THE SEPARATION OF WRITING FROM PERFORMANCE

The emergence of the writer

The Greeks cannot be said to have invented theatrical performance; they do, however, seem to have invented the western playwright, the dramatic poet whose written output stands in its own right as creative work. The divorce between text and performance was a gradual process. Early Greek poets like Sappho, Alcman and Pindar composed words, music and dance for specific performance events, and the word poet simply meant ‘maker’. Writing (without any markers of rhythm such as line and punctuation) existed to preserve the words alone, but the totality of words, music and dance were preserved into the classical period through memorization and reperformance. Of course, each reperformance would have modified the original, but the sense remained that Sappho or Pindar was the maker of a performance, not a set of words. This was the tradition into which Aeschylus and Sophocles stepped.

The dramatist had to go through the process of ‘seeking a chorus’ from the newly appointed magistrate, the archon. Plato speaks of poets ‘demonstrating their songs to the archons’. Although there was clearly no question of the archon taking a script away for silent reading, the writing process had become formally separate from the rehearsal process. In the course of time the writer withdrew from acting, and then passed the job of training the chorus to a specialist, whilst new competitive rules deprived him of the right to select his own actors.