At the heart of ancient Greek dramatic experience lies the chorus, a theatrical collective integral to the creation of meaning in comedy, tragedy and satyr play. Their songs not only structure ancient Greek drama, but also provide a wider mythical and thematic context for the unfolding dramatic action. Their centrality was made manifest in any given performance: occupying the ancient orchēstra, this large group – whether twelve or fifteen choral performers in tragedy and satyr play or twenty-four in comedy – dominates the visual field of the viewing audience. The logistics of producing a drama in ancient Athens likewise stressed the vital role of the collective: dramatists interested in putting on a play ‘asked for a chorus’ (χορὸν αἰτεῖν) and those with successful bids were ‘granted a chorus’ (χορὸν διδόναι).Footnote 1 The chorus’ significance increases when we consider its numerous connections to the world beyond the stage. It was deeply embedded in the fabric of fifth- and fourth-century bce Athens, operating at the nexus of multiple practices – educational, financial and political – that were fundamental to the ancient city.Footnote 2 Dramatic choruses also possessed a uniquely rich blend of ritual and cultic associations which resonated meaningfully across broader ancient Greek ‘song culture’ and traditions of performance.Footnote 3
Precisely because of their centrality and complex resonances across multiple ancient institutions and practices, understanding the nature and role of Athenian dramatic choruses presents an enormous challenge to modern sensibilities. When approaching Greek tragedy in particular, scholars tend to treat the chorus as a discrete unit in order to explain the collective’s wider cultural and ritual dimensions. This results in accounts that emphasise the chorus’ multifarious resonances across ancient civic and cultural life but which risk losing a sense of the group’s distinctive contribution to tragedy.Footnote 4 In a similar vein, contemporary theatre practitioners and audiences tend to treat the collective as a curious and formally rigid element, to be endured rather than enjoyed, or as an interlude which distracts from the dramatic action and the dilemmas of tragic characters.Footnote 5 In both cases the chorus emerges as a paradox: definitive of, and yet, peripheral to, the experience of Greek tragedy.
In contrast to this tendency, this book proposes what is, in one sense, a straightforward argument: it contends that the chorus was a flexible and multifaceted dramatic instrument in Greek tragic stagecraft. It aims to demonstrate this flexibility through a focus on ancient choral performance: that is, the multiple and varied ways in which tragedians staged the chorus across the fifth century bce. This argument is motivated by a separate but intersecting claim: that, starting with Aristotle’s Poetics, critical preconceptions about the tragic chorus have led to generalising accounts of the collective, by both critics and editors, that minimise or obscure the complexity of the group’s abilities on stage.Footnote 6 I argue that these misconceptions have compounded over the centuries, giving rise to an unduly myopic and rigid understanding of the chorus as a single and static entity.Footnote 7 Tragedy has played a pivotal role in modern philosophical discourses of individualism, subjectivity and agency.Footnote 8 G. W. F. Hegel, for example, sees Oedipus as the model of human self-understanding, and cites Antigone as a crucial figure in the development of individual consciousness.Footnote 9 For Judith Butler, Antigone is likewise key to the history and theory of kinship.Footnote 10 In their accounts philosophers elevate tragic protagonists as figures of exemplary individuality. However, the corollary to this privileging of tragic characters involves, as Miriam Leonard argues, ‘the effacing of the chorus’.Footnote 11 In philosophical and theoretical accounts centred on the singular trials of the tragic hero, the chorus is either ignored, or becomes the implicit foil with whom the individual is contrasted. Critics influenced by these accounts unwittingly curtail the collective’s ability and import on the tragic stage. In opposition to these modern critical conceptions of the chorus, I argue that the chorus is no way passive or inert. On the ancient stage, tragedians continually exploit the chorus’ capacity to model and voice a spectrum between individuality and collectivity; understanding the varied forms of the chorus’ performance therefore enables a more nuanced account of the complex dynamic between individuals and the collective in Greek tragedy. Instead of presenting the chorus as a static collective against which the drama of individuation plays out, my study of the tragic chorus in performance recognises the group as an active participant in that drama.
One of the main reasons why these static interpretations of the tragic chorus have arisen lies in the material on which they are based. In their examinations critics focus almost exclusively on the odes which the chorus sing, and which are seen as the collective’s defining yet simultaneously constraining activity. The odes are central to several dominant critical foci, including considerations of the chorus’ language and metre, their contributions to tragic form and style,Footnote 12 and studies of their dramatic authority and identity.Footnote 13 With a few exceptions, critics neglect the wide variety of choral dramatic activity that is reflected in surviving plays, such as the many instances in which the chorus interact with actors and directly contribute to the play’s action.Footnote 14 This focus on the chorus’ odes has given rise to a particular understanding of the chorus as existing ‘in the middle’:Footnote 15 the chorus as a body that mediates between the democratic city and an archaic or heroised past,Footnote 16 between the stage and viewing audience,Footnote 17 and between tragic and non-dramatic ritual or lyric forms.Footnote 18 The overwhelming attention that is given to their odes contributes to a general understanding of the chorus a group that operates ritualistically in order to establish an affective spectrum, setting the mood of a given drama for a viewing audience and guiding their responses.Footnote 19 Since the seminal work of Jean-Pierre Vernant, scholars have additionally focused on the chorus’ political resonances with Athenian democracy and the group’s affordances in the wider civic imaginary, with similar results: the collective nature of the chorus (seen as the ‘mouthpiece of the city’)Footnote 20 is typically contrasted to the individuality and agency of the tragic actor.Footnote 21 Such accounts are valuable, but, this book argues, they offer only a partial understanding of the chorus’ multiplicity on the tragic stage and diminish the group’s dramaturgical complexity, underplaying the manner in which the tragic chorus actively contribute to the drama as performers in their own right.
