tempting short-cut to insight, direct, a-htstorical analogizing is bound

to distort its material.

As Robert Weimann has argued in his work about the sources of Shakespearean theatre. 'anthmpologicel models' taken from pre-literate 'canoe plays' and 'jungle hunting games" are irrelevant. 'At this level of culture mimesis arises out of a comlnunity in which there is little division of labour, the 'spectators' take part in the game or join in the acting. The unity of player and audience is complete" (1978:2). In short, such models are not actually 'theatrical" in the sense intended by members of a literate culture.

14

More progress will be made in theatre research if superficial comparisons

are replaced by examinations of actual practices in their proper context. Mort

scrupulous theorists of myth and ritual such as Bynum and Kirk agree,

furthermore, that Harrison and Murray and their followers were demonstrably

wrong in their claims that ritual always underlies myth. These are simply

different types of phenomena and their relationship to one another is much more

complex than simply one of surface and depth, or cause and effect (1985252).

That myth and ritual, which tend to occur together a t festivals and other social

gatherings, are actually two different types of "social behaviour" (253) is not,

however, something that would be obvious to an anthropologist in the field. As

Kirk explains, "the ceremonial circumstances in which myths are most

conspicuously recited naturally make the deepest impression on the direct

observerf' (1970:253). So we can understand why early anthropologists had a

tendency to conflate the two and see the ritual as the crux of the event. However,

"the great majority of Greek myths were developed without any special attention

to ritual" (1985:253), and "[Greek] rituals do not seem to generate myths except

in rare and exceptional cases" (236). In fact, as Kirk has discovered through

detailed cross-cultural analysis, most myths worldwide have no particular ritual

connection whatever (1970:19). Sometimes existing myths are used to build up

the aetiology of a specific cult, and sometimes myths are invented to explain an

ancient cult practice, but such direct connections between myth and ritual are

rare (16, 18-19; also 1985:223-53). And even where it does exist, "the relation

between myth and ritual ... is not a simple matter of cause and effect in either

direction" (1985:252) .

15

As Bynum (1981) explains, rituals are activities communities use to

symbolically mark their social customs, like marriage; myths are the stories that

people tell each other and do not necessarily have any particular ritual content

at all. (Myths about sexual unions say nothing about how people celebrate

marriage rites, or even whether they do.) Whereas rituals are by nature local,

changeable and in some cases superficial, it is rather in the telling of stories

about experience than humans reveal somethmg of their ultimate and often

universalizable aspirations. According to Bynum, there are any number of

different ritual methods of getting married, or being initiated into adulthood, or

buried, or born into the community. These rituals, whch vary born place to place

and epoch to epoch, reveal almost nothing about the myths which coexist

alongside them-myths about the creation of the world, relations between men

and animals, between meu and women, between people and nature or the

supernatural, etc. One community might ritually mark the birth of girls by a

religiously sanctioned excision of their genitals; another might shower the

mother in small pink g&s and force her to wear a hat made out of the ribbons

from the wrapping-paper. These rituals reflect local social conditions and values

and do not usually produce myths, although they may well provide opportunities

for enjoying those that already exists6 As Kirk points out, the natives of the

Northwest Pacific practice the potlatch as one of their central rituals, yet have

One may perfcrm a play in honour o l e wedding, as the actors do in Mdaummer Night's Dmtm, or attend a performance of The Nutcracker during the Christmas holidays, as we do today, or go to the theatre during the Festival of Dionysos, as they did in ancient Greece.

16

virtually no myths about potlatch situations (1985:248). This is because, in

Kirk's words, "alongside the stream of religious imagination there rum a stream

of purely narrative invention" that we call storytelling, or myth (1985:226).

To this revised picture of the relation between myth and ritual, we must

add another important insight, drawn from contemporary psychology. In their

recent sunrey of global trends in the study of the human psyche, Hermans,

Kempen and Van Loon (1992) concluded that narrative is found universally at

the deepest levels of mental activity. Mythic narration is now believed not to be a

superficial add-on, but the basic mode of conscious experience (26-31). If the

human psyche is structured narratologically (2 7), then st or y t e h g activities

must take the place of ritual in the search for origins and basic human truths.

All we really know for sure about the emergence of theatre in Greece is

that it arose in connection with the competitive recitation of poetic stories, the

kind of universalist mythic material described above (Herington, 1985:9-6 1). As

Pickard-Cambridge (1962, 1968), Else (1965), Gernet (198 I), Segal (1986),

Taplin (1978), Herington (1985) and Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) have all

shown in their various ways, theatre was originally a story-telling activity, not a

ritual one.

The non-ritualistic nature of ancient theatre becomes especially clear

when we realue how different Greek religious rituals were from modern ones.

They were intensely participatory by nature, ofken private, and were expressly

not meant for mere

congregation, where a

17

"viewers." The phenomenology of the modem religious

large "audience" sits motionless on rows of benches facing

a specially appointed performer of actions, might well be called "theatrical" and

does indeed seem to have something in common with dramatic performance. But

Greek religious rites were not theatricalized in this way. On the contrary,

ancient Greek religion involved a great deal of walking, running and even racing

about fmm place to place outdoors, handling animals, feasting, and obscene

joking (Kirk, 1985:228-245).7 If theatre strikes our theorists as having something

in common with religion, that is because modern religious observance has been

influenced by theatre, not vice versa. To an historian, this chronology is obvious;

to theatre practitioners, it is apparently not. The international superstar director

Robert Lepage recently said in an interview on C.B.C. radio ("The Arts Tonight,"

April 11, 1994) that "theatre comes from the Church." A statement such as this

rarely meets any resistance; but it is about as meaningful as saying that epic or

lyric poetry "comes from the Church." AU of these verbal genres existed before

the advent of the Church. Although none of them is immune to religious

inspiration, influence, or repression, not one of them has any inherent or

necessary connection with religion, let alone any particular variant of it.

As Demck De Kerckhove (198 1) has pointed out, it was the very immobility of the audience at a tragedy that made theatre so revolutionary in its time. Eric Havelock (1963) also stresses the significance, and the novelty, of the emergence of a non-participating audience in the post Homeric world.

18

Perhaps the most illuminating case study we can make on this subject of

the theatre's relation to ritual is that of the emergence of a b o r i w theatre in

Canada within our time. This development, being recent and directly obsen-able,

provides the best evidence yet available that theatre comes from myth and not

from ritual. To draw conclusions from this phenomenon and to expect them to

apply also to ancient Greek theatre is, of course, to indulge in precisely the kind

of analogizing warned against above. But in this case the cultural contexts are

genuinely comparable. Both aboriginal Canadian and ancient Greek cultures

were intensely talk-oriented societies with rich oral traditions when a sudden

outbreak of alphabetical literacy occurred. Both also had flourishing ceremonial

traditions with elaborate ritual song and dance activities. And in both cases,

theatrical form was unknown-until the mythological stories which had

traditionally been recited orally by individual bards got written down, and

someone had the idea of dramatizing them by actors rather than just hearing

them from a storyteller.

From the direct testimony of playwrights like Tomson Highway (Highway,

1988, Brask and Morgan, 1992:~-xviii, Morgan, 1992: 130- 138) and Daniel David

Moses,8 we learn that native theatre derives its subject-matter and its

inspiration &om the body of mythology that had, before writing, been confined

to the oral register of the storyteller. Before the 1970s, "there was no native

Public Lecture, Malespina Univereity-College, Nanairno, B.C. 1994.

19

theatre" (Highway, in Morgan's interview, 132). Both theatre and literature were

"new to the ab0rigma.l commUDityi' when they appeared (Wheeler, 1992:43;

Petrone, 1990; Alexander, 1925). And what we see with unmistakable clarity in

the case of the aborigmd context is that theatre was invented for staging oral

legends outside of and m'tbout reference to the ritual life of the community.

Aborigrnal ritual dance and song have continued to thrive alongside of native

theatre, but the two have remained separate activities without direct causal

relations. Theatrical form did not emerge out of the potlatch or other Longhouse

activities which continue to carry out such ritual functions as preserving social

customs, afhming community solidarity, and celebrating local rites of passage.

Such traditional ritual performances are "fully comprehensible only to the

culturally initiated;" dramas based on myths like those of the Trickster, on the

other hand, "can function fully as well and authentically in downtown Toronto as

in Brochet, Manitoba" (Brask and Morgan, 1992:x, xv). Brask and Morgan, who

have studied the emergence of theatre in a number of aboriginal settings,

concluded that native rituals are alien to the universalizing narrativity of

theatrical performance (xiii) .9

Like the ancient Greek theatre, which aimed at the reinterpretation of

traditional stories from the point of view of the contemporary present, the plays

of Tomson Highway and Daniel David Moses recast legendary figures such as the

Rituals of the Inupiat, for example, are "communal and not meant for non-Inuit obsel-versn (xiii) .

Trickster in modern guise: Highway's Nanabush is portrayed as a bingo caller in

downtown Toronto of the present day; Moses' Coyote makes a phone call from the

Silver Dollar Lounge on Spadina Avenue. In ancient Greek and in aborigrnal

Canadian theatre alike, drama appears as a "rewriting" of myth, not as an

outgrowth of ritual. In both cases, furthermore, it was under the influence of

urban, literate modes that the idea of theatre was born. This idea of theatre was

a new one, not a continuation, in "disguised" form, of the religious past

(Highway, 1988:vi.i-viii, Highway, as in Morgan, 130).

Why have theatre practitioners and theorists remained so keen to see

their art in religious, ritualistic terms? For the present, a good tentative

explanation is provided by Jack Goody (1987):

A perpetual trend of complex, written cultures is the search for, and to some extent identification with, the simpler cultures of the past. One only has to recall the attraction of "savage" cultures for the 18th century Rousseau .... A modem version of the same theme lies behmd the search for the natural, the untouched, the oral ... and representing in some of its guises the apotheosis of the oral and the renunciation of the written as the real source of truth (293).

It is precisely this apotheosis of arality and renunciation of the written that we

see in Artaud, the most influential anti-text guru of our time, and in the early

Cole. Such nostalgic anti-textual strategies provide no real solution to the

problem of the dramatic text, however. In the first place, they are based on a

21

denial of the historical record; in the second, they are belied by the plain fact

that the Western theatre consists mainly of written plays.10

But the story does not end here, of course. Within the last few decades, an

explosion of interest in literary theory has had the effect of rehabilitating writing

as an intellectually respectable subject. However, the new text fetish produced

results for theatrical theory which have proven as absurd as those bequeathed us

by the previous avant garde. The pendulum had swung to a n equally extreme

position: theatre was no longer non-text; i t was now ad text. Theorists from the

late 1970s and into the nineties, apparently intoxicated by the cachet of

textuality, were moved to describe the stage spectacle as a "performance text"

"written" by a "stage-writer," the director, and "read" by an audience (Lyotard,

1977, Ubersfeld, 1978, Elam, 1980, Pavis, 1982, Svenbro, 1990, Cole, 1992).

One does not solve the problem of the relation of writing to the stage in

this way. By any definition of text that is meaningful in the context of theatre,

the body of a live actor speaking in person to an equally live audience is not a

textual phenomenon. From whatever point of view one wishes to adopt-

structuralist, post-structuralist, semiotic, phenomenological, Marxist,

existentialist and so on-performances cannot be analyzed in the same way as

texts. They make meaning in different ways, produce different sorts of

lo My concern is exclusively with the Western theatrical tradition. That the situation is quite different in the East will be acknowledged and discussed in Chapter 1.

22

experiences, are composed of radically different sensory material, are consumed

by audiences according to different principles, and communicate through

different channels, different media. To call them both texts is an abuse of the

language.

One of the reasons that literary theories of reading are ultimately so

inappropriate for use in dramatic theory is that the literary theorists who

pioneered these textual strategies were, Like Jane Harrison, not actually

students of the theatre. It might even be said that "literature" for twentieth-

century literary theorists means non-dramatic literature. To understand the

marginalized position of dramatic texts within modern literary studies, we need

to review the history of poetics. In classical aesthetics, the critical terminology

was such that artistic genres as diverse as epic, drama, novel11 and even dance

and flute-playing could be meaningfully discussed as related activities (see

Poetics, 1447a4448a). What these genres appeared to have in common was the

goal of imitative performance. Their formal and substantive differences-the

materials they used, the performative means they employed, and the objects

they imitated-appeared theoretically insignificant compared with the shared

telos which unified them within a single poetic collectivity. But this theoretical

aegis has itself disappeared over time: Romantic theories of art replaced mimesis

Aristotle speaks about the genre 'without a name' which 'imitates by language alone' (Poetieg 144%). We would call such things novels.

23

with poesis,, l2 and the history of literacy, with its "Gutenberg" practices and

habits of mind, elirmnated performance fiom many spheres of artistic life. As a

result, an Aristotelian poetics of "imitative performance" came to seem outmoded

for all arts-except those of the theatre?

In classical theories of poetics, drama-as the genre which incorporates d

the arts of imitative performance-recommends itself as a kind of sovereign

genre; in the Poetics, drama assumes a correspondingly central position. But in

modern poetics, which are concerned mainly with 'pure literatureH-1.e. non-

performative poetry and prose-drama becomes an anomaly. Is it an historical

relic, the literary theorists wonder, an archaeological remnant of our oral past?

(see Bakhtin, 1981, 1984, 1986; and Godzich and Kittay, 1987, for implicit

expressions of this view). Drama's multi-medial, performed nature makes it

much too fat a genre to fit under the desk-sized lens of modem poetics' study of

literary art qua text. Drama's presence in the discipline is tolerated out of

respect for historical ties, but its company is rarely sought. The dramatic text,

l2 Romantic theorists of art such as the SchIegeIs became disenchanted with the separation between form and content implied by Classical mimesis. Rather than viewing art as a representation of external nature, they insisted that art should be judged as a made thing, as something whkb signifies only itself and is therefore creative rather than imitative. See Tzvetan Todorov (1982a: 151-176) for a good summary of the shift from mimesh to poesis. See also Todorov (1982b:4) for use of poesis to describe the modern view, and Garan Sarbom (1966:208) for the use of mimesis.

l3 This has begun to change. Bakhtin reconceptualized literary types as speech genres (1986), and with the advent of speech-act theory (Austin, 1962 and 1975; Searle, 1969 and 1992), more and more theorists have been returning to the idea of literature as a performance (see Pratt, 1977; FeIman, 1983). But whether a non- dramatic text meant for silent reading can ever really be a performance is debatable to say the least.

24

always reeking just a bit of the stage, must represent something of an affront to

students of literature raised on notions about the autonomy of the text.

Experienced teachers of poetry and novels and short fiction have confessed to me

in private that either it "never occurred" to them to teach plays, or that they felt

"uncomfortable" when called upon to do so, feeling that their textual training

had ill-prepared them to analyse the kind of text that a play is.

We need look a t but a few standard reference works for literary theory

and criticism to see the uncomfortable position drama has found itself in since

the eighteenth century, when Aristotelian poetics began to collapse. In his

History of Modern Criticism (1981), Re& Wellek says simply that G. E.

Lessing's belief in the centrality of drama within literature is due to a faulty

notion of what literature is. Literature, for Wellek and for all the "modem

readed'14 on whose behalf he claims to speak, is ideally lyric poetry; if Lessing

had not been so blinded by "insensitivity," an outmoded Anstotelianism, and a

transparent occupational bias, he would have recognized this too (Vol.1, 164).

What we find in J.A. Cuddonts Dictionary of Literary Terns (199 1) is equally

telling. Cuddon defines "literature" as the group of "works which belong to the

major genres: epic, lyric, drama, novel, short story, odet' (505). When we consult

his entries for these genres, we h d , however, that the novel receives 22 pages of

history, theory and analysis; the epic rates 9 '1~ pages; both the lyric and the short

l4 My Italics.

25

story merit 4 pages each, and the ode elicits 3 ' 1 ~ pages. Drama is dispensed with

in exactly three sentences, two of which are not even about drama as a genre.

Drama is named by Cuddon as one of the "literary genres," but is not treated

equally with the others?

Drama's misfit status within modern literary theory is faced more directly

by Roman Ingarden in his The Litermy Work of tlrt (1973), but with e q d y

paradoxical results. A more exhaustive and p aimtaking analysis of "the basic

structure and mode of existence of the literary work (Lcxi) could hardly be

imagined. Ingarden begins by determining which objects fall under the heading

of "the literary work," and although he soon amends the formula to include the

"low-brow" genres as well, his definition of the category follows Cuddon's generic

approach. Literary works for Ingarden are works from all the "literary genres,"

and his examples are the Iliad, Schiller's dramas, The Magc Mouotain. Drama,

in short, is used along with the other genres to constitute the category "literary

art." Yet, some three hundred pages of analysis later, drama is found not to

conform to the very class of objects it helped to define. Ingarden is forced to

conclude that a play

l5 Fmm biographical mlonnation, we learn that Cuddon is himself an avid theatre-goer and playwright, so clearIy, "anti-theatricalism" (see Barish, 1981) is not at work here. On the contrary, Cuddon's dictionary shows more awareness of theatrical terms and kinds than most Literary anthologies and surveys. The problem seems to lie rather with the oddness of drama as a Iiterary genre.

is not a purely literary work in that entirely new means of representation, precluded by the essential nature of a purely literary work, appear in it: 1) real objects engaged in performing the function of reproduction and representation and 2) aspects appropriately formed and predetermined by the properties of these real objects, in which represented objectivities are to appear. (320)

On one hand, then, drama serves a vital function in defining the category of

literature; on the other, it is not really literature at all-it is, in Ingarden's

words, "a borderline case" (322).

This description of drama as borderhe case leaves the question of

drama's exact place within literature unsolved. Or, more precisely, it leaves

ambiguous the role played by drama's literary q d t i e s in constituting the

genre. If drama is only part& or "impurely" literature, are its literary elements

essential? Or perhaps just circumstantial and expendable? Are its literary

elements so opposed in nature to its non-literary ones that we must conclude, as

Veltrusky did (1977), that drama and theatre are two separate and

irreconcilably different art forms? And so we return to Hegel's problem: what is

the relationshp between writing and the stage? Are written plays just

circumstantial conveniences for actors, or is theatre dependent on writing for

more substantive reasons? Does everything written become "literatureN-which,

by modern definitions, must be seen as alien to bodily performance?

One must return to the source. To explore the theatre's use of writing

today is to prove nothing more than that our culture is dependent on written

modes. This we already know. It is easy to show, as Cole has done, that

27

even

adherents to ritualist doctrine are wedded to writing despite their wishes:

One can argue endlessly about whether the actor can or should or might firnction as a "social critic" (Brecht) or "skilled worker" (Meyerhold) or "secular saint" (Grotowsky) or "signal[er] through the flames1' (Artaud); but meanwhile there is no question that he is hc t ion ing as a reader. Every actor-whether he works for Robert Wilson or the Schubert organization, the Royal Shakespeare Company or the high school dramatics club-reads. (1992:3)

But reading has become an occupational necessity for practitioners in other

professions as well. What we need to ascertain is not whether writing is an

integral part of cultural life today, but whether it is an integral part of the

theatre as an art form; and the only way to do this is to return to the moment

when theatrical form visibly emerged out of epic recitation. Only by charting the

course of the generic shift from oral epic to drama will we be able to see clearly

what theatre owes to writing, and what it doesn't. We know that the epic was

originally an oral genre, that it arose in an oral context and can function without

the use of writing. Theatre, on the other hand, arose in the sixth century B.C.E.

in Greece in a literate context. As students of drama are acknowledgmg in

increasing numbers, theatre is a social practice as well a s an art, which to be

understood must be placed in its widest possible social context (cf. esp. Bristol,

1985). For this reason, we will be evaluating the generic novelties introduced

into story-telling by theatrical form by way of the culture-wide shift away from

exclusively oral modes of communication and toward an increasing reliance on

writing.

As we will be showing, the emergence of theatrical form w i t h a literate

context was not coincidental. Drama emerged when it did because technology

made it possible. The ancient theatre was in fact dependent on writing in a

number of important ways, many of which would not be apparent but for a

sustained examination of historical evidence fkom across various disciplines.

Our evidence for sixth- and fifth-century literary and performative

activities is admittedly sketchy, and what is offered in the following pages is

based on a great deal of reconstructive surgery by classicists. For this reason,

conclusions cannot help but be partly speculative. However, the account of

theatre's emergence out of epic recitation that will be offered has much to

commend it as a replacement for the hypothesis of the myth-and-ritual school.

Each chapter that follows is based on a concrete practice, or practices, for which

the evidence is secure. We shall not invent activities for the inventors of drama,

or create, as Harrison and Murray did, imaginary activities whlch "might" have

taken place. Rather, we shall confine ourselves to discussions of the literary and

perfonnative practices for which we have solid evidence. Conclusions are based

only on what we can be quite sure that the Greeks were actually doing in the

sixth and fifth centuries. We know that they used the alphabet (Chapter 1); that

they learned to write in schools (Chapter 2); that they had public, written law

codes (Chapter 3); that they wrote letters, poetry and wills, and that they used

coins with written inscriptions on them (Chapter 4). Each chapter will explore

the extent to whch the literate practice under discussion can be seen to have

shaped the mode of representation we know as theatre. The discussion in

29

Chapter 1 of the effects of the use of the alphabet in Greece beginning no later

than the eighth century is the most general and speculative, and depends most

heady on the primary research on literacy done by other scholars. As we move

into education, law, letters and coins, the existence of more plentiful sixth- and

fifth-century literary a d iconographic evidence will bring our analysis

increasingly into the realm of the concrete. Although these chapters are strictly

sequenced, each takes a slightly different approach to the central problem, and

each defers final judgments to the Conclusion at the end.

This examination of the relation of writing to the theatre is intended

solely as a contribution to the theory of drama; it is not intended as a work of

o r i d classical scholarship. But for the guidance of experts in ancient Greek

literacy, theatre, law, education, poetry, epic, coinage, and so on, I could not have

pursued my question into the sixth century B.C.E. By any scholarly standards, I

am an amateur classicist, and do not pretend otherwise. However, the Classics

may remain the one discipline leR in the academy where amateurism is not seen

as a shameful condition. The examples of Robert Wood, l6 Michael Ventris, l7 and

l6 The Englishman Robert Wood (1717-1771) was a Member of Parliament and Under-Secretary of State. Although he was 'conscious of his amateur status,' he was the first to revolutionize Classical scholarship with the suggestion that 'Homer could neither read nor write* (H.L. Lorimer, 1948: 13-14; also see Wood, 1976).

l7 Michael Ventris, English Architect, was the celebrated decipherer of Linear B (in 1953). See John Chadwick (1990) for a full account of Ventrid achievements, whicS also, in their way, revolutionized Classical scholarship by proving that a Homeric Greek was spoken in the Mycenaean palaces on Crete.

30

Heinrich SchLiemand8 should be enough to make classicists think at least twice

before condemning out of hand the efforts of amateurs to solve riddles left us by

the past.

I am preceded in this particular inquiry by a number of scholars from

various disciplines. The pioneer among these is Demck de Kerckhove, who in

several journal articles explored the relation between alphabetical literacy and

the theatre (1979, 1981, 1982, 1983). Charles Segal (1986) touches on the effect

of writing on the mythological material of tragedy, and Walter Ong (1982) and

Alfred Burns (1981) mention theatre in passing as one of the products of

Athenian literacy. Jesper Svenbro (1990) sees the theatre as itself contributing

to the literacy of fifth century audiences.

De Kerckhove's contribution is by far the most important. He has argued

that theatre not only reflected, but in its first appearance actually advanced the

epistemological revolution begun by the alphabet. My approach differs insofar as

I do not consider the theatre's effects on audiences, but rather its sources in

literate activities outside of the theatre. Segal's approach comes close to my own

in places, but IS focus is on Greek tragedy exclusively; he does not discuss

writing from the point of view of drama as a genre. Ong and Burns only make

off-hand, isolated suggestions about theatre's dependence on writing which they

'With the amateur's faith and enthusiasm' (Chadwick, 1990:6), this nineteenth-century businessman proved the historical reality of the Homeric legends with his startling archaeological discoveries c. 1876.

31

do not follow up. And while I have greatly benefitted fkom Svenbro's discussion of

the ABC S6ur9; I think hls conclusions are illogical. De Kerckhove has made an

interesting case for the theatre as an agent for the transmission of the alphabet's

effects, but I remain unconvinced that, as Svenbro suggests, spectators c a n

improve their reading by watching plays.

If there is one scholar to whose work I am most indebted, it is John

Herington and his Poetry into Drama (1985). His discussion of the gradual

emergence of dramatic form out of epic and lyric recitation has been invaluable

to me. However, Herington does not analyse the use of writing in his account of

this generic shift, an omission which M y leaves it incomplete. He shows that

drama appeared as an incorporating fulfillment of the long tradition of

competitive epic and lyric recitation; but because he does not consider the impact

of literacy, he cannot explain Low or why ths happened as it did.

My approach is also d o n n e d to a great extent by the generic thmkmg of

M. M. Bakhtin (198 1, 1984, 1986). Ldse Bakhtin, I have become convinced of the

truth of SchIegel's notion that the only reliable theory of genre is its history19

A final few words about terms and methodology are in order. I have

chosen to use theatre and drama interchangeably, a decision which may require

See F. Schlegel (1957:20) and (1968: 19, 60, 76, 78); Peter Szondi provides a useful discussion in 'Friedrich Schlegel's Theory of Poetical Genres* (1986:75-94).

32

justification. It is true that today, as in ancient Athens, many activities other

than the performance of plays take place in theatres. As it was for the

Athenians, a theatre is for us a place of viewing, and what is viewed there may

range from civic assemblies, to school graduation parades, to dance and music

concerts. And although drama usually means narrative works intended for

performance in theatres, drama can be performed elsewhere. However, when I

speak of the theatre, I mean it in the colloquial sense of "going to the theatre," by

which we always mean "going to see a play." So unless otherwise noted, theatre

is not being used to refer to the place, the physical space of the theatre, but to

the performance of a play, which is most often what we expect to see when we

pay money to go there. I will be further justifying ths choice as I go along by

showing how theatrical form is a mode of representation which is implied in the

peculiar phenomenology of the dramatic text.

More controversial stdl is perhaps my decision to quote sparingly &om the

literary works and to do so in English. The fist of these choices is bound to

unnerve those who are not familiar with the works under discussion. However,

this is not a work of literary criticism, but a work of theory. If criticism focuses on

what particular aesthetic objects me=, then theory concerns itself rather with

what they are. Detailed textual analyses would have added hundreds of pages to

ths document, sorely tested the patience of my readers, and ultimately

interfered with the main purpose of this work, which, I repeat, has more to do

with what these objects are than with what they mean. As inheritors of the twin

legacies of the New Critics and "deconstructionists," we do not lack for "close

33

readings" of classic texts. If anything is needed in this time and place, it is not

more details, but connections between them.

As for the decision to cite ancient sources in English, my reason is simple.

The intended audience of this work is made up of students and practitioners of

theatre, not students and readers of Greek. All translations of Homer are those

of Richmond Lattimore (195 1 and 1977); the translations of the Greek tragedies

are by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (1991); Alan Sommerstein's

translations (1982-85) were used for Aristophanes.

Chapter One: I 2

The ABCs of Drama

This ABC and grammar of acting are ... not difFcult. Without them, it is impossible to live on the stage. - -

S tanislavski

Within a few hundred years of their adoption of a phonetic script c.

750 B.C.E., the Greeks invented an entirely new poetic art. This art was

drama, and while it incorporated all the poetic genres that had been

practised up until that time (Herington 1985), its many formal and

substantive innovations were profound enough for it to be considered an

"invention" in its time (Aristotle 1449b11; 1449b7, 1449a13; Else 1965;

Gernet 1981:57, 17; Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1990:23-5, 185).

The conventional date for the Greeks' adoption of the Phoenician

alphabet is early- to mid-eighth century (Jeffery 1990:Zl; Harris 1989:vii;

Thomas 1992:53), although it has been argued that it might have been

somewhat earlier (Naveh 1988). But whatever the exact date, one thing is

clear: that when the Greeks Grst began to use alphabetical writing,i their

poetic genres were confined to the epic and lyric (Bowra and Higham 1950;

Alphabetically inscribed objects such as cups, vases and tombstones begin to appear in Greece in the middle of the eighth century (c. 740). The evidence is discussed at length by Stroud (1989:103- 1 lg), Jeffery (1 %lo), Powell (1991 : l44ff) and Thomas (199257M).

Pfeiffer 1968:22-24; Herington 1985). Indeed, our record shows nothing

remotely resembling drama until the middle of the sixth century, when

Thespis won a prize for tragedy (Pickard-Cambridge 1968:72). The pre-

dramatic genre of epic has a long history which stretches back into the Greek

Bronze Age (Powell 199 1: 114)) and lyric song, although probably older, is

well-attested for the seventh and sixth centuries (Davison 1962:149-50;

Nilsson 1968; Silk and Stern 198 1). Nevertheless, the traditional dominance,

by these two pre-dramatic genres, of the musical and poetic life of the

Greeks-and especially of their musical comp etitions-was increasingly

threatened by the parallel advances of the alphabet and drama. Despite the

fact that the upstart arts of tragedy and comedy were each given official

recognition at different times (Poetics 1449a3-1449b4; Pickard-Cambridge

1968:72@, they shared enough formal and functional features, and differed

&om their poetic forebears in sufEciently similar ways, for them to be

considered together as two faces of the new art of the theatre (Poetics

1448b12). A fourth century B.C.E. writer named tragedy as "the most people-

pleasing and hypnotizing branch of poetry" (Ildioos cited by H e ~ g t o n 98);

and such was its success, and comedy's, that even by the fifth century, "no

first-rate poet in any of the traditional nondramatic genres was composing in

Greece" (Herington 99). As Aristotle remarks, "when tragedy and comedy

came to light, poets2 were drawn either to one or to the other" (1449a13).

2 Poets, that is, who had in "ancient" times practised other genres (1448bll).

Because the invention and swift hegemony of dramatic art coincides so

neatly with Greece's literate revolution, it would be hard indeed for any

scholar sensitive to the historical dimension of drama's birth to avoid

drawing a conclusion or two. One of many theorists of recent years to draw a

direct causal link between Greece's alphabetical literacy and her cultural and

intellectual achievements (esp. Havelock 1963, 1978, 1986; Ong 1982, and

Segal 1986), Derrick de Kerckhove was perhaps the &st to focus directly on

theatre. In a compact journal article of 1981, he argued that "Greek theatre

was one of the developments of the phonetic alphabet" (23). In asserting that

"the theatre was to oral epic what writing was to speech" (24), de Kerckhove

was, on one level, simply making an historical observation: as Greece shifted

from an oral to a literate culture, the stories once narrated in epic

performance came to be theatrically performed in the written art of drama

(Aristotle 1449b7-9). That the epic was an oral genre, composed without

writing, and that theatre was a written genre, composed by literates, are not

in themselves contentious ideas. The orality of the Homeric epics is attested

by Lorimer (1948), Lord (1960, 1991), Havelock (1963, 1986), Nilsson (1968),

Parry (1971; 1989), Ong (1977, 1982), Nagy (1981, 1986), Foley (1981, 1986,

1990, 1991), Goody (1987), Willcock (1990), Powell (1991) and Thomas

(1992).3 And the literacy of the ancient theatre is explicitly confirmed by Page

(1987), Turner (1951, 1971), Davison (1962), Harvey (1966), Woodbq

Of the more recent discussions of the orality of the Homeric epics, Parry (1989:198-264), Powell (1991:113-200) and Thomas (1992: 12-50) are the most critically-minded and thorough. Even Thomas-who has made it her business to carry on Finnegan's (1977) work of problematidng the image of oral poetry popularized by Lord (1960)-has concluded that "whether or not Homer knew the

(1976), Ong (1982), Segal (1986), Harris (1989:35), Vernant and Vidal-

Naquet (1990), Svenbro (1990), Cole (1992), and denied by virtually nobody?

But de Kerckhove's theory of tragedy is more radical in its implications. It

suggests not just that theatre "happened to be" a literate phenomenon, but

that it owes its emteace to the alphabet.

To acknowledge the literate nature of the ancient theatre is one t h g ;

to suggest that the alphabet was responsible for its invention, is another

altogether. Does a mere scriptory system have the power to create an art

form that would not have existed otherwise? After all, a great deal had

happened in Greece between the epic and dramatic periods besides the

adoption of the alphabet. Society at large had transformed itself from a

heroic and aristocratic culture to a mercantile democracy, for a start, and this

shift in itself could plausibly account for even major changes in a nation's

artistic practices. ('I3u.s is essentially the line of argument pursued by Meier,

1990, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 1990 and Goldhill, 1990, among others).

art of writing, he would have remained an 'oral' poet in any meaningful sense of the word" (50). In Thomas and elsewhere, the meaning intended by "oral" is composition without the use of writing.

On thls subject Aristotle says two things. First, he notes that the roots of both tragedy and comedy can be found in the Homeric epic: Homer led the way Sy inventing a "dramatic" "metrical representation of heroic action" for tragedy, and "was the first to mark out the main lines of comedy" a s well (L448bll-12 and 1449b7ff). But he adds that both types of dramatic performance "originated in improvisation"-a statement which seems to suggest that drama had pre-literate roots (or a t least that Aristotle thought so). However, as all evidence points to the emergence of theatrical form in connection with sixth-century (unmasked) choral dithyrambs (1449a14; cf. Pickard-Cambridge, 1962: 34-81, Else, 1965), Aristotle's "improvisation" must be taken to mean "ad fib. additions to a literary performance," for the dithyramb was a highly wrought literary form by the time Arion is said to have brought speaking figures on stage during the choral song (Pickard Cambridge, 19, 28, 134; Else [I9651 discusses the evidence a t length also).

Not only may political factors appear sufficient to transform a nation's

representational models, but there is something especially paradoxical in the

suggestion that an art so corporeal in nature, so fundamentally ora l in

practice, could have been affected in any substantive way by -ting. How is

it possible that theatre, which seems to have a f d y resemblance to

performative practices common even in pre-literate societies, could be tied in

any important way to a writing system, let alone a particular writing system?

Whether or not the alphabet will appear capable of having a hand in the

shaping of Greek theatre will naturally depend, in the fist place, on how we

choose to view writing.

In traditional linguistics horn Aristotle to Saussure, writing is seen as

an inert medium for representing speech. In an almost Platonic hierarchy,

writing and speech are related to one another as shadow to substance, false

image to primary living reality. As a mere record of speech, writing of any

sort is not imagined, within this purview, to have any effects on actual

speech practices (besides occasionally "perverting" and masking them)? This

view of writing has, however, been replaced in our time by a more dialectical

understanding of the way writing systems affect the languages they record.

There is no question that, ontogenetically and phylogenetically, speech

precedes writing, and may very well continue happily in its absence. But

writing is a technology; and like any technology, its use by humans sets up a

"ee Derrida's discussion of the evils attributed to writing systems by Saussure, Uvi-Strauss and Rousseau in O f Grammatology (1974 and 1976); a related discussion appears in Thomas (1992:128).

dialectical relationship between itself, as artifact, and the natural entities

which it represents. As Don Ihde explains in his PMosophy of Technology

(1993), the very existence of such "historic" technologies as writing, the map,

and the clock, marks the beginning of a gradual transformation of available

ways of seeing the natural phenomena they measure, encode or record. Just

as the clock not only marks time, but alters our perception of it, so too does

writing penetrate and transform linguistic communication even while it

represents it.

First, writing freezes the ordinarily ephemeral flux of spoken language

in a form which can be "returned to and repeated (59). By making language

into a fixed artifact, writing both distances verbal meaning fkom its speakers,

and makes it available for objective analysis, measuring and comparison.

With the existence of the measured artifact come new standards-of

intelligibility, accuracy, evidence, proof, etc-which derive, not &om the

"natural" course of direct involvement in Itimmediate environments" (59), but

from the artifact. As Ihde observes, these artifactual standards (of, for

example, an exactly clocked "minute") open up a "dialectic" or "difference"

between themselves and naturally perceptible standards. This difference

brings with it two related consequences. Either "the sheer repeatability of the

standard within the artifact [will] be taken as a kind of ideal which nature

could only approximate" (59), or the differences established between natural

and artifactual will provide a set of abstract values against which

phenomena begin to be judged, evaluated, and specially privileged.

A good example of the first of these technological effects can be seen in

Platonic philosophy. Without appearing to have recognized what he was

doing, Plato latched on to the representational structure of writing and built

a whole metaphysics around it. In representing verbal material in a h e d

and decontextualized form, writing established new standards of ideality and

repeatability and sameness for words, abstract qualities which spoken

language, tied as it is to particular instances of utterance and engagement

with unique constellations of perceptual data, never attains. As Eric

Havelock has argued at length in Predace to Phto (1963), the existence of

these new decontextualized standards made it possible for Plato to conceive

of, and then privilege, the single, repeatable entities of thought we know as

the "forms."6

In short, Plato takes writing's fixed artifactual standards of noetic

purity and semantic stability as the standard with which to judge dentities.

Naturally occurring entities, however, are always in flux and subject to the

s-g dynamics of perception, and cannot live up to the standards of fixity

and repeatability set by writing. As a result, the whole perceptual world of

For Plato, intellectual entities are "always the same in al l respects," whereas "the many" objects available to natural perception, "by showing themselves everywhere in a community with actions, bodies, and one another" (RepubLic V.476a), "wander about, dnven by generation and decay" (VI.484b). For abstract, decontextualized contemplation, "an idea of the beautiful itself ... always stays the samen (V.479a); 'the lovers of hearing and the lovers of sights," on the other hand, are "unable to see and delight in the nature of the fair itselfh (V.476a-b). These translations are by Allan Bloom, 1968.

sights and sounds must be devalued in Platonic philosophy, demoted to the

status of mere imitations of transcendental signifieds.7

The second of Ihde's technological effects might be well exemplified in

the Enlightenment semiotics of G. E. Lessing, who imagines a kind of polar

continuum, with the "artificial" signs of written language at one end, and the

"natural" signs of body language at the other. Value here is given to

activities, such as poetry and theatre, which "naturalize" phenomena (i-e.

move h r n along the continuum away from their arbitrariness as

manufactured signs and toward the naturalness of the living body)!

But let us remain for a moment with Plato, for his views about writing

show with especial clarity the extent to which the existence of an "artifucial"

technology alters both terms in a naturaVartificia1 dialectic. Plato is notable

for having been perhaps the first to suspect that linguistic inscription, far

from being a neutral recording technique, in fact possesses special

characteristics of its own, and ones that are prone to penetrate men's souls

and change the way they think and communicate. Among other things, Plato

suggests in the Phaedms that writing might ruin natural memory (274-5).

Now, writing's ability to record and preserve speech, history, knowledge, etc.

in permanent form does indeed recommend it as an ideal mnemotechnic

This metaphysics is elaborated most fully in Books V and X of the Repubfic.

Detailed analysis of Lessing's semiotics can be found in Wellbery (1984: 129), and in WeUek (1981, Vol. 1 : 165).

device and even substitute. But to conclude that natural memory atrophies

as a result, like an unused muscle, is to take an undialectical, mechanistic

approach and to miss seeing the complex process which the appearance of a

new technology sets into motion. Although a certain brand of commonsense

logic would dictate that that which is replaced wil l fade, reality shows

something quite different. In fact, writing has been seen to strengthen

memory, if anything, for in the absence of a (verbatim) written record, there

is no way to tell if something has been memorized or not. Before writing, the

very concept of exact repetition has no meaning. As I.M.L. Hunter explains,

"the human accomplishment of lengthy verbatim recall arises as an

adaptation to written text and does not arise in cultural settings where text

is unknown" (1964:160; see also Goody, 1987:294). As the fieldwork of

numerous anthropologists and psychologists of memory has c o h e d ,

societies without writing have a different concept of memory from literates,

and do not memorize things exactly? Even oral bards' seemingly virtuoso

feats of memory have been observed in our time to consist, in fact, of radically

dissimilar versions of a given narrative which, however, are "experienced by

the bards themselves as "exactly the same" (Nilsson, 1968: 184-205; Lord,

1960:17ff; Goody, 1987:86-8). As M. T. Clanchy (1979:233), Goody and Watt

(l968:3 1-4), and Goody (1986: 12) have noticed, members of oral societies

Ruth Finnegan (1977, 1990, 1992) is tha one dissenting voice here; but as her examples are very brief Inuit poems, they should not be counted as genuine counter-evidence. Thomas (1992:39-51) discusses Finnegan's objections usefully, but alas does not analyse the evidence they are based on. See also Harris (1989:31-33) against the common assumption that illiterates' memories are simply better than those of literates.

perceive continuity where change is in fact the norm. Mythc narratives, laws

and customs are believed by those who repeat them orally to have been

preserved intact for generations, whereas in fact a l l have undergone

enormous changes without anyone noticing. The continual shedding, without

trace, of memories, history, laws and customs which no longer have present

relevance has been called a "homeostasis of orality" (Ong, 1982:46): without

written records of the progress and change of actuality, a difference between

"remembered" and "forgotten" cannot come into existence.10 Without writing

to control its vagaries, the human memory embellishes, deletes, tramp oses

and forgets altogether, and does so without any awareness of these changes.

Recent findings in neurobiology have only confirmed Ong's view: memory is

but the "storage of fragmentary but 'relevant' features" (Changeux, 1988:49;

see also Loftus, 1979, 1980; Finkel, 1988:62).

Not only does writing, contrary to Platonic suppositions, tend to

improve memory, but it was by literates and for literates that an "art of

memory" was invented. From Simonides into the Renaissance, the art of

memory which Francis Yates (1966) unearths was so caught up in literate

practice as to be almost a corollary of literacy. Organized around the use of

mental images which are meant to remind the subject of other things, the

various systems of memory that Yates describes can all be seen as using the

principle of writing-where a visible sign is taken as standing in for

lo Thomas provides a useful discussion of this "structural amnesia" for ancient Greece (1989 passim; 1992: 108-1 12).

something else-to aid recall in the absence of writing. These mnemonic

schemes, based upon a wholly literate notion of exact verbatim recall,

function by organizing "all things which can be expressed in speech" (144)

spatid' by creating imaginary headings, subheadings and so on, and by

mentally placing each concept or object under the right category-name, in the

right relation to all the others. In short, Simonides' art of memory depended

on the internalization of a systematically organized visual symbolism, i-e., on

skills learned through the acquisition of literacy (Goody, 1987, also makes

this point with respect to the Indian Vedas). The fact that the most elaborate

of these writing-dependent memory arts also just so happened to take the

form of memory Theatres, is an especially intriguing one, and says as much

about theatre as it does about literacy.L1

Thus, in its creation of new standards for memory (exact verbatim

repetition), and new techniques for meeting those standards (categorization

and "placement" of ideas on a visual scene or theatrical stage of the mind),

writing can be seen not just as an alien usurper of memory, but as

constitutive of a new concept of what memory is. From the Phaedrus it is

clear that Plato's understanding of memory has been influenced by literate

In De Kerckhove's view, it was precisely because Simonides was a man of the theatre that he "may have been the first Greek thinker to conceptualize the interiorization of visible spacen and imagine memory a s "a container, a mental box to store and classify representations and abstractionsn (IS8 I S ) .

standards of verbatim repetition. lz Far horn destroying memory thus

conceived, writing can more accurately be said to have produced it, for Plato's

understanding of memory would be unknown in a culture without writing.

From the point of view of society generally no less than from that of the

individual, writing can indeed be said to "create" memory: for without

writing, one is denied the opportunity to compare present practice with past

antecedents. Without the emergence of a documented difference between now

and then, one is compelled to live in an ever-changing reality perceived

(wrongly) to be the same.

We will have more to say about Plato's theory of writing later. But his

privileging of fixed intellectual entities, and his concerns about literates'

memories, clearly demonstrate that the difference between a representing

technology such as writing, and what it represents, should properly be

acknowledged to be dialectical in nature. Now, this notion-that the two

poles in any sort of nature/culture difference will always stand in a mutually

constitutive, interdependent relation-is an obvious one to any student of

dialectics. However, in the case of the relation of writing to speech (or texts to

phenomena), the dialectical interpenetration of one by the other has not

always been self-evident. According to Jack Goody, writing's effects on

thought and cultural practices first became apparent when a historical

12 Socrates quotes a written inscription from a tomb (264d), and Phaedrus disclaims the ability to "repeat from memory in a way worthy of Lysias what he, the cleverest of present writers, has put together at leisure over a long period of timen (228).

dialectic, which had formerly been applied throughout the humanities to

questions of economic production, was adopted for use in questions of

communication. In our century, Harold A. Innis (1951) and Marshall

McLuhan (1962) were the ground-breakers in exploring the effects of

communication systems on cultural Me. The enormous popularity of Jacques

Derrida's work has contributed further to the general awareness that writing

may have been a siguficant "absent cause" in our intellectual history. Since

the 1960s, innumerable books and articles about the consequences of literacy

have appeared, and thus even the most sceptical readers today are not likely

to deny that a technology as pervasive as writing will have some effect on

cultural life. The question that remains is what those effects are, and how

directly writing causes them.

Some theorists have seen writing's causality as direct. For example,

Robert Logan, who claims membership in the Toronto School of

communication theorists along with Innis, McLuhan and de Kerckhove,

credits the alphabet directly with a l l of the products of Western civilization:

codified law, monotheism, abstract science, deductive logic, individualism,

democracy, mass education, and capitalism (1986:18@. While the alphabet

certainly had a role to play in all of these developments, the idea that

literacy, or one variant of it, by itself "causes" anything directly has been

criticized for its idealism and mechanistic determinism (Scribner and Cole

1981; Olson 1985, 1988; Finnegan 1977; Taylor 1988; Thomas 1992:28@. As

David Olson cautions, writing alone cannot "simply cause social or cognitive

changes" (198514). The Ashanti warriors in A£rica, for example, used writing,

not to represent speech or pursue Aristotelian philosophy, but to decorate

their war-coats (Goody 1968:264). And in ancient Sparta, the alphabet was

known but its use was actively discouraged for most purposes except the

sending of military messages (Cartledge 197825037; Thomas 1992: 136-7).

Recently, historian of science G.E.R. Lloyd (1990) has argued convincingly

that a whole society, such as that of the sixth-century Greeks, cannot in truth

be said to possess a single "mentality," literate or otherwise.13 What Lloyd

demonstrates is that it is not in the psychology or biology of whole historical

groups that technological change manifests itself. Rather, explanations for

cultural change and diversity must be sought in the concrete "styles of

discourse" practiced in particular locales at particular historical moments,

and especially in the socially- and politically-specific "contexts of

communication" in which these discursive styles are embedded.

Consequently, as Thomas has argued, it is necessary to accept that

"fiteracy's] 'implications' are culturally determined" (1992:28) and are not by

any means automatic or physiological. That is to say, Literacy will affect

different speech communities in different ways. l4

'3 Thomas (1989, 1992) has demonstrated this general argument a t length by showing a) that Greek society retained many oral features even during periods when writing was used; b) that levels of literacy were extremely varied, and in some cases probably non-existent; and c) that attitudes to literacy varied throughout the Greek states depending on other soci-political factors such as the extent of democracy.

14 Harris discusses some of the social factors that influenced the spread and use of Literate modes in Greece (1989:60-3).

But even having shown the uselessness of deterministic models

(insofar as they are unable to take due account of "the importance of political

factors-both as necessary conditions and as positive stimuli" [134]), Lloyd

must finally make a pivotal acknowledgement. And what Lloyd is forced to

confess for language generally can also be said of the various media available

for representing it: that different systems do have inherent traits, and these

traits will naturally be either more or less conducive to the expression, and

therefore the development, of certain ideas (136). Our task, then, must be to

determine the extent to which the inherent traits of the alphabet were

conducive to the development of theatrical form within the particular

historical context of sixth century Greece.

One of the first linguists to emphasize the inherent traits of the

alphabet was Wilheh Von Humboldt (176% l835). Through a comparison of

the functioning of foreign, logographic scripts with his own culture's

alphabetical writing, Humboldt was able to isolate some of the latter's key

defining characteristics, and his observations remain valid today. In his

treatises "On Alphabetic Writing and its connection with the structure of

Language," and "On the Connection of Writing with Language,"l5 Humboldt

notes that alphabetic script is distinguished by its tendency to represent

sound separated from meaning (Christy, 1989:339). In this tendency,

Humboldt saw more than a mechanical operation; he saw the alphabet's

l5 Cited by Christy (1989:339ff).

soundkense separation as effecting a profound change in the relationship

between people and their language. To begin with, the use of the alphabet

requires the breaking-down of the sounds of speech into their smallest units.

These sounds, which we cal l phonemes, are in turn represented by a minimal

number of signs-letters-whose main distinguishing feature is that they

have no referential h c t i o n . What a letter represents is not a meaning, but

just a sound, or range of sounds, which is meaningless in itself. Whereas, for

example, Semitic signs such as bet, mem, 'a-, yod and rosh stood originally

for "house," "water," "eye," "hand, "head," the Greek equivalents after the

phonetic revolution-beta, mu, omicron, iota, rho-have no meaning at all;

they represent only sounds (Naveh, 1988:84-89). Alphabetic writing thus

represents speech by "hearing it"; alphabetic writing acts as the "ear" of

speech. And because what is heard must be aurally atomized into

representing letters, the sounds of speech become the "subject" of alphabetic

writing, a subject requiring analysis.

Logographic writing, on the contrary, could be said to remain

comparatively "deaf" to speech. Characters in Chmese, for example, do have

a phonetic portion, but it notes only certain features of the word and not its

exact pronunciation. That is, a sign in Chinese may represent a sound, but

may also represent a totally different sound in another context. In Chinese,

and in the logographic part of Japanese, there are no characters which have

"a fixed phonetic value for all elements of the language" (HagGge, 1988:77).

Because they are disconnected in this way horn the sounds of spoken

language, logograms have been said to encode speech "without

hearingiunderstanding it: without hearinghnderstanding its ideal and

phonetic autonomy as separate from what it designates" (Eristeva, 1989:93-

4). In "dissociat[ing] the spoken chain from what it expresses," and encoding

only its sounds, alphabetic w15ting on the contrary frees language up &om its

referential, world-ordering functions, and reveals it as a subject for abstract,

acoustical analysis. Because it requires an objecfifyrng breakdown of

language into meaningless sounds, alphabetic script is a "conscious reflection

about constituent forms" (Christy 1989:341). In Humboldt's view this

promotes a detached, objective contemplation of language because, with the

alphabet, it is possible to think of linguistic forms without simultaneously

invoking what Kristeva has called the whole "semantic and cosmic

classificatory" system which each logogram encodes. For logograms function

by actually constituting the speaker's semantic relation to the world. A

logogram makes inextricable "the concept, the sound, and the thing''; a

Chinese word, for example, "doesn't lose the thing; it only transfers it to a

plane where it becomes ordered with others in a regulated system. In this

way la langue and 'the real' are one and the same thing" (Kristeva 1989: 94).

Additionally, as de Kerckhove reminds us, reading in an alphabet is itself a

much more abstract operation than reading other scripts, since context has a

comparably negligible role in determining how to read individual words

(l988:4O 1-42 1).

Humboldt's analysis of the differences between alphabetic and

logogramic writing led him to hypothesize about the relation between writing

and civilization. For its ability to si& sound without the added baggage of

an already-constituted, value-laden reality of meanings and things,

alphabetic writing struck Humboldt as more conducive than other scripts to

certain abstract noetic functions. Although Humboldt's Eurocentrism rings

hollow today, his main insight has o d y gained in authority:

... even though we write as we do because that is the way we speak, it is also the case that we speak as we- do because that is the way we k i t e (Humboldt as cited by Christy, 344).

Since Humboldt's time, writing has indeed been observed to have

many different types of effects on the speech practices of its users. Its

concrete effects can be seen clearly in spoken Japanese, for example, where

written borrowings &om Chinese have led to what Florian Coulmas has

called a "creolization by writing" (as cited by Christy, 344). As Coulmas

explains, spoken Japanese has been shaped in part by the "massive influx of

Chinese loan words" which came into the language through the written

register (1989:122-4). The large number of homophones that exist today in

the Japanese vocabulary can be traced directly to the borrowed writing

system and the process of its adaption to Japanese phonology (127). But

because writing systems are modes of representation which, along with

language, get internalized for use in social representations of all kinds

(Olson, 1988:423-25; Vygotsky,

effects will inevitably manifest

speech.

1978, 1992; Luria, 198 1:27-87), writing's

themselves even beyond the domain of

Because it breaks the sounds of speech down into units on the

"individual" or "atomic" level, alphabetical writing has been connected with

the trend toward "atomization" in the Western philosophical and scientific

traditions generally. The beginning of this trend is datable to the middle of

the fifth century B.C.E. at the latest (IClrk and Raven, 1983:404), to the

writings of Leucippus and Democritus. Their epistemology, in which

individual "atomsy' "are compounded together and entangled ...[ to] create

something" (Aristotle, Physics, A3, l87a l), clearly reflects the tendency of

the alphabet to divide entities into small, mobile units. This analytical

reduction of spoken unities into individual letters has also been associated

with the breaking-down of monolithic structures in society at large. As

Kristeva sees it:

... the ideogrammatical type of writing was often accompanied by a mode of production said to be "Asian" (large productive and interdependent collectives, managed by a central organization, without isolated, urban and "democratic" ...units)...( l989:95).

Alphabetical writing, in short, has often been observed to coexist with a

social organization where individuals are given an autonomy analogous to

that dorded to the individual letters. The "emancipation of the sigdier" has

been connected historically with "the emancipation of the individual" (94):

... the Greek alphabetical system had as its correlative, on the sociological level, units of production that were isolated and closed on themselves, a development of individual consciousness in ideology, and a logic of noncontradiction in science (Aristotelian logic) (95).

Even sweeping generalizations such as these do have s a c i e n t

objective basis to satisfy sceptics. As G.E.R. Lloyd (1990) has demonstrated,

Eastern and Western historians of science do agree that despite their

comparably magnificent achievements in antiquity (in philosophy, ethics,

mathematics, logic and epistemology, literary criticism, medicine and

astronomy, skepticism, proof etc.), alphabetical Greek and logographic

Chinese investigations did take slightly Meren t forms (11). Whereas the

abstract, analytical, isolating operations of alphabetical script are clearly

reflected in the nature of Western science, Chinese science manifested itself

in practical, applied inventions directly c o ~ e c t e d with concrete activities

and carried out under rigid hierarchies (Lloyd, 125). And as we turn a t last to

the matter of theatrical invention, we find that the difference between

Eastern and Western styles can be similarly c o ~ e c t e d with the

characteristics of the available writing systems.16

The divergence between the effects of Eastern and Western scripts

begins with the way these two scripts are learned in the first place. Speech,

of course, is natural to humans; but writing must always be learned. In

Chinese, the written unit is the morpheme, and there are tens of thousands

of them (guesses have been made at 50,000; Taylor, 203). Given the fact that

It should be noted that languages "choose" their own most efficient writing system; there is no such thing a s a better or worse type of script. As a mono-syllabic language with no inflected endings, a number of separate "tones," and an unusually heavy proportion of homophones, Chinese could not efficiently be represented with an alphabet. Similarly, the Greeks modified the Semitic consonantal alphabet into a fully phonetic system complete with vowels because their language demanded it (Taylor 203-210; Hagage 76; DeFrancis 1989).

these legions of signs do not code sound directly, they must simply be

memorized. As a result, the Chinese system, like the Egyptian hiemglyp hical

one, was practically destined to remain in the hands of a specialist elite.

Aided neither by an alphabet to organize words along predictable lines, nor

by a thoroughgoing phonetic principle, students of such scripts need to be

very learned even to use a dictionary successfully. Under such learning

conditions, Egyptian script could easily be kept a "sacred language"

indefinitely; and Chinese writing, too, was used exclusively for "ritual and

magic purposes" for over a thousand years (HagGge, 79). The illiteracy rate in

China even at the beginning of this century has been estimated at 80%

(Taylor, 207). In short, logographic scripts tend by nature to remain in the

hands of a small elite of the specially initiated, for much special study is

needed to acquire them.

With the alphabet on the other hand, even Aristophanesf sausage-

seller can learn to read and write. With the acquisition of a mere 24 signs

(between 20 and 37 for other alphabets), students of the Greek alphabet can

transcribe any and every word in their spoken vocabulary without special

study. They may not spell these words "correctly," but the phonetic principle

wiU guarantee the decipherability of their writing by anyone who knows the

same 24 signs. What is more, it is possible with an alphabet to transcribe

words one doesn't even know, such as foreign or archaic words, specialist

jargon, or words disguised by dialect. This fact will prove sigd5cant for the

development of theatre, as we shall see momentarily. The connection

between phoneticism and easy, wide-spread literacy is demonstrated by the

Chinese example, where mass education has not been able to proceed without

the adoption of the phonetic pin-yin script. The creation of the phonetic Kana

scripts by the Japanese between the 8th and 12th century AD. has helped

guarantee the extremely high literacy rates there (although socio-economic

factors have undoubtedly contributed as well; cf. Taylor, 2 lo)."

The democratizing, open-eared tendencies of the alphabet proved to

have incalculable consequences for the early Greeks. For reasons having to

do both with the phonetic principle itself and with the socio-economic

conditions in Greece after the demise of the centralizing Mycenaean palace

cultwe c.1200 B.C.E, alphabetic writing was immune &om the start to

monopolization by a special elite of scribes. As Eric Havelock has stressed,

the Greeks' (necessary) discovery of the vowel made it possible for them to

reduce the ambiguity of syllabic writing systems, and in so doing, eliminate

the dependence on specialist scribes that inhibited the spread of writing

elsewhere. With the invention of vowels, writing became genuinely phonetic,

and for the first time, even non-specialists were able to read and write

(1963: 129, n.6). Consequently, (alphabetic) writing could be, and was, used in

Greece immediately for private purposes and by obviously untrained

individuals. Eighth-century inscriptions include the personal messages and

grafitti of ordinary people (Jeffery 1990:63), and in many of these earliest

17 Harris argues that the high literacy rate in non-alphabetical countries such as contemporary Israel and Japan is inadmissible evidence anyway: modern industrialized nations have remedies for the absence of phoneticism (such as the printing press, dictionaries, textbooks and mass education) which archaic civilizations certainly lacked (1989~46).

uses of the alphabet we find that letters have been used to record snatches of

hexameter verse (the language of epic performance; see Powell 1991:221).

