Introduction to Tragedy and Ancient Greek Theater
Books and Online Resources:
Didaskalia: Ancient Theatre Today. http://www.didaskalia.net/index.html. 3-D theatre and mask reconstructions, excellent introductory material on Greek and Roman theatre and stagecraft.
Easterling, P. E. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Kaufmann, Walter. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
Ley, Graham. A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1991.
McLeish, Kenneth. A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 2003.
Perseus Project. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/. Electronic texts (original languages and translations), critical studies, etc. An impressive resource for classicists.
Pomeroy, Sarah et al. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
Religious Roots of Tragedy: The Festivals of Dionysus at Athens were called the City Dionysia, which was held in March or April, and the Lenaea, which was held in January. Though classical theater flourished mainly from 475-400 BCE, it developed earlier from choral religious ceremonies dedicated to Dionysus.
The God of Honor: Dionysus was an Olympian god, and the Greeks celebrated his rites in the dithyramb. In mythology, his followers were satyrs and mainades, or ecstatic females. We sometimes call him the god of ecstasy, and as Kenneth McLeish says, he “supervis[ed] the moment when human beings surrender to unstoppable, irrational feeling or impulse” (1-2). His agents are wine, song, and dance. Song and dance were important to Dionysian rites, and the participants apparently wore masks.
At the festivals, three tragic writers would compete and so would three or five comedic playwrights. The idea was that each tragedian would present three plays and a satyr play; sometimes the three plays were linked in a trilogy, like The Oresteia. So the audience had a great deal of play going to do during the festival seasons; the activities may have gone on for three or four days, with perhaps four or five plays per day. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival provides something like this pace.
Organization: How were the festivals organized? Well, the magistrate was chosen every year by lot—the archon. Then, dramatists would apply to the magistrate for a chorus, and if they obtained a chorus, that meant that they had been chosen as one of the three tragic playwrights. After that affair was settled, wealthy private citizens known as choregoi served as producers for each playwright. The state paid for the actors, and the choregos paid chorus’ training and costumes. So there was both state and private involvement in the production of a tragedy or comedy.
The Playwrights: Aeschylus 525-456 B.C. / Sophocles 496-406 B.C. / Euripides 485-406 B.C.
Aeschylus composed about 80 dramas, Sophocles about 120, Euripides perhaps about 90. Aristophanes probably wrote about 40 comedies. Dramatists who wrote tragedies did not compose comedies, and vice versa.
The playwright was called a didaskalos, a teacher or trainer because he trained the chorus who were to sing and dance. As drama developed, the playwright also took care of the scripts and the music. He was something like a modern director, and may at times have acted in his own plays, especially in the early stages of his career. A successful dramatist could win prizes, but generally, playwrights were able to support themselves independently by land-holdings. Sophocles, for example, was a prominent citizen—he served as a general and treasurer. Aeschylus was an esteemed soldier against the Persian Empire, and his tombstone is said to have recorded his military service, not his prowess as a playwright.
The Theater: The theater for the City Dionysia was located on the south slope of the citadel of Athens, the Acropolis. The Didaskalia Classics site offers 3-D images of a later reconstruction: http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/recreatingdionysus.html.
The theater had three parts:
1. Theatron: this was for seating around 14,000 spectators; it was probably at first of wood, but later it was of stone. 2. Orchestra: this was for the chorus to sing and dance in and for the actors, when their function was developed. 3. Skene: this was at first a tent-like structure that served as a scene-building, and it had a door for entrances and exits. The Oresteia requires one, though perhaps the earliest plays didn’t. Costume was important, too, because it could be used to determine factors like status, gender, and age.
The chorus remained important in drama, especially in Aeschylus. At some point, a choregos (legend says it was “Thespis,” hence actors are “thespians”) stepped forth and became the first actor, or answerer (hypocrites). So the composer was the first participant to turn choral celebration into what we call drama, with a plot and interaction between characters. Apparently Aeschylus or Sophocles added a third actor. The former’s early plays required only two actors, but even that was enough to make for interesting exchanges between the chorus and the actors and, to some extent, between the actors and each other. With three actors, of course, the possibilities for true dramatic dialogue and action are impressive.
