Old Comedy

Classicists often refer to the philosophical and political plays of Aristophanes as "Old Comedy" to distinguish them from the more situational "New Comedy" of Menander, whose works influenced the later Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence.

However, Aristophanes was not the only playwright penning philosophical and political comedies during the Golden Age of Athens. He is the only comic dramatist of his era for whom whole scripts survive, but we do have fragments of plays by other writers who appear to have written in a similar vein.

One writer whose plays have only survived in fragments is Metagenes, who wrote Homer or the Athletes and Thurio-Persians. While The Persians is a famous tragedy by Aeschylus about the defeat of the splendid Persian Empire, the comedy Thurio-Persians seems to combine the luxuriousness of Persia with the Italian city of Thurii, which likewise had a reputation for opulence.

How opulent was life in Thurii? According to the play, the city had a river with food just floating on it, including barley loaves, cakes, and meat. According to one translation, "Fish slices that barbecue themselves fly from above right into the mouth." However, pescatarians should be cautioned that in a play by the rival comic poet Archippus, there are political negotiations between Athenians and the fish to establish a truce between them.

Another author of Old Comedy whose plays survive only in fragments is Crates, who acted in the comedies of Cratinus before writing his own works. In his play The Knights, Aristophanes praises the writings of Crates, who in Wild Beasts depicted animals objecting to being eaten (perhaps like the fish in the comedy by Archippus). The play depicts inanimate objects performing labor all by themselves, including automatically pouring pitchers and self-rinsing cups.

According to Aristotle, Crates turned away from making personal attacks on individuals. This was not true of Aristophanes, whose play The Clouds directly satirizes the philosopher Socrates. The few fragments we have of plays by the contemporaries of Aristophanes seem to indicate that Old Comedy was quite diverse in both its themes and its comic methods.

An Oresteia without Aeschylus

Last night, I saw Robert Icke's original drama Oresteia, a Euripidian meditation on the Iphigenia myth that also includes the story of her brother.

You might be thinking, "Wait, didn't Aeschylus write Oresteia? Isn't it about... you know... Orestes...? Hence the title? What does this play have to do with Euripides and Iphigenia?

The answer is everything. Icke's mis-named four-act drama, which does have some passing resemblances to Aeschylus's trilogy, begins with what is essentially an adaptation of the Euripides play Iphigenia in Aulis. This is the longest act in the play. (Or at least it felt like it.)

What's wrong with adding yet a fourth play onto the cycle Aeschylus wrote (other than that it makes the performance four hours long)? After all, Greek tragedies were originally performed as a tetralogy, with three tragedies followed by a satyr play? (Sadly, we don't have the satyr play that originally accompanied the three tragedies in Aeschylus's Oresteia.)

Nothing's wrong with it, I suppose (other than the disturbing tonal shifts it creates and the before-mentioned four-hour-long running time), but it's not what Aeschylus would have done, or indeed any other Greek dramatist, for that matter. As Aristotle wrote, the ancient Athenians believed that tragedy was the imitation of an action, not a recital of an epic tale. (That was kept for epic poetry.)

Aristotle observed in his Poetics that playwrights "who have dramatized the whole story of the Fall of Troy, instead of selecting portions... either fail utterly or meet with poor success on the stage." Aeschylus's Oresteia (including its lost satyr play Proteus) tells only the story of what happened in the aftermath of the Fall of Troy. By including the the story of Iphigenia, Icke expands the play to include events that happened even before the fighting at Troy began.

Perhaps the thinking was to include the things that ultimately caused the events in the Oresteia, but Aeschylus makes it clear that ultimate causes extend back generations. If one is to include Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis, why not also include Seneca's play Thyestes, since it tells the story of how the troubles of the House of Atreus actually started? Well, never mind. Icke includes an adaptation of Euripides before sending the audience off on a 15-minute intermission.

The play's second act roughly recounts the events of Agamemnon, the first play in Aeschylus's cycle. Occasionally, Icke includes some sly allusions to passages Aeschylus wrote, such as Klytemnestra discussing global communications in a manner reminiscent of that character's speech about signal fires in Aeschylus. What this play lacks, however, is a chorus, though perhaps the reporters are supposed to be stand-ins for the chorus.

After Aeschylus, the role of the chorus declined, and many of the plays of Euripides can easily be portrayed with no chorus at all. The elimination of the chorus makes this play feel more modern, as Euripides tends to be in general. Icke's third act (performed after a second intermission of ten minutes) sometimes mirrors the Libation Bearers of Aeschylus, but in spirit, it feels closer to the cynical Electra of Euripides.

A third five-minute intermission in Icke's drama is followed by a trial scene somewhat similar to that of The Eumenides by Aeschylus. Icke also takes advantage of some logical inconsistencies in Libation Bearers to create an interesting plot twist that does not exist in Greek mythology. The result is somewhat interesting, but why call this play Oresteia and why list Aeschylus as the playwright?

Had this original drama not claimed to be by Aeschylus, I probably wouldn't have seen it, and therein might lie the answer. If you want to see original plays that actually claim to be original, you might instead want to go to the Secret Theatre in Queens this Saturday, August 13th for the semifinals of their one-act festival.

My play My Fellow Americans made it to the semifinals, so you'll be able to see it on Saturday if you missed it earlier in the run. For more information, watch this space!

Laocoon

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is known for his Enlightenment-era dramas, including Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Miss Sara Sampson. However, he is also important for his many theoretical works on the theatre.

Lessing's Hamburg Dramaturgy is rightly hailed for the influence of its component essays on the German stage. One essay not included in the Hamburg Dramaturgy, however, is a book-length meditation on painting and poetry called Laocoon, in which Lessing sets forth a rational aesthetics for all art, drama included.

In the preface to Laocoon, Lessing speculates that the first person who compared painting with poetry was an amateur, the second was a philosopher, and the third was a critic. Since Lessing himself was a philosopher, I want to focus on the philosophic point of view in Laocoon. In discussing a hypothetical man analyzing the nature of pleasure (Aristotle is probably intended) Lessing writes: "Beauty, our first idea of which is derived from corporeal objects, has universal laws which admit of wide application."

This is a very Enlightenment concept of aesthetics. We arrive at ideas of beauty through experience. By observing corporeal objects, we come to understand that universal laws are at work. These laws can then be applied broadly to a variety of different works of art, regardless of when and where they were created. Do we agree, though? Is beauty universal? Can we uncover the laws by which it is governed? Do these laws transcend all time and place?

