Preclassical Drama

Introduction

Although theater is a comparatively late phenomenon in the history of human culture, its origins are obscure. Drama in the Western world goes back to Greek origins scarcely more than twenty-five hundred years ago—well within the period of recorded history—but information about the origin of Greek drama is scant and not always reliable, coming as it does from sources such as Aristotle, who wrote long after the fact. Other cultural traditions, however, though never fully documented from the beginnings to the appearance of a fully developed theater, have provided a series of models that suggest not only what may lie behind Greek drama but also what social and psychological impulses underlie all drama. Subdramatic rituals and performances in various parts of the world have illuminated several aspects of drama and theater.

The study of the origins of drama is therefore only in part a historical undertaking. Because of its appeal to the emotions and other functions of the mind that are not strictly rational, even fully evolved theater may be comparable in some ways to the rituals of prescientific peoples. Students of the theater hope, therefore, to learn something of the first principles of drama by investigating the theatrical performances of undeveloped cultures. Such cultures, often designated “archaic” to indicate their preliterate condition, invariably observe rituals of a theatrical character.

One of the great universals in such predramatic rituals is dance, described by Sheldon Cheney as “the great mother of the arts” and documented in artifacts such as cave paintings as early as 15,000 b.c.e. Although the motions of dance may be as purely formal and abstract as the sounds of music, most dance traditions have a demonstrably mimetic element. War dances that are mock contests, love-pantomimes related to fertility rites, and the animal dances of hunting societies testify to the mimetic use of dance. The horned, phallic dancer on the wall of the Trois Frères cave in southern France is our earliest example of such imitation. There is no way of telling at what point these dances were accompanied by the rhythmic chants of poetry or by the sound of musical instruments; the combination of dance, music, and song in rituals may be as old as human culture itself.

As it is no more than a step from imitation to illusion, the mimetic intention of a subdramatic song and dance may have the effect on a spectator of belief—for example, that the animal spirit represented in a buffalo-dance is real and not merely an imitation. A small child might easily be so deluded, but it is in the nature of religious ecstasy for an adult spectator, and even the performer himself, to make the additional step from self-conscious fantasy to a belief in the reality that is imitated. Modern theater succeeds even when a rational audience accepts the fiction that the action imitated on the stage is the real thing. By the same token, a religious congregation believes in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of its deity, just as the community witnessing a buffalo-dance accepts the reality the dancers before it are imitating. As an aid to such quasi-dramatic illusion, costume is a common adjunct to archaic performances. The dancer on the wall of the Trois Frères cave is dressed in an animal skin, complete with a mask and the antlers of the animal he represents. The mask is notably widespread in dance customs throughout the world. Representing the features of an animal, an ancestral spirit, or a god, masks symbolize the transformation and the illusion that are common denominators of ecstatic ritual and actual theater. A vestige of the theater-mask tradition remains in the playbook convention of listing the cast of characters as the dramatis personae, or “masks of the drama.”

An important difference between the mimetic performance of a preliterate dancer and the representations of true drama is the level at which the mimesis is accepted. Where the audience of a play believes in the symbolic correspondence between the actor and his role, archaic audiences—and often the performers themselves—take the correspondence further. As Johan Huizinga points out in Homo Ludens,

when a certain form of religion accepts a sacred identity between two things of a different order, say a human being and an animal, the relationship is not adequately expressed by calling it a “symbolical correspondence” as we conceive this. The identity, the essential oneness of the two goes far deeper than the correspondence between a substance and its symbolic image. It is a mystic unity. The one becomes the other. In his magic dance the savage is the kangaroo.

