The Chorus

The poet is always the voice of his age. He gives in song what his age has given him in sorrow or gladness. And yet, while he is the voice of his age, he has tones which the age does not give him--which, indeed, the age does not sometimes recognize. His message, besides, is not a phonographic reproduction of the age's voice and clamour, but is an expression of interpretations, with now warning and anon encouragement, which the age very frequently finds quite beyond its grasp. The ordinary mind saw only, beyond doubt, broken ships and pride dishonoured in Salamis and the Armada; but the soul of the poet heard whispers of doom and judgment, and saw gaunt shadows on the tide, so that the voice and message of his age, for him, meant history, and the meaning of history, the eternal thing in passing events, the philosophy of gods among men. 

The mind of the Greek was not shadow-haunted, any more than the mind of the Elizabethan Englishman; yet the circumstances and the outlook of their times gave to them both a pensive tendency. The laughter of the fields and woods, the song of streams, and the charm of shepherd life in Arcadia , were all very well; but, to face a struggle for existence against powerful foes, to wade knee-deep, and often heart-deep, through State complications and home-rule jealousies, made you frequently look over your shoulder as you pushed ahead. It begets a pensive habit. It teaches your heart to remember, to anticipate, and to desire. The essence of the tragic in human life lies as we have seen, in the struggle of Freedom against Fate--Freewill against unbending Destiny. Yet all tragedies are not wrapt in inpenetrable gloom, though shadows brood above them.

Undoubtedly, of course, a greater tragic melancholy lay above the heathen outlook than above the later Christian. Wherever you moved, over the laughing water or on the sunny land, at home or in the fields of fight, that shadow, which gave back no answer, moved beside you, and the rest was silence. The surly ferryman, with veiled face, received you with no greeting, and the shore ahead was horrid with wailing shades. 

Hence the poet, who, in this background, set the conflicts of heroes, gods, and men, was sure of a sympathetic multitude reading his interpretation into their own. Here was something intensely human, yet superhuman. Here was a meaning given to what was beyond all meaning, a light cast over what must for ever remain dark beyond all penetration. Thus, the poet of Tragedy produces an ecstasy. He draws men out of themselves--lifts their souls up to the applauding lip and the tearful eye, which are his certificates of success. 

So, vindicating the loftiness of his calling as a prophetic criticism and interpretation of life, the utterance of his creation must move along in loftier majestic cadence than the huckster's cry or the utterance of the streets; and the lyrical comment of some ideal spectator may well intervene to give spaces when the pent-up feeling of actor and of audience must have relief and rest. This was the function of the Chorus--one of the must remarkable adjuncts of any literary creation. 

Its origin is absolutely lost in mystery, and can only be guessed at. It's dithyrambic rapture and rhapsody, with the mystic dance weaving its captivating dreamy mazes around the Thymele, were a survival of religious symbolisms. Its sacred origin preserved for it its place until the end--was, in very truth, the real secret of its continued existence and popularity. The dialect of the Chorus which persisted was Doric--but a conventional Doric, and not the living patois; just as the Coptic prayers are embalmed in a tongue the very meaning of which is sealed even for the priests who read the liturgy.

The Chorus rejoiced in the triumph of good; it wailed aloud its grief, and sympathised with the woe of the puppets of the gods. It entered deeply into the interest of their fortunes and misfortunes, yet it stood apart, outside of triumph and failure. Only very seldom does it, as in the "Eumenides," come forward with individual remarkable effect. No gladness dragged it into the actual action on the stage, and no catastrophe overwhelmed it, except in storm of sympathetic pain. It was the ideal spectator, the soul being purged, as Aristotle expressed it, by Pity and Fear, flinging its song and its cry among the passions and the pain of others. It was the "Vox Humana" amid the storm and thunder of the gods.

In the Elizabethan Drama the feelings of the crowd are represented by nameless individuals, such as "First Gentleman," or "First Lord," and so forth, expressing emotions and opinions similar to those of which the Chorus of the Greeks was the mouthpiece. 

The Chorus showed its origin, partly, also, by dressing like the chief actor. When that was a woman, the Chorus were dressed as women, except in the “Antigone" where splendid isolation sets the trials of the Protagonist against the background of stupendous grief.

