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Abstract
"32 In this reading, the actors only served to "interpolate" on the literary texts and were the most responsible for the fact that the texts were "corrupted" from the poet's originals. Because of this, "the correction of texts has been the aim of philologists since the time of Aristotle," when tragic texts and other available documents about the performance of tragedy did not include "music or even metrical arrangement. [...]the suicide scene in Ajax would seem to depend upon some sort of stagecraft to be presented. Because the scene shifts to the barren beach and because Ajax discussed the sword planted in the ground near him at such length (at 815, 819, and 821), it is usually assumed that the act would take place there. Without such a suggestive commentary, we might have been satisfied with a literary or simple staging like Gardiner's. Because beyond that commentary, all that leads us to a more complicated staging are some textual ambiguities about the placement of the sword and a potential change of scene. [...]if anything, it was a reaction against the lack of imaginative potential I found in many of those stage directions and commentaries: they seemed to cling to staging techniques that I equated not with the grand gestures of a masked theatrical form in a twenty-thousand-seat amphitheater but with the everyday representational demands of modern realism.