Thought of the Week - 23rd July

This week I was thinking about the omnipresence of masks on the Greek stage. In Greek Drama, every single actor wears a mask and no person other than the Aulos Player is allowed to be present on stage without a mask on. Now I didn't really attach too much significance to the presence of the masks before this week. I had always known that Greek actors always had to wear masks of stiffened linen which always had the same expression on it. For me, the interesting thing about the presence of the masks was the skill that must have been required in the actors to successfully portray a range of emotions from behind the mask. They must really have relied heavily on voice modulations and subtle changes in body language to have been good enough to draw crowds of thousands to their performances. But this week, I came across some vase paintings that showed the stark dichotomy between mask-on and mask-off that got me thinking. I had seen many of these vase paintings before as part of a course I had taken in university but then I had been worried more about memorising the specifics of the paintings than taking in the significance of what they portrayed. Now, in the leisure of the summer, I had the time to actually look at the paintings and think about why the ancient Greeks portrayed masks so purposefully and carefully in such artifacts.

One of the vase paintings that I studied is represented below. It is called the Pronomos vase and it is one the most famous and valuable (information-wise) vase paintings related to the Greeks that has been found. It represents the FULL cast of an ancient Greek Satyr Play and therein lies it's significance. Other vases show excerpts from the casts of plays or scenes from the play itself but the fact that this vase shows the entire cast of the play is astounding and infinitely useful for classicists. I may go into a full discussion about the Pronomos vase in a future post but as far as this post is concerned, I only have to mention that the vase painting shows some of the actors with their intricately painted masks off and in their hands and some with their masks still on. The actors with the masks off are thus themselves while the masks represent their characters. For the ancient Greeks, the masks were the line between reality and fantasy, the characters and the actors. As can be seen below, all the actors depicted on the Pronomos vase with their masks on are all in character (one that of a Satyr: part of a chorus of Satyrs, and the others speaking characters) and are dancing or striking wild poses while the actors with their masks off are casually lounging about: clearly human beings and not Satyrs. It is of some importance to note here that the only people without masks on the vase are the Aulos player in the center and the two divinities watching the play right above him: Dionysus and Ariadne.

The Pronomos Vase

This explains, perhaps, why all the characters in Greek Drama were masked.