Even as writing became more widespread in the following centuries, "the

skill was certainly not confined to aristocrats or a class of specialists" (Harris

1989:48).18 Scribal specialists, who in so many other ancient cultures

reserved writing for their special, exclusionary purposes, did not do so in

ancient Greece (Goody 1986: 17; Thomas 1992:57).

The importance of relatively easy, non-specialist access to writing,

especially for the development of theatre, is also suggested by events

centuries later in Europe and England. Despite the alphabet, scribal elites

retained control of writing, at least partly by associating writing with Latin,

a language not spoken by the vast majority of people (cf. Auerbach, 1965).

But once conditions changed sufficiently for writing to be used in everyday

life, the alphabet's "earf1 for speech was as quickly exploited for recording

poetic performances as it had been in ancient Greece. In fact, among the very

first written documents in the vernacular to appear in Europe between the

ninth and twelfth centuries were, conspicuously, jongleurs' manuscripts; and

The question of exactly, or even roughly, how many people were literate in ancient Greece at any given point in the advance of literacy, although interesting in itself, is irrelevant to the present discussion. Regardless of whether there were thirty or t h y thousand literates in the eighth century B.C.E. in Greece, surviving artifacts dated to that period show distinctly that within the same..(cont.) century that the alphabet was developed, it was already being used to record poetry by unskilled hands. Harris devotes a book to the sensitive question of how many literates Greece probably possessed, and what level of literacy was likely to have been attained by them (1989:vi.i-115); Jeffery (1990), Stroud (1989: 103-1 IS), Powell (1991: 119-186) and Thomas (1992:56-88) discuss the archaeological evidence from the eighth and seventh centuries which pmves that early Greek writers were ordinary amateurs.

once performers with scripts replaced oral bards, actors were soon to follow

(cf. Auerbach, 280-94).

Although the debate still rages about the exact date at which this

occurred, the subtlety of the Greek alphabet as a recording device for poetic

performance was soon exploited in the service of longer poems." Only verses

written on the most durable materials have come down to us from the eighth

century; and as longer works of poetry would never have been recorded on

the side of a jug or cup or upon any of the other non-perishable materials

used for writing in the archaic period,zO we shall probably never know when

the lengthy works of epic poetry were first recorded? But Powell (1991),

surveying all the available evidence in a book-length study devoted

exclusively to the subject, argues convincingly that the Homeric epics must

have been written down before 735 B.C.E.-that is, in the very earliest days

19 Eighth-century inscriptions of verse, such as the "Dipylon vasen and "Nestor's cup," dated between 740 and 720 B.C.E., are only a few Lines long.

20 Thomas names leather, wood, wax tablets, possibly papyrus, gold and lead, pottery and stone a s the earliest writing materials used in Greece (1992:57).

By lengthy works, we mean of course the Homeric epics, the Lliad and the Odyssey. These works, traditionally ascribed to a virtual unknown named Homer, are thousands of lines long each. In order to avoid the elaborate, and from our point of view undecidable debate about the biography of Homer, we wi l l henceforward refer to these works as the Homdric epics. See A. Parry "Have We Homer's fiad?" (1989:104ff).

of Greek literacy (217-20)? The Erst recorded performance of drama took

place in the sixth century (E?i&ard-Cambridge 1968:72),* during the very

period in which we know that rhapsodes were performing the epics for large

audiences from a common text (PfeiEer 1968:B; Powell 1991:216-229).

Between the use of writing for recording Homeric verse, and the invention of

theatrical form, Havelock sees a continuity of activity:

It is a matter of the expanding technology of the shaped and preserved utterance, whether recited and mimed by an epic rhapsodist who himself "does" a l l the characters, o r split up into parts done by different reciters who became actors (48).

This chain of generic shifts--.fi:om (non-literate) oral bards, through

individual jongleurs or rhapsodes reciting fiom a written record of an epic

performance, to groups of actors with a common text written explicitly for

them--can be observed in both Greece, initially, and again in Europe. It can

also be seen in the emergence of theatre in aboriginal Canadian culture. The

role played by the alphabet in this series of generic shifts begins with the

writing down of myth, or other narrative material, and it is to that moment

22 Havelock believed the "alphabetizationn of the Homeric poems took place between 700 and 650 (1963:115); Pfeiffer can only say with confidence that a text of the epic poems must have existed at least by the sixth century (1968:8). However, as the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey can with confidence be dated to the end of the eighth century (Pfeiffer 1968:5; Powell 1991:220), something must account for their survival during the two centuries separating their composition from their sequential performance by rhapsodes in the sixth century (see Sandys 1958:19-27, Woodbury 1962:142-9, Pfeiffer 1968525 and Powell 1991:218-233 for the beginning dates of rhapsodic performance, and for discussion of the sources which date the recording of the epics back to the eighth century).

For additional sources see above, n. 4.

we need turn now. For it is the use of the alphabet for recording stories which

had previously been confined to the oral register that is the first step in the

shift horn epic to theatre.

As Lessing pointed out with respect to the artistic media of painting

and poetry, a representing medium is likely to have innate potentialities and

characteristic weaknesses. Writing, in the form of Linear A and B, was

known in Greece before the alphabet. However, the samples of Linear B

which have come down to us show that it was not a subtle and sensitive

recording device like the alphabet." On the contrary, it was so cumbersome

and specialist that, in Pylos for example, all writing seems to have been done

by the same thuty or so scribes (Stmud, 1989:109). Given its characteristics,

it is not surprising to find that Linear B seems to have been used only for

recording t h g s like inventories (for metalworking, wool production,

agricultural produce, defense, hade in imported luxuries, etc.) (108). Most

sigdicantly for our purposes, no poetry has been found in this script. As C.

M. Bowra explains it, Linear B was "unusually inefficient, even by the

standards of its own time." There is "no sign that the script was used for

anything that might be cdled literature, and if it was, it would have done its

task abominably" (1969:4; see also Chadwick, 1990 passim for detailed

description of the ambiguities and peculiarities of Linear B). The questions

that spring to mind as a result of this seemingly inherent writing proclivity

24 A convincing solution to the puzzle of Linear A has still not been proposed. See Chadwick, 1990: 156.

have also fascinated Eric Havelock, who pursued them by comparing Homer's

epics with me Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic written down in Sumerian

cuneiform (Havelock and Hershbd, 1978:5-9). What he found is that the

alphabetical work contains a notably larger percentage of dBit&rent words,

while the cuneiform is composed of a greater number of repeated words. The

repetition of formulaic words and phrases is, of course, highly characteristic

of a l l stories composed orally in the process of performance; but the

proportion of these is greater in the Sumerian text than in the Greek. What

Havelock concludes is that the constraints of the scriptory system forced the

person recording the oral performance to simplify it for ease and speed of

inscription. Since the construction of a WTitten version of a new, old or

otherwise non-standard word would require considerable invention on the

part of a scribe using a pictographic syllabary, the inclusion of such

unconventional or unfamiliar words into the text would be discouraged by

the scriptory system itself (10; see also Powell, 199 Ml- 10723.

Havelock is only speculating, of course, and there would be no way to

confirm his suggestion that the true complexity of the oral performance(s)

"behind the written version of Gdgamesh was belied by a writing system

that couldn't accommodate it. But he is liable to be right in principle: as Ruth

Finnegan's recent guide to research practices in oral traditional arts shows

25 Powell takes Havelock's demonstration much further by demonstrating at length that the peculiarities of Greek poetry (its reliance on shortened and lengthened vowels in the construction of the hexameter line, and the fact that heroic diction was an artificial Ianguage) guaranteed that it could never have been successfully recorded in any of the pm-alphabetic scripts of the area.

unmistakably, the danger of altering the record of a performance to suit one's

own writing habits is a real one, and one of which even users of the alphabet

must beware (1992:196@. If a pictographic syllabary is unwieldy for

transcribing performances of lengthy narrative, so too must a Chinese

logography be, with its non-reference to speech and its 50,000 characters.

By comparing Chinese and Greek writing systems, we avail ourselves

of an ideal test-case for a theory about the role played by the alphabet in

shaping theatrical form. In light of the logographic system's lack of interest

in the sounds of speech, it should not be surprising to discover that Chinese

verbal culture has no epic (Tao-Ching Hsu, 19851378). Although Hsu invokes

a political explanation for this "well known" anomaly-state suppression

during the Chou dynasty (1122-255 B.C.E.)-it is equally likely that this

absence of a unified body of popular mythology has its source in the writing

system. Or, more accurately, we should say "seeming absence," for the

Chinese writing system may simply never have recorded an epic. Given the

likely number of ancient Chinese literates, and given the sacredlhierarchical

nature of their involvements, it is plausible that popular Chinese legends

and myths &om earlier oral times were never recited to anyone who knew

enough characters to write them down. Without written records, traditional

material could simply disappear over time. The non-emergence of a Chinese

epic is important because it is an early indication that artistic speech

practices of the logographic East were headed along a Merent

developmental track than those in the alphabetical West. Whereas the

existence of a body of fixed, repeatable narratives provided the Greeks with

both the impetus and the raw material for developing an art of enactment in

their literate period, the absence of epic material in China a l l but guaranteed

that her performative arts of music and dance would remain tied to

(essentially non-narrative) ceremonial court rituals during an analogous

historical period (6" century B.C.E.).26 Even thousands of years later,

observers horn both East and West are still remarking on the profound

dissimilarities between the performing arts of the two cultural worlds

(Artaud, 1958; Barba, 1990;Yu Weijie, 1990).

As Tao-Ching Hsu put it, a popular, story-telling theatre did not

emerge in China as it did in the West. Despite ten centuries in which

impersonation and dialogue were kn0wn,2~ and despite the rna@cent

spectacles, elaborate dance forms, brilliant musical invention and stylized

ritual performances that may date back to the second millennium B.C.E.28, a

theatre of plays did not come into being (Hsu, 230-301). Although far ahead

of the Greek in many ways in the fifth century B.C.E., Chinese culture had

nothing that could be compared with the plot-based theatre of repeatable

plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Chinese performance arts of

the time were distinctly non-linguistic: they showed a distinct lack of interest

z6 Although Chinese writing is much older than the alphabet, it was not until the thirteenth century A.D. tha t anything like repeatable plays emerged; a real storytehng tradition is not marked in China until the Ch'ing dynasty, 1644 -1911 of our era (Tao-Ching Hsu, 1985:301 and 230).

z7 The first record of the use of a human mask is c.380 A.D. (Hsu, 208).

* The last Emperor of Hsia dynasty is said to have had "strange and spectacular shows staged by jesters and dwarfs," although Hsu thinks the source unreliable (202).

in human speech and left no mitten records of things said. Chinese court

jesters, who were perhaps the closest historical analogues to Thespis and

Aeschylus, are reported, in historical documents, to have mimicked the

speech of certain individuals (the governor of Hsuan-Chou, for example; see

Hsu, 212) on particular ceremonial occasions. But in the absence of a really

flexible mode of transcribing exactly what their verbal imitation consisted of,

such impersonations, as Tao-Ching reports, remained tied to the particular

moment of their utterance: they did not outlive their original context nor

produce repeatable plays let alone a body of dramatic literature. The

repeatable elements of Eastern performance arts thus consisted, and still to

an extent do consist, of non-lingru'sti'c elements: costumes, gestures, dance

steps, melodies, stylized character-types?

The "deafhess" of logographic script has its advantages: it enables

speakers of related but mutually unintelligible languages to communicate by

writing. But the result of this politically un&mg potentiality in China was

that the written register came to dominate Chinese intellectual life at a

remarkably early date. As G.E.R. Lloyd puts it, the "widespread

intelligibility" of the written script caused China to be "very much a culture

mediated by the written, more than by the spoken, word (1990:112). This

phenomenon has its direct analogue in traditional Eastern theatrical forms.

29 Thomas provides some interesting evidence for Greece that such performative elements can be preserved without the use of writing across the centuries (1992:122). This fact argues against Woodbury's speculations about the use of "a known textn in the dance steps represented in the Odyssey (VIII.258-65) (1962: 145).

Spoken elements are recessive in general, and those that are used are so

disconnected horn the living speech of audiences that it is not unusual for

these words to be complete gibberish to audiences and performers alike msu,

l985:2 10, Barba, 1990:33). As Barba says, it is in fact part of the "horizon of

expectations" of the Eastern spectator that what s h e sees will be

unintelligible in its verbal aspect (33).

In Western theatre, on the contrary, one sees a distinct and possibly

defining focus on the spoken register. The ancient Athenians, by contrast

with their Eastern, and even Spartan counterparts, were famous for their

reverence for the spoken word (Cartledge, 33); and correspondingly their

theatre, and ours, has revolved around the representation of contemporary

spoken language since its beginnings. Whether capturing the sounds of a

tyrant's bombast or a politician's sophistry; whether ridiculing the jargon of a

profession or the pretensions of the bookish; whether mimicking the quaint

errors of a foreigner or the woeful effusions of teenaged balladeers; whether

charting the oral habits of old speech, young speech or speech between the

sheets-that is, regardless of the particular character of the speech it records,

it is certain that the Western theatre has kept both ears open to oral

language since the genre first appeared.

The same speech-centrism that defmes the alphabet, and which came

to define the Western theatre, also defined Greek life in other areas. From

the epic age (c.1200-700 B.C.E.) through to at least the time of Aristotle (i-e.

nearly two centuries after the first recorded win in tragedy in 539 , culturally

significant social discourse was not only mainly spoken, but was even highly

and aggressively so, with agonistic oral debate organizing and carrying out

most social, political and intellectual activities (Lloyd 1990, Thomas 1992).

The equation this leaves us with is that the disconnectedness from speech

effected by the Chinese writing system is replicated but6 within culturally

significant discourse generally and within the representational style of

Eastern performance art; and the sensi t i~ty to spoken language exemplified

by the alphabet similarly manifests itself both within Greek discursive style

and in the speech-conscious representations of Greek theatre.

But is this equivalence between writing characteristics and artistic

practice a mere "analogy" with no substantive implications? To visualize

more clearly the tendency for a logographic script to inhibit the building up

of a body of proto-dramatic literature, we might try the following somewhat

silly but effective experiment. Imagine an itinerant Chinese bard singing a

long traditional poem about legendary or historical personages and deeds. If

the script available to his listeners is a logography, he need only sing the

word "ma" with a less than perfectly distinct tone for them to fail utterly to

have a way of knowing whether they should write the character for "agate,"

"weights," "ant," "masurium," "mother," "clamp," "sacrifice," "scold," or

"question particle" (De Francis, 1989: 103). In everyday speech, such extreme

ambiguity would not occur; but in poetic speech, surprising words often

appear in unexpected places. This is especially true of traditional oral poetry,

which often preserves archaic forms and accumulates terms and idioms from

widely separated geographical locations. If the logographer/spectator of this

epic performance heard an unfamiliar word, say "petard," he would have no

choice but to put together a sequence of characters chosen for their phonetic

value. Such a stringing together of characters whose phonetic associations

approximate the sound of a spoken word is obviously cumbersome. But its

inefficiency lies mainly in the fact that there would be nothing to prevent the

next reader of his manuscript &om decoding the signs semanticdZy and

reading, in place of petard, "creek him two beans" (pu ta er dou)30. This

demonstration is fanciful and actually somewhat unfair, for "petard" is an

English, not a Chinese word. But compared to the ease with which the

Homeric epics could be written down, the unwieldiness of a non-alphabetical

system is significant.

At some point not long after their borrowing and adaptation of the

Phoenician writing system, the archaic Greeks wrote down the Homeric epic

songs.31 The suitability of the alphabet for recording poetic performance

should already be evident; but the incredible speed with which it was to put

to this end is so striking that some scholars have been led to hypothesize that

the Greek alphabet "might have been invented as a notation for Greek verse"

(Wade-Gery 1952: 11- 14; PfeifTer 1968:23; Powell 199 1 passim). This does not

30 DeFrancis makes this same point, albeit much more effectively, in The Chiuese Language (1989, passim). Caulmas discusses similar problems in Japanese (1989: 127).

31 For the date at which this must have occurred, see above, n. 22 and accompanying text. Powell's argument, that the epics achieved their form when they were written down ca. 735, is the most exhaustive and logical (1991:189ff).

seem very likely, as the Greeks learned phonetic letters horn the mercantile

Phoenicians in the course of trade: its earliest use in Greece is therefore more

liable to have been connected with commerce and property (JeEery 1990:7-

13). Nevertheless, the alphabet enabled poets and performers to preserve, not

only the epic stories themselves, but all kinds of archaic words before their

use died out and their meanings were lost forever. Because the forms and

sounds of poetic words had been preserved in text, rhapsodic performers

generations after Homer were given access to their meanings as well. Partly

through etymology and partly as a result of having the whole poem before

them in fixed form, performers of a written narrative could interpret

meanings and keep the song alive for contemporary audiences. Consequently,

the recitation of even very old traditional material never could degenerate

into a ceremonial incantation of meaningless sounds, as such material did in

the East. What writing itself does for cultures generally, alphabetic writing

did for Western performers: it enabled them to have access to the "real

semantic history" of their performative material (Ong, 1982:8). And just as

all writing will tend, as a result, to increase its users' spoken vocabulary

many times over, so too did the alphabetical inscription of oral narrative

augment the available repertoire of Greek performers.

For this reason, the existence of texts of archaic epic poetry enabled

performers of the sixth and fifth centuries to perform poetic material of the

past (PfeiEer 1968:8; Thomas 1992: 119-125).3* But it also enabled rhapsodes

to explain and criticize such material fiom their own point of view WeiEer,

8).33 The rhapsodes, and, horn the late fifth century, the Sophists, could

maintain access through time to the meaning of a word like "phlegm" thanks

to etymology (cf. Prodicus' analysis of the word in PfeifXer, 40). Likewise,

uncertainties about the meaning, age, authenticity, or ig in and "correctness"

of words could also be pursued by performers (38-40). In fact, fiom Aristotle

we learn that "glosses" of rare or obsolete words were a common feature of

32 AS BOwra explains, "[iln the seventh century and later, the Homeric poems were performed a t public festivals, like that of Apollo on Delos, by professional bards" who "must have leaned [them] by heart from written texts" (196954). Mow recent scholarship, however, dates rhapsodic performance from a written text before large festival audiences to the sixth century (Powell 1991:216). The most convincing evidence that a written version of the Homeric epics existed a t this time or earLier is: a) that a d e , dateable to the sixth century, specified that rhapsodes must recite the stories in their proper order (which shows Pfeiffer that "a traditional text must have been available to which the rhapsodes were compelled to keepn [1968:8; Plato Hrpparchus 228b); b) that such early poets as Archilochus (c. 650!, Ncman (c.657) and Stesichorus (640-555) clearly knew the Homeric poems well, and that Pindar and Simonides had access to a stable enough version of the Homeric epics to quote or echo exact lines from them (Sandys 1958:23-23); c) that poets were using writing "perhaps as early as 730-700, certainly by 600" to write down their poetry (Harris 1989:47), and that the sixth-century lonian philosophers were definitely using it (47). Finally, there is the argument from logic alone: if texts of Homer did exist for rhapsodic memorization in the fifth century, which we know from Xenophon that they did (rhapsodes are described as "very precise about the exact words of Homer" Memorabifia iv.2, lo), there is no reason to doubt the many (later) stories dating the collection of the songs to the sixth century (or earlier), a century in which writing was already being used for poetry and many other purposes (see Pfeiffer's discussion of the traditions about the assemblage of the epics by the Peisistratids 1968:6-8; for the wide variety of uses to which writing was being put in the sixth century, see H a m s 1989:46-55 and Thomas 199256-73). This argument seems irresistible especially in light of the high esteem in which Homer was held; it is inconceivable that the Greeks would have used writing for so many purposes, both serious (laws) and trivial (graffiti), and not have used i t to immortalize the stories of their favorite poet. Powell (1991) argues that the Homeridai, a Homer society, possessed the first manuscript from Homer's time, or copies of it (232).

33 Among other evidence, Pfeiffer cites the fact that in a prose fragment from the sixth century, Pherecydes "explained" an aspect of the epics etymologically (12), and that critical discussions of the "hidden" or "allegoricaln meanings in Homeric epic can be dated back to the sixth-century rhapsodes Xenophanes of Colophon and Theagenes of Rhegium (9).

epic texts (1459 a9f.); and HeiEer considers the possibility that these glosses

date back to the sixth century, although the word itself (gloss@ f i s t appears

in the 6fkh (12). The existence of a permanent, unified version of the Homeric

epics into the fifth century encouraged its interpreters to notice

contradictions (Herodotus, 11.1 13-20), discover paradigms (Hippias on the

preference for "king' over "tyrant" in Homer, see PfeifYer, 52), and develop a

distanced, critical attitude to the works generally (12-40).

Had alphabetic writing been available to ancient Chinese court jesters,

there is obviously no guarantee that a body of epic writings, and then a

literary theatre, would necessarily or automatically have materialized. Social

and political factors, as suggested, were also at work (see Burn 1960:157 and

Harris 1989:61 for some of these). But while these factors certainly created

suitable conditions in Greece for a secular and artistic use of writing from an

early date, the practice of recording traditional oral narrative was itself made

available to the Greeks thanks to the speech-sensitive, democratic nature of

the alphabet.

When theatrical art emerged sometime in the sixth century, it was

beholden in a number of ways to the reduction of traditional narrative to

writing. In the first place, it took up the stories themselves. Aeschylus is said

to have described his plays as "slices from the great banquets of Homer"

(Athenaeus viii 347e, as cited by Garvie, 1969:46); Sophoclest use of Homeric

material gained him the appellation pliiltromeros and Homerikotatos

(Athenaeus vii 277e, as cited by Herington 1985:137 and Pfeif%er 1968:44).

Indeed, numerous ancient sources, from Herodotus to Isocrates to Plato to

AristotIe, leave little doubt that in their time and for centuries to come, the

dramatist's art was considered a continuation, through new formal means, of

the telling of stories first told in traditional epic recitation (Herington, 103-4).

As Havelock explains, "the Athenian stage plays, composed closer to the

native vernacular, became the Attic supplement to Homer:"

womer's] epic was not only the prototype of all preserved communication and remained so; its compendious content and widespread performance ~rovided a continuitv within which Greek drama Ean be seen as imitating the content and adapting the method to a performance which, stylistically speaking, Mered in degree rather than kind (1963:48).

What was innovative in drama was the way the tales were told. Rather

than being simply narrated by a single bard through his song, the stories

came to be represented in space with other bodies usurping the

representational functions of a single singer's voice. Let us now examine how

the alphabet helped to influence thls change in representational style.

In the fragments and extant plays of the fifth-century Greek

dramatists, there are, I believe, 83 references to writing.34 Both in stage

action and narration, characters are represented reading books, sending and

receiving letters, writing wills, interpreting written oracles and laws,

studying scholarly texts, and keeping expense-account records and records of

testimony in court. Writing is also used conspicuously throughout the first

dramas as a metaphor, with characters often being instructed to "inscribe"

something on the "tablets" of their minds. In the dramas, even the gods read

and write (Eumenides, 275, Frogs, 55-33). Clearly, the society reflected in the

dramatic literature of the fifth century practised writing, and practised it

often enough for most of these references to pass without special comment.

But when we turn to the Homeric epics, to the stories upon which theatre

34 None of my sources has attempted to amass a complete list. I count eighty-three references to reading, writing, books, inscription, letters and waxed tablets. Organized by author only, my list contains the following: Aeschylus, Eumenides 273-5; Prometbeus Sound 788-89, 459-61; Seven Agau'ast Thebes 647, 660; Suppiiants 178-9; 463, 991-2, 944-9; The Libation Bearers 450; Aitnai (?I frag. 530, a s cited by PfeifTer (1968:26); Sophocles, Ant&one 450-55, 499, 707-9; Phdoctetes 1325; Zk(pto1ernus frag. 540 (Nauck 1964); The Women of Tiachis 46, 155-63, 680-83, 1167; frags. 144, 597 and 742 (Nauck); Ampliiaraos (satyr play) (Athenaeus 10.4540; Euripides, Hecuba 293, mppolgtus 452ff, 857-65, 880, 953-54; Iphigenia in AuLis 108-23, 891; Iphigenia among the Taunkns 584-5,641-2,763; Meimppe frag. 506 (Nauck); Palamedes frag. 578 (Nauck); Phoenician Women 573-76; S u p p h t s 431-7, 1201-2; Theseus frag. 382 (Nauck); Trojan Women 661; frag. 627 (Nauck); Agathon, frag. 4 (Nauck); Akhaios Omphale hag. 33 (Nauck); Theodectes, frag. 6 (Nauck); Aristophanes, BabyIonians frag. 64 (Edmonds, 1957); Birds 974-91, 1024, 1036; The Broilers [?] frag. 490, frag. 676b (Edmonds); Clouds 18-24, 30-1, 759-74; Fair Place-Grabbers frag. 479 (Edmonds); Frogs52-3, 1114, 1407-10; Ceryhdes frag. 157 (Edmonds); Khights 188-9, 190-2, 1256; Thesmophoriazusai 768-84; T n j d d e s [?] frag. 623 (Edmonds) ; Wasps 959-60; Cratinus, The Laws frag. 122, [?] frag. 274 (Edmondsj; Tbe Thraciao Women frag. 71 (Edmonds); The Wise Flask frag. 195, frag. 196 (Edmonds); Kallias, Grammatical Playfrag. 31A, B, C, D (Edmonds); Herrnippus, The Porters frag. 63 (Edmonds); Eupolis, Exempt fmm Semke or the Workmen frag. 35, Flatterers 149-153, Mancas frag. 193, unknown work, frag. 304 (all from Edmonds); Plato, The Poet frag. 1 14, Phaon frag. 173, Daedalus I?] frag. 194 (all Edmonds); Philonides, unknown work frag. 7 (Edmonds); Anstomenes frag. 9 (as listed by Pfeiffer 1968:28 n. 2); Theopomp. frag. 77 (Pfeiffer 28 n. 2); Nicoph. frag. 19. 4 (Pfeiffer 28 n. 2).

based itself, we are struck by an inescapable realization: Homer's epic heroes,

unlike their dramatic embodiments, were illiterate.

Taken together, the Gad and the Odyssey comprise an encyclopedic

account of life during war and during peace. No feature of life as the epic

singers knew it seems unfit for representation in the songs, &om the proper

method of steering a chariot on the battlefield to the domestic arrangements

in Penelope's bedroom. Given the comprehensiveness of these poems as what

an ancient observer called "a fair mirror of human life" (Alcidamas as cited

by Pfefier 1968:50),35 and given especially their penchant for anachronism

(Msson 1968:211), one would expect writing to be represented within them

if it was known. But in the tens of thousands of lines of Homeric verse, there

are no references to writing at all, neither as a thing done nor as the subject

of a trope. The closest encounter with any kind of inscription occurs in the

story of Bellerophontes in Book Six of the Iliad (168-170). The "wicked

symbols" (semata lugra) that Bellerophontes takes with him to Lykia could

be described as a kind of writing insofar as they are "inscribed in a folding

tablet;" but they are also said to have magical powers "enough to destroy

He." As Powell has shown, the "fatal letter" motif was imported into the epics

from the Ancient East, where such folding tablets were used f3om an early

date (1991:199). That the eighth-century singers of the Greek epics had no

35C.M. Bowra says that the epics are a "modern and up to date" picture of life in Homer's historical period (1966, 1969:32). Powell does a comprehensive survey of the internal and external evidence for dating the Homeric songs (1991).

idea of how writing actually worked is proved when the word semata is used

again in Book Seven of the Ead, when the warriors draw lots: each puts a

mark on his own lot, but these marks are illegible to everyone but the marker

(181-9). Neither Bellerophontes' symbols nor the warriors' marks are

intended to represent anything; in one case they are their own magical

effects, in the other they are meaningless scribbles. Clearly, the bards are not

here depicting writing in the ordinary sense, as a representing device. This

obvious ignorance of how writing really functions has indeed led many

classicists since the eighteenth century to conclude with justification that the

composer of the fiadand the Odyssey was a strictly oral poet who composed

without the use of writing (Wood [I769 and 17751 1976; Lorimer 1948; Parry

1 9 7 1 : ~ ; Willcock, 1990; Powell 1991:200; Thomas 1992112, 50).

The picture we get from the epics of an oral Bronze Age society is (so

far) confirmed by the archaeologists, who date the first and very spotty

appearance of alphabetical writing samples to the eighth century (Jeffkey,

1990; Senner, 1989). In shifting over gradually from oral to literate modes-a

process which in Greece took place between 700 and 300 B.C.E.-any culture

is bound to undergo some changes? We have already looked briefly at one of

36 This notion was first advanced by Havelock (1963, 1978, 1986), (1986,1987). Thomas has added usefully to the subject (1989, 1990) b j from orality to literacy must have been, and by demonstrating tha t

Ong (1977, 1982), and Goody showing how complex the shift the widespread use of writing

augmented without eliminating many aspects of Creek life which, down to the third century, remained oral in practice. She very accurately describes the communication shift as one between Up~e t ry" and "oratory," rather than one between a "song culture" and a "book culture," as Havelock e t al. describe it. Oratory is indeed the better choice, for it , like theatre, was both dependent upon written modes and largely oral in practice. We will be returning to this issue in Chapters 2 and 3.

them: changes in the nature of memory. This desewes a closer look, for the

sunrival of traditional stories up until the advent of writing was wholly

dependent upon memory.

In the absence of any written records, memory must remain a very

approximate thing, as already noted. Accordingly, the culture dependent

upon memory will remain at the mercy of memory in maintaining itself.

Unable to rely on books, libraries and archives to keep track of information

pivotal to its sense of identity and material well-being, an oral culture must

seek and find its knowledge, truth, skills, history and wisdom about itself in

the living memories and speech of its members. Those members of an oral

society whose memories stretch back farthest will necessarily be most

valuable to the community at large, as will their ability to remember well

and pass on what they know in memorizable form to others.

Oral cultures have thus been described as conservative, in every sense

of the word (Ong 1977:119). Given the ephemerality of the spoken word, and

the mortality of the oral community's ultimate authorities, its elders, a

number of strategies tend to be used in pre-literate societies for aiding

conservation. Central amongst these is the use of constant repetition-f

stories, songs, rituals, genealogies, ancestry lists, formulae, phrases, epithets.

Ivan K a h k has mitten about contemporary West Afj5ca.n~ who still sit

together throughout the day reciting ancestry lists f r ~ m memory (1985:156);

in oral cultures, the recital of genealogies constitutes a distinct speech genre

(Halpern 1981:301-321). We can see evidence of this oral strategy also in the

Homeric epics. The catalogues of ships and the lengthy genealogical lists

surely functioned in their time as more than rhetorical ornamentation: they

served the practical function of preserving history. The stylistic peculiarities

of the epics have also been understood as stemming directly from the

limitations of an orally-dependent communication process. Such aides

memoires include the rigid hexameters, the constant repetition, the formulaic

descriptions, and the conventionality of the epithets.

When writing comes on the scene, both the form and the function of

memory change. Memory is no longer needed for cultural continuity, and

formulaic repetition tends to disappear in favour of memorization of text. The

most sigmficant consequence of this change in the nature of memory is that

memory loses its near-exclusive connection with what was heard, and

attaches itself to what is seen as well. A linguistic record of experience, once

communicated £corn mouth to ear in the form of myths, elders' maxims, and

ritual recitations, is now visually representable on the written page. The use

of aural rhetorical strategies for remembering culturally sigmficant material

begins to give way to the use of visual images in space. The "visual space" on

which these once-acoustic images can now be preserved indefinitely is, most

concretely, any fairly smooth surface: stone, pottery, animal skin, papyrus, or

even a bean.

But what we find, as early as the sixth century, is that this technique

of encoding information in visual space was internalized, providing a model

for representation in "mental" or imaginary space as well.

In her llhe Art of Memow, Francis Yates shows how, by Simonides'

time in Greece, memory had become associated, not with the sounds of words,

but with the visualization of fixed images (1966:lff.). In an oral context, as

witnessed by the Ead III.250-325, events are remembered and described

through the order in which people speak. By Simonides' time, things are

being remembered through their physical disposition in space?? Rather than

being associated with a temporal sound-sequence, memory is experienced in

terms of simultaneous spatial arrangement. As de Kerckhove, Ong and

Havelock have argued at length, this shift fi-om sound to sight, from a mental

soundscape to a visible landscape or "scene," is modeled on the example set

by the existence of visible written records. It is a shiR whose e ~ t e n c e we can

see clearly throughout the tragic texts and fragments, in references to

memory as a writing on the mind.38 We also find clear evidence of this

"hypervisualized noetic world" (Ong 1982: 127) in Platonic philosophy

somewhat later. Continually exhorting his interlocutors and readers to

imagine visual images of "ideas" which have an eternal (i.e. non-temporally-

linked) "form," Plato actively reflects this literate shift from temporal

"hearing" to spacial, static "viewing." The mode whereby knowledge was

received and disseminated had shifted from remembering what you heard, to

"seeing" the truth. In Platots intellectual "scenes," such as the Cave of

37 Rather than recollecting the events at a banquet by saying which guests spoke in what order, as Homer would have done, Simonides reconstructs the event by saying where everyone was located in the room (see Yates, 1966:l).

38 Pfeiffer (1968) provides a useful list of the relevant passages in plays and fragments (26 and notes).

Republic X, no less than in the widespread fifth-century practice of reading

itself, we see evidence of a move to visualization. And by Aristotle's time,

memory is directly equated with the order of letters in the alphabet (On

Memory and Reminiscence, 445213 16-25; cf. Yates, 1966:35).

But it was perhaps in the shift to a new mode of representing

traditional narratives that this heightened emphasis on the visual

manifested itself most tangibly. I . the epic age of Homeric song, a story was

something that was recited and heard; under the influence of writing's

emphasis on sight, a story became something to see. This generic shift,

between the aurality of epic and the visibility of the new theatrical forms, is

given unmistakable expression by one of Euripides' characters in ip6egenia

among the Tauzims:

I have heard marvelous tales from story-tellers, But nothing to compare With this event which my own eyes have seen.

(900-3)

In pre-literate storytelling, it was in the acoustic chain of sung or spoken

incidents that a plot inhered. Despite the musical, instrumental,

performative mode of epic recitation, a performing bard's stories were

verbally given, temporally-arranged, and taken in by the ears. With the

advent of theatrical form, a story came to be something that one sees. The

words from LT. quoted above are spoken immediately after a discussion

about the nature of writing, and spoken to a group of characters who are

themselves lettered. But the passage was also "addressed" to Euripides'

theatrical audience. In juxtaposing the hearing of tales from storytellers with

the seeing of an event with one's own eyes, Euripides is undoubtedly making

a metatheatrid statement about the virtues of his chosen genre. That

storytelling had, by Euripides' time, come to be associated with sight rather

than sound is also reflected in Aristotle's later writings on poetics. Indicative

of a notable departure from oral compositional methods, Aristotle advises the

aspiring playwright to "keep the scene before his eyed1 while writing (Poetics

1455a14ff.). In an oral context, advice for poetic composition would rather

have concentrated on hearing39

The transition from oral to literate modes has been studied for

Medieval Europe as well as for ancient Greece. Through his work on the

period between 1066 and 1307, M. T. Clanchy (1979) has found that the

spread of literacy in Europe had consequences on communication practices

which were s t r h g l y analogous to those hypothesized for Greece between

the turn of the millennium and the Classic age of Athens. Whereas pre-

literate Europeans would customarily have remembered a dying man's last

will and testament by having "heard" it themselves at his bedside, they

began to remember having "seen" a seal placed on a document, and to

39 AS the case of radio drama reminds us, audiences of 'oral' material wil l always 'visualize' the story they hear to some extent. But we are speaking here of compositroa, and the poet c o n b e d to the world of sound doesn't have to concern himself with physical impossibilities and visual contradictions in the way a playwright must. See C. M. Bowra (1969:50) on the "real contradictionsn that are possible and inevitable in oral compositional methods. As soon as a character in epic finishes speaking, he 'disappears.' On stage, on the contrary, playwrights must contend with moving speakers around physically before our eyes.

consider this evidence for the genuineness of the will (203). The technological

effect of writing on wills, knowledge, stories and other information is thus to

make them all, for the first time, objects for the eye rather than for the ear

exclusively.4~ And once the possibility existed of making what was formerly

only "heard" actually "visible," the Greeks were likely to have jumped a t the

chance: from the archaic into the classical period, Greek usage records a

highly valued distinction between hearing and sight. What was

"heard ...[fi om another]" had the value of mere "hearsay;" what one saw with

one's "own eyes" was more worthy of trust (Odyssey III. 93-5; Oe&pus 105,

Herodotus II. 99, 147, 156; Thucydides 1.20.1, 73.2; VI.53.3, 60.1; cf. Thomas,

1989:3, n.3; Segal, 1986:86). For this reason, it comes as no surprise to learn

that drama was the most 'people-pleasing" genre of poetry in antiquity; for in

the words of one member of the ancient theatre audience, drama meant that

Homer's stories could at last be not "merely heard, but also seen" (Herington,

1985: 103-4).

To "see" myths can thus be said to be the distinctive representational

mode of theatrical mimesis. It is worth noting that this relationship between

new-found literacy and theatrical representation is confirmed by the

aboriginal Canadian example. The use made by native poets of actors and

theatrical form, starting in the 1970s cf our era, has been described by one

40 The emphasis here is upon the word exclusively, since reliance on acoustic evidence didn't by any means disappear altogether. My thanks to Mechtilde O'Mara (University of Toronto) for this point; see also Thomas (1989, 1992) for Greek evidence about the continued reliance on oral modes.

expert as "giv[ing] the oral tradition a thee-dimensional context" (Petrone

1990: 180).

In any oral context, aboriginal Canadian or Greek, the existence of a

new representational model provided by the "evidence of letters" would not,

however, have effects c o h e d to the urge to make everything visible. The

likelihood, in a non-literate context, that important information will come

through one's ears also produces a situation in which the lines between

history and myth are blurred. Writing for this reason has been credited with

the emergence, not only of historiography, but also of fiction, as distinct,

intentional activities separable from mythic recitation (Segal, 1986:gO). An

oral culture's lack of "hard copy" compels it to satisfy its need for the

conservation of information by means of a medium which is by nature prone

to continual change. As an inevitable result, an event such as the Flood, or

the Sack of Troy, will enter the realm of myth nearly as soon as it occurs-

that is, at the very moment of its entry into the unstable medium of oral

tradition.41 Goody (1986, 1987) and Ong (1977, 1982) have found that a

tendency toward the narratization of all experience is a feature common to

oral milieux, and it is easy to see why. Not until a fixed record, such as that

of a Thucydides, can exist, will true history be able to detach itself from oral

41 We will have more to say about this later. But for now, note that Rosalyn Thomas' comparison of oial and written modes of transmission (1989) showed that even factual material told and retold orally becomes very distorted. Although omission and transposition are common in this 'broken telephone game" of oral transmission, i t is exaggeration above all that is responsible for turning historical fact into what Thomas calls "a timeless catalogue of heroic deedsn-in short, into myth.

lore. As William V. Harris points out, Thucydides included actual

transcriptions of key texts, and thus was able to liberate himself &om the

mythologizing tendencies of oral history, tendencies which are still very

present even in the work of Herodotus, who was still content to record and

accept as fact "what was said" (1989:80; Thomas 1992:112). It is not until

Thucydides that the logic of performance and invention is replaced by the

logic of writing and documents (Harris 80), and history becomes clearly

distinct from fiction. Furthermore, Thucydides advertizes himself as a

contemporary and eye-witness of many of the events he recounts, and thus

his record is freed horn the caprices of memory and the stylisations that come

of dependence on verbal mnemotechnics." At this point, a Merence between

tradition and truth can become perceptible, and fiction emerges as a distinct

way of speaking about the world or the past. By Anstotle's time, when

literacy was well established, this distinction between fiction and history had

become fairly obvious (Poetics 1451bf.). But it had not been long since the

two were indistinguishable. For example, in the Platonic texts it is clear that

the Homeric poems had customarily been expected to provide more than just

pleasure and a disinterested sort of eacat ion. On the contzary, and in

42 These mnemotechnics will include conventional formulas and epithets, parallel structures, regular meter and exaggeration. Now, the memorable qualities of such phrases as "In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean bluen do not, i t is true, seem to intedere with the historical accuracy of the saying. But in the recordmg of more complex and detailed historical verities, conventionality and exaggeration will seem to have their way. As proof of this, we need only remember the mythical qualities of Homer's telling of the events surrounding the Trojan War. So thoroughly did history become myth through oral transmission that scholars before Schliemann did not believe that there was any historical truth behind Homer's tales of Mycenae (see Chadwick, 1958, 1990:6).

Havelock's words, they were viewed as a "vast encyclopedia" (1986: 79). For

native Canadian culture as well, oral myths and legends and folk tales were

not experienced as fictional. On the contrary, they functioned as

indispensable repositories of cultural values and teachings (Petrone 1990: 10).

Songs and stories served as applied science, historical record and religious

practice all rolled into one: certain songs were used to heal the sick, others to

attract animals, others to strengthen the hunter (10-19, 121). When Petrone

lists the genres unknown in native Canadian culture before contact with

writing, she tellingly names "fiction" along with drama (183).

The use of written records obviates the need for the active

maintenance of a collective memory. Practical knowledge about customs,

techniques, history and genealogy can now be preserved outside the minds of

the collectivity, and individual energies are fieed to pursue more specialized

activities. In the Poetics, we see Aristotle actively engaged in working out

the boundaries among such specialist disciplines, distinguishing poetry from

history and history fiom philosophy. The category of fiction, of a poetic

making which is hee from the record-keeping function of oral epic, was

securely established by Aristotle's time, as we see horn his reference to the

fact that many dramatists make up their stories from scratch (145 1b. 19-26).

With the addition of writing, it also follows that language no longer

needs to be organized for the purposes of recall. Now, the Homeric poems, as

we have them, have certainly been affected somewhat by literacy. The

tradition which describes a Peisistratid redaction may not be perfectly

reliable, but we can be fairly sure that by the sixth century, a unified,

continuous written version of the Homeric epics was available for rhapsodic

recitation (FYeiEer, 1968:8)". But whatever literary organization or editing

occurred did not affect the epics' essential stylistic character, which still

exhibits a l l the salient features of an oral compositional style (see Thomas

1992:50@. As with other oral poetry around the world-fiom ancient

Sumeria, through the former Yugoslavia and into pre-European-contact

Canada-the language of the Homeric epics exhibits a "formulaic" linguistic

style (Lord 1960, 1981, 1990, 1991; Parry 1971, 1989; Hatto 1980; Foley

1981, 1986, 1990, 1991; Bauman 1986; Duggan 1990; Nagler, 1990). Features

common to verbal compositions carried out without the aid of writing include:

a ring-like, episodic structure, constant use of epithets, fixed formulae and

other stock expressions which can be moved around a t will as metrical slots

become available; and lots of repetition. These features are common to poetry

throughout the world which has been composed in and for oral recitation,

and have been observed in aboriginal Canadian verse as well (Petrone,

1990:19-22). With the formulaic method, it is possible for a singer of tales to

remember poems thousands of lines long without the aid of a fixed copy.

Rather than memorizing anything verbatim, the aoidos or bard learns a

vocabulary of formulae and a technique for manipulating and recombining

them within metrical constraints. As C. M. Bowra explains:

For additional sources and discussion of the evidence, see n. 31 and 32.

The art and the technique of poetry are passed fiom generation to generation by a strict training in the needs of oral composition and recitation. The young bard learns horn his elders the main outlines of stories, the names and personalities of characters, the rules of metre, the appropriate epithets for things and places and people, and, above all, an enormous mass of formulaic phrases, which are his main material in composition and his abiding resource to meet almost any need. Once a phrase has been formed and tested and proved its worth, it commands respect because it is established and comes fiom the past. It is expected and even demanded in the appropriate context (1969:4).

Under the influence of literacy, however, an altogether different type

of poetic technique can and does emerge. The existence of writing makes the

use of the formula obsolete, and repetition, which serves an equally practical

function, is noticeably curtailed. As Bowra continues, "the oral tradition,

which had come from Mycenaean times, broke down with the introduction of

the alphabet'' (56).

Indeed, when we compare the language of oral epic with that of the

West's first literary genre, we find differences which could not be more

pronounced. First among these is perhaps the "paradox," noted by Walter

Ong, that drama, while the very first poetic genre to be controlled by

writing,"4 should also be the first language genre to "make deliberate use of

colloquial speech" (1977:72). In light of what has been said so far, it may in

fact not be so paradoxical at all. Given the tendency of writing to make

obsolete the need for memorable, formulaic expression, and given the

capacity we observed earlier of alphabetical script to encode speech-as-

spoken, it would stand to reason that it was not in spite of, but rather

because of drama's literary character that it quickly distinguished itself as

the genre of contemporary speech par excellence. The language in drama

shows a complexity of syntax, and a par t icular i~ of speech wholly unlike

what we find in oral narratives.

The shift from the mnemonically-oriented formulaic language of epic to

a dramatic language of fixed, individualized vernacular speech did not

happen all at once, of course. The grand hexameters of Homeric diction

remained widely in use in lyric composition throughout the 7 t h and 6 t h

centuries; even between the heroic Aeschylus and the "bookish" Euripides

one can see an ongoing movement, with the advance of literacy, away kom

the language of stereotype and toward a language of idiosyncratic

contemporary speech.

4 Ong does not himself pmve that drama was the first genre to use writing from the start, but all evidence does point in that direction. That dramas had to be submitted in writing to the archon before their first performance (Dover, 1972:15) suggests unmistakably that writing was used in their composition. If epic was orally composed, we are left only with lyric a s an alternate contender for the title of "first literary genre." Less is known about the compositional methods of lyricists like Alcman, Stesichorus, AIcaeus and Sappho. So until actual evidence appears to show that they composed these (shorter) works in writing-rather than out loud, to the lyre, a s one would guess-drama must be left in possession of the distinction.

This "purely literary revolution" (Bowra, 57) in favour of

individualized expression can, of course, be attributed to some extent to the

"social revolution" that accompanied it (57). Lively trade with and

colonization of foreign populations would certainly have had the effect of

opening the Greeks' ears wide to the sounds of particularized, colloquial

speech. In addition, the move away from strictly hierarchical political models

would naturally favour more opportunities for individual expression, as

witnessed by the poetry of the lyric age (seventh and sixth centuries). As

Bowra explains, "in the seventh century Kings gave place in many districts to

small classes of nobles;"

Full of pride of success, and eager to draw attention to themselves, they turned from the past to the present, horn the old heroic ideal to a new sense of personality and individual worth (57).

These social changes, however, do not provide an adequate

explanation of themselves. As David Olson writes: "What the mind can do

depends on the devices provided by culture," not just on how that culture is

organized (as cited by Scinto 1986:164). Without the advent of a new

technology for poetic composition, epic recitation might well have retained its

supremacy as a storytelling form, despite the fact that its world-view was

outmoded, for no other reason than that nothing more highly particularized

was practicable in the absence of writing. For above all, "literacy makes a

radical difference to the complexity of organization that humans can

manage" (Winchester 1985:35). Without the technology of writing, the

complexity of organization characteristic of drama would have been

unthinkable.

Homeric epic has been described as being composed of blocks of

formulaic utterance which, in performance, were "stitched together" much as

we join "the relatively brief, relatively independent idea units" of ordinary

speech (Chafe 1985:lZ). The resemblance of the epic style to other types of

speech composed and performed in the physical presence of hearers can be

seen also in the tendency, of all of them, to be knit together with the help of

"flow monitoring devices" (i.e. you know, so, anyway). In lengthy oral

recitations of such modern works as the Afi5ca.n Bagre (Goody 1987179, 168)

or the Canadian aboriginal story of The Girl Who Married The Bear (Petrone

1990:12), we 6 n d evidence for the universality of this method of organization

within oral contexts. On the other hand, a composition which has been put

together at leisure, in a spatio-temporal context not inhabited by a listening

audience, will predictably be marked by an absence of such flow-monitoring

devices; and indeed, no direct references to "you," to the listener, can be

found in any of the tragic texts that have come down to us (Taplin

1977: 13 1).45

The disappearance of vocatives to the audience is just one of the

changes to composition that follow from the use of the written medium.

45 The situation is obviously different in Old Comedy, which addresses the audience directly in the parabasis.

Because it has both freed language fiom the demands of memory and

arrested its course in visible space, writing also stretches its users' control

over it. The writer can begin to manipulate longer units, and indulge in more

complex, multi-dimensional functions. The increased length of the units of

language that the poet can master with writing's help can be seen, first, a t

the level of the sentence: subordinate and relative clauses barely exist at all

in Homer but flourish in the writings of the Classic dramatists (Kalmh

1985:157). Increased complexity can also be seen a t the level of the story as a

whole. In oral composition, stories "are built up largely from self-contained

episodes" and themes are abandoned after they have served their purpose in

the individual locales (Bowra 50-51). As a result, both the fiad and the

Odyssey contain what Bowra describes as "real contradictions" from episode

to episode (51). However, when it becomes possible to see the beginning,

middle and end of a composition simultaneously, the concept of an organic,

unified structure comes into existence. Aristotle speaks of a poem as an

animal whose head, body and tail the eye takes in a t once-a statement

which could never be made of poetry before the use of writing. (Poetics

1451a). Nor, in an oral milieu, could one speak of a poetic composition as a

visible design, or 'painting," a trope Aristotle also resorts to in describing

tragic composition (1450b). But when all elements of a plot are set down on

paper, the relationships between them can become apparent, visible a t a

glance (cf. Ong 1982:148). In pre-literate epic, language is confined to the

"winged words" of oral speech; its parts must follow and actually replace one

another in time. It is only when put in visible space that they can be co-

present and available for comparison. Writing thus enables the kind of intra-

textual analysis that formed the debate between Zenodotus and Aristarchus

over whether Homer would really have used the word daita to describe

animal-food (17.XXTV.43 as discussed in Pfeiffer 1968:112), and between

Protagoras and Aristotle over whether it is inconsistent to put a prayer in the

imperative (Poetics, 1456138-10; see Pfeiffer for other literary criticism of

Homer by the Sophists, 38a. With the existence of written text come poetic

questions of thematic and verbal consistency, and of relationships between

part and whole.

Not only do relationships between elements in the telling of a story

become visible to literates, but these same elements can become viewable as

possessing relationships amongst each other outside of their narratological

function. As noted earlier, alphabetical script sunders the palpable

connection that exists in speech between word and meaning, between the

sigrufier (the word "tree"), and the s igdied that it refers to in reality (the

class of organic entities with roots, trunk and leaves). Gerd Baumann (1986)

maintains that in an oral culture, words represent the world indexically: to

define the meaning of a word one simply points to the object or state of

affairs. Because orally-dependent language must always be "sponsored"

language (Harris 1989: 100fi), i.e. sponsored by some speaker, language in a

pre-literate context will always be embedded in some concrete context of

actual use, engaged in an indexical pointing-to-the-world. But within the

second-order symbolic system of writing, words begin to refer to other words

within the system, to define each other outside of their indicating function.

By becoming a static, visible object for sight-a "thing" to look at-language

loses the illusion which it has in speech of being a transparent referential

medium. Writing distances words from their relation with reality, and brings

their relationships to one another into consciousness.

What results is a new awareness of a systematic dimension of

language, of the fact that words define other words arbitrarily in addition to

defining the world referentially. In culture generally, this abstracted view of

language has been credited with the birth of abstract philosophy and of

linguistic studies. But it is also one of the central driving forces at work in

the new genre of drama, tragedy especially. In the dramatic rewriting of

Greek mythic material, we find a "problematic of the sigdier" which is

noticeably absent in the epic versions by comparison. When the warriors of

epic speech are said to be "god-supported" or worthy of "honour," these words

refer unproblematically to the aid of the gods and the battle-renown of

fighting mortals which constitute the stuff of heroic legend. In the dramas,

however, characters use words which are explicitly ambiguous; the same

word means one thing to one speaker, something else entirely to another. In

tragic speech, words have lost their Homeric transparency of meaning and

become question-marks that must be negotiated aitliia the linguistic system

itself. The number of words and concepts in drama which are semantically

uncertain, intentionally ambiguous, rises to a very high number. In the

Oedipus alone, there are fifty words whose meanings are made

problematic;46 and although few dramas can lay claim to that statistic, a l l are

marked by an actively questioning attitude to the meaning of w0rds.4~ What

is honour? A convention of war or a virtue in itself? If a virtue, what h d ?

What is "love?" What are the difZerent kinds? Does the word love contain

within it certain inherent contradictions-a love of family bound to conflict

with a love for the poh? And what of polis? What is its relationship with

smaller units? With the non-human realm? What is 'law?" Is it the opposite

of "nature," or do the two words have some other relationship than as simple

contraries? Words in drama have been unmoored fkom a certain and stable

relationship with extra-verbal reality and, having thus become objects in

their own right, their limits, powers and peculiarities as meaning-generating

entities can be explored.

This distancing of speech from speakers, which theorists today

commonly call "alienation," has determined the form and function of drama

in a number of ways, some of which we shall explore in Chapter 4. For the

moment we will only point out that alienation does not so much introduce

new features into language use as it makes old ones apparent and available

for conscious reflection. To alienate language through writing is simply to see

linguistic mechanisms that were invisible previously. Words do define one

another systematically, and always have; but contextually-embedded speech

J.-P. Vernant (1978: 175) refers to the number collected by A. Hug.

47 Vernant analyses occurrences and types of ambiguity in the Agamemoon and Antigone (1978:175- 176).

gives them the iLIusibn of referring directly to the world of our experience.

Like Brecht's decision to let the lighting apparatus of the stage be seen by the

audience, writing's alienation of language simply shows what was always

there in speech, but which the directness and diaphanousness of spoken

language tended to disguise (cf. Derrida 1973).

Evidence of t h new problematic of language spawned by writing can

be seen in nearly a l l fifth-century drama. The co5ict in &&'gone stems

directly from mutually incompatible definitions of law and duty. There is no

single and certain referent for nomos (law, custom) attainable; the word has

become an abstract problem for analysis." The same can be said of kratos

(might, power, rule) in the Suppliants, of omma and pbainestbai (to eye, to

make visible, bring to light) in the Women of Tkac6is, of dike (justice)

throughout the Orestia, and sopha (wisdom) in the Bacchai, or of the

semantic relationship between eidos (that which is seen, known) and agnoia

(want of perception, ignorance) in the Oe&pus. As Vernant and Vidal-

Naquet observe (1990), this linguistic indeterminacy marks a profound shift

&om the "stable realities" of earlier forms, and defines the particular

character of dramatic language (186, 38-64; Searle 1982:2 11, n.3).

As Rosalind Thomas (1989) has admirably demonstrated for

communication practices in ancient Athens, the alienation of verbal

48 Vernant adds dike, phdos and phfia, kerdos, time, orge and deinos to the list of problematic words in the Antigone (1978:495, n. 5).

experience wrought by writing tends also to reduce conventional stereotype

and clichk. With no written account to refer to, even genuine memories of real

events get "simpMed" by oral modes of transmission. Acquiring

"conventional or idealized elements, cliches and stereotyped form," they are

gradually transformed into legendary material that bears "slight relation to

the original material" (284). These falsifications are cumulative, and thus the

telescoping, distortion and s i rnp~ca t ion of oral transmission is "irreversible"

(284). Anachronism is common, as is the tendency to endow events with a

more "colourful" narrative character than they really possessed (285). The

past is commonly altered to fit in with present values and beliefk, and whole

blocks of history disappear altogether. Although such distortions are

occasionally deliberate, in general they are a function of the mode of

communication itself (284). For these reasons, we are inclined to believe

Walter Ong when he says that "oral cultures not only express themselves in

formulas, but also think in formulas." This is so because "[to] be recoverable,"

it is not only expression, but thoughts themselves which "must be elaborated

mnemonically" (1977:103). Expression, after all, is not only the garb that a

thought wears, but the form that it takes, even for the one thinking it.

Hand in hand with the reduction in stereotyped features goes a

gradual disappearance of the need to conform to precedent. In what Bowra

calls "the strict tradition" of epic recitation, "any manifestation of individual

idiosyncrasies" is usually rejected (56)." But with the conservative function

of storytelling obviated by the existence of writing, "variation came to be

accepted for its own sake" (Kirk 1985:103), a change that would further

reinforce the emergence of fiction as a distinct linguistic category. Speaking

about the ''fresh meanings" introduced into traditional material by

Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Kirk says that "such

drastic ... reinterpretations usually presuppose a literate culture, both in

Greece and elsewhere" (109); "the literate handling of traditional tales M e r s

seriously. .from oral transmission" (105).

From the appearance in their texts of an exact, continuous line of

Homeric verse (Antigone 29-30, Hecuba 1078, Suppliants 800f. and Ion

504f), we can be fairly certain that the tragedians had before them a written

copy of the epics (Pfeiffer 1968: 11 1). The very existence of a visible, alienated

version of traditional stories is bound to enable poets to cogitate upon their

contents in ways that were unavailable to bards confined to the oral register.

As the first genre to benefit from the pre-existence of stories which did not

inhere in a particular speaker or in any live performative context, drama was

also the first Western verbal art to be composed "as a self-contained, discrete

unit, defined by closure" (Ong, 1982:148)-that is, to exhibit a unified, non-

episodic structure. The "deferred relation" between literate storytelling and

audience reception also permits the composition to be worked on, in private,

Finnegan (1977) and Thomas (1992) stress that oral singers do tend to embellish stories and stamp them with their own taste; deliberately changed meanings, however, were impermissible.

over time, and to be edited, corrected, reorganized and even interrogated

(Segal, 1986:77). As a result, the mythic contents are themselves distanced

from the writer, allowing for a wider range of particularized responses and

treatments than was possible formerly. For, as long as stories are connected

with collective memory, deliberate changes in the telling of them would be

counter-productive, even dangerous to the survival of the tradition. Oral

narratives are "composed" during recitation itself, which means that they are

always improvisations to some extent. But the leeway they give to the

individual bard is apparently quite narrow: deliberate changes to the

tradition are always felt to be "wrong or awkward, or. .. a 'mistake"' (Lord

1960:130; Finnegan 1990:247). As Lord goes on to explain, it is only in a

literate context that conscious changes and departures are felt to be "right"

and desirable (130). Aristotle confkms this when he advises that the

dramatic poet "must show invention" in his use of the tradition (1453b11).

