This week we're moving into tragedy and to
an entirely new genre in which myths are conveyed in antiquity.
Up till now we've seen epic poetry, on the one hand, and then we saw some examples of
the Homeric hymns. All of the things that we've looked at up
till now are long narrative poems, some of them very extended with Homer and Hesiod
and all of them use this dactylic hexameter form where we had a specialized
epic diction that was put to use to tell tales of the past and of the gods in a
certain kind of framework. We're going to move to something
completely different now, when we get into tragedy.
We're talking about another way of presenting mythic material that has it's
own constraints and it's own possibilities.
Which are very different than what happens in epic poetry, than what epic poems are
capable of doing. Tragic poets are dealing with much shorter
time frames. What's happening up on stage, usually
represents exactly the amount of time that you and I sit viewing what happens up on
stage. There's more pressure put on that
particular smaller time frame, to tell the, the full story in this small bit of
time. So we have a lot of more elusive kind of
reference to broader mythological traditions that get brought in and brought
to bear. Typically we are focusing on very small
window of time and it's chosen as a crux moment, something pivotal is happening in
a larger mythic strand. We concentrate on this crux moment and
the, what happens before and after unfolds as background and forward looking around
this very a tight focus that we have in the story.
Tragic time is usually now. What's happening on stage is happening
supposedly in the now time, and you and I are brought back to some earlier time.
That is meant to be unfolding right in front of our very arrs, eyes.
The people that we see up on stage are actual.
Real people that are inhabiting characters and acting like other people.
I suppose goes without saying. But casting our mind back across how we've
seen myth being treated in the course up until now.
We haven't seen that. We've seen an epic poet who stands up and
recites. And tells you all the things in the third
person that some other group of people did.
Now, we'll have people stand up and in the first person, represent themselves as if
they are Agamemnon or as if they are Clytemnestra or all the other characters
we've been reading about. There's a sense of absolute make believe
that's happening here. This is, again, different than what we see
in epic. People are standing up, pretending to be
To the other people. When my, young son walks around and back
in the early days he used to play make believe and you kind of wonder well that's
sort of interesting and slightly childish thing to pretend like you're someone else
but this is exactly what's happening in this genre.
And the strangeness of people walking around pretending to be other people I
think is by now completely lost on us; we're used to this genre.
But at the time the Greeks were really inventing a whole genre of tragedy it was
surely something that was striking and noteworthy.
Bringing to bear, actually bringing to life these ancient characters and the
figures up on stage was something that would have had a bit of a magical
resonance to it. The actors are all going to be male, they
portray characters that are male or female.
And they wear masks of different kinds. So we don't actually get to see their
facial expressions. Instead, there's a kind of stylized sense,
that's brought into the make believe. That just they, in their own persona, are
being covered up by an exterior masks. Which is often, which is typically very
rudimentary. Doesn't have a lot of elaborate kinds of
decorative items on it. It's just a way of hiding the normal
person's face and putting a tragic mask on the outside of it.
Tragedies start in the sixth century BCE. They start to come to be in ancient
Athens. They come to a full fruition in the fifth
century BCE. This is where the most important of our
tragedians show up and we have a major threesome that survives from antiquity of
Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. We'll be looking at examples of each of
these figures. Plays they were shortly after they had a.
Appeared themselves, historically, on the scene embraced very widely as the
obviously greatest of all these trag tragic poets from antiquity.
They also happened to survive to us, in some and a little bit more detail than
others. Some of them, we have more plays from than
others but these are the three greats recognized in their own time as such.
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The context for a tragedy is quite a bit
different than what we've seen with our versions of epic poetry.
Remember when we talked about Homer or Hesiod being sung we talked about a
context of aristocrats having a dinner party and maybe wanting to have some
entertainment after the dinner party. When we talked about the Homeric hymns we
talked about festival context and these hymns being sung in honor of gods at
festivals that were given in the gods' honor.
