The History of Greek Theater
Theater and drama in Ancient Greece took form in about 5th century BCE, with the Sopocles, the great writer of tragedy. In his plays and those of the same genre, heroes and the ideals of life were depicted and glorified. It was believed that man should live for honor and fame, his action was courageous and glorious and his life would climax in a great and noble death.
Originally, the hero’s recognition was created by selfish behaviors and little thought of service to others. As the Greeks grew toward city-states and colonization, it became the destiny and ambition of the hero to gain honor by serving his city. The second major characteristic of the early Greek world was the supernatural. The two worlds were not separate, as the gods lived in the same world as the men, and they interfered in the men’s lives as they chose to. It was the gods who sent suffering and evil to men.
In the plays of Sophocles, the gods brought about the hero’s downfall because of a tragic flaw in the character of the hero.
In Greek tragedy, suffering brought knowledge of worldly matters and of the individual. Aristotle attempted to explain how an audience could observe tragic events and still have a pleasurable experience.
Aristotle, by searching the works of writers of Greek tragedy, Aeschulus, Euripides and Sophocles (whose Oedipus Rex he considered the finest of all Greek tragedies), arrived at his definition of tragedy. This explanation has a profound influence for more than twenty centuries on those writing tragedies, most significantly Shakespeare. Aristotle’s analysis of tragedy began with a description of the effect such a work had on the audience as a “catharsis” or purging of the emotions. He decided that catharsis was the purging of two specific emotions, pity and fear. The hero has made a mistake due to ignorance, not because of wickedness or corruption. Aristotle used the word “hamartia”, which is the “tragic flaw” or offense committed in ignorance.
For example, Oedipus is ignorant of his true parentage when he commits his fatal deed.
Oedipus Rex is one of the stories in a three-part myth called the Thebian cycle. The structure of most all Greek tragedies is similar to Oedipus Rex. Such plays are divided in to five parts, the prologue or introduction, the “prados” or entrance of the chorus, four episode or acts separates from one another by “stasimons” or choral odes, and “exodos”, the action after the last stasimon.
...ods come for the free drugs that he offers. Johnny is a man for whom we feel pride, shame and pity all at once but such a contradictory character would be unstable and unpredictable. Aristotle defines tragedy according to seven characteristics. These are that it is characterized by mimicry, it is serious, it expresses a full story of a relevant length, it contains rhythm and harmony, the rhythm and harmony occur in different combinations in different parts of the tragedy, it is performed not narrated and that it provokes feelings of pity and fear then purges these feelings through catharsis the purging of the emotions and emotional tensions. The composition of a tragedy consists of six segments. In order of relevance, these are plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and performance. For a comedy the ending must be merry. Instead Jerusalem ends in death.
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The great Sophoclean play, Oedipus Rex is an amazing play, and one of the first of its time to accurately portray the common tragic hero. Written in the time of ancient Greece, Sophocles perfected the use of character flaws in Greek drama with Oedipus Rex. Using Oedipus as his tragic hero, Sophocles’ plays forced the audience to experience a catharsis of emotions. Sophocles showed the play-watchers Oedipus’s life in the beginning as a “privileged, exalted [person] who [earned his] high repute and status by…intelligence.” Then, the great playwright reached in and violently pulled out the audience’s most sorrowful emotions, pity and fear, in showing Oedipus’s “crushing fall” from greatness.
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Aristotle (384-322 B.C. believed that tragedy, as an imitation or mimesis of life as it could be, held more importance than history, which simply records the past. He considered that performance of a tragedy provided the perfect cathartic experience for an audience, leaving them spiritually purified and inspired. He felt spectators seeing and experiencing great hardship befall the play’s hero or heroine would achieve this emotional state and benefit from it.
Aristotle’s Poetics is a “reservoir of the themes and schemes deployed in ancient Greek tragedy and poetry” (Poetics iii). Written around 330 B.C., it was the first work of literature to make a distinction amongst the various literary genres and provide a proper analysis of them. In Poetics, Aristotle places a big emphasis on the genre of tragedy. When one hears of the word tragedy, one already assumes that something bad has occurred to an individual and an immediate emotion of sorrow occurs, but how does Aristotle see tragedy? Aristotle gives us his formal definition of tragedy on page 10: “Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” He goes on and explains all the components that make up tragedy. A tragedy must fall into two parts: complication and unraveling (also known as the denouement). Aristotle elaborates on that and speaks of four types of tragedy: “the Complex, depending entirely on Reversal of the Situation and Recognition; the Pathetic (where the motive is passion); the Ethical (where the motives are ethical). The fourth kind is the Simple.
Throughout time, the tragedy has been seen as the most emotionally pleasing form of drama, because of its ability to bring the viewer into the drama and feel for the characters, especially the tragic hero. This analysis of tragedy was formed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, and also noted in his Poetics (guidelines to drama). As a playwright, Shakespeare used Aristotle’s guidelines to tragedy when writing Othello. The play that was created revolved around the tragic hero, Othello, whose tragic flaw transformed him from a nobleman, into a destructive creature, which would inevitably bring him to his downfall. This transformation follows an organic movement of the complex plot from the beginning, middle, to the end of the drama while keeping the tragic hero consistent and also real. As the play moves on the audience feels pity for the tragic hero as well as fear for themselves as they watch the event taking place on stage. Othello can be seen as one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, because it follows the guidelines set up by Aristotle’s Poetics.
