Children in Greek Tragedy challenges two widely held assumptions: first, that our knowledge and experience of children is instinctive or natural (the ‘Universal Child’ fallacy); and second, that children in tragedy are helpless victims whose primary purpose is to engage the audience’s emotions. Griffiths applies a rich and varied methodology, drawn from childhood studies, quantum physics and performance studies, to analyse how social and theatrical conditions shaped the roles of children on the tragic stage. Through analysis of language, social context and staging, this book argues that playwrights employed child roles for their indeterminate and often dangerous potential. Unlike adults, children in tragedy never act independently and rarely speak. Their presence onstage is powerful not because they are weak and vulnerable, but because they conjure up multiple future roles. Although weak in the present, children represent a dangerous potential both because the child turned adult may pursue revenge and because they evoke the instability of time and fortune. Children’s unfulfilled potential is also sometimes employed to evoke pity, but Griffiths convincingly shows that children’s roles are far more complex than past scholarship has recognized.
In chapter 2, Griffiths attempts to prove that child actors were used in fifth-century BCE tragedy rather than adults playing child roles. Unfortunately, there is no explicit evidence for or against children playing child roles in fifth-century tragedy. Instead, Griffiths makes the case for child actors based upon the internal textual evidence of physical blocking. Very little independent movement is required of the actor playing child roles, and when it is, it is prompted by a direct verbal cue. In Ajax, for instance, Eurysakes’ movements are controlled by adult figures, who guide him onstage. After Ajax’s death, Eurysakes supplicates over his body. This act might be considered an independent movement, but Teucer gives the child explicit instructions about how to act. He tells him to touch the body, to kneel beside it, to hold out his hand with locks of his hair. Rather than remember these cues, therefore, the child must only follow the instructions of the adult actor. This argument gains strength not from isolated examples, but from the consistency of the trend when compared with the action demanded of adult roles. Why would child roles be so constrained if they were not played by child actors? Overall, Ifound the analysis of blocking convincing, although it does not offer incontrovertible evidence for the use of child actors. However, the analysis grapples only briefly with the use of dolls or objects for infants (92–97) and omits consideration of the use of dolls for older child roles. Dolls and child actors could be used at different points in the action of a single play, particularly when the role required a motionless body onstage. Ifind it hard to believe that the child actors playing Heracles’ three children in Euripides’ Heracles could have remained motionless onstage, as Griffiths suggests (73), for the final 385 lines of the play. Griffiths’ keen attention to staging demands consideration of how the use of dolls rather than child actors might change our understanding of the child’s embodied pathos and potential.
The remaining chapters analyse the temporal and affective strategies that the tragedians used to represent children as at once vulnerable and threatening, as present children and future adults, with multiple actual and potential roles. Using the metaphor of ‘superposition states’, Griffiths emphasizes the uncertainty and temporal lability that children’s roles create. This metaphor, which is drawn from quantum physics, feels forced at times, while at others it drops out of the analysis entirely. Yet Griffiths’ argument is a powerful one that resists oversimplification of child roles. Eurysakes in Ajax again provides a useful example. His name, which means ‘Broad Shield’, links him to his father’s weapons, which both do harm and protect. During his supplication, he shields his father’s body, actualizing the potential of his name. Yet the play also flags the multiple futures that are possible for him after the stage action ends, including the potential to harm, to be harmed, to be protected and to protect others.
Although the larger argument of the book is clearly laid out, the length and coherence of individual chapters varies. Some topics, such as naming and anonymity, explored at the end of the long chapter 2, deserve a chapter of their own, while chapter 5, ‘Plays and Playwrights’, is very short and largely repeats earlier arguments. Even so, each chapter offers new ways of thinking about children’s dramatic potential that counter the assumption that tragic children are inherently or naturally weak and pitiable. The final chapter also flags several avenues for future research, including consideration of fragmentary tragedy. Scholars and students will find this well-researched book a necessary starting place for research on children in Greek drama.