For tragedy very different. We have people that come to an outdoor
theater, a space analogous to the one. We see here a Roman version of one of
these, that we see in a beautiful form preserved, in Sicily.
Come to an outdoor space and sit around in, a large.
Usual, likely to be much more primitive then what we see here.
These big stone versions of these theaters are more of them are Roman examples.
The Greek versions would have been less well of, less monumental of their
architecture. Seating would have been more rudimentary,
maybe wooden benches maybe just a grassy hill.
And then the, the, the. Large stone buildings that we see around
the theaters, would not have been there for at, at a, at a, in Greek times.
So we have context in which you go to this outside space.
You come and in doing so, what, you understand yourself as.
We're engaging in something that's happening in honor of Dionysus.
Dionysus was the patron god of the theater.
And he was drawn out, often times very explicitly as being the focus of what the,
was happening in the theater. It was meant as a festival in his honor.
The most important of these festivals happened in Athens and happened very
specifically centered on Dionysus. So when we talk about the theater we're
gonna talk about this figure of Dionysus. He's gonna come up at a couple of points
when we deal with the tragedies themselves and in particular one.
We look at the Bacchi, we'll see that Dionysus indeed shows up as a character on
our stage. Think about that.
A festival in honor of Dionysus, in which Dionysus himself is going to participate.
Now drawing our mind a little bit to how these plays are staged.
You and I as an audience actually get up, go to this physical space and watch it
happen. We go collectively to, the whole groups of
us. They are watching this thing.
We're not sitting in one small dinner party and having a, a, an entertainment
that's been hired on for us. We're actually going to a place where many
100s of us could sit around and watch this entertainment unfold before us.
We see a couple of features when we walk in.
There's a very plain stage up front, only a few only a couple of meters off the
ground. Not, not high.
And that plain stage, up front, has scene, scenery behind it.
We're not going to see it here in our archeological example, but it has scenery
hanging up behind it. That scenery is going to be very plain and
very sparse. In the middle of it though always, is
going to be. A door, there's a door in the middle of
the back of the stage and usually when we're watching a tragedy, there's going to
be stuff that's happening behind that door.
So as we're watching we turn around and look at the door and say I wonder what's
happening back there, huh what could that be?
And then at some point in the play they'll be characters that disappear behind the
door and we'll say oh, what's happening back there?
And at some point in the play the doors might just burst open and we'll find out
whats happened back there behind the door. Some kind of awful, ugly stuff has going
on. So we've got a very spare stage, a very
spare screen behind us, and a door there that's a focus of a good deal of our
attention keeping an eye and an ear on that is a very good thing.
Now, the actors, we have a few of them up on stage they have these masks on and not
very elaborate costumes and they are reciting lines.
Imitating make believe were delivering direct lines in the first person of the
characters that they were representing. In front of the actors is going to be a
chorus. The chorus has a liminal role.
They have a role in between you and I and the actors up on stage.
You and I are out here in the audience. Up on stage are the actors that are these
individuals back here. In between us, in the zone.
In between, this is not very well spelled out here in this Roman example.
But there would have been a large space in front of the stage, before where you and I
were sitting, where the chorus moved around.
This is a group of people, the chorus comes in a group, a dozen give or take.
And these people as they're engaged in the tragedy they provide a kind of a
collective commentary on what's happening up on stage.
So there will be actors up there that are delivering lines.
They'll have dialog back and forth and then, the chorus might sort of jump in and
say have, have, have, are you sure you've remembered everything about the story that
you're telling this other character? Perhaps you can elaborate on that.
And, as a group, they'll speak and then the actor might respond to the chorus and
say, what are you people talking about? What do you know?
The chorus has gets engaged with the actors up on stage.
The chorus will also turn around and address us.
They might, well they typically worry about what's happening up on stage.
As the characters are going through the motions of what's going to happen to them,
the chorus might turn around and look at us and say, can you believe what's
happening up there on stage? Those people, look what they're doing, oh
my goodness, don't they realize what's about to happen?
