The History Of Greek Theater- Essay, Research Paper

The History of Greek Theater-

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 hero s 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 men s 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 hero s 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. Aristotle s 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 life s 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

poet s 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 audience s 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 Glouster s 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 poet s

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 audience s 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. Menander s 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: Barron s 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

342