This book offers an alternative framework for understanding this complex collective, by studying its multiple performative capabilities.Footnote 22 This investigation takes a basic question as its starting point: what else did the chorus do besides singing odes? Through this expansion of focus beyond the odes with which they tend to be associated, I argue against the readings sketched above, which see the chorus as predominantly a mediating body constrained by dramatic form or as a passive foil to the singularity of the tragic protagonists. Instead, I examine the chorus’ varied roles and abilities beyond the choral ode, both as an actor and as a physical performer, and consider how Athenian tragedians managed this versatile collective on the stage. I focus on various extraordinaryFootnote 23 categories of choral activity, around which the book is structured: fragmentation, augmentation, interruption and interactivity. These illuminate the varied choreographies enacted on the tragic stage, with particular attention to the chorus’ physical adaptability and polymorphism, that enable a better appreciation of how tragedians experimented with the chorus’ configuration as well as the group’s continual presence, both physical and sonic, on stage. I study the manner in which tragedians ‘fragmented’ the chorus by creating semichoruses (Chapter 1) and how they ‘augmented’ the collective by employing secondary choruses (Chapter 2). I also examine choral exits that occur mid-action and off- or on-stage events which ‘interrupt’ the chorus’ omnipresence on the tragic stage or halt their burgeoning song (Chapter 3). Finally, I explore the chorus’ versatile ‘interactivity’ in scenes where the collective participates more directly in the action and dialogue (Chapter 4). These chapters pivot around terms which I contend both enable us to better grasp the wider dynamics of tragic choral performance and reflect the group’s ability to perform an impressive range of activity across the spectrum of individuality and collectivity as well as mobility and presence. As I argue, these more flexible modes of performance illustrate the varied ways in which tragedians staged the collective’s polyphony, which I argue extends beyond the singing of odes, while also encapsulating the experimental and changing nature of tragic form.
0.1 The Critical Scene
Once we examine the chorus with these broader categories in mind, I argue that we can achieve a more dynamic and nuanced sense of the tragic chorus as a collective that is capable of multiple forms of performative and poetic activity. At the same time, this more flexible account of the chorus demands that we rethink our general approach to the study of ancient tragedy, and specifically that we reflect on the often excessively firm boundaries that have been established between the three Athenian dramatic genres (tragedy, comedy and satyr play) and which underpin our general understanding of ancient drama. These boundaries are drawn based on the small portion of plays which survive as well as the various complex processes of textual transmission and editing which have shaped modern understandings of Greek tragedy. My account therefore attends to areas of scholarship that are usually kept apart: performance studies, the history of textual criticism and formal analysis of tragedy. It also considers and reflects on the chorus in other dramatic genres, namely, satyr play and comedy, as well as in non-dramatic choral lyric poetry, an important trend in recent approaches to Greek tragedy.Footnote 24 This wider lens enables us to consider not only choral conventions across genres, but also the way in which the modern categorisation and editing of different genres impacts – and at times limits – our grasp of choral performance. This attention, in turn, reveal the presuppositions that have been projected onto the tragic chorus.
My account of the chorus’ dynamic and multifaceted role, then, is both grounded in, and seeks to contribute to, three major areas of inquiry in Greek tragedy that rarely converge: accounts of ancient performance, the history and transmission of dramatic texts and studies exploring the politics of tragic and literary form. In this section, I outline some major trends in these fields to clarify the nature of my own interventions in them. Scholarly attention to the conditions of performance on the fifth-century stage has significantly advanced current understandings of Greek tragedy in its original context. Though key aspects of the staging conditions in the fifth century bce have been lost and despite the fact that dramatic texts survived without any stage directions,Footnote 25 scholars have recovered crucial details about the performance of drama in the Athenian Theatre of Dionysus which have helped modify the Aristotelian and Romantic frameworks that have tended to organise the study and understanding of Greek tragedy since the Renaissance.Footnote 26 The work of N. C. Hourmouziades (Ν. Χ. Χουρμουζιάδης), focused around the function of the skēnē building and the uses of the central door in Euripidean drama, paved the way for the study of tragic performance.Footnote 27 Oliver Taplin’s pioneering study, orientated around the movements of actors across the tragic stage, made it possible to attend to the specifically theatrical dimension of Greek tragedy.Footnote 28 In the past few decades the study of tragic stagecraft has expanded to other extra-textual aspects of classical drama such as space, masks and instruments.Footnote 29 Tragedians are increasingly recognised in their role as didaskaloi (producers/instructors) for the plays which they wrote, produced and directed, in line with recent work on the ‘multimodal’ nature of theatre.Footnote 30 More recent studies on actors, costumes and props have continued to deepen our understanding of Athenian performance practices, and of what Eduard Fraenkel called ‘a grammar of dramatic technique’.Footnote 31 This work has furthermore helped us understand the way in which tragedy evolved after the fifth century and beyond Athens, as, for example, the City Dionysia was restructured in the fourth century to include the performance of ‘old tragedy’ (palaia dramata),Footnote 32 or as tragedy gained a more international and Pan-Hellenic audience.Footnote 33
In a similar – though typically separate – vein, increasing attention has been paid to the complex processes surrounding the textual survival of Greek tragedy and how these have guided the interpretation and understanding of the genre.Footnote 34 Studies of the manuscripts from which the texts of Greek tragedy are derived reveal the tenuous processes of transmission across the millennia.Footnote 35 The large number of variants in the manuscripts which survive testify to the multiple errors and contaminations that were introduced into the tragic scripts after their original performance and which have accrued through the centuries.Footnote 36 The aim of establishing the ‘original’ fifth-century text has motivated editors, ancient and modern, to correct these interpolations.Footnote 37 The work of these scholars is fundamental; their conjectures and emendations have the power to alter and shape our sense of tragedy. In recent decades, the discovery of papyri containing fragments of many plays otherwise thought to have been lost has enhanced this work, at times revealing presuppositions which had been made about Greek tragedy to be incorrect.Footnote 38 These discoveries have in turn enriched discussions of tragic performance and stagecraft.
