Download aristotle, actors, and tragic endings: a counter

ARISTOTLE, ACTORS, AND TRAGIC ENDINGS:
A COUNTER-RESPONSE TO JOHANNA HANINK
JENNIFER WISE
There’d probably be tears.
Which wouldn’t be auspicious.
Orestes1
I n Arethusa 41, I suggest that Aristotle’s sad-ending theory of tragedy
tells us more about the habits of fourth-century actors than about the tenor
of fifth-century tragedy (Wise 2008). On the basis of certain similarities
between the didaskalic record of 341–39 and the (roughly contemporary)
Poetics, I hypothesize that the philosopher may have been misled by the
performance practices of his time into equating “true” tragedy with weepy
endings. In Arethusa 44, Johanna Hanink takes up the challenge this idea
poses for much received wisdom about ancient tragedy and subjects it to
a most welcome scrutiny (Hanink 2011). In Hanink’s view, the hypothesis “marks a step forward for our understanding of how the realities of
contemporary performance might have influenced Aristotle’s own view
of tragedy” (312). I’m grateful to Hanink for the time she devoted to my
argument, for the additional evidence she has adduced in its support,2 and,
especially, for her keen grasp of what I was trying to do (324):
By drawing out the interplay of theatrical reality and Aristotelian theory in her article, Wise prompts us to examine
more carefully how the Poetics might be reconsidered
1 Orestes 789; trans. Arrowsmith 1992.239.
2 Hanink 2011.315, especially the wonderfully confirming calculations of Csapo
1999–2000.410–11.
133
Arethusa 46 (2013) 133–155 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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against the recent scholarship that has begun to investigate
the fourth century B.C. as both an important “dramatic”
era in its own right and a crucial site for the formation
of the notion of classical tragedy and the canon of Greek
plays that would survive.
Hanink clearly endorses this goal, concluding that “Wise successfully highlights the degree to which the Poetics has been read in the
past without due consideration of contemporary theatrical practice” (324).
Nevertheless, she disputes four “single points” that I make along the way
(312). She also misstates my argument in one key place, but in a way that
productively reframes the problem. After correcting this detail in her précis and drawing out its implications, I will deal in turn (albeit out of order)
with each of Hanink’s concerns and end with a brief discussion of why
her explanation for the depoliticizing of tragedy in Aristotle’s hands is less
credible than the one I offer.
Hanink’s summary of my argument is beautifully lucid and almost
wholly accurate (2011.311–12). But after noting that my hypothesis “rests
on a contention that fifth-century tragedies, or at least tetralogies, had, as a
general rule, concluded with ‘happy endings,’” Hanink misstates a crucial
point. She continues: “These productions, the argument goes, tended to end
on a propitious note for the citizens of whichever polis served as the play’s
setting and thus, by extension, for the Athenian spectators” (312). This is
not quite right. What I describe is the apparent fifth-century expectation
that tragic productions end propitiously for the spectators at the performance (not necessarily for the characters in the play). And the spectators
need not be Athenian.3 I name the various groups for whom fifth-century
tragedies seem to have been expected to end well: the spectators at Aetna
who viewed Aeschylus’s good-auguring Sicilian tragedy (2008.381), and
“the Athenians, their friends, allies, or fictional stand-ins” (395; also 394,
385). But there are some political groups who don’t fit into any of these
categories. The people of Sousa, for example, the city in which Persians is
set, would not have been seen by the Athenian spectators at the first performance of this play as friends, allies, or fictional stand-ins, but rather as
3 Csapo 2010.98–99 thinks that Euripides’ Captive Melanippe might have been written for
spectators at Metapontum or Herakleia and his Archelaos for audiences at Aegae; the audiences at Syracuse for a reperformance of Aeschylus’s Persians could also be added to the
list: Nervegna 2007.16.
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enemies, alter egos, or something of that nature.4 An inauspicious ending
for Athens’ destroyers, which is what Aeschylus theatrically delivers to the
people of Sousa in Persians, would, precisely because the misfortune was
not their own but their enemies’, have augured well for the Athenians watching it: the (sad) defeat of Persia portended the (happy) salvation of Athens.
This may just be a simple misstatement on Hanink’s part. But it
highlights the basic theatrical fact on which my hypothesis is based: the
emotional outcome for the people in a tragedy (the characters) may be different from the emotional outcome delivered to the people watching it (the
spectators). The fates of the characters, their happiness or sadness, is, of
course, specified in the text, but what this ending might portend (or portended) for the spectators at a given performance is simply not provided
by the play. The text of Persians, for example, says that Xerxes and the
chorus mourn and wail in grief and loss at the end. But how this dramatic
outcome was received by particular spectators is something that can only
be reconstructed or imagined on the basis of evidence from outside the
text: our knowledge that the play was written and first performed for Athenians, by Athenians (rather than for Persians, by Persians); the fact that
these Athenian singers, dancers, and spectators had recently defeated the
Persians in battle; that they had fined another playwright 1,000 drachmas
for producing a depressing play about the Persians;5 and that they knew
in advance that the performance would end not with the Persians’ tears
but with the frat-house antics of their own joyous satyrs.
How a play’s ending affects the audience depends, in other words,
on who that audience is, what they know, and how they feel—even before
the play has begun. As Aristotle observes in Rhetoric, audiences respond
very differently to the same stimulus depending on their pre-existing emotions, hopes, and expectations (1377b31–78a4):
When people are feeling friendly and placable, they think
one sort of thing; when they are feeling angry or hostile,
they think either something totally different or the same
thing with a different intensity . . . If they are eager for,
4 The tragic city of Thebes, which Froma Zeitlin analyses as an “anti-Athens,” might be
another setting where things were not expected to go well or resolve happily for the people;
see Zeitlin 1990.130–67.
