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The Origins of Greek Drama
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
Various difficulties beset the scholar investigating the origins of Greek drama. The ancient evidence is fragmentary, sometimes unreliable, and often difficult to interpret; Greek drama is the original drama, and from those to whom dramatic representation is a commonplace a real effort of imagination is required in dealing with its possible origins and early history; and scholars of a previous age, writing under the influence of early anthropological studies and their generation's innate notion of progress as ordered and inevitable, have sometimes bedevilled the whole investigation. Not all of these difficulties can be removed, nor are they without their compensating advantages. Anthropology can provide very interesting and suggestive parallels, and can help us to see significance where we might otherwise have missed it; and ritual no doubt has much to do with the beginnings of drama. But in attempting to explain the existence of the great drama of fifth-century Greece, we should do well to view with suspicion any theory which traces a direct and merely thickening line from primitive ritual to Aeschylus or Aristophanes, and regards the plays not as dramas but as interesting sources of evidence for primitive ‘survivals’. The more new facts about the origins (the plural is used with intent) of drama become known, the more complex these origins appear; and however much an artist is influenced (as he must be) by the conventions and inheritance of his own age, we should remember that that inheritance will include conscious intelligence and individual genius, as well as primitive ritual and superstition.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1961
References
page 126 note 1 The invaluable reviews by T. B. L. Webster and K. J. Dover in Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (Oxford, 1954), 80–83 and 112–15, are mainly for the specialist. So far as I am aware, there is not in English any general discussion of the whole problem, and this paper is an attempt to supply one.
page 126 note 2 There is no evidence for the existence of, e.g., Chinese, Indian, or Japanese drama as early as the fifth century b.c.; and Egyptian ritual did not develop into drama proper.
page 126 note 3 As is done, e.g., in different ways by G. Murray (in Harrison, J. E., Themis, Cambridge, 1912, 341–63Google Scholar), Ridgeway, W. (The Origin of Tragedy, Cambridge, 1910)Google Scholar, and Cornford, F. M. (The Origin of Attic Comedy, London, 1914).Google Scholar
page 127 note 1 I owe this quotation to an article by Pascal, R. in Modern Language Review (1941), 369–87Google Scholar, ‘On the Origins of the Liturgical Drama of the Middle Ages’.
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page 127 note 9 Ibid., Figs. 19–23.
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page 128 note 1 Arist. Poet. 1448a29 f.
page 128 note 2 Ibid. 1449a9 f.
page 128 note 3 Ibid. 1449a20 f.
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page 131 note 6 See above, p. 129.
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page 134 note 1 They may already have been connected, but this we cannot prove.
page 135 note 1 The progress from Thespis to Aeschylus is really no more sudden than other literary progressions. English drama moved quite rapidly from Interludes to Shakespeare, and Greek prose literature from Ionian logographoi to Herodotos with considerable speed.
page 135 note 2 Aeschylus has his own claim to be called the ‘inventor’ of tragedy: if the Dorians ‘invented’ the raw material and Thespis the essential actor, Aeschylus first showed what the new form was capable of expressing.
page 136 note 1 Shakespeare's range is wider because, among other reasons, his material is wider; his technique is different because (or partly because) his historical context is different. But these apart, a great artistic kinship remains.
page 136 note 2 Probably.
page 136 note 3 e.g. Hooker, E. M. in Greece & Rome, Second Series, vii (1960), 38Google Scholar, explains Adrastos as a divine king, the incarnation of Dionysos. After the ritual his ‘sufferings’ are related, his chorus sings; hence the messenger speeches and subject-matter of tragedy. This may be so, but it remains very difficult to guess at the details of sixth-century ritual.