The magical content of much predramatic activity has led some investigators to the study of shamanism as the earliest type of theatrical performance. The shaman, whose name originates in the title of the Siberian spiritual healer, is a kind of medicine man who deals with the spirits; he does his work in a trance state, using rituals chiefly for healing the sick. Shamanism is believed to have originated in central Asia and Siberia in paleolithic times and to have spread through Eurasia and over the Alaskan land bridge into the Americas. It is also found in Africa, Australia, and New Guinea, and is so widespread that it probably arose spontaneously in many cultures. Its techniques include singing or chanting, dancing, costuming, storytelling, and many forms of illusionistic tricks. It has been called the oldest technique of theatrical performance because of its similar repertory of skills. E. T. Kirby’s Ur-Drama: The Origins of Theatre explains the links between shamanism and theater in India, China, Greece, and Europe. Kirby distinguishes the shaman or controller of spirits from the medium, who is possessed by spirits who speak or act through him and determine his actions. His thesis is that “it is shamanism as it is most rigorously defined which has almost invariably been the antecedent of established theatre forms.” Kirby calls attention to the importance of an audience in shamanic rituals—they contribute to more than a séance between the shaman and his patient. Such rituals differ from theatrical rites of passage or other ceremonies in that shamanism depends on “the immediate and direct manifestation to the audience of supernatural presence, rather than its symbolization.” Dialogue is a particularly significant feature of shamanic ritual: The shaman converses with the spirits he has summoned or arranges conversations between his spirits and participants in the ritual. An important corollary of shamanistic theatricality is that it imitates not the existing reality but the “reality” of another world. If Kirby’s thesis is correct, theater in its origins was not concerned with ordinary reality, but with some transcendent and stylized spirit world, and with the abstract rather than the realistic: “Shamanistic illusionism, with its ventriloquism and escape acts, seeks to break the surface of reality, as it were, to cause the appearance of a super-reality that is ‘more real’ than the ordinary.” Ur-theater was surrealistic before theater was realistic.

Most theories of the origin of drama assume that in its earliest stages a dramatic performance fulfilled a social function more important than mere entertainment. The classical Greeks believed that their own tragic drama should serve as an inspiration to noble behavior, and Aristotle, writing at the end of the classical period, proposed a theory of group therapy: that tragedy effected a catharsis of pity and fear in audiences prone to an excess of those emotions. Modern anthropologists have tended to see both serious and comic theatricality in functionalist terms, as a mechanism for promoting group solidarity. Important religious beliefs are acted out at yearly seasonal festivals, clowns act out the expulsion of the community’s enemies, and by such dramatizations of commonly held views the spiritual life and emotional coherence of a group are periodically renewed.

Victor Turner has challenged this belief as a “flat” view of ritual. Rather than promoting “a gross group solidarity,” he argues, some theatrical forms work as a mechanism for resolving social conflict. Turner associates such performances with a “social drama,” which he describes as recurring “on all levels of social organization from state to family.” Taking its beginnings in ritual and juridical procedures, a form of representation evolved that was “agonistic, rife with problem and conflict.” Various kinds of theater, including puppetry and shadow theater, dance drama, and professional storytelling, became a means to “probe a community’s weaknesses, call its leaders to account, desacralize its most cherished values and beliefs, portray its characteristic conflicts and suggest remedies for them, and generally take stock of its current situation in the known world.” Turner conjectures that the various genres of cultural performance are potentially active in the phase of social drama concerned with redressive processes, when ritualized forms of authority such as litigation, feud, sacrifice, and prayer are invoked to contain a conflict and render it orderly. Social drama is by this definition a generic crisis in any community consisting of breach, crisis, redress, and restoration of peace through reconciliation or a mutual acceptance of schism. It is the cultural response to this social process, particularly in its third phase of redress, which generates the various genres of performance, including tragedy and comedy. Turner’s hypothesis is not arguable on the basis of observed evidence, though it fits the agonistic character of Greek tragedy and comedy as well as the socially conscious drama of the twentieth century. It is more appropriate to a dynamic society than to traditional, authoritarian, or stable communities. In any case, the end product of performance in Turner’s social drama is not so different from what other functionalists have found: the maintenance of an orderly and harmonious society.

Drama historians no longer believe that drama derived from a universal ritual in which, according to J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the New Year king or vegetation sprite deposed his predecessor. This theory has been shown to be synthetic, based on evidence that is not complete for a single culture, and though some handbooks still repeat Frazerian formulas, the theory as a whole can no longer be accepted. The same is true of William Ridgeway’s hypothesis in Dramas and Dramatic Dances of Non-European Races that theater originated in the worship of the dead. Theodor H. Gaster’s Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East argues that all drama in the Near East descended from seasonal rituals, but, like previous monolithic theories, this is little credited by modern scholars. Under the influence of Bronisław Malinowski and later anthropologists, students of preliterate drama have rejected the assumption that all cultures go through the same stages of development. It is also acknowledged that true drama, as opposed to theatrical ritual, is a more secular creation, likely to have been decisively molded by storytelling and the artistic performance of narrative poetry. Observers of African performing arts have promoted a view of drama as only supplementary to ritual, presenting secularized and popularized versions of beliefs that underlie ritual, thus giving ritual more meaning but in no way supplanting it. Psychologists, partly in response to Aristotle’s characterization of man as a mimetic creature, call attention to the human penchant for fantasy that reshapes reality into more satisfying forms. A greater appreciation of the complexity of human culture and creativity has thus reduced the appeal even of the newer monolithic theories. Nevertheless, many of the beliefs commonly held by later scholars still reflect the position of Frazer and his followers that the source of theater is ritual, and some of the most challenging modern theories proceed from a renewed search for universal patterns in the development of drama.

