Thespis of Icaria becomes the world's first actor - November 23rd, 534 BC

On this day in 534 BC, an ancient Greek performer named Thespis became the first known actor to portray a character on stage.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class as a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that raises the curtain on everyday history and
lets it take about I'm Gay, Bluesier. And in this episode,
we're talking about one of the most influential performers of

(00:22):
all time, a new kind of actor, who said, you
have played a vital role in shaping the way that
stories were told. The day was November four BC. An

(00:43):
ancient Greek performer named Thespis became the first known actor
to portray a character on stage. His performance took place
during an Athenian festival called Dionysia, which was an elaborate
celebration of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility. As
part of the festivities, a chorus would sing ancient hymns

(01:04):
called dither rams in the deity's honor. The performers recounted
the god's amazing exploits and abilities on stage, sometimes while
wearing masks and costumes, but they weren't meant to portray
specific characters in the story. That supposedly changed on what
would later be known as November twenty three, thirty four,

(01:26):
the traditional date assigned to the festival. Thespis is said
to have shaken things up that year by stepping out
from the chorus, donning a new kind of mask, and
performing the role of Dionysus himself rather than just singing
his praises. Many in the crowd considered the action blasphemous,
but the majority were too captivated to care. Thespis had

(01:50):
added a new exciting element to the early art of drama,
and the world would never be the same. The sixth
century edition of care after acting to choral processions was
brought about indirectly by a tyrannical politician named pizza Stratus.
After seizing power in Athens in the five sixties, pizzas

(02:11):
Stratus established a host of new public festivals, including Dionysia.
That citywide festival featured plenty of revelry and plenty of wine,
but there were more highbrow offerings on hand as well,
including artistic competitions devoted to music, dance, singing, and poetry. However,
in five thirty four it said that pizza Stratus wanted

(02:34):
to change things up by adding a drama competition to
the festival's offerings. At the time, that would have taken
the form of a choral presentation with dramatic and narrative elements,
not too far off from what we call a play today.
The difference was that the performers were all just narrating
in the third person, rather than exchanging dialogue as characters.

(02:57):
That was the kind of entertainment Thespis and is Troop
were expected to perform at Dionysia, but the actor had
something else in mind. Although little is known about his
early life, it's believed Thespis was born in Acaria, which
at the time was a city in southeastern Greece. Later
in life, he moved to the ancient Greek metropolis of Athens,

(03:19):
where he got involved in the fledgling art of theater,
perhaps as a traveling performer. He was later credited as
a talented playwright as well, but since none of his
alleged works exist today, it's unclear whether or not that's true.
What we do know for certain is that Thespis was
active during a time when the artistic world was changing.

(03:39):
Stories that had once been exclusively oral were increasingly being
written down and preserved. That shift began to change the
way some artists approached storytelling Before, there had been an
almost stifling sense of continuity. Performers were reciting or enacting
the stories of their culture as a kind of ongoing

(03:59):
rich ul But with the advent of writing, a story
could endure without the need of other people constantly retelling it.
And if that was the case, then the performance of
stories on stage could be new and different too. By
all accounts, Thespis was the first to take advantage of
that newfound freedom. There is no record of what exactly

(04:21):
he and his troop performed that day, but since the
festival was devoted to Dionysus, it's safe to assume it
was a scripted story that revolved around him. That theory
is also supported by a passage in Aristotle's Poetics, a
book of theatrical criticism written about two hundred years after
Thespis's alleged performance. According to Aristotle, Thespis broke from tradition

(04:45):
by jumping out from among the chorus and assuming the
role of Dionysus. He then proceeded to exchange lines with
the leader of the chorus, and even took on the
role of other characters, swapping between different masks to represent
each one. The performance apparently impressed the crowd, as Thespis
and his crew are said to have won the competition

(05:06):
that day. That said, there is a healthy debate among
scholars about Thespis and his true role in the development
of Greek drama. What exactly should we credit him for.
It's often implied that he invented acting, at least in
the Western world, but if we think of acting as
pretending to be someone else for the purpose of storytelling,

(05:27):
it's likely that somebody somewhere had already done that by
the time of Thespis. Still, there are enough contemporary stories
surrounding him to suggest he did have a transformative effect
on ancient Greek theater. We can see that just in
the act of stepping out from the chorus. By distinguishing
himself as the main character of the story, Thespis helped

(05:49):
establish the importance and effectiveness of the protagonist in drama,
and by speaking with the chorus, he tied it directly
to the stories plot, effectively make it a character as well.
Those ideas were further developed by other writers, including the
playwrights Escalus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Their plays are the earliest

(06:11):
preserved Greek tragedies written in the century after Thespis, and
each one builds on storytelling features credited to the actor.
Most notably, they added a full cast of characters meant
to be portrayed by more than one actor. Will never
know if Thespis really was the world's first actor, but

(06:32):
he was clearly influential enough to be written about with
reverence by the likes of Aristotle, Plutarch, and a host
of others. His likeness was also represented in mosaics, frescoes,
and sculptures found throughout ancient Rome, particularly in theaters and
in temples dedicated to Bacchus, the Roman equivalent of Dionysus.

(06:53):
That admiration continued for more than a thousand years, all
the way up to the time of Shakespeare, and he
and other English theater types began calling themselves Thespians in
his honor. In that way, it almost doesn't matter whether
Thespis was the first actor or not. Like the deity
he portrayed in his breakout role, he's more of a

(07:15):
concept now than a real person. He's transcended the specifics
of his life to become the embodiment of acting. The
God of theater and his disciples pay him tribute to
this day in the most appropriate way possible by bringing
the art of storytelling to life right there on the stage.

(07:37):
I'm Dave Lousier and hopefully you now know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. You can
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along by writing to this Day at ihart media dot com.

(08:00):
Thanks to Chandler Mace for producing the show, and thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again
tomorrow for another day in history class.