Transcript Greek Drama - Mount Vernon Nazarene University

Greek Drama
The Earliest of Representative Fiction
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Form: Strophe
στροφή, 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.
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 verseperiods a system, and gave the name strophe to
such a system only when it was repeated once
or more in unmodified form.
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.
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.”
Sites Cited
"antistrophe." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2005. Encyclopædia
Britannica
Online. 6 Oct. 2005 <http://search.eb.com/eb/article9124777>.
“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 <http://search.eb.com/eb/article9124887>.
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.
<http://www.parsonsd.co.uk/theatre/theatre_in
dex.php> 5 Oct. 2005.