Reading a Play

1
Reading a Play

• I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art
  forms, the most immediate way in which a human
  being can share with another the sense of what it
  is to be a human being
• --Oscar Wilde

2
Purpose

• Most plays are written not to be read in books
  but to be performed.
• However, there are advantages to reading plays in
  books.
• It is better to know some masterpieces by reading
  them than to never know them at all.
• It would be next to impossible to see every
  Shakespearean play on stage, but the plays are
  easily accessible on paper.

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Advantages

• A play is literature before it comes alive in a
  theater.
• If a play contains difficult language and
  allusion, reading it enables us to study it at
  our leisure and return to parts that demand
  greater scrutiny.
• Some plays are actually destined to be read more
  often than they are acted.

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Advantages

• Sometimes reading a play is the only way of
  knowing it as the author wrote it in its
  entirety.
• Producers of plays often leave out important
  speeches and scenes in plays, and the production
  itself is often representative of the producers
  interpretation of the play, which may be
  different from the way that one perceives it
  while reading.

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The Elements

• The protagonist
• The antagonist
• The exposition
• The climax
• The resolution
• Stage directions

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Tragedy

• Tragedy a play that portrays a serious conflict
  between human beings and some superior,
  overwhelming force.
• It ends sorrowfully and disastrously, and this
  outcome seems inevitable.
• The art of tragedy goes back to ancient Athens,
  where Greek dramatists Sophocles, Aeschylus, and
  Euripides wrote plays.

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Tragedy

• Tragedy is fairly simple
• The protagonist undergoes a reversal of fortune,
  from good to bad, ending in catastrophe.
• However, tragedies can be tough to interpret as
  many readers will have very different opinions
  about the text.
• Even though the formula for tragedy is simple,
  most tragedies will somehow fail to observe the
  conventions of tragedy.

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Real Life Tragedy vs. Literary Tragedy

• Real life
• The death of a child
• A fire that destroys a familys house
• The killing of a bystander caught in the
  crossfire of a shootout between criminals.
• What do these all have in common?
• They involve the infliction of great and
  irreversible suffering.
• The sufferers are innocent, and they have done
  nothing to cause or deserve their fate.

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Real Life Tragedy vs. Literary Tragedy

• Literary Tragedy
• The protagonists reversal of fortune is brought
  about through some error or weakness on his part,
  generally referred to as his tragic flaw.
• Despite this weakness, the hero is traditionally
  a person of nobility, of both social rank and
  personality.
• In most tragedies, the catastrophe entails not
  only the loss of outward fortunethings such as
  reputation, power, and life itself, but also the
  erosion of the protagonists moral character and
  greatness of spirit.

10
Style

• Tragedies are customarily written in an elevated
  style, one characterized by dignity and
  seriousness.
• In the Middle Ages, the word tragedy indicated a
  work written in a high style in which the central
  character went from good fortune to bad.
• Comedy indicated the opposite.

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How Tragedies Make the Reader Feel

• According to Aristotle, tragedies seek to arouse
  pity and fear in the reader.
• We feel sorry for those who appear to be worse
  off than ourselves.
• Even if a tragedy moves you, you will most
  likely feel a sense of detachment from the
  protagonist a better him than me attitude.
• There is also the element of fear readers are
  made to feel vulnerable in the face of lifes
  dangers and instability.

12
The Theater of Sophocles

• For the citizens of Athens in the fifth century
  B.C. theater was both a religious and a civic
  occasion.
• Plays were presented twice a year at religious
  festivalsboth associated with Dionysius, the god
  of wine and crops.
• In January there was the Lenaea, the festival of
  the winepress, when plays, especially comedies
  were performed.
• The major theatrical event of the year came in
  March at the Great Dionysia, a city-wide
  celebration that included sacrifices, prize
  ceremonies, and spectacular processions as well
  as three days of drama.

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The Theater of Sophocles

• Each day at dawn a different author presented a
  trilogy of tragic playsthree interrelated dramas
  that portrayed an important mythic or legendary
  event.
• Each intense tragic trilogy was followed by a
  satyr play, an obscene parody of a mythic story,
  performed with the chorus dressed as satyrs,
  unruly mythic attendants of Dionysius who were
  half goat or horse and half human.

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The Theater of Sophocles

• The Greeks loved competition and believed it
  fostered excellence.
• Even the theater was a competitive eventnot
  unlike the Olympic games.
• A panel of 5 judges voted each year at the Great
  Dionysia for the best dramatic presentation, and
  a substantial cash prize was given to the winning
  poet-playwright.

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The Theater of Sophocles

• Sophocles triumphed in the competition
  twenty-four times, but did not win a prize for
  Oedipus the King.
• Although this play ultimately proved to be the
  most celebrated Greek tragedy ever written, it
  lost the award to a revival of a popular trilogy
  by Aeschylus, who had recently died.

