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Social Space in Ancient Theatres

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Leslie du S. Read
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Abstract

How do modern archeological discoveries mesh with and affect present views of ancient theatrical techniques – specifically, of the interrelationship between performers and audience? Looking especially at the ways in which the audience itself was able to interact through the construction of the areas devoted to its own accommodation and circulation, Leslie du S. Read here blends narrative comment and photographic illustration to create a picture of the essential sociability of ancient theatre spaces – an aspect usually ignored by scholars primarily concerned with dramaturgical techniques. Leslie du S. Read, who is presently Head of the Drama Department at the University of Exeter, has for a number of years been researching both visible and known remains of classical theatres, and writing on the social context of stagecraft. He has at present a collection of over 4,000 slides of some 300 theatres, and is in the final stage of completing a history and guide to ancient theatre sites. All photographs in the present article were also taken by the author.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 9 , Issue 36 , November 1993 , pp. 316 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

Notes and References

1. My statistics count separate theatres but not separable buildings or construction phases discernable on a single site.

2. This shallowness would suit solo music and lyric, and also may reflect the anthologizing tendency of some Hellenistic technitae.

3. Harrison, Tony, ‘Facing Up to the Muses’, Proceedings of the Classical Association, LXXXV (1988).Google Scholar

4. It has been argued by von Gerkan, and Muller-Wiener, (Das Theater von Epidauros, Stuttgart, 1961)Google Scholarthat initially the theatron was restricted to the lower seating so that the higher pathways would have led to openings in a parapet at the top of the original theatre where the present diazoma is.

5. Small, D. B., ‘Social Correlations to the Greek Cavea in the Roman Period’, Occasional Papers of Society of Antiquaries, London, N.S., No 10 (1987), p. 85–93Google Scholar. Primarily concerned with Greek theatres in the Roman east, Small traces the breakdown of this egalitarian image – ‘with its paucity of hierarchical spatially distinguished seating’ – in the theatres at Stobi and Termessus under the Empire. The division into wedges (kerkides) in fourth-century and Hellenistic theatres may reflect tribal and citizen/non-citizen differentiation.

6. Ward-Perkins, J. B., Roman Imperial Architecture (second edition), London, 1981, p. 260.Google Scholar

7. De architectura, Book V, vi, 4.

8. De rerum natura, Book IV, trans. Latham, R., 1951, p. 75–83Google Scholar

9. A building inscription shows that construction was well advanced by 330–320 BC (see Burford, A. in B. S. A., LXI (1966), p. 296–300).Google Scholar

10. This has led Rush Rehm, for example, in his fine article on ‘The Staging of Suppliant Plays’ (G.R.B.S., LXXXIX), to espouse, mistakenly I believe, the notion of a rectangular orchestra in fifth-century Athens.

11. Pausanias, writing some 470 years after its original construction, could enthuse: ‘The Roman theatres have gone far beyond all the others in the whole world: the theatre of Megalopolis in Arkadia is unique for magnitude: but who can begin to rival Polykleitos for the beauty and composition of his architecture?’ (trans. Peter Levi, 1971).

12. Gebhard, E., ‘The Form of the Orchestra in the Early Greek Theater’, Hesperia, XLIII (1974), p. 428–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. See Ashby, C., ‘The Case for the Rectangular/Trapezoidal Orchestra’, Theatre Research International, XIII, (1988), p. 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many of the rectangular theatres cited in support of the dissemination of this form are not indisputable. Gebhard, for example, refers to the theatre at Tegea, to the small segments of straight seating, straight orchestra gutter, and curb uncovered by a trench during limited excavation in the 1920s. In the last two years the circular outer wall of this theatre has been uncovered for the first time, and the earlier trench (though not yet re-excavated) can now be seen to have cut across the lateral outer seating, which appears to have been straight (as at Heraklia Minoa) and not across the central seating as originally assumed.

14. This has been argued recently, with thoroughness and conviction, by Scullion, J. C. in his doctoral thesis, ‘The Athenian Stage and Scene-Setting in Early Tragedy’, Harvard University, 1990.Google Scholar

15. This was pointed out a long time ago by R. E. Wycherley in his review of Carlo Anti's Teatri Greci Arcaici. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘if the early theatre was essentially rectilinear in principle’, was this retaining wall ‘not made straight like the corresponding walls at Thoricus and Icaria’?

16. Dilke, O. A. W., ‘The Greek Theatre Cavea’, B. S. A., XLIII (1948), p. 161.Google Scholar