The Chorus has been censured as an absurdity, inasmuch as, representing a crowd, it shows a secret transaction of the soul being carried on before the public--an objection which, of course, might be applied to the condemnation of the whole Tragic Drama, whereby the inmost agonies of contending souls are laid bare to crowded benches. The Tragic Chorus represented with wonderful truth the Greek inquisitive crowd, and was essentially Athenian in conduct and in spirit. Indeed, it was more--it was intensely human! 

I question if the assertion that the chief motive of ancient Tragedy was the warning spectacle of retribution following upon some exaggeration of self is even a half truth. We humanly love to see into the lives of others, and, in a tragedy, we are not like indifferent spectators lounging on a balcony. We enter into the sorrows and the pathos all through the action; and the Drama would be more than half a failure if it only sent the onlooker away with the verdict, "Serve him right!" 

The Greek Tragedy was the child direct of the Greek Epic. It made the story stand out in a sort of bas-relief. It lifted the curtain of the gods, showed the hidden cords which moved events, revealed the progress of the invisible, and always with a bias on the side of good. Hence, exhibiting on the stage the nobility of heroic endurance and courage, or the awful accumulations of difficulties and despairs which dog the trail of sin, the Tragic Drama became a school of conduct for all the State and for all classes. In Athens , under the shelter of religion, it was untrammelled and unrestrained, and it created a public morality so pure and lofty that its own morality was braced by the very atmosphere itself had made. The Greek Tragic stage was the secondary school of applied ethics, the platform of history's vindication. 

Plato, though his soul moved in an atmosphere of highest poetry, felt somewhat afraid of this soul-shaking art; and, very remarkably, proposed to exclude dramatic poets from his ideal Republic, on the ground that they tended to develop sentiment at the cost of the practical side of the soul. But this is, indeed, a narrow view. The Drama is the most practical of all the poetic utterance. It is the creation of the practical Reason, and it issues in a practical life; for the sympathy with the passions, trials, conflicts, and wrongs represented on the stage, awakens mutual sympathy in an audience, and kindles humanity in the heart. 

Aristotle, who, in his philosophy, set before him as his quest the understanding of human nature rather than the transformation of human life, in replying to Plato's charge, defines Tragedy as "an imitation of a serious and complete action, which has magnitude . . . and it uses the agency of pity and fear to effect a purging of these, and the like emotions." The soul is purified by the power of pathos, and is ennobled in the purifying. It learns to pity others; and, taking self-pity, it diverts it outwards to the pangs of the world around, which is also under trial by the gods. At the same time, the vision of things makes us go warily, remembering our humanity. This "katharsis" steadies the circulation of the passionate constitution, gives us patience with our own lot, and sympathy with the lot of others, helping us at the same time to see life clearly, and to understand it as a whole

Euripides

In all, Sophocles won 20 competitions, making him the Carl Lewis (?) of Greek dramatic competition. Although far behind Sophocles in the medal count with a mere five, Euripides has since eclipsed both Sophocles and Aeschylus in popularity. 

The modern attraction to him stems largely from his point of view, which finds a strong echo in modern attitudes. His plays were not about Gods or royalty but real people. He placed peasants alongside princes and gave their feelings equal weight. He showed the reality of war, criticised religion, and portrayed the forgotten of society: women, slaves, and the old. 

Euripides is credited with adding to the dramatic form the prologue, which "set the stage" at the beginning of the play, and the deus ex machina, which wrapped up loose ends at the close. Aside from those devices, there is less contrivance, fate or philosophy in Euripides than in either Aeschylus or Sophocles. 

There is instead a poignant realism, such as in this scene from the anti-war Trojan Women, in which a grandmother grieves over the daughter and grandson she has outlived. During his life, Euripides was viewed as a heretic and was often lampooned in Aristophanes' comedies. Extremely cynical of human nature, he became a bookish recluse and died in 406 BC, two years before Sophocles.

Sophocles

In 468 BC, Aeschylus was defeated in the tragedy competition by Sophocles. Sophocles' contribution to drama was the addition of a third actor and an emphasis on drama between humans rather than between humans and gods. Sophocles was a fine craftsman. 

