Ramsey, 'Actors in the Audience', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9503
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9503-ramsey-actors
@@@@95.3.2, Bartsch, Actors in the Audience
Shadi Bartsch, Actors in the Audience. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 309. $37.50. ISBN
0-674-00357-8.
Reviewed by John T. Ramsey -- University of Illinois
(Chicago)
This book encompasses a great deal more than its enigmatic
title suggests. In the course of five chapters, the author
explores two models that are adduced to shed light on the demise
of sincerity, on the way in which language itself and personal
conduct adjusted to the loss of freedom during the first century
of the Roman empire. The first of these models is
"theatricality", that is, the need for the subjects of the
emperor, and even at times the emperor himself, to act out a
script in dealings with each other. Survival by those close to
the emperor, especially those in the senatorial class, often
depended upon guessing the correct attitude that should be
adopted in responding to the emperor's conduct in the political
sphere and on the domestic scene as well. The second model,
"doublespeak", concerns the insincerity of the literary artist,
and it is viewed as a natural response of the author both to the
lack of freedom that existed under the more tyrannical of the
Roman emperors and as a natural complement to the audience's
increasing role under the empire in determining the "meaning" of
a text by hunting for concealed criticisms of the regime. The
first three chapters concern primarily the first model, whereas
the fourth and fifth chapters (about equal in length to the first
three) concern primarily the second.
The author deliberately dispenses with an introduction,
preferring instead to let the chapters speak for themselves, as
she informs us in her preface. Chapter one, we learn from the
preface, ultimately inspired the title of the book as a whole and
grew out of an earlier version which had been given as a talk.
Some of the anecdotal features which must have made this a very
engaging lecture still remain. To begin with, we are invited to
mark a radical change in the audience's relation to the emperor
in the theater when the emperor himself, Nero, took the stage.
Previously audiences in the theater had occasionally protested
conditions and reacted to imperial policies, but when the emperor
began to perform as citharoedus and a stage-actor, members
of the audience, especially those belonging to the senatorial
class, found themselves compelled to "act" out their approval and
appreciation of the emperor's performance. B. points, for
instance, to the way in which Dio describes the reaction of the
audience to Nero's Greek tour in terms that recall the roles of
actors. Building upon modern social theory which sees
performance as an element in relations between persons of unequal
power (as discussed recently, for instance, by Scott,
Domination and the Arts of Resistance [1990]), B. directs
our attention to the way in which Tacitus in the Annals
applied the paradigm of acting not only to the reaction of the
audience to Nero's stage performances but also to everyday events
as well. In contrast with the portrayal in Suetonius and Dio, we
find a greater element of theatricality in Tacitus' treatment of
such incidents as the reaction to Nero's murder of Britannicus,
to his murder of Agrippina and to his punishment of Julius
Montanus. On the other hand, B. also perceptively observes that
at times Tacitus appears to have been misled by his own paradigm
according to which the "actors in the audience" were required to
follow a script laid down by the emperor. As she points out,
Tacitus seems not to allow for the gullible side of Nero that we
find revealed in Suetonius and Dio who show the emperor at times
actually taken in by the flattery of his courtiers rather than
cynically pulling the strings that controlled the actions of
those around him.
Chapter two considers the extent to which there may have
been "leakage" between reality on the one hand and dramatic
fiction on the other. The ancient sources themselves were
conscious of this intriguing possibility of fiction on the stage
having its counterpart in reality, noting, for instance, that
Nero played such roles as Orestes, Alcmeon, and Oedipus and that
he committed in real life many of the same crimes for which these
fictional characters were noted. B. points to the arrangement in
Suetonius who reverses historical fact by reporting first Nero's
acting roles, then the murder of his mother, and finally the
graffiti that commented on the murder by likening Nero to two
mythical matricides. Sensibly, however, B. does not see this as
necessarily deliberate distortion on Suetonius' part so much as
perhaps a convenient grouping of his material. In this same
chapter B. calls attention to the popularity of "fatal charades"
in the Neronian period, "fatal charades" being the term coined by
Coleman (JRS 1990) to describe the execution of criminals
who were forced to act out mythological roles (e.g., Icarus,
Orpheus, and Hercules) that entailed a real, and not just a
fictional death on stage. Here surely we are witness to the
two-way traffic between the stage (fiction) and real life that
was very much a part of the Neronian age, although in this
chapter the discussion veers somewhat from the "actors in the
audience" theme.
Chapter three brings us squarely back to the "audience", but
now the emphasis is on the active role of this audience in
detecting a subtext in the author's words. In this chapter, we
begin to make the transition to the second paradigm, that of
doublespeak, but for the time being the focus is still mainly on
the audience, not the author. B. argues that under the empire
the audience came to assume the initiative in discovering a
hidden message, one that the author dared not make plain because
he was living under a tyrant. Attention is drawn to the way in
which political comment in the theater differed under the
republic. Whereas under the republic it was more often the actor
(or sometimes the author of the play) who turned a line or
passage into a commentary on the current state of politics, under
the empire the audience was in a better position to indulge in
criticism of the regime because there was safety (and anonymity)
in numbers. It was the audience, therefore, who took the lead in
discovering a subtext, and this in turn led authors often to
adopt the expedient of protesting against reading a hidden
meaning into their words. The result could be wheels within
wheels, or a B. calls it , a "chinese box effect", since the more
an author avowed his loyalty to the regime and expressed praise
of the emperor, the more the audience looked for innuendo, so
meaning was always receding to deeper and deeper levels.