And then they'll turn around to the people on stage.
Don't you guys realize what's happening? Then they'll turn to us and say, they
don't seem to realize what's happening. They work back and forth between us and
the characters up on stage. They are also, in addition to being this
kind of go-between in terms of the content of the play, they're also physically in
between you and I and the people up on stage.
They occupy this minimal space in-between the stage and the general audience
seating. Also, they're.
Intermediate in terms of their numbers. Those up on stage are single individuals
speaking for themselves. You and I out in the audience are a whole
collective set of eyeballs watching what's happening there and we all react
collectively to what's happening there. The chorus is somewhere in between a
single individual and a collection; they all react as a single individual though
sometimes half of them will say one piece of dialogue and the other half will say
the other and they respond back and forth to each other.
But they have a collectivity to them that mirrors us but they have an individual,
oftentimes, individually expressed reaction to things that they express in a
single voice. So they have all these kind of roles as
mediating between us and the people up on stage.
The chorus sings songs, Choral odes are an important part of
tragedy. Often times what comes out in these odes
is going to be really important narrative background.
So as the actors are up on stage and they're having some disagreement or fight
about what, the, the some important piece of con that's con, some consequential
piece in your own lives. That chorus will jump in and start to sing
the song that tell us why it is that these two are so upset with each other.
There will be a background story that comes out through the choral ode.
Those odes are sometimes tricky to read. They are dense, they are very illusive,
the trididience, the stragic poets or assuming that you and I and the audience
have seen a lot of this stuff already. So just in the way that if we go to
Hollywood movie that is a sequel they might assume you've seen a whole bunch of
the movies that are, are before the sequel so also a tragedy. It's, it's assumed that
you're dealing with a highly literate audience.
Literate in the sense of having seen lots of tragedies and, have a sense of what the
tradition is. So it allows the poets to say a lot which
is to mention a few proper names or specific places.
It taxes us then as modern readers to make sure that we're up to speed on the
traditions that they are referencing. And I'll do my best to try to pull out
those traditions and highlight them such as they are relevant to the plays, but
there will be many more that are referred to in the tragedies that we will only be
able to make mention of in our class.Ah, So, the more materials that you want to
dig into and look into yourself the better it is going to be for you.
The stories that we are allowed. Or, that are capable of being told in this
genre are compressed. We already talked about this compression
in time. They're also compressed in terms of the
people that are involved. We've got these three, you know, few, a
few people up on stage. One, two, maybe three.
There's something really intense that's happening to them.
It's as if we're in a kind of pressure cooker or a vise.
The atmosphere in a tragedy is dense. It's almost too much.
It's, it's, it's as if things are just kinda packed on top of one another.
This compressed space produces an environment that's seems kinda
claustrophobic. If only we could find a way out, we never
going to be find a way out in tragedy. In that way, that epic poetry might be
described as being centrifugal, or pushing ourselves to the very edges of the earth.
The movement in tragedy is very much centripetal, it moves towards the middle
and people get confined and sucked into spaces that they might otherwise have
wished to escape, but escape is not gonna be possible, sadly, for many of the people
that we have a look at. It's also, going to be a different kind of
story that's told. The fantastic elements that are possible
in an, in epic. We could have marvelous voyages across
vast spanses of time, meeting strange people, on one side of the world to
another. We can go to the underworld and come back.
A lot of these adventure sides of the story are not going to be possible to do
in tragedy. It's very difficult to represent these up
on stage, and the Greeks mostly don't do that.
Instead, what we have is dialogue. We have one person speaking, and another
person answering, in that back and forth of human to human interconnection.
S, first person singular to first person singular.
It's this connections that the tragenians work and rework and dive into.
When we enter this world, it will be a world that is characterized by intimacy.
Sometimes intimacy is wonderfully supportive and nurturing.
Sometimes intimacy can be nasty and mean. We gonna see all these dimensions very
much worked out in the deep and cauldron-like psychology that we'll see
exhibited in many of the plays we're about to read.