Greek Drama

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Greek Drama

• The Earliest of Representative Fiction

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An Overview

• The ancient Greeks invented the theatre and
  wrote and produced the earliest plays.
• Nearly fifty plays written by five of the
  earliest writers still exist
• Aeschylus
• Sophocles
• Euripides
• Aristophanes
• Many of them are still performed

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How Theater Began

• The threshing floor
• Greek villages had a flat round place where
  people brought the grain at harvest time and beat
  or threshed it to separate the grain from the
  outer husks.
• This threshing floor made a good place for
  open-air dancing and singing, and on special
  occasions the villagers might gather to watch
  their young men singing and dancing.

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• Religion as source of drama
• The dances might be in honour of one of their
  gods, like Dionysus the god of wine, and the
  songs might tell stories of the god.
• According to CS Lewis this is a vital point in
  the development of fiction since it required the
  ability to envision action not in the literal but
  in the abstract.
• Happened again in the Middle Ages

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More History

• Thespis
• The Greeks believed that a man named Thespis, who
  lived near Athens, was the first to act out a
  song in honor of Dionysus while the rest of the
  young men sang.
• Thespis is remembered as the very first actor,
  and the man who invented drama in about 534 BC.

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• Thespis was probably the first to add a masked
  player, who engages in dialogue with the chorus,
  to these performance
• The very first prize for tragedy went to Thespis
  (hence our word "thespian") in 534 BC.

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Origins

• Origins of Athenian tragedy and comedy are
  obscure.
• The basic background is the existence, perhaps
  for centuries, of a chorus , with a leader,
  singing a song about some legendary hero then
  the leader, instead of singing about the hero,
  began to impersonate him.
• Add spoken dialogue, and we have "tragedy" in the
  Greek form.

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• The further addition of a second actor (or
  perhaps the leader of a second chorus?) made
  action and on-stage conflict of views possible.
• The third actor is still not used by Aeschylus
  for three-way dialogue, but is silent on stage or
  is off-stage changing roles. Early tragedy may
  have been largely sung, like a cross between a
  modern oratorio and a modern opera.

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The Plays Actors

• Actors
• When there was only one actor, he had to wear
  different masks to show he was acting different
  people.
• Soon a second actor was used, and then a third,
  but there were hardly ever more than three actors
  in a Greek play.

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The Plays Types

• Types of Play From the very beginning, plays
  were of three kinds
• 1. Tragedies. These were serious plays, usually
  about gods and heroes from Greek myths
• 2. Comedies. These were usually ridiculous, and
  often made fun of important people in Athens
• 3. Satyr plays. These were short, funny plays,
  that the writers of tragedies made up to perform
  after the serious plays.

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Greek Drama

• The hallmark of Greek Literature
• Greek comedy and tragedy developed out of choral
  performances in celebration of Dionysus, the god
  of wine and mystic ecstasy.
• Later Aeschylus added a second actor, creating
  the possibility for conflict and establishing the
  prototype for drama as we know it.

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• The seven plays of Aeschylus are the earliest
  documents in the history of Western theater.
• While Aeschylus's plays reflect Athens's heroic
  period, those by his younger contemporary
  Sophocles, especially Oedipus the King, reflect a
  culture that was reevaluating critically its
  accepted standards and traditions.

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• Even more so, Euripides's Medea is an ironic
  expression of Athenian disillusion.
• The work of the only surviving comic poet of the
  fifth century, Aristophanes in Lysistrata,
  combines poetry, obscenity, farce, and wit to
  satirize institutions and personalities of his
  time.
• Though parodic in tone, the work often carries
  serious undertones, thus adding to the rich
  diversity of writings from the ancient Greek
  world.

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The Form Strophe

• st??f?, turn, bend, twist, see also the term in
  versification which properly means a turn, as
  from one foot to another, or from one side of a
  chorus to the other.
• In its precise choral significance a strophe was
  a definite section in the structure of an ode.

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The Form Strophe--Continued

• In a more general sense, the strophe is a pair of
  stanzas of alternating form on which the
  structure of a given poem is based. In modern
  poetry the strophe usually becomes identical with
  the stanza, and it is the arrangement and the
  recurrence of the rhymes which give it its
  character.
• But the ancients called a combination of
  verse-periods a system, and gave the name strophe
  to such a system only when it was repeated once
  or more in unmodified form.

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The Form Antistrophe

• the portion of an ode which is sung by the chorus
  in its returning movement from west to east, in
  response the strophe, which was sung from east to
  west.
• It is of the nature of a reply, and balances the
  effect of the strophe.

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The Form Epode

• a verse form composed of two lines differing in
  construction and often in metre,
• the second shorter than the first.
• In Greek lyric odes, an epode is the third part
  of the three-part structure of the poem,
  following the strophe and the antistrophe.
• The word is from the Greek epoidós, sung or
  said after.

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Sites Cited

• "antistrophe." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2005.
  Encyclopædia Britannica Online.  6  Oct. 
  2005 lthttp//search.eb.com/eb/article-9124777gt.
• Ancient Greece and the Formation of the Western
  Mind Norton Anthology Resources
  http//www.wwnorton.com/nawol/s2_overview.htm
  Oct. 31, 2006.
• "epode." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2005.
  Encyclopædia Britannica Online.  6  Oct. 
  2005 lthttp//search.eb.com/eb/article-9124887gt.

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• Hooker, Richard Greek Drama. 1996 World
  Civlizations An Internet Classroom and Anthology.
  Washington State University. Oct. 31, 2006
  http//wsu.edu/dee/GREECE/DRAMA.HTM
• Parsons, David Greek Theater Classics Teaching
  Resources. lthttp//www.parsonsd.co.uk/theatre/thea
  tre_index.phpgt 5 Oct. 2005.