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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until August 13, 2026

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Menander Offstage

Brown, Mitch
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1479817969256543

Abstract Details

2016, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences: Classics.
This dissertation explores offstage action in the plays of Menander. It argues that the unseen events – those not shown to the audience but reported to them – in his plays serve various dramatic ends through their very invisibility. Thus the playwright, in addition to functioning as a producer of an actual spectacle for the audience to see and hear, is also a director of the audience’s imagination. This study provides close readings of several Menandrian plays, within a methodological framework with two primary questions: (1) why does Menander prefer to keep some people and events offstage and (2) how does such a decision contribute to his overall dramatic project within the play? The chapters, which each focus on one or (in the case of chapter 2) two plays, in totality, illustrate the various effects that can be achieved through the employment of the elsewhere and also the greater scope that Menander’s drama encompasses. The first chapter highlights how in the Dyskolos Menander uses the action that the audience does not see to build in the protagonist Knemon a binary characterization that leaves his true nature in suspense for much of the play. The second chapter explores Menander’s use and presentation of the most important offstage space – the household, arguing that Menander’s focus on these interior spaces allows them to become positions of power for the women who inhabit them. Through camaraderie and noble conspiracy, the women of the Samia covertly seize control of events from the patriarchs while Myrrhine in the Perikeiromene derives a dominant theatrical position from her own invisibility. Chapter 3 highlights the parallel that Menander draws in the Epitrepontes between the married couple Charisios and Pamphile. The playwright keeps both characters offstage in separate houses for a majority of the play and builds to their reconciliation by matching their dramatic movements from absence to presence. Finally, Chapter 4 examines how Menander uses the absence of his protagonist Kleostratos in the Aspis to position his play in a liminal dramatic space between tragedy and comedy and to explore the boundaries between the two types of drama.
Kathryn Gutzwiller, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Lauren Ginsberg, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Valeria Sergueenkova, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Niall W. Slater, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
218 p.
Classical Studies
Greek Drama; Greek New Comedy; Menander; Stagecraft; Offstage Action; Characterization

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Brown, M. (2016). Menander Offstage [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1479817969256543

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Brown, Mitch. Menander Offstage. 2016. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1479817969256543.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Brown, Mitch. "Menander Offstage." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1479817969256543

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1479817969256543
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This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.