This chapter explores the relationship between the Four Quartets (1936–42) and Eliot’s roughly contemporaneous Greek-inspired verse plays, The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949). The author traces the development of Eliot’s programmatic use of increasingly distant reading, and of his implicit argument for not translating Greek. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale reveal that Eliot deliberately thought about the use of Greek prototypes in the late 1930s, assessing both his own earlier effort with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and other Greek-inspired plays. The author examines the theoretical questions that prompt and frame Eliot’s approach and that tie the plays together with his last great poetic work. She thus outlines major aspects of his late poetics which surprisingly depend on his treatment of Greek materials, showing how they bring to a close his first foray into such materials in the late 1910s/early 1920s. Finally, she suggests that Eliot’s own Herakles character in The Cocktail Party is indebted to H.D.’s portrayal of Freud in Tribute to Freud.

This chapter outlines key developments in effect pedal history since the format’s inception in the 1960s. Centered around fuzz, overdrive, delay, and modulation effects, this chapter considers the technology’s role in how electric guitarists understand tone. Additionally, this chapter details the emergence of more recent playing styles explicitly centered around liberal effect pedal use, especially involving granular or micro loopers. By exploring these various technologies and performance techniques, this chapter suggests that guitar pedals produce not only musical sounds but also knowledge about musical sounds.

Chapter 5 begins with griffins and gorgons, exploring the connections between wondrous objects and hybrids. Gorgons also prompt a discussion of gender and hybridity. This chapter juxtaposes the gorgon and other female demons who threaten mothers and children with the satyr, an exaggerated figure of the man identified by and with his penis. These matched exaggerations, by turns horrific and comic, illustrate the function of the hybrid as a projection of certain human anxieties: what if the man were no more than his erection? What if the woman were as dangerous as she is beautiful? What if a mother devoured her children instead of protecting them? Each caricature exists as a counterpoint to the ordinary men and women encountered in our daily lives, but in recognizing these alternatives the Greeks are also using the contrafactual to ask what exactly it means to be human. For this reason, transformation is a recurring theme in early Greek culture, with a wide range of applications from the stage to ritual initiation. Here too the cosmos is a space of entanglement. If a human shares some characteristic with an animal, does the divine also partake of this mutability?

Philoctetes is the most ethically complex of all Sophocles’ plays. Philoctetes, Odysseus and the background figure of Achilles present various paradigms for the young Neoptolemus, who must decide in the course of the play which, if any, to adopt as his model. Philoctetes and Odysseus are both endowed with established convictions, but Neoptolemus’ moral character is still in the process of formation. Moral argument and choice take on a peculiarly dynamic role in the plot as we see him exposed to the influence of each of the two older men in turn. Odysseus has come to Lemnos to steal Philoctetes’ invincible bow, which, according to the oracle of Helenus, is necessary for Greek success at Troy. But he knows that Philoctetes hates him bitterly (75f.), so his plan requires the cooperation of Neoptolemus. Odysseus characterises the scheme as a joint one (25), but also makes his own controlling role quite clear. Neoptolemus is to serve (15), and to listen while Odysseus explains his plan (24f.).

Until late in the twentieth century, formal analysis of Mozart’s operatic ensembles (chiefly those of the Da Ponte operas) was heavily skewed towards the invocation of instrumental models, and pre-eminently sonata form. Additionally, the pursuit of “absolute correspondence between the unfolding of music, text and stage-action” (Abbate and Parker) came to seem increasingly suspect. The Magic Flute is a Singspiel, rather than an opera buffa, and its ensembles are complicated by the existence of “ensemble characters” (the Three Ladies and Three Boys) who generally function collectively rather than individually. This chapter offers analyses of the Act 1 and 2 quintets and the Three Boys’ Act 2 terzetto, seeking to destabilize readings that appeal to models such as sonata rondo and reading tonal structures closely against libretto structure. Evidence from Mozart’s autograph informs the concluding discussion of vocal scoring in the Act 2 choruses and the final moments of the work.

The Afterword considers the ways the Chorus to Henry V focalizes the temporal and representational resonances of Shakespeare at war, in his own time and across the succeeding centuries.

