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TRAGEDY
• Originated as songs and dances to please
the gods, performed in sacred places,
either by the whole community or by a
particular dedicated group of performers.
• Drew on Homeric epic, where characters
speak for themselves. Take out the voice
of the poet and you have a dramatic
situation.
• Main source of the original passion of
these songs and dances is fertility: the
Greeks did dances for Dionysos, the god
of the vine. Hence the main theatre in
Athens was the Theatre of Dionysos.
• Tragon Oïde—goat song. Was the
performance accompanied by the sacrifice
of a goat? Or, did Greek goatherds imitate
the movements of their goats?
• First actor—the semi-mythic Thespis (hence
thespian). In 534, in Athens, at the Sanctuary
(not yet theatre) of Dionysos, he first introduced
spoken verse into the choral odes. Thus he
begat opposition on the stage: the first
speeches, the first actor, the first interaction, the
first theatrical moment.
• An individual stands up and the chorus
responds:
– cf sculpture—less focus on the abstractly
human, more emphasis on the natural, real
human.
– Not an everyday human, an ideal type, a
hero, larger than life, who will define central
values and truths.
• Aeschylus, around 480 BC, introduced a second
actor and Sophocles, 10 years later, introduced
a third. Thus there could be dialog between
individuals—tension, action, event, plot. The
two or three actors would switch masks to play
different characters.
• All our words for drama come from these
early productions:
• Orchestra—the place where dancers
performed, then the place of the chorus,
now the place for musicians, if there are
any. It was an open space bounded,
originally, by an altar and a temple.
• Theatron—the hill the audience would sit
on to watch the action
• Skene—originally a tent to change masks.
It could be decorated as part of the action.
The top of it was the place of the gods,
who would sometimes be lowered into the
action by a crane called a mechane:
hence, deus ex machina.
• Proskenion—The skene was mounted on
a platform to improve sight lines.
• Here at Centre we have two theatres: a
proscenium stage, Newlin, and a thrust
stage, Weisiger.
• Annually there was a Festival of Dionysos
in Athens (the theatre seated about
15,000, or about half the population of the
city).
• From Thespis (534) onward, the
competition was judged by the public, and
competition was stiff just to present.
Winners were backed by wealthy
citizens—producers.
• Each day of the three-day festival there
were three tragedies and one “satyr
play”—very crude comedy.
• Aeschylus wrote more than 70 plays, of
which 7 survive. He was the master of his
day, but toward the end of his career, he
was repeatedly defeated in the
competition by his younger rival,
Sophocles. It is from Sophocles that our
notions of the structure of tragic drama
come.
• Sophocles: adolescent at time of the defeat of the
Persians
• Matured during the rise of Athenian democracy
• Only 7 of his 120-odd plays survive, three of them the
story of Thebes.
• Antigone was the earliest of the three Theban
plays, even though it is the latest chronologically
• Presented in 441, it precedes the dawn of the
Pelopponesian War and the beginning of the
plague
• The Parthenon had just risen behind the
orchestra of the theatre
• Oedipus was
probably from the
420s, after the first
Plague, at the dawn
of the Peloponnesian
war (431-404).