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Off-Stage Cries and the Choral Presence: Some Challenges to Theatrical Convention in Euripides

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2015

W. Geoffrey Arnott
W. Geoffrey Arnott*
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Extract

Eduard Fraenkel’s celebrated remark, that ‘for Greek tragedy there exists also something like a grammar of dramatic technique,’ has recently been confirmed, explained and illustrated by a series of distinguished studies emanating from both sides of the Atlantic. These demonstrate clearly how recurrent incidents were habitually presented by the fifth-century Attic tragedians with similar structural patterns. The transmission and execution of orders, for example, became so conventionalized that a set of rules for what is permissible and not permissible in the dramatic treatment can readily be formulated. By the time that a playwright like Euripides began competing in the dramatic festivals towards the middle of the fifth century, there already existed a sufficient body of material in plays produced for the accepted and acceptable dramatic conventions to be equally familiar to dramatist, actor and spectator. Conventions, however, like other organisms, may develop; they are not necessarily static. An experimentalist such as Euripides could play on his audience’s expectations and experience by altering just one of the elements in the conventional model, and by a minimal shift in the pattern shock the audience and amend the convention. In this paper I should like first to exemplify the Euripidean method briefly with two instances from the Ion, where the chorus creates or sustains the challenge to the conventions, and then to examine at greater length Euripides’ use and exploitation of the dramatic conventions tied to off-stage cries.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antichthon , Volume 16 , 1982 , pp. 35 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 1982

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References

1 In his edition of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (Oxford 1950), 2. 305 (commentary on lines 613 f.).

2 Taplin, O.The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford 1977),Google Scholar concentrating on exits and entrances; Bain, D.Actors and Audience (Oxford 1977),Google Scholar on asides and related conventions, and Masters, Servants and Orders in Greek Tragedy (Manchester 1981); and Mastronarde, D.J.Contact and Discontinuity (U. CaliforniaPublications, Classical Studies, 21, 1979),Google Scholar mainly on unanswered questions and disobeyed commands.

3 Euripides’ first play was produced in 455 B.C., according to the anonymous Vit. Eur., p. 2 Schwartz = TrGF I Did. C 9 p. 46 Snell. Cf. Webster, T.B.L.The Tragedies of Euripides (London 1967), 32ff.Google Scholar

4 Cf. my own paper in G&R 20 (1973), 53 f. = Longo, O. (ed.), Euripide: Lettere Critiche (Milan 1976),18f.;Google Scholar and Bain (1981: see n.2), 16.

5 Lindau’s must be accepted in line 221.

6 Cf. Burnett’s, A.P.translation of the Ion in the Prentice-Hall series (1970),p.138;Google Scholarand Bain (1981: see n.2), 16.

7 Cf. my earlier paper (loc. cit. in n.4).

8 This has been much discussed; the best comments seem to me to be those of Bain (1977: see n.2), 1 ff.

9 In his edition of Euripides’ Hippolytus (Oxford 1964), commentary on lines 710–12.

10 This failure of the chorus to make a positive response to Xuthus’ request is by no means unparalleled in extant tragedy: cf. Aesch. Cho., Soph. El., Eur. El. and I.A., along with Page’s note in his edition of Euripides’ Medea (Oxford 1938), commentary on line 263. In the other plays, however, the silence of the chorus does not imply hesitation about or rejection of the request, but rather a tacit agreement to it. Could Euripides accordingly have been playing on his audience’s past experience of this convention, and been leading his audience to believe that Xuthus was making his exit in the confidence that he had obtained at least a tacit consent from the chorus?

11 And thus leave the orchestra. On this teasing challenge to another convention, see above, pp. 35–6.

12 The echo was first noted by Boeckh, A.Graecae tragoediae principum, Aeschyli, Sophoclis. Euripidis, num ea quae supersunt et genuina omnia sint et forma primitiva servata (Heidelberg 1808),244;Google Scholar cf. Wilamowitz, Hermes 18 (1883), 236 n.l.

13 Schadewaldt and Murray assign the first cry to both boys, but Page argues (in his commentary at this point) that only one boy cries initially, on the grounds that it is customary for only one voice to be heard behind the scenes. This is not a strong argument: in all the other cases (with the exception of Aesch. Ag.) only one person is being murdered. We have not enough evidence on which to base a decision here.

14 Cf. Wilamowitz’s edition of Euripides’ Ion (Berlin 1926), commentary on lines 752, 754; Denniston’s, J.D. edition of Euripides’Electra (Oxford 1939),Google Scholarmetrical appendix pp. 213 f. (online 114), 224 f.

15 Cf.Tierney’s, M. edition of Euripides’Hecuba (Dublin 1946,Google Scholarreprinted Bristol 1979), in the commentary ad loc.

16 The meanings of this word are well discussed by Fraenkel in his commentary on Aesch. Ag. 1389 (3. 654 f.).

17 1244 rather than 1245. Nauck’s deletion of 1245 is persuasively supported by V. Di Benedetto in his edition of Euripides’ Orestes (Florence 1965), ad loc.

18 All the MSS. except B assign these two lines unreservedly to Electra, and even B’s original attribution of them to the chorus was altered by a second hand in that manuscript in favour of Electra. Hermann was the first modern editor to restore the two lines to their correct speaker and so vindicate B’s original assignment. See Di Benedetto’s edition ad loc.

19 On this switch, see my paper ‘Tension, Frustration and Surprise … in Some Scenes of Euripides’ Orestes’, which will appear in a forthcoming volume of Antichthon.

20 Cf. B. Gredley, GRBS 9 (1968), 415 ff.; and my own paper (above, n. 4), G&R 56 ff.= Longo 21 ff.

21 This paper owes a great deal to a series of stimulating discussions which followed seminars in various universities (mainly in New Zealand and Australia) where several different versions of the paper were delivered. Many questions were asked, including a particularly crucial one about the legitimacy of this type of approach to Euripidean studies. Our material, in terms of extant Greek tragedies, is so limited. We often do not know how a particular convention was staged: was there, or was there not, a spatial separation between actors and chorus? (Cf. now the useful remarks of Taplin, O.Greek Tragedy in Action [London 1978, 11 and 183 n. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar) And how far will audiences accept uncritically certain types of unrealistic convention? (Modern singers in opera die often enough of tuberculosis on a high C.) Such questions are challenging and not easy to answer, there can be no question, however, about the warmth of friendship and generous hospitality that we received on these occasions, for which I should like here to express my thanks, however inadequately.