¹ Guerilla Street Theater (New York: Avon, 1973), p. 12.

² Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theater (New York: Simon, 1968). Rumor has it that Grotowski announced in a recent unpublicized visit to the United States that he has totally given up theater as performance, has ceased his own work with actors, and will turn his attention to nontheatrical, therapy-like workshops. I have, as yet, seen no evidence to confirm or deny this rumor. Grotowski's text, Towards a Poor Theater, as well as his productions to date, are the sources for the comment in my essay. If, however, the rumor is correct, it will serve as an ironic confirmation of the actor's separateness from the public.

³ See E. T. Kirby, ed., Total Theater (New York: Dutton, 1969), for a collection of essays that suggest a historical perspective on environmental theater including audience participation theater.

⁴ “The Poetics,” in Literary Criticism, ed. Lionel Trilling (New York: Holt, 1970), p. 61 (my italics).

⁵ For Aristotle, however, “inner structure” is contrasted to spectacle and is a matter of the nature of events and characters, not essentially or solely a matter of dramaturgy. Thus, Aristotle argues that pity and fear are best produced when the characters involved in reversals and recognitions are “near and dear to one another,” when an action is brought about in ignorance and discovery of its meaning occurs afterward. The latter, particularly, is relevant to a structural consideration of how and why recognition scenes work, but stops short of examining the precise relationship of the spectator to such revelations. While it is the subject for a much longer discussion than the one I wish to make here, my argument moves in the direction that a clearer understanding of the workings of recognition scenes will enable us both to comprehend the narrowness of vision in Aristotle's claim that there are a very few families who furnish the subjects of tragedy and to grasp why two different playwrights, using the same family as subject, may evoke very different responses in the spectator.

⁶ Kenneth Burke and J. L. Styan are notable exceptions here. See Burke's “Antony in Behalf of the Play,” The Philosophy of Literary Forms, 3rd ed. (1941; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973) and Styan's Elements of Drama (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1960).

⁷ Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. David Grene, in Creek Tragedies, Volume I, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 162. All other citations from Oedipus are from this edition. I have yet to find a wholly satisfactory translation of Oedipus the King, and translations of this, and other Greek dramas, vary considerably and significantly. I have used the Grene translation here because it is verbally and commercially accessible to most readers and because it attempts more successfully than some translations both to retain the quality of the poetry and to keep the sense of meaning close to the Greek. Paul Roche's translation, The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles (New York: NAL, 1958), is admirable in its respect for the poetic qualities of the language but at times seems quite far from the intention of the Greek words. A translation by Luci Berkowitz and Theodore F. Brunner, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus (New York: Norton, 1970), may well succeed in “getting the point” of the original Greek across to a modern audience in accessible prose and verse, but it loses much of the poetic quality of the original in so doing.

⁸ The metaphor of masks is not intended to be deliberately confusing. It is revealing that this metaphor, particularly in the context of theater, seems a natural way in the modern world to express disguise, whereas in the ancient Greek world the wearing of masks suggests the presentation rather than the hiding of characters.

⁹ Sophocles‘, p. 163. The variations in the translation of this passage serve as a good, if unfortunate, example of what different directions the spectator/reader is led toward by different choices of English words. I cite below a few of the most frequently used translations. Some important differences include the inclusion or omission of the sun (not only as a source of light, but because of its pun in English on son); whether or not the lines read such that Oedipus clearly wishes for darkness; and the presence or absence of words like “sin” or “curse.” The use of the word “sin” seems to be a particularly wrong and dangerous translation; the concept of sin is simply not present in the ancient Greek world. The term “accursed” is less distressing, since a curse does not necessarily connote personal, human responsibility for wrong or evil, but in this instance, Roche's translation, which employs words like “should,” “could,” “would” to suggest morality and necessity, is probably closest to Sophocles’ intention.

From Paul Roche's translation:

From the translation of Luci Berkowitz and Theodore Brunner:

From a translation by F. Storr, Oedipus the King (1932; rpt. New York: Heritage, 1956):

¹⁰ Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribner's, 1969). This book, and especially the essay cited throughout my discussion, is a major source for the present essay. Indeed, to paraphrase CavelPs own acknowledgment, in The World Viewed, of Michael Fried, the essay would not be as it is without my readings of Cavell.

¹¹ Shakespeare, King Lear, Act iv, Sc. vi, 11. 96–104, in Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, 1948), p. 1124.

¹² Michael Goldman, The Actor's Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama (New York: Viking, 1975) pp. 6–7. Here, Goldman's term, actors-as-characters, which I discuss later in the essay, might be useful.

¹³ Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking, 1971), p. 155.

¹⁴ There are, of course, many instances in which we do know more about the actor than the nature of his vocation. But most such knowledge—about the actor's skill, his previous roles, his biography—is elitist in its nature and presses against a wall, which, were it to crumble, might well disperse and weaken our responses to theater. I am not arguing for an enforced naïveté, but it is true to my experience that, while the more I know about how words work, the more I am drawn into a poem, in contrast, the more I know about how actors (and sets, lights, costumes, blocking, acoustics, etc.) work, the more I am removed from the immediate power of theater. It is interesting, too, in this context, that film exploits and is even a vendor of knowledge about film actors, while the actors of theater have been allowed a much greater privacy and separate dignity.

¹⁵ The Theater and Dramatic Theory (London: Har-rap, 1962), p. 21.

¹⁶ “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd ed. (1941; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), p. 298.

¹⁷ Increasingly, there are exceptions, but those exceptions need to be stressed and extended. For example, Richard Ohmann's essay, “Literature as Act,” in Approaches to Poetics, ed. Seymour Chatman (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973), uses the work of J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), to lead us to consider literature as speech acts. He shows us the illo-cutionary acts (performed in saying a set of words) of several passages from drama and poetry, but he only tells us that we should examine the perlocutionary acts (“acts performed upon an interlocutor”); he does not show us how or why that is important. Ohmann also emphasizes the particularity of each perlocutionary act for each reader or spectator. Although few of us would deny the truth of the relativity of responses to art, there I think Ohmann misses an important portion of an argument made by Stanley Fish, in “What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about It?” (in Approaches to Poetics, p. 138). With Ohmann, we can come close to concluding that every act that occurs between a work of art and a spectator is unique and should be; with Fish, we are rather led to see that identifying the structure of a work of art should require from us an understanding of the specific acts intended by that work; not any act will suffice or be fair to that work. Further, Fish's insistence on the error in Ohmann's work of separating the speech acts contained within the work from those in which the audience participates is another way of pointing at my disappointment that Ohmann never shows a particular sentence “fully in action.”

¹⁸ What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), i, 31–40.

¹⁹ My own “looking” in this essay was greatly sharpened at many stages by Tracy B. Strong, and was finally focused by the careful readings of Barry O'Con-nell and Thomas R. Whitaker.