Preliterate society offers a wealth of opportunities to observe rituals with dramatic or theatrical elements: song with a narrative element, dance that imitates via mime, music that dramatizes the action of dancers, costumes and masks that aid the impersonations of performers, and magical tricks to support the illusion of an action represented to an audience. Even playing areas, ranging from round dancing-floors ringed by spectators to the contrived theatrical enclosure of a shaman’s tent, suggest the settings of true theater. The scenario of a sacred or shamanic ritual is close to the action that Aristotle identified as the “heart and soul” of tragedy, the earliest true dramatic form known. There are performers, and there is something like an audience—although ritual does not make the same distinction that theater makes between audience and performers. In spite of many similarities, historians of the theater are reluctant to call these archaic performances true drama; for this, they look for autonomous, exclusively dramatic performances in which theatrical art is free from the requirements of ritual.

The Ancient Near East and Egypt

Because of their proximity to Greece and their role as the home of the first great civilizations, the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean basin have been closely scrutinized for performances that may have influenced the Hellenic inventors of drama. Greece was in fact the meeting place of three powerful traditions, though it is not always easy to distinguish them in detail. The latest to be identified may be the oldest, and it is not to be confused with the so-called cradle of civilization, a conception of the ancient Near East that has been to some extent discredited. Before the Indo-European Greeks migrated into the southern Balkans in the beginning of the second millennium b.c.e., the inhabitants of what are now Greece, Crete, the Aegean islands, and western Anatolia shared a culture with the southeastern Europeans that can be identified through a family of artifact types, including religious figurines and other paraphernalia of ritual. Marija Gimbutas identified this as the Civilization of Old Europe in The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe. The roots of this cultural complex reach back into paleolithic times, but between about 7000 and 3500 b.c.e., “the inhabitants of this region developed a much more complex social organization than their western and northern neighbors, forming settlements that often amounted to small townships, inevitably involving craft specialization and the creation of religious institutions.” Many artifacts from this early period bear significant resemblances to those of the classical period that are connected with classical drama. Though not unique to this part of the world, the presence of masked figures and animal masks in a region whose earliest dramatic actors wore masks and (in comedy) animal costumes is probably no coincidence. As Gimbutas observes, “masks and masked figures, life-size or in miniature, of ancient Greece, Minoan Crete and Old Europe, imply liturgy and drama whose emphasis is theatrical. It is quite conceivable that all three belong to the same tradition.”

The second tradition to establish itself in Greece was that of the Greeks themselves, who brought with them the Indo-European language and myths that would provide the raw material of the earliest true drama. These people were to distinguish themselves from their neighbors in historical times by their passion for language, poetry, and debate; their extreme individualism; a love of the arts; and their secular temper. The aggressive and entrepreneurial character of the Greeks eventually brought them into contact with the more highly developed civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, which provided the third great component in the context from which theater was to take shape. Their possible contributions to the origins of Greek theater have been perhaps overemphasized in the past because of a diffusionist ideology of Western civilization. All civilized arts did not necessarily flow from the East, and it is impossible to establish any positive links between the pageantry of Egypt and the Near East, on one hand, and the theater of Greece, on the other. Still, it is certain that Greek culture was stimulated in various ways by contacts with Egypt and the East in two formative periods: first, in the Minoan-Mycenaean age (c. 1600-1100 b.c.e.), and later, from the Orientalizing period in Greek art (c. 750-650 b.c.e.) through the time in the sixth century when the dramatic festivals were instituted in Athens.

