Understanding Greek Theater

I will post here a paper I wrote about GREEK TRAGEDIES AND COMEDIES to a college course called "WESTERN HUMANITIES I" at Saint Petersburg College.

"Greek plays or dramas (tragedy and comedy) were a single performance in theaters (arenas) at Athens, spoken and acted by costumed actors and in part sung by a chorus of dancers to the music of a piper. The theaters were mostly located in places called AGORA. In this research paper, we are going to discuss the main elements of the Greek tragedy and comedy and its universality/contribution in arts and scholars of all times.

Theater as we know it in the West today was invented in Ancient Greece, in classical Athens more specifically. The zenith of the Greek Theater coincides with the great moment of its democracy and military power in the fifth century BC. After defeating the Persians in 460 BC approximately, the Greeks developed senses of competitiveness and rivalry.

In 534 BC, the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus founded the festival of the City Dionysia (or also called The Great Dionysia), one of the most popular events, whose main purpose was the presentation of plays and dithyrambs as a sacred competition. Competitive athletic sports and games were also Greek inventions at that time. The play-festivals served as a device for defining Athenian civic identity, which meant exploring, questioning and confirming what it was to be a citizen of a democracy.

The culture of Athens during the Classic period may be viewed as a “performance culture”. In the Dionysia and Lenea festivals there was competition both between the plays or rather groups of plays. Comedies as well as tragedies were performed publicly in local theaters. The Greek plays of the fifth century (BC) were very directly part of a rite, acts of worship offered to a mysterious power. The Greek god Dionysus was this power. He was evoked and even animals were sacrificed to his worship. In Greek mythology, Dionysus was the god of wild and uncontrolled ecstasy. He is too considered more specifically the God of wine. Perfection was the goal of classical Greek art.

Tragedy also reached its great moment in Greece. It was originated from Epic and Lyric poetry, dominant literary forms of artistic expressions from the late archaic age. With the rising of the democratic spirit and changes in the polis, epics were transferred to the stages, featuring the Greek tragic theater.

“The tragedies were primarily based on the legends of royal families – usually the dynasties of Thebes, Sparta and Argos – dating from the Age of Heroes of which Homer sang in his epics. Since the audience already knew these stories, their interest focused on the playwright’s treatment of a familiar tale, his ideas about its moral significance, and how his language shaped those ideas (Matthews, p. 62).”

The main plots in Greek tragedies constitute a grandiose set of variations on a relatively few legendary and formal themes that is not casually or occasionally intertextual, but always and inherently so. “The word tragedy in Greek means “goat song,” and this word may refer to a prehistoric religious ceremony in which competing male choruses sang and danced, while intoxicated, in homage, to the god of wine; the victory prize may been a sacrificial goat (Matthews, p.61).”

The essence of the tragedy was in telling stories about divine and/or humankind weaknesses, pains, sorrows, failures, and also acts of heroism. The conflicts in tragedies were mostly a consequence of fate. The Greek Tragedy passed through four distinct forms such as: the Thespian lyrical (the primary form which introduced the use of masks, with only one actor,) the early Aeschylean with two actors (also called the Old Tragedy,) the Sophoclean with three actors (also called the Middle Tragedy,) and the late-Euripidean drama (also called the New Tragedy).

Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes are the best-known Greek tragedy play authors, explaining why the classical periods were named after them. Each of them wrote over ninety tragedies (although only few survived) and won several festivals in Athens.

Aeschylus (525–456 BC) was born at Eleusius, near Athens. He fought for Athens in the great Persian Wars. His first victory as a tragic dramatist was gained in 485 BC. He won twelve times more. He elaborated over ninety plays, his masterpiece, the Oresteia, is the only trilogy that has survived. In his drama, “Aeschylus confronts and resolves the opposition between several seemingly irreconcilable polarities – Olympian and chthonian gods, divine and human justice, religious cult and civic ritual, and fate and free will (Matthews, p. 63).”

Sophocles (496-406 BC) was born at Colonus Hippius. He wrote 123 plays, of which only seven survived, all written after his victory over Aeschylus in a dramatic contest in 468 BC: Ajax, Electra, Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. Sophocles inaugurated the Old Tragedy adding one more actor in scene. He sees not the simplicity but the complexity of life. The Sophoclean hero, because he is complex, not single-minded, must be seen from more than one point of view, so it is important the role of one more actor on stage.

