ambitious posting

I was doing some tragic homework for mythology and couldn't help but whip out some Eco regarding "Ugliness in the Classical World." I found a lot of images of masks used in tragedies.
Apparently, these surprised-looking masks came about because the theaters for preforming were too large. It was difficult for the actors to portray their character through subtle facial expression and therefore, to oblige the cheap seats, they wore exaggerated (and creepy) masks (that subtly resemble blowup dolls).

"On these grand scales, actors' tools for communication with the audience were entirely different than modern ones. Body language, facial gestures, and vocal tones, though very effective in a small, modern theater, would have been lost in the sheer size of an ancient one. Instead, the actor wore a huge tragic mask to roughly depict his state of mind and relied on his speech to do the rest." (taken from my Clst200 notes)

It is not so much the masks that I find grotesque as the themes in the stories they were used to portray. Themes that we still find to be taboo today were prevalent in most forms of Greek entertainment.

It seems that the expressions of horrification on these masks are not unwarranted. With themes like cannibalism (the stories of Tantalus, Atreus), incest (Thysetes, Oedipus) and bestiality (Leda, Pasiphae) it is obvious why an actor would be freaked out... warranting a face something like this:



While we tend to avoid confronting the grotesque, ancient Greeks seem to embrace it in all aspects of their religion and entertainment. Fascinating

(also, if you have a free ten minutes, Wikipedia any one of the above mentioned Greek stories...)

Ali