5 See my discussion of this story as evidence that tragedies in the fifth century were expected
to end auspiciously for the spectators: Wise 2008.392–93.
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and have good hopes of, a thing that will be pleasant if
it happens, they think that it certainly will happen and be
good for them (trans. Roberts 1941.1379–80).
Depending on what the spectators desire and expect, on who
their friends and enemies are, how they feel about Persians in general, or
even Oedipus in particular, they will react very differently to the same
dramatic outcome.6 Theatre history shows unmistakably that features specific to the real-life context in which a play is viewed—a recent death or
assassination,7 a war or epidemic,8 the audience’s current opinions about
the peoples, issues, or characters represented9 —can shape the spectators’
experience as much as anything in the play itself. Audience response is
shaped even by the type of event they think they’re attending: are they
seeing the play within the context of a conquering king’s victory revels,
as part of a beloved actor’s farewell tour, or as part of a prestigious annual
celebration of their own free and democratic city?10 As Hans Robert Jauss
shows (1982), aesthetic experience is partly shaped in advance by a preexisting “horizon of expectations”—a set of beliefs and assumptions about
what we’re about to see.11
An audience’s emotional experience of a play is also shaped by
the intentions of the actors. Because audiences do not receive the play
from the text but only through the actors’ interpretation of it, the intentions
6 At Frogs 1183–90, for example, Euripides and Aeschylus violently disagree about whether
Oedipus was born lucky or was wretched from the start.
7 Consider the story about the audience bursting into tears at the proagon when Sophocles
appeared in mourning for Euripides. The story was clearly intended to record something
remarkable—revealing, if nothing else, that audiences did not normally burst into tears at
the proagon. In this case, however, they did, because events surrounding a performance
unavoidably shape its meaning: Lefkowitz 1981.88–104.
8 See Scott 1997.15–18 on the wholly different reception given by American and Canadian
audiences to the very same shows during the early years of WW I when only the Canadians were fighting.
9 During the French Revolution, Paris audiences interrupted and rioted during plays that
represented kings and powerful noblemen in positive ways; see Root-Bernstein 1984.198ff.
and Wise 2012.
10 See Ceccarelli 2010.101 for the shows staged by Philip and Alexander to celebrate
their sacking of cities and, especially, for her observation that in the fourth century, “dramatic festivals [sometimes] had no civic context at all, as when tragedy was performed
on the initiative of kings.”
11 See Revermann 2006.159–75 for a superbly detailed discussion of these issues;
also Bennett 1990 and Roselli 2011.3–5.
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of performers replace those of the playwright when the play is staged.12
The locus classicus for the consequences of this ineluctable fact is Anton
Chekhov’s comedy The Cherry Orchard, which was transformed into a
lugubrious tearjerker by Stanislavski and company—even while the playwright was still alive to object.13 Chekhov was a hard-working grandson of
a serf and son of a grocer, a largely rural doctor who treated peasants for
free.14 In The Cherry Orchard, he depicts an aristocratic family monopolizing 3,000 acres of land that they refuse on principle to cultivate, lease
out, subdivide, or take any steps to conserve. Their intransigence results in
bankruptcy, the loss of their estate, and the cutting down of their (unproductive) cherry orchard. Chekhov makes his intentions clear by ending the
play not with the sorrow of the aristocrats but with a speech by their old
servant Firs, who realizes in the final scene that his masters have forgotten all about him, locking him up in the house with the furniture as they
blithely depart forever to start new lives elsewhere.
Constantine Stanislavski, however, who acted in and directed
the play, was a privileged man-about-town and heir to one of the largest fortunes in Russia.15 He identified with his character Gayev and with
Gayev’s aristocratic relatives, mourned their fate, and made audiences do
the same. Accordingly, Stanislavski’s production of The Cherry Orchard
ended with a “heart-rending” bit of tearjerkery whereby Gayev slowly exited
the stage with his shoulders wracked in a spasm of virtuosic sobbing that
was described by one spectator as “almost more than an impressionable
playgoer can bear” (quoted by Loehlin 2006.68). This grief-wracked exit
does not exist in the text, is largely contradicted by Chekhov’s instructions for Gayev in the scene (Loehlin 2006.68–69), and, in any case, is
followed by the appallingly funny speech of the servant, Chekhov’s chosen ending. But Stanislavski’s display of soulful agony was so moving to
12 During the lifetimes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides when the poet acted his play
himself or “taught” it to others, the intentions of actors would scarcely have existed as an
independent determinant of the play’s meaning. Once posthumous revivals by professional
actors come on the scene, however, the interpretations of actors will “count for more” than
those of the poet, as Aristotle noticed (Rhet. 1403b33).
13 Chekhov’s letters of 1904 record his intense annoyance with the Art Theatre actors
over their misinterpretation of his play: they “positively do not see in my play what I
wrote.” He even offers to swear that some of them have never read the play through to
the end “even once”: Yarmolinsky 1973.466.
14 Koteliansky and Tomlinson 1925.1–10, Friedland 1964.158–59.
15 Stanislavsky 1925.21–32, Benedetti 1991.170–90.
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audiences that his character’s emotional suffering was experienced as the
true outcome of the play.
Stanislavski’s choices not only glorified the landed gentry’s sufferings beyond what Chekhov had intended, they also redirected the play’s
satirical barbs. Lopakhin, for example, is a vital but guiltily successful businessman (and grandson of a serf) who, Chekhov insisted, must be played
as “a cross between a merchant and a professor of Medicine at Moscow
University” (quoted by Loehlin 2006.48). Stanislavski’s production depicted
him instead as a boorish lout who spits, picks his teeth, and lazes around on
the divan, smoking; Lopakhin was also subjected to the ultimate theatrical
indignity of being dressed in a deliberately absurd looking hat: a yokel’s
knotted handkerchief (Loehlin 2006.48). The plot resolves, of course, with
Lopakhin’s purchase at auction and clearing of the land (to build summer
cottages). By portraying Lopakhin as a grossly materialistic boor, Stanislavski ensured that the fate of the aristocrats would seem lamentable indeed.
