The unit begins after the introduction to mythology. I have already described a general process to be followed in presenting each play. I would like now to describe unifying ideas, general concepts and skills that particular plays can illustrate.
It’s necessary to impress upon students the fact that the Greeks attained heights nearly unsurpassed in Western culture. They have given us political theory, art, philosophy, mathematics, and theater. The festivals of Dionysius were held three times each year and major dramatists competed for prizes. The City or Great Dionysia was held in the month of Elaphebolion (March to April); the Lenaea in the month of Ganelion (January to February); and the Rural Dionysia fell in Poseidon (December to January).
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It is interesting to observe the similarity between these dates and the major festivals of Christianity, Christmas and Easter. The actors at these presentations wore heavy, brightly colored robes and
cothurni
—shoes which had soles nearly a foot high. Their masks had voice-boxes built into them; they extended several inches above the players’ heads. No women acted in these plays. In more comic plays the chorus dressed as satyrs or goat-men. Each competitor submitted a tetralogy which included one satyr play. The Greek word for tent, scene, is the origin of our word
scene.
The scene was a tent behind the actor which later became a permanent structure. Actors used it for changing clothes. The door in the middle was thrown open to show tableaux of violence which had occurred backstage. Sophocles is credited with the introduction of the painted scenery which was suspended from this structure.
The class should be aware that drama began as religious worship. It’s also worth commenting on how much of this literature is lost to us. They should know that one stipulation of the contests was that the playwrights had to draw upon myth, although eventually even the Greeks became secular. (This is seen in Aristophanes’ satires of prominent figures like Socrates.) In most cases, the audience was already familiar with plot.
*
Their interest lay in the method of presentation, in the form.
Antigone
is as structured as the Parthenon. Such was the Hellenistic admiration for “. . . order, balance, symmetry, clarity and control.”
Antigone
addresses itself to religious and political questions. It is a play about conflicting ethics. You can make the class aware of such a conflict with a blackboard headline like:
PRESIDENT SAYS FAMILY MEMBERS WILL
NOT BE BURIED:
Bodies to be brought to City Dump
It sounds like World War II or Soylent Green. Wrapped around this central conflict is a very elegant and rhythmic structure, Creon is
*Today, most people have read a play before seeing it.
confronted on four separate occasions, Antigone on two. Creon,s confrontations increase in intensity: each time he speaks with a character of greater significance. Students should look closely at each confrontation. Try to have them discover the repeated action.: he is opposed, he loses control, he remains stubborn and unchanged, his stubbornness triggers serious consequences. Haemon, Antigone and Eurydice commit suicide. Suicide is endemic to tragedy. Aristotle says, of course, that the plot is the imitation of the action. Fergusson maintains that this one basic action is imitated repeatedly, rhythmically, and is reflected even in the language itself. The process is based on the form of ritual. “In general, the ritual had its agon, or sacred combat between the old King, or god or hero, and the new, corresponding to the agons in the tragedies, and the clear “purpose” moment of the tragic rhythm. It had its
Sparagmos,
in which the royal victim was literally or symbolically torn asunder, followed by the lamentation and/or rejoicing
of the chorus: elements which correspond to the moments of “passion.”
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How much of art is a tearing asunder of old kings? A lot. There is, in addition, something very sexual about this violent ritual. Art is an engaging and a releasing. Its terminology is “climax,” “catharsis,” “purgation,” “rising action,” “falling action.”
Life is an imitation of this action. Why imitate anything except to capture it by magic? Isn’t this the reason for the fear primitive peoples have of their own photographs? The point is that life is a rhythm, it is a heartbeat; and art imitates it.
All violence took place offstage in Greek drama. This changed dramatically in Roman times. The Romans adopted Greek culture and religion and later embraced Christianity. The drama declined; comedy was preferred when time was devoted to theater. Other spectacles appealed to this audience, like gladiatorial combat, and contests of Christians versus lions. “In the huge Colosseum and Circus Maximus wild beasts mangled their victims, to the joy of the crowd. Now there were even
naumachia
, 2,000 feet long, which could be flooded to float ships that engaged in naval battle in which hundreds of men met their deaths.”
