Simultaneity in the Plays of Menander
Mitchell Brown
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MITCHELL BROWN is an assistant professor in the Department of Classical Studies at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. His research interests include Greek and Roman drama, performance, and reception studies. In particular, he studies ancient comedy by combining material, historical, and textual evidence to understand plays as both cultural events and pieces of literature. In both his teaching and his research he strives to approach the Greek and Roman world not as a set of static objects and texts, but a dynamic space in which buildings, artwork, and writing affected and were affected by their various audiences.
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Abstract
One of the greatest dramaturgical changes from fifth- to fourth-century BCE Greek theater concerns the relationship of the offstage fictional universe to its onstage counterpart. The tragic and comic poets of the fifth century make no attempts to interweave the onstage and offstage worlds of their plays. The flexible nature of time in fifth-century drama allows characters to traverse long distances offstage in only a few short moments of onstage time, resulting in an incongruity in the seen and unseen settings of the play. Offstage spaces serve only as a scaffolding to support the more developed onstage world. In contrast, the fourth-century comic poet Menander goes to great lengths to preserve a realistic temporal relationship between his offstage and onstage worlds. In this article, I highlight Menander’s dramaturgical techniques in building such a relationship through analysis of two of his plays – the Dyskolos and the Perikeiromene – which all feature unseen, offstage households as settings that the playwright coherently incorporates into his drama through the reporting of characters who come on and offstage frequently. Through this technique, Menander invests his play with a simultaneity between offstage and onstage worlds, convincing his audience that seen and unseen events happen at the same time. I argue that this simultaneity greatly expands the capabilities of Menander’s drama and allows him to shift away from the political themes that dominate fifth-century drama and instead focus on the private, interior spaces, heightening the importance of women in the plays.
One of the greatest dramaturgical changes from fifth- to fourth-century BCE Greek theater concerns the relationship of the offstage fictional universe to its onstage counterpart. The tragic and comic poets of the fifth century make no attempts to interweave the onstage and offstage worlds of their plays. The flexible nature of time in fifth-century drama allows characters to traverse long distances offstage in only a few short moments of onstage time, resulting in an incongruity in the seen and unseen settings of the play. Offstage spaces serve only as a scaffolding to support the more developed onstage world. In contrast, the fourth-century comic poet Menander goes to great lengths to preserve a realistic temporal relationship between his offstage and onstage worlds. In this article, I highlight Menander’s dramaturgical techniques in building such a relationship through analysis of two of his plays – the Dyskolos and the Perikeiromene – which all feature unseen, offstage households as settings that the playwright coherently incorporates into his drama through the reporting of characters who come on and offstage frequently. Through this technique, Menander invests his play with a simultaneity between offstage and onstage worlds, convincing his audience that seen and unseen events happen at the same time. I argue that this simultaneity greatly expands the capabilities of Menander’s drama and allows him to shift away from the political themes that dominate fifth-century drama and instead focus on the private, interior spaces, heightening the importance of women in the plays.
| etudesdec2019brown.pdf |
