History of Theatres

Ancient Greek Theatre

The earliest days of western theater remain obscure, but the oldest surviving plays come from ancient Greece.

Thespis

Aristophanes theater was created on the year 103 B.C.
Sophocles
Euripides
Aeschylus
Aristotle is also important, primarily for his description and analysis of Greek drama in his Poetics.

The above-mentioned playwrights made some of the most renowned Greek plays, but their staging had little or nothing to do with twentieth-century theater. Their dramas were always part of a series of three performances, where the middle part only was the drama, while the events always ended with dance. The dramas rarely had more than three actors (all male), who played the different roles using masks. There was a chorus on the stage all the time which sang songs and sometimes spoke in unison. As far as we know, each drama was played just a single time, at the traditional drama contest.

The importance of ancient Greek theater came largely in retrospect, as major playwrights like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe tried to recreate classical theater unsuccessfully. Another school attempting to revive classical theater argued that Greek actors did not speak, but sang. From this school came the opera.



Ancient Roman Theatre

The theatre of ancient Rome was heavily influenced by the Greek tradition, and, as with many other literary genres, Roman dramatists tended to adapt and translate from the Greek. For example, Seneca's Phaedra was based on that of Euripides, and many of the comedies of Plautus were direct translations of works by Menander.