The second chapter explores the music behind the poetry of Homer, looking at the melodic part of poetry – that is, the part that makes poetry song – in the Iliad, Odyssey, and two Homeric Hymns. It suggests that the early conceptualization of music borrows from the fields of artisanal objects and animal sounds, using these two different kinds of materiality to enact the presence of melody avant la lettre. These modes of conceptualization both place song within the material world, suggesting a presence that can shift and change, but that it will persist by way of such change.

The Chorus in Milton's Samson Agonistes are framed as Milton's friends. In the mold of friendship in this era, they are therefore his peers, his counselors, his advisors, and his allies. They are both companions and neighbours. They also make common cause with Samson in resisting both women, the larger nation of Israel, and especially the Philistines. By showing male friends as creators of a boys-only clubhouse, Milton invokes the local chorographies and regionalism of his day. In making friendship both racist and sexist at its core, Milton also makes his closet drama a tool in exclusive and localized patriarchal networks. Juxtaposed with Thomas Fuller's Worthies of England and Pisgah-Sight of Palestine, Milton's Samson Agonistes is deliberately ungenerous to outsiders or larger loyalties.

The Chorus of the Agamemnon depict death and the afterlife in diverse ways, both in their dramatic role as the Elders of Argos and in their more universal choral songs. This chapter examines the ethical and political values their contradictory references imply, whether any affect their actions as characters, and how each links to other themes in the trilogy. The Elders go further than the Herald by not only treating death as oblivion at some points but even actively wishing death at others. In what way does this seeming escapism, contrasted with their emphasis on a good death as glorious, affect their resistance to the coup d’état? How does their story of returning casualties color the Argive critique of the Trojan War? The choral songs introduce different types of afterlives into the trilogy: in the memory of the living, at the grave, through the psyche that survives after death, in the possibility of resurrection, and even as a realm of punishment for ethical wrongs. The rest of the Oresteia significantly develops many of the Elders’ wide-ranging speculations.

Numerous Elizabethan philosophical and theological treatises deplored the duplicity, waywardness, and treachery of the imagination. Even Spenser participated in this, filling the chamber of Phantastes with freaks, monsters, and dangerous deceptions. Yet in the new commercial playhouses, from the late 1580s onwards, audiences were increasingly exhorted to ‘imagine’ or ‘suppose’, in a type of speech that we can dub the ‘imagine’ chorus. Originally a device to cover time and space in history plays and travel plays, the ‘imagine’ chorus began to be used not only to conjure unseen spectacles in the mind, but also to celebrate the powers of the imagination. This essay argues that it arose from the unprecedented experience of collective imagining in the new playhouses, and produced new thinking about the imagination as a magical and exhilarating creative force, as explored with particular sophistication by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry V.

Brecht is one of the few 20th-century artists who regularly uses choruses as a theatrical device. Its use by brecht leads to fundamnetal observations about his dramatic art more generally.

The bold and idiosyncratic piece 'the measure' is perhaps brecht's most challenging experiment with the 'big form'.

This chapter explores the relationship between theatrical music, visual record, and audience memory as mediated by a group of Attic vases, mostly dated from the mid- to late sixth century BCE, that show choruses of animals, animal-riders, and/or men wearing animal costumes. I argue for a new interpretation of these sympotic vessels, whereby they are understood as objects that engage and participate in a viewer’s memory of choral performance. I emphasize the referential flexibility of such images of theatrical music-making, which can evoke one specific performance but also, simultaneously, multiple performances across various genres. The vases thus activate a viewer’s cultural repertoire of choreia, which could include his own bodily experience of singing and dancing in a chorus; in doing so, they draw him in as both spectator and performer within their own choral productions.

Chapter 12 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho discusses Sappho’s poetic persona and its relationship to a putative historical figure; it exploits the material so fruitful in the biographical tradition from another angle, to illuminate the character types and roles constructed within Sappho’s poems and how they help to authorise the poet and engage her audience.

Chapter Five brings tragedy and comedy together to explore the links between female solo dance and madness in Euripides and Aristophanes. I begin by considering two instances of female dance that are described – but not performed – on the Athenian stage: Agave’s movement surrounding the murder of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae and the dance of Demostratus’ wife in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. I argue that the projection of these dances outside the theatrical space itself exposes anxieties about the unruliness of female bodies engaged in ritual performance – especially the singular dancer separated from the chorus. I conclude with a contrasting example, exploring how Cassandra’s performance in Euripides’ Trojan Women brings mad female dancing onstage, and, like Io’s dance in Prometheus Bound (Ch. 2), tests the bounds of tragic theatricality.

