The Origins of Theatre

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

what he did.  Alas the translations of the hieroglyphics differ so vastly that scholars cannot come to agreement on what actually happened at Abydos, and we will probably never know whether the Abydos Passion Play was ritual or drama.  Another text that exists is the so-called Memphite Drama, also on the subject of the death and resurrection of Osiris, said to have been performed – if it was performed – on the first day of spring. And as far back as 2800 BC, some scholars have argued that “pyramid texts” written on the walls of pyramids, about the trials the spirit must pass through after death, might have been acted out in honor of a dead pharaoh, but there’s no primary evidence.

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!