Classical and Hellenistic Greece
The city-state of Athens is
where western theatre originated. It
was part of a broader culture of
theatricality and performance in classical
Greece that included festivals, religious
rituals, politics, law,
athletics and gymnastics, music, poetry,
weddings, funerals, and symposia.Participation
in the city-state's many festivals—and attendance at the City
Dionysia as an audience member
(or even as a participant in the theatrical productions) in particular—was an
important part of citizenship. Civic
participation also involved the evaluation of the rhetoric of orators evidenced
in performances in the law-court or political
assembly, both of which were understood as analogous to the theatre and
increasingly came to absorb its dramatic vocabulary. The
Greeks also developed the concepts of dramatic criticism, acting as a career,
and theatre architecture.The theatre
of ancient Greece consisted of
three types of drama: tragedy, comedy,
and the satyr
play.The
origins of theatre in ancient Greece, according to Aristotle (384–322 BCE), the
first theoretician of theatre, are to be found in the festivals that honoured
Dionysus.The performances were given in semi-circular auditoria cut into
hillsides, capable of seating 10,000–20,000 people. The stage consisted of a
dancing floor (orchestra), dressing room and scene-building area (skene). Since
the words were the most important part, good acoustics and clear delivery were
paramount. The actors (always men) wore masks appropriate to the characters they
represented, and each might play several parts.Athenian
tragedy—the oldest surviving form of tragedy—is a type of dance-drama
that formed an important part of the theatrical culture of the city-state.Having
emerged sometime during the 6th century BCE, it flowered during the 5th century
BCE (from the end of which it began to spread throughout the Greek world), and
continued to be popular until the beginning of the Hellenistic
period.[12] No
tragedies from the 6th century BCE and only 32 of the more than a thousand that
were performed in during the 5th century BCE have survived.[13] We
have complete texts extant by Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides.[14] The
origins of tragedy remain obscure, though by the 5th century BCE it was institution alised
in competitions (agon)
held as part of festivities celebrating Dionysos (the god of wine and fertility). As
contestants in the City Dionysia's competition (the most prestigious of the
festivals to stage drama) playwrights were required to present a tetralogy of
plays (though the individual works were not necessarily connected by story or
theme), which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play.The
performance of tragedies at the City Dionysia may have begun as early as 534
BCE; official records (didaskaliai) begin from 501 BCE, when the satyr
play was introduced. Most
Athenian tragedies dramatise events from Greek
mythology, though The
Persians—which stages the Persian response
to news of their military defeat at the Battle
of Salamis in 480 BCE—is the
notable exception in the surviving drama.[18] When
Aeschylus won first prize for it at the City Dionysia in 472 BCE, he had been
writing tragedies for more than 25 years, yet its tragic treatment of recent
history is the earliest example of drama to
survive. More
than 130 years later, the philosopher Aristotle analysed
5th-century Athenian tragedy in the oldest surviving work of dramatic
theory—his Poetics (c.
335 BCE).
Athenian comedy is conventionally
divided into three periods, "Old Comedy", "Middle Comedy", and "New Comedy". Old
Comedy survives today largely in the form of the eleven surviving plays ofAristophanes,
while Middle Comedy is largely lost (preserved only in relatively short
fragments in authors such as Athenaeus
of Naucratis). New Comedy is known primarily from the substantial papyrus
fragments of Menander.
Aristotle defined comedy as a representation of laughable people that involves
some kind of blunder or ugliness that does not cause pain or disaster.