The special interrogatory, and in some places downright subversive character

of the tragedians' treatment of epic material can thus be attributed to a great

extent to the fkeedom given them by a written version of traditional material:

they were fiee to alter and criticize as much as they wanted without

imperiling the survival of the tradition itself.

Written myth, then, gave the poets of the sixth and fifth centuries both

the means and the liberty to criticize, question and change received narrative

material. But perhaps more radically, from the point of view of generic form,

it gave them the means to represent mythic figures as individualized

speaking subjects. The use of formulae, as we mentioned, served the needs of

composition in performance. The bard does not memorize the whole song, but

"internalizes" a vocabulary of phrases and formulae that he plugs into

appropriate metrical slots (Lord 1960:120, 36). In Parry's words, a formula is

"a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical

conditions to express a given essential idea" (30). The bard's reliance on

formulae is not, however, confined to epithets and other obvious epic "tags;"

in Lord's words, "there is nothing in the poem that is not formulaic" (47).s0

This may be an extreme view; nevertheless, the formulaic style has certainly

determined how individual figures' speech is represented.

In providing an easy and responsive method for transcribing

pronunciation, use of the alphabet opens up to poetic composition the ability

to "hear" the speech of individuals. Cut loose by writing from the formulaic

and metrical constraints of composition-in-performance, storytellers were

now free to exploit this alphabetical potential to the full, and they did. The

representation of the idiosyncratic speech of individuals is not evidenced in

epic speech, and, to reiterate, seems to be unavailable to non-alphabetical

theatres as well. For example, the heroes in the Iliad and Odyssey are not

characterized by their speech. What distinguishes Agamemnon from

Odysseus, or Hektor from Menelaus is not a distinctive word-choice, or the

use of characteristic constructions or metaphors. An oral bard thinks nothing

of giving identical speeches to a variety of unlike characters. As Willcock

Parry (1989) and Thomas (199251) discuss the evidence for and the significance of this (perhaps exaggerated) claim for oral poetry.

(1990: 10) has shown, the exact same words are spoken by Agamemnon in one

place and by Odysseus in another (M.122-157 and M.264-299).51 Roughly the

same soliloquy is spoken on one occasion by Odysseus m.404-lo), on another

by Menelaus (XVII.91-105),52 and the self-same formula is used to express

the thought of Agenor (XXI.553-70), Hektor (XW.99-130) and Achilleus

m.378-394) .53 In the Odyssey, Penelope and Eumaios deliver themselves

of the exact same words as well m . 4 1 - 4 4 and XVI.23-4),54 and the list goes

on. What distinguishes characters in epic is primarily the bard's use of

descriptive epithets: the brilliant Odysseus, the glorious Hektor, the warlike

Menelaos. Speech in the epic-which in any case remains a single, monologic

language circumscribed by the extratemporal epic traditi0n5~-is controlled

by the metrical and formulaic consistency demanded by an oral mode. A

5' This is the thirty-five-line offer of treasure that begins, in Lattimore's translation, with "seven unGred tripods; ten talents' weight of gold; twenty shining cauldrons; and twelve horses, strong, race- competitors who have won prizes in the speed of their feet. That man would not be poor in possessions, to whom were given all these have won me, nor be unpossessed of dearly honoured gold ..." The two speeches end with "AU this I wiU bring to pass for him, if he changes from his anger," and they are identical except Odysseus says "hew and "Agamemnon* and "you" instead of "me," "I," and "him."

52 It is the internal debate weighing two evils which begins "And [or 'deeply'] troubled, he spoke to his own great-hearted spirit: 'Ah me, what will become of me? " and ends "Yet stdl, why does the heart within me debate on these things?" and "Then why does my own heart within m e debate this?" There are small differences within the two versions of the speech, but the pattern is the same.

s3 AU three fighters say "yet stdl, why does the heart within me debate on these things?" and two begin with similar utterances: "Ah me! If I run away before the strength of Achilleus ..." and "Ah me! If I go now inside the wall and the gateway ..."

Both speeches begin "You have come, Telemachos, sweet light; (and) I thought I would never see you again, when you had gone in the shlp to Pylos ..." and ends "But come now ..."

s5 For a discussion of the "monologc" character of epic speech, see Bakhtin, "Epic a n d Novel" in The Dialogical Imagination (1981 :3-40)

character can be represented as saying only what the available metrical units

in a line will permit; and all speeches are largely determined in advance by

the existence of tried-and-true schemes. For this reason, speech as

represented by the oral means of the epic will not be particularized beyond

the point of basic pragmatics: the uttering of a threat, the offering of thanks,

the announcement of a wish to die at once. In the lyric, we begin to hear the

sound of a contemporary individual's speech56; but in drama, individuality of

speech becomes an organizing generic principle. In drama, individuality of

speech becomes explicit and far more thoroughly developed, since the

represented discourses are visibly brought into direct contrast with other

discourses. Lyric is generally composed of one individual's speech," so speech

particularity never becomes a real issue. In dramatic speech, on the other

hand style, the accents, nuances and social values inherent in each

individual's language are brought into an even sharper relief though contact

with the speech of other characters. In Bakhtinian terminology, the separate

discourses of drama can be said to mutually illuminate and comment upon

56 The lyricists of the seventh and sixth century were the first to show traces of the emancipation of individualized speech in poetry from the collectivity of traditional song (Barnstone 1962:2). But in the case of the lyric, the individuality of speech was merely "circumstantial," so to speak. It was the more or less inevitable consequence of the fact that lyrics were composed by individuals in a subjective vein; individuality of speech had not yet become a formal "principle."

5' Two exceptions to this general rule can be found within the subgenre of the choral lyric. Alcman's seventhcentury song for maidens a t a festival used the different voices of tho girls themselves (see Bowra 1969:83), and Sappho's song about maidenhood (c. 600) similarly includes a dialogue between the maidenhood itseLf and the bride shortly to loose it (86). The relation between the choral lyric and the dramatic form which grew out of it wiU be discussed further in Chapter 2. In general, though, the lyric singer "speaks primarily for himself" (Bowra 8).

each other. Speech in drama thus becomes both heterogeneous and

individualized.

Consider, for example, the unadorned, mocking verbal blasts of

Sophocles' Antigone: "I knew it; of course I did For it was public" (hbgone

492); "I know that I will die-of course I d0.J count that as a profit" (504);

"Why do you wait, then? Nothing that you say pleases me; God forbid that it

should" (545). Her expressions, rhetorically spare and pointed, are

characterized by a certain amount of aggressive overstatement and are

rooted in intensely felt but often unreasoned emotion: "Oh, oh, no! Shout it

out. I wiU hate you still worse for silence-should you not proclaim it to

everyone" (99-101); "If you talk like this I will loathe you ... Let me alone and

my folly with me, to endure this terror. No suffering of mine wiU be enough

to make me die ignobly" (109-114). The contrast with, say, the speech of

another Sophoclean heroine, Deianira, couldn't be greater. Whereas an epic

bard might have, in his own stereotyping voice, described Heracles' wife as

"the gentle Deianira," the "long-suffering Deianira," or the like, Sophocles the

playwright portrays the character through the qualities of her speech. Her

meekness and lack of self confidence are conveyed through her characteristic

use of qu&catiom, a kind of continual verbal self-subversion: "Zeus of the

contests made the end good-if it has been good" (me Women of IZac6is 25-

6); "For here I have taken on a girl-no, I can think that no longer-a

married woman" (536-37); "Well, the move is made, unless you think I am

acting rashly. If so I will stop" (586-7). She speaks with the unfocused

wordiness of a young girl, with full self-disclosure, as if she were always

aware of being answerable to someone else, of having to prove that she has

been a good girl: "I do not speak of the manner of their struggles for I do not

know. Someone who watched the spectacle unafraid could tell" (21-3);

"Something has happened which, if I tell you, my f iends, will seem a marvel

such as you never thought to he ar... I want to tell you this in detail, so you

may know the whole story" (672-79); "I neglected none of the instructions

that the beast the centaur explained to me ... And I did only what I was told to

do" (680-1); "And this is what I did" (688) "...as you saw" (692). Her many

uses of the words "house" and "home," her tags of endearments (Dear s e n d s ,

my friends, dear women, 0 kindest of men) and easy resort to clichdd truisms

(1-3, 92-3, 548-9) mark her speech with its distinctively sweet, trusting,

domestic flavour, and contrasts it with the speech of those around her. Or

consider the language of Creon, with its heavy reliance on metaphors and

images of control: Antigone is a horse to be broken (Ant. 522-3), b citizens

growling animals who must be brought under the yolk (324); tongues must be

kept under lock and key (200). People are described by him as animals and

objects: Ismene is a viper (53 I), Polynices is a meal for birds and dogs (207),

Antigone a h o w for Haemon's plow (569). Every inch the tyrant, h s

distrustful, advantage-seeking nature manifests itself in an overwhelming

number of profit, monetary and bribery images (325-34, 343-46, 361, 1094-5,

1096, 1107, 1118, 1127, 1130). This high level of speech particularization,

carried out with such consistency throughout a work, is unthinkable without

the aid of writing. Oral composition cannot help but flatten out and

homogenize the represen tation of individual figures' speech.

Individualized speech is manifested equally in tragedy and comedy,

and was to remain a distinguishing characteristic of the dramatic genres

throughout history. As mentioned earlier, the alphabet's special relation to

spoken language is evidenced especially in the ease with which it can

represent even foreign, incoherent or otherwise semantically opaque

language. Exploiting the abilities of his writing system, Thomas Dekker

would carry on the dramatic tradition by representing the sounds of Dutch

speech ( m e Shoemaker's Holiday, II.iii.7Off.); Shakespeare will do the same

for the sounds of French speech (Hen. V V.ii.99ff.). Earlier in the tradition,

we find Aristophanes using the alphabet for inscribing the incoherent jargon

of Persians ( A & ~ m s ) , 5 8 and recording the imaginary dialect of frogs in

his comedy of that name. In Euripides' Orestes, the alphabet proves its

elasticity in transcribing foreign "babble" at length, as translated here into

an equivalent mangling of English:59

Greekish sword-kill dead! Trojan scared, oh.

Run, run. Jump in slippers, fast, fast, clop-clop clamber over roof Hole in beams, inside court, jump down

boom! below.

Oh, oh, Where can run, where go?

Mebbe foreign ladies know? UP, UP,

58 See the text of The Athenian Society (1931:VoI. 1 106).

59 All translations of the tragedies are from Grene and Lattimore (1991).

Soar in air, him shimmer nothing? Swim in sea-mebbe? mebbe?- Where godbull ocean cradles world flowing water with? (1368-1379)

As a final example of the subtlety and particularity of speech representation

that could be attained by a poet who had learned his ABCs, we might look at

the sentry's speech to Creon in Antzgone. David Grene, who translated it,

remarked on a number of features which may not be obvious to a reader of

the English version:

He speaks with marked clumsiness ... the royal presence makes him think apparently that he should be rather grand ... He uses odd bits of archaism or somewhat stale poetical passages, particularly in catch phrases (199 1: 169).

Here is the speech:

My lord, I will never claim my shortness of breath is due to hurrying, nor were there wings on my feet. I stopped a t many a lay-by in my thinking; I circled myself till I met myself coming back. My soul accosted me with different speeches. "Poor fool, yourself, why are you going somewhere When once you get there you wiU pay the piper?" "well, aren't you the darling fellow! Stopping again? and suppose Creon hears the news from someone else- don't you realize you will smart for that?" I turned the whole matter over. I suppose I may say "I made haste slowly" and the short road became long .... etc. (242-253).

This speech-pompous, apologetic and endlessly digressing-continues in

this vein until Creon finally shouts "For god's sake, tell me and get out of

here!" (267).

As even these perfunctory examples should attest, the use of a written

alphabet-for breaking up words and putting them back together in new

ways, for catching exact rhythms and idiosyncratic constructions, for

combining different styles and meters in the same work and maintaining the

integrity of each-gives to the poet a device for recording speech with vastly

more individuality than was known formerly. Unencumbered by the

formulaic, mnemonic demands of oral recitation, the writer can, with the help

of this new technological "ear" of speech, record human discourse with a

freedom not to be matched until the invention of the wax cylinder60 And

perhaps not matched even then, in one respect: the fact that the speech

recorded in drama can never be smoothed out and homogenized by its

representing medium. As speech written to be performed-not by one

speaker but by separate individual speakers-language in drama is neither

subject to the monologizing voice of a single reciter, nor vulnerable to the

homophonic tendencies of a representing medium. For it is a feature of

dramatic writing that the speech which is particularized therein only gets

M e r particularized when it is spoken by actors on the stage. This is so

because all actors necessarily bring their own accents, dialects, intonations,

phrasing, pauses, emphases and gestures to bear upon each word of each

speech in performance; and this re-particularization of the poet's written

60 We are of course still dealing with poetry, which is to say that metrical regularity is not absent. The issue here is rather that even within the metrical constraints of verse, the literate playwrights were able to introduce a degree of speech particularity unknown in epic song.

speech goes on ad infiniturn so long as the play is performed, and wherever it

is performed.

This deep-structural heterogeneity of speech in drama is, therefore,

ultimately guaranteed by the fracturing of poetic performance into a number

of separate voices.61 Epic recitation, as we have said, is carried out by the

voice of a single speaker. But it was not only by convention that this was so.

In times before writing, traditional narratives had no existence "outside" of

the bards who knew how to tell them, and in consequence they remained the

''property," to some extent, of those who knew the technique. We have spoken

so far of oral material as communal property; but its shared possession was

of a diachronic rather than a synchronic character. As we see horn a number

of contemporary contexts, oral traditional stories and songs are collective

property through time (from one generation to another), but they tend to be

the exclusive property of certain specialized individuals or groups at a given

moment. In aboriginal Canadian culture, for example, only "certain initiated

elders" have the right to tell certain stories (Petrone 1990:11), and to this day

families possess certain songs over which they have exclusive control. Either

one must be a member of a special society (such as the Medewin of the

Ojibwa [Ill), or have learned the special skills of an aoidos from

apprenticeship to one who has already mastered and internalized them. The

Derrick de Kerckhove has suggested that this fracturation begins with the act of inscription itself: the scribe of a n epic "would be fragmenting the poem to process it through the alphabetic code, and the fragments of the story would appear as specific actions, mIes and heroic or exemplary attitudesn (1981:24).

esoteric nature of much oral material is obscured by the communal nature of

its reception; but all members of the collective audience are not equally

authorized as producers. In a literate world, on the other hand, performers

are suddenly able to memorize a story written from start to b h by someone

else, and to do so conceiveably overnight, with no apprenticeship whatever.

This in turn makes it possible for the story-telling function to be distributed

among separate speakers, speakers whose individual contribution to the

temporal unfolding of the tale has been determined in advance. But most

significantly of all, the pre-existence of the story in written form makes it

possible for performative power to be delegated to non-spe~aLists. When a

given narrative has already been written down, a performer does not need to

know any special techniques in order to make a contribution to the telling of

it. One does not even need to know how to read (although it helps), because

the fixity and repeatability of a written text makes rote memorization

possible even for those who must learn their parts with help from another

reader? And so it is not insi@cant that the earliest Greek actors were

amateurs: in a notable departure horn epic practice, actors had no specialized

skills, nor were they in possession of a specially monopolized traditional

style. Although actors' g d d s and clubs, schools and techniques were

eventually to emerge and a "histrionic tradition" eventually to appear (and

62 This is an important point, for it suggests that not all participants in a literate theatre would necessarily need to skilled readers, or even literate themselves. See Harris (1989) for recent and very conservative estimates of the number of readers in the various Greek periods.

sometimes be passed on within families), none of these existed in the early

days of drama's emergence (Slater 1990:385@.

This de-specialization of performance is fundamental to the

representational style of the theatre, and has remained a distinguishing

characteristic of dramatic performance to this day. For, in the final analysis,

all the "methods" and theatrical families in existence cannot outweigh one

fact: that more plays are enacted by amateurs than professionals. Whether in

school plays or church plays or plays pesformed at home or at some local

community centre ("Brownies," summer camp, Boys and Girls' Clubs, etc.),

ordinary citizens perform in thousands of plays every year throughout the

Western world. Even individuals who have never set foot in a professional

theatre are liable to have performed some part, in some play, somewhere.

We will have occasion to look more closely at the implications, for

theatrical theory, of this tendency of writing to de-specialize performance.

But it is worth mentioning at this point that a failure to appreciate this

aspect of theatrical representation has caused numerous modern theorists to

draw specious parallels between theatre and shamanistic performance.

Theorists such as Schechner (1976) and the early Cole (1975), intrigued by

superficial phenomenological similarities, have described theatre as

essentially shamanistic, and shamanistic performance as essentially

theatrical. The list of reasons why this comparison is misleading is actually

rather long, and includes such pivotal divergences as the presence, in the

one, and the absence in the other, of religious and ritual elements, and the

absence in theatre and the presence in shamanic performance of direct

audience involvement. Hsu described the main difference between the actor

and the shaman as follows: "The shamanesses worked on the spirits, not on

the spectators; they tried to invoke gods, not amuse men; in fact, in some

cases there might not be any spectators at all" (1985:ZOO). But aside horn

these obvious functional dissimilarities, there is another crucial Werence

which is generally overlooked. This is the fact that shamanistic performance

is the exclusive preserve of the specially initiated. Unlike the actor, the

shaman is specially "chosen" for his performative function, and must, also

d i k e the actor, undergo a physical "initiation" that marks him for life as a

select practitioner of a sacred and secret "vocation" (Conquergood 1992:45-9).

The actor, on the contrary, in antiquity no less than in modernity, is anyone

m*tb a smBt. For this reason, shamanic performance must be seen a pre-

literate performance type, with more in common with epic than drama, for

the shaman, like the rhapsode, is the physical embodiment of a traditional

style and the authorized repository of esoteric knowledge not available to

everyone.

The liberation of the performer from the need to belong to an exclusive

sect or special caste was achieved through the detachment of performative

material fiom the body and physical memory of the initiate. Before writing, it

was solely within the mind and personal performance of culturally

sanctioned specialists that traditional stories existed. Within the newly

literate world, these songs now existed "on the outside," where they could be

picked up and performed by "anybody." That this democratizing alienation of

epic material was an alarmingly new state of affairs, at least for some

observers, can be seen in Plato's Ion. Here the phdosopher raises his

concerns about the propriety of performances of important traditional

material by those who had no legitimate, or obviously special claims on it.

Because Ion was just an "anybody" with a script," Plato cast doubt on his

legitimacy by saying that he had neither sufEciently specialized episteme nor

authentic teche, neither knowledge nor craft. What rhapsodes like Ion

inaugurated by performing material which did not belong exclusively and

properly to them, actors developed even further.

It is worth noting that Plato's resistance to amateurism in public

performance cannot be wholly attributed to his particular philosophical

outlook. Wherever performance has traditionally been the preserve of

specialists, the figure of the actor, every inch the amateur, is bound to be

welcomed onto the storytelling scene like a parvenu into the yacht club. As

we see in Europe some centuries later, this is precisely what did happen

when the popularity of amateur plays began to challenge the privileges of the

professional minstrel. The monopoly on storytelling previously enjoyed by the

minstrels was in fact so seriously threatened by the amateur, script-bearing

actor, that the minstrels tried to have the giving of performances by

63 Ion was clearly a very talented reciter of Homeric epics, so he was not just "anybody" in that sense. Plato's objections revolve rather around the fact that Ion was demonstrably not an e v e r t in anf ih i~g other than the memorization of another man's words. For evidence that rhapsodes like Ion used written texts, see Xenophon (Memorabilia iv. 2, lo), where they are described as "very precise about the exact words of Homer, but very foolish themselvesn (cited by Sandys 1958:30); see also Thomas (lSS2:llg).

amateurs prohibited (Child 1912:8). The ability of written stories to take

storytelling out of the hands of a specialized group is thus testified to both in

antiquity and in the early days of secular drama in Europe.

But there is an additional issue here: in a theatrical performance, the

story is not merely detached hom the body of the tradition's proper

representative, the aoidos or minstrel. It is detached also &om the body of

my single performer. In contrast to both bardic and rhapsodic performances,

the story in a dramatic presentation is shared amongst a number of separate

performers, the actors. As Niall Slater points out, it is when the story can no

longer be told by the single body of any one performer (specialist or

otherwise), that the actor is born (1990:385). In order fully to appreciate the

extent to which the alphabet contributed to this feature of theatrical form, we

must take a step or two back into the early days of Athenian literacy.

Examples of alphabetical writing begin to appear in Greece starting in

the eighth century, and by the sixth century, the use of writing is widespread

(Harvey 1966; Pfeiffer 1968:24; Stroud 1989: 16; Harris 1989: 13-46; Thomas

1992:13). That literacy had become a household reality for W-century

playwrights is abundantly clear from both iconographic evidence of the

period and from the plays and fragments themselves. Aeschylus, Sophocles ,

Euripides, Callias, Cratinus, Eupolis, Anstophanes and many other

dramatists represent a world in which writing has become an everyday fact

of life. Writing is represented, either in actual use o r in figures of speech, in

over eighty separate places in the dramatic texts,64 and writing serves a

crucial role in the plot itself in at least ten different plays (Seven Against

Zbebes, m e Women of Trachis, &&gone, dlppolgtus, I A , L T., Frogs,

Clouds, Birds, Wghts). When we remember what a minuscule fraction of

a l l Greek plays written have come down to this frequency of reference to

writing must appear a l l the more impressive.

The importance which the dramatists attached to Literacy is beyond

dispute; but whether their audiences shared their interest in writing is

obviously another thing. Unfortunately, no expert on Greek literacy would

dare suggest that we can know from surviving documents exactly how many

members of the ancient festival audiences were literate. However, enough

evidence exists to say with safety that in the time of Thespis, literacy was

becoming common without being anywhere near universal @.G. Turner

1951; Davison 1962; Harvey 1966; PfeSer 1968; Woodbury 1976; Burns

64 See above, n. 34 for a complete list.

65 Of the thousands of tragedies which were written, thirty-two have s u ~ v e d . The majority of Aristophanes' plays have aIso been lost, not to mention the work of his comedic contemporaries, from whom we have fragments only. See Dover, 1972:l-3.

1981;66 Susan Cole 1981; Harris 1989; Svenbro 1990; Thomas 1989, 1992).

People &om the country, as opposed to the city, were evidently less likely to

be lettered (Harvey 1966:620); but Socrates' urban contemporaries could, and

presumably did, buy philosophical texts in the Athenian book-stalls for a

drachma (Apologp26d). Pfeiffer thinks Plato was exaggerating the cheapness

of Anaxagoras' books (1968:28), but there must have been enough books

about town for Aristophanes to make such fun of a city overrun by

bookmongers in his Gfth-century Birds, and for the Athenians to start

exporting shipments of them abroad c.400 (Xenophon Anabasis W.5.14 as

cited by Pfeif€er 28, n. 5). Aristophanes claims that his audience is so well

educated that they even take their books into the theatre (Frogs, 1114), but

as Harvey (1966) and Woodbury (1976) caution, he may have been

exaggerating for the sake of a laugh. Harvey finds a number of sources that

suggest that it was considered shameful, and downright "disgusting" in some

places not to know how to read and write (624-28); horn one typical slander

66 Burns surveys the evidence, and most earlier examinations of it. a s conclusions are confirmed by more recent opinions, i.e. that by the end of the sixth century, "literacy. though not universal, played an important role in Athens' intellectual and cultural development" (371). Of especial value is his demonstration of the distortions and inaccuracies that led Havelock (1963, 1966) to argue, against the evidence, that Literacy was an ineffectual rarity till the end of the fifth century. More recently, Harris (1989) has concluded that "literacy was, from early in Greek ... history, virtually universal among the men who made up the political and social eliten (29). Harris has divided literacy usefully into categories, and doubts that anything beyond "craftsman'sn literacy could have been attained without the printing press (under conditions of "craftsman's literacy," literacy is normal for skilled craftsmen, and rare for women, peasants and other unskilled laborers [8]). The survival of actual graffiti written by very early sixth-century mercenaries or common soldiers (Harris 48) suggests, however, to the contrary, as does the survival of a private letter written on lead c. 500 by an "ordinary Greek" (56). The very poor writing skills displayed in these and other artifacts of the period do however remind us that "literacy" may in many cases mean tho possossion of very rudimentary skills indeed. This is a point upon which Thomas (1992) is especially insistent.

on the Spartans, we find an expression of the suspicion that illiterates are so

backward, they probably don't even know how to coount. Aristophanes jokes in

the Wasps that even Athenian dogs are literate (959-60). And the sausage

seller of the Rlnigbts, who is explicitly characterized as lacking in all

refinement, knows how to read (188-9, 636, 1030-89). Perhaps the clearest

picture of Athenian literacy can be gleaned from the standard proverbial

phrase used to describe an utterly ineffectual know-nothing: "He can't read,

he can't swim" (Harvey 628).

Reddgured pottery samples begin to depict inscribed scrolls at the

beginning of the fifth century, and three of these that have survived have

been dated to before the birth of Aeschylus (HeiEer 1968: 27). Interestingly,

the majority of early fdth century vases showing people reading or holding

book rolls feature women in domestic scenes, and (female) Muses (Cole

198 1: I S ) , a surprise which may argue against assumptions that literacy was

but the privileged pastime of a handful of male citizen-scholars (cf. Pomeroy

1975). By the early fifth century, the Sphinx herself had acquired literacy,

and is depicted iconographically as reading horn a book between her paws

(PfeifTer 27)-an image which sheds a provocative new light on the nature of

Oedipus' cleverness in solving her riddle.

The theatre was, in fact, particularly active in exploring the uses of

literacy. Playwrights were apparently quite fond of actually "staging" writing

for their spectators. One popular method of representing writing on stage

was to have an actor describe, in words, the shapes of a series of letters,

thereby forcing the audience to visualize each letter in turn and eventually

guess at the word being spelled Euripides did this in his ZBeseus, of

which unfortunately we have only a hagment (hag. 382 Nauck 1964)), where

an illiterate ~ s t i c , a herdsman, describes what he sees, but cannot himself

read, on the side of a ship, i.e. "T-H-E-S-E-U-S." Sophocles' satyr-play

Amphiaraos similarly includes a bit in which an actor apparently dances out

the shapes of letters (Athenaeus10.454f); and Akhaios, in a fairly lengthy

fragment, has a satyr name all the letters in an inscription for the audience,

which together spell D-I-0-N-U-S-0-U (D belong to] Dionysus; fiag. 33

[Nauck 19641; see Svenbro's discussion 199O:3 77). This theatrical device was

also used by Agathon in his Telepbus (eag. 4 Nauck) and by Theodectes

(frag. 6 Nauck), and was ultimately parodled by Aristophanes in the

~ e s m o p i r oziazusae (768-84). Spelling out "Euripides," Mnesilochus

exclaims "What a horrible a' !" (see esp. Harvey's discussion 1966:632 n. 13)

Before we go on to look at the most illuminating of these examples of

"theatrical grammatology ," we should recapitulate: the revolutionary aspect

of the Greek alphabet consisted of its having sundered the relationship

between linguistic signs and their semantic referents. Before being taken up

for use in representing Greek, Semitic letters such as alp, bet and g a d stdl

implied some kind of reference to real objects. Whether by direct etymological

motivation or by convention for the purpose of memory, these signs still

67 Throughout the following discussion, I am indebted to the citations of Harvey (1966:604), Susan G. Cole (1981:149 n.20), and Bowra and Higham (1950:459).

referred to the objects for which they in some manner stood: ox, house,

throwstick. But because the Greeks adopted this system for representing a

different language, these signs no longer had any meaning at all: they were

used to represent sounds purely and simply without denoting anything by

themselves. Cut loose from reference to any particular thing, these signs

could be used to represent in a fkeer, more abstract way. In the alphabet,

linguistic signs are semantically undetermined.

Returning now to the most stunning use of the theatre for representing

writing, the Grammatike Zbeoria of Callias, we can use our

"grammatological theory" to illuminate the special kind of alienation of

performance that theatre effected. Callias' fifth-century play, sometimes

called We ABC Show and sometimes called 31he ABC nagedy (fkag. 3 1 A,

B, C, D. Edmonds 1957)G8 is provocative even in its title: a "theory" for the

Greeks was literally a "looking at" (tlieoma), and what is seen (theasthiu;) by

the spectators (theataz) of this show is precisely a play about writing. A

theozia of letters thus h d s its natural platform on the stage of the theatre

(theatron). The etymological, and even the practical, connections between

theatre and theory in general are numerous and provocative, and have often

been remarked upon before (see esp. Svenbro 1990:383 and Reinelt and

Roach 1992:3-4). But the ABC Show has useful light to shed on the relation

between grammatological and theatrical theory in particular.

68 Both Svenbro (1990:381-2) and Harvey (1966:632 n.13) provide valuable discussians of this fragment, and both have me in their debt.

The Chorus of this fifth century play is made up, not of Theban elders

or the women of Trachis, but of the twenty-four letters of the Ionian

alphabet, from Alpha through Omega. The prologue consists of a sung list of

a l l the letters in order ("Say Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and then The God's

epsilon69, zeta, eta, theta, iota ...." etc.); and when the Chorus splits into pairs,

what is sung is the combinations of consonants and vowels: "Beta alpha: ba.

Beta epsilon: be. Beta eta: be. Beta iota: bi" etc. The second half-chorus

answers "Gamma alpha: ga. Gamma epsilon: ge. Gamma eta: gQ etc.

Dialogue in the ABC Show includes a conversation between what appears to

be a teacher and two female pupils: "You must pronounce alpha by itself, my

ladies, and secondly epsilon by itself. And you there, you will say the third

vowel!"70 And on it goes in this vein. Again in this play, the audience is

encouraged to recognize letters' names and sounds from verbal descriptions

of their shapes. One actor says: "I am pregnant, my ladies ... but out of shame,

my dear fiends, I will tell you the name of the babe by means of letters:

There's a long, straight stroke.."71 etc. The description of letters continues in

this way until the actor has succeeded in spelling out the word pso. The

meaning of pso is unfortunately not known today, but Edmonds suggests a

colloquial form of "stench @so&. Svenbro thinks that the context, in

69 Svenbro (1990:381-2) restores the original ei of the manuscripts w h c h Edmonds alters into "epsilon" in his translation; both explain that ei was inscribed on the temple at Delphi and was thus known as Apollo's letter.

70 Svenbro's translation is used here, with some elements of Edmonds'.

71 Svenbro's translation mainly.

addition to the gesturing involved in miming the shapes of the psi and the

omega, suggests a comic and obscene effect (Svenbro, 382).

If a performance of an alphabet lesson as rudimentary as this one

seems to suggest that the Athenians were only just becoming literate in the

fifth century, it should be remembered that there was a variety of local

scripts in use up until 403, when Ionian characters were adopted in Athens

officially (see Svenbro 1990:381). Edmonds suggests that the play was likely

acted before 430 (1957:180), which would have been an appropriate time for

a lesson in Ionian writing? In any case, Calliasr representation of Ionian

characters on stage in the Grammatike ZZeonk provides us with perhaps

the most graphic example imaginable of the overlap between

grammatological and theatrical theories. The alphabet represents speech by

dividing the verbal world into a small number of repeatable visual shapes,

and the theatre represents stories by dividing narration into a number of

discrete, visible "characters" as well.

In the ABC Show, we see how the basic semiological principle of

writing was transferred from the letters of the alphabet to the bodies of

performers on the stage. Just as the letters of the alphabet could be freely

'2 Alternatively, the play could suggest that large numbers of the audience were stiU not using writing at aU and needed instruction. As we cannot tell from this short fragment what the play was about, i t is pointless to speculate further. A s there is no evidence from the period to suggest that plays were written for anything other than large festival audiences, this is not Likely to be a school

play.

used in combination to represent the words of speech, so too were the bodies

of a c t o r ~ r young men singing in the chorus-given over to the task of

representing the letters of the alphabet. In this way, the stage could be said

to have absorbed the s i m g , alienating practice of writing. The body of

the actor, which functions explicitly as an unmotivated 'letter" in the ABC

Show, functions implicitly as an unmotivated sign (for a fictional character)

in every other play. Unlike the epic aoidos, who sings the Muse's song in his

own person, who remains always Homer or Ion even when he is relating

what AchiUeus said or did, the theatrical performer has the semiotic freedom

to stand in for anyone and anything. Whether representing a mythic hero or

a contemporary Athenian slave, a god or a hog, actors, who explicitly

represent letters in Callias' play, are those performers who, like letters,

function primarily by representing, and have the semiotic freedom to

represent potentially anymeaning.

Like letters, which alphabetization unmoored from reference to any

particular semantic identity, theatrical performers are characterized by their

release from the anchor of their own proper identities. This absolute

representational mobditty is ultimately what separates actors from

rhapsodes. As Herington has shown with a number of ancient sources, a good

deal of what we have come to think of as "histrionic techque" was already

worked out by the rhapsodes of the sixth century (1985:7-13). Aristotle

suggests this too when he says that rhapsodes and actors are both apt to

overdo their gestures, and that this is a histrionic error that can befall even

non-dramatic performers of poetry (Poetics 1462a6f.). When rhapsodes like

Ion recited sections of the IIiad and the Odyssey at the Panathenaia, they too

wore special costumes, and impersonated the speech of their fictional

characters (loo 530cfT.). Because of these impersonations, and because their

performances consisted of interpretations of poetic texts (530c.3-4),"

Herington is justified to some extent in considering the actor's art a

continuation of, rather than a radical break with, earlier genres of poetic

perfomance.74 But he is justified only to a certain extent, for there is a

generic leap between merely quoting the various characters' speeches, as the

rhapsode does, and actually pretending to stand in for one of them, as the

actor came to do. The rhapsode does not change his identity-he always

performs "as" himself.

In theatrical representation, on the other hand, the performer is

detached fiom this "as-himself" and invested instead with an (arbitrary,

alphabetical) "as-anything." In dl dramatic literature, there is perhaps no

better description of this semiotic freedom than the analysis of the particular

"manner" of theatrical "showing1' provided by Shakespeare's Launce:

73 For evidence of the "written-nessn of the rhapsodes' texts, see above footnotes 22, 31, 32, 33 and 63. Consider also Plato's Pbaedrus, in which an oratorical performer is shown with a written text.

74 Havelock makes the same point: "whether recited and mimed by an epic rhapsodist who hmself "does" al l the characters, or split up into parts done by different reciters who became actors," the two types of performance "differed in degree rather than in kind" (1963:48).

Nay, I'll show you the manner of it. This shoe is my father; no, this left shoe is my father: no, no, this left shoe is my mother; nay, that cannot be so neither:-yes, it is so; it is so; it hath the worser sole. This shoe, with the hole in, is my mother, and this my father ... this staff is my sister ... : this hat is Nan, our maid: I am the dog; no, the dog is himself', and I am the dog,--O! the dog is me, and I am myself: ay, so, so (Tie Gent. 1I.ii.i. 15-26).

The actor, like Launcefs shoes and Calliasf letters, has the fkeedom to stand

in for anything on the theatrical stage. Furthermore, the basic principle of

semiotic mobility extends also to objects on the stage, where shoes and hats

can stand for parents and maids.

That there was a transference of the arbitrary semiotic principle from

writing to the stage is confirmed by Calliasf ABC Show; but the sigdicance

of this transference for theatrical theory is less clear. As semioticians such as

Veltrusky (1964) and Elam (1980) have noticed, one of the first conventions

of theatrical space is that it treats the things which fill it as unmotivated

signs: a sack of potatoes can represent a dead body, a boy can represent a

girl, a crooked index finger can represent a chink in a wall. But awareness of

this "alphabetical" freedom of people and objects on stage has led some

theorists to conclude that theatrical performance is itselfa kind of writing as

a result. Jean-Francois Lyotard claims that staging a play involves the

rewriting, or transcribing, of the text by the director, who is described as a

kind of "writer" himself (1977:90). Elam conceives performance as a "text"

(1980:3, 7, 12, 213). Pavis similarly describes the director as a "writer," and

performance as a "stage writing," or "text" which can be "read" by the

audience; even the actor's body can be "read like a text" (1982: 31, 55, 73, 78,

124, 135, 174). Ubersfeld does likewise (1978:24), as does De Marinis (as

cited by Carlson, 1984:50 1). Svenbro describes stage presentation as a "vocal

rewriting of the text,lt75 and from that to deduce that Athenian audiences

actually improved their r e a h g skills by watching plays (1990:371@. Cole

(1992) begins by questioning the appropriateness of the stage-as-quick-book76

trope, but ultimately makes the surprising decision to retain it on the

following grounds: since we commonly speak of "reading" "photographs,

drawings, films," we should be able to speak of reading a performance text,

especially since so many reputable theorists and poets have already done so

(200).

In the first place, conformity with past theoretical precedent, no

matter how illustrious, is not adequate justification for maintaining a

descriptive trope, particularly one so fraught with generic sigmhmce. But

in the second, more pressing case, Cole should have been alert to the fact that

"photographs, drawings, £ilms" have one thing in common which theatrical

performance does not have: as artistic objects, photographs, drawings and

films are all inanimate, disembodied tissues of signs. Performance is patently

not a text in this sense, which really means that i t is not a text at all. One of

the effects of the popularity of semiotic models, especially those of Barthes

and Derrida, has been to expand our notion of what a text is. In the main this

75 But "vocal rewritingn is a contradiction in terms!

'6 "Quick" in the Medieval sense of "living;" see Cole, 199.

has been a positive development, providing critics and theorists with a

consistent vocabulary for speaking about all kinds of cultural phenomena

(rather than just about books). But the theatre Mers from many other

products of culture in one key respect: its special character consists in the

fact that it combines, explicitly, both textual and non-textual phenomena.

The theatre's distinctive combination, and even contrast, of text and non-text,

cannot be argued away; and recognition of this unerasable duality is

therefore essential for an accurate understanding of the genre. By calling

both the textual, and the living, non-textual aspects of theatrical practice by

the same name, theorists obscure the differences between them, and leave

themselves no room to discuss the relation between bodies and texts, a

relation which could be said to comprise the essence of the art.

The popularity of literary criticism throughout the last several decades

has had the lamentable result of encouraging theatre theorists to imagine

that "readerly" hermeneutics can be used to analyze the audience's

experience of theatrical performance. I'm thinking in particular of Susan

Bennett's "The Role of the Theatre Audience" (1987) and David Cole's Acting

as Reading (1992). Both of these works use varieties of "reader-response"

criticism to describe theatrical processes. Relying on theorists of reading such

as Iser (1978), Cole for example quotes, approvingly, such theoretical

statements as the following: a text is "a sort of living organism" "formed out

of living matter;" a text is "an organic web" (Lotman as cited in Iser, 66). Or,

"the text is ... a verbal body ... that can be sounded, weighed;" the text is "a sort

of human being" poulet as translated and cited by Cole, 65; and her, 154).

Cole concludes that "to the extent that texts are experienced as others,

reading tends to be experienced as interpersonal encounter1' (13). Iser asserts

that "a dialogue" exists between readers and their books, a "dyadic

interaction" (Iser, 80, 66). On the basis of such ideas, Cole theorizes that

"texts are capable of standing in all the sorts of relations to their readers that

one self may stand in to another:" a book may serve the function of a "friend,"

"therapist," and "lover." Now, anyone who has had the pleasure of having a

real fkiend, therapist or lover is not likely to be convinced by this. But Cole is

convinced, and goes on to say that "to be alone with a text ... is already to be

interacting with others." This is so because, thanks to reader-response

criticism, "solitary reading is, at all moments, interaction with 'others"' (14).

Reading is certainly described that way, but that doesn't make it true.

The decision to treat corporeal performance as a text has led theorists

such as Bennett and Cole to dubious conclusions about actors and audiences

alike. Cole ultimately asserts that "it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that

acting begins and ends in readingt' (8) and that reading and acting are

e q u d y physical activities (29). In the process of his analysis, Cole cannot

help but falsify the nature of both acting and reading. In the f i s t place,

books are not what Poulet says they are, i.e., "living, feeling, resisting" people

(as cited by Cole 39-40). Consequently, encounters with them are not

dialogues, but complex monologues. Books are mechanically reproducible,

which actors (so far) are not. And it is of the nature of writing to have a

deferred relation with its receiver, a relation strictly opposed to the

simultaneity with which theatrical signs are produced and received.

Furthermore, the word "audience," when used of a text's readership, has an

abstract, almost imaginary quality to it, whereas audiences of stage plays are

real, present "collectivit[ies], acting here and now on one another and on the

speaker" (Ong, 1975:13). Theatre audiences, in short, occupy the same spatio-

temporal context as the performers. As Ong observes further, texts are

produced out of writers' withdrawal from direct immersion in a social

situation (1977:57), a feature of writing (and reading, for that matter) that

can hardly be predicated of acting. Writing can communicate over time and

distance in the absence of both the sender of the message and any particular

receiver, and again, this is something that (sane) actors do not normally have

the ability to do. Theatrical performance involves the spatial and temporal

co-presence of sender and receiver, and surely this is enough to guarantee

that it cannot meaningfdly be described as any kind of ~riting.7~

In fact, precisely because it is not writing, theatrical performance can

"display" or represent writing in a way that a written medium itself cannot.

In staging the Ionian alphabet for the Athenians, Callias can both use a

grammatological semiosis, and show the difference between letters and

bodies. Unlike Callias' female writing student, who represents her baby with

letters, the representing signs of a writing system do not ever get "pregnant"

themselves. This difference, between real people and inanimate signs, cannot

be ignored theoretically. As States observes, theatrical signs distinguish

77 In the case of broadcasts or films, this rule would seem to evaporate-which is precisely why it does make sense to speak of films and recordings as texts.

themselves &om textual ones precisely in this way: that "in the theatre, there

is always the possibility that an act of sexual congress between two so-called

signs will produce a real pregnancy" (198520). Writing is regularly &splayed

on stage, but theatre does not become writing by virtue of this. Methods of

displaying writing range &om Callias' alphabet chorus, to the writing of

"Thebes" on the scenery, to the pinning of Shakespearean love-letters on

trees, to Brechtian placards, to the multiplicity of avant garde devices for

showing actors as readers? For reasons similar to those stated above,

directors can only be said, without sophistry, to be behaving as "writers"

when they compose introductory notes for the playbill, or indicate therein

that the performance will run without intermission.

As we see in the ABC Show, the theatre can represent writing, but it

does this representing by means of a medium which is unambiguously not

writing itself (i.e. actors' bodies and voices and real objects). What this play

can tell us about theatrical representation is that the use of a written

alphabet may well have suggested a new model for the relation between

performer and performance. In the epic world of Homer's heroes, writing is

not practiced? Sigd?cantly, neither is theatre. The poetic performance

practices represented in the Homeric texts are confined to the kind of epic

78 See Cole's discussion of the readerly theatre of the Wooster Group, DaryU Chin, Robert Wilson and La Mama's Home Remedies (1990:190-96). These productions actively explored, in performance, the phenomenology of reading by staging acts of reading, giant books, projected text and so forth.

7B See esp. Powell (1991) for a discussion of the absence of writing in Homer.

recitation that the fiad and the Odyssey themselves embody. A single bard

sings, to lyre accompaniment, the "acoustic renown" of heroes.80 In the

literate age that saw the invention of dramatic form, however, the poetic

performer is changed into a different sort of being, assumes new functions,

and exhibits new capacities. One of these functions is to create meaning for

an audience, not through who he i s a n epic aoidos inspired by the Muse-

but through whom he can arbitrarily represent-a Trojan woman, a cloud,

the letter '0'. Rather than embodying in himself the locus and control-centre

of a single unified poetic monologue, as did the bard or rhapsode, the

performer in drama becomes, like a letter, an atomized element in a larger

semiotic structure. Thespis (c.534) is credited with having recognized the

nature of this difference instantly: while both actor and rhapsode performed

before large audiences dressed in wreaths and beautiful clothes, the actor's

function was marked by the addition of a mask, for he was performing not

primarily "as himself," but arbitrarily representing some other person or

thing. Thespis is said to have first used white lead to disguise his identity,

then flowers; but evidently these were not adequate, and he settled on a

plain linen mask as a mark of his freedom &om the "as-himself?' of the

rhapsode (Pickard-Cambridge 1968: 190). Before the alphabet was used for

composing stories, narrative performance was given in propra persona.

Neither epic reciters nor hthyrambic choral singers wore masks, for neither

80 The epics describe a wide variety of performance types, some competitive, all confined to epic song and dancing (LGad: XVIII.604-5; XXIV.720-2; Odyssey IV.17-19; VIII.248-62, 370-80, 470ff; XxIII.143-5).

had any

revelers,

need of disguise. Pre-dramatic singers spoke as themselves: as

worshippers, inspired bards, or members of a competing tribe

(Flickinger 19 18-73: 10- 11; Pickard-Cambridge 1962:50; Vernant and Vidal-

Naquet, 1990:23-24). Only the theatrical performer visually represents

something other than himself, and only the actor needs a mask. The early

use of a mask on stage was thus an expression of the theatre's "alphabetical"

representational style: as letters do, so does the actor.

The use of a body as a sign for something else obviously has pre-

dramatic precedents; but it is in drama that this basic semiotic activity is

exploited consciously and fully for artistic ends. For example, in the Odyssey

alone there are numerous cases of corporeal impersonation,81 although it is

usually the prerogative of a goddess, Athena, to arrange for someone's

disguise (I.105, II.383, II.401, VIII.8, Xm.429-30). Not only does the fictional

Odysseus dress up as a beggar as part of his home-coming scheme, but the

historical Solon, we are told, impersonated a mad messenger in delivering a

political poem in the market-place mlse 1965:41). In addition, the use of the

body to represent animals or gods has been seen to accompany religious

rituals and dances around the world (Hsu 1985:196-208, Lkvi-Strauss 1982,

Petrone 1990:17, Beck, 1993). As Aristotle suggested (Poetics 1448b5ff), and

as contemporary neurobiology confirms (see esp . Finkel 1988:66), imitative

role-playing comes naturally to man and serves the practical function of

These cases of corporeal impersonation were not, of course, aesthetic performances, but rather functional expedients to accomplish a practical goal.

adapting us to our cultures and teaching us how things are done in them.

Children do it even before they have done much else, and continue to use

their bodies to imitate other things throughout their lives. Humans

apparently l e a n by imitation and role-playing, the utilitarian benefits of

which always seem to include a measure of inherent pleasurability. So

clearly, the use of the human body for representing other absent people,

things or states of affairs did not come into existence with the advent of

dramatic form (let alone writing). But before theatre, there is no evidence

that such role-playing had been fused with storytelling, nor had it emerged

as a poetic genre proper. Before writing, storytelling was the province of a

single speaker and that speaker's own deictically-grounded identity. The

various characters represented in his tale were all controlled and motivated

by his single identity as composing/performing servant to the Muse. When

the appearance of writing fkactures the oral-based unity of composition and

performance into two separate activities, the poet emerges as a writer who

tells his story through the use of arbitrary signs rather than through his

presence. And this representative structure, observable at the stage of poetic

composition in the activity of inscription, is extended to the activity of

performance as well, with actors rather than letters doing the representing.

Arbitrary representation of this kind was not new to life, in other words, but

new to the phenomenology of storytelling.

Callias' letterlcharacters, who function on stage as signs for fictional

personages or things which they themselves are not, present theorists of

drama with a dilemma. If it is the nature of a sign not to be what it

represents, what does this say about actors? If they represent passionate

human beings, as they do in so many plays, does this mean that they must

not be passionate human beings themselves? Diderot wrestled at length with

this paradox, concluding at one point that actors must on some level be quite

devoid of their o w . personality in order to represent other personalities

(1957:16-20). The question goes further: can men and women, who on stage

represent men and women, albeit "other" ones,82 even be said to function as

signs at all, since at root they also are what they represent? The answer

involves the recognition that the actor remains a performer, even while s h e

functions as a sign does. Like the epic rhapsode, and like the lyric performer,

the actor is still competing-for the audience's love, for the prize, money or

fame. As a contestant in a festival agon, the actor is therefore still engaged in

all the pragmatics of performance: exhibiting virtuosity, displaying bodily

charms, flattering, seducing, shocking, moving the audience to tears and

delighting in the effects. Plato's Ion provides us with a lovely description of

the paradox of the actor, for whom the performative pragmatics of pleasing

always underlie his semiotic activity of representing. The means of

performance in drama may have become representational, but the end, or

goal remains "to please."

To say that the actor preserves the performative function of the a d s

or rhapsode is therefore to say that he experiences the effects of his

82 For an eloquent statement of this situation, see Handke (1969).

performance as he p ~ m s . Like other types of performer, the actor

experiences the audience's enjoyment or disapproval simultaneously with his

performance, which is to say that audience response will more or less directly

afXect the way he performs.

It is here that the difference between theatre and other literary arts

makes itself most keenly felt. A text such as a novel is never a performance:

the letters on the page do not get nervous before the reader's gaze, wither at

the reader's restlessness, nor do they bloom before the reader's appreciative

laughter, applause, cheers. This may seem obvious enough, but there have

been many attempts among theorists of the disembodied literary arts to

arrogate "performance" pragmatics to the novel. The most notorious of these

is perhaps Bakhtinls insistence that novels are ''plays ... without footlightsw--

which in a Bakhtinian worldview makes them superior and more truly

"dramatic1' than plays (Wise 1989). Derrida also arrogates performance

functions to texts in a number of discussions (e.g., the writer "put[s] things

on stage ... is on stage himself; writing is a theatrical "scene" etc. 1981:206,

290), and Knsteva speaks of texts as theatrical performances as well

(1970:185@. Cole has also noticed that this affectation, by critics of texts, of a

theatrical vocabulary is rampant in critical camps fkom the New Critics to

the phenomenologists of literary response: readers are said to "act out'' the

text, "impersonate" the characters, get "cast in roles," etc. (1992:23-9).

However, this use of performative metaphors to describe textual activities

obscures the fact that written signs do not possess the same qualities as stage

actors and objects: co-presence in a unique time-space context with a living

audience, dialogic interaction with that audience, and an ever-changing

phenomenal reality. To cal l a textual artifact a performance is therefore no

less mistaken than to call a performance a text.

Actors do indeed extend the arbitrary semiotic principal &om page to

stage, but they also preserve the performative function of the oral bard, who

tries to delight the listener with his own present self. Although it is not easy

to accept this, there would seem not to be any hard and fast rule which

explains how these two functions interact in the actor's art. Some actors try

to transcend their own personal oral-performative indinations in pursuit of a

perfectly transparent semiotic representation; others exploit their own deictic

reality for use in the representation, as did the ancient actor who brought the

ashes of a dead relative on stage with him in order to gain the audience's

sympathy for his character by way of their sympathy for him. For some

performers, performative intentions and desires consist mainly of being

beautiful and charming above all; others aim in performance above all to

seduce their audiences, by various reality-effects, into taking their

representations for reality. In some cases, the oral-performative and

dramatic-semiotic functions enter into a conspicuous conflict. Sometimes this

happens inadvertently-when an actor is poorly cast or does not understand

the role-and sometimes to a purpose, when s h e has decided to use the

performative function to comment upon or criticize the role as written. The

exact nature of the balance struck between the two functions clearly varies

greatly from performer to performer, play to play, even from one given

moment in a given production to the next. As Brecht noticed with his usual

perspicacity, the actor, as performer, will always be taking up some attitude

to his role (1964:37, 98, 137, 198). But between the Brechtian extremes of

"naturalizing" the role (closing the gap as much as possible between semiosis

and performance) and "alienating" it (deliberately widening the gap between

the two) there are sure to be as many shades of gray as there are actors.

There certainly elrists a common prejudice among North American actors

that the performative function of the actor should merge with perfect

equivalence into the representative k c t i o n , but this is simply one style

among many. In Bert 0. States' view, the non-representational aspects of

stage presentation function by "wounding" the "semiotic circuitry" of the

representation, but this view has no greater universality in the theatre than

does its opposite (1985 gasszh.). On the contrary, oral-performative

phenomena, if anything, are more commonly used in support of semiotic

functions. (A comehan is cast in the role of a comedian, a pianist represents

Mozart, real life lovers are cast as lovers, or become lovers during rehearsal,

memories of actual traumas are summoned up on stage, etc.)

One of the main reasons why the oral-performative and semiotic

functions cannot be pitted against each other in any predictable, universally

valid way is that the actor, in performing as his phenomenally real self, is

even here involved in representations-not of the character, but of himself.

That is, he represents himself with an eye to gaining the audience's approval.

How an actor, say, in Callias' play, chooses to represent the 0 of the script

may be the product of his semiotic vision of the shape of the letter 0, but it is

also a function of how he wishes to show himself m&g an 0, of what image

of himself he wants the audience to have? In short, there is little that can be

stated as axiomatic about the relation between an actor's own personal

intercourse with his audience as a performer and his representation of

absent sigdieds. Only one thing can be said with certainty on the subject:

that in representing the absent things that they are not, actors do so from the

point of view of their own personal oral-performative present.

In the chapters that follow, we will be pursuing the question of what

this "oral-performative present" consists of for speakers in a literate milieu.

But for now let us sum up what this chapter on the ABCs of acting has

discussed.

The use of the alphabet and its superb ear for speech enabled the

Homeric epics to be written down. The visible existence of traditional

narrative material in the form of text in turn eliminated the need for

formulaic compositional techniques, permitting innovative treatments of old

stories, and a heightened ability to represent the sounds of individual speech.

With the existence of written myths also came an inevitable sundering of

performer fiom thing performed, a sundering which replaced specialized

83 This is an important point, whch wdl be returned to in the following chapter. But to put it simply, phenomenologists of performance are wrong to dismiss this issue out of hand with facile cIaims that "in the theatre there is no ontological difference between the image and the object* (States 1985:35). On the contrary, performers and possibly even dogs on the stage are "imaged" by the audience in historically specific ways. For this reason, stage objects never coincide absolutely with their ever- changing images. People on stage both represent themselves and are perceived by spectators according to historically specific desires and agendas. Elin Diamond provides an excellent discussion of the weaknesses of the phenomenological approach favoured by States. See Diamond, 1992:394-7.

manipulators of traditional formulas with writers, on one hand, and

amateurs who memorize their texts on the other. We have also seen how the

arbitrary s i m g principle of the alphabet was taken up as a model for

this new style of representing narrative: rather than senring as an extension

of the voice of the Muse and collective memory, narrative representation, like

the alphabet, was split up into discrete arbitrary units, each of which

signdied heely within a systematic collective.

These formal innovations meant the disappearance of the singular,

extemporizing singer of an unfixed story with many variations.84 Replacing

him and his formulaic improvisation was the actor, who performed as one of

a number of atomized storytelling units all acting in accordance with a single

authorized script. Composed by one poet in writing, the fixed story was now

"taught" to the individual performers in all its aspects: words, music,

choreography, everythmg (Taplin 1977:12-14; see also Frogs 1249ff., Birds,

749). Rather than inheriting and in a sense embodying a traditional story

which had been preserved by mouth-to-ear transmission from singer to

singer over time, the actor that grew out of the rhapsode in the sixth century

now had to "learn" an original composition from a poet's text. For this reason,

the playwright was called didaskalos, for plays were produced only by being

84 Variations did exist among the oral versions of a given story, although they were not of the order of willful changes or intentional re-interpmtations. Once the epics were reduced to writing, however, variations were not so easily tolerated: "With the concept of the fixed text comes the concept of the correct text, and incongruous versions are gradualiy erodedn (Kirk, 1985: 1 10).

taught to performers who had no special skills themselves (Taplin 13; also

Ilhesm. 30,88 and Frogs 1021).

Having made possible this sequence of changes in poetic practice that

culminated in the shift fiom epic to dramatic storytelling, the alphabet

created a type of performer previously unknown in ancient Greece: the

memorizer of texk85

85 As we wiU be discussing in what follows, the rhapsode's use of written material is distinguishable from the actor's insofar as epic writings were records of oral performances, not stories created in textual form from the start. Aristophanes explicitly uses the word "writingn to describe fifth-century playwrighting (frag. 676b Edmonds 1957).

Chapter Two: I 1

The Student Body

But when asked to say something from a play, As anybody might ask a schoolboy, ... What trickles out, as if from a cracked jug? ApoLIo the bnght, a hunter was he! Your old granny, I say, can recite that Without being able to read or write!

Herondas, 22ie Skhoolmaster

When Artaud objected, in theory, to traditional conceptions of theatre,

his objections centred directly on the didacticism inherent in the actor's

performance of a h e d script. For Artaud, a respect in the theatre for "what

has been written" makes performers into "grammarians" and "graduate

students" (1958:41). In speaking of "the subjugation of the theatre to the

text," and of the "dictatorship of the writer," Artaud's criticisms are clearly

born out of concerns about the subservience of performers to their texts. For

Artaud, genuine theatrical creativity is nullified when actors become

students and the stage a classroom.

Artaud's terminology is accurate. The generic shift from bard to actor

didmean the end of composition-in-performance, and the birth of the poet as

didaskah. It meant the end of the performer's heedom to put the story

l~ranslated by Davenport (1981). lines 30-35 in Crusius' German edition (1967).

137

together spontaneously and digerently every time, and the beginning of

verbatim memorization of a fixed text. The ancients viewed the playwright as

the "teacher" of his texts, a defhition which presumably makes the actor into

his "student." What does it mean for an poetic art to be organized along these

lines? Was Artaud justified in claiming that there is something

fundamentally un-theatrical in this practice of book-based scholarship?

