Static Actors, Silent Singers

Aeschylean actors could be silent and motionless on the stage for a notoriously long time. My paper reconsiders this curious phenomenon from two mutually related angles. First, it enquires into how spectacles of inactivity had to affect the overall musical and movement design of the plays in which they were originally embedded. Building on these findings, the paper then historicises how the iconic scenes quickly entered the theatrical repertoire and also changed with it through the fourth century BC . By the 430s, the actors’ displays of inactivity could still look quite identical to their Aeschylean archetypes, but they had been reassigned to minor characters, meaning to the second or third-best soloist. In this and other ways, fourth-century actors reused traditional elements of the repertoire by adapting them to the monodic trends of their day.