The script or ‘original manuscript’ of texts by the great authors of classical theatre represents an illusory mirage for modern philologists. The texts that reached the Hellenistic age must have been much more varied, and it cannot be ruled out that our manuscripts often retain traces of their diachronic instrumental use in various places. The Alexandrian critics became aware that the text of a dramatic work is something anthropologically different from any ancient literary text, so they were induced to evaluate it ‘through the eyes of the actors’: they probably discovered the importance of ‘staging’, which took place in diachrony, but often appeared either condensed in one text or registered in multiple copies.