The Influence Of Greek Tragedies

Theater and drama is directly influenced by the fundamentals that Greek dramatics set in the preliminary stages of growth in the theater department. One of the biggest and arguably most important forms of Greek theater was tragedy. The subject of Tragedy is very broad and hard to define. To give the topic the attention it deserves it needs to be placed in its own piece of work to help dive into the different details surrounding Greek tragedy. This paper will start by looking deeply into exactly what a tragedy is and the origins of where it came from. The second section will discuss the three great playwrights of Greek tragedy and the effect that they have individually and as a whole on the art form of tragedy. It will start with Aeschylus as one of the first playwrights of tragedy. We …show more content…
Next we will discuss the factors Euripides has had on Greek tragedies. Lastly this paper will touch on the effects Thespis had on theater in modern society.
The first question that must be defined when discussing the influence of tragedy is ‘what exactly is a tragedy’? In the theater it is hard to define exactly the complex nature that makes up a tragedy. A man by the name of Benno von Wiese who studied German tragedy from Lessing to Hebbel once stated that even for this comparatively restricted period he has refrained from giving a ‘magic formula for interpretation’. We are often able to find the essence of tragedy in earlier Greek works, such as poems. We start to see a concept