Lessing runs into trouble for us when his essay wanders into the territory of flat-out racism. In chapter 25, he reflects upon the fact that the "Hottentots" in Africa have very different concepts of human beauty than his own Euro-centric ideas. According to Lessing, those people regard "as beautiful and holy what excites our disgust and aversion."

Citing a source called The Connoisseur, Lessing invites the reader to imagine a "pressed gristle of a nose, flaccid breasts descending to the navel, the whole body anointed with a varnish of goat's fat and soot, melted in by the sun, hair dripping with grease, arms and legs entwined with fresh entrails." Is this part of Lessing's argument for universal beauty?

We take it for granted that whether a nose is "pressed" or slender is a matter of taste, and a narrow nose is only culturally constructed as beautiful. While breasts reaching the belly button might not be everyone's kink, who are we to judge? And come on, no one really adorns their body with entrails. That's just one of Lessing's racist fantasies, right?

Except, in a note, Lessing documents this as factual. According to The Connoisseur, an African beauty actually did appear adorned with "the shining entrails of an heifer." Whether this was true or not, Lessing gives us his evidence for believing it. Even if we accept that the contours of noses and the shapes of breasts are subject to personal taste rather than universal laws, can we really accept that it's only a matter of opinion whether entrails are sexy?

Here, however, I think we find a challenge to our own concepts a beauty. If I dig chicks in leather jackets, no one sees that as odd, but isn't leather the tanned skin of an animal? How is wearing the skin of a heifer any different from wearing its entrails? Though Lessing begins by trying to demonstrate universal laws of beauty, he ends up supplying arguments against the existence of those laws.

This brings us back to the famous sculpture known as the Laocoon group that gives its name to the essay. Lessing is struck by the sculpture's beauty, but it also presents suffering and horror. How can we reconcile the sculpture's artistic power with its grotesque and horrifying appearance?

Lessing is at his best when he compares the sculpture with the Sophocles play Philoctetes. The hero in that drama cries out in pain, which is horrid, but through art, the horrid can be rendered beautiful. As Lessing points out, Sophocles did not "hesitate to make the theatre ring with the imitation of those tones of rage, pain, and despair."

The fact that we hear that cry in drama, that we can experience the anguished calling out of Philoctetes while Laocoon must be forever silent in marble, could be an argument for drama being the most powerful of all the art forms.

Aristotle's Poetics

When discussing Greek drama, the subject of Aristotle's Poetics frequently turns up, since not only is it a fascinating piece of criticism, but it also gives us a lot of evidence about the origins and history of classical tragedy.

It was Aristotle who suggested that tragedy grew out of the dithyramb. He also credited Aeschylus with first increasing the number of actors from one to two, and Sophocles with adding a third actor. Sophocles, according to Aristotle, also introduced painted scenery to tragedy.

The sixth chapter of The Poetics is the most famous. In it, Aristotle lays out his theory of catharsis, a purgation through pity and fear. He also catalogues the component parts of tragedy: plot, character, language, thought, spectacle, and melody. Of these, The Poetics singles out plot as the most important, since tragedy is not an imitation of people, but of their actions.

Plot, according to Aristotle, must be complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In order to be beautiful, it must also have a size or magnitude appropriate to it. Plays must not be so long that we cannot hold them in our memory, and Aristotle writes that at one time tragedies were timed by water clocks, or at least some people people say so. (I wonder what would have happened if a play went over the time limit!)

Aristotle is opposed to episodic drama, in which actions follow one another in no probable or inevitable sequence. Instead, he recommends the use of reversals and recognition scenes, which work best when they go together to cause suffering, or pathos.

Later on, Aristotle's vague suggestions got taken for hard-and-fast rules all playwrights had to follow. If we take his advice as it was meant, helpful hints rather than dictates, The Poetics can be a useful resource for dramatists even today.

Postmodernism

Just as the failed revolutions of 1848 brought about the climax and end of Romantic movements across Europe, the year 1968 brought a climax of the dreams and ambitions of the entire world in the post-war era, as well as the collapse of those dreams for very many.

In January of that year, the Prague Spring began in Czechoslovakia, when the liberal reformer Alexander Dubček became head of the country's Communist Party, promising "Socialism with a human face" and lifting censorship. The wave of liberalization led to uprisings in Poland and other Eastern European countries, as more and more people sought liberation from the oppressive policies of the past.

In the United States, Robert Kennedy launched a campaign for president that drew millions of young, idealistic voters. Meanwhile, his ally Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a civil rights movement that continued to be peaceful, in spite of provocations by white supremacists.

But if the year promised freedom, what it ultimately delivered was death. The bloody Tet Offensive in Vietnam left a huge number of casualties. Both King and Kennedy were assassinated. Student protests in Paris devolved into riots that failed to bring about meaningful political change. Across the United States, many cities were literally burning with social strife, and authorities tried only to contain the violence, unable (and in the view of many observers, unwilling) to stop it.

The Prague Spring collapsed, and days later, so did the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as police clashed with anti-war protestors. The subsequent election of Richard Nixon as President of the United States and installment of Soviet tanks throughout Eastern Europe ensured that violence, repression, and decay would continue.

Though the following year, 1969, saw the first human beings land on the moon, what should have been a victory for all humanity came in the wake of so much chaos that many people were unsure of what humanity's future would really be. Modernism, which had thrived after World War II, seemed hopelessly naïve with its optimism of unending horizons and positive change.

Instead, art from around 1970 on is sometimes labelled postmodern, since it embraces skepticism and irony rather than grand gestures and sweeping narratives. Postmodern art engages with art from the past, but in a way that is eclectic, borrowing snatches and pieces of past art, but deliberately not synthesizing it together into a unified, comprehensive whole. The very notion of totality or universalism becomes a bitter joke in the hands of postmodern artists.

Postmodernism can be seen in architecture, for instance the AT&T skyscraper in New York which is topped by a non-functional broken pediment. It can be seen in photography, for instance in the work of Cindy Sherman, whose "Untitled Film Stills" series shows the photographer herself dressed up in various costumes, looking like she is in a series fictional movies. Postmodern sculptors like Jeff Koons use grand techniques to immortalize items of kitsch, producing such objects as giant stainless steel balloon animals. 

