For centuries the plays attributed to ancient Greek dramatists were studied chiefly as written texts, read in libraries and quoted by scholars. Only more recently have historians of theater insisted that these works were first of all scripts for performance, composed for a single festival before a large outdoor audience. This shift in approach has changed how the plays are understood.
Readers who treat a tragedy purely as literature may miss features that make sense only on the stage. The chorus, for instance, can seem to a reader like a series of long interruptions, but in performance it filled the space between episodes with song and movement. Likewise the masks worn by the actors, easily forgotten on the page, governed how a character could be recognized and how emotion was conveyed at a distance.
Attending to performance does not replace the careful reading of the text; it supplements it. The historian who keeps both the script and the stage in view gains a fuller sense of what these works were and of the experience they were designed to create.
According to the passage, in performance the chorus served to
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