I impose on the reader’s patience with such a detailed recitation
of the facts of this case because the point it is meant to illustrate is difficult to appreciate in the abstract: that even something as trivial as the
choice of a character’s hat—a matter of greater concern to the costumer
than the poet, as Aristotle might say—has a direct hand in determining
the meaning of a play’s ending for the spectators. Although, as James
Loehlin so tactfully puts it, “Stanislavski’s treatment” of Chekhov’s characters “seems to go against Chekhov’s text” (2006.68), it was Stanislavski’s production of The Cherry Orchard that toured the world and made
the play famous, “moving audiences to tears” all over Russia, Europe,
and the United States (Loehlin 2006.68, 79). Stanislavski later admitted
that Chekhov “had written a happy comedy, and all of us had considered
the play a tragedy and even wept over it,” but the play’s reputation had
been made.16 Following Aristotle, we might consider extra-textual matters
like the actor’s “delivery” to be “unworthy” of serious attention (Rhetoric 3.1404a2). But as this case shows, it is the choices made by actors, as
much as or more than those made by playwrights, that decide if, when,
and for whom the spectators weep.
If a play like The Cherry Orchard could be transformed within
months of its composition from a critique of the Russian aristocracy into
16 Years later, Stanislavski (wrongly) remembered “Chekhov’s anger” in connection
with Three Sisters (1925.278), but Geoffrey Borny 2006.201 corrects his mistake. See also
Senelick 1997.67–71.
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an anguished lament for their martyrdom,17 how much more might the
tenor of fifth-century tragedies have changed over the course of a hundred
years? During the fourth century, according to Edith Hall, the most “durable marks” left on “[the spectators’] memories” “after the performance of
a play” were those connected with “the afflictions suffered by the leading
characters” (2006.16). But as Eric Csapo crucially reminds us, this was
evidently not the case for most of the fifth century, when audiences were
much more intently focused on the choral aspects of tragedy (2010.105; also
1999–2000.404). Representations of (and jokes about) the effects of tragedy on audiences show that spectators’ reactions varied widely in the fifth
century, from effusions of patriotism and military zeal (Frogs 1020–44),
through delirious love for the playwright’s braininess,18 to outrage over the
play’s moral, religious, and political ideas.19 In addition to focusing on a
tragedy’s civic “advice” (Frogs 1008–09, 1055), a “typical” fifth-century
Athenian spectator like Dionysus20 was most memorably impressed by
things that were done and sung by the chorus (Frogs 1028–29).21 By the
mid-fourth century, on the other hand, tragic audiences are depicted as
mainly focused on “the suffering of individuals” (Roselli 2005.21);22 by the
mid-third century, a tragedy could conceivably be performed in competition without any chorus at all (unlike comedy: Nervegna 2007.21). In short,
fifth-century spectators reacted to the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
17 In his reconstruction of Stanislavski’s production from photos and eyewitnesses,
Loehlin describes (2006.68) the final scene: Ranevskaya has “her hands crossed over her
chest in an image of saint-like suffering.”
18 Frogs 52–60, 770–80; also many anecdotes about the audience’s love for the poet’s
brains, philosophy, and poetic skill in Kovacs 1994.25, 33, 35, and 37.
19 From Lefkowitz 1981 and Kovacs 1994. Despite the unreliability of some or even
many of these stories, a distinct picture of audience response to fifth-century tragedy does
nevertheless emerge, and it is one in which the spectators are simply not particularly focused
on the “suffering” of the protagonists. Instead, the anecdotes speak of the audience being
astounded and terrified by the show’s noise, costumes, and special effects, and enlightened
or infuriated by the playwright’s ideas (Lefkowitz 1981.70, 71, 95, 103, 158, and 159). In
Kovacs 1994, tragedy is reported to have made audiences feel happy (43), to have physically saved them (25), and morally, religiously, and politically provoked and angered them
(7, 39, 53–55, 63, 87, and 105), sometimes to the point of physical and legal action (7,
53, and 61–63). See also Roselli 2011.26–49 for an excellent discussion of many of these
anecdotes and testimonia.
20 Wright 2009.157 n. 63, also Slater 2002.
21 See Ceccarelli 2010.138 and n. 130 for the predominantly choral meaning of tragedy in the fifth century.
22 Roselli 2005.20–21 quotes and analyses a fragment from Timocles’ comedy Women
at the Dionysia.
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Euripides in ways that were specific to their moment in historical time.23
A textually prescribed ending that delivered one set of emotions to audiences in this century, in the hands of one set of performers, may have had
a very different effect on spectators a hundred years later.
Let me start, then, with Hanink’s third point, about the “the
nature of fourth-century Euripidean revivals” (2011.312). She begins by
accepting, and providing additional evidence for,24 my suggestion that
the celebrity actors who mounted such revivals would have been likely to
favour minimally choral and maximally protagonistic plays (315). But she
disputes my corollary suggestion that these star actors, for similar reasons,
would also have been likely to choose weepy over celebratory plays. As
evidence for her skepticism, she cites Ion and Orestes, two protagonistcentred plays that may have survived thanks to their selection for celebrity
revival (Hanink 2011.315):
And yet there does not seem to be any correlation between
the percentage of a tragedy that consisted in actors’ song
and the nature of the play’s resolution: of the four Euripidean plays that are more than ten percent actors’ song
(Hecuba, Ion, Phoenissae, Orestes), two are tragedies
that Wise numbers among those that have “happy endings”: both the Ion and Orestes are resolved by means of
a deus ex machina.
