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May. 25th, 2012 06:30 pmGreek tragedies come in threes. Playwrights were invited to have their plays performed at the City Dionysia, a huge festival in honour of Dionysus where Athens showed off how cultured it was. This is important: Athenian values are being defended to outsiders, at least a little. Comedies were performed at smaller, local festivals, and they have a lot more jokes about politics.
People were paid to attend the theatre in Athens (starting around the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles, or a bit before, I think). It'd almost be worth the lack of indoor plumbing and the horrific sex roles.
Greek theatre was not like modern theatre - there was lots of singing, and the conditions of staging were entirely different, but that's a huge tangent and I'll talk about it if it becomes relevant. The origins of tragedy are something lots of people talk about but no one actually knows anything about, so we'll drop that too. These are the basics.
Every playwright got one full day for his plays. The tragedies were performed one after another, with short breaks in between. After the three tragedies came the satyr play, which used tragic meter to make lots of dirty jokes about some of the same themes the trilogy covered. Right after the death of Ajax, when you're still all shell-shocked and horrified, you get to watch a bunch of satyrs getting drunk while wearing giant strap-ons. This is what Aristotle called catharsis.
This is entirely different from the modern experience, even of Greek plays, since we only have one surviving complete trilogy, Aeschylus's Oresteia, which is missing its satyr play.
Aeschylus's trilogies (we think) were all focused on one myth each, like the Oresteia. Later on, playwrights mostly wrote individual plays about different myths, and then presented three together as a trilogy. We have three plays by Sophocles about Odysseus, but he wrote them for three different festivals.
So what is the Oresteia?
( Cut for cannibalism, matricide, infanticide, filicide, mariticide, and war. )
You have no idea how many times I typed 'Troy' as 'Tory' in this post.
People were paid to attend the theatre in Athens (starting around the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles, or a bit before, I think). It'd almost be worth the lack of indoor plumbing and the horrific sex roles.
Greek theatre was not like modern theatre - there was lots of singing, and the conditions of staging were entirely different, but that's a huge tangent and I'll talk about it if it becomes relevant. The origins of tragedy are something lots of people talk about but no one actually knows anything about, so we'll drop that too. These are the basics.
Every playwright got one full day for his plays. The tragedies were performed one after another, with short breaks in between. After the three tragedies came the satyr play, which used tragic meter to make lots of dirty jokes about some of the same themes the trilogy covered. Right after the death of Ajax, when you're still all shell-shocked and horrified, you get to watch a bunch of satyrs getting drunk while wearing giant strap-ons. This is what Aristotle called catharsis.
This is entirely different from the modern experience, even of Greek plays, since we only have one surviving complete trilogy, Aeschylus's Oresteia, which is missing its satyr play.
Aeschylus's trilogies (we think) were all focused on one myth each, like the Oresteia. Later on, playwrights mostly wrote individual plays about different myths, and then presented three together as a trilogy. We have three plays by Sophocles about Odysseus, but he wrote them for three different festivals.
So what is the Oresteia?
( Cut for cannibalism, matricide, infanticide, filicide, mariticide, and war. )
You have no idea how many times I typed 'Troy' as 'Tory' in this post.
