Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession. Edited by Pat Easterling and Edith Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp. xxxi + 510. $90 cloth.

Abstract

The art of acting is hard enough to describe when it is in our midst. In view of the difficulties, we in theatre studies usually make our lives easier by assuming that opera and ballet are the property of other disciplines. Consider the problems, then, of dealing with this broad topic across a thousand years of history and the whole Mediterranean world, when we have but a handful of references in treatises devoted to rhetoric or poetry, some paintings of scenes (reinterpretations of originals) and other equally problematic forms of iconography, models of masks but not the actual objects worn, playtexts often in the form of fragments (lacking stage directions but sometimes accompanied by bookish commentaries), some puzzling scraps of musical notation, a set of inscriptions, and precious little more, with nothing faintly resembling a treatise on acting. Without attempting an overview, Easterling and Hall have gathered together twenty essays under three headings: the art of the actor, the professional world, the idea of the actor. Each essay is a rigorous attempt to salvage something of substance from the wreckage.