Abstract
This chapter highlights the way in which Aristotelian perspectives limit the contemporary actor’s ability to engage effectively with ancient tragic drama, leading them to mislocate the problems such plays pose, and misunderstand the manifold possibilities represented by the genre’s challenges. This chapter contends that the perspective of the theatre historian, concerned with the relationships between play-texts, theatre practices, and their changing cultural contexts, can help establish a clearer sense of how the Poetics responds to tragic performance in the fourth century BCE, proposing a revisionary identification of Aristotle as a proto-Hellenistic figure. A closing discussion highlights the ways in which Aristotelian presumptions about the nature and function of tragedy set the stage for particular (mis)applications of Stanislavski-inspired practices.
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Notes
- 1.
Unravelling the contested term catharsis is beyond the scope of the present discussion, but Wiles (99–100) offers a succinct introduction to the issue.
- 2.
In the Poetics itself, Aristotle praises what seems to be Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Tauris for the success of its dramatic reversal (1454a), which leads to a happy ending.
- 3.
All quotes from Poetics in this chapter are from Kenny (2013).
- 4.
Halliwell (1998, 19) focuses on Aristophanes’ Frogs (405 BCE) as indicative of ‘some of the passions and liveliness’ of earlier, fifth-century debates about the purpose and value of playwriting.
- 5.
Considering the scholarly field of archaeology, Michael Shanks observes a similar ‘confusion of primary and secondary sources’, noting that ‘most works used by ancient historians are only secondary sources which happen to be a little closer (chronologically and not necessarily conceptually) to what they write about’ (1996, 121).
- 6.
- 7.
See further Wiles (93–4).
- 8.
- 9.
Kotlińska-Toma speculates that the text reproduced today might even be a compilation of class notes, which may have been in circulation among Aristotle’s pupils (15). On the fragmentary condition of some of the text of the Poetics , see Halliwell (1992, 411).
- 10.
- 11.
The word ‘Hellenistic’ is derived from Hellenes: a useful umbrella term which covered all the peoples who spoke Greek, and shared Greek cultural and religious values (even where they came from different city-states, with different rulers, laws, and customs).
- 12.
For a discussion of Hellenistic culture after Alexander, see Lane Fox (2001).
- 13.
In her volume Hellenistic Tragedy (2015), Kotlińska-Toma adopts the performance of the drama Agen in 325 or 324 BCE as marking the beginning of this cultural phase (2). In Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy, Hanink opts for 322 BCE, the year in which Athens was conquered by Macedonian forces, as marking the start of Athenian Hellenism (2014, 221).
- 14.
Hanink (2015) discusses possible reasons for this change in practice, arguing that it represented a deliberate attempt to evoke, and perhaps re-stage, some of the achievements of fifth-century Athens.
- 15.
This ‘canon edition’ was afterwards ‘borrowed’ by Egyptian king Ptolemy III, and ended up in the Alexandrian library, thus playing a key role in the preservation of tragic texts (Kotlińska-Toma, 15).
- 16.
Wiles (96) offers a vivid account of the very different terms in which the experience of tragedy is evoked in Aristophanes’ Frogs.
- 17.
On Aristotle’s conceptual separation of artistic affect from an artwork’s makers/performers, see Hall (2017, 27–8).
- 18.
Goldhill notes that ‘It would be foolish to maintain that the Oresteia , in particular, with the final procession of torch-bearers, the entrance of the Erinyes, the carpet scene, does not involve visual, dramatic action essential to the trilogy’s working’ (1986, 3). This theme will be revisited at greater length in Chap. 6.
- 19.
Aristotle’s knowledge of this scene is evidenced in his critique of this sort of denouement (1454a).
- 20.
Halliwell relates Aristotle’s unease with performance to the specific terms of his philosophical enquiry in the Poetics , stressing ‘Aristotle’s attempt to turn the poet into an artist who is the maker not of materials for the theatre (although he may be incidentally that in practice) but of poetic constructs, muthoi, the experience of which is cognitive and emotional, but not directly dependent on the senses, as it would have to be if drama could only be fully realised in acted performance.’ (1998, 343) He additionally suggests that this project of ‘separating drama from the context of public performance’ was part of Aristotle’s ‘attempt to restore a cognitive significance and respectability to poetry in the face of Plato’s criticisms’ (27).
- 21.
Halliwell suggests that the fourth-century theatre’s lack of reliance upon ‘the guiding designs of the playwrights’, and ‘loosening of the bond between text and performance’ facilitated Aristotle’s own intellectual division of dramatic text from the public theatre (1998, 343).
- 22.
Hamlet says something similar to the players at Elsinore, in a speech often taken to represent Shakespeare’s critique of the actors of his own day, so this is clearly not a charge uniquely levelled at the actors of Aristotle’s period.
- 23.
In this, the actors of the fourth century BCE may, like the author-director-actors of the previous century, be compared with the contemporary figure of the multi-skilled ‘theatre-maker’ (Radosavljević, 2015).
- 24.
See further Clauss & Cuypers (2010, introduction).
- 25.
See also Hanink, who comments that ‘To Athenodorus’ mind, Alexander’s festival had evidently constituted the better offer’ (2014, 20).
- 26.
Hanink identifies such views as providing urgent impetus for the Lycurgan cultural project, which (by contrast) ‘set out to ensure that Athens and tragedy be forever linked’ (2014, 220).
- 27.
See further Hall (2017, 40–1).
- 28.
Wiles (103) additionally draws attention to the philosopher’s ‘materialist’ worldview, which may have meant that he found the religious overtones of much choral song and dance uncongenial.
- 29.
Aeschylus, too, is credited with having ‘reduced the choral element’ (1449a), potentially suggesting that the (perceived) decline of the chorus had been going on for as long as anyone could remember.
- 30.
On the changing architecture of The Theatre of Dionysus in the age of Lycurgus, see Hanink (2014, 92–100).
- 31.
Available from: http://www.cssd.ac.uk/course/acting-classical-ma (viewed 5 February 2018).
- 32.
See further Hall (2004).
- 33.
On the marketing, and marketization, of actor training in the USA, see Tyler Renaud (2010).
- 34.
Though, in practice (and as many students have discovered, to their puzzlement), the latter is actually quite difficult to square with the ‘tragic hero’ approach to interpretation. After all—who is the play’s flawed Aristotelian protagonist?
- 35.
Goldhill identifies a renewed focus on staging the entire Oresteia trilogy, rather than just its first play, Agamemnon , as symbolic of ‘an increased recognition of the political nature of ancient tragedies’ among theatre-makers and audiences (2008, 55). On the problems of reading the Oresteia via Aristotle, see Wiles (101–4).
- 36.
This is the kind of interpretative passivity that Bertolt Brecht was reacting against when he labelled his own politically engaged theatrical experiments ‘non-aristotelian’ (Willetts 1964, 78).
- 37.
A similar approach may have been familiar practice in Athenian theatre before Aristotle’s time. For example, in the comic play The Women at the Thesmophoria (411 BCE), Aristophanes presents a comic portrait of the (real-life) tragedian Agathon, ridiculously dressed up in women’s clothing to summon the necessary mood for writing tragic females.
- 38.
Not entirely impossible. It is said, for example, that a lost text of Aristotle’s dealt with comic drama. See Wiles (104–5).
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Dunbar, Z., Harrop, S. (2018). The Aristotle Legacy. In: Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95471-4_2
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