Theater and drama in Ancient Greece took form
in about 5th century BCE, with the Sopocles, the great writer of tragedy. In his plays and those of the same genre,
heroes and the ideals of life were depicted and glorified. It was believed that man should live for
honor and fame, his action was courageous and glorious and his life would
climax in a great and noble death.
Originally, the heros recognition was created
by selfish behaviors and little thought of service to others. As the Greeks grew toward city-states and
colonization, it became the destiny and ambition of the hero to gain honor by
serving his city. The second major
characteristic of the early Greek world was the supernatural. The two worlds were not separate, as the gods
lived in the same world as the men, and they interfered in the mens lives as
they chose to. It was the gods who sent
suffering and evil to men. In the plays of Sophocles, the gods brought about the
heros downfall because of a tragic flaw in the character of the hero.
In Greek tragedy, suffering brought knowledge
of worldly matters and of the individual. Aristotle attempted to explain how an
audience could observe tragic events and still have a pleasurable experience.
Aristotle, by searching the works of writers of Greek tragedy, Aeschulus,
Euripides and Sophocles (whose Oedipus Rex he considered the finest of all
Greek tragedies), arrived at his definition of tragedy. This explanation has a
profound influence for more than twenty centuries on those writing tragedies,
most significantly Shakespeare.
Aristotles analysis of tragedy began with a description of the effect
such a work had on the audience as a catharsis or purging of the emotions. He decided that catharsis was the purging of
two specific emotions, pity and fear.
The hero has made a mistake due to ignorance, not because of wickedness
or corruption. Aristotle used the word
hamartia, which is the tragic flaw or offense committed in ignorance. For example, Oedipus is ignorant of his true
parentage when he commits his fatal deed.
Oedipus Rex is one of the stories in a
three-part myth called the Thebian cycle. The structure of most all Greek
tragedies is similar to Oedipus Rex. Such plays are divided in to five parts,
the prologue or introduction, the prados or entrance of the chorus, four
episode or acts separates from one another by stasimons or choral odes, and
exodos, the action after the last stasimon. These odes are lyric poetry, lines
chanted or sung as the chorus moved rhythmically across the orchestra. The lines that
accompanied the movement of the chorus in one direction were called strophe,
the return movement was accompanied by lines called antistrophe. The choral ode
might contain more than one strophe or antistrophe.
Greek tragedy originated in honor of the god of
wine, Dionysus, the patron god of tragedy. The performance took place in an
open-air theater. The word tragedy is derived
from the term tragedia or goat-song, named for the goat skins the chorus
wore in the performance. The plots came from legends of the Heroic Age.
Tragedy grew from a choral lyric, as Aristotle said, tragedy is largely based
on lifes pity and splendor.
Plays were performed at dramatic festivals, the
two main ones being the Feast of the Winepress in January and the City Dionysia
at the end of March. The Proceeding began with the procession of choruses and
actors of the three competing poets. A herald then announced the poets names
and the titles of their plays. On this day it was likely that the image of
Dionysus was taken in a procession from his temple beside the theater to a
point near the road he had once taken to reach Athens from the north, then it
was brought back by torch light, amid a carnival celebration, to the theater
itself, where his priest occupied the central seat of honor during the
performances. On the first day of
the festival there were contests between the choruses, five of men and five of
boys. Each chorus consisted of fifty men or boys. On the next three days, a
tragic tetralogy (group made up of four pieces, a trilogy followed by a satyric
drama) was performed each morning. This is compared to the Elizabethan
habit of following a tragedy with a jig. During the Peloponnesian Wars, this
was followed by a comedy each afternoon.
The Father of the drama was Thesis of Athens,
535 BC, who created the first actor. The actor performed in intervals between
the dancing of the chorus and conversing at times with the leader of the
chorus. The tragedy was further developed when new myths became part of the
performance, changing the nature of the chorus to a group appropriate to the
individual story. A second actor was added by Aeschylus and a third actor was
added by Sophocles, and the number of the chorus was fixed at fifteen. The chorus part was gradually reduced, and
the dialogue of the actors became increasingly important.
The word chorus meant dance or dancing ground,
which was how dance evolved into the drama.
Members of the chorus were characters in the play who commented on the
action. They drew the audience into the
play and reflected the audiences reactions.
