Two Basic Tragic Situations

Drama (Oyun) $ncelemesi ve Ö%retimi

Saturday, October 25, 2008

THE ORIGINS OF DRAMA ! The supreme literary achievement of the Greeks was the tragic drama. Like so many of their other great works, it had its roots in religion. ! At the festivals dedicated to the worship of Dionysus (the god of spring and of wine), a chorus of men dressed as satyrus -or goat men- sang and danced as around an altar, enacting various parts of a choral lyric that related the story of the god"s career. ! The chorus dressed in goat skins because the goat was sacred to Dionysus and goats were #prices" which were awarded for the best enactments. The name #tragedy" which came to be applied to this drama was probably derived from the Greek word #tragos" meaning #goat" and/or #tragoidia" which means #goat-song!. ! In the open air, day-lit Greek theatre, the chorus was a practical necessity. The chorus commented on the events and participated in them. In time a leader came to be separated from the chorus to recite the main parts of the story (Thespis 534 B.C.). The true drama was born about the beginning of the 5th century when Aeschylus introduced a second #actor" and relegated the chorus to the background. The addition of the third #actor" by Sophocles made possible a drama which could show and develop a human situation in all its aspects.

The Theatre of Sophocles: ! For a citizen of Athens in the 5th century B.C. when the classical Greek tragedies originated, a play was a religious occasion. Plays were given in January or in the spring. So well did the Athenians love contests that at the spring festivals each playwright was to present - in competition - three tragedies on successive days, the last tragedy to be followed by a short comedy. The comedy was a satyr play - a parody of a mythic story, with a chorus of actors playing satyrs (creatures half goat, half men). ! Seated in the open air, in a hillside amphitheater, as many as 14,000 spectators arranged in rows looked out across a rounded orchestra or dancing place, where the chorus of fifteen sang passages of lyric poetry and danced. Besides providing stage business, the chorus had a function in telling the story: in the plays of Sophocles, they converse with the main character and sometimes comment on the action, offering words of warning and other unwanted advice. As they physically stand between audience and the principal actors, the members of the chorus serve as middlemen who seem to voice the spectators" reactions. ! Behind the orchestra stood the actors, in front of a stage house or skene. Originally, skene was a dressing room; later it is believed to have borne a painted backdrop. Directly behind the skene, was a colonnade - rows of pillars - which provided a ready-made set for a palace.

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Drama (Oyun) $ncelemesi ve Ö%retimi

Saturday, October 25, 2008

! In the time of Euripedes, the skene supported a hook and pulley by which actors who played gods could be lowered of lifted - hence the Latin phrase #deus ex machina" (god out of the machine) for any means of bringing a play quickly to resolution. What did the actors look like? ! They wore masks (#personae" - a thing through which sound comes). Some of these masks had exaggerated mouthpieces, probably designed to project speech across the open air. From certain conventional masks the spectators recognized familiar types: the young soldier, the wise man, the beautiful girl. Perhaps in order to gain in dignity, actors in the Greek theater eventually came to wear the #cothurnus" - buskin (a high, thick-soled elevator shoe).

Greek Tragedies 1. There was little action presented on stage; the main business of the actors was to recite the incidents of a plot which was already familiar to the audience, because the story was drawn from popular legends. 2. Greek tragedy devoted little attention to the study of the complicated individual personality. 3. Greek tragedies had as theme the conflict between the individual and the universe, not the clash between personalities, or the internal conflicts of one person. Their purpose was to ask questions about the nature of man, his position in the universe, his relation to the powers that govern his life; in short: tragedies concerned with the problems of man"s fate. Therefore, the prime function of these dramas is the expression of the feelings and reflections excited by man"s encounters with the external forces which appear to rule his life and the actions he takes in such an encounter. The tragic fate that befell the main characters was external to individuals. It was brought on by the fact that someone had committed a crime against society or against the gods, thereby offending the moral scheme of the universe.

Punishment must follow in order to balance the scale of justice. The Tragic Situation: ! In Greek tragedy, the tragic situation, in which the characters find themselves, is always a situation in which man seems to be deprived of all outward help and is forced to rely entirely upon himself. It is a situation of extraordinary tension, of outmost conflict. Studying the plots of a number of Greek tragedies one can find variations of two basic tragic situations:

1. there’s the case of man’s miscalculation of reality 2. the case of man between two conflicting principles. The protagonist is suddenly put at the crossing point of two duties, both of which claim fulfillment. Either way, every tragic situation results in severest suffering for the protagonist the catastrophe, sealing the tragic situation, comes as an avalanche that over-rolls both the bad and the good. This indicates that the individual is responsible not only for his own but also for the fortunes of society.

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Drama (Oyun) $ncelemesi ve Ö%retimi

Saturday, October 25, 2008

! It is common to all characters in a tragic situation that they are confronted with a choice.

‘Choice is at the heart of tragedy.’ The results of this choice are always fatal. In his suffering, in the entire destruction of this outer and inner self, the tragic hero attains a certain greatness.

Tragic Dramatists • Aeschylus: ! ! Seven Against Thebes ! ! Prometheus Bound ! ! The Oresteia

guilt and punishment

He examines the dangers of arrogance, the ancient rule of blood for blood and the inevitability of the misuse of power (Justified the ways of gods). • Sophocles: ! He personified the Hellenic ideal of "nothing too much!. ! ! !

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Oedipus Rex Antigone Electra

He had profound sympathy for human weakness. To Sophocles, any violation of the cosmic order creates suffering, but suffering can redeem and exalt. • Euripedes: ! He questions the established beliefs. He was the first to give ordinary man place in drama. He was a skeptic, individualistic, a humanist. Because of his humanism, his tendency to portray men as they are and his introduction of the love motif into drama, he is often considered a modernist. ! ! Medea ! ! Alcestis ! ! The Trojan Women He dealt with situations having analogue in real life.

Comedy Writers • Aristophanes: ! !

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The Frogs Lysistrata Page 3

Drama (Oyun) $ncelemesi ve Ö%retimi

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Aristotle!s concept of Tragedy ! !A tragedy, then, is an imitation of an actions that is serious, complete in itself and a certain magnitude; in a language embellished with each kind of artistry… cast in the form of drama, not narrative; accomplishing through incidents that arouse pity and fear the purgation of these emotions." Poetics, ch. VI Aristotle observe that the protagonist is a person of #high estate"; but he is fallible. The hero"s downfall is the result of his hamartia (his error, flaw or weakness of character). Every tragic hero has some fatal weakness that brings him to a bad end. In some classical tragedies, it is hubris: extreme pride, leading to overconfidence. !

purgation --> katharsis (purification)

!

recognition --> anagnorisis (the revelation of some fact not known before)

!To see things plain - that is anagnorisis, and it is the ultimate experience we shall have if we have leisure at the point of death… It is what tragedy is about: the realization of the unthinkable." Clifford Leech ! reversal --> peripeteia (peripety: an action that runs out to have the opposite effect from the one its doer had intended.)

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