SOURCE: Arnott, Peter D. “Character and Continuity.” In Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre, pp. 162-92. London: Routledge, 1989.

In the following essay, Arnott contends that, because actors played multiple roles in the same production, some continuity in Greek theater was provided by the mask and costume, but that any given dramatic situation was meant to be taken essentially in isolation.

We have suggested that, far from providing the rigid format that the neo-classicists attributed to it, the Greek theatre furnished an ambience that was infinitely flexible. In this imaginative world, the normal laws of time and space were suspended. Both were controlled by the wit of the dramatist.

To a large extent, this free-floating environment conditions plots that are themselves flexible, and can reshape themselves at will, no less than the setting does. We see this most conspicuously in comedy, which does not even have the parameters...