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Knowledge and Authority in the Choral Voice of Euripidean Tragedy Donald J. Mastronarde Scholarly attention has often turned in recent years to the familiarity and centrality of choral poetry and performance in archaic and classical Greek culture, and this attention has been extended in suggestive ways to the relation of the chorus within tragedy to other choruses and to the possible interpenetration of civic identity and fictive identity in some choral songs of Greek tragedy.1 Such studies This paper is a slightly expanded version of the presentation I gave at the “Crossing the Stages” conference. It is derived from a longer study in progress on the Euripidean chorus. There is some overlap with my article “Il coro euripideo: autorità e integrazione,” QUCC n.s. 60.3 (1998) 55–80. The Italian version contains a much fuller version of Section I as well discussions of Aristotle’s view of the integration of the chorus and of the chorus of Medea that are not included here. The paragraph on the complicity of the chorus in Orestes in Section II and the discussion of Andromache (Section III) appear here and not in the Italian essay. 1 See, for example, C. Calame, Les choeurs de jeunes filles en Grèce archaïque (Rome 1977) = Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Role, and Social Functions (Lanham, Maryland 1997); B. Gentili, Poesia e pubblico nella Grecia antica: da Omero al V secolo (Rome 1984) = Poetry and its Public in Ancient Greece: From Homer to the Fifth Century (Baltimore 1988); J. Herington, Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition (Berkeley 1985); A.P. Burnett, The Art of Bacchylides (Cambridge, Massachusetts 1985); S.H. Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play 88 Syllecta Classica 10 (1999) reassert the importance of the chorus within the polyphony of voices that make up a Greek play, and this recognition of the chorus’ heightened value parallels the ideological weight sometimes ascribed to the chorus as the representation of a group placed in sharp contradistinction to the individual heroic actors. Nevertheless, there remains , in my judgment, a tension in the implied audience of tragedy between, on the one hand, sympathy with and wonder at the extraordinary individuals of the mythic elite with their heroic ambitions and, on the other hand, identification with the middling values and the safety of the common man, represented in nameless servants and choruses. Equally, there is a paradoxical tension in the chorus of tragedy, for it is important to recognize the variety and instability of the choral voice—that is, to understand how it may shift from the “intradramatic” position of a group with particular fictional identity and status and with plausible psychological motivations and immediate emotional responses, and thus with all the limitations of a partial perspective, to the “extradramatic” position of a collective voice less tied to a particular identity, and standing more aloof from the action, and thus capable of more authoritative utterance. Because there is a competition between factors that lend to the choral voice a special claim upon the audience’s attention and agreement and those factors that undercut such a privilege, the authority of the choral position is ultimately limited and problematic. John Gould has recently well reminded us of the “otherness” of the choral role and challenged approaches that have claimed too much “centrality” and civic identi fication for the tragic chorus.2 Yet we should not have to choose in Greek Religion (Baltimore 1993); and the articles collected in Dioniso 55 (1984–85) and in Arion ser. 3, 3:1 (1994–95), especially A. Henrichs, “‘Why Should I Dance?’: Choral Self-Referentiality in Greek Tragedy,” 56–111 of the latter . For further bibliography on the chorus, see V. di Benedetto and E. Medda, La tragedia sulla scena: la tragedia greca in quanto spettacolo teatrale (Turin 1997) 248–83; and for Euripides in particular see M. Hose, Studien zum Chor bei Euripides [Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, Bd. 10, Bd. 20] (Stuttgart 1990–91). 2 “Tragedy and Collective Experience,” in Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, M.S. Silk, ed. (Oxford 1996) 217–43. I have also found suggestive the reflections on...

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