Greek Theatre Through Greek Theatre Through MedievalMedieval

An overview

Review Origins• Where did theatre begin and why?• What role has it played in ancient civilizations.• Tribal – Stories and ritual• Religious – Community and ritual• Governmental – creating a common belief and

system of justice• First recorded formal theatre … Egypt…

Egypt

• The world's earliest report of a dramatic production comes from the banks of the Nile. It is in the form of a stone tablet preserved in a German museum and contains the sketchy description of one, I-kher-nefert (or Ikhernofret), a representative of the Egyptian king, of the parts he played in a performance of the world's first recorded "Passion" Play somewhere around the year 2000 B.C. This Egyptian Passion bears a notable resemblance to the Passion Plays of the twentieth century. Its purpose is obviously to keep vivid in the minds of the faithful the sufferings and triumph of a god.

In the case of the Egyptian "Passion" the central figure was the legendary king-divinity, Osiris. According to the historical legend, Osiris ruled wisely. He was treacherously murdered and his body was cut in pieces and scattered. His wife, Isis, and his son, avenged his murder, gathered up the pieces of his body for pilgrimage relics, won back his throne and established the cult of Osiris-worship.

The acting of those days must certainly have been quite as realistic as that of any modern stage, for later Greek historians tell us that many actor-warriors died of the wounds received in the "sham" battles between the enemies of Osiris and the forces led by his son, Ap-uat. The play closes with the resurrection of Osiris as a god and the foreshadowing to all the faithful of their own final resurrection.

Greek Theatre Vocabulary• Catharsis – The purification or purgation of

emotions caused by tragic experience

• Pathos – a quality that evokes pity or sandness

• Hamartia – a tragic flaw leading to the downfall of a tragic hero or heroine

• Hubris – excessive pride

• Deus ex machina – Explained later

• Periaktoi – Three sided trianular sets that can be turned for change of scenery

GreekVocab. continued• Aristotle’s three unities – (later slide)• Dionysis – Ancient Greek God of wine, fertility, and

theater. Inspired ritual madness and joyful worship.• Skene- background building of Greek and Roman

theatre. Source of scenery.• Proskenion – raised platform on which the actors

performed – in Renaissance becomes proscenium (the picture frame for box theater)

• Satirist – mocks the follies and shortcomings of established people or conventions.

• Orchestra – the circular playing area used as a stage in Greek Drama

Greek Theatre

• IT is to the Greeks that we owe the first great plays. Aristotle, a philosopher and teacher born in the first quarter of the fourth century, became not only the most important mouthpiece of Greek dramatic criticism, but also one of the most important influences in all the history of literature. He analyzed the plays of the fifth century as well as those of his own time, classified the kinds of drama, and laid down rules for the construction of tragedy.

• Aristotle was not a playwright himself but his criticism set the standard for plays of the period and his “rules” for what is a good play remained the standard for centuries thereafter.;

• ARISTOTLES THREE UNITIES

• The most famous of the Aristotelian rules were those relating to the so-called unities--of time, place, and action. The unity of time limits the supposed action to the duration, roughly, of a single day; unity of place limits it to one general locality; and the unity of action limits it to a single set of incidents which are related as cause and effect, "having a beginning, a middle, and an end." Concerning the unity of time, Aristotle noted that all the plays since Aeschylus, except two, did illustrate such unity, but he did not lay this down as a rule.

• All drama required dramatic action or which would induce “pity and fear” or Catharsis for the audience.

Thespis

• Early Greek theatre was a religious celebration for the God Dionysus. Dithyrambs or musical odes were written to be sung by a chorus. Thespis, an early actor and playwright was thought to be the first person to step out of the chorus and speak as a character individually, thus becoming the first actor. It is from Thespis actors got their name “thespians” meaning character who speaks alone.

Aeschylus- 525 - 456 BC

Improvements Introduced by Aeschylus

Many were the improvements which Aeschylus introduced, especially in diminishing the importance of the chorus and in adding a second actor, thus giving prominence to the dialogue and making it the leading feature of the play. He removed all deeds of bloodshed from the public view, and in their place provided many spectacular elements, improving the costumes, making the masks more expressive and convenient, Finally, he established the custom of contending for the prize with trilogies, or series of three independent dramas. This form remained the format for all the great playwrights of the period for two centuries.Plays- Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, Prometheus Bound, Seven Against Thebes

