Noh Drama & Greek Tragedy

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 Wes

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loping a critical framework better able to explain and justify the peculiar pleasure produced by the imitative arts, especially tragedy" (Vince 40). In concentrating on plot and the construction of the written text Aristotle was also in step with the gradual shift from an oral culture to a book culture. Thus with increasing acceptance of "writing, as distinct from performing, as a creative literary activity, drama and theater, text and performance came more and more to be conceptualized and treated as separate provinces involving separate activities" (Vince 40). The rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics in the Renaissance meant that new developments in drama, relying on the authority of the greatest philosopher of antiquity, developed along these same lines and Western drama since that time has conceived of text and performance as separate phenomena while the mimetic nature of drama has always been taken for granted. Even though it is a "questionable assumption" that "Aristotle's theories were based on the practice of fifth-century dramatists" the notion of their tragic art that derived from his Poetics "is commonly treated as the epitome of drama and theatre" (Vince 42). The separation of text and performance that followed fr

Category: Literature - N