From Words to Action: Ambiguity of Speakers and Stage Action in Aristophanes' Comedies

Abstract

The ancient dramatic texts consisted of the words spoken by the characters and nothing else. There were no stage directions and the names of the characters were not written before their lines. This has lead to some problems determining who the speakers are in some passages, especially in comedies. The dramatic texts were written for the purpose of theatre production. Because of the lack of stage directions in the texts and little evidence that the dramatic texts were read as literature by contemporary readers, it can be questioned whether the authors had any reason to include information about the stage action in the texts. There are different positions held towards what kind of texts the ancient dramatic texts should be considered to be. Some hold that the stage action which is not part of the text must be interpolated in order to make sense of the texts. Others are convinced that the texts convey all the necessary information for readers to understand the essential stage action. In most cases the stage action needed to make sense of the drama is given by the text. The many passages where it is difficult or impossible to determine who the speakers are in Aristophanes' comedies, however, could be taken as an argument against treating the dramatic texts as self-sufficient texts. In this thesis I will discuss comments by scholars concerning distribution of text to speakers in Aristophanes' comedies in order to investigate some of the possible approaches to the dramatic texts. I will discuss if the different approaches indicate anything about the hermeneutic status of the dramatic text. I will also conduct an experiment, where I distribute text to speakers in the prologue of Frogs by Aristophanes in order to discover challenges to the position that the stage actions of the dramatic texts can be determined based on the text alone.