There are two flaws in Hanink’s reasoning here. The first is that,
as the case of The Cherry Orchard shows, the texts of Ion and Orestes tell
us little about how these plays were performed by fourth-century actors.25
Indeed, about plays like these where the “happiness” of the ending depends
wholly on the eleventh-hour reversal of a deus ex machina, we must remain
completely in the dark, for we do not even know whether Old Tragedies
in revival were performed right to the end (see Nervegna 2007). (In later
23 Roselli 2005 analyses “the prejudices and expectations” of this audience in detail;
n. 26 provides a bibliography of current scholarship on its composition in the fifth century.
Also Revermann 2006.159–75.
24 Especially Csapo’s statistics (1999–2000.410–11) that suggest to Hanink (2011.315):
“That nearly seventy percent of the sung lines in Orestes would have been sung by actors
(and not the chorus).”
25 For the things they do tell us, such as actors’ textual interpolations, see Page 1987
and Hall 2007.
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periods, we see star actors ending the play midway through, with their most
heart-breaking or clap-trapping speech.26) The fact that Aristotle associates
Euripidean plays in general with miserable endings (1453a25), despite the
fact that many of them end happily in the texts, tends to support my view
that fourth-century actors, even when staging an “all-time favourite” play
like Orestes (Nervegna 2007.19), performed it in such a way as to impress
the spectators most strongly with the suffering of the protagonist (see Hall
2006.16). The other weakness in Hanink’s counterargument on this point
is that the sample size is too small. Two ostensibly happy-ending plays out
of four sounds like a lot, but out of all the Old Tragedies chosen for revival
in the fourth century, these two may have been exceptional choices in a
period overwhelmingly dominated by sad-ending plays.
In connection with this, her third objection, Hanink also cites the
fact that new tragedies continued to be written and staged as trilogies (320).
This she takes as evidence that Aristotle would not have been as likely as
I suggest to have mistaken the true nature of fifth-century tragedy. However, these new trilogies were presented without a concluding satyr play.
That is, neither the excerpted revivals nor the three-part premières of the
fourth century concluded with the kind of raucous celebration with which
all tragedies had ended at the City Dionysia in the fifth century.27 How
could Aristotle have known what effect a concluding satyr play would have
had on the audience’s experience of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides in the previous century? His discussion of satyr performance
in Poetics shows clearly that the question hadn’t even occurred to him.28
26 When on tour, for example, Stanislavski’s actors performed individual acts of Chekhov’s
plays. The actors and “the public” enjoyed these excerpts, says Stanislavski 1925.286,
“for they allowed the actors to “focus the spectators’ attention on the emotions of the
characters.”
27 Hall 2006.168, Harrison 2005, Griffith 2002.202–03, Sommerstein 2002.22ff.;
also Seaford 1984.1–59, who analyses the “obscenity, hilarity, and joyful endings” of
satyr drama (5). Gilbert 2002.85–87 compares the dominant theories of the satyr play in
our time. While they differ in their view of its anthropological function, all agree that the
satyr play ended with joy and success. For evidence of how the disappearance of the satyr
play from tragedy proper affected people’s view of tragedy, see Hall 2007.284: whereas
“in 430 Tragoidia had still been conceived as a cheerful maenad, the companion of boisterous satyrs,” a fourth-century monument equates tragedy “with a famous actor and a
melancholy role.”
28 At 1449a20–23, he associates satyr performance with dancing, trochaic tetrameters, and
a “ludicrous” and undignified effect—but also with the distant past of tragedy’s development, long since left behind and irrelevant to both the fifth- and fourth-century tragedies
that he discusses.
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Conceivably lacking the counsel of any fifth-century playwrights or audiences, Aristotle would have had no reason to conclude that all the actors
of his time were doing tragedy “wrong.” On the contrary, as he tells us
himself, he concluded, on the basis of what he saw “on the stage, and in
the tragic competitions,” that when actors did tragedy well, they were doing
it “right” (Poetics 1453a26–28).
Turning to Hanink’s first point, we proceed to the matter of my
alleged exaggeration of Euripides’s unpopularity in the fifth century.
Hanink writes: “One of the key premises underlying Wise’s argument is
that fourth-century audiences received Euripidean tragedy far more warmly
than had Euripides’ contemporaries” (2011.313). In fact, my discussion
of Euripides is concerned solely with his record of victories in the tragic
contests and with the (universally accepted) fact that, judged by his number of first-place prizes, he was the least successful of the fifth-century
tragedians whose work is known to us today.29 That this was my intent is
stated plainly: “Compared with the sensational success of Aeschylus, who
won first prize thirteen times of the nineteen he competed, and Sophocles,
who won at least twenty victories (and never placed third), Euripides won
a paltry four times in his life” (2008.383).30 My purpose in mentioning
this fact was to invite readers to compare it with Aristotle’s discussion of
Euripides in Poetics; my purpose was not, as Hanink suggests, to present Euripides as unpopular with fifth-century audiences in any absolute
sense. I noted Euripides’ poor fifth-century record of victories relative to
Aeschylus and Sophocles for the sole purpose of teasing out the oddness of
Aristotle’s decision to defend Euripides’ sad-ending strategy on the basis
of its success in competition (Poetics 1453a23–28).31
As I tried to show, Aristotle uses an argumentative sleight-of-hand
to equate “the tragic” with sad endings (even while acknowledging that
some of the best tragedies actually end well).32 It occurs in his statement
29 As Roselli notes (2005.1), Euripides was both the least winningest of the three
great fifth-century tragic poets and “wildly popular.” Wright 2009.149–50 discusses the
existence of an “anti-prize” mentality and emphasizes the disjunction between the number
of prizes a poet won and how warmly his work was received.
30 Again at the end of the paragraph (2008.383), I specify that I am “judging” the success of Euripides’ plays in competition only “by the number of times they were awarded
first prize.”
