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Greeks 1: Stage, Function, Chorus, Masks
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Tragedy: A Complete History
In this course, Professor John Lennard explores the history of tragedy from its origins in ancient Athens to the present day. In the first three modules, we think about the tragedy of Classical Athens, looking in particular at the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, before turning in the fourth module to Roman tragedy and Seneca the Younger. In the fifth module, we think about how the arrival of Christianity of Europe may have impacted people's views of tragedy in the Middle Ages, before turning in the sixth, seventh and eighth modules to the tragedy of the Renaissance period – including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Marston, Webster. After that, in the ninth module, we think the Restoration Tragedy of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, before moving on in the tenth module to consider the intersection between tragedy and Romanticism – looking especially at works of Lessing, Schiller, Goethe and Kleist. In the eleventh and twelfth modules, we think about the impact on tragedy of first a new medium – the novel – and then a new technology – the camera. In the thirteenth module, we think about tragedy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, looking especially at the work of Henrik Ibsen, before moving on in the fourteenth module to think about the relationship between tragedy and war – especially the First World War (1914-18). In the fifteenth module, we think about the tragedy and Modernism, looking in particular at the plays of Bertolt Brecht and novels of William Faulkner, before turning in the sixteenth module to think about how tragedy has represented the Sho'ah, i.e. the Holocaust. In the seventeenth module, we return to Modernism by thinking about the works of Lorca and Beckett, before moving on in the eighteenth module to look at tragedy in film and television. In the nineteenth module, we think about tragedy written by non-Western writers and in non-Western contexts, looking in particular at Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956) and the works of the Yoruban writer, Wole Soyinka, before turning in the twentieth and final module to tragedy today and in the future.
Greeks 1: Stage, Function, Chorus, Masks
In this module, we think about the origins of Greek tragedy in Classical Athens, focusing in particular on the size and location of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, the festival of the Dionysia at which most tragedies were performed, the distinction between the actors and the chorus, ideas relating to the movement of the chorus, and the importance of the mask in the performance of Greek tragedy.
Reading list:
– Jacques Lecoq, The Moving Body (trans. Bradby, 2000)
My name is John Lennard, and this is the first of a 20-part series
00:00:03on tragedy, from goat songs to 9/11. And it's the first of three on the Greeks
00:00:07called Stage, Function, Chorus, Masks. And you have to start with
00:00:13the Greeks when you're doing tragedy because they invented it.
00:00:19The word literally means goat song. Tragos is a billy goat.
00:00:23Aoidē is a song. But tragos was also a time of puberty and a term
00:00:28for lechery. As we still say, if we call a lustful man an old goat.
00:00:33And so straightaway we have to ask what the Greeks were doing when
00:00:39they staged tragedy. Greece was not then unified.
00:00:44Athens was a powerful city-state. Some kind of theatre began there in the
00:00:49sixth century BCE. But tragedy really got going in the fifth century BCE after the
00:00:54Athenian defeats of the Persians in 490 and 480 left Athens the pre-eminent power
00:01:01in the region for the next century. And it also became the world's first
00:01:08democracy electing rulers for fixed terms. The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens was
00:01:12large and central. It was a major public building amid other public buildings,
00:01:18and it included a temple. There were other smaller theatres out in
00:01:24the demes, the areas around the city that fed to the city-state and
00:01:28comprised its territory. And tragedy was performed once a year at a
00:01:32religious festival, the Dionysia. So just imagine it.
00:01:37In theory, every adult male citizen would be present, including all the political
00:01:42and military leaders. And at the opening ceremony,
00:01:48there would be a sacrifice, probably of a goat. And there would be a
00:01:51whole lot of formal ritual including, for example, a special group,
00:01:56the war orphans. Children of citizens who had been killed fighting for their city,
00:02:01fighting for Athens, and for whom the city took formal
00:02:08financial responsibility for their upbringing and education as orphan.
