Greek drama (Tragedy) -- History and criticism; Mythology, Greek, in literature
Scenery was painted on canvas or boards and attached to the front of
the buildings. In satyric drama it appears to have varied little—a wild
district with trees, rocks, and a cave. Tragedy generally employed a
temple or palace-front, though even in the extant thirty-two there
are exceptions—the rock of Prometheus, the tent of Ajax, the cave
of Philoctetes, and so forth. In a façade there were three doors,
corresponding to the three permanent doors in the buildings; when a cave
or tent was depicted, its opening was in front of the central door.
Statues were placed before the temple or palace—those of the deities, for
instance, in the _Agamemnon_ to whom the Herald utters his magnificent
address. Individuality would be given to a temple by the statue of
a particular god. Scene-painting was probably not very artistic or
scrupulous of details. We never read any praise of splendid theatrical
scenery such as is familiar to-day; and clever lighting effects were
of course out of the question when all was performed in the daylight.
Here and there the persons allude to the landscape, as in Sophocles’
_Electra_, where the aged attendant of Orestes points out to the prince
striking features of the Argolid plain. Such things were mostly left to
the imagination of the audience, like the forest of Arden and the squares
of Verona or Venice in Shakespeare. Undoubtedly, a Greek tragedy provided
a beautiful spectacle, but this resulted from the costumes, poses, and
grouping of actors and chorus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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