The Classic era of Greek Theater

From the Classical era, we have barely 44 plays still extant, with perhaps hundreds more lost. Much of our knowledge comes from the writings of Aristotle from a century later, yet he concentrates largely on aesthetics and says little about the theater itself (MacGowan and Melnitz 1-2).

We do know that the theater developed as part of the solemnisation of the god Dionysus, a pan-Hellenic god who was widely renowned throughout the Archaic period and honored at spectacular contests with tragedies and comedies. His was also an orgiastic cult. Dionysus is the god of ecstasy and possession and cogency be called the patron saint of the drama as swell as of various festivals and celebrations. Bacchus is the Roman name for the same god. The iconography of Bacchus makes him tardily recognizable in art grows and evokes images of wine and revelry along with particularized symbols of the god and his cult. In Greek mythology, Dionysus was a bastard boy of Zeus. The mother of Dionysus is variously named depending on the source, and some have verbalize she was Demeter, or Io, and some Dione, and still others Lethe. The most common romance has it that Zeus draped himself as a mortal and had a secret affair with Semele ("moon"), the daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes. Zeus's wife, Hera, was jealous. She disguised herself as an old neighbor and advised Semele to ask her buffer to do her a favor by

Clasz, Cary. "Theatre History." http://users.aol.com/clasz/

Cohan, Robert. "The Greeks." http://lupus.northern.edu:90/ trigger-happy/

The modern-day theater has at times drawn on elements of Greek drama, as noned. The modern theater is largely commercialized in nature rather than religious, but a definite kind of social religions infuses much of the theater at least since the time of Eugene O'Neill earlier in this century. O'Neill saw the theater in essentially religious terms, and in his approach he harked lynchpin to the religiously-oriented theater of the Greeks.

In general, O'Neill did not deal with the preoccupations of the external introduction but with his own preoccupations and his own personal demons, which he desire to eliminate in his plays: "And this tension, this pain of spirit, could only be released if divided by an audience, by a body of fellow sufferers who in the sharing become father confessors" (Chabrowe xii). He dramatized his conflicts in a way that made them into a religious experience. This approach could not have been further removed from the prevailing style in the American theater at the time. There had never been anything but a commercial theater in America, existing mingled with the poles of burlesque and melodrama. Prior to World War I, the only contemporary drama in which American audiences could see three-dimensional characters was work by Europeans such as Ibsen and Shaw, and even this repertory was seldom found in the legitimate theaters. O'Neill saw the theater as requiring the writing of plays in the spirit of the Greeks, which meant restoring to the theater its original buy the farm as a place of ritual and religious experience. He therefore had a twofold aesthetic view, both the creative thinker of the theater as a temple of the gods and an idea of manners as inevitable tragedy. His plays are most easily dumb as having one or the other emphasis:

In other words, the emphasis is sometimes on the celebration of manner in the abstract and sometimes
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