31 The oddness of his argument is especially glaring since, as Hanink notes (2011.319–
20), Aristotle was surely aware of Euripides’ record of victories in the fifth century.
32 At 1453b27–54a10, he lists all the possible types of tragic plots: the murder is either committed or averted, in knowledge or in ignorance. Of the (less good, less tragic) type of
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that though critics disagree with him and say that tragedies should not end
sadly (as they often do, for example, in Euripides), sad-ending tragedies are
actually the “right” or “correct” kind of tragedy to write, the “most truly
tragic” kind of tragedies. Why? Because, says Aristotle, these plays prove
their superior tragic-ness “on the stage, and in the tragic competitions”
(1453a23–28). As a way of unpacking this rationale, I chose in my article
to focus on its second half, “in the tragic competitions,” because victories
in tragic competition are objectively quantifiable. Since we know for a
fact that Euripides rarely did succeed “in the tragic competitions” with his
sad-ending strategy in the fifth century, then it simply does not follow, as
Aristotle says, that the strategy’s effectiveness is proved in competition—
unless, of course, as I propose, he was really thinking of the fourth-century
contests, during which, if the didaskalic record of 341–39 is any indication, Euripides’ record was impressive indeed. Over a three-year period,
his plays beat out those of his Old Tragedy rivals for selection by starring
actors three years in a row, a success rate of 100 percent.33
But even leaving Euripides’ success rate out of it and concentrating instead on the first half of the rationale, we arrive at the same result:
Aristotle is basing his preference for sad endings not on the play texts, nor
on what the critics say is appropriate for tragedy, but on how effective the
plays are “on the stage.” The “right” tragic, Aristotle says, is what is “seen
to be the most truly tragic” “on the stage.” Tautologies like this—true tragedy is what is most truly tragic—are errors in reasoning. But the rationale
is no less revelatory for its fallacious logic. It shows that when justifying
his bias toward sad-ending plays, the philosopher is thinking of his own
experience as a spectator of tragedy as “seen” “on the stage.” Euripides’
improved fortunes in fourth-century contests, therefore, demonstrable as
it is, is not “one of the key premises” of my argument (Hanink 2011.313).
A look at Euripides’ comparatively few victories in the fifth century was
just a convenient way of showing how surprisingly stage-centric Aristotle’s preference for sad endings really is.
This brings us to Hanink’s fourth point. Given Aristotle’s access
to perhaps the entire corpus of fifth-century tragedies, Hanink doubts that
plot in which the murder is averted, he praises Cresphontes, Iphigenia, and Helle as “the
best” of this (not “truly tragic”) kind.
33 Snell 1971.13–14. James Butrica interprets the record as saying that these Euripidean plays “won” against others (2001.197); Revermann thinks it can’t be known whether
they competed or were just exhibited (2006.21). Euripides’ improved success rate in the
contests of the fourth century is attested either way, however: either he won three years
in a row or was chosen for exhibition three years in a row.
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he could have been misled by the way in which fourth-century actors performed them. After surveying some of the evidence that Aristotle would
have had to hand, Hanink concludes that (321)
It is thus hardly the case that it was merely “on the basis of
watching single acts of fifth-century tragedies out of context” that Aristotle produced the Poetics (Wise 2008.42).
Rather, the Poetics would have been composed upon the
firm foundations of Aristotle’s own access to the tragic
texts and exposure to new performances and reperformances at both the Great Dionysia and elsewhere.
I do not in fact say or imply anywhere that it was “merely” on
the basis of fourth-century performances that Aristotle wrote the Poetics.
The point I make is rather that these performances evidently played a very
significant role in shaping Aristotle’s ideas about tragedy, since, by his own
admission, stage effectiveness was the touchstone whereby he judged what
was “most truly tragic.” Though he acknowledges the existence, excellence,
and even the critically approved normalcy of happy-ending tragedies, he
nevertheless departs from the norm and equates “true” tragedy with sadending plays. That he adduces their effectiveness “on the stage” as “the
best proof” of their superior tragic-ness should be enough to persuade us
of the need to give due weight to his experience of tragedy as performed
“on the stage.” For where else does a man get his ideas of stage effectiveness if not from the stage? No matter how “firm” his knowledge of or
exhaustive his access to the body of fifth-century tragic texts, Aristotle all
but tells us outright that he did not derive his sad-ending theory of tragedy from texts of any kind. When explaining why sad endings are more
“truly tragic” than happy endings, he refers us to the impression that actors
make with these plays “on the stage.” As he says, plays with miserable
endings reveal themselves to be “the right” kind of tragedy when they’re
performed well: “on the stage, and in the tragic competitions, such plays,
properly worked out, are seen to be the most truly tragic” (1453a23–28).
His bias toward sad-ending tragedies is thus based not on poetic texts but
on theatrical performances.
Furthermore, as we learn from the reception of Chekhov’s plays
over the course of a century, stage performances, especially highly effective and moving ones, come to inform people’s subsequent reading experience. For decades after Stanislavski’s histrionic tour de force, even
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readers of Chekhov experienced The Cherry Orchard as a weeper.34 This
is because the “horizon of expectations” of which I spoke above affects
readers no less powerfully than theatre goers (Jauss’s insights were first
developed in connection with readers’ responses to literary texts). Having spent his entire theatre-going life seeing fifth-century plays on stage
only in the non-satyric, apoliticized, and protagonist-centred versions presented by famous actors, Aristotle is very likely to have had his “horizon
of expectations” shaped by these performances and by his fellow spectators’ reactions to them. In fact, it’s almost inconceivable that the best and
most deeply affecting performances of tragedy that he’d witnessed in the
theatre would not have shaped, even if unconsciously, his basic ideas of
what tragedy is supposed to be.
