Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/253

 DRAMA 245 and dances in honor of Bacchus, were enacted. These odes, being more genial and comic, were called /cw//cjJfa, comedy, from K&/U?}, village, and yd*] (literally, the song of the village). The ear- liest known form of drama is the dithyrambus, a hymn in honor of Bacchus, song by a chorus accompanied by music, gesture, and dances. About 570 B. C. Susarion, a native of Megara, recited an ode at Athens. In 535 Thespis, a native of Icaria, recited an ode, with responses by a dithyrambic chorus ; in this we perceive the first germ of dialogue. Such were the rude elements found by ^Eschylus about 500, and out of them he created the drama as we now behold it. Nothing essential has since been added to its structure. He removed the chorus into the background, and used them only as an auxiliary. He brought a second actor upon the scene, and introduced dialogue ; thus the drama became an action instead of a narrative. He invented scenery, costume, and machinery. Banishing the lewd and Baccha- nalian character from the dithyrambic hymn, he supplied its place with pure tragedy. From his works were gathered those rules called the unities, referred to by Aristotle. These changes were wrought within 30 years. His expansion of the drama caused the Atheni- ans to build the great theatre of Bacchus, the Lenaaum, the former theatre having broken down under the pressure of the people gather- ed to witness a representation in which Ms- ehylus and Pratinas were rivals. Thirty years later Sophocles introduced a third actor, and thus diffused the dialogue and fertilized the ac- tion. As a dramatic poet he surpassed ^schy- lus by a noble grace and a sweet majesty. Fif- teen years afterward Euripides enabled Greece to behold as contemporaries the three greatest purely tragic poets the world has produced. In reviewing their works we must remember that ^Eschylus was the creator of that fanciful world which Sophocles and Euripides culti- vated. The dramas of ^Eschylus are dark, gloomy, and terrible ; thunder and lightning are their atmosphere, and demigods their dra- matis person; his human beings are gigan- tic in moral stature, and removed above our sympathies. Sophocles drew human nature as it ought to be. Euripides depicted men and women as they were. The origin of the drama is popularly but erroneously ascribed to Thespis. This improvisatore did no more than improve upon the dithyrambus ; he first organized a regular chorus, and invented dan- ces of peculiar energy and grace ; but his per- formances were a kind of ballet farce. The tragedy of the Greeks was a fable or a series of events begotten of each other in a natural sequence. It began with a simple position, so selected that the auditor required no explana- tion to understand the present condition of affairs. The development of the characters was required to be simultaneous with the ac- tion, the one being involved in the other. The action should not stray from the one place beyond such a limit as the time employed in the performance might naturally permit ; nor should a lapse of time take place during the piece longer than one day. These unities of action, place, and time, however, so strenuous- ly insisted upon by the French dramatists, were not always strictly observed by the Greeks. Aristotle refers indistinctly to the unity of action ; he says in reference to the unity of time : " Tragedy endeavors as much as pos- sible to restrict itself to a single revolution of the sun." Of the unity of place he says noth- ing. The Greek tragedy was often composed in trilogies, or three distinct plays, all connected ; such, for example, was the trilogy of ^Eschy- lus, formed of the " Agamemnon, " the " Choe- phori," and the "Eumenides." In the first, Agamemnon, returning from the siege of Troy, is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra ; in the second, Orestes, Agamemnon's son, avenges his father by the slaughter of his mother ; in the third, Orestes is pursued by the Furies for this unnatural deed; the gods cannot agree upon his case until Minerva decides in his favor, and releases him from the torture of the avenging divinities. These three conjoined formed a complete action. The early history of comedy is more obscure than that of tragedy. The earliest comic poet of whom we have re- mains is Aristophanes, who flourished nearly a century after ^Eschylus. He was the last of what was called the old school. Comedy was divided into three forms, the old, the middle, and the new. In the first or old comedy, the characters were real living personages, who were freely satirized under their real names. This license was soon so abused that a law was passed forbidding the names of real person- ages to be used in comedy. This impediment produced the second or middle comedy, where the prohibition was evaded by giving fictitious names to the real characters, and distinguish- ing the individual intended to be satirized by a mask or by some unmistakable inference. The middle comedy lasted about 50 years, when it was superseded by the third or new comedy ; in this form the characters and the subject were fictitious, and as the old satirized and ridiculed statesmen, orators, and generals under their real names, so the new was aimed at abstract vice, and not at the individual of- fender. As tragedy descended from the con- templation of divine matters to depict human woes, it gradually lost its grandeur. So, also, as comedy divested itself of its direct influence upon men and things, and from a statesman became a philosopher, it lost its pith and power. The list of dithyrambic poets preceding JEschy- lus, from TOO to 525 B. C., includes Archi- lochus, Simonides, Lasus, Arion, Stesichorus, Solon, Susarion, Hipponax, Theognis, Thespis (birth of ^Eschylus). Afterward came Choari- lus, Phrynichus, Epicharmus, ^Eschylus (in- vents the drama, and first exhibits in 499), Chionides, Sophocles (first victory in 468), Euripides (first exhibits in 455), Cratinu*,