Helen's Theatrical Mêchanê: Props and Costumes in Euripides' Helen

Helen’s Theatrical Mêchanê Props and Costumes in Euripides’ Helen Sarah Powers Aristophanes’ comedies are characterized by a heavy use of props and other theatrical items, such as prominent set and costume pieces. We could think of the giant dung beetle that the heroes ride up to heaven in Peace (though some might classify that as stage machinery), Dionysus’s lion skin and club in Frogs, and the baskets of goodies to which Paphlagon and the Sausage-­ Seller treat Demos as they fight for his support in Knights (and the cascade of the goodies when Paphlagon’s basket is overturned, showing how much he has withheld ).1 In Thesmophoriazusae, the most memorable use of a prop comes with the wine-­ skin that Mica, one of the women at the assembly, treats as her baby. In one of the play’s climactic scenes, the play’s unnamed male main character holds the wine-­ skin “baby” over the altar and threatens to “kill” it, and the painting on the Telephus vase helps us imagine what this object might have looked like onstage.2 We have other vase paintings that represent props in other Old Comedies that have not survived, so it seems safe to say that stage properties were an important element of Old Comedy, and as New Comedies often revolved around recognition tokens and other key objects, we can see a continuation of the centrality of props in comedy, even through modern examples of the genre.3 However, Greek tragedy and other tragic forms that follow its basic style typically have a very different relationship with props and theatrical paraphernalia. In Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, Bert States has explained what he terms the “rhetorical scenery” characteristic of plays performed in a mostly bare or neutral space, such as those of the Greeks or Shakespeare. States argues that a world in this kind of theatre is created primarily through language and 24      S a r ah P owe r s metaphor, which then inflect everything that the audience might see on the stage. He explains, “The very thickness of Shakespeare’s world is derived from the way in which poetry triumphs over neutral space.” Real objects on this stage may be important, but even these, States contends, tend to be shaped by language and metaphor.4 In the context of Greek tragedy, the rich purple fabric that Clytemnestra spreads before Agamemnon in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is a prime example of such a heightened or “rhetoricized” prop. Its significance to the scene suggests that it must have been a real object on the stage, but that object is so laden with symbolic value through the play’s language that it takes on a much deeper and more complex meaning than an ordinary garment or carpet, even a sumptuous one. In his objection to it, Agamemnon even uses imagery of speech or crying out to describe the inappropriate nature of walking on such ornate fabric: “chôris podopsê­ trôn te kai tôn poikilôn / klêdôn autei” [literally, “The cry (or ‘appellation ’ or ‘omen’) of ‘foot-­ wipers’ and of ‘intricate’ (or ‘multi-­ colored’ or possibly ‘embroidered’) shouts in different directions”] (926–27).5 Not only do Clytemnestra and Agamemnon discuss the cloth at length, then, but Agamemnon even describes the fabric as crying out. Language is thus central to the shaping of this object, and one might even go so far as to suggest that the idea of the object becomes more important than the object itself. This is clearly different from the comic uses of props and costumes that rely so heavily on the materiality and functionality of the objects, as we can see in Aristophanes and others.6 Euripides’ Helen has long been considered a “problem play,” and schol­ ars have been especially challenged to classify it generically. Is it a tragedy? A romance? A few have even claimed that it is really a comedy!7 I would like to suggest that long before the “happy” ending, which is in fact characteristic of many Greek tragedies, it is the overabundance, unusual importance, and everyday nature of the theatrical “stuff” (props, costumes , and...