Why Not?
Posted on | July 31, 2007 | No Comments
Though I’ve avoided wading into the recent ardent discussion of “tribalism” as a social and economic model for supporting theatre artists (out of a profound sense that the concept eludes me), it has got me thinking again about the historical models of society and theatre. Though I spent four years of formal study and many more of informal research, I realize I don’t have a gut-level understanding of how the tradition of public performance has manifested in even the oft-taught eras of our history – Classical Greece and Elizabethan England – which bugs me.
I went to some very traditional schools, and so I think I inherited a certain Victorian conservative classicism – the idea that all civilization sprung forth, new born, from Greece in the 5th Century, and the Classical Greece was a socio-cultural-political Garden of Eden from which our depraved world has descended – or rather declined.
So there’s a part of me that wants to believe that Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were the only theatre practitioners in history to be treated appropriately – as rock-star philosopher kings – by a citizenry who completely and uniformly valued their contributions to society and human understanding.
But, of course, that all seems more than a little ridiculous to me today, and jibes with none of my understanding of human nature.
Sometimes facts are truer than myth. In the midst of digging, I came across this quote from Mark Damen of Utah State University, discussing the disputed origin of the word “tragedy”:
“… the Greek word tragoidia presents even more of a mystery. That it means “goat (trag-) song (-oidos)” is certain because there is no other way to interpret the word satisfactorily in Greek, but to what the “goat” refers is not at all clear…
It has been suggested by another scholar that “goat-song” may refer not to goats as such, but to an ancient Greek slang term, “to goat,” referring to the breaking or cracking of a young man’s voice during puberty. (note) If ancient tragic choruses were performed by young men, this could make an odd sort of sense. (note) The term tragoidia would then be a joke …
Names for dramatic genres are, in fact, known to be based on jokes elsewhere, for instance, the modern performance genre called “soaps.” After all, could the reason for the name “soap” be easily reconstructed two millennia from now, if it were not known that there was once a connection between daytime drama and the detergent industry? Without such knowledge, future scholars might go for simplistic but reasonable-sounding explanations, such as, “These emotional melodramas were seen to ‘cleanse’ the soul, and thus the genre came to be called ‘soaps’.” It would be much harder to recreate the real reason for the name, that it is essentially an ironic jab at the early commercialism of this art form.”
Now, that’s an origin story I can get behind.
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