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The Theater of Sophocles Staging

• As many as 17,000 spectators could fit into the
  open air hillside amphitheater.
• The audience was arranged in rows, with the
  Athenian governing council and young military
  cadets seated in the middle sections.
• Priests, priestesses, and foreign dignitaries
  were given special places of honor in the front
  rows.

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The Theater of Sophocles Staging

• The performance space they watched was divided
  into two parts the orchestra, a level circular
  dancing space, and a slightly raised stage
  built in front of the skene or stage house,
  originally a canvas or wooden hut for costume
  changes.

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The Theater of Sophocles Staging

• The actors spoke and performed on the stage
• The chorus sang and danced in the orchestra
• The skene served as a general set or backdrop

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The Structure

• No more than 3 actors were allowed on stage at
  any one time
• The chorus had to have 15 members
• The actors spoken monologue and dialogue
  alternated with the chorus singing and dancing
• Each tragedy began with a prologue
• The parados came next (the song for the entrance
  of the chorus)

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The Structure

• The next action was enacted in episodes, like the
  acts or scenes in modern plays
• The episodes were separated by danced choral
  songs or odes
• The play ended with the exodos, or closing, in
  which the characters and chorus concluded the
  action and departed

21
The Actors

• The actors wore masks
• Some of these masks had exaggerated mouthpieces,
  possibly designed to project speech across the
  open air.
• The masks helped spectators far away recognize
  the chief characters.

22
The Masks

• The masks often represented certain conventional
  types of characters the old king, the young
  soldier, the shepherd, the beautiful girl
  (womens parts were played by male actors)
• The actors also began to wear cothurni, high,
  thick-soled elevator shoes that made them appear
  taller than ordinary men.

23
The Civic Role

• Athenian drama was supported and financed by the
  state.
• Administration of the Great Dionysia fell to the
  head civil magistrate.
• He annually appointed three wealthy citizens to
  serve as choregoi, or producers, for the
  competing plays.

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The Civic Role

• Each producer had to equip the chorus and rent
  the rehearsal space in which the poet-playwright
  would prepare the new work for the festival.
• The state covered the expenses of the theater,
  actors, and prizes.
• Theater tickets were distributed free to
  citizens, which meant that every registered
  Athenian, even the poorest, could participate.

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The Civic Role

• The playwrights addressed themselves to every
  element of the Athenian democracy.
• Only the size of the amphitheater limited the
  attendance. It could hold slightly less than
  half of the population of Athens.

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The Civic Role

• Greek theater was directed at the moral and
  political education of the community.
• The poets role was the improvement of the polis
  or city-state.
• The purpose of the tragedies was for the
  performers and the audience to put themselves in
  the places of persons quite unlike themselves, in
  situations that might engulf any unlucky
  citizenwar, political upheaval, betrayal,
  domestic crisis.

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The Civic Role

• The release of the powerful emotions of pity and
  fear created a sort of paradoxhow a viewer takes
  aesthetic pleasure in witnessing the suffering of
  others.

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Aristotles Concept of Tragedy

• Aristotle defined tragedy in the fourth century
  B.C.
• He didnt make the definition to lay down the
  laws for what tragedy should be.
• More likely, he drew from tragedies that he saw
  or read and gave a general description of them.

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Aristotles Concept of Tragedy

• The protagonist is a person of high estate,
  such as a king or queen or other member of a
  royal family.
• The protagonist must fall from power and from
  happiness his high estate gives him a place of
  dignity to fall from and perhaps makes his fall
  seem all the more a calamity in that it involves
  an entire nation or people.

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Aristotles Concept of Tragedy

• The protagonist is not only extraordinary because
  of his position in society Oedipus is not only a
  king but also a noble soul who suffers profoundly
  and who employs splendid speech to express his
  suffering.

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Aristotles Concept of Tragedy

• The tragic hero is not a superman he is
  fallible.
• The heros downfall is the result of his own
  error or transgression, or whats called his
  tragic flaw.
• Often, the tragic flaw will be extreme pride,
  leading to overconfidence.

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Aristotles Concept of Tragedy

• Aristotle implies that after witnessing a tragedy
  we feel better, not worsenot depressed, but
  somehow elated.
• We take a kind of pleasure in the spectacle of a
  noble man being abased.
• Part of this pleasure may be based in our feeling
  of rightness or accuracy of what we have just
  witnessed.

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Aristotles Concept of Tragedy

• Recognition the revelation of some fact not
  known before or some persons true identity.
• Tragedy is about the realization of the
  unthinkable.
• Reversal action that turns out to have the
  opposite effect from the one its doer had
  intended.

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Aristotles Concept of Tragedy

• The play usually ends with the protagonist
  accepting his fate as the divine will of the
  gods.
• The protagonist has fallen from high estate but
  is uplifted in moral dignity.

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End