Perhaps the defining element of postmodernism is its unwillingness (and perhaps inability) to get away from the past it always confronts. The postmodern feminist artist Judy Chicago spent years assembling "The Dinner Party" which includes 39 place settings at a giant triangular table, each place setting painstakingly handcrafted to honor a different woman from history, including the playwrights Hrotsvitha, Hildegard of Bingen, and Virginia Woolf.

In theatre, postmodernism can be seen in the work of such playwrights as Tom Stoppard, Heiner Müller, and Janusz Glowacki, each of whom wrote plays that deconstruct the most famous work in the dramatic canon: William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966, shifting the play's center of attention from Hamlet to two minor characters. The play's dialogue is deeply influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett, but its playfulness marks it as a work of postmodern drama rather than the serious modernism practiced by Beckett. Müller's 1977 play Hamletmachine goes even further in its rejection of the conventions of drama, questioning even the importance of an author at all. In 1982, Glowacki premiered Fortinbras Gets Drunk, which takes a Stoppard-like approach of focusing on a minor character from Hamlet, but to probe political issues as much as existential ones. All three writers went on to create other postmodern works, including Stoppard's Travesties, which reworks Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Müller's Quartet based on the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel Dangerous Liaisons, and Glowacki's The Fourth Sister, which sends up Chekhov.

The British writer Harold Pinter was a close associate of Beckett, and his early works, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and The Homecoming, all exhibit the anxieties of post-war theatre of the absurd. Dubbed "comedies of menace," these plays rely on seemingly mundane dialogue and pregnant pauses to create an atmosphere of dread that reflected the unspoken horror of the new nuclear age. In the 1970s, though, Pinter turned in a new direction. Influenced by the postmodern turn toward skepticism and questioning, Pinter wrote a series of plays that retained the sometimes comic and sometimes tragic atmosphere of his earlier plays, but that delved into the nature of memory of past events. In Old Times, three people tell stories about their past together, sometimes revising their versions of the story, and sometimes contradicting the versions of other characters. Pinter's 1975 play No Man's Land depicts two older men recalling their past lives together, but the piece gets us to not only question whether the two men ever met in the past, but also whether the men themselves know the truth. One of Pinter's most commercially successful works, Betrayal, tells the story of a marital affair, but in reverse chronological order, from end to beginning.

Another postmodern British playwright, Caryl Churchill, first rose to prominence with Cloud 9, an attack on Victorian colonialism and sexual repression that implies a link between the two. Her 1982 play Top Girls utilized overlapping dialogue and out-of-chronology scenes to critique the way women sacrifice themselves and one another to get ahead in the world. Written in the wake of the election of the rightwing politician Margaret Thatcher as the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom, the play celebrates feminism while at the same time critiquing it. Churchill's work sometimes appropriates figures from folk belief to discuss contemporary issues, as is the case in Mad Forest and The Skriker, but the hallmark of her plays is an unending drive to experiment. Her fragmented 2012 play Love and Information contains more than 100 characters in dozens of scenes, many of them less than a minute long.

One manifestation of postmodernism in drama has been the so-called Theatre of Images. While most traditional theatre has been concerned with language (one of the six elements of drama laid out by Aristotle), the Theatre of Images replaces linguistic texts with a procession of images that are not necessarily aligned with any verbal meaning. Directors such as Richard Foreman, Lee Breuer, and Robert Wilson are often identified as artists working in a Theatre of Images rather than a theatre of words. Foreman is influenced by modernist writers like Gertrude Stein, but he has also tried to make audience members active participants in the creation of theatre, as he did with his 1976 play Rhoda in Potatoland. He frequently directs plays with non-professional actors, preferring their simplistic expressions over the mannered performances of trained actors.

Breuer co-founded the avant-garde Mabou Mines Theater Company in 1970 (together with JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, Frederick Neumann, and David Warrilow). With Mabou Mines, he has re-imagined numerous classic plays from the canon. His production of Gospel at Colonus used gospel music to re-introduce the feeling of the sacred into Sophocles' play Oedipus at Colonus. Breuer's production of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House portrayed Nora as physically towering over the men in the play, accentuating the absurdity of her situation. His production of Peter and Wendy used Japanese-style puppetry techniques to tell the story of Peter Pan, and has played to adult and child audiences alike.

The term Theatre of Images is perhaps most associated with Wilson, who borrows from different media, cultures, and historical time periods to create eclectic pieces of theatre that usually have no discernible plot. He collaborated with the composer Philip Glass to create the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach. Because of the length of the opera (more than five hours with no intermission) audience members were invited to come and go as they pleased, selecting which parts they chose to pay attention to and which parts to ignore. For the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Wilson planned a massive 12-hour-long performance called the CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, but the Olympic Arts Festival cancelled it. Since then, Wilson has frequently worked outside of the United States.

Some scholars have labeled the Theatre of Images as postdramatic, since it eschews plot in favor of creating an overall mood or feeling. Rather than creating a narrative that tells a story, postdramatic theatre focuses on physical phenomena that audiences experience directly. While this style of theatre has its roots with modernist playwrights like Beckett, as well as postmodern writers like Müller, Pinter, and Churchill, it attempts to outgrow the playwright entirely. It renders the text as merely one component of a performance, and usually not even a very important one. Postdramatic performance stretches theatre to its limits, and because of that, most audiences have tended to avoid it, opting instead for more commercial theatrical ventures.

Stooping to Conquer

In a famous essay in 1772, the author Oliver Goldsmith tried to make a comparison between laughing and sentimental comedy.

Borrowing the definition from Aristotle, Goldsmith called comedy "a picture of the frailties of the lower part of mankind, to distinguish it from tragedy, which is an exhibition of the misfortunes of the great."

The problem was, in Goldsmith's view, British comedy had taken to detail the calamities of people in the middle classes rather than poking fun at their foibles, as had been done by comic writers of the Restoration, such as Colley Cibber and John Vanbrugh.

He also claimed to have history on his side. Though the Roman playwright Terence sometimes had his comedies approach the quality of tragedy, Goldsmith observed that Terence always stopped short of rendering his characters truly pathetic. In Goldsmith's opinion, the only advantage of sentimental comedy was its novelty.

More importantly, he warned of what we might be losing in giving up the genre of laughing comedy for a comedy of sentiment:

It is true that amusement is a great object of the theater, and it will be allowed that these sentimental pieces do often amuse us; but the question is, whether the true comedy would not amuse us more? The question is, whether a character supported throughout a piece, with its ridicule still attending, would not give us more delight than this species of bastard tragedy, which only is applauded because it is new?