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How similar to the bear-baiting and love of violence in Elizabethan times!
Rome was a strange mixture of barbarity and decadence, civilization and codified law. Decadence existed simultaneously with the new religion of Christ. What makes a people bellicose? What makes the Romans so different from the Greeks? Perhaps sailors are different from soldiers. These questions are better left to anthropologists. A dramatic silence of six hundred years followed Rome.
The Church understandably outlawed such spectacles, only to resurrect them eventually in the pagentry of ritual. They were appealing to masses of illiterates. Drama continued to be associated with religion, but there was a secular variety no longer acceptable to organized religion. Mimes and jugglers wandered and performed, keeping comedy alive. The church added histrionics to the Mass, and gradually moved drama closer to the marketplace in the form of miracle and mystery plays which were performed on pageant wagons capable of moving from place to place. These plays gradually became more exaggerated in terms of plot and character development, and encompassed more of secular living.
Everyman
is a morality play.
Everyman is a useful teaching tool. It demonstrates the form of allegory to students. It introduces the concept of LEVELS within a play—on a literal level, every action
does
something; on other levels, every action
means
something. This difficulty in noticing anything more than the literal may be peculiar to urban students, but I have found it to be a problem. I often draw concentric circles, staircases and pyramids to indicate rings or levels of interpretation to my students. I see this as the principal value of this play. The characters are real people, yet on another level they are abstract ideas. Students can speculate on what the names of characters in other plays indicate:. Earnest, Worthing, Canon Chasuble, Lady Bracknell, Miss Prism, the Smiths. What is, after all, in a name?
The Renaissance takes its name from the reawakening of interest in the classics. By Shakespeare’s time the printing press was in operation, the church had been questioned, the New World was opening up. It was another age of transition, like the Roman period, like our own. Elizabethans liked spectacle and bawdy humor. The sound of language was fundamental to their world. All information was received by word of mouth. It was once again possible to earn a living as a playwright.
Romeo and Juliet
appealed to a different kind of audience than either
Antigone
or
Everyman
. It is certainly more secular; the Church is even laughable in the form of Friar Lawrence. This age had felt the effects of the conventions of courtly love—the idolatry of womankind by such groups as the Cult of the Daisy. Was it possible that love was a religion?
It is interesting that in both
Antigone
and
Romeo and Juliet,
young lovers die at the hands of society. The ideals have changed. The ideas of religion, politics and duty are very different in the plays. The effect the two sets of double suicides have on the observer is very different; this is not only because of theme and ideals, but also because of character development. The theme of young lovers perishing persists. Is there another level of meaning? Could the lovers represent Youth itself?
One of the valuable lessons a unit like this one is the observation that themes are so often recurrent. Consider the theme of confused identity and the mystery of parentage. Antigone’s father is the notorious Oedipus, whose name now labels a psychological phenomenon; her mother is also her father’s mother! In Wilde’s play the theme is satirized: Jack’s parent is a leather bag. The fact that Hedvig is not, after all, his own child causes Hialmar to precipitate her suicide. Once again, the idea of the birth mystery is satirized by lonesco in the infamous exchange between Mr. and Mrs. Martin who discover they are the parents of Alice only to be undermined by Mary, the maid:.
And here is the proof: the child that Donald spoke of is not Elizabeth’s daughter, they are not the same person. Donald’s daughter has one white eye and one red eye like Elizabeth’s daughter. Whereas Donald’s child has a white right eye and a red left eye, Elizabeth’s child has a red right eye and a white left eye! . . . Donand and Elizabeth, not being the parents of the sane child, are not Donald and Elizabeth.
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Wilde’s play is reminiscent of Moliere or Oliver Goldsmith because it is farcical, full of confusion and inconsistencies which give rise to humor. This inconsistency in language and logic reappears in Ionesco where it is satirized. Wilde manipulates language; he exposes hypocrisy and pretense. He is interested in what he terms: “the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain for proof of any kind.”
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His lifestyle and beliefs ran counter to Victorian England’s:
What is termed sin is an essential element of progress. Without it, the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type.