00:02:12These people were an important part of the ceremony, to see them,
00:02:17important witnesses of it. Then there were three full
00:02:22days of tragedy. And on each day you would see three tragedies,
00:02:26all by the same playwright, not necessarily on the same theme,
00:02:31but somehow relating to one another, followed by a satire play,
00:02:35a rather lighter-hearted piece. And then the next day the same again,
00:02:39three more plays and a satire play. The third day, same again.
00:02:44And then after that, you would choose a winner for the tragedy
00:02:49competition and have a whole series of political votes on important things.
00:02:54"Shall we go to war this year"? To which the answer
00:03:00was usually, "yes", in the case of Athens. Because their power was extending and they
00:03:02came into extended conflict with the Spartans. And so what was going on?
00:03:08Now, these performances also you had actors in them, but you also had a chorus.
00:03:16A group of 12 people in tragedy who danced and perhaps sang. I'll be coming back to
00:03:21them in a minute. So if we're going to ask what is the function of tragedy we have to
00:03:26try to think of the Houses of Parliament, the National Theatre,
00:03:31St. Paul's Cathedral, the National Ballet,
00:03:34and either Wembley Stadium or Lord's, as all being the same place,
00:03:38a single building where acting, dancing, worshipping,
00:03:43and making major political decisions occurred in a
00:03:47compound, competitive package. The Theatre of Dionysus,
00:03:50where it happened, is a large, fan-shaped terrace of seats accommodating
00:03:55up to 20,000 people. So some spectators were pretty distant
00:03:59from the action. There were special box seats for the political
00:04:05and military leaders. There was a fairly small,
00:04:08rectangular stage before a back wall, the scaenae. And in that back wall,
00:04:11there was a single, central door that led into an unseen interior space.
00:04:17And exits on either side, which conventionally one of them went to
00:04:23far away and one of them went to nearby. And between the terraces and the stage,
00:04:26there was the circular orchestra, literally a place of dancing as a theatre
00:04:33is literally a place of seeing. And that was where the chorus,
00:04:39quell for tragedy, more for comedy, that was where the chorus
00:04:43performed, singing and dancing their parts. The chorus is one of the great
00:04:47mysteries and wonders of tragedy. In the surviving plays,
00:04:52they may be specified as men or women, older or younger. But although for
00:04:56practical reasons of movement they had a leader, the Choragos,
00:05:01they represent ordinary citizens. Not the actors who cause and suffer those
00:05:06tragedies, but, you know, the great figures, Agamemnon,
00:05:12Oedipus, they're actors. But the chorus are those who are affected
00:05:15by the tragedies, the citizens who have to observe and weep at what happens.
00:05:19The chorus, that is, has a democratic force
00:05:25as social representatives. But they very rarely have any power to
00:05:28affect what is happening. How they moved and spoke is radically
00:05:32uncertain, and was probably quite varied. Lines might have been spoken sometimes in
00:05:37choric unison, or they might have been distributed between members of the chorus,
00:05:42so that one spoke one line and another a second. Choric speeches are often highly
00:05:47metrical, formally patterned in stanzas with a strophe, and antistrophe,
00:05:53and an epode. So that it might be that movement was involved on the one hand
00:05:59this and on the other hand that, and then some sort of resolution.
00:06:05And the bulk of the money that was spent by the Athenians producing tragedy,
00:06:09was spent on the time it took to train the chorus. A French theatre practitioner
00:06:15called Jacques Lecoq has a very interesting book called
00:06:21The Moving Body. He, thinking about the practicalities of
00:06:24trying to get 12 people moving together. I mean, one model might be the
00:06:29Janet Jackson dancers, or another might be a classical chord or ballet.
00:06:34But another equally good one might be a really good football team in a flowing
00:06:39attack, where everybody is moving independently, but they're all very
00:06:45sharply aware of what the others are, what the others are doing,
00:06:50where they are, moving in coordination with them to achieve a single end.