. . . From the thirteenth chapter of the Poetics we learn that the best sort of tragic hero is a man highly esteemed and prosperous who falls into misfortune because of some serious hamartia: examples, Oedipus and Thyestes. In Aristotle’s view, then, Oedipus’ misfortune was directly ocasioned by some serious hamartia. . . . The word hamartia is ambiguous: in ordinary usage it is sometimes applied to false moral judgments, sometimes to purely intellectual error - the average Greek did not make our sharp distinction between the two(18-19). This view of a tragic flaw, moral or intellectual in nature, within the protagonist is not shared by all literary critics. Robert D. Murray, Jr. in “Thought and Structure in Sophoclean Tragedy” gives a formalist’sperspective on the issue: For the formalists, A. J. A. Waldock answers the moralists with appealing indigantion, in his discussion of the Oedipus Tyranus: We know little of Sophocles’ religion. . . . He believed that there are ups and downs in fortune, and that men are never secure. . . . There is no meaning in the Oedipus Tyrannus. There is merely the terror of coincidence, and then, at the end of it all, our impression of man’s power to suffer, and of his greatness because of this power. Now Waldock’s reaction is surely a needed response to the ultramoralistic notion that Sophocles was driven by an urge to warn his contemporaries that they should not be rash or proud lest a vengeful
Aristotle. “On Tragedy.” Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Robert DiYanni. 6th Ed. New York, 2007. 2196-2198. Print.
According to Aristotle, a tragedy must be an imitation of life in the form of a serious story that is complete in itself among many other things. Oedipus is often portrayed as the perfect example of what a tragedy should be in terms of Aristotle’s Poetics. Reason being that Oedipus seems to include correctly all of the concepts that Aristotle describes as inherent to dramatic tragedy. These elements include: the importance of plot, reversal and recognition, unity of time, the cathartic purging and evocation of pity and fear, the presence of a fatal flaw in the “hero”, and the use of law of probability.
Aristotle’s definitions of tragic hero also states that all tragic heroes have “hamartia” which translates to “mistake or error” (Oedipus). This is not shown in the characters for if it was the audience would not become emotionally attached to them. Also the hero’s flaw must result from something that is also a part of their virtue, usually lack of knowledge. In this case Oedipus fits perfectly because his lack of knowledge of his birth parents. This really impacts the audience for the fact that no action could fix his hamartia. Since nothing can be done the audience fears for Oedipus because no matter what his fate cannot be changed
Greek Drama had three main categories The Comedy, Satyr Plays, and The Tragedy. The most popular of the three is The Tragedy, its themes are often such as loss of love, complex relationships between men and the gods, and corruption of power. These dramas taught the people of the city the difference between good and bad behavior and the ramifications of going against the gods. According to Aristotle, the perfect tragedy consisted of the downfall of the hero through a great misunderstanding, causing suffering and awareness for the protagonist meanwhile making the audience feel pity and fear. The prominent writer who Aristotle based his perfect tragedy theory was Sophocles, his drama Oedipus the King had all the elements of a perfect tragedy.
Tragic hero is a character of noble stature and has greatness but is triggered by some error and causes the hero’s downfall. Oedipus is the tragic hero of “Oedipus the king”. Oedipus has a noble stature and has greatness. From the beginning of the story Oedipus is shown as a noble caring man. He is greatly worried about the plague in Thebes “but my spirit grieves for the city, for myself and all of you” (75-76) he tell the priest and his people of Thebes. If Oedipus didn’t care for his kingdom, he wouldn’t have tried to seek out who was Laius murderer. Oedipus solves the riddle of the sphinx. By solving the riddle the people of Thebes respected Oedipus because he had saved the city from the sphinx. The priest prays to Oedipus rating him “first of men” (41). Solving the riddle of the sphinx “not knowing nothing, no skill, no extra knowledge”, (46-47) he triumphed. By solving the riddle Oedipus became grand and short tempered and these characteristics brought him to his downfall. He is too proud to see any truths and he refuses to believe that he killed Laius his own father and married his own mother Jocasta. Tiresias, the servant of Apollo, is being called a lair after he told Oedipus that he was the one that killed his father. Oedipus refuses to believe that he could have been responsible for such horrible crime. He tells Tiresias that “envy lurks inside you” (435) and he thinks Creon sent Tiresias to try and overthrow him. Oedipus just accus...
In Aristotle’s book, Poetics, he defines tragedy as, “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and possessing magnitude; in embellished language, each kind of which is used separately in the different parts; in the mode of action and not narrated; and effecting through pity and fear” (Aristotle 1149). Tragedy creates a cause and effect chain of actions that clearly gives the audience ideas of possible events. The six parts to Aristotle’s elements of tragedy are: Plot, character, language, thought, spectacle, and melody. According to Aristotle, the most important element is the plot. Aristotle writes in Poetics that, “It is not for the purpose of presenting their characters that the agents engage in action, but rather it is for the sake of their actions that they take on the characters they have” (Aristotle 1150). Plots should have a beginning, middle, and end that have a unity of actions throughout the play making it complete. In addition, the plot should be complex making it an effective tragedy. The second most important element is character. Characters...