Performance and Space in Ancient Drama

Imperial pantomime was not, of course, the street performance that we think of today, but what seems to us a strange mix, with a notoriously effeminate silent masked male player (the "pantomime") at center stage, in some sense "acting" and "dancing" the part, while other male and female players, notionally off stage, spoke and sang the libretto, performed the music, and at times added an additional "actor." Exactly who did what, in what way, and where, remains controversial.

This paper offers a new reading of Plautus’ Amphitryon based on theorizations of identity as performative. A basic tenet of performance studies is that personal identity, in both theatrical and everyday contexts, is constructed by the set of repeated, characteristic actions that an individual embodies—what Schechner (1985) calls “twice-behaved behavior.” Identity performativity is deployed most famously in Butler’s theorizations of gender and has had an important reception in the study of gender in the ancient world (Butler 1988, Butler 1990, Gunderson 2000).

The first few lines of Plautus’ Truculentus develop the conceit that the stage is a temporary incursion of Athens into the heart of Rome. The prologus addresses the audience as a public assembly and asks that they consent to this ad hoc territorial redefinition of Roman city space. Scholars have sometimes noted the similar turn in the Menaechmi (7-12; 72-76), where the prologus draws attention to the arbitrariness of the stage’s “here,” which may change from city to city between plays.

While the choral culture of archaic and fifth-century Greece has enjoyed the focus of many scholars in the past half century, the role of the chorus in fourth-century culture has remained obscure - and with good reason. The texts of choral performance have acted as a mainstay for much discussion of choral theory and, after 400, extant choral texts are few and far between. Peter Wilson has demonstrated in his work on the institution of choregia that non-lyric texts can be just as illuminating, if not more so, in this kind of enquiry.