In The Pronomos Vase and Its Context, Oliver Taplin examines the framing devices that help signal the beginning and ending of a play. He is primarily concerned with positing what devices may have been employed in ancient Greek theatre. He imagines that, though the evidence is scant, some type of curtain call may have been a way to serve as "an important transition between the agonies of the tragedy and the hoped-for relative security and happiness of the lives of the audience...the actors demonstrate publicly that they have survived unscathed" (259). For Taplin, surviving descriptions of the traditional proagon (a public announcement by the playwright of his play and its subject matter) provide plausibility that some type of final announcement or public conclusion was used to mark the end of a tragedy or days-worth of tragic playgoing. Furthermore, he points to the Pronomos Vase (depictions of Greek theatre, c. 400 BCE) as an evidence that some type of "curtain call" was utilized in ancient Greek theatre and that the actors removed their masks to reveal their citizen-selves.

While it's possible that the "curtain call" is--at least in the Western theatre traditions--as old as the Greeks, it is important to note that an actual curtain was rare in theatre until the popularity of the proscenium arch took hold in the 17th century. While, we do know that Roman theatres had a curtain called the aulaeum that would fall into a small slit in the stage to reveal the beginning of a play or scene, there's no evidence of "curtain calls" in Roman theatre. Rather, most theatrical traditions in Europe up to the Modern Era utilized an epilogue to signal the end of the play and call for a response from the audience--a tradition that began with the Greeks and was common in Roman plays. Robin Goodfellow's (aka Puck's) monologue at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream is just such a device. As Patrick Tucker identifies, many early modern theatre productions in England actually ended with a familiar uptempo dance (Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: The Original Approach, 56-57). As Tucker states, "the finale dance is just that transforming moment that a modern curtain call is: allowing...the actors to be acknowledged" (57).

In the Modern Theatre, the proscenium arch makes an excellent placement for a curtain that can disallow the set or the stage to be seen by the audience before and after the performance. The famous phenomenologist, Bert O. States, describes the curtain and the tradition of the curtain call as the appropriate--even welcome--place in a performance for "the spontaneous disclosure of the human," ("Phenomenology of the Curtain Call," The Hudson Review 34.3, 375). In that moment, the actors return to participants within the Play of Manners in which all people play a part throughout their everyday lives.