What is
history? Impossible to define succinctly, but below are few fairly interesting
attempts:
Aristotle: If you would understand anything,
observe its beginning and its development.
Cicero:
Not to know what happened before we lived is to remain perpetually a child.
George Santayana: Those who
cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Anonymous: History repeats itself because no one was listening the
first time.
James
Joyce: History is a nightmare from which
I am trying to awake.
Robert Penn Warren: History is not melodrama, even if it usually
reads like that.
Simon Schama, in his History of Britain:
History: “It’s written not to
revere the dead but to inspire the living.
It’s our cultural
bloodstream, the secret of who we are, and it tells us to let go of the past,
even as we honor it.
Alan
Bennett, his 2004 play, History Boys,
put several pithy statements about history into the mouths of his characters:
From
a female teacher’s point of view:
Mrs
Lintott: “History’s not such a frolic
for women as it is for men…History is a commentary on the various failings and
continuing incapabilities of men.
What
is history? History is women following
behind with the bucket.”
And
from Rudge (the student who excels at sports and little else, when asked by Mrs
Lintott how HE would define history):
“Can I speak freely Miss?
How
do I define history? It’s just one
fucking thing after another.”
De nobis fabula narratur
I read this phrase in an article by an historian of ancient
history and became attached to it. Literally it means something to the effect
of “about us the story is told.” But the
scholar translated it loosely: “Their story is our story.”
I was moved by that phrase, as it concisely captures why I teach
history. The past is important in itself, but only really resonates when we
realize that in addition to relating the past, it also informs the present and
the future. So in my last few years of teaching I began and ended the course
with those words.
And so I begin this course: de
nobis fabula narratur.
The Origins of Theatre
As every schoolboy knows (or at least as all of my students
should remember) the history of theatre began with OG the CAVEMAN.
I told you
that this is going to be theatre history according to DR JACK, right? One day
Og suddenly ran into a dinosaur and runs away! The dinosaur chases OG, who
trips on a rock and falls. In desperation, OG grabs the rock that tripped him
and threw it with all his might. The rock hit the dinosaur square on the
head…and the dinosaur dropped down dead!
(My students may remember that at this point I played for them
Richard Strauss’s Also
Sprach Zarathustra, making a bit of a fool of myself dancing around
pretending to be an ape.)
Being a practical caveman, OG grabs the dinosaur by the tail and
drags him back to the cave. OG’s neighbors were shocked by the sight and asked
how he did it. So OG made up a story:
“Well, I was strolling
along, just minding my own business, when this dinosaur gets in my way. I
stare at him, he stares at me -- this path is not big enough for both of us, so
I make a move towards him, like THIS...!” And OG began to act out his little
white lie.
The leaders of the cave clan didn’t believe OG, so they grilled
him and he confessed:
“Okay Okay -- I tripped over a rock, panicked, threw it, it was a
lucky shot -- that’s how I killed him…I swear!”
The elders mulled this over and concluded: “It wasn’t luck -- that
rock was placed there by the gods so we could eat the meat of the dinosaur! We
must give thanks to the gods. You will help us thank them.”
OG and the elders sang and danced in a circle around a fire, and
in this song and dance they reenacted the saga of OG. Then they roasted the
dinosaur on a spit and gobbled it up!
A week later the clan elders picked up some rocks and went out to
hunt dinosaur, but before they did, they again sang and danced, enacting the
story of OG’s battle in praise of the god who put the rock in OG’s path -- and
to ask that god for help in their next hunt.
And that’s how theatre began! Hmmmm…
If you’re thinking “that’s the most ridiculous thing I ever read,
you’re right, but no one can really say how theatre began, and the saga of OG
the illustrates some of the major theories on the origins of the theatre:
1) the natural tendency for humans to TELL STORIES
2) The philosopher Aristotle’s theory of MIMESIS, which argues
that humans have a basic urge/ability to IMITATE and that that urge somehow led
to theatre
3) and RITUAL, the most widely regarded of these theories,
that repetition of OG’s or any story created a ritual, from which
theatre had its roots.
While those three theories have been argued about by scholars (who
LOVE to argue), and are often thought of as separate, I’d argue that they might
well have worked together. To return to OG briefly, every time the cave clan
hunts dinosaur they sing and dance, telling stories and imitating
OG and the dinosaur. The repetition creates a ritual, which
gradually becomes more involved. Certain people become more adept at portraying
OG and the dinosaur and continually take on the roles; at some point costumes and
props are added; the players’ skill becomes impressive in itself.
