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The Three-Actor Rule

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Clifford Ashby
Clifford Ashby
Affiliation:
Clifford Ashby is Emeritus Professor of Theatre Studies at Texas Tech University.
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Extract

For those who may have been a little dismayed by my previous questioning of such sacred absolutes of the Greek theatre as (1) the circular shape of the original orchestra, (2) the central placement of the altar, (3) the panoramic siting of Greek theatres, and (4) the dawn beginning of performance, please accept this assurance: the three-actor rule for tragedies is alive and well—and not presently refutable. I shall apply the three-actor rule to the extant tragedies in order to see what effect it had upon acting and production practices during the Classic period.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1995 , pp. 183 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1995

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References

Notes

1. See the following: ‘The Case for the Rectangular/Trapezoidal Orchestra’, Theatre Research International, 13, Spring 1988, pp. 1–20Google Scholar; ‘The Siting of Greek Theatres’, Theatre Research International, 16, Autumn 1991, pp. 181–201Google Scholar; ‘Did the Greeks Really Get to the Theatre before Dawn—Three Days Running?’, Theatre Research International, 17, Spring 1992, pp. 2–7Google Scholar; ‘Where was the Altar?’, Theatre Survey, 32, May 1991, pp. 3–21.Google Scholar

2. Aristotle, The Poetics, 4.1449a 15–19.

3. Poetics, 7.1551a 8–9.

4. Bywater, Ingram writes that ‘the idea of tragedies having been at some date or other timed by the clepsydra is to my mind highly improbable’. Aristotle on the Art of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), p. 182.Google Scholar

5. G. E. Bean, ‘Priene’, in Princeton Encyclopaedia of Classical Sites.

6. The inscription reads: ‘Athenopolis, son of Kydimos, priest of Dionysos.’ F., Frhr, Hiller, Von Gaertringen, ed., Inschriften von Priene (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1906)Google Scholar, #177.

7. There is some slight evidence that Aeschylus began writing in a time when play length was restricted, and that in his old-fashioned manner he continued to write with a time limit in mind. Six of his seven plays are nearly identical in line length, varying only from 1047 to 1093; only Agamemnon, with 1673 lines, exceeds this apparent limit. By contrast, the plays of Sophocles range in length from 1278 to 1779 lines, those of Euripides from 1055 to 1693.

8. ‘Aeschylus and the 3rd Actor’, in Words and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theatre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1979).Google Scholar

9. Dating is taken from Brockett, Oscar G., History of the Theatre, 6th ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1991)Google Scholar, chap. 2. With his frequent editions, Brockett is able to keep abreast of the ever-changing dating of these plays.

10. Most classicists would object to the suggestion that this speech is not an integral part of the play's structure. Pickard-Cambridge, Arthur speaks of ‘The Three Tremendous Lines Assigned To Pylades’. The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 141.Google Scholar

11. On The Embassy, 337. With a rhetorician's disregard of consistency, Demosthenes also assigns Aeschines the major role of Creon in Sophocles' Antigone in order to recite some lines which ‘Aeschines omitted to quote, though he has often spoken the lines, and knows them by heart; for of course you are aware that, in all tragic dramas, it is the enviable privilege of third-rate actors to come on as tyrants, carrying their royal sceptres’. Ibid., p. 247.

12. In the fifth century, each playwright was given three actors to perform all the roles in his four plays. By 341 bc, according to Margarete Bieber, the apportioning of actors was changed so that the three leading actors performed on all three days, each appearing in one tragedy by each of the three playrights. This would have had the effect of levelling the playing field for the competitions between both the playwrights and the actors, and would also give the first actor only one major role to perform each day. See Bieber, , The History of the Greek and Roman Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 81–2.Google Scholar

13. See Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, p. 137–43.

14. , AeschylusChoephori (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. liii–liv.Google Scholar

15. Demosthenes, in his derogatory fashion, offers some verification of this emphasis on voice: He states that ‘those famous actors Simylus and Socrates' were better known as “the Growlers”’. On the Crown, p. 262. (‘Growler’ may also be translated as ‘Groaner’.)

16. The giant Polyphemus, in Cyclops, would need to be giant-sized. Since this is slapstick comedy, the role was probably played by a speaking actor whose costume permitted concealment of a mute figure on whose shoulders he rode. Stilts are a possibility, if perhaps more difficult to manoeuvre.