Content area
Full Text
THEATER OF THE PEOPLE: SPECTATORS AND SOCIETY IN ANCIENT ATHENS. By David Kawalko Roselli. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2011. Pp. 285.
To Plato, the mass audience was a threat to political order and to the appreciation of art. In recent scholarship, from Vemant and Vidal-Naquet to Winkler and Zeitlin, the collective audience and its role in the development of Athenian democracy has been celebrated.1 In Theater of the People, the first book-length treatment of the ancient Athenian audience, David Kawalko Roselli navigates between ancient and modern perspectives and argues that the idea of a collective or mass audience was always in tension with the many points of view that spectators brought to the theater. In this valuable book, Roselli collects wide-ranging evidence and organizes it in the service of several important questions: Who was in the Athenian theater audience and when? How influential was the audience and in what ways? How did the physical arrangements of the theatron (seating area) and the changing economics of the theater affect the composition of the audience?
In the first chapter, "The Idea of the Audience," Roselli examines various aspects of the relationship between the ancient Athenian audience, theater practitioners, and the political elite. The chapter is subdivided into ten sections (e.g., Crazy about Drama, Capturing the Audience, Who Judges?), some of which are further divided into subsections (the subsections of Celebratory Performance in Drama are, for example, Performing Victory in Tragedy, Satyric Victories, and New Comedy and Beyond). To some extent these sections help organize the material, but many of the topics (judging, audience response, etc.) are threaded through the sections and the chapter is better read as an extended and learned meditation on the nature of the audience. In "Critical Views of the Theater Audience," one of the last sections of the chapter, Roselli steps back to consider two key sources, Thucydides and Plato, within the larger context of democracy and popular...