In the past fifteen years, scholars have taken a renewed interest in the study of tragic form and its social and political inflections.Footnote 39 In a broad-ranging chapter, Edith Hall analyses the socio-political nuances of metres and verse forms in Athenian drama, illustrating how drama’s metrical variety produces a series of ‘aural gearshifts’ that reflect tensions of power that are broadly applicable to the fifth-century polis.Footnote 40 In his masterful study of Sophocles’ language, Simon Goldhill examines a wide range of ‘formalist’ categories and elements of Greek tragedy and how these reflect the playwright’s interest in exploring key political issues such as responsibility, agency and civic cohesion.Footnote 41 In her study of Euripides, Victoria Wohl interprets dramatic form as ‘a kind of political content’,Footnote 42 with the power of shaping emotions and sensibilities, and aims to reinvigorate understanding of the youngest playwright through a formal analysis of his surprising plots and open structure.Footnote 43 Recent scholarship on ancient literature more broadly likewise reflects an interest in the politics of literary form,Footnote 44 as well as in reviving formalistic interpretation and reading.Footnote 45 Many of these more recent works take inspiration from Caroline Levine,Footnote 46 who issued a call for a ‘new formalist method’ focused on the various ‘affordances’ of form.Footnote 47
In these areas, however, the chorus tends not to be a prominent topic of discussion.Footnote 48 Though there has been increasing attention paid to dance and music, activities in which the chorus plays an important role,Footnote 49 actors and objects dominate scholarly studies of the performance conditions and practices of Greek tragedy. In these accounts, actors have been given prominence, since, for example, it was known that the City Dionysia featured a prize for actors from as early as the period between 451/0 and 448/7 bce.Footnote 50 That the fourth-century Athenian statesman Lycurgus commissioned an official copy of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides is also taken as evidence of the dominance of actors, who tinkered with the text to enhance their own performances.Footnote 51 According to standard accounts, as the actors increase in prominence and virtuosity, the chorus’ significance and overall contribution to the drama declines, and their songs become interludes which are textually removeable.Footnote 52 A third-century bce papyrus (P. Sorb. 2252), published in 1962, which contains the first 100 verses of Euripides’ Hippolytus, appears to corroborate this account of choral decline that occurred beyond the fifth century bce, as the song sung by Hippolytus’ attendants (as well as the three lines that Hippolytus sings with them) has been excised from it.Footnote 53 Recent work on the transmission of these texts in the medieval period and the Renaissance furthermore discusses the general confusion in the transmission of tragic lyric metres, since surviving tragic manuscripts had listed choral lyric parts in continuous and unorganised blocks.Footnote 54 Scholars have in particular recognised the key role of Byzantine scholar Demetrius Triclinius (fl. c. 1300–30) in organising the lyric sections of tragedy, through his ‘rediscovery’ of the principle of strophic responsion in the structure of Greek lyric.Footnote 55 Though the editorial work and scholarship of classical philologists since the seventeenth century have greatly advanced our understanding of Greek tragic texts, discussions of perceived choral textual ‘excesses’ continue in the present day, such as the final choral closing lines (known in German as Schlussworte) in Greek tragedy, which are seen as unnecessary and expendable.Footnote 56 In a similar fashion, the chorus is rarely the main focus in analyses of the politics of tragic form. Simon Goldhill’s wide-ranging examination of Sophocles’ language is a prominent exception, in that he devotes three chapters to the chorus, but the analysis is generally focused on their lyric exchanges with actors and on how the collective’s role was redefined in nineteenth-century Germany.Footnote 57 In her study of Euripides and the Politics of Form, Victoria Wohl considers the choral role in only three plays, Alcestis, Ion and Suppliant Women.Footnote 58 Wohl’s more recent essay exploring how the muthos of Iphigenia at Aulis intersects with problems of agency and decision-making privileges tragic characters.Footnote 59 By contrast, the chorus is more integral to Mario Telò’s discussion of Old Comedy, where he considers a range of phenomena including choral collectivity in the parabasis, ‘choral agitation’ and ‘choral chōra’.Footnote 60 While these accounts have augmented our sense of the dynamics of ancient chorality, there is still a lack of sustained attention to the tragic chorus and the politics of form. This partly stems from the fact that many of these works challenge the critical legacy of Aristotle’s Poetics, in which the chorus rarely features, as I discuss below.Footnote 61
My examination of the chorus on both stage and page emphasises the tragedians as chorodidaskaloi, and joins recent work that disputes the narrative of choral decline to accentuate instead the ways in which Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides mobilised the collective to achieve different dramatic ends.Footnote 62 I argue that the ancient tragedians, as poets who were also composers and producers, were fascinated by the many possibilities of the chorus and ‘played’ with them to showcase the collective’s polymorphism and polyphony as well as the experimental and changing nature of tragic form. My focus on the chorus’ performative flexibility also complements recent advances in the wider study of chorality. Work on archaic and classical choruses begun by Claude Calame and others has helped us re-evaluate the centrality of choreia (choral song and dance) to ancient Greek culture as well as the wider social and ritual dimensions of the chorus.Footnote 63 This work has inspired scholars to reinterpret the tragic chorus in terms of their ritual and performative function,Footnote 64 but also to reconsider the lyric scope of tragedy, which had largely been neglected because of the privileging of tragic plot and character (and actors) stemming from Aristotle’s Poetics.Footnote 65 Tragedy is now more widely understood and recognised as a choral genre.Footnote 66 My approach also coheres with work that unpacks the legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German thought about tragedy, in particular the views of Philhellenic idealisers such as Hegel and Nietzsche, who limited the role of the chorus, either as an assessor of the moral world of tragedy or as an embodiment of the musical spirit of the genre.Footnote 67 Scholarly accounts of the global reception of Greek tragedy, and the way in which the genre has been invoked and adapted across the centuries in varying contexts, have expanded our understanding of the numerous affordances of tragedy.Footnote 68 In short, we are now in a better position to understand the complex depths of the chorus and the various ways in which ancient tragedians were able to manage and stage the collective. My account reconceptualises and reclaims the group as performers in the broadest sense of the word.
