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Notes On The Theater of Aeschylus: Background

The document provides background information on Greek theater, focusing on the plays of Aeschylus. It discusses: 1) The origins of Greek theater in religious rituals dedicated to Dionysus that evolved into formal dramas by playwrights like Aeschylus. 2) Details of the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, where plays were performed, including its large amphitheater structure and areas like the orchestra and skene building. 3) Performance conventions like masks, costumes, and the chorus's role between actors and audience.

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Greg O'Dea
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63 views4 pages

Notes On The Theater of Aeschylus: Background

The document provides background information on Greek theater, focusing on the plays of Aeschylus. It discusses: 1) The origins of Greek theater in religious rituals dedicated to Dionysus that evolved into formal dramas by playwrights like Aeschylus. 2) Details of the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, where plays were performed, including its large amphitheater structure and areas like the orchestra and skene building. 3) Performance conventions like masks, costumes, and the chorus's role between actors and audience.

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Greg O'Dea
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© © All Rights Reserved
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English 113

Western Humanities I
Dr. O’Dea

Notes on the Theater of Aeschylus

Background
The grand Greek theater of Athens (5th and 4th centuries B. C.) grew out of primitive rituals
performed in conjunction with three annual festivals dedicated to Dionysus, the god of fertility,
regeneration, and wine. The older rituals, which included orgiastic feasting, drinking, sex, and
sacrifices to the god, evolved into more formalized role playing, and eventually into the great
dramas by renown playwrights such as Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles.
While Greek theater became more secularized, its religious qualities never wholly disappeared.
Plays were performed only at the thrice-yearly festivals, and then in large doses of four or five
plays a day—circumstances that had great impact on the content, form, and production of the
drama.

The Theater
The great dramas of the 5th and 4th centuries B. C. (or those which have survived) were written
for performance at the Theater of Dionysus at Athens, a huge amphitheater dug out of the slope
beneath the south side of the Acropolis. While its expansion and renovation over many
centuries makes it impossible to determine its original shape, scholars have come to accept the
following as a reasonable approximation (see attached illustrations).

The audience—which often numbered around 20,000—sat on wooden benches that ascended
the hillside and more than half encircled an orchestra, a dancing area perhaps 78 feet in
diameter. A wooden building or tent called a skene (from which we derive the term “scene”)
closed off the second half of the amphitheater, and served as a vague scenic background, a
changing place for actors, and an acoustic wall, reflecting the actors’ voices back to the
audience. The narrow space between the skene and the orchestra was known as the
proskenion and served as the main acting area.

Performance
While the qualities of performance were necessarily dependent on the individual play being
performed, most Greek drama of Aeschylus’s time adhered to certain conventions. All actors
wore exaggerated masks and costumes representing the social status and moods of their
characters. The masks also allowed distant members of the audience to better distinguish the
characters (see attached illustration).

The chorus, a group of perhaps 12–15 actors who represent the moods and thoughts of the city
or nation, normally chanted their lines in unison and stood—or often danced—in the orchestra,
between the principal actors and the audience. There were no curtains or changes of scene to
divide the action in the play; instead, the chorus often chanted odes (strophe–antistrophe) to
indicate their reactions to the current situation, and also to suggest (vaguely) the passage of
time.
The Oresteia of Aeschylus
[Review “The House of Atreus” section of the Notes on the Odyssey handout]

Like Homer some three centuries earlier, Aeschylus (ca. 525-455 B.C.) chose to render a
portion of the story of the House of Atreus in his greatest work—though the demands and
conventions of his dramatic form focus the action and ideas much more intensely and more
lyrically than the sprawl of Homer’s epic form could do. The Oresteia, a trilogy of tragedies
comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, takes up the legend of
another homecoming after the Fall of Troy: that of the Greek general Agamemnon upon his
return to the city of Argos, and the vengeful events that follow. Indeed, it is doubly a
homecoming story, since most of the trilogy is taken up with the return to Argos of Orestes, the
exiled son of Agamemnon and Clytemestra, who must seek revenge for his father’s murder.

[Review the introduction to Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides in the
Shapiro edition]

Structure in Greek Drama


While each drama is built according to the ideas suggested by its particular subject matter, it is
useful to understand the basic structure underlying each play

• Prologue—an opening, expository scene of monologue or dialogue which establishes


time, place, and antecedent action
• Parados—a chorus-sung “entrance song,” performed as the chorus marches or dances
into the orchestra
• First Episode—a scene of dialogue between characters, perhaps including the chorus,
that furthers the action of the play
• First Stasimon—an interlude in action, sung and danced by the chorus; often expressing
the minds of the people on the events and situations of the preceding episode
• Second Episode—as above, furthering action
• Second Stasimon—as above, comment on the episode
• Third Episode
• Third Stasimon
• Fourth Episode
• Fourth Stasimon
• Exodus—an “exit scene” of dialogue bringing the action to a close

(some tragedies may have one less or one more episode/stasimon pairing)

[Self-test: decide where these divisions fall in Agamemnon]


Greek Theatre Masks
Theater of Dionysus

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