Euripides (480-406 BC) was born in Athens. He abandoned painting for literature. He wrote about 80 dramas, of which 19 survived. Some of his masterpieces are Alcestis, Medea, Orestes, and Electra. His works became more popular in Athens after his death. The Euripidean tragedy got more involved by the Peloponnesian war and by the Sophist philosophy. He introduced what it is called the New Tragedy, a more intuitive work. His plays are reflections about human experiences, traditional mythology, and human consciousness. Macbeth of Shakespeare has a strong influence from Medea.

Drama was not necessarily an original feature of the festivals at which it was performed. Comedies were performed in the Dionisya Festival just as the tragedies were. Tragedy had first place, occupying the theater for three days, on each of which were performed three tragedies and followed by a satyr-play (presenting indecent behavior and strong language) or a comedy.

Aristophanes is a very important name of the classic Greek Comedy Theater. In his works, he attacked the Athenian system of law, ridiculed politicians of that time, and caricaturized the intellectual and ordinary men. Aristophanes helped creating what it was called later ‘the old comedy’. This term means comedy produced in Athens during the fifth century BC. Eupolis, Cratinus and Aristophanes are its main exponents, but had no doubt that Aristophanes was the greatest of the three. Here is the beginning of one of his great plays: “Lysistrata:”

“[A street in Athens before daylight]

LYSISTRATA – If anyone had asked them to a festival of Aphrodite or of Bacchus or of Pan, you couldn’t get through Athens for the tambourines, but now there’s not one solitary woman here. Except my next-door neighbor. Here she’s coming out. Hello, Kalonike.

ALONIKE – Hello, Lysistrata. What are you so upset about? Don’t scowl so, clear. You’re less attractive when you knit your brows and glare.

LYSISTRATA – I know, Kalonike, but I am smoldering with indignation at the way we women act. Men think we are so gifted for all sort of crime that we will stop at nothing –

KALONIKE – Well, we are, by Zeus!”

In Old Comedy, plays had a strong element of criticism, even though free speech had its limitations in Athens. In Lysistrata, Aristophanes points out the absurdity of the prolonged Peloponnesian war. “In the play, Lysistrata, an Athenian matron, persuades the women of Athens and Sparta to withhold sex from their husbands until they sign a peace treaty (Matthews, p65).”

How important is the Greek tragedy for later Western literature and thought? The production of plays such as Medea or Oedipus the King is made until recent times. The intellectual and aesthetic contributions of these works are infinite. Greek tragedies influenced not only plays (Shakespeare and Goethe) and operas, but also thinkers as varied as Freud, Sartre and Nietzche. A book on Greek tragedy may be a work of historical documentation or of literary criticism, although the relationship between anthropology and the Classics (tragedies), for instance, has brought more than that. The studies in tragedies have explained the idea of ritual and of, so called by anthropologists, “magic thoughts”. The critical understanding of Greek tragedy is extremely flexible. It is possible to explore them politically, historically, in psychoanalysis, in linguistics, in philology and so forth.

Plato and Aristotle developed extensive thoughts concerning tragedies. In Aristotle’s work called Poetics, he affirms that the essential thing in tragedy was not the characters but the events, the fable, the mythos, and the action compounded from it. For him the preeminent example, which he repeatedly cites as model tragedy, was Sophocle’s Oedipus, in which the action, the “destiny”, takes precedence over character. This is why the Greek drama perpetuates in History. The capacity of becoming modern lies in its actions. According to Aristotle, tragedy plays are eternal for conceiving and portraying man in his universal conflicts such as: surviving, death, human justice, humiliation, sexuality, power, free will, weakness, fears, and so on. It consists in the simple idea that it is no accident that the Greek tragedy survived as creative stimulus in the drama of later eras.

Bibliography

1. KITTO, H. D. F., “Greek Tragedy.” Barnes and Noble Inc., 1968.

2. MATTHEWS, T. Roy and PLATT, F. Dewitt, “The Western Humanities.” Michigan State University, 2000.

3. ARISTOPHANES, “Lysistrata.” Chandler Publishing Company, 1961.

4. RIDGEWAY, William, “The Origin of Tragedy.” Benjamin Blom Inc., 1966.

5. HAMBURGER, Kate, “From Sophocles to Sartre.” Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1969.

6. “Greek Tragedy.” Cambridge University Press, 1997

7. LATTIMORE, Richmond, “Story Patterns in Greek Tragedy.”

The University of Michigan Press, 1964.

8. SANDBACH, F. H., “The Comic Theater of Greece and Rome.” Norton and Company Inc., 1977.

9. ARISTOTELES, “Poeticas.” Editora Siciliano, 1985.

10. AYLEN, Leo, “The Greek Theater.” London and Toronto Associated Presses, 1985.