The saga of OG, and increasingly, other stories, were told over and
over again via movement and gesture and song accompanied by rhythmic drumming
-- stamped dance steps in a circle that reflects the age-old cycle of birth,
growth, aging, death, and rebirth.
As far back as 40,000 years, illustrated cave paintings showed
humans disguised as animals to assist the hunt; throughout the
world,
communities sang, danced, and disguised themselves to cope with natural and
supernatural powers. These rituals generated pleasure as well, and from
the combined forces of need and pleasure, certain rituals were repeated annually
at key moments in the year to coincide with the great cycle -- at the winter
solstice when lengthening night gives way to lengthening day; at the equinoxes,
spring -- when ploughing and planting begin; autumn -- when what was planted
has grown and is harvested.
At some point, as the pleasure factor increased, as less yearly
fear was involved, in these rituals the ceremony began to be played for its own
sake -- and THIS, argue many theorists, IS how theatre began!
But...in history there’s nearly always a “but”...every origin
theory has been debated and most disregarded. Where is the EVIDENCE? Well,
there IS no evidence...no primary evidence, meaning something concrete from the
era in which the theatre was enacted. If you ever come upon a theory that agrees
with your way of thinking, I promise you that it will probably never be
universally accepted.
Theatre history according to Dr Jack – that’s what you’re getting
here. It’s MY version of history (MY-story, JACK-story) loaded with my own prejudices
and proclivities. But I hope that via these writings you may be able to form
your own version of history: YOUR-story, whether it’s HIS-tory or HER-story...maybe
even ITS-story!
Let’s look at one of the most popular ancient rituals for which
there IS primary evidence, one that was depicted in many separate cultures in
the spring of the year, to ensure fertility -- though it differed somewhat from
culture to culture, it always involved a god-man who would die, and then be
reborn.
In Egypt yearly from 2500-550 BC such a ritual was enacted about
Osiris, who succeeded his father as ruler and married his sister Isis.
In
one of many versions, Osiris’ brother Set grew jealous, killed and dismembered
Osiris, and buried parts of his body throughout the kingdom. Isis
gathered up the pieces and revived Osiris, but Osiris was unable to remain on
earth, was buried at a place called Abydos, and went to the underworld, where
he became judge of souls. In time, Osiris’ son Horus won back his
father’s kingdom. This is one of the most revered ancient Egyptian myths.
At Abydos, every year for 2000 years this story was retold.
But, although scholars have called it the Abydos Passion Play, we can’t
prove that it was acted out as a drama. Our only piece of primary
evidence is a stone tablet written in approximately 1868 BC by Ikhernofret, a
participant in the ritual that year, on which he wrote
However, less than 100 years after Abydos, we can look to Greece,
specifically to Athens, for the incontestable beginnings of theatre.
In Greece, as in other ancient societies, a family of gods was
worshipped, or at least appeased. One Greek god was worshipped for the
same reason as the Egyptian god Osiris -- to ensure fertility. As the
reasons were similar, so were the details of the story.
In one of the many
versions of the tale, this Greek god was born of Zeus (king of the gods) and
Semele (a mortal woman) -- which technically makes him a demigod, or
god-man. He was hidden by Zeus from Hera, Zeus’s understandably jealous wife and queen of the gods, in that
god’s thigh; when it was safe Zeus took him out of this thigh, and in this
sense resurrected him, so that he was born-again; and he was reared by
half-goat, half human creatures called satyrs. In another version,
Dionysos was torn to pieces by the Titans, but his mother (this time Demeter, goddess
of barley and corn, another fertility figure) pieced together his mangled limbs
and made him whole again. There are other variations still, but all tell
of a god-man who was resurrected or twice-born, thus his name -- Dionysos.
Like Osiris, Dionysos was associated with fertility and the
natural
cycle--birth, growth, aging, death, rebirth -- at least partially
because he was resurrected. He was also associated with revelry and
intoxication and the earliest form of his worship was rather barbaric, with maenads, groups
of women devoted to the god, tearing wild animals to pieces while dancing ecstatically in a state
of alcoholic and mystical intoxication.
Dionysos was praised each spring, originally with wild dances in a
circle around a phallus (to insure the primal creative urge). By the
sixth century BC the phallus had been replaced by an altar, the dancing became
less frenzied, and the dancers chanted poetic hymns to Dionysos; these
poems of praise were called dithyrambs. Out of the dithyramb comes the
first form of western drama, tragedy.
And that's where we'll begin next time!
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