Any exploration of the relation between students and teachers must

begin with the recognition that book-based study radically altered the nature

of learning. As Frederick Beck (1964) has pointed out, didaskaleion does not

occur often in our antique sources. It does not exist at a l l in Homer, for

example, but makes its &st appearance in the sense of "school" in the Gfth

century. We see its first uses in Sophocles (fi.799 as cited by Beck 1964:78)

and in Thucydides (VII.29). In pre-dramatic literature, it is more common to

come across references to individual teachers whose actions are described

with the verb trepso, to "rear" (Beck 49). Both from the context of Homer's

and Hesiod's discussions of this brand of teaching, and from the word itself, it

is clear that this pre-literate "rearing" is a rather Merent thing from that

which happens in schools. Speaking of the relationship that prevailed

between a Cheiron or a Phoenix and his pupil, Beck summarizes as follows.

The "rearer" in Homer and Hesiod

was responsible for the whole development of his pupil, moral, physical and intellectual, and not merely or solely for the imparting of specific aspects of knowledge (49).

The pre-literate teacher begins his involvement with his charge more

o r less horn birth, and might continue it for a near life-time. Phoenix, for

example, "reared" Achilleus "to be both a speaker of words and a doer of

deeds" (l7. M.435-43), and did so "with b] heart's love" (485). In pre-literate

education, as Beck describes it, "the pupil learns by imitating his teacher in

all their joint activities" (60-1). Consequently, between such "rearers" and

their charges, there is a strong emotional bond, and learning is but the

outcome of their intimate ongoing relationship and shared experience.

Phoenix bounced Achiueus on his knee, cut up his meat into little pieces at

table, and fed him wine (l7. M.490fl). As a result, the service of a pre-literate

teacher such as Phoenix is, in Jaeger's words, "only a continuation of the

almost paternal love which has always bound h i m to his charge (1969, Vol.

1:28).

A legendary teacher like Cheiron--evidence of whose reputation has

come down to us through literary and archaeological material from the

archaic period-is, however, never represented as a teacher of letters (Beck

1975:lO). For literacy was to put an end to the kind of one-on-one

relationship that teachers like Cheiron represented. As Plato makes perfectly

clear in the P h a e h s , literacy threatened nothing so much as the warm,

even passionate intimacy between teacher and student? And as could be

predicted, representations of Cheiron in Greek art begin to disappear with

the establishment of formal literary schooling (10). Whereas teachers and

students had formerly enjoyed each other's company "in all their joint

activities," fifth century students were trundled off t o learn their letters only

for certain spec& hours of the day. And when they arrived for their lessons

they appear, by all accounts, to have sat in classrooms in anonymous groups

of between sixty and one hundred or more (Herodotus V1.27.2; Thucydides

W.29; scholion on Laws 629a as cited by Burns 1981:375 and Beck 77-89).

And whereas the tutor had formerly shared a l l the student's activities,

Athenian grammar students seem to have had separate specialist instructors

for each class (Jeffrey, 1990:63; Burns 375).

As Beck recounts, there are a number of stories dating the institution

of formal schooling in Greece to the middle of the seventh century (77). But

as the sources are not entirely trustworthy, we shall have to be content with

the consenrative estimate that schools were established at some point

between the sixth and the first decades of the fifth century, as writing was

Because books do not contain "anything clear or certainn ( 2 7 5 ~ ) ~ because they cannot answer back (275d-a), and because they cannot suit their instruction personally to the psychological needs, or "naturen of each individual student (277b-c), they cannot teach properly (275). Socrates speaks disparaging of the new breed of book-toting autodidacts, saying that they will be "difficult to get along withn (275) and possess only the "appearance of wisdomn (275). What literate pedagogical models threatened to replace above all was the "living and animate speechn of teachers which is "written in the s o d of the learnern (276a). The imagery throughout the ddogue--of planting and sowing seeds (276e), of fatherhood (275d-e), and especially of passionate love (Socrates admits to being inspired and "bewitched" by his pupil: 278c-e and 242e)donnects oral instruction with personal, emotional intensity, and written pedagogy with orphanhood (275e) and barrenness (276a-e).

being more widely used and required (Harris 1989:55, 57). By the end of the

sixth century, book-learning may have already been ruled legally compulsory

for all citizens' sons in some parts of Greece (we do not know about Athens

spe&cally),3 and there is evidence of schools throughout the city-states by

the turn of the century (Beck 78; Burns 375; Immerwahr 1964:17; Harris

1979:55ff; cf. Havelock 1977:386 n.4, who alone disagrees).

The playwrights themselves tell us very little about the curriculum of

the education they received as boys? Sophocles and Euripides both feature

pedagogoi in their EIektra plays, but these household servants functioned

mainly as a kind of nanny, taking care of the children and taking them to

school, and not necessarily instructing their charges themselves (Plato Lyms

208c; also Euripides Medea and Ion). Aristophanes in the Clouds offers a

sustained reflection on Gfth-century education, but he is speaking of a

particular brand of Sophistical training which, besides being obviously

distorted for comic ends, was a type of "higher" education whch would not

reflect the regular school curriculum of letters/music and gymnastics

(mgh t s 188-90; Plato Protagoras 325d-e).

Harris discusses the evidence for the school law attributed to Chamndss of Catana, and makes a compelling case for the assumption that "[tlhere must already have been some [schoolsj in the sixth century" (1989:5'7). In any case, i t appears that "a number of elementary schools existed, and taught writing, by about the turn of the century" (55) and that "practically aIl prosperous Greeks, and some who were not, sent their sons to school in the 490s" (58).

A s Harris notes however, fifth-century schools, a t least, are described by our sources as being mainly concerned with the teaching of letters (57 n. 56)

But we are given a rare gbnpse into the workings of the kind of book-

learning that the dramatists would have experienced themselves in Callias'

ABCShow. What we see here instantly casts Plato's nostalgia for pre-literate

education in an appropriately reactionary light. For whereas Homeric

education was associated with the training of boys, we see in Callias' play

that, in the literate classroom, women are now educational subjects too. As

witnessed by iconic evidence, Callias may not have been merely taking

dramatic licence by making his students women. From a few surviving vases

and terra cottas, we see that it was not only boys, but also perhaps girls who

crept like snail unwillingly to school with writing tablets in their hands (S.

G. Cole 1981; Beck 1975, plate 69 and 71 esp.). What such students did when

they got to school can be partly gleaned from the ABC Show they repeated.

And they repeated verbatim: "Beta alpha: ba. Beta epsilon: be. Beta eta: be."

They did as the teacher bid them do: "You must pronounce alpha by itself,

and secondly epsilon by itself. And you there, you will say the third vowel!"

(fiag. 3 1 Edmonds 195 7). As archaeological evidence codtrms, students

learned their lessons in precisely this way. A piece of pottery has survived

with grammar lessons inscribed upon it-?ha, rhb, rhi, rho, rhou, rh6, sa,

sb," etc.--complete with a mistake and the teacher's correction (Beck 16). A

very early wax-covered writing tablet has survived (c. 700-650) with the

alphabet written across the top as if for a student (Powell 1991:155 fig. 55),

although there is nothing specifically to connect this teaching device to use in

a school.

What does one actually learn in learning the alphabet this way? The

letters themselves have no meaning; even the order in which they are

arranged is senseless and wholly conventional. To be sure, once one has

mastered the use of the technology, one can go forth, read books, and in so

doing acquire more knowledge and information than would ever be possible

from practical experience alone. But the teaching of the alphabet and its uses

is unlike other types of teaching in that it is unusually decontextualized. In

conditions of orality, it is hard to imagine anything teachable that would not

be taught within a concrete sphere of action: fishing is taught to the

apprentice in mid-stream, religion to the initiate during a ceremony,

recitation to bards-hopeful during a recitation, proverbs to grandchildren in

contexts to which the proverb applies. As confirmed by the above-named

examples in Homer and Hesiod, learning and teaching happen for pre-

literates within contexts of practical action. Learning the alphabet is clearly

not of this kind. Like the whole gamut of book-based classroom activities to

which it leads, it is characterized by a high degree of abstraction and

decontextualization.

From literary references and contemporary representations in visual

art-both of which sources have been confirmed by the archaeological

discovery of actual samples of the classroom materials themselves-we know

that poetry, largely Homer's, was a major component of the student's

educational diet (Beck 1975:14). And as this passage from Plato shows,

poetry was learned the same way as the alphabet was:

... and as soon as his boys have learned their letters, and are in a condition to understand what is written ...[ the teacher] sets before them on their benches the works of good poets to read, and compels them to learn them by heart .. . .(Protagoras 325d-e).

Plato's account of epic memorization in the classroom is confirmed

iconographically by the Douris Cup (c.485 B.C.E.). It shows a student reciting

horn memory a (now lost) poem, the Grst line of which-"Moisa moi amphi

Skaman&on eurron archom' aeiadeinV-is depicted on the scroll held by the

onlooking teacher (Beck 1975:14). Verbatim memorization of this type was

one of the preconditions for the performance of theatrical literature.

What precisely do students and actors do in thus repeating, verbatim,

the content of a written composition? Oral performers before the advent of

writing never did it-what are its implications for the performer of drama?

The effect of this model of book-based learning on theatre is a crucial one to

pursue, because it is largely through their experiences in the classroom that

literates absorb the kind of practices and models which mark them as

"literates" compared with their "oral" counterparts. Particularly in modern

psychological studies and tests, it is an individual's exposure to the classroom

that, more than any other factor, causes such changes in their attitudes and

mental habits as we have come to associate with the effects of literacy

(Scribner and Cole 1981; &so Taylor 1988).5

The teacher says: "You there, Aeschylus, recite this passage from

Sappho's love poem." And the diligent student does, knowing all the while

that he is not a Sapphic lover, his teacher i s not the beloved, nor is the

classroom either a festival or a symposium to which the other pupils have

come for entertainment. In short, what is repeated by the student in the

process of book-learning is not c o ~ e c t e d with his "here-and-now" experience

in the classroom. In the pre-literate one-on-one relation between tutor and

fiend, the recitation of poetry may indeed have had some direct grounding in

the interlocutors' shared experience (especially since pre-literate education

was connected with the training of boys for life in battle, and the epics were

largely about men in battle). But between a roomful of students and an

instructor who may be a virtual stranger to them, and a paid professional to

boot (Beck 14), any direct relation between the content of the lesson and the

social context in which it is learned is precluded. In short, book-learning

involves the repetition of contextually irrelevant material, material which is

unmotivated by the context in the speaker finds himself'. It requires the

S~errick De Kerckhove has also stressed (in a personal exchange) the phenomenological similarities between classroom and theatre. Unlike pupils of oral instruction, who learned everything in situ and by physical imitation in a 3600 context of action (Jaeger Vol. 1:29), the classroom student is confined to a specialized "abstract" space and encouraged to develop a unidirectional gaze at a writing tablet or bookroll.

student to "bracket" or ignore the present being lived, ignore, that is, the

concrete social relations inherent in the present interlocutory situation.

Although his testimony is much later, Plato does provide a beautiful

image of this transcendental effort. In the Phaednrs, Socrates finds that he

must keep his head and eyes covered in order to avoid speaking like a lover

to his student, succumbing to his student's physical presence (237a5). The

P h a e h s in fact gives us an unusually well-balanced view of the nature of

book-learning. The disinterested, phenomenally-disengaged character of

literate study is shown, not only in this work, but throughout Plato's oeuvre,

to have enormous advantages over a practically-embedded model of learning.

Taking utterances and information out of contexts enables one to reflect upon

them consciously and at leisure, to view their premises and hidden

assumptions, to expose the prejudices which support them and the

illogicalities which they hide. Mental structures, social paradigms and

inherited values can be pulled into the light of abstract reason, and

inconsistencies, contradictions, injustices be drawn out. By "bracketing" the

sights and sounds of sensible reality, one is less likely to mistake fleeting

desires, illusions or mere opinions for truth. This literate bracketing of one's

physical context is also explicitly associated in the Phaednrs with the

qualities that make for clear thinking and speaking generally: self-

consistency, synthesis, clarity, definition of terms, the breaking up of entities

into constituent parts, "divisions and collections" and especially, a unified

organic structure (264~; 266c).

This detachment from sensible reality that, in the sphere of

philosophy, allowed for new intellectual operations upon experience,

produced also, in the aesthetic sphere, new possibilities in the relation

between performers and narrative material. Under the influence of the book-

based study of fixed texts that was taking place in Greece toward the end of

the sixth century,6 the nature of performance changed, and drama was the

result.

At first glance, the practice of memorizing a text would appear to

sign& the end of all performative heedom. However, the leeway in oral

performance for individual contributions was actually very narrow. With no

books to store knowledge, an oral culture depends on the kind of

conservation-through-repetition that we looked at earlier. Willful alterations

of the inherited tradition can lead to the irrevocable loss of valuable parts of

it. This need for conservation is likely to make innovation, intentional

distortions, or any kind of radical rethinlting dangerous and hence rare. This

would go for scientific and practical knowledge as well as

historicaUmythological knowledge. Because in an oral context, this

conservatism is a necessity, conservatism becomes the primary virtue of the

bard's art (Ong 1982:39). All that protects the story horn sinking into

oblivion is metical consistency and the formulaic style; hence, as we

For the beginnings of book-based study in Greece, see above n. 3. See also Woodbury for evidence about the "outburst" of literary activity in Greece beginning in the seventh century with Archilochus, and for details concerning the survival and collection of Literary texts through the sixth and fifth century (1962: 149-155).

observed, deliberate innovations are experienced by audiences and tellers

alike as "mistakes" (Lord 1960:130, Finnegan 1990:247). Studies of oral

narrative from the former Yugoslavia to Afkica throughout the century have

shown that whereas there is no such thing as a single "correct" version, and

whereas each performance is unique, the variations that do occur are not of

the order of active, intentional change (Lord 120-23). Words vary, episodes

are arranged in different order, even protagonists' names are changed from

one version to the next; but so conservative in motive are these changes that

the tellers themselves assert that they are telling "exactly the same storyff as

they heard elsewhere (Finnegan 247).

These features of poetic performance in the absence of texts are all too

easily overlooked. Artaud was not alone in idealizing the spontaneous

creativity of oral performance: the history of twentieth-century theatre has

been shaped, in many respects, by theorists and practitioners who, explicitly

or implicitly, view texts and textual practices as the bane of the theatre

(Craig 1956:21, Benamou 1977:7, Rothenberg, 1977:12, Wiles 1980, Innes

1981:258). Although the virulence of Artaud's brand of grammaphobia has

disappeared from more recent theoretical statements, contemporary theorists

still proceed on the assumption that texts are "privileged objects which have

"domina[ted]" the theatre adversely for too long (Reinelt and Roach 1992:3).

"Authorship" by individuals has come to be interpreted in its negative sense,

as the imposition of the "authority" of a bad teacher. What is rarely

acknowledged in such theorizing is that performative "subservience" is not an

invention of literate culture. It is not only theatrical performers with texts

who are circumscribed in advance, but also oral performers. As servant to an

oral-traditional Muse of memory, the '"improvising" bard of pre-dramatic

storytelling was in fact constricted in ways from which the literate actor is

comp natively free.

We saw in Chapter One how the spatial co-presence of the whole story

allowed for changes to the way stories were put together. Literacy enabled

the creation of an "organically" unified poetic structure with thematically-

and linguistically-consistent beginning, middle, and end-a structure which

is easily visible in most fifth-century plays. A performance of epic material,

on the contrary, was begun and ended arbitrarily. As we see fiom the

opening invocations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and fkom Demodokos' own

procedure (Od Vm.500), the singer starts up at potentially any point in the

cycle, and ends equally arbitrarily, usually when someone interrupts him, as

Alkinoos and Penelope do (VII.97; 1.340). In fact, as Lord found fcom his field

research in the former Yugoslavia, stories are rarely sung to the end; they

simply stop for one reason or another (1960:30).

Now, this shift to organic form and narrative closure do not appear, at

f i s t sight, to represent any loosening of performative constraints (and seem

in fact to do the opposite). Formal changes like these are, however, part and

parcel of a redefinition of the storyteller's art, a redefinition which is

pregnant with implications for individuals practising it. Unified structure

and narrative closure reflect a re-interpretation of the status of traditional

material as a storehouse of individual fictional stories with limits. From the

descriptions in the Odyssey of the practice of Phemios (1.325) and Demodokos

(VIII.43@, it is clear that the bard's song was not considered fictional: it was

history and news in one. Telemachos, hearing reports of Orestes' matricide,

says it will soon be a "theme for bards," confirming that the instantaneous

passage between history and myth that we mentioned previously was a

smooth one (Od 1.350-2; see also Beck 1964:29). The bards were "the

historians of their time, having the double function of recording and teaching

history" (30). What they sang was inspired by the Muse, authorized by the

collective memory over which she presided, and was therefore true. By the

literate dramatic age, however, traditional material was simply the "raw

ingredients" of fiction, to be divided up and used for various pleasurable

effects which were unrelated to any recordkeeping function (Poetics 1450b8-

1451b3).

In the alienating atmosphere of literacy, inherited mythology, and the

formulae which contained it, become distanced enough fiom audiences and

transmitters alike to admit of more complex and particularized responses.

For this reason, a general "interrogatory" stance-both to inherited material

and to the values carried by it-has been linked by many scholars to the use

of writing (Winchester 1985:34, Goody 1987:279). The development of a

generalized scepticism is especially dependent on the use of writing, for

without written records that can be accumulated and compared, doubts about

inherited wisdom cannot be followed up and will tend to be overwhelmed by

the longevity of the tradition itself (Goody 1986:31). The strength of the

tradition over and against the individual derives mainly from the fact,

observed in Africa by Jack Goody, that the "embeddedness of speech and

action" in concrete contexts produces an atmosphere in which meanings,

norms and values tend to be immanent in one's way of life. Until ideas and

practices take on an existence which is outside of a particular lived context

(i-e. when they get written down in texts), they tend not to be experienced as

having any existential limits or boundaries. Until a practice is "drawn away,"

or abstracted horn the doer by being written down, it is not an "object" for a

"subject" to view, but a constituent of his being (Bauman, 1986:44). With no

difference delineated between speaker and spoken, or actor and thing done,

members of a non-literate society have been observed to have no experience

of, for example, religious ritual as a distinct thing. As Goody puts it: to be an

Asante is to be necessarily in an existential state where such-and-such things

are said and done (198613-12). Ritual doings, such as mimetic sacdice, and

traditional sayings, such as mourning songs and prayers, are ontologically

merged with the doer and sayer's own identity. It is consequently a feature of

pre-literate practices that they are compulsory. A question as to whether or

not something culturally mandated should or should not be performed or said

by an individual will not tend to emerge. To be a post-Mycenaean Greek was,

therefore, necessarily to recite the praises of one's heroic ancestors and their

illustrious deeds. The genealogies and catalogues were connected with the

reciters' own identities, and in a sense affirmed them. The question of the

truth or fictionality of a poetic account cannot under such circumstances

become an issue.

To take a more recent example of oral practice, there is a piece of

oratory fiom a West Coast tribe of Canada which is cast in the form of a

responsive choral song. A bereaved chief exhorts his tribe not to m o m any

more; they repeatedly respond "We do not mourn any more" (Petrone

1990:22). A modern reader or "anthropologist" might be inclined to see in this

dialogue between chief and tribe a dramatic speech practice. But to do so

would be to take literacy practices so for granted as to forget that, in this

mourning ritual, the identity between speaker and spoken is complete. These

words are not "performed for viewers, in the dramatic sense. They are a

necessary consequence of who the speakers are (a mourning chief and his

tribe). In a literate context, on the contrary, speech practices become

alienated enough to become optional and actively chosen by individual

speakers; not only does the compulsion of ritual disappear, but performance

is no longer an extension of identity (Goody 1986:14; 1987:69).

Accordingly, we see that Greek epic recitation is still marked by these

two oral features: identity between speaker and spoken and the presence of

compulsory ritual elements. The Homeric bard is described as a "divine

singer" whose special identity as the gods' elect is dErmed throughout, both

in epithets and by his blindness, a sign of his sacred office (Od. 1.335, VII.62-

4). Epic recitation is also marked by the presence of a compulsory ritual

element: the invocation to the Muse at the start. A £ked ritual invocation is

also included at the beginning of many modern Yugoslavian songs as well

(Lord 45).

In drama, however, all such compulsory ritual sayings and doings

have disappeared. Despite what Pickard-Cambridge has called the

"unscrupulous" fantasies of members of the myth-and-ritual school, classical

scholars have been unable to find any evidence of fixed and compulsory ritual

elements in the ancient Greek plays.7 Furthermore, the identity of speaker

and spoken which typically characterizes non-literate practices is visibly

sundered in theatrical representation: a chorus of Trojan women is

performed by Athenian ephebes (Winkler 1990:20-62); young boys represent

women who represent letters of the alphabet.

These new freedoms in performance---from the duty of conservation

and its attendant constraints, fiom the constraints of proper identity and

from the compulsion of ritual-can all be connected in one way or another

with the existence of k e d texts. It is certainly paradoxical that textual fixity

should have such Liberating effects. But both in Greece and again in the

Middle Ages, book-based study tended to loosen up ossified verbal habits: its

We are speaking here about the contents of the plays. The only religious ritual performed in the theatre was apparently the immolation of a piglet to purify the space; but as this action was dso performed in the Assembly to purify the seats of the Prytanes, it can hardly be considered as a ritual with any specid connections to theatrical performance. See Else (1965:3-17), Pickard-Cambridge (1968:~-58), Taplin (1978:161, 191 n.3), Gernet (1981:57), Herington (198553 , Segal (1986), Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990:16-23). Winkler's hypothesis that the chorus was made up of young men in military training is not evidence for the existence of ritual elements in the plays themselves; even if this does connect tragic performance to a rite of passage for some, it was hardly a ritual, since only the best singers were chosen and thus not aU ephebes would have gone through it (1990:57-60). A ritual in our sense is compulsory and must be repeated exactly the same way every time to function properly. See Vickers for the absence of ritual elements in the earliest drama (1973:33-42). The theatre festival itself staged a number of military rituals in addition to the dramas; these will be discussed in Chapter 4.

unprecedented control by writing allowed drama to be the first poetic genre

to make deliberate use of colloquial speech (Ong, 1977:72), and it was the

most "sophisticated...schoolmen" who pioneered the use of vernaculars in the

I Middle Ages

When

(Clanchy 1979: 170).

a customary saying or practice gets written down, a number of

things happen. First, it loses its "invisible" or bansparent and borderless

equivalence with life as lived. It is made a visibly concrete, distinct thing on

the page, but i t also becomes an intellectual challenge insofar as it becomes a

thinkable thing with lirmts. In an oral society, man stands, in Ongts words,

a t the centre of a 360 degree sound-life: he is part of it and contained within

it. Once aspects of this sound-life are put on paper, they can be viewed, as it

were, fiom without. The individual's unidirectional gaze a t a page-be it

papyrus, parchment or waxed tablet-puts him in a new relation to cultural

material. No longer contained "within" a speech or social practice, he is

availed of the position of an "outsider," as a viewer whose gaze is separated

&om involvement.

This outsidedness of a literate's relation to a text not only opens up the

possibility of taking an individualized stance toward the language or

custom-be it dissent or active endorsement-but to some extent necessitates

a redefinition of oneself as an individual, perceiving subject. For as long a s

engagement is one's mode of being in relation to a given practice, the practice

is equivalent with one's participation as a member of the practicing group. It

is probably for this reason that even elementary literacy has been tied to the

kkelihood of an individual's separating himself £corn local traditions,

imagining an alternative reality, and actually seeking it elsewhere

(Winchester 1985:47). Literacy's tendency to separate individuals from their

unexamined immersion in cultural practices, and to encourage their

individualized responses, was implicitly recognized by Plato, who criticized

literates precisely for their tendency to be diEicult to manage (Phaedrus 274-

5. cf. also Aristophanes' Clouds, where sophistical students are assumed to

reject traditional ways of life to the extent of beating their parents!).

The separation of speaker and spoken that writing accomplishes

means that epic material, now existing "outside" the poet, can be

manipulated more fkeely. No longer obliged to teach and record at once, the

poet can pursue more personal and tangential questions. In an oral context,

no two versions of a given traditional story were ever exactly alike (Finnegan

1990:246). But in the absence of a fixed version of any of these performances,

there is little possibility of putting interpretations side by side and

comparing them. Consequently, the dialectic between "tradition" and the

"individual talent" only emerges with the advent of texts. In orality, new

versions are doomed to replace the old. From this point of view, writing can

be said to open up an unprecedented dialogue with consequences for all

cultural discourse: the dialogue between old and new versions, ancient and

modern laws, standard and deviant interpretations, conventional and

idiosyncratic doctrines, etc. New versions can exist alongside old ones,

mutually illuminating and commenting upon one another. The literate

storyteller, in short, has the freedom to determine his own personal attitude

to tradition without impeding its survival.

This "outsidedness" of the poet to traditional material has further

consequences, especially for the poetic innovations that dramatic form

represented in its time. Oral epic is a genre which praises the past deeds of

heroes. The epic bard had a single rigid mandate: to preserve and increase

"the glories of men" (Jaeger Vol.l:40). The bard Phernios is described as "the

speaker of fame," and the glonfylng function of the epic singer is made clear

elsewhere as well (Od 1.338, Vm.73; n- IX.189; see Jaeger 40). As Jaeger

observes, epic is so strictly limited to praise that "[elverything low,

contemptible, and ugly is banished from the world of the epic" (42). In the

words of the ancient rhetor Dio of Prusa,

Homer praised almost everything-animals and plants, water and earth, weapons and horses. He passed over nothing without somehow honouring and glo-g it. Even the one man whom he abused, Thersites, he called a dear-voiced speakez8

As Nagy has shown (1986239-102), the genre of praise poetry to which the

Homeric epic belongs has been observed in practice around the world. Ruth

Finnegan (1990) has described the context of this genre as practiced in parts

of Africa: the bard travels fkom town to town, taking up his position in the

Dio Prusensis, Or. XXIII, ii. Cited by Jaeger, Vol.l:42.

market-place and singing the praises of a rich or iduential townsman until

he gets money or some other gift (250). From descriptions in the Odyssey, we

find confirmation of this practice: Demodokos is fetched by a herald to come

and sing the praises of an illustrious house and be fed (Vm.43f3). And

Pindar, too, made his living by peripatetic flattery: "My plainest rule, when I

arrive in this isle, is to shower it with praises" (IsWms, 6, 20f, cited by

G.S. Kirk 1985:lOZ). Now, in Bean praise poetry, the panegyric turns to

invective if the singer is ignored. As we see here clearly, praise and abuse are

related as antithetical speech types; but most important is the fact that both

are motivated directly by the context in which the performance occurs. One

praises in expectation of one's supper, and abuses when it is not provided.

In a pre-literate milieu, there is no sustained abstraction possible of

content from context: to sing the epics is necessarily to be performing a

particular concrete action, i.e. praising heroes. But when writing allows

composition to be separated from performance, poetry comes out from under

the control of specific performative contexts: it can be composed outside of

these contexts (alone and a t home, for example), and new options can

emerge. In pre-dramatic poetry, each genre had its own specific performative

function, and its own distinctive musical meter. The praise poetry of a

Pindar, for example, would be written in the appropriate meter, such as

Aeolic or dactylo-epitrite. Epic praise was confined to dactylic hexameters,

and invectives to iambics. Within oral performance, this melopoetic

consistency served both the needs of the singers and dancers, and the

pragmatics of the song itself', whose function had to be made manifestly clear.

In praising an athlete in an epicinian ode, for example, one couldn't very well

lapse into iambics, the meter used for invective. But because the advance of

literacy was increasingly making poetry an object for analysis rather than

contextual performance alone, it became possible to contemplate these

compositional norms, and to overturn them.

Thus whereas pre-dramatic poetry was locked by orality into the use of

a single homogenizing musical and metrical mode, drama became, under

literacy's tutelage, the first genuinely heterogeneous genre. In dispensing

with dactylic hexameter, and introducing iambics in its place (among others),

dramatic composition was able to exploit the potential of the alphabet for

recording speech. By including iambics in its storytelling, drama was able to

bring poetry closer to the sounds and rhythms of everysay speech, as

Aristotle acknowledged (1449a18;. also Herington 119-20). But equally

pronounced was the effect that this hybridizing must have had on the nature

of the story and of performance itself. Singing the legendary deeds of one's

ancestors in iambics? This was new indeed. What must the poet think of

Homeric material if he writes about it in the meter resewed for invective?

Accordmg to a well-known anecdote, Solon berated Thespis for

standing in front of so many people and telling such blatant lies in his play

(Plutarch Solon 29 as cited by Nagler 1952:3). Now, this story is usually

interpreted to mean that Solon was shocked at the duplicity inherent in

Thespis' chosen form, i.e. in pretending to be someone he was not. But a

closer look tells us something else. It was certainly not Thespis'

impersonation that shocked him, for Solon was in fact well known for at least

one such poetic impersonation of his own (Plutarch Solon 8.2 as cited by

Hadas 1954:42 and Else 1965:41). A more plausible explanation lies

elsewhere.

Unfortunately, we have none of Thespis' plays. But in drama fiom

Aeschylus onward, the genre is specially marked by its tendency to turn

inherited material on its ear. ALl the plays which treat of mythological

material (and that is most of them), share a distinct taste for criticizing,

altering, questioning and transforming the traditional stories they treat.

Dramatic texts tell the story of a Greek military victory from the point of

view of the losers, who turn out not to be "barbarians" at all; Iphegenia was

never actually sacrSced on the altar by the Greeks, as legend had it, but got

a job elsewhere, sacrif5cing the Greeks themselves; the glorious hero Ajax is

portrayed in the theatre as a demented and decidedly unheroic torturer of

sheep; the great and famous archer Philoctetes is depicted as a smelly,

pathetic, whining invalid; Helen is a monster in one play, a darling in the

next, or flies off to Egypt instead of Troy; Orestes is delirious, if not clinically

insane; the murder of Agamemnon was masterminded and carried out, not

just by the tyrant Aegisthus, but by Agamemnon's own wife; heroes get

arbitrarily executed by politicians rather than dying magnXcently in battle,

or simply go about in "rags and tatters" rather than in the shining armour

and strong greaves that Homer dresses them in. The all-seeing Zeus is a

paranoid, typical sixth-century tyrant; Athena is a recognizable

contemporary citizen, casting her ballot capriciously in the dikastezia. As

Kirk notes, Euripides' Princess Elektra is married off to a "virgin peasant"

and herself becomes a "condescending psychopathic shrew;" Jason is both

cowardly and unfaithful, and the god Apollo is a bungler (103-4). In drama,

Homeric gods and heroes are no longer the extra-temporal, godlike stuff of

praise poetry, but, essentially, contemporary Athenian citizens subject to

ridicule and abuse, and to representation in iambics. If Thespis' plays were

anything like this, it is no wonder that Solon was shocked.

Comedy's connection with iambics, or lampoons, was well-known to the

ancients (Poetics 1448blOff.); but rarely do scholars today accept how close

tragedy, too, must have been in its early days to the humour of the lampoon.

Because one of the novelties of tragedy was to represent even epic heroes in

non-heroic meters, tragedy can be seen by us today, as the ancients

themselves saw it, as sharing a common origin with comedy. As Else records,

Plutarch wrote in his Proverbs of tbe Alexandzians 0 that tragedy and

comedy both arose "out of laughter," and Aristotle clearly shared this view

when he wrote that tragedy only "acquired seriousness late," being initially

composed of "short plots and comical diction" (l449a 17- 18).

The literate separation between speech context and spoken content

thus makes socially subversive speech acts more likely to occur. Whereas

heroes must, so to speak, always be praised in oral epic recitation, they can

be subjected to novel interpretations where performance is separate from

creation. Indeed, in the hybrid literary art of the fifth century, what Solon

called "lies" were not only tolerated, but actually sanctioned. As Simon

Goldhill (1990) has shown, ancient drama expresses its nature-its rewriting

of tradition and subversion of norms-both within the plays, and between the

plays and the festival context in which they were performed. According to

Goldhill, tragedy and comedy were "genres of transgression" in the most

expanded definition of the term, for their targets were not only the heroic

values of the Homeric worldview (also Goldhill 1986:ch.6), but also the norms

and values so grandiloquently dLsplayed at the Great Dionysia itself. The

performative context of the theatre festival-with its display of allied

tributes, its awards to citizens for outstanding service to the polis, and its

parade of the orphans of war-was meant to celebrate Athenian

cividmilitary virtues and advertise them abroad. Considering the dramatic

festival as a "speech act" of a global kind, we could say that it was a genre of

praise for Athens. But the plays themselves actively probe and even

undermine the civic and military virtues that are championed by the social

setting in which they appeared (1990:97-129). For this reason, Goldhill is

almost alone among classicists today in maintaining that there was in fact a

more than circumstantial connection between theatre and its patron deity,

Dionysus.9 Contrary to the ancients' own favorite dictum, that it had

Compare the more representative conclusion of Gernet, that there is "no primary and fundamental relationshipn between "Dionysus and the literary genre which circumstances ended up placing under his patronagen (1981:57). See also Jaeger: "Tragedy, too, owes both its traditional material and i ts ethical and educational spirit to epic, not to its own Dionysiac origin" (Vol.l:42). Vornant and Vidal- Naquet write similarly: "The 'truth' of tragedy is not to be found in an obscure, more or less 'primitive' or 'mystical' past secretly haunting the theatre stage" (185). Rather, it is "a literary genre with its own rules and characteristicsn which must, "from the point of view of art, social institutions, and human psychology, be regarded a s an inventionn (23). Or, as R. C. FLickenger writes, it is only by "transgress[ing] good philological practicen that one could trace tragedy back to any sort of religious ritual (1973:6).

"nothing to do with Dionysus,"lo Goldhill suggests that it was this specially

theatrical transgression of context by content that made dramatic

performance an "essentially Dionysiac event" (129).

But in addition to its daring use of iambics for singing of heroes,

drama distinguished itself &om previous poetic practice by combining in

itself practically dl the meters that had traditionally been kept distinct. As

Silk and Stem (1981) remind us, the various poetic meters available in

Greece &om the eighth century to the birth of drama were roughly equivalent

not only to the various rhythms of Greek music, but to separate poetic genres

as well (139-40). Add to this the fact that these poetic species had

associations with separate localities and even different dialects (Herington

112-13), and we can begin to get an idea of the radical heterogeneity that

drama introduced. Before drama, the poetic/musical modes had not been

allowed, as it were, to "converse" with one another; with writing they could

be brought into contact, into a hybridized state of mutual interanimation.

Speaking of drama's incorporation of previously unrelated poetic material,

Aristophanes wrote in the Frogs, '"at is this phlatothrat? Was it from

Marathon that you collected these rope-winder's songs, or from where?"

(1296). Of Euripides, he writes: "he gets his honey fkom anywherefrom

porn songs, from the drinking songs of Meletus, fkom Carian oboe tunes, horn

lo This motto was originally uttered in connection with either Epiganes' tragic composition, or Thespis'. See Flickinger, 1973: 11.

keenings, from the dance-halls" (1301). In Aristoxenusl words, tragedy was "a

mixture" (Herington 110).

Drama's thoroughgoing language heteroglossia shows just how

complete a disjunction literacy had effected between speech content and

speech context. Aristophanes could put porn songs and ritual lamentations

into "dialogue" in a single poetic composition, and put them both together on

the stage, because thanks to literacy's alienation, both had lost their

necessary connection to particular performative actions and contexts. The

existence, by the sixth century at least, of such poetic genres in writing

meant that a "keeningtt was no longer something that you necessarily and

exclusively did over a dead body; it was now just one poetic language among

many. Aj an alienated (decontextualized) language with no inviolable

connection with any particular action, it could be "staged" in juxtaposition

with a porn song without excessive impropriety. Standing outside of direct

involvement with any concrete speech context, the literate playwright can

bring languages into novel combinations, representing them freely on the

stage as objects for contemplation.ll

Throughout his oeuvre, Bakhtin argued that it is only when discourses

are seen horn "withoutt1 that they lose their sacrosanct and inviolable

character. When this happens, social languages, and the practices that go

Vernant and Vidal-Naquet stress the dif'ference between doing something and staging it: on stage, a ritual lamentation or sacrifice becomes "simply a representation" (16).

with them, are relativized to the point where they can no longer lay claim to

any absolute metaphysical truth. They are forced instead simply to compete

with one another in the "market-place" of heteroglossia. The emergence of

this condition of linguistic free-enterprise in Greece cannot, of course, be

attributed solely to literacy. Certainly Athens' growing cosmopolitanism

under the Peisistratids, plus Greek colonialism and commerce generally,

would have made their own contributions to this process by "physically"

bringing various languages into relativizing contact with one another. But

the radical language heteroglossia that drama reflects can be traced to

features of literacy.

The cutting-loose of discourse from its embeddedness in contexts of

action not only gives rise to an individual "subject" who can treat a discourse

as an "object," but to the possibility of conflicting views of that same object.

For this reason, the emergence of an individual perspective upon, as opposed

to a group participation within, cultural activities has also been linked with a

shift %om worldview to ideology."

... writing, the presence of the text of the word in addition to its utterance, favours a partly independent role for ideology, giving it a measure of "structural autonomy'' which it doesn't possess in oral societies (Goody 1986:22).

The most si@cant consequence of the emergence of an independent

ideology is that by its nature it will be perceived in opposition to other

ideologies. In fixing the worldview of Homeric orality in writing, the

technology of script detaches its value-system from particular lived

performative contexts (the celebration of the deeds and mete of heroes), and

establishes it as an abstract, non-context dependent "universal" dictate.

Through the now-visible dialectical difference between textual universals

and lived particulars, an ideological conflict emerges. But writing goes

further: it establishes a "semi-permanent platform" (3 1) for those aspects of

experience that conflict with these now-universalized ideas. In so doing,

writing allows the dissenting voice of the ideological "other" to be heard over

longer stretches of time, long enough to establish itself as a different

interpretation of reality. For example, we begin to hear, in the poetry of

Archilochus (c. 650), the occasional challenge sent out to the traditionally

esteemed, Homeric notion of the glory of a hero's death in battle. In

Archilochus, a coward proclaims his virtue, the love of life. This is a

proclamation which thumbs its nose at an entire worldview-the Homeric

culture of kleos (acoustic renown). But in Euripides, Archilochus' personal,

lyric rejection of the heroic ideal becomes a principled point of view which is

not tied in with the identity of any single speaker. When in drama a

character says that "It is better that we live ever so miserably than die in

glory" (LA. 1250), an alternative point of view is receiving a generalizable

expression, and one which cannot be discounted as an isolated (personal,

lyric) utterance. In short, interpersonal conflict is now ideological in nature,

and discourse is its medium. But because each discourse is equally alienated,

and representative of a Meren t interpretation of reality, there is no

resolution possible, only winning and losing.

In fact, the Homeric worldview did not exist in a fixed written version

for long before ideological debate over its values appeared: Xenophanes

attacked the Homeric world-view on a number of grounds WeifEer 1968:8-9);

Stesichorus (c.640-555) denied the veracity of Homer's version of events

(Beck 196427); and rhapsodes performing the textual Homer were,

accordingly, forced to defend him ideologically, some resorting to allegorical

defenses WeiEer 10). From at least the sixth century on, Greek poetic and

intellectual life was dominated by this polemical spirit, this agonistic claim

and counter-claim by individuals against other individuals. Stories of the

famous "contest" of Homer and Hesiod go back to the sixth century (ll), as

does the institution of contests in epic, and then dramatic poetry. In the fifth

century, Sophists attacked each other, philosophers attacked the Sophists,

and by Aristophanes' time, playwrights were accusing each other on stage of

being "frauds" (Frogs 909). These polemics only escalated into Aristotle's

time, when arguments "Against X were the order of the day (Pfeiffer 49-

131). In short, Homeric praise was increasingly replaced by ideological

contest, a discursive shift which was eventually to manifest itself in the

innovations of theatrical form. As Vernant and Vidal-Naquet put it, "the

legendary hero, extolled in epic, becomes a subject of debate now that he is

transferred to the theatrical stage" (186).

This agonistic style of literate Greek discourse has been usefully

discussed by G.E.R. Lloyd (1990), who found the confLictua1 ad horninem

argument at work in spurring on many of the h e s t humanistic

achievements of Greek science and philosophy. But where storytelling is

concerned, the literate shift from worldview to ideology proved equally

productive. Between the eighth and the sixth centuries, as writing began to

be used for increasingly elaborate poetic compositions,12 the idea that a poet

of mythological material could be a single creative individual had emerged.

Consistent with the earliest uses to which it was ever put (Schmandt-

Besserat 1989:27-42 for writing generally; Harris 1989:46 for eighth-century

Greece), writing thus becomes a mark of poetic "personal property." In the

fifth century, as we see from Aristophanes' battle of poetic identities in the

Frogs, storytelling had become a site of personal ideological conflict.

Dramatic form reflects this shift to open, democratized debate in two

crucial ways. In the first place, poetry in theatre has become ideologized

insofar as it has become dialogic. We have just spoken of the poetic

heteroglossia that drama inaugurated by combining within itself meters and

dialect characteristics that had only been used separately before (see

H e ~ g t o n 114). There is one poetic feature, however, that drama does not

appear to have borrowed from anywhere: the stichomythia (140). This rapid-

fire interchange of statement and counterstatement is the epitome of the

special kind of ideological debate that writing fosters. Swift but sustained

dialogic exchanges between speakers was not used anywhere that we know of

in pre-dramatic poetry-and could not have been practised in poetic

l2 One of the most intruiging pieces of evidence for the earliest possible dates for this phenomenon is the fact that the poetry inscribed on the famous "Nestor's Cupn (735-730) can be seen as an intentional "Literary allusionn to Homer (iI.II.632-7). See Powell's analysis (1991:163).

composition without the aid of writing. This is because, in stichomythia,

meaning is created between speakers. In isolation, the utterances are

incomplete; the meaning of each is absolutely dependent on its position in the

two-part exchange. The locutions of dialogue are interrelated, co-dependent

on one another to the extent that the whole exchange stands or falls on the

inclusion of each and every element in sequence. This is not the kind of

poetic composition that one can improvise spontaneously in the manner of an

oral bard. The verbal fabric is so tight that every word, in exact sequence,

counts for the intelligibility of the whole. In other words, its exact verbatim

repeatability is a precondition of stichomythian dialogue, which means, in

effect, that the use of writing is a precondition both for its creation and its

performance.

S tichomythia is an interchange, not only of utterances, but necessarily

of voices. Dramatic dialogue, which thus marks the breakup of the unified

time-space context in which poetic discourse used to be located, is for this

reason a clear aesthetic reflection of the ideologically conflictual tenor of

literate society. By using writing in the first place, the dramatist is untying

his discourse fkom the time-space context in which he produced it. But in

using dialogic form in particular, the playwright goes further. The dramatist

is the poet who can no longer perform his own work by himself', and thus the

very act of writing is inclusive of others, and of the separate time-space

contexts which they inhabit. Dramatic poetry does not only imply others, but

needs them.

The contest that writing opens up between inheritors of the same

poetic tradition is thus reflected, on the level of poetic form, by a textual

gap-and, potentially, a contest-between creator and performer. While this

separation shows signs of its existence in epic and lyric performances, it is

only in dramatic composition that the distinction becomes an indispensable

artistic principle. The existence and early use of writing for poetry helped to

guarantee that, in the archaic period, epic and lyric poetry was "certainly re-

performed" by singers other than the composers of such material (Thomas

1992: 119, 13). But (written) epic and lyric poems generally tend have one

thing in common: while they may be performed by someone other than their

creator, they do not have to be. For epic and lyric composition is monological

in nature; one person only is required to perform them, regardless of whether

that person happens also to be the creator or not. The one pre-dramatic genzo

of poetic composition which constitutes an exception to this rule is of course

the choral lyric; and it is horn this multi-voiced genre that ancient sources

such as Aristotle believed that dramatic form developed (Poe. M49a 14). '3

Like the choral lyric, whose most famous exponents included the poets

l3 Flickenger sums up what evidence is available by saying that 'tragedy and satyric drama [which in his view predate comedy] are independent offshoots of the same literary type, the Peloponesian dithyramb" (1973:3). The first reference to this subgenre of choral lyric that has come down to us appears in Archilochus (c. 680-640), who says "I know, when my wits are thunderstruck by wine, how to lead Lord Dionysus' dithyrambn (7). Performers in the dithyramb were not, however, impersonators, but spoke as "themselves, in propna persona as revelers and ~orshippers" (10). By the middle of the seventh century, this type of choral song was "poetized" by being composed on non- Dionysiac mythical subjects, and by the end of the sixth century it had become a regular and very formal literary genre meant for performance by a chorus of fay (1 1).

Pindar, Simonides and Bacchylides, dramatic form made the separation

between composer and performer explicit, and necessary.

Plato, often thought of as wholly unsympathetic to writing, concludes

in the Phaedius that, for the disinterestedness and rationality that it fosters,

writing has its benefits. He goes further, in fact, conceding that even the

worst writer is less likely to "completely miss the mark," than the speaker

who refuses the intellectual benefits of abstraction altogether (235e). The

benefits of abstraction are equally palpable in the changes to performance

that produced dramatic form. Like the grammar student who was his

prototype, the literate actor thus accumulates all the benefits that literacy

brought to performance in the first place: heedom from the compulsion of

traditional contexts, disinterested rationality, and enough of both of these

things to invent individualistic solutions and even radically new forms.

But what happens when such literacy-related innovations become

conventions themselves? Will not verbatim repetition from that point on have

only negative effects, such as inculcating a parrot-like mentality and

eventually eroding the performer's creativity? Such effects, at least, would

appear to constitute the crux of Artaud's objections to a theatre of

"grammarians and graduate students." Let us look, then, a t what the

student/performer does, exactly, in memorizing and repeating a dialogical

text.

Unlike the oral bard, as we have said, he repeats verbatim. But

because the words that he repeats come fkom a book and not &om another

performer's mouth, what he repeats has a special character. Like musical

notation, written speech cannot record the performance itself. As theorists of

language such as Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986) and Ricoeur (1981) have

taught, writing cannot even record meaniog by itself (i.e. without

interpretation). In speech, linguistic meaning derives mainly horn extra-

verbal factors: from conditions prevailing in the context of the utterance,

from the inner intentions, knowledge and beliefs of the speakers, horn the

nature of their relationship in terms of social status, fkom their gestures,

tones of voice and facial expressions (Lakoff, 1948:926). In speech, in fact, the

verbal component constitutes a relatively small percentage of all meaning-

generating elements.

To use the speech act vocabulary of Austin (1962 and 1975) and Searle

(1969), writing can record only the locution of the said. The locution gives us,

essentially, a string of syntactically-arranged words whose possible

individual meanings can be looked up in a dictionary. But that, of course,

does not give us a meaning for the utterance as a whole. This is because

writing has no means of recording either the illocutionary intentions of the

speaker (a desire to frighten, inform, or to arouse the listener), or the

perlocutionary effects the utterance was meant to generate (causing the

listener to do, feel, or think something as a result of the utterance). The

dramatic text, composed as it is almost exclusively of direct fist-person

utterances without surrounding lexical material, is therefore especially dl-

equipped to convey the meaning of its locutions.

Nicholas U d d , who with Rdph Rolster Doister wrote one of the very

first genuine comedies of the Christian era, understood the inherent

ambiguity of such texts. As Headmaster of Eton, he appears to have written

the play at some point between 1534 and 1541 for performance by his

students. The play features the famous letter incident, where Ralph Roister

Doister's (purchased) love-letter is read aloud on stage, twice, with the

opposite meanings. In terms of the pedagogical relation between U d d and

his actor-students, the play would have provided a superb example of what

the decontextualization of language in writing can do. Indeed, when one of

Udall's students went on to publish his own book, Rule of Reason (1553), he

inserted Ralph's letter into the text as an example of ambiguity.

Udall's pupil Thomas Wilson certainly learned this lesson well-

whether from his classroom studies or his acting we couldn't say. But Ralph's

delightfully ambiguous letter is a paradigmatic document for the theatre as

well as the classroom. Before speaking what has been written, one needs to

decide what type of speech act it is: is it a humble and charming love-letter,

or the offensive blather of a self-aggrandizing blockhead? As Lakoff puts it:

"it is normally true in all languages that one must somehow make clear the

type of speech act involved: are you asking a question, making a statement,

or giving an order?" (926). In written speech, the "type of speech act involved"

is not provided.14

In memorizing the text, all that can be internalized is what the text

provides. What the text provides is the locution. In order for it to be spoken,

to make sense as an act of speech, the actor must decide what type of speech

act it is. In other words, per- and il-locutionary intentions must be added.

Consequently, in turning a decontextualized locution into a speech act, the

actor must contribute "more" than he is given.15 Not only must he decide

what type of speech act to supply, but he must also add all the extra-verbal

elements which in Life would normally accompany a speech act of the kind he

has decided to perform. These extra-verbal elements, without which the actor

may be uttering just a List of ambiguous words, will range from rate of

delivery, to tones of voice, to facial expression, to physical action and

deportment, even through to an imaginary positing of a "context" which may

involve appropriate clothing and the use of objects.

Furthermore, the speech act which he has devised on the basis of the

written locution is not in fact destined for reception by the listener to whom

l4 This deficiency of written language is of course less apparent in inflected languages such as Greek, which goes further than English in expressing the mood of an utterance.

l5 Interpretive contributions of this kind are obviously not literally quantifiable. But a s the example of Ralph's letter (or better stlll, very bad acting!) proves, i t is possible to reduce the comprehensibility of a written utterance to near zero-a fact which suggests that the actor's contribution must be accepted as decisively large.

the locution is addressed in the text. That addressee is a fictional character,

and exists only as another textual locution, or set of locutions. Rather, the

speech act is destined, initially in rehearsal, for reception by his fellow

performer(s), and ultimately, in performance for an audience of spectators,

many of whom may be barely within earshot. Therefore, in addition to

creating a meaningful corporeal speech act, he must devise a way to

communicate his conception to a great many people who may be watching

and listening &om a distance. Depending on the circumstances, this may

require that he add features to the conception, amplify it, or m o m the whole

in some other way. Clearly, the verbatim memorization of a textual locution

is in fact but the very beginning of an interpretive, creative process which far

exceeds the model on which it is based.

The situation into which writing has thrust the performer has been

effectively described by David Olson (1988). "While writing solved the

problem of storage of information, it created ... the 'meaning' or 'interpretation'

problem" (425). Writing created this problem by inaugurating a visible

distinction "between what a text says and what it means" (429). Out of this

difference comes the possibility of taking a variety of different mental

attitudes to verbal content.

One can hear the propositional content and then decide whether to believe or doubt it, or one can hear an utterance and then think whether it was meant literally or metaphorically. One can, as we say, begin to reflect on text rather than merely remembering it (435).

Thus, compared to the type of repetition which an oral performer might

practice, that of the text-bearing actor is more philosophical and ultimately

more personal. Philosophical, because i t involves the interpretation of an

abstracted, decontextualized locution; personal, because textual locutions are

by nature ambiguous and wiU admit of divergent interpretations.

Interpretation not only gives scope for an individual's own tastes, values,

belief& and desires, but in fact demands that the full range of these personal

criteria be brought to bear. In short, parrot-like copying may be precisely

what text-based learning discourages.

But for Socrates of the Phaedrus, book-based learning has a more

serious flaw: the danger that, having rescued itself fiom the caprices of the

senses, learning loses touch with them altogether and becomes barren,

fixitless in the physically-generative sense. Although real knowledge, for

Socrates, can perhaps only be gained through physically disengaged means,

it must, to stay alive, keep planting itself physically into present bodies.

Socrates compares words and knowledge to valuable seeds which must be

"plant[ed] and sow[n]" properly, directly in the soul of a living listener (2 76a).

If we plant our ideas only in books, he says, we will ultimately be sowing "in

wateru-that is, our words will bear no fruit (276e). We must on the contrary

sow what we know physically in our listeners, keep seducing them in the

flesh and impregnating them with a love of wisdom. The advantage of face-

to-face instruction and discourse (dialegesth-onvers ation) is therefore, for

Socrates, that it is procreative (276e).16 Thus, while this bodily-based

conversation, seduction and impregnation ("plant[ing] and sow[ing]") can

"[take] us in a wrong direction" (265b-c), lead us astray "like an animal"

(235e), it is a risk which must be taken. The dialogue implies that we must

risk the intellectual errors that will no doubt come of our surrender to live

speech acts, for the very madnesses and transports which produce poetry and

wisdom in the first place cannot feed but on real flesh. For performers, then,

perhaps the real issue in the use of text is what happens to the body and the

physical interestedness that book-based study tends to eliminate.

Among other interesting things that it does, this dialogue noticeably

casts the dialectic between written and spoken communication into the form

of a contest between texts and bodies. And not just the body as an

abstraction, but what Bakhtin would call the lower material body. When

Socrates greets Phaedrus by asking what he's got protruding from under his

cloak, he sounds rather like Mae West demanding to know whether the bulge

in her interlocutor's trousers is a pistol or a sign that "he's happy to see her."

The dialogue evinces many similar echoes of a particular dichotomy typical of

literate culture: a valued split between textual "height" and corporeal

"lowness." When he wants to subvert the loftiness of his ascent into tales of

mythic nymphs, Socrates brings the discussion down to the level of his feet

l6 Oral teaching is described as 'taking a accompanied by knowledge, which are able to are not without fruit but contain a seed, from Rowe (1986).

fitting soul" and planting and sowing in it 'words help themselves and the man who planted them, and which others grow in other soils." Translation by C.J.

(230b7). In fact, he uses foot-related tropes twice in this dialogue (250e4-5),

both times referring either to "descent" into animalistic pleasures

("surrendering himself to pleasure does hLs best to go on four feet") or a

descending return to the physical reality of the present context ("to judge by

my foot"). But the whole dialogue is an implicit comparison between the

downward pull of the lower body-sex, impregnation, birth, eating,

sickness-and the more high-minded pursuits of divine and disinterested

truth. By the dialogue's end, Plato has come down in favour of entry,

impregnation, and a renewing birth in the physical body. It is worth

examining this higMow polarits' further. Not only is it a perennial theme of

literate cultures everywhere, but it is one which has obvious relevance to a

genre like theatre, which actually embodies it.

We have spoken so far about the dialogue that writing creates between

past and present versions, official and deviant interpretations, and between

the various separate speech genres that oral habits tend to keep apart. But

there is a related contest: that between "high" and "low" discourses. We have

hinted at it by showing how theatre was born out of a new intra-poetic

dialogue between the praise of epic and the blame of iambics. But as scholars

of literacy such as Jack Goody (1968, 1986, 1987), M.T. Clanchy (1979), and

Gerd Bauman (1986) have shown, even in newly and only partly Literate

societies, bookish activities quickly establish themselves as "higher" than

orally-embedded ones. Goody describes how schools andlor religious sects-be

they of the Egyptian temple-scribes, Medieval scriptoria, or other types of

academy-actively perpetuate this highflow binarism, this socially polarized

higMow "diglossia" (Bauman, 42). Characteristic of this valued split is its

tendency to spread out both horizontally and vertically: it will have the effect

of classing occupations as well as gender in a social hierarchy. Those who

work and learn with their hands, or speak only the "mother tongue," will lose

status proportionately as scholarship establishes itself.

In Aristophanesf lampoon of the Air-worshipping residents of the

"Reflectory" in the Clouds, one sees clearly this association of scholarship

with height, high-mindedness, elevation.17 This association probably derives

not so much fiom such historical facts as the early use of writing for charting

the movements of heavenly bodies, or &om the fact that a given culture is

likely to have learned writing fiom one which seems to be "superior." It

cannot be wholly accounted for even by the fact that writing's benefits might

tend to be most quickly recognized and exploited by the upper levels of the

social hierarchy in the fist place (government, clergy).18 It may rather be the

case that the highflow structure originates in a more h d a m e n t a l and

universal experience of bodily life.

Just as all people must experience their head, eyes and brain as

"higher" than their lower regions of feet, anus, gut and genitals, so too,

l7 See also Cfouds (520-564) and Wesps (65), where Aristophanes explicitly contrasts the height of his own dramatic subjects with the lowness of less bookish ones.

l8 And this most certainly would not have been the case in Greece, where writing was k t used by private individuals (see Chapter 4) rather than, as in Egypt and Medieval Europe, by the uppermost reaches of the social hierarchy.

perhaps by a kind of primal existential analogy, will intellection, sight,

imagination be deemed higher functions than w h g , making, copulation,

digestion and defecation. Stallybrass and White (1986) have provided a

useful description of how, in general, "cultures 'think themselves' in the most

immediate and effective ways through the combined symbolisms" of a

geographic hierarchy (mountaintop vs. valley), a corporeal hierarchy (upper

vs. lower orifices, protrusions and organs); a hierarchy of the social plane

(lang vs. beggar) and of psychic forms &gh philosophical, theological, or

"classic" literary genres vs. low physical crafts, "popular1' entertainment, etc.)

(3). A writer in the twelfth century AD. contrasted the lowness of "trifling

mummers in vulgar rhymes" with the height of literary works such as the

Aeneid (Clanchy, 1979:157); Aristophanes elevates his intellectual writings

over "vulgar low comedy" ( Wasps, 66).

In one of his characteristic attempts to interfere with such rigid binary

thinking, Nietzsche famously claimed that the only thoughts worth having

came w M e waLkiz~g; but the communication of thoughts through writing is

by definition an activity of the "upper" realms. With no alphabetical

equivalent for the physical presences of speech, what writing leaves out is, in

Barthes' words, "quite simply, the body' (1977:5). It is still a body that writes,

and a body that reads; but reading and writing, despite what Iser and Poulet

say, cannot be corporeal in the same way as speaking and listening are.

Passionate readers and writers might disagree with this. After all, as

Euripides shows in I.A., even writers moan, wail, and pull out their hair in

the act of writing a letter. But there is a limit to the extent to which writing

can serve as conduit for the body. Punctuation and other graphic and lexical

devices can substitute themselves somewhat for the signs the body uses in

speaking (grimaces, eye-movements, hand gestures); but there is one side of

bodily input into speech for which there is absolutely no analogue in writing.