Chapter four turns away from the audience and considers the
intent of the author to subvert the apparent meaning of
his own text. To my mind, this chapter is the most valuable in
that it offers a new and challenging interpretation of two
apparently contradictory texts by bringing to bear some of the
themes found in the earlier part of the book. One of these texts
is Tacitus' Dialogus de Oratoribus concerning which
readers have been hard pressed to explain the seemingly
irreconcilable positions adopted by Maternus in his two speeches,
and indeed why it is that the first speech, on poetry, has any
place in a dialogue about the decline in oratory. On the one
hand, Maternus first argues that poetry (particularly his domain
of dramatic poetry, which ventures to criticize the regime) is
superior to contemporary oratory, which has degenerated into a
mere tool for greedy advancement (clearly referring to the
delatores). On the other hand, in his second speech he
presents the decline of eloquence as an inevitable consequence of
the lack of contentiousness which has been banished by peace and
prosperity under the auspicious rule of Vespasian. B. partially
accepts Luce's solution of the contradiction between these two
positions (each speech making the "best case" that can be made in
a debate), but she introduces a new element by seeing the first
speech as the signal which should alert us to read the overt
praise of Vespasian's regime as a false message. According to
B., the author deliberately subverts the import of his own words,
and he does so not by employing irony, whose message is intended
to deceive no one, but by resorting to doublespeak which conveys
one meaning to the emperor and his supporters and quite a
different meaning to the opponents of the regime. B., who
accepts Murgia's dating of the Dialogus to the reign of
Nerva (vs. AD 102), argues from the insincerity of the praise of
Vespasian's regime, under which the delatores of the
Neronian period continued to flourish, that we are to read into
this work a comment on the parallel that existed with the reign
of Nerva under whom a similar tolerance was enjoyed by the
Domitianic delatores. She goes on to suggest that in the
light of this discovery we should have a fresh look at the
first-person praise in Tacitus of Nerva and Trajan in the
Histories and Agricola.
The second half of this ambitious chapter proceeds to show
how this same approach may unlock the meaning of Juvenal's
Seventh Satire which begins by promising a blooming of the
arts thanks to the patronage of Caesar but in the second half
paints just the opposite picture of grim neglect and hackneyed
productions. Once again the paradigm of doublespeak suggests a
new and revealing way to make sense of these two apparently
contradictory halves of the poem.
In the final chapter, B. brings to bear all that has been
revealed about the use of acting and doublespeak under previous
regimes to highlight the dilemma facing Pliny when he wished to
convey sincerity in his Panegyricus. So much of what
Pliny says had been said on earlier occasions, insincerely in
praise of tyrants, that Pliny was forced constantly to try to
forestall the notion that his words were to be interpreted as
having a subtext. Borrowing Scott's distinction between "public"
and "hidden transcripts" (the former being the "scripted" truth
that is imposed by the propaganda of the dominant party; the
latter being the real truth that is liberated from this
propaganda but must remain discreetly concealed as a subtext), B.
tries to show how Pliny struggled to make it appear that these
two transcripts had become one under Trajan. The constant risk
in offering praise was that just the opposite message would be
conveyed to an audience that was accustomed to look for concealed
criticism, often embedded in the most abject flattery. This
final chapter provides a logical conclusion to the book as a
whole, which is rounded out with three brief appendices (on the
"Cena Trimalcionis" and on two topics related to the discussion
of Maternus in chapter four), end notes (82 pp), bibliography (16
pp), and index (5 pp), but chapter five comes as a bit of an
anticlimax after the masterly fashion in which the knotty
problems in the previous chapter were so adroitly addressed.
However, the shift in the concluding chapter from the problematic
to the more straightforward task of interpretation is
thematically appropriate.
The book is not without the inevitable typos that escape the
eyes of even the most careful proofreaders: e.g., "nave" for
"naive" (p. 19); "not to mention [out of] the roles . . ." (p.
40); "death theater" (p. 55); "imperante Nero"
(p. 202, 2nd occurrence); "effectof" [sic] (p. 288). More
troubling to this reviewer was the fact that the spine of this
Harvard U Press book broke at pp. 150-51, despite careful
handling. One has to wonder how library copies will fare.
However, to conclude on a positive note, I heartily
recommend this book to readers who have an interest in Roman
historiography and literature of the early empire and more
generally to any reader who has an interest in how language may
be shaped by its response to the suppression of freedom. Not all
of the views expressed by B. will win ready acceptance, but the
beauty of her presentation is that she invites us to reconsider
familiar texts and historical episodes in a new and interesting
light.