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

self-righteousness 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.

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.

Aristotle’s Commentary (335 BC)

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 concent- ration 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.