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I’ve heard of death, food, geography and vanity as motivations for history, but Sin? I have written in the margin of my book: “Perhaps all of literature is the study of human sin and human failure, both normal and abnormal—especially abnormal.” I would be interested in reading student responses to his theory.
Just as MoliEre was the contemporary of Racine and Corneille, Wilde was the contemporary of Ibsen. This was an age which saw the publication of
The Origin of Species
, the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and the pressure of the conformist Victorian Age. Wilde reacted by wearing knee-breeches and a sunflower in his lapel. He satirized womanhood, paternity, marriage arrangements and the church. Ibsen looked at individuals. He resurrected tragedy—real tragedy, not melodrama. He saw the hypocrisy of the bourgeois who are always single-mindedly fearful of losing anything they have so recently gained. Shaw said, after the Great War, “. . . war, pestilence and famine have wrecked civilization and killed a number of people of whom the first batch is calculated at not less than thirteen millions. Had the gospel of ibsen been understood and heeded, these fifteen millions might have been alive now.”
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We know that art is a reflection and illumination of its time, and that it has prophetic properties as well.
Ibsen is singular in drama. His theater was an exposition of social problems, not simply an entertainment.
The Wild Duck
details the failure of ideals as well as their necessity. Rellig, the realist, is a perpetrator of lies because he knows they are necessary. Werle, the idealist, preaches the truth and shatters illusions for the sake of an ideal. He is “thirteenth at the tab1e.” Does this mean he is Christ or Judas?
Ibsen sets up some important pairings. There are two married couples: Mrs. Sorby and Werle, who have no secrets, and the Ekdals, whose life together is based on a lie. There is Rellig, the realist, the antithesis of Gregers, the idealist. There is a contrast between Rellig’s two patients: Molvick and Hialmar. Hedvig and Gregers are Werle’s two children. Ekdal and Werle are the two fathers. Mrs. Sorby and Gina are the two wives. This duality is present in
Romeo and Juliet
, in
The Importance of Being Earnest
, and in
The Bald Soprano
. I’ve been impressed with duality in theater. I think it is somehow connected with the imitation of action.
The people in
The Wild Duck
seem to lead their lives independently of one another. Rellig is the only character who can notice their patterns of living and who shows any understanding of their actions. After two world wars he disappears. Art undergoes a transformation. There are abstract paintings, mobiles, atonality, dissonance, and anti-theater. There is the competition of the photograph and the film.
What are the students to make of Ionesco? The world is absurd, communication is impossible, there is no such thing as logic, there can be no projecting of any information into the future. We can base no knowledge on past events. It might be useful to tell students that when Ionesco decided to write
The Bald Soprano
, he was learning to speak English.
In spite of his dislike of the theater, Ionesco wrote a play, almost against his will. This is how it happened. In 1948, he decided that he ought to learn English, and so he acquired an English course. Learned research, published in the august pages of the
Cahiers
du College de Pataphysique,
has since, by close textual analysis, established that the text in question was
L’Anglais sans Peine
, of the
Assimil
method. Ionesco himself described what happened next:
I set to work. Conscientiously I copied whole sentences from my primer with the purpose of memorizing them. Rereading them attentively, I learned not English but some astonishing truths—that, for example, there are seven days in the week, something I already knew; that the floor is down, the ceiling up, things I already knew as well, perhaps, but that I had never seriously thought about or had forgotten, and that seemed to me, suddenly, as stupefying as they were indisputably true.
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He believed that he had written a very serious piece, he had dramatized “the tragedy of language.”
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Students should recognize everyday conversation being mimicked, Perhaps they can tell you why the play is an attack on conformity, on moving through life as a robot without experiencing it. How has the audience changed?
Well, I’m finished. I have no reputation to protect, and so I’ve tried to be provocative. But I will say again that I think an understanding of the history of a form, and of history itself, is necessary in order to understand people and art. Shaw said, “The shallowness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction.”