Goldsmith tested this hypothesis with his own play, She Stoops to Conquer, which opened the following year at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. George Coleman the Elder was manager of Covent Garden at the time, and he did not particularly care for the piece. Neither did David Garrick, who had turned down the play for Drury Lane.

On the advice of Samuel Johnson, though, Coleman put the play into rehearsal with the actress Mary Bulkley in the leading role of Kate Hardcastle. It ended up a success, and the theatre even chose to use it for their season closer later that year.

At the end of his essay, Goldsmith had written:

It is not easy to recover an art when once lost; and it will be but a just punishment, that when, by our being too fastidious, we have banished humor from the stage, we should ourselves be deprived of the art of laughing.

Fortunately for us, no such calamity occurred, and She Stoops to Conquer continues to delight audiences to this very day.

Burke on Tragedy

In his 1757 book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke wrote not only about painting, poetry, and our direct response to nature, but also about an audience's response to tragedy. This is hardly surprising, given the high regard with which the eighteenth century regarded tragic drama. Much of Burke's analysis is derivative of Aristotle, who wrote of a catharsis "through pity and fear" in a manner similar to that which Burke would use to describe the sublime. Burke's observations on tragedy are interesting, however, since they show how someone in mid-eighteenth-century Britain viewed the production of new tragedies for the stage.

Burke's modifications of Aristotle, including his theories with regard to astonishment, are stated in absolute terms, but they particularly apply to British tragedies written during his own lifetime. In fact, John Home's tragedy Douglas, which first played at Covent Garden the very same year Burke published his philosophical speculations, embodies the tragic ideals described in Burke's landmark work.

One stumbling block for interpreters of Aristotle has always been explaining how watching an incestuous patricidal tyrant decide to tear his eyes out is something that should be enjoyable. As Burke states the problem, "objects which in reality would shock, are in tragical, and such like representations, the source of a very high species of pleasure." He deftly navigates these waters by observing: "terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close." Provided we are able to watch from a safe distance, there is no horror too great or fantastical for our rapt observation. In fact, Burke postulates that, "there is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity."

While Aristotle sees value in the purgation of terrifying emotions, Burke views our safe observation of terrors as good in and of itself. That which excites "the ideas of pain, and danger" is what Burke calls "the sublime" and "is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling." Even if tragedy does not make us feel precisely good, it makes us feel more fully human. In order to feel the strongest emotion possible, we must experience the sublime, a quality Burke associates closely with nature. According to Burke, the highest passion aroused by the sublime is astonishment, which he calls "that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror."

This discussion of astonishment brings us to Douglas, a play on the cutting edge of public taste in tragedy during Burke's time. Rejected by David Garrick for Drury Lane, Douglas received a trial run in Edinburgh in 1756, leading to the play's London debut the following year.

The presence of nature is felt from the very first scene, which according to the stage directions takes place in "The court of a castle surrounded with woods." Even if those woods are not immediately visible onstage, the natural world is constantly encroaching on the court in the person of Norval, the peasant-raised hero. Norval's famous speech in Act II celebrates the natural environment, citing the "Grampian hills," "frugal swain," and "flocks and herds" that once surrounded the hero.  To complete the play's movement in the direction of the natural world, the final act takes place in the woods themselves.

Home uses this last act to create the feeling of astonishment Burke describes in his treatise. Burke's description of how "motions are suspended with some degree of horror" finds an almost literal manifestation in the play's description of Lady Randolph perched on the edge of a precipice. Suspended between life and death, Home's heroine gazes with horror down into the abyss. The scene recalls Burke's chapter on vastness in Part II, in which he claims "height is less grand than depth; and that we are more struck at looking down from a precipice, than at looking up at an object of equal height." Contemplating both the depth of the natural landscape and the depth of her own despair, Lady Randolph no doubt feels a sensation of astonishment--and is the cause of astonishment in the audience.

Home describes Lady Randolph as standing "Upon the brink," looking "Down on the deep," and then gazing up with "her white hands to heaven." Before her plunge, she is literally suspended between the heavens and the abyss. Though this bodily manifestation of astonishment occurs offstage, it appears in the audience's imagination. The sublime image of the precipice could not be realized onstage with the technologies available in the 1750s (though later eras would attempt such feats with spectacular scenic designs). Still, Home successfully painted a portrait of astonishment, and in a way that closely paralleled the graphic description of this feeling as Burke had penned it at nearly the identical time.

The Mirror and the Lamp

Back in the 1950s, the critic M.H. Abrams published an important book on Romantic literary theory called The Mirror and the Lamp. The title comes from a major shift Abrams believed happened at the end of the eighteenth century. Since the days of Plato and Aristotle, the major metaphor for art had always been a mirror being held up to nature. With Romanticism, however, the metaphor shifted. Art became a lamp, radiating from within the artist into the outside world. Since we made that shift, Abrams argued, art has never been the same.

In his first chapter, Abrams lays out his now famous coordinates for art criticism. All art is related to the universe around it, to its audience, and to its artist. The relationship of art to the universe is explored by mimetic theory. This is the approach of Plato in The Republic and of Aristotle in The Poetics. In his Ars Poetica, however, Horace takes a pragmatic approach, using criticism to show how an artist can more effectively use poetry to move an audience. This is also the approach of Sir Philip Sidney, who in The Apologie for Poetry sees art chiefly as a means to an end. Abrams includes in this second pragmatic category Samuel Jonson, who was troubled by the fact that Shakespeare "seems to write without any moral purpose."

The breakthrough of Romanticism related art back to the artist, creating an expressive theory of criticism. Abrams cites William Wordsworth's 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads, which defined poetry as "The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." During the Victorian era, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle continued to develop this theory, raising expressive theory to a form of hero worship of the artistic genius.

There is of course one other way of looking at art, and that is to look at the art itself, disconnected from the world, from the audience, even from its creator. Abrams calls this an objective approach, though he does not imply a moral judgment here. Objective criticism, as practiced by formalist critics including T.S. Eliot, is not necessarily more truthful. It simply is limiting its approach to the work of art and nothing else. It agrees with Archibald MacLeish that "A poem should not mean / But be."