Both Egypt and Mesopotamia have traditions of predramatic activity at least as early as the third millennium b.c.e., centuries before the Greeks themselves arrived in the southern Balkans. These traditions fall into two categories, with some overlap: literary dialogues of the sort that later produced the Song of Songs and the Book of Job, and sacred liturgies and pageants that followed a semidramatic scenario. In Mesopotamia, the Sumerian pageant of the “sacred marriage” solemnized each year the divine royalty’s mystical union with the gods in what is fancifully described as a “mystery play” and a “great religious drama” with pantomime, incantation, and music. Although this ritual was discontinued by Hammurabi at about the beginning of the seventeenth century b.c.e., observances of this type became common throughout the Near East; a vestige of it survived even in classical Athens, where the wife of the King Archon was ritually “married” to Dionysus and had the duty of spending the night with him in his temple. A Sumerian festival of the New Year continued into Babylonian times; there was a celebration in Babylon in the time of King Nebuchadrezzar I (twelfth century b.c.e.), which included showy processions, a recitation of the myth of creation, and pantomimic performances. All of this is far from what today’s audience would recognize as drama, but a small number of texts from Sumeria deserve mention because of their dramatic quality. In one such text, titled “Hammurabi’s Conversation with a Woman,” the great legal reformer is represented as captivated by the charms of a woman with whom he converses. This may have been a kind of court play, though nothing is known of any performance. There is also a Sumerian epic in dialogue form, “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,” which may have been a secular drama. Seven “divine disputations” have also been discovered that have a theatrical character. These represent humanized Sumerian gods in debate with one another, each praising his own merits and belittling those of the other. Dialogue literature became widespread in the Near East and, like other literary forms, is likely to have been known to Greeks who came into contact with the commercial centers of the Levant.

The roots of drama go back even further in Egypt than in Mesopotamia. A group of documents known as the Pyramid Texts were claimed in 1882 by the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero to have a dramatic character. The earliest of these sepulchral hieroglyphs were written on the interior walls of royal pyramids, and later in the tombs of nobles. Portions of some can be dated on the basis of internal evidence as having been composed as early as about 4000 b.c.e., though the actual inscriptions were made in the early third millennium. They are concerned with the resurrection of the dead and contain what appear to be stage directions and a script for a dramatic liturgy in which various divinities speak, frequently identifying themselves by name (“I am Horus”). It is speculated that the lines were recited by priests who wore animal masks representing the theriomorphic gods involved, although nothing is known of the actual rituals. These lines were evidently endowed by tax revenues set aside for the purpose, and there are accounts of misappropriations of such endowments for similar rites on behalf of more recently deceased nobles.

The Memphite drama is also of great antiquity, dating to about 3100 b.c.e. It was first rediscovered in the eighth century b.c.e. by an Ethiopian pharaoh in a worm-eaten leather or papyrus copy. Although this pharaoh had little notion of its age, he had it copied on a stone, which was eventually used by modern Egyptian peasants as a nether millstone and was later rescued after much of it had been worn away. This text, probably written as a coronation festival play, celebrates the gifts of the god Ptah, who was believed to have influenced the early development of religion and culture and to have aided the development of Egypt.

A later coronation festival play celebrated the elevation of a Middle Kingdom pharaoh to the throne in about 2000 b.c.e. A similar political ritual text has survived, a Heb Sed celebrating the coronation jubilee of King Osorkon II in the twenty-second year of his reign. Heb Seds symbolized the renewal of a king’s power through an imaginary death and resurrection after a long period of his reign. They are believed typically to have taken a dramatic form.

Another type of dramatic ritual is medicinal drama, of which a single example is recorded on the Metternich stele . This shamanic drama tells how the goddess Isis’s child Horus is stung by a scorpion and cured by a combination of magic and artificial respiration. This divine paradigm would have been used to promote the healing of a real patient.

The Abydos passion play were perhaps the largest and showiest of the Egyptian liturgical dramas. This great pageant celebrated the death and resurrection of Osiris and the coronation of the god Horus. Abydos became the principal seat of the cult of Osiris, but similar liturgies were acted out at Busiris, Heliopolis, Letopolis, and Sais. No single document gives a complete account of the Osiris legend, but evidence that the legend was dramatically reenacted in considerable detail comes from a stele set up by a court official named Ikhernofret in the twelfth-dynasty reign of Senwosret III (1887-1849 b.c.e.). In this stele, Ikhernofret records his accomplishments as organizer and participant in the Osiris mysteries, beginning with the words “I organized the departure of Wapwawet as he goes to the rescue of his father,” evidently in an early stage of the complex pageant. It has been conjectured that the full enactment of the Osiris story took place over an extended period in the religious year. The legend had considerable potential for dramatic elaboration because Osiris was the most humanized of the Egyptian gods, having evolved from a fertility god into a Christlike or Promethean figure, a special friend to humankind who suffers betrayal and death. The tears and laments of his mourners bring about his resurrection, and he becomes the ruler of the dead. This passion play of Osiris was a regular feature of Egyptian popular religion from about 2500 b.c.e. and was performed at Abydos until about the middle of the sixth century b.c.e. Herodotus knew of two other passion plays in Egypt a century later, and similar pageants were celebrated well into the Christian era.

