In the De finibus (1.2.4), Cicero claims that Roman dramatists copied their Greek originals “word for word.” If we read further in the same passage, however, Cicero states that Romans did more than merely translate from the Greek:

What strikes me first about [those who claim to despise Latin writings] is this: why does their native language not please them on serious topics when not unwillingly do they read Latin tragedies that have been translated word for word from the Greek? Indeed, who is so hostile practically to the name Roman that he would despise or reject Ennius’ “Medea” or...

So a character in Livius’ tragedy asks of the value of an early deed in relation to the present. Should something be admired solely because of its age, or rather because it possesses some other quality besides antiquity to deserve commemoration in the present? Perhaps the character realized that the question actually requires an understanding of the present, against which the value of an earlier event can be measured. Livius’ plays, already ancient by the late Republic, are important for more than their antiquity. As the first Roman dramatic works, they influenced the form of drama that was to follow,...

Accius’ clever response that whereas he could put speeches into the mouths of his characters, but not into those of his opponents in the law courts, points to similarities in style, beyond argumentation, between the rhetoric of the forum and that of the tragic stage recognized by those audience members posing the question.¹ The reciprocity between the theatre and the forum leads to the recognition of theatrical elements in oratory and of rhetorical elements in the theatre—the orator as actor and the actor as orator—and accordingly, the perception, and in this case the self-identification, of theatre spectators with...

Ovid’s jesting interpretation of the reasons why women attend the theatre illustrates how the audience itself provided as much “theatre” as the stage did.¹ But what if the barrier between actor and audience were removed in a production of a fabula praetexta or historical tragedy to reveal someone from the audience represented onstage, whether or not he is seated in the audience during performance? From a performance-criticism perspective, when offstage reality pervades dramatic reality, in the case of praetextae, reciprocity ensues, resulting in the semiotics of competing realities: one identifies “real” persons and events onstage, and conversely, one interprets persons...

After killing her children, Medea (Seneca Medea 982–994) considers the effects of her anger and voices her one regret: that she did not turn Jason into a spectator, since her crime does not exist without him as audience, despite the fact that a crime was committed—her children are dead. In other words, Medea needs a stage audience to validate her stage actions. Audience reaction onstage replaces stage action in a drama, which makes the reaction of the actual audience irrelevant.

To examine the effects of this reciprocal relationship between the stage and the audience, two questions inform this...

When the audience’s own theatricalized reality is incorporated into stage reality, the metatragedy of Seneca results: theatricality replaces theatre as characters become their own audience watching or commenting on their own theatricalized stage actions. The audience itself shifts roles from spectator to witness when the theatricalized stage actions of actors compete with their own perception of the world outside of the theatre, making the recognition of dramatic illusion on the stage and the interpretation of dramatic allusion off the stage difficult. Confusion replaces catharsis when the audience cannot distinguish between theatre and reality. Where is the “real” audience? The term...