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Reading a Play
I regard the theatre as the greatest of
all art forms, the most immediate way
in which a human being can share
with another the sense of what it is to
be a human being
--Oscar Wilde
Purpose
 Most
plays are written not to be read
in books but to be performed.
 However, there are advantages to
reading plays in books.
– It is better to know some masterpieces
by reading them than to never know
them at all.
– It would be next to impossible to see
every Shakespearean play on stage, but
the plays are easily accessible on paper.
Advantages
A
play is literature before it comes
alive in a theater.
 If a play contains difficult language
and allusion, reading it enables us to
study it at our leisure and return to
parts that demand greater scrutiny.
 Some plays are actually destined to
be read more often than they are
acted.
Advantages
 Sometimes
reading a play is the only
way of knowing it as the author
wrote it in its entirety.
 Producers of plays often leave out
important speeches and scenes in
plays, and the production itself is
often representative of the
producer’s interpretation of the play,
which may be different from the way
that one perceives it while reading.
The Elements
 The
protagonist
 The antagonist
 The exposition
 The climax
 The resolution
 Stage directions
Tragedy

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Tragedy: a play that portrays a
serious conflict between human
beings and some superior,
overwhelming force.
It ends sorrowfully and
disastrously, and this outcome
seems inevitable.
The art of tragedy goes back to
ancient Athens, where Greek
dramatists Sophocles, Aeschylus,
and Euripides wrote plays.
Tragedy
 Tragedy
is fairly simple:
– The protagonist undergoes a reversal of
fortune, from good to bad, ending in
catastrophe.
– However, tragedies can be tough to
interpret as many readers will have very
different opinions about the text.
– Even though the formula for tragedy is
simple, most tragedies will somehow fail
to observe the “conventions” of tragedy.
Real Life Tragedy vs. Literary Tragedy
 Real
life:
– The death of a child
– A fire that destroys a family’s house
– The killing of a bystander caught in the
crossfire of a shootout between
criminals.
 What
do these all have in common?
– They involve the infliction of great and
irreversible suffering.
– The sufferers are innocent, and they have
done nothing to cause or deserve their fate.
Real Life Tragedy vs. Literary Tragedy

