Euripides Day 5: Playing the OTHER

Many scholars emphasize the role that the chorus plays in reacting to events on stage on behalf of the audience. They are the physical, cognitive, and emotional link between the world of the heroes in the drama and the world of the fifth century Athenian audience; the audience therefore experiences the action and suffering of the drama by way of the chorus. In recent years, however, there have been several studies that seek to undermine the authority of the chorus by emphasizing their marginality and frequent lack of knowledge or agency within the plays.

The former view of the chorus must therefore account for the extraordinary disparity between the Athenian citizen audience and the marginal identity of the chorus of most dramas. For choruses of captive women, we must ask how characters who are wholly opposite to the Greek citizen male could speak to the values of those in the audience or teach the young men portraying them. It is in fact the disparity between the chorus member and the character of the captive woman he becomes in performance that is one of the more extraordinary aspects of the captive woman’s lament. 

The most obvious category separating the Athenian audience and many tragic choruses is gender. Recent scholarship has demonstrated some of the many continuities (as well as the discontinuities) involved in the incorporation of choruses of young women from archaic and aristocratic festival contexts into the world of the City Dionysia. The impersonation of the choral dancing of adolescent females by adolescent males seems to have been a crucial element in the experience of being a chorus member.

The choral singing and dancing of young men in tragic choruses is only one component of tragedy’s engagement with feminine modes of discourse, however, and is part of a larger structure. The classic study in English of the feminine and the theater is Froma Zeitlin’s Playing the Other (1996), which draws on her own earlier pathfinding work and that of other scholars such as Nicole Loraux and Jean-Pierre Vernant. In her analyses of several individual works of epic, tragedy, and comedy, Zeitlin articulates the theory that Greek tragedy uses the feminine to explore the masculine, and it does so under the aegis of the god Dionysus, who is the god most clearly associated with the crossing of boundaries and the impersonation of the other. The experience of “playing the other” belongs to both the actors on stage and the spectators in the audience, and it is by no means confined to the playing of female roles by male actors. The tragedies of Euripides offer the most complete exploration of the phenomenon.

Note:  While it is true that not all choruses are women, the choruses of two-thirds of the surviving tragedies are. Since the same chorus danced all four plays that were entered by each playwright, the vast majority of all choruses would have danced the role of a woman.