A mimetic approach, of course, does not always mean that the world is portrayed precisely as it is. An eighteenth-century essay sometimes attributed to the playwright Oliver Goldsmith uses the analogy of sculpture to describe how artists pick and choose pieces of the world they wish to represent. According to the essay, a sculptor will take the best parts "from a great number of different subjects" to form "an ideal pattern."

However, there was an even more radical idea lurking in the ancient writings of Plotinus. The Neoplatonist philosopher saw artists as representing not an object in the world, but an abstract ideal form that exists independently of the world. As Plotinus put it:

The arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of the natural world… we must recognize that they give no bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives, and, furthermore, that much of their work is all their own; they are holders of beauty and add where nature is lacking. Thus Pheidias wroght the Zeus upon no model among things of sense but by apprehending what form Zeus must take if he chose to become manifest to sight.

This seed planted by Plotinus came to fruition during the Romantic era. Abrams quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who said the goal of the Fine Arts was "to make nature thought, and thought nature." According to Coleridge, beautiful images "though faithfully copied from nature, and accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet." It was instead the poet's job to use images to show, if not the world of ideal forms, the world of emotion within the mind of the poet. Instead of the mind being a tabula rasa of John Locke, simply being written upon by the world, the Romantic mind projected outward, inscribing itself upon the world around it.

The expressive theory of art travelled a long road from the Neoplatonists to Romanticism. Abrams gives special attention to the ancient philosopher Longinus, author of On the Sublime. Longinus held that "there is no tone so lofty as that of genuine passion, in its right place, when it bursts out in a wild gust of mad enthusiasm." He found sublime poetry to be the echo of a great soul. This way of thinking led Romantic theorists to elevate the ancient Hebrew poetry of the Bible to a level akin to that of the ancient Greeks, and to elevate lyric poetry above that of epic poetry, which had previously been seen as the ideal.

Wordsworth and Coleridge took similar but slightly different approaches to this new way of thinking about poetry. Wordsworth advocated "stripping our own hearts naked" and looking to those "who lead the simplest lives." Coleridge did not disagree, but he felt more was necessary to create great poetry than to simply capture the primitive language of rustics. Coleridge's so-called dynamic philosophy emphasized the mind's almost mystic ability to bring about harmony among contraries. According to Coleridge, the poet:

Diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power… reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities. 

The next generation of Romantics continued to develop these expressive theories. Percy Bysshe Shelley embraced a sort of Romantic Platonism, writing that poetry "is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth." John Keats embraced the enthusiasm of Longinus, writing that "the excellence of every art is its intensity." John Keble gave a famous definition of poetry as "the indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling."

Abrams himself favors a different definition, one coined by a mysterious writer who signed his name "S" in an article called "The Philosophy of Poetry" which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1835. Abrams writes that in all probability this "S" was Alexander Smith, a Scottish scholar who had to retire from teaching early due to poor health. In any case, for "S" prose is the language of intelligence, while poetry is the language of emotion. Thus prose communicates our knowledge about objects while poetry expresses how these objects affect us. As the Blackwood's article puts it, poetry "is essentially the expression of emotion; but the expression of emotion takes place by measured language (it may be verse, or it may not)--harmonious tones--and figurative phraseology."

According to "S" a line like "My son Absalom" is not poetry, but the Bible is poetic when King David laments "oh! Absalom, my son, my son." Though the interjection of "oh" and the repetition of "my son" don't actually add any meaning to the phrase, they take the passage beyond a mere statement of fact to become an expression of a deep emotion. But how do poets, dramatic or otherwise, create works that express such emotions?

This brings Abrams to the shift from mechanical to organic theories of creation. Up through the eighteenth century, most theorists saw the process of creation as one of construction. A playwright, for instance, built a play in the same way a shipwright builds a ship. It was up to the writer to assemble together all of the elements of a play according to a preordained plan. In so doing, an artist had to build a play, or poem, or statue, according to certain fixed rules, just as a shipwright must construct a vehicle that will be inherently bound by the laws of physics. As the Scottish poet James Beattie put it in 1776:

It would be no less absurd, for a poet to violate the essential rules of his art, and justify himself by an appeal from the tribunal of Aristotle, than for a mechanic to construct an engine on principles inconsistent with the laws of motion, and excuse himself by disclaiming the authority of Sir Isaac Newton.

Coleridge replaces this mechanical model with a new one, that of an organism that grows naturally, assembling together a variety of elements without needing to be conscious of how it does so. In a letter to Wordsworth, Coleridge equated the philosophy of mechanism to that of death. Art, rather, was a living thing, much like a plant that grows from a seed, assimilating earth, air, light, and water into something new. Artists, though they might follow a natural pattern, need not be any more conscious of rules than an oak tree is aware of how it grows from an acorn.

This unconscious quality of genius became an important part of Romantic theory. Prior to Romanticism, critics recognized natural genius, but rarely praised it. In a typical passage in The Spectator, Joseph Addison compared natural genius to a wild landscape with no order or regularity. Artful genius, on the other hand, was "the same rich soil under the same happy climate, that has been laid out in walks and parterres, and cut into shape and beauty by the skill of the gardener." Similarly, Alexander Pope saw Shakespeare as an instrument of nature, while Homer was a genius who had tended a mighty tree until it had produced the finest of fruit.

This prejudice in favor of artful genius, as opposed to natural genius, was not confined to literary critics. One of the greatest champions of artful genius was the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. While he did not advocate a strict following of arbitrary rules, Reynolds praised artists who could discover the tendencies of the natural world and recreate them in painting. Reynolds held that:

It cannot be by chance, that excellencies are produced with any constancy or any certainty, for this is not the nature of chance.... [T]he rules by which... such as are called men of Genius, work, are either such as they discover by their own peculiar observations, or... [are] not easily to admit being expressed in words.

Yet not much later, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and others were praising the natural, unconscious growth of poetry from the pure, virgin mind of the poet, not from some system of scientific discovery. Where did they get this idea? Did they come up with it from the undefiled wells of their souls? No. They stole it. From the Germans.

Which brings us to the most thought-provoking (and ridiculous) subject heading in Abrams' entire book: "German Theories of Vegetable Genius." 

A subject heading like that deserves its own blog post. Come back tomorrow to see what Abrams meant by that doozie.