The ingredients of drama were at hand in Egyptian ritual and letters, but the special cultural conditions that gave rise to theater in Greece were not present in Egypt. A stagnant culture, authoritarianism, and a preoccupation with religious ritual have variously been blamed for the failure of drama to germinate. As for the influence of Egyptian or Near Eastern dialogues and liturgies, there is no evidence that the Greeks were imitating anything outside their own culture when they did invent theater. The institutions suggestive of drama were only part of a milieu that the Greeks, particularly at the time of the birth of tragedy, were inclined to dismiss as barbaric.

The Origins of Greek Tragedy and Comedy

The cardinal fact for the study of Greek dramatic origins is Aristotle’s remark in the De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705) that tragedy developed “from the leaders of the dithyramb,” a song and dance in honor of Dionysus. There were other Greek cults whose rituals included mimed scenes from the life of the gods, such as the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis and the Delphic combat of Apollo with the Python. These rituals or liturgies were comparable to similar presentations in Egypt, but only the Dionysiac cult developed the capacity for myths from which the dramas of tragedy sprang. The worship of Dionysus was a late arrival in Greece, possibly coming from the northern regions such as Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace. Definite cult forms did not take shape in Attica, where tragedy developed, until the sixth century b.c.e. By that time, it was able to incubate in the hothouse conditions of a civilization already distinguished by a highly developed epic tradition and a mature lyric poetry. With literary siblings of this quality, the dithyramb had not only a rich base on which to develop but also a high standard of taste to meet. Accordingly, the dithyramb developed a larger repertory of events from the life of Dionysus than the archaic hymns composed in honor of the other gods. Moreover, for reasons that are not clear, the dithyramb became a more open-ended form than the older hymns. The Athenian tyrant Cleisthenes assigned to it a chorus originally sung for the hero Adrastus, and in the fifth century Bacchylides made the Athenian hero Theseus the subject of his Seventeenth Dithyramb. As far back as the early seventh century b.c.e., the great lyric poet Archilochus was already a regular leader and participant in dithyrambic performances: “I know how to lead the fair song of Lord Dionysus, the dithyramb, when my wits are fused with wine.” The poet’s emphasis on intoxication is significant, because the worship of Dionysus, unlike the other major Greek cults, was ecstatic. Wine stimulated the religious rapture of the god’s worshipers, who surrendered their personal identities: The men imagined themselves to be Satyrs or goat-men, the women maenads (“ravers”) or bacchantes (from the cult name Bacchos). This element of transformation grew out of the ecstatic character of Dionysiac religion and led to the role-playing of regular drama.

It is a great irony that a form of art demanding as much discipline and calculation as drama should have developed from the wild abandon of ecstatic dancers, but it was the freedom from the rigid formulas of ritual that gave Dionysiac worship its initial promise as a medium of artistic development. The mythic stories that were to be its raw material came from epic and heroic poetry, which was highly developed even as early as the mid-eighth century b.c.e., when writing was first introduced to Greece. Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1611) and Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614), composed in the formulaic style of oral poetry in the latter half of that century, set a literary standard for all time: His language and themes recurred in every literary genre throughout the rest of antiquity. The dramatizing style of Homeric narrative, particularly in the Iliad (more than half of which is direct dialogue), is echoed in tragedy, which in turn employed the long messenger-speech as a medium of narrative. In the generations after Homer, rhapsodists traveled around the Greek world giving dramatic recitations of scenes from Homer, further cultivating a Greek taste for theatrical performances.

Lyric poetry was another major influence on the original form of Greek drama. “Lyric” is a generic term for both personal monody (such as the poems of Sappho and Alcaeus) and choral song. As the name implies, both forms were recited to the accompaniment of the lyre, and both were identified with the word ōidē (whence “ode”), or song. The word survives in the second part of tragoidia. All poets were songwriters—even Homer called on his muse to sing, and the education of every well-born boy included instruction in the lyre. Homer’s fiercest and angriest warrior, Achilles, is also represented as an accomplished musician and singer of heroic song. The songs of lyric were less narrative than the verses of epic and more obviously meditative in the sense that they explored the meaning and the ramifications of a situation or an emotion, sometimes finding mythic paradigms for immediate experience and always looking for language precisely suited to what they sought to express. The style and rhythms of lyric poetry provided the main idiom of early tragedy, whose primary content was choral lyric. Choral song and dance were a part of the cultural life of every Greek, both male and female. Any public event of importance was marked by choral performances, either by adults or by groups of girls or boys. Sophocles himself sang and danced as a boy in a choral celebration of the Athenian victory at the Battle of Salamis, and it is reported that he took to writing because his voice was too weak for performance. Although choral dance is illustrated on many Greek vases, the details of choral dance are as little understood today as are those of early Greek music, but it is clear that most performances called for a dozen or more dancers, often holding one another’s hands as in some folk dances of modern Greece and its neighbors. The words strophe and antistrophe (“turn” and “counterturn”), used to denote stanzas of the choral interlude in mature Greek tragedy, suggest that the original movement of the dance was circular. The circular form of the orchestra (“dancing-place”) in many Greek theaters also suggests a kind of circle dance.

