HISTORY OF THEATRE

We are in Athens, in the market. The place is crowded.

It’s not only to buy or sell that people come here. For the majority of

Athenians it’s a meeting-place, many have come just to see others,

to have some entertainment and fun.

We see almost a procession with two men at the head of it.

One of them is tall and handsome, the other, fat and small.

That must be Sophocles and Euripidus, the playwrights.

Who else could rival them, “the voices of people,” in popularity

here?

The Athenians left us literature in variety and quality surpasses those not

only of other Greek states, but of all other ancient people taken together.

We speak only about drama, with its two forms: tragedy and comedy.

There are three great names in Greek tragedy – Aeschylus, Sophocles,

and Euripides. If we add Aristophanes, a comic play writer, the Father of

Comedy, the picture will be complete.

Do we realize how greatly our modern culture is indebted to the

Greeks? We say “theatre” and “drama,” “orchestra” and “music,” and do

we remember that all these words have come from ancient Greece?

The root of our word theatre is Greek thea, meaning “looking at,”

from which came “theatron,” “a place for viewing.”

Drama grew out of Greek drao, meaning “do,” “act,” “perform.”

Comedy has its roots in Greek word komos, meaning a festival with music,

dancing, performing and, you must be sure, plenty of humour.

Tragedy grew out of tragoidos, which in ancient Greece was the name for

poets or bards going around the countryside and presenting their poems or

singing songs.

We also have orchestra, a place for the dancers in the Greek theatre,

and scene, a tent or other sheltered place used as a dressing room in the

early Greek theatre.

Music means “belonging to the Muses,” (and museum came from the same

root, meaning “temple of muses.”)

The Greek theatres were built on the hill-side. It was always open to the

sky, with the rows cut in the rock, and orchestra or dancing floor below the

seats. It could have about twenty thousand spectators.

The theatre was the centre of the growth and development of nation.