Audience: Would have consisted mostly of male citizens—the ones who ran Athenian democracy by participating in the Assembly. There would probably have been very few, if any, slaves or women present, and perhaps some resident aliens or “metics” and visiting dignitaries. Drama was surely a male-centered affair, as was the political life of Athens. Public speaking was vital in democratic Athens—anyone who was someone in the legal/political system needed to know how to move and convince fairly large numbers of men. Theater and political life, as we shall see from Aeschylus, were in fact closely connected: the same skills were required, and the same class of people participated (male kyrioi, or heads of households who also performed military service). So while the stuff of tragedy seems almost always to have been the ancient myth cycles, the audience watching the plays would have felt themselves drawn in by the dramatists’ updating of their significance for the major concerns of the 5th-century B.C. present. And that present was, of course, the age of the great statesman Pericles (495-429 B.C.), who drove home the movement towards full Athenian democracy from 461 B.C. onwards and who at the same time furthered a disastrous course of imperial protection and aggression that had ensued from victory in the Persian Wars around 500 B.C. Greek tragedy grew to maturity in the period extending from the battles of Marathon on land in 490 B.C. and the naval engagement at Salamis in 480 B.C., on through the Second Peloponnesian War from 431-404 B.C., in which the Athenians lost to Sparta the empire they had gained during half a century of glory following the victories over Persia. Athens’ supremacy didn’t last long as such things go, but it burned brightly while it lasted, and festival drama, along with architecture, sculpture, and philosophy, was among its greatest accomplishments. So the dramas took place in one of the most exciting times in Western history—both heady and unsettling at the same time, shot through with violence, democratic and artistic flowering, victory, and great loss.
Tragic Masks: The masks tell us something about tragedy: with linen or clay masks, a single actor might play several roles, or wear several faces of the same character. (Visit Didaskalia’s interactive 3-D mask page at http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/visual_resources/images/masks/mask_mm/rotmask1.html.) Wilde said, “give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” His quip should remind us that masks don’t discourage expression—as Kenneth McLeish says, they had religious significance in the theater: participants in Dionysian rites offered up their personal identity to the god, and further, he continues:
“Wearing a mask does not inhibit or restrict the portrayal of character but enhances it, allowing more, not less, fluidity and suppleness of movement; and the character created by or embodied in the mask and the actor who wears it can feel as if it has an independent identity which is liberated at the moment of performance—an unsettlingly Dionysian experience” (9).
That emphasis on what we might call expression is important especially because—Aristotle’s claims about plot being the soul of tragedy notwithstanding—not much happens in many Greek tragedies. Instead, chorus members and characters “take up an attitude” towards the few well-packaged, exciting events that take place on or off the stage. The action is important, but the characters’ words and attitudes help us, in turn, gain perspective on the action. Perhaps when Aristotle emphasizes plot so much, he’s taking for granted the great power of the Dionysian mask to support the plot in driving the audience towards catharsis. Character, he says, will reveal itself in relation to the play’s action.
Aristotle’s Theory of Drama and Shakespeare’s Practice as a Dramatist
We will cover Aristotle briefly in our class, but if you would like to read something more detailed about his theory of drama, please see my Fall 2007 E491 Literary Theory blog (http://www.ajdrake.com/blogs/491_fall_07/), where (in the entry for Week 2) I cover The Poetics in some detail. In Aristotle’s view, a well constructed plot that follows probability and necessity will induce the proper tragic emotions (pity and fear or terror), with the result being “catharsis,” a medical term that may be interpreted as “purgation” (of emotion) and/or as “intellectual clarification.” I should think that the tragic emotions, once aroused, become the object of introspection; thereafter, the audience attains clarification about an issue of great importance—for instance, our relation to the gods, the nature of divine justice, etc.
Aristotle's theory of tragedy in The Poetics is simple in its essentials: the dramatist must craft a plot ("an arrangement of incidents") that follows the laws of necessity and probability and thereby represents a unified action. If the dramatist follows the precept that "plot is the soul of tragedy," the proper emotional effect should follow: the audience's pity and fear will lead them toward catharsis. The latter was a Greek medical term that had to do with purging the body by means of cutting a vein and "bleeding" the patient; it is usually interpreted to mean that a tragic play stirs up powerful feelings but also renders them harmless or puts them in the service of artistic reflection. To extrapolate broadly, we may leave the theater emotionally purified and much "clearer" intellectually about our own nature as human beings, our place in the universe, and our relationship with the gods. Aristotle was a scientist, and he considered the arts intellectually significant: he suggested that mimesis (imitation, representation) is one of the main ways we learn things from the time we are children onwards. Dramatic mimesis is a species of representation in general, so in that sense it's continuous with life beyond the theater. We find in Aristotle, then, a view that says carefully structured works of theatrical art open a window to an important emotional and intellectual experience, one that makes painful sights and stories worthwhile to see and reflect upon.