The Greek proclivity for the performing arts promised a ready audience for a deritualized Dionysiac performance. The work of adaptation has been attributed to a series of more or less shadowy individuals, the first of whom is Arion, a celebrated performer on the cithara who lived at Corinth around the end of the seventh century b.c.e. Sources point to Arion as the first poet to have written out dithyrambs, to have named the form, and to have produced them in Corinth. He may also have made alterations in the form of the dithyramb that brought it a step closer to tragedy; one source indicates that his songs came to be called “tragic drama” and his singers tragoidoi, but the evidence is problematic. Lasos of Hermione, an Argive, is believed to have introduced dithyrambic contests in Athens during the time of the tyrant Hipparchus. If this is true, Lasos can be credited with bringing the dithyramb to the city best suited to its development, as Athens was already the largest of the city-states and the Pisistratids had an active performing arts program. Under them, the City Dionysia became the great Athenian festival of musical and poetic contests, among which the dithyramb had a naturally preeminent place. The festival retained its importance in 510-509 b.c.e. after the expulsion of the tyrants. Simonides became the most successful of many composers of dithyrambs for the Athenian contests, claiming in one of his own epigrams to have won fifty-six dithyrambic victories. These performances at Athens were danced and sung by choruses of fifty men or boys; women of the citizen class were excluded from public life in Athens, and this kind of performance remained the sole prerogative of males throughout the fifth century, with men playing all female roles. The poet whose dithyramb won the first prize was awarded a bull. For the most part, however, the dithyramb remains something of a mystery. No complete specimen survives except for some possible later versions by Bacchylides, and the sources of information are late and unreliable.

Thespis is the name (probably a nom de plume meaning “inspired”) associated with the invention of tragedy proper, because the writer and impresario who adopted this name wrote in a role for a hypokritēs, or “answerer,” who played opposite the exarchos, or leader of the chorus. The dialogue between the chorus leader and his answerer now appeared as a series of “interpolations,” or episodes. This new dialogue-drama was introduced to Athens (or at least won its first victory there) under the tyrant Pisistratus in 534 b.c.e., possibly after a period of time in which Thespis and his troupe wandered around Attica with a wagon that served as a kind of float or stage for his performances. There is some evidence that Thespis performed in Athens as early as 560 b.c.e., before the organization of dramatic competitions. Thespis is said to have tried various methods of disguising the faces of his actors, first with white lead and other dyes, then with masks of white linen.

Thespis’s successor, Choerilus , made additional experiments with masks, and another early tragedian, Phrynichus, introduced masks representing female characters that were shaded lighter than the masks of male characters. This concern with masks shows that from the earliest stages of tragedy the role of actors was primarily recitative, and that the use of facial expression to convey character or emotion was alien to the form. The first known attempt to represent anything other than mythic action occurred in 492 b.c.e., when Phrynichus wrote about Persian reprisals against the Ionian revolt in The Capture of Miletus. The performance so distressed the Athenian audience that the playwright was fined. After the Persian defeat in 480-479 b.c.e., both Phrynichus’s Phoenissae (476 b.c.e.) and Aeschylus’s Persai (472 b.c.e.; The Persians, 1777), which represent the defeat through Persian eyes, were performed. These plays are early exceptions to the rule that only mythic subjects are suitable for the tragic stage. An early form of tragedy is evident in Aeschylus’s Hiketides (c. 463 b.c.e.; The Suppliants, 1777), long believed to be his earliest surviving play until a papyrus discovered in 1952 showed that it was produced after 470 b.c.e., probably about 463. The dominant role of the chorus, not only as a commentator but also as the chief character, and the relatively minor role of other characters in dialogue with one another indicate the strongly choral nature of the form that Aeschylus inherited. It was he, according to Aristotle, who added the second actor. This change, which made possible the evolution from chorus-drama to actor-drama, was to have far-reaching consequences for Greek theater and by itself justifies the characterization of Aeschylus as the “father of Greek tragedy,” but other innovations—in scene-painting, costuming, and special effects—suggest a flair for theatrical showmanship that compelled imitation and left an indelible stamp on Greek stage conventions. Subsequent developments, such as Sophocles’ introduction of the third actor, were little more than refinements of Aeschylus’s idea of the theater, and though his greatest successors had their own poetic vision, the Greek tragic theater remained Aeschylean in conception to the end.