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In light of recent terrorist and political movements, I have to believe him. More than this, I believe Mme. de Stael, whose words I have mounted in a little gilt frame:
Tout comprendre
ce serait
Tout pardonner
Sample Exercise One: Translation
(Exit.)
Chorus. Of happiness the crown
and chiefest part
Is wisdom, and to hold
The gods in awe.
This is the law
That, seeing the stricken heart
Of pride brought down,
We learn when we are old.
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Chorus.
Who wants happiness? The main
Requirement is to be sensible.
This means not rebelling against
God’s law, for that is arrogance.
The greater your arrogance, the heavier God’s revenge
And proud men in old age learn to be wise.
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(Creon and his attendants enter the house.)
Chorus.
What will be is in other hands than ours.
Our happiness depends
on wisdom all the way.
The gods must have their due.
Great words by men of pride
bring greater blows upon them.
So wisdom comes to the old.
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Statute of Greek Tragic Actor
(figure available in print form)
Sophocles
4
(figure available in print form)
Settings
Long days journey into night
—O’Neill
Act One
Scene: Living room of James Tyrone’s summer home on a morning in August, 1912.
At rear are two double doorways with portieres. The one at right leads into a front parlor with the formally arranged, set appearance of a room rarely occupied. The other opens on a dark, windowless back parlor, never used except as a passage from living room to dining room. Against the wall between the doorways is a small bookcase, with a picture of Shakespeare above it, containing novels by Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, philosophical and sociological works by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Kropotkein, Max Stirner, plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Kipling, etc.
In the right wall, rear, is a screen door leading out on the porch which extends halfway around the house. Farther forward, a series of three windows looks over the front lawn to the harbor and the avenue that runs along the water front. A small wicker table and an ordinary oak desk are against the wall, flanking the windows.
In the left wall, a similar series of windows looks out on the grounds in back of the house. Beneath them is a wicker couch with cushions, its head toward rear. Farther back is a large, glassed-in bookcase with sets of Dumas, Victor Hugo, Charles Lever, three sets of Shakespeare, The World’s Best Literature in fifty large volumes, Hume’s History of England, Theirs’ History of the ‚onsulate and Empire, Smollett’s History of England, Gibbon’s Roman Empire and miscellaneous volumes of old plays, poetry, and several histories of Ireland. The astonishing thing about these sets is that all the volumes have the look of having been read and reread.
The hardwood floor is nearly covered by a rug, inoffensive in design and color. At center is a round table with a green shaded reading lamp, the cord plugged in one of the four sockets in the chandelier above. Around the table within reading-light range are four chairs, three of them wicker armchairs, the fourth (at right front of table) a varnished oak rocker with leather bottom.
It is around 8.30. Sunshine comes through the windows at right.
As the curtain rises, the family have just finished breakfast. Mary Tyrone and her husband enter together from the back parlor, coming from the dining room.
Mary is fifty-four, about medium height. she still has a young, graceful figure, a trifle plump, but showing little evidence of middle-aged waist and hips, although she is not tightly corseted. Her face is distinctly Irish in type. It must once have been extremely pretty, and is still striking. It does not match her healthy figure but is thin and pale with the bone structure prominent. Her nose is long and straight, her mouth wide with full, sensitive lips. She uses no rouge or any sort of make-up. Her high forehead is framed by thick, pure white hair. Accentuated by her pallor and white hair, her dark brown eyes appear black. They are usually large and beautiful, with black brows and long curling lashes.
What strikes one immediately is her extreme nervousness. Her hands are never still. They were once beautiful hands, with long, tapering fingers, but rheumatism has knotted the joints and warped the fingers, so that now they have an ugly crippled look. One avoids looking at them, the more so because one is conscious she is sensitive about their appearance and humiliated by her inability to control the nervousness which draws attention to them.
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Waiting for Godo
t—Becket
A country road. A tree.
Evening.
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Mother Courage—Brecht
Spring, 1624. In Dalarna, the Swedish Commander Oxenstierna is recruiting for the campaign in Poland. The canteen woman Anna Fierling, commonly known as Mother Courage, loses a son.
Highway outside a town. A sergeant and a recruiting officer stand shivering.