Sophocles 495- 405 BC

Sophocles was perhaps the greatest of the Greek poetic writers. Added the third actor to the play. Wrote and performed in many of his over 130 plays. Only 7 complete plays remain but they are considered amongst the greatest plays ever written in any time. His towering portrayals of men caught in their struggle with fate and destiny are the hallmark of great Greek theatre and all tragedy thereafter. Three of his extant plays are considered the best ever written. They include:

Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, and Electra

Euripides 480-406 BC

Euripides was less respectful of the Gods and theatre traditions. His plays were more humanistic and tended to criticize war and social conventions which made him controversial and sometimes unpopular. Many of his plays had woman protagonists. He employed Deus Ex Machina (God in a Machine) freely. This was device which would bring a convenient end to the tragic events. However, his plays hold up very well today, due to their humanistic viewpoint, feministic and antiwar themes and are the most often performed professionally today especially his most famous plays;

Medea,Trojan Women, Helen, Hecuba, Iphigenia in Tauris, Phoenecian Women, The Bacchae

Deus ex machina is a Latin phrase meaning "God from the Machine." It describes an unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot (eg. having the main protagonist wake up and realize it was all a dream). The phrase has been extended to refer to any resolution to a story which does not pay due regard to the story's internal logic and is so unlikely it challenges suspension of disbelief; allowing the author to conclude the story with an unlikely, but more palatable ending. In modern terms the Deus ex machina has also come to describe a person or thing that suddenly arrives and solves a seemingly insoluble difficulty. While in storytelling this might seem unfulfilling, in real life this type of figure might be welcome and heroic.

The notion of Deus ex machina can also be applied to a revelation within a story experienced by a character which involves the individual realizing that the complicated, sometimes perilous or mundane and perhaps seemingly unrelated sequence of events leading up to this point in the story are joined together by some profound concept. Thus the unexpected and timely intervention is aimed at the meaning of the story rather than a physical event in the plot.

The Greek tragedian Euripides is notorious for using this plot device.

Deus ex Machina

Masks from the Greek Theatre

Comedy TragedyWoman

King Creon Medea Actual artifact of mask

Aristophanes 448-385 BC He wrote forty plays, eleven of which still survive, and his plays are the only surviving examples of what is called Old Comedy. These are plays with a satiric edge and often ribald humor but still literate and poetic in presentation. He is still considered one of the greatest comic writers of all time and like Euripides he takes pot shots at social conventions.

His most famous plays are;

The Frogs, The Birds, Lysistrata

The Wasps, and The Clouds

Roman Theatre

• The Romans who conquered the Greeks in 250 BC had little theatre to speak of of their own. The copied Greek conventions for a while but eventually moved toward spectacles like gladiatorial combat and ribald spectacle for theatre. They cut the Greek orchestra in half and added seating and walls to prevent the audience from being splattered by gore from the events. Eventually they developed a colloseum type of theatre which is imitated today in our football stadiums. There were three playwrights whose work remains important though seldom performed mainly because they were the models for Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers. These writers were Senecca, Terence and Plautus

The Dark Ages

• As Christianity began to take hold during the reign of Constantine, all theatre was banned by the early Roman and Orthodox Catholic churches and disappeared entirely as a literary form for over 600 years during the period called the Dark Ages where no great intellectual or scientific developments occurred in the western world. Theatre perhaps continued in the form of storytelling and folk theatre, but no new literature emerged until the early 1100’s. AD.

Medieval Theatre

• The rebirth of theatre ironically was created by the same source which ended it previously, the Catholic Church. Monks and priests began to depict scenes from the Bible in tableau to illustrate to the illiterate masses the stories of Jesus. Eventually the tableaus became dumb shows and then lines were given to characters. They were first performed in the church and then moved outside and eventually performed by the people of the parish as a form of celebration and competition.

Types of Medieval drama

• Mystery plays told the stories from the bible as a kind of instruction to the masses and were mostly those of the Old Testament

• Passion Plays told the story of Christ particularly of his last days and crucifcifiction and resurrection

• Morality plays were tales of good vs. evil which told of the path to salvation.

• Saint Plays told stories of the lives of the saints• Pageant and Cycle plays were performed by the town guilds

during religious holidays and were performed on Pageant Wagons which could fold down into makeshift stages.

Folk Drama and Traveling theatre

• Rural towns would often portray popular folk stories like those of Robin Hood and act out these tales for the amusement of the citizens.

• Commedia Del Arte style troops of traveling players also began to circulate in the 1400’s and portrayed comic tales with stock characters which became well known to the viewers of these plays.

Pageant Wagon