Aristotle used Sophocles' play, Oedipus Rex for his classic analysis of drama, The Poetics. Sophocles' plays are suffused with irony. In The Oedipus Trilogy, Oedipus seeks the truth about his father's murder. The truth that awaits him, however, is that he is the murderer.    

In Electra, the hunted murderer Aegisthus finds the identity of a body under a blanket is Orestes, the man who has relentlessly hunted him and his lover, Clytemnestra. He is relieved that he has escaped justice. However, when he lifts the blanket he discovers the body is that of his lover Clytemnestra. Orestes has indeed caught up with him. 

Sophocles' plays are about the folly of arrogance and the wisdom of accepting fate. Sophocles believed in the Greek gods, but his plays are suffused with existential insights that have been voiced many times since. For instance, compare this observation by Antigone: What joy is there in day repeating day, some short, some long, with death the only end? I think them fools who warm their hearts with the glow of empty hopes.

Aeschylus, the First Playwright

Until 484 BC the Athenian drama competitions consisted of a trilogy of dithyrambs and a satyr play. Their style of presentation was choral rather than dramatic. However, around 484 BC there appeared on the Athenian theatre scene a playwright named Aeschylus. 

Aeschylus turned the dithyramb into drama. He added a second actor (the antagonist) to interact with the first. Heintroduced props and scenery and reduced the chorus from 50 to 12. Aeschylus' Persians, written in 472 BC, is the earliest play in existence. 

Aeschylus' crowning work was the Oresteia, a trilogy of tragedies first performed in 458 BC. They tell the legend of Agamemnon, the Greek war hero who was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, and the pursuit of justice by his children, Orestes and Electra. Thematically, the trilogy is about the tragedy of excessive human pride, arrogance or hubris. 

This hubris is required to murder a person for personal gain, as Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus do, as well as the hubris to in turn hunt down and kill them, as Orestes and Electra do. In the end, the Furies, vengeful emissaries of the gods, themselves bring Orestes and Electra to trial. 

Aeschylus makes a point that has been echoed by historians and dramatists, psychologists and crime writers for centuries since: that the root of evil and suffering is usually human arrogance. On a dramatic level, the plays convey the suffering of a family torn apart by patricide and matricide.

The Form of Tragedy

The traditional tragedy in Aeschylus' time (circa 475 BC) consisted of the following parts:

1. Prologue, which described the situation and set the scene
   
2. Parados, an ode sung by the chorus as it made its entrance

3. Five dramatic scenes, each followed by a Komos, an  
     exchange of laments by the chorus and the protagonist   

4. Exodus, the climax and conclusion

Aristotle - arousing of fear and emotion, purging (catharsis) - the unities: unity of time place and character - Pathos (Greek for instructive suffering) which has come to mean the quality in something that arouses sympathy. 

Often used today to describe something sad but not necessarily tragic. Satyrs, trilogies of tragedies were interrupted by satyr plays (which made fun of characters in the tragedies around them). Hence the word tragedy. Comedy from Komodos which means 'merrymaking,' and 'singer.'

The Culture that created Tragedy

Tragedy did not develop in a vacuum. It was an outgrowth of what was happening at the time in Athens . One hand, Greek religion (see Bullfinch's Mythology. It is in library) had dictated how people should behave and think for centuries. On the other, there was a birth of free thought and intellectual inquiry. 

Athens in the fourth and fifth centuries BC was bustling with radical ideas like democracy, philosophy, mathematics, science and art. It boasted philosophers like Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Democritus. There were the first known historians Thucydides and Herodotus. The scientists and mathematicians like Thales, Hippocrates, Archimedes, and later Euclid (euclidean geometry), Pythagoras (the Pythagorean theorem), Eratosthenes, Hero (the steam engine!), Hipparchus and Ptolemy. 

In these respects -- a blossoming of free thought after years of religious dicta -- ancient Athens resembled Renaissance England, which not coincidentally spawned the next great era in theatre. In essence, the ancient Athenians had begun to question how nature worked, how society should work, and what man's role was in the scheme of things. Tragedy was the poets' answer to some of these questions -- How should one behave? How can one accept the injustices of life? What is the price of hubris? Read a soliloquy from a Greek tragedy, or from Hamlet or Macbeth, and what you will hear is these questions being asked.