How does one even describe it in writing? Following Benjamin, Barthes

refers to the "aura" of a individual body, the obtuseness, and uniqueness, of

its brute surfaces, none of which can be mechanically reproduced or even

properly contained within language at all. But Bakhtin possibly puts it more

usefully by speaking about the "grotesque body," the body experienced as full

of secreting o a c e s and pregnant protrusions, the body which burps and

farts, laughs and gets pregnant, putrefies and dies. In terms of the

symbolically generative hierarchy mentioned above, this is the low body, the

body as lower order, the body as base. In eliminating all traces of this

grotesque aspect of bodily life from written communication, writing "elevates"

itself over speech. Writing thus makes all texts appear "high in comparison

with the grotesque bodily realities of speech. But of course Plato has as much

as suggested this explanation already: in the absence of a real speaker's

body, physical entry and "pregnancy" cannot take place.

A clear picture begins to emerge of the scholarly activity of the literate

actor. In the first place he must bracket his sensible reality; in the second he

must repeat verbatim; and in the third place, he must implicitly submit t o a

valued distinction between the "height" of his text and the "lowness" of his

body. As a memorizer and repeater of already-written texts, the actor is like

the Athenian student with a poem set on his bench. But as a performer who

speaks to listeners in person, he is also like Phaedrus, the lover who affects

his interlocutor with his lower body. To use the imagery that Plato used

throughout his dialogue about writing and teaching, a performer of this type

is subject to both decontextual and sexual models of communication.

To understand the relation between these two models in the theatre,

we might start at the point at which the actor's activity departs &om the

model of book-based scholarship on which it was originally based. The actor

who has conned his part considers himself "off book," an accurate description

if ever there was one. Unlike the student's, the actor's verbatim recitation

does not begin and end with the book, so to speak, before him on his bench. It

might be interesting to reflect for a moment on the phenomenology of the

actor's text, at least as far as we know it. An actor's text can always be

spotted a mile off: it looks more like a scroll than a book, from spending so

much time in a back pocket during rehearsal; it is covered with markings on

every page, from the arrows and squiggles that indicate blocking, to coffee

stains, to underlinings, to marginal notes of every kind. It quickly becomes a

fairly dog-eared palimpsest of the actor's physical experience during the

preparation of the show. Used book stores tell the same tale in another way.

Except for &-box sets of Shakespeare, the volumes in the play section are

invariably smaller, cheaper and in general more disreputable-looking than

the objects one sees on the history, religion and philosophy shelves. This may

seem a trivial point, but it is an accurate reflection of the theatre's relation to

its books. That is to say, even the theatre's books are somewhat base,

grotesque, and marked everywhere by traces of lower material bodily life.

When we compare players' manuscripts from the late Middle Ages, we see

just how sigdicant this fact is. The oldest extant secular play in English, the

hterludiirm de C k o et PueUa, written in approximately 1260-and

abducted from the British Museum in 1971--survived into our century in a

tiny, palm-sized roll (Clanchy, 1979: 113). Like other players' manuscripts of

the time, it is a physical record of the contexts in which it was used. As Erich

Auerbach points out, these texts, written for use by actors, survive so

sparsely in libraries precisely because they were actively, physically carried

around in palms and pockets and simply fell apart. Those that survived are

generally poorly executed and very badly worn (1965:288-9).

So it is fair to say that the body intrudes even on the "highness" of the

actor's book. But the interpretive process is defined by the body in more

significant ways. In his analysis of the actor's interpretive procedure, Cole

(1992) argues that the actor interprets his text while alone, and then defends

his reading against the solitary readings of other actors in rehearsal. In

reality, it is not as masturbatory and "readerly" as that. For in the particular

type of textual understanding that characterizes the actor's work, the bodies

of others actively enter into the interpretation process, where they become

both hermeneutical device and final court of appeal. In the theatre, the

creation of meaningful utterances out of textual locutions happens in a

context of direct intercourse between bodies. Meanings generated from play-

texts are thus not the products solely of isolated literary interpretations, but

also of the actual effects that bodies have on one another. In rehearsal no less

than in performance, the ear for speech that the text provides is augmented

by an eye for what even the grotesque body does. A suddenly dilated pupil or

rush of blood to the skin tells the actor something new about the relation of

this language to these bodies; perspiration, revulsion or desire may come

unbidden and add to understanding. This dialectical relation between texts

and the bodies which con them is thus the relation whose nature the actor

must fathom each time he goes into rehearsal or on to the stage. But this

text-body relation also forms the subject of many plays.

In the PMoctetes, for example, Odysseus gives Neoptolemos some

very school-masterish, decontextualized instruction, teaching him in the

manner of the Sophists what to say and how to say it. He in fact directs his

student in an elaborate play-within-a-play, explaining the actor's objectives,

and even offering him a possible "motivation" with which to make his

performance appear more credible. Neoptolemos goes on to give an excellent

recitation for the poor susceptible Philoctetes-at least, initially. He begins

by doing as all obedient studentlactors must: he "brackets" his own

contextual reality, suppresses his own motivatedness in propria persona, and

functions like a sign in Odysseus' story. He represents the embittered

warrior, wronged by the Atridae, on his way home. But his cooperation in

Odysseus' plan to "ensnare the soul of Philoctetes with ... words" ultimately

crashes to the ground Like a stack of writingtablets when the bottom is

pulled out. The bottom, literally, for what he faces is that against which no

lesson is proof: the grotesque body of his interlocutor. As is the case

elsewhere in Greek literature, i t is the foot and not the buttocks which takes

on the burden of all that is lowest in man; and Philoctetes' foot is as

grotesque as can be imagined. Gushing pus and foulest stench, it reduces the

body connected to it to that powerless state of surrender to biological reality

so typical of physical illness or decay. This is human life before civilization,

during that period of s e ~ t u d e to a "state of nature" where life is but the

grinding round of pain, sleep, the struggle to feed oneself and drag one's

imprisoning carcass into shelter. Face to face with this suppurating flesh,

this man as "the thing itself," Neoptolemos, from the point of view of his own

physical, experiential reality, must re-evaluate his semiotic intentions. He

takes off his mask, speaks unscripted lines, and shows hlinsedf And

Sophocles criticizes the "shabby, slit-eyed soul" of Odysseus precisely for its

Life-denying didacticism: he criticizes him for teaching Neoptolemos "step by

step" how to act "against his nature" (1013).

This critique of didactic prescription stipulates that the body must

have some input into any interpretation of what is good and right, human or

inhuman, virtuous or evil. And it is a critique, of course, which drama is

uniquely well-equipped to keep alive. Plato's critique of textual modes,

appearing as it does in a text meant only for reading, must appear merely

ironic by comparison. But as a performed art of bodies and texts, drama can

reveal the limitations of textuality and mean it. We see this same critique, for

example, in Measure for Measure, where the body in one way or another

resists all attempts at didactic prescription. Neither Angelo's legal text, nor

Isabella's religious text, nor ultimately the Duke's dramatic text proves able

to bring the body into obedience: Barnardine's body refuses to obey the

schedule (TV.iii.59); Angelo's sex organs fill up with "strong and swelling"

blood in the middle of an anti-sex lecture (.I.ii.l42ff), and Isabella's body can

barely be stopped horn further seducing and %reed[ingln with practically the

first man she sets eyes on when on furlough fiom the nunnery (II.iiAOf3).

Everyone's "codpiece," as Lucio puts it, wiU "rebel" of itself, irrespective of all

discursive dictates (III.ii.124). What plays such as PMoctetes and Measure

for Measure represent, in writing, is also necessarily what actors do

themselves in rehearsal and performance: they both study their parts and

show themselves in ways that may contradict textual dictates. Dramatic

texts, as lessons, thus have a built-in generic safeguard against the

possibility that any text may turn out to be the product of a "slit-eyed soul" in

light of new physical evidence. All actors may begin like Neoptolemos,

dutifully learning their lessons, but they are also generically sanctioned to do

as he does in going beyond and "below" them.

What he finds "below" his lesson is in this case the limit at which

pragmatism gives way to simple compassion for another suffering mortal.

What Angelo and Isabella 6nd beneath their religious and legal dictates is

similarly what "the flesh ... shall better determine" (II.ii.273-5): that to be

frozen into textual absolutes (I.iv.58-67; II.ii.45, III.ii.106) is to "be absolute

for death" (III.i.5; m.i. 118), and that as far as the "more gross" physical body

is concerned, everyone "weigh[s] equally" (IV.ii.29-32). Does this mean that

in the conflict between the text and the body, the latter will always be on the

side of fundamental decency, fecundating Life and brotherly love? Not

necessarily.

The high textuaVlow bodily polarity pursued so far owes a great deal

to Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque (1968). In Bakhtinls view, the

grotesque body represents the body of "the people" which resists a l l attempts

by official culture to control its actions and centralize its verbal-ideological

reality. B akhtin conceives of "carnivalesque degradationi1-which manifests

itself in popular-festive forms of social interaction like theatre--as subversive

of the attempts by "serious" forces of high culture to impose their sacred

books and transcendent doctrines throughout the verbal-ideological world:

... the carnivalesque spirit.. .destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning.

The essential princip a1 of [this] grotesque realism is ... the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body ...( 20).

For Bakhtin, carnivalesque degradation is a double movement down: it both

"bring[s] down to earth," and "turn[s] [its] subjects into flesh" (20). In the

cosmic dimension, "downward" is earth, "upward" is heaven, while in the

bodily aspect, "which is not," according to Bakhtin, "clearly distinct from the

cosmic, the upper part is the face or the head and the lower part is the

genital organs, the belly, the buttocks" (2 1). Or the feet, we might add, which

were and which remain in many Mediterranean countries the "lowest,"

rudest part of the anatomy. Bakhtin was chiefly interested in the

incorporation of carnivalesque imagery by the novel, and he did not pursue

the relation between carnival and theatre.lg But like Nietzsche's

ApollonianlDionysian contest, by which it was heavily infhenced (Wise,

1989), Bakhtin's high-low binary has obvious uses in theatrical theory.

Having adopted this conception in some of its aspects, it should be

stipulated that its applicability to theatre is limited. In the first place, the

inventors of theatre had no sacred books with which to Gighten the populace

and repress lower bodily impulses as officials in Christian Europe did. The

Homeric epics, which came as close to a "bible" as anything the ancients had

in terms of official doctrine or sacred books (Parke, 1967:9), did represent

some abstract spiritual values and certaudy stressed extratemporal

meanings, but there the similarity ends. The more serious flaw in Bakhtin's

carnival is that he sees the repressed lower order as "insistently cheerful and

hopeful" (Bristol, 1985:23). To Bakhtin's mind, the lower material bodily

realm is forever afEming the indestructible vitality of life, the indomitable

spirit of the people, the ever-regenerating power of nature. In carnival as

Bakhtin sees it, the barriers separating man from man are joyfidly broken

down and a spirit of universal brotherhood prevails. Not surprisingly,

Bakhtin's vision of the populace's bodily life has since been characterized as

"naively idyllic, vague and even silly" (Bristol, 23).

l9 See Michael Bristol (1985), who did.

But Nietzsche, who fist sketched in the outlines of this theory, knew

better. The populist orgiastic rituals which for Nietzsche represented the

antithesis of high Apollonian control threatened even their participants with

savage violence and death. If we can trust Euripides' account in the Bacdai,

Nietzsche was closer to the ancients' own view of the matter. Indeed, the

blind destructiveness of the bacchantes' revels in the B d a i stands as an

instructive warning against any tendency to view the body and its low

domain in simplistic, idyllic terms. Populist corporeal doings may well tend

to be banished, denigrated and ideologically demonized by high, official

culture in its efforts to establish itself as sovereign over cultural life. And

theatre in the Christian era did indeed suffer, over lengthy stretches, from

just such attempts to repress the lower bodily realm. But it would be equally

false to reverse the snobbery, and view non-literary activities as

transcendently, transhistorically true, good and humane. As Stallybrass and

White remind us, carnivalesque orgies are just as likely to manifest their

grotesque bodily impulses in the stoning of pigs, o r Jews, or adulteresses; in

the slaughtering of animals, or "witches," or Turks, or in the ideologically-

motivated destruction of any other group marked out for a ritualistic

"cleansing." Pentheus was not the &st nor will he have been the last to be

ripped apart by revelling

20 And this is to say nothing about the more prosaic fact that the lower material bodily stratum can also be, and in our time especially has been, a carrier of disease, suffering and death.

The lower, material, bodily stratum certainly stands opposed to

literate modes, insofar as it marks the limit of what texts can represent, and

what they can compel. But there is no justification for positing the existence

of any single bodily truth, from "universal harmony" to "the goodness of

nature." If we are to take the body seriously in the theatre, and the genre

obviously demands that we do, we must take it seriously on its own terms. To

do so means taking it as, primarily, a material substance in history. And just

as any other aspect of material nature is affected by culture and reflects its

ongoing changes and trends, so too must the body be seen as subject to more

or less precisely locatable historical values and assumptions (see Purdy

1992:5 for a discussion of the body as "a primary site for ideological

inscription"). The female body, for example, has been perceived throughout

history in various different ways. Images of "womanhood," however they are

generated, become the lenses through which spectators view female bodies on

the stage, even through which actors view their own bodies (Diamond

1992:390@. The body is also a "medium of culture" (Bordo as cited by Forte

1992:249), and it will be perceived and even experienced according to

available models. For example, Webster (1959) noticed that seventh-century

sculptures of the human form were to some extent determined by literary

models. The Homeric body, with its emphasis on eyes and knees, is what

artists came to see themselves: their human forms privileged eyes and knees

accordingly (44). Such historically-determined perceptions of the body may be

invisible at the time, and those who represent the body through history may

claim that they are simply seeing the body as it really, or naturally, is. But

the verbal-ideological content of such representations (i-e. "eyes and kneesW)21

becomes increasingly obvious over time. In short, the relation between "the

"material' body and the body in representation" is not a simple one (Forte

249).

The relation between text and body is rather a dialectical one which

the theatre simply keeps alive. In the Philoctetes, Sophocles all but admits to

the undecidability of the contest between high and low by bringing on a deux

ex machina at the end of the play. The battle between Philoctetes's foot and

Odysseus's clever mouth, in the midst of which the actorktudent

Neoptolemos finds himself, is not the kind of contest which should be decided

in favour of either. Neither foot nor mouth has a greater claim to truth as far

as the human anatomy is concerned: an absolute decision either way is

amputation, or censorship, of the most arbitrary kind. As far as the theatre

as socio-historical institution is concerned, Philoctetes's foot, as a stage

image, will take its meaning for audiences and actors alike from the

historical context in which they are a l l embedded. For the Greeks-who in

spite of their many cures for diseases (Ant.398) had no hospitals or steroids

or CAT scans-the decay of the archer's flesh would probably have

represented a genuine threat to bodily health and a descent, ultimately, into

21 The "eyes and knees" of Homeric epic might be compared to the "tits and ass" of the modern American musical comedy; see the song of that name in A Chorus Line.

the realm of the inhuman. To us today, it might represent no more than a

quaint reminder that we are composed of flesh and blood after all, in spite of

our many machines.

By Artaud's time, literate modes had entrenched themselves beyond

what could have been imagined by the inventors of drama. So "high indeed

had bookishness become over the centuries that bodily performance itself had

actually disappeared from many spheres of life. But for the inventors of

drama, bookish elevation was still something of a novelty and even a bit of a

joke. Both from quips like those of Aristophanes-"Either Prodicus, or a book,

has been the ruin of 6im1 ((fag. 490 Edmonds 1957)-and &om more serious

critiques (Turner 1951:15-23), it is clear that in the first rounds of this

contest between body and text, the text was not assumed to have any special

privileges .22

Many Greek texts reflect an insistence on countering high textual

aspirations with low bodily realities. We have already referred to Socrates'

feet. But there are countless other similar subversions of high by low in the

Greek literary pantheon. Oedipus' literate braininess in solving the riddle of

the Sphinx is opposed by the brute lowness of his "swollen foot;" Odysseus'

stratagems are thrust earthward by a disgustingly odoriferous disease in the

archer's foot; and the Eumenides, who represent the limitations of high

22 Thomas confirms the nonsontrolling nature of writing as used by the Greeks through all phases with much discussion and evidence (1992:128ff ).

justice and written law, ooze bodily fluids on the ground. In the Women o f

Tradis, overweening confidence in the interpretation of oracular texts is

countered with grotesque physical agony; the reading of oracle-books in the

W g h t s is brought into direct contrast on stage with the guzzling of a

bellyful of wine; and Hippolytos, who is introduced as a 'pupil" (1 I), an

obsessive reader of books (953-4) with a "high heart" (730), meets his death

under the feet of trampling horses. In another typical subversion of high by

low, Philodeon of the Wasps starts the play addicted to writing out sentences

and penalties in the law courts, and ends the play dancing drunkenly around

the stage with a naked flute-girl. This play is an especially interesting

example, since the low-bodily ending refers explicitly to the performance of

drama itself: the debased dikast speaks explicitly of "the feet of Euripides"

(podon E u e d o u 1414) and the dance steps, leg kicks, belly-slaps and bum-

splits of Thespis and Phrylllchus (1480, 1492, 1524-5). Pentheus' official state

cleverness is also "taught a lesson" by the low animalistic forces of physical

ecstasy in the Bacchai. And what, in the end, was the great answer to the

Sphinx's riddle of ages-a riddle which, by Aeschylus' boyhood, was depicted

as written in a book? It is of course the feet of man as he ages (&pous,

tnpous, tetrapous) .23

The explicit contrast between the elevation of booklearning and the

baseness of bodies, and the debasing subversion of one by the other, has

23 See Vernantls discussion of the riddle (1978:485).

remained a central theme of theatrical literature throughout its history. Dr.

Faustus is perhaps the paradigmatic dramatic exploration of book-learning;

Hamlet is conspicuously a book-toting "student," as are numerous important

characters from Moliere through Chekhov.24 The nature of the dramatic text

has determined, however, that these are not merely literary images. As both

a literary and a corporeal art, drama can explore the texthody dialectic

without annulling the ''lower" half. In short, if the theatre is a classroom, it is

one in which the student learns as much fiom texts as he does fiom bodies.

What we know of stage practice in the ancient theatre confirms what

the plays themselves suggest: that the body's privilege over and against

textual dictates seems to have been mandated for the genre fkom the start.

As classicists such as Denys Page are forced to conclude, "we can be certain

that [the ancient] actors made themselves free of the play and altered it

repeatedly." (1987:lO). They appear to have added lines, cut speeches, altered

stage directions, written their own prologues, changed sad endings to happy

ones, transposed speeches from one character to another and even horn one

play or other written work to a separate piece. Aristotle mentions, among

other things, the penchant of actors such as Polos Neoptolemos and

Theodorus for deliberately distorting the meanings of textual locutions in

order to bring out subversive new meanings (mete 1404b19, 1413b25). He

also mentions the tendency of actors to "put in something of their own"

24 See also Cole (1992). who has accumulated an impressive list of plays, from Shakespeare through Kleist, %sen and Brecht, that contain what he calls a "topos of interrupted reading" (140ff).

(Poetim 1461b3-4). The actor who was to play the Phrygian slave in Orestes

(whose speech we cited earlier) is believed to have flatly refused to jump off

the roof for his entrance as the text demands, evidently insisting that lines be

added which support his preference for entering normally through the door

(Page 42). Surveying the hundreds of known or suspected interpolations, cuts

and alterations by actors to their tragic texts, Page concludes that our

founding thespians may have been almost as cavalier with their texts as

Garrick was with Hamlet or Hamlet was, for that matter, with Tibe M d e r

of Gumago.

Page's examples are likely to have come from the fourth century, by

which time acting was no longer an amateur activity and the works of the

fifth century dramatists, especially Euripides, were being revived by now

highly virtuosic professionals. At this time, the actors counted for more than

the plays, as Aristotle famously lamented. But many types of evidence from

the fifth century are equally suggestive that the "sovereign" text of Artaud's

nightmares is a modern, not an ancient concept.25

That fourth-century actors were wont to take serious "Neoptolemean"

liberties with their texts is proven most decisively by the passing of the

25 Thomas (1992) provides copious evidence that improvisation was still highly valued in the fiRh century and beyond (124), and that written records never developed the kind of "controllingn power over Greok life that some moderns associate with literacy (129ff). Thomas cites LQvi-Strauss as example (128), a modern writer whose misunderstanding of literacy's effects parallel Artaud's h o s t exactly.

Lykurgan law (Plutarch Kt. X Orat. Lye. 84lf as cited by Thomas 1989:48).

Copies of the three great tragedians' work were installed "in public,"

presumably in the city archives or Metroon, and actors were legally bound

not to deviate £corn them. However, we might do well to assume that such a

law would be about as effective in stopping actors &om having their way with

texts as would be a law prohibiting any other low bodily function. Angelo

tried t o legislate the body into strict obedience in Measure fol Measure, and

we know what a spectacular failure that was. He found out the hard way,

through the heating up of his own bodily fluids, that the body is inor&zzate.

The "voice of recorded law" (II.iv.61) may attempt to control the body, but

short of "geld[ing] and splay[ing] a l l the youth of the city," actors "will tot"

nonetheless.

The passing of the Lykurgan law proves that, by the fourth century at

least, a distinction between textually legitimate originals and unauthorized

performative liberties did exist (Thomas 1989:49). This idea, that there is

only one "authorized" version of a given story, and that all other versions are

"spurious," only makes its appearance with literacy, for in conditions of

orality, even what was intended to be "the same" story cannot help but be

slightly Merent in each performance. The bookish preference for the

original over the copy underpins the widespread assumption in the scholarly

community today that a text must be pure and uncorrupted by non-authorial

additions or deletions.

However-and this is a huge quaMcation-dramatic texts were f i s t

written in the sixth and fifth centuries, not in the fourth. And as Rosalind

Thomas (1989 and 1992) has shown, this was still a time in which what was

said and done mattered more than what was inscribed. In the fifth century,

the existence of writing had, by all accounts, radically altered conceptions of

accuracy of record. But its use was not so firmly entrenched that a "precise

Merentiation between original versions and inferior 'copies "' would

automatically be made (47). A given military treaty, for example, would be

recorded on numerous Merent stellai and displayed in various locations

without any sense of which was "the original." If a treaty was deemed no

longer good, all copies were slated for destruction, and this without any sense

of the necessity for keeping even one "for the record" (53). This conception of

the ontological status of a piece of writing is obviously worlds away from

ours. Given our present-day emphasis on the sacredness of "the original," we

h d it hard to imagine tolerating the ambiguity of a multiplicity of slightly

different versions of the same document. And we must find the ancients'

habit of blithely obliterating writing considered no longer relevant to be

equally peculiar. But this is perhaps precisely the view of writing which we

must adopt ifwe are to comprehend the ontology of the dramatic text.

When a tragedian won the prize for his poetic composition, he did so on

the basis of what his actors said and did on stage during performance, not on

the basis of what he wrote (Page 108). From Aristophanes' depiction of

Dionysus sitting on board a ship reading his own copy of Euripides'

Anck.omeda, and horn other remarks about everyone having a book "in his

hands1' (52, 1114), we have to conclude that the plays were available to the

public in written form, at least from the end of the fifth century. But

available not as holy writ, as it were. Even for Aristotle much later,

playwrights were still "makers" of plays, not the inscribers of them (Page

108).26 And so a historical leap is required to imagine what 'the text" meant

for the inventors of drama: it was not an ossified dictator, but a living part of

an ongoing oral process.

What the playwright "made" on stage obviously consisted of the

performers' own corporeal speech acts. And since, for all we know, the first

published version of a given play was based on one specific and highly

interpolated performance, such actorly input may itself have become the

official text? So what we find, historically, is that drama emerged in a

literate context where poetry, although written and available for study, was

stiU thought of as an oral phenomenon. It should not therefore be surprising

to find that classicists are in agreement that the texts of the three great

tragedians have come down to us in irredeemably "corrupt1' versions. Because

26 Aristophanes, however, a century earlier, describes Euripides explicitly as a 'writern (frag. 676b Edmonds 1957).

27 As for the difficult question of exactly how the dramatic texts were copied and circulated among the public, very Little is known for certain. L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson find enough evidence to date the existence of a 'book traden to the middle of the Gfth century (1968:2). References to the part of the Athenian market where books can be bought (Eupolis, fr. 304 cited by Reynolds and Wilson 2), plus Socrates' statement about the price of pldosophy texts (Apology 26) would lead u s to assume that the public got copies of plays by likewise buying them. Whether the copies were made by the playwright, the actors, or entrepreneurial booksellers and scribes is not known. See Page, 1934 and Hadas, 1954.

the fifth-century writer was not prone to think in terms of a single "original,"

there were only copies and copies of copies. And what was true of ancient

Greek tragedies is true of Shakespeare and plays in modernity as well: which

text could lay claim to being the "authorized" Shakespeare? (see esp. Orgel

1988:l) Which version of a Beckett play is the "original"? Although

playwrights such as JonsonZ8 and ShawZ9 have occasionally appeared as

exceptions to this rule, it is more typical of dramatic writing from Aeschylus

to the present that the dramatic text does not possess the kind of textual

purity and fixity up against which scholarized standards for "original

authorityt' and "absolute allegiance" can meaningfully be held.

Of course, the peculiar status of the Greek dramatic text does not

depart so far fiom the scholarized model of verbatim repetition and copying

from a single fixed version to return to the comxnunality of oral modes of

composition. Nevertheless, it has retained something of the living, udinbhed

quality of a collective story composed directly in performance. Written in a

decontextualizing atmosphere where texts are available for study and

individual ideological interpretation, drama is nevertheless a genre into

which oral-compositional elements re-enter through the back stage door.

28 Jonson s u p e ~ s e d the printing of his plays and cared deeply about the published version.

29 Shaw's obsessiveness about the printing of his plays extended even to the spelling of particular words and an almost novelistic concern with elaborate printed stage-directions.

It may be worthwhile to make another detour to look at the kinds of

"liberties" from textual authority that the actor typically takes. We will look

a t two representative examples, one &om antiquity and one &om the

nineteenth century of our era. Antigone's speech at 904-20 in Sophocles' play

about her is widely agreed to be a "very probable" actor's interpolation (Page

87-90; see also Whitman 1951:92). In this speech, Antigone questions her

motives for burying her traitorous brother:

Had I been a mother of children, and my husband been dead and rotten, I would not have taken this weary task upon me against the will of the city. What law backs me when I say this? I wiU tell you: If my husband were dead, I might have had

another, and a child from another man, if I lost the &st. But when father and mother both were hidden in

death no brother's life would bloom for me again. That is the law under which I gave you precedence, my dearest brother ...

Within the context of performance, one can well imagine why this

speech would have been added, if indeed it was. It provides the actor with an

emotional "close-up," an opportunity to display the pathos of the character's

inner feelings in a way for which Sophocles' writing for the part leaves no

room. The speech, however, appears almost exactly in Herodotus a. 119.6), and so the assumption among scholars such as Page and Whitman has

always been that an actor lifted it from there for use in the Aotzgoae.

There is no denying that the content of the speech stands in outright

contradiction to the rest of the role. Antigone's act of burial is presented

throughout the play as a defiance of man-made laws of the state. Against

these relativistic, transient, merely-human laws of mortal decision-makers,

Antigone contrasts the eternal, absolute laws of basic morality, the

categorical imperative of ethical behaviour represented by the gods, the cult

of the dead, family love. She rejects Creon's written law (499) because, in

distinguishing between contingent categories of "traitor" and 'patriot," it

blinds itself to the basic humanity which both types of men share. But in the

speech quoted above, how does Antigone justrfy her action? By invoking a

similarly man-made law which, exactly like Creon's, arbitrarily distinguishes

between "replaceable" and "irreplaceable" dead relatives. Antigone describes

her law as one which, just like Creon's, mandates burial only for certain

contingently-defined corpses. Antigone's idiosyncratic privileging of brothers

over children and spouses in this speech is, in essence, identical to Creon's

privileging of patriots over traitors. With the inclusion of this speech from

Herodotus, the apparent basis of Antigone's rebellion disintegrates, and her

conflict with Creon loses much of its meaning.

What this example suggests is that a textually-mandated allowance for

the re-entry of orallperformative elements is Janus-faced in its implications.

On one hand, it may do little more than reentangle storytelling in precisely

those inconsistencies and illogicalities that writing had rescued it from in the

first place. But on the other hand, the actor, in following his performative

inclinations, may also introduce a more complex, "lifelike" aspect into an

overly consistent textual structure. Perhaps Sophocles' understanding of

Antigone's heroism was too simplistic after all; perhaps seemingly principled

political motives really are always mixed, mutually contradictory, and

ultimately quite personal.

The production history of A D d ' s House tells that the first German

actor to perform the title role of this play in Germany categorically refused to

end the play with Nora leaving her family (Ellen, 1918). A scene was added,

on the insistence of the actor, in which Nora goes back into the child's room,

and under pressure from her deep maternal and wifely feelings, collapses

into a repentant ball of tears. Instead of the slam of the door that echoed

throughout Europe, this actor preferred a sentimental and utterly

conventional family tableau. Had Ibsen been writing in Euripides' day, this

absurdly interpolated version might well have been the one we have on our

bookshelves today.

These two examples are typical both of the Liberties Page suspects

actors took in antiquity, and of the alterations actors make today. We still

think nothing of deleting lines that "just do not work," cutting "boring"

sections and changing endings that offend us. Such textual liberty as the

genre sanctions is bound to have mixed results. The actor who added the

meditation on Antigone's motives, in giving himself more scope for histrionic

display, may have done so at the expense of the play's internal coherence.

Furthermore, this actor's addition, like many since, reveals something about

"the presence of the actor1' that anti-text theories of performance too easily

forget. What an actor finds "outside" his text may simply be a subscription to

another text (in this case, a text of Herodotus).30

Textual liberties of the kind taken with the ending of A DaU's House

are perhaps more representative. Shakespearean tragedies were, with

infamous regularity, transformed into happily-ever-after pieces in the

nineteenth century, and plays like Measure for Measwe, at least since

Shavian critiques of matrimonial Bappy ends,"31 have commonly had their

textual "integrity" violated in performance too. Actors today, reflecting the

critical ideology of their time and place, are prone to see the Duke's last-act

nuptial offer as a piece of chauvinistic impertinence, and to snub it, insisting

that Isabella's liberation from the nunnery need not be accompanied by a

prompt confinement w i t h the bonds of wedlock. Actors' rejections of

aspects of their texts in favour of their own "gut" reactions are apparently

built right in to the genre as an ever-present potential. Because of the gap

that writing opens up between performer and thing performed, there will

always be room for a difference between what a text says, one hand, and how

the performer feels about it, on the other. For this reason, the literate

tendency toward narrative closure has not prevented the dramatic text from

30 Cole saw the comical side of this phenomenon when he observed that the anti-text enthusiasts of the 1960s turned out to be the greatest readers of all-they simply wad Artaudian theory rather than plays (1992:4).

31 In the Preface to Gettbg Mwm'ed, but particularly in the Afterward to Pygmalion, Shaw criticized the dramatic convention in which matrimony between a self-determining male and a manipulated female comprises the appropriate and expected "happy end" of the plot.

remaining open-ended. Intending both memorization and performance,

dramatic texts retain what Bakhtin would have called a 'loop-hole," a bodily

escape-hatch which ultimately distinguishes plays from other products of

literacy.

In the case of the DoUs House incident, this fkee area allowed for little

more than the imposition, on performance, of an even more conventional

"reading" of human action than the text itself offered. Because even this

performative prerogative to follow one's gut instinct is never wholly free from

some ideological conditioning, we cannot ignore the fact that an actor's

liberation &om textual dictates may amount in some cases to little more than

a refusal to be liberated by (a progressive, unconventional) text. In short, it is

not only texts, but also bodies which are potentially ossified, reactionary,

closed. The important thing, though, is that all plays, like the Duke's play-

within-a-play in Measure for Measure, are staged by real bodies which

always come complete with their own historical agendas and bodily

inclinations. From the intention-less locutions of the text itself, there is no

way to tell whether, for example, Isabella considers her summons fkom the

nunnery and into wedlock to be a desirable release or not. Decisions of this

kind must be supplied by the individual actor(s). Therefore, the "last word"

on questions of ultimate value, of whether textual contents are good or bad,

desirable or undesirable, is vouchsafed not to any text, but to the performer,

for better or for worse.

In summing up our discussion of the text's introduction of a high-low

dialectic into performance, we might mention another dimension of the

contest which is relevant to theatrical theory. What Bakhtin has said about

litezate culture in the Renaissance has been shown to have been equally true

of the context of drama's birth (and of other literate civilizations as well):

that literacy is a city phenomenon (Goody 1987:300). It is to the cities that

intellectuals and poets gravitate, and it is from the city that writing

emanates in the form of decrees, laws, levies, treaties, books. To inhabitants

of the city-with its tendencies toward enlightenment, erudition, and verbal-

ideological centralization-the country-with its illiterates, its stronger

connections with ancient rituals, animal life and other bodily doings-ften

appears base, backward, low. At Athens, a ham actor is told to take his small

verbal technique and big bodily brawn to the rural festivals, were a "lower"

form of art prevailed (Rckard-Cambridge 1968:168; Aristotle, Rheton'c

iii. 12. Ml3bEf; cf. Dover 1972: 12, n.3). Socrates had no use for the country;

the only thing that could lure him beyond the city walls were "speeches in

books" (Phaedrus- 230.d.5-230e). Illiterates represented in the dramas and

fkagments are generally from the country, as we mentioned earlier; and

Socrates of the Clouds dismisses his hopeless old student as an ignorant

farmer (ag~oikon: 628).

The emergence of literacy, both in post-Homeric Greece and in early

Renaissance Europe, seems to have inaugurated precisely the kind of split in

cultural life that both Bakhtin and Nietzsche describe: on the one hand

urban, Apollonian forces tend to put centripetal pressure on cultural life,

textualizing and universalizing it; on the other hand, rural, Dionysian

involvements, with their popular oral traditions and orgiastic rituals, dances

and animal acts, tend to function centrifugally, pulling it apart and down to

the lower regions of the grotesque body. However, in periods of transition

from oral-traditional to high-literate culture, when centrifugal and

centripetal forces are both simultaneously at peak levels of vitality and

influence, a special species of art could be said to emerge. The period between

Homer and Socrates must number among these transitional times, as must

that between late Medieval and Early Renaissance Europe. In aboriginal

Canadian culture, a similar transition could be said to be playing itself out

right now. Peisistratus is said to have brought poets from all parts of Greece

to the Athenian court, within which urban literate milieu drama was

developed (Herington 1985:61). And Thornson Highway, who was born in

rural Manitoba, says that it f i s t occurred to him to dramatize traditional

native stories during his sojourn, after a university degree, on the city streets

of Toronto (quoted in Morgan 1992:130). In both cases, the union of high-

literate city impulses with traditional rural low-bodily ones produced a

species of offspring which, in Nietzsche's words, exhibits the salient features

of both parents. Theatre, which was "foreign" to both aboriginal culture

before writing (Thornson 142; Brask and Morgan 1992:x, xii, xiv; Wheeler

1992:43) and to Greek culture in its oral phase (Webster 1959:55), thus

appears to owe its emergence (and its renaissance in Medieval Europe), to

the city culture of literacy.

Traditional stories about Arion's introduction of the low, concupiscent

satyrs into the high literary genre of choral praise poetry may have

additional light to shed on drama's special combination of high and low

principles (cf. Hdt. 1.23, Webster 1959:68, 76 n.36; Else 1965:17-24; Pickard-

Cambridge 1962: 13 If.). But whatever stages performance went through on

the way to the invention of dramatic form, there is no doubt that a "satyric,"

or camivalesque lowering of al l that is high has remained the main

distinguishing characteristic of theatre among the literary genres. This has

often caused it to have a more or less disreputable image within high literate

culture.32 Always implicitly threatening the highest ideals of scholarship

with "debasement," the theatre has also had a checkered career as far as its

membership in the hierarchy of genres is concerned. However, in sixth

century Greece as in the Renaissance, literary standards were very high, but

not so high as to foreclose inclusion of the grotesque body in literate

compositions. For this reason, despite their various historical distortions and

idealizations, both Nietzsche's and Bakhtin's generic theories are not

altogether wrong in connecting the birth of genres to precise historical

moments.

As Veltrusky remarked about the possibility of a genre's remaining

"the same" over time: "A literary genre is not 'timeless' because it does not

change but because it preserves its identity through a l l the changes it

32 The most exhaustive study of the theatre's low reputation within literate culture is Jonas Barish's The Abtitbeatmcal Prejudice (198 1).

undergoes" (1977:7). The identity of drama, as a literary genre, thus resides

in its maintenance of a certain £reedom horn itself qua literary text. As

Thomas (1989 and 1992) suggests, the standard of absolute textual authority

which the scholarly community was destined eventually to champion-and

which in art we are more justified in associating with novels than with

plays-had to wait for its fdfiknent for the invention of the printing press.

Two conclusions are inevitable. The first is that scholarly anxieties

about textual "spuriousness" are bound to be at their most acute in

discussions about drama, for it is a type of writing which does not lose its

contact with bodily realities, with new performative contexts which leave

their marks upon it. The second is that the dramatic text, by a felicity of

history, is perhaps not the bad teacher it is often said to be, for it is written

and "unfinished at the same time.33 Because it intends performance by

contemporary bodies, the dramatic text is a kind of written hypothesis which

is tested afkesh each time it is performed. Weighed in the corporeal scales of

the actorsf lived experience of the present, the dramatic text is made

answerable to that present on an ongoing basis. If its wedding gowns are

experienced as ideological straight-jackets, or its heroidmilitaristic ideals as

paralyzing suits of armour, then the actor can exercise his generically-

mandated prerogative for casting such textual garments off. Using a

33 It is fascinating, if perplexing, to observe the frequency with which literary theorists arrogate this quality of "unfinishednessn to the novel, a genre which, more completely than any other, reflects the fixed and finished tendency of print literacy. See Bakhtin, 1981 and 1984 and the discussions of Friedrich Schlegel's theory of genre in Szondi (1986:75-94).

Bakhtinian figure, we might say that drama is a kind of textual

acknowledgement that, when it comes to the student-performer's body and

the fabric of his text, "all existing clothes are always too tight" (1981:37). In

short, the Artaudian objection to alphabetical didacticism is one which

cannot reasonably be leveled at drama, despite the fact that drama surely

benefits from its high intellectual standards. For unlike Plato 's preferred

literary genre, the philosophical dialogue, the dramatic text does not "always

say the same thing' (Phaednrs, 275d).

Chapter Three: I I

Actors and Lawyers

This can't be Athens; I don't see any law courts.

Aristophanes

For the law of writ and the liberty ...

Shakespeare

I n the previous chapter we saw how the birth of the performer as

student, far horn signaling the end of theatrical creativity, may have been

the condition for its possibility in the f i s t place. The literate practices of

decontextuahed book-learning and verbatim memorization seem in fact to

have helped bring a new type of heterogeneous, dialogical performance into

existence, contributing also to the creation of the actor as new type of

storyteller. By m a h g the acquisition of poetic and narrative material into a

"less personal, less 'intensive'" process (Goody 1987: 1 14) , writing distanced it

from poets and performers alike, and alienated it from their bodies, which

came to be defmed as "low" against a fixed text. This ahenating process

produced the "autodidact," whose outsideness and individuality allowed for

an abstract, disengaged interrogation of inherited norms and values. We

concluded, therefore, that book-based learning and teaching can be said to

have had the same consequences for performance as such literate practices

tend to have on cultue generally: while they can introduce new constraints

and a pressure away from the body, "they may also help break through the

crust of customary thinking" which oral contexts can preserve, allowing

greater fkeedom of individual bodily response in the long run (Goody

1987:300). As Goody puts it:

A central digerence between an oral and a literate culture lies in the modes of transmission, the first allowing a surprisingly wide de ee of creativity Y but of a largely cyclical kind, the atter demanding repetition as a condition of some incremental change (185).

Drama's special connection with the classroom was already palpable in

the century after Aristotle. In the mime of Herondas about a school-master, it

is made clear that while even an illiterate grandmother might know a line of

oral-formulaic poetry off by heart, it is the mark of a book-learned student

that he will also know plays (Davenport 1981:14-18). And is it likely to be

pure coincidence that the earliest plays we have from the Christian era were

written by Hroswitha for performance by her students?

We have looked so far at what theatrical form owes to the alphabet

and book-based schooling. In this chapter we will explore the impact on

poetic speech genres of the existence of written law. Like the book-based

school, the didaskalion, written law is a social phenomenon which is both

conspicuously absent from the world of epic speech, and highly visible in both

the dramatic age at large and in dramatic works in particular. Aeschylus,

Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes each wrote at least one play on the

subject of written law; of Aeschylus's surviving works, at least four are

explicitly concerned with it. As we shall be discovering in the course of the

chapter, there are a number of ways in which the establishment of written

law supported the invention of drama, both formally and in terms of its

content.

Legal process exists in some form or other in most human societies

that have been observed and described throughout history (Gagarin 1986:s).

But legal procedures in pre-literate societies do appear to share certain

features which distinguish them from the practice and function of law in

societies with writing (9). Because the workings of preliterate justice as

depicted throughout the Homeric epics have obvious parallels in other

noditerate cultures around the world (O'Barr 1982:lO; Beck 1993;

Humphreys 1983; l985:3 16; Gagarin 2-6, 23, 29-30), and because Homer's

depiction of justice is considered a fairly accurate reflection of Greek culture

in the ninth and eighth centuries (Bowra 1969:32; Havelock 1978:55-87;

Humphreys 19853 16; Powell 199 I), we are justified in taking our evidence

for the workings of preliterate justice from a literary source. In comparing

the representation of conflict resolution in the epics with the legal process as

represented in the dramas, we see a number of sigmficant differences,

differences which accurately reflect the shift fkom epic to dramatic form.

The picture that Homer provides of the w o r h g s of preliterate justice

is also corroborated by Hesiod, who was himself involved in a legal wrangle

with his brother Perses. Both from Homer's most detailed descriptions of

conflict resolution (II. XlZ!l497-508 and Od. XI.568-71) and horn Hesiod

( Works aod Dags 27-39), we find a conception of justice as "straight dike," as

a "straight" settlement that is spoken by the noble elders, called kings

("straightW=itheia; see a. m.571-95). These hereditary kings are described

as sitting in judgement, either individually or in an elders' circle, and

suggesting mutually agreeable compromises to the disputants. From Hesiod

(T6eog. 80-93 and Wo~ks and Dags 213-85), we know that proposing

solutions of this kind was one of the central duties of the hereditary kings,

and that giving such judgments was largely a matter of persuading the

parties to accept the offered solution. As Havelock put it, "the performance of

judgement is also a function of rhetoric" (133). From Homer's description of

the arbitration of the blood-feud on Achilleus's shield, we see that the elder

who proposed the "straightest &kt?' was rewarded with "two golden

measures," a prize or gift paid by the disputants. Not surprisingly, these

kings were also said to be "grft-devouring' (Hesiod W d s and Dags 27-39),

for favorable judgments had to be paid for in &. In the absence of a code of

written law, justice thus resides within the body of the b g or magistrate,

and the judge's authority derives also horn his body, as it were, for he is a

kmg and spokesman for justice by virtue of blood-ties and class inheritance.

Other features of preliterate justice can be found throughout the B a d

and Odyssey. Among the most important fkom our perspective is that legal

redress was not available universally, and in many respects remained a

private (as opposed to a public) affair. In the case of homicide, for example, it

was the duty of the victim's family to enforce the traditional punishment,

which was generally exile (or possibly blood-money; cf. a. XVm.497ff.). The

epics show that this reliance on family meant that murder went unpunished

in many cases. For example, Heracles could kill a foreigner without legal

consequences, for a foreigner has no family to enforce the customary penalty

(Od XXI.24-30; Gagarin 14). Homer's Oedipus could commit patricide with

impunity, and continue to rule Thebes after knowledge of his deed was public

(Od. XI.271-80; l7. XXm.679-80; Gagarin 14). With legal process a private,

familial &air, it was, in effect, optional and dependent on the existence of

individual families, and on their will and power to enforce punishment. This

meant that beggars, suppliants, women, non-citizens or any other members

of society without strong kinship or clan ties would necessarily find

themselves excluded fkom the customary avenues for legal action. Moreover,

because justice in the absence of legal codes consists of mutually acceptable

compromises (105), disputants are in a sense free to determine whether even

customary legal rules will pertain or not. For example, Eurymachus suggests

a settlement in the Odyssey (XW.54-59) which Odysseus appears to be at

liberty to reject; he accepts no restitution fiom the suitors and slaughters

them instead. All the Achaians agree that Agamemnon should accept the

ransom offered by the priest as settlement for Chryseis, but he rejects the

proposal out of hand (11. 1.20-34). The private and personally discretionary

character of pre-literate justice is also evidenced in Achilleus' rejection of

Nestor's proposed settlement in Book One of the E a 4 and in other disputes

throughout the same work (XXII.543-54, 571-95, 787-92; cf. Gagarin 39-41).

Indeed, the narrative of the Odyssey as a whole validates the ad hoc

workings of private hereditary justice. Odysseus is presented as praiseworthy

in his murder of the suitors, and the example of Orestes, in his decisive

murder of Aegisthus, is held up to the procrastinating Telemachus as a

positive one (Lattimore 1991:B). In the absence of written laws of the state,

blood-ties will tend to empower individuals to make their own family-rooted

rules: as legitimate hereditary kings, Odysseus and Orestes can also claim

"legitimacy" in their respective elimination of usurpers. The dispute between

Achilleus and Agamemnon which forms the plot of the ma& despite the

proposals of men in council, is also finally settled on a purely personal basis:

Achilleus simply refocusses his wrath toward the enemy, and gives up

punishing his own co-combatants. As Gagarin points out, disputes in the

absence of systematic legal rules and binding penalties will tend to be settled

in a way that leaves the conflict itself intact (105). For example, the

"resolution" of the conflict between Achilleus and Agamemnon makes no

decision for the future about rival claims for are& within the heroic

worldview, both combatants had little choice but to advance their own claims.

Similarly with homicide: if families are obligated to exact extra-legal justice

for such crimes, then they are obligated to take turns in doing so ad

idinitzzm-a point made repeatedly by Aeschylus throughout the Orestia. As

long as blood-crimes are resolved as if they were private offences against

individual families, there is no end to murder.

Gagarin, who has analysed all of these Homeric disputes (and others

in Hesiod), concluded that it is not an exaggeration to say that law as we

understand it comes into existence with writing. There existed, to be sure,

many traditional maxims and orally-repeated codes of conduct before writing.

But as our Homeric examples show, traditional proto-legalistic sayings have

the illocutionary force of pieces of advice; they are invoked to j u s e a certain

line of conduct, but do not have the force of determining behavioual choices

in the first place (55). They are statements of what people usually do, or have

traditionally done, and are used as rhetorical support for advice. But since

there will tend to be a saying for every occasion, such maxims are mutually

contradictory as a group. Unlike written laws, they do not apply necessarily

and universally; and they are, in any case, sponsored by particular speakers

whose advice may well be rejected.

The one exception to the notion that law is equatable with writing is

often said to be the case of the Icelandic "lawspeakers." Like the early Irish

bards, who are said to have memorized and recited collections of laws, the

Icelandic lawspeakers possessed a body of laws that they recited in full every

three years. But as historian Gjerset has shown (1924:29-48) and Gagarin

has argued (lo), in places where such "law" is confined to the oral register

and remains in the possession of specially-authorized individuals

(lawspeakers or hereditary magistrates), it fails to produce "legal behaviour."

Such laws, because they remain c o ~ e c t e d with the body of the king or

lawspeaker, do not inspire general obedience. As Gjerset notes, civic life in

pre-literate Iceland continued to be ruled by private custom, for regular

citizens did not view this arcane specialist knowledge as having any

relevance to them personally (46). Most sigdicantly, when the Icelandic

laws were written down c.1118 AD., they were still subject to a kind of

private possession, the consequence of which was that, for several centuries,

no official version of them existed. Between the various copies possessed by

individilal lawyers for their own use, there were substantive variations. The

net effect of this condition, of course, is that justice remains "oral" in

principle: the voice of the law is still rooted in a particular speaker's body.

The connection between (pre-literate) legalistic utterances and the

concreteness of the circumstances of their delivery is reflected in their formal

structure. Whereas traditional spoken maxims will tend to take the form of a

second-person imperative ("Do unto others," for example), a law generally

takes the form of a third-person conditional statement ("if anyone does X, Y

will happen" [Gagarin, 551). Taken as a global speech act, the epic reflects

this personal proximity between giver and receiver of oral counsel perfectly.

The epic singer addresses the Muse directly in a second-person imperative:

"Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son"; "Tell me, muse, of the man of many

ways" (Lattimore's trans. 1951 and 1965).l This is speech from "me" to "you,"

and the deictic structure of the opening invocation is repeated in the works

themselves, with the characters sometimes taking on the position of the "you"

(e.g. "Then, 0 swineherd Eumaios, you said to him in answer ..." Od. XnT.165,

360, 442; 17.XX.2). The speech act of epic could be described as "I sing to you

about hun," or "You (the muse) sing to me about him." But in either case, it is

a speech exchange between a present "me" and a present "you" about a past

"hidthey."

Cf. the imperative mood of the Line of epic verse inscribed upon the "Douris Cup" above, p. 144

In the type of speech which structures the inscription of a law,

however, the situation is different. In the first place the utterance is in the

conditional: "if. .." or "when ..." Who is now speaking? The lack of deictic

grounding for the speaker in a conditional utterance is further emphasized

by the lack of a specific addressee: to whom is the utterance speaking? The

subject of the legal utterance is "anyonef1 or "the man who ..." According to

Kunon's speech-act analysis of legal utterances (l986), the illocutionary

force of a law is "to enact." But since the law being enacted may depend upon

future conditions (if anyone commit X), such utterances may more accurately

be called 'potential performatives" (40). They depend upon the fulfillment of

certain "post-conditions" to enact themselves. Kunon claims that such

potential speech acts do not occur outside of legal texts. But as a global

speech act, the dramatic text stands as an exception to this rule, if it is one.

Precisely like a legal text, the dramatic text as a whole is a conditional third-

person utterance: "whoever shall play this part will say ..." As in the case of

such legal performatives as wills and marriage ceremonies, which depend

upon future actions for their legal enactment (death or consummation), the

dramatic text is a potential enactment contingent upon future extra-textual

events. Like traditional maxims and proto-legal advice, the Homeric epic has

an "I1' declaring to "you" what has happened in the past; Like written law, the

dramatic text is a kind of speech-hypothesis awaiting enactment in the

fi~ture by "anyone."

The earliest extant written law, found in Dreros, Crete, has been dated

roughly to the middle or second half of the seventh century (Jeffery

1990:311). It begins with the formula "the city has thus decided," and goes on

to stipulate that if a man has held a certain public office, he shall not be able

to hold the same office again for ten years. Carved in stone on the wall of a

temple, this law is our earliest record of the growing trend toward public

legislation that was soon to manifest itself throughout Greece. Whether

written on axones, or wooden blocks, as they were initially in Athens (Jeffery

58-9), or cut in stone, as in Crete, the law codes of seventh and sixth century

Greece had a number of features in common: they were self-consciously

public, they applied to everyone mandatorily, they were specifically legal in

nature, and they were officially authorized and recognized as such by the

polis as a whole. The homicide law of Draco (c.620), of which some hagments

have survived (Gagarin 52), is especially interesting in this regard. As

perhaps the very first law on murder, the Draconian statute made murder a

public offense, merely by being written down? As Kunon says about such

criminal codes, they are only really "laws" when they are addressed to

everyone; "the publication of statutes is [thus] an integral part of the

promulgation of legislation" (27; my italics.). Or, as legal theorist George M.

Calhoun puts it, it is only with written law that legal rules and changes

"become distinctly perceptible, and when made have to be made consciously

and intentionally ..."

Because, even after the reforms of Ephialtes, murder continued to be tried by the closed hereditary court of the Areopagus, one could argue that homicide continued to be a "private" suit (cf, Humphreys 1985). But the laws of Draco, whlch made legal procedure compulsory, and closely regulated by public statute, had the effect of removing homicide remedies from the private realm of family self-help, making them in essence a "public" issue (Gagarin, 114).

And so begins a long process which matures in a fully developed system of statute law, with p emanent legislative machinery and provisions for periodic revision, and gradually transforms the esoteric legal lore of the aristocracy into legal science (1944:22-23).

The first steps toward the establishment of a truly legal order seem to

have been taken by the writing down of "ancestral tlzesmia" by lawgivers,

thesmothetai, who recorded decisions for their own use (Aristotle

Constitution of Athens 3.4, 16.10; Gagarin 56, 130). But with the

publication throughout Greece of written laws, oomoi, law took on a different

character. Its detached, public status, and the fact that highly specific

penalties were stipulated, took justice out of the hands of individuals and

personal discretion. By establishing "the cityf' as the agent of such laws, a

genuinely legal atmosphere was in effect inaugurated. As we saw in the

Homeric examples above, extra-legal means could easily be resorted to by

individuals in cases where there was no real threat fkom an opponent. But in

a legal dispute there must necessarily be two parties. With the city now

speakkg the law rather than an individual, even those crimes that had

formerly been dealt with privately came under the legal sphere. With laws

now officially authorized by a place, they were for the first time addressed to

everyone who lived in that place. Thus even crimes within various "non-city"

spheres, such as the family or religion, were soon brought under the Solonian

"shield" of such universal city-laws (Ostwald 139, 145). As Gagarin points

out, the very act of enacting a set of laws for a particular place would have

the effect of redefining individuals as cihieos rather than merely as

members of families (80). Aeschylus discusses this effect a t length in the

Suppliants: individuals are now subject to the laws of their states, which,

despite ancestral customs, may be different &om one place to the next

("According to laws at home you must plead ..." 390). And this new conflict

between state law and family custom is featured prominently in other

dramas as well (Antigone, the Orestia)). In fact, there seems to be a

relationship between d theatre and this consciousness of citizenship. As

Brask and Morgan have observed of Amerindian, Inuit and other aboriginal

communities, theatrical performance "seems to have evolved in the context of

the rise of state-level societies" (1992:~). Of the appearance of drama in

Greek antiquity, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet have similarly observed

(paraphrasing Walter Nestle): "tragedy is born when myth starts to be

considered horn the point of view cf a citizen'' (1990:33).

The public inscription of law had another, equally signrficant effect:

social rules were now visibly separated into laws and non-laws. This is

important, for as Gagarin notes, societies without writing have rules, but no

method for recognizing rules, no legal idcastructure for distinguishing rules

fkom other types of social utterances. For this reason, it is fair to say that the

Greeks' decision to write down a set of laws "was in effect a decision to enact

legislation" (136).

With written law, an abstraction-"the city1'-now regulates the

behaviour of "everybody," another abstraction. Somewhat surprisingly,

however, public prosecutors were unknown. With the city now authorizing

the law, but not actually representing it in court, it might appear that the

legal rule requiring two parties in any dispute could not be upheld. But Solon

enacted a law code in the fist decade of the sixth century at Athens that was

to have the effect of guaranteeing public prosecution. He introduced "the

right of any person to take legal action in behalf of the injured partys1

(Constitution of Atbens 9.1; Ostwald 9). Legalizing an action of this sort,

which came to be called a graph6, meant that that legal redress became

available even to those who, either by citizenship laws or by some other

obstacle, were prevented horn pleading their case in person. By permitting

injured parties to be represented in this way by written accusations, the

Solonian code changed the whole nature of justice. Because litigants no

longer had to be embodied litigants, that is, flesh-and-blood particular

litigants, justice was now something that even an abstract litigant could

claim. This representational structure proved to be a democratizing one, for

now cases could be submitted on behalf of "the people" as a whole, and crimes

by magistrates or other civic officials could now be prosecuted with "the

people" as the injured party (Ostwald 9; Gagarin 69). With even magistrates

now subject to prosecution, the Homeric scenario, where two disputants

brought their case before the judge, was rewritten. The judge was no longer

the outside arbiter of private conflicts who possessed legal procedure within

himself. He was now pulled within the legal sphere as a potential disputant.

As a corollary of this new state of affairs, Solon enacted a law of

impeachment (Cons.At6. 8.4.), and established what appears to have been a

public law court, the heLiaza, and an appeals procedure for hearing disputed

judgments of the magistrates (Cons. Ath. 9.1; cf. Ostwald 9).

There is a great deal of uncertainty about the finer details of the

Solonian reforms, for our sources, Aristotle and Plutarch, are very late. But

the written laws of the seventh and sixth century, whether intentionally or

not,3 indisputably started a shift towards an increasingly democratic legal

system (Ostwald 203). By establishing an appeals procedure and a public

court composed of regular citizens chosen by lot irrespective of wealth,

Solonian law sketched in the main outline of the populist jury courts of the

fifth century which Aristophanes immortalized in the Wasps. Aristotle

thought these law courts, or a a s t e r a , were the main repository of popular

power in Athens (Pol. 2.12.1273b35-74a5; Const. Ath. 9.1, 41.2). The right of

isegon'if-the right of everyone to have his say regardless of social position-

was only further enshrined by Solon's followers, Cleisthenes and Ephialtes

(Ostwald 48, 203, 461-2). Although we have so far spoken of Athens as a

cosmopolitan meeting-ground for poetic dialects and metrical types and the

place where the "mixed" genre of drama was invented,4 Athens was even

prouder, perhaps, of her other "mixing" policies (Arist. Const. At6. 2 1.4;

Ostwald 15-20), i.e. her mixing of the speech of rich and poor, powerful and

powerless in a single voice of binding legal authority.

This pride in isegon'a, in the mixed speech of the whole people, was

surely shared by Aeschylus, whose Suppliants is a kind of sustained

That these legal reforms probably did not intend to have the effects they did is a point made repeatedly by Ostwald and Gagarin. We shall be returning to this idea shortly.

