Western Literature(Week11)

Drama

The specific mode of narrative, typically fictional, represented in performance.The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience.The early modern tragedy Hamlet (1601) by Shakespeare and the classical Athenian tragedy Oedipus the King (c. 429 BC) by Sophocles are among the masterpieces of the art of drama. A modern example is Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) by Eugene O’Neill.

The two masks associated with drama represent the traditional generic division between comedy and tragedy. They are symbols of the ancient Greek Muses, Thalia and Melpomene, the Muse of comedy represented by the laughing face, and the Muse of tragedy represented by the weeping face, respectively.

• Comedy

 For ancient Greeks and Romans a comedy was a stage-play with a happy ending. In the Middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings and a lighter tone. In this sense Dante used the term in the title of his poem, La Divina Commedia.

• Tragedy

A form of drama based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in audiences.While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term tragedy often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. From its origins in the theatre of ancient Greece 2500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

- Oedipus the King

Louis Bouwmeester as Oedipus in a Dutch production
 of Oedipus the King c. 1896.

An Athenian tragedy by Sophocles that was first performed about 429 BC. Of his three Theban Plays that deal with Oedipus, Oedipus the King was the second to be written. However, in terms of the chronology of events that the plays describe, it comes first, followed by Oedipus at Colonus and then Antigone.
Oedipus the King tells the story of Oedipus, a man who becomes the king of Thebes, while unwittingly fulfilling a prophecy that he would kill his father, Laius, and marry his mother, Jocasta.
The play is a classic Greek tragedy and regarded as a masterpiece. It is mentioned often by Aristotle in his Poetics as an exemplar of the composition of tragedy.

- Thespis
 The first person ever to appear on stage as an actor playing a character in a play.In other sources, he is said to have introduced the first principal actor in addition to the chorus.

 

Semele

In Greek mythology, she was the daughter of the Boeotian hero Cadmus and Harmonia, was the mortal motherof Dionysus by Zeus in one of his many origin myths.