00:06:53Now, from vase paintings and the like, it seems probable within tragedy,
00:07:00costumes were quite smooth and formal, white robes and the likes.
00:07:04And the same paintings sometimes show the masks that were worn.
00:07:09And they weren't small facemasks as in commedia dell'arte, but they were whole
00:07:13head masks like this one, which was made about 20 years ago by a
00:07:17Spanish mask maker called Caheis [SP] for use in a Handel opera.
00:07:24And if I put it on, I can tell you that it is a very strange experience indeed to
00:07:30wear such a mask. If you do mask work with students, one of the things that can
00:07:42happen is that the students who are normally very talkative find that they
00:07:48shut up, and the students who are normally silent find that they talk.
00:07:53I mean, putting a mask on is a transformative experience.
00:07:58It's a very strange experience. And it can have very odd
00:08:02effects on people. There is a story, for example, from the making of the film,
00:08:05V for Vendetta. The actor who was first cast as V was James Purefoy.
00:08:09But he found that when he was wearing these masks he simply could not keep
00:08:15his head still. It bothered his vision. He kept on trying to,
00:08:21sort of, move his head to see round the corners of the mask somehow.
00:08:23And after a few weeks, the directors, the Wachowski siblings, just,
00:08:28kind of, gave up and let him go. And that was when Hugo Weaving was called
00:08:31in to play the part because he could keep his head absolutely still and he does all
00:08:36through the film. And it's one of the extraordinary things about seeing that
00:08:41film is to have this face that is not only featureless but also completely still.
00:08:45And we know something about the mystery. Probably the most interesting conversation
00:08:54I've ever had about masks was with a Nigerian dancer, Yoruban dancer,
00:08:58called Koffi Koko who was in Cambridge doing some work. And it doesn't quite work
00:09:01for this mask, but we had the mask he was using. And what he said was he pointed to
00:09:08the eyes, and said, "See, the eyes of the mask are always open.
00:09:12The person wearing it cannot not see. And the mouth is always open.
00:09:17The person wearing it cannot not speak". And I think that's an important thing
00:09:22because we sometimes say that the choruses in Greek tragedies are neutral.
00:09:28But they're not neutral because they don't have opinions about things.
00:09:33And they're not neutral because they don't have prejudices about things,
00:09:36they do and they express them from time to time. But what makes them truly neutral is
00:09:39that they have no choice. They have to see.
00:09:44They have to bear witness. They have to speak.
00:09:47They have to bear witness. They have no choice about it.
00:09:50The actors do. They have volition. But the chorus don't,
00:09:54they simply suffer. And that's what makes them neutral. So one brief word more about
00:09:58the satire plays which ended each day of tragic performance. We only have one and a
00:10:05half surviving ones, but from those, it's clear that
00:10:11they were funny. They were lighter-hearted. They were a long step
00:10:15towards comedy although not quite the same thing as comedy. And it seems likely that
00:10:18what they were doing was bringing the audience back down to normality,
00:10:23as it were. That after the heightened experience of tragedy you had an interlude
00:10:29that helped people to readjust so that when they left the theatre they weren't in
00:10:35an ecstatic state or, you know, freaked out by the tragedies,
00:10:40but were, sort of, back to normal. So those are the things,
00:10:44function, space, chorus, masks. The matrix of tragedy as it
00:10:47came into being. And from that there followed two and a half thousand years of
00:10:54history which is what we'll be following along.
00:10:58
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Lennard, J. (2018, August 15). Tragedy: A Complete History - Greeks 1: Stage, Function, Chorus, Masks [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/tragedy-a-complete-history/tragedy-and-technology-1-the-novel-26d99526-bf0d-4a5f-b385-18e88bfc05db
MLA style
Lennard, J. "Tragedy: A Complete History – Greeks 1: Stage, Function, Chorus, Masks." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/tragedy-a-complete-history/tragedy-and-technology-1-the-novel-26d99526-bf0d-4a5f-b385-18e88bfc05db