As for the precise nature of tragic insight, well, it varies from play to play. Aristotle knew that just saying a tragedy ends unhappily wasn't much of a description – what would we do then with Aeschylus' The Oresteia, a trilogy that ends in triumph for its remaining protagonist and glory for the city of Athens? But to take a prominent example of a play that really does end badly for its protagonist, what is the nature of the insight gained in Sophocles' Oedipus the King? Surely the lesson isn’t simply that you shouldn’t kill your father and then sleep with your mother. Those are primal taboos. Perhaps, then, we see the iron law of prophecy and divine sway brought home to us: Oedipus had tried to flee a prophecy, but the god’s words catch up with him anyway. Even this admirably clever character cannot outwit his own fate, and his very strengths (cleverness and determination, self-sufficiency in the face of hardship) become the engines of his destruction. Or perhaps we come to understand the painful process of gaining insight into the nature of things and of ourselves. Oedipus the King tells us something—to our discomfiture—about how we fit into a cosmic order presided over by difficult gods. Another example would be Sophocles’ Antigone—there are competing sets of laws and rights in the cosmos. Antigone asserts familial piety (she wants to bury her slain brother), while Creon asserts his prerogative to be obeyed as a king who had decreed it fitting to leave Antigone's brother unburied since the man had made himself an enemy to Thebes. Both are in their own context taking the moral high ground, so situation thereby yields us the Hegelian notion of tragedy that pits incompatible rights against each other.
There doesn't seem, then, to be any one thing to learn from ancient tragedy, except perhaps that the world never works they way we want it to but instead has its own ways. Greek tragedy teaches us that (contrary to what Protagoras said) man is not the measure of all things; humanity is certainly not the boss of the universe. We are caught up in nets of significance beyond our power to escape or perhaps even to understand fully, and the best we may be able to do is to seek clarity and maintain our dignity in the face of that harsh insight. But that's important, too: the Greeks cared a lot about how you faced up to a fate imposed upon you by forces beyond your control, about what attitude you struck up in the face of disaster and, sometimes, divine indifference or even hostility. In tragedy, as Northrop Frye and others have long said, it is death that gives meaning to life: which means that the art form pays homage to a kind of magnificent powerlessness: life only yields its full significance when we are on the verge of losing it. What good does "insight" do the protagonist (and us by implication) if consciousness is about to be extinguished and we won't be able to act upon our hard-won insight? Well, that's a very human question, one we might suppose tragedy to ask but not, I think, to answer to everyone's satisfaction. Maybe there's some value in not going to one's grave a dupe, an unwitting plaything of a hostile or uncaring universe: there's dignity in getting clear on things.
Of course, we need not suppose Shakespeare bothered much with literary theory; he almost surely never studied Aristotle's Poetics. He seems to have had a general (and not necessarily favorable) acquaintance with what would eventually become in eighteenth-century drama a rigid doctrine of the unities of action, time, and place, and of course he knew from any number of sources and influences (Horace, etc.) that art was a species of imitation. A dramatist or an actor "holds the mirror up to nature," as he makes Hamlet say. Aristotle offers us valuable insights in his own right, which can serve as a point of departure for thinking about Shakespeare's own idiosyncratic way of developing tragic plays. It's often said that the Renaissance's great minds drew from classical authors the courage they needed to step forth into the full development of their own humanity; that makes sense as a broad generalization, but there's another and more disturbing set of insights to be drawn from the Greeks and Romans all the way back to Homer, a poet often described as reassuring but who at least implicitly recognizes the "dark side" of Greek culture and thought: the stuff, that is, of Greek tragedy. This sense for the dark side, for the gap between knowledge and power, for the great distance between our need for intelligibility and security and the way the world and the gods treat us, may be what Shakespeare drew from the classical tradition.