Tragedy was the highest development of the original song and dance in honor of Dionysus. The dithyramb, from which it evolved, maintained a life of its own long after Thespis made tragedy a separate dramatic form, and a third kind of performance, the satyr play , survived as an adjunct to tragedy. The satyr play may in fact have been the earliest form of drama; as its name implies, the actors retained their dithyrambic character as satyrs, the phallic goat-men who follow Dionysus, who drink large amounts of wine, and who take indecent sexual liberties with maenads. The basic content of satyr drama consisted of unseemly outrages that the mischievous satyrs, the demons of misrule, visited on the venerable characters of Greek mythology. These performances had less to do with satire (a word derived from an unrelated Latin root) than with mythological farce. They seem originally to have been unscripted scenarios, though two examples of a later, more premeditated form survive in Sophocles’ Ichneutae (fifth century b.c.e.; the hunting dogs or trackers) and Euripides’ Kyklōps (c. 421 b.c.e.; Cyclops, 1782). Like the cartoon show, which was for years appended to American motion pictures, the satyr play was part of a tetralogy that a tragedian would offer at the annual dramatic competition, consisting of a trilogy of tragic dramas and a single satyr play. Euripides’ Alkēstis (438 b.c.e.; Alcestis, 1781) was submitted instead of a satyr play in 438 b.c.e.; its plot and themes are suitably countertragic.

Satyr drama proved to be an artistic dead end, eclipsed by the serious drama to which it was attached. Its themes and point of view were more successfully exploited in comedy, which was also a part of the dramatic festivals in honor of Dionysus. Its name, kōmoidia, or kōmos-song, is derived from the name of another Dionysiac celebration, the “revel.” A scene in Aristophanes’ Acharnēs (425 b.c.e.; The Acharnians, 1812) illustrates how the early kōmos may have looked when it was a simple rural procession in which the main personage sings a licentious song to Dionysus’s phallic companion, Phales. Aristotle adds that the kōmos included derisive songs making fun of prominent or unpopular persons. The comasts disguised themselves in masks and animal costumes to protect themselves against reprisals. This story accounts for the theriomorphic choruses of Aristophanes’ Sphēkes (422 b.c.e.; The Wasps, 1812), Ornithes (414 b.c.e.; The Birds, 1824), and Batrachoi (405 b.c.e.; The Frogs, 1780) and for the conspicuous presence of political satire in Old Comedy, which is known only in the late fifth century works of Aristophanes. The animal choruses have parallels in theatrical rituals all over the world, however, and their original purpose may not have been disguise. Somewhat less is known of the development of comedy than of tragedy, perhaps because, as Aristotle said, it was taken less seriously by the first historians of theater, but like tragedy (which uses a Doric dialect in the lyric portions and Attic in the dialogue), comedy appears to be a composite form. One element of comedy was the kōmos of Dionysus’s revelers; another was improvised Dorian farce, combined by Epicharmus of Syracuse (c. 530-440 b.c.e.) with a comic agōn, or debate-scene. Another distinctive feature of Old Comedy is the parabasis, a kind of entr’acte structurally related to the agōn in which the chorus lay aside their dramatic role and make a speech to win the favor of the audience. As this feature tends to become less prominent and finally disappears entirely in Aristophanes ’ later comedies, it may be surmised that it was an early component of Old Comedy. The prominence in the parabasis of political commentary suggests that it may have been a means of bringing political discontents into the open under the protection of a kind of carnival privilege. Another early feature is the comic Old Man, an established citizen and paterfamilias who hatches a fantastic scheme to rid himself and his fellow citizens of some common affliction in the body politic. Here, too, the pattern tends to break down as Aristophanes’ later comedies become less formulaic. A type-scene that occurs in the later portions of many of Aristophanes’ comedies shows the beating and expulsion of supposed undesirables. Performances of this type are common worldwide in rituals of mockery and are related to customs involving scapegoats in which a criminal representing all the wrongs of the community is led around, beaten, and killed. A ritual of this kind is reported to have existed in early Athens, and the symbolic chastening of informer, creditors, and other supposed delinquents in Old Comedy may well be a substitute for the earlier ritual executions. The padded costumes and red-tipped phalloi worn by the actors of Old Comedy are also common features of humorous performances in various parts of the world. In the Attic theater these are believed to be survivals from Dorian farce, but like other features they may go back to much earlier fertility rites.

