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8. Plutarch: 'The Intelligence of Animals' 983
9. Old Testament I Kings XVIII:25 ff.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
SKY AND STAGE
WE are now in a position to reconsider the origin and
significance of Greek tragedy. A goat-song festival began with
the sacrifice of a bull at the beginning of the Great Dionysia at
Athens.
The bull was slain as the procession entered the city; a he-goat
was sacrificed, probably on the thymele, and the festival of
drama began. The sacrifice was accompanied by a dithyramb.
This was a form of lyric poetry heard especially at Athens. It
was in the Phrygian mode, as befitted Dionysus, accompanied
by pipes. The leader mounted the eleos (thymele), or altar, to
recite a tale in trochaic metre about Dionysus. There was a
circular movement of the chorus, probably with reversal of
direction for the antistrophe. There is a fragment of Aeschylus,
addressed to a female chorus: "You are to stand round this altar
and shining fire, and pray, in a circular formation."
The word tragedy comes from 'ode', song, and 'tragos', goat.
The other word for a goat, aix, is used by Aristotle to mean a
fiery meteor. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, developed from
the leaders (exarchontes) of the dithyramb. The first name
known to us of a tragedian is that of Arion, who flourished
around 600 B.C. in the city of Corinth. Choral odes in tragedy
retained the Doric dialect of Dorian Corinth. Thespis, about
536, wrote the first recorded tragedy. There was one actor, and
the chorus.
In the early days of Greek dithyramb, inflated goat skins were
covered with olive oil. The chorus jumped on them and
slithered off.
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The scenery for a tragedy was usually a palace or a temple. In
the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., there would be a prologue, in
which one, or sometimes two, actors introduced the subject of
the play, but this was a later development. A primitive tragedy
began with the entrance of the chorus, originally resembling
satyrs (capripedes satyri Horace). They were generally humble
inhabitants of the city where the action of the play took place.
There would be twelve or more of them. At each side of the
orchestra there was a parodos, or entrance, which gave its name
to the opening song, parodos, of the chorus, which was
accompanied by a musician playing a pipe. The actor, or
'struggler' (agonistes) came onto the stage. 'Episode' is an
entrance. The chorus, rather than solo actors, were the original
performers, but a second actor was introduced by Aeschylus in
the 5th century, and a third by Sophocles. The first actor was
the protagonist, the second the deuteragonist, and the third the
tritagonist.
In a very early tragedy the subject matter would be the life and
death of a god, especially Dionysus. Later, heroes would be the
subject, and eventually ordinary people. When tragedians
abandoned stories about Dionysus, public criticism said 'It's
nothing to do with Dionysus'. Aeschylus introduced the
tetralogy to meet this objection. His 'Oresteia' had the 'Proteus'
as a satyr play to follow the three tragedies.
The actors wore masks. We learn from the Roman poet Horace
that Thespis, regarded by many as the inventor of tragedy, went
on tour with wagons, presumably used as a stage; his players
coloured their faces red with wine lees. He is also said to have
introduced masks made of linen. In the 5th century at any rate,
the masks had expressions that suited the character of the
wearer. The mask had a projection, onkos, at the top, supporting
a high wig.
The actor wore cothornoi or buskins. These were high boots,
laced at the front, with a thick sole which would increase the
height of the actor and help to give an imposing and even
supernatural appearance. Since a buskin could be worn on
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either foot, the word became a nickname for a trimmer in
politics.
The actor wore a wig, headress and a long robe. Female parts
were played by men. (In a comedy, actors wore a sisura,
goatskin, like a shawl, over the tunic).
The episodes in a tragedy were scenes involving actors and
chorus. Between episodes the chorus would sing a stasimon, a
song during which they would stand in one place, as opposed to
the parodos when they entered. The stasima were reflections on
the action that had just taken place in the episode.
After the final episode, there was a final stasimon, then the
exodos or final scene.
It is generally held that in Aeschylus's plays the emphasis is on
the gods controlling events, as in the Iliad; in the plays of
Sophocles the clash is between man and god; in Euripides the
heroes and heroines may be brought right down to earth, but the
gods are never far away. Euripides was attacked by
Aristophanes for clothing his characters in rags. To give an
example in detail, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus portrays the
murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover
Aigisthos. In the next play of the trilogy, Orestes murders his
mother to avenge his father, acting on the instructions of the
god Apollo. In the third play, the Eumenides, he is under attack
from the Furies, or Eumenides, divine pursuers who take a
different view of the action of Orestes from Apollo. Man is a
puppet, pulled this way and that by warring deities.
In his clash with an opposing force (god, hero, man or woman),
a fatal flaw in the character of the tragic hero is revealed.
Hamartia, the Greek word for sin in the New Testament, means
in classical Greek missing the mark, going astray. The cause of
the error is probably hubris, or arrogance, going too high and
too far, like a god. The corresponding word in Latin, which
comes from the same root, is superbia. It implies setting oneself
up above one's fellow mortals. This results in a confrontation,
and at some point the complications of the plot are resolved by
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a change of direction and fortune, the peripeteia. The hero who
was successful and powerful is overthrown. In most tragedies,
great importance attaches to a recognition scene which leads to,
or indeed is part of, the peripeteia. In the Oedipus Tyrannus,
Oedipus, king of Thebes, has been very, even too, successful.
He has answered the riddle of the Sphinx, been rewarded with
the throne of Thebes and with Jocasta, the widowed queen.
When plague affects the city, he undertakes to find the guilty
man who has brought pollution. He is himself revealed as the
guilty man, a man who has murdered his father and married his
mother. It is through his own persistence that he finds out who
he is, and is revealed as the cause of the plague.
In The Bacchae of Euripides, it is the Stranger who is revealed
as the god Dionysus.
After the katastrophe, or overturning, things settle down to a
new order, possibly helped by the appearance of a god or
goddess from the sky, lowered by a crane (deus ex machina).
Scene shifting and stage effects were employed in a Greek
theatre. The ekkuklema was a device for rapidly removing
scenery to reveal the interior of a house. There was a lightning
machine, keraunoskopeion, and a thunder machine, bronteion.
The tragic pattern is a sequence: koros, a surfeit of happiness
and success; hubris, the resulting arrogant behaviour; nemesis,
the desire of the gods for vengeance. They are red in the face [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]