Notes on Greek Drama

The Birth of Athenian Drama

Though theatre historians regularly talk about "Greek drama," all of the extent plays from ancient Greece come from a single city-state, Athens. Indeed, Athens dominated Greek drama, just as it dominated so many other aspects of Greek culture in the fifth century BCE. Even after the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian Wars, Athenian culture remained the gold standard. This was also true after the conquest of Greece, first by the Macedonians, and then by the Romans. Even today, our entire global culture frequently looks back to Athens as the model of drama, philosophy, art, and democracy.

All Greek theatre seems to have grown out of the dithyramb, a choral ode sung and danced in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility who subsequently became the god of drama as well. 

According to ancient sources, the extraordinary man who transformed the dithyramb into a piece of drama was Thespis, who came from the island of Icaria but later seems to have settled in Athens. It was Thespis who turned the dithyramb into a story and stepped out from the chorus to take on the role of one of the characters. While people continued to perform dithyrambs, this modified version became its own art form. The Greek's called it tragedy, which means "goat-ode," so it is possible a goat might have been given to the person who composed the best tragedy.

Dithyrambs, tragedies, and later comedies were all performed at festivals in honor of Dionysus. These included the Rural Dionysia at the beginning of winter, the Lenaia in mid-winter, and most importantly the City Dionysia at the beginning of spring. The Athenian tyrant Pisistratus, who seized power in the sixth century BCE, encouraged the City Dionysia as a means to win popular support. The festival continued to grow after his death and the subsequent return of democracy. Eventually, three full days of the festival were dedicated to the performance of tragedies.

Athenian playwrights not only wrote the words for their plays, they frequently composed music, choreographed dances, and even acted the leading roles. For the City Dionysia, officials would select three playwrights to present performances on each of the three days dedicated to tragedy. Each performance consisted of three tragic plays and a comic satyr play, which poked fun at myths and legends. Originally, all of these plays seem to have been related. As time went on they evolved into four relatively independent works. The playwrights competed against one another for first, second, and third prize, which would be awarded for an entire cycle of four plays. A jury of ten citizens chosen by lot would award the prizes. With victory came prestige, but no great material benefit.

Aeschylus

The first Athenian playwright whose work survives is Aeschylus. It was Aeschylus who introduced a second actor to the stage. Prior to that, the main actor could only make speeches or converse with the chorus. With Aeschylus, for the first time, there were actual scenes, with actors speaking to one another. Aeschylus was also famous as an actor, usually performing the leading role in his own plays. He also introduced lavish spectacles, including choruses wearing exotic costumes.

The oldest surviving drama is The Persians, a tragedy by Aeschylus celebrating the defeat of the Persian Empire by an alliance of Greek city-states. Aeschylus himself fought in that war, as did many in his audience. As a result, most historians view the play's account of the naval battle at Salamis as reasonably accurate. The play features a chorus of exotically dressed Persians hearing about their nation's defeat. It also includes a dramatic moment where the ghost of the emperor's father returns from the grave to condemn his son's decision to invade Greece.

The rest of the Greek tragedies we have are based on myths. Aeschylus wrote The Seven Against Thebes about a fratricidal war between the two sons of Oedipus, Polynices and Eteocles. Another play, The Suppliants, seems to be a throwback to an earlier era of drama, because the chorus functions as the main character. It concerns the daughters of Danaus, known as the Danaids, who flee Egypt after being forced to marry their cousins. The modern playwright Charles Mee later used the same story as the basis for his play Big Love. Aeschylus probably also wrote the play Prometheus Bound, which shows the unjust punishment of the titan Prometheus for bringing fire to mankind.

Most importantly, however, Aeschylus wrote the only surviving trilogy of related tragedies performed at the same festival. The trilogy, known as the Oresteia, consists of the three plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. Originally, it was performed with the satyr play Proteus, but that play has been lost, with the exception of a few fragments. Together, the plays tell the story of the fall of the House of Atreus, which allegedly ruled the city of Argos during the Trojan War. Queen Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon after he returns victoriously from the war. Her son Orestes comes home to revenge his father's murder and kills Clytemnestra, but then is tormented by the mythical Furies for murdering his mother.

Ultimately, Orestes is forgiven and the Furies are transformed into Eumenides, which represent a new spirit of justice. Much of the success of the last play, however, came from the elaborate outfits in which Aeschylus costumed the Furies, as well as the chaotic dances he choreographed for them. According to an anonymous biographer of Aeschylus writing long after the events occurred, at the premiere of The Euminides the Furies were so frightening that a woman in the audience went into labor. Though the anecdote might be an exaggeration, it does show how moved audiences could be by Athenian drama. It also establishes that women were in the audience for tragedies, even though men performed all of the roles (though some scholars still dispute this assertion). 

Sophocles

Aeschylus eventually lost his place as the top tragic poet in Athens to his younger rival Sophocles. While Aeschylus was known to take leading roles in his plays, the soft-spoken Sophocles did not act, instead sometimes playing the lyre onstage. He introduced a number of innovations to tragedy, including painted scenery, and he added a third actor, allowing for more complicated scenes. Sophocles also seems to have fixed the size of the chorus at fifteen, including the choral leader, or koryphaios. Though the chorus grew out of the dithyramb, which had 50 members, Aeschylus had dramatically reduced it in size, possibly using as few as 12 performers.

Though many tragedies relegate scenes of violence to offstage, Sophocles showed explicit violence onstage in his play Ajax, in which the tragic hero falls on his sword in full view of the audience. Though it is unknown how his painted scenery functioned, it could have aided the action, such as providing partial cover for the suicide of Ajax. Other plays of Sophocles also seem to have involved dramatic onstage action. According to one ancient account, Sophocles himself played with a ball onstage in his now lost play Nausicaa. Later dramatic theorists who wanted to hold up Sophocles as a model of restraint and decorum conveniently forgot these facts.

His play Antigone (first performed around 441 BCE) so impressed Athenians it is thought to have helped him win election as one of the city's ten generals. In the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Georg Hegel singled out Antigone as the greatest tragedy of the ancient world, because it so successfully lines up opposing forces that clash onstage. The character of Antigone represents traditionally female values, including home and hearth, the gods of the family, the netherworld, and the importance of the individual. Her uncle Creon, on the other hand, represents traditionally male values, including the security of the state, the public good, practical expedience, and the importance of the group. Sophocles gives both sides their due, even though the audience's sympathy ultimately rests with Antigone.