It is rash to form any but the most tentative theories about the origin of Old Comedy because the evidence available is so late and incomplete. The examples of the form that survive from the last quarter of the fifth century, composed by a brilliant poet for a sophisticated audience, are highly eclectic and much influenced by mature tragedy, which is tirelessly parodied. Aristophanic comedy combines refined lyricism, literary parody, political satire, and licentious humor with a sublety that defies archaelogical analysis.

All Greek dramatic performances were technically and originally religious acts, performed throughout the fifth century at festivals of Dionysus , the de facto patron of theater. The first comedies were performed at the lesser or Rural Dionysia in December or early January. In Athens itself, comedy was first improvised at the Lenaea , a festival in January or February named after the Lenai, or maenads. Tragic performances were added to this festival about 442 b.c.e. The principal dramatic festival was the great or City Dionysia, celebrated in late March or early April. This festival was observed throughout Attica, and its direction was the responsibility of the archon eponymos, the highest state official, who selected the plays that were performed. Dithyrambs, comedies, and tragedies were presented, tragedies in the morning and comedies in the evening.

An ancient proverb has it that Greek tragedy as it is known today has “nothing to do with Dionysus.” Except for Euripides’ Bakchai (405 b.c.e.; The Bacchae, 1781), the last play of the last great tragedian, and Aristophanes’ The Frogs, Dionysus or his worship is not the subject of extant Greek plays. Gilbert Murray proposed in 1912 that the basic scenario of tragedy followed the outline of a ritual in which the year-daemon suffered and was killed in the form of a sacrificial animal, then resurrected. This attempt to apply Frazer’s anthropology has as few adherents today as the belief that Euripides’ The Bacchae, representing the persecution and triumph of Dionysus, reproduces the original pattern of early tragic ritual. The most plausible aspect of such hypotheses is that the suffering of many tragic characters that is displayed after the fact in a spectacular way, such as the bloody corpses in Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 b.c.e.; English translation, 1777) or the mutilated eyes of Oedipus preserves the traditional sparagmos, or dismemberment, of live animals by frenzied worshipers of Dionysus. Most students of the Greek stage are ready to agree, however, that the extant plays are essentially independent of their ritual origins and can be understood properly only if they are read as literary and dramatic artifacts.

Bibliography

Bergmann, Bettina, and Christine Kondoleon, eds. The Art of Ancient Spectacle. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. In nineteen essays, explores events such as combat in the arena, festivals, theatrical productions, processions, and banquets in terms of their forms and the visual arts created for them.

Bieber, Margarete. The History of the Greek and Roman Theater. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. Explores the ancient roots of Greek and Roman drama.

Cheney, Sheldon. The Theatre: Three Thousand Years of Drama, Acting, and Stagecraft. New York: McKay, 1972. Provides history and interpretation of the development of performance and stage acting. Bibliography.

Kirby, E. T. Ur-Drama: The Origins of Theatre. New York: New York University Press, 1975. Discusses ancient origins of theater.

Lexova, Irena. Ancient Egyptian Dances. Translated by Diane Bergman. New York: Dover, 2000. Using numerous illustrations, investigates the origins, nature, and role of dance in Egyptian culture, including gymnastic, imitative, dramatic, and lyrical performances. Bibliography.

Pickard-Cambridge, Arthur W. Dithyramb, Tragedy, and Comedy. 2d ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1962. Provides history and criticism of Greek tragedy and comedy.

Schechner, Richard, and Mady Schuman. Ritual, Play, and Performance. New York: Seabury Press, 1976. Explores a host of topics related to the very early origins of theater, including shamanism and meditation, social dramas and ritual metaphors, and magic.

Wilson, Edwin, and Alvin Goldfarb. Living Theater: A History. 3d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999. Traces the development of theater in a contextual manner, examining the social, political, and economic conditions of each era. A small chapter on early theater, followed by more substantial chapters on Greek and Roman theater.