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The Stage of Aristophanes. By C. W. Dearden. Pp. xiv + 203. London: The Athlone Press, 1976. £7.00

The theatre of Dionysus in Athens has a unique importance in the history of drama: that was where the oldest plays in existence were first performed, and some understanding of its physical lay-out and organisation is indispensable if one is to understand the nature of the earliest public drama. Yet the details are elusive and intractable. The archaeological remains of the classical building are scanty, because it was largely demolished and rebuilt in later periods; and we have no adequate picture or verbal description of it. Our best evidence is the surviving texts of the plays themselves, but to infer physical features of the theatre from the dialogue and songs is a task of great complexity and uncertainty. It has been attempted in many modern books and articles, above all in the magisterial work of Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, but still much remains unexplained. C. W. Dearden's book is based on a Ph.D. thesis written in London in the 1960s. Since completing the thesis he has moved to New Zealand and risen rapidly to become Professor of Classics at Wellington; this has probably left him little time for further research, and some weaknesses of the book are attributable to the fact that it remains essentially a research student's thesis. First, it is written for readers already familiar with the subject, and is not readily intelligible to anyone unacquainted with Pickard-Cambridge and other books. Secondly, only the plays of Aristophanes and not those of the tragedians are used as evidence. No doubt one author was enough to exercise one Ph.D. student, but it would have been more useful to readers to have a study based on all the evidence available. Thirdly, even within that limited range, Dearden has not had time to consider fully the implications of every passage in every play, and some difficulties are overlooked or treated superficially. Fourthly, he has not managed to keep up with work done since his thesis was submitted. Books published in 1971 seem to have been glanced at hastily, later books and articles not at all. This is particularly unfortunate because in recent years some important new questions have been raised. For instance, did the Athenians allow stage-hands to move scenery and furniture in full view of the audience while the play was in progress, as K. J. Dover has suggested ? This question, we now realize, is vital for understanding their use of realistic scene-setting, but Dearden does not consider it.