欧洲文化作业

Outstanding dramatists and their plays Early in their remote past , the Greeks started to perform plays at religious festivals .Out of these origins a powerful drama developed in the 5th century B.C.
Performances were given in open-air theatres , with the audience sitting on stone benches and looking down at the stage from three sides.
I will list that the outstanding dramatists of anticent Greece were Aeschylus,Sophocles,Euripides,Aristophanes .
Firstly,Schylus, son of Euphorion, a scion of a Eupatrid or noble family, was born at Eleusis 525 B.C., or, as the Greeks reckoned time, in the fourth year of the 63rd Olympiad. His first occupation was in a vineyard, and his reverence for the god of the vine inspired him to follow the bent of his genius and contribute to the spectacles then newly established in honor of Dionysus.
He wrote such plays as Prometheus Bound , Persians ,and Agamemnon .In these plays there are only two actors and a chorus . Yet they manage tostir and move the audience deeply by showing heroes and heriones in complicated human situations ,out of which there is no escape but death . The play are written in verse . Aeschylus is noted for his vivid character
portrayal and majesticpoetry .
Now ,I will tell some knowledge about Prometheus Bound . The tragedy is based on the myth of Prometheus , a Titan demi-god who , against the will of Zeus , stole fire from the gods for the benefit of man. His terrible punishment by Zeus, and his continuing defiance of Zeus in the face of that punishment, remain universal symbols of man＇s vulnerability in any struggle with the gods.
The Persians explores the period from the seventh century BC, to the seventh century AD, and presents a comprehensive introduction to ancient Persia.Incorporating recent research, and translated sources from a wide range of corpus material, Maria Brosius explores the history of Persia, and brings a new understanding of Persian society and culture and the structures on which these empires were built: the king and his court; religion and culture; art and architecture.
Agamemnon is only the first play of the great tragic trilogy, the Oresteia. Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia around 458 B.C.E.. It is his sole trilogy to survive intact. The two other plays, Choephori and Eumenides, and a lost satyr play called Proteus won its author first prize at the Great Dionysa that same year.
A dramatic competition whose later victors included Sophocles
and Euripides, the Great Dionysa took place once a year in Athens during the festival of Dionysus. The conventions of the competition were such that dramatists were responsible for nearly every aspect of production and staging, from composition of the plays themselves to costumes and scenery.
Sophocles was the author of plays like Oedipus the King , Electra , and Antigone . Contributed greatly to tragic art . He added a third actor and decreased the size of the chorus .Sophocles has had a strong impact on European literature . Some of his plots were taken over and adopted by later writers .The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud’s term “the Oedipus complex ”was also derived from Sophocles’s play .
Oedipus the King has a perfect plot . It is the story of a man who unknowingly committed terrible sin .An oracle said that the child Oedipus would grow up to kill his father and married his mother . So the parents asked a shepherd to leave him on a hillsiide , but he was rescued and brought upas the son of the king of Corinth . Hearing the oracle ,Oedipus ran away from Corinth . While travelling , he met and killed Laius ,king of Thebes of the Sphinx , he married the queen of the country , Jocasta , knowing not that she was his own mother . Thus , unwittingly , he fulfillled the oracle . Later , realizing the truth
of his birth , he stabbed out his eyes ,while Jocasta hanged herself .
Antigone is about what happened to a girl by that name , who was the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta . She had ddefied the king’s order by performing funeral rites over her brother , executed by the state for treason , and was condemned to death on that account . It is thus a play with an important thenme ---about the difficut choice one has to make between public duty and private feeling
Ellie Electra is the Greek coalition commander Agamemnon and Wang Hou Kela was resistant to Stella daughter. After the Trojan War, Agamemnon returned, but was the queen and her Pin Fu Yi Jisi Hughes killed. Ellie Electra to inspire her brother palace, killing her mother and Pinfu. Spiritual daughter physician put this killing of the mother to report the story of Fu Chou, compared to the girls on the mental development of the Electra complex .
Euripides wrote mainly about women in such plays as Andromache , Medea ,and Trojan Women . He was more of a realist than Aeschylus and Sophocles , concerned with conflicts . His characters are less heroric , more like ordinary people . He may be called the first writer of “problem plays ” .He was a
friend of Socrates and the intellectuals , but the people who flocked to the performance often found him disturbing . Aristotle said of him , “if a bad manager in all other points , Eeripides is at least the most tragic of the poets ”. In the 19th century , the Engkish petess Elizabeth Browning called him “Euripides the human” .
Comedy also flourished in the 5th century Bf.C.Its best writer was Aristophanes , who has left eleven plays , including : Frogs , Clounds , Wasps , and Birds . These plays are loose in plot and satirical in tone , full of clever parody and acute critism . They treat of contemporary events and coontain direct attacks on well-known people of the day , such as Socrates in Clouds and Euripides in Frogs . Coarse language is a striking feature of Aristophanes .。