As Hanink acknowledges, Aristotle’s theatre history researches
were characteristic of his own time, not the fifth century (2011.320–21).
The relative novelty of this kind of “retrospective” scholarship could well
mean that he inherited a theatrical record consisting of little more than
lists of names and dates of victories.35 Crucial questions about performance practices are obviously left unanswered by such lists.36 Indeed,
what Aristotle says about the paucity of evidence for early comedy applies
to the issue of audience reception generally: for most of theatre history, it
wasn’t taken seriously enough as a scholarly subject for anyone to write
about.37 Thus even the most defining facts about the reception of tragedy
in the fifth century, such as whether the audience expected to be carried
away by joy or by sadness at the end, could well have been unknown to
Aristotle in the fourth.
As the annals of theatre history prove, a century can open an
unbridgeable chasm between performance traditions. Less than a century
34 Even by experts, the play continued to be read as a tragedy for about eighty years, for
example Hornby 1986.60. See Senelick 1997 for a complete history of the play’s reception, esp. 67–71.
35 See Scullion 2002 for the issues connected with fifth-century victors’ lists and
Wright 2009.138–77 for the inordinate obsession in all periods with prizes and number
of victories.
36 As Revermann 2006.167 and Hughes 2012.206 remind us, even highly detailed
historical records are surprisingly mute about the things we most want to know, such as
performance practices and audience reception.
37 For gaps in the history of comedy, Poetics 1449a37; for the boom, over the last fifteen
years, in interest in issues of “reception,” see Gildenhard and Revermann 2010.1 and Revermann 2006.9ff. Roselli 2011 goes a long way toward rectifying the traditional scholarly
neglect of the subject of audience response.
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separates Shakespeare from the Restoration, for example, but when his
plays were revived after 1660, they were staged in a way that would have
been unrecognizable to Shakespeare’s own audiences, with female actors
in the women’s parts, French neo-classical “improvements” to the verse,
and Italian-style opera choruses.38 About a century separates the lifetimes of Goethe and Elvis Presley, but we’d be making a big mistake if
we assumed that the performance practices and audience expectations of
Goethe’s time were known to contemporaries of Elvis Presley—even to
those contemporaries who were experts in theatre, such as Orson Welles,
Neil Simon, or Bertolt Brecht. Hanink thinks that Aristotle’s access to
fifth-century texts and knowledge of the fourth-century theatre would
have prevented him from making any fundamental errors, but there are
some fundamental things about which Aristotle conceivably had no reliable
information at all: 1) how the poets and amateur actors of the fifth century
had originally interpreted the roles that he was used to seeing in the hands
of famous, full-time professionals; 2) the effect that the concluding satyr
play had on everyone’s experience of tragedy during the fifth century—
performers and spectators alike; 3) all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in
which the immediate political context for tragic performance in the fifth
century differed from the context in which he viewed it in the fourth; and
4) the specific ways in which the nature of the Old Tragedy event as an
actor’s (rather than a poet’s) art had changed people’s horizon of expectations when approaching, viewing, and judging tragic performances—and
responding to their endings.
Hanink’s remaining point concerns her reluctance to accept the
consequences of the fact that in the fifth century, unlike in the fourth, tragedies at the City Dionysia appear always to have been funded, rehearsed,
performed, and judged as four-part affairs. In challenging my conclusion
that this can only mean that all fifth-century (City Dionysia) tragedies were
tetralogies, she cites various pieces of evidence that could be taken to suggest, on the contrary, that even in the fifth century, the individual acts of
tragic tetralogies were viewed as separate, stand-alone works (2011.318–
19). As quickly becomes apparent, however, Hanink’s arguments all hinge
on her particular understanding and use of the word “viewed.” Whereas
she uses the word metaphorically to mean “considered, talked of, notated,
38 See, for example, William Davenant’s Macbeth (1674) and other standard acting
versions of Shakespeare during the Restoration: Spencer 1965.
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mentally conceived,” I use it literally to mean “actually seen by people
sitting in a theatre.” She writes
(319; my emphasis):
Contrary to Wise’s arguments, it was not standard for
any given three-plus-one slate of plays to be viewed as
a tetralogy. When, moreover, it comes to the three great
tragedians, it is only in the case of Aeschylus that we have
evidence for the composition of true tetralogies, that is, of
groups of plays connected not just by a general theme but
by the sustained development of a more or less single plot.
One can see from Hanink’s criteria for “true” unity—i.e., thematic
and narrative (rather than spatial and temporal) continuity—that on the subject of tragic tetralogies, we are simply talking about different things: I’m
talking about what spectators saw in the theatre, Hanink about how readers might write or talk about tragic texts. That a fictional Dionysus, sitting
in a boat with a book entitled Andromeda, might use this title to describe
what he’s reading is hardly surprising, but it does nothing to alter the fact
that when Andromeda was first performed in competition at the City Dionysia, spectators experienced it as but a piece of a much larger work, the
four-part entry submitted by Euripides to the contest that year. Similarly,
that on victors’ lists each of the four parts of a tragedy was inscribed with
its own title does nothing to change the fact, so justly pointed out by Mark
Griffith (2002), that they took their places on the list in the first instance
not as winning plays in their own right but as a quarter of the tragic performance that won (or didn’t win) first prize. Regardless, even, of whether
the poets invented or, in rehearsal, used these subtitles themselves, when it
came to performance in competition, the spectators judged and therefore
“viewed” each contest entry as a tetralogy.
As for Hanink’s insistence that trilogies like the Oresteia were, in
any case, the exception rather than the rule, the non-survival of any trilogy
except the Oresteia makes it impossible to say much of anything about
what was or was not typical of trilogies. More to the point, however, is
that the way in which the four parts of a tragic composition related to one
another narratively and thematically is actually a separate (literary) issue
that does not really bear upon the theatrical fact that, during the fifth century at the City Dionysia, tragedies were performed and therefore viewed
by spectators as four-part affairs.