The Greek plays were performed in open-air
theaters. Nocturnal scenes were performed even in sunlight. The area in front
of the stages was called the orchestra, the area in which the chorus moved and
danced. There was no curtain and the play was presented as a whole with no act
or scene divisions. There was a building at the back of the stage called a
skene, which represented the front of a palace or temple. It contained a
central doorway and two other stage entrances, one at the left and the other at
the right, representing the country and the city.
Sacrifices were performed at the altar of
Dionysus, and the chorus performed in the orchestra, which surrounded the
altar. The theatron, from where the word
theater is derived, is where the audience sat, built on a hollowed-out
hillside. Seated of honor, found in the front and center of the theatron, were
for public officials and priests. he seating capacity of the theater was about
17,000. The audience of about 14,000 was lively, noisy, emotional and
unrestrained. They ate, applauded, cheered, hissed, and kicked their wooden
seats in disgust. Small riots were known to break out if the audience was dissatisfied.
Women were allowed to be spectators of tragedy, and probably even comedy.
Admission was free or nominal, and the poor were paid for by the state. The
Attic dramatists, like the Elizabethans, had a public of all classes. Because
of the size of the audience, the actors must also have been physically remote.
The sense of remoteness may have been heightened by masked, statuesque figures
of the actors whose acting depended largely on voice gestures and grouping.
Since there were only three actors, the same men in the same play had to play
double parts. At first, the dramatists themselves acted, like Shakespeare.
Gradually, acting became professionalized.
Simple scenery began with Sophocles, but
changes of scene were rare and stage properties were also rare, such as an
occasional altar, a tomb or an image of gods.
Machinery was used for lightning or thunder or for lifting celestial
persons from heaven and back, or for revealing the interior of the stage building.
This was called deus ex machina, which means god from the machine, and was a
technical device that used a metal crane on top of the skene building, which
contained the dressing rooms, from which a dummy was suspended to represent a
god. This device was first employed by
Euripides to give a miraculous conclusion to a tragedy. In later romantic literature, this device was
no longer used and the miracles supplied by it were replace by the sudden
appearance of a rich uncle, the discovery or new wills, or of infants changed
at birth.
Many proprieties
of the Greek plays were attached to violence. Therefore, it was a rule that
acts of violence must take place off stage. This carried through to the
Elizabethan theater which avoided the horrors of men being flayed alive or
Glousters eyes being put out in full view of an audience (King Lear). When
Medea went inside the house to murder her children, the chorus was left
outside, chanting in anguish, to represent the feelings the chorus had and
could not act upon, because of their metaphysical existence.
The use of music in the theater began very
simply consisting of a single flute player that accompanied the chorus. Toward
the close of the century, more complicated solo singing was developed by
Euripides. There could-then be large-scale spectacular events, with stage
crowds and chariots, particularly in plays by Aeschylus.
Greek comedy was derived from two different
sources, the more known being the choral element which included ceremonies to
stimulate fertility at the festival of Dionysus or in ribald drunken revel in
his honor. The term comedy is actually drawn from komos, meaning song of
revelry. The second source of Greek comedy was that from the Sicilian mimes,
who put on very rude performances where they would make satirical allusions to audience
members as they ad-libbed their performances. In the beginning, comedy was frank, indecent
and sexual. The plots were loosely and carelessly structured and included broad
farce and buffoonery. The performers were coarse and obscene while using satire
to depict important contemporary moral, social and political issues of Athenian
life. The comedy included broad satire of well known persons of that time.
Throughout the comedic period in Greece, there
were three distinctive eras of comedies as the genre progressed. Old comedy,
which lasted from approximately 450 to 400 BCE, was performed at the festivals
of Dionysus following the tragedies. There would be contests between three
poets, each exhibiting one comedy. Each comedy troupe would consist of one or
two actors and a chorus of twenty-four. The actors wore masks and soccus, or
sandals, and the chorus often wore fantastic costumes. Comedies were
constructed in five parts, the prologue, where the leading character conceived
the happy idea, the parodos or entrance of the chorus, the agon, a dramatized
debate between the proponent and opponent of the happy idea where the
opposition was always defeated, the parabasis, the coming forth of the chorus
where they directly addressed the audience and aired the poets views on most
any matter the poet felt like having expressed, and the episodes, where the
happy idea was put into practical application. Aristotle highly criticized comedy, saying
that it was just a ridiculous imitation of lower types of man with eminent
faults emphasized for the audiences pleasure, such as a mask worn to show
deformity, or for the man to do something like slip and fall on a banana
peel.
