Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy by Melissa Mueller

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 403 different forms, each contains variations on themes familiar from the odes for Hieron that ultimately reinforce his superlative rule. The Conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments and briefly compares Pindar’s odes for Hieron with odes for other monarchs: the Battidai of Cyrene and the Emmenidai of Akragas. In contrast to both, Hieron’s rule was not a hereditary monarchy. It was precisely Hieron’s unique status that allowed Pindar, a poet especially concerned with his own self-presentation at just the right historical moment, to explore issues of monarchical power. Morgan’s readings of the odes for Hieron are a model of New Historicist analysis that offer valuable new insights and make this book essential reading for students, researchers, and anyone interested in Greek literature and history. Florida State University Virginia Lewis Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy. By Melissa Mueller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2016. Pp. 272. Melissa Mueller's Objects as Actors marks an important, if tentative, step in applying tenets of thing theory and new materialism to analysis of ancient Greek tragedy. Mueller does not explicitly mark this as the work’s intention: instead, Objects as Actors contains a series of complex investigations into the often inter-dramatic or extra-dramatic meanings of material props in the playing space of specific tragedies, building on previous work in theatre studies by Marvin Carlson and Andrew Sofer,1 while also incorporating strong philological analyses and careful cultural considerations of the original production contexts. While Objects as Actors could be stronger in its theoretical framework, it has much to offer to the close reader or the audience member of the tragedies it covers in reconsidering both the material reality and the abstract implications of objects in ancient Greek drama. Mueller organises her chapters into two parts: the first three chapters center around “metonymy,” or “well-known epic or theatrical objects” (8); the next three are based on metaphorical objects that are often brought into material reality through later, interdramatic texts. Throughout, Mueller gives mostly philological consideration to production possibilities, following Oliver Taplin’s ideas of in-text stage directions2 and Nancy Felson’s thoughts on deixis for clues to blocking and the use of props.3 The first chapter focuses primarily on Sophocles’ Ajax, with particular attention to Ajax’s sword as Mueller’s first “object as actor.” Drawing on Gell’s idea of distributed personhood,4 Mueller sees Ajax’s sword, famously won in the gift-exchange with Hektor after their duel in Iliad 7, as a chief actor in Sophocles’ play, capable of influencing character decisions and audience anticipation alike. While Mueller’s philological analyses around the sword are convincing, especially looking at its agency as sphageus (“slayer,” 29), Mueller 1 Particularly M. Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor 2001) and A. Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor 2003). 2 O. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford 1977); id., Greek Tragedy in Action (Berkeley 1978). 3 N. Felson, “Introduction,” in The Poetics of Deixis in Alcman, Pindar, and Other Lyric (Arethusa 37; Baltimore 2004) 253–266. 4 A. Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford 1998). 404 PHOENIX generally reads Iliad 7 through Sophocles, claiming that Hektor “duped” Ajax where the Iliad gives no evidence of such a trick (27). Still, this first chapter offers a compelling look at how the sword remains a focal point of action in Sophocles’ drama, comparable to the bow in Philoktetes, or Herakles’ arms in Euripides’ eponymous play. In the second chapter, Mueller expands on tragic responses to epic objects, adding tragic responses to other plays’ props, with an “inter-dramatic” exploration of the tapestries in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and their later iterations in other plays involving the House of Atreus. While the tapestries are, like Electra’s urn, one of the few tragic props that scholarship has extensively examined, Mueller’s addition traces the linguistic threads that bind significant textiles throughout these plays. She also discusses the production of cloth,5 and muses on the possible olfactory associations that porphyry-dyed tapestries might provoke in the audience...