0.2 Choral Knowns and Unknowns
The chorus, I contend, was a flexible instrument which tragedians frequently employed for its unique ability to perform across – and thereby self-reflexively represent – the spectrum of individuality and collectivity. To understand how this might be the case, it is essential to review what is known about the tragic chorus. Who were the members of the tragic chorus and how many were they? What did their movements look like? How did they sing and speak? These questions have been addressed by multiple scholars, but I reprise them here in three sections corresponding to key issues – size and composition, space and arrangement, delivery and performance – to emphasise the instability of many of these ‘facts’ about the tragic chorus’ performance.
This overview is additionally necessary for two reasons. Firstly, in comparison with the vast and extensive scholarship on other key areas of Greek tragedy, there are relatively few critical examinations centred solely on the group. In general, scholars tend to avoid synoptic accounts of the tragic chorus as they either consider choral technique in individual tragedians or in specific plays,Footnote 69 or discuss the collective only in connection to specific phenomena such as music.Footnote 70 This means that facts about the chorus and their performance appear tangentially and usually in a secondary position to other broader concerns. Secondly, many claims about the chorus’ alleged eventual decline rest on statistics derived from the handful of surviving tragedies, which are treated as definitive evidence even though they only represent a small portion of the total fifth-century tragic output, about 3 per cent.Footnote 71 To cite a prominent example, for centuries many believed Aeschylus’ Suppliants to have been the earliest play simply because of the chorus’ dominance in its plot – a dominance emphasised by evolutionary accounts of the genre since Aristotle – until papyrus testimony proved otherwise.Footnote 72 Because similar arguments have been made based on presumptions about the ‘typical’ or ‘atypical’ behaviour of the chorus – which are again based on the small portion of texts that have survived – I seek to expose the faulty presuppositions which underpin many accounts of Greek tragedy. As this overview aims to show, we need to be more open to the complexity of choral stagecraft because the evidence is less clear than it is sometimes taken to be. Once we recognise how much is unknown, new possibilities for choral performance emerge.
0.2.1 Size and Composition
Since my first two chapters examine choral division and secondary choruses in Greek tragedy, polymorphic phenomena which I call choral ‘fragmentation’ and ‘augmentation’, I begin with a brief consideration of the size and composition of the chorus. Whereas the number – and prominence – of actors increases in the fifth century,Footnote 73 the size of the chorus is disputed. This uncertainty carries important implications for understanding the dynamics of choral performance.
The number of the chorus members (choreutae or choreuts) is typically understood to have been twelve, increasing to fifteen over the course of the fifth century.Footnote 74 As with most ‘facts’ about tragedy, this information largely stems from much later sources, such as the ancient biographical tradition and marginal explanatory comments from various scholiasts, which were penned centuries after these plays were originally performed.Footnote 75 There are only two contemporaneous pieces of evidence that allude to these numbers. That the chorus at one point consisted of twelve choreutae can be seen in the scene in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon when the chorus, hearing the cries of the dying king, splits into twelve individual voices, which the text clearly marks as different speakers.Footnote 76 We also have a dedicatory inscription dated to 440 bce recording a victory of Euripides, which lists fourteen choral performers, excluding the coryphaeus, which scholars have discussed at length as the basis for the figure of fifteen.Footnote 77
David Sansone has argued that the size of the chorus remained at twelve throughout the fifth century, and that the notion of fifteen is erroneous, stemming from a confusion with the increase in actors.Footnote 78 He arrives at this persuasive argument by combing through all the sources which discuss the change in choral size.Footnote 79 Whether the chorus consisted of precisely twelve or fifteen choreutae, however, is not my main concern. Tragedies do not adhere to literal and stable modes of representation: for example, the seven mothers in Euripides’ Suppliant Women and the fifty daughters of Danaus in Aeschylus’ Suppliants were represented by either twelve or fifteen chorus members.Footnote 80 What instead interests me is the way in which these specific numbers have been marshalled by critics and editors to correct what are perceived to be ‘unusual’ choral combinations and performance dynamics. Many emendations to tragic texts occur precisely in scenes where the numbers are thought not to add up. My first two chapters, which address scenes in tragedy that feature either divided or secondary choruses, reveal that the augmented or fragmented chorus was seen as a problem to be fixed because certain numbers informed critics’ vision of chorality. Awareness of the historically contingent engagement of critics can reveal the limits of our knowledge and allow a richer sense of the possibilities of choral performance to emerge.