Aristophanes, a comic poet of the old comedy
period, wrote comedies which came to represent old comedy, as his style was
widely copied by other poets. In his most famous works, he used dramatic satire
on some of the most famous philosophers and poets of the era. In The Frogs he
ridiculed Euripides, and in The Clouds he mocked Socrates. His works followed all the basic principles
of old comedy, but he added a facet of cleverness and depth in feeling to his
lyrics, in an attempt to appeal to both the emotions and intellect of the
audience.
Middle comedy, which dominated from 400 to 336
BCE, was very transitional, having aspects of both old comedy and new comedy.
It was more timid than old comedy,
having many less sexual gestures and innuendoes. It was concerned less with people and
politics, and more with myths and tragedies. The chorus began its fade into the
background, becoming more of an interlude than the important component it used
to be. Aristophanes wrote a few works in middle comedy, but the most famous
writers of the time were Antiphanes of Athens and Alexis of Thurii, whose
compositions have mostly been lost and only very few of their found works have
been full extant plays.
In new comedy which lasted from 336 to 250 BCE,
satire is almost entirely replaced by social comedy involving the family and
individual character development, and the themes of romantic love. A closely
knit plot in new comedy was based on intrigue, identities, relationships or a
combination of these. A subplot was often utilized as well. The characters in
new comedy are very similar in each work, possibly including a father who is
very miser like, a son who is mistreated but deserving, and other people with
stereotypical personas. The chief writer of new comedy was Menander, and as
with the prominent writers of the middle comedic era, most of his works have
been lost, but other dramatists of the time period, like Terence and Platus,
had imitated and adapted his methods. Menanders The Curmudgeon is the only
complete extant play known by him to date, and it served as the basis for the
later Latin writers to adapt.
Adventure, brilliance, invention, romance and
scenic effect, together with delightful lyrics and wisdom, were the gifts of
the Greek theater. These conventions strongly affected subsequent plays and
playwrights, having put forth influence on theater throughout the centuries.
Bibliography
1. Lucas, F.L.,
Greek Tragedy and Comedy, New York: The Viking Press, 1967.
2. McAvoy,
William, Dramatic Tragedy, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1971.
3. Murray,
Gilbert, Euripides and His Age, New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.
4. Reinhold,
Meyer, Ph.D., Essentials of Greek and Roman Classics, New York: Barrons Educational Series, Inc., 1960.
5. Trawick,
Buckner B., World Literature, Volume I: Greek, Roman, Oriental and Medieval
William
McAvoy, Dramatic Tragedy, 1971, p. ix
Ibid., p. x
William
McAvoy, Dramatic Tragedy, 1971, p. xi
Ibid., p.
vii
Meyer
Reinhold, Ph.D., Essentials of Greek and Roman Classics, 1960, p.60
F.L. Lucas,
Greek Tragedy and Comedy, 1968, p. 3
Ibid., p. 9
Ibid., p. 10
Ibid., p. 10
Gilbert
Murray, Euripides and His Age, 1955, p. 145
F.L. Lucas,
Greek Tragedy and Comedy, 1968, p. 12
Ibid., p.62
Gilbert
Murray, Euripides and His Age, 1955, p.146
Gilbert
Murray, Euripides and His Age, 1955, p. 153
F.L. Lucas,
Greek Tragedy and Comedy, 1968, p. 12
Buckner B.
Trawick, World Literature, Volume I: Greek, Roman, Oriental and Medieval
Classics, 1958, p. 76
Meyer
Reinhold, Ph.D., Essentials of Greek and Roman Classics, 1960,
p. 114
Ibid., p.
238
Ibid., p.
253
Buckner B.
Trawick, World Literature, Volume I: Greek, Roman, Oriental and Medieval
Classics, 1958, p. 76
Meyer
Reinhold, Ph.D., Essentials of Greek and Roman Classics, 1960, p. 254
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