Tragedy

Between 600 and 500 BC, the dithyramb had evolved into new forms, most notably the tragedy and the ‘ satyr ' play. Tragedy, derived from the Greek words tragos (goat) and ode (song), told a story that was intended to teach religious lessons. Much like Biblical parables, tragedies were designed to show the right and wrong paths in life. Tragedies were not simply plays with bad endings, nor were they simply spectacles devised to ‘ make 'em laugh and make ' em cry. ' 

Tragedy was viewed as a form of ritual purification, Aristotle's catharsis, which gives rise to pathos, another Greek word, meaning 'instructive suffering'. They depicted the life voyages of people who steered themselves or who were steered by fate on collision courses with society, life's rules, orsimply fate. 

The tragic protagonist is one who refuses out of either weakness or strength to acquiesce to fate: what for us nowmight better be described as the objective realities of life. Most often, the protagonist's main fault is hubris, a Greek, and English word meaning false or overweening arrogance. 

It could be the arrogance of not accepting ones destiny (i.e. as in Oedipus Rex), the arrogance of assuming the right to kill (Agamemnon), or the arrogance of assuming the right to seek vengeance (Orestes). Whatever the root cause, the protagonist's ultimate collision with fate, reality, or society is inevitable and irrevocable.

Thespis

In about 600 BC, Arion of Mehtymna ( Corinth ) wrote down formal lyrics for the dithyramb. Some time during the next 75 years, Thespis of Attica added an actor who interacted with the chorus. 

This actor was called the protagonist, from which the modern word protagonist is derived, meaning the main character of a drama. Introduce a second speaker and one moves from one art, that of choric chant, to another, theatre. 

Tradition ascribes this innovation to one Thespis and even gives him a date; he is said to have performed Athens about 534 BC. Whether this is true of not, his name has achieved immortality in theatrical jargon - 'actors' and 'Thespians' are synonymous.

The Dithyramb

An essential part of the rites of Dionysus was the Dithyramb. The word means 'choric hymn'. This chant or hymn was probably introduced into Greece early accompanied by mimic gestures and, probably, music. 

It began as a part of a purely religious ceremony, like a hymn in the middle of a mass describing the adventures of Dionysus. In its earliest form it was lead off by the leader of a band of revelers, a group of dancers, probably dressed as satyrs dancing around an altar. 

It was probably performed by a chorus of about fifty men dressed as satyrs - mythological half -human, half - goat servants of Dionysus. They may have played drums, lyres and flutes, and chanted as they danced around an effigy of Dionysus. Some accounts say they also wore phallus -like headgear. It was given a regular form and raised to the rank of artistic poetry in about 600 BC. 

Introduced into Athens shortly before 500 BC, dithyramb was soon recognised as one of the competitive subjects at the various Athenian festivals. For more than a generation after its introduction the dithyramb attracted the most famous poets of the day. 

By this time, however, it had ceased to concern itself exclusively with the adventures of Dionysus and begun to choose its subjects from all periods of Greek mythology. In this way, over time the dithyramb would evolve into stories in 'play' form: drama.

The Cult of Dionysus

The theatre of Ancient Greece evolved from religious rites which date back to at least 1200 BC. At that time, Greece was peopled by tribes that we in our arrogance might label 'primitive'. 

In northern Greece, in an area called Thrace, a cult arose that worshipped Dionysus, the god of fertility and procreation. This Cult of Dionysus, which probably originated in Asia Minor, practised ritual celebrations which may have included alcoholic intoxication, orgies, human and animal sacrifices  and perhaps even hysterical rampages by women called maenads.

The cult's most controversial practice involved, it is believed, uninhibited dancing and emotional displays that created an altered mental state. This altered state was known as 'ecstasis', from which the word ecstasy is derived. Dionysiac, hysteria and 'catharsis' also derive from Greek words for emotional release or purification. 

Ecstasy was an important religious concept to the Greeks, who would come to see theatre as a way of releasing powerful emotions through its ritual power. Though it met with resistance, the cult spread south through the tribes of Greece over the ensuing six centuries. 

During this time, the rites of Dionysus became mainstream and more formalised and symbolic. The death of a tragic hero was offered up to god and man rather than the sacrifice of say, a goat. By 600 BC these ceremonies were practised in spring throughout much of Greece .