Introductory Concepts

I'm Dr Rosie Wells. I'm lecturer at King's College London,

and my module is all about ancient theatre.

It's an introduction to this drama,

which is some of the oldest drama that we have in the Western tradition.

Tragedy comedy. It all began in ancient Athens at the end of the sixth century,

and some of the drama that we have surviving from

that the place that we have surviving from that period,

the fifth century BC,

that this is a golden age for those plays and the

first moments when that form of drama is being discovered.

So we've got plays from the playwrights aristo phonies, who is a comic playwright.

We've got the tragedy in East Dallas, Europe, please, and Sophocles.

And together these make up some of the most important pieces of drama in the cannon.

The context of the performance of these drama

was in the festival for Dionysus Dionysus,

the God for wine, the God for drama, that God for sort of forgetting yourself.

So these celebrations involved dramatic performances,

and the most famous really is

the great diagnoses, or the city dynasty that took place in March.

And what's so important about that is

March was when people would first sale again.

So it included not just an Athenian audience,

but really a very broad Greek audience.

And at those festivals,

the performance space would have included Did an orchestra that's a dancing space

around that are the seats set up the hillside in the fifth century?

Those weren't stone yet.

Those were actually just wooden benches that people would have sat on.

And we're talking about an audience of about 10,000 people,

and the form that these take.

What makes these plays really extraordinary is

that they're verse that actually poetry.

There's a lot of singing and music that goes on in these performances,

so some of the technical features that you

come across in tragic drama are as follows.

One of the things that you have to bear in mind

is that most of these plays were performed in front of

a backdrop that was usually a palace and would have this

central door that we're come back to when we look at staging

and their mythological for the most part. So you're distancing the tragedy.

You're distancing the story that's taking place.

You're gonna have a prologue at the beginning

someone introducing what the story is all about.

What the situation is at the beginning of the story.

Very strange element for us now is that you're going to have a chorus,

a group of women, a group of men who are going to come in as characters in the play.

They enter with their paradox. That's

their entry song,

and after that, there really on stage for the entire performance

taking part, interacting with the actors.

And they offer this collective voice on what's going on

for the actors themselves, with the characters,

the protagonists in the drama they can argue in different modes in tragedy.

You don't just have, um,

something naturalistic. You don't just have maybe how it would be in real life.

Rather, you've got the option.

You can have this law court mode where you're gonna have this bag on

where you're each going to state your case very formally in a long speech.

Or you might have this very quick paced sticker Mathea,

where it's a line for a line exchange and and that can really build the tension,

and something is going to happen at the end of that,

a very important part of tragedies, the messenger speech.

Someone will come on and report what's going on off stage.

Often that will be violence that's taking place.

You're not going to see someone hanging themselves on stage,

but what you are going to get.

It's a very, very graphic report of exactly how that was done,

usually inside the palace and then that that corpse might be revealed.

But the messenger speech is where we

learn exactly how that took place.

And finally, you've got the day s ex machina.

That's the god from the crane, the flying in God towards the end of the play,

who might resolve all the issues that the

humans can't manage to sort out for themselves.

Now, those features can be different in every single play.

But if you know what those features are,

you're ready to recognise them and ready to

see what the playwrights are doing with them.

In these drama festivals,

you'd expect a tradition to present three tragedies which

may have been connected in the story so you can

have a trilogy where you have the three stories

connected as we're going to see with the Oresteia.

Um,

but they didn't need to be. And that's followed by a satyr drama.

And that this this is this extraordinary relief after the comedy after the tragedy,

where you're going to have this comedy with these followers of Dionysus,

these guys, these goat men really wearing these fairy trunks, having these horses,

tails and these fallacies as well.

And they are characterised by really being so lusty

and being so cowardly as well. And, of course, wanting to drink the whole time.

You can see how this is a recipe for humour.

So you get to see these guys after your tragedy.

You get to have this laugh you get to see because it's still mythology.

Actually, sometimes some of the same characters that you've seen

in a tragic setting are going to reappear in the Sata drama,

and now you're going to actually be able to laugh at them.

So Heracles, who may have been very serious as he is in Europe,

it is Heracles and he kills his Children.

He kills his wife, and we see the consequences of it.

Actually, he could turn up in a satyr drama,

and he's been characterised as a glutton, and we're all having a good laugh at him.

The only surviving Sata drama that we have is Europe, the Cyclops.

And if you go and read that,

you start to get an idea of what these things were like and what these plays, really,

what made them so funny and actually also how

they are very different from what Paris often is

the comic playwright is doing.

Comedy was really characterised by the grotesque.

So what you have is characters dressed in costumes,

which give them padding their their larger than life.

Their faces are exaggerated.

And actually, most of all, you've got the strap on phallus,

which means that it's an instant source of humour in comedies at different points,

especially in something like the Lysistrata, when all the women are on sex strike.

But that's not all that comedy is doing.

And I mean, apart from all the jokes are jokes about bodily functions,

the slapstick.

Actually, you've got at its core a very, very important political element.

And importantly for our study of fifth century Athens. This stuff was topical.

So this is commenting on politicians of the day, and it may well have included

these often fantastical locations for the comedy,

so you have people going into hell.

You have people going up into the heavens.

But at the same time,

you've got these ordinary guys from fifth century Athens trying to, for example,

established peace when the city of Athens is really at war.

So from that point of view,

Aristophanes is really extraordinary for this combination between

11 moment you're having a joke about slapstick,

and the next moment you're making very, very serious political point.

So how do we know all about this stuff?

How do you know what was happening in fifth century drama in these performances?

Well, of course, we've got the play text.

And as I mentioned, those are just a selection of all those plays that were written.

Apart from that, we've got artefacts that show performances,

especially for comedy.

In the fifth century.

You've got a clue of what those performances might have looked like.

We've got later vases from the fourth century BC,

which give a hint of what tragedy might have looked like on stage

from much later in antiquity.

You get playlists, performance dates given for some of these plays,

and and a very famous example of that is the parent marble,

which is now in the Ashmolean.

And I mean again. It's an inscription is on a stone. It's fragmentary in parts.

You can't read it in places but where you can.

That's such an essential clue to when these things were taking place,

which can really change your understanding of the meaning of the play.

Because if it took place later than another play,

it might be referring to this earlier performance.

And the final,

really crucial piece of evidence that we have

when we're thinking about ancient theatre is,

of course, the Papiri that were dug up in the sands of Egypt.

Sometimes they're even found in the mummy cases

where if you crack open the mummy case,

you can find well in amongst a load of launch analysts.

You might just get a little scrap of literary papyrus,

which has maybe a few lines from a play, and we've got, of course,

these quotations from later often think about how now

people might quote a little bit from a film.

And that's what you're doing in ancient literature to show that you're learning.

You're quoting a bit. Oh, its like this bit in this play,

and sometimes that can really give us a clue to what these plays were like