Greek Theater: Tragedy and Comedy in Ancient Greece
The Choir
The root of Greek theater is a choir, and it always appears in tragedies. But over time, the choir loses importance. Mimo: Short works and comfortable everyday life.
Greek Comedy
Its origin is after the tragedy. As occurs in the tragedy, it is in Athens where the comedy reaches its peak. The comedy has a foreign element to the tragedy; it is called digression, which, located in the center of the comedy, is a long run of very broad lines, in which the poet presents his thesis among other things. Other elements of comedy are obscene, and the burlesque element sometimes culminates in the personal attack.
The Most Important Figure is Aristophanes in Greek Comedy
Stages of Comedy
The evolution of comedy is divided into three stages:
- Ancient Comedy (until 400 BC)
- Middle Comedy (to 320 BC)
- New Comedy (to 250 BC)
Important authors are:
Aeschylus: Distributed the subject of heroic myth into three parts, and on them wrote three tragedies dealing with three key moments in their area and ended with a satirical drama in order to download the terrible atmosphere of the previous voltage.
The Aeschylus tetralogies: Two humanly irreconcilable views, which reach the limit situation of despair, but ultimately find a higher justification in the divine plan.
Aeschylus presents his theater in a highly poetic and highly expressive language.
Sophocles: As a playwright, deleted the tetralogical structure observed by Aeschylus and introduced a second actor in the tragedy.
Described how heroes should be.
Euripides introduces us to men as they really are. The drama of Euripides demystifies pain, so it grows. In the theater of Aeschylus, “suffering” is emphasized.
Overall Rating of Greek Tragedy
Sophocles and Euripides lived in parallel; that is, they were absolutely contemporary. Among the three authors, they include the integrity of human life.
The word that goes more deeply into Greek tragedy is the one Aristotle spoke when he said that its main function is catharsis (purification) by suffering.
Tragedy has been the school of Greece.
Aristotle’s View
According to Aristotle, what we call “drama” or “classical theater” would be a kind of art that uses a variety of resources such as rhythm, word, and music to imitate people who perform actions.
So, by the mode or form that occurs with the imitation, this type of poetics is called “drama,” which comes from the ancient Greek verb “to do.” By the imitated object, plays lead to their ultimate consequences: high and ridiculous topics that were already covered by Homer in his epic poetry and are divided into:
Tragedies or plays that imitate people who are morally superior, better, with a beautiful performance that involves actions formidable and worthy of compassion.
Some of the most important characteristics of tragedy are:
The incident, which is a twist on the action. It is usually placed in the third act, where the climax occurs.
Tragedies tend to play much with anagnorisis, which is the recognition of a character who until then had remained hidden.
Comedy, or plays that imitate people of inferior quality, in appearance laughable as a variant of the ugly.
For the medium that it mimics, tragedy consists of six basic elements: plot, characters, language, thought, spectacle, and music, all well organized in an outline of the presentation type, middle, and end, and quantitatively distributed in the prologue, episode, exodus, choral singing, parody, and stasimon.