Download Drama

DRAMA
Greek drama was a distillation of life in poetic form represented
on the stage. In these vivid presentations, members of the
audience, through their representatives in the *chorus became
vicarious participants in events happening to a group of people
at another time and in another place.
Plots were always taken from mythology, heroic legends, or stories
of royal houses. Since these age-old themes were forms
of popular history, known in advance, the dramatist could
concentrate more on purely poetic functions than on *plot
development, providing dramatic commentaries on old tales and
reinterpreting them in the light of *recent events. Euripides, in The
Bacchae (407 BC) shows current *social and political problems in
a broader historical perspective by reminding the audience that
present difficulties had parallels in times past.
Origins
The origins of Greek drama lay in the ancient tradition of heroic
verse in which the storyteller might impersonate an epic hero. They
were also associated with the worship of *Dionysus (the Bacchus of
Roman mythology). He was the god of wine and revelry, whose cult
festivals coincided with spring planting and fall harvesting seasons.
From primitive magical practices, the rituals gradually grew in
refinement until they became a vehicle for powerful creative
expression. When. theatres came to be built, they were located in a
precinct sacred to Dionysus. His altar occupied the center of the
circular orchestra, where the chorus sang and danced. The
audience that gathered paid their tribute to him by their presence.
The *Theater of Dionysus at Athens had an auditorium hollowed out
into a hillside to accommodate approximately eighteen thousand
spectators. The semicircular tiers of seats half surrounded the
orchestra and faced the *skene, a building or raised platform on
which the actors played their roles. The skene was a permanent
architectural facade with three doors for the actors. The chorus
entered and exited at the corners below. The scene, suggesting a
temple or palace, was suitable for most dramatic situations, since
the action always took place in the open.
Structure,
Scope
A typical Greek play opens with a *prologue, spoken by one of
the actors. The prologue sets the scene, outlines the plot, and
provides a taking-off point for the action that is to follow. The
substance of the drama then unfolds in a sequence of
alternating choruses and *episodes (usually five episodes
enclosed by six choruses) and concludes with the exodus of the
chorus and an *epilogue.
The actors wore masks of general types that be recognized
instantly by the audience. Direct action never occurred on stage.
Any action or violent deed took place elsewhere and was
reported by a messenger or another character. The plays
proceeded by narration, commentary, speculation, dialogue, and
discussion. These devices served two principal purposes: to accent
the poetry of the play and to give the widest possible scope to the
spectator’s imagination. Greek drama unfolds as a sequence of
choral song, group dances, mimed action, and dialogue
coordinated into a whole. *Poetry, however, always remains the
central concern.
Euripides, said the philosopher *Aristotle, sought to show people as
they are, while Sophocles had depicted them as they ought to
be. In some ways, the works of Euripides may not be as typical of
the Hellenic style as those of *Aeschylus or *Sophocles, but his
influence on the subsequent development of the drama, was
greater. The Bacchae, the last of Euripides’ surviving plays, was
written while he was in exile, at a time when the darkness and
disillusionment was descending on Athenian intellectuals toward
the end of the disastrous Peloponnesian War. In it he gives voice to
some of the doubts and uncertainties of his time.
The theme is the complex interplay between the human and
divine wills, the known and the unknown. And what is the pale selfrighteousness of *Pentheus against the implacable, terrifying wrath
of the god Bacchus? *Agave, Pentheus’ mother, is led to murder
her own son because she voluntarily surrenders her reason to an
irrational cult. Her son’s downfall comes because his reason was
not strong enough to comprehend the emotional and irrational
forces that motivated his family and his subjects.
Since Pentheus could not understand these forces, he could not
bring them under control and thus lacked the wisdom and
tolerance necessary in a successful ruler. While imperfect in
some ways there is a strange, wild beauty in the play’s choruses
and the magic of its poetry supplies this drama with all the
necessary ingredients of theater at its best.
Aristotle’s Commentary (335 BC)
After the great days Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had
passed, Aristotle, with knowledge of their complete works, instead
of the relatively few examples known today, wrote a perceptive
analysis of tragedy and more broadly of art in general in his treatise
*“Poetics”. True drama and all works of art, must have form in the
sense of a beginning, a middle and an end. Tragedy, according to
Aristotle, had to be composed of six necessary elements, which he
ranked as follows:
•*plot, “the arrangement of the events”;
•*character, “that which reveals moral purpose;
•*thought, “where something is proved to be or not to be”;
•*diction, “the metrical arrangements of the words”; and
•*spectacle.
The 6th requirement was
an overall one:
Aristotle said of the six most central elements of tragedy, the most
important is the combination of actions, for tragedy is a *MIMESIS
(an imitation) not of men but of action and life” It is “an imitation of
an action that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude; in
language embellished with each kind of ornament, the several kinds
being found in separate sections of the play; in the form of action,
not narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to
accomplish its *katharsis or purgation of the emotions.”
Aristotle…
His analysis points to the sum of the parts being greater than just the
music and the poetry and the individual characterizations. Only
seeing (or reading) a tragedy (or reading) in one continuous sitting
can give the proper effect: the unrelieved tension, the elevated tone,
the often opaque poetic language, the long, complicated speeches
and odes, full of allusions and oracular obscurities, the total concentration on the most fundamental questions of human existence, of
man’s behaviour and destiny under divine power. It was this total
effect which invested tragedy with its highest religious quality, made
more concrete and vivid by direct reference to gods and orac1es,
prophecies and gods; by the use of myth as the normal source of the
story itself; by the many hymn like passages of choral singing; by the
masks and costumes and dances to which the Greeks were
accustomed in their rites.
HELLENIC HERITAGE
We are all Greeks.”So said Shelley in the preface to his play “Hellas’.
“Our laws, our religion, our arts, have their roots in Greece.” Merely the
mention of such key words as mythology, philosophy, and democracy
points immediately to their Greek source. So also do the familiar forms
of architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, drama, and music have
their taproots in the age-old soil of HelIas, the land where the Hellenic
style was nurtured and brought to fruition. Such, then, was the
remarkable configuration of historical, social and artistic events that
led to this unique flowering of culture. Although circumstances
conspired to bring about a decline of political power, Athens was
destined to remain the teacher of Greece, Rome, and all later
peoples of western civilization.
And the words of Euripides still ring down the corridors of time:
Happy of old were the sons of Erechtheus,
Sprung from the blessed gods, and dwelling
In Athens’ holy and untroubled land.
Their food is glorious wisdom, they work
With springing step in the crystal air.
Here, so they say, golden Harmony first saw the
light, the child of the Muses nine.