We are on more stable ground when it comes to the question of who the chorus were. Until the late fourth century bce chorus members were drafted from the general male Athenian populace, and were trained from the summer until the dramatic performances in the following spring.Footnote 81 Many scholars tend to ignore this lengthy (and well-funded) training regime, and instead produce accounts which contrast the ‘amateur’ citizen chorus with the more ‘professional’ actors who became more skilled vocal performers in the course of the fifth century.Footnote 82 Complex solos such as that of the Phrygian messenger in Euripides’ Orestes are cited as evidence of the general professionalisation of actors.Footnote 83 While I do not dispute the level of increasing skill required of actors, I object to the ease with which this proficiency is contrasted with a perceived lack of expertise in the chorus. Recent work on Athenian choreia reveals that Athenian men had personal experience with choral performances, such as singing in dithyrambs.Footnote 84 On the basis that each of the ten Athenian tribes was responsible for producing two dithyrambic choruses (each of which consisted of fifty choreuts), Vayos Liapis, Costas Panayotakis, and George W. M. Harrison estimate that each year around 1,160 citizens participated in tragic, comic, and dithyrambic choruses at the City Dionysia.Footnote 85 This number has two important implications for both the performance and immediate reception of Greek tragedy in the fifth century. It firstly calls into question the alleged ‘amateur’ nature of the choreuts comprising the tragic collective. Performing in other choruses means that these men were well versed in choral practice, even before they underwent a period of rehearsal and training prior to the tragic performance.Footnote 86 Secondly, based on this lived experience of performance, a large portion of the Athenian male viewing audience present at the Theatre of Dionysus would have been similarly attuned to complex choral dynamics and choreographies on stage.Footnote 87 Even if we take into account the certain presence of metics and foreign visitors among the audience – groups who may not have had this same prior experience with choruses – work on affect, cognition and kinaesthetic empathy likewise helps us understand potential synergies between audience and stage.Footnote 88 My point for now is that in its performance the tragic chorus, as a large collective made up of Athenian citizens, was visibly and recognisably part of the wider network of Athenian choreia. This would have been an inescapable fact both to those embodying the choral role on stage and for many members of the viewing audience.
0.2.2 Space and Arrangement
If critical preconceptions of the size of the chorus have limited understanding of their dynamism, the question of where and how they performed has also tended to be limited by critics’ preconceptions. As I illustrate in Chapter 3, in various scenes tragedians suspend the chorus’ omnipresence on stage through unexpected exits mid-action, in one rare case – Euripides’ Helen – even manufacturing the group’s disappearance into the skēnē building itself at an early point in the play.Footnote 89 This ability to interrupt choral rhythms is a crucial component of my wider argument that the chorus’ dynamic capacity for movement is one of the key ways in which tragedians ‘played’ with the chorus.
Approaching their capacity for movement first requires an understanding of space and motion on the Greek tragic stage. Scholars have extensively studied tragedy’s performing space in fifth-century Athens: the Theatre of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis. Though the theatre itself underwent various transformations in the centuries after the first performance of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, scholars of ancient Greek theatre have identified various key elements of this fifth-century performance space, namely the orchēstra (‘dance floor’) and from 458 bce onward, the skēnē (a wooden stage building behind the orchēstra).Footnote 90 The latter’s roof and proskēnion (what lay in front of the stage building) were also important for performance. Research on other on-stage devices has likewise expanded our understanding of fifth-century theatre and its special effects; these include the ekkyklēma, the machine which wheeled out bodies both living and dead, creating arresting visuals such as Clytemnestra gloating over the bodies of Cassandra and Agamemnon, and the mēchanē, the crane which conveyed the gods ex machina.Footnote 91
I will go on to argue, however, that these valuable accounts of the practicalities of the Greek stage need to be located within a wider understanding of the nature of theatrical space, which is a complex phenomenon that reflects a flexible and dynamic relationship between the stage, spatial environment and the viewing audience. On the stage itself, there are important distinctions between off- and on-stage spaces.Footnote 92 In Greek tragedy, though the skēnē could help manage and delineate the scenic space, namely the area in which the actors and chorus performed, the dramatic imagined space could also take the audience to faraway lands, such as Susa in the heart of the Persian Empire (Aeschylus’ Persians), the rocky island of Lemnos (Sophocles’ Philoctetes) and the Crimea (Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians).Footnote 93 The chorus played a key role in defining both concrete and imagined dramatic spaces given their almost perpetual on-stage presence and their unique ability to take the audience imaginatively outside the drama through their lyrics.Footnote 94
More directly, however, the chorus gave tragedy form and structure: their movement into and out of the performance space defines the shape and space of the drama. As mentioned above, their songs not only structured tragedy but were also key in creating kinetic space, as they offered a variety of activity and movement. The chorus’ sweeping entrance (parodos) along the long ramps which ran left and right of the orchēstra (eisodoi or parodoi) marked a key juncture for any given play.Footnote 95 Despite the fact that the term for their odes, stasima, etymologically suggests standing in situ (i.e. stasimon as ‘standing song’), these odes were characterised by song and dance.Footnote 96
Because the movements of the chorus played a key role in defining theatrical space for Athenian viewing audiences, a brief word on the physical stage space of tragedy is warranted. It is universally agreed that the chorus occupied the orchēstra, a space twenty metres wide. As its etymology suggests, it was the space for dancing (literally the ‘dancing place’).Footnote 97 It also had an altar (thymele) to Dionysus at its centre which could be incorporated into drama, for example as the grave of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers or Thetis’ shrine in Euripides’ Andromache.Footnote 98 Its shape is widely debated but what is clear is that the audience surrounded the space on multiple sides in the open-air space.Footnote 99 The chorus’ dancing and general movements would have thus been visible to spectators from various angles.
