Chapter 3 - Text and Performance Context

Summary

Through a careful examination of all aspects of the experience of hearing or reading a declamation, this chapter explores how in practice the audience could move from the declamatory past to the extra-declamatory present. The framing of declamations, whether by prefaces (prolalia, protheoria) or in Philostratus’ Vitae sophistarum, blurred the line between text and context. The location of a performance was also often suggestive: declamations were texts to a significant degree experienced by audiences in the same physical spaces that its fictions traversed. A declaimer’s language was another way in which the fiction remained tethered in reality: declaimers had distinct personal styles and often partook in the ‘Asian’ style so different from that of their historical subjects. Finally, by means of their body language and by means of a running ‘metarhetorical’ commentary declaimers frequently ‘dropped the mask’ in the course of their performances. In short, this was a genre that far from shutting out the world beyond its fiction, repeatedly included it in the performance.