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

Notes

NOTES Introduction 1. Euripides’s Bacchae dramatizes the conflict between the god of wine, mask, and theatre, Dionysus, and the ruler of Thebes, Pentheus. Dionysus, disguised in mortal form as a priest of his cult, arrives in Thebes from the East with a devout band of his sincere female worshippers, maenads or bacchae. Because the city has denied Dionysus’s divinity, he punishes its women with a madness that leads them to a perverse interpretation of his rites on Mt. Cithaeron until he can persuade Thebes and especially Pentheus to respect him. Nevertheless, the stubborn, young Pentheus refuses to acknowledge the stranger/foreigner as a god, so Dionysus convinces him to dress up like a maenad to spy on the women. The god then deludes Pentheus’s mother, Agaue, into believing her son is a lion, and Agaue, her sisters, and the rest of the Theban maenads brutally murder him on the mountain, affixing his head to a stake. The play ends with Dionysus’s pronouncement of his punishment for Agaue and Cadmus. 2. Phillip B. Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Theatre Histories, 64. 3. The Fasti together with the Didascaliae and List of Victors provide fragmentary records of the City Dionysia or Great Dionysia and Lenaia festivals from approximately the early fifth century bCe through the mid-second century bCe. The Fasti list, for example, the names of the victorious tribes in the men’s and boys’ dithyrambic competitions, chorēgos (producer), and didaskalos (composerdirector ), who would sometimes, but not always, be the poet and an actor. For the records, see Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 101–25. See also Benjamin W. Millis and S. Douglas Olson, Inscriptional Records for the Dramatic Festivals in Athens. 118 | noteS to pageS 3–7 4. Oliver Taplin, “Greek Theatre,” 19–20. 5. As I discuss more specifically in chapter 2, classicists such as Helene P. Foley (Female Acts in Greek Tragedy) and Jeffrey Henderson (“Women and the Athenian Dramatic Festivals”) are of the opinion that at least some women were present, whereas scholars such as Simon Goldhill (“Representing Democracy”) have suggested the contrary. 6. Etymologically the word means “the writing of history.” For a discussion of various aspects of historiography (descriptive, historical, and analytical or critical), see Michael Stanford, A Companion to the Study of History, 5–7. For further reading and references on theatre historiography, see Thomas Postlewait, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, which, on pages 1–5, discusses various possible meanings of history and historiography. See also Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie, eds., Interpreting the Theatrical Past; Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Representing the Past; Bruce McConachie, “Doing Things with Image Schemas”; and Tracy C. Davis, “Between History and Event.” For further reading on historiography in general, see Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft; David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History; E. H. Carr, What Is History?; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History; R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of His­ tory; Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader; C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History; Michael Stanford, The Nature of Historical Knowledge and A Companion to the Study of History; and Hayden White, Figural Realism and Tropics of Discourse. On the history of classical scholarship, see Sir John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship; Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography and Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography; Rudolf Pfeiffer, The History of Classical Scholarship and The History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850; and Leighton D. Reynolds and Nigel G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars. 7. The work has been revised by John Gould and D. M. Lewis. 8. While this standard reference work needs updating, The Context of Ancient Drama still provides a valuable summary of the available sources. 9. The comedy stages a debate (agōn) between “Aeschylus” and “Euripides,” comic characters who are parodies of the historical tragedians. Despite this scene’s use of comic exaggeration, it often serves as a historical source on tragedy’s performance. 10. This vase, as discussed in chapter 5, offers more visual evidence about performance conditions than any other extant vase and is the basis for many theories about costume and mask. 11. Bacchae’s dramaturgy does not appear to be typical, but its atypical features are significant. They suggest that whatever scholars learn about the general modes of performance, they still must take into consideration how individual plays operated within those general modes. 12. While I...