新喜劇の新奇な演技様式と,その再現可能性について
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概要
- 論文の詳細を見る
1 Recoverability of dramatic action Efforts to reconstruct the acting style of New Comedy from extant artefacts are becoming increasingly popular A wealth of archaeological material related to New Comedy may give us a general idea of how the genre was staged All the evidence, as expected, shows New Comedy actors using their arms and legs to a much greater extent than is the case with actors who do not wear masks However, the artefacts give us only a very general idea of the acting techniques and for anything more than that our only recourse is to the evidence of extant texts But to what degree is concrete stage action recoverable from them ? Menander is very economical in his means to move forward the plots and his fondness for economy may suggest a likewise tendency in treating stagecraft as no more than an effective tool for advancing the plot, with his actors hardly ever departing from the playtexts to perform longer stretches of dramatically irrelevant action Frequently the dramatist prefers to move on with the plot without developing at any length scenes suitable for comic elaboration All this does not mean that he has left his actors no room for effective acting where it is called for I discuss some examples and propose that in terms of stagecraft Menander can achieve surprisingly much with very few and subtle means thanks to an elaborate delineation of his plots and characters The spectators were familiar with the genre and individual character types and this allowed him to hint and abbreviate while the effects were comparable to those Aristophanes (or Plautus) achieved with more robust means 2 Voice All treatises on hypokrisis from Aristotle to Quintilian stress the importance of voice training I briefly discuss quoted speech which, with formal markers of transition between individual speakers becoming less and less intrusive with the passage of time, was a happy medium for Menander's actors to prove their qualities The requirements placed on them were quite different from those put on Aristophanes' actors who used voice mimicry for predominantly farcical effects Menander's star-actor had to portray various characters through his voice with much more subtlety, and his imitation in a quick sequence of a number of characters in various emotional states must have been a tour de force 3 Kosmiotes and melodrama All free-born characters in Menander's domestic drama are in principle noble and behave like gentlemen Their behaviour cannot then be expected to show heavy gesticulation, their walking is neither slow nor fast, they are kosmioi, and there is eurythmia in their movements However, the acting does not turn dull because the genre, influenced by Euripides, is also interested in exploring the comic potential of showing apparent cases of social boundaries transgressed, accepted codes broken and agitated reactions such cases elicit Moreover, the poet is constantly playing games with his knowledgeable audience and their assumptions He builds even into the most typical situations of the highly conventional genre novel twists that make action/acting on stage elusive and difficult to be taken at face value Thereby Menander succeeds in conveying a sense of freshness and variety for which he was valued as an exceptionally realistic poet.
- 日本西洋古典学会の論文
- 2005-03-08