theatrehistory.com + Theatre History + ...
To make a timeline based on major plays? Oedipus, Hamlet, Godot... (too subjective?)
...
The Poetics
Greaco-Roman world View
C6 BC - C3 AD (Sophocles)
"a sustained, highly diversified tendency to interpret the world in terms of archetypical principles ...The Greek universe was ordered by a plurality of timeless essences which underlay concrete reality, giving it form and meaning" (3-4)
C6 - 5 B.C.
Mythic Vision
Explanation by reference to myth and gods: "In the various divinities and their powers lay a sense of the universe as an ordered whole, a cosmos rather than a chaos" (17)
C.5 - 4 BC
Plato
The proto-Idealist: The 'Idea' or 'Forms': "an underlying rational unity and order existed within the flux and variety of the world" (19): timeless and unchanging reality as 'forms' existing independent of, but perceived by, the mind; perception of truth somewhat mystical; material world a poor imitation
C.4 BC
Aristotle
The proto-Natural Scientist & empiricist; "True reality ... was the perceptible world of concrete objects, not an imperceptible world of eternal Ideas" (56). Theory of 'indwelling form': "A substance ... is not simply a unit of matter, but is an intelligible structure or form ( eidos ) embodied in matter" (57)
C2 BC - C3 AD
Rome
Carried on Greek thought and myth, but more pragmatic and of this world.
Christian world View
C.4 - C15 Truth is God
C.4 - C15
Christianity
Reality / Truth is unchanging and timeless God. The next life is more important than this one. Christian theology heavily influenced by Idealist
Neo-Platonism
Renaissance World View Mid C15 - mid C17
Humanist value on life and art
Mid C15 - C16
general
'Re-discovery' of Classical past; new 'humanist' emphasis on human life and achievements
C16
Reformation
Reformation (and new Church of England) breaks dominance of the Catholic Church;
Reformation has enormous consequences for centuries: new focus on human life, individualism, domestic and secular work as devotion to God ('Protestant work ethic')
Scientific Revolution
C16-C17 We are no longer at the centre of the universe or of God's creation.
1 st half C16
Copernicus
'Copernican Revolution': heliocentric universe
2 nd half C16
Kepler
Refined and elaborated Copernicus' theory
End C16
Janssen
Invention of microscope, perhaps by Dutchman Zacharias Janssen
Beginning C17
Lippershey?
Invention of the telescope, perhaps by Dutchman Hans Lippershey
1 st half C17
Galileo
Further elaboration of heliocentric universe
1 st half C17
Descartes
Rationalist philosophical foundation of new science; epochal defining statement of modern self: cogito ergo sum thinking, self-aware subject cannot be doubted: sharp distinction between subject (internal, mind, consciousness) and object (external material world, the body) which is therefore measurable and explicable: certain knowledge possible through disciplined rationality alone. "Thus human reason establishes first its own existence, out of experiential necessity, then God's existence, out of logical necessity, and thence the God-guaranteed reality of the objective world and its rational order" (279). "In Descarte's vision, science, progress, reason, epistemological certainty, and human identity were all inextricably connected with each other and with the conception of an objective, mechanistic universe; and upon this synthesis was founded the paradigmatic character of the modern mind" (280).
2 nd half C17
Newton
Consolidates heliocentric universe with 'law of Gravity'
Enlightenment C18 The age of rationality, science & Empiricism - one of two streams emanating from the Renaissance
C18
Locke
Empiricism : In opposition to the rationalism of Descartes; "There is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses" (333); we should observe the world neutrally and dispassionately and record data without distortion. Reason then works out the connections between things
Hume
Empiricism more extreme: Scepticism of transcendence and metaphysics. Since our knowledge of things is based in empiricism, we can only know our experience and mental impressions of things, not the things in themselves.
Kant
"recognised that man could only know the phenomenal, and that any metaphysical conclusions concerning the nature of the universe that went beyond his experience were unfounded" (341). The correspondence between the world and human understanding was explained by the fact that "the 'world' science explicated was a world already ordered by the mind's own cognitive apparatus ... In the act of human cognition, the mind does not conform to things; rather things conform to the mind" (343) ... "Science's answers derive from the same source as its questions" (346); called Kant's ' Copernican Revolution' : "as Copernicus had explained the perceived movement of the heavens by the actual movement of the observer, so Kant explained the perceived order of the world by the actual order of the observer" (346-47). "Thus the true philosopher's task was to investigate the formal structure of the mind, for only there would it find the true origin and foundation for certain knowledge of the world" (347). "Man was again at the centre of his universe, but this was now only his universe, not the universe" (349).
Late C18 - mid C19
Romanticism
The age of subjectivity, emotion, the unique, free & creative individual - the other stream emanating from the Renaissance
"the Romantic vision perceived the world as a unitary organism rather than an atomistic machine, exalted the ineffability of inspiration rather than the enlightenment of reason, and affirmed the inexhaustible drama of human life rather than the calm predictability of static abstractions ... the Romantic valued man rather for his imaginative and spiritual aspirations, his emotional depths, his artistic creativity and powers of individual self-expression and self-creation" (367). Intense self-awareness, focus on complex nature of human self; darkness as well as light in human soul; the sublime.
In regard to reality and truth: " the Romantic gloried in the unbounded multiplicity of realities pressing in on his subjective awareness , and in the complex uniqueness of each object, event, and experience presented to his soul. Truth discovered in divergent perspectives was valued above the monolithic and univocal ideal of empirical science. For the Romantic, reality was symbolically resonant through and through, and was therefore fundamentally multivalent, a constantly changing complex of many-levelled meanings, even of opposites" (368). Imagination valued as "true ground of being, the medium of all realities" (369).
C19 Divided world View
Influences of the Enlightenment and Romanticism
1848
Marx & Engels
The Communist Manifesto; 1867 Marx's Das Kapital
mid C19
Compte
Positivism and sociology
2 nd 1/2 C19
Darwin
Evolutionary theory
Late C19
Nietzsche:
There are no facts, only interpretations; "There exists a plurality of perspectives through which the world can be interpreted, and there is no authoritative independent criterion according to which one system can be determined to be more valid than others" (370). Since there is no one truth, the world can be transformed by a heroic individual act of will. "Truth was not something one proved or disproved; it was something one created " (371)
End C19 - beginning C20
High Modernism
Freud
Exploration of the irrational unconscious; Psychoanalysis
WWI
Totalitarian society and socialist states
WWII
Cold War and New Technologies
Postmodern :
1968
Y2K : The End of Century and Millennium
... New Age
... to use the timeline in my other classes!
* filmplus.org/thr : Theatre Theory Pages
* History of Directing
* histry of Acting?
...
