The Strange Case of the Singing Chorus that Was Not There. On the Authority of Authorities.

The Warres of Cyrus King of Persia, a play often attributed to Richard Farrant and published in 1594, but possibly dating from at least the previous decade, contains a curious piece addressed to the audience. Without speech heading and misplaced in the middle of act 2, it is cast in blank verse like all the dialogues and makes an obscure allusion to a chorus that does not appear in the course of the play. While this peculiar appearance has often been noted, and sometimes seen as an example of how “the prologue refers to itself as a chorus” (Wiggins, 813. The Wars of Cyrus, King of Persia), it remains unclear whether it belongs to this play, what happened to the chorus it mentions, and exactly what it says about it. Its praise of the ancient chorus as a singing part in the Greek fashion as opposed to the neo-Senecan wailing chorus of contemporary neoclassical drama, tells us something about what ‘authentically ancient’ could mean for them. Starting from this peculiar document, the essay offers reflections on the early modern understanding of the ancient chorus in relation to ideas of choral performance in contemporary English dramas. It argues that The Warres’ strange reference to an absent singing chorus in the Greek style lets us glimpse into complex processes of construction of ancient authorities questioning monolithic views of classical tragedy.