Theatre Foundations

Video Transcript

There's no origin story for theater that everyone agrees on, but there are some theories that we can explore. In the West, at least, up until the sixth or seventh century BCE, we didn't have theater as we know it today, but we did have religious ritual, which can get pretty theatrical.

Rituals are often ways of mediating between the human and the supernatural. They can serve to enact or re-enact significant events in the human or supernatural worlds - births, marriages, deaths, harvests. In ritual, according to the mythology scholar Mircea Eliade, "The time of the event that the ritual commemorates or reenacts is made present." So, ritual represents, literally re-presents, old stories or idea and makes them happen now, which is a lot like what theater does.

This doesn't mean that ritual is identical with theater. Ritual is sacred, and theater is usually secular (though not always, as we'll see). Theater and ritual can draw on similar mythological sources, but ritual typically treats those sources as fact and theater as fiction. In ritual, the audience often participates; in theater, they usually sit politely. Unless there's audience participation, which is universally adored.

In the late nineteenth century, a group of classical scholars decided to search for the origins of theater. They took an anthropological approach and saw theater as a direct evolution of religious ritual. This theory really got going with James Frazer, whom we also discuss in the Crash Course Mythology episode on Theories of Myth.

In The Golden Bough, written between 1896 and 1915, Frazer and his contemporaries, the Cambridge Ritualists - which, by the way, this is obviously the name of my new band - tried to take a "scientific" approach to the question of theater's origin. He looked around at so-called "primitive" societies in Africa and Asia, societies he didn't really "know that much about" and decided that theater had emerged as a sophisticated refining of ritual.

According to Frazer, here's how it goes: You start out worshipping some kind of god or practice, and that worship gets distilled into rituals to attract the attention of that god or guarantee good fortune. Once your primitive society really gets going, those rituals generate myths and those myths get transmuted into theater. So eventually you arrive at jazz hands and sequins.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan puts it, in this view, "Art became a sort of civilized substitute for magical games and rituals...art like game became a mimetic echo of and a relief from old magic of total involvement."

Video Transcript:

This ritualism theory is useful in some ways and as we'll see in the next episode, it fits very nicely with Greek drama, mostly because the whole theory was pretty much based on Greek drama. That's a welcome fix to how preview generations of scholars viewed Greek drama - as something pure and stately, not as something that might have evolved from passion and magic - but this theory causes problems when you try to apply the history of Greek drama to other dramatic traditions.

Frazer and his colleagues didn't actually know all that much about the so-called "primitive" societies whose theater they wanted to study; the rich and sophisticated cultures the Ritualists encountered throughout Africa and Asia were lost on the Cambridge types...because Euro-centrism.

So they did a lot of pretty non-scientific guessing, working backward from what they knew about classical theater and hypothesizing about what kind of rituals may have produced it. Frazer also operates with the underlying belief that all societies basically evolve in the same way and that even though, in his view, so-called primitive societies are inherently inferior, given enough time and care they'll get more and more sophisticated until they too can produce Cats.

Okay, Frazer didn't talk about Broadway musicals, but maybe you're starting to understand a couple of the major problems with this theory and the assumption that all societies are on a trajectory toward Western civilization, which in this view is just getting better and better all the time. This view, by the way, is know as "positivism."

Video Transcript

Another theory that gets going after Frazer is the idea that people create myths out of a desire to explain and rationalize the world around them. In ritualism, myths and theater emerge as a response to pre-existing rituals. But in this other theory, known as functionalism, myths serve an etiological function, a way of explaining how and why things came to be the way they are.

According to one of the lead functionalist theorists, Bronislaw Malinowski, myth "is a statement of primeval reality which lives in the institutions and pursuits of a community. It justifies by precedent the existing order."

Unlike the Ritualists, the functionalists didn't assume that all societies operate and evolve in the same way or will create the same kinds of myths. Malinowski didn't really discuss theater, but some of his followers did, and they locked on to the idea that many early Greek dramas have their origins in myth and some of those myths are etiological. The Oresteia explains the legal system, Prometheus Bound explains that liver is tasty. Just kidding, it explains how we get fire and technology.

So, if myths explain the world, and theater is based in myth, we can think about theater as a way of explaining the world to ourselves. But such a view does have some drawbacks. Take one of the very earliest recorded plays, Aeschylus's The Persians. That was based on contemporaneous historical events, not in myth.

Video Transcript:

Besides the Ritualists and the Functionalists, there are a few other theories too. One is that theater derives at least in part from the clown figure - who's sort of the secular equivalent of the shaman in early societies. Their job was to make fun of the headman and other establishment figures and practices. We can maybe see this influence in satyr plays, which we'll visit in the next episode. And it's linked, at least a little, to the idea that theater may originate from games and the playful instincts of humankind, a phenomenon called the ludic impulse.

Another related theory, which really gets going with Aristotle, is that human beings have a "mimetic impulse": humans have a in-built desire to imitate, to act, and to pretend - and that's how we learn. According to Aristotle, this desire eventually gets refined and codified into theater.

So, to sum it up: ritual, myth, clowning, playing games, playing pretend. Somehow out of all of this, or maybe out of none of it, we get Hamilton.