Elements of Greek Tragedy

hey so today we're gonna have a brief introduction on the elements of Greek tragedy the first thing you need to know is that a tragedy is when a basically good protagonist makes a mistake and his world ends up crumbling before realizing his error we're gonna talk specifically as it relates to the drama Antigone and Antigone was an ancient Greek play written by a man named Sophocles around the Year 440 BC so let's talk about some objectives for your reading the first thing you want to be able to do when reading Antigone is to be able to explain the influence of historical context on the form style and point of view of the text remember this play was written a long time ago in ancient Greece and the way people live back then their culture and their beliefs highly influenced the way the play is written and the purpose of the play I want you to be able to identify some universal themes in Antigone and that's going to be really important because later on we're probably gonna find the same themes in a Shakespeare play and possibly have to compare them so keep an eye for those Universal themes of course we always want to use our reading strategies like making predictions and visualizing and drawing inferences because sometimes the language of these place is hard and the things they talk about is not very well known to you so the more strategies you use to understand the better you're going to enjoy the play and also compare and contrast how the authors use of literary devices conveys a message we'll always be looking for similes metaphors allusion personification and all that other great stuff you've been learning about for years because this happens a long time ago analyzing the cultural or social function of literature is also going to be very important Antigone like most Greek tragedies has a religious significance to the ancient Greeks and it portrays a lot of their values so we can learn a lot about that time period just by reading this play so let's talk about some conventions of tragedy conventions means basically the things that make a tragedy a tragedy so what we're going to see in ancient Greek is time that the entire plot of the drama is going to occur in mostly a single day or a day and a night place there's going to be only one main scene you're not going to see a lot of you know scene changes like you might in modern day plays the Greeks kept it pretty simple action there's one main plot in Antigone and you're not gonna see subplots with sub characters doing other things there's one main thing going on so at least that makes it a little easier to understand back in ancient Greek drama there was no violent action on stage so maybe you've seen the Shakespeare play before and you see people doing like 4/10 sword fights on the stage because violence certainly does occur you know that people die offer instance in Romeo and Juliet people die on stage not so much for the ancient Greeks they kind of allude to violence but they don't show you it and that's probably because of the ancient religious significance of these shows also this ancient Greek drama has no actual suspense and what I mean by that is the audience who went to see these shows already knew before the play even started what was going to happen because all of these plays are based on myths and legends that the Greeks would have been very familiar with and just in case they weren't familiar with them the chorus right at the start of these plays is going to tell you pretty much what's gonna happen before it does so the point of seeing this play is not to find out what happens in the end because they know the point is to learn from the choices the characters make and then just to enjoy the performance these plays emphasize people ideas and emotions not so much the plot it's the people and the characters and what they learn now there are six parts of a tragedy in ancient Greece of course remember plot most important element there's one main plot characters tragic hero these tragedies in ancient Greece have a tragic hero that is the basically good character who is wise and beloved who falls from grace due to some character flaw of his own there's definitely themed theme is a huge part of tragedy the playwright wants the audience to learn something from watching this show diction there's going to be many literary devices like metaphors used to enhance the plays point and to basically help the audience visualize better what the playwright is talking about song is part of ancient Greek chorus it's not it's not like singing with music it's more like chanting but whenever the course speaks in the show it's actually a song is actually chanting and spectacle special effects they're not really as important for the ancient Greeks but sometimes you will see this and notice in the green box no deus ex machina allowed that's a Latin word phrase meaning God from from a machine so basically that means that if the show is going along and that all of a sudden at the end something unexpected happens and the end of the show occurs that's a deus ex machina like it came out of nowhere you know it came out of nowhere and a change that's not gonna happen in these ancient Greek shows because again there's no real suspense the audience knows what's going to happen everything kind of connects and makes sense so you're not gonna get any crazy plot twists coming at you when you watch these shows so let's see how what this really short video clip has to say the first really important study in Greek tragedy was by a fourth century Greek philosopher called Aristotle and Aristotle thought for a very very long time about what made Greek tragedy effective and he actually came up with a formula and that is that the heroes of tragedy needed to be good but not so good that sort of couldn't relate to them people trying to be good but making mistakes like Creon he is actually trying to be a good king of Thebes he's just not getting it right he's making lots of mistakes and the good guy who isn't good enough but he's pretty much like you or me makes a mistake it ends in in some terrible misfortune and he goes from a status of being sort of happy and rich and content to utter misery and not a despair what Aristotle says this should do to the audience's make them feel incredible pity for the people they're watching which I think we certainly do in Antigone first for her and then by the end for Creon and also fear that oh if I put a foot wrong that might happen to me and it's those two emotions that are Istanbul says that tragedy really needs to elicit all right so what they were talking about there is the tragic hero mostly and what the lady was saying was that a tragic hero was worthy