Showing vs. telling

pp. 17-75

in: William Gruber, Offstage space, narrative, and the theatre of the imagination, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Greek tragic playwrights typically dramatized violence or dying by means of so-called messenger scenes. Bustling on stage to report after the fact on events such as the slaughter of Clytemnaestra or the dismemberment of Pentheus, the messenger is one of the best-known conventions of ancient drama. One of the best-known and yet also one of the most hackneyed: the messengers' elaborate narratives of disaster figured so prominently in ancient tragedies that they soon became objects of ridicule, even among contemporaries. The comic poet Aristophanes often makes fun of the messengers of tragedy for their habit of making short stories long. In his earliest play (Acharnians, 425 BCE), for example, a messenger comes on stage to deliver a parody of a retrospective narrative concerning a battle; the climax of his report comes when he tells how the Athenian general Lamachus stumbled into a sewage ditch. And in Lysistrata (411 BCE), Aristophanes' best-known comedy, a play in which the women of Athens refuse to have sex with their husbands and lovers unless they agree to put an end to the Peloponnesian War, a messenger from Sparta appears on stage suffering from a stupendous penile erection, one so large and irrepressible it impedes his story-telling.