Did Greek dramatists write stage instructions?

Abstract

There is no agreement on the answer to this straight and modest question of textual history. As representative of one extreme I may cite Page's excursus in Actors' Interpolations : note ‘the prompt-copy must certainly have contained (among other notes) stage-directions’. He and his allies clearly imply that the original text, whether the dramatist's autograph or some contemporary fair copy, was covered with dozens – indeed hundreds – of stage directions, and that for some reason they were all but eliminated in the course of transmission. For the opposite view I quote David Bain's new book: ‘Such marginalia as we have are for the most part reader's additions and do not constitute part of the paradosis’. In favour of this side is the absence from our texts of all but a handful of the thousands of possible stage directions: on the other hand there is just that smattering in both tragedy and comedy, and they have to be explained.