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Endgame
—Beckett
Bare interior.
Grey light.
Left and right back, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn. Front right, a door. Hanging near door, its face to wall, a picture. Front left, touching each other, covered with an old sheet, two ashbins. Center, in an armchair on castors, covered with an old sheet, Hamm. Motionless by the door, his eyes fixed on Hamm, Clov. Very red face. Brief tableau.
Clov goes and stands under window left. Still, staggering walk. He looks up at window left. He turns and looks at window right. He goes and stands under window right. He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at window left. He goes out, comes back immediately with a small step-ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes six steps (for example) towards window right, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window right, gets up on it, draws back curtain. He gets down, takes three steps towards window left, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, looks out of window. Brief laugh. He gets down, takes one step towards window right, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window right, gets up on it, looks out of window. Brief laugh. He gets down, goes with ladder towards ashbins, halts, turns, carries back ladder and sets it down under window right, goes to ashbins, removes sheet covering them, folds it over his arm. He raises one lid, stoops and looks into bin. Brief laugh. He closes lid. Same with other bin. He goes to Hamm. removes sheet covering him, folds it over his arm. In a dressing-gown, a stiff toque on his head,
a large blood-stained handkerchief over his face
, a whistle hanging from his neck, a rug over his knees, thick socks on his feet, Hamn seems to be asleep. Clov looks him over. Brief laugh. He goes to door, halts, turns towards auditorium.
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The Cherry Orchard
—Chekhov
Scenes
The action takes place on the estate of Madame Ranevsky, about the turn of the century.
Act One
A room, which has always been called the nursery. One of the doors leads into Anya’s room. Dawn, sun rises during the scene. May, the cherry trees in flower, but it is cold in the garden with the frost of early morning. Windows closed. Enter Dunyasha with a candle and Lopahin with a book in his hand.
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The Balcony
—GenFt
Scene One
On the ceiling, a chandelier, which will remain the same in each scene. The set seems to represent a
sacristy
, formed by three
blood
-red, cloth folding-screens. The one at the rear has a built-in door. Above, a huge Spanish crucifix, drawn in
trompe I’oeil
. On the right wall, a mirror, with a carved gilt frame, reflects an unmade bed which, if the room were arranged logically, would be in the first rows of the orchestra. A table with a large jug. A yellow armchair. On the chair, a pair of black trousers, a shirt and a jacket. The Bishop, in mitre and gilded cope, is sitting in the chair. He is obviously larger than life. The role is played by an actor wearing tragedian’s cothurni about twenty inches high. His shoulders, on which the cope lies, are inordinately broadened so that when the curtain rises he looks huge and stiff, like a scarecrow. He wears garish make-up. At the side, a woman, rather young, highly made up and wearing a lace dressing-gown, is drying her hands with a towel. Standing by is another woman, Irma. She is about forty, dark, severe-looking, and is wearing a black tailored suit and a hat with a tight string (like a chin-strap).
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The Master-Builder
—Ibsen
Act One
A plainly furnished work-room in Solness’s house. Folding doors in the wall to the left lead out to the hall. On the right is a door to the inner rooms of the house. In the back wall is an open door to the drawing-office. Downstage to the left a desk with books, papers, and writing materials. Upstage from the door is a stove. In the right-hand corner is a sofa with a table and a few chairs. On the table a jug of water and a glass. A smaller table with a rocking-chair and an arm-chair is in the foreground to the right. There are shaded lamps burning on the table in the drawing office, on the table in the corner, and on the desk.
Inside, in the drawing-office, sit Knut Brovik and his son Ragnar busy with plans and calculations. At the desk in the workroom Kaja Fosli stands writing in the ledger. Knut Brovik is a shrunken old man with white hair and beard. He is dressed in a somewhat worn but well-cared-for black coat. He wears glasses and a white stock which has grown slightly yellow. Ragnar Brovik is in his thirties, well-dressed, fair-haired, with a slight stoop. Kaja Fosli is a slenderly built girl a little over twenty, neatly dressed, but with a delicate look. She has a green shade over her eyes. All three work for a time in silence.
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