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The final part of Hanink’s article is devoted to proposing a different explanation than the one I offer for Aristotle’s most striking omissions in Poetics: the absence from his account of tragedy of its Athenian,
civic, Dionysian, and celebratory aspects. I attribute the gloomy, depoliticized image of tragedy that we find in Aristotle to the appearance of a new
member of the “theatrical cast of Athens,”39 the full-time professional actor
(2008.398). Hanink thinks that Aristotle’s universalizing of tragedy is more
likely to have been shaped by, and in turn reflects, tragedy’s “status, already
in this period, as the city’s most successful cultural export” (2011.322).
While it is true that tragedy was a successful cultural export of
the Athenians in Aristotle’s time, the problem with Hanink’s proposal is
that tragedy always was a successful cultural export of the Athenians.
Far from being a development that was specific or new to “this period,”
the fourth century, as Hanink’s hypothesis would require, the export of
Athenian tragedy was, on the contrary, one of its defining characteristics
from the start. As Oliver Taplin points out, evidence for the export of
Athenian tragedy predates even our earliest surviving play (1993.2). Eric
Csapo makes the same point with great quantities of evidence (2010.83–
107), counting four “certain” venues for staging plays outside Athens by
about 420 and another four that are “probable” (2010.102). Athenian tragedy was exported to Sicily with Aeschylus in the first quarter of the fifth
century, to other locales in Italy through the middle of the century, and to
Macedon with Euripides and Agathon toward the end (Taplin 1993.2–3).
Taplin considers the very early date by which Athenian tragedy acquired
its status as a successful cultural export to be but the logical consequence
of its performance at Athens for tourists and foreigners (3–5). For these
visitors to Athens, as for the patrons who invited Athenian playwrights
back to their foreign courts—to say nothing of the Athenians themselves,
who throughout the fifth century performed in tragedies with concluding
satyr plays and watched their friends and relatives do the same—tragedy’s
intimate connection with the Athenian polis and its Dionysian celebrations
would have been obvious.
Indeed, if patterns in early modern theatre history are any guide,
tragedy’s cultural prestige abroad existed because of its specifically Athenian character, not despite or in opposition to it. For example, the first
international exports of commedia dell’arte occurred within a year of the
founding of Il Gelosi—that is, “from [the] very inception” of the genre
39 The title of Edith Hall’s 2006 book.
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itself (Henke 2008.19). The Gelosi troupe, the Aeschylus of commedia
dell’arte, was the first great exponent of a type of theatrical performance
that was still relatively new.40 The troupe was founded and first performed
in Italy in 1568. Within the year, it had played in cities as far flung as Linz
and Prague; by 1576, eight years later, Il Gelosi had successfully exported
commedia dell’arte to Paris, Vienna, Munich, Spain, and Antwerp (Henke
2008.26–27). Yet despite its almost instantaneous transformation into an
export commodity, commedia dell’arte lost none of its local and wholly
Italian characteristics: regardless of where or for whom they played, commedia actors performed in Italian, staged the same Italian plots and characters as they did at home, and used precisely the same Neapolitan, Venetian,
and Bergamese dialects, masks, and costumes that had made this form of
theatre so famous and beloved in the first place.41
Athenian tragedy seems likewise to have been exported to foreign
courts and cities without any diminution of its local characteristics. Judging
from the politically allusive, chorally elaborate, satyr-inflected way in which
tragedy was written and performed in Athens throughout the fifth century,
the genre’s concurrent status as a successful cultural export seems not to
have had any de-politicizing or de-Atticizing effect.42 The reason for this
may lie in the very nature of cultural exports: the more famous Athenian
drama became in cities far and wide, the prouder its practitioners would
have been of the specifically Athenian qualities that had given their products such cachet. Likewise from the point of view of the cultural importers: when twentieth-century Parisians, Muscovites, and Berliners wanted
American jazz, jeans, Coke, movies, and rock-and-roll, they wanted “the
real thing,” with all of its political meanings and authentic materials, not
some de-Americanized, universalized knock-off.43
40 According to Henke 2008.19–20, the first written evidence of commedia dell’arte
dates to the 1540s.
41 Other examples abound. In nearly all pre-industrial periods during which performers were limited to the transportation technologies of the Athenians (foot, horse, cart, and
sailing ship), new forms of theatre, including Italian opera, English sentimental comedy,
German Sturm und Drang, and Parisian melodrama, became international sensations within
as little as one year. For the last of these, see Wise 2012.
42 The same appears to have been the case with Old Comedy: despite its export far
beyond its point of origin, even the latest example of the genre, Frogs, is still as politically allusive, locally topical, and, essentially, as Athenian as ever; see Taplin 1993.3–5,
48, Slater 2002, and Revermann 2006.
43 As Quebecois playwright Michel Tremblay noted in 2000, it is precisely their
accuracy to specific locales that gives plays their truth value: http://www.iti-worldwide.
org/theatredaymessage_list.html (accessed December 14, 2011).
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And yet, after nearly a century of successful export without any
apparent change to its basic performance practices, Athenian tragedy
underwent a seismic shift in 386.44 First at the City Dionysia and later
elsewhere45 excerpts from Old Tragedy classics began to be performed in
a non-satyric, minimally choral, and purely histrionic way—“purely histrionic” in the sense that these excerpts, chosen and staged by actors, were
now removed from their original literary and political contexts. Hanink’s
cultural export theory does not fit well enough with the known chronology to explain this shift, but as Paola Ceccarelli puts it, the “considerable
changes in [the] production” of tragedy after the fifth century do line up
with “the rise of professional actors” (2010.105).46
Aristotle himself saw the advent of experts in tragic acting as a
significant feature of his time. In the first chapter of Book 3 of Rhetoric,
he mentions two ways in which tragedy was “now” different than before.
