Athenian Tragedy in Performance: A Guide to Contemporary Studies and Historical Debates

6. Gesture and Mask

6 a GESTURE AND MASK Scholarship on gesture in the fifth-century theatre depends in large part upon theatrical scenes on vases1 and upon dramatic texts. These sources provide ample examples of actions such as kneeling, weeping, kissing, embracing, sitting, lying down, running, striking, bowing the head, prostration , and the handling of objects and tokens. However, scholars must consider to what extent the movements and gestures indicated by fictive characters on static images and in texts corresponded to the actions of fifth-century actors.2 While the codes and conventions for representing actions in iconography or a play-text may parallel in some ways the kinetic movement on the stage,3 surely there are differences. For example, vases depict movements that are static and frozen in time, but performers in a multidimensional theatre articulate movement into that space and across a period of time. Dramatic texts signal and describe gestures but give no indication of specific characteristics such as their size, speed, intensity, or fluidity. What can be visualized, then, when, as Pickard-Cambridge has lamented , “we are simply ignorant of the degree of stylization that prevailed, even in gesture”?4 Oliver Taplin, Michael Halleran, Richard Green, Maria Luisa Catoni, Jan Bremmer, Herman Roodenburg, Donald Lateiner, Alan Boegehold, Glenys Davies, and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones are some of the scholars who have addressed this difficult question.5 The studies of representations of gesture by Bremmer and Roodenburg, Catoni, Lateiner, and Davies have 100 | Chapter Six helped to create a backdrop against which theatrical gestures can be compared . Green has demonstrated a method for comparing representations of everyday gesture to those of theatrical gestures, and while Taplin has focused on visual imagery as well, his well-known The Stagecraft of Aeschylus and Greek Tragedy in Action have, like Halleran’s work, focused primarily on the gesture and movement represented in theatrical texts. LlewellynJones , however, combines the visual and the literary in his exploration of a comparative method with Japanese Kabuki. Although their approaches are distinct, all of these scholars share the common task of deciphering the conventions of texts and iconography and translating into words the traces of gestures and movement inscribed in these artifacts. In order to interrogate the historiographical problems that arise in the process, I limit my discussion in this chapter to a few key works on theatrical gesture and its related subject of the tragic mask of the performer. I begin with a consideration of the criticism that Oliver Taplin’s The Stage­ craft of Aeschylus (1977) has received for collapsing theatrical character and actor into a single identity. I also discuss a technique that Richard Green has applied in his “Towards a Reconstruction of Performance Style” (2002), where he compares cultural attitudes about gesture, derived from literature, to depictions of gesture in iconography. I then examine the cross-cultural approach of Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones in his “Body Language and the Female Role-Player” (2005), before turning my attention to David Wiles’s Mask and Performance (2007) and Peter Meineck’s “The Neuroscience of the Tragic Mask” (2011). The final section of the chapter addresses the information about gestures in Bacchae’s dressing-up scene and describes historiographical issues that arise in several scholars’ arguments about the significance of those gestures. I focus in particular on two points: the problem of circular reasoning in E. R. Dodds’s6 and Richard Seaford’s7 arguments for the association of the gestures with ritual, and the search for authorial intent in Bernd Seidensticker’s8 argument for their association with comedy. I conclude the section with a discussion of the risks and rewards of David Wiles’s practitioner-based approach, which contests the theory of the socalled “smiling” mask of Dionysus.9 In this way, I attempt to illustrate both the information in the text about theatrical gesture and the mask, as well as the difficulties inherent in using that information as evidence for a reconstruction of the gestures and movements of Bacchae’s historical 405 bCe production. geSture and maSk | 101 Words versus Gesture/Character versus Actor Oliver Taplin’s The Stagecraft of Aeschylus speaks vividly to the historiographical questions surrounding the study of gesture. Stagecraft’s rigorous scholarship demonstrates with painstaking detail10 the importance of words in the reconstruction of not only gesticulation and the handling of stage properties but also movement and the lack of it as in tableaux. Taplin argues that “extra action [in a tragic...