The other plays by Sophocles that have survived are Oedipus Tyrannus (Oedipus the Tyrant), Electra, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. These have all inspired countless retellings over the years. Oedipus Tyrannus became the basis for Jean Cocteau's play The Infernal Machine. Luis Alfaro reset Electra in a barrio in East L.A. with his play Electricidad. The poet Ezra Pound did a modern verse adaptation of The Women of Trachis. Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote an adaptation of Philoctetes called The Cure at Troy. The most famous modern version of Oedipus at Colonus, the last play Sophocles wrote, was a Broadway production directed by Lee Breuer called Gospel at Colonus, which famously used a gospel choir for the chorus.

We also have about 400 lines of The Trackers, a satyr play by Sophocles about the search for the newborn god Hermes after he had stolen cattle sacred to Apollo. While tragedies and comedies had all sorts of choruses, satyr plays always had a chorus of satyrs. Greek art depicts these mythical creatures as naked men with erect phalluses and long horsetails. They traveled in the company of the fat god Silenus, who always led the chorus. Satyr plays lampooned myths and reveled in low comedy.

Euripides

The playwright Euripides was somewhat younger than Sophocles, though the two died roughly around the same time, in about 406 BCE. Euripides first competed in the City Dionysia in 455 BCE, a year after the death of Aeschylus. Though he was a frequent competitor, his plays won first prize only five times during his career. After his death, however, the plays of Euripides became wildly popular. For this reason, more plays have survived by Euripides than by any other tragic writer of antiquity.

Alcestis appears to be the oldest surviving play by Euripides, but it is not a typical tragedy. When it was first performed in 438 BCE, it took the place of a satyr play, which might help to explain the play's tragicomic tone. Euripides also wrote the one complete satyr play that has survived, Cyclops. The play closely follows the account of the cyclops in Homer's Odyssey, but with lewd comments being made by Silenus and the chorus of satyrs. Another early play, Medea, has proven remarkably popular over time, though when it was first performed Euripides came in only at third place.

In 428 BCE, Euripides captured first prize for a cycle of plays containing Hippolytus, a tale about a vengeful queen who lusts after her stepson. This later became the basis of the neoclassical play Phedre by the French playwright Jean Racine. The play helped to incite critics of Euripides to accuse him of misogyny. This charge was strengthened by rumors his two unhappy marriages suffered from infidelity on both sides. However, Euripides presented highly sympathetic portraits of women taken as captives in war in such plays as Andromache, Hecuba, and The Trojan Women.

In some cases, Euripides seems to be competing directly with his predecessors. His play Electra, for instance, tells the same story as The Libation Bearers, but with far more cynicism. Sophocles might have intended his own Electra as an answer to the way Euripides had handled the story. His plays often contain a break midway through in which the direction of the plot markedly shifts, as is the case with Herakles. They can also indulge in excess to the point that they become melodramatic, a criticism often leveled at his play Orestes.

In his later tragedies, Euripides often employs a happy ending, as is the case with Iphigenia in Taurus, Ion, and Helen. These plays are sometimes called romances, a genre also identified with the late plays of Shakespeare. To achieve his joyous resolutions, Euripides sometimes had a god appear at the end of the play, possibly being lowered down from a crane in the theatre known as the mechane. His last cycle of plays, which included Iphigenia at Aulis and The Bacchae are noticeably darker. These won him first prize in 405 BCE, but only posthumously, as Euripides died the previous year.

Tragic Structure

Most of the tragedies we have from classical Athens fit the same general structure. They begin with a prologue, in which one person or a handful of characters might set the scene. A parodos follows, in which the chorus enters singing and dancing. This is typically followed by a series of episodes in which the characters confront one another. After each episode comes a stasimon, in which the chorus sings and dances again. After the episodes and stasimons comes the final scene, often known as the catastrophe, followed by an exit of the chorus known as the exodus.

The chorus was typically a homogenous group of people, such as a group of elders, suppliants, or local women. There was generally one choral leader (the koryphaios), and the chorus was sometimes divided into two halves. One half might sing the first part of an ode, known as the strophe (meaning "turn"). The other half would sing a response, called the antistrophe (meaning "counterturn"). There sometimes followed an after-song known as the epode.

In addition to the chorus, tragedies had no more than three actors, though these actors usually played several roles. In some cases, multiple actors might even portray the same character at different parts of the play. In addition to the playwright, the lead actor, known as the protagonist, also competed for a prize, as did each chorus. The secondary actor was known as the deuteragonist, while the third actor was called the tritagonist. There could also be any number of mute characters brought out, but at no point could a playwright have more than three speaking characters onstage, though the chorus and choral leader effectively functioned as characters as well.

In his book on tragedy, The Poetics, the Athenian philosopher Aristotle looked back from the fourth century BCE at the golden age of theatre and identified some of the dramatic techniques that were most effective. He wrote that a tragic hero should be a great personage who commits a misstep or harmartia, which is frequently translated as a tragic flaw. A typical example of harmartia is pride, or hubris. The hero should at some point achieve the insight of recognition, or anagnorisis, in which he or she uncovers a hidden truth. There should also be a reversal, or peripeteia, where a great person is brought low or an unfortunate person is lifted up. Aristotle suggested it is best when anagnorisis and peripeteia happen at the same time.

The purpose of tragedy, according to Aristotle, is catharsis. He described this as an experience of pity and fear that purges the audience of these emotions. Much has been written about the experience of catharsis and how it functions in tragedy, but it is probably easier to experience than to define. Anyone who has experienced awe and wonder at the end of a tragedy has felt catharsis. Whether or not it has any social function, as some theorists suggest, it is an undeniable fact of tragedy, at least when well performed.

Aristotle said that tragedy should have a unity of action, so that the plot was all of one piece. Later commentators added a unity of time and a unity of place. Aristotle does state that poets, so far as is possible, do tend to confine the action of plays to a single revolution of the sun or slightly longer. He never states this as a hard and fast rule, though, and some of the tragedies he discusses exceed this limit. Nowhere does Aristotle state that a tragedy must occur in a single place, as classical tragedies can move across vast distances in a single play.

The Poetics singles out Oedipus Tyrannus as the most perfect tragedy. Aristotle also frequently cites Iphigenia in Tauris as an example of an exception to many of the norms of tragedy. Other plays he discusses include Medea, Antigone, Orestes, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Libation Bearers, Ajax, Prometheus Bound, Philoctetes, Trojan Women, and Electra.