Chapter Two is the first of four chapters on Athenian drama, and it takes as its focal point Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. In this chapter, I observe that the representation of the maiden Io as a wild and erratic dancer engages with images of female choreia and the precarious position of the outstanding maiden soloist that originate in Archaic poetry but develop a special force within Athenian tragedy. Building on arguments developed in Chapter One, I explore how the image of the maiden chorus creates space for the female soloist to relate positively to her choral group, and then demonstrate that Io disrupts that paradigm by appearing utterly unmoored from any sense of chorality. I argue that Io embodies the play’s vision of mortal life and offers an image of resistance to the authority of Zeus distinct from the static suffering of Prometheus himself – a resistance that is grounded in the twin forces of mobility and maternity.

Chapter Four turns to Aristophanes’ Wasps, wherein the playwright’s depiction of Philocleon as a renegade komast and irrepressibly unruly dancer in Wasps provocatively questions the socializing force of the kōmos as well as the mimetic force of dance itself. This chapter begins by considering the kōmos more broadly as a space for solo dance, especially male solo dance. I argue that Greek literature persistently imagines the kōmos (and even the symposium) as a kind of chorus, drawing the potentially unruly expression associated with these spaces into the socializing orbit of choreia. In the second half of the chapter, I show that Aristophanes exploits the unruly potential of komastic dance to represent Philocleon as a character who repeatedly breaks free of both social and generic constraints, even to the point of sidelining the chorus itself. In the final scenes of the play, I suggest that Aristophanes probes the ability of dance to function as a stable form of representation and problematizes the place of dance within both drama and society.

Chapter Seven offers a pair of readings in Greek historiography, drawing from the various models outlined in the preceding chapters to illuminate the role of dance description in scenes from Herodotus’ Histories and Xenophon’s Anabasis. My analysis demonstrates that these historians draw on familiar tropes about the social status and cultural significance of solo dancers (both male and female), yet also refigure them to serve their own creative and narrative ends. I suggest that the act of writing about embodied action – of fixing dance in words – is an analog for the work of the historian in translating disparate actions and events into a coherent narrative.

Chapter One examines the representation of both choral and solo dance in Books 6–8 of the Odyssey, arguing that the representation of virtuosic Phaeacian dance in the eighth book of the poem underscores the tense relationship between Odysseus and his Phaeacian hosts and articulates distinctions between choral and solo dance that echo across Greek literature. While the Odyssey itself is much earlier than the late Archaic and Classical texts explored in subsequent chapters, the models of performance set forth in Archaic hexameter poetry retain their currency in Greek culture through the time of Plato and beyond. The chapter thus considers Homeric poetry as paradigmatic for the representation of both choral and solo dance. The chapter also advances a new reading of the role of dance in the Phaeacian books of the Odyssey, arguing that the Homeric poet presents embodied performance and action as a means by which Odysseus and the Phaeacians negotiate their fraught relationship. My analysis highlights the disruptive and competitive elements of dance that simmer beneath the surface of the poem, suggesting that the prevailing scholarly interest in choral dancing has occluded the unique and unusual elements of Phaeacian dance.

If description facilitates the effect of ante oculos ponere, one can also state (echoing Cicero) that direct speech confers upon John the power ad aures ponere, allowing him simultaneously to appear as a mere spectator and aural witness to what he has heard. This explains the recurrent use of the lexeme ????sa throughout the entire account. As we know, direct speech facilitates the momentary concealment of the narrator. John deftly uses this device to shift the protagonist role to the voices that he hears. To recreate the dramatic action, the author of the book of Revelation borrows various techniques from tragedy: the chorus; a frequent recourse to deixis; the use of dialogue to indicate movement; and messenger speeches. As though these theatrical devices were not sufficient to express what the narrator heard, the author also makes use of the dramatized epistolary form. In addition, we must remember that John also witnessed an aural environment replete with celestial chanting, the sound of trumpets, etc. Through language, the audience is immersed in the revelation’s aural context. Finally, John is aware that his text will be read aloud; this explains the use of the oral style.