Though some choral odes suggest particular movements, such as hands as oars (Aesch. Sept. 854–60) or the rapid movement of hair (Eur. IT 1151–2), accounts of the tragic chorus’ movements and potential arrangements on stage draw heavily from later sources, including ones which were written centuries after the first staging of plays in fifth-century bce Athens.Footnote 100 One of the most prominent is the second-century CE grammarian and rhetorician Julius Pollux, who described various important features of ancient Greek theatre.Footnote 101 His Onomasticon, which is a compilation of other sources, elaborates on the chorus’ alleged rectangular formation (Poll. Onom. 4.108–9):
μέρη δὲ χοροῦ στοῖχος καὶ ζυγόν. καὶ τραγικοῦ μὲν χοροῦ ζυγὰ πέντε ἐκ τριῶν καὶ στοῖχοι τρεῖς ἐκ πέντε· πεντεκαίδεκα γὰρ ἦσαν ὁ χορός. καὶ κατὰ τρεῖς μὲν εἰσῄεσαν, εἰ κατὰ ζυγὰ γίνοιτο ἡ πάροδος· εἰ δὲ κατὰ στοίχους, ἀνὰ πέντε εἰσῄεσαν. ἔσθ’ ὅτε δὲ καὶ καθ’ ἕνα ἐποιοῦντο τὴν πάροδον. ὁ δὲ κωμικὸς χορὸς τέτταρες καὶ εἴκοσιν ἦσαν οἱ χορευταί, ζυγὰ ἕξ, ἕκαστον δὲ ζυγὸν ἐκ τεττάρων, στοῖχοι δὲ τέτταρες, ἓξ ἄνδρας ἔχων ἕκαστος στοῖχος.
The parts of the chorus are row and file. There are five files of three in the tragic chorus, and three rows of five, for there were fifteen in a chorus. They entered in threes, if the entrance was done in a file. If the entrance was by rows, then they entered by fives. Sometimes they performed the parodos one at a time. The comic chorus was of twenty-four choreuts with six files, and four to a file; there were four rows, with six in each row.Footnote 102
Because this type of rank formation and the term file (stoikhos) applies to armies, this description makes a connection between the dramatic chorus and the hoplite battle line. This has led some, notably John Winkler, to link choral participation with ephebic military training.Footnote 103 Another later source, a scholion to one of the orations of the second-century CE Aelius Aristides, further elaborates on this formation, noting that the chorus’ positioning was different from that employed in battle (schol. Ael. Arist. Or. 3.154, Dindorf 3.535–6):
ὅτε γὰρ εἰσῄεσαν οἱ χοροὶ, πλαγίως βαδίζοντες ἐποιοῦντο τοὺς ὕμνους, καὶ εἶχον τοὺς θεατὰς ἐν ἀριστερᾷ αὐτῶν, καὶ οἱ πρῶτοι τοῦ χοροῦ ἀριστερὸν ἐπεῖχον … εἶτα ἐπειδὴ ἐν μὲν χοροῖς τὸ εὐώνυμον τιμιώτερον, ἐν δὲ πολέμοις τὸ δεξιὸν, ἐπιφέρει πλήν γε οὐκ ἀριστεροτάτης … τοὺς οὖν καλοὺς τῶν χορευτῶν ἔταττον εἰσιόντες ἐν τοῖς ἑαυτῶν ἀριστεροῖς, ἵνα εὑρεθῶσι πρὸς τὸν δῆμον ὁρῶντες.
