ABSTRACT

AS THE ENTIRE BUSINESS of performing the Ta′ziyeh was considered to be an act of devotion, none of the people who wrote or composed the scripts ever bothered to put their signature on them. Consequently, today we are not able to identify the authors of the Ta′ ziyeh plays. Furthermore, the scripts were not written or created by single hands or drawn from single sources. They were ‘composed’ from different sources by different people. Nevertheless, those various materials had to be gathered together and synthesized by a person whose duty it was to assemble the whole Ta′ziyeh. His tasks included the provision of a unified text for performance, the selection and training of the actors, the direction of the actors on the stage, and so on. This person was called Moin al-Boka or ‘Master of the Ta′ziyeh’. this role was somewhat similar to the role taken by the choregoi in Greek theatre or the prompter in the Elizabethan theatre. The duty of a choregoi in Greek theatre was to train and costume the chorus as well as to select the musicians and supply the props. The prompter in the Elizabethan theatre was responsible for running performances, making lists of props, costumes and music and copying out the actors’ roles.1