Tragedy and Comedy in Greek and Roman Theatre
The Greek and Roman section of the PAU asks you to combine literary history with Aristotle's critical vocabulary. A passage from tragedy or comedy may be set for identification and commentary, so you need the structural units of the plays, the conventions of the theatre buildings, and the difference between Aristotle's descriptive analysis and later neoclassical prescription.
Greek dramatic structure
- A tragedy normally moves through prologue, parodos, episode, stasimon and exodos; kommos and amoibaion name sung exchanges between actor and chorus.
- The chorus is a character-group with ritual authority, not a neutral narrator; in Aristophanes it can step out in the parabasis.
- Performance used masks, the skene, orchestra, ekkyklema, mechane and the deus ex machina. Three speaking actors (protagonist, deuteragonist, tritagonist) doubled roles.
- Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides define tragedy; Aristophanes defines Old Comedy, Menander New Comedy.
Aristotle's toolkit
In the Poetics the six elements are mythos (plot), ethos (character), dianoia (thought), lexis (diction), melopoiia (song) and opsis (spectacle). Mimesis is representation, not copying. Catharsis is the purgation or clarification of pity and fear through the plot. Hamartia is an error of judgement or ignorance, not necessarily a moral flaw. Peripeteia is reversal of fortune; anagnorisis is recognition. Aristotle insists on unity of action; the unities of time and place are later, prescriptive developments.
Roman theatre
Plautus writes cantica, stock types (senex, servus callidus, miles gloriosus, meretrix) and contaminatio; Terence prefers double plots and humanitas; Seneca's five-act, rhetorical, ghost-haunted tragedies transmit revenge tragedy to the Renaissance.
Worked example
Suppose the messenger in Oedipus Tyrannus announces that Polybus is dead. Oedipus rejoices because he thinks the oracle is falsified; the messenger then reveals that Oedipus was a foundling. The reversal (peripeteia) is the shift from relief to dread; the recognition (anagnorisis) is Oedipus's discovery of his identity. His hamartia is not 'a fatal flaw' but the error and ignorance in killing Laius and fleeing Corinth. The effect of pity and fear is produced by the plot's arrangement, not by a moral tag at the end.
Traps that cost marks
- Saying Aristotle demanded the three unities.
- Calling the chorus a narrator or ignoring its sung metres.
- Treating peripeteia as any plot twist rather than a reversal tied to the protagonist's fortune.
- Mixing Aristophanes' political Old Comedy with Menander's domestic New Comedy.