See above, page 163.

celebration of the glories of popular sovereignty. Performed, it seems, in 463

(Podlecki 1966:43), this play shows how, in a country where law has

admitted into itself the principle of representation, even weak non-citizens

can receive a fair public hearing. The suppliant women &om Egypt seek

refuge in Argos (which is really fifth century Athens disguised), and throw

themselves on the altars of the local deities for protection. But as Aeschylus

shows, it is not by customary religious practices that the suppliants are

saved, but by a legally-binding vote of the assembled people. The daughters

of Danaus are described as exiles from a less democratic state to whom the

notion of popular sovereignty is quite alien. They know nothing of the

empowerment of the people to make authorized decisions for the pohs as a

whole. Reflecting a pre-legalistic concept of kingship, the chorus, urging King

Pelasgus to make a judgement in his own person, says, "You are, yes, the

city, the people1 A prince is not judged./ The land, the hearth, the altar you

rule/ With the single vote and scepter" (369-72). But Pelasgus, king in a

democracy, must "share a l l with the citizens"; he refuses to "actl Alone, apart

&om the people" (367-8, 398-9). By "representing" the suit of the daughters of

Danaus before the assembled citizens of Argos, Pelasgus wins for them an

authorized city remedy against the customary violence of their pursuing

cousins. As we mentioned before, a suppliant escaping the "self-help" of a

family in its private disputes would have had no hope of protection horn any

higher public law before the Draconian code. In the Supplants, this victory

for the weak through legal means was a double one, however. Not only was

the traditionally defenceless suppliant given visible protection from family

vengeance, but women, shown throughout Homer to be mere chattels or

"prizes" for men to dispose of as they wish, are legally protected in their

desire not to be "household-slave[s] to Egyptus' sons" (334). As the Chorus

stresses, the citizen-jury of Argos honoured them even as women, not

"cast[ing] their votes/ On the side of men" (643-4) as would have been

customary,

Although the publication of the Draconian and Solonian law codes did

not necessarily intend this, the effect of writing on legal process was to give

the Greeks a distinct taste for the precise kind of public accountability that

Aeschylus celebrates in the Suppliants. In Stroud's words, the early Greeks

were in fact "obsessed" with public accountability (1989: 103-1 19). At the base

of many Greek legal inscriptions we find the phrase "So that anyone who

wishes may read" (Harvey 1966:600). That writing (in a script that could be

easily read by the public at 1arge)S was the precondition for such juridical

accountability is not merely the view of modem historians and theorists of

law such as Gagarin, Kunon and Ostwald and Calhoun; it was the belief of

the ancients themselves. We find direct causal connections drawn between

written law and democratic government in Anstotle (Pofitiics 1270b28ff.;

Thomas 1989:60) and implicitly in Aeschylus (Suppl. 942-49; cf. Burns,

198 1:377). But Euripides perhaps stated it best: the public inscription of law

is the great equalizer.

For estimates of how many members of the Greek populations were able to read these inscriptions, see Harris (1989) and Thomas (1992).

In early days, before laws were common, One man has power to make the law his own: Equaliw is not yet. With written laws, People of small resources and the rich Both have the same recourse to justice. Now A man of means, if badly spoken of, Will have no better standing than the weak; And if the little man is right, he wins Against the great. This is the call of fkeedom: "What man has good advice to give the city, And wishes to make it known?"

For the city, what can be more fair than that? (SuppI. 432-443)

This speech explicitly compares written law with pre-literate connictual

speech: written law upholds the rights of the weak, and does so by validating

their verbal claims. Before writing, the rich man could be "badly spoken of'

by one with "small resourcesf1 without effect. Writing comes to the aid of

speech, under this view, for without it, disputes remain contests of identities

in which the great wiU win.

The abstracting of justice away £corn the body of the judges and

disputants alike made personal conflicts into decontextualized "cases" for

public hearing. In the legal context which bred drama, conflicts and kingly

decisions which were once hidden fiom common view went public: they

became theatricalized.6 Etymologically, the theatre was a place for viewing,

the place where citizens went to see, to contemplate and judge the musical

agones, or competitions. What they saw on stage once dramas were

Vernant and Vidai-Naquet make s similar point when they write that tragedy "could be said to be a manifestation of the city turning itself into theatre, presenting itself on stage before its assembled citizensn (1990:185).

performed there was very similar to what they saw on Athens' other public

stages, in the assembly and the law courts. In the law courts, they watched

as cases were argued, self-justifications offered, events recounted, and

verdicts passed on the guilty. They heard the claims and counter-claims of

witnesses, and the mutually contradictory statements of the litigants. They

heard cross-examinations and denials, and observed the relentless drive to

get to the bottom of things, to the truth. Judging horn the extant dramas of

Aeschylus and Sophocles in particular, that is also precisely what they saw

in the theatre. In the Theatre of Dionysus no less than in the &asten&

regular citizens watched as "great men" faced public prosecution,

interrogation and indictment on various charges. In drama, the great figures

of mythology and public life were forced to stand public trial and justify

themselves in speech. Orestes must defend hunself against murder, Oedipus

must prosecute "anyone" gurlty of crimes against the state, with "anyone"

proving inclusive of even himself; Antigone must stand interrogation for

violating the state's written laws by Creon, who must in turn justdy his own

lawlessness; the Seven attack Thebes protected only by their shields, on

which the justice of their claim is inscribed; and Prometheus, sentenced to a

term in the stocks for traitorous actions against a tyrant, justifies h u man-

loving crimes in a fashion at once typically dramatic and typically forensic: in

speech, in argument, in rebuttal and explanation. That Prometheus is

immobilized on a rock makes his recourse to verbal self-justification

especially p~ignant .~ But in appearing on stage before the assembled citizen-

audience as an accused criminal whose "case" is being heard, Prometheus is

not in principle different &om any other dramatic figure. And just as the

Solonian "shield of written law helped gain for the public the right to bring

even the strong man to justice in a court of law, so too is Prometheus'

criminal case connected with writing in the theatre. Prometheus' crime

involved giving writing to mankind, an act conceptualized explicitly as a

democratizing threat to the lawlessness of the tyrant Zeus, who rules without

public accountability ("he ... rules without having to give accountft 324).

As Jaeger has observed, the climaxes of the action in the lliad are

always Tales of Prowess, or msteiai (Vol. 1:44). Similarly, the whole series of

episodes in the Odyssey are aimed expLicitly toward the anst& in which

Odysseus, together with his son, at last vanquishes the suitors. In Homer,

the consequences of such great deeds are never so important as the doing of

them. But even in the earliest dramas, we see a wholly different attitude to

human action. Here, the climax of the action is not the deed, but the verbal

justifkation of it after the fact. When Aristotle listed all the possible

permutations of a tragic plot, he admits that there can only be four: either

the deed was done, or it wasn't, and either knowingly or not (Poetics

145313 15- 16). Concern has shifted, in short, away from the prowess of deeds

and toward a determination of their lawhhess. When the action in drama

But not unusual in theatrical Literature; see ssp. Beckett's Play.

begins, Ajax has already slaughtered the sheep. Oedipus has already broken

all the laws, the Suppliants have already disobeyed, and the Persians have

long since built their unholy bridges. In some cases, it is true, the crime is not

actually committed until the second scene. But delays in these cases usually

exist only to establish that the doer was acting knowingly and on purpose:

Antigone and Clytaernestra, for example, make their first entrances as

hardened criminals, despite not yet having actually done the deed. Dramatic

form put all such m y h c heroes on stage, not to watch them in action, but to

cross-examine them.

The startling similarities between public hearings in the legal sphere,

and those which were staged before citizens in the theatre, have often been

remarked on (cf. esp. Ober and Strauss 1990:237ff; Henderson 1990:271-313;

Vernant and Vidal-NaquetB 1990:32-33). Court cases were heard before mass

audiences of hundreds or thousands of listeners (Humphreys 1985:3 16, 357

11-20; Sommerstein 1983:xvi; Ostwald 205); the audiences at dramatic

presentations also numbered in the thousands, as we see fiom the size of

surviving amphitheatres. Furthermore, scholars believe that even the seating

was arranged, in both auditoria, according to the same rules (Winkler

199022-23, Henderson 1990:286; Ober and Strauss 238). The casting of a

ballot by judges was the climax toward which both legal and theatrical

spectacles aimed: both agonistic performances aimed toward a majority

%ay write: "Tragedy is not only an art-form; it is also a social institution that the city, by establishing competitions in tragedies, set up alongside its poLitical and legal institutions."

decision about the winner. Not only that, but playwrights and oratorical

speech writers were described by their contemporaries as doing the exact

same thing: both were writers of "tetralogies," a term which originated in

reference to the delivery in court of four speeches concerned with the same

case (Pickard-Cambridge 80). The Greek word agonizomai refers equally to

"going to law" and competing on stage for the prize in a play? And finally,

the length of the contestants' speeches was regulated at law and on stage

(before the fourth century) in the exact same way: by the water-clock

(Poetics, 1451a12).10

Philodeon of the Wasps describes the courts as "a mighty power that

allows us to mock at wealth" (575); Euripides describes writing as an aid in

this process of criticizing the "great man." In legal procedure of the fifth

century, writing was used for this purpose in a particularly concrete way.

The "complaints" which formed the preliminary hearings of a court case were

submitted to the anakrisis in the form of writing, graph& "to hand in an

accusation" against someone was "graphen apopbereid' ( Wasps 848, Thomas

1989:42; Stockton 1990:99). And because the dramatists also submitted their

See Lddell and Scott's Greek-Eoglsh Lexicon (Oxford 1983:lO): 'to contend for the prize on the stage, act" and 'to contend against in a law suit."

lo As Mechtilde O'Mara (University of Toronto) has pointed out, there is a problem with the manuscript a t this point in the Poe6cs. Kassel in the 1965 OCT marks it with obelisks. However, if the text as we have it is correct, it was believed by Aristotle's contemporaries that plays were "once in other days" regulated by the water-clock, a device which unquestionably was used in the courts. For evidence of the practice in pre-fourth-century theatre, Aristotle only cites common opinion ("they say").

writings to an archon for a 'preliminary hearing" of the same type, we might

ask what indeed was Euripides doing in submitting say, the BppoZ'os, or

the Medea for performance in the theatre, if not graphen apopherein? For the

written complaints of dramatists were, like those of litigants, submitted to an

archon before coming before the public. To our earlier conclusions about the

"unfinished nature of the dramatic text, we might add this insight, drawn

fiom legal procedure of the time: the dramatic text remains open precisely

because, like the graph6 of a complaint against the great, it awaits its public

hearing. It is the written accusation, not the judgement itself. Is Hippolytos

an insufferable misogynist prude, or an innocent victim of a false graph6 (in

this case a literal one, submitted by his step-mother)? Is Medea a victim of a

monstrous society or a monster herself! Is Orestes gdty as charged, or

innocent? What about Oedipus? Antigone? Verdicts of this type are made on

the basis of performance alone. The case is not decided until it comes to court.

Athenian jurors and playgoers alike were conscious of their role as

decision-makers. They appear even to have used writing as an aid in

reaching their decisions. Philodeon comes home from the law courts

"plastered with wax beneath his fingernails" horn marking the litigants'

penalties on writing tablets ( Wasps 109,165); and when Bdelycleon acts the

part of juror, he calls instantly for his writing tablets, so that he might make

note of the main points of the testimony (538, 559, 576-77: "That's now the

second point of yours I'm writing down."). Likewise, in the "great debate" that

Aristophanes said took place in the theatre, and which he gives us a glimpse

of in the Frogs, the "jurors" apparently came "armed for action1' as well:

"Everyone's holding his little book, so he can follow the subtle points."

Whether he meant, by "little book," the texts of the plays being judged, or

tablets for writing down the good points of the debate staged before them, is

impossible to tell.

The use of writing came eventually to have a much larger share in the

jurisprudential process: after 378/7, witnesses merely confirmed their

prepared written testimonies and cross-examination was eliminated

(Humphreys 1985:316). And by Aristotle's time, playwrights were writing

plays "suitable for readingtt alone (Arist. h2ietonc m. 12.1413b 12f; see also

PfeiEer 1986:29 and Taplin 1977:13 n.1). But until that time, contests at law

and in the theatre were decided primarily on an oral basis. Like actors, who

won awards on the basis of "the charm of their speech," (Herington

1985:126), public speakers in Athens' other auditoria won the listeners'

favour by like means. When we remember that the six thousand jurors who

passed judgement in the Athenian law courts were regular non-specialist

citizens who had received no training in law whatsoever, we can appreciate

the full extent of the similarity between dramatic and forensic speech. "The

presiding magistrate did not sum up the arguments made by the two parties

or give authoritative rulings on legal issues" (Humphreys 323). Nor did the

jurors deliberate; they heard the oral performances and dropped their voting-

pebble in an urn. Thus we see why her study of Athenian legal procedure led

l lsee Arrowsmith, 1962:98 n. 70, who discusses the ambigruty of the line and the dfficulty in determining exactly what Aristophanes meant by biblion in this context.

Humphreys to conclude that the law courts and theatre were related "urban

institutions": "Both put the audience in the position of judge; both made

extensive use of competitions in argument" (323).

The same went, of course, for the popular Assembly, where arguments

were similarly staged, put in contest, and voted on. There are even recorded

cases of the Theatre of Dionysus (near Munychia) being used for such

political Assembly meetings (Ostwald 394). As in the law courts and theatre,

performative speech in the Assembly was preceded by a written document (by

draft proposals prepared by the Council: Stockton 1990:88; Ostwald 77); but

the "end" of all these activities was an oral performance whose aim was to

win a lay audience's favour, i.e. to win.

The chorus in the Frogs addresses the whole citizen audience as the

"judge" of the musical competition; Kleon in Thucydides refers to Athenians

as "spectators [theata] of speeches" generdy (2.38.4; cf. Ober and Strauss

247). Furthermore, jurors and dramatic judges were both chosen by lot

(Pickard-Cambridge 1968:95-96; Ostwald 462). Admittedly, only ten judges

were picked to write out the winners' names and cast the deciding votes in

the theatre on behalf of the whole audience; but it is clear that their voting

was deeply Sec ted by general audience response, by the sympathies of the

mass "jury" as a whole (Goldhill 1990: 100).

In raising their hands, casting their ballots or voicing their approval or

condemnation in the form of applause or invective, theatrical audiences thus

functioned essentially as jurors in a court of law. And as Henderson has

demonstrated at length (1990:271-313), the identity between these two

activities was obvious even to the participants at the time. With six thousand

Athenians officially registered for jury duty every year, Athens' reputation

for litiginousness appears not to be unjustified. As the Hoopoe remarks in

me Birds, if they're Athenians, they must be jurymen (108-9, CIouds 202-8,

Thucydides I. 77; also Stockton 96).

Of course, what similarities there are between the "hearing" of a text-

based case in the theatre and Pnyx or dikasteria conceal one major

difference. A successful speech in the assembly may send thousands of men

off to their deaths in battle, whereas a successful tetralogy in the theatre

causes nothing directly to happen outside of the addition of the victors'

names to the list of winners.12 But as a "Literacy event,"l3 theatrical

performance is structured like a jury trial, where a written accusation is

judged by a mass audience in performance.

Unfortunately, most of the works that originally made up the full

tetralogy of the dramatic accusations are lost. Had more complete dramatic

l2 Although basically valid and worth making, this distinction, between the real consequences of forensic speech and the unreal consequences from dramatic speech, is not absolute, however. Some of Aristophanes' poetic suggestions seem actually to have been instituted in reality. See Henderson, 1990:271-313.

l3 Brian Street (1988) discusses Heath's definition of a "literacy event" as "any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of the participants' interactions and their interpretive processesn (61).

case-hearings survived, it is certain that the legalistic essence of early

theatre would be more readily apparent. Discussions of ancient tragedy in

our time are more likely to emphasize Aristotelian notions of "katharsis" arid

"tragic flaws."l4 But the legal associations even of these terms have somehow

been obscured in modernity. By Aristotlets time, the former had come to have

strong associations with medical practice; by our time the latter in particular

has come to be associated with anachronistic Christian values. In the century

before the invention of drama, however, in the legal inscription horn Dreros,

Crete, we find that kat.baros has something to do with the kind of

purification one achieves by swearing an oath in court (Gagarin 86). And

hubns as we find it in Hesiod is not a tragic flaw, moral failing, sin or any

other abstract ethical trait, but the bad outcome of a crooked law-suit (Works

and Dags 224-85). The opposite of bubns is not modesty or goodness, but

justice and straight settlements in the arbitration of disputes (dike and dikaii

Gagarin 49).

Some of the theatre's early connections with legal process are

somewhat circumstantial, but they deserve a quick look anyway. For they

prove that the early dramatists knew the workings of the literate legal

system at first hand, and that legal procedure was an everyday fact of life in

the early days of dramatic performance. Aeschylus, whose surviving three-

part "case" against Orestes gives us perhaps the best glimpse we have of the

l4 Vickers (1973) discusses the widespread misinterpretation and mistaken use by modern theorists of critical terms from antiquity (26-3 1).

legalistic nature of dramatic composition, was himself brought before the

newly-empowered public courts. Along with Megacles, Aeschylus shares the

distinction of being the first citizen to be charged with a religious crime

against the state. He was accused of revealing religious secrets of the

Eleusinian mysteries in a play, secrets that should have been known only to

initiates (Arist. Nich. Ethics 3-1-11 la6- 10; Ostwald 528).15 Aeschylus was

apparently acquitted by a &astenbn; his defence, according to Aristotle,

was that he didn't know they were secrets when he staged them in a play.

The prosecution of Aeschylus helps to remind us that the performance

of Greek drama was itself not a religious phenomenon. So far fkom "being" a

religious spectacle, tragedy was legally prohibited even from staging certain

religious elements, as Aeschylus' court case proves. In the dramatic age,

religious cults, which had traditionally been under the control of the old

families, came under jurisdiction of the state. The hereditary priesthoods

were upheld by public legislation (Ostwald 145), but their essentially private

and secretive character was m e d as well. In fact, in the first years of the

fifth century, two particular family-run priesthoods were ordered by public

decree to conduct initiations individuaLI' initiating in groups would be

punishable by a fine of 1000 drachmas (Ostwald 140). Therefore, while

religious practices were supposed to be individualistic, private and secret in

nature, what dramatists like Aeschylus did in staging plays was the virtual

l5 This anecdote reminds one instantly of the trouble Mozart is said to have gotten into for revealing secrets of the Masonic temple cult in his Magic Flute.

opposite: public, communal, open, unhidden (see esp. Padel 1990:336ff. and

Seale 1982, passim, for discussions of Greek drama as that which reveals,

brings to light, makes public). Theatre was not an initiation "into" anything;

it was, like a legal spectacle, a public bringing-to-light, a show, a "hearing."

Herodotus (6.21.2) reports that the tragedian Phrynicus was also

forced to stand trial in the courts, where he was not as lucky as Aeschylus.

He was sentenced to a fine of 1000 drachmas and prohibited from re-

performing his Capture of lldiletus on the grounds that it had reminded the

Athenians of their recent and very painful loss of that city. Apparently there

were limits to what could be shown on stage: religious secrets were taboo, as

were, apparently, too-fresh miseries. But such charges as were laid against

the dramatists did not necessarily stand up in court. After a performance of

the BabyIonians at the City Dionysia in 426, Kleon submitted a graph4

against Aristophanes "for having ridiculed magistrates ... as well as Kleon, in

the presence of foreigners" (Achazmiazzs 377-82; also Henderson 1990). This

action seems not to have made it beyond the preliminary hearing (Achar.

381-82; Ostwald 207 n.33). Sophocles was also publicly charged by his son

with incompetence; the accusation was read in court and the playwright was

acquitted (Bieber 196 1:28-29).

In the dramatic age, and under the influence of literacy, interpersonal

conflict had it;seLf become legalized and theatricalized, and dramatic form

represents this state of affairs in its very structure. That a particular legal

system will tend to produce a corresponding type of storytelling is confirmed

by Sally Humphreys' (1985) study of social relations implicit in various legal

systems. In China, for example, where magistrates were brought in fkom

elsewhere to judge cases in social contexts which were UIlfhdiar to them,

bringing the truth to light in court was a labyrinthine and hazardous task.

Not surprisingly, the detective story, which explores the "outsider's"

navigation through an alien, clue-strewn environment, was invented in

China (315). But in Athens, where citizens sat in public judgement over

fellow citizens, where "the assembly and the law courts were a kind of

theatre, and the theatre an assembly-place, a court" (Padel 1990:338), a

forensic form of storytelling was invented instead.

It is perhaps in the stichomythia above all that dramatic form reflects

the legal atmosphere in which it materialized. In the dispute between

Achilleus and Agamemnon in the Iliadfor example, we see that the speech of

each disputant is separate and self-contained. Achilleus has his say; then

Kalchas has his; then Achilleus speaks again; then Kalchas again in answer,

then A g m e u o n , Acmeus, Agsur;em;;on m b so f&h. !a thc :;ace d 132

lines, nine monologic speeches are represented, and they are each fairly long,

ranging from seven to twenty-three lines each. Here, verbal contest consists

of autonomous set-speeches which, because they are separated by

transitional narrative segments spoken by the bard, do not intersect directly

at any point. Because the bard introduces each speaker in the bard's own

voice, the characters speaking never respond to each other directly; their

speeches do not come into contact. In drama, however, a new type of verbal

debate makes its appearance. The paradigmatic example comes fiom the

interrogation of Orestes in the Eumenides

Chorus: Say first, did you kill your mother or did you not?

Orestes: Yes, I killed her. There shall be no denial of that.

Chorus: There are three falls in the match and one has gone to us.

Orestes: So you say. But you have not even thrown your man.

Chorus: So. Then how did you kill her? you are bound to say.

Orestes: I do. With drawn sword in my hand 1 cut her throat.

Chorus: By whose persuasion and advice did you do this?

Orestes: By order of this god, here. So he testi6es. Chorus: The Prophet guided you into this

matricide? Orestes: Yes. I have never complained of this. I do

not now. Chorus: When sentence seizes you, you will talk a

different way. Orestes: I have no fear. My father will aid me from

the grave. Chorus: W your mother, then put trust in a

corpse! Trust on. (587-599; Lattimore's trans .)

In thirteen lines, thirteen separate statements, each responding directly and

inextricably to the one before. We have spoken earlier about why this type of

interchange would require the use of writing, both for composition and

performance. As a poetic mode of representing human speech, however, it

may have owed an equal debt to the model of forensic speech which

developed out of written law. Aeschylus was of course deliberately staging a

legal cross-examination in this scene, as Aristophanes was to do later in the

Wasps, where a trial of the family pet is staged with kitchen utensils for

witnesses (908-980). Nevertheless, a forensic speech-style is exhibited also by

dramatic characters who are not visibly competing in a court of law. In a

grove outside Argos, the daughters of Danaus are challenged to provide

verbal proof of the "truth" of their "tale" that they claim Argive ancestry (270-

280):

Chorus: Wasn't 10 once in Argos charged with Hera's temple?

King: Io was, the tale is prevalent. Chorus: And wasn't Zeus to a mortal joined? King: Which was &om Kera unconcealed. Chorus: How end these royal jealousies? King: A goddess changed a woman to a cow. Chorus: And Zeus, did he approach the horned

cow? King: Zeus became a bull, they say.

Chorus: But ;hat did Hera appoint for ill-omened Io?

King: A gnatlike goad it was, or driving sting. Choms: That the Nile-dwellers call the gadfly. King: That drove her from Argos. Chorus: It confirms my tale. (291-310)

When Aristotle was later to draw up rules for the effective interrogation of

opponents in his Rheton'c, it was to the dramatists he looked for examples of

forensic speech no less than to the orators themselves. He would have

approved of the Chorus' strategy, above, in leading the witness by asking a

series of shod questions. As he puts it, interrogation is an effective device

"when one premise of an argument is obviously true, and you can see that

your opponent must say 'yes' if you ask him whether the other is true ..." (1419a6ff). He goes on in this vein, advising further that, as the audience will

be unable to follow "a series" of questions posed at once, the successful orator

will ask one compact question at a time-precisely as the Chorus does above

(1419a17-20). This forensic dialogue structure is apparent throughout

Sophoclean drama as well. One sees a lengthy cross-examination, made up of

short questions and replies, in the Oedipus (986-1045), Ajax (95-120)

Antigone (786-8 l5), P6iloctetes (100- 122). Even the very terse dialogic

exchange between the sisters in Oedipus at Colonus (1957ff) is structured as

an interrogation.

Taking a quick detour, we might look at what modem theatrical

theory has had to say about this. The most authoritative statement on the

subject is Manfred Pfister's 3lheory and Analysis of Drama (1988), a

thoroughgoing account of the special structure of the dramatic text. Pfister

notes here that the direct speech of characters, especially their dialogical

speech, "constitutes the predominant verbal matrix used in dramatic texts"

(5). Pfister quite rightly also notices that this primary truth about dramatic

texts often goes unacknowledged; even Aristotelian poetics obscure it by

focusing instead on abstractions such as "the plot." The question Pfister's

formulation leaves unanswered is: why does discourse in drama consist

mainly of direct dialogical debate? We have already begun to see how writing

may have played a part in making obsolete the mediating voice of the

narrator, or bard, whose function before writing was to remember and with

his own voice report what all the characters said and did. But the emergence

of this characteristically dramatic "verbal matrix," this direct dialogical

speech, may have been equally beholden to the agonistic hee-for-all of

Athenian jurisprudence. In the absence of an authoritative judge in the legal

sphere, human disputes became precisely what we see in drama: direct

dialogical speech without interruption, without narrative manipulation, and

with judgement passed only by listeners at the end of the performance.16 In

our time, on the contrary, even jury trials are regulated by an authoritative

judge, whose specialist knowledge and impartiality is supposed to ensure

that justice is properly administered. In such forensically mediated

atmospheres as ours today, it is not surprising that the main storytelling arts

of our time are the heavily mediated genres of novel and film. Indeed, it is

only in our time that the presence of the guiding hand of some outside

authority has come to be expected even in the theatre (i.e. the director).17 In

short, the potentially unmediated verbal agon of all dramatic form may

derive horn the forensic style of Athens' literate legal system.

In the long speech from the Suppliants which we cited earlier,

Euripides also equates written law with an expansion, to more types of

speakers, of the freedom to speak and give "good advice" to the city. The

phrase he uses toward the end of the speech is actually a quotation fkom

ordinary civic procedure. The Athenian assembly always opened with a

l6 The audience at the theatre was judging the performance of a play, whereas t he listeners at a trial were supposed to be judging the merits of the case. This might seem to suggest that the type of judging being done was different in each case. However, a s we will be discussing shortly, the difference between the two is not as great as it might appear. As Bettyruth Walter (1988) and Dennis Kurzon (1986) have shown, speakers in legal contexts win the support of their audiences mainly on the basis of their perfbrmances, which in many cases means that acting coaching is required even by those litigants who are "innocent." Binginnocent is never enough; one must appear to be innocent a s well, which sometimes means actinginnocent.

l7 See Pavis especially (1982) for uncritical acceptance of the mediating role of the director in theatre art, and unexamined assumptions about the existence of such mediators in theatre practice throughout history.

herald asking: "What man has good advice to give to the polis and wishes to

make it known?" (Finley 1983:139). With the existence of the "shield" of

written law, not only does the speech of the poor have protection,lB but so

does that of the younger members of the community. Euripides' speaker goes

on (after the section quoted above) to discuss the plight of the "youthful

townsmen," who, like "ears of corn in a spring field" (Suppl: 291-310), are

likely to be cut off by their power-jealous elders. But with the publication of

written laws, the legal decision-making process and speech itself is

"liberat[ed] ... from its attachment to immediate reality" (Meier 1990:86), and

"good advice" can for the first time be judged without reference to or

prejudice against the speaker's own identity. As Humphreys puts it, legalized

debate meant that those who would not otherwise be called upon to speak in

public found themselves addressing large audiences for the first time, and

doing so in a context where attention had to be paid to "the way in which

opposing views were argued rather than [to] the status and achievements of

the proponents" themselves (317). In the oral world of the epics, as in oral

societies generally (cf. Clanchy 1979:150), we see clearly how the speech of

the young is devalued in favour of that of the elders (I7. IX.53-4, Od. III. 21-

24, 125, 362-3; N.205; W.155-58). In the tragedies, on the contrary, as

Garland (1990) has pointed out, elders are not depicted as having any innate

monopoly on wisdom, and have moved mainly to the periphery of the action.

In the written world of drama, even youths such as Neoptolemos can speak

l8 Solon said that he "stood covering both [rich and poor] with a strong shield, dowing neither to triumph unjustly over the other" (Solon frag. 5.5-6; Gagarin 1986:138 and Finley 1983:l).

with more wisdom than their elders, like Odysseus, and elders are

themselves often portrayed as crotchety and conventional in their thinking

(the chorus of old men in Agamemnon, Tieresias in 0.T. and Oedipus and

Creon in O.K.; Garland 1990:266-7). The growing power of the younger

members of society is amply demonstrated by Aristophanes throughout his

oeuvle (Ihights 225-26, 731; A c h m - a s 676-718; and the whole of Clouds

and Waspi). Ostwald has amassed considerable evidence connecting the

increasingly visible presence in public life of the young to use of the law

courts (229ff.). For this empowerment of more types of citizens to have their

say, Euripides credits writing.

The dramas themselves accurately represent this widened speech

community, with slaves, women, children, cripples, foreigners and even the

insane given power of public speech. We have already mentioned some

examples of dramatic presentations of the speech of foreigners (Orestes,

Persians); Aeschylus also put publicly before the ears of the assembled

Athenian citizenry the broken Greek of a foreigner in the Suppfiants (835-

950). In the story of Clytaemestra as told by Homer, the woman is peripheral

to the story. She is given power neither of action nor of speech (Od. 529ff.).

By Agamemnon in the Bad, she is compared, unfavourably, to his new slave

Chryseis (I.111-14); but fiom neither woman do we hear a thing.19 The

innovations represented by drama are nowhere more pronounced than here:

written drama gives all the women of Greek mythology and contemporary

Athenian life a chance to speak. In delegating performative power of public

speech to female figures, the Suda reports that Phrymcus lead the way

(Fhckinger 1973:4); but Aeschylus was not far behind. In the Agamemnon,

Clytaemestra has become one of the main actors in the mythological story of

Agamemnon's murder; she has joined the lists of verbal combatants, and her

entry into the public order of speakers is explicitly recognized: "My lady, no

grave man could speak with better grace. I have listened to the proofs of your

tale, and I believe" (351-2). The epic singer, by contrast, confined his song

largely to the deeds of Achilleus and Odysseus and their fellow warriors;ZO

the logogrphoi of the theatre wrote instead about Antigone and

l9 The justly famous exchange between Hektor and his wife is often cited as evidence of Homeric sympathy for female speakers, and for the importance of their place in the heroic world. The scene itself, however, shows Hektor telling Andromache to go back to her knitting and her womenfolk and not to trouble he r head with thoughts about war, which are the business of men (read "loom and distaff" for my knitting: VT.486-90). Helen is indeed given "the last word" (nearly) a t the end of the Iliad, but proportionately with the length of this vast work, that is precisely what she gets: a word. In a work tens of thousands of lines long, Helen's 14 line speech in Book X X N (762-775) is negligible, particularily in light of the fact that the war was supposed to have been about her in the first place.

20 Womae are not of course absent from the world of the epics. Odysseus does meet some interesting females on his way home, and Penelope is never long out of his mind, nor ours. But Homer's women are chiefly instruments in plots about men, or reflect t he desires, actions and aspirations of the men who are the real subjects of both stories. As Jaeger has suggested, the virtues of Penelope, Helen, Arete or Nausicaa-loyalty, chastity, beauty and good advice-are enumerated and praised mainly insofar as they reflect well on the men who are associated with them (Vol. 1:23). Epic women all remain "prizes" on a certain level, and do not pursue their own actions and agendas. On the contrary, a dramatist's treatment of the tale about Odysseus' return home would doubtlessly have cast Penelope as her own protector and murderer of the su i tors -or of her unfaithful husband! This hypothesis is amply confirmed by Aeschylus' treatment of the homecoming theme: in Homer, i t is Aegisthus who slaughters Agamemnon; in Aeschylus, Clytaemestra is clearly the mastermind.

Clytaemestra and Iphigenia and Lysistrata; about Hecuba and Elektra and

Medea; about Helen and Andromache and Alcestis; about suppliant women

and Trojan women and women of the Assembly.

However, as in the law courts and assembly, women were not allowed

to appear on the stage in person. Their speech could be represented in

writing, not performed in the flesh. Nevertheless, given the ability of writing

to outlive the context of its production, these represented discourses could at

least survive, perhaps to be more properly incarnated in the future. For this

reason, we might add to writing's virtues an immunity fi-om domination by

whatever social conventions are regulating public speech at a given

moment .2'

Access to public speech was evidently widened in the age of drama, but

speech in propnb persona was still Limited, by the Athenian concept of

citizenship, to land-owning males. And it is here that writing's connection

with isegolia shows its most interesting face. For while foreigners such as

Lysias and women such as Aspasia could not speak publicly themselves, they

were enabled, by the existence of written forms of communication, to write

speeches for others to deliver (Stockton, 1990: 18; S.G.Cole, 198 1: 135). Such

writers, or Iogog~aphoi, wrote speeches for others to memorize and deliver in

21 1 do not mean to suggest that the dramatists themselves hoped that women would one day perform their female roles. That writing accumulates meanings and performative possibilities through time which were not intended by the author is a matter to whch we shall be turning shortly.

public, guaranteeing that their voices could, in some manner, be heard

(Humphreys, 318). So popular were such written speeches that by the fourth

century, "court speeches w e r e i n the company of dramatic texts and mimes,

with which they have much in common ...-t he light reading of the period"

(320).

Women, foreigners and slaves did not enjoy the same rights of public

speech a s land-owning males in Athens of the fifth century B.C.E.. Neither,

of course, were Blacks, Indians and immigrant Chinese allowed to tes* as

witnesses in court in California as recently as the 19th century A.D. (Doo

1973; Humphreys 356 n. 1). The disempowerment of some speakers in public

is not, however, just a political issue. Speech contexts often do exclude many

potentially wise speakers for technicalllegal reasons-i.e., for lack of proper

credentials such as citizenship or membership; but d speech contexts

disempower some members of society "naturally," or inevitably. Isocrates was

evidently a case in point in Athens. He had much good advice to give the city,

but apparently was not f l e d by nature as a pleasing speaker (C.J. Rowe

1986:Z 15ff.). There is also a funny story told by Aristophanes about the book-

loving Thucydides, who became suddenly tongue-tied, "paralysed in the jaws"

when he was called upon to speak in a trial (Wasps 945-48). Not all members

of a given speech community will be effective speakers; but some may not be

able to speak at all. There was a fascinating case which came before a

Medieval court at a moment just before writing had revolutionized the legal

sphere in Europe. In a judicial system where testimony and proof still had to

be authorized by speech in person, a certain Agnes, a deaf mute, was denied

legal rights because she could not speak on her own behalf (Clanchy

1979:222). Her case could not be represented, either by writing or someone

else's speech: she either spoke for herself or was disqualified from receiving

legal redress. Without the ability of writing to represent speech, citizens like

this English mute cannot enjoy the rights of isegona-

From Aristophanes in particular we know that playwrights were

valued largely for the advice they gave to the city; but not everyone who has

a valuable contribution to make is gfted by nature with prize-winning

charm. As we see fkom the inscription on a statue erected in the Theatre of

Dionysus, actors won audience favour above all for "the charm of their

speech" (Herington 126); and apparently they still do. According to powerful

New York theatre critic John Simon, charm is the one quality an actor cannot

do without (1975:216-18). Socrates was said to be the ugliest man at Athens,

a detail which might help to explain his sardonic treatment of crowd-pleasers

like Ion. With the existence of writing, then, the public platform is opened up

to anyone who merits an audience, regardless of his natural physical

equipment and prevailing social taboos. Foreigners and women like Lysias,

Isocrates, and Aspasia were allowed to have their day in court, so to speak.

In a world of speech without writing, the pragmatics of performance will

emphasize the speaker's identi@ and personal charm over the substantive

qualities of his argument. Without the need to appear in person, the

dramatic logographer, by the same token, is free to make his or her

contribution on paper, and leave the public communication of these ideas to

those best suited by nature to win an audience's approval.

However, like the switch from oral-intensive instruction to book-based

schooling that we looked at in the last chapter, the writing down of law has a

cost. The loss of their lived, context-bound particularities made disputes into

abstract cases rather than contests of identities. But this loss of context,

which always accompanies writing to some extent, means a corresponding

loss of meaning. Although some degree of interpretation is required even in

speech, interpretation takes on a much greater burden in deciphering

meaning when communication is done in writing. We spoke earlier of the

ease with chich alphabetical writing can transcribe speech; but newer

technologies of communication, such as film, video and tape-recorders, have

revealed just how much of speech is in fact not recorded by writing. In

ancient writing up to the invention of the printing press, thu was especially

true. More recently, we have developed a more consistently used and detailed

system of non-verbal signs to take the place, in writing, of the gestures,

inflections, tones, pauses, emphases and so on that organize and give

meaning to our verbal utterances in oral delivery. But punctuation,

paragraph breaks, italics and font size can only go so far as substitutes for

the sounds and gestures which in oral communication have enormous

semantic value even though they have no alphabetical equivalents. It is for

this reason that, in literate communication, interpretation comes to the

forefront in the search for meaning.

Using Ricoeur's words, we might say that writing can fix only the

"noema" of speech, the "saying as said" (1981:203); what the alphabet is not

equipped to represent i s the "noesis" of a given speech act, the communicative

intention in the mind of the speaker. In direct oral interlocution, non-verbal

gestures and other bodily signs are what carry most of the burden of

communicating intentions. For words themselves are inherently ambiguous.

They possess only more or less strictly delineated potentialities for meaning;

it is how they are used that determines what is meant. And so with written

law such questions arise as "What exactly did Solon mean when he wrote

that 'anyone' can submit a graplik?" It is context alone that tells us that when

he wrote "anyone" he did not mean women and slaves. Meanings such as

these, which are more or less directly manifested to speakers within the

historical and psychological context of utterance, must be supplied by

readers. For readers are by definition those receivers of verbal messages who

mhabit contexts separate &om those in which the messages are produced.

The contextual Merence between conditions of production and of reception

may be one of space, or time, but is usually both.

As a decontextualized communication, writing thus makes the need for

interpretation explicit. But decontextualized language was not unknown

before writing. In Homer, for example, we notice that interpretation was

widely practiced. Given the naturally decontextualized nature of dreams,

omens, oracles and other ambiguous phenomena, meaning must be actively

supplied if it is to be had at all. The interpretive reading of signs assumed to

be sigdicant was described by the verb hupokzinesthai (Svenbro 1990:373).

In contrast to the manteis, whom Plato describes in the Timaios as the

soothsayers or oracular mediums who themselves produce the ambiguous

phrases, a hupokzites is one who (only) iuteqrets such "words and enigmatic

signs" (72a-b). Interpretive practices of this kind-be they aimed at the

cryptic sayings of a Delphic oracle, the flight of birds, the cracks on heated

animal bones, or the entrails of beasts-are widespread in early societies

from Newfoundland to China. Judging from the occurrences of references to

interpretation in Homer (II. W.407 and W.228; Od IX. 111, XV.170, and

XIX.535; Hymn to Apollo 171), the meaning of the activity for the ancient

Greeks is fairly clear: a hupokrites is one who suggests the "real meaning" of

a verbal or visual sign. What oracles, entrails and the flight of birds have in

common with writing is that all are experienced as autonomous, meaning-

laden sign-systems which are cut off fkom ordinary, explanatory

embeddedness in a communicative context. In the case of written law, this

kind of decontextualization is inevitable. Interpreters are now required, and

orators, or lawyers quickly come into existence with the advent of written

law. Given their function, it should not be surprising to learn that the Greeks

used bupokrinest6ai and related words to describe the public speech of

orators (Fhkard-Cambridge 1968: 127).

Like law, poetry, too, needs interpreters once it is written down. In

conditions of orality, poetry does not exist in this decontextualized state.

Poetry is manifested only in concrete conditions of utterance, where producer

and receiver are co-present. Because poetic utterance comes only through the

mouth of the bard, jongleur or griot, there is no textual "locution" to

interpret; the "real meaning" intended by the speaker is present in the

context. But once poetry is composed directly in writing, outside of a

physically-engaged communication event, interpretation, both the possibility

and necessity of it, is built into poetry from the start. Even the poet must to

some extent be the interpreter of his own work, for production and reception

cannot coincide absolutely. And so it comes as no surprise to find that in the

sphere of poetry, too, a class of interpreters soon springs up analogous to that

of orators in the legal sphere. And the interpreters of poetic texts, of course,

were those performers called hupokzitazi, actors. From the official lists of

victors in poetic contests (Pickard-Cambridge 1968:132 cites LG. ii2.2325),

and from Aristophanes (Wasps 1279), we know that hupokrites was the

proper word to describe the dramatic actor horn at least the fifth century

onwards. Distinguishable from the rhapsode and from other types of

performer through the use of this special name, the actor for the ancients was

first and foremost that performer who ioteqprets.

Although theorists of drama today are more likely to emphasize the

actor's role-playing function,22 or his physical presence, as the essence of his

function, it must be remembered that these ways of distinguishing the actor

from other performing artists would have had no meaning in antiquity. It

would have had no meaning to say that the actor was the one who

dancedhng in person, or impersonated other men, for in the time and place

of drama's invention, all poetry, not just drama, was performed, sung,

22 Cf. J. Svenbm (1990) and Pickard-Cambridge (1927:llO) for other interpretations of h u p ~ k ~ t e s among moderns (the "answerern for example, was briefly popular but was discredited by Bywater and Pickard-Cambridge). I accept Parkes' definition of the word as "one who suggests a meaning" (1967:17), and I trust it mainly because, as a scholar writing on a subject other than theatre, Parkes can be assumed to be disinterested.

danced, and involved impersonation. As John Herington (1985) has shown at

length, epic and lyric and dramatic poetry were all, equally, arts of musical,

corporeal performance. Plato speaks of both theatrical actors and epic

rhapsodes as "out of their proper minds" when impersonating mythological

characters; and Pickard-Cambridge provides good evidence that lyric

recitation involved impersonation as well (1927:41-3). According to

Herington, the main shape of histrionic performance, which came

increasingly to be associated with actors, had in fact been already worked out

by rhapsodes before the invention of dramatic form proper. Working fkom his

written "reminders" of Homeric texts, the rhapsode was essentially the same

kind of performer that the actor became. Differences between the arts of the

epic and lyric performers on one hand, and that of the actor, on the other, did

exist; but they did not derive fkom questions of impersonation or corporeal

presence.

One of these differences seems to have had to do with the nature of

their respective texts. Once writing was available for recording Homeric

poetry, rhapsodes used mitten reminders." This determined that, like

actors, their function would be "to interpret the meaning of the poet to the

audience" (Ion 530~3-4). But their scripts were records of performances which

had originally been oral, untouched by writing. In Ricoeurts terms, they were

not yet "texts." For Ricoeur, a decisive break is made when writing is not just

23 See Chapter 1, page 58 n. 22 and 69 n. 32 for a discussion of evidence and dates.

used to record pre-existent spoken utterances, but is chosen &om the start,

before the commencement of spoken communication or in place of it. Text

takes over from "reminder" when writing ceases recording discourse, and

starts creating it. The birth of text is what brings the actor as hupokn'tes into

existence, for he is the first performer to come after a writing, a writing

which antedates any corporeal performance of it, and which must therefore

be interpreted p ~ o r even to its first peI.fomance.

The actor's performance, like that of the rhapsode or lyricist in so

many ways, thus distinguishes itself &om them insofar as what is performed

by the hupokzites is already an interpretation of ambiguous signs (as the

name suggests). Common parlance even among actors today confirms this

interpretive function. In order to understand the meaning of their "words and

enigmatic signs," the actor must supply the illocutionary and perlocutionary

intentions and effects that are missing horn the textually-fixed locution. The

actor must decide what a given locution "really means" in a given context-

which, as we discussed earlier, is tantamount to deciding what it does in the

context of the utterance: issues a threat, makes a promise, changes the

subject, etc. The actor must also decide what perlocutionary effects this

illocutionary act is able, or is intended to achieve-bring the conversation to

a halt, attain the interlocutor's trust, etc. Actors ordinarily speak, in

Stanislavskian terms, of "motivation," "through-line of action" and "objective"

instead of ill- and perlocutionary acts, but as the above should indicate, these

are effectively the same things.

Of course actors and lawyers are not the only interpreters that writing

spawns. Textual scholars and exegetes, literary critics, historians and

theorists of various kinds are also called into being with the separation of

utterance &om context. What actors and lawyers do at the level of individual

sentences (what Medea or Article X of the constitution says here..-), textual

critics, historians and theorists do at the level of utterances taken as wholes

(what Euripidest works say in their totality; what the law intends or effects

generally). As far as theatre and the law are concerned, there appear to be

two main consequences of the growing reliance on the interpretation of text.

The Grst is a potential for seeing meaning as static and singular.24

Partly because, before print, text had to be copied laboriously by hand word

for word, the "truth" of the text could easily be equated with its "literal"

accuracy. Furthermore, an assumption that such "literal meaningtt is a

property of language itself could ensue. An assumption of this kind is what

Per Linnel has called the "myth" of literal meaning (1988:47). It is myth, of

course, because

24 We have already referred to the appearance of this literacy effect in Platonic philosophy (above pp.40ff). Compare also Kirk's observation that writing wiU tend to encourage the establishment of a standard authorized version: "with the concept of the fixed text comes the concept of the correct text, and incongruous versions are gradually eroded" (1985: 110).

there are no fixed "literal" meanings which are invariably activated when utterances containing certain specific words are processed, no invariant features constituting the subject matter every time a particular word is used. In each single case different things are, or may be, known and understood (47).

Words themselves are "dynamic, only partly determined;" it is their use in

particular contexts which decides what they mean. What Ph te r has said of

dramatic utterances is equally true of speech acts of any land: they do not

"just consist in [their] propositional expressive content alone, but also in the

way [they are themselves] the execution of an act-whether in the form of a

promise, a threat," etc. (1988:6). Textual interpreters have been known in our

tradition to fall into this literate trap of forgetting about the context-bound,

action-oriented nature of linguistic utterances. However, those interpreters of

texts whose interest is explicitly performative-such as actors-know in

principle that the letters of a literal locution may reflect little of the "real

meaningtt of an utterance. The same is probably true in legal spheres. But in

those interpretive spheres where texts are not integrally attached to action

and performance, there is potentially nothing to prevent equations between

meaning and "literal" truth. Especially where interpretation is modeled on

scribal letter-copying, meaning may seem to be decidable only with reference

to the exact letters of an "original," and verifiable only with a textually-based

true or false. Meaning, in short, can be confused with textual qualities, and

be assumed to have the fixed and single form of letters.

A literacy-sponsored belief of this kind in a single "literal" meaning is,

however, an extreme case, and was certainly not typical of fifth-century

Greece (Thomas 1992). Although our culture does know of them, literate

activities so divorced fkom life as to become breeding grounds for such

hermeneutical mistakes or "literacy myths" are rare. Even rarefied religious

exegesis is on guard against the letter which kiueth. A more common and

representative effect of textual analysis on language practices is rather the

reverse: that writing actively encourages the multiplication of meanings.

Meanings are multiplied in two ways. In the first place, an utterance

on the page can suggest a variety of referents and connotations, some of them

mutually contradictory. As Howard Felperin has argued, echoing a sentiment

which we might associate with Hazlitt,25 a single Shakespearean word like

"virginalling" cannot be delivered orally without the loss of many of the

meanings which attach themselves to it as long as it remains written down.26

This is because, in speech, an utterance must come equipped with a clear

per- and illocutionary intention, which is to say that its potential meanings

must be reduced down to a single choice.

But in addition to the greater polysemy of written language at a given

moment, there is also the fact that texts accumulate meanings over time. As

Ricoeur points out, this is the "positive signrficance" of writing's

25 See above. p 5. n. 2.

26 Halperin writes: "The impossibility of rendering theatrically the suggestive force of the word 'virginalling' must stand as a perennial caveat to those who maintain the primacy of performance over text" (19857).

v&emdung. For while writing in a sense deprives a document of the

pragmatic intentions of its creator, it also releases it from the hzitahbos of

those intentions, and meanings which were either not available to the writer

in his present context, or were even expressly foreclosed or "censored by him,

can be discerned and contributed by readers horn other temporal contexts. In

artificially extending the life of a given utterance, writing thus extends the

range of a given utterance's meaningfulness, making it available to more

receivers in more contexts. And writing extends the depth of an utterance's

meaningfulness as well, for it wiU be interpreted in light of previous

readings. To take an example from the legal sphere, the reforms of Solon and

Cleisthenes were hardly intended to put political and legal power into the

hands of the demos (Ostwald 15@. Isegonk was the eventual result of

written law, not its motivation (Gagarin 123-24). The same could be said

about the Constitution of the United States when it was drafted. The

survival of such locutions in textual form has been accompanied by continued

reinterpretation of them, and a gradual accretion around them of additional

meanings: that government "by the people" should by rights include the

enfkanchisement of women, naturalized immigrants and landless citizens as

well; that "equality" among citizens includes equality among races, and that

"anyone" means more than land-owning males. Equality among races was

always contained in and justified by the concept of equality among citizens,

but it was a dormant and invisible meaning which had to await historical

change before it could be seen. As C. G. Thomas puts it, social inequities of

the types named above are brought into consciousness largely on the basis of

the decontextualized analysis of terms: "although written codes were a

precondition for the eventual perception of inequities, such a perception was

surely the result, not the cause, of the codification" (1977:455). Pressure for

concrete social reform may come out of such perceptions (458), and this

sometimes in spite of the writer's own intention.

After centuries of interpretation of the Greek plays, there is no doubt

that some of the meanings available to us today were scarcely visible to

Sophoclesf audiences and not intended by Sophocles himself. But that does

not mean they were not there as potentials. In the case of the Greeks and

even Shakespeare, a huge time span and great lack of documents would

prevent us horn even attempting to distinguish "intended" from surplus

meanings. For a concrete example of this accretion of meanings around

dramatic texts, we might be better off looking closer to home, say to the

nineteenth century. Erckrnann-Chatxian's Le JuifPolonaise was performed

in London in 1871 in a stage adaptation called me Bells. It was a big success

and made Henry Irving famous. In its original context, the play's meaning

had to do with a greedy father's guilty conscience, and the psychology of guilt

generally. Interpreted by us today, after ovens actually were used in Europe

to dispose of Polish Jews after they had been robbed, the play reads as a

much more sinister document and even as a work in some way "about"

Auschwitz. This meaning, which is now undoubtedly " in the play, would

obviously not have been available to its f i s t readers nor to its author.

As Peter Szondi (1986) and Paul Ricoeur (1981) have demonstrated,

textual interpretation involves a special kind of analysis, and cannot be

thought of as merely a variant of the interpretation of speech. The textual

utterance, already decontextualized, provokes readers to Merent sorts of

mental operations, for their understanding needs to be co~fstzucted In

speech, understanding is guided by the speaker's present intentions. In

writing, an experience of authorial intention fades, and the focus shifts to the

reader's own internal rep ertoixe of available meanings. Attributing meaning

to texts thus inevitably sends the reader into a kind of self-reflexive process

where their own world-making and world-imagining apparatus is brought

into active operation.

This Merence between textual and oral understanding is sometimes

underestimated or even ignored in contemporary theatrical theory. As

listeners to live speech acts, theatre audiences are in a different position ws a

ws meaning than readers are. Therefore, it is wrong to attribute "readerly"

responses to theatre audiences (esp. Bennett 1987; D. Cole 1992). The process

of shuttling back and forth internally between intention-less signs and self-

supplied interpretations is a hermeneutical process alien to the theatre-goer.

The listener in the theatre, on the contrary, is given a continual supply of

already-constituted verbal meanings and intentions which he or she is,

instead, called upon to internalize, let resonate there, and organize into

patterns and conclusions. (And this is not even to say anything about the

more obvious social, perceptual and phenomenological differences between

listening and reading). A clear picture of the special nature of textual

understanding would have prevented theorists of drama fkom attributing

readerly responses to theatre audiences, and textual qualities to stage

spectacles (Lyotard 1977; De Marinis 1979; Elam 1980; Pavis 1982).

A failure to recognize the special character of textual interpretation is

also evident in those theories which see stage speech as a "restoration" of

speech latent in the text. The discourse that on stage is given as speech, is

first found by actors as an intentionless locution; they do not "restore" but

make it into speech through interpretation. It is therefore incorrect to see the

process of performing a play as one of "restoring" language "deposited" by the

author on paper to some kind of earlier condition as situational speech (Pavis

1982). The "situational discourse" which is performed on stage has not been

"restored," but constructed

The language performed by actors on the stage has already been

shaped by textual properties, and properties of textual interpretation. One of

these properties, as we discussed briefly earlier @p. 164ff.), is the infusion

into discourse of an abstract ideological dimension. In connictual forensic and

dramatic speech, this means that debate takes on a "principled quality. In

forensic speech we can see with great clarity how disputes quickly come to be

inhabited by larger, more general social and political issues. In marked

contrast to pre-legal arbitrations, "the formal hearing of a dispute essentially

dramatizes power relations between opposing gmups within a society"

(Humphreys 315; my italics). As we see horn the Wasps and the Mghts in

particular, public debates in Gfth century Athens took on social dimensions

larger than the individualities of the disputants themselves: they were

experienced as representative of power struggles between rich and poor, old

aristocracy versus nouveau ride, young Sophists against old democrats, etc..

In epic speech, on the other hand, stories about Agamemnon, Clytaemestra,

Orestes, Antigone are told without reference to generalized ideological

conflict. Epic disputes always seem to be contained comfortably within a

unified worldview where heroic and fda l fdynas t ic values are taken

sufEciently for granted not to need expression. Eumaios does not tell us how

he likes being a faithful servant; Penelope has nothing to say about her

position in the heroic society-she goes quietly upstairs when her son tells

her to get lost. But these same basic stories, when staged, became the

vehlcles for exploring al l kinds of social power relations: Antigone's conflict

with Creon is explicitly cast as a "gendered" one (70-73), and representative

of new social tensions between the oikos and the pofis; the effects of the

Trojan war on Clytaemestra are also conceived in terms of the inequities of a

gendered social hierarchy (Ag. 859, 940); the punishment of Orestes' blood-

gudt is overtly a question of power relations, a contest both between mothers

and fathers for status under customary justice, and between Athene's city

C O U ~ and the private justice of custom. In Homer on the contrary, Achilleus'

wrath runs its course oblivious to underlying social values. The conflict is

not, for example, a principled disagreement about whether women are

appropriate tokens of status, but only about who gets which one. According to

Goody (1987), the emergence of the kind of ideologized debate that one sees

emerging in drama is not "based exclusively on a particular political system,

nor upon [a] clash of cultures in a general sense;" rather, it depends "upon

the framed opposition of theories set down on paper which permitted a

different form of scrutiny, the analysis of text" (77).

In opening up what Roy Harris calls the "autoglottic space" (1989:105)

between utterance and sponsor, writing makes abstract, conceptual thinking

possible, as we have discussed. But the putting down of ideas on paper leads

to a particular form of abstract reasoning which is especially dependent on

the visual plane of the textual medium. I am thinking here of the syllogism,

the non-contradictory proof. This non-contradictory syllogism-if all men are

mortal, and Socrates is a man, etc.-tied by so many scholars to Greek

literacy, was in fact also isolated by Aristotle as the essence of dramatic

poetry. Poetry, as Aristotle described it, is not about unrelated or mutually-

contradictory particulars (as history might be), but about " demonstrable"

truths of probability and necessity (145lb36m. To take but one example, the

structure of Oedipus clearly displays this abstracted, autoglottic concern

with an abstract truth, demonstrable syllogistically. For the play is itself a

kind of exercise in abstract, non-contradictory logic: if all men are prohibited

from committing incest and parricide, and Oedipus is a man, then Oedipus is

therefore a criminal, despite who he is in this particular case: a good king

with no mensrea (criminal intent).

It is illuminating to discover that one of the oldest extant legal texts

that we possess from the period, the Hecatompedon (485/4 B.C.E.), shows

that such demonstrations of gutlt as the Oe&"us mounts were of keen

interest to our newly literate cultural forebears. The text revolves around the

question of whether an offender against the law must have acted knowingly

(eidos), or should be found guilw even if he acted in ignorance (agnaia), or

despite himself, without criminal intent (akon) (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet

1990:64, Ostwald 23). The organization of argument within drama shows a

like use of the non-contradictory proof, and dramatic structure itself could be

said with equal justi6cation to be organized along syllogistic lines. Like the

conditional structure of the dramatic utterance as a wholrC'if'-the

arrangement of incidents within it is generally aimed at the eduction of the

third term in a logical demonstration ("If Character X doesidid Y, and Y is 2,

then X is 2"). As Aristotle says of all such tragic syllogisms, the possible

outcomes of such dramatic graph6 are strictly limited in number by logic:

"Besides these there is no other way, for they must either do the deed, or not,

either knowingly or unknowingly" (Poet. 145313 15- 16).

Forensic speech of this type, which first comes in to existence when

argument is extracted horn personality and written down, manifests its

connection with dramatic discourse again when literacy has its renaissance

in Europe. From the point at which the monastic class begins to dominate our

literary records in the Christian era, writing is not often used to record

secular civic debate in Europe until around the ninth century (Clanchy 1979,

Elsky 1989, Auerbach 1965). When secular documents do begin to appear,

between the ninth and twelfth centuries, we notice that writing is used

earliest for two si@cant and probably related purposes: for transcripts of

juridical proceedings, and for the stage scripts of jongleurs (Auerbach 280-

291; Clanchy 225). Why the benefits of writing should be recognized so

quickly for these two speech practices is clear: in both cases, the exact

wording is important to the outcome, as is the order in which the utterances

are delivered. Syllogisms about Socrates' mortality or Oedipus' grult will fail

to induce the final term if individual words are changed even slightly.