When the choruses entered they sang their hymns moving transversely and kept the audience on their left, and the foremost of the chorus kept to the left side … since the left side in choruses is more distinguished, though in battle <lines> it is the right … When entering they placed the good choreuts on their left side in order that they might be located facing the people who were watching.Footnote 104
This describes an arrangement where the best dancers were placed in a prominent position, the left, facing the audience, and the worst in the centre row and others in the rear.Footnote 105 This entry additionally suggests that the chorus entered by the western eisodos as it favoured the audience.Footnote 106 However, it is difficult to ascertain the veracity of this information, especially when the sources postdate tragedy by centuries. Many scholars in fact believe that these statements do not reflect fifth-century performance practice, but rather that of the Hellenistic period or later.Footnote 107
Other later sources describe other movement. Many of these describe the strophe as a ‘turning’ and antistrophe as the corresponding ‘turning back’.Footnote 108 A scholion to Euripides’ Hecuba 647 mentions that the choreutae sang the strophe moving to the right, the antistrophe to the left and the epode while stationary.Footnote 109 The strophic structure of most choral odes cannot be denied; that is, that a set of verses is paired with another which responds to the first set, and as such are identical in their music and very likely dance.Footnote 110 But this pairing, often confirmed by metre, does not convey any information about movement or dancing, so we are in the dark when it comes to the realities of the orchēstra as a performance space.Footnote 111
Given its etymological link to the chorus as a ‘dancing space’, for many centuries the orchēstra was thought to have separated the chorus from the actors, who were imagined to have been positioned on a raised stage.Footnote 112 Recent studies on the Theatre of Dionysus, however, suggest that the raised stage was not a feature of the fifth-century theatre, and that instead chorus and actors performed alongside one another in the same flat space.Footnote 113 That the chorus shared the same space with actors can be seen in a variety of plays across the fifth century, from Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers (458 bce) to Euripides’ Helen (412 bce) in which actors easily move from the skēnē to the orchēstra or vice versa, as well as in various plays featuring close proximity between actor and chorus, such as Euripides’ Orestes, where Electra orders the chorus to keep their distance from her sleeping brother, as I discuss in Chapter 3.Footnote 114 In Euripides’ Trojan Women and Phaethon, the chorus even enters the stage from within the skēnē.Footnote 115 This leads to further questions about how the bodies of the actors and chorus might have been arranged in this shared space, a phenomenon now referred to as ‘blocking’ in modern theatre practice. Although it is impossible to offer concrete answers to many of these questions, I raise these practicalities of the performance space to emphasise that many of the ‘facts’ we think we know are suppositions. Once we recognise the presuppositions that are readily made about the chorus’ performance, we are able to see the way in which they occlude the potentialities of the chorus in performance. By unsettling those assumptions we generate new possibilities for how the chorus operated and the numerous ways that tragedians as chorodidaskaloi exploited the dynamic capacities of the collective.
0.2.3 Delivery and Performance
Beyond the makeup of the chorus and the space in which they performed, key questions remain regarding the nature of their performance. In Chapter 4 I explore what are seemingly ‘unusual’ modes of performance for chorus and actors: dialogue for the former, and song for the latter. Underpinning the notion that such modes were unusual are presuppositions about tragic delivery and performance: who is allowed to sing or speak, and when. Exactly how the chorus delivered their contributions is difficult to determine. We know that dance and costumes were involved, though their traces, especially in the former case, are impossible to ascertain. Did this group of twelve or fifteen always sing, or were they allowed to speak? Scholarship focused on the chorus’ polyphony underlines the challenges involved in answering this question. Claude Calame has in particular revealed the multiple dimensions of the choral voice, spanning ritual, hermeneutic and affective dimensions.Footnote 116 Despite this work on the extensive range of the voice and the complexities of tragic soundscapes,Footnote 117 basic questions regarding choral delivery remain. Did they speak in one voice? Did they have a leader who could speak on their behalf? In this section I briefly review some of the salient points regarding their delivery and the assumptions that are too readily made, and which ultimately occlude other possibilities for the chorus in performance.
Tragedy has two main modes of delivery: speech and song.Footnote 118 The former was conveyed by the iambic trimeter, a metre which could accommodate both colloquial and lofty registers and considered by Aristotle to be closest to speech (Poet. 1449a23–7) – and as such typically associated with actors – and the latter with the lyrics of the chorus.Footnote 119 The chorus’ lyrics generally took a strophic shape, as discussed above, and were accompanied by a piper playing the aulos, a double reed wind instrument.Footnote 120 The reality was much more complicated, however: actors may also sing or chant, and the chorus may chant in anapaests or occasionally speak in iambic trimeter.Footnote 121 The chorus was thought to have employed this type of chanted recitative (parakatalogē) in scenes featuring trochaic tetrameters, such as when they react to Agamemnon’s off-stage cries in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.Footnote 122 Anapaestic marching in choral entries and exits might have also involved music.Footnote 123
Though actor’s song is a prominent area of study, with many recent treatments examining the musical complexities of some of these individual arias,Footnote 124 choral speech has received less attention. The widespread assumption is that when the chorus spoke in trimeters these lines were delivered by the chorus leader, coryphaeus (κορυφαίος, ‘head speaker’), despite the fact that evidence for this shadowy figure is late.Footnote 125 Many of these accounts draw on presumptions that the tragic chorus in general does not partake in an extended speech (rhēsis).Footnote 126 Peter Wilson, however, points out that there is no basis in ancient sources for this curious practice employed by most editors of Greek tragedy and that this ‘habit of assigning the lines of spoken dialogue to an individual leader rather than the whole group rests on no more than an assumption about the collective’s need for a “spokesman”’.Footnote 127
More recent accounts grounded in performance have attempted to counter this longstanding editorial practice. For example, David Wiles holds that a single voice would be difficult for the audience to identify, hence the chorus may have spoken in unison.Footnote 128 Here he draws attention to ancient prejudices stemming from Aristotle which suggest that a group speaking in unison would be unintelligible.Footnote 129 However, the logistics of the festival context, in which the chorus trained for several months, suggests that there was time in which to train a group to speak as one. Given the uncertainty around this issue, I consider the possibility that the chorus spoke as one to be extremely plausible. Indeed, as I discuss in Chapter 4, in certain scenes where a speaking chorus is contrasted with a singing actor, the juxtaposition between the individual and collective voice would have achieved a greater dramatic effect than a single voice representing the chorus.
