Greek tragedy and Japanese Noh drama offer interesting points of comparison. Although they are separated by nearly two millennia, by thousands of miles, and by cultural differences too numerous to mention both were theatrical traditions involving masked performers, the frequent use of music and dancing, on-stage choruses, and historic-mythological themes and stories drawn from traditions with which the audiences possessed some familiarity. Both theatrical traditions had important spokesmen and the perpetuation of the traditions, as well as later centuries' understanding of them, depended in large part on Aristotle's Poetics and Zeami's essays on Noh drama. But the two writer's approaches indicate the principal difference in the two traditions as well. Aristotle, as a thinker rather than a playwright or actor, contributed to the transformation of Greek drama into a literary tradition in which the text was the dominant factor. Zeami, on the other hand, was concerned with performance and the dramatic text was not a fixed entity but was always subordinate to the performance. Because Zeami's contribution is relatively recent the same tradition in which he worked continues to the present day. The Greek drama, however, had reached its height in the century before Aristotle codified its means and ends. Yet his Poetics established a paradigm for drama which, though it was divorced from the imperatives of performance, was to remain the dominant conception of theater in the West for 2,000 years.
Greek drama originated in the choral hymns sung to the god Dionysus. Mimed episodes were enacted to accompany the dithyrambs of the seventh century and, as Aristotle has it, a "long series of changes" ended only on Tragedy's "attaining to its natural form" (Aristotle 670). The alternation of choral song and dance with enacted scenes predominated until Aeschylus introduced the second actor and "made the dialogue, or spoken portion, take the ...