How can twenty-first-century understandings of audience experience illuminate essential aspects of ancient performance traditions, and how might Greek theatre challenge modern interpretative frameworks in return? This volume maps the unsettled dynamics of Greek spectatorship across theoretical, affective, and social domains. “Dynamic” captures both the transient, phenomenological quality of theatrical experience and its emotional force, while “unsettled” foregrounds spectators’ shifting cognitive states within diverse audiences and points to the need for new analytical approaches.

The editors’ opening essay defines four fundamental dimensions of performative experience: interactivity, diversity, alternation, and integration. Twelve subsequent chapters examine theatre architecture, tragedy, comedy, and classical vase-painting through a range of case studies informed by recent work on emotion, cognition, phenomenology, materiality, and embodiment. Bringing together classical scholarship and performance theory, the volume will interest classicists, theatre and reception scholars, and cognitive scientists seeking a historical perspective on embodied spectatorship.