Scripts, "whether for jongleurs or lawyers," enable their readers to see

exactly what was said, or how they should speak, and "see the manner

directly" (Clanchy 225). And what was true for jongleurs in learning

vernacular romances by heart is even more true for the more specialized

actors who replaced them after the thirteenth century. An oral bard, working

alone and without anything to "prove," can deliver the episodes in nearly any

order at all without consequences for his recitation as a whole-witness the

invocation that starts the Od'sey: "Begin it, goddess, at whatever point you

will." In the communal production conditions of drama, however, the order of

incidents must be known in advance. Unexpected departures can result in

pandemonium for everyone; but more importantly, the syllogism whch the

fictional incidents have been arranged to induce will fall apart. The same

goes for proceedings at the bench: exact verbatim records of the litigants' and

witnesses' testimonies are crucial to the outcome. This fact of forensic speech

is recognized instantly by Bdelycleon: he writes down the key points in the

defendant's argument verbatim (Wasps 576-77). Indeed, one could go so far

as to assert that one of the earliest secular dramas of the European period

was actually a lawyer's handbook, called llhe Court Baron and published in

1265. The lively, vernacular-styleZ7 forensic dialogue in this practical guide to

pleading so closely resembles the speech of Shakespearean characters that

one cannot help but appreciate the extent to which legal discourse, even the

fictitious legal discourse of me Court Baron, provides a ready-made model

for dramatic composition. (Asked a simple yes-or-no question by the crown,

the naive poacher Walter de la More launches into a lengthy digression about

how his wife, off her food for a month, was suddenly taken with a mighty

longing to eat a tench-a speech which parallels, in nearly every aspect,

Pompey's rambling discourse about Mistress Overdone's sudden "female"

cravings for stewed prunes in Measure for Measure.)

When thoughts are made visible in writing, many abstract operations

become practicable which could otherwise not be pursued beyond a very

rudimentary point. Thus, forms of proof, such as the non-contradictory

syllogism, emerge with ease in literate contexts (Goody 1987:77). In oral

contexts, without the ability to arrange thoughts in simultaneously co-

present configurations, contradictions are difEcult to see. Writing for this

reason is conducive to the invention of the formal proof; but perhaps even

more sipficantly for science and the humanities, "it also accumulates and

records these proofs (and what they prove) for future generations and for

further operations" (68). Thus we are not surprised to find that the scientific

method and empirical observation begin to replace ritual magic, shamanism,

27 "Vernacular-stylen because it was written in French, the written language of the time, but intended as n life-like representation of regular spoken English.

sacrifice and belief in oracles and other supernatural agents in literate

societies. As Jack Goody suggestively describes it, it is only when one keeps a

running, systematic record of the relation between one's dreams or horoscope

and reality that one begins to discover for certain that the former hardly ever

actually "foretells" the latter. "In oral memory the many misses tend to be

forgotten in favour of the occasional hits" (69). Writing thus not only enables

logical demonstrations and proofs, but produces an atmosphere where such

methods of argument will tend to be expected?

A good example of this move toward rational argumentation can be

found in Jocasta's speech to Oedipus against putting one's trust in oracles.

Like any forensic speaker, she is of course partial: she has no desire to lose a

loved one again to a husband's irrational fear of oracular predictions. But her

demonstration is nonetheless a rational, empirical one. The future is by

definition unknowable; oracles pretend to be able to predict the future;

therefore they are necessarily untrustworthy (977-84). To say that Euripides

was even more famous for such empiricist arguments would be a serious

understatement; as Aristophanes jokes in the Frogs, Euripides' characters

walk around muttering "Is life life?" (Cf. Arrowsmith for the Euripidean

sources of the joke: 1962:97-98, n. 69). Euripides' "bookish" preference for

28 This is not to say that Literate Greece did not remain a profoundly superstitious and religious society. People stiU put their trust in oracles and priests, and remained irrationally teRified of curses, symbolic acts and religious gestures. But atheists, scientists and other empirical observers began to appear in increasing numbers, and such "proofs" as the empiricists were developing came to be expected even in other spheres a s well. See especially Lloyd, 1990 but also Thomas 1992.

what can be visibly proven true is accurately reflected in a line &om Wise

Melanape (fiag. 286): "Zeus, whoever Zeus is, for I know him only by report"

(cf. Ostwald for other "atheistic" statements of Euripides: 280-81).

However, to be able to induce visible contradictions on papyrus is one

thing; communicating one's true deductions in public is another thing

entirely. The uttering of the above Euripidean sentence in the theatre is

reported t o have caused such an explosion of disapproval by the audience

that Euripides was forced to change it (280). And so at last we are brought to

one of the central issues in our discussion of dramatic logography. What is

the relation between the written submission and the public hearing? We

have established so far only that the former is written, and "comes first," and

that the latter is oral, follows it in time, and produces a popular judgement.

What are the implications, for speech genres such as drama, of this hybrid

use of two separate media, temporally thus configured?

The tragedians Aeschylus and Euripides are shown competing, in the

Frogs, largely on the basis of what they wrote, for the honour of being judged

best civic advisor; but all evidence shows that in the auditorium itself, it is

the charming speech of the performers that will tend to carry off the prize.

Socrates is reported to have cautioned that charming speech and good advice

are two Merent things, and those blessed by nature with an abundance of

the former are not necessarily the same people who have any of the latter to

offer (Xen. Memorabila, m.6). A performer is by definition someone who

seeks the spotlight, who desires and often needs recognition for his personal

charms. But as Socrates of the Phaednrs sensibly warns, if we give our

attention to those who need, rather than merit our attention, we are putting

ourselves into the hands of "not the best people but the most helpless"

(233.d.5).29

Socrates' remarks about the pragmatics of performance may be valid

for another reason, however. For we have already seen some evidence that

the pragmatics of performancc+the need or desire for public favour-will

have a tendency to run counter to the pragmatics of dramatic speech writing,

i.e. to give good advice to the city. As Aristophanes warns his potentially

"indignant" audience at a performance of the A&-ms, "what I say wiU be

shocking but it will be right" (496-509). In other words, the poetic motive to

speak about "Justice" and what is "right" can be difEcult to reconcile with the

performative need to win the audience's favour.

As long as it remains an oral process, the hearing of public advice wi l l

tend to remain tied to the kind of audience psychology which "blames the

messenger." Herodotus reports that in the summer of 479, a messenger was

dispatched to propose a peace settlement to the Athenians on Salamis.

Lycides, who stood up before the assembly and advised that the offer be

accepted, was stoned to death by his indignant audience (IX.5.1-3; cf. also

29 This suggests that there is good justification for a division of labour among writers and performers. On the other hand, the existence of actor-playwrights such as Sophocles, Shakespeare and Molihre suggests that Socrates may have been mistaken in this after all.

Ostwald 25). Like the actor's bowdlerization of Ibsen's feminist text that we

looked at in the last chapter, the retraction of such "shocking" statements as

Euripides wrote for the theatre may therefore be an inevitable consequence

of arguing cases before a powerful public. Athenian jurors dropped their

stones into urns rather than hurling them at the defendants, and the

tomatoes we throw at our public speakers today are unlikely to result in

mortal injury, but the pragmatics of audience response is the same in all

such live speech situations.

According to Aristotle and Aristophanes in particular, public

performance, for all its democratizing strengths, will tend to compromise the

integrity of public debate in certain ways. Aristotle lamented this

development thus: "and just as in drama the actors now count for more than

the poets, so it is in the contests of public life, owing to the defects of our

political institutions" (met. III. 1.140313.33). What he meant by the "defects

in our political institutions" was fully articulated by Aristophanes in the

Wasps and the fights. In the Wasps, we see how unfettered popular power

in the law courts can produce a situation where the class interests of the

jurors can take precedence over abstract values of juridical fairness. When

civic debate is itself ideologized, every case is an opportunity for the common

man to bring the rich man down, and make him pay, and this regardless of

the particulars of the case ( Wasps 241). Every defendant becomes an "enemy

of the people," a "lover of monarchy," a "conspirator" or a "dictatortt (463-500).

Even wrangles in the market place over onions and salt fish are invested

with ideological implications (488-99). Whether they created this state of

affairs or simply exploit it, demagogues certainly fanned the flames of such

ideological hostilities, and Aristophanes suggests that justice hasn't a chance

when jurors are under the power of demagogic suggestion.

The resulting situation, at least in Aristophanes' view, is one in which

the decision-making process is corrupted by the need to "feed" the audience,

to bribe it with tasty treats. Successful public speech is thus presented in the

fights as a matter of flattering the audience with appeals to its stomach:

here a sausage-seller is the ideal orator, for he wiU know the most delicious

recipes. He is advised to make his speeches, Literally, palatable (fi. 214-16).

The use of cookery images in Aristophanes' discussions of successful public

speech reminds us, of course, of Brecht's warnings about "culinary theatre."

The danger of "catering" to audience "tastesff is similarly warned against by

Aristophanes in the A&m'illfs (370-74; 634-40). In the legal and political

sphere in Athens, t h s need to flatter the audience in order to get a favorable

judgement was epitomized in the career of the sycophant, who grew rich by

prosecuting wealthy men before hostile juries (Ostwald 2 19-26).

Such weaknesses of a theatricalized judicial system are still of concern

today. In her study of modern forensic speech and its effect on juries,

Bet tmth Walter (1988) found that juries tend to have a built-in bias in

favour of prosecutors (vii), a proclivity which may be a hold-over of the

democratic ideal expressed earlier by Euripides-that common written law

will bring the great man low. Walter calls the lawyer's final summation

speech to the jury the "aria" of the performance (225), and concludes that the

most successful lawyers are those who are most aware of their histrionic

function (vii). ConGrming Aristophanic fears about the pragmatics of

performance, Walter found further, &om hundreds of case studies and

interviews, that "much of what [lawyers] do and say during the trial,

including summation, is directed towards getting the jurors to like them"

(22 1).

What is most intriguing about Walter's &dings is that in legal

contexts where lawyers are not competing directly for a popular audience's

affections, in appellate court for example, they are less inclined to

demagoguery, more inclined to demonstrate expertise in law. When arguing

in appellate court before legal colleagues only, lawyers are equally

constrained by audience response; but they are constrained in the direction of

high (legal) standards and away from what we might call "low" emotional

tactics and direct appeals to the audience's ideological sympathies (224).

Aristotle complained that in his time, juries care more "for what is to the

people's advantage than for what is just" (Const. At& 1-13). The pressure

that results, when speaking before lay audiences, to appeal as directly as

possible to the emotions, is hilariously described by Philoclean in the Wasps

(565-575). For these reasons, Walter concludes that even seemingly

monologic forensic speech is "in fact a two-way communication" (viii).

Argument in the presence of a judging audience will always perforce be a

"response" to the audience's needs, wishes, tastes and prejudices.

Theatrical analogues for these pragmatics of performance are not hard

to find. Brecht's "culinary theatre" is of course one of them, as are the many

hams, schmaltz-mongers and sycophants of stage history. Like Walter's

lawyers, performing artists are probably equally likely to find their

performances changed by the level of their audience's perceived level of

expertise. An Emma Thompson or a Kenneth Branagh may think twice about

using, before an audience of respected actors, certain histrionic devises which

they would use with impunity before a popular audience of non-specialists.

The same could be said about musical performers: a '"pops" concert is not

above resorting to the kinds of bells and whistles that are thought "too low"

to be offered for the delectation of expert musicologists. Like the highflow

dynamic which we saw in the previous chapter, there appears to be a

highflow polarity in the cuisine of performance technique as well: one "caters"

to expert taste with rarefied specialist knowledge and textual fidelity, and

satisfies the lay audience with emotion and ideology. Speaking of the "low"

tactics used on stage to win the favour of the mass festival audience,

Aristophanes describes plays which have "slaves scattering nuts from a little

basket among the spectators" (Wasps, 58). Such culinary tactics, although

ridiculed as vulgar, were apparently quite common (cf. Peace 962, Wealth

794-80 1, and Sommerstein 1983 vol. 4: 157)

In Page's analysis of actors' interpolations discussed earlier, there is

also evidence that the pragmatics of performance will tend to have a number

of other, related effects. Performers often appear to have "improved" their

texts by making them, on the one hand, more conventional and repetitious,

and on the other, more gratuitously spectacular and sensational. Tragic

endings are often changed to implausibly happy ones, and the addition of

redundant virtuosic ornamentation seems common as well (Page 43). There

seems to have been an urge to suit the presentation to the tastes of the

audience, which in some cases seems to have meant the deletion of certain

speeches or episodes that were crucial for the coherence of the plot (Page 38-

9)

What is perhaps most fascinating about such interpolations is that

they appear to characterize oral speech practices generally. In oral speech as

in performance, the pragmatics of action and effect on the Listener take

precedence over the syntactic coherence of what is said. We discussed this

earlier with reference to Plato's equation between the oral speaker and the

lover in the P h a e h s . In that discussion we suggested that, despite its

weaknesses, writing does have the virtue of fostering greater

disinterestedness and logical consistency. In Thomas' study of Athenian

family and state history as perpetuated by written and oral means

respectively (1989), we find some interesting corroboration for the Platonic

view that speaking in public "means fkequently saying good-bye to the truth"

(2 72e).

According to Thomas' hdings, an oral version of a given event will

tend to take a more "conventional and repetitious form" than will the same

material recorded and communicated in writing (214). Furthermore, an oral

history quickly becomes ideologically selective as well: historical events (and

people) which do not explicitly confirm the basic ideological picture of Athens

as a bastion of freedom and justice and a bulwark against enslavement get

deleted from the account. Only the written documents retain traces of

military defeats, shameful deeds, collusion with tyrants, bribery. The reason

for this is clear: a speaker is always dialogically engaged in a concrete

communicative context where some kind of real action is taking place. An

orator delivering a funeral oration, for example, is not in a position to remind

mourners that the battle in which their loved ones lost their lives was a

disgraceful defeat, or that victory was gained by morally dubious means.

When delivering obsequies, one must perforce be obsequious.

From this we might conclude that the same is likely to go for speakers

in other contexts as well: the needs of the listeners and the context will tend

to be given precedence over the internal completeness or accuracy of the said.

As Roland Barthes has put it, the needs of interlocution tend to "overwhelm"

what is said. In speech situations, my body, as speaker, must respond to the

needs of your body, as listener. In writing, the listener's body is absent, and

so are its needs; in writing, in Barthes' words: "I think less for you, I think

more for the 'truth'." Writing at home, Phrylucus must have thought me

Sack of lldiletus a great idea; within the festival context of dramatic

performance, it was a disaster. Ditto for Euripides and his scepticism about

Zeus.

Not only is one likely to have the motive for glossing over certain

unpalatable truths in a speech situation, but such is the ephemerality of the

spoken word that these omissions and illogicalities will tend not even to be

noticed. It is only when one writes down, say, a farmly genealogy, that

missing generations and impossible chronologies become obvious and

undisguisable. Accordingly, it is only because Page has the text before him,

in a written version that can be inspected with the eyes, that he can see that

something important has dropped out of a plot. Similarly with Aristophanes'

jurors and his festival audience: without the aid of some kind of written

version of the case, it is hard if not impossible to judge the truth of what has

been said.

In stage history &om antiquity to the present, we can easily find

examples of all the types of distortions and falsifications which Thomas h d s

issuing &om oral versions of family and state history: characters are deleted

or merged into composites, incidents are wiped out or get mixed up in

performance with other incidents, complexities are simplified, time

telescoped. Oral history's tendency to remember defeats as victories has a

clear analogue in the stage's proclivity for turning sad endings into happy

ones, as nineteenth-century performers did with Romeo and JuLiet and other

plays. Oral history also has a habit of foregrounding and then remembering

only sensational aspects of an event at the expense of its "substance." For

example, a political reformer is remembered not for his role in introducing

radical democracy, but for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his

death m o m a s 203). Similarly in the theatre, a play like me B d s enters

stage history not as an alarming symptom of European antiSemitism, but as

a stunning spectacle in which Henry Irving slowly laced up his boots. Just as

Thomas has found that the needs of the context of the epitapfi0ei-e. the

glofication of Athenian democracy-pragmatically dominated everything

said there, so too do performative choices in the theatre often suggest that

the culinary and ideological needs of the public can substantively affect the

presentation of theatrical material.30

Students of linguistics generally claim that writing lags behind speech

and tends to conserve outmoded forms. But in the realm of public

performance, where audiences may come to judge already convinced about

what is right and just and what is not, it is writing, not speech, that may be

more progressive. Writing is able to imagine new kinds of speech long before

they would be applauded in actuality. Not only do the writings of Aspasia

and Lysias come to mind, but also those of Maria Stewart in nineteenth-

century America. She gave the very first public speech by an American

woman in Boston in 1832. But her oration was about the need for higher

education for blacks, and female blacks in particular, and it met with an

audience so hostile that she was forced to give up public speaking within the

year (Safire 1992:562). So we cannot be but sympathetic, ultimately, to the

30 1 do not mean to suggest by this that sad endings are better than happy ones or that catering to audience taste is necessarily a bad thing. As in other "free market" situations, the need to satisfy public demand creates competition and can produce good results. In genres of unfettered representation, such as novels and Glm, I might even argue that happy endings are ethically superior to ones where everyone is blown up a t the end. But the theatre's way of representing reality is not nearly so totalising and closed as novelistic or filmic representations are. The question to ask of a theatrical hearing is thus the one which might be put to a court of law: did the case get a fair hearing? Questions like this are not particularly relevant to novel and films, which usually achieve their definitive form only once, after which point they are mechanically reproduced (rather than reinterpreted) and consumed by all audiences in the same version.

actor who in Germany insisted that Nora stay home. A theatrical audience,

like Aristophanes' jurors Pbilucleon and Bdd 'eon , may know what it likes

and what it hates before even hearing the evidence.31

Without the checks to its stereotyping tendencies provided by such

written documents as, say, the written histories of Thucydides, oral history

takes on "the quality of a timeless catalogue of heroic deeds" (Thomas 232).

An example of how dramatic texts may indeed function much like historical

documents in recording the more "unsavory" or diflicult truths of a given

society can be seen in comparing Euripides' Ion to oral tradition on the

subject of cormption at Delphi. Oral history, as Thomas shows, "forgets" the

Alcmaeonids' bribery of the oracle and remembers only that they were great

enemies of tyranny. The "bookish" Euripides, on the other hand, does not

hesitate to call the oracle a "Delphian h d . "

Nevertheless, while a writer of plays or histories may be free of a

certain hhd of performative motive, he is never entirely fiee fiom aLI

motives, nor lacking in techniques for fulfilling them. Literate

decontextualization only extends so far. Even the solitary writer is subject to

personal agendas, and, if skilled, he can devise specious "proofs." As a

character in Euripides' Phoenix says of this problem of truth and argument:

"I've already been chosen to judge many disputes and have heard witnesses

31 Philocleon means "loving CLeonw and Bdelycleon, "loathing Cleon."

competing against each other with opposing accounts of the same event. And

like any wise man I work out the truth by looking at a man's nature" (fkag.

812 Nauck; Humphreys 323). In other words, in human conflicts, it is

sometimes not the arguments that matter, but the disputants' "natures" or

intentions. Although intentions can certainly be obscured in speech, they are

perhaps even more easily veiled in writing.

As in the sphere of written law, the dramatic text remains, long after

the ballots have been cast, as a standard against which to review the

decisions taken within oral-performative contexts. A hearing on the stage, as

in the courts, is always subject to appeal? The case may be brought before

the public again with different interpreters and different jurors, or perhaps

when social conditions are more favorable to a fair hearing. As long as both

written and spoken media are retained to balance each other's weaknesses, it

would seem that the decisions made in performance will be able to go on

exemp-g democracy in action without straying too far from the abstract

call of justice. The low culinary techniques which "cook the books" according

to ideological stereotype will, we must assume, be kept in check by high

intellectual and professional standards, and vice versa.

As in the forensic and political sphere, the texts of the theatre, both

ancient and modern, are not ends in themselves. Rather, they set in motion a

32 Jury trials in fifth century Athens were actually not open to appeal; but ours are today, of course.

discursive process whose mode is pedozmance and whose end is a decikibn.33

While potentidly arbitrary, this decision remains implicitly open for future

discursive interrogation and can be overturned at any time. For example,

readers of the Eweaides cannot help but be struck by the almost

scandalous arbitrariness of Athene's deciding vote. She adds her ballot in

favour of Orestes' acquittal because, as she says with a feeble attempt a t self-

justScation, she simply prefers men. Understood in its proper context, this

gesture is not a bit of institutionalized male chauvinism,3~ but is a political

gesture in the broadest sense of the word. As Christian Meier (1990)

describes it, "what is presented here is, in a nutshell, the 'decisionist' insight"

which constitutes one of the main political advances of Athenian democracy.

Athene's vote, while poorly justified, is accepted as legitimate simply because

it is "part of the democratic decision-making process." She has heard the

evidence, and votes on the basis of who she is at that particular moment, and

Aeschylus makes no apology for the arbitrariness and blatant partiality of

her decision. The point of this scene for Athenian law no less than for the

aesthetic court of the theatre, is that the decision is accepted as valid despite

33 In our comparison between the decision-malung process in court and tha t which takes place within a theatre festival audience, some readers may sense a qualitative difference. They might object that judging the gudt of an accused criminal i s fundamentdy different from judging the excellence of a play. However, a s the recent case of David Mamet's Oleanna shows clearly, audience reaction is intimately tied up with judgments about whether the characters are being justly or unjustly accused. Like the ancient dramas, Oieanna is structured as an "indictment" of i t s characters, and audiences have loved or hated it depending on their "verdictsn about the validity of the playwright's accusations. See also above, n.16.

34 See also Aeschylus' Suppliants, who praise the jury of Argos for legally empowering them a s women.

its partiality, despite the fact that it "may not necessarily rest on compelling

arguments" (107). As a decision taken within the living context of the

decision-makers' present reality, it may not embody "ultimate truth"; but it

will at least be an accurate reflection of one real moment in the community's

ongoing sear& for it. What could be said of a society with written laws and

jury courts could be said also of social contexts where written theatre thrives:

that the decisions made by the "interpretersn and their audiences in and

through performance may appear arbitrary, superficial or even downright

wrong to posterity. But such decisions can inform the future, without binding

it, about the experiential truth of one particular moment in the ongoing

dialogue between speakers and their texts. And what is more, the freedom to

make such decisions could even be described as a precondition of any

genuinely Liberal order, political or aesthetic (see Meier 108).

Chapter Four: I

The Phenomenology of Inscrip tion k

Brin out the scales then, if my duty is to ju ! ge two master poets like a grocer selling cheese.

Aristop hanes

In death the creature got a voice; in Life it had none.

Sop hocles

W h e n Aeschylus represented Athens' eponymous deity on stage in

the Eumenides, he envisioned her as a democratic-minded, but less than

perfectly rational dikast casting her vote according to her taste. For all the

reasons outlined in the last chapter, we can see why this image is as fitting a

tribute to Athens' populist legal system as it is to the theatrical stage on

which it was displayed. Athenian law may eventually have been carved

literally into stone, but it functioned rather as the Solonian shield under the

protection of which free democratized debate could be carried on. Like the

jury courts, theatre was a literate civic institution which owed its existence

largely to written law and the isegoria which it made possible. As we will be

showing in what follows, writing was responsible for expanding the fieedom

and mobility of human actors in other ways as well. Not only in legal

disputes, but in economic exchange, private communication, and in other

personal spheres of action too, writing was instrumental in the creation of

new types of social intercourse, of all of which theatre was the accurate

aesthetic reflection.

Writing recently about the nature of writing, Derrida observed the

following:

Th[e] movement of analytic abstraction in the circulation of arbitrary signs is quite parallel to that within which money is constituted. Money replaces things by their signs, not only within a society but from one culture to another, or from one economic organization to another. That is why the alphabet is mercantile. It must be understood within the monetary moment of economic rationality. The critical description of money is the faithful reflection of the discourse on writing. In both cases, an anonymous supplement is substituted for the thing (1976:300).l

Derrida's theory of the relation between money and writing is surprisingly

identical to the ancients' own view of it. After a quick look a t Homeric

economy, we will see how the use of an arbitrary currency is indeed a faithfid

reflection of the t r a c in theatrical signs.

Like other preliterate milieux, the world of the Homeric epics reflects a

"pre-market society" (Donlan 1981:lOl). As Aristotle was to say later of

"barbarian" economies, exchange in the absence of coinage meant the direct

I have modified Spivak's translation very slightly, for she doesn't use the word 'mercantile," which seems a more accurate choice than the two approximate terms she puts together in Lieu of Derrida's one. The Greek word "emporos," meaning "long-distance trader," might d s o be appropriate here.

barter of "useful objects for other useful objects" (Pol 1.i.x. 1257a25). Strabo

similarly spoke of the Albanians as "not like shopkeepers;" they too did not

use coins, but rather used "straightforward" barter to exchange goods

(502) as cited by Jones 1993:Zl). Aristotle's and Strabo's descriptions of such

pre-market systems suggest that while perhaps "barbarous" on one level, this

system was also more "natural" on another. Aristotle associates the use of

coinage with "the other art of wealth-getting, namely, retail trade" (1257b). A

look at the Homeric economy shows that the emergence of retail trade out of

the barter system meant more than just the emergence of "the art of wealth-

getting."

We see the barter system at work in the epic when the Achaians obtain

wine by exchanging bronze, iron, s h s , oxen and slaves (U. W.472-5). But

as Donlan has shown in his study of such Homeric transactions, goods given

and exchanged were valued symbolicdy, not according to strictly economic

principles. Like the aboriginal Inhabitants of the Queen Charlotte Islands of

British Columbia, for whom the possession of coppers and blankets

traditionally secured social prestige (Cole and Lockner 1993:52, 128-9), the

Homeric society prized commodities in a way that was not commensurate

with what we would call their "monetary" value. A cup, tripod, item of

clothing or jewelry, as a "treasured" status symbol or "prize," would not have

a direct equivalent in common goods such as animals or other natural

produce; hundreds or even thousands of oxen would be needed to make up

the perceived value of a single item of "treasure" (Dolan 106). In short,

material transactions were s t c a s e d into two distinct levels of exchange, the

"prestige" economy of "treasure" given and received among the warrior elites,

and the substantive economy having to do with livelihood, and in which

everyone participated:

Functionally, the social-symbolic sphere of the Homeric economy sustains and perpetuates a graded status-system, enabling those at the top to presente their positions relative to those below (109).

It was only by being a member of the warrior elite that one had access to the

items with prestige value, and these were circulated within elites according

to ritualistic and symbolic rules as opposed to economic ones (as grfts, signs of

kingly hospitality, etc.). For this reason, the Homeric economy is directly

embedded in the "total social structure," and transactions are carried out

according to non-economic motives (101-6). We can see this clearly in the

agon between AchiUeus and Agamemnon: the allocation of treasure-goods is

described as symbolic of the relative status of the warriors. And the wealth of

objects offered to AchiUeus in belated recognition of his status (IX.160-61)

serves as a "demonstration of the ranking figure's ability to exercise political

dominance by controlling the movement of prestige goods" (1 10).

With the adoption of coinage throughout the Greek world in the

seventh century (Kraay 1976:25-27), the symbolic and socially-stratified

status system of Homeric exchange was replaced by a liberalized,

independent economic sphere. Here, natural products, trade and commerce

between different groups were emphasized instead of the circulation within

one group of prestige goods (Don1a.n 110). Solon's interference, through law,

in the perpetuation of aristocratic social values was echoed in the economic

sphere by the advent of coinage. As the tragedians described written law, so

Plato and Aristotle described money: it was a great equalizer. Retail trade, as

Plato describes it, has positive social ben&ts beyond the advent of

shopkeepers:

For surely one who makes equal and similar the nature of goods of any kind, when it is dissimilar and unequal, does good; and we must agree that this is what the power of money also achieves (Laws XI. 918.a-b).

Money is an "instrument" (Pol. 289a-b), a "medium" which in Aristotlels

words makes things equal: "Money is in fact a kind of measure which by

making things measurable reduces them to equality" (Nie6. Et6. V.V. 1133a-

b). In a free market economy as opposed to a prestige one, exchanges must be

able to occur among socially unequal individuals and between one social

sphere and another. In truly reciprocal economic relations, Aristotle writes, it

is not always

two doctors [for example] that associate for exchange, but a doctor and a farmer, or in general people who are different and unequal; but these must be equated. This is why all things that are exchanged must be somehow comparable. It is for this end that money has been introduced, and it becomes in a sense an intermediate; for it measures all things ...[ and determines] how many shoes are equal to a house or to a given amount of food (1 133a17-2 1).

Money--called nomisma because it is a man-made custom or law (nomos)

rather than a naturally occurring phenomenon-thus makes both goods and

the individuals who exchange them commensurate and equal. As an abstract

medium for fxing value outside of concrete social relations, nomisma gives

shoemakers the same economic rights to purchase tripods as kings had

monopolized in Homer, just as written nomoi had equalized their rights and

freedoms in the settling of disputes as well.

The representational "law" of money was also recognized by the

ancients as analogous to the representational structure of writing and

language generally. Both are merely customary, have no real meaning or

value in themselves, and function by convention in the absence of the thing

itself (cf. Plato's description of money, where he uses the same terms he uses

elsewhere to describe writing: Repub. m.416e-417a, also II.371b; see also

Plutarch: "the use of language resembles the exchange of coinage ..." De

Pyttuae O~aculis lOCIV=9406b as cited by Jones 1993:12). The writer of the

dialogue Elryxras (Plato?) wrote at length on the arbitrariness of money: "In

Ethiopia they use engraved stones which would be useless to a Spartan"; the

Carthaginians tie objects up in leather pouches and the Spartans use "iron

weight as a currency." But a l l these systems are as mutually

incomprehensible as foreign languages: "among us the man who had the

most of these would be no richer than if he had a number of pebbles horn the

mountain" (399e-400c). Like language and writing, which make it possible to

discuss things and states of affairs in their absence and in the absence even

of (one of) the speakers themselves, so money, by representing absent things

arbitrarily, expands people's ability to exchange goods without reference to

their own identities, or status, or to the presence or identity of the things

exchanged.

We saw in the case of written law that the first step in the

establishment of an independent, public legal order was the writing down of

ancestral thesmia by the thesmothetai, the hereditary lawgivers. These laws,

although written, were st i l l private property in effect; they had not yet been

thoroughly abstracted away fkom the body of the king. In the history of

coinage, we find that a similarly proprietary stage was gone through before

money became a genuinely public, city phenomenon. The Erst issues of Greek

coins, which Kraay calls Wappenmiinzeo, or "heraldic coins," were connected

with particular ruling families or other individuals who appear to have been

personally responsible for minting them (Kraay 56-7). These coins were

stamped with changing imagery (beetle, bull's head, horse, seal, lion, cock,

goat, owl, etc.); and like the early coinage of Medieval Europe, these heraldic

coins with their shifting types seem to have been recognized as valid only for

short periods of time each (59). A half-stater fkom Ephesus, dated before 590

B.C.E.-contemporary with the Solonian law code and a half century before

the first official contests in tragedy-has words written upon it: "I am the

badge of Phanes" (23). Coins of this kind were associated also with the

Peisistratids of Athens, appeared in Ionia and Lydia as well, and hctioned,

in Kraay's words, as "personal devices of successive rulers or tyrants" (21-3,

25). Although he puts it forward only as a hypothesis, Kraay guessed that the

change in types may have had some connection with the Panathenaic

festivals.

A co~ect ion between money and the festival atmosphere within which

drama emerged was soon to be palpable, however. By the m h century,

anyway, Aristophanes could speak in the same breath about visitors to the

festival and the money they brought with them in the form of tribute ("That

is why they will come now fiom those states bringing you their tribute, eager

to see that superb poet who took the risk of talking justice before the

Athenians." A&ar. 641-51). Pericles called Athens a "wage-earning city,"

(Kraay 64); and she displayed those wages on stage every year a t the Great

Dionysia as one of the central civic activities of that festival ("they passed a

decree to divide the funds derived fkom the tributes of the allies into talents

and to bring it onto the stage, when the theatre was full, at the festival of

Dionysus ..." Isokrates De Pace 82 as cited by Goldhill 1990: 10 1-4). Theatrical

presentations thus shared "top billing" at the festival, shared the stage, with

money. Does this tell us anything about the nature of dramatic performance?

The Greeks apparently believed that their theatre festivals had "nothing to

do with Dionysus" (Fhckinger, 1973: 1 1; Pickard-Cambridge 13 1); did they,

then, have something to do with coins?

To answer this question, we need to look at what happened during and

just after the Peisitratid tyranny in the last few decades of the sixth century.

Firstly, sometime after 560, the heraldic coins with shifting pictographic

types were replaced by new fiedtype: the famous Attic owl with a helmeted

head of Athena on one side and a standing owl, olive branch in the field, on

the other. Most importantly, this coin featured a writing that did not refer to

"ownership" by a sponsoring individual like Phanes. These owls were

stamped with an Alpha, a Theta and an Epsilon-Athens. A coin of this type,

clearly marked with the city of its origin rather than the name of an

individual patron, is explicitly international currency. Unlike the earlier

heraldic coins, which have been found by archaeologists only in particular

localities (Kraay 58), these "owls &om Laurium" (Birds 1106-8) circulated

widely, ending up in places far away from Athens. "All these features suggest

a change of h c t i o n , from a coinage intended for internal needs to one

designed for foreign trade" (60).

This new international status of coinage is in keeping with movements

elsewhere in Greek social life toward greater cosmopolitanism. Many of the

f i s t writers of laws for Greek states were also foreigners (Gagarin 1986:60),

and nearly &of the lyric poets who assembled in Athens around the time of

drama's invention were from elsewhere (Pickard-Cambridge 1927: 19-58;

Herington 1985:61-81). As we noted in Chapter 2, the poetic heteroglossia

that distinguished drama from earlier forms accurately reflected this

increased cosmopolitanism. With Athenian coinage now intended for use

outside Athens as well as within, we see economic interaction extended in

two ways at once: both spatially and temporally.

Plato recognized the first of these when he noted in the Politics that

with money one can make exchanges indifferently in one's own market-place

a t home "or traveling fkom city to city by land or sea, exchanging money for

other things or money for money" (289e-290a). The ability to do so is

inherently empowering to the individual: with money as portable as it is,

even a shoemaker from a land where shoes have no value can travel to a

place where shoes are in short supply, trade his shoes for money, and return

home to purchase the house that would otherwise have been unattainable.

For this reason, Aristotle rightly associated money with the existence of

surplus goods (Politics 1257a-b), and its workings with the law of supply and

demand. But the freedom from local conditions of supply and demand that

money wins for its users is reinforced by money's abstraction horn temporal

conditions as well. In Aristotle's words, "money is also a ldnd of guarantee of

future exchange," for while money is not always worth the same amount, "its

value is more likely to be stable" than things themselves (Nicb. Eth. 1133a-

b). Indeed, a sudden drop in demand can render actual commodities

valueless. Real objects, the "things themselves," are also subject to physical

realities, such as decay and seasonality, fkom which a representing medium

such as coinage is effectively immune.

Just as the Athenian owl represented exchange freed from temporal

and spatial constraints, so too did the dramatic text, which came to

prominence within a century, sigrufy poetic composition liberated horn time

and space. With a written text "in his pocket," Aeschylus could restage plays

in Sicily that had already been shown at Athens (Podlecki 1966:6).

Aristophanes, too, could give repeat performances in different years

(Arrowsmith 1962:98, n. 70), and revise his texts after their performance

(Sommerstein 1985:xix), as could Euripides (Segal 1986:78). Unlike the

partly improvised recitation of the oral bard, the dramatic text outlives its

context, guaranteeing that, like a coin, it retains its value for the future and

thus ensures the possibility for the "appeal" that we mentioned previously.

Like city currency, the Athenian play both reflected a local origin and saw

itself in cosmopolitan terms, was aware of itself, if you will, as an

international commodity.

From this point of view, the presence on stage of foreign monies does

seem to tell us something about the type of social institution that theatre

originally was. The clearest image of theatre's international, mercantile

nature can be had by way of contrast with religious ritual. Like Dionysian

rites, which, as Euripides shows in the Bacchai, were explicitly not for

"outside" viewers, religious and initiatory rituals are by nature local

phenomena (Bynam 1981:142-63). While rituals of propitiation, sacrifice,

fertility and rites of passage are found around the world, the details of their

performance are not universal; on the contrary, rituals are, as concrete social

practices, a reflection of prevailing local conditions and are as senseless and

even repellent to outsiders as they are "right" and "necessary" to those for

whom they are customary. Stories, on the other hand, have a greater

universalist appeal, and the mythological material upon which drama was

largely based had always had a strong "universalizing tendency" (Herington

59). As songs about the ancestors of a variety of politically and geographically

&tinct peoples, the epics were not tied to a specific locality as rituals

generally are (see also Kirk 1970; Brask and Morgan 1992). Sacred

aboriginal Canadian songs, for example, are performable in particular

localities only; their export to outsiders in the form of a written version is

explicitly forbidden (Filewod 1992:26).

The reorganization of the Panathenaia festival that made it into a city

institution is conventionally dated at c.566 B.C.E. (Thomas 1989:290). Epic

recitation was already a "festival phenomenon" by this time, involving the

performance of acknowledged "classics" (Heiffer l968:8). Thespis began

competing in the musical competitions in the new category of tragedy c.560-

534; competitions in men's and boyst choruses were added to the festive

agones mousikoiin 50918 or 50211; comedy was added as a prize category in

486 (Winkler 1990:49; Pickard-Cambridge 21-25, 92). But whereas, for

example, the dithyrambic choruses had entered the competitive lists already

loaded with distinctly local, tribal associations-having had a long history as

a tribal form-the tragic chorus was a new type of performing group and was

free of all such connotations and connections (see esp. Gernet 1981:17;

Raschke 1988:79). Both in its (probable) performance by ephebic hoplites and

in its militarist dance formations and marching music (Winkler 20-58;

Pickard-Cambridge 159), the tragic chorus was a competitive art of the

Athenian d t a r y state and thus had imperial, or interstate associations

from the start. The tributes of Athens' military allies thus shared the stage

with tragic choruses for substantive cultural reasons. The xenoi, the

strangers and allies who came to the City Dionysia to bring their tribute and

watch the show (Achar. 496-509), were by both actions participating, yet as

"outsiders," in Athens' cultural and military display-and in a sense paying

for it. One does not perform rituals for "wages." Yet at mercantile Athens, the

poets were paid (Frogs 367), as were the actors (Dover 1972: 15- 161, as was

"wage-earning" Athens herself in the form of allied tributes. In a ritual

context, it is local gods, not cosmopolitan citizens, who get paid.

As Isocrates wrote of the internationalist character of Greek

institutions in the fifth century: "those are called Greeks rather who share in

our culture than those who share in our common race" (or. 4, Panegydcus 50

as cited by PfeiEer 1968:50).2 In other words, in this mercantile age of

international currency, Athenian culture, too, separated itself from locality

and blood-ties to become an international commodity suitable for "export"

and expressly directed beyond its point of origin.

The rise in the use of coinage just prior to the appearance of drama

helped determine that the theatrical stage was, and remains, a mercantile

space. Dramatic characters, from Sophocles' Theban kings to Aristophanes'

Athenian jurors to Dekker's London merchants to Shakespeare's whole

cosmopolitan crew are forever talking about obols and drachmas and ducats

and florins, and visibly giving them to one another on stage as in ~~ Night. As a perennial stage image, the coin represents above all the mobility

of signs that Derrida described at the opening of the chapter. By detaching

economic value from its former embeddedness in social relations, the coin

allowed even Athenian slaves to get rich. Within a decade or so of Aeschylus'

death, Pericles instituted pay for public service (Ostwald 223), and his

See Jaeger's discussion of Isocrates' (fourth-century) internationalist cultural ideals: 'The economic exchange of goods by export and import is only the material expression of this spiritual principal. He makes the Piraeus [the port of Athens] the focus of the whole commercial life of Greece. And, similarly, he makes the Attic festivals the great social centre of the Hellenic world. In the immense throngs of strangers and in the many-sided intellectual intercourse which takes place there, both the wealth and the ar t of Athens and Greece are displayed and harmonized with one another" ( 1960: III.78).

"commodi6cation" of civic life meant that even the poor could take up

powerful decision-making positions. As we are Ied to believe by Aristophanes,

jurors were notoriously poor; they took the job mostly for the obols. In a social

context not "alienated" by the use of money, only the privileged leisure class

can Bord to enter public life.

In an oral context, a citizen's perceived social worth will tend to

remain tied to hereditary wealth. Homer's heroes are "valued" in precisely

this way: a man is judged noble in terms of who his father is. Social worth is

measured in vials of noble blood, so to speak. But by Sophocles' and

Euripides' time, poetry shows a ditrerent sort of economy, and the worth of

dramatic figures is measured in such "anonymous" scales as even a

shopkeeper might use (Euripides was said to be the son of a greengrocer, but

Aristophanes may have been simply having a joke at the tragedian's

expense). In Elektra, family prestige is shown no longer to be the measure of

human nobility (367-go), and even the offspring of barbarian slaves will be

judged of higher value than snobbish, dim-witted aristocrats like

Agamemnon (Ajax 1225-1400). In drama, characters are "written in our

hearts" as worthy (1399) according to calculations other than hereditary

lineage. For this we must give at least partial acknowledgement to the re-

valuation of worth that the anonymous coin effected.

The liberation from timekpace categories, and from determined social

relations, that money achieved in the economic sphere has its corollary

elsewhere in verbal life. Now, dramatic texts, although certainly among the

first books that Greek literacy produced, were probably not the very first,

that honour apparently going to the works of the Pre-Socratic philosophers

(Harvey 1966:587; Turner 1951, 1971; Bums, 1981). But books of any kind

are not likely to have been the most common manifestation of literacy at this

time. The Greeks wrote on leather, papyrus and waxed tablets, but samples

of such writing could never have come down to us from the sixth century;3

o u sources for these writings are mainly literary and iconographic (for

example: Herodotus V.58-59; Burns 374). The majority of actual samples of

writing contemporary with drama's appearance that have survived are

inscriptions, both private and public, on the more durable materials of stone,

pottery, marble, lead, household objects and tombs. We have so far spoken of

two types of inscription, coins and law codes. Let us now look at the others.

Solon described his own written code as a "shield." In a society where

war is as common an occurrence as it was in Greece, a shield is bound to be a

loaded image. In Book XVIII of the Bad, there are almost 200 lines devoted

to the famous description of Achilleus' shield. Made by Hephaistos, it depicts

scenes horn the cosmic, natural, and social realms. Central among these

painterly vignettes is a description of the workings of pre-literate justice,

where the blood-feud between two men is arbitrated by the elders of the

tribe. In the dramatic age, as we have shown, the nature of justice had been

An actual sample of a waxed writing tablet has, however, survived from very early seventh century northern Etruria, with an alphabet inscribed along the top as a prototype presumably. Reproduced in P o w d , 1991:155, fig. 55.

radically altered: power to evaluate actions had been wrested fkom the hands

of a select bench of elders who inherited it as their "own," and placed in the

hands of ordinary citizens, drawn yearly by lot, and casting their lots under

protection of the shield of written law. In Aeschylus' Seven Against ZZzebes,

this Solonian connection between the shield and literate protection is made

again. In devoting an entire play to verbal descriptions of the shields of a

city's assailants, Aeschylus is harking loudly back to Homeric practice, to be

sure (see Garner 1990:179-83 for other interpretive allusions to Homer in the

tragedies). But the shields of the Seven prove not to be modeled on epic

practice at all. These theatrical shields are not image-laden tapestries or

colourful murals of the sights and sounds of life, as Achilleus' was. Rather,

they are modeled on Solonian literate practice, for they are shields of

m - t i n g . 4

The play is fairly static in terms of action, but it is nonetheless tightly

wound around a central opposition horn which it gains great tension. That

opposition is between the written proclamations of the sheld-bearers who

aim to sack the city, and the battle as it unfolds in actuality. No distinction is

made here between the writing on the shields of the aggressors and their

It is worth mentioning here that what Powell (1991) has described as the "first literary allusionn of the Western tradition, the poetry inscribed on "Nestor's Cup" (c. 735-720 B.C.E. and still extant), presents us with another clear image of the changes that were made to Homeric practice under the impact of literacy. For whereas the famous Bronze Age cup of Nestor in the Kad 01.632-7) is decorated with the forms of doves and with golden nails, a cup made in the late eighth century, and meant to refer to Homer's, is conspicuously inscribed with alphabetic writing, complete with punctuation for word, phrase and line divisions (163).

speech: their written sayings are descried as "shouts" or "loud cries1' (476-8)

and "boasts (437); the letters "declare" (434), are "threats" (436); the

characters on the shields are even granted the power to "babble" (661) and

utter "dreadful sayings'' (678-9). The sayings on the shields are in essence

threats, or rather promises and predictions about the impending destruction

of Thebes. One forecasts: "I1l.l burn the city" (434); one promises that "Ares

himself shall not cast me horn the tower'' (470); the last depicts Justice,

personified as a woman, saying: "I wiU bring him home and he shall have his

city and shall walk in his ancestral house." Triumphant destruction is what

these writings vaunt3 But the battle itself proves them false; the attack is

repulsed and the city saved. Because we do not meet the warriors behind the

shields, their writings become a kind of "character1' in the play. The contest

acted out within the drama becomes one between the promises of inscription,

and the temporal unfolding of events which they attempt to prescribe.

Shoshana Felman (1983) and George Steiner (1977) have written

about the paradoxical nature of promises of any kind, written and spoken.

How can a physical entity such as a mortal person even make a promise at

all? A promise implies a knowledge of the future, which no speaker has; or,

let alone knowledge about the future, it assumes the mere existence of a

future which the promiser may not even live into. That contingent, present-

And as Derrick de Kerckhove has rightly observed, each boast is an individualized utterance with its own attitude and point of view. By contrast, warriors subjected to epic treatment are invariably given non-particularized formulaic utterances, regardless of their personalities. See above, pp. 97- 98ff.

bound creatures such as men even dare to make promises at a l I strikes these

two writers as perhaps a "scandal" in itself. But what is merely scandalous

about the promises of speaking bodies becomes a kind of ontological

emergency in their writing. For what me Seven suggests about Polyneices'

writing, is applicable to aLI -tiag. To write means to fracture a given act of

communication into two or more temporal compartments, each of which is

sealed off from the others to some extent. I write in my temporal present, a

writing that will be read in your temporal future. When in that unpredictable

future you read what I have written, it will speak to you from the past, since

that is where it was written; but it will speak to you in a present which I as

writer will not share, and of which I can know nothing. What is noticeably

scandalous about oral promises is therefore even more pressingly the scandal

of writing, for every writing is directed at an unknown future.

The inscriptions on the Seven's shields, no less than the inscription of

laws on stelai or plays on papyrus, stand thus as implicit contracts or

covenants between temporal contexts. They intend control over the future-

"All men shall..;" "Thou shalt not..;" "He shall have his city..;" "Ares shall

not..;" "I will burn..."-and into whatever contexts they enter, they bring the

future-controlling echoes of the past in which they were authored.

What does this mean for drama? In the first place, it means that those

theorists such as Peter Szondi (1987) who speak of drama as the genre of the

"absolute present" are telling only a small slice of the tale. Using Bakhtin's

category of the chronotope, we might agree that drama's internal

representation of time is oriented toward and in favour of the present.

Radically departing fkom epic speech in this respect, which always speaks of

events which took place in the distant past, dramatic discourse inhabits the

same temporal context as the story it speaks about. What in the epic is

presented as legendary material cut off from any experiential contact with

the singer and his audience, is represented in drama as a contemporary

event, unfolding in the same temporal context which the actors and audience

themselves inhabit. As Bakhtin has persuasively argued, a discursive shift

into the present and away from an illustrious but inaccessible past is loaded

with political and ideological signifi.cance. The implicit message which epic

speech sends to its audiences is, in effect: "Everything is already over and

done with. Nothing is happening now; yours is just to marvel as a

descendant." By telling of tragedies and battles which are unfolding now,

before the audience's very eyes, drama, on the other hand, acts as a kind of

validation of the present. Contrary to epic speech, it says, in effect: "The

great decisions are happening now, in your lifetime. This world is your world,

these figures are your contemporaries, and these problems belong to you, to

us." Or as Goethe noticed in his 1797 essay on Epic and Drama (1986:192-

9 9 , "the epic poet describes an action as being altogether past and

completed"; he speaks as one recollecting things which have happened, and

which "belong absolutely to the past." The voice of the epic poet is "the voice

of the muses in general." Against the epic word, Goethe contrasts the

explicitly anti-transcendent, living contemporaneity of dramatic

presentation: "With the stage player on the other hand, the position is

exactly reversed. He comes before us as a distinct and determined individual.

He wants to interest ourselves in him and his immediate surroundings."

Even when the subject of a play is taken fiom the past, as the ancient

dramas often were, it is still represented fiom the point of view of the still-

evolving historical present being jointly lived by the actor and his audience,

within the concrete present of the theatrical event. So Szondi is a t least

partly right to stress the present-ness of drama in comparison to other

modes,

However, the structure of the written word has determined that this

internally represented present, this dramatic chronotope, is already

inhabited by the past, by the past of the author's inscription. And because

written plays outlive the present of their performance, the intercourse

between past and present which they open up in performance is itself but a

single juncture of temporalities in a potentially infinite series aimed toward

the future. Anything written both comes from the past, and positions itself

for future readings.

This poly-temporality of the dramatic text gives it the structure of a

legal utterance, as we noted earlier. But it also reflects the structure of

spoken language in ways that are not immediately apparent. What is rarely

tangible to speakers is that even regular speech situations are inhabited by a

complex of temporalities. Every here-and-now, in Life as on stage, is both

inhabited by the past and projects itself into the future. The thought of

writing's "pastness" has been known to offend theatre theorists since a t least

Artaud, who called for the speedy destruction of texts after their first use.

Insofar as Artaud was not talking nonsense, his view has the virtue of

reminding us that writing cannot help but offend our purest notions about

human communication: that it should remain fully alive and attuned to the

present moment. On the contrary, Polyneices' text, being fixed and finished,

was unable to respond to the changing reality of the battle as it unfolded in

the present.

By the same logic, however, even speech is gdty of this crime against

the ephemerality of the present. For it is not only written words, but all

words, which are already old when we use them. We are not, as Bakhtin

wrote, Adams and Eves uttering the first words of speech. Even if we were

each able to freshly fabricate a new language for every new moment of our

experience, we would still be the inheritors of thousands of years of

meaningful verbal communication and all the established semantic patterns

that have grown out of it. We are rather scavengers, taking words £ram

wherever we find them-fiom previous contexts, past experiences, other

people's mouths. Any act of speech requires that we breathe our own breath

into these mots trouv6s, that we make them adequate to our needs in a given

context, that we make them five for us, and for our interlocutors. Like the

dramatic actor who must take locutions fkom a text and new-fashion them

into personal, Living acts of speech, so too must every speaker off the stage

work at bringing language into the present, and into Life. The difference

between speaking a line of written text and making a "spontaneous" oral

utterance is therefore, in principle, not as great as is sometimes imagined.

Every word we use in speech is already a linguistic quotation horn elsewhere,

and thus the process of making language live is more or less the same on

stage as it is in life.

Having taken up a word for use, speakers also enter into a pact with

the future. Even to speak is to promise implicitly that one's words will "hold,"

that they will remain adequate to one's intentions during the time it takes for

them to travel to the other's ear, and on the following day as well. Language

itself has this structure of a promissory note; writing simply makes our

verbal contracts with the future explicit.

The issue for the theatre, then, is not how written exchange may or

may not sin against some illusory ideal of perfect presencefor not even

speech possesses that (cf. Derrida 1973)-but rather what it enables given

the inevitable poly- temp orality of our linguistic experience. As Derrida has

argued throughout his work, human consciousness is always inescapably

putting its faith in the mental signs, words and images that extend

consciousness beyond itself, into the future, merely as a function of its self-

preservation. To write may perhaps simply be to have greater faith in the

ability of meaning to survive the vagaries of this temporal slippage. But &om

me Seven Against Thebes, we can glimpse one thing that m i h g can do

that speech cannot.

As we saw in the previous chapter, live speech situations in the

present are hampered in ways &om which writing is comparatively fiee.

Being in the present means being subject to the needs of the present, the

ideological blindnesses of the present, and so on. Because the present cannot,

at any given point in history, accommodate all truths, writing, precisely

because it is not contextually embedded in any given point in present time

and space, can go on insisting on those ideas which present contexts have

disowned or failed to hear. Like the inscription on Polyneices' shield, writing

can uphold the rights of the losers, whose speech is silenced altogether in the

decisions of real events. To the Theban hearers of Polyneices' sayings, his

words were foolish "babblings"; and the fact that Thebes won the day

confirmed them in this view. But were they really babblings, just because

present reality nullified them? Polynieces did have some rights to the Theban

throne, after all. In writing about the justice of his claim rather than just

speaking about it, he in a sense makes reality accountable for the partiality,

one-sidedness, and occasionally arbitrary nature of its decisions.

An example £corn Aeschylus' own temporal context is illuminating

here. In the 470s, coincident with the appearance of m e Persians, the

institution of the public funeral oration was established at Athens. So intent

were the Athenians of the time on dismantling the old aristocracy and

establishing in its place a "de-tribalized" democratic polis, that legislation

was passed prohibiting the singling out of individuals for praise (Nagy

1986:95). Speech at the public funerals of war dead had to confine itself to

praise for the polis as a whole. Soldiers and generals alike were to be lauded

simply as citizens who had communally, not individually, contributed to the

glory and triumph of Athenian democracy. After centuries of Homeric-style

emphasis on ancestors and noble lineages, it became "politically incorrecti1 to

refer to such things. Nagy has suggested that these legislated restrictions

against a certain kind of speech may have led directly to the invention of a

new written genre, the poetic epigram (95). If so, this might provide a good

illustration of the remedy which decontextualized, "non-present" writing can

provide to speakers in literate milieux. Like written law, which proscribes

future action only so that it can better protect the liberties of those living

under it, the dramatic text stands also like a shield over performance,

guaranteeing that what sounds like babblings to an audience of the present

may yet receive a fairer hearing tomorrow.

Laws, coins and written promises, like dramatic texts, are thus all

covenants between temporal contexts. Like the written contract described by

Euripides in the P ' e d e s , they are "medicine against forgetting" (fkag. 572

Nauck; translated by Burns 377). In this hagment, Euripides praises writing

for protecting truth as it travels into the future: "the tablet ... does not allow

lies." We will look shortly at the Ii!@po1ytos, which shows that things are not

quite so simple: writing can preserve lies as well. For the moment, however,

let us see what other insights for dramatic texts we can wrest fiom the

structure of an inscrip tion.

The first thing we find, unexpectedly, is that the earliest alphabetical

inscriptions found so far in Greece by archaeologists are not public, but

private and fairly personal in nature. The thousands of clay tablets that have

come down to us £corn the brilliant Mycenaean palace cultures of Knossos

and Pylos, written by a handful of official scribes in Linear A and B, are

generally palace inventories (Stroud 1989: 108; Finley 1960-68:7-23). No

private correspondence, poetry or laws have been found in this writing. When

alphabetical writing begins to appear in the eighth century, however, we find

writing fist put to rather Merent ends.

In the earliest alphabetical inscriptions that we have, writing is used

to make objects speak. The objects in question are jugs, cups, vases, statues

and tombstones, and the speech is in verse, sometimes with punctuation

included. An eighth century cup, in dactylic hexameters, says: "I am the

delicious drinking cup of Nestor. Whoever &mks from thls cup, swiftly will

the desire of fair-crowned Aphrodite seize him" (Stroud 11 1- 12). A seventh

century marble statue says, in three hexameters, "Nikandra, daughter of

Deinodikes the Naxian, a maid beyond compare, sister of Deinomenes, now

wife of Phraxos, dedicated me to the far-darting goddess who delights in

arrows" (112). A final exarnple is lcost stunning in its relevance to dramatic

practice: "I explain {hupokzinomiu) the same thing to a l l men, whoever asks

me, namely, that Andron son of Antiphanes dedicated me as his tithe? This

example is so provocative, of course, because hupokrinomiu; "to

interpret/expound/answer/speak dialoguelreply ," was the word-family used

by the Greeks to describe their actors as well, who were hupokritai This

speaking object, in Svenbro's view, shows how, in sixth century Greece, "the

The verb hvpokrzhesthai, in Homer, denotes a spoken reply in the form of an interpretation (see Svenbro 1990:373). Svenbro translates it here as "answer" for convenience, but rejects "answer" as an unacceptable English equivalent for h upohinomai in this context. As Svenbro does not himself supply a better alternative, I take the liberty of suggesting "explain."

written word and the actor [were] analogous, interchangeable" (1990:374).

Andmn's statue describes itself as a hupokrites whose textual message says

the same thing to all men. And as Svenbro points out, this interchangeability

of writing and acting becomes explicit in Plato, who criticizes both writing

and acting on precisely these grounds-i.e., that they both "always sign&

the same thing" (Phaednrs 2754 Im 532d; Svenbro 378). Both inscribed

statue and actor are the agents for the transmission of someone else's textual

message; both communicate a fhed message to a l l men indiscriminately.

There are a few things about this use of writing which deserve attention.

In the first place, the inscriptions on these "speaking objects" mark

what Paul Ricoeur might call the birth of "text," the birth of writing as an

autonomous form of verbal comm~nication.~ Because jugs and statues do not

actually speak, the utterances inscribed on them are not records of speech.

They are not even really representations of it, for there is no conceivable

model upon which such a representation could be based. Writing here is not

so much representational as it is a ~ t h o ~ d . This is someone writing, someone

initiating communication through inscription as an dtemah've to speech

rather than as an echo of it. A palace inventory in Linear B, on the contrary,

was probably not experienced as autonomously communicating with its

readers. Its contents were likely thought of as a mere potential to be

Speaking of fifth-century funerary inscriptions, to which we will be turning momentarily, Harris (1989) makes a similar point: writing of ths kind clearly went beyond the function of transcribing a spoken message (83-84); such writing i s text rather than recorded speech.

actualized by the reader's voice! But the inscriptions on the speaking objects

are in the first person singular; they present themselves as an "I" who speaks

by itself. On the speaking objects, then, writing has the power to speak, or

rather to communicate by itself, instead of speech.