As this overview reveals, there is simply a great deal that we do not know given the patchiness of the evidence. Because tragic texts themselves are silent on choral movement and placement, and contain no stage directions, a too exclusively textual approach fails to capture the complexities of choral performance.Footnote 130 My approach, by contrast, centres choral polymorphism and polyphony, thereby emphasising the ambiguities of choral performance and the ways in which this ambiguity allowed tragedians to play and experiment with the collective. As I will go on to illustrate, overturning ossified assumptions about the ‘static’ chorus reveals a more flexible vision for both choral performance and Greek tragedy as a whole. My conceptions of the fragmented, augmented, interrupted and interactive chorus reveal the varied ways in which tragedians played with this dynamic collective to interrogate conceptions of both individuality and collectivity. The wide range of choral activity across the fifth century – kinetic, poetic and performative – and the self-reflexive ways in which tragedians manage and stage them confirms that the chorus was not only a nimble dramatic instrument, but also a laboratory for experimenting with a range of dramatic possibilities.
0.3 Playing and Theorising the Chorus
This book offers a new reading of the dynamism and flexibility of the tragic chorus, and of tragedy as a whole, offering an expanded sense of the chorus’ vocal and theatrical potentialities. My discussion encompasses a wide range of plays across fifth-century tragedy and includes evidence from fragmentary tragedy as well as analogues from satyr play and Old Comedy. Instead of taking a chronological approach, my account is organised around critical categories which are, I propose, more useful for illuminating choral performance. These terms, in my view, capture the varied activities that the tragic chorus undertook in fifth-century Athenian theatre. My aim is not to provide an exhaustive or comprehensive account, but rather to offer an exploration of choral multiplicity that I contend better equips us to understand the tragic chorus in its ancient performance.
My chapters examine four categories of choral activity that conceptualise the chorus’ physical and vocal flexibility: fragmentation, augmentation, interruption and interactivity. These general ‘choreographies’ present new conceptualisations of the chorus’ various physical arrangements and rhythms on stage, by using critical terms that are better responsive to the multiple inflections of the chorus’ dynamic performances on the fifth-century stage. Chapter 1 (‘Fragmenting the Chorus’) examines the propensity of the tragic chorus to split in surviving Greek tragedy, not only into half choruses but also into different individual voices. These various states of fragmentation illustrate the way in which tragedians play with the chorus’ ability to slide towards and away from uniform collectivity. The chapter also scrutinises the assumptions about fragmentation and wholeness which have implicitly informed critical and editorial approaches to the chorus, and which have occluded collective’s propensity to divide over the centuries. Building on this vision of a dynamic chorus that is revealed through fragmentation, I then turn to the lesser studied phenomenon of secondary choruses in Greek tragedy in Chapter 2 (‘Augmenting the Chorus’), which shows how various playwrights stage subsidiary choruses or multiple choruses in conflict. I argue that secondary choruses complicate the standard model of the chorus as a single and static entity by forcing spectators to confront various choral groups that perform and blur multiple roles (civic, performative and ritual). I also examine two modes enabled by these supplementary choruses: the way in which these secondary collectives, when in the presence of the main chorus, create a ‘swarm’, and when they are not, are able to ‘haunt’ and inform audience perceptions of the main chorus.
Chapter 3 (‘Interrupting the Chorus’) focuses on various forms of choral disruption: choral exits mid-action, dramatic and textual manifestations of choral silence, as well as off-stage cries as phenomena which ‘interrupt’ the chorus. The chapter examines how tragedians disrupt the rhythm of choral performance in crises of emotion or action, from scenes in which a literal interruption on stage silences a chorus to those where an expected choral ode is delayed or cut short. This chapter explores how the chorus is (dis)embedded in the flow of dramatic narrative, thus accentuating choral conventions and expectations. I conclude with a discussion of the chorus’ interactive dimension in Chapter 4 (‘Interacting with the Chorus’), which turns to the chorus in dialogue. It analyses the dynamic interplay between actors and chorus in lyric dialogues, illustrating how the chorus’ extensive range across the various modes of delivery (sung, recitative and spoken) maps onto the tensions of exchange and violence that are typical of drama. I argue that this focus enables us to understand the flexible roles of both chorus and actor in tragedy. My examinations of the interactive chorus reveal their ever-changing, porous, and responsive relationships.
My analyses in these four chapters involve an examination of analogues in satyr play and comedy which are widely recognised as more polyphonic and interactive genres in which some of these configurations and phenomena are not seen as suspect.Footnote 131 Indeed, as my account illustrates, the tragic chorus was frequently fragmented, augmented, interrupted, as well as shown in dialogue at key junctures in ways comparable to their other dramatic counterparts. My chapters thus collectively trace the various flexible configurations which the tragedians employed beyond a single unified and ‘whole’ chorus. This examination of the physical and vocal mobility of the chorus reveals their polymorphic and polyphonic nature.
As ‘playing the chorus’ in the book’s title suggests, the tragic chorus was nimble and interactive, with a dynamic ability to adapt, fragment, grow and perform. These accounts of the fragmented, augmented, interrupted and interactive chorus challenge the notion of the chorus as a static and unchanging group defined by its ‘wholeness’. The chapters that follow reveal the tragic chorus to have been an internally complex and protean entity characterised by a physical and performative dexterity which was a crucial component in the tragedians’ varying explorations of human individuality and collectivity.