One was its shift from a “poetical” to a colloquial diction: “The language
of tragedy,” he says, used to be “decorated” by “poetical” words, but it has
“dropped” that style altogether and “given up all words not used in ordinary
talk” (1404a29–33). The other change was the emergence of tragic acting
as a distinct and requisite component of tragic production. Whereas skill
in acting scarcely counted in the past, and poets used to win tragic competitions without even thinking about it, expertise in “matters of delivery”
had become an absolute requirement (1403b32–34): “It is those who do bear
them in mind who usually win prizes in the dramatic contests . . . in drama,
the actors now count for more than the poets.” About the expertise of such
specialists in delivery, Aristotle says that “it was a long time before it found
its way into the arts of tragic drama” at all (1403b22–23). This is because,
in the past, “the poets acted their tragedies themselves” (1403b23–24). In
other words, so long as the poets were performing their own plays, acting
as a distinct art form hardly existed; now it was what won awards.
Aristotle’s sense that the rise of acting specialists was a feature
specific to his time (“now”) is also suggested by Plato’s Ion.47 When Plato
44 See Ceccarelli 2010.113, esp. n. 43, for a discussion, with bibliography, of the evidence for
the reperformance of Old Tragedy from 386; also Easterling 1993.562 and 1997c.
45 Ceccarelli 2010, Nervegna 2007, Easterling 1997a, and Hall 2007.
46 Ceccarelli 2010.105 writes that these changes were “linked, not least, to the rise
of professional actors,” reminding us that there were surely other causes as well, among
them, presumably, the same political changes at Athens after the loss of the Peloponnesian
War that caused the shift from Old to New Comedy.
47 Woodruff 1983.5 puts the dialogue’s probable composition date before 390 and its
dramatic date before 412, which would make it a picture of the performing professions
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depicts Socrates interrogating an expert in matters of delivery about the
nature of the performer’s art, it is still to the older member of the theatrical cast of Athens, the rhapsode, that he turns. That is, even at the end of
the fifth century, a rhapsode like Ion was still seen as the “working professional,” the specialist in matters of performance and delivery, the one for
whom dramatic performance was a “trade.”48 This was probably because
during most of the fifth century, as Csapo notes, actors still came from a
handful of “well-to-do families” (2010.88); they were not yet professional
performers. In the fifth century, in Niall Slater’s words, acting “was not
yet a way of making a living: there simply were not enough performance
opportunities” for actors to sustain full-time careers (2002.29). By the
mid-fourth century, all this had changed.49 Aristotle writes about an actor
like Theodoros exactly as Plato had previously written about a rhapsode
like Ion: as a full-time professional, a specialist in his own distinct art
form, competing and winning prizes against other like-minded professionals, and pursuing a (potentially) remunerative career.50 In the days of
histrionic amateurism,51 the tragedian’s job was a civic one, “to delight”
the city with a propitious “gift”;52 the job of the fourth-century actor was
to make the spectators cry.
With the advent of full-time performance specialists such as Theodoros and Polos, tragedy would inevitably have changed to some degree
from a good civic augury into the kind of protagonistic monology of individual suffering that we see reflected in Poetics and in the didaskalic record
of 341–39. And whether we look to Aulus Gellius’s story about Polos’s urn
in Electra, or to Stanislavski’s sobbing exit in The Cherry Orchard, we see
that the actor’s special skill, his professional technique, is precisely what
Aristotle recommends to the tragic poet in Poetics: to sympathetically feel,
during the generation prior to Aristotle’s.
48 See Woodruff 1983.5ff. for the significance of Plato’s repeated use of technê to
talk about Ion’s job.
49 Duncan 2005.63 dates the rise of the full-time professional actor to the fourth century, Csapo 2010.83–116 and Hall 2006.30, 298 to the end of the fifth.
50 Rhetoric 3.2 and Politics 7.17, 1336b13–14; Ion 530b–d, 535e, 537e, 538b, 539e,
541c.
51 Fifth-century actors and poets were paid (Csapo 2010.88–89). By amateurism I
mean that their participation in drama was unrelated to their livelihood and could therefore
be part-time or seasonal.
52 See Hanink on the economy of charis and timê with which all three tragedians were
associated both vis-à-vis Athens and other places. She quotes the hypothesis for Oedipus
at Colonus that conceives of the play as a “favour” given by Sophocles to the Athenians,
a gift intended “to delight” the city: 2010.60.
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oneself, the painful emotions of the leading characters (1455a29–b). Polos
sympathized with the grief of a mourning princess; Stanislavski emotionally identified with the sorrows of a bankrupt nobleman. Underlying this
job of sympathetic identification—of feeling what others feel—is an ethical assumption about the universal equivalence and interchangeability of
all human feeling, and Aristotle’s theory of tragedy is based on the same
assumption: we pity the character and fear for ourselves. Inspired, perhaps,
by the feats of sympathetic identification carried out by the virtuoso actors
of the fourth century, Aristotle concluded that all human beings will react
identically to Oedipus’s fate and that this emotional reaction will be identical to Oedipus’s own: as he suffers, so suffer we—all of us, regardless
of whether we ourselves are aristocrats or servants, Athenians or Persians.
In my earlier paper, I argue that the rise of the fourth-century actor was a
“catastrophe for our understanding of fifth-century tragedy” (2008.384),
and I maintain that this is true (with allowances for some degree of strategic hyperbole), but it’s worth adding that it was a very good thing for the
theatre—and our humanity. The actors of Aristotle’s time may have given
us a distorted picture of Old Tragedy, but they also developed a technê
that has been teaching the rest of us ever since how to sympathize with
the suffering and mourn the destruction of others—including our enemies.
University of Victoria
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