and Noble but has some kind of flaw and normally the flaw is extreme pride or desire and that's called hubris the hubris is the tragic heroes huh Marsha his character flaw and that Marsha leads to disaster as the protagonist tends to break a moral law for the ancient Greeks a law that goes against their mythology and their gods laws because the tragic hero has a hemara and therefore breaks some kind of moral law retribution occurs for him it's cosmic payback and you know yes he suffers because of it in fact a catastrophe happens it changes the hero's fortunes and he ends up utterly miserable mostly and in most of these shows specifically in ancient Greece recognition does happen at the end it's called anagnorisis where the tragic hero in an ancient Greek tragedy realizes what he's done he learns his moral lesson he knows he can't go back and he knows he can't fix it and that kind of helps the audience identify with him and embrace the universal message that he was supposed to learn but unfortunately for the tragic hero it's it's too late his life's not gonna get better but your life as the audience might now that you've learned the Greek chorus is hugely important in these ancient Greek plays they provide entertainment and they kind of set the mood when the chorus is happy you know that good things are coming when the chorus is talking about death despair and bad omens you know that bad stuff is gonna happen in the play so they're kind of neat they also represent the common people and they will comment on the events in the show so if you're not sure how to react to something Antigone says like you think what she says is okay well they might come in in the next part of the show and say that she's being prideful and she's being immoral she's being bad and you kind of learned that you might think Antigone is fine but they're telling you the ancient Greeks don't think that's okay that behavior is not okay these guys this core definitely take sides in the dramatic conflict they make it very clear who they support and they tell you why they warn characters of what's to come so sometimes a character in this case Creon he's our tragic hero well one of them he's our tragic hero and at points the course basically warns him you're not you're being too prideful you're not trusting your advisors you're closing yourself off to what the people want you're too full of yourself but the Creon ignores them and Creon suffers so our purpose of tragedy is catharsis for the ancient Greeks catharsis was hugely important this means the purging or cleansing of emotions or learning through suffering now the tragic hero he learns through his own suffering but the audience you also learn through suffering vicariously along with that hero tragedies are supposed to evoke pity and fear in you the one who watches it you're supposed to feel anxious as the hero makes poor decisions since you already know he's going to make those decisions you already know that he's going to end up miserable or possibly dead you know you kind of feel even though it's not true suspense it is suspenseful to see how he reacts to the choices he makes the closure of the tragedy when recognition occurs for the hero is supposed to spiritually cleanse the whole audience and so that you don't make the same mistakes that that hero made so here's some background you need to know for the play before you start Antigone Antigone and Ismene those are sisters they're the daughters of Oedipus who is who is dead at this point Oedipus was the former king of Thebes and he had been banished for something horrible he had done if you have read the play Atticus Rex which translates to Oedipus the King you can learn all about the bad thing that Oedipus did without knowing it was fated so it's not it's not all his fault but nevertheless he did something that brought a curse upon his family and that's why all of these other people's lives end up so horrible because of their father's poor choice and poor fate edifis also have sons of attea Cleese and Palin Isis and their brothers of Antigone and Ismene those sons they fight for power over Thebes they they fight to basically control their polyneices and eteocles attea Cleese stays in Thebes to defend it whereas polyneices gets an army outside of thebes and basically tries to invade but they're both trying to vie for power just one was in the city and polly was outside of the city in the end polyneices and eteocles they're both killed they both die in battle and when they both die well the only man left to take over is this man named Creon at a pisses brother-in-law and uncle and Creon decides early on that for whatever reason because atiek lease was in the city of Thebes defending it and Polynices was getting like another army outside of Thebes to help attack it that polyneices must have been a traitor polyneices is bad and Creon refuses to give Polynices a proper burial but he does give a proper burial burial to Atia cleese now maybe you don't think that's a big deal because you're not an ancient Greek but back then they believed that if you were not given a proper burial that your soul would not move on properly in the afterlife so Antigone is horrified by Korea's decision not to bury polyneices and she's going to do some things that you know she's gonna get a little trouble for but that's kind of the conflict of this play it's about a burial that Creon won't bury polyneices and Antigone wants him to bury polyneices so there we go some textual elements to be aware of in this play well there's a prologue which is the opening scene there's the parados which is the first time the course will enter and chant about the theme of the play usually the chorus elucidates the theme so listen for that episodes are the ancient Greek word for scenes so instead of saying scene 1 scene to scene 3 it's episode 1 2 3 Staz Mons are choral ODEs so it's just another way of saying the choral ode Tasmin the strophe and the antis trophy are the two different voices of the chorus so when the chorus speaks one half will talk to the other half and they'll talk in unison so like six members will say something and then six numbers will respond and that's how they talk to each other but it's still all the chorus and the final part of the tragedy is the Exodus usually sung by the chorus as they exit and that's gonna once again point to the theme of the show and what the audience should have learned by seeing what happened to the tragic hero so if you have any questions please ask me and let's enjoy the show by reading it

Channel: Cynthia Thrush

Views: 32,089

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Id: oJ1wq-yHz2E

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2016