Roman Tragedy: Theatre to Theatricality

From Tragedy to Metatragedy

plays could have been mounted successfully.46 In addition to convincing arguments drawn from textual evidence, Sutton cites a graffito from Pompeii that suggests that the Agamemnon was sufficiently popular that performance of the play should at least be considered, if not produced by Seneca, then soon after his death.47 What seems clear from the texts themselves is that the theatre audience is irrelevant—Senecan tragedy is theatrical even without the theatre , or even an audience seated in an auditorium. When the audience’s own metatheatre is incorporated into stage reality, the metatragedy of Seneca results: theatricality replaces theatre as characters become their own audience watching or commenting on their own rhetoricized stage actions. The audience seated in the theatre has effectively shifted roles from spectator to witness. Since Senecan drama undermined the very dramatic reality essential for theatre, the decline of tragedy after Seneca may be due to the inability of tragedy to compete with offstage theatricality , even if incorporated onstage, and to an audience in the auditorium , that felt alienated from the audience onstage. Perhaps pantomime engaged the audience’s interpretative abilities without challenging their very notions of reality, as in opposed to tragedy’s growing alienation from the audience in the auditorium in favor of the audience on the stage. The Phoenissae may point to the intrusion or fusion of pantomime into tragedy for spectacle, which would make distinctions between various genres of theatre performances irrelevant. F RO M T R A G E DY T O M E TAT R A G E DY By looking forward from Livius rather than back from Seneca, this study has traced, in general, the development of theatre to theatricality that transformed tragedy to metatragedy. The fragments from the plays of Livius, Naevius, and Ennius illustrate that the stage was not the exclusive domain of actors unconnected with the reality of the audience. Ennius’ rhetorical skill contributed to the perception of offstage theatricality in that only once actors say and do things appropriate to the theatre can they be quoted and imitated offstage and recognized as theatrical . The involvement of the audience or the inclusion of the audience’s reality on the tragic stage points to the development of metatheatre concurrently with the development of the theatre itself: the recreation of the audience’s reality onstage leads to a perception of theatre, whereas the recreation of stage reality or the framing of offstage reality in relation to the theatre leads to a perception of theatricality offstage. m e tat r a g e d y 137 Pacuvius’ and Accius’ plays point to their own theatricality. The seeming dialectic with rhetoric and Accius’ exploitation of spectacle for pathos seems to reflect his audience’s experience outside of the theatre, in particular the growing audience awareness and exploitation of a theatricalized reality off the stage. This reciprocal relationship between the theatre and the audience’s perception of reality outside of the theatre, whether due to the plays of Accius, Varius’ Thyestes, or Ovid’s Medea, may have anticipated and shaped how Neronian Rome interacted with the theatre. What happens, however, when the audience’s reality, in the form of historical drama, enters the stage? The audience’s theatricalized reality was reincorporated onto the stage, producing “competing realities.” The dramatic recreation of historical events leads to a contaminatio, not with another play, but with reality. Since real or historic people assume stage roles in praetextae, the dramatizing of events alters both onstage and offstage reality and intentionally breaks down the separation between the stage and the audience. This is especially the case if, say, a celebrated general is depicted onstage by an actor watching “himself” in audience, and vice versa. The opening program of Pompey’s theatre, with visual referents to his own triumph, demonstrated to public figures exploiting the stage, through the restaging of previously produced plays and the inclusion of the audience’s reality, that tragedy could be made topically relevant to produce a correspondence between real people and mythological characters , current events and mythological events, and the current stage production (dramatic text) and a previous stage production (dramatic text). Although the audience may have understood allusions to contemporary persons and events in stage productions before this date, Pompey ’s conscious self-association with a mythological character points to the manipulation of a theatre event to guide the audience’s interpretation of that allusion. The attempted restaging of Accius’ Brutus following the assassination of Julius Caesar and...