- Greek Drama
(By Peter Levi)Introduction
There is plenty of drama in everyday life, and the experience of life is the source of everything that succeeds in the
theatre. Almost every human society has formal drama of one kind or another, if we define the word loosely. We
know the Greeks sat on theatre benches to watch sacred rituals. The ceremonies of state and of religion, and the
moments of birth, death, marriage, harvest, and so on, have a great deal in common with theatrical drama, but we
recognize drama strictly speaking because it uses actors, takes place in something like a theatre, an area defined by
an audience, and probably has a plot, and more importantly an inner form, that we have learnt to expect. Once
there is a theatre, there will be many other conventions: applause, competition, a style of speech, maybe the mask
and the dance.
These conventions were not invented, though the Greeks believed that some of them were, but inherited and
modified from social and religious ceremonies in which the drama began before it became theatrical. The obvious
direct ancestor of theatrical choral lyrics is the dithyramb, which was a processional and choral lyric performance
with narrative themes. When did the first actors step out from the chorus line? The history of the theatre, like all
social history, is always the history of change; conventions may alter and then recur, but the inner form of
theatrical performance, the skeleton of what is expected, becomes utterly transformed in time; this transformation
is irreversible.
Then what about the origins, the very earliest adaptations? First one, then two, then three actors, always with the
same choral background, though the chorus could be used in quite different ways.
Three kinds of plays - tragedy, comedy, and plays in which the chorus was the satyrs who belong to Dionysus.
Music, with a history of its own. It is apparent that in the course of the fifth century B.C., Athenian plays tended
roughly to become more human and realistic, rather more secular and less religious, more fictional and less
mythical, although none of these changes ever reached its final stage even in the fourth century, and tragedy with
invented plots, as opposed to the wild and original adaptations of Euripides, was an innovation that had no future
for many centuries. It was made late in the day by the sophisticated young poet Agathon who figures in Plato's
Symposium; we know little about it.
The origins of Athenian tragedy are almost equally obscure. There is no doubt that dancers in animal masks
performed in the sixth century in various parts of Greece. The origins of tragedy are certainly ritual and religious.
The first tragedies in Athens were performed around a cart in the agora, which was mostly an open space. The
actors probably came in from the country, perhaps from the sanctuary of Dionysus at Icaria or from Eleutherae.
The fact that they spoke in verse should not surprise us: impromptu dialogue in verse between actors and audience
could be heard at the Zacynthus carnival until the other day.
But beyond this we are in an area where the findings of modern folklore studies and social anthropology must be
called in to cast their flickering and often misleading light. Occasionally, in a play we have, one seems to catch a
whiff of origins, of a dying god or the rituals of initiation or the animal dancers, but these sensations are insecure,
and the romantic arguments and general theories they have sometimes given rise to have been unsatisfactory. All