Art & Creativity Quote by John Eaton

Timing is where theory meets the body: it is the difference between a scene that lands like a blow and one that drifts. Eaton’s gripe that Greek drama’s pacing is “all off” sounds, at first, like a politician moonlighting as a dramaturg. Then he flips the complaint into a corrective: you can’t judge Aeschylus as if it were modern stagecraft, because the clock you’re using is the wrong one.

The intent is partly diagnostic, partly defensive. “From the theatrical point of view” quietly means from our contemporary, dialogue-forward expectations - tight scenes, escalating plot, efficient beats. Greek tragedy often refuses that rhythm: choruses interrupt, speeches stretch, action happens offstage. Eaton’s subtext is that the “dead air” isn’t dead; it’s occupied by something we’ve stripped away. Music wasn’t decoration. It was structure. It carried transitions, sustained emotion, and fused the audience into a shared tempo, like a public ritual rather than a private narrative.

Context matters: an early-19th-century anglophone world discovering antiquity through texts, not performances. Classical drama arrived as print, shorn of its sonic infrastructure. Eaton is pushing back against the typical neoclassical move - treating Greece as a rulebook - and instead treating it as an ecology. If you remove the music, you don’t just lose atmosphere; you sabotage the play’s engine. The line also smuggles in a cultural argument: what looks like aesthetic “fault” may be a mismatch between institutions. Greek tragedy wasn’t built for our proscenium impatience; it was built for a city listening together.