In the episodes to come we'll have it all: tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral-expealidocious.

Yup, this series could go on forever. And let me introduce you to Dionysus, Greek god of the theater. And wine.

They can't all be charming, genius birdmen, I guess.

In this series we'll explore the history of theater and how we can understand and analyze it.

We'll take a look at significant plays and performances along the way, but in this episode we're going to define theater and look at some theories about how it got started.

So, Prologue over! Act 1, Scene 1, BEGIN!

First! Let's define "theater, the building": a theater is a place in which a play is performed.

If you trace the word back to its Greek origins and it literally means "the seeing place."

It can be big or small, indoors or outdoors, purpose-built or just borrowed.

Sometimes plays are performed in spaces that aren't really theaters at all—in a park or a parking lot, on a sidewalk, or in a private home.

Theater also refers to the performance of plays and to the body of literature and other documentation that has accompanied it.

Some plays, known as closet dramas, aren't even written to be performed. And that's theater, too.

So are improvised plays that don't have a script and plays that have a script, but don't use words, like some of Samuel Beckett's shorts.

A familiar definition is that theater requires at least one actor and at least one audience member and that definitely covers a lot of stuff.

But - what's an actor? What's an audience member?

While most plays use human actors, there are plays performed by robots and laptops with voice synthesizers.

There are plays performed by animals and by puppets, though usually there's a human helping out with those. I hope.

Sooooo … Is everything theater? If you want a really expansive definition, the composer John Cage said that "theater takes place all the time, wherever one is; an art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case."

So…is this theater? Well, not for you. You're watching a video recorded earlier. But here. In this room.

I'm performing, right? And there's an audience if you include Stan and Zulaiha watching me. Am I doing theater?

Want to hear my "To be or not to be," guys? Yorick? Aw.

They say no every time! A plague on both your houses.

We'll come back to it a couple of times, especially when we talk about political theater and protest theater and immersive theater, but for now we'll use a more narrow definition: theater is a deliberate performance created by live actors and intended for a live audience, typically making use of scripted language.

We may meet some exceptions along the way—lookin' at you, robo-actors—but this'll work for now.

And, before we get too far, let's confront the perennial controversy: should you spell theatre re or er?

And the short answer is, both of them are fine!

RE is more common outside of the US but for some folks, this spelling acts as a shibboleth.

You may have heard someone say "a theater is a building; but the theatre is an art!" or "theater is a destination, but theatre is a journey".

Here at Crash Course, we don't mind either... but have chosen to stick with er for consistency.

There's no origin story for theater that everyone agrees on, but there are some theories we can explore.

In the West, at least, up until the sixth or seventh century BCE we didn't have theater as we know it today, but we did have religious ritual, which can get pretty theatrical.

Rituals are often ways of mediating between the human and the supernatural.

They can serve to enact or re-enact significant events in the human or supernatural world—births, marriages, deaths, harvests.

In ritual, according to the mythology scholar Mircea Eliade, "The time of the event that the ritual commemorates or reenacts is made present."

So ritual represents, literally re-presents—old stories or ideas and makes them happen now, which is a lot like what theater does.

This doesn't mean that ritual is identical with theater. Ritual is sacred, and theater is usually secular (though not always, as we'll see!).

Theater and ritual can draw on similar mythological sources, but ritual typically treats those sources as fact and theater as fiction.

In ritual the audience often participates; in theatre, they usually sit politely.

Unless there's audience participation, which is universally adored.

In the late nineteenth century, a group of classical scholars decided to search for the origins of theater.

They took an anthropological approach and saw theater as a direct evolution of religious ritual.

This theory really got going with James Frazer, whom we also discuss in the Crash Course Mythology episode on Theories of Myth.

In The Golden Bough, written between 1896 and 1915, Frazer and his contemporaries, the Cambridge Ritualists (which by the way, this is obviously the name of my new band) tried to take a "scientific approach" to the question of theater's origins.

He looked around at so-called "primitive" societies in Africa and Asia, societies he didn't really "know much about," and decided that theater had emerged as a sophisticated refining of ritual.

According to Frazer, here's how it goes: You start out worshipping some kind of god or practice, and that worship gets distilled into rituals to attract the attention of that god or guarantee good fortune.

Once your primitive society really gets going, those rituals generate myths and those myths get transmuted…into theater.

Eventually you get jazz hands and sequins.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan puts it, in this view, "Art became a sort of civilized substitute for magical games and rituals….

Art like game became a mimetic echo of and a relief from the old magic of total involvement."

For an example of the (sometimes questionable) evidence that the Cambridge Ritualists drew on to support their idea that ritual evolved into theater, let's look at the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, describing a ceremony he witnessed in Egypt.