Space in the Tragic Scholia

This paper asks what might seem like an unanswerable question: can the ancient scholia on tragedy, in this case particularly the scholia on Sophocles, tell us anything coherent about the conceptualization of space shared by dramatists, performers and audiences? The material does not look promising. The surviving notes are often scrappy and seemingly random, having been excerpted from different sources, cut down, reshuffled and sometimes corrupted in the long process of transmission; this means that the great majority are anonymous and undatable, and only a few can be attributed to particular scholars. Their references to what is to be imagined about the stage action may be disappointingly cryptic, or may look like little more than armchair guesswork, and it is easy to dismiss them altogether.