Theatre history from antiquity through modern transformations
This domain tests chronology with causation: which social, technical and institutional conditions produced which theatrical forms. You need names, periods, typical venues and the reason a change happened, not a list of dates.
Antiquity
Greek theatre flourishes in fifth-century BCE Athens within festivals of Dionysus. Key features: chorus, masks, open-air theatre with a theatron, orchestra and skene; this should not be confused with the later Roman amphitheatre form; Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in tragedy, Aristophanes in Old Comedy, Menander in New Comedy. Aristotle's Poetics analyses plot, character, thought, diction, song and spectacle. Roman theatre gives Plautus and Terence in comedy and Seneca in rhetorical tragedy; it also develops spectacle and pantomime.
Medieval and Renaissance
Medieval drama grows from liturgy into mystery and miracle plays, morality plays and farces, performed on pageant wagons or fixed mansions; Spain develops the auto sacramental. The Renaissance recovers classical texts. Commedia dell'arte uses professional performers, scenario-based improvisation, lazzi and stock types, many but not all of which are masked. Elizabethan open-air playhouses such as the Globe (1599) use a thrust stage and daylight. The Spanish Golden Age works through corrales, Lope de Vega's Arte nuevo (1609), Tirso and Calderón. French neoclassicism imposes the unities and bienséance with Corneille, Racine and Molière.
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Enlightenment bourgeois drama, Diderot and Lessing, and Goldoni's reform of commedia lead toward domestic subjects. Romanticism values emotion, history and mixed genre, visible in Hugo's Hernani (1830). The well-made play and melodrama dominate the popular stage. Realism and naturalism arrive with Zola's theory, Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov; the box set and the fourth wall are consolidated, and Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre (1898) systematises rehearsal.
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries
Symbolism, expressionism, futurism and Dada break realistic conventions. Brecht's epic theatre and alienation effect, Artaud's theatre of cruelty and the Theatre of the Absurd (Beckett, Ionesco) redefine dramatic action. Postdramatic theatre (Lehmann) decentres text. In Spain: Lorca, Valle-Inclán, Buero Vallejo and Sastre. Technical shifts matter: nineteenth-century lighting technologies and changing artistic conventions alter the control of stage and auditorium light; electricity, fly systems and projection change scene changes and spectacle.
Worked example
Compare Greek and Elizabethan staging. Reason: both rely on daylight, verbal scenery and audience imagination, but Greek theatre uses a large open-air theatre, masks and a central chorus, while Elizabethan theatre uses a thrust stage, rapid scene changes and direct soliloquy. A question asking why soliloquy flourished in Elizabethan theatre can be answered through conditions: spectators on three sides, no realistic set, and a need for direct contact.
Traps
Saying all Greek plays obey the three unities; confusing commedia dell'arte with scripted comedy; dating the Globe to Shakespeare's birth; explaining realism only through subject matter and not through staging conventions.