Greek Theatre - History of Drama.

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Greek Theatre

History of Drama

In early ages, people used to communicate without using words. They also performed some sort of ritualistic communication to protect themselves from animals. Then gradually they started to put language in and started to do some sort of performances for their own amusement. This kept on evolving and took the face of the type of performances we see now days.

The Greek Theatre originated in 300 BC. The Greek Empire however originated in 600 BC. Greeks were the first who invented the theatre as a place to perform and watch performances. A famous Greek philosopher, named Homer talked about Gods and Legends. He also told some of the very famous stories of that time such as Illiod. Homer also spoke about Mortal Heros, which then became some of the characters of these performances. The first ever theatre performances were done in Greece carried out by priests. These performances were religious. They started of by performing in the mountains as it helped them to project their voices to a longer distance with as the sound in the mountains echoed. All of these performances were based on Greek Gods. The main Greek God was Dionysus. He was the God of Wine, Agriculture and Fertility of Nature. Most of the plays were based around Dionysus himself.

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The main theme or genre of the performances was tragedy but as time passed comic plays were also performed. Because the plays were done in a very large scale the audience was quite big as well. So to accommodate everyone mountains were carved to make seats. These kinds of theatres were called amphitheatres. The amphitheatres seated about 20,000 people at a time.

Due to the open atmosphere and a very large audience it was very difficult for the audience to hear the characters speak clearly. To overcome this barrier, 50 people stared speaking at the same time. ...

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