Greek Performance Techniques

In classical Greek theatres, the main action occurred in a circular space where the chorus danced known as the orchestra or "dancing place." In the middle of the orchestra was a stone called the thymele, which could have served as a prop alter, or it might have been a place for the koryphaios to stand. Behind the orchestra was the skene, a temporary building that provided a backstage area. Actors could enter and exit through the skene, and gods could be lowered down from the top of the skene using the mechane. Performers behind the skene could also roll out a cart known as the ekkyklema, which often revealed corpses in tragedies. The skene had small openings called thyromata in which there might be small painted panels known as pinakes.

Spectators sat on a semi-circular slope radiating out from the orchestra. The Greeks built this seating area into a hill, unlike the Romans who built freestanding structures for the audience. At first the Greeks used temporary wooden benches known as ikria, but later they built a permanent semi-circular stone structure called the theatron. A walkway called the diazoma separated upper and lower section of the theatron. The seat of honor directly in front of the orchestra was called the prohedria, and was reserved for priests and other dignitaries. 

Actors typically wore long, sleeved tunics and were masked. Masks were made of lightweight materials such as linen, cork, and wood. They covered the entire head, making the character's head slightly larger than normal. Masks and costumes were especially important in comedy, when they might transform actors into insects, birds, or other animals. Portrait masks could also depict prominent individuals being lampooned.

Attic Comedy

While tragedy was associated with the city, Athenian comedy was originally associated more with the farming region around Athens known as Attica. The oldest surviving Greek comedy, The Acharnians, features a chorus of men from a rural district outside the city and attacks the pro-war policies of Athens that frequently devastated the countryside. Comedy was not added to the City Dionysia until 487 BCE. Comedy seems to have been most associated with the Lenaia festival held in mid-winter. While visitors came from across Greece to the City Dionysia, the Lenaia festival was primarily for locals, so comic playwrights could be relatively free to criticize Athenian politicians.

The only comic plays to survive from the golden age of Athens are by Aristophanes. In addition to The Acharnians, he wrote a number of other plays criticizing Athenian politics and politicians, especially the demagogue Cleon, the chief object of satire in the play The Knights. Aristophanes also made fun of philosophers, putting Socrates on stage in The Clouds. His play The Wasps pokes fun of older men who liked to sit on juries. The heroes of The Birds are so fed up with Athenians doing nothing but argue over laws, they convince the birds to build a new kingdom in the sky.

Like tragedies, these comedies begin with a prologue followed by a parados in which the chorus comes onstage singing and dancing. The protagonist in an Aristophanes play typically has an outrageous plan, sometimes called the "happy idea." In Lysistrata, for instance, the title character wants the women of Athens and Sparta to stop sleeping with men until their husbands agree to end the war between their two cities. Though there was generally only one chorus, Aristophanes sometimes makes use of two. Lysistrata contains both a female and a male chorus who are ultimately reconciled at the end.

Aristophanes frequently made fun of Euripides and often quoted the tragic writer's more overwrought lines for comedic effect. In his play The Frogs, performed at the Lenaia the year after Euripides died, the god Dionysus himself goes down to the underworld to bring the playwright back to life. While there, he finds there is a dispute going on between Euripides and Aeschylus as to who is the better writer. Dionysus judges between the two, and decides to take Aeschylus back to life instead. The play manages to combine slapstick with a rather serious attempt at literary criticism.

One of the hallmarks of comedy during the period, sometimes referred to as "Old Comedy," was the ability to blend together incredibly bawdy jokes about sex, excrement, and drunkenness with lofty ideas concerning politics, art, and philosophy. The play The Parliament of Women portrays a group of women who seize political power in Athens and create a collectivist state in which everything is owned jointly. Extending this to sexual relations, they declare that young and beautiful people can have as much sex as they want, so long as they sleep with the old and ugly first. Halfway through a comedy, the chorus would typically come forward and address the audience directly in the parabasis, asking them to support the playwright. However, Aristophanes dropped this device in some of his later plays, including The Parliament of Women.

These later plays move toward a transitional form called "Middle Comedy" which was less political and focused on fictional characters rather than lampooning public figures. The chorus became less important in Middle Comedy and had virtually no effect on the plot. The only surviving example of Middle Comedy is Plutus by Aristophanes. In the play, the god of wealth walks the earth, but because he is blind he cannot tell good people from bad ones. Eventually, Middle Comedy would give way to the so-called "New Comedy" of Menander, the chief comic writer of Hellenistic Greece.

The Hellenistic Stage

Alexander the Great transformed the ancient world when he led the armies of Greece, which had been united under his Macedonian father Philip, to conquer the sprawling Persian Empire and even invade India in 327 BCE. Though Alexander's empire fell apart shortly after his death a few years later, Greek culture, known as Hellenic, was spread across the Mediterranean, and at the same time it was profoundly influenced by other cultures, particularly those from the east. Historians refer to the period after Alexander as Hellenistic, since it kept many of the traditions of classical Greece while also melding them together with other traditions.

During the Hellenistic period, theatre changed dramatically. The orchestra, which seems to have been circular before, became semi-circular, or sometimes in the shape of a polygon. While the chorus continued to dance in the orchestra, the main actors moved to an elevated area called the logeion behind the orchestra but in front of the skene. Both the skene and logeion came to be built out of stone, not just wood. Theatres also employed trap doors during this period, from which characters could ascend from the netherworld.

The stature of the actor increased, both metaphorically and physically. As festivals frequently revived older plays rather than presenting new ones, commentators focused on the craft of the actor rather than just that of the poet. Hellenistic actors wore thick-soled platform shoes called kothornoi, at least for tragedies. They augmented their already large masks with a headpiece, or onkos, making themselves appear even taller. To fill out the body, they would employ chest and stomach pads.

In comedy, the chorus declined in importance and the interest shifted from supernatural events to improbable but still realistic situations. This was the New Comedy of Menander, who flourished at the end of the fourth century BCE. Only one more or less complete play by Menander survives. This is Dyskolos, sometimes translated as The Grouch. The play relies on quick changes among the actors, who numbered four in comedy, as opposed to the traditional three in tragedy.

Fragments of other plays by Menander also survive. One, The Girl From Samos, is substantially complete, though it is missing more than a hundred lines. It is notable, however, in that a surviving mosaic from Roman times illustrates a scene from the play. Roman writers frequently adapted Menander's plays into Latin, so the situational comedy he developed had a long-lasting influence. Even modern-day sitcoms can trace their origin back to the New Comedy of Menander.