An investigation of the conventions governing the relation between the spoken words of the Greek tragic texts and the probable actions of the characters, with detailed attention to the characters' awareness (aural and visual) of their surroundings and of others present, and to the conventional, stylistic, and psychological factors that may signal reduced awareness and loss of "contact." This work also features a rhetorical analysis of many types of questions, study of roundabout and skewed responses to questions, and study of the delayed execution or ignoring of commands. The interpretations and textual readings of dozens of passages in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are discussed.

The digital version (prepared May 2008) was produced by scanning and careful proofreading, including re-entry of the Greek in Unicode, so that the text is completely searchable.