Literary Tragedy:
– The protagonist’s reversal of fortune is brought
about through some error or weakness on his
part, generally referred to as his tragic flaw.
– Despite this weakness, the hero is traditionally
a person of nobility, of both social rank and
personality.
– In most tragedies, the catastrophe entails not
only the loss of outward fortune—things such
as reputation, power, and life itself, but also
the erosion of the protagonist’s moral
character and greatness of spirit.
Style
 Tragedies
are customarily written in
an elevated style, one characterized
by dignity and seriousness.
 In the Middle Ages, the word tragedy
indicated a work written in a high
style in which the central character
went from good fortune to bad.
 Comedy indicated the opposite.
How Tragedies Make the Reader Feel
 According
to Aristotle, tragedies seek to
arouse pity and fear in the reader.
 We feel sorry for those who appear to
be worse off than ourselves.
 Even if a tragedy “moves” you, you will
most likely feel a sense of detachment
from the protagonist: a “better him
than me” attitude.
 There is also the element of fear:
readers are made to feel vulnerable in
the face of life’s dangers and instability.
The Theater of Sophocles
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For the citizens of Athens in the fifth
century B.C. theater was both a religious
and a civic occasion.
Plays were presented twice a year at
religious festivals—both associated with
Dionysius, the god of wine and crops.
In January there was the Lenaea, the
festival of the winepress, when plays,
especially comedies were performed.
The major theatrical event of the year came
in March at the Great Dionysia, a city-wide
celebration that included sacrifices, prize
ceremonies, and spectacular processions as
well as three days of drama.
The Theater of Sophocles
 Each
day at dawn a different author
presented a trilogy of tragic plays—
three interrelated dramas that
portrayed an important mythic or
legendary event.
 Each intense tragic trilogy was followed
by a satyr play, an obscene parody of
a mythic story, performed with the
chorus dressed as satyrs, unruly mythic
attendants of Dionysius who were half
goat or horse and half human.
The Theater of Sophocles
 The
Greeks loved competition and
believed it fostered excellence.
 Even the theater was a competitive
event—not unlike the Olympic
games.
 A panel of 5 judges voted each year
at the Great Dionysia for the best
dramatic presentation, and a
substantial cash prize was given to
the winning poet-playwright.
The Theater of Sophocles
 Sophocles
triumphed in the
competition twenty-four times, but
did not win a prize for Oedipus the
King.
 Although this play ultimately proved
to be the most celebrated Greek
tragedy ever written, it lost the
award to a revival of a popular
trilogy by Aeschylus, who had
recently died.
The Theater of Sophocles:
Staging
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As many as 17,000 spectators
could fit into the open air hillside
amphitheater.
The audience was arranged in
rows, with the Athenian
governing council and young
military cadets seated in the
middle sections.
Priests, priestesses, and foreign
dignitaries were given special
places of honor in the front rows.
The Theater of Sophocles:
Staging
 The
performance space they watched
was divided into two parts: the
orchestra, a level circular “dancing
space”, and a slightly raised stage
built in front of the skene or stage
house, originally a canvas or wooden
hut for costume changes.
The Theater of Sophocles:
Staging
 The
actors spoke and performed on
the stage
 The chorus sang and danced in the
orchestra
 The skene served as a general set or
backdrop
The Structure
 No
more than 3 actors were allowed
on stage at any one time
 The chorus had to have 15 members
 The actors’ spoken monologue and
dialogue alternated with the chorus’
singing and dancing
 Each tragedy began with a prologue
 The parados came next (the song for
the entrance of the chorus)
The Structure
 The
next action was enacted in
episodes, like the acts or scenes in
modern plays
 The episodes were separated by
danced choral songs or odes
 The play ended with the exodos, or
closing, in which the characters and
chorus concluded the action and
departed
The Actors
 The
actors wore masks
 Some of these masks had
exaggerated mouthpieces, possibly
designed to project speech across
the open air.
 The masks helped spectators far
away recognize the chief characters.
The Masks
 The
masks often represented certain
conventional types of characters: the
old king, the young soldier, the
shepherd, the beautiful girl (women’s
parts were played by male actors)
 The actors also began to wear
cothurni, high, thick-soled elevator
shoes that made them appear taller
than ordinary men.
The Civic Role
 Athenian
drama was supported and
financed by the state.
 Administration of the Great Dionysia
fell to the head civil magistrate.
 He annually appointed three wealthy
citizens to serve as choregoi, or
producers, for the competing plays.
The Civic Role
 Each
producer had to equip the chorus
and rent the rehearsal space in which
the poet-playwright would prepare the
new work for the festival.
 The state covered the expenses of the
theater, actors, and prizes.
 Theater tickets were distributed free to
citizens, which meant that every
registered Athenian, even the poorest,
could participate.
The Civic Role
 The
playwrights addressed
themselves to every element of the
Athenian democracy.
 Only the size of the amphitheater
limited the attendance. It could hold
slightly less than half of the
population of Athens.
The Civic Role
Greek theater was directed at the moral
and political education of the community.
 The poet’s role was the improvement of
the polis or city-state.
 The purpose of the tragedies was for the
performers and the audience to put
themselves in the places of persons quite
unlike themselves, in situations that might
engulf any unlucky citizen—war, political
upheaval, betrayal, domestic crisis.

The Civic Role
 The
release of the powerful emotions
of pity and fear created a sort of
paradox—how a viewer takes
aesthetic pleasure in witnessing the
suffering of others.
Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy
 Aristotle
defined tragedy in
the fourth century B.C.
 He didn’t make the
definition to “lay down the
laws” for what tragedy
should be.
 More likely, he drew from
tragedies that he saw or
read and gave a general
description of them.
Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy
 The
protagonist is a person of “high
estate”, such as a king or queen or
other member of a royal family.
 The protagonist must fall from power
and from happiness; his high estate
gives him a place of dignity to fall
from and perhaps makes his fall
seem all the more a calamity in that
it involves an entire nation or people.
Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy
 The
protagonist is not only
extraordinary because of his position
in society: Oedipus is not only a king
but also a noble soul who suffers
profoundly and who employs
splendid speech to express his
suffering.
Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy
 The
tragic hero is not a superman;
he is fallible.
 The hero’s downfall is the result of
his own error or transgression, or
what’s called his “tragic flaw.”
 Often, the tragic flaw will be extreme
pride, leading to overconfidence.
Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy
 Aristotle
implies that after witnessing
a tragedy we feel better, not worse—
not depressed, but somehow elated.
 We take a kind of pleasure in the
spectacle of a noble man being
abased.
 Part of this pleasure may be based in
our feeling of “rightness” or accuracy
of what we have just witnessed.
Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy
 Recognition:
the revelation of some
fact not known before or some
person’s true identity.
 Tragedy is about the realization of
the unthinkable.
 Reversal: action that turns out to
have the opposite effect from the
one its doer had intended.
Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy
 The
play usually ends with the
protagonist accepting his fate as the
divine will of the gods.
 The protagonist has fallen from high
estate but is uplifted in moral
dignity.
End