The speaking objects are also sigdicant for their use of writing for

poetic composition. Because pre-alphabetic Greek script seems not to have

been used for poetry, these alphabetical inscriptions mark the detachment of

poetry fiom the human mouth, and therefore £corn the extra-temporal voice of

mnemosjme, memory. In their use of the personal pronoun, they anticipate

the lyric practice of such poets as Archilochus, who for his unprecedented use

of the "I" in poetry, has been described as "the first Western man whom we

know as a personality" @armtone 1962:Z). But there is a peculiarity of the

use of the "I" on the speaking objects which brings it closer to dramatic

practice than lyric. For the lyric poet generally speaks for himself in his

poems, just as the epic singer speaks as himself, a divine servant of the

Muse? The inscriber of the speaking object, however, uses the "I" without

reference to him or herself. It is the jug or statue to which the "I" refers, not

the one writing. What this does, in a sense, is to create a hypothetical

identity, the use of which declares: "if this cup could speak, this is what it

See Svenbro, 1990. on reading before silent reading.

The epic singer uses the "I" in passages which quote the figures' speech. but he is always, in effect, telling us what "they" said. Such first-person speech in epic is never detached enough from the singer to become genuinely "first person."

would say." The relationship between inscribed speech and authorship in

drama is the same. The "I" in dramatic speech does not refer to the author,

the one writing, but to hypothesized identities: "If the mythological figures

could speak to us today, this is what they'd say." For this reason, the

inscribing of speech on these oggettiparlanti is already dramatic composition

in the profoundest sense (Svenbro 366-84). To c o ~ e c t this with what we said

in Chapter 1 about the emergence of distinctly fictional utterance in a

literate milieu, the speech inscribed on these objects is clearly hypothetical-

and hence unambiguously fictional.

Both dramatic texts and speaking objects are inscriptions of direct first

person speech which is unmediated, unmotivated and decontextualized:

unmediated, because the writer is not "quotingt' the speech within his own

utterance, as an epic singer or novelist might; it is unmotivated because the

"I" does not refer to the one writing; and unusually decontextualized, because

it is neither grounded in a concrete speech situation (an epic bard singing to

an audience) nor constitutive of a red first-person address (what happens

when a lyric "I" speakslwrites to a hearerlreader).

Thls use of writing, as mentioned above, is what Pfister has called the

predominant verbal matrix of the dramatic text. For the phenomenology of

dramatic performance, writing of this kind has special consequences. As

Pfkter notes, it makes the story temporally immediate, which in turn enables

its physical enactment. Following Wilder, whom he quotes, E s t e r notes that

the dramatic story unf01ds simultaneously with its telling (274). The writer

interrupts the story neither with

disjunct material, which means

his own "I" nor with any other temporally

that the story orients itself naturally to

translation into real speech in the here and now (performance) and doesn't

need the telledauthor at all. But there is an additional consequence.

The direct first person address inscribed on the speaking object

"speaks for itself." Not completely by itself, of course; it needs a reader. But

that is explicitly what it needs most. According to Clanchy (1979)) Elsky

(1989)) and Svenbro (1990), writing did not always appear to speak directly

to readers in this way. Medieval manuscripts were assumed to need the voice

of a living speaker; the idea of silent reading was almost unknown (Elsky

115). The same could be said of writing in Greece before speaking objects

(Svenbro 370). But here, as in the dramatic texts that were to follow within a

century, the mitten "I" addresses the "you" of any and all readers directly, as

regular speech does, regardless of whether it is spoken out loud or read

silently. This is an essential if obvious feature of such writing: without it

there would be no way to explain the fact that plays, while usually meant for

performance, are not always meant for performance, and can be

meaningfully read silently at home. Speaking objects do not need to be

performed to be understood, even though they are inherently performable.

But i t is a feature of the dramatic text to which it is worth drawing attention,

for it argues strongly against Hegelian notions that drama comes into

"contradiction" with itself unless performed. So we agree with Pfister that the

unmediated speech that makes up the dramatic text accounts for its

performabdity; but it also accounts for its readability, and no less essentially.

Recognition of the directness of first-person speech as represented in

drama actually takes us a bit further, toward a realization that the basic

mode of addressivity of the dramatic text is to any and all readers, to textual

interpreters generally. This would seem to go without saying, but i t does not,

to judge from a persistent trend in theory away horn the notion that what the

dramatic text intends, in preface to performance, is a reading experience.

Hegel might stand as a precursor to this, by way of his proclamation that

dramatic texts are not for reading, period. More recently, J. R. Searle's

Austin-inspired analysis of the dramatic text stipulates that a dramatic text

is like a recipe for baking a cake: "it is a set of instructions for how to do

something, namely, how to perform the play" (1975:328). David Cole (1992)

similarly describes the dramatic text as a "blueprint" (215). Because "there

are no general readers of blueprints," Cole extends the logic to the dramatic

text, concluding that actors are the only intended readers of plays: "theirs

alone is the kind of reading invited and legitimized by dramatic texts" (215).

That the dramatic text is neither a recipe nor a blueprint can be seen clearly

from the Andron statue, which says the same thing to aLI readers ~3'thout

dt'smimination.

A recipe tells one how to do something. From our previous look at what

written speech does and does not contain, it is clear that the act, the "doing"

part of speech is precisely what the text leaves out. A given line of text can be

"done," that is, performed, in any number of ways: it can be mumbled,

sneered, shouted, sobbed; said quickly while knitting, drawn out slowly

throughout the duration of a sword-fight; it can be spoken as an aside to

oneself, shared confidentially with the audience, laughed in the face of

another actor, or "thrown away" into the wings as the set changes and

another part of the forest is revealed. In short, the one thing a dramatic text

does not tell its readers is "how to perform it." So it is clearly not anything

like a recipe. A recipe in which action remained so completely undetermined

would not be a recipe at all-it would produce a cake one day, and a wddorf

salad the next, depending on who was making it. Actors, in any case, are not

objects like the eggs, flour and sugar which are combined according to the

instructions of recipes. A text of written speech simply does not give

instructions for action; it prescribes only that it be read, and if read by actors

who intend to perform it, that it be memorized.10

Searle is not primarily a theorist of drama, of course, and his view of a

play as a recipe is not likely to be shared by anyone who has ever been on the

stage. However, it is no exaggeration to say that theatre history as still

taught in the schools is based on just such a mistake. As Michael Kobialka

(1988) has shown, the still-current view that medieval drama "began" with

the @em Q ~ a e ~ t i s trope is based precisely on this assumption that theatre

appears when action is prescribed. When put back into context within the

Regula~s Concordia, as Kobiaka has done, we see that so-called stage

directions are not that at all. They are simply descriptions of the monks' daily

lo Writing much more sensibly than Searle about the logical status of performative texts, Thomas (1992) stresses that the texts of archaic poetry demanded only that they be read and "learnt by heart as soon as possible" (119). They did not, in other words, prescribe anything specific as far as performance is concerned.

duties. The rules say how and when to perform one's toilette-and how to

conduct church services. But because the proper execution of the monks'

duties took place, during the senrice, in front of other people, our

"authorities" in theatre history call such actions "theatrical" and the texts

regulating them "plays." On the contrary, they were codes of conduct. They

were indeed "recipes" for action, instructions for monastic practice. The first-

person direct speech of the dramatic text, as we have seen, does not say what

to do.11 For this reason, we can look neither to the Quem Quaedzs trope nor

to any other set of ritual rules for the beginnings of drama. Not only is there

a paucity of instructions for how to do things in dramatic texts, but there is a

built-in preference, in theatrical performance, for doing them differently

every time. If Mrs. X delivers a given line while lacing up her corset, Mrs. Y

is obliged to give the speech while taking the corset off; and Mrs. 2, if she

comes last, has our sympathies, for she must come up with something new.

As Taplin has observed, ritual performances work in the opposite way. "The

whole point about ritual is that it should always be the same: it is the aim of

l1 In recognition of this cardinal rule of the theatrical text, Pavis (1982) goes so far a s to claim that stage-directions are not really part of the dramatic text a t all. His view is that only what is pronounced by the actors on the stage is the dramatic text proper. This extreme position accurately reflects the fact that most dramatic texts have no stage-directions, and all can do without them, since they tend to be ignored in practice anyway. I think this takes things too far. The representation of speech in such modern drama as that of Ibsen, Chekhov and Shaw has focused on very subtle psychological nuances. The "written accusations" of modernity often indict stage figures with inner rather than outer crimes, crimes of thought and motive rather than of deed. With verbal conbct increasingly interiorized, stage directions must carry a larger burden, pmviding as they do useful aids in a sometimes baffling interpretation process. Statements made by Chekhov's characters, for example, are often so perfectly banal on the surface that extra-verbal c l u e ~ . g . that a character speaks while looking out a window at migrating birds-can be a decided help. Even where the author did not himself write them, stage directions are still part of the dramatic text-which is to say that like everything else in the play, they are fair game for the whims of performance.

its performers to repeat the rigmarole as perfectly, as identically as possible"

(1978:161; see also Vickers 1973). In theatre, it is not continuity but

invention and novelty which guide action: Hamlet on the beach, in the park,

in Nazi uniform, in a skirt.

Cole's blueprint idea is not much better than Searle's recipe.

Aristophanes joked that everyone in the audience has his own biblioa, which

should serve to remind us that it is not by some antitheatrical error of

modernity that plays are enjoyed by readers. Indeed, plays are naturally

directed even toward non-~p~aLis t readers: as the Andron statue remarks,

direct speech says the same thing to all men. All men who can read, of

course; but they needn't know any arcane codes, as architects do, or even be

performers themselves. This is a key feature, since, as we observed earlier,

the first actors were not professionals (see esp. Winkler 1990 and Slater

1990). Unlike ritualistic and otherwise specialized documents which are

meant for, or are only comprehensible to, the specially trained (blueprints,

instructions for surgery, written choreography for dance steps, etc.), dramatic

texts are addressed to anyone who can read: military trainees, students,

bellows-menders. A Mi'dsummer Night's Dream points this fact up nicely:

even tradesmen with no specialized knowledge of theatrical conventions can

respond immediately to the direct speech of their dramatic text just by

reading it. And as their bizarre, albeit strangely affecting performance

shows, their script does not provide instructions for how to perform it!

There is another set of speaking objects which sheds some light on

this. These are the inscribed tombstones, of which we have numerous

samples which predate drama by about a century. These show clearly how,

when it comes to written speech, it is not a question of the loss or return of

orality, but merely a matter of the fact that writing was chosen horn the start

instead of oral speech. One inscription reads: "Stranger, go back to Sparta

and tell our people that we who were slain obeyed the code" (Barnstone

1962:136). This is not the hypothetical speech of a drinking cup, but the

hypothetical speech of deadpeople. Like the speech of an inanimate object or

fictional character, this written speech cannot be referred back to an "earlier"

or originary occurrence of "situational discourse," for this utterance presents

itself as the speech of people who are already dead. To communicate

information to a living person fiom beyond the grave is a verbal act which

must take written form, which can only ever be a written communication.

The advantages of this overtly textual form of verbal communication

were as obvious in antiquity as they are today. Writing is especially valuable

for recording wills, contracts and any other vital information that may be in

the private possession of one individual and therefore vulnerable to

irreplaceable loss in case of death. Euripides celebrated these benefits in the

Palamedes: "a man dying may write the measure of his possessions and tell

his children, and he who receives may know" (fkag. 572 Nauck translated by

Burns 376-7). Sophocles explores the phenomenology of the written will in

more detail in me Women of Z?zchis.

man's

Deianira opens this play with the observation that "You cannot know a

life before the man has died," a typically Attic sentiment which proves

to have some relevance to writing. The play explores, among other things, the

difference between knowledge available before and after Heracles' death, and

does so partly through the agency of the writing he left his wife before he set

out on his final labours. During more than a year, there has been "no word

from him-no spoken word, that is: in his absence his writing spoke to her

instead. The tablet he left is both an oracle and a last will and testament, but

begins to function as a private letter might, communicating directly to one

person in the physical absence of the speaker. In the passage from

Palamedes quoted above, Euripides names the letter along with the will as a

written remedy for physical absence: "that one not present across the

expanse of the sea may know how everything is at home." Deianera says of

her absent husband that he sounds, in print, "as though he were no longer

living1' (161). Because the tablet contains instructions about what should be

done with his property after his death, there is no surprise in finding that

Heracles sounds "as though he were no longer living."

Deianera's remarks can be taken further, however. To engage in other

kinds of writing is also to invoke one's death, structurally, since it is a

peculiarity of written communication that it can continue to function and

deliver its message in the absence, and after the death of the sender. In an

oral speech situation, there is, if not the illusion of immortality, at least the

probability that one will live through the conversation, or expects to do so.

Oral speech acts could even be said to be life-giving; at least this is suggested

by the many stories performers know of the power of performance to keep

illness and death at bay until the curtain falls. In common parlance,

"curtains" means death; but until they fall, the actor lives. It is probably very

rare that one of the interlocutors of any type of speech situation dies before

the end of the exchange. If they entered the ongoing present of a speech-act

alive, chances are they both expect to leave it in the same state.

But it is when one thinks of death that writing suggests itself, and vice

versa. The possibility that his death might be imminent sent Heracles for his

writing instruments, not to his wife's ear. Wills can of course be delivered

orally, as King Lear tried to do. But as Shakespeare shows in his play about

a wiU, the oral register is incapable of handling such verbal content without

disaster. Instead of signing and sealing hls last testament in a

decontextualized writing situation, as he might have done, Lear made his

beneficiaries perform for it. And by insisting on delivering his wiU in a

situational present-rather than writing it up for posterity-Lear gave his

heirs a cruelly mixed message. He spoke of death, but implied through his

use of living speech that he was by no means resigned to its inevitability. As

B3zg Lear is, like all of Shakespeare's other plays, full of scenes featuring

the use of writing for communication, this play can be read as a sustained

exploration of the contrasting characteristics of oral and written modes and

the way they interact with one another.

Writing brings a w M of death not only because much of the writing

available to literates was written by dead people, but also because, for all a

writer ever knows, his or her words may reach their very first reader only

posthumously. To write is to defer the presentation of one's words or

thoughts to a future date, and the ever-present risk is that one may not live

to see it.

This connection between writing and death becomes especially

pressing in Euripides, the most "bookish" of tragedians, and one who is

rivalled only by Plato for the amount of thought he devoted to the impact of

literacy. Three of his plays, H@po.os , Ipfigeenia Among the Tauxiam, and

Iphigenia at Adis, feature letters prominently in the action? As in

Sophocles' play about the will, written messages sent within Euripides'

families are all bound up with death in some way. In me Women of Dacliis,

Heracles writes to his wife out of a fear that his death may be nigh; Phaedra

writes to her husband as a direct result of her decision to commit suicide;

Agamemnon writes to lure his daughter to a sacrificial death, and Iphigenia

sends her letter to Orestes, written by a (now) deceased scribe, to "save [her]

from dying" in foreign obscurity. Describing his daughter in death,

Agamemnon uses the same phrase Plato later used to describe a piece of

writing: both types of offspring are "cut off and quite separated" &om its

parent (IA. 669; Phae. 275d-e).

See especially Harris (1989) for the archaeological proof for the use of writing for such private communication over long distances. One particularly relevant artifact is the lead letter, found in the Black Sea area, and written a t the very end of the sixth century from a Greek colony of the period. Much like Iphigenia's letter in Euripides, it was written by someone in present danger of enslavement, and is a letter home for help (56. Harris takes Herodotus' mention of Polycrates' letters (520s B.C.E.: 111.4043) as the first evidence for letter-writing that we have; also see p. 57 n. 55).

We have already suggested some of the advantages of this cutting-off:

escape horn time and space restraints, and fkeedom horn the adverse

pragmatics of certain kinds of performances. For Plato, however, the

decontextualized or orphaned status of writing is also a weakness. Separated

from the explaining, self-justifymg presence of its "father," a text can too

easily be "ill-treated and unjustly abused-" It can be misunderstood, and

perhaps even more dangerously, fall into the wrong hands. This is exactly

what happens in IA., where a letter meant for Clytaemestra is hijacked by

Menelaos and read by him-an invasion of privacy which Agamemnon

describes "a thing which goes against all conscience" (304fX). Like the

speaking objects and tombstones, the letter is a message which

communicates indiscriminately with everyone.

Regardless of the intentions of the writer, whoever reads a letter

becomes its receiver. Speech, on the other hand, can chose its hearers, and

exclude others. This suggests that even private writings such as letters have

something of a public character about them, which is paradoxical given the

seemingly more private nature of the activity of writing. In IA., a private

message between husband and wife becomes news for the whole army. While

this blindness, o r promiscuity of writing with respect to its potential readers

greatly alarms Plato, it is given a more balanced hearing by Euripides. The

interception of the letter is unquestionably a bad thing for Agamemnon and

family, but it is a clear boon for the stalled expedition. The inability of

writing to control the circumstances of its reception can thus be viewed either

as a detriment or a strength, depending upon one's politics. To those, like

Plato, who value the author's own intention above

writing must weaken and even damn it to some

all, this fatherlessness of

extent; but to those who

value the rights of the many potential receivers over and above the

authorizing privilege of the sender, writing's orphaned state will be seen

rather as one of its greatest strengths. (Given the social nature of theatrical

production, it can be assumed that the performers of plays will fall in the

latter category.)

In I.A., Agamemnon's first letter has the power to transport his

daughter to the sacrificial altar;l3 his second letter proves powerless to avert

her transport to death. This theme of death and transportation is a common

one in Euripides, and appears in the Ion, H d e q and IT. (Lattimore

1992:344). In the two Iphigenia plays, the theme is connected with the

potentialities of writing. In its ability to transcend her physical conditions in

Taurus and communicate with receivers in another time and place,

Iphigenia's letter has the power to "save per] fkom dying." In a n oral context,

such immortality can also be attained through the song of the epic bard and

the muse of memory. But to achieve acoustic renown (kleos), and the

immortality that it confers, in the absence of writing, one's deeds must

already be known, must already have had their public impact. In LT, the

writer is living in foreign obscurity, beyond the reach of kleos, and is believed

dead. To read Iphigenia's letter will be, in her words, to "listen through my

l3 See Powell's discussion of the "fatal letter" theme (1991:199); see also Thomas for other evidence for the general Greek "distrust of writingn (1992:130).

opening grave1And hear my living lips cry out" (641-2). Iphigenia's situation

thus reminds us of the exiled, expatriate, or otherwise silenced writer-

examples of which were as plentiful in antiquity as they are today! Through

her letter, as through texts generally, a message may still reach the ears of

the community, if only posthumously. Iphigenia also evokes the situation of

receivers of such written messages: like the many actors who were to speak

Euripides' words after his death, she is aware that "[her] words were written

down by one who died" (584).

And so the paradoxical nature of texts: at once more private and more

public than speech, they on one hand imply the death of their authors, and

on the other, extend their lives almost indefinitely. In IT., writing proves

doubly paradoxical in its effects. As long as they confined themselves to oral

speech, brother and sister failed to recognize each other. Both believed the

other to be dead, and this fore-knowledge, or deception, as it turned out,

determined that each perceived the other as a stranger. It is only when

Iphigenia reads her letter out, verbatim (785), that the truth of their

identities is revealed. Their co-presence in a phenomenally real context '

deceives them and blinds them to a truth only revealed in writing. That

writing has the power td manifest a truth which a situational presence

obscures, is an idea which goes very much against the grain of one of the

central myths of modern performance theory. But what this scene

l4 See above, n. 12.

demonstrates is that phenomenal perception is never "naive," and the senses

are not a tabula rasa u.pon which the pure essences of things imprint

themselves. Perception is, '"in itself, something which already .. interprets"

(Heidegger 1962:189-90). Merely seeing an object is a presentation to oneself

of "something as something" (207). Iphigenia presents Orestes to herself "as"

a Greek stranger and sacrificial victim; Orestes presents the phenomenal

being before his eyes to himself "as" Thoas' priestess. This scene must

present audiences with a graphic account of the ineluctable interpenetration

of "real" perceptions with the representing "fore-knowledge" that structures

and interprets them. As in the countless dramas in the repertoire which

similarly traffic in stories of disguise, deception, last minute reversals and

revelations, IT. shows how our perception of phenomenally present realities

is itself the product of internal cognitive processes.

However, once the writing in Iphigenia's letter has remapped the "as-

structure" of her and Orestes' perceptions, the representation is rejected as a

poor substitute for the reality it has revealed. The "dead" letters, written by a

dead man on behalf of a woman believed dead, have paradoxically succeeded

in revealing the living to the living. Speech unaided by writing could not

have done this, for perception is ruled by the perceivers' own interpretation

of what they see and hear. But once the perceptual revolution is

accomplished by the letter, the ecstasy of sensual contact follows:

How can I look at letters! Let me look- Oh let me stare at you ... Oh let me touch you with my hands and prove That you are real and hold you close, close! (793-6)

Writing can reveal new realities for perception, but the goal of such

revelations remains bodily engagement. Writing, in this recognition scene, is

shown to be an enabling device, not an end in itself. This goal--of real

sensuous contact-is however shown to depend upon a rerouting of the

semiotic circuit within the bodies of the perceivers. This perceptual

restructuring, at least as Euripides has it, could only be achieved by

bypassing reality and intervening directly in the representational structures

themselves (i.e. through abstract text). To use a Nietzschean image, we might

say on the basis of Euripidean dramaturgy that the physical co-presence of

man to man may not itself be suflicient to break down the dykes that

separate them if each perceives the other "as" the enemy. Iphigenia and

Orestes would not have embraced but for the ability of writing to remake

their world in another image.

For performance theory, this insight offers a timely critique of

essentialist phenomenology such as one finds in States (1985). It is not

reasonable to imagine that audiences in the theatre enjoy direct perceptual

access to "the things themselves" when objects are displayed on stage. Like

Orestes and Iphigenia, perceivers in the theatre cannot help but see

according to their own personal foreknowledge; and such foreknowledge, as

Diamond has argued, is not the same for everyone, neither throughout

history nor even within a single audience (1992:390-98). We do not get the

phenomenal essence of dogginess on stage, but "how I see dogsW-+r rather,

"how I see this dog in this play today." Multiply this perceptual experience by

the number of audience members, and you have theatrical phenomenology.

Images of men and women reading, writing, sending and receiving

letters appear in four separate Greek tragedies. Like the coin, the letter is a

common theatrical trope a d stage image. The number of extended incidents

involving letters in the Shakespearean corpus alone rises to near forty. When

Menelaos demands his purloined letter back in I A , (''give me the letter"), he

may be the first speaker to be represented in verbal art as making such a

request, but he is by no means the last (cf. Lear I.ii.41, for example). The

very persistence of the image in Western theatre from its beginnings

suggests that it is an essentially theatrical image, not just a convention of

this or that particular stage.

In some cases, the "fatherlessness" of written messages is exploited by

its users for the purpose of deception (Agamemnon's first letter, and those of

Phaedra in Hippolgtos, Edmund in Lear and Maria and company in Tw-

Nig6t). However, letters are used in equal numbers to communicate a truth

whose utterance a hostile speech-context prevents: Agamemnon's second

letter, Iphigenia's, and those of Friar Lawrence and Romeo, of Mdvolio and

nearly all the comedic lovers. Not only are letters used for deception as often

as for the revelation of truth, but speech is shown throughout the repertoire

to be as effective in spreading falsehood as writing is. There are many Greek

characters who, like Phaedra's maid, Hippolytos, Orestes and Odysseus,

pledge with their mouths while keeping their hearts unpledged; just as, on

Shakespeare's stage, speakers may smile and speak fair while remaining

villains. In these examples, as in such plays as Kleist's Pendiesilea and

countless others, speech, tbo, can obscure.

If the persistence of images of letters on the stage tells us anything, it

is that speech and writing are equally at home there. As our f i s t systematic

theorist of drama himself acknowledged, it is natural enough that a

character Like Iphigenia "should want to send a letter" (Poe. 1455a11-12).

Aristotle was right: but only because this Iphigenia is living in a world that

has been revolutionized by writing. In the epic treatment of similar

material-a character wishing to communicate with a family member across

the seas-no such possibility exists. When Telemachos wishes to "know how

everything i . 1 5 with his absent father abroad, he must actually get into a

ship and seek him out physically. Indeed, one can almost go so far as to say

that much of the plot of the Odyssey derives from the impoverished

communication media available to speakers in Homer's oral context. Had it

been equally "natural" for Odysseus to write a letter home, the Odyssey

would have been a rather different tale. But in literate contexts, speech and

writing are, equally, modes through which individuals represent the world to

one another; and as Iphigenia says of writing and speech in IT!: "In any

plan, two ways improve upon one" ('759).

There is a h a l use of inscription at Athens that has bearing on

theatrical practice. This is the writing or scratching of an individual's name

on a piece of broken pottery, known as an ostrakon. The institution of the

ostracism is believed to have been established by Cleisthenes, some time at

Euripides Palsmedes frag. 578 Nauck.

the very end of the sixth, or beginning of the fifth century-that is, some

decades before Aeschylus' first recorded win at the festival. The purpose of

the ostracism-which was held yearly if the citizens voted in favour of

holding o n e w a s to rid the city for ten years of the one man whom most

citizens wanted most to be rid of. Scholars today describe the ostracism as a

politically expedient, inverse substitute for voting, since Athenians did not

elect many of their civic officials, but drew names randomly by lot (see

Ostwald 27, 118, 177; Vanderpool 1970). Over five thousand ostraka have

been dug up by archaeologists-a drop in the bucket since at least six

thousand ostraka had to be submitted each year for the ostracism to go

ahead.

The ostrakon functions like a secret ballot. The individual, whose name

is written most often by the voters wins-not a prize, as in the case of the

agones of the theatre festival-but exile for ten years. The literate practice of

voting by inscribing a name on some surface or other was a common one at

this time in Greece: priestesses at the oracles recommended courses of action

by scratching names on beans (Parke 1970:87), and theatrical judges wrote

the contestants' names, in order of merit, as a way of selecting the winner

(Dover 1972:16).

To write a name on an ostrakon was to express one's opinion in public

without having to answer for it personally, a practice which would have

mixed consequences. On the one hand, it would protect genuine, honest

desires which might shrivel into passivity otherwise Q might be h a i d to

ostracize Themistocles or vote for Euripides if I had to do it face-to-face). On

the other hand, it could encourage an abdication of responsibility and poorly

thought-out decisions. As Plato might ask of such anonymous written

practices, from whence comes the writer's authority to vote for Themistocles?

Can he defend his scrawl, or is what he wrote the extent of his knowledge? In

protecting the writer's anonymity, the ballot may be protecting his ignorance;

but it may by the same token be protecting the fieedom of his speech.

Aristophanes apparently submitted his first plays without revealing his

identity (Dover 15), and the option that he exercised in so doing, of making a

public contribution anonymously, existed thanks to writing.

Not only did the selection of the winner in the theatrical contests

depend upon this literate practice; playwriting itself was a kind of aesthetic

reflection of the institution of the os t r a~ i sm.~~ First, both are verbal acts

which embody a peculiar overlap between private and public spheres. In both

cases, a public event is going to take place; it is already scheduled. The

ostracism has been voted upon and is imminent; similarly, the theatre

festival is a civic institution whose date is set and is known in advance, Both

civic institutions represent for the individual citizen an opportunity, an

opportunity to contribute something in writing. For both types of citizens,

playwrights and ostracisers alike, writing is a mode of public participation.

Although both types of written contribution concern the citizen body a t large,

l6 Humphreys (1978:229) also sees the similarity between the institution of the ostracism and both tragedy and comedy, although her analysis is brief and unenlightening.

the immediate context of inscription is largely private, not public. One could

always fill out ostraka in groups (see Vanderpool 11-16), of course, and

Sophocles, at least, is said to have taken the "natures" of his actors into

consideration in writing for them (cf. also Aristotle, who says that dramatists

may write to please the actors [I45 1b 1 lf.] and/or the spectators [1453a12f.]).

Nevertheless, there are limits on the extent to which writing can ever be a

social act. It takes only one hand to hold a writing instrument, whereas two

at least must be present for a conversation to take place.

The similarity between these two literacy events is evident also after

the writing's entry into the public sphere. For in both cases, the bids for

public participation may amount to nothing, or to something other than was

hoped for by the writer. One's inscription of the name of Pericles on an

ostrakon may prove to be an isolated gesture, and Themistocles may be

banished after all. Or, one's inscription of a play about Heracles may be

rejected by the archon, and one about Oedipus performed instead. After his

death, the name of Aeschylus on a submission was enough to guarantee that

a chorus would be granted and the play be produced. But otherwise, the

plays submitted for performance might not reach the public at all ( Dover

1972: 15).

Now, the performance of a fictional play about a mythic personage like

Heracles may appear only superficially related to the banishment of a living

contemporary citizen such as Pericles. But the two are in fact related.

Tragedy, as we remember, was believed by the ancients to have been

invented when poets began to write choral compositions based on a named

subject (Fllckinger 1973:B-9). The act of naming is of course the essence of

the ostrakon, as it is of the ballot generally. In fUing out an ostrakon or

ballot, the citizen must survey the whole social scene of competing interests

and individuals, he must consider multiple scenarios and zero in on that

single name which represents to him all that is rotten about the life of the

city a t that moment. Similarly in writing their plays, Greek playwrights

s w e y e d the great mass of mythological material and zeroed in on that

single character whose story they felt was most germane to the current social

scene. From the political relevance and topicality of subjects in tragedy and

comedy alike, i t is clear that the playwright's choice of a name was, in

essence, an answer to the following question: given the state of Athenian life,

a public hearing of whose case would be most pressing and apt at this year's

festival?

For example, Aeschylus wrote about the blood-gdt of Agamemnon,

Clytaemestra and Orestes in the immediate aftermath of the Ephialtic

reforms, which deprived the Areopagus of "all those accretions by virtue of

which it exercised guardianship over the state" (Const. At6. 25.2; Ostwald

203). The pacification of the Eumenides, about which Aeschylus could write

in naming Orestes, had its direct civic correlative in the denuding of the

Areopagus of all but one of its hereditary rights as law court, and in the

empowerment of the popular city jury in its place. The topicality of dramatic

names is more readily apparent in comedy, of course, for Aristophanes does

not disguise them behind mythology: he names Cleon, Laches, Euripides,

Socrates directly. In tragedy, the topicality of the choice of character names is

sometimes more opaque to us, but it is there. Plutarch preserved a story

which is illuminating here: "And so it befell, as the story goes, that when the

verses composed by Aeschylus upon Amphiaraus were recited in the theatre

[he cites lines 952-4 of the Seven Agaiast mebes here] a l l the spectators

turned their eyes on Aristides" (Life of Axistides 3.4-5 translated by Podlecki

37). At a time when Aristides was up for trial on bribery charges, Aeschylus'

portrayal of the mythological Amphiaraus turned the spectators' thoughts to

a contemporary citizen similarly fallen in with bad company (Podlecki 39).

Here, a mythological name is but a front for the name of a contemporary.

Scholars believe that Sophocles' Neoptolemous was meant to evoke thoughts

of the young Pericles (Ostwald 413, n 4 , and Podlecki provides evidence for

the topicality of other character names in Aeschylus' tragedies as well

(Podlech passim).

A closer look at the ostraka themselves shows additional similarities

with playwriting. On many ostraka, it is true, there is nothing but a name, a

fact which might seem to suggest that the comparison cannot be taken too

far. Writing a dramatic poem, whch involves plot, characterization and

mimetic artistry is obviously a far more elaborate undertaking than the

writing of a bare name. But some of the few surviving ostraka are actually

artistic character-sketches in miniature. In making their written

contributions to the life of the city, some citizens expressed themselves by

drawing caricatures of their named choices (Vanderpool 15); some added

insults and curses, and one, who submitted an ostrakon against Pericles'

father in 484 B.C.E., wrote his accusation in the form of a little poem (9).

When we bear this in mind, the writing of plays and the writing of ostraka do

not seem very different at all.

The Ead and the Odyssey, whch together made up that Homeric

"banquet" horn which the tragedians selected their names (Athenaeus 8.347e

as cited by Goldhill 1986:55), were by nature composites of stories, catalogues

of sailors' or warriors' tales which were built up through inclusion,

accumulation. Not all plays are about individuals, of course, but even a play

about the women of Troy has singled them out from a larger mythological

scene. Aristophanes' practice, with its undisguised attacks on real named

individuals and groups in the social scene, has done this explicitly. In writing

plays about Cleon or Socrates, he too was singling out whichever individual

was most blameworthy in Athenian political life at the time of the festival.

The tragedians' method was less overt; but like Aristophanes and his fellow

writers of ostraka, the tragic dramatists also selected their names first and

foremost in their capacity as citizens. Like the regular citizen who wrote a

poem about Xanthippes, son of Arriphron for submission to the ostracism,

playwrights chose a name by way of making a written contribution to an

upcoming civic event. And so we should not be surprised to find that while

our ancient papyri manuscripts lack many of the extra-verbal markers we

associate with writing, they did include character names.17 A written

composition about Iphigenia or Prometheus may not have included

punctuation, word separations or paragraph breaks, but it would name

names (See Page 1962:74, 106, 169, etc.). The ability to write a name, and a

colloquial or poetic comment, was apparently one literate skill that even the

most backward hayseeds may have possessed at the beginning of the fifth

century (Vanderpool 9), and one upon which the ostracism, no less than the

theatre festival, depended.

'Rus ability to write a single name, but also a list of names, is a

literary practice upon which drama depends for a number of reasons.

Athenians often wrote lists of names: archon lists, victors lists, casualty lists,

lists of citizens, of jurors, of assemblymen. Now, as we noted earlier, the

recital of ancestry Lists is a common feature of oral culture, amounting to a

distinct poetic genre in some oral milieux (Halpern 1981:301-321). But as

Jack Goody (1987) has observed with respect to emergent African literacy in

this century, to write a list whose items one can see is a very different thing

than an oral recitation of an acoustic series. The purpose of an oral list is to

remember the series. Poetic meter and formulae are used to help the items

stay glued in sequence, and the sequence must go on; to stop in the middle is

to risk losing one's place. For this reason, the only types of relationships

l7 This is a complex issue. The papyrus manuscripts are late copies, and often character-names were abbreviated. But the fact that some character names were written is sufficient for our purposes here. See Dover, 1972:lO.

between terms that can emerge are those of sound and sequence. To alter the

chronological sequence is tantamount to defeating the purpose of the list.

When the terms in a list are visibly co-present in space, however, they

can admit of operations upon them which are neither acoustic nor

chronological, but abstract and conceptual. As Goody's case study among the

Vai shows, members of society who have learnt to make written lists soon

begin to manipulate their contents along logical, categorical lines. To cite just

some of Goody's examples, to write a list of hi t-names is to begin to see the

boundaries of abstract categories: is tomato a fixit? Where do fruits end and

vegetables begin? To write a list of supplies is to begin to wonder whether

chicken belongs in the meat category, even though practical action would

have suggested that it was different horn meat. A list of expenditures begins

to suggest and allow a division into t - e s of purchases, rather than just a

temporal segmentation into when they were made. Goody found as well that

a chronological ordering principle for names tended to be abandoned in

favour of more useful organizing principles, such as age, sex, initial syllable,

etc. (213a.

In ancient Greece, as it happens, the use of the written list in the early

years of the sixth century did have revolutionary results of precisely this

kind. The citizen body was reconceptualized on paper. Whereas blood and

ancient cult ties had traditionally been the organizing principle for

individuals' names, these customary and naturally occurring categories were

replaced by abstract conceptual ones. Ten new tribes (phyla) were artificially

created, and individual names were inscribed under the new tribal list-

headings not according to ancestry (i-e. not according to a hereditary

chronology), but according to domicile. By pushing names around on paper,

new relationships could emerge and be invented. Whereas, for example,

"Boutad" had formerly referred only to descendants of the noble Boutes, it

was now the name "of any person, however humble, who resided in the deme

of that name" (Ostwald 20). Accordingly, citizensf names begin to appear on

ostraka without their patronymic, and mocMed by their demotics instead

(Vanderpool6-8).

Not only were individuals reconceptualized and categorized according

to deme rather than Dad, but the tribes which had once, similarly, been

organized according to blood-ties were reconceptualized as well. Whereas

tribes had formerly been dominated by a few powerful families with ancient

religious affiliations, the tribe could now be reconstituted in writing

according to an abstract principle, in this case the idea of "fair

representation." Hencefornard, each tribe consisted of inhabitants of

spatially disjunct demes, which meant that for the first time, tribe f l a t i o n

was an abstraction without "natural," blood-based associations (2 1). Whereas

individuals used to belong to the collectivity__or be excluded from it+n the

basis of their membership in hereditary brotherhoods, they were now fkee-

floating items in a written list that could be moved around at will.

The consequences of these paper-based reconceptualizations for

Athenian politics were huge, as Stockton (1990), Ostwald (1986) and Meier

(1990) have shown. By creating categories that existed only on paper,

Cleisthenes broke up local connections based on religious cults (Meier

1990:61), and for the Grst time established citizens& as the sole organizing

principle for items in the community lists (60). Even the names assigned to

the new tribes were arbitrary and detached horn traditional connections. A

list of 100 hero-names was submitted to the Delphic oracle, and a choice was

made in writing (60).

In a corresponding fashion, a poet to whom a list of mythological

names is available is capable of performing different operations with and

upon them than is a poet confined to the world of sound. In an oral context, it

is undoubtedly possible to "think' Odysseus separately from the stories told

about him. But it is only through the agency of literate practices such as the

list that a name like Odysseus will become an object for abstract,

decontextualized contemplation ( theasth) . To write a list of the Homeric

hero-names is to shake them loose from epic embeddedness in tramtional

songs, loose, that is, fiom the singers' traditional treatment of them. It is to

be able to contemplate them with less semantic pre-determination. Detached

from their inherited oral-acoustic chains, character names were allowed to

enter into new cognitive configurations. Anything put in a written list is

given a new lease on life, as i t were. Just as Cleisthenes was able to

reconceptualize his citizens on the basis of where they lived rather than, as

formerly, on the basis of who their ancestors were, so too were the literate

poets of the dramatic age able to rethink the mythological figures on lines

other than those established by traditional stories alone. In making use of

epic tradition, as Aristotle advises, the dramatist "must show invention"

(1453131 1). Before new interpretations of Odysseus can be imagined, however,

his name must be abstracted away from customary views of him as many-

wiled and merely resourceful. Accordingly, in drama he has become a

slippery smooth talker, a walking indictment of suave colonial barbarity (see

esp. the Hecuba).

The phenomenology of the dramatic text is most iuurninating here.

What we see when we look at a play today is unique in the verbal arts. At the

beginning is often a nam+Elektra, King Lear, Minna Von Barnhelm, Uncle

Vanya, Candida, Amadeus. Works &om the other genres are often titled by

names as well, of course. But in the dramatic text, the name or title is

followed by another written element which is not technically speaking part of

the story being told: a list, a list of other names. Now, there is no way of

knowing whether the ancient playwrights headed their plays with lists of

characters as playwrights do today. Given that the archon who approved the

play for production was also responsible for allocating actors to the

productions, such a list of characters might have been expedient; but more

we cannot say. Regardless, though, of when the practice of writing out a list

of character names attached itself to playwrighting, it evidently became and

remains one of the key distinguishing features of the dramatic text.

The sign&cance of this phenomenological feature of the dramatic text

for theatrical performance is enormous. The writing of character-names

outside the storytelling discourse sigmfies n o k g less than the liberation of

the mythological figures from their containment within the Muse's

monologue. In epic storytelling, there is only one speaker. The aoidos or

rhapsode alone has the power of speech in performing the story, even though

there is no limit to the number of characters who can be spoken for. This

feature of epic speech-that ail speech represented in the story is subsumed

under and within the single voice of the speaker and the Muse of memory

who inspires him-is fundamental to the genre. It is also a defining

characteristic of (non-choral) lyric and novelistic speech as well. When Thetis

or Hephaestos, Penelope or Odysseus, Leopold or Molly o r any other

novelistic character speaks, his or her speech remains an utterance of a

single controlling linguistic consciousness, that of the author, aoidos or

rhapsode. In drama on the other hand, the names of speakers signify the

existence of x-number of autonomous speech positions, actual speakers

(actors). The writing of character-names in the dramatic text, whether in the

list a t the beginning or before each bit of speech, is therefore symbolic of

narrative exotopy: these written elements remain perpetually outside of the

story, just as the actors who stand in for these names remain outside the

speech act of the storyteller (the playwright).ls

The decontextualized list of character names thus stands a t the

entrance of the dramatic text like an engraved Delphic motto on the

l8 This point is an important one for theory, since it shows that the dramatic text is composed of non- spoken elements which are still integral to performance. See Pavis, 1982, who says that the dramatic text must be defined as including only those elements which are actually pronounced by the actors.

architrave above the gates: Speak for Thyself. However, before the dramatist

can delegate this power of speech to "outside" individuals as the genre

demands, he must fist determine who these individuals are. For nothing

happens in drama until the speakers or their names are chosen. (Cf. the very

st art of rehearsals for the play-within-a-play in Miblsummer-Nigh t 's Dream:

"Here is the scroll of every man's name ..." I.ii.4.) Unlike epic and novelistic

storytelling, which can get under way simply on the basis of an impulse to

tell a story-"Once upon a time..."-the dramatic text has no story outside of

the speech of its separate characters. Regardless of what stories it is based on

or inspired by-and a very large percentage of dramas are based on

preexistent stories-the text itself, phenomenologically speaking, consists

almost exclusively of names and speech. (See f i t e r 1988:163ff., on the

"limitation" of dramatic storytelling, i.e. that figures appear only insofar as

they speak, or fail to speak.) With the exception of the occasional stage

direction,lg the dramatic text contains names of characters and what they

say. Speaker and spoken, sayer and said-these are the materials out of

which the dramatist makes his story.

This use of the speech of named figures to tell a story requires that the

single beam of narrative discourse that was the bard's or novelist's be sent

through a kind of prism, a prism which fractures it into the separate speech

positions that are the separate characters, and ultimately, the actors who

l9 Dover thinks that some stage-directions in ancient tragedy and comedy "go back to the author's own day" (1972:10),

will perform them. The list of the dramatis personae is the basic expression

of this hacturation, a kind of spectrogram or image of it. Or rather, perhaps

it functions in the first place as a spectrog~aph, an instrument for obtaining

the kind of atomized image of speech that drama makes out of narrative

material.

The visual orientation of this analogy of the spectrograph is apt, since

ancient audiences of the first dramas appear to have been struck most by

drama's making-visible of what was formerly only described by the voice of

the rhapsode (See esp. de Kerckhove 1979, 1981, 1983; Segal 1986:75-86;

Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1990: 185-86, 243; Herington20 1985: 136). To

liberate mythological characters 6.om their containment in the Muse's song,

and to allow them to step forward into the light of embodied day, amounts to

a translation into visible space of what was formerly heard. But what is

made visible is constructed as a speech spectrograph: the story is broken

down into the speech of Antigone, of Ismene, of Creon, Haemon, Eurydice,

the Elders of Thebes, and so on. With the whole burden of storytelling, or

world-making, now devolved upon the speech of named subjects, a

character's speech is no longer just one element in the story-as dispensable

as, say, a description of the sunset-as was the case in epic speech. In oral

tradition, the basic principles of variability and mutLiformity which we

20 As Herington puts it: "For the contemporaries it must have been dazzling enough, especially in the early years, when each Dionysia might reveal to the audience for the first time ever an Orestes, say, or a Memnon, or a Niobe, or an Oedipus, who was no longer a mere mechanical component of a famous story, but who breathed, walked, and, above all, spoke for himself" (1985:136).

looked at earlier have been observed to extend even to the story's character-

names &ord 1986:20). In the oral mode of storytelling, who says what is not

important, nor are the particular names of characters; in different versions of

the "same" oral story, character names may change as well. The structure of

drama, with its division of the world into specific speech positions, has

determined on the contrary that only Hamlet can say "to be or not to be;" only

Jocasta can say "God keep you horn the knowledge of who you are."

To write a story based on a list of speakers means to divide the world

up into speech-positions. And just as one begins to see relations among

colours in a spectrogram, or among items in a written list, so too will the

relations among speech-positions become manifest in a dramatic writing of

mythic material. Where does Antigone's speech end and Ismene's begin?

What determines what aspects of a story are given to one character for

utterance rather than to another? This problem of who says what is for the

playwright not just a logistical one. To decide, for example, whether chicken

goes in the meat category involves asking questions about the essence of the

abstraction "meat," and exnmining abstract relations among types of

animals, methods of husbandry, of food preparation, and so on. Similarly,

when the names Antigone and Ismene enter the lists, they can begin to be

conceptualized in ways that make their relationship to one another visible.

They are sisters: how do sisters speak to one another? To what extent do they

speak the same language? To what extent will their age difference manifest

itself in linguistic differences? In different values and outlook? And so on.

Dramatic writing thus involves conceiving of individuals as loci of speech (or

silence, as the case may be), and thinlring of the world of actions and event in

terms of verbal correlatives. In dividing the world up into separate speech-

positions, the dramatist is thus engaging in a kind of conceptual analysis of

the verbal-ideological world.

Like the internal chronotope of the dramatic text, which shifts value

from the finished past onto the ongoing present, this spectrographic division

of narrative into exotopic speech positions carries social and political

meaning as well: characters are subjects who speak for themselves, not

"objects" for containment within a single trans-personal discourse of

tradition. Just as the institution of the ostracism gave ordinary citizens a

voice in public affairs, so too did the shift from epic to dramatic form give the

figures of mythology a voice in the telling of their stories. For this reason,

dramatic form is democratic, and clearly reflects the structure of such

political institutions as the ostracism. Without lists of citizens, lists of

candidates, and the ability to vote anonymously, democratic institutions of

this kind cannot function properly, if at all (see Harris 1989: 115, 63). For

similar reasons, the ability to draw up a list of separate speakers and their

speech, and to submit it for public hearing and performance by others, is a

precondition of dramatic form.

In this final chapter, we have seen the various ways in which the

literate practice of inscrip t i o n 4 f lists, names, letters, wills and poetry-has

had a hand in shaping both the structure of the dramatic text and the social

practice that is theatre. On the basis of these findings, two things are clear:

that fkom the very beginning, theatre and drama were structured according

to same set of social and poetic principles, and cannot therefore be described,

as Veltrusky did, as two separate art forms; and secondly, that we cannot any

longer accept those theories which see literacy and literacy practices as

peripheral to, let alone destructive of, the art of the stage. As a genre

dependent on the manipulation and exchange of decontextualized, arbitrary

signs-in the form of written speech, lists of names, future-oriented contracts

and coins, and the documents left by the absent and the dead-theatre is

indeed an art of writing.

What these conclusions suggests for contemporary and future and

dramatic theory is the subject which we must address briefly now.

Conclusion: I 1

Writing and the Theatre

What should that alphabetical position portend? Shakespeare

Our story began with the writing down of archaic stories, stories that

had once been c o d e d to the "winged wordsn of oral recitation. Powell (199 1)

may be right that these Homeric tales were written down as early as the late

eighth century B.C.E.; or perhaps the most scrupulous amongst us are right

when they emphasize the lateness of the evidence for these early literary

activities, and insist that we postpone the date of a literary Homer into the

sixth century. But the extent of textual criticism that is detectable in the

time of Thespis-as practiced by such writers as Xenophanes, Theagenes,

and Stesichorus-gives us good cause to say with confidence that a written

Homer, and literary criticism of the works attributed to him, were

components of Greek poetic life before the flowering of dramatic form in the

early fifth century.

- --

See above, p.166f. In addition to Pfeiffer (19685-26), see the more recent discussion of Homer's earliest critics in Richardson (1992:30-39), which supports Powell's case for the earliest possible date for a written Homer. Sixnilar arguments can be found in Segal(1992).

The theatrical style of storytelling, which emerged in effect as the

generic replacement of epic song,2 was able to exploit a literary, alienated

attitude toward traditional material in creating a distinctly dramatic

approach to narrative. Most importantly, their knowledge and use of writing

enabled our first playwrights to manipulate poetic materials in ways that

had been unknown to oral bards. In terms of its creation by an individual

reader of inherited material; in terms of its public submission and

transmission by arbitrary and anonymous signs; in terms of its performance

by non-specialist and "other" actors; and in terms of its democratic and non-

conservative function in relation to its audience, the dramatic text no less

than theatrical performance represented a radical departure from epic

narrative as practiced before "tragedy and comedy came to light" (Poetics

1449a13). As for the exact date at which writing was used for poetic

composition, enabling al l the innovations listed here, the archaeological

record has been kinder than the extant evidence for the first written epics:

writing was used to record verse as early as the eighth century3 The

2 See above, p.36.

See above, p.561f.

dramatists in this respect, despite what Ong has said,' were not so much

innovators in their use of writing for poetic composition as they were

revolutionary in the degree to which they exploited the potentialities of

literate modes and, in so doing, made use of writing as "text" rather than as a

mere reminder of a spoken performance.

If this account of the origins of theatrical form seems one-sidedly

literary, it must be remembered that, with the exception of those

performative innovations which derived from the use of writing,s theatre did

not itself introduce, but only retained all the performative features of pre-

dramatic poetry: performance in person before large audiences,

impersonation of narrative figures, costumes, music, and dance. Thus it is

needless to look beyond poetic practices, as theorists often do,6 for drama's

performative models (worship, Dionysiac ecstasy, ritual practices, etc.) . As

Herington (1985), Segal(1992) and Thomas (1992) have shown, multi-medial

corporeality was a deh ing characteristic of aLI poetry in Greecebefore,

- - - -- -

Ong. 1977:72. See above, p.85-6.

I.e., the ability to teach one's own poems to other actors who memorize their separate parts verbatim (rather than improvise, as did the bard, a lay composed from memory in the presence of hearers under inspiration from the Muse).

See for example Burkert (1966:87-121) and Harrison (1991:568).

during, and after the dramatic age of the fifkh century. The Homeric epics

give us clear pictures of the singing, dancing and emotional identification

that accompanied pre-dramatic performances,' as do the lyric poems of

Archilochus (see Ayrton 1977).

Thus we have seen how Aeschylus' immediate progenitors were

readers of Homer, not orgiastic congregations of goat-sacrificers; and if

Aeschylus was able, by his own admission, to develop his art of drama by

cutting thick slices fiom the Homeric feast (Athenaeus VIII 347e), he was

able to do this slicing precisely because history had placed into his hands an

appropriate tool: a pen. For just as the bard is always represented wielding

the instrument of his trade, the lyre (D. M. 188, XWI.567-604; Od

XW.340f.; Segal 1992:4, 25), fifth-century representations of the playwright,

both on vases and in the theatre itself, depict him clutching the instrument of

his chosen genre-the book-roll?

Segal (19924-29) provides a complete list of scenes of bardic performance from both the Iliad and the Odyssey with discussion.

See esp. the Pmnomos Vase as reproduced in W i e r and Zeitlin (1990, plate I); Aristophaoes describes Euripides as a writer (frag. 676b Edmonds) and his plays a s available to readers aboard ships (Frogs 52-3). For a complete list of representations of readers and writers on stage, see above, p. 72, n. 34.

For theatrical theory today, these findings suggest above all that

drama cannot in good conscience be described as a "pre-literary" genre into

which the use of writing was later imported. But further: the evidence

provided in the foregoing shows that as writing was already in use at the

time of drama's invention, the practice of theatre must be located resolutely

~ t h l ' n literature-not as a "borderline case" (Ingarden, 1973:322), but as the

very genre that established the practice which we now take to be specifically

"literary": a use of writing to tell a fictional story in which the text is

demonstrably more than a record of an antecedent performance. As literary

modes of communication precede drama both diachronically and

synchronically (i.e., written modes pre-date both the appearance of theatre in

history and the appearance of any given play on the stage), theatre must in

fact be credited with the possession of a privileged vantage point upon

Literahue itself. For in drama, unlike in the other literary arts, this "coming-

after" is the impetus but not the end of creation, which, in drama, continues

in performance even sometimes at the expense of literary dictates and

models. In short, drama's peculiar mode of being-within-literature is as a

potentially ideal critic. Knowing both the benefits and the limits of all

literary activity, drama is a rare species indeed: a beneficiary of literary

culture which cannot loose its capacity for genuine interrogation of the

models that produced it.

Of contemporary theory, Benjamin Bennett's recent work (1990)

provides an analysis of drama's place within literature which is most in line

with the evidence fkom ancient Greece. Bennett discusses theatre as an

essentially literary event and drama as "the memory and the conscience of

Literature" (60). Drama for Bennett is "not merely one Literary type among

others, but rather is to literature as literature is to the whole of language, a

focus of maximally intense self-reflection ..." (14). Despite many such exciting

observations, however, Bennett has chosen to retain a ritualist vocabulary,

concluding that "drama is the church of literature" (14), and that "the destiny

of drama ... is to become a ritual exercise in the ethics of reading" (54).

Furthermore, B e ~ e t t ' s conclusions ultimately hinge on his belief that

spectators in a theatre "know that [they] are interpreting, whereas we

generally experience our reading ... as if it were nothing but a reception of the

work" (67). Our analysis of the difference between written and oral modes

suggests, however, that the reverse is more likely to be true.

Cole's (1992) exploration of the role of reading in the actor's work

usefully examines an area of theatre practice which has been too long

neglected. Nevertheless, his approach is compromised by an uncritical

importation into the theatre of a readerly hermeneutics which was developed

for, and is better suited to, use in such non-performative genres as the novel.

And although Cole astutely observes that one of the central dialectics in

theatre practice is between reading and "feeding the audience," he takes this

"feeding," which is really but a convenient metaphor to describe the

performer's need to "please," as a literal description of the atavistic pleasures

lodged in r e a b g . Thus, in effect, the root pleasure of performance for Cole

can be traced back to the hidden psychological pleasures of reading-a very

illogical and disappointing conclusion. It is certainly true that the actor, like

the bard before him, is primarily concerned to give pleasure; and we might

add that bardic performance was originally intimately connected with actual

feasting (Segal 1992:4-22).9 But not all corporeal pleasures, on stage or off,

are necessarily culinary, and the pleasures of performance cannot all be seen

as derivative of the pleasures of reading. Western playwrights have

9 It is further interesting to reflect upon the fact that of the sunriving fragments of comedy, twenty- two are concerned with literate practices-and hundmdsconcern food. For this reason, the paradigmatic fragment from the lost fifth-century plays might well be that of the comic poet Plato: a Homeric parody in which a Iegendary hero stands on stage reading verbatim from a cook-book! (Phaoo frag. 173 Edmonds).

undoubtedly all been readers, but actors and audience-members may enjoy,

and at various times probably have enjoyed theatrical performance without

having experienced the pleasures of reading themselves. Cole's theory is a

perfectly illustrative case of the theoretical errors that must come of the

uncritical use of (post-Romantic) literary theory in discussing theatrical

phenomena. Modem literary theories tend to be characterized by a built-in

bias in favour of print, a bias which strictly limits their use in dramatic

theory.

Among other contemporary theoretical accounts of the relation

between writing and performance, those of Fbral (1982), Kirby (1982) Pavis

(1982) and States (1985) have insights to offer, but ultimately get bogged

down in distinctions that cannot be maintained, at least for theatre. The

theatricality of the stage is not necessarily destructive of the semiotics of a

literary work (Fkral), there is no aspect of theatrical performance that is

wholly "nonsemiotic" (Kirby), directors and actors are not "stage writers," and

the phenomenology of the stage is not a universal constant that can be

simply pitted against its sign-making functions (States): in the theatre, there

is also a phenomenology of the text (as we have shown), and a Wtorical)

semiotics of "real" self-display. Because theatre uses both oral-performative

and textual models of communication simultaneously, dramatic

representation must be described according to its own lights-that is,

described in terms other than those drawn fkom post-Gutenberg literary

theory.

The contention advanced throughout this work, that theatre is a

product of literate technology and must be viewed in its proper historical

light as a preliminary to any contemporary theorizing, is not, in its premises

at least, particularly novel. An awareness of the important role played by

technology in shaping our communication practices and in turn the forms of

our cultural life, thoughts and values, goes back to the Homeric epics

themselves. In a culture so explicitly dependent upon the human voice for

communication, we find, as we would expect, that the greatest evil that

Homer's heroes can imagine is to be lost beyond the reaches of hearing, to

have lived and died without fame, or to be absent, like Odysseus on an island

of Sirens, out of earshot and vocal range of a l l but those fearful singers who

make men forget, and in so doing, make them forgotten (Segal 1992:22). By

the dramatic age, communication practices have changed, but this

consciousness of technology's determining role has not: in the face of absence

or the fear of deathly silence, dramatic heroes reach for their wribg

implements, a medicine against forgetting that their Homeric prototypes

were forced to find in the voice and heart of the singer (24). And whether

through Shakespeare's plays or Humboldt's essays on ~ t i n g ,

acknowledgement of the effects of technological artifacts upon "natural"

communication modes has continued to be made in modernity, becoming ever

more explicit with the acceleration of technological change in the twentieth

century.

In our time, Innis, McLuhan, Havelock, Ong and de Kerckhove have

been the most sigdicant theorists of technology's effects; and even if

twentieth-century prejudices against writing have disinclined students of

theatre to accept their messages about media in theory, the stage, at least,

has in practice continued to reflect the power that technology has to shape

our identities and the narratives of human life. Every time a character on

stage picks up the phone, or like Beckett's Krapp Listens to his own voice on

tape from an absent body, the theatre is carrying out its work of reflecting

upon the changes wrought by technology upon our naturally-occurring space-

time categories. In the theatre, these space-time categories have never been

entirely natural, since &om the very beginning of the art form, Clytaemestra

has received smoke signals from Troy, and men and women have

communicated through writing from beyond the grave. But so long as the

theatre remains also a genre in which real bodies communicate naturally in

real time and space, such meditations upon the impact of technology as the

genre can mount will always retain the power to atenogate new

technologies without simply being absorbed by them. Of course, the

dialectical nature of the natural-artifactual polarity guarantees that even our

notion of theatrical "presence" is bound to change-just as surely as our

notion of what constitutes a "unified" time, place or action has been changed

by the advent of satellite telephones and television and transcontinental

flight. But the continued presence of real bodies on stage will also safeguard

for theatre, on behalf of literature generally, sufficient measures of

naturalness to enact drama's ancient literary mandate: to provide an

accurate aesthetic reflection of, as well as an effective critical tool against,

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