GREEK TRAGEDY
Καλημερα! Today, I decided to take you on a journey through time and space. If you agree, we are now going to leave Australia and catch a flight whose final destination is Athens in the beginning of the fifth century BC. This century was Athens’ Golden Age: it was a political hegemony (ο ηγεμων, ονος : one who leads) which means supremacy, and its economy was growing, but what I am going to speak about today has to do with Athens’ cultural blossoming. The fifth century was the time of sculptors such as Phidias, ceramics and the theatre, especially tragedy. Greek tragedy is the topic of my seminar today. You may already know a few things about this matter, but my mission today is to broaden your knowledge. Although uncertainties …show more content…
You have to know that every tragic play had to follow a typical structure. According to MacLennan, a professor from the University of Tennessee who is authoritative and reliable because what he says is supported by the site ArtsEdge whose purpose is to provide the “highest quality Internet content and professional development to teachers and students throughout the United States” (ArtsEdge, 2015), every tragedy started with a prologue of which the purpose was to present the topic of the play. This prologue was followed by a parode during which the chorus entered the play dancing and singing and also explaining to the audience the context of the story and what happened just before the action started. Then came the episode, the most important part of the tragedy because it is where most of the plot happened. Nevertheless, it is rather a dialogue between the actors or an actor and the chorus than actual action. There was on average between three and five episodes, each of them followed by a stasimon in which the chorus singing made comments or reacted upon the previous episode. The last of the five essential parts of a tragedy was the exodus, literally the song to get out, whose purpose was to present to the audience what the moral of the story was (Englert, n.d.). Next to the structure of the play, there were also other important conventions that had to be respected by the playwrights: the hero had to experience a tragic destiny, a reversal of fortune and a downfall and this is the essence of the tragedy. They also had to take the three rules of unity into account: unity of place (the action had to take place in only one location), unity of time (the part that the tragedy was representing couldn’t cover more than 24 hours) and unity of action (it had to be only one story per play). The chorus also had several features which
Καλημερα! Today, I decided to take you on a journey through time and space. If you agree, we are now going to leave Australia and catch a flight whose final destination is Athens in the beginning of the fifth century BC. This century was Athens’ Golden Age: it was a political hegemony (ο ηγεμων, ονος : one who leads) which means supremacy, and its economy was growing, but what I am going to speak about today has to do with Athens’ cultural blossoming. The fifth century was the time of sculptors such as Phidias, ceramics and the theatre, especially tragedy. Greek tragedy is the topic of my seminar today. You may already know a few things about this matter, but my mission today is to broaden your knowledge. Although uncertainties …show more content…
You have to know that every tragic play had to follow a typical structure. According to MacLennan, a professor from the University of Tennessee who is authoritative and reliable because what he says is supported by the site ArtsEdge whose purpose is to provide the “highest quality Internet content and professional development to teachers and students throughout the United States” (ArtsEdge, 2015), every tragedy started with a prologue of which the purpose was to present the topic of the play. This prologue was followed by a parode during which the chorus entered the play dancing and singing and also explaining to the audience the context of the story and what happened just before the action started. Then came the episode, the most important part of the tragedy because it is where most of the plot happened. Nevertheless, it is rather a dialogue between the actors or an actor and the chorus than actual action. There was on average between three and five episodes, each of them followed by a stasimon in which the chorus singing made comments or reacted upon the previous episode. The last of the five essential parts of a tragedy was the exodus, literally the song to get out, whose purpose was to present to the audience what the moral of the story was (Englert, n.d.). Next to the structure of the play, there were also other important conventions that had to be respected by the playwrights: the hero had to experience a tragic destiny, a reversal of fortune and a downfall and this is the essence of the tragedy. They also had to take the three rules of unity into account: unity of place (the action had to take place in only one location), unity of time (the part that the tragedy was representing couldn’t cover more than 24 hours) and unity of action (it had to be only one story per play). The chorus also had several features which