The prime dramatic character of Greek tragedy is agonistic. Its myths for the most part show men struggling toward some goal, in conflict with one another, or against some force of circumstance or destiny, which is often personified in a god. Tragedy is at the same time a dramatic form restricted severely by theatrical conditions. The number of its speaking actors is held to three. It avoids the staging of any physical action like an assault or battle, let alone catastrophe, or death—for whatever reasons of narrative tradition, aesthetic convention, or simple impracticability. Despite certain ritual or symbolic aids to representation such as music, dance, and gesture, it is in consequence a drama of extreme, sometimes exclusive, verbal concentration. Exposition, development, climax, resolution, action and reaction—all movement occurs in the narrow room of at most three stage persons at any one time debating to confirm or change their attitudes or intentions—often, with a single character so placed debating within himself, in monologue or soliloquy, or in relief or opposition to another voice. My subject here is this last mise-en-scène: the deliberate working up of the ordinary exchange between characters into the opposition of one character to one or two others in a formal debate.
In a bibliography at the end I list works cited more than once; they are abbreviated to the author's name, where necessary a date, and page or section number. As to Stevens's own publications, I cite his 1976 monograph as 'CEE' and his two earlier articles (both published in this journal) just by the years of their appearance, 1937 (Euripides) and 1945 (Aeschylus and Sophocles). Commentators on plays get their usual terse recognition, 'Author on play(-name and) line-number'. Base-texts for the dramatists are the current OCT editions: Aeschylus (Page), Sophocles (Lloyd-Jones and Wilson), Euripides (Diggle), Aristophanes (Hall and Geldart), Menander (Sandbach), Plautus (Lindsay), Terence (Kauer and Lindsay). Dramatic fragments are cited from Snell-Kannicht-Radt TrGF and Kassel-Austin PCG. The paper benefits greatly from my access to unpublished material. First, I include many notes upon colloquial and everyday language left at his death by Eduard Fraenkel (1888-1970). I owe my knowledge of them to Mr Peter Brown of Trinity College, Oxford, who suggested that such matter may survive in the archive of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where indeed it does; I thank the President and Fellows of the college for permission to transcribe or cite from it. 1 In the Fraenkel Papers Box 12 there are five small notebooks, two of which are devoted to the language of Sophocles, particularly the colloquial and everyday, and to colloquial idioms of Iono-Attic dialect as precursors of the koinē. The notebooks are not dated, but some of the material in them was to be used-or had been used-for Fraenkel's Italian seminars on Sophocles' Ajax and Philoctetes during the middle to late 1960s (published posthumously: see the bibliography at Fraenkel 1977 and 1994; for the new material see at Fraenkel MSS). In the last years of his life Fraenkel returned energetically to his lifelong interest in registers of dramatic language, and studied Sophocles generally: see the bibliography by N. Horsfall, JRS 66 (1976), 200-5 and the survey by L. E. Rossi in Fraenkel 1977, viii-xvi. 2 1 Peter Brown has my thanks also for helping me to improve the general discussion with which the paper begins, Part I below; so too Angus Bowie and Doreen Innes. I gratefully acknowledge some advice over arrangement by the editor Miriam Griffin, and particularly thank her for accepting a paper of unusual form. 2 Rossi's premessa contains lively reminiscences of Fraenkel in Italy; on pp. xxix-xxx he lists published commemorations of Fraenkel. Russo's prefazione in Fraenkel 1994 also has factual and biographical matter relating to the Italian seminars, with some photographs.
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