Greek Theater

1. Greek Theater c. 550-220 B.C.E.

2. Dionysus God of wine, agriculture, and fertility of nature

3. Theater of Dionysus, Athensbase of the Acropolis

4. Reconstruction drawings

5. Epidauros

6. Greek Theater • Greek theater was directed at the moral and political education of the community • The poet’s role was the improvement of the polis (city-state) • Plays tend to reflect five specific thematic ideas: • Reverence: learning to respect something other than one’s own desires and needs • Self-knowledge: never claiming ignorance as an excuse for one’s actions • Balance: avoiding excessive behavior • Forethought: making decisions after first considering their consequences • Irony of fate: man’s limited power contrasted with the gods’ omnipotence

7. Balance through Contrapposto

8. Structure of Plays • Prologue: speech or scene that preceded the entrance of the chorus • Parodos: entrance song of the chorus sung as they entered the orchestra • Episodes: scenes in which the actors took the main roles • Stasimon/a: the subsequent choral odes, sung and danced by the chorus, which usually alternated with the episodes. These odes were usually structured in alternating, metrically identical stanzas, called strophe (“turn”) and antistrophe (“counterturn”). If there was a metrically different free-standing stanza following the strophe and antistrophe, this was called an epode. • Exodos: song sung by the chorus as they left the orchestra, concluding the play

9. Tragedy

10. “Definition” • A drama of a serious and dignified character that typically describes the development of a conflict between the protagonist and a superior force (such as destiny, circumstance, or society) and reaches a sorrowful or disastrous conclusion.

11. Terms • Hamartia: some error or frailty / act of injustice • Tragic flaw: an excess of some character trait that leads to disaster • Hubris: overweening pride (presumption suggesting impious disregard of the limits governing human action in an orderly universe) • Catharsis: the purging and illuminating that tragedy effects through pity and fear • Peripeteia: reversal, point when the hero’s fortunes turn in an unexpected direction • Anagnorisis: recognition • Dramatic irony: the meaning of a character’s words or actions is understood by the audience but not by the character

12. Some Characteristics of Tragedy • Materials drawn from familiar myths • Major events happen offstage, reported/commented • Setting in dynastic house • Images of rock, net, house in disorder • Deplores hubris

13. The Tragic Hero… • is king or person in position of high leadership • is of noble stature • is good, but not perfect • is prompted by will or circumstance, fatal ignorance, or binding obligation • commits “an act of injustice” / possesses a tragic flaw (harmartia) • is responsible for his own downfall (tragic vs. pathetic) • ’s punishment exceeds the crime • falls, suffers, and dies/meets an unhappy outcome • gains self-knowledge

14. The Silver Lining • Outcome is death • Tragedy affirms life in this world • Tragedy ends in optimism • Tragedy is paradoxical • Catharsis

15. The Vision of Tragedy • The highest comedy gains its power from its sense of tragic possibility • the profoundest tragedy presents a full if fleeting vision, through the temporary disorder, of an ordered universe to which comedy is witness • without a sense of the tragic, comedy loses heart; it becomes brittle, it has animation but no life • without the recognition of the truths of comedy, tragedy becomes bleak and intolerable

16. Aristotle’s Poetics • Tragedy as mimesis • Tragedy as distinct from history • Six elements of tragedy (in order of importance): • Plot • Character • Diction • Thought • Spectacle • Song

17. Structure of Plays

18. from Paul Roche’s introduction to Oedipus • “It is true that the downfall of the house of Oedipus was foretold by the gods even before Oedipus was born, but it was foretold because it was going to happen; it was not going to happen because it was foretold.” • “ . . . the tragedy was that having murdered his father and married his mother he made the fully responsible mistake of finding it out. As he was an upright man, but proud, the gods allowed him to make the first mistake; as he was a headstrong man, but overweening in self-confidence, he allowed himself to make the second. Zeal mysteriously worked with destiny to trip him up on his self-righteousness and then reveal an arrogance which pressed forward to calamity.”