THE WORLD OF TRAGEDY
  • Syllabus
  • Unit One
    • Aristotle's Poetics
    • Ancient Greek Theater
    • Oedipus the King
    • Antigone
    • Medea
    • Playing the Other
    • The Birth of Tragedy
    • The Mourning Voice
    • Lars von Trier's Medea
    • Cherrie Moraga's The Hungry Woman
    • A Theory of Adaptation
  • Unit Two
    • Early Modern Theater
    • Richard III
    • THEATER EXCURSION
    • Original Practices
    • Women of Richard III
    • Hamlet
    • Notorious Identity
    • Shakespeare's Ghost Writers/King in the Car Park
    • Mock Hamlet Exam
    • Hamlet 2
  • ASSIGNMENTS
    • Student Website Assignments
    • MEDEA ESSAY SAMPLES
    • THEATER REVIEW GUIDELINES
    • THEATER REVIEW MODEL
    • FINAL PAPER HAMLET
    • TIPS FOR FINAL PAPER
  • Resources
    • WHAT WE LEARNED
    • Glossary
    • Further Reading
    • Professor Walsh Recommends
    • Places and Projects
    • The World of Tragedy
    • FINAL PAPERS
  • TECH
    • A History of Hamlet
    • Paul
    • Estella
    • Estella
    • Estella
  • FINAL PAPERS
    • Hamlet: Jedi Knight
    • The Lion King
    • Game of Thrones
    • House of Cards
    • Shakespeare's Hamlet
    • Sopranos
    • Tragic Women
    • Waiting for Godot
    • Films of Tim Burton
    • Miley Cyrus
THE MATERIAL FOUND BELOW COMES FROM ROBERT FAGLES'S INTRODUCTION, "GREECE AND THE THEATER," TO SOPHOCLES, THE THREE THEBAN PLAYS: ANTIGONE, OEDIPUS THE KING, AND OEDIPUS AT COLONUS.  NEW YORK: PENGUIN, 1984. 
Picture
Map of Greece
Picture
Map of Athens
1) Locations 
            Agora – Marketplace crowded with people
            Acropolis – Temple of Worship up on a hill (Parthenon in Athens) “edge of the city”

2) Athens
         - Most powerful city in Ancient Greece
         - Port of Peraeus
         - Imperial and Democratic
         - Taxes other city states
         - Wealthy, Festive, Leisure (p. 17 “The revenues of empire and profits from commercial operations…made possible that lavish expenditure on public festivals…”

3) Festival of Dionysus (p. 17-18 “Among these festivals the most famous and popular was the Dionysia)
            - Vegetation/Fertility/Sexuality (p. 18 “Dionysus is the life spirit of all green vegetation…”)
            - Drunkenness/Crowd Mentality
            - Theater (p. 18-19 “Dionysus is often portrayed in contemporary vase painting as masked or even as a mask…”
            - Madness
            - Sexually Ambiguous
            - Roman  à Bacchus

4) Theater
            - Seated 15,000
            - Athens Theater SE of Acropolis (Parthenon)
            - Actors in masks
            - Male actors for female roles

5) Non-realistic Performance
            - Diction (words)
            - Delivery (voice)
            - Gestures (choreography)

6) Chorus (p. 20 “In addition to actors and spectators, there was a third element of the performance, one older than either of these two. It was the chorus…”
            - Chorus = Dance
            - Older than Drama
            - Thespis added Speech
            - Thespis àThespian

7) Competition (p. 21 “For, like almost all Greek institutions, the festival of Dionysus was a contest.”
            - 3 Dramatists (E.g. Sophocles v. Euripides v. Aeschylus)
            - 3 Days
            - 3 Prize levels
            - 10 Judges (elected opening day)

8) Sophocles
            - Won 1st place 18x
            - Playwright and Army General
            - Wrote 123 Plays (7 contemporarily available)
            - Died @ 90 years

9) Politics
            - Tribute Money displayed prior
            - War orphans paraded in armor (p.22 “The orphaned children of those Athenians who had fallen in battle were cared for and educated by the city; once they had reached young manhood, they were paraded in the theater in full armor…”)
            - Honors for academics and foreign heads of state
            - Mockery of prominent figures via comic poets

10) Mythology
            - Basis for Tragic Storylines
            - Facts of Faith are inescapably valid
            - Theme of Fate v. Effort
            - Mythology was popular knowledge (p. 24 “Oedipus always kills his father and marries his mother…”)
            - Historically Significant (p. 23 “These myths were the only national memory of the remote past…”)

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