Stage Directions in Ancient Greek Plays

The primary purpose of stage directions in modern plays is to guide actors' movements on the stage. Generally they are notations in the script of the play, inserted by the playwright in brackets, telling the actors where to sit, stand, move about, and to enter, and exit.

It is Oliver Taplin's theory that stage directions formed part of the script in the plays spoken out loud by the characters or chorus. If a stage direction was essential and it was of significant importance to the action of the play  the actor or chorus already on stage or in the orchestra would announce them directing the audience's attention to the necessary action as part of the script for the play. The Greek playwrights did not insert stage directions in their texts separately from the spoken script.

Examples

Line 150 Aeschylus Persians

The Chorus chants:

"But here approaching, with a light in her eyes like that of gods, is the king's mother, our queen! 

I prostrate myself before her;

And all must address her with words of greeting."

References

Oliver Taplin (1977). The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy. Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-814006-1.

Oliver Taplin (2003). Greek Tragedy in Action. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-41492-5.

Bieber, Margarete. “The Entrances and Exits of Actors and Chorus in Greek Plays.” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 58, no. 4, 1954, pp. 277–284. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/500381.

P. E. Easterling (1997). The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Chapter 12 Simon Goldhill - Modern critical approaches to Greek Tragedy: Cambridge University Press. pp. 334–. ISBN 978-1-107-49369-8.

p.339
For Taplin, it is a crucial starting-point that “all significant action' is 'implicit in' or 'sanctioned by' or 'indicated in the words' of the play. Wiles writes, however: ' a good dramatist does not use language to duplicate information available to the eye'.

David Wiles (3 June 2004). The Masks of Menander: Sign and Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance. Cambridge University Press. pp. 137–. ISBN 978-0-521-54352-1.

Denys L. Page (1934). Actor's interpolations in Greek tragedy.

Aeschylus (28 February 2008). Aeschylus: Persians and Other Plays. OUP Oxford. pp. 1–. ISBN 978-0-19-814968-2.

Athenian Tragedy in Performance by Melinda Powers (2014) - Internet Archive

Word and Deed: On 'Stage-Directions' in Greek Tragedy

Joe Park Poe

Mnemosyne

Fourth Series, Vol. 56, Fasc. 4 (2003), pp. 420-448 (29 pages)

Published by: Brill

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4433466 

Did Greek Dramatists Write Stage Instructions?
O. Taplin
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society
NEW SERIES, No. 23 (203) (1977), pp. 121-132
Published by: Cambridge University Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44696643

Did Greek dramatists write stage instructions?

by Oliver Taplin

The Cambridge Classical Journal Vol. 23 1977 , pp. 121-132

Cambridge University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068673500003953

Announced Entrances in Greek Tragedy

Author(s): Richard Hamilton

Source: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology , 1978, Vol. 82 (1978), pp. 63-82

Published by: Department of the Classics, Harvard University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/311021